Month: July 2016

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Summer Reading: Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Odd Girl Out

Elizabeth Jane Howard, her husband Kingsley Amis, and a cat.

Elizabeth Jane Howard and  Kingsley Amis (her husband) and a cat!

Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923-2014), best known for the Cazalet Chronicle, a five-volume literary family saga, seems to be having a revival.

In January Hilary Mantel wrote in The Guardian that Howard’s books are underrated.  She especially likes The Long View.

But the real reason the books are underestimated – let’s be blunt – is that they are by a woman. Until very recently there was a category of books “by women, for women”. This category was unofficial, because indefensible. Alongside genre products with little chance of survival, it included works written with great skill but in a minor key, novels that dealt with private, not public, life. Such novels seldom try to startle or provoke the reader; on the contrary, though the narrative may unfold ingeniously, every art is employed to make the reader at ease within it.

Fortunately, Open Road Media has recently reissued all of Howard’s books as e-books.  And several bloggers have reviewed them, including  The Bookbinder’s Daughter, The Homebody, and Dovegreyreader.

I discovered Howard in the ’90s and started with the Cazalet Chronicle.  Over the years, I have tracked down the rest of her books and loved them. In the mood for some fast summer reading, I rummaged through my bookcase and recently picked Howard’s  Odd Girl Out (1972).

odd girl out howard 194348 Odd Girl Out is, as you might guess, the story of a triangle. It is  deftly written, bold, and curiously modern,  though it is not Howard’s best book.  It is, however, a compelling summer read, with the frankness and eroticism  of so many women’s novels of the late twentieth century.

It begins with an idyllic scene:  Anne and Edmund Cornhill, a sexy married couple, are eating breakfast in bed in their lovely country house.  They are discussing the imminent visit of Arabella, the daughter of Clara, Edmund’s stepmother during a very brief marriage to his  father.

Anne is very easygoing about the visit.

“Of course I don’t mind, my darling.  Of course I don’t.” She wore the top half of his pajamas and was putting cherry jam on a piece of toast.  She thought for a moment, and then added, “It will be lovely for me to have someone to talk to while you’re in London.”

This happy couple, who have fabulous sex every night, do not anticipate disruption.  Edmund works in London as an estate agent; Anne is a housewife who enjoys gardening, cooking, and Elizabeth Taylor’s novels.

Howard is a master of third-person point-of-view narrative and, in short segments, shows us perspectives of several characters.   Before we meet Arabella, we are introduced to her rich mother Clara and the latest in a string of husbands (this one is a prince), who are planning a Caribbean cruise and plotting to marry the problematic Arabella off to a rich old man; and Janet, a penniless housewife and mother of two whose actor husband, Harry, whom she no longer loves, has deserted her for another woman (Arabella).

We meet Arabella while she is having an abortion, lying on a “high, hard, humiliatingly uncomfortable table.” Afterwards, she spends the day in pain sitting on benches at the zoo and visiting her favorite gorilla:  she has no home, because she has walked out on Janet’s husband, Harry, and is waiting to  take the evening train to Henley, because the Cornhills are the only people left for her to visit. Ann and Edmund somehow mistake her for a child:  she has very good manners and demands very little.

But, yes, she wedges her way into their life.  She has been neglected by her rich mother and feels she has never been loved. She adores the atmosphere of the Cornhills’ home and and wants to be a part of it.   Edmund seduces her, but she has known it would happen and has bought a new outfit for the occasion, and afterwards she asks him happily if he loves her more and says that’s why she slept with him. Then, while he is away in Greece for weeks on business, she seduces Ann.  Of course Anne and Edmund have no idea Arabella is so promiscuous.

Arabella is the link between every character in the novel, and she wreaks havoc. She is not an entirely unsympathetic character:  she is simply so rich and has been brought up so badly she doesn’t know how to have relationships.   She stays with various people for short periods of time and then she leaves.   But the Cornhills are a real couple, and she wants what they have.

Howard can see all points of view. During their idyllic affair, Arabella and Ann have long conversations about whether women are nicer than men.  (The bisexual Arabella favors women.) Edmund is the least sympathetic character, self-centered and insensitive.  But Arabella’s unwitting effect on Janet, the wife of Harry, her  last boyfriend, turns out to be so dire that we can’t overlook it.

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A Few Words on Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown

Jewel in the crown scott 146746

One Monday in 1984, after going through two boxes of Kleenex in a single weekend and losing my voice, I stayed home from work and read  Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown, the first novel in The Raj Quartet.

Was it a great book, or was I simply swept away by the British TV series shown on  “Masterpiece Theater?”  Scott, who won the Booker Prize not for a volume of the tetralogy but for Staying On, a superb novel about an English couple who stay on in India after they retire, is most famous for The Raj Quartet, which has a much broader sweep.

I recently reread and loved The Jewel in the Crown.  It is so vast, so ambitious, told brilliantly in interwoven chapters of traditional narrative, interviews, a memoir, and  journals.

Set in 1942 in the city of Mayapore, The Jewel in the Crown delineates the escalation of tension between the British and Indians over the question of independence. The British temporize and justify their presence by the proximity of the Japanese and possibility of invasion; the Congress is sympathetic to Ghandi and his followers, who practice civil disobedience in their campaign for independence.  There is a huge cast of characters, both Indian and British.  The catalyst of the action in The Jewel in the Crown?  Attacks on two Englishwomen during riots after the Indian Congress votes to support Gandhi and independence.

I certainly do not have the background to discuss colonialism in India, but I was especially struck by the central role of two English women of different generations and contrasting attitudes toward India and the Raj, Miss Edwina Crane and Miss Daphne Manners.

