Just Get to the Story ... Skip the Forward and Introduction

Remember in public speaking, the instructor chanted "first you tell them what you're going to tell them, then you tell them, then you remind them what you told them." Maybe that is just fine in oral instructions, but it is tedious and falsely page-filling in a novella. Victor Hugo's The Last Day of a Condemned Man was published in 1832, with memories still fresh from the French Revolution and the guillotine used much more broadly. Hugo could picket in front of state capitals or on the eve of executions today. He believed (1) society made the criminal what he is and could not blame anything else for his falling into a life of crime when all other opportunities were cut off and (2) more than the criminal suffered by his death, namely his family. Hence, there was no moral authority for capital punishment by the state.

If his wasn't so blatantly stated in both the interpretive foreword and by Hugo himself in his introduction, TLDOACM seems more neutral -- depicting the depravity of the inmates, the intentional distancing of surviving family members of the convicted. Because he never divulges the crime, Hugo leaves open to interpretation whether this incarceration and verdict was a political travesty/vendetta or just punishment for a violation of the sacred norms of society. Had it been disclosed, a lot of Hugo's argument would have been weakened. He argues against all facts, a charge he levels against his perceived biases in those who favor capital punishment.

All in all, an A.

Keeping in my French lit vein, I watched an "art house" movie last night, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Set in China during the worst of the reign of Chairman Mao, it is a Jules and Jim kind of story of two young men, sent to remote mountains to be reeducated from their bourgeois ways. Instead they influence the village with their violin music, knowledge of dentistry and love of French literature. They take on the education of a teenage girl, the granddaughter of the local tailor. All in French and Chinese, the scenery is beautiful, the dialogue succinct and the tension precisely toned. A wonderful movie about a horrible time in a nation I still find without allure.

Still Reading Murder Mysteries by the Light of the Naked Moon

Browsing through the two week take-outs in the library, picked up Naked Moon by Domenic Stansberry only because it was a new moon, the sturgeon moon this month. Unfamiliar with the author, but he has won an Edgar and been nominated for both a Shamus and Hammett. This story gets off to a slow and confusing start, maybe because I am picking up the series mid-stride. Set in an old part of San Fransisco, a former Italian now Chinese neighborhood, the lead, Dante Mancuso of the pelican nose, faces intrigue from "the company" ... an ill-defined organization with either/or or both underworld and governmental ties. Trust no one. Dante is not a noble protagonist but surely a memorable one. I have reserved three of Stansberry's other books to continue my delving into this threatening milieu.

Meanwhile, I also finished the book for book club Tuesday night, a Booker prize winner, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. Funny, I mentioned this book to Hamagrael who was vacationing "back home" this week, and she said she avoided this book hearing about its vulgar language. I told her the book is written as if by Paddy at age ten so the swearing is juvenile bravado, testing out dirty words almost like the boys do at Catholic grammar school learning a new word in vocabulary lessons. The tone of this book is marvelous. All the "growing up" stories that are familiar, be it Tom Sawyer, Tin Drum or Painted Bird, still leak the dexterity of a class A writer. This book not only has the language but also the random memory structure and absence of motives that are the realities of a young boy's mind. I will not enthusiastically endorse the book, though, being more intrigued by another Booker winner I am reading, The Famished Road by Ben Oki.

Meanwhile, ran a double feature on my DVD last night, finally getting a long-reserved copy of A Single Man and chancing on a copy of Changeling. I wanted to see the former because I thought I liked Julianne Moore; I was reluctant to watch the latter because I strongly dislike Jolie. What a surprise. I guess I forgot Eastwood directed Changeling and it was a perfectly, if violently rendered true story that holds its own against the greats of LA corruption, as good as Chinatown.

Funny while Hamagrael was home, we were both reading Victor Hugo, she Toilers of the Sea that I picked up for her here since her library system isn't deep, and me reading Last Day of a Condemned Man on the Hesperus Press list. While neither of us have finished, we both remarked on the blaring anti death penalty polemic that saturates these books.

I feel like the lethargy of summer is ending and I want to read more. Just one more weekend of picnics and parties and my life hopefully resumes its more natural rhythms.

