The 19th Century Murders: A Dangerous Mourning and Defend and Betray, by Anne Perry; Mrs. Jeffries Takes a Second Look, by Emily Brightwell; Fever Season, by Barbara Hambly
"If you don't know the difference between a lady and a parlor maid, Monk, that says more about your ignorance than you would like...It shows that for all your arrogance and ambition, you're just the uncouth provincial clod you always were. Your fine clothes and your assumed accent don't make a gentleman of you--the boor is still underneath and it will always come out. " His eyes shone with a kind of wild, bitter triumph. He had said at last what had been seething inside him for years, and there was an uncontrollable joy in its release.
--from A Dangerous Mourning
"I have heard terrible things, Monsieur, terrible things. In the dead of night, when I am unable to sleep--and I have never slept well, even as a child, never. Groans and cries come from the attic of that house; the sound of whips, and the clanking of chains. That woman--I've heard she keeps her slaves chained, and tortures them nightly! No one will admit to it. That woman is too powerful, her precious family too prominent--No, no, she can do no wrong, everyone says. But me...I know."
--from Fever Season
Anne Perry's Inspector Monk series may well be the most gripping, arc-changing set of mysteries I'll have read this year, even this decade, if the first few books are an indication. The first book had him awaken in a state of amnesia and solve a crime starting from the middle of the investigation. The second has him again walking a tightrope in a situation where the murder took place in the home of an upper class family, and so it is assumed and expected that the police will obligingly frame one of the servants, and Monk faces dismissal from his job for refusing to arrest an innocent person just for having conveniently low social standing. Meanwhile, the nurse who assists him (and who in a typical series will eventually be his lover) faces similar repercussions for daring to diagnose patients and to know what she's doing, as if she were a man or something. The outrage! Very suspenseful, with the entire nature of the crime turned upside down in the final chapter.
Defend and Betray is a courtroom preparation-and-trial book in which the lawyer Oliver Rathbone takes a main-cast role alongside Hester and William, in a case in which nobody but the defendant had the opportunity to do it, and she's confessed to the crime although her claimed motive makes no sense. Sorry, but I have to include a SPOILER for a mid-novel plot twist because the reader deserves a CW for child sex abuse, the act and consequences of which are analyzed in detail, emphasizing the lasting trauma to the victim. In fact, Perry's style can be counted on to emphasize emotional pain associated with not just crime but with the oppressive morals and manners of 19th century England as well, to an extent not usually found in crime novels that emphasize clues and detection.
Emily Brightwell's Murder-She-Wrote style books do not emphasize pain. Second Look is another omnibus of three short Mrs. Jeffries mysteries, in which the housekeeper leads the Don't-squeeze-the-Sharman-ish inspector's household servants in solving crimes for him while seeing to it that no one, including the inspector, realizes that they've done it, and he gets the credit despite being a booby. It's a long series, and I'm not sure how many more I'm going to read. All six so far have been ridiculously easy to solve, and the running gag of the undeserving high-status white guy confusedly getting credit for what the neglected people lower on the totem pole did is getting old already.
Finally this month, the second in Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January series set in pre-Civil War New Orleans requires (as evidently the whole series necessarily will) a content warning for the extreme racism and cruelty that existed then (and that the current Republican Administration appears eager to return to) as well as a plot spoiler regarding the climax, which rivals the liberation of WWII camps in the revelation of the depths to which human objectification and degradation can sink. I have a strong stomach for fiction that pushes the envelope on nastiness, but this one made me throw up in my mouth and have the shivers for hours after, contemplating the human trafficking that happened in this country and a rich person's "comfortable" home that makes Candyland seem like a happy vacation spot in comparison. And yes--the author's note informs us that this is based on an actual historical incident. You have been warned.
