MarysLibrary

Sparta by Roxana Robinson

You don’t get it. I’d love to do this – what you say. Change. I can’t. Something’s not working. All you do is tear me apart. I’d like to be back here with you all, but I’m not. You don’t get it. I’m not here. I’m not home. I’m still there.

Conrad has returned from a second deployment to Iraq and left the Marines. He is now at home in Katonah, New York, and adjusting to civilian life in the US is not, at this point, possible for him. He suffers from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, but PTSD is too glib a term for his experience.

Roxana Robinson’s Sparta is as good a novel about the problems of men (and women) returning from war, any war, as you will find. Beautifully written, perceptive, with skilled characterization, the novel isn’t easy to read but it is worth reading.

The story begins on an aircraft returning men to the US from Iraq. The trip is a bridge from there to here. But Conrad realizes he has sand in his lungs, dust that forms the very soil of the battleground that he is bringing back with him.

Conrad joined up after studying the classics at Williams College, inspired by the heroism of Sparta. He didn’t look ahead to the downfall of Sparta as its men became hollow from the experiences of battle.

And now that his military experience is over, Conrad, too, is hollow. He doesn’t know how to go back to the man he was before he left for war and he is unable to get the help he needs from the veteran’s hospital and doctors purportedly available, but in fact so strained for resources that they are of no real help at all.

A powerful book, beautifully written, with a meaningful message.

An Old-Fashioned Detective Story

The story begins in the PI’s seedy office, the kind we see in noir films with a club on the street level pounding out an insistent bass all night and a neon light blinking across the grubby street. In walks a wealthy man who wants to hire the gumshoe to prove that his sister was murdered and did not die of suicide as the police have concluded. He provides some evidence that doesn’t add up to much, and the detective refuses the case. Until the wealthy guy offers him double the usual fee and a large retainer. He needs the money and so he says yes.

A temp has just arrived who will serve as his secretary for a couple of weeks, as long as he can afford to pay her, and the gal (this is the sort of tale where you expect the women to be called gals and dames) turns out to be unusually gifted at improvising, whether it’s coffee for the client when the office has no coffee pot or pretending to be a rich woman shopping for a gift for her fictional sister in order to tease information from the salesgirls. She is adroit at acquiring information from people on the phone.

As the detective interviews the people who knew the dead woman, her friends and family, her neighbors, the guards and chauffeurs who were employed by her, the colleagues who worked with her, and the police who investigated her death, he comes to agree with his client that she was indeed murdered and before long he knows who killed her. He just has to prove it.

The story is set in contemporary London and part of the story hangs on cell phones and email, but it is steeped in 1930s LA ambiance. It’s a detective procedural and follows the hero as he slowly puts together a case much as the sleuths in Chandler and Hammett stories did.

So who wrote this mystery? The author and title are in the comments.

I Am Become a Name

This long, but I love every line.

            Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

IT little profits that an idle king,

 By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

 Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole

 Unequal laws unto a savage race,

 That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

 I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

 Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd

 Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those

 That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when

 Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades                       

 Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;

 For always roaming with a hungry heart

 Much have I seen and known; cities of men

 And manners, climates, councils, governments,

 Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;

 And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

 Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

 I am a part of all that I have met;

 Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

 Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades             

 For ever and forever when I move.

 How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

 To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!

 As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life

 Were all too little, and of one to me

 Little remains: but every hour is saved

 From that eternal silence, something more,

 A bringer of new things; and vile it were

 For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

 And this gray spirit yearning in desire                      

 To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

 Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

 

   This is my son, mine own Telemachus,

 To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,--

 Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil

 This labour, by slow prudence to make mild

 A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees

 Subdue them to the useful and the good.

 Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere

 Of common duties, decent not to fail                         

 In offices of tenderness, and pay

 Meet adoration to my household gods,

 When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

 

   There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

 There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,

 Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me--

 That ever with a frolic welcome took

 The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

 Free hearts, free foreheads--you and I are old;

 Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;                    

 Death closes all: but something ere the end,

 Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

 Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

 The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

 The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

 Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

 'T is not too late to seek a newer world.

 Push off, and sitting well in order smite

 The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

 To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths                     

 Of all the western stars, until I die.

