The Book of Wonder by Lord Dunsany
My rating: 5 of 5 stars Wonder, Irony, Horror, Poetry, and Fantasy “Come with me, ladies and gentlemen who are in any wise weary of London: come with me: and those that tire at all of the world we know: for we have new worlds here.” That's the preface of Lord Dunsany’s The Book of Wonder (1912). The fourteen short stories following his invitation are full of fanciful wonder, whimsical irony, sly horror, rich imagination, and poetic style. They explore and transcend the boundaries between the “real” world of London and careers and business etc. and the “imaginary” world of Faerie and gods and monsters etc., usually depicting protagonists who undertake some impossible feat of “Romance.” There is a centaur, a pirate, a troubadour, an idolator, an idol, a young man from Sussex, a straight-laced young lady of London, two bored businessmen of London, and several thieves. Sometimes the heroes and anti-heroes fail in their essays, but even or especially then their attempts are sublime. Here is an annotated list of the stories. In “The Bride of the Man-Horse,” a lusty young centaur takes up the legendary war-horn of his people and sets off across “the mundane plane” and past numerous cities on a quest to win Sombelene, the mortal daughter of a half-centaur, half-god father and a half-sphinx, half-lioness mother. After opening with an ominous cough, “The Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweler, and of the Doom that Befell Him” recounts how Thangobrind took up his sword Mouse and tried to steal the Dead Man’s Diamond (reputed to always find its way back home) from its spider idol maker. In “The House of the Sphinx” the narrator escapes a malevolent forest by seeking refuge in the House of the Sphinx, whose paramour is Time and children gods, only to find that the flimsy door of the House can’t protect the resigned Sphinx from an imperious and ghastly doom. “The Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men” features three thieves sent by their nomadic poem-less tribe to steal a gold box full of choice poems. When pursued by a giant implacable guardian, is it better to flee, hide, or jump over the edge of the world? After offending the etiquette of the gods in "The Injudicious Prayers of Pombo the Idolator," Pombo turns iconoclast till an arch idolater tells him about a Little Disreputable God residing at the edge of the world. “The Loot of Bombasharna” features pirate captain Shard, his ship the Desperate Lark, the beautiful city Bombasharna (looking “far off like a pearl, shimmering still in its haliotis shell, still wet from the sea”), the Queen of the South, and a floating island. In “Miss Cubbidge and the Dragon of Romance” a staid young upper-class London lady is ravished away by a gold dragon out of the prime of romance, and, forgetting advertisements for pills and political cant, defeats time with her kidnapper. Because the icy beautiful queen (like “a sun-stricken mountain uplifted alone”) in “The Quest of the Queen’s Tears” will only marry the man who can make her cry, the troubadour-king Ackronnion embarks on a quest to collect the tears of the Gladsome Beast. In “The Hoard of the Gibbelins” Alderic, famed Knight of the Order of the City and the Assault and hereditary Guardian of the King’s Peace of Mind, decides to rob the absurdly rich Gibbelins, who “eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man.” In “How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art upon the Gnoles” a “likely lad” is taken by his master thief teacher into Faerie to rob the dread gnoles, ignoring ominous portents like “the skeleton of some early Georgian [fairy] poacher nailed to the door in an oak tree.” "How One Came, as Was Foretold, to the City of Never" recounts how a lad from Surrey flies off on a hippogriff in search of the City of Never in wonder’s native haunt, twilight. But isn’t there a fairer city and “a deed unaccomplished”? In “The Coronation of Mr. Thomas Shap” a “plausible” man of business escapes the beastliness of his London life by building a beautiful fantasy city, and then, “unwisely insatiate,” annexes all lands of wonder. "Chu-Bu and Sheemish" depicts the rivalry between the established idol Chu-Bu and the upstart idol Sheemish, whom the priests one day start worshiping. “The situation called for immediate miracles,” like an earthquake. One day in “The Wonderful Window” a young man of business, who’s liable to gaze into the distance as if “the walls of the emporium were of gossamer and London itself a myth,” buys a window from a