Too Many Books, Too Little Time

I must confess that I thought this book had two strikes against it before I began to read it:

1. 1. It was yet another story of the Holocaust, and
2. 2. It was written by Erik Larson who, in my opinion, sometimes ruins a good story by overly pedantic attention to detail.

So why, you might ask, did I even give it a try? Mainly because I’m a sucker for 20th Century US history. Something that’s always troubled me about WWII and, particularly the Holocaust, is why it took us so long to get into it and why we did so little to help European Jews. The reviews I read of this book promised to address these questions.

If you haven’t read or heard about this book, it is essentially the story of William E. Dodd, America’s ambassador to Germany in 1933, Adolph Hitler’s first year in power. A professor of history at the University of Chicago when he was selected by Franklin D. Roosevelt to represent the US in Germany, Dodd had experience in Germany as a student, but no diplomatic experience whatsoever.

Dodd packed up his wife, Maggie, his grown children, Bill and Martha, and sailed to Germany with little idea of what lay ahead for the family. As Larson puts it, they

embarked on a journey of discovery, transformation, and ultimately, deepest heartbreak.

At the time, America was in the midst of the Depression and many Americans held a deeply isolationist opinion. There was fear that allowing Jewish immigrants to come to the United States in large numbers would draw off the few jobs that were available. Many felt that “Nazi oppression of Germany’s Jews was a domestic German affair and thus none of America’s business.

Even within the Jewish community there were divisions, with some Jews frustrated by Roosevelt’s failure to speak out while others feared that protests and boycotts would make life more difficult for those in Germany.

It was against this backdrop that Dodd, a naive and inexperienced academic suddenly thrust into one of the most vicious and divisive regimes in history, entered the scene. Roosevelt had two priorities for Dodd: to ensure that Germany repaid the large debt owed to the US following World War I, and that Dodd do what he could to “protect [German Jews], and whatever we can do to moderate the general persecution by unofficial and personal influence ought to be done.” In other words, Roosevelt’s direction to Dodd was to do whatever he could to straddle the fence, insufficient direction for a new ambassador with no political experience.

What follows is an account of the Germany that Dodd encounters, very different from that he experienced as a student. While initially striving to fulfill Roosevelt’s obscure direction, as his tenure in Berlin progressed Dodd found it more and more difficult. Following what is now called ”The Night of Long Knives” in which Hitler and his SS imprisoned and/or murdered those set against him, Dodd could no longer keep his own opinions to himself.  His attempts to bring forth more overt US interference in German politics earned him powerful enemies in Congress and eventually Dodd was dismissed from his post and returned to the United States.

The story is interesting and insightful, providing the unique perspective of an American citizen and family who lived through and within Germany’s transformation to a fascist state. As a reader, you travel down that road with the Dodds and experience their growing concern, and finally their disgust and terror, at that transformation.

I have to say that my one complaint – and it is an ongoing complaint I have with Larson’s work – is the attention to minutiae so often present in his writing. I will share only one small example here, information that would probably be appropriate in an academic work, but not in a book meant for the general public. This passage introduces “The Night of Long Knives”:

At 2:00 A.M. Saturday, June 30, 1934, Hitler left the Hotel Dreesen and was driven at high speed to the airport, where he boarded a Ju 52 airplane, one of two aircraft ready for his use. He was joined by two adjutants and a senior SA officer whom he trusted, Viktor Lutze. (It was Lutze who had told Hitler about Röhm’s scathing remarks after Hitler’s February 1934 speech to the leaders of the army and SA.) Hitler’s chauffeurs also climbed aboard. The second aircraft contained a squad of armed SS men. Both planes flew to Munich, where they arrived at four thirty in the morning, just as the sun was beginning to rise. One of Hitler’s drivers, Erich Kempka, was struck by the beauty of the morning, and the freshness of the rain-scrubbed air, the grass “sparkling in the morning light.”

See my point?

