Monthly Bookpost, September 2014
Bluebeard, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
"You parasites! You ingrates! You rotten spoiled little kids!" seethed Dan Gregory. "Your loving Papa asked just one thing of you as an expression of your loyalty: 'Never go into the Museum of Modern Art.'"
I doubt that many people who heard him even knew that we were in front of a museum. They probably thought he had caught us coming out of a hotel or an apartment house--someplace with beds for lovers. If they took him literally when he called himself a "Papa", they would have had to conclude that he was MY Papa and not hers, since we looked so much alike.
"It was symbolic!", he said. "Don't you understand that? It was a way of proving you were on my side and not theirs. I'm not afraid to have you look at the junk in there. You were part of my gang, and proud of it." He was all choked up now, and he shook his head. "That's why I made that very simple, very modest, very easily complied with request: Stay out of the Museum of Modern Art."
Seems to me, all of the Kurt Vonnegut protagonists are the same, with a different sausage casing over them. They remind me of Mr. Natural, the white-bearded, imperturbable R. Crumb cartoon character who keeps on trucking, taking everything in stride without apparent reaction. He could get arrested, lose essential body parts in a war, get kidnapped by aliens, the world could end, and he'd just be all, "So it goes." It's an interesting effect in a few Vonnegut books; annoying in several at once.
In Bluebeard, the schtick is modern "my kid could do that" art. The Mr. Natural du jour happens to be named Rabo Karabekian, an Armenian Immigrant who is taken on as an apprentice by a pretentious artist, loses an eye in WWII, and loses his first marriage by failing to provide for his family due to pity for his fellow artists. He trades money he needs out of charity for the then-worthless paintings of guys named Rothko and Newman and Pollack, and later finds himself the owner of the most priceless collection in the world, for reasons of taste that Vonnegut doesn't pretend to disguise his contempt for. Tremendous concentrations of paper wealth have made it possible for a few persons or institutions to endow certain sorts of human playfulness with inappropriate and hence distressing seriousness. I think not only of the mudpies of art, but of children's games as well--running, jumping, catching, throwing. Or dancing. Or singing songs. Maybe the abstract expressionist movement was a joke played on the rest of us by the One Percent, who arbitrarily declared a bunch of large single-color canvases and random spatterings to be magnificent, just because they could.
Bluebeard does draw on the Bluebeard myth for thematic sustenance. There are secret chambers of various kinds, where characters are arbitrarily told not to enter, which of course makes them morbidly curious. Rabo has ostentatiously locked up a potato barn with instructions not to open it until his death, and so everyone, including a lot of readers, is dying to know what's in there. Knowing Vonnegut, it's probably something anticlimactic and stupid....except that I suggest you read it through to the end and find out. The description is one of the more moving things I've read recently, at least by Vonnegut
Journal of a Solitude, by May Sarton
The value of solitude--one of its values--is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression. A few moments of desultory conversation with dear Arnold Miner, when he comes to take the trash, may calm an inner storm. But the storm, painful as it is, might have had some truth in it. So sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.
This one made me a little wistful. consisting of excerpts from a journal in the early 70s, in New Hampshire, the environment depicted in words and photos has enough in common with the area around my aunt's house in Vermont to make me imagine a completely different place from where Sarton was actually living, and to see it mostly as a description of the changing seasons around the house and garden than as a glimpse into the mind of the writer. As with most journals, it is mostly a description of everyday events, with some philosophical insights here and there, some about feminism, some about art and writing.
A Maze of Murders & A Feast of Poisons, by C.L. Grace; Dark Fire, by C.J. Sansom; The Burgundian's Tale & The Prodigal Son, by Kate Sedley
He turned and glimpsed the hooded figure, but Sir Walter only had a few seconds of life left. The sharp, two-edged axe cut through his neck, shearing off his head as easily as a maid would snap a flower.
--from A Maze of Murders
A pale-faced maid, fingers to her face, stared at her mistress screaming and spluttering on the floor. Others came in. Mother Croul knelt down as she tried to restrain the blacksmith's wife. It seemed as if the woman was choking. Mother Croul tried to put her finger into Isabella's mouth but withdrew quickly, gasping at the sharp bite. The woman was now losing consciousness, eyelids fluttering, she tried to pull herself up to vomit, only to fall back on the floor. She was beyond all help. Mother Croul picked up the wine cup, sniffed, and recoiled at the pungent smell of almonds.
---from A Feast of Poisons
In the intervening twelve years, Judith had married twice more; first to a Justin Threadgold, who had been carried off four years later by the plague, and secondly to a man thirteen years older than herself, her present husband Godfrey St. Clair. Still childless herself, Judith had two stepchildren, Alcina Threadgold and her present husband's son Jocelyn St. Clair. Both these young people were treated as Judith's own, lavished with affection and everything that money could buy (she was now a very wealthy woman, thanks to Lionel Broderer's management of the embroidery business).
"But it's the old familiar story," Timothy went on, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "Faced with her own flesh and blood, warmed by the young man's apparent devotion and affection, Judith had barely known him a month before she made him her heir, presented him with extravagant gifts of money and jewels, and allowed herself to become besotted by him..." there was a pause before Timothy added grimly, "Two weeks ago, he was found battered to death in Fleet Street, not two or three hundred yards from his aunt's home in the Strand.
---from The Burgundian's Tale
Simon stayed where he was, his features contorted with hatred. "I meant what I said," he shouted at his brother. "In God's name, I wish someone would kill you!"
No sooner had he spoken than there was a vivid flash of lightning, followed by an ear-splitting clap of thunder. The flames of two candles, standing in a wall niche, were suddenly extinguished. Rose Micheldever gave a little sigh and fainted.
