As it is a very rare thing to meet or to see anyone that would be worth our while to look at twice in so dull a place as a small provincial town, we must consider ourselves fortunate—more fortunate than we deserve when we think of our sins—at having this opportunity to be introduced to someone who, we may venture to say, was interesting.
The driver’s face—for we, as well as the town children, may be allowed to be a little inquisitive here—was, above all, good natured and loving, though a trifle rugged and worn. His eyes were thoughtful, their colour grey, but at times their thoughtful expression changed to a twinkle of merriment. His nose, we are sorry to confess, wasn’t the best part of him, for it showed a certain redness—an unmistakable sign that he had more than once drunk his glass and enjoyed it. He seemed a man somewhat below an ordinary man’s size, and was sitting, as little men who are moderately stout often do, with his knees wide apart and his plump thighs smiling.
This part, on page two, was the point at which The Redhead asked me to stop reading Powys’s book out loud. Smiling thighs? Think of our sins? Maybe not.
I continued to myself, and I’m glad I did. This old fashioned Wilder-ish, Stratton-Porter-ish, Chesterton-ish morality tale is fast reading and decently plotted, even if the prose is a bit overly self-aware. I imagined it voiced-over by Morgan Freeman.
There is a “small provincial town” with the usual population of goodhearted rustics, gossipy busybodies, people with dark secrets and people in need. In the course of an evening, a mysterious wine peddler, who knows more about everyone in town than a stranger should, visits them all and offers draughts of supernaturally endowed wine that changes the lives of everyone in town. His work done, the peddler moves on...maybe to visit your area next.
The peddler is clearly supposed to be God, or Jesus, or at least an angel figure, but since Powys never comes out and says so explicitly (you can almost see him winking at you the whole time, but he keeps the text ambiguous, at least), you may choose to interpret him as a secular magician whose miraculous wine is akin to Wonka’s chocolate, or Mary Poppins’ cordials, or Alice’s mushroom. Either way, Weston’s wine can have a nasty kick to it for those on the “naughty” list; but for the rest of us, it is as satisfying as the old stories tend to be when at their best.
In Code, by Sarah Flannery, with David Flannery
When you finally crack a problem, whether by yourself or with some help, you experience a great feeling of self-satisfaction and pride. Recently Dad asked my ten year old brother, David, "What is the smallest number with exactly seven factors?" This kept him quiet for a while. In fact, the puzzle was a little too hard for him (or at least it did not pique his curiosity) and he appeared not to be thinking about it because a day or two later I heard him ask for a different puzzle, only to be told, "But you didn't solve the last one I gave you." When David made some evasive excuse, dad--contrary to his usual practice of never giving the least hint--took him to the kitchen blackboard and got him to do some calculations. Then he gave him a little nudge in the right direction (factors coming in pairs). Then I saw David's eyes light up: "Oh, yeah!" In no time at all he scribbled the answer on the board and turned around, smiling like a Cheshire cat. "That was cool," he said, and skipped off to his next pursuit.
I impulse-borrowed this one from the library, having noticed the clever-looking red-haired girl posed in front of an equation-strewn blackboard on the cover and learned from the jacket that she was Sarah Flannery from County Cork and that she had won both the Irish and European Young Scientist of the Year awards for research and discoveries in internet cryptography. Part mathematics lesson, part Irish autobiography, part groundbreaking girlpower story. What could be better?
I really liked the early parts about growing up in cork with an intelligent family. Flannery's father, Professor David Flannery (who is credited as part author of the autobiography) seems like an amazing person to know or to take a class from. He reminds me a bit of my uncle who used to hold court at the dinner table and Socratically question the children or have them fetch the OED to explore the etymology of a word that came up in conversation. I wanted to be that kind of father to my children, to get them excited about learning the way Flannery the Elder clearly did.
I was also interested and challenged by the math, just as I was not by the math of Ptolemy (Bookpost, February 2013). There's a fine line one has to walk when writing about a technical subject for the general reader. Several times, the book urges the reader to be brave and not be intimidated by the big scary math, to the point of bordering on condescension, and it begins with the kind of missionary/cannibal puzzles I'd seen before in several forms. On the other hand, when it got into the details of public key encryption, I was definitely out of my comfort zone and appreciated having the art and mystery of code dumbed down for me. And of course, the story climaxes with the details of Flannery's original Cayley-Purser algorithm that made her famous and had serious professional mathematicians poring over it. In fact, the Flannerys hit pretty much the right balance of challenging and explaining, and I was grateful to learn a little about what my computer-programmer friends do and how it works. I was also intrigued enough to go looking to see if Flannery had a FaceBook page (she does) and message an author in Ireland that I liked her book. Modern times are awesome.
The Thousand Nights and a Night
Whereat Al-Rashid marveled and summoning the Kazi and his witnesses, bade draw up the marriage contract between Abdullah and the damsel whom he had brought from the City of Stone. And so he went in to her, and wedded her, and they lived together and enjoyed all manner of delights for many years until at last there came to them the Destroyer of Destinies and Sunderer of Companions. And extolled be the perfection of Allah, who dieth not. Moreover, O auspicious King, I have also heard a tale about...