Grade: B+

This is the story of a murder trial. Perhaps even more, it’s the story of a series of failures in the justice system that may, or may not, have ultimately resulted in justice served IN SPITE OF, not because of, the system. Or it may be that justice wasn’t served at all. The story is an interesting one; the outcome may be frustrating to the reader, but anyone who has had dealings with our judicial system knows it isn’t without its shortcomings.

Here’s the skeleton of the case:

• Daniel Malekov and his estranged wife, Mazoltuv Borukhova, become embroiled in a bitter divorce. Their four-year old daughter, Michelle, balks at visiting with her father, who has been ordered to have supervised visitations due to an allegation of molestation.
• In the process of working out these arrangements, Malekov is incomprehensibly – and without requesting it – given full custody of the child. Mother and daughter are both distraught.
• Shortly thereafter, while delivering the daughter to her mother for visitation, Malekov is murdered in broad daylight and cold blood.
• Mikhail Mallayev, a cousin of Borukhova, is found guilty of the murder. Borukhova is found guilty of ordering the execution.

Janet Malcolm is not here to give us an unbiased view of the trial, but she is here to try to shed light on what, seen through her eyes, is a strange and one-sided trial in which the members of the court, the press, and nearly all the principles in the case have presumed guilt before a single word of evidence is presented. Malcolm is not so sure, and tells us early on that “[Borukhova] couldn’t have done it, and she must have done it.”

She goes on to show us how the system failed this family. Michelle’s court-appointed law guardian, who never spoke to the child, seems to make the quixotic recommendation that she be moved to her father’s custody based on his personal dislike of Borukhova. Both the judge in the custody hearing and the trial judge, Robert Hanophy, seem to be biased against her as well. Hanophy is also shown to be seriously worried about the trial extending past the date that he is to begin his vacation, making decisions based on expediency rather than jurisprudence. The list of people who harbor ill-will toward Mazoltuv Borukhova is astonishing. The fact that her defense team is less that Clarance Darrow-material is another problem.

There are other factors that are unexplained and somewhat perplexing. Why is there no one brought to testify in Borukhova’s defense or as character witnesses? How to explain the 90 phone calls that took place between her and Mallayev if they were not in some type of collusion? How does she happen to bring out such vitriol among everyone who has dealings with her?

Malcolm doesn’t weigh in on Borukhova’s ultimate guilt or innocence. Her purpose is to argue that Borukova was denied a fair trial based on a system that seemed to pass judgement on her because of her personality, before there was opportunity to assess her guilt. In making this argument, Malcolm is successful, if not unbiased.

Grade: A-

I don’t much like reading a book after I’ve seen the movie – I feel at the mercy of the film’s interpretation, rather than the author’s. However, it’s been a long time since I saw the excellent Cate Blanchett/Judi Dench version of this story, so I thought I might not be overly influenced by it. Not so. Cate was Sheba, Judi, Barbara, as I read, but that wasn’t really such a bad thing.

In case you missed the film (and I highly recommend that you rent it, if you did), this is the story of Sheba (Bathsheba) Hart and Barbara Covett, high school teachers at St. George, a school in a lower class London neighborhood. Sheba is the newly hired pottery teacher; Barbara a very veteran history teacher. The two women are opposite in every way. Sheba is fey, artsy, wealthy (or as she puts it, “at most only upper middle class”). Barbara is a lonely spinster. There are hints at her attractions to women, but this is a storyline that was emphasized more in the film than the book.

The plot is pretty straightforward. Barbara, under the auspices of “mentoring” Sheba, worms her way into Sheba’s life. Sheba, married and the mother of two children, begins an affair with Connelly, a fifth-year student. Barbara does a lot of “tsk-tsking” about the situation, but it isn’t until Bangs, a male teacher, invites Barbara to lunch – raising her hopes of a possible romantic relationship, but in fact wanting to quiz Barbara on how to get Sheba’s attention – that the older woman lashes out and reveals the affair to him. Barbara’s been having a bad week: her cat is sick, Sheba has rejected her to meet with Connelly, and now Bangs, whom Barbara has seen as “a message of hope,” disappoints her. She immediately regrets her indiscretion, but she has set in motion the events that lead to both Sheba’s and her own downfall.

