Tag: 20th century

Day 224: The Happy Foreigner

~ whatmeread ~ 3 Comments

Cover for The Happy ForeignerThe Happy Foreigner by Enid Bagnold is interesting as a record of conditions in France right after World War I. In fact, at the time of its publication (1920), it was lauded for its journalistic qualities. The book is almost certainly quasi-autobiographical, although it was published as fiction.

Fanny is a British girl who volunteers to drive for the French army right after the war. In many places the villages are completely destroyed, and very little food is available. The driving is difficult and hazardous. Fanny and the other girls live in a shack with paper-thin walls, a leaky roof, and mud on the floor, and sleep on stretchers supported by sawhorses. From there, she is transferred closer to Germany, where she lives more comfortably in a town with more gaeity. It is ironic that the Germans seem to be in better shape economically and their towns less ravaged after the war than the French.

As well as a true depiction of the time and place, the novel is about the entrance of women into areas of work that had previously belonged solely to men. When Fanny first enters the dining room of an underground fortress in Verdun, her second posting, all talk ceases, as most of the men have not seen a woman in years. Later when she is assigned to drive for a Russian Colonel, she must address his doubts about her capabilities before he will let her drive.

Fanny meets a French officer, Julien, and they fall in love, but their relationship is one of the oddest things in this unusual, almost telegraphically written book. They are both so leery of each other that their dealings with each other are very tenuous.

I was a little disappointed that Bagnold chose to anchor this tale around a romance, no matter how odd, as it seemed a hackneyed idea, but I suppose that given the circumstances of just a few women among a huge number of men, that was an inevitable choice.

Day 222: The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for The Hare with Amber EyesBest Book of the Week!

In 1994, the world-class ceramics artist Edmund de Waal inherited a collection of 264 netsuke from his great uncle Ignace (Iggie). De Waal decided to trace the history of the netsuke from the time they came into his family, and in doing so, to trace the history of the family itself and the times they lived in. The result is a fascinating combination of memoir, history, art history, and collection of musings on related topics, The Hare with Amber Eyes.

Charles Ephrussi originally purchased the netsuke in Paris during the second half of the nineteenth century. The Ephrussis were at that time a wealthy family of bankers, originally from Odessa, who in previous generations had expanded their offices to Vienna and from there to Paris. Charles Ephrussi was not a banker but a noted art collector and critic, friend of Impressionists such as Degas and Manet, and one of the two models Proust used for his character Charles Swann.

De Waal attempts to understand Charles through an examination of his writings and possessions and through events in his time, particularly the effect of the Dreyfuss case on antisemitism in France. Charles’s work in art was an important part of his life, and in this section of the book I was struck by the connection de Waal makes between Japonisme–the interest in and collection of Japanese artifacts, with their focus on nature and everyday life–and the rise of Impressionism, which was considered revolutionary partly because of its focus on nature and everyday life instead of “noble” subject matter such as historical scenes or stories from the Bible or mythology.

In 1899, Charles sent the netsuke to Vienna as a wedding present for his younger cousin Viktor Ephrussi, de Waal’s great grandfather and eventual head of the Ephrussi bank in Vienna. De Waal traced what he could of the life of Viktor and his family, this story culminating shortly after the dual terrors of the Anschluss and Kristalnacht. During this time, everything that this branch of the family owned was confiscated by the Gestapo. In these pages of the book, de Waal does a better job of conveying the fears and anxieties of those times than any of the recent books I have read.

De Waal’s grandmother Elisabeth recovered the netsuke after the war. How they returned to the family is an incredible story that I will not reveal. Shortly after she returned to England with them, where some of the family had made their home, they traveled to post-war Japan with de Waal’s great uncle Iggie.

I have just supplied the barest outline of the fate of the netsuke, which provides a focus for de Waal’s investigations and musings, but the family’s story and the story of their times is fascinating and imaginatively reconstructed. The book is at once a meditation on and enthralling depiction of the life and times of an extraordinary family.

Day 221: The Postmistress

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for The PostmistressIn The Postmistress, Frankie Bard is a radio reporter working with Edward R. Murrow in London at the beginning of World War II. She meets an American doctor during the Blitz who has left his new wife at home to come help in London, inspired by Frankie’s broadcasts. He gives her a letter for his wife right before he is hit by a car and killed.

