Back to the Classics #24

I read this book for my second round of the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2020.

Classic about a Family. This 1879 novel is last of the six-novel Palliser series. In his autobiography, Anthony Trollope asked, “Who will read Can You Forgive Her?, Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux, and The Prime Minister consecutively, in order that they may understand the characters of the Duke of Omnium, of Plantagenet Palliser, and of Lady Glencora?” Me, Tony, I would, though I confess a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic was the force that made so much reading happen. I wonder why Trollope hesitated to include The Eustace Diamonds in the Palliser list despite the fact that Lord Fawn, the old Duke, Madam Max, etc. make appearances. Did he forget, like the eldest daughter, “little Lady Glencora,”  of Planty Pal and Lady Glen slipped his mind?

The Duke’s Children - Anthony Trollope

The sixth and final political novel in the Palliser series stars ex-Prime Minister and Duke of Omnium Plantagenet Palliser. In previous novels his Parliamentary comfort zone was fenced with facts and figures, which were supposed to keep dishonest rhetoric and  the passions of political faction firmly out. His colleagues in Parliament saw him as a safe choice to become the Prime Minister in a coalition government, because he was narrow-minded and risk-averse, and had a strong sense of the proper ways to proceed with unavoidable change.

After the coalition folds, he misses his active public life though he is thin-skinned about criticism and not gregarious as a politician ought to be in a happy and free country. His colleagues want him back in government but he claims he is too disillusioned to return. But when having breakfast with his sons, he flies into a speech:

“A very great grind, as you call it. And there may be the grind and not the success. But—“He had now got up from his seat at the table and was standing with his back against the chimney-piece, and as he went on with his lecture,—as the word “But” came from his lips—he struck the fingers of one hand lightly on the palm of the other as he had been known to do at some happy flight of oratory in the House of Commons. “But it is the grind that makes the happiness. To feel that your hours are filled to overflowing, that you can barely steal minutes enough for sleep, that the welfare of many is entrusted to you, that the world looks on and approves, that some good is always being done to others,—above all things some good to your country;—that is happiness. For myself I can conceive none other.”

“Books,” suggested Gerald, as he put the last morsel of the last kidney into his mouth.

We hardcore readers are with Gerald when it comes to books over politics.

In his family life, indeed, the Duke’s self-centeredness is a problem.  He is very private and unforthcoming, with little inclination to express his feelings to his three adult but still single children. Like many cool distant introverts, however, his reticence in demonstrating bottled-up feelings makes him emotionally unstable when under stress.

And in this novel he faces many stressors in the form of his modern-minded children. He scarcely knows them, having seldom conversed with them or gotten a sense of their dispositions.

Out of his awareness, his daughter Mary has engaged herself to a young gentleman with a solid character but little fortune and no profession. The novel starts after this is a fact so we don’t know exactly how they fell in love, but we are told clearly Frank Tregear is not hunting a fortune. The fact of this engagement was, to the Duke’s mind, withheld from him deliberately by old family friend Mrs. Finn when she was informed. Mary tells the Duke she will always obey her father but she will also always love her man, no matter that the Duke thinks the match unthinkable on dynastic and other social grounds. The Duke puts her under house arrest and drags her to the continent where she is overcome with psychosomatic disorders.

His older son and heir – called Silverbridge (his title) but also named Plantagenet - has not only been expelled from Oxford for painting the Dean’s house scarlet and shares ownership of a racehorse with a bad friend but also has turned his back on the liberal political convictions of the family. This apostasy deeply pains the Duke, an intensely political man. After much shilly-shallying, Silverbridge tells his father he won’t marry English woman Lady Mabel Grex because he is going to marry wealthy vivacious American Isabel Boncassen. The Duke thinks Silverbridge is walking away from his duty as an heir.

“I thought you liked her, sir.”

“Liked her! I did like her. I do like her. What has that to do with it? Do you think I like none but those with whom I should think it fitting to ally myself in marriage? Is there to be no duty in such matters, no restraint, no feeling of what is due to your own name, and to others who bear it? The lad out there who is sweeping the walks can marry the first girl that pleases his eye if she will take him. Perhaps his lot is the happier because he owns such liberty. Have you the same freedom?”

