A young man named loyal blood has to leave his family's New England farm after he commits a terrible crime. So far, the crime is undiscovered, but he A young man named loyal blood has to leave his family's New England farm after he commits a terrible crime. So far, the crime is undiscovered, but he goes on the road. He works his way out West and spends his life working as a farm hand, forester and general laborer, sometimes relying on food that he gets by hunting, trapping and fishing.
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He writes postcards back home to his parents and sister but never gives an address for them to reply. Decades later the postcards are still arriving long after the death of both of his parents and the sale of the farm. We gather that Loyal was born around 1920 and he was still on the road at the time of the last postcard in 1988.
The author spent a lot of time on research, or talking with informants, because we learn a lot about a variety of subjects. We read about trapping animals, especially coyotes, the changes in the dairy industry when electricity and then automated milking machines came in, and we learn about uranium mining. How many people know about snow rollers that preceded snowplows? We also learn about societal changes such as the cowboys who railed against the hippies and then grew their hair long and started smoking dope.
I love Annie Proulx’s writing. Every sentence is crafted, especially the opening sentences to each section or episode that pull us into the story. She creates wonderful metaphors and descriptions. I’ll cite some of these so you can see what I mean:
“Ronnie, red-eyed from the funeral, leaned over and put the china dog in the center of the table as in a place of honor. The port-wine mark that stained his chin was deep in color, as though he’d rested it in a dish of crushed blackberries.”
“Shifting weights and counterweights of regard shot back and forth between them like abacus beads on wires.”
“The sailor was a big, sandy-headed man, a potato face and needle eyes, his mood to talk entering the car before he did.”
“They moved into farmhouses hoping to fit their lives into the rooms, to fit their shoes to the stair treads. She thought they were like insects casting off tight husks, vulnerable for a little while until the new chitin hardened.”
“Beeman Zick had the lower bunk and the upper hand.”
“Ray took so long to die, was so unwilling to give up life, that Mernelle thought of plastic bags, sleeping pills, thought of disconnecting his oxygen or crimping the tube until he had to let go.... The cancer gnawed inside him, sometimes quiescent enough to let him smile, say a few sentences, his guileless eyes fixed on her, his thinness stretched under the sheets. She imagined it in him, a wet maroon mass like a cow’s afterbirth, pulling his life into its own.”
In a way, and one critic suggested that this book is like a Great American Novel: the migration from east to west, the transition away from agriculture, the wanderlust, the Native Americans and the immigrants – Basques, Cubans, Mexicans and many others - the loneliness exaggerated by the wide-open western spaces. But we encounter few African Americans.
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Annie Proulx is best known for Shipping News, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994, and for her short story, Brokeback Mountain. Both were made into movies. The Shipping News is one of my favorite books.
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A note for philatelists: the publisher cheapened out on the numerous post cards with inscriptions that add interest to the story. Each one is illustrated with the 3-cent George Washington stamp. But it would have cost only cost a penny to mail the earliest ones, going up to 15 cents in 1988. And, by the way – now 56 cents. Inflation! LOL
Top photo from travelwyoming.com The author from theguardian.com Stamp from postalmuseum.si.edu ...more
My second book by DeLillo. The main character is an ‘intellectual,’ I assumed a psychologist, who advised the US military about getting into the heartMy second book by DeLillo. The main character is an ‘intellectual,’ I assumed a psychologist, who advised the US military about getting into the hearts and minds of local people during the Iraq War. (How did that work out? we might ask.)
He’s retired now, living in isolation in the Mexican desert. He has a young man visiting, a video maker, who is trying to talk him into a one-take video documentary of him talking “just standing in front of a wall.”
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Meanwhile his daughter comes to visit, recovering from a marriage that just broke up. They talk about life and a lot about time; there’s a contrast set up between the geologic time of the barren landscape they survey with binoculars and silly human time. Here’s a quote:
“It's all embedded, the hours and minutes, words and numbers everywhere, he said, train stations, bus routes, taxi meters, surveillance cameras. It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.”
A couple of other quotes I liked:
“You had the kind of marriage where you told each other everything..... Tell her everything you feel, tell her everything you do. That's why she thinks you're crazy.”
“He was beginning to resemble an x-ray, all eye sockets and teeth.”
There’s a lot about watching and surveillance.
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I found the book a bit dull and slow-moving. I prefer another of DeLillo’s I read: The Body Artist
Top photo: The Sonoran Desert from Wikipedia The author (b 1936) from loa.com ...more
The story of a man and his brother building a cabin in Maine. The book was given to me by my sister because my wife and I have a cabin on a lake in ceThe story of a man and his brother building a cabin in Maine. The book was given to me by my sister because my wife and I have a cabin on a lake in central Maine. And it needs work! The book has good writing in a journalistic style, nothing literary. But a good read. The author writes a blog for the New York Times and was a journalism professor at Boston University.
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The author buys five acres of land in Bethel, Maine, in the southwestern part of the state in the foothills leading up to the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
The theme is creating a home. The author has suffered loss recently: a divorce after a long marriage, the loss of his mother, the loss of his job as a newspaper editor in Philadelphia. There's a chapter on the hardships the two brothers endured as they grew up. An absent father and an in-and-out abusive alcoholic stepfather. The author has an apartment back in Boston but he wants a home. Something that has meaning to a person who lived in a rental units with a single mom, constantly moving, and we suspect leaving unpaid rent behind.
Thirty years earlier he had helped build his brother's house in Maine. His brother’s teenage sons help in the new construction process. Both the author and his brother had part time construction jobs in their youth, one as a framer and one as a sheetrock installer, so they know a lot more about this type of project than the average bear.
The author has thought about this project for a long time and he has a huge stack of timber stored on his brother's property. It's been stored so long they disagree about how useful some of the deteriorating boards are. The author initially has visions of old-fashioned construction with a mallet and wood pegs but his brother, a construction manager, quickly talks him out of that.
We have chapters about his thoughts about the design and construction. We get insights into the building codes and environmental concerns that anyone who has engaged in this kind of one-off construction has dealt with. For example, strict adherence to the environmental rules would have required them to blast out a ledge, causing more damage to the environment than ignoring the rule would. The zoning codes contradict the environmental issues. The town would require a 24-foot-wide driveway! That would mean turning his front yard into a gravel parking lot.
There’s a chapter where he reminisces about cabins he has known and stayed in. He takes walks around the property and acquaints us with the stream and animals in the environment.
He's a smart shopper. New windows for the cabin would cost at least $10,000 but he's able to buy and repair old ratty ones for $5 each. (view spoiler)[ His brother asks him 'you didn't actually pay money for any of these did you?' (hide spoiler)] Just figuring out what type of footings or pilings are needed and the construction of them is worth a chapter.
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We read a chapter about the history of settlement of the area going back to the Native Americans and the various landowners, saw mills and factories that shaped the region. He wants an orchard so they plant 50 apple trees. All in all, a good read.
Top photo of a Maine cabin from seasidemaine.com The author (b. 1950) from Facebook ...more
A novella, a fable really. An impoverished family along the Gulf of Mexico coast (we presume Mexico) struggles for a living by pearl diving. One day tA novella, a fable really. An impoverished family along the Gulf of Mexico coast (we presume Mexico) struggles for a living by pearl diving. One day the man discovers a huge perfect pearl that can change their life. But will it change it for the better or for worse?
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The man knows the local pearl buyers are in cahoots with each other to offer the lowest prices, so he will make a multi-day trip out of town to sell the pearl in the big city. Everyone in town knows about the pearl and they are a target for theft and scams.
