This year (2023)
Previous years: 2022; 2021;
2020; 2019;
2018; 2017;
2016; 2015;
2014; 2013;
2012; 2011;
2010; 2009;
2008; 2007;
2006; 2005
David Mitchell:
The
Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet
Abir
Mukherjee:
A
Rising Man
A Necessary Evil
Ovidia
Yu:
The
Mimosa Tree Mystery
The
Frangipani Tree Mystery
The
Betel Nut Tree Mystery
The
Paper Bark Tree Mystery
James Nestor:
Breath
J.L. Heilbron:
Galileo
David Grann:
The
Lost City of Z
Diana Setterfield:
The
Thirteenth Tale
Shion Miura:
The
Easy Life in Kamusari
Stacy Schiff:
Vera
(Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov): Portrait of a Marriage
Vladimir Nabokov:
Pale
Fire
Mikhail Lermontov:
A
Hero of our Time
Vladimir Nabokov:
The
Real Life of Sebastian Knight
Namrata Patel:
The
Candid Life of Meena Dave
Alba de Céspedes:
Forbidden
Notebook
Banine:
Parisian
Days
Edward Chisholm:
A
Waiter in Paris
When the Portuguese arrived in Japan at the end of
the 16th century, besides commerce, they brought numbers of Catholic priests
whose mission it was to convert the natives to Christianity and so to "save"
them.
Soon the Japanese became aware of these subversive
intentions, got rid of those who had become "saved", and eventually cut off
all contact with the Portuguese. A canal was dug across a small peninsula in
Nagasaki Harbor, creating a small island which was named Dejima. It measured only 120 by 75 meters and it was
connected to the mainland by a bridge. After 1641 only Dutch traders were
allowed to use Dejima, and except for special purposes - paying yearly
homage to the Shogun in Edo - they were not allowed to set foot on Japanese
soil. The bridge was guarded night and day. The Dutch traders were not
allowed to learn the Japanese language. Instead there were official Japanese
translators. Everything on the island was under strict Japanese control.
Dutch ships came perhaps once each year, sailing up from Batavia, hopefully
not to be lost in a Typhoon or taken by pirates or enemy ships. Before
setting foot on Dejima the Dutch traders or officials were required to
surrender all books or objects having anything to do with Christianity, to
be stored away by Japanese officials until the time they left. All Christian
ceremony was strictly banned on the island.
The book is a novel set against this background. The
author also wrote Cloud Atlas, a book I read a few years ago and
which was made into a movie staring Tom Hanks. As we could thus expect, the
story involves unpleasant characters doing unpleasant things. I suppose
David Mitchell has studied the history of Dejima to such an extent that much
of the detail must be true to life. After all, imagine what it must have
been like confined in such a small space for years at a time, uncertain
about the fate of the next possible Dutch ship that might arrive in a year
or two.
The protagonist is Jacob De Zoet, a book keeper who has
been sent by the Dutch East India Company to investigate possible corruption
on the island. It turns out that the most corrupt person is his own
supervisor. And then we have a story about the abbot of a monastery up on a
mountain near Nagasaki containing monks and "sisters" who have been saved
from prostitution, or something. They are impregnated by the monks, and the
resulting babies are sacrificed in some sort of ritual aimed at prolonging
the life of the abbot, or perhaps also some of the chosen monks. We are not
told whether the monastery was devoted to Buddhism, Shintoism, or some other
religion. Surely all of this is rather far-fetched. Could the author be
telling us about some strange aspects of ancient Japanese culture? In the
midst of all of this an English frigate cruises into Nagasaki Harbor and
takes a few pot shots at Dejima, blowing up the buildings before sailing
away. Judging from the Cloud Atlas, such stories must be a typical device of
the author. In the end we have an unfulfilled, distant love story of De Zoet
and Ogawa Uzaemon, an angelic Japanese woman.
This is a murder mystery taking place in India in
the early 1920s. But who could write such a book? An English person would be
accused of romanticizing English colonialism, the "Raj", and an Indian
person would become lost in transcendental philosophical thoughts on the
mysteries of India.
As his name implies, the author is of Indian descent, yet
he grew up in Scotland and lives in England. And so he can write stories
about the India of those days as he sees it, unburdened by all of this
politically correct baggage. The protagonist is Captain Sam Wyndham, an
Englishman who has spent four years in France in the Great War, in the
trenches, but also in military intelligence under Lord Taggert who is now
Commissioner of Police in Calcutta. Wyndham was a policeman before and after
the war with Scotland Yard, and so Taggert has asked him to come to India to
take up a position with the Indian Imperial Police. Wyndham's sidekick is
Sargent Banerjee, whose forename is Surendranath, something which the
British find to be unpronounceable, and so he has been called
"Surrender-not" ever since he joined the imperial police. Surrender-not is
of the Brahman caste and his family lives in a huge palace-like mansion
somewhere in Calcutta. But they have disowned him, owing to his connections
with the British. The author has written a whole series of novels based on
these characters, and this is the first in the series.
A highly placed British civil servant is found stabbed to
death outside a brothel in Black Town, the slum to the north of Calcutta,
separated from White Town where the mansions and palaces of the British and
the wealthy Indian population live. Was it a gang of terrorists whose aim
was to achieve independence for India? Wyndham's assistant, Digby, has an
informer who leads him to Sen, a terrorist who has been on the run for
years. But Sen tells Wyndham that he has become a disciple of Gandhi. He now
rejects violence and seeks independence through peaceful means. He is
quickly whisked away by Military Intelligence to be hanged a day or two
later, satisfying the general opinion of White Town. Nevertheless Wyndham
and Banerjee investigate further, eventually coming to the truth of the
matter in the highest places.
Taking a look at the map of India as it was in 1920, we see that at least a
third of it was made up of princely states, or kingdoms, some of which were
larger than England itself. We are told that at the time of Independence in
1947, there were 565 of them. The story in this book concerns Sambalpore, an
imaginary and extremely rich princely state with extensive diamond mines.
Our intrepid pair, Captain Sam Wyndham and Sargent Banerjee, are riding in a
Rolls Royce with the Crown Prince of Sambalpore in Calcutta. Suddenly a man
in traditional Indian clothing with his face covered with ash and whatever
else it is jumps in front of the car and shoots the Crown Prince with a
revolver. Wyndham is able to follow him and the assassin points the gun at
his own head, pulls the trigger and commits suicide.
And so Wyndham and Banerjee travel to Sambalpore to find
out who was responsible. As a friend of the Crown Prince in his days as a
schoolboy in England, Banerjee is invited to attend the funeral. And Wyndham
takes a holiday to accompany him. After all, they cannot violate the
sovereignty of Sambalpore by conducting their own investigation.
Nevertheless, the Maharaja does ask them to do all they can to find the
murderers. The British Ambassador has cabled the Viceroy, and has been
instructed to tell Wyndham and Banerjee to leave Sambalpore immediately and
report back to Calcutta. They ignore this and so we have a story of palace
intrigues, a harem 120 strong producing well over two hundred progeny of the
Maharaja, besides his three official Maharanis and only two official sons.
Was it that other prince who was behind the murder? What of the young
English woman who was scandalously in love with the Crown Prince? Was it the
head eunuch? Was it the Prime Minister cooking the books on diamond sales?
We ride about the place in all those Rolls Royces, and especially in a Mercedes Simplex, following the investigation.
The author is a native of Singapore and is writing
about Singapore. The story begins with the narrator, Su Lin, together with
everybody else in her house and also all the neighbors being forced at
gunpoint out into a field to stand for hours, waiting for something horrible
to happen. It is 1943 or so and the Japanese Gestapo, or kenpeitai, are rounding people up to transport them to
their torture chambers. Su Lin's uncle is taken away. A hooded informer with
loose clothes and a small slit for the eyes to remain anonymous, points at
random people. Suddenly Su Lin recognizes the way the figure is walking and
calls out who it is, saying that the woman informer is only pointing at
people for personal reasons of revenge. Rather than being shot or slammed in
the face with a rifle butt, the commanding officer of the kenpeitai, Hideki
Tagawa, steps out from behind a truck and takes Su Lin aside, speaking to
her. It seems he knows her, and he takes her to the main headquarters of the
Japanese Occupation of Singapore where she agrees to work for them as a
translator. One of the neighbors, a man of Arab descent living in an
expansive mansion, has been murdered. Su Lin comes from the neighborhood.
