Sunday, December 31, 2017

Back to the Classics 2018

I have read these books for the Back to the Classics 2018 reading challenge.

Click on the date to go to the review.

A classic that scares you: Middlemarch – George Eliot (1872)
Posted: January 29

The Parade's End Tetralogy by Ford Madox Ford
Some Do Not
No More Parades
A Man Could Stand Up
Last Post

A classic travel narrative: Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo - William Makepeace Thackeray (1845)

A 20th century classic: All the King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren (1946)

Brave New World Revisited - Aldous Huxley (1958)

A classic crime story: Rear Window - Cornell Woolrich (c. 1940s)
  
Classic Crimes - William Roughead (c. early 20 century)

A classic in translation: The Case of Comrade Tulayev – Victor Serge

A 19th century classic: Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen (1811)

A children's classic: Peter Pan – James Barrie

A classic by a woman author: American Humor – Constance Rourke

A classic with a color in the title: Red Threads – Rex Stout (1939)

Re-read a favorite classic: The Genius and the Goddess – Aldous Huxley (1955)

The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1902)

A classic with a single-word title: Wanderer – Sterling Hayden

A classic by an author that's new to you: Shakespeare – Mark Van Doren

Thursday, December 28, 2017

2018 European Reading Challenge

I will read these books for the 2018 European Reading Challenge.

1/ The Irish Sketchbook of 1842 - Wm. Makepeace Thackeray (Ireland)

2/ Call It Treason: A Novel - George Howe (Germany)


4/ The Spies of Warsaw – Alan Furst (Poland)

5/ Eminent Georgians - John Halperin (UK)

Monday, December 25, 2017

Mount TBR #60

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. – William Makepeace Thackeray

It’s strange that I finish the reading year as I began: with a picaresque novel. Barry Lyndon was first published in 1844. It was a dusty forgotten novelette until Stanley Kubrick made a gorgeous movie out of it in the middle 1970s.

Set in the late 18th century, our young anti-hero, Redmond, must flee his native Ireland after a scandal in which his affection for a cousin nearly derails her brothers’ efforts to marry her off to a detestable but rich Englishman. After misadventures, he enlists as a British squaddie fighting on the Continent. He deserts but is impressed in a mercenary army of the Prussians. Worse, he is forced to become a household sneak and spy, where at least he meets his long-lost uncle who has been unable to return to Ireland because of political troubles. The uncle helps him escape the clammy Prussian grip. The two sharpers make a precarious living at play (gambling) in the shabby minor courts of Europe. Redmond goes to England in order to relentlessly pursue a wealthy widow, Countess Lyndon. He marries her, but his utter irresponsibility with money denies him happiness and respectability.

Compared to exuberant Dickens and genial Trollope, Thackeray’s humor is bitterly satirical but at least unprejudiced. Thackeray aims smacks at everybody. He punctures apologists of English doings in Ireland and the hypocrisy of English society at every level, especially concerning ambitions for gentility. He ridicules Irish poverty and pretentions to royal lineages that reach back into the misty reaches of time. Thackeray even mocks the stock character of the loyal-unto-death Irish Mama. The dragon Bell Brady spoils Redmond rotten and forgives him for his worst misbehaviors and eggs on his low conceits and brutal mistreatment of his wife. Thackeray also derides military valor, prowesss, and honor as words words words.

Besides the untrustworthy unlikable narrator, jumps in time and anti-authoritarian stance, this novel feels modernist for its use of real historical characters and scandals of bygone days:

