Nonfiction RC #8

I read this book for the Nonfiction Reading Challenge 2014.

Darwin & The Science of Evolution - Patrick Tott, 2001

This short book covers Darwin’s life and provides an overview of the theory of evolution.  It is part of the Abrams Discoveries series, whose books are lavishly illustrated and printed on heavyish shiny paper like coffee table books but are in fact rather small, at 7 x 5 x 0.5 inches. The account of the voyage of the Beagle was well-done. I thought the discussion of the earliest advocates and detractors of the theory of evolution was fair, with a nod to Alfred Russel Wallace. I think this pitched at thinking adults who need a brush-up on the topic or a general summary.

Mount TBR #20

I read this book for the Mount TBR reading challenge 2014.

The Case of the Stuttering Bishop – Erle Stanley Gardner

Picture Perry Mason, that legal lion, shackled to the dreary chore of paperwork. His salvation arrives in the form of a bishop - or so the gentleman claims - fresh from Australia and trailing mystery like incense. Mason, who wonders speech disorders in a person who does much public speaking, suspects the prelate is less cassock than camouflage.

The tale Mallory spins is operatic in scope. At its center looms Renwold C. Brownley, a name that sounds as though Dickens and Gardner conspired over gin rickeys. Brownley, a plutocrat of the old school - meaning no school at all - wrecked his son’s marriage and drove Julia Branner to the Antipodes, where she abandoned her infant daughter. Now, years later, detectives have produced a girl who may or may not be the lost heiress. Julia cries impostor. The bishop predicts Julia will seek Mason’s aid, and so she does, bringing with her a cargo of trouble.

From this point, the plot pirouettes like a prima ballerina on a waxed floor. Mallory is attacked, vanishes en route to his ship, and Brownley himself is murdered - an exit as abrupt as his manners. Julia, accused and obstinate, refuses even to explain her innocence. Mason, undaunted, juggles impostors like a carnival performer while Paul Drake trails shadows.

This ninth Mason novel is a labyrinth of lies, a veritable masquerade where everyone wears a borrowed face. Though the roster of suspects is modest, Gardner’s ingenuity keeps the reader guessing until Mason, with a flourish worthy of Houdini, unmasks the villain. The courtroom is but a cameo; Mason and District Attorney Burger still exchange civilities - an idyll soon to perish in later books.

Bottom line: A vintage concoction, rich in complexity and period flavor. For devotees and curious newcomers alike, it is a reminder why Gardner once ruled the mystery roost with the serene confidence of a bishop - albeit one who never stuttered.

European RC #2

I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2014.

The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy’s Final Year – Jay Parini,

I feel uneasy with historical novels whose main characters are historical figures, since I assume writers just make stuff up without reading any background (e.g. T.C. Boyle). It reassures me that Parini is an academic. As a scholar should, he has read all the memoirs and diaries of the principle characters. As a serious novelist, his sense of timing is impeccable – the drama just unfolds and the situation grows desperate when the reader thinks it can’t get more desperate. As a poet, he writes striking prose.

Set in Russia in 1910, this novel covers the last year in the life of novelist and philosopher, Leo Tolstoy. He has stopped writing fiction in favor of articles about Christianity, non-violence and George’s theory of taxation. His fame and philosophy have attracted dreamers, money-grubbers, fame junkies, and frauds to his estate. He basks in their adulation. However, he feels that as long as he lives in luxury, paid for by royalties, he is not living a true complete Christian life.

The portrait of Tolstoy’s wife, Countess Sofia, is a sympathetic one, which is a change considering how often writer’s wives get kicked around. Sofia suspects that Leo is going to change his will. Doing so, the royalties would be channeled away from her children and grandchildren, a situation she cannot contemplate without rage. 

Different chapters are narrated by different followers. His supporters also feel disquiet. They vie for Tolstoy’s approval. They make sure that other people know how close they are to the great man. They undercut each other, as disciples often do. Tolstoy’s followers have all kinds of love and altruism in their hearts, but sharp elbows and unworthy motives when dealing with each other. Their hypocrisy is a hoot.

Nonfiction RC #7

I read this book for the Nonfiction Reading Challenge 2014.

The Look of Architecture - Witold Rybczynski, 2000

This is a transcription of lectures the writer made at the New York Public Library at the turn of our century. The topic is the role of fashion on architecture. Rybczynski asserts that architects bristle and shudder when asked about what style has influenced them. Their fear, he suspects, is that answering clearly would put them in a box and stifle their creativity. His overview of the coming and going of styles such as the Gothic and Classical provides much interesting reading for a reader – like me – who know little about this topic. At 144 pages, this is short and agreeable like his other books about odd familiar things such as Waiting for the Weekend (the social history of the modern weekend) and Home: A Short History of an Idea.

