Wednesday, April 22, 2020

The Man Who Went Up in Smoke by Maj Sjowall-Per Wahloo (1966)

Detective Martin Beck travels to Hungary to find a missing Swedish journalist.

Mystery Review: The Man Who Went Up in Smoke is the second Martin Beck mystery, taking place two years after the first, and similarly begins with almost nothing: no clues, no leads, no direction. As Beck says: "He could not remember ever being given such a hopeless, meaningless assignment." For the first half of the book the reader merely gets to enjoy Beck's self-deprecating sense of humor and his modest daily routine as he gets to know the food, wine, and sights of Budapest. All told with a wealth of minute detail, which I suppose is a testament to the detective who sees all. While good company (though Beck is still immoderately interested in boats and still immoderately depressed), the reader slowly begins to suspect that there must be bigger game afoot while learning about Hungary during the cold war. The reader may well solve the mystery before Beck does and except for one incident The Man Who Went Up in Smoke doesn't have the suspense or intrigue of the first book, but that's not really why we're here. The team of Sjöwall and Wahlöö hook the reader with their characters and setting; the puzzle is merely the icing on the cake. I was captivated while reading and the pages flew by. It was only after I finished reading the novel that the story seemed a little thin. I'll just chalk it up to the sophomore slump and now I have to see how the third book, The Man on the Balcony, compares to The Man Who Went Up in Smoke.  [3★]

Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Child of All Nations by Irmgard Keun (1938)

A young girl and her dysfunctional parents, driven out of Germany by the Nazis, are on the run through Europe.

Book Review: Child of All Nations was written after the Nazis took power, but before the war. It's a first-hand account of those years when people knew war was coming, but could do nothing to stop it. The small family makes a desperate journey, together and apart, through Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Italy, France, and Austria (I may've missed a country in there). For various reasons, often lack of money, they're unable to put down roots anywhere. Told by preteen Kully, her innocent eyes often see more clearly than the adults around her. Cleverly and humorously narrated, Kully is both younger and older than her years. I expected the novel to be more of a diatribe against the fascist regime that banned her books and drove Irmgard Keun (1905-82) from her homeland. She's first and most interested in telling an engaging story about a pretty mother, an alcoholic father, and a child too often on her own. She succeeds. I don't usually enjoy adult books with child narrators, as when too genuinely child-like they're not all that interesting, and if too precocious they're either insufferable or more of a literary device and stand-in for the author. In Child of All Nations Keun has done a remarkable job of threading the needle: Kully is wisely naive in just the right measure: "I fail to understand why one shouldn't ask people for money if they have got some. It annoys me when people don't hand over their money when they have it and we need it. Why do they suppose we go to the trouble of asking?" In her first two books (popular novels of the "modern woman," Gilgi, One of Us (1931) and The Artificial Silk Girl (1932)) Keun unwittingly revealed the Nazis early efforts to take power. In After Midnight (1937) and this novel she deliberately gives a contemporary account of a Germany possessed by the fascists and Europe posed on the brink of war. While still telling an enjoyable story. All Keun's novels are worth reading, with another being translated to English this year. My only (small) complaint about Child of All Nations is that the ending was somewhat abrupt and not wholly satisfying. But then again, there was no proper ending for this story in 1938.  [4★]

Saturday, April 18, 2020

Roseanna by Maj Sjowall-Per Wahloo (1965)

A tourist is found dead in Lake Vattern; the Swedish police investigate.

