My monthly book post. Crossposted, as usual, to bookflurries, What Are You Reading, and a whole bunch of other sites that put up with my meanderings.
Below the cut: quotes and commentary from Dreams from my Father, Brother Cadfael, Scarpetta, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, and many others!
Omigosh, they didn’t tell me he was BLACK: Dreams From My Father, by Barack Obama :
"The painting depicts a harpist," Reverend Wright explained, "a woman who at first glance appears to be sitting atop a great mountain. Until you take a closer look and see that the woman is bruised and bloodied, dressed in tattered rags, the harp reduced to a single frayed string. Your eye is then drawn down to the scene below, down to the valley below, where everywhere are the ravages of famine, the drumbeat of war, a world groaning under strife and deprivation.
"It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere...That’s the world! On which hope sits!"
"Isn’t that...the world that each of us stands on?"
"Yessuh!"
"Like Hannah, we have known bitter times! Daily, we face rejection and despair!"
"Say it!"
"And yet consider once again the painting before us. Hope! Like Hannah, that harpist is looking upwards, a few faint notes floating upwards towards the heavens. She dares to hope...she has the audacity...to make music...and praise God...on the one string...she has left!"
If you have to choose between this book and The Audacity of Hope, choose this one. When he wrote it, Obama wasn’t running for President and trying to please all the nice people who vote, and so he was able to be himself, and say something controversial.
I grew up in the Free to be you and me era, with racial and gender differences downplayed, and mostly in majority white neighborhoods where I never had to confront racial differences, and therefore developed a "Yeah, so?" attitude toward the idea that some people had different colored skin than mine, and that in places, no doubt very far from where I was, that was considered important somehow, even worth fighting about. And in 2008, I thought of Obama as first of all the Democrat and therefore the one I would vote for, and second, probably a really good one who meant it about moving America away from the utter trainwreck that Bush had caused. When I thought of his race at all it was pretty much to give his election a few bonus points for probably making a lot of dusky-hued people especially happy to have him, on top of everything else. Dreams From My Father is about Barack Obama the black male growing up in late 20th century America, working for change in a shunned urban black neighborhood, and eventually, making a pilgrimage to Africa in search of his roots. And I figure, thank god the Republican base doesn’t believe in reading books, ‘cause they’d throw an even bigger fit about Obama than they’re throwing, if they had read this one. About how DIFFERENT he feels. About his perspective on the inner cities and race relations, and how palpably different it is from any other President of the United States. Has any other President ever entered the South Side of Chicago without a security entourage, much less made a home there for a time?
But yeah, he still represents ME, more than any other President in my lifetime. That’s the wonder of it. He’s one of all of us.
Trouble in Normaltown: Born Victim, by Hillary Waugh :
She didn’t look up, and a tear dropped onto her bare arm and coursed toward the underside. Fellows stepped back and regarded her for a moment. Cassidy, rising from his notes said, "She’s got to give us some help, Chief. She’s got to remember what the girl had.
Fellows silenced him with a gesture. "We’ve been pushing too hard." He took Mrs. Markle’s arm and raised her to her feet. "It’s been a pretty bad day for you, ma’am", he said. "Mrs. Shaw’s downstairs waiting to take you to her place. Would you like us to pack some things for you?"
She shook her head, and the tears were still falling. "No", she whispered, keeping her head bowed and her hands at her side. "I’ll get something."
He released her arm, and she walked out slowly. "It’s not fair", she said. "God isn’t fair to make these things happen."
This is a police procedural from 1962, set in suburban Connecticut (as opposed to, I guess, urban or rural Connecticut), at a time when the neighbors all knew each other, the front door was usually unlocked, and the policemen on the beat were your friends. Chief Fellows might as well be the same cop who played poker with Felix and Oscar on The Odd Couple. In fact, the setting may as well be Pleasantville, in black and white, only with a missing teenage girl who probably won’t be found to have just been out late with the girls or nursing a good natured, needy hobo back to health or something. Nicely done, with a properly jarring ending.
