Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
My rating: 5 of 5 stars Biblical, Ebonic, Sensual, Sad, Funny, Revelatory Dusk in Eatonville, a small all-black town in Southern Florida in 1928. Janie Crawford Killicks Starks Woods returns to her house in town after having been gone almost two years living with her third husband, Vergible Woods, AKA Tea Cake, in “the muck” of the Everglades: planting and picking beans, hunting and fishing, dancing and storytelling, laughing and loving. Janie has returned to Eatonville after burying Tea Cake. Walking in unaffectedly sexy and free forty-year-old beauty though clad in muddy overalls, “her firm buttocks like she had grape fruits in her hip pockets; the great rope of black hair swinging to her waist and unraveling in the wind like a plume; then her pugnacious breasts trying to bore holes in her shirt,” barely noticing the greedy-eyed men or the envy-eyed women of the town, Janie is magnificent. No matter that the women cruelly gossip about her, hating her for looking younger than forty, for having been married for twenty years to Joe Starks, the town mayor and post master and store owner and de facto emperor, and then for having had the temerity after Joe’s death to turn down all the older decent single men’s offers of marriage in order to run off with Tea Cake, a man without fixed occupation at least ten years her junior. Janie’s only friend in town, Phoeby Watson, visits her to give her a plate of mulatto rice and to hear what happened to her while she was away. The rest of the novel depicts Janie’s life story up to that point: her attempt to find a way to live so as to “utilize myself all over.” To live not as her loving but limiting grandmother wanted her to (marrying for stability not love) but rather as she had felt during a sensual epiphany beneath a blossoming pear tree at age sixteen “With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!” Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is a rich, potent novel composed in two registers: the standard-English third-person narration that is Biblical, poetic, ironic, and sensual; and the Ebonic dialogue that is demotic, southern, witty, and colorful. The gap between the two is striking, as in the following passage: “They sat there in the fresh young darkness close together. Pheoby eager to feel and do through Janie, but hating to show her zest for fear it might be thought mere curiosity. Janie full of that oldest human longing—self revelation. Pheoby held her tongue for a long time, but she couldn’t help moving her feet. So Janie spoke. ‘Naw, t’aint nothing’ lak you might think. So ‘tain’t no use in me telling you somethin’ unless Ah give you de understandin’ to go ‘long wid it. Unless you see de fur, a mink skin ain’t no different from a coon hide. Looka heah, Pheoby, is Sam waitin’ on you for his supper?’” I’d never read anything by Hurston before, and her writing amused, moved, and enriched me. The vivid descriptions of everything from barbecued meat (“the seasoning penetrated to the bone”) to love: “He looked like the love thoughts of women. He could be a bee to a blossom, a pear tree blossom in the spring. He seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps, crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung about him. He was a glance from God.” And the savory characters’ lines: “If dat was my wife, I’d kill her cemetery dead,” or “Put me down easy, Janie, Ah’m a cracked plate,” or “Ah’m gonna sweep out hell and burn up de broom.” There is much about the human condition as differently experienced by men and women. Janie’s first two husbands have no appreciation for her mind or soul, wanting only an obedient worker in the house who is thankful to be kept therein. Of her first marriage, we read, “She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.” Her second husband thinks women and chickens are of equal intelligence and that she should be grateful for what he gives her, though “She got nothing from Jody but what money could buy.” Janie is thirsting for love and poetry--the bees among the blossoms--and experience: “You got to go there to know there.” The novel also says much about the difficulties of black life in America, in ways still relevant today. Janie’s grandmother (who as a slave was raped by her master) tells her, “Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out.” Partly as a result, “us colored folks is branches without roots and that makes things come roun in queer ways.” White and black bodies (really all the same of course) are treated with egregious difference after a hurricane. Then there is the pathetic skin color snob Mrs. Turner who takes to Janie because of her coffee and cream-colored skin, Mrs. Turner telling her that she’s too good for the dark-skinned Tea Cake and scorning dark black people as an affront to her white God. Speaking of God, the title of the novel refers to a moment of existential fear during an apocalyptic hurricane. This connects to a provocative earlier passage: “All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. . . Fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars, the beginning of wisdom.” As she reads the audiobook, actress Ruby Dee savors every word, from the narration to the black vernacular, convincingly voicing all manner of characters and moods. She makes the audiobook a five-star experience. (I'd give the novel itself four stars because I thought some of the humorous scenes of people debating or teasing go on a little too long.) Evocative blues guitar picking periodically closes or opens scenes, perhaps to start or end different audiobook disks. Readers who want to see a mother of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker at her peak or are interested in the African American experience centered in early 20th-century Florida but speaking to all people in any time should read this book. View all my reviews
