MarysLibrary

Two high school kids from Verona by Gilbert and Sullivan (an adaptation by William Shakespeare)

I recently spent an hour or two with my pal, Will. Mr Shakespeare and I are getting to know one another much better, lately. I call him Will and he calls me Marye. I read in school what they made me read of his work, I read or (mostly) re-read some of the plays over the decades, and a few years ago I read the sonnets. Most of the sonnets. I like sonnets. I’ve always loved structure.

But recently I’ve decided to read all of the plays. Imagine my surprise when I found some new ones. I really did think Will had quit writing quite a while ago. I read some in alphabetical order just before we left Virginia. Not the optimal way to approach them. I was going to read them in order by history (ancient Britain – Lear, Greece and Rome – J Caesar, Renaissance – R and Juliet, etc.) But then, thanks to a recommendation by my friend, Pamela, I got my hands on a guide by Harvard professor, Marjorie Garber, that lists the plays in the order they were written. Well, as they were written in her opinion. There are as with everything else Shakespearean, many opinions. Including the theory that the plays were written not by Shakespeare himself but by another man with the same name. (No, I'm not making that up.) (Shakespeare After All, 2005.)

So I started a few weeks ago with Two Gentlemen of Verona, for reasons I cannot explain – either I had no reason to start with or I’ve forgotten, or both. I had read this play within the last couple of years. And instead of crediting myself with it I decided to re-read it. That’s because I . . . not love, I don’t love it the way I love The Winter’s Tale or Julius Caesar . . . because I have a crush on it.

 One of the reasons scholars place the play so early in Shakespeare’s career is because it’s so sloppy. Let me give you one example. The two boys – to call them gentlemen is laughable, but then so is most of the play. Anyhow, the boys are from Verona and their fathers would like them to travel, see the world, live at the court of the nearby Duke of Milan (or emperor – the play can’t seem to decide which he is), and gain some polish.

One of them, Proteus, is in love with a local girl, Julia, so he opts to stay in Verona. But Valentine, a handsome lad with an IQ of about 90, is getting ready to go to Milan as the play opens. In fact the ship is waiting in the harbor for him and he has to hurry to catch the tide.

Now you don’t have to know much Italian geography to know that both Verona and Milan are inland. To go by ship from one to the other would entail an overland trek to Venice, a sail around the boot, a landing in Genoa, and another trek. By land there would be a well-traveled road taking you directly from one to the other.

Either Shakespeare was having a joke on his audience or he was incredibly sloppy. Or he had an uneducated collaborator, or the printed version of the play was corrupted, or who knows what. Shakespearean scholarship is sometimes a little out of focus. But I go with sloppy. Also sloppy is one character's welcome of another “to Padua.” There’s more, but you get the idea. Proteus, by the way, ends up in Milan as well, forgets about Julia, falls in love with Sylvia, and tells the duke about his best friend, Valentine’s, plan to elope with her. Julia, who really loves Proteus, follows him to Milan, dressed as a boy of course – so Shakespearean.

Why do I like this play so much? Because it was really written by Gilbert and Sullivan. Valentine, kicked out of Milan by the duke for planning to abscond with his daughter, is taken captive by a gang of outlaws who, because he,  like them, is an “outlaw,” and because he is handsome, vote him their leader. Reference is made to Robin Hood's merry band.

Right behind Valentine is Sylvia, followed by Proteus, followed by the duke, followed by Julia. When Valentine happens on Proteus trying to rape Sylvia and realizes his best friend’s treachery, he’s angry. But Proteus immediately repents and voices his regret, so of course Valentine immediately forgives him and offers him Sylvia. Julia faints and is recognized under her costume, the duke agrees to allow Valentine to marry his daughter, Proteus decides he loves Julia after all. Exuent to a marriage feast.

 One other highlight:

 Who is Sylvia? What is she,/That all our swains commend her?

