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| Feb 02, 1922
| 1990
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Memory, deftly shifted in a variety of contexts, structures this difficult novel, preceded in its themes and characters by The Dubliners and Portrait
Memory, deftly shifted in a variety of contexts, structures this difficult novel, preceded in its themes and characters by The Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man. In Portrait the aspiring artist Stephen Dedalus had declared that only by leaving Ireland could he find his true voice as an Irish author. In Ulysses he has returned, summoned to the bedside of his dying mother who implores him to pray. He refuses. Having renounced the Catholic Church but unable to throw off his years of a Jesuit education, he spends most of the novel in a paralysis anchored by guilt and alcohol. Ulysses is not Stephen Dedalus’s story. It is the story of an older man, Leopold Bloom. However, before we dismiss the youthful Stephen, brimming with unfulfilled potential and morose resentments, we must applaud two resonant scenes. In “Telemachus” (Ch. 1) he contemplates his mother’s life beyond her role as mother and wife. “Her secrets: old fans, tasselled dancecards, powdered with musk, a gaud of amber beads in her locked drawer. A birdcage hung in the sunny window of her house when she was a girl. She heard old Royce sing…and laughed with others when he sang….Folded away in the memory of nature with her toys.” (p.9-10) The passage shines because it is embedded in thoughts of his own misery. Stephen Dedalus’ profundity surfaces again in “Nestor” (Ch. 2). We listen to the smug falsehoods of the headmaster, Mr. Deasey, Stephen’s employer. Deasey is a truly obnoxious character. His morality is anchored in money. He dismisses Irish nationalism and its provocations. He is virulently antisemitic. Stephen’s deflection is sufficiently veiled to avoid the appearance of disrespect: “History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” (p.32) As a teacher of classical history, Stephen had already been contemplating how the past has been reduced to myths and reams of dates and events for schoolboys to memorize. The subject of distortion, this time Irish rather than English distortion is revisited in “Cyclops” (Ch. 12) “The Citizen” expounds on a litany of historical grievances against England. The subject is also a focus with numerous references to Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-1891), whose betrayal by the Irish following the lead of the Catholic Church has been conveniently forgotten. The idea of a collective memory was first broached in “The Dead,” the final story in The Dubliners. In “Proteus” (Ch. 3) Stephen contemplates the past – marauding Vikings and knife-wielding villagers slaughtering beached whales. “Their blood is in me, their lusts my waves.” (p.42) By “Circe” (Ch. 15) a vivid and horrifying iteration of the historical collective emerges. Nearly every character in the book now emerges as a spectral presence. Even the dead Paddy Dignan whose funeral Leopold Bloom had attended early in the day appears, as do Blooms mother and father, his dead son Rudi, and Stephen’s mother. Yet, the hallucinatory visions seem not to belong solely to Bloom and Stephen. Nor are the phantasmagoric accusations entirely trustworthy. Faceless crowds alternately revere and revile Bloom. A fickle madness seems to suggest how crowds are so easily manipulated through fear and rage with leaders stoking their frenzy. Joyce has orchestrated a macabre fantasia by unleashing humanity’s worst repressed drives. Bloom’s own sexual ambivalence and sad0-masochistic arousal may be shocking, but they recede into the maelstrom of the human torrent. Like his experiments in the presentation of the past, Joyce conjures various presentations of time. Throughout the first half of the book church bells explicitly mark the time. Temporal certainty has dissolved in “Circe,” but it was presaged two chapters previously in “Nausicaa” (Ch. 13). In that chapter Bloom notices that his watch has stopped at 4:30 – the fateful moment when his wife Molly and Blazes Boylan have coupled. Joyce presents a tour de force of temporal representation in “Wandering Rocks” (Ch. 10). Rev. John Conmee's perambulation through Dublin, a one-legged sailor begging for coins, Stephen’s starving sisters, his alcoholic father Simon exiting an auction house, Bloom’s perusal of a smutty novel for Molly, Blaze Boylan’s cocky ogling of a shopgirl, and the conversations of Tom Rochford, Nosey Flynn, Ned Lambert, Lenehan and M’Coy are intertwined. We see the same scenes occurring almost simultaneously from their different viewpoints. A variant of this treatment of time occurs in “Sirens” (Ch. 11). While “Bronze” (Lydia Douce) and “Gold” (Mina Kennedy) serve the Dublin barflies, Bloom and Richie Goulding (Stephen’s uncle) sit in the adjacent dining room. The two physical locations are connected by a physical presence, Pat the waiter. “Bloom signed to Pat, bald Pat is a waiter hard of hearing, to set ajar the door of the bar. The door of the bar. So. That will do. Pat, waiter, waited, waiting to hear, for he was hard of hear by the door.” (p.246) The two concurrent scenes are now connected by the music occurring in the bar room. In the same chapter Joyce turns to another concurrence – the expression of mixed emotions. Lenehan had been hitting on Doucy who finally shows him a bit of leg. As she does so her face is a combination of triumphant pride and dismissiveness: “Bending, she nipped a peak of skirt above her knee. Delayed. Taunted then still, bending, suspending, with wilful eyes….Smack. She let free sudden in rebound her nipped elastic garter smackwarm against her smackable woman’s warm-hosed thigh….She smilesmirked supercilious (wept! aren’t men?), but, lightward gliding, mild she smiled on Boylan.” (p.240) Joyce’s use of puns, wordplay, synecdoche, metonomy, inventive portmanteau, and interrupted thought trains gave this book, written over a century ago, a contemporary freshness. However, this only partially offset the literary allusions that only a highly educated peer of that time would have been familiar with, and his convoluted, sometimes seemingly endless sentences. The book is filled with sly humor. In “Lestrygonians” (Ch. 8) Bloom recalls Molly’s malapropism regarding Ben Dollard, a portly baritone. “She used to say Ben Dollard had a base barreltone voice. He has legs like barrels and you’d think he was singing into a barrel. Now isn’t that wit? They used to call him Big Ben. Not half as witty as calling him base barreltone….Powerful man he was at storing away number one Bas. Barrel of Bass. See? It all works out.” (p.136) On one level reading this book is like seeing a black and white photo come to life. Historic Dublin’s denizens are shown, warts and all. Grievances, alcoholism, hypocrisy, envy, poverty, misogyny, and antisemitism, but also community, familiarity, laughter, sentimentality, story-telling, music, and a shared history are the threads that form the warp and woof of this culture. All of this is condensed into a single day, June 16, 1904. It took Joyce the outsider who spent his life in Italy and Switzerland to see, unravel, and then reweave these threads. This was the choice of our local book club. We are reading it over the course of three months. That was not the way to tackle this book. It is meant to be read multiple times. I only read it twice on a chapter by chapter basis. Like the “blind men and the elephant,” we never captured a satisfying sense of the book’s overall shape. NOTES: My citations come from the paperback Wordsworth Classic edition. Ware: 1932. This online version is filled with helpful annotations especially on the subjects of Irish history, Catholicism, and real life characters that inspired the characters in the book: https://www.joyceproject.com/ This book was an essential resource that summarized each chapter: THE GUIDE TO JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES, by Patrick Hastings. This book was helpful in connecting ULYSSES to THE DUBLINERS, PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, and the ODYSSEY: REJOYCE, by Anthony Burgess, NY, Norton, 1965.Burgess devotes a section to each of Joyce’s works, including FINNEGAN’S WAKE which I did not read. ...more |
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not set
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Mar 04, 2025
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Mar 04, 2025
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| 0142437344
| 9780142437346
| 0142437344
| 3.64
| 158,449
| Dec 16, 1916
| Mar 25, 2003
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really liked it
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I am certain I missed most (all?) of this book's nuance, so these are merely my impressions of his meticulously constructed novel. Its structure guide
I am certain I missed most (all?) of this book's nuance, so these are merely my impressions of his meticulously constructed novel. Its structure guides the reader along a subtle emotional arc shaping the life of its protagonist Stephen Dedalus. Stephen: the first Christian martyr. Dedalus: the man whose imagination and invention sent him on a desperate flight to freedom. In the unformed mind of the child Stephen Dedalus the ideas behind these words don't even exist. Instead, a vivid incident forms its imprint. At Clongowes, a Jesuit boarding school, a bully shoves Stephen into a cesspool. He gets pneumonia and hallucinates his death. “The rector would be there in a cope of black and gold and there would be tall yellow candles on the altar and round the catafalque. And they would carry the coffin out of the chapel slowly and he would be buried in the little graveyard of the community off the main avenue of limes. And Wells [the bully] would be sorry then for what he had done. And the bell would toll slowly....How beautiful and sad that was!” (p.22) At 15 Stephen will view death through the lense of nearly a decade of Catholic schooling. Adolescent sexuality has bloomed from longing into action. Consciousness of his sins becomes crushing as he sits, day after day, through the sermons leading up to the feast of St. Xavier. “The next day brought death and judgment, stirring his soul slowly from its listless despair. He suffered its agony. He felt the deathchill touch the extremities and seep onward towards the heart, the film of death veiling the eyes, the bright centres of the brain extinguished one by one like lamps, the last sweat oozing upon the skin, the powerlessness of the dying limbs, the speech thickening and wandering and failing, the heart throbbing faintly and more faintly, all but vanquished, the breath, the poor breath, the poor helpless human spirit, sobbing and sighing, gurgling and rattling in the throat.” (p.120) Joyce has taken us from a stately beauty of slowed time to the eternity of an agonizingly slow death opening into a portal of an even more agonizing and punitive eternity. Fear and guilt take center stage here. However, Dedalus' understanding and rejection of Catholicism is complex. Again returning to a boyhood incident, Joyce describes how an English teacher berates Dedalus for expressing heresy in an essay. The offending phrase is “...without a possibility of [the soul] ever approaching nearer [to the Creator]” rather than the phrase “without a possibility of ever reaching.” (p.83) Classroom bullies mock him and even accost him physically. He lapses into detachment, rather than either shame or anger. It is a small inkling that Catholic morality is an imposed morality. In our minds, it returns us to a still earlier incident. His childhood caretaker, Dante Reardon, raged against his father and uncle at Christmas dinner, screaming that Parnell was an unfit leader because of his “immoral” love affair. By the time Stephen travels to Cork with his father, Dante, who once seemed a powerful presence in his life is now remembered as “an old woman who kept two brushes in her wardrobe.” (p.98) Feelings of esteem for his father and for what he once considered the concrete foundation of his childhood had “faded out like a film in the sun.” (p.99) Joyce also injects images of corruption. He starts by giving us a mere whiff. When Stephen takes his first communion “he had smelt a faint winy smell off the rector's breath after the wine of the mass.” (p.47) At the same school he received a sadistic beating for breaking his eyeglasses. For the maturing Dedalus, however, the real corruption is the political collusion between the oppressive English government and the Catholic Church, a hegemony of Irish cultural and spiritual enslavement. It is this foreign infiltration that infects every school of Irish intellectual life that he encounters that convinces Dedalus that he must leave Ireland in order to develop an authentic creative voice. In his final diary entry he declares: “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” (p.275-276) I read this book in preparation for our book Club's 2025 project to read James Joyce's Ulysses. Even with the notes, large sections remained obscure and even incomprehensible to me. The edition of Portrait that I read was: NY: Penguin Classics, 1992, with introduction and notes by Seamus Deane. Joyce's origianl book was published in 1916. ...more |
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not set
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Dec 08, 2024
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Dec 08, 2024
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| B000W969O0
| 4.28
| 18,345
| Oct 03, 2006
| Oct 09, 2007
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really liked it
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Hampton Sides presents a vibrant narrative of the transformation of the American West structured around Kit Carson, a man who always found himself at
