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Book 106: The Emigrants



“Even the least of his reminiscences, which he fetched up very slowly from depths that were evidently unfathomable, was of astounding precision, so that, listening to him, I gradually became convinced that Uncle Adelwarth had an infallible memory, but that, at the same time, he scarcely allowed himself access to it. For that reason, telling stories was as much a torment to him as an attempt at self-liberation. He was at once saving himself, in some way, and mercilessly destroying himself.”

Dates read: November 21-24, 2016

Rating: 7/10

One of the hardest things I’ve ever done is leave home. I love the Ann Arbor area where I grew up. The trees, the lakes, the restaurants and bars…I know them and love them and miss them. When I got back from my three years in Tuscaloosa for law school, I swore to myself that I’d never live anywhere else long-term ever again. But then, of course, I’ve ended up doing just that. And as much as I love Reno and our life here, there’s a part of me that still thinks of Michigan as “home”.

Leaving one’s area of origin, and the emotional impact of doing so, is at the heart of W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants. I thought it was a novel when I picked it out for my Kindle, but it’s not: it’s a collection of four short stories on a common theme. The first two stories are fairly short and deal with men displaced in Europe as a result of their Jewish heritage during World War 2, and the second two are longer and deal with transnational migrations, with one story having no apparent connection to Jewishness and the second being the most explicitly tied to the Holocaust of all four of them, as well as being the only story primarily based in a female perspective.

All of the stories end in tragedy, and only one is told even in part as a first-person narrative. It gives the book a sense of remove, and the beauty of Sebald’s language makes it feel like almost like an elegy in prose form. The power of loss and memory is gorgeously and movingly conveyed…every one of these stories gently rips your heart out. As someone who doesn’t particularly enjoy short stories, I found that this was a very well-done collection of them. There aren’t too many, and they are all arranged around a similar theme in a way that really works and keeps the stories flowing together and seeming like one piece. Like four movements to a piece of music. I would definitely recommend it, but maybe if you’re not in a low mood already, because as lovely as it is, it’s a downer.

Tell me, blog friends…have you ever lived away from home for a long time?

One year ago, I was reading: Seating Arrangements

Two years ago, I was reading: Occidental Mythology

Book 101: The Queen of the Night



“I wanted to eat and so I learned to sing. I am the same as the woman who on a winter afternoon roasts chestnuts from the Bois de Boulogne and sells them so she can buy her dinner. It took more than a witch to make a singer out of me. And if it was a gift from God that made me this way, it was the gift He gave us all, called hunger.”

Dates read: November 1-6, 2016

Rating: 9/10

As an older millennial (I was born in 1985), I didn’t grow up immersed in the digital world, but I also don’t remember much of a world before computers. All my papers were written in Word, I’ve been doing research on the internet since high school, and I’ve had Facebook since it was rolled out to the first round of non-Ivies, the second semester of my freshman year of college. Sometimes I wonder what it must have been like to live in a world where our lives weren’t so tied to the internet. Where you could move to a new place and be a new person because there wasn’t a trail of easily accessible information following you wherever you went. It’s kind of mind-boggling, honestly.

An ever-changing identity is the centerpiece of Alexander Chee’s The Queen of the Night. We’re introduced to Lilliet Berne at the height of her fame as an operatic soprano in Paris in the 1870s. She’s approached by a man who says he can give her the one honor that she hasn’t attained so far: a role she can originate. The only snag is that the new opera is based on a novel that’s clearly based on her own past, a past she thought she’d managed to escape from. There are only a handful of people who know her real life, and she determines to find out which one of them has betrayed her.

The book is a recounting of the story of her life, with one incredible circumstance leading directly into another: she grows up in frontier America and sets out to get to Switzerland, where she has relatives, once her entire family dies. In order to make it overseas, she joins a circus, from which she escapes to become a hippodrome rider, and then becomes a prostitute, and then a handmaid to the Empress of France, and finally an opera singer in training. She becomes an figure of obsession to a professional tenor and he dogs her steps, determined to possess her entirely, even while she tries to elude him and falls in love with another man. She does eventually find out who is behind the mysterious new opera and it seems for a while that she might even get a happy ending…but this is a story about opera, and operas don’t usually have one of those.

If you read that plot outline and thought it sounds insane, you’re right. IT’S BONKERS. But it’s really good! I tend to be irritated by plots that require too many convenient contrivances, but with this book it’s best to put logic aside and just enjoy the ride, because it is a fantastic, soapy trip that Chee takes us on. It’s a bit on the long side, but it doesn’t get bogged down anywhere…you might think that with the list of twists and turns that Lilliet’s life takes, that it would feel cluttered or get hard to keep track of what was going on, but Chee is in control of his story and characters, and creates a vivid, lively world that was hard to tear myself away from.

