Paging All Bookworms! discussion
PAGE COUNT TRACKING - 2017
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JamesF's 2017 Challenge
July 156. Articles on As You Like It [218 pages]
Not an actual book, but I downloaded journal articles from the Academic Search Premier database on each of the three plays I have just read and will be seeing next week. There were eleven on As You Like It:
Robert B. Bennett, "The Return of a Malcontent: Jacques and the Meaning of As You Like It" (Shakespeare Studies, 1976) -- this was an important article which is cited in many of the later articles; it argues that Jacques is the type of the traveller-melancholic, and that he is reformed during the course of the play. (interesting because Jacques is probably the Shakespearian character I most identify with)
Alice-Lyle Scoufos, "The Paradiso Terrestre and the Testing of Love in As You Like It" (Shakespeare Studies, 1981) -- links the forest to the garden of Eden myth in mediaeval thought (e.g. the Purgatorio) and considers that the subject is the "testing" of Orlando's love; points out the withered tree with the snake is an image of the tree of knowledge and that Orlando's temptation is an analogy with Adam's temptation in Genesis.
Mark Bracher, "Contrary Notions of Identity in As You Like It" (Studies in English Literature, 1984) -- a general reading of the play in terms of exclusive vs. inclusive ideas of identity, with a movement from one to the other in Arden.
Dale C. Priest, "Oratio and Negotium" (Studies in English Literature, 1988)
Daley A. Stuart, "The idea of hunting in As You Like It" (Shakespeare Studies, 1993) -- interesting information on a limited topic; the fugitives were starving and hunting for food, not hunting as a noble pastime.
Andrew Barnaby, "The political conscious of Shakespeare's As You Like It" (Studies in English Literature, 1996)
Clare R. Kinney, "Feigning female faining: Spenser, Lodge, Shakespeare and Rosalind" (Modern Philology, 1998) -- comparing the three versions of Rosalind in The Shephearde's Calendar, Rosalynde and As You Like It, in terms of the increasing female voice from absence through imitation of male discourse to independent discourse.
Chris Fitler and S.P. Cerasano, "Reading Orlando Historically: Vagrancy, Forest, and Vestry Values in Shakespeare's As You Like It" (Mediaeval and Renaissance Drama in England, 2011) -- puts the play in the context of the centralization of power and the Elizabethan poor laws; considers Shakespeare's likely audience and how they would react to various passages in the play. A more political reading than I would have thought the play would bear, but the arguments are persuasive.
Leah S. Marcus, "Anti-Conquest and As You Like It" (Shakespeare Studies, 2014) -- The Forest of Arden as an internal colony; not well-developped.
Jonathan Lear, "Rosalind's Pregnancy" (Raritan, 2015) -- interprets the play as Platonic metaphysics; too profound for me to follow.
Paul Joseph Zajac, "The Politics of Contentment: Passions, Pastoral, and Community in Shakespeare's As You Like It" (Studies in Philology, 2014) -- the meaning of "content" in contemporary political discourse.
July 557. Articles on A Midsummer Night's Dreami [303 pages]
Seventeen articles on A Midsummer Night's Dream, downloaded from Academic Search Premier; some of these are useful and some are bizarre specimens of academic critics trying to build up a resume to get tenure.
Leon Guilhamet, "A Midsummer Night's Dream as the Imitation of an Action" (Studies in English Literature, 1975) -- general view of the unity of the play as about "discordia concors".
David Ornerod, "A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Monster in the Labyrinth" (Shakespeare Studies, 1978) -- compares Bottom's transformation to Apuleius' Metamorphosis and through that to the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, especially as they were interpreted by Shakespeare's contemporaries as referring to lust or desire based on appearances as opposed to reason, which he considers the main theme of the play. I need to re-read Apuleus sometime in a modern unexpurgated version -- or in the original if I have time to renew my shaky Latin after I retire.
Anna Stegh Comati, "Intermedial Issues Inscribed in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream" (Todas as letras, 1980) -- despite (as one could imagine from the title) being overly concerned with modern critical theory and filled with jargon -- maybe someday I'll read a few books on critical theory and find out what these jargon terms actually mean (if anything) -- this did have some interesting insights into what Shakespeare was parodying in the "Pyramus and Thisbe" episodes.
Virgil Hotton, "A Midsummer Night's Dream: Tragedy in Comic Disguise" (Studies in English Literature, 1985) -- takes the content of the "Pyramus and Thisbe" play too seriously, and claims that there is a tragic undercurrent in the play -- because we realize in the end there are no fairies and we're stuck with only the Christian god. Interesting comments about why the fairies are better than the Christian god -- I admit I'd prefer to believe in fairies than god if I had to choose either of them -- but not what Shakespeare could have meant; "Pyramus and Thisbe" was a joke, and it's a comedy.
Hugh H. Richmond, "Shaping a Dream" (Shakespeare Studies, 1985) -- suggests a possible source for the romantic couples plot in Cinthio's Hecatomitthi
Clifford Davidson, "'What hempen home-spuns have we swagg'ring here?': Amateur actors in A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Coventry Civic Plays and Pageants" (Shakespeare Studies, 1987) -- describes the Coventry plays, which the young Shakespeare may well have seen, and makes comparisons to aspects of the "Pyramus and Thisbe" production
Allen Dunn, "The Indian Boy's Dream, Wherein Every Mother's Son Rehearses His Part" (Shakespeare Studies, 1988) -- one of the strangest articles I have read on Shakespeare; interprets the play as the dream of the Indian boy, and suggests that Shakespeare was trying to illustrate the Lacanian version of the Oedipus complex between the boy and Titania. Maybe I should read Lacan someday? or maybe not.
Homer Swander, "Editors vs A Text: The Scripted Geography of A Midsummer Night's Dream" (Studies in Philology, 1990) -- How an editorial change in the position of a comma from the reading of the Quartos and Folio changed the geography of the play, by putting Titania's bower into the woods rather than in (an offstage) fairyland, and how returning fairyland from the Athenian woods into an otherworldly kingdom might change the interpretation of the play.
Maurice Hunt, "The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the School of Night" (Essays in Literature, 1996) -- similarities between the two works, especially in the images of night, moonlight, and the planet Venus.
William W.E. Slights, "The Changeling in A Dream" (Studies in English Literature, 1998) -- Shakespeare leaves some questions ambiguous.
J.P. Conlon, "The Fey Beauty of A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Shakespearean Comedy in the Courtly Context" (Shakespeare Studies, 2004) -- starts out with the differences between court comedies and masques; there does not have to be a character representing Elizabeth in every play. It seems more concerned with other critics than with the play itself. It ends up by arguing the final happy ending is false because we (and Shakespeare's audience) know that Hippolyta later dies giving birth to Hippolytus who is ultimately killed by the bull from the sea, so the fairies are intended to be sinister, and the play is secretly arguing for the resumption of Midsummer Night bonfires to exorcize fairies, and this all has some connection with adopting the Gregorian calendar a hundred years later. Hard to follow.
Bruce Boehrer, "Economes of Desire in A Midsummer Night's Dream" (Shakespeare Studies, 2004) -- the relationships between Oberon, Titania, the Indian page, and Bottom, somewhat overinterpreted.
Christopher Scully, "Peter Quince's Parcell Players" (Journal of the Wooden O Symposium, 2005) -- an interesting article, not actually about this play; it uses the rehearsal from the "Pyramus and Thisbe" episode as a jumping off point to discuss the actor's preparations in the mediaeval mysteries, and particularly the "parcells" or actors' individual cue scripts, such as Flute obviously memorized his part from.
Michael Flachman, "Acting Shakespeare" (Journal of the Wooden O Symposium, 2011) -- a roundtable discussion between the director and some of the actors in a previous Utah Shakespeare Festival production of the play; I will be interested to see the differences with this year's production.
Stephanie Chamberlain, "The Law of the Father: Patriarchal Economy in A Midsummer Night's Dream" (Journal of the Wooden O Symposium, 2011) -- the role of parental authority in marriage contracts as part of the economic life of the time.
Jennifer Waldron, "'The eye of man hath not heard': Shakespeare, Synaesthesia, and Post-Reformation Phenomenology" (Criticism, 2012) -- overinterpretation of a joke spoken by Bottom as profound theology -- she's written a whole book of this.
Gitanjali Shahani, "The Spicèd Indian Air in Early Modern England" (Shakespeare Studies, 2014) -- the fairies and the Indian page in relation to contemporary discussions of native and exotic spices.
July 758. Articles on Romeo and Juliet [371 pages]
Twenty-two articles on Romeo and Juliet from Academic Search Premier:
Charles B. Lower, "Romeo and Juliet IV.v: A Stage Direction and Purposeful Comedy" (Shakespeare Studies, 1975) -- argues that the first Quarto stage direction is correct in having the mournings of the Capulets at the supposed death of Juliet all be spoken at the same time, to create a comic effect which reassures the audience that she is in fact not really dead.
James Black, "The Visual Artistry of Romeo and Juliet" (Studies in English Literature, 1975) -- discusses Shakespeare's use of visual stage effects in the play, specifically the repetition of the same visual scene with different and heightened emotional dialogue (the two balcony scenes, the two scenes in Friar Laurence's cell, the three scenes with Prince Escalus, etc.)
Gerry Brenner, "Shakespeare's Politically Ambitious Friar" (Shakespeare Studies, 1980) -- discusses the motivations of the characters, and especially of Friar Laurence; argues that the friar marries Romeo and Juliet, contrary to canon law (which forbid secret marriages and marriage of minors without parental consent), not in their best interests but because he wants credit for ending the feud; that for the same reason, he doesn't let Prince Escalus in on the plot, invents the dangerous plot with the drug instead of simply helping Juliet join Romeo in Mantua, and entrusts the message to Romeo to another friar rather than to Romeo's servant as agreed upon.
Marilyn L. Williamson, "Romeo and Death" (Shakespeare Studies, 1981) -- Draws attention to the facts that Romeo is constantly talking about his own death, even before meeting Juliet and on many subsequent occasions, consistently acts in reckless disregard of his own safety while talking about how he may be killed, has one near suicide attempt after his banishment, and has noticed the apothecary and speculated about his willingness to sell poison before the events of the play, to suggest that he is essentially suicidal and that the tragedy is at least in part due to his own character.
Jill L. Levenson, "The Definition of Love: Shakespeare's Phrasing in Romeo and Juliet" (Shakespeare Studies, 1982) -- analyzes the Petrarchan language of the play.
Giorgio Melchiori, "Peter, Balthasar, and Shakespeare's Art of Doubling" (Modern Language Review, 1983) -- considers Shakespeare's use of the servants as it differs in the two Quarto editions, and draws conclusions about the doubling of characters by the same actors.
Jill L. Levenson, "Romeo and Juliet before Shakespeare" (Studies in Philology, 1984) -- discusses the five major treatments of the Romeo and Juliet plot before Shakespeare and how Shakespeare has changed the story.
Jill Colaco, "The Window Scenes in Romeo and Juliet and Folk Songs of the Night Visit" (Studies in Philology, 1986) -- how the window or balcony scenes refer to the folk song and ballad traditions of the night visit and the aubade.
Nathaniel Wallace, "Cultural Tropology in Romeo and Juliet" (Studies in Philology, 1991) -- discusses the historical context of "Verona", or London, in the period of transition between feudal and capitalist relations; suggests that the Montagues and Capulets are more "merchant" houses than aristocrats; discusses the economic similes and metaphors in the play; interesting but weakened by the author's attempt to fit it into literary theories of "metonymy" vs. "metaphor".
Joan Ozark Holner, "'Myself condemned and myself excus'd'" Tragic Effect in Romeo and Juliet" (Studies in Philology, 1991) -- discusses the fight scenes and the character especially of Mercutio, and how Shakespeare modified the feud from his sources.
Leslie Thomson, "'With patient ears attend': Romeo and Juliet on the Elizabethan Stage" (Studies in Philology, 1992) -- considers the staging of the play, particularly the tomb scene, in relation to descriptive dialogue.
Robin Headlom Wells, "Neo-Petrarchan Kitsch in Romeo and Juliet" (Modern Language Review, 1993) -- discusses Shakespeare's use of Petrarchan clichés; most of the article is disagreeing with other critics; apparently considers the play is a parody of "heroic love", but not really clear.
Carolyn E. Brown, "Juliet's Taming of Romeo" (Studies in English Literature, 1996) -- falconry imagery in the balcony scene.
J. Karl Franson, "'Too soon marr'd': Juliet's age in Romeo and Juliet" (Papers on Language and Literature, 1996) -- points out that Juliet is below the legal age for marriage in England at that time, and that the average age for marriage was even higher than it is today. Argues that Shakespeare emphasizes her age by repeated numerological uses of 13 and 14.
Jerry Weinberger, "Pious Princes and Red-Hot Lovers: The Politics of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet" (Journal of Politics, 2003) -- discusses the political situation and the possible motivations of Friar Laurence.
Carole Schuyler, "A.C. Bradley's Concept of the Sublime in Romeo and Juliet" (Journal of the Wooden O Symposium, 2005) -- discusses the sublime as defined by Bradley in the context of the play; contrasts Juliet's "sublime" love with Romeo's.
