Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Victorian gothic

Nicole's pick: Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher (New York: Walker and Co., 2008).

Discussed: 29 November 2009 @ Stella's (Commercial Drive)

Alrighty, after an extended absence I am going to powerblog through the next two entries - book club choices from the last two months - before we have yet another meeting and I fall hopelessly behind. In short, everyone enjoyed The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, a true crime account of a ghastly murder that took place in a country house smack-dab in the middle of the Victorian era.

Whicher was one of England's most celebrated detectives, and he was the real-life model for many of the famous sleuths of fiction, and, arguably, for the whole detective genre. He amazed followers with his ability to nab the culprit through deductive reasoning based on the tiniest of clues. Summerscale does a capable job of describing the Victorian detective craze, but her greatest accomplishment (to my mind) is how she reveals the other side of the coin - popular discomfort with the way inspectors like Whicher quite literally rummaged through a family's dirty laundry in search of evidence. To many observers, his methods reflected a disregard for the sanctity of the family and the Victorian home, at a time when public respectability was so important. Ultimately, it was this controversy that defeated Whicher.

Basically, the whole club thought this was a fun popular history; I especially enjoyed Summerscale's illuminating etymological discussions: the Victorian evolution of words like "detective" and "clue" (or "clew"). Honestly, we didn't spend as much time deep in discussion about it as we have with other books, perhaps because of our general consensus. What fascinated me was the fact that in the end, it was not deductive reasoning that elicited a confession from the murderer, but religious conversion. What was it about this experience that, after so many years, brought about the mystery's resolution? But that, I suppose, is another history.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

What your great-gran was reading

E.M. Hull, The Sheik (1919: London; Virago, 1996).

I'd been meaning to read this for a while. I first heard of it in Ross McKibbin's Classes and Cultures, an historical survey of interwar Britain. The plot: a haughty English heroine is kidnapped in the Algerian desert by a lusty sheik who rapes her repeatedly. She eventually falls for him, but, as McKibbin notes, "Her choice is not quite so shocking as it appears, since the sheik (typically) turns out to be half-English and of noble birth." It was a runaway best-seller, going through several editions in its first year and selling over 1.2 million copies. The thought of 1.2 million English ladies panting over this kind of softcore rape fantasy reduced my friend Bethany and I to tears of laughter. Needless to say, it was only a matter of time before I tracked it down for myself.

The Sheik did not disappoint, either as straight-up romance or historical artifact. The reclusive Edith Maude Hull, who wrote it as a hobby, was marvelously artless. She transmitted her sexual fancy, and her preconceptions about race and gender, with equal candour. The result is more innocent than repellent. In fact, the rich, beautiful, pampered, racist Diana Mayo is so smug in her (false) sense of superiority and self-sufficiency, you really start wanting her to be conquered by someone. Eventually, she is. And how! By the end of the book just a glance from the Sheik elicits quivers and shakes. The story's climax offers ludicrous proof of Lady Diana's utter submission. Not a feminist read, although perhaps a post-feminist one, given the unquestionable popularity of Hull's vision with interwar female readers. (And yes, I am again reminded of the Twilight saga, another piece of unliterary, unfiltered fantasy storytelling. Apparently Stephenie Meyer has responded to criticisms of her books with, "I never said that I was a writer.")

The Sheik is not a fount of political correctness. It is astonishingly racist in its depiction of Arabs, constituting a complete catalogue of stereotypical slurs; the men are dirty and violent, but easily cowed, while the women are slavish and sniveling. Diana is at one point captured by a rival sheik, described as "the Arab of my imaginings":

[...] this gross, unwieldy figure lying among the tawdry cushions, his swollen, ferocious face seamed and lined with every mark of vice, his full, sensual lips parted and showing broken, blackened teeth, his deep-set, bloodshot eyes with a look in them that it took all her resolution to sustain, a look of such bestial evilness that the horror of it bathed her in perspiration.

