La Louve de France by Maurice Druon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars The body of France was sick Yikes! Maurice Druon sure doesn’t coddle his reader. At the end of the fourth novel of his Les Rois Maudits (The Cursed Kings) series about the early 14th century decline of superpower France, the time of “punishment” is coming, partly because Prince Philippe (son of Philippe Le Bel) has benefited from two regicides to become King of France. The prologue to the fifth book in the series, La Louve de France (1959), then skips forward five years to announce that Philippe is dead! Despite Philippe being good king material and having a solid enough position vis-à-vis his barons and the Pope, his reign ran into a buzz saw of adversity, ranging from famine to a Templar-inspired pillaging of towns and churches by huge bands of roving youths. In short, after being the main, mostly appealing player in the fourth novel, Philippe is forgotten in the fifth, for which Druon shifts his focus to thirty-three-year-old Queen Isabelle of England, nicknamed by her foes the She-Wolf of France (la Louve de France) because she’s the feisty daughter of Philip Le Bel. In the first novel, Isabelle was already estranged from her husband, Edward II, who preferred spending his time and love on men, and by the time of the fifth book, things have gotten so bad that Isabelle is being kept under a rotating house arrest, spied on and isolated and stolen from by the King’s favorite Hugh Despenser and his people. She fears for her life. This fifth novel introduces new historical figure-characters, like the feckless and irrational Edward II, doomed to become kingly only after it’s too late, and Roger Mortimer, Edward’s ambitious and implacable foe and Isabelle’s would be lover, who begins as a political prisoner in the Tower of London (much of this book takes place in England), while reacquainting us with various remarkable characters from past novels: --Robert d’Artois the giant nephew and Mahaut d’Artois the giantess aunt, STILL locked in their bitter long-running family feud and still formidable political players; --Charles Valois, younger brother of Philippe le Bel, ambitious and reckless, would be Holy Roman Emperor and de facto ruler of France through his weak nephew King Charles IV; --Spinello Tolomei the wizened Lombard banker, who for many years has funded most of the disastrous wars waged by France; --his nephew Guccio Baglioni, still resentful that Marie Cressay rejected him and still ignorant that she had to in order to raise the heir to the throne of France as if he were their son; --Hugues de Bouville, rotund, soft, sensitive, and in need of a good Confession about sacrificing the baby of Guccio and Marie to save the heir to the throne and hiding his identity; --and Pope John XXII (Jacques Dueze), no fool, wise to Valois’ extortionary practices and curious about Guccio and Marie. Druon often changes our perceptions of such characters. We begin this novel loathing Edward and Hugh and sympathizing with Isabelle (for the first time) and Mortimer and Robert and end by sympathizing with Edward and Hugh and loathing Mortimer and (to a lesser extent) Isabelle. Druon doesn’t achieve this simply by making characters suffer (though that helps), but by writing their points of view and ennobling them via suffering. Even the self-serving Valois, who, after diverting a Crusade to free Armenians from Turkish oppression in the holy land to a French invasion of a French populace in Aquitaine, just the latest instance of his life-long ambitious scheming, is forced to confront his mortality earlier than he’d imagined and more movingly than we’d expected. Soon Valois is talking with, praying for, and loving Enguerrand de Marigny, whom in an earlier novel he had executed on false charges: “Each man who dies is the poorest man in the universe.” The overall effect is to show that people, even famous historical figures, are people. “The saintly are never as saintly, nor the cruel ever as completely cruel as others believe.” Druon’s eye for irony is ever keen, as when Guccio takes “his” son to see Clemence, widow of the poisoned King Louis Hutin, and the woman has a pang of envy at seeing “Guccio’s” healthy boy, while neither she nor Guccio have any idea that the child is Clemence’s and the rightful King of France. Or in a line like this: “One went from war to tournament and from tournament to war. Ah! What pleasures and noble adventures!” Nothing alienates us from medieval France and England so much as the horrific public humiliations, tortures, and executions they performed on criminals: “And all these knights who had sworn by Saint George to defend ladies, maids, the oppressed and orphans, rejoiced, with much laughter and joyful remarks, at the spectacle offered to them by this corpse of an old man cut in two halves.” Though their disposal of the parts of an important deceased man is also exotic: “The entrails, as Valois had disposed of them, were transported to the abbey of Chaâlis, and the heart, enclosed in an urn, given to his third wife to await the moment when she herself would have a burial.” Druon, as ever, however, makes many dry, incisive insights into human nature that resonate with us today, like “Nothing is more repugnant to a woman than the sweat of a man she's stopped loving,” and “But the proud easily have a pure conscience.” And he writes wonderfully vivid, historically transporting descriptions: “La Réole, built on a rocky spur and dominated by a circle of green hills, overlooked the Garonne. Cut out against the pale sky, enclosed within its ramparts of good ocher stone gilded by the setting sun, displaying its bell towers, the towers of its castle, the high framework of its town hall with its openwork bell tower, and all its roofs of red tiles pressed one against the other, it resembled the miniatures which represented Jerusalem in the Books of Hours. A pretty town, truly.” One thing to keep in mind when reading Les Rois Maudits is that Druon may sometimes present rumors as facts. For instance, in the third book Mahaut poisons King Louis Hutin and his baby son, when Wikipedia (for what it’s worth) says Louis probably died of illness and doesn’t say anything about how his son died. Similarly, in this fifth novel a red-hot poker fatally shoved up a royal anus is now seen as propaganda by historians. So Druon is writing historical FICTION, not history. That said, his novels make psychological sense and are absorbing and powerful. View all my reviews
