Tag: 19th century

Day 659: The Prague Cemetery

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Cover for The Prague CemeteryThe Prague Cemetery opens in 1897 with a monologue that is so vile and bigoted against just about everyone—the French, the Germans, the Italians, Jesuits, Masons, women, and especially Jews—that I almost put it down at that point. That monologue is the ranting of the main character, Simonini, as learned at his grandfather’s knee. Simonini is an absolutely repellent person who makes his living forging wills and other documents but who also works for the French secret police, and the German secret police, and the Okhrana, making up lies and creating international incidents.

Simonini has a problem. He has gaps in his memory. Further, when he explores a passage in his house, it leads to the rooms of someone who wears a cassock. Following the advice of an Austrian Jew (whom he calls Froïde), he begins writing down what he can remember of his life. The next time he awakens, he finds his diary annotated by the Abbe Della Piccola, who seems to remember the time periods he cannot but doesn’t remember the others. It is soon obvious that these are two personas of the same man.

Simonini is already a forger when he begins his first employment in espionage, spying on the leadership of Garibaldi’s army for the Piedmontese secret police. He always ends up exceeding his orders, though, so when he blows up the ship containing Ippolito Nievo, who is in charge of Garibaldi’s finances, instead of simply assuring the books go to the government and nowhere else, he is shipped off to Paris.

Simonini is most concerned with the fate of what he considers his life work, a document that is supposed to be a true account of a meeting of eminent rabbis—and one Jesuit—in the Prague cemetery, where they plot against the Gentiles and scheme for world domination. Although Simonini has plagiarized some of this document from other sources, he has fabricated most of it, including the setting. Over the course of 40 years, he perfects this document, eliminating the Jesuit and changing it to a series of protocols, all the while trying to sell it to different governments. It is this document that becomes the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, used by the Nazis and other hate-mongers through the years to justify anti-Semitism, even though everyone involved in its creation knew the document was apocryphal.

Although this tale is supposed to be some sort of answer to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, being based on actual instead of made-up events, and though it is told with proper postmodern irony, it left a bad taste in my mouth. As Simonini and his abettors make up more and more ridiculous stories linking, say, the Masons to Satanic rites, with the public gleefully believing everything, I felt disgusted. Almost every character in the novel except Simonini was an actual person, and all the events the novel is based on are true, which makes it even more disturbing. Eco even has Simonini responsible for framing Dreyfus. Simonini also murders people and dumps their bodies in the sewer beneath his house.

Maybe I agree with one reviewer that some readers may not understand irony. I’m not sure. The construction of a truly dark and repellent protagonist reminded me of the novel Perfume, except that I enjoyed Perfume. I just know that although I have a dark sense of humor myself, this novel made me want to take a bath.

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Day 655: The Night Inspector

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Cover for The Night InspectorWilliam Bartholomew is a survivor of the American Civil War, but in many ways he is also a casualty. His face was destroyed, so he wears a mask, but he also bears less discernible scars from his work as a sniper for the Union army.

Bartholomew is working as a commodities trader when he meets the writer Herman Melville. He has read and admired Moby Dick, but the novel was mostly met with mockery by the critics and ignored by the public. Unable to take care of his family with his earnings as a writer, Melville takes a job as a deputy customs inspector.

Bartholomew has a relationship with a Creole prostitute that he considers deeper than the usual one of client. She asks for his help in a venture that seems laudable but is illegal. To pull it off, he must involve Melville.

At first, I wasn’t sure where this novel was going. It is dark and sometimes disturbing, and I even thought it might become a mystery. It does not, but it fully captures the consciousness of a man who is tough but has had to fight to keep from being shattered by circumstances, his own actions, and his conscience.

It is also a vehicle for depicting Melville. There, I was not so sure it was going to be successful in making Melville interesting until the denouement of the novel.

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Day 654: Longbourn

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Cover for LongbournBest Book of the Week!
There has been a plethora of Pride and Prejudice reinterpretations and sequels in the past few years, and I haven’t found the ones I’ve read to be very interesting. Longbourn, however, looks at the novel from a completely different angle, from the point of view of the servants in the Bennet household.

Sarah has been a housemaid for the Bennets since she was a child. Although she is grateful for the kindness shown to her by the housekeeper, Mrs. Hill, she chafes against the limits of her existence and the sheer hard work. She has begun to wish for more.

Mr. Bennet unexpectedly hires a servant named James Smith. There is some mystery about him, for Sarah overhears Mrs. Hill having a heated discussion with Mr. Bennet about him. At first excited to have a new member in the household, Sarah is disappointed by his unkempt appearance and the fact that he never looks at her. Besides, she soon meets the handsome and exotic Ptolemy Bingham, Mr. Bingham’s mulatto coachman.