Digging up Bones; The Potter’s Field, by Ellis Peters:
Close under the slight slope of the bank which marked the margin of the field, with broom bushes leaning over the curve of the furrow, where the plough had turned, the coulter had cut more deeply and dragged along the furrow after it something that was not root or stem. Cadfael went on his knees and stopped close to see the better. Brother Richard, shaken at last by the consternation that had rendered his fellows inarticulate, and now chilled them into silence, stood back and watched warily, as Cadfael drew a hand along the furrow, touching the long threads that had entangled the coulter and been drawn upwards into the light of day.
Fibers, but fashioned by man. Not the sinewy threads of roots gouged out of the bank, but the half-rotted strands of cloth, once black, or the common dark brown, now the color of the earth, but still with enough nature left in them to tear in long frayed rags when the iron ripped through the folds from which they came. And something more, drawn out with them, perhaps from within them, and lying along the furrow for almost the length of a man’s forearm, black and wavy and fine, a long, thick tress of dark hair.
Brother Cadfael mysteries are easy to solve. To me, the point of them is not the challenge but the examples of warm-hearted goodness in the characters even in the midst of the long and bitter medieval civil war that forms the backdrop for the whole series, the simple virtues of the peasants, the wisdom of the monks, even the Catholic sympathy usually given to the culprit whose motives tend to be morally ambiguous at worst. Definitely an SCA background, as opposed to the way the middle ages really were, reading Brother Cadfael is as close to a literary cup of warm cocoa as a murder mystery gets. I’m nearing the end of the series, and so I read them sparingly, regretting that before too long, I’ll have gone through them all and there won’t be any more.
Fall of the Frosted Mini Wheats: Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann:
Hanno was silent. Not because he wanted to defy his father, or hurt him. Under normal circumstances, the population, the streets, even the warehouses were matters of complete indifference to him, but the moment they were raised to the status of questions on a test, they filled him with reluctant despair. He could be in a perfectly fine mood, even be enjoying a little chat with his father, but as soon as the conversation took on the least hint of a little oral exam, his mood sank to zero and below, and all his powers of resistance collapsed. His eyes lost their sparkle, his mouth took on a despondent poutm and all he could feel was a great pang of regret that Papa had been so carelessm because he surely had to know that these tests always turned out badly and spoiled the meal for himself and everyone else. He gazed down at his platem his eyes swimming with tears. Ida nudged him and whispered the names of the streets and warehouses. But that was pointless, absolutely pointless. She didn't understand. He knew the names well enough, or at least most of them, and it would have been so easy to oblige Papa and answer his questions, at least in part, if only he couldm if only it weren't for this overwhelming sadness. A stern word from his father and a quick rap of a fork against the cutting board made him flinch. He glanced at his mother and Ida and tried to speak; but the first few syllables were choked with sobs--he just couldn't. "Enough!" the Senator shouted angrily. "Don't say anything. I don't want to hear it. You don't have to answer. You can sit there brooding like a deaf mute for the rest of your life for all I care!" And they finished their meal in silent rancor.
This book concerning four generations of the commercial Buddenbrook dynasty fascinated me. Although it purports to be about the decay of a family tree (stirring dreary memories of depressing decayed family stories by William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez), it is not about yet another decline into poverty. In fact, the family's material fortunes actually increase until the final chapters. Instead, the book is about the conflict between commercialism and art, the mind and the soul, and since I've done my best to work at both, Buddenbrooks, though it was written over a hundred years ago, speaks to me.
No member of the Buddenbrook family is a bad, person, exactly. But the lines of conflict are drawn about where you'd expect. The elder generations are practical, honorable, materially successful, miserly philistines, while the younger ones are deeply sensitivem openhearted, dareaming, weak, ineffectual runts, and the ones in the middle suffer the inner turmoil of the virtual Frosted Mini-Wheat, torn between conflicting inner needs. The author's sympathies are not with either extreme. Although the fate of the Buddenbrooks is describes as a "decline", the clear implication is that what they lose may not have been worth saving.
