Back to the Classics #18

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

20th Century Classic: This novel is generally regarded as set in the Jazz Age – but it’s not: it’s set a couple years before and a bit after the Great War so it’s hardly a mirror of Flaming Youth in the Roaring Twenties. Plus, I never knew critics regarded this one as the worst of his four complete novels. Besides inordinate length and immaturity of vision, it seems they didn’t like his uncertain stance toward his characters. My stance as a reader was uncertain. I didn’t sympathize with their partying but I warmly sympathized with their love – Fitzgerald can make thems that was young once and married 40+ years since remember falling in love. How is that not a super-power?

The Beautiful and Damned – F. Scott Fitzgerald

In this 1922 American novel, an indolent young man with expectations of millions meets a beautiful woman who wants to party as hard as possible while she is still young and attractive. In luminous prose, Fitzgerald tells the story of how their love turns tumultuous and then just sour. It’s the kind of love story with self-destructive characters that reminds us how good life can be even though we face money worries, have plain looks and narrow prospects, get married with eyes wide open, and stay married with eyes wide shut.

And don’t abuse alcohol.

It’s certainly not a novel for readers who need to like the characters. The characters are as detestable here as Trump, Daisy, and Jordan in The Great Gatsby: nonchalant, manipulative, sullen, hostile, rude, stubborn, with favorite words being “now” and “more.” For other readers it’s fun to toss back the popcorn and revel in how two sweethearts paint the pre-WWI Big Apple red, spend money they don’t have, live in nonstop denial, and hang out with worse and worse companions. Nya-nya, you inept rich and pretty people should’ve stayed home, read Thackeray, and listened to Mama Told Me (Not to Come), like we hardcore readers do.

How does Fitzgerald make us stick with these dissolute characters, giving abject lessons for readers that don’t need reminders that alcohol abuse will drive them to the dogs? Because he gives the familiar moralistic reminders in new vivid ways. For instance, he raises the question if Americans twisted up the “pursuit of happiness” into the hedonic treadmill. In short, get over chasing the next big thing:

And that taught me you can't have anything, you can't have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it - but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.

But we don’t read serious fiction only for reminders on how to live a flourishing life. Fitzgerald tells and shows information about his characters and mixes in truths about the weird irrationality of love that aren’t beautiful. Gloria broached the idea that losses and disappointments may accrue to the extent that even love is left behind. Love isn’t enough to balance expectations failed over time.

What a writer Fitzgerald was! Perfect, natural flow of writing. I put it down only when I felt too exhausted to read it as closely as it ought to be read. I suppose some readers and editors wish that many melodramatic details of Anthony and Gloria's lazy decline were cut. It’s painful to see them and their friends shredded by their ignorance – nobody in the second-generation of rich raised them to equip themselves with any values that would protect them, so they were inevitable victims of their feelings and dissipation, bent under the weight of boredom and bad company, so young and naive about time. 

But after the sound of decanters shattering and frenzied laughter, the ending gives us hope for Gloria as an genuine grown-up who just happens to wear a Russian sable coat.

Note re Errata: Tom, Tom Buchanan, not Trump. Silly me, getting two arrogant hypocritical hulking bullies confused. One last point: Anthony’s expected inheritance is $30 million in 1920 which is the equivalent of about $400 million in 2022.

Taoist Monks In Cowls?

The Haunted Monastery – Robert van Gulik

Judge Dee is travelling back to his headquarters in Han-yuan with his three wives and his faithful assistant Tao Gan when sudden autumn storms compel the party to shelter in a Taoist monastery.

He is exhausted but eager to gather background on the recent deaths of three young women in the monastery. However, as an official in a Confucian bureaucracy where observing etiquette is a big deal, he is forced to conduct hypocritically polite conversations, watch a mystery play and participate in a banquet of macrobiotic fare he can’t stand.

