Tag: 19th century

Review 2514: Germinal

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My copy of Germinal seems to be a special edition, released in 1942 by Nonesuch Press, and perhaps part of a book club, because inside its cover is a little insert that says it is part of a series called the Ten Great French Romances. Now, I’m not so sure of the other books, although some of them don’t strike me as Romances (not even using the original definition), but poor Zola would be rolling over in his grave. Why? Because he was basically the founder of a new kind of literary movement for his time that rejected Romanticism. It was called Naturalism and is supposed to be based in science and logic and takes an impersonal stance, observing but not commenting. It also takes determinism as one of its tenets—that is, a character’s fate is determined at the get-go.

One little personal comment before my review—I received this novel as a Christmas present from my brother after unthinkingly commenting that I had never read any Zola. After I started reading it, I realized there was a reason for that.

The novel begins and ends with Étienne Lantier. He is an engine-man who has lost his job after a dispute with the foreman, and he has been traveling north looking for work. He is starving and doesn’t expect to find any.

It’s 1866, and the revolution 70 years before has helped the middle class but not the poor. Étienne travels from place to place but finds nothing.

He meets an old man nicknamed Bonnemort whose family, the Maheus, has worked for the Montsou Mining Company for generations. He ends up hanging around one of the Montsou pits, the Voreau, and so is on hand when Maheu, Bonnemort’s son, learns that his best putter has died. (I never figured out what a putter is, but now I see it’s someone who brings empty containers up to the surface and brings filled ones down to the bottom.) Étienne has just walked off, but Maheu sends his daughter Catherine after him to fetch him back and gives him a job. (Yes, women worked in the mines, too.)

Étienne is a little better educated than the miners and has been writing to a representative of Workers International. Soon, he is talking about half-understood principles of socialism and unionism to the mine workers. The Maheus, whom he takes a bed with, are barely able to feed themselves on the wages of Maheu, Catherine, Bonnemore, and Zacharie, and in fact Zacharie is being prevented from marrying because his family needs his wages. Then the unexpected demand for repayment of a debt begins a period of starvation.

Although the novel is about an actual 1866 mining strike, a strong subplot is about Étienne’s relationship with Catherine. He at first takes her for a boy, she is so young, but because a man named Chaval is pursuing her, Étienne assumes she is loose, as most of the mining women are, so they start off badly. (Modern audiences may be upset, as I was, when they find that Catherine doesn’t enter puberty until long after she is involved in a sexual relationship with Chaval.)

After a period of hardship for all the miners, the company decides on a new policy of timbering that will essentially cut the miners’ wages. Étienne becomes their leader when the miners begin negotiations to avoid a strike.

This novel is unremittingly grim. Zola digs you right in to every detail of the miners’ lives and then includes a couple of passages that contrast this with what the middle class mine managers and owners are doing. For example, the village has just emerged from a period of starvation when Zola describes a several-course dinner party at the home of Hennebeau, the mine manager. Later, when the miners are destroying the mines, Hennebeau is too wrapped up in the discovery that his wife is unfaithful to pay much attention.

Although this novel is considered a very important work in French literature, naturalism is not for me. It is too brutal.

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Review 2506: The Voyage of the Narwhal

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In 1855, Erasmus Wells has spent years working with the items in his father’s collection of specimens, ever since he himself returned from an ill-fated exploration in the South Pacific. The members of the expedition were mocked, but the worst thing was the acclaim given to the leader after he released his book—cut and pasted from the journals and records he confiscated at the end of the trip—including Erasmus’s—but giving them no credit.

But Erasmus almost unwillingly finds himself departing on a voyage to the Arctic, to be lead by his sister Lavinia’s young fiancé, Zeke Vorhees. Zeke was raised like a younger brother to Erasmus and his brothers. He is handsome and charismatic, but may not make good leadership material. However, Erasmus has promised Lavinia he will take care of Zeke.

And Zeke proves divisive as a leader almost from the beginning, determined to do what he wants even if it unnecessarily risks the lives of his men. He almost immediately gets on bad terms with Mr. Tyler, the sailing master, even though he should be relying on Tyler’s experience. Although the purpose of the voyage is to find out more about the Franklin expedition, Erasmus becomes worried that Zeke has other intentions.

