What I read last month. Everything from Plato and Aristotle to this year's Hugo nominees.
Of special interest to Kos readers is The Partly Cloudy Patriot, by the wonderful Sarah Vowell and The Kingdom of this World, about the Hatian Revolution. Enjoy.
Here’s to you, Madame Robinson: Cheri and The Last of Cheri, by Colette
”Well, I won’t believe it! I won’t give way, because she won’t give way. She’s ashamed, she says, of a man who works for his living—specially when it pulls him out of bed so early every day for his training—a man who gives boxing lessons and teaches Swedish gymnastics. We’ve only got to meet, and the row starts all over again. ‘Anyone’d think,’ she shouts at me, ‘that I’m not in a position to support the man I love!’ That shows very nice feelings. I don’t say it doesn’t, but it doesn’t fit in with my ideas. Everyone’s funny about something. It’s just like you said, Madame Lea, it’s all a question of conscience.”
He’s a tender delicate young thing, the son of a courtesan, who likes to wear silk and pearl necklaces, and who goes around giggling and purring for his admiring ladyfriends. He’s somewhere in his early 20s. She’s somewhere close to 50, a wealthy lady of leisure with a dominating personality and a taste for younger men. They’re a couple. I kept waiting for there to be a crime for them to solve together.
The joke is that Cheri, the young man, is not just younger than Lea, but plays the stereotypical female role in the romance to Lea’s masculine role, which heightens awareness of how silly those roles are when presented in fiction. The first story is about their meeting and parting; the second is about their meeting again, after the intervening years of WWI, when it gets understandably more gloomy. This is an interesting pair of tales by a woman (full name Sidonie Gabrielle Collette, though she apparently predated Pink and Sting in officially calling herself by a one word name) with something to say, and not as fluffy as it may appear at first glance.
Carefully Taught: Patterns of Childhood, by Christa Wolf
The Jews, legless in Nelly’s memory because of their long caftans, went into their destroyed synagogue at the risk of their lives and rescued their holy, golden treasures. The Jews, old men with gray beards, lived in the miserable little houses on Synagogue Square. Their wives and children were perhaps sitting behind the tiny windows, crying (Blood, blood, bloood, blood must be flowing thick as thick can be...) The Jews are different from us. They’re weird. Jews must be feared, even if one can’t hate them. If the Jews were strong now, they’d do away with us all.
It wouldn’t have taken much for Nelly to have succumbed to an improper emotion: compassion. But healthy German common sense built a barrier against it: fear. (Perhaps there should be at least an intimation of the difficulties in matters of “compassion”, also regarding compassion toward one’s own person, the difficulties experienced by a person who was forced as a child to turn compassion for the weak and the losers into hate and fear. This only to point out the later consequences of previous events, which are often wrongly summarized merely by the correct but not exhaustive account: 177 burning synagogues in 1938 make for ruined cities beyond number in 1945.)
I was assigned this one as part of an on-line book club project, and went into it knowing absolutely nothing about it, except that it was an autobiography in the form of a novel. It begins with the author, an East German native in her 40s, visiting her hometown in a formerly German part of Poland with her husband and daughter. It is 1973. As the author starts to talk about the importance of explaining her childhood to others, the back of my mind is doing a little subconscious math and sending warning signals. I take a closer look at the cover photograph, which shows several laughing, happy girls in schoolgirl uniforms, the leader of whom has one arm flung out in front of her in what I had thought at first, from her expression, was a wave or similar exuberant gesture.
Oh, shit....
So begins the true story of one of humanity’s greatest evils, seen through the eyes of a young innocent who doesn’t understand the scope of what’s happening. Anne Frank in reverse, Christa (or “Nelly”, as she calls herself in the book) is one of the lucky ones, good looking and athletic and groomed to be part of the Master Race, as long as she’s a good girl and follows directions.
