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PAGE COUNT TRACKING - 2018
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Nov. 18120. Honoré de Balzac, La vieille fille [1836] 202 pages [in French, Kindle]
The first of two books (with La cabinet des antiques) published under the collective title Les rivalités. I had originally intended to skip these and go on to Les illusions perdus and I probably should have; I know there are articles proving that this is one of the more important of Balzac's books but I found it rather boring. Like many of his novels, it begins with long descriptions of the characters and settings before anything much happens, but in this novel I never managed to get interested at all. He asks at one point in his description of the "old maid", why not write about the misfortunes of stupid people as well as the misfortunes of geniuses, since there are so many more of them? I felt like answering, because they aren't that interesting to read about.
The novel is about an "old maid", rather stupid, dévot (always a bad sign in Balzac), and physically unattractive, but very rich -- and the three men who compete to marry her (and her fortune). There is also a subplot about a young woman who tries to extort money from two of the suitors by pretending to be pregnant, which goes nowhere. The two more important suitors are from opposite parties, one "liberal" and one royalist, which may be part of the point of the novel, but the political descriptions were just monologues by Balzac which were not really illustrated by the plot.
Maybe I've just read too many of his novels and I'm burned out; I'm reading La cabinet des antiques now and then I'll see whether my interest is renewed by Les illusions perdus which is generally considered to be one of his best works; if so I'll continue my original plan of reading one or two works from each of the remaining divisions of the Comédie humaine, about nine more books; if not, I may drop Balzac and move on to Victor Hugo who's next in my French lit project.
Nov. 23121. Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism [2006] 496 pages
A history of the influence of Alexander von Humboldt on the science and culture of nineteenth-century America, with special reference to exploration (although art and literature are dealt with as well). The book is divided into four parts: the first is an account of Humboldt's ideas and their direct influence in the United States; the second deals with J.N. Reynolds and the project to explore Antarctica (and contains some information about Captain Symmes hollow Earth theory); the third is a life of Clarence King and his explorations in the Great Basin and the Sierra Nevadas; the fourth is about Admiral George Wallace Melville and the earlier life of John Muir, and their explorations in the Arctic. There is a final chapter and epilogue tracing the later history of the environmental movement and its failings. The Humboldtian influence becomes less as time goes on, though never quite disappearing. The information in the book was very interesting as was the author's viewpoint on the problems of modern environmentalism, although I would have liked more emphasis on the actual science of the expeditions, and I think Sachs spent too much time discussing whether the subjects were gay or not.
Nov. 24122. Honoré de Balzac, Le cabinet des antiques [1837] 289 pages [in French, Kindle]
The second book of Les rivalités, this was not just related in subject matter to La vieille fille, but was actually a sort of sequel, continuing the same story about the same people, although oddly the names of the two most important rivals was changed -- the de Gordes family becomes the des Esgrignons, and Du Bousquier becomes Du Croisier. The political background is more explicit in this book, which contains an economic analysis of the ultra-monarchists, represented by the des Esgrignons; the main theme is the refusal of this element to compromise with or even understand the new conditions of bourgeois France, and the consequent financial irresponsibility of the young count who is brought up to consider himself entitled to live a noble lifestyle without any kind of occupation, a view which Du Croisier uses to entrap him in debts.
Perhaps because it is a sequel, the action begins sooner and there is more of it than in the first novel, so it is somewhat more interesting to read. I found it impossible, though, to sympathize with the aristocratic characters Balzac obviously intends the reader to sympathize with -- idle, useless, egotistical, only interested in their own pleasures. The hero of the book, the notary Chesnel, is presented as heroic and self-sacrificing because he is totally subservient to the des Esgrignons, the perfect symbol of domestic service (Balzac himself is aware that many readers will not see that as a positive trait, because his praises of Chesnel seem rather apolegetic). Actually, he is responsible for the tragic outcome of the count by serving as an "enabler", covering up his faults and paying his debts so long as his small fortune allows.