Is it true that art is art and commercialism is commercialism, and never the twain shall meet? More often than not, it seems to me, but the exceptions are plentiful.
Watch out Boy, She’ll Chew You Up: The Bride Wore Black, by Cornell Woolrich :
His glass fell, crashed on the floor. He started to writhe, clutch at himself. "My chest--it's being torn apart. Get help, a doctor..."
"No doctor could reach here in time." She was like a spinning top now, seeming to recede down the long vista of the walls. His dimming eyes could see her as a blur of brightness, then like white metal cooling, little by little she seemed to go out forever in the dark.
He was on the floor now at her feet, moaning out along the carpet in a foaming expiration: "...only wanted to make you happy..."
From far away a voice whispered mockingly, "You have...you have..." Then trailed off into silence.
I can't tell whether the antiheroine of this magnificent little Hitchcockian spellbinder is one big cliche, or whether she was one of the original deadly noir females in a genre spanning The Maltese Falcon and Kill Bill. Woolrich was an early noir king, and this is one of his very best tales. In any case, the femme fatale here is irresistibly beautiful, enshrouded in mystery, and whenever she shows up, you know some hapless male is about to be very efficiently and nastily dealt with. She apparently chooses and stalks her victims carefully, and yet they seem to have nothing in common, and have no connection with their attacker or with each other. Or at least, none that the police can discover. Is she a random psycho, or does she have a motive as mysterious as herself? And will the dogged, intuitive police detective assigned to the growing list of homicides catch his predatress, or will she complete her spree and vanish into the mists from whence she came?
Speaking of cliches, I couldn't put it down until the final thrilling page. It's one of the most suspenseful reads I've had in a long time, and I've read a lot of them. High recommendations.
Non-fucktard personal finance: Guide for Tough Times, by J.K. Lasser :
The amount that can be taken from your pay to satisfy creditor claims can't exceed the lesser of 25% of your disposable earnings or the amount by which your disposable earnings exceed 30 times the current minimum hourly wage (currently $6.55 for the federal minimum wage; $7.25 starting July 23, 2009. In effect, 75% of your wages are exempt from withholding. If your state provides greater protection of your wages for you, then state law overrides federal law in this case. Find your state's law on garnishment. You can't be terminated from your job merely because you are subject to garnishment.
A personal finance guide for those of us on the short end of eight years of George W Bush. Not an exciting read, but maybe a useful one, included here for the sake of completeness. As with most financial help, if you cared enough to pick up the book in the first place, you probably know most of what you're going to be told already, but it's so comprehensive that there will probably be at least some new information. And even with the things you already know you should or shouldn't be doing, odds are a little reminder might not hurt. Worth reading, if you're worrying about making ends meet. And these days, who isn't?
Like Epiphanies in a Pod: Dubliners, by James Joyce :
Observing me the young lady came over and asked me did I wish to buy anything. The tone of her voice was not encouraging; she seemed to have spoken to me out of a sense of duty. I looked humbly at the great jars that stood like eastern guards at either side of the dark entrance to the stall, and murmured:
"No, thank you."
The young lady changed the position of one of the vases and went back to the two young men. They began to talk of the same subject. Once or twice the young lady glanced at me over her shoulder.
I lingered before her stall, though I knew my stay was useless, to make my interest in her wares seem more real. Then I turned away slowly and walked down the middle of the bazaar. I allowed the two pennies to fall against the sixpence in my pocket. I heard a voice call from one end of the gallery that the light was out. The upper part of the hall was now completely dark.
Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.