The story is told by Barbara who, after the affair becomes public and Sheba has been banned from the school and her family, begins to develop a timeline of the events (these are the “notes on a scandal”), putting gold stars by those she considers most significant. She says that this might be “helpful for the court case,” but Barbara is such an obviously unreliable narrator that, as readers, we cringe to think of her interpretation of events becoming public.

There are several interesting subtexts to this novel, the main one being the difference between how men and women are treated when found to have engaged in inappropriate relationships with minors. In Sheba’s case, the press is titillated, men view her not as a child molester but as a tramp, no one except Connelly’s mother sees him as a victim. The general consensus is that Connelly is one lucky boy.

This is a story that works on many levels, only occasionally dropping the ball on what is, ultimately, a fascinating psychological study of a bitter and disturbed woman. Joanna Briscoe, writing for The Guardian, says:

This is a fascinating, brilliant, irritating novel, consistently defying definition by genre, literary worth, or even purpose. It’s a quiet little read – yet horribly addictive. Underlying breathtakingly acute observations, and much fine writing, there’s a lightness of sentiment that sporadically propels the novel into the realms of commercial pap.

Personally, I wouldn’t go so far as to say “commercial pap,” but there are a few missteps, particularly where the interactions between Sheba and Connelly are addressed. Nevertheless, I found it an interesting, funny, sad, and thought-provoking read. I’d recommend it.

Grade A-

One thing I think we can all be grateful for is that we weren’t born female in early Victorian England. The other thing we can be grateful for is that the lives and rights of women at that time were so restricted as to provide great subjects for the Brontë sisters. Of course I read Charlette’s Jane Eyre and Emily’s Wuthering Heights years ago, but with the new movie version of Jane Eyre out in theaters, I decided to read something by sister Anne. Anne Brontë died at age 28, so there weren’t too many choices: Agnes Grey, her autobiographical first novel, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. I decided on Agnes Grey.

Agnes’s parents married under a bit of a dark star: although deeply in love, Mrs. Grey came from a wealthy family who objected to her marriage to a lowly rector. Mrs. Grey’s father disinherited her, but the Reverend and Mrs. Grey were able to get by and raise their family fairly comfortably on the small income generated by land owned by the Reverend. This, of course, does not make for a very engaging plot – happy marriage, well-loved, healthy children, adequate income,  so this family had to – and did – fall upon hard times. To help the family finances, Agnes decided to take one of the few avenues available to well-bred girls and hire herself out as a governess. The bulk of this novel deals with the trials and tribulations that arose from that decision.

Poor Agnes had truly terrible luck with employers and their offspring. Anyone who complains about the way children behave today, or the way their parents coddle them, should open a copy of Agnes Grey. They’ll find that things haven’t really changed all that much. The first home in which she works is the Bloomfields, where she is put in charge of three perfectly awful children. Agnes is given responsibility with no authority over these three, and when she unable to make them either learn or behave, she is dismissed.

You would think this was enough to make her consider another line of work, but there weren’t many options available to her, so she puts herself out for hire once again. This time she ends up at the Murrays, where she is put in charge of two older girls – one vain and insipid, the other “outdoorsy” and uninterested in learning. However, it is an improvement over the Bloomfields, and Agnes stays on to see the girls grown.

Because this is a Brontë novel there is, of course, a thwarted romance, impoverishment, illness and death, all followed by a happy ending. The novel tends toward lengthy exposition on manners, morals, religion, etc. which drags it down and, I must admit, I skimmed in many places. Still, it was an interesting look at what life for Anne Brontë must have been like and, I suspect, far more realistic than the novels of her sisters.

