06 July 2005

F

FALLOWS, JAMES AND DEBORAH

   OUR TOWNS: A 100,000-MILE JOURNEY INTO THE HEART OF AMERICA (2018)

James Fallows, a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, and his wife Deborah undertook the task of getting to know more about a couple of dozen US towns. They traveled in their own plane and touched down in towns of various sizes--for instance, Bend, Oregon, and Fresno, California.

Sometimes the account reads more like a Chamber of Commerce publication but of course the authors would not have wanted to be overly critical of any of the towns they visited, and criticism wouldn't really have been fair, coming from people who were just passing through and casually observing.

So they asked themselves what sorts of enterprises were flourishing in each town and why. They seem to have particular enthusiasm for several charter schools--an enthusiasm I found surprising in authors who were also apparently interested in just what kind of atmosphere was prevailing in some US towns that enabled the election of Donald J. Trump as President. Surely charter schools represent one more effort at the kind of privatization that Trump has favored.

One wonders if the Fallowses have failed to think this through. Charter schools are known for their ability to "cherry pick" their students, leaving less qualified students in the public schools, which are already severely underfunded. The result is the neediest students in our midst are even less apt to receive the education they need. Charter schools strike at the heart of democracy too by removing many young people into a protected environment instead of obliging them to associate with the general population. What will they have learned about their fellow citizens if they have been receiving their education only in charter schools? They will have learned only about those carefully selected classmates with whom they've associated on a daily basis for 8-12 years.

However, the account is fair and informative otherwise, and usually interesting.  For instance, one learns that the air space in the western US is often occupied by the military, and the pilots of other planes have to work around the air space that is reserved for the military.

There is perhaps too much detail about the actual flights--technical specifics about flying a plane that might not be of much interest to readers who don't fly planes.

And there is sometimes a tendency to use trendy language, like the absurd, meaningless "one-off" that has come into use in recent years:  there are "one-off exhibits" and "one-off eco hotels."

But this is carping about a book that provides an interesting window on a variety of places.

10 December 2019
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FAULKNER, WILLIAM


    MOSQUITOES (1927; 1955)

This novel, Faulkner's second, originally appeared in 1927. It is a truly bad book, complete with ugly racial stereotypes, the n----- word, plus a character usually referred to as "the Semitic man." However, the Jewish characters seem to represent the "voice of reason" in the book, and maybe Faulkner is speaking through them. He puts an assortment of people on a yacht on Lake Pontchartrain, where they proceed to behave inexplicably and abominably. Are they all drunk, or what?

Very little of the Faulkner style is evident here. Towards the end a few passages take off into the tiresomely overwritten style that he indulges in in the Sartoris novels and THE SOUND AND THE FURY and ABSALOM, ABSALOM! ("Not yet despairing because not yet desiring, he nursed his remorse in a silence that was so profound...," for example).

In the Introduction I learned that Faulkner got fired as a Scoutmaster for drunkenness; that he fabricated his military record--not just once or twice in passing remarks but making a lifetime project of it, even going around in an outfit designed to look like an RAF uniform, which he’d had made for himself. He was in the RAF but never a pilot as he went around claiming to have been.


(1 March 2003)
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FELDER, DON

   HEAVEN AND  HELL: MY LIFE IN THE EAGLES, 1974-2001         (2008)

Don Felder of the Eagles band tells his life story here but I wish he hadn't.  Most of the account is an outpouring of grievances against the two band members who he perceives as having wronged him--Don Henley and Glenn Frey.

Felder seems to be a litigious sort and managed to get himself fired from the Eagles after more than two decades with them.

One doesn't know how much of this story to believe because the bitterness motivating it is so intense.  The Eagles took plenty of cocaine and smoked plenty of pot.  They lived a life so high and so pampered that women were throwing themselves at them.  This has been true of many music groups in recent times.  One wonders why the many stories of instances of greed and cruelty on the part of Henley and Frey were included.  Even if these are true, what is the point of disclosing them to readers who can  have no knowledge of the situation and no way of obtaining other points of view? Clearly the only point is for Don Felder to vent his rage.

Very little light is shed on the actual songs and how they were made though the process of mixing is made clear enough. Who actually wrote the music and who wrote the lyrics isn't spelled out except that it seems sometimes to have been a group project.

This book was a long slog.

3 October  2012
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FERRANTE, ELENA (pseud.)

     THE LYING LIFE OF ADULTS (2020)

This story is about lying--and the way in which the narrator, 16-year-old Giovanna, wakes up to the lies adults around her have been telling and starts telling some of her own. But it is also the story of an adolescent girl's introduction to an adult experience of sex.

Giovanna has two caring parents who seem to have risen from humbler backgrounds to become the kinds of people who don't behave coarsely--or speak in dialect any more. But she makes contact with her father's sister, her aunt Vittorina, who hasn't been in communication with the family for years and whose hatred of Andrea, Giovanna's father, spews forth with an almost animal-like ferocity. It is through Vittorina that Giovanna begins to see her parents from a different perspective.

