Mount TBR #12

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

Time Must Have a Stop – Aldous Huxley

Huxley is best-known for Brave New World, his most accessible novel. This novel is less accessible. For instance, a mystic stand-in for the author says, the difficulty of living is becoming “your inner not-self in God while remaining your outer self in the world.”  I mean, I count myself as one of the one in ten million readers that can swing with “your inner not-self in God”. So, not for everybody but for those that like a novel of ideas, especially mystical ones.

The time is the late 1920s, the places England and Italy. The center of the story is Sebastian Barnack, a seventeen-year-old schoolboy but already a poet of unusual gifts and accomplishments. Huxley captures how strange it must be to be a young artist – alternating between bursts of ecstatic pleasure in creation with mere words and awkwardness and self-consciousness found in any teenager.

Sebastian’s looks are such that they attract women of all ages, which is decidedly a mixed blessing. He gets pretty much whatever he wants simply by smiling. Sebastian isn’t skillful at delaying gratification or thinking things through due to his own temperament and the fact he’s a teenager whose brain wiring for ethics hasn’t developed yet.

Not that the people around him help with ethical development. His father in England is wrapped up in the futile pursuit of politics. In Italy, Sebastian goes to stay with an uncle of artistic and hedonistic tastes. Huxley presents the milieu of the idle moneyed class in sharp satire. Eustace Barnack is an epicurean with a small ‘e,’ a lover of food, wine, and a good cigar. An unfortunate coronary event brought on by excessive pleasures of the flesh takes Eustace to the extra-mundane plane, where he literally refuses to go into the light, illustrating Huxley’s view that it is free will all the way, baby. We decide – yes or no, with every decision we take - whether we are going to live according to nature and develop our self-control and wisdom enough to accept the things we can’t control, to change the things we can control (i.e., our responses to change and fortune), and to foster the courage and fairness to know the difference.

Sebastian tells a lie and the lie has terrible repercussions that will call to mind the consequences of a petty crime in Tolstoy’s  The Forged Coupon. The book, however, is wrapped up quickly with extracts from Sebastian's diary, made during an air-raid in London during WWII (Huxley wrote this book in 1943). Absorbing as the final chapter is, it seems an abrupt way to end this novel. When I re-read this novel – and Huxley always pays re-reading, nobody will get the point reading it only once  – it will probably work better for me.

Memorial Day, 2019

Two passages from Eugene B. Sledge's With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, the one WWII memoir to read if a reader is going to read only one war memoir in a lifetime.

Excerpt One
As I struggled upward [onto the boat] with my load of equipment, I felt like a weary insect climbing a vine. But at last I was crawling up out of the abyss of Peleliu!… I stowed my gear on my rack and went topside. The salt air was delicious to breathe. What a luxury to inhale long deep breaths of fresh clean air, air that wasn't heavy with the fetid stench of death… But something in me died at Peleliu. Perhaps it was a childish innocence that accepted as faith the claim that man is basically good. Possibly I lost faith that politicians in high places who do not have to endure war's savagery will ever stop blundering and sending others to endure it.

Excerpt Two
We thought the Japanese would never surrender. Many refused to believe it. Sitting in stunned silence, we remembered our dead. So many dead. So many maimed. So many bright futures consigned to the ashes of the past. So many dreams lost in the madness that had engulfed us. Except for a few widely scattered shouts of joy, the survivors of the abyss sat hollow-eyed and silent, trying to comprehend a world without war.

Mount TBR #11

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

The Nutmeg of Consolation – Patrick O’Brian

In the 14^th episode of the twenty-book series set on the high seas in the Napoleonic era, after landing on a reef and then seeing their ship destroyed by a typhoon, the crew of HMS Diane under Captain Jack Aubrey are trapped on an island about 200 nautical miles from Batavia (as in Jakarta, not Western New York of John Gardner fame). They are salvaging materials to build a schooner and make an escape.

Unfortunately, in a rousing fight scene, local Dyaks set the schooner afire. After settling Dyak hash, our heroes and their crew are able to escape the island.