First Course in Murder

Okay, I have completely abandoned "meaningful" reading selections and have reverted to my habit of murder mysteries with The Grave Gourmet by Alexander Campion. Although I have recommended it to the best-traveled Slacker since the story is set in Paris where she travels every year, the book is only a "one star" ... generous at that. Got to love the heroine's name, Capucine, French for nasturtium by the way, one of my favorite flowers, but as a young detective on her first murder after slogging away in financial crimes behind computers, she seems clueless and only clarifies her deductions with the assistance of her older, much wiser, restaurant critic husband Alexandre (the author's alter ego, peut etre?). Can't figure out how to make that look grammatically correct.

I was hoping for -- if not a Nick and Nora couple of sleuths-- at least a duo as vital as my secret addiction: Eve Dallas and Rourke of J. D. Robb's In Death series. Capucine and spouse come no where close. The death staged at a three star restaurant from apparent food poisoning is really a case of industrial espionage, an area Capucine has no understanding of whatsoever.

In the epilogue, Alexandre and the chef/owner of the place where the body was stashed catch up on what has happened to them and to Capucine during the year since the murder. The chef has relocated to New York City because his Parisian regulars deserted him and only tourists came to gawk at the scene of the crime. To quote the chef: "... The French patron is knowledgeable, but he is cynical too, and that makes him difficult. In America, they know nothing." Strangely, this seems to sum up Capucine, as a flic, she knows nothing.

Maybe If It Was Told Around a Campfire

One Thousand and One Ghosts never hit that tally and never had the fright level one expects in tales about encounters with spectres. The style is recognizably Dumas and there is enough French history post reign of terror to make stories about vengeful nobles timely. I suspect his dealing with the barbary of the guillotine is less diatribe than the Hugo on the Hesperus list.

I am still finding it difficult to find something noteworthy, let alone erudite, to write about these novellas, distracted as I am by several good movies I have interspersed given my long empty work-less (pay-less) afternoons. Today, before finishing Dumas, I watched An Education which is a fine rendition of the seduced sixteen year old by the older lying married man and read the subtitles from A Heart in Winter while my younger son vacuumed the house. That story more typical of French cinema has the characters never acting as you hope they do; always finding more honesty in their frustrations and daily lives than from a Hollywood glossed story where no love goes unfulfilled. Work and self knowledge are esteemed as more meaningful than flings. Quite a contrast to An Education where the plot is so formulaic and predictable. I liked the portrayal of French community which is sorely absent in the British flic ... from all the overheard conversations in the bistro, in friends houses in the middle of the night. The dialogue from An Education is not as tangential, more moralistic teachers at school or stark vacuity of bimbo hanger-ons.

I guess I have to attack the book selected for my face-to-face book club for the 31st. Got a reminder from the co-chair today. It is a Booker Prize book so hopefully once I get further into it, I'll get engaged and finally be happy about summer reading. Think a comedy movie might help as well. As would challenging work.

The Compulsion of Lists

Read the other Bulgakov book published by Hesperus, The Fatal Eggs. This one was even worse than A Dog's Heart. Once again, the plot centers in Moscow after the Revolution with a "aristo" scientist trying to cope with the stupidity of the committee members. This experiment entails a "red ray" that the scientist directs on to frogs which causes them to mature and reproduce quickly and expotentially. All this is occurring during one of the first USSR agricultural crisis -- some poultry disease. The good comrades decide to usurp the scientist's red ray and use it on imported eggs to jump start the industry. Unfortunately, the eggs sent to the committee are not chickens, but an assortment of reptiles with the sci-fi predictable mutations and loss of lives.

Well that's about it, my summary without engagement of any kind with the author, his bland style, dated crusade, et cetera, et cetera.

At least the next book to review, One Thousand and One Ghosts by Dumas is a goodie.

But the Other Parts are Bolshevik

Even Hesperus has some "eh" books. Finished one such a couple of days ago, namely Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov. It is a novella set close to a decade after the Russian Revolution at a time when the newly minted Communists were all for singing at dawn and breaking up the larger apartments into more equitable "cubbies." The main character is a well-to-do doctor/mad scientist (oh I forgot to mention, this falls in the satiric sci-fi genre) who takes home a mongrel from the streets, fattens him up and transplants the pituitary gland and gonads of a common criminal. (N0, this isn't heading into the successful realms of The Charlatan.)