This is one of those books that I kept promising myself I would stop at the end of the chapter to go to sleep, and was hard pressed to resist just one more after that before turning out the light. My one quibble would be that in a book full of evocative characters, Lilliet herself is a bit of a cipher. But, given the many shifts in her circumstances and role she is meant to play, too big of a personality wouldn’t feel quite right either. Her most defining feature is her determination to survive…no matter what comes around the bend, she always manages to figure out a way to adapt and keep going. That’s a powerful statement in and of itself. Overall, though, this is a very enjoyable read and I would heartily recommend it!

Tell me, blog friends…have you ever wished you could start fresh someplace new?

One year ago, I was reading: this book!

Two years ago, I was reading: Primitive Mythology

Book 95: Sophie’s Choice



“I was unable to make the anthropomorphic leap and thus failed to comprehend the resemblance between a swan and any specific human being, but Sophie swore that they were dead look-alikes, began to call him Tadeusz and murmured to him in little glottal clucks and clicks of Polish as she heaved at him the debris from her bag. I rarely ever saw Sophie lose her temper, but the conduct of the other swans, bossy and preemptive, so fatly greedy, infuriated her and she yelled Polish swear words at the big bastards and favored Tadeusz by making sure that he got more than his share of the garbage. Her vehemence startled me. I did not—because I could not at the time—connect this energetic protectorship of the underdog (the underswan?) with anything that had happened in her past, but her campaign for Tadeusz was funny and immensely appealing.”

Dates read: September 30-October 8, 2016

Rating: 6/10

Lists/Awards: National Book Award

Growing up, we all read books and stories about the Holocaust in school. We all learn about Auschwitz and the ovens. But for me, personally, there were three movies that took it beyond words in a history book and made the horror of it visceral: Schindler’s List, The Pianist, and Sophie’s Choice. They are all beautifully and powerfully made films that I never want to watch again. There’s something about actually seeing it depicted on film that takes what is objectively horrible on the page (all three are based on books) and makes it just a harrowing gut punch almost too much to be borne. It’s still hard to read about, but not as hard as watching it.

William Styron’s original novel of Sophie’s Choice takes us to post-WWII Brooklyn. It’s not the poverty-ridden borough of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, but neither is it modern-day wealthy hipster Brooklyn. It’s in-between, an “ethnic” (read: mostly Jewish) working-class neighborhood. It’s in a boarding house there that our narrator, aspiring writer and native Southerner Stingo, finds himself after he quits his dead-end publishing house job and can’t afford Manhattan any longer. His first day in his new room, he’s treated to the sound of noisy, athletic sex in the room right above his…and not too long after, he meets the lovers, Sophie and Nathan, in the midst of an awful, emotionally and physically violent public fight.

The pair are soon reconciled, though, and Stingo is quickly drawn into their orbit. Beautiful Sophie is a Polish survivor of Auschwitz who does secretarial work for a chiropractor, and the mercurial Nathan is an American Jewish medical researcher, and Stingo falls a little bit in love with both of them as he begins to write a novel based in his experiences of the South. But another messy fight and breakup between Sophie and Nathan ultimately reveals that neither of them is exactly who they seem to be and makes their tragic end seem inevitable.

This took me unusually long to get through: not because the subject matter is tough, even though it is, but because the book is just dense. Styron’s prose tends towards the purple, and while usually I’m down with books that are on the overwritten side, it’s a lot, you guys. It feels like the writing is struggling against the story, almost, trying to keep it from sweeping over the reader. There are plenty of remarkable passages, but the ratio of those to portions that drag isn’t nearly high enough.

The story of Sophie and Nathan, when it manages to take off, is sweeping and powerful and dramatic (if a bit on the Freudian side…there’s a lot of eros/thanatos stuff going on). But what grinds it to a halt is the character of Stingo. He’s an obvious writer-insert character, and Styron badly overestimates how interesting the portion of the book that’s devoted to his sexual frustration is. It’s not only boring, it’s cringe-worthy, especially the section where he jerks himself off while sharing a hotel room with his father and makes so much noise when he finishes that he wakes his dad up. I’m not going to say that no one wants to read about that because maybe someone does, but it’s tonally discordant with a book that’s mostly about the evils humans inflict on themselves and each other and the way we tell our own stories to try to shape the world into a way we can better cope with it. There’s greatness here, but it desperately needed a better editor to cut it and make it shine like it should have. As is, it’s worth reading but not something I’d honestly recommend.

Tell me, blog friends…can you rewatch those kinds of movies?

One year ago, I was reading: The Professor and the Madman

Book 90: Neon Green


 “It was his birthday after all, and this was who he was- a committed environmentalist. The very idea filled him with energy. His life was a fight. He was a fighter, no apologies and no breaks for inconvenience. Of course he knew that mopping up the spill would probably do nothing, that it was an infinitesimal smidgen in the grand scheme of things, but his fight was no less important when it was symbolic. Symbols added up to something.” 

Dates read: September 17-19, 2016

Rating: 5/10

What is history? Specifically, what is historical fiction? I’ve been trying to wrestle my head around it for a while. If a book was written as contemporary literature 100 years ago, is it now historical fiction? On a related note, I think we’d all agree that a book set 50 years ago is historical fiction…but what about 40? 30? 20? 10? Or is it based on set events? Is a pre-9/11 book set in America historical fiction, since there was a significant cultural shift that occurred after that point? Is it within a lifetime? Whose? As an almost-32-year-old, I don’t like to think about my own lifetime as encompassing history, but to a 14 year-old, a childhood before smart phones may well be.