The liberal villains, on the other hand, are shown, probably rightly, as hypocrites and venial; Du Croisier began as a Republican when he could profit from the Republic, then switched to monarchism when that was more profitable, and becomes a liberal constitutionalist when his social climbing is rebuffed by the des Esgrignons. Thereafter, he devotes himself to vengeance against the family under the cover of politics.
After reading this, I understood a little more about what the first book was trying to do, but I still can't understand why critics consider it one of his best novels.
Nov. 26123. Alan Walker and Pat Shipman, The Ape in the Tree: An Intellectual & Natural History of Proconsul [2005] 288 pages
According to the preface, while this book is written in the first person viewpoint of Alan Walker, it is mainly written by his wife, Pat Shipman. For most of the book, it follows a chronological order covering the history of the "digs", beginning with the discovery of the first Proconsul fossil and continuing through Louis Leakey's and Walker's own excavations. For a while, Proconsul was considered to be a subgroup of the European dryopithecines, but then was reinstated as a separate group; I would have liked more information about how the two groups differ and what their actual relationship may have been. It then passes on to more detail about the teeth and bones and what the studies reveal about the nature of the genus.
Proconsul, as far as is known today (or at least as of 2005), consists of four species, P. africanus, the original discovery, P. heseloni, a very similar species which is the best known, especially from the sites on Rusinga Island in Lake Victoria, the somewhat larger P. nyanzae, and the largest and least well-known, P. major. It is a "stem-ape", from about 20-17 million years ago, after the split-off of the apes from the Old World monkeys but well before the split between the lines leading to the lesser and great apes of today. It seems to have been an arboreal quadruped, probably a frugivore, with some "monkey-like" attributes (e.g. a flexible backbone), some already "ape-like" attributes (e.g. lack of a tail and no ischeal pads) and many attributes which are in between modern monkeys and apes, but moving in the direction of the apes (e.g. a slower rate of maturation). Contrary to what was originally thought, it has few if any adaptations for brachiation. The book then sketches a brief speculative history of the evolution of the apes.
Written in 2005, this is more recent than most of what I have read on primate evolution, but fourteen years is still a long time in a science that is constantly developing so undoubtedly some of the conclusions here have already been modified.
Nov. 27124. Lady Hyegyŏng, The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng [1795, 1801, 1802, 1805] 400 pages [Kindle]
An early Korean classic, this book actually consists of four separate memoirs. At the beginning of last month, I read another classic work, Queen Inhyun, about a conflict in the Korean Chosun dynasty; these memoirs deal with the next three generations, the reigns of King Yŏngjo, who killed his son Crown Prince Sado, of Sado's son, King Chŏnjo, and the early years of Chŏnjo's son, King Sunjo. The author of the memoirs, Lady Hyegyŏng, was the widow of Prince Sado and the mother of King Chŏnjo. The collective impression of the four memoirs is that the family conflicts of this absolute monarchy were similar to those of the Ptolemies in ancient Egypt or some of the Roman emperors; they make the British monarchy of Richard III or Henry VIII look modern by comparison. The theme of all four is that Lady Hyegyŏng's father and brothers were upright, virtuous servants of the monarchy who were undone by the constant plotting of a variety of other royal families (the list of villains changes in each of the four books, which are hardly consistent among themselves); I suspect that in fact they were probably up to their necks in conspiracies as well. Underlying the family disputes is a factional political struggle between the Norons and Sorons which is never really explained, but which a modern historian would probably see as the key to the events.
Nov. 30125. Hwang Sok-yong, The Road to Sampo [1973] 118 pages
A short story rather than a novel (since it is a bilingual edition, the English text is probably no more than sixty pages even including the afterword and biography of the author), The Road to Sampo follows the travels of two laid-off construction workers, Yŏng-dal and Chŏng, to the home of Chŏng on the island of Sampo, which he has not seen for over ten years. Along the way they meet Paek-hwa, a runaway prostitute also trying to get to her home. In the end, it turns out that "home" no longer exists; the former fishing and farming village of Sampo has been connected to the mainland and has become a construction site for a hotel and tourism complex. The reader of course has suspected something like this all along; the story has no surprises or real plot, just a very powerful depiction of the life of Korean day laborers. (Hwang himself was a construction worker in his twenties, and later, after a stint in the military fighting in Vietnam, he returned to be a factory worker; after a while he became known as an author, and an activist in the workers', peasants', democracy and reunification movements, who eventually spent many years in exile and prison.)
