European RC #1

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge 2019.

Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991: A History - Orlando Figes

I eagerly snapped this history up at a UBS because I found fascinating the author’s A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 and Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia. Both books provide interesting information while the writer’s enthusiasm for the subject is infectious. The reader walks away wondering how a country so poorly lead, so economically troubled, so socially roiled could achieve so much in the sciences and humanities.

Unfortunately, I found this book not nearly so smoothly written or stirring as those two books. It is concise. But its concision sometimes leads to confusion. I didn’t really comprehend what happened in that eventful and murky period of early and mid-1917 when Kerensky was trying to make the Provisional Government work. Also the concision meant that Soviet and Comintern participation in the Nationalist Revolution in China was left out completely.

On the other hand, the treatment of post-Patriotic War period had some new material for me. Overall, it would do well enough for a grad student who needs are quick overview. Also worthwhile for the general reader who doesn’t need a lot of detail.

The Master and Margarita

The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov

In this novel, a huge black cat named Behemoth plays the familiar to Satan. The Devil has dropped by Moscow in the 1930s, an especially repressive time in the Stalin era when people just disappeared, taken away by the secret police after being denounced by enemies at work or in their apartment building. Satan, going by the alias of Professor Woland, finds it easy to stir up trouble and unrest among new Soviet Humanity. They are comrades who are prone to lying, fear, and cynicism in the pursuit of the important things in life such as promotions and dominating life in communal apartments.

Behemoth the demonic cat walks on his two hind legs, makes sarcastic wisecracks, and quaffs vodka. He plays chess. He likes burning things and tearing heads off. Reckless with a Browning, he is the antithesis of the responsible gun user. He is a shape-shifter, but often doesn’t bother because he enjoys scaring people with his true form. Huge for a cat though he is, he is still disrespected and smacked around by bigger beastly characters.

Like V., by Thomas Pynchon. The Master and Margarita is another modernist novel whose learned allusions to things philosophical, teleological, and historical may intimidate readers who are just looking for a good literary time. Be not daunted. Just enjoy the exuberant language such as:

At a time when no one, it seemed, had the strength to breathe, when the sun had left Moscow scorched to a crisp and was collapsing in a dry haze somewhere behind the Sadovoye Ring, no one came out to walk under the lindens, or to sit down on a bench, and the path was deserted.

Though scenes like that reminded me of Riga, where I lived for four years, I must confess that I was daunted at times. At first it was hard to get oriented to the two stories, particularly near the beginning. In the Jerusalem narrative, for example, Pontius Pilate meets Jesus for an interrogation that ends with Pilate’s uneasy conscience at the sentence of death he issues. In the Master's tale, the conformity of ordinary people in the Roman Empire is paralleled by cowardice and moral imbecility of desperate Soviet critics. They kid themselves that they have freely chosen to subordinate themselves to the dictates of thugs and philistines. They are “furious” living under the contradictions of saying one thing and believing another, so they take out their self-disgust and anger on targets designated by the cultural authorities.

I read the translation by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor. Critics have praised this as an accurate and complete English translation. It has notes by Bulgakov's biographer, Ellendea Proffer.

Back to the Classics #1

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

Very Long Classic. You would think that the door-stop novels The Last Chronicle of Barset or He Knew He Was Right were Trollope’s longest but in fact the novel discussed here, at 1300 manuscript pages and about 420,000 words, was his longest. Critics have said it would have better had about 100 pages ended up on the cutting room floor, but I found it a page-turner because winter is the season to settle into a long novel and Trollope tries hard to be easily understood, despite occasional balled-up sentences (he wrote too fast and didn’t revise for later editions).

The Way We Live Now – Anthony Trollope

It is 1873. Augustus Melmotte moves to London from the badlands of Middle Europe with the odor of financial impropriety wafting about him. He buys a large house on Grosvenor Square and ensconces his wife and grown daughter there. Building the reputation as great financial wizard and big spender, he throws daughter Marie a grand ball.

Probably based on the real-life bunco artist James Fisk (shot dead in 1872 by a business partner), a San Franciscan wheeler-dealer named Hamilton K. Fisker and his naïve English partner Paul Montague bring Melmotte into the puffing of a Ponzi Scheme called the South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway. Rich jackasses and titled muttonheads are induced to speculate and sit on the board, whose meetings last about 15 minutes every Friday. Trollope satirizes what he called in his autobiography "a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places… so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable."

