Sea People - The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson - 2019 - 362 pages

Sea People - The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson, 2019, 362 pages

An Autodidactic Corner Selection.

From the very start I loved this marvelous book.  It is the epitome of the very best narrative non-fiction. 

The publisher Harper Collins  description 

Is accurate:

“Sea People - The Puzzle of Polynesia is blend of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Simon Winchester’s Pacific, a thrilling intellectual detective story that looks deep into the past to uncover who first settled the islands 

of the remote Pacific, where they came from, how they got there, and how we know.”

I am very interested in the history of the Philippines.  Once you go back to the days prior to the conquest by the 

Spanish everything is pretty much conjecture.  I have wondered where the first settlers of the Philippines came from.  The text book answer is it was traders from Malaysia and China.  But the archipelago as not unpopulated when they arrived.  Further the 

expeditions were largely men only.  So who were the people they met?  Recent studies have found human remains over 700,000 years old in Luzon.  This is not the topic of Thompson’s book but from it I learned how linguistics evidence, cultural artifacts show the first inhabitants of the Philippines probably were part of a very long term migration from Madagascar.  I was fascinated to learn from Thompson that the linguistic diversity of an area is a reflection of how long it has been settled.  The 100 plus languages of the 

Philippines testifies to a very old settlement.  It takes a long time for many languages to develop.  

Here is the puzzle this book comes close to answering:

“For more than a millennium, Polynesians have occupied the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, a vast triangle 

stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. Until the arrival of European explorers they were the only people to have ever lived there. Both the most closely related and the most widely dispersed people in the world before the era of mass migration, Polynesians can trace their roots to a group of epic voyagers who ventured out into the unknown in one of the greatest adventures in 

human history.

How did the earliest Polynesians find and colonize these far-flung islands? How did a people without writing or metal tools conquer the largest ocean in the world? This conundrum, which came to be known as the Problem of Polynesian Origins, emerged in the eighteenth century as one of the great geographical mysteries of mankind.” From Harper 

Thompson spends a lot of wonderful time detailing the first encounters of Europeans and Polynesians.  Some were 

peaceful, some violent. The two groups were very curious about each other.  Of course the sailors wanted sex and women were willing to service them for trade goods.  The people were considered very attractive. Thompson goes into a lot of details about  early studies and theories of Europeans.  Some thought the Polynesians were a lost tribe from Israel, others felt they were originally from South America or India.

Throughout the huge region, the people were similar in appearance, life style, religion, food and language.  Most islands had pigs, dogs chickens and an unwanted stowaway, the black rat.  They found some islands with only  dogs! 

Thompson  helped me understand how language similarities can be used to help us understand the history of ancient societies.  Polynesia was a pre-literate society relying on the memory of bards for their historical knowledge.  Thompson explains how the Polynesians viewed their past.  They knew they had come from else where and these views are fascinating. She details the work of early European students of the culture.  

Thompson goes into the history of theories of scholars and anthropologists from the mid-19th century up to the great strides made when radio carbon dating was developed (Thompson does a fine job explaining technical matters in a lucid fashion.)She ends the book talking about how DNA research and computer analysis has advanced the field.

Thompson's book is not just science.  Her husband is a Maori and her sons carry the DNA  of ancient Polynesian.  

I loved this book for several reasons.  It taught me lots of history I did not know, in an intriguing fashion. Thomson showed me how conclusions are reached and justified.  I learned about language groups with thousands of items, including the 100s of languages of the Philippines.  

Christina Thompson is the author of Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia,  from Harper, and Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All,which was shortlisted for the 2009 NSW Premier's Award and the 2010 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. 

A dual citizen of the United States and Australia, she was born in Switzerland and grew up outside Boston. She received her BA from Dartmouth College and her PhD from the University of Melbourne and held post-doctoral fellowships at the East-West Center in Honolulu and the University of Queensland before becoming editor of the Australian literary journal Meanjin.

Since 2000 she has been the editor of Harvard Review. A recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the Australia Council, as well as an NEH Public Scholar Award, she teaches writing at Harvard University Extension, where she was awarded the James E. Conway Excellence in Teaching Writing Award in 2008. Christina lives outside Boston with her husband and three sons.  From the authors website

Mel u

The Flight Portfolio by Julie Orringer - 2019 - 566 Pages

“To be in Marseille, not Paris, still carried a certain novelty, a whiff of the unknown. If Paris reeked of sex, opera, art, and decadent poverty, Marseille reeked of underground crime, opportunism, trafficked cocaine, rowdy tavern song. Paris was a woman, a fallen woman in the arms of her Nazi captors; but Marseille was a man, a schemer in a secondhand coat, ready to sell his soul or whatever else came quickly to hand”.