--from The Prodigal Son
On the evening of May 16th last, a Sabbath Day, at the fair house of Sir Edwin Wentworth of Walbrook, a member of the Mercers' Company, his only son, a boy of twelve, was found at the bottom of the garden well with his neck broken. Sir Edwin's fair daughters, girls of fifteen and sixteen, told how the boy had been attacked by their cousin, Elizabeth Wentworth, an orphan whom Sir Edwin had taken into his house from charity on the death of her father, and had been pushed by her into the deep well. She is taken to Newgate, where she is to go before the Justices on the 29th May next. She refuses to plead, and so is likely to be pressed, or if she pleads, to be found guilty and go to Tyburn next hanging day.
--from Dark Fire
Here's where I say goodnight, Gracie: These are the last two of Grace's Kathryn Swinbrooke novels. I'm not disappointed. They started out promising, with the female physician in 15th Century Canterbury defying expectations, but became formulaic fairly quickly. A Maze of Murders is so formulaic I thought I'd already read it as one of PC Doherty's books from last year, set two centuries earlier. It involves yet another precious jewel taken from Constantinople during a Crusade the final fall of Byzantium to the Turks, and brought to England by a now-guilt-ridden knight who is murdered during penance, with everyone saying it must have been a secret group of Templars trying to get their relics back. However, this really does happen in the Edward IV reign; the battle of Towton plays a part, the murder is committed in the middle of a supposedly inaccessible hedge maze, and the relic is stolen separately from a locked room in a church---and then there are so many more murders that the killer is discovered almost via process of elimination. so it's totally a different story. A Feast of Poisons takes place in a small town with more dirty secrets than inhabitants, where the local lord is receiving French diplomats to negotiate a peace treaty for the King while the local people drop like flies and Swinbrooke must figure out which of about five old crimes is pertinent to why people are being poisoned in the present. This is actually an improvement; usually (and like a sore thumb in Maze of Murders), Grace mentions just one old crime predating the mystery, which MUST turn out to be the real cause of the present-day crime.
Kate Sedley still has several volumes to go, some emphasising important historical events, some not. The burgundian's Tale does involve Roger Chapman's sometimes patron the future Richard III, who has Roger press-ganged from Bristol to London to solve the murder of his cousin's waiting-maid's son (No, really. It's good to be royal and get to indulge whims like that). As is usual with Sedley, look for the apparently unrelated incidental death. The Prodigal Son brings Roger to a country estate at the same time as, as the title implies, the house Bad Boy returns after a long absence. Sedley's impressive feat here is to have the victim separately alienate a dozen suspects within a confined number of pages, leaving Roger with way too many threads to untangle while looking for the relevant facts. Even in a sea of red herrings, though, I found the solution obvious.
Dark Fire is the second "Shardlake" novel by CJ Sansom, and the plot quoted above, about the son killed in the well, is so well-narrated and gut-wrenchingly tragic that it made me forget that I started including historical mysteries in my reading mostly to aid in, you know, studying history. It has a parallel plot--some nonsense about the re-discovery of Greek Fire being the final straw leading to King Henry Wolseying Thomas Cromwell's sorry ass--that really does reference political history, but which made me groan and want to thumb through the sections about it to get back to the Wentworth family horror. Shardlake, of course, is called upon to handle both cases, and does so expertly. I find myself very much liking this series.
Dialogues Concerning Cause, Principle and Unity, by Giordano Bruno
You can say whatever you like, and think as you wish, but I hold that, in order to be happy in this life, it is better to imagine oneself Croesus, and be poor, than to imagine oneself poor, and be Croesus. Is it not more conducive to beatitude to have a slattern you think beautiful, and who satisfies you, than a Leda or a Helen who bores you and who you end up abandoning? What does it matter then, to those people, whether they are ignorant and ignobly occupied, when their happiness is in direct proportion to their own self-esteem? The ass likes fresh grass and the horse barley, just the same as you who like white bread and partridge, the hog is as happy with his acorns and slops as Jupiter with nectar and ambrosia. Do you want, by chance, to disabuse them of their agreeable folly when, in return for the cure they come and break your head? I will leave aside the question of which is folly, the illusion or the cure. A Pyrrhonist once said, "Who knows whether our state is not death, and that of the alleged dead, life?" Who knows if true happiness and true beatitude do not consist of the due linking and taking apart the parts of a phase?
I've mentioned earlier this year that "great books", and philosophy in particular, come mighty scarce after the Renaissance and before the 17th Century. Giordano Bruno is one of the reasons why. He dared to write one of the few philosophic works of the 16th Century, and was burned by the inquisition for it as an example to others not to use their imaginations. I marvel that Rabelais escaped.
Cause, Principle and Unity is such a harmless bit of navel gazing that it's almost hard to see why they bothered to kill him over it. But then, it does contradict the church, so there you are. Remember Bruno when the Christians thrust their noses into secular government again and again; if they get there, we're in for more inquisitions.
The book is short and readable; a bridge between the more popular Plotinus (See Bookpost, November 2012) and Liebniz. Bruno believes that God is the first principle of all things in that, as the "world soul" pervading all nature, his nature is the nature of everything in the Universe. All things have being as the result of the forming action of the world soul, therefore God is the first cause of all things. Further, there is only one kind of matter that is both noun and verb; all things are Unity, and the appearance of variety is just an illusion (another variant on the supposed "one and many" paradox that is of interest only to philosophers). When churches are in charge, they evidently kill you for that.