This famous collection of tales has a lot in common with Katherine Mansfield's Bliss, which I read last year. Both books contain tales with a common theme of dreaming hearts confronted with the real world and realizing things about themselves that bring thick sour liquids rising in their throats. Both have a more detached than usual thir-person narrative. And both have excellent literary reputations, but left me feeling the urge to shrug and wonder what the fuss is about. For people other than the characters, the events are so small that I often had to read a particular tale a second time to find the epic realization. Joy'ces The Dead, the longest tale in the collection, is often called one of the very best short stories of the 20th century. And it's good, certainly, but my own preference tends a lot more strongly to the likes of Saki, O. Henry, Raymond Carver or John Cheever. The story that really stuck hauntingly with me was Counterparts, in which a bullied office worker endures failure and humiliation at work and at the pub, then goes home and beats his hapless son.
Le Grand Mal de Mer: The Wanderer (Le Grand Meaulnes), by Alain-Fournier :
It was the end of the candle, the flame of which guttered, flickered a moment and went out. Meaulnes returned to his own room and shut the door. In spite of the darkness he made out all the things which he had tidied, in full daylight and full happiness, a few hours before. Garment after garment, all intact, he found again his old wretched suit, fom his hobnailed shoes to his clumsy belt with the brass buckle. He undressed and dressed again swiftly, but distraught, placing his borrowed clothes on a chair, putting on the wrong waistcoat...
Under the windows, in the stable yard, the bustle of departure had begun. Pulling, shouting, and pushing, each one wanted to get his vehicle out of the confused crowd in which it was hemmed. From time to time a man would climb on the driver’s seat of a trap or on the hood of a big covered cart and search about with his light. The reflection of the lantern came in at the window; for a brief moment the room around Meaulnes, once familiar and where everything had been so friendly, breathed again, lived again...and thus it was that, carefully closing the door, he left this mysterious place which no doubt he was never again to see.
This distinctly French book is a series of vignettes in the lives of some youths who are in their late teens, although from the naivete of the characters and their school behavior, it is easy to misperceive them as much younger. From the narrator’s fascination with his friend Meaulnes, in fact, it seems as if there is a very large difference in age between them.
The main point of the book is the expert construction of the world from a happy go lucky youthful perspective. The world is full of sap and hope, promising everything and keeping many secrets for a later day. The plot is mostly whimsical; boy comes across a strange festival at a mysterious house in the woods, falls in love with a lady, then is transported home and has further adventures trying to find the house and lady again in the light of day. Later on, the book takes a distinct downturn, as several characters decide to sacrifice their own happiness out of a stupid "noble sense of duty", with the result that maybe all of them will end up miserable. Considering that the author wrote this book in 1914 and then stopped writing to march off to die "nobly and dutifully" in World War I, it is a pity that the warning hasn’t been more widely seen.
Doubly Dated: The Stepford Wives, by Ira Levin:
Joanna wished that the flower bed and the fence weren't there, so she could move closer. Or, darn it, that Carol would come to HER side of the fence. What was so top-priority urgent in that flourescent-lighted copper-pot-hanging kitchen? "Walter's coming over to talk with Ted," she said, speaking loud to Carol's naked-seeming silhouette. "When you've got the kids down, why don't you come over and have a cup of coffee with me?"
"Thanks, I'd like to", Carol said, "but I have to wax the family room floor."
"TONIGHT?"
"Night is the only time to do it, until school starts."
"Well, can't it wait? It's only three more days."
Carol shook her head. "No, I've put it off too long as it is," she said. "It's all over scuff marks. And besides, Ted will be going to the Men's Association later on."
"Does he go every night?"
"Just about."
Dear God! "And you stay home and do housework?"
"There's always something or other that has to be done," Carol said. "You know how it is. I have to finish the kitchen now. Good night."
"Good night," Joanna said, and watched Carol go--profile of too-big bosom--into her kitchen and close the door. She reappeared almost instantly at the over-the-sink window, adjusting the water lever, taking hold of something and scrubbing it. Her red hair was neat and gleaming; her thin-nosed face looked thoughtful (and, damn it all, intelligent); her big purpled breasts bobbed with her scrubbing.
