MarysLibrary

Lyrical Ballads

Lyrical Ballads and Related Writings by William Wordsworth
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Published in 1798, this collection of short poems is more notable for the "advertisement" - a sort of short introduction - and for the preface to the 1802 edition than for the poetry itself. In the introduction, Wordsworth wrote: "The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure."

The 21st century reader, encountering thee and thou and can'st and robb'd and the other poetic diction and affectations of early Romantic poetry and finding it anything but modern, has difficulty understanding what was so revolutionary about this slim book of poetry. It contains "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" and "Tintern Abbey" but otherwise most of the poems are no longer well known or considered first-rate. Many of the pieces concern madness, a fallen womkan, an idiot, a child who does not understand that her siblings are dead, or a shepherd who has lost his flock. These were not, in the 18th century and earlier, considered fit topics for poetry.

Besides the poetic fertility of everyday life in the lower classes, Wordsworth was trying to sell the idea that:

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man;
Of moral evil and of good
Than all the sages can.

Nature was not seen at that time as the spiritual inspiration it now is. This was before the flock of golden daffodils and the 19th century custom of vacationing in the Alps.

Here, from "Tintern Abbey," is more of Wordsworth's Romantic philosophy:

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Pretty inspiring. I especially like "the round oceans." It goes on:

Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
And all my moral being.

It's enough to make Samuel Johnson spin in his grave.

2011 No 19

Coming soon: O: A Presidential Novel, by Anonymous

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The Brontes Went To Woolworths

The Brontës Went To Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What fertile imaginations the characters in this little novel display as they create elaborate lives for people they see in a play or in court or spot on the street. Three sisters and their widowed mother (and their succession of stuffy governesses) entertain themselves by learning all they can about, for example, the judge presiding over the trial on which the mother is a reserve juror.

Judge Toddington and his wife, in the imaginations of the girls, come to tea and invite them to dinner. Toddy, as the judge soon becomes, drives them home in his big car and phones them at night to chat. The careless reader, like the confused governess, may not recognize at first that these activities are entirely in the minds of the characters.

Until the day when one of the girls meets the judge's wife in real life and begins a friendship with her and Toddy that soon includes the entire family.

The Brontes? I can't tell you much without this becoming a spoiler, but they do go to Woolworth's, at least in someone's imagination.

Charming, whimsical, very much of its time (the late 1920s). This book is not for everyone, but it was certainly the book for me. I loved it.

2011 No 18

Coming soon: Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge

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The Empty Mirror

The Empty Mirror by J. Sydney Jones
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Books set in Vienna always, eventually, get to the food. Sacher tortes and coffees of various kinds, sausages, spaetzle, and of course schlagsahne. (The only German I know is "mit schlagsahne, bitte.")

J Sydney Jones' The Empty Mirror is a Vienna mystery in which a former criminal attorney, Karl Werthen (now practicing what seems to be property transfer law or something similarly boring), and a famed criminologist, Dr Hans Gross, team up to prove that Werthen's friend, Gustav Klimt, is innocent of a string of gruesome murders. Every two weeks or so another mutilated body turns up in the Prader (something else that tends to pop up sooner or later in Vienna novels.)

When another person is murdered whilst Klimt is in jail he is released but the two men are now committed to solving this mystery. All of the murders are so exactly alike it has to be a single person perpetrating them. Fortunately, Gross has a colleague high up in the police administration of the city and he is acquainted with Richard Freiherr von Kraft-Ebbing, the chair of the psychiatry department at the University of Vienna. The detectives therefore have access to the cadavers and the case records and they have their profiler.

As they trace the weapon used on each victim and begin to see a pattern in the murders the case is suddenly closed by the apparent suicide of a man who writes a confession. But things are not what they seem and a few weeks later the sleuths are back on the trail, this time with the complication of the assassination of the empress to consider.

At first glance this novel isn't quite as good as those by Frank Tallis, whose series begins with A Death in Vienna (aka Mortal Mischief), but it's the first book in a series and I expect Jones will get into the swing of things with another book. I enjoy almost any novel set in Vienna, especially if it comes mit schlagsahne.

This book should ideally be read with a good map of Vienna at hand. 

