Tag: 20th century

Day 577: Red Sorghum

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Cover for Red SorghumRed Sorghum is absolutely brutal. It tells the story of a Chinese family during the time of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Most of the action of the book takes place in 1939 and a few years thereafter, although there are glimpses of years before and later. I say book, because it is described in some places as a series of novellas and in other places as a novel.

The two main characters are Yu Zhan’ao, the narrator’s grandfather, also known as Commander Yu, and Dai, his grandmother. The narrator’s father Douquan is a less important character. The narrator himself only makes an appearance in the last two pages.

The book begins with an ambush of the Japanese near Black Water River. But nothing here is related in a straightforward manner. The narration moves back and forth in time as Commander Yu’s preparations for the battle alternate with the story of Uncle Arhat’s kidnapping as slave labor for the Japanese and the story of how Yu Zhan’ao meets Dai. There is plenty of violence in all of these stories, and we are not spared any details of guts falling out, decapitated heads, or anything involving bodily functions.

The Chinese are at war through most of the book, of course, but various factions of Chinese fight and kill each other just as viciously. Although Commander Yu wins the battle of Black Water River, almost all of his men are killed when his ally, Detachment Leader Pocky Leng, fails to turn up at the ambush, then steals all of the captured armament.

Earlier in time but later in the book, Grandfather Yu meets Dai on her way to marry a rich man’s son. Her father’s greed has betrothed her to a leper. Yu seduces her on her way back to visit her parents after three days of marriage and then goes off to murder her husband and father-in-law, leaving her a rich widow.

Sometimes the violence in this book is so extreme it is almost funny. People behave grotesquely—they are crude, barbaric, disgusting, venal, and revengeful. Commander Yu is almost more eager to kill Pocky Leng than he is the vicious Japanese, who are nearly cartoonish in their evil.

In between scenes of almost unbelievable brutality are beautiful descriptions of nature, with a strong emphasis on color. Red is consistently a symbol of life and goodness while green is its opposite. Sometimes blood is green instead of red and too the sun can be green. This use of color comes to a focus in the last pages of the novel, where Mo Yan laments the disappearance of the wonderful red sorghum (a major presence in the novel) and excoriates its green hybrid replacement.

I found very little to like in this book. I read it all, but I basically had to force myself to finish it (and beautiful descriptions or not, I got tired of reading about sorghum). I know the book has received a lot of admiration, and I do not exactly agree with the criticism that it glorifies violence, but there is a lot of very graphic violence in the novel.

Day 575: All the Light We Cannot See

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Cover for All the Light We Cannot SeeI felt a bit of distance while I was reading All the Light We Cannot See, but by the end I was brought under its spell. It is about a German boy and a French girl who meet briefly during World War II.

Werner is growing up in an orphanage in Germany. He has always been fascinated by how things work, particularly electronics, and he is far advanced of his teachers in math. One day he discovers a broken radio set in the trash and is able to make it work. He and his sister Jutta discover a children’s broadcast from France in which a man explains science topics and plays music. This station delights them for years until it becomes dangerous to listen to under the Nazi regime.

With all his gifts, Werner is slated to work in the mines when he is old enough. He gets an opportunity, though, to attend a technical school. Against Jutta’s advice, as Werner has avoided being pulled into the orbit of Nazi politics, he takes his chance.

Marie-Laure’s father is a locksmith employed by a Paris geological museum. At the age of five she becomes blind. Her father teaches her to find her way in their neighborhood by making a model of it, which she learns by feeling her way. She loves spending time at the museum, learning about all its treasures and handling the shells. She also loves reading adventure stories in Braille.

When the Nazis are due to invade Paris, the museum gives four stones to four employees to keep safe. One of them is the museum’s most precious possession, a fabled diamond with a curse attached; the others are fakes. Marie-Laure’s father receives one of them, and the two leave the city, eventually arriving in St. Malo, where Marie-Laure’s great-uncle lives.

The diamond acts as sort of a MacGuffin in this novel. Of course, we are sure who has the real stone.

The stories of Marie-Laure and Werner’s pasts alternate with the bombing of St. Malo in 1944 by the Americans. Werner is trapped with some German soldiers in the basement of a hotel, while Marie-Laure is hiding in her great-uncle’s house from a German officer searching for the diamond.