I understand that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is Anne’s better work. Brontë scholars postulate that had she lived, Anne would have been the best writer and most successful of the three, so I may just give Tenant a try.

Grade: C

Rarely have I been so happy to FINISH a book as I was Blood Meridian. There are so many reasons why!

This is at least my third stab at reading this book. Maybe more. I decided to read it years ago when I read Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why. Bloom named it the definitive story of the American West, and I love stories of the American West. I went right out and bought a copy of Blood Meridian and quickly discovered that I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Here’s a sample sentence:

The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning.

Yep, that’s one sentence and there are a LOT of sentences like that. I couldn’t face it. Then I took not one but TWO seminars on the work of William Faulkner, and felt that I was finally ready to try Blood Meridian again. I have to admit, I was better able to handle the structure of the novel, but this time I was sent packing by the content.

Any book with “blood” in the title should be a hint that there’s going to be violence, but in this book the violence is graphic and unceasing. Take, for example, the tree of dead babies (WARNING – this quote is not for the squeamish):

The way narrowed through rocks and by and by they came to a bush that was hung with dead babies. . . These small victims, seven, eight of them, had holes punched in their underjaws and were hung so by their throats from the broken stobs of a mesquite to stare eyeless at the naked sky.

So, that was as far as I got the second time I tried to read Blood Meridian.

For some reason this book has stayed with me as a sort of literary Mt. Everest for me to conquer. It helped to read Harold Bloom’s interview with AV Club where the great man himself admits that it took him three tries to actually finish the book. He blames the first failure on poor health, but I’m guessing that reading the book just made him sick. Still, if three times was a charm for him, I thought it might be for me – and sure enough, it was.

I’m not going to try to convince you that this was an easy or a pleasant read. It was neither. I had to read with a dictionary beside me (and ask my husband to translate the frequent lapses into Spanish). The book is full of arcane, biblical, and just plain hard words that were completely unfamiliar to me. As  noted, the syntax was challenging, the content gruesome, but in between was some beautifully lyrical writing, such as the following:

They passed through a highland meadow carpeted with wildflowers, acres of golden groundsel and zinnia and deep purple gentian and wild vines of blue morninglory and a vast plain of varied small blooms reaching onward like a gingham print to the farthest serried rimlands blue with haze and the adamantine ranges rising out of nothing like the backs of seabeasts in a devonian dawn.

Not just anyone can put together a sentence like that.

I have to say that I’m glad I read this book, challenging and disturbing as it was. As Bloom points out, this is the final expression of the American Western. He says, “It culminates all the aesthetic potential that Western fiction can have. I don’t think that anyone can hope to improve on it, that it essentially closes out the tradition.”

It’s a great relief to know that. Now I’ll never have to read anything like this again.

Grade: A

The holidays pretty much did me in, in terms of blogging. Between shopping, cooking, gift wrapping, out-of-town company, and a trip to Palm Desert, there just never seemed to be time to sit down and write. However, that DOESN’T mean I didn’t have time to read. Here are a few short reviews of what I read over the holidays:

THE BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN by Wallace Stegner

If you read my blog regularly, you know that Wallace Stegner is one of my very favorite authors. He has a sense of the West in the early half of the 20th Century that is unparalleled. His masterpiece, The Angle of Repose, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was listed by the Modern Library as one of the Best 100 English-Language novels of the 20th Century. Nevertheless, Stegner seems to be relatively unknown compared to other Western writers like Steinbeck and London. If you’ve never read anything of Stegner’s, I can’t encourage you enough to give him a try.

The Big Rock Candy Mountain is a semi-autobiographical novel of Stegner’s own life with his restless father. The patriarch of Candy Mountain is Bo Mason, a man who drags his family across the country as he searches for his next “get rich quick” scheme. Based on the lyrics from the song, “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” Bo really believes such a place, an opportunity, a Shangra-La, exists:

There was some place where money could be made like drawing water from a well, some Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and unrestricted and full of adventure and action, where something could be had for nothing.