Meanwhile the man’s son is bitten by a scorpion. The doctor, who does not speak the language of the poor people, refuses to tend to his son – until he hears about the pearl. (view spoiler)[ Even then, he gives the child some kind of fake ‘cure.’ (hide spoiler)] The local priest suddenly takes an interest in the family.
Things reach a point where the pearl diver’s wife considers throwing the pearl back into the sea.
Steinbeck was heavily influenced by Hemingway’s writing, so we have short, simple, direct sentences with no flowery language, but occasionally Steinbeck offers us an expansive paragraph such as the following:
“It is wonderful the way a little town keeps track of itself and of all its units. If every single man and woman, child and baby, acts and conducts itself in a known pattern and breaks no walls and differs with no one and experiments in no way and is not sick and does not endanger the ease and peace of mind or steady unbroken flow of the town, then that unit can disappear and never be heard of. But let one man step out of the regular thought or the known and trusted pattern, and the nerves of the townspeople ring with nervousness and communication travels over the nerve lines of the town. Then every unit communicates to the whole.”
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The two authors were contemporaries although they were not friends. Hemingway lived 1899-1961; Steinbeck, 1902-1968. But Hemingway had the jump on writing with most of his major works published a decade before Steinbeck’s. Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in 1954 and had died by the time Steinbeck won his in 1962. I also enjoyed reading Steinbeck's novel Cannery Row
Top photo of poverty in Mexico from voanews.com The author from theparisreview.org ...more
Russo is one of my favorite authors. I have read a half dozen novels by him before I came across this collection of his short stories.
In the title stRusso is one of my favorite authors. I have read a half dozen novels by him before I came across this collection of his short stories.
In the title story, the ‘whore’s child’ is an elderly nun taking a writing class from an English professor. She has only one story to tell: hers. “They are waiting for us to die,” she confessed. “Impatient of how we clutch to our miserable existence.”
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On Monhegan Light, a man married to an artist comes to realize that for 20 years his deceased wife’s summer vacation in Maine to do painting involved a liaison with another man. The theme is ‘you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone or until someone takes it from you.’
In The Farther You Go, a father intervenes in his daughter’s marriage where there has been an incident of abuse. He comes to realize his daughter’s ‘non-readiness for life.’
In Joy Ride a boy’s parents’ marriage is dissolving. His father is more dopey than abusive. His mother obviously has borderline mental illness issues. He and his mother take off in the family car to flee Maine for California. They live with grandparents for a while, but will they return? (view spoiler)[ Late in life he tries to talk with her his mother about all this, but she insists he made this story up and the whole escapade was just a vacation. (hide spoiler)]
In Buoyancy, an older retired couple returns to Martha’s Vineyard for a vacation. The woman has had a breakdown but seems to be recovering. Then a setback. (view spoiler)[ He has a breakdown. (hide spoiler)]
Poison is a bit of an odd story of two male authors. They grew up in the same old mill town and have been good friends since childhood. There’s a new development in town. The old polluting factory is going to be reopened. (view spoiler)[ One man sees it as an opportunity but the other one wants to fight it and expects his lifelong friend to help out. (hide spoiler)]
In The Mysteries of Linwood Hart, a dreamy kid plays baseball while he is trying to deal with the dissolution of his parents’ marriage. They are old fashioned Catholics, so they are only separated. Can they get back together? The man’s nickname is Slick.
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Good stories and Russo is as good a short story writer as he is a novelist, although I still prefer his novels.
Top photo of Monhegan Lighthouse in Maine from wikipedia The author from prhspeakers.com ...more
For many years I had been aware of this book title but never knew what it was about. I’m glad I decided to read it. SPOILERS FOLLOW
The story is of a For many years I had been aware of this book title but never knew what it was about. I’m glad I decided to read it. SPOILERS FOLLOW
The story is of a 32-year-old man with an intellectual disability. He lives in an apartment with a landlord who keeps an eye out for him and he works in a bakery owned by his uncle where he enjoys his “friends.” Unfortunately some of his “friends” are guys who kick his legs out from under him and get him drunk to dance with a lampshade on his head.
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He’s selected to be the first person to undergo a brain operation to improve his mental capacity. The procedure worked wonders on a laboratory mouse named Algernon.
REMAINDER OF REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
It works on Charlie Gordon (that’s his name) and he becomes a genius. He’s so brilliant he learns foreign languages and alphabets in a week and starts to compete with his doctors in knowledge about his condition and prognosis. Charlie comes to believe: “The depressing thing is that so many of the ideas on which our psychologists base their beliefs about human intelligence, memory, and learning are all wishful thinking.”
At times in his life he had been institutionalized and he feels that, for folks like him who attempt to live outside an institution: “The world doesn’t want them and they soon know it.”
Another unfortunate occurrence: Algernon’s brilliance starts to decline and he reverts to his former level of mouse intelligence. Will the same happen to Charlie?
As Charlie’s intelligence improves, he also recovers memories he had forgotten for years. So we learn of many terrible traumas of his boyhood with a mother who beat him and refused to believe he couldn’t learn like other kids. She was embarrassed by him. One of the saddest parts of the story is his memories, framed by a window, of watching other kids play because she did not allow him to leave the house.
Most of the story is told through a journal that Charlie has to keep. We watch his intelligence and written language abilities develop. We see him struggle with IQ tests, mazes and Rorschach inkblots. We watch Charlie struggle with romance and sex. We share his feelings when his doctors and psychologists exhibit him at a medical conference like a “freak show.”
An excellent story that we can consider science fiction – until it is not. I note that it has a very high rating on GR (4.15) with almost half-a-million people rating it. The book has been made into plays, TV dramas and a 1968 film, Charly, starring Cliff Robertson, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. The book has been a frequent target of those who want to censor library acquisitions.
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Daniel Keyes (1927-2014) was an English professor at Ohio University where I worked for much of my career. He retired in 2000, two years after I arrived, but I never got to meet him and I wasn’t aware of his work at the time.
Merged review:
For many years I had been aware of this book title but never knew what it was about. I’m glad I decided to read it. SPOILERS FOLLOW
The story is of a 32-year-old man with an intellectual disability. He lives in an apartment with a landlord who keeps an eye out for him and he works in a bakery owned by his uncle where he enjoys his “friends.” Unfortunately some of his “friends” are guys who kick his legs out from under him and get him drunk to dance with a lampshade on his head.
[image]
He’s selected to be the first person to undergo a brain operation to improve his mental capacity. The procedure worked wonders on a laboratory mouse named Algernon.
REMAINDER OF REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
It works on Charlie Gordon (that’s his name) and he becomes a genius. He’s so brilliant he learns foreign languages and alphabets in a week and starts to compete with his doctors in knowledge about his condition and prognosis. Charlie comes to believe: “The depressing thing is that so many of the ideas on which our psychologists base their beliefs about human intelligence, memory, and learning are all wishful thinking.”
At times in his life he had been institutionalized and he feels that, for folks like him who attempt to live outside an institution: “The world doesn’t want them and they soon know it.”
Another unfortunate occurrence: Algernon’s brilliance starts to decline and he reverts to his former level of mouse intelligence. Will the same happen to Charlie?
As Charlie’s intelligence improves, he also recovers memories he had forgotten for years. So we learn of many terrible traumas of his boyhood with a mother who beat him and refused to believe he couldn’t learn like other kids. She was embarrassed by him. One of the saddest parts of the story is his memories, framed by a window, of watching other kids play because she did not allow him to leave the house.