Hampton Sides presents a vibrant narrative of the transformation of the American West structured around Kit Carson, a man who always found himself at the right place at the right time. At age 17, chafing at his saddler's apprenticeship, he opted for adventure along the newly opened Santa Fe Trail. He lived among the mountain men before the fur trade tapped out. In 1842 he married Joseta Jaramillo, sister of Charles Bent's wife. Bent would be the future governor of the Territory of New Mexico. He guided the 1842, 1843 and 1845 expeditions of John Fremont mapping out the Oregon Trail and participating in an abortive foray to foment rebellion in California which was then still part of Mexico. He guided Stephen Kearney's westward march during the Mexican-American War and led the First New Mexico Volunteers under the command of Union commander Col. Edward Canby during the Civil War. Afterwards, he played a major role in the so-called “Navajo Pacification” project Despite his participation in these seminal events, he had little insight into the broader picture: “...Carson had unwittingly fouled his own nest, luring to the West the very sorts of people he loathed. Everything he touched, it seemed, had withered. The beaver he had trapped were on the verge of extinction. The Indians he had lived among had been decimated by disease. Virgin solitudes he once loved had been captured by the disenchanting tools of the topographers.” (p.415) By the time of his death in 1868, the great buffalo herds were being slaughtered. St. Louis, at the margin of a vast and unexplored frontier when he set out across the Mississippi, was now a cosmopolitan metropolis, the center of the country. Civilization had overtaken him. It's natural in any story to look for heroes and villains. Carson is neither. During his lifetime, he was celebrated and almost super-human powers attributed to him. At the same time, he was guided by personal loyalties which never allowed him to question the orders of his leaders. He was a tool for the fulfillment of the ambitions of others. He committed brutal acts in an environment of brutal vengeance-seeking. Along with Fremont he obliterated an Indian fishing village called Dokdokwan on the shore of Lake Klamath to avenge the deaths of two friends in their party. Historians would later agree that this tribe was not the one which had attacked the party. In the spring of 1864 a grove of 3000 Navajo peach trees at Canyon de Chelly was destroyed on his orders, a zealous enactment of Gen. James Carleton's policy of starving the Navajo into submission. The overall brutality of the times was hard to stomach. The torture and murder of Governor Charles Bent during the 1847 Taos Insurrection is described in detail. Artillery was key in both the Mexican-American and the Civil Wars, leaving battlefields strewn with the bodies of soldiers and horses. Kearney's hurried forced march from Santa Fe to California formed a grim trail of the bodies of horses and mules dead from starvation, drought, and overwork. In 1862 500-600 Confederate horses and mules were bayoneted to death at Apache Canyon on the orders of Major John Chivington, who had ordered that the contingent of captive Texans also be killed if the main Confederate force returned to this supply depot. This same Major Chivington was also responsible for the Sand Creek Massacre on Nov. 29, 1864. His attack was unprovoked and over 150 Cheyenne, mostly women and children were murdered. The story of the Navajo unfolds parallel to that of the Western expansion. Their history of raiding, which earned the enmity of surrounding tribes like the Pueblo and the Utes as well as the Spanish and Mexican settlers surprised me. (I had always thought of the Navajo as peaceful herders of sheep and goats). They also took captives as slaves as well as being enslaved when captured in retaliatory raids. Navajo beliefs and culture are included in several chapters with the revered warrior and sage Narbona as a focal point. These details fill in a framework of logic to the Navajo resistance and tragedy to their mass displacement to Bosque Redondo in 1864 under Gen. James Carleton's ill-thought-out proto-reservation scheme. Hampton Sides captures the zeitgeist of the Western expansion. It was fueled by President James Polk's ambition to create a United States spanning both oceans. In pursuit of that goal he searched for an excuse to start a war with Mexico. It was fueled by dreams of mineral wealth in lands held by Mexico. It was fueled by the press with its claims of a “Manifest Destiny.” And, it was fueled by racism, not only against Native Americans but against a Hispanic population which had resided in those lands for generations. My husband called my attention to this book after I attended a lecture on the history of New Mexico and complained that none of the events and people were at all familiar. This book filled in many of the gaps in my knowledge. It is complemented by Bad Mexicans by Kelly Lytle Hernández which is primarily set in the early 20th century but briefly covers Mexican-American relations since Mexico's independence from Spain. ...more |
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not set
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Nov 2024
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Nov 01, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| 9390652081
| 9789390652082
| 9390652081
| 4.11
| 318
| 1897
| Feb 2021
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liked it
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Nothing about this brief novel is ordinary. The setting is a group of isolated rural villages in Orissa (Odisha). The narrator is looking back on the
Nothing about this brief novel is ordinary. The setting is a group of isolated rural villages in Orissa (Odisha). The narrator is looking back on the 1830's, unspooling his story with coy irony and recognition of his audience with a sly wink, linking storyteller and audience in a subversive alliance. The exposition is leisurely with the story arc not discernible until deep into the narrative. The main character is a landlord (zamidar) named Ramchandra Mangaraj. He has risen from abject poverty to enormous wealth through what today we would call extortion and loan sharking. This lamentable surge of upward mobility is a direct result of the Settlement Act of 1793, a tax agreement between the East India Company and the ruling British Government. In return for serving as tax collectors and delivering those taxes, landlords were granted extensive land ownership powers. The arrangement resulted in their squeezing already impoverished tenants while causing zamidars who failed to deliver taxes on time (a frequent occurrence due to distances and almost non-existent roadways) to lose their lands to wealthier and frequently absentee landlords. This was explained in the translator's afterword. Senapati, then, is giving us a view of a transformation in progress. We are watching the effects of a subsistence economy abruptly being replaced by a cash economy, something the West has touted as “progress.” We peek at the account books of Mangaraj as one small indicator of how this transformation is being effected. Senapati concludes: “Trade and commerce make you rich, agriculture brings in only half as much.” (p.11) A second pillar of oppression are the law courts. Since the British governors could not understand any of the native languages, they distributed sinecures as favors to locals. This created an administrative apparatus corrupt from top to bottom. Senapati laments the demise of local governance where five reliable caste heads of the village (The Pancha) adjudicated village conflicts. A fine would be collected and held in the "caste funds" for use in communal betterment. Now, he laments, everyone floods to the English law courts: “The end result is that the cunning and rich get away scot-free with one hundred and one murders, while the simple and poor go through hell.” (p.52) We are watching a dubious legality replacing traditional morality. Senapati sums colonialism up in a delicious parable. Native birds must be satisfied with minnows that swim in Demon Lake. “You could also see eighty or a hundred snow-white cranes and four or five grey herons squelching about in the mud. They looked like the lowly farm hands who toil in the fields from dawn to dusk....But did you see those cormorants who flew in from some far off land? After diving into the water a couple of times and filling their bellies, they took wing again....Hey, all you Hindu cranes and herons, take a good look at the English cormorants. They fly in from a distant land with empty pockets and fill their bellies with whatever's at hand – chenga, benga, gadisha, you name it – before taking off.” (p.70) Tradition survives in a distorted and dysfunctional form. Morality can only survive if there is communal consensus. We learn that traditional morality is based on the shastras: self-control, meditation, performance of duties, piety, contentment, forgiveness, honesty, and simplicity. Yet, the only character practicing these virtues in Mangaraj's victimized and ineffectual wife. For a woman to be barren is still a sign of great misfortune. Yet, Senapati fills his novel with numerous instances of wastrel children. One might conclude that the greater misfortune is having children! Nevertheless, the belief that motherhood would fulfill her leads naive Saria open to manipulation by Champa, Mangaraj's maidservant. The custom of modest gratuities is another instance of corrupt maneuvering in this transformed society. Whereas the night watchman (chowkidar) would receive small quantities of produce, wool, or money, Gobara Jena turned the practice on its head. Better be generous or you might find your house robbed at night! Gobara was not only derelict in his duties; he was in league with criminal gangs. Little wonder that Gobara Jena and Mangaraj had much to discuss late at night. I found this a difficult book to read despite its brevity. The structure is disconnected. Puzzling and clearly criminal acts are being planned or perpetrated. Why is a deep hole being dug behind that banyan tree? Why does Champa reassure Mangaraj that all she needs are some hampers and servants to carry out a plan to his benefit? The crimes and their consequences are not revealed until much later in the story. Senapati is not interested in creating momentum. The stories were at first published serially and only later edited and added to as a novel. In addition, Senapati is more interested in allowing the reader to infer the truth rather than force-feeding us any obvious conclusions. In this way he hopes the impact will be more devastating. He does draw some particularly vivid portraits of Mangaraj and Champa. He is also adept in creating mood. He tells us of the night's darkness, the rain, the disturbed branches of a banyan tree, bats flying out of the branches and birds feeding on its fruit. The description has us holding our breaths, waiting for something we know will happen. Those types of passages, however, are rare. The characters always remained abstract to me. The most vivid character was Senapati himself. His narrative is a constant reminder of his presence, much the way an oral storyteller's voice and gestures are a critical element of his story. As for “karma,” I never felt convinced in its reality. Instead, we are left with a sense of schadenfreude which scarcely compensates for the individual tragedies we have witnessed. This was a thought-provoking novel that deftly shows the cruel effects of colonialism. This was the month's selection of our local book club. Notes: Lord Dadhibaman Temple: https://odishatour.in/dadhibaman-temp... Birupa River: https://www.mindat.org/feature-127548... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 28, 2024
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Aug 28, 2024
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Paperback
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| 0393059030
| 9780393059038
| 0393059030
| 4.01
| 228
| 2005
| 2005
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really liked it
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The Hero is a concept deeply ingrained in Western culture and has been a constant driver in our narrative of history. Thus, for England Charles Gordon
