Mount TBR #5

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

A History of Japan, 1615-1867 - Sir George Sansom

This is the final volume of the magisterial trilogy by the distinguished British historian. The first volume covered to 1334 (reviewed here) the second from 1334 to 1615 (reviewed here).

The book opens with an examination the creation of the Tokugawa regime under the three Shoguns after Tokugawa Ieyasu: Hidetada, Iemitsu, and Ietsuna. Sansom is sympathetic to the next one, Tsunayoshi, though he is notorious as the Dog Shogun who ordered everybody to address dogs politely as “O Inu Sama.”

In seven additional chapters, Sansom describes conditions in the second half of the seventeenth century in terms of political shifts, urban and rural conditions, economic expansion and the problems which it posed. He briefly – that is, tantalizingly - touches on how the philosophy of Neo-Confucian Wang Yang-ming influenced Japanese reformers running up the end of Tokugawa rule. The response to the Black Ships is handled cursorily.

I highly recommend this set to serious students of traditional Japan. These books focus mainly on topics in social science. For the humanities, see Sansom’s excellent Japan: A Short Cultural History.

Back to the Classics #6

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

Two sisters are disappointed romantically by two previously engaged guys. Sister Marianne reacts with drama, tears, prostration, melancholy and generally makes jilted doe Lily Dale look like a slouch. Sister Elinor hides her unhappiness so as not to burden her emotional mother and sister with her sadness. She takes a tack that is as sensible as it is rare:

And after all, Marianne, after all that is bewitching in the idea of a single and constant attachment, and all that can be said of one's happiness depending entirely on any particular person, it is not meant—it is not fit—it is not possible that it should be so.

Arguing we had better not base our happiness on somebody we can lose, Austen rejects notions of soul mates united forever in bliss. Given this skeptical attitude about heart’s desires, it seems a miracle that she is still read today, steeped as we are in the belief “the only one for me.” Not to mention our uneasiness about and excessive respect of money, stuff, and status – i.e, more things we can easily lose - is as worthy of contempt now as it was in the 18^th century.

But her novels survive because she appeals to those of us, like Elinor, that make strong efforts to bear our troubles without fretting, to conceal emotion with fortitude in order to prevent giving other people pain, to bear up because our self-respect demands it. For Austen, those that lack self-restraint choose to lack self-restraint; those that lack principle and civility consciously reject manners and elan.

Just read it. It’s great. This is my second Austen. I totally understand why her fans are totally nuts about her. Austen is stern, but reasonable. Austen appeals to us readers who read in order to see life more clearly, who believe it is important, insofar as they can, to live life bravely, with self-command, controlling what is up to them (their own responses to life) and not worrying much about what is out of their control (wealth, property, reputation, station, awards, hangers-on, etc.).

Back to the Classics #5

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

The Case of Comrade Tulayev – Victor Serge

Revolutionaries, being imperfect people, make imperfect decisions, which make imperfect political systems. The Old Bolsheviks, for example, went along with Lenin in the employment of repressive measures against the adversaries of socialism. After Lenin died, Joseph Stalin, to consolidate power,  unleashed the apparatus of repression against the Old Bolsheviks, exiling jailing torturing and killing thousands of them. The most famous novel to come out of the Stalinist purges was Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler. Its power comes from its concision: it focuses on the story of a high official asked to confess falsely to treason, willing to take on ignominy and nine grams of lead in his skull as his last duty to the party.

Victor Serge, an Old Bolshevik, lived through the purges in various points in the Stalinesque meat grinder – surveillance, imprisonment, uneasy release.  He lived because the regime feared the opinion of influential people in the West. Serge ended up in Paris in the late 1930s. Though this book is out of his direct and miserable experience, he writes of repression under Stalin with detachment. This novel is not the nightmare of 1984, not the angry expose of Soviet stupidity of The First Circle nor Soviet hypocrisy of Darkness at Noon. The Case of Comrade Tulayev is more realistic and yet more symbolic and more unified than the novel he wrote in different places and times, Conquered City.

The high official who oversaw purges of innocent college professors and students, Comrade Tulayev, is shot down on a Moscow street one wintry night. “You must see, nevertheless," a high official tells one of the blameless accused, "that the Party cannot admit that it is impotent before a revolver shot fired from no one knows where, perhaps from the depths of the people's soul.” As the Party is unable to ascribe anything to chance, the investigator goes on, implicating, disgracing, imprisoning, and killing hundreds of people. The real murderer, in fact, goes free, working as a clerk in a subway construction yard. The killer had acted on impulse, with gun that had fallen into his hands by sheer chance. But the Party saw the assassination as an opportunity to do in a few more enemies.