Melmoth the Wanderer, by Charles Robert Maturin
He raised his voice, and evidently speaking with increased difficulty..."By this bread and wine, which the faithful receive as the body and blood of Christ, but which His presence converts into matter as viperous as the suicide foam of the dying Judas...by all these...I know him, and command him to be gone...! He is....he is..." and he bent forward as he spoke, and gazed on the Englishman with an expression which the mixture of rage, hatred and fear rendered terrible. All the guests rose at these words...the whole company now presented two singular groups, that of the amazed guests all collected together, and repeating, "Who, what is he?" and that of the Englishman, who stood unmoved, and Olavida, who dropped dead in the attitude of pointing to him.
This one is a brief early 19th century forerunner of the gothic horror genre that apparently had a lot of influence on Poe, Lovecraft and Wilde; once you start looking for them, you can find several Melmoth easter eggs in other works.
Maturin's original, however, is a tad disappointing. It starts with a nephew discovering a mouldy old manuscript after his miserly uncle's death. The narrative of the manuscript is missing and illegible in several places, so that Maturin doesn't have to write the parts of the book that give him writer's block. Melmoth is a man who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for a long life and supernatural powers; his escape clause is that he can escape damnation by trading his gift to another, but back in Maturin's day there was no one but Melmoth so foolish as to gain the world at the price of his soul.
The edition I read also had an appendix by Balzac, "Melmoth Reconciled" in which Melmoth solves his problem by going to the financial district of Paris. Not only does he quickly find a banker eager to sell his soul, but the bankers happily and profitably trade among each other for years afterwards.
Essays of Francis Bacon
I had rather believe all the fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind. And therefore God never wrought miracle to convince atheism, because his ordinary works convince it. It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion. For while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them, confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity. Nay, even that school which is most accused of atheism doth most demonstrate religion; that is, the school of Leucippus and Democritus and Epicurus. For it is a thousand times more credible, that four mutable elements, and one immutable fifth essence, duly and eternally placed, need no God, than that an army of infinite small portions or seeds unplaced, should have produced this order and beauty without a divine marshal. The Scripture saith, The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God; it is not said, The fool hath thought in his heart; so as he rather saith it by rote to himself, as that he would have, than that he can thoroughly believe it, or be persuaded of it. For none deny there is a God, but those for whom it maketh that there were no God. It appeareth in nothing more, that atheism is rather in the lip than in the heart of man, than by this; that atheists will ever be talking of that their opinion, as if they fainted in it within themselves, and would be glad to be strengthened by the consent of others
Bacon's essays range from one to eight pages each, and read like dense 8th grade level encyclopedia entries, with the distinction that they're opinionated while disguised as fact. On the other hand, his opinions were pretty much the prevailing ones of the time; Bacon was a member of the government, and did not want to ruffle feathers by being too controversial. When talking about courage, for example, he'll point out that some say discretion is the better part of valor, but that others say the bravest are those who take on impossible odds. On "praise", he points out that praise is a welcome reward for a job well done; on the other hand there are some who flatter, so take heed, etc. How diplomatic.
Also included here is "The New Atlantis", an unfinished description of a utopia that, for reasons unclear to me, was selected for both the Harvard Classics and the Great Books of the Western World set. It's a poor imitation of Thomas More's Utopia (See May 2014 Bookpost) that doesn't really describe the way the people live. There's a whimsical religious mythos, and a whimsical history of the land, and a description of several kinds of science experiments they perform--Bacon was real big on classifications--and then it just ends.
The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt
Scrambling, skidding harum-scarum to the door, I fumbled with the lock. "Mom?" I called, sliding the top bolt, throwing open the door--and then my heart plunged, a six-story drop. Standing on the doormat were two people I had never seen in my life: a chubby Korean woman with a short, spiky haircut, a Hispanic guy in a shirt and tie who looked a lot like Luis on Sesame Street. There was nothing at all threatening about them, quite the contrary; they were reassuringly dumpy and middle-aged, dressed like a pair of substitute school teachers, but though they both had kindly expressions on their faces, I understood the instant I saw them that my life, as I knew it, was over.
This one is competing with Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries (see last month's Bookpost) for the title of Big Important Book of the Year. Seems to me, Catton takes the prize easily; nevertheless, Tartt got the Pulitzer and a handful of other awards for a work that seems destined to be discussed at less highbrow book clubs than those that choose The Luminaries.
It's a coming-of-age book, that begins with the protagonist, Theo, abandoned by his loser shit-waffle of a father at around age 13, and orphaned by his mother when the museum they are visiting is blown up by terrorists. Theo crawls out of the rubble in the confusion, filching a small, priceless painting of a mournful goldfinch chained to its perch, because he identifies with the bird (you can see exactly where this is going thematically, right?).
Theo spends time living with a snooty, amoral rich family; then the shit-waffle father shows up and drags him to Nevada to steal the kid's inheritance and blow it away at the casino, because that's what shit-waffle dads do to their children. Along the way, Theo befriends an antique dealer whose partner had given Theo his ring as he lay dying during the museum blast. He continues to cling to the painting as a crutch while hoping no one finds out he has it and has him arrested. There is angst and crime and betrayal and the corruption of innocence, and the sense that people are more concerned about owning objects than about having virtue. It's a decent read, but I have a hard time understanding why it merits quite the lavish amount of praise it's been getting.
