Tag: historical fiction

Day 181: Clara and Mr. Tiffany

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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 176: Queens’ Play

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Cover for Queen's PlayBest Book of the Week!

Queens’ Play is the second book of Dorothy Dunnett’s excellent historical fiction series, the Lymond Chronicles. Although it is not absolutely necessary to read the first book, Game of Kings, you will enjoy the other books more if you do. If you decide to continue this series, it is important to read them in order after this one.

Francis Crawford of Lymond enters the scene disguised, and it is some time before we figure out which of two characters he is. Francis has been asked by Mary de Guise, Queen Dowager of Scotland and mother of Mary Queen of Scots, to travel to France and protect Mary. Although Mary is still a little girl, plots revolve around her, and her mother is afraid her life is at risk.

The Irish prince Phelim O’Liam Roe’s arrival into France is a spectacular one, as his ship almost crashes into another one when entering the harbor. This incident is perhaps not an accident, as evidence mounts that someone is trying to kill the prince. To the French court, O’Liam Roe is unbelievably provincial, and he is immediately the butt of ridicule. He is attracted to Oonagh O’Dwyer, an Irish woman living on the borders of society, but she disdains him. In fact, she is the mistress of the Irish rebel Cormac O’Connor.

O’Liam Roe has brought with him Thady Boy Ballagh, an ollav, or trained master poet. Untidy, fat Thady Boy is gaining popularity with the decadent French court through a series of reckless deeds and his brilliant musical performances.

It seems that the Queen Dowager’s fears are correct. During a hunt that employs the king’s leopards as hunting animals, someone lets Mary’s pet hare out in front of the cat near her pony. As she struggles to save her pet, the cat turns its sights on Mary.

As always, Dunnett combines heart-stopping action and suspense with a detailed knowledge of the period. This book begins some of the plot threads that will continue throughout the series.

Day 171: Eye of the Red Tsar

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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

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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

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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.

Day 166: We, The Drowned

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Cover for We, The DrownedBest Book of the Week!

We, The Drowned is an unusual novel by Danish writer Carsten Jensen that has become an international best seller. It relates the history of the author’s home town, the port of Marstal, Denmark, from 1848 to 1945. Although it picks principal characters to follow during these times, large portions of the novel are written in the first person plural, as though the entire town is the Greek chorus in a play. The novel follows the fate of the town as it rises to become a major shipping port to its near demise just before and during World War II.

The narrative style of the novel feels like a series of seafaring tales. Ships sink, sailors are never seen again, but the townsmen of Marstal continue to be lured out to sea. We follow them as the Danes go to war with Germany in the mid-19th century and the men of Marstal wonder why they are fighting men they traded with the week before. In this conflict, Laurids Madsen is shot upward from an exploding ship and lands again on his feet, unharmed, creating a legend about his boots.

Years later, his son Albert travels the South Pacific looking for his father, who went to sea when Albert was four and never returned. He finds him with a second family in Samoa.

As an old man retired from a prosperous career as a sea captain, Albert befriends a young boy, Knut Erik Friis, whose widowed young mother does everything she can to keep her son from going to sea. When she gains some economic power in the community, she undercuts the town’s shipping industry in an attempt to keep all the young men home.

These stories and many more, ending with Knut Erik’s experiences during World War II, tell the rich tales of the lives in this seafaring town. Although I was initially a little put off by the narrative style, I found myself barely able to put down this book.

Day 165: Alexandria

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Cover for AlexandriaFor years I avidly collected all of Lindsey Davis’s Didius Falco mysteries. My passion has cooled a bit, as it usually does for series mysteries, but I still enjoy them enough to pick them up when I find them.

Marcus Didius Falco is a cynical, rascally, wisecracking “informer” during the Roman Empire of Vespasian. I have followed his path from the first book when he met Helena Justina, the fiery, unconventional daughter of a senator. Falco has had to work his way up from the plebeian rank and earn enough money so that he can legally be permitted to marry her.

In Alexandria, the 19th novel in this series, Falco and Helena Justina have been married for awhile when they travel to Alexandria with their two daughters, their adopted teenage daughter, and their mongrel dog for a vacation and visit to his uncle. Almost immediately upon arrival Falco is plunged into an investigation when his uncle’s dinner guest of the night before, Theon, the head of the famed library, is found dead, locked in his own office.

Of course, Falco has to figure out how Theon was murdered and why. He soon finds that several of the library’s scholars may want Theon’s job. Of course, people begin dropping like flies, including a philosophy student who is mauled by a crocodile. Falco begins to suspect that something else might be going on.

Davis’s books always involve a multitude of interesting, shifty characters and lots of dirty politics and other shenanigans, and Falco is always engaging and amusing. Davis does a convincing job of re-creating the ancient world in her books.

If you are interested in this series, I recommend that you start with the first book, Silver Pigs (recently renamed The Silver Pigs). Although the mysteries are stand-alone, developments in Falco’s personal life make it more enjoyable if you read this series in order.

Day 161: Peony in Love

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Cover for Peony in LoveI’ll start out right away by saying that after reading the touching and engrossing Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, I was disappointed by Lisa See’s Peony in Love. The innocuous description on the back of the book gives you no warning of the subject of the novel. I think that is unfortunate, because not very many readers of See’s other books will be prepared for it.