James F. Wheeler, "'Wedded to Calamity': Considering Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet Against the Popular Conduct Literature of the Renaissance" (Journal of the Wooden O Symposium, 2005) -- discusses the chapbooks and other popular manuals of behavior and the light they shed on the play.
Simon J. Kyle, "'The Lightning Which Doth Cease to Be': The Human Experience of Time in Romeo and Juliet" (Journal of the Wooden O Symposium, 2005) -- discusses the experience of time in the play, and some of the contradictions in the chronology, in the light of the theory of time presented in Augustine's Confessions.
Barbara Mather Cobb, "'To Free-Town, Our Common Judgement Place': Commoners in Romeo and Juliet" (Journal of the Wooden O Symposium, 2010) -- discusses the attitudes of the non-noble characters (especially the servants, and the friar).
John Sullivan, "Lipsian Neostoicism and Shakespeare's Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet" (Journal of the Wooden O Symposium, 2011) -- the friar as a neo-Stoic philosopher.
Chikako D. Kumanots, "Time and Stage Directions in Quarto 1 and Quarto 2 of Romeo and Juliet" (Journal of the Wooden O Symposium, 2011) -- how the exits and entrances change the pace of the play; differences between the two quartos.
Kiki Lindell, "Putting the Fun Back in Funerals: Dealing/Dallying with Death in Romeo and Juliet" (Comparative Drama, 2016) -- a Shakespeare class in Sweden combines literary study of the play with a production; emphasizes the comic aspects of most of the play; a comedy with a tragic ending.
July 859. David Blixt, Origin of the Feud: Essays on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet [2012] 67 pages [Kindle]
This is a collection of essays -- actually more ideas about the play and its staging -- by someone who has acted and directed Shakespeare (and is currently associated with the Michigan Shakespeare Festival, which his wife directs), as well as writing the Star-cross'd Lovers series, which are a sort of "prequel" to the play. After reading so many academic articles full of jargon these essays in informal natural English by someone who actually has to think about how the play works came as a relief. The title essay is about the author's relation to the play and the research that lead to his novels, as well as explaining his take on the "backstory". The next essay explains that the play is "a Comedy that goes horribly wrong at the end" rather than a tragedy from the beginning (interestingly, the article I read previously by Kiki Lindell comes to the same conclusion -- and was also written from the perspective of someone who has directed the play.) The other essays deal with staging of particular scenes, and gave me some things to look for as I see the play at the Utah Shakespeare Festival next week. (I would love to see one of this author's productions.)
July 1460. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer [1934] 321 pages
One of the reading program challenges at the library this month is to read a "banned" book, and since I don't consider a book to be "banned" just because it's taken out of a kindergarten classroom or reclassified from children to young adult at some library (not that I approve of giving in to religious censorship in those ways) I went back to the famous banned novels of the thirties, which were actually prevented from being sold, to read this trilogy of Henry Miller's. I had to read the second volume (Tropic of Capricorn) for a Modernist Literature course in college a half-century ago -- it actually makes sense to start with that first, since it and the last book are "prequels" to this one -- but I had never read this first one, which was important not only as one of the books which brought down the U.S. censorship laws but as introducing a new style of writing, sort of a combination of Joyce's "stream of consciousness" with a light infusion of French surrealism. I like the style more than the content, which is the slightly fictionalized autobiography of a bohemian writer (Miller himself) during the depression; it was somewhat like Steinbeck's Cannery Row, but at least the characters in Steinbeck were authentic unemployed workers and not just refugees from the middle class work ethic (and there was more actual plot, if a less adventurous style). This volume is set in Paris; the second volume is set in the United States before he goes to France, and the third, Black Spring, is as far as I can tell a sort of novel in stories which overlaps with both. (I'll re-read the second and read the third volumes later this month.)
Miller is a writer who undoubtedly made more of an impact at the time he was writing than he does today, unless one keeps in mind the literary context of the time; the sex which was so shocking in the thirties is more a matter of explicit language than of really explicit description, by comparison to many novels of the sixties for instance, and today one is more likely to be shocked by the male chauvinist posing than by the sex itself. It's interesting to compare this novel to the description of the same period by one of Miller's women friends, Anais Nin, in her Cities of the Interior series of novels. I liked Nin's writing better. Miller's style has become so common today that one almost forgets that it was something new and fresh when Miller wrote this. From a viewpoint of literary history it is a must read, though.
July 1561. Honoré de Balzac, Une fille d'Eve [1842] 125 pages
One of the most interesting short novels of the Comédie humaine, this is the story of two girls raised by a religious mother, who marry as soon as possible to escape. One marries a rich banker, who is corrupt and tyrannical; the other marries a count. The story is largely about the count's wife and her love affair with a political journalist. The novel depicts the political situation in the first years after the July Revolution (i.e. under Louis-Philippe).
July 1862. Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn [1939] 348 pages
I understand now why this was the book my professor selected back in college rather than the more important (historically) Tropic of Cancer, because it is a better book; there is more content as opposed to simply style. The first fifty pages or so about his work for the "Cosmodemonic Telegraph Agency" is both funny and insightful, and there are good passages throughout the book. The chronology is even more confused than in the first book. It drags occasionally if you're not into his metaphysical daydreams, although they are partly redeemed by the surrealist language, sometimes almost DADA-like. Unlike the former book, this is set in the United States, mainly Brooklyn. Otherwise, the same comments as in my review of Tropic of Cancer.
July 20
63. Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air [2016] 228 pages
This is the August read for my local library book discussion, and one of the September reads for the state library discussion. It is a memoir by a neurosurgeon who was diagnosed with lung cancer. There is a lot of good discussion about what it means to be a physician, and how doctors ought to approach the idea of death; there are a few anecdotes about particular patients and operations. The author is obviously intelligent and well-read in literature and philosophy as well as medicine. There is no discussion of the economic aspects of healthcare; the emphasis is on the care itself, and it's just assumed to be provided. The later chapters deal with the author's experience as a patient and coming to grips with the knowledge that he will die soon. (He lived about two years after the diagnosis.) The almost obligatory religious testimony is kept to a few paragraphs at one place in the book; the overall tone is secular. A worthwhile book that I probably would not have chosen on my own, and it only took one evening to read.
July 2164. Honoré de Balzac, La femme abandonnée [1833] 68 pages [Kindle, in French]
A short but interesting novella from the Comédie humaine, this deals with the love affair of the vicomtesse de Beauséant, whose back story is told in Père Goriot, and a younger man, Gaston de Nueil. The story shows the effects of the double standard of morality on a sensitive woman and on the man as well. One of the earlier works of Balzac.
July 22
65. Henry Miller, Black Spring [1936] 208 pages
Written between the two "Tropics", but considered as the third volume of the "trilogy", this is less a novel than a collection of related stories (although there isn't much narrative connection in the novels, either.) All are in the first person and clearly about Miller; some are set during his time in America and others in France, and there are discrepencies in details of events and names. Some are mostly autobiography, while one or two are so surrealist that they could be taken for dreams rather than life (in particular, "In the Night Life . . ."). The style is similar to Tropic of Capricorn and shows a clear development over Tropic of Cancer. Parts of this drag, but there are also very well-written passages which are unforgettable (in the story I mentioned, the episode of the "Coney Island of the Mind".)
July 2566. Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi [1941] 244 pages
Another challenge at the library was to read a travel book about somewhere you'd like to visit, and since I was already reading Henry Miller I decided to read his memoir of his trip to Greece, in 1939. The background is World War II, which broke out just after he arrived. Of course, this is not really a typical travel book; it is a subjective account of his reactions to Greece. The style is recognizable from his fiction, although there is less purely surrealist writing and more factual matter (and no sex). He visited among other places Epidaurus, the ruins of Mykenai and Tiryns, Sparta, and Knossos and Phaistos in Crete, though most of his time he was based in Athens; the places are less important than the people, from his friend the writer Lawrence Durrell and his wife Nancy who invited him to their home on Corfu, to the poet Seferis (Georgios Seferiades) who later (1963) won the Nobel Prize in Literature, to the mysterious Katsimbalis who is the "Colossus" of the title.
July 2967. Honoré de Balzac, La Grenadière [1832] 28 pages [Kindle, in French]
67a. Honoré de Balzac, Le message [1833] 17 pages [Kindle, in French]
I counted these two together because they are so short. La Grenadière is a description of an English noblewoman who dies apparently in disgrace, and her two sons; Le message is the story of a young man who has to report the death of a traveling companion to the man's mistress. They are among the earliest stories of the Comédie humaine.
July 3168. Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories [1992] 278 pages
Nella Larsen was one of the most important writers of the "Harlem Renaissance" of the 1920s. Apart from three rather forgettable short stories, this book contains Larsen's two published novels. (A third later novel was rejected by the publishers and is apparently lost.) One of my Goodreads groups is reading Passing next month; I will review that separately in the Norton Critical edition. This review will focus on her other, somewhat less known novel, Quicksand. The protagonist, Helga Crane, is like Larsen herself of mixed Danish and Black ancestry; her Black father abandoned her white mother and she and her white second husband were embarrassed by Helga's existence. In addition to the objective rejection of Helga as a mixed raced child, a theme which was already common in Black literature, Larsen shows the psychology of the girl herself, her internalization of her parents' dislike, such that she can not identify for very long with either race. She despises the educated Black elite to which she initially belongs for trying to imitate white behaviors, but also despises the Blacks who are uneducated as vulgar.
Reading this a month or so after reading Colin Whitehead's Underground Railroad, my first impression was that there was a similarity in the way the two books were structured; although Whitehead's book is deliberately chronologically ambiguous, showing many different periods as simultaneous, while Larsen's novel deals realistically with a definite period of history (the 1920's), both use geography to explore the different aspects of Black experience.
Quicksand begins with Helga as a teacher in a Black "Uplift" school, which reminded me of Whitehead's "Charleston", a "liberal" institution which attempts to "raise" Blacks to a higher but still subordinate place in white dominated society. (The model was probably the Tuskeegee Institute, where Larsen worked as a nurse.) Rebelling against that, she moves to Harlem, where Blacks live apart with a certain freedom to be Black, but bounded by poverty and the discrimination of the surrounding white city. This is the episode which most resembles Larsen's own life at the time it was written; it is largely a criticism of the Black "elite" of the time, who try to imitate white society and look down on the "lower class" Blacks as vulgar and uneducated. Her third move is to Copenhagen, where she is more or less exhibited as an exotic; not considered as inferior but definitely as different, and her uniqueness is still defined by her racial identity rather than her personal identity. (Larsen herself had spent some time living with her white relatives in Denmark.) She than moves back to the United States, and ends up in a small Southern town where she tries to fit into the mold of uneducated Black society (and traditional domestic and religious life) as the wife of a preacher. (This episode does not match with anything in Larsen's life.) With each move she becomes more deeply trapped, hence the title. I found the love theme and the Alabama ending as somewhat poorly motivated, and not of the same quality as the earlier chapters. Taken as a whole, however, this was a very good novel and one I would highly recommend.
August 269. Honoré de Balzac, Gobseck [1830] 51 pages [Kindle, in French]
The story of the usurer Gobseck; this is one of the subplots of Père Goriot seen from another angle.
August 670. Nella Larsen, Passing (Norton Critical ed.) [1929/Norton ed. 2007] 546 pages
The second and better known of her two published novels, Larsen's Passing chronicles the relationship of two childhood acquaintances, Irene and Clare, who are both light-skinned Black women. Irene is married to a dark-skinned Black doctor, Brian, has two children, and identifies openly as Black, although she occasionally "passes" to go to an all-white restaurant or event; Clare is permanently "passing" and is married to a white racist, John Bellew, who is unaware of her "true" race. The novel is presented through the viewpoint of Irene, and despite the title is not as much about Clare in my opinion as about Irene.
The novel is set in the same milieu as the Harlem episode in Quicksand; the "elite" "middle-class" professional Black society of the Harlem Renaissance, the milieu that Larsen lived in at the time as a librarian and the wife of a physics professor -- in a way, Passing is an amplification of the critique of that society which she began in the earlier novel. Irene is characterized as someone who is very concerned with "security", with fitting in with the society she is familiar with and fulfilling the standard roles approved of in that group. In Clare's "passing" (and in Gertrude's marriage to a white man who knows she is Black) Larsen brings in other choices available to some Blacks (or mixed race persons) beyond those in the first novel. Irene, although she prides herself as being loyal to her "race", unlike Clare, is determined to imitate the behaviors of the white middle class; while Clare, from a working class background, has by passing and marrying a very rich white man leapfrogged into a higher social group. Ironically, Clare associates with Irene's darker Black servants, which Irene disapproves of, and seeks out the Black culture which Irene has turned her back on. As one critic puts it, Irene is the one who is really "passing" by thinking the way the white middle class does, while Clare is consciously manipulating the white society. Actually, we learn very little definite about Clare, because the Clare we see is mediated through Irene, who is afraid to see Clare in herself. She disapproves of Clare decieving John, but she manipulates Brian and prevents him from living the life he wants to live. It is clear that Irene is a "puritan", or better a "Victorian" -- to choose between two anachronistic labels; even in her relationship to her husband she is repressed, disapproving of passion and sexuality, not as immoral but as vulgar, not respectable. She eventually suspects Clare and Brian of having an affair -- as much of what Irene believes, it is ambiguous whether this is reality or not: Irene projects her fears onto Clare in so many ways, her fear of not being respectable enough, of being "found out" as Black (culturally), of sexuality and so forth.
