A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka

This was an amusing little light-reading diversion for the women’s auxiliary chick-lit club of Skokie, Illinois.  The “Skokie Women’s Discussion Group” met yesterday (2^nd and 4^th Wednesdays of every month).  They love these stories that portray all men as bumbling idiots, easily swayed by any wiggly pair of “knockers.”  These stories that cast men with rock-solid egos, albeit with sometimes squishy other parts.  Besides work, these men play and watch games, and eat a lot.

This fictionalized memoir reads more like a series of neighborly chats at the checkout queue of the local Sainsbury’s, with the focus of the week being one of three alternating points: 1) sisterly bonding; 2) 20^th century Ukrainian history; and 3) a generous helping of Judge Judy.  All in all, I thought Marina’s writing style was “cute and entertaining.”  It’s a harmless book that can be read quickly or intermittently as the mood suits one.  I will recommend it to my sister, who wouldn’t miss a Judge Judy episode; she loves the sheer crassness of those who would seek J.J.’s opinion/decision.  My Slavic friends (in my age group) are all fervent, nationalistic slaves to polka dancing.  They will pour over this book with serious, critical attention.  For those more modern American friends of mine, the 99%, I’d recommend it to the women in my age group.  The family bonding/understanding issue is far bigger and certainly more important that what was attempted in this chin-wag book.  Nonetheless, it at least brings up the point that “older sister” maybe has some insights into the family history/dynamic from which younger sister was sheltered.

So, the undisclosed factor in my soft handling of this book is that my college 4th year roommate, and 5th year (I switched from engineering to Math, Physics, & German) best friend was known as Oleks Rudenko.  That was 1959-60 thru 61: the University of Arizona at Tucson. Oleks was a young teenager during the German offensive East (1941) and subsequent retreat West (1944).  He had joined the partisans for Ukrainian independence as a runner early on.  He was captured by the Germans and sent back as a worker.  In 1945, he was free as a 17-year old survivor to roam Germany with a band of like-thinking ex-patriots.  He had wild tales to tell of commandeered jeeps, teen-aged adventures, smiling American GIs with cigarettes, food, and gasoline.  He came across to America in 1948; worked to make money, learn English (badly, but it served him well in 50’s America) and also enough to get into college.  I stayed with Oleks and his wife eight years later (1968) when he was finally settling down and I was starting graduate school. 

I danced a lot of polkas in those days with the Slavic graduate student clubs; learned a lot of Eastern European history.  I hope that Oleks found peace with the dissolution of the Soviet Union:  I don’t know; I lost contact in the eighties.  I hope he got to go back.

The causes never die. 

What is the What by Dave Eggers

I’ll open with an apology: my normal voracious reading appetite has been soured for the past few months by attending four funerals over the summer.  I’m not reading as much, and I’m reading with impatience and an intolerant eye.

Nonetheless, I think I’m still reading good books like Joan Didion’s “Blue Nights,” which makes one think that she and JCO are in some sort of high-stakes poker game for who can open their veins wider.  For leitmotif, I’m gobbling up John Grisham’s latest, “The Litigators,” which is great fun.  My pulp-fiction bathroom book is “House Divided,” by Mike Lawson: a spy/murder/lawyer book about the NSA (like the Peace Corps, one of the few regrets at not joining from my post-college possibilities).  But back to the mortality memoirs, I recently finished JCO’s “The Corn Maidens” and am now setting out on the Julian Barnes book, “The Sense of an Ending.”  Even with the fluff reading, this is all well-written stuff: thoughtful, well-researched, and thoroughly life-relevant, even life-enhancing.

O.K., I guess I can’t avoid commenting on this month’s installment in our library book club text collection of dry, acidic diction.  “What” is right up there with “Envy” and “Sanctuary” as a compilation of words that characterize TMI: Too Much Information.  “Bliss” was in the running for this year’s prize, but wound up fourth – it was too accommodating to the reader.  These journalism articles, overly long and repetitive, were examples of bad memoirs – boring content, instead of exciting novels – emotive and insightful.

One lesson I’ve learned this year, and wish I could enforce, is that journalists should not be allowed to publish books.  There’s so much good stuff available, why encourage the proven bad writers.  One should: encourage youth and encourage fledgling authors; but hacks .??. – no advances – make them self-publish.

The cases in point are Eric “Bliss” Weiner, Neil “Sanctuary” White, and Dave “What” Eggers.  To me, these are men who beg, borrow, steal, and/or whatever to get their words out.  They’re con-men – out to sell a newspaper (Please see all the old Barbara Stanwick and/or Gary Cooper movies from the thirties).  These people changed that industry.  Reporters are now characterized as soulless jerks and creeps, male and female, who lust after the salacious and will go to any end to find gossipy items (just Google: Murdoch, Sun).

[But see, here I go: reacting to the loss of my mother, a radio friend, a church friend, and a local neighbor.]  I want to [and will of course] continue to say that my mother’s parents were both lifelong newspaper people.  My grandma opened her first paper at 19, as publisher/editor on the Louisiana/Texas border.  My mom’s father taught me to run the linotype at a young age.  They jointly ran the county papers, including the Waterloo {where my mother was raised} Gazette.  These kind of people are the genesis and inheritors of “the freedom of the press.”

My three minutes are running out.  I have hardly spoken of Eggers or his book.  Eggers is a bad writer – it’s a shame he had to drop out of Cal-Berkeley.  One reviewer tactfully says, “it defies categorization” – biography or novel – fiction or memoir.  I answer that an author knows what they are writing.  The story is not “engaging”, as another reviewer says; it is completely boring – I read it all – I never was interested in anyone’s story ---- whether they lived or died ---- nor what they were living or dying for ---- not in anything from the book.

Eggers didn’t do the number one thing an author must do: make me care whether they lived or died, whether they thrived or succumbed, whether they became relevant or not.  Journalists only have to achieve a buy-in for two minutes of one or two days. 

Good writers make you think about their characters for weeks, months and years afterward.  I will not remember Achak Deng next week. 

Will You .?

The Windup Girl -- Paolo Bacigalupi

Published: October 30, 2011
BANGKOK — Shielded by hundreds of thousands of sandbags piled shoulder high along the city’s outskirts, most of Bangkok remained dry on Sunday, allaying fears for the time being that the massive metropolis would be swamped by monsoon floodwaters.