Mystery Review: Roseanna is the first of the Martin Beck mysteries written by the writing team of Maj Sjöwall and her partner Per Wahlöö, and an early example of what's sometimes called in English "Nordic noir." The plot is both plain and simple: after a tourist is found dead the police investigate capably, methodically, and deliberately. This novel also proceeds capably, methodically, and deliberately, written in a deadpan, stripped-down, just-the-facts style. Details are amply supplied. I found the slow, calculated reveal of information, page by page, to be irresistible, like eating potato chips. I needed another page because the previous one was not enough. Part of that is due to our dour and depressed detective in Roseanna. Martin Beck is perpetually miserable: feels unwell, sleeps poorly, eats rarely, and is in a marriage that has more walls than windows. The mystery itself, the crime, is secondary to the character development and the gray setting. There are no tricks, nothing fancy, little breaks the steady drip, drip, drip as the plot proceeds at its own pace, as the suspense patiently builds. That pace reflects the often boring, shoe-leather approach of everyday police work. Realism. It's intelligent with no condescension, nothing is added for shock value or to look clever, there's no witty banter meant to impress. There is little hard-boiled here, no gratuitous violence or posturing. Just the patient, silent civil servants of the police force. Roseanna and Martin Beck don't work to be likable, they are what they are. If you like that sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing you will like. I liked it a lot.  [4★]

Friday, April 17, 2020

Six Tales of the Jazz Age & Other Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1960)

A selection of stories from two other of Fitzgerald's original short story collections.

Book Review: Six Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories is an odd assortment of F. Scott Fitzgerald's work, valuable for the introduction written by daughter Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald (then Lanahan) and because it contains three stories from the hard-to-find All the Sad Young Men (1926) (published following The Great Gatsby). The remaining six stories were taken from an earlier book (as suggested by the title) Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) (published following The Beautiful and Damned). Generally this selection first assembled in 1960 consists of stories that had not been chosen for other anthologies; the most notable such at the time was Malcolm Cowley's The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1951). Thus, mostly the weaker of Fitzgerald's works. As Frances Fitzgerald notes in the Introduction here: "A few short pieces in the original collections have been left out, for the very reason that they are 'pieces' rather than stories proper." The six stories included here from Tales of the Jazz Age are:

"The Jelly-Bean" - True love makes a young man want to be a better person, and then it doesn't.

"The Camel's Back" - An absurd story about how the course of true love never does run smooth, except for camels.

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" - The strongest story in this collection, more affecting than I expected given its odd and awkward premise, and later made into a 2008 film with Brad Pitt. Surprising that this wasn't included in the Cowley anthology.

"Tarquin of Cheapside" - More clever than brilliant and clearly the product of a lit major, but clever nonetheless.

"'O Russet Witch!'" - A fable of fantasy and regret for the Jazz Age.

"The Lees of Happiness" - Another fable of lost chances and what might've been.

But Six Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories also includes "other stories." F. Scott once told his daughter: "I guess I am too much a moralist at heart and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form rather than entertain them." This attitude is reflected in the three stories found here from All the Sad Young Men:

"The Adjuster" - A young wife and mother still wants to enjoy life after marriage, but in a harsh lesson learns the error of her ways. A generally unpleasant story with an even more unpleasant moral. Judgmental and a bit prudish.

"Hot and Cold Blood" - A husband and soon-to-be father is goaded by his wife into selfishness, but soon learns the error of his ways. A more palatable moral, but still a harsh lesson for the shrewish wife.

"Gretchen's Forty Winks" - A young wife and mother refuses to delay gratification for six weeks even to establish the couple in wealth, so her husband masterfully takes matters into his own hands.

Not the best introduction to Fitzgerald's stories and not a particularly strong selection of his work, serving as a catch-all for works not collected elsewhere. But Fitzgerald is always interesting, even at his most average, and Six Tales of the Jazz Age provides a glimpse into the wide variety of his efforts. No one will be harmed by reading these stories, but the four original collections and the anthology by Matthew J. Bruccoli, The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1989) are best.  [3★]

Thursday, April 16, 2020

Abacus by Mary Karr (1987)

The first book by the noted memoirist, a collection of 35 early poems.