The Hero is a concept deeply ingrained in Western culture and has been a constant driver in our narrative of history. Thus, for England Charles Gordon was touted as the hero who would restore order in the Sudan in 1884. (His official mandate was merely to observe and report back to Consul General Baring in Cairo). A year later he became the martyred hero of Khartoum. Dr. Robert Felkin had merely to invoke Gordon's name in a letter to The Times of London in December 1886 to catalyze support for an expedition to rescue Emin Pasha, dubbed Gordon's “Last Lieutenant.” Emin Pasha, governor of Equatoria, was under threat from the Mahdi's forces, now led by Khalifa Abdullah. The organizers of the so-called Emin Pasha Relief Expedition turned to yet another hero for the expedition's leadership – Henry Stanley, renowned explorer and savior of the saintly Dr. Livingston. This book delves into the disparate personalitiees of Emin Pasha, Stanley and scores of actors connected with the horrific drama that unfolded across equatorial Africa over a three year time span. It is a highly readable and detailed narrative based on diaries, letters and contemporary writings. It points to the unreliability of Stanley's own account, In Darkest Africa. Neither Stanley nor the organizers of the expedition had primarily humanitarian motives. Stanley had been employed by King Leopold II of Belgium for five years and was aware of Leopold's ambition to transform what was called the Congo Free State into a personal fiefdom. The British, led by William Mackinnon, hoped to establish a trade monopoly and were working to charter the IBEAC (Imperial British East Africa Co.). Stanley's goal was to extract Emin Pasha. Emin Pasha had merely asked for guns and ammunition and had explicitly declared his intent to remain in Equatoria in letters he had dispatched. Stanley, however, was confident he could persuade Emin Pasha to leave and accompany him to London. It would be a powerful display of his own heroism in "rescuing" Gordon's "last lieutenant." These conflicting agendas had serious repercussions. From the outset Stanley chose to begin his march in West Africa at the mouth of the Congo River. This west to east route was longer than the east to west routes that had already been traversed. From the Congo River's mouth, the route would take them through the unexplored and inhospitable Iturbi Forest. This bizarre decision was no doubt influenced by Stanley's association with King Leopold. Stanley repeatedly overcame obstacles with ingenuity and resourcefulness. However, neither he nor his lieutenants gave any thought to the sheer number of miscalculations nor their catastrophic consequences. The most serious problem was obtaining food. Stanley assumed they could barter for food with the natives and brought a supply of trinkets for this purpose. However, much of central Africa was in the midst of a famine and Stanley had warnings about this when the expedition first landed. The convoy resorted to looting villages along their route. The terrified natives fled, and his men occupied the emptied huts for the night and burned them in the morning when they departed, after taking any food they found. Eventually, the villagers would simply pack up their food and livestock and melt into the forest until the convoy had passed through. Stanley also imagined that they could hunt game to supplement their diets. However, no animals were to be seen. The authors point out: “Evidently, the sound of eight hundred men tromping through the jungle was something of a warning signal.” (p.77) Stanley had organized the expedition on a military model. That model enabled him to enact a level of appalling brutality without restraint. Officers were subjected to verbal abuse and humiliation. Porters were nothing more than beasts of burden. James Jameson wrote of his duties in keeping the porters moving as “...not fit for any white man, but ought to be given to slave-drivers.” (p.70) The military model enabled a callous calculation of expected and acceptable losses. Any natives opposing him were “the enemy.” Stanley's leadership infected his officers with the mindset that the ends justified the means. For Stanley, that end meant speed at any cost. He needed to extract Emin Pasha before the Mahdi forces captured Equatoria in order to realize his goal of a triumphant grand tour. This warped morality had lasting effects. William Stairs at one point noted the abysmal governance of central Africa under Leopold's agents which included the notorious slaver Tippu Tib. “...the state, as now constructed, is one huge mistake.” (p.93) Yet, having survived the ordeal, he led yet another expedition in 1891 – under the employ of King Leopold. Stanley's reliance on the very unreliable Tippu Tib would have fatal consequences. The title The Last Expedition refers to more than Stanley's career. His expedition was the conclusion of a century of activities that opened up the continent. “In the decade that followed, during the so-called Scramble for Africa, that opportunity was ruthlessly exploited by a parade of nations, quasi-governmental enterprises, and individuals that continued well into the twentieth century, a parade whose malignant legacy haunts the continent to this day. Stanley was their point man and drum major. Bula Matari [his epithet] was more than a Breaker of Stones; he and his ilk broke Africa wide open, and no one has yet found a way to put it back together again.” (p.337) My husband recommended this book to me when he learned I had read The White Nile. ...more |
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Jun 28, 2024
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Jun 28, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 0143039954
| 9780143039952
| 0143039954
| 3.82
| 1,135,941
| -700
| Oct 31, 2006
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it was amazing
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THE ODYSSEY, tr. W.H.D. Rouse Believed to have been composed around 800 BC, The Odyssey immerses us in an ancient world. Uncertainty was perhaps the no THE ODYSSEY, tr. W.H.D. Rouse Believed to have been composed around 800 BC, The Odyssey immerses us in an ancient world. Uncertainty was perhaps the norm. The rituals and rigid rules of propriety can be seen as attempts to create order. (Today, we do something similar in our faith in technological development). Although the ancient world of Odysseus might seem alien in its beliefs and values, its concerns were familiar. What constitutes a good life? How are contradicting ethical demands to be resolved? The poem opens with a consideration of justice. A gathering of intrusive suitors have taken up residence in Odysseus' palace. While demanding that Penelope wed one of them, they are draining the resources of the estate, consuming the best portions of food and drink, and living lives of indolence and corruption. Even worse, now that Odysseus' son Telemachos is approaching adulthood, they begin to plan his murder. Homer contrasts these transgressors with Telemachos' dutiful show of hospitality to a stranger named Menthês, actually Athena in disguise. A lesson embedded in this epic is that actions have irreversible consequences. In a climactic moment the seer Halithersês Mastoridês is not only ignored but mocked by the Suitors when he predicts Odysseus' return and their deaths if they do not leave. It is a signal to us that their doom is sealed. Of course the main character is Odysseus. However, the first four books depict Telemachos' navigation toward maturity. Athena sends him out into the world of adults among the peers of his father. This journey mirrors Odysseus' own travels. Together the two arcs suggest the circumnavigation of life from youth to old age. Homer repeatedly reminds us of life's transience. In Hades Odysseus encounters Agamemnon and Achilles. There they speak with a candor stripped of the pride and guile they most certainly would have employed in life. Achilles makes a shocking statement in response to Odysseus' description of the lavish rites performed to memorialize his life and passing. “Don't bepraise death to me Odysseus. I would rather be plowman to a yeoman farmer on a small holding than lord Paramount in the kingdom of the dead.” (Bk. XII, p.134) In Book XXIV Homer revisits Hades where Hermes has awakened the dead to greet the newly slain Suitors. Hearing of clever Penelope's loyalty in contrast to his own wife Clytemnestra's perfidy, Agamemnon exclaims “The fame of her virtue shall never be forgot, and the immortals will make upon the earth a lovely song for faithful Penelope.” (Book XXIV, p.264) Glory and posthumous honors. There is an abstract quality to these accolades. The Greeks seem to be searching for something more, something that addresses the core of human existence in this epic. We find that something if we look more carefully. Homer threads his narrative with ambiguity. Agamemnon's death is recounted several times. Nestor in Pylos blames Clytemnestra's lover Aigisthos whom he accuses of wearing down and finally seducing Agamemnon's wife. “At first she would have nothing to do with the shameful business, I mean Queen Clytemnestra; for she was not really a bad woman.” (Book III, p.38) Menelaos heard the story from the Old Man of the Sea and simply tells Telemachos that his brother was stealthily murdered by Aigisthos, making no mention of Clytemnestra, but rejoicing that the murder was avenged by Agamemnon's son Orestês. Zeus, too, assigns the blame to Aigisthos, in his complaint: “Upon my word, just see how mortal men always put the blame on us gods! We are the source of evil, so they say – when they have only their own madness to thank if their miseries are worse than they ought to be. Look here, now; Aigisthos has done what he ought not have done. Took Agamemnon's wedded wife for himself, killed Agamemnon when he came home, though he knew quite well it would be his own ruin! We gave him fair warning, sent our special messenger Hermês, and told him not to kill the man or to make love to his wife....” (Book I, p.12) Finally, we get Agamemnon's version in which he totally lays all the blame on Clytemnestra. That version forms a contrasting pairing to Penelope's faithfulness to her own husband. Our own sensibilities require us to factor in the sacrifice of Clytemnestra's daughter Iphigenia in the Iliad, which is not mentioned in this poem. Homer also provides a nuanced view of Helen. She is a radiant and charming hostess but shrewd enough to realize that these qualities will only get her so far. As the banquet for Telemachos progresses with stories of heroism and inevitable sadness for the deaths of beloved comrades in a war she was largely to blame for (Nestor had earlier admitted they set off for plunder), she drugs their wine. She blames Aphrodite for her own transgression, and claims she instantly recognized and aided Odysseus when he entered Troy as a spy are accepted with equanimity by this insensate audience. Helen here is quite a bit more than the static icon of beauty enshrined in legend. Just as Homer startles with his depiction of Helen, he surprises us with Penelope's skepticism. Even when told that Odysseus has returned and disposed of the Suitors, she is understandably doubtful. After all, we as readers have been immersed in lies and half-truths throughout this epic, and seen how Athena appears in various disguises. Homer liberates her from a static symbol of loyalty. Her speeches oscillate rhythmically to those of Odysseus. When Eurycleia the nurse joyously announces the death of the Suitors, Penelope cautions her: “Nanny, dear, don't boast too soon with all that gloating and chuckling....there is no truth in your story. No, no, it is one of the immortal gods who killed these proud men.” (Bk. XXIII, p.254) Only a few pages back, Odysseus had told the nurse: “Keep your joy in your heart, woman; quit now, no cries of triumph. It is not decent to boast over slain men. These have been brought low by God's decree and their own wicked deeds.” (Bk.XXII, p.251) The pairing is even more explicit when Odysseus chides Penelope: “Strange woman! The inscrutable will of God has made your heart unfeeling beyond mortal women.” She retorts: “Strange man, I am not proud or contemptuous, or offended, but I know what manner of man you were when you sailed away from Ithaca.” (Bk. XXIII, p.256) With the trick of their bed, she has truly attained the status of Clever Penelope. This was the selection of our local book club. I have drawn many of my thoughts from the memoir An Odyssey; A Father, a Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn is a classics professor at Bard College, and I highly recommend his book. The edition of The Odyssey I read was: The Odyssey; the Story of Odysseus, translated by W.H.D. Rouse, NY: New American Library of World Literature, 1937. ...more |
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| 3.91
| 2,733
| 1994
| May 13, 2014
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really liked it
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An unshakable legacy of tenacity and despair underlies this tense novel. Of course at its center is Aljaz, a river guide physically and emotionally br
An unshakable legacy of tenacity and despair underlies this tense novel. Of course at its center is Aljaz, a river guide physically and emotionally broken. But for a moment, consider the character Maaria Magdalena Svevo. She was the midwife attending Aljaz's birth. She was the confidante of Aljaz's mother Sofia back in Trieste. She had seen the gradual souring of Sofia and Harry's marriage despite their being still in love with each other. She had listened to the stories of their own pasts when Aljaz was too young to understand or even care, as children are wont to be in their relationship to their parents. Present at Aljaz's difficult birth, her laugh is one of defiant triumph. With Couta Ho, the wife Aljaz left behind, she is the quiet presence that draws out the contours of grief that Aljaz refused to hear. She is a repository for the memories of the living. The visions a drowning Aljaz has are connected to a more distant and potent past retained by the river and only now, able to be released. Now, we can speak of Aljaz. The first vision the river releases is his birth. “I was born the umbilical cord tangled around my neck...unable to scream....arriving in the world not dissimilarly to how I am now to depart it.” (Location 113) Moreover, his head was encased in a caul. Bad luck and good luck. In the beginning they hang in the balance. The river releases other visions. He glimpses his father Harry's brief childhood, darkened by Harry's mother Rose's early death, and his premature plunge into adulthood when Harry's rather Boy is killed in an accident. There are also images of Boy's own life as a backwoods logger. And, there are images of other relatives going back at least four generations. There is no chronology to these visions. They are mixed with Harry's own memories, both past and nearly current. The current ones reecount with agonizing precision the fateful rafting expedition on the Franklin River. Flanagan describes in detail the hurried preparations for the trip. Aljay is again reminded of how time has seemed to move forward without him. He is the mere employee of an indifferent corporation headquartered in far off Sydney. In his youth he was an independent guide with full control over those he guided and the quality and quantity of the supplies they packed. In fact, the only reason he has been hired is that his fellow guide, Cockroach, although familiar with other rivers, has never traversed the Franklin, a long river that courses through uninhabited virgin rainforest and enormous bluffs, narrowing into fast-moving rapids. The relationship between the guides and the customers, referred to as punters, is also detailed. The two belong to different and incompatible worlds. Yet, the guides are also responsible for keeping everyone safe. To achieve that they must apply a combination of theater and psychology. Hints of aborigine myth flicker through the images Aljaz sees. Harry recalls a story that the souls of the drowned migrate into the bodies of seals. Autie Ellie he remembers, once told him that the souls of his ancestors re-entered the world as sea eagles. In one of Aljax's visions Harry hosts a manic barbecue attended by animals once plentiful in Tasmania, and even some that have gone extinct. The animals talk in raucous voices and tell stories that contain fragments of Aljaz's life. In the end all of these images connect granting Aljaz a power as primordial as the river itself. The fragmented exposition propels this novel on the first read. Questions hang in the air. How did Harry get to Trieste? Who is Couta Ho? How is Ned Quade, a convict, connected to Aljaz's story? These questions are all answered by subsequent passages. A second reading of the book feels slower. The draw becomes the complexity of the characters' lives. What makes this novel engaging is Flanagan's ability to make us visualize the events. The transition from a sluggish river so shallow frequent portaging is required to a raging monster remains vivid and menacing no matter how often the passages are read. Each character including Aljaz has a unique descent into sadness, fear, self-loathing, loneliness and denial. What elevates this into the realm of tragedy is Flanagan's ability to unify the elements. Each life is part of an inescapable continuity with a past as old as the land. It is a land that was once “fat and full of trees and game....plains so thickly speckled with emu and wallaby dung that it looked as if the heavens must have hailed sleek black turds upon the land, ...and the vast blue Derwent River rainbowed with the vapoury spouts of pods of whales and schools of dolphins swimming beneath.” (Location 3568) Goodreads friends brought this book to my attention when I was looking for a novel with an Australia setting. ...more |