Adding to the comedy is a poet who writes rude verses about the abbot and a vaudeville girl whose bear loves only her and is dangerously crabby with everybody else. In a funny scene with another entertainer woman, she asks Judge Dee for his advice on how to deal with Sapphic advances to which our judge gives advice more tolerant than we’d expect from a magistrate in the 670s.

More sobering, however, through a window, he sees a one-armed woman being assaulted by a soldier. And he notes an odd relationship among a young woman who wants to become a nun, her chaperone, and her brother. In a story that takes place in the course of only one night, Judge Dee is pitted against the most dangerous kind of crook: the smart guy who’s gone off the rails by thinking the rules don’t apply to him.

The perp is pretty easy to figure out in this story that depends mainly character and setting for its interest. I wonder, too, if Taoist monks in fact wore cowls, attended matins, or got promoted to be almoners and priors. At about 100 pages, the length is just right, with a fast last third of the mystery making up for the rather plodding first two-thirds.

Another Damn'd Thick, Square Historical Novel, eh, Mr. Eco?

Baudolino - Umberto Eco

Using postmodern irony, paradox, and unreliable narration, Eco gives a wonderful sense of medieval thought and culture. Doing so, he explores the impact of fantasy, fabrications, and gossip upon what we ruefully agree to call “reality.” “I had not yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one,” the hero of the title says.

Eco is often accused of writing professorial prose, but in this novel Eco’s alchemy combines the historical, political, fantastical, picaresque and adventurous to create magic. But I confess at the 2/3’s mark I was flagging. One reason was the endless Games of Thrones-type intriguing and fighting amongst factions. Another reason I was weakening was the vast erudition of the author. I quailed in particular due to his deep knowledge of medieval history, as well as the myths and legends that infuse it – not to mention our own images of it, fed by, for example, Ivanhoe or Eaters of the Dead or The Name of the Rose or movies from Robin Hood with Errol Flynn to the forgotten 1981 epic Excalibur (which would be cool, come to think of it, with a head full of mescaline).

I had the impression that Eco had a lot of fun writing this novel. I also imagine that he enjoyed running down countless sources to enrich and embellish the prose with a range of tones, sometimes ironic, sometimes melancholy, sometimes amazed or ostentatiously learned to the point of laboriousness of detail, calling to mind another detail-ridden novel The Quincunx.

In the second part Eco introduces the reader into a surprising collection of peoples, creatures, monsters and legendary characters in a journey into the unknown that comes close to the fantasy genre. I recommend this big novel to readers that derive pleasure from getting overwhelmed in literary labyrinths.

The Limbo Line

The Limbo Line  - Victor Canning

This 1963 thriller combines an adventure yarn with a Cold War spy story. Readers that enjoyed Greenmantle by John Buchan or Conan Doyle's Brigadier Gerard stories would probably like this tale.

Richard Manston, retired spy, lives in the English countryside as a gentleman farmer. His ex-spy master Ronnie Sutcliffe tempts him back into the Great Game with the chance to foil a fiendish Soviet plot.

The Soviet trade agency is acting as the façade for a program that kidnaps and brainwashes Russian defectors. The victims are then trafficked back to the People’s Paradise. They are forced to tour, lecturing about how they were duped into defecting and how unjust life is in the cowardly West.

Sutcliffe’s joes have marked down Irina Tovskaya, a ballet dancer, as the next likely victim. Manston’s mission is to use Irina as a lure to attract the attention of the Soviet thugs. Then, once they’ve snatched Irina, Manston follows them in order to identify the line of safe houses – the Limbo Line - back to the Eastern bloc.

Manston does his damnedest to keep things professional but he falls for Irina anyway. The chase leads to the countryside of France, the setting for an exciting climax with all the right elements: cruel henchmen, evildoing communists, a damsel in distress, and lots of original action sequences in curious settings.

Besides the intelligent writing we like to see in James Bond stories for adults, Canning could put across great characters. The bad guys are utterly believable as capable professionals who would be likeable even admirable but for their soulless and inhuman cause. The oppressors stand in contrast to Manston, whose cause is Irina. As somebody once said in a James Bond novel, “People are easier to fight for than principles. So surround yourself with human beings.”

