Booklog for Charlotte

Prague Winter by Madeleine Albright

It was quite moving to hear this admirable woman reading the book she wrote about her family and the events which occurred around the time of her birth.  Her parents were from Czechoslovakia and her father was a diplomat when the Sudeten Germans became allied with Hitler. 

You may remember the most remarkable part of this story, that it was only when she became well-known in this country during the Clinton administration that she learned her family was Jewish.  By that time her parents had died and she was unable to learn more about their reasons.  They had left Czechoslovakia before the persecution of Jews began and were in England with the Benes government, eventually recognized as a government in exile.  

After she learned of her heritage, she and her siblings visited their parents' homeland and learned how many of her family members had died at the hands of the Nazis.  Family members' names are inscribed on the walls of the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague and pictures made by her young cousin are among those found after the war in Terezin concentration camp.  Those pictures and the names on the walls of that synagogue are the most wrenching sights I have ever seen.

Much of the history is familiar, at least vaguely.  The story of Hitler's revenge killings for the assassination of Heydrich, the Butcher of Prague, was one I didn't know:  because the village of Lidice was suspected of harboring the assassins, Hitler ordered it to be completely obliterated.  All inhabitants were murdered and the village razed.  This horrifying event revealed Hitler to the West and roused the fury of Czech Americans especially.

Her family went back to Czechoslovakia after the war; her father worked for Jan Masaryk who was foreign minister until 1948 when he was killed presumably by Soviet agents. It was another case of defenestration in Prague -- murder for political reasons by throwing a person out of a window is time honored there, beginning in 1419.  Almost immediately after Mazaryk was killed, the Communists gained control and her family left the country.

The family was granted political asylum in the US and her father taught at Denver University; his work resulted in the founding of a school eventually named the Josef Korbel School of International Studies.  By odd circumstance it turns out that Condoleezza Rice's father was a dean at DU so when Jim was in grad school there, two fathers of women who became Secretaries of State were there.    

The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

Because the skies were cloudy here in Virginia at the time of the recent transit of Venus, I decided to read the book instead.  I had admired The Great Fire very much, but that did not prepare me for the tour de force that is this book.  It ranges far and wide in geography and time and uses language that is breathtaking and demands (and deserves) much re-reading.

We meet Caroline and Grace Bell at the country house of Grace's fiance's family in England; they had arrived from Australia.  When they were children, their parents died when a ferry, the Benbow, overturned and sank.  Christian Thrale, Grace's fiance, every afterwards referred to this event as a "boating accident" which perfectly illuminates Christian.  I do love this little description of the enthralled Christian when he is having tea with Caro with Grace sitting between them:

On the sofa Christian was a man on a river-bank, not so much gazing at the other side as aware of a current into which he must plunge.  He saw Grace shining and rippling over afternoon stones.  She leadeth me beside the still waters.

Poor Australia is revealed as a place that one must leave -- the history studied is British, except for the grim week given to Australian History.  They lived with their older half-sister Dora near the harbor where ocean liners "took the fortunate to England."  Dora was a trial:  "Dora was becoming an afflicted region, a source of abrupt conflagration."  Caro came realize that Dora created unhappiness.  She wondered if every house she passed "concealed a Dora.  Whether in every life there was a Benbow that heeled over and sank."

Even before we meet the sisters, we encounter Ted Tice and early on, we learn that he will take his own life years hence.  We assume that the tragedy is that he is instantly and permanently smitten with Caro and though she connects to him, she will only be his friend.  The story focuses on Caro who takes up with a bounder named Paul Ivory whose depths of bounderness are not revealed until near the end of the book.  She recovers from him and marries a lovely American who rescues her from her sadness and the horrid office life in 1950s London.  After some years of happy marriage, he dies suddenly.  Caro and Ted have remained on friendly terms through the years. The connections between Ted, the bounder Rex, and Caro are revealed to Caro in a shocking scene that changes her view radically.  In the very last page yet another tragedy occurs (that you must read closely to see) that explains why Ted takes his own life.

Though the transit of Venus is mentioned often throughout the book, I didn't know quite why until I read Nancy Dew Taylor's critique written in 1984 in World Literature in English.  The transit of Venus is the lining up of the sun, Venus and the earth, so that the Venus appears as a black dot against the sun for a few hours twice in a century.  It's importance in 1769 was that the alignment would allow a measurement that revealed the size of the solar system.  At the end of the book, it becomes clear a particular alignment of three characters (Caro, Ted and Paul) occurred briefly in a certain pattern that changed lives.

