Reading Diary

Book 8 of Julia Spencer-Fleming's Miller's Kill series. I LOVE her work and am eagerly searching for more like her. Book 8 ends on such a cliffhanger - well, multiple cliffhangers, really - that I'm tempted to suggest someone new to the series stop at book 6, which is a satisfying ending. But I suspect, if you love these characters as much as I do, you won't be able to. Please, Julia, we are waiting to find out what happens next for Clare & Russ and Kevin & Hadley!!

The Christopher Killer, Alane Ferguson

I don't ordinarily read much YA these days, but I took a chance on Alane Ferguson's forensic mysteries and thoroughly enjoyed the book. Likeable characters, solid attention to real detail, and a clever alibi. I'm looking forward to reading more in this series!

Monday, December 5, 2016

The Anatomy of Motive, John Douglas

Originally published in 1999, therefore becoming somewhat dated, although the history is always fascinating and Douglas' observations as an FBI profiler no doubt remain essentially on the mark, human nature being what it is. I took a class once on "The Philosophy of Evil," and I think we should have read this. Douglas emphasizes again and again the cowardice and inadequacy of these men--that's not being sexist, there really are way more men--who do hideous things in order to feel in power, in control, important. There's a kind of toxic combination of higher-than-average IQ (often) with low socio-economic status: situations in which white men--and that's not being racist, because in Douglas' experience most of them are white--feel the world owes them.

I think one of the most disturbing things about this--well, there is a lot that's disturbing in true crime--is Douglas' grim view of recidivism. Essentially, the criminal (he considers sexual predators, spree-killers, arsonists, and bombers in depth) is driven by psychological factors that only escalate violence, the way an addict might need to keep increasing the amount of drug. The best solution here looks like capturing people as early as possible and removing them from society. Douglas, at least of this writing, makes a case for capital punishment as a method of stopping someone who will never be able to stop himself. A fascinating read, if you have the stomach for it.

Still Life, Louise Penny

1st book in Louise Penny's Chief Inspector Gamache series. I picked this up from a "You May Also Like" list on Amazon for Julia Spencer-Fleming: the setting is small town, rural, this time across the border in Canada, but otherwise I'm still puzzled. Spencer-Fleming reads to me like police procedural, whereas Louise Penny I thought is pretty clearly in the "cozy" category. This is not a book you want to read while on a diet: the main characters and investigators eat a lot of freshly baked chocolate croissants.

The energy is also completely different. Gamache is a "slow and steady" investigator, sitting on a park bench, eating his croissant and patiently watching the locals, like a cat sizing up mice. It was unclear which direction the investigation was going; there was an accidental quality to the discoveries, although I suspect that's often true in real life, but I prefer Archer Mayor or Spencer-Fleming's mysteries, where there are distinct pushes as the investigators pursue specific theories or leads.

Penny writes poetically and there are two big surprises I enjoyed but won't give away; my favorite element in the book was the use of painting.

Friday, November 25, 2016

Out of the Deep I Cry, Julia Spencer-Flemming

I am currently binge-reading Spencer-Fleming's Clare Ferguson/Russ Van Alstyne mysteries. At book 6 I started buying them because I couldn't get them from the library fast enough.

"Out of the Deep I Cry" is book 3 and possibly my favorite so far, although I continue to be blown away. One of the things I appreciate is that Spencer-Fleming reinvents her structure from novel to novel. Book 3 jumps backwards and forwards in time, book 4 is structured by the Episcopal daily order of service, book 6 is organized into the church's yearly calendar, etc.

Here's why Spencer-Fleming is brilliant. She is a pro with foreshadowing and unexpected chapter-ending twists, which make her mysteries un-put-down-able. She has moments of surprising beauty [from "To Darkness and to Death"]:

[Clare] hiked over a rotting log, crushing coffee-brown pulp and meaty fungus beneath her boots. The smell, rich and wet, mingled with the odor of pine sap. A flash of movement caught her eye, and she whirled, just in time to see a gray fox vanish like smoke into the earth.

and moments of completely relatable ordinariness:

Clare slipped inside, closing the door with a careless kick and sinking into one of the old wooden chairs she had purchased in an attempt to warm up her all-white, straight-out-of-the-box kitchen. She sat for a moment, listening tot he silence.

I love the kicking the door shut, because it's a detail a writer wouldn't have an obvious reason to use ("Clare opened the door and went inside"), but it queues the emotional backdrop for the scene coming up and at the same time gives Clare such "oh yeah I've done that" humanity.

Mostly I love the depths, the rawness, but with such sensitivity, with such moments of grace [from "All Mortal Flesh"]:

Suddenly, a black bubble of grief rose up out of his chest and he let out a barking sob. Clare took one hand off the wheel and held it out to him. He clutched it in a bone-cracking grip, his chest heaving as he fought to regain some control.
"Jesus," he said, when he could speak again. "Jesus Christ. I'm losing my mind."
Clare shook her head. Her eyes were wet, too, although from sympathy or from the pain where he was grinding her knuckles together, he couldn't tell. He released her hand.
"You're not losing your mind. Grief makes us all crazy at times. You read those Kubler-Ross theories and you think grief has all these recognizable levels, like going through school. Once you pass all the tests, you get to leave. But day to day, moment to moment, grief is more like..."
"Losing your mind?"
"Yeah."