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| 0449912442
| 4.38
| 14,942
| 1956
| Jun 09, 1998
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really liked it
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Losing faith and being an atheist are not the same thing. Three years after the end of World War I, 25-year old Ludwig Bodner has rejected the theolog
Losing faith and being an atheist are not the same thing. Three years after the end of World War I, 25-year old Ludwig Bodner has rejected the theological truisms of Vicar Bodendiek while sensing the sterility of Dr. Wernicke's science. The war prematurely aged him while robbing him of a natural maturation. He wants something to believe in while languishing in the offices of the Kroll Brothers, sellers of gravestones. This is a picaresque novel filled with symbolic suggestions. Ludwig imagines he is in love with Isabelle, an inmate of an asylum adjoining the chapel where he plays the organ on Sundays for extra money. She has been diagnosed as a schizophrenic. Interpreting her opaque allusions as profundity, her lapses into paranoia as vulnerability, he reveals his own conflict between cynicism and idealism. An amateur poet himself, her strange speculations feel poetic. When she asks if mirrors hide things behind what they reflect, we realize that Ludwig has been using Isabelle as a mirror reflecting back his own unfulfilled longings. He has been drawn into a solipsistic fairy tale. Whereas Isabelle's delusions seem to approach hidden truths, what he calls a “a strange wisdom,” his customers are committed to self-delusion. (p.46) A late husband might have been a wife-beater and drunkard leaving his family in perpetual poverty. In death he is transformed into near sainthood – loving, kind, and industrious. Only the best gravestone with the most florid tribute can do as a monument to his virtues. The black obelisk purchased by the Kroll patriarch before the war is virtually unsaleable: the color – too grim; the size – too imposing; its simplicity – too austere. It might be a fitting memorial to a reality people would prefer to ignore. When the Kroll Brothers receive a commission to create a war memorial, a more generalized delusion emerges, one that omits the responsibility for the war, the jingoism that duped a generation of youth into four years of senseless horror, leaving its leaders relatively unscathed. At the ceremony, Major Wolkenstein dons his outlawed uniform and leads the dedication to his heroic “comrades.” Oskar Fuchs, a gravestone salesman, voices that hypocrisy on another occasion. He relates how the Kaiser's impending visit provoked a frenzy of corpse swapping between his fellow cemetery custodians. Officers' corpses were a scarce commodity. He states: “...a full sergeant major was rare, you know. Those swine always sat way behind the front and almost never got killed.” (p.344) How could the Kaiser bestow commendations without fallen of sufficiently elevated stations? Like cynicism, inflation is a sign of the times. When the novel opens the rate is 10,000 marks to the dollar. In a few months it has climbed to nearly a trillion marks. The devastation is most effectively expressed by the following passage: “The dollar has gone wild; it no longer leaps by thousands and ten thousands, but by hundreds of thousands daily. Day before yesterday it stood at 1,200,000. Yesterday at 1,400,000. Tomorrow it is expected to reach two million – and by the end of the month ten. Workmen are given their pay twice a day now – in the morning and in the afternoon with a recess of a half-hour each time so that they can rush out and buy things – for if they waited a few hours the value of their money would drop so far that their children would not get half enough food to feel satisfied. Satisfied – not nourished. Satisfied with anything that can be stuffed into their stomachs, not with what the body needs.” (p.262) Nazism began to sprout almost the moment the War ended. History is forgotten and memory reshaped. A gang composed of youths who never fought in the War call themselves the Iron Guard and roam the town beating up and murdering anyone they deem unpatriotic. They are encouraged by leaders like Major Wolkenstein. Heinrich, the self-righteous moralizer of the two Kroll brothers, voices a longing for a kaiser who will sweep the county back to the halcyon days of the past. This provokes Ludwig's fury: “You've forgotten something. You've forgotten the important word because....Today we have seven million unemployed and inflation and we have been conquered because we had the national government you love so much! Because we had your beloved blockheads and puppets in uniform as our government! And we must not have them back to make things go better; instead we must be careful that they don't come back, because otherwise they will drive us into war again and into the muck again.” (p.322) This book was published in 1957. It is not really a sequel to All Quiet On The Western Front, but continues many of that book's themes. It is notable for its small town setting rather than in Berlin and for its vivid portrayal of a 1920's Germany. However, the protagonist Ludwig Bodner is not very likable. The Isabelle scenes are lengthy and move through their story arc too slowly. Episodes of hedonistic pursuit intended to be funny come across as a macabre carnival. Actual humor relies heavily on Schadenfreude. A number of female characters are cast in roles of grotesque parody. However, the novel seeks to delve into emotional truths of the period. Its relevance cannot be ignored as America veers toward strongman adulation and embraces distortions of history and memory. I read this book to supplement my reading of the author's All Quiet On the Western Front, the selection of our local book club. Despite my reservations I'm glad I did. Remarque was an extraordinary writer who deserves wider acclaim. Denver Lindsey, the translator, was one of the pre-eminent translators of German into English of the period. ...more |
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| 4.09
| 490,051
| 1928
| Jan 01, 1987
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it was amazing
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World War I didn't just extinguish the lives of over 2 million German soldiers. It extinguished a society. What remained was a traumatized generation
World War I didn't just extinguish the lives of over 2 million German soldiers. It extinguished a society. What remained was a traumatized generation disconnected from the past, from their families, from institutions and from the comfortable certainty of a future. The novel views the war through the eyes of eighteen-year-old Paul Bäumer. He and his classmates were encouraged, cajoled, perhaps even bullied into volunteering for the army by the unquestioning conviction of their teacher, Kantorek. There were thousands of Kantoreks and they shepherded millions of Bäumers into the slaughtering pens. When they fell they were replaced by even younger recruits. In Bäumer's class only one, Joseph Behm, hesitated. Behm was now dead, killed as much by peer pressure as by bullets. Bäumer contemplates his education. The war has turned poetry, music, history and even the shelf of treasured books in his room into vacuity. Learning was nothing but experience cloaked in abstractions. “The wisest were just the poor simple people. They knew the war to be a misfortune, whereas those who were better off, and should have been able to see more clearly what the consequences would be, were beside themselves with joy. Katczensky said that was the result of their upbringing. It made them stupid. And what Kat said, he had thought about.” (p.11) Remarque lulls into a state of complacency with his opening paragraphs. For once there is plenty of food for the Second Company just returned from the front lines. Double rations of beans, sausage, bread and tobacco are greeted with exhilaration. Then, Remarque casually divulges the reason for the windfall. Out of 150 men, 80 have returned. It's a casualty rate of 40%. It's as if the horrors stand in a queue, eager for a turn to sicken and shock us. Lice, rats (which they must compete with for food), cold and disease remain even in the brief intervals when the gas attacks, bombs and bullets stop. Then, there are the haunting screams of dying horses and men throughout the night, deterring any attempts at sleep. A stack of preemptively constructed coffins are in full view. Language, stripped of euphemism, has been pared down to the coarse and carnal. The novel questions the whole notion of human agency. Did Bäumer choose to go to war when he had no idea what war would entail? Existence in the trenches makes a mockery of the idea of agency. Chance rules. “The front is a cage in which we must await fearfully whatever may happen. We lie under the network of arching shells and live in a suspense of uncertainty. Over us, Chance hovers. If a shot comes, we can duck, that is all; we neither know nor can determine where it will fall.” (p.101) When Bäumer is granted leave he feels even worse. The false normalcy of civilian life is isolating. The small niceties like food hoarded from meager supplies just to welcome him home only reinforce his sense of helplessness. The claims of comradeship by the town's arm-chair warriors are offensive. His only comrades are the men he shares the trenches with. But worst of all, the hiatus has stripped away his protective shell of numbness. When he returns, fear rules his thoughts. The banality of their suffering is underscored by the Kaiser's brief review of the troops. He's much smaller than they expected. The fresh uniforms they were issued for this pantomime are returned once the Kaiser has left. Kropp had assessed the situation much earlier. Let all the ministers and generals do the fighting, like gladiators. The wrong people were doing the fighting. By its conclusion the novel makes clear that even the survivors will have no future. Their's will be shadow-lives feeding on illusion. He voices a prescient valediction: “And men will not understand us – for the generation that grew up before us, though it has passed these years with us already had a home and a calling; now it will return to its old occupations, and the war will be forgotten – and the generation that has grown up after us will be strange to us and push us aside. We will be superfluous even to ourselves, we will grow older, a few will adapt themselves, some others will merely submit, and most will be bewildered; – the years will pass by and in the end we shall fall into ruin.” (p.294) This was a powerful book drawing impact from its brevity. It was this month's selection of our local book club. NOTES: An essay in the journal Scholarly Editing by Sarah Eilefson on the various translations of the book. https://scholarlyediting.org/2017/ess... ...more |
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| 0593297261
| 9780593297261
| B08Y6D74GY
| 4.40
| 11,145
| Sep 21, 2021
| Sep 21, 2021
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really liked it
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Doing the right thing was never the easy path for Walt Longmire, Sheriff of fictional Absaroka County, Wyoming. That difficulty is evident from the ou