Instead of mailing the letter, Frankie carries it around Europe for three months while she interviews Jews who are fleeing their countries. All that time, the wife, Emma Trask, doesn’t hear from her husband and is not notified of his death. Frankie also witnesses the murders of innocent people by Nazis and never reports them. She just goes home.

In the doctor’s small Massachusetts home town, the postmistress is Iris James. She doesn’t seem to be that important a character, although the book surrounds her with this great mystique that she is the center of the village because she knows all its secrets. What she actually does is withhold a letter to Emma from Dr. Trask’s landlady saying that he has disappeared, and she does this because Emma is pregnant.

I felt this book was entirely frustrating, because I found the characters’ actions inexplicable. What kind of person carries a letter for someone else around in her pocket for three months without mailing it? What kind of reporter witnesses the deaths of innocent people and doesn’t tell anyone about them? A postmistress who withholds a letter from its recipient is disobeying federal law, and I suggest that the upright, responsible Iris wouldn’t think of doing that, let alone reading the letter in the first place. And who would decide it is better for a wife to be left in limbo for years? Trask has already deserted her for the war with very little explanation, which is traumatic enough.

Everything pivotal in this novel seems like a contrivance to me. In addition, the novel that is supposed to be about the postmistress gets hijacked by the reporter, whose actions throughout are irrational. I also feel as though too little attention is paid to the details of life during the war. Frankie’s journey to the continent during the height of German occupation seems to be completed with very little difficulty, and in record time. One reader on Amazon points out that Frankie and her London roommate Harriet have a refrigerator in the room, even though they were uncommon in England in the 1940’s. In other respects, the characters seem oddly untouched by the war. Although Sarah Blake wrote another novel that I enjoyed very much, Grange House, I cannot recommend The Postmistress.

Day 219: Joy in the Morning

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for Joy in the MorningI loved A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but unfortunately, Betty Smith’s Joy in the Morning isn’t anywhere near that calibre. Carl Brown and Annie McGairy meet and fall in love. Although Annie is only 18, she travels from Brooklyn to a midwestern university where Carl is attending law school. They are married, and the novel is about their first difficult year.

The couple are far away from friends and they have very little money. They go through the expected adjustments and she becomes pregnant. Annie wants to be a writer. Unfortunately, the reader is subjected to samples from diaries, short stories, and plays that are uniformly dreadful. I have to wonder at the couple of professors in the novel who think she might be gifted. (The irony is, of course, that Smith was gifted, and if these samples were really her own from that period of her life, then the professors saw something in them that I cannot.)

The novel often explores trite situations and has a very uniform plot line, without much of an arc. The dialog is extremely unsophisticated. When I read this novel, I hypothesized that perhaps it was Smith’s first. However, it was actually published last, in 1963. As with other Smith books, I suspect that the novel is at least partially autobiographical, although she apparently never admitted that of any of her books.

Day 196: The Secret Keeper

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for The Secret KeeperI loved The Forgotten Garden so much that Kate Morton’s other books, although very good, have not been able to hold their own against it. At first I thought The Secret Keeper would also be good but not great, but a terrific surprise at the end of the book made me change my mind.

The novel begins in 1961, when sixteen-year-old Laurel Nicolson is up in the treehouse on the family farm dreaming about her boyfriend. She sees her mother Dorothy go into the house with her baby brother Gerry. It is Gerry’s birthday, and Laurel knows her mother has left the birthday picnic to fetch the family’s special birthday knife so she can cut the cake. A few minutes later, a stranger goes to the door, and Laurel sees her mother stab the man with a knife. He is assumed to be the man who has been attacking women in the area.

Fifty years later, Laurel is a famous character actor who has come home to visit her ill mother. Her mother’s memory is failing, but she has asked Laurel’s sister Rose to get some things out of a box that has always been private. Among them is a photograph of Dorothy and her friend Vivien, who died during the Blitz.

Laurel’s memory of the long-ago incident with the stranger has become muddied and even inaccurate, but she begins to remember it more clearly when she decides to look into it further. She finds that the attacker was Henry Jenkins, Vivien’s husband. Since Dorothy must have known Henry, there is obviously more to the story.