 2012  No 17

George Orwell is disillusioned

I'm reading the Peter Davison 20-volume Complete Works of George Orwell and I've arrived at Volume 11, Facing Unpleasant Facts, 1937-1939. Orwell went to Spain in December of 1936 to fight with the International Brigade, but he ended up as part of POUM, Partido Obrero de Unification Marxista, with which he connected through representatives of the Independent Labour Party who were fighting in Spain.

He fought until May when he was shot in the throat and went to Barcelona to recover. He and his wife escaped from Spain just ahead of the Stalinists who had broken into his wife's hotel room and stolen all her papers and his diaries. They then held a secret hearing and convicted the Orwells of being Trotskyists and sentenced them to death.

At first Orwell didn't want to admit that these other people who were fighting the good fight were executing people, with or without a trial. But eventually he faced up to what the totalitarian Stalinists were doing - and what had happened to the Russian Revolution. He accepted finally that the glowing reports from Stalin's world were fanciful and that there was a grim gulag in the workers' paradise.

Orwell may have been no political theoretician, especially in 1937; and he certainly did not have the facts available to him that have now surfaced; but, intuitively, he assessed the position accurately. The vision of a socialist society that he experienced on first arriving in Barcelona was not destroyed by Franco; it was betrayed by his Communist allies. As described by him in Homage to Catalonia, this has all the inevitability of tragedy. That peculiar evil feeling in the air - an atmosphere of suspicion, fear, uncertainty, and veiled hatred' that he found on his final visit to Barcelona was precisely that of the miasma of evil and terror dramatised in his favorite Shakespeare play, Macbeth. The effect of that experience marked all else he wrote and did until the day he died.

There is an excellent quote in this volume from a letter written by Jennie Lee, the wife of Aneurin Bevan, the architect of British socialized medicine.

. . . up to his last day George was a man of utter integrity; deeply kind, and ready to sacrifice his last worldly possessions - he never had much - in the cause of democratic socialism. Part of his malaise was that he was not only a socialist but profoundly liberal. He hated regimentation wherever he found it, even in the socialist ranks.

Anthony Trollope's Best Novel, "Can You Forgive Her?"

All Trollope aficionados are periodically asked The Big Question: Which of Trollope's books should a newcomer read first? Even with 47 novels to choose from it's difficult to answer that question. I think you have to have read all of Trollope and be re-reading him before you truly appreciate his books. But of course you have to start somewhere.

Can You Forgive Her? should be the place to start. It has everything that makes Trollope so beloved. There's a love story in which a young woman has to choose between marrying the man she loves or the man her family wants her to marry. In fact, there are two of them, with very different women making very different decisions. There's a hunting scene, one which is exciting to read and which throws light on one of the love plots. There is an election story, where the candidate we are following must put a lot of money into the hands of questionable lawyers and innkeepers in order to bribe the voters.

There is not one but two trips to Switzerland. Trollope liked to send his characters abroad to places he had recently visited and use the scenes and atmosphere of those places to enhance his stories. There's a wonderful inheritance plot, always interesting and important in Trollope novels. There's political negotiating for important jobs in a new government, if there is to be a new government. And there are house parties where the characters get to like one another - or in some cases to loathe one another.

Most important in Can You Forgive Her? the reader is introduced to one of literature's most scintillating characters, Lady Glencora Palliser, the richest woman in Britain aside from the Queen, who is in love with one man but must marry another because she is too young to fight the countesses and marquesses who are her guardians and carries too heavy a weight of wealth. What she makes of that marriage and how is, in my opinion, one of the finest stories in Victorian literature.

What about the title? Whom are we being asked to forgive and for what? Ostensibly we are judging Alice Vavasor, who breaks her engagement (a serious sin in itself) with the man she loves and becomes engaged to her cousin because she can't face the boring life she would lead with her beloved in Cambridgeshire, a place Trollope apparently felt was the most cheerless in England. By accepting her cousin's proposal she feels she can be part of his political campaign and have some interest in life aside from housekeeping and babies. And those dreary fens.