The Arabian Nights is a collection of tales collected over centuries, and Naguib Mahfouz (see last month’s Bookpost) aside, the most famous literature in Arabic, so I had to give it a go while I was studying the Islamic zenith that coincided with Europe’s Dark Ages. The thing is, I’d already read the entire ten-volume Richard Burton translation a couple of years before starting these Bookposts, and really, it’s not worth a second journey this soon. Seriously. Ten volumes.
DID YOU KNOW: Sinbad is in the original 1001 Nights, but Alladin and Ali Baba, the two stories best known to westerners, are not. For them, you have to go to the Supplemental Nights, an ADDITIONAL seven volumes in Burton’s set (I’m not making this up; seventeen total). In a few years more, I may try reading these to my kid, but for now, I just did a brief review with the Harvard Classics “Tales from the Arabian Nights” version, which has some of the best stories. Read it and for literary discussion purposes, you’ll have read the Arabian Nights.
Other verbose authors are accused of being paid by the word, but Scheherazade, who narrates, had an excuse. Her husband the Caliph was going to kill her when she stopped talking, and so we can forgive her for packing the tales with lots of extra description. The typical story does not begin with “There was a woodcutter with three sons, the youngest of whom was called Simpleton”. No, here, we begin with the father’s story, usually a king or rich man who has much to satisfy him, but who wants a son, and so, after a few nights’ worth of adventures, during which the man says “There is no God but the One god, and Mohammed is his prophet” a lot, he meets with a mysterious magician or old crone, who gives him a potion or directions for a spell that gets his wife with child. And so the son is born, and maybe a sibling or two, and THEN the real story of the favored child’s adventures begins. And this happens over and over and over....in the full set, the stories necessarily get repetitious, but the murderous husband never complains, and always asks for the next tale.
Those of us who played early Magic the Gathering games will remember the Arabian nights supplement and will be bemused to learn why, for example, the Drop of Honey and Abu J’afar cards do what they do. For the most part, the set is best read in small batches.
The Prince of Darkness, by P.C. Doherty; The Nightingale Gallery & Red Slayer, by Paul Harding
The sun had hardly moved in the heavens when the mad prophet’s body, his throat slashed from ear to ear, was dumped in a scum-rimmed marsh deep in the forest and sank without a trace. An hour later the mercenary captain rejoined the royal party as they sat on their horses amongst the thick, rich weeds of a slow moving river. The soldier nodded at Gaveston, who winked back, smiled, and slipped the hood off the falcon which stirred restlessly on his wrist, the bells of his jesses tinkling a warning of the death it would bring to this soft, green darkness.
“Now I have drawn blood,” Gaveston muttered to himself, “I can enjoy the hunt.”
--from The Prince of Darkness
As I have said, Reverend Father, my purse is empty, shriveled up and tight as a usurer’s soul. My collection boxes have been stolen and the chancery screen is in disrepair. The altar is marked and stained; the nave of the church is often covered with huge pools of water for our roof serves as more of a colander than a covering. God knows I atone for my sins. I seem to be steeped in murder, bloody and awful. It taxes my mind and reminds me of my own great crime. I have served the people here six months now and I have also assumed those duties assigned by you, to be clerk and scrivener to Sir John Cranston, coroner in the city of London.
Time and again he takes me with him to sit over the body of some man, woman, or child pitifully slain. “Is it murder, suicide or an accident?” he asks, and so the dreadful stories begin. Often death results from stupidity. A woman forgets how dangerous it is for a child to play out in the cobbled streets, dancing between the hooves of iron-shod horses or the creaking wheels of huge carts as they bring their produce up from the river; still, a child is slain, the little body crushed, bruised and marked, while the young soul goes out to meet its Christ. But, Reverend Father, there are more dreadful deaths. Men drunk in taverns, their bellies awash with cheap ale, their souls dead and black as the deepest night as they lurch at each other with sword, dagger or club. I always keep a faithful record.
--from The Nightingale Gallery
The Tower had its macabre secrets. Beneath one of its walls ran cold, green-slimed passageways. Torches, old and blackening, hung listlessly from sconces rusting on the walls. No one had been down there for years, a mysterious warren of tunnels even the soldiers never frequented. Three dungeons were there, but only two doors, and in the central cell, a square black box of a room, sprawled a decaying skeleton. There was no witness to what it had been when the flesh hung plump on the bones and the blood ran like hot wine through the heart and brain. The skeleton was yellowing now; a rat scurried through the rib cage and poked fruitlessly at the empty eye sockets before scampering along the bony arm which rested against one wall, just beneath the crudely drawn figure of a three-masted ship.
--from Red Slayer
More historical mysteries that have as much actual historical information as detection, and I’m glad to incorporate them into my decade-long dabble in history. Doherty’s Prince of Darkness has the Thirteenth Century Detective Hugh Corbett finally forced to embroil himself in the scandalous affairs of Edward, Prince of Wales (later Edward II) with his male lover Gaveston and a prostitute named Eleanor, who turns up murdered in this book. Was it Edward breaking off the affair? Gaveston out of jealousy? King Edward teaching his son a lesson? French spies seeking an excuse to stir controversy and break off the Prince’s engagement to Isabella of France? Or one of the nuns in the priory? Additional murders and attempts on Corbett ensue.
