War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy 1869

My Posts on Tolstoy

Yesterday I completed my third read of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.  I first read it about forty years ago, and prior to yesterday I completed it on February 25, 2009.   As I finished it yesterday I wondered if I will complete it for a forth time.  

War and Peace is the consensus choice among list makers as the best novel ever written.  Adding my voice to this, I would only say if it is not then there is nothing that clearly deserves that title. It is not a difficult or obscure work,  the only obstacle it presents to some potential readers is the length.  I would suggest you try to read it through in a week or so if possible.  Many say that Tolstoy gets better as you get older.  My experience confirms this.  

I decided not to recast any of the plot,the themes etc.  if you need this information for school to avoid reading the book, check Wikipedia.  

The Four Books by Yan Lianke (2012)

The Four Books by Yan Lianke (Beijing, 1958), translated by Carlos Rojas, takes its title from the four books of Confucianism and the four Gospels of Christianity.  The Four Books is a very dark, brilliant look at life in a Re-Education Camp in China during the years of The Great Leap Forward, 1958 to 1961, in which the government devoted all of the resources of the country to an effort to surpass the industrial productivity of the United States.  Anyone with the hint of a middle class or above past, with any sign of a western education was sent for an indefinite stay in what were called "Re-Education Camps" in which those who once might have been a concert pianist or a famous scholar were made to do farm work or smelt iron under the brutal direction of "leaders" who were distinguished only by their mindless devotion to the ideas of Mao and his underlings.  In one heart breaking scene, a mathematician presented a solution to a centuries old problem and the only comment on it by the authorities reviewing all academic work  was "send him for re-education". 

The Four Books focuses on camp 99.  All those in this camp used to be university professors.  They are under the direction of "The Child".  No one in the book has a name, they are referred to by their old work, as say The Theologian, the Author, the Musician,  the Scholar and so on.  The camp starts out producing wheat and later smelting Iron. People are given gold stars by the Child when he approves of their actions.  With enough stars, you can in theory leave the camp and go home.  People also get stars for informing on others and just at the whim of the child.  The child begins to collect all the western and Chinese classic books the professors had brought to the camp to burn in his quarters for warmth.  Sex is forbidden.

The atmosphere of the camp is one of constant anxiety and stress with terrible punishments for minor infractions of rules.  No one can trust anyone else.  Camp residents are referred to as "criminals".

The book has a very interesting narrative structure.  The author writes a running commentary on camp activities for the child, informing on others and gets extra stars and food for that.  He is also in theory writing a real book on the experience.  

Soon the Great Famine comes in which millions died and we see the terrible impact of this.  The sole focus of life for camp members is in the search for food.  Many die of starvation and some resort to cannabalism of the recent dead.  The Child is every boss you ever hated.  He worships the "higher ups" and drives those in his camp to impossible production goals.  

I know it may not sound like it, but in many ways this is a very entertaining book, a satire on institutional power. Large cooperations like to infantilize their employees and often characters very like the Child are placed as front line managers, selected for their stupidity and venal devotion to the "higher ups".  Anyone who ever worked for a giant corporation will see that.  There is a lot of violence, cruelty and incredible hardship depicted.  Some rise to great dignity, others sink to the pits, often the same person does both.  The ending is shocking and disturbing in its depth.  

I really enjoyed The Four Books and found it a near compulsive read.  

YAN LIANKE

YAN LIANKE

was born in Beijing in 1958. He is the author of a huge number of novels and story

collections, all remarkable for both their subject matter and their style. He has received many literary prizes, the most prestigious: the Lu Xun in 2000 and the Lao She in 2004. 

"The Giver" by Lois Lowry

The Giver by Lois Lowry (1993, 179 pages)

I like books that create alternate worlds I can . The Giver does this wonderfully.  From the very start of the book we see the world Lowry has created in its own terms as perfectly logical and consistent. We understand how things work in the society created. We can even build our house in this world easily.

Everybody lives a completely controlled life in a completely controlled environment.  Total harmony and tranquility having seemingly been achieved.  This is done without any brute force.  It has just evolved over time and everyone seems quite happy.  The rules are designed to produce a state of mind in which one is happy with one's place in life.  There is a price to pay.  People no longer see colors, no one reads anything but job training manuals, there is no passion of any kind.   There are no birds.   Even the landscape has been flatted out to eliminate any hills or valleys.   People can apply to a committee for a spouse and will be assigned a suitable one.  After three years a couple may make application for a child.  Children are produced by women designated as “birthmothers”.  Training for children is completely prescribed.  Precision in language is stressed.  Children are constantly being observed to determine their future place in society. Everybody takes a morning pill once they get to about age 11 to suppress what are called “urges”.  It is a totally blanded out society.  There is no crime, no hunger, no war and all receive the medical care they need. Everything seems to work.