Victor Canning was a prolific writer who was considered in the same storied ranks as Desmond Bagley, Hammond Innes, Geoffrey Household, and Manning Coles. His masterpiece The Rainbird Pattern was awarded the CWA Silver Dagger in 1973 and nominated for an Edgar award in 1974.

The Ides of Perry Mason 40

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

The Case of the Substitute Face - Erle Stanley Gardner

This is the twelfth Perry Mason mystery, published in 1938. Unusually for Gardner, this murder story begins on the high seas, on a cruise ship embarking from Honolulu and bound for San Francisco.

Perry and his office manager Della Street are returning from conducting research on the police forces of China and Japan (the paper was later titled "Torture and the Culture of Terror in Areas Occupied by the Imperial Japanese Empire"). Separate staterooms, if you please. Della’s cabin-mate has been Belle Newberry, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Carl Newberry. Though an observer would expect Carl be cheerful on the first vacation in the adulthood of an ill-paid bookkeeper, not so. Carl has been distant and distrait with his family and other passengers

But it’s a distraught Mrs. Newberry who seeks Perry’s professional advice. She suspects her family’s vacation is being paid for with newfound wealth that her husband embezzled from his former employer. Perry tries to put her off, explaining that murder cases are more in his line. Mrs. Newberry is worried that exposure of her husband’s sticky-fingered misdeeds and the ensuing scandal would damage the marital prospects of Belle. Because Perry has been charmed by Belle’s vivacity and dislike of sham (though she herself is pretending to be rich to attract a millionaire’s kid on board), Perry says he will help the family through its thorny problem.

Mason calls his PI Paul Drake to execute a plan. The goal is to cut a deal with Carl’s former employer whereby Carl can keep out of The Big House by agreeing to return the remaining money. The plan has a chance but is blown up when the murder of Carl Newberry takes place.

It looks bad for Mrs. Carl Newberry. An eyewitness puts her on the scene of the crime, an open deck, at the time the ship was buffeted by high winds and torrential rain. Deputy District Attorney, C. Donaldson Scudder, oozes complacency and, seeing the trial as a mere contest of wits, the eyewitness is determined not to be shaken out of what she claims she saw. Although shorter than usual, the courtroom scenes sizzle with exciting give and take. It’s persuasive because the reader knows Gardner is bringing his own 20 years of courtroom experience with difficult witnesses to the story.

Other outstanding scenes feature Perry interviewing persons of interest in fast-paced slangy dialogues. For comic relief, Mason commits a B&E with Paul Drake in his role as BooBoo, Bess Marvin, or Ron Weasley, the sidekick full of trepidation but dependable loyalty and resource when the chips are down, no matter what trouble the hero stirs up. As for the damsel in distress, Della Street goes missing and an alarmed Perry pulls out all the stops to locate her. Before they find her is about as fretful and crotchety as we’ll ever see our favorite lawyer.

I enjoy the Mason mysteries from the 1930s. They feature an ornery attitude born of the Depression, a rough edge of the Little Guy’s Lawyer fighting a criminal justice system savage in its determination to put somebody in the gas chamber even if it’s got to be the wrongly accused in the dock. Gardner also takes swings at the hypocrisy of the rich when it comes to maintaining their perks and social position against the lazy undeserving Rest of Us.

Back to the Classics #17

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

Classic Short Stories. The first five stories were written for the Saturday Evening Post and the sixth was rejected by the Post but snapped up by Scribner’s. The author needed the revenue so he polished the six stories, added a seventh story to improve overall unity, and published the book in February, 1938. If I can put on my ESL Teacher hat, Sartoris is said “SAR-tris” or “SAR-dƏ-ris” because in unstressed syllables /t/ becomes /d/, like city, right or left, forgettable. It’s not “sa-TOR-is.” And “Bayard” is said “baird.