Her family is an important and powerful Chinese clan, the Chens, controlling
much of the business of the island, and she speaks Japanese, English, Malay,
and some sort of Chinese dialect as well, fluently. It is agreed that Su
Lin's uncle will be freed if she is able to find out who the murderer was.
As we get into the story it seems that the Japanese would
like to take on the role of the English who had been driven from Sngapore.
The Japanese are no longer mindlessly killing people, throwing them into
concentration camps. Now they would like to pacify the population, establish
reliable systems of government.
The plot of the story is derived from the real-life Operation Jaywick. A group of 14 commandos took a
small Japanese
fishing boat and sailed from Western Australia to Singapore, disguised
as Japanese fishermen. In the night they attached magnetic explosive mines
to the hulls of seven small ships. They were cargo and tanker ships. No
warships. Three were sunk, but one of those was salvaged; the other four
ships only had relatively minor damage. The commandos then sailed back to
Australia to be greeted as heroes. Things were not so happy in Singapore.
The Japanese could not believe that such an attack could be mounted from so
far away. It must have been "terrorists" in the local population. Hundreds
of people were rounded up and horribly tortured and killed. Extremes of
suffering for such minor, even meaningless results.
The story of the book changes these details. Most of the
ships have become warships. The one exception is a cargo ship containing
some sort of treasure being transported to the Japanese motherland, and the
murdered Arabian had something to do with stealing it. In the end it turns
out that the supreme Japanese commander on the island was behind everything.
But more than this, Hideki Tagawa asserts that Su Lin is
his cousin. Her mother (both her parents are long since dead) was Tagawa's
long lost sister. Su Lin hates him and she hates the Japanese. Surely this
is just an absurd story he has made up to manipulate her. But he shows her a
photo taken when he was a child and his sister was a young woman. She
recognizes him in the photo and sees herself in the image of the sister.
Was the picture "photo-shopped" using whatever means they
had in those days for cutting and pasting photographic film? If so, who was
the model in the photo looking so like Su Lin? On the other hand, although
this book was advertised in amazon as the "Su Lin Series Book 1", it seems
that it is not really the first book of the series. In fact the first book
is "The Frangipani Tree Mystery" which is supposed to be the "Crown Colony
Book 1" of the author. I have now read that book and it is clear that it
gives much of the background to the present story. But one thing does remain
a mystery. In the Crown Colony Book 1 it is mentioned in passing something
about Su Lin's various aunts on her mother's side. It is certainly not said
that they are all Japanese women. Also it is not implied that they are the
Japanese prostitutes which are mentioned in the Betel Nut Tree Mystery
(Crown Colony Book 2). No. It is implied that they are part of the Chinese
community. I suspect that this is an unintended mystery, and if it were to
be pointed out to the author she would tell us that it of no importance.
The
Frangipani Tree Mystery
This is the first book in the series. It is 1936
and Su Lin has finished school, having passed an exam to obtain the General
Cambridge Certificate. Su Lin's family expect her to marry and become a part
of the Chen clan, having children, cooking, cleaning. But she wants other
things. Perhaps to become a reporter or at least a secretary. The sister of
the Governor, Miss Vanessa Palin, is more or less in charge of the school.
She also believes that women can do more than simply sit at home and so she
arranges a possible job for Su Lin as a housekeeper for Chief Inspector Le
Froy, the head of the police in Singapore, possibly leading to further
opportunities. But suddenly the interview with Le Froy is interrupted with
the news that Charity Byrne, a young woman who had been brought over from
Ireland to look after the mentally retarded daughter of the Governor, has
fallen from a balcony of the Governor's mansion, killing herself. Le Froy
drives quickly to the scene together with Su Lin. It is soon established
that the body of Charity has a knife wound in its side.
Unusually for a "native", Su Lin is allowed to enter the
inner rooms of the mansion along with Le Froy. She wanders out and finds the
daughter who has retreated somewhere into the forest, establishes a rapport
with the retarded young woman and ends up living in the house for weeks,
looking after her. And so she is able to observe things from the inside. The
seemingly idle, useless Governor's son. The always correct Miss Vanessa. The
Governor's wife who has grown fat, angry with everything, especially the
"black" natives and the tropics in general, and the Governor himself who
does more than simply admire attractive young women.
All of this leads to an explosive end which Su Lin
survives to become the valued assistant of Chief Inspector Le Froy.
The
Betel Nut Tree Mystery
King Edward VIII abdicated from the throne of England at
the end of 1936 in order to marry the American divorcee, Wallis Simpson.
Something which was considered a scandal. The story of this book imagines a
more or less analogous business taking place in Singapore. We have the son
of an aristocratic English family arriving with his American divorcee
fiancee, together with her small son and a further retinue of various
characters. The prospective groom laughs and plays practical jokes,
inconveniencing other people. Suddenly he is found dead in the hotel. And so
we are introduced to a strange collection of unpleasant people. The fiancee
is extremely, offensively egocentric. There is the best friend of the
murdered man who is perhaps in love with the fiancee. And then the best
friend of Su Lin falls in love with that best friend. Eventually he also
dies. The father-in-law of the prospective bride seems to be only concerned
with his grandson. But is it really his grandson? Some of the scenes in the
hotel resemble a slap-stick comedy. I began to wonder why I am reading this,
but I did read through to the end. It was a diversion.
The
Paper Bark Tree Mystery
It is now one or two years later. The Japanese have
invaded China and are reported to be committing atrocities. Yet the English
administration of Singapore forbids any criticism of Japan for fear of
offending the Japanese. Le Froy has been trying to keep track of suspicious
Japanese activities in Malaya, but he has been disciplined for doing this.
He has lost his position. Various administrators have been brought in from
India. They are only concerned with putting down the Indian "terrorists" who
are seeking Indian independence. All Indians in Singapore are considered
potential terrorists and are arrested, or at least brought in for
questioning. The person who has replaced Le Froy has fired Su Lin, saying
that no natives are to be trusted. But then he is found one morning murdered
in the "shack" where the police records are kept...
Why am I reading this stuff?
Reading a novel transports us out of ourselves into an
imaginary story, a dream, showing us what life might be like in a different
world. This might be pure diversion, especially if it's a nice story. Or we
might think of problems with life which we hadn't thought about before. And
then we might find real life to be not so pleasant and hope for a story
which brings us out of this real world.
And so I'm not really in the mood for a story which is
depressing or just plain frivolous and silly.
The German Foreign Minister - that seemingly immature,
thoughtless woman, Annalena Baerbock - has announced to the world in the
forum of the European Parliament that Germany is at war with Russia. German
battle tanks are to be rolling through Ukraine again in the direction of
Stalingrad (or Volgograd) as if we are in a time-warp of 80 years; it is
January 1943 and the Wehrmacht is on the move, led on by a modern-day
goddess of victory, Germania, saving the Earth, if not from carbon dioxide,
at least from the scourge of Slavic hoards. No thought is given to how this
war has been provoked over the last 15 or 20 years; about the deceptions of
that woman before her, Mrs. Merkel, pretending to guarantee the Minsk
agreements. And so hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are being sacrificed
for nothing. The newspapers, television, radio in Germany are saturated with
a single, unified clamor for more war, more weapons, aircraft, rockets,
longer range. Blow those Russians to smithereens!
As more and more longer range rockets are thrown into the
fight we can imagine what will happen as the salvos increase. How are the
Russians to distinguish a salvo of "conventional" rockets from a salvo of
atomic bombs in a massive "first strike"? After all, various elements in
Washington have been openly fantasizing about how wonderful such a thing
would be. There are hundreds of American atomic bombs stationed in Germany.
Heaven knows how many are in Poland and the Baltic countries. The Russians
would only have 2 or 3 minutes to decide whether or not to quickly launch
their counter-strike before it would be hit by the incoming atomic bombs.
There is no time. The launch decision will be decided automatically by
computer remote control. Life has become an absurd theater of horror. Will
we survive this madness?
Breath, by
James Nestor
After all those thoughts this book is a breath of
fresh air. What can we say about breathing? We all do it. Otherwise we
wouldn't be alive. It's trivial. As far as medicine is concerned (according
to the book, and I can well believe it is true) it doesn't matter how you
breathe: through the nose, the mouth, through a tube, it's all the same.