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Quotable

And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms. - William Bradford

 

 

Disintegration

Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America by Eugene Robinson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There is no "black America" any more says Eugene Robinson, Pulitzer-prize-winning Washington Post writer and MSNBC commentator. In the days of Jim Crow and widespread discrimination it didn't matter whether a black person had a PhD and taught at Stanford University or dropped out of high school and worked as a domestic, all black people were in danger of insult and even violence.

In the last 40 years this has changed, and for some African Americans it has changed dramatically. The black community, says Robinson, is a community no longer in the way that it was when Oprah was a hosting a local Tennessee radio show, Barack Obama was a toddler, and Tiger Woods was a newborn. Black Americans, according to Robinson, can now be divided into four categories.

The Transcendent are those like Condaleeza Rice, Colin Powell, and Obama who are richer or more powerful than any of us, black or white. The Mainstream are the more than a third of black Americans who are now in the middle class, well educated, and earning above the median.

Robinson's Emergent category includes native blacks who are pulling away from their background of poverty and succeeding in school and in the employment world, heading for Mainstream status. The second category of Emergent comprises immigrant blacks from Africa and the Caribbean. Black immigrants to the US are the best educated, hold the most degrees, and most likely to be professionals in their native land. Ethiopians and Eritreans in the DC area are an example of such groups whose children are attending Ivy League schools, winning Rhodes Scholarships, and becoming the stars of their generation.

Robinson's last category is the 25 percent of blacks whom he calls the Abandoned, those who remained behind in what were once flourishing black areas like U Street in DC, Sweet Auburn in Atlanta, and prosperous all-black neighborhoods in Detroit, Chicago, and most other American cities.

When discrimination eased, those African Americans who could afford it moved to integrated suburbs, leaving behind those who could not afford to move. Especially after the rioting of the late 60s and early 70s, the once lively neighborhoods became wastelands of vacant lots, boarded up buildings, and pervasive crime and the residents left tended to be single mothers and their children and old people. Drugs, failing schools, teenage pregnancies, gangs, and every other sort of dysfunction have made it increasingly difficult for the Abandoned to better their lot.

Robinson backs up his categorization with statistics and some personal experience and I think he is perceptive about the lives of African Americans today. He explains clearly the irony that increasing opportunities for black Americans have had the effect of creating an underclass and leaving them behind with little hope or ambition. His solution to the problems of the Abandoned tend to large government assistance programs and continued affirmative action, most of which I disagree with, but most of Robinson's book is perceptive analysis and very worthwhile.

Whose Body?

Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ah, Lord Peter Wimsey! Here in the first of Dorothy L Sayers' mysteries he is at his young and flippant best attempting to identify a corpse wearing nothing but a pince-nez. His friend, Inspector Parker, is dealing with a disappearance in the same neighborhood. Could they be connected?

It's his mother, the dowager duchess, who alerts Lord Peter to the need for some detecting. The vicar's wife, Mrs Throgmorton, has appeared at the dower house to say that the architect who is repairing the lovely church of St John-before-the-Latin-Gate in Duke's Denver has failed to appear because he found that morning a murdered man in his bathtub. The stubborn and not very bright Inspector Suggs is about to arrest the architect for murder and Lord Peter goes to his assistance.

As with all Sayers' mysteries, quotational ping-pong is played, nonsense is blathered, and very sharp intellect is applied to the problem. With the assistance of the incomparable Bunter, Lord Peter traces the pince-nez, figures out how the body got into the bathtub, and discovers the grisly details of the crime and who the perpetrator is.

2011 No 15

Coming soon: Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America by Eugene Robinson

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Wish List

Guerlain's Apres l'ondee perfume

 

The Attenbury Emeralds

The Attenbury Emeralds: The New Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane Mystery by Jill Paton Walsh
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Back in 1921 the Case of the Attenbury Emeralds was Lord Peter Wimsey's first foray into detection. Reference was made to the case over the years in other Dorothy L Sayers mysteries but until now we didn't know the whole story. And quite a story it is.

This current mystery, which takes place in 1951, is another which entails restoring the king stone of the Attenbury emeralds to the family, which badly needs the jewel in order to pay death duties, which the Labor government after the war raised to prohibitive rates. (Aside: this led to thousands of English country houses being torn down or abandoned to fall down, which I consider a tragedy - a country abandoning its historical and architectural legacy. We tear down our architectural history daily in the US but one would expect better understanding of its importance in the Old Country.)