Website of Julie Orringer


Cynthia Ozick's Review of Flight Portfolio - from The New York Times

Varian Fry (image above)

October 15, 1907. New York City

December 7, 1941 - USA declares war on Germany

September 3, 1967 Redding, Connecticut

Varian Fry's father was an affluent stock broker, the epitome of Protestant Wasp gentility.  Fry, a Harvard graduate, was meant to join the American between the wars elite.  In 1935 he took a trip to Berlin.  He was deeply appalled by the violence directed against Jews by the Germans.  Five years later he is living in Vichy controlled France, in Marseille, directing the American funded Emergency Relief Committee.  Their mission was to get prominent Jewish artists, intellectuals and anti-Nazi dissidents to the United States.  He eventually helped over 2000 people designated for deportation to death camp escape.  (1994 - Fry became the first United States citizen to be listed in the Righteous among the Nationsat Israel's national Holocaust Memorial, award by Yad Vashem.From Wikipedia)

Orringer has turned this history into a true master work.  She makes Marseille into a character in the novel.  I felt very much I was walking the streets of Marseille, feely a bit too secure, smelling the sea, eating the food, dealing with corrupt officials and ordinary French citizens trying to figure out how to survive the food shortages.  Fry finds his clients challenging, among them are the great artist Marc Chagal, Hannah Arendt, Thomas Mann's son and daughter in law, numerous Surealists and anti-Nazi leaders.  

Orringer shows us lots of people involved with the work.  Everyone is totally viable.  The people all were very interesting. Marseille is a dangerous place.  The Vichy government is under the thumb of the gestapo.

A romance is center stage in Flight Portfolio (I really liked the name of the novel once I learned where it comes from) between Varian and another man. This relationship goes back to their days as Harvard students.  The other man is hiding a secret.  Varian is married, his  wife is rich, eight years older and she accepts his attraction to men. 

There are  interesting plot turns  among frequent exciting developments in the efforts to get people out of France.  Varian finds way to deal with all sorts of problems, though he has his failures.  

I found Flight Portfolio deeply enthralling, almost painfully  so at times.  I did wonder how the hidden family background of Varian's boyfriend related to the Germans treatment of Jews.  I think we are being told to look deeper into our own history.

Flight Portfolio is a beautiful profound work of art.  I give my great thanks to Julie Orringer for the years that went into this novel.

I hope to read her debut novel The Invisible Bridge in July.

Julie Orringer is the author of two award-winning books: The Invisible Bridge, a New York Times bestselling novel, and How to Breathe Underwater, a collection of stories; her new novel, The Flight Portfolio, tells the story of Varian Fry, the New York journalist who went to Marseille in 1940 to save writers and artists blacklisted by the Gestapo. All her work has been published by Alfred A. Knopf, and her books have been translated into twenty languages. Her stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Granta Book of the American Short Story and The Scribner Anthology of American Short Fiction. She is the winner of the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children, and is at work on a novel set in New Orleans. From the author's website

Mel u

The Railway Children by E. (Edith) Nesbit - 1906

Website of Eleanor Fitzsimons - author of The Life and Love of E. Nesbit

Edith Nesbit 

August 15, 1858 Kennington,London, UK

May 4, 1924. New Romney, UK

I first heard of Edith Nesbit (who published as E. Nesbit) in biographies of Nancy Mitford and Rosamond Lehmann, two of my English favourite authors.  Both grew up with very 

fond memories of the writings of Nesbit. In fact their own childhood seems like something Nesbit might have created.  Nesbit was a very prolific writer of what we now call young adult fiction.  I recently acquired in Kindle format a 9435 page "Ultimate Collection of the Work of E. Nesbit" with twenty novels and more than two hundred short stories and poems, for $0.99 (estimated reading time 113 hours and two minutes).  

I love to read literary biographies.  I recently became aware that Eleanor Fitzsimons, author of Wilde's Women, has forthcoming in October this year

The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit.  A quick bit of research told me I wanted to read this book. (Nesbit, along with Beatrix Potter, a biography of which I have posted upon, are considered by many the UK's greatest writers of fiction for 

children and young adults-Never having read anything by Nesbit I checked on Amazon for her highest rated books.  Among them was The Railway Children, available for free as a Kindle.  I finished this book yesterday.  I loved everything about it!  Reading it was a joyous experience.