And these are characters who are fundamentally trying to help other people, whether that's in the capacity of chief of police or Episcopal priest. They are the ones going toward the disaster when everybody else is trying to get out, and they ask each other, "What can I do to help?" "What do you need?" Their identity as helpers and leaders is the foundation of their partnership - it is impossible not to care deeply about these characters.

A Share in Death, Deborah Crombie

British cozy mystery, the kind where there are 10 suspects, each with a quirk or secret, but otherwise interchangeable. I always think I will like these because I grew up reading Agatha Christies, but I find they feel emotionally hollow to me now and I'm gravitating toward procedurals. I suspect it has something to do with one's vision of evil or general sense of life as upbeat or somber.

This is the first in Crombie's Kincaid series, and therefore possibly not representative. I never emotionally invested in the detective (despite his catchy name), I think because I didn't see what he cared about, apart from solving the case, although again, that partly goes with the sub-genre territory. What impressed me most was reading the back and finding out Crombie is originally from Texas. I would never have guessed that from her thoroughly English village setting.

Saturday, November 12, 2016

The Rule of Four, Caldwell & Thomason

The concept of the book - the decoding of secret ciphers in a little known Renaissance text - sounded very Da Vinci Code to me, and I almost took a pass on it, not being a fan of conspiracy theory-type suspense, but I ended up totally enjoying every minute of this book!

If you are looking for a murder mystery, that thread is minor, but there's so much else that's brilliant and heartfelt in this intellectual head-trip of a book which skips backwards and forwards in the telling.

From Chapter 24:

"In a world where half the villagers always lie and half of them always tell the truth; where the hare never catches the tortoise because the distance between them shrinks by a never-collapsing infinity of halves; where the fox can never be left on the same bank of the river as the hen, or the hen on the same bank as the grain, because with perfect regularity the one will consume the other, and nothing you can do will prevent it: in that world, everything is sensible but the premise. A riddle is a castle built on air, perfectly habitable if you don't look down...."

November 8, 2016 feels like it needs its own marker.

Unitarian minister Theodore Parker wrote in 1853:

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/11/15/arc-of-universe/

Martin Luther King Jr. more famously summarized Parker's thought as “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

It is also worth rereading King's "I Have a Dream" in its entirety:
I Have a Dream

Wednesday, November 2, 2016

In the Bleak Midwinter, Julia Spencer-Fleming

This is the first in Spencer-Fleming's Clare Fergusson & Russ Van Alstyne murder mystery series set in rural New York state. Clare is an Episcopal priest with a background as an Army helicopter pilot. Russ is the local Chief of Police, also with a military background. What she's captured brilliantly is that both positions (minister and detective) are 'set apart': helping professions in which the real people can easily disappear behind the job title.

I was initially dubious. The first chapters felt sensational (abandoned baby, dead teenage girl, incest!) and forced - characters conveniently volunteer and inquire into each other's backstories - but I got sucked in halfway through, and absolutely hooked by about 2/3rd to 3/4. That's a long way to go before getting bitten by the bug, but it does make you reach right away for the next book in the series! I believe there are 8 books out currently.

Spencer-Fleming has a terrific eye for detail, sounds, and smells, that make the world of the book feel real, but I think her outstanding quality is the way she writes in scenes of non-physical intimacy that powerfully bind her characters together: cooking dinner, shared humor, trading stories and hobbies; just knowing there's someone you can be yourself around, who will come looking for you when you are lost.

Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich

The full title is "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America." It should be required reading in college. Or high school. Ehrenreich, a journalist, describes in three sections her experiences as a waitress, as a maid, and a retail clerk, plus other assorted jobs along the way as she attempts to live within her earnings. This is seriously a case of walking a mile in someone else's shoes....

Even though the book is getting dated (2001), it's a snapshot of what it's like to work in a minimum wage job and try to survive. It was an eye-opener to me to realize one of the huge problems is rent. Some of the people she meets are caught living in low-end weekly rate motel rooms because they can't set aside enough to be able to pay a first month's deposit on an apartment that would be cheaper in the long run. Others solve the problem by sharing single-sized living space with other people. Some live out of their cars.

These are not people who are poor because they are unemployed. Many have a job, one and a half or even two full-time jobs. Working poverty, as Ehrenreich shows in her own experience and through the people she meets and informally interviews, is not just a case of belt-tightening, but life in a state of crisis. If you care at all about issues of social justice, you need to read this book or one like it.

Sunday, October 30, 2016

The Shifting of the Fire, Ford Madox Ford

This is an early (1892) Ford Madox Ford novel, which has been undeservedly forgotten. Yes, there are some strange bits (the crows) and some overly stagey-Gothic bits, but there is so much good here that shouldn't be rushed by. Ford, like Woolf, has a keen awareness of subjectivity: the compressed/dilated experience of time, the gap between the interior and exterior in conversation.

