Nonfiction RC #20

I read this book for the Nonfiction Reading Challenge 2014.

Adventures in Japan: A Literary Journey in the Footsteps of a Victorian Lady - Evelyn Kaye, 2000

The 1990s saw many travel books of the “in their footsteps” variety, in which a writer would trace the route of a famous traveler. In this case, travel writer and journalist Evelyn Kaye followed the tracks of Isabella Bird in the Tohoku (northeast) and the island of Hokkaido in Japan in 1998.

On the upside, her writing is enthusiastic, endearing in a solo female traveler who has never been to Japan before and does not speak the language. Everything is new to the writer, the pretty scenes, the easy transportation, the tasty food. Everybody is nice, willing to go out of their way to help her have a nice time. She quotes judiciously from Bird’s Unbeaten Tracksin Japan (1878), which I read in tandem with this one.

On the downside, she seems to belong to the “if you can’t say something nice” school of travel writers, so we have to rely on the Bird quotations. This, on the culture of the Ainu:

The glamour which at first disguises the inherent barrenness of savage life has had time to pass away, and I see it in all its nakedness as a life not much raised above the necessities of animal existence, timid, monotonous, barren of good, dark, dull, “without hope, and without God in the world…”

Another quibble I have is that the Japanese words are rendered in a way that we would expect somebody who doesn’t speak the language would render them. For drinking water, we get “okiya” for ohiya and for generic water, we get “misu” for mizu. Kuruma is given over and over again as “kurama.” Nor was she well-served by her translators. For the proverb about Nikko, “Never say ‘splendid (kekko)’ till you’ve seen Nikko,” we get “content” for “splendid.” 

But I still recommend this short introduction to regions of Japan that receive little press. Her description of resorts brought back nice memories of the summer of 1992, which I spent teaching in Niigata, which has many hot springs to enjoy.

Vintage Mystery #38

I read this book for the Vintage Mystery Bingo Reading Challenge 2014. The challenge is to read 6 or more Vintage Mysteries. All novels must have been originally written before 1960 and be from the mystery category.

I read this for G-5:  An Academic Mystery

A Question of Proof – Nicholas Blake, 1935

This straightforward mystery premiers PI Nigel Strangeways. Strangeways’ ability to charm while he grills people calls to mind Lord Peter, but without the fatuous dottiness, mercifully. His penchant for drinking tea all day long identified him, for those in the know at the time, with poet W.H. Auden.

Set in an English prep school, the story offers fertile ground for a realistic examination of a closed society within a closed society. That is, the masters (teachers) circle the wagons when parents are around. The boys form their own secret society to raise hell and enforce conformity. As teenage boys are still wont to do, they coin their own slang terms for misfits and deviants, such as “oick” and “chivver.” Cecil Day Lewis (has real name) has clearly drawn from his year-long experience teaching at Summer Fields, a prep school in Oxford, so we readers can’t expect more authority on this score.

Lewis/Blake knew his audience required a higher level of literacy and reasoning so he peppers his text with Latin and French tags that drive us to the web for translations, not to mention allusions to the Bard and the Greek classics. This is not a thriller like Smiler With A Knife nor is it as relentless as The Beast Within. I found the most likeable characters to be the boys, who are presented with a realistic mixture of naïve openness to and alert mistrust of the adult world.

Malcolm Noble, an expert on vintage mysteries says that in this novel, Blake shows that it is possible to write an effective detective story within the conventions of vintage mysteries, without overplaying social comment or abnormal psychology. I say, that the psychological explanation of the perp’s motivation is so inane and improbable that Blake meant it to be a parody of the psychological reveal.

Highly recommended for fans of Golden Era mysteries. In Twelve Englishmen of Mystery, Earl F. Bargainnier says this novel was written because Blake couldn’t think up any other way to make a hundred pounds to pay for a leaking roof without attracting the attention of the police. So, necessity really is the mother of invention. And a 15-book series starring a memorable detective.