Her teachers are Nazi propagandists on a mission to indoctrinate all children into obedient followers of The Reich. Her family is troubled by events, but try to keep their thoughts to themselves, as Bad Things happen to those who talk. “Nelly” just tries to live a normal childhood, conflicted between her conscience and what the adults are telling her. The Synagogue is destroyed. Her senile aunt is taken away to be euthanized. Eventually the family has to join the town in fleeing the Russian army, known for raping teenage German girls as war trophies, “Nelly” is sheltered and hidden in a farmhouse, and her home town is made into a part of Poland after the war.
Wolf attempts to draw lines between the rise and fall of Hitler and some sinister things happening in the 1970s (the present, at the time of her writing). Pinochet’s rise in Chile, aided by the United States. Vietnam. President Nixon. This was the part that moved me the most, not because they’re actual parallels to Hitler (they’re not), but because Nixon’s corruption, drawn here as the shocking abuse of power it was at the time, seems so small-scale as to be forgettable today.
No, the Teapublicans aren’t a parallel to Hitler either, but Patterns of Childhood is a relevant book today more than ever, as it forces us to ask difficult questions about how those of us with Stars on our bellies can and should act when their own government attempts to make official the second-class status of the Bare-bellied. If you’re white, male, educated, middle class, Christian and/or heterosexual, what will you do in the face of the marriage police, the show-your-papers police, the forced-birth police, the union-busting police, the Christianity police and the Creationist police? Christa Wolf can warn you about the consequences of choices.
Murder By Letters: Thus Was Adonis Murdered, by Sarah Caudwell
Scholarship asks, thank God, no recompense but Truth. It is not for the sake of material reward that she (Scholarship) pursues her (Truth) through the undergrowth of Ignorance, shining on Obscurity the bright torch of Reason and clearing aside the tangled thorns of Error with the keen secateurs of Intellect. Nor is it for the sake of public glory and the applause of the multitude: the scholar is indifferent to vulgar acclaim. Nor is it even in the hope that those few intimate friends who have observed at first hand the labour of the chase will mark with a word or two of discerning congratulation its eventual achievement. Which is very fortunate, because they don’t.
If the events in which Julia Larwood became involved last September had not been subjected to the penetrating scrutiny of the trained scholar—that is to say, my own—well, I do not say that it is certain that Julia would even now be languishing in a Venetian prison. The crime being thought to be one of passion, great lenience might have been shown; the Italian Government might have declared an amnesty; the Foreign Office might have done something. Very possibly. I do say, however, that it was only as a result of my own investigation that Julia’s innocence was conclusively established and that she returned to England without a stain on her character.
This is one of those excellent English murder mysteries that used to come out in the first half of the 20th century, except that this one was published in 1980. It has the classic formula—seven tourists on an art-lover’s guided trip to Venice are put up in a special wing of a hotel with very limited access, thereby narrowing the possible suspects to the members of the tour. You try to find the killer before the group of London solicitors trying to absolve their friend solve it.
The twist here is that the solicitors receive their clues backwards and forwards in time, as their friend Julia’s very descriptive letters from Venice, written before and during the murder, arrive by slow post from Italy while the solicitors are already aware of the murder and trying to solve it. I’m hard to fool, but this one got me. Caudwell’s style is erudite and whimsical. Highly recommended for mystery enthusiasts.
A Surfeit of Epigrams: Euphues (The Anatomy of Wit) by John Lyly
The similitude you rehearse of the wax argueth your waxing and melting brain, and your example of the hot and hard iron showeth in you but cold and weak disposition. Do you not know that which all men do affirm and know, that black will take no other colour? That the stone asbestos being once made hot will never be made cold? That fire cannot be forced downward? That nature will have no course after kind? Can the Aethiop change or alter his skin? Or the leopard his hue? Is it possible to gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Or to cause anything to strive against Nature?
But why go I about to praise Nature, the which as yet was never any imp so wicked and barbarous, any Turk so vile and brutish, any beast so dull and senseless that could or would or durst dispraise or contemn? Doth not Cicero conclude and allow that if we follow and obey Nature we shall never err? Doth not Aristotle allege and confirm that Nature frameth or maketh nothing in any point rude, vain and imperfect? Nature was had in such estimation and admiration among the heathen people that she was reputed for the only goddess in Heaven. If Nature, then, have largely and bountifully endued me with her gifts, why deem you me so untoward and graceless? If she have dealt hardly with me, why extol you so much my birth? If Nature bear no sway, why use you this adulation? If Nature work the effect, what booteth any education? If Nature be of strength or force, what availeth discipline or nurture? If of none, what helpeth Nature? But let these sayings pass as known evidently and granted to be true, which none can or may deny unless he be false or that he be an enemy to humanity.