The premise of the book is a mercenary marriage a young woman (Edith) makes to an elderly millionaire when her fiance (Clem) suddenly loses his fortunes. What makes the story fascinating, I think, is Ford handling of it, starting with a rather extraordinary paragraph about the realities of poverty that keeps the reader from sliding into conventional moralizing.

He concludes:
"If you are sentimental you will shudder and feel righteously horror-struck at the turn of affairs, if practical you will say, 'H'm, a very proper arrangement under the circumstances."

Edith herself, when considering her options, justifies her decision as a form of 'earning money' toward her future happiness, and although Ford does not explicitly pursue this, it at least raises the reality that for young women of her class of her time, autonomy is largely beyond reach.

You find here, in early form, an observation repeated in "Parade's End" that the English are, in Ford's view, singularly ill-equipped to deal with passions and life's great events.

And then there are the tiny gems which give depth and dignity to the unremarked, like Clem's maiden aunt:
"I have little doubt that the poor old lady, stiff and starched as she was, cried a little the night before he departed, for the sight of him had caused the return to her mind of an old, sweet sorrow, and she had grown old and feeble, and her frame was ill able to stand even the shadow, falling thus after long years, of a passion that had once moved her in her most occult being."

Even Edith's horrible husband gets his moments of sympathy:
"Delays of any kind were dangerous to Mr. Kasker-Ryves, inasmuch as they forced his thoughts inwards, and he detested his thoughts."

Saturday, October 15, 2016

Crosstalk, Connie Willis - NO SPOILERS

This is a recent release, and if you’re like me and pre-ordered the book a million months ago, the last thing you want is for someone to give away the plot (!!!), so I’ll keep my comments general.

Willis consistently creates characters it’s easy to like. She’s particularly good at setting up love triangles in which a smart, beautiful woman is trying to get closer to a charming, perfect, preoccupied Guy A, only to discover through the execution of the plot that it’s the smart, sweet, slightly rumpled Guy B she wants. It’s about moving from love-out-there to partnership; it’s about a woman (anyone, really) turning away from being dazzled by “perfection” to recognizing true worth is a good heart inside a less flashy exterior, which is partly about romance, but also about what we expect of ourselves, and being kind to the less-than-perfect aspects of ourselves. That never gets old for me.

I think, collectively, of Willis’ work as an indictment of superficiality. She has a set of stock characters she shows as silly: people who gossip, helicopter parents, women who date a string of wrong men without knowing why, the Mr. Perfects. To her credit, she often finds a way to add a twist – so in “Bellweather,” the insufferable Flip turns out to be a key to the puzzle. But essentially Willis uses them as obstacles, delays, and for easy comic effect, which is fine, of course. I do think it loses on compassion, because people (or parts of ourselves) driven by the Urgent rather than the Important are fearful and in pain under the surface – so I can moderately enjoy them, but I think her style of comedy works best in her short stories and in her novel-length books I prefer her at her more serious: Passage, Lincoln’s Dreams, Blackout, etc. I love her comedy; I think she is at her best when she grapples with loss and specifically death.

There’s one line – not a spoiler – in Crosstalk that sums up Willis’ style of writing for me:

Every thought was connected to every other in a tangled maze of memories and cognitive links and associations...

because I don’t think Willis writes “plot-driven” books, nor are they really “character-driven”…. I think they’re “theme-driven.” She’ll take an idea, like in this case communication, and riff on it – names, images, setting, elements of the plot – in this kind of ever expanding, looping back in on itself and shooting off in new directions style – and by the end you’ve found out a lot of really fascinating tangentially related things and have a sense of having thought more deeply about something important. She often builds these around a question, or a series of related questions, that form the “quest for knowledge” plot that hook me and drive me to keep reading page after page. I ADORE her books. She is the writer who has made me want to write.

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Open Season, Archer Mayor

I've been reading mysteries set in New England and just recently discovered Archer Mayor's books. Open Season, his first, is a terrific procedural, but with more insight and heart than one usually finds in the sub-genre. He has a wonderful description of his development as a cop as seen in his relationship with his gun:

"It also meant carrying a gun--the ultimate symbol of the simple answer to a complex world--and it gave me a chance, every once in a while, to do something "right," which by that time in my life was becoming an elusive quality... [But] most bad guys were usually regular guys with a screw loose--barring a few exceptions.... The gun lost its appeal as I began to rely more on my instincts than on its authority. I came to see if finally as the unreasoning thing it is: the admission of your brain's collapse under panic and impotent rage."

There is also a wonderful description of his mother that concludes with the perfect simile:

"Outwardly, she remained pleasant and good-natured, but I always sensed a tiredness there, as if she'd been asked to smile for the camera just one shot beyond her tolerance."