Just draw air into the lungs and blow it out. Nothing could be simpler.
But how can some people hold their breath for 10 minutes,
or free dive in the ocean for minutes at a time? The book doesn't tell us
how they do this. But it does tell us about the one very basic thing which
many people no longer do. Namely:
SHUT YOUR MOUTH
Beginning in 1830, the painter George Catlin traveled among the Indians - or Native
Americans - living with different tribes throughout the Americas. He admired
their perfect physiques, the symmetry of their faces and their general
physical health. And everywhere he was told that this was due to breathing
through the nose, not the mouth. Breathing through the mouth leads to
congestion throughout the head and all sorts of different consequences which
are explained in the book.
Some time ago I did look at a video of someone giving a
talk about the Buteyko
method which also emphasized the importance of breathing through the
nose. But it also involved stopping breathing for as many seconds as
possible, holding the breath until it became uncomfortable. Something about
carbon dioxide. The instructor said that mouth breathing causes crooked
teeth, asthma, colds, and all sorts of other things. But the remedy with all
that breath holding seemed so unpleasant. I've now made it to 75 years old
and I'm still Ok with breathing the way I always have, so why bother?
James Nestor gives a much broader view of all of this.
Not breathing properly through the nose might have much to do with it, but
crooked teeth also result from soft, mushy, overly processed food and no
chewing. Perhaps processed sugar not only ruins the teeth but distorts much
else of the body's metabolism. As the facial bones degenerate, becoming
smaller and thinner, the eyes sag, become baggy. The jaw recedes.
We are then told of the mechanism the body has for
distributing oxygen throughout the system. It is regulated by carbon
dioxide. This is the Bohr
effect. If there is not enough carbon dioxide in the blood then the
amount of oxygen being transported to the cells of the body decreases.
Therefore we should breath slowly through the nose allowing the carbon
dioxide in the blood to reach a healthy level. The example of athletes being
tested on an ergometer - an exercise machine - is described. In the first
test they breathed "normally", gasping for breath through the mouth as well
as the nose. Then the test was repeated with only nose breathing and they
were astonished to find that they then performed better.
I found this difficult to believe. I usually jog about 5
or 6 kilometers, which I run a couple of times each week. In the middle is a
little hill and I'm always totally out of breath after climbing it. I have
to walk for a few minutes to get my breath back, breathing heavily, before
continuing to run. And so, inspired by the book, I decided to see how far I
could get by only breathing through the nose. It is winter here, cold, wet,
so the eyes water, going through the nasolacrimal duct to the nose, restricting nose
breathing even more than is otherwise the case. I had expected to have to
gasp for breath after only a hundred meters or so, like trying to hold my
breath for a minute or more. But no! I was probably jogging a little slower
than usual, and my lungs were missing that cold hit which the air when
quickly inhaled through the mouth provides. There was even a minor feeling
of suffocation from the increased carbon dioxide and the effort of inhaling
through the nose. Yet I could keep on going without stopping, and I even
jogged up the hill more easily that usual. I was able to complete the whole
workout without once opening my mouth. Afterwards the muscles felt less
tired than usual. So there you are! I have decided to become like an
American Indian and keep my mouth closed.
The book also tells us to often breath deeply. It has
been found that the size of the lungs is decisive for health. The larger the
lungs, the more healthy you are and the longer you live. And so I thought to
bring out my favorite flute and just enjoy breathing into it, playing
through a few of the pieces I used to play before taking up the viol in
retirement. But in order not to interrupt the flow of the music it seems
impossible to avoid quickly inhaling through the mouth as well as the nose.
Oh well... Nothing is perfect. People say that there is an analogy between
the flute and bowed stringed instruments. The breath flowing over the far
edge of the embouchure hole is like the bow being drawn across the string,
and then the lungs and the spaces in the nose and the sinuses are like the
resonant body of the viol.
The second half of the book is titled "Breathing+". All
those things about Buddhist monks and their extreme endurance. The
techniques of Wim
Hof. This involves the opposite of the breathing technique which was
described in the first part of the book. Hyperventilating. Subjecting the
body into a directed stress. The traditional technique of the peoples of the
Himalayas is known as Tummo. There is a YouTube video of a young man who is a teacher of
Tummo. I can imagine that he might be an American Indian. An ideal young
man. A wonderfully proportioned face and body, in harmony with himself and
the world. A model of good breathing.
Galileo, by
J.L. Heilbon
Galileo's father was Vincenzo Galilei, a lute virtuoso and philosopher of
music of the renaissance. Of course the lute was the most important
instrument in the music of those days. Galileo, the son, often accompanied
his father on the lute, and so he became himself a well-known virtuoso. In
those days musicians were subjected to the whims of the local prince or
duke, or catholic bishop. Money was withheld and only obtained after a
certain amount of begging, leaving the musician and his family half
destitute. And thus Vincenzo decided that Galileo should become a medical
doctor. After all, doctors can always be expected to become rich. But
Galileo didn't like medicine. As a way out he slid into mathematics. This is
also often a formula for poverty, but Galileo combined this with literature,
theology, astrology, of course music and so forth, becoming a renaissance
man and a professor of all those things, but especially mathematics, at the
University of Pisa at the age of 25.
Galileo wrote numbers of books on various subjects, and
lots of letters to various people, expounding on all his ideas. And then
there are the archives of the Vatican which in those days was concerning
itself with the Counter-Reformation and the Inquisition, producing
further reams of paper in the style of the East German STASI on everybody in
Italy, including Galileo. As a result the biographer has much to draw from
in his description of the hero. One possibility would be to ignore all of
that boring detail and instead tell a good story, bringing in the juicy
details which the life of Galileo certainly could provide, given a
sufficient amount of literary fantasy. Our author, J.L. Heilbon, decided
instead to fill his biography with long verbatim quotes (in translation)
from all of those sources, providing us with a book containing much tedious
detail and little fantasy. There are pages and pages of schoolbook geometry,
giving us diagrams of the circles, lines, triangles and squares which
Galileo published, together with lots of sentences in the style of: let ABC
be a triangle and CF be a line bisecting AB, etc., etc... I don't know how
to reproduce such texts in the HTML language. Perhaps it would be possible
to integrate a TeX file into these writings here, but I don't know how to do
that. When reading the book I skipped over much of the text, feeling sorry
for the students of those days at the University of Pisa who had to master
such things. But while skipping through these things I did stop at a certain
point and tried to verify what was being quoted.
Apparently, if I understood what was being said, it seems
that Galileo asserted that a pendulum of fixed length always swings with a
given fixed period, regardless of the amplitude of the swing. But as
everybody knows, that is false! Therefore I wondered where Galileo's mistake
lay. Again there were pages of text filled with elementary geometric
assertions. And I was struck by the Figure 4.6, reproduced in the book. Now
it is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. But in mathematics, one
can also say that a picture is a thousand times more likely to produce a
mistake. Despite this I would have liked to include the Figure here.
However, after spending 4 or 5 minutes looking at the LibreOffice Draw
software on my computer, and thus realizing that I would have to spend 4 or
5 hours in order to work out how to make such a drawing, I have instead
decided to describe the drawing with words.
Let ACF be a right angled triangle. Let AC and AF be the
sides adjacent to the right angle so that the remaining side, AF is the
hypotenuse. Let us assume that the length of AC is some number r, and it is
less than the length of CF. Let K be a circle with radius r and center-point
C. The hypotenuse AF intersects the circle K in some point D between A and
F. Then the text preceding this Figure asserts that "if you remember your
Euclid, you know that AD·AF=2AC²". I assume this must be a direct quotation
from something of Galileo. At first it almost seems plausible. After all,
AD<r and AF>r, so perhaps it is some kind of obscure generalization of
the Pythagorean Theorem. Remembering that in this kind of geometry, products
are represented by geometrical areas, I started drawing quadrangles,
triangles, looking for similar triangles and all that. Did Euclid really
prove such a theorem? After wasting a half hour and three or four pieces of
paper on this fruitless exercise I decided to do the thing properly and
think of simple trigonometry, immediately seeing that the assertion is
false.