In the opening chapter  Scott introduces us to cranky, eccentric Miss Edwina Crane, the Superintendent of the Chuch of England mission schools, who has spent most of her adult life educating Indian children. She loves India, and her work here has saved her from a drab life as a governess.  But she regards Gandhi’s civil disobedience as a betrayal of the Raj, and when she takes his picture down, the Indian ladies she has entertained  at tea every  Tuesday stop coming. Miss Crane entertains English soldiers instead.  She muses,

Reacting from her newly found distrust of the Mahatma and her disappointment in the behavior of the ladies (the kind of disappointment she had actually become no stranger to), she wondered whether her life might not have been better spent among her own people, persuading them to appreciate the qualities of Indians, instead of among Indians, attempting to prove that at least one Englishwoman admired and respected them.

jewel in the crown everyman 51UlGGLkxUL._SX305_BO1,204,203,200_Miss Crane’s hubris during a day of social unrest and  rioting–she insists on returning home from the village where she has spent the night at the house of an Indian teacher and his family, though the phone lines have been cut and the police advise her there has been violence–results in the murder of the Indian teacher who insists on accompanying her, when she simply can’t make herself put her foot on the accelerator and drive through the crowd.  After his death, Miss Crane’s entire view of every good deed she thought she had done in India is dust.  She commits suttee, as if she were the wife of the teacher.

The true heroine is Daphne Manners, a young orphaned English woman who is the niece of a former governor of the province.  After she is orphaned (her father and brother die in the war), she visits Lady Chatterjee (“Aunt Lili”), an Indian aristocrat, at MacGregor House in Mayapore.  Daphne becomes acquainted both with the English at the club (where Aunt Lili can’t go) and with Indians.  Daphne falls in love with india and with Hari Kumar, a handsome Indian raised in England who returned to live with his aunt in India after his father’s death.  He is working well below his potential as a reporter for an Indian paper.  Both Daphne and Hari are in India to stay; but Hari is not acknowledged as English in India because of his color. And they live on opposite sides of the river:  they are not actually supposed to socialize.  Aunt Lili tolerates their meetings but does not encourage them.   Daphne loves India; Hari hates it.

Then Daphne is gang-raped by a group of  Indian men the night after Congress votes for independence. Ronald Merrick, a racist policeman who wants to marry Daphne and is out to discredit Hari,  arrests Hari and six “political” men who obviously have nothing to do with the rape.  This appalling incident shatters Daphne. But surprisingly she decides to keep the child.  She and Hari have been lovers, and she hopes the child will be hers.

This is really a vast novel, complex, intelligent, vivid novel.  Here’s a brief example of the writing, in the opening paragraphs:

Imagine, then, a flat landscape, dark for the moment, but even so conveying to a girl running in the still deeper shadow cast by the wall of the Bibighar gardens an idea of immensity, of distance, such as years before Miss Crane had been conscious of standing where a lane ended and cultivation began: a different landscape but also in the alluvial plain between the mountains of the north and the plateau of the south.

It is a landscape which a few hours ago, between the rainfall and the short twilight, extracted colour from the spectrum of the setting sun and dyed every one of its own surfaces that could absorb light: the ochre walls of the houses in the old town (which are stained too with their bloody past and uneasy present); the moving water of the river and the still water of the tanks; the shiny stubble, the ploughed earth, of distant fields; the metal of the Grand Trunk road. In this landscape trees are sparse, except among the white bungalows of the civil lines. On the horizon there is a violet smudge of hill country.

Gorgeous writing and a great book!

You can read about the tetralogy in detail in Peter Green’s stunning 2013 article in The New Republic, “The Origins of Paul Scott’s Vast Masterpiece.”

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What Bloggers Are Reading: Main Street, Midnight in the Century, Getting It Right, & a Poem by Ellen Moody

main street lewis limited editions wood-collage-31

I read several blogs yesterday and added ten books to my TBR pile.  That cannot be good!

Let me share the joy.

1 Thomas at Hogglestock.com has posted pictures of his  beautiful Limited Editions Club copy of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, with illustrations by Grant Wood. It is signed by Wood.  I’m gobsmacked!

And Thomas is a fellow Lewis fan.  He writes,

Nine years before Virginia Woolf published A Room of One’s Own, Lewis’s heroine Carol Kennicott asked for a room of her own in Main Street. Even though Main Street is seen a classic take down of small town America, I think it should be read as well as an early feminist classic.

sinclair lewis main-street

The Penguin cover art by Grant Wood

If you haven’t read the Nobel Prize-winning Lewis, you’re in for a treat.  I often think of him as the American John Galsworthy, another Nobel Prize winner whose popular books are now relegated to the musty middlebrow arena.

I first read Main Street in an Images of Women in American Fiction class at a midwestern university.   I  identified with Carol Kennicott, a versatile young woman who  at “Blodgett College” (Lewis, a Minnesota native who got away, can’t help but mock Midwestern culture ) flirts with art, music, drama, and even playing basketball and wonders what her special talent will be.  She knows she will have to earn her living.  But how?  Almost all of us in the class were wondering the same thing.

But how she was to earn it, how she was to conquer the world—almost entirely for the world’s own good—she did not see. Most of the girls who were not betrothed meant to be teachers. Of these there were two sorts: careless young women who admitted that they intended to leave the “beastly classroom and grubby children” the minute they had a chance to marry; and studious, sometimes bulbous-browed and pop-eyed maidens who at class prayer-meetings requested God to “guide their feet along the paths of greatest usefulness.” Neither sort tempted Carol. The former seemed insincere (a favorite word of hers at this era). The earnest virgins were, she fancied, as likely to do harm as to do good by their faith in the value of parsing Caesar.

Carol goes to library school in Chicago and works in a public library in St. Paul, but her patrons don’t need her recommendations.  So she  falls in love  and marries the robust Dr. Will Kennicott, and moves to his small conservative hometown, Gopher Prairie. Her fantasies of importing culture to Gopher Prairie are sweet but absurd and Lewis gently satirizes her, but at the same time traces her growth and maturity.  She is one of my favorite American heroines.

And is Gopher Prairie as bad as it seems?  Yes and no.

serge midnight2 Karen at Kaggsysbookishramblings has almost convinced me to read the Soviet writer Victor Serge. (I have a roll of “Dostoevsky pills” handy –Necco wafers!– in case it proves too depressing.)    Midnight in the Century sounds fascinating, if grim.

