Classic #1

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2015.

David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

I highly recommend this classic coming of age novel. The title character, himself a writer, narrates his life, from his birth until the achievement of his personal and professional maturity, as if he were writing memoirs with no intention to publish. Thus, the tone is introspective, rueful, nostalgic without being misty. As for the abundance, Dickens will be a writer who prefers to use two full pages to describe and report something that another writer would do in only a paragraph. But I found this copiousness to be perfect for a vacation-like read. In early January, courses have not yet stated so I can just settle into reading a lavish rich book of an evening and let all David’s adventures and misadventures go by.

To my mind, the profusion of detail contributes to making characters come alive. Dickens introduces readers to a large number of characters, some of these very eccentric, that are wonderfully drawn. Even the bit players – waiters, shopkeepers, carters and other caricatures – give off an almost pulsating life and fun.

Some post-modern readers may deplore Copperfield and his friends as unbelievable paragons of virtue, incapable of negative thoughts and liable to tears at any moment. See the too perfect Agnes. See the noble Dr. Strong. As for villains, they are cruel and wicked, without any redeeming features. See the monstrous Murdstone brother and sister not to mention Uriah Heep.

But I don’t think the characters are so uncomplicated.

First, the cad James Steerforth is endowed with great charisma and intelligence, able to move in the highest and lowest social spheres with the same will and desire that he brings to committing a despicable and inexcusable action, such as ruining a rebellious girl. He has self-knowledge too – he knows he’s not a bad person, but that he’s a guy that just does bad things. Really bad things, admittedly, but he’s not a monster, despite how the Peggotys and Ham eventually see him.

Second, Dora Spenlow acts like a pouty, empty-headed child. In an extremely funny scene, David urges her to take more responsibility to run the household, like “firm” Mr. Murdstone urged David’s childish mother. But she freaks out at such dreadful responsibility. She begs David to regard her as his child-wife, which to my mind shows she is well-aware of her deficiencies. She’s also canny enough to guess that David regrets that he ever married her.

Third, Mr. Dick is intellectually disabled, always scratching his head feebly or threatening to stand on one leg when stressed. He possesses, however, amazing emotional intelligence. By chapter 45 we can readily believe his own self-knowledge when he suggests to David that he is probably in a better position than anyone else to clear up the misunderstanding in the Strongs' troubled marriage:

A poor fellow with a craze, sir," said Mr. Dick, "A simpleton, a weak-minded person--present company, you know!" striking himself again, "may do what wonderful people may not do. I'll bring them together, boy. I'll try. They'll not blame me. They'll not object to me. They'll not mind what I do, if it's wrong. I'm only Mr. Dick. And who minds Dick? Dick's nobody! Whoo!" He blew a slight, contemptuous breath, as if he blew himself away.

Best, Aunt Betsy Trotwood has both self-knowledge and plain sense. When David and she talk about the fallen woman:

'Poor Emily!' said I.

'Oh, don't talk to me about poor,' returned my aunt. 'She should have thought of that, before she caused so much misery! Give me a kiss, Trot. I am sorry for your early experience.'

David naively asks her for help in reforming Dora. She nixes his entreaty with:

'Trot,' returned my aunt, with some emotion, 'no! Don't ask me such a thing.'

Her tone was so very earnest that I raised my eyes in surprise.

'I look back on my life, child,' said my aunt, 'and I think of some who are in their graves, with whom I might have been on kinder terms. If I judged harshly of other people's mistakes in marriage, it may have been because I had bitter reason to judge harshly of my own. Let that pass. I have been a grumpy, frumpy, wayward sort of a woman, a good many years. I am still, and I always shall be. But you and I have done one another some good, Trot,—at all events, you have done me good, my dear; and division must not come between us, at this time of day.'

Aunt B. knows be be loved confers benefits. But loving somebody too helps.

She’s also a stoic. When brought to the subject of her property which has been embezzled by Uriah Heep: 'Well, sir,' sighed my aunt. 'All I have got to say about it is, that if it's gone, I can bear it; and if it's not gone, I shall be glad to get it back.’ As fellow stoic Peggoty said earlier in the novel, when David criticized Yarmouth, we have to take things as we find them.

I daresay more astute readers will get more out of David Copperfield than my austere and stoical take. But I guess that’s the point to big whacking novel like this one.

European RC #1

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge 2015.

The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien - Georges Simenon, tr. Linda Coverdale in 2014

Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien (1931) has been translated as The Crime of Inspector Maigret and Maigret and the Hundred Gibbets. This 2014 translation is part of a raft of Maigret novels re-issued by Penguin.

On a routine mission in Brussels, Inspector Maigret’s suspicions are aroused in a café by a shabbily dressed individual counting a bundle of cash. The dubious man buys a cheap suitcase, and so does Maigret. The man takes a train to Bremen in northwestern Germany, and so does Maigret. Seizing an opportunity, Maigret switches the two suitcases. In Bremen, the man takes a hotel room, and so Maigret gets the room next door. When man discovers the substitution of suitcases, he commits suicide with a revolver. Maigret opens the switched suitcase, and finds that it contains what testing reveals to be a suitcoat that is not only old but blood-stained too. Deeply shocked by the fatal consequences of his acts, Maigret feels determined to get to the bottom of this strange chain of events, to understand what drove a man to take his own life.