Most of all, I appreciate his subtle, careful handling of childhood abuse, which is able to convey indirectly. There is a brilliant scene in which he interviews the mother in a dark green living room he likens to an aquarium. It's an unusual image, but the metaphor of being underwater works so well in this context. The way the elderly mother keeps it and herself spotlessly clean while ignoring the incredible ickiness that has gone on in the house. There's a bit where she reaches down a collects a bit of fuzz off the carpet and puts it in the pocket of her cardigan. Completely real.

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark

I'm a huge fan of non-linear narrative and delayed decoding, and Spark's book is a gem. I love the way she circles around, building the characters through repetition and variation. Even Miss Brodie's speech has this circular quality as she hops from general principles or life lessons to associations or corrections in the present moment. There is an incredible build toward the final, unexpected twist.

I'm looking forward to seeing the Maggie Smith movie, but I'm very glad I read the book first. Absolutely brilliant.

There are delightfully clever lines, like the description of Miss Brodie's nemesis, Miss Mackay, "a sharp-minded woman, who smelt her prey very near and yet saw it very far." And I adore Sandy's imaginary conversations with literary figures, especially her exchange as Miss Brodie recites Tennyson's The Lady of Shallot, which is priceless:

Down she came and found a boat
Beneath a willow left afloat,
And round about the prows she wrote
The Lady of Shalott.

"By what means did your Ladyship write these words?" Sandy enquired in her mind with her lips shut tight.
"There was a pot of white paint and brush which happened to be standing upon the grassy verge," replied the Lady of Shalott graciously. "It was left there no doubt by some heedless member of the Unemployed."

Wednesday, August 17, 2016

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith

"It was a good idea to practice jumping into his own character again, because the time might come when he would need to in a matter of seconds, and it was strangely easy to forget the exact timbre of Tom Ripley's voice. He conversed with Marge until the sound of his own voice in his ears was exactly the same as he remembered it."

I had seen the 1999 movie with Matt Damon years ago, and it didn't make a huge impact on me at the time, but I watched again recently and this time it absolutely jumped out and grabbed me. One of the things I admire about Damon as an actor, particularly in his earlier roles, is his willingness to take on difficult, awkward, uncomfortable roles like Tom Ripley: the humiliation, the self-conscious geekiness, the desperate unrequited adoration of Dickie Greenleaf.

Matt Damon as Tom Ripley

I picked up the original novel and found it utterly fascinating, but for completely different reasons than I expected. I think the script (adapted from the novel by director Anthony Minghella) is brilliant, and it goes a long way to making Ripley more appealing. We see his impoverished, subservient life in America; we watch the slights and slurs of Dickie and Freddie (both of whom are less likeable characters); the murder of Dickie is an unpremeditated crime of passion; we watch Ripley fall in love only to realize even if he has gotten away with his crimes, the cost is his heart and his humanity. There is a shatteringly beautiful moment of honesty--and I don't know if this is Minghella, or from one of Highsmith's later Ripley novels:

                         RIPLEY
               Whatever you do, however terrible,
               however hurtful - it all makes sense,
               doesn't it? inside your head. You never
               meet anybody who thinks they're a bad
               person or that they're cruel.

                         PETER
               But you're still tormented, you must be,
               you've killed somebody...

                         RIPLEY
               Don't you put the past in a room, in the
               cellar, and lock the door and just never
               go in there? Because that's what I do.

                         PETER
               Probably. In my case it's probably a
               whole building.

                         RIPLEY
               Then you meet someone special and all you
               want to do is toss them the key, say open
               up, step inside, but you can't because
               it's dark and there are demons and if
               anybody saw how ugly it was...

I also love the addition of the Cate Blanchet character weaving in and out and the ending with the detective. I love the opening, which begins with a case of mistaken identity (a borrowed Princeton jacket) that highlights the class differences. And I love that sometimes Ripley unexpectedly tells the truth to people he likes.

On the other hand, the book captures, excruciatingly, the psychological torment of Ripley, reminiscent, I think, of Shakespeare's Richard III. The book is also full of Italy, in a way that is more than backdrop. I'm also madly in love with Highsmith's depiction of Marge--"gourd-shaped," full of the cheerful energy of a girl-guide, pathetically in love with Dickie herself, and hardly the sharpest tack in the box. She is human and frustrating and sad and interesting in a way that Gwyneth Paltrow's character was reduced into something glamorous. It's a choice that makes perfect sense for a movie, but I liked the book better.

Mostly what I found fascinating was the bizarre combination of Ripley's character, which is emotionally and morally detached from the big events, but the incredible sensitivity to the minutia. He can tell when Marge or Dickie has cooled toward him from a look, or a change in tone, and has to guess at why. He is intensely aware of his own moods and expressions, frequently trying to change or disguise them to fit the occasion. He has a remarkable sense of not being himself, or being "better" at being himself. The paragraph I quoted earlier in which he has to practice to become like himself again is one of my favorites.

The issue of Ripley's sexuality in the book is heavily veiled (1955), but I'm glad it's more evident in the movie version, because it fits so perfectly with his perceived need to take on another role, hide his true self.