Set two decades ago, before widespread home computing/internet access and cell phones, Margaret Wappler’s Neon Green seems like it can be considered historical fiction relatively safely. Well, maybe, because there’s an important difference: in Wappler’s world, Earth has been visited by alien life from Jupiter since the early period of the Reagan administration. While the details are kept carefully shrouded (a time before Wikileaks!), it’s become normalized enough that you can send in an application to be visited by an alien ship. No lifeforms will emerge, but it looks really cool on your lawn for several months. You have to be at least 16 to apply, which means that Gabe Allen is just old enough to secure a ship for his family’s yard. The problem is that his parents, especially his father, are definitely not on board with it.

Parents Ernest and Cynthia Allen are both staunch environmentalists: Cynthia has channeled her passion into an environmental law-focused career, while Ernest does freelance environmental consulting. They’re the early-90s-crunchy-granola kind of people that do most of their shopping at the food co-op and brought their own bags long before it was trendy. They live a cozy little life, mostly pretty happy, in a cozy little neighborhood outside Chicago until two things happen in fairly close succession: the spaceship arrives, and Cynthia’s advanced brain cancer is discovered. The confluence of these events sends Ernest over the deep edge.

Despite the aliens, this isn’t really a science fiction story. It’s a story about a family in crisis…in particular, about a man in crisis, because Ernest is really at the heart of the narrative. The social changes around families and gender roles that took place throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s eroded a lot of markers of traditional masculinity, and not even hippy-dippy types like Ernest are immune from the angst that can bring. It’s easy to see that his reaction to the spaceship is rooted mostly in his inability to control what he thinks of as his home turf, and the ways in which he tries to cope with his wife’s health situation only further demonstrate that he’s spinning out. Both son Gabe and daughter Alison deal with their grief about their mother’s grim prognosis in their own different ways, and before long the once mostly happy family is unrecognizable from what it used to be.

It’s well-written enough, but for me, there wasn’t enough “there” there. It’s the kind of character-driven family drama that I tend to enjoy, but crucial to these kinds of books is a connection built to the characters. The story suffers for its focus on Ernest, whose masculinity-based identity crisis isn’t particularly compelling. I thought Alison’s story was much more interesting but incredibly underdeveloped, and Gabe and Cynthia herself could have also done with more attention paid to them. This didn’t “feel” like a book written by a woman, to me: thinking that a middle-aged guy’s largely self-inflicted sufferings are worth a preponderance of the reader’s time and energy doesn’t usually tend to be a mistake female writers make. I enjoyed the 90s throwback nostalgia, but otherwise found this pretty skippable.

Tell me, blog friends…do you think we’ll make contact with aliens within your lifetime?

One year ago, I was reading: Wild Bill Donovan

Book 86: The Bridge of San Luis Rey



“Some say that we shall never know and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a single feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.”

Dates read: September 4-6, 2016

Rating: 6/10

Lists/Awards: Pulitzer Prize, Time All-Time 100 Novels

Life isn’t fair. It’s a lesson our parents start trying to teach us young, usually, but it takes a long time to really stick. Sometimes good things happen to bad people for no reason, and the reverse is even more infuriatingly true. Someone who could have helped cure cancer was probably shot somewhere today and there’s nothing we can do about it. Why? Just because. Same reason these kind of things happen all the time.

It might sound bleak, but this kind of thinking actually makes me feel better when bad things happen. It’s nothing personal, it’s just the way things are. But to Brother Juniper in Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, that explanation isn’t good enough. Brother Juniper is a monk, and in his eyes, people die for a reason. So when five people fall to their deaths when a Peruvian bridge collapses, he gathers their stories to try to puzzle out why.

The five are are an older woman estranged from her beloved daughter, that woman’s young helpmeet, a young man mourning the loss of his identical twin brother, a stage manager who made an actress famous, and the actress’ son. It’s a brief little novella, but it’s actually more a series of interconnected short stories than anything else. There are four stories going on: the story of the fall of the bridge and its effect on the local populace, the story of the woman and her companion, the story of the twin, and the story of the manager and the actress’ son. The people on the bridge, far from being sinners cast down by a vengeful deity, were for the most part flawed but fundamentally good people who had experienced sorrow but were about to make a turn into happiness. What divine justice is there in that?

Even Brother Juniper can’t see any. But while the mysteries of life and death may not be revealed by the story of those who perished with the bridge, what really comes through in these stories is love. The love of a parent for her child, the affection between companions, the love of siblings, romantic love, unrequited love…it actually reminds me of Love, Actually (which I know some people wish would vanish entirely from the earth, and definitely has issues, but I attach a lot of sentimental value to) in the way that it highlights the bonds between people. At the end, it’s love that moves us, no matter what form that love takes.

