Back to the Classics #10

I read this book for the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2022.

20th Century Classic: Though with age the lure of “relatable characters” has become less pertinent to me, this novel starring a guy like me – racially ambiguous – may have had something to do with my inability to put this story down.  I won’t provide substantial framing or a content advisory relative to this novel. Suffice to say, its setting is Mississippi in the late Twenties – a racist society - so that rotten racist epithet is all over this novel. Not reading a great novel, a triumph of American literature, because of a rotten racist epithet is, I think, like pretending racism and white supremacy don't exist.

Light in August – William Faulkner

This excellent novel from 1932 is a Great Southern Novel, right up there with All the King’s Men or Margaret Walker's Jubilee. On one hand, the plot and incidents unfold in a readily comprehensible fashion. While there are flashbacks and shifts in narrative voice, they are not as baffling as in The Sound and the Fury (TS&TF) or As I Lay Dying.  This is nearly a stand-alone novel, with few references to other novels in his Yoknapatawpha cycle. As for theme, it’s Faulkner’s enduring theme, as one character sums up:

‘It is because so much happens. Too much happens. That’s it. Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That’s how he finds that he can bear anything. That’s it. That’s what is so terrible. That he can bear anything, anything.’

On the other hand, just like reading TS&TF, even the most hardcore readers have to approach a Faulkner novel as if it were music, letting the need-to-comprehend-everything pedant-self be carried away by the rhythm and flow without trying to understand every note perfectly. In Faulkner’s prose there are notes that seem off and notes that seem only kind of clear or not clear at all. Just go with it.

Combinations of words are encountered in this novel as if they are heard in dreams or sedated coming out of surgery. Some phrases are like synesthesia, alluding to smells that are touched, light that is smelled, sounds that are savored like umami. I read, shaking my head, just gaping in disbelief at what Faulkner is putting down,

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

The stories that make up the novel are not, I think, as important as simply understanding the characters and their trials. The protagonist, Joe Christmas, is a hero on a quest in search of an identity that he never finds. He has to start with a parentage that is unknown but people make decisions about him and for him as if his origins clear were clear enough to pigeonhole him. Joe Christmas cannot free himself of the insomnia, anorexia, anger, loneliness, and social and emotional withdrawal caused by his abusive upbringing at the hands of a ruthless Christian. He is a rambler with a future doomed by the violence with which he is constantly treated and which he metes out to other people.

Joe Christmas also brings to mind the character Meursault in Camus’ The Stranger. Both are treated unjustly by cruel police and the stupid criminal justice system.  Both are atheists: Meursault curses and mocks the prison chaplain; Christmas utters blasphemies from the pulpit of a black church. Neither believe in prayer, Meursault scoffs at the preacher who urges him to and Christmas does likewise when Joanna Burden wants to pray with him. More existentially, staring into the face death, both resign themselves to the human condition (constantly fighting one's own and others' stupidity, injustice, fear, craving). They both are resigned to their inescapable cruel fate at end, seeing freedom in their ability to choose how they are going to respond to death. Life is difficult, and when you have to die you’ll die, but life’s a gas anyway.

Other well-drawn characters include lonely defrocked preacher Gail Hightower, his friend lonely Byron Bunch and lonely fanatic Joanna Burden. Not so lonely is single but pregnant teenager Lena Grove, the comic relief that calls to mind luckless Anse Bundren whose bewitched neighbors feel compelled to help. Using her youth and vulnerability, Lena is such a deft operator that she gets older married women to provide assistance even though they instinctively don’t like her for being so dumb as to couple with a smooth-talking drifter. But blessings rain down on faux-naïve Lena, while others like Joe Christmas can’t turn around without running into trouble. Ain’t nobody in a Faulkner novel gonna say life is fair and dealing with injustice is part of the endurance that we need to get out of life uncrushed, unbowed, unafraid. 

There is also the setting of the Southern small town of Jefferson (Mississippi) with the time being the late 1920s. For Faulkner, time is both fleeting and eternal. A person’s lifetime is transitory. But the historical memory of a people – e.g. Southerners, Americans - is haunted by undying ghosts, as implied in the quotation about memory above. Race-based chattel slavery. Deprivation, lawlessness and violence. White supremacy. People hold tight to their values about anti-smarts, unreality, hierarchy, victimhood, law and order, sexual anxiety, Sodom and Gomorrah, beliefs rooted in a peasant past and bitter memories of defeat in the war. The angry spirit of racism seems especially irremediable and undying, because it is part of people’s religious and social identity.

