Tag: 20th century

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.

Day 541: Cradle of Gold

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Cover for Cradle of GoldA few years ago I reviewed The Lost City of Z, which told about Percy Fawcett’s search for a fabled city in the Amazon jungle. That book alleged that Fawcett was a possible model for Indiana Jones. It is a minor point of Cradle of Gold that Hiram Bingham III is much more likely to be the model. Bingham was the man who brought the world’s attention to Machu Picchu.

At the time, Bingham was hailed by the western world as Machu Picchu’s discoverer, despite its being known about all along by the nearby farmers. Bingham’s story also has other examples of chauvinism and controversy, including his removal of artifacts without the permission of the Peruvian government. (He more or less permanently “borrowed” them.) Peru has only recently won a law suit against Yale University for the return of the collection, including many human remains. Still, Bingham is recognized even in Peru for his contributions to Peruvian history and archaeology.

The book begins in Hawaii, where Bingham was born the son of missionaries who expected him to study theology. But Bingham did not see himself taking up his father’s mantle. He was still fairly young when he took the money saved for his education and tried to embark for San Francisco. Although he was prevented from leaving and eventually ended up attending Yale University, he soon after became an explorer.

The book is named Cradle of Gold after Choqquequirau, supposedly the home of the Virgins of the Sun, which was the first site Bingham visited. He found it had been looted long before. Instead of pursuing it further, he became interested in finding Vilcabamba, the residence of Manco Inca, one of the last rulers of the Inca who was captured and slaughtered by the conquistadors. Initially attracted because no one knew what happened to Manco Inca’s great treasure, Bingham eventually became more interested in Incan history and artifacts.

This book is the engrossing story of Binghams’ origins and expeditions, his contributions to science, and the controversy that followed. Author Christopher Heaney is a Doctoral Fellow in Latin American history at the University of Texas, Austin. He has written a clear and interesting account for the general public but supported by extensive documentation. If you are interested in stories of exploration, you will like this one.

 

Day 540: Empire Girls

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Cover for Empire GirlsRose and Ivy Adams are stunned by the death of their father, but his will astonishes them. He has left the house that Rose loves to a brother the girls did not know existed. He has also left them in heavy debt. His attorney, Mr. Lawrence, explains that if they can’t find their brother Asher to clear up the will and pay off the taxes within three weeks, the bank will repossess their beautiful house in upstate New York. All the sisters have to go on is a postcard from a place called Empire House in New York City.

The two sisters make an uncomfortable team. Rose has always been the caretaker, treated by their father as the plain sister who takes care of the house. Ivy he thought beautiful and talented. Ivy is thrilled to go to New York, envisioning a brilliant future for herself as an actress. Rose, who is a homebody, only goes to save the house. The two are almost always at odds—Rose prim and disapproving, Ivy spoiled and childishly complaining that Rose ruins everything.

The girls go to stay at Empire House, a rooming house in Greenwich Village, hoping to find Asher. No one there admits to knowing him, but the girls think they are all lying.

After some initial coolness, Rose begins to fit into the household. She accepts a job doing housework from Nell, the owner of Empire House, and sews for Cat LeGrand, who owns a dress shop and speakeasy. She also almost immediately falls in love with the Empire House cook, Sonny Santino. Although Ivy at first seems to be in her element of 1920’s gaiety and gets a job as a waitress at Cat’s, she does not adjust as easily.

Written in alternating chapters by each sister, the novel doesn’t really evoke a colorful picture of the 20’s. Only the amount of drinking seems to reflect the time period.

The characters of the two sisters are almost cartoonish at first—they are so polarized. Yet at the same time their voices are indistinct enough that when I was reading a chapter, I would often forget which sister was speaking.

http://www.netgalley.comThe reasons the inhabitants are lying to the girls and what they are lying about seem contrived. The timeline of the novel is absurdly short and yet the girls only make a few feeble attempts to find Asher. Although Asher’s situation has some secrets, too, the ultimate fate of the  sisters is perfectly predictable. I found this novel lightweight and silly.

 

Day 539: The Hours

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Cover for The HoursBest Book of the Week!
One of our Pandora channels repeatedly plays Philip Glass’s music from the movie soundtrack of The Hours. So, as soon as I began reading it, the intricate notes of the score became a mental accompaniment to the novel. That is, I got an ear worm.

I came to the novel with the slight disadvantage of being unfamiliar with Mrs. Dalloway, having been traumatized by To the Lighthouse in a college English class. But you don’t have to be familiar with it to appreciate this lovely, cleverly constructed novel, an homage to Woolf’s own.

The novel begins with Virginia Woolf’s suicide. But later it returns to 20 years before, when she is writing Mrs. Dalloway.