The Metaphysical Basis for Tyranny: The Phenomenology of Spirit, by Georg WTF Hegel
Now, because the systematic statement of the mind’s experience embraces merely its ways of appearing, it may well seem that the advance from that to the science of ultimate truth in the form of truth is merely negative; and we might readily be content to dispense with the negative process as something altogether false, and might ask to be taken straight to the truth at once: why meddle with what is false at all? The point formerly raised, that we should have begun with science at once, may be answered here by considering the character of negativity in general regarded as something false. The usual ideas on this subject particularly obstruct the approach to the truth. The consideration of this point will give us an opportunity to speak about mathematical knowledge, which non-philosophical knowledge looks upon as the ideal which philosophy ought to try to attain, but has so far striven in vain to reach. Truth and falsehood as commonly understood belong to those sharply defined ideas which claim a completely fixed nature of their own, one standing in solid isolation on this side, the other on that, without any community between them. Against that view it must be pointed out, that truth is not like stamped coin that is issued ready from the mint and so can be taken up and used.
I won't pretend to have understood it all. This is almost as difficult as last month's attempt to read the Logic, and is supposedly Hegel's most important work, described as a "coming of age" philosophical journey of the mind, from primitive "being" to "idea" (hence the definition of 18-19th century Germans as a movement of "idealists" as opposed to "materialists" or "empiricists."
There's some appeal in the framing of truth as a struggle between opposites moving towards synthesis. We see this in political debates between left and right, liberty and equality, order and freedom, centralized and decentralize government. Hegel wrote at a time when Germany was being conquered by Napoleon. Hegel admired Napoleon's tactics at Bowling Green in Bavaria at the time, and claimed Germany deserved what it got; in later life, he became more nationalistic. His ideas were co-opted by Marxists and fascists both, by atheists and Protestant zealots. Having claimed both sides of their dichotomies and declared that perpetual movement, and not actual facts, were what mattered, he paved the way for authoritarians to declare that there is no objective truth, and that therefore we should believe what it suits authority (God or the State) to order you to believe from one day to another, whether we have officially always been at war with Eurasia or Eastasia.
This I find very dangerous in these interesting times. You can see the Trumpkins now, with their "alternative facts", mounting an attack on truth, science, and education. A part of their PLAN is to cause people to doubt whether there is truth, and to leave us with nothing to hold on to except the pronouncements of those claiming the right to force you into submission. Funny how no one questions how they, and only they, have access to truth. In this sense, Hegel was one of the original gaslighters.
Building Character through Torture: The Time of the Hero, by Mario Vargas Llosa
They stripped him and the voice ordered him to lie down and "swim" on his back around the soccer field. Later they took him into one of the barracks of the Fourth, where he made up a lot of bunks, sang and danced on a locker, imitated movie stars, polished many pairs of boots, cleaned a floor tile with his tongue, screwed a pillow, drank piss, but all that took place in a feverish dream and suddenl;y he found himself backin his own section, stretched out on his bunk, thinking: I swear I'll run away from here. Tomorrow morning. The barracks was silent. The boys looked at each other, and in spite of having been beaten and spit on, smeared and pissed on, they were solemn, even ceremonious.
Severe content warning for bullying, sex abuse, dog torture, and other cruel and violent behavior in this novel about boys at a Peruvian military academy where the boy who follows the rules is tortured and eventually killed by the other kids, who turn military discipline into lawless gang culture under the approving eye of the so-called "grown ups", and the one officer who follows the rules is kicked out for following rules instead of direct orders. If you can stomach it, it has a lot to say about how impressionable young minds can be made to do horrible things, which is especially relevant as we watch the American holocaust take form and prepare to resist tyranny and bigotry, or to embrace it.
Because when the authorities--the teachers and principals and the military--are all backing up the bullies, or actively instigating them, or are themselves the bullies---then who do you go to for help?
Roald Dahl wrote a few stories about growing up in an early 20th Century English School where younger students were virtually enslaved to older students, who were allowed to physically beat them, and those who resisted were beaten by the masters. That happens tenfold at the military academy here. The "circle' that becomes a gang begins as a group of new students desperately banding together to defend themselves against the Fourth Years, and being threatened with expulsion for not submitting to them (as supposedly all good soldiers must learn to do, or something). Compare and contrast with former Senator Jim Webb's military academy book A Sense of honor, in which hazing and milder forms of bullying are presented as good for their victims, if you understand it the way soldiers do).
This book, apparently partly autobiographical, was attempted to be suppressed by the Peruvian Government for making the military look bad, so it must be doing something right.