Karen writes,

Victor Serge is fast becoming an author I turn to when I want a book that I know will be enthralling and beautifully written. After discovering him via his “Conquered City” in 2014, I was recently bowled over by “The Case of Comrade Tulayev”. And after spending some time in the rarefied world of (fictional) history (I’m reviewing a little out of order here), I felt that I needed to read something that dealt with the human side of the past and how it affected people on a smaller scale – so Serge seemed the ideal choice.

3 Melissa at The Bookbinder’s Daughter reviewed Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Getting It Right, which has been reissued by Open Road Media. And, guess what, I found my old paperbook copy with the tanned pages.  Those tanned pages are the reason for e-books! I love Howard’s witty women’s fiction and must reread something by her soon..

getting it right howard 1566243Meanwhile, Melissa begins her review of Getting It Right:

Gavin Lamb is a thirty-one year old virgin who still lives at home with his parents.  It’s not that he can’t afford to move out because he has a very lucrative career as a hairdresser in London.  But he doesn’t like change and moving out of his childhood home would be more change than he could possibly handle.  His doting and old-fashioned mother would also have a very hard time letting go of her son.

4 Ellen Moody has written a stunning poem, “Washed Away by Sorrow.” You can read it at Under the Sign of Sylvia.

Here is the first stanza.

Sorrow is not the same as sadness:
For me it’s been a great dissolver
It has washed away many emotions
that used to actuate me
however obscurely, however blindly
however misunderstood.

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Why We Love Goodreads: How an Outrageous Review Put a Book on My Wishlist!

Pile-of-Books woman readingGoodreads is brilliant, it is fun, it is silly, it is serious. It has 50 million members. Yup, 50 million readers who cannot be controlled by the establishment.  We rate and review books, join book groups, and read about new books.

Professional writers aren’t keen on it.  Why it matters to them I don’t know.  It annoys them that amateurs can scribble and post, while they spend hours honing their prose.  A posh male book reviewer–who and at what publication I don’t remember– referred to “the boredom of Goodreads.”  I noted it.    Another posh male reviewer sneered at “the plot summaries at Goodreads.”  Well, aren’t boredom and plot summaries a part of reviewing?  It is obvious that most of these consumer reviews are personal notes: it would be mad to post literary criticism at Goodreads!

Like everybody on Goodreads, I follow Lori, the founder of “The Next Best Read Book Club” and a reviewer of small press books. I also follow some authors.  Genre writers, who are used to establishing a fan base at conventions, make better use of Goodreads than literary writers.

On my wishlist, because of Goodreads.

On my wishlist, because of Goodreads.

But here’s the real reason we like it:  outrageousness!   The following outrageous Goodreads review  of Daniel Menaker’s  memoir, My Mistake, is far from flattering, but it makes me WANT to read the book.  This happens often.

Are you ready?  Here is Liz Waters’ review.

“My Mistake” by Daniel Menaker is an interesting book. It destroyed any illusions I had about ever having my fiction published. That was probably the last dream I had left, and Mr. Menaker took care of that. While I have often noticed that the new stars in Hollywood are often related to the old stars in Hollywood, I surely should have assumed that such connectivity applied also to the publishing world of New York. That I did not was my mistake.

Daniel Menaker was born into the erudite and exclusive world of publishing and landed a position checking facts for the New Yorker, a magazine I once adored. He did not try to hide the fact that family connections helped him get there. His elitist Swarthmore (et al) education helped him along as well, a fact that he doesn’t hesitate to remind the reader of every few pages. He went up ladders and jumped from one ladder to another painlessly in that world that so few get to know. Even fewer get to know it with the name-dropping intimacy Daniel Menaker enjoyed.

If this review reeks of crass envy, so be it. Of course any aspiring writer would be envious of Mr. Menaker’s life in writing. He tells of a world that none of us ordinary mortals will know. And, he makes it pretty daggone unattractive.

If you enjoy reading about how the other half lives, you will adore this book. I found the fact that it is history written in the present tense a little tedious, although I enjoyed the subject matter. In my opinion, the past is past and using the present tense doesn’t put me in the moment, it simply sets my teeth on edge. However it is certainly correct in the literary sense, or Mr. Menaker would never have chosen this particular form to tell his story. I didn’t like the book, but that doesn’t mean that you won’t like it. Read it yourself and decide.

Outrageous! This would never have been published anywhere!  Daniel Menaker, a memoirist, fiction writer, and book editor, started his career as a fact checker at The New Yorker. As executive editor-in-chief at Random House, he worked with Salman Rushdie, Elizabeth Strout, and Colum McCann (if Wikipedia is correct). It would never have occured to me to read My Mistake if one of my “authors” hadn’t rated it,  and if I had not read Water’s review. Now it’s on my wishlist, though first I have to read all the books on my TBR….

Addendum:  I learned about Menaker’s book because Larry Watson, a writer I follow,  gave it five stars at Goodreads.  Most of the Goodreads reviewers love it, but oddly  Waters made me want to read it because she was hilarious  about class envy.  Who hasn’t felt that?  Anyway I am very interested in reading about Menaker’s life in New York (I could never find my way around that city) and his publishing career.  If it’s good enough for Larry Watson…

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Two Extraordinary New Books: Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things& Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl

pile of books open_books

Oh, we bloggers.  We are so picky.  I have impeccable taste, the blogger says.   Well, don’t we all, you say (and it’s probably true). But we can be particular, because we  don’t get paid for our opinion.  If we got paid we might be kinder or unkinder, who knows?   If I don’t like a new book after 25 pages–or 50 tops, if I have been conned by a hyperbolically positive review–I toss it.  Why?  Because I’d rather be reading Trollope.  And by the way, the critic Laura Miller is leading a discussion of Trollope’s Barchester Towers this month at Slate.

Some extraordinary new books are being published, if we can only find them.    I serendipitously read two pitch-perfect novels this week:  Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things, winner of the 2016 Stella Prize in Australia (and published by Europa Editions), and Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl–well, I read everything by Tyler, and everyone is reading it, so I can’t say it’s really a discovery.