But there were some interesting things in the book. For
example we have Archimedes and his "eureka" moment. I had always wondered
how Archimedes could so precisely measure the volume of water displaced by
the crown in the story. As described in the book, and also in a long-winded article of the Wikipedia, Archimedes, and
also Galileo, needed only to take a piece of gold of the same weight as the
crown as measured on a balance in the laboratory. Then both the crown and
the gold piece are submerged in water. If the crown contains lots of silver
- which has a lower specific weight than gold - then the crown will have
more volume than the gold piece. Therefore it will be more buoyant in water
and the balance will tilt toward the gold piece, proving that the crown is
not made of pure gold.
And then we have the story that Galileo stood on top of
the Leaning Tower of Pisa and dropped two objects of different weights,
showing that they descended at the same speed and thus showing that
Aristotle was wrong. But this is not at all what the true story was.
Aristotle was the required text to be taught at universities. Yet it was
generally recognized to be false, and what was worse, it contradicted much
of the teachings of the Bible. Thus Saint Thomas Aquinas, back in the 13th century,
provided us with an official interpretation of Aristotle, making it
more acceptable for Christianity and - more or less - for physics. At the
time of Galileo, lots of people were dropping all sorts of weights from
buildings and interpreting the way they were falling in one way or another.
This was the Great Problem of Motion. For example it was asserted that if we
have a piece of wood and a piece of iron of the same weight, then the wood
will fall more quickly than the iron. The experiment is difficult to
perform. Perhaps the wood slips out of the hand faster than the iron, or
not. The reason given for the assertion that wood falls more quickly is that
wood contains more air than iron (remembering that everything is composed of
the four elements: air, water, earth and fire). And compressed air in the
wood is heavier than normal air, so it falls faster... or something. Maybe
it was also thought that iron contains more fire which tends to rise, thus
slowing the rate of descent (although that possible argument was not quoted
in the text). All of this produced heated arguments and counter arguments.
Lots of bad feelings. Galileo was always quick to take offense. And then
there were all sorts of similar arguments about other natural phenomena. I
began to skip lightly through through the book, gliding over this nonsense.
Some things were reasonable, others, such as Galileo's theory of tides, not
so.
Of course Galileo was a big fan of the Copernican world
view. Copernicus
lived a hundred years before Galileo, so it was not as if this was a
startling new idea. In fact the official view of the Roman Catholic Church
was that all of these theories about astronomy had nothing really to do with
the church. After all, Aristotle had asserted that the heavenly objects are
perfect spheres and the fixed stars are fixed on a rigid metal sphere, and
all that, which is obviously nonsense. It was all interpreted away by Saint
Thomas as being of no significance for theology, and therefore the church
had no particular position on the question. Copernicus' book was widely
circulated and debated throughout Italy for a century before Galileo came
along.
The problem was that Galileo had become famous by
developing the telescope which had been first constructed in Holland, and he
looked through it at night. He saw that the moon had mountains; he
discovered four small moons of Jupiter; he discovered, or at least
described, sunspots. All of these things were considered to be sensational.
Galileo was a very devoted catholic and he was good
friends with the Pope Paul V who, unfortunately, died in 1621. The
successor, Gregory XV didn't last long, and then came Urban VIII in 1623. A
very touchy person. Quick to anger, as was the now famous Galileo himself.
Urban developed a hatred for Galileo for some obscure reason. And unlike
these days where those princes of religion with their outlandish costumes
and elaborate ceremonies are not taken seriously, back in the days of the
Inquisition the popes could have people burned at the stake at the drop of a
hat, or an imagined affront. Thus the story that after signing his
confession, Galileo was supposed to have murmured "and yet it moves", is
certainly not true. Tycho Brahe's model with the Earth at the center of the
Universe, the Sun and the Moon orbiting the Earth, and everything else
orbiting the Sun, is of course completely equivalent to Copernicus' model
through a trivial change of frame of reference. And Urban VIII declared
Brahe's model to be acceptable, so the controversy was about nothing. The
whole business resulted in a retreat from science in Italy for at least a
hundred years, during which time progress was made in the northerly lands of
Europe which had rejected the Catholic Church and all of its abuses.
This book caught my eye owing to its title. "Z" is
the symbol of the Russian war in Ukraine. But it has nothing at all to do
with that mess. Instead it is concerned with Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, the British explorer,
and his quest for the lost land of El Dorado which he decided to think about as the "Lost
City of Z" for some reason. In 1925 he disappeared into the Amazon jungle
together with his son and his son's friend, never to be seen again.
Looking at the Wikipedia page of the author, we see a flabby middle-aged man, the
antithesis of the intrepid explorer. Yet he traveled to Brazil, to Dead
Horse Camp and beyond, the last known position of Fawcett, in order to
research this book. For David Grann the excursion was infinitely more
comfortable than it had been for Fawcett and his companions. The jungle has
been done away with, replaced with vast open fields of soybeans. He tells us
that his car and driver had to negotiate the mud and rut holes in the roads
leading to Dead Horse Camp. And then there was the problem of getting to the
Indian village which was rumored to be the place where Fawcett was killed
all those years ago. This was more complicated. It was in a part of the
jungle which still existed and was a protected area. The Indian tribes were
left alone and outsiders were only allowed in under very special
circumstances. David Grann was able to obtain a guide who was familiar with
the local people and who acted as translator. They traveled for hours along
the Upper Xingu river in a boat with outboard motor, finally stopping to
walk a few hundred meters inland to the village of the Kalapalos Indians.
The local chief told him that Fawcett and his two
companions were not killed by their tribe, but rather by the neighbors who
were much more brutal. Be that as it may, the author met up with Michael Heckenberger, an anthropologist of the
University of Florida who studies the Kalapalos people and has himself
become a member of the tribe. He has identified vast structures, mounds in
the earth, indicative of large interconnected settlements: the Kuhikugu archeological site. This might have been the
civilization glimpsed by early Spanish explorers, the legendary El Dorado.
Fawcett's "Z". The inhabitants must have been wiped out by the diseases
brought by the Europeans, degenerating into small, brutal tribes, killing
all intruders, in particular the Spanish. Since there is a lack of stones in
the Amazon, their cities were made of wood and earthworks. The former
disappearing into the jungle growth and the later gradually subsiding. All
of this is the subject of Heckenberger's research.
But the main part of the book is a biography of Percy
Fawcett and his world of the Amazon in the early 1900s. A man of extreme
physical fitness and determination. Unlike today, an expedition was totally
on its own. Dark clouds of mosquitoes biting everything; worms which
penetrated under the skin, growing there, spreading throughout the body;
poisonous snakes; brutal cannibalistic Indians; hunger and thirst. It was a
paradox that the jungle was full of dangerous life, but almost none of it
was suitable for eating - at least for the explorers who were not familiar
with the ways of the Indians. Most of the people who tried to explore the
Amazon never returned.
We are left with the vision of a vast, forgotten
civilization. The City of Z.
This is a retelling, or paraphrasing, of Jane
Eyre, that classical 19th century romance for lonely girls, brought
into a more or less modern setting. We have the orphaned heroine. The
decrepit, ancient English mansion consumed by fire, consuming an insane
female. The disfigurement of the beloved. In the original, Mr. Rochester is
blinded but also freed of poor old Bertha. (I much preferred Jean Rhys' Wide
Sargasso Sea, showing how the sensitive Antoinette is converted by the
evil Mr. Rochester into the tragic figure of Bertha.) Diana Setterfield's
Adeline is evil from birth, leaving her complacent twin sister Emmeline to
be disfigured by fire, and to be loved by the destitute half sister, Vida
Winter, the version of Jane Eyre for the present story.
These fires, killings of unwanted rivals, is long in the
past. Vida Winter is now an old woman in her 80s, in the process of dying.
She is England's greatest living novelist, having written a book a year,
each volume selling millions, being translated into countless foreign
languages and being sold in their millions as well. She must be as rich as
J.K. Rowling, or even very much richer. She lives in a huge house somewhere
in the English countryside, surrounded by huge gardens, servants. The
not-quite-twin, the disfigured, mentally disturbed Emmeline, lives in a
secret wing of the house, lovingly attended to by the housekeeper.
