Christmas With Yevtushenko
‘My Education’ By Susan Choi
I’m not sure why I decided to read this book. I’d read her much acclaimed Trust Exercise and had found it fascinating, well-written, yet finally unsatisfying.
I wonder if I feel the same way about this one?
The surprise ending (should I give it away? I don’t know) didn’t tie things up the way it should have. Not that things should have been tied up with a proverbial neat little bow. Indeed not. Messiness was a sort of theme of the novel. But the surprise didn’t seem to ‘justify’ what preceded it. Or rather, the surprise diminished what came before.
This isn’t the surprise, but one nice twist to what begins as a campus novel is that the handsome, rakish professor with a reputation for sleeping with graduate students is not the love interest; it’s his wife.
And the affair between her (a professor in her right, I should add) and the protagonist, a young woman, is painfully and beautifully messy. The friction and the fights and the character flaws are oh so wonderfully and naturalistically conveyed. And when the novel, near the end, skips ahead more than a decade, Choi captures the cycles of life by pairing the protagonist with a husband who is, in his own, quiet way, as manipulative, demeaning, and controlling as was that earlier, dramatic and cruel lover.
Which is perhaps why I felt let down. After so perspicaciously depicting the relationship and its reverberations through the main character’s life, surely it deserved better (though I enjoyed the suggestion that she was, in the end, a secondary character in her own story)?
The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu
I enjoy a lot of early twentieth century pulp, but I have no illusions that many of them are… insensitive to certain issues. But nothing quite prepared me for this level of unbridled racism. I wasn’t surprised by the anti-Asian racism (though ‘Yellow League’ was a bit blunt), but it around thirty odd pages in when the protagonist announced his intention to disguise himself as a ‘dago seaman’ that I properly understood that this was some serious Citizens Council stuff.
And spelling ‘clue’ as ‘clew’ everywhere… sure by the second quarter of the twentieth century we’d more or less agreed on that particular spelling? Sure, apparently, we were all unreconstructed racists, but did the white race have no redeeming features? Mr. Sax Rohner, Esquire, suggests that no, no we did not. Way to throw me under bus, dude. Can you try not to be completely terrible? You’re making the Doc Savage book I read look like a joint project of W.E.B. Du Bois and Lao-Tze.
It could also be compared to Riddle of the Sands, which was written to warn England of the dangers posed by Germany ahead of the First World War. This book was similarly written to assure racist whites that their MAGA fever dreams Asian infiltration are not, as rational people believed, the unfortunate side effect of too much Fox News and having skipped their court mandated drug counseling sessions, but a real thing that is actually happening because only racists are smart enough to connect the dots and see that Hugo Chavez killed Kennedy to steal the election for Ho Chi Minh so that President Bernie could hand Fort Knox and the nuclear football over to the severed head of Karl Marx who had been living in a jar with Doris Day and controlling the world from Berkeley, California.
The titular insidious one was, apparently, creating a Pan-Asian power bloc to rival, if not overcome, western powers. Of course, the author missed the rising power of Japan in favor of a more generalized racism, despite the fact the novel’s 1913 publication took place less than a decade after the Japanese had soundly spanked Russian in a brief and decisive war.
The hero, a sort of polymathic super detective, rather like a leaner Doc Savage, has a distressing tendency to occasionally speak in all CAPS like the tweets of a teenage girl or a LOSER ex-president, which, granted, is less offensive than his frequent digressions into anti-Chinese diatribes. His sidekick is a more laid back type, speaking with normal capitalization and engaging in less active racism; more of an armchair bigot, if you will.
The episodic nature makes me suspect it was originally published in serial form in monthlies. It moves quickly, but then so do most adventures from this time. Also in common adventures from this time, a lot of deus ex machinas, which I wouldn’t have minded so much if it weren’t for, you know, the racism. That sort of makes everything feel more irritating.
Studying With Miss Bishop: Memoirs From A Young Writer’s Life
I am a fan of Gioia, but more as a figure than a poet (though his translation of Dante is superb and that, too, is poetry). I enjoyed his novella length essay on the Catholic writer in contemporary times and felt he was one of our best Poet Laureates in terms of actually promoting poetry (I love the poetry of Charles Wright, but he was marvelously disinterested as Poet Laureate). I was pleased to read that he was a young fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs and got his start reading At the Earth’s Core (the first of his Pellucidar books).