Most of the story is told through a journal that Charlie has to keep. We watch his intelligence and written language abilities develop. We see him struggle with IQ tests, mazes and Rorschach inkblots. We watch Charlie struggle with romance and sex. We share his feelings when his doctors and psychologists exhibit him at a medical conference like a “freak show.”
An excellent story that we can consider science fiction – until it is not. I note that it has a very high rating on GR (4.15) with almost half-a-million people rating it. The book has been made into plays, TV dramas and a 1968 film, Charly, starring Cliff Robertson, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. The book has been a frequent target of those who want to censor library acquisitions.
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Daniel Keyes (1927-2014) was an English professor at Ohio University where I worked for much of my career. He retired in 2000, two years after I arrived, but I never got to meet him and I wasn’t aware of his work at the time....more
My second book of great short stories by Raymond Carver. As I wrote in my review of his collection “Where I’m calling From” these are stories from a wMy second book of great short stories by Raymond Carver. As I wrote in my review of his collection “Where I’m calling From” these are stories from a writer considered by many to be one the masters of the modern short story. Many of the stories have a flavor of the author’s youth (let’s say the 1940’s and 50’s since Carver was born in 1938 and died at age 50) even though they were written in the 1970’s and 1980’s.
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His stories have a patina of quaintness from that era: boys on bikes going fishing in the local creek; door-to-door salesmen come knocking; everyone smokes; everyone drinks scotch; the mailman knows everyone on his route; people call their neighbor “Mr. Johnson; some adults kneel by their bed at night to pray.
These 21 stories are of modern life, usually with a raw edge: divorce; alcoholism; infidelity; nasty neighbors. As one critic writes, they focus on the plight of ordinary men and women. Carver writes with short sentences, simple words and quite a bit of dialog.
Some examples of the stories and his writing:
In the story Fat, a man in a restaurant by himself is so fat that he thinks of himself as multiple people. “I think we’re ready to order now…” “Believe me, he says, we don’t eat like this all the time, he says. And puffs. You’ll have to excuse us, he says.”
Put Yourself in My Shoes is a story of a writer and his wife who had lived for a year in a furnished house while the owners were in Europe. They signed a lease but had never met the owners. It’s Christmas time and they decide to stop by and meet the owners for the first time. Bad idea. But the writer gets an idea for his next story.
In What Did You do in San Francisco? A small town postman speculates about the odd doings of a new family on his route based on their mail, their comings and goings, and bits of gossip from neighbors. At one point the man of the house, now living alone, appears to be anxiously awaiting a letter. “But I could tell by the look on his face he wasn't watching for me this time. He was staring past me, over me, you might say, over the rooftops and the trees, south. He just kept staring even after I’d come even with the house and moved on down the sidewalk. I looked back. I could see him still there at the window. The feeling was so strong, I had to turn around and look for myself in the same direction he was. But, as you might guess, I didn't see anything except the same old timber, mountains, sky.”
In Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes, two fathers get in a fistfight over a dispute between their boys about a wrecked bike. That night, while ready to go to sleep, one of the nine-year old boys says to his father “Dad? You’ll think I’m pretty crazy, but I wish I’d known you when you were little. I mean, about as old as I am right now. I don’t know how to say it, but I'm lonesome about it. It’s like – I miss you already if I think about it now. That's pretty crazy, isn't it? Anyway, please leave the door open.”
The Student’s Wife is a simple story of free-floating anxiety. A young woman is married and has a couple of kids. There is nothing WRONG in her marriage or with the kids but she spends a sleepless night wandering the house and ends up almost terrified. Of what? Life.
Great stories.
I’ve also read and reviewed a fascinating book about Carver’s relationship with his editor, Gordon Lish. That book’s title, Scissors, is appropriate, since in the story, Carver’s editor sometimes cuts Carver’s already minimalist short stories in half or cuts the last five pages and often changes the endings. Carver, needing the money, lets him do it. That book is by a French author, Stephane Michaka, translated from French.
My first DeLillo. I decided it was time I read something by him. Since he’s new to me I didn’t want to read one of his tomes (Underworld 800+ pages) sMy first DeLillo. I decided it was time I read something by him. Since he’s new to me I didn’t want to read one of his tomes (Underworld 800+ pages) so I started with this 120-page book and another (Point Omega, review to come).
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An older man, a writer, lives with a younger woman, his third wife, in an isolated rented house on the coast in New England. He dies and sometime later she returns by herself to revisit. Her friends from New York call: “Are you okay? Why are you up there all by yourself?” In the last third of the book, she discovers that an old man is living in the house with her. (view spoiler)[ He’s so strange that initially she thinks he escaped from a mental institution. He speaks very little but when he does, he says things that she and her husband said to each other when they lived here. Had he been living in the attic eavesdropping on them all that time? Are we into magical realism? Is there a reincarnation thing going on? (hide spoiler)]
This isn’t a book you read for its plot. It’s really about those unnoticed moments in time that pass us by as we go through life. After reading it, I found myself ‘noticing’ little moments more. Here’s the opening passage:
“Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.”
Here are a few of many such ‘moments in time’ that I enjoyed reading:
“She ran water from the tap and seemed to notice. It was the first time she’d ever noticed this.”
“She said, ‘What?’ Meaning what did you say, not what did you want to tell me.”
“She took a bite of cereal and forgot to taste it. She lost the taste somewhere between the time she put the food in her mouth and the regretful second she swallowed it.”
“A voice reported the weather but she missed it. She didn’t know it was the weather until it was gone.”
“It was her newspaper. The telephone was his except when she was calling the weather. They both used the computer but it was spiritually hers.”
Sometimes we get into obscure stuff that could mean anything. The writer tells his wife a kind of goodbye message: “Coming and going I am leaving. I will go and come. Leaving has come to me. We all, shall all, will be all left. Because I am here and where. And I will go or not or never. And I have seen what I will see. If I am where I will be. Because nothing comes between me.”
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The author, Don DeLillo (b. 1936) has written 18 novels as well as plays, short stories and essays. His work has won a variety of well-known awards. I liked the book and gave it a ‘4’ as did many of my GR friends whose opinions I respect. But if you take overall GR ratings into account, be aware that The Body Artist is extremely low rated on GR – 3.3.
Top photo of a house in Maine from Airbnb on territorysupply.com The author from theguardian.co.uk ...more
A heartfelt story of a hapless antihero. Pnin is an untenured professor of language and literature at a small upstate New York college. Born in RussiaA heartfelt story of a hapless antihero. Pnin is an untenured professor of language and literature at a small upstate New York college. Born in Russia, he struggles with English to the point that others imitating his accent and malapropisms are the highlight of faculty parties. That provides a thread of comedy throughout the otherwise quasi-tragic novel.
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There’s lots of other humor and good writing. Pnin walks behind ‘two lumpy old ladies in transparent raincoats like potatoes in cellophane.’ There are puns such as a ‘Dr. Rosetta Stone.’ Said of an art professor: "the college was not particularly pleased either with Lake’s methods or with their results, but kept him on because it was fashionable to have at least one distinguished freak on the staff.”
Pnin is a bumbler. He gets on the wrong train going to speak to a women’s club. We’re terrified as we watch him learn to drive. We learn about the situation of Russian emigres as he is invited to a woodsy upstate B&B place in summers. They talk of their homesickness and who was killed by the Nazis or who has been imprisoned by the Communists.
Pnin has the additional misfortune of still being in love with his ex-wife back in Russia. She continues to ‘use’ him in amazingly atrocious ways. (view spoiler)[ She gets him to come back to Russia to accompany her and to pay for her to trip to the US where she tells him they will remarry. Actually she’s pregnant by her real future husband, also aboard the ship, who introduces himself to Pnin on the voyage. (hide spoiler)]
The author is famous as a literary stylist and he uses an intriguing trick in the book. We think the story is being told by an omniscient narrator but there's an occasional ‘I’ popping up telling the story. We don't learn who this ‘I’ is until the end of the book.