But all of this is just a framework for telling us the
real story which is about the mystical relationship of twins with one
another. The book starts off by telling us about Margaret Lea, living in an
antiquarian bookshop in Cambridge (if I remember rightly) with her father,
reading sought-after and rare editions of Jane Eyre and also some of
the novels of Wilkie Collins, and so on. We are told that she was the
dominant half of a Siamese twin; at birth the other half was cut away,
leaving Margaret alive but with the feeling of guilt, loneliness, longing
for her murdered other half. She goes on and on about this. Where is her
other half? Is she waiting in the other world, beyond death? How is
life possible alone? Everything is depression. Her mother has fallen into a
deep, lasting depression, rejecting Margaret, mooning after the lost other
half. Only her father tries to be a bit sensible. And then when the story
gets going it is also all about the twins Adeline and Emmeline. How they
long for each other and how they suffer from separation. I began to wonder
what it is that the author has about twins. Does she have a twin obsession?
Almost all the rest of us do not have a twin, and even most twins are not
identical twins. It is normal not to be a twin.
Margaret receives a letter from Vida Winter, asking her
to write her biography. And so the story begins, immersing us into the world
of both Jane Eyre and of twins, further than we had really wanted to
go.
A Japanese novel about forestry. The narrator,
Yuki, has just finished school in the big city of Yokohama, not doing well.
And so he is suddenly confronted with the fact that his parents and school
teachers have gotten him a job working in the mountain forests at an obscure
place called Kamusari, without asking him. He goes there, is placed under
the tutelage of Yoki, lives in Yoki's house together with his wife Miho, and
gets to know all the other people in the village as well. Gradually he
learns all about how forestry is done in Japan. He becomes strong and learns
to love life in the forest, becoming accepted as a member of the village. He
falls in love with the school teacher, Nao, who, unfortunately, at least at
first, rejects him. Nao is secretly in love with Seiichi, the owner of all
the forestry land, but who also goes out every day to work in the forest
along with everybody else. Seiichi is married and is a very honorable person
so that Nao's secret love is in vain. Towards the end, Nao does consent to
go for the occasional walk with Yuki, so there is hope. The book is written
in a simple, almost juvenile style, as if it is a book for children. This
may be the style of the translator; perhaps it does not reflect the style of
the original.
We learn lots about how forestry is done in Japan. The
workers continually walk around the mountain, cutting down "weeds" with
scythes, climbing up the trees with ropes to cut off lower branches in order
to have the trees growing straight with few knots in the wood. All of this
labor must make the final lumber which is the product of the whole business
extremely expensive. We are told that wood which is imported into Japan is
much cheaper, but this domestic wood is considered to be of a more pure
quality. Of course the whole thing is not a "forest", rather it is a tree
plantation, or farm. There is a sacred mountain where nature is left to
itself. Yuki is overwhelmed by all the life and growth in this real forest.
At the end of the book the men of the village march up to near the top of
the sacred mountain to chop down a gigantic, thousand year old tree. Then
they climb on top of it and slide down the mountain, risking their lives in
a kind of wild toboggan ride. I wonder how the huge log with a diameter of 3
or 4 meters is supposed to be prevented from rolling over, crushing
everybody. Such destruction serves to honor the god of the mountain.
In Australia, south of Eden on Twofold Bay, there is a
huge logging operation. There is certainly no "weeding" or any of that. The
native bush - it's not called forest - is completely cleared away with
bulldozers in some given plot of a few hectares, and the whole thing is
shredded into wood chips to be sent to Japan to make paper. Then the land is
left to regenerate by itself for a sufficient amount of time, "weeds" and
all. Maybe these days the wood chips are just burned. Here in Germany
burning wood chips for heating houses is applauded by the voters of the
Green Party, despite the fact that it causes increased levels of pollution.
Germans make much of their forests, or "Wälder". When I
first arrived in the Spring of 1975 I was astonished at the intense green of
the forests. And yet everywhere it was said that the forests were dying.
"Waldsterben". They have been continuously dying between then and now. Fifty
years ago they were dying due to acid rain, or smog, global cooling, or
something. Now they are dying due to climate change. People are continuously
concerned about the death of the forests. And yet for some reason there is
now more forest here than there was 50 years ago. Some real forests are left
alone and are full of thick vegetation. In fact, as I understand it, in
places where people are afraid to go - for example in those countries of the
Balkans where they are continuously cutting each others throats, or around
Chernobyl - the forests are absolutely thriving. The problem in Germany is
that most of the trees are in privately owned tree plantations. And it was
thought that planting fir trees would give the most profit. Fir trees are
not really suited to this climate. The natural vegetation is oak and beech
and lots of other things. Hard wood. But that grows more slowly with lots of
curved branches. Not so good for building slanted roofs or wooden
partitions. And so the fir trees, planted in rows of mono-culture, are weak,
tending to sickness. Given a nice warm summer then the owners of the tree
plantations complain. Their trees are attacked by beetles; they fall down
together in their rows and columns if a storm wind blows. People panic. They
spray the tree plantations with pesticides from helicopters. They vote for
the Greens. And they cannot see the healthy natural forests which are
thriving next to all those unnatural tree plantations.
I found this book in a list of the 20 best
biographies. It is as much concerned with the husband, the author, as with
Véra. Both were born at the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries in the
old Saint Petersburg into very wealthy families, living just a block or two
from one another but first meeting in the 1920s in exile in Berlin.
Vladimir's ancient and aristocratic family occupied a huge city mansion, and in fact when an uncle died,
Vladimir, at the age of 16, was bequeathed a magnificent country estate. But all of this was lost to
communism, leaving the family in exile with practically nothing. As a young
man Vladimir was handsome, athletic. A championship tennis player. Even as a
teenager he published books of his poetry. The family first went to England
where Vladimir entered Cambridge at Trinity College and studied zoology and
languages while the others moved to France. Later Vladimir moved to the
large emigrant Russian colony in Berlin where he existed writing books of
Russian poetry and giving tennis lessons to the other Russians in the city.
He fell in love with one beautiful young Russian aristocratic woman after
the other, becoming engaged, but ultimately rejected as the penniless poet
with no future by those families who had had the foresight to take out
enough money in time. He was proud of the fact that although he was fluent
in both English and French, he was unable, and refused to learn, German,
despite the fact that he lived in Berlin for perhaps 10 years until the
Nazis came to power.
Véra's family was Jewish; also very wealthy. And as with
the Nabokovs, almost all was lost in the emigration. Véra was fluent in
various languages, including German, and so she was working as a translator
in Berlin. When they first met Vladimir was just recovering from the
rejection of his latest marriage engagement. In his impulsive, poetic way,
he declared himself to be totally in love with Véra. She was in love with
him. They were together in tiny, uncomfortable apartments. The other Russian
aristocrats thought it a minor scandal that he was together with a Jewish
woman, but life had been overturned anyway, and they married with little
ceremony. Véra devoted herself to Vladimir. He was a genius. The
greatest Russian writer of the century, and indeed this view was shared by
others in the Berlin colony. Véra continued to earn barely enough with
translations, but she also became Vladimir's secretary, typing drafts of his
manuscripts. And so life went on.
As it became clear that life in Berlin would be
impossible, Vladimir traveled to Paris and London, trying to find publishers
for his writings, giving talks. After 10 years of marriage to Véra,
separated on one of these trips, he fell completely in love with Irina
Guadanini, another young Russian aristocratic woman... Drama. Tragedy. He
eventually returned to Véra, rejecting his new love with Irina, and she
became an embittered woman, withdrawing into herself, growing old and
isolated. We have the feeling that Vladimir simply remained with Véra for
the convenience of her devotion, her typing and her dealing with all the
practical aspects of life. For the rest of his life Vladimir pretended that
he was unable to deal with anything practical. He could not drive a car; he
could not use the telephone; he could not write letters. All of these things
were for Véra. And she devoted herself to them and to him so that he found
that he also loved her devotedly. They became inseparable.
At the last minute they escaped from Paris to the United
States where he was able to obtain a temporary position at Wellesley College, lecturing to the adoring young
female students about literature. He also gave occasional talks at Harvard
and eventually obtained a permanent position at Cornell University. Much of
the book is devoted to this phase of their lives.
To be quite frank, I often wonder why there are faculties
of literature at most universities. I enjoy reading these things for various
reasons which I've often mentioned here. It is pleasant to read stories,
usually more so than watching a movie or even talking to others, listening
to their stories. But when did the idea arise that literature should be more
than a pleasant diversion and instead become a serious academic field of
study? What is the point of such studies? Certainly before the 19th century,
novels were considered to be nothing more than trivial ways to pass the
time. Something to chat about in idle moments.
