Book log archives - January 2009

Archives - January 2009

archives -- index by author -- index by category -- favorite books -- links

Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience (reread), Hospital Sketches: Though Hospital Sketches is lightly disguised autobiography and Work a fully-fledged novel, they are an interesting paired read because of Alcott's use of her own experience in both.

Hospital Sketches describes her sojourn (cut short due to illness) as a nurse in a Washington, D.C., hospital during the Civil War; it's witty in a rather Dickensian style (Alcott calls herself Tribulation Periwinkle, for example) and touching even though sentimental. I mostly enjoyed it, though I was bothered by Alcott's condescending attitude toward the black people for whose freedom she enthusiastically worked; although she rejoices at the Emancipation Proclamation, she also clearly stereotypes blacks, as "obsequious, trickish, lazy, and ignorant, yet kind-hearted," and does not provide the kind of individual portrait she does for the white soldiers and doctors. The edition I read is part of the Bedford Series in History and Culture, which are intended as teaching texts, and I thought the editor, Alice Fahs, did an excellent job in her introduction in placing the book in the context of its time, both literary and historical, and examining Alcott's racial attitudes.

Work uses even more of Alcott's own experiences. She is specifically interested here in examining how women might find meaningful, fulfilling work. Her heroine, Christie, like Alcott herself, goes through a number of jobs -- seamstress, servant, companion, governess, actress (Alcott was never a professional actress, but loved to write and act in plays) -- before finding a place for herself in a domestic, idealistic, female-centered setting. Other bits and pieces of Alcott's life are echoed here, like her temptation to throw herself off a bridge in a particularly bad moment, and some of her characters are based on people she knew, like Thoreau and Theodore Parker. It's a little disjointed and episodic to start out, as Christie goes through her series of jobs, but the second half is more collected. Though Alcott does tend to moralize, her portrait of women helping each other is a hopeful one, and she doesn't pull her punches in her realistic examination of women's place in society in her time. In a way, her central concern isn't that different from Little Women, which is also much concerned with its heroines' search to find places for themselves as they grow up.
Ellen Klages, The Green Glass Sea (reread), White Sands, Red Menace: White Sands, Red Menace picks up where The Green Glass Sea left off. The bombs have been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Dewey Kerrigan has moved with her foster family, the Gordons, to Alamogordo, where Phil Gordon is working at the White Sand Missile Range, and Terry Gordon, who has given up her chemistry career for a year for Phil, is helping the scientists' movement to control and limit use of the atomic bomb. Dewey and Suze Gordon are still learning to live with each other, to fit in at their new school, and to find a place for themselves in a society which privileges boys over girls.

As with The Green Glass Sea, I was impressed by Klages' lucid style and her detailed historical setting, and I was pleased to spend more time seeing Dewey and Suze develop. I did think the book lacked some of the focus of The Green Glass Sea; none of the many plot threads quite got as much time as I'd have liked, particularly those dealing with Suze's friendship with a Mexican-American girl and with Terry Gordon's political activism. The book ends with not every question answered (though nothing is left as a cliffhanger), and I'd certainly love to read another one, if Klages writes one.
George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying: Gordon Comstock is waging his own private war on money and respectability (as represented by the omnipresent potted aspidistra plants). Having given up a lucrative job in an advertising agency, he works in a bookstore and writes poetry in the evenings in his tiny, cold rented room. His girlfriend, Rosemary, understands him and is patient with him, as is his friend Ravelston, a well-off socialist...that is, until Gordon's life is turned upside down and he starts to descend even further down the money ladder.