Neither is it as memorable as Frankenstein because the manifest political message. Which is, I decipher, the Russian classes were either 1) oblivious to the masses but overlaying a "culture" on the country or 2) so downtrodden as to become near-dogs themselves ... scrounging for food or attacking. Being written in the mid 1920's, the medicinal/psychiatric side effects lack the more frightening parodies that could be expressed post-DNA and more organ transplant operations. The story ends with the doctor restoring the doggie-ness to the "patient," implying the author's belief in the comfortable, if imperfect known world.

In the Beginning, Was the Word

Wow, two in one day. My drive to get books back pre-Woods Hole continues. Another Hesperus amuse bouche finished. This time, The Diary of Adam and Eve, by Mark Twain, as unknown as the Hawaiian diaries and equally enjoyable. Even though this one can be read in the length of a TV comedy hour.

Of all people to write the forward, Hesperus chose John Updike. Okay. There is a marked different world view when it comes to the battle of the sexes. Updike points out how shallow and undeveloped Twain's vapid female counterpoints are to his male leads. Okay granted. But in this book, given the time and contemporary buzz of Darwin and emerging psychoanalysis, Eve is portrayed charmingly. She is not the she-devils of Zola. She is stereotypical, but only in a post-feminist decade. She does have some glaring gaps: her only attempt to cook is to throw one of her cherished apples into the fire, fire that she, not "man" discovered. Twain portrays her is consumed by curiosity, a scientist who experiments, but not to the expense of her awe of beauty, and the recognition of worth being defined by something other than usefulness.

Twain's take on the acclimation of one sex to the quirks of the other's is a wondrous filling in of the blanks in Genesis. How did they come to adjust to each other? How did the acclimate to gender based traits? The device of using a dairy to interpret the same events first by Adam, with his world view and then by Eve, is a perfect way to explain away how to this day a man and a woman regard the same thing as polarly different and holding innately different relevance. It is especially clever how they explain the appearance of Cain, and Eve's "crazy" protective stance to something that Adam thinks could be a fish or a kangaroo or a bear without a tail. Even with their consumption with discovering the cause of all things, and documenting a quasi-theorem for all things around them, Adam simplistically believes that Eve found Cain in the forest and goes looking for more of this unknown species; he is jealous of her good luck in finding another one, Abel, after he has searched so far and wide.

I loved Eve's appreciation of beauty, beauty that is so much more valued because it is mysterious. Being someone enamoured of the Moon, her perception on day two of her life: ..."The moon got loose last night, and slid down and fell out of the scheme - a very great loss. It breaks my heart to think of it. There isn't another thing among the ornaments and decorations that is comparable to it for beauty and finish. It should have been fastened better. If only we can get it back again. But of course there is no telling where it went to. And besides, whoever gets it will hide it. I believe I can be honest in all other matters, but I already begin to realise that the core and centre of my nature is love of the beautiful, a passion for the beautiful ... For I do love moons, they are so pretty and so romantic. I wish we had five or six. I would never go to bed. I should never get tired lying on the moss-bank and looking up at them." Would there be moon glow disturbing my bedchamber this evening.

If one can overlook Updike's imposition of his own more "modern" interpretation of the stance between the sexes and his similar compulsion to belittle religion and project that firmly onto Twain, he does put a publishing reality on the collection. Much like Dickens did with A House to Let, these six stories were reworked over time, given the interest of a paying publisher. That adds to the humor of Eden being Niagara Falls, there being no buffalo in Buffalo and the overall barrenness of Tonawanda. (We New Yorkers are often to ignorant or oblivious to Twain's time in Buffalo -- I ate in this green house when I was visiting the county motor vehicle office out thataway in the 70s -- but at least the final snippet rehashes the absurdity of countermanding the theory of evolution by erecting a statue to Adam in Elmira, commercially assuring a place in history to an otherwise inaccessible, but quaint town. Today, it can claim the fame of Tommy Hilfiger.)

Would that I find a couple more Hesperus hours of humor.