It seems that the Nabokovs wrote out in detail, perhaps
word for word, the lectures he spoke at Cornell. And then Véra came to each
of his lectures, often sitting in front of the students, being introduced as
his "assistant". She filled in details, erased the blackboard, helped him
while he pretended to be helpless. Apparently it was a popular performance
and his lectures were very well attended. Students were astonished to learn
that Véra was his wife. And I find the whole thing difficult to imagine. Who
ever heard of someones wife - or husband as the case may be - intimately
taking part in ones lectures like that? The idea seems impossible, bizarre.
And then at home Véra spent sleepless days and nights, typing up these
lectures and the other writings of Vladimir, as well as cooking for him,
looking after their son, Dimitri, keeping the house clean and tidy, driving
Vladimir to the faculty and back. Always trying to stay in the background;
only Vladimir was important. Gradually some began to suspect that Véra had
also taken over some of Vladimir's writing, an idea she always vehemently
disputed. During the holidays Véra drove the family out West to the wide
expanses of America, and Vladimir pottered about with his hobby: collecting
butterflies. Véra was staunchly anti-communist. She applauded Joseph
McCarthy and was indignant about the fact that he had fallen from grace. She
was proud and vocal about her Jewish ancestry, while Vladimir floated above
such things.
Up to this point Nabokov was just one of the many obscure
immigrant intellectuals filling posts at American universities. All of this
changed with Lolita, propelling Vladimir into instant celebrity, if
not notoriety. He continued to write. His Pnin, which I enjoyed so much, was written after Lolita.
The income from Cornell was no longer needed. Gradually they sought a place
to settle in Europe, ending up in the Montreux Palace Hotel in 1961 and living there on a
permanent basis until his death in 1977. Véra continued typing for him,
driving him about as his chauffeur, dealing with all the disputes with
publishers, taxation problems (they had taken out American citizenship, thus
creating permanent tax difficulties for themselves), all of the details of
the translations of Nabokov's various novels into countless other languages,
and so on... while Vladimir remained in his role as the helpless genius.
After Vladimir's death, Véra stayed in the Palace Hotel another 14 years
until she also passed away.
I must read a few more of Nabokov's books.
Pale Fire, by
Vladimir Nabokov
Clicking in to Amazon to download this book,
nothing happened. I wondered what the problem was. But then I noticed a text
telling me that I had already "bought" this book from them. Indeed, some
years ago, perhaps just after I had read Pnin, I must have started
reading this one, but I see that I soon gave up. This time, having read all
about the lives of Vladimir and Véra, I was determined to push on to the
end.
It starts off with a 999 line poem. I was going to write
that it is a nonsense poem written as a joke, but perhaps the professors of
literature in all the universities of the world would admonish us to take it
seriously. The story is that the poem was written by John Shade, a professor
of literature at an American university. In fact the scene seems to that of
Cornell University. This book was written by Nabokov after he had become
rich and famous with his Lolita. He was freed of the constraints of
academic life and could make fun of his former colleagues.
After wading through these 999 lines we then have a much
longer prose exposition which is that of Charles Kinbote, a neighbor of
Shade in this imaginary Cornell and a colleague of his in its Faculty of
Literature. Shade has died after completing the poem and Kinbote is editing
it for publication, or whatever. He rambles on and on. Obscure nonsense for
page after page about an imaginary country named Zembla which has some of
the attributes of Russia, but many attributes not of Russia. How he was a
close friend of Shade, although Shade despised him. How he is secretly so
much more wonderful than the others in the Faculty. And so on. I made it
further into the book than was the case at my last attempt, but well before
the end I could not avoid the question of why I was wasting so much time on
such nonsense. And thus I stopped. But looking at the number of stars people
give the book at amazon.com, I see that I am nearly alone in this. And
therefore, once again, I realize that I am living in a completely different
world from that which all of you other people seem to occupy.
In my world I interpret this book as being the product of
an excess of egotistical exuberance on the part of the author in that phase
of his life. In the previous book we saw that whenever Vladimir or Véra were
asked about their favorite authors or books, they could honestly only think
of Vladimir. All other authors were dreadful, or at least inferior. Vladimir
was everything.
Well, it is true that he was perhaps the best in his
style: the witty satire. But there are many other styles in literature. For
example the Nabokovs made fun of Jane Austen as being a dreadful writer of
rubbish. But in her style surely any sensible person would say she was
wonderful. I enjoyed reading her books. This present book, Pale Fire,
in the style of Nabokov, is for me rubbish.
Pale Fire was mentioned often in the previous
biography of the Nabokovs, but also the classic Russian novel A Hero of
our Time was often mentioned. The Nabokovs must have had a good
opinion of the author, so I'll read that next to see what it's all about.
This was first published in Russian in 1840. There
is a translation by Vladimir, together with his son Dimitri Nabokov; it may
well be better than the one I have read, but this one was freely
downloadable from Gutenberg.org. We can read about the author here. Lermentov was a member of the Russian
aristocracy, as was the Hero of his book, Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin.
They both became officers in the Russian army after a difficult childhood.
The author, Lermentov, served in the Caucasian mountains, having been exiled
there after his taking part in a duel - which was of course illegal. And
this book is set in the Caucasus. Lermentov was killed in another duel which
he had provoked by insulting a former friend for attiring himself in native
costume. Thus the author's life and death follows the plot of his novel,
with the twist that in the novel, Pechorin coldly shoots his opponent after
complicated disputes on the conduct of the duel, disappearing into the mists
of the mountains.
Beautiful, young, wealthy, aristocratic women throw
themselves at Pechorin, princesses, countesses, provoking the envy of the
other officers and husbands. He treats them all with cold disdain. And the
author was similarly the object of desire of young, wealthy and aristocratic
women. The novel was criticized at the time of publication for its senseless
lack of morality, but this was part of the Byronic tradition of the romantic
age.
We are among the mountains in the south of Russia with
their countless, violent tribal people. There are spa resorts filled with
visitors from Saint Petersberg and Moscow, taking the waters, reminding us
of the ancient traditions of Russian society.
The narrator is the half brother of the writer
Sebastian Knight. Despite his name, Knight was a Russian, born to an
aristocratic family at the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries. In exile
he studies literature at Cambridge (was it Trinity College?). The half
brother, known only as "V" - he doesn't want to tell us his name or any
other personal details - lives in France, having little contact with
Sebastian. Just a letter every year or two, although Sebastian, who has
become a successful novelist, regularly sends him money. It is now 1938 or
39; Sebastian has died and V has decided to write his biography. Nabokov
wrote the book during that time, before he had moved to America. It is the
first book he wrote in English. It was published in America in 1941.
We learn about the life of Sebastian Knight. He lived
together with Clare Bishop, a woman faithfully devoted to him, typing his
manuscripts, looking after him. I'm not sure if it was said that Clare was
also Russian. Certainly neither her name nor that of Sebastian sounds
Russian. But as with Lenin and Stalin, and even Pushkin, it seems that
Russians are fond of substituting simple pseudonyms for their more complex,
many syllabled real Russian names. During a separation from Clare, Sebastian
meets and falls in love with a mysterious woman. While looking through
Sebastian's old papers, V can find nothing to tell him who this woman was,
and so he sets off on a quest to find her. Eventually he does find Nina
Leclef, living in Paris. It turns out that she is also Russian, despite her
name and her perfect French. She is a deceptive, manipulative woman.
Having just before read the biography of Vladimir and
Véra Nabokov, all of this sounds extremely familiar. Are we completely
misplaced if we think of the following obvious associations?: Vladimir =
Sebastian; Véra = Clare; Irina Guadanini = Nina. Perhaps even adding Sergey
(Valdimir's brother) = V.
The author, Vladimir Nabokov seems to be describing his
life for us: his struggles with the English language; his love for, or at
least the convenience of his life with his wife Véra; his wild infatuation
for Irina Guadanini. I wonder what Véra thought when typing up all this
stuff. Unlike this imaginary story, the real life Vladimir Nabokov stayed
with Véra and lived on for many years, writing his Lolita and all
the rest.
