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 He is withdrawn and silent, speaking only when spoken to and then with flat semi-responses that give the impression he’s not saying all he knows. His reticence at work gives him a reputation for being aloof and withdrawn.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 the jaded mystery reader confronts the abyss of repetition, there comes a moment of reckoning - a silent room, a ticking clock, and the whisper: read something new. So I obeyed, lifting a worn volume from a table at a used book sale, its pages heavy with unknown destinies. I did not know the hero’s name. My ignorance was pure.

This book is a genesis - a portrait of series hero Kurt Wallander before the shadows fully claimed him. It is 1969. He is young, raw, stationed in Ystad, a town crouched on Sweden’s southern edge, its medieval bones jutting through cobblestone streets and timbered facades. Kurt walks these streets with a sense of propriety that borders on obsession, and he broods - because brooding is the Swedish birthright. His father, a painter who wields cruelty like a palette knife, mocks his choice of profession and sells the family home without a word, leaving Kurt untethered. Mona, his lover, is a storm - capricious, demanding, a wound that will not close.

Five tales unfold here - three brief, two lingering. They are not mere puzzles; they are meditations on decay. As Kurt peers into the life of a dead neighbor, he asks, How could anyone be so alone? The question hangs like smoke in a winter room.

These stories echo Camilleri’s Montalbano - men marooned in societies unraveling thread by thread. Ystad and Vigata: provincial sanctuaries, now porous to forces beyond their control. In these pages, crime is not an aberration but a symptom - a fever born of breakdown, corruption, and the slow erosion of trust. Beneath the investigations lies a terror older than murder: the terror of hopelessness, of a world where conspiracies bloom like mold, the strong devour the weak, and people literally die of loneliness.

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)

 

Back to the Classics #8

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

Pre-1800 Classic. Cicero, I gather, was popular in the Victorian age, but he fell out of favor among scholars and the thinking public in the 20^th century. Because of a growing interest in Stoicism in the last ten years, however, thinking people with an interest in ancient philosophy have turned to reading Cicero, who borrowed many ideas from Socrates and the Stoics.

On Obligations – Cicero (44 B.C.)

This text was the last that Cicero wrote before he was murdered by killers hired by Mark Antony[1]. The book is addressed to his son whom Cicero suspected was spending his dough living the idle life of a student in Athens. Cicero discusses ideas that his easy-going son – and us if we find them useful - can apply in daily life in order to flourish.

Cicero claims that what defines us as human beings is our rationality and our gift of speech. All of us have rationality in common. Our reason assists us in restraining our emotions so that we can think through issues of ethics and sharpen our ability to identify our duties (obligations) in situations that daily confront us. As human beings with reason, we are responsible for managing our feelings and leading our way of life. We have a free choice among alternatives. We decide where and when we commit our time, energy, talent.

The above paragraph seems familiar, echoing self-help advice we’ve all read during this wretched pandemic but maybe even before, if we have been into self-help writing. It is material that we have internalized so deeply that we don’t even wonder whether it’s true. Of course people should do these things. Conduct should be orderly i.e. done in the right way and seasonable, i.e. done at the right time. Do what you need to do in the best way you can whenever you have to do it and do it that way every time. Sounds like Bobby Knight.

To repeat, this book has been so influential in western culture that its ideas seem as givens. Another example: we have to use our reason determine what is honorable, useful, or virtuous, and which of two virtuous courses is more virtuous. We need to live and work in the real world and gain experience in defining what is expedient (merely tactful or shrewd or self-serving) and how to judge between two expedient things; and what to do when the honorable and the expedient appear to clash. Cicero claims that they only seem to conflict; that we are not analyzing the situation clearly or properly if we don’t see that the honorable action is the expedient and vice-versa. The lodestars here are justice (be fair), courage (tell the truth), prudence (foresee consequences), and temperance (restrain craving and emotion).

The book is also a political philosophy that claims there is no higher calling than public service. For Cicero, the pursuit of glory and good reputation is motivated by inherent benefits to society and the desire to be useful to one’s fellow citizens. What Cicero considers to be the foundation of society is being able to enjoy one’s possessions in complete safety. A rich conservative, Cicero deplores the property tax and any legislation that would reduce income inequality. For all his talk about justice,  Cicero is mum on imperialism of any kind much less Roman imperialism. Nor does he say anything about chattel slavery, not even about its bad effect on free labor and the alienation of the lower classes (whom he calls “the mob”).