Beyond our shared love, this is a lovely little book. I wish that he had delved more into his own experiences around class and race, but I also recognize that this is not that kind of book.
He examines how his interactions (mainly as a young poet) with five poets and writers affected him. While he notes a funny encounter with a drunk James Dickey (who resented a negative review that Gioia wrote), the reminiscences are by and large fond and positive.
My personal favorite was the chapter about the classicist, Robert Fitzgerald (I loved his translation of The Aeneid), but section on Ronald Perry, an apparently talented, but mostly unknown poet, is the most affecting. It is a beautiful meditation on mortality, in the end. Perry’s literary reputation was small and his memory limited, most likely, by the lifespan of those who knew him. Most writers will not be remembered.
Review: The House On Vesper Sands
The House on Vesper Sands is not the kind of book that I usually pick, but I read a review of it (I believe it was in a sort summary of interesting, recent mysteries) and was sufficiently intrigued to borrow it from the library. It was 60% very good and 40% disappointing, mainly for not having stuck the landing and for shoving threads together rather than properly tying them off.
We never actually meet the main villain nor see him at work (though we do get a look at a secondary villain, who O’Donnell tries to position as the real main baddie but… well, like much of the final quarter of the novel, wasn’t as successful as might be hoped).
The two threads are brought together at the end and, well… the somehow seem to more just be in the same room, rather than really feeling like an organic coming together.
On the positive side, it’s a wonderful gothic 1890s London and the three main protagonists are wonderful, especially Inspector Cutter, who actually made me laugh out loud with his impatient sarcasm. But Cutter is also rather opaque. Readers can easily guess the villains, but we are never properly given to see how the sleuths get there.
I would still recommend this book to my mystery-loving mother, except that it has sort of magical element (given a pseudo-science gloss), which strikes me as not her sort of thing.
Snow Country
I don’t know why I put this book on hold at the library, but I’m glad I did (sorry, DC Public Library, for being late returning it!). A kind of melancholy minimalism and claustrophobic stasis afflicts the characters, of whom there are really only three: Shinamura, an apparently wealthy man (or, at least, a man of sufficient means not to need to work); Komako, the geisha (who begins, rather, as a sort of geisha in training) who becomes his lover; and Yoko, another sort of geisha in training.
It takes place in a sort of middle class vacation spot in the titular snow country, where people ski in winter and enjoy hot springs the rest of the year. Neither wealthy nor sophisticated, the geishas who work here have neither the luxury nor the illusion of their profession’s official distance from sex work.
Shinamura is married back in Tokyo, though only one short scene takes place there. He returns frequently to the hot springs town to see Komako, though the memory of an early sighting of Yoko stays with him and both he and Komako struggle with both love and ambivalence towards her.
Though obviously not needing to work, Shinamura is first seen traveling third class on the train and stays in a resort that is rather obviously not fancy. But his independence still sets him apart from the women, whose lives are precarious, options limited, and who work in a career where their livelihood doesn’t last much longer than their looks.
The ending is notably ambiguous, but it is obvious that Shinamura was never going to give either woman a happy ending. It’s not that he’s indecisive, but rather… I can’t say. If you read it, you’d understand what I mean. Perhaps that his money and gender protect him from having to ever make a truly difficult decision?
A Cruelty Special To Our Species
Just… just a wonderful collection. I missed her when she came to town and read at East City Bookshop, but was glad when I finally picked up book.
The most common theme is alienation in some of its most disturbing forms. There is the alienation of being non-white seeking affirmation and a place in a white world, but the heart of the book are series of naturalistic biographical poems (often a form of prose poem) describing the lives of Korean comfort women, kidnapped by Japanese soldiers in World War II, and of Korean women who were abused by American soldiers during the Korean War (should I say, what we call the Korean War). The most heartbreaking parts about the emotionally and physically damaged women living in the long thereafter that followed the end of hostilities.
‘From Dawn To Decadence: 1500 To The Present: 500 Years Of Western Cultural Life’ By Jacques Barzun
I knew of Barzun as one of one of the New York intellectuals of the fifties and sixties, but only knew of him; I’d never read him.
But after reading an essay by someone who knew him (I can’t remember where I read; some right leaning publication, I believe, but one of those who mostly try to ignore Trump and assert some intellectual legitimacy to the right), I thought I should rectify that.
For better or worse, all the library had was his immensely long, late in life, magnum opus.
A couple of things struck me while reading it.