The movie ends so perfectly, that it's hard to believe there's more to Ripley's story, but I'm eager to read the additional four "Ripley" books Highsmith wrote.

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

But What If We're Wrong, Chuck Klosterman

Yes, the book cover is printed upside down. Also the book jacket flaps are sideways, just to throw you a bit.

I utterly, thoroughly, completely enjoyed this totally fascinating book. Klosterman imagines how what we think and value now might look from a future perspective, looking back. This is not just a matter of guessing at what might be "hot," but an in-depth, surprising analysis of what makes a book, a piece of music, television, sports, etc. memorable or valuable to people over the passage of time. This includes a retrospective analysis of the curious fate of a book like Moby Dick which had nearly no traction when it was first published, but has come to be almost synonymous with The Great American Novel.

It made me think in new ways. It made me laugh. Absolutely one of the best non-fiction books I've read this year.

Tuesday, July 12, 2016

The Course of Love: A Novel, Alain de Botton

Link to B & N

"We seem to know far too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue."

I've been following Alain de Botton's career since How Proust Can Change Your Life. I think he's absolutely brilliantly insightful and has really made it his life's work to show us how philosophy and the arts can speak, if we listen, to the very everyday challenges of being human. I also always have the sense in his work that he truly believes to understand is to feel compassion - for oneself and others - and I think that's tremendous.

So I was excited to read his latest book, The Course of Love. It is subtitled "A Novel," but it is really more of a handbook to the complexities of married love, interspersed with fictional episodes illustrating the various points. A bit like taking a seminar on relationships and watching video segments.

What de Botton advocates is approaching love and marriage, raising children, and ultimately one's life, from a perspective that is more Classical than Romantic:

"Maturity means acknowledging that Romantic love might only constitute a narrow and perhaps rather mean-minded aspect of emotional life, one principally focused on a quest to find love rather than to give it...."

"Melancholy isn't always a disorder that needs to be cured. It can be a species of intelligent grief which arises when we come face-to-face with the certainty that disappointment is written into the script from the start."

He talks about the almost inevitable disappointment that one has not, looking back, achieved greatness. Cynicism, he says, is too easy. Instead, de Botton urges use to find "the prestige of laundry."

"There is valor in being able to identify a forgiving, hopeful perspective on one's life, in knowing how to be a friend to oneself, because one has a responsibility to others to endure."

"The courage not to be vanquished by anxiety, not to hurt others out of frustration, not to grow too furious with the world for the perceive injuries it heedlessly inflicts, not to go crazy and somehow to manage to persevere in a more or less adequate way through the difficulties of married life--this is true courage; this is a heroism in a class all of its own."

Saturday, July 9, 2016

Orlando, Virginia Woolf

The Hollow Crown trailer on IMD.com

I'm working my way slowly through Woolf, mostly chronologically, but in this case, I jumped ahead to Orlando. There are people who really, really love Woolf (on www.goodreads.com, for instance). I struggle. In Orlando I admire her psychological insight and thoughts on topics such as the value of obscurity, the subjective compression and expansion of time, the socially constrained role allowed to women. She often dazzles me with her prose ("orgulous" swans) and ecstatic, vibrant visions of Nature, but I have a very different sense of what a story is, and it comes up clearly in Orlando.

There are several points in this narrative that spans 300+ years in which Woolf in the narrator's voice excuses herself from relating the particulars of a conversation, and she passes over these noting that often what is said on these occasions is insignificant. Contrast this, however, with how Jane Austen handles similar social gatherings - for Austen the story, the revelation of character, is in the dialogue and mannerisms, sometimes the sillier the more revealing. Woolf tends to sweep over particulars as irrelevant to the big, important questions that interest her.

It is widely noted that Woolf's inspiration for Orlando was her relationship with the colorful aristocratic Vita Sackville-West, but for me Orlando the character remains vague, bizarrely detached from human relationships - there is a husband who seems more fairy tale than real and promptly disappears, an infant who no sooner is born than drops out of the story. Orlando has next to no friends, takes no interest in the changing times and displays little curiosity. The intoxication - like other Woolf heroines on my reading of them - is within one's own mind where enormous questions are posed ("Life? Love? Poetry?") and different answers tried out and discarded as insufficient.

I might be able to write this off as a difference in taste except that Woolf seems so miserable to me. Reviewers occasionally call Orlando a "romp," or words to that effect, but I just see the sadness, the loneliness, the frustration. Orlando spends a large part of the second half of the book in search of a semi-articulate desire for "Life and a lover," only to find lovers (except in the form of her absent, fantastical husband) disappointing. Life then. One of the things that fascinates me about stories about immortality is that they almost have to tackle the question of what is worth doing with a life. Orlando composes a lengthy poem she eventually manages to publish, but I think the "life" question remains open.