But while she is learning some secrets her parents have been concealing from her for years, she is also yearning for a more adult experience, and she develops a crush on Roberto, who is already engaged to Giuliana, a friend of Giovanna's who is also the daughter of Margarita, a friend of Vittorina who is the widow of the man who was Vittorina's great love.  Roberto, somewhat like Giovanna's parents, has risen from a more squalid background to become a successful academic intellectual, and his polished air seems to appeal to Giovanna, who spends considerable time and energy devising ways of putting herself in his company.

Throughout most of the novel it doesn't occur to Giovanna that she is planning to take Giuliana's fiancé away from her. Surely most 16-year-olds wouldn't attempt this bit of treachery, but it doesn't bother Giovanna in the least--until near the end, when she realizes that she doesn't want to be this kind of person--and maybe she really isn't so interested in Roberto, after all.

It turns out that what she really wants is someone to help her lose her virginity, and she sets out to look for a likely candidate, and finds one.

How many women who were approaching adulthood in about the same era must have indulged in similar exploits, and for similar reasons?  This is a novel many women would be able to read with understanding and empathy.

I read this book as an audiobook, read by Marisa Tomei, who reads the men's dialogue in a strange falsetto voice that is very jarring. 

19 June 2022

     MY BRILLIANT FRIEND (2012)

     THE STORY OF A NEW NAME (2013)

These two novels are the first part of the Neapolitan Novels tetralogy, and since I have yet to read the other two, I would probably do well to reserve my comments until later.

For now, though, this story, which seems autobiographical though very little is known about the author, would speak to any woman who grew up at the time when the two main characters here--the narrator Elena or Lenu and her friend Lila--were coming of age. Both were born in 1944 in Naples, and at first they seem joined in a spirit of rivalrous camaraderie as they spend their childhood in the combative atmosphere of warring families in their tight-knit community.

They are both doing very well in school and aspire to become famous writers.  But eventually their lives go in quite divergent directions--Elena to proceed with the luxury of continuing her studies because she has some lucky breaks and a more supportive family, Lila fated to stop her education and enter the workaday world--with the apparent escape hatch of a marriage that turns out to be disastrous for her.

 The Story of a New Name never pauses to preach or to direct the reader towards any particular point of view, but in the story it tells it is making abundantly clear how calamitous a marriage to an abusive man can be--and how helpless a woman was, at the time, if she discovered after the fact that the man she married is physically violent.

When the overworked Lila, having received a story she'd written as a child (and forgotten about), tosses it indifferently into the fire, we know that she is yet another victim of circumstances (her poverty among them) and the cruelty of a system that looks the other way in the face of violence.

One would think that the title of the first novel, My Brilliant Friend, would refer to Lila since the story about Lila is told by her friend Lenu. But at one point it becomes clear that "my brilliant friend" is actually Lenu herself as well--when Lila, trying to persuade Lenu to continue her education, says, "You were my brilliant friend."  There is considerable evidence that the bond between Lenu and Lila is so strong that they are almost two aspects of one person.

The two are often quite bitchy to one another. Lenu does not try to gloss over anything in her account. She clearly takes a dim view of some of her own past behavior, relating incidents matter-of-factly but with a tinge of cynicism. She is  a much older woman looking back on her past as she proceeds with her narrative.

There has been much speculation about the real identity of Elena Ferrante but that seems beside the point, given the nature of the novels. They were written by someone who understood what it was like to grow up in one part of Naples at that time, someone who has enabled us to see the entire experience in vivid detail.

6 April 2019

   THOSE WHO LEAVE AND THOSE WHO STAY (2014)

In this third book, Lenu and Lila are thirtyish and bearing children. Lila, along with her devoted live-in companion (but not lover) Enzo, has learned computer skills--and is hired by Micaele at a high salary. Lenu's life has taken a less rocky course. She is married to Pietro, whose mother and sister are often helpful to Lenu in her promising literary career, and there are two daughters.  In 1976, the daughters are 3 and 6.

She and Lila are not especially close during these years. However, it is often Lila who contacts Lenu suddenly, often with some astonishing news to impart.

By the end of this third novel we know that Nino, with whom both Lenu and Lila have been smitten at various times, is irresponsible and vain, and yet we see Lenu destroy her marriage and even leave her husband and children for Nino's sake. By this time we are wondering about just how reliable a narrator Lenu has been, all this time, but perhaps in the last book we will find out more.

Throughout the story so far, violence or the threat of it has been a constantly recurring element--not appearing so very often but often enough for us to realize that it must always have been about to erupt whenever a situation involved several men of Lila's or Lenu's acquaintance.

The men are apt to want to prove themselves, to defend "their" women. Violence is the way a dispute is often settled. If this state of affairs leaves Lenu and Lila often at the mercy of the men in their lives, perhaps that is part of what this book has to say to us: This is the way things have been at this time and in this place, for women (and of course children, even more helpless).

This is a novel about class, about the almost impassable barrier between the haves and the have-nots in this world. Just how rigid the barrier must be becomes clear whenever the author pauses to tell us that one of the characters lapses into dialect in speaking. We soon learn that the dialect is not readily understandable to speakers of standard Italian--and that using it probably brands the speaker as belonging to a less admired, more marginalized class of people. Through this observant attention to whether her characters are using dialect or standard Italian, the author is letting us know what Lenu and Lila have been up against in their struggles to find places for themselves in the world.

