Book Review: "Obsession: An Erotic Tale" by Gloria Vanderbilt

Obsession: An Erotic Tale (2009)
Gloria Vanderbilt(1924-)

144 pages

Under the pile of my letters [to my husband] I came upon another, tied with magenta grosgrain ribbon --- dove-gray envelopes with writing in magenta ink in an unknown hand…

So begins the descent of a recently widowed woman into an obsession bordering on madness. As she reads through these letters from the unsuspected mistress of her deceased husband, the insecurities that she had managed to hold at bay in the fire of her husband’s apparent passion for her rise up, and jealousy begins to consume her.

On the other side of the continent, the mistress learns of her lover’s death, and, although fully provided for, she finds herself now suddenly alone, an invisible remnant of her lover’s life. She too is consumed by jealousy --- for the widow who has a public connection to her lover that the mistress will never enjoy.

The book is a slim volume, easily read in a couple of hours, and to describe much more of the plot would give away too much, and ruin the pleasure of discovering how and what these two mourning women learn of the details of each other’s lives, and the unexpected connections they share.

The story moves between dreams and reality, and at times it can be unclear where the line between the two is. This too, however, somehow takes the reader back to the title emotion: obsession can overpower one’s thoughts, and leave one’s mind swimming in a shifting world of the real and the imagined.

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Book Review: "The Golden Lotus (Jin Ping Mei)"

The Golden Lotus (Jin Ping Mei) (~1600)
Attributed to Lanling Xiaoxiaosheng (pseudonym)
Translated by Clement Egerton

1280 pages in 2 volumes


Considered one of the earliest Chinese novels, The Golden Lotus (in Chinese Jin Ping Mei) tells the story of the rise and fall of a “dissolute young man whose name was Ximen Qing.” Master of an estate in provincial China in the early 1100’s, Ximen is in his late 20’s and has inherited substantial wealth, which he spends freely to pursue a life of easy pleasure.

At its heart this is a morality tale: from the beginning the author makes clear that Ximen will squander his wealth and his life on sexual escapades with any number of beautiful women, and on wine and food that he enjoys with the many false friends who surround him in hopes of benefiting from his free spending ways. Through Ximen and his interactions with those around him, the author describes a deeply corrupt society, with few citizens of honor; those who do try to live a moral life in this story find themselves at the very least undermined by the corrupt citizens and officials with whom they must interact, and at worst taken advantage of in their naiveté. The author often calls out the corrupt nature of a newly introduced character hundreds of pages before that character’s true colors show.

The introduction of the book opens with the comment that “for centuries now, the novel in your hands has been denigrated as a ‘dirty book’.” Certainly the author most graphically lays plain Ximen’s corrupt lifestyle through the description of his many sexual exploits, though, as mentioned in the introduction, these scenes make up only “a fraction of one percent of the total text.” Unable to resist the charms of beautiful women, Ximen brings one after another of them into his household, opening the novel with three wives, and gradually adding three more as the story develops. Beyond his ‘official’ wives, he has all manner of dalliances with female servants, wives of the men working for him and “singing girls,” who do indeed sing, but also provide other types of pleasures for their clients. The scenes of lovemaking are explicitly described, but the use of many metaphors for both the anatomy involved and the sexual acts Ximen and his lovers perform softens what would otherwise be pornographic passages into colorful, erotic scenes. (See, for example, a poem from the story.) For the author, particularly with the sexual activities involved becoming more extreme and unnatural as the story develops, these scenes seem to provide a dual purpose of entertaining the reader, while at the same time displaying the corruption and baseness of Ximen’s life.

In his business dealings as well, Ximen takes advantage of the rampant corruption around him, his money buying all manner of favors: the reduction of taxes owed; the ability to obtain goods more cheaply; and the biasing of the law in his favor. Ximen plays the system to the hilt, benefiting repeatedly from the access his wealth gives him, eventually ‘earning’ a government position form which he enriches himself with bribes in exchange for favors from those who come before him. That he takes these bribes is only natural for him; as a minor official he is now simply on the other end of the same types of dealings he has long participated in to receive favors himself. The theme that the ‘rich get richer’ is indeed timeless.

