Gilded Needles by Michael McDowell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Tale of Two Families—and Revenge—in 1882 NYC On one side are the Shanks, living in a pair of adjoining houses on West Houston Street in the Black Triangle, a notoriously sordid and crime-ridden neighborhood in NYC. Led by 5’3” 200-pound Black Lena Shanks, an illiterate, one-eared German immigrant widow, ex-con, and fence, the Shanks, comprised of Lena’s daughters Louisa and Daisy and her twin grandkids Rob and Ella, are all involved in the family businesses: providing (usually safe) illegal abortions, running a pawn shop as a front, and fencing stolen goods brought by women (Lena refusing to do business with men). Included among the Shanks is Maggie, a refined octoroon prostitute who receives only gifts of jewels and clothes for her services and is married to Lena’s brother (currently being held in Sing Sing). On the other side are the Stallworths, living in well-appointed manses in tony Gramercy Park and Washington Square. The Stallworths are comprised of the patriarch grandfather Judge James Stallworth, his son the Presbyterian Pastor Edward Stallworth, his two children Helen (a deeply religious young lady who abhors New Year’s Day as a pagan festival) and Benjamin (a mentally weak young man with small ears and an egg-shaped head, too gormless to be a true black sheep), the Judge’s daughter Marian Phair and her husband, the up and coming lawyer Duncan Phair, and their two little kids Edwin and Edith. The paths of the two families were set on a collision course when, near the end of the civil war, Judge Stallworth sentenced Lena’s husband to death for arson and Lena to seven years in prison on Blackwell’s Island for pickpocketing. She’s forgotten neither his cold blue eyes nor his merciless judgments. In addition to those characters, we have supporting players like the Sapphic Pugilist Charlotta Keego, who tattoos on her body the jewels she cannot wear in the ring; the prostitute Weeping Mary, who is good at crying and at posing as an Irish nursemaid to rich kids; and the veiled widow Mrs. General Taunton, who brings succor to the sick and impoverished in the Black Triangle and staffs her house completely with mutilated or handicapped servants because her husband was a one-legged man before he died in a Civil War battle. As the Stallworths target the Black Triangle and the Shanks in their campaign against vice in NYC as a means to advance their political and social ambitions, they have no idea that they’re provoking a dish best served cold. As the Shanks receive blow after blow against their members and livelihoods and lives, we have no idea how they’ll survive, let alone eat a dish best served cold. Our sympathies are with the Shanks because, although criminals, they are spunky and female-oriented rogues (Lena helping poor women in trouble, Daisy helping her abortion clients), while the ostentatiously law-abiding Stallworths, are, apart from Helen and the little kids, arrogant, entitled, cruel, smarmy, self-righteous, self-aggrandizing thugs. Throughout, McDowell’s depiction of late 19th-century NYC is vivid and appalling. I like little touches like how people refer to the abortionists as “angel makers.” The political motivation of the Stallworth clan is interesting: a fanatical drive to bring down the Tammany Hall democratic political system dominating the city. The themes on gender seem a bit ahead of the novel’s time of publication (1980). One reason Judge Stallworth is so inveterately hostile to the Shanks is that they are a family of criminal women. One reason Helen’s father is so unable to listen to her desire to alleviate crime by alleviating poverty is because she’s a young lady. The women fighters are probably same-sex partners, though McDowell sketches their relationships with a light touch. There are plenty of neat lines, some ironic, some straight, like, “No city has a shorter memory than New York,” or “There was something distasteful about victims,” or “Moral turpitude in a high place was at least as interesting as corruption in a low one, and there was no one could not feel satisfaction at the overthrow of a hypocrite, especially one of standing and influence.” Audiobook reader R. C. Bray is capable and appealing, though his style is pretty monotone. Gilded Needles is an entertaining novel! It is also at times violent, with some graphic scenes, which break out unexpectedly and take the story in unforeseen directions, but the violence is more appalling than gratuitous. I am impressed by how different the book is from McDowell’s The Elementals, and I will read other books by him. View all my reviews
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The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars “Is it over now?” “Oh, no.” The Mirror and the Light (2020), the last novel in Hillary Mantel’s wonderful and bleak Cromwell trilogy, begins and ends with executions. Neither one is a surprise if you know British history, but the first is disturbing, the second devastating, because of Mantel’s ability to render historical figures fully and complexly alive. Even Duke “Uncle” Norfolk, the proud blue blood who looks like a piece of half-digested gristle, goes off on foul foaming rants, and loathes Thomas Cromwell, cogently explains at one point a key aspect of King Henry VIII: he sees courtiers and servants not as people but as tools like siege engines, to use when needed and discard when not. Like the first two novels, this one concerns Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith-brewer’s son from Putney who rises to be the right-hand man of Henry, serving as Deputy of Church Affairs, Master Secretary, and Lord Privy Seal and becoming a Knight of the Garter, Lord of Wimbledon, and Earl of Essex, with his son Gregory married to the sister of the only one of Henry’s queens to provide him a viable son and his nephew Richard knighted and his protégé Rafe Sadler a King’s counselor, and so on. What could go wrong? Well… Cromwell is a man of enemies great and small and owes all his status, wealth, and power to Henry (“I am where my King put me”). He knows that he’d be all alone without any potent ally or friend should Henry turn against him or die. As Mantel says in the illuminating interview with the reader Ben Miles after the audiobook version of the novel, one reason for the appeal of the trilogy is that it is both a rags to riches story and a fall from glory story. A third of the way into the 16th century, England is a backwater island nation poised on a knife’s edge, with hostile powers abroad (France, Spain, and the Vatican) and antagonistic cultures close to home (Scotland, Ireland, and papists). Not to mention the people of England rising up in an ad hoc rebellion whose target is the vile jumped-up Cromwell and “his” greedy taxes. Henry’s break with the Catholic church has led to the dissolution of the monasteries, but the King is unwilling to embrace Protestantism and is just as likely to burn a “heretic” Lutheran as to hang an inveterate papist. Will Cromwell ever see his dream come true of an English Bible being read by the British people? Cromwell is a great protagonist! Skilled at coercing damning evidence from suspects and witnesses and racking commoners when hurried, he tries to avoid cruelty and would prefer no one to be