Wood and Tyler are  prominent writers of very different types, both well worth reading

Natural Way of Things Wood cover_9781609453626_683_600First, the must-read.  Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things is one of the strangest and most powerful novels I’ve read this year. Slightly reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, it describes and explores a misogynist society’s hatred of women’s sexuality.  Wood’s staccato style and weird, vibrant imagery keep this feminist novel well above the level of the popular formulaic dystopian novels.

The plot is bizarre and mysterious.   A group of young women wake up to find themselves drugged and imprisoned on an abandoned property in the Australian outback.  Why are they there?  What do they have in common?  Yolanda and Verla, the two strongest of the women, become silent friends.  Talking is rarely permitted except at night when they are alone and locked into the “shearer’s quarters,” kennel-like tiny rooms in a corrugated metal building.   Gradually they recognize one another from TV: each woman has been involved in a public sex scandal.

Yolanda, who at first thinks she’s in an asylum, hope they’ll increase the dose of drugs so she won’t have to deal with the horror.  When she is shoved into a room with Verla, who vaguely remembers being held down on a yellow bus and handcuffed, they make eye contact and Yolanda takes the initiative and speaks: “Have you got a cigarette?”  Verla is fascinated by the 19th-century ugly canvas smocks, calico blouses, and boots Yolanda wears.  Then she realizes she is wearing them, too.

Verla feels she recognizes Yolanda.

It seems to Verla she has known this girl once, long ago.  As if Verla had once owned or abandoned her, like a doll or a dog.  And here she is, returned, an actor on a stage, and Verla there too, both of them dressed in these strange prairie puppets’ clothes. It could all be hallucination.  But Verla knows it isn’t.  The doll opens her mouth to speak again and Verla says, “No,” at the same time as the doll-or-dog girl asks, “Know where we are?”

Humiliated, shorn of their hair, and clipped together by chains on a lead, they are forced to do pointless work–they build a road– and are frequently beaten by Boncer, the cruel keeper who breaks a woman’s jaw on the first day.  Teddy, who thinks he is here for a summer job, is slightly less cruel but he also despises them.  And Nancy, the only woman keeper, likes to play “nurse” and experiment with medications and hypodermic needles when the women get ill.

Much of the novel operates on the level of metaphor and symbol:  the heroines’ visions of white horses, kangaroos, brown trouts, the power of hunting, and a river that is “a wide rope of bronze silk twirling” are utterly enchanting and liberating.  When the power goes out and Verla discovers there is very little food left,  the tables are turned on the keepers.  They still have weapons but they are terrified:  Boncer, Teddy, and Nancy take drugs to cope.  But the women learn to survive,:  Yolanda becomes a hunter, Verla gathers mushrooms, and others gain new skills, too, as they get in touch with their animal nature.  The ending has a twist you won’t see coming.

Tyler vinegar girl ows_14661160223620Next, the light read. Pulitzer Prize-winning Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl, a retelling of The Taming of the Shrew, is clever, charming, entertaining, and  hilarious. This is the third in Hogarth Press’s Shakespeare Project, retellings of Shakespeare’s plays by “acclaimed and bestselling novelists of today.” Tyler, who is either the most underrated American writer working today (a woman at a party said) or the most overrated (a man at the same party), is always enchanting and manages to pull it off.

Twenty-nine-year-old Kate, an assistant at a preschool who often gets into trouble for saying exactly what she thinks, is odd but likable.  She wanted to be a botanist, but she still lives at home with her absent-minded scientist father and her popular teenage sister, Bunny, because  she was kicked out of college for calling a professor’s explanation of photosynthesis “half-assed.” She has never wanted to go back,  and though she would like another job, she knows she doesn’t interview well.  Kate is the kind of confused, isolated character we meet in all the Tyler books.

The plot is allusive to The Taming of the Shrew, but Tyler has made  it more subtle.  To cut to the chase, Kate’s father is trying to make a match between Kate and his Russian assistant, Pyotr, because Pyotr needs a green card.

Naturally, Kate doesn’t like the idea, but Pyotr is charming in an odd kind of way.  He woos her and tells her he likes her long hair and asks her how long she has grown it.

“Oh. Since eighth grade, maybe. I don’t know. I just couldn’t take any more of that Chatty Cathy act.”

“Chatty Cathy?”

“In the beauty parlor. Talk, talk, talk; those places are crawling with talk. The women there start going before they even sit down—talk about boyfriends, husbands, mothers-in-law. Roommates, jealous girlfriends. Feuds and misunderstandings and romances and divorces. How can they find so much to say? I could never think of anything, myself. I kept disappointing my beautician. Finally I went, ‘Shoot. I’ll just quit getting my hair cut.’ ”

Oh, it’s so charming!  I do know what she means.

It’s one delightful scene after another. Kate is very annoyed at first (and so are we), but Pyotr looks better and better, as Kate realizes she doesn’t have a chance with the guy she has a crush on at the preschool.  Kate, like her father, understands  statistical odds. She doesn’t have much of a life.   Her sister Bunny, who turns out to be the real feminist, can’t believe she is considering the deal.

And what will happen?  It is a surprise.

Well, I loved the book, thought I didn’t quite buy the epilogue.  But enough said!  So entertaining!

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Hanging on by a Thread: Bookstores, Translation, & Literary Links

Hanging-By-A-Thread

O tempora!  O mores!”–Cicero

It’s the end of the world as I know it, and I feel fine.–R.E.M.

We are hanging on by a thread, whether because of political anxiety, bad hairdos, global warming, or the uselessness of melatonin on hot nights. And we book junkies wonder what direction our lives will take if the printed word is censored in the new isolationist frenzy at home and abroad:  newspapers (dying or dead),  magazines (dying or dead), proofreading (dying or dead: I found a Latin error the other day in a great new novel),  foreign language study (budget cuts have eliminated many language departments), and communication via misspelled texts instead of letters on stationery (oh, long done!).

the swerve 51chpVixqKL._SX330_BO1,204,203,200_Well, thank God there’s a wide selection of backlisted and used books for sale online.  It is a vast improvement over having to travel hundreds of miles to find out-of-print books or obscure classics. I am not Poggio Bracciolini, the book scout who discovered the manuscript of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) in a German monastery (The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt).  Travel is expensive.