If you’ve read Ecclesiastes or Proverbs in the Bible, or Pilgrim’s Progress, or even Polonius’s speech to Laertes, you’ve seen most of the meat and sauce that is to be found in Euphues, a 16th century book that may or may not have provided etymology for the word “euphemism”.
There’s very little plot. Euphues and his friend meet a woman whom they both like. The woman first chooses the friend, then Euphues, then dumps them both for someone else. At every step of the proceedings, each character talks about what to do next, and why, in the form of an ethical question, in speeches as long as John Galt’s, and only ten times as funny. Afterwards, Euphues goes off alone and writes a series of letters about virtue.
As you’ll notice from the quote above, Lyly never uses one simile or comparison, or appeal to authoritative text when he can produce five. The wise guess is that he must have been paid by the word. It seems to me, Lyly’s main contribution to literature was to produce a huge chest of raw word-jewels from which Shakespeare and other subsequent writers in English could select a stone or two to make beautiful works of art.
A Country for Old Men: Laws, by Plato
Every real man should be of the spirited type, but yet also as gentle as possible. For there is no way to avoid those injustices done by others that are both dangerous and difficult, or even impossible, to cure, except to fight and defend oneself victoriously, in no way easing up on punishment. This, every soul is unable to do, if it lacks a high born spiritedness. On the other hand, in regard to the curable injustices men commit, one must first understand that no unjust man is ever voluntarily unjust. For no one anywhere would ever voluntarily acquire any of the greatest evils—least of all when the evil afflicts his most honored possessions. Now the soul, as we asserted, is truly the most honorable thing for everyone; therefore no one would ever voluntarily take the greatest evil into his most honorable possession and keep it for the rest of his life. So the unjust man, like the man who possesses bad things, is pitiable in every way, and it is permissible to pity such a man when his illness is curable; in this case, one can become gentle, by restraining one’s spiritedness and not keeping up that bitter, woman’s raging. But against the purely evil, perverted man who cannot be corrected, one must let one’s anger have free rein. This is why we declare that it is fitting for the good man to be of the spirited type and also gentle, as each occasion arises.
This is the biggest dialogue in Plato, and the only one without Socrates. It consists of an unnamed Athenian telling two other philosophers about the rules for the ideal state. It gets weird.
I've been tending to pigeonhole Plato as the right-wing kook to Aristotle's Reasonable Man. In Laws, however, he's all over the map. He's still conservative in his opposition to Free Speech, his contempt for average people, and the downright shocking way in which he applies the laws more harshly to slaves than to others. On the other hand, he is liberal in that he comes closer to establishing equality for women than any other Greek author whose works survive, and his criminal code emphasizes rehabilitation as a first resort, on the grounds that no person voluntarily does what he knows to be wrong. And then there are times when he just inspires head-scratching, as when he urges public drunkenness as an educational experience, "proves" the existence of God on the grounds that the state says God exists, and proposes what may be the dullest public festivals in literature not intended as satire.
Bottom line: Although he starts out disagreeing with the idea that the purpose of the State is to achieve military superiority, Plato is trying to establish Spartan society in Athens. And, while Sparta was very good at fighting and conquered Sauron's army at Thermopylae, they provided little else to history by way of civilization and left no works behind, while Athens nearly invented theater, philosophy, Democracy and mathematics--and kicked the Orcs' asses at Salamis and Mycale as well. Maybe Plato's Sparta-lust is just a case of the grass being greener on the other side.
The Golden, Fleecy Mean: The Ettics, by Aristotle
This, then, is what the just is—the proportional; the unjust is what violates the proportion. Hence one term becomes too great, the other too small, as indeed happens in practice; for the man who acts unjustly has too much and the man who is unjustly treated too little, of what is good. In the case of evil, the reverse is true; for the lesser evil is reckoned a good in comparison with the greater evil, since the lesser evil is rather to be chosen than the greater, and what is worthy of choice is good, and what is worthier of choice a greater good.
