My January Reading

Well, 2015 started out strong on the reading front so I've decided to re-start my monthly summary of what I've been reading.  If I read something that really strikes me (and if I have the time) I'll blog about that book separately.  Although I enjoyed much of what I read this month, nothing hit me so strongly that I needed to drop everything and write about it.  Here's what I read:

1.  Kate Atkinson.

I've been wanting to read more Kate Atkinson ever since I read Life after Life last summer so I took the opportunity of my January "lull" in the workplace to do that.  I discovered through Helen at She Reads Novels that Akinson has written a series of "sorta" detective novels.  That seemed up my alley and a good way to ease back into reading.  In January I read  four of them:  Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There be Good News, and Started Early, Took My Dog.   I think those are all she has written in her series so far.

I call them "sorta" detective novels because they aren't really detective novels in the true sense of the word.  They seem more like literary fiction that simply features a (somewhat reluctant) detective named Jackson Brodie.  Former military and retired police, Brodie is more than up to whatever life throws at him. And Brodie is very fallible and at times can seem somewhat incompetent.   In Case Histories he has set himself up as a private investigator and is approached to find missing persons and missing things.  By the end of that novel he is able to retire completely but the next few books find him dragged into situations that require him to solve crimes.  Atkinson seems just as much, if not more, interested in the other characters she creates as she is in Brodie and it usually takes a good 100 pages or so before she really gets us into a real plot. That was ok with me because plot is often the least important thing in a book to me.  I admit, though, that her habit of spending a lot of time in characters' minds rather than on their actions does get a little tiring at times. But just about the time that I'm starting wonder if anything is ever going to happen, something unexpected happens.   Case Histories is probably the weakest of the four novels and she gets better and better with each subsequent novel, probably because with each novel she strays further and further from the genre demands of detective fiction.

One of the things that I really liked about Life after Life  was Atkinson's "voice" as a novelist, especially her devastating but understated sense of humor.  That sense of humor is there in the Brodie books but less so in the first couple books than in the last two.  Finally, in Started Early, Took my Dog she seems to have hit her stride and that same voice really comes out.   One of my favorite lines was when she was describing Brodie's taste in books.  He wasn't much of a guy for fiction.  "What he had discovered was that the great novels of the world were about three things -- death, money and sex.  Occasionally a whale." 

On the whole I enjoyed this series and hopes she gives us more Jackson Brodie.  I plan to look up her other novels this year and work my way through them.

2.  Storm at the Edge of Time by Pamela F. Service.    This may seem an odd choice for me to read, as it is really a children's book.  I was drawn to it because the author has a background in archaeology and the story is set in the Orkney Islands, which I would like to visit some day.   Three children, all from three different time periods, are drawn to a stone circle on one of the Orkney Islands and end up coming together through some kind of magic.  They go on a quest through the time periods to find the three pieces of a broken magical staff that will save the world.   Part of the story takes place in the last days of the Vikings, part takes place in current time and part takes place in the 26th century.  As an adult I didn't find it particularly gripping but I think an 11 year old might like it.

3.  The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson.  My book club chose this book and I was glad because I've been wanting to read it. Wilkerson won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction a few years ago for this book.   She tells the story of black migration from the American South to the rest of the United States in the years from about 1915 through 1970.  Wilkerson primarily tells this long history by focusing on three individuals:  Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster.

Ida Mae was born in Mississippi where her family picked cotton.  She moved up to industrial Chicago with her husband in the 1930's after a relative was beaten almost to death for a crime he didn't commit.  Ida Mae was an uneducated woman who was hard working and seemed to be genuinely good person.  George was from Florida where his people were fruit pickers.  He got part of a college education before his father stopped paying for it.  He moved New York in the 1940's when he was warned that he was going to by lynched for trying to gain more rights for the pickers.  George got a job as a baggage handler on the east coast train lines.  Robert Foster was born in Louisiana, became a doctor and moved to California in the 1950's because he thought there was more scope for him to succeed than there was in Louisiana.  He was married to a woman from an upper class black Atlanta family.  Robert eventually became the physician to Ray Charles.

The substance of the book is fascinating and thought provoking.  Be warned that it is long - my paperback version is over 600 pages (although the pages after p. 538 are acknowledgements, notes, index, etc.)  It took me a long time to get through, longer than I expected.  My one complaint (and the one reason I kept putting it down) is that it is written in language that,  to me, seemed to be at about the 6th grade level.  Certainly a high school student could easily read this book and understand it.  Most people would call it "accessible" and consider that a compliment.  I, on the other hand, found myself bored by the style.   For instance, here she is on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor:  "On the other side of the Earth, at a harbor in Hawaii, a bomb exploded. It was at a naval base. Pearl Harbor.  People heard it on the radio, not knowing what it meant."

Almost all of the book is written in that style.  You could easily read this book out loud to a child of seven (if you didn't mind reading to your child about lynchings and racism) and they would understand what they were hearing.  Sometimes there will be interludes between the stories of Ida Mae, George and Bob that are written in normal, adult non-fiction style and I found myself flying through those parts.   Most people will not have a problem with this and will probably consider it a plus, but for me it was sometimes excruciating and I just had to put it down and read something else written at an adult level. Besides that, however, I'm glad I read it.

4.  Some Luck by Jane Smiley.  The first book in a planned trilogy, Jane Smiley is telling a family saga.  Interestingly, however, she doesn't tell it in an epic style.  There is no narrative arc, things just happen.  Every chapter is another year, beginning in 1920 and ending in 1953.  In some ways the family experiences everything that happened to the country in that time period and in other ways they just skirted the edges.  Within each chapter, the story is told in the third person, but shifting between the points of view of the various characters.  Often the point of view is that of a child ... which I, truthfully, found mostly boring.  But I liked the adult points of view, including the points of view of the adults who started out as children.  I can't honestly say that I loved this novel.  I love her writing style but I found the structure of the novel caused me difficulty engaging with the characters.  But I enjoyed it enough that I'll read the next two books.

5.  A Fine Summers Day by Charles Todd.  The next in the Inspector Rutledge series, Todd goes back in time to before the Great War, before Rutledge became a victim of PTSD.  I was doubtful about this, prequels often don't work.  There is no suspense because we know what comes next.  But this one does work.  The future doesn't really matter for the story itself and seeing Rutledge as he was before the War makes Rutledge after the War much sadder.  So far, the writing duo of Charles Todd, hasn't managed to create a woman character worthy of Rutledge but I wondered if maybe one of the female characters in this volume might come back later.  And no, I don't mean the vapid fiance, Jean who of course is back.

6.  The Children Act by Ian McEwan.  I admit to being a big Ian McEwan fan.  I like the way he strings sentences together and I usually like the settings of his novels.   This one is set in the legal community of London.  I spent some time in London during one trip wandering around near Lincoln's Inn and so I could picture some of the settings.  It's not a long novel and I flew through it.  Not my very favorite McEwan novel but I did enjoy it.

7.  Poetry of the First World War:  An Anthology edited by Tim Kendall.  I've been working my way through the poems in this anthology for three or four months and finally finished it.  My immediate take away was that it wasn't a surprise that, of the poets that survived the war, only Robert Graves really went on to great things.  My second thought was that I really don't like most of the WWI poets.  I was glad to find the Laurence Binyon poem, For the Fallen, from whence came the famous stanza: "They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:  Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them."  I don't think I had ever read the entire poem before. But it ended up being symbolic of the entire set of poems.  Certain lines in some of the poems struck me, very few entire poems touched me.  I might, however, read some more Robert Graves.