Content Advisory: Since we live in a twitchy society where the needless to say increasingly needs to be said, that rotten racist epithet is all over this story, which shouldn’t be a shock because the fiction is set in a racist society.

The Unvanquished – William Faulkner

The stories are set in Mississippi during and just after the Civil War. They tell the story of the Sartoris family and their slaves. The protagonists Ringo (black) and Bayard (white) have grown up together and are in their mid-teens. Ringo lives in the house and calls Bayard’s grandmother Miss Rosa Millard “Granny,” making the reader wonder if Ringo and Bayard are half-brothers.

The first couple of stories easily hold the attention because they were written for a general magazine audience that Faulkner knew was not up to the challenges of complex grammar and narrative devices as found in The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying. Narrated by the adult Bayard Sartoris, they combine humorous storytelling and gallantry of the Lost Cause stuff (shades of Margaret Mitchell) with the more realistic background anxiety of nearby combat, depredations by the Union army, robbery and murder committed by Southern highwaymen, and uncertainty about how swiftly the war is going to end in defeat for the Confederacy. The mature Bayard remembers that Ringo and he were “the two supreme undefeated like two moths, two feathers riding above a hurricane.” One feels the storm was not only the Civil War but tense racial relations during Reconstruction too.

Gradually, the stories become darker. Granny, a strict Christian woman with no tolerance for cussing or lies either of omission or commission, has to balance the imperative to provide food and money to kin and neighbors with deception, thievery, forgery, and fraud. Granny’s good-intentioned but illicit activities not only force her to consort with ruffians and corrupt her into the sin of pride but also suck Ringo and Bayard into felonies, violence, revenge, and corpse mutilation.

Faulkner’s subject here: know at some point conscience and ethics have to be reconciled with the cultural imperatives of ‘help the poor and afflicted’ and an ‘eye for an eye.’ Ponder disregarding public opinion in an honor-bound culture when reputation – a must-have when you don’t have money, property, or future prospects - is involved.

Faulkner’s next subject is memory’s contribution to our knowing things, our accepting a version of reality as true. To divert the boys on a rainy day, Granny Millard reads out cake recipes from a cookbook (I had an aunt that read recipes aloud, providing running commentary on whether she thought they would work or not). Ringo always requests a specific recipe be read.

“Cokynut cake, Granny." He said coconut cake every time because we never had been able to decide whether Ringo had ever tasted coconut cake or not. We had had some that Christmas before it started and Ringo had tried to remember whether they had had any of it in the kitchen or not, but he couldn't remember. Now and then I used to try to help him decide, get him to tell me how it tasted and what it looked like and sometimes he would almost decide to risk it before he would change his mind. Because he said that he would rather just maybe have tasted coconut cake without remembering it than to know for certain he had not; that if he were to describe the wrong kind of cake, he would never taste coconut cake as long as he lived.

Ringo would rather think that he ate coconut cake but doesn’t remember eating it than know positively that he’d never eaten it. Ringo naturally prefers to remember something in a way that makes him feel good. Ringo wisely avoids jumping to conclusions, as the consequence of being wrong may be disturbing to his sense of self and his place in the world. Bayard, admitting Ringo is ahead of him, also treats memory in a wary fashion. When he relates the story of his child-self witnessing Granny and Loosh burying a trunk full of the family silver, he thinks, “I either looked out or dreamed I looked out the window and saw (or dreamed I saw) the lantern.”

Faulkner’s big subject: Given memory is so tricky, unreliable, self-serving, biased, how do we view huge historical events, especially while we are personally involved? As for the Civil War in American memory, many books have been written. See David W. Blight. Given the world is so complicated, we accept explanations of life and events that are pragmatic or satisfying – good enough, as it were -  even if not logical or based in reality. 