The second Maigret novel proves no exception to other Depression-era mysteries such as Peter the Lett, A Man's Head, and the genuine downer The Yellow Dog. All have a sad atmosphere, like November and December in northern Europe. Gray skies, fog, sloppy rain, cruel gusts are rendered well, in short brushstrokes. So are the mists and shadows around very old buildings such as churches and guild halls. Ditto for the warm, stuffy, smoky interiors of bars, offices, hotels, newsrooms, morgues, police stations with their small silences, or soft obscure sounds.

And what a story! Dark and macabre. Nothing to celebrate, just the tragedy of romantic and adventurous youth going terribly off the rails in the blink on an eye. Simenon manages to bring his characters so closely to us that we end up realizing that we could all act like that, pressed by those circumstances and fueled by alcohol, for college students who toy with the hazardous assumption that in a world where life is cheap there’s no difference between crime and virtue.

But we fans will bet anything that our series hero Maigret does not assume life is cheap. Moving among Bremen, Rheims, Brussels and Paris, Maigret is his usual unwavering, taciturn self:  "a pachyderm plodding inexorably towards its goal." So between the atmosphere, international settings, and unusual story, I highly recommend this early Maigret story newly translated by Linda Coverdale.

The Road to Ubar

The Road to Ubar: Finding the Atlantis of the Sands - Nicholas Clapp

An Emmy award-winning documentary film maker is intrigued by stories about Ubar, a lost city in what is now Oman. He persuades NASA that he's a serious researcher so they take shots of the area from space. This data collection provides evidence for backers who pony up for a 1991-92 expedition.

This book presents a narrative of desert travel and archeological dig in the matter-of-fact style and enthused tone of a Nat Geo article. Some parts do ramble and the fictionalizing didn't work.

But this is well worth reading for those with a passing interest in travel stories, the Middle East, or pop archeology

Wolf Song

Wolf Song  - Harvey Fergusson, 1927

Critics and discerning readers of Westerns have called  the finest novel of the American West. The protagonist is Sam Lash, a mountain man, and is based roughly on the life and times of Kit Carson.

The novel opens with a bang. Chapter One moves quickly, in economical and flowing prose. The descriptions of nature and fights are a cut above. The ethnocentric and male chauvinist baggage that we’d expect in a novel written in the 1920s keep this book from being as satisfying a read as A.B. Guthrie's The Big Sky, another novel on the mountain men.

Sometimes the vernacular speech is forced and cheesy. Dadgummit, shoot me for a tail-draggin' galoot if it ain’t true this novel has survived a purty spell and folks are still reading it in 2008.

Survival counts. I think readers who like semi-literary westerns or are interested in the history of Taos and New Mexico will enjoy this novel

Back to the Classics 2015 Sign Up Post

June 22, 2015: I read these books for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2015.

Click on the title to go to the review.

•  19th Century Classic: My Lady's Money - Wilkie Collins

•  20th Century Classic (fiction): Kappa - Akutagawa Ryunosuke

•  Classic by a Woman: Among the Tibetans – Isabella Bird

•  Classic in Translation: Magic and Mystery inTibet – Alexandra David-Neel (original in French)

•  Very Long Classic: David Copperfield – Charles Dickens.

•  Classic Novella: The First Men in the Moon – H.G. Wells

•  Classic With a Name in the Title: Best Max Carrados Mysteries – Ernest Bramah

•  Humorous or Satirical Classic: A Rogue’s Life -  Wilkie Collins

•  Forgotten Classic: Hoaxes - Curtis Daniel MacDougall

•  Non-fiction Classic: The Naturalist in LaPlata – W.H. Hudson (lesser-known work by a famous author of Green Mansions)

•  Children's Classic: The Lost World – Arthur Conan Doyle

•  Classic Play: Volpone – Ben Jonson

Running the Amazon

Running the Amazon – Joe Kane

In this travel book by Joe Kane, a multi-national team raises the funding to locate the source of the Amazon in order to follow it from the snowfields of its origin in the Peruvian Andes to the Atlantic Ocean. What makes this travel book exceptional is that the personal and inter-cultural conflicts among the 11 team members are much more interesting than the usual egomania and fatigue-based sniping and carping that mar other travel narratives. The writing style is restrained even when Kane is dealing with dangerous white water, extreme geography and weather, bugs snakes and germs oh my, and Shining Path guerrillas. Well worth reading.

Stalin & His Hangmen

Stalin and His Hangmen - Donald Rayfield

It is easy to see why this book in used in poli sci courses about highly repressive political regimes. This book will give an insight in the reality of repression when the gangsters in a society occupy the highest positions of power. The concise biographies of Stalin himself and his scorpion-like henchmen are especially interesting. The only drawback is that we don't get a sense of the psychology of coercive persuasion: who were the jailers, the torturers, the executioners and what buttons did their superiors have to push to turn ordinary slobs and brutes into evil war criminals. It's not enough to imply that they did evil deeds out of fear of the consequences of non-compliance.