I read this in a Norton critical edition, which, after the text of the novel (82 pages) has another 460+ pages of additional material. This begins with a section of contemporary reviews of the novel and background articles from the press of that time on passing and miscegenation (including a section on the Rhinelander case, which is mentioned in passing in Passing), then has three very interesting sections of selections from earlier novels and stories (the first section is about "the tragic mulatta", the second about "passing", and the third has literature from the Harlem Renaissance), and ends up with 16 critical articles in chronological order from the 1970s to the time this edition was published. The first reviews of the book were critical of it because they all took it as being the story of Clare and her "passing", in the tradition of the earlier novels included here, and they found the way in which Clare was seen through Irene as getting in the way of the "real" story. The modern articles mostly see the novel as being the story of Irene, with Clare and her "passing" as mainly a "foil" for eliciting Irene's character, which is the way I read the novel as well. However, some of them I think go to far in denying that the novel is about race at all, and seeing it as about class and gender (which in part it is) and about "homoeroticism" (which I don't really see in the text) -- of course it is essentially about race, whatever else it is also about. Usually I avoid critical articles about modern novels (as opposed to older classics where they can fill in background I'm not familiar with) but in this case many of the older criticisms enlarged my understanding of the book. The newer criticisms were jargon-filled postmodernist/feminist/psychoanalytic academic criticism of the type I get nothing from, mainly concerned with locating the book in terms of trendy literary theories rather than the context of the time it was written.
The questions which this book (and her previous novel as well) inspire without pretending to answer (and which were issues discussed in the Harlem Renaissance in general) are still relevant: what, really, is race? Is it something "real" and intrinsic, or is it just a social construction? How does "passing" relate to this? Are mixed race people actually Black, as the theory of hypo-descent (the "one drop" theory) insists, are they a separate "race", or part Black part white, or at some point are they just "white"? Is imitating educated white culture a means of "uplift", or is it a betrayal of some authentic Black culture? Is the culture of jazz and sensualism as presented by writers like Van Vechten the authentic Black culture, or is it a stereotype of "primitivism" derived from white opinions of Blacks? Is integration with white society the goal, or a form of assimilation to be resisted? How is race related to questions of class and gender? These questions are not only relevant to Afro-Americans but posed in terms of "négritude" are debated in African literature, and perhaps in all the literature of the colonial and neocolonial countries. I read this book for a discussion group on Goodreads, and there is certainly much in this book to discuss.
August 1071. Honoré de Balzac, Autre étude de femme [1839-1842] 39 pages [Kindle, in French]
This odd short work brings together characters from many of the novels and novellas of the Comédie humaine at a salon, where they tell parts of their stories and converse about various subjects, including the differences of women in different classes in France. The different parts were written separately and originally intended for other works, so Balzac here is just making use of his fragments which ultimately didn't fit elsewhere. It doesn't particularly work.
August 1272. Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing [2016] 305 pages
Written by an author who was born in Ghana and grew up in the American South, this novel narrates the family saga of the descendants of two half sisters, one of whom (Effia) was "married" to the British governor, James Collins, and remained in Ghana, and the other (Esi) who was taken as a slave to America. The novel begins in 1778 (the author is very clear in indicating the ages of each character when they are first introduced, which together with a few dates allows the reader to figure out the chronology of each chapter to within a few years.) Each line is represented by six more generations, who are presented in alternating chapters at one important time of their lives. The novel covers both the history of Ghana, with the struggle against the British and the warfare between the tribes, and the experience of American Blacks in slavery and under Jim Crow, up to the independence of Ghana and about the present time in the United States (if my calculations are right, the final chapter is set in the late eighties or early nineties).
[SPOILER ALERT: The line which stayed in Ghana is represented by Effia's son, Quey Collins, who becomes the chief of his Fante village and marries into the Asante royal family; his son, James Richard Collins, who becomes a small farmer in an Asante village; his daughter Abena Collins; her daughter, Akua Collins; Akua's son, Yaw Agyekum, who becomes a professor and ultimately moves to the United States; and his daughter Marjorie, who is a college student. The American line is represented by Esi's daughter, Ness Stockham, a slave on a Mississippi cotton plantation; her son Kojo Freeman, who escapes to the North as a child and lives as a free Black; their son H, kidnapped back to the South, who after the Civil War becomes a coal miner in Pratt City, near Birmingham, Alabama; his daughter Willie Black, who goes north and lives in Harlem, married to a light-skinned Black who leaves her and becomes white (interestingly, after my just having read Larsen's novel Passing, she doesn't say he "passed", she says he "is a white man" but "used to be colored") and becomes very religious; her son Carson, called "Sonny", who grows up in Harlem, works for the NAACP for a time, then becomes disillusioned and gets involved in drugs during the 1960's; and his son Marcus Clifton, who is a student at Stanford.]
I thought the novel was very well-done, considering how much it covers; I didn't find the rapid changes between episodes difficult to follow, although some reviewers on Amazon had problems with that. The novel doesn't tone down the horrors of slavery and warfare in either country, but also doesn't describe them in such detail that it was difficult to read. I read this for a discussion group on Goodreads, and there should be much in this book to discuss, especially since the same group has recently discussed Whitehead's Underground Railroad and (in a different subgroup) Larsen's Passing.
August 1773. Honoré de Balzac, La femme de trente ans [1842] 220 pages [in French]
A novel which, like the previous story, was re-assembled out of various stories which had been published separately, this begins as a realistic novel about a marriage between a young girl, Julie, and a colonel in Napoleon's army, Victor d'Aiglemont, whom she initially idolizes but whom she soon realizes is a complete nullity. There is also a suggestion of sexual incompatibility, which of course Balzac could not describe openly at the time he was writing, so some of the motivations are obscure. They have a daughter, Hélène. The novel then goes on to two affairs, one, apparently never consummated, with an English lord trained in medicine and interned by Napoleon for the duration of the war with England, named Arthur Grenville, who dies in a melodramatic fashion, and one with a friend of her husband, Charles de Vandenesse, which results in a son, who dies in a melodramatic scene. As the novel progresses, it becomes less and less realistic, until in the story of Hélène it becomes totally Romantic with a murderer who becomes a pirate, completely unbelievable coincidences à la Dickens, and the death scene of the aged Julie in her youngest daughter's house. There are passing references to other characters in the Comédie humaine, but this is not a novel which adds anything new to the overall conception. La femme de trente ans is one of Balzac's least successful and least well-written books, but it does have some interesting psychological commentary. In the order I am reading them (I'm not sure where I got the list, which is different from the one given on Wikipedia) this is the last novel before Père Goriot, so I'm where I started out and a little over two thirds of the way through the Scènes de la vie privée.
August 1974. Honoré de Balzac, Le colonel Chabert [1832] 81 pages [in French]
A cavalry commander in Napoleon's army is reported dead, but actually survives with a severe head injury. Meanwhile, his property is sold and his wife remarries. The novel, narrated by the lawyer Derville (who appears in other novels as well) is about his attempt to get back his identity, and among other things is a satire on the legal system of the time.
August 2275. Hamid Mohsin, Exit West [2017] 231 pages
This was not what I expected; I expected a fairly realistic narrative about immigration and the treatment of immigrants in Europe and America, with the "doors", which I had heard of, functioning sort of the same way as the trains in Colin Whitehead's Underground Railroad as a device for getting the protagonists into different situations without wasting time on the details of transportation. Instead, although it did present the lives of the protagonists in their own country and in exile in a fairly realistic way, the "doors" seemed to be essential to the story, as a kind of science fiction story about what would happen if borders could no longer be maintained in any practical way. I'm not sure whether the "doors" were intended as a "magical realist" device or whether they were somehow technological; I have read some actual science fiction stories about teleportation devices and the social consequences they might bring, but not focused so much on the question of refugees.
The novel is essentially a "love story", but with an ending which defies our expectations of the genre. It is about two young people, a man named Saeed and a woman named Nadia, who live in an unspecified Islamic country (the author is from Pakistan, but the country in the story seems to be more like the Middle East or perhaps Afghanistan), a country in which the extreme religious elements are winning against a less religious, more "Westernized" but disorganized majority and a government with little popular support. They meet at a University class and fall in love. Eventually, as the violence increases, they leave the country for the "West" through a "door", living first in a refugee camp in Greece, later as squatters in London, and eventually in a neighborhood in California. In each chapter there is a vignette of other people living in other places, which I expected would somehow combine with the main story but never did.
Two aspects of the novel impressed me. The first was that life in their own country was not treated as "exotic" or "primitive", but the author went out of his way to show the similarities with the "West", the stores full of consumer electronic devices, the dependence on cell phones (and the idea that a repressive government could isolate people so easily by cutting off transmission, now that land phones and other means of communication have become rare -- something to think about), and the typical student/young worker lifestyle. The other was that the nativists were not treated as simple ignorant villains, as just "haters", but that he showed that they were motivated by a real fear for their families, their religion and their culture (I think this is the message of the "vignettes" I mentioned)-- something easy to forget today when we tend to lump together all those who for example voted for Donald Trump with his anti-immigrant rhetoric with the neo-fascists and Klansmen of the alt.right. It's easy to say that they are trying to hold on to priveleges which are illegitimate in a historical sense, to advantages which derive from the domination of the European countries and later the United States over the colonial world -- and Mohsin certainly doesn't deny that -- but they also believe, and rightly within the context of their individual lives within their own communities, that they have earned those advantages through their own work. While our sympathies -- and outside the novel, our political attitudes and activities -- certainly need to be with the refugees and their humane treatment and incorporation into the host culture, and against anti-immigrant and racial violence, we need to understand both sides of the question, and think about how to approach the anxieties of those within (and often at the bottom of) the host cultures. As long as we accept that there is a limited amount of economic resources, and accept that the top two or three percent have a right to most of it, then any redistribution of the rest means one group losing whatever another group wins, and racial, ethnic and religious conflict is inescapable. The author offers no solutions beyond understanding each other, which is a beginning but not enough.
Mohsin is perhaps better known for an earlier novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which I previously had no desire to read, but after reading this I think perhaps that novel also is not what I assumed it was, so I may add it to my reading list for the future. I read this one for an online discussion group next month.
August 2476. Nevil Shute, A Town Like Alice [1950] 279 pages
This is one of the books for the Utah State Library book discussion for next month; I've seen it on several lists of modern classics, though I'm not sure why -- it's not a bad book but neither is it a very significant one. It's actually two historical novels with a common heroine; the first is a novel based on a real occurrence (though transposed from Sumatra to Malaya for some reason) about a group of interned British women who are marched around the country by the Japanese army, which doesn't know what to do with them, and the second takes the leader of that group to Australia after the war, where it shows her building up a small provincial town into a more developed one. The strong female character may be somewhat unusual for a book published in 1950, and both parts of the novel are interesting. The style is somewhat awkward, since the supposed narrator, a British solicitor who apparently gets his information from the heroine's letters, is rather too well informed about her personal life to be realistic, and the book would have been better with an "omniscient" narrator since that is what it actually is. The novel portrays, probably accurately, the British/Australian attitudes of the time towards race, without any comment, which might make it difficult for some readers; and the ease with which everything works out in her plans in Australia without any opposition is also somewhat unrealistic and seems a bit like "libertarian" propaganda.
[This review is based on an undated hard cover edition published by Amereon House. Note that the low overall rating on Amazon.com is from combining one star reviews for an abridged children's Kindle edition with reviews for other editions. When will Amazon wake up and give customers a way to distinguish reviews of the work as such, the expression (specific translation or edition) and the item (my copy had blah blah blah wrong with or it didn't arrive, etc.)?]
August 2777. Honoré de Balzac, Le contrat de mariage [1835] 142 pages [in French, Kindle]
The marriage between an elegant but weak young man, Paul de Manerville, and the spoiled daughter of a Spanish nobleman, Natalie Evangélista, is undermined from the beginning by a fight over the contract of marriage and the financial arrangements, which causes the mother-in-law to seek revenge against Paul. The plot is difficult to understand because so much depends on the intricacies of early nineteenth century law concerning marriages and inheritances. The impact is also weakened by a long monologue at the beginning and a long letter at the end by Henry de Marsay, an otherwise minor character in the novel (although one of the more important figures in the Comédie humaine as a whole) which present a misogynistic view of marriage and much irrelevant material about politics.
August 3078. Honoré de Balzac, La messe de l’athée [1836] 29 pages [Kindle, in French]
A portrait of a physician, based on a friend of Balzac, and certainly one of the fairest portrayals of an atheist by a Christian writer. The story is very slight – the narrator, Bianchon, a medical student, notices the famous surgeon and atheist Despleins attending a mass; he investigates and finds that Despleins has in fact founded the mass. He questions him about it, and Despleins explains that he was helped when he was himself a poor medical student by a water porter who was a believing Catholic, but by the time Despleins had established himself as a surgeon and become wealthy enough to do something for his benefactor in turn, the man had died, and the only way Despleins had to pay the moral debt was by establishing a mass for his soul.