The fascination of this novel lies in its examination of officials at all levels, party members, old Bolsheviks, and suspected Trotskyists who must face repression. The Left Opposition basically shit on the bureaucratic creeps that flourished under Stalin. The toadies, like lickspittles everywhere, developed finely tuned antennae that told them which officials where in and worth cultivating and which were out, bound for the labor camps. Serge re-creates amazing atmospheres, such as that of a typical office of a suspect where people that like him can barely contain their sorrow that he will soon be arrested, but others are cowardly and craven and seem to look right through him. Various scenes are incredible, such as the old party man on his way to his Moscow trial sharing a freezing jail with boys on their way to a labor camp.

A symbolic theme of the novel is time. Serge often references relentless time and change. We may cry and stamp our feet that paranoid megalomaniacs are our leaders and sorry craps their enablers. But we still live in a world of flux. Even ordeals have their endpoints. And lots of people – like the Old Bolsheviks – keep their faith.

Mount TBR #4

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

A Murder of Quality - John le Carré

This 1962 mystery was the second novel of the author of the Karla Trilogy and, more recently, The Constant Gardener and A Legacy of Spies. At only about 150 pages, A Murder of Quality lacks elbow room. That is, it feels like the novelist had to restrain himself from exploring themes such as the lingering effects of WWII on those that had to fight it in particular but how the past haunts the present in general; the suffocating environment of public schools; religious differences between Church of England and Nonconformists; and the overall deceptiveness of mere appearance and persona. Retired spy George Smiley, for example, looks like “the very prototype of an unsuccessful middle-aged bachelor in a sedentary occupation.” But the inoffensive appearance masks the fact he has, one colleague observes, “the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin.”

To sum up the plot, Smiley is contacted by a wartime coworker who has received a strange letter. A woman who lives in a public school town writes that she afraid that her husband, one of the masters there, has designs on her life. Smiley recalls that Terence Fielding, brother of one of Smiley's colleagues in intelligence during the war, teaches classics at the school. However, Smiley hears that the letter writer has been murdered. Smiley is invited by the local police to investigate since the local chief of police knows a little of Smiley’s WWII exploits, wants to hold off Scotland Yard, and the middle class chief is not comfortable investigating the quality that are connected to the public school.

Like Maigret in a Simenon novel, or Campion in an Allingham novel, Smiley finds himself investigating  the crime in a world with its own rules of manner and conduct. Also in the whodunnit manner, there are red herrings and odd characters galore. This early novel is well-worth reading for fans of le Carré, Alan Furst, and whodunit writers with a little edge like Tey, Marsh, Innes and Highsmith.

St. Patrick’s Day

Troubles – J.G. Farrell

A character in this novel says that history is what is remembered, but ‘everything else’ – that is, daily life as what we ordinary people get up to - tends to be forgotten. This story examines people that are trying to carry on their regular lives while history is unraveling their Irish world.

It is 1919. Major Brendan Archer is a gentleman, a believer in honor, chivalry, and playing the game even after the Great War by the end of which some members of his generation like Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves  had said “goodbye to all that.” Too English, however, he is, not to be regarded by a dynamic Irishwoman as standoffish and stuffy. Archer has been released from his hospitalization for shell shock brought on by his service in the trenches. He visits the Victorian-era Majestic Hotel in County Wexford, Ireland, to find out if still on is his accidental engagement to Angela Spencer made while he was on a brief leave from the war.

Angela’s father Edward owns the hotel, which like British rule in Ireland, is going to pieces. Edward is hard to respect, given his snooty airs and anti-Catholic prejudices, but his dogged optimism has a certain pride.  A master of self-deception, Edward frets about renovations and conducts amateur experiments in psycho-physiology. The hotel and science are distractions so he can disregard the political troubles between Protestant Unionists and Catholic Nationalists. The escalating violence and resulting stress gradually seize his attention and steadily unhinge him.

Archer feels high-strung and restless due to his war experience. He feels tired of conflicts of any kind. Ireland, with its “vast and narcotic inertia,” casts its spell over him. He insensibly becomes involved in the Anglo-Irish family's issues and tensions with servants and tenants. Lacking boldness to get on with his life, he makes friends with the old ladies who permanently reside in the hotel. He’s also unlucky enough to fall in the love for the first time. He’s pretty defenseless, not that that makes us readers pull for him since the love object is so worthless.

Human beings are not at their best in this novel.  An old order goes poof.  But it is by no means grim or dejecting. Farrell manages cutting satire and blackly comedic situations without being mean or depressing. Long at 400+ pages, this novel has spots where nothing much happens except atmosphere and curious detailed descriptions, yet overall it’s a satisfying and enjoyable read. Farrell had soul. For readers into highly literary fiction, Ireland, or the effects of sectarian violence on ordinary people, this is a moving story. This novel won the Lost Man Booker Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.