Aside from presenting fully realized characters and an interesting story, Longbourn imagines a completely different view of the Bennet household and the action of the original novel, which here is only peripheral. We find unexpected sympathy for Mrs. Bennet through Mrs. Hill’s knowledge of her history. Mr. Bennet turns out to have a secret. Lizzie and Jane are still the most likable Bennet girls, but they think nothing of sending Sarah to walk to Meryton in the pouring rain to buy roses for the girls’ dancing shoes. The viewpoint from the kitchen is certain to be an unexpected one.

This novel is fascinating, providing its own rich story while carefully observing the events of Austen’s novel in the background. I loved this truly original re-imagining.

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Day 641: Remarkable Creatures

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Cover for Remarkable CreaturesRemarkable Creatures is based on the true stories of Elizabeth Philpot and Mary Anning. These were two women of the early 19th century who collected fossils along the sea near Lyme Regis, beginning before fossil collections became wildly popular. Some of their finds resulted in discoveries about evolution and extinction. The novel is told in alternating chapters from the point of view of the educated upper-class Elizabeth and the uneducated working-class Mary.

Elizabeth Philpot already realizes she will be a spinster when her newly married older brother nudges her and her two sisters to look for a less expensive place to live away from the family home in London, perhaps in some genteel seaside resort. The women choose Lyme Regis, and their brother soon finds them a comfortable but small stone cottage.

Louise Philpot becomes interested in gardening and Margaret busies herself with the town’s social scene, but Elizabeth realizes she must find something to occupy herself. When visiting a carpenter’s shop, she meets Mary Anning, at the time a child, and sees the fossils Mary has collected and is trying to sell. She is fascinated particularly by the fish and decides to look for fossils herself, doing much to help label herself and her sisters as eccentric.

Mary Anning finds and sells fossils to support her family, but she is also fascinated by them. After she begins her acquaintance with Elizabeth, she starts learning more about the scientific theories behind her work. When she discovers the fossil of a previously unknown animal, she does not know that her discovery challenges the beliefs of conventional religion that every animal created by God is currently alive on Earth.

Philpot and Anning, who made significant contributions to the science, both eventually find themselves frustrated by the lack of recognition for their contributions. It is worse for Mary, for she is not only a woman and uneducated, she is considered just a fossil hunter.

I found the subject matter of this novel interesting but feel Chevalier was probably struggling with the difficulties of depicting real people in fiction. Although she depicts two distinct women, they do not seem fully formed to me. I couldn’t help contrasting this novel with the wonderful The Signature of All Things, which is a similar story although completely fictional. There I got a sense of a strong, fully realized individual. To contrast, Chevalier gives each of her main characters a few signature traits—for example, Elizabeth judges people by what part of their physique they “lead with”—and we don’t get a sense of fully formed individuals.

 

Day 637: The Quick

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Cover for The QuickAt first, The Quick seems like a straightforward historical novel about a young writer in 19th century London. But it has a twist. To be honest, if I’d known what the twist was beforehand, I probably wouldn’t have chosen this novel to read, because frankly, I’m tired of this subject. That said, I’m glad I read the book, because it is absorbing, well written, and quite suspenseful.

James and Charlotte Norbury grow up neglected in a rambling house in Yorkshire. Their father rarely comes near them after their mother dies and seems to forget they might need attention or tutors or governesses. So, while the two children run wild, it is the older Charlotte who takes care of James and teaches him to read.

After their father’s death, James goes away to school while Charlotte stays in the care of Mrs. Chickering, an elderly relative. James eventually moves to London to try being a writer, but he is not wealthy and has difficulties finding acceptable lodgings he can afford. An acquaintance introduces him to Christopher Paige, a young aristocrat looking for someone to share his rooms. Although the more austere and shy James does not envy Paige’s life of frivolity, he slowly begins to realize that Paige is his first friend—then that he is more than a friend.

One night, though, a terrible event takes place. Christopher Paige is killed and James disappears. When James does not appear at Mrs. Chickering’s funeral, Charlotte travels to London to find him.

In London, Charlotte’s inquiries attract the attention of the members of a powerful and mysterious club, the Aegolius. There has been an unexpected event at the club, and other people are looking for James. Soon, Charlotte finds herself involved with a secret substrata of the city.

Owen depicts a wonderfully atmospheric London. Although I was at first disappointed with the direction the story took, I still was unable to put this book down.

