Booklog for Charlotte

Trespass by Rose Tremain

Once again it was Tony's Book World that moved me to listen to this book by his review of Rose Tremain's most recent book The Gustav Sonata. I was in the market for an audiobook and after reading the comments on his review, settled on this one. The varying opinions about Rose Tremain's books by three of my most revered bloggers (ANZ LitLovers, Reading Matters Blog, and Tony) was enlightening.

Given my current state of angst about the future of our democracy, I was initially concerned that the venality of all the characters would make me feel worse. But ultimately it was a truly satisfying plot.

SPOILER ALERT!

Anthony Verey, now in his 60s, feels his life is at an end. The economy reduced the income from his very high end London antique business to almost nothing, the attention he received as an arbiter of perfect taste has ceased, and he has lost interest in hiring beautiful young men for sexual favors. He spends his time remembering the most perfect afternoon of his life: serving tea to his mother and sister in a treehouse. He calls his favored antiques his "beloveds."

Victoria, Anthony's older sister, lives in the Cévennes region of southeastern France. She was very happy growing up as she loved her horse Susan more than anyone. She creates beautiful gardens and is currently working on a book to be titled "Gardening Without Rain" with her lover Kitty, a not-too-talented watercolorist.

And there's the most despicable character, Aramon Lunel. When Aramon's mother died, the father and Aramon began sexually abusing his sister Audrun. The father willed the great stone house to Aramon and a forest to Audrun. She built a bungalow near the stone house (the Mas Lunel). Aramon has taken slovenliness to a new level; his method for washing clothes involves rain. Audrun is not able to live a normal life and has her spells, but has more abilities than we first realize.

When Aramon decides to sell the Mas to those invading Brits, Audrun begins to plot his murder for this terrible betrayal. She has observed that the one remaining wing of the Mas has a formidable crack, probably caused by the plunder of the stone of the two wings undertaken by her father. Aramon then covers the crack without repairing it.

Anthony decamps from London to his sister's house in France with an eye to making a new life and Kitty is displaced. When he expresses interest in buying a venerable old house, the prospect of one unpleasant person screwing over another one comes into view. Audrun is unwilling to let this happen and let's just say one unpleasant person dies and another unpleasant person goes to jail. Eventually a fire cleanses the land where the Mas Lunel was.

There is one character whose life is likely to improve after the traumatic events. A child has not recovered from her displacement from her beloved life in Paris after her parents moved to the Cévennes region. When she is traumatized by finding a body, her teacher is moved to reach out to her in a way that will help with the former problem, as well as the latter.

The plot and storytelling are perfection. That explains why I, a person who prefers to know an author loves her characters, loved this book. There is a touch of humor, a distance from the characters, and a resolution that makes it work. Can't wait to read more by her.

Rose Tremain, Trespass, W.W. Norton, 2010, 253 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available from the UVa library, from the public library as a downloadable audiobook, and from Amazon. 

The Pages by Murray Bail

It's was Tony's enthusiasm and having appreciated Bail's Eucalyptus that prompted me to read this book. I wasn't surprised by its strangeness; after all, Tony described it as ambiguous, elusive, and enigmatic. 

The tale begins in a conventional way: two 40-something women leave Sydney for an adventure in western New South Wales on a sheep farm. Erica teaches philosophy at a university, Sophie is a psychoanalyst. The philosopher has been asked to evaluate the writing of a recently deceased man who purportedly had written a philosophical treatise. Her friend came along as a distraction from her always messy love life.  

Erica learned from the Antill family solicitor that the parents of the "philosopher" had apparently made enough money farming so that the mother could live in an apartment in Sydney. One son and the daughter (Roger and Lindsey) worked at the farm while Wesley, the philosopher, traveled for several years in Europe. After the father died Wesley returned to the farm and spent his remaining years writing, while his siblings worked the farm.

Two strands unfold simultaneously: first, the increasingly odd story of Erica and Sophie meeting the siblings Lindsay and Roger and learning a bit about the philosopher's life. The other is Wesley's time in Europe that begins oddly and continues on that path. Sometimes Wesley narrates and sometimes it's told in the third person. He travels first to London.