April Reading (and Television Viewing)

April was not a great month for me for reading, at least in terms of volume.  In fact, looking back on the month, I'm a little shocked to find that I only finished four books last month.   Here they are:

1.  Lean In, by Sheryl Sandberg.   I wanted to read this book but I also needed to read it because the women at my firm decided to have a discussion about it at a brown bag lunch one day. And it turned out to be great discussion.

While I think that any woman could read this book and get something out of it, it clearly isn't directed to all women. Sandberg is pretty up front about that.   It will appeal more to women who see themselves in a career rather than a job, and will especially appeal to women like me who made the decision early on to climb some kind of ladder - either because that is what drives them or, like me, because I am in a career that is "up or out" (i.e. you either keep rising or you are asked to leave). Women whose priorities in life are not, and may never be, related to their job may not find themselves as interested in this book.

Our work discussion was great because all the women in the group were lawyers committed to practicing law for the rest of our lives.  While some have young children and have cut back on their hours temporarily, they do not see that as taking them off the career path (indeed it can't because, as I say, law firm life is generally "up or out" still, no matter how much people may deny that it still is).  These women fully expect to return to full time work when their kids are older.  And all of us, whether we have children or not, face the same issues during the work day.  When I say we discussed the book, it would be more accurate to say that we used the book as a jumping off place to discuss the many issues that we face every day in our work day. 

Sandberg does fill the book with a lot of helpful data (backed up by many pages of footnotes).  None of it was news to me but it was helpful to have it all in one place written in accessable language.  I found myself wishing that some of the MEN in my organization would read the book so that they could more fully understand what the women are up against from an institutional point of view.

I've read a lot of reviews of the book.  The negative reviews mostly seem to complain that it isn't a different book.  Many wished  that Sandberg had spent more time discussing how to change institutional barriers (and reviewers who say that she doesn't discuss them at all are totally off base - in fact, I found myself wondering if some of the people who wrote negatively about the book had even read the book.  Sandberg manages to touch on almost everything, she just doesn't explore everything).

This is definitely a book that focuses on women taking control of what they can control and helping them with some strategies for that.   That appeals to me and I found it appealed very much to the women in our discussion group.  But then, it would.  Women who go to law school tend to be self-starters, very independent, and, most of all, pragmatic.   We recognize that institutional barriers exist (oh trust me, we recognize it all the time) but, in the meantime, while we wait and hope and work toward removing them, we have to get on with our own careers.  Talking in practical terms about what we can do in the here-and-now to help those careers is always welcome.

I've gone back to one of reading groups I had temporarily dropped out of and they will be discussing this book next month.  It will be interesting to compare the discussions.  I recommend this book. 

2.   Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck.   As I said, I've returned to one of my reading groups and this was their choice this month.  I know that I've read Cannery Row before, many many years ago when I was on a John Steinbeck kick.  But I really didn't remember it, so it was all new to me.  I had a recollection that I loved the way Steinbeck wrote and wondered if I would feel the same 20 or 30 years later.  I did.  This novel is a series of vignettes of the people (most of whom are down on their luck but don't see it that way) living in a California coastal town whose main employer is the fish (sardine) canneries.   Not that any of these people work for the canneries except occasionally when they really need money. There isn't much in the way of plot, which is fine with me.  Lots of characterization - Steinbeck makes me think well of people who, if I met them in real life, I'd probably run away from.  And, oh how he can string together sentences.    Recommended.   Although if you've never read any Steinbeck, I'd recommend Grapes of Wrath instead.

3.  Ancient Lights, by John Banville.   I've been reading this through my NOOK app for a few months now.  It took me a long time to finish even though it is not a long book, partly because I used it as my lunchtime reading and I didn't have much time for lunch reading but also because I wanted to read it slowly.  Like Steinbeck, Banville is an expert at stringing together sentences.  I found myself re-reading paragraphs, sometimes aloud, just for the joy of his language (another reason it was hard to read at lunch unless I was alone).  There is, again, not much of a plot.   The book is written as a stream of consciousness memoir by an older character remembering the sexual relationship he had as a young boy with the mother of a friend of his (which at first gave me pause) combined with his more or less present day writing about a film he is in (he is an actor) and his thoughts on the death by suicide of his daughter.   I didn't realize until I reached the notes at the end that this novel is the third of a trilogy.  I might go back and read the first two books.  Recommended.

4.  Arcadia by Lauren Groff.   When I first started practicing law I worked with a woman who had lived in a commune in the 1970's.  I never talked about it with her, other people told me.  I remember thinking "How horrible.  I would never want to live in a commune." This novel about a boy who grows up in a commune in upstate New York was not, therefore, something that I expected to really find myself relating to.   And I didn't.  Groff did keep my interest through the first two sections which covered the main character's childhood and adolescence at the commune.  But it was downhill for me from there.  The third part takes place years later after the commune fell apart and his own marriage has fallen apart.  Since I couldn't see the joy of communal living and certainly didn't see the appeal of the character's missing unstable former drug addict wife, I kept waiting for him to come to his senses and just move on. The fourth part takes place in an apocalyptic near-future when the climate has changed so much that some food is no longer available and some kind of flu is wiping out much of the population.  I think it was 2018 (which I found hard to buy into since that is right around the corner).  I disliked that section intensely in terms of plot and characters.

Groff writes well which is why I kept going.  And I can't say that her characters were caricatures - she made them very real to me.  And she certainly didn't portray the commune as a utopia, nor did she portray it as a terrible place (at least not until the end).  Her portrayal seemed even handed to me.  The truth is that I have, and have always had, a viscerally negative reaction to the kind of people are most likely to think living in a commune is a good thing and especially to the kind of character who, after escaping from one, would actually miss it.  That's really just me and not a problem with Groff.  So while I can't recommend this novel since I mostly just wanted it to be over by the last part, people who don't have the kinds of issues I have might enjoy it.

And that was it for April.  One of the reasons I read fewer books was because I became caught up in a number of television series.  Oddly, all of them were on cable and I don't have cable.   But the descriptions intrigued me enough that I bought iTunes season passes for them.  They included:  (1)  Spies of Warsaw, based on a novel by Alan Furst that I read last year; (2) Top of the Lake, an original Sundance Channel series directed by Jane Campion, set in New Zealand and starring Elizabeth Moss and Holly Hunter; (3) Vikings, an original scripted drama from The History Channel (!) about, well, Vikings and based on Scandinavian sagas about Ragnor Lothboke; (4) Doctor Who ('nuff said); (5) Orphan Black an original BBC America series about a group of human clones all played by Tatiana Maslany; and (6) Defiance, set in a post-apocalyptic, post-alien invasion, St. Louis (how could I not watch it, if only to see how they kept the Arch still standing despite missing a chunk). I enjoyed and recommend all of them.

I wasn't wild about the novel Spies of Warsaw when I read it, I thought it moved kind of slowly and didn't have a real ending.  The television show is much better (and has more plot than the novel; I think I read somewhere that the screenwriters also used parts of other Furst novels), although it still moves slowly and doesn't have a real ending.   Top of the Lake reminded me a bit of Twin Peaks.  It was full of odd characters and, in many ways, the actual solution to the mystery wasn't all that important - although it did manage a few surprises for me at the end. 

