J.'s bookshelf: all en-US Mon, 28 Apr 2025 03:30:59 -0700 60 J.'s bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Lock 14 44149 154 Georges Simenon 0143037277 J. 0 to-read, simenon 3.59 1931 Lock 14
author: Georges Simenon
name: J.
average rating: 3.59
book published: 1931
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/28
shelves: to-read, simenon
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Fortune of the Rougons (Les Rougon-Macquart, #1)]]> 14827593 The Fortune of the Rougons is the first in Zola's famous Rougon-Macquart series of novels. In it we learn how the two branches of the family came about, and the origins of the hereditary weaknesses passed down the generations. Murder, treachery, and greed are the keynotes, and just as the Empire was established through violence, the "fortune" of the Rougons is paid for in blood.

Set in the fictitious Provencal town of Plassans, The Fortune of the Rougons tells the story of Silvere and Miette, two idealistic young supporters of the republican resistance to Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d'etat of December 1851. They join the woodcutters and peasants of the Var to seize control of Plassans, and are opposed by the Bonapartist loyalists led by Silvere's uncle, Pierre Rougon. Meanwhile, the foundations of the Rougon family and its illegitimate Macquart branch are being laid in the brutal beginnings of the Imperial regime.

Brian Nelson provides an engaging translation as well as a wide-ranging introduction that explains the background to the Rougon-Macquart series as well as the historical setting of the novel and its special qualities. This edition also features a chronology, bibliography, and extensive explanatory notes.

About the Series For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
"]]> 301 Émile Zola 0199560994 J. 4 zola
What we will see is that Plassans is France, ungainly expansion alongside ramparts falling apart, borders uncertain, a triangulated society where Monarchists, Bonapartists and Republicans all collide. Zola is writing his Les Misérables with this one but revised for the later era -- a tiny epic, a miniature of an imploding world.

The introduction in the graveyard at midnight almost couldn't be more of a 19th century opening: the lovers who meet at the secret spot of the concealed rifle, the mystery tombstone ... all converging toward the chaos and occasional splendor of Louis-Napoleon's coup of 1851. Setting the foundation for the entirety of the Rougon-Macquart cycle on ambiguous seismic ground, a deep societal fault line of uncertainty. Zola employs his 'Panorama' technique here, torrents of words that are only vaguely connected, but swept up in the rush of the coup. Character Miette is France's Marianne, waving the red flag yet somehow oblivious-- and will be the icon for the better instincts of the society, though flawed by naivete and the unreliable human nature of all the characters.

The Fortune sets all the elements into play; Zola meticulously planned his twenty-novel sequence only as he went, and this one would set the tone, introducing Rougons Pierre, Eugene, Aristide, Pascal, and Antoine Macquart, from the dark-horse side of the mixed clans. Witchy character Félicité, less a grand matron and more a Lady Macbeth, is established here, and all will play major parts in the hundreds of chapters to come.]]> 3.99 1871 The Fortune of the Rougons (Les Rougon-Macquart, #1)
author: Émile Zola
name: J.
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1871
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: zola
review:
Zola welcomes us to the broad series to come with a slowly-evolving story of a splintered family in a fairly provincial French backwater, the expanding village of Plassans. The family here will be the center of everything that is to comprise twenty novels, and the genesis of the author's expansive, wide-reaching epic documentary of France during the Second Empire, roughly 1852 to 1870.

What we will see is that Plassans is France, ungainly expansion alongside ramparts falling apart, borders uncertain, a triangulated society where Monarchists, Bonapartists and Republicans all collide. Zola is writing his Les Misérables with this one but revised for the later era -- a tiny epic, a miniature of an imploding world.

The introduction in the graveyard at midnight almost couldn't be more of a 19th century opening: the lovers who meet at the secret spot of the concealed rifle, the mystery tombstone ... all converging toward the chaos and occasional splendor of Louis-Napoleon's coup of 1851. Setting the foundation for the entirety of the Rougon-Macquart cycle on ambiguous seismic ground, a deep societal fault line of uncertainty. Zola employs his 'Panorama' technique here, torrents of words that are only vaguely connected, but swept up in the rush of the coup. Character Miette is France's Marianne, waving the red flag yet somehow oblivious-- and will be the icon for the better instincts of the society, though flawed by naivete and the unreliable human nature of all the characters.

The Fortune sets all the elements into play; Zola meticulously planned his twenty-novel sequence only as he went, and this one would set the tone, introducing Rougons Pierre, Eugene, Aristide, Pascal, and Antoine Macquart, from the dark-horse side of the mixed clans. Witchy character Félicité, less a grand matron and more a Lady Macbeth, is established here, and all will play major parts in the hundreds of chapters to come.
]]> <![CDATA[The Rougon-Macquart Cycle: Complete Collection - ALL 20 Novels In One Volume: The Fortune of the Rougons, The Kill, The Ladies' Paradise, The Joy of Life, ... Germinal, Nana, The Downfall and more]]> 30242861 Les Rougon-Macquart is the collective title given to a cycle of twenty novels by French writer Émile Zola. Subtitled “Natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire�, it follows the life of one family during the Second French Empire (1852�1870). In this tremendous work Zola first and foremost examines the impact of social environment on men and women, by varying the social, economic, political and professional milieu in which each novel takes place. It provides us with a close look at everyday life, gives us a deep insight into important social changes and it shows us the true people's history of the Second Empire.
Table of Contents:
The Fortune of the Rougons (La Fortune des Rougon)
The Kill (La Curée)
The Belly of Paris (Le Ventre de Paris)
The Conquest of Plassans (La ConquĂŞte de Plassans)
The Sin of Father Mouret (La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret)
His Excellency Eugène Rougon (Son Excellence Eugène Rougon)
The Drinking Den (L'Assommoir)
One Page of Love (Une Page d'amour)
Nana
Piping Hot (Pot-Bouille)
The Ladies' Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames)
The Joy of Life (La Joie de vivre)
Germinal
The Masterpiece (L'Ĺ’uvre)
The Earth (La Terre)
The Dream (Le RĂŞve)
The Beast in Man (La BĂŞte humaine)
Money (L'Argent)
The Downfall (La Débâcle)
Doctor Pascal (Le Docteur Pascal)
Émile Zola (1840-1902), French novelist, critic, and political activist who was the most prominent French novelist of the late 19th century. He was noted for his theories of naturalism, which underlie his monumental 20-novel series Les Rougon-Macquart, and for his intervention in the Dreyfus Affair through his famous open letter, “J'accuse.”]]> 9038 Émile Zola J. 0 This is about the Rougon Macquart cycle, all of it, twenty novels-- but the Oxford World Classics paperback editions, not kindle or ebook. From what I could see, no hardback edition [Everyman, Modern, etc] published the entire cycle in modern translation. The Oxford books are deceptively good, offering a sort of Student's Minimum of basic, efficient, value-- at about $15 each, which, sigh, is where we're at even for paperbacks.

ONE The Fortune : /review/show...

I'm reading the cycle in the Zola-prescribed order, so will start with The Fortune Of The Rougons .... but the intention here is a running commentary of all things RM, and I'll be skipping back and forth to try to clarify, improve, expand the entries as I go. So this will be constantly in edit mode, and probably end up as more a journal of the process than a review.
___

First it might be good to list the Macro themes, the long-game framing by the author. By design, each book zones in on a sub-theme that is complex, but exists only to define the bigger structure. So a few (unsurprising) major themes first.
Worth saying, here at the outset, though I'd read three of the RM books before restarting at one with The Fortune, that there is a fundamental difference between Zola's effort and the omnipresent 'multi-generational saga of a splintered family melodrama'--- that THIS IS NOT what was intended here.
Those kinds of books use a splashy historical background as filler and color, for an even splashier soap-opera, amongst the stock-issue characters. The knows-better, too-stern Father, the disenchanted son, the wayward but headstrong daughter, etc. In Zola's RM world-- the characters exist only to drive the narrative along & populate the Era, which is his major concern.

Zola is a documentarist, interested in clarity, a journalistic photo of the times, which in themselves weren't unfailingly splashy. As it happened, they did lead to the crack-up of the world order in WWI, but Zola lives in preamble times. Birth of the Modern times, where no one is quite sure what will happen, but fairly sure something is happening.
___

Realized that listing "Themes" of a twenty book cycle you haven't read yet-- might be slightly premature. Okay then. What can be said at this point-- end of Eugene and five or six Zolas in-- is that all the discontents of Modernism are the focus. The automation of lives, the centralization but isolation in the cog-in-the-machine society being born. The dubious quality of plurality as culture, and its tastes over establishment ancien régime aesthetics ... smashing headlong into the disruptive, intoxicating New. A methodical Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis' in twenty discrete bottles.

Two things I've noticed. The mature documentarist voice in Zola is constantly at war with the young author's voluptuous appetite, for color, emotion, engagement. That undertow isn't far below the monochrome surface. And when Zola tells you that "it was rumored" that Count, Duke or Marquis X might have had a mistress, or might actually be the father of a character in question-- it's generally true, and he's just disinclined to go beyond rumor on the page. Helps if you remember, though.

I've decided to try to avoid the spoilers that the Oxford series includes in its Forewords --and every printed review seems to include without notice-- in a review of the cycle. But no guarantees, it might happen. Also thinking maybe it's for the best not to do individual reviews of each of the books ... Ooops no.
See below.
__________________________________

Update, March 2025. Five novels in, now reading number six, The Conquest Of Plassans.
Now realize there will have to be individual reviews. To which I'll post links at the top of this update page.
Worth saying at this point that this has been great reading, and not a slog at any point thus far. I've learned to end each novel by going back to the very informative Oxford Classics Foreword in the book, which along with the plentiful footnotes along the way-- illuminates the context and historical background of Zola's cycle. I recommend saving those till the end.

Another couple of things I've noticed .... There's generally a 'witch' character, who is a devious prognosticator or instigator behind the scenes. In fact there are generally two emblematic woman characters, one being the resourceful witch and the other being a resolutely virtuous opposite to that. As perhaps in life, the witch character is far from just hostile or harmful; in fact she's often the most useful character to the author and the novel's forward progress, positioned to know things in advance, or to impel backstage dramatic surges.

Another is what I'm calling the 'Zola Panorama' -- a literary equivalent of the 18th century visual mural, but in words. An attempt at all-encompassing view that excludes nothing, noting all specifics in a sweeping, lengthy, descriptive passage, that will immerse the reader completely in the scene. Zola does this in nearly every novel, though the sequences in The Belly Of Paris are the most memorable, most extended. This technique has been compared by lit reviewers to the Impressionism of the Second Empire, a verbal rendition of the onslaught of detail, the emotional fusion of light, color and line in the arts of the day.
_______________________________]]> 4.40 1871 The Rougon-Macquart Cycle: Complete Collection - ALL 20 Novels In One Volume: The Fortune of the Rougons, The Kill, The Ladies' Paradise, The Joy of Life, ... Germinal, Nana, The Downfall and more
author: Émile Zola
name: J.
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1871
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: currently-reading, city-of-light, la-belle-epoque, downtempo-picaresque, zola
review:
October, 2024. We begin.
This is about the Rougon Macquart cycle, all of it, twenty novels-- but the Oxford World Classics paperback editions, not kindle or ebook. From what I could see, no hardback edition [Everyman, Modern, etc] published the entire cycle in modern translation. The Oxford books are deceptively good, offering a sort of Student's Minimum of basic, efficient, value-- at about $15 each, which, sigh, is where we're at even for paperbacks.

ONE The Fortune : /review/show...

I'm reading the cycle in the Zola-prescribed order, so will start with The Fortune Of The Rougons .... but the intention here is a running commentary of all things RM, and I'll be skipping back and forth to try to clarify, improve, expand the entries as I go. So this will be constantly in edit mode, and probably end up as more a journal of the process than a review.
___

First it might be good to list the Macro themes, the long-game framing by the author. By design, each book zones in on a sub-theme that is complex, but exists only to define the bigger structure. So a few (unsurprising) major themes first.
Worth saying, here at the outset, though I'd read three of the RM books before restarting at one with The Fortune, that there is a fundamental difference between Zola's effort and the omnipresent 'multi-generational saga of a splintered family melodrama'--- that THIS IS NOT what was intended here.
Those kinds of books use a splashy historical background as filler and color, for an even splashier soap-opera, amongst the stock-issue characters. The knows-better, too-stern Father, the disenchanted son, the wayward but headstrong daughter, etc. In Zola's RM world-- the characters exist only to drive the narrative along & populate the Era, which is his major concern.

Zola is a documentarist, interested in clarity, a journalistic photo of the times, which in themselves weren't unfailingly splashy. As it happened, they did lead to the crack-up of the world order in WWI, but Zola lives in preamble times. Birth of the Modern times, where no one is quite sure what will happen, but fairly sure something is happening.
___

Realized that listing "Themes" of a twenty book cycle you haven't read yet-- might be slightly premature. Okay then. What can be said at this point-- end of Eugene and five or six Zolas in-- is that all the discontents of Modernism are the focus. The automation of lives, the centralization but isolation in the cog-in-the-machine society being born. The dubious quality of plurality as culture, and its tastes over establishment ancien régime aesthetics ... smashing headlong into the disruptive, intoxicating New. A methodical Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis' in twenty discrete bottles.

Two things I've noticed. The mature documentarist voice in Zola is constantly at war with the young author's voluptuous appetite, for color, emotion, engagement. That undertow isn't far below the monochrome surface. And when Zola tells you that "it was rumored" that Count, Duke or Marquis X might have had a mistress, or might actually be the father of a character in question-- it's generally true, and he's just disinclined to go beyond rumor on the page. Helps if you remember, though.

I've decided to try to avoid the spoilers that the Oxford series includes in its Forewords --and every printed review seems to include without notice-- in a review of the cycle. But no guarantees, it might happen. Also thinking maybe it's for the best not to do individual reviews of each of the books ... Ooops no.
See below.
__________________________________

Update, March 2025. Five novels in, now reading number six, The Conquest Of Plassans.
Now realize there will have to be individual reviews. To which I'll post links at the top of this update page.
Worth saying at this point that this has been great reading, and not a slog at any point thus far. I've learned to end each novel by going back to the very informative Oxford Classics Foreword in the book, which along with the plentiful footnotes along the way-- illuminates the context and historical background of Zola's cycle. I recommend saving those till the end.

Another couple of things I've noticed .... There's generally a 'witch' character, who is a devious prognosticator or instigator behind the scenes. In fact there are generally two emblematic woman characters, one being the resourceful witch and the other being a resolutely virtuous opposite to that. As perhaps in life, the witch character is far from just hostile or harmful; in fact she's often the most useful character to the author and the novel's forward progress, positioned to know things in advance, or to impel backstage dramatic surges.

Another is what I'm calling the 'Zola Panorama' -- a literary equivalent of the 18th century visual mural, but in words. An attempt at all-encompassing view that excludes nothing, noting all specifics in a sweeping, lengthy, descriptive passage, that will immerse the reader completely in the scene. Zola does this in nearly every novel, though the sequences in The Belly Of Paris are the most memorable, most extended. This technique has been compared by lit reviewers to the Impressionism of the Second Empire, a verbal rendition of the onslaught of detail, the emotional fusion of light, color and line in the arts of the day.
_______________________________
]]> Ulysses Annotated 882850
The annotations gloss place names, define slang terms, give capsule histories of institutions and political and cultural movements and figures, supply bits of local and Irish legend and lore, explain religious nomenclature and practices, trace literary allusions and references to other cultures. Annotations are keyed not only to the reading text of the critical edition of Ulysses, but to the standard 1961 Random House edition, and the current Modern Library and Vintage texts.]]> 694 Don Gifford 0520253973 J. 4 Ulysses.

An important facet of this volume is that it is not a summary, nor is it a condensation or analysis of what happens in the novel. If you want something that explains, "here Bloom's question reveals more than he is saying and indicates ..." then you want another book.

This book is all about translating the Latin, the Greek, the Dublinisms, the limericks, the popular song and riddle--- and the millions of strange little phrases and words with which Joyce loves to baffle the reader.

Only two quibbles here. The first, minor quibble is that not all the questions prompted by the miscellanea of the text are answered here. That might require a book twice as thick, but it's surely not impossible.

The second, and overwhelmingly Major Quibble-- this should really be fixed -- is the reluctance of Gifford's volume to ever repeat itself, even in brief, even for clarity's sake, even for the convenience of the user. When something peculiar is mentioned once, even briefly, Mr. Gifford's dutiful fact checkers note, transcribe, post and define that something, along with its peculiarities, right away. After which, each and every mention thereof is re-directed backwards in this fat volume to that first mention with a very annoying "See pp.21-22" or "See Also pp.22-23" or "Cf pp.23-24".

So perhaps Mr Gifford can picture the reader, utilizing his Annotated guide, coming across a reference to, say, "red tape", late in the book. Perhaps being some tens of thousands of words away from its first occurrence, he will be forgiven for forgetting the meaning, and permitted to check the guide. So he saves his place in Ulysses, puts aside that volume and picks up the Annotated guide. After finding his current position correlated by Mr Gifford, he is relieved to find that the expression is indeed noted at that mark. But he will find that if what he wants-- and he does-- is to find out what meaning "red tape" may have, he is to be re-directed by the helpful Mr Gifford by the entry that reads "Red Tape, see pp.21-22". At which point he can reverse backwards into the early part of the guide and find the very first appearance of that term.

Once he is reminded of the meaning of the term, he may put down the Annotated and go back to where he left his bookmark in Ulysses. I would suggest that the novel itself is enough labyrinthine red tape to be navigating, and that a brief re-statement of terms, a reminder at the point where it occurs in the current chapter --would best serve the reader engaged in this endeavor.

Beyond that little glitch, a usefully comprehensive guide {see also: paragraph 1, sentence 1, above}. ]]> 4.20 1922 Ulysses Annotated
author: Don Gifford
name: J.
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1922
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: lit-lectures, jimmy-craick-corn
review:
Very usable, an encyclopedic approach to the arcana of Ulysses.

An important facet of this volume is that it is not a summary, nor is it a condensation or analysis of what happens in the novel. If you want something that explains, "here Bloom's question reveals more than he is saying and indicates ..." then you want another book.

This book is all about translating the Latin, the Greek, the Dublinisms, the limericks, the popular song and riddle--- and the millions of strange little phrases and words with which Joyce loves to baffle the reader.

Only two quibbles here. The first, minor quibble is that not all the questions prompted by the miscellanea of the text are answered here. That might require a book twice as thick, but it's surely not impossible.

The second, and overwhelmingly Major Quibble-- this should really be fixed -- is the reluctance of Gifford's volume to ever repeat itself, even in brief, even for clarity's sake, even for the convenience of the user. When something peculiar is mentioned once, even briefly, Mr. Gifford's dutiful fact checkers note, transcribe, post and define that something, along with its peculiarities, right away. After which, each and every mention thereof is re-directed backwards in this fat volume to that first mention with a very annoying "See pp.21-22" or "See Also pp.22-23" or "Cf pp.23-24".

So perhaps Mr Gifford can picture the reader, utilizing his Annotated guide, coming across a reference to, say, "red tape", late in the book. Perhaps being some tens of thousands of words away from its first occurrence, he will be forgiven for forgetting the meaning, and permitted to check the guide. So he saves his place in Ulysses, puts aside that volume and picks up the Annotated guide. After finding his current position correlated by Mr Gifford, he is relieved to find that the expression is indeed noted at that mark. But he will find that if what he wants-- and he does-- is to find out what meaning "red tape" may have, he is to be re-directed by the helpful Mr Gifford by the entry that reads "Red Tape, see pp.21-22". At which point he can reverse backwards into the early part of the guide and find the very first appearance of that term.

Once he is reminded of the meaning of the term, he may put down the Annotated and go back to where he left his bookmark in Ulysses. I would suggest that the novel itself is enough labyrinthine red tape to be navigating, and that a brief re-statement of terms, a reminder at the point where it occurs in the current chapter --would best serve the reader engaged in this endeavor.

Beyond that little glitch, a usefully comprehensive guide {see also: paragraph 1, sentence 1, above}.
]]> Audition 7280651 191 Ryū Murakami 039333841X J. 0 to-read, mystery, japan 3.43 1997 Audition
author: Ryū Murakami
name: J.
average rating: 3.43
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: to-read, mystery, japan
review:

]]> Mr Norris Changes Trains 705163 230 Christopher Isherwood 0099771411 J. 4 Our voices sounded so absurd that I could have laughed out loud. We were like two unimportant characters in the first act of a play, put there to make conversation until it is time for the chief actor to appear. A sweetly nostalgic look backwards at what unexpectedly becomes nostalgia-- the half-understood, the loony, the unexplained and the senseless-- as they begin to morph into the storyline of what we remember. And into what we end up calling human nature, once we have some perspective on the past.

At this point it goes without saying that this author was writing about life that wasn't mainstream, and yet reflected the era in a kind of funhouse mirror version. Isherwood was able to contrast his unusual cast of characters, contrary and unmanageably compulsive, against the backdrop of the burgeoning National Socialist regime in Germany's thirties, a larger frame that makes individual failings or eccentricity seem minor.

Our impressionable and yet worldly narrator makes his polite way amongst the international flotsam and near-society types that comprise certain circles in Berlin, 1935. Rather than savagely giving us a wicked parody of everyone he meets and all he sees, he opts for a kind of quiet empathy in the hopes of understanding the larger things. As much as this helps the story, since he gets far more out of the proceedings than he might with a more judgmental approach-- in the end he gets no further in his larger quest, due no doubt to the precarious uncertainty of the era.

Isherwood has a kind of opposite number here to Hamilton's The Slaves Of Solitude, but with characters who are the inverse of quiet bed-sit desperation; they are criminals, bolsheviks, secret homosexuals, dominatrixes and jaded, perverse aristocracy, harboring various kinds of intents. It's a Reader's Digest "Most Unforgettable Character" with candidates who would truly horrify that staid family publication.

(..there is one ridiculous Baron whose proclivity for young boys is aided by his reading list in one particular genre: it is the Boy's-Castaway-Island scenario that fascinates him. Whenever we encounter the Baron, he's likely to be asking if a current escort reminds the narrator of one of his desert-island idylls. Grown men. Some wearing monocles. Boy castaways. Berlin. Nazis. Isherwood makes it impossible not to laugh, and yet...)

Mr. Norris Changes Trains is by turns silly, antic, then not-silly, and threatening, unpredictable. The introductory scene in the train embodies this nicely. Detail flies by in dense clouds, but a small item here or there may prove consequentially deadly. Perhaps. Kind of like life, but life in a highly-fraught, delirious era, that will never happen quite the same way again. ]]> 3.75 1935 Mr Norris Changes Trains
author: Christopher Isherwood
name: J.
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1935
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/12/14
shelves: between-the-wars, germany, berlin, isherwood
review:
Our voices sounded so absurd that I could have laughed out loud. We were like two unimportant characters in the first act of a play, put there to make conversation until it is time for the chief actor to appear.
A sweetly nostalgic look backwards at what unexpectedly becomes nostalgia-- the half-understood, the loony, the unexplained and the senseless-- as they begin to morph into the storyline of what we remember. And into what we end up calling human nature, once we have some perspective on the past.

At this point it goes without saying that this author was writing about life that wasn't mainstream, and yet reflected the era in a kind of funhouse mirror version. Isherwood was able to contrast his unusual cast of characters, contrary and unmanageably compulsive, against the backdrop of the burgeoning National Socialist regime in Germany's thirties, a larger frame that makes individual failings or eccentricity seem minor.

Our impressionable and yet worldly narrator makes his polite way amongst the international flotsam and near-society types that comprise certain circles in Berlin, 1935. Rather than savagely giving us a wicked parody of everyone he meets and all he sees, he opts for a kind of quiet empathy in the hopes of understanding the larger things. As much as this helps the story, since he gets far more out of the proceedings than he might with a more judgmental approach-- in the end he gets no further in his larger quest, due no doubt to the precarious uncertainty of the era.

Isherwood has a kind of opposite number here to Hamilton's The Slaves Of Solitude, but with characters who are the inverse of quiet bed-sit desperation; they are criminals, bolsheviks, secret homosexuals, dominatrixes and jaded, perverse aristocracy, harboring various kinds of intents. It's a Reader's Digest "Most Unforgettable Character" with candidates who would truly horrify that staid family publication.

(..there is one ridiculous Baron whose proclivity for young boys is aided by his reading list in one particular genre: it is the Boy's-Castaway-Island scenario that fascinates him. Whenever we encounter the Baron, he's likely to be asking if a current escort reminds the narrator of one of his desert-island idylls. Grown men. Some wearing monocles. Boy castaways. Berlin. Nazis. Isherwood makes it impossible not to laugh, and yet...)

Mr. Norris Changes Trains is by turns silly, antic, then not-silly, and threatening, unpredictable. The introductory scene in the train embodies this nicely. Detail flies by in dense clouds, but a small item here or there may prove consequentially deadly. Perhaps. Kind of like life, but life in a highly-fraught, delirious era, that will never happen quite the same way again.
]]> How to Travel Incognito 6197695 176 Ludwig Bemelmans 0870081381 J. 0 3.83 How to Travel Incognito
author: Ludwig Bemelmans
name: J.
average rating: 3.83
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/08
shelves: to-read, essay-editorial, period-travel
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories]]> 18360 117 AnaĂŻs Nin 0804009813 J. 0 3.76 1977 Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories
author: AnaĂŻs Nin
name: J.
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1977
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/26
shelves: to-read, city-of-light, little-girl-lost, short-stories, next-up, between-the-wars
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East]]> 57827532 A major history of the British Empire’s early involvement in the Middle East

Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 showed how vulnerable India was to attack by France and Russia. It forced the British Empire to try to secure the two routes that a European might use to reach the subcontinent―through Egypt and the Red Sea, and through Baghdad and the Persian Gulf. Promised Lands is a panoramic history of this vibrant and explosive age.

Charting the development of Britain’s political interest in the Middle East from the Napoleonic Wars to the Crimean War in the 1850s, Jonathan Parry examines the various strategies employed by British and Indian officials, describing how they sought influence with local Arabs, Mamluks, Kurds, Christians, and Jews. He tells a story of commercial and naval power―boosted by the arrival of steamships in the 1830s―and discusses how classical and biblical history fed into British visions of what these lands might become. The region was subject to the Ottoman Empire, yet the Sultan’s grip on it appeared weak. Should Ottoman claims to sovereignty be recognised and exploited, or ignored and opposed? Could the Sultan’s government be made to support British objectives, or would it always favour France or Russia?

Promised Lands shows how what started as a geopolitical contest became a drama about diplomatic competition, religion, race, and the unforeseen consequences of history.]]> 448 Jonathan Parry 0691181896 J. 4
Also has the same nothing-ever-settled vibe, of John Reed's Ten Days That Shook The World, another history very nearly undermined by its obsession with org-charting the micro detail.

Naturally this was a read to get to some sense about the formation of what we call the Middle East today, how it is that there's a simmering world-war going on there at (fall '24) the present moment. How conditions permitted an outside entity to form a whole new country. Called Israel.

This history is a British perspective, on how the Foreign Office of the day-- footnoted thoroughly-- viewed and responded to developments in the Levant, Suez, and the Persian Gulf, during the administration of the Ottoman Empire, which would fall to pieces in the first World War. As mentioned, the details are endless, and they are all built on other details, conditional on previous developments. The casual reader should be warned off-- this is an enormous trudge if you don't have a wall-size chart of the Sinai and Arabia on your reading room wall. Even if you do.

What I took away: first, you have to immediately remove-while-remembering-- the constructs around the religions of Islam, Christianity and Judaism from the operational detail on the ground. The slowly grinding wheels of narrative here have only some religious bearing-- beyond the Tribal alliances that religion created, anyway. Next, you need to consider the period detail-- implied but not always emphasized-- that Naval traffic and Waterways were uppermost in the minds of the Brits, that anything overland took months, that electronic communication was for another century. The land of the Ottomans was very close to feudal in all aspects. A city or port could be worthless in all but the most important 'coaling station' significance placed on its position by world steamship routes.

The narrative of the book covers the stratagems and squabbling of Empires-- not just Britain but France, Russia, others-- to do all the things that empires do. As in cornering markets, force-feeding ideology, tipping and fouling the scales of justice (where there were scales at all), and using interventionist leverage wherever possible to attain market monopolies in emerging ports and centers.

If you can hold with that-- it quickly becomes apparent that the establishment of Israel-- not covered in the timespan of the book-- is a land grab begun in the 19th century, just one of dozens and dozens of regional land grabs taking place all across the former Ottoman lands. That to imbue the Zionist 'mission' with heavenly rays of entitlement-- goes fully contrary to the leadup, the rush for real estate, markets and profit, that was in progress for the preceding century across the developing world of the Near East.

In the end, an ultra complicated preamble to a simple answer.]]> 3.50 2022 Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East
author: Jonathan Parry
name: J.
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/13
date added: 2024/10/13
shelves: culture-clash, levant, oblique-strategies
review:
I may never have read such hardcore history for history's sake. Who was in charge of which department during which period, who sent a memorandum to whom, where the previous treaty said the border was, what constituted a tariff under the follow-up treaty, what the revisions of the revisions indicate, which formerly-influential Foreign Office poobah seemed to fall back, once a new government was empowered ... infinite detail.

Also has the same nothing-ever-settled vibe, of John Reed's Ten Days That Shook The World, another history very nearly undermined by its obsession with org-charting the micro detail.

Naturally this was a read to get to some sense about the formation of what we call the Middle East today, how it is that there's a simmering world-war going on there at (fall '24) the present moment. How conditions permitted an outside entity to form a whole new country. Called Israel.

This history is a British perspective, on how the Foreign Office of the day-- footnoted thoroughly-- viewed and responded to developments in the Levant, Suez, and the Persian Gulf, during the administration of the Ottoman Empire, which would fall to pieces in the first World War. As mentioned, the details are endless, and they are all built on other details, conditional on previous developments. The casual reader should be warned off-- this is an enormous trudge if you don't have a wall-size chart of the Sinai and Arabia on your reading room wall. Even if you do.

What I took away: first, you have to immediately remove-while-remembering-- the constructs around the religions of Islam, Christianity and Judaism from the operational detail on the ground. The slowly grinding wheels of narrative here have only some religious bearing-- beyond the Tribal alliances that religion created, anyway. Next, you need to consider the period detail-- implied but not always emphasized-- that Naval traffic and Waterways were uppermost in the minds of the Brits, that anything overland took months, that electronic communication was for another century. The land of the Ottomans was very close to feudal in all aspects. A city or port could be worthless in all but the most important 'coaling station' significance placed on its position by world steamship routes.

The narrative of the book covers the stratagems and squabbling of Empires-- not just Britain but France, Russia, others-- to do all the things that empires do. As in cornering markets, force-feeding ideology, tipping and fouling the scales of justice (where there were scales at all), and using interventionist leverage wherever possible to attain market monopolies in emerging ports and centers.

If you can hold with that-- it quickly becomes apparent that the establishment of Israel-- not covered in the timespan of the book-- is a land grab begun in the 19th century, just one of dozens and dozens of regional land grabs taking place all across the former Ottoman lands. That to imbue the Zionist 'mission' with heavenly rays of entitlement-- goes fully contrary to the leadup, the rush for real estate, markets and profit, that was in progress for the preceding century across the developing world of the Near East.

In the end, an ultra complicated preamble to a simple answer.
]]> Frisk 856165 128 Dennis Cooper 0802132898 J. 0 to-read 3.68 1991 Frisk
author: Dennis Cooper
name: J.
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1991
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Empires of Light 6344842 The gripping history of electricity and how the fateful collision of Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse left the world utterly transformed.In the final decades of the nineteenth century, three brilliant and visionary titans of America’s Gilded Age—Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse—battled bitterly as each vied to create a vast and powerful electrical empire. In Empires of Light, historian Jill Jonnes portrays this extraordinary trio and their riveting and ruthless world of cutting-edge science, invention, intrigue, money, death, and hard-eyed Wall Street millionaires. At the heart of the story are Thomas Alva Edison, the nation’s most famous and folksy inventor, creator of the incandescent light bulb and mastermind of the world’s first direct current electrical light networks; the Serbian wizard of invention Nikola Tesla, elegant, highly eccentric, a dreamer who revolutionized the generation and delivery of electricity; and the charismatic George Westinghouse, Pittsburgh inventor and tough corporate entrepreneur, an industrial idealist who in the era of gaslight imagined a world powered by cheap and plentiful electricity and worked heart and soul to create it. Edison struggled to introduce his radical new direct current (DC) technology into the hurly-burly of New York City as Tesla and Westinghouse challenged his dominance with their alternating current (AC), thus setting the stage for one of the eeriest feuds in American corporate history, the War of the Electric Currents. The Wall Street, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Niagara Falls, and, finally, the death chamber—Jonnes takes us on the tense walk down a prison hallway and into the sunlit room where William Kemmler, convicted ax murderer, became the first man to die in the electric chair.]]> 510 Jill Jonnes 1588360008 J. 0 4.30 2003 Empires of Light
author: Jill Jonnes
name: J.
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/29
shelves: to-read, la-lumiere, history, tech
review:

]]> My Enemy's Enemy 391799
In this wry, piercing short story from one of the greatest of all British postwar writers, an ageing poet considers the value of his art - and of the critics who've found genius in it. Then, with his final work, he exercises a unique revenge . . .]]> 774 Kingsley Amis 0575008164 J. 2 amis-and-son, short-stories No, I don't think so. The partial stories and fragmented fiction found in this collection are notable in that the quality is so variable that the flaws are on full display. Easy to see Amis finding his footing in this group of orphaned plot threads, and easy to see where his confidence and flow turn on like a traffic light; for the completist or aficionado, a field day. For the average reader, not so much.