Doing the right thing was never the easy path for Walt Longmire, Sheriff of fictional Absaroka County, Wyoming. That difficulty is evident from the outset when the teen he is supposed to protect tops her hostility to his interview with the roar of her exiting Buick Wildcat leaving him and Dog in a cloud of exhaust and dust. Native American women are raped, assaulted, murdered or theysimply vanish well above any national average as author Craig Johnson makes clear so the threats against Jaya “Longbow” Long of the Northern Cheyenne are not to be taken lightly. She is a high school senior, and her basketball prowess is not just the key to the Lame Deer, Montana Lady Morning Stars team, but to her own prospects for the future. Tribal Chief Lolo Lang, Jaya's forceful maternal aunt, has extracted a promise from Walt to investigate a prolonged series of threatening letters – letters similar to ones sent to Jaya's sister Jeanie who vanished on night outside Billings, Montana a year ago. Longmire's investigation will plunge him into the most dysfunctional elements of Native American life, a dangerous network of White Supremacists spawned by the state prison system, and the scarcely remembered supernatural lore that Cheyenne elders once told. Longmire first hears of this ghost story from a Crow named Iron Bull who recalls a chilling memory: “'At first, all I could see was the fog and it was coming at me like it was going to cover me up, but it didn't. I could've reached out and put my hand in it, but I didn't....Then I saw her, there in the fog – not her, but the absence of her. It was an outline of that girl, Jeanie One Moon, and I could hear her voice. No words, just the voice.'” (p.33) This recollection forms the backbone of the story. Long time companion Henry Standing Bear has a prominent role in the story. The banter between him and Walt is always entertaining as well as a thoughtful counterpoint to Walt's myopia. They encounter a woman Walt dated in his youth when they go to the Wainwright Ranch to interview her son and are kicked off the ranch by her husband. She hints that they could still intercept her son by the corrals on the way out using the ploy of a scarf she claims to have left in the area when they first arrived. “'Do you remember that scarf I had on while I was riding in the arena?' It seemed like an odd thing to say. 'Um, no....I don't think you had...' Henry interrupted. 'I remember the scarf. Would you like us to take a look around the arena before we leave:' ….The Bear shook his head. Out of her earshot he tells Walt, 'You truly can be slow at times.'” (p.72) This was only the fourth Longmire book I have read, and it was intriguing. The plot had unexpected twists, an assortment of reprehensible characters, tension and explosive action. However the ghostly realm of the “Wandering Without,” a black hole of trapped souls devoured by a perpetually hungry nothingness gives this book momentum and propels the reader immediately into the next Longmire book, Hell and Back. That book is even better than this one. My husband recommended this book to me. He has been making his way through the series in order. ...more |
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| B09NXDMC9Z
| 3.96
| 9,069
| Sep 06, 2022
| Sep 06, 2022
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really liked it
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There will always be the unknowable, something that defies logical explanation, something that philsophers have wrestled with for centuries. Perhaps t
There will always be the unknowable, something that defies logical explanation, something that philsophers have wrestled with for centuries. Perhaps that is the allure of ancient ghost stories. Their reshaping of our experiences and uncertainties acknowledge unknowability while keeping it compartmentalized. In this, the 18th book in the Longmire series, Craig Johnson immerses us in a Cheyenne shadow existence where time is frozen, memories are erased, terror lurks on the edge of consciousness and existence is a perpetual loop of isolation. A movie released 50 years ago, clocks never budging from 8:17, an 1888-o silver dollar, the number 31 and a town called Pratt. Remember, remember, remember....Like the ticking of that clock that goes nowhere, these are all clues but Walt is caught in a vacuum where his memories have been lost and along with them his identity. When the character Father Vanderhoven appears, the name sent a shiver up my spine. I had just finished Johnson's previous book, Daughter of the Morning Star. That book was grounded in the appalling statistics of murder, rape and disappearances of Native American women. This book stems from the government's program of “assimilation” of Native Americans. Agents forcibly extracted children from their families and placed them in special boarding schools where they were allowed to only speak English. A principal architect of the movement was a man named Richard Henry Pratt. Johnson captures the horrors inflicted on these children, physical as well as the mental trauma of forced alienation from their families, culture and language. Hell and Back toggles between Walt struggling to find direction and the frantic efforts of Standing Bear and Vic to rescue him from what they are certain is imminent danger. They are convinced that he is still alive, but for how long? More than her normal foul-mouthed self, Vic rages at anyone who might obstruct her path to finding Walt like a vengeful Fury. She calms herself by declaring “'I'm taking my gun out for a walk.'” (p.107) Her opposite in temperament, the understated menace of The Bear, makes for a satisfying combination as they interview a curiously evasive man named Riley and a dangerous apocalyptic fanatic named Artie Small. This was without question my favorite book in the series. It is more like Part 2 of Daughter of the Morning Star and that title must be read before reading this book. I have also learned that The Highwayman is another title relevant to this book. Unfortunately, I hadn't read that one. ...more |
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| 3.71
| 3,241
| 1968
| Jul 03, 2013
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James Michener was captivated by a Spain that I found disconcerting. The Catholic Church permeates the fabric of Spanish society. The notion of separa
James Michener was captivated by a Spain that I found disconcerting. The Catholic Church permeates the fabric of Spanish society. The notion of separation of Church and State is incomprehensible. There the Church is a deeply conservative institution where the encyclicals of Pope John XXIII are perceived as ideologically destabilizing. Economically it has for centuries been dominated by landed families. The Guardia Civil is a welcome public presence insuring order. Michener’s friend Don Luis Morenés y Areces advises him: “You must view Spain as a nation on a three-legged stool. Church, army, landed families. If any of these topples they all fall down.” (p.463) The Spanish view of history was another jolt to my “norteamericano” perspective. That view extols the conquistadors, bringers of civilization to the New World and glory to Spain. (Mexico has a different view. Statues of Cortes are banned in that country. Likewise, here in New Mexico, Columbus Day is referred to as Indigenous Peoples’ Day). The savagery of the Spanish Inquisition is viewed as part of the “Black Legend,” a concerted effort by Protestant scholars to defame Spain. Michener examines this claim in detail and offers several interesting conclusions regarding the abrupt end of Spain’s Golden Age and the apparent stagnation of its intellectual life. Although this book was published in 1968, it is actually a compendium of James Michener’s impressions over nearly 25 years of visits to Spain beginning in 1932. He attempts to capture an eternal essence of Spanish culture, a portrait of its national character. It’s an approach that might seem quaint today but was popular at one time (e.g. Ruth Benedict’s Chrysanthemum and the Sword). Nevertheless, he never sinks into facile stereotyping. It is notable that he never uses the word “machismo” in the nearly thousand pages of this book. Instead, he offers a useful lexicon. “Duende” is something he describes as “unmistakable class,” a dark spiritual profundity, or “the essence that makes something Spanish.” (p.69) Another term is “pundonor,” “the world’s most austere definition of honor,” one that implies the essence of character. (p.71) These words suggest a unique and individualistic aesthetic. As in his novels, Michener imbues this travelogue with a deep historical imagination that sustains a narrative of continuity. In Burriana on his first trip to Spain he views the barges loaded with Valencia oranges. The barges lie in shallow water and must be hauled to a waiting freighter. “In Roman times businessmen using this coast for the transfer of freight to Italy had solved the problem. They reared a breed of oxen that thrived in salt water, and now these huge beasts, working in the sea with often only their eyes and horns visible, backed close to a barge while workmen attached chains to their harness.” (p.15) At every stop in this tour of Spain, observation catalyzes historical connections. Michener seeks out a spiritual vitality in his travls. Whereas he acknowledges artists like Zurbarán, El Greco and Velásquez, his heart dwells in medieval Spain. He describes in loving detail the sculptures and architecture of Spain’s monasteries and churches, prolific examples of Romanesque architecture. “Why do I like Romanesque buildings so much?....When I see a fine example of Romanesque, I feel that I am in the presence of the very best that an age could accomplish, and it was an age that accomplished much. I am at the wellsprings of art, those solid beginnings without which no later art could have achieved much. I am standing with stonemasons who saw things simply and who resisted the temptation of flying off at strange tangents. There is something perpetually clean and honorable about the best Romanesque, and when I see it my whole being responds, as if the artisans who perfected this style were working for me alone. I hear voices singing in plainsong, or the oboes of Pamplona playing without harmony. I am in a different age, with a different set of values, and I find its simplicity exactly to my taste.” (p.869) Michener will, with this aesthetic of authenticity, delight in the harsh terrain of the Extremadura, anchored by Badajoz. The Extremadura was the birthplace of Cortés, Pizarro, and Balboa. He searches in vain for a pure version of flamenco where art is not eclipsed by showmanship. He welcomes the serendipitous. In Barcelona he views a seeming spontaneous street dance accompanied by rustic sardana music. In Madrid he extols the zarzuela, which he likens to operetta and laments its declining popularity. Even a collection of black and white photos by Robert Vara are liberated from the text and could stand on their own as a visual essay. He had instructed Vavra to be guided by his instincts, indifferent to any of Michener’s inclinations that he might perceive. Michener concludes his expansive tour with two highly personal chapters. One is on the artistry of the bull fight. The other follows the route of the Santiago de Compostela pilgrims. On bullfighting I have my own opinions. However, I did learn that the bulls are specially bred for special characteristics on a handful of well-known historic family ranches. At Astorga near the end of the Santiago de Campostela route there is an intriguing construction designed by Antonin Gaudí. It is called the Palace of Astorga and even Michener finds it awe-inspiring. Of all the locales Michener described, my favorite was almost a side-trip – Las Marismas (the Tidelands). It is southwest of Sevilla where the Atlantic Ocean and the Río Guadalquivir create a unique seasonal marshland fecund with wildlife. In 1969 in an effort to halt the devastation of this unique area due to agricultural development, the Parque Nacional y Natural de Doñana was created. It is now a World Heritage Site. This was a sprawling probe into Spain’s culture and history. It was informative but exhausting. I do not know how much of Spain has changed since Michener’s visits. My 3-star rating should not deter anyone from reading this unique perspective on a country we tend to think of in terms of romantic fantasies and derogatory generalizations. NOTES: Dialnet-ASearchForTheMeaningOfLife-6843420.pdf A SEARCH FOR THE MEANING OF LIFE: JAMES A. MICHENER, YOUTH, AND ETERNAL SPAIN Mark DeStephano. I recommend this essay which offers a much more comprehensive summary and commentary on this book. ...more |
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| 0374712875
| 9780374712877
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| Oct 22, 2013
| Aug 02, 2016
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Nightmares and reality embrace in this intense novel. An extended passage of explicit homosexuality fills the opening paragraphs. However, even as the