Day 632: The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

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Cover for The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie NewtonBest Book of the Week!
Just by coincidence, it seems, I have read several books in the last few years dealing with the wars in Kansas over whether it would be a free state or not. Bleeding Kansas by Sara Paretsky was the first book I read on the subject and the least well done, not providing much background for readers who don’t know a lot about the subject. The next book I read was Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, much more poetic but concerned mostly with a son’s reaction to his minister father’s participation in the bloodshed. The Good Lord Bird provides more of a comic flavor to the time, but it concentrates on a portrait of John Brown. I just finished Jane Smiley’s The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton, which provides the most background to the issues and a more vivid picture of the times.

Lidie Harkness is a tall, plain young woman who has spent most of her time avoiding her traditional duties and instead rides, hunts, and swims with her 12-year-old cousin Frank near their home in Quincy, Illinois. She is the only child of her very old father’s second wife, and her sisters are much older. When her father dies, she knows her sisters are at a loss for what to do with her and eager to get her off their hands.

She meets Thomas Newton, a New England abolitionist on his way to join friends in Lawrence, Kansas. He seems struck by the stories Frank tells him of Lidie’s outdoor abilities, and it is not long before they are married and on their way down the Mississippi.

Flyers are plastered all over Lidie’s brother-in-law’s store promising a settled paradise in Kansas, but the reality is much more frantic and primitive. Lidie and Thomas find themselvs in a bustling but rustic town and are soon trying to build a homestead from a rough 12 x 12 cabin. Of concern, though, are all the rumors about the political situation and the outbursts of violence against the mostly free-state settlers by groups of pro-slavery Missourians who are trying to force them out.

In this tempestuous climate, Lidie tries to get to know her husband and also to understand just how committed she is to the fight against slavery. The novel depicts its time and location vividly. Lidie’s is an interesting portrait of a young woman attempting to find her own place in the world and decide what she believes about marriage and the issues of her time.

Day 630: Amherst

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Cover for AmherstAmherst combines the tale of two love stories, one actual and one fictional. The historical actual affair was between Emily Dickinson’s brother Austin and the much younger Mabel Loomis Todd. The modern fictional affair is between Alice Dickinson, working on a screenplay about the affair, and Nick Crocker, an older academic who gives her a place to stay in Amherst while she does her research. All of these people are married to others except Alice.

Emily Dickinson herself is a minor character in the 19th century story. Her brother and Todd used her house for their trysts—a known fact—and there is some debate about how much exposure Emily herself had to sex. Nicholson theorizes a woman listening at doors and a sort of free love attitude by everyone except Sue, Austin’s wife. I found it all a little sordid and probably unlikely.

All of this might be interesting to a reader of literature if Nicholson had spent any time with these characters before thrusting them into their love affairs. We don’t know any of them, so we don’t care about them (alas, too often my complaint lately).

Worse, to me, are the liberties or omissions at the end of the novel. Nicholson gives Todd full credit for her efforts to publish Dickinson’s poetry after her death, even having her spend hours convincing Thomas Wentworth Higginson of the value of Emily’s work. He doesn’t mention that Higginson was already very familiar with Dickinson’s poetry, having been in correspondence with her for 20 years before her death, as related in the excellent biography White Heat. (Although on the surface Nicholson seems unfamiliar with or ignores some of the content of the biography, he interestingly uses the phrase “white heat” to refer to the affair between Todd and Austin Dickinson.) Higginson was already convinced of the worth of Dickinson’s poetry—he just had doubts about how publishable it was. In fact, he almost certainly met Dickinson, which Todd never did.

The other historical fact Nicholson completely glosses over is the one the world of literature finds most shocking—that Todd and Higginson edited Dickinson’s poetry, changing capitalization and spelling but even rewriting some of the passages.

http://www.netgalley.comThe lovers are not really likable, in fact or fiction. Austin Dickinson actually consummated his affair with Todd while his wife was grieving the recent death of their young son. Mabel comes off everywhere as self-centered, and she fought with the Dickinson’s over Emily’s legacy as much as she ensured it.

The two modern lovers are just not interesting, really more of a footnote to the historical section, and I found Nick to be extremely manipulative. The novel also employs that overused trope of having Alice find out immediately in a way that is too crass to be believable that Nick has a reputation as a seducer. Note to minor characters: these warnings never work.

It’s hard to tell whether Nicholson meant these stories to be romantic, although he states in an interview that he is interested in exploring love. I did not find the stories romantic, either one of them. I also did not feel they particularly explored the theme of love. I was not at all drawn in by this novel, neither by the historical nor by the modern story.

Day 626: River Thieves

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Cover for River ThievesReading River Thieves did not leave me with the same impression of wild originality as did Galore, the other Michael Crummey novel I read. Still, it is an interesting historical novel about the interactions between Europeans and the Beothuk Indians in early 19th century Newfoundland.

This novel is based on a true incident. It concerns an investigation into the killing of a Beothuk man by trappers after they went looking for redress for some thefts. This expedition brought back a Beothuk woman, later called Mary, who is captured at the beginning of the novel. But the narration of this story is far from straightforward, and we do not learn exactly what happened until the end of the novel.