On the Motion of the Heart and Blood, & On the Circulation of the Blood, by William Harvey
If the mitral cuspidae valves do not prevent the egress of fulginous vapours to the lungs, how should they oppose the escape of air? And how should the smilunars hinder the regress of spirits from the aorta upon each supervening diastole of the heart? And, above all, how can they say that the spiritous blood is sent from the arteria venalis (pulmonary veins) by the left ventricle into the lungs without any obstacle to its passage from the mitral valves, when they have previously asserted that the air entered by the same vessel from the lungs into the left ventricle, and have brought forward these same mistral valves as obstacles to its retrogression? Good God! How should the mistral valves prevent regurgitation of air and not of blood?
Harvey is included in the Great Books set and in the Harvard Classics, as a wonderful example of the scientific method in action. Harvey's proof that the blood circulates (that is, it goes in a circular pattern instead of the veins and arteries being completely separate systems, with blood in the veins and "spirits" in the arteries, with some blood transferred via pores in the ventricles, as Galen--see Bookpost, December 2012--and other ancients asserted) is both readable and convincing. Harvey was passionate and in some places even humorous.
As with Ptolemy and Copernicus, Galen and Harvey are excellent examples of advancement of ideas and controversial theories put to the test, which ought to be (and once were) taught to high school science classes. Nowadays they oppose actual science to nonsense in "science vs. Creationism" or "climate change vs. business needs" controversies, without teachers daring to indicate how to decide which is the truth, because moneyed interests prefer that children grow up ignorant and tractable, as in the good old days of pig-wallowing peasants and feudal overlords.
The Periodic Table, by Primo Levi
In the summer, when he went off by himself, he often took along a dog to keep him company. This was a small yellow mongrel with a downcast expression; in fact, as Sandro had told me, acting out in this way the animal episode, as a puppy he had had a mishap with a cat. He had come too close to a litter of newborn kittens, the mother cat was miffed and became enraged, and had begun to hiss, getting all puffed up; but the puppy had not yet learned the meaning of those signals and remained there like a fool. The cat had attacked him, chased him, caught him, and scratched his nose; the dog had been permanently traumatized. He felt dishonored, and so Sandro had made him a cloth ball, explained to him that it was the cat, and every morning presented it to him so that he could take revenge on it for the insult and regain his canine honor.
Fascinating. It's not quite a memoir, and it's not fiction, and (contrary to the blurb on the back) it is not an account of the author's holocaust ordeal. It's maybe the things in between (since atoms are mostly, you know, empty space and all that).
It's about his ancestors (including the grandfather who used to pronounce curses in Yiddish that translated as "May you have an accident in the shape of an umbrella"). It's about studying chemistry in Italy before Mussolini. And working in a chemical plant at Auschwitz. And friends' stories about stopping the boiler that's about to blow, and making chemicals out of chicken shit. And the life cycle of a carbon atom.
What holds it together? Why, chemistry!
Each section is titled with the name of a chemical element. The first one, about ancestors, is "Argon", because Levi's ancestors were noble gases--mostly inert, but noble. The one about Italian fascism is "Iron"; various tales about chemical experiments are named for the chemicals being experimented on, and so on.
What ties them together is Levi's use of language. He is a master of the quirky anecdote, and you just feel like following him wherever he leads, and that's just fine.
The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, by Sir Philip Sidney
With that, he stabbed himself into divers places of his breast and throat, until those wounds, with the old, freshly bleeding, brought him to the senseless gate of death. By which time, his servants having, with fear of his fury, abstained a while from coming unto him, one of them (preferring dutiful affection before fearful duty) came in and there found him swimming in his own blood, giving a pitiful spectacle, where the conquest was the conqueror's overthrow, and self-ruin the only triumph of a battle fought between him and himself. The time full of danger, the person full of worthiness, the manner full of horror, did greatly astonish all the beholders; so as by and by all the town was full of it, and then of all ages came running up to see the beloved body; everybody thinking their safety bled in his wounds and their honor died in his destruction.
Together with Orlando Furioso (see Bookpost, June 2014) and The Faerie Queene (probably this October or November), The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia pretty much epitomizes how romances were written in the 16th century. Arcadia has the advantage of being written (mostly in prose), although the custom of throwing in long sections of superfluous poems and stories-within-stories is used to a tedious degree.
The basic plot is farcical. King Basilius of Arcadia consults an oracle (note to self: Never, Never seek to know your future. Your reaction to the answer will bring about ironically bad outcomes without fail) and is given a horrible parade of predictions: His elder daughter will be kidnapped, his younger daughter succumb to "an unnatural passion"; he himself shall commit adultery with his own wife, and his sons-in-law will be accused of his murder. Naturally, (im)Basilius tries to prevent the prophecy from coming true, and thereby brings it all about, but in such a way that all the disaster can be comical and the parties ultimately live happily ever after. He brings his wife and as-yet-unmarried daughters to be secluded on an island where no one is allowed to have contact with them (being the King, his absence brings about civil war and invasion on top of all the other things); and, of course, two handsome princes are drawn by curiosity to sneak in, one disguised as a shepard and the other as an amazon. The King falls in love with the cross-dressing prince, thinking him a woman; his wife also does, seeing that he is not. Trajicomic rom-com hijinks ensue!
As with Fielding and especially Samuel Richardson, who both admit to having been influenced by Sidney (Richardson's Pamela--see Bookpost, January 2011 is drawn from the equally aggressively virginal Pamela of Arcadia), the tone of the book is didactic and moralistic. Everything happens because of the virtue, or lack thereof, of the characters. Balilius endures comic mayhem as punishment --very light chiding, by Greek Epic standards, but you wouldn't want to endure it yourself--for his hubris in having sought to know his future.
It's a long read, and preachy at times, but not particularly difficult. Moderate recommendations.