Nightmares and reality embrace in this intense novel. An extended passage of explicit homosexuality fills the opening paragraphs. However, even as the “client” summons lewd thoughts to achieve his climax, sixteen year old Máni Steinn Karlsson's mind dwells on Sóla G, the beautiful girl he equates with the elusive cat-suited criminal of a French nihilist film series. He hears the approaching roar of her motorcycle. A wordless consciousness of her presence heightens the eroticism of the moment. French nihilism is the perfect vehicle to ignite the boy's imagination. The year is 1918. The legitimacy of conventional authority is eroding as World War I drags on. The violence and audacity depicted in the films of Louis Feuillades with Musidora his charismatic star articulate a cry against the old order which has been percolating up from mainland Europe. Icelandic society is particularly conservative due to its geographic isolation. The language has changed little since the 9th or 10th century when it was settled. Homosexuality was considered an act of depravity. It goes without saying that Feuillades' films were considered shocking to the mainstream while embraced by a segment of its restless marginalized youth. In contrast to the visceral rawness of the opening, a later homosexual encounter is treated with immense poignancy. This time the boy is with a war veteran who has lost a leg. It is the veteran who translates Steinn Karlsson's name into English as “Moonstone.” A brief poem, “Billy,” tells us all we need to know. Billy was the foreigner's deceased lover. He fantacizes that Steinn Karlsson is Billy as they embrace. In time, the boy will stop charging the foreigner for his services. A horrifying dream suggests a separation between the boy's homosexual encounters for money in order to survive and those encounters satisfying a mutual need for intimate contact. Nineteen Eighteen is the year the “Spanish” flu appears in Iceland. The pandemic scenes are notable for Sjon's masterful prose. When the cinema's pianist dies an eerie silence extinguishes meaning from the flickering images on the screen. The mechanical sound of the projector becomes an insistent reminder of the futility of escapism. When the lights go on, the sickly audience is forced to confront reality. All of this amplifies the silence that pervades the city – silence interrupted by the hammering of coffin construction. When Dr. Árnason argues the theater has spread the plague, he throws in accusations of immoral titillation and depravity. The reader cannot avoid a comparison with attitudes prevalent during the Aids epidemic. Sjon is all too aware of how the “Spanish” flu seemed to target the young and healthy. “[the old women] have given room to so many ailments in their day that the scourge now making a meal of their descendants can find no morsel worth having on their worn-out old bones.” (p.50) A new sequence of nightmares unfolds when the boy succumbs to the pandemic. He recovers, however, and is rewarded with a brief interval of bliss. He is commandeered into helping the doctor move sick patients. The driver of their medical vehicle is Sóla G. Sjón calls this book Moonstone; the Boy Who Never Was. However, his choice of 1918, a year in which so much happens, provides a canvas of reality that cannot be ignored. It was the year in which the last major eruption of Mt. Katla took place, an event the townspeople view with curious detachment. It was the year Iceland became an independent nation. At the same time, these events are blurred by the lens of history. Despite the conceit of the title, Sjón has created a character who feels all too real. At the same time, he permits his character the grace of metamorphosis. This book was really outside my comfort zone. It was deservedly acclaimed by the literary establishment. The writing is powerful. However, I cannot say I would want to revisit this author. I read it because another of his works is this month's book club selection, and I wanted to broaden my understanding of him. NOTES: The actress known as Musidora played Irma Vep (an anagram of Vampire) and was immensely popular in the 1920's. This article provided background on both the film series and the actress. https://www.messynessychic.com/2022/1.... The Pool Group was a real group. Further information about them can be found on Wikipedia. ...more |
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| 4.06
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| May 16, 2011
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really liked it
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Unquestionably, both Albert Einstein and Marie Curie were scientific geniuses. What author Barbara Goldsmith fails to capture is the uniqueness of Mar
Unquestionably, both Albert Einstein and Marie Curie were scientific geniuses. What author Barbara Goldsmith fails to capture is the uniqueness of Marie Curie's genius embedded as it was in a scientific age still in its infancy. Einstein was a theoretical physicist. Marie Curie was a meticulous researcher, able to harness that ability to her own curiosity and experimental designs. Her unusual dexterity was a necessary asset in an age of relatively crude instrumentation. According to her granddaughter Hélène Langevin-Joliot, the glass tubes she blew were so uniform in thickness that they never shattered under heat or pressure. The electrometic apparatus that was so central to her work required such focus and delicacy that Langevin-Joliet asserts that no one today is able to use it. Still, Goldsmith writes that her goal is to humanize her subject, andd this she accomplishes in multiple ways. Marie Curie's Polish identity was forged from childhood by the repressive Russian Imperial regime which attempted to stamp out any vestiges of the Polish culture and language. An intellectual framework of individual betterment, educational attainment and rationalism were shaped by the Polish positivism she imbibed at the covert “Flying University” she attended after graduation from Gymnasium. Disappointed by a romantic infatuation and deeply hurt, she re-focused instead on her original goal to enroll at the Sorbonne and pursue a career in science. Despite her resolve and many achievements, her life was also marred throughout by lapses into deep depression. Goldsmith was able to access recently released archival materials in writing this biography. Perhaps most poignant are the diary entries written after Pierre Curie’s untimely death from a carriage accident. Marie Curie wrote as if addressing a living Pierre. To me, the entries reflected a state of intentional magical thinking as much as the belief in spiritualism that Goldsmith suggests. Piere was central to Marie Curie’s life. His dedication to scientific discovery matched her own. He negotiated a deal with the Central Society for Chemical Products to pay for lab assistants. He persuaded Eduard Suess, president of the Academy of Sciences of Vienna to broker a deal for obtaining the huge quantity of pitchblende needed for the distillations to obtain increasingly pure samples of radium. He persuaded Baron Edmond de Rothschild to cover the transportation costs for the imported pitchblende. When he learned that Marie was excluded from the nominating letter for the 1903 Nobel Prize in physics, he made it clear he would refuse the prize if Marie was not included. In a rare glimpse into the romantic side of their relationship, Goldsmith admits: “Yes, these two were dreamers. Frequently at night, Pierre and Marie would walk hand in hand the five blocks back to the laboratory, drawn by the mysterious element that these two scientists viewed with romanticism. ‘I wonder what It will look like>’ Marie asked. Pierre answered, ‘I should like it to have a beautiful color.’” (p.93) They certainly viewed in their imaginations radium as their child. It would be a child that betrayed them, long exposure to its rays damaging their health. In her introduction Goldsmith states that her purpose is to penetrate the mythology that has grown around Marie Curie. “But behind this image there was a real woman. It was this person I wished to pursue.” (p.18) Yet, revealing the “real” person feels somehow insufficient. A big part of that person was a dedication to science. Goldsmith never ignites in us the beauty and excitement science produced in Marie. Part of this is due to an inadequate attention to historical context. Marie Curie was born about the same time Mendeleev published his Periodic Table. When she began her experiments, J.J. Thompson’s model of the atom as a solid aggregation of protons and electrons was still believed (the “plum pudding model”). These facts are mentioned only briefly and the book fails to capture the dynamic swerve science was taking when Rutherford’s experiments suggested a planetary model that would help explain how radioactive waves might be created. This book was the selection of our local book club. I am looking forward to an interesting discussion. NOTES: Einstein is quoted as referring to Marie as a “cold fish.” Yet, when the scandal of her affair with Paul Langevin, a married man, erupted, Einstein wrote her a rousing letter of support. https://www.biography.com/scientists/... ...more |
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| 1641293608
| 9781641293600
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| 3.74
| 1,372
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| Aug 01, 2023
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really liked it
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Ghosts haunt the protagonist of this novel. The character is Aki Ito from Hirahara's earlier book, Clark and Division and the ghosts here are figurati
Ghosts haunt the protagonist of this novel. The character is Aki Ito from Hirahara's earlier book, Clark and Division and the ghosts here are figurative, but powerful. The Ito family has returned to their pre-war home in the Los Angeles area. Their joy at leaving the brutal midwestern winters is dampened by the extreme changes to once familiar environs. “Home” is a ghost, alive only in their memories, a reminder of irretrievable loss. Aki drives by their old house in Tropico. It's now part of a homogeneous upper middle class enclave. Another ghost is that of Aki's older sister Rose whose shocking death still reverberates in their muted grief. Her ashes sit in a golden urn on the mantel. In this confusing new L.A. with its mosaic of shifting geographies, Aki keeps a photo of Rose protected from the clutter of her purse. “I unzipped the side pocket and there, almost like a talisman, was a high school photo of my dear sister, Rose. No matter where I was, I wanted her close to me.” (p.31) This sequel to Clark and Division contains no spoilers but builds on the character foundations laid out in the earlier book, creating a stronger emotional connection to them, particularly to Aki who is now married to Art. The advice Art's Aunt Eunice had given now seems prescient. Married life is an adjustment. Expectations of passionate romance begin to give way to the day-to-day practicalities of work and the separate worlds they have come to inhabit. Aunt Eunice had cautioned the headstrong Aki that communication would be key to a strong marriage. Aki's own parents' were in an arranged marriage, devoid of those expectations Aki had been harboring. Art is newly returned from military service. He has landed a part-time job at the Rafu Shimpo. The job doesn't pay much, but is a start toward his hopes of becoming a full-time journalist. He puts in long hours and has become part of a circle of politically astute columnists. His elation is not enough, however, to dispel the trauma of war and the nightmares he treats dismissively. Aki, unlike Rose, was never politically active and is employed as a nurse's aid at the Japanese Hospital where the effects of poverty, inadequate housing, unsanitary conditions, crowding and dislocation are even more dire than what she witnessed at Manzanar. When Haruki Watanabe is brought to the hospital with a head injury, Aki discovers Watanabe is the father of Art's best man at their wedding. She already had negative impressions of the man, whom everyone called “Babe” for his baseball prowess, a nod to the great Babe Ruth. She considered Babe uncouth and intrusive. Moreover, he had lost their wedding photos when he accidentally dropped his camera thus ruining the film. Babe and Art had served together in the military where their friendship had grown even closer. Aki sees bruises all over Watanabe's body and suspects Babe of elder abuse. However when she shares her misgivings with Art, he shuts her down in harsh decisive tones. So much for forging lines of communication. The mystery surrounding Babe's father deepens when he is murdered, and the police are unable to find Babe. Intent on untangling the mystery and proving or disproving Babe's guilt, Aki secretly enlists the aid of a reformed thief with a bad reputation. His name is “Hammer” Ishimine. Hammer had befriended Aki's sister Rose in Chicago and is now in L.A. hoping to obtain legal guardianship of his half-brother Daniel. Aki was surprised to learn Hammer's backstory and had agreed to write a letter of recommendation on his behalf, so she is confident that he will help her without prying into her precarious relationship with Art. The strength of this novel is its immersive portrayal of injustice, racism and resilience. Aki is shocked by the Winona trailer camp, a place without sewers or electricity where Issei and Nisei languish to either die or survive through criminal enterprise. Roy Tonai, another character from the previous book, is struggling to regain possession of the produce market owned by his family. Even Aki's mother doesn't believe Roy will succeed, but her father, previously employed as a manager at the Tonai market, has pinned his hopes on Roy. At least it is a distraction from the alcoholism he fell into at Manzanar. Before the war, Babe owned the family farm. His legal title has been voided. Properties of other ethnic Japanese are being confiscated by the government in an escheat lawsuit which Aki learns about from Art's journalist friends. The ethnic Japanese community distrusts the police, judicial system and politicians with good reason. This is a period of widespread corruption. Even Aki reflexively speaks of “us” – meaning non-Caucasians in her assessments. Her inquiries reveal the close sense of connection internees from the same relocation camp feel. Chiyo, a former roommate of Rose's, and Babe were sent to Gila River in Arizona. Chiyo is a veritable stream of information about the camp and its inhabitants. Hirahara uses the camera as a subtle device giving us insight into Babe's personality. Babe was an enthusiastic photographer and had bought himself an expensive camera. Since cameras were forbidden in the camps, it was confiscated. He bought himself a cheaper camera after his release, and his enthusiasm for the hobby motivated his offer to take Aki's wedding photos. Whatever his shortcomings, photography remained important to Babe as Aki later learns. This was an enjoyable and illuminating follow-up to Clark and Division. As the tragedies unfold, Aki draws us into the question she poses: “I thought back to my sister, Rose, and fierce anger shot through my body. Would either Rose or Mr. Watanabe have met their tragic ends if we hadn't been removed from our homes?” (p.94) NOTES: Hirahara mentions several references which she encountered in doing her extensive research for this book. Particularly relevant is this page from Ben Pease's cartography project: http://www.japantownatlas.com/ ...more |
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| 1324007028
| 9781324007029
| B0BHPTXXLM
| 3.85
| 769
| Jul 18, 2023
| Jul 18, 2023
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This book shifts that creepy opening visual of the mini-series “The Last Of Us” from science-fiction to reality. Monosson, who teaches in the Departme