 It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

 It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

 And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

 Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

 We are not now that strength which in old days

 Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

 One equal temper of heroic hearts,

 Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

 To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

A Land More Kind than Home by Wiley Cash

Something has spoken to me in the night . . . and told me I shall die, I know not where, Saying:”‘[Death is] to lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth.”

This quote from Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again provides the title for Wiley Cash’s novel which takes place in a fictional rural area near Wolfe’s home in Asheville, in the western part of North Carolina, in the hills and mountains of the Blue Ridge.

From the beginning this novel feels like a Greek tragedy, narrated by three people, the young Jess, who sees something he should not; the old lady who is the conscience of the town of Marshall; and the sheriff, who has to pick up the pieces when Jess’ mother makes a terrible mistake and his father does what he has to do.

A Place More Kind than Home is Cash's first novel, beautifully written. It is not a folksy, local color tale. It’s an intensely suspenseful  narrative about people who are unable to forget the past and struggle to cope with the surprises of the present.

Top Ten Words that Make Me NOT Pick Up a Book

Top Ten Tuesday is a feature created at The Broke and the Bookish blog. Each week they post a new list for bloggers. Click on the logo to see the lists coming up and those posted in the past. This week's list is:

Top Ten Words/Topics That Will Make Me NOT Pick Up a Book

1. Suspense
2. Fantasy
3. Sci-Fi
4. Violence
5. Sex/Erotic
6. Horror
7. 30 Days to . . 
8. Cruelty to small children and animals
9. War
10. Drugs

Have You Made a Comment?

Have you commented on one of my posts lately? Has the message failed to appear in the Comments section?

I have tried to make a couple of comments myself and they have disappeared, apparently into the Typepad dead letter office.

If you have a missing comment, please let me know in an email: [email protected]

Thanks

I Love My Neighborhood

 

Ten Authors Who Deserve More Recognition

Top Ten Tuesday is a feature created at The Broke and the Bookish blog. Each week they post a new list for bloggers. Click on the logo to see the lists coming up and those posted in the past. This week's list is:

Top Ten (actually only Five) Authors Who Deserve More Recognition

1. John Barth - Not all of his books, many of which are still in print and being read. But the one book that is, I think, his best, and is seldom heard of is The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), written in the style of the late 17th century.

2. Diana Abu-Jaber - Her first novel, Arabian Jazz (2003) is about a Lebanese-American family in upstate New York and it is splendid. She understands and has the talent to write convincingly about immigrants from the Middle East as her father was born in Jordan. Her mother is of British and Irish extraction and her descriptions of the conflict of cultures in her family are hilarious. Her most recent novel, Birds of Paradise (2011) is described by Publisher's Weekly as stunning, with effortless prose and fully fleshed characters.

3. Margaret Cezair-Thompson - The True History of Paradise (1998), Cezair-Thompson's first novel,  conveys the very essence of Jamaica in beautiful and precise language. The Pirate's Daughter (2008) is lighter in tone than True History, and features a spunky girl and Errol Flynn. I eagerly await her third novel.

4. Paul Adam - Adam writes mysteries and the best of these feature Gianni Castiglione, a luthier in Cremona. In the first Castiglione mystery, The Rainaldi Quartet we learn he plays with an amateur quartet that includes the chief of police, a priest, and another Luthier, Tomaso Rainaldi. When Rainaldi turns up dead, Castiglione works with the police to discover who did this brutal murder and why.

5. Cynthia Harrod-Eagles - This author is not unknown but I believe she deserves much more recognition for her Morland Saga, a set of 35 English historical novels that begins during the Wars of the Roses and is expected to continue through World War II. I own them all and have read a good many of them. Originally called "history without tears," the saga is filled with cultural and social history, not to mention compelling characters. I don't think Harrod-Eagles repeats a single plot in all those books.

 

The Dinner by Herman Koch

Now and then a book comes along that shouldn't be in any way appealing to a particular reader. For example, I don't like tension and suspense, dark humor and deepening gloom, unreliable narrators. So Herman Koch's new novel, The Dinner, shouldn't be my type of book.

I've been vetting books for next year's Buff Orpington Tournament. So I've read the first 30 to 50 pages of a lot of books that aren't my type just to get a feeling for whether they are any good, unappealing as I might find them. For example, Rachel Kushner's new novel, The Flamethrowers, is not a book that appeals to me at all. But I read 30 pages or so and I think it's a pretty good book, though I don't plan to read it. The Blue Book by A L Kennedy has been well received in some circles. I read the first 30 pages and from that much of the book I think I can say it's not really first-rate.

