Book Review: "Little Reunions" by Eileen Chang

Little Reunions (2009)
Eileen Chang (1920-1995)
332 pages

Early in Eileen Chang’s novel Little Reunions, her main character, Julie, muses on the complicated history and messy present of her family:

Memories, happy or not, always embodied a doleful note …. She never sought out melancholy, but life unavoidably overflowed with it. Just thinking [about her family’s past] made her feel like she was standing in the portal of an ancient edifice, peering through the moonlight and dark shade that permeated the ruins of a once novel and illustrious household, which was now nothing more than scattered shards of roof tiles and piles of rubble from collapse walls. That instant of knowing what once existed here. (67-68)

But the apple does not fall far from the tree, and Julie herself struggles to escape the long shadow of her family’s tendency toward dysfunction. Though able to recognize foibles and frailties in her family, friends and acquaintances, she finds herself cursed with many of these same weaknesses, leaving her no more able to elude unpromising relationships than the rest of her family.

The story opens in the fall of 1941, with Julie beginning her fourth year studying at a convent school in Hong Kong, having left her home in Shanghai in the wake of its occupation by the Japanese. By December the Japanese have taken control of Hong Kong too, and with the convent shut down and little else holding her to Hong Kong, Julie returns home to Shanghai. There, freed from the demands of school but also without a degree, she struggles to find her bearings, not least because she must once again navigate the intricate machinations of her family.

Further complicating her attempts to build a life for herself in Shanghai are the destruction and chaos that enveloped mid-twentieth century China. The long and painful Chinese civil war that dominated the period was interrupted for a time by the horrors of the Japanese invasion, before re-starting with a vengeance once the Japanese were defeated by the Americans. These geo-political events form the back drop of Chang’s story, as they did for her novel Naked Earth and the short stories of her collection Love in a Fallen City. (My reviews of these linked to at right.)

In fact, Julie’s observations about her family quoted earlier, describing “an ancient edifice, … the moonlight and dark shadows that permeated the ruins of a once noble and illustrious household … now nothing more than scattered shards … and piles of rubble,” also succinctly depict China at this nadir of its history. The resulting disruptions of these wars, both in terms of the restriction on movement, as well as the acceleration of social transformations driven by outside influences, serve to complicate Julie’s already strained relationships.

And these challenging relationships begin with the one between Julie and her mother. Already in the opening pages we learn that

Julie’s uncle [on her father’s side] had no daughter of his own, so there was a verbal agreement that he adopt her. Consequently, Julie began calling her birth parents Second Aunt and Second Uncle, and since childhood found this arrangement liberating. (12)

Julie’s birth mother too has taken full advantage of the freedom this situation has given her. Divorced even before Julie moves to Hong Kong to study, her mother travels abroad for years at a time, all the while cycling through a series of temporary relationships. With neither mother nor daughter quite satisfied with their own lives, and each critical of the other’s choices, their little reunions tend to play out as deeply strained reconciliations, despite the biological ties that bind them.

However much Julie may have enjoyed the freedom these “peculiar” (12) family arrangements gave her as she grew up, their full impacts become clear as she reaches adulthood. The complexity of her family life, and her on-again, off-again connection with her mother become a hallmark of her dating relationships. When the charismatic Chih-yung enters her life and eventually becomes her husband, she finds herself struggling to create the deep relationship with him that she longs for.

Chang’s approach to telling the story reflects the complexity of the relationships it describes. Though structured around a nominal timeline of Julie’s recollections of her experiences from just before the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong in late 1941 up to around the time of the end of the Chinese civil war in 1950, the story has the flighty, stream-of-consciousness nature reminiscent of the running dialogue we most of us have running through our heads about ourselves and our lives as we go through the day. Julie will be present in a particular moment and scene, and suddenly some action or smell or word will transport her thoughts to a time in her past, or occasionally her future. Then, just as suddenly, she will return to the present, though not always at the same moment she had left from.

As would be true for someone who could hear our own often jumbled thoughts, these transitions happen without warning, with nothing flagging that Julie has jumped forward or backward in time. But readers who allow themselves to be drawn into the flow and pattern of her thinking, and the intensity of her experiences, are rewarded for their effort. Within the interconnected puzzle pieces of the life that she presents us, we come to discover a wonderful, if dark and melancholy, character study of a woman coming of age in a rapidly changing China, a country struggling to find its place in the modern world during a long period of disruption and uncertainty.

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Other reviews / information:

According to the Translator's Note in the book, "Eileen Chang completed Little Reunions in 1976 and sent [it to friends] who later became her literary executors." (vii)   
 
This another wonderful selection in the New York Review of Books (NYRB) Classics collection.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "The Chrysalids" by John Wyndham

The Chrysalids (1955)
John Wyndham (1903-1969)

200 pages

Are we nearing such moral and social disorder that frightened parents will run back to Mother Church and beg her to discipline their children, at whatever cost to intellectual liberty?

The Lessons of History, 96, Will and Ariel Durant

It seems almost axiomatic that intellectual liberty declines--- sometimes significantly --- in times of societal stress. Though it’s not always a turn to “Mother Church,” populations can react to violent events or even only perceived threats by all too willingly sacrificing their freedom of expression and opinion in exchange for the apparent security of authoritarian regimes. A kind of mob rule can in fact occur in support of government restrictions, with a fearful majority actively and aggressively intimidating and coercing anyone venturing outside the norms, characterizing such people as dangerous, a risk that must be expunged at any cost.

John Wyndham’s novel The Chrysalids presents perhaps the extreme case for a civilization under stress: the desperately slow recovery after a world-wide nuclear war. Set in a distant future, in which much of the planet and its population have been destroyed, the descendants of those who survived have passed through a long, dark period of chaos and uncertainty, and are only gradually rebuilding the structures of civilization.

Wyndham centers his story around David, a boy whose family lives in a farming village on the border of a growing federation of such communities in current day Labrador. Though that place name has remained, the region itself has changed dramatically in this future, having become warm enough to support extensive agriculture, which forms the basis of life and the economy for the slowly coalescing society.

The members of this federation know little about the world of the distant past, other than that some sort of cataclysmic event occurred, referred to as the “Tribulations,” which ended the civilization of those they call the “Old People.” Legends abound of seemingly impossible technological capabilities possessed by the Old People but lost in the Tribulations; the one clear legacy the survivors regularly confront is a propensity for babies, animals and plants to appear with mutations. The growth of the federation is in fact dictated by the frequency of deformities seen in areas beyond its borders, called the “Wilds”: over generations, as fewer deformities are seen among the plants and animals in the Wilds, people expand out into them to found new settlements.

The appearance of mutations has thus, since far back into the long dark period after the Tribulations, played a central role in the lives and concerns people of the federation. With no understanding about what causes these deformities, however, the reasons why they appear more frequently in some years than others and in some family’s crops or animals or children but not others remains a mystery. This vacuum of knowledge about the causes of the deformities, and their implicit association with the ancient destruction, has not surprisingly engendered deep-seated fear and superstition.

To assuage their uncertainties the survivors have placed their faith in the one book that has survived from the Old People: the Bible. In particular, they hew tightly to an extension, entitled “Repentances,” written in the dark period following the Tribulations. The text of Repentances describes how God wrought the Tribulations on the Old People as punishment for some unrevealed behavior. In order to repent for those sins, it demands that the survivors root out and destroy any abnormality, whether in a plant, animal or person.

To accomplish this, the government and church instituted a merciless set of religious strictures, which have over time became harshly enforced cultural mandates, with children taught to fear any deformity.

