Back to the Classics #14

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

Classic in Translation: Maigret a peur was published in 1953.  This translation by Margaret Duff was released in 1961. Duff also translated Maigret and the Apparition. In 2017, Penguin released a new translation of Maigret a peur by Ros Schwartz, who speaks the pandemic-induced truth when she says, “There's no substitute for face-to-face teaching.”

Maigret Afraid – Georges Simenon

Returning to Paris from a convention of cops in Bordeaux, series hero Maigret, a chief inspector, is feeling old and out of it. He has zero interest in the latest forensic technology. With 20 years as a detective behind him, he trusts his own experience and intuition when questioning people involved in crimes. He also has loyal and effective Lucas and Janvier to help him back in Paris.

After procrastinating a social visit for 20 years, Maigret stops at Fontenay-le-Comte to meet his college friend, Chabot, who is the examining magistrate in that country town in the southern Vendée region. Two murders in a week have rocked the nervous populace. The first victim is Robert de Courçon, an eccentric aristocrat; the second is the widow Gibon, a retired midwife. And Maigret is only hours in town when a third victim, the old drunkard Gobillard, falls victim to the lead-pipe wielding culprit.

Gobillard’s body was discovered by Alain Vernoux de Courçon, Robert's nephew. His explanation of being near the scene of the crime raises suspicions against him. A doctor who does not practice, Alain interests Maigret with his hypothesis regarding the culprit, who must be criminally insane since the victims have no connection with each other. But the local folks are getting distraught and restive. On top of forming vigilante groups to patrol the city at night, they suspect that Chabot the examining magistrate will not investigate Alain properly since Chabot is part of the in-crowd of the rich and powerful in the town.

… Rarely, however, had Maigret had such a strong sense of a clique. In a small town like this, of course there are the worthies, who are few and who inevitably meet each other several times a day, even if it is only in the street. Then there are the others, like those who stood huddled on the sidelines looking disgruntled.

The traditional Maigret pattern pieces are stitched together neatly in this novel. On the French Atlantic coast, the Vendée gets its share of rain in the spring. So the novel opens with the usual slashing rain storms. Simenon uses once again the narrow milieu that Maigret must crack open, this time, the élite of small-town rich slipping down the slope and their enabling town officials.

The theme of ‘time waits for nobody’ also comes to the fore. Maigret recalls their long-gone early life and wonders if Chabot was as listless in youth as he seems near retirement age. Maigret’s grunting and taciturnity seem tough but in fact he insightful about and careful with the feelings of others.  Always emphasizing that he is acting in an unofficial capacity, Maigret is careful not to show up his languid friend. Maigret, however, takes tact a little too far when he remains only silently disapproving at the thuggish methods of the local police machinery, treating the vulnerable – poor, female, disliked – like trash.            

And at the end Simenon returns us readers back to normal with Madam Maigret keeping home fires burning in their Paris apartment. It’s a marriage where both partners accept each other just as they are.

Other Maigret novels reviewed on this blog:

·         The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien

·         The Grand Banks Café

·         Maigret and the Wine Merchant

·         Maigret Enjoys Himself

·         Maigret Goes Home

·         Maigret and the Reluctant Witnesses

·         Night at the Crossroads

·         The Misty Harbour

·         Maigret in Holland

·         The Two-Penny Bar

·         The Man on the Boulevard

·         Maigret's Revolver

 

A Mysterious Life

The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg - Nicholas Dawidoff

This 1994 biography opens with Bernard and Rose Berg, who at the end of the 19th century emigrated from Ukraine to Newark, New Jersey, to escape endemic anti-Semitism and occasional pogroms. They worked hard to build a brighter future for their children. Bernard Berg was self-taught and became a pharmacist, working 15 hours a day seven days a week. He did not observe his religion. He could speak and read six languages and it was he who taught his youngest son Morris a.k.a Moe his first foreign languages.