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The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Are you ever likely to have a normal life?” Have you heard? Frances Crawford of Lymond is back in Scotland! You know, the villain guilty of “reaving, ruttery, and all manner of vice and treason,” the woman-hating scoundrel who blew up his sister and a bunch of nuns, sold intel to England to cause a devastating Scottish loss on the battlefield, and spent the last five years in the “stews and alleyways of Europe” womanizing and drugging and thieving! What’s Lymond (with a big price on his head) doing back home? Well, about the first thing he does (with his merry band of sixty outlaws) is to crash a party his mother is hosting in the family castle, rob forty ladies of their jewelry, throw a dagger into one of their shoulders, steal the family silver, flirt with his older brother’s nineteen-year-old wife, and set fire to the castle. Surely, there must be some extenuating circumstances to his supposed crimes? Well, he does, apparently, shoot his brother in the shoulder with an arrow at a Robinhood-esque archery contest and send his sister-in-law numerous pieces of jewelry, involve a blind young noble woman in his machinations, and adopt (corrupt?) as his protege young Will Scott the eldest son of a Scottish lord… Part of the pleasure of reading Dorothy Dunnett’s The Game of Kings (1961) is gradually and suspensefully finding out what Lymond is really up to and how much of his reputation is accurate and how much false. As he rides around Scotland and Northern England scheming and banditing and spying and seducing (?) in his attempt to interview three Englishmen while causing as much trouble as possible to the English army, his honest and resentful big brother Richard, the third Lord Culter, is obsessively trying to catch him to make him stand trial in Edinborough for his manifold crimes. All that personal and family stuff is going on in the 1547 historical context of the Game of Kings of the title, whereby post-Henry VIII France, Spain, and England (at least) are using dinky feisty backwater Scotland to jockey for advantage over each other, sending there a variety of mercenaries from other countries (Italy, Germany, Denmark, etc.) as well as their own countries’ soldiers. Scotland has been walking a tightrope between France and England and will probably need to choose one or the other to be its master in the near future. Five-year-old Queen Mary of Scotland is a valuable prize to win to cement an alliance for either France or England. In that interesting historical international and political situation, Dunnett writes compelling characters. Substantial, strong, and interesting female characters are numerous, from little girls like ten-year-old English girl Philippa Somerville (who can’t quite forgive Lymond for interrogating her in front of her somewhat terrorized parents) to old women like Lymond and Richard’s sixty-year-old mother Sybilla (who knows at least as much about what’s going on as anyone else). Christian Stewart, the open-minded, independent, red haired blind young lady, is great, a match for Lymond. Even Agnes Herries, at first an obnoxious and unpleasant 13-year-old heiress warped by romance stories, becomes a neat character. Lymond, aka the Master, is a wonderful protagonist! He’s charismatic, enigmatic, brilliant, educated, knowledgeable, strategic, tricky, bawdy, witty, playful, and bold. He quips, quotes, and sings in French, Spanish, Latin, German, and (of course) English. He plays a mean guitar and a divine harpsichord. He’s a crack bowshot and an accomplished fencer, wrestler, and brawler (don’t fight him if he’s in boots and you’re in slippers). He can outdrink and outthink anyone. He confesses to a woman at one point that one reason for his bad reputation is that everyone hates a person who excels at too many different things. He has cornflower blue eyes and blond hair. “Every line of him spoke, palimpsest-wise with two voices. The clothes, black and rich, were vaguely slovenly; the skin sun-glazed and cracked; the fine eyes slackly lidded; the mouth insolent and self-indulgent.” Is Lymond too perfect? Well, when he dons a black wig and a Spanish accent to pose as a mercenary captain, it’s a bit too much, but he isn’t invulnerable, capable of being knocked out or seriously wounded or having his spirit obliterated. And the interactions and relationships between all the characters are involving, with many intense conversations and suspenseful action. After numerous raids, skirmishes, battles, duels, bargains, treacheries, interrogations, fortune tellings, alchemical experiments, quarrels, debates, secret meetings, disguisings, hostage takings, and the like, the novel climaxes in an intense courtroom drama. Throughout, Dunnett’s writing is prime: vivid, tight, witty, and elliptical. Bantering lines: “A fine, capable hand. Line of life—hullo! You appear to have died at the age of seven.” “The embalmers are exceedingly skilful nowadays,” she said gravely. Witty lines: “Have you ever lost your memory?... It's an experience pleasant but precarious, like the gentleman who sat under palm trees feeding fruit to a lion.” Cool lines: “God knows I've been wrong politically, legally, conventionally and any other way—in judgments before. But these always seemed to me the more irrelevant aspects of human decency.” Savory lines: “Well; in comes this fellow ordering gloves, and as fussy as a flea in a bathtub over the pattern…” Keen lines: “Patriotism is a fine hot house for maggots. It breeds intolerance.” Vivid, evocative descriptions: “High on the hilltops, among the wet scrub by the burn, a blackbird was singing. The notes, round as syrup, melted into the raw air of dawn and coaxed the cold, reddened sun to its day.” As Dunnet has Lymond speak multiple languages, especially French and Latin, and her characters use some Scottish or archaic English words here and there, it’s probably not possible to understand everything fully in the audiobook. But it’s always entertaining or moving or exciting etc. And audiobook reader David Monteath does superbly with different moods, voices, accents, and characters, without overdramatizing. And listening to the Scottish accent is a great pleasure: “Wait noo, I’ll be doon.” Dunnett brings an exotic past time and place to life with apparent accuracy and authenticity, while working in universal themes that resonate with us today (like family conflict and bad reputation and political scheming). I’m looking forward to the next novel in the series. View all my reviews
The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault
My rating: 5 of 5 stars “What had become of us?” OR Growing Up in a Declining Athens OR Love During Wartime The Peloponnesian War makes the Trojan War look like a brief walk in the park. In Mary Renault’s The Last of the Wine (1956), fifty-year-old Alexias recounts his youth, first love, and early manhood in Athens during its devastating, nearly thirty-year war with Sparta. Alexias begins by relating how when his mother was pregnant, his father decided to name the baby—should it be male—after his beloved younger brother, and that because the baby was prematurely born small and ugly—not fit to bear the name Alexias—his father wanted to have him exposed on the mountain, for on that birth day the twenty-four-year-old brother had taken hemlock to die with his plague-killed lover, tipping over his cup to write the youth’s name, Philon, in the dregs, “as one does after supper in the last of the wine.” Baby Alexias was spared being exposed when a Spartan attack on Athens called his father away. That opening initiates the themes of the novel relating to the effects of war on everyday life, the depth of male-male love, the fraught relationship between Alexias and his father, and the melancholy awareness of the passing of time. After telling of his natal brush with death—ironically saved by the war—Alexias narrates the story of his youthful education in philosophy, politics, war, and love against the backdrop of Athens’ decline through its long conflict with Sparta. Building a loving relationship with his young step-mother; meeting Socrates for the first time at school, being caught by his ugliness, wisdom, and charisma, and becoming his lifelong student/friend; seeing off his father on the ill-fated Sicilian Expedition (a debacle that speeded up the decline of Athens); meeting the love of his life, Lycus, son of Democritus (with Socrates playing Cupid!); fighting alongside Lycus against Spartan raids; winning the foot race at the Games in Corinth; working through his resentment of Lycus’ jealousy; joining the Athenian navy; surviving Sparta’s siege of Athens by any means necessary, including posing as a sculptor’s model/lover; and much, much more. To reiterate: as Alexias grows, Athens decays, and he and Lycus lose their youthful innocence, grace, and beauty. Sadness, then, underlies the story. As Alexias learns what is important (to balance freedom with responsibility and democracy with individual excellence and to know oneself before attempting to know anything else), his wonderful city forgets what is important, changing from a proud beacon of culture, democracy, and liberty to a cruel empire, to an oligarchy, and finally to a vassal of Sparta. Alexias is writing the book as a still grief-stricken middle-aged man; recalling one’s youth is ever a nostalgic activity. The novel, however, is much more than sad, for as Alexias says, “There is a beauty of the soul that works out through bitterness like a vein of marble through earth.” And his love for Lycus is luminous: “Here’s to life. You gave it me.” And the novel has so much interesting and exotic ancient Greek culture and LIFE! Sports, festivals, plays, music, philosophy (Socrates and the sophists!), politics (democracy vs. oligarchy!), education (pedagogue-chaperons!), trade, war, gods, superstitions, statues, gender roles, class divisions, and love. Alexias’ class prized love between men (especially young ones) more than that between men and women, looking on the former as the noble stuff of poetry and romance and the latter as the mundane stuff of marriage and reproduction. His father gives Alexias advice on how to handle the importunate suitors he’ll attract as he comes into his youthful beauty (one shows up at his house with serenading hired musicians), and Alexias notes that his friend Xenophon was a little strange for not being interested in men. It was no homophobic culture. Although Alexias and his family and lover are fictional, Renault writes convincing supporting historical characters like the wonderfully charismatic and enigmatic Alcibiades, Xenophon, and Plato. Socrates is the philosophical and moral compass here, making everyone who interacts with him question preconceived assumptions and think for themselves, such that whoever happens to be in power in Athens hates him, whether democrats early or oligarchs late. He teaches his students (from whom he accepts no money and insists on calling “friends”) things like “Who can do good without knowing what it is?” And “Know thyself first.” Renault writes lots of such wisdom, like “The soul is the surfeit dream of a man with enough to eat.” And intense psychological moments, like “I had made his memory live for him, and he had made it live for me, so we stared both of us with an inward eye, seeking blindness again.” And powerful love, like “Always from my first remembrance, whether he rode or walked or ran or stood talking in the street, I knew him apart from all other men.” And vivid descriptions, like “Spring was here. On the terraced hills below us, new barley bloomed the earth with green, and the black vine stocks were budding. We were sunning ourselves with the lizards on the great warm stones…” And potent, culturally appropriate similes, like “I saw him on the wall leaning upon his spear with firelight on him like a warrior done in red on a black vase.” Renault is an excellent historical fiction writer, telling an absorbing and moving story while immersing us in Greece such that it’s alien and alive and resonates with us. Barnaby Edwards gives a fine reading of the audiobook. Lovers of historical fiction and or of ancient Greece should read this novel. View all my reviews
Butcher's Crossing by John Williams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “You’re no better than the things you kill.” Imagine a compact, undigressive Moby-Dick about buffalo hunters instead of whalers. Both Melville’s epic and John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing (1960) depict an obsessive leader who takes men with him away from civilization to kill impressive wild creatures. A big difference between veteran buffalo hunter Miller and Captain Ahab is that the former hasn’t been mutilated by a bull buffalo, and his holocaust of a hunt has nothing to do with revenge. In that way, Williams’ novel is more terrible than Melville’s, because Miller is not existentially struggling against “whiteness” etc. but is merely a man with enough powder, lead, and endurance to kill thousands of buffalo. After twenty years in Boston and three years at Harvard, William “Will” Andrews, whose Unitarian lay minister father encouraged him to read Emerson more than the Bible, arrives at the aptly named Butcher’s Crossing on the Kansas prairie. The “town” is an inchoate collection of six shabby structures and a few tents, reeking of manure, dust, heat, and buffalo hide brine pits. What on earth is Will doing there?! He wants to leave cities to experience wilderness and nature and become a transparent Emersonian eyeball, a free and clean part of God. Will his expectations be fulfilled when he goes on a buffalo hunt with the experienced, laconic hunter Miller, his Bible reading, whisky drinking, one-handed right hand man Charlie, and the unpleasant, pessimistic, skilled buffalo skinner Schneider? Miller claims to know a pristine hidden valley in the Colorado