Stepping ahead from Edward I to the death of Edward III and beginning of the John of Gaunt regency, we come to Paul Harding's underrated "Sorrows of Brother Athelstan" series and its variation on the "disgraced cop is assigned to work in the baddest part of the inner city" trope, substituting for "cop" a friar doing penance and for "inner city" 14th century Southwark and The Stews, a rat-warren of pig-wallowing peasants, filthy taverns, rat-infested sewers and brutal guardsmen. Oh and, yes, plague. It's as gritty as any modern urban crime drama and much less hygienic. Part of Athelstan's duties is accompanying Sir John Cranston, the belching, always-drunk coroner of London, on his rounds to inspect the many, many corpses that turn up. The result is a refreshingly new sort of buddy-detective partnership, with Cranston and Athelstan alternating being the "Holmes" and the "Watson"; either is as likely to spot vital hidden clues as the other, and both do good investigative work by appearing to be incompetent or insignificant, throwing opponents off-guard.
The Nightingale Gallery is named after a corridor in a paranoid rich man's house, built of extra-creaky floorboards so that no one can cross it undetected, and where the first of several murder victims is found in a pretty good locked-room puzzle. Red Slayer opens on another locked room puzzle and unfolds into several interlocking mysteries involving grave-robbers and a group of people with a secret, being hunted down and killed one by one.
Among the Believers, by V.S. Naipaul
A Federal prosecutor, who knew Nusrat, gave me a little harrangue about the procedure while the case was going on. He was anxious for me to stay and see him handle his own case, which was against a teacher in government service who—anxious to emigrate—had given false information when he applied for a passport. As a government servant, the teacher should have had an NOC—a no-objection certificate—but the poor wretch, no doubt despairing of getting such a certificate, had hidden the fact that he was a government servant. The prosecutor said the case was going to come up in ten minutes. But with half an hour being the standard unit of delay in Pakistan, ten minutes meant a long time. Nusrat and I moved on. And indeed, when we looked in a while later, there was another case going on, and our prosecutor was still waiting.
V.S. Naipaul is a noble prize winner, born in Trinidad, brought into the British Empire, famous for such worthy novels as A House for Mr. Biswas, and presently in disgrace as a sexist apologist for Imperialism. In 2011 he infamously boasted that women couldn’t write decent fiction and that no woman was his equal as a writer (never mind offensiveness; it’s just bad karma to say shit like that). Among the Believers, written in 1981, does for/to muslim countries what he did for/to India in his vicious An Area of Darkness, a book that “cleverly” juxtaposed the dark-skinned racial features of India with the “darkness” of a third-world Hellhole. Because Naipaul is of West Indian descent himself and is a Big Important Author, he gets away with these things. On the other hand, the muslim world, especially in the days of Ayatollah Kohmeini, probably WAS such a Hellhole, and so watching my mutual enemies annoy each other has its moments.
Why did I read this? Bernard Lewis (see Islam in History, last month’s Bookpost) mentioned that Naipaul was nominated for the coveted “sentence of death” award by the Islamic Book Critics’ Association for speaking disparagingly of Islam, and so I was curious. I love to read offensive books, and sometimes I get what I deserve.
Naipaul wanders with palpable scorn through Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia, complaining about hotel conditions and making fun of the ignorant peasants, who don’t much like him either (go figure). He redeems himself most consistently when interviewing people one-on-one and reporting their statements to him without comment.
Frankenstein Takes the Cake, by Adam Rex
"The Best Man of Frankenstein Makes a Trip to the Buffet"
Let us see vhat we have...carrot soup (very nice)
London Broil, chocolate fountain, some kind of-a rice
Cheese and fruit---ah, that's cute! Little coffin-shaped cakes.
The chilled rum of the night, vhat a sweet punch it makes!
Hey, vhat's this? It's like toast. I vill try a small bite.
Most unusual. Pungent. Yet something's not right.
Madam, vhat's on this bread? Yes, yes, butter, uh-huh.
Also garlic, and--wait.
This is garlic bread?!
BLUH!!
I haff allergies, dolt! And I thought we vere clear--
I vas told it was safe to try everything here!
Vhat became of that list that I gave to your bosses?
I am not to haff garlic, wheat, peanuts or crosses!
I vill NOT 'calm down.' I vill go right on yelling--
Oooh boy, here we go. First the hives, then the svelling.
Oh vhere's my inhaler? It's not in my vest.
Vas it there vhen I dressed? Vhen I had my vest pressed?
Vhen I had my tuxedo repaired at the tailor?
HELLO! Um, has anyvhone theen muh inhaluh?
The sequel monster-kiddie poetry book to Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich (Bookpost, March 2013); not as good as the first one, but still cute. I preferred the running gag of Phantom of the Opera poems scanning to tunes the phantom had stuck in his head; in the second volume, we instead have Poe running gags featuring ravens delivering punchlines that rhyme with "Nevermore"; the Headless Horseman's blog where he complains about his pumpkin not holding up without refrigeration; Son of Dracula wetting the coffin; and the various members of the wedding party of Frankenstein. There's an ad for the Wicked Witch of the West to try the water diet and watch the excess pounds melt away, and first contact with extra-terrestrials in the form of alien email spam. You know...wholesome entertainment to read to your kids.