Like his brother who became a doctor and his sister who was a musician and teacher, Moe was prodigy. He excelled in both baseball and schoolwork, which allowed him to study and play at that bastion of anglo-saxon protestants, Princeton. To his father’s deep displeasure and disgust, Moe opted to become a big league ballplayer in an era that had very few college-educated players. His long career as a catcher was undistinguished, studded as it was with injuries. Loquacious Berg however took great pleasure in being singled out by the press as a scholar and gentleman, since sportswriters were not used to getting good interviews from the tongue-tied plug-uglies and hayseeds that populated baseball’s ranks.

On more than one occasion Moe declared that he had chosen to be a baseball player for the money and the opportunity it gave him to visit the major cities of the U.S. and stay in good hotels. Moe liked having vast stretches of discretionary time.  All he had to do was show up and play in the afternoon and he had winter off. He passed the bar in New York but when he did take a job at a prestigious firm, he hated the routines of office work and the expectation that he would be easy to find at work..  He quit and later did everything to hide the experience and no one ever understood why. He also loved obsessively reading newspapers, buying at least six dailies every single day. Nobody could touch his unread papers because they were “still alive.”

When World War II broke out, Berg worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America's first intelligence agency. To serve his country as the fervent patriot that he was, in 1944 he left for Europe to investigate and thwart the threat of the creation of the atomic bomb by Nazi Germany. His goal was to find out which European scientists were involved in the theory and production of the super-weapon and, if so and if necessary, shoot dead Werner Heisenberg, the brilliant German physicist considered to be in charge of the project. During his numerous trips and meetings with the most famous physicists and scientists of the day, Berg learned that Germany was in fact lagging badly on splitting the atom, a finding in which his superiors had never completely believed. Such is the irony of espionage.

After the war, President Truman disbanded the OSS but Berg remained with the CIA until 1952, when he blatantly failed a mission. In 1954, he was fired. Moe Berg at this point found himself alone, without money. The last 25 years of his life saw him living exclusively thanks to the goodwill and favors of friends. He lived with his brother in Newark until, kicked out when his brother's patience and loyalty finally ran out, he moved in with his sister. Everyone understood, to a greater or lesser degree, that Moe no longer knew how to live without working in the secret services, no longer having a purpose that would allow him to live in secrecy, as he had always done.

One would think that the story of athlete and spy would be really exciting. But not so with this particular athlete and spy. In fact, Moe was an eccentric and there’s no denying that a reader had better be deeply interested in unexplainable personalities if they are to reach the end of this book. For instance, not even in love and romance was Moe lucky, despite being tall, good-looking, extroverted, well-read, charming, and funny. He never managed to establish a stable relationship with a woman, though apparently he had quite a number of affairs and was credited with always being seen out on the town with a knock-out in tow. He wanted to introduce his one serious relationship to the family but his father refused to meet her because the two lived together without being married. That relationship ended because Moe and the war put a lot of distance between them and Moe did nothing to narrow that distance.

After Moe's death, the author interviewed psychologists who studied Moe’s OSS work file and personality. They declared that the main cause of Moe’s shallow friendships and lack of long-lasting romantic relationships could be the persistent disapproval that his father expressed about Moe’s seeming unwillingness to be a serious professional and normal adult. Though on the surface it looks like he just wanted to live life on his own terms, in fact Moe seems to have had a serious case of imposter syndrome, keeping everybody at a distance lest, he feared, they would find out of was a phony. It should also be noted that neither his brother nor his sister ever got married or had kids. His sister in fact was so peculiar that Newark people would cross the street to avoid dealing with her complaints, accusations, and rages. Brilliant people with IQ's off the charts don't often have smooth ordinary lives.

As I hinted above, not much happens in the last quarter or so of the book because Moe did not do anything in his middle and old age except travel around the country and freeload off people who liked him. I would recommend this book to travelers facing long flights or hospital patients or people doing vigils in hospitals because the books is interesting and stimulating without being demanding. I would also recommend this book to people who are interested in case studies of imposter syndrome, though this book was written before that phrase became a thing.