War Challenge #23

I read this for the 2014 War Challenge with a Twist at the reading challenge blog War Through the Generations

The World at Night – Alan Furst

Faced with the brutal occupation of his country, Jean-Claude Casson figures he will somehow carry on producing action and gangster movies. But as time passes he realizes that Nazi counter-intelligence is watching him. His phone makes strange noises. His letters are fooled with. He is bullied to really help them. Rather than collaborate, he contemplates escape and helping the British. But he must contrive a way to take his lover Citrine with him.

This novel has a measure of espionage but mainly describes the dark atmosphere of the first year of the Nazi occupation of Paris. As for plot, in fact, Casson goes over a script by the hunted Jewish writer Fischfang and thinks:

Yet, a mystery. Hotel Dorado was luminous. Not in the plot -- somewhere in deepest Fischfang-land there was no real belief in plot. Life wasn't this, and therefore that, and so, of course, the other. It didn't work that way. Life was this, and then something, and then something else, and then a kick in the ass from nowhere....

That judgment rather echoes a reader like me who likes more than a minimum of story. At least, what action does occur is consistent with character, which is a plus. The climax and ending fall short. As somebody who has read much Simenon, I goggled at the reference that The Nightclub (1933) was a Maigret story when really it is a stand-alone roman durs. Nitpicking about plot and goofs aside, I thought this novel was more enjoyable than the slow-moving The Polish Officer (too much of a story in that case), but not up to the high standards of characterization and incident of Dark Star and Night Soldiers.

This could be me, however, not leaving a longer time between Furst’s novels. I read Furst’s Night Soldiers in July, only five months ago. And I read Simenon’s novel about Nazi occupation Dirty Snow only about a month ago. Maybe I was unconsciously comparing….

Nonfiction RC #19

I read this book for the Nonfiction Reading Challenge 2014.

Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: An Account of Travels in the Interior Including Visits to the Aborigines of Yezo and the Shrine of Nikko – Isabella Bird

Miss Bird is known as the most famous Victorian lady traveler. Published in 1880, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan was the result of her first East Asian journey, one made after her sojourn in the US, which produced the memorable A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains. She was an accurate observer, had a keen eye for plants, and had interest in public sanitation and medical care in hospitals.

Unbeaten Tracks in Japan is a selection of the letters she sent to her sister during her seven months in Japan in 1878. She began her trip in Yokohama and Edo (then newly named Tokyo). With her 18-year-old guide Ito, she made her way through the prefectures of Tochigi (Nikko), Niigata, Yamagata, Akita, and Aomori. Luckily it was summer when she passed through mountainous snow country. Then she crossed the Tsugaru Strait to Yezo (now called Hokkaido), where she learned about the culture of the Ainu, an indigenous people of Japan and Russia.

In the northeastern part of the country, she was definitely the first foreigner that local people had seen in their lives. Imagine such a sight for country people, living narrow lives, toiling in unmitigated drudgery, eating a monotonous diet, never seeing strangers. Miss Bird was mistaken not only for a man but also for:

Near a large village we were riding on a causeway through the rice-fields, Ito on the pack-horse in front, when we met a number of children returning from school, who, on getting near us, turned, ran away, and even jumped into the ditches, screaming as they ran. The mago ran after them, caught the hindmost boy, and dragged him back—the boy scared and struggling, the man laughing. The boy said that they thought that Ito was a monkey-player, i.e. the keeper of a monkey theatre, I a big ape, and the poles of my bed the scaffolding of the stage!

Generally she found people well-mannered though nearly naked, "lamentably dirty and swarming with vermin." That she tolerated amazing discomforts and privations on her rough journey is impressive. She lived off eggs, rice, tofu cucumbers, and the occasional chicken. Of course, she’s a lady of her time with the opinions about food, evil smells, dirt and squalor of poverty that we would expect in a country parson’s daughter.