I’m one of the few who read all 359 pages of this diatribe against bio-engineering. I read it even though I wouldn’t call it a Science Fiction novel. There’s a nice travelogue on Siam (remember “The King and I”,) including a brief political history. It’s about what research you’d get from clicking on Wikipedia. The plotline is cute, but too thin for a real Sci-Fi book. The insistence on Thai names for people and places is always difficult for American readers. It takes over a hundred pages just to get into the flow of the author’s style and gain familiarity with the characters.

Now if I just look at the book as a modern, action movie script, then I think the author has done a wonderful job. There’s just enough character development to carry a 120-minute, all-audience film. There are plenty of sympathetic characters to root for: Jaidee (think Obi Wan-Kenobi) and Kanya (Luke); Anderson the American; Hock Seng the loyal but befuddled foreigner; and of course Emiko who will provide plenty of female sisterhood as well as contortionist sex for the 14 year-old male viewer. Evil-doers abound leading off with global mega-corporations versus populist farmers; then politicians (shoot them all, like the lawyers) versus the eco-friendlies.

I’m sure this will be filmed in a 3-D format. There’s plenty of opportunity for computer graphics. All our favorites: war, violence, torture, and sex, all to extremes. It was a hard slog through the repetitious action scenes. I guess this leaves the movie director with multiple options for filming. However, I did finish the book and liked it. Author Bacigalupi is certainly no William Gibson as many of his credits claim, but it’s an enjoyable read that I would and will recommend. I’d certainly point out this book to anyone contemplating travel to Thailand. I can’t wait for the movie.

A Long Way Down -- Nick Hornby

The Breakfast Club – (revisited 20 yrs on)

I’m too old to put up with the angst and yammering of youth’s hard slog up the hill of adulthood. I can take a few hours of this whining, but I would have much preferred a 90-minute Hollywood version.

The Breakfast Club (1985) was successfully targeted on 14-year olds. It quickly became an adolescent classic like my generation’s James Dean flic, “Rebel Without a Cause” 30 years before.

“Way Down” takes a similar four losers from the Breakfast Club; ages them fifteen years; and places them on top of a building, each with a perfectly rational and expedient solution to their dysfunctional lives – jump off.!! Unfortunately, they fail. What could have turned out to be a great population control idea, through a strategy of weeding out the weak, instead turned into a paper wastage machine for the author.

Yes, I think success spoiled Nick Hornby. Then again, maybe he only had the one book in him. He’s certainly been writing the same story over and over again. This idea, of the four on a building, could have been an interesting short story, or a stage play, or a screenplay without the precedent book. However, Hornby seems to be locked on the 300-page novel format. This particular effort was a cheap, gimmicky shortcut – four, otherwise unrelated mini-stories, wrapped into one “novel.”.

Now I grant you that British humour plays a lot on human foibles, mistakes, and downright stupidity; and I do love my “Red Dwarf” and “Absolutely Fabulous”. However, these four idiots would be lucky to average an IQ of 65. Then again, I have to admit how idiotic it is for so many “bright” men to be caught with their pants down so often. Nonetheless, this book didn’t pass test number one of fiction, suspension of disbelief. And without that, who gives two cents about the miserable, depressing lives of a quartet of wankers in England.

Portraits of a Marriage -- Sándor Márai

This recent translation of an older Hungarian book is a great example of several styles that are outdated these days. First, there is the multiple POV approach, which was just beginning in the pre-WWII days when this was written. Like my favorite model, Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, this book is composed of four short stories, all chronicling the same events but from different points of view and time frames.

The separate story approach has the advantage of reinforcing the truism that 100 people will see the same events in a hundred different ways; and that there are 100 different “truth”s to the one set of events. The memoir genre, which is becoming more and more extensively used, has come under fire recently for “distorting” the “real truth” of events. This separated POV story approach helps to define the memoir as just one of the 100 truths of an event. This clarification isn’t a part of the modern multiple-POV styles. When the POV switches from within a single story, the reader is forced to multi-task and switch POVs, often beyond their ability. There seems to be a fine, gray line of acceptable frequency of switching POVs. Dickens switched at a macro level, maybe every few chapters to a new sub-plot. Alternating chapters is quite common these days, but not commonly done well. I often decide to skip an entire POV, alternate set of chapters, assuming that the author will knit them together in the end.

The other older style of writing was the use of the expository first person narrative. In this case, other characters are never actually incorporated, merely spoken to without response coming back. Each of the first three chapters is a supposed several hour monologue, or more accurately, a dialogue with an imaginary or unhearable friend. This avoids the pesky details like scene setting, entrances and exits, and “he said”-“she said”s. This was an acceptable style prior to stage and screen adaptation became popular around the time of WW-II.

I enjoyed this book, but it’s not for the casual reader. It is a book to be read slowly and one where the entertainment comes from delving deeply into characters.

The Guilty Plea by Robert Rotenberg

For those who like a bit of contrast, here’s a Canadian legal thriller. And in keeping of contrasts, I’ve shown both book covers, American on the left, somewhat subdued with a techie background finish; and then on the right, a more old-fashioned but bloodier, hit-you-over-the-head cover used in Toronto Canada where this author hails from.

Lawyer stories always make good summer reading and this is a good one. The outcome is always clear (see the title.) It is the contrasting explanations of American versus Canadian judicial systems that were interesting to me: rules of evidence, cross examination, and other lawerly detail of that sort. My sister, who spent many years as a paralegal would love this book.

Of course, there are the usual twists and turns to catch the reader by surprise and plenty of sex to keep the action going. Canada, however, is a quiet place. There’s not much violence in this book, that didn’t seem to cross the border. Moreover, without violence, there aren’t any villains to stimulate our moral outrage.

Overall, the writing seemed like a retro throwback to American lawyer stories of the nineteen seventies. With the good writing, that made it easy and pleasant to read: a good book for the summer of 2011.

All the Time in the World -- E.L. Doctorow

This guy Doctorow is a prolific writer. I’ve seen his name now for years. I’ve picked up novels of his several times, and then put them back down because I thought they were too “heavy.” This book of short stories was a way to get into hits style and thoughts. Now, on reflection, I think maybe he just hit too close to home with me. I really enjoyed his stories; they made me laugh, and think, and pause to say to myself “that’s me.”

The opening story, Wakefield, tells the story of a yuppie man who, on a whim, spends a year hiding from his wife and job, in his garage loft.
Edgemont Drive is another tale of the suburbs. An old man arrives in front of a couple’s house in an old Ford Falcon. He parks there for days, weeks, and then wheedles his way into the house: his old house. He has come to die there; and does.