 His constant search for this place, his inability to reach it, results in trauma and heartache for his wife, Elsa, and their two sons, Chet and Bruce. But for Mason, the Big Rock Candy Mountain was always around the next turn, in the next state, over the next border.  

For Stegner, who portrays himself as the son, Bruce, he is left with a sense of rootlessness. “How,” he asks, “did a tree sink roots when it was being dragged behind a tractor?”  Much of this book deals with America, and Stegner, trying to establish an identity, and there are long meditative passages that ponder the question, “What is an American?”

But more than that, there is the story of a family, a family that struggles against itself and its environment. It’s not necessarily the most loving family – at times it’s quite the opposite – but the strength of Elsa and her sons, their ability to withstand the vagaries of their lives with Bo- keeps you rooting for them all the time.

Grade: A

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WINTER’S BONE by Daniel Woodrell

Winter’s Bone tells the story of a 16-year old girl, Ree Dolly, who finds that the future welfare of her family depends on her. Living hand-to-mouth in the Ozark Mountains, Ree discovers that her father, a methamphetamine dealer, has used their home a collateral to help pay his bail after a drug arrest. Unfortunately, her father has disappeared and, unless Ree can locate him, the bail bondsman plans to foreclose. Ree’s mother has retreated into a state of depression or mental illness, and is unable to comprehend the situation. Ree must care for her two younger brothers while she scours the Ozarks and her family tree for information about her father.

This is an intense and harrowing story. The setting is so strong that it is almost a character in and of itself. The relatives she goes to for help are as unsympathetic a group as your ever likely to meet in literature, and the prevailing atmosphere throughout the novel is as chilling as the title leads you to believe.

In spite of this, I found myself rooting for Ree and the book hard to put down. It is often difficult to read, but felt like an authentic look at an American subculture that was quite foreign to me.

After I finished the book, I rented the movie on Netflix. While the movie is receiving accolades and will probably be nominated for many awards, I recommend the book.

Grade: A

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THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE by Julie Orringer

I resisted reading this book because I have felt overwhelmed and overloaded with Holocaust novels the last few years. However, I read several blogs and reviews about it that sounded interesting, so I decided to give it a try.

My assessment is, to paraphrase someone whose name escapes me at the moment, if this is the sort of thing you enjoy, then you will probably enjoy it. Here’s where you can read some of the many positive reviews this book has received:

New York Times

Los Angeles Times

NPR

Booking Mama Blog

Really, there are tons of positive reviews that celebrate this book. It must be me, but I’m afraid I found it repetitive, overwritten, and overly-romantacized. Feel free to disagree.

Grade: C-

Now it’s time for me to get busy and see what the rest of you are reading. I need a new book!

Just when you think that everything that could be written about World War II has been written, Laura Hillenbrand (author of megahit, Seabiscuit) finds a new slant. Unbroken is the story of Louis Zamperini, a young man from Torrance, CA – right in my backyard – who joins the Army Air Force, is shot down during an air battle over the Pacific Ocean, and captured by the Japanese. Unbroken is Zamperini’s life story, with an emphasis on his interment in Japanese prison camps.

The book is broken into five parts. Part I deals with Zamperini’s boyhood in which he makes the transition from budding juvenile delinquent to Olympic track star. Part II takes him into the Army Air Force and the air battle that downs his plane. From here, Part III details the excruciating ordeal that he and his companions experience adrift on the ocean for over a month, a feat that Hillenbrand describes as the longest recorded time that anyone has survived in these circumstances. Part IV chronicles his experience at the hands of his Japanese captors; Part V his attempt to put his life back together following the war.