No, Not the Sliders White Castle

The White Castle – Orhan Pamuk

My ambition for the last year or so has been to read more modernist and post-modernist fiction so I was pleased when a used book sale coughed up this 1985 novel, the first that gained praise for the author of Snow and My Name is Red.

The setting is Istanbul in the 17^th century. Our narrator is a young Venetian scholar who was taken prisoner by Ottoman pirates and sold as chattel to a teacher and intellectual named Hoja (master). Our narrator and Hoja resemble each other physically and both are highly educated for their time. Lucky our narrator is a quick study and learns the devilishly hard Turkish language quickly. Conversing in a common language is a double-edged sword. They see how similar they are to each other – both having wide ranging intellectual interests in astronomy, the natural sciences, engineering, medicine and architecture – but also realize they have large personal and cultural differences.

The novel examines the master and slave relationship. Unsurprisingly, this unequal economic relationship between two people prevents understanding and sympathy. Furthermore since their relationship is so tilted to the master-owner’s side, they alienate each other and come to hate each other to the point where they want to kill each other. The novel mainly tells about the psychological cat and mouse between these two protagonists.

The novel also discusses the uneasy relationship of royalty and factions of influencers in a court. Hoja meets the very young sultan and impresses the youngster with pseudo-scientific gibberish and wondrous stories faraway places and fantastical beasts. Hoja’s learning and fluency are impressive enough that he is appointed chief astrologer. Pamuk helps us see the precarious place of science and Western knowledge versus an established state religion and folk superstition in a pre-modern empire.

Fortunetelling is based on the interpretations of dreams and daily events, and technology based on science is accepted only insofar as it delivers practical results, such as building siege engines and inventing an absurdly unwieldy weapon that sounds like a tank cannon.  Still even the most benighted soothsayer and bigoted sycophant seem to assume science comes from the West, that any genuine scientific work must be reviewed and approved by the West, and that this never-ending process of generating knowledge is one of the deep differences between East and West.

An epidemic of bubonic plague breaks out. While our two educated protagonists are trying to stem the progress of the pestilence, they are also conducting research on proto-cognitive psychology in order to identify mental processes like learning, memory, perception, and problem-solving. Hoja is too smart to understand why people are so damn dumb and bores the Venetian with rants stuck on the question “How can conservatives be so damn dumb and still manage to be so damn influential?”

In this novel the presence of the bubonic plague will eerily evoke memories and emotions associated with our three summers dealing with the virus. The sultan and his advisors set rules keeping strangers away from the palace. They debate messaging about social distancing in the general population. Factions have a familiar furious debate about lockdowns. One side claims closing down markets, shops, bathhouses and spectacles will slow the spread and save lives. The other side says the economic impact will be too severe. The two intellectuals in our story apply early epidemiological and statistical methods to understand the spread. They are also pressured by the sultan to predict when the epidemic will end. They work in fear of “idiot imams” who publicly warn it is going against God’s will to control the spread, that it is the intention of Heaven to take those fated to die of the plague and wrong to interfere with divine intentions.

The ending is contrived and unbelievable, making me suspicion that postmodernist writers don't know how to end novels. My other criticism would be that the tempo becomes markedly deliberate in the middle of the book. It felt for a time as if I were reading the same process over and over again, though one wonders if we readers were supposed to feel the frustration of the Venetian’s involuntary inertia and indolence, enslaved and passive, seeing no chance of seeing his native country or people ever again. Plus, I felt the perennial feeling that reading in translation I was missing intertextual elements. I know zilch about Turkish literature, nor do I have any sense of Pamuk’s risk-taking when criticizing, or being perceived to criticize, Turkish culture, in either 1985 or 2022.

Classic English Whodunnit

Unholy Dying by R. T. Campbell

In this 1945 murder mystery no suspect has an alibi. When geneticist Ian Porter, disliked by fellow scientists and research assistants alike, is found murdered most foully at a learned convention, plant physiologist John Stubbs is determined to find the perp and clear his nephew, Andrew Blake.