This book shifts that creepy opening visual of the mini-series “The Last Of Us” from science-fiction to reality. Monosson, who teaches in the Department of Environmental Conservation at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, presents a mix of biology, ecology, history and public health policy in this highly readable brief book. Not all fungi are harmful. Mushrooms are for many a culinary treat. The diverse yeasts in sourdough starter are part of the fungi family Saccharomyces. Others, like Candida albicans are benign residents in the microbiodome of our guts. Most fungi, in fact, are helpful. A few, however, are killers. Frog and American bat populations have been decimated by fungal infections in our own lifetimes. Even more well publicized due to their threats to the food supply are Fusarium odoratissimum, a fungus deadly to banana plants, and Puccinia graminis, responsible for Wheat Stem Rust. 2024 article on fungi devastation of amphibians: https://www.theguardian.com/environme...? Monosson describes a number of cases in detail. The story of the bats is told with special poignancy. “For at least half a century and probably longer, bat watching had been a summer tradition in my town of Montague, Massachusetts. The most common bat is the little brownbat, or Myotis lucifugus (Myotis means mouse-eared; lucifugus means to flee the light)." (p.84) In the short span of a few decades a fungus called Pseudogymnoascus destructans has wiped out some 90% of littlebrowns and other species. Scientists hypothesize that the bats become vulnerable during hibernation (called torpor because they awaken and move about every 10 to 20 days). During torpor their body temperatures drop from a range of 95-100 degrees F. to 39.2-50 degrees F. During torpor B-cells and T-cells, part of the bat's defensive mechanism, appear to be absent from their circulating blood. The sequestering of these cells is consistent with the energy reduction that occurs during torpor. Virulent spores grow those insidious hyphae. The alarming tendrils branch through the keratin-rich membrane of the wing, tearing holes and choking off nutrients. By 2008 when Jon Reichard visited Aeolus Cave in Vermont, once host to the largest population of hibernating bats in the northeast, he found the floor of the cave carpeted with thousands of carcasses and the walls curtained with the dying. The outlook is grim. Fewer than 10% of bat populations infected by the so-called white-nose syndrome survive. A slim hope for survival hinges on genetic diversity. The fungus was present in European bats at least a century ago. Those bats did not die from the infection. American bats appear to have been infected as recently as the mid to late 20th century. Scientists hope that the genomes of the few survivors will evolve into a species-wide immunity in the American bats. The case of White Pine Blister Rust (Cronartium ribicola) offers a lesson in complexity. After stands of Eastern White Pine (Pinus strobus), prized for the masts of sailing ships, were cut down in the 18th century, efforts to replace the trees relied on importing German seedling stock. Western European pines were infected but had evolved resistance to the fungus' fatal effects. Spores first infect currant and gooseberry bushes. There, a second type of spore, one that can only germinate on pine needles, is produced. These spores penetrate the waxy coating of needles and spread through needles, stems and the trunk of the tree. “Male” and “female” elements fuse and “mate.” The recombined genetic variations offer additional protection to the fungi spores which then disburse to land on the berry bushes thus renewing the cycle. In the West the fungus was first noticed in British Columbia around 1910. By the early 1930's it was decimating Western White Pine (Pinus monticola) and Whitebark Pines (Pinus albicaulis). Whitebarks are dependent on the Clark's nutcracker to reach the tight cones situated in the upper reaches of trees which typically grown to heights of 40-60 feet. The nutcrackers harvest huge quantities of the seeds and cache them in the ground. They are crucial to the dispersal of the seeds. Monosson details the heroic efforts over generations to save the Whitebark. In 1970 Bokum Kinloch discovered a gene Cr1 in sugar pines that caused infected needles to die before the fungus could spread. This die-out deprived the fungus of nutrients. However, so-called single-gene protection is an ephemeral defense because fungus' quickly evolve workarounds. Currently, research on genome sequencing may offer potentiality. It's a race against time. Monosson has written this book to heighten our awareness of actions we still can take and lessons we should be learning from past mistakes. What her writing lacks in literary imagery it more than makes up for in both drama and urgency. “We are the direct and indirect cause of species extinction and disruptions caused by fungi. We are all living in the same little boat: planet Earth. Pine trees, bats, frogs and myriad others – we save them, we save ourselves. Acting on Hope to prevent further degradation is our moral obligation.” (p.196) Equally compelling is the ecological subtext of these examples. We are all connected, not in a simplistic “circle of life,” but in a complex and dynamic web of interdependence which includes not just visible nature but invisible and active microbiodomes in the soil. Habitat loss, unrestricted transport of exotic species and the reduction of genetic variation have provided gateways to the next fungal pandemic. “Some of the best defenses for any species – trees, wildlife, crops – is the genetic diversity within their population. We make it difficult for species to retain diversity: we clear-cut forest, breed and plant monocro, clear land for our use, and cause the planet to warm.” (p.159) NOTES: In addition to ample footnotes the author provides lists of “Further Reading” and of nonprofits which support research and science-based policy-making advice on current and future fungal pandemics. I have tried to include Latin names in this review because there is such a variety of common names can often lead to confusion. 2024 article on fungi killing amphibians: https://www.theguardian.com/environme...? ...more |
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| 1101584858
| 9781101584859
| B0072NZZVC
| 3.88
| 6,310
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| Jun 05, 2012
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really liked it
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Uhuru na Kazi . FREEDOM AND WORK! Kenyans understood that freedom and jobs were linked if colonialism was to truly end. Jomo Kenyatta's slogan was a p
Uhuru na Kazi . FREEDOM AND WORK! Kenyans understood that freedom and jobs were linked if colonialism was to truly end. Jomo Kenyatta's slogan was a powerful call for unity. Author NgugIwa na Thiong'o opens his novel on the eve of independence. He probes the uncertainties of half a dozen characters. Each one is motivated by a different past and suffers from a mix of conflicting motives. Uncertainty generates fear. Has their long suffering truly achieved anything? Will they recover the lands, the source of their livelihood, taken when the British Protectorate was established in 1895? Will the empty storefronts be filled and the economic ruin caused by The Emergency be reversed? Nationhood is an abstraction; what will its reality look like? NgugIwa na Thiong'o provides a taste of the future when Gikonyo's hopes to buy a plot of land with some partners are dashed by the local MP who betrays him. Karanju rightly surmises that the existing power structure will remain. The British District Officer Thompson will merely be replaced by a Black man. Unity was a myth, just like the casting of Jomo Kenyatta and the villager Mugo as superhuman heros. Songs celebrating Mugo's bravery were being sung: he was the close confidant of the martyred Kihika; he cowed the Home Guards beating a pregnant woman. Uhuru would be incomplete without a victory speech from him. The Party, represented by Warui, a village elder; Gikonyo, a successful entrepreneur linked to the martyr by marriage; and Wambui, a fierce female activist, press him to speak. Both their urgency and Mugo's surprising refusal are puzzling to the reader. Incrementally, NgugIwa na Thiong'o peels back the complicated emotions of each of his characters. The key lies in the subjective narratives of the past. All of the characters are connected in some way to Kihika, a zealot with the uncomplicated clarity of youth. That clarity made his voice charismatic. In his rhetoric people felt the confluence of culture, grievance, history and religion. He invoked the words of Harry Thika back in 1920. Three decades later the time for words has ended Kihika declares. His call for action was cloaked in a Swahili proverb. He articulated the hypocrisy of the Missions: “We went to their church. Mubia, in white robes, opened the Bible. He said: 'Let us kneel down to pray.' Mubia said: 'Let us shut our eyes.' You know, his remained open so that he could read the word. When we opened our eyes, our land was gone and the sword of flames stood on guard.” (p.14) Jesus was a paradox, but Moses leading his people to freedom was someone they could understand. Kihika became a martyr and his blood nourished the Movement. He became a myth, and anyone can attach his own meaning to a myth. NgugIwa na Thiong'o is particularly interested in how colonialism wreaked lasting psychological damage on the Kikuyu. It was an infection that rippled across time. General R's father become a violent drunk and his mother's submissiveness seemed to him to mirror the submissiveness of the Kikuyu to British power. Warui, the village elder, lost his oldest son in World War II and his remaining sons went off to become squatters after the war. Gikonyo's sense of guilt prods him into anger-fueled misogyny toward his wife Mumbi. The same feelings of guilt provoke in Mugo a profound sense of alienation. The British had shown how a hierarchical political system could cement power. Kuranju found the thought of that power intoxicating. After Kihiku's death he becomes a collaborator, fingering suspected rebel sympathizers. He rises to head of the Home Guard. Power strips away his humanity and replaces it with fear and contempt. Betrayals permeate this novel. Someone betrayed Kihika, leading to his capture and execution. The local Party representatives are certain of the Judas' identity. Bury the past as the Government urges? Never. General R will keep that lust for vengeance alive. Each character, however, is guilty of some act of betrayal, even Kihika. Those betrayals have consequences which we will witness. NgugIwa na Thiong'o believes the past cannot be buried. Like Warui, history has an undeniable contintuity, and we are reminded of that by stories like this one. This was a cmplex novel despite its brevity. It is worth multiple readings because of the temporal drift from present to past and the shifting points of view. I read this because it was the selection of our local book club. ...more |
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| 1501106376
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| 1501106376
| 3.95
| 2,242
| Aug 09, 2022
| Aug 09, 2022
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liked it
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When we think of 19th century Americana, flatboat river travel does not spring to mind. It's only one of the shortcomings of American history as it is
When we think of 19th century Americana, flatboat river travel does not spring to mind. It's only one of the shortcomings of American history as it is taught in public schools. Even before 1776 river travel, not roads, connected people,.shaped patterns of settlement and inspired restless imaginations. The river flatboats were sturdy raft-like constructions built from any materials at hand. Livestock, produce, timber, salt pork and grain floated up the Monongahela, westward along the Ohio River, and then down the Mississippi to New Orleans. Author Rinker Buck wanted a taste of that history. Rivers have been commandeered into state boundaries. This book changes that perspectivet. Rivers are organic systems, vast watersheds. The Mississippi itself cannot be thought of independently from the Ohio River with its many tributaries. “The mouth of the Ohio at its confluence with the Mississippi at Cairo, Illinois, is almost a mile wide. The merging of the rivers spreads a massive, triangular fan of rippling water and sandbars to the banks of three states – Illinois, Kentucky, and Missouri. The green Ohio waters closing against the muddier, brown Mississippi form a sharp beige line that points due south right over the best sailing channel. The Ohio is actually considered the main stem of the Mississippi because its discharge after moderate rains, at 300,000 cubic feet per second, exceeds the flow of the Mississippi moving south from Thebes, Illinois, which is roughly 200,000 cubic feet per second.” (p.263) The blue squiggles on a conventional map suggest a static permanence that is non-existent. Channels narrow and widen. Currents accelerate and shift. Banks erode. Fallen trees become snags, trapping enough debris to form islands. Silt is deposited on rich alluvial plains. Rivers are as alive as the people who dwell on their banks or sail their waters. The title of this book invites comparison to Mark Twain's memoir chronicling the events of his youth as a steamboat pilot. Buck's adventure is a stark contrast. The waterways have changed. Dams, canals and locks are so numerous that lengthy traffic jams occur. Tugs pushing over 30 fully loaded barges navigate the congested serpentine channels. Forced to swing wide to make the turns, they demand extraordinary caution from Buck on his small wooden craft. Some of the most interesting stories describe encounters with the taciturn no-nonsense professionals captaining these barges. One shepherds him into the safety of the barge's massive wake. Another creates a surge to dislodge him from a sandbar. Buck's view from the river offers a stark panorama of industrial decay. Once busy ports declined as steel mills and coal production declined. The 1980's recession was another blow to the numerous