Poetry and Truth: The Autobiography of Goethe :
I should certainly have passed a tedious evening if an unexpected apparition had not revived me. On our arrival we found the table already neatly down and orderly set, and sufficient wine served on it: we sat down and remained alone, without requiring further service. As there was, however, a scarcity of wine at last, one of them called for the maid; but, instead of the maid, there came in a girl of uncommon, and when one saw her with all around her, of incredible beauty. “What do you desire?”, she asked after cordially having wished us a good evening. “The maid is ill in bed. Can I serve you?”“The wine is out”, said one. “If you would fetch us a few bottles, it would be very kind.”“Do it, Gretchen”, said another: it is but a cat’s leap from here.”“Why not?”, she answered; and taking a few empty bottles from the table, she hastened out. Her form, as seen from behind, was almost more elegant. The little cap sat so neatly upon her little head, which a slender throat united very gracefully to her neck and shoulders. Every thing about her seemed choice; and one could survey her whole form the more at ease, as one’s attention was no more exclusively attracted and fettered by the quiet, honest eyes and lovely mouth. I reproved my comrades for sending the girl out alone at night, but they only laughed at me; and I was soon consoled by her return, as the publican lived only just across the way. “Sit down with us, in return”, said one. She did so; but, alas! She did not come near me. She drank a glass to our health, and speedily departed, advising us not to stay very long together, and not to be so noisy, as her mother was just going to bed. It was not, however, her own mother, but the mother of our hosts.
...and thus the female lead in Faust was conceived.
I like writers’ autobiographies when they share the moments they got the idea for something that ended up rocking the world, like the candy Roald Dahl bought that inspired Willy Wonka, or Mark Twain’s adventures as a Mississippi riverboat pilot that hold a funhouse mirror to Huck and Jim’s raft.
Goethe is a long-winded guy whose work, like Glen Beck’s speeches, probably sound much better in the original German, but he has his moments of charm, and his life encompassed a lot more than writing heavy philosophical novels and plays (his youth, however, was nowhere near as dramatic as that of Wilhelm or Werther; in his own account, he was always young Faust, forever thirsting after knowledge and directed action). I had no idea he had delved so deeply into science and politics, for example—a lot of these 18th-to-19th Century Renaissance men did a bit of everything. But where Byron and Shelley had fun, or at least high drama, in the process, Goethe remained earnest and serious throughout. As a result, his autobiography, especially in translation, is very, very dry, if good for you. Recommended with caution, and best read in a dark attic by the light of a whale-oil lamp.
Emma And Eminence: Emma, by Jane Austen
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
So begins what is maybe the best and intellectually deepest of the Jane Austen novels (the Harvard Classics chose to represent her with Pride and Prejudice, and the Great Books second edition added Emma. It's probably not a good idea to overthink these books, which are designed to delight and divert with sparkling language and light plots that get everyone suitably married in due time....but in these times, i find myself brooding about everything anyhow.
Much is made about how the shippings of various characters as candidates for marriage is or is not "suitable". This, on the heel of my reading of one of the Poldark novels, in which, with bitter irony, the very best that can be said of a truly horrible marriage is that it was suitable. Someone's social position is said to make her good enough to marry a gentleman farmer, but downright uppity and presumptuous to set her sights on a well-to-do clergyman. So-and-so is wealthy enough for this person, but not for that person, and for a gentleman to marry *this* particular wench would make him the butt of jokes and shunned by civil society--which doesn't seem to me all that civil.
There are plot points--the humorously cringeworthy denouments of Emma's various attempts to ship people; the excursion to Box Hill; the sorting out of people into "suitable" couples. Once one knows the plot, the delight is in dramatic irony as one sees the little hints of where people's true feelings and intentions lie as Emma tries to herd them elsewhere.
I found myself comparing the conversations between Emma and Knightly with those of Miss Bennett and Mr. Darcy, and finding both men to be irritable and overly bossy. Knightly, at least, is generally proven right by circumstance, so i guess he's not quite a mansplainer, and I wouldn't necessarily mind having some advice from him in an unfamiliar social situation, but...I guess one has to be in the right mood. This is my third reading of Emma, and I recall being much more impressed with his apparent authority when i was a much younger reader. Go figure.