I truly loved Vikings and am thrilled it is coming back next year.  It is violent but not gratuitously so - after all it's about ... Vikings!  Someday, someone should adapt Dorothy Dunnet's epic novel King Hereafter as a series.  It takes place about 200 years after this television show, during the late days of the Vikings, after Scandinavia becomes nominally Christian.

Of all the shows I've watched, the one I can't stop telling people to watch is Orphan Black.  Tatiana Maslany is doing amazing work playing human clones who look alike but have completely different personalities (including characters impersonating other characters).   In a just world she would get an Emmy.  And the story is odd and entertaining. I regularly think that this series is what Dollhouse should have been and wonder if Joss Whedon is watching it.  I might write about it when it is over.  HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Defiance has just started and while it seems somewhat derivative of other science fiction shows, I love this kind of science fiction.  Hopefully, once the writers set the stage and establish all the characters it can develop a unique voice.  And they still haven't explained the Arch fix yet.

Doctor Who - well,  Doctor Who.  :)

Discuss Among Yourselves

I belong to two different reading groups and, recently, I've been thinking of taking a break from both of them. Not a permanent break, just a hiatus.

One of my groups meets once a month and the other meets about every six weeks. That means that every two months I have to read three books for my groups. And that is certainly a manageable number. But I am having a problem with it. It is not that I can't read three books in two months but I am, more and more, finding that I want to use the time I take to read those three books to read different books.

The Summer is not Infinite

A lot of people are reading Infinite Jest this summer.  Some people have even started group blogs to blog about their reading of Infinite Jest.

I find myself both uninterested in reading Infinite Jest this summer and jealous beyond belief of the people who know enough other people willing to read the same novel and blog together about it as a group.

(btw, other people are reading Villette this summer and blogging/discussing it. )

People of the Book

One of my reading groups chose Geraldine Brooks' People of the Book to discuss this month.   I forgot what we had chosen and only remembered to ask someone about a week before I was supposed to have read it.  I raced through it but  I finished it in time.

The novel is the story of people and of a book, the Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century Spain.  Brooks tells the story of the people who created it and who saved it from destruction throughout the centuries sometimes at great cost to themselves.  The novel is divided between two stories.  One is the modern story of Hanna, a rare book specialist who is called to Sarajevo in the 1990's to conserve the book, which has been in a bank deposit box during the war and is now to be displayed.  This story takes place over the length of the novel but it is interrupted for brief stories about other persons who were important in the history of the book.   And each of these individual stories ties into something that Hanna found when conserving the book:  a fragment of a butterfly wing, a cat hair, a wine stain, etc.

There seemed to be a bit of disagreement in our group (I was in the kitchen making coffee so I missed most of it) between those who liked the modern story and those who liked the historical stories, but it didn't seem to be a big disagreement.   I thought that one of the saddest parts of the book was that we the reader completely "discovered" the history of the book but Hanna never did.  As in real life, she could only take the clues that she found in the physical book and try to learn from them the barest of detail about where the book had been. 

Each of us had our favorite parts of the historical sections.  Mine was the last section in which a slave in Moorish Spain creates the beautiful pictures to which text is later (in another story) added.  But many in my group thought that the story of the rabbi in Venice was the most poignant.   Interestingly we didn't spend much time talking about the political situation of Sarajevo, although that is a big part of the novel.

Because I read the novel so fast I missed a couple of connections.  The historical sections are told in reverse chronological order and often you discover in another section something that happens to a character you are reading about.   It was good to have a discussion and have people point out those instances.

The one thing we all agreed was that the author had Hanna jump too fast into her relationship with Karaman.  Maybe we're all too pragmatic to believe that people can meet each other and immediately feel that connection - other than, of course, lust.  I also thought that a few of the plot points made things just a little too easy.  For instance, the part in which Hanna just happens to join her mother in the city where her (unknown) father's family lives and then her mother gets into a car accident with Hanna's (unknown) grandmother.  I like the people in my novels to have to work toward discoveries, not have them thrown in their laps. 

I think that bothered me more than anyone else (I'm always more interested in structure than character).  We discussed whether the author just needed to keep the plot moving so that we could move on to the next historical section and everyone in the group seemed satisfied with that explanation.  Everyone except me.  Truthfully, I thought this novel would have been better if the author had decided on one story or the other.  Either a novel about Hanna that was fully developed or a huge historical novel that spans generations.   Again, I'm left to wonder why an author chose to tell such a big story in such a small book.  I would have liked a little more development.

Laura Lippman's Tess Monaghan

I haven't posted much lately about books I've been reading. But that's not because I'm not reading. On the contrary, I'm flying through books.

At the suggestion of andif, I've been reading Laura Lippman's series of mystery novels that feature Baltimore private investigator Tess Monaghan. I love a good mystery series and this, so far, has been a really good series. I've read Baltimore Blues, Charm City, Butcher's Hill, In Big Trouble, The Sugar House and In a Strange City. I'm working on The Last Place right now.

Like I said, I love mystery novels. But I don't usually talk about them. Sometimes one of my reading groups picks one to read and there really isn't a whole lot to say after everyone decides whether or not the ending was surprising. A series is another matter because then there is often (but not always) an underlying story that builds the characters and can be a topic for discussion. But most reading groups don't commit to a whole series.

I thought I'd take a break from reading and talk a bit about why I'm enjoying this series. First, she hasn't annoyed me with erroneous lawyer detail. Yes, there is the obligatory lawyer, but he has only a small part in the series. He is important to Tess because he is a rowing coach as much as for his legal connections. Lippman spends very little time ever talking about him practicing law - which is a good thing. That means I'm not distracted by erroneous or unlikely lawyer details, as I often am in these types of series. And what she does talk about she either gets right or it's close enough to right that it isn't a distraction for me. For instance, one of the clever things about this series, is the reason there is an obligatory lawyer in the first place: to give Tess a confidential relationship with her clients. That's a really good reason and it's believable. Lippman doesn't quite get it right (or, she got it right once but then stopped getting it right), but that doesn't really matter because she has the overall idea right.

The other thing she's done right is give really good descriptions of Baltimore that paint a picture but don't go into so much detail that it is distracting. I like a mystery series that makes me feel part of a city: the London of Lord Peter Wimsey; the Rome of Marcus Didius Falco; the Edinburgh of John Rebus. Often when an author sets a story in a "second" city there is either too much description or too little. If there isn't enough description there is no sense of place. But too much detailed description (and this is usually the case) makes the reader feel like a visitor instead of a resident.

So far in my reading only one book was set outside the Baltimore area: In Big Trouble. So far, it has been my least favorite of the series, but not because of the descriptions of San Antonio. She does a good job with those. No, the problem for me was that Tess ended up solving the mystery in Texas the same way she would have done it in Baltimore, which was completely unrealistic. Lippman has done a great job of giving Tess a network in Baltimore with lots of contacts that can help her solve cases: newspaper contacts from her previous job, legal contracts, contacts within the police force and especially family and friend contacts that are very believable. Tess comes from a low profile politically connected family in Baltimore; not the glamorous political connections but the working class, bureaucracy connections (I'm waiting to see if she ever uses her mother's connections at the NSA). She also has a good friend that comes from money and that provides her with entry into circles that would otherwise be closed to her.

But in Texas she has no real contacts and yet... everyone opens up to her. I found it especially unbelievable that a homicide detective would sit there and share speculation about the case with a total stranger who has just found the dead body. This is one of my pet peeves about many mysteries I read. The detective just has to show up and everyone opens up. I was glad when Lippman moved Tess back to Baltimore.

