The Reading Life Review. January 2016 - A Look Ahead- Brief Comments on my "review policy"

In January I only did 14 posts, the smallest monthly number  since I began blogging nearly seven years ago.  Two factors contributed to this.  One was a case of just needing a break.  Secondly I spent a week in rural Philippines where my internet access was by a cell phone and I do not care for writing longish posts on them.  There are 2815 posts on the blog.

As of today The Reading Life has received 3,871,179 page views.  The most visited posts are, as normal, those on short stories by authors from the Philippines.  The top countries of visitor residency are the USA, the Philippines, Russia, India, and Germany.  The most common city of residence is the Greater Manila Metro area, the top US state is California.

This month I posted on four works of nonfiction, all of which were given to me for review purposes.

1.  New England Bound Slavery and Colonization in Early America by Wendy Warren.  

2.  Ravensbrook Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women by Sarah Helm.  A post in honor of International Holocaust Day

3.  Woman of Rome A Life of Elsa Morante by Lilly Tuck.  Very good literary biography

4.  Montaine by Stefan Zweig.  An elegant appreciation 

Some Novels Read in January 

1.  Barry Lyndon by William Thackeray only 19th century work read in January.

2.  All Our Worldly Goods by Irene Nemirovsky- I love this author.  A Holocaust Day read

3.  Journey By Moonlight by Artel Szerb.  Arguably Hungary's greatest writer.  Also a holocaust day work.

Short Stories.

I read ten short stories while in the rural Philippines.  All are listed in a post.  Yesterday I read a short story by Paul Bowles, ""The Delicate Prey" that is considered one of his very best.  I also posted on a soon forthcoming collection Miss Grief and other Short Stories by Constance Fenimore Woolson edited by Anne Boyd Rioux.  Woolson is a truly talented writer

Review Policy Notes

Unlike  most book blogs, I regularly review nonfiction, mainly history and literary biographies but I am quite open.  I look at every review book I receive.  If I have told you I will post on your book then I will. My interests are wide and I invite all to submit their works.  

Near Term Reading Plans

In February I hope to post on two novels by Rosamund Lehmann and on an excellant biography of her.  I am reading The Dogs and the Wolves by Iréne Nemirovsky.  I will post on a first rate biography of Constance Fenimore Woolson by Anne Boyd Rioux.  I will continue to read short stories, hopefully at least one every other day.

I offer my great thanks to Max u for the Amazon Gift Card.

Mel u, Editor, Founder, Curator

Ambrosia Boussweau, Euopean Director

 

The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon by William Thackeray 1844 - With Scene Shots of the Stanley Kubrick Movie

Earlier this month I read William Thackeray's great classic, Vanity Fair.  Upon completing it I wanted to read another of his works.  I recalled back some thirty five years ago when I saw the 1975 Stanley Kubrick movie based on Thackeray's Memoirs of Barry Lyndon.  I still remember how beautiful the movie was, the wonderful costumes, and presentation of 18th century life.  I was not really eager to read another 1000 page novel right now and Barry Lyndon is under 400 pages so I decided to give it a try.  I ended up totally enjoying it.  

   Lady Lyndon and Barry's Son

I liked that it was partially set in Ireland.  The novel is narrated, with a few intrusions by the fictional editor of the memoirs, by Barry Lyndon.  He tells a tale a brilliant mixture of sharp insight and self-delusion. We see him go from being captured to fight in the German army to being considered, at least by himself, one of the great men of European society.  Gambling plays a big part in his life.  He is a feared duelist with the sword or pistol.  A great lover, or so he tells us, first driven from Ireland when he falsely thinks he killed a romantic rival  in a duel over a woman.  The book was initially serialized so something exciting happens in almost every chapter.  

       Lord Bullington, Barry's step son and arch enemy

Barry Lyndon is exciting with nonstop action.  Barry is convinced he is entitled to great riches and is wronged by everyone but perhaps his Irish mother.  I did not end up liking Barry but maybe i felt a bit sorry for him.

By all means first read Vanity Fair but lovers of the Victorian novel, especially picturesque adventures, should consider putting Barry Lyndon on their one of these days maybe list.

Mel u

Woman of Rome A Life of Elsa Morante by Lilly Tuck

Literary biographies are one of my favorite reading areas.  It seems the 21th century is getting off to a great start with lots of wonderfully researched and elegantly written biographies of authors in the last few years.  Woman of Rome A Life of Elsa Morante by Lilly Tuck exemplifies this.  The author of a biography of a famous author  has a difficult task.  The temptation is to use the life history of the subject as resulting in her works, to,identifying characters in an author's work with real people in her life. 

Elsa Morante (1912 to 1985) most highly regarded novels are History and the cult classic, Arturo's Island.  She published lots of short stories, a good bit of political journalism, she was a communist as were most Italian writers and intellectuals of the period.  She married in 1941 the novelist Alberto Moravio, author of numerous novels including Woman of Rome, the source of the title for Tuck's biography.   She got her literary start publishing short stories.

