Reading Those Classics #14

Classic Set in France. Beautifully evoked is the physical content, the sensuous satisfaction of a beautiful early summer day in Paris at the beginning of the novel.

Maigret’s Patience – Georges Simenon

Retired mobster Manuel Palmari has spent the last couple of years in a wheelchair, disabled by machine-gun fire from a couple of hoods he later had snuffed. But he’s shot dead in his Paris apartment. The death of his past informer brings Inspector Maigret into the case. Nearing retirement, Maigret feels a subtle tug, a link hard to define, to a member of his own generation being ushered from this vale of tears.

One highlight of this better-than-average Maigret story is chapter four in which Maigret canvasses the residents of Palmari’s apartment building on rue des Acacias. The building houses a cross-section of Parisians: an American lesbian who’s a journalist, the bartender of an elegant hotel, pensioners at peace with the world and not, two sales reps, a chiropodist, a gym teacher, a deaf and dumb codger and maids occupying the rooms on the top floor, not to mention the victim and his hottie companion.

The investigation is completed in only two days, giving this an unusually short time span. Also unusual is Maigret’s office on the Quai des Orfèvres is not the setting for dramatic action. Starting from an altogether banal affair, this story is an excellent example of the way in which series Maigret conducts his investigations: soak up the atmosphere with questions and keen observation, light fires under people of interest and then see which way they jump.

One of Simenon’s strengths is describing the weather. Spring is described wonderfully. It stands in contrast to the dark memory the novel ends with, the damage and death at Douai by the first bombing attack of the German invasion in May, 1940.

 

Click on the title to go to the review.

Prize Winning Classic: The Moviegoer – Walker Percy

Classic Novella: Old Man – William Faulkner

Classic Epistolary Novel: Augustus – John Williams

Classic Comic Novel: Thank you, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse

Classic Short Stories: New York Stories – John O’Hara

Classic Air Pilot Memoir: Wind, Sand, and Stars - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Classic Set in the Big Apple: Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos

Classic 19th Century Novel: Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite – Anthony Trollope

Classic Police Procedural: Wolf to Slaughter – Ruth Rendell

Classic War Memoir: Flight to Arras - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Classic American Mystery: Might as Well Be Dead - Rex Stout

Classic Courtroom Drama: A Woman Named Anne – Henry Cecil

Classic Abandoned: Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon

Inspector Montalbano #8

The Patience of the Spider – Andrea Camilleri

The eighth mystery with Inspector Salvo Montalbano as the protagonist is set in Vigata, Sicily in the early 2000s.

It starts with our hero convalescing from a gun-shot wound to his shoulder suffered near the end of the previous novel Rounding the Mark. He keeps waking up at 3:27:40, the exact time he was shot. So PTSD, despite the proximity of his loyal long-suffering GF Livia. She has left her home in Boccadasse, near Genoa, using up her holiday time off to nurse him back to health. They bicker but don’t meet head on elephants in the corner like her inability to cook (an agony to foodie Salvo) or his inability to understand how his selfishness and cluelessness drive Livia crazy.

The series nemesis Commissioner Bonetti-Alderighi orders Montalbano back in the saddle for an abduction case. On her way home on her moped, a college girl was snatched by kidnappers. Montalbano does not head the investigation but at least his colleague Inspector Filippo (Fifi) Minutolo sides with the angels. A fatuous bureaucrat, Bonetti-Alderighi says Minutolo ought to be an expert in kidnappings because he's a Calabrian from Messina. In another satirical passage Montalbano plays pranks played on idiot TV newscaster Pippo Ragonese, who blamed the kidnapping on “illegal immigrants.”

Montalbano knows kidnapping is committed either for money or for assault which often culminates in murder. He worries the end will be murder when he sees for himself what everybody knows: the victim’s family is not well off, and in fact, living in a dingy villa, with the victim’s mother slowly dying of a chronic disease.