This is a small book with a big reputation, and I…didn’t really get the hype? Yes, it was good and surprisingly thought-provoking considering its length, but I wouldn’t have identified it as a literary classic if I didn’t already know it was exactly that going in, if you know what I mean. It was definitely a quality piece of writing, but it wasn’t…special. I would be willing to bet that within a year I will have forgotten that I ever read it but for the recordation of it on this here blog. But it is a classic, so it’s apparently been very meaningful to some people and it’s definitely an enjoyable, quick read.

Tell me, blog friends…to look at the other side of the coin here, is there a novel that you think should be a classic that you can’t understand why it’s not?

One year ago, I was reading: The White Queen

Book 82: Yesternight



“I had tried to be a good girl. Oh, my Lord, after hopping into boys’ beds, how I worked until my brain ached; how diligently I had played by the rules. I had stopped seeing men altogether, dressed in skirts that fell well past my knees, and wed myself to the ‘female-appropriate’ stratum of a male career.”

Dates read: August 23-25, 2016

Rating: 3/10

Like most people, I hold some irrational beliefs. I’ve always had a soft spot for astrology (which I know is making my husband shake his head as he reads this), and I’ve made a visit or two to palm readers/psychics (neither of which told me anything that was particularly true). When you acknowledge your own irrational beliefs, it’s hard to draw a line and say that yours are truer than any other. If the position of the stars in sky when I was born has an influence on my life, why couldn’t ghosts be real? If my crooked little fingers are significant to who I am as a person, why couldn’t someone have a guardian angel that watches over them?

At the beginning of Cat Winters’ Yesternight, Alice Lind doesn’t believe in anything irrational at all. A female psychologist in the 1920s, she’s been shoved into the pink ghetto of school (and by extension, child) psychology rather than the doctoral research she desperately wants to conduct. She mostly administers intelligence tests, but has dealt with a few significantly disturbed children who were thought to be supernaturally influenced and revealed their troubles to be the product of entirely mundane phenomena. Her own childhood had a mysterious event of its own: at age four, she violently assaulted a group of neighborhood children. Her family refuses to provide her with more information regarding the incident, and it would seem it precipitated her interest “solving” the mystery behind the troubled children she encounters. When she steps off the train in Gordon Bay, Oregon, though, she soon finds herself confronted with her most perplexing case ever.
The seven year-old niece of the local school teacher, Janie O’Daire is a math prodigy, able to perform complex calculations in her head and working on college-level proofs. More than that, though, she’s claimed since the time she could talk to be a young woman from Kansas named Violet, who drowned. With a set of acrimoniously divorced parents (which would have been very rare in that time period), it would seem she is ripe for the kind of emotional issues that might provide a prosaic explanation for her claims. But as Alice digs deeper, it becomes more and more probable that this might, in fact, be a genuine case of reincarnation. As she becomes convinced that Janie is telling the truth about her past life, Alice finds herself wondering if her violent outbursts might be the product of her own previous existence as a notorious murderess. 
So I know my policy around here with regard to spoilers has been to avoid them as much as possible without compromising my ability to fully discuss the book, which usually means no or minimal spoilers. While they don’t ruin a book for me personally, I know other people feel differently and I do my best to respect that. However, the ending of this book had a substantial impact on how I ended up feeling about it, so if spoilers bother you, please close this window and come back when you’ve read it (or don’t, I guess, I’m not the boss of you, but I hope you do!). 
It turns out that Janie is in fact a reincarnated spirit, and a visit to Kansas to see Violet’s sister proves it. Alice has convinced herself that her childhood outburst, as well as an experience in college when she attacked a classmate who impregnated and then dismissed her, is the result of her own past life as the homicidal owner of an old hotel not too far away. No sooner has she convinced herself (and her new lover, Janie’s father) that it’s true, then Alice’s sister reveals that the details Alice recalls about the murderess in question were actually told to her by that sister when she was very young. She’s not expressing the violence of a vengeful presence inside her, she just has anger issues. Soon thereafter, Alice and her lover have a fight that becomes physical and he ends up dead. We’re treated to an epilogue in which Alice is now raising her young son, the product of that relationship, and he’s revealed to be…the reincarnation of his own father. Which, no. That’s stupid and terrible. Until the end, the book hums along pretty well. It’s nothing particularly special, but the plot moves quickly and it’s entertaining to read (I’d have rated it at a 6). The end, though, just completely ruins it. It’s awful. I’d had some quibbles with the book previously (Alice doesn’t make much of an effort besides taking people at their word to determine whether Janie has ever experienced any abuse and the unlikelihood of an actual divorce at that point in history…it would have been much more realistic to have Janie’s parents estranged than divorced) that were enough to keep me from finding it anything more than slightly above average, but that ending just torpedoed it. I would not recommend this book to anyone.
Tell me, blog friends…do you have any irrational beliefs?