burned at the stake. He saves numerous people from execution and or mutilation, even when saving them is not in his own best interests. If he vows to protect your child, he will not fail you: “That’s the point of a promise... It wouldn't have any value if you could see what it would cost you when you made it.” He sees the ghosts of those he has helped destroy or failed to save. He habitually puts his hand to his chest to feel his trusty hidden dagger. He scorns Catholic relics and saints and is engaged in dissolving the monasteries of England, supposedly to give more land and wealth to the Crown, but he is not averse to funneling such spoils to his family and protégés. He keeps half his wealth in banks abroad but also pays for many royal expenses and saves Henry money in transactions with French merchants. He knows multiple languages. He has a self-deprecatory wit: “My list of sins is so extensive that the recording angel has run out of tablets and sits in the corner with his quill blunted wailing and ripping out his curls.” He will lapse into vivid memory: being beaten by his father, finding work at an Italian banking house, loving a Low Country widow, reviving Henry after he fell off a horse, being kissed goodbye by the doomed George Boleyn, etc. His motto is, “Go forward, sir. It’s the one direction the Lord permits.” If he is unhandsome (“He has small eyes and mouth, large nose, the body god afflicted him with”), he is humorous, philosophical, open-minded, organized, brilliant, calculating, brave, loyal. Mantel’s Henry is fascinating: intelligent, shrewd, vain, fickle, manipulative, manipulable. “Lying gives him a deep and subtle pleasure,” to the point that he believes his lies. He refuses to have sex with his new Queen and then complains that God has decided not to let him have a son by her. He listens to sound advice by Cromwell and then acts on fake accusations by the man’s enemies. As Cromwell says in the secret book he’s writing, The Book Called Henry, you can never anticipate or know the king and should never turn your back on him. Like all princes, Henry “is half god, half beast.” Mantel’s narrative strategy is striking. Her present tense works with her vivid and sensual descriptions to immerse us in the time and place of her novel. Her narrator often says “He, Cromwell” (e.g., “He gapes at her, he, Cromwell, who is never surprised”) even when we don’t need to be told who “he” is, the cumulative effect etching her hero in our brains. Her narrator is like an omnipresent witness to or participant of the events, like, say, a minor member of Cromwell’s staff, saying things like, “But our Antwerp contacts are silent. Perhaps we are missing something.” Such a person could not know what Mantel reveals of Cromwell’s thoughts, feelings, memories, and dreams, but the effect is to ally the narrator with Cromwell. Mantel runs the mirror and light motif through her novel, whether descriptions of light on the Thames or on an executioner’s sword called Mirror of Justice, or moments when Cromwell flatters Henry, “Your majesty is the only Prince the mirror and the light of other kings.” Other themes concern aging, gender, families, and power. Like the best historical fiction, the novel is both universal and vividly particular. We can taste the food the characters eat in early 16th-century England, see and feel their clothes and accessories, enjoy their spicy conversations, and learn their politics. A vital part of the appeal of the novel is the audiobook reader Ben Miles. In their interview, Mantel said that Miles’ questions for a production of the theater version of the first two books influenced her in writing this third one and that his voice became the voice of Cromwell. Yes! Miles is Cromwell as well as Henry, Norfolk, Christophe, Jane Rochford, and all the other characters. Throughout, he shows his deep and sympathetic understanding of the text. With such a big (38+ hours!) and incandescently written book, it is impossible to choose only a few examples of its pleasures, but here are some: Vivid descriptions: “The blade went through her neck with a sigh, easier than scissors through silk.” “Latimer smells of burning too. The air sparks around him as he walks.” “The afternoon is damp as if it had been rubbed with snails.” Great lines: “But if you can’t speak truth at a beheading, when can you?” “Poets prosper… it is their friends who sustain the hurt.” “She had built a little house for love, and it was flattened by one remark. Now she lives in the wreckage.” Witty dialogue: “This will require self-abasement.” Richard Cromwell says, “Shall I go out and find somebody who’s better at it than you are?” “Richard Rich knows the art of creeping,” Gregory offers. “And Wriothesley can crawl when required.” View all my reviews
La Loi des mâles by Maurice Druon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Yikes—You, two, Philippe? La Loi des males (the law of men), the fourth novel in Les Rois Maudits (the Cursed Kings), continues Maurice Druon’s absorbing autopsy of the epic fall of France as a superpower in the early 14th century. After over 300 years of the blessed rule of eleven long-reigning kings, the Capetians are said now to be cursed, for eighteen months after the Iron King Philip the Fair died, his successor and son Louis X (the Quarrelsome) has died, presumed to have been poisoned (a dog expired after licking Louis’ bloody bandages). The situation at the start of this novel is fluid and flammable: Louis died leaving his second wife Clemence several months pregnant and a five-year-old daughter by his first wife Marguerite, whom he had killed in prison to enable him to marry a less adulterous and more pious woman, and now the girl’s uncle the Duke of Bourgogne is promoting her claim to succeed Louis, while Louis’ uncle Charles Valois is eager to become the Regent for the fetus inside Queen Clemence. Still more. Louis’ capable and ambitious younger brother Philippe is off in Lyon trying to get the Conclave of Cardinals to choose a France-friendly Pope and could return at any time to make his own play to become Regent. And let’s not forget the fractious Flemish, the starving populace, the dry treasury, and the long-running d’Artois family feud between the giantess Mahaut and her giant nephew Robert! Getting tangled up in that power politics plot is the doomed romance between the young Lombard money lender Guccio Baglioni and the poor country aristocrat girl Marie Cressy. And yes the world is run by the law of men, women largely being awfully treated, like the village women in d’Artois counties raped by Robert d’Artois and his men on their pillaging spree, or Queen Clemence being denied any role in serving as regent for her own baby son, or Blanche the wife of Louis’ younger brother Charles still going mad in a dungeon for having committed adultery, or Marie Cressy being forced to serve as wet nurse for the Queen and being denied access to her husband Guccio. The only woman somewhat free from the law of men seems to be Mahaut d’Artois, the formidable psychopath with a fondness for potions and poison. Twenty-five-year-old Philippe is a likeable, capable, cool, calculating, myopic (literally) guy who’s willing to bend rules, play hardball, intimidate, bribe, confine, or ally with enemies, accept regicide to get the power he believes (and is