I particularly liked Butcher's Hill, which had a couple of really good plot twists that were unexpected but not so much of a stretch that I found them unbelievable. And I liked In a Strange City which had a wealth of interesting tidbits about Baltimorean Edger Allen Poe. So far, the plots aren't formulaic and Tess grows and learns as the series goes along. In the current book I'm reading, The Last Place, she has been forced to go to anger management classes and it will be interesting to see how she comes out of those. (This one also involves a serial killer and is giving me the creeps.)

I'll be sorry when I get to the end of this series.

This and That: Book Clubs, Children's Books, George Clooney, etc.

• So, who watched Castle? It was ... good enough to pass the time on the typical brain dead Monday night. I was doubtful during the first half hour but I liked the second half. Although they could lose the mother character.
• I belong to two book clubs and neither one of them has ever considered that we should turn the club into ... well, a club. But a book club in Canada did. They built themselves a private club complete with a bar serving premium liquors.

  The board originally hoped to sell 120 two-person memberships at $100 each; they've now sold 340 and are considering capping the number, Hunziker says.

  “And this is in a town of 700!” she points out.

  Sounds like my kind of book club! (h/t HeyLady)

• When I was in third grade my favorite book was Baby Island. Don't ask me why. I think the whole idea of being washed up on a desert island just fascinated me. Today the idea of being stranded on a desert island with a boat of babies sounds like my kind of hell. But I still remember Baby Island fondly. And Carrie brought back those memories by mentioning it in a blog post about good books to read aloud.
• Did I mention that George Clooney is here shooting a movie? It's called Up in the Air and, while lot of it is being shot at the closed D Concourse out at the airport, they are also shooting downtown. Lots of sightings starting to happen. For instance, George shoots hoops at St. Louis University's arena. The local paper even published an interactive map where fans could pinpoint where they had seen him . My favorite entry was the one that claimed to see him in Springfield Missouri (about 3.5 hours from here) where he was caught scaling a fence trying to peek in the window of Brad Pitt's childhood home. Of course as The Riverfront Times pointed out, if George had been all the places people spotted him:

he'd almost certainly be dead or in jail by now. One reader reports seeing him "harassing midgets" in Granite City. Another saw him drinking a forty in Fairground park, and yet another reports witnessing the actor as he stabbed a man at a Popeye's restaurant and stole the victim's three-piece meal and fruit punch.
Yet another reader says he beat Clooney in a go-kart race in St. Charles. The actor has also been reported at numerous east side gentlemen's clubs where he supposedly has an insatiable thirst for the "chocolate milk" -- whatever that means.

Today one of my colleagues told me that she spotted him. Yep, live and in person. And I believe her. I hope I spot him and get to talk to him. Because I really want to have a political conversation with him. Really.

Not Reading "The Kindly Ones"

There used to be a big independent bookstore located right across the street from my office building. Among other things, it had a cafe that served coffee, pastries and light sandwiches at lunchtime. I used to walk across the street for lunch at least twice a week. Sometimes I would go with other people but often I would go by myself. I would often run into other people I worked with while standing in line to pick up a sandwich and we'd grab a table together to eat before we wandered off separately to check out our favorite sections of the store.

One day there was a table of about six of us who had run into each other by chance. We ended up in an animated discussion of a review we had all read in the New York Times Book Review. It turned out that none of us had read the book in question or had any interest in reading the book in question. But we had a fantastic discussion about the review. We laughingly said that we should start a lunchtime book club in which we only discussed well written book reviews.

I was thinking about this as I've been reading reviews of Jonathan Littel's The Kindly Ones, which I have not read nor do I particularly want to read. Littel's novel, written in French, was recently translated into English. It is a fictional memoir of Dr. Maximillian Aue, a former Nazi officer who observed and engaged in the atrocities of the Nazi regime. It also tells his individual story in which he murders his mother and engages in an incestuous relationship with his sister.

While highly acclaimed in Europe, winning prestigious awards, it was also subject to much criticism. The very idea of telling a story of the holocaust from the perspective of a Nazi simply offends some people. Others were offended by what they call the "pornographic" nature of the sections dealing with Aue's personal life.

As the Waterstones Books Quarterly says:

Despite the massive (and, admittedly, unexpected) commercial success of the book, it has divided critical opinion, being vilified and exalted in equal measure. While some critics have compared the novel to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Littell has been disparaged elsewhere as ‘a pornographer of violence’, and has been criticised for his graphic descriptions of incestuous sexual fantasy and the protagonist’s apparent obsession with his bodily functions. It has to be said that this novel is definitely not for the faint-hearted or easily offended.

Now it is coming to the English speaking world. In the first review I read, in the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani panned the novel. But I didn't take it very seriously because Kakutani's review mostly seemed concerned with pointing out that her view was better than all of those other people in the world who have said that this is a novel worth reading. She begins the review by listing all the prizes the novel has won and then she belittles them:

The novel’s gushing fans, however, seem to have mistaken perversity for daring, pretension for ambition, an odious stunt for contrarian cleverness. Willfully sensationalistic and deliberately repellent, “The Kindly Ones” — the title is a reference to the Furies, otherwise known in Greek mythology as the Eumenides — is an overstuffed suitcase of a book, consisting of an endless succession of scenes in which Jews are tortured, mutilated, shot, gassed or stuffed in ovens, intercut with an equally endless succession of scenes chronicling the narrator’s incestuous and sadomasochistic fantasies.

Yes, all of those other people in the world were ... mistaken. How simple.

She concludes:

Whereas the philosopher Theodor Adorno warned, not long after the war, of the dangers of making art out of the Holocaust (“through aesthetic principles or stylization,” he contended, “the unimaginable ordeal” is “transfigured and stripped of some of its horror and with this, injustice is already done to the victims”), whereas George Steiner once wrote of Auschwitz that “in the presence of certain realities art is trivial or impertinent,” we have now reached the point where a 900-plus page portrait of a psychopathic Nazi, dwelling in histrionic detail on the barbarities of the camps, should be acclaimed by Le Monde as “a staggering triumph.”

So there.

Last week a second New York Times review by David Gates was published, also not recommending the novel: "When you get this far into a novel, you should be able to tell whether something’s intentionally preposterous; but in this book, apparently a middlebrow historical epic gone willfully weird, it’s hard to trust that the author knows what he’s doing." But at least Gates gave Littel credit for trying something big, but failing. Littel, perhaps, bit off more than he could chew:

While “The Kindly Ones” may have a Nabokovian narrator — obscurantist in his erudition, hyperspecialized in his sexual tastes — its exhaustively researched historicity and documentarian realism clearly derive from “War and Peace.” It would take a writer of unimaginable genius to work these opposed tendencies into a coherent whole — and Tolstoy himself might have thought twice before trying to write fiction about the Holocaust. (Though, being Tolstoy, he would eventually have rolled up his sleeves anyhow.)

This review was a little more to my taste because I don't see the point in condemning a work without trying to figure out what the author was trying to do. On the other hand, Gates didn't try very hard, asking questions but then just "supposing" answers: "What does Littell hope to reveal with what Aue calls these “infantile obscenities”? I suppose we’re to connect this compulsion for self-completion with his indifference to the mass murders in which he’s complicit, but such peculiarity hardly seems necessary." My immediate thought was, then maybe the "peculiarity" was put there for another purpose?