Cicero echoes “Know thyself,” and it's an encouraging point that we lose may lose sight of as we age and insensibly change in ways we never anticipated. We have the duty to know ourselves well enough to identify when we are getting older disgracefully, with slower reasoning, narrower thinking, more permeable filter between brain and tongue, shorter tempers, or more forgetful of how polite people act.

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[1] vain loud thuggish greedy stupid muddled ambitious shameless with an insatiable hunger for women and sex – strong men like Mark and Orange follow the same old patterns. 

Last Crossing

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania - Erik Larson

Larson’s forte is writing popular history that reads like adventure fiction with a lot of human interest. This book tells the story of the sinking of the luxury liner Lusitania by a torpedo from a German U-boat in May 1915. This incident is little-known today because the sinking of the Titanic overshadows other maritime disasters that occurred at the beginning of the 20th century.

Plus, the loss of the Lusitania tends to be subsumed in the history of the protracted and complex entry of the US into WWI. Larson points out that in fact the sinking of the Lusitania should not be compared to Pearl Harbor, because even after the sinking American public opinion was not in favor of joining the war. Look at the dates: the sinking was in 1915 and the US didn’t enter the war until 1917. The majority of the American people did not want the Lusitania to be the cause for entry into the war nor did President Wilson. He thought that Americans did not understand what total war would cost the US.

Larson reads voraciously between book projects so he likes to conduct research.  He read memoirs, letters, diaries, and court testimonies in order to capture the human dimension of the tragedy. By the end of this book we have enough knowledge of many of the passengers so that when they meet their various fates as the ship goes down we really feel sorrow for them. In an interview with Europa Press, Larson explained that one of the reasons that led him to narrate this story is the fact that it does not last in memory as “a simple geopolitical episode. …My goal was to bring this story to life so that readers could experience what the people of that time were experiencing.”

He does equally impressive study of the shipping company, the ship, capsule biographies of the most interesting principles, trade routes and the increasingly important role of German submarines during WWI. The historical account also covers political and economic background, the social and political life of the President Woodrow Wilson, Sea Lord Winston Churchill in the British admiralty and the captain of the U-20, the submarine that sank the liner.

Larson makes clear that like many events, from KAL 007 to 9/11, a variety of factors had to come together for the atrocity to occur. If they the ship had left New York a couple hours earlier, the sub would not have seen them in the spot where they were a perfect target. If the weather hadn’t been perfect, the sub would not have gotten off the shot. About 60% torpedoes failed for various reasons. But not this one. Factors meshed and the deaths of civilians just minding their own damn business had to happen.

Of Larson’s various books, I’ve only read Isaac’s Storm, the one about Galveston hurricane in 1900. I found Dead Wake to be as respectful of his subject and the victims and survivors as in Isaac’s Storm.

What Beckoning Ghost

What Beckoning Ghost - Douglas G. Browne

The shadow of World War II looms over this 1947 mystery. Excited by séances run by a Madame Varché, the mother of a submariner lost in the North Atlantic claims to have met and talked with the ghost of her son in London’s Hyde Park. Wally the Bum also sees this apparition and, seven years later, after he sees it again, Wally is found drowned.

Harvey Tuke, “the rudest man in the Department Of Public Prosecutions,” becomes involved after he witnesses the erratic behavior of re-married wife of the submariner at a dinner party he was dragged to by his own wife.  The excitable wife is later found drowned. Aiding Tuke’s informal investigation are his superior Sir Bruton Kames, a bull in a china shop, and Wray, the sly snippy Assistant Commissioner (Crime) of Scotland Yard. The exchanges among the trio are acerbic but never disagreeable.