There was only one true trail [back to grace] …. But so faint was the trail, so set with traps and deceits, that every step must be taken with caution, and it was too dangerous for a man to rely on his own judgement. Only the authorities, ecclesiastical and lay, were in a position to judge whether the next step was a rediscovery, and so, safe to take; or whether it deviated from the true re-ascent, and so was sinful. (40) 

Able to count on the almost fanatical support of the majority, the government of the federation actively pursues the rooting out of any mutations that appear, through purity officers assigned to every village.

However, as the occurrence of deformities has gradually but visibly declined --- at least in the gradually expanding lands of the federation --- and as ships exploring far beyond the Labrador’s natural borders have brought back reports of people in distant lands whose appearance would seem to violate the word of the Repentances, but who otherwise seemed normal and happy, doubts are beginning to arise among some members of the community about the draconian measures, and about what truly constitutes a dangerous deformity.

For David and some of his friends this question becomes deeply and dangerously personal. They have discovered within themselves an ability that, though not directly visible, puts them at risk from the extremists in their society if discovered. To survive they conceal this ability --- but the risk remains ever present, and weighs ever heavier on them as they grow up. When events finally conspire to reveal their secret, the friends must rally to each other’s support, to confront and defend themselves against the impassioned wrath of their erstwhile families, friends and landsmen.

The story's title is based on a variation of the word chrysalis, which, according to Merriam-Webster, means ‘a sheltered state or stage of being or growth’ (such as for a butterfly), a definition that aptly describes the growing federation of villages in this novel. In the aftermath of the horrific events of the past, a hard shell of dogmatism has protected this slowly expanding population of survivors for untold generations. Gradually, however, a growing segment of the community look to a more rational basis for life, wanting to free themselves from the stifling rules that have constrained their society.  The religious mainstream of the community, however, remain deeply fearful of any weakening in the resolve of the people to re-earn God’s grace, and will not yield without a fight.

As Christopher Priest points out in his Introduction, although The Chrysalids has a post-apocalyptic setting, Wyndham has presented a timeless examination of the debilitating effect that extremism can have when it takes hold of a society. Despite whatever basis may have originally existed for such it to develop, such extremism inevitably leads to constraints on behavior and thought that stunt a society’s growth and development. Wyndham’s cautionary tale, however, ultimately offers a combination of a glimmer of hope and call to arms: rational people can and must push back against the darkness.

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Other reviews / information:

The Introduction to The Chrysalids was written by Christopher Priest, another science fiction writer whose novel Inverted World, also published by NYRB; my review here.

This another wonderful selection in the New York Review of Books (NYRB) Classics collection.

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Book Review: "Naked Earth" by Eileen Chang

Naked Earth (1956)
Eileen Chang (1920-1995)

245 pages

A crushing claustrophobia envelopes a reader in the opening chapters of Eileen Chang’s powerful novel, Naked Earth, and continues tightening its dispiriting grip through to the end. Set in the People’s Republic of China of the early 1950’s, as the Communist revolutionaries have emerged victorious from the Chinese Civil War, Chang’s novel examines the effects on the Chinese people of the Communist Party’s aggressive consolidation of power. Her portrayal of the Chinese social and political milieu of that time most nearly resembles a nightmarish cross between Huxley’s 1984 and Kafka’s The Trail, as the Party creates a suffocating web of mutual surveillance and fear. Perhaps even more haunting than the disturbing image of her characters caught up in the intricate and ultimately dangerous machinations in the China of the 1950’s, is the recognition of the all-to-common human traits that allow such nightmares to erupt anywhere in the world given the right conditions; “man’s inhumanity to man”, to borrow from poet Robert Burns.


The story opens as a truck travels into the Chinese countryside carrying university students mobilized by the government to carry out land reform. Led by a low-level, Communist party organizer, the group has been assigned to help party members in a small farming village re-apportion land from Big Landlords (in the novel, formal government terms and slogans are capitalized) to the local Poor, who are mostly landless day-workers. The village the student team arrives at, however, has no Big Landlords, and so the local officials, afraid of failure, go after even the Middling Farmers, grabbing all the land around the village for re-distribution. To justify the taking of the land for the poor, the officials condemn and demonize even lower class working farmers as Big Feudal Exploiting Landlords, subjecting them to brutal ‘denunciation’ meetings, and then imprisoning or torturing them to death.

Among the students watching the increasingly zealous and overheated mob is the story’s protagonist, Liu Ch’üan, who has arrived in the village with a passionate desire to support the Communist Party’s efforts to improve conditions. Liu quickly becomes disillusioned as he observes the local party officials, with the support of the party organizer, whip the villagers into a frenzied and increasingly gruesome mistreatment of the working class villagers. Under consideration for party membership, Liu is looked on by the party organizer directing the group as an unofficial leader among the students, and so feels some level of responsibility to try and guide events. At the same time, he hesitates to raise his voice in opposition --- the very slogans and mottos that had seemed proper and principled in the fervor of the student meetings back on campus he now finds turned, in the crucible of policy implementation in the village, into an ideological minefield; a small miss-step potentially ending one’s hope for party membership or even putting one’s life at risk.

When Liu does finally speak out against the abuse of the lower class farmers, the organizer quickly chastises him, saying that Liu has “taken the wrong Class Route,” and is due for some Self-Examination” by the group. Even after the meeting, when Liu talks briefly to a fellow student who shares his concerns, danger lurks; another passing student warns them in a whisper to stop their discussion: “If anybody should hear, they’ll say we’re Holding a Small Meeting.” (40) Every action, every word, can be twisted into an accusation of working against the Party.

Liu survives the situation in the village, saved in part by a sudden government-ordered transfer, along with the party organizer, to Shanghai. In what is effectively a promotion for the two of them, they are assigned to the Resist-America Aid-Korea Association, formed to prepare propaganda in support of the Chinese efforts backing North Korea against the US-supported South Korean army. Whereas in the countryside Liu had dealt with a small group of rather transparently corrupt party officials, in the big city he finds himself buffeted by a vast network of shifting conflicts and alliances among party members seeking advancement and warding off political threats. He also discovers the unforeseeable risks of sudden shifts in government policies that can turn someone who may have been in favor just the day before into a pariah, accused of being a villainous traitor, becoming toxic to even accidental acquaintances. For a person of conscience, such as Liu, just staying out of trouble with the party, much less achieving advancement through its ranks, becomes a virtually untenable proposition.

Chang has written a compelling condemnation of the authoritarian government that formed in China in the wake of the Chinese civil war of the 1940’s, and the vast and oppressing system of psychological and social control it imposed to maintain power. Through the trials and tribulations of her affecting main character, Liu Ch’üan --- a conscientious common-man who is neither a self-centered party member focused only on advancement nor a self-sacrificing idealist --- Chang demonstrates the pernicious ability of such systems to undermine and eliminate even principled opposition.

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Other reviews / information:
This another wonderful selection in the New York Review of Books (NYRB) Classics collection.

This NYRB Classics edition has an introduction by Perry Link (available on-line here), in which he mentions that United States Information Service (USIS) offered Chang a grant after she left China in 1952 to write this book, and another (The Rice-Sprout Song). He comments that:

This fact has been widely noted, and its significance sometimes exaggerated. It is far-fetched to imagine that the USIS distorted Chang’s writing. She is too powerful a writer for that --- too “immune from being tricked,” in [MaoTse-tung confederate] Tai Ch’ing’s phrase. (xii)

I have also read and reviewed (here) a set of short stories by Eileen Chang, Love in a Fallen City, another selection in the NYRB Classics collection.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "The Door" by Magda Szabó

The Door (1987)
Magda Szabó (1917-2007)
Translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix

262 pages

Someday perhaps someone will speak with absolute sincerity about all the things he has felt, and the world will be astounded to find that most of its maxims and observations are mistaken, and that there is an unknown soul at the center of that soul about which all the stories are told. .............................. Germaine de Stael, French Author, 1766-1817

The mysterious challenge of discovering the most profound feelings and motivations of another soul --- as captured so wonderfully by de Stael in the quote above --- animates Magda Szabó’s novel The Door. The tremendous responsibility that comes with such knowledge, and the likelihood of achieving only an incomplete understanding, set the stage for a gripping --- and devastating --- endgame in the story.