This novel is beautifully written and shows the hardships of war from both sides of the conflict. Werner struggles with his desire to do what is expected vs. what is the right thing. Marie-Laure tries to resist the chaos of war in other ways. I felt for a long time that the novel would end predictably, but I was pleasantly surprised and delighted by how the ending opened up from a claustrophobic setting to a more universal feeling.

Day 572: Lisette’s List

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Cover for Lisette's ListIn 1937, Lisette and André Roux are on their way to Provence. Lisette has abandoned the opportunity to become an apprentice at the Galerie Laforgue and André his job as the frame builder for famous artists. They have left their beloved Paris to take care of André’s grandfather Pascal, for Pascal has written to say that he is dying.

When they arrive in Pascal’s village of Rousillon, however, they find Pascal has been out playing boules. Lisette is horrified at leaving her life behind on a false pretense. Pascal is sometimes ill, but he is mostly lonely.

He also has a legacy he wants to pass down. Pascal owns seven paintings by masters that he traded for picture frames back when the painters were struggling. He wants to pass to Lisette the stories about these paintings, three by Pisarro and three by Cézanne and one study of heads by an unknown artist. Pascal is also proud of Rousillon, where workers have dug ochre out of the ground for centuries to make the paints used in these paintings.

Although Vreeland’s descriptions of Provence and Rousillon are evocative, I feel that the first part of the novel gets bogged down in these teaching moments of Pascal’s. Even though I am interested in art, these conversations are too didactic to come across as authentic.

There are other moments like this farther into the novel, but it picks up during and after World War II in Lisette’s efforts to survive as a Parisienne alone in the village. André leaves to fight at the beginning of the war. Before he leaves, though, he hides the paintings because he has heard that the Germans will search out art and either take it or destroy it because of decadence.

http://www.netgalley.comI was mildly interested in this novel. It is clear that Vreeland loves art, and she does a fine job of evoking the paintings and the gorgeous landscapes of Provence. She is so interested in these subjects, though, that we get a much sketchier idea of the character of Pascal, for example, or André.

Day 566: Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay

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Cover for Savage BeautyNancy Milford, author of an acclaimed biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, was able to gain unlooked-for access to Edna St. Vincent Millay’s papers to write this compelling biography. She explains in the prologue that she stopped by the house of Millay’s sister Norma in 1972, hoping to talk her into working with her on a biography. Norma, who had all along refused access to her sister’s legacy, decided it was time.

The result is a riveting biography, full of excerpts of letters—some never sent—poetry and scraps of poetry, and notes. It is unflinching in looking at Millay’s lifestyle and addictions.

Millay, of course, is famous as the voice of a newly liberated youth, particularly of women, in the Jazz Age. She began publishing her poetry at a young age and became famous after her first book, when she was in her early twenties. For a long time, she was wildly popular—movie star popular—which is interesting in a nation that generally doesn’t love poetry. And, like many a modern idol, she had a lot of attention paid to her appearance, which was small, with fiery red hair, and sprite-like.

That is about all I knew about her—that and a bit of her verse. Her childhood was hard. Her mother left her father when Edna and her sisters were young and was away much of the time trying to make a living for them as a nurse, while the girls fended for themselves. Still, she brought the girls up with a love of music and poetry. Millay published a few poems in a children’s poetry magazine and won all their awards, but her big break came when she attracted the attention of a wealthy patroness, who arranged for her to attend Vassar.

I am not going to relate Millay’s life story in this review—you can read the book for that—but instead ruminate on some ideas this book made me consider. One is the strange relationship Millay had with her mother Cora and her sisters Norma and Katherine. For Cora, her letters always expressed much affection, often resorting to baby talk. Yet increasingly, Millay kept her mother at arm’s length, sending money instead of visiting her.

With Norma, too, the messages were affectionate, but the visits were few. In her case, there seems to be fair enough evidence that Edna’s husband Eugen Boissevain acted as a barrier between Millay and some people, including her family. As time progressed, for example, almost all of Norma and Katherine’s letters to Edna were answered by Eugen.

Katherine’s case was different, a life that seemed to be an attempt to compete with Edna in her own backyard, and failed. Edna’s patroness also saw Katherine into Vassar, from which she failed to graduate. She published a couple of prose books and some poetry, but her work was deemed too similar to her sister’s to succeed. This evaluation must have been disheartening, but in later years she claimed that Edna stole her ideas, an allegation that was patently absurd, especially as they had barely been in touch for years. Katherine’s relationship with Edna toward the end consisted solely of letters that were a combination of vituperation and demands for money. Like Edna, Katherine was an alcoholic, although not apparently a high-functioning one.