Periodically, the novel looks back at the people left behind, particularly Alexandra, who has been hired to keep Lavinia company. She is also hired by Erasmus’s brothers to color illustrations for a book of exploration, and later begins to engrave, but she yearns to travel herself.

Barrett builds suspense as the novel moves from Erasmus’s loneliness and sense of isolation to his fears about the results of Zeke’s leadership to a sense of true peril. This is a truly fascinating novel that builds on the records of actual voyages of exploration during this period. Although Erasmus has his flaws, he is a sympathetic main character. I’ve read several really good historical novels this year, and this is one of them.

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Review 2493: Dostoevsky Read-a-Thon: Devils, or The Possessed

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I haven’t felt as if I had the time to fully participate in Russophile Reads’ Dostoevsky Read-a-Thon, but my original plan was to read some of the shorter works. (That’s boiling down to The Gambler.) I have already read all the long ones and reviewed a couple of them already, and I didn’t think I had time to read any more. Well, that was the plan.

I could not remember Devils at all. For some reason, I got it into my head that it was about the same length as Notes from Underground, a relatively short work. So, I put a hold on it at the library. It already had four holds on it, which is unusual for my local library, and surprising. After a while, when only one hold had been released, I realized I wasn’t going to get it in time to read it for the project, so I began looking for a copy of it. That was when I discovered that Devils was once known as The Possessed, which I had in my own library (which means I have actually read it. I don’t put books on the shelves until I’ve read them). The newer editions of this book are all called Devils or Demons, apparently a preferred version of Dostoevsky’s title. And I have a Modern Library edition of the old Constance Garnett translation, which was all that was available years ago for most of the classic Russian translations (now considered inferior). And, of course, it’s more than 700 pages long with very small type. But I plunged in.

So, finally I get to my review. Let me say first that my spelling of names might seem eccentric now (especially Nikolay instead of Nikolai, which is much closer to the correct pronunciation), but since I reread the Constance Garnett translation, I am using her spelling.

The Introduction to my Modern Library edition of The Possessed says that although Dostoevsky thought he was a progressive, he wrote the book out of fear of nihilism and revolution. Until some events toward the end of the book, though, it’s hard to take the activities of the radical characters seriously.

The novel starts with two respected members of a provincial town. Stepan Trofimovich Verhovensky is a highly regarded scholar. However, for 20 years he’s been living under the patronage of wealthy and forceful Varvara Petrovna Stavrogin, supposedly writing a book but accomplishing nothing. He’s not exactly a parasite but rather an impractical, unworldly intellectual who has never had to take care of himself. He does manage to spend a lot of her money, but lately she’s been drawing in the expenses.

The action gets started (sort of) by the not quite simultaneous arrival of these two characters’ respective sons, Nikolay Vsyevolodovich Stavrogin (usually referred to just as Stavrogin) and Pyotr Stepanovich Verhovensky. Stavrogin is a sulky, charismatic young man who left years ago as a student and may be involved with a group of nihilists in town. He is also quite the womanizer, for we learn that both of Varvara Petrovna’s young friends, Liziveta Nikolaevna and the more dependent Darya Pavlovna, were involved with him during a visit to Switzerland. Pyotr Stepanovich has been gone even longer, as his father took no interest in him when he was a child and sent him away to be raised. He doesn’t seem important at first but turns out to be the catalyst for most of the action. He seems frivolous but is madly lying to and manipulating people for his own ends.

Both Stavrogin and another character named Shatov have become disillusioned with the revolutionary group that a group of the characters belong to, but Shatov, who has been running an illegal printing press, has asked to quit. Pytor Stepanovich has as one his goals, aside from sowing general confusion, to convince his group of five cell members that Shatov means to betray them, because he wants them to kill him. Pyotr Stepanovich, we learn, is an informer himself but also wants to avenge an insult by Shatov, who spat in his face back in Switzerland. Stavrogin doesn’t seem any more devoted to the cause, but Pyotr Stepanovich has secret plans for him. (There’s another character Pyotr Stepanovich wants vengeance against, and that’s his foolish father, Stepan Trofimovich.)