The younger son Gerald has been sent down from Cambridge because he attended a prohibited horse race in which his brother’s horse was running. Gerald also loses thousands of pounds in a card game with a noble bad hat, a young throwback to 18^th century ethics-free nastiness. In a wonderful scene, the Duke upbraids Gerald but all his pearls as to the unwisdom of gambling fall right to the ground as the youth is only overwhelmed at the relief of being bailed out.

The Duke has always been a quiet person, given to peaceful pursuits like walking and reading. His refrain to his sons: “You do not quite understand me, I fear.” He simply can’t understand his high-spirited extroverted sons. He is shocked by his daughter’s defiant stand to love her commoner Frank Tregear. He is doubly shocked by his heir’s falling in love with the daughter of a rich American intellectual American. The world is changing too fast for him. Madame Max aka Mrs. Finn can help him only up to a point and the Duke has nowhere to turn, nobody to talk to, nobody to trust.

The book is worth reading mainly for Trollope’s tidy unwrapping of the lonely yielding of the Duke. But other characters show Trollope’s psychological astuteness too. Major Tifto induces Silverbridge to bet recklessly and ends up in a racing scandal. Clever and outspoken Lady Mabel Grex, daughter of a lord that would rather party and die than abstain and live, attracts Silverbridge’s romantic attention until her tragic fate overtakes her; her scenes with Silverbridge and Frank feature her scalding honesty. Trollope introduces witty and gorgeous Isabel Boncassen with zero satire and is even respectful with her father, though he speaks through his nose like the worst kind of American. Lord Silverbridge too grows in the novel, as a politician, as a would-be husband, and as a friend. The rackety Beargarden crowd puts in a couple of appearances especially the lazy and obtuse Dolly Longstaff.

And so the novel and the six-novel series ends, with our old friend the Duke thwarted but at least back in government again with a cabinet-level post. Nothing like work and duty fulfilled to take one out of one’s self. But though the young get what they want in this novel, the disappointed Duke, one feels, is in for an uncomfortable old age, watching the world grow less ethical, farther from the goals of a more just, more prosperous world for a greater number of ordinary people  – a money-mad world balefully examined in The Way We Live Now – a world blown up by the Great War and subsequent break up of numerous empires. 

Back to the Classics #23

I read this book for my second round of the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2020.

Classic with a Place in the Title. “…in this early summer of 1940 … there was a bookshop at the ground floor of the Hotel Astor … I saw a two-volume box called The Tale of Genji. I had never heard of this book ….I took this home expecting I would probably not read it for quite a while but I started to read it anyway and this became literally my salvation from the newspapers from the horrible things that were going on in the world. This was a world of fiction, it is true but it was a beautiful world and was something I was craving and wanted to know more about,” said scholar & translator Donald Keene in 2011. So yeah, I will read a French novel from 1962 called Les Autres, The Others to get away from  "times of disruption" and "current conditions" But also to learn about how to live. Or in the case of these existential thrillers, how not to live.

The House on Quai Notre Dame - Georges Simenon

In his provincial hometown, Blaise Huet dropped out of architecture school. He was forced to use the connections of his rich influential Uncle Antoine to land a poorly-paid post as drawing master at the city arts school. To keep students at bay and forestall any social relations worthy of the name, he uses the no-talking method and in silence just circulates the classroom making corrections. The students therefore have resentfully nicknamed him The Silent Idiot. Just about all the adults in town see him as a loser who married a woman from the wrong side of the tracks. When Irène is not doing her nails, she cheats on him – of course - but he loves her for her faults, not her virtues, He digs that she will never challenge him, that she too is unwilling  to live anything beyond their listless animal-like existence of sleeping, eating, and boinking once in a blue moon.

Blaise is going through the motions of life, only seldom feeling anguish when he can’t avoid the streets of his childhood and youth, streets he never escaped due to his own sluggish irresponsibility. A character without knowledge, ability, reputation, or caliber, and a cuckolded husband to boot, Blaise knows he is mediocre, but in this belief he finds his own satisfaction.