When they finally put their heads up, the kidnappers reveal a savvy approach to the media. They send every message and photo not only to the family but also to local TV stations in order to inflame public opinion. Cleverly manipulated, the public loudly demands that the ransom be paid by the only wealthy person in the family, the victim's uncle, a dishonest businessman with political ambitions. When the uncle at first hesitates to pony up the ransom, indignant members of the public assault his trophy wife in a parking lot and burn two of his trucks.

Montalbano follows the investigation from the sidelines and interviews persons of interest in the shadows. However, he has the impression that something doesn't seem right, that some questions haven't been asked, some answers have been missed. In a fine passage, on his veranda at his Marinella house near the sea, looking at a spider's web, he realizes even the cliché of a “web of deceit” can be helpful. He has a vision of brains behind the kidnapping. Camilleri gives a nod to logic and rationality in thinking, but he also puts into action Montalbano’s feeling, intuition, and neuroses, not to mention his synesthesia, his ability see smells and taste shapes. No wonder Montalbano solves cases with creative leaps of imagination.

Camilleri's skill and mastery managed to surprise me once again: he manages to write an excellent detective story without hinging the plot on a murder. He paints, with few characters and only a ghost of a plot, a fresco of a family dragged into the drama of the kidnapping of their daughter, though already burdened by the mother's illness and reduced to poverty due to family conflict.

Humor lightens the serious plot elements. Clownish Officer Catarella and silly spats between Montalbano and Livia provide comic relief. Camilleri also satirizes the corruption, incompetence, and sheer stupidity of public functionaries.

Movie: Death to Smoochy

Death to Smoochy:  2002 / Color / 109 minutes

Tagline: He's Big, He's Blue, He's Smoochy... and He's got to DIE!

Actually, the color of kid’s show rhino is fuscia, not blue, and the use of vibrant colors makes this bitter comedy a visual wonder.  I suppose I’m easy to impress since I watch mainly black and white movies, but I’ve rarely seen a movie with such richly saturated colors. The colors in the production design pop like colors in The Simpsons.

The other strong point is the casting.  Catherine Keener, as usual, is outstanding as the jaded producer of kid-shows. Stopping just short of geekiness, Edward Norton plays it sincere and schmaltzy as the rhino character.  Full of caring and sharing, he says, “When my brothers and I played cowboys and Indians, I was always the Chinese railroad worker.” As the character displaced by Smoochy the Rhino, Robin Williams is as an angry, harsh, foul-mouthed lunatic. Asked by a cop if he is okay, he says, “I don't know. I'm kinda fucked up in general, so it's hard to gauge.” Leading a half-comical half-scary Irish gang, Pam Ferris sports bright red hair that I can’t believe is found in Ireland or Nature.

The movie twice uses the jaunty mambo music of Yma Sumac, so you know you’re in for a roller-coaster ride. The movie is not a satire of smarmy kid shows like Barney the Dinosaur. Nor does it satirize the corruption and back-stabbing of the corporate or entertainment world.  The plot, characters, and writing are so over the top that the movie does not have the basis in reality that a lesson or meaning needs. Screenwriter Adam Resnick takes his relentless hard-edged tone from Jonathan Swift and Ambrose Bierce, but I can’t accept it as satire, the movie has a cartoonish quality that makes it impossible to accept as having anything to do with the real world. The colors, Yma Sumac and other offbeat musicians, histrionic language, weird reflections, and odd transitions all combine to keep us off balance in a fantastical world. It’s fantasy with no fable, lesson or moral.

But the heckling starts to weary and grate at about 90-minute mark of this 110-minute movie. The salty language, the larger-than-life acting, unrestrained gestures, and the fantastical become tiring.  Lines are delivered so fast and frantic that it’s hard to catch the funnies. My Bride like the comic gang lead by evil Pam Ferris, but I ended up lying down, exhausted.

The movie generated little box office revenue. Maybe the folks got tuckered out like I did. Maybe people went to a Robin Williams movie expecting heart-warming Patch Adams, but got a relentless misanthropic loony-tune instead. One thing: the production design looks like no other movie.