As the book opens, Lord Peter tells Harriet about his very first case, locating the king stone for Lord Attenbury when it went missing at a house party in 1921. Complicating that puzzle was the existence of a second stone with a continuation of a Persian love verse engraved on the back of the Attenbury family emerald. This second stone was shown to Lord Peter by Nandine Osmanthus (yes, I know, but Lord Peter doesn't do any gardening), a representative of an Indian maharaja whose family sold the stone now owned by the Attenburys to feed their people in a time of famine 300 years before. The maharaja wants to reunite them but the Attenburys won't sell in 1921.

Now they must sell, but when the current Lord Attenbury goes to the bank to claim the stone they have kept there for more than 30 years he finds someone else is claiming this stone is theirs and they have the paperwork to prove it. He of course goes to Lord Peter to help him out. Peter follows the story of the stone over the years every time it was taken from the bank, to secure a loan in 1929, to be worn at a costume party in 1941, and to be examined by a historian of jewelry after the war.

This book, for followers of the Lord Peter series, has some exciting and unexpected family developments. Our favorite characters reappear, Freddy Arbuthnot, the dowager duchess, the horrible Helen, Inspector Parker, and of course Bunter, now married and with a son who goes to Eton with Bredon, the Wimseys' son. Life has changed a great deal in England by 1951 but Lord and Lady Peter have adjusted and continue to lead their charmed life.

I was so enthusiastic to again read a Lord Peter story that I bought for my Kindle (for only 99 cents!) the first of the mysteries, Whose Body?, which you will recall begins with a quiet little man finding a corpse in his bathtub, a corpse which is wearing nothing but a pince nez. A review of that book will be along soon.

2011 No 14

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The Perfect Scent

The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York by Chandler Burr
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

[I just wrote a review three times longer than the one below - and if I do say so who shouldn't - three times more entertaining - and then lost it with the click of a mouse. Dear Goodreads, please find a way to save drafts . . . ]

In The Perfect Scent, Chandler Burr follows one of France's most eminent perfumers, Jean-Claude Ellena, as he developed Un Jardin de le Nil, his first scent as Hermes' in-house "nose." Meanwhile he spent a year watching Sarah Jessica Parker work with Coty to develop her signature scent, Lovely. Most celebrity scents have nothing to do with the woman whose name and image is on the bottle and the advertising. But Parker was the creative director of her perfume and it was her scent preferences and ideas that drove the kind of perfume Lovely became.

Chandler Burr is one of those writers who can write about anything. He started his career at the Nitze School at Johns Hopkins majoring in international economics and Japanese studies. He also studied at Paris' l'Institut d'etudes politiques and Bejing's Central Institute of Foreign Nationalities. (If there's a modern language he doesn't speak no one knows what it is.) From this stuffy background Burr began writing for the New Yorker and then became the New York Times' scent critic. Recently he's been named the curator of New York City's Museum of Arts and Design's new Center of Olfactory Art.

This was one of those books I borrowed from the library and readl then I felt I had to buy my own copy to re-read and keep. Even those who are uninterested in perfume or fashion would find the book interesting because of Burr's skill and because it's about the perfume business - the development of the bottle, the choice of "etui" - the packaging - and the advertising, wooing of journalists, training of salespeople. Really, an unusual and outstanding book.

2011 No 13

Coming soon: The Attenbury Emeralds

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Left Neglected

Left Neglected by Lisa Genova
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Left neglect is an actual condition, caused by injury to the right side of the brain and resulting in the inability to see the left side of things. Lisa Genova, who has a PhD in neuroscience from Harvard, is one of those rare scientists who can write for those of us who don't know our parietal lobe from our patella and who is what's more able to create living characters and then trace the changes as they adapt (or do not adapt) to a crisis in their world.

Left Neglected is about a high-powered Boston businesswoman who is injured in a car accident and then struggles to put her world back together as she copes with left neglect. The other characters are equally realistic: her husband, who works for a start-up that looks like it may soon be a shut-down; her son, who has been diagnosed with ADHD and is not adjusting well; and her mother, who has long been estranged but now is living with the family to help the protagonist with daily living.

I heard about this book at a favorite book blog of mine, Lesley's Book Nook, and it sounded so interesting I put in a request at the library immediately. I'm so glad I did. It's a fine book.

2011 No 12

Coming up: Chandler Burr's The Perfect Scent

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