The star is Professor Stubbs. He frequently quaffs beer lest he become dehydrated, eats with no regard to caloric intake, smokes a disgusting pipe, and speaks like a character out of Dickens. His high spirits, eccentricity, and flowery way with words are mostly amusing and engaging. But in the last quarter of the book, the reader is reminded of the New Yorker cartoon in which the wife takes the burly husband aside at a party and advises, “Would you please stop being so ‘larger than life.’” 

Author Campbell was a poet, but he has realistic insight into the rivalries and enmities among scientists, who are ever mindful that credit for generating knowledge be assigned to the correct expert, especially if they are the expert.  The university setting and the atmosphere of competitiveness and adversarial challenge ring true, especially for readers who are experienced with principle investigators who are determined to generate knowledge, establish reputations, attract grants and wow the attendees of learned conventions.

Campbell’s next book was Bodies in a Bookshop. It starred Stubbs too, and the narrator was another young associate, Max Boyle. In Unholy Dying, the young narrator Andrew Blake tells the story in the first person in parts one and three.

 Whodunnit writers have a long tradition of poking fun at their own genre. Affectionate jibes are sent the way of John Dickson Carr, with Stubbs reading Carr’s “impossible murder” mysteries to clear out his brain. Readers that like Edmund Crispin and Rex Stout’s beer-drinking amateur detectives will like Stubbs too. Readers that enjoy careful, literate, and entertaining use of language will be reminded of Nicholas Blake and Michael Innes.

The Ides of Perry Mason 38

On the 15th of every month, we publish a topic related to Our Favorite Lawyer.

The Case of the Vagabond Virgin by Erle Stanley Gardner

Despite its subpar ending, this 1948 Perry Mason story features plot twists and red herrings enough to keep the reader turning the pages until the reveal. In fact, some fans argue that it is one of the best Mason tales.

Department store mogul John Racer Addison hires Perry Mason to bail out a fetching maiden named Veronica Dale. Addison had given hitchhiking Veronica a ride. Her hard luck story combined with her chaste manner, wide azure eyes, and platinum blonde gorgeousness all persuaded Addison to call on his connections to get her a room, alone, in a nice hotel. Talking a walk on the streets, however, Veronica is taken to the cop shop to be booked on a vagrancy charge by a policeman who was concerned for her safety. Remember this is 70 years ago, when women could not get into a hotel on their own, and “vagrancy” was the catch-all charge for taking people in who were doing anything the police didn’t think appropriate (nowadays it is “disorderly conduct”).

Things look up for Veronica when Perry gets her out of jail and she lands a job at Addison's department store in the hosiery department (remember those?). The worm turns though when blackmailer Eric Hansell, red-haired and sleazy, gets a whiff of the incident and makes a beeline to Addison to take a chomp out of him. Through Addison’s head dances a headline like, “Dirty Old Goat Lures Girl to Hotel.” On top of Addison’s trouble, moreover, his partner that he can’t stand, Edgar Z. Ferrell, has bought a house out from under Addison in order to set up a love nest very near the culvert where Addison picked up Veronica.

When it rains, it pours.

Poor Ferrell is murdered without ever having a scene or a line. Addison is arrested for the crime. During the courtroom sequence, Mason makes sneering pompous DA Hamilton Burger look a complete tool for reasons I can’t possibly spoil in a review.

I don’t think Gardner believed his readers expected a lot of characterizations so he didn’t spend time or space constructing characters with deep motives. But for some reason, in this one, the characters are exceptionally vivid from series regular Sergeant Holcomb (ominous, mean, and arrogant) to John Racer Addison (impulsive, irritable, nervous).