As perhaps it should, except that it is so easy to leave the question open, and that is no help to anyone actually engaged in finding an answer. At this point in my life, if I was going to take a stab at it, I think the answer is partly turning inward - because external goals turn out to be ephemeral - but only in order to settle the tumult inside, because I think what's really required is to look outward again from a place of centeredness, to take a genuine interest in the lives, petty though they may be, of others, to feel and act out of compassion, to pursue an intellectual and/or artistic work requiring one's highest faculties. It seems to me that Woolf's mental casting about - she uses the metaphor of the sea - keeps her perpetually wrapped in a cloud of philosophical and Romantic abstractions, and that, for all her insight, she fundamentally disdains other people because they are selfish, or fallible, or their concerns are simply more prosaic. Again, the contrast with Austen.

I do have to say that A Room of One's Own, made a huge impact on me when I read it, and when you read Orlando there is no doubt this is the same author. The idea of making Orlando a woman with a man's prior experience and perspective of the world is utterly brilliant and revolutionary genius.

7/11/16 afterthought:
My friend, who is far more knowledgeable about Woolf, explained to me that Orlando is an experiment in biography, an attempt to get at the essence of a person without being tethered, as normal biographical projects are, to dates and setting, as these could be seen as incidental to discovering, or showing, who a person really is. I admit this turns my reading of Orlando inside out - what I had taken for foreground is background and vice versa. I'll have to rethink my response to the book and give some thought to Woolf's intriguing theory. My gut response is that while the "facts" of a person's life are not sufficient to tell us who they are (born x at y to z, died x of y), what is important are the choices they make, the habits, the proclivities and pursuits, their relationships, and these are all very particular and detail-based. For me, I think, as a reader, a biography is an attempt to walk in someone's shoes, to try understand the world from his/her perspective, and that requires "grounding."

If you have a moment, please visit Jessica's blog at: http://alreadytoldtales.blogspot.com/ where she writes her thought-provoking retellings of classic fairy tales.

The Hollow Crown Disc 1: Richard II, William Shakespeare

Ben Whishaw as Richard II

I loved this production of Richard II. The play has never appealed to me greatly because Richard is such a complicated likeable/unlikeable figure, but this production absolutely made it work. Whishaw is phenomenal in the role of Richard. He has a shy quality, and a showman quality, and a martyr quality, but can turn in an instant and lash out with spite. Richard tends in the play to use language comparing himself to Jesus, and Whishaw gave you all of that, but also picked up Richard's nastiness and over-the-top theatricality. I've never been so aware of the many distinct facets of character in this role. In the "Making of" DVD extras, Whishaw mentions that he and director, Rupert Goold, talked about Michael Jackson, and I never would have thought of that comparison, but I think it's brilliant because they captured that quality of never being off-stage...even in how he sits and moves, Whishaw's Richard is always performing.

Rory Kinnear was also notable as Bolingbrook (the future Henry IV), because he brought a surprising restraint and moral uprightness, sometimes an unexpected gentleness, to the role. One had the sense he was a good man, trying to do the right thing, and getting in over his head.

David Suchet as the Duke of York

Whishaw's performance makes him the star, but a surprising amount of the heavy-lifting in the play, I think, goes to David Suchet's fantastic performance as the Duke of York. He's so good, you don't even notice how good he is, because he makes it look easy. He makes it sound as if he's speaking plain English. Patrick Stewart also comes in briefly to knock John of Gaunt's "England" speech out of the park. It's just a pity his character isn't around longer.

The other knockout feature of this production for me was the portrayal of two conflicting worlds (see also Henry IV post) between Anglo-Saxon medieval England and Richard's elaborately refined environment he's created for himself. There is a brilliant, brilliant juxtaposition at the trial-by-combat scene in which we move from knights on horses to Richard's tent decorated with flowers.

Find The Hollow Crown on Netflix, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or iTunes: rent it; buy it. How often do you get to the chance to binge-watch the Shakespeare History Cycle??! I'm kicking myself that I didn't know this series aired in 2013. My only consolation is that it would have killed me to wait until 2016 for The Hollow Crown: The War of the Roses (Henry VI Pts 1-3 plus Richard III with Benedict Cumberbatch!).

The Hollow Crown Disc 2-3: Henry IV, William Shakespeare

Jeremy Irons and Tom Hiddleston

The more I think about these two plays together, the more they puzzle me. I don't have a good feel for the "shape" at all. When I think of the Henry IV plays, I think of them as having three big through-lines: Hal's relationship with Falstaff, Hal's relationship with his father Henry IV, and Hal's relationship with Hotspur.

The relationship that seems to get the most attention in this 2013 version is the Hal/Falstaff, and the arc is one of disillusionment. After a jolly introduction, Tom Hiddleston plays a serious Hal, quick to take offense, dismayed to discover his companions are no better than they are. Case in point: 1 Henry IV Act V scene iv in which Falstaff presents the dead Hotspur to Hal and Lancaster as his own handiwork.

FALSTAFF: ...There is Percy:

Throwing the body down
if your father will do me any honour, so; if not, let
him kill the next Percy himself. I look to be either
earl or duke, I can assure you.
PRINCE HENRY: Why, Percy I killed myself and saw thee dead.
FALSTAFF: Didst thou? Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying!