Among the many unanswered questions facing the reader at the end of the third book is the problem of what Lila has meant about noticing that the "margins" of things were disintegrating.  There have been hints that Lila is sometimes near the breaking point, and some of her statements about her perception of reality have been alarming.

Although, given the givens, this story could easily have become self-pitying, it is very matter-of-factly stated, and Lenu as the narrator seems to be viewing her past self from a critical, detached stance.  In the last book perhaps we will find out how Lila disappeared and whether she was ever found.

4 May 2019

  THE STORY OF THE LOST CHILD (2015)

The reader who has read the entire quartet of the Neapolitan Novels will have spent considerable time learning about the first 60 years or so of the lives of Lenu and Lila---and on reaching the end will probably miss them as one would miss well-known friends.

There are many sad events and quite a few deaths in the course of those decades from 1944 to the mid-2000s.

We are left wondering about how much to trust Lenu (and her narrative). She has betrayed her friend Lila too many times, acted in ways that benefit herself and hurt Lila. For instance, Book 2 opens with Lila giving Lenu some notebooks that she wasn't supposed to read--whereupon Lenu drops them into the river.

Lenu has no qualms about pursuing her career as a writer and enjoying considerable acclaim and popularity while leaving her children in the care of others--one of whom is often Lila, who has children of her own.

The reader might want to know more about the "dissolving margins" that Lila describes at the time of the major earthquake. Is this a mental illusion, or could it be a vision problem that has gone undiagnosed? We never find out. But Lenu puts them to use by writing a novel about Lila (in direct opposition to Lila's having made her promise never to write about her) and claiming that she was motivated in doing so by an attempt at giving permanent form to Lila's dissolving boundaries. Are we expected to believe this lame bit of self-justification for her betrayal of her friend?

By the end of the narrative Elena (Lenu) looks like an ambitious person who doesn't mind exploiting her friends in furthering her career.

But perhaps it is the now-vanished Lila who "wins" in the end. It turns out that she has been quietly visiting libraries and studying up on the city she has never left, finding out its grim and bloody history.  Elena's attitude upon finding out about Lila's research is tellingly condescending: she pronounces that of course Lila would never finish this project but it's good that she's occupying herself--even though she knows nothing about how to do research.

We suspect that she is underestimating Lila and that Lila will have figured out how to go about finding the information she is seeking, all on her own.

 Elena/Lenu supposes that there might be a "text" resulting from Lila's writing and that she, who runs a publishing company, might acquire it and publish it. Here is yet another instance of Lenu's opportunism, her willingness to exploit her friend. Perhaps it would have been meant as a service to her friend (affording her a chance to have her work published) but the reader might suspect at this point that the idea has more to do with burnishing Lenu's reputation than with being kind to her friend.

After Lila has been explaining to Lenu that the familiar church of San Giovanni Battista is really founded on a disgusting trash heap, Lila says:

    "They seem so important, the books," she said sarcastically. "You've devoted your whole life to them. And the evil breaks through the floor and emerges where you don't expect it."
It sounds as if Lila has found the meaning of her dissolving margins even though Lenu might not have done so.

16 June 2019


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FINN, PETER AND COUVÉE, PETRA

     THE ZHIVAGO AFFAIR: THE KREMLIN, THE CIA, AND THE BATTLE OVER A FORBIDDEN BOOK (2014)

Peter Finn is a Washington Post columnist who gained access recently to some CIA documents pertaining to the publication and distribution of the controversial novel Doctor Zhivago by Soviet author Boris Pasternak.

What we have here is an account of the CIA's involvement in the complicated story of the battle between East and West over publication of a novel that didn't toe the prescribed socialist-realism line laid down by the USSR and that even seemed a tad critical (but only a tad) of the Soviet system.

The Soviet authorities seem to have shown colossal stupidity by raising objections to the book's publication in the first place. Moreover--though little is made of it in this book--anti-Semitism was involved.

The book is oddly silent about a couple of topics that strike me as important enough to have been included: how Pasternak spent the Second World War years, and how it is that he could have been Jewish enough to have been a target of Russian anti-Semitism and yet Russian Orthodox enough to have had a Russian Orthodox funeral after receiving the last rites of the church.

He seems to have been born into a Jewish family who were somewhat assimilated, with a father who reportedly became a Christian.  However, Boris Pasternak stated that Jews ought to become assimilated--that Judaism ought to die out.

This view is horrifyingly unacceptable to most Jews the world over, of course. One has to wonder about whether Pasternak had an opportunistic streak--and whether it was that opportunism that embroiled him in the controversy that raged around Doctor Zhivago for so long.

This book doesn't pass judgment on the CIA but it should be fairly clear to any reader that the kind of cloak-and-dagger maneuvers and publicity stunts in which the CIA involved itself, for the sake of using this novel as a way of defying and showing up the USSR, may have been somewhat diverting for the CIA "operatives" but that they were using a novel as a political football, and a very dangerous one at that.

Pasternak's book (and the movie made from it) made vast sums--but he must have received only a small fraction of the royalties he was owed. His long-time companion/mistress and her daughter were arrested and sent to a camp for years on a trumped-up charge.

It looks as if Pasternak had very little control over the situation once he had finished his book and shown it to a publisher. From then on he and his book became tools in the Cold War.