Their culture-bound values drag themselves and other people into abysses. As if there were a compulsion in certain kinds of people to impose their principles on others even when they are moved by masochism, white nationalism, militarism, fascist power worship, fanaticism, and misery. Ordinary men and women just want to be left alone to mind their own business. Is it so much to ask, just a little peace, ask a couple of characters in this novel.

The pathos of Faulkner's writing and the cruelty of the incidents make the reader turn away from looking into the abysses even while there are plenty of those magical reading minutes in which the reader is so involved in the story that it is almost impossible to put the book down. The flashbacks are inserted with genius, especially that technique when the reader is told the upshot and then Faulkner backs up and recounts events that lead up to it.

After finishing this book, I am convinced of the greatness of William Faulkner.

Memorial Day 2022

Note: RE people seeing this day of remembrance and mourning as the first day of summer. This is a day to honor the men and women who died for our country while serving in the U.S. military.

The Soldiers' Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War - Samuel Hynes

Readers of war memoirs have one question, “What was it like, the war.” Hynes points out that images and expectations of war are cultivated in our imagination and to our benefit we can change our understanding of war by bringing war in our imagination (“war in the head”) closer to the reality of war as human experience. Reading first-hand accounts of war, we can be vicariously involved in other people’s war experience.

Therefore, Hynes’ object was to scrutinize the expectations and experiences ​​that civilian soldiers took into the two destructive wars in continental Europe, the Vietnam War, and POW camps run by the Germans. Hynes excludes the memoirs of commanders and high ranks, because they did not participate first-hand on the battlefield and so are unable to describe of their own knowledge and experience what was happening.

The author also covers memoirs by sufferers who went through the massacres of the Holocaust and the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some extended quotations are upsetting. I had to put the book down for days at time, to recover.

Hynes was a Marine pilot during WWII so he testifies that many American young men in the Thirties read the WWI memoirs of Sassoon and Graves. They knew the horror of industrialized war, but readily signed up after Pearl Harbor because they matter-of-factly figured that if the country was good enough to live in, it was good enough to fight for. They also felt on an instinctual level that Hitlerism was evil, just as we ordinary people now feel the presence of barbaric evil, when we look at images of the malicious destruction of life and property in Ukraine.

Hynes also points out that many WWII American soldiers were wary high-sounding concepts like “valor” and soldiers in Vietnam warned new guys about not acting like John Wayne in a movie. Hynes says for civilian soldiers, going to war was a stage of their lives, though certainly for some it was the high point of their lives, the one time they were involved in something really huge and important. Hynes acknowledges that for some young males going to war was the ultimate adventure.

This balanced book is worth reading, though some passages are disturbing .

Accounts mentioned this book; click on the title to read the review:

·         Toward the Flame: A Memoir of World War I – Hervey Allen

·         Ill Met by Moonlight: The Abduction of General Kreipe - W. Stanley Moss

·         The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien

·         A Passionate Prodigality - Guy Chapman

·         With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa - Eugene B. Sledge

·         All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque

·         The Road Past Mandalay: A Personal Narrative - John Masters

·         Goodbye to All That - Robert Graves

 

The Nero & Archie Show

Three Men Out – Rex Stout

The main characters in Rex Stout's detective stories are the genius misogynistic rotund detective Nero Wolfe who grows orchids, likes gourmet food and refuses to go outside and his assistant Archie Goodwin, the narrator of the stories. Together they look for perpetrators of crimes. While the stories are ingenious, the pleasure in reading a Nero Wolfe detective story is mainly due to the dynamics between brash Archie Goodwin and his grumpy employer. The novelettes in particular make me laugh out loud.

This book has three longish stories that first appeared in the early Fifties in a weekly called The American Magazine. In the first story, Invitation to Murder, a client wants to hire Wolfe because he thinks one of the three women employed by his brother-in-law poisoned his sister. But at the same time Archie is doing interviews in the brother-in-law’s house, the client is murdered with a blunt object. The highlight is Archie tricking agoraphobic Wolfe out of the brownstone to inspect the scene of the crime, which is a lot funnier, I admit, if you are already veteran reader of the stories.

In the second story, The Zero Clue, a math whiz uses advanced statistical methods to tell fortunes. He is afraid that a client is planning or already committed a serious crime. Archie goes to his office to talk but can’t find the potential client. The cops later contact Wolfe and Archie because the math whiz has been found killed completely, having left on his desk a mysterious message coded in the geometric arrangement of eight pencils, which look like the initials N.W. There’s not much action in the story, but a whole lot of Wolfe talking to people, with Archie appearing at the wrong place at the wrong time (as is his wont), and a clever twist that would be more frustrating to us ignoramuses were it handled by a lesser writer than Stout. The extended red herring throughout (especially the way it builds and builds upon itself as we become more aware of it) was an enjoyable misdirection.