Nor do I romanticize independent bookstores, which are and always have been rich people’s hobbies. Some are good and some are bad, and there are few in these parts, but I hear they’re coming back.  Print book sales are up, they say, but since an e-book now costs almost as much as a paperback, isn’t that a deciding factor?  Well, they don’t admit that, but they are admitting to a coloring book boom.

Many years ago, an independent bookseller told me that if a book review ran in the newspaper before the book’s publication date, it hurt his business.  If the buyer couldn’t find it right away, he or she usually forgot about it and the bookseller lost a sale.  Now that we can “pre-order,” it must be even more disheartening.  I do quite often read reviews of books a week or month ahead of publication.

But not all is lost! We still have contact with the world.   Here are literary links to three articles about literature in translation. Let’s bring back language study, too.

1. Sam Jordison mentioned the rise of translated fiction in the UK when he asked The Guardian book club to choose a book in translation for  June.  (They chose The Master and Margarita.)

The fact that translated fiction now accounts for 7% of sales in the UK market is a welcome change. It feels like a long time since I wrote an article lamenting the lack of traction that foreign fiction had in the UK. If I were to attempt a similar provocation now, I might be tempted to suggest things are heating up too much. Every other book that publishers send me for review at the moment seems to be translated. On the one hand, this stream of books makes me worry about the thoughtless following of fashion and the many-limbed, no-headed mass of the mainstream publishing industry. On the other hand, it’s a heck of a lot better than books on mindfulness or beating titles like The Man Who Caught the Smugsmug Train to Cozylandia.

2. Words Without Borders recently published an interview with Lydia Davis on translation.  Her is an excerpt.

Q.  Does a translator need to dominate the culture of both the language she is translating to and the culture of the language she is translating from?

madame bovary lydia davis 515JL42NLCL._SX329_BO1,204,203,200_LD: By “dominate,” do you mean “master”? Or, even better: “have a deep and thorough understanding of it”? I want to clarify, because the attitude of a writer, including a translator, toward his or her own culture, as well as the culture of the original text, should be that of a seeker rather than a dominator. One is always seeking to understand. One gains some understanding, but one never understands completely—true of any culture in which one is working or living.

But to answer more simply: let’s assume that the translator has a good, deep understanding of her own culture. Then the question is how deep does her understanding of the other culture need to be? I found, in translating Madame Bovary, that a good deal of the text was understandable, and translatable, without that deeper knowledge of nineteenth-century French culture in a provincial town. Certain human behavior seems to be fairly universal, or at least common, to Western civilizations of the last couple of centuries. (I should beware of generalizations—there are always exceptions!) Other habits, customs, expressions are not as familiar to us in the twenty-first century. Still, translating the way I do, staying close to the original—even when it comes to expressions such as “to put straw in one’s boots” or “other dogs to beat” (yes? is that what Homais says to the beggar?)—rather than seeking equivalent expressions in English, the customs, habits, even modes of thinking of Flaubert’s time come through quite well. But I may translate accurately what is on Emma’s mantelpiece without knowing what her taste in decor “means”—and it would be good to know, even though that wouldn’t change my translation, in this case. For Flaubert, of course, what she had on her mantelpiece indicated her slavish following of current fashion, her striving for bourgeois gentility. His readers at the time would have known that. I use many reference books, learn what I can, write endnotes to help readers of the translation, but I do not feel I have to become a scholar of the culture Flaubert was writing about, or within. (Long answer! Third cup of coffee!)

3. At Words without Borders, Aaron Poochigian speculates in “Have We Lost The Lofty? Virgil’s Aeneid and the History of English Poetry” about changing literary tastes and new translations of the Aeneid.  Here is the opening paragraph.

aeneid dryden e2cde76d4ee8730e958f4bd11f157370.600x510x1In two months’ time Farrar, Straus and Giroux will release Seamus Heaney’s translation of Book Six of the Aeneid. In the same way as the epic was, in the words of his daughter Catherine Heaney, “a touchstone . . . to which he would return time and time again through his life,” so the often-translated epic itself has been a touchstone for changing literary and cultural tastes throughout the course of English literature. Translations of the Aeneid have, in fact, inaugurated major literary movements. Now seems a good time to review the history of this very Roman poem in English. Translations and re-translations are fascinating because they reveal the tastes (and limitations) of past ages and our own. Though poets of yore found in it a justification for British imperial ambition, the epic feels in places as if it were written with the express purpose of turning off contemporary readers—the hero’s great virtue is the Roman ideal of pietas (“piety, dutiful respect”), and the narrative is a kind of literary empire-building. We here in the twenty-first century want heroes with a rebellious spirit and abhor empires for their oppression of native peoples. No, the Aeneid’s politics are not for us.

By the way, I love Lydia Davis’s translation of Madame Bovary, and of course I read The Aeneid in Latin.

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Post-Apocalyptically Hot & John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up

brunner omnibus 412eODF6XqL._AC_UL320_SR210,320_It is post-apocalyptically hot outside.  Miles and miles of eerie, empty streets.   The  humidity frizzes our hair as we ride our bikes:  we all suddenly have 1972 perms. Wear your good clothes:  Sweated-up L. L. Bean gets more respect than  J. C. Penney.  Stop frequently for water.

Here are some temperatures to consider:  103 in Phoenix, AZ; 95 in Little Rock, AR; 97 in Dallas, TX; 91 in Washington, D.C.; 90 in Omaha, NE; 91 in Des Moines, IA;  90 in New York, NY.  (Put them in a column and it’s a poem.)

We had a heat wave in June;  now the heat is back.  Who is responsible for climate change?  What a long list: industrialists, politicians,  power companies, etc.,  going back to the 19th century.  We have all had the information about pollution and global warming since the ’60s, and yet we are all fossil fuel junkies. The car and truck emissions cause one-fifth of all U.S. emissions, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.  And I don’t know about you, but I have my air conditioner on.