There are the fragments that come from Amis's wartime exploits in the Signal Corps, all of which have that familiar, khaki Catch-22 quality, surely meant for a novel that didn't materialize. Then there are the middle period experiments with what can only be called humorous-magazine-fodder, just right for the commuter's evening train ride, a couple of mature short stories squeezed in for contrast, and the finale, a completely bizarre sci-fi attempt.

From one of the better moments :
“Will you sit, please,� the clergyman directed. He was a bulky man of about fifty-five with white hair carefully combed and set. He had a thick voice, as if his throat were swollen. It went down a tone or two each time he told the congregation to change its posture. His way of doing this even when it was clearly unnecessary, and of giving every such syllable its full value, made up a good substitute for quite a long sentence about the decline of church-going, the consequent uncertainty and uneasiness felt by many people on such occasions as did bring them into the house of God, his own determination that there should be no confusion in his church about what some might think were small points of procedure, and the decline of church-going. Now, after making absolutely certain that everyone had done his bidding, he pronounced the dead woman’s name in the manner of an operator beginning to read back a telegram.
All The Blood Within Me 1962
Thing is, in the long run, even of short fragments, it's Kingsley Amis, and when he's on, he's dead on. There are traces, all the way through, of his particularly rueful comic voice. Just so happens there's a lot of clearing his throat, too. Bloody cigs.

]]> 3.24 1962 My Enemy's Enemy
author: Kingsley Amis
name: J.
average rating: 3.24
book published: 1962
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2024/08/06
shelves: amis-and-son, short-stories
review:
'Social Satire At Its Ironic Best'?
No, I don't think so. The partial stories and fragmented fiction found in this collection are notable in that the quality is so variable that the flaws are on full display. Easy to see Amis finding his footing in this group of orphaned plot threads, and easy to see where his confidence and flow turn on like a traffic light; for the completist or aficionado, a field day. For the average reader, not so much.

There are the fragments that come from Amis's wartime exploits in the Signal Corps, all of which have that familiar, khaki Catch-22 quality, surely meant for a novel that didn't materialize. Then there are the middle period experiments with what can only be called humorous-magazine-fodder, just right for the commuter's evening train ride, a couple of mature short stories squeezed in for contrast, and the finale, a completely bizarre sci-fi attempt.

From one of the better moments :
“Will you sit, please,� the clergyman directed. He was a bulky man of about fifty-five with white hair carefully combed and set. He had a thick voice, as if his throat were swollen. It went down a tone or two each time he told the congregation to change its posture. His way of doing this even when it was clearly unnecessary, and of giving every such syllable its full value, made up a good substitute for quite a long sentence about the decline of church-going, the consequent uncertainty and uneasiness felt by many people on such occasions as did bring them into the house of God, his own determination that there should be no confusion in his church about what some might think were small points of procedure, and the decline of church-going. Now, after making absolutely certain that everyone had done his bidding, he pronounced the dead woman’s name in the manner of an operator beginning to read back a telegram.
All The Blood Within Me 1962
Thing is, in the long run, even of short fragments, it's Kingsley Amis, and when he's on, he's dead on. There are traces, all the way through, of his particularly rueful comic voice. Just so happens there's a lot of clearing his throat, too. Bloody cigs.


]]> <![CDATA[Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946�1962]]> 60557650
This book delves into the various circles of artists who lived in France following World War II. Featuring new scholarship and illuminating essays, the groundbreaking volume illustrates many of the paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photos, and films produced between 1946 and 1962. Americans in Paris introduces the story of the American creative community that inhabited the City of Lights following the Second World War. Proposing Paris as decisive for the development of postwar American art, this volume investigates the academies where many of these artists studied, the spaces where their work was exhibited, the aesthetic discourses that animated their conversations, their interactions with European artists, and the overarching issue of what it meant to be an American abroad.
Ěý±Ő±Ő> 300 Lynn Gumpert 3777436372 J. 0 france, history, to-read 4.67 Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962
author: Lynn Gumpert
name: J.
average rating: 4.67
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/22
shelves: france, history, to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[This Poison Will Remain (Commissaire Adamsberg, #11)]]> 43131760
A murder in Paris brings Commissaire Adamsberg out of the Icelandic mists of his previous investigation and unexpectedly into the region of Nîmes, where three old men have died of spider bites. The recluse has a sneaky attack, but is that enough to explain the deaths of these men, all killed by the same venom?

At the National Museum of Natural History, Adamsberg meets a pensioner who tells him that two of the three octogenarians have known each other since childhood, when they lived in a local orphanage called The Mercy. There, they had belonged to a small group of violent young boys known as the "band of recluses." Adamsberg faces two obstacles: the third man killed by the same venom was not part of the "band of recluses," and the amount of spider venom necessary to kill doesn't add up.

Yet after the Nîmes deaths, more members of the old band succumb to recluse bites, leading the commissaire to uncover the tragedy hidden behind the walls of the orphanage.]]> 416 Fred Vargas 0143133667 J. 0 to-read, vargas-fred 3.98 2017 This Poison Will Remain (Commissaire Adamsberg, #11)
author: Fred Vargas
name: J.
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/19
shelves: to-read, vargas-fred
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Climate of Fear (Commissaire Adamsberg #10)]]> 30780002
A woman is found murdered in her bathtub, and the murder has been made to look like a suicide. But a strange symbol found at the crime scene leads the local police to call Commissaire Adamsberg and his team. When the symbol is found near the body of a second disguised suicide, a pattern begins to emerge: both victims were part of a disastrous expedition to Iceland over ten years ago where a group of tourists found themselves trapped on a deserted island for two weeks, surrounded by a thick, impenetrable fog rumored to be summoned by an ancient local demon. Two of them didn t make it back alive. But how are the deaths linked to the secretive Association for the Study of the Writings of Maximilien Robespierre? And what does the mysterious symbol signify?]]> 416 Fred Vargas 0143109456 J. 0 to-read, vargas-fred 3.77 2015 A Climate of Fear (Commissaire Adamsberg #10)
author: Fred Vargas
name: J.
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/19
shelves: to-read, vargas-fred
review:

]]> <![CDATA[I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year]]> 58412441 The instant #1 New York Times bestseller | A Washington Post Notable Book | One of NPR's Best Books of 2021The definitive behind-the-scenes story of Trump's final year in office, by Phil Rucker and Carol Leonnig, the Pulitzer-Prize winning reporters and authors of A Very Stable Genius.“Chilling.â€� â€� Anderson Cooper“Jaw-dropping.â€� â€� John Berman “Shocking.â€� â€� John Heilemann“Explosive.â€� â€� Hallie Jackson“Blockbuster new reporting.â€� â€� Nicolle WallaceĚý“Bracing new revelations.â€� â€� Brian Williams “Bombshell reporting.â€� â€� David Muir The true story of what took place in Donald Trump’s White House during a disastrous 2020 has never before been told in full. What was really going on around the president, as the government failed to contain the coronavirus and over half a million Americans perished? Who was influencing Trump after he refused to concede an election he had clearly lost and spread lies about election fraud? To answer these questions, Phil Rucker and Carol Leonnig reveal a dysfunctional and bumbling presidency’s inner workings in unprecedented, stunning detail.ĚýFocused on Trump and the key players around him—the doctors, generals, senior advisers, and Trump family membersâ€� Rucker and Leonnig provide a forensic account of the most devastating year in a presidency like no other. Their sources were in the room as time and time again Trump put his personal gain ahead of the good of the country. These witnesses to history tell the story of him longing to deploy the military to the streets of American cities to crush the protest movement in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, all to bolster his image of strength ahead of the election. These sources saw firsthand his refusal to take the threat of the coronavirus seriously—even to the point of allowing himself and those around him to be infected. This is a story of a nation sabotaged—economically, medically, and politically—by its own leader, culminating with a groundbreaking, minute-by-minute account ofĚý exactly what went on in the Capitol building on January 6, as Trump’s supporters so easily breached the most sacred halls of American democracy, and how the president reacted. With unparalleled access, Rucker and Leonnig explain and expose exactly who enabled—and who foiled—Trump as he sought desperately to cling to power.ĚýA classic and heart-racing work of investigative reporting, this book is destined to be read and studied by citizens and historians alike for decades to come.]]> 476 Carol Leonnig J. 4 slow-boil-the-frog metaphor-- that he was way off the rails and the battle lines between Donald and planet-united-states were now very established.

Clarity, pace, and the ridiculous story of a dangerous and ridiculous man. Read while you still remember the recent past. ]]> 4.43 2021 I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year
author: Carol Leonnig
name: J.
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/02
date added: 2024/05/02
shelves: con-games, non-fiction, release-the-flying-monkeys
review:
This was very good. What comes across most strongly is the obscured truth that the Fourth Year of the Trumpshow was significantly evolved and more disastrous than the preceding years. We forgot, immersed in our slow-boil-the-frog metaphor-- that he was way off the rails and the battle lines between Donald and planet-united-states were now very established.

Clarity, pace, and the ridiculous story of a dangerous and ridiculous man. Read while you still remember the recent past.
]]> Caligula and Other Plays 3265421 0 Albert Camus 0141183152 J. 4 stage-play, noir-environs A plot as basic as The Postman Always Rings Twice, but a presentation like some odd ritual observance. Has that kind of once-removed recitation & response feeling of religious rites, and with Camus the liturgy is a narrowly bleak philosophy.

A man returns to his home, a roadside Inn, to find that he is unrecognized by his own Mother and Sister; for their part, they are consumed in the poisoning and serial murder of their male visitors, who don't suspect that a night at this inn will be their last. The expression 'dysfunctional' is vastly inadequate in the description of this reunited family; the unmentioned absence of a head of household or Father figure underlines the characters aimlessness and failure to find identity. Both Kind Hearts And Coronets and Arsenic And Old Lace come to mind, with a dash of the inevitable Sweeney Todd.

As the score of a musical work is meant to provide the starting line for the conductor and the musicians, this play sets out the barest guidlelines for what the actors may make of it. This could be imagined as anything from the most solemn greek-tragedy all the way to the other extreme of a leering and transgressive cabaret of cruelty, with staging and mise-en-scene to suit the version. Could easily be Brechtian operetta or Kabuki madhouse, perhaps with a little impromptu rendition of Mack The Knife. Camus has left tremendous wide spaces for a variety of approaches; subtext and silences might be filagreed with elaborate exotica or left bluntly, gapingly open, dependent on the intent of the production. ]]> 4.50 1949 Caligula and Other Plays
author: Albert Camus
name: J.
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1949
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/04/13
shelves: stage-play, noir-environs
review:
Just read "Cross Purpose" on this outing.
A plot as basic as The Postman Always Rings Twice, but a presentation like some odd ritual observance. Has that kind of once-removed recitation & response feeling of religious rites, and with Camus the liturgy is a narrowly bleak philosophy.

A man returns to his home, a roadside Inn, to find that he is unrecognized by his own Mother and Sister; for their part, they are consumed in the poisoning and serial murder of their male visitors, who don't suspect that a night at this inn will be their last. The expression 'dysfunctional' is vastly inadequate in the description of this reunited family; the unmentioned absence of a head of household or Father figure underlines the characters aimlessness and failure to find identity. Both Kind Hearts And Coronets and Arsenic And Old Lace come to mind, with a dash of the inevitable Sweeney Todd.

As the score of a musical work is meant to provide the starting line for the conductor and the musicians, this play sets out the barest guidlelines for what the actors may make of it. This could be imagined as anything from the most solemn greek-tragedy all the way to the other extreme of a leering and transgressive cabaret of cruelty, with staging and mise-en-scene to suit the version. Could easily be Brechtian operetta or Kabuki madhouse, perhaps with a little impromptu rendition of Mack The Knife. Camus has left tremendous wide spaces for a variety of approaches; subtext and silences might be filagreed with elaborate exotica or left bluntly, gapingly open, dependent on the intent of the production.
]]> <![CDATA[La Symphonie Pastorale and Isabelle]]> 1250940 170 André Gide 014018046X J. 0 to-read 3.83 1931 La Symphonie Pastorale and Isabelle
author: André Gide
name: J.
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1931
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen: Introduction by John Banville (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)]]> 43584582 The Heat of the Day, The House in Paris, and The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen established herself in the front rank of the century's writers equally through her short fiction.

This collection brings together seventy-nine magnificent stories written over the course of four decades. Vividly featuring scenes of bomb-scarred London during the Blitz, frustrated lovers, acutely observed children, and even vengeful ghosts, these stories reinforce Bowen's reputation as an artist whose finely chiseled narratives--rich in imagination, psychological insight, and craft--transcend their time and place.]]> 907 Elizabeth Bowen 1101908181 J. 0 4.00 1981 Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen: Introduction by John Banville (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)
author: Elizabeth Bowen
name: J.
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/29
shelves: to-read, short-stories, elizabeth-bowen
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Shadowy Third: Love, Letters, and Elizabeth Bowen]]> 55271919
Using fascinating unpublished correspondence, The Shadowy Third exposes the affair and its impact by following the overlapping lives of three very different characters through some of the most dramatic decades of the twentieth century; from the rarefied air of Oxford in the 1930s, to the Anglo-Irish Big House, to the last days of Empire in India and on into the Second World War. The story is spiced with social history and a celebrated supporting cast that includes Isaiah Berlin and Virginia Woolf.

In the style of Bowen, a novelist obsessed by sense of place, Julia travels to all the locations written about in the letters, retracing the physical and emotional songlines from Kolkata to Cambridge, Ireland to Texas. With present day story telling as a colourful counterpoint to the historical narrative, this is a debut work of unparalleled personal and familial investigation.]]> 386 Julia Parry 0715653571 J. 0 to-read, elizabeth-bowen, bio 4.23 2021 The Shadowy Third: Love, Letters, and Elizabeth Bowen
author: Julia Parry
name: J.
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/29
shelves: to-read, elizabeth-bowen, bio
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia]]> 4396089 264 James Palmer 0465014488 J. 0 3.34 2008 The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia
author: James Palmer
name: J.
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/22
shelves: to-read, asia, east-west, between-the-wars
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Lessons from the Edge: A Memoir]]> 53968466 416 Marie Yovanovitch 0358457548 J. 0 4.46 2022 Lessons from the Edge: A Memoir
author: Marie Yovanovitch
name: J.
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/10
shelves: currently-reading, history, eastern-bloc, non-fiction
review:

]]> Leopoldstadt 48567463 0 Tom Stoppard 0571359043 J. 5
This isn't moving from the to-be-read shelf. I'll read it again for pace, sleight-of-hand, and concision. Tom Stoppard's rosebud. Just on the precarious verge of bloom.
]]> 4.31 2020 Leopoldstadt
author: Tom Stoppard
name: J.
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/10
date added: 2023/09/10
shelves: stoppard, theater, between-the-wars, central-europe, five-star
review:
Deft. Devastating. Just the measured weight of the signature-Stoppard patter, the timing. The big subject lurking within the clever retorts and parries. The pratfall, used sparingly here for Stoppard, some flourishes with tricks up the sleeves, and then the dagger through the heart.

This isn't moving from the to-be-read shelf. I'll read it again for pace, sleight-of-hand, and concision. Tom Stoppard's rosebud. Just on the precarious verge of bloom.

]]> Lady Joker, Volume One 56572078 One of Japan’s great modern masters, Kaoru Takamura, makes her English-language debut with this two-volume publication of her magnum opus.

Tokyo, 1995. Five men meet at the racetrack every Sunday to bet on horses. They have little in common except a deep disaffection with their lives, but together they represent the social struggles and griefs of post-War Japan: a poorly socialized genius stuck working as a welder; a demoted detective with a chip on his shoulder; a Zainichi Korean banker sick of being ostracized for his race; a struggling single dad of a teenage girl with Down syndrome. The fifth man bringing them all together is an elderly drugstore owner grieving his grandson, who has died suspiciously after the revelation of a family connection with the segregated buraku community, historically subjected to severe discrimination.

Intent on revenge against a society that values corporate behemoths more than human life, the five conspirators decide to carry out a heist: kidnap the CEO of Japan’s largest beer conglomerate and extract blood money from the company’s corrupt financiers.

Inspired by the unsolved true-crime kidnapping case perpetrated by "the Monster with 21 Faces", Lady Joker has become a cultural touchstone since its 1997 publication, acknowledged as the magnum opus by one of Japan’s literary masters, twice adapted for film and TV and often taught in high school and college classrooms.]]> 576 Kaoru Takamura 1616957018 J. 0 3.59 1997 Lady Joker, Volume One
author: Kaoru Takamura
name: J.
average rating: 3.59
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/11
shelves: currently-reading, mystery, japan, and-you-make-all-your-animal-deals
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West]]> 62919358 The riveting, untold story of the hundred-year intelligence war between Russia and the West with lessons for our new superpower conflict with China.

Spies is the history of the secret war that Russia has been waging against the West for a century. Espionage, sabotage, and subversion were the Kremlin’s means to equalize the imbalance of resources between the East and West before, during, and after the Cold War. There was nothing “unprecedented� about Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. It was simply business as usual, new means used for old ends.

But the West fought back after World War II, mounting its own shadow war, using disinformation, vast intelligence networks, and new technologies against the Soviet Union. Spies is an inspiring, engrossing story of the best and worst of mankind: bravery and honor, treachery and betrayal. The narrative shifts across continents and decades, from the freezing streets of St. Petersburg in 1917 to the bloody beaches of Normandy; from coups in faraway lands to present-day Moscow where troll farms, synthetic bots, and weaponized cyber-attacks are launched woefully on the unprepared West. It is about the rise and fall of eastern superpowers: Russia’s past and present and the global ascendance of China.

Mining hitherto secret archives in multiple languages, Calder Walton shows that the Cold War started earlier than commonly assumed, that it continued even after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, and that Britain and America’s clandestine struggle with the Soviet government provides key lessons for countering China today. This fresh reading of history, combined with practical takeaways for our current great power struggles, make Spies a unique and essential addition to the history of the Cold War and the unrolling conflict between the United States and China that will dominate the 21st century.]]> 688 Calder Walton 1668000695 J. 0 4.26 2023 Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West
author: Calder Walton
name: J.
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/11
shelves: to-read, coldwar, eastern-bloc, russia, someone-to-watch-over-me
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Field Of Blood (Paddy Meehan, #1)]]> 1781461
When the body of a four-year-old boy is found tortured and battered to death, it is assumed the child has been the victim of a vicious sexual predator. Instead the police are led, not to the house of an adult killer, but to the doors of two eleven-year-old boys.

Fresh from school, Paddy Meehan has just started work on the Scottish Daily News. Determined to be an investigative journalist, she also wants to be financially independent. But her colleagues � hard-drinking chauvinists to a man � believe a woman’s place to be in the home, and preferably in the bedroom. And Paddy’s family all they want is for her to get married to her fiancé, Sean, and have children of her own. Then Paddy discovers that one of the boys charged with the child’s murder is Sean’s cousin, Callum. Soon Callum’s name is all over the News, and her family blames Paddy. Shunned by Sean and those closest to her, Paddy finds herself dangerously alone.

Set in Glasgow in 1981, a time of hunger strikes, riots and unemployment that decimate the old industrial heartlands, The Field of Blood is the first in a stunning new crime series featuring Paddy Meehan. Infused with Mina’s unique blend of dark humour, personal insights and the social injustices that pervade society, this is a novel that will grip the reader while challenging our perceptions of childhood innocence, crime and punishment, right or wrong.


From the Trade Paperback edition.]]> 371 Denise Mina 0593050975 J. 0 to-read, mystery, mina 3.63 2005 The Field Of Blood (Paddy Meehan, #1)
author: Denise Mina
name: J.
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/10
shelves: to-read, mystery, mina
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Meaningful Life (New York Review Books Classics)]]> 3979476 214 L.J. Davis 1590173007 J. 2 new-york-city
Author Davis seems to have a short-story that is perfect for a New Yorker humor column, maybe, that he has extrapolated into a full novel in length. At times it's a charmingly exasperating kind of strategy, able to include all kinds of asides and sidebars that stray from the action but enhance the story and characters. At other times, the reader is stuck in the circles of hell with the protagonist, wishing only for a quick end to it all.

Overall, I think he has a novella here, one that needs an understandingly sympathetic editorial hand; the relentless 'and-then-it-gets-worse' storyline needs paring down-- integration, rather than chopping out. The wandering perspective and detached introspection are also well worth keeping, but maybe restraining a little too.

At best A Meaningful Life feels like those hapless characters in some Fitzgerald and most Nathaniel West creations, striving, generally-competent Everymen, who get caught in a stupefying chaos that reflects the world we've inherited.

At worst, we have something like Confederacy Of Dunces or Portnoy, whose self-loathing and flailing self-regard end up making the reader wish he were anywhere else, and in story terms tend to advance the plot to exactly nowhere.

For this reader, the latter effect weighs down the forward action of the novel to a fatally flawed crawl, and the murder that happens toward the very end of the story is positioned poorly to put the whole thing back on the tracks. If Macbeth has a perfectly-timed murder, this has the opposite. It would have added pace and adrenaline if it had occurred in the middle going, but as it is, the jolt somehow isn't enough, and it is too late for any revived interest. ]]> 3.60 1971 A Meaningful Life (New York Review Books Classics)
author: L.J. Davis
name: J.
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1971
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2023/07/30
shelves: new-york-city
review:
A short novel that feels endless at times, a what-can-go-wrong-will-go-wrong tale, the story of an epic fail, in the trenches of urban gentrification and renovation.

Author Davis seems to have a short-story that is perfect for a New Yorker humor column, maybe, that he has extrapolated into a full novel in length. At times it's a charmingly exasperating kind of strategy, able to include all kinds of asides and sidebars that stray from the action but enhance the story and characters. At other times, the reader is stuck in the circles of hell with the protagonist, wishing only for a quick end to it all.

Overall, I think he has a novella here, one that needs an understandingly sympathetic editorial hand; the relentless 'and-then-it-gets-worse' storyline needs paring down-- integration, rather than chopping out. The wandering perspective and detached introspection are also well worth keeping, but maybe restraining a little too.

At best A Meaningful Life feels like those hapless characters in some Fitzgerald and most Nathaniel West creations, striving, generally-competent Everymen, who get caught in a stupefying chaos that reflects the world we've inherited.

At worst, we have something like Confederacy Of Dunces or Portnoy, whose self-loathing and flailing self-regard end up making the reader wish he were anywhere else, and in story terms tend to advance the plot to exactly nowhere.

For this reader, the latter effect weighs down the forward action of the novel to a fatally flawed crawl, and the murder that happens toward the very end of the story is positioned poorly to put the whole thing back on the tracks. If Macbeth has a perfectly-timed murder, this has the opposite. It would have added pace and adrenaline if it had occurred in the middle going, but as it is, the jolt somehow isn't enough, and it is too late for any revived interest.
]]> Alien Hearts 1782012
Richard Howard’s new English translation of this complex and brooding novel—the first in more than a hundred years—reveals the final, unexpected flowering of a great French realist’s art.]]> 177 Guy de Maupassant 1590172604 J. 0 3.81 1890 Alien Hearts
author: Guy de Maupassant
name: J.
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1890
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/29
shelves: to-read, city-of-light, next-up, maupassant
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Voyage Out (The Virginia Woolf Library)]]> 148905 ]]> 375 Virginia Woolf 0156028050 J. 0 to-read, off-shore, next-up 3.77 1915 The Voyage Out (The Virginia Woolf Library)
author: Virginia Woolf
name: J.
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1915
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/27
shelves: to-read, off-shore, next-up
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Mr. Putin REV: Operative in the Kremlin (Geopolitics in the 21st Century)]]> 26267110 544 Fiona Hill 0815726775 J. 4 4.14 2012 Mr. Putin REV: Operative in the Kremlin (Geopolitics in the 21st Century)
author: Fiona Hill
name: J.
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/23
date added: 2023/07/23
shelves: history, non-fiction, russia, secret-agent-man
review:
Comprehensive, concise, blunt where required. Fiona Hill is a professional Russia Analyst and the methodically organized outline here displays that expertise. Recommended for all armchair kremlinologists.
]]> <![CDATA[In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran]]> 244616 304 Christopher de Bellaigue 0060935367 J. 4
Still worth it, though. Iran needs to be an open book in our era, not an orientalist's mystery-box. ]]> 3.47 2005 In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran
author: Christopher de Bellaigue
name: J.
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/23
date added: 2023/07/23
shelves: history, mid-east, memoir, east-west, expats
review:
Gets a (firm) fourth star from me only due to the subject matter and persistence of the author. Residing in the culture via marriage, de Bellaigue is observant and immersed, but somehow still manages to be a bit haphazard and disorganized in his pursuits. Resulting in a book of many questions, some detail but not enough, and a reluctance to reach many conclusions.

Still worth it, though. Iran needs to be an open book in our era, not an orientalist's mystery-box.
]]> Journey by Moonlight 158217 Journey by Moonlight (Utas és Holdvilág) is the fantastically moving and darkly funny story of a bourgeois businessman torn between duty and desire.

'On the train, everything seemed fine. The trouble began in Venice ...'

Mihály has dreamt of Italy all his life. When he finally travels there on his honeymoon with wife Erszi, he soon abandons her in order to find himself, haunted by old friends from his turbulent teenage days: beautiful, kind Tamas, brash and wicked Janos, and the sexless yet unforgettable Eva. Journeying from Venice to Ravenna, Florence, and Rome, Mihály loses himself in Venetian back alleys and in the Tuscan and Umbrian countryside, driven by an irresistible desire to resurrect his lost youth among Hungary's Bright Young Things, and knowing that he must soon decide whether to return to the ambiguous promise of a placid adult life, or allow himself to be seduced into a life of scandalous adventure.

Journey by Moonlight (Utas és Holdvilág) is an undoubted masterpiece of Modernist literature, a darkly comic novel cut through by sex and death, which traces the effects of a socially and sexually claustrophobic world on the life of one man.

Translated from the Hungarian by the renowned and award-winning Len Rix, Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight (first published as Utas és Holdvilág in Hungary in 1937) is the consummate European novel of the inter-war period.]]> 299 Antal Szerb 1901285502 J. 0 4.22 1937 Journey by Moonlight
author: Antal Szerb
name: J.
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1937
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/23
shelves: currently-reading, crack-in-the-sky, downtempo-picaresque
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Favourite of the Gods and A Compass Error (NYRB Classics)]]> 32171510
When disaster strikes, Anna and the prince fall back on the standards of behavior of their disparate cultures;ĚýConstanza, with her European upbringing, is free to plot her own course, and she does so with daring, making an unconventional life for herself in England and on the continent during and after the First World War.

Her own daughter Flavia is the heroine of A Compass Error , which begins where the first novel concludes. Flavia too is a brilliant young woman, though both more brash and more faltering than her mother, studying for her entrance exam to Oxford when she becomes involved with a mysterious woman whose arrival at a sensitive moment in Flavia’s adolescence will alter both her and her mother’s lives forever.]]> 512 Sybille Bedford 1681370565 J. 0 3.84 1964 A Favourite of the Gods and A Compass Error (NYRB Classics)
author: Sybille Bedford
name: J.
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1964
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/08/24
shelves: to-read, between-the-wars, coming-of-age, europe, expats
review:

]]> Sybille Bedford: A Life 53481715 The first biography of the universally acclaimed British writer, Sybille Bedford, by the celebrated author of books about Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh.

Passionate, liberated, fiercely independent, Sybille Bedford was a writer and a journalist, the author of ten books, including a biography of Aldous Huxley, and four novels, all of which fictionalized her extraordinary life. Born in Berlin, she grew up in Baden, first with her distant, aristocratic father, and then in France with her intellectual, narcissistic, morphine-addicted mother and her lover. She was a child with a German Jewish background who survived two world wars and went on to spend her adult life in exile in France, Italy, New York, and Los Angeles, before finally settling in England.

Bedford was ahead of her time in many ways, with great enthusiasm for life and all its sensual pleasures, including friendships with bold faced names in the worlds of literature and food as well as a literary network of high-powered lesbians. Aldous Huxley became a mentor, and Martha Gellhorn encouraged her to write her first novel, A Legacy; in 1989, her novel Jigsaw was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In the 1960s, she wrote for magazines and newspapers, covering nearly 100 trials, including those of Auschwitz officials accused of Nazi war crimes and Jack Ruby, on trial for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. Brenda Wineapple has called Bedford one of the finest stylists of the 20th century, bar none. In this major biography, Selina Hastings has brilliantly captured the fierce intelligence, wit, curiosity, and compassion of the woman and the writer in all the richness of her character and achievements.]]> 432 Selina Shirley Hastings 1101947918 J. 0 3.80 Sybille Bedford: A Life
author: Selina Shirley Hastings
name: J.
average rating: 3.80
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/08/21
shelves: to-read, bio, between-the-wars, europe
review:

]]> In Our Convent Days 4912245 256 Agnes Repplier 0403007046 J. 0 3.62 1905 In Our Convent Days
author: Agnes Repplier
name: J.
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1905
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/06/14
shelves: to-read, boarding-school, roman-catholic
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Journey to the East (Mit Press)]]> 1858603 288 Le Corbusier 0262622106 J. 3 ways of the world, more or less. And then, having had a mad dash at life, the courtly, bohemian, and maybe even not-so-reputable ways of the continent-- return to promptly immerse himself in the lifelong drudgery of administering his father's concerns.

Here's the journal of Charles-Edouard Jeanneret at twenty-four, long before his self-induced transformation into the architect and design-polemicist Le Corbusier, eventually one of the founders of International Style in the 1920s.

But this is 1911, and the world is a Nineteenth Century one. And Journey To The East is most notable, I think, as a period piece, an illustration of a time we can't imagine any longer, as encapsulated by a young man who was enraptured by it (and a little by his own impressions). At the turn of the century, The East meant only Central Europe and beyond, so an itinerary starting in Berlin and headed down the Danube toward the Balkans-- fit the bill.

Jeanneret's voice isn't so much unique as it is of-its-day, and highly impressionable; orientalisms abound --add to the mix the idea of who he would become, and there's an intriguing, slightly arriviste charge to the account. A world where electricity, the idea of 'traffic', and even the telephone are conspicuously absent-- becomes a kind of Conradian up-river affair for Little Corbu; the imagery becomes a bit hallucinatory at times, matched by long stream-of-consciousness passages.

But he also offers beautiful little line-drawings of what he sees all along the way, showing how he sees it, with a young man's enchantment in the framing. The sketches are well-proportioned, and draw the eye; exactly the effect a later traveler would attempt with photographs, but made by a draftsman who trusts his hand to take visual notes accurately.

It must be said, though, that all the while he really wants to go native and can't quite manage the full leap of faith. Until he sees the Parthenon that is, whereupon truth, golden dimensions, and angels singing seal the deal. Odd, though, that the resulting epiphanies are had at the shrine of the Western Ideal, in what is titled a journey to the East...

There is some discussion as to whether Jeanneret had met Gropius & Mies van der Rohe in Berlin before he left, where he had worked for an architect called Peter Behrens; whether he had yet seen the world in the stark terms of Toward A New Architecture, his vertical assault on style. But it doesn't matter; there is also the engaging thing of seeing him come alive to the cultures he encounters in direct response to what they build. His discussion of the Hagia Sophia is still very illuminating to the western reader, and the Parthenon experience surely has resonant chords for many.

Another aspect here is that this is before the war and the Paris peace accords of 1919, which would redraw the world; rather than boundaries as we know them, Jeanneret travels through what was the Austro-Hungary of the Hapsburgs, and into the Ottoman empire of the last caliphate. Bounded on the far shore by British East Africa, and on the eastern edge by the crumbling old Persian empire, this Grand Tour takes him through long-forgotten conceptions of the world, dim memories now of a euro-centric globe.

Here's a snip of the bazaar at Stamboul, in Constantinople [Istanbul:] :

Here, in effect, is Sesame, because one discovers and dislodges from beneath the piles of coarse earth the most sumptuous nuggets of the East, from the Islam of Europe to as far as the jungles, brought here piece by piece across the sands, mountains, and brush by solemn caravans.
It is a labyrinth (Baedecker recommends that one carry a compass), a maze of arcades, without a glimpse of sky for several kilometers. It is closed in, suffocationg, and secluded. Here and there tiny windows pierce the low barrel vault, and yet it is well lit. It is deserted at night and frenzied during the day. At sunset, the heavy doors are drawn, enclosing the fabulous wealth, and the great clamor subsides.
Upon arriving, forewarned by the cries of these strange people, I could always imagine a metal god seated on the lintel of the door, rubbing his fat gold belly with both hands. His lips would be greedy , and his forehead would recede like that of an orangutan. His nostrils would be flared, and his gaze restless. He would have long donkey's ears. The hierophant sits there and in his slimy manner overhears the glib and deafening voices; he has the same features as his master, and as for his claws he has stolen them from the oldest of the bridges tolltakers, who died of grief. He speaks all languages, badly, is dressed like us, and his hair is fuzzy...
Meanwhile, carpets are not retrieved from their fall, nor embroideries from their swoon, nor pottery, now rendering every movement perilous. You are utterly seduced by a young persian girl dressed in scarlet, beneath a golden canopy in an Ishfahan garden with tulips and hyacinths everywhere.... Truly, you cannot be cold-blooded any longer; there are too many crazy things before your eyes, too many delightful evocations that throw you into a foolish stupor. You are intoxicated; you cannot react at all. This torrent, this flood, this avalanche of charlatanism brutalizes and annihilates you.