As Szabó’s story opens, a couple in Budapest, Hungary, have moved from a small apartment to a home. Magda and her husband are writers, and quickly realize that they will need to hire a housekeeper to allow them the time they desire to dedicate to their writing. Recommendations from neighbors and friends lead them to Emerence, an old lady who lives in a nearby apartment building, where she serves as the building caretaker. Magda discovers that, along with that caretaking job, Emerence performs a variety of other work and activities in the neighborhood, from sweeping snow for several families to rescuing abandoned pets and bringing food to neighbors who are sick.

Though a seemingly indefatigable worker, Emerence comes with a prickly and peculiar personality, which becomes immediately apparent to Magda and her husband when they realize that the normal interview process has been turned on its head: Emerence arrives to interview them, and so decide whether to take on the position as their housekeeper. As Emerence tells them, “I don’t wash just anyone’s dirty linen.” (6)

In the months after Emerence begins working for the couple --- adding the housekeeping job to her existing workload --- Magda comes to realize what an unusual person she has introduced into her presence. Emerence performs the work needed in the house, but on her own schedule and terms. She can be generous to the extreme, but will never accept help or a gift for herself. She seems to have almost a sixth sense for knowing details about the people and happenings in the neighborhood, but remains cryptic and circumscribed in revealing anything about herself. Perhaps most surprising to Magda, Emerence has never been known by her neighbors to have allowed anyone into her apartment; she entertains a stream of people on her front porch, but the door to her home, as to her thoughts, remains firmly closed.

Already in the opening pages we learn that over the course of some twenty years together, Magda and Emerence develop a complex yet powerful relationship, and that the very strength of that relationship will finally have traumatic consequences for both of them. The story, then, follows the evolution of the relationship between these two wildly different personalities: Magda a writer and philosopher who seemingly second guesses her every thought and action, and for whom working can consist of sitting for hours staring out at the landscape; and Emerence, a stoic and disciplined laborer, with solid and unwavering convictions, who can be deeply generous to someone one day and fiercely chastise them the next.

Since Emerence gives no quarter, and accepts no compromise, the novel develops around Magda’s struggles to accommodate Emerence by learning about her past and so divining her intentions. Magda’s preconceptions and tendency to rush to judgement in every encounter color her view of Emerence; with Magda serving as our narrator, we too only slowly come to understand the complexity that lies behind Emerence’s tough exterior. The other characters in the novel, including Magda’s husband, remain largely in the background, serving mainly as foils for Emerence, and thus opportunities for Magda to potentially discover new information about her.

The Door opens as a moving character study, building on the quotidian interactions between Magda and Emerence. Seemingly innocent and even mundane moments transform into psychological battles between two extremely different personalities who nonetheless come to slowly, grudgingly, feel deep affection and trust for one another. Ultimately, however, as de Stael intimates in the quote that leads off this review, there remain limits to Magda’s understanding of Emerence, limits engendered by her inability to overcome her own personal convictions and outlook, and in the final part of the novel these limits prove to be of dramatic and fateful consequence.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Last Words from Montmartre" by Qiu Miaojin

Last Words from Montmartre (1996)
Qiu Miaojin (1969-1995)
Translated from the Chinese by Ari Larissa Heinrich

161 pages

Unless you would studiously avoid reading the notes on the back cover and inside the front cover of the book--- and overlooked the obvious incongruity in the bibliographical and biographical information included at the top of this review --- I won’t need to bother with a spoiler alert before revealing that the book’s author, Qiu Miaojin, committed suicide in 1995, leaving behind the unpublished novel, Last Words from Montmartre. Given this background knowledge, the book’s title takes on a darker meaning, imparting a distinct sense of foreboding before a reader has even begun the story; turn then to the book’s epigraph and your breath will catch in your throat. Every line in the novel becomes freighted with potentially dire consequences.

Through a series of twenty letters written by Qiu’s narrator, Zoë, we learn about the bitter and painful aftermath of a recent break-up she has experienced with her girlfriend and lover. The letters, written to her ex-girlfriend and to other friends, reveal the depths of her feelings for her ex and that the impact of the relationship and the final break-up pass well beyond love and loss into the realms of obsession and hopelessness. In one early letter, Zoë wonders whether

Maybe the world has always been the same, maybe it has always crushed to bits anything you hoped it would not crush. But it’s not the world’s fault, it’s still the same world that keeps crushing down. It’s not the world’s fault, it’s just that I’ve been wounded; can I really assimilate all these wounds? (8)

From these early lines the reader is put on notice of how deeply Zoë’s existence has been shattered by the dissolution of the relationship.

What might have devolved into a simple story of heartsick pining over a lost love, thought, develops instead into a deeply disturbing, but ultimately compelling, look into a damaged soul. Through the series of letters she writes, Zoë ardently beseeches her ex-girlfriend and her closest friends to recognize the depth, intensity and permanence of the connections she feels grew and will forever exist between the two women, connections that she refuses to believe can be entirely sundered, even by the infidelity and breakup that have occurred. At the same time, however, she reveals, in raw and uncompromising language, the human frailties that challenged the relationship as it developed and ultimately led to its end --- her comments as unsparing of her own faults as of those of her ex. A reader can be forgiven for being both struck by the intensity of Zoë’s passions, and cringing before the harsh light of reality that she shines on her own innermost struggles. The nagging feeling that accompanies reading the story --- that it may indeed to some significant extent be autobiographical --- only heightens for the reader the import of each sentence Zoë writes.

The book includes an Afterword by the translator, which opens with a bit of a teaser, asking the questions a reader naturally wonders about Qiu: “How did she die? Who were her lovers? Did she die of a broken heart?” (149) Beyond noting, however, that these questions have been investigated and explored in books and theses on Qiu’s work and life, he leaves no hints as to the answers; we are left to explore for ourselves. The Afterword does describe some of the commonalities between Qiu and her narrator, as well as the political and cultural environment in which Qiu grew up in Taiwan, before moving to Paris to study and work in 1994, at the age of twenty-five. The translator points out that Qiu’s work became part of a queer literature movement that formed a “conspicuous … presence on the literary scene” (153) in Taiwan in the 1990’s.

In this striking novel, Qui tears away the mask of stability and practicality which people generally present to their friends, relatives and lovers. Her narrator describes her innermost passions and desires, revealing their oppressive, and ultimately destructive, impact on her life. Last Words from Montmartre is not a novel for those easily frustrated by what they consider irrational behavior in others (while believing themselves to be rational actors in what they do); here, instead, we find the roiling, irrational stew lying behind the brave mask with which people often attempt to face the world.

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Other reviews / information:
This is yet another wonderful selection from the NYRB Classics collection.

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Book Review: "The Professor and the Siren" by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

The Professor and the Siren (1961)
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957)
Translated from the Italian by Stephen Twilley

69 pages

Only in the final two years of his life did aristocrat Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa turn to writing fiction, all of which was first published only after his death. Three of his short stories, newly translated, have been published by the New York Review Books (NYRB) in The Professor and the Siren. Behind simple plot lines the stories reveal often unspoken truths contained within the daily vagaries and rituals of human behavior.