At age 12 there is a big ceremony in which a committee of elders will inform a person what their life work will be.  Some will be doctors, some engineers, some laborers, some administrators etc.  Jason, the central figure in the central figure in the novel gets a very special a unique future job.   One that is only designated when the current holder of the job is near the end of his expected life span.  It is the job of receiver of memories.  No one in the community has any knowledge of strong emotions, no knowledge of what the world was like in the past before the controls were put in place.  There is no snow or rain but the receiver of memory has these in his mind.  No one has any knowledge of pain or love but the receiver of memory. Jonas’s job is to have all the memories and experience that can produce wisdom.  He is given his memories by the current holder of the position,  The Giver.  The function of the job is to provide advice to the council of elders when they are faced with a new challenge.  The current receiver of memory has 1000s of books in his home. No one else is allowed to read what they want and in fact no one wants to anyway.  If a newborn is not up to standards after a year he is “released”.  Once a person is too old he is also released.  No one knows quite what that means but is treated as joyous occasion.

Of course once Jonas begins to get memories and feelings and can even see colors, things are not as simple to him as they once were. I do not want to give away any more plot detail.  I was very interested in finding out about his training for his new job.  I found the world created in this book fascinating and very believable. The Giver made me laugh, kept  me very interested in the fate of the characters (the depictions of life in the family units –what they are called in this society-were very well done) and made me think.  I am so glad I read this novel.  I think it could be read and enjoyed by any one 12 and up.   It has won a lot of awards.  It is an easy to read book.  It did not take a long time to read it but the world Lowry creates will always be there for me to wander into.  I endorse it without reservation and will pass it along to my daughters to read.

There is an excellent post on The Giver  on Suko's Notebook

(This is a rewritten for style post from five years ago.  I decided to repost it in observation of movie based on the book.

Please let us know if you have seen the movie

Mel u

"The Monstro" by Junot Diaz (from The New Yorker, June 4, 2012)

My Posts on Junot Diaz

"Monstro" is a strange apocalyptic story by Junot Diaz set in the Domincan Republic and Haiti.  The June 4 and June 11, 2012 issues of The New Yorker featured works of science fiction by writers not normally known for this genre.   Diaz's story starts out with the narrator, a young Dominican man attending Brown University in Rhode Island hoping to become a journalist, talking about a mysterious disease that "actually makes Haitians darker" that has just begun to be noticed in relocation camps. 

Like most of the narrators in Diaz's fiction, the teller of this story is obsessed with hunting for women and is very much bonded to his mother.  The disease begins to spread rapidly.  Soon over 500,000 have it.  The disease takes a series of very strange twists.  Periodically the victims all simultaneously begin to make for about thirty seconds a terrible high pitched noise.  They cannot stand to be separated from each other.  The strange symptoms of the disease are very interesting.

The narrator is very good friends with another Brown University student from Santo Dominigo.  He comes from a hyper-wealthy family.  A lot of the story is just the two men hanging out together.  Our narrator is in awe of his friend's wealth.  

This is very much a fun story.

The story can be found here.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/04/monstro

Mel u

The Wandering Jews by Joseph Roth (1926, translated 2001 by Michael Hoffman)

My Posts on Joseph Roth

The Wandering Jews is the eighth book by Joseph Roth I have so far have the honor of reading.  One of the most sincere compliments a reader can pay to a writer is simply reading all their books you can.  I am committed to reading all of the translated available as Kindle edition works of Joseph Roth. (There is some background information on Roth in my prior posts.)

The Wandering Jews is a briiliant and odd collection of articles on the place of Jews in European society and culture in the 1920s.  The composition history of the book is not made totally clear in Michael Hoffman's interesting introduction.  Roth was at the time one of the best paid journalists in the world.  It appears to me he probably wrote these first to be published in journals with inclusion in a book in mind.  Roth had his issues but he was of surpassing brilliance, as smart as they come.  

I cannot read anything wriiten in 1926 about European Jews without the coming Holocaust over writing the text.  Much of current world events is driven still by Anti-Semiticsm.  Roth's book will help to understand the place of Jews in world history. 