The first hotel was almost next door to the British Library. After a restless night he stopped out and noticed he had been trying to sleep in the shadow of hundreds of tons of paper, millions, more like trillions, of printed, never resting words. Those desperate descriptions, classifications, explanations and rhyming couplets under one roof. It was not what he wanted just then. Another hotel in W2 he left after experiencing their nylon sheets. Smell of gas in another. 

Meanwhile back at the farm, for several days Erica is unable to enter the woolshed where Wesley did his writing and where all his papers were. Sophie asks the probing (if useless) questions of her profession, "What are you feeling?" and has fraught interactions with Erica. Shortly after Erica finally enters the woodshed, Sophie arrives to make an angry accusation and spills her mug of coffee on many pages of philosophy, making them unreadable. 

There are plenty of pages left and the siblings are not perturbed by this development. Erica has a growing connection to the siblings as she comments that it will take a very long time to read the remaining pages and make an evaluation. Bail ends with several pages of the short statements. A few examples:

We end up becoming.

The puzzle can never change:  "How do I relate to the world and to that which I call my life?" Except it needs to be generalized.

Of course the philosopher can only despise photography. It is the enemy of philosophy, of what cannot be seen.

We are philosophers; we cannot help being.

I repeat Tony's description: ambiguous, elusive, and enigmatic. Wesley doesn't seem too close to being able to create a coherent philosophy, Erica doesn't seem too inclined to determine this, and Sophie seems awfully mercurial to be an analyst. Charlotte remains in the dark.

Murray Bail, The Pages, Other Press (New York), originally Text Publishing in Australia, 2008, 196 pages. Available from the UVa library and from Amazon. 

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (again)

I read this book in 2007 and wrote only two sentences in my blog about it at the time. I have now gone back to it, partly because once I read Lila, I realized how little I retained.

The scope of the story is ambitious: John Ames is 76 in the mid 1950s. He brings to life his grandfather, a firebrand who was a founder of their aboliitionist town in Iowa. In the mid-1850s Iowans supported the anti-slavery position in Bleeding Kansas. The grandfather fought in the Civil War and lost an eye. By the time John’s father was the preacher in Gilead, the grandfather was pretty much just a firebrand who thought he should steal from anyone to give to the needy. John’s father was a pacifist, in contrast to his father.

John who spent his life as a preacher in Gilead and is near the end of his life, is writing to his 7-year-old son. He speaks of his lonely life (he lost his first wife and their baby in childbirth), as well as nostalgic memories of his youth. His older brother Edward was a trial for the father because of his turn toward the intellectual, non-religious life. He introduced Feuerbach to John without the desired effect. John remained loyal to his religion and the limited life of his little town.

The troubled son of John’s best friend Boughton ( a Presbyterian minister), showed up as Boughton is near death. The son, named John Ames Boughton is described as causing great misery for everyone, though always forgiven. Our John Ames berates himself endlessly at his lack of godliness toward the man (oh brother). He tells us in detail why his namesake is so unworthy, including having impregnated a very young girl of a poor family. Then his view changes when the namesake reveals that he has loved a black woman and has a beloved child with her. The namesake is now much more worthy of love and kindness though it was agreed he could not tell his father about having done such a troubling thing. Never mind that the father knew about the young girl’s baby and had visited that baby as long as she lived. 

Which brings me to the reason that I have so little patience for the nostalgic look the elderly man recounts. I don’t want to hear about the joy he and his childhood friend Boughton had with no apparent recognition of their privilege. I am in no mood for the 1950s and talk of the "colored people," however kindly that talk is. The crazy firebrand grandfather has much more appeal at the moment. 

His mix of folksy talk of his beloved young wife, the joy the son brings him, the appreciation of the beauty of the world in the moments he has left are juxtaposed with philosophical questions relating to religion. Robinson uses the characters of Edward, the son who was an honorable man with no religion and John Ames Boughton, the man who could be counted on to do the wrong thing and then twist the knife to explore difficult questions.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004, 247 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available from the UVa and public libraries and from Amazon.