Back to the Classics #13

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

Classic on Your ‘To Be Read’ Shelf Longest: In this novel the narrator says, “Let no one tell me that childhood is lived in a timeless present. Rather it is a fever of futures, an ardor of perpetual anticipations.” True – we all remember the frenzy of Christmas. Ardor fades with age. Letting a book stay on the shelf for literally decades even when I expect it to be fun to read may be part of living in the present which I increasingly tend to do instead of looking forward. The future, I figure, will come soon enough. It always has in the past.

Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright - Steven Millhauser

This 1972 novel perpetuates the traditional literary fraud of fiction impersonating fact: in this case, the biography of Edwin Mullhouse (1943-1954), who at the age of ten, wrote the Great American Novel, entitled Cartoons.

The self-styled biographer is a friend of Edwin, Jeffrey Cartwright. Only a few hours after the tragic death of the precocious genius, Pal Jeffrey starts to chronicle young Edwin’s very short but intense existence. For a 12-year-old, Jeffrey has an exceptional ability to grasp all those irrelevant but wonderful things that constitute anyone's childhood.

The first reason to read this novel is to be astonished at Millhauser's re-construction of the whole world of transient impressions, turbulent emotions, dramas and interludes, fears, confusions, bungles and shocks that constitute the daily life of a child. Jeffrey narrates the story in a strangely formal and pedantic voice at times, but at other points in a style of dazzling clarity and coloring. But always with the vision and perspectives of a child, which reminds us fogeys of everyday things sixty years ago, like being in elementary school, bored witless but then excited to be distracted by a spring storm:

Quite suddenly, with a sound of crumpled cellophane, it began to rain. The drops were immense; within minutes the playground was uniformly dark. The wind flung rain against our windows with a sound of fingernails against glass, and scraped the gleaming garbage-can cover in short sharp bursts across the tar. ... Hardly had the last ripple of thunder died away when again the lightning came, a precise enormous many-veined flash that stood fixed for an instant, transforming the heavens into a vast nervous system: in the pale intense light, monstrous black telephone poles stuck up into the livid sky; far away white houses gleamed; and palely luminous through the sheeted rain, white crossbeams of distant frontyard fences gleamed.

The second reason to read this novel is that Millhauser presents a satire of biography, especially literary biography (also skewered in A.S. Byatt’s Possession).  Jeffrey’s anxious dedication to detail astounds and overwhelms and in the end disturbs; for example, one list of many is the list of prizes from candy and cereal boxes that goes on for a hilarious and nostalgic two pages. Like our narrator reminds us:

For what is genius, I ask you, but the capacity to be obsessed? ...We have all been geniuses, you and I; but sooner or later it is beaten out of us, the glory faded, and by the age of seven most of us are nothing but wretched little adults.

Such is the choice our workaholic culture and addiction-driven consumer life offer: be obsessed or be average. As literary biographer Lucasta Miller says, “Only obsession can explain what keeps the literary biographer going.”

When this book was released in 1972, some critics griped that though the writing was evocative and well-observed, the novel seemed to lack deeper meaning. Beyond me is how they missed that this is story of obsession. As such, it joins classics of passion and fixation such as Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, Lolita, The Collector, and Possession (again with Byatt!).

Jeffrey is obsessed with Edwin. The reader wonders why Jeffrey is so sedulous and rapacious in observing and collecting data on Edwin’s life. Is the voracity for information gathering and analysis to fill a gap in Jeffrey and his world? Jeffrey mentions his mother only in passing and mentions his father not at all. He has no sibs. He has no friends but Edwin. He manipulates girls to like him to distract Edwin’s attention from them. Adapting typical maladaptive behavior, Jeffery seeks to control his corner of a chaotic world and allay anxiety by collecting rocks and stamps. And Edwin.

Jeffrey’s asides and mania for lists hint he has blind spots, as he imposes on Edwin’s life Jeffrey’s own narrow interpretations and expectations. He’s cynical and jealous as he describes Edwin’s schoolboy crush on the “unworthy” Rose Dorn. That Edwin’s family is Jewish, for example, escapes his fixed gaze and detailed commentary. So do the sudden disappearances or deaths of kids that have attracted Edwin’s attention and that are blandly mentioned in passing by Jeffrey. Jeffrey is the classic untrustworthy narrator who poses as all-knowing, like a literary biographer.