These are not thrilling tales. These stories are readable etudes. Doctorow does a good job of capturing people, their thoughts and dialogues. He makes it all real. He spins a yarn that pleases us, the reader. In Assimilation, we read the story of Ramon, a legal immigrant busboy, and Jelena, the foreign daughter of a Russian gangster. Ramon is tricked into a marriage with her, but after many trials and tribulations, she falls in love with him. This sounds like a 1940’s movie plot, but Doctorow has freshened it up and brings it off satisfactorily.

There are a dozen short stories in all, just right for summer reading by the pool, each one takes about an hour or two of distracted reading. The stories in the middle of the book are centered on religion as a theme, with quite a bit of tongue-in-cheek moralizing.

The tongue-in-cheek becomes comedic with stories like Jolene’s, who from age 15, continuously sells her soul to the lowest bidder and bounces from bottom to bottom; all the way to The Writer in the Family, who writes letters home to his mother from his dead father; and then Willi, who lusts after his step mom.

the Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry

Another author with a 1st book for us to read. This was fortunately a good read; no skipping pages or skimming passages or characters. It was definitely an ambitious and risky book. It was ambitious to attempt to handle so many characters, and to try doing it with depth. I think losing a quarter of the characters would have tightened things up more to my liking. Another ambitious experiment was continuously switching points of view. In one of the final chapters, I swear she shifted from Rafferty to Jack to Towner to May. Sounds like a Diants triple play. It’s more work to maintain consistency with a single POV.

I acknowledge that these days, two POVs work better when translated into film scripts, but this was just laziness or impatience in getting the book finished. Maybe I’m just a 20th century reader, but I liked the way Lawrence Durrell handled four POVs by writing four versions of the same story in “The Alexandria Quartet.”

Barry took a lot of risk using the Salem witches as the sub-theme of her plotlines. She had to succeed in coming up with new and interesting aspects to this theme. If she failed, the publishing world would pillory her for a banal exploitation of the past. However, I thought her exploration of the lace making and lace reading was brilliant. Using this as the dominant theme of the book worked, especially the use in chapter introductions and as dialogue quoted adages. Another risky adventure for Barry was choosing a central character suffering from Schizoid Personality Disorder. Moreover, twin trauma; I can’t forget that. Didn’t we have a twin-trauma book just a few months ago.?.

This is all risky because Barry has chosen an unsympathetic primary protagonist. Thankfully, she has also given us Rafferty, who is very likeable. My next-door neighbor is like Towner. She moved in three years ago with all sorts of vague references to a troubled past. She does not chitchat with the neighbors; is not friends with any of us. Her dog’s name is “Rambo” and he scares the beegeebers out of all the other neighborhood dogs. He still growls, barks, and races back and forth after all the neighbors and their dogs. I’m personally glad that Barry took the risks; it made the book more challenging to follow and intriguing as the plot unfolded. I’m sure she cut her readership in half by using a crazy female lead.

I thought the use of the Calvinists as a deus ex machina was way over the top. Probably makes a great final scene for the movie, with burning torches and pitchforks, but we’ve had 87 Frankenstein movies in the past 100 years, so maybe that bit is a little clichéd. For balance, I would have preferred more depth about the island coven, and strangely, maybe more about the fishing aspect of town. Of course, everyone would want more about Rafferty’s back-story rather and not so much about the crazy lady’s.

Overall, this novel is full of 1st book flaws, but the sheer energy behind interesting and creative ideas carries this book up into the realm of good reads for serious readers.

SixKill by Robert B. Parker

Spenser’s final story. Parker’s last book. Death was the only way to slow down Parker’s annual output of two variations a year of the same plot, same characters (sometimes by other names). Early in his long career, he fell into the trap of writing each novel with more BIFF, BAM, & ZOW than the last. He adjusted after realizing that approach wasn’t sustainable. So the pace, and fireworks, has been predictable and yet still satisfying for over twenty years now.

This iteration of the story centers around Spenser, a Phillip Marlowe type detective with modern tastes living in Boston. He is approached by a beautiful defense attorney, Rita Fiore. She, along with police captain Quirk, contrive to have Spender look into the murder of a young girl in the hotel bedroom of an on-location movie star nicknamed Jumbo. .

In Parker stories, there are two levels of bad guys: (1) dislikeable criminals who are generally there just for color and are left alone; and (2) sadistic baby-killer types with no redeeming value. The hero kills these nasty ones, usually towards the end of the book. There are many good people, and all of them are just personality variations on the hero. Parker writes a simple story, black and white, good guys and bad guys. This gives Parker a large audience that can understand and enjoy his books.

There’s a back-story on Z. Sixkill, an Indian, reminiscent of Jim Thorpe. In this book, Z is a fill in for Hawk, strong, silent sidekick to Spenser. His theme is redemption.

This is pure pulp fiction – I read it in less than 24 hours and enjoyed every moment of it. Big print – lots of blank space on the page. Funny -- and good triumphs over evil.

An Evil Eye by Jason Goodwin

Well, I made it through the fourth, and current, book in the Investigator Yashim series, “An Evil Eye.” I hope that Jason Goodwin, the author, takes a break for a few years. Four books in four years is an amazing achievement for a novice fiction writer. The money must be a welcome change to an otherwise obscure historian specializing in the 19th century Ottoman Empire.

My reticence for further accolades might be due to my distractions as July 4th approached and I had am open house exhibit going on at the local Community Center; but it also may be due to Jason’s rush to glory while his publisher was still pushing advance checks into his face. This book shows the signs of a distracted author that weren’t there in the first three. Goodwin has been guilty of meandering in all the preceding books but with the first three, as far as we can tell, he caught himself and tied the errant thread back into the plotline. In this book, he goes off in direction and doesn’t clean things up until the very end.
Having said the above, I still heartily recommend the series. Any flaws with this last one are more than compensated for by the continued lyrical presentation of Constantinople in 1839, life in Istanbul, life in the sultan’s palace, and of course, love, life, and mystery two centuries ago.

There is no simple plotline in this fourth book in the series. Goodwin has fallen prey to a common problem of a rush to publication. Each of the first three books had clear, simple mainline plot threads: the Janissary Tree was a revolt of the old guard; the Snake Stone revolved around relics and commerce in antiquities; the Bellini Card focused on family traditions in Venice.