We're treated to Nabokov’s erudition. You'll need a dictionary on occasion. We also read things like a discussion of how the timeline in Anna Karenina is out of whack. And we read the author's theory that Cinderella’s (originally Cendrillon) glass slipper was really a mistranslation of the French for squirrel fur vair as verre (glass).
Nabokov avoids overdoing the funny accent. But here’s an example when Pnin is asked for his address: “It is nine hundred ninety nine, Todd Rodd, very simple! At the very very end of the rodd, where it unites with Cleef Avhvnue. A leetle breek house and a big blahk cleef.”
An example of good writing: “Outwardly, Roy was an obvious figure. If you drew a pair of old brown loafers, two beige elbow patches, a black pipe, and two baggy eyes under heavy eyebrows, the rest was easy to fill out.”
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Pnin is a short novel that Nabokov (1899-1977) wrote in English while he was a professor at Cornell (1948-1959). Pnin was serialized in The New Yorker magazine and it’s credited with bringing his work to the attention of American readers (including Lolita which had been published two years earlier).
Top photo of Nabokov (far left) and his siblings from acplwy.org The author from bostonglobe.com
A classic story of immigrants on the Great Plains of Nebraska in the late 1800s. This is the third book in what the publishers call her ‘Great Plains A classic story of immigrants on the Great Plains of Nebraska in the late 1800s. This is the third book in what the publishers call her ‘Great Plains Trilogy’: O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark and My Antonia. Cather considered My Antonia her ‘masterpiece’ despite the fact that she won a Pulitzer in 1923 for One of Ours, a World War I story.
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Immigrants and hardships. The first thing I liked is that these immigrants are not your typical immigrants as they might be portrayed on a Hallmark Channel story: hard-working, self-sacrificing, in love with the new land, etc. Antonia (prn. An-to-NEE-a) is a daughter of a Bohemian immigrant family fresh off the boat. The father is so homesick that he is depressed and suicidal. The older brother who runs the farm is arrogant, and self-serving and drives Antonia dawn-to-dusk in the fields as if she were a man. The mother is whining, conniving and not above begging for food and clothing from neighbors, and then being rather unthankful – almost resentful of their help.
But Antonia tolerates it all and comes to epitomize that American Dream immigrant farm girl. In addition to first-person narratives, much of the story is told by a neighboring farm boy, Jim, who grew up near Antonia. When he leaves the area to go to Harvard Law School, he keeps in touch with Antonia’s doings through acquaintances and infrequent visits, sometimes decades later.
The immigrants the story focuses on are Bohemians (of the present-day Czech Republic), but there are also Swedes, Norwegians, Russians, Austrians and Hungarians.
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The stark landscape is like a character in the book, so I shelved it as an 'environmental novel.' I’m reminded of the vast openness of Giants in the Earth. Jim thinks “There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creek or trees; no hills or fields…I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it….If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out.”
There isn’t a lot of plot other than the daily struggle to grow enough food to avoid starvation and to get enough fuel to avoid freezing in winter. Antonia’s family has been ripped off from the outset. In their travel to the new world, in the poor-quality land they are sold, and in the exorbitant price they were charged for what is basically ‘half’ of a sod house built cave-like into a hillside.
A good portion of the book is made up of vignettes of farm neighbors and townspeople. We read the stories of a tramp who kills himself in the fields; two Russian brothers who fled their home country after ‘throwing a bride to the wolves’ [no spoiler – you’ll have to read it!]; an itinerant blind, Black piano player; a sleazy money-lender and his wife. (Another reason you won’t see this story on Hallmark – there are multiple murders and suicides.)
About halfway through the book the action shifts to town. Jim is an orphan who lives with his grandparents and they move to town when they get too old to farm. Antonia eventually comes to town too. A lot of farm girls are more valuable to their families by bringing in money living in town as nannies and maids to better-off families. Some of them get jobs as clerks and as waitresses and maids in the hotel.
There’s a kind of life-long romance between Jim and Antonia, although nothing develops when they are young because Antonia is four years older than Jim. A cover blurb from H. L. Mencken tells us “No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Antonia.” Since most of the story is told by Jim, he tells us ‘I’ve been in love with Antonia all my life.’ And yet the novel is not a romance in a traditional sense. I have to put all this in a spoiler. (view spoiler)[ Sure, Jim has a puppy love crush on Antonia in his youth. When Antonia moves into town in her late teen years, Jim hangs out with her and three other good-looking young women, all Antonia’s age – that is, they are all a few years older than he is. They go to dances until his grandfather, a minister, makes him stop. Townspeople think this relationship a bit odd – a young boy hanging with four older young women, not just in the dance hall, but swimming and going on picnics. Despite many opportunities, Jim never makes a move on any of them. We start to wonder about Jim’s sexual orientation. Even years later, he meets with one of the most attractive of the women who is still single, as he is, and she is obviously interested in him. He visits her apartment regularly and he even says he’s in love with her. But he never makes a move and nothing comes of it. Cather, who was very likely gay (she had a female partner for 39 years) may be sending us a coded message through Jim – coded because the book was published in 1918. (hide spoiler)]
I’ll leave the ending of Antonia’s story as a surprise for those who want to read the book.
This book is without doubt an American classic. You could call it a heartwarming story but there’s a lot of tragedy along the way. Much of the writing, I would call lyrical, especially the harsh descriptions of winters and the beautiful depiction of landscapes – akin, I think, to the lush landscape writings of Virginia Woolf and Collette.
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The author (1873-1947), wrote a dozen novels, many of which were historical novels not set on the Great Plains. These include one of her best-known works: Death Comes for the Archbishop, set in New Mexico, as well as Shadows on the Rock set in Quebec, and Sapphira and the Slave Girl, set in antebellum Virginia (where Cather was born and lived until age nine).
[Edited 2/10/23]
Top photo of present-day Red Cloud NE where the author lived from visitredcloud.com Willa Cather’s home in Red Cloud NE from Wikipedia The author from willacather.org...more
A story of cultural conflict and about the stresses endured by Layla, a modern young Muslim woman in India who is pressured – forced - into a marriageA story of cultural conflict and about the stresses endured by Layla, a modern young Muslim woman in India who is pressured – forced - into a marriage to a man picked out by her mother. I say she’s ‘modern’ because she has spent quite a bit of time going to school in the US where her father is an M.D. He left her mother in India and married an American woman.
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Alternating schools between the US and India makes her feel like ‘the other.’ Her American school friends think of her as ‘the Indian girl.’ Her Indian friends think of her as ‘the American girl.’
The man Layla’s mother has picked out for her is young, good looking and college educated, so her mother can’t understand her resistance. Her mother assumes she’s possessed. (view spoiler)[ She takes her to a spiritual healer to force out the evil spirits. Then she locks her in her bedroom until she finally agrees to the marriage. (hide spoiler)]
We learn a lot from Layla about being a Muslim in predominantly Hindu India. But she tells us she's not very devout. Her family’s religious practices are halfhearted. They don't pray five times a day when they hear the call to prayer but they do maintain silence. She fasts for four days not 30. She's never read the Koran. She tells us there are Muslim men who are actors in Bollywood movies but they always have to play Hindus.
