Back to the Classics #5

I read this book for the 2019 Back to the Classics Reading Challenge

Classic Tragic Novel. The tragedy in this novel is not only that a death in the family makes its members realize they have zero emotional connection with each other. Also, the sad backdrop is that the government plans to “develop” the market district of Les Halles. Simenon makes us see Zola’s “Belly of Paris,” we believe in the solidarity between traders and the restaurateurs, it’s a beautiful community. And the government is going to destroy it for the sake of modernity and development.

The Old Man Dies (La Mort d’Auguste) – Georges Simenon (tr. Bernard Frechtman, 1967)

This novel is set in a changing Paris in 1961. The generation born in the late 19^th century is dying off. For instance, Auguste, the 78-year-old boss of Chez Auvergnat, the famous bistro near Les Halles, collapses one evening in front of 30 diners.

He quickly succumbs to his stroke and his three sons start the hunt for the estate in the form a will, bank books, stocks, deeds, cash. The wily old peasant was close-mouthed and mysterious about money matters so the sons have no idea where to start or what they might find. The more greed and alcohol mix, the more suspicious brothers Ferdinand and Bernard grow towards Antoine, who ran the restaurant with their father. Of course – this is France, after all - the sisters-in-law, animated by visions of comfy days, a new car, an Italian vacation, get involved and the situation accordingly deteriorates.

The family intrigue coming out of an ordinary crisis, as is often the case in Simenon's “hard novels,” is confusingly simple, and Simenon coolly observes typical behavior, devoid of moral judgments. Antoine is just an ordinary guy suddenly thrust into a normal situation – dealing with a death in the family - but without the pre-modern solace of religion, traditions, or family support. Under the pressure of craving and fantasizing about affluence, the brothers fail to pull together, and realize they have grown apart and become strangers.

At the funeral, Ferdinand and Bernard are indifferent to their father’s death, while Antoine, with them in the back of a funeral car, thinks of the sadness of things.

European RC #4

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge 2019.

The Winter War: Russia's Invasion of Finland, 1939-1940 - Robert Edwards

This book is an interesting combination of diplomatic and military history. The goal of Stalin and his henchmen in the 1930s was that of Czarist Russia: to protect European Russia from attack from the West by annexing Eastern European countries such as Poland and the Baltic States. After the Nazi-USSR non-aggression deal, the USSR occupied Eastern Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and then set its sights on Finland. Edwards concisely and clearly lays out the diplomatic maneuvering in the run-up to the war, which is interesting for readers, who as they age, grow more interested in the preludes and aftermaths of war. Edwards provides useful mini-biographies of the diplomatic Finns and military Russians. I felt awe and respect reading about the brave ill-equipped Finns holding out against the ill-lead Communists for three long cold months in 1939-40. A Finn I met while we lived in Latvia in the 1990s told me that every Finnish family had a member killed or wounded in that war.

Back to the Classics #4

I read this book for the 2019 Back to the Classics Reading Challenge

Classic by a Woman Author. I was going to read Persuasion for this category but this 1924 collection of short stories fell into my lap so I read them more or less happily.

Poirot Investigates – Agatha Christie

Over the years I’ve said rude things about Dame Agatha, for which, older and wiser now about the benefits of extremely light reading material, I retract with chagrin, knowing that sometimes a tired brain can’t handle anything heavier than a mystery. I have zero plans to read her novels, but I must say Hercule Poirot is one of the best PI characters in detective fiction and the short stories in which he stars are perfect gems, like the Nero Wolfe novelettes.

Hercule Poirot is similar to Sherlock Holmes. He is a thinking machine and vain about this superior deductive powers. It helps in the comical department that the narrator of this these stories, Capt. Hastings, is clueless buffoon, the classic dim-witted Col. Brain of Henry Cecil novels who does not quite grasp how dim-witted he himself is. The lively interplay between Hastings and Poirot is entertaining. 

These are short stories so Christie does not have any room for characterization, melodramatic padding,  or the complicated engines of death that plague mysteries from the Golden Era of Whodunnits. These stories, only about 10 to 15 pages long, are little classics, ingeniously and tightly constructed. Lest the reveals start to feel contrived, they ought to be read one at time over a period of weeks. 

The Murder of My Aunt

The Murder of My Aunt  – Richard Hull

Set in Wales, this 1934 mystery takes place in the country town of Llwll. Our comically obnoxious and self-absorbed narrator Edward Powell cluelessly lets his anti-Welsh stereotypes show. He takes pains to point out how unspeakable Llwll seems, in terms of both its pronunciation and its dullness. The maritime weather is cloudy, windy, and as wet as the bottom of the ocean. The men are all built like rugby-players and their speech has an “ugly Welsh lilt.” Worse, they are browbeaten by Welsh women who tend to be small but make up for it by always taking charge. Edward’s Aunt Mildred recruits the local farmers and merchants in efforts to man Edward up into a real Welshman.