In the 1920s and continuing on culturally there is a divide of great importance between the so called European and The Eastern European or Yiddish Jew.  As later detailed by Hannah Arendt the Yiddish Jew or Shetl Jew did not want to assimilate.  The European Jew, in the words of Roth,  totally adopted the look, the clothes, the language and the ways of their host countries.  Many became ardent patriots. Roth heeps scorn on Jews who volunteer to fight in inter-European wars.  Above all other places, the European Jew most prospered within the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Roth tells us that this in part happened because the Empire was so multicultural that Jews were seen by the authorities as just another group.

There is a great deal of valuable information in this wonderful book.  Roth explains why Jews were often found in certain lines of work.  He talks in a fascinating way about the work of the peddler and installment seller, the money trader, the Rabbi, and wonderfully about the love of reading deeply found within Jewish culture.  He talks about immigration, how older people might live for decades in New York City and speak little English while their grandchildren would rise to places of prominence.  There is an interesting chapter devoted to immigration to America and a lot of illuminating insights on Zionism and Palestine.

The Wandering Jews is a brilliant work.  A miasma of bitter sadness hangs over the book 

as you read of the very old fascinating culture of Eastern European Jews knowing what will soon happen in Europe.

In one really poignant line Roth said that behind the most sophisticated fully assimilated Eurooean Jew, there are just a bit back Yiddish Jews that would embarrass them in front of the Goy.

This book also gives us a lot to ponder about in terms of post colonial issues and contemporary Middle Eastern Issues.  In my opinion, much of the political trouble in the world  has its roots in European Anti-Semiticism.   Behind much terrorism lies Anti- Semiticism.  

One of the biggests pleasures in this book is the opportunity to come in contact with the brilliance of Joseph Roth.  

"The Bear Came Over The Mountain by Alice Munro ( December 27, 1999 inThe New Yorker)

My Posts on Alice Munro

When Alice Munro won The Nobel Price short story lovers world wide felt gratified to see the genre recognized.  Alice Munro has published 139 short stories and one novel, most set in her native rural Ontario.    I was kindly recently give an advance review copy of her forthcoming collection of twenty five short stories published from 1995 to 2014,  Family Furnishings.  It is a generous collection, well over five hundred pages.  

"The Bear Came Over the Mountain" was originally published in The New Yorker.  It is set in rural Ontario and centers on a retired college professor and his wife.  My main purpose in this post is to keep a record of my reading of this excellent story and to share with my readers a link to the story. 

Many have rightly said that Alice Munro can do more with thirty pages than most other authors can do with three hundred.   This is very true of "The Bear Comes Over The Mountain".  One day the professor finds his wife wandering around outside, she does not recognize him.  He has to choice but to place her in a facility.  Much of the story takes place on his visits.  She and a man their have formed a very close bond. ,He talks to the nurses their and they say these things happen but they pass.  The husband thinks back on the decades of their marriage.  We see the impact on changing habits on college life.  In time he meets the wife of the man his wife is bonded with.  She tells him not to be concerned on sex as her husband is not capable. The insights into both marriages are very moving.  The ending of the story was very satisfying. 

This is a very much worth your time story which you can read here

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/10/21/the-bear-came-over-the-mountain-2

Mel u

Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham (1915, 736 pages)

My Posts on Maugham

How can you not like a novel that uses "Meredithian" as an adjective?

Over the last three years I have read and greatly enjoyed two short stories by W. Somerset Maugham (1874 to 1965-there is some background information on him in my posts).  I knew that Of Human Bondage was his undisputed master work.   The main reason I have previously not read it is basically the length.  I am so glad I overcame my hesitation.  The Manchester Guardian recently listed it as the 44th best novel of all time and that was what pushed me to go ahead and read it.  

Of Human Bondage is a coming of age story that covers about 20 years in the life of Philip Carey.  Based on current events in the story it takes place from about 1880 to 1905.  He was made an orphan by the early death of his mother and went to live with an uncle, an Anglican cleric. Philip has a club foot and this was an important factor in his life.  Philip was expected to become a cleric himself and was educated with that in mind. I totally loved the scenes in the book where Phillip first comes to read in his uncle's library of 4000 or so books.  Anybody that came to the reading life on their own at a young age will identify strongly with Philip. Phillip does not thrive at University and his uncle pressures him into a five year apprenticeship at an accounting firm.  Everywhere Philip goes Maugham does a marvelous job of making the experience come to life with marvelous minor characters and great descriptions.  Maugham lets us feel we are walking the streets of London and later Paris.