This plot investigates women’s lives and travails in the seraglio. Goodwin creates subplots around a young girl, another around potential mates for the sultan; then another for head woman, the sultan’s grandmother. He also follows the head woman’s rival along with the intrigues in the palace. He channels his youth growing up in the palace through an adventuresome young man. While on intrigue, he also weaves subplots around the numbers 2, 3, and 4 political officials, viziers and pashas. There are half a dozen other subplot lines and a great number of new characters introduced. There were too many for me to keep track of and I missed his elaborate attention to detail in two areas: when describing the city; and preparing a meal. These last two areas were there in the book, but not with the pizzazz of previous books.
I’m serious when I suggest that someone needs to pull together all his recipes and discussions of food and eating. Everything is available here in northern California and it just fits in well with the semi-vegetarian California cuisine.

State of Wonder --- Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett is one of those authors whose new books are automatically sent to the “top of the list” as a must read. She’s an academic author. She spends a lot of time perfecting plot and characters, so we only see a new work every two or three years.
This is an amazing story and a compelling read. It’s all I can do to hold back from just reading it straight through, from cover to cover. However, like a good Armagnac, the reading is best, when one savors it over time without guzzling.

Marina Singh is a Minnesotan medical doctor with an eastern Indian father, who abandoned her, returning to India. She has nightmares about her childhood visits to Calcutta. She gave up her surgical career because of a common mistake when in residency (she never watched Dr. House or Grey’s Anatomy). At the opening, she is a lab tech with a partner, Eckman; and a quiet sexual relationship with her 20-years-older boss. The boss sends Eckman to the Amazon; Marina’s old surgery professor reports Eckman’s death after three months. Marina bonds with Eckman’s wife, who has every thing Marina really wants: kids, acceptance, and a stimulating life. Marina travels to the Amazon to pick up the pieces. She finds all those things she has been missing in her life.

Ann Patchett normally puts most of her attention on people and their psychology, motivations, and back-stories. As a change of pace, Patchett has written an action thriller here, not much psychoanalysis.
So, she has channeled Homer, using all the adventure devices we love in “The Odyssey.” We have the Lotus-Eaters, who forget their mission preferring somatic drugs [Rapps]. We have the cannibalistic Laestrygonians [Hummocca] with yellow heads and poison darts. We have the protective drug “moly” to resist Circe [malaria]. And of course, there’s an encounter with Scylla, the six-headed monster [Anaconda]. Marina exhibits growing strength and commitment as the story unfolds.

Patchett’s writing is tight: no meandering, no wasted words on fluff. I appreciate the time and effort that went into scores of revisions; they were worth it. There is never any hint of what’s going to happen next.
Marina blossoms when dropped in the Amazon jungle. Life will never be the same. Patchett explores the boundaries of love: for children, for a child, of a friend, and mentors; and not unlike Odysseus, the story ends when they get home.

There will be considerable temptation on the part of the movie director to turn this script into something like “Anaconda” or “Arachnophobia,” or even Tarzan. This is not what the book is all about and it would be a shame to have the movie miss the point, while in search of some teenager-appeasing computer graphics.

The Bellini Card -- Jason Goodwin

O.K., this is the third book of a series: the investigator Yashim series. The series focuses on Istanbul in the late 1830’s, as the Ottoman Empire is declining and a new sultan takes power. Yashim, as a well-educated Eunuch, is a trusted and tactful personage in the palace. He has no specific role, but higher-ups call on him to solve mysteries that don’t fall into the normal responsibilities of governance.

For any author, the bar is always higher with each new murder mystery in a genre series like this one. Goodwin has deftly dealt with his readership’s lust for more and better, by introducing a second city, Venice, to contrast, compare, and develop similarities with Istanbul. As he points out, the two cities are both ancient, only four degrees of latitude apart, and only a few days boat ride away from each other.

Goodwin also beefs up the role of sidekick through development of the Polish diplomat, Stanislaw Palewski. This enhanced role is a good indication of Jason Goodwin’s maturing into authoring murder mystery novels. He has plopped in the classic, and recognizable, device of Arthur Conan Doyle’s periodic disguised appearance of Sherlock Holmes as a beggar in rags, totally surprising Watson, who has been sent off to stir up the natives.

In my opinion, this is the perfect way to teach: history, geography, cooking, sociology, art, and language. At the simpliest level, there is the plot line of a murder mystery. From this level, the writing is lyrical and pleasantly descriptive. In “The Bellini Card,” for the first time in the series, Yashim the Investigator, fights for his life several times, and turns out to be marvelously adept at the martial arts. This will be great for the movie version. Of course, even though he is a eunuch, his love-making dazzles a beautiful woman in each episode.

For the more curious reader, each page is a jumping off point for further personal research, investigation, and cogitation. It is fascinating for me to dig back with WikiPedia or Google to look more deeply at that period, especially with its merry-go-round changes in country names. I was a stamp collector last mid-century and Goodwin brings to my mind all those long forgotten country names.

I am no chef, but I am tempted to pull together all the recipes for what are simple country dishes, into Yashim’s cookbook, but I’m sure Jason has already sold the rights to that little goldmine . They sound delicious because of all the spices and herbs, but mostly because of the manual care in preparation that he describes.

The author, Jason Goodwin, appears to be an authentic renaissance man; a man who can carry on about the arts and culture of his chosen period as well as grasping past triggers for why things turned out as they did. As an author of genre novels, Goodwin treats his most curious readership to an after dinner trolley full of stimulating language usage, sprinkled with just the right amount of other Indo-European language phrases.

In the Sanctuary of Outcasts -- Neil White

I’ll leave it to someone else this month to identify the sub-genre here. I’d love to moan anecdotally about having to wash my hands after every reading session.
Between Wikipedia and Google, there’s more than enough factual information available on Hansen’s Disease to satisfy all but those who might find prurient interest in these subjects.

I will limit myself to simply digging into the vast, muddy morass of a lost soul; a sociopath driven by greed, pride, and envy, who never lets go of his sinful ways. He hangs onto his bigotry and his lust for wealth and fame. He is the antithesis of a Christian, repentant soul.
Reading a man’s own boastful words about his debauchery was the only redeeming rationale for finishing this book.

Halfway through I began waiting for the epiphany; the metamorphesis from total rogue to a man of Christian temperance. Two-thirds of the way through I was rooting for him to contract the disease, then dedicating the rest of his miserable life to writing for the bimonthly magazine, The Star. Alas, his just desserts would have to wait for his release.

Remember Doc’s adage, “Don’t believe anyone in here. They’re all criminals” And while keeping that thought in mind, this book needs to be read with a skeptical mind, reading between the lines, and noting what is not said, as well as what is on the page. Our protagonist in this fictional memoir is a con man, pure and simple: a reasonably good con man and a reasonably successful con man; nonetheless, a con man in jail. The best con men believe in their pitch. There’s another ubiquitous adage that I’ll steal from The Shawshank Redemption, “There ain’t no guilty prisoner’s at Shawshank; we’re all innocent.” From my experience, there’s no better con man than an ex-con.