But we are aslo asked to judge Lady Glencora who marries a man she doesn't love, a cardinal sin in Trollope. She then obsesses on the possibility of running away with the man she really loves. This is almost beyond possibility in Trollope as in most Victorian novels. Whether she elopes with this other man or not, can the reader ever really forgive her for even thinking of it?

All of these delights make Can You Forgive Her? the ideal Trollope novel for a beginner except for one thing. It is about 1,000 pages long. Perhaps 50 years ago you could hand this to a reader inexperienced in the 19th century novel. But today could you seriously expect someone with no feel for the measured language and slow pace of the book to enjoy it - or even to finish it? Do you think they would forgive you for recommending it?

2012  No 16

This is, according to my records, the seventh time I've read the novel. I've also re-read parts of it many times. It's my favorite Trollope.

Two for Sorrow - the latest Josephine Tey/Archie Penrose mystery

Here I am again grousing about a book I thought I was going to be giving five stars. This third mystery in which the amateur detective is Josephine Tey has a clever and complicated plot. But the book, which is nearly 500 pages long, should have been closer to 300. The author couldn't resist throwing the kitchen sink in there: a plea for prison reform, a description of women's prisons at the turn of the 20th century, a history of "baby farming," and a lengthy and boring subplot in which a character from a previous book tells Josephine that she loves her and Josephine anguishes over how she feels about this woman.

I think the subplot is a failed attempt to round out the character of Tey, which is flat and one dimentional. That is not a complaint. I don't expect my fictional detectives to be real people. Miss Marple is perfect the way she is. The detectives in the Deborah Crombie and Susan Hill mysteries are a surprising exception. There was no need for the boring and ultimately ineffectual lesbian relationship, which slowed down the action annoyingly.

The book begins with Tey starting a new detective novel in which she takes an historical situation and plans to fictionalize it. Two women in 1902 are running a scheme where one of them, a nurse and midwife, runs a home for unwed mothers. When the babies are born she takes money from the young mothers to place the children in homes where they will be welcomed and loved. Unfortunately, instead of adoption it is death that awaits these children. A second woman takes the babies away, kills them, and disposes of the bodies.

Grim as this is the plot is based on a real case and reference is made to another woman who did much the same thing only abandoned the babies rather than killing them. It was called baby farming. As the fictional Tey researches this practice she becomes embroiled in a murder that takes place in the book's present, 1936. The motive seems to be an attempt to keep the murdered woman from telling what she knows about the baby farming case of 30 years before.

Archie Penrose's cousins are busy making sets and costumes and evening dresses for a gala fund-raiser for a nursing school and attached women's club, a club to which the real life Tey belonged. The scramble to get everything done on time, the internal politics of the nursing vs the club factions, the ongoing murder investigation in the middle of this chaos - these are excellently well done and I was engrossed in the story.

But the author kept stopping dead in the water to talk about how a particular woman prison manager allowed female prisoners to have mirrors and photographs in their cells at Holloway Prison. Or to lecture us on how uncivilized hanging was. (It was, actually, but the middle of a fast-moving mystery plot is not the place to discuss it.) The lesbian sub-plot dragged very slowly. I read it carefully because I assumed there was some carefully placed clue there that would lead to the identify of the killer. There wasn't.

So instead of the 5 stars that this book would have earned if a tough editor had forced the author to control herself and focus on the story - the book gets only 2 stars. I am exceedingly disappointed because there is so much potential for this series to become really first rate. I'm putting my hopes on the next volume of Tey/Penrose adventures.

2012  No 15

Believing the Lie

Believing the Lie is the 17th Inspector Lynley mystery and the series is wearing out. I discover I'm no longer interested in Lynley's private life and his skills at solving mysteries, never all that sharp, rely more on Sergeant Havers than ever. Meanwhile, Havers' private life, which I do care about, is not given enough attention. That may change with the next novel as this one leaves us with a cliff hanger.