Against the advise of his Uncle, who controls his money until he is twenty one, he quits the accounting work, he was doing poorly any way, and moves to Paris to follow his dream of becoming a painter.  Much of the novel deals with his life as an art student in Paris.  Now the central villain of the novel appears, Mildred, who will be the near ruination of Philip's life.  

Compressing a lot, Philip comes to see he has no real talent as a painter and returns to England to study medicine.  His father was a doctor.  His uncle approves of this after reprimanding him for time wasted.   Maugham lets us see exactly how one became a doctor in London.  He also takes us through areas of terrible poverty.  Philip has to drop out of school for years, becomes homeless, all basically caused by his obsession with the incredibly nasty Mildred.  I don't want to tell too much but he does return to school and becomes certified as a doctor. While working in a hospital he becomes friends with a patient there and ends up almost a part of the man's extended family.   I will not say more of the plot.  You will come to hate Mildred and feel Philip is in need of a good thrashing!

The prose is elegant and simple in sentence structure.  There are lots of great literary references, this is for sure part of the reading life canon of books about people who lead reading centered lives, and artistic discussion.  

(A scene in from the movie, in Philip's quarters, with Mildred)

 I strongly endorse the reading of this book.  I downloaded it for free from Manybooks.org.  

Please share your experiences with Maugham with us

Did you like the happy ending?

What Maugham novel should I read next.

Mel u

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles (1949)

My Posts on Paul Bowles

Paul Bowles (1910- born in New York City, died 1999 in Tangiers) was a highly talented composer, a great writer and is probably most now remembered as Counter-Culture icon of the 1960s.  (There is some background information on Bowles in my posts on those of his  short stories I have read.)  Bowles spent many years of his life living in Tangiers.  He was deeply into the culture of the region.  

Bowles' most read literary work is his novel, set in Algeria, The Sheltering Sky.  It a book people fall in love with.  It is the story of three Americans on a journey of no real purpose across North Africa.  It helps us see into the impact of colonialism, Algeria being at the time a French colony, on the colonized and the colonizer.  Taliking place in a setting of savage beauty, the Americans look upon the inhabitants as little more than tourist couriousties, the good ones are servile and obsequious, the bad ones are sinister, nearly beyond the bounds of reason.  They are always concerned with being robbed, with whether or not they can find any edible food.  The descriptions of the desert landscape are very evocative and powerful.  The central characters in the novel are perfectly realized. 

The Sheltering Sky  is a very deep book. In my opinion going further into the roots of racism and the colonial mentality than The Heart of Darkness.  In the very powerful closing sections of the book we see how colonialism is tied into visions of masculinity, of the white traveler in a place where he thinks he can do whatever he wants. It is also about the nature of travel, being a stranger in a strange land.  It is a very painterly book.

Scene from the movie based on the book

I hope to reread this book in 2015.  I have a collection of sixty five of his stories and will be working my way through them.   This is truly a great work of art.

Please share your experience with Bowles with us.

Mel u

"Alone" by Yiyun Li (November 16, 2009, from The New Yorker) -A Short Story by the Winner of the 2005 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize

My Posts on Yiyun Li

If one day you are looking for quality new to you short stories one very good place to start is by looking in the archives of The New Yorker for works by winners of the annual Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize. I was happy to find some stories by Yiyun Li in the archives.  Yiyun Li won in 2005 for her debut collection of stories A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.  I have previously read and posted on several of her short stories and one of her novels, Vagrants.  I also read but did not post on Kinder Than Solitude.  Most of her work is either set in China or deals with experiences

 of Chinese born  immigrants to America.  A deep sense of sadness and aloneness permeates her work, a sense you will never really be understood.  

My main purpose in this post is to journalise my reading of the story and to let others  know it can be read in the archives of The New Yorker for a little while.

The story centers on a woman originally from Bejing now living in the American Pacific Northwest.  Her husband of sixteen years, now back in Bejing, has filed for a divorce and she recently returned the papers. She is on a road trip alone to Vancouver, a forest fire is threatening towns.  She thinks now her husband can go to hostess bars in Bejings with his clients and not feel guilty.  She cannot escape a terrible tragedy she experienced at age twelve.  I just cannot reveal this as it would spoil the experience of first time readers.  It will make you ponder how having such an event, kept secret for decades, even from her husband, impacted her consciousness.  As the father of teenage girls, it made me think very hard to try to understand the tragedy. 

This is a suberbly told story.  I will be reading all of the Yiyun Li stories in the archives.