From here the story alternates between Laurel’s investigation in the present and the war years of young Dorothy (Dolly) Smitham. Dolly is madly in love with Jimmy Metcalfe, a newspaper photographer who also has sole care of his senile father. Dolly wants to marry immediately, but Jimmy thinks they can’t afford it yet, so Dolly takes a job as a companion to a wealthy old lady in London. At a war effort volunteer job, she meets Vivien, who lives across the street with her husband, a successful novelist. Dolly, who comes from a lower middle class background, gets carried away with the idea of leading a more exciting, fashionable life. After a series of misunderstandings, she hatches a plan to get money for her marriage and talks the reluctant Jimmy into helping.

At this point, my major problem with the novel was a growing dislike for Dolly, who seems narcissistic and lacking in conscience. I kept wondering how she was going to develop into the beloved mother of five children. But the novel goes on to unearth secrets. With Morton’s gift for storytelling and excellent writing, I think this novel is as good or better than The Forgotten Garden.

Day 181: Clara and Mr. Tiffany

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for Clara and Mr. TiffanySusan Vreeland’s Clara and Mr. Tiffany is a novel about Clara Driscoll, a real artist who headed a woman’s workshop designing the most complex lamps and screens for Louis Comfort Tiffany. The novel details the ups and downs of a long professional relationship, including Driscoll’s frustration at not being recognized as the designer of some of Tiffany’s most famous pieces. A lot of the interest in the novel resides in the tension between the women’s division and the men’s division, which was only allowed to work on the more mundane pieces.

Right now I am reading some of Vreeland’s own comments about the captivating woman she found depicted in Clara’s own letters. Unfortunately for the novel, Vreeland does not do a great job of making her characters interesting in this book or of conveying the woman she found in those letters. Several important but minor characters are so undefined that I couldn’t keep them straight.

I believe that Vreeland is hindered rather than helped by the fact that she is fictionalizing the lives of real people whose relatives are probably still alive. She has written more successful books about artists who lived farther in the past–Monet in Luncheon of the Boating Party and Artemisia Gentileschi in The Passion of Artemesia, for example. There are certainly interesting aspects to the story–Driscoll had an unusual life featuring at least one bizarre event–but the novel is written more like a series of incidents than a narrative with an arc.

Day 177: Below Stairs

~ whatmeread ~ 3 Comments

Cover for Below StairsThis is actually my posting from yesterday. We were having some internet problems.

Below Stairs is the memoir of a kitchen maid that inspired the series Upstairs, Downstairs. Margaret Powell worked in service in the 1920’s from the age of 15 until her marriage. She was an intelligent girl who could have been a teacher, but her parents couldn’t afford to support her while she qualified, so she left school and began working at 13. Later, after her sons were grown, she went back to school and passed her 0-levels at the age of 58, followed by her A-levels.

Powell began as a kitchen maid and worked her way up to cook, mostly through ambition and nerve because she never really received any cooking training. (You had to feel sorry for the first employer who hired her as a cook, because she admits she only knew how to cook vegetables!) Her memoir describes the conditions the servants worked and lived in, sometimes very bad; the work she had to do, including ironing shoe laces in one position; and the way she resented how servants were treated by many of her employers. Although Powell wanted to become a cook, as it was the most privileged job available to her, her biggest ambition was to be married so that she could leave the life of servitude.

The memoir is written in a conversational style, including quite a bit of scathing commentary. It is an interesting book, although Powell’s memories are mostly negative. She says that she had fun, but she only slightly mentions any amusements, focusing on the numerous snubs she received and the ridiculous things she was expected to do. Of course, this adds to the interest of the narrative. One employer was actually even a bit miffed at Powell’s own name (Margaret Langley at the time), deeming it too “posh” for a servant. Although the memoir is written at least 40 years after Powell worked in service, the experience still obviously rankles.

Day 171: Eye of the Red Tsar

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for Eye of the Red TsarI had a strange reaction to Eye of the Red Tsar by Sam Eastland. I felt as if the author had researched the time and place without actually grasping anything about it. The novel is placed in post-revolutionary USSR with flashbacks to pre-revolutionary Russia. Tsar Nicholas II and Stalin are both characters in the book, in their different time periods, but you do not get any feeling that the author understands what kind of people they were or anything about the politics involved. Given my fascination with Russia, this novel would seem to be a great fit for me, but I have nothing but objections to it.

