Mount TBR #5

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

A History of Japan, 1615-1867 - Sir George Sansom

This is the final volume of the magisterial trilogy by the distinguished British historian. The first volume covered to 1334 (reviewed here) the second from 1334 to 1615 (reviewed here).

The book opens with an examination the creation of the Tokugawa regime under the three Shoguns after Tokugawa Ieyasu: Hidetada, Iemitsu, and Ietsuna. Sansom is sympathetic to the next one, Tsunayoshi, though he is notorious as the Dog Shogun who ordered everybody to address dogs politely as “O Inu Sama.”

In seven additional chapters, Sansom describes conditions in the second half of the seventeenth century in terms of political shifts, urban and rural conditions, economic expansion and the problems which it posed. He briefly – that is, tantalizingly - touches on how the philosophy of Neo-Confucian Wang Yang-ming influenced Japanese reformers running up the end of Tokugawa rule. The response to the Black Ships is handled cursorily.

I highly recommend this set to serious students of traditional Japan. These books focus mainly on topics in social science. For the humanities, see Sansom’s excellent Japan: A Short Cultural History.

Back to the Classics #6

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

Two sisters are disappointed romantically by two previously engaged guys. Sister Marianne reacts with drama, tears, prostration, melancholy and generally makes jilted doe Lily Dale look like a slouch. Sister Elinor hides her unhappiness so as not to burden her emotional mother and sister with her sadness. She takes a tack that is as sensible as it is rare:

And after all, Marianne, after all that is bewitching in the idea of a single and constant attachment, and all that can be said of one's happiness depending entirely on any particular person, it is not meant—it is not fit—it is not possible that it should be so.

Arguing we had better not base our happiness on somebody we can lose, Austen rejects notions of soul mates united forever in bliss. Given this skeptical attitude about heart’s desires, it seems a miracle that she is still read today, steeped as we are in the belief “the only one for me.” Not to mention our uneasiness about and excessive respect of money, stuff, and status – i.e, more things we can easily lose - is as worthy of contempt now as it was in the 18^th century.

But her novels survive because she appeals to those of us, like Elinor, that make strong efforts to bear our troubles without fretting, to conceal emotion with fortitude in order to prevent giving other people pain, to bear up because our self-respect demands it. For Austen, those that lack self-restraint choose to lack self-restraint; those that lack principle and civility consciously reject manners and elan.

Just read it. It’s great. This is my second Austen. I totally understand why her fans are totally nuts about her. Austen is stern, but reasonable. Austen appeals to us readers who read in order to see life more clearly, who believe it is important, insofar as they can, to live life bravely, with self-command, controlling what is up to them (their own responses to life) and not worrying much about what is out of their control (wealth, property, reputation, station, awards, hangers-on, etc.).

Back to the Classics #5

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

The Case of Comrade Tulayev – Victor Serge

Revolutionaries, being imperfect people, make imperfect decisions, which make imperfect political systems. The Old Bolsheviks, for example, went along with Lenin in the employment of repressive measures against the adversaries of socialism. After Lenin died, Joseph Stalin, to consolidate power,  unleashed the apparatus of repression against the Old Bolsheviks, exiling jailing torturing and killing thousands of them. The most famous novel to come out of the Stalinist purges was Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler. Its power comes from its concision: it focuses on the story of a high official asked to confess falsely to treason, willing to take on ignominy and nine grams of lead in his skull as his last duty to the party.

Victor Serge, an Old Bolshevik, lived through the purges in various points in the Stalinesque meat grinder – surveillance, imprisonment, uneasy release.  He lived because the regime feared the opinion of influential people in the West. Serge ended up in Paris in the late 1930s. Though this book is out of his direct and miserable experience, he writes of repression under Stalin with detachment. This novel is not the nightmare of 1984, not the angry expose of Soviet stupidity of The First Circle nor Soviet hypocrisy of Darkness at Noon. The Case of Comrade Tulayev is more realistic and yet more symbolic and more unified than the novel he wrote in different places and times, Conquered City.

The high official who oversaw purges of innocent college professors and students, Comrade Tulayev, is shot down on a Moscow street one wintry night. “You must see, nevertheless," a high official tells one of the blameless accused, "that the Party cannot admit that it is impotent before a revolver shot fired from no one knows where, perhaps from the depths of the people's soul.” As the Party is unable to ascribe anything to chance, the investigator goes on, implicating, disgracing, imprisoning, and killing hundreds of people. The real murderer, in fact, goes free, working as a clerk in a subway construction yard. The killer had acted on impulse, with gun that had fallen into his hands by sheer chance. But the Party saw the assassination as an opportunity to do in a few more enemies.