The central characters are three children, two girls and a boy and their mother.  (My wife and I have three daughters 
so I do like books featuring three children.) The time is maybe 1905, before the fall of the Czar.  The father is off stage for most of the storyline, his absence drives the plot.  Events necessitate the family move from their posh London home, selling much of their furniture, to a country home.  The courageous mother, you will love her, such mothers helped England endure and win two world wars, tells the children they "will be poor for a while".

Their new house is near a Railway.  They are not horribly poor but for the first time the children sense they must watch their money.  They seem to have some income and the mother makes money from publishing in magazines.

The children are fascinated by the train, they personify the locamotive as a red dragon.  They begin to wave at an elderly gentleman who is on the 913 AM train everyday.  Soon he begins to wave back. This relationship turns out to be a wonderful happenstance for the family.  One of the things I liked about this novel was just how fundamentally decent almost everyone the children encounter turn out to be.  Several characters seem gruff at first but soon they show a deep core of decency.  There are numerous cliffhangers (this was first published in serial fashion and I know I would have been an eagerly awaiting new chapters).  I don't want to spoil at all the plot as it is so gripping, such fun.

All of the characters, even the minor ones,  are very real.  The relationships of the children to each other was perfect. We see them develop in response to their situations.  Nesbit subtly depicts class differences in rural England.  The mother is obviously very cultured.  In a marvelous chapter we do meet a famous Russian writer.

I was wondering would today's mchildren still love this story.  Our daughters are now 21, 23, and 25.  Two are avid readers.  I will encourage them to try this novel.  

I will start her The Treasurer Seekers very soon.

Once I have read a few more works by Nesbit, she has a number of short stories featuring cats, I willread Eleanor Fitzsimon's new biography.

You tube has the movie based on the novel. It is quite decent

The Edith Nesbit Society's website had a good brief bio on her 

http://www.edithnesbit.co.uk/biography.php

Eleanor Fitzsimons is a researcher, writer, journalist and occasional broadcaster. Her work has been published in a range of newspapers and journals including the Sunday Times, the Guardian and the Irish Times and she is a regular radio and television contributor. She has worked as the sole researcher on several primetime television programmes for the Irish national broadcaster, RTE including an examination of the historic relationship between Britain and Ireland commissioned to coincide with the landmark visit of Queen Elizabeth II to Ireland. She is the author of the highly regarded Wilde's Women..from her publisher.

Mel u

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow - 1953 - 586 pages

“In 1953, Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March struck out on a course so independent from the tide of American fiction that no literary lessons could flow from it: it left no wake, and cut a channel so entirely idiosyncratic as to be uncopyable.”. Cynthia Ozick

June 10, 1915 - Montreal, Canada

Nobel Prize - 1976

April 5, 2005 Brookline, Massachusetts

"1 IAM AN AMERICAN, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles." Opening lines of The Adventures of Augie March

As I read through The Adventures of Augie March, I kept thinking of the most famous poem ever written in celebration of an American city, “Chicago” by Carl Sandburg (1914).  You can be sure Bellow could recite it.  Chicago, in 1953 America’s second biggest city, seems, though full of Eastern European immigrants and a massive migration of African Americans from the south, the epitome of an American city.  Without apology to anyone Augie March chronicles his multifaceted life in Chicago.  Born a near orphan, he rises from poverty to old European wealth while pursuing various careers from book thief to smuggler of illegal immigrants.  Included is a kind of bizarre to me interlude in Mexico.  He sometimes depends on patronage of gangster like big business men, he has numerous romances.  Probably in 1953 the depiction of his sexual activity might have been shocking to some.

Augie loves reading.  He gets his start in the reading life through being given a set of The Harvard Classics which was charred a bit in a fire.  (The Harvard Universal Classics, originally known as Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf, is a 51-volume anthologyof classic works from world literature compiled and edited by Harvard Universitypresident Charles W. Eliotand first published in 1909. - Wikepedia).  He draws from these readings though his life. Augie was am autodidactic of the first class.

The Adventures of Augie March is for sure the work of a powerful highly creative learned man. Bellow’s parents were Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Russia, he was fluent in Yiddish.  

For students of America literature,this is am important novel.  I can see some saying it seems dated, from sixty six years ago.