He was a powerful enough figure in the USSR to be able to have personal conversations with both Stalin and Khrushchev, and the reports of these that are included in this account are fascinating.

Whether Zhivago is an important literary work is a question that has been put on a back burner. Vladimir Nabokov did not hold Pasternak in high esteem at all, and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion condemned Pasternak and Zhivago as "despicable." It is unfortunate that the hijinks of CIA agents and helpers, some of them well known in the media (Gloria Steinem, Zbigniew Brzezinski), have overshadowed the issue of the work's literary merit.

And then there is the vexed question of Pasternak's Nobel prize.  The book implies that he might have been awarded the Nobel prize primarily as a political gesture--and it is noted that the award citation did not mention Zhivago specifically.

Somewhat later the Nobel prize for literature went to Mikhail Sholokhov, one of the darlings among the USSR's favored literary lights, for his ponderous novel Quiet Flows the Don. It seems as if the Nobel laureates in literature are chosen for political reasons sometimes--a sad fact  that is highlighted by this book, though it is not emphasized.

The book seems like a fair and objective account. However, since the CIA traffics in disinformation and lies, how sure can anyone be that the documents on which this book is based are the truth?

July 10, 2016

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FISHER, THOMAS, MD

     THE EMERGENCY: A YEAR OF HEALING AND HEARTBREAK IN A CHICAGO ER (2022)

This account of a year in the life of an emergency room doctor during the COVID-19 pandemic has very important things to say--particularly about the calamitously long waits endured by patients in emergency rooms. The author also inveighs against a tendency on the part of hospitals to give more favorable access to medical care to patients with adequate insurance. His revelation of the extent to which this is happening is eye-opening--and chilling.

For me the book was also interesting because it dealt with a location in Chicago that I knew well for many years--the Hyde Park area and specifically the University of Chicago Hospitals.

As an African-American, the author is particularly concerned about the poor quality of care so often received by the Black community.

Perhaps in an attempt at making the book more personal, he alternates chapters of his narrative with chapters that are letters to individual patients. I'm not sure that this technique works especially well but the book on the whole was well worth reading.

10 September 2023
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FISHKIN, SHELLEY FISHER

     LIGHTING OUT FOR THE TERRITORY: REFLECTIONS ON MARK TWAIN AND AMERICAN CULTURE (1996)

Interesting comments on Mark Twain and the Mark Twain industry. especially the Hannibal, Missouri, tourist trade. The author does a good job of demolishing those who criticize Huckleberry Finn for its perceived racist elements.

10 May 2000
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FITZGERALD, F. SCOTT



  
    F. SCOTT FITZGERALD: A LIFE IN LETTERS (1994)

Image result for f. scott fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald's letters are interesting but sad as he becomes increasingly imploring in his need for ready money--so "his" daughter (always "my daughter," never "our daughter") can stay on at Vassar, so he won’t have to "put" Zelda in a "public asylum," and so on. 

Fitzgerald reveals himself to be the whiny spoiled child one always suspected he was, and undoubtedly anti-Semitic despite a sort of friendship with S. J. Perelman. 

The collection includes letters to Hemingway, Edmund Wilson and other notables.

3 August 2001
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FITZGERALD, PENELOPE

   THE GOLDEN CHILD (1977)

The author takes us into the world of a museum--this one in the midst of staging a popular exhibit to display a gold-covered doll that was important to a pre-Christian culture.

The story soon becomes a murder mystery and moves along at a fast clip.  There are entertaining passages, and the story is replete with the author's wry humor.

However, she may have got carried away towards the end, when she has one of the main characters, Waring Smith, wounded by a gunshot but apparently wandering around in a business-as-usual mode in spite of being covered with blood for quite a while. We never find out if his wound was tended to. There are quite a number of such loose ends in the story, but most of it is pretty good fun anyway.

(7 April 2011)

    THE BOOKSHOP (1978)

Short, quietly excellent novel about a widow in a small East Anglian town who decides to open a bookshop. Without any love story, this is an extraordinary disclosure of a triumph of human greed and lust for power.

8 May 2001

   HUMAN VOICES (1980)

This short novel takes us into the lives of some employees of the BBC during World War II. The plot revolves around Sam Brooks, who is in charge of recorded programs but who has too great a liking for young women employees (his "seraglio," as some of his colleagues call his collection of young women). The novel has quiet humor and good sense.

Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) began her writing career at the age of 60. She herself worked at the BBC during World War II, and this book is almost certainly based on her own experience. She has probably captured much of the atmosphere of war-ravaged London, including the ever-present danger of unexploded bombs.

However, the plot of the story doesn't quite jell. Pathways are opened up in the story, only to trail off into nowhere. What become of Lisa Bernard and her baby, for instance? Still, this was a novel well worth reading.


1 April 2005
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FITZSIMONS, ELEANOR

    THE LIFE AND LOVES OF E. NESBIT:  VICTORIAN ICONOCLAST,     CHILDREN'S AUTHOR, AND CREATOR OF "THE RAILWAY     CHILDREN" (2019)

Although I haven't read any of E. Nesbit's work, I did see the film version of The Railway Children, which was quite well done and enjoyable. E. (for Edith) Nesbit was highly popular years ago, particularly as an author of children's books. However, as this biography reveals, she was also renowned as an entertaining hostess--and as a Socialist and member of the Fabian Society.

