The School Days of Jesus by J. M. Coetzee (forthcoming 2016)

 

Long Listed for the 2016 Booker Prize

Foe by J M Coetzee, a post colonial Robinson Crusoe  my post

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The Schooldays of Jesus by J. M. Coetzee is a sequel to The Childhood of Jesus, which I have not yet read.  The Schooldays of Jesus is set in a Spanish speaking country, probably in the 1930s.  The only book mentioned is Don Quixote and there is political unrest similar to that of the period of the Spanish Civil War.  My reading of the book was very much influenced by the title, I wondered if we were seeing in the life of the young man David an allegory of the missing years of the historical Jesus.

David is maybe seven  when the story begins, he is being taken care of by a couple, not his bilogical parents who are on the reasons we never quite understand running from the authorities.  The couple ends up working as farm laborers on an establishment owned by three sisters.  David enjoys the freedom of the field, often in the company of his dog Bolivar. (I just now wondered if this could be an allusion to the great liberator, putting another twist on the allegory.). The three sisters agree to sponser the schooling of David at an academy that primarily teaches dance but also deals in numerological matters.

The boy gradually learns things about life, the adult world.  The couple, whose bond never seemed strong, drift apart.  The woman starts working at a shop, the man begins to deliver advertising leaflets.

There are several interesting plot developments.  There is much to think about.  

I was kindly given a review copy of this book.  I found it fascinating and am very glad I had the opportunity to read The School Days of Jesus.

J.M. Coetzee's work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Foe, and Slow Man, among others. He has been awarded many prizes, including the Booker Prize (twice). In 2003, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Mel u

The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh (2001. 598 pages)

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My thanks to Max u for the provision of an Amazon Gift Card which allowed me to acquire this book. 

A few years ago I read, really liked and posted upon  the first two installments of Amitav Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy, The Sea of Poppies and The River of Smoke.  The final book in the trilogy Flood of Fire  came out earlier this year.  I want to read it for sure but I will wait until the price drops from $14.95, which is too high for an E Book of a novel.

I did not really have any plans concerning reading more of the works of Ghosh until I received notice that his set in Burma historical novel, The Glass Palace,  covering the period around 1890 to 1990 was temporarily marked down from $11.95 to $1.95.  I like historical fiction set in South and South East Asia and I felt this would be a good book so I acquired it.  I was right.  It certainly was.

The book reminded me of the just published masterwork by Anne Proux, Barkskin in that it is very much about the logging industry, in this case Burmese teak, and is a multi-generational family saga.  As the story opens, our lead character is a deck hand on a riverboat.  The boat is badly damaged and the young man, maybe fiveteen, is told to go ashore and find work for the thirty days it takes to repair the boat.  He is an Indian, looked down upon by many Burmese and is directed to a food shop of an Indian lady who hires him and gives him a place to live.  He decides to stay on and he meets a man who will change his life and play a big role in his future.  He will become the father he never had. 

There is a lot of very interesting material in The Glass Palace about the teak logging industry.  In one fascinating and quite gruesome section we learn how anthrax impacts and ultimately kills elephants. Moving the huge logs down river is hard dangerous work.  

We learn a good bit about the Burmese royal family, displaced by the British and sent into exhile in India when the British take over.  

India soldiers serving in the British army play a big role in the story.  Indians see this as a mark of family honor but the Burmese see them as contemible slaves set to be kill for the English.

There are a lot of personal entanglements and romances in the novel, sometimes they worked, sometimes they did not.

The segments involving war against the Japanese were very exciting.  

If you like first rate historical fiction, especially set in the Indian Subcontinent, then I 

 endorse this book.especially if you can get it for $1.95.  

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria and is the author of The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and the first two volumes of The Ibis Trilogy; Sea of Poppies, and River of Smoke.

The Circle of Reason was awarded France’s Prix Médicis in 1990, and The Shadow Lines won two prestigious Indian prizes the same year, the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda Puraskar. The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke award for 1997 and The Glass Palace won the International e-Book Award at the Frankfurt book fair in 2001. In January 2005 The Hungry Tide was awarded the Crossword Book Prize, a major Indian award. His novel, Sea of Poppies (2008) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, 2008 and was awarded the Crossword Book Prize and the India Plaza Golden Quill Award. 

Amitav Ghosh’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and he has served on the Jury of the Locarno Film Festival (Switzerland) and the Venice Film Festival (2001). Amitav Ghosh’s essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Times. His essays have been published by Penguin India (The Imam and the Indian) and Houghton Mifflin USA (Incendiary Circumstances). He has taught in many universities in India and the USA, including Delhi University, Columbia, Queens College and Harvard.  In January 2007 he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest honours, by the President of India. In 2010, Amitav Ghosh was awarded honorary doctorates by Queens College, New York, and the Sorbonne, Paris. Along with Margaret Atwood, he was also a joint winner of a Dan David Award for 2010. In 2011 he was awarded the International Grand Prix of the Blue Metropolis Festival in Montreal.   From amitavghosh.com 

Mel u

The Reading Life Review - Paris in July Edition.