mountains where they will find thousands of prime wild buffalo, the hides of which ought to be bring thousands of dollars. All they need is a little capital with which to outfit their team, which Andrews, having received a bequest from an uncle, is eager to provide. The novel, then, has some usual western genre features. A young, innocent, sensitive guy from the east goes west to experience nature and hooks up with a seasoned, capable hunter and his grizzled sidekick. A shrewd businessman and a good prostitute appear. A handful of Indians make a miserable cameo. A quest ensues for an elusive mountain valley sheltering a vast herd of buffalo. But in its philosophical underpinnings and questionings, the novel is not a usual western. The story is introduced by a pair of epigraphs, one by Emerson from “Nature” (nature blessing people with the sanctity of religion) and one by Melville from The Confidence-Man (nature freezing people to death or making them idiots). The dueling epigraphs and novel remind me of Melville’s annotated copy of Emerson’s essays on microfilm I read in graduate school, where he wrote in the margin at one point something like, “I pity the fool who subscribes to this!” Williams (I believe) is more in Melville’s camp regarding nature. And at times the book doesn’t feel like a usual western: “In his mind were fragments of Miller’s talk about the mountain country to which they were going, and those fragments glittered and turned and fell softly in accidental and strange patterns. Like the loose stained bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, they augmented themselves with their turning and found light from irrelevant and accidental sources.” The novel is sensual. Williams writes vivid details involving the five senses of activities like smelling a rotting buffalo carcass, being thirsty, climbing a steep mountain too quickly, being lost in a blizzard, submersing oneself in a fast cold river, shaving after eight months in the wilderness, looking at a woman’s nude body, and so on. Concise, poetic writing: “A patch of turning aspen flamed a deep cold in the green of the pine,” and “The sip of whisky seared his throat as if a torch had been thrust into it.” Many vivid details, too, about the “craft” of buffalo hunting: making bullets, sharpening knives, shooting buffalo, skinning buffalo, dressing buffalo, stacking hides, thawing frozen thongs in a bucket of pee, and, of course, plenty of details of the buffalo’s body, like “His head lowered, his upturned curving horns, shiny in the sunlight, bright against the dark mop of hair that hung over his head.” It is at times an awful novel. Miller’s knowledge that Indians use every part of the buffalo, even down to making beautiful and clever and fine bone toys and implements from them, does not prevent him from becoming “an automaton” in a non-stop orgy of killing them for nothing more than their hides. Far from using every part of the buffalo in the service of life, they sprinkle strychnine on the myriad carcasses to kill wolves. Although Charlie hates wolves as the devil’s brood, Miller’s destruction of the buffalo is a cold, mindless response to the life in which he has immersed himself. I regret that the point of view character and moral center of the novel Will doesn’t evince a little more discomfort with the holocaust of over 4,000 buffalo, but I suppose that just makes him a 19th-century rather than a 21st-century man. The novel shares with Williams’ historical academia novel Stoner (1965) his careful writing and psychological insights. Butcher’s Crossing is a literate western, and it must be quite disturbing to anyone who loves animals alive more than dead. View all my reviews
Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars An Inspiring and Sad Female Native American Robinsoniad In the Newbery Medal winning novel Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960), a Native American named Karana recounts how at the age of twelve she ended up alone on her home island and then, apart from some wild dogs and other creatures, lived there for eighteen years. Author Scott O’Dell’s Afterword reveals that he based his novel on a real historical native woman called “The Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island,” that she lived off the Californian coast on one of the Channel Islands southwest of LA and Catalina, and that she was eventually found and taken to the mainland and put in the Santa Barbara Mission. Because no one spoke her language so she could only tell her story partially by using gestures, O’Dell is imagining almost everything in the story, including Karana’s native name. In that context, O’Dell writes an authentic feeling, absorbing, and moving novel relating how Karana survives for years there, like a female indigenous Robinson Crusoe. How she gets food and water and shelter, dries abalone, makes a dress from cormorant feathers, deals with hostile wild dogs, survives a hurricane and an earthquake, hunts a devil fish, hides when otter hunters show up, and generally deals with being the only human being on the island. O’Dell writes convincingly in Karana’s first-person voice, as when she describes things like the arrival of a big western ship (“At first it seemed like a small shell afloat on the sea. Then it grew larger and was a gull with folded wings.”) and its use of a canon (“A puff of white smoke came from the deck of the ship. A loud noise echoed against the cliff. Five of our warriors fell and lay quiet.”). I wonder when Karana is telling her story. It’s not a present-tense first-person story (that trend not having been in vogue when O’Dell wrote the novel), so, unlike something like, say, The Hunger Games, it’s obvious that the story is being told long after the events occurred, as the first line reveals: “I remember the day the Aleut ship came to our island.” However, the novel ends without any indication of how Karana would have learned enough English (or Spanish) to tell her story so well. [In fact, the historical woman Karana is based on died of dysentery just seven weeks after arriving at the Santa Barbara Mission.] Anyway, it feels like a mature survivor’s story of her youth. It is a sad book, both in Karana’s isolation and more largely in the plight of her tribe and all Native Americans, partly because of the restraint with which O’Dell has Karana tell her story. She rarely expresses the strong emotions she must be feeling and never says anything like, “Another case of white people taking our resources and killing our people.” The novel packs a strong emotional punch as a result. However, I’d maybe have liked a bit more of a righteous polemic on that score! But after all Karana is ignorant of the larger world, being born and raised on her island, and is only aware that people live on the mainland. (view spoiler)[One of