Sept. 1 79. Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad [1967] 550 pages [in Spanish]
I read this forty five years ago in a college literature class (in translation) but it didn't really make much of an impression on me, perhaps because that class introduced me for the first time to so many different styles when I had never been exposed to anything except Romantic/Realist straightforward narratives in high school or my own reading. Since then I have realized in reading so many other books from Latin America and the Caribbean, and even Africa and Asia, that this book was almost as much of a watershed as Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake were earlier on, and I have intended for a long time to re-read it, this time in Spanish.
The novel narrates the history of a fictional town named Macondo in an unspecified country which is obviously based on Colombia, summarizing the history of Latin America through six generations of one family, los Buendía. It begins with the founding of the town in a description which suggests an origin myth, with the town originally isolated from all outside contact, then gradually brought into the larger world by visits of "gypsies"; after these introductory chapters, the first half of the novel is concerned largely with a series of 32 civil wars between the conservative government and liberal rebels, begun and lost by Colonel Aurelio Buendía, while the main focus of the second half is the activities of an American banana company, culminating in a strike and a massacre. (These events are based on real events in Colombian history, but treated in a distorted, mythologizing way). The exit of the banana company is followed by a continuous rain of more than Biblical proportions (four years, eleven months and two days) and a subsequent hot, drying wind which between them turn the town into a ghost town. In the end, a great hurricane destroys the town completely and it is forgotten by outsiders.
This summary of objective events does not give a real feeling for what the novel is about, however. The importance of the book lies in the style, which critics have named "magical realism", and which has been used since in so many novels from Latin America and elsewhere that it is often described as the prevailing style of "post-colonial" literature ("post-colonial" being the academic euphemism for neo-colonial). If not the first, this is at least the most complete and paradigmatic example. I am not an expert in literature, much less literary theory, but my impression is that "magic realism" is basicly the use of magical or other impossible or highly improbable episodes within the context of an essentially realistic work, not for their own sake as in a fantasy but as an allegorical or symbolic commentary on the underlying realistic text; sort of similar in concept to surrealism but with seemingly objective episodes rather than subjective dreams or meaningless word combinations. Other aspects of the novel which may be more unique to García Márquez are a cyclical structure which reminds me of the famous quotation about those who do not understand history being condemned to repeat it (with Marx's addition, first as tragedy, then as farce) and an almost post-modernist concern with self-reference (the novel is supposedly based on the encoded manuscript prophecies of the gypsy Melquiades, which are finally deciphered at the very moment the town is destroyed, and throughout there are references to language which is not understood or is misunderstood.)
I am sure that much of what is in this novel went over my head, although the edition I read (the Catedra edicion edited by Jacques Joset) had a lengthy introduction and interpretive notes on almost every page. It was a fun book to read, though, just on the literal level, although my inadequate Spanish made it a somewhat slow read for me.
Sept. 580. A.C. Bradley, Shakespearian Tragedy [1904] 432 pages
After a couple introductory chapters, this book deals in depth with the four major tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. Shakespearian Tragedy is one of the most important works of Shakespeare criticism; influenced by Swinburne, Dowden and Moulton, this is a work that later critics all had to deal with, whether agreeing with Bradley or polemicizing against his views. I found his ideas and arguments useful in thinking about the plays, which I have read several times and seen performed.
Sept. 981. Jodi Picoult, Small great things [2016] 470 pages
The premise of Small great things is that a Black nurse is ordered not to touch the baby of a white supremacist; the baby dies and the nurse is accused of murder. The major characters, who alternate perspectives in separate chapters, are the nurse, Ruth, the white supremacist father, Turk, and Ruth's white lawyer, Kennedy.
This is the September book for my library's book club. It was much better than I had expected. First, Picoult is a much better writer than I associate with "bestselling" novels. More importantly, she tackles important issues; unlike most white authors who write about race, she doesn't write about "safe" topics like slavery or Jim Crow in the South which invite the response, "Things were horrible back then (or down there). Of course it's all different here and now", but deals with contemporary racism, in both its obvious overt form of white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and in the "liberal" "color-blind" form which is much more prevalent (she calls them "active" and "passive"). For that I'm willing to pass over a number of faults.
At one point she has the main character, the nurse Ruth, think about her white lawyer, "What Kennedy said to all those strangers, it's been the narrative of my life, the outline inside of which I have lived. But I could have screamed it from the rooftops, and it wouldn't have done any good. For the jurors to hear it, it had to be said by one of their own." Unfortunately, this is true; there were dozens of narratives by ex-slaves before the Civil War, but it was only when a white woman wrote an account so watered down and sentimental that it's main character's name has become a byword for Blacks who sell out the struggle, that the abolitionist cause, at least in literary form, reached a mass audience of whites; there were hundreds of novels and books by Blacks about Jim Crow, but the books that reached a white mass audience and are read even today are To Kill A Mockingbird and Black Like Me. This is what justifies, I think, a white author for writing this sort of novel, about something a white person can't directly experience in the same way.
In some respects, the book is basically liberal (the white lawyer's name is Kennedy -- she claims it's for Robert, not John) but Picoult in the end (I think the characters here are expressing her own opinion) does criticize simply working within the system and say that it's necessary to change the system. She never really identifies "the system", however, and while she seems to give a good account of racism (not being Black, I can't say whether she gets it all right, but it sounds like what I've read by Black authors and heard from Blacks) she never connects race with class or economics; at times she suggests that racism is somehow natural to whites, and she never suggests how to overcome it except by changing individual consciences. Her account of "passive" racism is good but she mixes it with the "liberal guilt" idea that somehow all whites are racists just by having privileges that Blacks don't -- which pretty much empties the idea of "racism" of all real content.
The novel avoids most of the usual clichés, with two major exceptions. One is Ruth's mother, the "beloved domestic", which is found in so many white novels about slavery and Jim Crow, although at least in this book she's not seen just from the perspective of the white family; the other is the ending, which I won't describe to avoid "spoilers", but which is one of the oldest clichés, one which I have read over and over again in some of my reading this year, and which is just too "pat" an ending -- her "bestseller" persona coming out, maybe.
I'm looking forward to discussing this in a group that has also read Americanah, Kitchen House and The Underground Railroad, and I'm sure the parts about the White Power Movement will provoke discussion after Trump and Charlottesville.
Sept.1782. Charles H. Kahn, Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans: A Brief History [2001] 193 pages
I assumed from the title that this would be a book about Pythagoras and his immediate circle, but that was basically covered only in the first two chapters; most of the book is about the Pythagorean and neo-Pythagorean tradition after the time of Pythagoras, through Philolaus and Archytas, the Pythagorean influence on Plato and the Old Academy, the Roman/Alexandrian revival of Pythagoreanism after centuries of neglect, the neo-Pythagoreans and their influence on neo-Platonism, and the revival of Pythagorean ideas in the Renaissance -- the book ends with Kepler. It's very much a summary; the last comprehensive account of Pythagoreanism, as the author points out, was Chaignet's two volume French history published in 1873, although he bases this book largely on the twentieth century works of E.R. Dodds, Walter Burkert, Carl Huffman and Leonid Zhmud. Burkert and Huffman read the work before publication, although Kahn occasionally disagrees with their interpretations. Philosophy is emphasized; there was less about the mathematical and musical traditions than I was hoping for, but also less emphasis on the occult practices than I expected.
Sept. 1883. Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II [1985; tr. 2017] 331 pages
This was Alexievich's first book. After many rejections by the censorship, it was first published, in somewhat censored form, in the Soviet Union during Gorbachev's glasnost, in 1985 in Russian and in 1987 in English translation. (That translation, by Progress Publishers, is still available in a Penguin edition in the UK.) This is a new translation made since she won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature last year; some of the censored passages and other new material have been added. The book is an oral history; it is made up of interviews with women who participated in the war, with only brief introductions by the author. The style will not be unfamiliar to anyone who has read any of her other books (when she won the Nobel, the only two that were available new on Amazon were Zinky Boys (1990) and Voices from Chernobyl (1997)).
As she points out, World War II saw the first large scale use of women in the military in many countries; about 225,000 in England, 450-500,000 in the US, and about 500,000 in Germany, for example. (Her figures) Most, apart from partisan units, were nurses, administrative aids, or in other noncombatant positions. In the Soviet Union, on the other hand, there were almost 1,000,000 and they fought in nearly every capacity. This book contains interviews from women who were infantry soldiers, sappers and miners, snipers, a few pilots, only one sailor (the navy was more resistant to women than the other branches), as well as partisans and underground resistance leaders in occupied areas, although a large percentage were in more traditional female occupations, such as doctors (yes, this was already a traditional occupation for women in the USSR by the 1940s), nurses or other medical personnel, cooks, laundry workers, etc.
Alexievich says that there was a difference between the men's war and the women's war, meaning in the perceptions of men and women, with the men more concerned with the questions of what happened historically -- battles, advances and retreats, what units fought where under what commanders -- while the women were more concerned with the actual conditions, the small events, the human side of the war. However, I think that this is more a matter of what she was looking for and the questions she asked in her interviews; essentially she left out the interviews that she thought talked too much about the historical aspects, on the grounds that they were too influenced by the husbands or others present at the interviews. Nevertheless, it is true that this book presents a very different aspect of the war than one would find in a standard history book. The censors objected that it was not "heroic" enough, in other words was not useful for propaganda purposes, and the author seems to admit that, but I think there is much real heroism here, precisely in the hardships they suffered. It's by no means, as one censor claimed, an All Quiet on the [Eastern] Front -- these women knew what they were fighting for: defending their country against a brutal Nazi invasion. While the book does occasionally document an individual Russian violation of the "laws of war", a prisoner killed, some revenge killings and rapes when the army got to Germany (although not on the scale claimed by Western propaganda, based on Nazi sources), there was actually a good deal of restraint, given that the Germans systematically exterminated whole villages, burning the houses to the ground often with the women and children inside, and that most of these soldiers both male and female had lost many or most of their families, not just in combat but in the war against the civilian population. Comparing the behavior of Russian to American troops as some "historians" do is irrelevant; the United States was never invaded, never had millions of civilian deaths or atrocities on our own soil. World War II was a different war entirely for the US and the USSR (and to some extent the rest of the world) -- for us it was a war of soldiers and sailors "over there", not of the entire people at home. (Even in fiction, it is easy to tell a WWII novel written by an American from one written by a European; and even in European novels written and set in the 1980's the war is more present than in American novels from the period of the war itself, or the 1950's.)
The book is about personal experiences, not about politics; but it is impossible to read it without realizing that, in the author's words, "without 1937, there would have been no 1941" -- that is, without Stalin's purges and show trials, which eliminated the most competent and experienced military leaders and disorganized the Red Army, the Germans would never have defeated the Russians at the beginning of the war and it would have been fought, as they expected it would be if it ever came (which Stalin, trusting in his agreements with Hitler, told the people it never would), on foreign soil rather than in the outskirts of Stalingrad and other major Soviet cities. The Germans were defeated by the courage of the people despite the criminal incompetence of the ruling bureaucracy. The crimes didn't stop there; after the war, many of the soldiers who were captured and spent time in German POW camps were accused of treason and stayed in the "Gulag" until the Krushchev reforms.
Yes, this book is somewhat one-sided, puts the accent on hardships and negative experiences; it shouldn't (and of course never would) be the only thing someone reads on the Second World War; but since the military and "heroic" aspects are present in thousands of books in all countries, this is a worthwhile book to read -- and especially for Americans who for the most part have no idea of the war on the Eastern Front, but think of the war in Europe in terms of D-day and driving the Germans through France and Italy.
Sept. 2284. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, The Langurs of Abu: Female and Male Strategies of Reproduction [1980] 361 pages
An interesting study from the late 1970's of reproductive strategies in the hanuman langurs, Presbytis entellus, based mainly on the author's fieldwork with seven troops around the town of Abu (on Mount Abu) in northwestern India. After a chapter on older studies and one on the evolutionary history of the colobines, the book concentrates on the social and mating behaviors of the various troops at Abu, with some comparisons to other sites (and other species of primate.) The Abus have a polygamous structure with generally one alpha male and a number of adult females, along with subadults, juveniles and infants. The troops tend to be taken over every two or three years by outside males, and one of the points of the study was to establish whether or not this resulted in systematic infanticide (it did) and what the evolutionary advantages might have been. She also studies the frequent occurence of alloparenting. She tries to explain all of the behaviors in terms of sexual selection and inclusive fitness. The basic paradigm is sociobiology.
"This book has been digitally reproduced. The content remains identical to previous printings." Unfortunately, not really; the color illustrations are in black and white and all the illustrations are blurry and hard to make out, as with most digitally reproduced books (i.e. print on demand.) This is especially problematic because the book is heavily illustrated. There are many tables and charts, as well.