First, though, we meet a middle-aged woman, Clarissa Vaughn, whose best friend calls her Mrs. Dalloway. Like her namesake, Clarissa is eagerly going out into a crisp, clear morning to buy flowers for her party. This is New York, though, in the late 1990’s, and Clarissa’s party is for her dearest friend Richard, a poet who is dying of AIDS. He has recently been chosen to receive a prestigious prize for poetry, and the ceremony is that night.

Back in 1920’s Richmond, England, Virginia Woolf is trying to decide the plot of Mrs. Dalloway. Someone will die, she thinks, but will it be Mrs. Dalloway herself? Woolf also copes with her own fears about her mental state, her yearning to return to living in London, and a visit from her sister Vanessa Bell.

In 1950’s Los Angeles, Laura Brown struggles with being a suburban housewife and mother. Although she loves her husband and small son, she feels unsuited to this life.

Cunningham presents us with three stories, and a theme of threes recurs. Woolf has bouts of mental illness, Richard suffers from dementia caused by his illness, and Laura is struggling with depression. The jellyfish shapes and voices of Woolf’s migraine visions appear in Richard’s episodes of dementia. And Laura briefly sees a grayish jellyfish cloud floating over her son’s head. A forbidden kiss and the color mustard feature in more than one story. And other links that I will not name are more intrinsic to the plot. The three stories are so cleverly interwoven, we’re not sure if the events of one cause the events of the other.

This is a novel of astonishing beauty, cleverly constructed and entertaining. I’m going to find a copy of Mrs. Dalloway.

Day 531: Midnight in Europe

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Cover for Midnight in EuropeChristián Ferrar is a lawyer and Spanish émigré who lives in Paris during the time of the Spanish Civil War. He wants to do what he can for the Spanish Republic against the fascists. The Republican government contacts him to help with the occasional arms deal. Getting arms is difficult, because the fascist governments of Europe are on the other side. Besides, the US and other countries have banned sales of weapons to the Republic because of atrocities committed by the communists.

Working with Ferrar on these dangerous transactions is a Swiss citizen named Max de Lyon who used to be an arms dealer. The two of them get into some sticky situations during missions to Poland and Odessa.

For someone doing secret work, Ferrar is oddly unsuspicious of a Spanish marquesa who comes to his office to consult him and seems open to his advances. It was so obvious to me that she was a spy that I’m giving away a plot point.

I occasionally enjoy a good spy thriller and had heard good things about Furst, but I did not find Midnight in Europe involving. None of the characters have much depth, and Furst doesn’t successfully build any tension. I remember enjoying an earlier book of Furst’s years ago, so perhaps my problem is that I have lately been reading the master, John Le Carré.

http://www.netgalley.comThis period is a fascinating one, and I would have hoped Furst would do more with it. For one thing, he explains very little about the war, seeming to assume that everyone will automatically know the Republic is the good guys. Perhaps he thought that explanations would slow down the action, but the action never really gets going. Interestingly, he only mentions atrocities committed by the side we’re supposed to favor, although there were plenty on the other side. He does a better job evoking the growing threat from Nazi Germany.

Day 521: The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches

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Cover for The Dead in Their Vaulted ArchesThe tone of The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches is a little more somber than in the previous Flavia de Luce mysteries. Just as Buckshaw was about to be sold out from under the family in the previous novel, we learned that Flavia’s mother was found. Years ago lost in a mountaineering accident, Harriet de Luce was the owner of the house. Her fortune could not be passed along to her family without proof of her death. Now, her body is on the way home.

Flavia is surprised to find her mother’s remains have received a military escort. In fact, ex-prime minister Churchill is at the village’s small train station when the body arrives.

A tall man approaches Flavia at the station and asks her to tell her father that “the Gamekeeper” is in jeopardy. Moments later he is dead, having been pushed under a train.

I was a little surprised to find Bradley playing a few of the tricks that I associate with less skillful mystery writers. One of them is to spin out the story by having a character delay doing what is obviously urgent. Flavia waits quite awhile to convey this message from the tall man.

Part of the charm of these novels is always 11-year-old Flavia, who combines high intelligence with childish naïveté and some wild ideas. This time she decides to bring her mother back from the dead using some old chemistry experiments. While trying to do this, she finds her mother’s will inside her jacket. She doesn’t pass that on right away, either.

Flavia’s adventures this time include flying in a Gipsy Moth and getting involved in espionage. Of course, there is a murderer to capture and family secrets to explore.

Still, I didn’t find this novel as much fun as I usually do. Probably because of the subject matter, Bradley has to step back quite a bit from the humor.

Flavia is growing more thoughtful, although she is still as reckless. The novel hints at a change of scene in upcoming books, and although I think Buckshaw is wonderful, perhaps we need one.