With my skeptic’s eye, I objectively observe that almost no one really likes Neil White; outside, inside, prisoners, patients. Where are outside friends? Didn’t he have any real friends? Of course his mother loves him; that’s what mothers are for. And inside?: he’s pretty much alone. No one sticks with him; and before he leaves Carville, he bails on all his “associates,” thinking, as usual, just about himself and what he can gain or lose from an action, totally venal . This man is a reprobate : a con artist who ripped off people before, during, and after this particular period twenty years ago. I sincerely regret that the Sonoma County Foundation effectively passed some money his way, but I’ll content myself with believing that it went towards the education of “Little Neil” at Princeton.
I’m sure he did try and shop this book around as an expose in the mid-ninties. Even with Carville closing in 1998, no one bought it or him. And no one ever wants to hear about “My soft 18 months at a Federal tennis ranch.” So the manuscript languored around for fifteen years until the latest publishing fad; “memoirs”. Neil White added a “memoir” genre designation and found someone to publish it. No prizes for this one, but White finally cashed in.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Sociopath – a person who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience
Debauchery – Wickedness, corruption, dishonesty, decadence, lack of morality
(n.) Corruption of fidelity; seduction from virtue, duty, or allegiance.
Venal -- capable of being bought or obtained for money or other valuable consideration :
purchasable; especially : open to corrupt influence and especially bribery
Reprobate -- n. 1. A morally unprincipled person. 2. One who is predestined to damnation

The Snake Stone -- Jason Goodwin

The initial question is, “Does the second book in the Investigator Yashim series live up to the brilliant promise of The Janissary Tree?” The answer is a resounding, “Yes!” For me, the author Jason Goodwin is just hitting his stride with this book. He is more comfortable the second time around; he has become a part of nineteenth century Istanbul and has adapted well to the format of fiction.

This second book in the series, The Snake Stone, establishes what we can expect in the future vis-à-vis Yashim’s personality, and his supporting cast of characters. Many devices of my favorite classic murder mysteries are incorporated: the suave detective with refined culinary skills, an extensive knowledge of art, history, and language. Even though he is a eunuch, he is tempted by beautiful women and teased by their kisses. This is one of life’s problems for Yashim. Of course, he gets beat up at times, like all detectives, and faces near-death situations. Others die around him, mysteriously, otherwise it wouldn’t be a detective story.

I think the period chosen by Goodwin, mid 19th-century, late thirties specifically was an ideal era. 1839 marks the beginning of the decline of the Ottoman Empire (ending with the Crimean War). Things were quiet in the English speaking world of the 30’s: Great Britain was consolidating its empire; the U.S. was likewise quietly consolidating under Jackson, then Van Buren, and then Tyler. Historically, it’s just a generation or two out of reach: recognisable, but quaint. Most important, though, is that these years were a wonderful vantage point from which to jump back in history, hundreds and hundreds of years; and Constantinople was still a major hub of political, commercial, and cultural activity. Constantinople was a pivot point for western history: Troy, Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul; each has had a significant impact on our western heritage and history.

It is with Yashim’s ruminations about previous empires and peoples, going back centuries where the reader experiences the magic ingredient that makes this series more than just another whodunit. Author Goodwin captures the flavour of the city and its peoples without sounding like a travelogue or page from WikiPedia. He stirs his blend with the artistic flair of a master chef, with a seasoned talent for evoking the sights, sounds, and smells of this great city.
Beneath the historian is a poet.

Sample post of a review by another ID

Yes you can do this

Selected Novels and Short Stories – Patricia Highsmith

WOW.
It’s so exhilarating to find a “new” voice from the forties that I’d never heard of before. Well, we know women were surpressed, including writers. But I’m surprised that Patricia Highsmith wasn’t a movie star (look at her beauty), as well as a first-rate author of novels, (and if had been allowed in those 40’s days, a screenwriter as well). Who “cleaned up” after her “Strangers on a Train” story, picked up by Alfred Hitchcock for a major movie ?; none other than Raymond Chandler, who let himself receive major credit for the story.
So, this book covers two of her famous novels: “Strangers of a Train” and “The Price of Salt.” A number of short stories are included as well to provide divertisment from the serious novels. She is certainly capable of diversion onto other plateaus of thought.



From Wkipedia
“The Talented Mr. Ripley is a 1999 American psychological thriller written for the screen and directed by Anthony Minghella. It is an adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith 1955 novel of the same name, which was previously filmed as Plein Soleil (Purple Noon, 1960).
The film stars Matt Damon as Tom Ripley, Gwyneth Paltrow as Marge Sherwood, Jude Law as Dickie Greenleaf, Cate Blanchett as Meredith Logue (a character created for the film.”
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

The other major story in this anthology is “The Price of Salt,” known as an erotic lesbian thriller. There was no movie made because lesbian relationships can’t end up happily in the Hollywood of the nineteen-fifties (book pub. 1952).
These 21st century days, maybe this could be a great counterculture screenplay and movie. It’s a solid story and others of her works (see above) have made good films.

The Janissary Tree Jason Goodwin June 2011

Korea was fifty years ago. MASH was done with its third series of reruns twenty-five years ago. Korea is old news – grandparent’s news. Time to move forward with world events.
Strange as it may seem by calendar dates, “The Janissary Tree“ may be far more relevant to today’s reader: Ottoman Empire; Istanbul in 1836 (see earlier picture below); Muslim Sufi sects from Turkey to Egypt; and the legacies of the early nineteenth century French and USA revolutionary period. (See last month’s review of “Island Beneath the Sea.”
This Janissary book is also a much better device (fiction) for dispensing background facts and figures. This particular author is a master cradtsman at weaving interesting historical tidbits into a murder mystery story.
And there are tittalating factors which I only now bring up, such as the subtitle of the book, “Yashim, the Eunuch Series -- #1.” OK, wait a minute; we got the #1 bit and that’s good – it’s going to be a series which all of us readers love, but what’s this other bit about the Eunuch – is the author going to explore into the history, beginnings, feelings, emotions, and love-life of a Eunuch.?.