Anyway, a little bit trying at times, irrationally exuberant at others, the reader who wants to enjoy this has to go with the flow, both of the journey, and Jeanneret's purplish rendering thereof... Well worth the trip, worth relaxing overly-strict tolerances for tight prose, allowing, even appreciating, the self-conscious persona of Youth. "Have a look at this, I'm in on the joke, I get the picture," the narrator tells us again and again. Well, yes, nearly that. Lovely period-travel memoir, in the knowing voice of youth.]]> 4.00 1966 Journey to the East (Mit Press)
author: Le Corbusier
name: J.
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1966
rating: 3
read at: 2009/02/24
date added: 2022/06/14
shelves: arts, asia, europe, design-architecture, period-travel, empires-end, east-west, non-fiction, memoir, urban-design, levant, travelers
review:
As an official part of his education, a traditional European young man of means and expectations would take himself off on a 'grand tour' of the Continent, in the years of the 18th and 19th centuries. It would be understood that he would return with some acquaintance with the fine arts, the salons of society and their denizens -- the disparate and unsettling ways of the world, more or less. And then, having had a mad dash at life, the courtly, bohemian, and maybe even not-so-reputable ways of the continent-- return to promptly immerse himself in the lifelong drudgery of administering his father's concerns.

Here's the journal of Charles-Edouard Jeanneret at twenty-four, long before his self-induced transformation into the architect and design-polemicist Le Corbusier, eventually one of the founders of International Style in the 1920s.

But this is 1911, and the world is a Nineteenth Century one. And Journey To The East is most notable, I think, as a period piece, an illustration of a time we can't imagine any longer, as encapsulated by a young man who was enraptured by it (and a little by his own impressions). At the turn of the century, The East meant only Central Europe and beyond, so an itinerary starting in Berlin and headed down the Danube toward the Balkans-- fit the bill.

Jeanneret's voice isn't so much unique as it is of-its-day, and highly impressionable; orientalisms abound --add to the mix the idea of who he would become, and there's an intriguing, slightly arriviste charge to the account. A world where electricity, the idea of 'traffic', and even the telephone are conspicuously absent-- becomes a kind of Conradian up-river affair for Little Corbu; the imagery becomes a bit hallucinatory at times, matched by long stream-of-consciousness passages.

But he also offers beautiful little line-drawings of what he sees all along the way, showing how he sees it, with a young man's enchantment in the framing. The sketches are well-proportioned, and draw the eye; exactly the effect a later traveler would attempt with photographs, but made by a draftsman who trusts his hand to take visual notes accurately.

It must be said, though, that all the while he really wants to go native and can't quite manage the full leap of faith. Until he sees the Parthenon that is, whereupon truth, golden dimensions, and angels singing seal the deal. Odd, though, that the resulting epiphanies are had at the shrine of the Western Ideal, in what is titled a journey to the East...

There is some discussion as to whether Jeanneret had met Gropius & Mies van der Rohe in Berlin before he left, where he had worked for an architect called Peter Behrens; whether he had yet seen the world in the stark terms of Toward A New Architecture, his vertical assault on style. But it doesn't matter; there is also the engaging thing of seeing him come alive to the cultures he encounters in direct response to what they build. His discussion of the Hagia Sophia is still very illuminating to the western reader, and the Parthenon experience surely has resonant chords for many.

Another aspect here is that this is before the war and the Paris peace accords of 1919, which would redraw the world; rather than boundaries as we know them, Jeanneret travels through what was the Austro-Hungary of the Hapsburgs, and into the Ottoman empire of the last caliphate. Bounded on the far shore by British East Africa, and on the eastern edge by the crumbling old Persian empire, this Grand Tour takes him through long-forgotten conceptions of the world, dim memories now of a euro-centric globe.

Here's a snip of the bazaar at Stamboul, in Constantinople [Istanbul:] :

Here, in effect, is Sesame, because one discovers and dislodges from beneath the piles of coarse earth the most sumptuous nuggets of the East, from the Islam of Europe to as far as the jungles, brought here piece by piece across the sands, mountains, and brush by solemn caravans.
It is a labyrinth (Baedecker recommends that one carry a compass), a maze of arcades, without a glimpse of sky for several kilometers. It is closed in, suffocationg, and secluded. Here and there tiny windows pierce the low barrel vault, and yet it is well lit. It is deserted at night and frenzied during the day. At sunset, the heavy doors are drawn, enclosing the fabulous wealth, and the great clamor subsides.
Upon arriving, forewarned by the cries of these strange people, I could always imagine a metal god seated on the lintel of the door, rubbing his fat gold belly with both hands. His lips would be greedy , and his forehead would recede like that of an orangutan. His nostrils would be flared, and his gaze restless. He would have long donkey's ears. The hierophant sits there and in his slimy manner overhears the glib and deafening voices; he has the same features as his master, and as for his claws he has stolen them from the oldest of the bridges tolltakers, who died of grief. He speaks all languages, badly, is dressed like us, and his hair is fuzzy...
Meanwhile, carpets are not retrieved from their fall, nor embroideries from their swoon, nor pottery, now rendering every movement perilous. You are utterly seduced by a young persian girl dressed in scarlet, beneath a golden canopy in an Ishfahan garden with tulips and hyacinths everywhere.... Truly, you cannot be cold-blooded any longer; there are too many crazy things before your eyes, too many delightful evocations that throw you into a foolish stupor. You are intoxicated; you cannot react at all. This torrent, this flood, this avalanche of charlatanism brutalizes and annihilates you.

Anyway, a little bit trying at times, irrationally exuberant at others, the reader who wants to enjoy this has to go with the flow, both of the journey, and Jeanneret's purplish rendering thereof... Well worth the trip, worth relaxing overly-strict tolerances for tight prose, allowing, even appreciating, the self-conscious persona of Youth. "Have a look at this, I'm in on the joke, I get the picture," the narrator tells us again and again. Well, yes, nearly that. Lovely period-travel memoir, in the knowing voice of youth.
]]> <![CDATA[Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West]]> 23848139
In Putin’s People, the investigative journalist and former Moscow correspondent Catherine Belton reveals the untold story of how Vladimir Putin and the small group of KGB men surrounding him rose to power and looted their country. Delving deep into the workings of Putin’s Kremlin, Belton accesses key inside players to reveal how Putin replaced the freewheeling tycoons of the Yeltsin era with a new generation of loyal oligarchs, who in turn subverted Russia’s economy and legal system and extended the Kremlin's reach into the United States and Europe. The result is a chilling and revelatory exposé of the KGB’s revanche―a story that begins in the murk of the Soviet collapse, when networks of operatives were able to siphon billions of dollars out of state enterprises and move their spoils into the West. Putin and his allies subsequently completed the agenda, reasserting Russian power while taking control of the economy for themselves, suppressing independent voices, and launching covert influence operations abroad.

Ranging from Moscow and London to Switzerland and Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach―and assembling a colorful cast of characters to match�Putin’s People is the definitive account of how hopes for the new Russia went astray, with stark consequences for its inhabitants and, increasingly, the world.]]> 640 Catherine Belton 0374238715 J. 4 history, non-fiction, russia
This took me all of last summer to read and it was absolutely worth it. No one knew then, that The Littlest Czar would pull an international wobbly and go face down in the historical chip-dip. But he has. This book would take a twelve-page review to sum, analyze and draw conclusions from all the material included. But a funny thing has happened on the way to that necessity--- because Vlad has skipped the exposition and proceeded straight to the spoiler, with his Ukraine misadventure.

This was a great book in many instances, and clearly required grueling sky-high amounts of data and historical archaeology to produce. It's also a great book to have absorbed prior to Vlad's cross-border road trip. As such, probably best to leave this one to the economists and historians and not the casual readers. Be assured that the evidence is damning.
]]> 4.17 2020 Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West
author: Catherine Belton
name: J.
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2022/05/13
date added: 2022/05/13
shelves: history, non-fiction, russia
review:
This is an epic investigatory report, on the finances of the Modern Russian state and its architect, little Vlad Putin, the boy who wanted to be a spy and a tough guy. But it has none of the bitter drama of that description. It's a clear-headed, well-documented economic report, and most if not all of the overarching dramatic threads must be drawn by the reader.

This took me all of last summer to read and it was absolutely worth it. No one knew then, that The Littlest Czar would pull an international wobbly and go face down in the historical chip-dip. But he has. This book would take a twelve-page review to sum, analyze and draw conclusions from all the material included. But a funny thing has happened on the way to that necessity--- because Vlad has skipped the exposition and proceeded straight to the spoiler, with his Ukraine misadventure.

This was a great book in many instances, and clearly required grueling sky-high amounts of data and historical archaeology to produce. It's also a great book to have absorbed prior to Vlad's cross-border road trip. As such, probably best to leave this one to the economists and historians and not the casual readers. Be assured that the evidence is damning.

]]> <![CDATA[The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin]]> 12382651 The Man Without a Face is the chilling account of how a low- level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to her own people and to the world.

Handpicked as a successor by the "family" surrounding an ailing and increasingly unpopular Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin seemed like a perfect choice for the oligarchy to shape according to its own designs. Suddenly the boy who had stood in the shadows, dreaming of ruling the world, was a public figure, and his popularity soared. Russia and an infatuated West were determined to see the progressive leader of their dreams, even as he seized control of media, sent political rivals and critics into exile or to the grave, and smashed the country's fragile electoral system, concentrating power in the hands of his cronies.

As a journalist living in Moscow, Masha Gessen experienced this history firsthand, and for The Man Without a Face she has drawn on information and sources no other writer has tapped. Her account of how a "faceless" man maneuvered his way into absolute-and absolutely corrupt-power has the makings of a classic of narrative nonfiction.]]> 304 Masha Gessen 1594488428 J. 4
It's also a Vladimir Putin biography, which by definition must span the disintegration of the Soviet empire and the reformation of whatever it is we're calling modern Russia these days. With her reporter's sense of what matters, Gessen runs thru the dirty wars in Chechnya, the gross incompetence of the sinking of the submarine Kursk, the Moscow apartment bombings, the Beslan school hostage fiasco, and the incredibly mismanaged Moscow theater siege in 2oo2. Putin's learning curve, you might call it, or just Putin's scorecard. It is an astounding record for what is meant to be a first-world country in the modern era.

Also carefully noted are the means and levers to power, notably the money scams, the shell companies, the media lockouts, extra-legal maneuvers, backstage switches and rule changes that have brought about Modern Russia. The claustrophobia of the surveillance-and-vendetta program as per the Kgb. Also the Litvinenkos and Politkovskayas, murdered outright, in cold blood, in the methodical enforcement of the regime.

"I had written an article... and it was illustrated with the document that I had found--the one signed by Putin. Next thing I knew, there was a man on a ladder parked outside my apartment door--twenty-four hours a day. "What are you doing here?" I would ask every time I opened the door to find him there. "Fixing," he would growl. A few days later, my home phone was turned off. The phone company claimed to have nothing to do with it ..."

The two most interesting factoids for this reader: first, that Putin verifiably plagiarized his dissertation for a graduate degree in economics. Maybe not momentous given the fast, fraudulent climate of 90s Russia, but in light of later developments certainly a valuation of the character of the man. Second, (and fascinating in what we are seeing in his grooming of casino man Donald Trump)-- the fact that Putin very early grasped the value of the casino business in St. Petersburg, where he was waist-deep in that most-slippery of businesses :

When his biographers asked him about the nature of his work in St. Petersburg, Putin responded with the lack of subtlety that had come to characterize his answers to sensitive questions. He had tried to take over the casinos, he said.
"I believed at the time that the casino business is an area where the state should have a monopoly," he said. "My position ran opposite to the law on monopolies, which had already been passed, but still I tried to make sure that the state, as embodied by the city, established control over the entire casino industry." To that end, he said, the city formed a holding company that acquired 51 percent of the stock of all the casinos in the city, in the hopes of collecting dividends. "But it was a mistake; the casinos funneled the money out in cash and reported losses every time," Putin complained. "Later, our political opponents tried to accuse us of corruption because we owned stock in the casinos. That was just ridiculous..."

If you're a reader of Masha Gessen in her columns in the New Yorker, Slate, or NY Review Of Books, you will want to absorb this one, if only to see where she's coming from, as if you didn't know. Worthwhile to see it charted though, in chapter and verse, especially in our increasingly-Russian era.]]> 3.79 2010 The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin
author: Masha Gessen
name: J.
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2017/06/17
date added: 2022/05/07
shelves: history, russia, non-fiction, review-400
review:
This is a history, really, not an essay. But reporter Masha Gessen somehow manages to make a 3oo page recent-events history feel as streamlined and narrative as an essay, which is definitely no small thing.

It's also a Vladimir Putin biography, which by definition must span the disintegration of the Soviet empire and the reformation of whatever it is we're calling modern Russia these days. With her reporter's sense of what matters, Gessen runs thru the dirty wars in Chechnya, the gross incompetence of the sinking of the submarine Kursk, the Moscow apartment bombings, the Beslan school hostage fiasco, and the incredibly mismanaged Moscow theater siege in 2oo2. Putin's learning curve, you might call it, or just Putin's scorecard. It is an astounding record for what is meant to be a first-world country in the modern era.

Also carefully noted are the means and levers to power, notably the money scams, the shell companies, the media lockouts, extra-legal maneuvers, backstage switches and rule changes that have brought about Modern Russia. The claustrophobia of the surveillance-and-vendetta program as per the Kgb. Also the Litvinenkos and Politkovskayas, murdered outright, in cold blood, in the methodical enforcement of the regime.

"I had written an article... and it was illustrated with the document that I had found--the one signed by Putin. Next thing I knew, there was a man on a ladder parked outside my apartment door--twenty-four hours a day. "What are you doing here?" I would ask every time I opened the door to find him there. "Fixing," he would growl. A few days later, my home phone was turned off. The phone company claimed to have nothing to do with it ..."

The two most interesting factoids for this reader: first, that Putin verifiably plagiarized his dissertation for a graduate degree in economics. Maybe not momentous given the fast, fraudulent climate of 90s Russia, but in light of later developments certainly a valuation of the character of the man. Second, (and fascinating in what we are seeing in his grooming of casino man Donald Trump)-- the fact that Putin very early grasped the value of the casino business in St. Petersburg, where he was waist-deep in that most-slippery of businesses :

When his biographers asked him about the nature of his work in St. Petersburg, Putin responded with the lack of subtlety that had come to characterize his answers to sensitive questions. He had tried to take over the casinos, he said.
"I believed at the time that the casino business is an area where the state should have a monopoly," he said. "My position ran opposite to the law on monopolies, which had already been passed, but still I tried to make sure that the state, as embodied by the city, established control over the entire casino industry." To that end, he said, the city formed a holding company that acquired 51 percent of the stock of all the casinos in the city, in the hopes of collecting dividends. "But it was a mistake; the casinos funneled the money out in cash and reported losses every time," Putin complained. "Later, our political opponents tried to accuse us of corruption because we owned stock in the casinos. That was just ridiculous..."

If you're a reader of Masha Gessen in her columns in the New Yorker, Slate, or NY Review Of Books, you will want to absorb this one, if only to see where she's coming from, as if you didn't know. Worthwhile to see it charted though, in chapter and verse, especially in our increasingly-Russian era.
]]> Seven Dead 34862888 288 J. Jefferson Farjeon 0712356886 J. 4
Do NOT ask obvious questions along the way, just go with that pre-midcentury mystery vibe. Jeepers!
Absolutely perfect beach or vacation read.]]> 3.47 1939 Seven Dead
author: J. Jefferson Farjeon
name: J.
average rating: 3.47
book published: 1939
rating: 4
read at: 2022/04/11
date added: 2022/04/11
shelves: mystery, between-the-wars, shaggy-dog
review:
A late-in-the-day Golden Era mystery, with almost all the furnishings: Odd location, odd circumstances, clever chief inspector, plodding but canny sergeant, clever repartee. (Fizz!) In the midst of which our casual & irreverent protagonist meets his dithery but stalwart distressed-ingenue. (Frisson!) Untrustworthy foreigners and rickety orientalism, those bounders, are encountered as we start in the cozy village green of England but spiral out to exotic locales. (France!)

Do NOT ask obvious questions along the way, just go with that pre-midcentury mystery vibe. Jeepers!
Absolutely perfect beach or vacation read.
]]> The Lost Estate 983730 The Lost Estate is Robin Buss's translation of Henri Alain-Fournier's poignant study of lost love, Le Grand Meaulnes. This Penguin Classics edition also contains an introduction by Adam Gopnik.

When Meaulnes first arrives at the local school in Sologne, everyone is captivated by his good looks, daring and charisma. But when Meaulnes disappears for several days, and returns with tales of a strange party at a mysterious house - and his love for the beautiful girl hidden within it, Yvonne de Galais - his life has been changed forever. In his restless search for his Lost Estate and the happiness he found there, Meaulnes, observed by his loyal friend Francois, may risk losing everything he ever had. Poised between youthful admiration and adult resignation, Alain-Fournier's compelling narrator carries the reader through this evocative and unbearably poignant portrayal of desperate friendship and vanished adolescence.

Robin Buss's translation of Le Grand Meaulnes sensitively and accurately renders Alain-Fournier's poetically charged, expressive and deceptively simple style. In his introduction, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik discusses the life of Alain-Fournier, who was killed in the First World War after writing this, his only novel.

I read it for the first time when I was seventeen and loved every page. I find its depiction of a golden time and place just as poignant now as I did then
Nick Hornby]]> 227 Henri Alain-Fournier 0141441895 J. 0 to-read 3.72 1913 The Lost Estate
author: Henri Alain-Fournier
name: J.
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1913
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/08/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Bicycle Design: The Search for the Perfect Machine]]> 5059134 176 Michael Burrows 0952060329 J. 4 bicycle
Extra care has been put into making the sections .. Aerodynamics, Materials, Geometry .. perfectly readable for the amateur enthusiast as well as the expert. Hard not to lose track of one or the other, but this stays short and nimble enough to cover the spread.

Starting in the ur-cycling fog of the Nineteenth Century, author Burrows cites a core understanding from which everything else branches out :

"One area that I would like to explore though, if the reader will permit me a bit of a ramble, is the origin of the bcycle. This is not because it has not been written about before, but because it has not been done by the right type of person.
As far as I can see, most of the speculation in this area has been done by writers, which is something that I am not. I am, however, a 'tinkerer' and maybe even an engineer-- which is almost certainly what the Baron Karl von Drais was.
For it was he who took that most remarkable first step in the evolution of the bicycle, when he discovered that a vehicle with a pair of in-line wheels does not necessarily do the obvious --and fall over."

Great read for the thoughtful cyclist who may prefer a little relevant logic and practicality with his absolutely ridiculous spandex shorts. ]]> 4.67 2000 Bicycle Design: The Search for the Perfect Machine
author: Michael Burrows
name: J.
average rating: 4.67
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2012/06/06
date added: 2021/07/06
shelves: bicycle
review:
Unorthodox bicycle designer and visionary Mike Burrows gives a nice overall view of the general bike design game, in considering the Bicycle as a kind of transmission for human movement without petrofuels.

Extra care has been put into making the sections .. Aerodynamics, Materials, Geometry .. perfectly readable for the amateur enthusiast as well as the expert. Hard not to lose track of one or the other, but this stays short and nimble enough to cover the spread.

Starting in the ur-cycling fog of the Nineteenth Century, author Burrows cites a core understanding from which everything else branches out :

"One area that I would like to explore though, if the reader will permit me a bit of a ramble, is the origin of the bcycle. This is not because it has not been written about before, but because it has not been done by the right type of person.
As far as I can see, most of the speculation in this area has been done by writers, which is something that I am not. I am, however, a 'tinkerer' and maybe even an engineer-- which is almost certainly what the Baron Karl von Drais was.
For it was he who took that most remarkable first step in the evolution of the bicycle, when he discovered that a vehicle with a pair of in-line wheels does not necessarily do the obvious --and fall over."

Great read for the thoughtful cyclist who may prefer a little relevant logic and practicality with his absolutely ridiculous spandex shorts.
]]> Abigail 43452825 Abigail, the story of a headstrong teenager growing up during World War II, is the most beloved of Magda Szabó’s books in her native Hungary. Gina is the only child of a general, a widower who has long been happy to spoil his bright and willful daughter. Gina is devastated when the general tells her that he must go away on a mission and that he will be sending her to boarding school in the country. She is even more aghast at the grim religious institution to which she soon finds herself consigned. She fights with her fellow students, she rebels against her teachers, finds herself completely ostracized, and runs away. Caught and brought back, there is nothing for Gina to do except entrust her fate to the legendary Abigail, as the classical statue of a woman with an urn that stands on the school’s grounds has come to be called. If you’re in trouble, it’s said, leave a message with Abigail and help will be on the way. And for Gina, who is in much deeper trouble than she could possibly suspect, a life-changing adventure is only beginning.

There is something of Jane Austen in this story of the deceptiveness of appearances; fans of J.K. Rowling are sure to enjoy Szabó’s picture of irreverent students, eccentric teachers, and boarding-school life. Above all, however, Abigail is a thrilling tale of suspense.]]> 333 Magda Szabó 168137403X J. 0 4.27 1970 Abigail
author: Magda SzabĂł
name: J.
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1970
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/05/21
shelves: central-europe, boarding-school, currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets]]> 30200112
Bringing together dozens of voices in her distinctive documentary style, Secondhand Time is a monument to the collapse of the USSR, charting the decline of Soviet culture and speculating on what will rise from the ashes of Communism.

As in all her books, Alexievich gives voice to women and men whose stories are lost in the official narratives of nation-states, creating a powerful alternative history from the personal and private stories of individuals.]]> 496 Svetlana Alexievich 1922253995 J. 4 Secondhand Time whelms and then overwhelms with the low-level data, the core builds out from the copious scraps. What is left to the reader is a heartbreaking introduction -- or recapitulation-- of the searing, stormy history of the Soviet Union. As seen by the woman & man in the middle of the storm.

And as with any wide-screen portrayal of a people and place too complex to sum, the feeling that's left is entirely human, entirely poignant. Don't pick this up as a contemplation of the eternally altruist spirit of mankind, though. It's a deadly, cold-blooded account as well, when the circumstances demand it:

“� one said, “No matter what, I’m still a communist. We were supposed to build socialism. How could we have broken Hitler’s spine without Magnitka and Vorkuta?�
The second one: “I've been talking to the local elderly â€� A lot of them worked or served--- I don’t know the right word for what they did—in the camps. They were the cooks, the guards, special agents. There was no other work out here, and those jobs paid well: salaries, rations, outfitting. That’s what they call it, â€work.â€� For them the camps were work. A job! And here you are talking about crimes against humanity. Sin and the soul. It wasn't just anyone doing time, it was the people. And the ones sentencing them, and guarding them, were the people, too—not foreign workers, not people brought in from outside—they were the very same people. Our own menâ€�. Now, everyone’s the victim and Stalin alone is to blame. But think about itâ€� it’s simple arithmetic â€� Millions of inmates had to be surveilled, arrested, interrogated, transported and shot for minor transgressions. Someone had to do all thisâ€� and they found millions of people who were willing to…â€�

Let's be real-- this is a long and difficult read. But a country that was so instrumental-- some might say counter-instrumental-- to the story of the West really has to have its story told and understood. Fascinating and bleak. ]]> 4.44 2013 Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets
author: Svetlana Alexievich
name: J.
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2021/05/21
date added: 2021/05/21
shelves: history, non-fiction, russia, steely-russian-skies-go-on-forever
review:
Like the better longform Ken Burns documentaries, Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time whelms and then overwhelms with the low-level data, the core builds out from the copious scraps. What is left to the reader is a heartbreaking introduction -- or recapitulation-- of the searing, stormy history of the Soviet Union. As seen by the woman & man in the middle of the storm.

And as with any wide-screen portrayal of a people and place too complex to sum, the feeling that's left is entirely human, entirely poignant. Don't pick this up as a contemplation of the eternally altruist spirit of mankind, though. It's a deadly, cold-blooded account as well, when the circumstances demand it:

“� one said, “No matter what, I’m still a communist. We were supposed to build socialism. How could we have broken Hitler’s spine without Magnitka and Vorkuta?�
The second one: “I've been talking to the local elderly â€� A lot of them worked or served--- I don’t know the right word for what they did—in the camps. They were the cooks, the guards, special agents. There was no other work out here, and those jobs paid well: salaries, rations, outfitting. That’s what they call it, â€work.â€� For them the camps were work. A job! And here you are talking about crimes against humanity. Sin and the soul. It wasn't just anyone doing time, it was the people. And the ones sentencing them, and guarding them, were the people, too—not foreign workers, not people brought in from outside—they were the very same people. Our own menâ€�. Now, everyone’s the victim and Stalin alone is to blame. But think about itâ€� it’s simple arithmetic â€� Millions of inmates had to be surveilled, arrested, interrogated, transported and shot for minor transgressions. Someone had to do all thisâ€� and they found millions of people who were willing to…â€�

Let's be real-- this is a long and difficult read. But a country that was so instrumental-- some might say counter-instrumental-- to the story of the West really has to have its story told and understood. Fascinating and bleak.
]]> Tom Stoppard: A Life 53731654 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Shakespeare in Love--remain as fresh and moving today as when they dazzled their first audiences. Stoppard's life, too, is fascinating: born in Czechoslovakia, he escaped the Nazis with his mother and spent his early years in Singapore and India before arriving in England at age eight. Skipping university, he embarked on a brilliant career, becoming close friends over the years with an astonishing array of writers, actors, directors, musicians, and political figures, from Peter O'Toole, Harold Pinter, and Stephen Spielberg to Mick Jagger and Vaclav Havel. Having long described himself as a "bounced Czech," Stoppard was surprised to learn late in life of his Jewish family and the relatives he lost to the Holocaust, secrets his mother had kept from him. Hermione Lee's in-depth analysis seamlessly weaves Stoppard's life and work together into a vivid, insightful, and always riveting portrait of a remarkable man.]]> 896 Hermione Lee 0451493222 J. 0 4.36 2020 Tom Stoppard: A Life
author: Hermione Lee
name: J.
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/04/24
shelves: to-read, bio, stoppard, theater
review:

]]> Sleepless Nights 347413 Sleepless Nights a woman looks back on her life—the parade of people, the shifting background of place—and assembles a scrapbook of memories, reflections, portraits, letters, wishes, and dreams. An inspired fusion of fact and invention, this beautifully realized, hard-bitten, lyrical book is not only Elizabeth Hardwick's finest fiction but one of the outstanding contributions to American literature of the last fifty years.]]> 176 Elizabeth Hardwick 0940322722 J. 3 memoir, downtempo-picaresque The stove died, the snow clung to the panes, the outline of fringed lamps caught the light of the street. In the shadows, listening to the bells ringing the hours, we would lie smoking and talking. Slim and ultimately murky concoction of passing fancies, interesting people, shadows, colors, places. In sum maybe a lot more like poetry than a narrative, but sequences and blurry memories cross paths as only narratives can.

In New York.
How pleasant the rooms were, how comforting the distresses of New Yorkers, their insomnias filled with words, their patient exegesis of surprising terrors. Divorce, abandonment, the unacceptable and the unattainable, ennui filled with action, sad, tumultuous middle-age years shaken by crashings, uprootings, coups, desperate renewals. Weaknesses discovered, hidden forces unmasked, predictions, what will last and what is doomed, what will start and what will end. Work and love, the idle imagining the pleasure of the working ones. Those who work and their quizzical frowns, which ask: When will something new come to me? After all, I am a sort of success.

In Holland.
An unfashionable gracht in the center of Amsterdam--the Nicolaas Witsekade. A busy, bourgeois street bordering on sloppy waters and the towers of the Rijksmuseum in view toward the west. Houses with stone steps and made of yellow or red brick are lined up in a businesslike, practical, 1920's decency and dullness. Autumnal tile decorations on the facades and here and there fans of purple and amber glass over the doorways.
Housewives of centuries have created the pleasantly stuffy little rooms with their dark paneling, have hung round lamps, with shades of old tasseled silk, over the carpeted dining tables. The house is not handsome and the landlady worries about the apartment because it has been her own and everything in it is dear to her. Anyway we said as we met her anxious glance: What a triumph every country is.

The Continent.
So that wraps up Verona. We take in the cracked windows and the brilliant dishevelment of Istanbul. And the long time in Holland, time to take trains, one to Haarlem to see the old almshouse governors painted in their unforgiving black-and-white misery by Frans Hals in his last days.
Antwerp and Ghent: what wonderful names, he said, hard as the heavy cobbles in the square. Amsterdam, a city of readers. All night long you seemed to hear the turning of pages, pages of French, Italian, English, and the despised German. Those fair heads remembered Ovid, Yeats, Baudelaire and remembered suffering, hiding, freezing. The weight of books and wars.

A memoir, a scrunched up packet of travel notes, character sketches, found in the bottom of a bag. A watery watercolor. Thread? No thread? In the end it doesn't matter, it can be only what it is. Hardwick isn't overly interested in trimming the edges, plotting out the segues, smoothing transitions. It's her back pages, where the all drabs are collected, this once, alongside all the dribs.]]> 3.69 1979 Sleepless Nights
author: Elizabeth Hardwick
name: J.
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1979
rating: 3
read at: 2020/09/11
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves: memoir, downtempo-picaresque
review:
The stove died, the snow clung to the panes, the outline of fringed lamps caught the light of the street. In the shadows, listening to the bells ringing the hours, we would lie smoking and talking.
Slim and ultimately murky concoction of passing fancies, interesting people, shadows, colors, places. In sum maybe a lot more like poetry than a narrative, but sequences and blurry memories cross paths as only narratives can.

In New York.
How pleasant the rooms were, how comforting the distresses of New Yorkers, their insomnias filled with words, their patient exegesis of surprising terrors. Divorce, abandonment, the unacceptable and the unattainable, ennui filled with action, sad, tumultuous middle-age years shaken by crashings, uprootings, coups, desperate renewals. Weaknesses discovered, hidden forces unmasked, predictions, what will last and what is doomed, what will start and what will end. Work and love, the idle imagining the pleasure of the working ones. Those who work and their quizzical frowns, which ask: When will something new come to me? After all, I am a sort of success.

In Holland.
An unfashionable gracht in the center of Amsterdam--the Nicolaas Witsekade. A busy, bourgeois street bordering on sloppy waters and the towers of the Rijksmuseum in view toward the west. Houses with stone steps and made of yellow or red brick are lined up in a businesslike, practical, 1920's decency and dullness. Autumnal tile decorations on the facades and here and there fans of purple and amber glass over the doorways.
Housewives of centuries have created the pleasantly stuffy little rooms with their dark paneling, have hung round lamps, with shades of old tasseled silk, over the carpeted dining tables. The house is not handsome and the landlady worries about the apartment because it has been her own and everything in it is dear to her. Anyway we said as we met her anxious glance: What a triumph every country is.

The Continent.
So that wraps up Verona. We take in the cracked windows and the brilliant dishevelment of Istanbul. And the long time in Holland, time to take trains, one to Haarlem to see the old almshouse governors painted in their unforgiving black-and-white misery by Frans Hals in his last days.
Antwerp and Ghent: what wonderful names, he said, hard as the heavy cobbles in the square. Amsterdam, a city of readers. All night long you seemed to hear the turning of pages, pages of French, Italian, English, and the despised German. Those fair heads remembered Ovid, Yeats, Baudelaire and remembered suffering, hiding, freezing. The weight of books and wars.

A memoir, a scrunched up packet of travel notes, character sketches, found in the bottom of a bag. A watery watercolor. Thread? No thread? In the end it doesn't matter, it can be only what it is. Hardwick isn't overly interested in trimming the edges, plotting out the segues, smoothing transitions. It's her back pages, where the all drabs are collected, this once, alongside all the dribs.
]]> <![CDATA[The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World]]> 53054943 The hidden story of the wanton slaughter -- in Indonesia, Latin America, and around the world -- backed by the United States.

In 1965, the U.S. government helped the Indonesian military kill approximately one million innocent civilians. This was one of the most important turning points of the twentieth century, eliminating the largest communist party outside China and the Soviet Union and inspiring copycat terror programs in faraway countries like Brazil and Chile. But these events remain widely overlooked, precisely because the CIA's secret interventions were so successful.

In this bold and comprehensive new history, Vincent Bevins builds on his incisive reporting for the Washington Post, using recently declassified documents, archival research and eye-witness testimony collected across twelve countries to reveal a shocking legacy that spans the globe. For decades, it's been believed that parts of the developing world passed peacefully into the U.S.-led capitalist system. The Jakarta Method demonstrates that the brutal extermination of unarmed leftists was a fundamental part of Washington's final triumph in the Cold War.]]> 320 Vincent Bevins 1541742400 J. 0 to-read 4.62 2020 The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
author: Vincent Bevins
name: J.
average rating: 4.62
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/08/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia]]> 39380403
Williams argues that Operation Gladio soon gave rise to the toppling of governments, wholesale genocide, the formation of death squads, financial scandals on a grand scale, the creation of the mujahideen, an international narcotics network, and, most recently, the ascendancy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a Jesuit cleric with strong ties to Operation Condor (an outgrowth of Gladio in Argentina) as Pope Francis I.