The cover of the Vintage edition and various critics claim this is a novel, but I think it would be better to read this book as a collection of inter-related short stories – that is, read only one or two every Sunday for a month – because Faulkner himself never intended the stories to coalesce into a novel. He said, “I saw them as a long series. I had never thought of it in terms of a novel, exactly. I realized they would be too episodic to be what I considered a novel, so I thought of them as a series of stories.”

Sometimes It Rains

Note: Having read novels like Red Harvest, Dirty Snow, The Gate, The Translator, Light in August, and The Crime of Olga Arbyelina, I’m hardly the kind of reader that avoids uncomfortable fiction. I don't need to like characters. Nor do I require an ending in which Jeeves has put everything right. But I am a reader who can feel tried enough to quit a novel. So apply the rule that always works: If the writer of a review is clearly an idiot, and the review is negative, then the result is a positive review.

The Quincunx - Charles Palliser

This 1989 chunkster takes the form of a massive Victorian novel of suspense like Bleak House. But it uses modern techniques. We have an omniscient narrator whose information could be interpreted in multiple ways. We meet tight-lipped characters that sit on information. We inferring readers know stuff that the characters don’t know.

After about 250 pages, I had to bail, but not because of the equivocal nature of the narrative.

First, though I enjoyed the detailed descriptions in The Children’s Book, here they demanded too much of my patience. I grant the author knows the economics and anthropology of Victorian London as deeply as Henry Mayhew. But the copiousness of background detail made me wait too long for the story to uncurl.

Second, relentless is the theme in The Quincunx that in Victorian England life for the vulnerable was typically brutish, uncertain, and full of distress. I was exhausted by the insistent background drone - like a leaf blower - that back then the poor never had a moment of rest. Going out of my way – i.e., reading a 900-page story set in a vicious, wicked, and miserable world – to lick the bleeding wounds of despair just didn’t strike me as a wise use of my time, from a mental fitness point of view.

Third, Dickens, Collins, and Trollope ruled autocratically over stories, wielding the power of life and death over characters. But we readers always knew that even though these authors were going to put protagonists through snubs, job woes, violence, affliction, murder trials, self-discovery, hellish marriages and on and on, they were not going to stew the lifeblood out of the protagonists.

Don't get me wrong. I’m down with characters cringing when authors reach for their whip (paraphrasing Nabokov, who put Humbert and Albinus through all they deserved). But as I read this novel, I realized that this late 20th century author was making no deals with me the reader along these lines of ‘things working out.’

Stewing the lifeblood out of this willful brat and his annoying mother was a distinct possibility, a prospect I approached with trepidation and relish, an unbecoming teetering that doesn’t do me proud. I suspected in genuine modernist style the ending was going to be ambiguous whether kiddie and marmee were ever going to get out of the jam in which the heartless scumbags landed them. And I thought I would be needing more than the ambiguities after 900 pages of anxiety, cupidity, and duplicity. 

Call me needy.

So, the plenty of detail and background, the risk of harsh themes in a treacherous world leaving indelible imprints on my mind, and the uncertainty whether the ending would be clearly unfortunate or ambiguously felicitous were too much for me. I don’t like being the reader that sniffs because the author didn’t write the book the reader had in mind, but bugging out happens, even at the risk of coming off as idiot whose negative review can – maybe even should - be interpreted as a positive review.

Hmmm ... where's that copy of Thank You, Jeeves? 

Simenon biography

Georges Simenon: Maigrets and the Romans Durs - Lucille Frackman Becker

This is a short biography of the prolific author and a critical overview of his detective novels and existential noir thrillers. Call me a credentialist, but I don’t read biographies of literary figures unless the biographer has authority. And it's clear Becker does have the credentials. She was professor of French literature at Drew University (New Jersey) and she worked to found the Simenon Collection there.  

Readers that would like this biography would be fans of the remarkable character Inspector Maigret, the Parisian homicide detective who starred in about 75 mystery novels and hundreds of movies and television episodes. Despite Simenon's appalling literary output – almost 200 penny-dreadfuls as apprentice work and almost 400 novels with his name on them – Simenon is considered a great 20^th century writer and never caught heat for his prolificness, unlike Dickens, Thackeray, or Trollope.