A plot to fix a Giants and Red Sox world series is featured in the third story, This Won’t Kill You. Wolfe has old-world notions of hospitality so he feels he must accompany a French guest to visit his greatest desire: the deciding game of a World Series at the Polo Grounds. The corpulent Wolfe in an old-style stadium seat – when only 10% of adult Americans were obese – is pretty hilarious, despite our more broad-minded attitudes about body shape, size, and appearance these days. The stadium is an unusual setting in a series that usually ended with all the suspects collected in Wolfe’s office with the red chair.

I think tightly written novelettes like these are the greatest whodunnits since Christie wrote short stories with Poirot. So, this was a very fine mix of unusual stories that impressed me. Other Stout fans prefer the novels because they give more room for characters development – especially the 35^th Street brownstone characters - and funny set pieces between Wolfe and citizens of the world who seem to have been born to get on his nerves.

Keep in mind the books were written a long time ago. So one hand we have about the coolest place on Earth, New York City, in the middle of the 20^th century. On the other, the reader might get annoyed by the stereotypical way in which women in general and the relationship between Archie Goodwin and women are described.

They Hated That Man

That Man: An Insider's Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt – Robert H. Jackson

Heirs are busy people so the manuscript for this book was stored in a box in a closet for about 50 years after it was written. A lawyer, Jackson was a Democrat in Western New York, as a rare species in the first half of the 20^th century as it is at present. That was how he started his personal and political relationship with Roosevelt, who was a luminary in New York state politics. After FDR became President, Jackson worked in the Treasury, the SEC, and then Justice in the Tax Division, the Antitrust Division, and ultimately Solicitor General and Attorney General.

He was appointed to the Supreme Court when Harlan Fiske Stone replaced the retiring Charles Evans Hughes as Chief Justice in 1941. He established a reputation as a masterful writer, though one admits that the competition is other attorneys, not professionals known for their clarity of expression.  However, his prose is clear in this memoir. Some subject matter is inherently murky -  controversies relative to extensions of executive power have to be written in a prose a bit technical and opaque in places.

But its value is that it presents a unique perspective on working with FDR. The most interesting chapter is on "That Man as Politician," while the most objective were on the administrative abilities and economic knowledge (both low) of the subject.

Some readers may regard it as filler but I found extremely interesting the capsule biographies of people whose names we wide-ranging readers have often come across – e.g. David Dubinsky, Louis Howe, Harold Ickes, Missy Le Hand – but had only a vague idea of their background and role. Like writing captions for photographs, I imagine writing capsule biographies is harder than looks.

1980s Hard-Boiled

Grave Error - Stephen Greenleaf

In the first of the series starring PI John Marshall Tanner, he is hired by a wife worried about her husband’s recent furtive behavior. Such as, he disappeared for a week and large amounts of money are running through his hands. Going on a spree and all night poker would drive ordinary guys off the rails for a week, but the husband is no ordinary guy. He’s a nationally famous consumer advocate whose reputation for probity and integrity makes partying unlikely and undesirable.

The couple have a handicapped daughter who has retained as a PI Tanner’s old buddy. The old buddy ends up snuffed execution style. Old buddy’s distraught wife hires Tanner to nail the perp. Though Tanner puts the consumer advocate case on the back burner, he does get emotionally involved with a beautiful and smart lawyer who works in the consumer organization. Tanner pursues the case to the very bitter end.

Tanner is a fairly intellectual guy. In his first-person narration, he deploys heavy duty vocabulary like “immutably” and “vilify.” He makes learned allusions, owns an original Paul Klee, and a taste in antiques, given that he works at his grandfather’s walnut desk. Those that like Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer series will enjoy a convoluted plot and Tanner’s brooding descriptions of Northern California’s landscapes and lifestyles. When this novel was released in 1979, The New Yorker magazine praised it with, “The classic California private-eye novel . . . Mr. Greenleaf is a real writer with a real talent.”

This is probably a pandemic-induced mood talking but I found this too depressing. Tanner’s an emotional guy who takes things to heart. He’s had rough experiences that have left marks. The plot too often stops while Tanner recounts grotesque stories and ruminates. And ruminates a little more. For Tanner, the causes of bad events are enduring, not temporary. And a bad event’s causes affect many areas of life, not just a few. Individuals who make stable and universal attributions for negative events tend to experience longer lasting, and more severe, depressive episodes. And poop a lot parties.

Though many readers and critics consider Greenleaf the natural heir to the hard-boiled traditions of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, I doubt if I will read another one of the 14-book series.