Sure to be controversial, Operation Gladio connects the dots in ways the mainstream media often overlooks.]]> 416 Paul L. Williams 1633884783 J. 0 to-read 4.35 2015 Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia
author: Paul L. Williams
name: J.
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/08/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Agnes Grey 1023067 Alternate cover editions can be found here, here, here, here and here.

'The name of governess, I soon found, was a mere mockery � my pupils had no more notion of obedience than a wild, unbroken colt�

When her family becomes impoverished after a disastrous financial speculation, Agnes Grey determines to find work as a governess in order to contribute to their meagre income and assert her independence. But Agnes’s enthusiasm is swiftly extinguished as she struggles first with the unmanageable Bloomfield children and then with the painful disdain of the haughty Murray family; the only kindness she receives comes from Mr Weston, the sober young curate. Drawing on her own experience, Anne Brontë’s first novel offers a compelling personal perspective on the desperate position of unmarried, educated women for whom becoming a governess was the only respectable career open in Victorian society.

This edition also includes Charlotte Brontë’s memoir of her sisters, the Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell. Angeline Goreau examines Anne Brontë’s complex relationship with her sisters and her unhappy career as a governess as influences in writing Agnes Grey.]]> 168 Anne Brontë J. 0 3.65 1847 Agnes Grey
author: Anne Brontë
name: J.
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1847
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/07/17
shelves: to-read, this-england, heres-that-rainy-day
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes / The Amateur Emigrant]]> 1111376 Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes(1879), a highly entertaining account of the French and their country. The Amateur Emigrant(1895) describes his travels to and around America: the crowded weeks in steerage, the cross-country train journey. Filled with sharp-eyed observations, it brilliantly conveys Stevenson’s perceptions of America and the Americans. Together, these writings reveal as much about the traveler as the places he travels to.]]> 320 Robert Louis Stevenson 0141439467 J. 0 3.52 Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes / The Amateur Emigrant
author: Robert Louis Stevenson
name: J.
average rating: 3.52
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/06/24
shelves: to-read, period-travel, next-up
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Weird Fiction in France: A Showcase Anthology of its Origins and Development]]> 49256784 It has required nearly two centuries since the beginnings of modern weird fiction in the cradle of the Romantic Movement for the concept to be properly formulated, and the course of its development usefully mapped.
That cartography can now be carried out with a reasonable degree of accuracy, as the present collection, albeit limited in time and space, hopefully illustrates. The book hopefully shows that fiction depicting hypothetical aberrations in nature or perception is not a necessarily a symptom of aberration on the part of the author, but frequently quite the evidence of a sanity contemplating its own potential limits and uncertainties, in a context that is esthetic rather than diagnostic. �
Romanticisme is not dead, and is no less preciously modern today than it was two centuries ago, and weird fiction is not the least of its achievements.]]> 332 Brian M. Stableford 1612279465 J. 0 4.00 2020 Weird Fiction in France: A Showcase Anthology of its Origins and Development
author: Brian M. Stableford
name: J.
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/04/16
shelves: to-read, france, eccentric-practices
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America]]> 52269471 For the first time, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower tells the inside story of the data mining and psychological manipulation behind the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum, connecting Facebook, WikiLeaks, Russian intelligence, and international hackers.

Mindf*ck goes deep inside Cambridge Analytica's "American operations," which were driven by Steve Bannon's vision to remake America and fueled by mysterious billionaire Robert Mercer's money, as it weaponized and wielded the massive store of data it had harvested on individuals in--excess of 87 million--to disunite the United States and set Americans against each other through psychological manipulation. Bannon had long sensed that deep within America's soul lurked an explosive tension. Cambridge Analytica had the data to prove it, and in 2016 Bannon had a presidential campaign to use as his proving ground.

Christopher Wylie might have seemed an unlikely figure to be at the center of such an operation. Canadian and liberal in his politics, he was only twenty-four when he got a job with a London firm that worked with the U.K. Ministry of Defense and was charged putatively with helping to build a team of data scientists to create new tools to identify and combat radical extremism online. In short order, those same military tools were turned to political purposes, and Cambridge Analytica was born.

Wylie's decision to become a whistleblower prompted the largest data crime investigation in history. His story is both exposé and dire warning about a sudden problem born of very new and powerful capabilities. It has not only exposed the profound vulnerabilities and profound carelessness in the enormous companies that drive the attention economy, it has also exposed the profound vulnerabilities of democracy itself. What happened in 2016 was just a trial run. Ruthless actors are coming for your data, and they want to control what you think.]]> 288 Christopher Wylie 1984854631 J. 5
... I said nothing during the meeting, but afterward I went to see Alexander Nix. "This can't be legal," I told him. To which he replied, "You can't expect anything legal with these people. It's Africa."
To my way of thinking, the Cambridge Analytica operation explains about ninety percent of both the American and British nightmare scenarios of the last few years: Trump and Brexit. Mr. Wylie was in a position to see the way the company came to be, the disturbing inside track. He is someone who knows it inside out, in the right order, and with the right inflection, because he knew all the players--and was there.

Wylie is something of a tech nerd, who bounced around the various spheres of influence in North America and Britain--basically offering credible social-science number-crunching, for persuasion and turnout in political campaigns. Gigs in Canada for the LPC party, then the US for Obama, then to Britain for the Lib Dems, before the move to the shadowy SCL Corporation in Britain, who did all manner of political analysis, polling and disinformation campaigns, all over the world. If you needed a referendum tipped in the third world, if you needed to target certain demographics in elections, then SCL could arrange all of it discreetly.

(Later in the life of the scam, the head of SCL and its corporate twin, Cambridge Analytica, one Alexander Nix, would be caught in a devastating BBC video sting, offering an array of 'fixes' to an offshore interest. From voter suppression to bribery to honey-traps, Nix assures the would-be clients, SCL/CA could arrange things in ways profitable to all players in the deal.)
It's probably best to let the book speak for itself, in exerpts :

Social Engineering Is Big Business.
Let's start with Breitbart, the disruptive right wing enabler funded by the affluent Mercers, and operated after the passing of Breitbart himself by the ever-calculating, pre-trumpist Steve Bannon.

“When Andrew Breitbart (who had introduced the Mercers to Bannon) died suddenly in 2012, Bannon took his place as senior editor, and assumed his philosophy.�

“� the Breitbart Doctrine: Politics flows from culture, and if conservatives wanted to successfully dam up progressive ideas in America, they would have to first challenge the culture. And so Breitbart was founded to be not only a media platform but also a tool for reversing the flow of American culture…�

“At our first meeting, Bannon was the executive chair of Breitbart and had come to Cambridge in search of promising young conservatives and candidates to staff his new London bureau�.
He had a problem, though. For all the site’s sound and fury, it became pigeonholed as a place for young, straight white guys who couldn’t get laid. Gamergate was one of the first, most public instances of their culture war: When several women tried to bring to light the gross misogyny within the gaming industry, they were hounded, doxed, and sent numerous death threats in a massive campaign against the “progressives� imposing their “feminist ideology� onto gaming culture.�

“Gamergate was not instigated by Breitbart, but it was a sign to Bannon, who saw that angry lonely white men could become incredibly mobilized when they felt that their way of life was threatened. Bannon realized the power of cultivating the misogyny of horny virgins. Their nihilistic anger and talks of “beta uprisings� simmered in the recesses of the Internet. But growing an army of “incels� (involuntary celibates) would not be sufficient for the movement he fantasized about. He needed to find a new approach. This is one of the odder moments in the Cambridge Analytica saga …�

Forging The Weapons For Dismantling The Culture.
“Mercer looked at winning elections as a social engineering problem. The way to “fix society� was by creating simulations: if we could quantify society inside a computer, optimize that system, and then replicate that optimization outside the computer�. The structure chosen to set up this new entity was extremely convoluted, and it even confused staff working on projects, who were never sure who exactly the actually worked for. SCL Group would remain the “parent� of a new US subsidiary, incorporated in Delaware, called Cambridge Analytica…�

“Nix initially explained how this labyrinthine setup was to allow us to operate under the radar. Mercer’s rivals in the finance sector watched his every move, and if they knew that he had acquired a psychological warfare firm (SCL), others in the industry might figure out his next play—to develop sophisticated trend-forecasting tools—or poach key staff. We knew Bannon wanted to work on a project with Breitbart, but this was originally supposed to be a side project to satiate his personal fixations. Of course, this was all bullshit, and they wanted to build a political arsenal…�

All That Remained Was Finding Targeting Data.
Enough Targeting Data.
“One of the challenges for social sciences like psychology, anthropology, and sociology is a relative lack of numerical data, since it’s extremely hard to measure and quantify the abstract cultural or social dynamics of an entire society. That is, unless you can throw a virtual clone of everyone into a computer, and observe their dynamics. It felt like we were holding the keys to unlock a new way of studying society. How could I say no to that?�

Survey Says: Trust Facebook. Who Knows You Best?
“He typed in a query, and a list of links popped up. He clicked on one of the many people who went by that name in Nebraska � and there was everything about her, right up on the screen. Here’s her photo, here’s where she works, here’s her house. Here are her kids, this is where they go to school, this is the car she drives. She voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, she loves Katy Perry, she drives an Audi, she’s a bit basic � and on and on and on. We knew everything about her � and for many records, the information was updated in real time, so if she posted to Facebook, we could see it happening.�

“And not only did we have all her Facebook data, but we were merging it with all the commercial and state bureau data we'd bought as well. And imputations made from the U.S Census. We had data about her mortgage applications, we knew how much money she made, whether she owned a gun. We had information from her airline mileage programs, so we knew how often she flew. We could see if she was married (she wasn't). We had a sense of her physical health. And we had a satellite photo of her house, easily obtained from Google Earth. We had re-created her life in our computer. She had no idea.�

“”Let me get this straight,� I said. “If I create a Facebook app, and a thousand people use it, I’ll get like 150,000 profiles? Really? Facebook actually lets you do that?”�

� � this means that, for an analyst, there’s often no need to ask questions: You simply create algorithms that find discrete patterns in a user’s naturally occurring data. And once you do that, the system itself can reveal patterns in the data that you otherwise would never have noticed. Facebook users curate themselves all in one place, in a single data form. We don't need to connect a million data sets; we don't have to do complicated math to fill in missing data. The information is already in place, because everyone serves up their real-time autobiography, right there on the site. If you were creating a system from scratch to watch and study people, you couldn’t do much better than Facebook…�

And That Only Sets The Stage.
Wylie comes across as sympathetic, believable, and credible on the facts; he terminated his association with SCL/Cambridge within a year of Bannon's taking over, and before the Trump Campaign. If you had any lingering suspicion that the social media, elections or referenda in which you partake might be fair or unobserved by interlopers, you never will again.
Recommended.

“On March 16, 2018, a day before The Guardian and The New York Times pubished my story, Facebook announced that it was banning me from not only Facebook but also Instagram. Facebook had refused to ban white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other armies of hate, but it chose to ban me.�]]> 4.35 2019 Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
author: Christopher Wylie
name: J.
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2020/02/27
date added: 2020/03/10
shelves: and-you-make-all-your-animal-deals, oblique-strategies, something-nasty-in-the-wood-shed, history, five-star
review:
... I said nothing during the meeting, but afterward I went to see Alexander Nix. "This can't be legal," I told him. To which he replied, "You can't expect anything legal with these people. It's Africa."
To my way of thinking, the Cambridge Analytica operation explains about ninety percent of both the American and British nightmare scenarios of the last few years: Trump and Brexit. Mr. Wylie was in a position to see the way the company came to be, the disturbing inside track. He is someone who knows it inside out, in the right order, and with the right inflection, because he knew all the players--and was there.

Wylie is something of a tech nerd, who bounced around the various spheres of influence in North America and Britain--basically offering credible social-science number-crunching, for persuasion and turnout in political campaigns. Gigs in Canada for the LPC party, then the US for Obama, then to Britain for the Lib Dems, before the move to the shadowy SCL Corporation in Britain, who did all manner of political analysis, polling and disinformation campaigns, all over the world. If you needed a referendum tipped in the third world, if you needed to target certain demographics in elections, then SCL could arrange all of it discreetly.

(Later in the life of the scam, the head of SCL and its corporate twin, Cambridge Analytica, one Alexander Nix, would be caught in a devastating BBC video sting, offering an array of 'fixes' to an offshore interest. From voter suppression to bribery to honey-traps, Nix assures the would-be clients, SCL/CA could arrange things in ways profitable to all players in the deal.)
It's probably best to let the book speak for itself, in exerpts :

Social Engineering Is Big Business.
Let's start with Breitbart, the disruptive right wing enabler funded by the affluent Mercers, and operated after the passing of Breitbart himself by the ever-calculating, pre-trumpist Steve Bannon.

“When Andrew Breitbart (who had introduced the Mercers to Bannon) died suddenly in 2012, Bannon took his place as senior editor, and assumed his philosophy.�

“� the Breitbart Doctrine: Politics flows from culture, and if conservatives wanted to successfully dam up progressive ideas in America, they would have to first challenge the culture. And so Breitbart was founded to be not only a media platform but also a tool for reversing the flow of American culture…�

“At our first meeting, Bannon was the executive chair of Breitbart and had come to Cambridge in search of promising young conservatives and candidates to staff his new London bureau�.
He had a problem, though. For all the site’s sound and fury, it became pigeonholed as a place for young, straight white guys who couldn’t get laid. Gamergate was one of the first, most public instances of their culture war: When several women tried to bring to light the gross misogyny within the gaming industry, they were hounded, doxed, and sent numerous death threats in a massive campaign against the “progressives� imposing their “feminist ideology� onto gaming culture.�

“Gamergate was not instigated by Breitbart, but it was a sign to Bannon, who saw that angry lonely white men could become incredibly mobilized when they felt that their way of life was threatened. Bannon realized the power of cultivating the misogyny of horny virgins. Their nihilistic anger and talks of “beta uprisings� simmered in the recesses of the Internet. But growing an army of “incels� (involuntary celibates) would not be sufficient for the movement he fantasized about. He needed to find a new approach. This is one of the odder moments in the Cambridge Analytica saga …�

Forging The Weapons For Dismantling The Culture.
“Mercer looked at winning elections as a social engineering problem. The way to “fix society� was by creating simulations: if we could quantify society inside a computer, optimize that system, and then replicate that optimization outside the computer�. The structure chosen to set up this new entity was extremely convoluted, and it even confused staff working on projects, who were never sure who exactly the actually worked for. SCL Group would remain the “parent� of a new US subsidiary, incorporated in Delaware, called Cambridge Analytica…�

“Nix initially explained how this labyrinthine setup was to allow us to operate under the radar. Mercer’s rivals in the finance sector watched his every move, and if they knew that he had acquired a psychological warfare firm (SCL), others in the industry might figure out his next play—to develop sophisticated trend-forecasting tools—or poach key staff. We knew Bannon wanted to work on a project with Breitbart, but this was originally supposed to be a side project to satiate his personal fixations. Of course, this was all bullshit, and they wanted to build a political arsenal…�

All That Remained Was Finding Targeting Data.
Enough Targeting Data.
“One of the challenges for social sciences like psychology, anthropology, and sociology is a relative lack of numerical data, since it’s extremely hard to measure and quantify the abstract cultural or social dynamics of an entire society. That is, unless you can throw a virtual clone of everyone into a computer, and observe their dynamics. It felt like we were holding the keys to unlock a new way of studying society. How could I say no to that?�

Survey Says: Trust Facebook. Who Knows You Best?
“He typed in a query, and a list of links popped up. He clicked on one of the many people who went by that name in Nebraska � and there was everything about her, right up on the screen. Here’s her photo, here’s where she works, here’s her house. Here are her kids, this is where they go to school, this is the car she drives. She voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, she loves Katy Perry, she drives an Audi, she’s a bit basic � and on and on and on. We knew everything about her � and for many records, the information was updated in real time, so if she posted to Facebook, we could see it happening.�

“And not only did we have all her Facebook data, but we were merging it with all the commercial and state bureau data we'd bought as well. And imputations made from the U.S Census. We had data about her mortgage applications, we knew how much money she made, whether she owned a gun. We had information from her airline mileage programs, so we knew how often she flew. We could see if she was married (she wasn't). We had a sense of her physical health. And we had a satellite photo of her house, easily obtained from Google Earth. We had re-created her life in our computer. She had no idea.�

“”Let me get this straight,� I said. “If I create a Facebook app, and a thousand people use it, I’ll get like 150,000 profiles? Really? Facebook actually lets you do that?”�

� � this means that, for an analyst, there’s often no need to ask questions: You simply create algorithms that find discrete patterns in a user’s naturally occurring data. And once you do that, the system itself can reveal patterns in the data that you otherwise would never have noticed. Facebook users curate themselves all in one place, in a single data form. We don't need to connect a million data sets; we don't have to do complicated math to fill in missing data. The information is already in place, because everyone serves up their real-time autobiography, right there on the site. If you were creating a system from scratch to watch and study people, you couldn’t do much better than Facebook…�

And That Only Sets The Stage.
Wylie comes across as sympathetic, believable, and credible on the facts; he terminated his association with SCL/Cambridge within a year of Bannon's taking over, and before the Trump Campaign. If you had any lingering suspicion that the social media, elections or referenda in which you partake might be fair or unobserved by interlopers, you never will again.
Recommended.

“On March 16, 2018, a day before The Guardian and The New York Times pubished my story, Facebook announced that it was banning me from not only Facebook but also Instagram. Facebook had refused to ban white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other armies of hate, but it chose to ban me.�
]]> <![CDATA[The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era]]> 25593014 544 Thomas Schatz J. 0 to-read, history, la-la-land 4.23 1988 The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era
author: Thomas Schatz
name: J.
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/03/04
shelves: to-read, history, la-la-land
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Dangerous Muse: The Life Of Lady Caroline Blackwood]]> 638190 416 Nancy Schoenberger 0306811871 J. 0 to-read, bio, eire 3.53 2001 Dangerous Muse: The Life Of Lady Caroline Blackwood
author: Nancy Schoenberger
name: J.
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/03/04
shelves: to-read, bio, eire
review:

]]> Black Narcissus 17248720 258 Rumer Godden 1844088391 J. 4
She was quite alone. The Palace was hidden by the hill from the village� It was on a ledge cut like a lip from the face of the hill and it seemed to be perpetually riding into the North. It faced the mountain Kanchenjungha with the valley and gulf between.
It was strange how little you noticed the valley or the river where the green snow water streaked the jelly whiteness of the stream. You noticed the gulf where the birds flew level with the lawn; across it was the forest rising bare the bony ridges, and behind them and above them, the Himalayan snows where the ice wind blew.
Sometimes they were like turrets of icing sugar, pretty and harmless; on some days they seemed as if they might come crashing down on the hill. On others they were hidden behind drifts of cloud and a spray floated from one to another; but however they looked, there was always the wind to remind you of what they were. The wind was always the same.

Rumer Godden's ill-fated nunnery above the treeline is the original Shining, where the sense of Place begins to control the inhabitants, becomes an argument and nearly a character in its own right, before the story is over. Or maybe more truthfully, somehow becomes an insistent counter-argument to each character's motivations.

There is an excellent film treatment of The Black Narcissus which has long held a place in the pantheon of every Cinema art-house worthy of the name, directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger. You can try not to picture their tortured souls and harsh vistas if you'd like, but it's pretty much a definitive and untouchable version. If you haven't seen it, do try the book first, and you'll have the best of both worlds. Recommended.]]> 3.83 1939 Black Narcissus
author: Rumer Godden
name: J.
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1939
rating: 4
read at: 2020/02/24
date added: 2020/02/24
shelves: himalayas, boarding-school, crack-in-the-sky
review:
Above the dramatic action, above character, above the inherent conflicts-- there is the atmosphere. Haunted, austere, bleak and forbidding, a disused mansion in the high Himalayas, where the nerves jangle and you go to the edge and look down to see clouds.

She was quite alone. The Palace was hidden by the hill from the village� It was on a ledge cut like a lip from the face of the hill and it seemed to be perpetually riding into the North. It faced the mountain Kanchenjungha with the valley and gulf between.
It was strange how little you noticed the valley or the river where the green snow water streaked the jelly whiteness of the stream. You noticed the gulf where the birds flew level with the lawn; across it was the forest rising bare the bony ridges, and behind them and above them, the Himalayan snows where the ice wind blew.
Sometimes they were like turrets of icing sugar, pretty and harmless; on some days they seemed as if they might come crashing down on the hill. On others they were hidden behind drifts of cloud and a spray floated from one to another; but however they looked, there was always the wind to remind you of what they were. The wind was always the same.

Rumer Godden's ill-fated nunnery above the treeline is the original Shining, where the sense of Place begins to control the inhabitants, becomes an argument and nearly a character in its own right, before the story is over. Or maybe more truthfully, somehow becomes an insistent counter-argument to each character's motivations.

There is an excellent film treatment of The Black Narcissus which has long held a place in the pantheon of every Cinema art-house worthy of the name, directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger. You can try not to picture their tortured souls and harsh vistas if you'd like, but it's pretty much a definitive and untouchable version. If you haven't seen it, do try the book first, and you'll have the best of both worlds. Recommended.
]]> High Times, Hard Times 101168 392 Anita O'Day 0879101180 J. 4 “I went into the club where Roy Eldridge was working and he came up and said, “I heard you on the radio.â€� I thought he meant a record. “No, a commercial. For Dr. Pepper,â€� he said, “I told my friend, â€That’s Anita. Nobody else sings like that.’â€� He was delighted I had my own sound and he could recognize it just as I can recognize him on any old tune. That recognition is the ultimate respect between our kind of musician.â€�

Seems to me that the all-time Jazz Vocalist pantheon, as it stands now Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan--- missed one. As unique and individualist as any in the Trio of greats, Anita O'Day never even tried a song she couldn't swing, swing hard and lay to rest with distinction. Her voice is more like an instrument than any of the pantheon, even Ella, by virtue of what it is not: no embroidery, no tremolo, no vibrato, and hardly any coloratura swooshes whatsoever.

Her early life consisted of Marathons, Walkathons, “Real Live Baby Raffles�, and other antique notions of the thirties; her life in the Biz was surprise weddings, Hotels, highways, airplanes and decoding how to cop heroin in each new town. Her autobiography is a late-in-the game reconsideration of a life lived hard, a story of bouncing off the circumstances, crashing, and learning to stand up again. And it's a junkie's story. If there's a choice between getting her records or getting her book, get the records. But once you read the book, the backstory starts making all kinds of sense.

Here in no particular order, are some excerpts :

“As I listened, I realized that I didn’t have her range. She sang the songs in the keys they were written, while I was a fourth down or a fifth up—whatever.�

"When we approached the club and I saw the people lined up down the block and around the corner, I asked, “What the hell are those people waiting for?�
â€Ô¨´ÇłÜ.â€�
“My god, I didn’t realize I had that kind of draw.�
“You’re out on bail,� the manager said. “Dopers aren’t that common around here.�
I was tempted to tell him about some of the entertainers he’d had in the past, but I held my tongue. He turned out to be right. Most of the people were coming to hear “The Jezebel of Jazz�...
The crowd was a little boisterous when I danced to the mike for my first number opening night. I sang the way I’d been singing, and when they seemed restive, I began wailing. I’d show them. I’d done it before. I’d do it again. And by the time I finished my first set, the scene was wild, lovely..."

“Anita O’Day is demonstrating at the Blue Note why she is one of the little handful of great stylists among jazz singers. She can give any song her unmistakable imprint... The girl is so modern she’s almost ahead of herself. Her minor keys and and offbeat phrasings have a weird other worldliness...� Chicago Sun-Times 1952

“What made that cool was you didn’t have to spend eight or ten hours hunting the stuff. All you had to do was walk into a drugstore and buy it. It took fifteen minutes and you were set. Ten ounces was all you needed to boil down. Whatever was left was the goodie. It was a combination of alcohol, opium and camphor. You took it, and thought you were Dracula.�

“To be honest, John [Poole, drummer] and I didn’t go about it in the smartest way possible. Instead of fixing with just enough stuff to get our bodies back in chemical balance, we really got stoned. Just to give you an idea of how stoned, one evening I fixed some corned-beef hash for John and me and opened a can of dog food for Penny, my French Poodle. Halfway through dinner, John asked why our food tasted so funny. You guessed it. I’d given Penny the hash and we were eating dog food.�

“As one of the Walkathon emcees used to sing, courtesy of Gorge M. Cohan, “Life’s a funny proposition.�

With the few worthwhile Jazz books out there-- Straight Life, Really The Blues, Trouble With Cinderella, Lush Life, and a couple I can't remember, O'Day's account stands front and center. A no-nonsense narrative from one of the best to grace the Jazz stage.]]> 4.21 1981 High Times, Hard Times
author: Anita O'Day
name: J.
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1981
rating: 4
read at: 2019/09/04
date added: 2020/02/19
shelves: music, memoir, jazz, golden-arm
review:
“I went into the club where Roy Eldridge was working and he came up and said, “I heard you on the radio.â€� I thought he meant a record. “No, a commercial. For Dr. Pepper,â€� he said, “I told my friend, â€That’s Anita. Nobody else sings like that.’â€� He was delighted I had my own sound and he could recognize it just as I can recognize him on any old tune. That recognition is the ultimate respect between our kind of musician.â€�

Seems to me that the all-time Jazz Vocalist pantheon, as it stands now Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan--- missed one. As unique and individualist as any in the Trio of greats, Anita O'Day never even tried a song she couldn't swing, swing hard and lay to rest with distinction. Her voice is more like an instrument than any of the pantheon, even Ella, by virtue of what it is not: no embroidery, no tremolo, no vibrato, and hardly any coloratura swooshes whatsoever.

Her early life consisted of Marathons, Walkathons, “Real Live Baby Raffles�, and other antique notions of the thirties; her life in the Biz was surprise weddings, Hotels, highways, airplanes and decoding how to cop heroin in each new town. Her autobiography is a late-in-the game reconsideration of a life lived hard, a story of bouncing off the circumstances, crashing, and learning to stand up again. And it's a junkie's story. If there's a choice between getting her records or getting her book, get the records. But once you read the book, the backstory starts making all kinds of sense.

Here in no particular order, are some excerpts :

“As I listened, I realized that I didn’t have her range. She sang the songs in the keys they were written, while I was a fourth down or a fifth up—whatever.�

"When we approached the club and I saw the people lined up down the block and around the corner, I asked, “What the hell are those people waiting for?�
â€Ô¨´ÇłÜ.â€�
“My god, I didn’t realize I had that kind of draw.�
“You’re out on bail,� the manager said. “Dopers aren’t that common around here.�
I was tempted to tell him about some of the entertainers he’d had in the past, but I held my tongue. He turned out to be right. Most of the people were coming to hear “The Jezebel of Jazz�...
The crowd was a little boisterous when I danced to the mike for my first number opening night. I sang the way I’d been singing, and when they seemed restive, I began wailing. I’d show them. I’d done it before. I’d do it again. And by the time I finished my first set, the scene was wild, lovely..."

“Anita O’Day is demonstrating at the Blue Note why she is one of the little handful of great stylists among jazz singers. She can give any song her unmistakable imprint... The girl is so modern she’s almost ahead of herself. Her minor keys and and offbeat phrasings have a weird other worldliness...� Chicago Sun-Times 1952

“What made that cool was you didn’t have to spend eight or ten hours hunting the stuff. All you had to do was walk into a drugstore and buy it. It took fifteen minutes and you were set. Ten ounces was all you needed to boil down. Whatever was left was the goodie. It was a combination of alcohol, opium and camphor. You took it, and thought you were Dracula.�

“To be honest, John [Poole, drummer] and I didn’t go about it in the smartest way possible. Instead of fixing with just enough stuff to get our bodies back in chemical balance, we really got stoned. Just to give you an idea of how stoned, one evening I fixed some corned-beef hash for John and me and opened a can of dog food for Penny, my French Poodle. Halfway through dinner, John asked why our food tasted so funny. You guessed it. I’d given Penny the hash and we were eating dog food.�

“As one of the Walkathon emcees used to sing, courtesy of Gorge M. Cohan, “Life’s a funny proposition.�

With the few worthwhile Jazz books out there-- Straight Life, Really The Blues, Trouble With Cinderella, Lush Life, and a couple I can't remember, O'Day's account stands front and center. A no-nonsense narrative from one of the best to grace the Jazz stage.
]]> <![CDATA[Inspector Imanishi Investigates]]> 112895
But Imanishi is dissatisfied, and a series of coincidences lead him back to the case. Why did a young woman scatter pieces of white paper out of the window of a train? Why did a bar girl leave for home right after Imanishi spoke to her? Why did an actor, on the verge of telling Imanishi something important, drop dead of a heart attack? What can a group of nouveau young artists possibly have to do with the murder of a quiet and “saintly� provincial old ex-policemen? Inspector Imanishi investigates.]]> 360 Seichō Matsumoto 1569470197 J. 4 3.86 1961 Inspector Imanishi Investigates
author: SeichĹŤ Matsumoto
name: J.
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1961
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2020/02/03
shelves: asia, japan, mystery, matsumoto
review:

]]> A Quiet Place 30054221
"Seicho Matsumoto combines the prolific output of a Rex Stout with the literary qualities of Elmore Leonard.""San Francisco Chronicle "

While on a business trip to Kobe, Tsuneo Asai receives the news that his wife Eiko has died of a heart attack. Eiko had a heart condition so the news of her death wasn t totally unexpected. But the circumstances of her demise left Tsuneo, a softly-spoken government bureaucrat, perplexed. How did it come about that his wifewho was shy and withdrawn, and only left their house twice a week to go to haiku meetingsended up dead in a small shop in a shady Tokyo neighborhood?
When Tsuneo goes to apologize to the boutique owner for the trouble caused by his wife s death he discovers the villa Tachibana near by, a house known to be a meeting place for secret lovers. As he digs deeper into his wife's recent past, he must eventually conclude that she led a double life...
Seicho Matsumoto was Japan's most successful thriller writer. His first detective novel, "Points and Lines," sold over a million copies in Japan. "Vessel of Sand," published in English as "Inspector Imanishi Investigates "in 1989, sold over four million copies and became a movie box-office hit."]]> 240 SeichĹŤ Matsumoto 1908524642 J. 4 japan, mystery, matsumoto A Quiet Place the author looks to the distinctly Japanese pursuit of contemplation, and to internal-external equivalents as the guideposts. Protagonist Mr. Asai is a classic Salaryman making his gradual way up the tediously slow ranks of corporate Japan. On a business trip that is more about ego-stroking the hierarchy than team building, an emergency call comes through to inform him that his young wife has died.

Entirely plausible, it turns out, as the wife had a pre-existing heart condition, but all does not sit well. With time and reflection, Mr. Asai begins to turn out loose ends that can't be contained or reined in with easy explanations.

So begins a remarkable mystery, beautifully rendered in careful prose, and sympathetically translated. We are in the territory of Simenon, perhaps, where our everyday cubicle warrior is blindsided with a revelation or recognition of something rule-breaking, and explosive. We are also firmly situated in Hitchcock environs, where reality itself is a thin concoction of likely excuses, where a crack in the horizon brings enormous strife and suspense.

Matsumoto studiously locates his story in uniquely Japanese territory and atmosphere.
“Asai decided to stop his enquiries for now, after investigating the two hotels at the top of the hill, and returned home to his lonely, empty house. He fell quickly into a fitful sleep, still troubled by the words of the maid at the Midori.
He woke up early. The wristwatch he’d placed by his head showed just after 6 a.m. Only a single man would put his watch next to his pillow, or someone on a trip away. Every day the feeling that he’d been abandoned grew stronger and stronger; Eiko’s relatives had even stopped dropping by.�

The author uses the bland, the modern, the banal, not the exotic, to render the Japanese milieu. In fact the atmosphere, like a foggy San Francisco night gives Hammett his mood and backdrop-- brings the consciousness of the hero as well as the externals. I kept remembering the long and lingering walking shots, in noir-influenced films like Antionioni's Blow-Up, and Malle's Ascenseur Pour L'Ă©chafaud; pursuits without pursuers, where worry and a disturbing tonality is more important than the minimal narrative at hand.
A curious cat's whisker away from five stars. Very recommended.]]> 3.65 1975 A Quiet Place
author: SeichĹŤ Matsumoto
name: J.
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1975
rating: 4
read at: 2020/02/01
date added: 2020/02/01
shelves: japan, mystery, matsumoto
review:
Another absolute Matsumoto jewel. In A Quiet Place the author looks to the distinctly Japanese pursuit of contemplation, and to internal-external equivalents as the guideposts. Protagonist Mr. Asai is a classic Salaryman making his gradual way up the tediously slow ranks of corporate Japan. On a business trip that is more about ego-stroking the hierarchy than team building, an emergency call comes through to inform him that his young wife has died.

Entirely plausible, it turns out, as the wife had a pre-existing heart condition, but all does not sit well. With time and reflection, Mr. Asai begins to turn out loose ends that can't be contained or reined in with easy explanations.