0 Comments
A Bond Undone by Jin Yong
My rating: 5 of 5 stars “black hair in the morning, white in the evening” A Bond Undone (2019), the second volume of Jin Yong’s four-volume historical fantasy kung fu bildungsroman epic Legends of the Condor Heroes (1957-59), takes up in mid-cliffhanger where the first one, A Hero Born (2018), left off. Lotus Huang is still trapped in the palace of the Sixth Prince of the Jin Empire, having to use her quick wits, feminine wiles, martial skills, and hedgehog chainmail to fight through challenges from six traitor Song masters. Guo Jing is in a charnel pit with the blind and now crippled Iron Corpse Cyclone Mei, who, after whipping Liang the Jinseng Immortal, clamps a Nine Yin Skeleton Claw grip on Guo Jing’s windpipe to make him carry her on his back and enters a poignant memory-fugue monologue. And the Jin princeling Wanyan Kang continues to take poorly the news that a wandering Song farmer is his real father, not the Sixth Jin Prince. The second volume is at least as exciting, funny, moving, and entertaining as the first. There are many colorful characters and impressive scenes, among them Iron Corpse recalling her intense relationships with her dead husband and her betrayed shifu (teacher); Lotus Huang cooking delectable dishes for the gourmand Northern Beggar Count Seven Hong; students, teachers, and foes reuniting at Roaming Cloud Manor; Guo Jing disastrously meeting his lover’s father (who “refused to plant a sprig of blossoms in a pile of cow dung”); Apothecary Huang and the Western Venom Viper Ouyang dueling with flute and zither; the childlike Hoary Urchin playing a trick on Guo Jing; and Guo Jing and Gallant Ouyang competing in three rigged trials for Lotus Huang. The novel continues the education of the simple and slow but good and persistent Guo Jing in the context of the Jin Empire trying to finish subsuming the Song Empire via skullduggery and Mongols. Separated from his primary teachers (the Seven Freaks of the South), Guo Jing goes on to learn the Dragon Subduing Palm repertoire from the Northern Beggar and the Competing Hands technique from the Hoary Urchin. And he continues learning about life from Lotus, as when she puzzles him by comparing a colorful lake, mountain, and sunset cloud landscape to a monochrome ink painting. Part of Guo Jing’s education concerns an artifact reminiscent of Tolkien’s One Ring: The Nine Yin Manual. This old, unique hand-written manuscript reputedly describes and explains every known inner and outer kung fu move and countermove and thus for years has been sought, stolen, and fought over by martial artists, and even the most moral possessors can never quite bring themselves to burn it. “Flummoxed by how a book could cause so much havoc and ruin so many lives,” Guo Jing views it as an evil work, while the Hoary Urchin believes it to be a force for good. “It was worn and weathered from years of use and rough handling. The once white paper had yellowed. Its corners and edges were dogeared and creased. The words were obscured by smudges from hands and spots of water damage. Was it tears or tea? And the blots of purplish black. Were they blood?” The Manual plays a richly ironic and thematic role in the A Bond Undone. Like the first volume, the second features umpteen wuxia action scenes, with weapons ranging from hands, feet, swords, and spears to chopsticks, needles, coins, and tunes. On display are Jin Yong’s fanciful names for techniques (e.g., Dragon Subduing Palm, Exploding Toad, and Luminous Hollow Fist) and moves (e.g., Swirling Leaf, Black Tiger Steals the Harp, Hands Stretched for Charity, Haughty Dragon Repents, Wayfaring Fist, and Nodding Phoenix). Much action like this: “Mei swung her arm in a horizontal swipe known as Torrent and Tempest from the Cascading Peach Blossom Palm repertoire. The air parted with a whoosh.” The Northern Beggar even parodies such nomenclature by referring to the Ginseng Immortal’s Gibbon Climbs the Tree move as a Bare-Assed Monkey Climbs the Tree. The appendix explains that Chinese philosophies like Taoism and the I Ching inspire different kinds of kung fu, which, although often superhuman in effect, is an art with application to life, as reflected in lines like, “Absence trumps excess,” “The firm cannot endure the supple,” and “It is only through the simplest dish that a chef’s true skill is revealed. The same goes for the martial arts.” Indeed, cooking and kung fu are