Simon Russell Beale as Falstaff

I've previously seen this treated as absurd - another case of Falstaff being outrageous - and Hal easily and willingly gives up his claim to killing Percy. In this version, it was a much more serious matter: Hal had "won" Hotspur's honor, exchanged honor with him by killing him in battle, and to give this up hurt. The lie was a personal injury, an example of how his dearest friend would stab him in the back if it meant personal advantage. In the end, of course, Hiddleston's Hal forces a laugh and allows Falstaff's false claim to stand, but it is a bitter moment. There's a similar point in 2 Henry IV in which Hal overhears Falstaff insulting him. I've seen this played good-naturedly - Hal revealing himself and confronting Falstaff with his own statements - but Hiddleston's version also treats this seriously. Hal is very offended and it's another blow to their, by this point, tenuous relationship. The Falstaff, Simon Russell Beale, is one of the best I've seen. I think he absolutely nails this role, possibly definitively. I think where they really got it right was a bit in which Hal confronts Falstaff after the Gadshill robbery and the two of them start circling each other, laughing and trading insults, like two boxers performing for a crowd: I think that's the Hal/Falstaff relationship perfectly.

I'm not a huge fan of Jeremy Irons as a Shakespearean actor - I think he tends to play the emotion rather than the details of the text - and I think this may be why the Henry IV/Hal conflict of the two plays didn't work for me.

Joe Armstrong as Hotspur

The Hal/Hotspur also didn't work for me, particularly, I think, because they made a choice to play Hotspur "realistically" as a rough and tumble soldier/thug, so his quick temper and reputation worked, but it was hard to picture him waxing lyrical, as he does in the text, about "plucking bright honour from the pale-faced moon." I would really, really like to see Hotspur as "the hero" of the piece, right up until near the end, so that the audience is right there with Henry IV in wishing this was the prince, and then the exchange happens where we see the value of Hal and the folly of Hotspur after all. One of the things that is difficult about this particular relationship is that Hal and Hotspur have no scenes together until the final battle, but I think this means as a director, as an actor, you have to play their scenes as if they are, in fact, very conscious of each other, thinking of each other, constantly comparing themselves mentally. At any rate, in this production, Hotspur came off as brutal and rather unlikeable, while Hal was charming from the start, so there wasn't much ambiguity to be resolved.

What I did get from this production was a vivid sense of two worlds in conflict: the rowdy, golden glow of life in the streets, and the grim, dour court obsessed with plots and civil war. And Hiddleston makes a striking Hal - he looks like a prince visiting among mortals - and it made me think of lines actually in Richard II where Richard complains that Bolingbrook (on his way to becoming Henry IV):

...Observed his courtship to the common people;
How he did seem to dive into their hearts
With humble and familiar courtesy,
What reverence he did throw away on slaves,
Wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of smiles
And patient underbearing of his fortune,
As 'twere to banish their affects with him.
Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench;
A brace of draymen bid God speed him well
And had the tribute of his supple knee,
With 'Thanks, my countrymen, my loving friends;'
As were our England in reversion his,
And he our subjects' next degree in hope.

and it occurred to me that Hal really loves England - I mean the people - and understands them in a way that Henry IV does not or has lost. Everyone is worried that Hal has fallen away from his princely role, but he is, in a way, coming to know his future kingdom. I think this is important, the way that it is important for Superman to love Lois Lane (possibly the first time that comparison has been made), or the Gnostic Jesus to love Sophia: God incarnate loves the fallible, all too human, world. That's tremendously beautiful and moving to me, but then is under-cut if the rest of the story is one of disillusionment and revulsion.

What does Hal learn from his time in Eastcheap? I think that's the question of the Henry IV plays, and this production seemed to say: "That a king has no true friends." I'm not sure that's how I'd tackle it. Or perhaps it is not what Hal has to learns as the fact that he is able from the start to find value in Eastcheap that shows he will be a good king.

The Hollow Crown Disc 4: Henry V, William Shakespeare

Tom Hiddleston as Henry V

There is good Shakespeare and bad Shakespeare, and I think the difference is whether the director/actors are fighting the text or working with the text, and to be fair, in my time in theater I have done both. One tip-off is how much "extra-textual" (or intra-textual) material gets put in. To me, that indicates the director and/or actor is struggling, trying to communicate a vision or emotion in spite of the text instead of through it.

There is A LOT of extra-textual material in "The Hollow Crown: Henry V" (2013), from the framing device of Henry the Fifth's funeral - which is ahistorical, since Henry V died in France and only his bones were transported back - to additional shots of Henry riding a horse, shooting a long-bow, sailing on a ship, etc.. I can let some of those go as visual filler behind the Chorus, but there are also "meaningful" moments - glances exchanged (because they have no lines), or a bloodied scrap of cloth in the hands of the boy who "grows up" in the last moment of the film to become the Chorus.