The Ides of Perry Mason 36

This month marks three years of the custom of posting a review of a Perry Mason mystery on the 15th of every month. And no end in sight. How long can this practice go on? Do I really want to be the guy that has read all 82 novels and 4 short stories?

The Case of the Lonely Heiress – Erle Stanley Gardner

This 1948 mystery was the 31st Perry Mason story. Robert Caddo is the publisher of a sleazy magazine called “Lonely Hearts Are Calling.” The Post Office inspectors, sticklers for honesty one and all, are threatening him with a charge of false advertising. They’re making noises about jail if he can’t tell them the identity of the heiress behind an ad that is raking in big bucks for Caddo (chumps have to buy multiple copies of the magazine so they can use an original coupon to connect with a lonely heart).

Mason disbelieves in Caddo's integrity as much as the Post Office, but he charges an exorbitant fee to look into the matter. Perry writes responses to the ad, and the heiress responds to one. PI Paul Drake dispatches one of his operatives as the responder. The heiress is found to be a genuine heiress.

Caddo is happy, but the heiress ends up in a jam. She calls Mason because she has stumbled over a dead body – a murder victim, in fact - and she’s afraid she’s landed in a vulnerable position. This was not a bad assumption in pre-Miranda days.  The take-aways from Mason novels are “Admit nothing” and “Say nothing without your lawyer present.” But in this one the Lt. Tragg and the police are especially odious and scary in the constitutional rights department; Tragg and Perry get into a nasty fight in this one

This one is worth reading because Our Hero goofs up no less than three times. Della fans will like it because Della spends a lot of time onstage, with comments that get to the pith of the matter.

Back to the Classics #9

I read this book for the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2022.

Classic in Translation. Nothing like a translation from the French of an existentialist thriller like Simenon.

The Stranger – Albert Camus (1942)

This short novel is set in French Algeria in the early 1940s. The narrator is Mersault, an uneducated, working class clerk living in a rough milieu. His feelings, thoughts and actions reveal his rejection of the freedom to make our own meaning, to create our own values in life. His dodging and shirking of the responsibility to make sense of life and live with a modicum of courage wisdom or forethought land him in trouble deep with public opinion and the meat grinder of the criminal justice system.

Narrator Mersault admits that he was once a student but when he was forced to give up his studies he realized studying, tests, degrees, etc. were pretty futile for a guy like him. And what a lout he is. He gets on just fine with the violent bullying abuser Raymond. Mersault doesn’t have the smarts or the sense to think through the consequences of his actions when Ray gets him involved in a vendetta with some locals over a Moorish woman. “Tell me who your friends are,” says the Latvian proverb, “and I’ll tell you who you are.”

His GF Marie says she likes him because he is so odd. Because he doesn’t express interest in her life, maybe she figures that after they’re married he’ll still be so uninterested that she can come and go as she pleases. Of marriage, he says things that encourage and discourage the prospect. He sincerely doesn’t care if they get married or not and he has zero sense of how she thinks about the issue.

His indifference indicates something is psychologically wrong with Meursault. He is withdrawn and silent, speaking only when spoken to and then with flat semi-responses that give the impression he’s not saying all he knows. His reticence at work gives him a reputation for being aloof and withdrawn.  Meursault is so peculiar that he turns down a transfer from sleepy Algiers to exciting Paris, thus amazing his supervisor with his nutty objectivity that one place is as good as another.

Meursault keeps acquaintances at a distance with this reserve. The only reason that his GF Marie puts up with him, one suspects, is that due to her experience she figures all men are cold detached lumps. Meursault doesn’t connect with anybody, though he knows lots of people in the French-speaking community in North Africa.

Meursault can’t predict what other people are expecting. He doesn’t pick up on body language like smiles and gestures. At his mother’s funeral, he demonstrates a lack of feeling and inability to express appropriate grief that scandalizes the people connected to the old folk’s home where she passed away. He gets distracted by details in the environment, stuff that normal brains filter out – the blobby red ears of an old man, the sopping wet hand towel at work.

He is also defenseless to the glaring sunlight of the environment. Camus constantly emphasizes the relentless light in this novel. I lived in Saudi Arabia for three months; the hard fierce light is as if a hand is gripping your head and squeezing. I can assure the reader that sunstroke can cause the irrational aggression and violent behavior that land Meursault in jail. This passage is how it is, really:

Wherever I looked I saw the same sun-drenched countryside, and the sky was so dazzling I dared not raise my eyes. Presently we struck a patch of freshly tarred road. A shimmer of heat played over it and one's feet squelched at every step, leaving bright black gashes. …

The story is pretty simple, and so is the language. The philosophical stance, however, is challenging. I think Camus is reminding us that Meursault’s narrow mindless life is no way to live. But concerning Meursault’s response at the end, with the chopper just around the corner, Meursault realizes that he alone has control over his fate because he can choose how he will think and feel and act in response to what the mean stupid criminal justice system and indifferent universe have in store for him. 