Indeed, Edward has serious need of manning up. Like many narrow-minded idlers, he is a selfish narcissist. As lazy as a toad, he only grudgingly helps in the garden. He’s happily jobless, content to live on an allowance doled out from his dead parents’ fortune. He nags his aunt to improve the stodgy interior decoration of the house. He keeps a Peke named So-So, spoils it rotten, and lets it kill his aunt’s pigeons. With no girlfriend in sight, he reads French smut. Even more alarming than his admiration for British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley is his penchant for wearing sweaters the color of crushed strawberries.

Aunt Mildred continually harangues him for his weight, acne, foppishness and incompetence at bridge. With so much bad blood, their sick sad relationship, we feel, can only get worse. Edward is caught out by his aunt in a series of pointless lies, vandalism, and farm animal endangerment. Aunt makes him pay, literally, and so he decides to murder her and inherit his parents’ fortune. His attempt to kill her fails. And fails. And fails again. The plot twists are funny in a mordant, ironic way. Edward's sulky egotistical explanations for his repeated failures are a hoot.

Judging by the fact that Hull’s first novel has been released in more editions than his fourteen other novels, The Murder of My Aunt remains his best-known and best-regarded work. Hull worked as a full-time accountant. Writing was in his moonlighting job, so his hyper-articulate prose is a wee bit stiff and feels labored by the end. This is balanced by his ingenious plotting and black sense of humor. The first-person narrative is amusingly unreliable, calling to mind the clueless narrator in The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford.

Knowledgeable fans and critics regard The Murder of My Aunt as a classic of the inverted mystery. It appears on “The Reader’s List of Detective Story Cornerstones.” Critic-historian Howard Haycraft called this mystery "a classic of its kind; an intellectual shocker par excellence."

St. Patrick's Day

A contemplative Cher takes us through a brooding Danny Boy, circa 1970. 

Joan Baez does The Green Green Grass of Home on the Smothers Brothers Show. 

From tears of grief to tears of rage: Erin Go Bragh from the Wolfies. 

Can't stop angry though so here's the The Irish in America -  The  Everly Brothers - Don and Phil - doing Walk Right Back.

Back to the Classics #3

I read this book for the 2019 Back to the Classics Reading Challenge

Classic Comic Novel. I was going to read a Peter DeVries novel for this category but found it so outdated that I had to put it down. Strange because outdated usually never puts me off. But casual asides about domestic abuse, yuck.

Independent Witness - Henry Cecil

The English judge Henry Cecil (1902 - 1976) wrote comic legal fiction. Think of John Mortimer’s Rumpole stories, though more gentle and less acerbic, just as clever, funny, and enjoyable. Cecil’s bag of tricks will call to mind P.G. Wodehouse in that Cecil uses stock characters like the dumb colonel, the obsessed widow, the silly young person, etc. But, to my mind, Cecil writes breezy profound stories set in a recognizable world whereas Wodehouse writes silly tales set in Neverneverland.

This novel from 1963 describes a hit and run case in which a member of Parliament is accused of not only hitting a motorcyclist but fleeing the scene. Cecil has a variety of characters take the stand. The dialogue-driven examinations should be read slowly and savored. While this is not a typical whodunit, I still recommend it to mystery fans since there is a traditional reveal. Cecil’s humor is very English, wise, and humane.

Henry James said that Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs had a “hard lucidity.” Cecil’s lucidity is light, with plain prose, dazzling dialogue, and difficult legal points explained gracefully and comprehensibly. Cecil was a barrister and high court judge himself so his views on evidence, judges, juries, lawyers, and clients are worth listening to.

Reading Henry Cecil’s books confirms my belief that the basic vices (the injustice of snobbery, the gluttony of avarice and lust, mean inquisitiveness, etc.) and virtues (self-control, fairness) of human beings haven’t changed and probably won’t change down through the ages. His legal fiction from the Fifites and Sixties is still in print, because his wit, style, intelligence, and deft plotting still provide much interest and sheer reading pleasure.