The set up for Believing the Lie is unrealistic, though I don't really begrudge a mystery writer who reaches for strange situations. All the ordinary ones (like insane serial killers, etc.) have been worn out. In this book a friend of Lynley's boss' boss asks that Lynley be sent to visit him at his estate in Cumbria, undercover, to determine whether his nephew's recent drowning was really accidental as the inquest decided or if he was murdered. The boss, with whom Lynley is having an affair (which really is beyond belief) spends the entire book trying to find out where he is and what he's doing.

There are a dozen little and big mysteries, with family members and spouses and partners discovered to have interesting pasts. The "biggest" mystery, the background of the estate-owner's daughter-in-law, is bizarre. But I guessed it very early in the book. I guessed at a few other things and was wrong. This is a guesswork because there aren't a lot of solid clues.

This book, more than other Elizabeth George mysteries, has some disgusting characters, and the language is, in my opinion, overly offensive and vulgar. There were no likable characters at all. The people one sympathizes with are presented without subtlety. The reader never suspects them of anything nefarious. Some of the descriptions of Lake Windermere and Morecambe Bay are lovely. But when the descriptions of scenery are more gripping that the "suspense" you have a problem.

2012 No 14

To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf is a surprisingly popular author considering how difficult her books are to read. She is lauded for her "stream of consciousness" style, and of course she was in at the beginning of that trend and so has historical importance. But just how meaningful is that technique now? What do her books have to say that we still in the 21st century want to hear?

I'm afraid my answer is, not much, though one does come away from To the Lighthouse with a warm picture of life in the Ramsay household summer house in the Isle of Skye in Scotland. Actually, when they begin building fortifications on the beach and the sound of the guns in France can be heard from the house during World War I, you realize the author has lost her focus a bit and is describing, as she has been doing all along, the house in Cornwall where the Stephen family summered when Virginia was a girl. But wherever the house is located it is really the heart of the beautiful Mrs Ramsay, who makes the house come alive with her family and the artists and academics invited to visit there.

Two extended scenes demonstrate what is best about the novel. The first is a dinner party in which Mrs Ramsay's thoughts wander about as she thinks about not having the money to repair the greenhouse, worries about her husband being annoyed because he isn't accorded the attention his vanity requires, watches for a young couple to come back from the beach where she has sent them hoping the young man will propose, considers the feelings of an old man who is a frequent guest and who annoys her husband by asking for a second bowl of soup. It's a beautiful scene which takes place in 1910, before electricity has arrived on the island, and at a time when people still dressed for dinner. The party is reflected in the windows of the room and the description of the entire affair is beautifully done. Difficult to read but worth the work.

The second passage, written in a more straightforward style, is seen partly through the eyes of an old woman who is paid by the family to clean the house during the winter. We learn in a startling sentence that Mrs Ramsay has died. The family does not return to the house for many years. Despite the work of the cleaning woman the house deteriorates, plaster falls, rats inhabit the attic, books molder, swallows nest in the drawing room, and the garden, which Mrs Ramsay loved, goes to ruin with carnations among the cabbages and poppies in with the roses. The description of the deterioration is stunning.

And the lighthouse? The book begins with the child, James, wanted to sail to the lighthouse the next day but his father tells him it will not be possible because of the weather. Indeed, the visit is not made at that time. But when the family returns to the house after an absence of 10 years, two of the children go to the lighthouse with their father and they connect with him, perhaps for the first time, as he praises his son's sailing skill.

The only character besides Mrs Ramsay that I was sympathetic with and really understood was Lily Briscoe, a painter, who is insecure about her work in 1910 because she is criticized by a fellow visitor because her work is not in the acceptable style. And besides, he says, women can't paint or write.

Ten years later Lily completes a painting she had begun on the previous visit 10 years earlier just as the family sailing expedition reaches the lighthouse. What does that signify? I haven't a clue. But I was gratified that Lily was now able to paint as she liked without concerning herself with what other people would think about her work.

Note, I began re-reading this book back in October as it was the November choice for the 22nd Ave Book Club. I didn't get around to finishing it until mid-January. As I've implied, it's not a page-turner.