Find all of my previous Bookposts here: http://admnaismith.livejournal.com/tag/bookposts
"You parasites! You ingrates! You rotten spoiled little kids!" seethed Dan Gregory. "Your loving Papa asked just one thing of you as an expression of your loyalty: 'Never go into the Museum of Modern Art.'"
I doubt that many people who heard him even knew that we were in front of a museum. They probably thought he had caught us coming out of a hotel or an apartment house--someplace with beds for lovers. If they took him literally when he called himself a "Papa", they would have had to conclude that he was MY Papa and not hers, since we looked so much alike.
"It was symbolic!", he said. "Don't you understand that? It was a way of proving you were on my side and not theirs. I'm not afraid to have you look at the junk in there. You were part of my gang, and proud of it." He was all choked up now, and he shook his head. "That's why I made that very simple, very modest, very easily complied with request: Stay out of the Museum of Modern Art."
Seems to me, all of the Kurt Vonnegut protagonists are the same, with a different sausage casing over them. They remind me of Mr. Natural, the white-bearded, imperturbable R. Crumb cartoon character who keeps on trucking, taking everything in stride without apparent reaction. He could get arrested, lose essential body parts in a war, get kidnapped by aliens, the world could end, and he'd just be all, "So it goes." It's an interesting effect in a few Vonnegut books; annoying in several at once.
In Bluebeard, the schtick is modern "my kid could do that" art. The Mr. Natural du jour happens to be named Rabo Karabekian, an Armenian Immigrant who is taken on as an apprentice by a pretentious artist, loses an eye in WWII, and loses his first marriage by failing to provide for his family due to pity for his fellow artists. He trades money he needs out of charity for the then-worthless paintings of guys named Rothko and Newman and Pollack, and later finds himself the owner of the most priceless collection in the world, for reasons of taste that Vonnegut doesn't pretend to disguise his contempt for. Tremendous concentrations of paper wealth have made it possible for a few persons or institutions to endow certain sorts of human playfulness with inappropriate and hence distressing seriousness. I think not only of the mudpies of art, but of children's games as well--running, jumping, catching, throwing. Or dancing. Or singing songs. Maybe the abstract expressionist movement was a joke played on the rest of us by the One Percent, who arbitrarily declared a bunch of large single-color canvases and random spatterings to be magnificent, just because they could.
Bluebeard does draw on the Bluebeard myth for thematic sustenance. There are secret chambers of various kinds, where characters are arbitrarily told not to enter, which of course makes them morbidly curious. Rabo has ostentatiously locked up a potato barn with instructions not to open it until his death, and so everyone, including a lot of readers, is dying to know what's in there. Knowing Vonnegut, it's probably something anticlimactic and stupid....except that I suggest you read it through to the end and find out. The description is one of the more moving things I've read recently, at least by Vonnegut
Journal of a Solitude, by May Sarton
The value of solitude--one of its values--is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression. A few moments of desultory conversation with dear Arnold Miner, when he comes to take the trash, may calm an inner storm. But the storm, painful as it is, might have had some truth in it. So sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.
This one made me a little wistful. consisting of excerpts from a journal in the early 70s, in New Hampshire, the environment depicted in words and photos has enough in common with the area around my aunt's house in Vermont to make me imagine a completely different place from where Sarton was actually living, and to see it mostly as a description of the changing seasons around the house and garden than as a glimpse into the mind of the writer. As with most journals, it is mostly a description of everyday events, with some philosophical insights here and there, some about feminism, some about art and writing.
A Maze of Murders & A Feast of Poisons, by C.L. Grace; Dark Fire, by C.J. Sansom; The Burgundian's Tale & The Prodigal Son, by Kate Sedley
He turned and glimpsed the hooded figure, but Sir Walter only had a few seconds of life left. The sharp, two-edged axe cut through his neck, shearing off his head as easily as a maid would snap a flower.
--from A Maze of Murders
A pale-faced maid, fingers to her face, stared at her mistress screaming and spluttering on the floor. Others came in. Mother Croul knelt down as she tried to restrain the blacksmith's wife. It seemed as if the woman was choking. Mother Croul tried to put her finger into Isabella's mouth but withdrew quickly, gasping at the sharp bite. The woman was now losing consciousness, eyelids fluttering, she tried to pull herself up to vomit, only to fall back on the floor. She was beyond all help. Mother Croul picked up the wine cup, sniffed, and recoiled at the pungent smell of almonds.
---from A Feast of Poisons
In the intervening twelve years, Judith had married twice more; first to a Justin Threadgold, who had been carried off four years later by the plague, and secondly to a man thirteen years older than herself, her present husband Godfrey St. Clair. Still childless herself, Judith had two stepchildren, Alcina Threadgold and her present husband's son Jocelyn St. Clair. Both these young people were treated as Judith's own, lavished with affection and everything that money could buy (she was now a very wealthy woman, thanks to Lionel Broderer's management of the embroidery business).
"But it's the old familiar story," Timothy went on, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "Faced with her own flesh and blood, warmed by the young man's apparent devotion and affection, Judith had barely known him a month before she made him her heir, presented him with extravagant gifts of money and jewels, and allowed herself to become besotted by him..." there was a pause before Timothy added grimly, "Two weeks ago, he was found battered to death in Fleet Street, not two or three hundred yards from his aunt's home in the Strand.
---from The Burgundian's Tale
Simon stayed where he was, his features contorted with hatred. "I meant what I said," he shouted at his brother. "In God's name, I wish someone would kill you!"
No sooner had he spoken than there was a vivid flash of lightning, followed by an ear-splitting clap of thunder. The flames of two candles, standing in a wall niche, were suddenly extinguished. Rose Micheldever gave a little sigh and fainted.