For quite a while, Dostoevsky seems to be setting us a farce, Stepan Trofimovich’s behavior is so clueless and absurd, the social machinations and gossip in the town are so ridiculous, and the radicals’ attempts to sow confusion are so silly. But violence kicks off thanks to the activities of Pytor Stepanovich.

Frankly, although I believe that Dostoevsky had a radical youth, his depictions of their meetings and their statements of belief seemed absurd. But I am no expert on on 19th century radicalism.

Everyone is in a frenzy at usual with Dostoevsky, and frankly, I had a hard time tolerating the many long, rambling speeches, whether of a religious or nihilistic subject. (And the nihilists, as well as others, sure seem to spend a lot of time talking about God.) This book was so long that by the end, when Dostoevsky has knocked off half the main characters, I was just skimming. Not my favorite of his works.

However, I was lucky enough, while poking around on the web, to find a multi-part article by Elif Batuman (author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them) about attending a 12-hour-long production of The Possessed in Italian on Governor’s Island. The first part is called “My 12-Hour Blind Date, with Dostoevsky,” and if you want to read all the parts, there are links to them, published by The Paris Review. It’s hilarious.

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Review 2488: #1970Club! Charity Girl

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Georgette Heyer is always a pleasure, and I was delighted to reread this one for the 1970 Club. As usual, on my first post for the club, here is a list of some other books from 1970 that I have reviewed:

Now for my review.

While visiting friends in the country, Viscount Desford goes to a party to see the latest beauty. He notices someone watching the party from upstairs. Thinking that she’s a child, he speaks to her, only to find she is older, a naïve relative who has been taken in out of charity.

The next day on his way to London, he finds the girl, Cherry Steane, on the road, running away from her aunt. Desford tries to talk her into returning, but she has been treated as a drudge and accused of trying to attract Desford to herself away from her beautiful cousin. He finally agrees to take her to her grandfather’s house in London, but upon arriving there, finds the house shut up.

Desford tries to think where he can take Cherry without ruining her reputation. His parents’ house is out of the question, not only because his father is suffering from a gout attack but also because Lord Desford despises both Wilfred Steane, Cherry’s father, who disappeared without paying her school fees, and Steane’s father.

Desford decides to take her to his best friend, Henrietta Silverdale. At one point, Lord Desford tried to arrange a marriage between Desford and Henrietta, but both refused. However, when Desford brings Cherry in, Henrietta feels pangs, fearing he may be attracted to her.

This novel features one of Heyer’s romping plots, with Desford encountering a slew of memorable characters while he tries to find a place for Cherry.

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Review 2483: In the Upper Country

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In 1850, Lensinda Marten lives in an all-Black town in Canada north of Lake Erie. She is a healer, but she is puzzled when she is summoned to the side of a slave catcher who has come after a group of escaped slaves that are hiding on Simion’s farm. Puzzled because the man is dead. When she hears that an old woman, one of the escapees, has been arrested, she realizes she is wanted to write a story about the woman for the Abolitionist paper.

She goes to visit the old woman in jail and finds that she isn’t ready to tell her story. Instead, she wants to swap stories with Lensinda. In doing so, a history of cruelty is reveealed, and the two women find connections between each other.

Thomas says in the Afterword that he heard and read many stories about Canada’s history of slavery, its treatment of First Nations people, and the War of 1812, but he could find no story that did everything he wanted. So, he chose this method of telling several stories that interface.

Although I found the information interesting and the settings and historical details to be convincing, I’m afraid his approach didn’t work that well for me. Just as I was getting interesting in Lensinda’s story, the novel appeared to move away from her. There were quite a few characters whose connections aren’t immediately clear, and I kept getting them confused as we jumped from story to story. Eventually, the stories connect, but that wasn’t clear for quite a while.

I read this novel for my Walter Scott prize project.

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Review 2479: Classics Club Spin Result! Merkland

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I have read and enjoyed all of Margaret Oliphant’s Carlingford series as well as her first novel and one other. Merkland (which has different subtitles depending on where I look at it: in my eBook it says “A Story of Scottish Life” and in my hardcopy it says “or, Self-Sacrifice”) is her second novel and shows her inexperience. I read it for my Classics Club Spin.