A young journalist in Turin retreats to an out-of-the-way café to nurse his wounded pride in the title story of the collection. His attempt to juggle two relationships has suddenly and awkwardly collapsed when his two girlfriends learn of one-another’s existence, causing him to seek out an alternative to his normal haunts. Over repeated visits he becomes acquainted with another regular at the café, an aged fellow Sicilian, who turns out to be a famous professor of ancient Greek language and culture. The old man, cantankerous and rather misanthropic, gradually warms to his young acquaintance, eventually recounting a mystical experience of love from his youth that altered his life irrevocably. For the young man, the unexpectedly intimate story provides a deeper understanding of the professor’s previously arbitrary and cruel opinions of his fellow man.

In “Joy and the Law,” a poor worker who struggles to provide for his family unexpectedly receives a large fruitcake as a Christmas gift from his boss. He rushes eagerly home to share the treat with his wife and kids, only to discover that society’s demands have their own ineluctable claim on his treasured bounty.

The final story, “The Blind Kittens,” opens with the purchase of a plot of land by an avaricious Sicilian land-owner. Expanding on the lands inherited from his father --- who had turned a small homestead into an extensive set of holdings --- the landowner shows little interest in improving the land or its infrastructure, single-mindedly focused on increasing the size of his family’s estate. His jealous carping and uninformed judgments of Sicilian noblemen, whose status he dimly perceives as beyond his reach, are matched only by their in-turn wildly exaggerated and dismissive opinions of a man they consider hopelessly below their level. In this short piece Lampedusa deftly skewers the provincialism and pettiness of his countrymen --- and their counterparts everywhere.

The book includes an introduction that provides background on Lampedusa, and insight into the themes and settings of the stories. The title story is clearly the gem of the collection, a wonderful tale of mythical love. Though the remaining two stories are less fully developed, they are engaging in their own right, for the peek they provide into the human soul. Reading these stories, I was reminded of a quote from the French author Germaine de Stael:

Someday perhaps someone will speak with absolute sincerity about all the things he has felt, and the world will be astounded to find that most of its maxims and observations are mistaken, and that there is an unknown soul at the center of that soul about which all the stories are told.

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Other reviews / information:

Read quotes from this book

This is yet another wonderful selection from the NYRB Classics collection.

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Book Review: "Agostino" by Alberto Moravia

Agostino (1942)
Alberto Moravia (1907-1990)
Translated from the Italian by Michael F. Moore

111 pages

The transition into adolescence can bring feelings of confusion and uncertainty, the sudden awareness that one is no longer a child, but not yet an adult: the games played with other children only a short time before feel uninteresting, if not inane, while forays into the adult world leave one struggling to understand rules of behavior that seem complex and arcane. Toss in the suddenly raging hormones, and it’s a wonder anyone makes it through.

In Agostino, author Alberto Moravia tells the story of a thirteen year-old boy abruptly entering this period. The title character’s father has died sometime before the story opens, but his family is well-to-do and so living comfortably; he has no siblings, living alone with his mother. As the novel opens, Agostino and his mother are spending their summer holidays at the sea, where they have their own house near the beach. Extremely close and affectionate, he and his mother spend their days lounging together in the sun, and each morning the two of them take a paddle boat out onto the water, where far from shore they swim and enjoy having the sea to themselves. Agostino looks forward to these daily trips, in which he has his mother all to himself; since the death of his father, Agostino’s mother has turned away any potential suitors, giving Agostino her undivided attention.

This blissful time for Agostino comes to a jarring end in the middle of the summer, however, when his mother suddenly accepts the invitation of a handsome young man to join him for a paddle boat ride. Agostino’s childhood innocence comes crashing down around him as he not only loses the exclusive attention of his mother, but also awakens to the recognition of his mother as a beautiful, desirable woman. Complicating matters, this realization awakens his own sexuality and, more critically, transforms his childish feelings of affection for his mother into a more disquieting direction for him.

Attempting to escape the physical proximity to his mother and so have space to work out these unexpected developments in his feelings, he ends up involved with a group of local boys, mostly older than himself. The boys in the group come from poor, working class families, and their coarseness and roughhousing, precisely the opposite of the children he has known in his life up to this point, both repel and attract him. He finds it difficult, however, to completely assimilate himself into their world of often brutish and thievish behavior. In his desire to achieve manhood, without precisely knowing what that destination entails, he gains little traction from observing either his mother’s world, or that of the group of local boys with whom he hangs out, and gradually becomes unmoored from any point of stability.

The focus of this short but affecting novel remains on Agostino; Moravia only somewhat generically develops the other characters, whether Agostino’s mother, or the group of local boys. Even with Agostino, we learn little or nothing about his past, his interests or his life in general. For Agostino the unexpected break with his childhood occupies him completely, and so also Moravia in telling the story.

In his young, main character, though, Moravia creates someone with whom the reader can empathize. Agostino is not someone you want to take by the shoulders and give a good shake to wake from a whining, self-centered pout. Rather Moravia’s story highlights the quite real complications of adolescence, and the loss of innocence that growing up entails. Any sensitive soul who has questioned their place among humanity when confronting the ugly and inhumane behavior sometimes present in the world will identify with Agostino’s feelings, when, out on a boat ride with the boys where he is the butt of their nasty jokes and coarse behavior, he realizes that

[his] sense of oppression and silent pain was made more bitter and unbearable by the fresh wind on the sea and the magnificent blazing of the sunset over the violet waters. He found it utterly unjust that on such a sea, beneath such a sky, a boat like theirs should be so full of spite, cruelty and malicious corruption. [It] created between sea and sky a sad unbelievable vision. There were moments he hoped it would sink. He thought he would gladly die, so infected did he feel by their impurity and so ruined.(66) 

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Other reviews / information:

This is yet another wonderful selection from the NYRB Classics collection.

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Read quotes from this book

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Fear" by Gabriel Chevallier

Fear: A Novel of World War I (1930)  

Gabriel Chevallier (1895-1969)

305 pages

[Our enemies] are … the children of the same God [as we are]. And God, the father, presides over the fratricidal struggle of his own children, and the victories on both sides. He’s just as happy whichever army sings the Te Deum. And you, one of the just, you pray to him to ruin and annihilate other just men. How do you expect me to make sense of that? [116]

Jean Dartemont, a French soldier convalescing from shrapnel wounds suffered during a bloody and chaotic battle of the First World War, confronts a hospital chaplain with this question. The chaplain has come to ask the soldier to repent of his sins, but Dartemont, fresh from the horror of the front lines, can only focus on “the greatest sin, in the eyes of the Church and the eyes of man, [which] is to kill your brother [and] which the Church is ordering” him to do. (116) He finds himself unable to sway the priest’s views of the war as just and right however; and, as he talks to the hospital nurses, and later his family and friends, he encounters this same support for the war again and again. In this support he recognizes, and laments, the success that French political and cultural leaders have had in creating a patriotic fervor around the righteousness of the war, and an image of the fighting as the latest heroic adventure in a centuries-long history of French military successes. He and his fellow soldiers at the front, by contrast, have found that the slaughter and destruction they witness and participate in has quickly disabused them of these sorts of idealistic beliefs.


In the autobiographical novel Fear, author Gabriel Chevallier tells the story of his experiences as a soldier during World War I, both his time at the front lines and on leave back among the civilian population, through the character of Dartemont. The dichotomy between the image of the war among the general public in France and the reality of the war for the soldiers fighting it, plays a central role in the novel. More generally, the reader gets a first-hand account of the horrific destruction the front-line soldiers faced in the First World War.