Edna’s relationship with her husband was unusual, too. After a gay and determinedly single life including many affairs with both men and women, Millay married not long after the failure of an affair with another man. Eugen is frequently described as a man who did everything for Edna, including absenting himself so that she could have an affair with a much younger man. Her family and some of her friends seemed to blame him for keeping her apart from them, but I can’t help feeling that most of that was at her desire, since she seemed to see who she wanted to see.

All of this makes me wonder how far a creative person can go in selfishness—how acceptable that is in the service of art. Millay was certainly one of those extremely charismatic people who attracted others like moths. How often such people are completely self-absorbed, even if they are not geniuses. If a person’s genius is fueled by intense emotion, is it okay to fire that  emotion at the expense of others? To blow hot and cold on people’s passions until they are madly in love and then discard them? I don’t really know. Many of Millay’s lovers remained her lifelong friends after the affair was over, but it seems that charismatic people are more often forgiven their actions than others. I haven’t come to any conclusions on this. These ideas are just some the biography made me consider.

I read this book in tandem with The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Review to come.

 

Day 561: Lucky Us

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Cover for Lucky UsI was enchanted by Away, so I was excited to find that Amy Bloom had another book out. This novel is good but does not live up to the other.

Eva Acton has not met her older half-sister Iris until Eva’s mother dumps her on the front porch of her father’s home. Up until then, Eva worshipped her father, but she begins to see that he has his flaws, a second family being a major one of them. Another is stealing the money Iris wins in talent competitions.

Once Iris has managed to hide enough money from her father, she and Eva take off for Hollywood, where Iris is determined to make it big. At that point, Eva’s formal education comes to a halt, when she is 14.

Iris is beginning to have some success when her chances are ruined by betrayal and scandal. The girls, their friend Francisco, and their father, who has joined them upon premature news of Iris’ success, set off for New York.

This Depression-era novel is written in a light, jaunty tone, narrated mostly from Eva’s point of view punctuated by letters. For after a lot has happened, the girls are eventually separated.

The conflict of the novel is around some choices Iris makes, causing Eva to take on responsibilities and struggles that Iris has initiated. Iris commits several unconscionable acts.

http://www.netgalley.comI cared about what would happen to Eva and some likable friends, but I felt that the end of the novel was too easy on Iris. I also felt that this novel lacked the originality of Away. It is interesting, though, because I was never sure what would happen next, and the narrative style has its charms.

 

Day 560: Shah of Shahs

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Cover for Shah of ShahsI remember the Iranian revolution very well, so when my book club selected any book by Ryszard Kapuściński, I chose Shah of Shahs.

Before the revolution, I dated an Iranian student who called himself a revolutionary. Since I never knew him to work toward a revolution in any way, I always figured that he thought he was doing something fashionable or expected by espousing the cause. (I’m not saying that many weren’t sincere or that they didn’t have reason to want a change in government.) Still, I never believed that the Iran those students got was the one they wanted.

Shah of Shahs is an odd book, not exactly journalism, not as incisive and fact-based as, say, an essay by Hitchens, full of opinion and supposition. The book jacket refers to Kapuściński as a mythographer and to the book as a combination of journalism and literature. Perhaps it is this combination that I have trouble with.

What the book does provide is plenty of information about the roots of the people’s discontent—and they were truly a mistreated and abused nation. Kapuściński starts by describing his room in a Teheran hotel, where in 1985 he is the only remaining occupant. His room is cluttered with photographs and scraps of notes from interviews. He puts them in order, describes the photos—beginning with one of the Shah’s grandfather—and relates bits of the history of Iran. Later, he describes his interviews with intellectuals who returned from abroad, people whose relatives were tortured by the Savak, people who were afraid to speak or act for fear of torture, people who took part in protests at the risk of their lives, and so on. In one case, he tells the story about an old man who complains about the heat at a bus stop, calling it “oppressive.” He is hauled off by the Savak for using the word “oppressive,” and he probably wasn’t seen again.

The book is sparely written. It also contains fascinating material that brought me to a better understanding of the dilemmas of Iran. But especially toward the end of the book, it indulges itself in flights of philosophical rumination about the causes of revolutions, which I did not find as interesting.