--from The Prodigal Son
On the evening of May 16th last, a Sabbath Day, at the fair house of Sir Edwin Wentworth of Walbrook, a member of the Mercers' Company, his only son, a boy of twelve, was found at the bottom of the garden well with his neck broken. Sir Edwin's fair daughters, girls of fifteen and sixteen, told how the boy had been attacked by their cousin, Elizabeth Wentworth, an orphan whom Sir Edwin had taken into his house from charity on the death of her father, and had been pushed by her into the deep well. She is taken to Newgate, where she is to go before the Justices on the 29th May next. She refuses to plead, and so is likely to be pressed, or if she pleads, to be found guilty and go to Tyburn next hanging day.
--from Dark Fire
Here's where I say goodnight, Gracie: These are the last two of Grace's Kathryn Swinbrooke novels. I'm not disappointed. They started out promising, with the female physician in 15th Century Canterbury defying expectations, but became formulaic fairly quickly. A Maze of Murders is so formulaic I thought I'd already read it as one of PC Doherty's books from last year, set two centuries earlier. It involves yet another precious jewel taken from Constantinople during a Crusade the final fall of Byzantium to the Turks, and brought to England by a now-guilt-ridden knight who is murdered during penance, with everyone saying it must have been a secret group of Templars trying to get their relics back. However, this really does happen in the Edward IV reign; the battle of Towton plays a part, the murder is committed in the middle of a supposedly inaccessible hedge maze, and the relic is stolen separately from a locked room in a church---and then there are so many more murders that the killer is discovered almost via process of elimination. so it's totally a different story. A Feast of Poisons takes place in a small town with more dirty secrets than inhabitants, where the local lord is receiving French diplomats to negotiate a peace treaty for the King while the local people drop like flies and Swinbrooke must figure out which of about five old crimes is pertinent to why people are being poisoned in the present. This is actually an improvement; usually (and like a sore thumb in Maze of Murders), Grace mentions just one old crime predating the mystery, which MUST turn out to be the real cause of the present-day crime.
Kate Sedley still has several volumes to go, some emphasising important historical events, some not. The burgundian's Tale does involve Roger Chapman's sometimes patron the future Richard III, who has Roger press-ganged from Bristol to London to solve the murder of his cousin's waiting-maid's son (No, really. It's good to be royal and get to indulge whims like that). As is usual with Sedley, look for the apparently unrelated incidental death. The Prodigal Son brings Roger to a country estate at the same time as, as the title implies, the house Bad Boy returns after a long absence. Sedley's impressive feat here is to have the victim separately alienate a dozen suspects within a confined number of pages, leaving Roger with way too many threads to untangle while looking for the relevant facts. Even in a sea of red herrings, though, I found the solution obvious.
Dark Fire is the second "Shardlake" novel by CJ Sansom, and the plot quoted above, about the son killed in the well, is so well-narrated and gut-wrenchingly tragic that it made me forget that I started including historical mysteries in my reading mostly to aid in, you know, studying history. It has a parallel plot--some nonsense about the re-discovery of Greek Fire being the final straw leading to King Henry Wolseying Thomas Cromwell's sorry ass--that really does reference political history, but which made me groan and want to thumb through the sections about it to get back to the Wentworth family horror. Shardlake, of course, is called upon to handle both cases, and does so expertly. I find myself very much liking this series.
Dialogues Concerning Cause, Principle and Unity, by Giordano Bruno
You can say whatever you like, and think as you wish, but I hold that, in order to be happy in this life, it is better to imagine oneself Croesus, and be poor, than to imagine oneself poor, and be Croesus. Is it not more conducive to beatitude to have a slattern you think beautiful, and who satisfies you, than a Leda or a Helen who bores you and who you end up abandoning? What does it matter then, to those people, whether they are ignorant and ignobly occupied, when their happiness is in direct proportion to their own self-esteem? The ass likes fresh grass and the horse barley, just the same as you who like white bread and partridge, the hog is as happy with his acorns and slops as Jupiter with nectar and ambrosia. Do you want, by chance, to disabuse them of their agreeable folly when, in return for the cure they come and break your head? I will leave aside the question of which is folly, the illusion or the cure. A Pyrrhonist once said, "Who knows whether our state is not death, and that of the alleged dead, life?" Who knows if true happiness and true beatitude do not consist of the due linking and taking apart the parts of a phase?
I've mentioned earlier this year that "great books", and philosophy in particular, come mighty scarce after the Renaissance and before the 17th Century. Giordano Bruno is one of the reasons why. He dared to write one of the few philosophic works of the 16th Century, and was burned by the inquisition for it as an example to others not to use their imaginations. I marvel that Rabelais escaped.
Cause, Principle and Unity is such a harmless bit of navel gazing that it's almost hard to see why they bothered to kill him over it. But then, it does contradict the church, so there you are. Remember Bruno when the Christians thrust their noses into secular government again and again; if they get there, we're in for more inquisitions.
The book is short and readable; a bridge between the more popular Plotinus (See Bookpost, November 2012) and Liebniz. Bruno believes that God is the first principle of all things in that, as the "world soul" pervading all nature, his nature is the nature of everything in the Universe. All things have being as the result of the forming action of the world soul, therefore God is the first cause of all things. Further, there is only one kind of matter that is both noun and verb; all things are Unity, and the appearance of variety is just an illusion (another variant on the supposed "one and many" paradox that is of interest only to philosophers). When churches are in charge, they evidently kill you for that.
