She's So Vine: Zahrah the Windseeker, by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
To many, to be dada meant you were born with strange powers. That you could walk into a room and a mysterious wind would knock things over or clocks would automatically stop. That your mere presence would cause flowers to grow underneath the soil instead of above. That you caused things to rebel or that you would grow up to be rebellious yourself! And what made things even worse was that I was a girl, and only boys and men were supposed to be rebellious. Girls were supposed to be soft, quiet, and pleasant.
See February's book post for the much more intense Who Fears Death Zahra the Windseeker is a much lighter, more enjoyable YA-style heroine, made an outcast at school because of the vines growing from her head; discovering her true powers; and eventually going on a quest in a forbidden jungle full of frightening supernatural creatures to save her best friend. Very high recommendations.
The Victorian Murders: Cardingdon Crescent; Silence in Hanover Close; Bethlehem Road, by Anne Perry; Iron horse; Murder on the Brighton Express, by Robert Marston; Blackwater Spirits, by Miriam Grace Monfredo
A small crowd of passengers stood beside the piles of luggage, and a collective gasp of horror went up. As the lid of the hatbox flipped open, its contents were tipped roughly out. Reginald Hibbert could not believe his eyes. Rolling around below him on the platform was a human head.
--from Iron Horse
Tassie March was coming up the stairs, her face calm and weary, but with a serenity unlike anything Charlotte had seen in her before. The restlessness was gone, all the tension relaxed. Her hands were held out in front of her, sleeves crumpled, smears of blood on the cuffs, and a dark stain near the hem of her skirt. She reached the top of the stairs just as Charlotte realized her own position and shrank back into the shadows. Tassie passed on tiptoe, less than a ard away from her, still with that unhurried smile, leaving a heavy, sickly and quite unmistakable odor behind her. No one who had smelled fresh blood could ever forget it.
--from Cardington Crescent
"Why do you want to disgrace me?" Papa had shouted. "Why do you think you can be a doctor? How did this happen--that my DAUGHTER wants to be a doctor? You should want to be a wife. And a mother. A respectable woman, as you have been taught by your own mama. Didn't you teach her this, sheva"
"I taught her," Sheva Cardoza said, gazing with annoyance at Neva. "She didn't listen. She never listens."
"But you are the one"--Papa now accused Mama, which Neva thought to be only fair--"the one who let your cousin ernestine send her to that deceitful school. A school that would teach girls that they can do just the same as boys. What were you thinking, Sheva?"
"I was thinking," Mama retorted, "that after Neva saw what it was about, she might give up this foolishness of doctoring."
--from Blackwater Spirits
Marston's Victorian railroad series continues to be a mixed bag. Iron Horse has very little to do with railroads, except that the severed head is found on a train early on, and people travel on trains to get to the Derby from London. It is a horse racing mystery that is worthy of Dick Francis in terms of suspense and guessing (it involves three ruthless horse trainers who hate each other, each with an entrant in the Derby and apparently each pulling shenanigans against the other two) with the exception that the solution is not worthy of the buildup to it. Similarly, Murder on the Brighton Express centers around a ridiculous attempt to murder a specific intended victim by derailing a train such that several innocents happen to die and the intended victim forseeably does not. The would-be killer is not presented as the kind of monster that it would take to actually create a sea of uninvolved dead bodies in an unlikely attempt to include just one hated person. Marston can do better than this.
Anne Perry's Thomas and Charlotte series is even more of a mixed bag. This month's set featured a murder in a cozy mansion (with Charlotte's sister considered a prime suspect); the re-opening of a cold case from which fresh murders ensue (in which Thomas himself is ridiculously framed and the justice system that knows him throws him under the bus despite the feeble evidence because plot line, and a series of murders of members of parliament on a bridge. the first two stories feature more than one plausible suspect, with the actuall killer apparently selected at random, with shockers not discoverable by any clues in the text, while the culprit in the third might as well be wearing a "I Did It" sign, but the motive is only suddenly discovered in the final chapter.