As usual, I found the foreign press more interesting. The Times of London gave it a pretty good review while implying that anyone who really wants to enjoy it ought to read it in the original French. Some of us might even infer from the review that even the English translation could have been better if it had only been ... English: "This Anglo-American translation, which is certainly faithful, cannot quite capture the stunning use of language in the French original, in which harsh-sounding German ranks and technical terms strike the ear like the crack of a whip." Anglo-American translation. Hmmmm.

Interestingly, Littel is an American who has lived in France for years and he decided to write this novel in French. He did not, however do the translation.

The Times did acknowledge the controversies over this novel:

The book has caused a furious controversy. This is hardly surprising since in the past 25 years the Holocaust has become a sacred subject, mistakenly separated from and elevated above the Second World War itself. Some critics have argued that humanising one of the oppressors creates a form of empathy, if not sympathy. But I cannot understand how anybody could sympathise with Aue by the end of this book. Littell, a Jew, rightly believes that the prime duty of a writer as well as a historian is to understand. He has succeeded in putting himself inside the tortured mind of his character.

Aue's own sexual narcissism and perverse fixations with graphic scenes of degradation, to say nothing of a scatalogical leitmotif, has prompted accusations that the book constitutes a form of Nazi pornography. Yet it is a far cry from the crass SS orgies of Visconti's The Damned. Aue is completely obsessed by his twin sister, with whom he developed an incestuous relationship at puberty. There are mysterious details, such as the twice-mentioned fact that Aue is circumcised. Littell refuses to explain, saying that he himself is not sure what they signify, but that they felt essential when he wrote them: a form of symbolic logic that is intuitive and completely unplanned. As an author, he feels that it is up to the readers to analyse as they see fit. It is not the job of the novelist to explain his own work.

The review in The Globe and Mail was even more analytical, while not raving about the novel:

...The Kindly Ones is a work of art and it brings to its subject things only art can. To begin with, although it is ostensibly about the Shoah told from the side of a German soldier, it is actually a long meditation on transgression and the limits of the human imagination. Max Aue is homosexual, incestuous, matricidal. He is obsessed with feces, sperm and blood. Everything about him is about crossing a line. Why?

In order to rethink where our lines actually are, to think through what "limits" mean: moral limits, aesthetic limits, sexual limits. The great act of the imagination here is not only the imagining of what it would be like to be a Nazi (and, as Littell is a Jew, this is already a sacred act), it is also in trying to push the imagination to its furthest limits and, in doing so, to reaffirm limits, to reaffirm humanity. That is: It's only from outside of town that one knows where and what "town" is.

It was not until I read Daniel Mendelsohn's extremely well written analysis in The New York Review of Books that I wished that the "Book Review Book Club" existed so that we could discuss it.

Mendelsohn calls it an ambitious, serious novel and believes it worthy of serious treatment (implying that so far it hasn't received serious treatment from the English language press). According to Mendelsohn, to understand the novel we must understand Littel's ambitions - we must try to understand what Littel was trying to accomplish.

The key to these ambitions lies in the complex resonances of the novel's title. Bienveillantes is the French rendering of the classical Greek word Eumenides : the "well-meaning" or "kindly" ones, the ritual appellation rather hopefully used to designate the awful supernatural beings far better known to us as the Erinyes, or Furies. In Aeschylus' Oresteia—a work that Littell's novel repeatedly invokes, from the protagonist's casual reference to his closest friend as his "Pylades" to large plot elements, not the least of which is his murder of his mother and her second husband—the hero Orestes is pursued by these awful, slavering, dog-faced creatures, whose province is the punishment of kin murder, after he kills his mother, Clytemnestra, in a divinely ordained retribution for her murder of Orestes' father, Agamemnon. (Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon because he sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia in order to win favorable winds for his fleet's journey to Troy.)

The heart of the trilogy is in fact a competition between the claims of vengeance and the claims of justice: not for nothing does its climax, in the third play, take the form of a trial scene. For Eumenides ends with Orestes being acquitted by a newly instituted formal court of law, a result that enrages the Furies, who are finally appeased with a promise that they will henceforth no longer be reviled bogies but rather incorporated into the life of the Athenian state and given a new home beneath the Acropolis. In accordance with their new, rather domesticated status, their name gets prettified, too: instead of the dreadful Furies they will henceforth be known as Eumenides, "the kindly ones." And yet it is hard not to feel that this ostensibly happy ending has disturbing overtones: How tame, really, do we think these superficially redubbed Furies will be?

To name a literary work after the third play in Aeschylus' trilogy, then, is to invoke, with extreme self-consciousness, two related themes: one having to do with civilization in general, and the other with human nature. The former concerns justice, its nature and uses: how it is instituted, and then executed, how much it conflicts with, regulates, and possibly appeases the more primitive thirst for vengeance, which it is meant to supersede. The latter concerns the unsettling way in which, beneath even the most pleasant, "kindly" exteriors, dark and potentially violent forces lurk. Neither, needless to say, is restricted to Greek tragedy, or classical civilization; if anything, both are intimately connected to the main preoccupation of Littell's novel, the German program of extermination during World War II.

Mendelsohn then spends the next few pages working through the novel to see how Littel succeeds. He breaks the essay down into parts and first looks at the story of Aue as the "human brother" who, in the course of war, does inhuman actions by his own free will. In the next part he examines Aue's personal story and spends much time analyzing Littel's structure in terms of the story of Orestes, not only the Aeschylus version but as the classical story was later used by Jean Paul Sartre.

Littell's insistence on developing the fantastical, the grotesque, and the motif of extreme sexual excess that grow out of his Orestes theme is clearly the result of a choice; and he himself has carefully planted clues about the meaning, and the justification, of that choice, one that has little to do with the Holocaust per se, or with novelizing history, and everything to do with something very French and very literary.

Exactly halfway through The Kindly Ones, Aue finds himself in Paris—this is in 1943, the trip at the end of which he will go to the South and murder his mother—and, while strolling among the stalls of the bouquinistes, picks up a volume of essays by Maurice Blanchot (an author whom Littell has studied seriously and who, by a nice coincidence, has been recently translated by Ms. Mandell, the translator of The Kindly Ones). Inevitably, Aue is very much taken with an essay that he vaguely describes as being about a play by Sartre on the Orestes theme: the volume in question, then, must be Blanchot's 1943 collection Faux Pas, which, in a section called "From Anguish to Language," contains the essay "The Myth of Orestes," and the Sartre drama in question is Les Mouches, which was first produced in 1943. Aue says little about the essay, apart from paraphrasing its point that Sartre "used the figure of the unfortunate matricide to develop his ideas on man's freedom in crime; Blanchot judged it harshly, and I could only approve."

Sartre's play has famous connections to the Occupation and the moral dilemmas of France: in it, Orestes returns home to Argos to find a corrupted city and, indeed, a corrupted cosmos; he learns from Zeus himself that the gods themselves are unjust, a discovery that renders absurd his, or anyone's, wishful yearnings for a life uncomplicated by moral anguish, indeed for a life in which one could simply be a person like any other person, a "human brother."

Where Mendelsohn differs from many other reviewers is in his belief that the "pornographical" sections are not gratuitous or unnecessary, but are absolutely necessary to Littel's vision of what he is trying to achieve.