Farrell's other two major novels also turn on a British community dealing with threats. In The Siege of Krishnapour, hostile local Indians attack a lonely British outpost in the 1857. In his masterpiece, The Singapore Grip, the Japanese invasion of the Malayan Federated States and Singapore in 1942 hands the British their most ignominious military defeat in their history of Empire.

European RC #4

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge

When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light under German Occupation, 1940-1944 - Ronald C. Rosbottom

I’ve figured that I’ve read enough in recent years about war and its effects on society and individual soldiers and civilians. As I grow older, I find that I’m more easily appalled at the terrible lingering effects of war on survivors and less able to shake off the contemptuous sadness that politicians don’t seem to get smarter or less irresponsible.

However, when I saw this book sitting in a little library, I couldn’t stop myself. I felt curious about what happens when the worst totalitarians in the world occupy a city known for its openness, tolerance, and liberty. Surprise, surprise – the Nazis really liked the whorehouses, drinking, and looting and plundering, but they did everything they could make daily life impossible and hazardous for the French. They controlled time with curfews. They controlled urban space with no-go zones and barriers. They had a made a of rules and regulations that made everybody guilty of some infraction if the authorities bothered to look. They controlled behavior like eating with shortages, ration cards, and long lines for food. A Latvian once told me the Soviet strategy was to keep people off-balance by making mere errands a huge tiring hassle, so people would have no energy left for protest.

Rosbottom describes the collective trauma imposed on the French by the Germans. Deprived of information from the outside world, the French were starved for facts about Allied progress in other theaters. The French had no idea how long the Occupation was going to last, so they felt the uncertainty that contributes directly to anxiety and depression. Over time, in daily life it was often difficult to say where the boundary between collaboration and adaptation to a new reality was set. This is an interesting theme as our country wrestles with the lines between “collusion” and “cooperation” and “conspiracy.”

He also tells about local police and authorities playing a major role in, among other things, the implementation of the Holocaust. A special squad of French police went hunting for Jewish people to deport. And the French authorities were efficient in the summer 1942 round-up of Jewish people who were imprisoned at Vélodrome d'Hiver and transported from there to death camps.

Rosbottom arranges the book both thematically and chronologically.  He did research with printed materials and looked for perspectives in many different interviews. In addition to soldiers, politicians, members of the resistance movement and ordinary civilians, he gives capsule views of a number of well-known artists and writers such as Picasso, Camus, Cocteau, and Duras, whose work and production were involved in examining the occupation. Rosbottom is a professor of French, not a historian, so his interests and expertise are more related to the humanities, not economics or sociology.

Readers who want background to Albert Camus's The Plague and Anthony Beevor's Paris After the Liberation 1944-1949 may find this book interesting. Although many readers will find Rosbottom’s prose easy enough to comprehend, readers who prefer history written novelistically a la Erik Larsen should stay away.

Mount TBR #3

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

My Country and My People – Lin Yutang

This book was released in 1936, yet another tumultuous year for the Chinese people. In the Suiyuan Campaign, two puppet forces founded and supported by Imperial Japan fought to wrest control of the Suiyuan province from the Republic of China. Late in the year a crisis came about when Chiang Kaishek, the leader of the Nationalist government, was kidnapped by his subordinates Chang Hsueh-liang and Yang Hucheng to persuade Chiang to change his policies toward imperial Japan and the Chinese Communist Party. Chiang believed Japan was a disease of the skin, but saw the Communists as a disease of the heart so he didn’t want to ally his party with the CCP.

China thus was an object of interest in the US, due to its problems and the attention brought to it by Pearl Buck with her best-seller The Good Earth. Lin Yutang was also an explainer of Chinese life and culture. He must have been popular because publishers released many of his books, which were easy to read, wise, and daring.

Daring because he grouped in “culture” not only political, artistic, or literary pursuits but also the ordinary doings of everyday life. Dr. Lin blames China’s parlous state on two influences: Confucius and the difficult written language. Confucius, he says, forgot to include “a person and a stranger” in the list of important human relationships, so the Chinese never developed a strong civic sense of duty to the community. Second, if the written language were not so formidable to learn in ancient days, education would have been possible for all and ordinary people would have been able think more independently and force change in society more readily. Thus, China in 1936 would have been very different.

Granted, the chapter on the place of women does not pass muster in our day. And, of course, events and change have rendered much of the information of only limited interest. But for readers interested in traditional China and looking for general information about national character and wonderful translations of Chinese poems and light writing, this is a good book.