Dutiful, but not Insightful Reading

Trying to clear the decks of library books before I head off for a couple days vacation, I finished the third Malcolm Gladwell book, Blink. This one has two diametrically opposed observations. First, that trained people can make accurate decisions in about two seconds because they ignore everything that is irrelevant and zero in on the key element. Hoving from the Met is used as an example of someone, who it appears can intuitively spot a forgery, but who in reality has trained for years (harken back to Gladwell's theory of 10,000 hours to expertise). Just when you want to trust your own gut first impressions, Gladwell flips over to illustrate split second biases of the cops in the Amadou Diallo case and how conductors are prejudiced in whom they place in their orchestras unless auditions are held behind screens. This is not a message of "trust but verify;" rather I can only conclude that Gladwell is more comfortable when that instant discern affects inanimate objects rather than people, especially those one does not know. I really have nothing else to say. Sorry this took longer than two seconds to read. But I think you get my impression.

Vacant House, Empty Book

Another Hesperus 100 pager down: this time A House to Let "by Charles Dickens." Well, not actually. The book is a collection of six short stories, one of which is a horrible poem, with the only thing in common being a thread of speculation as to why a dilapidated house across the street from the narrator is vacant with no chance of being rented. Inside the cover, the table of contents credits only one of the stories as being exclusively written by Dickens, two co-authored with good old Wilkie Collins, one singularly by Collins, and the other two by little known women, Elizabeth Gaskell and Adelaide Anne Procter. The book emerges more as a marketing device for Dickens' magazine, especially to promote the circulation of work by these lesser female writers. The two strongest selections are the story's "book ends" first and last installments which happen to be the two co-authored pieces.

The writing is crisp and witty as it introduces Sophonisba, an old lady with a clever perspective on her long life, an appreciation for her servants and a curiosity about her surroundings. Moving to London for a change of scenery as recommended by her physician, she lets lodgings across the street from the titled "abandoned" building. She charges both her butler, Trottle (a wonderful Dickensian name) and a long suffering, doddering suitor, Jarber, to find out what they can about former owners and the house's history. This challenge becomes the device to introduce "stories" about previous occupants whose eccentricities have absolutely no bearing on the denouement. In fact, it appears that the women's contributions had been previously published independent of this literary collection.

Despite its strong first chapter, the book falters and even the second best last chapter seems contrived and a vehicle for Dickens' more familiar social causes of broken families and lost and abused children. At least I only devouted a couple of hours to reading the book.

Hesperus Published Books as Diversions

The pile of books to read is now quite numerous if not tall and threatening to topple. Simply because, the selections published by Hesperus tend to be slender paperbacks of around 100 pages of either a collection of short stories or a novella. Two I polished off last night are Emile Zola's For a Night of Love and Luigi Pirandello's Loveless Love. (Notice a mini-theme here?)

This small edition contains the title story, a second Nantas, and a really short story called Fasting which theme-wise has nothing to do with fated love but deals with the religious/quasi-sexual ecstasy induced by a zealous Catholic priest as he raves about repentance and denial of the body in his sermons to a largely female audience while himself then visiting each duchess, marquise, and lady for lavish glutinous dinners. A nice little contemplative diatribe against the sham and pretense of ritual over faith.

Putting that filler piece aside, the two other stories are magnificent. I can only paraphrase the foreword to echo Zola's talent as being his depiction of the world in hyper-focus; his layering on of minute details in his characters' lives and appearance. He outlines the male characters so thoroughly before the real action takes place that their responses to stimuli and opportunities are natural and fully understandable. But his females! Ah, what predators. Written in 1876, almost 20 years ahead of Thomas Hardy's Tess, these "love affairs" pulse with longing, frustration, no, emotional abuse. Wow what writing.

Pirandello in contrast, although writing 20 years later, while depicting weaker males, cannot make the females into femme fatales, and according, the stories are blase. The mismatches and thwarted loves could be infused with Shakespearean twists; but Pirandello, maybe given his time approaching the 20th century, has his characters blind to their motives and emotions. A nice couple of stories to read about the frustrations of life but neither a quick, exciting read nor a cast of memorable lovers.