2012  No 13

Mid-Winter Cleaning Day

Today our house was "deep cleaned." All the heavy furniture was moved, the walls were dusted, ledges above doors and windows cleaned, and Mary's Library was straightened and reorganized.

Here's what it looked like when the cleaners started.

And here's what it looked like when they were done. Every book was taken from the shelf and dusted. I'm extremely grateful to Beverly and Rick for doing this for me.

View from my front porch

Wonderstruck - My Newberry Pick

Wonderstruck is THE children's book of 2011. When I encountered it I quit reading children's books in my project to predict the Newbery winner. This is it.

Half of the book is a normal story, simply but elegantly written, that tells about a young man who has hearing difficulties. The other half is a graphic novel about a deaf girl. Both are engrossing.

And at the end of the book the two stories converge and each completes the plot of the other. It's brilliant and it's a winner.

2012 No 12

More 2011 Mop-Up

I still have a lot of books in my notebook that I finished reading in 2011 but didn't post about. Here are a few more of them.

Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip-Confessions of a Cynical Waiter by Steve Dublanica
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A back-of-the-scenes expose of restaurant management. Well written and amusing at times and I did learn quite a bit about how a professional kitchen is run.

2011 No 178

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

From the blurb: "An influential psychologist who is convinced that many important CEOs and politicians are, in fact, psychopaths teaches Ronson how to spot these high-flying individuals by looking out for little telltale verbal and nonverbal clues. And so Ronson, armed with his new psychopath-spotting abilities, enters the corridors of power. He spends time with a death-squad leader institutionalized for mortgage fraud in Coxsackie, New York; a legendary CEO whose psychopathy has been speculated about in the press; and a patient in an asylum for the criminally insane who insists he's sane and certainly not a psychopath."

2011 No 179

Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy F. Baumeister
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength is an unusually sensible book about the importance of self-discipline and what physiologically contributes to success. For example, eating fat and sugar makes it easier to resist temptation of all kinds, but what does this mean if you are trying to lose weight? Fascinating book. Not self-help.

2011 No 180

1493: Uncovering The New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Charles Mann's follow-on to 1491 is primarily about the post-Columbian exchange, the flora and fauna, including bacteria and viruses, that passed from the old world to the new and vice versa. Where would we all be without tomatoes, potatoes, and chocolate? He spends a bit of time explaining how evolution created such different worlds.

2011 No 181

My blog is six years old

Today is the sixth anniversary of my blog. On that Tuesday in 2006 when my blogging began I was reading The Gentleman in Trollope, Barchester Towers, and Tea with Jane Austen.

 Here's a post from that first year of blogging:

We were in the grocery store yesterday and there they were – boxes of Crayola crayons with 64 colors. Wilhelm was looking at light bulbs – we use those curled ones that are energy saving and don’t burn out as quickly, but they hide them in the light bulb display so it was taking a while.

Anyhow, from the other side of the aisle those crayons were singing to me. In Greek. I think Wilhelm had earplugs because he didn’t hear a thing. I told him I was going to cut them up to add extra color to salads (they are edible, you know), but he didn’t buy that. He did buy the crayons.

As Miss Woodhouse and I were admiring them later he said, offhandedly, “Now I suppose you’ll want the bigger box.” Bigger Box! A box with more than 64 colors?

I was on the Internet in a flash and there on the Crayola site was a box with 120 colors. It will be here within 5 business days.

Trollope's Golden Lion of Granpere

The Golden Lion of Granpere by Anthony Trollope
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Famous authors can be notoriously insecure. They begin to wonder whether their success is based on continued excellence or if people just buy their books because their name has become a popular brand.

This apparently happened to Anthony Trollope in the mid-1860s when he was at the height of his fame, having just finished the Barsetshire series. So he decided to publish some books anonymously and see if they were as popular as, say, Doctor Thorne.