Millhauser wrote this novel while he was a break from PHD studies in you-know-what major – the reader can tell Millhauser had read enough literary biographies and literary criticism for three lifetimes. While the novel reminds us of an American childhood that those us born in the Forties and Fifties can connect with, it also reminds us that this mock-biography did not stem the tide of doorstop biographies: John Adams by David McCullough (751 pages); Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow (818 pages); and Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather L. Clark (1,154 pages).

Inspector Montalbano #6

The Smell of the Night - Andrea Camilleri

In Sicily, like everywhere else, people aren’t into thrift as much they hope to make a big score for an easy-going old age. And the big score is exactly what Emanuele Gargano, the self-styled wizard of finance, promises. Gargano, in his forties, tall, elegant and so handsome that he seems to have stepped out of an American movie, cultivates a reputation as a brilliant wheeler-dealer in financial matters.

After almost the entire population of the province of Montelusa has entrusted him with their nest eggs, he suddenly vanishes. Having disappeared with everybody’s life savings, the previously admired figure becomes the most hated man south of Naples. Of course, in Vigàta, too, the manure has hit the ventilating device and enraged pensioners are on the look-out for the dastardly thief and their promised returns.

Series hero Commissario Montalbano accidentally gets into a situation, whose consequences he cannot foresee at the beginning. Although a senior investigator argues that the “financial wizard” has been rubbed out by the Mafia, Montalbano believes there is more to it than a gangland killing. Although this case is not part of his job, nosy, he gets deeper and deeper into it.

Maverick Montalbano does what he wants. To say the least, the energetic and emotional inspector is idiosyncratic. He seems to hold a special position, because he opposes orders and invents excuses to get around his superiors with few consequences. In addition, one can call his methods of investigation quite unconventional.

The author skillfully combines the criminal case with a view of Sicily and its inhabitants, so that one would like to pack the suitcases straight away and head for the Med. One feels sympathy with Montalbano who mourns the island’s transformation into a concrete wasteland. The nostalgic tone will remind one of Simenon saying goodbye to his Paris in the late Maigret novels of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Camilleri writes easy, less frilly prose but in no way unimaginatively. His stories are not overloaded, getting to the point right away. Also the humor comes in welcome doses, as in the other books. The ending especially beautiful and evocative.

Year of Wonders

Year of Wonders – Geraldine Brooks

A best-seller in 2001, this book was the debut novel of Brooks, a journalist, essayist and historian. It’s surprising anybody’s first novel could engage us hardcore readers with so much storytelling skill and take us so effortlessly to a distant time and place.

From the fascinating initial chapter, we are transported into the setting, so strange yet at the same time realistic, of the autumn of 1666 in a small English village. Brooks appeals to our senses so we see its colors, we breathe its scents, we admire its misty green landscapes. This story is narrated in the first person by our protagonist, Anna Frith, the 18-year-old maid of the rector of the village. She has passed and will go through trials and come out with her head high, showing her strength and courage.

It is to widow Anna's house that nice Mr. Viccars, a tailor tired of London, will bring bolts of fabric infested by fleas which will then spread bubonic plague throughout the village. With a clear and concise narration, the author has us witness the succession of events in the small community, the disgusting deaths, the testing of Christian faith, the yielding to superstition and occult practices, the solidarity that will give way to selfishness and mob violence, the loss of clear thinking to anxiety, as the social and economic order withers away.

This is a superb historical novel. Brooks bids us to reflect on human nature and its strengths and weaknesses, when it is faced with unpredictable disorder and unrelenting grief. Reading this novel in the shadow of a million covid deaths in the US it’s impossible not to feel involved in the emotions of the characters or not be reminded that ordinary people are capable of both selfish and selfless behavior in extraordinary circumstances.