In July I was once again participated in one of my favorite book blog events, Paris in July.  Below is a list of the works I read for the event.   I did not get everything read I had in my plans but hopefully there is next year.  

French Literature and History on The Reading Life  

Host Webpage for Paris in July 2016

1.  The Dogs and the Wolves by Iréne Nemirovsky - must reading for Nemirovsky lovers

2.  Mavis Gallant -  Two Set in Paris works, a short story and a note book entry

3.  Five Nights in Paris by John Baxter.

4.  The Little Paris Book Store by Nina George

5.  "The Problem of Summer Time" by Marcel Ayme

6.  "Love Under the Roof" by Emile Zola

7.  "The Purse" by Honore de Balzac 

8.  Gertrude Stein and her Family by Kathleen Warren - a first rate literary biography

9.  "Czarist Parisian Emigres" by Joseph Roth 

10. Gigi by Collete  it gets no more Parisian than this.

11.  The Cat by Collete 

I read only two other novels, The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, a Nobel Prize Winner and The-Black  Notebook by Patrick Mindano, also a laureate.  I did not post on The Black Notebook.  I also read a few short stories by Guy de Maupassant, looking for one I could include as part of my participation in Paris in July but none moved me enough to post upon.

I posted on a short story by Clarice Lispector, "One Less Day".  

I read two works of history on which I did not post.

1.  Congo:  The Epic History of a People by David Van Reybrouck.  A very well done book

2.  The King of Vodka The Story of Pyotr Smirnov and the Upheaval of an Empire  by Linda Himelstein.   an interesting book 

The works I most enjoyed were the two works by Collete and the one by Iréne Nemirovsky. 

I have no big reading plans for August, I hope to post on novels by two authors who have done Q and A Sessions on my blog, Karl Parkinson and Heather Fowler.  Both are first rate works.

Mel u

Ambrosia Bousweau

"Izzy's House". - A Short Story by Michael Alenyikov, the author of Ivan and Misha

You can read "Izzy" here

Another wonderful story can be found on The Reading Life

In August of 2015 I was honored to publish a story by Michael Alenyikov, "Negative Reservations".

My Post on Ivan and Misha  November 29, 2011)

I first encountered the work of Michael Alenyikov when I read his wonderful collection of interrelated short stories Ivan and Misha.  I loved this work. .  Here are my opening remarks: 

" Ivan and Misha by Michael Alenyikov is an interrelated set of short stories about two fraternal twins, one bi-sexual and one gay, and their father, Lyov. The first story is set in Kiev (the largest city in the Ukraine) in Russia, where they were born.    In the brief prologue (set in the 1980s at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union) we learn that the wife of Lyov and mother of the boys died before they were six.   The father is a doctor.   We learn he only received one year of medical training and was sent out into the horrors of WWII in the Ukraine to remove limbs from soldiers,  without anesthetics.   They live in a large apartment complex in the style of the times.   The father keeps promising his sons a better life, a new mother, a new apartment, but nothing really happens until he moves the family to New York City and the stories start in the late 1990s"

"Izzy" is another wonderful work of art from Michael Alenyikov.  Michael works slowly and meticulously, as would an old world craftsman wanting only to produce perfection. His work feels in the grand European tradition of Proust,  Zweig, Balzac, and Mann.  My primary purpose is to let my readers know that they can read one of his short stories online.

"Izzy" is set in San Francisco.  I think it is in the mid-1970s to early eighties, in a time before a one bed room condo cost a million dollars and traffic was not dominated by Google buses.  Our lead character, Eddie, has been sent by his boyfriend, David, just completing medical school in Boston, to look for a place for the two of them to live in San Francisco.  David hoped to get on as a medical resident at a hospital there. This as at a time when being gay was regarding by most as something to be kept hidden.  People came to San Francisco to live in the open.  The plague of AIDS was lurking still, but there. 

David told Eddie to look up his friend Izzy when he gif there.  Izzy, who moved to San Francisco from Canada, will show him around the city.  The story opens with Izzy and David in bed.  One of the things being subtly done in "Izzy" is a celebration of the joy of being gay before AIDS, when you could have sex without fear of death, about a time passed probably forever.  

Michael does a fantastic job creating a sense of place, to letting us feel we are a young man from formal rigid Boston in what was once a magic city.  It is a great pleasure to follow him as he wanders the city.  The sex scenes, the polymorphic feel of the city, in the eyes of Eddie and Izzy, are very well done.   We go from bathhouses and no last name sex to the parks of the city to elegant restaurant.  We go to a funeral, we know it is an AIDS death but those there are not yet aware of the coming plague.  