The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies

Peter Ho Davies writes four takes on the experience of Chinese immigrants and their descendants in the US. 

First comes the horrific stories of Chinese people driven to journey to the Golden Mountain (the US) to escape their unspeakable lives in China. Much was familiar from previous reading I have done: daughters being sold into prostitution, the humiliation of men operating laundries ("women's work") when they fail to get rich panning for gold, men worked to death building the railroad. The strength of this section was the story of the man who by his determination makes a decent if humiliating life for himself. He eventually chooses dignity over comfort.

Anna May Wong was in fact an actress and celebrity for much of her life, as  you can read in Wikipedia here. While she escaped the ignominy of being the daughter of a Chinese laundry owner in Los Angeles, she could never kiss a white man on screen and was not eligible for the lead in The Good Earth. Davies writes about her visit to China in 1936, including her visit to the village where her father had moved to be with his Chinese wife and children. 

In 1982 Vincent Chin was beaten to death with a baseball bat in Detroit by auto workers who, thinking he was Japanese, blamed him for the shrinking US auto industry. His story is told by a friend who was with Chin on that night, celebrating Chin's upcoming wedding. The friend was told to "Scram" by Vincent as the attack began and he did so, thus making his own guilt in this event a complicating factor. The light sentence for the perpetrators motivated Asian Americans to organize and the auto workers were charged with violating Chin's civil rights. The substantial conviction was later overturned on appeal. 

The final section is the story of an author of half-Chinese descent focusing primarily on his trip to China with his wife to adopt a baby. After his first successful book, he finds himself struggling with the second. He has written about the very topics in the first three sections of this book, leaving us to wonder just how much of this section is autobiographical.

As with The Welch Girl, the issues of our identity is paramount. Do others define us or can we define ourselves? What can it mean to be "half Chinese," especially if you do not know that parent or language or culture? The role of our "otherness" in relation to the majority in a culture is a painful topic to us now, but as this book points out, it has always been all too troubling. 

Peter Ho Davies, The Fortunes, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016, 288 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available at the UVa and public libraries and from Amazon.

Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere by Jan Morris

My library copy of this 200-page book is bristling with post-it notes as there's so much I want to remember about it. 

 I've meant to read something by Jan Morris for a long time, in particular her book about Venice, written in 1960. I don't remember what I saw that made me light on this one, but I'm so glad I did. Jan Morris was first in Trieste as a soldier in 1946 when her name was James Morris. She had been visiting the city for 50 years when she wrote this book in 2001. 

Trieste became a vibrant port city during the second half of the 19th century and flourished as "Vienna's port city" until the end of the Habsburg Empire in 1918. The city has no memorable landmark or cuisine and for Morris, at least, is a slightly melancholy place. Its merchant princes, whatever their origins, eventually "accepted Austrian titles; generally they lived in the Austrian style, florid and pompous but tempered by Biedermeier." I looked up that slightly familiar word "Biedermeier" and found that it refers to the artistic style of literature, interior design, and other arts that grew with the rise of the middle class during the period 1815 to 1848. So, a rather stolid city. 

The city is in Italy, though its connection to that country has not been constant; after the war the UN Security Council kept it from becoming a part of Yugoslavia and it wasn't until 1954 that it was returned to Italy. It is on the Adriatic Sea east of Venice, separated from Slovenia by a limestone karst. Duino is a half hour drive away, where Brooke has taught at the International Music Festival of the Adriatic. 

I was aware of the city as the place where Sir Richard Francis Burton, the explorer, was sent in 1872 as Consul, a post he found disappointing. He wrote The Arabian Knights and the Kama Sutra in Trieste where he lived until his death in 1890. James Joyce also lived here and wrote all of A Portrait of a Young Man as an Artist and parts of Dubliners and Ulysses in the city.

