Monkey: A Folk Novel of China

Today is my birthday. I was born in a Year of the Monkey, and this blog has enough internal evidence that you can guess among 1956, 1968, or 1980.

Monkey: A Folk Novel of China - Wu Ch`eng-en and Arthur Waley

Wu Ch`eng-en lived in the sixteenth century, a time when conservative literary men could not risk their reputations by collecting and writing up folk legends.  But Old Wu liked old stories so he published under a pseudonym Monkey, a stitching together into a novel the ancient myths and legends that he enjoyed as a kid.

The first part of the story is about The Monkey. He is not so much devoted to learning but soaks up knowledge of magic and kung-fu through sheer curiosity and boundless energy. From the Dragon of the Eastern Sea, he snatches a magic iron cudgel and creates havoc in both Hell and Heaven. For his pranks and capers, he is buried under a mountain by the Buddha himself. Born in a Year of the Monkey myself, I was entranced by the Monkey’s trouble-making antics and tolerant of the woe he causes out of own pure conceit. Life would go much smoother if folks would just let us stable geniuses born in the year of Monkey implement our plans and follow our whims.

Along comes Tripitaka (based on the historical traveler Hsuan Tsang), who is on a mission to India in order to find Buddhist scriptures to bring back to China and lead the people to enlightenment. According to the prophecy, Tripitaka frees the Monkey and enlists him as a bodyguard against the various thieves, goblins, ogres, beasts, demons, imps, bogeys and monsters that they will inevitably encounter.  Tripitaka is a comic character because he’s not up to the rigors of the pilgrimage. He is easily annoyed and thwarted. The slightest setback brings tears to his eyes.

It’s hard to classify this diverse novel because it has elements of folk tale, fantasia, allegory, and poetry. It even satirizes bureaucracy, sending up a Heaven that is ridden by nepotism, bribery, indolence, and petty functionaries in endless celestial offices, bureaux, and divisions. The supernatural elements are wonderful, featuring ghosts, fairies, and all kinds of haints.

This translation was done by the near-legendary ArthurWaley. In all his work, his goal was to put the story into lively English that could be enjoyed by ordinary people. Thus, his footnotes are few and pithy. Waley wanted to make this sometimes profound, sometimes silly, always fantastical story readable with a blend of imagination, humor, and charm. I recommend this to readers who like P'u Sung-Ling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio aka Strange Tales of Liaozhai. This fantasy offers, in Tolkien’s words, consolation, the recovery of a clear view, and the chance to escape the bleakness of the quotidian.

Back to the Classics #12

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

Classic Play. I was at a loss as to what to select for this category. By chance I was reading a script of a wartime broadcast by George Orwell in which he mentioned that he thought Arms and the Man and the play discussed below as Shaw’s best. So that was good enough for me since I’ve always liked Orwell better as a critic than a novelist (he pointed me to Smollett too). Anyway, the script is at this link and a BBC radio performance with a young Judith Anderson at this link.

The Devil’s Disciple (1896) – Bernard Shaw

I find reading the scripts of plays difficult, since it’s hard for me, a word not an image guy, to fill in scenes, body language, and inflections the way Shaw envisioned and even less experienced players can bring out in a melodrama such as this. But this was much more enjoyable than I expected because to make every word count Shaw forces me to go slow, discern the meaning of every word, and hear the intonations in my head:

Major Swindon:

(unctuously) I can only do my best sir, and rely (huffy pause) on the devotion of our countrymen.

General John Burgoyne:

May I ask, (warningly) Major, (mildly surprised such a churl would) are you writing a melodrama?

Major Swindon:

(sullen, puzzled, expecting a scolding) No, sir.

General John Burgoyne:

(monotone, trying it on for size) What a pity! (sarcastically but not too) WHAT a pity!