This, then, is one species of the just.
All things naturally seek the good. Virtue is a golden mean between two extremes, as liberality is the virtue between the miser and the prodigal, and courage is the virtue between the coward and the berzerker. Seek the friendship of virtuous people and development of the intellect. The happiest life is the life of philosophical contemplation.
Aristotle’s Ethics is the original work that set out these ideas, which are so common today as to be almost or fully taken for granted. It’s also a very dull book, loaded with digressions, which mixes questions of the basic nature of virtue with such things as , whether it is better to have friends in bad times or in good, and whether goodness is an instrument or an actualized end.
I used my re-reading of it to check my premises. Yes, I pretty much agree with most of what he says (there are exceptions, the most glaring disagreement having to do with acceptance of slavery and the idea that it is impossible to be friends with those of a higher or lower social rank), but very little of it is actually helpful. He does all sorts of classifications and pigeonholes and very dry pronouncements, but it doesn't say much about the ethical dilemmas that bother me these days--how to reform an unjust society, how to successfully wrestle emotional turmoil, what to do when someone you care about has a conception of right that is alien to yours; how to cure bad tendencies in oneself and others. It's like being shown an extensive menu when you really want the nutritional information on the foods described and it isn't given.
Bottom line: Ethics is a book everyone should read at least once, probably when young enough to discuss with parental figures, and then build on it. These are axioms from which ethical theorums are built.
Tut Tut, it Looks Like Reign: Pyramids, by Terry Pratchett
It’s a fact as immutable as the Third Law of Sod that there is no such thing as a good Grand Vizier. A predilection to cackle and plot is apparently part of the job spec.
High priests tend to get put in the same category. They have to face the implied assumption that no sooner do they get the funny hat than they’re issuing strange orders, e.g., princesses tied to rocks for itinerant sea monsters and throwing little babies in the sea.
This is a gross slander. Throughout the history of the Disc most high priests have been serious, pious and conscientious men who have done their best to interpret the wishes of the gods, sometimes disembowelling or flaying alive hundreds of people in a day in order to make sure they’re getting it absolutely right.
This is the seventh Discworld book, and, it seems to me, the best of the seven since the first one, The Colour of Magic. I rejoice that I have so many, many more in this huge series.
As always, Pratchett’s secret is his ability to meld revered history, myth and culture with trashy myth and culture and role playing game tropes. Hence, the hero Teppic is heir to the throne of Djelibeybi, (a stand-in for ancient Egypt), a country which has gone on being ancient while the rest of the Disc modernized, and actual Egyptian history overlaps with New Age Pyramid Woo-Woo and cliches from Crypt Keeper tales about cursed mummies. Teppic has been sent to Ankh-Morpork for a modern education in the Assassin’s Guild, and when called back home, suffers severe culture shock.
There are skewered variations on the Sphinx’s riddle, Zeno’s paradoxes, Greek philosophy, Homeric epics and the Persian Wars (unfortunately, Pyramids was written well before 300 came out; Pratchett would have had a field day with “This is Sparta” jokes involving banana peels and lost tourists). Highest reccomendations, as with all Discworld books.
Tamar Almost of the Bailey: The Shortest Way to Hades, by Sarah Caudwell
Julia continued for some time after this to discourse of the high principles and noble traditions for which Sir Thomas More had gone to the scaffold and Erskine May had resigned high office. I blame for this sort of thing the authors of the Guide to Professional Conduct which is handed out wholesale to all those called to membership of the English Bar: they have seen fit to include in it a number of sensational and romantic tales about barristers behaving well and acting on principle and so forth; and have too little considered, in my opinion, what effect these may have on impressionable persons such as Julia, who misunderstand things and take it all seriously.