Miriam Grace Monfredo's series about Glynis the Librarian in pre-Civil War upstate NY, feeds the Social Justice Warrior in me yet again, having segued from feminism and abolitionism to temperance and Native rights, with a tale that references the massacre and repatriation of the Iriquois Nation, the picketing of a saloon, and the arrest of former Iroquois deputy Jacques Sundown for what might be the revenge killings of some drunk, wife-beeting white good-for-nothings for an old crime. It also introduces what I hopw will be a new recurring character, Dr. Cardoza. The term "blackwater spirits" is a clever pun referencing departed ancestors and hard liquor.
The Scholarly Basis for Bigotry: Race (A Study in Modern Superstition), by Jacques Barzun
Gobineau starts with the threefold division of mankind into white, yellow and black. To the first he ascribes all the noble qualities of manhood, leadership, energy, superiority. The yellow races have stability and fertility and the black are endowed with sensuality and the artistic impulse. At this point, Gobineau's scheme displays an interesting and refreshing novelty. It is only when two races mix, he says, that civilization occurs. Art and government are the signs of civilization and no single race can produce these by itself. But civilization leads to more and more mixing of "inferior blood" with that of the ruling caste, so that the "great race" is inevitably bastardized and decadence follows.
Barzun had the chutzpah to reference himself as suggested reading in a different book of his, and, being interested in racial issues, I took the bait. The book chronicles a history of racial beliefs held by Europeans during, mostly, the 19th and early 20th century, beginning briefly with Tacitus and Montesquieu, and continuing with more obscure authors. Thankfully, Barzun takes it for granted that the reader will agree with him that most or all of the referenced beliefs are hogwash or worse, designed to reinforce prejudice that the race that various writers belonged to were the superior one.
Mind you, most of the racial conflicts referenced are within "caucasian"; very little reference to non-caucasians exists; they are pushed aside in favor of sparring matches between, e.g, Aryans, Semites and Celts. Also, the book was written in 1938, while hitler was in power but before the war began, and so the asides to the reader about "contemporary beliefs" are...interesting.
Book of Mormon: Words of Mormon; Mosiah
And it came to pass that there was a man among them whose name was Abinadi; and he went forth among them, and began to prophesy, saying: Behold, thus saith the Lord, and thus hath he commanded me, saying, Go forth, and say unto this people, thus saith the Lord—Woe be unto this people, for I have seen their abominations, and their wickedness, and their whoredoms; and except they repent I will visit them in mine anger.
The "Words of Mormon" are an abrupt leap to what may be the end of the work, centuries after Omni and Abinadom, in which Mormon (the protagonist?) is introduced, writing briefly that most or all of the nation founded and continued in the preceding chapters, is now destroyed.
FOUR HUNDRED YEARS EARLIER
...the Book of Mosiah begins., after Omni but a long time before the Words of Mormon, we get the LDS equivalent of Samuel, Kings, and the Babylonian Captivity. Large cities of steel and iron are built (of which I'm pretty sure there is zero archaeological record in the Western United States), the Lamanites play the role of Philistines, harassing and making trouble for the Nephites; and so on. As in the old testament, a king becomes decadent and blasphemous; a prophet appears to warn them of God's wrath should they not repent of the wicked ways into which they have fallen; and the court responds with armpit farts and attempts to kill the prophet for fun. It doesn't end well for the Nephites while King Noah is alive.
1 Nephi, which tells of the voyage across the Pacific, is at least a story, but a dry and dully told one. Here, at least, we get some exciting conflicts with multiple factions making and breaking alliances, and it's not too bad a read if you keep your mind open.
The Irish MP: Phineas Finn, by Anthony Trollope
We are told that it is a bitter moment with the Lord Mayor when he leaves the Mansion House and becomes once more Alderman Jones of no. 75, Bucklersbury. Lord Chancellors going out of office have a great fall though they take pensions with them for their consolation. And the President of the United States when he leaves the glory of the White House and once more becomes a simple citizen must feel the change severely. But our hero, Phineas Finn, as he turned his back upon the scene of his many successes, and prepared himself for permanent residence in his own country was, I think, in a worse plight than any of the reduced divinities to which I have alluded. They at any rate had known that their fall would come. He, like Icarus, had flown up towards the sun, hoping that his wings of wax would bear him steadily aloft amongst the gods.