The complex system of unwritten rules that govern the exchange of gifts form an important part of the corruption described in the story. At nearly every type of encounter, one must be sure to present an appropriate set of gifts; and, when receiving gifts, show the appropriate mixture of gratitude to having been offered them and reluctance to having to accept them. Seldom, however, is a gift actually rejected --- at most the giver deems it, “only a trifle, which you many well pass on to your maids,” in order to both downplay his own generosity and help the receiver to overcome his ‘guilt’ at accepting what is offered. Of course, receiving a gift immediately places the recipient in a kind of debt to the giver that requires some future favor or gift in return.

The descriptions of the interactions between the characters, such as the exchange of gifts described above, are one of the more interesting parts of the novel, though it is often difficult as a westerner to fully appreciate the cultural details. Each visit between characters in the novel, for example, leads to a detailed description of the greetings between the guests and the hosts, the carefully arranged seating at the table and the types of food and wine provided. And a further level of complexity is added as the author describes occasional, almost ritualized, disputes over what level of greeting should be exchanged, who should sit where, or whether the guests have eaten and drank well enough.

The version of the novel reviewed here was translated into English in the 1930’s by Clement Egerton. It comes in at 1280 pages (in two volumes), though according to the introduction the source material is much longer, and Egerton deleted many (though not all) of the poems that appeared in the original, but that he felt were not central to the story. Although the plot develops around Ximen’s exploits with his lovers and friends, and the harsh payment he must eventually make for his debauched life, much of the narrative focuses on the day-to-day lives and interactions of the characters, the rituals that structure their world. By the middle of the second volume I was left with mixed feelings --- the account of the lives of these people of another culture, centuries old, was fascinating to read, but at the same time, the repetition gradually had me ready to reach the end.

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Book Review: "Give Me Your Heart" by Joyce Carol Oates

Give Me Your Heart: Tales of Mystery and Suspense (2010)
Joyce Carol Oates (1938-)

260 pages

Stands of lilac growing wild. That rich smothering smell, there’s a kind of madness in it.

These lines from the story “Smoother,” one of ten in Give Me Your Heart: Tales of Mystery and Suspense, a recent collection from Joyce Carol Oates, could serve as an epigraph to the book. In each of the stories a slow but inexorable madness grows to overwhelm a character: for some, transgressions thought to be firmly buried in the past re-surface suddenly, shattering their veneer of normalcy; for others a pitiless life and hopeless future weighs on their sanity, stripping them of the strength to avoid on-coming disaster. Oates paints dark visions of grim lives in these stories, the main characters fighting losing battles against their inner demons as they try to maintain the charade of a stable life for the family, friends, neighbors and themselves.

In the title story of the collection, a psychiatrist receives a letter from a past patient with whom he had become far too close, and who now demands a part of him that she feels to be her just due. The girl at the center of the story ‘Strip Poker’ joins some older boys for a boat ride across a lake, trying to escape the frustrations of her young teenage life and her scolding mother, only to find events reeling out of her control in a secluded beach house. In ‘The Spill,’ the second wife of a taciturn husband struggles to care for a houseful of children, including a young nephew of her husband whose ‘mental age … seemed to oscillate wildly;’ when she becomes pregnant again, the weight of her responsibilities finally becomes too much for her to contain.

For the most part in these stores the physical violence is only implied, anticipated, or at most described at some distance of time and place from its actual occurrence. Oates instead confronts us with more of a psychological violence, trading the temporary shock of gore for a disquiet of the mind that can haunt the reader even after the book is finished and set aside. We inhabit the minds of the characters, squirming ourselves as we watch them twist and bend in the face of situations that spiral out of their control --- that, often, they allow to spiral out of their control --- as they stagger forward, powerless to escape the seductive pull of the abyss they long for even as they may dimly recognize its danger. The suspense in these stories often builds slowly, but gradually reaches a frantic sprint that will have you pushing to reach the climax even as you try to slow down and savor Oates’ beautiful writing.