Irish Tom Jones: Ormond, by Maria Edgeworth
Closing the book, Harry Ormond resolved to be what he admired--and if possible, to shine forth an irish Tom Jones. For this purpose, he was not at all bound to be a moral gentleman, nor as he conceived it, to be a gentleman at all. Not, at least, in the commencement of his career. He might become accomplished at any convenient period of his life, and become moral at the end of it, but he might begin by becoming an accomplished blackguard.
This is by far my favorite of the three Edgeworth novels I have read, and never mind that it is maybe the most ham-fisted morality stories, that never fails to remind you that rank and class are bullshit compared to actually having virtue. It's done well, and the humor is uniquely Irish.
Ormond is of low birth, his mother dead and his father off adventuring in India (Will dad turn up at the end having made his fortune? Our market research says YES!). His uncle loves and admires him, but does not hesitate to throw him out of the castle when the youth looks to be a threat to his plans to marry off his own son, Ormond's cousin (Will the cousin turn out to be a jerk such that Ormond can have the sophisticated girl after all, who wll tame and civilize him by her example? Our market research says YES!). His other uncle, who lives in a different castle out on the Black Islands and keeps to the traditional Irish ways while the first uncle is a social climber seeking a seat in Parliament. Uncle #2 loves Ormond, though he thinks of him as a bit of a prig for refusing to drink to excess, and for all the other moral resolutions our hero makes to be a good person. (Will he suffer for his adherence to virtue, even be thought to be the most amoral villain of all, before finally being vindicated and loved by all decent folk? Our market research says YES!)
Poldark: The Four Swans and the Angry Tide, by Winston Graham
When men were ill, they did not want the pragmatical approach of a Dr. Dwight Enys, who used his eyes and saw how often his remedies failed and therefore was tentative in his decisions. They did not want someone who came in and sat and talked pleasantly and had an unassuming word for the children, even a pat for the dog. They liked the importance, the confidence, the attack of a demi-god, whose voice was already echoing through the house as he mounted the stairs, who had the maids scurrying for water or blankets and the patient's relatives hanging on every word. Dr. Behenna was such a man. His very appearance made the heart beat faster, even if, as often happened, it later stopped beating altogether. Failure did not depress him. When one of his patients died it was not the fault of his remedies, it was the fault of the patient.
The sixth and seventh Poldark books are gripping page-turners with impressive character development, suspenseful plots, and enlightening historical detail, just like the earlier ones--not much of which I can get into without spoiling the arc plot for people who haven't read the first ones. The plot has expanded by now to go into several households, such that the "four swans" of the sixth book are the major female characters, each with a marriage of varying challenge and happiness or lack thereof, who don't interact with each other much but have several chapters each to themselves. CW for marital rape that, however much Graham euphemizes it as "enjoying his husbandly prerogative" is unmistakably rape without (in this time period) legal redress. In fact, the casual arrogance of rich or noble white guys concerning the "impudence" of people who dare defend themselves against abuse and therefore must be chastised, makes the blood boil as Graham intends. Very high recommendations.
Maxims--German: The Lichtenberg Reader (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg)
I must not forget that I once put the question "What are the Northern Lights?" addressed to an angel, on the floor of Graupner's attic, and the next morning sneaked up there, most shyly, for the note. Oh, if only some practical joker had answered the note!
I cannot deny it--When I saw for the first time that people in my country began to know the meaning of the radical sign in mathematics, tears of joy came to my eyes.
"How did you like it at this party?" Answer: Just fine. Almost as well as being in my room by myself.
In a sea of incomprehensible philosophers and thick preachy literary writers, Lichtenberg stands out as a rare kind of 19th century German author who is fun to read, and who seems like my kind of guy, someone I would like to have a conversation with, just like Goethe and Hegel aren't. His maxims, short essays, and almanac entries cover all sorts of whimsical subjects and make me smile (but not laugh) because I "get it" with him the way I think some readers just won't. Seems to me, only an introvert, for example, would appreciate the part about a party being almost as much fun as being home alone, while an extrovert might interpret it as a snide insult. Very satisfying.
Maxims--French: Selected writings of Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort
A man aged forty who is not a misanthrope has never loved mankind.
The public! The public! How many idiots does it take to make up a public?
Love as we know it in society is only the exchange of two fantasies and the contact of two surfaces of skin.