closely related in the novel, which serves some delicious and enticing dishes like bok choy stir fried in chicken fat, eight treasures duck, and Made for Each Other Broth. Martial and graphic arts are also related, as when Lotus Huang and Guo Jing observe an ink painting: “The powerful brushwork slashed like a sword and quivered with pent up force, as if each stroke could pierce through the paper and take flight.” The relationship between Guo Jing and Lotus Huang continues to charm, for they love each other so purely and complement each other’s strong and weak points so well. When she’s not saving him from nefarious enemies or leading him into dangerous situations, she teaches him to appreciate food, ink painting, and nature. The lovers were made for each other. Jin Yong writes great lines, whether evoking humor (“Brother, perhaps you’re a little obsessed with the martial arts”), love (“He decided not to interrupt this perfect image of sleep and turned his attention to counting her eyelashes”), loss (“Like my heart, he turned to ice”), or human nature (“There are some exceptionally clever people in this world. But . . . nothing good—no indeed, only the very rotten—comes of running into one of their kind”). With his superb reading of the audiobooks, Daniel York Loh enhances the consistency of the fine English translations by Anna Holmwood for the first volume and by Gigi Chang for the second. Never over-dramatizing, he always uses the right touch for the different characters and situations. His reading of Iron Corpse’s monologue is splendid, alternating between her malevolent kung fu hag rasp in the present and her pure teenage voice in the past. His reading makes up for the audiobook lacking the notes of the physical book. At one point the Hoary Urchin asks Guo Jing, “As long as they’re amusing, what’s the difference between real events and good stories?” A Bond Undone is amusing. I can’t wait to read the third volume of Legends of the Condor Heroes. After all, this one ends on another cliffhanger, and as a poem quoted in the novel implies, I’m not getting younger: Sitting by the blossoms, wine in hand, I wish to ask my gentle friend, Is there a way to hold on to spring? If only spring could be persuaded to stay. View all my reviews
A Hero Born by Jin Yong
My rating: 5 of 5 stars Better than a Chinese Lord of the Rings Jin Yong’s Legends of the Condor Heroes (1957-59) has been called "the Chinese Lord of the Rings," but it features no Elves or Hobbits or Orcs or Dark Lords--just human beings. It’s a Historical Epic Fantasy Romance Adventure Kung Fu Bildungsroman featuring male and female martial arts experts (wuxia) of different traditions, abilities, and personalities in the early 13th-century historical context of the rising Jin Empire trying to complete its takeover of the declining Song Empire while both empires are trying to enlist the aid of the Mongols being unified by Genghis Kahn. One of the most popular books in the world, with 100s of millions of Chinese-speaking readers, Yong’s four-volume magnum opus is finally being translated into English. A Hero Born (2018), translated by Anna Holmwood, is the first of the four volumes to be translated. Not being able to read Chinese, I have no idea how accurate the translation is. All I can say is that listening to the audiobook was one of the most unstoppably entertaining reading experiences in my life. The sprawling story centers on Guo Jing, a good-natured, naïve, slow, and persistent peasant youth, and his relationship with the love of his life, Lotus Huang, a clever, quick, bold, and independent rich girl. Though Guo Jing grows up among the Mongols as martial brother to Temujin’s youngest son, he and Lotus Huang are patriotic children of the Song who hate the Jin. The story relates the fate of Guo Jing’s parents and their friends, the Mongolian childhood of Guo Jing, his training in kung fu by the Seven Freaks of the South, his encounter with formidable foes like the renegade kung fu husband and wife duo Copper Corpse and Iron Corpse (aka Twice Foul Dark Wind), his departure on a mission to try to kill the scheming Jin prince Wanyan Honglie, his falling in love with Lotus, and his further educational adventures in kung fu and life. If you like heroic fantasy and are interested in Chinese history and culture or liked the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), you would like A Hero Born. It’s a cinematic page turner by turns humorous, scary, thrilling, or moving because Jin Yong is so good at creating colorful characters and then putting them in unexpected situations in a rich world with a history that matters. His heroes and villains are flawed, distinctive, vivid, and human. The novel is full of humor (e.g., “He wasn’t known as the Butcher of a Thousand Hands for nothing”), pathos (e.g., “For eighteen years she had thought he was dead, and here he was, her husband, standing before her, like a spirit reincarnated”), and terror (e.g., “Some time passed and then a cracking sound started echoing all around them, first slow, then faster, like beans popping in hot oil. The noise was coming from her joints, but she was sitting perfectly still”). There