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Book Review: "The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness" by Rick Bass

The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness (1997)
Rick Bass (1958-)

190 pages

In three beautiful, often haunting novellas Rick Bass transports us into the lives of people intimately connected to the natural world. For his characters in these stories nature seems close and deep and bristling with energy that draws their focus, and often their lives, away from the encroaching modern world. They may find nature cruel and hard, or mystical and awe-inspiring --- or even all of these in turns --- but they relish their place in its seemingly limitless mystery.

The Myth of Bears tells the story of a hunter and his wife who have left the desert south-west for the snowy, stark wilderness of Alaska, where they live in a small cabin far from the nearest town, and hunt and trap animals, selling the pelts. Fearing her husband’s increasingly erratic behavior, the woman has bolted through a window in their cabin and disappeared into the winter night. But her continued love for him keeps her from leaving completely, and she sets up a simple camp in the woods from which she watches over him, daily hovering on the edge of his apprehension, balancing her fear of his ability to track her with her continued love for him. For his part, the hunter can sense her presence, and desperately wants her back with him, and so she becomes one additional prey that he tracks as he goes about his work. Thus, the two play a high-stakes version of hide-and-seek, with Nature becoming a third party in the game, as it both helps her to conceal her whereabouts and provides him clues to her presence.

In the second novella, Where the Sea Used to Be, a man has gone into business for himself, leasing property on which he drills for oil, competing against former colleagues who work for the oil leasing firm he had left some years before. He discovers that he has a special knack for knowing where oil is buried, far beneath the surface: every lease he drills produces oil, and he finds the right spot to drill even on properties that had come up dry for his former employer. Understanding that oil is found where ancient shallow inland seas had once existed before being buried under thousands of feet of earth, as he flies over the countryside in his small plane he finds himself able to read the millions of years of history of the land and pinpoint the deposits of oil. For his nature-blind rivals he has a shamanistic connection to the natural world that they cannot fathom.

The final novella takes up the last half of the book, and shares its title. Bass has a lead-in quote as preface to each of the three stories, and though he chooses fittingly in each case, the preface quote for the third story stopped me in my tracks: a wonderful, visceral homage by the writer John Graves to the desire to know what our natural surroundings were like before mankind re-shaped them to fit its needs. Graves achieves a pitch-perfect mix of poignant regret and pragmatic realism, and I read and enjoyed it several times (it is reproduced here) before continuing on to the novella it introduces.

Bass’ narrator in the third novella tells the story of her love for the land of her ancestors, a 10,000 acre homestead where central Texas gives way to the west Texas desert. Her mother having died young, she has grown up with her younger brother, father, grandfather and a Mexican farmhand who has settled in as part of the family. As a young girl, she and her brother explore the land around her family’s home, and she paints for us an intimate and vivid portrait of the river, the hills, the plants and the animals that come to have a deep hold on her. As she brings the story to the present, and the modern world begins to intrude on her beloved land --- even 10,000 acres cannot provide isolation from the forces of economic expansion --- the reader aches with her for the impact on the natural beauty she cherishes. Bass’ writing style and language make the feel and smells and sounds of the land come alive for the reader, allowing us to revel in it as the narrator herself does. A more beautiful and moving appreciation of the natural world and its ability to enlighten the soul would be hard to find

Together the three stories introduce us to people who live close the land, who strive to understand what the land can tell them, and who remain engaged in and enthralled by the mysterious beauty and variety of the natural world; a perfect book of stories to read on a hiking trip at your favorite park or during breaks from working in the garden out back.

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Read quotes from Rick Bass' writings here.

My review of another collection of short stories from Rick Bass, For a Little While, is here.

Used as a story preface in The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness, find a beautiful quote from John Graves reproduced here here.

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Other reviews / information:
Michael Gorra, in The New York Times

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The Ideology of Austerity

In an article in the 28 November 2011 issue of The Nation magazine (Night Thoughts of a Baffled Humanist) Marilynne Robinson examines the drive in the United States (and elsewhere) to address the current economic crisis through austerity programs that focus on rolling back many of the public institutions that have come to play such important roles in our lives, and that came about as our society developed a greater sense of community and recognition of the common good.