Fortune decrees that in Batavia a Dutch ship has just been raised so it is now possible to for Jack and the crew to intercept the French frigate Cornélie, which was part of their original mission anyway. Ultimately, they are to make their way to Chile and Peru in order to foment independence movements there and thus get up Spain’s nose.

In this outing the usual brisk pace is not maintained at all times and there seems more nautical mumbo-jumbo than usual. Nevertheless, like a good historical novelist should, O’Brian gives insights into the times and places, especially in the miserable colonial life of Australia. I used to think that Australia was lucky to get the convicts (while we were stuck with the Puritans), but I was disabused of that notion by this book. The interplay among our favorite characters is funny as usual, with the addition of two little girls, survivors of an epidemic of what American Indians call “white man’s diseases” on their island. After hearing Ireland being trashed by dumbass English soldiers, Stephen runs a lowlife through in an immensely satisfying scene. The scene where Padeen tells Stephen he always knew the doctor would come for him will send a decent reader to the box of Kleenex.

Obviously, I’m going to give Aubrey-Maturin novels good reviews, given I’ve read 14 of them so far, with a couple of those being re-read along the way. I’ve got plans to read the rest, too. And then start over with #3 HMS Surprise.

Heaven grant me the time.

Mount TBR #10

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

French title: Les Innocents

First Published: 1972

Englished: Eileen Ellenbogen, 1972

The Innocents – Georges Simenon

Married, with two teenaged children, steady income from a creative work, comfy apartment in Paris a long way from country origins, George Célerin believes he’s got it made. But the sudden death of his wife Annette in a traffic accident gets Célerin to examining his life, his marriage, his relationships with other people. And we know in Simenon’s existential thrillers that the process of examining a hitherto unexamined life reveals disagreeable truths.

Célerin realizes that he missed red flags. In bed, Annette is frigid. When they are married Annette tells him “We’ll always be good friends.” In contrast with universal custom in France, after the birth of their first, she continues to work as a social worker with the poor, old, and afflicted. And Annette is killed on rue Washington, a street where the poor, old, and afflicted do not live.

Like I said, our protagonist was warned but he was besotted with love, affection, and trust and protected by other innocents who didn’t want his innocence disillusioned and naively assumed their secret would never get out.

Like the other psychological thrillers, Simenon writes a short, simple, efficient little novel, raw and straightforward. In this novel, an ordinary man's disturbing confrontation with his own evasion of responsibility begins when his confidence in a spouse and their marriage is shaken up. Simenon argues that unless we can preserve our ignorant, silly shelter of innocence with work and love or the usual distractions, we will inevitably find contentment to be fragile and tranquility transient. Simenon reminds us that we are mortal; that the Fate can strike at random when we expect it the least; that we don’t control our health or our property or other drivers; that we are, all of us, alone.

Until, at least, the dog drops her leash in our lap.

Click on the year published to go to the review.

·         The Nightclub  / L'âne rouge (1932)

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

·         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 Glass Cage / La Cage de Verre (1973)

·         Aboard the Aquitaine / 45° à l'ombre (1979)

Mount TBR #9

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

The Broken Vase - Rex Stout

It is early 1941 in New York City. Gentleman farmer and private eye Tecumseh Fox is rich enough to afford giving a grant of $2,000.00 (about $35,000 in our 2019 dinero) to a young gifted fiddler to purchase a Stradivarius. Though not a music lover, Fox attends the Carnegie Hall concert for the premier performance of the fiddler on his prize violin. Unmusical Fox notices that the audience is shocked and leaving in droves. Fox is told that the violin’s tone didn’t sound at all right. The young violinist, in front of witnesses, takes his own life during the intermission.

Case closed, but a killing occurs that makes Fox think the suicide and the murder are linked. The rich mother of the murder victim hires Fox to investigate the circumstances and find out who committed a murder. Fox has a series of interviews and adventures that make for amusing reading, especially when one’s brain is too tired for hard reading matter.