We all have the freedom to choose how we will think, feel, and act when we face loss, death, injury, affliction, insult, greedy leaders, mask slackers, loud chewing, bad drivers, hangnails, stepping on a dog toy in the dark.

Kurt Wallander when Young

The Pyramid: The First Wallander Mysteries - Henning Mankell

When it comes to reading mysteries, there comes a time when the jaded reader must take the bull by the horns and just read something new. So I picked this up at a used book sale in a tony suburb, not knowing the series hero at all.

It appears that this book is the origin story of series hero Kurt Wallander, set at the beginning of his career in 1969 when he was only a twenty-something police officer in Ystad, an old town on Sweden's southern coast, famous for its medieval town center with cobblestone streets and half-timbered houses. Young Kurt is ridden by a keen sense of what’s proper and tends to brood – neither inclination strange, considering he’s Swedish. His father, an artist and bully, gives him guff for his career choice and passive-aggressively sells his house – Kurt’s childhood home – without even telling Kurt where he’s moving. And look up “high maintenance pain in the neck girlfriend” in the dictionary and see a picture of Kurt’s GF Mona.

This book collects five pieces, thee short stories and two novellas. As is typical in noir police procedurals since the 1980s, the author places the homicide investigations in the socio-economic conditions in which daily life is lived and crimes are committed. “How could anybody be so alone,” Kurt wonders as he finds out more about the bleak daily life of an elderly neighbor whose death he is investigating.

These stories reminded me of Andrea Camilleri’s Salvo Montalbano novels. The protagonists live in traditionally close-knit - but fraying societies - with an increasingly flimsy sense of belonging and respectability. Ystad, Sweden and Vigata, Sicily are situated far from national hotspots of politics, fashion, education, publishing, entertainment, or economy, but they are still affected by social changes out of everybody's control. Mankell and Camilleri seamlessly weave into the plots deep-seated fears shared by ordinary people, not only the prospect of lonely sickly old age but also the breakdown of society caused by conspiracies between criminals and strongmen like - well, you know.

Night Soldiers #13

Midnight in Europe – Alan Furst

This 2014 espionage thriller is set in Europe between the wars. A refugee from the Spanish Civil War, Cristián Ferrar works as a lawyer for a prestigious law firm with clients in Paris, New York, and as far east as Budapest. The firm sympathizes with the Spanish Republic against Franco’s fascists, the Nationalists. Cristián is approached by the Spanish Embassy to procure arms on behalf of the embattled Republic, whose ostensible ally, Stalin’s USSR, is not providing replacement parts, ammunition and armaments.

Unlike lots of heroes in spy thrillers, Cristián is not a combat infantry veteran or old hand in a tough-guy job like walking boss of lumberjacks or manager of a heroin factory. He’s just a quick-thinking professional who does his duty when his government, his country, asks him to do his part. Unlike cynical and hard-boiled writers of thrillers, Furst has faith that ordinary people will step up to the plate when the going gets rough.

Cristián soon finds himself in various European cities with arms merchant Max de Lyon, who’s been there and done that when it comes to gun-running. Furst absorbingly portrays Berlin in 1938 as a place smothered by secret police. We readers are also convinced by the settings of the tough shipyards of Gdansk and low-class sporting houses in Istanbul.

The novel is divided up into episodes in which Cristián and Max have to call on all their smarts and resourcefulness. The best set-piece is the last, in which Max’s confederates in Odessa manage to use Stalin’s system of terror against itself and pull off an audacious heist. The climax involves getting the maguffin back to Valencia on a tramp steamer. While there is not much shooting and stuff blowing up real good, it’s gripping thriller material.

Click on the title to go to the review of Alan Furst’s historical spy novel

1.       Night Soldiers (1988)
2.       Dark Star (1991)
3.       The Polish Officer (1995)
4.       The World at Night (1996)
5.       Red Gold (1999)
6.       Kingdom of Shadows (2000)
7.       Blood of Victory (2003)
8.       Dark Voyage (2004)
9.       The Foreign Correspondent (2006)
10.   The Spies of Warsaw (2008)
11.   Spies of the Balkans (2010)
12.   Mission to Paris (2012)
13.   Midnight in Europe (2014)
14.   A Hero of France (2016)
15.   Under Occupation (2019)