Ahmed Ben Hassan, the Sheik, of course, does not fit this description. "Only" his sexual cruelty towards Diana fits the racial stereotype, while the heroine is bewildered by the Sheik's meticulous grooming and cleanliness - hygiene being apparently the preserve of Europeans.

The same passion with which Hull rails against the natives, however, she injects into the romantic bits as well, and the results are perfect: "The touch of his scorching lips, the clasp of his arms, the close union with his warm, strong body robbed her of all strength, of all power of resistance." Rrrow!

Monday, October 26, 2009

Speak, blog

Amanda's Pick: Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1966). 1st revised edition. Originally published as Conclusive Evidence (1947).

25 October @ The Banana Leaf (Broadway and Carnarvon, Vancouver)

Speak, Memory is not a suitable candidate for a blog post, so I will confine myself here to a few passing remarks instead of vainly attempting to capture some kind of essence. Nabokov, I believe, would not have approved of blogging, but there it is. Lowly literary worms like myself will never produce memoirs like Speak, Memory, so we have to content ourselves with shallow, ephemeral commentary on the masterpieces.

Like Lolita, this book - an autobiography of roughly his first forty years, his European period - is mechanically faultless, with prose as crisp and fresh as I can imagine. An astonishing feat considering that English was not his first language. His command of vocabulary is, in my reading experience, unsurpassed; words as obscure as pleach, ecchymotic, quiddity, and ha-ha (look them up) sprinkle every page, but never showboat. Of course, the reader gathers early on that Nabokov was some kind of prodigy, and I was amused, even charmed, by his casual arrogance in that regard. Although he mysteriously lost his mathematical genius in a childhood fever, he seems to have taken his other gifts for granted, scoffing at the fact that his cousin discovered War and Peace at age seventeen, when he had read it at eleven. Later, he pricelessly refers to Balzac and Zola as "detestable mediocrities from my point of view."

Nabokov rarely makes explicit his own self-image, stating instead that the true aim of autobiography should be "the following of... thematic designs through one's life," but it is a pleasure when he reveals his little idiosyncrasies. Sleep, for example, he describes as "the most moronic fraternity in the world," "a mental torture I find debasing," and a "nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius." This is an eccentricity, if there ever was one. Leanne noted that Nabokov discusses his mental snaps and faraway visual memories with a resonance that few have the talent to convey. His extended discussion of the colours he has long attributed to particular letters - the "confessions of a synesthete" - was not "tedious and pretentious" as he predicted, but refreshing.

The other, more obvious fascination of Speak, Memory is Nabokov's fabulous historical background. His family was not merely wealthy; it straddled the peak of the social pyramid. Nabokov's father was a liberal and a democrat, but he made no attempt to live as anything other than what he was - an aristocrat. The Nabokovs' country estate, Vyra, maintained fifty servants, and the star on their Christmas tree touched the ceiling of their "prettiest drawing room"; there were, apparently, multiple drawing rooms from which to choose. Nabokov exhibits a fierce belief in his father's virtue and progressiveness, but he makes no attempt to efface his own privileged outlook, revealed most clearly in his juvenile lust for a local peasant girl:

"Strange to say, she was the first to have the poignant power... of burning a hole in my sleep and jolting me into clammy consciousness, whenever I dreamed of her, although in real life I was even more afraid of being revolted by her dirt-caked feet and stale-smelling clothes than of insulting her by the triteness of quasi-seigneurial advances."

Nabokov was endowed with enough riches to care little for the loss of them when the Bolshevik Revolution broke.

Everyone at our meeting admired these memoirs and were, in many ways, overwhelmed by them. One widely-voiced complaint was that reading Speak, Memory felt like "homework." Nicole confessed that her "escape" between reading snippets of the book was watching snippets of Grey's Anatomy. For Leanne, it was the Sunday paper. Only two of us read it in its entirety, and the others were not sure they'd ultimately finish it. But I would enthusiastically recommend Speak, Memory to anyone who wants to see one of the few true virtuosos at work.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Didn't make my day

Elmore Leonard, Hombre (1961: New York; HarperCollins, 2002).