The Golovlyov Family

The Golovlyov Family - Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov (pen name: Shchedrin)

This novel  Gospodá Golovlévy, written in the 1870s and called “the grimmest of Russian novels,” features the members of a spectacularly dysfunctional family. In the back country of Russia, set just before and just after the emancipation of the serfs, the characters duke it out over money or anger over perceived ingratitude. Like many carriers of grudges, the characters enjoy play-acting while listing their sacrifices for an ungrateful world. It’s almost as if they were practicing their spiel for St. Peter in order to enter the Pearly Gates, posturing like the wretched goofs in Fargo (e.g. Wade, in the kitchen, pulling out a gun, cracking the barrel, peering in, saying “Okay ... here's your damn money, now where's my daughter?... Goddamn punk ... where's my damn daughter...”).

The character of Arina Petrovna Golovlyova is an outstanding businesswomen who has increased the size of the family estate with canny acquisitions of bankrupt estates. But since she has never felt, much less expressed, tender feelings for her children, they grow into idle, shallow, reprobate adults.  After two sons drink themselves to death, the son Porfiry Golovlyov, nicknamed Little Judas (Iúdiushka) and The Bloodsucker, eases Arina Petrovna out of the way. Porfiry is one of the most atrocious characters in the whole of Russian literature.  He chatters endlessly to divert himself and others from reality. When any threatening reality asserts itself, he distracts himself with religious platitudes and procrastination. One early critic noted Iúdiushka’s “cold, calculating, cynical hypocrisy, its miserly ferocity.”  The set pieces in which he thwarts serious conversation are masterworks of tension, between Porfiry’s humbug and the interlocutor’s hopeless desperation to get to a decision and then get away.

I suppose one could read this novel as an indictment of the horrible shapes that loveless childhoods and avarice twist people into. This novel is a social artifact, a presentation of manners among the landed gentry at their worst before serfdom was abolished. But I think the social interpretation would detract from the writer’s psychological insight into the roots of alcohol abuse and the artistic touches, such as Shchedrin’s brilliant treatment of silence. Plus, there’s that Russian audacity to treat in fiction the giant themes, the most desperate questions we face in life. Readers that liked Ivan Goncharov's 1859 Oblomov would probably like this one too. Grim, yes, but this novel exerts a spell I’ve not often fallen under while reading a novel.

European RC #3

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge 2019.

Five Days in London, May 1940 - John Lukacs

This short but deep dive into diplomatic history tells the story of the first five days of Winston Churchill’s Prime Ministership (if that’s a word). Lukacs’ thesis is that this five-day period was crucial because during it WWII was not won  but it was not lost to Hitler either. Lukacs concentrates on the struggle between Churchill and Chamberlain and Halifax who were for appeasing Hitler. Lukacs examines the conflict one day at a time, describing meetings of heavy discussions and fascinating survey results reporting on the mood of the country. With the Dunkirk evacuation as the dramatic backdrop and Hitler taking over Norway too, the backdrop could not be more dramatic. Worth reading for WWII buffs who love getting into the weeds.

Old Madam Yin

Old Madam Yin: A Memoir of Peking Life, 1926 - 1938  – Ida Pruitt

Ida Pruitt was born in Shantung province to missionary parents in 1888, After she grew up bilingual and bicultural in China, she was educated in the United States. She returned to China in 1918, worked as a medical social worker, and worked for twenty years as head of the Social Service Department of the Peking Union Medical College hospital. She had to leave in the late 1930s because of the what the Japanese still delicately call the China Incident, i.e, the war against China that cost roughly 20 million Chinese men, women, and children their lives.

Pruitt is best known for her book, Daughter of Han, which told about her friendship with an ordinary working woman the late 1920s and 1930s. Old Madam Yin is about a lady of the leisure class that Pruitt met when madam applied to the hospital for an orphan boy to be adopted by her second son. Pruitt and Madam Yin became friends, as they shared an affinity for keeping busy and managing the affairs of others (in a good sense).

Pruitt describes the graceful manners and gracious sensibility this social class. She keenly observes clothes, furnishings, gardens, courtyards, and houses. Pruitt’s subject, Madame Yin enjoys her life and the challenges of using her social and political skills to establish and maintain all she can to ensure the prosperity of her family. But change is inexorable. Harmony and concord are impossible to preserve. A daughter shockingly defies the family by marrying a cousin who is also a political radical. To Madam’s deep bewilderment, a son marries a Frenchwoman, who could not care less about learning Chinese and adjusting to Chinese ways though she married a Chinese man and moved to China. Pruitt candidly observes the success or failure of an international marriage largely depends on the wife.

For readers into traditional China, Republican China, deep descriptions of artifacts and places, and women’s issues this book is worth reading. Also interested would be readers who are into the bittersweet experience of reading about traditional civilizations and their customs that are utterly vanished from our modern-a-go-go world.