are moments of devastating psychological truth, as when a needy princeling orders his servants to catch a rabbit so he can break its legs and then bring it to his tender-hearted mother and say, "I found a wounded rabbit for you to tend," so she can say, "Oh, you are a good boy," never realizing his cruelty or duplicity. Indeed, Jin Yong has a rich sense of irony: an act of mercy sets in motion a chain of tragic events; the reader knows someone’s identity the characters are clueless about; the best laid plans involving painstaking years of preparation often go awry. The irony leads to pithy and wise remarks on life like, “But it as they say: the swimmer is the one to drown, the cart always breaks on flat ground.” Jin Yong writes imaginative, exciting, and unpredictable action scenes ranging from personal duels to big battles. In addition to different kung fu disciplines and techniques (e.g., Nine Yin Skeleton Claw, Neigong Inner Strength, Water Kung Fu, etc.), he assigns countless fanciful or descriptive names for the kung fu moves “performed” by his characters: Mandarin Duck Kick, Enter the Tiger’s Lair, Branch Beats the White Chimpanzee, Black Dragon Gathers Water, Cat Chases Mouse, Pick the Fruit, Open the Window to Gaze at the Moon, Embracing the Gentleman’s Cape, Jumping Carp, Eight Steps to Catch the Toad, Falling Star, Laugh the Jaw Out of Joint, and many more. (I loved reading action like, “He reached for the spear and traced a Rising Phoenix Soaring Dragon through the air, the red tassel dancing behind him, until the point thrust forward straight at the cupboard.”) At times the kung fu verges on the superhuman, but it obeys a set of rules that are gradually revealed, confirmed, and played with: all kung fu masters have a single weak spot on their bodies, are limited by their ability to control their chi (inner life force), are supposed to be honorable (poison is permissible if you keep the antidote handy), and are never always the best: “Every peak sits under the shadow of another.” There are more appealing things in the work. It contains many savory Chinese cultural references, from quoted poems, Taoist monks, and exotic dishes, to the ubiquitous kowtow, elaborate names like The Garden of the Eight Drunken Immortals, and similes comparing things like black hair to the clouds in an ink painting, rain drops to soy beans, and a waist-sash to “the color of spring onions.” And its treatment of gender is impressive, as characters like Lotus Huang and Iron Corpse are believable, sympathetic, strong, and at least as formidable martially and intellectually as the men. Daniel York Loh reads the audiobook with great empathy, understanding, and restraint. He does a splendid malevolent and damaged Iron Corpse voice, a perfect civilized spoiled princeling voice, and nice Guo Jing and Lily Huang voices. I had a wonderful time with A Hero Born, often on the edge of my seat or chuckling with pleasure, often surprised, never bored. As it ends with simultaneous cliffhangers, the moment I finished it, I had to start the second volume, and I’m sure you will, too. View all my reviews
Emma: An Audible Original Drama by Anna Lea
My rating: 3 of 5 stars A Fine Adaptation Marred by Music This Audible Original full-cast recording of Anna Lea’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s romantic comedy of manners Emma (1816) captures the original story’s spirit and retains much of its content and style. But the sound effects and music! (Music and sound design by Stephen Jones.) Carriage wheels roll, horses snort, birds twitter, rain patters, fires crackle, silverware clinks, pianofortes plink, and so on, all quite audibly. The most excrescent sound effect is a loud clock ticking during conversations indoors when the fire and silverware are at rest. Actually, for the most part the sound effects are OK (to this listener), because they aren’t repeated by the narration (which redundancy harms the “illuminated production” audiobook of Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint, wherein the narrator will say, for example, “The door opened” and we hear a door opening). The Hollywoodish Austenesque music, however, is another matter, being irritatingly intrusive from the start, coming at the ends or beginnings of every scene, running over and through too much of Emma Thompson’s fine narration, and detracting from rather than enhancing the listening experience. That’s a pity, because the adaptation of the novel and the reading of the professional actor readers are fine. The story concerns the education by experience of Emma Woodhouse, a wealthy (30,000 pounds!) 