A few good things:  the air is actually cleaner (though not very clean) since the Clean Air Act  in 1973. (There is a long way to go, but the EPA measures air emissions and at least there’s no lead in the air now!)  And Science magazine reported last week that  the Antarctic  hole in the ozone layer has begun to heal.  The scientists say it’s because of the Montreal protocol, an international agreement in 1987 that phased out the industrial production of ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).

john brunner the sheep look up 0345236122I recently read John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up , a 1972 dystopian classic.  In this terrifying post-modern literary SF novel,  pollution has rendered the U.S. practically a wasteland.  The poisoned air blows into Canada and sometimes across the ocean to Europe (sound familiar?);  everyone is sick; antibiotics no longer work; fleas and rat infestations in houses and apartment house can no longer be controlled because they are immune to poison; the acid rain in NY is so bad that you need to wear plastic outside; the water is poisoned (there are frequent “no-drink water” days); intelligence levels are dropping (lead in the air and water); a virus causes spontaneous abortion; the oceans are so polluted that people vacation in Colorado rather than California; and big businesses are profiting by selling air filters, water filters, etc.

There is a huge cast of characters, but at the center of the novel is Austin Train, a radical environmentalist who has gone undercover. The novel is not ABOUT him, but all the characters (journalists, nurses, policemen, factory workers, drop-outs, housewives, rich industrialists)  react to his ideas.  Most of them are distorted by his followers, known as Trainites. And there are dozens of men who call themselves Austin Train.  Many of them urge violence.

The narrative is broken up into fascinating short segments:  traditional narratives, radio broadcasts, news, announcements, poems, etc. One segment is called “Signs of the Times.  The signs are arranged in rectangles on the page, making it look like a flow chart,  but I can’t duplicate that here. Anyway, here are the signs:

THE BEACH NOT SAFE FOR SWIMMING

NOT DRINKING WATER

UNFIT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION

Now Wash Your Hands (Penalty for noncompliance $50)

FILTERMASK DISPENSER (Use product only once – maximum 1 hour)

OXYGEN (25 cents)

John Brunner

John Brunner

Some of the most horrifying incidents in The Sheep Look Up revolve around hunger.  An industry that manufactures food for international relief ships a poisoned batch to a country in Africa experiencing famine:  people who eat it go crazy and kill each other.  The same thing happens in the Honduras.  There are cover-ups.  But no one really knows what happened.  And then a “worm” imported from South America kills most of the food being grown in the U.S.

Austin Train knows there’s no hope for the U.S., but there might be for the planet.
Let us hope there’s hope for all of us!

A very gloomy book, but it does show us what the future could hold. A little too long, but a great novel!  You really don’t need any more dystopian novels after you’ve read this.

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Outsider in Amsterdam by Janwillem van de Wetering

outsider in amsterdam janwillem van de wetering 5161-dBqzeLSoho Crime has reissued the first novels in 24 of the small press’s most popular crime series.  This new introductory series is called “Passport to Crime.”

Full confession: I  started with the Dutch writer Janwillem van de Wetering’s  Outsider in Amsterdam (1975), because  I read  his autobiographical books on Zen, The Empty Mirror: Experiences in a Japanese Zen Monastery and A Glimpse of Nothingness: Experiences in an American Zen Community.  For a couple of months I  attempted (uncomfortably) to meditate 15 minutes a day while kneeling with my butt on a cushion.

Van Wetering (1931-2008) had a fascinating background.  Not only  was he once a Zen Buddhist monk, he was also a police officer in Amsterdam.

In the preface, he explains that he returned to Amsterdam after a long trip and received a letter saying he had to serve in the Army.  When he complained that he was over 30 and didn’t want to be a soldier,  a middle-aged woman behind a desk suggested he work as a policeman in his spare time instead.

He writes,

The idea staggered me.  I never knew that one can be a policeman in one’s spare time.

But one can, and for several years now I have been a member of Amsterdam’s Special Constabulary ….  I have been in a number of adventures in the inner city of the capital and some of them inspired me to write this story.

In Outsider in Amsterdam, the first volume in the Amsterdam Cops series, Detective-Adjutant Gripstra, a brilliant, overweight, middle-aged officer whose  years of experience help him unravel the most difficult puzzles, and Sergeant de Gier, his moody contemplative,  much stronger young partner,  investigate the suicide of Piet, the leader of a religious cult called the “Hindists.”

outsider in amsterdam hardcover van de wetering 46961But is it suicide?  They are not sure.  When they knock on the door of the house where Piet lived and ran his religious business, a tiny Papuan black man, Jan Karel Van Meteren,  insists on checking their ID (which never happens).  Van Meteren, a traffic cop who used to be a police officer in his own country,  got to know Piet and lived free in the house, along with four hippies who work in the Hindist restaurant in the house.   Van Meteren says he had nothing to do with the religion.

Gripstra and De Gier pass the restaurant on the first floor and pause to look at a statue in a niche of a female deity doing an erotic dance. The statue is important later.

Van de Wetering, who wrote these books in English, is a master of the convoluted plot and has a strong but straightforward style that does not occlude the story. He also adroitly captures the liberal mood of the 1970s and the mid-twentieth-century interest in Eastern religion, sex, and drugs. The police officers are both well-developed, unique characters who have compassion for the victims: they do not take life and death lightly

The description of the corpse is grisly, but the violence takes place offstage. Once Van Meteren leads them upstairs to Piet’s room

De Gier had a feeling that they had now penetrated into the secret part of the house; perhaps the silence of the corridor motivated the thought.  The music of the restaurant didn’t reach this lofty level.  Gripstra entered the room and sighed.  He saw the corpse and it moved, exactly as he had expected. It would be the draft, of course, all phenomena can be explained, but the slow ghastly movement chilled his spine.  De Gier had now come in as well and watched silently.  He noticed the small bare feet with their neat toes pointed at the floor.  His gaze wandered upward and recorded the protruding tongue and the wide open bulging blue eyes.  A small corpse that had belonged to a living man.  A little over five feet.  A thin man, well dressed in khaki trousers of good cloth, nicely ironed, and a freshly laundered striped shirt.  Some forty years old.  long thick dark red hair and a full mustache, hanging down at the corners by its own weight.  De Gier moved closer and looked a the corpse’s wristwatch.  He grunted.  A very expensive watch, worth a small fortune.  He couldn’t remember ever having seen a gold strap of such width and quality.