So begins a remarkable mystery, beautifully rendered in careful prose, and sympathetically translated. We are in the territory of Simenon, perhaps, where our everyday cubicle warrior is blindsided with a revelation or recognition of something rule-breaking, and explosive. We are also firmly situated in Hitchcock environs, where reality itself is a thin concoction of likely excuses, where a crack in the horizon brings enormous strife and suspense.

Matsumoto studiously locates his story in uniquely Japanese territory and atmosphere.
“Asai decided to stop his enquiries for now, after investigating the two hotels at the top of the hill, and returned home to his lonely, empty house. He fell quickly into a fitful sleep, still troubled by the words of the maid at the Midori.
He woke up early. The wristwatch he’d placed by his head showed just after 6 a.m. Only a single man would put his watch next to his pillow, or someone on a trip away. Every day the feeling that he’d been abandoned grew stronger and stronger; Eiko’s relatives had even stopped dropping by.�

The author uses the bland, the modern, the banal, not the exotic, to render the Japanese milieu. In fact the atmosphere, like a foggy San Francisco night gives Hammett his mood and backdrop-- brings the consciousness of the hero as well as the externals. I kept remembering the long and lingering walking shots, in noir-influenced films like Antionioni's Blow-Up, and Malle's Ascenseur Pour L'Ă©chafaud; pursuits without pursuers, where worry and a disturbing tonality is more important than the minimal narrative at hand.
A curious cat's whisker away from five stars. Very recommended.
]]> In This House of Brede 80977 672 Rumer Godden 0829421289 J. 0 4.35 1969 In This House of Brede
author: Rumer Godden
name: J.
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1969
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/01/29
shelves: to-read, roman-catholic, next-up
review:

]]> Memoirs of a Beatnik 276891 Memoirs of a Beatnik is a moving account of a powerful woman artist coming of age sensually and intellectually in a movement dominated by a small confederacy of men, many of whom she lived with and loved. Filled with anecdotes about her adventures in New York City, Diane di Prima's memoir shows her learning to "raise her rebellion into art," and making her way toward literary success. Memoirs of a Beatnik offers a fascinating narrative about the courage and triumphs of the imagination.]]> 208 Diane di Prima 0140235396 J. 3 And so they would come, each of them the same, but all of them different... And they would clamber half-clothed, hastily, into bed, or sit on the blankets and talk me awake, or they would have brought up some grass or some wine, and I would watch, tousled and sleepy, while they made a fire. There would be the B-Minor Mass to fuck to, or Bessie Smith, and we would have a moon, and open window breezes off the river, or dank, chilly greyness and rain beating down, bouncing off the windowsill in bright, exploding drops, and it was all good, the core and heart of that time. I thought of it as fucking my comrades, and a year slipped by.

Lots of sex, maybe even exaggerated amounts of sex. If you read the Biography and the Intro, though, you get the picture: novice author Di Prima was encouraged to overdo the sex parts by her Editor (Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press, who would count Miller, Beckett, Burroughs, Nabokov amongst his much-censored clientele) and she complied, with amusingly overdone enthusiasm.

Once you get by the sex--and you'll have to do that every other chapter--you get two interesting things from di Prima. First, and sort of unexpectedly, after all of the heaving libertine bodies and open thighs-- you actually get something of a Beatnik memoir. The Scene in Nyc was smaller and simpler than it seems to later historians, and the few blocks of Greenwich Village couldn't really contain a pre-woodstock-nation's worth of beatniks, anyway. There are standalone moments of recognition and cascading epiphany, as here, with the first read of the iconic HOWL:

It followed, that if there was one Allen [Ginsberg] there must be more, other people besides my few buddies writing what they spoke, what they heard, living, however obscurely and shamefully, what they knew, hiding out here and there as we were--and now, suddenly, about to speak out. All the people who, like me, had hidden and skulked, writing down what they knew for a small handful of friends--and even those friends claiming it couldn't be published--waiting with only a slight bitterness for the thing to end, for man's era to draw to a close in a blaze of radiation--all these would now step forward and say their piece. Not many would hear them, but they would, finally, hear each other. I was about to meet my brothers and sisters.
We had come of age. I was frightened and a little sad. I already clung instinctively to the easy, unself-conscious Bohemianism we had maintained at the pad, our unspoken sense that we were alone in a strange world, a sense that kept us proud and bound to each other. But for the moment, regret for what we might be losing was buried under a sweeping sense of exhilaration, of glee; someone was speaking for all of us, and the poem was good. I was high and delighted. I made my way back to the house and to supper, and we read Howl together, I read it aloud to everyone. A new era had begun.

Di Prima encountered all of the writers, jazzers, folkies, artists and bohemians that one could expect. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Miles Davis and other late-50s icons all appear, casually, and as everyday neighbors or even bed partners.
My legs relaxed of themselves and opened slightly to
Sorry, no. Moving on-- The other non-sex viewpoint is the insider story of the reclamation of downtown Manhattan by determined urban pioneers, artists, anyone who thought they could weather a winter in a drafty post-industrial loft and re-inhabit the deserted industrial warehouses and machine shops of the areas bordering the Villages, both east and west.

The sex parts are largely irrelevant, as if she had gone on about the wonders of smoking grass for pages. But they sold books, and Girodias was a salesman if nothing else. The sense of an apocalyptic dawn breaking over a new era, the merging of the modern and the bohemian-- and the everyday kid from the City blooming with the times, belongs to Di Prima, not Girodias. Overlook the naughty bits and there is a lot of heart in this. Ehm, heaving.]]> 3.72 1969 Memoirs of a Beatnik
author: Diane di Prima
name: J.
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1969
rating: 3
read at: 2020/01/24
date added: 2020/01/24
shelves: greenwich-village, new-york-city, memoir
review:
And so they would come, each of them the same, but all of them different... And they would clamber half-clothed, hastily, into bed, or sit on the blankets and talk me awake, or they would have brought up some grass or some wine, and I would watch, tousled and sleepy, while they made a fire. There would be the B-Minor Mass to fuck to, or Bessie Smith, and we would have a moon, and open window breezes off the river, or dank, chilly greyness and rain beating down, bouncing off the windowsill in bright, exploding drops, and it was all good, the core and heart of that time. I thought of it as fucking my comrades, and a year slipped by.

Lots of sex, maybe even exaggerated amounts of sex. If you read the Biography and the Intro, though, you get the picture: novice author Di Prima was encouraged to overdo the sex parts by her Editor (Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press, who would count Miller, Beckett, Burroughs, Nabokov amongst his much-censored clientele) and she complied, with amusingly overdone enthusiasm.

Once you get by the sex--and you'll have to do that every other chapter--you get two interesting things from di Prima. First, and sort of unexpectedly, after all of the heaving libertine bodies and open thighs-- you actually get something of a Beatnik memoir. The Scene in Nyc was smaller and simpler than it seems to later historians, and the few blocks of Greenwich Village couldn't really contain a pre-woodstock-nation's worth of beatniks, anyway. There are standalone moments of recognition and cascading epiphany, as here, with the first read of the iconic HOWL:

It followed, that if there was one Allen [Ginsberg] there must be more, other people besides my few buddies writing what they spoke, what they heard, living, however obscurely and shamefully, what they knew, hiding out here and there as we were--and now, suddenly, about to speak out. All the people who, like me, had hidden and skulked, writing down what they knew for a small handful of friends--and even those friends claiming it couldn't be published--waiting with only a slight bitterness for the thing to end, for man's era to draw to a close in a blaze of radiation--all these would now step forward and say their piece. Not many would hear them, but they would, finally, hear each other. I was about to meet my brothers and sisters.
We had come of age. I was frightened and a little sad. I already clung instinctively to the easy, unself-conscious Bohemianism we had maintained at the pad, our unspoken sense that we were alone in a strange world, a sense that kept us proud and bound to each other. But for the moment, regret for what we might be losing was buried under a sweeping sense of exhilaration, of glee; someone was speaking for all of us, and the poem was good. I was high and delighted. I made my way back to the house and to supper, and we read Howl together, I read it aloud to everyone. A new era had begun.

Di Prima encountered all of the writers, jazzers, folkies, artists and bohemians that one could expect. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Miles Davis and other late-50s icons all appear, casually, and as everyday neighbors or even bed partners.
My legs relaxed of themselves and opened slightly to
Sorry, no. Moving on-- The other non-sex viewpoint is the insider story of the reclamation of downtown Manhattan by determined urban pioneers, artists, anyone who thought they could weather a winter in a drafty post-industrial loft and re-inhabit the deserted industrial warehouses and machine shops of the areas bordering the Villages, both east and west.

The sex parts are largely irrelevant, as if she had gone on about the wonders of smoking grass for pages. But they sold books, and Girodias was a salesman if nothing else. The sense of an apocalyptic dawn breaking over a new era, the merging of the modern and the bohemian-- and the everyday kid from the City blooming with the times, belongs to Di Prima, not Girodias. Overlook the naughty bits and there is a lot of heart in this. Ehm, heaving.
]]> <![CDATA[The Eustace Diamonds (Palliser, #3)]]> 73954
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700Ěýtitles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theĚýseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-dateĚýtranslations by award-winning translators.]]> 794 Anthony Trollope J. 3 She had her child. She had her income. She had her youth and beauty. She had Portray Castle. She had a new lover -- and if she chose to be quit of him, not liking him well enough for the purpose, she might undoubtedly have another whom she would like better. She had hitherto been thoroughly successful in her life. And yet she was unhappy. What was it that she wanted?
She had been a very clever child--a clever, crafty child; and now she was becoming a clever woman. Her craft remained with her; but so keen was her outlook upon the world, that she was beginning to perceive that craft, let it be never so crafty, will in the long run miss its own object.

A 19th century reboot of Moll Flanders, not such a waif cast upon the cruel world, but the same hard schemer at heart. Dickens certainly did "endearingly crooked" better, and Thackeray did satire at least as well, but Expediency and Opportunism-- have their bard in Anthony Trollope.

From there we go downhill, I'm afraid. Trollope's wide cast of greedy, dispassionate, feckless characters, nearly all with dubious backgrounds, are entertaining and distracting enough, but they don't necessarily energize the story. Everyone is devious and deceptive, operating on pure self-interest, and the rare exceptions are more or less walking sugar-comas in progress. The atmosphere of crass & tawdry actually begins to disallow savage satire if it is the general norm. So we hunt for any ripple of development, a pivot toward altruism. It does not come.

In its defense, this novel has perhaps the greatest, most single-minded McGuffin of all time, in the diamonds, and their ability to prompt the worst motives. Still, a lot to ask, given we are to dedicate ourselves to 750 pages of wondering about them.

A recurring highlight is Trollope's way with written correspondence-- letters between characters. These are little works of wonder, multi-faceted and funny, (meant to be, unconsciously so, and otherwise), cruel and manipulative, fawning and predatory, each a master class in how to compact a character's contradictions into one short note. For this reader, the brevity and insight of the letters has a thing or two to teach the novel, or its editor. (Trollope evidently edited himself here.) This could have been one of the greatest novels ever, with about four hundred pages trimmed away. A non-sugar shot of human warmth here or there might have balanced a lot, as well.

But in the chase for the Diamonds, and all they may represent, no well-intentioned gesture goes unpunished, and every bit of luck is accompanied by remorse or guilty schadenfreude. Enough to void the initial or eventual glow of their original promise. Trollope pulls the rug out, every single time.]]> 3.96 1873 The Eustace Diamonds (Palliser, #3)
author: Anthony Trollope
name: J.
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1873
rating: 3
read at: 2020/01/06
date added: 2020/01/10
shelves: this-england, and-you-make-all-your-animal-deals
review:
She had her child. She had her income. She had her youth and beauty. She had Portray Castle. She had a new lover -- and if she chose to be quit of him, not liking him well enough for the purpose, she might undoubtedly have another whom she would like better. She had hitherto been thoroughly successful in her life. And yet she was unhappy. What was it that she wanted?
She had been a very clever child--a clever, crafty child; and now she was becoming a clever woman. Her craft remained with her; but so keen was her outlook upon the world, that she was beginning to perceive that craft, let it be never so crafty, will in the long run miss its own object.

A 19th century reboot of Moll Flanders, not such a waif cast upon the cruel world, but the same hard schemer at heart. Dickens certainly did "endearingly crooked" better, and Thackeray did satire at least as well, but Expediency and Opportunism-- have their bard in Anthony Trollope.

From there we go downhill, I'm afraid. Trollope's wide cast of greedy, dispassionate, feckless characters, nearly all with dubious backgrounds, are entertaining and distracting enough, but they don't necessarily energize the story. Everyone is devious and deceptive, operating on pure self-interest, and the rare exceptions are more or less walking sugar-comas in progress. The atmosphere of crass & tawdry actually begins to disallow savage satire if it is the general norm. So we hunt for any ripple of development, a pivot toward altruism. It does not come.

In its defense, this novel has perhaps the greatest, most single-minded McGuffin of all time, in the diamonds, and their ability to prompt the worst motives. Still, a lot to ask, given we are to dedicate ourselves to 750 pages of wondering about them.

A recurring highlight is Trollope's way with written correspondence-- letters between characters. These are little works of wonder, multi-faceted and funny, (meant to be, unconsciously so, and otherwise), cruel and manipulative, fawning and predatory, each a master class in how to compact a character's contradictions into one short note. For this reader, the brevity and insight of the letters has a thing or two to teach the novel, or its editor. (Trollope evidently edited himself here.) This could have been one of the greatest novels ever, with about four hundred pages trimmed away. A non-sugar shot of human warmth here or there might have balanced a lot, as well.

But in the chase for the Diamonds, and all they may represent, no well-intentioned gesture goes unpunished, and every bit of luck is accompanied by remorse or guilty schadenfreude. Enough to void the initial or eventual glow of their original promise. Trollope pulls the rug out, every single time.
]]> Agent Running in the Field 43904017 Nat is not only a spy, he is a passionate badminton player. His regular Monday evening opponent is half his age: the introspective and solitary Ed. Ed hates Brexit, hates Trump and hates his job at some soulless media agency. And it is Ed, of all unlikely people, who will take Prue, Florence and Nat himself down the path of political anger that will ensnare them all.

]]> 282 John Le Carré 1984878875 J. 4 le-carre, suspense-espionage Almost certainly the worst and most-clunky title ever.
Bottom line, a synthesis, a distillation of what can happen, and what doesn't need to happen, in a modern Le Carré outing. Great read, a movie between book covers.

Unencumbered by the ambiguous-pov stylizing of many of his great efforts, this one just gets right on the tracks and goes. Tempting to think the elderly author no longer feels the need for the frames-within-frames and oblique exposition he usually indulges in. No crossword here, but an Instagram.

Also, in his golden years, Le Carré has emerged as a classic social democrat, a principled citizen of the world who's less and less enamored of the tribal / nationalist games that current politics seems to be playing with humankind. And as we've become accustomed to in the last couple books, he puts that philosophy right on the page, no sense in being difficult. Our circumspect, restrained narrator finally declares outright:

� � Let me say here and now, precisely as I repeated the same ad nauseam to my chers collegues, that although the word clusterfuck had not so far entered my vocabulary, Brexit had long been a red rag to me. I am European born and bred, I have French, German, British and Old Russian blood in my veins and am as much at home on the Continent of Europe as I am in Battersea. As to his larger point about the dominance of white supremacists in Trump’s America—well, there too we were not at odds, and neither were many of my chers collegues, however much they might later wish themselves into a more neutral posture...�

A polished, sleek, cosmopolitan novel of manners, and spies. Terrible, awkward title. Go.]]> 3.75 2019 Agent Running in the Field
author: John Le Carré
name: J.
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2020/01/04
shelves: le-carre, suspense-espionage
review:
Maybe the most-streamlined and pacey Le Carré ever.
Almost certainly the worst and most-clunky title ever.
Bottom line, a synthesis, a distillation of what can happen, and what doesn't need to happen, in a modern Le Carré outing. Great read, a movie between book covers.

Unencumbered by the ambiguous-pov stylizing of many of his great efforts, this one just gets right on the tracks and goes. Tempting to think the elderly author no longer feels the need for the frames-within-frames and oblique exposition he usually indulges in. No crossword here, but an Instagram.

Also, in his golden years, Le Carré has emerged as a classic social democrat, a principled citizen of the world who's less and less enamored of the tribal / nationalist games that current politics seems to be playing with humankind. And as we've become accustomed to in the last couple books, he puts that philosophy right on the page, no sense in being difficult. Our circumspect, restrained narrator finally declares outright:

� � Let me say here and now, precisely as I repeated the same ad nauseam to my chers collegues, that although the word clusterfuck had not so far entered my vocabulary, Brexit had long been a red rag to me. I am European born and bred, I have French, German, British and Old Russian blood in my veins and am as much at home on the Continent of Europe as I am in Battersea. As to his larger point about the dominance of white supremacists in Trump’s America—well, there too we were not at odds, and neither were many of my chers collegues, however much they might later wish themselves into a more neutral posture...�

A polished, sleek, cosmopolitan novel of manners, and spies. Terrible, awkward title. Go.
]]> <![CDATA[All You Need Is Ears: The Inside Personal Story of the Genius Who Created the Beatles]]> 91974
"Certainly," I said, "I'm willing to listen to anything. Ask him to come and see me."

"O.K., I will. His name's Brian Epstein..."

All You Need Is Ears is the story of George Martin, the man who spotted the Beatles' talent, who recorded and produced them from the start, and who brought their musical ideas to life. In this witty and charming autobiography, he describes exactly what it was like to work in the studio with the Beatles--from the first audition (and his decision to scrap Pete Best on drums) to the wild experimentation of Sgt. Pepper (complete with sound effects, animal noises and full orchestras in evening dress at the direct request of Paul McCartney).

This is a singular look at the most important musical group of all time, and how they made the music that changed the No other book can provide George Martin's inside look at their creative process, at the play of genius and practical improvisation that gave them their sound; it is an indispensable read for Beatle lovers and anyone interested in the music world.]]> 304 George Martin 0312114826 J. 3 five, doesn't it....)

In the mid fifties the Producer was less involved with constructing sound montages than with the everyday business aspects of his label & studio, connecting artists with repertoire to suit, and making sure the charts for the string section integrated with the vocalist's lines. It would be a long way from there to the experimental musique concrete, eight-hands-on-one-piano & circus-calliope of 'Sergeant Pepper', but Martin affably & creatively went along for the ride, and ended up shaping a lot of it to make musical sense. And to fit into the grooves of the Lp records the world would line up to purchase.

At the Emi-Parlophone studios, suits and labcoats were the order of the day for the producers and engineers. This was the era of non-automated vacuum-tube mixingboards, enormous tape transports, and huge lathes for mastering-- which required a full staff of knowledgeable technicians, to prep a recording session hours ahead of time. Martin's book does a nice job in the middle chapters with describing musical sound, sound itself in fact, and how it came to be translated to an analog 'record' of the original event by these means. As the actual Lp record was the end product in the Beatle era, a clear explanation of how they work & how they were cut fits in here as well. Most of these are now lost arts, or at least specialty pursuits that never really gain any public notice, so it's a valuable little tour, conducted by the master of ceremonies circa 1965 or so. For anyone with a slightly technical ear, invaluable to read.

Also interesting is Martin's take on the transition of Recording from simply a documentary, where a faithful record would mirror the events unfolding in the studio--- to a completely abstract art. A medium where sonic events and background washes could be built up like paint on a canvas, where sound effects & music recorded all over the world at different times could morph into the middle of an instrumental solo, in a sonic environment created in the imagination, rather than in soundproof booths.

The lapses in this account are the track-to-track details, the instrumentation and improvisation involved, and for that there is a better book, written by Martin's Engineer Geoff Emerick. Beyond that, Martin sort of glosses the golden age-- he goes rather quickly from the fast, rock-and-roll early era right into the psychedelic era and then promptly wraps that with a tip of the hat to the awards, golden records and the rest. As much as the coverage of the early years is fascinating, the post-beatle era is contrarily tedious. For the remainder of the book he goes on about his distinctly non-golden era, and the account suffers in his effort to cover the periods in like fashion. No one cares in the least any more whether Martin recorded the group 'America' or had a hand in the filmscore for the Beegees version of Sgt. Pepper, and Martin of all people might have seen that in advance.

You can't fault a book for what it's not, though, and having the man who added string quartets to Yesterday, the man who ran all the recording sessions for the Beatle era music-- set down some thoughtful commentary, even briefly, is well worth the read. What comes across between the lines of the narrative here, as in the recordings themselves, are the qualities of reserve and taste that George Martin brought into what might otherwise have been a brief, one-hit-wonder scenario.

Geoff Emerick's book is called "Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles" and is the preferable account for the non-completist.]]> 3.96 1979 All You Need Is Ears: The Inside Personal Story of the Genius Who Created the Beatles
author: George Martin
name: J.
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1979
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2019/12/19
shelves: arts, bio, united-kingdom, music, memoir
review:
Short and somewhat overlooked book on the Sixties and Beatles era, by the well-regarded record producer of all the Beatles records, George Martin. Rather than focus directly on the fab-4 phenomenon, Martin takes the long view, building the story solidly on what happens on the way to sitting in the control booth one day saying, 'right then lads, more lively on the yeah-yeah-yeahs this time'... It is certainly reasonable to say that Martin was the fifth beatle, his contributions to the sound and content of that body of work incalculably influential. But the old-school British restraint runs deep here, so (although supported by most other accounts) he's not about to confirm that, or tell tales from behind that curtain, which draws some of the life out of this story. But we know, nonetheless. (the closest he comes to this is in stating that Lennon and McCartney were the guiding lights of the musical output, and that Harrison, Starr and Martin were the support team. Well said, humble, truthful, but still adds up to five, doesn't it....)

In the mid fifties the Producer was less involved with constructing sound montages than with the everyday business aspects of his label & studio, connecting artists with repertoire to suit, and making sure the charts for the string section integrated with the vocalist's lines. It would be a long way from there to the experimental musique concrete, eight-hands-on-one-piano & circus-calliope of 'Sergeant Pepper', but Martin affably & creatively went along for the ride, and ended up shaping a lot of it to make musical sense. And to fit into the grooves of the Lp records the world would line up to purchase.

At the Emi-Parlophone studios, suits and labcoats were the order of the day for the producers and engineers. This was the era of non-automated vacuum-tube mixingboards, enormous tape transports, and huge lathes for mastering-- which required a full staff of knowledgeable technicians, to prep a recording session hours ahead of time. Martin's book does a nice job in the middle chapters with describing musical sound, sound itself in fact, and how it came to be translated to an analog 'record' of the original event by these means. As the actual Lp record was the end product in the Beatle era, a clear explanation of how they work & how they were cut fits in here as well. Most of these are now lost arts, or at least specialty pursuits that never really gain any public notice, so it's a valuable little tour, conducted by the master of ceremonies circa 1965 or so. For anyone with a slightly technical ear, invaluable to read.

Also interesting is Martin's take on the transition of Recording from simply a documentary, where a faithful record would mirror the events unfolding in the studio--- to a completely abstract art. A medium where sonic events and background washes could be built up like paint on a canvas, where sound effects & music recorded all over the world at different times could morph into the middle of an instrumental solo, in a sonic environment created in the imagination, rather than in soundproof booths.

The lapses in this account are the track-to-track details, the instrumentation and improvisation involved, and for that there is a better book, written by Martin's Engineer Geoff Emerick. Beyond that, Martin sort of glosses the golden age-- he goes rather quickly from the fast, rock-and-roll early era right into the psychedelic era and then promptly wraps that with a tip of the hat to the awards, golden records and the rest. As much as the coverage of the early years is fascinating, the post-beatle era is contrarily tedious. For the remainder of the book he goes on about his distinctly non-golden era, and the account suffers in his effort to cover the periods in like fashion. No one cares in the least any more whether Martin recorded the group 'America' or had a hand in the filmscore for the Beegees version of Sgt. Pepper, and Martin of all people might have seen that in advance.

You can't fault a book for what it's not, though, and having the man who added string quartets to Yesterday, the man who ran all the recording sessions for the Beatle era music-- set down some thoughtful commentary, even briefly, is well worth the read. What comes across between the lines of the narrative here, as in the recordings themselves, are the qualities of reserve and taste that George Martin brought into what might otherwise have been a brief, one-hit-wonder scenario.

Geoff Emerick's book is called "Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles" and is the preferable account for the non-completist.
]]> Penance 31423183 The tense, chilling story of four women haunted by a childhood trauma.

When they were children, Sae, Maki, Akiko and Yuko were tricked into separating from their friend Emily by a mysterious stranger. Then the unthinkable occurs: Emily is found murdered hours later.

Sae, Maki, Akiko and Yuko weren't able to accurately describe the stranger's appearance to the police after Emily's body was discovered. Asako, Emily's mother, curses the surviving girls, vowing that they will pay for her daughter's murder.

Like Confessions, Kanae Minato's award-winning, internationally bestselling debut, Penance is a dark and voice-driven tale of revenge and psychological trauma that will leave readers breathless.]]> 240 Kanae Minato J. 0 mystery, to-read, japan 3.83 2009 Penance
author: Kanae Minato
name: J.
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/12/18
shelves: mystery, to-read, japan
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Name of the Game is a Kidnapping]]> 28815193
Down on his luck and now on his way out career-wise, he planned to go publically chew out the man who brough him down. Instead, upon uncovering a deep secret, he devises a plan to bring down his new rival in a twisted game called kidnapping.]]> 240 Keigo Higashino 1942993838 J. 0 to-read, mystery, japan 3.66 2002 The Name of the Game is a Kidnapping
author: Keigo Higashino
name: J.
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/12/18
shelves: to-read, mystery, japan
review:

]]> The Blessing 8041278
When Grace Allingham, a naïve young Englishwoman, goes to live in France with her dashingly aristocratic husband Charles-Edouard, she finds herself overwhelmed by the bewilderingly foreign cuisine and the shockingly decadent manners and mores of the French. But it is the discovery of her husband’s French notion of marriage—which includes a permanent mistress and a string of casual affairs—that sends Grace packing back to London with their “blessing,� young Sigismond, in tow.

While others urge the couple to reconcile, little Sigi—convinced that it will improve his chances of being spoiled—applies all his juvenile cunning to keeping his parents apart. Drawing on her own years in Paris and her long affair with a Frenchman, Mitford elevates cultural and romantic misunderstandings to the heights of comedy.]]> 242 Nancy Mitford 0307740838 J. 3 She knew, or thought she knew, that Frenchwomen were hideously ugly, but with an ugliness redeemed by great vivacity and perfect taste in dress... So all in all she was unprepared for the scene that met her eyes on entering...

This is Mitford's unapologetic memoir of her own romance with a charming but decidedly not monogamist Frenchman, and really, with the idea of France itself. What works here is the casual seduction of a really independent Englishwoman by the whole of French culture; maybe something that viewed in macro might also be about the unbreakable quality of French cultivation and polish, remarkably unbowed by the world wars.

The observations of the Narrator are what makes this book fly, always reasonable if not practical, and never too deeply indebted to settling scores or rooting for any specific side. What doesn't work is the daily-diary kind of structure, which relies too heavily on what happened on a given day. If you have a very unpremeditated, free-wheeling narrator telling the tale, it feels as if there must be, at a minimum, some backstage logic to tie things up.

Not to be too focused on this lack though, the book very nearly makes it along the casual lines of this structure-- which does good things for the pacing and drive-- until one of the set-pieces fails along the way. (And then the "oh, do have a look, darling" perspective goes wobbly. In my reading the central Famous Children Ball thrown by Mme. Marel goes flat, and sinks the arc of the book in so doing. Shame, really, since a Mitford-trademark wicked-humourous blowout there would have carried the whole thing).

Uneven, but still well worth the read, as the sacred-cow-puncturing and biting euphemism always manage to cover any soul-baring that might have been imminent; we are English here, after all. Having rushed back to London after one too many infidelities courtesy le husband, our Narrator expects a comforting wave of the home country to wash away all of that Continental nonsense; somehow, though, after France the English seem ridiculous too, not just stodgy but loopy and shallow. We watch as Mitford's vision clears, and the larger picture comes into focus.

In the Vintage edition's introduction to The Blessing, Caryn James mentions that Mitford had originally been commissioned by producer Alexander Korda to write this in screenplay form; as it happened the production never began, and Mitford rescued the material as a Novel. This reinvention may have something to do with the uneven structure and occasional lapses I found; what may have seemed impossible to sacrifice from the screen version, like the Children's Ball, might have been reconsidered one too many times. Other aspects, like the central positioning of Sigismond, (who is in fact the Blessing of the title) are neatly bundled and tied up at the end -- as if ready for the shooting script of the movie. Who knows, this probably could have been done a half a dozen different ways, and this, as we all must agree, is one of them.]]> 3.72 1951 The Blessing
author: Nancy Mitford
name: J.
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1951
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2019/12/12
shelves: mitfords, france, plucky-british-girl-sorts-it
review:
She knew, or thought she knew, that Frenchwomen were hideously ugly, but with an ugliness redeemed by great vivacity and perfect taste in dress... So all in all she was unprepared for the scene that met her eyes on entering...

This is Mitford's unapologetic memoir of her own romance with a charming but decidedly not monogamist Frenchman, and really, with the idea of France itself. What works here is the casual seduction of a really independent Englishwoman by the whole of French culture; maybe something that viewed in macro might also be about the unbreakable quality of French cultivation and polish, remarkably unbowed by the world wars.

The observations of the Narrator are what makes this book fly, always reasonable if not practical, and never too deeply indebted to settling scores or rooting for any specific side. What doesn't work is the daily-diary kind of structure, which relies too heavily on what happened on a given day. If you have a very unpremeditated, free-wheeling narrator telling the tale, it feels as if there must be, at a minimum, some backstage logic to tie things up.

Not to be too focused on this lack though, the book very nearly makes it along the casual lines of this structure-- which does good things for the pacing and drive-- until one of the set-pieces fails along the way. (And then the "oh, do have a look, darling" perspective goes wobbly. In my reading the central Famous Children Ball thrown by Mme. Marel goes flat, and sinks the arc of the book in so doing. Shame, really, since a Mitford-trademark wicked-humourous blowout there would have carried the whole thing).

Uneven, but still well worth the read, as the sacred-cow-puncturing and biting euphemism always manage to cover any soul-baring that might have been imminent; we are English here, after all. Having rushed back to London after one too many infidelities courtesy le husband, our Narrator expects a comforting wave of the home country to wash away all of that Continental nonsense; somehow, though, after France the English seem ridiculous too, not just stodgy but loopy and shallow. We watch as Mitford's vision clears, and the larger picture comes into focus.

In the Vintage edition's introduction to The Blessing, Caryn James mentions that Mitford had originally been commissioned by producer Alexander Korda to write this in screenplay form; as it happened the production never began, and Mitford rescued the material as a Novel. This reinvention may have something to do with the uneven structure and occasional lapses I found; what may have seemed impossible to sacrifice from the screen version, like the Children's Ball, might have been reconsidered one too many times. Other aspects, like the central positioning of Sigismond, (who is in fact the Blessing of the title) are neatly bundled and tied up at the end -- as if ready for the shooting script of the movie. Who knows, this probably could have been done a half a dozen different ways, and this, as we all must agree, is one of them.
]]> Conviction (Anna and Fin, #1) 42283333
With her safe, comfortable world shattered, Anna distracts herself with someone else's story: a true-crime podcast. That is until she recognises the name of one of the victims and becomes convinced that only she knows what really happened.

With nothing left to lose, she throws herself into investigating the case. But little does she know, Anna's past and present lives are about to collide, sending everything she has worked so hard to achieve into freefall.

Conviction is the compelling and unique new thriller from multiple award-winner and author of The Long Drop, Denise Mina.]]> 376 Denise Mina 0316528501 J. 4 mina, off-shore Crime And Punishment's Raskolnikov comes to mind. Dozens of noirs from Chandler to Goodis have this trait; Dorothy Hughes' In A Lonely Place comes to mind. The puzzle, and the intrigue, derive from the reader's increasing familiarity with the internal spiral within.
Denise Mina's new mystery Conviction spirals outward, on the other hand. Almost the opposite of the internal considerations of the above, the adventure lies in circumstances throwing the protagonist against a dozen occasions of jeopardy, one leading inevitably to the next. In Hitchcock movie terms, if the first type is an inward spiral, and explores the path toward evil, the example is Vertigo; whereas in the Mina novel the example of the outward spiral, the classic innocent caught in an undertow of circumstance --would be North By Northwest.
It follows that the pace and drive of the spiral-outward novel are accentuated, the narrative accelerates with the velocity of unpredictable outside influences. The inward-spiral variation is more of an admire-the-clockwork puzzle than an open adventure.
All that said, Mina's mystery here is still a psychological mystery, while the pace and drive are nonetheless break-neck. My mention of North By Northwest is intentional, as Conviction shares a lot of the abrupt shifts of scenery, and the onslaught of the unexpected, with that film. Eventually it will see the big screen, almost without a doubt. See it in these pages first.
Recommended.]]> 3.47 2019 Conviction (Anna and Fin, #1)
author: Denise Mina
name: J.
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2019/12/09
shelves: mina, off-shore
review:
Generally, psychological mysteries tend naturally to narrate the motives, the interior deliberations of the anti-hero or, sometimes, the murderer. Crime And Punishment's Raskolnikov comes to mind. Dozens of noirs from Chandler to Goodis have this trait; Dorothy Hughes' In A Lonely Place comes to mind. The puzzle, and the intrigue, derive from the reader's increasing familiarity with the internal spiral within.
Denise Mina's new mystery Conviction spirals outward, on the other hand. Almost the opposite of the internal considerations of the above, the adventure lies in circumstances throwing the protagonist against a dozen occasions of jeopardy, one leading inevitably to the next. In Hitchcock movie terms, if the first type is an inward spiral, and explores the path toward evil, the example is Vertigo; whereas in the Mina novel the example of the outward spiral, the classic innocent caught in an undertow of circumstance --would be North By Northwest.
It follows that the pace and drive of the spiral-outward novel are accentuated, the narrative accelerates with the velocity of unpredictable outside influences. The inward-spiral variation is more of an admire-the-clockwork puzzle than an open adventure.
All that said, Mina's mystery here is still a psychological mystery, while the pace and drive are nonetheless break-neck. My mention of North By Northwest is intentional, as Conviction shares a lot of the abrupt shifts of scenery, and the onslaught of the unexpected, with that film. Eventually it will see the big screen, almost without a doubt. See it in these pages first.
Recommended.
]]> <![CDATA[The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories]]> 6033225 Mavis Gallant is renowned as one of the great short-story writers of our day. This new gathering of long-unavailable or previously uncollected work presents stories from 1951 to 1971 and shows Gallant's progression from precocious virtuosity, to accomplished artistry, to the expansive innovatory spirit that marks her finest work.