Becker says, “The cultural importance of Simenon's oeuvre derives not from its success in terms of financial ratings or of records established, but from its success in conveying to the reader insights into the human condition.” In this short biography, she is tactful in covering the subject’s mother issues and resulting misogyny. She also provides a judicious examination of the subject in occupied France and his cautious decision to leave France in 1945 and live in the US for almost 10 years.  

In clear language that is easily understood by a lay reader, she examines both the Maigret stories and stories of people living lives of quiet desperation. She makes the excellent point that what distinguishes the two genres is that the conclusions of Maigret novels offer the reader the hope of peace in a stable world while those of the psychological novels offer, well, sighs of resignation in a universe indifferent when it’s not being hostile.

I’d recommend this authoritative and readable biography.

The Roman Durs

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 temperate responses to life in the rear view mirror, driven by the shock of aging, altered circumstances or irrational responses to more or less normal occurrences.

In the 1980s, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich released a boatload of romans durs in English. But at the time US culture wasn’t into home truths (Walkman, moonwalking, Magnum PI, Rubik’s Cube, neon, Chariots of Fire, big hair, preppies, aerobics, sleepwalking president, etc.). 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 days, in the shadow of the pandemic, endless senseless violence, and sanctimonious bastards strangling liberty and safety.

Click on the year published to go to the review of the existential noir pulp.

·         The Nightclub  / L'âne rouge (1932) ·         Tropic Moon / Coup de Lune (1933) ·         The Lodger / Le locataire (1934) ·         Aboard the Aquitaine / 45° à l'ombre (1936) ·         Talatala  / Le Blanc à lunettes (1937) ·         Donadieu’s Will / Le Testament Donadieu (1937) ·         The White Horse Inn / Le Cheval Blanc (1938) ·         The Family Lie / Malempin (1940) ·         The Delivery (1941) ·         Uncle Charles has Locked Himself in / Oncle Charles s'est enferme (1942) ·         The Truth About Bebe Donge / La Vérité sur Bébé Donge (1942) ·         Across the Street / La fenêtre des Rouet (1945) ·         Act of Passion / Lettre à mon juge (1946) ·         The  Mahé Circle / Le cercle des Mahé (1946) ·         Three Beds in Manhattan / Trois chambres à Manhattan (1946) ·         The Reckoning / Le Bilan Malétras (1948) ·         Aunt Jeanne / Tante Jeanne (1951) ·         The Girl with a Squint / Marie qui louche (1951) ·         A New Lease of Life / Une Vive Comme neuve (1951)

·         The Burial of M. Bouvet  / L'Enterrement de Monsieur Bouvet (1952) ·         Dirty Snow / La Neige était sale (1953) ·         Big Bob  / Le Grand Bob (1954) ·         The Magician / Antoine et Julie (1956) ·         The Little Man from Archangel / Le petit homme d'Arkhangelsk (1956) ·         The Premier / Le Président (1958) ·         The Grandmother / La Vieille (1959) ·         Sunday (1959) ·         The Widower / Le Veuf (1959) ·         Teddy Bear / L’Ours en peluche (1960) ·         The House on Quai Notre Dame (1962) ·         The Fate of the Malous / Le Destin des Malou (1962) ·         The Old Man Dies / La mort d’Auguste (1966) ·         The Confessional / Le Confessional (1966) ·         The Move a.k.a. The Neighbours (1967) ·         The Man on the Bench in the Barn / La Main (1968) ·         The Rich Man / Le Riche Homme (1970) ·         The Disappearance of Odile / La Disparation d'Odile (1971) ·         The Innocents / Les Innocents (1972) ·         The Glass Cage / La Cage de Verre (1973)

Maigret novels reviewed on this blog, click on the title to visit review:

·         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