The fascination of this novel lies in its examination of officials at all levels, party members, old Bolsheviks, and suspected Trotskyists who must face repression. The Left Opposition basically shit on the bureaucratic creeps that flourished under Stalin. The toadies, like lickspittles everywhere, developed finely tuned antennae that told them which officials where in and worth cultivating and which were out, bound for the labor camps. Serge re-creates amazing atmospheres, such as that of a typical office of a suspect where people that like him can barely contain their sorrow that he will soon be arrested, but others are cowardly and craven and seem to look right through him. Various scenes are incredible, such as the old party man on his way to his Moscow trial sharing a freezing jail with boys on their way to a labor camp.

A symbolic theme of the novel is time. Serge often references relentless time and change. We may cry and stamp our feet that paranoid megalomaniacs are our leaders and sorry craps their enablers. But we still live in a world of flux. Even ordeals have their endpoints. And lots of people – like the Old Bolsheviks – keep their faith.

Mount TBR #4

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

A Murder of Quality - John le Carré

This 1962 mystery was the second novel of the author of the Karla Trilogy and, more recently, The Constant Gardener and A Legacy of Spies. At only about 150 pages, A Murder of Quality lacks elbow room. That is, it feels like the novelist had to restrain himself from exploring themes such as the lingering effects of WWII on those that had to fight it in particular but how the past haunts the present in general; the suffocating environment of public schools; religious differences between Church of England and Nonconformists; and the overall deceptiveness of mere appearance and persona. Retired spy George Smiley, for example, looks like “the very prototype of an unsuccessful middle-aged bachelor in a sedentary occupation.” But the inoffensive appearance masks the fact he has, one colleague observes, “the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin.”

To sum up the plot, Smiley is contacted by a wartime coworker who has received a strange letter. A woman who lives in a public school town writes that she afraid that her husband, one of the masters there, has designs on her life. Smiley recalls that Terence Fielding, brother of one of Smiley's colleagues in intelligence during the war, teaches classics at the school. However, Smiley hears that the letter writer has been murdered. Smiley is invited by the local police to investigate since the local chief of police knows a little of Smiley’s WWII exploits, wants to hold off Scotland Yard, and the middle class chief is not comfortable investigating the quality that are connected to the public school.

Like Maigret in a Simenon novel, or Campion in an Allingham novel, Smiley finds himself investigating  the crime in a world with its own rules of manner and conduct. Also in the whodunnit manner, there are red herrings and odd characters galore. This early novel is well-worth reading for fans of le Carré, Alan Furst, and whodunit writers with a little edge like Tey, Marsh, Innes and Highsmith.

St. Patrick’s Day

Troubles – J.G. Farrell

A character in this novel says that history is what is remembered, but ‘everything else’ – that is, daily life as what we ordinary people get up to - tends to be forgotten. This story examines people that are trying to carry on their regular lives while history is unraveling their Irish world.

It is 1919. Major Brendan Archer is a gentleman, a believer in honor, chivalry, and playing the game even after the Great War by the end of which some members of his generation like Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves  had said “goodbye to all that.” Too English, however, he is, not to be regarded by a dynamic Irishwoman as standoffish and stuffy. Archer has been released from his hospitalization for shell shock brought on by his service in the trenches. He visits the Victorian-era Majestic Hotel in County Wexford, Ireland, to find out if still on is his accidental engagement to Angela Spencer made while he was on a brief leave from the war.

Angela’s father Edward owns the hotel, which like British rule in Ireland, is going to pieces. Edward is hard to respect, given his snooty airs and anti-Catholic prejudices, but his dogged optimism has a certain pride.  A master of self-deception, Edward frets about renovations and conducts amateur experiments in psycho-physiology. The hotel and science are distractions so he can disregard the political troubles between Protestant Unionists and Catholic Nationalists. The escalating violence and resulting stress gradually seize his attention and steadily unhinge him.

Archer feels high-strung and restless due to his war experience. He feels tired of conflicts of any kind. Ireland, with its “vast and narcotic inertia,” casts its spell over him. He insensibly becomes involved in the Anglo-Irish family's issues and tensions with servants and tenants. Lacking boldness to get on with his life, he makes friends with the old ladies who permanently reside in the hotel. He’s also unlucky enough to fall in the love for the first time. He’s pretty defenseless, not that that makes us readers pull for him since the love object is so worthless.

Human beings are not at their best in this novel.  An old order goes poof.  But it is by no means grim or dejecting. Farrell manages cutting satire and blackly comedic situations without being mean or depressing. Long at 400+ pages, this novel has spots where nothing much happens except atmosphere and curious detailed descriptions, yet overall it’s a satisfying and enjoyable read. Farrell had soul. For readers into highly literary fiction, Ireland, or the effects of sectarian violence on ordinary people, this is a moving story. This novel won the Lost Man Booker Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.