This one is the flip side of the dreadful The Great American Stay At Home Wives Conspiracy that I read last year, and features the same People Different From Us world in which marriage is a never ending battle of the sexes about which spouse will have to do all the chores so that the other one can go play all the time. In this one, it is the men who are winning.
It's also more of a novella than a novel; I read it in about an hour, and was surprised that that was ALL there was to it. I'd expected more from a book so famous that it gave us a common vocabulary word; the "Stepford", the vapid human Barbie or Ken doll who never has an original thought and never steps out of the domestic bubble. The main plot device is about as secret as soylent green, and about as campy, but it is the only point to the story, and so I won't give it away here. Just in case.
Definitely worth reading once, and it won't cost you a lot of time, but it's definitely a tale whose time has passed. It inspires more giggling than spine tingling. Or maybe it's just that a suburban man of the '00s who respects his wife but nevertheless belongs to an all-male fraternal club is not the target demographic.
Across the Himalayas By Frog: My Journey to Lhasa, by Alexandra David-Neel:
More than once I had considered the idea of crossing the Po country. It was an old idea of mine, for I had discussed it with Yongden three years before, in the Kum Bum Monastery, but the vague facts I had gathered about Po yul from traders of central Thibet or the people of Kham had been rather discouraging. Many maintained that the Popas were cannibals. Others, more moderate in their opinions, left this question unsettled. But all united in affirming that anyone foreign to the Po tribes who entered their country was never seen again.
So I hesitated a little before risking this odd adventure, when the words of the general decided me: "Nobody has ever been there..." All right. I would see these ranges and these passes. Truly it would be "an interesting road to Lhasa"! Hearty thanks to you, sir, who on purpose or by chance did me a real service.
I was now at the foot of the hills about which I had dreamed for years. Hesitation was impossible.
On one level, an adventurous travel journal from the age of exploration, a rare one by a female explorer, that would be almost steampunkish but for the complete lack of technology; the government of Thibet strictly forbade foreigners from the lands explored here, and so David-Neel and her companion disguised themselves as natives and carried little to nothing that might have given them away as westerners. On another level, a bittersweet slice of a country that no longer exists. On yet another level, yet another disillusionment at a culture that I had previously given points for goodness of soul, but which is depicted here as having feet of clay like all the others. I've long since grown accustomed to the spectacle of Christians, Muslims and Jews being mind-bogglingly brutal and stupid in the name of their respective deities; I haven't quite gotten used to the same characteristics in Buddhists, and it saddens me.
And on another level still, it's just plain silly with culture shock. In 1920s Thibet, if a passer by lies to a beggar and claims not to have any spare change, the beggar might respond by loudly denouncing the lie and calling out loud on the gods to punish the liar with ten times ten years of poverty, at which point the passer by will tremble and offer much cash to the beggar to take the curse off. Better yet, someone being mugged might threaten to put a curse on the muggers, and the muggers will fall to their knees, drop their weapons, and humbly beg their victim's pardon. David-Neel and her companion, those wily tricksters, get out of many scrapes with their verbose curse-skills.
The book loses something because English was not David-Neel's first language (there's no mention of a translator in the book, so I assume she wrote it in English herself), and scenes that ought to be exciting lose excitement. David-Neel describes herself dangling by a fraying rope over a dizzying gorge; being robbed by brigands; and outwitting spies who might at any moment discover her identity and denounce her to the Thibetan government, which would surely kill her....and the tone of the description is more what you'd expect from someone telling you what time it is.
Plaguing with Fire: Unnatural Exposure, by Patricia Cornwell :
Logging on to America Online, or AOL, I was greeted by a mechanical voice announcing that I had mail. I had e-mail about various cases, trials, professional meetings and journal articles, and one message from someone I did not recognize. His user name was "deadoc". Immediately I was uneasy. There was no description of what this person had sent, and when I opened what he had written to me, it simply said, "ten".