Set in 1777 in New Hampshire during the our Revolutionary War, Shaw examines the self-justifying bloody policies of imperial forces, such as hanging more or less innocent locals to terrorize surviving friends and relatives into submission. Similarly, Shaw contrasts the demands of other outside forces like organized religion to compel good behavior with the individual’s duty to develop a sense of responsibility for one’s own damn self. Shaw’s thesis is that it is a person’s duty to identify her own character and know what she can and cannot accomplish in this messed-up world. Crisis is to be welcomed as a chance to grow; a smooth life makes us sluggish, lazy, reluctant. The characters Anthony Anderson and Dick Dudgeon grow as human beings, finding their own true destiny and self-knowledge, through the prospect of unjust summary execution at the hands of the British. 

This is a good play. Reading the script makes me want to see it acted. I refuse to watch the Hollywood version, as I would predict it keeps the melodrama that Shaw is satirizing but cuts the ethical points that Shaw wants to make.

The Ides of Perry Mason 1

The 15th of every month until I don't know when I will post a review of a Perry Mason mystery. For the hell of it.

The Case of Fan-dancer's Horse - Erle Stanley Gardner

This 1947 outing was the 29th of the Perry Mason courtroom mysteries. Perry and his confidential secretary Della Street find a fan-dancer’s outfit in a jalopy that was involved in an accident that they witnessed.

Perry places an ambiguously-worded ad in the paper to find the owner and return the pair of ostrich plume fans and white slippers.  This ad attracts the attention of a fan-dancer, whose hubba-hubba stage name is Cheri Chi-Chi. But other claimants think that the wording of the ad refers to a missing and wounded saddle horse.

A rancher is found with a Japanese sword - crikey, what people get up to with war souvenirs  - with a burr from an ostrich feather in the gushing wound. Stuck with yet another lying and chiseling client, Perry is more than put out when his shapely client steals his car to flee the cops and later is spied burying a bloody ostrich fan.

One downside is that the reader will be driven to her device in order to look up antique terms such as “fan dancer” and “nautch dancer.” The upside is that she will then know the styles of dance in burlesque and never again confuse nautch dancing with the cooch or the balloon bubble dance. So much to know in this world!

Another downside is that it is fairly easy to narrow the murderer down to three characters, which is unusual for a thick-headed reader like me who rarely beats Perry to a solution. This is balanced, to my mind, by two upsides. One is that Gardner reminds us again to beware of police funny business when they cut corners to nail who they assume is the perp; at least, DA Hamilton Burger gets frustrated and annoyed with Sergeant Holcomb’s malfeasances. The other is that Gardner demonstrates his respect and sympathy for Mexicans in this novel, a stance not often taken in the late Forties.

Back to the Classics #11

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

Classic Set in a Place Where You Lived. I lived in Japan in 1979-80 as an exchange student, learning the language in an intensive program. Later I lived there from 1986 to 1992 as an employee of the Ministry of Education. Six years felt about two years too long. But what was I supposed to do? Leave a good-paying job only to return to a country in the midst of a recession brought on by restrictive monetary policy enacted by a Fed overly concerned about inflation; the loss of consumer and business confidence as a result of the 1990 oil price shock on the heels of the invasion of Kuwait; the savings and loan crisis that nobody remembers nowadays but was one of the biggest thefts in history;  and a slump in construction resulting from overbuilding during the 1980s. See how big history affects little lives?

This Scheming World – Ihara Saikaku

The settings are the major economic power-houses of 17^th century Japan such as Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo (now Tokyo). The intended audience is the town dweller, or 町人 chōnin, the generic name for merchants and artisans who sold goods and services to samurai who exploited farmers. There were classes of town dwellers. The masters were high bourgeoisie who set up stores in good locations and homeowners who rented residences. They were affluent enough become money-lenders to samurai who needed money to run their local governments and other townsmen who had to spend to keep up appearances and maintain face. The lower-tier townsmen had shops on backstreets and catered to people like them. Like the poor and work classes today, ordinary disasters – illness, fire, accidents – made for financial crises that drove them to money-lenders too.

The different classes also had different entertainments such as going to kabuki and sumo matches, eating at banquets, and frequenting brothels for the well-off to smaller theaters from knockabout plays and shows for the plebs. The town dwellers also became literate and wanted to read about people like themselves - practical, realistic, vulgar.

They also had different money problems, as we can imagine since too much money and too little money present their own problems. But members of both classes worried a great deal about New Year’s Day when all outstanding loans were due.