Rex Stout is better known and more respected for his novels starring Nero Wolfe, rotund orchid fancier and PI to the rich and famous. Critics and fans agree that his other detective creations – Tec Fox, Alphabet Hicks, and Theodolinda ‘Dol’ Banner – are not up to the Wolfe-Archie stories, especially the novellas.

But I don’t care. As a fan of between the wars whodunnits, I like the vintage characters, society settings, and squads of suspects. To his credit, Stout always plays fair with the reader, giving enough information to the reader to figure it out by the reveal. Also, like Conan Doyle was able to in the Holmes stories, Stout captures an insular world timelessness – affluent Manhattan, mid-20^th century – a quality that I hope discerning readers will enjoy for years to come.

Mount TBR #8

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

The Case of the Irate Witness – Erle Stanley Gardner

The Gardner Fiction Factory (Gardner’s own words) closed in 1970 with Gardner’s passing in March, 1970. This compilation of four novelettes was released in 1972 in paperback by a publisher naturally eager to slap on covers the author’s name and that of his famous series hero, Perry Mason.

The novellettes were first published in magazines between 1942 and 1953. The Case of the Irate Witness may well be the only short piece that features Mason. Something Like a Pelican is a story starring Lester Leith, a series hero that appeared only in novellettes.

The Case of the Irate Witness (1953). Ironically, the Mason story is the only unsatisfying story in the bunch. On vacation, Mason involves himself in the case in which we are not even given a glimpse of the wrongfully accused client. Though we’ve seen clients effectively effaced in Mason novels before, this omission in a short piece is so glaringly odd that the good courtroom scene doesn’t make up for it.

The Jeweled Butterfly (1952). Gardner uncharacteristically makes a female the protagonist. Peggy Castle writes up a house organ that has a not-mean gossip column. A note directs her to spy on hot Stella and handsome Don on a date. But the situation leads to robbery and murder and Peggy turning into a damsel in distress that must be rescued by a detective who is smitten with her looks – once she takes her glasses off, of course (see Bogie and Dorothy Malone).

Something Like A Pelican (1942). Lester Leith was the gentleman detective, a 1930s stock character that was tired and stale by WWII. The goofy tone in this story strikes the readers almost as hard a character bringing his shotgun into the office and nobody thinking twice about it.

A Man Is Missing (1946). Gardner sets this story in rural Idaho which gives him a chance to do the kind of nature writing he liked to do. Writing about camping, fishing, and hunting has been done better by other writers but it’s nice to read subjects about which the writer obviously cares deeply. The use of amnesia is as disturbing to a reader as using time travel. But in the end we keep our feet on the ground as the rural sheriff and packer-guide prove to a big city detective that local knowledge helps experience and common sense. Gardner believed rationality could figure out nutty behavior and call bad guys to account.

Worth reading for readers seriously into Gardner.

V. – Thomas Pynchon

V.  – Thomas Pynchon

This post-modern novel mines obscure crevasses of the 20th century in order to bring to light events and attitudes that less curious readers may feel better be left under rocks. In complex but exuberant language, Pynchon examines near forgotten situations such as German imperialism in Southwest Africa, Malta during WWII and the Suez Crisis, and life among slacker artists in the Big Apple in the 1950s. 

Pynchon subjects the main character Sidney Stencil to all sorts of grief because of Stencil’s futile efforts to do what we all try to do, i.e. make sense of a world in constant flux so that we can predict and control our lives. 

I could see many readers tossing the novel against the wall, frustrated that it doesn’t go anywhere, that nobody could disentangle the facts, stories, themes and tones in this novel. Yeah, too much like life – nobody can get a handle on it. And the guy that thinks he's got a real good bead on things is kidding himself. And others, if they're not skeptical.

But I think born-in-the-fifties readers who like set pieces, in macabre historical settings, with dopey characters and daft situations and playful words would like this strange novel though it does have excruciating parts.

European RC 2019 Wrap Up Post

I read these books for the European Reading Challenge 2019.

Click on the date to go to the review.