Dec. 5126. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Pre-Platonic Philosophers: Translated from the German and Edited with an Introduction and Commentary by Greg Whitlock [1872-73, tr. 2001] 287 pages
The text of Nietzsche's lecture course of 1872-73, written between The Birth of Tragedy and Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks; the lectures were never polished for publication and never published separately even in German before 1995, but remained buried in the Gesammelte Werke in an incomplete form and unknown to all but Nietzsche specialists. There are seventeen lectures, which cover all the major Pre-Socratic natural philosophers from Thales to Democritus, as well as the later Pythagoreans and Socrates. Nietzsche has many interesting insights on these philosophers, especially Anaximander, Heraclitus and Anaxagoras, some of which foreshadow modern views of the development of Greek philosophy and others which are more iconoclastic (or even rather strange). I had always wondered why Nietzsche never wrote anything on the Sophists, who seem to me to have some resemblances to his thought, but from the comment on them in the lecture on Socrates it appears he accepts the Platonic denigration of them at face value.
The major importance of the lectures, however, is for the light they shed on his own philosophy and its development. The text is accompanied by an extensive commentary by Whitlock which traces the origins of many of his ideas in the Neo-Kantian materialists such as Lange and Ueberweg, as well as of course Schopenhauer, and the eighteenth century physicist Roger Joseph Boscovich, and also shows how his interpretation of the early Greek philosphers leads to his later ideas of eternal recurrence and the will to power. This book will be a must-read for all students of nineteenth century German philosophy.
Dec. 6127. Maryse Condé, Une Saison à Rihata [1981] 214 pages [in French, Kindle]
One of Maryse Condé's earliest novels (I think the second), Une Saison à Rihata is set in Rihata, a regional capital of a fictional West African country. Condé lived for a decade in West Africa, in Sénégal, Guinea, and Ghana. I don't know enough about African history to guess which of these countries the country in the book might be modeled on, although some geographical facts (a former French colony bordering on a former Portuguese one) suggest Guinea; possibly it is a composite of several African nations. The basic outline is unfortunately familiar enough. The novel takes place some two decades after Independence; the first President, corrupt and surrounded by Western advisors, was overthrown by an even more corrupt and brutal military dictator, Toumany, who has ruled for over ten years under the cover of an "African socialism" called "Toumanysm".
The novel begins with the family of Zek (sort of an African Rabbit Angstrom), his alienated and pregnant wife Marie-Hélène (born in Guadaloupe), his mother Sokamba (a representative of traditional African values), his orphan nephew Christophe, and his six daughters, who are in a sort of voluntary exile in Rihata. After establishing these characters and a little bit of their previous history (more of which is revealed in various flashbacks throughout the book), two new characters arrive, who are actually the protagonists of the political action of the novel: Zek's younger brother, Madou, who is a high-ranking minister in the Toumany government, on a secret mission (which of course everyone knows about) and Victor, a guerilla from the North of the country, who is on a mission to spy on Madou's mission. The two plots, the political and the personal, intertwine, together with many flashbacks, in a complex fashion. The two best portraits of the novel are the reformist Madou, originally a radical educated in the Soviet Union, who tries to "change the system from within" and step by step is led to become an important part of the repression he set out to oppose, and the "ultraleft" Victor, also well-meaning, but undisciplined and impulsive, who by his spontaneous individual acts of violence creates most of the disasters in the novel.
If Condé started out with a novel like this, I'm looking forward to reading her later works; I don't know why I had never heard of her before she won the fake Nobel.