"Madeleine's Birthday," the first of Gallant's many stories to be published in The New Yorker, pairs off a disaffected teenager, abandoned by her social-climbing mother, with a complacent middle-aged suburban housewife, in a subtly poignant comedy of miscommunication that reveals both characters to be equally adrift. "The Cost of Living," the extraordinary title story, is about a company of strangers, shipwrecked over a chilly winter in a Parisian hotel and bound to one another by animosity as much as by unexpected love.

Set in Paris, New York, the Riviera, and Montreal and full of scrupulously observed characters ranging from freebooters and malingerers to runaway children and fashion models, Gallant's stories are at once satirical and lyrical, passionate and skeptical, perfectly calibrated and in constant motion, brilliantly capturing the fatal untidiness of life.]]> 340 Mavis Gallant 1590173279 J. 0 4.04 2009 The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories
author: Mavis Gallant
name: J.
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/11/26
shelves: to-read, short-stories, next-up
review:

]]> American Writings 5055187 848 Lafcadio Hearn 1598530399 J. 0 4.00 2009 American Writings
author: Lafcadio Hearn
name: J.
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/11/04
shelves: to-read, next-up, travelers, anthology
review:

]]> <![CDATA[This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality]]> 41717504 Learn how the perception of truth has been weaponized in modern politics with this “insightful� account of propaganda in Russia and beyond during the age of disinformation (New York Times).

When information is a weapon, every opinion is an act of war.

We live in a world of influence operations run amok, where dark ads, psyops, hacks, bots, soft facts, ISIS, Putin, trolls, and Trump seek to shape our very reality. In this surreal atmosphere created to disorient us and undermine our sense of truth, we’ve lost not only our grip on peace and democracy � but our very notion of what those words even mean.

Peter Pomerantsev takes us to the front lines of the disinformation age, where he meets Twitter revolutionaries and pop-up populists, “behavioral change� salesmen, Jihadi fanboys, Identitarians, truth cops, and many others. Forty years after his dissident parents were pursued by the KGB, Pomerantsev finds the Kremlin re-emerging as a great propaganda power. His research takes him back to Russia � but the answers he finds there are not what he expected.

Blending reportage, family history, and intellectual adventure, This Is Not Propaganda explores how we can reimagine our politics and ourselves when reality seems to be coming apart.]]> 236 Peter Pomerantsev 1541762118 J. 4
... I see people I have known my whole life slip away from me on social media, reposting conspiracies from sources I have never heard of, some sort of internet undercurrent pulling whole families apart, as if we never really knew each other , as if the algorithms know more about us than we do, as if we are becoming subsets of our own data, which is rearranging our relations and identities with its own logic, or in the cause of someone else's interests we can't even see ...
The trick with pro-grade "disinformation" seems to be not just creating one reality for each target audience, but the complete disregard with which you create a separate one for another target audience without alerting the first. Until the disinformer has mastered the art, he or she may be concerned with a unified spread of influence, across a broad range of a target population, but the opposite appears to be true. Narrowing and segmenting the target is much more important than any concern with "consistency". Micro-targeting sets specific mousetraps for specific, shortrange goals, undetectable shifts that can be expanded and later congealed as a position. And eventually a position that nobody would have agreed with in the first place. All is deniable, the important thing is outcome. Let them debate fairness, or moving goalposts, in the unflattering glow of defeat.

Soviet-Kiev born Pomerantsev takes a two-part approach to his book (his update, really, since his first book, which was more Russia-centric) --in which the main stream is his tour of world Information specialists, analysts, dissidents and movement people, who narrate their perspective of a world that is finding that truth is more debateable than ever. Against which he mixes in some elements of biography, his childhood with dissident parents, a family who escaped to the West. His parents worked in film and media, and Pomerantsev grew up in the shadows of his father's new employers, both the BBC and Radio Free Europe. Under each category of narrative in the book, the theme is basically the definition of control. Which entities shape history, and how their manipulation of information deceives the participants.

We get the all-too-familiar, with whispering campaigns, scam, smear, and fake news. Alongside of which we get the new developments, which the Russians call active measures--- where capillarity, white-jamming, sockpuppets, cyborgs, trolls and bot-herders all move among us. And which cumulatively are able to force large change in microscopic interest-groups.

The former Cambridge Analytica analyst Christopher Wylie has placed the blame for access squarely in the hands of Facebook: “Imagine we are on a blind date, we’ve never met before and I start telling you how much I love your favourite musicians, how I watch the same TV as you do etc, and you realise the reason I’m so perfect for you is because I spent the last two years going through your photo albums, reading your text messages and talking to your friends. Facebook is that stalker.� In the current climate of untrustworthy influence campaigns, using an algorithm-based, non-randomized platform to obtain your news, your politics, your positions-- is to hand over the keys of the car to an unknown driver.

Pomerantsev's book is a kind of intermediate disinfo reader; it hops all over the map, but it's useful to recall the timeline in the narrative. The key dates in the origin of the Information Plague are these: 1991, fall of the Berlin Wall & Soviet Union; 2000, election of Kgb Officer Putin to Russian Federation; 2007, the Russian hack and cyber-shutdown of Estonia; 2014, the Russian invasion and disinfo war with Ukraine; 2016, Brexit, and the assisted appointment of Donald Trump to the US Presidency.

The soaring use of influence campaigns is mirrored by the rise of unregulated new information platforms, only now imaginable via new technologies. Both the Russians and the West-- from the First World War forward, really--have used propaganda techniques to bias and control the facts and fictions that write history. America has always had a culture & soft-power apparatus operating in tandem with its wartime propaganda campaigns; the Cold War expanded and diffused those boundaries. The Russians seem never to have differentiated the two. The fine print under the Russian campaigns seems to be that Life Is Wartime. And to be fair, if your life was the 2oth Century in Ukraine or East Germany, that may not be far off. But it's important to recognize it and label it, define the components and name them. Pomerantsev, along with others, like Wylie, like Masha Gessen-- are doing just that.

It matters. It's personal, it's life and death.
Manufactured Consent-- is not consent.]]> 4.02 2019 This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality
author: Peter Pomerantsev
name: J.
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2019/11/02
date added: 2019/11/02
shelves: history, russia, oblique-strategies, non-fiction
review:
... I see people I have known my whole life slip away from me on social media, reposting conspiracies from sources I have never heard of, some sort of internet undercurrent pulling whole families apart, as if we never really knew each other , as if the algorithms know more about us than we do, as if we are becoming subsets of our own data, which is rearranging our relations and identities with its own logic, or in the cause of someone else's interests we can't even see ...
The trick with pro-grade "disinformation" seems to be not just creating one reality for each target audience, but the complete disregard with which you create a separate one for another target audience without alerting the first. Until the disinformer has mastered the art, he or she may be concerned with a unified spread of influence, across a broad range of a target population, but the opposite appears to be true. Narrowing and segmenting the target is much more important than any concern with "consistency". Micro-targeting sets specific mousetraps for specific, shortrange goals, undetectable shifts that can be expanded and later congealed as a position. And eventually a position that nobody would have agreed with in the first place. All is deniable, the important thing is outcome. Let them debate fairness, or moving goalposts, in the unflattering glow of defeat.

Soviet-Kiev born Pomerantsev takes a two-part approach to his book (his update, really, since his first book, which was more Russia-centric) --in which the main stream is his tour of world Information specialists, analysts, dissidents and movement people, who narrate their perspective of a world that is finding that truth is more debateable than ever. Against which he mixes in some elements of biography, his childhood with dissident parents, a family who escaped to the West. His parents worked in film and media, and Pomerantsev grew up in the shadows of his father's new employers, both the BBC and Radio Free Europe. Under each category of narrative in the book, the theme is basically the definition of control. Which entities shape history, and how their manipulation of information deceives the participants.

We get the all-too-familiar, with whispering campaigns, scam, smear, and fake news. Alongside of which we get the new developments, which the Russians call active measures--- where capillarity, white-jamming, sockpuppets, cyborgs, trolls and bot-herders all move among us. And which cumulatively are able to force large change in microscopic interest-groups.

The former Cambridge Analytica analyst Christopher Wylie has placed the blame for access squarely in the hands of Facebook: “Imagine we are on a blind date, we’ve never met before and I start telling you how much I love your favourite musicians, how I watch the same TV as you do etc, and you realise the reason I’m so perfect for you is because I spent the last two years going through your photo albums, reading your text messages and talking to your friends. Facebook is that stalker.� In the current climate of untrustworthy influence campaigns, using an algorithm-based, non-randomized platform to obtain your news, your politics, your positions-- is to hand over the keys of the car to an unknown driver.

Pomerantsev's book is a kind of intermediate disinfo reader; it hops all over the map, but it's useful to recall the timeline in the narrative. The key dates in the origin of the Information Plague are these: 1991, fall of the Berlin Wall & Soviet Union; 2000, election of Kgb Officer Putin to Russian Federation; 2007, the Russian hack and cyber-shutdown of Estonia; 2014, the Russian invasion and disinfo war with Ukraine; 2016, Brexit, and the assisted appointment of Donald Trump to the US Presidency.

The soaring use of influence campaigns is mirrored by the rise of unregulated new information platforms, only now imaginable via new technologies. Both the Russians and the West-- from the First World War forward, really--have used propaganda techniques to bias and control the facts and fictions that write history. America has always had a culture & soft-power apparatus operating in tandem with its wartime propaganda campaigns; the Cold War expanded and diffused those boundaries. The Russians seem never to have differentiated the two. The fine print under the Russian campaigns seems to be that Life Is Wartime. And to be fair, if your life was the 2oth Century in Ukraine or East Germany, that may not be far off. But it's important to recognize it and label it, define the components and name them. Pomerantsev, along with others, like Wylie, like Masha Gessen-- are doing just that.

It matters. It's personal, it's life and death.
Manufactured Consent-- is not consent.
]]> <![CDATA[Evil Empire: The Irish Mob and the Assassination of Journalist Veronica Guerin]]> 1781820 Ruthless godfather John Gilligan controlled a colossal drug empire and a mob of Dublin gangland's most dangerous criminals. Violence and the threat of murder kept terrified witnesses silent and other gangsters in fear. Gilligan thought himself above the law---and never managed to figure out that there was a line between what gangsters can and cannot do.
Evil Empire tells the chilling inside story of Gilligan's rise to power, his savage gang, and the truth about the terrifying murder that shocked the world. Also shown is the behind-the-scenes drama of the dedicated police squad that waged an unprecedented four-year war to smash "Factory" John's Evil Empire.]]> 384 Paul Williams 076530841X J. 0 3.71 2003 Evil Empire: The Irish Mob and the Assassination of Journalist Veronica Guerin
author: Paul Williams
name: J.
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/09/19
shelves: currently-reading, history, crime, eire, non-fiction
review:

]]> Nobody Walks 22358131 Now for the first time since he cut all ties years ago, Bettany returns home to London to find out the truth about his son's death. Maybe it's the guilt he feels about losing touch with his son that's gnawing at him, or maybe he's actually put his finger on a labyrinthine plot, but either way he'll get to the bottom of the tragedy, no matter whose feathers he has to ruffle. But more than a few people are interested to hear Bettany is back in town, from incarcerated mob bosses to those in the highest echelons of MI5. He might have thought he'd left it all behind when he first skipped town, but nobody really just walks away.]]> 296 Mick Herron 1616954868 J. 1 The author has stripped his story down to barest essentials, no doubt in the drive for pace and thrill. Character basics are good, but barely sketches, the atmosphere is present, but thin. You might think the Plot was so miraculously stellar that it dictated this approach. That would be wrong, there are holes and plausibility mismatches all over.
Can't say it any other way, this was a misguided effort. Nobody Walks feels like a closed theme park, where the rides are free and still operational, but pointless without the rest of the carnival going on.]]> 3.91 2015 Nobody Walks
author: Mick Herron
name: J.
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2015
rating: 1
read at: 2019/09/12
date added: 2019/09/12
shelves: suspense-espionage, secret-agent-man
review:
Just no.
The author has stripped his story down to barest essentials, no doubt in the drive for pace and thrill. Character basics are good, but barely sketches, the atmosphere is present, but thin. You might think the Plot was so miraculously stellar that it dictated this approach. That would be wrong, there are holes and plausibility mismatches all over.
Can't say it any other way, this was a misguided effort. Nobody Walks feels like a closed theme park, where the rides are free and still operational, but pointless without the rest of the carnival going on.
]]> <![CDATA[The Lost Traveller (Virago Modern Classics)]]> 12786050 This is an alternate cover edition for ISBN 0860680959 .

The Year is 1914.

Clara Batchelor, the heroine of Frost in May is now fifteen.

The Lost Traveller, a brilliant portrait of a young girl's coming of age, continues the story of Antonia White's famous Frost in May. Clara returns from the regimented convent of her childhood, still in thrall to the benevolent authoritarianism of her father and the imperious affection of her dissatisfied mother. In this devout Catholic family Clara is 'Daddy's girl', and their intense relationship makes impossible demands on a young girl unwillingly learning to be a woman.

Against the background of a world at war, Clara experiences the vagaries of adolescence, its promise, its threat of change. Then, faced with the first tragedy of her adult life, she comes to realise that neither parents, marriage nor her faith can protect her. Clara is becoming a woman...

First published in 1950, this brilliant portrait of adolescence is the first of the three-novel sequel to Antonia White's famous novel, Frost in May, The Sugar House and Beyond the Glass complete the trilogy.]]> 314 Antonia White J. 3 � this produced at times an uncomfortable sense of dissipation. She felt she was not so much growing up as expanding shapelessly in all directions. She read omnivorously, devouring but not absorbing; never going deep into anything for fear of missing something else till her head was a chaos of unrelated ideas. All the values that had seemed so clear at Mount Hillary were becoming muddled. It was not that she doubted the truth of her religion but that it was becoming more and more difficult to make it a real part of her life. The nuns had prepared her to expect hostility and ridicule; what she found was indifference.

A full twenty years after her near-miraculous Frost In May debut, Antonia White returned to the story to continue almost exactly where she had left off. For some reason Nanda, our heroine from Frost, is now Clara in Traveller, but virtually all else remains the same, parents, home, convent-school Mount Hillary, and surrounding circumstances.

Like any sequel, the reader is here as much to find out what happens as to expect a discrete, modular work in itself, and in that we are certainly not disappointed. As any kind of through-the-looking-glass adventure though, we are not, this time, witnessing anything new. The Frost book somehow took us inside of wobbly adolescence, fraught with all confusing headwinds, stabilized by the intuitive intelligence of the lead character.

This one finds all the conditions generally known, but our lead is hitting the skids, being controlled by the circumstances rather than giving much fight. It's that awkward age. Questions and conflicting beliefs smashing all around, oceans of notions and no reliable moral compass anywhere within reach.

To give White her due, she doesn't neatly package this little trip through the doldrums, and as it happens, a random, tragic event arrives to break up the sideways motion of the book. It's not what the reader expects, and it certainly knocks the protagonist back on her heels. As such--- and after all as very clearly pegged by the title of this novel-- this outing serves as a kind of turning point, repositioning from what was, to what will be.
________________________

Should be mentioned that the bulk of this installment takes place outside of Mount Hillary's, so really nothing in common with the first book. Also, the first book wasn't super specific about time frame, leading some (me) to wrongly assume is was in the late teens, just after the war. It wasn't-- it was well before the war, because the onset of the Great War happens within the time frame of Lost Traveller, so it is somewhere around 1913 as it opens.]]> 3.94 1950 The Lost Traveller (Virago Modern Classics)
author: Antonia White
name: J.
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1950
rating: 3
read at: 2019/09/04
date added: 2019/09/05
shelves: this-england, roman-catholic, plucky-british-girl-sorts-it
review:
� this produced at times an uncomfortable sense of dissipation. She felt she was not so much growing up as expanding shapelessly in all directions. She read omnivorously, devouring but not absorbing; never going deep into anything for fear of missing something else till her head was a chaos of unrelated ideas. All the values that had seemed so clear at Mount Hillary were becoming muddled. It was not that she doubted the truth of her religion but that it was becoming more and more difficult to make it a real part of her life. The nuns had prepared her to expect hostility and ridicule; what she found was indifference.

A full twenty years after her near-miraculous Frost In May debut, Antonia White returned to the story to continue almost exactly where she had left off. For some reason Nanda, our heroine from Frost, is now Clara in Traveller, but virtually all else remains the same, parents, home, convent-school Mount Hillary, and surrounding circumstances.

Like any sequel, the reader is here as much to find out what happens as to expect a discrete, modular work in itself, and in that we are certainly not disappointed. As any kind of through-the-looking-glass adventure though, we are not, this time, witnessing anything new. The Frost book somehow took us inside of wobbly adolescence, fraught with all confusing headwinds, stabilized by the intuitive intelligence of the lead character.

This one finds all the conditions generally known, but our lead is hitting the skids, being controlled by the circumstances rather than giving much fight. It's that awkward age. Questions and conflicting beliefs smashing all around, oceans of notions and no reliable moral compass anywhere within reach.

To give White her due, she doesn't neatly package this little trip through the doldrums, and as it happens, a random, tragic event arrives to break up the sideways motion of the book. It's not what the reader expects, and it certainly knocks the protagonist back on her heels. As such--- and after all as very clearly pegged by the title of this novel-- this outing serves as a kind of turning point, repositioning from what was, to what will be.
________________________

Should be mentioned that the bulk of this installment takes place outside of Mount Hillary's, so really nothing in common with the first book. Also, the first book wasn't super specific about time frame, leading some (me) to wrongly assume is was in the late teens, just after the war. It wasn't-- it was well before the war, because the onset of the Great War happens within the time frame of Lost Traveller, so it is somewhere around 1913 as it opens.
]]> <![CDATA[Frost in May (Frost in May #1)]]> 1280771 221 Antonia White 0860680495 J. 5 not all been to a Convent School For Girls, though, exactly, and that's what makes this story instantly mesmerizing. Here, we are between the wars, 1930, and the convent school is place of sheltered neutrality for the female children of the aristocracy and well-heeled merchant class.

The Stations Of The Cross
For this reader, there was no disconnect from the days when I was under the guidance of much the same kind of organization. The regulated systems all fall into place, like the different prayers and devotions for the passing hours, the shifts in stage-managing the seasons of the Church. There is weight and depth in the discipline of the faith, for ... well, for the faithful, anyway. The prayers might be thought of as scales are to the musician, etudes maybe. And the seasonal shifts taken as the natural synchronization of a living faith to the earthly indicators of God's infinite complexity, mirrored in the outside world. Catholicism wisely takes the cues and codes of the observable world and ritualizes them, imbues them with the glow of transcendence.

Alternately, the atmosphere of the classical Roman Catholic educational model may be thought of as relentless indoctrination, accompanied by sharp-eyed surveillance, and enforced with various kinds of cruelty, mental or physical. Just a matter of whether you found it inspirational, or not.

Cold Snap
Frost In May brings on the omniscient Mother Superior, the gruff but kind worker-bee nuns, and their opposites, the vindictive brittle old nuns past any sense or hope of return to the race. Did I just read this or am I remembering ... Possibly the worst are the passive-aggressive, glenda-the-good-witch nuns-- all of them filling impressionable young adolescents, dangerously close to their delicate first maturity-- full of wishful nonsense and toxic backspin.

Stories of little-girls-who-just-wouldn't-listen, penances, privations and mortifications; secret reports and constant observation. There is one instance here of the 'famous game' wherein the nun called the Mistress Of Discipline judges where a hidden key may have been pocketed by one of the girls, strictly on the basis of sizing up their guilt with her withering stare. Played for carefully-instructive laughs, it is still agonizing. She is never wrong.

This is not to imply that the Lord's work is always accomplished in such a direct or straightforward path :

"� nothing is more pleasing to God than suffering bravely borne for our Lord’s sake. I expect you noticed that there were some children from the Poor School making their First Communion with you this morning. You must remember that they do not come from good homes like you; they are often quite pathetically ignorant. Well, one of the nuns was helping them to put on their veils and their wreaths, and one little girl called Molly had great difficulty with hers. So Mother Poitier fastened it on with a big safety-pin, but, as you know, she does not see very well, and she unfortunately put the pin right through Molly’s ear. The poor little girl was in great pain, but she thought it was part of the ceremony, and she never uttered a word of complaint. She thought of the terrible suffering of Our Lord in wearing His crown of thorns and bore it for His sake. I am sure Molly received a very wonderful grace at her First Communion and I should like to think that anyone here had such beautiful, unselfish devotion as that. She might have gone about all day with that pin through her ear, if she had not fainted just now at breakfast. Now, talk away, again children, and be as happy as you can all day long. But even in your happiness, never forget that a good Christian is always ready to take up his cross and deny himself and unite himself to the passion of Our Blessed Lord."

Heaven Can Wait
The seasons ebb and flow, the misunderstandings get ironed out, and the onset of a holy occasion may bring the opportunity for an actual bright line to be drawn, in the murk and incense-laden atmosphere. Or, yet again, the opposite of that, in the confounding contrariness of holding real life to a mythical mirror.

Antonia White's characters are a study in natural opposites, and the girls are as intriguing as the nuns. As the clientele of the Convent Of The Five Wounds are anything but disadvantaged, the girls are often well-travelled, vaguely worldly and nearing the ripening verge of young womanhood. By turns childish, giddy, and then haughty, knowing and flirtatious, the 'little ones' are way too clever to fall for the idea of convent-forever, so devoutly pitched by the staff--the idea that a school girl would find her vocation, and choose to take vows and join the convent. The nuns know this generally won't sell, of course, but play along gamely, since the least-likely amongst the girls just may-- well, we've seen all of this embodied by Julie Andrews and Hayley Mills in cinemascope, so not much use letting the secrets out.

And the author has other ideas. Her novel is pitched to a counter-crescendo midway or more through the proceedings, where our central girls are laid up in the infirmary, faking measles; their devious hanky-exchange and breathing-on-each-other program has worked!-- at least to the extent of sharing the sniffles. And here they are allowed tea and toast, can read or write as they please, and they spend days by the fireside recovering -- most crucially from the convent itself, and its rules.

The Trouble With Angels
Having drawn us along in the gearing-up to the liturgical year, the waves of penance and mysticism in the cold and forbidding nunnery, it is here in the glimmer of the fire-light that author White finds her tipping point. Tea and sympathy in a safe port of call, a lazy pause, a weightless lull in the strictness and conformity--before the inevitable fall.

It doesn't really matter what that fall may be, as for the nuns it is the rarest of their charges who doesn't fall, who doesn't succumb to the worldly temptations of debutante balls and the ongoing jazz age outside the walls of the convent. There is sublime clarity and certainty in Antonia White's prose, a sense of having lived it, too, that counters neatly the tensions and uneasy doubts that it portrays. Five stars.]]> 3.88 1933 Frost in May (Frost in May #1)
author: Antonia White
name: J.
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1933
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2019/09/05
shelves: boarding-school, roman-catholic, five-star, plucky-british-girl-sorts-it
review:
We've all been there, sort of. That is, we've all seen this basic story unfold, the slow dawning of a worldly realization within the walls of a formerly impregnable fortress, the heady push into the free air, when the idols have crumbled and the game is up. We've not all been to a Convent School For Girls, though, exactly, and that's what makes this story instantly mesmerizing. Here, we are between the wars, 1930, and the convent school is place of sheltered neutrality for the female children of the aristocracy and well-heeled merchant class.

The Stations Of The Cross
For this reader, there was no disconnect from the days when I was under the guidance of much the same kind of organization. The regulated systems all fall into place, like the different prayers and devotions for the passing hours, the shifts in stage-managing the seasons of the Church. There is weight and depth in the discipline of the faith, for ... well, for the faithful, anyway. The prayers might be thought of as scales are to the musician, etudes maybe. And the seasonal shifts taken as the natural synchronization of a living faith to the earthly indicators of God's infinite complexity, mirrored in the outside world. Catholicism wisely takes the cues and codes of the observable world and ritualizes them, imbues them with the glow of transcendence.

Alternately, the atmosphere of the classical Roman Catholic educational model may be thought of as relentless indoctrination, accompanied by sharp-eyed surveillance, and enforced with various kinds of cruelty, mental or physical. Just a matter of whether you found it inspirational, or not.

Cold Snap
Frost In May brings on the omniscient Mother Superior, the gruff but kind worker-bee nuns, and their opposites, the vindictive brittle old nuns past any sense or hope of return to the race. Did I just read this or am I remembering ... Possibly the worst are the passive-aggressive, glenda-the-good-witch nuns-- all of them filling impressionable young adolescents, dangerously close to their delicate first maturity-- full of wishful nonsense and toxic backspin.

Stories of little-girls-who-just-wouldn't-listen, penances, privations and mortifications; secret reports and constant observation. There is one instance here of the 'famous game' wherein the nun called the Mistress Of Discipline judges where a hidden key may have been pocketed by one of the girls, strictly on the basis of sizing up their guilt with her withering stare. Played for carefully-instructive laughs, it is still agonizing. She is never wrong.

This is not to imply that the Lord's work is always accomplished in such a direct or straightforward path :

"� nothing is more pleasing to God than suffering bravely borne for our Lord’s sake. I expect you noticed that there were some children from the Poor School making their First Communion with you this morning. You must remember that they do not come from good homes like you; they are often quite pathetically ignorant. Well, one of the nuns was helping them to put on their veils and their wreaths, and one little girl called Molly had great difficulty with hers. So Mother Poitier fastened it on with a big safety-pin, but, as you know, she does not see very well, and she unfortunately put the pin right through Molly’s ear. The poor little girl was in great pain, but she thought it was part of the ceremony, and she never uttered a word of complaint. She thought of the terrible suffering of Our Lord in wearing His crown of thorns and bore it for His sake. I am sure Molly received a very wonderful grace at her First Communion and I should like to think that anyone here had such beautiful, unselfish devotion as that. She might have gone about all day with that pin through her ear, if she had not fainted just now at breakfast. Now, talk away, again children, and be as happy as you can all day long. But even in your happiness, never forget that a good Christian is always ready to take up his cross and deny himself and unite himself to the passion of Our Blessed Lord."

Heaven Can Wait
The seasons ebb and flow, the misunderstandings get ironed out, and the onset of a holy occasion may bring the opportunity for an actual bright line to be drawn, in the murk and incense-laden atmosphere. Or, yet again, the opposite of that, in the confounding contrariness of holding real life to a mythical mirror.

Antonia White's characters are a study in natural opposites, and the girls are as intriguing as the nuns. As the clientele of the Convent Of The Five Wounds are anything but disadvantaged, the girls are often well-travelled, vaguely worldly and nearing the ripening verge of young womanhood. By turns childish, giddy, and then haughty, knowing and flirtatious, the 'little ones' are way too clever to fall for the idea of convent-forever, so devoutly pitched by the staff--the idea that a school girl would find her vocation, and choose to take vows and join the convent. The nuns know this generally won't sell, of course, but play along gamely, since the least-likely amongst the girls just may-- well, we've seen all of this embodied by Julie Andrews and Hayley Mills in cinemascope, so not much use letting the secrets out.

And the author has other ideas. Her novel is pitched to a counter-crescendo midway or more through the proceedings, where our central girls are laid up in the infirmary, faking measles; their devious hanky-exchange and breathing-on-each-other program has worked!-- at least to the extent of sharing the sniffles. And here they are allowed tea and toast, can read or write as they please, and they spend days by the fireside recovering -- most crucially from the convent itself, and its rules.

The Trouble With Angels
Having drawn us along in the gearing-up to the liturgical year, the waves of penance and mysticism in the cold and forbidding nunnery, it is here in the glimmer of the fire-light that author White finds her tipping point. Tea and sympathy in a safe port of call, a lazy pause, a weightless lull in the strictness and conformity--before the inevitable fall.

It doesn't really matter what that fall may be, as for the nuns it is the rarest of their charges who doesn't fall, who doesn't succumb to the worldly temptations of debutante balls and the ongoing jazz age outside the walls of the convent. There is sublime clarity and certainty in Antonia White's prose, a sense of having lived it, too, that counters neatly the tensions and uneasy doubts that it portrays. Five stars.
]]> Slow Horses 36669962
When a young man is abducted and his kidnappers threaten to broadcast his beheading live on the Internet, River sees an opportunity to redeem himself.

Is the victim who he first appears to be? And what’s the kidnappers� connection with a disgraced journalist? As the clock ticks on the execution, River finds that everyone has his own agenda.]]> 328 Mick Herron 1473674182 J. 0 to-read, suspense-espionage 4.02 2010 Slow Horses
author: Mick Herron
name: J.
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/08/23
shelves: to-read, suspense-espionage
review:

]]> A View of the Harbour 1707956 309 Elizabeth Taylor 0860685438 J. 4 this-england Prudence poured herself more tea... "And I called out in a loud voice 'This funeral must not go on!' Robert was furious and told me not to be hysterical because unfortunately no one else could see that the coffin lid was bobbing up and down, and at last... Teddy Foyle was there, I don't know why... and he took one of those packing-case openers from his pocket, and prized the coffin open�"
Prudence leant her chin on her wrist and looked at her mother, waiting.
"And it was full of a very fine set of Fielding in calf, that I once coveted very much in a shop in London, only it cost twelve pounds. But of course it was not to be expected that we should find them in granny's coffin..." Prudence stirred and stirred her tea... "And then Ethel, your Aunt Ethel, suddenly called out in a ringing voice: 'I chopped Mother up and put her in the boiler last night, to make room.' And your father made a very nice and sensible speech asking us not to panic and saying, 'You must all excuse Ethel.. She is at a funny age.' It seems so very vivid this morning."

Author Taylor's droll postwar novel of manners verges into Jamesian prosody, gossip-mongering, shameless cavorting, acidic parody, and confessional self examination as it proceeds. And if that doesn't sound so great, don't worry overly much. It finds its feet periodically, struggles, wobbles, skips and hops around, but then generally moves in natural cycles along its way; in looking back, it is a visit that the reader will miss when she leaves.

Our stay in 'Newby' in the south of England is moderated largely by its participants, but led in and then memorialized by its own Virgil, the former sea captain named Bertram... Who, after much waffling around-- will eventually paint the View of this tiny harbor town, this faded seaside resort. The atmosphere is unfailingly picturesque, and paint peels in all the best, saltiest ways, so the author has a perfect little amphitheater here for her dramas. But Bertram is a visitor-- something that the reader may expect he'd be even years later-- and as we go he hands off the narrative to those more toward the center of the small community.

It wouldn't be interesting to synopsize the story here. But I will say that in the intricate, sometimes soap-opera tinged proceedings, something valuable and very like humanity manages to peek through the stage curtains. In the characters we have memorable, spiky personalities, not content to play their part and exit; each will play a broader part in the long game, and yes, we have flesh and blood rather than puppets. (Which should be said is hard to manage with upwards of a dozen major characters.)

Hard to walk away from this and not connect to postwar British Cinema. Without direct comparison, though, it's safe to say that the people here felt real, their dilemmas palpable, rather than being cutouts dramatizing some Canterbury allegory. Unlike, say, the People of David Lean films-- who to me always feel like they are quotable, unassailable Patron Saints of something or other-- rather, the denizens of Newby come across as plausible. More like the everymen types of the early Powell Pressburger films, who may have a moral purpose up their sleeve but squiggle out of easy classification. Something like I Know Where I'm Going, maybe; where people with workaday problems are led circuitously to small eurekas, of recognition, and maybe redemption.]]> 4.03 1947 A View of the Harbour
author: Elizabeth Taylor
name: J.
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1947
rating: 4
read at: 2019/08/22
date added: 2019/08/22
shelves: this-england
review:
Prudence poured herself more tea... "And I called out in a loud voice 'This funeral must not go on!' Robert was furious and told me not to be hysterical because unfortunately no one else could see that the coffin lid was bobbing up and down, and at last... Teddy Foyle was there, I don't know why... and he took one of those packing-case openers from his pocket, and prized the coffin open�"
Prudence leant her chin on her wrist and looked at her mother, waiting.
"And it was full of a very fine set of Fielding in calf, that I once coveted very much in a shop in London, only it cost twelve pounds. But of course it was not to be expected that we should find them in granny's coffin..." Prudence stirred and stirred her tea... "And then Ethel, your Aunt Ethel, suddenly called out in a ringing voice: 'I chopped Mother up and put her in the boiler last night, to make room.' And your father made a very nice and sensible speech asking us not to panic and saying, 'You must all excuse Ethel.. She is at a funny age.' It seems so very vivid this morning."