Well Yes.
Yashim is sort of a mix between Sherlock Holmes’s deductive powers; Sam Spade’s street smarts; and Spenser’s savoir-faire, but of course as a eunuch, he adds a touch not found in any other male hero character. He is able to walk freely within the harem, all segments of cultured Islamic society; and also within the endless variety of homosexual men living in metropolitan Istanbul.
The plotline isn’t as complicated as one might assume with all these characters. The Janissaries, who were Sufi-led soldier regiments, not unlike Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army in Iraq, seem to be trying to become a political force again. Their sign is a series of bizarre murders. Yashim is called upon by what we’d call the Secretary of Defense to solve the murders and uncover any plot brewing. There are many sub-plots: relationships with Slavic ambassadors; Poles and Russians {the wife of one makes him tingle??(where); and friendship with the madam (male) of a boys dance troupe (erotic/exotic).
It’s always hard to get the frequency of foreign words just right in an historical novel like this: too many strange words becomes laborious and we set it aside; not enough and we feel that the proper research wasn’t done – the work’s not authentic. This author, Jason Goodwin, has hit a perfect balance. He has after all, penned a non-fiction history on the subject, “Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire.”
It’s like the difference between Patrón and Jose Cuervo tequila; Ottoman Empire or North Korea: smooth and easy versus hard and gritty. It’s your choice.

Nothing To Envy by Barbara Demick

Well here we go again.!.! Another magazine article, maybe a series in the Sunday supplement. We book club reader’s mostly crave literary fiction, not textbooks or magazine pieces.

{Literary fiction is a term that has come into common usage since around 1960, principally to distinguish serious fiction (that is, work with claims to literary merit) from the many types of genre fiction and popular fiction (i.e., paraliterature).}.
{{Paraliterature is an academic term for genre literature, such as science fiction, fantasy, mystery, pulp fiction and comic books, which is not generally considered literary fiction by mainstream literary
standards.}}

We rarely get any of this para-literature and we get way too many non-fiction works. I had to look up the “Samuel Johnson Prize.” Lo and behold, it’s not just a non-fiction prize, it’s a British journalism prize selected by fellow journalists. Actually almost all of the prior ten selections, 2000 to 2009 looked pretty good to me. They seemed to go off the deep end with this one, though. I’ll pass this “Samuel Johnson Prize” blurb around.
As a journalistic piece of writing, this is an excellent story: well researched; taught me a lot I never knew before; it even got us involved with some of the characters, whose names were changed to protect the innocent. I thought the opening picture of North Korea with its’ lights out at night, versus South Korea looking brighter than Las Vegas, was especially attention-grabbing.

However, this reading becomes boring by Chapter 4, and there are 16 more chapters to go. This is like a front cover article in a magazine that grabs your attention enough to get you to turn to page 16 for the first continuation, but when that in turn refers you to page 202, you realize that you’ve already absorbed 90% of what you are going to get from this piece. It’s time to move on.
Maybe it would work better as a textbook for a current events/Korean history class. At least then you could spread the chapters across a full semester, rather than take it all in within two weeks.
This story sets a 10-year low-water mark for depressing books selected for Brown Bag Book reading. Millions are killed through starvation and sheer idiocy; education is taken lower than any marker because it is lies that are taught in schools. By holding back on Western “gadgets,” like computers and cell phones, North Korea is half a century behind the South; and at this point, reunification would create havoc for several generations, if it’s at all possible.
The best outcome might be if China were to trump up a reason to cross the border and take over the North, to provide a two-decade buffer prior to Korean reunification.
Good Luck with that.

The Housekeeper and the Professor --- Yoko Ogawa

What a pleasure to read a book about my field, mathematics. My only gripe is that the popular books on mathematicians have them being autistic and/or socially abnormal in some way or other.
A short, sweet book with the positive message that everyone, including 80-minute men, make a contribution to the betterment of the world. All the characters are endearing, even quaint. The use of the English language was a bit too bland for my taste, but maybe that was the tranlation.
I’m always trying to pinpoint just why the author wrote, and published, the book we are reading at the time. One common answer that I come up with is, as an exercise. An etude wherein authors set themselves certain rules and guidelines and try to achieve a goal within those rules. I often thought Robert Parker took on challenges just such as this to prove to his students that they could do it. He’s the one who wrote the same detective story scores of times over the years, changing only genders, races, or historical settings.
Ogawa’s writing has all the rhythm of a standard novel: emotional ups and downs, plotlines going backwards and forwards. It has excellent character development and by the end, we have bonded with, and shed a tear for the Professor.

However, this reading is almost more of a prose poem than a short novel or novella. Trying to describe the book, I want to say it is like a Japanese water-color depiction of a misty morning view of the hills across a river valley.
There is no thematic drama, which is usually found in the Western novel. Not one of the seven deadly sins plays a part in this prose: not wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, nor gluttony.
Aging takes place of course, since it is a memoir sort of narrative, but even this is peaceful. Changes take place, but in years, decades, not suddenly. Dementia slowly takes the Professor away; the boy grows up, middle-age leaves the housekeeper basically unchanged.
The epilogue is predictable, as is the whole plotline advancement, but the reader doesn’t care much, because it’s classic schmaltz. My unofficial poll, taken in people’s moments of weakness, indicates that 83% of the adult, TV-viewing audience watches at least one Hallmark Theater production a week, and 70% of that 83% watch right up until and through the tear-inducing final scenes.

PS: My favorite game, with kids, on long automobile trips (last one 1997,) is factoring license plate numbers (difficult these days with vanity (see sin on right) plates. What are the prime factors of your plate.? Mine are KGGV 951. {3 X 317}.

On the right.

See a painting of the sin of Vanity (or pride): One of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Sourland --- Joyce Carol Oates