Two events at the same time motivate him to relate his story of his road to self-knowledge. The death of his uncle Antoine, eminent jurist, aged 72, is caused by an overdose of barbiturates on Halloween. And his cousin Edouard, who had been missing for years, unexpectedly returns.

The events which Blaise relates reveal the hidden weave of the complicated relationships among the members of the Huet family. Uncle Antoine is the husband of Colette, 31 years his junior. At 41, she’s kept her looks, but she’s pretty neurotic. Perhaps Uncle Antoine loves her for her neuroses.

She is carrying on with Dr. Jean Floriau, the husband of Monique (born Huet), Antoine's niece. However, upon discovering her suicided husband’s corpse, Colette attempts to throw herself out a window, so Dr. Floriau checks her into a clinic. As for Lucien Huet, he is a sincere Catholic and newspaperman well-respected in the community. He did time in the Buchenwald concentration camp after he had been the victim of an anonymous denunciation that informed the occupying Germans that he joined the Resistance. After the war, he found out who the informer was, which turns up the temp on the already boiling family after uncle’s death.

Not much happens in this novel. One gets the feeling that Simenon just wanted to try first-person narrative, a device he didn’t employ much. Nor did he refer often to real life situations like families being ripped apart by deportations to camps and wartime denunciations. French funeral customs, probably long gone by now, are interesting.

When Nietzsche Wept

Note. I continue my trek to fin de siècle Vienna, part of my continuing efforts to distract myself from what the media delicately calls “everything going on now.” 

When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel of Obsession - Irvin D. Yalom 

 

I like historical fiction, generally speaking, since I have no problem with an author using historical facts as background to fiction. I usually have a problem with using actual historical figures as characters, since I assume the writer is using real people as mouthpieces, which I’m uneasy with. But in this one I trusted Yalom, a psychiatrist and academic, to have done his homework and not play fast and loose with the positions of his characters.

The setting is the fin de siecle Vienna, a hotbed of change in science, medicine, and the arts. Dr. Josef Breuer, busy physician and part-time researcher on equilibrium, is suffering the fall-out of disastrously treating Bertha Pappenheim for her visual disturbances, hallucinations, partial paralysis, and speech problems. Having turned forty, he’s having intrusive erotic and romantic fantasies about Bertha mainly because he doesn’t want to face the reality of getting old and having to adjust his expectations of life. In short – he’s having the usual existential crisis of seemingly successful affluent middle-aged men. 

Into his office confidently shimmies the beautiful and persuasive Lou Salome. She’s afraid that her friend Friedrich Nietzsche, an unknown and poor philosopher, is suicidal. She wants Breuer to treat him without telling Nietzsche of her machinations on his behalf. Mainly because he is beguiled by her beauty, Breuer agrees.

Breuer treats Nietzsche’s severe migraines but also inveigles the philosopher to apply his radical ideas about life into helping Breuer get over his obsession with Bertha. The jousting of the two brilliant protagonists during the therapy sessions makes for interesting reading for people into the history of psychoanalysis and the heroic approach to life. Telling Breuer nothing is more daring than self-enquiry, Nietzsche rhetorically asks, “Become who you are. And how can one discover who and what one is without the truth?”

The novel has many pithy ideas that have a Stoic flavor, though Nietzsche thought the Stoics mean and petty and narrow. “A tree requires stormy weather if it is to attain a proud height” could be right out of Seneca’s letters. Marcus Aurelius could have written “Life is a spark between two voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death” in his Meditations. And the overstated claim “There are no facts, only interpretations” echoes Hamlet’s “Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so” and Epictetus’ “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.”

Conclusion: very readable. In fact, I read this novel of ideas twice. Even if the characters involved here never actually met, the author still tells the story in such a way that I could believe in the plausibility of their meeting. Another recommendation is that reading this book made me want to read other books by the author.

Vienna 1900

Vienna 1900: Games with Love and Death - Arthur Schnitzler

Schnitzler (1862-1931) was a doctor, playwright, novelist and short story writer in fin de siècle Vienna. He is most well-known as the author of Traumnovelle (Dream Story) which served as the basis for Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick's last movie.