Over last weekend 52 people were shot in Chicago, ten died, mostly in gang violence.  My bet is Augie March would just quote Heraclitus, grab a drink and go out looking for another woman but he would not move.  

From the publisher 

“The great novel of the American dream, of “the Universal eligibility to be noble,” Saul Bellow’s third book charts the picaresque journey of one schemer, chancer, romantic, and holy fool: Augie March. Awarded the National Book Award in 1953, The Adventures of Augie March remains one of the classics of American literature. An impulsively active, irresistibly charming and resolutely free-spirited man, Augie March leaves his family of poor Jewish immigrants behind and sets off in search of reality, fulfillment, and most importantly, love. During his exultant quest, he latches on to a series of dubious schemes–from stealing books and smuggling immigrants to training a temperamental eagle to hunt lizards–and strong-minded women–from the fiery, eagle-owning Thea Fenchel, to the sneaky and alluring Stella. As Augie travels from the depths of poverty to the peaks of worldly success, he stands as an irresistible, poignant incarnation of the American idea of freedom. Written in the cascades of brilliant, biting, ravishing prose that would come to be known as “Bellovian,” The Adventures of Augie March re-wrote the language of Saul Bellow’s generation.”

Chicago

BY CARL SANDBURG

Hog Butcher for the World,

   Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

   Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;

   Stormy, husky, brawling,

   City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.

And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.

And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.

And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:

Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.

Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;

Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,

   Bareheaded,

   Shoveling,

   Wrecking,

   Planning,

   Building, breaking, rebuilding,

Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,

Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,

Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,

Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,

                   Laughing!

Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation

Saul Bellow won three National Book Awards, the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer.  No other American writer has been so recognized.  The Adventures of Augie March is a big sprawling very American novel focusing on the rise from poverty and ignorance of Chicago born Augie March.  (In the Fall of 2011 it was selected as the One Book, One Chicago title.

I will soon begin his Mr. Sammler’s Planet,about  a Holocaust survivor.  

Lovers of America Literature, readers of Whitman, Dos Passos, Pynchon, give this book a try.

Mel u

The Reading Life Review - May 2019 - Future Plans

May Authors 

Column One

1. Neera Kashyap -. India - award winning multi-genre writer
2. Bram Presser - Australia - The Book of Dirt - 2018 Winner of the Jewish Book Council Goldberg Prize for Debut Fiction

Column Two

1. Colson Whitehead - USA - Pulitzer Prize Winner
2. Esther Singer Kreitman - Poland to UK -Dance of the Demons - highly regarded Yiddish writer, 

Column Three

1. Balli Kaur Jasnal - Singapore - author The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters as well as Erotic Stories of Punjabi Widows
2. Susmita Bhattacharya - India - author of Table Manners, an award winning debut collection of short stories

Column Four

1. Rose Doyle - Ireland - author Friends Indeed, prolific writer
2. Alexander Spiegelblatt - Romania to Israel - poet, novelist, short stories - Yiddish writer
3. Ghayde Ghrowi - Oman (first Omani writer to be featured) - short stories

Column Five

1. Israel Joshua Singer -Poland to NYC - author The Brothers Ashkanazi
2. Mavis Gallant - Canada to France

Home Countries of May Authors

1. India - Two
2. Poland - Two
3. USA - One
4. Singapore - One
5. Ireland - One
6. Romania - One
7. Oman - One
8. Canada - One 
9. Australia - One

In May seven women were featured and three men, eight are living, three not.

Nine writers were featured for the first time, three are old friends.

Blog Stats for May 2019

5,685,267 pages views since inception

Top Visitor's Home Countries:

USA, India, the Philippines, Germany, Russia, UK, Ukraine, Spain and Czechia

There are 3550 posts on line.

Future plans and hopes

I will continue reading more Yiddish Literature.  My project on Short Stories by South Asian Women is working out well.  

I will continue reading along with Buried in Print for the Short Stories of Mavis Gallant Project.

Buried in Print's Mavis Gallant Project

http://www.buriedinprint.com/mavis-gallants

I offer my thanks to Max u for his kind provision of Amazon Gift Cards.

I am very grateful to all who leave comments, you help keep me going.

To Ambrosia Bousweau, European director, you are a very important part of the spirit of The Reading Life

To Oleander Bousweau, your assistance is becoming essential, please give my regards to all at the  Bousweau Foundation.

To my fellow book bloggers, keep blogging.