The story takes us years into Eddie's future.  He goes through numerous moves and relationships, he breaks up with David.  He makes a good career but through it all we sense he wishes he was back in San Francisco.

Michael does a great job in developing his characters, the sex scenes are very well done.  

 

I strongly endorse the purchase of Ivan and Misha to all lovers of fine literature. 

I look forward to reading more of his work.

"Moments later, as if nothing had happened, we stood looking out the window at a sky filled with clouds both leaving and arriving at the same time; blue emerging from gray, one moment brash, the next wistful, tentative; and below us, wind steamrolled through the park, stirring a canopy of restless green leaves into a landscape of hills and valleys, as if a thick blanket covered the limbs of countless lovers wrestling unseen below."  From "Izzy"

Michael Alenyikov is the author of Ivan and Misha, which won the Northern California Book Award for Fiction and was a Finalist for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction; in 2013 he was awarded the Gina Berriault Award by San Francisco State University. His writings have appeared in The Georgia Review, Descant (Pushcart nominee), The James White Review, The Catamaran Literary Reader, Jonathan, Modern Words, New York Stories, The Gay and Lesbian Review, forthcoming in The Chicago Quarterly Review, and anthologized in several editions of Best Gay Stories (Lethe Press). He is a past MacDowell Fellow. Alenyikov is a native New Yorker, growing up in the three large outer boroughs (with a few years in L.A. wedged in between the Bronx and Brooklyn). He is a clinical psychologist (now disabled with myalgic encephalomyelitis), and has been a Boston cab driver, a bookstore clerk, and an interactive media writer and content developer. He has made San Francisco his home for the past 22 years. www.michaelalenyikov.com. 

Mel u

The Cat by Colette. (1933, translated by Antonia White)

The Cat, set in Paris, is the best book about a cat I have yet read.  Second best would be A Man, a Cat, and Two Women by Junichiro Tanazki, nearly as good.  Both focus on a wife's jealousy of her husband's love for a cat who was part of his life long before he met her.  

If Paris is the city of love, then Colette (Sidione-Gabreelle Colette 1873 to 1954) is her high priestess.  For many their image of Paris derives from memories of the movie, Gigi, made from her probably most famous work.  Living to almost eighty, she produced many volumes of writings of all sorts.  When she passed in 1954 she was given the first ever state funeral for a French woman.  

As The Cat begins a young couple are about to marry.  Colette does a marvelous job describing the passion of love, the infatuations of the honeymoon where neither can do wrong.  But in this marriage the wife has a rival, one who has been with her husband much longer than here, Sasa, a beautiful chartreuse cat.  Colette knows and deeply loves cats and it shows.  The wife demands to know who he loves more and she does something to the cat he cannot forgive. Besides a brief appearance  of his mother, an old servant, there are only three characters in the story, the man, the cat and the wife.

The Cat is not as famous as Gigi or Camille but for sure it is worth reading.  The estimated reading time is about ninety minutes.

French Literature and History on The Reading Life  

Host Webpage for Paris in July 2016

So far for July in Paris I have read

1.  The Dogs and the Wolves by Iréne Nemirovsky 

2.  Mavis Gallant -  Two Set in Paris works, a short story and a note book entry

3.  Five Nights in Paris by John Baxter.

4.  The Little Paris Book Store by Nina George

5.  "The Problem of Summer Time" by Marcel Ayme

6.  "Love Under the Roof" by Emile Zola

7.  "The Purse" by Honore de Balzac 

8.  Gertrude Stein and her Family by Kathleen Warren

9.  "Czarist Parisian Emigres" by Joseph Roth 

Mel u

"II Plce:r Dō Mō koe:r" a short story by Hortense Calisher (first published September 1, 1956, in The New Yorker)

A Story about a New York City College woman's semester in Paris, in 1956

Host Webpage for Paris in July 2016

"Certainly, Hortense Calisher’s stories take their place in that central line of narrative that runs from Henry James and William Dean Howells and Edith Wharton through Scott Fitzgerald and Hortense Calisher’s contemporary, the late John Cheever."  - John Hollander, from his Introduction to The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher.

Hortense Calisher (1911 to 2009, born and died in New York City) published twenty books in her life, mostly novels but some memoirs also.  My knowledge of her work is limited to a few of her short stories I have so far read and posted upon.  The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher, a world class literary treasure, will appeal to those who like the New York Stories of Edith Wharton and Henry James.  My quick research found no visits to Paris in her life history but in the educated affluent circles she lived in and wrote about many had been there.  Young women often spent a college term there to polish their learned in Americs French.   "

"II Plce:r Dō Mō koe:r" is about a young Female New York high school student  who is enrolled in a class in French being taught by a phonetics expert.  They are not initially taught grammar, word meaning, just how to make the sounds.  The instructor uses a phonetic alaphabet to represent the sounds, it is used in the story title.  Here is the class description:

"I was taught to speak French with tears. It was not I who wept, or the other girls in my high-school class, but the poet Verlaine—the one who wrote “II plœ:r dã mõ kœ:r.” Inside forty slack American mouths, he wept phonetically for almost a semester. During this time, we were not taught a word of French grammar or meaning—only the International Phonetic Alphabet, the sounds the symbols stood for, and Verlaine translated into them.