the saddest moments comes at the very end when, after eighteen years alone on the Island the Blue Dolphins, a ship with a Spanish missionary shows up there, and she chooses to live with people rather than to go on living alone, and she proudly dons the special, beautiful cormorant feather skirt she’s painstakingly made, and the missionary and his people make her an ankle length dress to wear instead, and she resolves to wear her own dress once they get to the mainland, but we suspect it won’t be so easy for her henceforth, and it’s clear that the white people care nothing for her culture and will impose their own on her. (hide spoiler)] O’Dell writes some potent early second-wave feminist stuff on gender roles and their limitations: “I wondered what would happen to me if I went against the law of our tribe which forbade the making of weapons by women—if I did not think of it at all and made those things which I must have to protect myself.” Despite being all alone, it takes an effort of will for Karana to do what she needs to do to survive. Another important theme running through the novel concerns the human exploitation of animals, and Karana’s change regarding that is remarkable. (view spoiler)[The tragedy of Karana’s people derives from the insatiable human greed for otter skins. The other saddest part of the novel for me—sadder even than the deaths of her stupid and fated father and of her quick and foolish little brother—is the death of the dog Rontu. In the early part of the story, Rontu probably helps kill Karana’s brother, and she resolves to kill every last wild dog on the island, but after she has shot the big dog with an arrow, she suddenly decides to save his life and then tames and befriends him. “Why I did not send the arrow I cannot say. I stood on the rock with the bow pulled back and my hand would not let it go. The big dog lay there and did not move, and this may be the reason. If he had gotten up I would've killed him. I stood there for a long time, looking down at him, and then I climbed off the rocks.” Partly as a result of her relationship with Rontu, she decides at one point to never kill any more animals (apart from abalone and fish!) for food or clothes, regardless of whether or not they are her friends. (hide spoiler)] I have no idea how accurate O’Dell’s depiction of Karana and her people is, but he did research the lives of Native Americans in the Southwest Museum of the American Indian and manages to tell an absorbing, page-turning, authentic-feeling story with mostly only one human character on stage, the last member of her lost tribe, and makes us care about her. View all my reviews
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Would-Be Dominican Tolkien-- Oscar de Leon, AKA Oscar Wao (a mocking nickname given him when he dressed up for Halloween like Dr. Who but was said to look like Oscar Wilde) is sure no stereotypically aggressive, confident, womanizing young Dominican man! Instead, he’s a morbidly overweight uber-nerd, deeply and comprehensively into Dungeons and Dragons and sf and fantasy and anime books, tv shows, movies, and the like. His dream is to become the Dominican Tolkien, his fear to die a virgin. Junot Diaz' The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) relates Oscar’s story, as well as those of his potent and rebellious sister Lola, his potent and hardworking mother Belicia, his impotent and refined grandfather Abelard (a doctor!), and their roots and lives in the Dominican Republic in the past and in Paterson, New Jersey in the “present” of the historical fiction, moving around in time and place from the 1940s to the 1990s. Diaz also works into his novel the background and life of the narrator of the novel, Yunior de Las Casas, a well-meaning, weightlifting, and philandering Dominican who befriends Oscar and dates his sister (and who DOES become a writer). Because of Oscar’s interests and Yunior’s attempts to understand them, the novel is full of references to LOTR and a host of other fantasy and sf works, characters, and games (Dune, Watchmen, Akira, Gary Gygax, Gormenghast, Galactus, Jack Kirby, Stephen King, Twilight Zone, etc.), like “Oscar had like a zero combat rating,” and “… when Gondolin falls you don’t wait around for the balrogs to tap on your door. You make fucking moves.” And because of the Dominican characters and narrator etc., the novel is also full of English swear words and Spanish expressions, some of which are understandable from the context, some not, all of which give it an interesting spicy-Spanish-Nerd flavor, as in “Her name was Ana Obregon, a pretty, loudmouthed gordita who read Henry Miller.” The book begins with the "author" Yunior introducing the Dominican concept of fuku, a curse/doom that can nail a person or an entire country. He recounts Dominican history featuring the 20th-century tyrant Trujillo, “the Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated,” a leader for whom the country “was his very own private Mordor.” When you include President Johnson invading the Dominican Republic in 1965, the Vietnam debacle may be understood as a fuku coming home to roost in America. Anyway, in the novel the main target/victims of the fuku are Oscar de Leon and his family. **Note: we know from the title and other hints from the narrator that Oscar is going to die young; part of the suspense in reading the book lies in wondering when/how it will happen. I liked the book a lot, but I found the parts set in the Dominican Republic most absorbing and interesting, because I had been totally ignorant about the country and its history, starting with how the Spanish treated the indigenous people there and running up through the assassination of Trujillo (the Sauron of the DR, though his death sure didn’t lead to any kind of a utopia). The contrasts between the cultures of the Dominican Republic and of the USA are striking. The parallels between what Belicia and Oscar experience in the Dominican Republic decades apart from each other have a powerful and awful irony (Lola makes a terse and devastating condemnation of Dominicans at one point: “We’re ten million Trujillos”). By contrast, I did not care SO much for the parts featuring Oscar in Paterson or at Rutgers etc., because he can be too self-centered, self-destructive, self-pitying, and inveterate a nerd, and I could have done with maybe one or two fewer of his attempts at romantic relationships. I found myself much more interested in the plights of Abelard and Belicia in the Dominican Republic than of Oscar in Paterson. It's a funny but sad novel with a wonderfully distinctive voice. Lin Manuel-Miranda reads his parts of the audiobook splendidly (those with a male narrator), though I have a hard time picturing him as black. Karen Olivo reads her parts (those with a female narrator) well, too. And the interesting footnotes from the physical novel ARE read in the audiobook. View all my reviews