probably right) he is the most qualified to wield, and then to need a bit of comfort from his wife. Mahaut turns into an ever-scarier monster, while Robert is a larger-than-life, foul-mouthed, self-centered, shrewd, brutal, raping, scheming, bullying thug. I am glad he’s in the series, but I sure wish he’d get his comeuppance (as in finally being exiled from d’Artois). After recovering from her long debilitating illness and feeling that being good didn’t do her any good, Clemence undergoes a fascinating metamorphosis from a frugal, pious, modest Queen to an extravagant hedonist widow, throwing a fortune away on entertainment (with handsome young men) and rare gourmet foods, counting her jewels, and lolling about the palace in see-through-fabrics. Guccio and Marie are sweet, but we were told in the third novel when they parted that it was the last time they’d ever see each other again. Guccio’s uncle Tolomei does his best for the young couple (while keeping an eye out for the main business chance), but his usual shrewd eye deserts him when dealing with Clemence’s protector Bouville and his appallingly practical wife. The 72-year-old Cardinal Dueze gets barely three hours of sleep a night while researching theology, law, medicine, alchemy, corresponding with umpteen VIPs, reasoning in his private time that there probably isn’t any heaven or hell (or God), all while finding time to do some astrology to calculate the most propitious time to try to become Pope. I feel worst about what happens to Marie than to what happens to anyone in the first four books. Unlike the Templar Grandmaster, the squire lovers of Marguerite and Blanche, Enguerrand de Marigny, and Louis Hutin, et. al., Marie is harmless, innocent, and pure. She’s not physically tortured or burnt at the stake (yet), but jeeze. I’m upset by Druon’s treatment of her, and I’m hoping she’s a real historical figure, not a character he created to torment! By the way, one wonders how Druon came upon much of this history if it was such a secret and all! I imagine he read some historical rumors? Louis Hutin’s death, for instance, is said by Wikipedia (for what it’s worth) to have been due to illness and not to poison. Will Mahaut’s poisonous activities (according to Druon) ever be exposed, then? I’m itching to check online about it all but will refrain till I finish the last book. Like the first three novels in the series, this one features compelling characters, interesting historical details, riveting scenes (like a cool surrender, an appalling baptism, and a suspenseful coronation), great writing, and provocative foreshadowing bombs (like “The time of punishment [for Philippe] was just starting”) Also as in the first three novels, Druon is keen to demonstrate how our successes (especially those for which we have sacrificed a wee bit of our integrity) do not always bring unalloyed joy. I’m onto the fifth book, intrepidly but trepidatiously. View all my reviews
The Nutmeg of Consolation by Patrick O'Brian
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Pirates, Rats, Coca, and Purgatory (Australia) The 14th Aubrey Maturin Age of Sail book, The Nutmeg of Consolation (1991) begins with our bosom buddies Post-Captain Jack Aubrey and naturalist-surgeon-spy Stephen Maturin and the survivors of their wrecked frigate the Diane running out of food on an uninhabited island in the South China Sea. To raise the men’s morale Jack sets the sailors against the marines in a hotly contested cricket match. Stephen, having no interest in cricket but being the designated hunter of the mission (because he’s so hopelessly useless in the vital task of fashioning a schooner from the wreckage of the frigate), goes off on his own looking for increasingly scarce wild pigs or monkeys. Through Stephen’s point of view, Patrick O’Brian concisely reminds us of what happened in the 13th novel: ambassador Fox winning a coup (thanks to Stephen’s vital but resented assistance) by getting the Sultan of a piratical Malay state to sign a treaty with the British instead of with the enemy French, and then prematurely sailing off in a pinnace to announce his triumph only to drown with all hands during the typhoon that wrecked the Diane. Jack is hoping to finish the makeshift schooner and sail off to Dutch-held Batavia when some pirates (led by a bare-breasted young lady with filed incisors and a sharp kris) pay a call. The novel features about the usual limited but vivid amount of action for an O’Brian book, a ferocious land battle, a suspenseful sea chase, and a small-pox ravaged island, and then settles in for a long stretch in the then new colony at New South Wales, Australia, and Sydney Cove, as Jack tries to get his ship repaired and outfitted while dealing with hostile and corrupt local officials and foolish and wild sailors, and Stephen sojourns around the Australian outback, observing the exotic flora and fauna (including kangaroos, platypuses, and “the small, flat, gray animal that sleeps high up in a gum tree and claims absurdly to be a bear”). Stephen also wants to do something to help the convict Padeen, his former ship’s surgeon’s assistant who in an earlier book in the series accidentally became addicted to opium, got arrested for breaking into an apothecary’s shop, and then got transported to Sydney, where he’s just received 200 lashes for trying to escape. The scenes describing the new British colony (“an utterly inhuman place” set in a “dismal plains of purgatory” outback) are fascinating: gangs of chained convicts doing slave labor and getting brutally flogged, British officers land-grabbing the best land and importing sheep into it, corruption rife at every level, and everywhere the cruelty attendant upon “absolute power and the absence of public opinion.” The book respects the aborigines while showing the pernicious effect British rum has on them. Add to all that the harsh wilderness, and Stephen can’t help but wonder why it was ever thought a good idea to make a colony there! As in the other books in the series, I love the moments when Jack and Stephen express their friendship for each other (e.g., “Why there you are, Steven, how glad I am to see you.”) And I enjoy the all too human characters, like, of course, Jack and Stephen, but also minor ones like fractious, nasal Killick. Like the other books, this one has plenty of humor, like when the frigate rats start acting strangely tame because, it turns out, they’ve gotten into Stephen’s supply of coca leaves and eaten all of them, which provokes in Stephen a bad mood to match that of the rats when they finally realize there’s no more coca. “He was not the first sailor to be deceived by a rat.” Lots of witty lines, like “Stephen was convinced that moral advantage was a great enemy to marriage” and “What are the three things that cannot be concealed? Love, sorrow, and wealth… and intelligence-work comes a very close fourth.” Lots of savory period vocabulary and expressions, like “What joy!” or “’God's blood—hell and death, so I have” Or “made their staggering crapulous way to the strand...” Lots of details on what it was like to be aboard a ship of the line in the age of sail, from Jack's favorite suet pudding, “boiled baby,” to the tons of fetid fluid in a man of war, deriving not only from the sailors who sometimes, especially during storms, relieve themselves wherever they get a chance, but also from the cables that conduct into the ship the refuse and sewage and slaughterhouse run off from the ports they call at. Lots of O’Brian’s sublime descriptions of the sea and sky seen from a sailing ship, like: “She reeled off her twelve and even thirteen knots throughout the sunlit hours and even seven or eight by night, with the topgallantsails taken in and in spite of her foul bottom; and all this through a hugely rolling sea that varied from the deepest indigo to pale aquamarine but that always (apart from the broken water) remained glass-clear, as though it had been created yesterday.” In addition to such features, audiobook reader Ric Jerrom is so ideally suited to O'Brian's work that I always feel good to read another Aubrey-Maturin novel, so I’m looking forward to the 15th in the series. View all my reviews