You can read the story here

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/11/16/alone-8

From author's webpage

Biography

Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing and came to the United States in 1996. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, Guardian First Book Award, and California Book Award for first fiction. Her novel, The Vagrants, won the gold medal of California Book Award for fiction, and was shortlisted for Dublin IMPAC Award. Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, her second collection, was a finalist of Story Prize and shortlisted for Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Kinder Than Solitude, her latest novel, was published to critical acclaim. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Yiyun Li has received numerous awards, including Whiting Award, Lannan Foundation Residency fellow, 2010 MacArthur Foundation fellow, and 2014 Benjamin H. Danks Award from American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others. She was selected by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the top 20 writers under 40. She is a contributing editor to the Brooklyn-based literary magazine, A Public Space.

She lives in Oakland, California with her husband and their two sons, and teaches at University of California, Davis.

 

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson (March 3, 2014 in The New Yorker)

I offer my great thanks to Max u for providing me a gift subscription to The New Yorker.  This gives me the opportunity to read and share with my readers my thoughts on works by some of the greatest contemporary short story writers in the world.  Whenever I can I will provide a link to the story.  

"Once in a while, I lie there as the television runs, and I read something wild and ancient from one of several collections of folktales I own. Apples that summon sea maidens, eggs that fulfill any wish, and pears that make people grow long noses that fall off again. Then sometimes I get up and don my robe and go out into our quiet neighborhood looking for a magic thread, a magic sword, a magic horse."

Denis Johnson has been mentioned by a number of the short story writers with whom I have done Q and A sessions as a short story writer whose work they greatly admire. I have learned to trust their advise.   I was happy to find a new story by Johnson in a recent issue of The New Yorker. 

"The Largesse of the Sea Maiden" started out a bit slow for me, seeming like kind of a combination of a Cheever and a Carver story about a hard drinking advertising copywriter, formerly of New York City now living in San Diego.  I was not really that taken with the story for the first few pages then as the story began to wander down the dark back streets of New York City, the narrator was there to pick up an award for one of his TV commercials at a ceremony, I came to understand why people like Johnson so much.  Much of the story is taken up with glimpses into the lives of people he meets.  

I will leave the main plot of the story untold so as not to spoil the experience of first time readers.  I for sure hope to read Jesus's Son one day.

You can read this story here:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/the-largesse-of-the-sea-maiden

Born in Munich on July 1, 1949, Denis Johnson was raised in Tokyo, Manila, and the suburbs outside of Washington, D.C. He studied with Raymond Carver while earning his MFA from the University of Iowa. While still enrolled, his first collection of poetry, The Man Among the Seals (Stone Wall Press, 1969), was published.

During the next few years, Johnson published several collections of poetry, including Inner Weather (Graywolf, 1976); The Incognito Lounge (Random House, 1982), selected by Mark Strand for The National Poetry Series in 1982; andThe Veil (Knopf, 1985); as well as four novels, including Angels (Knopf, 1983), which received the Sue Kauffman Prize for First Fiction from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

During this time he struggled with alcoholism and various other addictions. It was out of these experiences that he wrote his breakthrough volume of stories, Jesus’ Son (Harper Perennial, 1992), which was later adapted for the screen.

Please share your experience with Johnson with us.

Mel u

Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) by Stacey Sciff, 1999 - Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

I have read only two of the books of Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire and Lolita in addition to a few of his lectures on literature.  I like to read well done literary biographies so when I received an E Mail promotion saying Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of a Pulitzer Prize, by Stacey Schiff was for sale for a short time in Kindle format for $1.95 I purchased it.  I am very glad I did.  It is, among other things, a wonderful account of a marriage.

Mrs. Nabokov, I cannot bring myself to call this majestic woman, "Vera" worshipped her husband for his very real literary genius, loved him as a flawed man, was his greatest reader (he often said without her he would have written nothing) and his business and life manager.  Mrs. Nabokov was the child of Russian Jews, Nabokov came from a once aristocratic family (both maintained a life time hatred of communism and a strong aversion to Soviet Russia ).

The book is not a straight.line chronological biography.  It assumes you have a decent grounding in European literature and history and for sure assumes you know who Nabohov was, it being very unlikely that you would be interested in the book if you did not.