Hillenbrand has done a tremendous amount of research, interviews, and other documentation that authenticate the events in this book, and in many ways the attention to detail keeps the reader firmly engaged in the story. I read the book - 500 pages – in two days, unable to pull myself away from it. That Zamperini was able to survive this ordeal is truly astonishing.  The details of his time floating in the ocean accompanied by sharks is harrowing, and his treatment by the Japanese horrifying. For me, the book covered a piece of WWII history that I knew next to nothing about.

Having said that, there were spots where the inclusion of minutia dragged the story down, particularly in Part I. The heart of this story is Zamperini’s war experience. While his early life experience, and his conditioning and fame as an Olympic runner, were important to establish, it probably could have been done more concisely.

I also finished the book with the feeling that, in spite of the mountain of research and direct quotes from Zamperini, I felt fairly disconnected from him. Perhaps the fact that, following the war, he was often called on to speak about his experiences ultimately gave his recollections a “canned” feeling. Then again, the fact that he is in his 90′s may have distanced him from the experience. Also, Hillenbrand, who suffers from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, had to conduct her interviews with Zamperini by phone, which may have affected her ability to connect with him “up close and personal”.

These are minor quibbles – the book is spellbinding. Even if you think you aren’t particularly interested in reading more about WWII, you’ll be on the edge of your seat while reading much of this book.

Grade: A-

Kathleen Kent’s new novel, The Wolves of Andover, is the prequel to her first novel, The Heretic’s Daughter. Set in 1673 Massachussetts, this is not only the story of how Matthew and Martha Carrier, the parents in Heretic’ Daughter, met and married, but of the brutally harsh environment and life in the early American colonies.

While Kent has loosely based both of these novels on her own family history, she has done her homework in setting the scene. In fact, the setting is so prominent that it could almost be considered the antagonist, as the characters struggle to survive in this austere place and time.

Martha, a spinster at age nineteen, is sent from her home in Andover to nearby Billerica to work as a servant to her cousin, Patience. Here she meets Thomas Carrier, working for her cousin’s husband in exchange for the promise of land. When a pair of roaming wolves threatens her cousin’s home, Martha and Thomas begin to forge a bond. From this point their story emerges as their courtship begins to develop.

However, Thomas has a mysterious past, which becomes evident as the novel progresses. The story moves back and forth between the New England setting and Britain, where King Charles II longs to avenge his father’s death at the hands of Oliver Cromwell. Charles II hires a band of loutish killers to travel to The Colonies to search out those he believes responsible, Cromwell supporters who have been successfully hidden by the colonists. Thomas’s role – which was revealed in Heretic’s Daughter – makes him a prime target.

There are places where this subplot pulls the story off course and has a detrimental effect on its overall success. Having said that, it also adds a level of suspense that helps the story rise above that of a romance novel. The historical accuracy and the detailed look at family life in the early colonies makes it a fascinating read. Anyone who read and enjoyed The Heretic’s Daughter should find this prequel equally satisfying.

Grade: B+

Before I begin, I should probably make it clear that I’m a Michael Cunningham fan. I loved The Hours and A Home at the End of the World, so I looked forward to the release of By Nightfall. In fact, I ordered it as soon an it became available on Kindle and could hardly wait to begin reading it. That said, upon completing it this weekend, I was going to write a review until I discovered that Ron Charles of The Washington Post has done a far better job on his video review than I could ever hope to do.

Most of the reviews of this novel have waxed eloquent about middle-aged angst, the search for meaning and/or beauty, the complexity of relationships – blah, blah, blah. It’s true that Cunningham demonstrates his usual evocative images and insightful internal dialogues, but the problem is that so little actually happens. The protagonist, Peter’s, marriage is unsatisfying, his art gallery is “second tier,” the artists he represents are difficult and demanding . . . With his caustic review, Charles seems to be the only one who was as impatient as I was for Peter to get over himself and quit whining. I, for one, had no trouble understanding why his grown daughter couldn’t stand him. 

Do yourself a favor and watch Ron Charles’s video – it’s immensely more entertaining than this frustrating and disappointing book.

Grade: D