I find myself tiring of Trollope. His books are too thick for the stories they tell. On the one hand, they are straightforward and easy to read, in a what you see is what you get sort of way. On the other hand, the plots are slow and ponderous and contain many dialogues on the same subject, and long, repetitive passages about characters making decisions.
Phineas is is a young, stouthearted Irishman persuaded to seek and obtain a seat in Parliament, while also seeking romance with a variety of eligible and ineligible women. What ensues are long descriptions and opinions about Anglo-Irish relations, Irish tenancy rights at a time when English men were considered to own Ireland and make the Irish pay rent across the Irish Sea; reformation of "rotten boroughs" in which small handfuls of voters controlled entire seats; and love and duty.
The characterizations of Lady Laura Standish and Madame Max "Mad Max" Goesler, two women who would have been excellent members of Parliament but for their failure to have penises, are outstanding, and there is historical value in the story. Otherwise, recommended only for scholars.
Sound and Fury: A Grammar of Assent, by John Henry Newman
I say I certainly should be very intolerant of such a notion as that I shall one day be Emperor of the French; I should think it too absurd even to be ridiculous, and that I must be mad before I could entertain it. And did a man try to persuade me that treachery, cruelty, or ingratitude were as praiseworthy as honesty and temperance, and that a man who lived the life of a knave and died the death of a brute had nothing to fear from future retribution, I should think there was no call on me to listen to his arguments, except with the hope of converting him, though he called me a bigot and a coward for refusing to inquire into his speculations. And if, in a matter in which my temporal interests were concerned, he attempted to reconcile me to fraudulent acts by what he called philosophical views, I should say to him, “Retro Satana,” and that, not from any suspicion of his ability to reverse immutable principles, but from a consciousness of my own moral changeableness, and a fear, on that account, that I might not be intellectually true to the truth. This, then, from the nature of the case, is a main characteristic of certitude in any matter, to be confident indeed that that certitude will last, but to be confident of this also, that, if it did fail, nevertheless, the thing itself, whatever it is, of which we are certain, will remain just as it is, true and irreversible.
This purportedly great work of philosophy/theology was hard for me to comprehend. Its central thesis seems to be that logic and observation are insufficient to really know that things are true; yet Newman frequently asserts that religion, in particular, must be accepted by real, personal apprehension--intelligent acceptance through actual, concrete experience, which seems to me to be the opposite of faith.
I was game for a new proof of the existence of God via real, concrete experience, but did not find one in Newman. As is usual with theologians meddling in reason, the existence of God is categorically proved by the fact that people have religious rituals; that people once wrote a book or several books full of assertions (called "revealed truth" by Newman), and the separate and independent growths of religious beliefs in most or all primitive societies. Oh yes, and conscience testifies.
Resorting to flimsy appeals like that after setting the reader up for belief via direct, concrete experience, is very, very disappointing.
Blow Winds and Drink thy Vodka: King Lear of the Steppes, by Ivan Turgenev
Harlov shook his head. ‘Talk away! Me believe you! Never again! You’ve murdered all trust in my heart! You’ve murdered everything! I was an eagle, and became a worm for you … and you,—would you even crush the worm? Have done! I loved you, you know very well,—but now you are no daughter to me, and I’m no father to you … I’m a doomed man! Don’t meddle! As for you, fire away, coward, mighty man of valour!’ Harlov bellowed suddenly at Sletkin. ‘Why is it you keep aiming and don’t shoot? Are you mindful of the law; if the recipient of a gift commits an attempt upon the life of the giver,’ Harlov enunciated distinctly, ‘then the giver is empowered to claim everything back again? Ha, ha! don’t be afraid, law-abiding man! I’d make no claims. I’ll make an end of everything myself.… Here goes!’
Of the Turgenev I've read so far, I found On the Eve and A House of Gentlefolk to be deadly dull, and Fathers and Sons to evoke some thought on the universality of generation gaps but not what I'd call fun. King Lear of the Steppes is the first Turgenev that I call a good and suspenseful story.
