Classics I Didn't Expect to Like

I started these novels out of a sense of duty and was surprised they turned out to be compelling reads.

1. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. You yell at her and want to shake her, don't marry him. And she does. Talk about letting characters do what they think best....

2. The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen. Quiet coming of age, loss of innocence novel. Great atmosphere.

3. The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton. I was expecting a stuffy novel of manners but got sharp satire and a fine expatriate, international marriage story.

4. The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. Another story about a guy who is a chronological adult but needs to do a lot of growing up.

Mount TBR #52

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2016. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945 - Ian Kershaw

This history explains the reasons why Nazi Germany continued to fight even when it was clear to the government and military that the war was lost. The book also tells grim stories about the consequences of Hitler’s decision never to capitulate. Thousands died. Concentration camp inmates died in thousands on death marches from camp to camp. German civilians died in their thousands under Allied bombing and rampaging Red Army soldiers. Three million German soldiers in the east went into captivity in the USSR and million did not return to Germany. What’s really grim about the whole story is the lack of moral courage on just about everybody’s part, military, civilian, bureaucrat, or thug. The take-away lessons do not say much for people in hard situations, in uniform or not, though the one-third that do step up are to be admired and, heaven willing, emulated.

Mount TBR #51

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2016. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

The Foreign Correspondent – Alan Furst

Alan Furst writes best-selling historical spy fiction. The novels are set before and during World War II. His protagonists are similar to Eric Ambler and Alfred Hitchcock’s ordinary people pulled into murky intrigues in which they have no control over anything except their own will, their own sense that they must strike back against Fascist tyranny.

Authority is mindless in that some people, especially in groups,  will force their wills on individuals if given a sliver of a chance. Conformity is mindless too because doing what one is told is a lot easier than thinking. But Furst’s protagonists resist mindlessly too. They don’t have deep philosophies about liberty and freedom. They just don’t like getting pushed around and feel they must fight or be overwhelmed by bigots, xenophobes, haters of all stripes. Want rights? Got to fight for them, against adversaries both foreign and domestic.

In this novel is set 1938, right on the eve of war. Carlo Weisz, along with scores of other Italian brain workers, has had to move to Paris. He belongs to a small group that publishes an underground newspaper that is printed in Italy, then distributed samizdat-style by sneaky teenagers in bus stations and other public places.

Carlo finds himself dealing with agents of various intelligence services and plug-uglies sent by Mussolini. He's able to visit Germany on reporting jobs and meets the woman that he loves, unfortunately married to anti-fascists and thus watched by the Gestapo.

The Foreign Correspondent is long on atmosphere and short on action.

Other Novels by Alan Furst Reviewed on this Blog

Night Soldiers

Dark Voyage

Dark Star

Red Gold

The World at Night

Blood of Victory

Mount TBR #50

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2016. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

First Russia Then Tibet – Robert Byron

Robert Byron is famous for one of the best travel narratives from between the wars, The Road to Oxiana. In Russia, he plays his usual pugnacious self and gets in the face of Soviet cultural officials and toadies, standing up for the individual’s right not to connect all art as fuel and exhaust of the class struggle. The first half is marred by too much economics and because, I am not an art historian, too much about the history of Russian painting.

The Tibet half wonderfully describes the misery of travel in a harsh environment:

The morning, which came at last, was the crisis of the expedition. My own face, for which I had constructed a mask out of two handkerchiefs, had ceased to drip, and was now covered with yellow scabs, which adhered unpleasantly to the surface of the beard. But those of M. and G. had liquefied in the night, and they arrived in my room to breakfast, speechless with despondency. The cold was intense; the room was filled with the odour of yak-dung and lamp-smoke; my head was pounding; and I had whispered to myself, during the despair of dressing, that if – if either of the other to suggest an about-turn, I should not oppose him. To endure this pain for three more weeks would be merely the weak-mindedness of the strong.

A wonderful book, I highly recommend it to readers into classic travel writing.