I read this because I wanted to read some manly pulp; years ago I was lent Charles Willeford's The Cockfighter, and it entranced me. Leonard is revered in western and crime fiction circles, and several of his works have been adapted for the screen. (I very much enjoyed the 2007 adaptation of his short story, "3:10 to Yuma," starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale.) But I found Hombre, considered one of Leonard's best, to be unremarkable.

In short, Leonard's picture of rugged masculine virtue seems trite. But it is certainly possible that he invented the western hero we know so well - that, in 1961, his vision was original. If so, Leonard's reputation is understandable. But from my 2009 perspective, the protagonist is cut from cardboard. In this story, John Russell is the true man of action and few words, a man who looks out for himself and minds his own business, but who, in a pinch, remains unruffled and incorruptible:

"He let people do or think what they wanted while he smoked a cigarette and thought it out calmly, without his feelings getting mixed up in it. Russell never changed the whole time, though I think everyone else did in some way. He did what he felt had to be done. Even if it meant dying. So maybe you don't have to understand him. You just know him."

Ho-hum. These kinds of characters do much better on screen, without the voice-over. That said, our narrator, a young man who spends three days in Russell's company while their stagecoach gets held up by no-good bandits, has an endearing everyman quality that meshes with Leonard's plain-talking literary approach. His remark on an improper exchange between two of the coach passengers made me smile:

"Frank Braden had eased lower in the seat and his head was very close to Mrs. Favor's. He said something to her, a low murmur. She laughed, not out loud, almost to herself, but you could hear it. Her head moved to his and she said one word or maybe a couple. Their faces were close together for a long time, maybe even touching, and yet her husband was right there. Figure that one out."

The book is not without its charms, therefore, but they have faded over the years. I didn't like Hombre enough to further investigate why Leonard is hailed as a master of his craft.

Saturday, September 26, 2009

I'm ready for my dinner now

Kerry-Lynn's pick: Knut Hamsun, Hunger (1890: Penguin, 1998)
16 September 2009 @ Stella's (Commercial Drive, Vancouver)

Kerry-Lynn went out on a limb with this one - Hunger is not the kind of book that you burn through, unable to turn the pages fast enough because you are so thrilled by the action. The back of the Penguin edition calls it a "searing excursion into the realm of the irrational." Sounds like the latest Nora Roberts, no? Hamsun - I think of him affectionately as Knut - presents a few days in the life of a man in late-Victorian Kristiania (Oslo), as he scrambles to forestall starvation until his body and moral rectitude can replenish themselves. Our only version of events is filtered through his half-crazed mind.

Our individual reactions to Hunger, more than anything else we've read for book club, were shaped by our personal interests and backgrounds. (I should say that Jennifer couldn't come to the meeting, and I don't know if she read the book, but those who know her best were confident that she wouldn't have liked it anyway.) For Kerry-Lynn, who spent years toughing it out in the rarefied world of ballet, Hunger was a tale of the struggling artist, whose suffering is at least partly self-induced - the result of an imprudent and even prideful commitment to his "craft."

For Nicole and I (she with a background in English literature and I with a background in English history), Hunger was a tale of alienation in the modern city, and Knut an early modernist because he privileged man's inner psychology over his outward actions - thought over plot. And Leanne, well, she didn't get past the first twenty-five or thirty pages. From what I could gather, the protagonist's disfigured thought processes and mercurial disposition repulsed her.

I won't speculate on the psychoanalytical impulses behind Leanne's violent reaction to the book (!), but I can see where she's coming from. You know the enraged homeless guy who stands in the middle of the street screaming at someone invisible? That's this guy. Fascinating, but disconcerting and frustrating too. His impaired judgment causes him to ignore and squander the few chances that do cross his path.

We all - even Leanne, perhaps - came away with a real... appreciation for Hamsun's achievement. But that is precisely what bothers me about my own assessment. I wanted to escape from myself when I was reading Hunger. It occurred to me at one point, "I should teach this for my European survey class," and from then on I was just gathering historical cues to flesh out the modernism lecture spontaneously writing itself in my head. That kind of systematic evaluation does a disservice to the story's most beautiful, brutally human moments.