She knew quite a few prominent people in her day, including George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Noel Coward.

She must have been a powerhouse of energy as she produced numerous books and poems while also running a household (with a 30-room house) that included five children. She was an avid gardener as well.

This was a fascinating story about a dynamic and influential woman.

5 January 2023

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FLANDERS, JUDITH

     THE MAKING OF HOME:  THE 500-YEAR STORY OF HOW OUR HOUSES BECAME OUR HOMES (2015)

This book is a fascinating and well-researched social history of the concept of a home--as contrasted with a house. We learn how the notion evolved over centuries, running parallel to the notion of privacy.

I had a few problems with the book, however. One was the inattention to apartment living. How does it fit in with the author's general theories?  One cannot refer to an apartment as one's "house" but one can (and usually should) refer to it as one's "home."  And yet in many people's minds, apparently, only an actual house (free-standing or with only an adjoining wall or two) can be regarded as a real "home."

I've never understood why this distinction should be made. One can have almost as much privacy in an apartment as in a house.  The only real difference appears to be that apartments cost less than houses do and usually require less maintenance (which means less expense to the resident). In other words, a "home" in the popular mind of the present day means a costly residence for the "haves" in this world, those who can afford a house, while apartment dwellers aren't entitled to call their (rented) space a "home."

This question has completely eluded the author, but her book would have been quite different, I suspect, if she had addressed it.

The miscellaneous facts she introduces into her account are extraordinarily interesting.  For instance, people in the past expected far less comfort in their residences than we do today. They were cold and crowded surroundings, and furniture came into the picture only fairly recently.

This is a book that is well worth a careful reading.

16 May 2017

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FLORA, KATE CLARK

      DEATH DEALERS: HOW COPS AND CADAVER DOGS BROUGHT A KILLER TO JUSTICE (2014)

A true-crime narrative, set in New Brunswick, Canada,  telling of the process of capturing David Tanasichuk, who killed his wife Maria, apparently because he desperately needed money to support his drug habit--and Maria happened to have quite a bit of pawnable or saleable jewelry, which he promptly hocked or sold shortly after her death.

It makes for an interesting story though sometimes the writing is pedestrian.

And, just as an aside, I've never known anyone who wore up to 20 rings at a time as Maria is said to have done. I can't imagine how she did it.

3 April 2021
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FORNI, P. M.

    THE CIVILITY SOLUTION:  WHAT TO DO WHEN PEOPLE            ARE RUDE (2008)


The author is a professor of Italian literature at Johns Hopkins University who is concerning himself with civility. This book isn't a guide to manners, exactly. For one thing, it isn't nearly comprehensive enough to qualify as an all-purpose etiquette book in the Miss Manners vein.

Forni sets up a series of situations and briefly outlines one or more ways of dealing with them. He concentrates particularly on travel, driving, and the Internet.

In general, the recommendations seem sensible, but there were all too many situations where I wanted to say, "Let it go! Forget about this!" but where Forni recommends saying something to the offending party.

How much peace and quiet is a plane passenger really entitled to during a flight, for instance? Forni seems to believe that a passenger has a right to demand it.  He also believes that people have a right to dictate what topics others can talk about.

A little of this kind of insistence goes a long way, in my experience. All too soon a civility-chaser who pursues Forni's recommendations will be acting tyrannical.

18 November 2012
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FORSTER, E. M.


    

   A ROOM WITH A VIEW (1908)


On the surface this seems to be a romantic novel with a happy ending--boy gets girl, and they live happily ever after. But it is ever so much more than that.

Lucy, around whom the story turns, eventually faces a choice once she has decided to break her engagement to Cecil Vyse: she can become a liberated woman, never marrying but working at a job, or she can take the romantic route and give herself to George Emerson, the man who has been all but excluded from her world for having twice taken it upon himself to kiss her unexpectedly.

The author makes it quite clear that Lucy's battle is with the physical feelings that George has awakened in her. Apparently George has not tried any such tactics as George has used, and indeed George himself makes quite a case for his having no real strategy but just having been carried away, acting on the impulse of the moment.

For that time and place--among the more prosperous British around 1900--George's impulsive kisses were clearly regarded as an insult to Lucy so severe as to be almost an assault.  Moreover, there has been a witness, and much of the story revolves around the treatment of that witness (Lucy's cousin Charlotte) and what she knows.

Although not much is made of it, there is also the scene where Lucy and a couple of others happen to witness several naked men swimming--one of them George, and another (somewhat surprisingly maybe) the beloved clergyman. 

The two  snatched kisses and the naked swimming scene have apparently had a profound effect on Lucy, and the reader is probably hoping that she will come to her senses and ditch Cecil Vyse before it is too late.

The story is simple enough but it is the dialogue that gives it far more depth than a run-of-the-mill love story. Lucy and her brother Freddy are capable of acerbic wit--and both want to break free of the bonds of convention imposed by them on their mother, the amusingly named Mrs. Honeychurch, and her social milieu.

The story often targets the snobbery and class-consciousness of British society. While a light-hearted story in many ways, it is shot through with  critical arrows aimed at a world perceived to be too fragile to last much longer. The era of "gracious living" was sustained only at great cost, and Forster sees how flimsy and wrong-headed the whole structure of that life has been.