Sept. 3085. Samuel Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays [1984] 316 pages
Twenty-nine very short, very depressing plays, written between 1957 and 1984, in chronological order. None were much over ten pages long; some were written in English, others translated from French. They are mainly absurdist pieces, about the meaninglessness of life. The best known is probably Krapp's Last Tape. The most interesting was a filmscript with the generic title Film, which played with the idea of esse est percipi. The same ideas were repeated through most of the plays, which mainly had generic titles like Play or Theater -- old age, death, meaninglessness. They were very much in the spirit of the 1950's, when the earlier ones were written, and I'm sure it was a fresh approach then, but the repititiousness made the collection somewhat tedious as well as did I say very depressing? Read for a challenge on Goodreads.
Oct. 186. Fred W. Kennedy, Daddy Shape: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures Of Samuel Sharpe, A West Indian Slave Written by Himself, 1832 [2008] 411 pages
Samuel Sharpe, one of Jamaica's "Seven National Heroes", was the leader of a large scale slave rebellion in 1831-32. He was sort of the Nat Turner of Jamaica, and this book, like William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, is presented as if it were the actual narrative written by the character in prison before his execution. Although the novel sticks to the facts which are known, primarily about the rebellion itself, which is the most interesting part, the early life and many of the details and secondary characters are fictional. The book is unusual for a work of fiction in having notes and a bibliography.
The book is not bad for a first novel, although there are definite faults; the description of the plantation is somewhat stereotyped and has the cliché of the good master/cruel overseer which dates from Uncle Tom's Cabin or earlier. I can certainly believe that slave owners protected themselves from unpleasantness and possible reprisals by delegating the "dirty work" to the overseers, while taking credit themselves for any mercy or concessions, just as in a modern factory the "dirty work" is left to the bottom level foremen and the upper levels of management try to seem benevolent and reasonable. In both cases, however, the reality is that the policies are set by the owners and higher-ups and any overseer or foreman who deviated too much in either direction would soon be out of a job. So while I have no problem with the average slaves being shown believing the overseer rather than the owner is the enemy, I have a problem with the author not undercutting that at all, and with a militant character like Samuel Sharpe being taken in by it.
Other aspects I have trouble with are showing the hero as a kind of Christian version of Ghandi who wants to carry out nonviolent resistance but is forced into violence by extremists among his followers -- this represents more a liberal version of history which is uncomfortable with violent resistance of the oppressed. Although I read it a long time ago, I seem to remember a similar problem in Styron's novel. It may of course be based on the historical documents, but naturally this would be the account that any intelligent slave would give in prison who was trying to minimize his responsibility for what the whites would consider as crimes. In general, I think the white "allies" are given more credit than they probably deserve -- while there may well have been dedicated anti-slavery activists among the whites, I think they should have been shown more hesitant, and in particular the Black leaders should not be shown as taken in so completely -- frankly, I think the Blacks would have been much more skeptical and cautious with regard to white "friends". The impression the novel gives is that the white allies were ultimately, if unintentionally, responsible; which of course was the take of the white propaganda -- Blacks (and workers) are always happy to "know their place" until outside agitators arrive. . . Perhaps all these problems then were a result of the biases of the documents which the author used for his evidently very thorough research; and if these "confessions" were really supposed to be the actual apology of someone trying to defend himself it would be believable, but we are obviously intended to take the narrative as true and not a fiction by Sharpe just trying to get off, which means the author is somewhat responsible for the way things are presented.
Finally, the rebellion, like that of Nat Turner and many others in the U.S., Jamaica and elsewhere had a strong religious ideology, and it is correct to emphasize that from a historical point of view -- Sharpe's rebellion was after all called "the Baptist War" -- but from the point of view of the modern non-religious reader, there were just too many sermons. These were the only places where I lost interest.
All in all, though, this was a good contribution to my understanding of Jamaican history and ultimately an inspiring book, which I would recommend.
87. Stephen Hawking, My Brief History [2013] 127 pages
A very short autobiography of the well-known physicist. Like all of his later books, much of the space is taken up by photos and white space, so it was even shorter than it looks -- less than a two-hour read. It was interesting to read about his earlier life; the descriptions of his theories were too brief and I think would be unintelligible to anyone who didn't already have some familiarity with his work -- but then, probably anyone who would read this has already read at least A Brief History of Time and other popular works on physics and astronomy, so it probably doesn't really matter.
Oct. 588. Michael Chabon, Moonglow [2016] 430 pages
This novel is the first book I have read by Chabon, best known for The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay; I read it for a group discussion on Goodreads. Inspired by the stories his grandfather told the author at the end of his life, and a memoir by his uncle, the book has the form of stories told to the narrator (named Michael Chabon) by his maternal grandfather (his mother’s stepfather), supplemented by his own memories and the reminiscences of his mother and others who knew his grandparents. It is not clear how much of this is actually true; some is obviously not plausible and some just seems too novelish to be real life. As the book jacket says, it is “an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir.” The style is deliberately non-chronological, which makes it difficult to get into at the beginning but very rapid-paced when all the strands come together at the end.
The life of the grandfather covers the Second World War through the late 1980s; there are many different aspects but the main connecting thread is the development of rocketry from the V-2 to America’s loss of interest in space exploration in the Shuttle era. The cover-up of von Braun’s role in the production of V-2s by slave labor was enlightening, and the fact that more laborers died building the rockets than were ever killed by them. There is also much about his grandmother, a Jewish emigrant who suffered from mental illness. Although I lived through most of the period of the novel after the war, there were no characters close to my age, so it was difficult to identify with the reactions of the characters to events I experienced quite differently.
The writing was excellent, and if I had read it on a Kindle instead of in print, I would have probably posted a number of quotations from it; but the content, though interesting, was not interesting enough to make it a favorite.
Oct. 9
89. Honoré de Balzac, Béatrix [1839] 340 pages [in French, on Kindle]
While I like the idea of Balzac’s Comédie humaine, he just wrote too much, and much of it is uneven. This book is one of the full-length novels that anchor the shorter works of the collection, and not the best of Balzac, although oddly it was one of the most popular at the time it came out, perhaps due to the allusions to actual people. It has the double purpose of describing life in Brittany, and describing the life of intellectual women.
After about a fifth of the book comprised of pure architectural and landscape description in which nothing happens but a few games of cards, the protagonist, Calyste, a rather stupid and spoiled young Breton nobleman, becomes involved in a love triangle with two malicious and calculating older women, Felicité and Béatrix. The former is loosely based on George Sands, which Balzac both admits and denies by describing her as “a rival of George Sands”; the latter, and more unpleasant of the two, and her fatuous musician/lover Conti, are apparently based on Marie d’Agoult and Franz Liszt. (I don't know how much actual detail is taken from these real persons beyond the fact that they were artists; biographies of Sands and Liszt are on my TBR list, but so far down I may never get to them.)
In a second part of the novel, added later, Calyste and Béatarix reappear with a different set of secondary characters. There are many “cross-references” to other books and stories of the Comédie humaine. The biggest problem for a psychological/realist novel is that the psychology in many respects just didn’t seem to me to work. I suspected that this was an early work, but if the 1839 serial publication is really when it was written it came after such masterpieces as Père Goriot.
Oct. 11Counting these two as one again, because 21 pages isn't really enough to count as a book by itself.
90. Honoré de Balzac, La Grande Bretèche [1832] 21 pages [in French, on Kindle]
A well-written but rather unoriginal short story in the "Gothic" mode about an abandonned mansion and the horrible secret it hides. Written early, this was later appended to the mélange called "Une autre étude de femme", perhaps more for economic than artistic reasons.
90a.Honoré de Balzac, Honorine [1843] 70 pages [in French, on Kindle]
A study of marital infidelity presented as a story told in Italy, by the French Consul-General in Genoa, with two of the characters from Beatrix among the auditors, Claude Vignon and Mlle. des Touches (= George Sands.) The novella was written at about the same time as he was writing some of his best novels and stories, and is very interesting, although the moral viewpoints seem very outdated today.
Oct 2791. Honoré de Balzac, Modeste Mignon [1844] 401 pages [in French, on Kindle]
One of the longest, latest, and possibly one of the best of Balzac's novels. Technically it is better than most, in that he begins with the intrigue before portraying the scene and the characters, rather than starting with fifty pages of description of people, architecture, furniture and scenery before anything happens, as in some of his books. The descriptions are spread throughout the novel when the characters are introduced.
Modeste Mignon is a twenty-three year old woman, who at the beginning is kept secluded under strict observation by her relatives because her older sister had eloped with unfortunate consequences. After the situation is set up, there follows a lengthy epistolary section where Modeste and a man are corresponding, and both are misrepresenting themselves, which leads to a possibly comic, possibly tragic situation, followed by a romantic . . . quadrangle? Pentangle? In any case, there is much satire here of nearly all the classes of French life -- rich and middle bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, various layers of the aristocracy -- except of course the peasantry and working class, which aren't much in evidence in any early nineteenth century novel apart from domestic servants. There is also much discussion of love, marriage, and social relationships, as well as the nature of literature and the character of poets.
Because the reader knows that this is Balzac and not a Harlequin, it is not certain until the end whether it will be a comedy or tragedy, and who, if anyone, will end up marrying the girl.
Oct. 2792. Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. An Oral History [2013; tr 2016] 470 pages
An oral history of the fall of the Soviet Union, written in the same style as the author's earlier books about Chernobyl, Afghanistan, and World War II; this is not quite as good, because in those books people were recounting actual experiences, while in this book, at least for much of the time, and especially at the beginning, it's more their impressions of what it all meant, and the average person has no real understanding of history, there or here -- it reminds me somewhat of the discussions about Trump on Facebook, where people just talk past each other or call names in an emotional way. Later in the book, there were more actual accounts of things that happened. The selections were often repetitive, there were alot of reminiscinces of World War II that were similar to the earlier book, and at times I was on the verge of giving up, when I would come across something that shed new light on the problems or events. Of course there is a point to the repititions; while Alexievich is probably honest enough in her reporting, there is no guarantee the people she is interviewing are telling the truth (and some obviously are not), but when the same sorts of things are repeated over and over again the gist is probably true even if not all the details are.
It is interesting in a way, to get a feel for how people saw the events at the time and how they see them today; the opinions are divided between those who put more emphasis on the accomplishments of the Soviet Union, on the idealism and the emphasis on the ordinary worker, on the victory over Hitler, who still idealize Stalin even while admitting his crimes, and on the other hand those who put the emphasis on the crimes of the bureacracy, the persecutions and purges, and saw the overthrow of the USSR as a positive thing at the time -- most of whom now consider rightly that they were betrayed. (One annoying thing about the book, given that people's opinions changed over time, is that the selections aren't strictly chronological and there is no indication of when the various interviews occurred. In fact, I never did figure out what the principle of ordering was, or what the different chapter headings meant.) The best selections try to combine both views, that the Soviet experience had both positive and negative aspects and that the freedom they wanted was confused with or sold out for consumerism. One thing which is said many times in different ways is that what the people wanted was a new, better kind of socialism, not capitalism; but capitalism is what they ended up with, in its crudest and most exploitative "gangster" form. As one person said, with only a little exaggeration, they wanted to become another United States and ended up becoming another Colombia. (Clearly, this shows an illusionary view of what the United States is actually like, but that's another discussion.)
As far as actual experiences go, the book makes abundantly clear that contrary to the belief of most Americans that the overthrow of communism represented a glorious triumph of capitalism and freedom, things actually got very much worse -- while a few people, mostly connected with the state apparatus (of course), got immensely rich, the new economy was a disaster for most ordinary people, with the worst living conditions since the death of Stalin. (Granted, there are virtually no interviews with people who got rich in the nineties.) There was a great deal of violence throughout the country, with gangsters killing people with or without a "political" excuse, ethnic violence -- murder of ordinary, non-political Russians in the newly independent countries carved out of the old USSR, and people of those nationalities by Russians in Moscow, the war in Chechnya and its terrorist reflex in Russia, and acts of individual revenge (though very little justice for the actual victims of Stalinism). And finally, the ex-KGB leader Vladimir Putin (and more sadly, Dmitri Medvedev, a dissident I once had respect for) re-established "law and order." I would recommend the book if only for this, which should be (but probably won't be) an effective antidote to the Reagan-Bush propaganda of our media.
The most powerful selections, and the hardest to comprehend -- the people she interviewed couldn't understand either -- were the sudden outbreaks of ethnic and religious hatred in places like Georgia and Azerbaijan (there is no mention of Bosnia or places outside the former USSR, where similar things occurred), where people just began killing former friends, murdering old women and young children, without any provocation, after having lived together peacefully for decades. Undoubtedly there were economic interests involved, and in the case of the religious violence there seems to be a core of latent hatred in all religions waiting for economic and political conditions to bring it to the fore, but this is beyond my comprehension. Maybe if I understood why so many Americans support Trump, I could understand why people hated each other over there. I don't want to believe that it's just "human nature" or sociobiology, but it's hard to see how people raised their whole lives in the Soviet Union could be changed so quickly by the first experience of capitalism.