And so, rather than using the graphic details of violence and sex simply (and naively) to shock his reader in a superficial way, the violence, the "pornography of violence" even, are consciously evoked, given their baroquely nightmarish details, in order to heighten the "impression of the sacrilegious"—not to somehow defend Aue because he is outside of morality, but to show us, horribly, what a life outside of morality looks, feels, sounds, and smells like. The "pornographic" material is not a shallow symbol of Max's evil (a puritanical reading, if anything): it is, rather, Littell completing Sartre's unfinished task, "pushing the abjection far enough," struggling to show "impiety against real piety"—the "piety," in this case, being our own conventional pruderies and expectations of what a novel about Nazis might look like.

In this sense, The Kindly Ones places itself squarely within the tradition of a "literature of transgression," especially the French lineage that descends from the Marquis de Sade and the Comte de Lautréamont to Octave Mirbeau and Georges Bataille. Particularly in the elaborate sexual fantasies, the teenage sex between siblings, the coprophilia and incest themes, it is hard not to feel the influence, above all, of Bataille, to whose signature work, Histoire de l'Oeil, in which a violently detached eye becomes a sexual fetish used with great inventiveness, Littell seems to allude more than once in scenes of eyes popping out of crushed or exploded heads. I think that Littell might say that precisely because we are by now inured to representations of Nazi evil in literature and especially in film, he needs to break new taboos in order to make us think about evil, about a life lived in evil and a mind unsentimentally willing, even eager, to accept the ramifications of that choice.

This is a marvelous essay. It led to all kinds of thoughts. Was this a novel that could only be appreciated in Europe where the remnants of classical education still exist? Or does the commercial success of the novel in Europe speak less to the presence of a classical education than to the timelessness of the ancient Greek stories? Or was the commercial success so grounded in the lingering fascination with the war in the former battlegrounds of that war that it will not translate to untouched American soil? Or does it simply say something about the choices made by newspaper publishers with respect to who gets to review a book and get it published in the New York Times. And an even more basic question: Is it no wonder we have very few novels of ideas in our time when there seem to be so few persons who have the background necessary to understand those ideas?

In any event, it didn't make me want to read the novel. But I do encourage everyone to read Mendelsohn's essay.

A Thousand Splendid Suns

One of my reading groups chose the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini, as this month's book to read. A New York Times best seller, this novel has been recommended to me by many people. It has a compelling story. I predict we will have a good discussion about this novel.

In the end, though, it didn't grab me. I would never want to read it again.

What I started wondering about half-way through this novel was: Why did Hosseini choose to take a story that spins out over a long number of years and confine it to 400 pages?

I often wonder about length of novels. How does an author decide to balance the span of years of the story with the number of pages he has allotted to himself? There doesn't seem to be a rule: authors seem to be free to lock themselves into any page limitation (or lack of limitation) they want. I look at my nightstand and I see Anna Karenina, a novel of 800 pages but with a story that takes place over only a few years. But ... Anna Karenina was written a long time ago in another time and in another country.

My first thought was that Hosseini was influenced by what the modern American book industry thinks will sell. I didn't want to think that - but I did. I've noticed over the last number of years that most novels sitting on the piles of "new fiction" at Barnes and Noble are, at their most basic level (page count), structured the same way. They are between 300 and 400 pages. It's almost as if a story that can't be told in less than about 350 pages shouldn't be told. And 400 pages seems to be pushing it; most new novels seem to be about 300 pages.

This seemed unfair to Hosseini - to think that he "sold out" to the book industry and was only interested in creating a best seller and not a successful novel. And since I think this novel will provoke good discussion, I wondered if I was wrong to make this initial judgment.

But the fact is that, for whatever reason, Hosseini chose to tell a BIG story in under 400 pages. This would be a difficult task for any author. Hosseini's tale is not set over 40 years of peace and prosperity where the most exciting thing that happens in the world surrounding the characters is the birth of new lambs each spring. No, this is a story in which the world the characters inhabit is beset with coups d'etat and war and invasion and revolution and religious misery.

Hosseini seemed to solve this problem (or try to solve it) by telling a small story set amidst a big background. This is a story of how big events affect ordinary people. That's a perfectly legitimate choice, used many times before. What is Gone With the Wind but the story of one woman living amongst the chaos of a civil war and its aftermath. Of course, Margaret Mitchell chose to tell that 10 year story in almost 1,000 pages. Which again, begs the question, of why Hosseini chose to limit his page number in this way. Notice I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt that he chose to limit his pages. If I assume that he didn't make that choice consciously and it just ended up being 400 pages, then we move into a whole other discussion. But I truly think it was planned.

The other thing that Hosseini seemed to do to solve the problem was to tell thirty years of the forty year story from the point of view of young girls. A simplistic point of view. Maybe because I just finished reading To Kill a Mockingbird, I found myself wishing through the first half of the novel that the little girls' stories were told from a more retrospective point of view rather than right there in the moment. The simplicity of their thought processes bored me a bit. I like little girls; I was a little girl once. But I don't particularly find the perspectives of little girls all that enlightening.

The other question that went through my mind was: why did Hosseini decide to break up the stories of his two principal characters through the first half of the novel? Given his page limitation I thought it was odd that he chose to tell the entire story of both women in straight chronological time. Mariam and Leila are not the same age, so it would be impossible to tell a simultaneous story about Mariam's childhood and Leila's childhood in a chronological fashion - they had to follow each other. But this means that in order to reach the point in the story where their lives intersect he has had to tell a 30 year tale in 200 pages. Each girl's story is about 15 years. If he had chosen to tell some of the stories in flashbacks or some other more complicated form than chronological he could have, perhaps, said more in fewer pages. And perhaps this would have allowed for deeper characterizations of the other characters in the story.

I thought that many of the characters in this novel, other than the principal characters, were simply sketches. Some sketches in the first half of the novel are drawn more boldly than others but they are still drawn for the reader and not, I think, created for the reader. I found it difficult to enter the story and experience what the characters were feeling in the first half of the novel This does not mean I didn't understand what the characters were feeling (the author is a competent writer, he's very clear about what they are feeling.) But I didn't feel it in my gut.

For instance, the death of Mariam's mother in Part One did not carry the weight with me that it could have. Nor, even, did the betrayal by Mariam's father. I felt as if the bare plot outline of Part One was good enough, and compelling enough, to have justified its own 350 page novel. Certainly the characters introduced in Part One that surround Mariam are complicated characters and further fleshing out of those characters would have been welcome. And yet Hosseini hurried through those 21 years of his story.

My problems with the novel fell away about half-way through Part III when I did step into the women's lives and care about them. But when I reached the end I found myself a bit annoyed that I had to read 400 pages to appreciate the approximately 50 pages that worked for me.

So I simultaneously thought the novel was too short and too long.

Ordinarily I would just shrug and put the book away and not wonder about why it didn't grab me. But I knew I needed to discuss it this week at my reading group and I also needed to figure out what I wanted to write about it.

I realize that I should try to judge a novel by what an author is trying to achieve and not by what I think he should have been trying to achieve. It is always dangerous to try to guess what an author's goal was when writing a novel, but I think Hosseini wanted to tell a story that would give the reader enough information to understand the plight of Afghani women over the last 40 years and get the world talking about it. And he achieved that. This novel is being discussed in book groups across the country and a lot of people are talking about the plight of women in countries like Afghanistan. So I suppose this novel is a success. But I still didn't like it.