Orwell is satirizing the money-oriented society, and very wittily, yet he never allows his characters to become two-dimensional slaves to the satire. Gordon may be frustrating (for us and for his friends), but Orwell made me empathize with him as well. The love story is poignant, and Rosemary is a well-realized character also, an independent, sympathetic woman whose relationship with Gordon feels very real; I loved their ongoing playful mock battles. The ending is theoretically happy, but with a typically Orwellian edge.
Mary Henley Rubio, Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings: This isn't as good as the last biography I read (Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf, which I think is going to be my gold standard for a while), but it's an admirable biography. Rubio co-edited Montgomery's journals for publication, and her in-depth knowledge of Montgomery provides an amazing level of detail and an ability to weigh the contents of Montgomery's journals (rewritten extensively by Montgomery to convey her preferred version of her life) with other sources to paint a fuller picture. Rubio's writing style isn't polished, and I wished she'd talked more about Montgomery's books, but those small weaknesses are more than outweighed by the book's strengths.
Lucy Maud Montgomery, Magic for Marigold (reread): I will admit that Magic for Marigold is not one of my favorite Montgomery novels. Marigold is a young girl growing up on Prince Edward Island, in a house with her widowed mother and her grandmother. Like all Montgomery heroines, she is imaginative, making "magic" for herself from a variety of sources. The problem is that she's not much more than that -- she lacks the vitality of Anne, Emily, Valancy, or Jane of Lantern Hill. The book is episodic (based on a series of short stories Montgomery wrote about Marigold before deciding to make it a book), and so we only see Marigold at intervals throughout her childhood and can't follow her development. Also, she doesn't have the obstacles that Anne and the others do and lacking something major to struggle against, she seems to lack their spirit. I think perhaps Montgomery didn't put as much of herself into Marigold as into her other heroines. Still, there's enough of Montgomery's charm to make me reread the book occasionally (though I always wish I'd skipped the last chapter, in which Marigold learns that she must share her boy friend Budge with other boys but that she'll "always be here for him to come back to" -- ew).
Lady Caroline Lamb, Glenarvon: Lamb had a passionate affair with Lord Byron; after he broke it off, she continued to obsess over him and eventually published Glenarvon, a Gothic novel featuring thinly disguised versions of Lamb, Byron, and other prominent public figures. Oh, how I longed for some coherency of plot or character to pull this together. There are intriguing pieces -- a plot to murder a ducal heir, the Irish revolution of the late 1700s, disturbing obsessive love, the fictional portrayals of Byron and Lamb -- but they're only pieces, and only held my attention sporadically. Oh, well, I wasn't expecting it to be really good: I just wish it had been better.
Michaela Roessner, The Stars Dispose, The Stars Compel: Tommaso de Befanini is destined to be a great cook. His family have been cooks for generations, working in the households of astrologer Cosimo Ruggiero and of the Medici family. But when he's pulled into intrigue surrounding the young Duchessina, Caterina de' Medici, his horizons expand more than he could have imagined, as his life is intertwined with hers. I loved Roessner's evocation of Renaissance Florence: the people (real and imaginary), the sights, the smells, and most of all the tastes. The food descriptions are absolutely mouth-watering. I also loved her use of kitchen and hearth magic; the astrologers do magic as well, but it's the homely sort I really found entrancing, the magic worked by Tommaso's mother Piera. There was one thing that bothered me quite a bit about the book, though, which was Tommaso's sexual relationship with a much older man. Possibly this would have been less squicky in that time period, but what can I say, I found it unsettling and had to think of Tommaso as older in order for it not to bother me too much.

I didn't know before I started reading The Stars Dispose that there was a sequel, but I managed to find The Stars Compel and read it fairly quickly. It was still pretty good, but I didn't enjoy it as much, largely because it focused more on political intrigue than on the kitchen and hearth magic which I thought was such a strong feature of the first book. Apparently, Roessner planned a third book, which hasn't yet materialized; I wish it would, because like the first book, The Stars Compel doesn't exactly wrap up all the plot threads.
W.H. Lewis, The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV: Lewis's first sentence explains that "if long-winded titles were still the fashion, [this book] might with more accuracy have been called 'Some aspects of French life in the days of Louis XIV'," and indeed, that would be a good description. Lewis doesn't cover every possible facet of life during those days, but selective though it is, it's very enjoyable, based on a vast familiarity with and a deep fondness for the writers of the period and full of wonderful details. On court etiquette, among other fascinating tidbits, there's this: "Who could guess that if you encounter the royal dinner on its way from the kitchen to the table, you must bow as to the King himself, sweep the ground with the plume of your hat, and say in a low, reverent, but distinct voice, La viande du Roi?"