I do not desire to give a synopsis of their lives together.  I will just talk about some of the many things I liked about and learned from this profound deeply emphatic biography.   I learned of their very real struggles just to get by in Europe.  Nabokov gave English and tennis lessons and his wife translated and did secretarial work while typing all her husband's manuscripts.  It was fascinating to learn more about the Russian Emigre community in Paris and very sad to see many supported Hitler's anti-Semitic  policies, seeing the Jews as responsible for the fall of the Tsar and the destruction of their privileged world.  Mrs. Nabokov was often thought to be a White  Russian countess or a German princess but she always quickly asserted she was a Russian Jew.  Mrs Nabokov ran all the practical details of their life.  I was ashamed of Nabokov when I learned he had numerous affairs with other women.  They got out of Europe just in time, 1938.  Nabokov taught literature at several American universities, Wesleyan, Cornell and Harvard.  The accounts of the lectures and classroom atmosphere are just wonderful.  Mrs. Nabokov, a very deeply read person, attended every class and set in the first row.  Sciff tells us some say it was because she did not trust her husband around coeds and she had good reasons for this.  It took Nabokov a while to get his feet with his lectures but in time they became among the most popular courses at Harvard.  He there made many of his famous/infamous remarks trashing writers like Balzac, Stendhal, Faulkner, Mann, and many others.  

Lolita changed everything for the Nabohov's.  It was fascinating to see the extreme difficulty  of getting it published as even publishers who loved it feared publication might get them arrested.  I loved reading about all the money and offers that came flooding in to Mrs. Nabokov, who handled all her husband's correspondence and business affairs, once Lolita became a best seller.  It was on the New York Times best seller list for nearly two years. The movie rights to Lolita (Vladimir approved of the movie and the lead actors) alone made them rich.  The book sold millions of copies and the demand for his worked fired new editions of all his old works and translations into numerous languages.  Mrs. Nabohov with her husband's occasional help, supervised translations into French and German.  Lolita freed the Nabokov's from financial worry for the rest of their lives and left Vladimir free to focus on new works, now much in demand.  The success of Lolita left many who never would read the book thinking perhaps the author was a closet pedophile. In one hilarious segment we learn he once planned to bring a 12 year old girl to a posh NYC publishing party as his escort.  His wife vetoed the idea.  

Vladimir loved it when Time put his picture on the cover.

We learn a lot about Nabokov fascination with butterflies.  He was very serious on this and, of course, his wife supported his avocation.

Demitri Nabokov (1934 to 2012) was a successful opera singer and translator and was for many years in charge of his father's estate.  He was also an amateur race car driver.  He served in the US army, specializing in teaching military Russian.

Mrs Nabokov was not a doormat, she managed her husband, watching him at social events to prevent him from verbally trashing people.  She was very capable of defending her rights and was far from afraid to tell off her husband.

Nabokov could not bear to be separated from her more than a few days.  It seems like he needed her to tell him what to eat, what socks to wear etc.  We also learn a lot about their one child, Demitri.  

We learn about lots of fascinating people drawn to the Nabokov's once he became very famous.  They lived in Switzerland, partially for tax purposes and traveled in Italy and France.  It was great to hear of their time in Hollywood, living at The Beverly Hills Hotel. Nabokov met John Wayne at a studio party and asked him what he did for a living.  Nabokov and his wife became American citizens and they were both staunch defenders of America during the Vietnam War era, driven on by their hatred of Communism and Soviet Russia.

The insights of Sciff on the work of Nabokov were very interesting.  This is not a work of literary exegesis but you cannot separate the life of Mrs. Nabohov from the work of her husband.  We also learn a lot about the publishing world and elite American universities, especially Harvard.  

Above all this book is a portrait of a marriage.  The Nabokovs deeply loved and understood each other.  Mrs. Nabokov was the perfect "literary wife", supporting her husband in such a way that he could devote himself to his work.  She was a very strong woman, dealing on her own with publishers, agents, buying cars etc.  Nabokov was clearly very dependent on her for the very smallest details of his life.  He gave meaning to her life.

This is a wonderful book.  I loved it and will read, I hope, Nabokov better in the future as a result of reading it. There is just so much to like about this book.  I hope to read Schiff's  other biographies  one day.

Vera Nabokov 1901 to 1991- married 1925 to 1977

Vladimir Nabokov 1899 to 1977

Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize, the Ambassador Award in American Studies, and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Institut Français d'Amérique. All three were New York Times Notable Books; the Los Angeles TimesBook Review, the Chicago Tribune, and The Economist also named A Great Improvisation a Best Book of the Year.

Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and was a Director’s Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She was awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2011 she was named a Library Lion by the New York Public Library. Schiff has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe, among other publications. She lives in New York City.

From the author's webpage.