Dr. Blow & Professor Manciple #1

She Died Because… - Kenneth Hopkins

Eighty-one-year-old Doctor of English Letters William Blow looks up from his scholarly endeavors over Samuel Butler’s burlesque polemic Hudibras. Blow realizes that it is 3 o’clock – morning or afternoon, he isn’t quite sure – and decides to ask his housekeeper, Mrs. Solihull, to rustle him up some lunch. He finds her, however, in her room lying on her rug.

Lest people get the wrong idea, Blow fetches his seventy-nine-year-old friend, Professor Gideon Manciple. Gideon notes that she has a knife in her back.

Thus a professor of English and a professor of numismatology dodder their way into a murder investigation. Blow’s absent-mindedness and Manciple’s craftiness bedevil the official police including Superintendent Urry, Constable Poindexter, Inspector Elkins and Sergeant Wix. All of the characters are comic in their own unique way. English majors and readers who like the erudite mysteries of Michael Innes and Nicholas Blake will find exchanges like this a hoot:

… Blow put in, “I very often hear her singing through the wall. 

“Singing through the wall? 

“Through the wall, singing. Dear me, how pedantic you policemen are.”

The quiet ways, impracticality and unworldliness of the two unlikely sleuths afford them protection against the bad guys. Very funny are their forays into the worlds of burglary, fencing, and sex work. I recommend this comic mystery to readers looking for a break from mayhem and angst or those that need a fix of veddy hardcore Britishness. The books are violence-free, and cruelty-free (unlike Innes), and angst-free (unlike Blake).

Dr. Blow and Professor Manciple starred in two other detective novels Dead Against My Principles (1960) and Body Blow (1962). Hector Kenneth Hopkins was born in 1914 and also wrote as Christopher Adams. This forgotten classic from 1957 was one of the The Perennial Library mystery series published in 1984 by Harper & Row.

The Ides of Perry Mason 50

On the 15th of every month, we run something related to Our Favorite Lawyer. This novel was made into an episode in late 1957 and features a beautiful 1957 Ford Thunderbird.

The Case of the One-Eyed Witness – Erle Stanley Gardner

This 1950 Perry Mason mystery opens with so much antique Americana that we cynics wonder if a young author is mining notes of all the noir movies they’ve seen. Movie theaters full on week-nights, pharmacy soda fountains, nickels for a pay-phone, and an LA night club with a live orchestra, a floor show, a hat-check girl, a photograph girl, and a cigarette girl. People sport retro names like Clark, Carlton, Medford, Myrtle, and Arthman. They use retro expressions: “in a blue funk,” “thimblerig,” “look all over hell’s half acre,” and “You’ve got a lot of crust to….” Everybody smokes; in fact, Mason smokes Raleighs.

It’s not all cheesy nostalgia. Lawyer Mason and PI Paul Drake’s investigation uncovers a racket in human trafficking, a problem that has hardly gone away. They also expose a con that depends on the mark’s racism and fear of discrimination, two sides of injustice still among us. The criminal justice problems Gardner underlines plague us yet, particularly confirmation bias on the part of cops, improper police procedures, eyewitness misidentification and misinterpretation of circumstantial evidence by prosecutors.

A Perry Mason story constitutes comfort reading because though the DA appears to hold all the trumps, the reader has no doubt about the outcome. We long-time Perry fans know three things as sure as eggs. 

Perry’s clients act foolishly by sitting on facts even with their lawyer and talking to the cops without a lawyer present. However, Perry assumes they are innocent of first-degree murder so he can be counted on to fight for a fair trial, especially when the breaks are going against his clients.  Perry feels such commitment to the truth that he will not suppress, conceal, or distort any of the actual evidence. 

Gardner had his plot wheels and formulas, heaven knows, but in this one, to keep things interesting for himself and hardcore fans like us who've read them all, he prevents Mason from knowing who his client is for more than half the book. More dubious, he lets the readers keep in the dark as to who certain people are until late in the novel. Still, I have no reservations recommending this classic.