Clarissa Oakes by Patrick O'Brian
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Woman Aboard the Surprise?!? Ah, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin sailing aboard the Surprise again—what could be better!? As Clarissa Oakes (1992), the fifteenth book in Patrick O’Brian’s age of sail Aubrey-Maturin series begins, the odd couple bosom buddies should be feeling good about finally having been able to leave the hellish Australian penal colony, with Stephen recovering from his severe duckbill platypus poisoning (he is an inveterate and at times reckless naturalist), but Jack is feeling unusually tetchy (even ship-surgeon Stephen’s usual emetics and bleeding don’t seem to help), because he had some amorous hopes rudely dashed back in Australia, because Stephen has forced him to accept aging (pulling a hank of Jack’s long hair before his eyes to show him it’s grayer than blond now), and because the crew of the Surprise has been behaving oddly, leering and smirking at him in unsailorly fashion. Jack soon discovers to his righteous indignation that Midshipman Oakes has smuggled aboard the Surprise a transported female convict dressed as a boy! And Jack believes that a woman aboard only brings bad luck and dissension. To try to secure the situation, he has the couple formally married, and all seems well at first. But the crew soon dangerously divides into factions, as the newly wed wife seems to be having sex with multiple officers, such that they become bitter rivals whose men hate each other. Needless to say, this is no state for a British ship to be in during the War of 1812 with both American and French enemy ships about. And the old Surprise (a 500-ton frigate privately owned now by Jack who loves its sailing character even though its guns are too light to suit contemporary naval ships) has been given a delicate mission to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), where Jack is to assess a civil war between a southern queen and a northern upstart and help whichever side seems more likely to welcome an alliance with England. As the northern upstart is being supported by the Franklin, an American privateer crewed by the French, Jack determines to help the queen. But will his ship’s crew disintegrate into civil war before they can reach the Sandwich Islands? Will Clarissa Oakes continue entertaining any officer who comes to her for “help”? Will Stephen be able to improve Jack’s health? Will he ever get to land on an island to explore its flora and fauna? Meanwhile, letters from home reveal that all is not well with Stephen’s wife Diana, who, no maternal role model, seems to have become alienated from their infant daughter and from Jack’s wife Sophie. The novel is full of all the virtues of the others in the series: appealing characters, stimulating conversation, vivid descriptions, and sudden and sparing violent action scenes. (If you like nautical warfare, you might be disappointed by how little there is, but the rare moments when it does break out are quite gripping and suspenseful.) Clarissa Oakes is a compelling new character. Intelligent and unaffected, her childhood and youth were such that she views sexual intercourse as of no more importance than a kiss on the cheek and derives no pleasure from either: “I'm not a monster incapable of affection... Only I cannot connect it with that toiling, striving, grasping... with anything of a carnal nature. They seem to me poles apart.” She also happens to have some information that Stephen in his capacity as intelligence agent finds most interesting and useful. The novel is the only one in the twenty-book series named after a female character… And yes the novel is full of great writing, descriptions, and lines, like: “… a mildly rotten sea, unvarying Prussian blue almost to the horizon under a pure, pale sky, the sun just clear of the eastern ocean, the moon sinking into it on the other hand, and on the starboard bow, a low domed island of some size, far off, but already as green as a good emerald in the slanting light.” “Ten knots… All hands loved to feel their ship running fast with this urgent heave and thrust and the water bubbling along her side, the bow wave hollowing out midships to show her copper.” “A turmoil of squids pursuing pelagic crabs... and two or three fathoms below these... some schools of fishes crossing and recrossing, all of the same mackerel shaped kind, all flashing as they turned and all feeding upon a host of fry so numerous that they made a globular haze in the clear green water. The boobies preyed on both, either making a slight skimming dive to snatch up a squid just under the surface, or plunging from a height like so many mortar bombs to reach the depth where the fishes cruised.” There is an unconvincing Captain Kirk-like one-night-stand, and the only violent action occurs ashore near the end of the novel, but the character of Clarissa Oakes and the suspense as to how the Surprise will work out her presence are absorbing. Fans of the series should read this book, but readers interested in O’Brian and Jack and Stephen should of course start with the first one, Master and Commander. Ric Jerrom continues to be the ideal reader for the audiobooks. It’s a pleasure to hear him read lines between Jack and Stephen like, “Do you suffer, brother?” “I suffer, brother, but moderately.” View all my reviews
A Red Death by Walter Mosley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “You’ve got a big problem, son.” July 1953. World War II veteran Ezekial “Easy” Rawlins is sweeping one of his secretly owned buildings, the Magnolia Street Apartments near Watts, when he does some provocative foreshadowing: “Everything was as beautiful as always … it wasn’t going to last long. Soon Poinsettia would be in the street, and I’d have the morning sun in my jail cell.” Five years ago, the affair of The Devil in the Blue Dress (1990) gained Easy $10,000, under the table money with which he bought some apartments to rent out under an assumed name, and now a disheveled, persistent white IRS agent given to calling Easy “son” starts investigating him for tax evasion. As Mofass, the man who collects rents for Easy (and acts like his boss to hide that Easy is the owner) tells him, “They got you by the nuts, Mr. Rawlins.” Meanwhile, EttaMae Harris, a beautiful, strong, sexy woman Easy still loves fifteen years after she married his murderous best friend Mouse, has just left Mouse and moved from Texas to LA with her cute son LaMarque. Who knows what Mouse would do were he to show up and find EttaMae and Easy together? Then a fervid anti-communist FBI agent named Darryl T. Craxton offers to dismiss Easy’s tax troubles if our man will just get to know Chaim Wenzler, a Jewish union organizer