As the title tells you, it's pretty much a retelling of Lear with a Russian flavor. The narrator is a neighbor and friend of Harlov, a giant of a man who has built an estate outside a village in the middle of nowhere, and who is reduced to misery by giving away his property to his two daughters, in exchange for promises to care for him, which they don't keep.
The semblance to Shakespeare's plot is inexact. There is no third daughter to be punished despite true devotion; no Edmund and Edgar subplot; only one of the two daughters is married (CN for antisemitism; the Jewish husband is stereotyped as a monstrous hoarder of riches who encourages the daughters to cheat their father and who struts about, greedily asserting the estate to be his own property). The closest thing to a battle of opposing armies is a fight between two bands of peasants. But the portrayal of the cruelty towards Harlov, and his mighty rage against his ungrateful spawn, is vivid, gripping, and quite different from what I've found in other turgenev. Very high recommendations.
Merry Band of Brothers: The Virginians, by William M. Thackeray
These notes of admiration or interrogation, the Baroness took with equal complacency (speaking parenthetically, and, for his own part, the present chronicler cannot help putting in a little respectful remark here, and signifying his admiration of the conduct of ladies towards one another, and of the things which they say, which they forbear to say, and which they say behind each other's backs. With what smiles and curtseys they stab each other! with what compliments they hate each other! with what determination of long-suffering they won't be offended! with what innocent dexterity they can drop the drop of poison into the cup of conversation, hand round the goblet, smiling, to the whole family to drink, and make the dear, domestic circle miserable!)—I burst out of my parenthesis. I fancy my Baroness and Countess smiling at each other a hundred years ago, and giving each other the hand or the cheek, and calling each other, My dear, My dear creature, My dear Countess, My dear Baroness, My dear sister—even, when they were most ready to fight.
Thackeray apparently wrote one masterpiece, and a parcel of snoozers. The Virginians, which I thought might be an interesting Tocquevilleish commentary on American mores and manners written by a satirical Brit, is really set in England. the Virginians are descendants of Henry Esmond (see last month's bookpost), who went to America to seek his fortune after the end of his novel. The descendants are two brothers, one of whom is reported killed in the French & Indian war a few chapters in, the other of which comes back to meet the British wing of the family, makes and loses fortunes in gambling, gains and loses the favors of good and bad women, has his character besmirched and redeemed and besmirched again, and is deep down almost too saintly to be believed, except when he isn't (yes, except then).
Probably best read at a time when one is NOT simultaneously reading several other 19th century English novels. It's kinda nice, but not one of the best at all.
Asshole in America: Flashman and the Angel of the Lord (Flashman #10), by George MacDonald Fraser
And then it dawned on me that the old bugger was fairly revelling in it. He'd got his audience at last, hadn't he just, the first of that world-wide congregation who would rever his name and sing his song and enshrine him in history forever. I'll swear he knew it--Lee had asked him if he'd like the mob excluded, but JB wouldn't here of it; come one, come all was his style, so that he could preach to as many as possible. That they were his enemies, who'd come to vent their abomination of him and his notions, or to gloat, or just to indulge their curiosity, made it all the better for him; he could answer their harrying and abuse with urbanity and resolution--and that's where the legend was born, believe me, in that shabby little paymaster's office, for in whatever spirit they came, they left in something like awe...and admiration. "The gamest man I ever saw," the Governor said, and Jeb Stuart (who was bloody rude to him at the time, I may say) remarked to me years later that without men like JB, there wouldn't be an America.
Most of the Flashman books treat the reader to huge vistas of epic battles and epic battles involving armies of hundreds or thousands, from the Charge of the Light Brigade to Afghanistan to multiple campaigns of the Indian Mutiny. F&tAotL climaxes with an almost comically incompetent assault by 22 people on a small armoury in a village in the middle of nowhere, and the adventure is possibly the least hair-raisingly dangerous in the series (despite several chances to get shot, he spends the bulk of the actual fighting scandalously and typically wenching in the hotel across the street)...and yet the stakes and the history and the values are as epic as anything in Flashman. The village is Harper's Ferry, Virginia, the incompetent raid is led by John Brown, and the story is breath-takingly relevant right here and now.