Although the main character of the novel is Anne Ross, it has two plots concerning the fates of two disgraced young men. At the opening of the novel, Anne learns from her unsympathetic stepmother not only that her older brother Norman Rutherford, long believed dead, may be alive, but that he is believed to be the murderer of Arthur Aytoun, who was found shot to death 18 years before. Anne is horrified when she learns that her great friend, Mrs. Catherine Douglas, has invited this man’s daughter, Alice, to stay with her, for she thinks Alice must hate her family.

Mrs. Catherine, for her part, is facing a dilemma. She has unexpectedly inherited some money and, being already wealthy herself, had intended to give it to hard-working but poor young James Aytoun, Alice’s brother. However, two old friends have come to her to ask for help for Archie Sutherland, the young local laird, who has fallen in with bad companions and is badly in debt. She decides in Archie’s favor, but before she can send him the money, he loses his entire estate gambling.

Mrs. Catherine sets about rescuing Archie by bringing him home to recover and arranging honest employment where he might eventually earn enough to buy back his heritage.

For her part, Anne discovers a letter that indicates Norman may be innocent of the crime even though the circumstantial evidence against him is strong. She makes it her goal to try to clear her brother’s name, especially important because Alice Aytoun has fallen in love with Anne’s young stepbrother, Lewis.

So far, so good. Two interesting plots plus other subplots such as the identity of a mysterious child and the fate of Rutherford’s estate in the hands of his dissolute English ex-companions. However, this novel is much longer than it needs to be, containing passage after passage of moralizing and sermonizing. Modern audiences may also be dismayed at its strong message against women’s rights. Further, the novel takes several chapters beyond the crisis to wrap up its loose ends, and by the end I was just skimming the paragraphs trying to finish.

A final note about the edition I read. I dislike reading eBooks, so even though I have Oliphant’s complete works on my iPad, I looked for a paperback version. Drat these print-on-demand books! I ended up with the edition shown above, published by Horse’s Mouth, that had all the evils except that it was corrected for misreadings by machine reading, which I have encountered before. No page numbers, no copyright or any other kind of information except a short biography and a list of other works, no formatting (the text starts at the bottom of page 2). Worst of all, it is only in about 6 pt. type at the largest, when anyone who knows anything about it knows that about the smallest you can go and still be readable is 9 pt.

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Review 2474: North Woods

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In early colonial days, a couple flees one of the colonies into the wilderness of Massachusetts. There, they settle in a valley.

A settler with a baby is kidnapped by natives. When she becomes ill with fever, they leave her with an old white woman, who cares for her. But when white men come after her and plan to kill the natives—the old woman’s friends—she murders them. Before this happens, one of the men gives the captured woman an apple, and she drops the seeds on the ground.

An apple tree grows.

After the French and Indian Wars, Major Charles Osgood gives up his uniform and decides to grow apples. His friends think he has lost his mind. He searches all over until a child leads him to an apple tree near a ruined cabin in the wilderness. The apple is marvelous. He builds a house and takes cuttings from the tree to make an orchard, producing an apple called Osgood’s Wonder.

So Daniel Mason goes on relating the history of this plot of ground, from one owner to another. People die, are murdered, are conned, become ghosts, run mad, the wilderness recedes and then returns, the house is ruined and rebuilt, added to, ruined, rebuilt. Each section is linked to others by characters, coincidences, and place. Some of the incidents are funny, some fates are sad, some characters get what they deserve. Tales are punctuated by songs written from the grave.

I can’t really convey how much I enjoyed reading this unusual novel. It’s steeped in the beauty of the forest. It somehow manages to involve you despite some quite short (some longer) stories of its characters. You get worried about the fates of apple and chestnut trees! I loved this one. It did exactly what a book is supposed to do, pulled me into a different world and made me reluctant to leave it.

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Review 2468: The New Magdalen

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In The New Magdalen, Wilkie Collins has written a sensation novel that is by definition quite melodramatic. The subject, as you might guess from the title, is the reformed prostitute.

That’s what Mercy Merrick is, although she first appears as a nurse on the battlefield of the French/German war. An Englishwoman, Grace Roseberry, is stranded there on the way to England to live with her father’s friend, Lady Janet Roy, after her father’s death. Unfortunately, she was robbed on the way and has only her letter of introduction.