Although I have liked Kate Atkinson's books in the past, her new one, Life after Life, strikes me as weak, so I didn't finish it. I was sure I'd love Tara Conklin's The House Girl. But I didn't think it was well written so although I had planned to read it, I didn't.

Then came Herman Koch's book. Dark satire, uncomfortable, lacerating. I need none of these in my reading right now. Says The Economist: "The reader does not rise from his table happy and replete so much as stand up suddenly, pale and reeling. . . . Read The Dinner and taste the shock."

With so much against it, really it's a surprise that I should read even so much as the first 30 pages. But I did and I was on page 44 before I thought to look up and see how much I had read. By page 110 there was no way I was going to leave the book unfinished. And I gulped it down, reading all but about 20 pages in one sitting.

The story unfolds like peeling an onion - with just as sharp and astringent an odor. It's complex and subtle but sometimes hits you like a brick. I can't even tell you who the main characters are or what the book is about without spoiling the effect of constant puzzlement and surprising revelation. Normally, I go out of my way to find somebody who is willing to tell me the plot or a novel or movie and how it all turns out. I don't like suspense or surprises. This book depends on constant low level suspense and I ate it up. 

I know nothing about Dutch literature, and I had not heard of Herman Koch before this book popped up in translation in February. It has been popular in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe and I'm sure it will grow increasingly popular in the US.

Here's what The Wall Street Journal said about it:

It's a summer's evening in Amsterdam, and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant for dinner. Between mouthfuls of food and over the polite scrapings of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of polite discourse -- the banality of work, the triviality of the holidays. But behind the empty words, terrible things need to be said, and with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened.

 Read it.

Top Ten Best and Worst Movie Adaptations

Top Ten Tuesday is a feature created at The Broke and the Bookish blog. Each week they post a new list for bloggers. Click on the logo to see the lists coming up and those posted in the past. This week's list is:

Top Ten Best/Worst Movie Adaptations

This is a tough category for me. I don't watch that many movies. But I do watch TV adaptations, especially costume dramas like Downton Abbey (which is original, not from a book.) However, there are some adaptations that I can comment on.

Pride and Prejudice - There have been a number of attempts to capture the delights of this Jane Austen novel, including a movie with Greer Garson and Lawrence Olivier in 1940, and TV adaptations in 1980, 1995, 2003, and 2005. The one from 1995 with Colin Firth as Mr Darcy is splendid. The 1940 movie is fun as long as you accept that it only glances at the novel (someone commented that the costumes were probably left over from Gone with the Wind - all the women wore hoop skirts.)

The 2005 version should have been the best yet, what with Matthew Macfayden, Donald Sutherland, Keira Knightley, Rosamond Pike, and Carey Mulligan. Alas, it fell a bit flat. The 1980 version was poorly cast, with the exception of the stunning David Rintoul as Mr Darcy.

The Thin Man - This is a top ten movie. Unfortunately it's not an adaptation exactly as the book wasn't written until after the movie. It's good, but the movie is better.

The Magnificent Ambersons - This is a good book by Booth Tarkington (1918) and The 1942 movie should have been brilliant, what with Orson Welles in charge and starring Anne Baxter, Agnes Moorehead, and Joseph Cotton as well as Welles. Unfortunately, Welles left the country before the editing was finished and the studio cut at least an hour from Welles version of the film and re-shot a happy ending, then destroyed Welles exorcised film. Criminal. We have a weak movie with flashes of Wellesian genius.

Little Women - The 1933 version of Louisa May Alcott's enchanting 1869 novel was star-studded, with Katherine Hepburn as Jo, and Joan Bennet, Edna May Oliver, and Spring Byington in the cast. It was directed by George Cukor. I loved it and it was my favorite until the 1994 movie with Winona Ryder, Gabriel Byrne, Kirsten Dunst, Claire Danes, Christian Bale, and Susan Sarandon. There are a gazillion other movies and TV adaptations but I have seen none of them.

Related articles

Mr Darcy surfaces as statue in London lake