I can’t remember whether I found this book when looking for more about native peoples or for filling holes for my A Century of Books project. In any case, it does both.
Readers from the U. S. may not be familiar with the name “Big Bear,” but I’m betting Canadian readers are. He seems to have been their equivalent of Sitting Bull.
In The Temptations of Big Bear, Wiebe tells Big Bear’s story beginning in 1876, when the Cree, of whom Big Bear was a chief, along with other groups of native peoples and the Métis, meet to discuss a treaty with British officials. The treaty calls for the people to “sell” several hundred thousand acres to the government in exchange for small reservations and regular payments as well as assistance when they are hungry. Big Bear does not sign the treaty. He wants to wait to see what happens.
Within a few years, it becomes apparent that the buffalo, upon which the Cree depend, are dying out, so Big Bear signs the treaty. However, he does not select a reservation for his people. Instead, they continue to move among their usual environs.
This novel leads up to events at Frog Lake in 1888, where some of the Cree warriors attack the settlers, kill some, and take others prisoner. These attacks follow years of broken promises and starvation. Although Big Bear tries to stop them, he is disregarded. Of course, he is held responsible by the authorities and tried, despite all the white witnesses but one having testified for him.
This is an eloquently written novel. It is insightful and interesting, and Big Bear’s last speech at his trial made me cry.
Wiebe doesn’t cite sources, and it’s hard to tell whether some of the speeches and writings are verbatim from records or not.
The New Life was a slow read for me. It took me almost a week, which is unusual for me with fiction. I read it for my Walter Scott Prize project.
The novel is loosely based on two men, John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis, who in the early 1890s wrote a book together. When I looked them up, it didn’t seem as if it was very loosely based—Crewe gives his characters almost identical names. But then I realized it is set after Symonds’ death in order to bring in the trial of Oscar Wilde.
John Addington is a gay man who is married and has three grown daughters. He is known for writing about a vast array of subjects. Henry Ellis is an idealistic, naïve younger man, a doctor. He marries a good friend, Edith, and their intention is to lead the way to the New Life. I wasn’t exactly sure what that entailed, but at minimum it seems to be that spouses are equal partners. Unfortunately for Henry, they never discussed the sexual side of marriage. He thought there would be consummation; Edith, a lesbian, did not. So, Henry continues a virgin with a fascination for the subject of sex. They live separately, and soon Edith has a new friend, Angelica.
Henry wishes to make a scientific study of sex and publish the results, and since he knows some gay friends, referred to at that time as “inverts,” he decides to start with them, having a theory that rather than an illness or perversion, inversion is natural. He decides to invite John Addington to join him in his project, not because he thinks he is gay, but because of his reputation as a writer about various topics.
John has been getting more tired of keeping his secret as an invert. He has confessed to his wife and occasionally has brought a man home for sex, an action that I thought was breathtakingly cruel. Now he meets Frank, a much younger, lower-class man who wants to be his friend. When John sees Henry’s proposal, he thinks such a project will change people’s ideas about inversion so that he can be free to do what he wants.
The men write the book and begin looking for a publisher. However, just at that time, Oscar Wilde is found guilty of inversion and is sentenced to jail. The backlash is such that the two fear their work is unpublishable.
If you are not a fan of graphic sex scenes, this won’t be the book for you, especially the first few hundred pages. The novel opens, for example, with a very explicit and detailed wet dream. I am not really a fan of explicit sex scenes in novels, so I found the first half of the novel hard going, despite it being well written and having vivid descriptions of life in Victorian London. (It has a wonderful description of a day that is so smoggy no one can see where they’re going.)
The novel picked up for me after the book, entitled Sexual Inversion, is published and the police go after a bookseller for selling indecent material, their book. Then it becomes about the reactions of the various characters once there is a threat to their own lives.