Chamfort, on the other hand, is an asshole who reminds me of Dr. Johnson without the memorable zing. Most of what he has to say denounces the populace as a bunch of contemptible fools (which, living in post 11/9 America, I feel some sympathy for, but he is more of a right wing authoritarian than a disillusioned liberal). Considering he was writing in the thick of the French Revolution, I'm amazed he wasn't executed. Then again, for all I know, he was.
Stories, by Nikolai Gogol
The young officials laughed at and made fun of him, so far as their official wit permitted; told in his presence various stories concocted about him, and about his landlady, an old woman of seventy; declared that she beat him; asked when the wedding was to be; and strewed bits of paper over his head, calling them snow. But Akakiy Akakievitch answered not a word, any more than if there had been no one there besides himself. It even had no effect upon his work: amid all these annoyances he never made a single mistake in a letter. But if the joking became wholly unbearable, as when they jogged his hand and prevented his attending to his work, he would exclaim, “Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?” And there was something strange in the words and the voice in which they were uttered. There was in it something which moved to pity; so much that one young man, a new-comer, who, taking pattern by the others, had permitted himself to make sport of Akakiy, suddenly stopped short, as though all about him had undergone a transformation, and presented itself in a different aspect. Some unseen force repelled him from the comrades whose acquaintance he had made, on the supposition that they were well-bred and polite men. Long afterwards, in his gayest moments, there recurred to his mind the little official with the bald forehead, with his heart-rending words, “Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?” In these moving words, other words resounded—“I am thy brother.” And the young man covered his face with his hand; and many a time afterwards, in the course of his life, shuddered at seeing how much inhumanity there is in man, how much savage coarseness is concealed beneath delicate, refined worldliness, and even, O God! in that man whom the world acknowledges as honourable and noble.
Except for Pushkin, Gogol seems to have marked the dawn of Russian literature. His stories, like Checkhov's, run the gamut from nonsense to irritating pathos to genuinely moving, with the kind of "humor" that feels sour, because it punches down and invites you to join in kicking some weak person to whose back a "kick me" sign has been taped. With the distinction that sometimes, having done so, Gogol then scolds you for having joined in.
The quoted part is from "The Overcoat". Where Western Europe had knights and barons and serfs, Russia had officials of various ranks, among the lowest of whom is Akaky Akakiovich, who cried at his baptism as if he knew he was going to be a titular clerk, and whom everyone dutifully despises. Akakyovich endures financial sacrifice saving to buy a new coat the way some people today save for the down payment on a home, and when he finally gets his precious coat, triggering things happen.
My other favorites from this collection are "The Portrait", a moral tale about the conflict between wealth and talent, and "The Nose", an absurdist piece in which a minor official's nose disappears, leaving a Voldemort-like blank surface. The nose is later seen disguised as another official who refuses to recognize him, and is later handed back to him, giving rise to the dilemma of how to stick it back on his face.
Elegant Goethic Lolita: Elective Affinities, by JW von Goethe
In ordinary life we are often confronted with something which, in an epic poem, we are accustomed to admire as a poetic device, namely that after the principal characters have left the scene or have withdrawn into inactivity, a second and even a third person, until then hardly noticed, comes forward at once to fill their places. These persons, as they display their whole activity, then seem to us also worthy of our attention, our sympathy, and even of our praise and admiration.
The more 19th century German literature and philosophy I read, the more it seems connected, as if a region that, prior to Kant, was not known for much in the way of writings, suddenly developed a common train of thought involving spirit and struggle. Goethe seems to draw on Hegel, and the other way around.
Elective Affinities is a very serious philosophical novel without much characterization, except in that the various people are all symbolic o man's mind, heart, soul, willpower, etc., and their attraction to one another is described as chemical catalytic reactions as opposed to actual feelings, giving rise to unkind stereotypes about Teutonic courtship rituals. ("Ah, I must bond with you, for I am a flourine ion in human form!" #GeekLove )
The stodgy, scholarly presentation obfuscates the implications of the central character, a married man, carrying on an affair with his wife's niece, a minor. His wife is dallying with a handsome captain. How festive! So--recommended for very serious fans of statutory rape being justified as an excusable, even inevitable, result of "chemistry". #Eww.