JCO is more prolific than ever.!. You normally think of a collection of short stories as being gathered from one, two, or three decades of past writings; … .. not “Sourland”. I decided to read this book from front to back, serially. Right off the bat with “Pumpkin-Head”, we face JCO’s recent widowhood through the prospect of being hit on by males who want to “help” the recently bereaved with their “sexual” needs.
Things were sort of back to normal in the next half a dozen stories: violence, rape, other childhood fears, but I felt a growing recognition of thoughts and phrases from her memoir: hospitals, subservience to men, and female teenage powerlessness. Then, with “The Beating”, it dawned on me --- these were all new stories; all writen since her “A Widow’s Story.” She opened the spigots to her dark and mourning side and prose has been gushering out. These are great short stories --- all over the map on character and plot line, but with constant focus on three interlinked, human driving forces: obsession, fear, and violence(power).
In “Bitch,” she transfers the male role from husband to father, then in just three pages, she mind-dumps her stream of consciousness fears of inadequacy and powerlessness at her loss; at the hospital; and of no male figurehead in her life.
“Honor Code” is about the female-to-female bullying that goes on at every level of school, albeit more so at the upper echelons of academic priciness.
JCO has organized the short stories into three segments for this book. She doesn’t explain why she chose these groupings. If I were pushed to label the three parts, I would say –I- was women’s stories; -II- was girls stories; and –III- was early bereavement stories.
But I have to mention that, as the reader progresses from front to back of these sixteen stories, the plots become stranger, even delusional, as was “Probate”, which mixed in fear & regret, along with blenderizing hospital and courtroom experiences. When we reach the title story, “Sourland”, we’re in fantasyland. The plotline is like one of those teen-age, chain-saw scary movies; where the viewer is constantly screaming, “No! No.!. Stop.!. No one in their right mind would descend a dark staircase into an unused cellar to see what the strange noise was, when we’re just three girls, home alone on a Saturday night.”
Another view of these stories is as the exercises leading up to, “A Widow’s Story,” which was the full memoir of JCO’s experiences and traumas of bereavement. Reading both the memoir and the short stories is probably of interest mostly to writers trying to analyse her craftmanship. Themes are repeated between memoir and stories. Putting both together is the making of a master writing class on soul searching.

Island Beneath The Sea --- Isabel Allende

My guess is that Isabel Allende was culturally trained at a young age for story-telling. Her plot lines always seem to unfold seamlessly: the next paragraph, and chapter following logically, without question, as the most normal outcome of preceding events.
Allende does well with her historical novels, I think, because she is researching her own family tree, her own country’s history, and more realistically, the histories of South and Central America. At some point, there will be a serious movie (not Zorro) incorporating her stoies of the nineteenth century.
Isabel spears a name from a dartboard, a Frenchman, Toulouse Valmorain, who arrives in Haiti in 1770 to take over the family plantation. Clear family bloodlines disappear almost immediately, as in the savage West Indies, the melting pot has begun with colors, creeds, and races all copulating with whomever, or, so it seems, the nearest at hand.
Allende deftly juggles half a dozen story line threads: Toulouse of course, as a plantation owner; his mistress Tété, who is a slave, but a family retainer, not a field worker; and Etienne Relais, a royalist Frenchman, Major of the guard in Haiti. Remember 1793 was the date Marie A. {let-them-eat-cake) was guillotined.
Earlier Isabel has set up Violette Boisier, a courtesan of mixed heritage. It seemed important at that time to keep track of white-black blood mix: half, quarter, eighth,; but also with whom it was mixed: Spanish, French, or English. So, a lot of variations possible and all of them came about.
The great slave rebellion of 1791 marks the midpoint of Allende’s story. The 500,000 slaves on this small island easily fought off the few French regiments and burned all the plantations, driving off the few thousand Europeans.
The focus changes after this revolution to New Orleans. Toulouse Valmorain has sired two children, Maurice, born by Toulouse’s first wife, a Spanish nobelwoman; and Rosette, whose mother was Tété. The novel follows their growing up, intertwined with events in France under Napoléon Bonaparte, like the Louisianna Purchase in 1803. Toulouse builds another sugar plantation. The pace of the book seems hurried in the final pages, trying to squeeze in appropriate outcomes for each character. But maybe this is just the slow pace of the tropics in the first half compared to the industriousness of America in the second.
As Allende’s tale winds down, Maurice and Rosette are secretly married aboard a ship outside the port of New Orleans. Mixed marriages are not allowed in the United States in the year 1806. Maurice vows to become an Abolitionist while going to college in Boston. Pregnant Rosette stays home and winds up being jailed, then dying during childbirth. Grandma Tété takes on the task of raising the child.

The Geography of Bliss -- Eric Weiner

Things were too good to be true for our merry band of readers. We’re back to the “stinker” books again. “Bliss” is the type of book that makes us ask, “Why are we reading a travel book? And no Dave Barry or Bill Bryson either – why such a boring and unfunny book?”

Eric Weiner is not a writer

He is a man who has leveraged his opportunities to their maximum potential. My hat’s off to him; he’s squeezed the last drop of ink out of his pen. This is his one “book,” and I assume his last. His lone claim to “fame” is ten years at NPR. But wait, the “R” in NPR stands for radio, an auditory art focussed on current events; no writing, no reflection, no comedy, no basis for this publication. As Eric says, “NPR were the best years of my life.” Now he’s too young to be “recapturing his youth”; maybe he just missed the expense account travel money.

His approach to covering a topic is irritatingly, repetitively formulaic: a dash of old NPR vignette; a liberal lambasting of the locals and their culture; a heaping pile of rubbish about happiness; with seasoning to tasteless, poorly researched facts and figures; topped off with a large dollop of shallow reflection. Did I say yet that he was boring?

Eric Weiner is not a philosopher.

Eric strikes me as the kind of a guy who enjoys traveling and has hoisted many a local libation getting his story. One aspect of his writing “style” is to ask himself rhetorical questions, or worse yet, for variety I suppose, have a friend ask him the leading question. This is how he ferrets out the truth of a situation.

Eric is full of pronouncements, like, “Europe is intrinsically interesting.” He is saying this because of the “warrens of narrow streets and alleys.” Hello Cairo, Tokyo, Jerusalem, Hong Kong, Beijing, or Bombay. It’s large, old cities than are intrinsically interesting, Eric, the world over. Eric gives full credit to the Swiss for rueing envy on the path to happiness, while this is a major tenet of almost all religions and philosophies, like Buddhist thought or the old testament’s tenth commandment.

Eric Weiner is not a commedian.

Eric does actually stoop to a low point of telling a fart joke and at the heart of triteness uses the old cliché about the English and Americans being separated by a common language.. Maybe I just like the slapstick of Dave Barry – hard to measure up to a travel writer like that. Then again, now that I think about it, my daughter writes a better travel story than Eric Weiner does, http://MyTravelBumBlog.BlogSpot.com . She’s equally as well-traveled, much more insightful, and a lot funnier. Start reading at 2009: December: Permission to enter.

One irritating stylistic quirk of Eric’s is the way he will open a paragraph with what seems to be an interesting vignette or anecdote like meeting Susan and her in-your-face NY style. Then the paragraph dissipates into ramblings about conferences, Perrier, and name tags.

Egypt: A Short History

This is a new library book that I can heartily recommend. The author does a brilliant job of meeting the goals he set out to accomplish: it is short; yet it is a complete 5,000-year history of Egypt; and he never gets bogged down in what could easily be diversionary tangents, as so many other books like this wind up doing. I picked it up because, with things going on the way they have this year in Egypt, it is topical and even active readers need help through books like this to assess what’s happened and where things might be going.