Dec. 7128. Dava Sobel, The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars [2016] 323 pages
The Glass Universe is the story of the Harvard Observatory under the directorships of Edward Charles Pickering and Harlow Shapley, that is to say during the last quarter of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, with particular (but not exclusive) emphasis on the role of the women employed first as computers and eventually in other roles. There is also a little bit of context about the role of women in astronomy elsewhere; a major theme of the book is how women broke into academic astronomy. The title refers to the glass photographs of stars, which were taken at the Observatory (and its offshoots at Arequipa and Bloemfontein) and interpreted by the women, although given the preoccupation of the book with the struggle to get women the titles and pay they should have had I wonder if there isn't a subtle allusion to "glass ceiling" as well. The last chapter, though not actually called an epilogue, very briefly covers the period from World War II to the present and just brings us up to date what happened to each of the people dealt with in the book.
Two months ago I read George Johnson's Miss Leavitt's Stars, a biography of Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who was one of these computers and who discovered the relationship between the period and absolute magnitude of the Cepheid variables, which allowed them to be used as "standard candles" for measuring the universe. There was some overlap between the two books, but where Johnson focused on Leavitt and what was relevant to her discovery and put the rest in the background, Sobel gives Leavitt about a chapter and places the main emphasis on Williamina Fleming, Antonia Maury, and Annie Jump Cannon and the development of the spectral classification of stars. There is also something about Cecelia Payne-Gaposchkin's discovery of the predominance of hydrogen and helium in the universe. The book also includes many other figures who were not as well-known, who did the routine work but never made significant discoveries of their own. A less expected focus of the book was on the two rich widows, Anna Palmer Draper and Catherine Wolfe Bruce, who financially supported the work of the Observatory.
Another book that is an obvious comparison is Hidden Figures, since the female computers in that book were hired to do the same kind of work as these women. The theme of breaking down prejudices to allow recognition of women's contributions is basic to both, and there are parallels about the struggle to have women supervisors given the actual titles that correspond to their responsibilities, although this book concentrates only on gender rather than race -- all the women here are white and mostly from upper middle class backgrounds. A major difference is that this book contains more actual science since the women astronomers ultimately did original research as well as just calculations.
Dec. 12129. Hwang Sok-yong, The Shadow of Arms [1985, tr. 2014] 576 pages [Kindle]
Another novel by Korean author Hwang Sok-yong, The Shadow of Arms is based on his experiences as a South Korean "ally" during the Vietnam War. The main character, Ahn Yong Kyu, is a South Korean soldier who becomes an agent for the CID, part of the Korean military intelligence service, investigating (and participating in) black market dealings. The black market dealings are complicated and occasionally difficult to follow, which is the one shortcoming of the novel, but the general lines are clear enough. Among the other major characters are members of the Vietnamese Pham family: the older brother, Pham Quyen, who is also involved in black market dealings, is a major in the South Vietnamese army and the adjutant to General Liam, the military governor of Quang Nam province, while the younger brother, Pham Minh, becomes a member of a special urban guerilla group of the NLF. There are no important American characters, so the novel offers a very different perspective on the war from American war novels. In fact, there is very little in the way of combat; the novel is set mainly in Da Nang, in 1968 when the U.S. and allied intervention was at its height, around the time the Tet offensive. At the time, the U.S. and South Vietnamese were still on the ascendant, and yet the novel shows very clearly why they would eventually lose -- only the NLF actually cared about the war effort, while the South Vietnamese officers and the allies were concerned mainly about making money to go home or escape to some neutral country.
If I had realized that this book was translated from the French translation rather than directly from the Korean, I would probably have gotten it in French, as I did with Monsieur Han. It was originally published in two volumes, and previously serialized in a newspaper. The author ran a certain risk in publishing it under the Korean dictatorship of the time, given the resemblances of Korea and Vietnam as countries which were both divided between a Communist north and a capitalist, U.S. supported south. The introduction has a few spoilers and should probably not be read first.
