Doorways in the Sand

Doorways in the Sand - Roger Zelazny

After Lord of Light, Doorways in the Sand (1976) is probably  Zelazny’s best-liked science fiction novel.

The inventive plot involves a frozen uncle, realistic bad guys, and undercover alien cops. It has wacky inventions: dog suit so alien coppers won’t be conspicuous on Earth; the Rhennius machine for reversing one’s self and others; and a star stone, the function of which must not be revealed in a review.

The likeable hero Fred Cassidy is an eternal student (a wise-acre polymath, similarly to other Zelaznian protagonists) and a parkour artist before parkour was cool.

Zelazny’s ideas were copious and odd, but, in the context of the universes in the stories, also consistent and reasonable.

The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

The Crime of Olga Arbyelina - Andrei Makine

In this saga of suffering, an ex-princess and her hemophiliac son live among other Russian émigrés in rural France after WWII. She ekes out a living working in a library, enduring memories of exploitation by every man she has ever encountered. The plot and incident are simple, the language amazingly poetic. The high points are the descriptions of nature and the change of seasons. The low points – this is, after all, a Russian novel – are tragic.

Not for the faint of heart, trust me.

Flaubert in Egypt

Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour

By the author of Madame Bovary. Flaubert's journal entries are too much like notes to give the reader a clear idea of his response to the sights. 

Trying to our post-modern sensibilities are his stories of dallying with Egyptian prostitutes. The lewdness dismays but worse is the contempt he expresses “The oriental woman is no more than a machine: she makes no distinction between one man and another man. Smoking, going to the baths, painting her eyelids and drinking coffee— such is the circle of occupations...” 

He hitched a boat ride with an Arab slave trader and of the enslaved women he says, “All these faces are calm, nothing irritated in their expression – brutes take these things as a matter of course.” Yeah, he’s excused, being an artist and all. 

Right. 

The footnotes by translator Steegmuller are informative and not obtrusive.

Goodbye to All That

Goodbye to All That - Robert Graves

Depending on one’s point of view, this is most famous or notorious of memoirs coming out of the First World War. Graves lets himself write about as pissed off a book as we will ever see a civilized, well-read Englishman of his generation write. No Ford Madox Ford-like melancholy. Little Remarque or Chapman-like praises of camaraderie.

The initial chapters are about being bullied at school are unsentimental about those good old days, pits of snootiness, raillery, and incompetent teaching. Most of the book relates his experiences as a lieutenant and captain in the war. Snubbed at officers’ mess, an enraged and hurt Graves mutters that he will outlive every one of the arrogant snots. When much later he finds out that all of them got killed in the war, it’s shocking and ironic, in an angry, dismaying way.

His tone is, in fact, is so blunt that we wonder how accurate a story like this is: “Patriotism, in the trenches, was too remote a sentiment, and at once rejected as fit only for civilians, or prisoners. A new arrival, who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out.” 

He was also disgusted with jingoistic, bloodthirsty attitudes that he found on the home front since they were based on willful ignorance of conditions in the trenches. Graves gives his take on the controversy engendered when friend Siegfried Sassoon made incautious public statements about pacifism. Graves also describes his post-war PTSD in the form of insomnia, nightmares and hallucinations ("Strangers in daytime would assume the faces of friends who had been killed"). 

This eminently readable book is a must-read classic of the cynical postwar generation. 

The Ides of Perry Mason 12

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 the Singing Skirt – Erle Stanley Gardner

Ellen Robb doubles as the cigarette girl and chanteuse at The Big Barn, a cabaret and gambling joint that props up the sluggish economy of the sleepy burg of Rowena.  Ellen’s employer, George Anclitas, has the chief of police and city attorney in his pocket. Used to getting his own way and dumb like a crook, Anclitas recklessly cans Ellen when she refuses to help him fleece the sucker Halman Ellis, who has not only lost heavily at poker but has the hots for Ellen. Both his gambling losses ($10K in 1959 is $75K now) and his infatuation with the young beauty have enraged his wife Nadine.