One year ago, I was reading: The Song of Achilles

Book 78: A Passage To India

 
“He longed for the good old days, when an Englishman could satisfy his own honor and no questions asked afterwards. Poor young Heaslop had taken a step in this direction, by refusing bail. but the Collector couldn’t feel this was wise of poor young Heaslop. Not only would the Nawab Bahadur and other be angry, but the Government of India itself also watches- and behind it is that caucus of cranks and cravens, the British Parliament. He had constantly to remind himself that, in the eyes of the law, Aziz was not yet guilty, and the effort fatigued him.”

Read: August 12-15, 2016

Rating: 4/10

Lists/Awards: Time All-Time 100 Novels, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2012)

When I was in law school, I had a part-time job manning the circulation desk at the law library. I mostly worked evenings and weekends, which was great since it was almost always slow and I got a lot of homework done. Often the library would have been empty for hours by the time we closed up and I needed to go around and turn off all the lights and make sure everyone was out. There was always something unnerving about the library then…it was so quiet and still, and sometimes my imagination would get the better of me. I’d reach down to pick something up that had fallen from the shelf and be sure that I felt someone’s eyes on my back as I rose. Or I’d swear I’d seen movement out of the corner of my eye. There was never anything there, of course, but imagination running wild can be a powerful thing.

It’s just that, the power of the imagination to create an experience in the mind that may or may not have actually happened, that drives the central conflict in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. Plain young schoolmistress Adela Quested ventures to India with her friend, Mrs. Moore, to possibly arrange an engagement to Mrs. Moore’s son Ronny, a small-town official in the British administration. While there, Mrs. Moore comes across a young widowed Indian Muslim, Dr. Aziz, in a mosque and they strike up a quick and easy friendship. When she and Adela express a desire to the “the real India”, Aziz arranges a trip for them to see some caves outside of town. The trip is supposed to be joined by a British school principal, Cyril Fielding (one of the few unprejudiced members of the white community and a friend of Aziz’s), but he misses the train and Aziz takes the women out with just a few servants and a guide to accompany them. In the first cave, Mrs. Moore is shaken by the experience of the echo inside and opts out of further exploration. Aziz and Quested proceed, but become separated, each in a different cave. Aziz frantically searches for her, but emerges only to find that she’s running away and getting in a car, going back to the city. When he arrives back in the city himself, he’s arrested for assaulting her in the cave.

Since we see the story from his point of view during that section of the novel, we know he didn’t touch her. He couldn’t even find her! But what did happen in that cave that scared her so badly? And will he be convicted even though he’s innocent? The Anglo-Indians, as the British administration expats refer to themselves, are deeply racist, and there’s a great deal of consternation that there needs to be a trial at all. The incident stirs up a lot of enmity on the parts of both the British and the Indians, who come together despite their own religious divisions to support Aziz. The only Briton that supports Aziz is Fielding.

Racial divides and the inherent injustices of colonialism are the main themes, and there’s nothing really new or interesting in how Forster presents them. In 1924, when the book was published, it was possibly pretty progressive (for context, the British didn’t leave India until 1949), but in 2017, it’s not going anywhere unexpected. What I found to be the most interesting angle on it from today’s perspective is the relationship between Aziz and Fielding. It raises the question of what it means to be a good ally to an underprivileged group, and if there can ever be real friendship between people society holds as unequal. The book posits that as much as they like each other, the answer is ultimately no. Fielding stands by Aziz during the trial, but then seeks to keep him from suing for recompense from Quested…recompense he deserves, but will ruin her. Even though he’s presented to us as a fair-minded and fundamentally decent person, Fielding can’t help but let his own perspective as a member of the privileged group drive his thinking, and that undermines his ability to really understand where Aziz is coming from.

Honestly, though, I didn’t find much to like here. Coming at it from the world of now, the themes are tired and have been done before and better. Forster doesn’t have especially lovely prose, nor does he create particularly well-drawn or resonant characters. In its time, it was a major work, but I didn’t find anything all that compelling about it. I read it really quickly not because I liked it, but because I wanted to get through it and go on to something more interesting.

Tell me, blog friends…what “groundbreaking” books don’t hold up for you?

One year ago, I was reading: Devil in the White City

Book 73: Behave

“The most difficult part, you would think, is realizing that the person you idealized, whom you regarded as infallible, was imperfect all along. Instead, the hardest part is stopping to wonder what was so imperfect or unfinished within oneself as to impede comprehension of the obvious.”

Read: July 25-29, 2016

Rating: 5/10
 
Anyone who’s taken so much as an Introduction to Psychology course has probably heard about the Little Albert experiment. Very young children often don’t display fear responses to things that adults do, like rats, and Albert was no different in that respect. Albert was taught/conditioned to fear a white rat by pairing the appearance of the rat with a loud crash, which scared him. With repetition, Albert grew to be afraid of all fluffy white things, including dogs and even a Santa Claus beard. Before Albert could be deconditioned from this fear, the experiment ended.