Post-script: if you ever make it to Stella's, get the "Orleans" mussels, with fries.

Friday, August 28, 2009

Quirks that work

Reif Larsen, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (Penguin, 2009).

The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet is the kind of book that teeters on the edge of being irksome. It is, like so much postmodern pop culture, self-consciously idiosyncratic, bubbling with quick, knowing references to everything from railroad signals to Dolly Parton. The literary mechanism that enables such detail is a twelve-year-old cartographer - a child prodigy. His obsessive-compulsive mind spills out onto every page, and frequently into the margins. Footnotes, drawings, and maps are integral to the story; they are "illustrations" in the truest sense.

And although Larsen never makes this explicit, while the protagonist is twelve-year-old T.S., the speaker seems to be adult T.S., with emotional insights that could come only with life experience. These adult reflections also fill the pages, and the result could easily turn pretentious.

But Larsen errs on the side of charming. All the minutiae are offset by the powerful simplicity of T.S.'s "emotional journey" - he has lost a brother and is trying to understand, not only his role in the death, but his role in his transformed family. He uses his scientific work to grapple with his very unscientific dilemma. Not only does T.S. surreptitiously insert his brother's name into every one of his maps, but his personal issues determine the kinds of maps he draws. Faced with a surfeit of new sights and sounds on his first trip to Chicago, for instance, he ultimately chooses to chart the terrain of loneliness: he counts the number of people walking alone, and then the percentage who deflect their loneliness with cell phones or iPods. One of my favourite "maps" in the book uses arrows to illustrate the changing flow of conversation at his family's dinner table, both before and after his brother's death.

So all the bits and bobs have a role to play, and while some might find the end result cloying, I do not count myself in their number. The quirks worked for me. (For quirks that do not quite work, see the film 500 Days of Summer, playing now in your local theatre.)

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Restoring the integrity of my blog

Jennifer's pick: Rose Tremain, Restoration (Viking Press, 1990)
17 August 2009 @ The Nook (Denman Street, Vancouver, BC)

I'm beginning to have a problem with the five-star system that my book club uses. There is no nuance. I can read three books, and give them each a rating of four out of five stars, but that indicates a sameness about them that is misleading. It also makes the reviewer (my friends and I) appear passionless. Maybe it's time to scrap the system; until then you can see our critical insights and opinions reduced to a number below. (I lost the ratings - it must be a sign. I hereby retire the star rating system.)

Everyone liked Restoration. It's difficult to see how someone could not like it. Tremain's story is a sensitive rendering of the seventeenth-century world of an English courtier, but it is also surprisingly funny and touching. The speaker, our hero Robert Merivel, is absolutely lovable, even when his character sinks to the depths of depravity. He is so pathetic, but so open and child-like that you forgive him his trangressions - which include a heaping helping of the seven deadly sins, gluttony and lust in particular. (I used the film adaptation cover here, with Robert Downey Jr. in Louis XIV's wig. Excellent!) Reading about Merivel's turbulent fortunes is a pleasure. I wish I could give more specific information on my fellow members' individual perspectives, but we all seemed to be in loose agreement, and to be honest we didn't spend hours discussing it. My sister, who joined us that evening, remarked later, "I don't know if that qualifies as a 'meeting'."

I do, however, want to emphasize what a lovely example this is of an historical novel. Tremain doesn't fetishize the period details or showboat her knowledge of seventeenth-century politics. But she captures the zeitgeist, especially the significance and role of the king in courtly society. Merivel's adoration of James II might seem overblown, but a good absolutist monarch had that effect on his followers in the seventeenth century. James was not as charismatic or effective as Louis XIV, but to his courtiers he would have been the centre of the universe. Meanwhile, Merivel's life in "exile" shows just how much the rest of English society was moving onward and upward, regardless of the shenanigans of the royal court.


Saturday, August 22, 2009

Not even good enough to be called trash

Linda Lael Miller, Shotgun Bride (Pocket Star, 2003).