Perhaps the biggest problem with the book -- or rather with the reality of post-Soviet Russia, because I have no doubt that Alexievich's selections reflect the actual range of beliefs -- is that there is no analysis (even of a speculative kind) of what went wrong originally. One very indicative comment, in the very beginning of the book, is that the history of modern Russia is divided into four generations -- the generation of Stalin, the generation of Krushchev, the generation of Brezhnev, and the generation of Putin -- there is no mention of the pre-Stalin Soviet Union. "Communism" here means almost exclusively Stalin, with even his successors hardly mentioned. Lenin is named almost exclusively in the phrase "Lenin and Stalin". One person claimed that after the overthrow, "no one dared to mention the name Stalin"; clearly untrue as almost all of the selections in the book mention Stalin, whether favorably or unfavorably. The name which is never mentioned is the same one that would get people killed or sent to the gulag under Stalin and his successors (three or four sentences, one in a footnote, in the whole book.)
I also thought it was unfortunate that the book ended with a selection suggesting that people should live their private lives and avoid the political -- although many of the selections say the same thing, coming at the end, it more or less gave the same impression as the ending of Candide, that we should just cultivate our own gardens.
Reading a book like this, the obvious question that keeps coming to mind is, could it have ended up differently? If people wanted a better socialism, rather than capitalism, could that have happened? Could Gorbachev, a fellow student of Dubcek, have brought about a "Prague Spring" (if that had been his intention, which I doubt; and of course we don't know how Czechoslovakia would have turned out without the Russian tanks either)? Although many of the selections seem to suggest that the interviewees thought it might have been possible, if the movement hadn't been betrayed, I don't really see how. It seems to me that the Soviet Communist Party was too corrupt and bureaucratic, too discredited among the general population, that even the relatively more honest communists were compromised in too many ways, too afraid of real democracy, to have provided leadership for anything like that -- it was sixty years too late; while outside the Party there was no leadership at all, and too many illusions about the West, too much simple envy of Western consumer goods. Perhaps if there had been a non-Stalinist, anti-capitalist revolution in some major country in the West, there might have been hope; but in the timeframe of the 1990's the West was already in the midst of a period of reaction, which the fall of the USSR and the Eastern European regimes only deepened. All Alexievich's books show that the history of the Soviet Union and Russia from Stalin through Putin has been a tragic series of betrayals; the only thing to be added is that it was the tragedy not just of the Soviet people but of the whole contemporary world.
October 2993. Kei Miller, Augustown [2016] 239 pages
A story that takes place in two times: the present is April 11, 1982, in the Kingston neighborhood of Augustown; the past, presented as a story (merging into a flashback) is December, 1920, when Augustown (a slightly modified version of August Town) was still a separate village far from the city. In the present, we have the Jamaica we have met in Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings, filled with senseless hatred and violence; in the past, under British rule, we have the story of "the flying preacher", Alexander Bedward, the founder of Bedwardism (a somewhat mythical retelling of an actual historical event). Miller says in the book itself, "Look, this isn't magical realism. This is not another story about superstitious island people and their primitive beliefs. No. You don't get off that easy. This is a story about people as real as you are . . ." Of course it is magical realism, but the label is not important; the story of the historic Bedward, true or false or partly both, is a metaphor, or more than a metaphor, for the history of the island and its Black population, which reinforces the modern story of real and symbolic oppression -- or to use the great Rasta word, "downpression".
There are similarities to A Brief History -- this book is also supposedly narrated by a dead person, names are slightly changed from real people and places; and one of the main characters, "Soft-Paws", has the real name Marlon (a kind of footnote, such as I argued in my review that he used in The Last Warner Woman). Another possible literary allusion is that the first time Bedward floats, he is wrapped in the bedsheets -- a possible allusion to the famous floating away with the laundry scene in Garcia Marquez' Cien años de soledad. Miller's style, however, is entirely his own.
Oct. 3094. Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore [1979] 209 pages [on Kindle]
A short novel, based loosely on Fitzgerald's own life, about a woman who is separated from her husband living with her two young daughters on a boat in the Thames, about 1960. There is an interesting group of characters very well described. The story ends with a (nearly literal) cliffhanger, but not the sort which suggests a sequel; rather, it is left ambiguous how the character's future life will develop, as life itself is ambiguous. I believe this is the novel for which she won the Mann Booker Prize; it is next month's book on one of my Goodreads groups.
Nov. 295. Honoré de Balzac, Un début dans la vie [1842] 182 pages [in French, on Kindle]
A comic novel in which an intrigue about property serves as the excuse for a trip in a public dilegence, where a group of people try to mystify each other with strange tales of their lives. At the conclusion of the trip, one of the seemingly least important characters turns out to be the main subject of the novel; there are some other largely comic scenes and the novel ends with about the same cast of characters on the same route many years later.
Nov. 3
96. Kazuo Ishiguro. A Pale View of Hills [1982] 183 pages
As usual this time of the year I'm beginning to read the new Nobel Prize winner in literature; this year it's Kazuo Ishiguro, and for once (the first time since Doris Lessing in 2008) an author I've actually already read something by (his most recent novel, The Buried Giant). This one is his first novel, but there is none of the awkwardness of a first novel; the writing is similar to the later novel even though in a totally different genre (this is realistic, the other is an allegorical fantasy), with the same sense of strangeness and things not revealed, and confusion of events, and the same theme of selective remembering and forgetting and what should be remembered and faced; here there is an additional theme of lack of comprehension between generations, with Sachiko and Mariko, Etsuko and her two daughters, and Ogata-San and Jiro. The novel moves between the present in London and the past in Nagasaki, a decade or so after the war. In the end, nothing is really made clear, again as in the later book.
Nov.497. David Cairns, Berlioz: Servitude and Greatness 1832-1869 [1999] 895 pages
This is the second volume of the definitive English biography of Hector Berlioz. It has been almost a year and a half since I finished the first volume; because it was so long I kept putting other books ahead of it, which I need to learn not to do. This volume begins with his marriage to Harriet Smithson, and ends with his death; it covers the period of most of his important works. The works are all discussed, but without too much technical musical detail; the focus is on the life of the composer rather than the music itself, unlike for instance Abert's biography of Mozart, which it resembles in length. The book avoids taking too romantic an approach, which is a temptation with Berlioz especially, and clears up various misconceptions about his life and music, such as his relationships with Liszt and Wagner. One advantage of my procrastination is that I was reading this at the same time as I am working my way through Balzac's novels; Berlioz was a friend of Balzac, so I was reading nonfiction and fiction about the same period of French history.
Nov. 598. Honoré de Balzac, L'Interdiction [1836] 82 pages [in French, on Kindle]
A short novel about a lower level Paris judge, who is assigned the case of a marquis (the marquis d'Espard) whose wife is trying to have him declared mentally incompetent (I think that the English translation is titled "the commission in lunacy"). The story of the marquis has similarities to the plot of Mme. Firmiani. Here, Balzac is more cynical; the honesty of the judge and the marquis are contrasted to the general corruption around them. With this novella, I have finally finished the first and longest division of the Comédie Humaine, "scènes de la vie privée" (according to the list on Wikipedia, although the Norph-Nop edition I am reading assigns it to the third division, "scènes de la vie parisienne" -- Balzac moved things around in different editions and I'm not sure the order and divisions really matter that much.) Now according to my original plan, I will just read the most important novels of the other divisions -- including at least the ones I have print copies of; I'll see whether I can limit myself to that or not.
Nov. 1099. Helen Simonson, The Summer Before the War [2016] 479 pages
I read this for the Utah State Library/Library for the Blind discussion group, more out of duty than interest, and it's also scheduled for one of my Goodreads groups; it was actually somewhat better than I expected it would be. I admit to a certain prejudice as I'm not fascinated by the foibles of the British upper classes -- even if I had a television I wouldn't be watching Downton Abbey or the like. The label "postmodern" gets applied to everything, but this novel seems to me to be using a typical postmodernist strategy: wrapping a serious novel inside a genre novel (or parody of a genre novel).
My immediate impression from the first few chapters was that this book crams in every possible cliché of the British upper class romance; I thought, if this is intended as a deliberate parody, it's somewhat amusing -- if not, it's hilarious. The book begins with the arrival of a poor but proud orphaned schoolmistress, Beatrice Nash (at least she's not a governess) at the home of an aristocratic Suffolk family headed by an eccentric matriarch named "Aunt Agatha", whose husband "Uncle John" is usually away in the foreign office in London, and who has two nephews, Hugh, a surgeon in training, and Daniel, a fop and poet. There is an immediate suggestion of possible romantic interest between Miss Nash and Hugh, although he is officially in love with his chief surgeon's daughter -- named "Lucy", of course. There is a feud between Aunt Agatha and her friend "Lady Emily" on the one side and the Mayor's wife, Bettina Fothergill, and the conservative school governors on the other. Miss Nash naturally has to tutor three rowdy working class boys, "Jack", "Arty" and "Snout". (With names like these, the novel has to be a parody, right?) Other characters include a famous author, a pair of stereotype (and probably lesbian) suffragettes, a bevy of loyal servants, and a tribe of gypsies.
About a quarter of the way through the book, World War I breaks out in Europe, and the town begins feeling the effects in the form of patriotic rallies and committees, food shortages, and the arrival of refugees from Belgium. At this point, the book moves from genre parody (if that's what it is) to a more serious satire, which continues to get more biting as the novel continues. The themes of women's position, class differences, and of course the stupidity of the first world war are all dealt with. There are still touches of humor, and much that is predictable from the genre -- without going into detail, there are two episodes I think were intended as surprises, and I predicted both a hundred pages before they happened. Despite the necessary quota of tragedies, overall the "happy endings" predominate in most of the subplots as well as the main plot -- I don't think it is even a spoiler to say that the novel more or less ends with a wedding, apart from an epilogue set after the war.
I don't want to give too negative an impression; the writing is good, the characters are well-delineated if stereotyped, there is a good deal of humor throughout, and the serious themes are well handled if not particularly deep in analysis. The novelist shows a bit of hubris, however, in caricaturing Henry James, if that is who Mr. Tillingham is supposed to represent.
Nov. 17100. George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo [2017] 343 pages
An interesting and imaginative experimental fantasy novel, this is set in the "Bardo", the period immediately after death in some versions of Buddhism. The first book I read this year was The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is a description of the Bardo; although the setting of this novel does have some points of resemblance with the Buddhist view -- a temporary place where the spirits of the newly dead arrive before making the choice of their future existence, whether Nirvana or reincarnation -- and one vision in the novel is similar to the descriptions in the Tibetan scripture, the version here is definitely Christianized, conflating the Buddhist belief with aspects of Purgatory and an external judgement, and of the vulgar conception of "churchyard ghosts". The spirits who leave the cemetery apparently go to Heaven or Hell rather than Nirvana or reincarnating, although the details are never spelled out. The chapters in the Bardo alternate with chapters made up of quotations from books about Lincoln and the Civil War, often contradicting each other. At least some of the books quoted are ones I have read, but I'm not sure whether they are all real or if some of them are invented as in Eco's The Name of the Rose. The premise is that when Lincoln's son Willie dies at the beginning of the war, he finds himself in the Bardo and his spirit interacts with his father. The main point seems to be to reimagine the situation of Lincoln at that time in history, although there are also other things going on, such as digs at Calvinist theology. Some sexual themes and strong language might make it difficult for me to recommend in this community, but apart from that it would be a refreshing change from the derivative sort of fantasy that many of my friends read.
Nov. 24101. Honoré de Balzac, Ursule Mirouët [1841] 377 pages [in French]
Moral: Greedy relatives who secretly steal inheritances will be exposed and punished by God. (I hope this isn't a "spoiler"; everything is strongly foreshadowed from the beginning -- Balzac's novels don't really depend much on surprise plot twists.)
The first novel of the second division of La Comédie humaine, Scènes de la Vie de province, this was very different from the other books I've read of Balzac. It is a very well structured book -- not always Balzac's strong point. Unlike his more realistic novels, it has a Romantic feel to it, and not solely in the supernatural (or perhaps paranormal) aspects. The eponymous character (I can't really say heroine, much less protagonist) like many female characters in Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, and other Romantic authors, but unlike the typical Balzac women, is essentially passive and dependent, prone to become ill or collapse when confronted with any unpleasantness, and her male guardians act for her without usually consulting with her or informing her, protecting her from unpleasant realities; this is largely a "male rescue fantasy", except that the rescuer is not only the young lover, Savinien, but a whole committee of mostly old men -- beginning with the orphaned Ursule's original rescue by doctor Mirouët, we then have the curé, the juge de paix, and of course the old man with the white beard, Dieu. At the beginning of the book, Ursule is a few weeks short of sixteen, and by the end she is twenty, but she comes across as a very young girl; she is constantly described with words like "pur", "angelique", etc., but the best description is from a member of the opposing family -- "cette petite fille, qui certes est d'une grande beauté; mais elle est d'une dévotion outrée" (that little girl, who is certainly a great beauty; but she is outrageously religious).
Here we have the other problem with the novel; it is essentially a thesis novel, arguing for a particular view of religion. The doctor, a lifelong "Voltairean" atheist and "child of the Enlightenment", for some reason raises Ursule to be a devout (or in the stronger French sense, "dévote") Christian, who apparently doesn't notice that he is an atheist until she is a teenager, when she starts praying for him every night to be converted. He then suddenly converts due to a miraculous experience with a Mesmerist/Swedenborgian psychic and becomes himself a pious (though not especially orthodox) Catholic (in the original rough draft, which is included in the version I read (Le Livre de Poche, introduction by Renaud Matignon) the family are all Protestants). The paranormal/supernatural elements ("animal magnetism", telepathy, remote viewing, visions) are not a plot device but the point of the novel, and the introduction says that Balzac was himself strongly influenced by Swedenborgianism.