Lewis does show his own opinions and prejudices, some of which a more modern audience may not agree with -- for instance, "[t]o the modern reader, it cannot but be nauseating to learn that the prudent man about town, anxious to avoid the results of incautious sexual promiscuity, should invoke the protection of St. Job," which I just find interesting, not nauseating -- but he makes a definite effort to present a balanced picture. By the end of the book, I simply felt that I'd spent a few hours with a well-educated, well-spoken companion, and we'd had a lovely and interesting chat about a fascinating period.
Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads: Mer is a plantation slave in the Caribbean, a healer who both hopes for and fears liberation. Jeanne Duval is a Paris entertainer, lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire. Thais is a prostitute in Alexandria, who journeys to Jerusalem. Weaving their stories together across centuries are their shared experiences of oppression and a mysterious spirit who moves within them, prompting their actions, living their lives, and giving them hope. Hopkinson's style is lyrical, sensual, and full of vitality, and I loved her use of mythology to tie the novel's different threads together.

This was a challenging and thought-provoking book for me, especially as my first book for the Livejournal community, the Writers of Color 50 Book Challenge. The various settings were very new to me, and it was a shock to be plunged abruptly into the book's first scene, of Mer making a physical examination of a pregnant fellow slave. Hopkinson uses lots of words and phrases which I had to figure out from context, and I could feel that my unfamiliarity with the language and the settings made it more of a challenge to engage with the book, though eventually its sheer energy and magic drew me in. By contrast, I had no problems engaging with the book I'd just finished, a historical fantasy set during the Italian Renaissance, much more familiar territory to me. It was really interesting to have such a clear demonstration of what my usual reading boundaries are and why it's valuable to stretch them.
Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby: I was surprised to enjoy this more than I thought I would. Dickens' avowed purpose in writing it was to provide the public with a novel like The Pickwick Papers, full of funny episodes and lively characters, and since I wasn't terribly interested in Pickwick, I thought that boded ill for Nickleby. However, although the book is certainly episodic, following the adventures of its central hero, there's a plotline concerning his usurer uncle which travels through the book and provides it with a cohesive thread to follow. Nicholas himself, while not the equal in complexity of David Copperfield or Pip, does change and develop throughout the book, and the main villain, his uncle Ralph Nickleby is very well-drawn, with sadistic schoolmaster Wackford Squeers as a secondary comic villain. In Nicholas' development and in Dickens' portrayal of the awful school, I could see the beginnings of his later, greater books, and his comic talents are much in evidence here; I think I laughed out loud more than while reading any other Dickens I've read yet.
Patricia Gaffney, To Have and to Hold: Sebastian Verlaine finds his first stint as a magistrate rather boring, until the final prisoner is brought: Rachel Wade, just released after ten years in prison for the murder of her husband and then picked up for vagrancy when she was unable to find a job. Sebastian is intrigued by her and decides to offer her a position as his housekeeper, so that he can seduce her. As the seduction proceeds, however, Sebastian finds himself responding to Rachel rather differently than he had planned.

The two protagonists are very compelling, and their relationship is finely observed. Though Sebastian is cast in the "reformed rake" mold, Gaffney makes his progress toward reform convincing, and Rachel's journey from downtrodden former prisoner to confident free woman is even better. However, outcome aside, I did have some issues with their sexual relationship, which starts out frankly coercive (though not violently), and that dimmed the book for me rather. Still, Gaffney's writing was good enough to carry me through the difficult bits, and I'll be looking for her other two books in this series.
Georgette Heyer, The Talisman Ring: On Lord Lavenham's deathbed, he asks his relative Sir Tristram Shield to marry his granddaughter Eustacie and provide for her after his death, since his heir, Ludovic, has been a fugitive for justice for years after being accused of murder. When Ludovic turns up unexpectedly, what looked like a marriage of convenience plot turns quickly into a madcap adventure, as he, Tristram, Eustacie, and Miss Sarah Thane try to clear his name and recover his ancestral talisman ring. The characterization and relationships certainly aren't as complex as in my favorite Heyer novels, but this was very enjoyable. I think it's one of Heyer's funniest, and there's lots of witty interplay, slapstick comedy, and swashbuckling action.
Emma Smith, The Far Cry: Teresa Digby lives a fairly ordinary English life; she is fourteen, going to boarding school and living with her aunt, because her father and mother are separated. When her father discovers that her mother is about to return from America to visit Teresa, he impetuously decides to escape by taking Teresa all the way to India, to the tea plantation where her half-sister Ruth lives with her husband, Edwin. Teresa has always felt out of place in England; she feels oddly at home in India, yet there are still conflicts which must be resolved, between Teresa and her father, Teresa and Ruth, Ruth and Edwin.