It did strike me differently. Although Elinor is still my favorite of the two sisters, they both struck me more extremely this time. Marianne seemed like a true modern teenager, not as much for her reactions to Willoughby but more in her sulking (call it what it is), her rudeness to various kind characters whom she thinks ill-bred, and so on. But the thing is, 16 in the early 19th century meant she was supposed to be an adult, or almost. (Of course, she is also under the influence of the Romantic movement in art, literature, and music.)
As for Elinor, sometimes I felt she carried her comments a little too far, into preachiness. I got a little tired of her dissections of other people’s behavior.
I also appreciate the wit of the novel more. Although I always find Austen witty, she has drawn us some priceless characters and written quite a few zingers.
I am not so sure about Tomalin’s “wobble.” I looked for it but didn’t find much evidence for it unless you count Elinor’s dash out of the room after she finds out Edward isn’t married. I’d like to hear if anyone was struck differently. I remember not agreeing with some of Tomalin’s interpretations when I read her biography of Austen.
I read The Islandman to fill a hole in my Century of Books project. It is the memoir of a man who was born in the Blasket Islands in far Southwest Ireland, in 1856. The Irish edition of this book was a big seller in Ireland after it was published in 1929. The islands are now unpopulated as the government removed the last inhabitant in the 1950s.
The memoir is written as a series of anecdotes but in order of time. The existence of the inhabitants was a difficult one of mostly subsistence living. The people worked hard. Fishing was a major source of food, but scavenging shipwrecks was a source of subsistence and some income (money wasn’t much in use). Most families had a cow or two, hens, maybe pigs, and a donkey for hauling peat and seaweed. Patches of land were cultivated for potatoes and grain.
Although the people were poor, because of the fishing, they did well enough during the potato famine. However, they had many more difficult periods.
O’Crohan took to schooling but only had six years of school because there was no teacher on the island the other years. He of course spoke Irish but didn’t write it well until later in his life, when people started coming to him to learn the language.
This is an interesting account, especially as I’ve been interested in life on remote islands for some time.
I knew this book might not be a good fit for me, because I usually feel that mystery short stories are too short to do much but pose puzzles, but more importantly, because I usually think it is unsuccessful when an author continues another author’s work. However, I have generally enjoyed Lyndsay Faye’s books, so I tried this one.
Purporting to be lost stories, notes, and diary entries, most by Dr. Watson but some by Holmes, this book’s 15 stories span the time from before the two met until 1902.
I am not going to run through a description of each story. Instead, I’ll comment on how authentic Faye’s stories seemed as stories about Holmes, keeping in mind that I haven’t read a Holmes story in years.
First, how much like the originals are Faye’s Holmes and Watson? Faye clearly is very familiar with the books (this applies to pretty much all the things I’ll look at, not just this one) because she makes lots of references to other cases and certainly has down Holmes’s characteristics. However, it seemed to me that her Holmes is more of a Benedict Cumberbatch Holmes than an Arthur Conan Doyle one. For one thing, he is much more expressive of emotions, more so even than Cumberbatch, especially as the book goes on. Watson seems himself, only even more flowery of description, but smarter. Also, like in the B. C. version mentioned above, his war service is stressed a lot more.
What about the mysteries? Well, you’re reading the words of a person who never once guessed the solution of a Sherlock Holmes story—until now. On the one hand, Faye’s stories are not nearly as ridiculously overcomplicated and unlikely as Doyle’s (spoilers for ACD!)—teach a snake to crawl down a rope? while dying, say “the speckled band” instead of “a snake bit me”? On the other hand, it seemed ridiculously easy to guess at least portions of the solution for most of the stories (unlike in Faye’s other mysteries—this is what I mean by mystery short stories—they’re either totally opaque or too easy). For instance, in “The Case of Colonel Warburton’s Madness,” I guessed immediately that (spoilers) gaslighting was involved and who was doing it. I just didn’t know how. Later in a story about identical twins, I knew immediately that the twins had switched.
Faye writes well and keeps up the interest. I just wish she’d write more of her own stuff.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
What? Me Read? 