Joshua Judges Ruth
And that day Joshua took Makkedah, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and the king thereof he utterly destroyed, them, and all the souls that were therein; he let none remain: and he did to the king of Makkedah as he did unto the king of Jericho. Then Joshua passed from Makkedah, and all Israel with him, unto Libnah, and fought against Libnah: And the LORD delivered it also, and the king thereof, into the hand of Israel; and he smote it with the edge of the sword, and all the souls that were therein; he let none remain in it; but did unto the king thereof as he did unto the king of Jericho. And Joshua passed from Libnah, and all Israel with him, unto Lachish, and encamped against it, and fought against it: And the LORD delivered Lachish into the hand of Israel, which took it on the second day, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and all the souls that were therein, according to all that he had done to Libnah. Then Horam king of Gezer came up to help Lachish; and Joshua smote him and his people, until he had left him none remaining. And from Lachish Joshua passed unto Eglon, and all Israel with him; and they encamped against it, and fought against it: And they took it on that day, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and all the souls that were therein he utterly destroyed that day, according to all that he had done to Lachish. And Joshua went up from Eglon, and all Israel with him, unto Hebron; and they fought against it: And they took it, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and the king thereof, and all the cities thereof, and all the souls that were therein; he left none remaining, according to all that he had done to Eglon; but destroyed it utterly, and all the souls that were therein. And Joshua returned, and all Israel with him, to Debir; and fought against it: And he took it, and the king thereof, and all the cities thereof; and they smote them with the edge of the sword, and utterly destroyed all the souls that were therein; he left none remaining: as he had done to Hebron, so he did to Debir, and to the king thereof; as he had done also to Libnah, and to her king. So Joshua smote all the country of the hills, and of the south, and of the vale, and of the springs, and all their kings: he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the LORD God of Israel commanded. And Joshua smote them from Kadeshbarnea even unto Gaza, and all the country of Goshen, even unto Gibeon.
--Joshua 10:28-41
These are the first post-Moses books of the Old Testament, and I have a serious problem with them, for the same reasons I have issues about how the white settlers of North America treated the indigenous nations there. Joshua and Judges are essentially chronicles of genocide against Philistines, Amorites, and other peoples whose land the Jews came to take, because God. The word “Philistine” having an unsavory modern connotation, I had been of the impression that they were a greasy, uncultured people, and that Jerhico was a dilapidated rusty trailer park polluting the Jordan River, with a fence so flimsy that the wind from an orchestral brass section could topple it over. If so, these facts were neglected for inclusion in the Bible. We are told that the enemies of Judea were enemies merely for being there, and for gathering armies together when it became apparent that colonists were coming to take their land. I learned in my school choir that “Josh-a fit de battle ub Jericho and de walls come-a tumblin’ down” (the hymns actual spelling), but the later verses where Josh-a done slaughtered de unarmed peoples were left out. The bit quoted above, by which time they’ve passed from killing armies and walled towns to exterminating entire nations, is just the reductio ad absurdum of what comes before and after.
Similarly, Judges is one murder after another. A fat man stabbed in the belly. A nail secretly hammered into a king’s head. Samson, like many orators after him, killing thousands using only the jawbone of an ass. In fact, Samson, probably the most famous character in this particular section, comes across as fitting the modern definition of “philistine” more than any of the actual Philistines. He is a bully, showing off his muscles, starting fights, lighting foxes’ tails on fire and sending them to burn the Philistines’ crops for fun, probably giving noogies to nerds. He is also as stupid as he is strong. “Tell me the secret of your strength”, says Delilah to Samson. “Bind me with seven fresh bowstrings, and I will be as weak as a normal man”. And he lets her bind him, and he says, “I am as weak as a normal man”, and she says, “Samson, the Philistines are here”, and he says “Where?”, snapping the bowstrings and flexing his muscles. And after a few more rounds of this he still hasn’t figured what she’s up to, and confides the truth to her, that he can’t ever have a haircut or he’ll lose his strength, and she says, “That’s nice, dear, now why don’t you take a nap while I send for the barber”, and he’s all, “Duh, OK”. Seriously, look it up. Judges 15 and 16.
Ruth is a very short vignette that, like Esther (Bookpost, March 2013), involves a Jew marrying a non-Jew and somehow not being subject to stoning for impurity, and in fact, good coming from it. It’s apparently included mostly for contributing a step in the genealogy of David. The quote to remember is, Whither thou goest, I shall go; where you lodge, I shall lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I shall die, and there shall I be buried. They are the words of a slave rejecting the offer of freedom and vowing to continue to serve her mistress, and the patriarchs approve.