“My dear Julia,” I said at last, “do not distress yourself further about these matters. I have consented to undertake the inquiry, and there is no need for you to worry any more about civilization or the rule of law or what Sir Thomas More would have done. Sir Thomas will understand that you have done your best, and when civilization crumbles it will not be your fault at all. It is only fair to tell you, however, that I shall engage on the investigation without sharing your belief that it is a case of murder.”
She gave me a look of polite but distrustful inquiry, as if suspecting me of a wish to evade my task or excuse in advance a lack of zeal in its performance.
“Don’t you see,” I said, “that it’s the wrong girl who’s dead?”
See Thus Was Adonis Murdered, above. Caudwell’s second book features the same group of solicitors: Selena, Ragwort, Cantrip, Timothy and Julia, and their mentor and narrator Professor Tamar, who solves the crimes. I may have gone through the first book a little too quickly; only with Hades am I starting to really get a feel for these characters, to the point where their in-character reactions to situations are delightful because I know who they are.
For example, at one point the characters innocently accept an invitation to a gathering which turns out to be an orgy. The impressionable one is obliging but confused about being asked to try on the naughty-schoolgirl outfit, while the one who nothing perturbs immediately settles down on the divan, fully clothed in a room full of naked people and immerses herself in a Jane Austen novel with an “I’m not interrupting your pleasure; please don’t interrupt mine” sort of attitude. Later, after a visit to a shocking house of ill repute, the professor-narrator acknowledges that no doubt the reader would want explicit directions to such a place, and apologizes for being unable to oblige, having kept eyes closed for too much of the trip.
Also, I’ve noticed that Professor Tamar, although named Hilary, is never referred to by a gender specific pronoun and has an attitude toward the others distinctly like an indulgent uncle to five lovable but helpless young nieces and nephews.
These are very good stories, well plotted and well characterized, with enough comic dialogue and misadventures to make them worth reading even if you’re indifferent to whodunnits, and a joy to anyone who likes a good mystery in the classic style. After two volumes, I’m almost in love with the eccentrics of 62 New Square, Lincoln’s Inn, which is unfortunate because Caudwell only wrote four books before dying, and my love must be limited to a maximum of two more one-night stands. Ah, what kind of God would allow this to happen?
Vatta Victorious: Victory Conditions, by Elizabeth Moon
”I am Gammis Turek,” he said. He paused. His mellow voice, perfectly modulated to convey strength, determination, menace, was far more frightening than the harsh bellow of a thriller actor.
“You must understand this,” he said. “I can isolate your world at any moment. My fleets control the spaceways; my forces can disrupt ansible communications whenever I wish. I have many allies; their forces, too, are at my command. I have more ships than any system militia and weapons that can turn your home worlds into cinders.” A carefully measured pause. “If you force me to use them against you, I will have no mercy. You and those you love, everything you have worked for, will die in an instant. Here is proof of it.”
Now the scene showed an expansive office, where well-dressed civilians, all clearly humods, backed away from armed men wearing Turek’s maroon and black colors.
“They argued with my commands,” turek said. The troops fired, in short bursts, and people fell, some screaming at first, until at last the room fell silent. “They did not obey,” Turek said in a voice over, as the scene shifted to a brief battle between a rock-throwing mob and the soldiers. “That was Polson,” Turek said. “I own it now. I own its jump points. I own its ansibles. Only my people live on the world once called Polson. And it is not the only one.” The scene changed to a ruined city, smoke rising from shattered buildings. “Here, someone killed one of my men. Just one. Hundreds died here, maybe thousands. It doesn’t matter to me. I do not tolerate disobedience.” He did not sound angry, but like someone stating an undeniable fact.
This is the final chapter in Elizabeth Moon’s five volume “Vatta’s War” series, which I’ve been reading and enjoying over the past couple of months. The final book does more of what I’ve enjoyed all along—it gives Ky, Rafe, Stella, Aunt Grace and Toby a few more chances to uncover devious plots and triumph over enemies.