After her marriage, she moves in with her in-laws. It turns out that she likes her husband and she starts to fall in love with him but where’s the affection on his part? He says all the right things and seems like a nice guy but he’s out every night, although that’s not unusual for Muslim men. Her husband is obsessed with moving to the US. He’s one of those guys who thinks the streets are paved with gold. Layla worries that that’s why he married her – because she knows the ropes about living in the US and has connections through her father.
More pressure: Layla’s mother-in-law, whom she likes and respects, is very religious. Her son has drifted away from his religion. The mother-in-law expects Layla to somehow pressure her husband not only to stay in India but even get him to rejoin the family in praying five times a day! The Muslim man does what he wants, so how is this going to happen?
There’s an undercurrent of the threat of Hindu violence to Muslims throughout the story. There’s a pogrom near the end of the story and the violence affects Layla directly in an atrocity. (view spoiler)[ Hindu thugs invade their neighborhood and Layla’s best friend, who is pregnant, is raped and killed by a Hindu biker gang. (hide spoiler)]
In a fascinating passage Layla tells us that among Muslims in India a woman is seldom called by her name. She is defined by her relations to other people. “Like me, she was a bevi, wife, bhabhi, sister-in-law, then also apa , sister, amme, mother, and even sauken, the other woman.” Defined, as most woman were here, by how she was related to others. Indeed, a woman could not be on her own, her dependency constructed even in language.”
They have a delayed honeymoon in Madras (the title). And there’s a mystery. Who is the woman in full burka following them around in Madras on their honeymoon? (view spoiler)[ It’s not a woman. (hide spoiler)]
Wasn't there a TV show years ago called can this marriage be saved? That kept coming to mind. So can this marriage be saved? There’s a surprise ending.
A quote I liked: “A rich man is not the one who has the most, but the one who desires the least.”
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The author (b. 1969) is an American author born in India. This novel won France’s Prix du Premier Roman Etranger award and it was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. The book was written in English and published in 2004 but it appears to be the only novel the author has written.
Top photo: a Hindu temple in Chennai (formerly Madras) from Britannica.com The author from saminaali.net...more
[Edited 4/30/23] People between two worlds is the theme, as in many of the author’s books: Bengali immigrants in Boston and how they juggle the complex[Edited 4/30/23] People between two worlds is the theme, as in many of the author’s books: Bengali immigrants in Boston and how they juggle the complexity of two cultures.
Mainly we follow the coming-of-age story of a young man named Gogol Ganguli. His father gave him that first name because he had a traumatic event in his life during which he met a man who had told him about the Russian author Nikolai Gogol. The father survived the event and later became a fan of the author. (This book inspired me to read or re-read some of Gogol’s classic short stories including The Overcoat and The Nose.)
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The story starts in 1968 and the author uses American events as markers of time. They travel back to India to visit relatives infrequently, but when they do, it’s for extended periods – 6 or 8 months, so he and his sister have to go to school in India and they get a real dose of Bengali culture.
One of the best examples of the cultural chasm between the two groups is shown around social gatherings. There was a time when Gogol lived in New York, living a life on the cocktail circuit, four or five couples sitting around the table chatting about art and politics and whatever, drinking fine wine.
Gogol is aware of how thoroughly out-of-place and lost his parents would be in this scene above. Social gatherings at his parents’ suburban house when he grew up were day-long weekend events with a dozen Bengali families and their children eating in shifts at multiple tables. His parents acted as caterers seeing to the needs of all the guests while the children ate separately and played, older ones watching the younger ones.
These Bengali folks are not stereotypical immigrants who are maids and quick-shop clerks living in a crowded ‘Bengali neighborhood.’ They were college educated before their arrival in the US, they all speak English, and they are engineers, doctors and professors (as is Gogol’s father) now living in upscale suburban Boston homes. His mother and father did live for a time in inner-city Boston (in a three-decker tenement like I grew up in).
I think it’s realistic how this young American Bengali boy sometimes absorbs and sometimes rebels against the culture. He and his friends joke about themselves as “ABCD - American Born Confused Deshi.” He and his parents and sister speak Bengali at home but he makes a point of doing things like answering his parents in English and wearing his sneakers in the house. He pulls away from his Bengali heritage at college, deliberately ‘not hanging out with Indians.’
We get glimpses of how the cultural differences affect his parents too. It’s not until she is 47 that his stay-at-home mother makes her real first non-Indian friends, working part-time at the local library.
There isn't an elaborate plot other than that life happens. We touch base with Gogol going to college (Yale), having his first romantic and then sexual experiences, breaking up, getting a job. When Gogol goes to Yale it's 1982, so we learn about his first adventures with girls, alcohol and pot.
He has to start from scratch with women because he has never seen expressions of affection between his parents, not even a touch. As he drifts from woman to woman his mother is always urging him to go to dinner with this or that daughter of Bengali friends that he knew as a little kid running around in the backyard. He's still 'coming of age' when he is 27 and he's still searching for how he fits in between the two cultures.
I'm impressed with how thoroughly the author sticks to the name theme of the title all through the book. His name keeps coming up throughout his life as an integral part of his identity. (view spoiler)[ In college he legally changes his first name. (hide spoiler)] Lahiri is also a master at describing how people meet, fall in love, or enter into a relationship, and then drift apart.
There's a lot of local color of Boston including things I remember from the old days like the Boston Globe newspaper, the ‘girls on the Boston Common,’ name brands like Hood milk, Jordan Marsh and Filene’s Basement.
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The Namesake has displaced Interpreter of Maladies as Lahiri’s most popular book even though Interpreter won the Pulitzer prize. I have also read her two other most-read books, both of which are collections of short stories or vignettes: Unaccustomed Earth and Whereabouts. The author’s parents immigrated from Bengal and she grew up near Boston, where her father worked at the University of Rhode Island.
Top photo of Bengali students at Harvard by Shifa Hossain from mittalsouthasiainstitute.harvard.edu The author receiving the National Humanities medal from Barack Obama from economictimes.indiatimes.com...more
Quite a collection of potpourri about Cape Cod. We have just about every type of story you can think of including short stories, excerpts from novels,Quite a collection of potpourri about Cape Cod. We have just about every type of story you can think of including short stories, excerpts from novels, poems, diary entries, op-eds, nature essays, humor, a couple of American Indian folktales/fables, a travelog, a memoir, a ship’s log entry. Even a recipe for fish stew! There are 26 items in the 200-page book, so most are only a few pages.
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The core of the collection is made up of seven pieces, some by well-known authors.
In an excerpt from his novel Tough Guys Don’t Dance, Norman Mailer gives us a story of a drunken writer in a bar, 24 days (he’s counting) since his wife left him. He tries to woo a good-looking woman away from her companion with a tall tale.
In The Chaste Clarissa, John Cheever’s character proudly shares his technique to bed a newly married woman he tells us is “beautiful but stupid.”
Denis Johnson tells us of a Kansas man, an off-season visitor to the cape, who recently tried to commit suicide. We get some local color of Provincetown’s gay community. The piece is an excerpt from his novel Resuscitation of a Hanged Man.
We have a chaste May-December romance in The Last Kiss by Arturo Vivante. The story is focused on The Provincetown Players theatre that included such notables as Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Theodor Dreiser. There’s a twist: the main characters are a young male actor and a much older woman.
In Provincetown Diary, Louise Rafkin, who is known for her stories with a lesbian theme, spends a year on a fellowship in Provincetown. “Of all the small towns in which to land, I’ve managed to set down in queer heaven.”
Only John Updike could write an essay entirely focused on the tactile sensations of your feet in Going Barefoot: “…the seethe and suck of a wave tumbling rocks across you toes in its surge…”
Kurt Vonnegut, who lived on Cape Cod for twenty years, gives us humor from the Kennedy era in The Hyannis Port Story.