Dec. 16130. Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon [1977] 341 pages
The third of Morrison's novels, and the one that established her literary reputation, Song of Solomon is the "coming of age" story of a young Black man, Macon Dead III, nicknamed "Milkman", during the era of the Civil Rights movement. After a few chapters about his childhood, most of the novel takes place in 1963; the beginning is rather slow but the most important part of the book is his investigation of his family "roots", which allows him to understand his parents and his aunt Pilate, who is the most interesting character. There are similarities to the previous novel, Sula, in the contrast between Pilate and her family and Milkman's mother Ruth; Pilate, like Sula, defines herself apart from social norms while Ruth, like Nell in the earlier book, defines herself in conventional terms of her relationship to her father, husband and children. Despite some faults -- the character of Milkman's friend Guitar seems basically just introduced to give opportunities for discussing political issues about race, there are many stereotypes in the minor characters, the light flavor of "magical realism" doesn't entirely work and as in the earlier books Morrison occasionally seems to be trying too hard to be "literary" -- the overall impression is that this is a very insightful book about how origins influence character. I have to admit however that I didn't like it as well as the two earlier books.
Dec. 19
131. Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man [2007] 344 pages [Kindle]
The night before I had to lead a book club discussion on Hogfather, I went back and read the second book in the subseries on Death (the anthropomorphic personification thereof); this comes between Mort and Soul Music and is probably the best in the subseries before Hogfather. The "auditors" contrive to have Death forced to resign; without him carrying on his function of collecting the souls of the dead, they remain as a sort of zombie, and there is a build up of "life force" which is not released properly and causes all sorts of random problems. The book gives the origin of Death of Rats. I can't say too much else without spoilers.
Dec. 23132. Gabriel García Márquez, Ojos de perro azul [1974] 182 pages [in Spanish]
This book is a collection of fourteen short stories written between 1947 and 1955, and originally published in periodicals. Although not technically juvenilia, since he wrote them in his twenties and recognized them by republishing them in this anthology in 1974, they all date from before his first mature novella, La hojarasca. I think it would be true to say that with one or two exceptions they are of more interest for his development than in their own right as stories. They are all difficult to understand; unlike many modernists who began with more realist or romantic styles, right from the beginning García Márquez was seeking a modernist, non-realistic style influenced by writers such as Kafka and Borges, and he had not yet learned how to do that while remaining comprehensible to others. Nearly all of them are in some way about death; the first story is essentially about a consciousness in a dead body, and others are concerned with ghosts and spirits, influences of the dead on the living, and so forth. The stories from the fifties foreshadow his later technique of "magic realism" and resemble his mature works more than those from the forties. Probably the best is the title story, "Ojos de perro azul" about two people who dream together but never meet in the waking world.
Dec. 27133. Toni Morrison, Tar Baby [1981] 306 pages
A very interesting novel which touches on many important questions without answering them: the dilemma of Blacks in both America and the neocolonial world between affirming their own traditional cultures without stagnating in poverty versus assimilating the culture and education of the dominant culture without breaking with their roots and accepting "white" values (and the well-meaning but basically patronizing attempts of white liberals to decide for them); the difficulties in human relations (especially marriages and between parents and children) between people who have different histories, goals and values; the struggle between love and independence, again both in relationships and between parents and children; the thin line between emotional confusion and actual mental illness, with the insensitivity of people to the emotional difficulties of others; and as background to everything else, the unequal relationships between employers and workers, white and Black, Americans/Europeans and the neocolonial world, and men and women.
In this novel, Morrison abandons her previous concentration on her own midwestern Black heritage to widen the canvas to the Carribean, with brief episodes in Florida and New York, although Eloe, Florida seems very similar to the small Virginia rural town in Song of Solomon and plays the same symbolic role. It's also the first to include white characters other than in minor roles. The main action of the book is set on a fictional privately-owned island, the Isle de le Chevalier, in the formerly French Caribbean, during the Christmas holiday, apparently sometime in the mid-seventies; the major characters are an American Black sailor, Son, who has jumped ship, and Jadine (Jade), the visiting supermodel niece of the rich white owner's butler, Sydney, and cook, Ondine (who describe themselves as "Philadelphia Negroes, as mentioned in the book of the same name"). There is also much about the relationship of the owner, Valerian Street, with his wife Margaret, and their relationship to the servants. A number of Caribbean Blacks play minor roles. At times the book seems like a play with poetic passages interpolated between the scenes.