Author Taylor's droll postwar novel of manners verges into Jamesian prosody, gossip-mongering, shameless cavorting, acidic parody, and confessional self examination as it proceeds. And if that doesn't sound so great, don't worry overly much. It finds its feet periodically, struggles, wobbles, skips and hops around, but then generally moves in natural cycles along its way; in looking back, it is a visit that the reader will miss when she leaves.

Our stay in 'Newby' in the south of England is moderated largely by its participants, but led in and then memorialized by its own Virgil, the former sea captain named Bertram... Who, after much waffling around-- will eventually paint the View of this tiny harbor town, this faded seaside resort. The atmosphere is unfailingly picturesque, and paint peels in all the best, saltiest ways, so the author has a perfect little amphitheater here for her dramas. But Bertram is a visitor-- something that the reader may expect he'd be even years later-- and as we go he hands off the narrative to those more toward the center of the small community.

It wouldn't be interesting to synopsize the story here. But I will say that in the intricate, sometimes soap-opera tinged proceedings, something valuable and very like humanity manages to peek through the stage curtains. In the characters we have memorable, spiky personalities, not content to play their part and exit; each will play a broader part in the long game, and yes, we have flesh and blood rather than puppets. (Which should be said is hard to manage with upwards of a dozen major characters.)

Hard to walk away from this and not connect to postwar British Cinema. Without direct comparison, though, it's safe to say that the people here felt real, their dilemmas palpable, rather than being cutouts dramatizing some Canterbury allegory. Unlike, say, the People of David Lean films-- who to me always feel like they are quotable, unassailable Patron Saints of something or other-- rather, the denizens of Newby come across as plausible. More like the everymen types of the early Powell Pressburger films, who may have a moral purpose up their sleeve but squiggle out of easy classification. Something like I Know Where I'm Going, maybe; where people with workaday problems are led circuitously to small eurekas, of recognition, and maybe redemption.
]]> Villain 10001806 Ěý
A woman is killed at a ghostly mountain pass in southern Japan and the local police quickly pinpoint a suspect. But as the puzzle pieces of the crime slowly click into place, new questions arise. Is a villain simply the person who commits a crime or are those who feel no remorse for malicious behavior just as guilty? Moving from office parks and claustrophobic love hotels to desolate seaside towns and lighthouses, Shuichi Yoshida’s dark thriller reveals the inner lives of men and women who all have something to hide.]]> 304 Shūichi Yoshida 0307454940 J. 4 mystery, japan
That said, Mr. Yoshida provides a comprehensive and careful narrative, well worth the close reading required with lots of Japanese names and places. And as a storyteller that doesn't forget that Atmosphere is just as important after the murder as it is in the early going. Too many Japanese-- too many mysteries in all languages-- just drop the atmospherics once the hunt for the killer is underway. With a psychological mystery, the atmosphere becomes more important if anything, as we go. Mr. Yoshida does not forget, as we see here, mid-book, with a murder suspect on the run:
He was at a sauna in Nagoya. At the end of the red-carpeted hallway was a darkened room where guests could nap. The public phone was in one corner of the hallway. Next to it was a vending machine selling nutritional supplement drinks, three of the five buttons lit up indicating they were sold out...
His hand was resting on the phone's cradle and he pushed down hard on it. The call over, a few ten-yen coins plunked down into the coin return, clattering in the silent hallway. Keigo turned. Nobody else was around, just his own reflection in the mirror on a pillar, decked out in the light blue robe of a sauna patron. Keigo replaced the receiver on its cradle. He'd never noticed before how heavy a public phone receiver could be...
Banal detail, a seamy hideaway in a landscape of dangers real or perceived. And distinctly Japanese. Little things loom large, when the world is upside down. Mr. Yoshida knows.
Recommended.]]> 3.73 2007 Villain
author: Shūichi Yoshida
name: J.
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2019/08/12
date added: 2019/08/18
shelves: mystery, japan
review:
Exceptional Japanese murder mystery, of which there are too few in English translation. A millimeter from five stars, and probably held up by exactly that: the translation. Maybe not so much the actual translation as the fact that a rotating-pov psychological mystery is difficult even in its language of origin, and often founders, once translated. The problem of transitioning to the next narrator's stream of consciousness, the identifying characteristics of the players, the voicing of regional characters and the management of other cues that just fall naturally into place, in their original language.

That said, Mr. Yoshida provides a comprehensive and careful narrative, well worth the close reading required with lots of Japanese names and places. And as a storyteller that doesn't forget that Atmosphere is just as important after the murder as it is in the early going. Too many Japanese-- too many mysteries in all languages-- just drop the atmospherics once the hunt for the killer is underway. With a psychological mystery, the atmosphere becomes more important if anything, as we go. Mr. Yoshida does not forget, as we see here, mid-book, with a murder suspect on the run:
He was at a sauna in Nagoya. At the end of the red-carpeted hallway was a darkened room where guests could nap. The public phone was in one corner of the hallway. Next to it was a vending machine selling nutritional supplement drinks, three of the five buttons lit up indicating they were sold out...
His hand was resting on the phone's cradle and he pushed down hard on it. The call over, a few ten-yen coins plunked down into the coin return, clattering in the silent hallway. Keigo turned. Nobody else was around, just his own reflection in the mirror on a pillar, decked out in the light blue robe of a sauna patron. Keigo replaced the receiver on its cradle. He'd never noticed before how heavy a public phone receiver could be...
Banal detail, a seamy hideaway in a landscape of dangers real or perceived. And distinctly Japanese. Little things loom large, when the world is upside down. Mr. Yoshida knows.
Recommended.
]]> Parade 23346858 Parade each tells their story: their lives, their hopes and fears, their loves, their secrets.

Kotomi waits by the phone for a boyfriend who never calls. Ryosuke wants someone that he can’t have. Mirai spends her days drawing and her nights hanging out in gay bars. Naoki works for a film company, and everyone treats him like an elder brother. Then Satoru turns up. He’s eighteen, homeless, and does night work of a very particular type.

In the next-door apartment something disturbing is going on. And outside, in the streets around their apartment block, there is violence in the air. From the writer of the cult classic Villain, Parade is a tense, disturbing, thrilling tale of life in the city.]]> 230 Shūichi Yoshida 0099526646 J. 0 to-read, mystery, japan 3.47 2002 Parade
author: Shūichi Yoshida
name: J.
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/08/12
shelves: to-read, mystery, japan
review:

]]> Basic Black with Pearls 35835756
Shirley Kaszenbowski, nee Silverberg, is a middle-aged, middle-class woman in a Holt Renfrew tweed coat, a basic black dress, and a strand of real pearls. She may seem ordinary enough, pricing silk scarves at Eaton's or idling in hotel coffee shops, but in fact she is searching for her lover. He is an elusive figure, a man connected with "The Agency," a powerful technocrat who may or may not have suggested a rendezvous based on a secret code in the National Geographic. Her search takes her to the world of her past as a Jewish immigrant in the Spadina-Dundas area of Toronto. She finds the bakeries and rooming houses of her youth still haunted by survivors of postwar Europe and by her own memories of guilt and loss, while the consolations of art, opera, and pornography offer only echoes of her own illusions and desires. Her strange, wryly funny odyssey ends in a dramatic confrontation scene with her husband and "the other woman," as she trades in her basic black for another chance.

In Basic Black with Pearls, Weinzweig displays her gift for creating sympathetic characters in a slightly surreal, but always recognizable world.]]> 160 Helen Weinzweig 1681372169 J. 0 3.65 1980 Basic Black with Pearls
author: Helen Weinzweig
name: J.
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/08/10
shelves: to-read, mystery, noir-environs
review:

]]> Modigliani: A Life 9350997
Amedeo (“Beloved of God�) Modigliani was considered to be the quintessential bohemian artist, his legend almost as infamous as Van Gogh’s. In Modigliani’s time, his work was seen as an contemporary with the Cubists but not part of their movement. His work was a link between such portraitists as Whistler, Sargent, and Toulouse-Lautrec and that of the Art Deco painters of the 1920s as well as the new approaches of Gauguin, Cézanne, and Picasso.

Jean Cocteau called Modigliani “our aristocrat� and said, “There was something like a curse on this very noble boy. He was beautiful. Alcohol and misfortune took their toll on him.�

In this major new biography, Meryle Secrest, one of our most admired biographers—whose work has been called “enthralling� ( The Wall Street Journal ); “rich in detail, scrupulously researched, and sympathetically written� ( The New York Review of Books ) —now gives us a fully realized portrait of one of the twentieth century’s master painters and his upbringing, a Sephardic Jew from an impoverished but genteel Italian family; his going to Paris to make his fortune; his striking good looks (“How beautiful he was, my god how beautiful,� said one of his models) . . . his training as an artist . . .and his influences, including the Italian Renaissance, particularly the art of Botticelli; Nietzsche’s theories of the artist as Übermensch, divinely endowed, divinely inspired; the monochromatic backgrounds of Van Gogh and Cézanne; the work of the Romanian sculptor Brancusi; and the primitive sculptures of Africa and Oceania with their simplified, masklike triangular faces, elongated silhouettes, puckered lips, low foreheads, and heads on exaggeratedly long necks.

We see the ways in which Modigliani’s long-kept-secret illness from tuberculosis (it almost killed him as a young man) affected his work and his attitude toward life ; how consumption caused him to embrace fatalism and idealism, creativity and death; and how he used alcohol and opium with laudanum as an antispasmodic to hide the symptoms of the disease and how, because of it, he came to be seen as a dissolute alcoholic.

And throughout, we see the Paris that Modigliani lived in, a city in dynamic flux where art was still a noble cause; how Modigliani became part of a life in the streets and a world of art and artists then in a transforming revolution; Monet, Cézanne, Degas, Renoir, et al.—and others more radical—Matisse, Derain, etc., all living within blocks of one another.

Secrest’s book, written with unprecedented access to letters, diaries, and photographs never before seen, is an extraordinary revelation of a life lived in art . . . Here is Modigliani, the man and the artist, seemingly shy, delicate, a man on a desperate mission, masquerading as an alcoholic, cheating death again and again, and calculating what he had to do in order to go on working and concealing his secret for however much time remained . . .]]> 416 Meryle Secrest 0307263681 J. 3 arts, france, modernica
Modigliani, What I See
There is no significant light source in a Modigliani portrait. There are no beams or motes of dust caught in shafts from window or lamp or the heavens; this is not to say there is no light. Similarly, there is no significant meaning-- no overriding event or drama that shapes the content or execution, because it is nearly always the same content, and similar execution. Elegant line-drawings render well-massed re-imaginings of the human figure, generally relying on simplification, elongation, and some variation on the age-old beauty of the 'S' curve in their composition. Palette is amber-red and gold against green-grays and touches of delfty blues, and the tube of Umber must have always been squeezed out first.

Deceptively simple, and to be honest, never any real challenge to the Cezannes, Matisses or Picassos that were the front line of the School Of Paris of his day.

Not for Modi the wild reinvention of conception that Painting would undergo in these years; his subject was a tranquil, unsmiling, pared-down head-and-shoulder portrait, each and every one a sibling, another constant in his life's unvarying work. Male or female, a quiet sitter in an artist's studio, background just out of focus. Never would there be a Guernica, and Modi was a student of his contemporaries, as well as a big admirer of Picasso.

Rather, there is a taste and discretion that captures the small tensions and sometimes the turmoil of his subject; and there is the beautifully somber palette and graceful line that describe things that are innermost secrets, yet face the world every day.

There are small abstractions, the twists and gentle contortions of mass, the conscious allusion to masks, the reluctance to go too deeply into the eyes (sometimes abstracted to blank orbs). The anxiety in the hands, the rake of the shoulders, the turmoil in the glance remove the need for a storyline. There is the quiet moodiness in the illumination, contrasty and yet soft; there is the gentle palette of the surroundings, never featured but always a modifier. There is the Italianate sensuality of the forms and the line, rather than the furious French modernism of the day.

Modigliani's worst can sometimes seem like outdoor café-table caricaturing given the finearts razzle; there's no reason to dispute that, since quite often that was the beginning of one of his compositions. But his best, and most of it is his best, is single-mindedly sure, a purist vision of the human comedy --painted in the middle of a cyclone of the obstreperous modernism to be seen eating it's own tail for breakfast, daily, in Paris.

How The Book Sees It
I don't think author Seacrest would disagree very much with the way I see the work, and yet, as biographer, she has an agenda to keep, dragons to slay.

Amedeo Modigliani is often portrayed as one --a ringleader, even-- of the unstable, unwashed, absinthe-soaked madmen that terrorized Montmartre in the name of Art. Modern Art. Great serial-womanizing egotists leading lives of impropriety, scandal and worse. Ms Secrest wants to emphasize that as a lifelong tubercular, Modi had no choice but to kill the pain with drink and drugs, and thus his Legend is misleading. Fine; this is one of those distinctions that always surround a Maestro; was Mozart such a genius because he wrote under the gun in poverty, or because he could write under the gun... was Shakespeare influenced by others or was he not ... does it shift the work any? If it can't be established, is it not a wild goose chase? Once a controversy or inconsistency is mentioned, it's covered; but Secrest labors on.

There's no real need to deny any of the biographical facts, and certainly no real way to pin particulars of the artist's work on any given aspect. Don Modigliani may have been a grand old padrone with a huge family back in Livorno Italy if he hadn't had tuberculosis; he might have lived to the age of a hundred. But he didn't, his life was short, a supernova, the very grail of Paris School mad artist, and his paintings are exquisite.

Kenneth Wayne's Modigliani And The Artists Of Montparnasse structures itself that way, and still doesn't miss the point of the artist himself. I think it's the better way to approach things, since it ties together so much of the spirit of the place and time.

Secrest's book does fairly well by the Parisian underground it depicts; the lofts and lavoirs are the kind where you hang your bicycle from the ceiling, so the rats don't eat the tires. Still, it wants to downplay the absurdist modernist madman theme whenever possible, and if the paintings were the only evidence, she'd have a fair point; unfortunately, we know way too much about him and his world to call an entire subculture accidental. Her book is very well populated with family and descendants who wish the madman legend was not so. But. Modigliani was both genius and self-destructive madman, very likely willfully so in the face of the death sentence of tuberculosis. Unfortunate that there always has to be a new wrinkle to validate any new biography.]]> 3.80 2011 Modigliani: A Life
author: Meryle Secrest
name: J.
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2019/08/09
shelves: arts, france, modernica
review:
Sometimes the stars method of rating books doesn't quite make sense. As described by hovering the mouse, they are classifications that describe various levels of 'like'. Did, didn't, really did, did a lot. Sometimes that is the most important thing about a book, and we'd 'like' to think that if we approved, that the book must ergo be a good book. Sometimes though, verifiably good is more valuable than liked-- there are gaps between good and liked.

Modigliani, What I See
There is no significant light source in a Modigliani portrait. There are no beams or motes of dust caught in shafts from window or lamp or the heavens; this is not to say there is no light. Similarly, there is no significant meaning-- no overriding event or drama that shapes the content or execution, because it is nearly always the same content, and similar execution. Elegant line-drawings render well-massed re-imaginings of the human figure, generally relying on simplification, elongation, and some variation on the age-old beauty of the 'S' curve in their composition. Palette is amber-red and gold against green-grays and touches of delfty blues, and the tube of Umber must have always been squeezed out first.

Deceptively simple, and to be honest, never any real challenge to the Cezannes, Matisses or Picassos that were the front line of the School Of Paris of his day.

Not for Modi the wild reinvention of conception that Painting would undergo in these years; his subject was a tranquil, unsmiling, pared-down head-and-shoulder portrait, each and every one a sibling, another constant in his life's unvarying work. Male or female, a quiet sitter in an artist's studio, background just out of focus. Never would there be a Guernica, and Modi was a student of his contemporaries, as well as a big admirer of Picasso.

Rather, there is a taste and discretion that captures the small tensions and sometimes the turmoil of his subject; and there is the beautifully somber palette and graceful line that describe things that are innermost secrets, yet face the world every day.

There are small abstractions, the twists and gentle contortions of mass, the conscious allusion to masks, the reluctance to go too deeply into the eyes (sometimes abstracted to blank orbs). The anxiety in the hands, the rake of the shoulders, the turmoil in the glance remove the need for a storyline. There is the quiet moodiness in the illumination, contrasty and yet soft; there is the gentle palette of the surroundings, never featured but always a modifier. There is the Italianate sensuality of the forms and the line, rather than the furious French modernism of the day.

Modigliani's worst can sometimes seem like outdoor café-table caricaturing given the finearts razzle; there's no reason to dispute that, since quite often that was the beginning of one of his compositions. But his best, and most of it is his best, is single-mindedly sure, a purist vision of the human comedy --painted in the middle of a cyclone of the obstreperous modernism to be seen eating it's own tail for breakfast, daily, in Paris.

How The Book Sees It
I don't think author Seacrest would disagree very much with the way I see the work, and yet, as biographer, she has an agenda to keep, dragons to slay.

Amedeo Modigliani is often portrayed as one --a ringleader, even-- of the unstable, unwashed, absinthe-soaked madmen that terrorized Montmartre in the name of Art. Modern Art. Great serial-womanizing egotists leading lives of impropriety, scandal and worse. Ms Secrest wants to emphasize that as a lifelong tubercular, Modi had no choice but to kill the pain with drink and drugs, and thus his Legend is misleading. Fine; this is one of those distinctions that always surround a Maestro; was Mozart such a genius because he wrote under the gun in poverty, or because he could write under the gun... was Shakespeare influenced by others or was he not ... does it shift the work any? If it can't be established, is it not a wild goose chase? Once a controversy or inconsistency is mentioned, it's covered; but Secrest labors on.

There's no real need to deny any of the biographical facts, and certainly no real way to pin particulars of the artist's work on any given aspect. Don Modigliani may have been a grand old padrone with a huge family back in Livorno Italy if he hadn't had tuberculosis; he might have lived to the age of a hundred. But he didn't, his life was short, a supernova, the very grail of Paris School mad artist, and his paintings are exquisite.

Kenneth Wayne's Modigliani And The Artists Of Montparnasse structures itself that way, and still doesn't miss the point of the artist himself. I think it's the better way to approach things, since it ties together so much of the spirit of the place and time.

Secrest's book does fairly well by the Parisian underground it depicts; the lofts and lavoirs are the kind where you hang your bicycle from the ceiling, so the rats don't eat the tires. Still, it wants to downplay the absurdist modernist madman theme whenever possible, and if the paintings were the only evidence, she'd have a fair point; unfortunately, we know way too much about him and his world to call an entire subculture accidental. Her book is very well populated with family and descendants who wish the madman legend was not so. But. Modigliani was both genius and self-destructive madman, very likely willfully so in the face of the death sentence of tuberculosis. Unfortunate that there always has to be a new wrinkle to validate any new biography.
]]> <![CDATA[A Zola dictionary; the characters of the Rougon-Macquart novels of Émile Zola; with a biographical and criticial introduction, synopses of the plots, bibliographical note, map, genealogy, etc]]> 10261019 284 J.G. Patterson 1178191397 J. 3 inside-track, zola, reference
I've read three or four of the twenty novels and think I might take a stab at going completist. Getting organized, I purchased the guide to the Characters, a standard edition by JG Patterson. Next step: what order to read them in? It is not at all settled what should be read first...

Per Wikipedia, here is the Canon, cited in the order of its Publication:
1. La Fortune des Rougon (1871)
2. La Curée (1871�2)
3. Le Ventre de Paris (1873)
4. La ConquĂŞte de Plassans (1874)
5. La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret (1875)
6. Son Excellence Eugène Rougon (1876)
7. L'Assommoir (1877)
8. Une page d'amour (1878)
9. Nana (1880)
10. Pot-Bouille (1882)
11. Au Bonheur des Dames (1883)
12. La joie de vivre (1884)
13. Germinal (1885)
14. L'Ĺ’uvre (1886)
15. La Terre (1887)
16. Le RĂŞve (1888)
17. La BĂŞte humaine (1890)
18. L'Argent (1891)
19. La Débâcle (1892)
20. Le Docteur Pascal (1893)

But there are other, more internally chronological or just more coherent orders, readily available online. Looks like either way I start with La Fortune des Rougon, so that will be the start. But even before that: as I can't read French, which translations?

This will be a large undertaking, but no pressure, I seem to have the rest of my life to undertake the mission. If there was a perfect hardback set of the volumes, I'd buy it, but I don't see it out there. No ebooks or kindle version, I think. Got the character map in hand, at least.]]> 3.50 1912 A Zola dictionary; the characters of the Rougon-Macquart novels of Émile Zola; with a biographical and criticial introduction, synopses of the plots, bibliographical note, map, genealogy, etc
author: J.G. Patterson
name: J.
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1912
rating: 3
read at: 2019/08/04
date added: 2019/08/04
shelves: inside-track, zola, reference
review:
The skeleton key to the sprawling Rougon-Macquart novels of Emile Zola.

I've read three or four of the twenty novels and think I might take a stab at going completist. Getting organized, I purchased the guide to the Characters, a standard edition by JG Patterson. Next step: what order to read them in? It is not at all settled what should be read first...

Per Wikipedia, here is the Canon, cited in the order of its Publication:
1. La Fortune des Rougon (1871)
2. La Curée (1871�2)
3. Le Ventre de Paris (1873)
4. La ConquĂŞte de Plassans (1874)
5. La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret (1875)
6. Son Excellence Eugène Rougon (1876)
7. L'Assommoir (1877)
8. Une page d'amour (1878)
9. Nana (1880)
10. Pot-Bouille (1882)
11. Au Bonheur des Dames (1883)
12. La joie de vivre (1884)
13. Germinal (1885)
14. L'Ĺ’uvre (1886)
15. La Terre (1887)
16. Le RĂŞve (1888)
17. La BĂŞte humaine (1890)
18. L'Argent (1891)
19. La Débâcle (1892)
20. Le Docteur Pascal (1893)

But there are other, more internally chronological or just more coherent orders, readily available online. Looks like either way I start with La Fortune des Rougon, so that will be the start. But even before that: as I can't read French, which translations?

This will be a large undertaking, but no pressure, I seem to have the rest of my life to undertake the mission. If there was a perfect hardback set of the volumes, I'd buy it, but I don't see it out there. No ebooks or kindle version, I think. Got the character map in hand, at least.
]]> All Souls 1655608 210 Javier MarĂ­as 1860461859 J. 0 to-read 3.75 1989 All Souls
author: Javier MarĂ­as
name: J.
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/08/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Fever and Spear (Your Face Tomorrow, #1)]]> 982902 Alternate Cover Edition

Recently divorced, Jacques Deza moves from Madrid to London in order to distance himself from his ex-wife and children. There he picks up old friendships from his Oxford University days, particularly Sir Peter Wheeler, retired don and semi-retired spy.
It is at an Oxford party of Wheeler's that Jacques is approached by the enigmatic Bertram Tupra. Tupra believes that Jacques has a talent: he is one of those people who sees more clearly than others, who can guess from someone's face today what they will become tomorrow. His services would be of use to a mysterious group whose aims are unstated but whose day-to-day activities involve the careful observation of people's character and the prediction of their future behaviour.
The 'group' may be part of MI6, though Jacques will find no reference to it in any book; he will be called up to report on all types of people from politicians and celebrities, to ordinary citizens applying for bank loans. As Deza is drawn deeper into this twilight world of observation, Marias shows how trust and betrayal characterise all human relationships.]]> 384 Javier MarĂ­as 0099461994 J. 0 to-read, oblique-strategies 3.86 2002 Fever and Spear (Your Face Tomorrow, #1)
author: Javier MarĂ­as
name: J.
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/08/04
shelves: to-read, oblique-strategies
review:

]]> <![CDATA[White Nights (Shetland Island, #2)]]> 3093685
Raven Black received crime fiction’s highest monetary honor, the Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award. Now Detective Jimmy Perez is back in an electrifying sequel.

It’s midsummer in the Shetland Islands, the time of the white nights, when birds sing at midnight and the sun never sets. Artist Bella Sinclair throws an elaborate party to launch an exhibition of her work at The Herring House, a gallery on the beach.

The party ends in farce when one the guests, a mysterious Englishman, bursts into tears and claims not to know who he is or where he’s come from. The following day the Englishman is found hanging from a rafter, and Detective Jimmy Perez is convinced that the man has been murdered. He is reinforced in this belief when Roddy, Bella’s musician nephew, is murdered, too.

But the detective’s relationship with Fran Hunter may have clouded his judgment, for this is a crazy time of the year when night blurs into day and nothing is quite as it seems.

A stunning second installment in the acclaimed Shetland Island Quartet, White Nights is sure to garner American raves for international sensation Ann Cleeves.]]> 392 Ann Cleeves 0312384335 J. 4 mystery, scotland, off-shore � at this time of year, everyone went a bit crazy. It was the light, intense during the day and still there at night. The sun never quite slipping behind the horizon, so you could read outside at midnight. The winters were so bleak and black that in the summer folk were overtaken with a kind of frenzy, constant activity. There was the feeling that you had to make the most of it, be outside, enjoy it before the dark days came again. Here in Shetland they called it the 'simmer dim'. And this year was even worse. Usually the weather was unpredictable, changing by the hour, rain and wind and brief spells of bright sunshine, but this year it had been fine for nearly a fortnight... the birds still singing late into the evening, the dusk wich lasted all night, nature slipping from its accustomed pattern...

For this reader, Location is 2/3rds the battle. The right contrasts, the right measure of oddly exotic to completely everyday, even the right Light and Air, set the tone for once and for all. It's not the whole battle of course, because a sloppy mystery belongs to no location, serves no purpose, no matter where it is. No worries.

Ann Cleeves' Shetland Island series has that--uhm-- locked up. And with all the advantages of the right place--- better described by she than I-- it's got that sort of distant, contained Isolation thing going on. Which has served authors in many guises from decrepit Country Manor Houses ala Baskerville or Rebecca, to shipwrecks, to foreboding boarding schools in the hinterlands. Hello Hogwarts. (A locked-room mystery is the ultra minimalist's choice in this niche.) By intentionally confining the elements to a narrow set of variables, a mystery writer can ratchet up the suspense and make the actual plot seem really daunting, as there simply can't be a surprise culprit. Seemingly.

There is a sort of conflict of riches, with this series, accompanied as it is by the Bbc version-- that pits the same material, portrayed in different media, against itself. The Bbc series has the overarchingly enormous advantage of filming on the Scottish Archipelago of Shetland and adjacent locations; it's packed with incomparably unique, dramatic scenery. There is the tendency, for this viewer, at least, to drift off to examining the crags, tors, northern light and generally fjordish landscape so liberally framed-in --during discussions about how the body got there. Not generally a problem, as you'll refocus on the crime scene eventually, but. It's like watching a movie about the dangers of a tiger-ridden jungle place, and having a tiger in almost every scene. It almost splits the attention span.

Cleeves' book is a lovely evocation of a fairly complex mystery in that place, and manages quite well without the majestic drone or crane shots. Her aim is to turn up a bit of the anthropology of the place alongside the steady, workmanlike process of detection. A far Island town bordering the arctic circle is its own place, certainly, and its society and historical makeup are every bit as unique. So of course the villains, and the cops, are unique as well.

If there were a way to first read the books and then see the series, that would be the ultimate. As it is, you have to suspend a little technicolor in the book version, but aren't distracted by crane shots and the last rays of the sun crashing through the pounding surf every five minutes either.]]> 3.94 2008 White Nights (Shetland Island, #2)
author: Ann Cleeves
name: J.
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2019/07/25
date added: 2019/07/25
shelves: mystery, scotland, off-shore
review:
� at this time of year, everyone went a bit crazy. It was the light, intense during the day and still there at night. The sun never quite slipping behind the horizon, so you could read outside at midnight. The winters were so bleak and black that in the summer folk were overtaken with a kind of frenzy, constant activity. There was the feeling that you had to make the most of it, be outside, enjoy it before the dark days came again. Here in Shetland they called it the 'simmer dim'. And this year was even worse. Usually the weather was unpredictable, changing by the hour, rain and wind and brief spells of bright sunshine, but this year it had been fine for nearly a fortnight... the birds still singing late into the evening, the dusk wich lasted all night, nature slipping from its accustomed pattern...

For this reader, Location is 2/3rds the battle. The right contrasts, the right measure of oddly exotic to completely everyday, even the right Light and Air, set the tone for once and for all. It's not the whole battle of course, because a sloppy mystery belongs to no location, serves no purpose, no matter where it is. No worries.

Ann Cleeves' Shetland Island series has that--uhm-- locked up. And with all the advantages of the right place--- better described by she than I-- it's got that sort of distant, contained Isolation thing going on. Which has served authors in many guises from decrepit Country Manor Houses ala Baskerville or Rebecca, to shipwrecks, to foreboding boarding schools in the hinterlands. Hello Hogwarts. (A locked-room mystery is the ultra minimalist's choice in this niche.) By intentionally confining the elements to a narrow set of variables, a mystery writer can ratchet up the suspense and make the actual plot seem really daunting, as there simply can't be a surprise culprit. Seemingly.

There is a sort of conflict of riches, with this series, accompanied as it is by the Bbc version-- that pits the same material, portrayed in different media, against itself. The Bbc series has the overarchingly enormous advantage of filming on the Scottish Archipelago of Shetland and adjacent locations; it's packed with incomparably unique, dramatic scenery. There is the tendency, for this viewer, at least, to drift off to examining the crags, tors, northern light and generally fjordish landscape so liberally framed-in --during discussions about how the body got there. Not generally a problem, as you'll refocus on the crime scene eventually, but. It's like watching a movie about the dangers of a tiger-ridden jungle place, and having a tiger in almost every scene. It almost splits the attention span.

Cleeves' book is a lovely evocation of a fairly complex mystery in that place, and manages quite well without the majestic drone or crane shots. Her aim is to turn up a bit of the anthropology of the place alongside the steady, workmanlike process of detection. A far Island town bordering the arctic circle is its own place, certainly, and its society and historical makeup are every bit as unique. So of course the villains, and the cops, are unique as well.

If there were a way to first read the books and then see the series, that would be the ultimate. As it is, you have to suspend a little technicolor in the book version, but aren't distracted by crane shots and the last rays of the sun crashing through the pounding surf every five minutes either.
]]> <![CDATA[Have Mercy on Us All (Commissaire Adamsberg, #4)]]> 128894
In a small Parisian square, the ancient tradition of the town crier continues into modern times. The self-appointed crier, Joss Le Guern, reads out the daily news, snippets of gossip, and lately, ominous messages—placed in his handmade wooden message box by an anonymous source—that warn of an imminent onset of the bubonic plague.

Concerned, Le Guern brings the puzzling notes to the bumbling but brilliant Chief Inspector Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg and his straight-edged, right-hand man, Adrien Danglard. When strange signs that were historically believed to ward off the black death start to appear on the doors of several buildings, Adamsberg takes notice and suspects a connection with Le Guern’s warnings. After a flea-bitten corpse with plague-like symptoms is found in one of the marked buildings, Fred Vargas’s inimitable genius chief inspector is under pressure to solve the mystery and restore calm to a panicked Paris. But is it a real case of the bubonic scourge, or just a sinister trick designed to frighten as the body count grows and the culprit continues to elude the police?

Peopled with charming and eccentric Gallic characters, and packed with gripping historical detail, Have Mercy on Us All is a complex, surprising, and stylish tale from France’s finest mystery writer.]]> 353 Fred Vargas 0743284011 J. 3 mystery, france, vargas-fred "Why the 18 percent?"
"Because that's how many anxious, gullible and superstitious people live among us. The people who are afraid of an eclipse, who panic at the end of a millennium, who are scared by prophecies and believe that Doom is Nigh � the killer will have the city to himself � " Medievalist and author Fred Vargas sets the stage for an incomprehensible event: the mass panic and uncontrolled chaos of a release of The Black Death, the Plague, in our era. In the Paris of the new millennium, seemingly so distant from such monsters of antiquity. As a pretext for suspense and high-wire jeopardy, as a backdrop for the adrenaline-juiced counteraction of the metropolitan police, a wide-open map of storyline and possible outcome.

She should (Fred is a she) be on home ground, as a scholar of the Middle Ages and literally a specialist on the bubonic plague-- this should be the police procedural written in a white-hot onslaught of pace and drive. But it is not. For reasons unknown, the reader is given a long, leisurely lead-in to the possibilities of a pandemic like this, and yes given lots of fascinating background, but-- is somehow never really lashed into the crash vehicle, or duly abandoned at the center of the storm.

Vargas writes what might be called "Alt Procedurals". The reader should be confident that by the end of the maze here, there will be very adequate closure, that five or six bolts will be rammed home in a few pages, as with any satisfying mystery. But Vargas is most dedicated to the Alt part of the equation, the bewilderingly illogical and iconoclast part of her policiers. That anything should follow logically or sensibly-- is heresy to Vargas. And that's the best part of her work.

A normal police procedural has its "maze" of clues and actions set up like a pinball machine. Certain unpredictable events trigger certain very predictable consequences, which themselves feed into known pathways of narrative resolution. The fallen body and the crimetape lead inexorably to the confrontation and confession. Vargas says no. Vargas has a thinly disguised Gallic Shrug for the diehards of the procedural. Again though, that's what is good about her novels. Vargas sets up the story like a surrealist cabinet of wonders.

But. It's important that the maze in a procedural have its integrity, at least in theory. An assurance to the reader, perhaps, that things will go in the direction of a logical outcome. If you've read a few of Vargas' books, you're not worried about that. But here, her maze section diverts into what sailors would call the Doldrums; when nothing makes too much sense or pings any real triggers for fifty or a hundred pages at a time, the pace suffers. It's hard to keep hold of the bearings or a sense of timing if you've been floating at the whim of the currents.

Still, a good early mystery from Vargas, and one that wraps up sharply in the final chapters. Maybe a good starter-Vargas, an intro to the alt-procedural.]]> 4.12 2001 Have Mercy on Us All (Commissaire Adamsberg, #4)
author: Fred Vargas
name: J.
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2001
rating: 3
read at: 2019/07/04
date added: 2019/07/24
shelves: mystery, france, vargas-fred
review:
"Why the 18 percent?"
"Because that's how many anxious, gullible and superstitious people live among us. The people who are afraid of an eclipse, who panic at the end of a millennium, who are scared by prophecies and believe that Doom is Nigh � the killer will have the city to himself � "
Medievalist and author Fred Vargas sets the stage for an incomprehensible event: the mass panic and uncontrolled chaos of a release of The Black Death, the Plague, in our era. In the Paris of the new millennium, seemingly so distant from such monsters of antiquity. As a pretext for suspense and high-wire jeopardy, as a backdrop for the adrenaline-juiced counteraction of the metropolitan police, a wide-open map of storyline and possible outcome.

She should (Fred is a she) be on home ground, as a scholar of the Middle Ages and literally a specialist on the bubonic plague-- this should be the police procedural written in a white-hot onslaught of pace and drive. But it is not. For reasons unknown, the reader is given a long, leisurely lead-in to the possibilities of a pandemic like this, and yes given lots of fascinating background, but-- is somehow never really lashed into the crash vehicle, or duly abandoned at the center of the storm.

Vargas writes what might be called "Alt Procedurals". The reader should be confident that by the end of the maze here, there will be very adequate closure, that five or six bolts will be rammed home in a few pages, as with any satisfying mystery. But Vargas is most dedicated to the Alt part of the equation, the bewilderingly illogical and iconoclast part of her policiers. That anything should follow logically or sensibly-- is heresy to Vargas. And that's the best part of her work.

A normal police procedural has its "maze" of clues and actions set up like a pinball machine. Certain unpredictable events trigger certain very predictable consequences, which themselves feed into known pathways of narrative resolution. The fallen body and the crimetape lead inexorably to the confrontation and confession. Vargas says no. Vargas has a thinly disguised Gallic Shrug for the diehards of the procedural. Again though, that's what is good about her novels. Vargas sets up the story like a surrealist cabinet of wonders.

But. It's important that the maze in a procedural have its integrity, at least in theory. An assurance to the reader, perhaps, that things will go in the direction of a logical outcome. If you've read a few of Vargas' books, you're not worried about that. But here, her maze section diverts into what sailors would call the Doldrums; when nothing makes too much sense or pings any real triggers for fifty or a hundred pages at a time, the pace suffers. It's hard to keep hold of the bearings or a sense of timing if you've been floating at the whim of the currents.

Still, a good early mystery from Vargas, and one that wraps up sharply in the final chapters. Maybe a good starter-Vargas, an intro to the alt-procedural.
]]> In a Lonely Place 33275967
Written with controlled elegance, Dorothy B. Hughes's tense novel is at once an early indictment of a truly toxic masculinity and a twisty page-turner with a surprisingly feminist resolution. A classic of golden age noir, In a Lonely Place also inspired Nicholas Ray's 1950 film of the same name, starring Humphrey Bogart.]]> 206 Dorothy B. Hughes 1681371472 J. 5 "Why do you think I fought the war? To get back to Sylvia."
"And why did you fight the war, Mr. Steele?" Sylvia's smile wasn't demure; she made it that way. I don't see how you do this much better than Dorothy Hughes does here. Taut, streamlined, inevitability so physically definite you see it approaching like a wall. Of brick, maybe, but more likely spanish stucco, like any dump just off Wilshire. Or perhaps like the wall of fog that envelops you, as you drive west to the ocean from L.A. Sea spray and eucalyptus, misunderstood intentions, and a strangler out there in the night.

Author Hughes has an equation, a kind of an understanding with the reader, which works like this:
1. Reader knows one secret thing.
2. Author encodes that subtext into every glance, every splice of everyday narrative.
3. Equates to Reader immersion in raw, guilty, jangled nerves; every interaction is electric.
One of the High Commandments of Noir is the familiar expectation that at a certain point, everything you know must be wrong, that the rug can and will be pulled out, without notice.

For others, this is an effective plot device, a jarring theatrical coup in the center of the story. For Hughes this function is served by the city itself; the sparkle of a desert town that is also a Metropolis in its own right, the otherworldly light and spectacle of the day as the big sky goes purple and amber in the lead up to darkness. And then the fog and half-light. The sea, the opposite but constant companion to the somehow upside-down desert town of Los Angeles. The First City of Noir.

To talk of plotting or characters would be all spoiler, so we won't. Be advised that the book is nothing like the film rendition with Bogart, and is infinitely more chilling and deadly. A tour de force.]]> 4.28 1947 In a Lonely Place
author: Dorothy B. Hughes
name: J.
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1947
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2019/07/24
shelves: mystery, noir-environs, la-la-land, five-star
review:
"Why do you think I fought the war? To get back to Sylvia."
"And why did you fight the war, Mr. Steele?" Sylvia's smile wasn't demure; she made it that way.
I don't see how you do this much better than Dorothy Hughes does here. Taut, streamlined, inevitability so physically definite you see it approaching like a wall. Of brick, maybe, but more likely spanish stucco, like any dump just off Wilshire. Or perhaps like the wall of fog that envelops you, as you drive west to the ocean from L.A. Sea spray and eucalyptus, misunderstood intentions, and a strangler out there in the night.

Author Hughes has an equation, a kind of an understanding with the reader, which works like this:
1. Reader knows one secret thing.
2. Author encodes that subtext into every glance, every splice of everyday narrative.
3. Equates to Reader immersion in raw, guilty, jangled nerves; every interaction is electric.
One of the High Commandments of Noir is the familiar expectation that at a certain point, everything you know must be wrong, that the rug can and will be pulled out, without notice.

For others, this is an effective plot device, a jarring theatrical coup in the center of the story. For Hughes this function is served by the city itself; the sparkle of a desert town that is also a Metropolis in its own right, the otherworldly light and spectacle of the day as the big sky goes purple and amber in the lead up to darkness. And then the fog and half-light. The sea, the opposite but constant companion to the somehow upside-down desert town of Los Angeles. The First City of Noir.

To talk of plotting or characters would be all spoiler, so we won't. Be advised that the book is nothing like the film rendition with Bogart, and is infinitely more chilling and deadly. A tour de force.
]]> The Sweetness of Life 21532265
Along with Detective Superintendent Ludwig Kovacs, Raffael Horn, the psychiatrist engaged to treat the silent child, reluctantly becomes involved in solving the murder. Their parallel researches sweep through the town: a young mother who believes her new-born child is the devil; a Benedictine monk who uses his iPod to drown the voices in his head; a high-spending teenager who tortures cats. ĚýWith his background as a child psychiatrist, Hochgatterer draws back the veil of normality and presents a disconcerting portrait of a winter-held town filled with unsavory inhabitants.Ěý±Ő±Ő> 320 Paulus Hochgatterer 1623658535 J. 3
It makes things mysterious at first, setting the stage that way, and to be honest, solves a 'voicing' problem for the author; how to transition from the conscience or internal monologue of one figure, directly over to another's, without having to do a lot of re-set. If the reader expects to be inside a new/ returning character every chapter, it's easy to situate them after a few rounds, and expedites character exposition in the process.

With that, I have to confess; much as I'm a fairly veteran reader of mysteries and know the characterization salad-spinner system pretty well--- in the end of this one I wasn't quite sure what, or more exactly who, had caused what happened to happen. I know who it wasn't, but the more bent the internal narrative, and the more bent characters in one novel, the more difficult it is. I'd blame the translator if it weren't for exemplary prose and poised storytelling throughout. So I'll blame the Author. Okay then, moving on.

Ordinarily, slow-dawning detail and elusive clue tracking make for a good mystery. Here in fact we have a corpse and crime-tape fluttering in the Austrian wind by page 29; it takes our detective all the way to page 119 to get to the whiteboard in the squadroom, the layout of the trail of clues. Usually, as mentioned, this is all to the good. What works against the flow is the relentless "Our Town" sort of exposition, which author Hochgatterer employs throughout nearly every chapter. Well past the center point of the book, we're being introduced to further, unimportant characters, who only serve to crowd the scene. Yes, of course, it camouflages the murderer, but it's overkill, pardon the expression. It's an enormous talent that can take dozens and dozens of characters and integrate them on the fly. Here, we struggle with that.

That said, the Detective and the major characters are great, and worthy of another outing. Personally I always like a sort of cantankerous, non-linear Chief Detective. Ala Morse, it adds a dimension to an otherwise flat or dimension-less Chief Advanceman Of Plot. Unexplained 'peculiar' is intriguing, when done well. And that's what saves the book. Here's the Commandant, pursuing his hobby:

The sky had remained clear. From the kitchen window he could see the pale red tint of the evening in the southwest. The first stars would soon be visible. The telescope was beside his bed; the last few times he had not bothered to put it away. Tonight, he would go up to the roof, take his time, and align it properly. He would start by looking at the zenith, where at this time of year Andromeda was in view � of course it bothered him, when his other colleagues kept riding him about it. But when Strack had asked him what the point was of spending hours staring through a tube, he had said, "I'm looking for God, that's the point," and all of them had shut up, for good.]]> 2.87 2006 The Sweetness of Life
author: Paulus Hochgatterer
name: J.
average rating: 2.87
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2019/07/24
date added: 2019/07/24
shelves: mystery, central-europe, something-nasty-in-the-wood-shed
review:
After a few hundred mysteries, you get accustomed to the 'rotating-pov' sort of device employed by half of them. The idea that each new chapter will introduce, and then return, in rotation, to the inner voice of yet another character. What the Lady Of The House worries about. What the Chauffer thinks. What the Butler knew. But from the inside, from within their point of view.

It makes things mysterious at first, setting the stage that way, and to be honest, solves a 'voicing' problem for the author; how to transition from the conscience or internal monologue of one figure, directly over to another's, without having to do a lot of re-set. If the reader expects to be inside a new/ returning character every chapter, it's easy to situate them after a few rounds, and expedites character exposition in the process.

With that, I have to confess; much as I'm a fairly veteran reader of mysteries and know the characterization salad-spinner system pretty well--- in the end of this one I wasn't quite sure what, or more exactly who, had caused what happened to happen. I know who it wasn't, but the more bent the internal narrative, and the more bent characters in one novel, the more difficult it is. I'd blame the translator if it weren't for exemplary prose and poised storytelling throughout. So I'll blame the Author. Okay then, moving on.

Ordinarily, slow-dawning detail and elusive clue tracking make for a good mystery. Here in fact we have a corpse and crime-tape fluttering in the Austrian wind by page 29; it takes our detective all the way to page 119 to get to the whiteboard in the squadroom, the layout of the trail of clues. Usually, as mentioned, this is all to the good. What works against the flow is the relentless "Our Town" sort of exposition, which author Hochgatterer employs throughout nearly every chapter. Well past the center point of the book, we're being introduced to further, unimportant characters, who only serve to crowd the scene. Yes, of course, it camouflages the murderer, but it's overkill, pardon the expression. It's an enormous talent that can take dozens and dozens of characters and integrate them on the fly. Here, we struggle with that.

That said, the Detective and the major characters are great, and worthy of another outing. Personally I always like a sort of cantankerous, non-linear Chief Detective. Ala Morse, it adds a dimension to an otherwise flat or dimension-less Chief Advanceman Of Plot. Unexplained 'peculiar' is intriguing, when done well. And that's what saves the book. Here's the Commandant, pursuing his hobby:

The sky had remained clear. From the kitchen window he could see the pale red tint of the evening in the southwest. The first stars would soon be visible. The telescope was beside his bed; the last few times he had not bothered to put it away. Tonight, he would go up to the roof, take his time, and align it properly. He would start by looking at the zenith, where at this time of year Andromeda was in view � of course it bothered him, when his other colleagues kept riding him about it. But when Strack had asked him what the point was of spending hours staring through a tube, he had said, "I'm looking for God, that's the point," and all of them had shut up, for good.
]]> King Solomon's Carpet 459421 A Fatal Inversion for this updating of Conrad's novel of terrorist conspiracy, The Secret Agent.

Tom Murray is a promising musician reduced to illegal busking in Underground stations and a sad little love affair with his accompanist Alice, who left her husband and newborn baby, taking only her violin. Together with Jasper Darne, another dropout from his family who likes to ride on the tops of Underground carriages, and Jed Lowrie, a Safeguard volunteer who's left behind his own family to live for his hunting hawk Abelard, they live in a failed schoolhouse--whose bell tolled for the only time in memory when the headmaster hanged himself from its rope.

The school's owned by the old man's grandson, Jarv Stringer, who now passes the time by writing a book on the Underground and taking in waifs and strays while his aunt Cecilia Darne, Jasper's grandmother, quietly declines around the corner under the variously watchful eyes of her relatives and her longtime companion Daphne Bleech-Palmer. The apple of discord in this extended, dysfunctional family is sinister Axel Jonas, who rides the trains with a dancing bear, actually a man named Ivan, until Jasper one day leads him to Jarvis's, where he takes up residence, seduces Alice, and begins to gather details about the operation of the Underground in preparation for a cataclysmic bombing.]]> 355 Barbara Vine 0140156917 J. 0 mystery, to-read, rendell 3.76 1991 King Solomon's Carpet
author: Barbara Vine
name: J.
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1991
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/07/07
shelves: mystery, to-read, rendell
review:

]]> Shepperton Babylon 30226070 400 Matthew Sweet J. 0 3.75 2006 Shepperton Babylon
author: Matthew Sweet
name: J.
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/07/05
shelves: to-read, history, carny-rats, cinema, this-england
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Accordionist (Three Evangelists #3)]]> 33011353
But now Clément has disappeared from public view. His likeness has appeared in the papers and detectives from Paris to Nevers are on his tail. To have a chance of proving his innocence, he seeks refuge with old Marthe, a former prostitute and the only mother figure he has known.

Marthe calls ex-special investigator Louis Kehlweiler to help Clément. But what Louis uncovers is anything but straightforward, and he must call on some unconventional friends to help him solve his most complex case yet. Not only must Louis try to prove Clément’s innocence, he must solve a fiendish riddle to lead him to the killer�

A THREE EVANGELISTS NOVEL]]> 249 Fred Vargas 1846559987 J. 0 to-read, mystery, vargas-fred 3.87 1997 The Accordionist (Three Evangelists #3)
author: Fred Vargas
name: J.
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/07/03
shelves: to-read, mystery, vargas-fred
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Three Evangelists (Three Evangelists, #1)]]> 128893
A few weeks later, Sophia disappears and her body is found burned to ashes in a car. Who killed the opera singer? Her husband, her ex-lover, her best friend, her niece? They all seem to have a motive.

Vandoosler and the three evangelists set out to find the truth.]]> 292 Fred Vargas 0099469553 J. 0 to-read, mystery, vargas-fred 4.00 1995 The Three Evangelists (Three Evangelists, #1)
author: Fred Vargas
name: J.
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/07/03
shelves: to-read, mystery, vargas-fred
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand (Commissaire Adamsberg, #6)]]> 118840
Commissaire Adamsberg is convinced all the murders are the work of one person, the terrifying Judge Fulgence. Years before, Adamsberg's own brother had been the principal suspect in a similar case and avoided prison only thanks to Adamsberg's help.

History repeats itself when Adamsberg, who is temporarily based in Quebec for a training mission, is accused of having savagely murdered a young woman he had met. In order to prove his innocence, Adamsberg must go on the run from the Canadian police and find Judge Fulgence.

This is the finest novel yet from the incomparable Fred Vargas.]]> 388 Fred Vargas 1843432730 J. 0 to-read, mystery, vargas-fred 4.11 2004 Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand (Commissaire Adamsberg, #6)
author: Fred Vargas
name: J.
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/07/03
shelves: to-read, mystery, vargas-fred
review:

]]> Harriet Said... 17059207 192 Beryl Bainbridge 184408860X J. 0 3.58 1972 Harriet Said...
author: Beryl Bainbridge
name: J.
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1972
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/07/02
shelves: to-read, childhood-gothic, this-england
review:

]]> The Cure 3562670 305 Carlo GĂ©bler 0349106487 J. 0 4.06 The Cure
author: Carlo GĂ©bler
name: J.
average rating: 4.06
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/06/26
shelves: to-read, something-nasty-in-the-wood-shed
review:

]]> La Bâtarde 99089 La Batarde relates Violette Leduc's long search for her own identity through a series of agonizing and passionate love affairs with both men and women. When first published, La Batarde earned Violette Leduc comparisons to Jean Genet for the frank depiction of her sexual escapades and immoral behavior. A confession that contains portraits of several famous French authors, this book is more than just a scintillating memoir. Like that of Henry Miller, Leduc's brilliant writing style and attention to language transform this autobiography into a work of art.



Violette Leduc was born the illegitimate daughter of a servant girl and was encouraged to write by Maurice Sachs and Simone de Beauvoir. Her first novel, L'Asphyxie (In the Prison of Her Skin), was published by Camus for Gallimard and earned her praise from Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau, and Jean Genet. She went on to write eight more books, including Ravages, L'Affamee, and La Folie en tete (Mad in Pursuit), the second part of her literary autobiography.

]]> 488 Violette Leduc 1564782891 J. 0 to-read, france, memoir 4.12 1964 La Bâtarde
author: Violette Leduc
name: J.
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1964
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/06/23
shelves: to-read, france, memoir
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead]]> 1785957 193 Barbara Comyns 0984469311 J. 3
All the curdled norms and propped up pretensions of the Edwardians, and their mystified children, come out to play in a small village. What makes this different from a standard genre version is Comyn's detail, her milieu-drenched sense of the English countryside, the manners and atmosphere. The way time just drifts. And as always, her sense of how children see the same things the adults see but come away with very different views. Childhood Gothic for certain.

Nearly anything specific starts to verge on spoiler here, so I'll just say stick with it in the slow-burn buildup of the first fifty pages or so. Comyns knows how to put it in gear.
This would be a good 'first Comyns' to read; it only gets better and considerably weirder from here.]]> 3.85 1954 Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead
author: Barbara Comyns
name: J.
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1954
rating: 3
read at: 2019/06/20
date added: 2019/06/22
shelves: this-england, comyns, something-nasty-in-the-wood-shed, childhood-gothic
review:
Another perfectly-normal-goes-perfectly-squirrelly outing, from Barbara Comyns, mistress of the slow-dawning catastrophe.

All the curdled norms and propped up pretensions of the Edwardians, and their mystified children, come out to play in a small village. What makes this different from a standard genre version is Comyn's detail, her milieu-drenched sense of the English countryside, the manners and atmosphere. The way time just drifts. And as always, her sense of how children see the same things the adults see but come away with very different views. Childhood Gothic for certain.

Nearly anything specific starts to verge on spoiler here, so I'll just say stick with it in the slow-burn buildup of the first fifty pages or so. Comyns knows how to put it in gear.
This would be a good 'first Comyns' to read; it only gets better and considerably weirder from here.
]]> The Wrecker 11618859 360 Robert Louis Stevenson 1406582344 J. 0 4.00 1887 The Wrecker
author: Robert Louis Stevenson
name: J.
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1887
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/06/22
shelves: to-read, off-shore, strange-cargo
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Devotion of Suspect X (Detective Galileo, #1)]]> 8686068
When Detective Kusanagi of the Tokyo Police tries to piece together the events of that day, he finds himself confronted by the most puzzling, mysterious circumstances he has ever investigated. Nothing quite makes sense, and it will take a genius to understand the genius behind this particular crime...]]> 298 Keigo Higashino 0312375069 J. 2 mystery, japan The Devotion Of Suspect X, A Novel. In looking back, I guess that's where I parted company with this one. It is a detective story, a mystery, a straightforward piece of genre fiction, but it just doesn't qualify as A Novel.

Characters are not alive here, they exist as equations, transitional elements that guide the plot down the appropriate avenues to the next turnstile. The plot itself, though unhindered by much color in its enablers, is tricky, unusual, and certainly intricate enough to make the grade. But the actors onstage aren't given much chance to breathe. People in a mystery deserve to be rendered as people, before the reader cares much if they are perpetrator or victim. A Novel does that.

One other standout absence here is that once we're into the story by only a few pages, the idea of Japan just goes dormant and this could be any police procedural anywhere on earth. For this reader, the lure of the dense atmospherics and traditions of Japan was a large part of wanting to read this. What the author maintains is the Japanese manner, the politeness and restraint-- but that isn't enough to illuminate the scene.

There are trends in modern mysteries, and one of them is minimalism; to drain the work of character and atmosphere is perhaps an attempt at that, but really. It's like staging a cowboy & indian movie on a one room set, or an opera all acapella, with no orchestra. Too little is too little.]]> 4.16 2005 The Devotion of Suspect X (Detective Galileo, #1)
author: Keigo Higashino
name: J.
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2005
rating: 2
read at: 2019/06/15
date added: 2019/06/16
shelves: mystery, japan
review:
It says it right on the cover, The Devotion Of Suspect X, A Novel. In looking back, I guess that's where I parted company with this one. It is a detective story, a mystery, a straightforward piece of genre fiction, but it just doesn't qualify as A Novel.

Characters are not alive here, they exist as equations, transitional elements that guide the plot down the appropriate avenues to the next turnstile. The plot itself, though unhindered by much color in its enablers, is tricky, unusual, and certainly intricate enough to make the grade. But the actors onstage aren't given much chance to breathe. People in a mystery deserve to be rendered as people, before the reader cares much if they are perpetrator or victim. A Novel does that.

One other standout absence here is that once we're into the story by only a few pages, the idea of Japan just goes dormant and this could be any police procedural anywhere on earth. For this reader, the lure of the dense atmospherics and traditions of Japan was a large part of wanting to read this. What the author maintains is the Japanese manner, the politeness and restraint-- but that isn't enough to illuminate the scene.

There are trends in modern mysteries, and one of them is minimalism; to drain the work of character and atmosphere is perhaps an attempt at that, but really. It's like staging a cowboy & indian movie on a one room set, or an opera all acapella, with no orchestra. Too little is too little.
]]> Black Rain 3407723
Ibuse tempers the horror of his subject with the gentle humor for which he is famous. His sensitivity to the complex web of emotions in a traditional community torn asunder by this historical event has made 'Black Rain' one of the most acclaimed treatments of the Hiroshima story.]]> 300 Masuji Ibuse 4770006950 J. 0 to-read 4.00 1965 Black Rain
author: Masuji Ibuse
name: J.
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1965
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/06/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> This Is What Happened 34837211 From CWA Gold Dagger winner Mick Herron comes a shocking, twisted novel of psychological suspense about one woman’s attempt to be better than ordinary

Twenty-six-year-old Maggie Barnes is someone you would never look at twice. Living alone in a month-to-month sublet in the huge city of London, with no family but an estranged sister, no boyfriend or partner, and not much in the way of friends, Maggie is just the kind of person who could vanish from the face of the earth without anyone taking notice.

Or just the kind of person MI5 needs to infiltrate the establishment and thwart an international plot that puts all of Britain at risk.

Now one young woman has the chance to be a hero—if she can think quickly enough to stay alive.]]> 263 Mick Herron 1616958618 J. 4 mystery the stylized scenario, where that minimalism is meant to translate as eerie or postmodern or something.)

Herron shifts the reader's perception of the players as we go, and also what's perceived by the other characters on their own account. There are everyday reasons for that sort of thing-- how much is revealed on a first date, for example, or what an employee reveals to employers or co-workers. But details emerge, soon enough, and after a nerve-rattling introduction, we find the clues keep changing color or complexion with time, and with the telling. There will be sinister motives.

That being the case, I don't think it does the reader any favors to summarize the novel here; better to dive in, without pre-consideration of the story. This is something of a chamber piece, a haunting urban drama that reminds me a bit of Wait Until Dark, the Frederick Knott* play (filmed eventually with Audrey Hepburn & Alan Arkin).

Best indicator of the success of a mystery is whether you're interested in reading further outings from the same author. Sign me up.
________________________________
* Knott also wrote the original Dial M For Murder for the stage.]]> 3.20 2018 This Is What Happened
author: Mick Herron
name: J.
average rating: 3.20
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2019/06/06
shelves: mystery
review:
New mystery writer to me. Mr. Herron seems intrigued by the idea of including only the minimum of elaboration around the plot, as a measure for maintaining the pace and impact of the story. Very tight design, very lean narrative--(without coming across as that thrill-kill of the mystery genre-- the stylized scenario, where that minimalism is meant to translate as eerie or postmodern or something.)

Herron shifts the reader's perception of the players as we go, and also what's perceived by the other characters on their own account. There are everyday reasons for that sort of thing-- how much is revealed on a first date, for example, or what an employee reveals to employers or co-workers. But details emerge, soon enough, and after a nerve-rattling introduction, we find the clues keep changing color or complexion with time, and with the telling. There will be sinister motives.

That being the case, I don't think it does the reader any favors to summarize the novel here; better to dive in, without pre-consideration of the story. This is something of a chamber piece, a haunting urban drama that reminds me a bit of Wait Until Dark, the Frederick Knott* play (filmed eventually with Audrey Hepburn & Alan Arkin).

Best indicator of the success of a mystery is whether you're interested in reading further outings from the same author. Sign me up.
________________________________
* Knott also wrote the original Dial M For Murder for the stage.
]]> <![CDATA[The Hotel (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)]]> 536509 176 Elizabeth Bowen 0140183027 J. 3 � the doorway still framed emptiness. The meal clattered on. Nearly everybody here was English: the air was allowed to come in pleasantly through the open windows under green-striped awnings and feel its way, cool-fingered, from flushing face to face. Nobody was hurried or constrained, time put out no compulsion and the afternoon might have stretched ahead, as it seemed to stretch, brightly blank. Over it, however, habit had spun her web of obligations; a web infinitely fine and fragile from which it was yet impossible to break without outrage. Beyond the dining-room, along the expanses of the lounge, people risen early from their tables were awaiting one another, meek under the rule of precedent, to fulfil a hundred small engagements. Leisure, so linked up with ennui, has been sedulously barred away �

I don't think I've ever loved an author who's this difficult this much.

Difficult as in overcomplicated, overly-ambitious, circuitous; annoying, not tedious. Elizabeth Bowen writes in the tradition of Austen, of Henry James, of Thackeray, but she writes in the era of Waugh, Forster, Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Rebecca West. And while I've given this three stars, it's not so much for the work's accomplishments as it is for the vision, the white-knuckle-restrained execution, the absolute refusal to go along to get along.

Bowen's Hotel want to be a kind of Jamesian "innocents-abroad meet unforeseen-complexity" outing, meant for the boxing-out of mutually antagonistic worldviews, the interplay of thoughts-withheld vs views-expressed--you know-- the old verbal dagger and drawing room wit circuit. It also comes very near to Forster with the "Larky Holiday Outing Goes Dark And Scary-Vertiginous" structure over time. Italian Riviera, Brit expats. Complete with wiser, older Grand Matrons who stand by and comment for depthy reinforcement.

But this is Bowen's first book, and in spite of her courageous efforts to be obtuse, counter-customary and incisive-- no bell is rung, the effort is massive but the effect scatters itself. Unlike her major opuses, The House In Paris and The Last September, our Hotel denizens are never unpacked enough, the structuring weighs down the pace and cohesion. She misses that 'congruity' in James, where as we meet and become familiar with our characters, a shift takes place, toward an accelerated meshing of the narrative cogs. Producing, yes, pace. Direction.

Young Elizabeth Bowen wants it all right off the jump. She uses lots of oblique, vaguely cubist narrative angles on the story, breaking without notice into what today we'd recognize as Rashomon structure, but doesn't manage to circle in on a bright line or direction. Quite so much. (It should be said she's made it difficult for herself, in choosing a heroine who is in the tormented stages of early womanhood, juiced with emotion, uncertainty and rebelliousness on a hair trigger as her literate protagonist. Bright fireworks without and within yes, firm ground for a story, well, difficult.)

"Do you remember the Decameron lady who fished in the sea near here and was carried off by a pirate whom she liked from the first moment better than her husband?"
"Husband's shares were not good in those days," he said tolerantly. "I ought by the way to re-read my Decameron."
"Wouldn't it be nice," she said, suddenly smiling, "if the Saracens were to appear on the skyline, land and ravage the Hotel? They all take for granted--down there--that there aren't any more Saracens, but for all we know they may only be in abeyance. The whole Past, for a matter of fact, may be one enormous abeyance. "But I wonder," she added while a cloud of depression crept over her, "how many of us they would really care to take away?"
He did not know how she wished him to answer, and risked: "It would be an embarrassing choice."
She sighed flatly.

In the end, it all winds up in a poisonous revision of an Austen gallivant: the thorny briar path of Betrothal. For students of Bowen this is an indispensable outing. For the same sort of excursion by a more advanced practitioner, try booking a Passage To India.]]> 3.62 1927 The Hotel (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
author: Elizabeth Bowen
name: J.
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1927
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2019/05/31
shelves: expats, elizabeth-bowen, crack-in-the-sky
review:
� the doorway still framed emptiness. The meal clattered on. Nearly everybody here was English: the air was allowed to come in pleasantly through the open windows under green-striped awnings and feel its way, cool-fingered, from flushing face to face. Nobody was hurried or constrained, time put out no compulsion and the afternoon might have stretched ahead, as it seemed to stretch, brightly blank. Over it, however, habit had spun her web of obligations; a web infinitely fine and fragile from which it was yet impossible to break without outrage. Beyond the dining-room, along the expanses of the lounge, people risen early from their tables were awaiting one another, meek under the rule of precedent, to fulfil a hundred small engagements. Leisure, so linked up with ennui, has been sedulously barred away �

I don't think I've ever loved an author who's this difficult this much.

Difficult as in overcomplicated, overly-ambitious, circuitous; annoying, not tedious. Elizabeth Bowen writes in the tradition of Austen, of Henry James, of Thackeray, but she writes in the era of Waugh, Forster, Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Rebecca West. And while I've given this three stars, it's not so much for the work's accomplishments as it is for the vision, the white-knuckle-restrained execution, the absolute refusal to go along to get along.

Bowen's Hotel want to be a kind of Jamesian "innocents-abroad meet unforeseen-complexity" outing, meant for the boxing-out of mutually antagonistic worldviews, the interplay of thoughts-withheld vs views-expressed--you know-- the old verbal dagger and drawing room wit circuit. It also comes very near to Forster with the "Larky Holiday Outing Goes Dark And Scary-Vertiginous" structure over time. Italian Riviera, Brit expats. Complete with wiser, older Grand Matrons who stand by and comment for depthy reinforcement.

But this is Bowen's first book, and in spite of her courageous efforts to be obtuse, counter-customary and incisive-- no bell is rung, the effort is massive but the effect scatters itself. Unlike her major opuses, The House In Paris and The Last September, our Hotel denizens are never unpacked enough, the structuring weighs down the pace and cohesion. She misses that 'congruity' in James, where as we meet and become familiar with our characters, a shift takes place, toward an accelerated meshing of the narrative cogs. Producing, yes, pace. Direction.

Young Elizabeth Bowen wants it all right off the jump. She uses lots of oblique, vaguely cubist narrative angles on the story, breaking without notice into what today we'd recognize as Rashomon structure, but doesn't manage to circle in on a bright line or direction. Quite so much. (It should be said she's made it difficult for herself, in choosing a heroine who is in the tormented stages of early womanhood, juiced with emotion, uncertainty and rebelliousness on a hair trigger as her literate protagonist. Bright fireworks without and within yes, firm ground for a story, well, difficult.)

"Do you remember the Decameron lady who fished in the sea near here and was carried off by a pirate whom she liked from the first moment better than her husband?"
"Husband's shares were not good in those days," he said tolerantly. "I ought by the way to re-read my Decameron."
"Wouldn't it be nice," she said, suddenly smiling, "if the Saracens were to appear on the skyline, land and ravage the Hotel? They all take for granted--down there--that there aren't any more Saracens, but for all we know they may only be in abeyance. The whole Past, for a matter of fact, may be one enormous abeyance. "But I wonder," she added while a cloud of depression crept over her, "how many of us they would really care to take away?"
He did not know how she wished him to answer, and risked: "It would be an embarrassing choice."
She sighed flatly.

In the end, it all winds up in a poisonous revision of an Austen gallivant: the thorny briar path of Betrothal. For students of Bowen this is an indispensable outing. For the same sort of excursion by a more advanced practitioner, try booking a Passage To India.
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