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Paul Theroux gives us a memoir in Summertime on the Cape. (He lives part-time on Cape Cod and in London and Hawaii.) The Cape is a great place but it’s still a bit startling to see this world-traveler write “But anyone who grows tired of Cape Cod needs his head examined, because for purely homely summer fun there is nowhere in the world that I know that can touch it.”
The collection includes a few short oldies by Thoreau, Poe and Melville and a poem by Sylvia Plath.
I liked this collection because the selections truly were Cape Cod stories in local color and in the types of characters in the stories. Regional collections like this are sometimes disappointing because a story ‘set in,’ let’s say, Boston, doesn’t make it as a ‘Boston story’ if those elements are missing.
Isn’t it odd – I grew up close to Cape Cod and I’ve never heard anyone say I live IN Cape Cod – it’s always ON Cape Cod.
Another Cape Cod book from my sister – thank you! (I have a Cape Cod shelf.)
Top photo of Vonnegut’s house in Barnstable from newengland.com Provincetown’s gay scene from tripsavvy.com ...more
[My first post since Ian - no power, water or internet for most of a week!]
Entertaining and informative, this book is a memoir and a history of bookst[My first post since Ian - no power, water or internet for most of a week!]
Entertaining and informative, this book is a memoir and a history of bookstores and books. The author spent his life in the book business starting with his first job as a kid shelving books part-time in a local bookstore. One of the famous bookstores he worked at was City Lights in San Francisco.
He went on to be a full-time bookstore clerk and then a publisher's representative traveling around California selling books to bookstores. Later he started his own bookstore and then became a writer.
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The author makes occasional reference to books that were special to him, such as Grapes of Wrath, which he says was the book that got him hooked on reading as a kid. Another he likes is The Fierce and Beautiful World by Andrei Platonov.
We get a lot of odds-and-ends information about books, libraries and the book-selling business. Some examples:
The author estimates that the famous lost Library at Alexandria housed 50,000 to 100,000 books. Until sometime in the 1800s most books (maybe 90%) were bought from traveling salesmen. One of these early salesmen was a guy named Noah Webster.
He points out there were crudely printed typeset books even before Gutenberg such as sheets with prayers and images of saints that were peddled at shrines.
The earliest store we would recognize as a bookshop was in London in 1794. It was a glass-fronted, two-story building with a front counter as you walked in. He says it had a million books.
We read a bit about the printing process and a relatively unknown German inventor named Friedrich Koenig who in 1812 invented a steam-driven printing press. His press could print 1,100 2-sided pages in an hour, replacing the one-by-one hand-fed sheet process.
Mass market paperbacks came about during World War II, initially to save on paper. Penguin and Pocketbooks were the innovators in this field. In 1969 the chains started: first B. Dalton, then Waldenbooks, then Little Professor.
He tells us how few books sell a substantial number of copies. For example, in 2004, if you wanted to make a million dollars from your hardcover book you needed to sell about 300,000 copies at a royalty of $3.13 a pop. How many hardcover books sold at least 300,000 copies in 2004? Just 47. (And were half of those by James Patterson, Danielle Steel, John Grisham and Stephen King? He doesn’t say, lol.)
When you bought a book for $25 in 2006 here is where that money went: Bookseller $11.25; Publisher $8.87; Printer $3.00; Author $1.88.
Buzbee gives us details of returns and remainders. The bookseller pays postage to return books and once a book is remaindered, the author no longer receives royalties.
He has a section about banned and forbidden books and talks about the ‘fatwa’ on Salman Rushdie, which had the unintended consequence of making the book a bestseller. He tells us of the role of Silvia Beach, an American who owned a bookshop in Paris. She knew all the famous writers such as Hemingway and she was the one who dared to publish Ulysses.
And he does raise some interesting questions about banned books. It’s easy to say ‘I would never ban books in my bookstore.’ But in 1971, would you have sold the Anarchist Cookbook that gave detailed instructions about making bombs?
Thank you, Sister, for giving me this book.
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Top photo from biblio.com The author (b. 1957) from archives-sfweekly.com...more
I say this as a retired geography professor: this is truly an excellent book about the historical geography of Chicago and its region and how Chicago I say this as a retired geography professor: this is truly an excellent book about the historical geography of Chicago and its region and how Chicago evolved into the great city that it is, mainly during the 19th century.
It is a very readable book despite the fact that it's an ‘academic’ book. As evidence of the latter consider that it has 140 pages of footnotes, bibliography and index. My edition was illustrated with a dozen or so maps and 50 or so photos and sketches.
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Rather than attempting to give a summary I'm just going to highlight a dozen or so things that struck me and maybe they will pique your interest in reading this book.
In a chapter on rails and water, the author highlights how the Chicago ship canal connecting lake Michigan to the Mississippi system was critical in the city's development.
Railways: I know as a geographer the importance of Chicago's location at the southern tip of Lake Michigan where railways and roads connecting east to west across the northern US had to ‘bend’ south at Chicago on their way east.
Chicago grew as the epitome of a railway city. The author points out that railroads were an extremely centralizing factor in transportation and urban development, as opposed to highways that as we know, we're a major decentralizing factor in American urban development as they made possible suburban sprawl that weakened central cities.
In three chapters the author focuses on three main products that shaped Chicago's economic growth: grain (especially corn and wheat), lumber, and meat (especially pork and beef).
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Cincinnati, which became known as Porkopolis. Pork was the first long-distance meat item shipped because it could be salted for preservation. The author makes the case that the moving disassembly line (animals hung on hooks) was pioneered in Cincinnati and later perfected in Chicago. This process pre-dated the idea of the ‘assembly’ line used by Ford and others: one person stands at a station doing repetitive motions. Once railways came along Chicago eventually took over the pork market, eventually shipping ten times the volume that Cincinnati did.
One of the major academic contributions of the book is in a section the author calls ‘reading Turner backwards.’ Historian Frederick Jackson Turner is famous for his thesis that the American west was shaped by a few brave, isolated souls who went out to pioneer and shaped eventual urban development. Cronon stands this thesis on its head and says basically, the influence of the cities was always there in the first place. Where do you think those lonely cowboys were driving cattle to? They were driving them to railheads to ship them to cities. Farms spread across the west only after railroads gave farmers a market to ship goods to back east.
In the discussion of many commodities we learn the importance of what I'll call ‘leaving unused waste behind before shipping.’ This is an important consideration for the processing of any type of good. Wheat is a good example: you're better off shipping flour than whole grain because 40% of the raw product is left behind as waste.
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A big innovation was the steam-powered grain elevator (Buffalo 1842) that made sacking grain obsolete. Chicago’s grain elevators quickly put eastern operations out of business. (And after Chicago, when the Dakotas opened up, the center of milling moved to Minneapolis – General Mills and Pillsbury.)
The same weight-loss principle was true of lumber. Chicago was the center for lumber coming out of the Old Northwest Territory. Initially, railroads charged by volume and the lumber was shipped green (wet) and dried back east. Eventually railroads smartened up and started charging by weight. This incentivized Chicago lumber dealers to dry the wood locally.
It also helped the lumber industry when the Chicago area invented the balloon frame that is still used in housing construction today. Chicago interests set up national standards for wood quality and size. The heart of Chicago's lumber district was a mile of docks and canals along the Chicago River West of Halsted Street and South of 22nd St.