The story title is meant to be the International Phonetic Alphabet transcription of a line from Verlaine.b

In a few years, midterm in college, she goes to Paris to enroll in a language class.  Paris was still recovering from the war and such classes, which included room and some board, were common.  At first she is concerned the French, who she sees a snobbish, will laugh at her accent but the teacher tells her she speaks beautifully.  She does a tourist walk of the city but she cannot really understand the citizens.  

This is not a story with a big plot or dramatic turns.  Just an elegant account of one young woman's experience in Paris in the 1950s.

French Literature and History on The Reading Life  

Host Webpage for Paris in July 2016

So far for July in Paris I have read

1.  The Dogs and the Wolves by Iréne Nemirovsky 

2.  Mavis Gallant -  Two Set in Paris works, a short story and a note book entry

3.  Five Nights in Paris by John Baxter.

4.  The Little Paris Book Store by Nina George

5.  "The Problem of Summer Time" by Marcel Ayme

6.  "Love Under the Roof" by Emile Zola

7.  "The Purse" by Honore de Balzac 

8.  Favored Stranger:  Gertrude Stein and Family by Leslie Warren

9.  "Czarist Emigres" by Joseph Roth

Mel u 

 

"The Czarist Emigres" by Joseph Roth (first published September 23, 1926, included in Hotel Days Wanderings Between the Wars, Edited And translated by Michael Hoffman, 2015)

Host Webpage for Paris in July 2016

My post also includes scenes from a movie perfect for Paris in July, Ninotchka.

Joseph Roth was born in Brody, now in the Ukraine, in 1894.  It was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire

He left his beloved Vienna on January 30, 1933, the day Hitler became chancellor of Germany, moving to Paris.  Paris was his home for the remaining six years of his life.  He died in Paris May 27, 1939

His most famous work is The Radetzky March.  The Legend of the Holy Drinker, is, as far as i know, his only work of fiction set in Paris.  His novel The Hundred Days is set in the time of Napolean's brief escape but is nor centered in Paria.

For a time he was the best paid journalist in Europe.  Reading his journalism it is a pleasure and an honor to encounter such extreme intelligence and perceptivity.  His personal life can only be described as a "mess".  

I could not let Paris in July come to an end without posting on one of his articles about Paris.

In "The Czarist Emigres" Roth evokes the romantic figures of White Russians living in Paris, Grand Dukes driving taxis, counts working as waiters.  Roth knows that White Russians were almost all very anti-semetic.  Here are Roth's beautifully expressed thoughts

"We were armed with the old literary formula reflexively applied for every transgression and excess: “the Russian soul”. Europe was familiar with music-hall Cossacks, the operatic excesses of Russian peasant weddings, Russian singers and their balalaikas. It never understood (not even after the Russians turned up on our doorstep) how French romanciers—the most conservative in the world—and sentimental Dostoyevsky readers had deformed the Russian to a kitschy figure compounded of divinity and bestiality, alcohol and philosophy, samovar cosiness and the barren steppes of Asia. ....

The longer the emigration went on, the more our Russians resembled the notion we had of them. They flattered us by assimilating themselves to it. Their feeling of playing a part maybe soothed their misery. They bore it more easily once it was appreciated as literature. The Russian count as Paris cabbie takes his fares straight into a storybook. His fate itself may be ghastly. But it is at least literary. The anonymous life of the émigrés became a public production. And then they began to make an exhibition of themselves. Hundreds of them founded theatres, choirs, dance groups, balalaika orchestras."

A perfect movie to accompany this is Ninotchka, made in 1939.  Three Russian envoys have been send to Paris to sell some  Crown Jewels.  They get distracted by the opulence of capitalistic Paris and a special envoy is sent to follow up on the sale. The Grand Duchess who used to own them makes a legal claim on the jewels.  When Ninotchka, played to perfection by Greta Garbo arrives in Paris she is totally dedicated to Russia and abhors the decadence of Paris.  Slowly Paris seduces her.   Niniotchka is one of my favorite movies.  I must have seen it at least six times.  It is hilarious, poignant, the settings and clothes are marvelous.  It has all the Russian cliche figures Roth mentioned.  It premiered the year Roth died so I doubt he saw it.

Here are a few scene shots

      

     Greta researching some legal matters.

Do you have a favorite set in Paris movie?

Mel u