Van Meteren, who discovered the body, does not take it for granted that it was suicide. It could have been murder.  But there are so many suspects:  the residents of the house, especially Piet’s pregnant girlfriend, who threw a book at him which left a bruise on his head shortly before he died:  Piet’s wife, who may or may not have been in France at the time of the murder; the well-heeled businessmen who supported the venture; and Van Meteren himself.  And how did Piet make his money?  He was very rich.

Some of the odder scenes seem very  ’70s:  at one point Grjipstra, De Gier, and Van Meteren have a musical jam session in an empty room in Piet’s house.  (Amsterdam cops are different from Americans?  But what do I really know about musical cops?)

This book is well-written, and, like all the best mysteries, short.

I can’t wait to read the next book in the series.

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Superior Women’s Novels: Alice Adams’s Listening to Billie & Superior Women

alice adams 920x920

Alice Adams

In the late twentieth century, the writer Alice Adams was well-respected and widely reviewed. Her short stories were published in The New Yorker and she published 11 novels.  I read her books as they came out and loved them,  but regarded them as read-and-weed books.

Perhaps many of us undervalued Adams’ work.

How to evaluate Adams?  I recently reread two of her novels, Listening to Billie (1975) and Superior Women (1984).  They are not quite classics, but are superior women’s novels.  I clearly see the influence of Doris Lessing, Mary McCarthy, and Alison Lurie.  I admire her subtle interweaving of brilliant insights into the complex framework of her compelling narratives.

listening to billie alice adams 41odFTamZwLThese elegantly-written “middlebrow” novels are the kind of books reissued  by Virago and Persephone. Plot does not define them so much as intelligence, though the plots are absorbing.   In Listening to Billie, the heroine, Eliza, a poet, the daughter of a selfish, eccentric nonfiction writer, is a Billie Holiday fan. She marries her boyfriend, Evan, a professor, after she gets pregnant.  Evan turns out to be a very unhappy homosexual.  He stalks a student, the oblivious Reed Ashford, the most beautiful boy he has ever seen, and when he realizes he can never have him, he commits suicide.  Eliza does not allow her life to be ruined:  she moves to San Francisco and establishes a fulfilling life with her daughter. She works part- time as a secretary and begins to sell her poetry to magazines like the Atlantic.    She is a very kind character and a good friend:  I would love to know her.  Oddly, she meets Reed Ashford in San Francisco, and they are instantly attracted, two beautiful blondes.  They have an affair, which is perfect while it lasts.

I see the influence of Doris Lessing in the following passage.  Like Lessing’s heroines, Eliza asks herself questions about her identity during a sexual affair.  What will she wear to meet her lover tonight?

It was not simply the rare warm weather that had created a problem; after all, she had some cotton clothes. It was rather that she was not sure, that day, how to dress—who to be. She would go downtown, she thought; would perhaps buy something to wear tonight, but as what person would she go downtown, in what persona? As an upper-middle-class white woman in her thirties (Miriam’s friend), or as a young poet “in love”? And what could she possibly buy, what could she wear with Reed Ashford? For the moment, she settled on an old cotton dress in which she would be comfortable, if not invisible, which was what (and why?) she had at last understood that she would like to be today.

Listening to Billie is a well-crafted novel, but not a classic.

Alice Adams Superior Women 41xTsBHIaNLNor is Superior Women, thought it is a more satisfying novel. This riveting story of forty years in the lives of five women who meet at Radcliffe in 1943  is reminiscent of  Mary McCarthy’s The Group.  But  Adams, a graduate of Radcliffe, spends much more time detailing the joys of college.

The central character,Megan, the sexy daughter of a junk shop owner and a  car hop in California, falls in love with New England and her clique of close friends. She has sex with affable George Wharton, and  is shocked when he marries someone else.  It had not occurred to her that she was not good enough for a man with old money.  She  discovers that men love to make love to her but don’t want to marry her.  Fortunately, she begins to read Henry James,  moves to New York, where she has always wanted to live, and works first in publishing and then as a literary agent.  Much as she loves literature, however, work proves disappointing. After her publishing house gets gobbled up by a corporation,  she becomes a partner at aliterary  agency.  She works with  the writers and editors while the firm’s founder Barbara does the contracts.

One of their most important clients is a Gothic novelist .  Megan chats with her on the phone when she has a crisis.

And Jane Anne Johns, a Gothic novelist, calms down. She loves to talk to Megan. She is a very nice, now very old woman, with blue rinsed hair and a French château in Miami. She is given to diamonds and orchids and white mink coats. She is a great success. Her novels are consummate trash, a fact Megan tries not to think about; she is thankful that she does not have to read them, she only sells them, serialized, to magazines.

But the job is high-pressure:  constant parties Megan has to attend to schmooze with publishers, and readings to support her authors.  Eventually, she burns out.  She is happily in love with Henry Stuyvesant, a radical professor at the University of North Carolina, and sometimes wonders what will happen if they get married. Would she move to North Carolina?

As she thinks this, Megan is stricken with a vast distaste for the work that she does, in New York: all those nonbooks decked out for marketing. So much execrable prose. The sheer unreality of it all.

superior women adams knopf 9780394536323-usAll the idealism and brilliance in college, and this is where it goes.

But the other women in the group fare less well than Megan.   Lavinia, rich, beautiful, and prejudiced against Jews and blacks, is a fan of Proust who compares herself to Madame Guermantes.  Like Megan, she has trouble enticing men to fall in love with her.  She marries for money and position, and it turns out to be a terrible mistake:  she cannot have orgasms with her husband.  Her whole life centers on occasional affairs.  And she hates Megan.

The others also have problems.  Cathy, a devout Catholic, gets pregnant by a priest.   Peg also gets pregnant, dislikes her husband, and has five children and a nervous breakdown. The fifth woman, Janet, a Jew, is only Megan’s friend:  the others did not socialize with her.