Poetry Review: Abacus is a mature and thoughtful first book of poetry. Published eight years before her first astonishing memoir, The Liars' Club, it already contains the self-reflection which made that book successful and eye-opening. Much poetry since the days of Sexton and Plath contains elements of obvious autobiography, poetry and memoir share a close relationship, wondering do we classify it as fiction or nonfiction. In Abacus we see that Mary Karr was writing memoir from the beginning, just in poetry instead of prose. Consider such lines from this book as:

  • "I know the Perrys will be taking down the lawn chairs"
  • "You took them home to make a purple pie/ that stained my mouth and your hands"
  • "Ginnie ... got a heart-shaped/ locket, then a shotgun wedding ring"
  • "I hauled the army footlocker thunking/ up the basement stairs."

Each could be the grain of sand enwrapped by the full story that becomes a pearl in one of her memoirs to come. Many of the poems are the unabashedly romantic memories of someone living life richly, reflecting on bohemian larks, ex-lovers, and adventures. She writes of hitting the road much like a latter day Kerouac drinking champagne in a kimono and pearls; she's not above a sense of myth making:

  • "I was full of sex and Russian novels and the college/ we couldn't afford"
  • "I stole my mother's face,/ growing into her high heels,/ her taste for alcohol and men"
  • "After high school I ran away to the coast/ slept in a pink Lincoln Continental on blocks/ ... At night I traveled everywhere on LSD"
  • "In Paris where I use a cigarette/ for my night light."

The book's title comes from the poem "The Distance," in which a lover's gift of a pearl is "strung now with the rest, your gifts,/ my abacus of love and hate." As can be seen from the above lines, Karr's poetry is mostly straightforward and accessible as one would expect from someone who would later publish a pot-stirring essay titled "Against Decoration" in Parnassus in 1991. The poems can almost be read like prose, which is no criticism, and shows hints of Sylvia Plath ("Vampire") and Neruda ("Exile's Letter"). Some of the best pieces in Abacus discuss the long death of her beloved father in painful, sharp-edged syllables. As a first book one might expect it to be short, but as we'd learn Mary Karr was never prolific; she was too busy living life.  [4★]

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata (1948)

A married Tokyo dilettante visits the mountainous west of Japan to continue his affair with a troubled local geisha.

Book Review: Snow Country quietly seeps into the reader's subconscious in bits and pieces, subtle, gently sketched. Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972) carefully crafts a picture of two individuals who will never connect, who might as well live on separate planets. One feels deep honest passion, the other is incapable of genuine feeling, but somehow they meet and try to form an attachment. Softly written about emotions that should set the characters screaming. The man, Shimamura, is an "idler who inherited his money." He only appreciates the aesthetics of life, without emotion or involvement. He can write about the art of Western ballet without having the slightest desire to see one. He can have an affair with a gradually disintegrating woman, without the slightest interest in knowing her. He only appreciates her tragic beauty, her "life as beautiful but wasted." He appreciates only the concept, not the feeling of, emotion. Unfortunately, the opacity of his emotional distance keeps the reader from knowing the geisha Komako better, but that may simply be my being a bad reader. Kawabata has, in his understated manner, given us all the clues to her existence and state of mind: the drunkenness, the incoherence, the mood swings, the mad laughter. In a book about the lack of emotion, my emotions weren't involved as they should've been, for whatever reason. The translator states in his introduction that Kawabata's writing has roots in haiku, which seems right to me. Just as a well written haiku is open to multiple interpretations (though that may be just my view), so Snow Country is capable of different realizations. The difference being that for me a good haiku will give a sharp moment of emotional understanding, and this book's moment was more subdued, almost subliminal, ending with a effort to grasp the whole revelation in a single line. Living in snow country as I do, where we get as much snow as does the landscape Kawabata writes about, gave me no insight into this deceptive novel. Written in another place and time, Snow Country still bound me with delicate feelings that slowly unraveled as if they were my own.  [4★]

Monday, April 13, 2020

After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie by Jean Rhys (1931)

A young woman down and out in Paris and London lives through the aftermath of a troubled love affair.