Melmotte makes lavish gifts to charity and becomes so glamorous that HM government requests that he host – and pay for - a dinner for the Celestial Emperor of China. So drawn by his money, the Conservative Party recruits him to run for a seat in in Parliament. Rumor runs rampant however that Melmotte’s financial future is stormy, thus spooking would-be guests. Still, Melmotte manages to win the seat. But his future is not rosy.

This is a Trollope novel so there must be romantic trouble. Marie is pursued by two worthless guys for her money. Paul Montague’s previous affair with an American woman, Winifred Hurtle, complicates his subsequent romance with Henrietta Carbury. Georgiana Longestaffe, in her late twenties, is feeling behind in the matrimonial race and contemplates marriages with a Jewish banker, to the unreasoning anguish of her snobbish family who are quite okay with falsehood and chiseling but not okay with Jewish people. For a little comic relief, the romance of John Crumb and Ruby Ruggles (country names for country people) has rough going. There’s even a middle-aged romance between a newspaper editor and Henrietta’s mother, a writer who needs him to insure good reviews for her terrible books. A problem is that the triangle of Paul-Hetta-Roger fails to hold interest because Hetta isn’t interesting, Roger is a bit of a prig, and we Trollope veterans already know who is going to marry whom in the end.

Apparently, this is not a popular novel with readers that gush over the likes of Bertie Stanhope perhaps because the realistic observation of business and personal corruption is raw, especially for generally genial Tony, and the satire may seem strained in places. It’s hard for any writer to sustain humor and satire over the length of a novel, much less one about 700 pages long. Even more to the point, satire in 1873 seems mild to us in 2019. We have read Brave New World and Catch-22. Also, nowadays when we read Melmotte is a "horrid, big, rich scoundrel… a bloated swindler… a vile city ruffian,” how can we not  be reminded of somebody and conclude that given our nutty reality, satirists are hard put to ruffle us.

Readers may also be dismayed that with only few exceptions characters don't deal with each other with the least scintilla of honesty. Girls like the Longestaffe sisters scheme incessantly to land unwary rich guys as husbands. Parents like Lady Carbury and the elder Longestaffe disfavor their daughters as burdens while they cosset their sons who are genuine financial burdens. People even lie to themselves, persuading themselves to accept the most absurd things.  For example Father Barham convinces himself, despite evidence a child would judge rightly, that Melmotte is God's instrument and vows to help deliver the Roman Catholic vote to the crooked financier.

We have seen the weak male often portrayed in Trollope: Charlie Tudor, Harry Clavering, and Johnny Ames. But the dude-bros of the Beargarden Club are weak in ways different from the awkward hobbledehoy. Though idle and indolent, they are addicted to the excitement of gambling at cards, gorging and guzzling, and, Trollope implies, the vice of seduction and whoring. Their goal is to marry an heiress and get their paws on her money. Sir Felix Carbury is one of the most malignant, heartless characters I've read in a Trollope novel. I do believe Tony, along with us readers, smiles when Felix winces under the authorial taser.

Another point that may rattle readers that think they are used to Trollope is the author’s examination of domestic violence. Country girl Ruby Ruggles is doubly victimized. She is dragged about the house by her hair by her drunken grandfather. She is sexually assaulted in a London alley by the entitled shit Felix. We rather expect, our prejudices kicking in, victims vulnerable to assault to be young, female, rural, and poor, but Trollope does not turn a blind eye from the sensitive point that middle and upper class men coerce consent and obedience from women with violence. Lady Carbury was “at last driven out of her house by the violence of [her husband's] ill-usage.” The American Mrs. Hurtle has had to defend herself from a drunken husband and has shot a would-be rapist dead. And when Marie refuses to sign papers for her father:

That cutting her up into pieces was commenced after a most savage fashion. Marie crouching down hardly uttered a sound. But Madam Melmotte frightened beyond endurance screamed at the top of her voice, ‘Ah, Melmotte tu la tueras!’ And then she tried to drag him from his prey … Croll, frightened by the screams, burst into the room. It was perhaps not the first time that he had interfered to save Melmotte from the effects of his own wrath … Melmotte was out of  breath … Marie gradually recovered herself, and crouched,  cowering, in the corner of a sofa, by no means vanquished in spirit, but with a feeling that the very life had been crushed out of her body. …  [She] lay on the sofa, all in a heap, with her hair disheveled and her dress disordered, breathing hard, but uttering no sobs and shedding no tears.