The story opens with proclamations of war being displayed on walls throughout Dartemont’s hometown, unleashing a tidal wave of excitement and expectation. Dartemont finds himself put off by the aggressive frenzy of the public he witnesses in the sudden rush to go to war; he is convinced that the political leadership in France, as well as that in all the other countries involved in the conflict, have fed their populations lies and miss-conceptions in order to drum-up support for an unnecessary war. Despite Dartemont’s recognition of the propaganda that has created a false image and justification for the war, once conscripted into the army even he can’t help but succumb to the spirit of adventure that the public and his fellow soldiers view in the conflict. He buys into the idea that the war will not last long, and looks forward to what he calls his “baptism of fire.” (39)

Upon finally reaching the front, however, his excitement quickly turns sour, as he experiences first-hand the unimaginable devastation of the war. Looking out across the no-man’s-land beyond the front-line trench he stands in, he discovers

[a] new and greater horror: the plain was blue. The plain was covered with our comrades [in their blue uniforms], cut down by machine guns, their faces in the mud, arses in the air, indecent, grotesque like puppets, but pitiable like men….(62)

 Each day he watches as the body count rises rapidly with each ineffective and seemingly senseless attempt to attack the German trenches, successive waves of French soldiers mowed down by the German machine guns.

In place of the feeling of adventure Dartemont had brought onto the war, a new, almost paralyzing sensation grows: Fear. He finds himself struggling with and analyzing this fear, trying to understand how he --- how any soldier --- can go forward into the almost certain death of heavy shelling and machine guns that awaits them when they climb forward out of the trenches to attack. Then, when an injury sends him first to a hospital far from the front, and later on a period of leave before he returns to the front, Dartemont discovers to his dismay and frustration that talking about this fear, about the dominant emotion he has felt during the war, is impossible. The people back home, well-steeped in propaganda that has filled them with a blind patriotism and an unrealistically impression of the war as a heroic adventure, view Dartemont’s descriptions of the reality of the fighting and the emotions it triggers for the soldiers as simple cowardice on his part.

Dartemont’s disgust is not limited to the civilian public however. He struggles also to understand how he and his fellow soldiers --- on both sides of the front --- don’t turn on their superiors, despite the horror of the battles and the apparently senseless decisions of their commanders to continue to stage attacks, when each attack by either side simply re-validates the obvious: the advantage in the war is with those who defend. Chevallier, as expressed through Dartemont, clearly comes away from his experiences in the war with a dark and deeply cynical vision of mankind:

Men are stupid and ignorant. That is why they suffer. Instead of thinking, they believe all that they are told, all that they are taught. They choose their lords and masters without judging them, with a fatal taste for slavery.

Men are sheep. This fact makes armies and wars possible. They die the victims of their own stupid docility.

When you have seen war as I have just seen it, you ask yourself: ‘How can we put up with such a thing? What frontier traced on a map, what national honour could possible justify it? How can what is nothing but banditry be dressed up as an ideal, and allowed to happen?’(7)

Fear presents a powerful statement against the insanity of war. Chevallier has written a novel that gives us an up-close and intimate look at the fighting along the front lines during World War I, and its effects on the soldiers caught up in the maelstrom. The story also takes us back home with the soldiers, where they discover that even their eyewitness accounts fail to sway the public’s deeply engrained belief in the fundamental righteousness and inevitable victory that their government has promised in its propaganda. Not surprisingly, Chevallier recalls in a preface to the 1953 edition of the book that “its author was sometimes taken to task” for what he wrote, though he adds that “those who fought as infantrymen … wrote [to him]: ‘True! This is what we experienced but could not express.’” (xiv) In a sense these reactions together represent a further manifestation of the idea expressed in the book that the general public have a false understanding of the reality of war experienced by soldiers at the front.

In that preface Chevallier also points out that the tone of the novel now strikes him as containing the “arrogance of youth,” that his Dartemont is “still naïve enough to believe that everything is susceptible to reason.” (xiv) Certainly the story gives no quarter in its condemnation of people’s shallowness and muddle-headedness, as the ‘Men are stupid and ignorant…’ quote above makes clear. From the vantage point of a century later, one can question the certainty with which Dartemont broadly condemns any nation for going to war; should a country not go to war to stop a Hitler, for example? But remembering the context in which the book was written, the saber-rattling and bravado that allowed the European continent to move seemingly inexorably into the Great War (a process described wonderfully in Ken Follett’s historical novel of the First World War, Fall of Giants, which I reviewed in the previous post), and the willingness of political and military leaders on both sides to allow the fighting to slide into a grotesque war of attrition, the tone seems well-matched to what Chevallier apparently experienced.

For me this story provides a compelling sequel to Mark Twain’s The War Prayer, written just a couple of decades earlier, though I have no knowledge of whether Chevallier was aware of the book. In Twain’s story (more fully reviewed in this earlier post), a public has been whipped into a frenzy to fight and defeat their enemy. After a minister gives a fiery sermon to his congregation, proclaiming the righteousness of the war and praying for God’s aid in vanquishing the enemy, an old man enters the church and walks slowly up to the pulpit. He commands the people to listen to “the unspoken part of the prayer” that God also heard: the destruction, the death, the horror that they have asked of him. In Fear, Chevallier takes us forward into the actual execution of the war, and so into the truth of all that the old man described.

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Other reviews / information:
*This novel is yet another wonderful selection from the NYRB Classics collection.

*As I was reading this book, I stumbled across an article in National Geographic magazine, The Hidden World of the Great War, that describes the underground life of soldiers in the trenches, and recalls some of the challenges they faced beyond the fighting itself, as Chevallier describes in his autobiographical novel.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Don't Look Now" by Daphne Du Maurier

Don’t Look Now (2008; selected stories from 1952-1980)  

Daphne Du Maurier (1907-1989)

346 pages

I must first admit that this was a book that I judged by its cover.

A stack of them lay on a table near the bookstore’s collection of publisher NYRB Classics books, and the cover caught my eye as soon as I walked up. When I found out that the cover photo is a still shot from the movie Repulsion, my curiosity grew. (For those not familiar with the film, Repulsion was released in 1965 by Roman Polanski, and starred Catherine Deneuve; it is a psychological thriller, a kind of nightmare-on-film that has one of the qualities I look for in a movie: it grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go, even once it’s over.)

When I opened the book and discovered that one of the stories was The Birds, which served as the source material for the Hitchcock movie of the same name, I was hooked. Back home, as I sat down to begin reading the book, I was ready for a set of stories that would grab me, ‘Repulsion-like’, and not let go.

And the title story didn’t disappoint. As it opens a couple is having lunch in Venice, where they are vacationing in an attempt to find a return to normalcy after the death of their daughter. They notice two old women staring at them from across the dining room; later the wife returns from the restroom saying that she ran into one of the two, that they are sisters, and that one of them claims to have seen the couples dead daughter sitting between her parents at the table. The husband tries to laugh it off, but his wife is convinced that the women have had a true vision. Soon after this unsettling news the wife learns she must return home suddenly to London, and leaves the hotel to catch the next flight out, with her husband planning to follow her later that day with the car. Hours after his wife’s flight was scheduled to depart the husband thinks he sees her on a passing ferry standing with the two old women, and finds himself drawn into a deepening nightmare of uncertainty that soon has him questioning his sanity.