Morante was born into a struggling to get by high drama family.  She learned early what it meant to be a woman of Rome.  She was not of the temperment or inclination to work in a mundane job, a shop or a factory were not of interest to her. Tuck tells us she occasionally prostituted herself, as did the central character in Woman of Rome.   From an early age she developed a love for reading.   Morante and her husband were both half-Jewish.  When the Germans   occupied Rome in 1943, they moved to a remote village in the mountains and stayed there until the war was over.  Tuck shows us how from this experience came Morante's very powerful History.  (I hope to read this in February.)  I was moved when Tuck explained how Morante insisted this book be priced so as to make it affordable by as many people as possible.  The well known translator William Weaver helped produce an English language edition.   

Tuck devotes a lot of space to commentary on the novels of Morante, showing how her life experiences influenced  her work.  Morante's marriage was not a great match.  They were not at all a conventional literary couple.  Both had other relationships.  They divorced in 1961.  Morante liked handsome, artistic, sometimes bisexual men years younger than herself and Tuck elegantly describes her various relationships.  

Morante loved cats, especially Siamese cats, at times seemingly preferring them to people, an attitude I sometimes share.

"Animals are angels and Siamese cats are archangels" - Elsa Morante

I enjoyed this book a lot.  Morganite had a very interesting life and Tuck takes us along.

Mel u

Journey By Moonlight by Artal Szerb. 1937 A post in observation ofInternational Holocaust Memorial Day January 27, 2016

This week, in what I hope will become an annual event on my blog, I am posting on works by authors who died in the holocaust, holocaust memorials and historical works.  I will loosely define a holocaust as a mass killing of a group of people based on their race, religion, or geographic location.  There have been holocausts as far back as recorded history goes and they are still going on today.  I know that many more than Jews were killed in the Holocaust.  Much of the trouble in the world today was set in motion by the Holocaust.  

On January 27, 1945, seventy one years ago, the greatest Hungarian writer of the 20th century, Artal Szerb, was beaten to death in a forced labor camp in Balf, Hungary at the age of forty four.  This post is what I can do to honor his memory.  

Journey by Moonlight is considered Szerb's masterwork.  I was mesmerized by the beauty of the book and spellbound by the powerful intelligence i felt in contact with.   The central character of the work is a member of the Hungarian upper class, a bourgeois when that designation actually meant something.  He is obsessed, as was the author with Italian civilization and art.  He sees but can't quite understand a contrast by the eternal beauty of Italian art and the decay of Italian society under the fascists.  This is not an overtly political book at all, Szerb is far to great an artist for that.  As Julie Oreinger says in her elegant and perceptive introduction, the book is obsessed with the pairing of beauty and death.  There is a conversation between the central character, who loses his wife on a honeymoon trip to Italy, and a professor about the different treatment of death in Italian Catholicism and Germanic religions of the tenth century that I found totally illuminating.  

The translation by Lew Rix reads beautifully.

In the interest of full disclosure, I was given this book by the Publisher, The New York Review of Books. 

ANTAL SZERB (1901–1945) was born in Budapest into a middle-class family that had converted from Judaism to Catholicism. He studied German and English literature at the University of Budapest, receiving a PhD in 1924. Throughout the second half of the 1920s he lived in France, Italy, and England, where he worked on his first book, An Outline of English Literature (1929). In 1933 he was elected the president of the Hungarian Literary Academy and the next year published his History of Hungarian Literature, called by John Lukacs, “not only a classic but a sensitive and profound description of . . . the Magyar mind.” It was followed in 1941 by a three-volume History of World Literature. In addition to his critical writings, Szerb produced produced many works of translation, and published newspaper articles, essays, reviews, short stories, and novels, of which The Pendragon Legend (1934), Love in a Bottle, (1935), The Third Tower (written in 1936), Journey by Moonlight (1937), Oliver VII (1937), and The Queen’s Necklace (1943) have been translated into English. Having lost his university teaching position as a result of Hungary’s anti-Semitic laws, Szerb was sent to a labor camp, where it is believed he was beaten to death. He was survived by his wife, Klára Bálint, who died in 1992.   From the publisher New York Review of Books

Mel u

Candelaria Reading by the Road Seven Days in January

Reading by the two lane highway on the porch in front of the family property in Candelaria, Zambales is one of my very favorite things. Candelaria is 250 kilometers from metro Manila and at least fifty years back in time.  No traffic jams, no fast foods, no malls, no cabs and it is a pleasure to draw a deep breath, most in the town of five thousand, versus ten million plus in Manila, have deep roots.  I find it a very spiritual place, I feel my third eye opening more and more as I stay.  Maybe it is the peace and quiet and serenity.  Sometimes I let my mind wander back to the days before the Spanish came near five hundred years ago.  It is a great place to read, relax, feel the breeze from the nearby South China Sea. 

       View from our porch

For my own purposes primarily I want to journalize my reading for the seven days I was just there.