mysterious man (who bought it in Baghdad and installs it in the young man’s flat) and starts looking through the window at a golden city full of dragons dancing on flags. Dunsany could write-- --pure ecstasy: “For joy he was as a song.” --cool poetry: “The wind blew bleak from the stars.” --dry humor: “There the Gibbelins lived and discreditably fed.” --creepy horror: “The moment that Tonker touched the withered boards, the silence that, though ominous, was earthly, became unearthly like the touch of a ghoul.” --cosmic horror: “falling from us still through the unreverberate blackness of the abyss.” --philosophical questioning: “For who knows of madness whether it is divine or whether it be of the pit?” --and beautiful fantasy: “Built of a stone unknown in the world we tread were its bastions, quarried we know not where, but called by the gnomes abyx, it so flashed back to the twilight its glories, colour for colour, that none can say of them where their boundary is, and which the eternal twilight, and which the City of Never; they are the twin-born children, the fairest daughters of Wonder.” I listened to two LibriVox audiobook readings of Dunsany’s book, and much preferred the reading of Sandra Cullum, who has a clear and appealing manner and British accent. Her reading surprised me with the pleasure (to the point of grinning) of Dunsany’s prose. I also found online and was mesmerized by Sydney Sime’s detailed, decadent, and beautiful drawings that apparently inspired Dunsany’s stories. Fans of imaginative fantasy and rich style should find Dunsany’s writing wonderful, as Tolkien and Lovecraft did. View all my reviews
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The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution by Peter Hessler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Fascinating, Funny, and Moving Account of Egypt Based on his roughly five years living in Cairo with his wife and little twin girls from early in the Arab Spring revolution to well after Abdel Fattah el-Sisi imposed his martial police state dictatorial rule on the country, Peter Hessler’s book The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution (2019) fascinatingly depicts such changes in the context of the cultures of ancient and modern Egypt. We learn, for example, that the disproportionate number of young Egyptians (50% younger than 25) being dominated by male elders was not so different in the time of Pharaoh Akhenaten; that contemporary Egyptians as well as ancient ones favored strongman rulers; that ancient Egyptian rulers as well as contemporary ones embarked on “grandiose and misguided desert projects”; and so on. In his book Hessler makes many interesting insights into contemporary Egypt, about things like the following: --the complex nature of Egyptian culture (sarcastic, fatalistic, practical, local, paternal, superstitious); --the lack of governmentally organized systems for things like trash collection (the history of Cairo trash collection from the 20th century through Arab Spring is rich); the laws relating to divorce (if the wife initiates the proceedings she forfeits her right to alimony); --the inequality between genders (which Hessler sees as the biggest problem in Egyptian culture, as, for instance, married women rarely work outside the home); --the evil eye (never directly compliment someone on, say, their beautiful children, but instead use opposites like “your twins are beastly” or preface or conclude compliments with “This is what God has willed [masha’allah]” to avoid inadvertently cursing someone); --superstition (how Egyptians explain people with psychological problems as being possessed by afrits or djin); --the differences between and uses of classical “al fusha” (the eloquent) Arabic which is mostly written vs. demotic “ammiyya” (common) Egyptian Arabic which is mostly spoken; --education (why more than 25% of Egyptians are illiterate and how children’s textbooks are biased with, for instance Israel not appearing on maps and debacles like the last war against Israel described as victories); --drug abuse (opioid pain killer abuse is rampant in Cairo, not unlike in the USA); --the Cairene slum (such neighborhoods differ greatly from typical American slums, being vibrant, unplanned, improvised, centrally located, and strangely well-functioning places in which live 2/3 or 11 million of Greater Cairo’s denizens) --the niche filled by Chinese lingerie businesses (scattered up and down the Nile river towns and cities selling g strings and nightgowns to Egyptian women while speaking what