The Birds, according to Patrick McGrath in the book’s Introduction, “is the masterpiece” of short stories, and it certainly stands out in this collection. The tension builds from the first lines, quickly reaching a fever pitch sustained through to the end of the story. McGrath notes that Du Maurier did not like Hitchcock’s movie adaptation of her story, which had significant changes to the setting and characters. In Du Maurier’s telling, a hired hand on an isolated farm along the English coast must fight to protect his family when winter winds bring a sudden end to fall --- and a deadly change in the behavior of the birds. He and his family hear radio reports of similar occurrences all over England, the newscasters implying that some man-made impact on the climate lies behind the fanatical behavior of the birds, though the exact cause remains unknown. As the days pass the man and his family realize that their neighbors have perished, the government will not be able to help them, and that they must fight on alone against a relentless enemy.

The remaining stories are engaging, but do not achieve the same undertone of unease growing into fear and finally terror as the initial two. Some come closer than others to creating that tension, but for the most part they are either more straightforward mystery stories (say, like “Ripley’s believe it or not” stories), or they build some suspense but then conclude with a kind of final trick --- unlike a story such as The Birds, which has no surprise ending, leaving you with the dread of the unknown future.

In the story Escort, a freighter crosses the North Sea on a trip from Scandinavia to its home port in England during the early months of World War II. In the middle of the trip, far from safety, the crew spot a German U-boat periscope rise up out of the water in the distance, and they begin maneuvers intended to keep the U-boat at a difficult firing angle. As their hopes for survival fade, a fog bank suddenly closes in around them, and brings with it an old-style British raiding ship whose captain offers his assistance. The captain of the freighter accepts the offer, though unable to understand where the old wooden barque has come from and how it will fend off the German torpedoes.

In Split Second, a woman in early 1930’s England tidies up her home and then goes out for a walk through a nearby heath. Returning home she is shocked to discover that her things have been removed and a handful of people claim that they are renting rooms in what has become a lodging house. She calls the police to arrest the burglars, but ends up in custody herself instead. Why can she not convince anyone that she is the rightful owner, and why can the police not track down any of her friends, or her daughter studying at a nearby private school?

A mechanic decides to catch a movie after work in Kiss Me Again, Stranger and ends up falling in love with the usherette who collects his ticket. When he follows her onto the bus after the show and chats her up, his sudden crush for her can’t quite blind him to her odd behavior, starting with the fact that she asks him, as she falls asleep on his shoulder, not to let her miss her stop, at the bottom of a hill, near a cemetery.

A woman lies in a hospital bed, having waited for weeks to have the bandages removed from her eyes in The Blue Lenses. The doctors who performed her eye surgery and the nurses who tend to her are all most friendly and helpful, and her husband dutifully stops to visit each day. When the doctor can finally remove the bandages, he explains that she still has on her eyes protective blue lenses that she will have to wear for a week, and that could make things look odd. The last bandage removed, she looks around the room, and the furnishings do indeed have a blue tinge, though this hardly detracts from her joy at being able to see well again. Looking at the doctor and nurse next to her bed, however, she is shocked to see them with animal heads, the animals corresponding to their individual personalities; she desperately awaits the arrival of her husband later that evening to help her deal with what has befallen her.

In a small village along the coast of Brittany, a young fisherman’s wife frets about her husband’s upcoming fishing trip in La Sainte-Vierge, her brother having died only a year earlier while out fishing on the Atlantic Ocean. Looking for divine intervention, she goes to the local chapel and kneels before the statue of the blessed virgin to pray for her husband’s safe return, and ends by pleading for an acknowledgement that her wish has been granted. When the moon moves out from behind the clouds in the night sky, she sees the longed for blessing through the chapel window, in the nearby grass.

A wrong word at the wrong moment wreaks havoc on three lives in the story Indiscretion. A man is invited out by his boss to lunch to celebrate the boss’s marriage, planned for the following day. When the subordinate explains that his reticence to congratulate his boss is the result of unpleasant relationships he has experienced, his boss goads him into telling more. The man finally gives in, and describes a girl he had run into just the year before, and who turned out to be not who she had said she was. Fate intervenes the next day when the man goes to the train station to see his boss off on the honeymoon.

The closing story, Monte Verità, has an almost mystical tone to it. Two friends grow up climbing mountains together; when one of the pair marries, and goes off on a mountain climbing trip with his wife, she disappears into mysterious monastery-like building near the twin peaks of the mountain. It his left to the man’s friend to discover what has become of her.

If you are looking for tense, disturbing, psychological dramas, you will find a few such stories here, but many of the others end up on the lighter, mystery end of the spectrum. That said, with one’s expectations adjusted just a bit from the dramatic cover picture that serves as introduction to the book, there is much to enjoy and be captivated by in Du Maurier’s writing and construction of these tales.

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Other reviews / information:

This is yet another wonderful selection from the NYRB Classics collection.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Love in a Fallen City" by Eileen Chang

Love in a Fallen City (2007; stories originally written in 1943-47) 

Eileen Chang (1920-1995) 

Translated by Karen S. Kingsbury

324 pages

Chinese society experienced traumatic changes during the first half of the twentieth century. As the Qing dynasty ended in 1912 with the founding of the Republic of China, ancient traditions were giving way to western influences. In the midst of this cultural upheaval came the Japanese invasion, in 1937, and a brutal occupation that deteriorated into a harsh struggle for survival for the Chinese people. Even after the defeat of the Japanese in 1945, the remaining years of the decade saw China descend into a long civil war.

The Chinese writer Eileen Chang lived through these dramatic and difficult years, and they colored her work. Born in Shanghai, in 1920, she spent much of the first thirty years of her life both there and in Hong Kong. In the 1940’s, while studying English literature in Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation, she began writing stories and essays, taking care to remain below the radar of the occupation regime.

Love in a Fallen City collects together a half-dozen of her stories from that period. (It also contains an Introduction by the book’s translator Karen S. Kingsbury, with biographical information, and a short Notes section that provides context for some terms in the stories that may be unfamiliar to a western reader.) Chang’s stories reveal the challenges faced by both men and women as the strict cultural norms of their parents slowly, fitfully gave way to more western notions of romance and love. Where before families had carefully arranged the meeting and nuptials of a couple, now some young men and women could choose for themselves; but they might also suddenly find themselves judged and trapped by old standards and customs to which many in Chinese society steadfastly held. For some this resulted in a paralysis of choice mixed with fear, while for others it became a time of reckless abandoned.

In the opening story, Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier, a girl from Shanghai is living with her family in Hong Kong and attending university. When her family decides to return to Shanghai, she resolves to find a way to stay in Hong Kong and continue her studies. She approaches a wealthy, divorced aunt who lives in the city, but who has long been estranged from the family for her socialite behaviors, and asks to live with her. Though the aunt takes her in, the girl soon realizes that her aunt has motives beyond simple familial obligation. As she becomes increasingly caught up in the charms and risks of her aunt’s social world, and the barely hidden schemes in which her aunt involves her, the girl struggles to maintain her balance.

An awkward boy is befriended by the attractive daughter of one of his professors in Jasmine Tea, but doubts the depth of her feelings. Hints he has found of an earlier relationship between his dead mother and the girl’s father further complicate his relationship with her.

In the title story Love in a Fallen City, a woman has divorced her husband and moved back in with her family; the family resents having the extra mouth to feed, and yet also refuses to try and help her re-marry. She realizes that she must take matters into her own hands, and when she is attracted to a man who had been picked out for her younger sister, but who seems to show an interest in her, she makes her move. But does he seriously want to marry her, or simply have an affair?