Melmoth the Wanderer, by Charles Robert Maturin
He raised his voice, and evidently speaking with increased difficulty..."By this bread and wine, which the faithful receive as the body and blood of Christ, but which His presence converts into matter as viperous as the suicide foam of the dying Judas...by all these...I know him, and command him to be gone...! He is....he is..." and he bent forward as he spoke, and gazed on the Englishman with an expression which the mixture of rage, hatred and fear rendered terrible. All the guests rose at these words...the whole company now presented two singular groups, that of the amazed guests all collected together, and repeating, "Who, what is he?" and that of the Englishman, who stood unmoved, and Olavida, who dropped dead in the attitude of pointing to him.
This one is a brief early 19th century forerunner of the gothic horror genre that apparently had a lot of influence on Poe, Lovecraft and Wilde; once you start looking for them, you can find several Melmoth easter eggs in other works.
Maturin's original, however, is a tad disappointing. It starts with a nephew discovering a mouldy old manuscript after his miserly uncle's death. The narrative of the manuscript is missing and illegible in several places, so that Maturin doesn't have to write the parts of the book that give him writer's block. Melmoth is a man who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for a long life and supernatural powers; his escape clause is that he can escape damnation by trading his gift to another, but back in Maturin's day there was no one but Melmoth so foolish as to gain the world at the price of his soul.
The edition I read also had an appendix by Balzac, "Melmoth Reconciled" in which Melmoth solves his problem by going to the financial district of Paris. Not only does he quickly find a banker eager to sell his soul, but the bankers happily and profitably trade among each other for years afterwards.
Essays of Francis Bacon
I had rather believe all the fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind. And therefore God never wrought miracle to convince atheism, because his ordinary works convince it. It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion. For while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them, confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity. Nay, even that school which is most accused of atheism doth most demonstrate religion; that is, the school of Leucippus and Democritus and Epicurus. For it is a thousand times more credible, that four mutable elements, and one immutable fifth essence, duly and eternally placed, need no God, than that an army of infinite small portions or seeds unplaced, should have produced this order and beauty without a divine marshal. The Scripture saith, The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God; it is not said, The fool hath thought in his heart; so as he rather saith it by rote to himself, as that he would have, than that he can thoroughly believe it, or be persuaded of it. For none deny there is a God, but those for whom it maketh that there were no God. It appeareth in nothing more, that atheism is rather in the lip than in the heart of man, than by this; that atheists will ever be talking of that their opinion, as if they fainted in it within themselves, and would be glad to be strengthened by the consent of others
Bacon's essays range from one to eight pages each, and read like dense 8th grade level encyclopedia entries, with the distinction that they're opinionated while disguised as fact. On the other hand, his opinions were pretty much the prevailing ones of the time; Bacon was a member of the government, and did not want to ruffle feathers by being too controversial. When talking about courage, for example, he'll point out that some say discretion is the better part of valor, but that others say the bravest are those who take on impossible odds. On "praise", he points out that praise is a welcome reward for a job well done; on the other hand there are some who flatter, so take heed, etc. How diplomatic.
Also included here is "The New Atlantis", an unfinished description of a utopia that, for reasons unclear to me, was selected for both the Harvard Classics and the Great Books of the Western World set. It's a poor imitation of Thomas More's Utopia (See May 2014 Bookpost) that doesn't really describe the way the people live. There's a whimsical religious mythos, and a whimsical history of the land, and a description of several kinds of science experiments they perform--Bacon was real big on classifications--and then it just ends.
The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt
Scrambling, skidding harum-scarum to the door, I fumbled with the lock. "Mom?" I called, sliding the top bolt, throwing open the door--and then my heart plunged, a six-story drop. Standing on the doormat were two people I had never seen in my life: a chubby Korean woman with a short, spiky haircut, a Hispanic guy in a shirt and tie who looked a lot like Luis on Sesame Street. There was nothing at all threatening about them, quite the contrary; they were reassuringly dumpy and middle-aged, dressed like a pair of substitute school teachers, but though they both had kindly expressions on their faces, I understood the instant I saw them that my life, as I knew it, was over.
This one is competing with Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries (see last month's Bookpost) for the title of Big Important Book of the Year. Seems to me, Catton takes the prize easily; nevertheless, Tartt got the Pulitzer and a handful of other awards for a work that seems destined to be discussed at less highbrow book clubs than those that choose The Luminaries.
It's a coming-of-age book, that begins with the protagonist, Theo, abandoned by his loser shit-waffle of a father at around age 13, and orphaned by his mother when the museum they are visiting is blown up by terrorists. Theo crawls out of the rubble in the confusion, filching a small, priceless painting of a mournful goldfinch chained to its perch, because he identifies with the bird (you can see exactly where this is going thematically, right?).
Theo spends time living with a snooty, amoral rich family; then the shit-waffle father shows up and drags him to Nevada to steal the kid's inheritance and blow it away at the casino, because that's what shit-waffle dads do to their children. Along the way, Theo befriends an antique dealer whose partner had given Theo his ring as he lay dying during the museum blast. He continues to cling to the painting as a crutch while hoping no one finds out he has it and has him arrested. There is angst and crime and betrayal and the corruption of innocence, and the sense that people are more concerned about owning objects than about having virtue. It's a decent read, but I have a hard time understanding why it merits quite the lavish amount of praise it's been getting.