This is an unusual book and not easy to write up. The characters are vivid and often not very likable, yet Smith shows their thoughts and emotions with such perspicuity that I found them engaging even when I didn't like them. I thought the book's greatest strength was in its intensely sensual portrayal of its environment, from the first sentence ("The birds came and picked holes in the sleeping ears of Teresa Digby.") through the noisy, colorful shipboard journey and on into noisy, colorful India, which so entrances Teresa. Really, it was especially the aural quality of the writing that I found fascinating: Teresa wakened by bird noises, the children shrieking on the ship, the "inhumanly hopeless" scream of a peacock. The Far Cry is a perfect title, thinking about it.
Lili'uokalani, Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen: Lili'uokalani was the last reigning sovereign of Hawaii. In 1893, the monarchy was overthrown by a group of mainly American businessmen; in 1895, Lili'uokalani was arrested, imprisoned in Iolani Palace, and forced to abdicate the throne. Hawaii became a protectorate of the United States, and the monarchy was no more.

The book provides an interesting picture of late nineteenth century Hawaii's society and government, though the social parts are occasionally overfull of details about who visited whom and long lists of names. I especially liked the parts about Lili'uokalani's visits to England and her outsider's view of the society there. Queen Victoria showed her and her party friendship and respect, though I've read elsewhere there was racism behind the scenes, unbeknownst to the Hawaiians, when certain other sovereigns refused to escort the Hawaiians because of their skin color.

The second part of the book is more chilling. Lili'uokalani narrates the political machinations of the American businessmen who first forced her brother, King David Kalakaua, to sign the Bayonet Constitution, which stripped the monarchy of much of its remaining power and disenfranchised much of the populace. Upon Kalakaua's unexpected death, Lili'uokalani assumed the throne, but not for very long. When she tried to draft a new constitution, the opposing side took steps to neutralize her and remove her from power.

I'd call this an essential book if you're at all interested in Hawaiian history, and certainly an important book on American imperialism.
M.T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume 1: The Pox Party (reread), Volume 2: The Kingdom on the Waves: I read the first book last April, loved it, and was eager to read the second, although worried that it wouldn't be as good as the first. I needn't have worried. Honestly, though I don't really have anything new to say about Volume II, except that it's just as good as the first one, only on a wider scale -- as Octavian goes to war -- and has even more of Octavian's own narrative. I think schools should assign these two books along with Johnny Tremain as Revolutionary War reading, because they turn widely accepted notions of the Revolution on their heads and force us to re-evaluate some of the truths that we hold to be self-evident.
Anthony Trollope, Orley Farm (reread): This isn't one of Trollope's best-known novels (though it's hardly obscure), but I think it's one of his best. Years ago, when Sir Joseph Mason died, there had been some question about his will, which left most of his property to his eldest son but included a codicil leaving Orley Farm to his youngest, Lucius, son of his second wife. When the case came to trial, the authenticity of the will was apparently proved, and Lucius inherited. Now, though, an enemy of Lady Mason has uncovered evidence which reopens that old case.

The plot revolves around the doubtful will and possible forgery, but Trollope isn't really interested in creating suspense around whether or not Lady Mason is guilty; he makes that clear early on, and it's her fate, whether guilty or innocent, and the outcome of the second trial that provides the suspense. There are romantic subplots, of course, and to me, easily the most interesting one is the moving, poignant relationship between Lady Mason and old Sir Peregrine Orme. In fact, the older people are generally more interesting here than the younger, especially Lady Mason, whose richer personality and experience make her a far more complex heroine than the more typical young women. If you've never read Trollope, I think this would be a good place to start.


Last updated 16 March 2009. All text and photographs © George Mitchell and Margaret Johnston, unless otherwise noted Comments, questions, suggestions to margaret@lonelymountain.net.