The only reason this is on my blog is because I'm committed to reporting on every (non-work-associated) book that I read. This book, apparently second in the hallowed "McKettrick Cowboys" trilogy, was one of a handful of romance novels on the bookshelf at the N.S. cottage that my family and I rented this August. I had brought the current book club choice - Rose Tremain's Restoration - along to read, but it made sense to read a vacation paperback instead. Judging from the back-cover synopsis, Shotgun Bride seemed the raciest and most amusing of the bunch:

Kade McKettrick's got five mail-order brides-to-be camped out at the local hotel, all more than eager to provide him with the heir that will win him the Triple M ranch. But Kade, the newly appointed marshal, has his hands full with a troublesome outlaw gang. Why, then, is he so easily distracted by pretty "Sister Mandy" -- who most assuredly is not the nun she claims to be?

So, inspired by the cheese of Twilight, I dug in. But this book sucked. I didn't even finish it, a rarity for a completist like me. The story was plodding. The dialogue wasn't witty or sparkling. But I woud have dealt with this in exchange for good romantic tension and bodice-ripping love scenes. But no. When the cowboy and his lover finally get to it, after two-hundred-and-something pages, Miller likens their derobing to "an ancient ritual of sacred magic" or some such nonsense. It made my skin crawl.


Sunday, August 16, 2009

Like a man


Sam Keith from the journals of Richard Proenneke,
One Man's Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey
(1973: Alaska Northwest Books, 1999).

This is one of my very occasional forays into non-fiction. Dick Proenneke moved to Twin Lakes Alaska, in 1968, when he was in his early fifties. His goal was to build a cabin and spend an entire year in this secluded spot, living off the land and braving the brutal winter, when the temperature could get as low as -45ºF. In the end, Proenneke stayed for about twenty-eight years. His cabin is now a provincial landmark, and his journals and film footage are valuable records of Alaska's native landscape, flora, and fauna.

While Proenneke's experience may not be the most extreme ever recorded - his loyal friend Babe regularly flew in with a few supplies from civilization, and he did not hang out with grizzly bears - it might be the most meticulous. With the exception of nails, tar paper and polyethylene for his cabin roof, and a few simple metal tools, Proenneke built his cabin, above-ground cache, john, furniture, and other odds and ends (like a sled and snowshoes) from logs that he harvested, transported, seasoned, and hewed himself. He used old gas cans to make hinges, containers, and pots and pans. He fashioned a dutch door with wooden hinges and even a wooden locking mechanism. Everything he made looked so clean and operated so smoothly that, from the photographs, it is hard to believe they are handmade. His cabin logs tuck together seamlessly. He gathered stones from the lake beach and built himself a beautiful, neat, fireplace. He fired one shot at a ram early in the hunting season, and the meat lasted him the entire winter. Proenneke described in detail many of his projects and travels up and down the lakes, and most fascinating of all, filmed his activities as well. (Some of this footage has been collected in the one-hour program Alone in the Wilderness, which you can periodically catch on PBS.)

I was drawn to the book by the televised program, but was happily surprised to find that, on the page, Proenneke has a flair for rustic turns of phrase. He could write as well as be manly. On getting a bite on his fishing line: "It happened with the suddenness of a broken shoelace." On the view: "Rags of fog are strewn about the high peaks." On encountering a weasel: "There he was, sitting upright like a fence picket." Evocative and authentic. And my favourite, on the sudden changes in the lake: "Like a woman. All smiles one minute, and dancing a temper tantrum the next." (Proenneke's bachelor philosophy and attiudes toward women were charmingly old-fashioned. When Babe promised to bring some "mission girls" out to the cabin for a visit, poor Dick set about scrubbing down his quarters with the zeal of my Aunt Donna before a family reunion. The girls never materialized.)

This book deserves your attention for three reasons: because Proenneke's feats as an outdoorsman were outstanding; because it reads with sweetness, passion, and honesty; and because it will make even the most committed urbanite sigh at the prospect of solitude in the mountains.