When Ellen brings her wrongful termination complaint to lawyer Perry Mason, his secretary Della Street smells a rat. But Perry follows his instinct to help a client who’s not getting any breaks. Later Ellen brings a gun to Perry’s office. She claims that Anclitas had the gun planted in her luggage. Perry switches Ellen’s piece with one he has in his office safe, just in case muddying the waters for the authorities may turn out a useful thing to do. When Ellen is accused of the murder of Nadine Ellis, Perry ends up defending her. The ending tests the already strained relationship between Perry and DA Hamilton Burger.

Author Erle Stanley Gardner always kept up on developments in the law though he spent large parts of his work day dictating his mysteries. For example, when the Miranda decision came down, he was quick to incorporate in his novels the changes it ushered in. This novel revolves around two surprising points of law, one of which I won’t get into as it’s a spoiler. But the other involves Mrs. Ellis’ rage over her husband’s gambling debts. Perry tells her about new application of California divorce law in that certain debts, such as gambling debts, are the separate property of the acquiring spouse, even though they are incurred during the marriage. Thus, in case of a divorce, the gambling debt is not a part of community property, but an obligation to be the separate debt of the gambling spouse. This piece of divorce law still stands in the Golden State.

Anyway, this is a solid investigation and courtroom mystery. “The Case of the Singing Skirt,” wrote well-respected critic  Anthony Boucher in The New York Times Book Review at the time, “is one of the most elaborate problems of Perry Mason's career...This is as chastely classic a detective story as you're apt to find in these degenerate days.”

West with the Night

West with the Night - Beryl Markham

Markham, a pioneer aviatrix, was the first to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean from London (not Ireland) to North America. The flight ended not at its destination of New York City but tail up in a Nova Scotian peat bog. Publishers made her an offer and this book was released in 1942.

In clear graceful language that’s only sometimes portentous, she tells of growing up in Kenya, training horses, becoming a bush pilot, and making the trans-Atlantic flight. The story of a truly brave and remarkable woman received courteous reviews but after modest sales it sunk without a trace, considering 1942 also saw the Battle of Midway, the Battle of Stalingrad, the Second Battle of El Alamein, Operation Torch, and the Guadalcanal campaign.

Revived in 1983, the book has been a critical success and ordinary readers praise it with comments like “If you loved Out of Africa, you will love this beautifully written book!”  Some critics, however, point out Markham’s ethnocentrism and portrayal of locals as noble savages. She never deals with the justice and benevolence of waltzing into somebody else’s ancestral lands and turning pastoralists into plantation workers, servants, stable boys, and washerwomen.

A controversy, moreover, rages as to how much editorial guidance Markham received to write the memoir. I don’t doubt that a great book can come out of an author that writes scarcely anything else – Harper Lee. But there’re grounds for suspecting Markham didn’t write this book, her only book. She never talks about her schooling or about books she’s liked. She never mentions writing except in a stud book or flight log. The book has a style that was fashionable and so fit for sale at the time: elegant, snooty, Hemingwayesque.

It’s understandable that readers may be uncomfortable with whether a memoir is ghostwritten (John Dean’s Blind Ambition was written by historian Taylor Branch) or smothered by its author’s fishy claims (The Education of Little Tree, or A Million Little Pieces). But if a reader skipped West with the Night because of its unclear authorship, she’d be skipping some beautiful writing.

The Old Capital

The Old Capital - Yasunari Kawabata

This 1962 novel counts among his later novels. However, unlike The Lake or The Sleeping Beauty, The Old Capital is not shot through with sexual obsession and perversity.

Instead, it examines the failure of Japanese people to preserve their traditional culture against its vulgarization by modern Japanese buying and selling, i.e., ephemeral beauty embattled by trashy changes.

It also looks at how delicate love between men and women, parents and children can be. People who don't know much about Kyoto mountains, districts, streets, and temples may be confused as to what is being described is a shrine or a festival or what. Also, emotional responses and reticence by the characters may be obscure by readers unfamiliar with the Japanese cultural value of hinting and beating around the bush.

I think that for Japan-savvy readers, this novel, which even has a couple of laughs (amazing for Kawabata), is more accessible and enjoyable than Thousand Cranes and Snow Country.