As in his novel Too Many Cousins, Browne plots nimbly and delineates characters skillfully. The grandson of the Victorian illustrator Hablot K. Browne, better known as “Phiz,” Browne was trained as a painter before he turned to writing professionally. His descriptions are highly visual. This, on the sitting room of a respectable working class granny:

It was comfortable and scrupulously neat. What light there was filtered through the net curtain on to mahogany polished until it added a lustre of its own. Michaelmas daisies filled a vase on the table. Shelves of well-worn books, Goss china, photographs in plush or silver frames, a match-container resembling a pig and inscribed “Scratch Me”, a clock suspended in a model of the Eiffel Tower, an overmantel with an many pinnacles as St. Pancras station, oleograph and prints of “The Soul’sAwakening” and “Dignity and Impudence” – this handful from a host of ornaments recalled to Mr. Tuke the house in Albert Lane he has so recently left. … Parks and the late Victorian era seemed to be his portion just now.

Visual and historical details of London in the late 1940s make the story seem real. Often mentioned are the wrought-iron railings around Hyde Park that were removed and scrapped to provide metals for the war effort. Entire blocks of housing are bombed out, and set to be demolished but not cleared away, a common situation for 10 years in the city after the war. The climax narrates a thrilling subterranean chase in the storm drains under London.

Dover Publications reprinted this book and Too Many Cousins in the 1980s. They also released  wonderful mysteries such as Bodies in a Bookshop, Death Walks in Eastrepps, The PiccadillyMurder, and Death and the Pleasant Voices.

Dead Gestures of Dolls

As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner

In this southern gothic from 1930, each chapter unspools a gossamer thread of story, from the points of view of different characters.  It’s our readerly duty and pleasure to identify how these strands are woven into what Thomas C. Foster calls “only one story,” i.e., all works of literature are part of the same enormous, universal narrative.

Here’s the quest: Five siblings must travel by wagon to a distant town in order to bury their mother. It’s a grueling journey, since in Mississippi in July the encoffined remains decompose like the bonds between the family members.

The siblings are sensible Cash, elusive Darl, outlaw Jewel, little bro Vardaman and the fragile Dewey Dell, the seventeen-year-old daughter. Their father Anse feels stolid and stubborn in the pursuit of his one great ambition in life, finding the money to buy false choppers and “get my mouth fixed where I could eat God’s own victuals as a man should.”

Harrying himself and others with shoulds and musts and oughtas, Anse is also resigned, stupid, feeble, greedy, passive mostly but hypocritically active in justifying the low things he does to get his way. None of these qualities detract from his authority because the dominant patriarchal values are, after all, those of a peasant culture.

I be durn, if a man can’t keep the upper hand of his sons, he ought to run them away from home, no matter how big they are. And if he can’t do that, I be durn if he oughtn’t to leave himself. I be durn if I wouldn’t.

Anse, acting all helpless in his flagrant hangdog sad-sackitude, exerts a malign influence over kin and neighbors alike. It compels them to take Anse at his own self- estimation – the poor luckless, misfortunate man – that needs kindly Christian help. And Anse gets help, probably out of sheer habit that the countrymen are too traditionalist to even think about breaking. “I be durn if Anse don’t conjure a man, some way,” says neighbor Amisted. “I be durn if he ain’t a sight.” Not that Anse is totally wrong about misfortune following him - omnipresent buzzards circle in the sky, hinting to the reader star-crossed Anse may be on to something.

The only other one than Cash who has a broader vision is Darl. And he’s one gone cat: "In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you." Seeing the eternal in the transient (hey, I am is, either), Darl tries to purify and resolve a grotesque situation with a grotesque solution. But he is spent, alone.

In this novel told not only from points of view of the family, we also get folksy voices like Dr. Peabody. Called by useless Anse to tend to his dying wife Addie, Peabody’s voice takes us back to the plainspoken codgers of yesteryear: Comic sarcastic fatalistic realism, the voice calls to mind the appalling stand-up of Jason Compson. And as for strangeness, Vardaman, surely the younger brother of Darl, realizes that his just died mother, like a big fish he caught earlier in the day, has gone to a another mode, another dimension of experience.

Faulkner's prose baffles me. “But it’s better to build a tight chicken coop than a shoddy court-house, and when they both build shoddy or build well, neither because it’s one or tother is going to make a man feel the better nor the worse.”

But his ability to create characters awes me.