21-year-old lady who is intelligent, pretty, accomplished, funny, and high-spirited, and is running her family house and feeble-minded, self-centered, and hypochondriac father, with whom she lives. Her sister has married and left home. Emma claims to wish never to marry and says she’ll be content with her status and responsibility in taking care of her father and home and nieces and nephews and so on. Emma is spoiled, snobbish, egotistical, meddling, envious, and has too high a regard for her perception and sensitivity. Hence her need to be improved by adversity, which she doesn’t suspect but we eagerly await: Austen’s irony is one of the pleasures of the novel. The adversity will come about due to Emma’s misguided efforts to play cupid and anti-cupid, depending on whom she thinks ought or ought not to marry whom. The characters include the innocent and low status Harriet Smith (who is an unknown person’s “natural” child), the flirtatious and higher status Frank Churchill (who is the step-son of Emma’s childhood governess), the accomplished Jane Fairfax (whom Emma has always envied and hence disliked and distanced), the gentlemanly Mr. Knightley (a friend of Emma’s and her father sixteen years her senior), the eligible and superficial Mr. Elton (the neighborhood vicar), and so on. One bonus of this audible adaptation by Anna Lea is its reduction of many of Miss Bates’ lines. I still remember reading the original novel in book form years ago, when I became quite impatient with Miss Bates’ appearances in the story and soon took to skipping her interminable speeches, because Jane Austen was too good at conveying at great length and in exhaustive detail their irritating air-headed prattling quality. I believe that every important element of the full novel’s plot has been retained (even Emma’s appalling put down of “poor Miss Bates” at one point). And the adaptation keeps many of Austen’s wonderfully delicious lines, like this from the narrator: “The lady had been so easily impressed, so sweetly disposed, had, in short, to use a most intelligible phrase, been so ready to have him that vanity and prudence were equally contented.” It also retains the antique, genteel savor of her characters’ dialogues, like this from Jane Fairfax: “I am exceedingly obliged to you, Mrs. Elton. I am obliged to anybody who feels for me, but I am quite serious in wishing nothing to be done until the summer.” I often got the feeling that Austen’s comfortably well-off characters never actually DO anything or actually TALK about anything. They visit each other and have tea and attend dinner and dance parties and go on excursions exploring each other’s gardens and share carriages and gossip, and so on, but. . . Sure, getting married is an important part of life, but it seems to be all the characters are concerned about (that and what kind of family people come from and how much money they’re worth). After reading just before Emma Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, which is so full of interesting ideas about science, politics, economics, society, time, space, work, and, yes, love, Austen’s novel seems a little frilly. Furthermore, I got the sense that in the novel much of Emma’s class-conscious snobbery isn’t a flaw requiring change so much as Austen’s own feeling. Lines like “They [the Coles] were a very good sort of people, but they were of no origin, in trade, and only moderately genteel,” make my skin crawl a bit, as does the final development of the relationship between Emma and Harriet despite my telling myself, “Hey, Austen lived in a different era!” Anyway, so as long as you don’t mind a radio play type experience (including sound effects and music) and a story about half as long as, say, the Naxos unabridged recording read by the superb Juliet Stevenson (16.5 hours), this audiobook adaptation would be entertaining and worthwhile (especially if you could get it for free as an audible member!). View all my reviews
The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk / Palace of Desire / Sugar Street by Naguib Mahfouz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars Egyptian Culture, Human Nature, Comedy and Tragedy, Politics and Art, and Great Writing My husband took A second wife When wedding henna still Was fresh Upon my hands. The day he brought Her home, her Presence Seared my Flesh. Characters in Naguib Mahfouz’s The Cairo Trilogy (1956-58) sometimes sing popular songs like that. The Egyptian Nobel Prize winning author’s work is a semi-autobiographical look at vivid and intense moments in the lives of the members of a Cairene family living in the old part of the city in the first half of the 20th century, when Egypt was struggling for independence from England. The middle-aged patriarch Al-Sayyid Ahmad 'Abd al-Jawad is a terrifying tyrant at home. He makes his sons wait to eat till he leaves the table, refuses to let his wife Amina leave the house, and decides who his children marry: “I’m a man. I’m the one who commands and forbids. I will not accept any criticism of my behavior. All I ask of you is to obey me. Don’t force me to discipline you.” Although Al-Sayyid is a humorless, pious Muslim man at home, when out partying with his cronies he is a pleasure seeking, joke telling, tambourine playing, song singing, alcohol abusing, womanizing playboy. Amina, who when not cooking and cleaning and supporting her children stands in her rooftop garden gazing longingly at the minarets of the mosques she can never visit, is the heart of the family. Eldest son Yasin has inherited his father’s sensual appetites without any of his self-control; middle son Fahmy is a naive law student devoted to Egyptian nationalist-independence; youngest son Kamal (based