who’s helping the First African Church in charitable activities. Soon murder victims and Easy are turning up together, making the LA police suspect him of being a killer. Like many private eyes in hardboiled detective stories, Easy is an observant and laconic first-person narrator, drinks too much, gets plenty of straight sex but remains single, is observant and thoughtful, is not a sadist but can deal out punishment in self-defense, has a handy gun or two, and has a moral compass more active than most people’s around him. Unlike many typical private eyes, Easy is not actually a detective but a favor exchanger, helping people in his community when they’re in trouble with the law or each other. And he’s telling his story some thirty years after the events occurred. Also unlike many genre private eyes, Easy is African American, and many of the most interesting parts of this second novel in his series, A Red Death (1991), come from Walter Mosley’s depiction of 1950s era Los Angeles as experienced by people of color. This novel says some interesting things about African Americans’ identification with Jesus and the back to Africa movement. I really liked the concise and vivid descriptions of the different shades and kinds of skin color among the African American community: e.g., “His color was dark brown but bright, as if a powerful lamp shone just below his skin,” “Jackson's skin was so black that it glinted blue in the full sun,” and “Mouse's color was a dusty pecan.” As the novel progresses, Easy finds it increasingly difficult to steer clear of the IRS agent, to satisfy his FBI handler (“I'd become a flunky for the FBI”), and to avoid self-loathing while becoming good friends with Chaim and sleeping with Mouse’s wife. He nonetheless has the time (and energy) to engage in some one-night-stand action and to visit his good friends the Penas, who run a Mexican luncheon café and take care of his abused and mute adopted son Jesus, as well as to learn about communism, blacklists, and the like. I liked the first Easy Rawlins novel and was looking forward to this second one. Mosely has an ear for dialogue, writes concise and vivid descriptions, is good at evoking 1950s era LA, and weaves potent themes about race, religion, the Cold War, and human nature into his book. But… despite Michael Boatman’s professional reading of the audiobook, I didn’t enjoy this novel. I got tired of Easy’s (easy) self-recriminations and self-condemnations, didn’t enjoy his ability to have sex with near strangers while supposedly sleeping with the woman of his dreams, and was unimpressed by his detective abilities. And I found the denouement too speedy after the gradual development towards it. I will listen to other Easy Rawlins mysteries but won’t be in a hurry to return to him. View all my reviews
Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Innocents Abroad in an Apocalyptic Appalachia (?) Hiding out in some derelict cabin in some mountainous swampy woods (maybe Appalachia?) in some time (late 19th or early 20th century?), siblings Culla and Rinthy Holme (an ironic family name for the homeless pair) become young, unready parents of their (!?) baby. Culla can’t accept “the chap,” “a beet-colored creature that looked to him like a skinned squirrel,” and takes it from the labor-drained mother (his teenaged sister!) and abandons it in the woods and tells her it died. A nosy (saintly?) “gnomic” itinerant tinker (who mule-like pulls his own wagon and but for cocoa sells everything, including books with “sorry illustrations” of “grotesquely coital couples”) follows Culla’s tracks, rescues (steals?) the baby and brings it to some town to find a nurse for it. When Rinthy discovers that the baby didn’t die and looks at her brother, he panics and runs away, and Rinthy sets off looking for her baby by hunting the tinker. Outer Dark (1968) then depicts the siblings’ contrasting odysseys—Culla escaping, Rinthy searching—through “a landscape of the damned,” where sunlight is “an agony” and the dark more distressing than the dark of blindness: “The flowers in the dooryard have curled and drawn as if poisoned by dark and there is a mockingbird to tell what he knows of night.” This novel is almost reminiscent of McCarthy’s later The Road (2006), though that book’s father and son team is more poignant than Rinthy and Culla, who are not exactly traveling together. The ignorant, innocent siblings wander through insular, shabby towns and past ramshackle, isolated dwellings set in a beautiful and hostile natural world, encountering an assortment of grotesque denizens, from families to solitary widows and widowers. While people mostly are kind and helpful to Rinthy, they are often suspicious of and hostile to Culla, blaming him for any local crime or catastrophe. Indeed, one of the men Culla meets in his peregrinations tells him, “I don't believe you're no bad feller and no lucky feller neither.” It is interesting how calamity and mayhem accompany Culla without his fully being aware of it. Woven here and there through those parallel road trips are the murderous travels of three demonic figures, comprised of a philosophical bearded man and his two acolytes, one mute and one mentally challenged. With casual efficiency and atrocious good humor, they kill anyone they meet. Are they following or leading Culla and or Rinthy? McCarthy wouldn’t have either or both siblings run into the three demons, would he? And while we’re asking, will Rinthy ever find her baby or Culla Rinthy? Did the tinker manage to find a good home for the newborn “chap”? Will the baby redeem the fallen world? It's impressive how McCarthy gets us to root for the (probably) incestuous brother and sister, homeless orphans without anything of their own in the world. Perhaps Rinthy is superior to Culla because she at least wants something—her baby—and ever retains a natural, sacred grace despite (or because of) her bare feet, threadbare raiment, and lactating aching breasts: “She gave him a little curtsying nod, ragged, shoeless, deferential, and halfderanged, and yet moving in an almost palpable amnion of propriety.” The novel is vintage Cormac McCarthy: uneducated and ignorant but intelligent and articulate people engage in laconic, demotic, almost poetic conversations; work and craft are carefully depicted; apocalyptic natural settings stun the mind’s eye; amoral killers operate for opaque purposes; unpredictable and awful violence suddenly erupts; godless biblical similes compare people to lone acolytes, trembling penitents, witless paracletes, ruinous prophets, disciples of darkness, gospel miscreants, crippled marionettes, the morbidly tranquil drowned, spiders hanging in the darkness of a well; and everything combines to evoke a feeling of impending doom. He writes grand set piece scenes of catastrophe and terror, like a ferry