Cloak & Dagger #6

I read this for the 2015 Cloak and Dagger Mystery Reading Challenge

Un crime en Hollande, 1929

Aka Maigret in Holland, tr. Geoffrey Sainsbury, 1940

A Crime in Holland – Georges Simenon, tr. Sian Reynolds, 2014

After an evening party given in the Popinga home in honor of Professor Jean Duclos, who has come to lecture in Delfzijl, Conrad Popinga is killed by a pistol shot. Maigret is informally asked to visit the town and investigate the murder. The suspects abound: Duclos himself, who was holding the weapon immediately after the murder; Beetje Liewens, the 18-year-old mistress of Conrad, who returned to the Popinga house after her lover had taken her home; the grumpy farmer Liewens, who had caught his daughter with the victim and sternly disapproved; the naval cadet Cornelius Barens, who loves Beetje; Oosting, the old salt, whose cap was found in the bathroom Popinga; finally, Mrs. Popinga and her sister Any, who stayed home after the departure of the guests. Oosting's cap and a cigar butt at the scene of the crime fail to impress Maigret since he is convinced that the old sailor had no reason to kill Popinga.

Maigret goes after the culprit, but he must examine deeper human truths along the way, as part psychologist and part anthropologist. He contrasts his own culture (French, urban, Catholic) with that of the Protestant bourgeoisie in a small Dutch town. He realizes the behavior of the characters is profoundly influenced by a strict and austere environment against which some – like Conrad and Beetje – must rebel. Plus, he must contend with an unspoken attitude that doubts the social utility of denouncing and punishing the guilty if the guilty one belongs to the upper classes. Such a bad example for the lower classes, after all. As for comic relief, Maigret, the bull in the china shop, must deal with the delicate sensibilities of the Dutch police and Professor Duclos, who wants Maigret to do as the Dutch do when in Holland.

Fans count this one, the eighth Maigret novel, as one of the better early novels, written in the Depression era. Simenon’s powers lie in his economical style, his simple vocabulary, his way of setting scenes to evoke atmosphere, his probing of the psychology of his characters, and his awareness of and icy compassion for fallibility.

Classic #12

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

An Ermine in Czernopol – Gregor von Rezzori, tr. By Philip Boehm

In 1959 this novel won the prestigious Fontane Prize, a prize for German-language books. It chronicles in a roundabout way the misadventures of a Hungarian hussar in a Romanian town between the wars. His main problem is that he is totally devoid of a sense of humor, which dooms him to raillery against his pompous pride. “Laughter in Czer­nopol,” the narrator tells us, “had been elevated to an art form, a folk art of unparalleled authenticity . . . well endowed with the most vivid references, not to mention all manner of innuendoes.”

As in his better-known book Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, von Rezzori loves to capture types. The hussar’s wife is alternately depressed and anxious while his sister-in-law entertains half the men in town. The monstrously ugly Widow Morar scares the bejesus of the young von Rezzori and his older sister with the lurid story of her husband’s suicide, which she and her three sons witnessed through a keyhole. A recurring character is the creepy prefect, Herr Tarangolian, whose devilish looks and manner fascinate the kids, though they readily see through his patently insincere advice: “Dealing with people, my friends, is really nothing more than a question of the price that one is willing to pay. The better you understand life, the more capital you build.”

Much of the book is related to how children see the world. This, on the discovery of the power of words.

The sayings we overheard, the whimsical sentences, the amazing word formations all burst into glowing colors when touched by the magical light of association [. . .]. It was like a star dropping from the sky if one of my siblings actually used in speech one of the words that had so excited us—for instance, when Tanya spoke of a leap of a great capacity—and if we were able to trace it back, not to the gymnastic exercises which Herr Alexainu had also described as a king of capacity, but to a name—in this case that of a certain Fraülein Kapralik. Of course we had never laid eyes on her, but people said she gave Italian lessons. In any event, beyond our associations with capers and capricious—expressions our father liked to use in reference to us—her name called to mind a fun-loving woman from Capri. A similar wealth of associations opened up when a chance to overlap in pronunciation created by the miracle of fused meanings; for instance, when we heard the newly experienced word ektase—ecstasy—in the name of Năstase, which right away seemed to capture this young man’s tango-like essence.”