… it was through Mr. Reynolds that I was introduced to a score of [men of letters], and their great chief, Mr. Johnson. I always thought their great chief a great bear. He drank tea twice or thrice at my house, misbehaving himself most grossly; treating my opinions with no more respect than those of a schoolboy, and telling me to mind my horses and tailors, and not trouble myself about letters. His Scotch bear-leader, Mr. Boswell, was a butt of the first quality. I never saw such a figure as the fellow cut in what he called a Corsican habit, at one of Mrs. Cornely’s balls, at Carlisle House, Soho. But that the stories connected with that same establishment are not the most profitable tales in the world, I could tell tales of scores of queer doings there. All the high and low demireps of the town gathered there, from his Grace of Ancaster down to my countryman, poor Mr. Oliver Goldsmith the poet, and from the Duchess of Kingston down to the Bird of Paradise, or Kitty Fisher. Here I have met very queer characters, who came to queer ends too: poor Hackman, that afterwards was hanged for killing Miss Ray, and (on the sly) his Reverence Doctor Simony, whom my friend Sam Foote, of the ‘Little Theatre,’ bade to live even after forgery and the rope cut short the unlucky parson’s career.

Basically, our narrator is selfish, egotistical, careless, lying, xenophobic, racist and misogynist. He sees the world as a vicious brutal arena where only the nasty and cruel win. Barry believes that everyone owes him respect though he is too lazy to do anything to earn respect.  All the bad things that happen to him occur because people defame him or want revenge for his nonexistent misdeeds. Everything that goes wrong is the fault of others.

Funny that Barry Lyndon reminds me so much of – oh, never mind. It’s Christmas, after all.

Friday, December 22, 2017

Mount TBR #59

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

The Sound of Murder – Rex Stout

This book was first published in 1941 as Alphabet Hicks, named after the PI hero that Stout invented for the sake of a break from writing his popular Nero Wolfe mysteries. Internal evidence indicates that, like Donald Lam, Hicks is an ex-lawyer. Being disbarred because he chose to take a courageous ethical stand has given him a jaundiced view of the criminal justice establishment and the taxpayers who let said authorities get away with unjust shenanigans.

Hicks becomes a PI and cab driver to put bread on the table of the apartment he rents over a small and undiscovered Italian restaurant. One night a society matron recognizes him and asks for his help with her husband who has accused her of forking over his company secrets to a rival plastics manufacturer. Hicks needs a new suit so he takes her $200 ($3,300 in 2017) and embarks on fast-paced case with a couple murders, a country estate, two lovebirds, and high tech dictating machines that make vinyl records.

The characterization has the variety of types that we find in the better whodunnits of yesteryear. Most eccentric of all is Hicks who has become famous for his business cards. People ask him for one just to get a souvenir. His cards include only his name and a string of letters. People invariable ask him what M.S.O.T.P.B.O.M. means. So he has to reply, Melancholy Spectator of the Psychic Bellyache of Mankind. Quite a knee-slapper for certain kind of sesquipedalian reader that finds herself reading obscure mysteries by well-known writers.

A caution to those looking for a Nero Wolfe-like romp: The Sound of Murder has a brisk pace and lightness of tone that are winning but it is only as pleasant to read as a so-so Nero-Archie novel. In the mediocre Nero-Archies, Wolfe is not much of character. Ditto with Alphabet Hicks:  beyond a few quirks and mannerisms, there is not much there. And despite the risible business cards, The Sound of Murder features little witty banter of the kind we get between Wolfe and Archie.


Tuesday, December 19, 2017

Tour de Force

Tour de Force – Christianna Brand

Like Cyril Hare, who wrote 10 mysteries before he died young, Christianna Brand wrote only eight whodunnits in the 1940s and early 1950s before raising a family became a bigger priority. Prior to this one, I’d read only Green for Danger regarded as a classic novel and movie.

As in Green for DangerTour De Force (1955) features a small group, any member of which had more or less the same motive and opportunity to do in the vic. Brand’s cat and mouse game involves giving the reader fair clues all the way down the line, so it’s excellent for readers who enjoy puzzlers.

Her series character is Detective Inspector Cockrill, nicknamed Cockie, which is as well since we never find out his first name. Bird-like but tough, ironic, mercifully quirk-free but middle-aged enough to be tender-hearted, his base is Kent, but in Tour De Force, he is  vacationing solo to San Juan el Pirata (John the Pirate). He is tired of his fellow tourists on the package tour even before he disembarks, and about a third into the novel is he tired of abroad as well.