Hessler calls the Lingerie Dialect of Egyptian Arabic, which uses exclusively female forms and calls every woman “bride” and cheaters “Ali Baba”). The two most interesting and sympathetic figures in the book are Hessler’s gay interpreter Manu and his garbage man Sayyid. Manu lives a dangerous life in a society that frowns on homosexuality (there is no neutral term for being gay in Arabic, the police are given to arresting gay men and subjecting them to anal exams, and Manu’s lovers often robbed or beat him after sex because of their guilt). Sayyid (the scene stealer of the book) is a down-to-earth, illiterate, street-smart, hard-working guy living in the Cairene equivalent of a slum with his formidable and beautiful wife Wahiba and their kids. Sayyid knows everything about everyone who lives in Hessler’s upper-middle class neighborhood on an island in the Nile in Cairo, learning about them through their trash and his own connections, and he gets to know Hessler and his family quite well, even taking the author along with him on his garbage rounds and eating meals with him and so on. Sayyid seems more concerned with his epic marital troubles than with what happens in the Arab Spring and subsequent coup. Hessler is a vivid, observant, and witty writer when describing people, places, moods, and events, as with empty shipping containers looking in the distance “like stacks of Legos melting in the sun.” His accounts of crawling through a long narrow debris-filled tunnel in a Middle Kingdom pharaoh’s tomb, of participating in a scary demonstration in Cairo, of accompanying Sayyid on a visit to a sexist and cynical divorce lawyer, of seeing Nefertiti’s uncanny bust in Berlin, of driving through a desert of mirages, and so on, are all prime. Perhaps he gets a bit too narratively clever at times when shifting between historical and modern times in mid-chapter, as when late in the book he moves back and forth between an account of his interpreter Manu trying to settle into life in Germany as an asylum seeking refugee and the story of the Jewish family who had his (Hessler’s) apartment building built in Cairo early in the 20th century, because I’d have liked to have had one or the other account completed without jumping back and forth so much. It seemed to be a kind of narrative trick unnecessary for an already absorbing non-fictional work. Hessler is a capable reader of the audiobook, pausing and emphasizing just right. Perhaps a more dramatic professional reader might have made his book even more compelling that it already is with his own reading, but I like to hear the author reading his/her own book whenever possible. Hessler also interweaves into his book his descriptions and perceptions of Ancient Egyptian archeological sites like the Buried of the title (an ancient necropolis in Abydos) and of modern and contemporary Egyptologists so as to illuminate them as well as to suggest parallels between ancient and modern Egypt and its people. Thus, his funny, thought-provoking, moving, and illuminating book should be rewarding for anyone interested in Egypt, whether ancient or modern. View all my reviews
Agincourt by Bernard Cornwell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Doing the Devil’s Work with Beautiful Bows “On a winter’s day in 1413, just before Christmas, Nicholas Hook decided to commit murder.” That’s the choice opening line of Bernard Cornwell’s gritty historical novel Agincourt (2009). Hook, a 19-year-old forester for a minor lord, is patrolling for poachers when he sees at a distance the unsuspecting Tom Perrill, scion of the family his own family has been feuding with since Perrill’s grandfather killed Hook’s, and he immediately shoots an arrow that should skewer his foe, but due to a feather falling off in flight, the shaft goes astray. This sets in motion a chain of events in the prologue that has Hook going to London to assist in the hanging and burning of a group of “heretic” Lollards, punching a “black-hearted priest” (with bad teeth), failing to save a Lollard virgin from being raped and murdered, and finally leaving England as a mercenary archer to fight for Burgundy against France. Needless to say, Hook is a fine Cornwellian hero: laconic, brave, capable, and violent, a formidable fighter who’s no aristocrat and no saint but better by far than his vile Cornwellian nemeses. (Here Sir Martin and Tom Perrill are a little too ugly and awful.) The novel is a paean to longbowmen (“Archers were Hook’s heroes”), taking place during the 100 Years War between England and France, when the primacy