Reading Those Classics #13

Classic Abandoned. When this novel was released in 1973, the buzz it created was so loud and the cover so amazing that I, a dewy teenager, tried reading it. I got that it was about the absurdity of war, a hot topic during the Vietnam era. But I had to set it down, queasily unable to get past the part where Slothrop is fetching his harmonica which has fallen into a toilet. In the early Eighties, I took another plunge and got that is was about the obscenity of war. Only to set it down again after the coprophagia scene.

Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon

"All great literature," said Leo Tolstoy, "is one of two stories: a stranger comes to town or a man goes on a journey.” This massive novel presents both. Our hero Tyrone Slothrop is an American in Europe and he goes on a quest to find a key.

What key? Pynchon, in a rare lenient moment of lucidity, has a character speculate, “Somewhere, among the wastes of the World, is the key that will bring us back, restore us to our Earth and to our Freedom.” I think the writer is referring to a root of suffering, the craving that believes in the existence of pure universal truth and the re-establishment of the original state in which human beings lived in accordance with nature. In the weak moments when we’ve forgotten everything that we’ve read, we kid ourselves with the nostalgia for a past in which ordinary human beings were brave, wise, and temperate and their leaders fatherly, just, and benevolent. Long ago, back in the garden, times were stable, peaceful, prosperous. This illusion is a needless cause of distress and suffering that had better be rooted out.

On a quest our hero Tyrone Slothrop is trying to find keys to unlock the pure truth concerning two big questions, one personal and one scientific and technical. His search in France and Germany near the end of WWII and the early days of the 1945 peace contradicts the notion of a quest having a destination. Slothrop covers many miles but doesn’t seem to get anywhere. The search is not straight to the center of the labyrinth, because the author adopts - not explicitly, but we realize it only as we read on and on, compelled by our fascination with the writer’s strange use of words - the technique of deliberate misdirection that defies the reader to analyze. He zig-zags the quest under an endless accumulation of content, extracted from the most disparate cultural veins - from Hollywood musicals to research in organizational behavior; from slapstick to comics; from pornography to sheer Sixties doping and sexing and yelling “War! What is it good for? Absolutely. Nothing.”

Our hero Tyrone Slothrop is not the only one on the quest to find a key to big questions. Various paranoid followers of conspiracy theories think that through their own research they will find the key that explains the convoluted operations hatched by evil-doing multi-national corporations. Titans, managers and minions are motivated exclusively by capital’s thirst for hegemonic power and ecstatic experiences fueled by exotic drugs and weird sex, neither of which, one suspicions, are salutary with prolonged use or particularly useful in finding the key.

Paranoid explanations must explain everything. They begin with the assumption that everything – everything in Creation! - is connected. Though young in the early 1970s, I remember some people being plugged into the idea that something could always stand for something else – an LSD-laced notion, that – and that the whole system is One – whatever that implies - could be explained because everything is interwoven and everything changes with everything.

Great! How does knowing everything merges from one into another help me to cajole the dog out of her snit when she realizes she’s not going a trip with me this time?

When I was a kid, a puzzle I worked on was a 1000-piece merging of Jackson Pollock’s Convergence. I remember looking at the pieces so closely that I felt dizzy and had a sense of disorientation. This is the feeling I had for about two-thirds of this novel, a really crazy mixture of history, systems and game theory, behaviorist psychology, ethnography, natural sciences, applied mathematics and a little engineering with generous doses of the surreal, the grotesque, the ironic and the erotic.

The one-third that I readily understood was his masterly descriptions of things that he makes the reader see, hear, smell, touch and taste. Pynchon must have travelled in Northern Germany to get Baltic water, light, sand, rock and pine so right. His depiction of disorder and squalor is right up there with Dickens in Bleak House. The scene of Slothrop eating the vile English candies is as funny as it is disgusting (go to an Asian food market and get a selection of candy to learn there are lots of different ways to approach “sweet,” some of them wildly implausible to a palate that grew up eating Hershey’s).