Though I highly recommend following the link above to read the complete article, I have include below some selected passages from it.  (The bold emphasis and text in brackets are mine.)

 Over the years we seem to have become habituated, even addicted, to the notion of radical threat, threat of the kind that can make virtually anything seem expendable if it does not serve an immediate, desperate purpose of self-defense --- as defined by people often in too high a state of alarm to make sound judgments about what real safety would be or how it might be achieved, and who feel that their duty to the rest of us is to be very certain we share their alarm.  ...  In this climate of generalized fear civil liberties have come under pressure, and those who try to defend them are seen as indifferent to threats to freedom.  The world is indeed dangerous, an for this reason the turning of our society, and of Western society, against itself is flatly contrary to any rational strategy of self-defense.  But this is highly consistent with a new dominance of ideological thinking, and very highly consistent with the current passion for austerity, which gains from it status as both practical necessity and moral ideal.

...

At best there are two major problems with ideology.  The first is that it does not represent or conform to or even address reality.  It is a straight-edge ruler in a fractal universe.  The second is that it inspires in its believers the notion that the fault lies with miscreant fact, which should therefore be conformed to the requirements of theory by all means necessary.  To the ideologue this would amount to putting the world right, ridding it of ambiguity and those tedious and endless moral and ethical questions that dog us through life, and that those around us so rarely answer to our satisfaction.  Anger and self-righteousness combined with cynicism about the world as he or she sees it are the marks of the ideologue.  There is always an element of nostalgia, too, because the ideologue is confident that he or she is moved by a special loyalty to a natural order, or to a good and normative past, that others defy or betray.

...

...in America, an abstraction called capitalism has truly begun to function as an ideology.  The word is not included in the 1882 edition of Webster's Dictionary, and in the latest Oxford English Dictionary "capitalism" is simply "a system which favours the existence of capitalists," as systems like the self-declared social democracies of Western Europe have always done.  In contemporary America it has taken on the definition and the character that Marx ... gave it.  This despite the fact that Marx did not consider the united State of his time essentially capitalist.  This despite the fact that the United States as a society is structured around any number of institutions that are not, under this definition, capitalist.   Suddenly anything public is "socialist," therefore a deviancy, inevitably second-rate and a corruption of, so to speak, the public virtue.  If I could find any gleam of intelligence or reflection in all this, or any sign of successful education, I would be happy to admire it, so passionate are my loyalties.

...

This brings me ... to the subject of competition, great ally of austerity. ... In need of the focus {of competition} that comes with having an alien and threatening government to contend with, an appreciable number of Americans choose to consider their government alien and threatening, and, for good measure, socialist.  Again, this kind of thinking is eminently compatible with austerity, as the redistributive activities of government are exactly what they choose to be austere about.  Other alternatives include returning tax rates for the very wealthy to historically typical levels and cutting subsidies to oil companies.  Or there could be a candid admission that the responsibilities of the government involve it in great expense.  None of these options ignite populist zeal.  This is reserved for attacks --- call them "austerities" --- directed toward public schools, Social Security, national healthcare, the laws that protect air and water quality.

"to have known the land when it was whole and sprawling and rich and fresh"

Rick Bass, in his book of novellas The Sky, The Stars, and The Wilderness (which I will review in a later blog), prefaces the same-titled third of the stories with the following wonderful citation:

"Of all these passers-through, the species that means most to me, even more than geese and cranes, is the upland plover, the drab plump grassland bird that used to remind my gentle hunting uncle of the way things once had been, as it still reminds me.  It flies from the far northern prairies to the pampas of Argentina and then back again in spring, a miracle of navigation and a tremendous journey for six or eight ounces of flesh and feathers and entrails and hollow bones, fueled with bug meat.  I see them sometimes in our pastures, standing still or dashing after prey in the grass, but mainly I know their presence through the mournful yet eager quavering whistles they cast down from the night sky in passing, and it always makes me think what the whistling must have been like when the American plains were virgin and their plover came through in millions.