An interesting, well-written novel with some criticism of the bourgeoisie (from the wrong direction) and the irrationality of French inheritance law, but not really to my taste.
Nov. 26102. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity [1841] 339 pages
The version I read is the Harper Torchbook edition, containing the nineteenth century translation by the novelist George Eliot, a forward by H. Richard Niebuhr and an introduction by Karl Barth.
Feuerbach has the misfortune to be usually considered simply as a transitional figure, as the (merely biographical) link between Hegel and Marx. In large part, this is true -- seen prospectively from the philosophy of Hegel, Feuerbach is (as he considered himself; see his own preface) a radical materialist, replacing the abstractions of theology with the real nature of man; seen retrospectively from Marx, he is still very much an idealist, dealing with "essences" rather than concrete individuals in a concrete historical milieu. I might also add that compared to Hegel, he is a model of clarity; compared to Marx (or almost anyone else) he is a monument of obscurity. There are basically two groups of people who read him today; a small group of theologians who take him seriously as a challenge (note that the forward and introduction to this edition are by theologians, as are two of the three blurbs on the back cover, by Barth and Martin Buber), and those who are interested in the origins of Marx's views (the third blurb is a quotation from Sidney Hook's From Hegel to Marx).
The thesis of the book is that religion consists in an "anthropology"; that psychologically speaking it takes the "essence of man", or human nature, and objectifies it in a separate being, God. He develops this idea at length (with much repetition and a good deal of self-contradiction), showing that the predicates of God are actually predicates of human nature and that the error of religion is in confusing the predicate with the subject -- that while pagan religion takes the idea that for example "love is divine" (love being part of the "essence of man") and makes love a particular god or goddess, Christianity takes the idea that love is a god and reverses it to say that God is love; and likewise with understanding, mercy, etc., making the predicates of human nature into predicates of a single particular being, who in fact does not exist except as the sum of those predicates -- that if you take away the predicates of God there is no subject left. He also argues that religion abolishes the limitations of the finite human by considering them as unlimited in God, as the limited understanding of a particular man becomes omniscience in God, the limited power of the individual becomes His omnipotence, etc.; and that creation from nothing and miracles are the unlimited form of will, or personality, as pure arbitrariness, and thus linked to the idea of God as a personal being. Much of this is not wrong but just obvious; my reaction was basically why spend 339 pages telling us what everyone (including Christian theologians, even if they disguise it by talking about "analogy") already knows, that God's predicates are just human predicates without limitation -- even if sometimes he has striking formulations, such as that the real god of Christianity is Adam Kadmon. He does have some good insights along the way, however; some things that I had already realized but never seen in print -- that the real god of every religion is its mediator figure, for instance -- and other things that made me say, why hadn't I seen that before, e.g. that Calvinist "predestination" is just the religious equivalent of everything happening by chance. He ends up by proposing a kind of religion of human nature.
Writing at the time he was, and with a background in Hegelian philosophy and theology, he obviously knows very little about other religions, and what he says about them tends to be very superficial; this is definitely the essence of Christianity, even if he sometimes talks about the essence of religion in general -- in fact, it might better be called the essence of Lutheranism, because most of his quoted examples are from Luther or the patristic writers most favored by Luther. He also shows very little knowledge of the actual history even of Christianity; this is a psychology of the existing doctrine rather than a serious account of its origins. It also ignores totally the social functions of religions as they actually exist as institutions. I won't bother to repeat the Marxist criticisms of Feuerbach; anyone who reads this should follow it up, if they haven't already read it, with the wonderfully humorous early book of Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, where they settle accounts with Feuerbach and his "Young Hegelian" followers, that is with their own early origins.
The real question is why did this rather boring and obvious work have such an influence, and even caused such excitement among people like the young Marx and Engels, at the time it was written? I think the answer is that in Germany at the time, which was relatively backward compared to France or England, there was a desire, not for a real empiricist or materialist atheism such as had long existed in those countries, but for a kind of religious atheism, a doctrine that would let people reject religion while still considering themselves religious. Feuerbach faded into insignificance a few years later, with the revolution of 1848. Nevertheless, I think the book is still worth reading to understand why people are so attracted to the ideas of religion.
Nov. 29103. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye [1915] 240 pages
This is not actually a work by de Saussure, but rather (a translation of) a posthumous reconstruction of his teaching by Bally and Sechehaye based on student notes of three separate courses of lectures (given between 1906 and 1911) plus some other writings of de Saussure; nevertheless, it is one of the founding texts of what is now known as "structural linguistics." I took an introductory course in structural linguistics at Columbia about 1973, or more than sixty years after this material was delivered (and of course that course itself is now almost fifty years in the past). Here we can see de Saussure working his way toward the science that was presented in a more systematic way in my textbook then; without that experience, I would probably have had much more difficulty understanding this book, because it is rather polemical and tentative -- he spends much time defining the subject matter of linguistics and what he means by language, separating language ("langue") from speech acts ("parole"), and giving philosophical and methodological arguments for things that were later taken for granted as simply the facts about how language works. The most important part of the book is probably making the then new distinction of synchronic and diachronic linguistics as essentially different types of study.
Dec. 2104. Honoré de Balzac, Eugénie Grandet [1833] 179 pages [in French]
The second novel of the Scènes de la Vie de province, Eugénie Grandet (and the two following stories) are the works I read long ago in college for my French Literature survey course, and for good reason: this is not only one of Balzac's best novels but also one of the most representative of his style. Transitional between Romanticism and Realism, the characters are essentially determined by their environment and socio-economic backgrounds, that is to say essentially types, as in realist novels, and the plot follows logically rather than depending on coincidences, but on the other hand there is also a good deal of romantic exaggeration, especially in the character of M. Grandet, and the author intrudes in a way that would have been avoided in and after Flaubert. The novel is among his best-known and I probably don't need to do more than summarize the situation -- essentially a very rich but miserly father in the provinces has a naive young daughter who falls in love with a more sophisticated but economically ruined cousin, who leaves for the Indies to seek his fortune and returns years later. The strength of the novel is in the character development and the social satire rather than in the rather obvious plot.
Dec. 7185. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo [1913; tr. 1950] 172 pages
Four essays concerning the concepts of taboo and totemism, this was published in book form about three or four months after Durkheim's book which I reviewed a year and a half ago (The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life), which also dealt with the subject of totemism. Many of my objections to that book and the methodology of making "primitive" peoples such as the Australian aborigines models for the original hunter-gatherers of prehistory could be repeated here; in fact, Freud himself says much the same thing in one or two footnotes, but then procedes to ignore the problems he himself recognized and treat "totemism" as a fact of original religion, which he then tries to explain in terms of his own psychoanalytic theories (which of course have problems of their own). What he says about the origins of taboo in the first three essays -- comparing them to the obsessions of neurotics (what we would now call OCD) and explaining them on the basis of unconcious ambivalent emotional responses is quite interesting. The most famous part of the book, however, is the last essay, where he proposes his theory of the origins of "totemism" as a whole -- his famous theory of the "primal horde" of brothers who killed the father. Even allowing for the existence of primitive totemism, which is dubious, this theory is totally bizarre, and I wonder whether even psychoanalytic disciples of Freud could ever have taken it seriously. He does somewhat hedge, saying that even if it weren't literally, historically true, it would still explain totemism as a psychic impulse, but he makes it clear he does consider it to have been true. Of couse, religion and mythology are full of ambivalent relations to fathers (best known, the Oedipus myth). The book, like Durkheim's, is probably much more important for understanding the history of early twentieth century social science than for any light it sheds on the history of religion. The next book on my list is a history of the idea of totemism from McClellan to Freud which considers them from that perspective.
Dec. 17 [By the way, according to my files on my own computer (not all my reviews came through from Shelfari to Goodreads) this is the 1000th review I've posted since I started in 2009.]
106. Robert Alun Jones, The Secret of the Totem: Religion and Society from McLennan to Freud [2005] 347 pages
Ostensibly, this book is a history of the idea of totemism in nineteenth and early twentieth century anthropology/sociology, but in fact it's something more ambitious: totemism is just the thread that the author uses to organize a history of the rise and (in a sort of epilogue) fall of social evolutionary theory in general. The treatment is largely biographical; each chapter deals with one of the major figures: the first chapter, after a brief treatment of Henry Sumner Maine, focuses on J.F. McLennan; the second chapter on William Robertson Smith; the third chapter on James Frazer; the fourth chapter on Emile Durkheim; the fifth chapter on Sigmund Freud; and the book ends with the epilogue on the Boas school and Lévi-Strauss. The author is one of those writers, however, who cannot omit any fragment of their research, so each person who is mentioned (regardless of their importance, or whether they even wrote on totemism at all) is also given a biography, where they were born, their father's occupation, where they went to school and who their professors were -- and each of their professors then also has a biography provided, etc., so that there are three or four levels of embedded biographies, which makes it difficult to follow the basic thread of the development, and the reader is constantly dragged back and forth in time, from a book written in the 1890s to the influence of something written in the 1870s to the author's professor's book written in the 1860s to some influence in the 1840s and then back and forth until it goes back to the 1890s -- until the next digression. The end result is a very dense web which is not easy to understand. The book took me almost two weeks to finish.
As I mentioned at the beginning of my last year's review of Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, I originally intended to read certain recent books, but followed the bibliographies of those books to the bibliographies of the books they were based on and so forth, and ended up beginning with Durkheim because all of the bibliographies in a sense converged on his book. Moving forward very slowly, two weeks ago I read Freud's Totem and Taboo, which was essentially the next book in that project, and was published a few months after the Durkheim book. Hence, my interest in this book which traced the influences on those two books back to the beginnings of the nineteenth century. I found the content very interesting, even though it was not a particulary well organized or well written book. One problem is that, although it is intended as an objective study, it is in fact quite subjective: it is obvious, for example, that the author liked Robertson Smith and had no use for James Frazer, even though he says that they are both equally obsolete and arguing about the "wrong" questions. His conclusion is that evolutionary theories of culture were simply a dead end. I'm not so sure; although certainly these theorists were generalizing from inadequate and selective data, and comparing cultural practices which were derived from different socio-economic situations, and although many of their methods and assumptions were wrong, such as that modern "primitive" cultures were survivals of the original prehistoric hunter-gatherers and that all cultures went through essentially the same stages in the same order, etc., I think it may have been a mistake to banish the search for development out of anthropology altogether and limit it to a synchronic study of individual cultures. Boas himself did not go that far; he simply wanted to recognize that cultures have to be understood as functional wholes and their development understood in terms of their own conditions. At any rate, questions of origins will not go away, and banning them from academic anthropology simply results in their coming in through the back door in even more reductionist forms like sociobiology. I'll reserve judgement until I have read some of the later authors; Malinowsky and Lévi-Strauss are on my list for the coming year but if I judge by past performance I may not get very far with them.
Just as one particular note, I was interested to learn that Freud's theory of religion was influenced by his reading of Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity; I read and reviewed that last month but I hadn't made the connection to Freud.
Dec. 25107. Karl Kautsky, Der Ursprung des Christentums [1908] 532 pages [in German, on Kindle]
For Christmas this year I read a book about Jesus -- you know, the "reason for the season" and all that . . . . [insert appropriate emoticon here].
This is a classic work, usually translated into English as The Foundations of Christianity. Last month I read a similarly titled German book (though in translation) from 1841, Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity, which was an influence on the early Marx; this book, by a leading Marxist of the generation after Marx, is a complete contrast in every way, and demonstrates the difference that Marx made, even leaving aside his economic theories and views on revolution and communism, in the way that we view and discuss history and even religion. The earlier book discusses Christianity in an abstract, philosophical and psychological way, which makes it seem as if it could have originated (in its nineteenth century Lutheran form) at any time from the stone age to the present, in any part of the world -- the preconditions are all in the nature of man as a species and the development is a kind of quasi-logical deduction. Kautsky's work, on the other hand, begins from the social, economic and historical conditions of the particular place and time that Christianity originated and developed in, showing why and in what social classes it arose and spread and why it found such a successful reception. This is one of the best works I have read on early Christianity, although I have a few reservations.
Kautsky begins with a very modern-sounding critique of attempts to explain Christianity from the character and teachings of a historical Jesus (Ch.I). He points out that, apart from obvious Christian interpolations, there are no non-Christian sources for the existence, much less the life of Jesus. He gives examples of ancient historiography, showing that all the ancient historians from Thucydides to the end of antiquity wrote history as edification or polemic, and attributed speeches to the main actors, not as some sort of transcript that somehow survived but as what these generals, statesmen, philosophers, etc. (in the opinion of the historian) would have or should have said in the given circumstances. He points out that it was very unlikely (read: impossible) that anyone recorded the sermons and prayers of Jesus and transmitted them word for word to be translated long after into another language and incorporated in the gospels. In fact, the gospels give us not the biography of the historical Jesus or his actual teachings but the views about him that were held by the Christian communities of the time that they were written (many decades after his death, at the earliest), and represent the disagreements and polemics between them. In short, any speculation about Jesus is bound to be wrong; what we can, however, get from these sources is a picture of the early church, and that is what is of real interest from a historical point of view -- not who the man Jesus was or what he said, but why and how the Christian church as a real, historically important institution spread through the world and gained the dominant position it held from the fourth century to almost the present day (the "almost" is Kautsky's optimism.)