Day 556: Stoner

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Cover for StonerBest Book of the Week!
When I first began reading Stoner, I was afraid it was going to be a bleak modernist novel. But it is the opposite of bleak. It is a novel about a shy, awkward man who loves. Williams called it “an escape into reality.”

Williams begins the novel by describing William Stoner’s career at the University of Missouri:

“He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses.”

It seems that Williams will be writing about a nonentity, but this is not the case.

On the surface, Stoner does not have a happy life. He is the son of a dirt-poor farmer who decides that William should attend college to learn new agricultural techniques. So, Stoner arrives at the University of Missouri a gawky, unsophisticated boy who has only a mild interest in his courses and begins an undistinguished career.

Then in his sophomore year, he takes a required English literature survey course. Although he is speechless in class, he realizes he has found the thing he loves and so changes his major. He eventually earns a doctorate and begins a teaching career at the university.

He makes an unfortunate choice for a wife, marrying a girl whose training makes her more suitable for a society wife than that of an impoverished instructor. It is not clear why Edith marries him except possibly to get away from home. She makes very clear how distasteful she finds sex, and he is too inexperienced to know what to do about it.

Edith’s sexuality changes briefly when she decides she wants a child. After their daughter Grace is born, though, Edith takes little interest in her or in him. Stoner, on the other hand, falls madly for Grace. He takes on almost all the care for her in her first five or six years of life. Then Edith does everything she can to separate them and mold Grace into the type of girl Edith thinks she should be.

Stoner’s solace is in his work, for which he eventually finds a talent for teaching Medieval literature. His progress in his career is hindered, though, by university politics. He finds himself in a dispute over the fitness of a student to enter the doctoral program. Although Stoner’s position is completely justified and his actions misrepresented, he earns himself the enmity of the student’s mentor, Hollis Lomax, who eventually becomes department chair.

Stoner falls in love and finds for awhile some tenderness, but he knows his relationship will be short-lived. It is also ended by university politics.

What Williams accomplishes in this novel is to turn that first assessment of Stoner on its head. Stoner is a flawed man who owes many of the difficulties of his life to inaction, but he is doing work he loves, he is completely conscientious in his efforts, and he even manages a minor victory over his enemy after years of patience. The introduction to the novel states that although readers think Williams is depicting a sad life, he sees it as a novel about love, all the forms it takes, and the forces against it.

You may think this novel sounds dreary. It is not, and it is not often that you feel as if you know and love a character so thoroughly.

Day 555: Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking

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Cover for Mastering the Art of Soviet CookingAlthough Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is billed as a memoir, it is written with the help of the author’s mother and begins long before Von Bremzen was born, with the start of the Soviet Union. It is an unusual memoir, tracing as it does the history of the Soviet Union, decade by decade, through the meals cooked by one family.

In an entertainingly wry writing style, Von Bremzen relates the changes in Soviet approaches to government over time and the way these changes affected the populace. She begins by explaining how Lenin’s asceticism nearly eliminated Russian cuisine because of the idea that food was decadent (and hardly any food was available).

Von Bremzen ironically and knowingly traces the history of Soviet Russia through famine and glut, for each decade featuring a dish that seems to represent it (although one decade features ration cards). The recipes are at the end.

Von Bremzen relates her own mother’s history as the rebellious daughter of a prominent Soviet military officer, her mother totally rejecting the party line. Larisa was terrified throughout the Stalinist era and longed to leave the country. Anya, herself with a difficult start as a child not allowed to join the Young Pioneers or visit Lenin’s tomb (things she secretly yearned for), had finally found a comfortable place when her mother dragged her off to Philadelphia.

This amusing book is fascinating for people who are interested in Russia, which I have always been. Darkly funny are the countless contrasts between the official views of the country and Von Bremzen’s descriptions of the actual plight of the population. It is difficult to describe the divided viewpoint of the author, who obviously loves Russia and the 60’s vision of what it was, while at the same time being deeply skeptical of everything about it.

This book is unusual, intelligent, and well-written, about a woman’s attempts to reconcile her feelings about her country and upbringing.

Day 551: Mrs. Dalloway

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Cover for Mrs. DallowayMrs. Dalloway is preparing for a party at her home. She goes out herself in the morning to pick up the flowers.