As I pondered this, I happened across a completely unrelated blog post by Rohan Maitzen in which she admitted that an Egyptian novel she was reading came out of a completely different literary tradition than her own and that made her initially misunderstand it. Once she started to read the novel on its own terms, she appreciated it more.

I thought about that and I thought about Hosseini's novel and I wondered if perhaps the storytelling tradition out of which this novel comes is just not appealing to me. It struck me that the story is told in the way parables are told: small vignettes that are compelling - with just enough background and characterization to make for a good discussion. To write the novel in a more complex way, with flashbacks, would not work for a parable. The real discussion of a parable is going to be about the lesson to be drawn not about the plot or the characters - so the plot needs to be told in simple fashion and the characters can't be so interesting that they distract from the lesson. And that, possibly, is part of the reason that Hosseini made the choices he did with this novel. A linear, chronological story with enough detail to get the point across but not enough detail about the secondary characters to distract from what the lesson is. This novel will provoke discussion, but the discussion will always lead back to the plight of Afghani women in a general sense, not the specifics of this novel.

That is probably why this novel didn't work for me as a novel. I am a person for whom simple storytelling forms do not appeal. I don't like fairy tales. I don't like folk tales. I'm not wild about short stories. So a novel that is a parable would not be a type of novel that would appeal to me. Maybe that explains it.

But I expect the discussion tomorrow night to be good.

The Creative Process; The Gift of Creativity

Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of the best-selling memoir Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything across Italy, India and Indonesia. One of my book groups chose to read this book last year and I did enjoy it. It was a memoir about a woman trying to find balance in her life. She found it by, first, living in extremes. First she traveled to Italy and lived there for three months exploring pleasure (especially the pleasure of eating and drinking but also the pleasure of learning a new language and meeting new people). Then she moved on to India where she went to the opposite extreme and lived in an Ashram. Finally she went to Bali and tried to balance pleasure and devotion.

Elizabeth Gilbert was just at the 2009 TED conference and gave a talk on some of the things she's thinking about these days - mostly the idea of genius. But she is not thinking about genius as we usually conceive of it in this day and age. She is thinking of genius the way the ancients conceived of it - the kernel of creativity within us.

Lewis Hyde discussed this in his book The Gift. It was an important but small part of this book. Here is my description of Hyde's discussion:

Hyde spends time talking about the the ancient concept of the idios daemon, which the Romans referred to as each man's genius, a completely different concept than what we refer to as genius today. This was a man's personal spirit and to labor in the service of your personal spirit was an accepted part of the ancient world. On his birthday a man would receive gifts but would also sacrifice to his own genius so that when he died he could become a familiar household spirit and not a restless ghost who preys on the living.

"The genius or daemon comes to us at birth. It carries with it the fullness of our undeveloped powers. These it offers to us as we grow, and we choose whether or not to accept, which means we choose whether or not to labor in its service. For, again, the genius has need of us. As with the elves, the spirit which brings us our gifts finds its eventual freedom only through our sacrifice, and those who do not reciprocate the gifts of their genius will leave it in bondage when they die."

According to Hyde it is the sense of gratitude that causes a man to labor to bring forth the gift provided by his genius.'

I found Elizabeth Gilbert's perspective on genius interesting because she talks about it not only as a source of undeveloped powers but also as a source of anxiety for the artist, particularly the writer. And her conclusion is that a writer must stop worrying about genius, must think of it as being outside of herself and must think of it as a Gift to be enjoyed when it is there. I specifically liked that she counseled writers to address the invisible genius. So, for instance, when she was in the worst moments of writing her book and was sure it would be The Worst Book Ever - she addressed the invisible genius and basically said, "Look, if this is going to work you are going to have to do your part. But whether you do it or not I'm going to continue writing- because that's my job. Let the record show that I showed up for my part of the job."

Here it is:

Loving Frank's Fountainhead of Achievement

Last month one of my reading groups discussed Loving Frank, Nancy Horan's historical novel based on the love affair between the architect Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick.

The story, told in the third person but interspersed with "letters" written ostensibly by Borthwick, is told mostly from Borthwick's point of view. Borthwick met Wright when she and her husband, Ed Cheney, hired Wright to design a Prairie Style house for them in Oak Park, Illinois. For some reason, Horan decided to cover the crucial, initial interactions between the future lovers in a forward "written" by Borthwick and the novel suffers for this decision.

We are told in Borthwick's forward that, with the encouragement of her husband, she took on the task of working with Wright during the construction of the house and soon "was part of the team". Then the story shifts to the third person omniscient and we learn that those six months had seemed "enchanted" to her. At no time do we experience any of this enchantment and, in fact, throughout the novel it never became apparent to me what the attraction was between Borthwick and Wright. We are never shown the atraction, we are simply told by Borthwick that it exists.

It seems odd that Horan cannot convey any of the passion in a relationship that must have been passionate. In real life, the affair between Borthwick and Wright was a sensation covered extensively in the local Chicago papers. She left her husband and children for him and he left his wife and children for her. They stayed together for seven years. He built Taliesin, in Wisconsin, for her. They were together until she died.

Horan tells this story with as much detail as research will allow, and yet their relationship was a mystery to me. He was vain, arrogant, a liar, and a spendthrift. She was unhappy with a husband who she admits there was nothing wrong with (and whom Horan presents as an eminently decent man) and she claims to love her children even though she abandons them far from their home (and father) during an extended holiday in Colorado.

The novel suffered from too much exposition and not enough "scenes". It also suffered from lack of a dramatic arc. One of the problems with writing historical fiction is that history is history and lives don't always have dramatic arcs although they may have dramatic moments. To make a better story the author might have to alter history. Since Horan obviously didn't want to do that, it seemed to me that she really wanted to write a nonfiction work but didn't have enough research to make a whole book.

During our discussion, two members of my group said that parts of the story reminded them of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Since no one else in the group had ever read any Ayn Rand, we decided to give it a shot for our next discussion.

Rand's story does not suffer from lack of dramatic arc. But I found myself just as bewildered by the relationship of the fictional architect Howard Roark and his lover Dominique Francon as I was with the fictionalized Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick, although for different reasons. While Horan relied extensively on exposition, Rand relies heavily on dialogue. Although I read all of the words that Roark and Francon said to each other, I often had no idea what they were talking about. As I wrote earlier, Rand's novel read like a script of a film from the late 1930's-early 1940's. Lots of long speeches with lots of thinking aloud - except of course from the strong silent hero. (I was not surprised to learn that Gary Cooper played Roark in the movie version, it seemed written for him.) I felt that I might have understood the motivations of the characters a little better if there had been more exposition.

I was unaware that Ayn Rand had a philosophy and a following when I began the novel. I'm still not sure what that philosophy is because I decided to judge the novel only as a novel and not do any research into Ayn Rand and her beliefs. As I told friends that I was reading The Fountainhead, I found that the reactions were varied but always intense. Most people I know didn't like the novel although their reasons varied. A few people said it was one of their favorite novels. Almost everyone seems to have read it when they were young – except my sister cb who read it a few years ago after watching the movie Dirty Dancing and deciding she wanted to understand the fleeting reference to it made by one of the characters.

My own reaction was not intense at all. I didn't like it but I didn't intensely dislike it. I thought it was a better novel than Horan's because my bewilderment kept me wanting to read the story in the hope that things would become clearer; my bewilderment at the actions of Horan's characters simply made me exasperated with Horan. Rand made me think there was something wrong with my reading comprehension while Horan made me think there was something wrong with her writing.