Back to the Classics #11

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2020.

Classic by a Woman: This book was published in 1941 to universal praise. Virginia Woolf described Rebecca West as “hard as nails… a cross between a charwoman and a gipsy, but as tenacious as a terrier, with flashing eyes… immense vitality… suspicion of intellectuals, and great intelligence.”

Black Lamb Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia – Rebecca West

In 1936, novelist and critic Rebecca West travelled to Yugoslavia, because the assassination of its king in 1934 made her realize that she knew nothing about the southeast of Europe. This state of ignorance was intolerable to her, a powerful intelligence with a mighty pen. Having read a stack of books about the Byzantines and the Turk in Europe, she returned in 1937 for a more extensive journey. It took her about two years to write this book and its length – about 1200 pages – made her worry that nobody would read it.

In fact, this masterpiece has never gone out of print. It is not only a travel narrative of the highest achievement, but also a close examination of Balkan ethnography and history, and a meditation on the human condition in terms of the rise of fascism in the modern era. This, on Luigi Lucheni, the Italian anarchist and assassin of Empress Elisabeth of Austria in 1898:

It was indeed most appropriate that he should register his discontent by killing Elizabeth, for Vienna is the archetype of the great city which breeds such a population. Its luxury was financed by an exploited peasant class bled so white that it was ready to send its boys into the factories and the girls into service on any terms. The beggars in the streets of Vienna, which the innocent suppose were put there by the Treaty of Trianon, are descendants of an army as old as the nineteenth century. Lucheni said with his stiletto to the symbol of power, ‘Hey, what are you going to do with me?’ He made no suggestions, but cannot be blamed for it. It was the essence of his case against society that it had left him unfit to offer suggestions, unable to form thoughts or design actions other than the crudest and most violent. He lived many years in prison, almost until his like had found a vocabulary and a name for themselves and had astonished the world with the farce of Fascism.

Whacha gonna do about me, indeed a question still with us today.

Anyway, one writer was probably right in observing “Probably misclassified as a work of travel literature, the book has a curiosity, seriousness, and depth of insight that make it more akin to such classics of ethical reportage as Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom than to anything attempted by Bryson or Theroux.” Indeed, saying Black Lamb Grey Falcon  is a travel book is like saying Anna Karenina is “about Russia.”

Reading History

Last night I thought about what I read a long time ago and came up with these.

First: The Comics and Charlie Brown books, that is, collections of strips

Elementary School Years: I don't remember that I read much except I read a lot of comic books (that's why I am cool about graphic novels now - been there, done that). I remember reading ghost stories and Howard Pyles' Book of Pirates (excellent illustrations in the flowery Maxfield Parrish-type style). Civil War stories, too.

In about 1965 or 1966, the first grown-up book I ever read was Louis Armstrong's autobiography Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans.

High School Years. I did not read regularly but I read all kinds of stuff. At 13 or 14 I remember reading a fistful of Dickens' novels and all the James Bond novels. I read Gone with the Wind (so I never have to read another romance novel). I read a couple of Irving Wallace novels (so I've never read James Michener ; I decided if I want history I'll just read history)

High school was the only period in which I often read the book after I saw the movie. For instance, In 1972, at 16, I read The Godfather and A Clockwork Orange (that sent me to a couple of Burgess' novels which I didn't really get). Other examples are The Exorcist, The Day of the Jackal and Slaughterhouse 5 (That sent me to all over Vonnegut's writing).

Then, I also read a lot guy adventure stuff like The Sand Pebbles by Richard McKenna and The Eiger Sanction and The Odessa File and those hare-brained violent novels of Robert Ludlum (that's why I don't read James Paterson and others like him, been there, read that), but I also read Ross MacDonald, Raymond Chandler, and other hard-boiled writers.

College: I read contemporary best-selling fiction, the only period in my life when I did that: Looking for Mr Goodbar, Ragtime, Burr, and novels by Philip Roth. I think I had some yen to understand mainstream culture.

Since the 1980s I let books find me and read what falls into my lap.