Happily, not all that frequent are remarks in which she names names like “These preliminaries being settled, Mr. Tomatsu Aoki, the Chief Director, and Mr. Shude Kane Nigishi, the principal teacher, both looking more like monkeys than men in their European clothes, lionised me.” She also observes, like many foreign employees that came after her – like me – “An enormous quantity of superfluous writing is done by all officialdom in Japan, and one usually sees policemen writing. What comes of it I don't know.”

I admire Isabella Bird and thus recommend her book, at least as realistic counter to the gushing of, say, Lafcadio Hearn. Any reader with interest in determined women, travel narratives, or early modern Japan should read this book.

Nonfiction RC #18

I read this book for the Nonfiction Reading Challenge 2014.

Marlon Brando – Patricia Bosworth

I was born in the mid-Fifties so before my time was Marlon Brando alternately mumbling and braying into stardom dressed in a t-shirt, mixing brutality and vulnerability in A Streetcar named Desire. In the Sixties, I missed his often criticized turns except for his mannered hero in Mutiny on the Bounty. As for his comeback in the 1970s, I was a smart-aleck university student more impressed with Malcolm McDowell’s mixing brutality and vulnerability in A Clockwork Orange than with Brando’s regeneration. I mean, nearly unintelligible with his cheeks full of cotton in The Godfather? Wearing the gingham dress and bonnet in Missouri Breaks? That big biiiggg biiiiiggggg head in Apocalypse Now?

Hey, I was young. Snooty. Older now – if not old – I have to grant that actors have to take the risk of seeming silly. And in Last Tango in Paris, the casket scene has Brando’s Paul doing a helluva monologue. Too bad that nasty butter scene is always the one people remember. What were Brando and Bertolucci thinking, to humiliate a 19-year-old woman like they exploited Maria Schneider? She didn’t know what they were planning in that scene. Bertolucci later said letting her know beforehand what she was in for would have involved “too much discussion.”

I trust Patricia Bosworth because her biography of Montgomery Clift was brilliant. So I was willing to read this very short biography, in the Penguin Lives series. She excels in going over childhood and his early career. Brando’s beloved mother was an alcoholic and his father a philanderer and serial failure as a businessman.  Brando was a failure in school and thrown out of a military academy. He hated authority. He had frequent physical complaints, such as headaches or stomachaches, and had panic attacks.

He went to New York City to become an actor on his mother’s advice. He studied at the New School with Stella Adler, who was influenced by the methods of Konstantin Stanislavski. In this method, which I admit seems as vague to me as Zen Buddhism, the actor reaches inside, to plumb imagination to find what’s right for the role. "Stella Adler was much more than a teacher of acting," said Brando. "Through her work she imparts the most valuable kind of information—how to discover the nature of our own emotional mechanics and therefore those of others. "

Brando combined the manner of a caged wild animal with the honesty of the sensitive sincere guy in his own style, which influenced actors from Montgomery Clift and James Dean down to Al Pacino and Johnny Depp. For instance, he learned to handle objects in order to mirror inner turmoil, such as the famous glove scene in On the Waterfront or with the cat in The Godfather. Bosworth tells many interesting production stories, which is the main reason I read Hollywood books. I was perturbed by the stories about Elia Kazan lying to actors to get them angry at each other. Who the hell was he to be messing with other people’s heads like that?

Although he did not abuse drugs or alcohol, throughout his life Brando turned to food to relieve his depression. Like other children of alcoholics, he often took on the role of the “responsible parent" among his iffy friends. After his success on Broadway, he was an ATM for his friends, paying when they were in trouble with a lack of groceries or an unwanted pregnancy. If indeed, as Glenn Close said, "All great art comes from a sense of outrage," Brando had anger to burn. He punished women and men and himself by finding unreliable people to depend on. He belittled the acting profession, likening it to a craft like plumbing.

Anyway, the edition which I read was published in 2001. Bosworth briefly covers the suicide of his daughter and the imprisonment of his son, but does not dwell on how these ordeals may have complicated treatments for his health, which was plagued by overweight, diabetes and liver cancer. Brando died, of respiratory failure related to congestive heart failure, in 2004.