I would not, however, read this novel again or even be tempted to read any other Rand novels. I disliked the characters and found that I didn’t care what they did or what happened to them. I found their motivations hard to follow, perhaps because of the lack of exposition or perhaps because I would lose track of the point of many of the long speeches. By the last 150 pages I couldn’t wait for it to be over.

As I read The Fountainhead I thought about the parallels with Loving Frank. Of course, the principal male character, Howard Roark, is an architect and apparently designed buildings in the style of Wright. I understand that many people think the character is modeled on Wright. But where Roark seemed mysterious, the Wright of Horan's novel just seemed pompous and annoying.

Where the stories intersect is in the absolute certainty of Borthwick and Wright that their happiness is the most important thing and far outweighs any unhappiness they might cause others. Borthwick was, for a time, the American translator of the Swedish feminist writer Ellen Key. In the novel, even Ellen Key tries to make Borthwick see that, perhaps, abandoning her children in the way that she did was an act of selfishness. But Borthwick has none of it.

In that way, Borthwick and Wright are similar to the principal characters of The Fountainhead, whose philosophy is summed up in Howard Roark's long courtroom speech at the end of the novel: There is nothing wrong with selfishness because true selfishness means staying true to your ideals, whereas selflessness means losing your own self. And certainly this is the way that Borthwick and Wright lived.

In the end, Wright created great works of architecture just as the fictional Howard Roark created great works of (fictional) architecture. It is tempting to say that real genius is selfish and justifiably so; that the world is better for what they create despite their selfishness.

But not everyone is a genius. And Borthwick is a good example of that. She is simply a smart woman who lived her life for herself and no one else. Like Dominique Francon, she didn't even live her life for the benefit of the man she loved. Mamah Borthwick left no lasting original work unlike Wright, or even Ellen Key. Dominique Francon created nothing lasting in The Fountainhead. Is it justifiable to live a life of selfishness if one has no genius to mitigate the hurt caused to others by your selfishness? Perhaps not. But in life people do what they do.

Although I did not enjoy The Fountainhead, I’m glad that I read it. Especially since the economic times seem to have brought out quite a few blog posts with Ayn Rand references. One might as well understand the allusions – even in economics.

The Amber Room

One of my reading groups chose The Amber Room by Steve Berry as this month's book. A thriller set in Germany, the Czech Republic, Russia, Belarus and Atlanta, it involves the typical "ordinary man/woman" who gets caught up in a complicated situation including threats to their lives by professional killers.

I feel that I should review it, but all I can say is that I've read better thrillers. I'm usually able to suspend disbelief while reading these types of novels, but not this time. Maybe because the main characters were a judge and a probate lawyer. I've never liked novels with lawyers as main characters because I always notice the things that would never happen in real life. And if you are already noticing those things it's hard to suspend disbelief in the rest of the story.

But I did like learning about the Amber Room - the object that the characters in the novel are searching for. The Amber Room really existed. It was a room in the Catherine Palace near St. Petersburg with walls paneled in carved amber, backed with gold leaf and mirrors. The photo above is one of the few extant photos of the original Amber Room.

The Catherine Palace was looted by the Nazis during World War II and the Amber Room was dismantled and shipped to Germany. Many of the panels had originated in Germany and had decorated the walls of a room in Charlottenburg Palace in Prussia until the early 1700's. Friederich Wilhem I presented the panels to Tsar Peter the Great of Russia, who had admired them. Peter himself did nothing with the panels, but his daughter Elizabeth installed them first at the Winter Palace and then later at the Catherine Palace, where she brought in craftsmen to add to and enlarge them due to the scale of the palace. By the time she finished, the room contained six tons of amber.

The Amber Room survived the Russian revolution and, like other tsarist palaces, the Catherine Palace became a museum. During the German invasion of World War II, the museum curators covered the panels with wallpaper in the hope the Nazis would overlook them. That didn't work.

German soldiers disassembled the entire room and transported it to Konigsberg. At the end of the war Konigsberg was heavily bombed by the allies. Some people believe the Amber Room was destroyed in the bombing. Others believe that the panels were moved, along with many other art treasures, before the bombing began. But whether it was destroyed or hidden, the Amber Room has never been seen again.

Treasure hunters continue to search for the Amber Room. In my googling I found a news story from February 2008 involving a search for the Amber Room.

In the meantime, helped by a large grant from a German company and utilizing the few black and white photos in existence, beginning in 1979 the Russians began to recreate the Amber Room at the Catherine Palace. In 2003 the recreated Amber Room was dedicated by Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder as part of the 300 year anniversary of St. Petersburg .

Here is a portion of the recreated Amber Room:


To get more information you can either read the novel or check out the wikipedia.

(Original photo from alexanderpalace.org. New photo from amberjewelry.com)

A Spot of Tea

Are the British just better with words? I’ve always tended toward British novels but it is getting a bit ridiculous when I’m enjoying the writing on the website for The London Tea Room, a local tea room run by expatriate Brits. I was looking for their phone number and ended up reading the whole site. First I clicked “About Us”.

Since coming to the States in 1988, we never could find the type of tea room you’d find in London: not prim, not proper, not ultra-Victorian - just good tea in good china in a relaxed but cheery environment and a nice selection of cakes and the like to accommodate that which had been missing from our lives: an afternoon tea in the city, being amongst others out for the same: a rejuvenating break in the day to sit back, have a cuppa and reflect. Reflect upon what, you may ask? Being English of course.

A lovely idea. But it was the bottom of the page that made me realize, I liked these people!

Open Tuesday through Friday from 7:30AM to 5PM.
Saturday and Sunday from 9AM to 5PM.
Please schedule your lives accordingly.

Then I clicked on the tab for “Menu” and, like Alice in Wonderland, I was confronted with two labels: “Drink me” and “Eat me”. Hmmm. I clicked “Eat me” and looked for scones.

Might be called the cornerstone of our culinary array. Fluffier than cornerstone though. Choose from our daily variety. Or don’t choose. Have one or ten of each. We’re not here to judge.

Eventually I found the phone number and passed it along to a friend I was recommending it to. I’ve been to The London Tea Room a few times, the first time with one of my book groups. The staff was wonderful to us. The tea menu is enormous and was really fun to read. For instance Monks Blend: Black tea infused with grenadine & vanilla. First created by monks (like all worthwhile beverages, most notably ale, espresso and the appletini), this one is sweet and toasty. And of course Any tea may be Americanized; that is: “iced.”

We had such a great time drinking tea and discussing books and Beatrix Potter (the theme for the day) that I decided it was going to be a regular place to visit.
See? Love of books can lead you to really nice places.

The Fountainhead

This morning I posted my first thoughts on The Fountainhead at my friend Nancy's blog:

I'm reading The Fountainhead ... I just started. And this seems like a group that I could share some first impressions with.

I've never read anything by Ayn Rand and, in fact, don't know anything about her. But I'm about 60 pages into the novel and it feels for all the world like I'm reading the script of a Hollywood Movie circa 1939.

I never picture characters when I read but I hear the sound of their voices. As I read this I'm hearing that almost monotone staccato way they talked in old movies. Think Humphrey Bogart.

It was distracting me so much that I finally googled Ayn Rand and, sure enough, she was a Hollywood screenwriter.

I can't say that I dislike this style but it was not at all what I expected. (Nobody give away the storyline to me. I like to be surprised.)