Mel u

"Rough Deeds" by Annie Proulx (in The New Yorker, June 10, 2013)

It is hard to find top rate historical short stories as an author has less time to create an atmosphere.  "Rough Deeds" by Annie Proulx, set in the early 18th century in Canada, called "New France" still by many, is a very good historical short story.  It centers on a very tough business man who is logging the Canadian and Maine woods for masts for European ship builders. It takes fifty acres of woodland to build one ship.  He soon begins to build significant wealth through shipping the logs to European ports and coming back with a cargo of goods for import.   He, in partnership with another man, begins to buy up massive acreage of timber.  The problem is timber poachers. I learned a lot about the connections of the timber business to international affairs and much more from this story.  I will leave the rest of this very atmospheric story unspoiled for first time readers.

I have now read and posted on four of Annie Proulx's short stories.  People die violently in each of these stories.  I have access to one more of her stories and hope to read and post on it soon.

You can read, for a limited time, the story here.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/06/10/rough-deeds

Please share your experience with Annie Proulx with us.

Annie Proulx is the author of eight books, including the novel The Shipping News and the story collection Close Range. Her many honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner award. Her story “Brokeback Mountain,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award-winning film. Her most recent book is Fine Just the Way It Is. She lives in Wyoming. - from publisher web page

Mel u

My Thoughts on Completing Emile Zola's Rougon Macquart Cycle

Composed from 1871 to 1893 the twenty novels in Emile Zola's Rougon Macquart cycle

present French society in the Second Empire from 1852 to the fall of the empire in 1870.  They center on two intermarried families.  Taken as a whole the cycle is one of the supreme achievements of French literature.   I am glad I took the time, not really that much as few of the novels are over 400 pages, to read the full cycle.

I began reading the cycle, in publication order, skipping the four I had already read May 10 this year.  I am very glad I decided to read through the complete cycle.  The novels are very uneven in quality, from work to work as well as in individual novels.  As I was reading sometimes I thought is this  ever going to be over and then just as I was wondering if I could go on I would enter into segments of transcendent qualitity that just amazed me.  If there is a weakness in the work of Zola, this is just my thoughts, it is in the romances and the long rhapsodies on young girls.  I sense Zola equates sex or the lost of virginity as an act of corruption, an abandonment of the good and maybe God to embrace the world in all its corruption.  For sure once a woman has sex, married or not, something bad will soon happen.

Zola sees deep corruption everywhere, something bad is always coming soon in a Zola novel.  He has theories about heriditary degeneracy and this plays a big part in the cycle.  

These words from the last novel in the cycle kind of sum things up 

To those new to Zola, I would say first read his acknowledged by most, not by me, masterwork, set in the coal mines, Germinal.  Then I suggest you read The Dram Shop followed by Nana. Then you can decide for yourself if you want to read the entire cycle.  

I read the cycle in the Delphi Classics E Book of The Complete Works of Zola.  The translations are older public domain translations and some may be slightly bowdlerized for sexual content.  The edition also includes 11 other novels and a number of short stories.  To me it is $2.95 well spent and without it I would not have been able to read the cycle.   

There are ten Zola novels I have not yet read.  Maybe next year!

"Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx (from Close Range: Wyoming Stories, 1999)

"Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx was first published in The New Yorker October 13, 1997 and in an slightly expanded version in Close Range:  Wyoming Stories.  It was made into a movie in 2005.   Set in modern Wyoming  from 1963 to 1983 it is the story of two cowboys who fall in love.  Many more people will snigger at the expression "Brokeback Mountain" than will ever read the story.  It strikes at the very heart of the American myth of the macho cowboy.  There is only one explicitly sexual scene in the story and it is very powerful, perhaps because we are not expecting anything this vivid and we are shocked by what happens.  Rugged cowboys are not supposed to do this kind of thing in a society which worships masculinity and hates any sign of male homosexuality as an affront to Wyoming and the American way!  The two men have an encounter that is tender and erotic, it surprises both of them but they accept it without shame.  They go there own ways, over the course of twenty years each marries and has children and girlfriends,  They do manage to reunite on and off over the years and I think both think maybe they would have been better off with each other.  They live in a violently homophobic society where gay suspected men have been murdered.  I have left out a lot of this very rich story so as not to interfere with first time readers experiences. 

Proulx brings twenty years very much to life for us.  This is a great story.  It gives us a strong feel for Wyoming life.

This is the third story by Proulx I have read.  I have access to two more and will read them soon.

This story can be found online.  I do not include a link as I am not sure if it is authorized or not.