To my dismay, Pynchon uses lots of schoolboy humor relative to woman’s body as sextoy, which was very much of a time I remember, the raunchy early Seventies, the era of porn chic, lots of casual tossing around of the c-word. Feminists of the time pointed out Pynchon’s female characters were usually mere objects of male fantasy or bit players in men’s theatricals. I daresay this novel isn’t much read in our more enlightened era due to its misogyny. Just by the way, the tender narration of Roger Mexico and Jessica’s love affair - it really is beautiful - doesn’t make easier to take the pedophilia scene and the antagonism to same-sex sexuality either.

Now that I’ve experienced both I can say with confidence, like the Seventies itself, Pynchon’s technique has with long and short stretches where nearly nothing makes any sense. Lots of readers will find the unintelligibility off-putting. Me, I used to provide grammatical make-overs to technical articles in English written by non-native speakers of English so I'm used to not getting meaning out of texts. And I lived through the Seventies, such a nutty time that Americans decided to sleepwalk through the Eighties. 

The novel, therefore, is not really something where I’m going to read it and note down my analytical observations and even venture to detail the footprints on my soul Pynchon has left, as if you would understand or even be interested. This novel is a unique reading experience, like The Sound and the Fury or Manhattan Transfer. What will stick to a reader’s imagination and memory and intellect is decidedly subjective, impossible to predict. The reader just has to dive in, focus, engage the little grey cells, and let herself take her own personal mental tour, coming across passages shining like stars or smelling like turds from a dog on cheap chow.

At the least I know, after abandoning this classic twice, older now, with the literal scars to prove it, I’m tough enough to finish it. Nothing good comes easy.

Click on the title to go to the review.

Prize Winning Classic: The Moviegoer – Walker Percy

Classic Novella: Old Man – William Faulkner

Classic Epistolary Novel: Augustus – John Williams

Classic Comic Novel: Thank you, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse

Classic Short Stories: New York Stories – John O’Hara

Classic Air Pilot Memoir: Wind, Sand, and Stars - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Classic Set in the Big Apple: Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos

Classic 19th Century Novel: Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite – Anthony Trollope

Classic Police Procedural: Wolf to Slaughter – Ruth Rendell

Classic War Memoir: Flight to Arras - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Classic American Mystery: Might as Well Be Dead - Rex Stout

Classic Courtroom Drama: A Woman Named Anne – Henry Cecil

John Putnam Thatcher #24

A Shark out of Water – Emma Lathen

This mystery has a unique setting: Gdansk, Poland, in the in the post-Soviet 1990s. It also has a unique victim: a terror technocrat.

Stefan Zebriski wields expert knowledge of all things shipping in the Baltic. He provides useful information for his superiors in BADA, the Baltic Area Development Association, a grouping of the 10 countries on the Baltic Sea. But he’s a terror in that he gives advice on policy to the policy-makers. The idealistic advice is unwelcome and so is his stepping out of his lane to give it.  He’s also passionate so when he finds out about fraud going in his beloved BADA, he lets people know his suspicions. But before he can provide any details, he is battered to death with a tire iron in the BADA parking lot.

Colonel Oblonski, a Polish police detective, investigates the murder. Oblonski is out of his comfort zone when it comes to dealing with bureaucrats and diplomats in non-governmental organizations. So he comes to depend on consultations with series hero John Putnam Thatcher of Sloan Guaranty Trust, the third largest bank in the world. Thatcher is joined in Poland by his Sloan colleague Everett Gabler, who is satirized as a detail-obsessed Puritan who enjoys funerals.

Emma Lathen was the pen name of Mary Jane Latsis (1927-97), an economist, and Martha Hennisart (1929 - ), a lawyer. They co-wrote 24 novels featuring John Putnam Thatcher and seven novels starring a Congressman-sleuth under the pseudonym R.B. Dominic. Each Thatcher story is set in an industry providing a unique product or service such as fast food, nursery plants, clothing, cars, or Catholic schools. This novel in fact was last novel because no more books came after Latsis’ passing in 1997. Though the business environment has changed in the last 30 years, their message that good managers must combine knowledge of money with people skills is still as true as ever.