Indeed, the tourists run the gamut. Cecil Prout is a fashion designer who doesn’t seem to mind who knows he’s gay. Miss Trapp is a lonely woman who is getting the glad eye from Fernando, a Spanish-British tour guide from Gibraltar. Leo Rodd used to be a concert pianist before he lost an arm and his wife Helen helps him so much that she gets on his nerves. A young woman with red hair and lots of flash, Louvaine Barker is in fact a noted novelist. Vanda Lane is a reclusive young woman who is man-hunting. All the characters are well-developed and convincing.

A member of the group turns out to be a blackmailer and ends up with a knife in the chest. Strangely, the suspects were on the beach in plain view of Inspector Cockrill. The local police, smugglers one and all, need a patsy to appease touristic opinion so anybody will do, evidence be damned. Cockie, then, must act fact to protect his fellow nationals from the horror of injustice at the hands of feudal  and sinister foreigners. Underling the farcical aspects of the incidents in the story, Cockie must don the “hapless overseas” mask in a funny scene hinging on the language barrier.

I must confess that at more than 250 pages any mystery starts to weary me and this was no exception. But that’s just me. The reveal is truly a rocker. Justifying the gutsy choice of a title for this novel. I’m sure that readers who like puzzlers a la Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr would get a kick out of this story.

Saturday, December 16, 2017

Mount TBR #58

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy – William Irvine

So many people today seem to believe that meaningful and satisfying lives can be achieved only if they have bought the latest version or feel that they are not missing out on something. But they quickly get past the rush of purchase or being in the know and soon begin seeking the next best thing. So feeling satisfied much less serene or fulfilled is but a dream as they spend all their time working and buying the latest fashionable stuff.

To jump off the treadmill of getting, buying, having, wanting, we could read this book by a college professor in philosophy. It begins with simple arguments that advocate the need for a philosophy of life, or at least an orientation to work, love, friendship, civic duty, etc. Irvine argues that we can develop such a way of thinking with Stoicism, one of the ancient Greek and Roman philosophical schools.

The Stoics emphasized the development of the four virtues: bravery, prudence, wisdom and fairness. One goal of the Stoics was to live frugally since the more shit we have the more we have to take care of, thus distracting us form what is really important, like living with integrity. Another goal is to use our reason to maintain tranquility. The more involved we are in other people’s business - like working overtime so the company can simply make more money, like volunteering too much and spreading ourselves too thin - the more tumultuous our lives will be. They believed that using our reason was the key to freedom from fear, lust, anger, and greed. In our days of non-stop rage and upset fed by social media and bots from the devil knows where, this stoic advice about anger really strikes home.

Readers into Albert Ellis or cognitive behavioral therapy will be attracted by the encouragement to determine what is “up to us” – i.e. what we can control (our approaches and responses to inevitable trials and tribulations). Furthermore, we had better stop being anxious about with what we can’t control (our health, wealth, reputation, promotions, the Dotard, etc.), since obsessing and fretting become bad mental habits not to mention stealing joy. Irvine uses examples from his own experience which makes his ideas easy to connect with for readers with health challenges, aging parents, and demanding colleagues.

The lucid prose is easy and a pleasure to read. It presents various useful devices for the toolbox. Developing compassion and gratitude are in my toolbox for the coming new year.

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Mount TBR #57

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

Fun in a Chinese Laundry – Josef von Sternberg

This autobiography, named after an early Edison movie, is by the director of the 1930 German tragicomedy, The Blue Angel. Also hits but much less known today were six other movies, also starring Marlene Dietrich, such as Morocco and Dishonored and The Devil Is A Woman. Audiences liked these films too in spite of – or maybe because of – a beauty, irony, unease, exoticism and eroticism missing from most Classic Hollywood product,  hackneyed dreck brought about by the code of self-censorship, irony-free Tinsel Town executives, and the pressure to churn movies out like sausage.