The researcher conducting that experiment (which could never be conducted today) was John Watson, a prominent behaviorist, with his assistant Rosalie Rayner. Andromeda Romano-Lax’s Behave is a fictional account of Rosalie’s life, beginning just before she graduates from Vassar with a degree in psychology and continuing through her time as a research assistant in Watson’s lab and her relationship with John, first as his paramour and then as his wife and mother of their children. Children who are expected, of course, to be raised according to their father’s behaviorist principles. Before she could actually finish raising those children, though, Rosalie died of dysentery in her mid-thirties.

Rosalie’s story is an interesting one to tackle, because she was both a serious scientist at a time when it was possible but difficult to be a female scientist and a subject of tabloid gossip when she was named as a co-respondent in John’s divorce from his first wife. The affair led to John’s firing from Johns Hopkins, where Rosalie had been working with him while she pursued a graduate degree in psychology. The notoriety caused a hitch in his professional life, but completely destroyed hers. Even as their lives move away from professional psychology, though, the specter of Little Albert haunts them.  Behave reminded me a little of The Group…not just because it’s also set in part at Vassar (about 15 years earlier), but because they both deal with the struggles of intelligent, educated women to be all they want to be in a society that’s not really comfortable with working ladies. Rosalie is just as smart and driven as her husband, but her gender and her eventual motherhood conspire to keep her in the home, with doing drafting and editing work for John’s books as her only real intellectual outlet.

I didn’t know that I thought Romano-Lax quite nailed Rosalie’s characterization…I feel like I was supposed to read her as spunky and ambitious but her actions, particularly within her relationship, didn’t fit with that. She wants a job both before and after she has children, but makes only token efforts toward employment. She’s frustrated with her husband’s continuous womanizing, but only confronts him about it once. Reading about her life story, you can surmise that the scandal caused by her and John’s relationship put her in a position where it would have been difficult for her to leave him, but that’s never articulated in so many words. And John himself…Rosalie is constantly referring to his handsomeness and charm, but we don’t ever really see him be charming. We just see his poor behavior. If we’re meant to buy into the central love story that propels the narrative, it doesn’t quite work. The prose is solid and Rosalie Rayner is someone I didn’t know about, so I’m glad I was introduced to her story, but this just didn’t quite deliver for me.

Tell me, blog friends…did you take any psychology classes in college?

One year ago, I was reading: Dune

Book 71: The White Queen

 “A modest woman looks down in this world, keeps her eyes on her slippers; a supplicant bows low and stretches out a pleading hand. But I stand tall, I am aghast at myself, staring like an ignorant peasant, and find I cannot take my eyes from his, from his smiling mouth, from his gaze, which is burning on my face.”

Dates read: July 19-23, 2016

Rating: 5/10

Can we really ever understand anything without context? I’ve been big into Tudor-era England for years, reading plenty of fiction as well as nonfiction historical accounts centered around Henry the Eighth (and his wives) and Queen Elizabeth I. But until now, I’d read almost nothing about the period immediately preceding it: the Wars of the Roses, with two houses of royal lineage, Lancaster and York, squaring off against each other and fighting for the crown. Philippa Gregory’s Cousin’s War series begins with The White Queen, an account of the life of Elizabeth Woodville, wife of King Edward III.

I rolled my eyes pretty heavily when The White Queen kicked off with the hoary romance trope of instalove. But it redeemed itself from that sin by not dragging out an endless will-they-or-won’t-they in which we’re supposed to believe that two adults with serious responsibilities (he as the king, she as a widowed mother to two small sons) would pine after each other for years based on one encounter. Instead we’re supposed to believe that these same two adults would almost immediately fall in love and decide to marry…according to Gregory’s author’s note, because that’s what they did. That they married in secret while Edward’s advisors were trying to negotiate a marriage to a foreign princess for alliance purposes is a matter of historical fact. But to her credit, Gregory wraps up their “courtship” in a relatively short period of time and their actual marriage (and Elizabeth’s life after his death) make up the bulk of the book.

Although Edward was a prolific adulterer, Gregory doesn’t mine their relationship for drama. Elizabeth is not totally immune from jealousy, but she accepts that her husband is who he is and his philandering is only a minor plot point. The drama comes organically from the situation in which Elizabeth and Edward find themselves: the leaders of a tenuous dynasty, constantly threatened. Elizabeth even gives birth to her first son, also named Edward, in sanctuary (literally spending months living inside the walls of a church) because her husband has been temporarily foisted from the throne. With a background situation like that, she doesn’t need to create problems in their marital relationship for intrigue.

Getting into War of the Roses material does help the Tudor era issues make more sense. Henry’s desperation for a male heir is understandable when you realize that it was only with the marriage of Henry’s father (a Lancaster) to his mother (a York) that there was any sort of sustainable-seeming peace in England after a generation of civil war. Henry was only the second Tudor king and there were men in England with equally persuasive claims to the throne. It wasn’t just his personal desire for a son, it was a very real matter of societal security.