What it does not do is provide the final, thrilling climax and triumph over ultimate evil. That Gorzo The Mighty Bond villain and Emperor of the Universe I quoted above, the one behind all the plots, who the Vattas have been fighting the whole time...he appears on a vid screen one more time in the entire series, to speak for one more short paragraph. The big final space battle takes place entirely within one chapter. Blink and you’ll miss it. The book ends, as a result, in the same sort of unfinished way that you expect when you’re in volume two or four of an arced series, but which is a tad jarring when you know you’re done with the whole space opera. Turek, for all the hype, is no more of a galactic threat than the several minor villains who have been defeated along the way, and he’s much less fleshed out as a character.
Many readers will be disappointed at this, but I wasn’t reading it for the big arc and the epic final battle. I was more interested in the individual spy plots and traps, and in the growth of the protagonists, especially Stella and Rafe, from flawed everyday people into heroes. And that part, Moon does as well in the end as always. Bottom line, if you’ve read this far and enjoyed it, you might as well see it through.
As American as Apple Jacks: The Partly Cloudy Patriot, by Sarah Vowell
The more history I learn, the more the world fills up with stories. Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey caffe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao and the Dutch invention of the process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle's Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top. No wonder it costs so much.
Of all living writers who I haven't yet met, Sarah Vowell is the one I would most like to chat with over cocktails and dinner. I've seen her on The Daily Show (that's how I first learned she existed, in fact), and almost fell in love with her as soon as she began to talk. She's funny. She's snarky. She's a genius who knows her history and is doing what she loves, and her love for her subject matter is so contagious that she will cause you to love it too, whether she's rhapsodizing over Presidential libraries or Tom Landry or Pop-a-Shot games or a form letter she once got from a Congressman in Oklahoma. Sarah Vowell is incredible.
I'm not alone in my appreciation. As of this writing, I'm #54 on the library wait list for her new book Unfamiliar Fishes, and so I had to be content with one of her older books, a collection of essays from the late 90s and the early '00s, on a wide variety of subjects. The best of them combine serious scholarly historical subjects like the Gettysburg Address (I personally suspect that in Lincoln's first draft, the line about how "it is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced" was simply "Goddam fucking Meade.") and the Salem witch trials (Could [Sarah Good] have any idea then that, three centuries later, bloodthirsty tourists would sip her life story from a souvenir shot glass? What would she think...that the town that put her to death based on the harebrained testimony of a few teenage girls would remake itself as a vacation spot nicknamed Witch City?) with pop culture references from the 1908s.
The best two essays of all, "The Nerd Voice" and "Democracy and Things Like That" are both about Al Gore. The first recasts the 2000 Presidential election in terms of The Revenge of the Nerds, and rails against the frighteningly large section of the electorate that hates and opposes the intelligent and competent because it is intelligent and competent, and they don't want no egghead intellectual leading the free world and acting like he's somehow better than the average feedlot manager. The second essay recounts an appearance by Gore that Vowell attended at a New Hampshire high school, and the reaction of the students when the media misquoted Gore to make him appear self-serving, and created a national incident pillorying Gore for a gaffe that the students knew he did not commit.
The Partly Cloudy Patriot, like all of Vowell's books, is a wonderful, snarky tragicomedy by an American patriot who knows the true cost of love of country and pays it gladly, a book that ends too soon and leaves the reader wanting more. Very highest recommendations.
Regarding Larry: The Razor’s Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham
”What’s that big book on the table?”, she asked.
“That? Oh, that’s my Greek dictionary.”
“Your what?” she cried.
“It’s all right. It won’t bite you.”
“Are you learning Greek?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I thought I’d like to.”
He was looking at her with a smile in his eyes and she smiled back at him.
“Don’t you think you might tell me what you’ve been up to all this time you’ve been in Paris?”
“I’ve been reading a good deal. Eight or ten hours a day. I’ve attended lectures at the Sorbonne. I think I’ve read everything that’s important in French literature and I can read Latin, at least Latin prose, almost as fluently as I can read French. Of course Greek’s more difficult. But I have a very good teacher. Until you came here I used to go to him three evenings a week.”
“And what is this going to lead to?”
“The acquisition of knowledge,” he smiled.
I remember an acting teacher telling me once that drama was about conflict, goddamn it, and that no one ever wrote a play about someone working out a philosophy of life. That may be so, but W. Somerset Maugham wrote a book about it, and it’s a good one. In a smarter world, Larry Darrell would be a household name right along with Captain Ahab and Jay Gatsby.