Book Review: After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie is a straightforward title for this description of life after lost love, left with a "sore and cringing feeling." Between 1928 and 1939 Jean Rhys (1890-1979) wrote four novels of young women adrift in the modern world. Then the novels stopped and she disappeared until 27 years later when she became famous for writing Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a novel informed by having been born in Dominica and living as an exile for long periods in England. Mr. Mackenzie is the second of the four early novels. The young woman adrift in the modern world in this instance, an aging soiled dove, is Julia Martin, an Englishwoman living in Paris. We've met Julia before: she's Lorelei Lee, she's Irmgard Keun's "artificial silk girl," she's Blanche DuBois, she's Komako in Snow Country, she's Holly Golightly; she's a woman who lives on the generosity and guilt of men. But they're all different, they're each their own person in their own way. Here Julia is determined to stand up to the world even as she depends on the exchange of favors to survive. She won't knuckle under, she won't be dominated, even as she's tentative and dependent in an overwhelming world. She will keep her pride even if she has to cut off her nose to spite her face. "I don't look so bad, do I? I've still got something to fight the world with, haven't I?" In spiraling down, she's lost herself and lost her way, even when she knows "that she was doing a very foolish thing indeed." Self-destructive is the phrase. Julia doesn't know that beyond the sex she has little to offer, or little that she's willing to offer. Although she enjoys reading we don't learn what she reads. She's just a tough little nut who refuses to crack. But so troubled that she often fails to communicate except to relate a litany of complaint. She fails to respond, falls silent, almost catatonic at times, seems barely in touch with reality, answering in non sequitur. She's become so wrapped in her own misery she can no longer connect. She is not witty or charming as her looks fade. She has no friends, no relatives willing to help, little that makes her worthwhile, but she arouses our feelings nonetheless. We root for her for no reason than that she's a bit of green life growing through the pavement: "Her sordid wish to somehow keep alive." Although always seeking hand-outs from men, what she really wants "is that he would say something or look something that would make her feel less lonely." She's pitiful, she's human, left living in "the hour between dog and wolf." Apparently, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie forms a sort of semi-autobiographical trilogy, following Quartet (a/k/a Postures) (1928) and preceding Good Morning, Midnight (1939). Written with brevity and point this is a wonderful character study of someone with little to offer, but who immersed in emotion tenaciously clings to life and herself.  [4★]

Friday, April 3, 2020

Tales of the Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1922)

Fitzgerald's second collection of short stories, published shortly after his second novel The Beautiful and Damned.

Book Review: Tales of the Jazz Age includes a few of the best stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) and several that achieve nothing more than being briefly entertaining ("Porcelain and Pink") and beautifully written. By this time magazines would publish anything he wrote, so Fitzgerald was scraping the barrel (he needed the money) digging up old sketches from college, absurdist ramblings, imaginary plays, six-page enigmas, anything else he could find, and they were all published. Some are more clever than brilliant ("Tarquin of Cheapside"), but the oddities are fun and demonstrate his range -- few would guess that all of these were written by our Chronicler of the Roaring Twenties a century ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was interested in experimenting, breaking the mold, and he could be absurdly silly as some sort of proto-Beckett. But amidst the others are high points of Fitzgerald's short story career. "May Day" is a serious (he calls it "unpleasant") and nuanced take on social and political issues of the day. In "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz" (my favorite) Fitzgerald demonstrates that the rich really are quite different than the rest of us, willing to calmly countenance slavery, fratricide, and serial killing to preserve their wealth. "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," a fanciful tour de force, is both more sentimental and more effective than I expected. (It's also a distantly related 2008 film with Brad Pitt.) These three works belong in any selection of his stories. Fitzgerald's secret weapon is his unique empathy, an ability to get inside the minds and emotions of any of his characters, and take us along with him.  [3½★]

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)

Billy Pilgrim a veteran of World War Two is haunted by what he saw there.