Les Poisons de la couronne by Maurice Druon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars The Long and Glorious Reign of Louis X the Quarrelsome? Les Poisons de la couronne [the poisons of the crown] (1956), the third novel in Maurice Druon’s Les Rois Maudits [the cursed kings] series, starts in 1315 shortly after the second one ended. The death of the Iron King Philippe le bel (the Fair) thrust his son Louis X onto the throne facing many challenges: the French barons are reasserting their independence, the Flemish are getting uppity, the Conclave still can’t choose a new Pope, the family feud between Mahaut (aunt) and Robert (nephew) d’Artois is boiling over, the people are starving, the country is rain-soaked, and the treasury is dry. Good luck, France! Clueless Louis ended the previous novel imagining that marrying Clemence of Hungary would lead to a long and glorious reign, but on route from Naples to France the Queen-to-be is beset by ill omens, including an apocalyptic storm at sea and a serious injury to her “friend” and escort Guccio Baglioni on the dock. What will happen if Clemence—a deeply religious and empathic person—discovers that her new husband had his first wife strangled in prison? Like the first two novels, this one is peopled by vivid, compelling, flawed characters who, if not always likeable, are always interesting to observe. Louis le Hutin (the Quarrelsome) is a bad king: sickly, hysterical, fickle, malleable, callous, incompetent. His Mud Campaign against the Flemish is an absurd debacle. Will marriage to Clemence turn him into a good person and a holy king? Well, as the narrator puts it, “It is generally wrong to divert people from their nature. Better to leave a villain to his villainy than to turn him into a sheep; kindness not being his business, he will use it deplorably.” Soon, the “new” Louis is granting amnesty to criminals, leading to a surge in crime. Yet Druon makes even Louis sympathetic: “Am I then damned, am I then cursed, for not being able to be loved by whomever I love?” Louis’ younger brother Philippe is kinglier than the King. He forgives his wife Jeanne for aiding and abetting adultery and handles the feuding d’Artois nobles with gravitas and skill. His martial camp in the muddy mess of Flanders is clean and organized, and he passes the time there by having a knight entertain the men with recitations from Dante’s new poem The Divine Comedy, especially verses castigating his own royal family (in addition to interesting footnotes about the Hospitallers, Templars, and unicorns, Druon provides one about Dante’s hatred of the Capetians). If only Philippe had been born first! Charles Valois, Louis’ uncle, is awful: vain, greedy, and ambitious, he manipulates Louis while hoping something will happen to the King so he can become Regent. Mahaut d’Artois is a larger than life widow-countess-peer who wishes she could go to battle in armor and is dauntless in her scorched-earth feud with her nephew Robert for control of the d’Artois lands, castles, and incomes. When cornered, she can be devious and ruthless with potions and poisons. What’s goes for Mahaut goes for Robert d’Artois, minus the potions and poisons. Aunt and nephew are so alike that they gigantically hate each other: “This hatred which excluded any agreement, any transaction, exceeded its object, and one could wonder if there was not between the giantess and the giant a kind of passion in reverse, unknown to themselves, and which would have been better appeased in incest than in war.” I don’t know if Guccio, the young Lombard, is a real historical figure, but he’s neat: friends with Boccaccio’s father and full of youthful passion, enthusiasm, and recklessness. He performs dashing deeds and fabricates exaggerated accounts of his exploits and quickly believes them. What the proud, impoverished aristocratic brothers of Guccio’s beloved Marie would do to him if they found out that he, a money lender-usurer, is planning to marry their sister, I tremble to think. Tolomei Spinelli, Captain General of the Lombards in France, is wise, spicy, and crafty, advising his nephew Guccio about his romance with Marie while keeping an eye out for any way to make money and to get more French nobles in his debt. And Eudeline, the linen maid ex-lover of Louis, has come to hate the King but to love Clemence. “All her emotional forces were turned towards the queen, her friend. And if Eudeline was suffering at this moment, it was from Clémence's suffering.” She shows that there are some good people in this history and the world. As in the first two books, Druon is ever a fine writer. Great moments: “But Jeanne could not contain herself. Look! She had been doing nothing else for eight days since she was released. Like a starving person gorging herself on food without believing that she will ever be able to be satisfied, she regained possession of the universe through her gaze. The leaves on the trees, the light clouds, a steeple looming in the distance, the flight of a bird, the grass on the banks, everything seemed to her to be exhilaratingly splendid.” Vivid historical descriptions: “Hospitaller brothers, in long brown robes, passed ceaselessly between the bays of beds, sometimes to go and sing the services, sometimes to give care or distribute meals. The exercises of worship were intimately mingled with therapy; the rattles of pain answered the verses of the psalms; the scent of incense could not dominate the atrocious smell of fever and gangrene; death was offered as a public spectacle. Inscriptions, running around the walls in tall ornate letters, invited to prepare for death rather than healing.” Witty lines: “I believe in the virtue of poisons to get rid of an enemy, but hardly in potions to win an adversary.” Pithy wisdom: “Of all human functions, that which consists in governing one's fellows, although the most envied, is the most disappointing, for it never has an end, and allows the mind no rest.” Foreshadowing bombs: Behind Louis X rode his brothers Philippe and Charles, as well as his cousin Philippe de Valois. Before fourteen years, the crown would have rested on their three heads.” Druon writes the complexity of the human mind, as when Clemence’s grandmother watches the ship carrying her beloved granddaughter away to France and Louis: “The large ship … represented at the same time … the triumph of her policy and the melancholy of things completed.” And his history shows how past actions influence the present and future, cursed gifts that keep on giving, as in his reminders of what the Iron King did to the Templars. The overall movement of the series is the decline of France as a world power in the early 14th century, because of their rulers’ cruelty, stupidity, selfishness and superstition. On to the fourth novel! View all my reviews
Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars When Racism More Pernicious than Lovecraftian Horror In Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country (2016) the eight stories make a composite novel about the African American Turner and Berry families and their friends as they encounter the malign Adamite Order of the Ancient Dawn, an organization of white natural philosophers (call them wizards or alchemists at your peril) scattered across the USA in big cities like Chicago and tiny towns like Ardham (not Arkham!). The Turners et al have to deal especially with the descendants of the Order’s 18th-century founder, Titus Braithwhite, namely the amoral mad occult scientist Samuel Braithwhite and his son Caleb (pretty “likeable for a white guy” but may be the devil incarnate). Each story features a different point of view protagonist and a different supernatural challenge. Initially bemused by the supernatural, the characters quickly accept it and try to deal with it. After all, they have grown up in Jim Crow America, always having to be very careful around white people, whose natural dangers have prepared them for the supernatural ones. Here is an annotated list of the stories: The novella “Lovecraft Country” reveals to Atticus Turner, a 22-year-old African American Korean war vet, the existence in 1954 Jim Crow America of weird things like those he’s read of in H. P. Lovecraft stories: a mysterious silver car, an unseen powerful noisy thing in the woods, a community of serfs living around a manor house, an occult cult of natural philosophers, and a portentous ritual. But maybe the scariest and most dangerous things are everyday white people like racist policemen. In addition to Atticus, the story features his wise uncle George Turner (publisher of The Safe Negro Travel Guide!), his feisty childhood friend Letitia Dandridge, and his spicy father Montrose. 4 stars. After Letitia buys the very haunted Winthrop House in a white neighborhood in Chicago in “Dreams of the Which House,” she then stubbornly attempts to get the white ghost if not the neighborhood to accept her (You don’t want to play poker? How about chess?). This real estate deal can’t have some connection with Caleb Braithwaite, can it? 4 stars. “Abdullah’s Book” concerns a notebook of back wages (plus interest) owed a family slave ancestor, Caleb Braithwaite, a scary and comedic Chicago Museum of Natural History heist of an occult Book of Names attempted by some members of the Prince Hall Freemasons (including George, Montrose, Atticus, and a small and eager dentist), and a surprising and almost satisfying conclusion. 4 stars In “Hippolyta Disturbs the Universe,” Hippolyta, “a giantess and a negress” and a scout for husband George’s The Safe Negro Travel Guide, as well as an amateur astronomer, visits Warlock Hill in Wisconsin to check out the observatory of the somewhat deceased Order of the Ancient Dawn member Hiram Winthrop and finds herself looking through a telescope at another world and then having to decide whether or not to jump through a “doorway” into it. Some strange, sublime sf: “She steadied herself and turned around, to find Ida staring at her from several feet and thrillions of miles away.” 4 stars In “Jekyll in Hyde Park,” Letitia’s sister Ruby (an accepting and deferring doormat) comes in for some serious temptation by learning firsthand how much easier her life would be white. Is the mysterious and creepily clean-cut Caleb Braithwhite “the devil”? Or just “a man who knows what he wants and how to get it?” The story is my least favorite, partly because I can’t believe pious Ruby would do what she does in it. 3 stars “The Narrow House” is devastating. Caleb B makes another offer that can’t be refused, sending Montrose and Atticus to find Hiram Winthrop’s son Henry Winthrop, who ran away to be with a black maid, with whom he had a son of his own, so they can retrieve some potent books from the guy. This story highlights “the horror, the most awful thing, to have a child the world wants to destroy it to know you’re helpless to help him” in the context of racism and the horrifying Tulsa Massacre. 4 stars To get intelligence on his mother, in “Horace and the Devil Doll” the Chicago branch of the Order targets Horace, the sweet, creative, imaginative, and asthmatic twelve-year-old son of Hippolyta and George Berry. It features a nasty spittle curse and a creepy pygmy African witchdoctor devil doll. Can Caleb B help? At what cost? 3.5 stars 8. The Mark of Cain This story depicts the climactic showdown between rival members of the Order of the Ancient Dawn from Chicago and Ardham trying to wipe each other out, with Atticus as the prize, without reckoning on the formidable interference of the Turner and Berry and Dandridge families plus a few of their friends. I found it a bit over the top, unconvincing, and convenient. 3 stars The audiobook reader Kevin Kennerly does a fine job without over-dramatizing his voice for kids or women or old people or white or black people. He understands the story and reads it with enough enthusiasm and intelligence to enhance it. I enjoyed the book: it’s scary, funny, moving, and exciting. Ruff writes a straight-forward page turning story with teeth and heart. I like the references to Barsoom, Bradbury, and Lovecraft et al. (“But stories are like people, Atticus. Loving them doesn't make them perfect. You try to cherish their virtues and overlook their flaws. The flaws are still there, though.”) I got a kick out of Horace’s homemade comics about Orithyia Blue (inspired by his mother). I like the main characters and their relationships. The descriptions are vivid, the plots tight, and the dialogue often funny, especially via Montrose, like when he nails John Carter for being a Confederate officer or says things like, “You want me to go to Philadelphia and pick up the trail with my special Negro powers?” I like (painfully) the touches about racism in the US, which was worse in pre-Civil Rights era USA (e.g., in 1921 and the Tulsa massacre, which shaped the Turner and Berry families, and in 1954, when the story takes place, and, for example, black realtors couldn’t join the national realtor association) and which Ruff (as a white guy) has researched and thought and felt and imagined a lot about, and which also tell us a lot about how it’d feel to be a person of color today, because although things are better now, they are definitely not fair or equal either. By the way, in its depiction of a world in which the supernatural horrors are not worse than the discriminatory dangers the characters of color face in the USA, it resembles Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation books, though Ireland, unlike Ruff, is African American, and she’s writing supernatural alternate history while he writes supernatural historical fiction. And Victor la Valle’s The Ballad of Black Tom is more Lovecraftian in spirit than Ruff's novel. View all my reviews