Indeed, we are long way from Lily Dale eating her heart our over Crosbie in the sewing room.

Clearly, this story has strong passages and thus not to everybody’s taste. Some will cringe at the seeming anti-Americanism and anti-semitism. But I think Trollope’s view of Americans and Jewish people is nuanced. It seems to me that he is sympathetic to Winifred Hurtle and Ezekiel Brehgert, perhaps because they were outsiders like Trollope himself. If nothing else Mrs. Hurtle compels our attention because she’s the tough American woman who’s seen too much of life and says things like,

Yes; come. You shall come. And now you know the welcome you shall find. I will buy the whip while this is reaching you, and you shall find that I know how to choose such a weapon. I call upon you so come. But should you be afraid and break your promise, I will come to you. I will make London too hot to hold you; — and if I do not find you I will go with my story to every friend you have.

Whoa, daddy. Though a sad single girl threatened to stab another sad single girl in  scene played for laughs in He Knew He Was Right, I can't think of any other incident in Trollope where a woman threatened to horsewhip some dude.

I was badly burned by the latest one of his I read, The Belton Estate, so I was nervous this novel letting me down. I was concerned about the usual Trollope issues like his facetiousness, his less lucid grammar, and his tendency to mishandle surprises (I think unlike Austen he didn’t like pulling surprises on readers). I also fretted that it would have a slow, oh so deliberate, start like Dr. Thorne. Mercifully, the set-up was brisk and incidents started right away. This was first published as a serial so at the ¾ mark, the recapitulation of Marie’s story and Roger’s struggles of conscience makes the pace temporarily sluggish.

This book was so compelling that long as it is I read it in only about two weeks. I highly recommend it to Trollope fans and to readers who balefully wonder if the Chronicles of Barsetshire were the height of Trollope’s powers. I’d say this was as enjoyable as The Last Chronicle of Barset or He Knew He Was Right.

The Origin of Primitive Beliefs

The Birth of the Gods: The Origin of Primitive Beliefs – Guy E. Swanson


Guy Swanson (1922 - 1995) taught at UC Berkeley and conducted research in both sociology and social psychology. In this book, he works as a sociologist who is extending Durkheim's theorizing on the relation of the supernatural beliefs of a people and their social organization. For instance, societies with a prevalence of witchcraft are more likely to have much deprivation and unlegitimated or uncontrolled relationships with other societies (that is, little access to or broken-down means of social control such as local law enforcement). Other topics covered are monotheism, polytheism, ancestral spirits, reincarnation, the immanence of the soul, and the notion of gods who have an interest in human morality and reward or punish human action. As many as 25 editions of this book were published between 1951 and 1992, so clearly it influenced scholars in the sociology of religion. Readers interested in anthropology and social psychology would enjoy this book.

Walk Like an Ancient Egyptian

Ancient Egypt: Its Culture and History – J.E. Manchip White

Cable TV is jam packed with the ancient Egyptians. While enjoyable to look at – how did their painters get those amazing shades of blue  - these documentaries seldom give the big picture so we viewers assume that the New Kingdom Nineteenth Dynasty, Egypt’s most prosperous period, is all there is to know.

This comprehensive and readable book chronicles from Egypt-s pre-dynastic civilization to the Ptolemies. The chapters are divided according to theme such as social and political structure, war and international relations, religious ideas, visual arts, science and medicine, and the writing system. First published in 1952, and updated in the late 1960s, it is not close to current, but we can always watch for docs on the latest discoveries and research on the History Channel (when it's not showing reality shows featuring people we fall on our knees and thank heaven we don't know).

This book will give a good foundation to the general reader. The 48 monochrome pictures are not always clearly reproduced. Some ethnocentric attitudes (e.g. those litigation-loving Semites) near the end of the book will make us post-moderns roll our eyes.