The only one of these stories to be translated by Chang herself, The Golden Cangue follows the life of a woman whose family has married her into a more well-to-do family, but to a husband who turns out to be a sickly, tubercular cripple. (A cangue is a heavy wooden collar enclosing the neck and arms, and resting on the shoulders; it was used in Asia to humiliate petty criminals.) On her own in the family and frustrated by her situation, the woman turns bitter and vindictive, simply waiting for her husband to die so she can inherit his money. When this finally comes to pass she receives enough for her, and her son and daughter, to live on comfortably, but has become so scarred by the experience that she alienates everyone around her, believing that no one cares for or loves her, and that they are only after her money.

In a demonstration of Chang’s elliptical reference to the Japanese invasion and occupation in these stories, Sealed Off opens inside a Shanghai tram filled with passengers as it comes to a halt one evening rush hour when unnamed authorities unexpectedly seal off parts of the city. A businessman heading home discovers that a pestering nephew is also on the stuck tram. Not wanting to talk to him, the man quickly switches seats to sit next to a young woman with whom he then strikes up a conversation. Initially cool to his sudden attentions, she gradually opens up to him; but what are his motives with her, and how deep his interest?

The final story, Red Rose, White Rose, centers on a man who has studied in England and returns to China to take up a job in Shanghai. He moves in with a friend and, despite having a reputation as someone who can remain unaffected in the presence of a beautiful woman, falls in love with the friend’s wife. But he finds her too flirtatious and not very smart, and he worries about the scandal of an adulterous relationship, so he leaves her and settles for an arranged marriage. Increasingly unhappy with his new wife, he begins questioning the path he has chosen, his behavior becoming erratic and destructive. How can he regain his former peace of mind?

In each of these stories Chang mixes incredibly rich and colorful descriptions of life in early 20th century Hong Kong and Shanghai with the inner thoughts of her characters and their often pointed dialogue, as they verbally spar with one another, each trying to discover the other’s true motives while not revealing their own. The stories are written as though someone is remembering back to these times, and in fact some of the stories open with a brief paragraph or two which set-up a narrator telling the story to someone sitting with them. Although there is a main character in each story, whose path and thoughts Chang generally follows, she also switches at times to the point of view of another character, and their thoughts, before returning again to the main character. This technique deprives us as readers of the typical sympathy toward the main character over others in the story; here we find that each character struggles with and feels trapped by their own confused desires in the world of changing norms in which they live. And each discovers their own way of dealing with this struggle.

The wonderful stories in Love in a Fallen City provide us a window back into the tumultuous world of mid-20th century Shanghai and Hong Kong.

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Other reviews / information: Eileen Chang also wrote the novel Love, Caution, which was recently made into a movie, directed by Ang Lee; watch the trailer here.

Others of her stories, including some in this collection, have also been made into movies in China.

Born Zhang Ying, she also went by Zhang Ailing (Zhang being the family name).

This is yet another wonderful selection from the NYRB Classics collection. See their review of the book here.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes"

The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes (1554)  

Translated by W.S. Merwin

118 pages

Historical fiction, at its best, can transport readers into a past era in a way that a history book generally can not. When the historical fiction was also written during the time in which it is set, the benefits can be multiplied --- just reading a story written in a distant age provides its own special window into that time.

The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, first published in Spain in 1554 by an anonymous author, satisfies on both counts by taking us back to life in mid-16th century Spain through both the story itself, as well as its writing and presentation. The book is apparently considered to be one of the first picaresque novels. (In case you have to look that up, as I did, Merriam-Webster defines it as “a type of fiction dealing with the episodic adventures of a usually roguish protagonist” --- think Huckleberry Finn; picaresque comes from the Spanish word pícaro, which can refer to a ‘crafty devil.’)

Lazaro de Tormes --- Lazarillo being a diminutive of Lazaro --- narrates the story, recounting his life as an itinerant worker in central Spain to someone he refers to as “Your Excellency,” who “has written to ask for a full account”(5) of his life. Lazaro states that he lost his father when he was eight years old, and his mother could eventually no longer support him and so gave him over into the keeping of a blind man who passed through their town. The blind man became Lazaro’s first master, and through his nasty and tight-fisted ways, taught Lazaro harsh lessons about the difficult life of the poor. Even as he suffered under the cruel treatment of the blind man, Lazaro watched him ply his myriad of tricks for defrauding people in town after town; as Lazaro says upon leaving him, “the blind sinner had taught me a great many things.”

After escaping the blind man’s control Lazaro wanders from place to place, finding jobs with masters each more miserly than the last, whether priest or squire, constable or seller of papal indulgences. Each of Lazaro’s masters represents an archetype of Spanish life in the 1500’s, and the anonymous author spares none of them his sharp pen. The novel stands as a scathing critique of clerics more worried about their own pleasure than the lives of their parishioner or the poor, and nobility more concerned about appearances and honor than in doing an honest day’s work.

History books on Spanish describe the disintegration that began in Spain and its economy in the 1500’s after the initial boom time that came from the silver and gold discovered in the New World. Much of these riches from the colonies ended up squandered on religious wars throughout Europe, while a significant part of the rest often found its way into the coffers of the church in Spain. Many people followed that money, entering religious institutions instead of working to earn a living; the Spanish have a disparaging expression for this that translates as these people having entered the contemplative life. The gentlemen class too had little interest in getting their hands dirty working, too busy worrying about protecting their honor. The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes depicts these times in a novel form, and the accuracy of the representation can be judged by how quickly the Inquisition in Spain banned the book after publication.

The story is a short 118 pages, and split into roughly one chapter per master for whom Lazaro works. The author skips any detailed description of the countryside or towns through with Lazaro passes, and also avoids full character development in the story. He focuses instead on describing the basest characteristics associated with various vocations at that time in Spain by representing the selfishness, greed and laziness that Lazaro observes in his string of masters. Clearly meant as a critique of his fellow countrymen in 16th century Spain, the anonymous author brings to us, centuries later, a tiny window into the world of his time.

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Other reviews / information:
The cover is a detail from the painting by Francisco de Goya, Pilgrimage to San Isidoro.

This book is part of a wonderful series published by NYRB: New York Review Books.

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Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Inverted World" by Christopher Priest

Inverted World (1974)  

Christopher Priest (1943)

322 pages

In the science fiction novel Inverted World by Christopher Priest, a city is gradually, moved across the landscape by its residents as they strive to keep it near a point referred to as the “optimum.” For the people of the city, the meaning of the optimum has been lost over many generations, and some are only dimly aware that it even exists or that the city must continue to stay close to its location. The responsibility for the critical task of moving the city onward falls to the members of a system of guilds.

A deeply secretive organization, the origins and even day-to-day function of the half-dozen or so guilds remain as hazy to the rest of the city’s residents as does the understanding of the optimum itself. Like the optimum, the guilds’ origins are shrouded in mystery, having been established in the city’s distant past. To ensure that the focus remains on the all important goal of keeping the city close to the optimum, the guilds have developed into a deeply entrenched political and social structure, responsible both for moving the city and for governing it.

As the novel opens the main character in the story, Helward Mann, comes of age and enters into an apprenticeship that will prepare him for a position in the same guild as his father. He begins this new phase of his life with a basic education, but only a most limited understanding of what the guilds do. The guildsmen perform most of their work outside the city, and only guildsmen are allowed out of the city, so the other residents remain largely unaware of what they do.

Helward must work through a series of assignments in each of the guilds before becoming a full-fledged guildsman. Once he takes up his work as an apprentice, he begins to slowly learn about and understand the reality of the city’s precarious existence, as well as the role of the guilds and the reasoning behind their seemingly dogmatic rules. As have apprentices for generations before him, he must experience first-hand the situation outside the city walls, in order to fully grasp the importance of the guild’s work.