It's Worse than Forty Fights

Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond - Sonia Shah

The author takes cholera, an acute diarrheal illness, as her starting point because, like the bubonic plague, influenza, smallpox, HIV and you-know, it has caused pandemics. Writing this book in 2017 – i.e., before our first-hand experience - she points out in the recent past we have seen over 300 infectious pathogens emerge or re-emerge, like ebola, dengue fever, middle east respiratory syndrome, and – surprise! - novel coronaviruses.

Cholera really messes us people up by drawing fluid out of us. We dehydrate to death. About 1 in 10 people whom cholera sickens will develop the severe symptoms of watery diarrhea, vomiting, and leg cramps. In these people, the rapid loss of body fluids leads to dehydration and shock. Without treatment, death can occur within hours. As in the 1918 influenza, a person can be fine in the morning and dead by the evening. If not treated right away, it will kill half the people who catch it.  Cholera caused seven pandemics in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

How does a microbe become a pathogen that causes pandemics? When we enter wildlife habitats, we come into contact with novel viruses. The viruses jump into our bodies where they become pathogenic. The history of cholera illustrates this path. A marine bacterium, it lived peacefully in estuaries, swamps and wetlands, perfect to grow alongside planktons. When these environments were disturbed in India in the 19^th century, people had contact with the cholera in the environment. People using modern transport – ships, canals, trains – then spread it all over the world.

We are still invading wild habitat with farms, mines, and suburban development. Deforestation in West Africa lead directly to an outbreak of ebola in 2014. We have lost diverse bird species in North America because of loss of habitat. Robins and crows have taken over. Unfortunately they are efficient carriers of West Nile virus. In 1999 in New York City, we had the first big outbreak when it spilled over into humans. The loss of opossum and chipmunks, who eat the ticks that try to feed of them, due to suburbanization has lead to the increase of tick-borne diseases like Lyme disease.

Modern transportation increases the risk of pandemics. The Erie Canal, in fact, helped spread cholera by connecting waterways into a highway of infection. In the 19^th century prosperous cities like New York City and Paris had no sewage system. So cholera entered the ground water and made thousands of people sick. Her narrative of the filth of New York City in the 1830s beggars description. Though I have no idea how such a thing can be measured, historians claim that the average New Yorker of the time ingested about two teaspoons of fecal matter.

A day.

The crowding of modern urbanization too helps spread epidemics. In the 1830s the crowding in cities created a huge sanitary crisis. People coming off the land to New York City just used their traditional pooping practices. Cesspools and outhouses were untreated and there were no rules as to how they were cleaned or maintained. Cholera exploded over and over again in New York City. Terrible things happened in the early 1830s as mobs went crazy against Irish workers and doctors were stoned in the street. But the rich and powerful lobbied against measures to combat cholera.

What do we do to contain these outbreaks? Before vaccines and medications were developed to deal with infectious disease, we changed land use policies, dam construction, housing practices, and moved rural people out of poverty. People put screens on their windows. Cities had campaigns to get people to mop up or drain standing water so malaria mosquitoes could not breed.

But from around 1940 when drugs were developed the establishment went over to a biomedical model of fighting contagion.  We figured we would throw drugs at diseases to make them go away when people got sick. But vaccines are not sufficient. Dengue fever broke out in Florida because the foreclosure crisis had lead to many abandoned houses which meant swimming pools and gardens filled with standing water. They become giant breeding grounds for mosquitoes which spread dengue. The biomedical approach failed and now dengue fever in endemic in Florida.

So now we are looking a growth of new pathogens, spreading quickly, untreatable diseases. Most of human beings will live in cities in about 10 years. Millions will live in slums in impoverished parts of the world. Ebola will tear through cities with millions of people. Zika will take advantage of huge populations in dense conditions too.

The author says we need to engage in political and social causes for pandemics. Reading this book’s dark predictions about the future is scary, especially in light of our recent sad bitter experience and how it contributed to our environment filled with our otherwise smart relatives, co-workers, and neighbors that “believe in” the “plandemic hidden agendas” and “rushed through vaccines” on account of they did “their own research.”