Actually, Darrell has less in common with Ahab than with Mellville’s other creation, Bartleby, the clerk who always shouts “I am not part of your nutritious breakfast—I am a Free Man!!!” whenever the boss asks him to do something. Darrell goes from shocking the sensible businessmen of 1920s-era Chicago by sitting around their clubs reading good books instead of taking a job in an office, to shocking the socialites of Paris by living in a Spartan apartment and improving his mind instead of living decadently, to wandering in Weimar Germany as a laborer, to studying mysticism in India, and back to Paris and America. Along the way, he comes to peace with himself, and that’s most of what happens.
A lesser writer than Maugham would have given Darrell a supporting cast of foils representing excessive materialism, jingoistic nationalism, church hypocrisy, etc., all of whom would condemn Darrell and end up being exposed as unhappy losers and failures in the end. That kind of story has been told dozens of times. Instead, most of the characters who make other choices with their lives turn out more or less content. The closest character to an earnest object lesson, the social climbing Elliott who finds himself snubbed in old age when he can no longer give the fashionable parties—it seemed to me that he lives the life he wanted right up to the end, and with the help of the narrator (Maugham appearing as himself), has the last laugh on his enemies from beyond the grave. The primary love interest, Isabel, despite one unforgivable action late in the novel, is presented as basically a good sort who whose values are just too different from Darrell’s to make theirs a relationship that would work out. Another friend, Gray, devotes himself to a career which, though it has its ups and downs, is ultimately fulfilling, while the tragic Sophie is presented as closer to Darrell in “getting it” than any other supporting character. Maugham, commenting with detached bemusement, has some affection for them all and seems to give the message that any choice can be the right one, as long as one is true to oneself.
The Razor’s Edge is a pretty short, moderately paced novel that can be read in an evening or two and that gives the reader a good deal to think about on a couple of levels. High recommendations.
"Nevinyrral’s Ring: Ringworld, by Larry Niven
It was magnificent. One mountain, roughly conical, all alone, forming no part of a chain. It had the look of a volcano, a mock volcano, for beneath the Ringworld there was no magma to form volcanoes. Its base was lost in mist. Its higher slopes showed clear through what must be thinning air, and its peak had a shiny look of snow: dirty snow, not bright enough to be clean snow. Perhaps permafrost.
There was a crystal clarity to the edges of the peak. Could it thrust clear out of the atmosphere? A real mountain that size would collapse of its own weight; but this mountain would be a mere shell of ring foundation material.
"I'm going to like the Ringworld engineers," said Louis Wu to himself. On a world built to ordered specification, there was no logical reason for such a mountain to exist. Yet every world should have at least one unclimbable mountain.
I wanted to like this one more than I did. It's a very famous "first contact" science fiction work from 1970, that reminded me a little of Farscape. It involves an exploring party made up of two humans (the old adventurer and the naive love interest with a charmed life) and two aliens (the warrior and the intelligent, untrustworthy one), who discover an artifact of barely fathomable size--if the "Ringworld" were a hoop, the Planet Earth could rattle around inside it like a pebble. The rest consists of the adventures that ensue when they explore it and try to find out what it is, who made it, and what happened there.
There are many self-contained adventures of varying quality. I was spellbound by the incident with the "sunflowers", and wanted to skim through the episode of the "prison". Niven has a lot of different themes he wants to explore--destiny and luck and leadership and evolution--and when he focuses on one thing, it can be brilliant, but when his themes cross, it can get a bit muddled (Remember: don't cross the themes!). The characters are almost caricatures, vividly painted on the surface, but without enough on the inside to make them great. Highly recommended anyway; anyone who goes to conventions should read it at least once.