Throughout his process of learning, however, he constantly struggles to square the preconceived notions he has carried over from his education and his life constrained within the city with the surprising reality he finds on the outside. What he cannot know as he works through his questions and doubts about the almost incomprehensible world he has been exposed to is that the future of the city is about to change in ways that will shake the foundations of all he has learned.

Built around the simple, single focus of the relentless need for the city to move forward, Priest has constructed in Inverted World an exciting story of adventure and discovery for Helward and for us the reader. With Helward as our narrator we develop our understanding about the strange world of this novel as he does, and we are limited as he is by the ways in which his preconceived notions and expectations color what he sees and experiences. Fascinating too is the social structure that Priest creates in the novel, and watching Helward deepen his understanding of it and of his place in it, his eyes finally opened by the broader base of knowledge he has as part of the guild system.

Our only advantage over Helward are the occasional facts that he mentions, but takes for granted, and that seem like they must be typo’s or mistakes by the author; but even these only leave us as readers in little better position than our narrator, uncertain whether to believe appearances. And when the whole becomes clear toward the end of the story, it comes as almost as startling a revelation for us as it does for Helward.

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Other reviews / information: This is yet another wonderful book I have discovered through the series published by the New York Review Books (NYRB), which has searched out and re-published excellent fiction and non-fiction that had somehow slipped out of circulation.

The book includes an Afterword by John Clute that puts Priest’s novel in the context of his life and other work.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Store of the Worlds" by Robert Sheckley

Store of the Worlds: 
The Stories of Robert Sheckley (2012) 

Robert Sheckley (1928-2005)

266 pages

Robert Sheckley explores mankind’s weaknesses and inconsistencies, and imagines the dark potential extremes of our political and social behaviors, in this engaging collection of short stories. Written mostly in the 1950’s, many of these stories appeared in the popular science fiction magazines of the day, though the science fiction aspect is actually secondary of the stories; Sheckley uses it as a form within which to reveal human idiosyncrasies.

Sheckley builds each story around a particular personal or cultural characteristic, which he then extends to humans on a future earth, or traveling to distant planets. Often his stories come with a surprise ending, a twist to spice up his plot. Surprisingly (or perhaps not), despite having been written over fifty years ago the stories do not seem dated; if anything many of the topics could be pulled from today’s news.

An example of this topicality is the story Morning After. In it the main character, like most of his fellow citizens of the near future, is ‘a fully accredited voter, respectably unemployed, moderately well off.’ The earth’s population stabilized, war and poverty eliminated, life on earth had become comfortable and easy. Those with ambition enter politics --- and vie for votes by providing free food, goods and entertainment to any ‘fully accredited voter’ in their district; the politicians who offer the most free services have the most success in the elections. But the loss of ambition worries the leaders of earth, and they search for ways to counter-act it, as the main character discovers to his surprise.

Only a day after reading this story, I read a newspaper commentary which, if it had appeared 55 years ago could easily have served as the trigger for Sheckley’s plot (A Congress for the Many, or the Few? by Fred A. Bernstein, New York Times, 9 September 2012).

In Shall We Have a Little Talk? the government of a future earth sends out space travelers who have an aptitude for learning alien languages. Each traveler goes out alone to seek inhabitable planets, and when they come across one, they befriend the natives and learn their language. But they do not come in peace; once having learned the alien language, they try to buy property on the newfound planet, and, when they are refused for some reason, or have purchased the property and then are disadvantaged in some way, laws passed on earth are used to justify the invasion of earth’s armed forces to right the wrong. Thus the fig leaf of legal rectitude is provided for the take-over of new planets. To simply invade with no justification would be morally suspect: ‘[the majority back on earth] were idealists, and they believed fervently in concepts such as truth, justice, mercy, and the like … and they also let these noble concepts guide their actions --- except when it would be inconvenient or unprofitable.’

Sheckley takes a light tone with the stories; most are only ten to fifteen pages long, and he follows a similar approach in each one, combining the personal, cultural or political trait he wants to dramatize with a bits science fiction color and comedic spice.

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Other of my book reviews: FICTION and NON-FICTION

Book Review: 'Chaos and Night' by Henry de Monterlant

Chaos and Night (1963)
Henry de Montherlant (1896-1972)

236 pages

Celestino Marcilla, the central character in Henry de Montherlant's novel Chaos and Night, lives in Paris, an exile of twenty years from his native Spain. After fighting as an anarchist with the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War, he crossed the border into France with tens of thousands of his countrymen in early 1939, in panicked retreat from Franco's Nationalist army. (For more on the history of the war, see The Spanish Civil War.)   In Paris he shares an apartment with his daughter --- his wife having died in childbirth soon after the end of the civil war.

Not having to work, due to an inheritance skillfully retrieved from Spain for him by a lawyer, Don Celestino also has never learned to speak French, though he can read it competently. He spends his days reading French and Spanish newspapers, and writing anonymous editorials to the newspapers, deriding the political and social situation in the world, in particular in Spain and France, from his anarchist slant. Few of these end up in print; most, in fact, he never even sends out, carefully filing them for a book he never actually gets around to writing. Filled with melancholy for Spain, but disgusted by the fascist regime and his former countrymen who support it, he also has little love for France or the rest of the world.

As the years have passed in France, he remains consumed with his memories of fighting both the nationalists as well as his non-anarchist compatriots --- socialists and communists --- in the Republican militia. With nothing in his life of exile to match the thrill of fighting for his beliefs in the civil war, Don Celestino's anarchism becomes a hardened dogma that defines his life, and begins to warp his perception of reality. He observes and challenges the world around him and finds it in most ways wanting based on his social and political viewpoint. Friend and foe, relation and stranger, all are judged --- and generally condemned --- for their failure to meet his strict standards. He attempts to recapture the excitement of the civil war years by creating conflicts with both friends and strangers, though instead of the physical violence of the war he settles for verbal tirades on the ills of society and mischievous pranks to disrupt what he considers the blind and complacent bourgeois. Having finally rejected the few friends he has made in France over the years, the story finds him sinking into a self-imposed morass of loneliness and isolation, and he feels death drawing near.

This spell is broken by a note from Madrid informing him that his sister has died and he needs to come to settle matters related to the inheritance. Overcoming fears that he will be found out as a former left-wing militia member, he travels to Madrid with his daughter. As he wanders the streets of Madrid for the first time in over 20 years, his senses heightened by his fear of being recognized as an anarchist and former Republican fighter, he feels a new excitement to his life, but also experiences a deepening disconnect from reality, as he interprets every smile or frown from a stranger as connected to his involvement in the long past civil war. The story reaches its climax at a bullfight he attends, which for Don Celestino takes on the dimensions of a representation of the human condition, and speaks directly to his own past and present; his political views and his approach to life become filtered through the lens of the battle between the bull on the one side, and the bullfighter and his helpers on the other. (For a look at bullfighting, see the review for Or I'll Dress You in Mourning.)

In Don Celestino, Montherlant portrays the perilous ends of allowing one's principles and convictions to overrule empathy and sympathy for others, and the insanity that lies at the end of allowing dogma to rule one's life and relationships. Don Celestino replays in miniature the internal strife between political parties that tore apart the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War even as it was losing the larger battle to the Nationalists. Montherlant does, however, manage to walk a fine line in the story: there is humor in what Don Celestino says and does, but he never seems a clown; he creates a sad life for himself, but his strength in facing it holds us back from finding him pitiful.

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Other reviews / information:
The back cover review, from The New York Review Books