of heavily armored aristocratic knights was being replaced by that of British archers, who were primarily tradesmen and had already won great victories at Crecy and Poitiers when Hook goes to the continent to become an archer. Henry V has decided to prove that God is on his side by invading France and forcing its rulers to accept his claim on the French throne. Although Cornwell depicts the almost universal brutality of the late middle-ages, he does render the French due for especial retribution for torturing and massacring English mercenaries and French nuns, while not depicting any equivalent British atrocities. There are many virtues in the novel: Salty speech, as when Hook’s patron Sir John curses the French (“turd-sucking sons of rancid whores!”) or lauds Hook (“Your mother wasn’t wasting her time when she spread her thighs, Hook”). Humorous conversations, as when Father Christopher tries to get Hook to take a historical perspective: “It all happened before,” Father Christopher told him. “Before?” “You don’t know your history, Hook.” “I know my grandfather was murdered and my father too.” “I do so love a happy family. But think back to your great-grandfather’s time.” Vivid depictions of warfare, like the beginning of the battle of Agincourt: “The first sound was the bowstrings, the snap of five thousand hemp cords being tightened by stressed yew, and that sound was like the devil’s harpstrings being plucked. Then there was the arrow sound, the sigh of air over feathers, but multiplied, so that it was like the rushing of a wind. That sound diminished as two clouds of arrows, thick as any flock of starlings, climbed into the gray sky. Hook, reaching for another broadhead, marveled at the sight of five thousand arrows in two sky-shadowing groups. The two storms seemed to hover for a heart’s beat at the height of their trajectory, and then the missiles fell.” Cornwell, needless to say, doesn’t shy away from graphic depictions of warfare, writing of gouged, sliced, and jellied eyeballs, ripped bellies and spilled guts, crushed helmets and burst brains, smashed bones and spurting blood, broken teeth driven to the back of their owner’s skull, slurries of blood, mud, and shit. Not to mention the ravages of dysentery. Yet he finds beauty in the tools of war, whether new poleaxes or a fine longbow: “There was a beauty there, a beauty of yew and hemp, of silk and feathers, of steel and ash, of man and weapon, of pure power, of the bow’s vicious tension that, released through fingers rubbed raw by the coarse hemp, shot the arrow to hiss in its flight and thump as it struck home.” Is this Cornwell’s war fetish? He calls war “the devil’s work,” but seems to relish it and to admire men who are good at it: “A square blunt face, scarred and broken, beaten by battle and by life but undefeated. It was a hard face, a warrior’s face, a man’s face.” Cornwell varies his war scenes, from sieges to pitched battles, and creatively depicts different ways to maim and kill people in the middle ages. However, as graphic scenes like this begin accumulating--“Hook was swinging the poleaxe as he landed and its lead-weighted hammer head crashed into a crouching Frenchman’s helmet and Hook sensed rather than saw the metal crumpling under the massive blow that collapsed metal, skull, and brain”—the violence begins to numb and bore like war porn. Mind you, it’s not all war! Interspersed with the mayhem appears some life philosophy, as when Father Christopher tells Hook, “Beware of certainty. . . . Beware of the man who says he knows God’s will.” There are vivid descriptions of things other than battle, as with “Branches as gaunt as scaffolds against the sky.” There are also plenty of interesting historical details, as with the French calling the English “the goddams” (perhaps because of how often the English utter that curse), Father Christopher saying that one bath per lifetime is enough because the clean body makes an unclean soul, Hook’s grandmother making fertility potions from mistletoe, mandrake root, and a mother’s urine, and people saying things like, “Sweet weeping Christ and all his piss drinking saints!” The audiobook reader Charles Keating is fine, though perhaps too old for the many war cries of “Kill them!” And the overly dramatic orchestra music barging in in mid-chapter (from when the book was on CDs?) is mood-breaking. People who like historical war fiction and are interested in the 100 Years War should like Agincourt. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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