Revolutionary Russia – Orlando Figes

Posted: January 25

The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914 - Philipp Blom

Posted: February 6

Five Days in London, May 1940 - John Lukacs

Posted: March 6

The Winter War: Russia's Invasion of Finland, 1939-1940 - Robert Edwards

Posted: March 26

The German Generals Talk– B.H. Liddell Hart

Posted: April 18

The Reckoning- Georges Simenon

Posted: May 5

European RC #6

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge 2019.

French title: Le Bilan Malétras

First published: 1948

Translation: Emily Read, 1984

The Reckoning – Georges Simenon

Jules Malétras was born in poverty in Normandy in the 1890s. The port city of Le Havre was reduced to rubble by more than 100 bombings during WWII, so Malétras became an important and respected citizen of Le Havre by participating in the building boom after the war. Money, property, repute and comfort fail to make him content.

When he was poor, Malétras thought that everybody was like him, engaged in a struggle for the good things in life, a war of all against all. Despite his affluence, he assumed that honesty did not exist and that if people did not take the chance to lie, cheat, chisel, and steal, it was only because they were afraid of facing the music.

In contrast to happy rich bosses like Fezziwig, Malétras succeeded in business not because he had dealt with people, especially his employees, in a humane, respectful way. Becoming a self-made man on the backs of employees, he reduced subordinates to fawning and servility. After bullying people into becoming toadies, lest they lose their livelihood,  he despised them for being toadies.

He wasn’t less cynical and heartless in his family life, driving his first wife drink and becoming estranged from his daughter. He’s still in grief, though he himself does not recognize it as grieving, for the loss of a nineteen-year-old son of TB.

By 60 years of age, however, he had developed a bellyful of disgust at being placated and mollified so he sold the company and played the part of a local potentate. You’d think he’d be pleased in retirement with a new wife who has a touch of class and rank. He lives in a fancy new house and his time is totally his own.

But retirement is a desert for a man whose only activity in life was work, whose only connection with people was as a supervisor and boss and owner. He buys into a fish mongering business and works a couple hours as its clerk. He makes sure his partners quiver with obsequiousness. He watches old cronies playing cards, never even playing himself. He’s so bored in fact that he takes up with one of the two pitfalls for middle-aged men. No, not the bottle.

The nineteen-year-old. Dumb, disagreeable, demanding besides being a lousy dresser, scrawny Lulu laughs at his valuable gifts and wonders why Malétras has so little sexual interest in her. In reality, he’s just interested in having company, listens to her prattle and even plays cards with her and Joseph, who poses as her brother but is in fact her lover. 

Poor Lulu becomes grasping of better gifts and makes Malétras jealous by loose behavior with Malétras’ own son-in-law. In a fit of rage that his “innocent” dalliance has become sullied with avarice and cheating, he strangles Lulu after she repulses his demands.  Simenon deploys his usual irony, because Malétras is mostly completely uninterested in these games. Malétras is so detached during the act that Lulu worriedly asks him if she’s doing it wrong.

Having killed somebody pushes Malétras into the unfamiliar activity of introspection - change and its resulting realization that life is never going to be the same do that to middle-aged Simenonian males. Never before had Malétras questioned his own actions, motives, decisions, assumptions or preferences. He never gave a thought to his relationships with other people or their relationships with each other. Indeed, after an attack of angina pectoris, he finds that he does not have any fond memories to latch onto because he never savored the good things life when they happened to him. Indeed, the unexamined life, one devoid of gratitude or benevolence or respect or responsibility, isn’t worth living.  

Back to the Classics #9

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

20th Century Classic. I was going to read an imposing novel by Thomas Wolfe until I discovered that the novels after Look Homeward Angel were manufactured. That is, an editor cobbled them together from a million-word manuscript after Wolfe died of TB at 37 in 1938. Dejected, I turned to a best-seller of 1941, which turned out to be the author’s lone novel before he died in 1991 at 93 (he is buried in Arlington). Because the writer disappeared from public view and never published again, his only published novel turned into a neglected book.