There are a couple of problems with this. One is that Doctor Thorne is, in the estimation of many people, his best book, so comparing it to anything else, let alone an anonymously published novel means little. But the main problem is that AT, whose novels range from 400 to 800 pages and more, wrote three very slim novels. And unlike any of his other novels they were set in Europe. The characters were not English. And two of the three were tragedies, with people throwing themselves off cliffs in despair and such. They could hardly be more different from the books that made him popular.

Not surprisingly, they flopped. In fact, nobody wanted to publish his third novel and it was only a journal that Trollope himself was editing that finally accepted The Golden Lion of Granpere.

The novel? Well, at least it's not one of the tragedies; it starts out as a sensible novel of an angry father, a proud son, and a reticent girl. The boy loves the girl, the girl loves the boy, and the father wants to separate them. For no good reason at all except his sense that he should be making these decisions in his own house.

From there the novel deteriorates to farce, and rather funny farce at that. A charming book, easy and quick reading, and entertaining.

One other problem. Trollope and his wife visited Alsace Lorraine in 1867 and he came home and wrote this book set there in France. But because of the difficulty finding a publisher he didn't get it published until 1872. And by then it had changed hands, you know . . .

2012 No 11

This is a repost of comments from an earlier reading.

Pickwick abandoned yet again

The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This, the third or fourth attempt I've made to read The Pickwick Papers, got me to page 245, which is about five times further than I've been able to hold on in the past. This is not really a novel but rather a string of silly stories mixed with weak tales embedded in the ludicrous adventures of Pickwick and his friends.

On top of that Dickens adds his usual wearying lament for the debtors and others held in prison. Then there's a little touch of corruption in the courts and the legal profession and a nasty man who steals from everyone he can con, until, of course, he sees the light and reforms entirely.

I'm determined to read in 2012 the Dickens novels that are considered first-rate: David Copperfield and Great Expectations. But I will not waste my time on nonsense like Pickwick, which isn't even amusing. Bleak House is one of my favorite novels, although the sentimentality annoys me (Ester shaking her little basket of keys, Jo's deathbed prayer.) Let's hope DC and GE have at least a few realistic characters and a less than laughable plot.

2012 No 10

Two more books from 2011

The Season of Second Chances: A Novel by Diane Meier
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Here's what Publisher's Weekly had to say about The Season of Second Chances:

An out-of-touch Columbia professor gets a new lease on life in Meier's unconvincing debut when she takes on a fixer-upper house and some equally messy relationships. Forty-eight-year-old Joy Harkness loves teaching, but hates the campus politics and her lonely Manhattan life. So when she's invited to be part of a new program at Amherst College, Joy jumps at the chance and buys a nearly condemnable Victorian with no clue of how much work will be involved in making the house livable. Enter Teddy Hennessy, a younger handyman with a domineering mother. Inevitably, Joy and Teddy date, and Joy fixates on liberating him from his mother and on finding him more prestigious employment. Meanwhile, Joy's female friendships and their respective crises redefine who Joy is and what she values. Unfortunately, Meier focuses too much on surface matters and has a tough time making Joy come to life; her relationship with Teddy, meanwhile, carries uncomfortable maternal overtones. There are too many cracks in the foundation on this one.

This is an excellent synopsis but I don't think the book is as bad as the reviewer describes it. It's entertaining and there are some all too real people in the story.

2011 No 176

The American Heiress by Daisy Goodwin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this book because I loved the cover. Unfortunately, the story went downhill from there and didn't plateau until it was in well-trodden territory. An American girl loves a lad but goes off in the late 19th century to Europe to find a titled husband to buy with her mother's money. Here's the summary from the Spokane Library web site:

Be careful what you wish for. Traveling abroad with her mother at the turn of the twentieth century to seek a titled husband, beautiful, vivacious Cora Cash, whose family mansion in Newport dwarfs the Vanderbilts', suddenly finds herself Duchess of Wareham, married to Ivo, the most eligible bachelor in England. Nothing is quite as it seems, however: Ivo is withdrawn and secretive, and the English social scene is full of traps and betrayals. Money, Cora soon learns, cannot buy everything, as she must decide what is truly worth the price in her life and her marriage.