Grace confides in Mercy and then pressures her to confide in her, but she is not at all sympathetic to Mercy’s story of being forced by starvation into prostitution. Mercy reformed after hearing a sermon by Julian Gray, but every time she took a respectable position with the full knowledge of her past by her employers, she lost it once the servants or neighbors found out.

Mercy has loaned Grace some clothing. When after an attack, Grace is pronounced dead by the French doctor, Mercy takes her clothes and letters of introduction and assumes her identity, trying to get a better future.

Several months later, Mercy (now called Grace, confusingly) is Lady Janet’s adopted daughter and is betrothed to Horace Holmcroft. However, she can’t find it within herself to set a date without telling Horace the truth.

Then Julian Gray arrives. It turns out he is Lady Janet’s nephew. He has taken an interest in the case of a woman who has been hospitalized in Germany and claims to have been on her way to live with Lady Janet. Of course, this is the real Grace.

In Mercy’s absense, Grace appears and accuses her of stealing her identity. But Lady Janet doesn’t believe her and finds her offensive. And in fact, Collins depicts her as a horrible person.

That’s the message, really—the despicable virtuous woman versus the saintly ex-prostitute—for Mercy eventually decides to make things right.

Some of the Victorian values in this one are hard to stomach, but Collins knows how to keep readers interested in his story.

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Review 2458: Miss Granby’s Secret or the Bastard of Pinsk

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I was thrilled to learn that Dean Street Press was continuing its Furrowed Middlebrow imprint. This novel is an entertaining entry in that line.

In 1912, Pamela receives a bequest from her great-aunt Addie Granby of a house and a box of keepsakes and papers. Aunt Addie had been a well-known romance writer, but her modern great niece doubts that her spinster aunt ever understood the facts of life. Pamela finds hints that Addie had a romance when she was 16 with someone named Stanislaw. She also wrote her first novel.

The entirety of the novel, entitled The Bastard of Pinsk, is included within this novel. It begins with a conscientious list of terms that some polite young man has given her definitions for. As an example, “bastard” is given as “a very noble Hero of Royal Blood.”

The novel within the novel is made funny by the naïveté of its author, who writes in a Romantic, florid style and flings about words she doesn’t know the meaning or connotations of. Her Romantic upbringing and reading in the Gothic tradition are manifest in the ridiculous plot. If I have any criticism, it’s that it’s a bit too long. However, it picks up as it goes along.

Twenty years later Pamela learns that her friend Adey has been nursing an old man—her Aunt Addie’s Stanislaw! Now, she thinks, is her opportunity to find out about Aunt Addie’s past.

I received this book from the publisher in exchange for a free and fair review.

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Review 2443: After Sappho

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I read After Sappho for my James Tait Black project. It is experimental, written in short vignettes that jump around in time and from person to person. It tells the stories of lesbian women, mostly literary figures, trying to make a place for themselves. It begins in the late 19th century with women fascinated by the poet Sappho. Some of them study Ancient Greek, some dress like ancient Greeks or re-enact ancient plays, some travel to Greece.

The novel is vividly written in first person plural or in third person, at times slyly ironic, sometimes engaged in word play, often invigorating and with lots of sexual metaphors. It is interesting, telling of repressive laws against women, particularly in Italy, and reporting actual aggressively misogynistic “scientific” or political statements by men. It goes on to tell of the accomplishments and tragedies and love affairs of its protagonists, largely ignoring the men in their lives. For example, from this novel, you wouldn’t know there was a Leonard Woolf, just a Vita Sackville-West.

Although I found the novel very interesting at first, there were so many characters that I couldn’t keep track of them or remember which events happened to which ones. I could only track the ones I was already familiar with. For example, the novel begins and ends with Lina Poletti, even though she disappears about halfway through, so she is obviously important to Schwartz, but by the end I couldn’t remember her. I felt like I needed a chart.

And yet, I feel that with more character definition, I might have remembered all of them, but these short vignettes that tell of an activity or something they said didn’t really provide a cohesive picture to me of what the women were like.

So, I applaud this novel’s daring devices, but they didn’t really work for me.

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