Book Review: Slaughterhouse-Five is a brilliant work, a modern classic, a full and quietly emotional statement about life and war and death. Written without pretension or irony, this is a very human and humane book, how without meaning or purpose in the universe we, like Billy Pilgrim, are helpless in the face of what is to come. But it's not without hope. Even lacking order and illusion, we can learn to accept life. Subtitled "or The Children's Crusade," Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) writes of horror and terror in a tone of child-like wonder. Everything that happens in the book, no matter how consequential, is told calmly. Billy Pilgrim, a constant victim of circumstance and a veteran of the War, a survivor of the bombing of Dresden, and later an optometrist, has famously become "unstuck" in time, and he and the narrative jolt between various periods in his life, creating several story-lines that gradually accumulate, so that the reader sees different events being told simultaneously, filling in the story as a whole. Just as the story takes place at several times, so the book has several narrators, adding to the story's mosaic, which accumulates in strength and meaning. There is Kurt Vonnegut, the actual author; there is the first-person character of the author as participant in the story; there is an omniscient narrator that pulls it all together; and there are various characters who get to tell, briefly, stories within the story. Slaughterhouse-Five was written in the midst of the Vietnam War, which apparently was the appropriate moment for Vonnegut to write of the bombing of Dresden. The bombing is the center of Billy's life, the novel itself, and a lesson for Vonnegut and by extension, for us. If something as horrible as the bombing of Dresden (or countless other tragedies) can occur, then there is no meaning to anything, but Vonnegut writes it all in a tone of wide-eyed innocence. Although life may change, history doesn't and what is going to happen will happen, as realized in the Serenity Prayer (written by Reinhold Niebuhr). The only meaningful response is one of acceptance, embodied in the book's repeated "So it goes." Slaughterhouse-Five brings together elements of several of Vonnegut's books featuring characters such as Kilgore Trout, Eliot Rosewater, Howard Campbell, and others. A book that's required reading for anyone interested in understanding our common humanity in the midst of apocalypse.  [5★]

Thursday, April 2, 2020

The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark (1970)

A woman travels from Denmark to Italy in search of a man.

Book Review: The Driver's Seat is one of the best Muriel Spark (1918-2006) novels. Almost experimental, the story is written in present tense, but as if watching a movie, presented visually without interior thoughts. Spark solely describes what we see, not what anyone thinks or feels ("Who knows her thoughts? Who can tell?"). Lise is traveling with a purpose, that can be gleaned from a few hints along the way. Mostly she seems odd, perhaps disturbed. She's trying, and failing, to maintain control. But she wishes to be noticed, leaving a trail of bread crumbs behind in her travels. She tells lies, fabricates stories, adopts accents, dresses garishly, buys things she has no use for, laughs manically. We learn that she's 34, speaks four languages, works in an accountants' office, has been ill for some months, is thin with pale brown hair "probably tinted." Her identity is unfixed, her manner constantly shifting, her history, her affect changing. She has few or no contacts or connections, alienated from everything, responding (or failing to respond) in non-sequitur, abruptly ending interactions, abandoning people and commitments. She acts very much in the moment, blundering forward in her quest ("I keep on making mistakes") to meet, or find, her friend, a man, someone. Of men she says, "Too much self-control, which arises from fear and timidity, that's whats wrong with them. They're cowards most of them." If she can't find herself, she's willing to lose herself. She is seeking "the lack of an absence." When a man accuses her of being afraid of sex, she replies "Only of afterwards ... but that doesn't matter any more." Early on in The Driver's Seat we learn what will happen, how it will end, but that doesn't interfere with the story, only adds to it as we attempt to discern the why. The Driver's Seat is also an Italian film from 1974 with Elizabeth Taylor, who gives an amazing performance (apparently many consider it her worst film, I don't). Andy Warhol also makes an appearance, who is mostly Andy Warhol. Muriel Spark's writing is always a joy and I feel just a little smarter when I'm reading her books. She doesn't suffer fools gladly and expects (demands?) the reader to be as clever as she is. All her books are pleasures, but some, such as The Driver's Seat, stand above the rest.  [5★]