Farrell's other two major novels also turn on a British community dealing with threats. In The Siege of Krishnapour, hostile local Indians attack a lonely British outpost in the 1857. In his masterpiece, The Singapore Grip, the Japanese invasion of the Malayan Federated States and Singapore in 1942 hands the British their most ignominious military defeat in their history of Empire.

European RC #4

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge

When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light under German Occupation, 1940-1944 - Ronald C. Rosbottom

I’ve figured that I’ve read enough in recent years about war and its effects on society and individual soldiers and civilians. As I grow older, I find that I’m more easily appalled at the terrible lingering effects of war on survivors and less able to shake off the contemptuous sadness that politicians don’t seem to get smarter or less irresponsible.

However, when I saw this book sitting in a little library, I couldn’t stop myself. I felt curious about what happens when the worst totalitarians in the world occupy a city known for its openness, tolerance, and liberty. Surprise, surprise – the Nazis really liked the whorehouses, drinking, and looting and plundering, but they did everything they could make daily life impossible and hazardous for the French. They controlled time with curfews. They controlled urban space with no-go zones and barriers. They had a made a of rules and regulations that made everybody guilty of some infraction if the authorities bothered to look. They controlled behavior like eating with shortages, ration cards, and long lines for food. A Latvian once told me the Soviet strategy was to keep people off-balance by making mere errands a huge tiring hassle, so people would have no energy left for protest.

Rosbottom describes the collective trauma imposed on the French by the Germans. Deprived of information from the outside world, the French were starved for facts about Allied progress in other theaters. The French had no idea how long the Occupation was going to last, so they felt the uncertainty that contributes directly to anxiety and depression. Over time, in daily life it was often difficult to say where the boundary between collaboration and adaptation to a new reality was set. This is an interesting theme as our country wrestles with the lines between “collusion” and “cooperation” and “conspiracy.”

He also tells about local police and authorities playing a major role in, among other things, the implementation of the Holocaust. A special squad of French police went hunting for Jewish people to deport. And the French authorities were efficient in the summer 1942 round-up of Jewish people who were imprisoned at Vélodrome d'Hiver and transported from there to death camps.

Rosbottom arranges the book both thematically and chronologically.  He did research with printed materials and looked for perspectives in many different interviews. In addition to soldiers, politicians, members of the resistance movement and ordinary civilians, he gives capsule views of a number of well-known artists and writers such as Picasso, Camus, Cocteau, and Duras, whose work and production were involved in examining the occupation. Rosbottom is a professor of French, not a historian, so his interests and expertise are more related to the humanities, not economics or sociology.

Readers who want background to Albert Camus's The Plague and Anthony Beevor's Paris After the Liberation 1944-1949 may find this book interesting. Although many readers will find Rosbottom’s prose easy enough to comprehend, readers who prefer history written novelistically a la Erik Larsen should stay away.

Mount TBR #3

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

My Country and My People – Lin Yutang

This book was released in 1936, yet another tumultuous year for the Chinese people. In the Suiyuan Campaign, two puppet forces founded and supported by Imperial Japan fought to wrest control of the Suiyuan province from the Republic of China. Late in the year a crisis came about when Chiang Kaishek, the leader of the Nationalist government, was kidnapped by his subordinates Chang Hsueh-liang and Yang Hucheng to persuade Chiang to change his policies toward imperial Japan and the Chinese Communist Party. Chiang believed Japan was a disease of the skin, but saw the Communists as a disease of the heart so he didn’t want to ally his party with the CCP.

China thus was an object of interest in the US, due to its problems and the attention brought to it by Pearl Buck with her best-seller The Good Earth. Lin Yutang was also an explainer of Chinese life and culture. He must have been popular because publishers released many of his books, which were easy to read, wise, and daring.

Daring because he grouped in “culture” not only political, artistic, or literary pursuits but also the ordinary doings of everyday life. Dr. Lin blames China’s parlous state on two influences: Confucius and the difficult written language. Confucius, he says, forgot to include “a person and a stranger” in the list of important human relationships, so the Chinese never developed a strong civic sense of duty to the community. Second, if the written language were not so formidable to learn in ancient days, education would have been possible for all and ordinary people would have been able think more independently and force change in society more readily. Thus, China in 1936 would have been very different.

Granted, the chapter on the place of women does not pass muster in our day. And, of course, events and change have rendered much of the information of only limited interest. But for readers interested in traditional China and looking for general information about national character and wonderful translations of Chinese poems and light writing, this is a good book.

Back to the Classics #4

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

Rear Window and Other Stories – Cornell Woolrich

Among fanatics of noir, Woolrich is up there with Hammett, Chandler, and Cain, though most admit, I gather, that his prose is the most purple and pulpy of the founding bunch. Among non-fans of noir, Woolrich is probably best-known through the movie adaptations: The Bride Wore Black is a 1968 French film directed by François Truffaut and Rear Window is a 1956 corker by Alfred Hitchcock.