The other appeal is that the city of Czer­nopol is also a character in the book.  It belonged to Austria-Hungary until 1918, and then was part of Romania until 1940, when USSR sovietized it. Today it is Chernivtsi, Ukraine.

I would recommend this novel only to readers who liked Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and The Snows of  Yesteryear. The author, in this his first novel, has a tendency to over-write. But this probably just me, for whom lushness is prose goes right over his head.

Mount TBR #12

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2015. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

Angry White Pyjamas: An Oxford Poet Trains with the Tokyo Riot Police – Robert Twigger

This expatriate in Japan memoir presents an interesting twist. At thirty, an English poet feels weak and out of shape so he enters what is probably the most hardcore training program in the world.

The Yoshinkan Aikido Senshusei Training Course (養神館合気道専修生コース) offers about a year’s worth of hellish regime in order to earn a blackbelt in aikido. Designed with the Tokyo Riot Police as the target audience, the program takes people from zero skills to deadly weapon. A typical day takes seven or eight hours in the dojo 道場 the spartan training space for martial arts. A couple of hours go to Japanese lessons for foreigners, meetings, delivering reports, and cleaning the space. About four hours are devoted to brutal and effective training. Considering that foreign trainees are also working at least part-time, on top of taking a year or so to live in Japan, it’s demanding to say the least.

The Japanese have a peculiar way of turning hobbies into marathons of self-torture, abetted by teachers who mutter Yoda-like injunctions as instruction. When foreigners join such hobbies and sports, they see the culture without any party manners. Whether or not they continue depends on how much they love and want to get better at the activity.

Twigger’s experience underlines the basic idea that people are willing to undergo the pain both acute and chronic, yelling and grunting, bullying and meanness of hardcore training if it means that they will grow. Their improvement makes them appreciate the bullying and shouting instructors. Students learn that it is easy to quit and hard to keep going.

The most interesting idea in the book, to me, was the process of becoming indifferent to pain. It is not so much the physical discomfort that must be overcome, because, as everybody who exercises already knows, something is always sore, more or less, so one just gets used to aches and endures chronic pain. What novices must get past is the emotional response that whines "Pain is terrible, unfair, and shouldn’t be happening." There is no should or should not, we must not act as if the world should be something or other, but act according to the way we know it is.

Twigger mercifully avoids the tone of the dotty English intellectual abroad. His brief comments about things Japanese are pretty funny: “The Japanese obsession with their food is a cover for deep embarrassment about its adequacy.” Like most expatriates who write in this genre, he’s coy about costs and his level of proficiency in Japanese, the two things I always yearn to know. I highly recommend this book to people who have lived in Japan or who are curious are what it was like to live in Japan in the early 1990s, just before the Aum Shinrikyo gas attacks in 1994.

Classic #11

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

Talatala by Georges Simenon (French: Le Blanc à lunettes)

In the non-Maigret psychological thrillers, Simenon explores the same existential themes in unusual ways. He creates a familiar yet strange milieu with a troubled central character. Then Simenon turns up the heat. A death, a crime, or new people precipitate change. In this one, despite a climax of an attempted murder and suicide, we have a happy ending. Offhand, I can think of only one other optimistic ending to a psychological thriller by Simenon -  The Little Saint, in which a budding artist won’t allow emotional neglect and sexual abuse in childhood to stop him becoming a famous painter.

This novel is set in the Belgian Congo during colonial times in the 1930s. Brought low by the oppressive climate and malaria, the French and Belgian expatriates battle each other and the bottle. As we would expect, we have to make allowances for incidents and tone since this was written at a time when a writer could evoke shameless sexual practices of a colonist in Africa with a black female who happens to be only 15 years old.