The four stories collected here concern people in bourgeois society dealing with their problems of marriage and adultery, and the origins of sexual temptations. The interesting points are the use of the stream of consciousness technique and examinations of neurotic personalities (Schnitzler and Freud were close friends). Women consummate their desires, usually with worthless or otherwise inappropriate males, and pay heavy prices for pleasure outside of marriage.

With much psychological insight, Vienna 1900 also treats the issues of aging and its accompanying fear of boredom, decay, and suffering. Schnitzler handles these heavy themes with a candidness that is direct and provocative, never merely glum or stoical. Readers that like John Fowles or Tennessee Williams or who read Freud as a literary figure may like these stories.

The Ides of Perry Mason 17

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 Careless Kitten  - Erle Stanley Gardner

This 1942 novel is an authentic Golden Age mystery. It is a strong outing, as many of his novels written during WWII were, well-written with a solid plot and an inventive solution, both of which balance deprecating references to the adversary country of Japan.

In 1932 eminent banker Franklin Shore disappeared in the traditional mysterious circumstances, leaving behind ornery Matilda, a wife with cheatin' on her mind and an adoring 14-year-old niece, Helen Kendal. A decade later he suddenly gets into contact with the now grown-up niece. He tells her to bring Perry Mason to a confab but at the meeting, a man, not Franklin Shore, is found dead, shot through the head. Though Helen has no connection to the murder victim, the police charge her with the murder so she naturally hires Perry to defend her.

The roof really caves in on this unlucky family. Helen's cat and then Aunt Matilda are poisoned with strychnine. Both pull through. Lt. Tragg is enraged however, when he finds the kitty under wraps in the apartment of Della Street, Mason’s devoted and intrepid secretary. He arrests Della because Mason’s foe, D.A. Hamilton Burger, has convinced himself that Della also knows the whereabouts of Franklin Shore, He charges her for concealing a material witness thus obstructing justice.

Perry, Della, and Paul thus get involved in a case that registers 7 Strands on The Tangled Web Meter. Mystery writer and critic Jon Breen calls this one "one of the best pure detective novels [Gardner] ever wrote."

It's also well worth reading because Gardner has Perry vigorously defend what Burger calls "theatrical interludes" and "courtroom flimflam." Mason argues constitutional protections have been slowly by undermined cops, prosecutors, and judges, raising the prospect of the government using the law and the merciless criminal justice system as tools of political oppression. 

I, Claudius

Note. Yet another installment in reading books that take me far away from the pandemic crapstorm. Hope you’re doing okay.

 I, Claudius – Robert Graves

My wife switches to Game of Thrones and I flee. I usually hate historical dramas filled with enough intriguing, cruelty, fanaticism, superstition, and conflict to make me despise the human race. What is history but the story of endless struggles and violence for what is out of control of kings, warriors, artisans and farmers: power, wealth, property adulation, station, longevity, et cetera ad nauseam?

So you’d think a story of the completely sick Roman emperors, told by a member of their family, would make me turn up my nose. Not so. This is a full-bodied novel that begins with the re-birth of the monarchy and ends with the acclamation of Claudius, the last man standing, spared for years because he was considered a simpleton, good for only writing about safe historical topics like the long-gone Etruscans.

Our narrator Claudius was a seven-month baby so he is lame, deaf in one ear, and stammers. Therefore, in a culture that prized a smooth tongue and athletic and military prowess, from boyhood he has been shunted to the sidelines by his entire noble family. He finds himself observing the different political moves made by his ruling family, but especially by his evil genius grandmother Livia, wife of Augustus, to further her own goals, get her favorites plum positions, and ensure the continuance of the Roman Empire under a monarchy.

Livia is not treacherous, but she is unscrupulous, ready to do anything for what she believes to be the good of the state. She does terrible things to people in her way – mostly those sympathetic to a republic - because she thinks she is doing right by the Empire. Claudius grants that she, Augustus, and Tiberius all administer the empire skillfully, limiting lawlessness by brigands, pirates, and administrators and creating the stable conditions in which common people can prosper. Caligula’s major problem, besides his cruelty, was his maladministration. He wanted to be emperor but he didn’t like the tedious details of governing, a situation we ourselves have gotten a bellyful of since 2016.