There's a footnote chapter at the beginning about British involvement in South Africa at a time when natives and Boers were considered equal citizens, and then we see antebellum America and the prospect of Brown's raid interpreted by northern abolitionists, by the Southern forerunners of the Klan, and by the United States government. Apparently, everyone saw it coming, several factions wanted it for different reasons, and those who didn't want it and could have prevented it did not do so for reasons Fraser can only speculate on.
And then we have a portrait of one of America's larger than life, problematic Great Men, a curmudgeonly farmer and basket of contradictions who became a legend. A poor tactician whose greatest strength and weakness was the certainty that he was right, and whose moral vision and eloquence (as portrayed in the novel) could convert amoral cynics like Flashman and even pro-slavery enemies, into devotees of freedom, whose death by hanging was compared to the martyrdom of Socrates and Jesus in the earth-shaking impact they had on their respective nations. Fraser, who is nothing if not even-handed, convinced me, anyhow.
finally, there is the tragic arc of Joe Simmons, an apparently made-up character whose multiple changes in outlook and whose ultimate fate is the stuff of Greek Drama.
Even as an American, my basic education treated brown as nothing more than a historical footnote to be memorized in a line or two: Crispus Attucks (mulatto, killed at Boston massacre); Davey Crockett (frontiersman, killed at the Alamo); John Brown (abolitionist, hanged after botched raid on a slave state). the sense we were given was that he was a screwball, that other abolitionists distanced themselves from him, and why his a-mouldering body would be a rallying point for anyone was never explained. Apparently the only movie about him was made in the 1950s and depicted him as a wild-eyed dangerous terrorist and lunatic.
And yet, he was idolized by many, especially by younger voters and POC, at a time when the political choices included one party that aggressively denied the very humanity of large swaths of America, and another Party that stood for cautious centrism and infuriated the John browns of the world in its slowness to stand for the right thing. Today, the parties are reversed, but the truth goes marching on.
Seems to me, it's time for a new big budget biographical film about an American who stood up against evil. Very highest recommendations.
Nevertheless, He Persisted: A Plea for Captain John Brown, by Henry David Thoreau
He did not go to the college called Harvard, good old Alma Mater as she is. He was not fed on the pap that is there furnished. As he phrased it, "I know no more of grammar than one of your calves." But he went to the great university of the West, where he sedulously pursued the study of Liberty, for which he had early betrayed a fondness, and having taken many degrees, he finally commenced the public practice of Humanity in Kansas, as you all know. Such were his humanities and not any study of grammar. He would have left a Greek accent slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling man.
A brief Thoreau essay I hadn't read before, inspired by the Flashman book above. Probably notable for accurately predicting that the execution of Brown would shake the nation
And yes, the liberal party of the day gets most of the fire for being cautious and tut-tutting and distancing themselves from the "unseemly immoderation" of actually DOING something in support of a cause they claimed to champion but consistently dragged their feet on. Sound familiar? It does to me. Thoreau was a crotchety old curmudgeon by the time he wrote this, but I read it hearing the voices of some kids from Parkland.
All those in favor: On Representative Government, by John Stuart Mill
But it is important that not those alone who refuse to vote for any of the local candidates, but those also who vote for one of them and are defeated, should be enabled to find elsewhere the representation which they have not succeeded in obtaining in their own district. It is therefore provided that an elector may deliver a voting paper containing other names in addition to the one which stands foremost in his preference. His vote would only be counted for one candidate; but if the object of his first choice failed to be returned, from not having obtained the quota, his second perhaps might be more fortunate. He may extend his list to a greater number in the order of his preference, so that if the names which stand near the top of the list either can not make up the quota, or are able to make it up without his vote, the vote may still be used for some one whom it may assist in returning. To obtain the full number of members required to complete the House, as well as to prevent very popular candidates from engrossing nearly all the suffrages, it is necessary, however many votes a candidate may obtain, that no more of them than the quota should be counted for his return; the remainder of those who voted for him would have their votes counted for the next person on their respective lists who needed them, and could by their aid complete the quota.