After finding Nina, V is filled with the guilt which
followed Sebastian's death. He dreams about Sebastian and death. He was in
Marseilles in the south of France, in the middle of an intense patch of work
for the firm where he was employed when he received a telegram, telling him
that Sebastian was in a hospital near Paris, near death. V hurries to the
station; many hours on a crowded, filthy train. A taxi drive in the
snowbound, icy night. Only to find that Sebastian had died the day before. V
is obsessed with the thought of death. He has missed it. If only he had been
with Sebastian at the moment of his death. Perhaps Sebastian would have been
able to tell him what death is. To unlock this profound mystery.
Is the presence of death, being near a dying person, the
key to unlocking the mystery? If so, then we would expect hospital doctors
to be enlightened. But my observation (for what little it is and what little
it is worth) is that medical doctors tend to be remarkably unenlightened.
What is the point of being obsessed with death? A diversion from the more
important things of life.
Meena Dave is a woman of Indian descent, early 30s,
a photographer, traveling about the world, her photographs published in
newspapers, magazines. She is an orphan who had been lovingly brought up by
a white American couple who tragically died when their house blew up in a
gas explosion when Meena was 16, after which she was put in an orphanage for
a few years. She learns that she has been granted a legacy in the will of
somebody she doesn't know, thinking it must be something trivial. It turns
out to be an apartment in an extremely luxurious house in the historical
inner city of Boston, worth almost three million dollars. Her first thought
is to sell it and continue with her life of continuous travel, free of
commitments, attachments. She is told what the house is. It is called the
Engineer House. It was started a hundred years ago with a group of Indian
students who were studying at MIT, becoming a kind of fraternity. Most of
the students returned to India to help build the country after independence.
But a few stayed on, having families, agreeing on specific legal conditions
regarding the ownership of the house and the 5 or 6 apartments it contained.
Apartments could not be sold to outsiders. The ownership of an apartment
passed on to the eldest child of an occupant when that eldest child reached
the age of 25. But what had Meena to do with that?
She learns that the previous owner of the apartment was a
woman who had died childless. All of the other people in the house are of
pure Indian descent. They seem to have lots of money. Everything is clean,
perfect. They do everything together, keeping their Indian traditions,
cooking Indian food. While the front door is kept locked, the doors to the
apartments remain unlocked and the people move freely between the
apartments, often not bothering to knock. It is a perfect little Indian
village, not spoiled by all the dirt, squalor, bickering, of a real Indian
village in India.
Meena decides to keep the apartment and try living in it.
Across the corridor is a wonderful, handsome, young man who would be the
perfect partner for Meena. There are three older women in their 50s who
gradually initiate Meena into all the wonderful things of Indian culture. It
is a nice story. And there is the mystery of who Meena is; who were her
biological parents, why was she given away as a baby into adoption? What has
it to do with the Engineers House? At the end all is revealed and everybody
lives happily ever after.
But there are a number of problems with this story. To
begin with, in the real world Meena would have had to pay a million or more
in inheritance tax; impossible, given her situation. Apart from that, my
skeptical mind dwelled on a few further thoughts. In Australia, which is
also a country of immigrants, great emphasis was put on integrating new
immigrants into the life of Australia. They were discouraged from isolating
themselves into closed ghettos. Indeed, when I first moved to Germany, not
thinking that I was immigrating; I was rather taking up a kind of post
doctoral post for a year or two - which became a lifetime, I certainly
didn't try to find Australians or Americans rather than Germans or other
nationalities to be friends with. After all, if people want to immigrate to
another country then they should accept what they doing; if they want to
wallow in thoughts of the old country then they should get out, return to
that old country and get on with life.
But of course the great tragedy of all the displaced
people who are now settling in Europe, fleeing from the countless wars of
the United States, is that they can no longer return. Why aren't these
displaced people sent to the United States which is the source of their
plight, for example to the historic center of Boston, where they could live
in closed houses and streets, forming their own ghettos.
This is a novel written as a diary. It was first
published in 1950 in Italy in serial form in subsequent issues of a
magazine, corresponding to the six months of the diary, as if it were being
written by the protagonist, describing her real life from day to day. She is
Valeria Cossati, living in Rome. She is 43 years old and has two children:
Mirella, 20, is the daughter and Riccardo, 22, is the son. Both are studying
law at university. Her husband, Michele, is somewhat older than Valeria. He
works in a bank but doesn't earn enough to support the family, and so
Valeria also has a job in an office. She also does all the cooking at home,
the cleaning, looking after everything. A generation ago her family belonged
to the aristocracy, living in a villa near Venice, but they lost everything
due to mismanagement and the upheavals of the world wars. Michele does not
come from an aristocratic family; in his way he does love Valeria as does
she him.
The first days of the diary tell us how she bought the
notebook on a whim while out buying cigarettes for Michele. It is a secret.
She won't tell anyone in the family about it. After all, whenever she tries
to say anything serious, all the others laugh at her, not only the children
calling her Mama, but Michele, her husband, also calls her Mama. How could
Mama have a serious opinion about anything? The idea is absurd. And so she
desperately thinks about different hiding places for her notebook. Of course
Mirella has a diary which is in a locked drawer next to her bed, but that is
understandable; Mirella is a serious law student.
Valeria tells us about her life, her worries. The
apartment is too small. There are always problems with money. Mirella needs
new clothes but there is only enough for a few things. Riccardo also needs
more money than the small allowance he receives.
Mirella stays out late at night, alone with an older man
of 35 who, she discovers, is already married. A scandal. Valeria stays up
waiting for Mirella to return and is then angry, lecturing her about
morality. A woman should marry and devote herself to the family, the
children. But Mirella says that she does not want a life like that of
Valeria. She is ambitious. She will leave home as soon as she becomes 21.
She already has a job in a law firm and plans to move to another city, to
become a successful, well-known lawyer. Valeria is constantly worrying about
Mirella. What has she done wrong? Is Mirella living in sin? But her husband
Michele often has private, understanding personal conversations with his
daughter, which they stop when Valeria, with all her worries, comes into the
room.
Riccardo is a Mamma's child. She loves him. His law exams
are coming up, but we know that he will fail them. He has been promised a
job in Argentina, and he dreams of his future. And Valeria thinks with
horror of the emptiness if the wonderful Riccardo were to be so far away. He
has a young girlfriend, Marina, perhaps only 16 or 17. A simpleminded thing,
a school dropout, vacant eyes. Valeria can't stand her. But towards the end
of the notebook she is confronted with the pregnancy of Riccardo's
girlfriend. They must immediately marry. Riccardo, who had always scoffed at
his father and his pitiful job at the bank accepts an even more lowly
position there. One idea is that Riccardo and Marina simply go alone to
Argentina, leaving Valeria to take care of the baby. She thinks the idea
might be wonderful, having a new baby, a grandson of Riccardo, a room of her
own in Riccardo's then vacant bedroom. But Mirella pours cold water on this
vision with the obvious observation that Riccardo will certainly fail his
exams, nullifying the job offer in Argentina, so that all of them will be
left living on top of one another in the tiny apartment with the baby and
the hated Marina.
And then it turns out that Valeria's boss at the office,
the owner of the firm, is in love with her, and she with him. What a mess!
She prays in the church. She imagines that this notebook is the source of
her downfall. It is a sin, a work of the devil. And it is the end of the
book. What had started out as a fun adventure of hiding the notebook from
the family turns into a claustrophobic drama. Only Mirella is free. A
dramatic, absorbing book to read.
Banine's full name was Umm-El-Banine-Assadoulaeff,
or - according to the foreword to the book - Ummulbanu Asadullayeva.
She was born in 1905 and her childhood was in Azerbaijan's Baku, before the
Russian Revolution. The family was rich with all the oil of the Caspian Sea.
They were not an ancient Russian family. Instead they were more like the
billionaire oligarchs which all seemed to have come out of the woodwork in
Eastern Europe and Russia after communism collapsed in 1990. As a child
Banine was in love with a gardener on the family estate, but at 15 she was
forced to marry someone else in the oligarch class who she hated. Her family
escaped the Russian civil war, settling in Paris. She and her husband made
it to Turkey, and then she traveled on alone to Paris in 1923, at the age of
18, separating herself from him forever. Only many years later was she able
to obtain a divorce in a French court.