Claudius, a historian himself, collects evidence, finds reliable sources and in so doing does not shrink from recording the most arrogant, most disgusting, bloody, impious deeds of his family members, especially as regards the endless machinations of Livia, the ultimate spoiled brat-monster Caligula, and the police state tactics and preposterously aberrant sexual practices of Tiberius. What I appreciated most was Claudius’ ironic, sharp and yet regretful eye. He himself says that he takes the Stoic way of looking at things from his tutor Athenodorus. His keeping a low profile by shamming weakness and foolishness has in fact saved his life. Discretion is a sub-virtue of the stoic emphasis on wisdom.

In the end it is Claudius, who has been a spectator the entire drama and who has never demonstrated a yen for power, comes out on top, in a position he never wanted. The story makes us understand Nature provides for both fate and fortune. Stuff happens because that's the way Creation says it going to be; e.g. you're mortal so you'll sicken and die of something. But stuff also happens out of pure luck. To negotiate as much complexity as an ordinary human can, reason is the key. Reason tells me that I could get run over by a bus next Sunday so I had better enjoy while I can. Nor is it reasonable for me to expect life to reach some stasis point and then remain unchanged. Everything changes.

Inspector Montalbano #9

The Paper Moon – Andrea Camilleri

This 2005 mystery is the ninth story starring Inspector Salvo Montlbano. For those of us who have Mediterranean genes (if the Italians hadn’t, the Croatians would’ve invented opera), Salvo of Sicily is utterly relatable. He’s smart and intuitive and a devil for both work and the nice things in life like good food. But he is also grouchy, short-tempered with a sarcastic bent and sharp tongue. He is shocked and scared that he is not exempt from getting deeper into middle age. Surrounded by colleagues like the numbskull Catarella, he doesn’t like drama but creates a lot of it simply by being himself. And the drama of his personal and police life is often pretty funny.

Compared to other books in the saga, this one focuses more on the investigative aspect, leaving little space for Montalbano's personal life. For instance, a weekend visit from his long-time GF Livia takes up about three lines. The case unfolds in a linear way and without any particular twists until the final surprise.

There are many laughs in the story but there are harsh aspects as well. It is a murky story of drugs and sexual transgressions featuring incest, adultery, impotence, a coerced abortion and a sexual assault committed by the police. Some scenes are not for the faint-hearted. There are acerbic comments on Italy under Berlosconi and on our post-Nine Eleven security precautions:

It meant that, today, to enter any place whatsoever – an airport, a bank, a jeweler’s or watchmaker’s shop – you had to submit to a specific ceremony of control. Why ceremony? Because it served no concrete purpose. A thief, a hijacker, a terrorist, if they really want to enter, will find a way. The ceremony doesn’t even serve to protect the people on the other side of the entrance. So whom does it serve? It serves the very person about to enter, to make him think that, once inside, he can feel safe.

Think of this when you see employees wiping down surfaces so we can feel safe from air-borne covid-19.

This is worth reading mainly because Salvo Montalbano finds himself dealing with two astute women. He will need all his self-control and wisdom as he negotiates his way between dangerous Michela the Fury and Elena the Cheetah, who tries to charm him with innocence and spontaneity.

The Shape of Water	The Dance of the Seagull
The Terra-Cotta Dog	Treasure Hunt
3 The Snack Thief (2003)	17 Angelica's Smile (2013)
Voice of the Violin	Game of Mirrors
5 The Excursion To Tindari (2005)	A Beam of Light
The Smell of the Night	aka Blade of Light
aka The Scent of the Night	20 A Voice in the Night (2016)
Rounding the Mark	A Nest of Vipers
The Patience of the Spider	22 The Pyramid of Mud (2018)
The Paper Moon	23 The Overnight Kidnapper (2019)
August Heat	24 The Other End of the Line (2019)
The Wings of the Sphinx	25 The Safety Net (2020)
The Track of Sand	26 The Sicilian Method (2020)
The Potter's Field	27 The Cook of the Halcyon (2021)
The Age of Doubt	28 Riccardino (2021)

 

An Oxford Tragedy

An Oxford Tragedy - J.C. Masterman

This 1933 mystery novel feels authentic because its author was an academic all his life. Like the historian author, the narrator Francis Wheatley Winn is the Senior Tutor in History at fictional St. Thomas's. He probably speaks for the author when he avers “My life is bound up in the life of the college.”