Further, the characters’ actions are affected by a long history of their personal interactions. John Peyton is a young man at the beginning of the novel. He is in love with Cassie, his tutor and his father’s housekeeper, but she is somewhat mysterious and keeps aloof from him. John Sr. hired Cassie thinking that she and John Peyton might marry, but a misunderstanding interferes.

Lieutenant David Buchan encounters most of those figuring in the incident when he makes an earlier attempt to establish more cordial relations with the Beothuk than the violent ones currently existing. This expedition, which includes John Peyton, John Sr., and some of John Sr.’s employees, ends in disaster. It is the seemingly upright Buchan, later a captain, who is put in charge of the subsequent investigation.

This story is told at a remove from the characters. Although we learn the thoughts of several of them, Crummey never reveals everything, forcing us to view his characters more as an ensemble rather than to consider one a central character. In Galore, Crummey used this technique to depict the occupants of an entire village. Here, it is not quite as satisfying.

Day 621: Smith, The Story of a Pickpocket

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Cover for SmithI did not understand from the reviews I read for this book that it was a children’s book until I noticed its sprightly and simple tone. (My copy did not have this cover.) However, it is not suitable for just any child, because it begins with a murder and includes other violent acts. When I read in the introduction that Garfield wanted to write books full of adventure, like those by Robert Louis Stevenson, that made sense to me. The book is also described as Dickensian, but whereas some of Dickens’ and Stevenson’s books appeal to both adults and children, Smith does not have as much to offer adults.

Smith shares some plot elements with Oliver Twist, if the hero of the latter had been the Artful Dodger instead of the more innocent Oliver. For Smith is a twelve-year-old pickpocket. His adventures start when he picks the pocket of an old gentleman. Right after he does that, he sees the man murdered by two men dressed in brown. These men chase after Smith, but he eludes them.

Smith finds that all he has stolen is a paper that he can’t read. He is smart enough, though, to figure out that the paper must be important, since the men in brown are looking for him. Soon he finds he must leave the cellar where he lives with his two sisters and flee for his life. He goes looking for someone to teach him to read.

Smith’s adventures lead him to meet lots of characters who are vaguely Dickensian but somehow not as fully drawn as Dickens’ own. He finds shelter with a kindly blind man and his gruff daughter, is friends with a boastful highwayman, and meets an untrustworthy lawyer.

I found Smith only mildly entertaining but think that a child of the right age could be fascinated with this book—both by the life of a Victorian street urchin and by Smith’s adventures.

Day 618: Giants in the Earth

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Cover for Giants in the EarthI don’t usually read introductions until after I read a book, but I began to read the one for Giants in the Earth because I was curious about the book’s origins. I had always assumed it was an American book because it is about settlers in the Dakota territory. But in fact it was originally written in Norwegian and published in Norway in 1925 and 1926 and then translated to English in 1927, for Rölvaag came to the States in 1896 as a young man of 20.

The reason I mention the introduction by Lincoln Colcord, who translated the book with Rölvaag, is that it gives away a key plot point of the novel in the second paragraph. I couldn’t believe this, as it certainly affected how I read the novel, and it is especially egregious in that the event referred to does not happen until the very end of the book. If part of your enjoyment of a novel comes from not knowing what to expect, as mine does, do not read the introduction.

Per Hansa and his family have lost their way crossing the featureless prairies at the start of the novel. They had been travelling out with a group of Norwegians and Norwegian-Americans, but Per Hansa had difficulties with his wagon and the others went on ahead, even his best friend Hans Olsa. Then Per Hansa’s little group got lost in the fog for awhile, and now Per Hansa is afraid he might have missed the others and gone past them.

Per Hansa is an ebullient, sociable, hard-working man, and when he and his family finally arrive at the group of homesteads by Spring Creek, he is delighted with the land Hans Olsa has already marked out for him. He finds the prairie beautiful and is confident that he is going to make a wonderful life there for his family.

His wife Beret feels otherwise, and it is around her reaction that much of the novel centers. She is appalled by the prairie, this vast expanse that has not a single tree to hide behind. She soon begins to view the land as if it is some sort of godless and primitive monster, while Per Hansa sees only that it is rich and fertile.

The novel is set in the 1870’s and early 80’s and details the hardships of life so far away from any amenities. The men have to travel days for firewood in one direction and for supplies in another. Still, more immigrants keep arriving until there is a little settlement by the creek.

This is a fascinating novel about the Norwegian contribution to the settlement of the country. It is a realistic novel, not romanticized, with no big feats of heroism or villainy, just details of the life these people have chosen and its effects on them.