Ebony and Irony: The Kingdom of this World, by Alejo Carpentier
Under the government of Rochambeau, the remaining landowners of the Plaine, all hope of recovering their former prosperity gone, gave themselves over without let or hindrance to a vast orgy. Nobody paid attention to clocks, nor did dawn mark the end of night. The watchword was eat, drink and be merry before catastrophe swallowed up all pleasure. The Governor granted favors in exchange for women. The ladies of the Cap mocked the late Leclerc's pronouncement that "white women who had prostituted themselves to Negroes were to be sent back to France, whatever their rank." Many women became tribades, appearing at dances with mulatto girls whom they called their cocottes. The daughters of slaves were forced while still infants. This was the road leading straight to horror. On holidays, Rochambeau began to throw Negroes to his dogs, and when the beasts hesitated to sink their teeth into a human body before the brilliant, finely clad spectators, the victim was pricked with a sword to make the tempting blood flow. On the assumption that this would keep the Negroes in their place, the Governor had sent to Cuba for hundreds of mastiffs: "They'll be puking niggers!"
With the exception of the one below, this was the shortest book I read this month. It was also one of the strangest. I read it in about an hour and a half.
After the United States, the next nation in the Americas to declare independence from colonial European masters was...Haiti! Carpentier's novel is a telling of that revolution, as seen through a filter of magic realism by Ti Noel, born a slave on a plantation and spending his last days as a squatter on the plantation's ruins. Along the way, he witnesses the revenge of his fellow slave Mackandal, who uses voodoo to curse the colonists who oppress him, the mad dictatorship of Henri Christophe, the first post-colonial black ruler of Haiti, and the post-Christophe engines of "progress" intimating that the cycle of oppression and revolution may never end. Hunted by "masters" of both races of Haiti, Ti Noel seeks refuge in his own imagination, at one point transforming himself into a series of animals to hide from his oppressors.
Carpentier was Cuban, and The Kingdom of this World was most valuable to me as a voice telling me something about a culture I had not considered much before. I had previously seen the Caribbean only from cruise ships, and Haiti only through modern current events involving one disaster after another. I found myself lucky to have read Patrick Fermor's The Traveller's Tree (Bookpost, December 2009), which taught me some facts about Christophe and the Hatian revolution. Carpentier does not remind the reader of Haiti's actual history, and it would be easy for a fiction reader with no background on the subject to lose the significance of much of the book (Christophe first appears in the book as a cook, with no foreshadowing of the role he is to play in history).
I’m sorry Rava, I can’t do that: For Want of a Nail, by Mary Robinette-Kowal
Rava sat with her hand on the cable for a moment longer, weighing possibilities.
Ludoviko said, “It might be the transmitter.”
Cordelia shook her head. “No, because it did register for that moment. I believe the socket is cracked. Replacing that should be simple.”
Rava barked a laugh. “Simple does not include an understanding of how snug your innards are.” The thought of trying to fit a voltmeter into the narrow opening filled her with dread. “Want to place bets on how long before we hear from Uncle Georgo wondering why you’re down?”
Cordelia sniffed. “I’m not down. I’m simply sequestered.”
Pulling her hand out, Rava massaged blood back into it. “So . . . the hundred credit question is . . . do you have a new socket in storage?” She unplugged the camera and leaned back to study Cordelia.
The AI’s face was rendered pale. “I . . . I don’t remember.”
Rava held very still. She had known what not having the long-term memory would mean to Cordelia, but she hadn’t thought about what it meant for her family.
Cordelia was their family’s continuity, their historical connection to their past. Some families made documentaries. Some kept journals. Her family had chosen to record and manage their voyage on the generation ship with Cordelia.Worse, she supervised all their records. Births, deaths, marriages, school marks . . . all of it was managed through the AI, who could be with every family member at all times through their VR glasses.
You never know who you’re going to meet at a convention. The young woman I met at Norwescon last month, who impressed me enough at a panel that I went to her reading, was so modest in her presentation (I’m pretty sure she said that what she read from was her first novel, and that it hadn’t been finished or accepted yet) that I went away thinking she was a brand new writer, and hoping she’d get noticed.
It turned out she had already been noticed. “For Want of a Nail” was announced as a Hugo-nominated short story the day after her reading. It’s not hard to see why it got selected either. You can read it online and draw your own conclusions here:
http://www.maryrobinettekowal.com/...