The family had not had the forethought, or luck, to have
transferred their riches into a Swiss bank account, and so they arrived with
just what they had been able to carry with them. The jewels and other
valuables kept them going for a year or two in gradually decreasing luxury,
branching off into more bohemian lifestyles. Banine was able to find a job
as a model at a well-known Parisian fashion house, displaying the collection
for rich customers and the rest of the clientele which has undoubtedly
hardly changed in the hundred years between then and now. Her photo in the Wikipedia shows a woman in the style
of the 1920s; if not a beauty at least she seems more pleasant than all of
those lifeless modern-day fashion models.
Suddenly a cousin appears, full of life, throwing money
away in an extravagant fashion. She is Gulnar, and Banine attaches herself
to the cousin. The rest of the story is that of Gulnar's affairs, only
occasionally interrupted by Banine's own modest life. It seems that Gulnar
was the mistress of Otto, a German who was unfortunately married but
passionately in love with Gulnar and who was seeking a divorce to free
himself for Gulnar. But his business involved him traveling about for months
at a time, even into Russia. Later in the story he seems to have disappeared
into a communist prison, never to be seen again. For Gulnar it is a relief,
a cause for celebration when Otto leaves, receiving vast amounts of his
money along with his farewell tears. Gulnar flirts with various aristocratic
French gentlemen. They are awkward, old men, but rich and titled, things
that Gulnar covets. Banine is given an old French doctor who has an
eye clinic in Orleans. He is rich, but without a title (apart from his
medical qualifications - which hardly count in the world of fashion). She
visits him on weekends, telling us that she likes having sex with him, but
apart from that she finds him to be a stupid, pathetic, revolting creature.
At the end of the book we are told that Gulnar meets a
young man who is the exact image of JFK (but this is back in the 1930s). He
is fabulously rich, the son of a Texas oil millionaire. She marries him and
disappears into Texas. We are not told how long that marriage lasted. I find
it difficult to imagine the extravagant, fashionable Gulnar exchanging Paris
for Dallas, or perhaps even Paris, Texas. And in the real Paris, Banine's
ophthalmologist finally tells her that he has had enough of it. We vaguely
learn that she lived on in the life of Paris, marrying and divorcing. The
book was enjoyable to read, written in a lively style, this translation
perhaps reflecting that of the French original.
Another book about Paris. Again not a novel; a true
story. The author is an Englishman who tells us that he studied Oriental and
African Studies in London. What does one do with such a qualification? Go to
the Orient and Africa? Or perhaps work in a bank in the City of London,
dealing with Orientals and Africans. We are told that he spent countless
post-graduation hours applying for jobs with no response. His French
girlfriend told him that she wanted to return to Paris, and so he decided to
go along with her, see what his prospects there might be. There followed
further weeks of sending out job applications into the vacuous internet,
camped in their tiny apartment. But at least he did enjoy spending his days
walking about in Paris, finding it to be the most wonderful place on Earth,
reading his copy of George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London.
After a couple of months of this he still had no job. The girlfriend was
offered something in a museum back in London. She left and he stayed, saying
that he wanted to prove to himself that he could exist on his own.
And so eventually he walked into a famous, luxury
restaurant (he tells us that it is "Le Bistrot de la Seine", but the
internet finds no such restaurant - clearly he has changed the name to avoid
being sued), saying that he is an experienced waiter and that he would like
a job. He soon finds out that everything is appearance. The dining room is
elegant, stylish. Only well-dressed, chic people are welcome. And the famous
eat here: politicians, television "news" presenters, movie actors, along
with tourists wanting to be a part of fashionable Paris. It is only after
finishing the book and writing this piece that I have found a photo of the author on his internet site. He is
handsome, elegant. Clearly the manager of the restaurant hired him for his
good looks, the beautiful Englishman, despite his obvious lack of experience
and inability to speak the language. His role would be to charm the tourists
with his educated English. The restaurant also maintained a collection of
"hostesses": young women with long legs in short skirts, walking about,
leading diners to their tables, doing nothing in particular, just to be
looked at and admired.
He was assigned the role of a "runner". That is to say he
didn't take orders. Rather he supported the other waiters, bringing the
plates, drinks and everything from out of the door marked "private" into the
dining room on a silver platter, stacked high, balanced overhead on the left
hand, to the tables, then gathering the used things to be brought back on
the platter. His description of his first day was terrible. He had bought a
cheap waiter's suit and black shoes which didn't fit well with the last of
his money, and he was kept going from 6 in the morning till late at night
without a pause. Yet he was determined to see it through, not to have
another failure in his life. When reading this I remembered the sinking
feeling I had when reading Down and Out in Paris and London 50 years
ago. In a book we imagine ourselves being in the situation of the
protagonist. What if life were to lead me into such a mess? At least now, at
75 with a comfortable pension, such thoughts are behind me.
We are told about what happens beyond the "private" door.
It is the "pass", where food comes up from the kitchens and is assembled
together for the tables. The waiters in the dining room are all Europeans,
with one or two elegant North Africans. Behind the door everything is
non-European. At the pass are three Tamils - Tamil Tigers. There is chaos,
shouting, infighting between the waiters, grovelling for tips. Down in the
basement is the preparatory kitchen. Only black Africans are there, working
for a pittance, illegal immigrants, hacking away at vegetables, the wet
floor covered with peelings, dirt, even rats. Loud music, shouting, chaos.
The products of all this are sent up in a service elevator. The main kitchen
is somewhere above and it is strictly prohibited for any waiter to go up to
the main kitchen. The author imagines the main kitchen being filled with
exquisite chefs of the haute cuisine: a Paul Boucuse with a high,
white chef's hat, a "toque blanche". What an awakening he receives
after a few months in the restaurant when a lonely, middle aged American
tourist orders a steak and finds it to be red inside. She asks the author to
return it to the kitchen to be further cooked. The Tamils refuse to send it
up. The other waiters ignore him. And so he climbs the forbidden stairs to
the secret inner sanctum of the restaurant. Opening the door, he is shocked
to find that it is a small, hot, loud room. The cook is a Corsican; a huge,
sweaty man brandishing a huge cleaver, shouting at the others who are all
black Africans. There are flames everywhere. The walls and everything else
are covered with thick layers of old grease. Screaming at the author to get
out, the Corsican threatens him with his knife. When he learns why he has
come, his anger knows no bounds. He grabs the throat of the author with his
free hand, choking him, pressing him against the greasy wall, takes the
piece of meat and almost throws it on the floor, then throws it to one of
the Africans working at one of the pits of fire and shouts at him to cremate
it. The author escapes, almost suffocated, returning to the quiet, elegant
dining room where the woman inspects the meat and decides that she can now
eat it. Afterward, one of the hostesses tells the author that the back of
his jacket has become greasy and dirty.
Everybody behind the door knows that the food is rubbish.
The waiters use all sorts of dirty French words to describe it. None of
them, if they had the money, would eat in a restaurant like this. The food
must cost 50 or 100 euros or more for a dinner. They all know that small,
family restaurants are infinitely better, where a dinner costs no more than
10 or 15 euros.
The author, Edward Chisholm, simply loves the city of
Paris. I find this difficult to understand. He is prepared to put up with
anything in order to stay there. He rents a tiny room in the roof of a house
which costs him almost all of his earnings from the restaurant. His body is
covered with red spots from the bites of bedbugs. He is worked to such a
state of hunger and exhaustion that he faints, falling and breaking the
bones in his hand, hitting his head on concrete into a coma. But Paris is
nothing like the romantic nonsense of Hollywood movies. The air is polluted
with toxic fumes; the tap water tastes and smells strongly of chlorine - who
knows what sorts of dead germs are floating around in it; the streets are
filled with loud, aggressively driven cars, trucks, and especially scooters
making horribly loud, sudden, wasp-like screams; most of Paris consists of
dangerous high-rise slums, the various races and ethnicities are living in a
self-imposed apartheid, free of the police who are afraid to enter these
areas.
But from his internet
page we are told that he is now living in Lausanne in Switzerland. A
much, much more pleasant place! He is making a living as a writer, and I
wish him well. His life has become more interesting and fascinating to read
about than the lives of the two young bankers of the City of London who
happened to sit at a table on the terrace of the restaurant where he was
serving drinks, celebrating their bloated bonuses. He was horrified to
recognize them as former fellow students of the School of Oriental and
African Studies. How embarrassing that he had to serve them their drinks,
expecting them to toss a few coins onto the table as a tip. At least he
could move on in life. We feel sorry for the other waiters, his friends in
the restaurant, who could only look forward to more of the same.