But all of the women except Lavinia eventually make their way in the world.  And hatred is the only thing holding her back.

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The Fourth of July Reading List

abigailadams-portrait-letter

A portrait of Abigail Adams & a letter.

The Fourth of July is a wonderful holiday if you like fireworks, but it’s also a redneck holiday.  You know–guys in wifebeaters arrive with a case of  beer at dawn at the park to reserve the best place for viewing the fireworks.  For us it’s about grilling burgers, worrying about the salmonella factor of deviled eggs and potato salad,  swigging Arnold Palmers, eating cupcakes with red, white, and blue sprinkles, and twirling a few sparklers.

Why do we like it?  Well,  it is the sine qua non of  the Declaration of Independence and subsequent classics by Hawthorne,  Thoreau, Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway, Kay Boyle, Dawn Powell, Grace Paley, Ann Beattie, Philip Roth, and on and on and on…

Usually I prefer history books about the Romans or the Tudors, but I plan to read at least a few pages about the American Revolutionary War before the 4th. Here is  my list of

BOOKS TO READ ON INDEPENDENCE DAY!

Cokie Roberts Founding Mothers 51X5yUDIPhL._SX330_BO1,204,203,200_1. Cokie Roberts’s Founding Mothers:  The Women Who Raised Our Nation. I’ve always admired Roberts’ journalism on NPR, and this might be the book to kick off my interest in American women’s history. Goodreads says it’s the story of “women who fought the Revolution as valiantly as the men….. Drawing upon personal correspondence, private journals, and even favoured recipes, Roberts reveals the often surprising stories of these fascinating women, bringing to life the everyday trials and extraordinary triumphs of individuals like Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, Deborah Read Franklin, Eliza Pinckney, Catherine Littlefield Green, Esther DeBerdt Reed and Martha Washington–proving that without our exemplary women, the new country might have never survived.”

Esther Forbes Johnny_Tremain_cover)2. Esther Forbes’s Johnny Tremain, winner of the Newbery Award in 1944. This stunning historical novel, usually shelved in the children’s or Y.A. section, is really for all ages.  It is the story  of Johnny Tremain, young silversmith’s apprentice, who, after a crippling accident, can no longer work with silver.   He finds a job delivering a Whig newspaper, and gradually gets to know John Hancock and John and Samuel Adams.  Lots of history:  the Boston Tea Party, spying for the Sons of Liberty, and Paul Revere’s ride.  My husband and I love this book!

Paul Revere and the World he lived int 41uzp-ytBLL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_3.  Esther Forbes’s Paul Revere and the World He Lived in.   I’ve never actually seen this biography, but Forbes won the Pulitzer Prize for it in 1942.  If I ever find it…

LOA jacket template4  Abigail Adams Letters (Library of America).  The correspondence of Abigail Adams portrays”the American war on the home front,” says the LOA website.  Adams, the wife of John Adams, the second president of th U.S. , andthe mother of John Quincy Adams, the sixth President, wrote about politics, government, daily life, and travels to Europe as the First Lady.

american revolution writings from the loa 97818830119185 The American Revolution: Writings from the War of Independence 1775–1783 (Library of America).  The LOA description says:  “Drawn from letters, diaries, newspaper articles, public declarations, contemporary narratives, and private memoranda, The American Revolution brings together over 120 pieces by more than 70 participants and eyewitnesses to create a unique literary panorama of the War of Independence”.  And, by the way, it is on sale for $2.95 at the LOA website.

1776 mccullough 51ctyoISRHL._SX328_BO1,204,203,200_6 1776 by David McCullough, a historian who has won two Pulitzer Prizes, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. According to Goodreads, it is “the intensely human story of those who marched with General George Washington in the year of the Declaration of Independence – when the whole American cause was riding on their success, without which all hope for independence would have been dashed and the noble ideals of the Declaration would have amounted to little more than words on paper.”

alexander hamilton chernow 51P1c42DyLL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_7  Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow.  This biography was the inspiration for the musical “Hamilton.” According to Goodreads: “Few figures in American history have been more hotly debated or more grossly misunderstood than Alexander Hamilton. Chernow’s biography gives Hamilton his due and sets the record straight, deftly illustrating that the political and economic greatness of today’s America is the result of Hamilton’s countless sacrifices to champion ideas that were often wildly disputed during his time. ‘To repudiate his legacy,’ Chernow writes,’ is, in many ways, to repudiate the modern world.’  (If only the cover were less boring…)

radicalism of the american revolution wood 51xuCQy-2mL._SX313_BO1,204,203,200_8 The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood. Goodreads says this Pulitzer Prize-winning book is “a grand and immemsely readable synthesis of historical, political, cultural, and economic analysis, a prize-winning historian depicts much more than a break with England. He gives readers a revolution that transformed an almost feudal society into a democratic one, whose emerging realities sometimes baffled and disappointed its founding fathers.”

book of ages lepore 51A78ibbzjL._SX321_BO1,204,203,200_9 Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin by Jill Lepore.  Goodreads says,   “From one of our most accomplished and widely admired historians-a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin’s youngest sister, whose obscurity and poverty were matched only by her brother’s fame and wealth but who, like him, was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator.”

burr vidal 51Ch+y2dXUL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_10 Gore Vidal’s Burr.  You can’t go wrong with Gore Vidal, a masterly writer of historical fiction.  Goodreads says, “Burr is a portrait of perhaps the most complex and misunderstood of the Founding Fathers. In 1804, while serving as vice president, Aaron Burr fought a duel with his political nemesis, Alexander Hamilton, and killed him. In 1807, he was arrested, tried, and acquitted of treason. In 1833, Burr is newly married, an aging statesman considered a monster by many. Burr retains much of his political influence if not the respect of all. And he is determined to tell his own story. As his amanuensis, he chooses Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, a young New York City journalist, and together they explore both Burr’s past and the continuing political intrigues of the still young United States.”

Enjoy!  And let me know your own favorite Independence Day books.