partly on Mahfouz) is a lively, loving, imaginative boy. Eldest daughter Khadija has an acerbic tongue that often makes fun of people. Youngest daughter Aisha is fair, beautiful, and unworldly. The trilogy depicts the family aging as their country changes. In the first book, Palace Walk (1956), which covers the years 1917-19, Al-Sayyid rules at home and plays outside, Amina takes care of her family while trying to visit the mosque of Al-Husayn, Yasin fails to control his lusts and discovers his father’s dual nature, Aisha and Khadija get involved in matrimony, Fahmy gets involved in revolution, and Kamal tries to understand his changing family. The second book, Palace of Desire (1957), taking place from 1924 to 1927, focuses on the now teenaged Kamal, particularly on his quest to find truth, goodness, and beauty by studying world philosophy while doubting everything in life and on his one-sided idealized love for Aida, an older girl from a wealthy family. “It seemed he had fallen in love in order to master the dictionary of pain.” Acting as a foil to Kamal’s love are the comical sexual misadventures of Yasin, who marries the wrong women for the wrong reasons, and of Al-Sayyid, who gets back in the adultery game after a five-year hiatus. Though just as funny as the first two, the third novel, Sugar Street (1958), covering 1935-44, is sadder than the first two. Here the family is really aging, especially the once vigorous patriarch and his long-suffering wife, and there is much death. “It was sad to watch a family age.” The story centers on Kamal’s “infernal vacillation” as to whether or not to marry, on his new friendship with a kindred-spirit writer, and on his his nephews, Abd, who joins the new Muslim Brotherhood, grows a beard, and becomes quite the fundamentalist, and Ahmad, who joins a Marxist magazine and becomes quite the atheist. Throughout the trilogy Mahfouz writes interesting details about Egyptian family life in the big city in the first half of the 20th century, as well as about the education and class systems, wedding, marriage, divorce, death, funeral, and religious customs, café and brothel culture, gender roles, and politics. He relishes the Egyptian tendency to spice up life and defuse stress with irony. “If our houses are destroyed [in an air raid], they’ll have the honor of being demolished by the most advanced inventions of modern science.” And the Egyptian (or Arabic?) tendency whenever too happy or proud or sad etc. to say something like, “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God.” (The translation of the trilogy is fine, though I sometimes wished the translator would have rendered “God” and “Lord” as Allah.) In addition to particular details of Egyptian culture, Mahfouz writes about universal aspects of human nature, as in the following quotable lines: “Patriotism’s a virtue, if it’s not tainted by xenophobia”; and “People need confidential advice, consolation, joy, guidance, light, and journeys to all regions of the inhabited world and of the soul. That’s what art is.” He leads us into the heads and hearts of his characters, as in the following emotional lines: “In this manner he was afforded an opportunity to feel what a dead man might if still conscious,” “His secret flowed out of him like blood from a wound,” and “Watching her eat pastries was even sweeter than eating them himself.” He also writes wonderful similes with original, surprising, and perfectly apt vehicles, like: “His eyes ran over her body as quickly and greedily as a mouse on a sack of rice looking for a place to get in,” “There were pure white billows resembling pools of light over the Qala’un and Barquq minarets,” and “She was nothing but a symbol, like a deserted ruin that evokes exalted historic memories.” He also writes many humorously cynical lines, like “Ridwan was so proud they were there that his pride almost obscured his grief,” and “But life is full of prostitutes of various types. Some are cabinet ministers and others authors.” The Cairo Trilogy is 1323 pages long. Sometimes my attention waned. But it is full of great scenes, fine writing, authentic people, Cairene culture, human nature, ironic humor, devastating tragedy, and all sorts of interesting ideas about love, families, religion, politics, philosophy, life, and death. Readers fond of classic world literature should like it. View all my reviews
Devils by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Revolutionaries, Scholars, Scoundrels, and Nihilists Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Devils (1871-72; translation by Michael R. Katz 1992) depicts the end of the absurd and moving 20+ year platonic romance between Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky and Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina in the context of the possession of their provincial town by foreign radical ideas and homegrown atheist nihilists. The novel explores how dangerous ideas and words and writing can be (they can possess people); how revolutionary groups form and recruit and bind (possess) members and manipulate (possess) the masses into violent action; how fickle, foolish, mean, and malleable is public opinion; how