Flight by Sherman Alexie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “It's horrible, but it’s funny too at the same time” An anonymous, angry, alienated half-white, half-Native American fifteen-year-old boy nicknamed Zits (he counts 47 on his face alone) is telling us his life story (abandonment at birth by his Indian father, loss of his mother to breast cancer at age six, umpteen foster families and group homes and schools and arrests and experiences of abuse) when in a holding cell he meets a beautiful seventeen-year-old white boy who has named himself Justice. Justice turns Zits on to guns, and soon Zits is shooting people in a bank, getting fatally shot himself, and waking up in the body of a white FBI agent doing dirty work on an Indian reservation in 1975. This starts Zits, a self-proclaimed “blank sky, a human solar eclipse” and “a time-traveling mass killer,” on a vivid educational journey through time, place, and person (or through hell and or heaven). From inside a series of white or Native American hosts, he becomes a passive participant in various moments of crisis and violence, including the Battle of Little Bighorn (as a mute Indian boy) and the revenge massacre of a village (as an arthritic Indian killer). The ghost of 9/11/2001 is present, as Zits temporarily inhabits a flight instructor who taught a Somali immigrant how to fly, with unexpected consequences. Sherman Alexie’s Flight (2007) is an angry book, but much of the anger is directed not at white America’s treatment of Native Americans but at human beings’ propensity for violence, hatred, abuse, betrayal, and “the monster revenge.” The novel explores Zits’ quest for a way to survive psychologically intact in that world by empathizing with a variety of people from past and present, as well as his search for his father and a family. It is also a funny book! Zits (Sherman Alexie) has an irreverent, self-deprecating, and frank sense of humor, and I laughed at least as often while listening to the book as I winced. His riffs on foster families, policemen, TV, acne medication, and the smells of a huge, real old-time Indian camp, etc., cracked me up. At times the short novel reads like a Native American teenage Bukowski (Chinaski). The novel demonstrates that there are both good and bad white people and Native Americans and that “We’re all the same” (betrayers and betrayed, lovers and loved, haters and hated, etc.), but Zits’ travels through time, place, and person never get him inside a female host, or for that matter in an African- or Asian- or Hispanic-American host, or a gay one. This limits the scope of his novel to Native American and white and male experience. Also, after the devastating first three-quarters, the ending, though heart-warming, is almost too good to be true. Adam Beach reads the book perfectly, with an appealing Native American lilt in his English. View all my reviews
La Reine étranglée by Maurice Druon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars History with Teeth (Dirty Tricks, Executions, Betrayals, Corruption, and Courtship) Or How to Undo One Royal Marriage and Make Another (as the Cuckolded King of France) La Reine étranglée (1955), the second novel in Maurice Druon’s Les Rois Maudits series, begins in 1314, France. Philippe IV, the Iron King, AKA the Fair, has died, making his gormless, “shifty-eyed, narrow-shouldered, hollow-chested,” 25-year-old son King, Louis X, AKA the Quarrelsome. Humiliated by the scandal of his wife Marguerite’s adultery, Louis wants to remarry ASAP, but he’s still married to the Queen, so he needs her to write a annulling affidavit confessing that she committed adultery while never consummating their marriage, but she refuses, so he needs a sympathetic new Pope elected to free him from the marriage, but the Conclave of Cardinals is at an impasse. What’s a spoiled new king to do? Queen Marguerite is trying to remain sane in her cruel castle dungeon imprisonment with her cousin Blanche (they sure came down hard on adulteresses in that era!). Will she surrender and write the affidavit to annul her marriage and doom her daughter by Louis and herself? Philippe’s top minister (the most powerful man in France for sixteen years) Enguerrand de Marigny is clinging to power by sabotaging Louis’ attempts to annul his marriage and messaging King Edward of England. Honest in his financial dealings, will Marigny’s corrupt, ungrateful, and dough-like younger brother Jean, whom he made Archbishop, become his Achilles heel? Charles, Count of Valois, the Iron King’s megalomaniacal brother, is rabidly trying to destroy de Marigny, his hatred of him stemming from a land dispute and his desire to return the barons to their former independence and wealth (de Marigny spearheaded Philippe IV’s centralization of power in the state, ending the barons’ traditions of waging private war and coining their own money). Will he finally get the better of his archenemy? Spinello Tolomei, the chief Lombard banker, is scheming with Valois against de Marigny, because he’d like to return France to a more chaotic and fragmented state, because then bankers could wield more power via money and weapons. Tolomei’s capable young nephew, Guccio Baglioni, is still in love with Marie Cressay, the daughter of a penurious aristocratic family whose members appreciate his efforts to help them survive in their dilapidated family manor but would never accept him as a suitor for Marie. What hope for the young lovers? Clemence of Hungary is a beautiful if unfeminine French princess living in Naples; after seeing her portrait (painted by a student of Giotto!), Louis is eager for her to become his next Queen, but there’s still the small matter of Marguerite. Will Clemence’s formidable grandmother (who’s birthed umpteen kings and queens) let her marry the King of France? Robert d’Artois, who partly started the whole thing by exposing the adultery of Marguerite and Blanche (in the first book in the series), is trying to make himself useful to Valois and Louis so they’ll owe him. Can he use his larger-than-life masculine charisma to convince the canny Marguerite to write the affidavit? Complicating all of the above are a horrible famine, high prices, corrupt local officials, and a long cold winter. “Sometimes staggering hordes climbed from the fields to the villages in the vain dream of being given bread there; but they ran into other hordes of starving people who came from the city and seemed to be advancing towards the Last Judgment.” Will the common folk survive till spring? With dispassionate empathy, Druon rotates among the points of view of his characters as he tells the epic story of the fall of France from a superpower due to a series of cocky, stupid, venal, or brutal blunders. There are no heroes. And few likeable characters. Louis’ younger brother Philippe has integrity, young Guccio a romantic heart. And we sympathize with Marguerite (who’s too proud but over-punished for her adultery) and de Marigny (who’s been too powerful for too long but is comparatively clean). d’Artois and Valois are scoundrels, but they are capable of humor and frank self-reflection: “No man is absolutely bad.” Well, Louis is vile, lacking any moral or ethical core and getting his jollies from shooting doves released by a squire from a basket at point blank range. Druon relishes irony: palace washer woman Eudaline imagining Louis