Novels in Progress

1.  The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon by William Thackeray 

2.   Dr Faustus by Thomas Mann

Novels Completed while in Candelaria

1.  An Invitation to a Waltz  by Rosamund Lehmann.  My first read of her work, totally loved it.

2.  A Replacement Life by Boris Flishman.  Interesting concent, central character writes false claims  for holocaust payments for elderly New York Jews.

3.  The United States of Japan by Peter Tieryas.  Forthcoming shortly.  Really powerful 

4.  The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes.  My fifth of his novels, by far the best.

      Rice fields, amazing green

Short Stories Read While in Candelaria

1.  "In Another Country" by David Constantine.  Second reading

2.  "Strong Enough to Help" by David Constantine. Third reading. Read reading life story

3.  "The Pacific" by Somerset Maugham. A very brief work, almost a prose poem

4.  "The Shares of Loves" by Clarice Lispector, second reading

5.  The Quest for Latin" by Guy de Maupassant, newly translated by Sandra Smith, a fun to read work

6.  "The Watcher" by Clarice Hargrove, slowly reading her collected stories

7.  "Sabine Women" by Marcel Ayme.  My second read of his short stories

8.  "The Celestial Omnibus" by C. F. Forester.  Second reading. ,love this story but far from understanding it.

9.  "Dayward" by ZZ Parker.  I enjoyed this first venture into her work.

10.  "Irina" by Mavis Gallant.  The more of her I read, the more I like it.  Brilliant story

     The mangoes of Candelaria are considered the best in the world.  

Do you have a beloved reading get a way spot?  

Mel u

All Our Worldly Goods by Iréne Nemirovsky (1947, translated by Sandra Smith) A Post for Holocaust Memorial Day)

My Posts on Iréne Nemirovsky 

This week, in what I hope will become an annual event on my blog, I am posting on works by authors who died in the holocausts, holocaust memorials and historical works.  There have been holocausts as far back as recorded history goes and they are still going on today.  I know that many more than Jews were killed in the Holocaust.  Much of the trouble in the world today was set in motion by the Holocaust.  

Iréne Nemirovsky was born in Kiev, Russia February 11, 1903 into a wealthy Jewish family, her father was a banker for the Czar, and died in Auschwitz Concentration Camp on August 17, 1942.  She wrote thirteen exquisite novels, her most famous work is her Suite Francis, and published thirty short stories.  I have read nine of her novels and ten of her short stories.  After  her first novel, David Golder, published in 1926 she wrote almost a novel a year.  With her murder the Nazis, the French were far from blameless concerning the fate of their Jews, deprived the world of upwards of thirty novels.  To me the literary impact of the Holocaust is personified in Iréne Nemirovsky.  I do not forgive or forget.  My only way of expressing my feelings is to post on the latest of her works I have read, All Our Worldy Goods, published posthumously in 1947.

All Our Worldly Goods is largely set in a small town in rural France, taking place in the years 1910 to 1940.   It centers on two families, bound together by a marriage neither side wanted.  It begins showing us the impact of World War One on the residents of the town.  It ends with the devastation of the town by German bombing.  We see how innocent lives are devastated by the war.  Nemirovsky lets us feel the love of the French for their land, they are horrified by gas warfare in WW I that killed even their trees.   We are along when people leave Paris for fear of the approaching Germans in World War Two.  Nemirovsky is a master at the multifarious class distinctions that divide people and she shows how the war changed these distinctions.  In 1940 in France many, maybe most residents, thought the Germans would win the war.  Many were quick to turn on French Jews, jealous of their preceived wealth.  Many also did what they could to help their fellow citizens.

If you read a bit about Nemirovsky you will find suggestions that she was herself anti semetic.  I have seen this in top end journals.  It is based largely on the lead character in David Golder and it shows  a very shallow understanding of her work and life.  

Where Némirovsky died.

Mel u

Ravensbrück Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women by Sarah Helm (2014)

Posted in Observation of International Holocaust Memorial Day

More and More I see the holocaust as a direct assault upon the reading life.  

This is my first observation of International Holocaust Day.  All this week I hope to post in observation of this event.

Ravensbrück Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women by Sarah Helm is the first book length study that focuses on Ravensbrück, a concentration camp exclusively for women.   Most sent there were Jews but there were also Gypsies, Jehovah' Witnesses, political prisoners and common criminals.  On a side note I recently read a memoir by a French Jewish woman who survived Auschwitz who was asked when she returned to Paris if she had been raped by camp guards or German soldiers.  She said no there were very few cases of sexual contact between guards and inmates as the women were regarded as filthy vermin, just to kiss a Jewish woman could lead to the death penalty for a German guard.  The camp for women was set up because it was felt a mass of women would have less use as laborers than men so the killing process would be excelerated as women inmates would less be able to work for a shorter time then men.

Non-Jewish criminal inmates were given the jobs of running the various barracks.  Everyday was a struggle to survive and food became the overwhelming obsession.  

Helm goes into a lot of detail explaining the operations of the camp.  She also details the liberation of the camp by Russian soldiers and the frantic attempts of the Nazis to kill as many Jews as they could once they realized the war was lost.

This is a very much worth reading book.  

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