Peony’s sixteenth birthday is approaching. In six months she will “marry out” to the man who has been her fiancé since she was a child, although she only knows his name. She is excited because that night her family will begin hosting an epic opera by Tang Xianzu that she loves, and the secluded women will be allowed to watch it through a screen.

The story of the opera is important to the novel. It is about a girl who dies for love and haunts her lover until she is eventually brought back to life in honor of her steadfastness.

That evening, Peony peeps out from behind the screen and spots a handsome young man, with whom she falls instantly in love. Later in a brief absence from the performance she encounters him accidentally, and he begs her to meet him the next night. Such behavior is strictly forbidden. She has never been alone with a man outside her family, but she meets him anyway.

I usually try not to give away important plot points, but I will tell you one thing that happens in the first third of the book because I don’t think you can make a fair decision about reading it without knowing. So, this is my spoiler warning. Unfortunately, I don’t see any way to impart my objections without revealing this key plot point.

Convinced that she will be forced to marry a man she does not love even though she doesn’t know who her fiancé is, Peony starves herself to death, like the heroine in the opera. Just before she dies, when it is too late to save her, she finds out that her beloved actually is Ren, her fiancé (a twist that I found predictable). Presumably, she spends the rest of the novel as a ghost. I say presumably because after another 100 pages or so I quit reading.

I was already fed up with Peony because she wastes two opportunities to avoid the misunderstanding that causes her death. As in many movies, a few words could have cleared things up. That is, she and her lover never bother to exchange names. In addition, after the opera, when she is still in the audience, her father introduces her fiancé to the company. She is so convinced he is a stranger that she shuts her eyes. How likely is that?

Peony is already an extremely foolish girl even before she begins starving herself. I continued reading out of interest in Chinese beliefs about the afterlife, but when Peony begins manipulating Ren’s wife, I found this development too distasteful to continue. I regret that I cannot recommend this book, although I am still eager to try other books by Lisa See.

Day 156: Winter Garden

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Cover for Winter GardenI want to start out this review by saying that I usually avoid reading tearjerker fiction (by the way, that’s different from being brought to tears by emotion that is evoked honestly in fiction) and I don’t like things that are too heartfelt, if that makes any sense. Having misgivings, I read Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah upon the recommendation of a friend because I have always been interested in Russia. This decision was a mistake for me because I found this novel too corny, contrived, and predictable.

Meredith is a caregiver. She takes care of her father’s business and tries to take care of everything else for everyone. She has also tried to love her cold, withdrawn mother all her life, but her mother remains unknowable. Meredith’s sister Nina, on the other hand, is a photojournalist who seems unreliable to Meredith and hardly ever comes home. This, Meredith resents.

Their father has a heart attack, which brings Nina home. During his illness, he insists that the girls force their mother to tell them a fairy tale she used to tell them as children, only this time, she is to finish it. Then he dies, and Nina returns for the funeral.

It is obvious from the beginning, even before we hear a word of the tale, that it isn’t a fairy tale but a true story about their mother’s difficult life in Stalinist Russia. Of course, you immediately know that by listening to the story, the women will grow to love and understand their mother. By the way, they will also figure out how to reconcile their relationships with each other and solve their other life problems. A review I read says “Although this book starts off fairly maudlin, it evolves into a gripping read.” I have to disagree. I think it starts out maudlin and stays that way.

Day 152: The Master

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Cover for The MasterThe Master, Colm Tóibín’s engrossing novel about Henry James, is virtually plotless. Over the course of five years, James works, visit friends, and remembers significant events in his life and people who are important to him. At the same time he muses on how the people, tales they tell, or incidents he has observed have informed or will inform his writing.

I have often found James’s work perplexing, feeling as if there is a lot going on under the surface that I don’t understand. A novel about him, therefore, is not an intuitive choice for me. Nevertheless, I found myself extremely involved in this story about a man who appears to have always stood back and watched. In Tóibín’s view, James lived a life of “pure coldness.”

The book delicately depicts a complex man, social on the surface but always at an emotional remove from others, homosexual but so concerned about propriety and public opinion that he never acts on it (perhaps–that is not entirely clear) and avoids situations where he may be tempted. He is sometimes very cold in his inaction, such as when he deserts his best friend, Constance Fenimore Woolson, because she has been too open for his taste about their completely innocent relationship, causing some friends to blame him for her subsequent suicide.

The most fascinating part of the novel, in my opinion, is how it illuminates the way that a writer may take a situation, a sentence, thoughts about how a pair of people interact, and turn them into a complete work of fiction. For example, a tale told to him about two children alone on an estate reminds him of his relationship with his sister Alice. As children, both of them had been abandoned as their family toured Europe and have never been fully included in the events and emotions of the family. These memories finally emerge in the ghost story “The Turn of the Screw.” Similarly, his memories of his intelligent, vivacious cousin Minny Temple are brought back to life in first The Portrait of a Lady and then The Wings of a Dove.

Meticulously researched and beautifully written, The Master is an evocative novel about the inner life of an emotionally crippled writer.