marinas that once lined the banks. Enclosed in one of the claustrophobic-inducing locks on the Ohio, Buck describes the water surrounding him as a floating junkyard. Still, there are moments of extraordinary natural beauty. Near a marina called Rocky Point he sees an enormous cloud of yellow butterflies rise up from the Indiana shore and fly southward to the Kentucky bank, their wings contrasted against a canvas of startlingly blue sky. Buck details the construction of his flatboat, which he dubs “Patience.” He describes the outsized idiosyncrasies of a rotating crew, anchored by his good but annoying friend, Danny Corjulo, a voluble, hyperactive former colleague with formidable technological skills. Likewise, every navigational challenge over the course of nearly 4 months is included. Readers with sailing experience will revel in these descriptions. Lacking any knowledge of boats, I was most impressed by Buck's dedication to historical truth. Emanuel Leutze's iconic painting, “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” is so inaccurate that the New York Historical Society commissioned Mort Künstler to create a historically accurate version. He depicts the Continental Army's passage on a fleet of flatboats. The soldiers are huddled together, standing because that type of boat was notoriously leaky. The chunks of ice are replaced with the sandy floating typical of the Delaware River in winter. Recounting the removal of the Cherokee and other tribes under the Jackson administration, he quotes from a letter written by John G. Burnett, an eyewitness to the event and writing 52 years later. “'School children of today do not know that we are living on lands that were taken from a helpless race at the bayonet point to satisfy the white man's greed....Murder is murder, and somebody must answer.'” (p.230) Natchez with its impressive antebellum architecture was once a lawless boomtown. The architecture of its mansion district was built on a horrific slave trade. Sugar and cotton plantations in newly opened territories produced unprecedented demand for slaves, which depleted eastern seaboard planters were happy to supply. Their descendants were among those that settled in that district to form a social elite of absentee landlords owning vast tracts of land run by plantation managers. The increasingly brutal slave trade which made Natchez a slave market second only to New Orleans is described in detail by historian Edward E. Baptist. Repeatedly, Buck reminds us that the truth matters, that the past is also our present. He berates mainstream historians for their narrow perspectives and glib narratives. “I have long been disappointed that the ivy League ‘deans’ of American history so assiduously steered their scholarship toward promotion of American myths instead of toward research of events that authentically reflect what happened in our past, and how these events affected the common man. They are what I call ‘Wall Street historians,’ more interested in the bank wars or tariff disputes of financial elites, and their servants in the U.S. Congress, than the real-life conditions facing farmers or frontier mechanics.” (p.380) This memoir is a mental as well as physical journey. Rinker Buck finds elation in his growing navigational skills and gratitude for the gracious, warm-hearted generosity he encounters at each riverside landing. He re-discovers the pleasure of silence and the profundity of simply being in the present. Forced to be self-reliant, he understands himself with greater clarity. It’s a distillation of past and present just as he views American history. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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May 31, 2023
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May 31, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 1857151410
| 9781857151411
| 1857151410
| 3.69
| 90,560
| Apr 1861
| Mar 11, 1993
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really liked it
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SILAS MARNER is much more than the morality tale suggested by a cursory view of the plot. George Eliot offers a vivid portrait of rural England over f
SILAS MARNER is much more than the morality tale suggested by a cursory view of the plot. George Eliot offers a vivid portrait of rural England over fifty years earlier than the novel's publication. Instead of nostalgia she balances a comforting expectation of unchanging regularity enforced by the agricultural calendar with the parochial attitudes derived from community isolation. Life is good in Raveloe. Even someone like the inarticulate Silas Marner, driven by repressed desolation, senses it: “It seemed to him that the Power he had vainly trusted in among the streets and at the prayer-meetings, was very far away from this kind in which he had taken refuge, where men lived in careless abundance, knowing and needing nothing of that trust, which, for him had been turned to bitterness.” (p.17) That abundance is reflected in Marner's rapid commercial success as a weaver. There was ample demand for a bit of finery and sufficient coin to pay for his labors. There is an almost natural trajectory in Silas' passage from embittered spirit to commercial greed, like a river tumbling into a dry bed. Despite his miserly obsession, we know with certainty that he is a good person – a victim, and here lies the problem every high school student subjected to this book must have felt but lacked the words to express himself. Virtuous characters are boring. This is true not only of Silas Marner but of a second main character, Miss Nancy Lammeter. Far more interesting is her elder sister Priscilla, whose candor and lively wit insure life as a spinster. Nor does she fear that fate. That is who she is and she embraces the consequences. George Eliot views Nancy's would-be suitor Godfrey Cass with what felt like unwarranted sympathy. We learn of his weak will and duplicity immediately. She is compelled to soften our judgment by invoking a truism about the human psyche in general: “He fled to his usual refuge, that of hoping for some unforeseen turn of fortune, some favorable chance which would save him from unpleasant consequences....In this point of trusting to some throw of fortune's dice, Godfrey can hardly be called old-fashioned. Favourable Chance is the god of all men who follow their own devices instead of obeying a law they believe in. Let even a polished man of these days get into a position he is ashamed to avow, and his mind will be bent on all the possible issues that may deliver him from the calculable results of that position.” (p.82) Coincidences abound in the novel. However, they follow from a careful groundwork so that they feel more like a convergence of probabilities rather than artificial contrivances. It is established early on that Silas is extremely near-sighted. Moreover, he suffers from catatonic black-outs. We also know from the outset that Godfrey's brother Dusey is a careless opportunist and drunkard. He had blackmailed Godfrey into covering his gambling debts. The events that transpire all derive from these simple facts. This is only one of many examples of how George Eliot has carefully attended to the structure of this novel. The sanctimonious congregants of Lantern Yard, and in particular the perfidious William Dane's boast that he is one of the “Elect,” are stark contrasts to Raveloe's relaxed approach to church attendance and Dolly Winthrop's kindness toward Silas. Not only does she visit with cakes she has stamped with letters she had copied from the vestry (IHS), but she offers comfort with her unschooled faith and earnest grappling with the problem of evil: “...there's trouble I' the world, and there' things as we can niver make out the rights on. And all as we've got to do is to trusten, Master Marner – to do the right thing as fur as we know, and to trusten. For if us as knows so little can see a bit o'good and rights, we may be sure as there's a good and a rights bigger nor what we can know....” (p.165) Another example of this structure is the New Year's dance at Squire Cass'. It is a microcosm of village behavior, built on a foundation of well-worn patterns for socializing, behaving, imbibing, and joking. The deferential conventions are as tightly scripted as the steps of the various dances. Finally, there is the satisfying sense of closure conveyed by Silas' visit to Lantern Yard 30 years after his departure. George Eliot is not so much concerned with individual characters as with relationships. Here, also, she draws contrasting parallels. In chapter 9, the confrontation between Squire Cass and Godfrey reveals the erratic volatility and chaotic unreasoning temperament that shaped Godfrey's character. The squire vacillates between rage and a kind of forgetful indulgence. This is contrasted with the dignity of Nancy and Priscilla's father, and Silas' own unconditional devotion to Eppie. The name “Eppie” hints at a deeper significance. The finale is one of epiphany rather than either joy or justice. Silas is at last able to articulate the emotional bond between Eppie and himself, one that Godfrey cannot buy for himself with his money. Eppie calmly stands up to the people she has been raised to consider her “betters.” Even Nancy is forced to reconsider her instinct to support her husband. Godfrey is forced to admit to himself that some mistakes cannot be mended. I liked this book much more than I expected. George Eliot has a startling command of metaphor and writes with economy. This was the selection of our local book club. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Apr 30, 2023
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Apr 30, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 0099465639
| 9780099465638
| 0099465639
| 4.17
| 34,904
| 1950
| Jan 01, 2004
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really liked it
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Despite the Regency period setting (1814: the Mayfair District of London and the village of Ashtead, some 15 miles south of London), this entertaining
Despite the Regency period setting (1814: the Mayfair District of London and the village of Ashtead, some 15 miles south of London), this entertaining novel felt more in the vein of a comedy of manners rather than Jane Austen. However, the resemblance lent it a modern comedic flavor. Rambunctious Sophy, reared in a succession of European cities, is sent to the household of her aunt, Lady Ombersley, by her father, Sir Horace, who is a diplomat suddenly dispatched to Brazil. Sophy arrives with a little greyhound named Tina, a monkey named Jacko, and a parrot, in addition to a spirited riding horse, a maid, and her cartload of baggage. The menagerie presages the very improper and lively demeanor of Sophy, described as a woman striking rather than beautiful. She will soon become embroiled in the self-inflicted travails of the very conventional Ombersley family. Nineteen-year-old Cecilia is infatuated with Augustus Fawnhope, a well-born self-absorbed poet with the looks of an Adonis. The family has arranged a match between Cecilia and Lord Charlbury who is unable to press his suit since he has come down with the mumps. Charles is engaged to Eugenia Wraxton, a humorless, grimly proper woman whose chief recommendation is that she is the daughter of a Viscount. Lord Ombersley continues to pursue a carefree self-indulgent life of leisure, despite having plunged the family deep into debt with his gambling. Charles is de facto head of the family thanks to an entailment of Lord Ombersley's brother's estate and is determined to force Cecilia's marriage to Lord Charlbury. Finally, second son Hubert has been away at Oxford but is evidently a less than diligent student. Sophy quickly notices an undercurrent of anxiety which he attempts to mask by occasional bursts of exaggerated volubility and cheer. The scene all but begs for the intervention of “The Grand Sophy.” The opening chapters are filled with many amusing touches. The family is shocked when Sophy asks directions to Hoare's Bank where Sir Horace and she share a joint account. They are even more shocked when she discloses that she has been authorized to spend whatever sums she sees fit on her upkeep during her stay. In another scene Charles, Sophy and Miss Wraxton ride the bridal path in Hyde Park. Ever condescendingly solicitous, Miss Wraxton comments on Sophy's spirited mount, Salamanca. “'Oh, what a beautiful creature! But surely he is a little too strong for you, Miss Stanton-Lacy? You should commission Charles to find a well-mannered lady's horse for you to ride.'” (p.87) Charles has the good sense to keep his mouth shut, perceiving that Sophy had excellent control over the animal. It won't be the only instance of Miss Wraxton intruding with unwanted advice over a matter that is none of her business. The real comedic action, however, commences in the final third of the book when all of “The Grand Sophy's” strategems have aligned and the action begins. This was the selection of our local book club. It was suggested as an antidote to a particularly dark selection read two months ago. NOTE: I want to warn readers there is an odious episode with a moneylender named Goldhanger which really is repellant and beyond excuse. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Apr 27, 2023
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Apr 27, 2023
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Paperback
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Ms.pegasus
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it was amazing
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it was amazing
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really liked it
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Apr 23, 2024
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Oct 29, 2023
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really liked it
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Apr 27, 2023
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Apr 27, 2023
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