Delilah: A Novel about a U.S. Navy Destroyer and the Epic Struggles of her Crew - Marcus Goodrich

Goodrich sets the story on a destroyer in the Sulu Sea on the Philippines station about six months before the US enters World War I. He examines the personalities of and intricate relationships among the officers and enlisted men. He inserts them into unusual situations that reveal their dispositions and temperaments.

Goodrich is long on exposition and short on dialogue, in three huge chapters mercifully divided into shortish numbered sections. He employs the plain style of Hemingway, the elaborate style of James, and the surreal descriptive magic of Conrad. The recondite metaphors, abstruse symbolism and esoteric lexical choices (like “rubefacient”) challenge us readers who pride ourselves as word mavens. The byzantine Ford Madox Fordian sentences lead even us hard-core readers – people who base their self-respect on their penchant for reading Eliot and Pynchon for fun - to stamp our feet and groan “hard” and “incomprehensible” and ” “overwritten.”

It is our right as a reader to moan, but we need to remember, too, what avid reader Jack Kerouac said in 1952, “When something is incomprehensible to me (Finnegan’s Wake, Lowry’s Under the Volcano, Delilah by Marcus Goodrich), I try to understand it, the author’s intellect, and passion, and mystery. To label it incoherent is not only a semantic mistake but an act of cowardice and intellectual death.”

Delilah features no plot in the conventional sense though the episodes flow seamlessly; life flows as it does in Emma. Goodrich likes the vivid metaphor so the ship Delilah is the center of the story. For the crew, it is an overseer demanding endless toil and a nymph luring mariners to their doom. It is a pressure cooker where a motley collection of personalities have to live, eat, and sleep in close proximity. It is a force in the greater world projecting the political power of its country.  Delilah is also an ageing metal hulk, subject to wear, heat, salt, pressure, and weather. She makes incessant demands on the men to keep her stoked with coal and to repair her misaligned doohickeys and improper thingamajigs, lest mishaps ranging from breakdowns to explosions occur.

Goodrich intends also to present detailed character studies of ordinary men. He summarizes Captain Borden’s efforts to advocate for the antiquated ship and diverse crew. He is often at odds with the political wrong-headedness of the Navy and the government’s feeble dealings with local politicians, but faithfully carries out imperial errands of population-centric counterinsurgency operations. Young Signalman Warrington keeps himself to himself and reads books like Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations but insensibly gravitates toward connection with second-in-command Lieutenant Fitzpatrick. Chance and circumstance deny Seaman Rowe a chance to establish a sense of belonging and community among new shipmates.

Goodrich challenges the reader’s memory, patience, and expectations with these long expositions on the backgrounds and characters of his cast of players. However, it is important to Goodrich that we know the characters because he thrusts them into scores of outlandish circumstances. He wants us to see how ordinary people respond to unusual situations like brawls, shark attacks, and interactions with Neolithic peoples.

Amazing is the set piece on the landing in a rough surf and the subsequent search for caches of insurrectionist weapons in cave. It is a tour de force.

Wonder at the story of an old Irish monk and his missionary exploits; of the Christians who don’t want life-saving vaccines wasted on heathens; of the trader Parker, rotten to the core but a lover of the opera Rigoletto. 

The odd occurrences simply end with an especially intense incident of a sailor on a ferocious rampage, with the final sprinkles being the announcements that the US has declared war and the ship is being dispatched chop-chop on a run of thousands of miles to the Atlantic.

Goodrich took 14 years – from 1926 to 1941 when it was published - to write his only novel. One can tell Goodrich is following the first rule for writers, writing about what he knows about. Goodrich enlisted in the Navy at 16 years of age and served in the Philippines. After he left the military, he put food on the table by writing advertising copy and movie scripts and worked on Delilah, writing and revising. The book in fact feels and reads as if it were sweated over until Goodrich made the story and his themes as clear and true and complete as he could.

It was a best-seller once it was released, a guy’s book for guys on their way to fight in WWII. But any reader can enjoy this book as a triumph of literature, of novel writing, like Mansfield Park or The Tale of Genji - any reader who likes stories and reads with some pride in their own taste.