Pekkala, a Finnish soldier, is a prisoner in a labor camp in Siberia at the beginning of the novel. He was Nicholas II’s private investigator before the revolution, when he became known as The Emerald Eye. He remained completely faithful to the Romanovs, so when the family was captured by the Bolsheviks, he was exiled to Siberia. But at the beginning of the novel, he is released because Stalin wants him to find out exactly what happened the night the Tsar and his family were executed. Of course, this question has remained a mystery to the western world until recently, but I did not buy at all that Stalin and his predecessors would not have already known perfectly well what happened to the Romanovs.

My first objection is about how Stalin is characterized. The book takes place partly in 1929, when Stalin is only a few years away from his reign of terror. Yet he is depicted as quiet and thoughtful, not exactly true to the historical consensus. As a kind of extension of that thought, even though the book is about a time and place when everything is politicized, the novel provides no political context for the reader.

Another problem I have is with the narrative style. As Pekkala conducts his investigation, he remembers his past, in order. When I compare Eastland’s technique with that used in The Darkest Room, where characters have fleeting thoughts or disjointed memories that eventually add up to something, this novel seems incomparably clumsy in execution.

Finally (somewhat of a spoiler), I found it completely unbelievable, given the loyalty of the main character to the Romanovs, that he would willingly agree to work for Stalin at the end of the book. I forgive myself for revealing this turn of events, as it is easy to see it coming. Readers are told at the beginning of the book that Stalin is known as the Red Tsar. Obviously, since Pekkala was the Emerald Eye under the Nicholas, he will become the Eye of the Red Tsar under Stalin.

Day 169: The Distant Hours

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for The Distant HoursKate Morton has been one my favorite authors ever since I read The Forgotten Garden, which is still my favorite of her books. The Distant Hours is another of Morton’s atmospheric novels about family secrets.

When a letter posted in 1941 finally reaches its destination in 1992, Edie Burchill is surprised at the emotional reaction of her usually cool mother. She finds out for the first time that her mother was an evacuee during World War II at the home of Raymond Blythe, the author of Edie’s favorite childhood book, The True History of the Mud Man.

Later, after Edie has been asked to write an introduction for a reprint of Blythe’s classic, she gets lost meeting a potential author and accidentally finds Milderhurst Castle, the once stately but now crumbling home of the Blythes. Living there are the Blythe sisters, Percy, Saffy, and the invalid Juniper. In a way, too, the house is still occupied by the memory of their overbearing father.

The novel alternates between the present time and 1941, as we discover what happened during one night in 1941 that has haunted the family ever since. Morton is deft at creating a compelling atmosphere in the moldering castle and in keeping her readers in suspense.

Morton’s latest book, The Secret Keeper, is due out in October. I can’t wait to get my copy!

Day 167: City of Shadows

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for City of ShadowsAlthough I have read and liked books from Ariana Franklin’s “Mistress of the Art of Death” mystery series, I think that City of Shadows, a stand-alone thriller about a different period, is particularly good. On a side note, I am sorry to hear that Ariana Franklin has died, so we will never learn what her plans were for the characters in her series.

Esther Solomonova is a mysterious scarred woman who works for the phony Russian prince and nightclub owner Nick Potrovskov in 1920’s Berlin. However, the book begins a step before we get to Esther, when a woman is being chased through the streets of Berlin and dives into a canal to get away. Nick hears that this woman, Anna Anderson, is claiming to be Grand Duchess Anastasia of the murdered Romanov family, so he decides to take her under his wing in the hopes of getting a share of the Tsar’s fortune that has been left in England.

Anna is in an asylum, and the inmates claim that every six weeks a man lurks outside, trying to get a chance to murder her. After Nick removes her from the asylum, people begin dying. Only Detective Schmidt pays attention to Esther’s theory that someone is trying to kill Anna, since the only evidence is the testimony of insane people.

Franklin does a convincing job of mixing the true story of Anna Anderson with the completely fictional murder plot. She evokes a real sense of the chaotic, anarchic, starving Berlin in the time in which Hitler is coming to power.