showering their natural “daughter with gold and titles,” de Marigny feeling he’s “the most powerful character in the kingdom” holding “all destinies in his hands, even that of the King,” Louis imagining his coming “Long reign of glory,” and so on. He enjoys lobbing foreshadowing grenades, like “By this word, he separated himself from the only man capable of governing in his place and directing his reign. France would pay for this change of mood for many years.” And although I don’t like the characters, Druon so excels at conveying character and historical texture and has so few illusions about human nature and is such a concise and incisive writer, that there is much suspense, surprise, and pleasure in the story, as in the following examples: Barbed banter: “Ah! Cousin, did you think me so foolish as to allow myself to be taken in by your coaxing? You have just used it with me as whores usually do with men, irritating their senses the better to submit them to their will. But you forget that in this profession, women are stronger, and you are only an apprentice.” Great line: “‘Never… never have I seen a man in the world crawl with such height.’” Keen insight: “Power-loving men are above all driven by the desire to act on the universe, to make events happen, and to have been right. Wealth, honors, distinctions are in their eyes only tools for their action. Marigny and Valois belonged to that species.” Fascinating historical detail: “Louis saw the heart of his father, placed near the funerary bed in a casket of crystal and golden bronze. Everyone who saw this heart, the arteries cut flush, behind the pane, remained stupefied at its smallness: ‘a child’s heart… or a bird’s,’ murmured the visitors. And it was hard to believe that such a tiny viscus would have animated such a terrible monarch.” Vivid description: “His hair damp and hanging, his eyes vague, his shirt stuck to his thin sides, the Hutin looked like a drowned man who had just come out of the Seine.” Psychological autopsy: “Astonishing character that of this prince, at the same time impatient and tenacious, vehement and twisted, courageous with his body but weak before praise, and always animated by extreme ambitions, always launched in gigantic enterprises and always failing for lack of a correct appreciation of the facts.” Bittersweet triumph: “Man in truth is a strange creature… Do you know that suddenly I feel an emptiness of the soul? I had grown so used to hating this villain that now it seems to me that I will miss him.” Ennobling epiphany (the key to the entire series): “Any unjust act, even committed for a just cause, carries with it its curse.’ And when he discovered this, Enguerrand de Marigny stopped hating anyone and holding others responsible for his fate.” Now I’m (morbidly) on to the next novel in the series! View all my reviews
The Thirteen-Gun Salute by Patrick O'Brian
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “God be with you, ape” The Thirteen-Gun Salute (1989), the thirteenth volume in Patrick O’Brian’s fine age of sail series, finds the odd couple best friends Captain Jack Aubrey and Doctor Stephen Maturin aboard the frigate the Diane enroute to the China Sea to ally England with the Sultan of Pulo Prabang, a piratical Malay state, before the enemy French can do so. To accomplish this, Jack is finally reinstated to the navy, after having been exiled from it a couple novels ago when framed for cheating on the stock market (Lucky Jack Aubrey at sea, on land he’s extraordinarily unfortunate). Adding zest to the plot is the fact that Jack and Stephen’s traitor nemeses Ledward of the Treasury and Wray of the Admiralty will be involved in the negotiations on the French side. Adding an unpredictable element is the fact that the British envoy Mr. Fox being escorted aboard the Diane believes too proudly in the grandeur of his rank and too fervently in the importance of his mission, bears a sexual guilt and a strange hatred, and, most ominously, is no aficionado of music (violinist Jack and cellist Stephen having bonded over their shared love of classical music). Mr. Fox is an example of “A man who realizes he is unpopular deciding to make himself loathed.” As is often the case in the series, both Jack and Stephen have left behind some uncomfortable situations at home: Jack’s life may be threatened by a “worm” among the British powers that be, while Stephen’s wife Diana is pregnant and argumentative (which is really down to Stephen’s finally abandoning his laudanum). Interestingly, O’Brian is less interested in the espionage/political side of his story (the competitive negotiations for the treaty with the Sultan) than in the naval sides (e.g., sails, storms, currents, provisions, morale, gun practice, health care, working, singing, disciplining, and dining involved in a frigate) and natural sides (e.g., flora and fauna of the islands of the China Sea, from durians and orchids to tarsiers and rhinoceroses). O’Brian briefly sets up the situation, shows how Stephen gets intel via Chinese bankers, relates the Sultan’s doting on his “gazelle-eyed Ganymede” Abdul, and then cursorily--after the fact--resolves that part of his novel. He’s much more interested in depicting Jack dealing with callow midshipmen, a difficult rendezvous at sea, a typhoon, or a grounded ship or in depicting Stephen (“After medicine, my greatest interest is living things and their way of life)” climbing the Thousand Steps up the side of a volcano to stay in the sacred crater in a Buddhist temple in an Edenic setting full of wildlife that’s never learned to fear human beings and commune with orangutangs there. Readers who need suspenseful, realtime, violent action scenes in their historical fiction--battles, skirmishes, combats, at sea and or on land--may be bored, as the only such action in the novel happens offstage. I don’t mind the lack of war scenes so much because the other parts of the book are prime and because I enjoy spending time with the contrasting and complementary friends Jack (a big, bluff British Anglican natural seaman) and Stephen (a compact, circumspect Irish-Catalan Catholic landlubber Naturalist/Surgeon/Intelligencer). I feel good when they say things to each other like “Now surely you’ll turn in, brother. You look destroyed.” As ever, O’Brian writes vivid descriptions conveying what it was like to be at sea on a sailing ship of the line, like “In this clear weather, they could survey 700 square miles of sea... A pale cobalt dome of sky, darkening imperceptibly as it came down to the sharp horizon and the true azure of the great disc of ocean, two pure ideal forms and the ship between them, minute, real and incongruous.” And plenty of vivid descriptions of flora and fauna, like “The creature, quite unharmed, stood there gently swaying on its long legs. It was a very large insect indeed, greenish, with immense antennae and a disproportionately small, meek, and indeed rather stupid face.” Also as usual, he writes plenty of cool lines and ideas about human nature, political conflict, and natural history, like “Politics and delicacy can seldom go together,” "Stephen had never known a judge he liked," “Good and evil are so close at times... that there is scarcely the breadth of a hair between them,” and-- “Once again his mind turned to the question of integrity, a virtue that he prized very highly in others, although there were times when he had painful doubts about his own... Jack was a fair example... as devoid of self-consciousness as a man could well be... Steven had never seen him act a part.” Audiobook reader Ric Jerrom remains the only reader I can imagine for the series, having become for me the big British voice of Jack and the lean Irish voice of Stephen. And I love his nasal, raspy, “shrewish” Killick, too. Alas, this novel begins one of O’Brian’s story arcs within the overall careers of Jack and Stephen that may span a few books, so that this one ends with a fairly large cliffhanger. I also found the spy portion of the novel a little too sketchy and hinging on an unpleasant depiction of homosexuality (“pederasty”). But as it is a compact novel and as I continue to really enjoy spending time with Jack and Steven, I will happily (eventually) go onto book fourteen. View all my reviews
Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “I ain’t gonna be part of his science experiment!” The premise of Deathless Divide (2020), the sequel to Justina Ireland’s 19-century alternate history zombie apocalypse race relations novel Dread Nation (2018), is that during a Civil War battle for some unexplained reason the dead rose up and started attacking, eating, and turning the living. To kill the “shamblers” you must generally remove their heads, hence the preference among experienced fighters for bladed weapons (though they’re also proficient with firearms). African Americans are made to do the dirty work of putting down the dead, while whites stay out of harm’s way, though when an entire town is overrun by a horde, no one is safe. The southern and eastern states have been lost. With its protective mountains and deserts, California has resisted the worst of the shambler plague, but “Eventually, the dead will come walking.” The narrator Jane McKeene, now about 18, explains that at Miss Preston’s School for Combat for Negro Girls near Baltimore, she and Katherine Deveraux started off enemies, but that their adventures, culminating in an escape from the white nationalist “utopia” Summerland when it was overrun by a shambler horde at the end of the first novel, have made them best friends. Jane thinks she’s getting her ex-boyfriend Jackson back, until a shambler ambush and a past marriage destroy her hopes. Acompanying them are Jackson's little sister, an orphan boy, and some prostitutes. Jane also reveals her attraction to Gideon Carr, a white scientist-inventor. Jane et al decide to try for the Great Plains African American town of Nicodemus, where they hope to find some Miss Preston alumni. Jane’s ultimate goal is California, where she hopes her mother and aunt are waiting for her in an idyllic community called Haven. While Dread Nation was narrated solely by Jane, here she and Katherine take turns narrating chapters. Their different voices, personalities, and experiences complement each other. Their chapter epigraphs come from Shakespeare (Jane) and the Bible (Katherine). Jane is more violent, reckless, and down to earth, Katherine more ladylike, careful, and polite. With her golden skin, blond hair, and blue eyes, Katherine can pass for white, while Jane is obviously black. While Jane has loved both boys and girls, Katherine has never needed a lover. One moment, she’ll say, “A good pair of swords is always the best accessory,” the next, “I take a deep breath, enjoying the reassuring grip of the corset on my ribs before I set out.” Katherine fills us in on Jane killing the hateful sheriff of Summerland at the end of the first book. Ireland writes other interesting characters, like Jackson, who becomes a resentful but helpful haint haunting Jane; Gideon, who is driven to continue his experiments on living (especially black) people as he tries to perfect his anti-shambler serum so he can (he hopes) make up for causing the deaths of untold people; and Daniel Redfern, a Native American “survivor” who won’t risk his neck to help anyone. The first part of the novel takes place in the Great Plains, the second in California, morphing into a hardboiled zombie western, as Jane’s character transforms from the Angel of the Crossroads (shambler scourge) to the Devil’s Bride (human bounty hunter), saying things like “Killing a person who needs it is like making a garden. It's hard work but the result is pleasurable.” Gone are the days when she worries about crossing the line from survivor to killer. Katherine also changes in the second part, determining never again to pass for white, abandoning her corset, and becoming a shrewder observer of men. Jane’s part-two chapters start with epigraphs from books of sensational “true stories” of the “wilding west,” Katherine’s with quotations from travelers’ accounts of the wonders of California. Ireland imagines a fallen world of misery, loss, and death for all, and not only because of the zombies. At least as deadly for people of color are the pervasive white supremacy, racism, and discrimination. In San Francisco Katherine finds the same “greed and exclusion” as everywhere else in America, but here it's the Chinese running things, the whites paying for their labor and goods, and the negroes getting burnt out of their neighborhoods. Black people are “illegal” in the Oregon Territory, and criminals only get prices on their heads for crimes against whites. The absence of justice for black people in the novel’s alternate history reflects today’s USA. The sketchy steampunk elements introduced in the first novel remain underdeveloped here, with cameos by a “pony” (a steam-driven ironclad wagon) and a limited railgun. Ireland should leave such things out. And there are some unconvincing, lazy plot developments when for suspense Jane and or Katherine get snuck up on and put in tight spots there’s no way they would permit, given their trained, experienced, and capable characters. And the climax is too quick and tidy after so many chapters leading up to it. Nonetheless, the novel is exciting, moving, relevant, and funny. It’s exciting to read a book in which strong, capable, and charismatic young heroines of color have adventures and pursue justice in dangerous, unjust world. LGBTQ people are fully represented, too, even as Ireland resists de rigueur YA love triangles. And the writing is enjoyable, as in the following lines. “You and this corset are a recipe for disaster.” “My voice is as flat as the Great Plains themselves.” “God aint’ got nothing to do with this. It is the province of man.” “A mouthy Negro girl without any kind of sense? I am the world's most perfect scapegoat.” One sign of the strong writing is that, although audiobook reader Jordan Cobb irritatingly overread the overwrought Song of Wraiths and Ruin, she was OK reading Katherine’s half of this novel (though her “refined” English voice is egregious). When Katherine’s chapters read by Cobb feature Jane’s dialogue and when Jane’s chapters read by the *prime* Bahni Turpin feature Katherine’s, it’s not as jarring as it could be in less careful hands. The themes re race, revenge, survival, and identity are potent, the resolution satisfying, and Jane and Katherine appealing, so if Ireland writes a third book set in their world, I’ll read 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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