3 July 2019

   MAURICE (1913; published posthumously, 1971)


   Forster's novel about homosexuality came to light only after his death. Originally written in 1913-14, it was revised twice by the author (1932 and 1960) but apparently he thought it too controversial to be publishable, even in the more tolerant climate of his later life.

Presented here is an England that discreetly looks the other way while young men form sexual attachments for one another.  Pretending that these attachments never happen was a necessity given the laws that made homosexual relationships a crime.

Maurice Hall appears at 14 but we see him on into his early adulthood, as he becomes a stockbroker.  He has always regarded girls/women as if they were another order of being, creatures from a different planet, perhaps. He can't work up any physical interest in them. But he forms intense attachments to men--notably Clive Durham, a schoolmate.

It looks as if the bond between Clive and Maurice will become permanent--when suddenly Clive declares that he has discovered that he likes women and is about to marry one.  Aware that Clive's family is eager to have an heir, Maurice feels helpless and devastated.  

Some years later Maurice visits Clive and his wife and experiences a crisis, culminating in his decision to visit a hypnotist in an attempt at correcting what he feels obliged to think of as a defect. Toward that end, he lies to Clive and his wife, saying he's already engaged to a woman.

Meanwhile he's rapidly developing a relationship with Alec Scutter, a newer servant in the Clive Durham household and one who is about to emigrate to Argentina. Alec is crude and lower class, with a chip on his shoulder, and shrewdly knows how to suggest blackmail to Maurice without being blatant about it.

That Maurice is disintegrating by this time should be apparent to the reader. There is an incident where he knocks an older man down on a train and causes his nose to bleed. There is the way he lashes out at a servant unnecessarily.  Without putting his battle into words, he is clearly struggling hard against what he feels to be true--that his homosexuality is innate and irreversible--and what he knows is expected of him: a heterosexual existence.  He sees himself with his chosen partner, Alec, defending their life against a critical world: "...when two are gathered together, a majority shall not triumph" is what he feels he and Alec must demonstrate.

Many old notions in England were in the process of crumbling at the time when this book was written.  This story isn't an especially good representation of that crumbling world, however. This may be because Maurice either does some very odd things--yelling "Come!" out the window repeatedly at Clive's so that Alec will climb up to his bedroom window, for instance--or because the author hasn't made it clear how much of what is described is real and how much is a dreamscape. However, the character of Alec stands out. He is completely understandable, and his often ignoble part in the events shows how very keenly the class differences must have made themselves felt.

Forster is especially sensitive to the class structure that was deeply embedded in the world he inhabited, and this book is one more instance of that sensitivity. But, astonishingly (considering the time when it was written), he also provides an eloquent statement of the homosexual's dilemma.

20 November 2013


    THE LONGEST JOURNEY (1922)


Said to be Forster’s own favorite among his works, this novel is definitely not my favorite. Although it contains interesting observations about the English public school system and about child bullies, the plot is contrived, probably faulty, and hard to follow.

Ricky, the sensitive, lame protagonist, marries a woman who turns out to be "legacy-hunting" and who persuades him to hide his knowledge that another man is really his half-brother. Steve, the "earthy" half-brother, turns out to stand for Good, as does Ricky’s friend. Characters, including Ricky himself, die off in droves in this story, with very little attention given to their deaths--creating an oddly unreal impression throughout the absurd narrative. Very disappointing.


6 January 2004
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FOWLES, JOHN
     

   THE MAGUS (revised edition, 1977)

A long novel, set mainly in Greece. It seems to have been changed considerably since its first edition. The story is larded with phrases and whole sentences and paragraphs in Greek or French, untranslated, and every section is prefaced by a quotation from the Marquis de Sade.

When I read a work of fiction, I expect to find an interesting story with characters who capture my attention. In this book, the narrator/protagonist seems so incredibly dense and stupid in the way that he knocks his head against a stone wall throughout this novel that I found him tiresome.

Fowles said that the original title of this book was The God Game. I have a notion that he might have written this book intending it to be an allegory about God's nature (God as a sadist). It's the only way this story can make much sense.

Fowles also mentions having been influenced by Alain Fournier's novel Le Grand Meaulnes, a misty story of Platonic search for a vision of perfection that can never be grasped. This pointless but endless quest seems to be the "problem" of Urfe, the protagonist in The Magus.


The Magus is an intellectually pretentious work, in my opinion. Moreover, I had the uncomfortable sensation that the author had his eye on the cinematic possibilities when he set the story in Greece. This uncomfortable sensation turned into downright annoyance by the time I got to the dramatic pageant, with characters dressed up in masks of animal heads.


27 July 2005
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FRANKLIN, RUTH

     SHIRLEY JACKSON: A RATHER HAUNTED LIFE (2016)


Some years ago I read another biography of Shirley Jackson, and the author of this newer one cites it rather often. Even if Franklin's biography adds little that is new, it is a sympathetic portrait of a writer who she maintains deserved to be taken more seriously than she was.

Whether she makes a good case isn't for me to say since I've read only one story by Jackson--the one she is best known for, "The Lottery"--but her life is of interest.  A woman of her era who could combine motherhood (she had four children) with a successful career as a writer has achieved something beyond the wildest dreams of most women of the time.