Kenneth Branagh as Henry V

I have the 1989 Kenneth Branagh Henry V seared into my brain, so it was very interesting to watch a completely different version of the same play. Although even calling it "the same play" feels somewhat misleading - all movie versions of the play will almost certainly cut lines, but the 2013 Tom Hiddleston included a great many lines Branagh cut, and cut a great many lines Branagh included, so that one has the strange sense of watching a kind of "inverse" version of the text. The Hiddleston version cut all of the "Upon the King," soliloquy, which still amazes me, and dropped the entire traitor plot with Cambridge, Scroop, and Grey, which I think is also a great pity. One of the things you lose is the sense that France is coming after Henry, if Henry doesn't move against them.

What the 2013 version does give you is a probably more historically accurate picture of Henry's army straggling back toward Calais and a sense of doom going into Agincourt. Hiddleston delivers his "St. Crispin's Day" speech to a small group of his top lords while the commoners are standing in formation elsewhere, and it is a quiet speech in comparison to Branagh's. Branagh pulls out all the stops with a musical score, moving among his men and gathering them together in rousing camaraderie that makes you want to stand up and cheer. It's easier to see how Branagh's band of brothers carries the day against the odds.

Act V scene ii

Hiddleston, whom I liked as Hal, felt flat and humorless to me as Henry V, which is probably more historically accurate, but much less fun to watch. I particularly missed this in the final "wooing of Kate" scene, where the dominate feeling was "This is an arranged match and we might as well make the best of it." This is when I want to see Hal come back. It is an odd scene, for Henry to excuse himself as being a soldier, unable to speak of love. Surely, surely the Hal of Henry IV has more brains and imagination, but Hiddleston took these lines very seriously, playing a soldier king who looked exceedingly uncomfortable and out of his element.

What I came away with was a History Play about a particularly ugly, bloody period of time. If they hadn't been fighting in the mud at Agincourt, they probably would have been fighting in the mud at Shrewsbury again, or somewhere else: a king's strength, a man's worth, is defined by his ability to outlast his opponent in a primitive and barbaric form of warfare. Perhaps this was the point that fit with the theme of "the hollow crown," but it was depressing rather than inspiring. It seems such a waste for Hal and all he claims to have learned from his past experience.

I had a follow up thought about some parts that got cut, chiefly the "traitors" scene (Act II scene ii) and the Welsh, Irish, and Scot captains at Harfleur.... I keep thinking about Henry IV's injunction to his son to "busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels," at that part of the traitors scene is to show that if he doesn't do something, 1) France is coming after him, and 2) he'll spend his kingship defending himself from treasonous uprisings the same way Henry IV found he had to. And I think the importance of the captains at Harfleur is showing the animosities (and occasional comedy) of the various parts of Britain, but united under Henry and his cause. The weirdest part of the traitor scene is Henry's condemnation of Scroop:

But, O,
What shall I say to thee, Lord Scroop? thou cruel,
Ingrateful, savage and inhuman creature!
Thou that didst bear the key of all my counsels,
That knew'st the very bottom of my soul...

It goes on. The sense of betrayal is powerful and personal, but it doesn't really connect up to Henry IV does it? If this had been Poins, or Poins had been Scroop, it would make complete sense, but who has been so close to the king in friendship who was not in the Henry IV plays? I suppose a friendship that emerges in the time period between Henry's coronation and the events of Henry V, but it feels like such a lost dramatic opportunity.

Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Kings of the Earth, Jon Clinch

"The telephone was the old fashioned kind with a dial, rotary phones they called them, and the numbers under the dial were either worn away from use or obscured by dirt. He figured the second. Either way, in the absence of the numbers a person would need to count in order to make a phone call. Graham guessed that such a telephone probably didn't get much use, considering. It was a conduit to a world that had no business here."

Two words I came across in other readers' comments were "Faulkner-esque" and "rural Gothic." I think both sum up the experience of the book very well. Clinch took the basics of a real-life case of four brothers who lived together on a farm in upstate New York and blended it with history from his own family to create a fascinating glimpse of a small knot of people "left behind" by the modern world. "I don't think Lester's family ever knew about the depression or recognized they'd gone through it," their neighbor, Preston Hatch, relates. "It was all the same to them."

The book is organized as a series of narrative reminisces from different characters in different styles and jumps back and forth among the 1930s, 1950s, and 1990s, which was fascinating - there's that "delayed decoding" thing again that I love. You ended up with an in-depth look at the family from multiple perspectives at key points in their lives. Clinch is clearly most interested in the three brothers, but I found myself wanting to know about their youngest sister who makes a break with her past and yet remains tied to it. I have to admit I was looking for something more - a tall order, possibly unfair in such a terrific book - but I kept waiting for An Event, or A Revelation, until I finally figured out one wasn't coming. In this sense, I feel like Clinch may have stuck too close to his original story, but his priority seems to be showing the facets of this hidden, backwater, rural world rather than using it as a setting for a more plot-driven story.

It's beautifully written (that's the Faulkner part) and compelling in its pathos and ugliness. Absolutely worth reading.

Thursday, June 30, 2016

The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold