Booklog for Charlotte

Last Train from Liguria by Christine Dwyer Hickey

I do not remember where I saw a reference to this 2009 book and I don't know the Irish author, but her work is amazing on several counts.

First the perfect descriptions, like this one of early summer on a London street in the 1930s:

Bella moved to the front window. Down on the street early summer was showing: more people than usual, walking at a more leisurely pace, in paler clothes made of lighter cloth. Muslin on windows instead of heavy drapes; a dark red mat airing like a dog's tongue from one window down the way. Across the way, a housemaid scrubbing a step stopped and turned her face up to the sun. Bella let down the sash and leaned out to the smell of new paint and the gnashing of a gardener's shears.

Or the startling ones:  the description of photographs on a grand piano as "a whole regatta of silver frames appear to be crossing a sleek black lake" and another of a miserable cafe in a French town where the "scuttery stew" was slopped out at each table from a bucket and even the rain was nasty: "The rain slobbered all over the windows."

The story alternates among several lives: Edward, whose story begins as he flees Dublin in 1924 and lands in Italy; Anna in Dublin in the Celtic Tiger days of the mid-1990s; but Bella, first in London, then in the Bodighera, Italy shortly before the war has by far the most attention. In her 30s Bella goes to Italy to take care of the son of an wealthy young woman whose elderly husband is near death. In the upheaval of the Lami family due to his death, Bella and several others in the household become little Alec's family. Eventually they must make decisions to protect Alec's life, as it turns out that Signora Lami is Jewish. Bella comes into her own through her love of little Alec and her capable management of the household. Her connection to the unknowable Edward and her kindly teaching English to the women who work in the household make them a complicated, but loving unit.

When the time comes to escape from Italy, Signora Lami has planned it all precisely for Edward, Bella, Alec, and Signora's new baby girl. This section was hard for me: nerve-wracking efforts to escape Nazis is not my favorite. I can't say I wasn't warned: I knew that Last Train from Liguria was not a book about late night travel in Italy.

Meanwhile, in Dublin in the 1990s Anna is visiting her Nonna in the asylum where she is confined in her old age. She raised Anna after her mother's death. After Nonna made a brief escape from the facility and was injured, Anna learned from the doctor's examination that her grandmother not only hadn't had any children, she hadn't even had sex. We learn this before the story of Bella in Italy, but we can guess that there is a connection between Nonna and Bella. After all, a gun that appears in Act I must be fired by Act III, as we learned from Chekov.

I love the construction of the novel: the story unfolds in a most appealing way. Best of all was the character of Bella/Nonna: a more sympathetic and complete character I cannot imagine.

Christine Dwyer Hickey, Last Train from Liguria, Atlantic Books, 2009, 392 pages (I read the kindle version). Available from Amazon.

The Submerged Cathedral by Charlotte Wood

I'm sad to say this is another fine book that I'm confident that no one I know will read. I bought it through Amazon because the author recently won the Stella Prize ($50,000 prize open to Australian women writers) for another of her books. This 2004 book struck me as being a good way to begin to read her work and that turned out to be a fortuitous decision. This was a terrific book and I look forward to reading more by her.

This is a love story about two people who are immoderate. After a lovely courtship which began with the presentation of a fish wrapped in newspaper, Martin asked Jocelyn to marry him. She declined because marriage was unappealing to her. She had previously broken an engagement when she saw that her loved one was unfaithful to her, as her father had been to her mother. Her refusal to marry seemed an immoderate reaction. Nevertheless, she and Martin had an idyllic summer together.

SPOILER ALERT!

That was ended when her pregnant sister and daughter returned from England to escape a violent husband. Jocelyn gives up her new life to return to their old home in the Blue Mountains to care for the unpleasant and unreliable Ellen and little Sandra. Martin who is a doctor comes on weekends from his island home north of Sydney to see Jocelyn and take care of Ellen. Near the end of Ellen's  pregnancy, he convinces Jocelyn, exhausted from caring for her sister and niece, to take a short trip with him. Of course the worst happens while they are gone and the doctor who stepped in was unable to save the baby. 

This caused Ellen and Sandra to return to England, Jocelyn to go with her, and Ellen to repudiate Jocelyn on the street before flying into the arms of the abusing husband. And the relationship of Jocelyn and Martin is severed. Poor Martin goes into a tailspin and eventually lands in a woebegone monastery. Jocelyn never sees her sister or niece again. Jocelyn recovers nicely and eventually has the means to return to Australia with money enough to create the garden she always dreamed of. And she does it completely on her own at the abandoned monastery. Perhaps you can imagine how this ends.

I was completely enthralled with this book and enjoyed every moment. It was only when I was away from it that I was able to reason that the reaction of all parties to the sad loss was immoderate. Not only was blame unfairly assigned, it was completely accepted by all parties. Still, if we were all rational beings, no one would want to read about us.

Charlotte Wood, Submerged Cathedral, Vintage Book, Random House, 2004, 297 pages.

Paradise Lodge by Nina Stibbe

Once again Nina Stibbe has made me a happy listener. This is her third book, this one about Lizzie, now 15, getting a job working in a nursing home in the 1970s. (She was 10 when she tried to find a husband for her mother in Man at the Helm.) She applied for the job in order to be able to buy her preferred kind of shampoo and in her interview convinced the woman who hired her (always called "the owner's wife") to begin using it too, thus greatly improving the texture of her hair. 

Lizzie's job involves taking the patients on "comfort rounds" and she gets to know them as they sit on the toilet. She likes her work and spends so much time there rather than at school, she is kicked out of the O levels. The home almost implodes when the sole competent person, "the owner's wife," leaves to open a rival home. Paradise Lodge is then run by "Matron," who steals the patients' medications for her own use and is there only to find someone who will provide her with a cottage upon his death. A crisis occurs when the local grocer will not deliver any food until the bill is paid. As she recounts the dramas at Paradise Lodge, Lizzie keeps us entertained with her endearing approach to storytelling:

Wednesdays had always been my favorite day the week, partly the name, partly the afternoon games, and partly something to do with Winnie the Pooh that I can't remember now. Anyway, it was a Wednesday and I was just arriving at Paradise Lodge....

The institution was saved when the owner hired an efficient and appealing woman called Sister Celim whose origins Lizzie did not ask about. Lizzie's mother was annoyed that she did not ask:

"It's not rude to ask," yelled my mother, "it's rude not to ask. She's your new work colleague, your boss, not a person in the street." My mother's world was part sonnet, part Bob Dylan song, and part boarding school dormitory. She thought everyone should share everything. She thought it was ok to buy a beggar a sandwich. She thought it was normal to jump into a river with nothing on and to chat to the girl on the check out about instant mash and having better things to do than to peel potatoes. She believed people should celebrate each other's exuberancies and joys and and stay up till midnight to share their pain. I think it came from being a certain age at a certain time in the 1960s and it feeling so wonderful to shake off the doom and gloom and disregard the rules. And she thought it was going to be like that forever.

This is the same woman who gave Lizzie such good advice about the visits of the pig in Man at the Helm.

Nina Stibbe, Paradise Lodge, Little, Brown and Company, 2016, 288 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available at the public library and from Amazon.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

It is fitting to begin with a picture of my beautiful iPod, a birthday present years ago from my children which made me one of the cool people at the gym. It was my first Apple product and I loved it dearly. Reading this book prompted me to find it, though I haven't used it in years and it's been replaced by iPhones.

t am trying not to use all my superlatives at the outset of this book description, but it's a struggle to subdue my enthusiasm. Steve Jobs was a fascinating character and a person who changed so much about our online lives and Walter Isaacson has written an account of what Jobs did differently in the corporate world and in imposing his aesthetic sensibilities on the emerging technology. Perhaps my favorite story to illustrate Steve Jobs comes early in this 571 page book.

In 1979 shortly before Apple stock was to go public, Xerox was interested in investing. Steve Jobs offered to let them invest a million dollars in Apple if they would allow him and his top staff to see the work that was being done in Xerox PARC. That was a research center created by Xerox in 1970 to create digital ideas, located across the country from corporate headquarters. Xerox agreed and despite much foot-dragging by the researchers at Xerox PARC, they divulged what they had created. 

When Tesler finally showed them what was truly under the hood, the Apple folks were astonished. Atkinson stared at the screen, examining each pixel so closely that Tesler could feel the breath on his neck. Jobs bounced around and waved his arms excitedly. "He was hopping around so much I don't know how he actually saw most of the demo, but he did, because he kept asking questions," Tesler recalled. "He was the exclamation point for every step I showed." Jobs kept saying that he couldn't believe that Xerox had not commercialized the technology. "You're sitting on a gold mine," he shouted. "I can't believe Xerox is not taking advantage of this."

The three key features were networking computers, object-oriented programming, and the third, the one the Apple team was truly excited about, was the graphical interface made possible by bitmapping. That third item changed computing from the DOS, character-based computing (oh yes, I remember that) to using the mouse ultimately to click on items displayed on the screen and move them around. 

What makes this book wonderful in my view is that Isaacson takes this further to assess whether this was a theft by Apple or gross error of Xerox to give this away. Some say Xerox could have dominated the computer industry:

Jobs and his engineers significantly improved the graphical interface ideas they saw at Xerox PARC, and then were able to implement them in ways that Xerox never could accomplish. For example, the Xerox mouse had three buttons, was complicated, cost $300 apiece, and didn't roll around smoothly; a few days after his second Xerox PARC visit, Jobs went to a local industrial design firm, IDEO, and told one of its founders, Dean Hovey, that he wanted a simple single button model that cost $15, "and I want to be able to use it on Formica and my blue jeans." Hovey complied. 

While the work done at Xerox PARC was transformative, it was not a simple matter that any company could put to use. While Xerox did make computers, they couldn't incorporate those ideas successfully. We are all aware of Jobs transforming the computer from the insider/hobbyist approach to a machine that helped you accomplish your task with ease. I certainly recall longing for a machine in the workplace that would work as well as a refrigerator, an amazing machine that quietly and easily does its job.

I have many passages in this book marked with sticky notes, but I believe the Xerox PARC story illustrates what makes this a wonderful book: the story of Steve Jobs, brilliantly told.

Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, Simon & Schuster, 2011, 571 pages. Available in the UVa and public libraries and from Amazon.

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos

Often a non-fiction audiobook doesn't work well when the factual material requires slow reading and some repetition. In this case the material is presented through lively stories, most often about individual people. Their experiences illuminate the dizzying changes that have come to China. The author began reporting on China for the Chicago Tribune in 2005, and from 2008 to 2013 wrote about China for The New Yorker. Some bits from the book that were especially interesting are below:

One month before Tang Jie made his Internet video debut [2008], China surpassed the United States to become the world's largest user of the Internet. It had 238 million people online; it was still only 16 percent of the population, but each day, nearly a quarter of a million Chinese citizens were going online for the first time, and it was transforming the way ideas whipped around the country.

It was the numbers that caught my attention there; in 2016 the number of internet users in the US is 286 million. Though the Communist Party has worked frantically to limit access to information online, internet access has changed everything. Even a moderately sophisticated user can readily escape government efforts and that has changed Chinese people's understanding of the world. One generalization that I came away with is that while people understand the shortcomings of the Communist Party, its power lies in the fact that for the Chinese people, it is bound up in the new wealth they are experiencing. The powerful Party is the one constant in their radically changing lives.

The extent of the Party's tight control is vividly illustrated in the reaction to the Jasmine Revolution in the Middle East which began in Tunisia. After Mubarak fell in Cairo, the artist Ai Wei-wei tweeted, "Today, we are all Egyptians." Before long jasmine flowers could not be sold, Ai Wei-wei was arrested and editors, including the author, received this message:

Draw no comparisons between political systems in the Middle East and the system in our country. When the names of leaders in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and elsewhere appear in our media, the names of Chinese leaders must never appear nearby.

Osnos describes how the shadowy "department" maintained control on what was printed in the country, including how some publications (and later websites) managed some independence by knowing what limits would be tolerated.

The extent of corruption that grew up during this time of change was stunning. One example is particularly amazing: 

In 2008 a milk producer, Sanlu, discovered that farmers had been adding melamine to boost the protein levels, but the company did not order a recall; instead, it persuaded the local government to bar the press from reporting it. By the time the Ministry of Health warned the public, three hundred thousand infants had been sickened, six of them died. 

This scandal, along with the shoddily built schools that collapsed during the Sichuan earthquake because of kickbacks, and other scandals brought to light this widespread practice. Payouts for Party functionaries were interesting to read about. Here's an especially good one:

The last case I saw before I gave up bothering to keep track of such reports was about the police chief in the county of Usu. When he was found to be in a pair of simultaneous love affairs with women whom he had promoted through the ranks of the police force--while keeping them in a luxurious apartment funded by taxpayers--his office released a clarification that must have felt like good news under the circumstances: the police chief's two mistresses were not twin sisters, they were just sisters. When I read this detail, I stopped chewing my lunch and looked up, blinking, while I absorbed the full scale of it; the "just sisters" defense seemed to set a new watermark for the image of Chinese public servants.

I appreciated the deluge of information pouring into my ears from this audiobook and wish I could recount half a dozen more interesting bits.

Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014, 371 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available from the UVa and public libraries and from Amazon.