A Time to Keep Silence

A Time to Keep Silence  – Patrick Leigh Fermor

Patrick Leigh Fermor ranks with Rebecca West and Robert Byron as one of the best English travel writers who wrote between the wars. As a teenager Leigh Fermor walked across Europe  and chronicled that sojourn from Holland to Turkey in two famous books, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. He spent WWII on Crete fighting with the partisans. After the war, in the middle 1950s, he visited Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries in France.

As the title implies, the writer values quiet and rest. This is about his arrival at Abbey of St. Wadrille de Fontanelle, not far from Rouen:

To begin with, I slept badly at night and fell asleep during the day, felt restless alone in my cell and depressed by the lack of alcohol, the disappearance of which had caused a sudden halt in the customary monsoon.  The most remarkable preliminary symptoms were the variations of my need of sleep.  After initial spells of insomnia, nightmare and falling asleep by day, I found that my capacity for sleep was becoming more and more remarkable: till the hours I spent awake; and my sleep was so profound that I might have been under the influence of some hypnotic drug.  For two days, meals and the offices in the church--Mass, Vespers and Compline--were almost my most lucid moments.  Then began an extraordinary transformation: this extreme lassitude dwindled to nothing; night shrank to five hours of light, dreamless and perfect sleep, followed by awakenings full of energy and limpid freshness.  The explanation is simple enough: the desire for talk, movement and nervous expression that I had transported from Paris found, in this silent place, no response or foil, evoked no single echo; after miserably gesticulating for a while in a vacuum, it languished and finally died for lack of any stimulus or nourishment.  Then the tremendous accumulation of tiredness, which must be the common property of all our contemporaries, broke loose and swamped everything.  No demands, once I had emerged from that flood of sleep, were made upon my nervous energy: there were no automatic drains, such as conversation at meals, small talk, catching trains or the hundred anxious trivialities that poison everyday life.

Sleep deprivation is in fact “the common property of all our contemporaries.” I get exhausted just thinking how resignedly I – and most people I know - slog through “the hundred anxious trivialities that poison everyday life.”

The second monastery he stayed in La Grande Trappe, the Cistercian monastery in southern Normandy. The Trappist discipline was harsh, so much that he humbly concluded, “I was not in possession of any mental instrument with which to gauge and record my findings.”

The silence must have been hard for Leigh Fermor, considering that historian Max Hastings described him as “possibly the most brilliant conversationalist of his time, wearing his literacy light as wings, brimming over with laughter.” But it is in silence that we can finally encounter transcendence and we realize words can do only so much and no more. Every mystical tradition advocates silence as a path to the ineffable. Cultivating silence is difficult given a religious inclination toward making a joyful noise and a secular habit of gabbing to maintain relationships and flooding our skulls with digital input.

Having a tacked on feeling is the shortest third section, which is about the rock-cut monasteries in Cappadocia (Turkey). This cavil aside, I think that readers who are interested in the monastic experience would enjoy this. So would readers who get enthusiastic over a graceful style, if at times florid.

The Animal Story Book

The Animal Story Book - Andrew Lang

In the late 19^th century, Scottish author, poet, and scholar Andrew Lang had fairy, folk, and animal tales translated from writers such as Pliny, Alexandre Dumas, and Théophile Gautier. Then, he commissioned artists to create pretty black and white drawings. The collections were madly popular, probably influencing the reading tastes and habits of children and young people of the early 20^th century.

On the positive side, Lang, a romantic Victorian-era folklorist, chose good stories and edited the translation in such a way that the language is simple, direct, clear, and coherent. Like Lemony Snicket, he includes copious – that’s a fifty-cent way to say “many” or “numerous” - hard words that young readers do well to learn.

On the negative side, post-modernist readers will identify patriarchal and misogynist tendencies in Lang. Political philosophy aside, Lang sounds sweetly condescending, with a “Now, children!” tone that will put on edge the teeth of skeptical kids. Since the Doubting Thomas temperament is probably genetic, some kids, then and now, have a sensitive Bushwah Detector. It flashes red when it detects Didactic Intentions to Implant Mindless Compliance to Pretentious Authority. 

Readers who like sentiment and animals and whimsy will probably enjoy this. Passing on this would be readers who were bloody-minded kids that instinctively felt that something was wrong with Disney and all its works.