Tignor presents history up to and through Mubarak, winding up with a final section titled, “What Happens After Mubarak?” The author clarifies that the revolutionary movement, known as kifaya, has been active since 2005. Kifaya means “enough.”

The book left me with three new impressions that will stick with me for some time to come, as events in Egypt continue to unfold:

a.) Up until the 21st century, where everything now is electronically equidistant, Egypt had been geographically, the center of the occidental world. While maybe some would say, of course, that this is obvious, it is the cultural impact of this condition which begins to soak in as the history rolls by century by century, millenia by millenia. This is not to say that the center has the biggest armies or the most money or even power. But in most life forms, the surroundings feed the center. Picture an apple or an orange; the extremities are protection; the main pulp is the food and juice feeding the center, where the seeds for future propogation are found and nutured. For millenia, Egypt was the repository of world knowledge, education was revered; the population was cross-fertlized by almost every other race, creed, and color. A true melting pot.

b.) One of the manifestations of being the center is that all the big empires and great conquerors throughout history lusted after ownership of Egypt: Alexander and Bonaparte, the Ottamans and the Arabs. Up until the 20th century, Egypt was prized because of being the bread-basket of the world. This was because of the 4,000-mile long Nile River, which uniquely blessed Egypt by winding up running through the length of the country, bounded by a long range of mountains along the Red Sea, and forcing the river to overflow inland every year. Agriculture became far less important during the 20th century, and thus the Aswan Dam has switched Egypt to an energy-based economy.

c.) The third thing that gives one pause when thinking it through from a different perspective is religion. We don’t make fun of the Greeks or the Romans, the Angles or the Saxons for their multiple God religions. But we do make fun of the Pharaohs for believing they were the descendants of their one God. We also laugh at mummification, but don’t some of us send our body parts, sperm and/or DNA off into space (hoping for aliens to find and fix us?), or on ice in millennial refrigerators, waiting for … .. some future “God” to wake us up and renew our lives?

A Widow's Story --- Joyce Carol Oates

It is no secret that I am totally enamored with JCO and for more than just her marvelous psychological and philosophical novels. I think there is a silent attraction to her photographic image as well. I feel the same way about Michele Anna Jordan, another three-named evocative author. The iconic photographs of these women bring to mind an image for me of torch-singers of yore, with their musical story-telling, carrying the ennui of a full life, well-lived.
To my knowledge, this is the first memoir published under the JCO brand name. The author is very careful to be clear and truthful about many things in this book. One of these things is the careful nurturing of the JCO authorship brand. She, the person, is Joyce Smith, wife of Ray Smith, a married couple who jointly publish the Ontario Review of North American Literature.
Since I retired in 2001, I’ve attended a dozen classes and read half a dozen books on memoirs. JCO sets the bar at a higher rung with this work. As I read through the book, I kept stopping and exclaiming to myself, “WOW. This is so intimate and truthful! And we have been taught to hold back a bit on the intimacy, to shade the truth to protect one’s friends and loved ones.” I did just that on my recent posting of Memories of Paris.
JCO is such a good writer that she gets away with it. She gibes at friends and doctors; not with salacious gossip, just with her true thoughts. There’s a lot of stream of consciousness in this book; she includes e-mails and cards and letters, quotes from sundry authors. Because of her pain and grief, it is endearing. The reader gives her full rein to vent, rant, quibble, kvetch, but most often run away from facing her widowhood.
The Widow’s Handbook is a sort of subtitle for this book. That’s her most frequent audience through all the rambling, delusions and fears. She talks of suicide incessantly throughout, more so at the end; Sylvia Plath is explored often. She tries, unsuccessfully, to separate the Widow from JCO. Are writers predisposed to suicide? She makes comments like, “For writers, being a writer always seems to be of dubious value.” Another is, “Being a writer is in defiance of Darwin’s observation that the more highly specialized a species, the more likelihood of extinction.”
It is gardening at the end, which helps her attain the one-year goal. Hands in the earth, she embraces the annual regeneration of seed and solar cycle.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog -- Muriel Barbery

This year has started off with pleasurable reading; well, two out of three anyway: “Thirteenth Tale” and “Elegant Hedgehog.” “Silver Linings” was a bust.
Easy to see why this Hedgehog book was so popular in Europe. Intelligence is admired and an academic doctorate is revered. The gift of a sharp mind is accommodated in the educational system by testing and placements at the 7th grade and then 10th grade levels. England has Oxford and Cambridge. Education of the masses is not considered to be of any particular value other than keeping the kids busy and out of trouble until they’re 21. Of course many of the places at Oxbridge are family heritage positions, like it was for George Bush at Yale. So, therein lays the basis for the plotline of this book. Class distinction (land, power, money) creates dichotomies that roll over into the educational system and one’s place in society. America used to think itself as egalitarian with equal opportunity for all (all having been expanded slowly to include women and people of colour.) Alas, the pendulum has swung the other way since the eighties. The masses are being deliberately dumbed-down and access to the “power” universities is limited to families with power and/or money.
Whew. OK, there were plenty of socio-politico touchstones in this book, not the least of which was gender politics and ageism.
The book is inspiring, of course – moderately well-educated people throughout the world should aspire to half the intellectual curiosity and patiently rewarding acquisition of knowledge that Renée Michel has achieved. One would hope that this book is a beacon of hope for those with intellectual curiosity to work at trying to reap the rewards of constant learning.
The author’s choice of concierge and her mirrored younger self (unconceived daughter) were well-chosen. Who amongst us, at least in this country, has not found themselves dumbing down to maintain social equilibrium? Even if, nay especially if, one is gifted with intellectual curiosity, and fills the resultant void with knowledge, without the authenticating calling card of power and money, there has to be a hesitancy to admit, a lingering questioning of one’s confidence, before voicing an intellectual opinion. Now we don’t have concierges here in the States – the Brits have a “porter” at colleges which might stretch across to posh residences.
All the other characters were well cast, but fit because of the choice of Renée Michel. She was so accepting, broad-minded, and naively shy. Who could not want to adopt her, want her to find love at fifty, and to find acknowledgement by the world as a serious person. As universal as the story is, the treatment by Ms Barbery is uniquely compelling. It is timeless in its lack of modern gadgetry, even though often referred to. The attraction of this story is its characters, who are universal: this could be a Roman tale.
There is the warning at the end, enjoy the fruits of the garden, but don’t try to cross the line by eating the apple, or you’ll be hit by a laundry truck and die.