defensive and inferiority complex ridden Russia was (especially vis-à-vis European culture); and how multiply motived, contradictory, and complex the human heart and mind are. It asserts the need for common human decency as a balm for if not a protection from abuse and exploitation. And for some kind of spiritual faith and moral purpose: “the last word is universal forgiveness.” The novel powerfully reminds one that all too often charismatic and intelligent people who begin utopian revolutions are ultimately in it for power, and that, as one character muses at one point, “Convictions and human feeling—it seems they’re two different things,” with the latter superior to the former, despite the fact that politically driven people often lose sight of that. Dostoevsky anticipates and describes Stalin and Hitler. The novel has many great points. Like the following: --Fascinating characters (often morbidly so), like Stepan Trofimovich, the delusional, self-centered, spoiled, ineffectual scholar, and his amoral, manipulative, and destructive son Pyotr; Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin, the sane nihilistic rake, and his wealthy domineering mother Varvara Petrovna; and the earnest, ex-revolutionary student Ivan Pavlovich Shatov and his desperately self-willed friend Kirillov. --Great scenes, like Stepan learning that he’s supposed to marry a young former student of his; Pyotr behaving so innocently impudent and crafty in his first appearance; some feckless young people visiting a revered arbitrary hermit-priest; Pyotr revealing why he’s so invested in Nikolai; Nikolai confessing to a retired bishop; the Group of Five meeting for the first time; a literary fete going off the rails; the convict Fedka asserting his independence; and Stepan walking on the road in cavalry boots. . . --Keen and cynical wisdom about human nature vis-à-vis political schemers and dupes; revolutionaries and scoundrels; pseudo intellectuals and revered writers; aristocrats and peasants; atheists and Christians; Russia and Russians; public opinion and gossip. Just when it’s starting to feel sour and bleak, some fundamental love and belief almost redeems it (“Love is the crown of being”). --An interesting narrator: he’s trying to make sense of the events of the novel for which he was often a passive eye-witness, recounting them about three months after they occurred and a “Commission of Inquiry” began investigating what happened. He’s given to irony (e.g., “An enormous subversive organization of thirteen members”), though he tries to honestly reveal both his “reliable sources” and the limits of his “own best surmises” about events. Dostoevsky also, of course, writes great descriptions of people, like “In appearance Shatov closely resembled his convictions. He was clumsy, fair-haired, disheveled, short, broad-shouldered, thick-lipped, with very heavy, overhanging pale blond eyebrows, a furrowed brow, and an unfriendly, stubbornly downcast gaze that seemed ashamed of something.” He also writes many great lines on: --Love: “Even a louse can fall in love.” --Human nature: “The horror and vague feeling of personal danger, added to the thrilling effect of a night fire, produce in the spectator (not, of course, in those whose houses have gone up in flames) a certain shock to the system and as it were a challenge to the destructive instincts which, alas, lie buried within each and every soul, even that of the meekest and most domestic civil servant…” --America: “One has to be born in America, or at least live among them for many years, to become their equal.” --Revolutionaries: “Why is it that all these desperate socialists and communists are all so incredibly miserly and acquisitive and proprietarial?” --Religion: “The more impoverished an entire people is, the more stubbornly it dreams of reward in paradise.” Audiobook reader George Guidall excels at voicing the characters (especially Pyotr, Stepan, the convict Fedka, and Captain Lebyadkin), but it’s difficult to understand his French when Stepan speaks it (which he often does). Many of the characters’ three names are exotic enough and similar-sounding enough to cause confusion, as with Mavriky Nikolaevich and Nikolai Vsevolodovich. The narrator refers to Nikolai as Nikolai Vsevolodovich, Nikolai, Nikolai Stavrogin, or Stavrogin. All this is to say that it might be easier to read the physical novel than to listen to the audiobook. The book took me a LONG time to finish, and although the fault was mine because a trip interrupted my reading for three weeks, there are too many scenes with too much talking, and dealing with the book had already begun to feel like a not altogether pleasant chore even before that hiatus, and upon finishing it I felt freed from a kind of psychological bondage. If you are a fan of Dostoesvsky, this book would surely be worth your while, but if you are new to him, I’d recommend starting with Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
This blog is for book reviews. Please feel free to comment on any of the reviews! Categories
All
Archives
May 2024
Jefferson's books
by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
|
My Fukuoka University