2011 No 177

Alice McDermott's Child of My Heart

Child of My Heart by Alice McDermott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Alice McDermott is a writer akin to Stewart O'Nan and Anita Brookner, whose work is quiet and slow. McDermott won the National Book Award for Charming Billy and Child of My Heart is worthy of such recognition as well.

The narrator, a beautiful girl whose parents have moved to the Hamptons and encouraged her to care for the children of and to do pet sitting for rich and powerful summer visitors, hope that she will make a "good" marriage, something not quite as peculiar in the early 1960s as it seems today. She invites her favorite cousin, Daisy, the child of her heart, to stay with her for the summer.

Slowly, as the two girls walk the dogs and pet the cats and care for the child of summer people from the city the precarious state of Daisy's health, the wandering eye of an old and famous painter, and the dysfunctional family living next door come together to create a stunning denouement.

2012 No 9

Not a Creature Was Stirring on the Main Line in Bryn Mawr

Not a Creature was Stirring by Jane Haddam
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This first book in the Gregor Demarkian mystery series was published back in 1991. My friend Sarah told me about these books and I was delighted with them. Great plots, interesting suspects, amusing supporting cast, a holiday connection. And something you don't find in many mysteries, two characters who aren't just cardboard. One of them is the former FBI detective, Demarkian, who is still mourning the death of his much-beloved wife and regrets having retired early; he misses his job.

He has moved back to the neighborhood in Philadelphia where he grew up, a small Armenian enclave that has come through the years without decaying or losing its ethnic qualities. He finds there many of the people he knew 30 years ago and at first he is uncomfortable at the old women who manage to find out everything that is happening in the neighborhood. (This is not an Armenian thing - in the small Yankee/French Canadian town where I grew up people knew what you were going to do before you did it.)

The other particularly interesting character in the series is Father Tibor, the priest at the Armenian Catholic Church. He is wise and saintly, in as realistic a portrayal of such a man as I've read anywhere. He has lived under three repressive regimes and reads in six languages. He has books piled up everywhere in his apartment behind the church. He is always there when anyone needs help but he doesn't interfere with anybody. Whenever Demarkian begins to think Tibor is too naive, Father Tibor shows that it is perhaps Demarkian who is the naive one. The warmth and charm of this character is deeply engaging.

And the mystery? The father of a large and very wealthy Main Line family is found dead just moments before Demarkian arrives for dinner after having been invited in a mysterious manner by the dead man. He finds there the Bryn Mawr police chief, John Henry Newman Jackman, a man he has worked with in the past, a very good detective but over his head in this case.

If you pay very close attention you can figure out who's killing whom and why. But it isn't obvious and the clues are cleverly interwoven with the herring.

2012 No 8

Hypocatastasis

There's a word for everything.

.

Some Quasi-Classics

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hemingway is out of fashion these days, so much out of fashion it's sort of chic to say you like his work. Well, I didn't exactly like this novel, but I did understand it, something I can't say happened last time I read it back in the late 50s when Papa was still alive.

The book, it turns out, is about loyalty. The narrator introduces a young bull fighter, a man who is going to be a star before long, to a woman who will distract him and encourage him to drink too much and he will lose his innocence and his focus on his job. The people in the town in Spain, who have come to think of him as one of them because he is knowledgeable and loves the sport, now spurn him. He has been disloyal to them.

The is at the heart of Hemingway's belief in heroism and loyalty and love and the man in the arena. The book has much more to say, of course, and it's a delight to read about Paris' left bank in the 1920s. It is possible to figure out who the real people are on whom he has based his characters, none of whom he has treated gently. His spare style, used by many writers now, was shockingly new at the time he burst onto the literary scene.

There is much to know and to like and to enjoy about Hemingway's novels and a good biography is intensely interesting, considering his women and his children and his constant yearning for the heroic.

2011 No 174

Daddy Long Legs by Jean Webster
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The movie, Daddy-Longlegs, starring Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron, was made in 1955 and so I thought the book had been written in the early 1950s. A young girl is taken from an orphanage by a wealthy benefactor and sent to college and the '50s were when women were starting to go to college in large numbers. The story seemed at the time to be very modern.