Mount TBR #49

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2016. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

The Master Mariner: Running Proud – Nicholas Monsarrat

This historical novel has a unique premise. For an act of cowardice during a battle against the Spanish Armada, an English sailor is condemned to live forever. This gives the reader the opportunity to enjoy sea stories set in different eras. The times and settings are: exploring with Henry Hudson in 1610; piracy in 1670; clerk for Samuel Pepys in 1682; fishing on the Grand Banks in 1720; navigating the world with Capt James Cook in 1759 and fighting with Nelson in 1790. The mini-biographies of Hudson, Pepys, Cook and Nelson brilliantly convey the qualities and achievements that made them great. The set pieces contain rousing battle sequences and pirate horrors of torture and rape. Monsarrat’s theme is basically the hardships of men at sea – that men could endure struggles against officers and adversaries while undergoing privations of food, comfort, and ordinary companionship boggles the mind.

Mount TBR #48

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2016. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

Sex Goddesses of the Silent Screen – Norman Zierold

This biography chronicles the lives of five daring Circes of the silver and silent screen. It is a prime example of the many books about old Hollywood published in the early 1970s during a boom of nostalgia brought about by Watergate and the Vietnam War. That is, this biography is rich in readable anecdotes that mix misfortune and absurdity.

Theda Bara used her striking eyes, bold manner and skimpy outfits to seduce audiences, dazzle press agents, and enrage local censorship committees. Barbara LaMarr had that air of nursing a secret sorrow that some men find enthralling; pining in jail cell, one of her husbands called out her name as he bashed his head against a wall and later died of a blood clot. None of these actresses was emotionally or philosophically equipped to deal with Tinsel Town fame and fortune (who is, really?), but Pola Negri drew on her passionate Polish soul to protect her integrity by out-diva-ing everybody.  Mae Murray was a dancing blonde whose lip-sticked cupid lips earned her the nickname The Girl with the Bee-stung Lips.” Her story is probably the second saddest in the book, after Clara Bow’s descent into nervous breakdowns, madness and death in a sanitarium. 

Zierold spends excessive time describing the opulent life styles and habits of conspicuous consumption of the stars. He balances this by judiciously quoting knowledgeable critics and culture mavens from the 1920s. It’s interesting how little things change. Audiences at that time really were impressionable, mistaking vamping appearances  for reality, just as many people nowadays, for example, assume that Jennifer Lawrence is just as down to earth as any 25-year-old from Pendleton, New York. Also, critics back then were just as snarky and sharp as they are on the web today, but criticism never seems to make movies any better.

Mount TBR #47

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2016. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

French title: Le port des brumes

Englished: Linda Coverdale, 2015

The Misty Harbour – Georges Simenon

Nothing like an early Maigret mystery. This was written in 1931 and published in 1932. This translation, however, is one of the many re-translations that Penguin commissioned a couple of years ago. The goal, I think, was to better capture the spareness of Simenon’s prose.

The atmosphere is persuasive, with trains, fog, smoke from Maigret’s pipe, the stuffy rooms. The novel opens with Maigret escorting an amnesiac back to his native town. He’d been identified by his maid from a picture published in the papers. When they arrive at Ouistreham (in the Normandy region in northwestern France), Maigret tries to figure out the background as to why the amnesiac suffered a gunshot wound to his head, which, although patched up skillfully, robbed him of his memory and speech.

Once the victim is left at home he is killed with a dose of strychnine in his pitcher of water. The Inspector investigates. Simenon brilliantly describes closed community of seamen who work and drink around the lock, who live according to the tides, an exclusive order not loquacious with outsiders. They stick together in wary silence. The upper crust, too, face Maigret in silence. The victim and his maid Julie have only one advocate for the truth to come out, Maigret.

The plotting is rather uneven, but reader rather regrets leaving this atmosphere. These Depression-era Maigret novels are strong novels, marked by sober, precise writing. And don’t forget the existentialism before existentialism became cool in the Fifites. I’m not a totally objective observer because I like novels set in the Thirties but I think these novels do not age, thanks to the spare style of Simenon. Still, there are period artifacts: pitch pine, coal tar, alarm clocks, a peasant's cart, the bistouille (black coffee with moonshine) in glasses, pale firefly gaslights, fuggy taverns, and people smoking anyplace and drinking anytime they like.

I’m pretty sure back in the day, I read an earlier translation by Stuart Gilbert, one called Death of a Harbormaster. But this was worth re-reading.