This acerbic autobiography is well worth reading for fans into Hollywood during the Twenties and Thirties. He’s reticent about his early years, as many abused children from hard backgrounds and unstable families tend to be. In fact, the more Hollywood books one reads, the more one doubts the Good Old Days ever existed: the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries were not easy for people who had to scramble for money.

He must have been an autodidact since he never had time to attend school, but developed his artistic sense with a popular touch by attending amusement parks, magic show, flea circuses, cock fights, etc. His descriptions of travel prove him to be a curious and intrepid traveler eager to see all the low entertainments in various Asian cultures that he experienced on the eve of WWII.

He also reports, tellingly, that when his copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations wore out, he carried around Epictetus’ Handbook for in the moment reading.  His stoic acceptance must have influenced his worldly realism to take the world as it comes and control only what was up to him. This responsible attitude was to serve him well on the chaos of a movie set. Also stoic is his sense that life is a test of self-respect and faith – in his case, the faith that good work is possible even in the crass dream factory of Hollywood. His sense of duty to do his utmost despite the odds calls mind Marcus Aurelius’ admirable albeit boy-scoutish injunctions.

Even if Von Sternberg’s work ethic dates him, his honesty is searing – he tells it the way he sees it. He worked with Emil Jannings on The Last Command (1928). Sternberg found Jannings hard to manage” “To direct a child was one thing, but when the youngster weighs close to three hundred pounds it is not easy to laugh at all his pranks.” Sternberg claims this movie made William Powell a star despite the unsympathetic role he played, but humble-brags that Powell later inserted in his contracts the stipulation that he would never be assigned to a Sternberg set again.

Von Sternberg also writes that on the set of The Devil Is A Woman Joel McCrea “managed to survive meeting me, fled in terror after his first scene with me, and I had to replace him with another 6-footer.” He does not mention that he almost killed McCrea by requiring 35 takes of him ordering a glass of water. McCrea refused to continue, even after Dietrich enlightened him that there was nothing personal about being subjected to Von’s perfectionism. “He speaks to me in German and calls me an old cow,” Dietrich said. “Ignore him.”

Clearly, like Alfred Hitchcock, von Sternberg treated thespians like cattle, also referring to Marlene Dietrich, "No puppet in the history of the world has been submitted to as much manipulation as a leading lady of mine...." Despite his cold manipulative ways and biting sarcasm, he became known as a woman’s director. And like Woody Allen, he doesn't seem to care if his movies will be remembered or not, pleased by the chance to work.

Anyway, lots of good stories - especially about the emotional breakdown of Charles Laughton during the filming of I, Claudius - in sometimes forbidding prose from the last director, a la Cecil B. DeMille’s dressing up, who wore high boots, riding britches, a shooting jacket, and, at times, a silk turban.

Sunday, December 10, 2017

Three Sisters Flew Home

Three Sisters Flew Home - Mary Fitt, 1936

I’ve read only two mysteries by Mary Fitt, the other being Death andPleasant Voices. Even with little evidence, I have to conclude that though she was writing at the same time as Christie and Sayers, her stories don’t have the familiar elements of the Golden Age mystery. It takes a long time to get a corpse. No clues. No red herrings. No detective so no detecting. Nothing cozy that I can see, except that the action occurs in country houses filled with the rich, good-looking, and glamorous.

In fact, this story ends with the death of the character that we readers knew all along would be the vic. A cruel female artist invites her admirers, hangers-on, and enemies to a New Year’s Eve party. The guests include the enigmatic three sisters of the title. Each of the guests has a motive to knock her off. They play The Murder Game in the dark. In short, it is inevitable that the cruel artist will get her fatal come-uppance.