When I read The Creation of Anne Boleyn a while back, one of Bordo’s beefs with Philippa Gregory was that she’d alluded to Anne’s guilt on some of the charges…specifically, that she might have slept with her brother in a desperate attempt to conceive an heir for Henry and save her own head. But it’s not only to Anne that Gregory does this: her Katherine of Aragon is guilty of the charges that she’d consumated her marriage to Henry’s brother Arthur, and in this book, Elizabeth Woodville and her mother are guilty of charges of witchcraft that are levied against them. I almost wonder if this is Gregory’s way of pushing her audience out of their comfort zone a little. It makes us ask ourselves if they’d have “deserved” what they got, even if it were true. Did Anne deserve to die? Did Katherine deserve the cruelty she suffered at the end of her life? Did Elizabeth Woodville deserve to have her crown taken and her sons disinherited (and disappeared)? Even if it were true?

Tell me, blog friends…what period do you wish you had more context about?

One year ago, I was reading: Suspicious Minds

Book 64: The Relic Master

“He noted with amusement two adjoining booths, each advertising thorns from the Crown of Thorns. Unfortunate placement. But there were so many exhibitors these days. Space was tight. Placards and banners flapped in the late afternoon breeze. One advertised a Mandylion, another a sudarium, another a foot (whole) of the Magdalene. There was always a surcharge for an entire appendage.”

Dates read: June 23-25, 2016

Rating: 5/10

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not religious, but I did grow up Catholic. If I were ever to again become religious, I don’t think I’d move around my allegiance: I think I’d just go back to being Catholic. Though I’ve been out of the Church for more than half my life, I still find it appealing: the rosaries, the incense, the stained glass, the saints. I still have a Saint Christopher’s medal in my car, and I sometimes find myself invoking Saint Anthony when I’ve misplaced something. I think the saints are my favorite thing about Catholicism.

But there’s a dark side to Catholicism. The Inquisitions. The long succession of shady popes in the Middle Ages. And the practice of selling indulgences, which was part of pushing Martin Luther over the edge enough to nail his 95 theses to the door of the church and kicked off the development of Protestantism. It is in those tumultuous times, literally right before immediately after Luther’s action, where Christopher Buckley sets his The Relic Master. Indeed, Buckley places his protagonist, Dismis in the church where it happens as it happens. But this is not another The Name of the Rose, full of heady theological musings. It mines some similar territory about the nature of the Church, but it’s at heart a comedy.

Dismis manages to find himself in that fateful church at that fateful time because he is a relic hunter: he scours fairs where bits of bodies and artifacts whose owners claim that they’re connected to the saints are for sale to the highest bidder. Many, many of them are obvious fakery, but for the ones that seem to have some shred of authenticity, Dismas buys them for his patrons. Those patrons then use the relics to raise money for the church. Or more like “for the church”, as at least some of that funding gets diverted into the coffers of the church leaders themselves. This was a time when poverty as a godly virtue wasn’t really a thing.

When Dismas finally decides it’s time to get his life savings back from the banker he’s been storing it with and retire, it’s just in time to find out that banker has been arrested and put on trial for stealing his clients’ money. Desperate, he and his good friend, the painter Albrecht Durer, conspire to forge perhaps the most famous relic in the world: the burial shroud of Jesus Christ. Dismas had long thought the shroud of Turin (known then as the shroud of Chambery because it lived in Chambery) was a fake, so he pretends to discover a new one, purporting to believe it is genuine. But the forgery is quickly discovered and Dismas’ penance for his attempt to deceive is set: he has to go steal (or rather, relocate) the shroud of Chambery.

Accompanied by Durer, a handful of mercenary knights meant to keep him in line, and eventually Magda, a beautiful young woman they save from being tried as a witch, Dismas sets out for Chambery without much hope, or even a plan. From there there’s a predictable romance and assorted hi-jinks, with lots of witty reparte and another set of potential thieves after the shroud to contend with. It’s not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but for me, it didn’t have that spark that I need to be charmed by a comedy. Despite being humorous, I wouldn’t call it an easy read: the plot is very twisty and the large cast of characters can be hard to keep track of. It requires enough concentration that it’s not an easy plane/vacation read, but it’s too light to be Serious Literature. It’s an awkward in-betweeny space.

Tell me, blog friends…what are your favorite funny novels?

One year ago, I was reading: Ahab’s Wife

Book 63: Song of Achilles

“The never-ending ache of love and sorrow. Perhaps in some other life I could have refused, could have torn my hair and screamed, and made him face his choice alone. But not in this one. He would sail to Troy and I would follow, even into death.”

Dates read: June 20-23, 2016

Rating: 7/10

If you’ve been to school in the Western world, you’ve probably at some point read (or at least been assigned to read) parts of The Iliad and The Odyssey. I’ve “read” them (some actual reading supplemented by SparkNoting) and I honestly don’t get the hype. The Odyssey is the better of the two for me, and I can understand better its enduring appeal: an adventure story with a charming and quick-witted hero. The Iliad though…war stories don’t traditionally move me, and this one just bored me to tears.