Annie Proulx is the author of eight books, including the novel The Shipping News and the story collection Close Range. Her many honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner award. Her story “Brokeback Mountain,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award-winning film. Her most recent book is Fine Just the Way It Is. She lives in Wyoming. - from publisher web page

Please share your experience with Proulx with us

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The Burning of the World - A Memoir of 1914 by Béla Zombory-Moldován(2014)

The Burning of the World-A Memoir of 1914 by Bela Zombory- Moldovan (1885 to 1967, Hungary), translated and very well introduced by his grandson, is a poetic memoir of a painter who was drafted from his care free life at 29 to fight the Russians in World War One.  His memoir went unpublished  for many years until his grandson translated it into English.  It ends in 1915, with the author living on for five more decades.  If might be a fragment of a larger work we just don't know.

The book is being marketed as an "undiscovered" classic.  Most of the times phrases like that are hyperbolic but in this case I think it is very accurate.  There is something about the old Austro-Hungarian Empire that draws me to it.  Maybe it represents to me a

wished for time of high respect for culture, tolerance and the reading life.  I know many great writers loved the Empire.

Béla Zombory-Moldován lets us see the very mixed bag that made up the officer's corp.  One colonel refused to allow his men to dig fox holes because he thought it showed cowardice to hide from the enemy in a hole. In one scene with layers of irony and pathos the author straps on his dress sword and says "Now the Russians will really be scared".  He stood up to a full barrage of heavy Russian cannon and nothing could be found of his body.  Béla Zombory-Moldován is severly wounded and gets a three month leave.  We are with him as he tours his beloved Budapest.  He often talks of his painting and we see a very peaceful kind man forced to be a killer by fools.   The scenes where he visits his parents are very moving.

I am very glad I read this book.  It is a valuable edition to WW I memoir literature.

From the webpage of The New York Review of Books, the publisher.

Béla Zombory-Moldován (1885–1967) was born in Munkács (now Mukachevo), in what was then the Kingdom of Hungary, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, he established himself as a painter, illustrator, and graphic artist. Wounded in action in 1914 as a junior officer on the eastern front, he served the rest of the First World War in non-combatant duties. He was a successful painter, especially of portraits, during the interwar years, and was the principal of the Budapest School of Applied Arts from 1935 until his dismissal by the Communist regime in 1946. Out of official favor and artistic fashion in the postwar years, he devoted himself to the quiet landscapes in oils and watercolor that are his finest work. The writing of his recently discovered memoirs probably also dates from those years of seclusion.

BOOKS

• 

  The Burning of the World

  Recently discovered among private papers and published here for the first time in any language, this extraordinary reminiscence by a young artist, drafted into the bloody combat of the First World War, is a deeply moving addition to the literature of the terrible conflict that defined the shape of the twentieth century.
  
  

I was provided a review copy of this book.

Mel u

"Them Old Cowboy Songs - Travails of a Homesteading Couple" (May 5, 2008, in The New Yorker)

Just a few days ago I read, in the archives of The New Yorker,  my first work by Annie Proulx, "Tits Up in a Ditch".   I (http://rereadinglives.blogspot.com/2014/08/up-in-ditch-by-annie-proulx-june-9-2008.html) really liked this story and was gratified to find two more short stories by Proulx within the temporarily open archives of The New Yorker.  

Set in Wyoming, in the western USA in 1885, "Them Old Cowboy Songs" is a very powerful story about the attempt of a young couple, the husband is seventeen and the wife younger, to make a life for themselves in a very hard time and place.  Archie inherited $100.00 and he used it to buy eighty acres. He built a cabin for he and his wife to abide within.  We see their terrible hardships.  I liked it when I saw they had and cherished a cat named "Goldie".  We see their fear of Indians, the harsh winters and meet their neighbors.  Rose gets pregnant.  Archie imagines a son helping him on the farm.  The richest most powerful people were the owners of big cattle ranches.  Archie hears you can make good money working on a big ranch near him.  He learns the owner will not hire married men for far they will sneak away to see their families.  He lies and gets a job there.  

I will leave the rest of the story untold.  It is a very moving work.

You can read this story here

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/05/them-old-cowboy-songs

I have links to three more of her short stories and hope to read them soon. 

Annie Proulx is the author of eight books, including the novel The Shipping News and the story collection Close Range. Her many honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner award. Her story “Brokeback Mountain,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award-winning film. Her most recent book is Fine Just the Way It Is. She lives in Wyoming. - from publisher web page

Please share your experience with Proulx with us

Mel u