Inevitability is what Mary Fitt explores, as well as the psychology of women and the interplay of characters who are educated beyond their intelligence.  Kathleen Freeman (1879-1959) was educated at the University College of South Wales (Cardiff). She lectured there in the Greek classics from 1919 to 1946. English crime fiction writer H.R.F. Keating said, “As might be expected from a lecturer in Classical Greek, the novels of Mary Fitt are patently the product of a cultivated mind. A character in them is likely to comment on a situation with the words ‘as in Turgeniev’, and the reader is expected to pick up the allusion.”

Clearly, the novels of Mary Fitt are not for every reader. She’d be appreciated by readers who like academic mysteries by writers such as Michael Innes, Nicholas Blake, or Josephine Tey.

Thursday, December 7, 2017

Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, 2017

The War Complex: WWII in Our Time – Marianna Torgovnick

For about twenty years, historians have examining how members of Anglo- American cultures collectively remember war and its consequences. Examples are Sarah Purcell’s Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory inRevolutionary America and David Blight’s Race and Reunion: The CivilWar in American Memory. English professors have also taken on collective memory, such as Paul Fussell’s incredible  The Great War and Modern Memory.

English professor at Duke Marianna Torgovnick studies WWII as a cultural touchstone, especially in light of the Bush administration invoking it as a rallying exhortation in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In a series of essays she covers topics such as D-Day, Adolf Eichmann, the Shoah, WWII films such as Saving Private Ryan, and the fiction of W. S. Sebald. Mercifully, she keeps the jargon of Theory out, so the general reader can follow her line of thinking. For instance:
The war complex . . . is the difficulty of confronting the fact of mass, sometimes simultaneous, death caused by human volition under state or other political auspices, in shorter and shorter periods of time, and affecting not only the military but also, and even more, civilians . . . The war complex shows up as gaps or ellipses in public discourses around histories of quick, technological mass death.
As an example of mass death she cites the “Taipei Rebellion,” which I think an editor should have caught and corrected to the “Taiping Rebellion,” a little-known civil war that killed about 20 million men, women, and children between 1850 and 1864 in China. I’ve often wondered how (and why) English professors have cottoned to the philosophy of Sigmund Freud so it was interesting to see her examination of Freud’s idea about the altered state of consciousness produced by large-scale war and its lasting effects beyond the end of hostilities.

Monday, December 4, 2017

The Big Clock

The Big Clock – Kenneth Fearing

This inverted mystery was made into two movies, The Big Clock in 1946 and No Way Out in 1987. It was a best-seller when it was released in 1946 and has morphed into a cult classic since the late Forties, so the New York Review of Books published it in 2006 as one of its well-regarded re-issues.

I don’t want to risk spoiling this unique noir mystery with a plot description. Suffice to say, this “whodunit in reverse” provides plenty of surprising plot twists. What really sets this novel apart is the intelligent satire of corporate conformity. In the late Forties and early Fifties many social critics, malcontents, and beatniks were expressing their distaste for the Organization Man. Fearing gets in his whacks, as a characters describes the ideal writer for Futureways, a take-off on a Time-Life type of weekly magazine:

First place, you’ve got to believe you’re shaping something. Destiny, for example. And then you’d better not do anything to attract attention to yourself. It’s fatal to come up with a new idea, for instance, and it’s fatal not to have any at all, see what I mean? And above all, it’s dangerous to turn in a piece of finished copy. Everything has to be serious, and pending. Understand?

Another interesting theme is existentialism, another intellectual fad after WWII. The narrator of most of the chapters is George Stroud. Like a character in a Simenon novel set in New England in the Fifties (see here), he leads a routine tepid existence, not stunted but not contented either. Rejecting the illusion that life gives a “big prize,” he thinks, “The big clock ran everywhere, overlooked no one, omitted no one, forgot nothing, remembered nothing, knew nothing. Was nothing. “ Wanting to beat the big clock, he takes the usual Simenon way out by having an affair. When his adventuress-mistress is murdered, George finds himself facing that darn old hostile universe.

This is an excellent novel that I’d recommend to any reader into vintage mysteries.