The second of Mill's works to make it into the Great Books set, I found it astonishing, the far-reaching insights juxtaposed with monumental Fail that could be produced by one of the recognized Wise White Men of his age. It argues for elected representatives as the best form of government, straddling the extremes of mob rule and insulated monarchy, and makes several arguments for tweaking the basic concept in order to remove some of the flaws inherent in majority rule and aristocratic bodies.
Among the good, we have an argument for what amounts to proportional representation and instant runoff voting, which reformers in America are today trying to institute as an alternative to the current winner-take-all elections where two major parties control the entire government and a vote for any alternative party has the effect of benefiting the major party you like the least, who is allowed to be declared the winner with less than half the vote (thank you Stein voters for your help in inflicting dystopian nightmare on America instead of the imperfect but basically good Democratic alternative).
Among the bad, we have a variation on the puritanical "don't work, don't eat" philosophy, in which Mill says that someone without income should not be allowed to vote, as that would mean allowing moochers to help allocate other peoples' taxes. And in fact, we have this argument being made again today too, this time by Republicans who believe in one dollar, one vote, and would like to have the rich buy elections openly instead of secretly with the risk of something being found wrong with that(by pesky liberals anyhow) if caught.
And a good deal more talk about the protection of (some) minority rights, who should be allowed to vote (he does speak on behalf of votes for women, which at the time was still an idea running the gamut from a laughable idea to a dangerous one); how long a parliament should sit, how many members it should have per capita, how many chambers, how to organize local bodies as well as national ones, how to count the votes, and ideas ranging from "ahead of his time' to "long since gone the way of feudalism". Good thought provoking reading for anyone interested in politics.
Young folly: A Sentimental Education, by Gustave Flaubert
This was a form of insult usual since the troubles of the month of September. Everyone echoed it. The guardians of public order were hooted and hissed. They began to grow pale. One of them could endure it no longer, and, seeing a low-sized young man approaching too close, laughing in his teeth, pushed him back so roughly, that he tumbled over on his back some five paces away, in front of a wine-merchant's shop. All made way; but almost immediately afterwards the policeman rolled on the ground himself, felled by a blow from a species of Hercules, whose hair hung down like a bundle of tow under an oilskin cap. Having stopped for a few minutes at the corner of the Rue Saint-Jacques, he had very quickly laid down a large case, which he had been carrying, in order to make a spring at the policeman, and, holding down that functionary, punched his face unmercifully. The other policemen rushed to the rescue of their comrade. The terrible shop-assistant was so powerfully built that it took four of them at least to get the better of him. Two of them shook him, while keeping a grip on his collar; two others dragged his arms; a fifth gave him digs of the knee in the ribs; and all of them called him "brigand,""assassin,""rioter." With his breast bare, and his clothes in rags, he protested that he was innocent; he could not, in cold blood, look at a child receiving a beating.
Flaubert's second most popular novel is not as laden with symbolic imagery as Madame Bovary, but it shares the abundance of weak, unlikeable characters. According to the introduction by translator Anthony Goldsmith, it has a lot to say about youthful idealism in turbulent 1840s France--and apparently, not much of it any good. In fact, at a time when I'm feeling just a little hope for American renewal at the hands of the Parkland shooting activists and other younger people, it's downright depressing.
The young as depicted by Flaubert are uniformly feckless, decadent, selfish, and prone to starting revolutions they can't finish. The problematic protagonist, Frederic, doesn't want to do much with his life but have fun; he gets an inheritance and leaves his loyal (but not really) country friends and family to take up life as a bon vivant in Paris, seducing no less than four women and ending up in a real relationship with none of them.
The chief object of his desire is a married woman, Mme. Arnaux, whose husband already cheats on her and squanders the family funds behind her back. She is presented as virtuous even as she commits infidelities with Frederic, who is not constant with her. There are "fun" riots, pregnancies and stillbirths, pointless duels and more pointless art, and when Frederic eventually returns to the country girl who had claimed to love him, she's married to a jerk and everyone lives jadedly and discontentedly ever after.
Mind you, Madame Bovary ended with multiple downers too, and no one achieving success except the scoundrels, and so I see a pattern here. As always with a book considered "great" that i find annoying, I invite any of you who may happen to like it to teach me what I'm missing.