He then (Ch. II) gives a sketch of the rise and fall of the Roman Republic and the early days of the Empire, primarily from an economic viewpoint, showing why the society of the early Empire would find the doctrines of Christianity so attractive (and points out, interestingly at such an early date, that nearly all the elements of Christianity existed separately or in various combinations in other sects and movements of the time). Next (Ch. III) he moves to Palestine, and gives a history of the Hebrew people from their beginnings to the return from exile, explaining the origins of Judaism from the economic position of the country, its trade relations and so forth, and describes the situation of Jews in the diaspora. Then he combines the two strands to give a materialist description of the history of Judea from the return to the destruction of Jerusalem, and the class relations represented by the four major parties or groupings at the time of Jesus, the Sadducees, Pharisees, Zealots and Essenes. After this background, he turns to Christianity itself (Ch. IV, sec. 1), and argues quite convincingly that the original Christian community practiced "consumer-communism" (as he defines it at more length in his other book I read this year, on the communist sects at the time of the Reformation.) This all makes up more than half the book.
Of course, the book is somewhat over a hundred years old, and many of the specific "facts" he is trying to explain simply weren't the case; but overall he gives a good, clear explanation of the environment in which Christianity developed. With respect to the Roman history, he is certainly on the right track in seeing the decline of the Empire essentially as the result of internal economic causes, with the barbarian invasions and so forth as a result of the decline rather than its cause; some details might need to be revised, and of course he wasn't aware of the climatic changes we know about now, but I found this part very informative. (I do intend soon to read a more recent (half-century rather than century old) book on the decline of the Empire, from a similar materialist perspective, Perry Anderson's Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, which has been on my shelves since the more political days of my youth.) While, again unusually for the time, Kautsky recognizes that the Old Testament, whatever we may surmise about its original sources, was written in its present form to meet the ideological needs of the post-exile theocracy, his sketch of Hebrew history uses it much more literally than many scholars today (especially of a "minimalist" orientation) would be comfortable with. Finally, his account of the later Jewish history is based very largely on Josephus, and his account of the Essenes was written long before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. My major reservations however are not about this first half of the book.
The problem is, he then (Ch. IV, sec. 2) does just what he argued at the beginning was impossible: he tries to separate out the "genuine" early traditions in the gospels and Acts of the Apostles, to arrive a a construction of -- the historical Jesus! Granted, he does not attempt to reconstruct the religious doctrines, but he has a particular view of who Jesus was: the founder of a communist sect among the lower classes of Jerusalem, who also led an unsuccessful attempt at insurrection against the Romans and was captured and crucified. Now, this is not impossible, but it is very speculative (as he admits), and I've read too many other versions of the "historical Jesus" to be convinced: from those who essentially begin from a "synoptic" gospel view, minus the miracles (I leave out of account those who accept the miracles -- that's religion, not history -- or those who take the gospels as literally true but try to "explain" the miracles as fakes, like The Passover Plot, which is just senseless), to the various accounts from Schweizer to Chilton and the "Jesus Seminar", which variously interpret him as an apocalyptic preacher, an Essene, a renegade Pharisee, a Cynic philosopher, etc., to the extreme views that he was a Greek god or a psychedelic mushroom (at least that one was fun.) Kautsky at least has the advantage of basing his speculations on economic and historical reality, but it's still just speculation, and I would rather he had kept to his original promise of beginning with the Christian communities at the time we have evidence for.
He does return to this in Ch. IV, sec. 3-4, presenting the (still speculative, but better supported) view of the first century church as originally an entirely lower class, communist organization (in the sense of consumer-communism) organized around common meals (and in Jerusalem at least a common residence), and a mutual-support organization, with an ideology based on the idea that Jesus was the Messiah who would return again to punish the rich and reward the poor. In his view, what principally distinguished the Christians from similar Messianic sects of the times was what he calls its "internationalism", that is, that it replaced the ethnic hatred of Jews against Romans with a class hatred of poor against rich. (As I was reading this, my Facebook feed got several memes about Jesus as a long-haired anarchist etc., you've all seen them I'm sure; while we know nothing much about the real Jesus, this was certainly the view that the early church had of him and of itself.) In sec. 3 he follows this out, arguing that the class rather than ethnic basis of the Christian community allowed it initially to spread among the Jews of the diaspora, to the gentile sympathizers who accepted the Jewish monotheism and attended the synagogue without accepting the whole Mosaic law, and from there to the non-Jewish proletariat. (I should note that throughout the book, Kautsky, confusingly to those who know he is a Marxist, uses the term "proletariat" or "proletarian" in more or less its original latin sense of those without property, which would include the -- very small -- proletariat in the modern sense, i.e. wage-workers, but also semi-skilled artisans, peddlars and small-scale traders (think of a flea-market or the markets in underdeveloped countries), beggers, and others who were not actual workers in the modern sense.) He argues that outside Jerusalem, the high price of houses and the largely underground status of the communities eliminated the possibility of common residence and focused the "communist" tendency entirely on the common meals, while the influx of non-Jewish members led to other changes in the nature of the organization, which resulted in a split between Jewish and non-Jewish Christian communities. Especially after the destruction of Jerusalem the Christians began to try to distance themselves from the Jews who were largely a stateless and persecuted minority and play down their opposition to Rome (Ch. IV, sec. 4 is devoted to a discussion of the "Passion history" in the four gospels, showing how it contradicts itself and gets involved in many obvious absurdities from even a logical, let alone historical view, in trying to turn the blame for the crucifixion from the Romans onto the Jews.) At the same time, he points out, the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of its population led the diaspora Jews themselves to band together as Jews without regard to class distinctions, resulting in the collapse of the Jewish Christian communities and essentially leaving Christianity as a Hellenistic movement. He attempts to give evidence for this from the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of "Paul" to various churches, as well as some early non-scriptural sources such as the Didache and the writings of what Catholics call the Apostolic Fathers (most of which I have read, and his interpretation seems reasonable enough.)
With Ch. IV, sec. 5 he begins the story of the change of Christianity from this original radical proletarian organization to the "Oppression and Exploitation Machine" that was the later church. He argues that after the destruction of Jerusalem, the plausibility of any overthrow of Roman power disappeared. This change explains the turn to the anti-Jewish, pro-Roman orientation mentioned above, but more importantly, as the church became less an organization for struggle and more of a mutual support organization for its members, it required money. There were rich supporters who were attracted to the Christians by their doctrines, especially about salvation and resurrection (and Heaven and Hell after death, which now largely replaced the idea of the coming of an earthly Kingdom of God for the poor.) At first, they were not allowed as full members of the congregations unless they sold their possessions and gave the money to the poor (i.e. to the church community), but gradually it became enough to make a large donation and they could belong to the church despite still being rich. This resulted in downplaying the original class hatred. There is an interesting passage, although much earlier in the book, where Kautsky contrasts the Gospel according to Luke with the Gospel according to Matthew, showing how the class content of the former is converted into a religious-only content in the latter (the parable of Lazarus disappears completely, in the Sermon on the Mount "blessed are the poor", "blessed are they that hunger" become "blessed are the poor in spirit", "blessed are they that hunger after rightousness", and so forth.) Kautsky asssumes that this is because the Gospel according to Matthew is a few decades later, but it seems to me (I don't know what modern scholars hold about the chronology) that it could just as well represent different congregations, since the process would not have taken place at the same rate everywhere. At the same time, as the communities grew, the tasks that were originally taken on by various members as voluntary "callings" took so much time and skill that they had to be given to full-time paid officials, and the official who held the common purse and paid these salaries, the Bishop, grew correspondingly in importance. However, it was precisely the Bishop, as the one responsible for finances, who had the most interest in attracting and keeping well-to-do members, and so played the major role in the changes in the composition of the church. As time went on, the Apostles, that is to say the travelling preachers, became less important relative to the local presbyters (the origin of the word "priest") and teachers, who were paid by and eventually therefore appointed by the Bishop; and the connections between communities, which they had been the ones to keep up, were kept up through conferences of the Bishops, which also increased the powers of the Bishops over their own congregations as representatives of the common or "catholic" church. I won't go over the whole process, but this is perhaps the most interesting part of the book, how the church became bureaucratized and the hierarchy (the word literally in Greek means "rule by priests") turned it into its opposite, an institution for supporting the imperial government and the rich against the poor. The main point is that this change, the real "apostasy" of the church, was not primarily a change in religion and was not brought about consciously by some sort of conspiracy, as Protestants seem to think (although insofar as they still support the rich against the poor and obedience to "constitued" authority, for all their claims to be "reformed" or "restored" they are still on the post-apostasy side of the development), but was a natural, unavoidable (and largely unconscious) process connected with the growth of the church. The result, however, was that the church which "triumphed" under Constantine and became the dominant power in the western world was not the original proletarian church but its opposite, a church controlled by the rich and powerful. There was no "victory of Christianity" over heathen society, the church that won the victory was one with the previously heathen society it replaced.Kautsky says in one place that the proletarian struggle today cannot take the religious form it did in the days of the early church; of course he is right that it cannot succeed that way, but it seems that it can in fact take religious forms and still does. In reading his description of the early Christians, for example, I frequently found myself thinking of the Rastafarians in Jamaica. But Kautsky has a very different comparison in mind; his last section is devoted to a comparison of early Christianity to the social-democratic movement he was so personally involved with. Essentially, this last section tries to show that, although social-democracy was growing and developing a bureaucracy, this bureaucracy could not betray the workers, could not turn the movement into its opposite. I won't go over his arguments; he was proved wrong only six years later when the social-democratic leadership in nearly all countries led the proletariat into the bloodbath of World War I as followers of their "own" bourgeois governments. Kautsky, to his credit, opposed this. He also -- perhaps initially wrongly -- opposed the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, which very quickly became bureaucratized and turned into its opposite just as Christianity had centuries earlier.
[The e-book edition I read specifically says in its description on Amazon that it was "carefully proofread". Would that it had been so; it's full of typos, mostly of the kind that would not show up on spell-check, which is apparently what "careful proofreading" means today (either the typos form real, though wrong, words, or contain numbers which are ignored by spellcheck.) I have to admit that it is not the kind of gibberish that foreign language e-books so often are today, though -- perhaps the OCR program they used was actually designed for German.]
Dec. 28108. Michelle Cliff, Abeng [1984] 166 pages
Michelle Cliff is best known for her first novel, No Telephone to Heaven, which is one of the next books on my reading list, for the Goodreads group which is reading Jamaican literature this year. Abeng is a prequel to that novel, taking the protagonist, Clare Savage, a light-skinned, "middle-class" Jamaican girl, back to her adolescence at twelve years old. I will admit that it is an easy and enjoyable read, with mostly good likeable characters and good themes, as Clare discovers the discrimination against darker-skinned Jamaicans, women, and gays. Unfortunately, those themes are very explicitly presented, and rather than the themes seeming to come naturally from the story, the story seems obviously written to illustrate the themes -- the author usually begins by describing the problem, then shows the character discovering it, then tells us how she felt about it, and there are essentially no episodes which are not directly related to one or more of these themes. (There is also some material about the colonial history of Jamaica, presented in historical vignettes about her ancestors in the same way as in Margaret Cezaire-Thompson's A True History of Paradise, which the modern characters are explicitly described as not knowing about. Cliff's novel is the earlier of the two.) Together with the age of the main character and the simplicity of the writing style (largely in fragmentary sentences), that didacticism gives the novel the feeling essentially of a book at the border of Middle Grade to early Young Adult fiction. There is some frank discussion of sexual topics, but that only reinforces the impression -- mainly, these are straightforward explanations of the physical changes of puberty and what to expect when you start having periods, which would be of interest mainly to girls at the age of the protagonist, who are at the beginning of puberty and curious about these questions. I would have given this a better rating if it had been marketed for this age group, but neither the book itself, the description on Amazon, or the library catalog record gives any indication of this -- it seems to be presented as a literary novel for adults, and as such it simply does not have sufficient complexity or subtlety. Perhaps because it is a prequel, the real ending is followed with a somewhat disconnected new beginning with a new character, Miss Beatrice -- I got the feeling this was supposed to suggest Pip and Miss Haversham (Great Expectations is referred to earlier in the book) -- and the novel just sort of comes to an end with Clare in a new situation which is not really developed, probably to meet up with the beginning of the earlier book.
55. Naguib Mahfouz, Cairo Modern [1945/tr. 2008] 242 pages
His first novel set in modern times (King Fuad University and Cairo generally during the 1930's), and written a decade before The Cairo Trilogy, this book also deals with the theme of Egyptian politics and culture; although he begins the story with three friends, one an Islamicist, one a liberal with socialist leanings, and one a nihilistic opportunist, the story ends up focused on the third character, his rise and fall. He explores the role of poverty and inequality in corrupting politics and society, and the question of ethical principles. The book is somewhat more openly "preachy" than his later works, but still a very good novel.