And, as I finally get to the point, those social and economic worries are what this gentle lampoon is about. All twenty chapters are set on New Year's Eve, the deadline for paying off debts in the Edo period. So it was the day when buyers and sellers would go crazy with worry, wondering how they were going to pay, how they would escape paying, and whether they would get paid.

Ihara Saikaku was a businessman turned monk and writer after the death of his beloved wife. So he knew town dweller attitudes and troubles and gently condemned them from a moral perspective. He has icy compassion, spiced with melancholy and satire, for marchers in the endless parade – the spendthrift wives, the cheating husbands, the profligate sons, the cheating merchants, the hell-bound money lenders. Human beings - incorrigible, ready to believe anything, at their dumbest when they think they got a real good bead on things.

Back to the Classics #10

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

Classic in Translation. The translator of this novel was a British scholar of French literature and an editor of the Penguin Classics series. Perhaps to augment his not-great salary as a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, he translated numerous Simenon novels such as Maigret at the Crossroads, Maigret Goes Home, and Maigret Meets a Milord. The book reviewed here appears to be the only non-Maigret novel he Englished.  

French title: Le Veuf

Published: 1959

Englished: 1982, Robert Baldick

The Widower – Georges Simenon

In this 1959 noir, Simenon presents a compact examination of distress, tragic and throbbing like something by Ligeti. He returns to his perennial situation of a man living a routine existence, serenely deluded that he’s reached nirvana only to have an unexpected event expose his meagre existence for the desert that it is. Blind spots – his are so opaque he can't see himself as a man of silence, withdrawal, and highly-strung tightness. Therefore, he can't see that his own wife is fighting demons of her own, the least of which is her desire not to upset her blissfully ignorant husband.

Arriving home from his work as a commercial designer, Bernard Jeantet is worried not to find his wife waiting for him in their modest apartment in the Porte Saint-Denis. He learns from the police, after two days of suspense, that she has poisoned herself in a room of a luxurious furnished hotel on the Champs-Elysées. Jeantet is disturbed by how she staged doing away with herself - white dress, flowers, champagne – and by the realization she spent every Wednesday with a “friend” in the room. Per strict policy, the hotel cannot reveal the name of the “friend.”

Jeantet is told by chambermaid that a copper on the scene picked up the note his wife had left. He wants the letter very badly indeed, convinced that it will explain to him the motive of an act which he seeks to understand. Wasn’t Jeanne happy since he had married her after patching her up and harboring her, eight years earlier, when she was cuffed around on the street by her pimp?

Settling uneasily into his widowerhood, Jeantet ponders, for the first time, his life with Jeanne in their poky apartment, her indifference to housekeeping, the mediocrity of an existence made up of monotony and uneventful tranquility. They have zilch contact with other people save her relationship with a Miss Couvert, old lady who lives on the top floor with Pierre, a boy of 10 years that she raises.

An unwanted conversation with Miss Couvert brings out the woman’s assertion that “Jeanne did not even try to be happy.” She makes other revelations that, shall we say, give Jeantet pause. They also dispel Jeantet’s obsession to get hold of the suicide note. As the psychological novels sometimes do, this one ends on a hopeful note, that Jeantet taking a small step toward human contact and assuming adult responsibilities to himself and others.

Click on the year published to go to the review of the existential noir pulp.

·         The Nightclub  / L'âne rouge (1932)

·         Tropic Moon / Coup de Lune (1933). English should have been Moonstruck!

·         Aboard the Aquitaine / 45° à l'ombre (1936)

·         Talatala  / Le Blanc à lunettes (1937)

·         The White Horse Inn / Le Cheval Blanc (1938)

·         The Family Lie / Malempin (1940)

·         Uncle Charles has Locked Himself in / Oncle Charles s'est enferme (1942)

·         Act of Passion / Lettre à mon juge (1946)

·         The Reckoning / Le Bilan Malétras (1948)

·         Aunt Jeanne / Tante Jeanne (1951)

·         A New Lease of Life / Une Vive Comme neuve (1951)

·         The Burial of M. Bouvet  / L'Enterrement de Monsieur Bouvet (1952)