We watched it again a while back and that sent me to the book to re-read what was a delight to me when I was a girl. And I discovered it was published in 1912. Mary Pickford was the first Judy in the 1919 silent film. Remarkable.

The author, Jean Webster, was a women's rights crusader and a socialist and the book was way ahead of its time. There is a sequel, Dear Enemy, which I intend to read soon.

2011 No 175

Claire Tomalin's shocking and enlightening biography of Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Charles Dickens was a monster. I know, he spent enormous amounts of time and energy raising money for charitable causes. I know, he was sympathetic to the poor, demonstrated their plight in his books, and fought for social reform. I know, he was the most popular writer of the 19th century and his books are still read today, in part because of the vivid caricatures, those children of his fertile imagination.

But his ego was monumental. He was selfish on a scale hard to imagine, he was sarcastic about people who had done him no harm. He was almost unbelievably cruel to his wife, abandoning her after 20 years of marriage, 10 children, and at least two miscarriages, primarily because he fell in love with an 18-year old girl and his wife, was, not surprisingly, after all those children, growing fat. He was angry at her for having so many children - his sudden hatred for her was that irrational. 

He spread lies about her so fantastic most people were embarrassed for him. But if, like Thackeray, his publishers, and other formerly very close friends did not back him entirely he cut them off. His daughters were instructed to cease being friends with Thackeray's daughters and never to speak to their maternal grandmother again. At a time when he was making 10,000 to 12,000 pounds a year he offered his wife 400 pounds a year in alimony. He hired a doctor to declare her of unsound mind. The doctor would have none of it. Mrs Dickens quietly did as he asked and moved out of their house, making little complaint and maintaining her dignity. She was a lady.

Dickens was no gentleman. He dressed like the 19th century equivalent of a used car salesman and his word was about as good. He broke contracts with his various publishers many times in order to get more money. He lied with facility, verbally and in print, all his life.

His sentimentality knew no bounds. When he was writing about the death of Little Nell he worked himself into a tempestuous emotional state, demanding sympathy from all his friends. When the three-year-old daughter of one of those men died and another of Dickens' friends spent days consoling the bereaved father, Dickens wrote that he found this excessive.

Claire Tomalin has done a splendid job of presenting this larger-than-life character with all his strengths and his many horrifying weaknesses. Often a biographer will fall in love with her character and excuse behavior that is inexcusable. Tomalin does not do that. She is as fair to Dickens as it's possible to be and she evaluates his work with great skill and perception. (meaning she agrees with me about which books are great and which are laughably bad.)

2012 No 7

Simenon's Maigret and the Saturday Caller, a delicious mystery

Maigret and the Saturday Caller by Georges Simenon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Georges Simenon's Maigret mysteries are unlike any others I've encountered. They are so low key, so slow-moving, devoid of brightness or suspense it would be easy to overlook how clever they are and how well constructed.

Maigret and the Saturday Caller is typical of these sub fusc stories. For weeks, every Saturday, a man has been coming to 36, quai des orfevres, the headquarters of the Paris police, asking for Inspector Maigret, then leaving before he gets an interview with the famous detective. One Saturday when Maigret gets home he find the man waiting for him in his own living room with a peculiar confession to make. He plans to kill his wife and her lover.

Maigret takes the man seriously and carefully interrogates him. The wife took a lover two years previously and the Saturday caller tells Maigret that he has been sleeping on a cot in the dining room since then while the lover controls his business and shares his bed with the wife. Maigret asks the man to phone him every day on the theory that this will reinforce the man's reluctance to actually murder anyone. But one day the man does not call. Maigret sets in motion an investigation of . . . nothing. The wife and her lover are alive and no violence or anything else untoward seems to have taken place.

Like oysters and olives, Maigret mysteries are an acquired taste, but once you are used to them they are perfectly delicious.

2012 No 6