Ferdydurke, by Witold Gombrowicz
Sometimes a morbid dream will take us to a land where everything chokes us, corrupts and inhibits us because it pertains to the time of our youth and is therefore young, yet it has now become outworn, old and archaic, and there is no torment equal to the torment of such a dream, such a land. There is nothing more horrible than to delve into issues one has long outgrown, the old issues of youth and immaturity that have long since been pushed into a corner and settled...for example, the question of innocence. Oh, threefold wise are they who live solely by today’s concerns, the concerns of maturity and of the prime of life, leaving outdated problems to elderly aunts. Because making the choice as to the subject matter and the issues one will address is immensely important to the individual, just as it is to entire nations, and we so often see that a person who is mature and sagacious in his dealings with mature matters becomes, in the twinkling of an eye, painfully immature when confronted with matters that are too puerile or too far in the past—and incompatible with the spirit of the times and the rhythm of history. Truly, there is no easier way of inflicting naivete and infantilizing humanity than by presenting it with problems of this kind.
There’s a special kind of absurdist humor in Polish literature. I suspect it stems from centuries of having to cope with occupation by Huns, Vikings, Turks, Austrians, Russians and Germans. If you didn’t laugh and speak in riddles, you might get shot.
Ferdydurke is praised in Susan Sontag’s introduction as a bitterly funny satire. I didn’t find it ha-ha funny. More like, funny how all the stray dogs have disappeared since that Vietnamese restaurant opened. For one thing, the Swedish Chef word “Ferdydurke” appears nowhere in the body of the novel. For another thing, it reads like Alice in Wonderland for mature readers. It begins with the nebbishy everyman protagonist marched off by a professor-antagonist to a boarding school for children, as a student and treated like a child by teachers and students. It isn’t made clear whether he’s supposed to have been ensorceled (that’s my new favorite word from the Arabian Nights, derived from ‘sorcery’, it means transformed or enchanted) into the body of a child, or whether he’s put into a real school as an adult to humiliate him and they just do that in the environment of this book, or if it’s one of those totalitarian mindfucks like on The Prisoner where the secret police put you in a huge controlled environment and everyone else is part of the conspiracy to drive you mad or break you down. He’s just a grownup being treated like a child, and eventually he comes to accept that that’s who he is.
A main theme is topsy-turvyness. The protagonist makes a big thing about the innocence of children, and the children at the school happen to go out of their way to demonstrate their non-innocence, having the kind of graphic sexual conversations common among pre-adolescents who don’t really know the facts of life and who compare notes from various sources of varying accuracy. This may have been intended to be funny; I didn’t find it so. there are references to the big becoming small, the first being last, and people with assholes where their heads should be and the other way around (again, it’s written in a way that you could take it literally and envision a world where they really do have butts on their necks and fart when they think they’re talking (we all know people who are metaphorically like that, don’t we?), or interpret it as the protagonist’s mad hallucination, or as just a metaphor to begin with. It’s that kind of book. Recommended for absurdists.
Cryoburn, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Roic found himself briefly alone with the consul, who gazed in bemusement up the corridor after the short, retreating form. “Lord Vorkosigan is not exactly what I expected, when I was told the consulate should prepare for a visit from an Imperial Auditor.”
Roic, stoutly, didn’t snicker. “The nine Imperial Auditors are actually a pretty varied lot, once you meet them. Lord Auditor Vorthys, who’s also m’lady’s uncle, looks like a rumpled old engineering professor because that’s exactly what he is. There’s this crusty admiral, a retired diplomat, an industrialist...m’lord’s become more or less Gregor’s galactic affairs expert. The Emperor’s uncannily shrewd at matching his Auditors to their cases. Although I suppose we’ll have to hit a dud one of these days, he hasn’t sent us off-world on a fool’s errand yet.” Roic actually hoped for a dud case, someday. It could be restful.
“That’s reassuring.” Vorlynkin hesitated. “I think.”
Roic smiled crookedly at the codicil. “Yeah.”
This is the first Miles book I’ve read in over a decade. It’s been out since 2010, and I may have delayed reading it because I dreaded having to write about it in a Bookpost.
I mean, look at my username! I’ve been using Vor-based names online since I started blogging, and I even named my kid Miles, how’s that for fannish devotion for you? (Go ahead, point and laugh at me and call karma if he grows up to be an undersized hyperactive maniac. I deserve it. It’ll be worth it if I can borrow the scamp’s mercenary army now and then). With the exception of a few books sent to me by individuals who wanted me to bookpost about them, Cryoburn is maybe the only book that people have written to me, asking, “Hey, when are you going to write about that one, ‘Admiral’?” And I knew my muddled thoughts wouldn’t live up to the hype.
Of course I loved the book. I always do. Of course I give it my very highest recommendations, as long as you’ve read the other 14 in the series first. Not only are there plot spoilers, but there are character spoilers. Read Cryoburn out of order, and you won’t know why certain characters give each other a little look when a certain phrase is mentioned, or who that character is who is first seen as described by a stranger. Bujold is subtle, which is like fresh air in an age where readers are assumed to be a little dumb and where details are usually pounded into your brain with a hammer. Bujold is almost meant to be read out loud, and slowly, so that very funny lines (like that It could be restful in the quote above), which might be missed if read at my normal reading speed, will be noticed. The very last sentence of the main book, before the epilogue, went right through my head and out the other side before suddenly going off like a nerve disruptor.
Cryoburn is a stand-alone adventure complete with intergalactic intrigue, a bit of mystery, a bit of family drama, and a lot of exploration of the ethics and business snafus inherent in widespread cryogenic freezing of humans. The capitalist “paradise” of planet Kibou-daini, where corporations rule the government by being allowed to vote on behalf of their frozen clients, is only somewhat less problematic than the more extreme capitalist paradise of Jackson’s Whole. (another thing I admire about Bujold is that her books are an effective antidote to the crackpot libertarians, as they tend to depict pretty accurately what can be expected to happen in a completely unregulated pro-business environment, and it’s not anything nice). Ordinary people fall through the cracks, and encounter Miles Vorkosigan, and (as you can expect) their lives are never the same.
Bujold makes you laugh, makes you think, and breaks your heart, sometimes all at the same time. She remains the only author with three books on my “100 that rocked my world” list, and created the namesake for a member of my actual family AND my online social life. Very highest recommendations.
Better Off Without Em, by Chuck Thompson
The majority of southerners are not loudmouthed, uneducated, redneck fuckwits flying Confederate flags from the backs of their Kia and Mercedes lynch wagons. To what extent they were ever true many of these notions are comically outdated. Operative word “comically”, which is why I’ve employed them from time to time in this book, since few things are as hilarious to the northerner as a well-placed Snuffy Smith zinger.
What the majority of southerners are, and always have been, however, is willing to allow the most strident, mouth-breathing “patriotic” firebrands among them to remain in control of their society’s most powerful and influential positions. This is true whether they operate in the realms of religion, politics, business, education, or just basic day-to-day civic operations, like the hamlet nabobs in Laurens, South Carolina, who, knowing it’s wrong, still grant a business license to a guy who sells Klan shit from a shop in front of their picturesque little courthouse.
Just as it was southern zealots who pushed the country into the Civil War, it was southern zealots who, while the rest of the South turned its back, were allowed to construct and maintain the legal foundations of Jim Crow; who were allowed to turn the Scopes Monkey Trial into a humiliating circus; who were allowed to subvert federal laws protecting downtrodden laborers; who were allowed to circumvent Brown v. Board of Education and school desegregation by calling out the National Guard and building segregation “academies”; who were allowed to resist civil rights with dogs and water canons; who are still allowed to sidestep equitable school funding and proclaim without ridicule that a black president’s birth certificate is fake; who throw secessionist balls and insist that slavery had nothing whatever to do with the War That Did Not Have To Happen, and who swear that all of this was and is somehow being done in the name of a liberty to which they feel deprived due to their miserable lives of oppression and persecution beneath the Stars and Stripes.
I have mixed feelings about Thompson’s case for kicking the south out of the Union before they bring it down. My grandfather lived in the South most of his life and my father was born and raised in upper Florida. I enjoy many southern contributions to American culture: Bluegrass, country, zydeco and jazz music; Carolina and Cajun cuisine; whiskey from Kentucky and Tennessee; the Great Smoky Mountains; the writings of Faulkner, Wolfe and McCullers. My friends from the South are either entrenched liberals or apolitical, definitely anti-racist and anti-misogyny, and rarely even mention whatever religious affiliation they may have.
And yet, outside of music, literature and food and drink, the South is undeniably killing America with its toxic religion, toxic social hatred, toxic war on education, toxic economix and downright deadly politics. Take away the South, and both houses of Congress would have Democratic supermajorities, with a filibuster-proof Senate, and we could actually govern America instead of wasting oxygen on slut-shaming, birth certificate nonsense, and whether bigots and bullies should be free to do their thing if they claim to be devout bullies and bigots.
Thompson documents such massive southern Fails as the time—in 2010, not 1950—that the Biloxi School District purposely shut down the top performing school in the district (and 16th in the whole state), Nichols elementary, in spite of a nonprofit’s offer of a $1.5 million grant, just to make sure that white schools in the district would never be embarrassed by being outperformed by a black school again. The blatant politicization (always Republican, natch) of the churches. The nasty combination of war against the workers and the environment, and the deliberate luring of corporations to the area that want to treat their workers and natural resources as throwaways.
And, of course, the implications for the rest of America. The fact that the South’s pitiful wages and inadequate education ensure the growth of a new workforce—especially the people of color—who will never have the job skills or the pay prospects to be able to afford to pay the taxes to keep the country running, even as Southern states remain by far the most dependent on getting welfare from the taxes the rest of us outside the South pay.
The case that the North would benefit from the removal of the South from the Union is definitely inflammatory and controversial, and may be unworkable (in part because Thompson fails to note that we really WOULD need to build a border fence once the crazies became foreigners), but the way Thompson presents it, the conclusion is inescapable. Southern states need to kick out their existing leaders and—if they really are better than all those insolent Northerners say—replace them with leaders worthy of them. Or else get the fuck out of our nation before they drag the rest of us down with them. Very high recommendations.
The Human Stain, by Philip Roth
Later that day he was astonished to be called in by his successor, the new dean of faculty, to address the charge of racism brought against him by the two missing students, who turned out to be black, and who, though absent, had quickly learned of the locution in which he’d publicly raised the question of their absence. Coleman told the dean, “I was referring to their possibly ectoplasmic character. Isn’t that obvious? These two students had not attended a single class. That’s all I knew about them. I was using the word in its customary and primary meaning: ‘spook’ as a spectre or a ghost. I had no idea what color those students might be. I had known perhaps fifty years ago but had wholly forgotten that ‘spooks’ is an invidious term sometimes applied to blacks. Otherwise, since I am totally meticulous regarding student sensibilities, I would never have used that word. Consider the context: “Do they exist or are they spooks?” The charge of racism is spurious. It is preposterous. My colleagues know it is preposterous and my students know it is preposterous. The issue, the only issue, is the nonattendance of these two students and their flagrant and inexcusable neglect of work. What’s galling is that the charge is not just false—it is spectacularly false.” Having said altogether enough in his defense, considering the matter closed, he left for home.
Philip Roth is certainly an odd duck, and I like him. My introduction to Roth was Operation Shylock (Bookpost, May 2011), where he wrote a mindfuck of a book about himself being stalked by someone else pretending to be the real Philip Roth, with details about a Nazi war crimes trial that really did happen in Israel at about that time. In The Human Stain, set in 1998, the actual event that fuels part of the novel is the Clinton witch hunt and impeachment, contrasted and compared with the best take I’ve seen yet on the tired old “disgraced professor” trope.
Previous “disgraced professor” stories that come to mind right away are Mamet’s Oleander, Coetzee’s Disgrace (Bookpost, December 2011) and Franzen’s The Corrections (May 2012). All three of those appear to present the professor sympathetically, as a victim of “politically correct thought police” brought down after lifetimes of good service over stupid incidents with two sides to the story, and yet all three of them are in fact idiots at best, predators at worst, and definitely inappropriate for serious academia. All three contribute to their own removal from faculty at least as much by the way they respond to the investigations of alleged bad conduct as by the actions that lead to allegations themselves, and Roth’s Professor Silk is no exception. Silk, however, has the distinction of being unquestionably innocent of the charges, and doesn’t go around the bend until after his best friends have abandoned him out of self-interest and his wife has died suddenly, apparently of stress related to the scandal. Silk does in fact have a secret, but it’s not the one everybody thinks.
Roth shifts the narrative from time to time, focusing not only on Silk but on his two main antagonists, one a feminist professor and the other a misogynist Vietnam vet with PTSD. Some of it is a story we’ve heard many times before, but much of it is unique to Roth, who doesn’t claim to have the answers, but who certainly asks the right questions. Recommended.
Holy Disorders, by Edmund Crispin
”I know this stage,” put in Geoffrey. “You tell us you know who the murderer is, we ask you, and you won’t inform us, though there’s no reason in heaven or earth why you shouldn’t.”
“Of course there’s a reason why I shouldn’t.”
“What is it?”
“Because,” said Fen solemnly, “you did it yourself.”
“Oh, don’t be so daft.”
“All right, I know you didn’t. But seriously, there is a good reason why I shouldn’t. An all-important reason. You’ll know it finally.”
“Are you certain you know what you’re talking about?”
“Logically certain. I can’t think why I didn’t see it before. Unfortunately, there isn’t a shred of material proof...”
Crispin is a classic grandmaster of detective fiction, right up there with Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr. Holy Disorders is not the reason why. It’s Crispin’s second novel, coming after the deadpan The Case of the Gilded Fly (Bookpost, December 2012) and before later works in which Crispin was presumably better able to use humor in a murder setting. It is therefore Crispin’s first attempt at a ‘comic’ mystery, and the atmosphere fails by straddling adventure and silliness, with the characters and the situations coming off as two dimensional. It begins with a church organist on his way to a coastal village, who receives a series of comic death threats and improbable attacks.
More absurdism awaits at the village. Things happen that make no sense, and the reactions of the characters make no sense either. The story is set during WWII, and it turns out, one or more members of the cookie-cutter cast of characters is really spying for the Germans, and the only solution that fits the facts is that the spies are incompetent. The solution is...improbable.
The best parts are a series of vignettes that have little or nothing to do with the plot, such as the canon whose pet raven inspires Fen and Geoffrey to rattle off a series of Poe jokes, and the never-quite-explained diary of a bishop from days gone by who purports to be haunted by the ghost of a witch he had burned. Crispin just put them in because they were clever pieces of writing. I was annoyed because I spent an inordinate of time going over the bishop’s diary, thinking it must hold a clue to either the main murder or a crime within the crime like the story the old professor tells in The Case of the Gilded Fly, and was a wee bit frustrated to find that it didn’t tie into anything at all.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera
But first let us return to the bowler hat.
First, it was a vague reminder of a forgotten grandfather, the mayor of a small Bohemian town during the nineteenth century.
Second, it was a memento of her father. After the funeral her brother appropriated all their parents’ property, and she, refusing out of sovereign contempt to fight for her rights, announced sarcastically that she was taking the bowler hat as her sole inheritance.
Third, it was a prop for her love games with Tomas.
Fourth, it was a sign of her originality, which she consciously cultivated. She could not take much with her when she emigrated, and taking this bulky, impractical thing meant giving up other, more practical ones.
Fifth, now that she was abroad, the hat was a sentimental object. When she went to visit Tomas in Zurich, she took it along and had it on her head when he opened the hotel room door. But then something she had not reckoned with happened: the hat, no longer jaunty or sexy, turned into a monument to time past. They were both touched. They made love as they never had before. This was no occasion for obscene games. For this meeting was not a continuation of their erotic rendezvous, each of which had been an opportunity to think up some new little vice; it was a recapitulation of time, a hymn to their common past, a sentimental summary of an unsentimental story that was disappearing in the distance.
The bowler hat was a motif in the musical composition that was Sabina’s life. It returned again and again, each time with a different meaning, and all the meanings flowed through the bowler hat like water through a riverbed.
What I learned from this book is that EACH of us is a surgeon, and a photographer, and an artist, and a professor, and a member of the secret police. Does that answer your question?
This is an intensely philosophical novel, the main theme of which is that existence is—wait for it—unbearably light! Meaning, that everything happens only once, and is gone like a puff of smoke. As opposed to an alternate view in which everything that happens, happens over and over until the end of time, in which case it would be heavy.
There are characters—Tereza, Tomas, Franz and Sabina. Because their being is unbearably light, they take a detached, flighty view of things as they sleep with one another for fun and become alienated. A fifth character is the Prague Spring of 1968, which runs through the story the way the Clinton witch hunt of 1998 runs through Roth’s The Human Stain, above. But the main character is the human intellect, always seeking understanding and not finding it. I normally detest third-person books in which a first-person narrative occasionally appears as the author talking about writing, but Kundera managed to pull it off. Brief, very readable, and recommended just so you can confound the hipsters who want to feel smug about you not having read it.
The Crusades Through Arab eyes, by Amin Maalouf
In a Muslim world under constant attack, it is impossible to prevent the emergence of a sense of persecution, which among certain fanatics takes the form of a dangerous obsession. The Turk Mehmet Ali Agca, who tried to shoot the pope on 13 May 1981, had expressed himself in a letter in these terms: “I have decided to kill John Paul II, supreme commander of the crusades.” Beyond this individual act, it seems clear that the Arab East still sees the West as a natural enemy. Against that enemy, any hostile action—be it political, military, or based on oil, is considered no more than legitimate vengeance. And there can be no doubt that the schism between these two worlds dates from the Crusades, deeply felt by the Arabs, even today, as an act of rape.
Pretty much what the title says. The people most history books read by Christian Europeans cast as the “good guys” are the “bad guys” and the point of view given is that of Arabs, who according to Maalouf were hitherto living in peace and barely aware of the existence of Europe. I mean, aside from centuries of war with the Byzantine Empire in an effort to annex Asia Minor, that is. And the Arabian seizure of Persia, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, North Africa and most of Spain between 632 and 732, about three hundred and fifty years before the start of this history. Can you imagine invading a piece of land, and then 350 years later, acting as if you’ve owned it for eternity? And then getting snooty at “invaders” who come to try to retake it? I laughed so hard at the very idea, that I even stopped clamoring for a fence along the Mexican border for a while.
It’s good to look at a historical war from the point of view of the side you’re not expected to sympathize with. The colonization of America as seen by the Cherokee. The colonization of India as seen by India. The US Civil War as seen by—oh, wait. We already do that all the damn time. Star Wars as seen by Darth Va—oh, wait, we did that, too. 9/11 as seen by—whoa, steady there, we don’t want to go TOO far.
OK, I admit it. It’s controversial. But not very convincing and a little dull. Still, brief enough to be worth trying out for the sake of expanding horizons.
The Institutes of Justinian
The law of nature is the law instilled by nature in all creatures. It is not merely for mankind but for all creatures of the sky, earth and sea. From it comes intercourse between male and female, which we call marriage; also the bearing and bringing up of children. Observation shows that other animals also acknowledge its force.
Here I had a dilemma in my year of Medieval classics. The Code of Justinian is the most important non-theological book written between Marcus Aurelius and Machiavelli, and influenced legal systems from Turkey to Scotland. It’s also huge and too dull for anyone but serious legal scholars to appreciate. Did I loathe myself and my spare time enough to include it on my reading list? Fortunately, the Institutes were drawn up as a digest/companion/substitute for the entire legal code, and the Institutes are brief, readable and even enjoyable if you get yourself in the right mood.
It consists of four medium-length tracts concerning the laws of Persons, Property, Contracts and Torts/Crimes. I enjoyed it for the language, which steeps itself in magisterial dignity, and for the juxtaposition of legal concepts that remain almost identical to what they were in the sixth century (property ownership, inheritance) with things that look like ridiculous bigotry and idiotic superstitions today (slavery, church and state relations). Various cruel and unusual forms of capital punishment were decreed for, oh, everything. Sometimes comparison is made with the laws of Athens, the Roman Republic, and the pre-Byzantine Roman Empire as a way to justify the adoption of certain principles by Justinian. If the rich got away with cheating the poor in the past, then the law says they must always get away with cheating the poor, and that is called “precedent”.
Find all of my previous Bookposts here: http://admnaismith.livejournal.com/tag/bookposts