First, a fascinating aside about Hamlet within another aside about Shakespeare. He points out that it is a modern understanding to think of him a vacillating. In fact, Barzun argues, he was being judicious in a difficult environment. It is no small thing to kill a king and dangerous if you fail; also dangerous if you succeed, because you are vulnerable in the short term to popular unrest or the ambitions of nobleman who sees opportunity in the inevitable chaos. That he was not indecisive is proven, he writes, by Fortinbras saying, upon finding the scene of slaughter at the end (I am giving nothing away, I hope), that Hamlet would have made a great king. Surely, if Hamlet were the waffling type, this would not be the case. He also suggests that Laertes is included to point out the contrast between an impetuous character and a careful one; Laertes’ recklessness makes him an easy tool for Hamlet’s uncle. It also nicely matched an interesting (but not great) production of Hamlet that I saw at the Folger, where the director challenged the actors and audience not to focus on psychology, but on the actions of the characters.
Second, I am an elitist. I already knew this. But Barzun is writing elite, cultural history. He is not Braudel. He’s not even a Durant. He is an apostle of high culture. And, well, I like reading about that. That said, his brand patrician elitism can elide decency and slip into something distasteful, as in his off hand, Malthusian remark about “the rapid increase in people as hygiene and medication recklessly prolong life.” He was in his nineties when he wrote this book.
What did I learn? Well, it is the sort of magisterial, grand work one doesn’t find so much anymore, so one does learn a lot. Too much to sum up. But…
I’m not sure that counts as learning, but his thesis that monarchism is the key to unlocking an understanding of the baroque was fascinating, even if I am not qualified to judge it.
His portraits of cities as exemplars of particular times – Venice in the mid seventeenth century or London in 1715 – are as masterful as they delightful, until they are not. Paris in 1830 is oddly, mostly about German thought. His pastiche of 1895 showed an unsurprising indifference.
It feels like, and this especially struck reading his reading of the twentieth century, that the figures he most enjoys are more contemporary ones whose style harkens back to the witty and learned diaries, essays, and criticisms of Samuels Pepys and Johnson and the men who filled the pages of the Tatler and its siblings of the eighteenth century. But he does namecheck Garbage, one of the great bands of the nineties (the 1990s, that is), even if disparagingly (in the context of band names that are… bad? Dirty? Filthy?)
Should you read Barzun? Probably. He is Eurocentric and not terribly interested in non-white cultures, but these deep flaws don’t make him unreadable. Indeed, he is a witty writer. Lines like “a thin slice of antiquity for a large spread of modern butter,” in reference to French baroque culture’s preference for Roman over Greek antiquity struck me very nicely.
Rhythm Of War
I am officially tired of reading long, unfinished series of fantasy/science fiction novels, with each and every novel being longer than the last. I think this one clocked in at 1300 odd pages. Are you better than War and Peace? No? Then consider tightening your narrative.
Ok.
It wasn’t that bad, I was just ‘over’ this fourth book in the so-called Stormlight Archive about five hundred pages short of finishing it. Which, before you ask, I did finish it.
Sanderson does still write some great action sequences. He has characters (one in particular) who can fly (that’s technically not what he’s doing, but close enough without explaining an unnecessarily complicated magical system) and does a good job at depicting combat in multiple dimensions.
At least, if the author is try to his word, this particular storyline will end with the next book.
Free Food For Millionaires
It’s a long book, over six hundred pages, but it still annoyed me that some 150 pages in, I’m being told important traits about the protagonist. When the reader learns, over a quarter of the way in, that she’s oddly religious and even sees signs (not necessarily religious revelations, but still something quasi-gnostic), it feels like discovering something new than an author introducing a deus ex machina to move something along.
The protagonist, Casey Han, is often rereading Middlemarch and I suspect Lee sees it as a model for this book. But who is the village? The Korean-American community? The wealthy of Manhattan around whose edges Casey flits? It’s not clear. And despite being clearly soap opera-ish, Eliot never feels like a soap opera. This does. Must the Korean boyfriend have a gambling problem? Must the jerk husband have sex on the trading floor? Must the middle aged mother and the choir director have an affair? I never thought I’d say this, but I could use more social commentary and less sex.
Finally, if we accept that this is ultimately a soap opera, then the philosophical ending is unearned. She was aiming at a novel that deserved such an ending, but she ultimately didn’t achieve it. Despite some of the trappings, it was closer to Crazy Rich Asians than to George Eliot.
the coffee philosopher 