It wasn't accomplished without a heavy price, as the book points out. The emotional toll on Shirley Jackson was intense, and she died at only 48).

2 November 2019
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FRASER, CAROLINE

     PRAIRIE FIRES: THE AMERICAN DREAMS OF LAURA INGALLS WILDER (2017)

After having read three other books meant to provide a picture of the life of the author of the popular Little House books, I found this biography by Caroline Fraser to be the most thorough-going and balanced. Laura Ingalls Wilder's life and views are probably especially difficult to discern on account of her intense literary involvement with her daughter, the writer Rose Wilder Lane.

Fraser delves into the extent to which Lane was responsible for the content of Wilder's published work and concludes that Lane was by far the inferior writer--and that she all too often was pursuing her own political agenda.

Lane and possibly Wilder were, unfortunately, fascistic. What Fraser gives us is an author who helped to propagate a myth that the American public loved: of the basically happy frontier family, courageously overcoming obstacle after obstacle, conquering the wilderness almost single-handedly but clinging to the values of home and hearth above all.  

Fraser seems to acknowledge that the myth was false and self-justifying--but her objective isn't to debunk the Little House books so much as to narrate Wilder's life and the context in which it was lived.

She presents a scathing account of the televising of the Wilder books, focusing on the way in which Michael Landon, who played Pa, turned the TV dramatization into a showcase for himself--thus departing considerably from the original books, where the focus was on Laura.

This is a very timely account of a life that ended many decades ago, for it highlights the strong strain of bigotry and fascism that has been running through American life all along, and the recent Presidency of Donald Trump has been one more instance of an ideology that has long been a catastrophic element in our heritage.

15 July 2021
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FREEMAN, GREGORY A.
    
   LAY THIS BODY DOWN: THE 1921 MURDERS OF 11                   PLANTATION SLAVES (1999)

In Georgia John S. Williams, a white farmer, owned a plantation worked by black men whom he had bailed out of jail. In exchange for their debt to him, they were bound to do his bidding--in perpetuity, as it turned out, for the debt was never regarded as paid, and Williams locked his peons up at night to insure that they couldn't escape. He and his sons (who ran sub-plantations of the same type) were always well armed, and bloodhounds were at the ready in case any black man tried to get away. The peons were beaten cruelly and often. Some were killed.

Since peonage was against the law (though it was a frequently overlooked law throughout the south at the time, since it was a way for the south to keep the slave economy that had sustained it before the Civil War while nominally acknowledging that the former slaves were "free"), federal investigators showed up on Williams's plantation, looking into the matter of peonage there.

Williams was concerned that they might have found out too much, and so he determined to end the lives of eleven black men whom he regarded as most likely to reveal his guilt. Accordingly he ordered his overseer, a young black man named Clyde Manning, to help him kill these men. Manning clearly did not want to kill the men, but Williams emphasized that he had no choice: "It's your neck or theirs, Clyde," he said, and Manning knew he meant it.

The men were bludgeoned to death or dropped live off a bridge in pairs, chained together, along with stones to weight them down.

The evidence surfaced later, and Williams was convicted--a strange turn of events in Georgia of that time, when it was highly unusual for a white man to be convicted on the testimony of a black hired hand.

Later Manning was convicted too. Both men went to prison, Manning to die of tuberculosis only a few years later after serving on a chain gang while incarcerated.

This story is riveting--and gives a very grim picture of life for black people in the south after the Civil War.

One question I was left with was whether the reader is supposed to believe that Williams's family scenes during the courtroom--his weeping wife, his children clustering around him--were authentic and spontaneous, or staged for the sake of persuading the audience. I am inclined to believe that they were entirely staged, but I wish that the author had dealt with this question. The scenes (and there were several) have a Norman Rockwell quality that is almost too poignant to be real, given what we know for a fact about John Williams: that he was a ruthless, cold-blooded killer.

(22 December 2005)
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FRENCH, TANA

      IN THE WOODS (2007)


This was a very absorbing mystery involving murders that seemed to be related though they are separated in time by many years.  The murders were brutal--and the victims were children.  One of the pair of detectives assigned to the case, Ryan,  has a personal link with the earlier murder, and much of the narrative concerns his struggle with the need to dredge up a forgotten traumatic past.

The setting is Ireland, and the author seems to have a thorough command of the people and their speech.  She gives us a credible cast of characters behaving in ways that we can (usually) understand.

Ryan sometimes seems almost too self-pitying, even whiny, but he admits his own failings and sees himself as troubled. Cassie, on the other hand, is almost too often absolutely right in her judgments.

But the questions the reader has are dealt with as the story proceeds, and the narrative hangs together in a well-constructed way. Moreover, Tana French writes in a fluent, often lyrical style.

15 December 2018
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FRENKEL, FRANÇOISE

     A BOOKSHOP IN BERLIN: THE REDISCOVERED MEMOIR OF ONE WOMAN'S HARROWING ESCAPE FROM THE NAZIS (2019; originally published 1946)

The author was a Polish Jewish woman who opened a French bookshop in  Berlin in the 1920s. Under the Nazis her bookshop came to an end, and this is an account, not so much of the bookshop but of the impact it had on this woman's life. She was caught up in a maze of trying to avoid being herded onto a train and taken to a concentration camp. She accomplished her astounding escape by perseverance and good fortune, but it took three grim attempts to get her to Switzerland.