Familiar elements of the classic mystery are a large number of suspects, an amateur detective,  and a lengthy anti-climactic discussion of the puzzle in the last 25 pages.  In A Catalogue Of Crime (1989), critics Barzun and Taylor list it as one of the 90 best mysteries and say of it, “A first rate story, which...projects the genuine atmosphere, establishes plausible characters, and furnishes detection, logic and discussion of 'method' in admirably simple and attractive English...a masterpiece.”

I’m not sure I’d go that far. But I heartily recommend it to readers that like classic mysteries set at Oxford-type universities. It’s rather more intellectual than Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, with sometimes stiff vocabulary and ruminations on how a quiet community of scholars is rattled by a killing. It is, however, less puckish than Michael Innes’ The Weight of the Evidence in which while sunning himself in a courtyard Professor Pluckrose is crushed to death by a meteorite that the culprit has shoved out a window. 

At least, in this novel, one has a sense that murder has been done and that violence has dark consequences nobody can guess.

Back to the Classics #22

I read this book for my second round of the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2020.

Classic in Translation. This 1954 novel is titled Le Grand Bob in the original. Simenon’s romans durs (hard novels) often begin or end with a crime but are not mysteries. They are concise, clinical examinations of human beings who’ve left patience and moderation in the rear view mirror, driven by the shock of aging, altered circumstances or twisted thinking to irrational responses. In the 1980s, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich released a boatload of romans durs in English. But US culture (moonwalking, Magnum PI, neon, Chariots of Fire, big hair, etc.) wasn’t into home truths and the books were quickly remaindered, ending up in discount stores like Edward R. Hamilton. Times change. I daresay thinking people might get a charge out of existential thrillers in our plaguy days, given COVID-19 has even hardcore readers like us contemplating the ends of our tethers.

Big Bob - Georges Simenon

On a typical summer Sunday, in Tilly, on the banks of the Seine, the title character attempted to make his suicide look like an accidental death. But nobody is fooled. His wife Lulu Dandurand, consumed with carking guilt that he did it because action or inaction on her part, asks Dr. Charles Coindreau if he can find anything out that would explain Bob’s taking his own life, out of the blue. Charles searches the past and the present of his buddy Bob, the life of the party always cheerful and bantering, for pieces that can fill in this puzzle.

Coming from an upper middle class family, Bob had attended law school, first in Poitiers, where his father taught law, then in Paris. It was in 1930 that he met Lulu, a good-hearted young woman with no discernible future. Making the rounds of the dizzy array of French drinking establishments, he tells her of his decision to blow off his oral exams to be held the next day, an act tantamount to breaking with his family. Bob and Lulu, after having lived together, get married a few years later and settle in Paris where Lulu, a hatmaker, and Bob, who changes jobs frequently voluntarily and not, live modestly, the center of a boisterous social circle.

During a weekend at the Auberge du Beau-Dimanche in Tilly, Lulu had one of her many miscarriages. Dr. Charles Coindreau looks after her and becomes the couple's confidant. Charles's investigation into the death of his friend Bob yields revelations though one wonders if any explanation will be complete..

Bob didn’t value money, property, prestige, awards, vacations, authority. He flitted from job to job, always loving his wife, always laughing. He found meaning in his life by making one person happy and enjoying himself in an active social life. And when he found out his remaining time would have to be devoted to things that were unbearable to him and things that didn’t contribute to the happiness of Lulu, he chose to go through what the Stoics call the open door.

Bob’s dying well as an expression of living well, however, does not have a beneficial effect on Lulu. With his hard-headed bead on the tendency of people to call going through motions to get past one damn thing after another “living,” Simenon poses hard questions to middle-aged readers.  How relatable is a story about avoiding ruts? How do you the reader recognize yourself in the story? How do you not recognize yourself? How do you recognize value in life?