crossing a raging river at night or some men driving a vast polychrome tide of hogs along a bluff or Culla finding the wrong campfire or even Rinthy modestly seeing a doctor. Ed Sala is a great reader for McCarthy, because his gravelly voice convincingly handles the long sentences and difficult words and dialect-inflected dialogue and evokes the ominous significance of it all. If you like McCarthy’s overwrought, bleak, and beautiful writing, you would like this novel. It might traumatize people who have had babies or wanted babies. It might disturb pious Christians who believe that God knows what he’s doing and has us act according to His divine plan and who believe that preachers are efficacious and sinners pernicious. Despite its awful things, I found reading this novel to be a strange pleasure: “Night fell upon them dark and starblown and the wagon grew swollen and near mute with dew. On their chairs in such immobility, these travelers could have been stone figures quarried from the architecture of an older time.” View all my reviews
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Life is trouble, Boss,” or “My faith is a mosaic of unbelief” The anonymous 35-year-old narrator is a learned, intellectual book-worm (a “pen pusher”) writing a book on Buddha when he decides to go to Crete to run a lignite mine and hires a craggy 60-something year old rogue called Alexis Zorba, who seems to have been everywhere (Constantinople, Bulgaria, Greece, Anatolia, etc.) and to have done everything (worked, fought, married, fathered, danced, sang, etc.) and to have an inexhaustible wealth of anecdotes and questions and opinions about human nature, men and women, life, love, God, and so on. Zorba’s duties will be supervising the workers, cooking, talking, and playing his santuri (when he’s in the mood to do so). Zorba, the narrator soon realizes, is a free man, a living heart, a great soul, a voracious mouth who experiences everything in life as if for the first time. The narrator knows that while he has been reading and writing, Zorba has been fully living: “I stopped, ashamed. That is what a real man is like, I thought, envying Zorba's sorrow. A man with warm blood and solid bones, who lets real tears run down his cheeks when he is suffering; and when he is happy he does not spoil the freshness of his joy by running it through the fine sieve of metaphysics." He knows the happiest days of his life will be spending time with Zorba. Will he be able to exorcise the non-human perfect nothingness of the Buddha and depart from his careful, detached book learning and philosophy to embrace life? Nikos Kazantzakis' Zorba the Greek (1946) consists of various episodes involving Zorba (usually as instigator and main actor) and the narrator (usually as observer and side player). Zorba quickly seduces Madame Hortense, an “old Siren,” a faded and flabby French ex-chanteuse hotel owner, and takes over the work of the mine, letting the narrator, “Boss,” work on his book on Buddha or muse on life, the divine, and human nature. Being a “pen pusher,” the narrator is attracted to Zorba’s charismatic, passionate, earthy, frank, wily, irreverent approach to religion, patriotism, war, love, marriage, and life. Many impressive moments: a voluptuous widow running through the rain; Zorba and the narrator visiting a mountain-top monastery; Zorba going to Candia to buy materials to make a cable-train; Zorba consecrating (with the help of the monks) said cable-train; the villagers attacking the widow; a death and a funeral; the narrator writing letters to and receiving letters from his dear friend; Zorba telling the narrator about God. It is a lyrical, earthy, funny look at the Cretan countryside and people, still somewhat under the afterimage influence of the decaying Ottoman Empire. Lots of Greek and Cretan culture, like food, religion, work, music, religion, etc. Interesting how they kind of not-completely seriously talk or sing or bless about getting Constantinople back from the Turks. Throughout there are many references to world literature and art and religion, like Rodin, Dante, Buddha, Rembrandt, Homer, and Hindu statues, and many observations and conversations on spirit and body and world and marriage and religion and soul and body and human nature and food and icons and so on. When the narrator is trying to get to know his workers and to kindle in them the idea that we are all brothers, Zorba warns him not to open people's eyes unless you have something better to show them. If all you have is darkness, then what's the point? And there are some fine lines on human resilience in the face of tragedy and unhelpful (if not malevolent) gods. I liked Zorba’s frank disdain for organized religion and monks and all (he’d rather a priest curse him than bless him!). Rich stuff! Like in the following description of drinking Cretan wine: “We clinked glasses and tasted the wine, an exquisite Cretan wine, a rich red colour, like hare's blood. When you drank it, you felt as if you were in communion with the blood of the earth itself and you became a sort of ogre. Your veins overflowed with strength, your heart with goodness! If you were a lamb you turned into a lion. You forgot the pettiness of life, constraints all fell away. United to man, beast and God, you felt that you were one with the universe.” One thing that felt dated in the novel was, despite its woman-worship, its sexism. Zorba says things about women, “the female of the species,” like God made woman not from Adam’s rib but from Satan’s horns, so anywhere you touch a women you’re touching Satan, and “women have an unhealable wound making them desire to be desired by men,” and “Only people who want to be free are human beings. Women don't want to be free. Are they human?” The old siren Madame Hortense is a comic figure for the narrator, the young widow a frightening pantheress. It is a male-oriented book, with the main relationships being male-male (the narrator and his best friend from his class and background and the narrator and Zorba). Male-female relationships are necessary but transitory and secondary here. (view spoiler)[The fates of the two women we see involved with Zorba and the narrator, the Old Siren and the widow, are unnecessarily awful and or violent, with little real sadness or outrage from the narrator. (hide spoiler)] It is a talky novel, though Zorba is sure fun to listen to, and the audiobook reader George Guidall is great as Zorba--hectoring, leering, savoring, seducing words with his voice—and readers into passionate, lyrical, philosophical novels about life and Greek/Cretan culture should like it. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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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 ...
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