Oddly unmentioned in her account is the fact that she was married and that her husband had been sent to Auschwitz, where he died. I have found no explanation for this omission but perhaps she made the decision to omit it on the advice of a publisher or editor, who may have wanted this account to be purely her story. And it is.

It is beautifully focused and well told. She doesn't pause for many details about her life before the bookshop but she often gratefully mentions the good-heartedness of some very generous French people who helped along the way, as she sought shelter in various parts of France.

It would be interesting to know more about how this book, published in 1946, stayed forgotten until it turned up in some attic and was reissued in 2019. How many other books that deserve to be read are languishing somewhere in obscurity?

March 6, 2022
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FRITZSCHE, PETER
 
   LIFE AND DEATH IN THE THIRD REICH (2008)

The author is a professor of history at the University of Illinois, and he has apparently studied the literature of the Nazi era and the Holocaust very comprehensively. Drawing heavily on the astute observations in the diaries of Victor Klemperer as well as on many other sources, he paints a picture of the Germans that makes no apologies for them.

They were not "just following orders," nor, by and large, were they just going along with the genocide idea for the sake of the other elements of Nazism. They were often whole-heartedly participating in the genocide.

Fritzsche gives close attention to the use of the "Sieg Heil!" greeting in Germany--noting how often and on what occasions it was used. He finds that it was in very common use, replacing the more traditional forms of greeting at every level of social discourse.  He moves on to explore the extent to which Gentiles and Jews knew about what was really happening to the Jews and other "undesirables" who were deported--never to be heard from again.

Fritzsche offers no explanation for the Germans' behavior during the Nazi era, though he emphasizes that they were hurting economically in the 1930s, probably hurting enough to be desperate.  He just lets us know that this is how it was, and yes, most Germans had a very good idea what was happening to the Jews.

What is most puzzling to me is that so many people bought the twisted logic of the Nazis' plans.  Why accelerate the "final solution" just when Germany seemed in danger of losing the war? The logic behind this change in plans escapes me--except that Fritzsche strongly suggests that greed was a very powerful motivation.

The people whom the Germans were so rapidly moving about and ridding themselves of had property--and jobs. Land, valuables, assets that were coveted and all too easily seized. And, as people, they were occupying space.

One wonders about the burgeoning population of the world. Will there be other instances of genocide as the world's population grows?  More recent events seem to point in this direction.

Fritzsche clearly does not believe that the Germans are uniquely inclined to hatred and brutality.  His book is describing the way things probably were for the ordinary person in Germany between 1933 and 1945.

27 February 2013
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FROST, RANDY O. AND STEKETEE, GAIL

    STUFF: COMPULSIVE HOARDING AND THE MEANING OF THINGS (2010)

The authors have interviewed and studied several compulsive hoarders--persons whose accumulations of personal belongings have reached dangerous proportions. The objective was to analyze their motivations and behavior patterns and offer assistance in the daunting task of (1) disposing of the excess stuff and (2) effecting a permanent change in the hoarders' habits.

It seems to have been a discouraging enterprise since many hoarders do not perceive their accumulations as a problem.

The authors point out that persons who house large numbers of pets irresponsibly are also hoarders--and that there is a clear link between obsessive-compulsive disorder and hoarding.

Some hoarders have been able to continue their hoarding simply because they had enough money to pay for more storage space for their stuff. And the authors indicate that the US trend toward bigger and bigger houses is encouraging hoarding. Since 1970 the average house size [in the US] has increased by 60%, they tell us.

The book isn't very carefully written, however. The authors give a citation from William James dated 1918 (he died in 1910). They haven't sorted out the difference between convince and persuade, and so there are frequent sentences like When I convinced her to discard... .

Nevertheless, this was an interesting study of a disturbing phenomenon.

28 July 2013
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 FUSSELL, PAUL
    

    BAD; OR, THE DUMBING OF AMERICA (1991)

Amusing  incisive commentary on contemporary mores and style.

(1 June 1998)

   DOING BATTLE: THE MAKING OF A SKEPTIC (1996)

The author's autobiography, with a particular emphasis on his service in World War II. Growing up in Pasadena, California, he was in for a rude awakening when he entered the military. Later he went to graduate school and became a professor of English, concentrating on the 18th century and Samuel Johnson. Fussell's self-critical approach prevents this book from being arrogant or supercilious. He offers many refreshing if pessimistic perspectives on the American scene.

17 August 2005




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2 comments:

Judy said...

OMG I was thinking you were an amazing speed reader when I realized this is what you've written since 1982. Phew. Love the fiction list. I've partaken of some of those myself. TFA by Achebe is one of my all-time favorites.
Judy

wordswordswords/agate said...

I lost a large part of the books list years ago when there was a computer meltdown. Back then I was just storing the list of books I'd read on my PC and hadn't turned it into this blog yet. The list has been a way of making sure I don't read a book I've already read or an author I didn't much like. If anyone else finds it useful, that's great!

No, I'm definitely not a speed reader. I get through one or two books a month.

Thanks for stopping by!

--wordswordswords AKA agate (Joan)