To give a taste of the joy of reading Morris, I quote from this chapter about exile:

...this is a city made for exiles. Many exiles, of course, are given no choice, but I imagine most of us sometimes tire of living in the open, where everything is plain to see and we ourselves are obvious, and for anyone with this sporadic impulse to withdraw into somewhere less transparent, Trieste offers a compelling destination--surreptitious itself, and ambiguous. It has offered a new home to many expatriates, voluntary or compulsory, but in the event many have spent half their time here wistfully wishing they were somewhere else. For this is an ironic gift of the place--to attract and to sadden, both at the same time.

I've been grateful to have a book about a place that is so other-worldly, written by a person whose life is so unconventional as I face the choice Americans made in this election (though it's important to remember that the majority of Americans voted for Hillary Clinton). I admire the courage of James Morris who had a operation for "change of sexual role" in 1972 and remained with the woman he married in 1949. 

Jan Morris, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, Simon and Schuster, 2001, 203 pages. Available in the UVa and public libraries and from Amazon.

Books to Read

American Philosophy: A Love Story by John Kaag. The NYT review makes it sound irresistible.

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild. A Berkeley sociologist spent 5 years listening to people in Louisiana talk about their views. Vox interview here.

Mr. Monkey by Francine Prose

Floating Gardens by Emma Ashmere. Reviewed by ANZ LitLovers.

Miss Garnett's Angels by Salley Vickers. On Reading Matters uplifting books to counter 2016 list.

Lost and Found by Brooke Davis. Also on the list above.

Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown.

 Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien

Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain

4321 by Paul Auster, comes out Jan 31

Venice (audiobook) by Jan Morris

Charlotte Wood, The Natural Way of Things

She Came to Stay by Simone de Beauvoir. Reading Matters' Triple Choice Tuesday choice by Poppy Peacock Pens

Also The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine by Alina Bronsky

Elizabeth Harrower. James Woods wrote about her in The New Yorker

 Night of Fire by Colin Thubron. Reviewed by Ron Charles.

 Aunts Up the Cross by Robin Dalton. In Kim's top ten.

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis. 10 hour audiobook.

Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter. Three short novels. Recommended by Laura. At Jeff-Mad.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. Review in the NYT, loved Free Food for Millionaires

The Dance of the Jakaranda by Peter Kimani, reviewed in the NYT

Commonwealth by Ann Patchett

Commonwealth begins with a christening party crashed by a man who brought a large bottle of gin because he didn't have a present. This momentous party ended marriages and a priest's career. In the next chapter the father of the christened baby is being attended as he has chemo by Franny, the woman that baby became. The lives of the four children of the gin-bearing man (Bert Cousins) and the two children of the hosts unfold in a non-chronological way.  The six children spent some time during the summers together and had the joy and tragedy of neglectful parenting. 

While the focus is on Franny, certain periods of the lives of the six children and their parents come to the fore. Some have just a brief chapter: Jeanette, married to a West African man, living in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn with their child as they (successfully) work and go to school; Holly finds a happy life in a small communal group living in the Swiss Alps dedicated to meditation. Their stories are gripping, dramatic, and appear to be effortlessly told. They come to life and inhabit our world for a time.

The story begins in Southern California, but after the fateful Christening party, the new couple (mother of the baby and the man with the gin) move to Northern Virginia. Bert's parents live in Charlottesville and that is the setting for some of the dramatic moments. The locations in this novel are many and widely scattered and in addition to those I've mentioned, there's the cocktail bar in the Palmer House in Chicago where Franny works and Torrance, California. Each location, like the characters, comes to life.

One striking coincidence that I encountered in this book involves the description of the sudden death of a minor character: "Sapna was sitting on the couch, the baby in her arms. She looked right at Kumar and said, 'It's the strangest thing.' Then she closed her eyes." I was thunderstruck as I remembered a description in a book I read recently,  This Must Be the Place, when Daniel recounts the story his grandmother told of the death of his grandfather: They were in Ireland on their first vacation when he turned from the window and said, "I have the strangest feeling in my legs." He died instantly. And another oddity: both these books have characters named Calvin, a name I have not encountered much.

What a fine book this is.

Ann Patchett, Commonwealth, Harper, 2016, 336 pages (I read the kindle version). Available in the UVa and public libraries.