On the Motion of the Heart and Blood, & On the Circulation of the Blood, by William Harvey
If the mitral cuspidae valves do not prevent the egress of fulginous vapours to the lungs, how should they oppose the escape of air? And how should the smilunars hinder the regress of spirits from the aorta upon each supervening diastole of the heart? And, above all, how can they say that the spiritous blood is sent from the arteria venalis (pulmonary veins) by the left ventricle into the lungs without any obstacle to its passage from the mitral valves, when they have previously asserted that the air entered by the same vessel from the lungs into the left ventricle, and have brought forward these same mistral valves as obstacles to its retrogression? Good God! How should the mistral valves prevent regurgitation of air and not of blood?
Harvey is included in the Great Books set and in the Harvard Classics, as a wonderful example of the scientific method in action. Harvey's proof that the blood circulates (that is, it goes in a circular pattern instead of the veins and arteries being completely separate systems, with blood in the veins and "spirits" in the arteries, with some blood transferred via pores in the ventricles, as Galen--see Bookpost, December 2012--and other ancients asserted) is both readable and convincing. Harvey was passionate and in some places even humorous.
As with Ptolemy and Copernicus, Galen and Harvey are excellent examples of advancement of ideas and controversial theories put to the test, which ought to be (and once were) taught to high school science classes. Nowadays they oppose actual science to nonsense in "science vs. Creationism" or "climate change vs. business needs" controversies, without teachers daring to indicate how to decide which is the truth, because moneyed interests prefer that children grow up ignorant and tractable, as in the good old days of pig-wallowing peasants and feudal overlords.
The Periodic Table, by Primo Levi
In the summer, when he went off by himself, he often took along a dog to keep him company. This was a small yellow mongrel with a downcast expression; in fact, as Sandro had told me, acting out in this way the animal episode, as a puppy he had had a mishap with a cat. He had come too close to a litter of newborn kittens, the mother cat was miffed and became enraged, and had begun to hiss, getting all puffed up; but the puppy had not yet learned the meaning of those signals and remained there like a fool. The cat had attacked him, chased him, caught him, and scratched his nose; the dog had been permanently traumatized. He felt dishonored, and so Sandro had made him a cloth ball, explained to him that it was the cat, and every morning presented it to him so that he could take revenge on it for the insult and regain his canine honor.
Fascinating. It's not quite a memoir, and it's not fiction, and (contrary to the blurb on the back) it is not an account of the author's holocaust ordeal. It's maybe the things in between (since atoms are mostly, you know, empty space and all that).
It's about his ancestors (including the grandfather who used to pronounce curses in Yiddish that translated as "May you have an accident in the shape of an umbrella"). It's about studying chemistry in Italy before Mussolini. And working in a chemical plant at Auschwitz. And friends' stories about stopping the boiler that's about to blow, and making chemicals out of chicken shit. And the life cycle of a carbon atom.
What holds it together? Why, chemistry!
Each section is titled with the name of a chemical element. The first one, about ancestors, is "Argon", because Levi's ancestors were noble gases--mostly inert, but noble. The one about Italian fascism is "Iron"; various tales about chemical experiments are named for the chemicals being experimented on, and so on.
What ties them together is Levi's use of language. He is a master of the quirky anecdote, and you just feel like following him wherever he leads, and that's just fine.
The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, by Sir Philip Sidney
With that, he stabbed himself into divers places of his breast and throat, until those wounds, with the old, freshly bleeding, brought him to the senseless gate of death. By which time, his servants having, with fear of his fury, abstained a while from coming unto him, one of them (preferring dutiful affection before fearful duty) came in and there found him swimming in his own blood, giving a pitiful spectacle, where the conquest was the conqueror's overthrow, and self-ruin the only triumph of a battle fought between him and himself. The time full of danger, the person full of worthiness, the manner full of horror, did greatly astonish all the beholders; so as by and by all the town was full of it, and then of all ages came running up to see the beloved body; everybody thinking their safety bled in his wounds and their honor died in his destruction.
Together with Orlando Furioso (see Bookpost, June 2014) and The Faerie Queene (probably this October or November), The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia pretty much epitomizes how romances were written in the 16th century. Arcadia has the advantage of being written (mostly in prose), although the custom of throwing in long sections of superfluous poems and stories-within-stories is used to a tedious degree.
The basic plot is farcical. King Basilius of Arcadia consults an oracle (note to self: Never, Never seek to know your future. Your reaction to the answer will bring about ironically bad outcomes without fail) and is given a horrible parade of predictions: His elder daughter will be kidnapped, his younger daughter succumb to "an unnatural passion"; he himself shall commit adultery with his own wife, and his sons-in-law will be accused of his murder. Naturally, (im)Basilius tries to prevent the prophecy from coming true, and thereby brings it all about, but in such a way that all the disaster can be comical and the parties ultimately live happily ever after. He brings his wife and as-yet-unmarried daughters to be secluded on an island where no one is allowed to have contact with them (being the King, his absence brings about civil war and invasion on top of all the other things); and, of course, two handsome princes are drawn by curiosity to sneak in, one disguised as a shepard and the other as an amazon. The King falls in love with the cross-dressing prince, thinking him a woman; his wife also does, seeing that he is not. Trajicomic rom-com hijinks ensue!
As with Fielding and especially Samuel Richardson, who both admit to having been influenced by Sidney (Richardson's Pamela--see Bookpost, January 2011 is drawn from the equally aggressively virginal Pamela of Arcadia), the tone of the book is didactic and moralistic. Everything happens because of the virtue, or lack thereof, of the characters. Balilius endures comic mayhem as punishment --very light chiding, by Greek Epic standards, but you wouldn't want to endure it yourself--for his hubris in having sought to know his future.
It's a long read, and preachy at times, but not particularly difficult. Moderate recommendations.
Find all of my previous Bookposts here: http://admnaismith.livejournal.com/tag/bookposts