Clarissa Dalloway enjoys her walk. She loves the air, the invigorating city of London, the people. As she walks, she thinks about events from her past, particularly a summer when she was being courted by Peter Walsh at her home of Bourton.

On her walk, Mrs. Dalloway briefly encounters an old friend and we follow him and his thoughts for awhile. So through the day, the novel moves from the consciousness of one character to another, culminating in Mrs. Dalloway’s party. Thoughts and memories are triggered by random images, as Woolf tries to replicate human consciousness.

Woolf’s express purpose in writing this novel was to depict one day in a woman’s life. She also does a turn on the marriage plot—for we see thirty-some years later how that plot worked out.

Mrs. Dalloway harks back to her youth, when it seemed possible she would marry Peter. They argued a lot, though, and it seemed to her that he criticized her. We learn from Peter’s memories that he suddenly had the flash of a thought that she would marry Richard Dalloway. Convinced of this, he left for India. Now, he has returned to tell her he is in love again—with a much younger married woman who has children and is not of his class. Still, by the end of the novel it is as if he has forgotten his new love.

Clarissa married comfort and stability in Richard Dalloway. Instead of a challenging and more bohemian existence with Peter, she has a very structured life. But she is recovering from illness and sleeps in a narrow, prim bed in the attic. It is unclear whether she is happy, except in the delight of living she feels by her nature.

Septimus and Rezia Smith are a couple unknown to Clarissa who are also important to the novel. Septimus is suffering from a delayed shell shock and hallucinations from his experiences in World War I. Rezia, the wife he brought back from Italy, is taking him to see Sir William Bradshaw. Bradshaw is a Harley Street specialist who appears later at Mrs. Dalloway’s party.

As with other modernist novels, I sometimes felt I was missing something. At other times, though, I felt that my reaction was supposed to be something like “This is what life is.”

Having recently read The Hours (wrong way around, I know), Michael Cunningham’s tribute to the novel, I was fascinated by how, with slight adjustments of character and by breaking the novel into three time periods, he invokes even stronger feelings and gives us a fresh look at the material.

Day 549: Classics Club Spin #6! Herland

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Cover for HerlandHerland is the novel chosen for me from my Classics List by the Classics Club Spin #6!

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I guess most of my reaction to Herland is based on a dislike of utopian fiction, which seems to be more than ordinarily didactic. I like the occasional dystopian novel, but in my experience the dystopian writers are a bit more subtle about their lessons. Or in the case of Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy, if not subtler, funnier. I chose this novel for my list just because I thought I had never read it and I was trying to make sure I selected quite a few notable works by women.

Vandyck Jennings, Jeff Margrave, and Terry Nicholson are traveling when they hear of a land of only women and female children. They hear that men are not welcomed, so of course, they decide to go there. The land is isolated at the top of an unclimbable mountain, but the three fly up in Terry’s plane. There they are taken prisoner by the women, who educate them in their customs before allowing them to mix freely with the inhabitants. It is this education and subsequent discussions that make up the bulk of the novel.

These women have been isolated for thousands of years and began to reproduce asexually through parthenogenesis. Their world is a garden, perfectly peaceful, with no disease or strife. Although two of the men are sympathetic characters (the third is a first-class chauvinist), the implicit message is somewhat misandrist—that women can get along perfectly well, better really, without men.

The book is funny at times, as these bewildered males take in the lessons of Herland. The funniest scene is after the men marry, and Van is trying to get his wife Ellador to understand the pleasures of having sex more often than when she’s scheduled to reproduce. But most of the charm the novel has is overridden for me by its didacticism, even while I believe Gilman brings up some important issues.

Development of character is not something Gilman is very interested in for this novel. The men all have distinct but pretty much one-dimensional personalities, and the women are virtually indistinguishable except for older versus younger. Science and psychology must have been hot topics at the time (1912), because terms from both are thrown around quite a bit. Unfortunately, there is also an implicit advocacy for some of the theories of eugenics.

What I was most interested in was what happened to Ellador after she and Van escort the exiled Terry out of the country. But Gilman doesn’t say.

In Gilman’s time, many of the ideas that don’t seem so revolutionary now—like the need of all people to have a sense of purpose and the idea that subordination results in stunted humans—were probably revelatory and maybe even shocking. Some of them still are. Gilman certainly deserves to be read, but I prefer some of her other works, notably The Yellow Wallpaper.