To grow up among tradition-minded people leads one often into backward yearnings and regrets, unprofitable feelings of which I was granted my share in youth --- not having been born in time to get killed fighting Yankees, for one, or not having ridden up the cattle trails.  But the only such regret that has strongly endured is not to have known the land when it was whole and sprawling and rich and fresh, and the plover that whet one's edge every spring and every fall.  In recent decades it has become customary --- and right, I guess, and easy enough with hindsight --- to damn the ancestral frame of mind that ravaged the world so fully and so soon.  What I myself see to damn mainly, though, is just not having seen it.  Without any virtuous hindsight, I would likely have helped in the ravaging as did even most of those who loved it best.  But God, to have viewed it entire, the soul and guts of what we had and gone forever now, except in books and such poignant remnants as small swift birds that journey to and from the distant Argentine and call at night in the sky."

--- John Graves, Self-Portrait with Birds

Book Review: 'The Sun Over Breda' by Arturo Perez-Reverte

The Sun Over Breda: The Adventures of Captain Alatriste (1998)
Arturo Pérez-Reverte (1951-)

273 pages

In the fog, rain and mud of Flanders, far from their homes in Spain, soldiers of King Philip IV fight to retain control of the land for their country and for the “true religion,” against “heretical” and “Calvinist” rebels. The Spanish soldiers, often going without pay for many months at a time, fight on wearing disintegrating clothing and eating scraps of food, taking what they can from the occasional sacking of a larger city, or from what little the Dutch of the countryside still have left after many years of war. But then, as Arturo Pérez-Reverte makes clear throughout his novel The Sun Over Breda, these Spanish soldiers fight not so much for riches as for honor --- their own and their country’s.

The novel is one of a series written by Pérez-Reverte chronicling the adventures of the fictional Captain Diego Alatriste. Alatriste fights in the Spanish army during the tumultuous years of the early 17th century, as Spain, after over a century as the strongest, wealthiest and most influential country on earth, was beginning to slowly lose its grip on power. Though still strong, its army suffered the effects of too many widely dispersed commitments; though still wealthy, the country watched its riches disappear at an alarming rate to support those commitments; and though still wielding significant influence, it saw England and France begin to gain the upper hand in conflicts throughout Europe and the New World.

Captain Alatriste’s young, teenage aide Iñigo Balboa narrates the story, presenting it to the reader from some future point, as he looks back and tries to explain the events leading up to the surrender of the Flemish city of Breda to the Spanish in 1624 after a long siege, and the lives of the soldiers with whom he had shared the experience. Captain Alatriste, ever at the center of the Iñigo’s recounting, stands as an icon of the brave soldiers who fought for their homeland, and yet in many ways were homeless and on their own. A skillful fighter whose heroic engagement for the Spanish on far-flung battlefields carries much weight with his squad, Alatriste’s title of ‘Captain’ is actually honorary, not official, bestowed upon him by the men of his squad and even acknowledged by his immediate superiors. Thoughtful and taciturn, Alatriste is hard but fair, the epitome of the honor-bound soldier who follows orders without complaint, but understands too when he must stand with him men and his principles against an injustice.

The novel opens with the bloody sacking by the Spanish of a smaller city near Breda, and continues through a sequence of clashes up to the end of the siege of Breda itself. Pérez-Reverte, however, does not simply present to the reader an action-adventure story of hard-fought battles. Though plenty of swordplay and fighting occurs along the way, The Sun Over Breda stands out as true historical fiction, as the author goes into detail about the difficult conditions in which the soldiers (as well as the Dutch of the war-torn countryside) live, how the years of war have worn them down, and how and why they continue to carry on in the face of nearly unending hardship. Not just a novel of soldiers fighting bravely for their cause, Pérez-Reverte allows us to feel the cold, wet, stitched-together clothing the soldiers continuously patch together, the taste of the dried out bread and then soup they survive on as they wait to fight, and the chaos of hand to hand combat along foggy dikes and in dark caves barely wide enough to pass through.

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Other reviews / information:
To my mind, Viggo Mortensen plays an excellent Captain Alatriste in a film version of the series, Alatriste.

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