Dec. 31134. Honoré de Balzac, Les deux poètes [1837] 164 pages [in French]
The first book of the trilogy Illusions perdues, which is one of Balzac's major works, and which is probably the most autobiographical section of the Comédie humaine, although neither of the major characters is exactly Balzac. The two poets are David Sechard, who like Balzac was for a time an unsuccessful printer, and Lucien de Rubempré, who like Balzac becomes the protegé of a somewhat older noblewoman. The book shows the difficulties of a beginnning writer in the highly class stratified society of Angoulème. I enjoyed the novel more than some of the other Balzac which I have read recently, but I will hold off on a real review until I've finished the other two books of the trilogy.
Apr. 2024. Zora Neale Hurston, Selected Stories [1921-1939] 121 pages
Zora Neale Hurston was one of the key figures in the "Harlem Renaissance" of Black writers, as well as one of the first Black anthropologists. I'm in the process of reading her books because I'm leading a book discussion at the library next month on Their Eyes Were Watching God. Her four novels, and this collection of short stories are published in a single volume in the Library of America series, so I'm borrowing that from the library as one of my readings, but I'm going to count the five books separately since the novels were published that way and I have a couple of them myself in separate editions. I'm also reading the Collected Plays (since those are mostly short I'm only counting it as one book) and possibly a couple of her nonfiction books; I'm reading everything in chronological order but since all but one of these stories were written before the first novel I decided to read the last one and review the stories first.
The nine stories chosen here were written between 1921 and 1939; all but the last were written by 1934, the date of the first novel. In probable order of writing, the collection begins with three early stories, "John Redding Goes to Sea" (1921) and "Drenched in Light" (1924), which deal with adventurous children whose families try to hold them back to the traditional impoverished life of their small towns, and "Spunk" (1925), a tale of violence and revenge which she later made into a play of the same title. "Sweat" (1926) is about a dysfunctional marriage. "The Bone of Contention" (1929), a comic story about a trial, was the basis of her plays "De Turkey and de Law" and (in collaboration with Langston Hughes) "The Mule Bone". "The Book of Harlem", one of my favorites, is a very short story about a young man who comes to Harlem from the South, written as if it were a book of the Bible. "The Gilded Sixpence" (1933) is a story about a marriage; "Fire in the Cloud" (1934) is a new take on Moses at the end of the wanderings; and the final story, "A Story in Harlem Slang", is about two "pimps" (the word didn't mean what it does today) written as the title says in Harlem slang.
Reading these stories together with the plays written at the same time, I was struck by the connections between them, and I'm sure that there are also foreshadowings of the novels. The stories are all worth reading.
119. Hwang Sok-Yong, Monsieur Han [1970; tr. 2002] 127 pages [in French]
This year one of the groups I'm in on Goodreads is reading Korean literature; I decided to look for more books by some of the authors we are reading. I was surprised that so many of them were available through Amazon, mostly from other vendors; but less surprised that far more were available in French translation than in English. Hwang's books are an example.
Hwang Sok-Yong is one of the better known Korean authors; he spent much time both in exile and in prison for his activities in trying to bring about the reconciliation of the two halves of his tragically divided country. His novel The Guest is the one on the reading list for the group. This was his first novel, although he already had a reputation from his stories. He called it a chronicle rather than a novel, because it is based on the real character of his mother's brother. The novel begins with the death of the protagonist, Han Yongdok, then flashes back to his life as a doctor in a hospital in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, during the war, his condemnation for trying to treat ordinary patients rather than just the Party elite, from which he escapes without his wife and children to Seoul, where he arrives as a refugee, and falls foul of the security forces. It was interesting to read about the Korean war from a Korean perspective; I was impressed that contrary to what I had earlier feared, the novel is very even handed, showing the faults of both the distorted socialism of the Stalinists in the North and the corrupt and brutal pro-American regime in the South.