We learn of industrial magnates we seldom hear of such as Nathan Mears in the lumber business. He owned 40,000 acres of Michigan lumber, 15 sawmills, and he started five harbor towns for his fleet of ships taking lumber to Chicago. Chicago dominated the lumber market from for 30 or 40 years beginning in 1850, eventually displaced by the fact that the entire upper Midwest was now called ‘The Cutover’ and there was little left to cut.
The same weight-loss principle applied to beef once refrigeration started (salted ice on railcars). Only about 55% of a beef cow is meat. Initially, beef carcasses were hung on hooks in railcars and dressed by local butchers back east. Once mechanical refrigeration came along, dressed meat began to be shipped. Eastern butchers fought back with “We only sell what we kill.” But they could not sweep back the tide of cheap Chicago dressed meat.
Chicago's meat industry reshaped the Midwest and Great Plains. The bison were slaughtered. The open range was fenced in by the invention of barbed wire. Because cattle lost so much weight being driven to the railhead, the feedlot fattening system developed. Chicago became famous for its 450 acres of stockyards.
We read of another entire industry we tend to forget about: ice harvesting. It was the main occupation of otherwise idle northern farmers in the winter. The ice was shipped worldwide, protected from melting by insulation of straw and sawdust.
We learn about farmers’ discontent with just about everyone - grain elevator operators, railroads, wholesalers. They hated middlemen. Farmers always assumed (often correctly) that all these entities were ripping them off. This led to the rise of the Grange and various farmer cooperatives.
A retailer named Montgomery Ward took advantage of this discontent to promote his mail-order catalog to farmers by advertising that his prices were identical for both retail and wholesale. It was a big hit. Montgomery Ward, later emulated by Sears, became the two Amazon.coms of their day. They grew to be the two largest retail operations in the world, both based in Chicago, in large part because of the advantage of shipping goods in from suppliers and out to retail customers by rail.
Chicago quickly evolved as a manufacturing center too with the advantage of coal and iron ore coming in and out by water or rail. The manufacture of the McCormick reaper was an example. Chicago also became a manufacturing center for locomotives and Pullman rail passenger cars.
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A great book! The author (b. 1954) is a history professor at the University of Wisconsin. I intend to read another book he wrote: Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England.
Top photo of Dearborn and Randolph streets, 1909 (colorized), from Wikipedia Chicago stockyards from chicagotribune.com Chicago railyards from railroadworkersunited.org The author from history.wisc.edu ...more
This memoir is almost a handbook about dealing with depression. So be aware that THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS because I think the information is too This memoir is almost a handbook about dealing with depression. So be aware that THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS because I think the information is too important to worry about how much of the story I reveal. This is not a book you read for the plot. Although I’m fortunate to not be in either of these situations, I think it’s a ‘must read’ if you suffer from severe depression or if someone you care about suffers.
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In any case, we know the story from the blurbs before we begin: a famous author, about age 60, has such a severe bout of depression that he contemplates suicide and has himself admitted to a hospital before he can kill himself.
The story is focused on a 3-month severe bout that started in 1985 when the author was 60. He was joyless, suffering from severe insomnia and feelings of self-hatred and worthlessness. He became obsessed with possessing things like his glasses. He could not be out of sight of his (obviously saintly) wife.
This severe bout came upon him despite the fact that his books were selling well and he was in Paris to receive a literary award worth $25,000. He was trying to help himself and had given up alcohol. But he could hardly interact with people, couldn’t drive, and he says his friends told him his voice had changed to where he ‘sounded like a 90-year-old.’
The author suffered from severe clinical depression and if he made any single mistake in dealing with it, I would say it was this: he didn't get a second opinion.
He didn't like his doctor, a psychoanalyst, and Styron fundamentally didn't believe that any discussion of his mental issues would help. He was ‘old school’ in being embarrassed about having to go to a psychiatrist and he didn't really see the point of it other than getting prescriptions for various medications. Apparently his doctor shared these viewpoints.
They had halfhearted therapeutic sessions and then got down to the meds. The patient found out later that the doctor was allowing him to abuse the dosages of very powerful drugs. One drug the doctor told Styron to ‘take whenever you feel you need to take one,’ and for another drug he had prescribed triple the maximum dosage. [Do you hear loud quacking sounds like I do?] Styron names some of the drugs he took but not the doctor. They included Valium, Halcion and Ativan.
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The doctor also seemed to share in the patient’s potential embarrassment about a worst-case situation and the doctor advised him at all costs to “stay out of the hospital.” In the end, that hospitalization proved to be precisely what Styron needed to get out of the pit he had fallen into.
Perhaps Styron’s case was aggravated by the suicides of friends at the time. He was good friends with French author Romain Gary and both Gary and his wife separately killed themselves within a short time. Ditto with the 60s political radical Abbie Hoffman of Chicago Seven fame. Styron had even testified for the defense at Hoffman’s trial.
Styron talks about famous authors and artists who were suicide-prone. He gives us a list of 20-or-so and a few details. He's a proponent of a theory in psychology that folks who lost a parent around puberty, particularly a mother, may be prone to late-onset severe depression. Styron lost his mother to cancer when he was 14. There’s also genetics: his father suffered from clinical depression.
Styron (1925-2006) is known for two best-selling novels: Sophie’s Choice and Confessions of Nat Turner, although this memoir of depression has become his second most-read book, after Sophie.
Top photo of the author taken around 1959 from theparisreview.org Styron and his wife Rose in 1972 from newyorker.com...more
Two high-powered women live in one of Venice’s beautiful palazzo homes. One woman, an American, is an expert in Chinese art a[Edited for typos 7/1/22]
Two high-powered women live in one of Venice’s beautiful palazzo homes. One woman, an American, is an expert in Chinese art and archaeology. She has just returned from China and is well-known in art circles for having worked with the local museum to put together a display of ancient Chinese art. The other woman, a native of Venice, is an opera diva. They are lovers.
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Two thugs break into their mansion and severely beat the art expert, warning her not to have any further contact with the local art museum Director. Commissario Guido Brunetti gets involved and focuses his attention on suspicious doings of the art museum Director.
Then the Director ends up bludgeoned to death in his office. We quickly learn that somehow valuable pieces of Chinese ceramics in the traveling art exhibit have been replaced with fakes.
This is my third novel by this author of the Commissario Brunetti series set in Venice. (The author is an American, so the series is written in English, not translated).
The tone and the flow of the book remind me a lot of Andrea Camilleri’s detective novels featuring Inspector Montalbano. (The two authors have written blurbs for each other’s books.) Both have a lot of food talk. Montalbano has more of an eye for the women, because he’s single, whereas Commissioner Brunetti is a family man: two kids and a wife who is a professor. And yet, I think the Commissioner takes a bit more interest in the beautiful opera diva than he would want his wife to know. (The diva apparently is bi-).
As always in the author’s novels, there's discussion of dialect and how it reveals cultural and class differences among Italian regional cultures.
We get a lot of local color of Venice. The local color in this story focuses on the periodic flooding (the High Water of the title) and how people walk through flooded streets on boardwalks set out to make pathways. Sometimes the water still goes over your boots!
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The author (b. 1942) has created an industry out of her Brunetti novels. There are 31 in the series and this review is of #5. There are also books that are travel guides and walking tours of sites in her novels. She lives in Venice and in Switzerland. Her most widely-read book is the first book in the series, Death at La Fenice.
Top photo from abcnews.com The author from inquirer.com...more
The author lived the life of his character, Hank Chinaski, and much of that life was as an alcoholic. Bukowski wrote many no[Edited for typos 4/25/22]
The author lived the life of his character, Hank Chinaski, and much of that life was as an alcoholic. Bukowski wrote many novels but was better known as a poet in his lifetime (1920-1994). Someone called him the “Poet Laureate of Lowlife.”