Me, I tell myself that nasty attitudes were a reality in the period between the wars of which Simenon is a persuasive chronicler. Simply deploring outdated social attitudes does not help us to understand their causes or effects, nor does understanding them mean we are exonerating ordinary people in the past for having and acting on such attitudes. Besides, a hundred years from now, what will people say about our own 21st century tolerant ways, like letting Tedd Kruise, who reminds me of the Dick Tracy villain Putty Puss, get anywhere near the Presidency of the United States?

Anyway, back to the novel. After a plane crash the aristocrat Lady Makinson, a bored opium-puffing adventuress, has to stay in the residence of planter Ferdinand Graux. He is out to make his fortune in Africa by farming coffee. He is neurotic as hell. Only seeking peace of mind, he awfulizes every real or perceived threat to stability. The more contact he was with the stranger, the more his over-sensitive alert system is aroused and the more convinced Graux is that disaster is around the corner. Simenon’s self-absorbed heroes are always having alarmed premonitions, which don’t stop them, however, from surrendering to fascinating strangers. Graux knows so little of the world that it takes only a couple of sexual encounters with the aristo to make him fall in obsessive love with her, thus complicating his feelings toward his fiancé Emilienne.

Filled with callow erotic yearning and what he thinks is love, Graux follows her, to her consternation, when she returns to her husband, a diplomat in Istanbul. Meanwhile, Emilienne and Graux’ mother have compared letters from him that make them conclude “something is going on.” Brave Emilienne travels by herself to the Congo, but it is too late: Ferdinand left in pursuit of the opium-smoking hottie. Without losing her self-possession, Emilienne refuses to be impressed with the exotic locale and keeps the plantation and infirmary going, working with Camille, the steward and friend of her fiancé. She meets the Bodets, a young Belgian couple recently moved to the colony and Graux had met on the ship during his own return trip. They personify the kind of expatriate couple that should never live overseas, Europeans out of their depth, ill-equipped to live, much less thrive, in a hardship posting, and almost always wanting something else but they do not know not what.

Given the story is not a strong one, at least it features the hallmarks of its author. Simenon’s style seems at first to be flat and deadpan but its draws its strength from simple, immediately intelligible language. His staging works in that no scene or dialogue is too long or too short. I’ve read Simenon novels set in French provinces, New England, and Africa. Simenon’s versatility with characters and settings reminds me of Dickens. But his treatment of romantic obsession, dependence, alienation, and pursuit is his own.

Vintage Mystery #11

I read this book for the Vintage Mystery Bingo Reading Challenge 2015. The challenge is to read 6 or more Vintage Mysteries. All novels must have been originally written between 1960 and 1989 inclusive and be from the mystery category.

I read this for category S-5, “Medical Mystery.”

A Stitch in Time – Emma Lathen, 1968

Lathen’s smart stylish mysteries take aim at large institutions. She lampooned our diplomats in the State Department in Murder Against the Grain, racists on Wall Street in Death Shall Overcome, the auto industry in Murder Makes the Wheels Go Round, university professors and top administrators in Come to Dust. In this one, her target is the medical system, suburban hospitals, and the pharmaceutical industry. Sure, the book is dated – people smoke in hospitals, unreal – but commentary on why medications cost so much frickin’ money and how that presents a financial burden on working class people still ring true after all these years.

In this novel, shady medical practices are revealed during a law suit. The patient died on the operating table but the suit questions whether the cause of death was a bullet by his own hand or the seven hemostats left inside him after the round’s removal. Her portrait of the conceited doctors, brow-beaten nurses, and wary staff circling the wagons to protect their jobs and the reputation of the hospital sears with serio-comic denunciation of cover-ups. So much for the Hippocratic oath in the aftermath of the murder of an egocentric surgeon (is that redundant?).

This was this seventh of John Putnam Thatcher’s cases. Lathen’s construction of a puzzle is better in this outing than usual. There is a large number of suspects so the perp is not obvious. The best point is the interesting setting and witty prose.