A graphic file had been attached, and I downloaded and decompressed it. An image began to materialize on my screen, rolling down in color, one band of pixels at a time. I realized I was looking at a photograph of a wall the color of putty, and the edge of a table with some sort of pale blue cover on it that was smeared and pooled with something dark red. Then a ragged, gaping red wound was painted on the screen, followed by flesh tones that became bloody stumps and nipples.
I stared in disbelief as the horror was complete, and I grabbed the phone.
"Marino, I think you’d better get over here," I said in a scared tone.
A potboiler featuring Cornwell’s Dr. Scarpetta, the high-strung, hypercompetent Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia, and the kind of psycho killer who leaves clues to taunt the detectives and converses with Scarpetta over the internet. Miss Demeanor hopes this situation is much rarer in real life than it is in fiction, as any criminal dumb enough to go mano a mano with master detectives on purpose when guilty of a capital crime needs to be Mordened on a spike, as an example to other would-be outlaws. Simply doing the job without getting caught is challenge enough, OK?
The midgame of this book is thrilling enough, as Scarpetta and the team try to avert what could be a world-devastating plague, but the ending didn’t live up to the hype. In fact, it left me shrugging. There have been better Scarpetta tales, and probably will be more.
Pretty Bird Woman Habitat: Green Mansions, by W.H. Hudson :
It was a human being—a girl form, reclining on the moss among the ferns and the herbage, near the roots of a small tree. One arm was doubled up behind her neck for her head to rest on, while the other arm was held extended before her, the hand raised towards a small brown bird perched on a pendulous twig just beyond its reach. She appeared to be playing with the bird, possibly amusing herself by trying to entice it onto her hand, and the hand appeared to tempt it greatly, for it persistently hopped up and down, turning rapidly about this way and that, flirting its wings and tail, and always appearing just on the point of dropping onto her finger. From my position, it was impossible to see her distinctly, yet I dared not move. I could make out that she was small, not above four feet six or seven inches in height, in figure slim, with delicately shaped little hands and feet. Her feet were bare, and her only garment was a slight chemise shaped dress reaching below her knee, of a whitish grey colour, with a faint lustre as of a silky material. Her hair was very wonderful; it was loose and abundant, and seemed wavy or curly, falling in a cloud on her shoulders and arms. Dark it appeared, but the precise tint was indeterminable, as was that of her skin, which looked neither brown nor white. Altogether, near to me as she actually was, there was a kind of mistiness in the figure which made it appear somewhat vague and distant, and a greenish grey seemed the prevailing colour. This tint I presently attributed to the effect of sunlight falling on her through the green foliage; for once, for a moment, she raised herself to reach her finger nearer the bird, and then a gleam of unsubdued sunlight fell on her hair and arm, and the arm at that moment appeared of a pearly whiteness, and the hair just where the light touched it, had a strange lustre and play of iridescent colour.
This book may have been groundbreaking literature when it first came out; today it reads like a drug-induced male fantasy of Woman. The main male character is forever descending into lush, exotic jungle, and the Jungle Girl he finds there is a being of light, all mysterious and beautiful and in tune with nature. The snakes won’t bite her, and the birds come and sit in her hand, and the dark, treacherous indians hate and fear her, and when they try to shoot her with blowpipes, they miss and hit each other while the girl shakes her head in a you-silly-men sort of way. And then...Yes! The man wants to tame and civilize her, and...Yes! It cannot be done, for she is a free spirit who follows her own path, for she is Didi, the Bird Goddess, and so...Yes! His clumsy White Man efforts to help will instead threaten to destroy her, and the indians and the jungle too.
I feel sorry for Hudson and take some comfort in knowing that the book was known as an "instant classic" in his lifetime, although it is not well known today. Amid all the too-visible chalk outlines, you can see where Hudson honestly poured his heart and soul into the story. His feelings are as real as the feelings that an emotional teenager might pour into a diary that would make an unrelated reader years later burst into peals of merry laughter. A lot of people, women especially, might find Green Mansions downright offensive. I found it so hard to take seriously that it was just amusing.