But for better or for worse, the Homeric epics are a bedrock part of the Western literary canon. Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles looks at The Iliad from a fresh perspective: that of Patroclus, Achilles’ closest companion. Since this is a retelling of a classic story (a genre to which I am predisposed), we already know how it’s going to play out: Agamemnon will steal a slave girl claimed by Achilles, leading to the hero refusing to fight for the Greeks, leading to Patroclus donning his armor and being slain by Hector of Troy, leading to Achilles killing Hector and dragging him around the walls of his city, only to be killed himself by an arrow from Hector’s brother Paris. What’s different is what comes before and between.

As most of us know, it was not uncommon in Ancient Greek life for older men to have sexual relationships with younger men. Homosexual relationships between men of the same age, however, were rarer. When I was taught The Iliad, even in college, the bond between Patroclus and Achilles was usually described as just a deep friendship (lip service was paid to the idea they could have been lovers but it was never taught as being the more persuasive interpretation). Miller’s novel, however, roots itself in the alternate interpretation: she presents us with Achilles, the most gifted warrior in Greece, as a man in a loving and stable lifelong relationship with Patroclus.

It would actually be more accurate to say she presents us with Patroclus as the romantic partner of Achilles: the story belongs to Patroclus, it is told through his eyes. Patroclus as created by Miller is a gentle soul, a disappointment to his aggressive father, who is banished when he kills another child purely by accident. He is sent to Peleus, father of Achilles, to be fostered, and is chosen by Achilles of all the young men at court to be his companion. Their relationship only gradually becomes romantic, much to the disgust of Achilles’ river goddess mother, Thetis. She conspires more than once to break the couple apart, but their love is too strong and they remain together until the end. Miller explains Achilles’ rage over the theft of his slave girl as being not about being deprived of a lover, but as being disrespected as the greatest soldier in the army by having his rightfully-claimed prize taken away.

I found it a much more enjoyable take on the story than the original. Miller really gets the time to develop Patroclus and Achilles as characters in depicting them from boyhood all the way through adulthood. She paints a very devoted relationship between them: though both briefly experiment with sex with women, they never stray from each other and Achilles refuses to leave Patroclus despite strong maternal pressure to do so. Since Miller’s Patroclus isn’t a skilled or enthusiastic warrior and instead serves the Greek contingent at Troy as a healer, most of the battlefield scenes that I find so boring to read are left out entirely. This is a solid read for fans of historical fiction and/or classical retellings.

Tell me, blog friends…did you have to read the Homeric poems in school at any point? Did you like them more than I did?

One year ago, I was reading: Creative Mythology

Book 60: The Name of the Rose

“Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.”

Dates read: June 6-12, 2016

Rating: 7/10

Lists/Awards: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, New York Times bestseller

I’ve always loved languages. Growing up, one of my goals was to learn all the Romance languages during the course of my lifetime. I learned a little bit of French in middle school, took two years of high school Spanish, took two years of Italian in college. I speak none of these languages completely or especially well (my Italian was pretty okay immediately after I finished taking it, but that was ten years ago), so adding Portuguese and Romanian to my plate doesn’t look like it’s ever going to happen, but I’d still love to make it happen if it ever works out. It’s not been much a priority until now, but maybe someday.

Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose is the first book I’ve ever read that features heavily the root of the Romance languages: there’s so much Latin I had to keep a website with most of the translations up on my phone when I was reading it so I wouldn’t miss anything (well, too much anyways). The book is a murder mystery set over the course of a week in a monastery during the Middle Ages (hence all the Latin). That’s the way I’d describe it to people, but it’s also so much richer and deeper than that.

It’s about faith. It’s about sin. It’s about various schismatic movements within the Catholic Church in the 1200s and 1300s (the time of the anti-popes). It’s about laughter and poverty and their roles within the lives of the cloistered. It’s about those cloistered, their relationships with each other and the outside world. It’s about books and learning and whether wanting to learn more is always a good thing and whether knowledge should be controlled. It’s about power and having it and wanting it.

The story follows Adso, a young novice monk, traveling with Brother William of Baskervilles, a Franciscan when Franciscans were a very new movement. They arrive at an abbey famous for its incredible library and are begged by the abbot to help inquire into the death of a monk just the night before. William, who is an obvious and intentional analogue to Sherlock Holmes, is intrigued and goes about investigating. Was it a suicide? A murder? And every day, another monk keeps turning up dead, making William and Adso’s work a race against time.

I can already tell I’m going to need (and want) to read this one again. It’s so dense, so full of allusions and historical references I just don’t understand, that it’s obvious that to read this only once means that you’ll never be able to fully appreciate it. It reminds me of Dante’s Divine Comedy, in that it’s certainly readable and enjoyable on its own, but without a fuller understanding of the world at the time, you can’t really understand everything that’s going on. So I’ll need to read up on the establishment of the Franciscan order and the other religious splinter groups that developed around the same period and tackle this one again. The writing is lively and the characters and drama compelling enough that I’m sure it’ll be a rewarding experience. But for the first time through, despite having liked it, I feel like I’ve missed enough that it wasn’t quite as satisfying as it could have been.

Tell me, blog friends…have you ever taken a class on just one piece of literature? My class on La Divina Commedia in college was one of the best classes I ever took!

One year ago, I was reading: The Woman Who Would Be King

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