·         Dirty Snow / La Neige était sale (1953)

·         The Magician / Antoine et Julie (1956)

·         The Premier / Le Président (1958)

·         The Grandmother / La Vieille (1959)

·         The Fate of the Malous / Le Destin des Malou (1962)

·         The Old Man Dies / La mort d’Auguste (1966)

·         The Man on the Bench in the Barn / La Main (1968)

·         The Rich Man / Le Riche Homme (1970)

·         The Disappearance of Odile / La Disparation d'Odile (1971)

·         The Innocents / Les Innocents (1972)

·         The Glass Cage / La Cage de Verre (1973)

Mount TBR #14

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

Prisoner’s Base – Rex Stout

When I first read a Nero Wolfe novel in college, I was not impressed though people whose taste I respected recommended the stories starring the rotund agoraphobic Manhattan- dwelling PI. I thought Wolfe was more a collection of quirks and ornerinesses than a character. But now in middle-age, I have seen the light.

In the course of this 1952 outing, three women are strangled to death. The killings are all connected to an $8 million inheritance and the control of a large maker and distributer of towels (Stout’s wife was in the textile industry so we often get references cloth and woven products). The incidents are knitted together skillfully with only once scene – Wolfe typically gathering all the suspects in his office for the first time – slowing progress down. Stout also shows his grotesque lapses of good taste in his descriptions of people and, sorry to say, wounds.

As usual, the cops are mean and thick-headed but they do get off a couple of nifties that barb Wolfe’s right hand man, Archie Goodwin. Of course, Archie narrates, as the soul of brashness and American confidence. Wolfe gets in his licks too. Upon being told he was free to leave the cop shop after being dragged down there by a cop martinet out of cussedness:

His reaction was humane, romantic, and thoroughly admirable. As if we had rehearsed it a dozen times, he arose without a word, got his hat and stick from a nearby table, came and gave me a pat on the shoulder, growled at the audience, “A paradise for puerility,” and turned and headed for the door. I followed. No one moved to intercept us.

Stout indeed liked the big word. Why use “childishness” when “puerility” gives better alliteration?

I don’t like the Wolfe novels as much as a novelettes but this is worth reading for both fans and novices. Be warned that besides the violence against women, a sadness at the loss of life is inescapable in this book, unlike most whodunnits, where murder is just a signal “Let the game begin!”

Mount TBR #13

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

Death at the Chase – Michael Innes

The mysteries starring Sir John Appleby started in 1936 and ended in 1986.  Those from the 1970s and 1980s are the length of novelettes and are entertainments in learned style and puckish humor. I think the main audience are avid readers who read genre fiction between nonfiction and serious fiction. Writers similar to Michael Innes would be Margery Allingham, Patricia Wentworth, Nicholas Blake, Cyril Hare, and Michael Gilbert.

In this 1970 novel, Sir John is in retirement at his wife’s estate Long Dream Manor in Gloucestershire. Of course, this is a country-house murder case. Of course, the recurring character Chief Constable Tommy Pride has Sir John informally take over the investigation of the murder that doesn’t happen until about just after the half-way point of the book. Of course, the murder of a rich miser has brought to the fore mean and quarrelsome relatives.

There is not much in the way of mystery. But Innes touches lightly on the theme of the past having sway over the present. During the war the murder victim, under torture, revealed names of Resistance fighters to the occupiers, resulting in round-ups and massacres. So on the anniversary of that day, an attempt is made on Ashmore's life.

'What we're considering is that there may be a kind of joke at the heart of it,' Appleby said. 'A thoroughly evil joke. But you're absolutely right about the criminal mind – or rather about any mind wrought to plan and perpetrate something like murder. Calculation and rationality can suddenly go by the board, and something quite unpremeditated, and even quite profitless and meaningless, take their place. That's why detective stories are of no interest to policemen. Their villains remain far too consistently cerebral.'

This is probably true.  This is why former detective Dashiell Hammett has Gutman say in The Maltese Falcon, “That's an attitude, sir, that calls for the most delicate judgment on both sides.  Because as you know, sir, in the heat of action, men are likely to forget where their best interests lie and let their emotions carry them away.”