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The main character/narrator is the same one in Factotum, which I reviewed. But in Post Office, Hank is more settled, having worked 11 years in the post office. He’s more settled in his love life too. There are three or so women he’s fairly steady with (steady is a relative word), each over a few years. (view spoiler)[ One young rich woman he marries, although that doesn’t last, and with another he fathers a child, although they shortly separate and he pays child support. His women are all heavy drinkers like him. One of his women friends basically drinks herself to death. ... (hide spoiler)]
A lot of the book, most perhaps, is about conditions and incidents at his job. Initially he is a substitute mailman, appearing each morning to see if there is work for him or not. (When he tells us he is drinking and having sex until 2:00 am and then getting up at 4:00 am to go to work, we imagine he is exaggerating!) When he fills in for people who call in ‘sick’ it is often because there is torrential rain or it’s a route with steep hills.
Later, a full-time worker, he is in a truck collecting mail from mailboxes on street corners. Then he passes an exam and graduates to mail sorter where he sorts tubs of mail and puts them into slots for the carrier to deliver. He also distributes big piles of 4th class mail – that’s junk mail (although he never uses that term; it must have come into use after 1971 when this was written).
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The almost-Orwellian environment he works under seems like something out of the 1800s. Did supervisors really time workers with a stopwatch? Did they really send a nurse to your home to do random checks to see if you were actually sick? Hank, of course, is every supervisor’s nightmare. Even if he is sober he’s likely to curse the supervisor out. Hank is constantly ‘written up’ for his failures and for his attitude. He’s often sent for job ‘counseling’ but somehow he lasts 11 years.
Hank spends a lot of time at the horse track and believes he has a betting ‘system’ that works. So we get a few pages that are a primer on picking the nags.
As I said in my review of Factotum, we have some graphic sex, and a bit about bodily functions, that strike me as ‘in celebration' of the fact that it is 1971 and you could write stuff like that now and still get published. Of course Hank’s a misogynist and we hear stereotypes and read inappropriate remarks about Blacks. But as drinking buddies, Hank loves everyone until he decides to slap a woman or punch a guy out.
Because of the author’s willingness to use coarse language we get some original one-liners like “Moto was grinning from eyebrow to asshole.” And “I got drunker and stayed drunker than a shit skunk in Purgatory.” He also has an original opening sentence “It began as a mistake.”
I liked the story. It’s an easy read with straightforward writing. Thank you to GR friends Bernard and Mark George who commented on my review of Factotum and encouraged me to read some other works by Bukowski. Considering that I had never heard of this author until I stumbled on Factotum a year ago, I was amazed to see that Post Office has more than 100,000 ratings and almost 5,000 reviews.
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As you can tell from his photo, the author lived the life he wrote about and still survived to age 73 (1920-1994). He was born in Germany but his parents moved to Los Angeles when he was three. Bukowski was a prolific writer. He wrote six novels (three were made into movies) as well as dozens of plays, screen scripts and collections of poetry.
Web sources say his work addresses the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work. The FBI kept a file on him as a result of his column 'Notes of a Dirty Old Man' in the LA underground newspaper Open City.
Top photo of LA in the 1970s from bizarella.com Mail sorting in Mobile Alabama in 1956 from about.usps.com The author from bbc.co.uk...more
Many of us know the story set in a dingy tenement: a mother and her adult son and daughter. If the phrase ‘lives of quiet desperation' has any meaningMany of us know the story set in a dingy tenement: a mother and her adult son and daughter. If the phrase ‘lives of quiet desperation' has any meaning, it’s here in this stage play.
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The fragility of daughter Laura is symbolized by the tiny glass animals she collects and her life of dusting them and playing old records. She’s so unable to handle stress that she vomits during exams and has to withdraw from secretarial school.
Son Tom is a frustrated writer and poet who hates his job in a shoe warehouse. He dreams of escape and adventure as a sailor in the merchant marine.
The mother, a stereotypical Southern belle, talks constantly of her “gentlemen callers” in her youth. Now she is fixated on the need for her daughter to have some callers. Even one caller.
The absent father is symbolized by a living room portrait – he simply took off.
The stage is set for a young man, an acquaintance of Tom’s in the factory. A possible 'caller'? He's coming to dinner with disaster to follow.
In reading the introduction, I was struck by the autobiographical nature of the story, starting with the author’s name, which was Tom, before he adopted Tennessee. He was born in Mississippi to a ‘very Southern’ mother and later lived in St. Louis and New Orleans. He had a mentally challenged sister who had a lobotomy the year before this play was first performed. The author regretted all his life that he did not prevent this operation on his sister.
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This play was the first big success by Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) who went on to become one of only a handful of well-known American playwrights. He also wrote Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Night of the Iguana, with most made into movies.
Top photo from the play from cloudfront.net The author from newstatesman.com
A Jack Kerouac-type story of bumming across the country. But Hank Chinaski, our main character, started in LA and went east while Jack started east anA Jack Kerouac-type story of bumming across the country. But Hank Chinaski, our main character, started in LA and went east while Jack started east and went west.
Jack would be a fun guy to have a beer with. And so would Hank except that with Hank, at the end of the night, you’d have to call a cab, dump him in the back seat and give the cabbie his address, (to some run-down boarding house with bedbugs). Somehow next morning you’d still end up posting bail for him.
The author lived the life of his character, at least for ten years when he was a raving alcoholic. Bukowski wrote many novels but was better known as a poet in his lifetime (1920-1994). Someone called the author the “Poet Laureate of Lowlife.”
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In the book, Hank is a full-blown alcoholic, working a job now and then to get enough money for his next binge. He loves to travel cross-country by bus and train, his suitcase filled with pints of whisky. In the book he starts out in New Orleans and travels to LA, then Philly and St. Louis, LA again, Miami and back to LA. (Although published in 1975, the story is set in the 1940s just after WW II.)
His parents are in LA. When he comes home, drunk of course, there are tears, screaming, slappings from his mother, and fist fights with his father. Living at home is “not an option.”
He’s constantly hitting on women in low-life bars and has a high success ratio – they are almost always prostitutes. So we have some graphic sex, and a bit about bodily functions that strikes me as almost ‘in celebration' of the fact that it is 1975 and you could write stuff like that now and still get published.
Of course Hank is a misogynist. We also have the occasional inappropriate remarks about Jews, Blacks, Hispanics and gays. When he cleans up his hotel room he thinks “I must be turning fag.” But as drinking buddies, Hank loves everyone until he decides to slap a woman or punch a guy out.
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Hank is an aspiring writer who sends stories out weekly and occasionally has one published for $50. But in the meantime (years) a lot of the story is about the low-level jobs he worked.
This is the only novel I’ve read that gives you an accurate idea of what it’s like to work jobs like these because I did too, and Bukowski tells it like it is. As a kid in high school and college I worked part-time evenings and full-time summers in three grocery stores (meat, produce and stocking shelves), clean-up boy in Woolworths, boxing hot-dog buns in an automated bakery, a hardware warehouse unloading trucks, taxi driver, a soda-canning plant, and three plastics factories (including the Titleist golf-ball factory!) and as a salesclerk in Western Auto (anyone remember those?).
I liked the story and it’s an easy read with straight-forward writing. I’m glad I read something by a new author previously unknown to me. Since then I've also read and enjoyed his novel Post Office.
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[Revised 7/13/23]
The author's grave in Los Angeles from, wikipedia Workers in a Texas onion warehouse in the 1950s from texashistoryarchives.com The author from amazon.com...more
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