Mount TBR #19

I read this book for the Mount TBR reading challenge 2014.

The Squabble – Nikolai Gogol, tr. Hugh Alpin for Hesperus Press,

Gogol is known for the novel Dead Souls, the Petersburg cycle (which includes his best-known story, The Overcoat) and the Mirgorod cycle (four stories, of which three are included in this volume). More fun to read than Dostoyevsky, Gogol’s tone is happy and loud, that’s for sure. Gogol describes an intense friendship between two recluses deep in the Ukrainian countryside and how a squabble derails their companionship. The story’s momentum is smooth though the tone is breathless. Then it just stops.

The characters Gogol sets up in the story are all that they can be. They can’t help it when or where they were born. How they were raised. How they learned to get along with people with no good intentions and think only of themselves.  Ivan I. takes it into his head that he wants Ivan N’s gun. He offers a pig and two sacks of oats in trade for the weapon. Ivan N doesn’t take to the proposal, not only because it confers personal protection:

    “What’s that! Two sacks of oats and a pig for the gun?”

    “Well, isn’t that enough?”

    “For the gun?”

    “Of course it’s for the gun.”

    “Two sacks for the gun?”

    “Not two empty sacks, but sacks of oats; and have you forgotten the pig?”

    “You can go and kiss your pig, or if you prefer it, then the Devil!”

    “Oh, you’re so touchy! You’ll see in the other world you’ll have your tongue studded with hot needles for such blasphemous words. After a conversation with you, people need to wash their hands and face, and fumigate themselves.”

    “Allow me, Ivan Ivanovitch. A gun is a noble thing, the most curious amusement, and, what’s more, a nice decoration in the room…”

    “You, Ivan Nikiforovich, are fussing over your gun like a bear with a sore head,” said Ivan Ivanovich in annoyance, because he was truly beginning to get angry now.

    “And you, Ivan Ivanovich, are a real goose.”

This Hesperus volume contains two other stories from the Mirgorod series: “Olde-Worlde Landowners” and “The Carriage.” The first is Gogol’s parody of the Philemon and Baucis myth and his parody of the kind of sickly-sweet Russian writing that romanticizes nature. The Carriage is a slight and funny examination an examination of how conceit, ambition, and alcohol prove dangerous obstacles to getting ahead. Gogol’s characters always want more stuff and they end up getting royally screwed for their greed.

War Challenge #18

I read this for the 2014 War Challenge with a Twist at the reading challenge blog War Through the Generations

A Long Long Way – Sebastian  Barry, 2005

Like The Soldier’s Song (Alan Monaghan, 2002), this novel examines an Irishman’s experience in the trenches during WWI and the way in which the war acted as a catalyst in pushing nationalists and unionists further apart. A Catholic from Dublin, Willie Dunne enlists in the King’s army to protect home and family from barbarism, only to find himself fighting the adversary but oppressing his own people during the Easter rising in Dublin in 1916.

When he sees a nationalist murdered on the street during the rising, his own national identity stirs. After his inarticulate expression of this stirring in a letter causes a terrible rift with his father over politics, street boys spit on and stone him, despising him as a “British Tommie.” This calls to mind the scene in The Soldier’s Song when Stephan Ryan is beaten by thugs on a Dublin street because he is wearing a British army great coat. To be beaten by the same people that cheered its soldiers on to war months earlier – it’s irony as tangled and knotty and intractable as you’d find in the Balkans.

Considered one of Ireland's finest writers, Sebastian Barry writes dense prose, in various registers, gentle, tough, peaceful, reverent, harsh but never melodramatic or excessive. For example:

When they came into their trench he felt small enough.  The biggest thing there was the roaring of Death and the smallest thing was a man.  Bombs not so far off distressed the earth of Belgium, disgorged great heaps of it, and did everything except kill him immediately, as he half expected them to do.

There is occasional overuse of adjectives. As for writerly writing, in one line, I wondered if a “scent” could leave an “echo,” but maybe that’s just me distracting myself.

I still recommend this book to readers who are already familiar with the history. Barry assumes the reader knows the background of the Easter Rising and will recognize conditions to identity the battle since he never gives names of engagements. For Barry, battles are not the focus, its on an individual’s experience, to remind us of the costs and losses and confusions faced by people in the 20^th century, when extraordinary choices were presented to ordinary people.