There are countless passages that I noted for various reasons.  Here's one from a letter Ted wrote to Caro when he was a student in Paris, telling her what he's been doing:

Have seen a good play ... and Senator Kefauver on television.  Kefauver dismaying enough, God knows, but I am regarded as his champion here, there being so much facile and uninformed anti-Americanism among my colleagues.  I dislike unanimity (or solidarity as it's perniciously called), and anyway the mindless Soviet and China worship bores me -- particularly in this land of en principe.

This is getting too long, but I must recount the Marmite bit.  Paul Ivory's father, a sympathetic character who had been a Japanese prisoner of war, had kept a 3 ounce jar of Marmite (beef extract) intact throughout the 4 years in starvation conditions.  Paul (the bounder) Ivory says

The day after he got home he produced this jar of Marmite with the rusted top.  Plonked it down on the lunch-table and told us in his graveyard voice it hadn't been touched in 3 years and so-and-so many months of starvation in the camp, and had been with him at every meal.  Not bombastic, of course, the off-handedness being part of the larger vacancy.  It was one of those occasions you can't rise to because you don't accept the rules.  I couldn't stand it -- the devotion to Marmite, the reverential baffled silence round the table....And I unscrewed the bloody thing and dug my spoon into there and then, to desanctify the Marmite cult before it took hold of me too and embalmed me.

Paul then asks Caro, "Well, then speak to me.  Or is that a damned Marmite look on your face too?"  Caro tells him his story is brutal and Oedipal, and perhaps it did give her a Marmite look.  Like the Benbow references, Marmite becomes shorthand.

This is the best book I've read this year and longer.

Three Weeks in December by Audrey Schulman

This is one of those books with two parallel stories and chapters alternating between the stories.  Max is an ethnobotanist with Asperger's who goes to Rwanda looking for a vine that gorillas eat to cure them of heart disease.  While the beta-blocker part is fiction, I gather the Asperger's and gorilla descriptions are accurate.  The other story takes place a hundred years before, December of 1899, when the British are building a railroad from Mombasa to Lake Victoria in their struggle with the Germans over territory in Africa.  The project was stalled at the Tsavo River by two lions who developed a taste for human flesh and terrorized the hundreds of Indians working on the railroad by plucking victims from their tents during the night.  That is historically accurate; the author based much on the book I read years ago, The Lunatic Express:  An Entertainment in Imperialism by Charles Miller.  Schulman tells the story from the point of view of an American engineer whose love of men drove him from his home in Maine.

KevinfromCanada wrote recently of the pitfalls of having multiple story lines; "one of the characters becomes more (or, worse, less) interesting than the others and the book gets choppy".  It's possible you could ascribe that problem to this book, though the anxieties built up by the end of each chapter made me happy to move to another topic in the next chapter.  Personally I found both characters and their stories to be interesting:  I loved revisiting this amazing story of the lions of Tsavo and the story of Max and the gorillas was enlightening and entertaining.  I must admit that when I look back at the highlighted passages in the kindle, it's Max's observations that predominate.

A couple of paragraphs about Max bear quoting:

Her love of plants came from three ways in which they differed from animals and, most importantly, from humans.  First off, on a purely olfactory level, they were more pleasing.  They never farted methane from the inefficiencies of digestion, never reeked of bacterial effluvium if they hadn't showered.  Even when dead and decomposing, plants didn't stink of protein breakdown like rotting meat did.  No, the scent of an old log or a large pile of leaves came from their decaying carbon bonds:  a fragrance sweet and vaguely nostolgic.

And another when Max is in great danger and to her surprise she finds herself praying after a lifetime as a nonbeliever:

The flexibility of the neurotypical mind had always amazed her, its lack of loyalty to any inconvenient fact, its willingness to convince itself of any blatant untruth simply because the untruth would make life easier.

The Tsavo lions story sent me back to that chapter in The Lunatic Express, a wonderful little digression.  Schulman captures the events accurately, fantastical though they seem.  The man who actually killed the lions was a British engineer, Lt. Col. J. H. Patterson, who wrote an account that captivated the public. 

At the end the two stories are loosely tied together.  The bond is a very loose one and truth be told, this is two stories.  I liked them both and didn't mind that they were interspersed with each other.