It Had to Be Murder was the original title of Rear Window, which he published in 1942 in the late lamented pulp Dime Detective. Left obscure in the story is why the narrator is trapped in his Big Apple apartment and so idle that he takes to secretly observing the lonely city lives of his neighbors through their windows. He realizes that the man across the way has very likely done away with his invalid wife. And he enlists the help of his “houseman,” an African-American, to break into the possible killer’s apartment. It’s a solid story that’s fun, though allowances are asked to be made by the casual racism and all of us readers know the reveal, more or less.

Though the fanatics seem to regard Post-Mortem (1940) as a mediocre story, I think the over-the-top premise redeems it. A widow wants to have her recently deceased husband disinterred so that a pocket of the last suit he’ll ever wear can be checked for a missing but winning sweepstakes ticket. Hey, $150K back then had the purchasing power of $2.5 million today, so I don’t think many people would think twice on this unique problem. The oddity is that her current husband puts his foot down and refuses to go along with the disinterment. Why?

The story Three O’Clock made its first appearance in a 1938 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly. A concussion turns a mild-mannered watch repairman into a deviser of infernal engines of death. He rigs up a homemade bomb to blow up his house with his wife in it. Oh, what these nimble-fingered handy guys will get up to when they go off the rails. But circumstances prove that Creation is not above having its little joke on the unwary makers of infernal engines. The suspense in this story is so killing that the smart reader slows down to get the maximum effect.

Change of Murder (Detective Fiction Weekly, 1936) is the shortest story of this collection. It is a noir story with gangster characters, one named Brains and the other Fade (as in the craps term). What makes it worth reading in our jaded day is Woolrich’s surprise ending, which will call to mind the tradition of H.H. Munro (Saki) but a lot grimmer.

Momentum was originally published as Murder Always Gathers Momentum in 1940. In a story with a persuasive Depression-era bleakness, an ordinary guy, half of a young married couple, has the wolf baying at the door. He runs into a peck of trouble when he accidentally yet fatally shoots a conscience-free rich guy who owes him money. This fast-moving, ironic story will persuade even the most skeptical reader that doing a bad thing once makes it more likely to do so again. And again. And again.

In Woolrich’s view, the universe has endless space, time, and flux. In other words: so many people are bouncing off so many other people – especially in cities, the usual setting of his stories – that mischief and turmoil and irony are inevitable. The characters in Woolrich stories think to get across muddy roads they are walking safely on planks but really they are walking on tightropes over abysses. With no pole.

Massacre Day

The Boston Massacre, known as the “Incident on King Street” by the British, was an incident on this day in 1770, in which British Army soldiers, fearing for their lives under relentless attack by snowballs thrown by a jeering crowd, shot into said mob and killed people. Nine British regulars were charged; seven were acquitted and the other two were found guilty of manslaughter.

The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution - Alfred F. Young

In colonial times, George Robert Twelves Hewes worked a Boston shoemaker, a trade that paid little and garnered less respect. The coming of the British troops after 1768 activated his militant leanings. He entered the political arena and participated in the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party. He was less proud to have been at the tar and feathering of the Britisher who beat him bloody. Rejected by the army because he was too short, he put in service during the war on a privateer, crewed during the capture of several prizes, and got screwed out of the prize money.

After the war Hewes, like many artisans, moved out of Boston, only to fail to find greener pastures. He lived in destitute obscurity in Otsego county, in upstate New York. In the 1830s, however, the national mood had changed from willful forgetting of the revolution and its veterans to celebrating the few remaining vets.

Young builds a persuasive case that in the 1830s radical labor organizers and radical abolitionists portrayed Hewes as a heroic working-class icon. Hewes was feted in Boston to during the Fourth of July celebrations of 1835. The rads appropriated Hewes to make the point that it was not only General Washington and men of property like Hancock who made liberty in America possible. It was humble people, like Hewes, who contributed equally, and by God should be treated equally with shorter work hours and more tolerable work conditions.

Social conservatives, argues Young, had been active in minimizing the radical aspects of the American Revolution. They downplayed the fact that the Tea Party had been a revolutionary act. Men of property developed Boston to the point that places like The Liberty Tree and familiar places and buildings associated with the Revolution were left to rack and ruin or pulled down. The Fourth of July was privileged over all other holidays that once celebrated the prewar events such as the Boston Massacre.

The book is divided into two parts, Hewes’ life and times and an examination of the role that personal and collective memory play in influencing of understanding of history. This book is an interesting and accessible read for general readers who want a deeper insight into how is history is used by conservatives and progressives for their own social and political purposes.