In recent years, I have developed the bad habit of picking up used copies of "Best Of" annual collections--best poems, best stories, best whatnot--and then letting the books sit on the shelf. This summer would be a good time to read through some of those. The Best American Essays 2007 shows that essay writing is thriving, and several of these pieces are by writers I want to read again.
Choosing a favorite essay from the collection is impossible, because the styles and topics vary widely. Comparing a war memoir with an investigative war report or a think piece about California with a theater critic's thoughts on stage fright would be a wasted effort. The varied writing is strong across styles and topics.
An essay that impressed me to the point of buying a book by the author was "Passion Flowers in Winter" by poet Molly Peacock. She examines the lives of her mother who died at 73 and Mary Delany, the 18th C. collage artist who began making art at around the same age. Peacock observes that "the process of inventing your life seems to go on all of your life" and then continues with a focus on biography, memoir, and observations about craft. Peacock went on to publish The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life's Work at 72 (2011), which I have just purchased.
Among the many excellent essayists in the collection, here are a few I plan to read again.
Ian Buruma, "The Freedom to Offend." His book Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance has been on my TBR for a while, and he has a new book coming out this fall, Year Zero, A History of 1945.
Marione Ingram, "Operation Gomorrah." In this essay, she remembers the childhood experience of surviving a bombing raid in Hamburg during WWII. I believe it is an excerpt from her recently published memoir, The Hands of War: A Tale of Endurance and Hope, from a Survivor of the Holocaust. Ingram came to ther USA after the war and became active in the Civil Rights movement.
John Lahr, "Petrified," an essay about stage fright. Drama critic for The New Yorker. Here he chose an intriguing topic. I read about Stephen Fry's stage fright for the first time in this essay on the same day Fry made news by publicly, and bravely, discussing his manic depression.
Louis Menand, "Name That Tune." He wrote a short piece about a phone with a ring tone frequency that cannot be heard by people over the age of twenty.
"Readers who are over twenty may not hear the new ring tone; if they had it on their phones, it might as well be silent. But most readers who are under the age of twenty will not be able to 'hear' this Comment. Yes, they will see the words, and they will imagine that they are reading something, and that it makes sense; but they can never truly 'get it.' The Comment is simply beyond the range of their faculties. For all intents and purposes, if you're under twenty, this page might as well be blank."
Laughing here. My son took a class from Menand a few years ago when he was under twenty, and I wonder if he was one of the under-twenties who did not get it. Very likely. I still want to read Menand's The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America about novelist Henry James; psychologist Williams James; Supreme Court Justice Oliver Well Holmes, Jr.; and philosopher and scientist Charles Sanders Peirce, founder of semiotics. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History, 2002.
Richard Rodriguez, "Disappointment," an essay focused on the myth of California as a paradise of limitless promise. I have not read nearly enough Rodriguez, who has a new book coming out in fall 2013: Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography.
The Best American Essays 2007, David Foster Wallace editor.
Series editor Robert Atwan.
Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007
307 pages.
My knowledge of the history of the women’s movement in the United States has been limited to an outline of the events of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention and a passing familiarity with the work of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott. The Grimké sisters, Angelina and Sarah, abolitionists and campaigners for women’s rights, had been vague figures for me until now.
The history of the Grimkés’ participation in the abolitionist movement, of the origins of the women’s rights movement in abolitionism, and the political shifts that took place among abolitionists and women’s rights advocates over the years makes a dramatic story. First the abolitionist movement split over women’s rights in the years 1837-1840, and then the women’s rights movement became divided over issues of race following the Civil War.
Angelina Grimké (1805-1879) and Sarah Grimké (1792-1873) are the superstars of the early women’s rights movement in Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement 1830-1870: A Brief History with Documents by Kathryn Kish Sklar (2000). Daughters of a South Carolina slave-owning family, the Grimkés left the South and moved to Philadelphia where they became Quakers. On the death of their father, the sisters were women of independent means, able to devote their attention first to their own spiritual development and then to abolitionism.
Initially the sisters concentrated exclusively on religious matters, but in 1835 they joined William Lloyd Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society. On account of their experience as witnesses to the abominable practices of slavery, they were welcome contributors to the abolitionist cause. Angelina joined the movement when Garrison called for the faithful to carry the abolitionist movement to the South. In 1836, she wrote an article for his newspaper, The Liberator, encouraging women in the South to follow the example of British women by petitioning Congress to end slavery. The immediate goal of these petitions was the abolition of slavery in Washington, D.C. Sarah followed with her own anti-slavery tracts.
Before Garrison began calling for racial equality and an immediate end to slavery, many white abolitionists had embraced a "gradualist" approach that involved compensating slave owners for the loss of their human "property" and sending the freed slaves to Africa. Garrison, using Protestant religious rhetoric familiar to the American reading public, "argued that slavery was a sin, because it deprived human beings of the freedom they needed to choose their own salvation."
During the 1830s more free blacks than whites subscribed to Garrison’s paper, and at that time more than 90% of free black men in the North were denied the right to vote. The first American women’s anti-slavery organization, the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, had been formed in 1832 by a group of black women. Maria Stewart, an African-American woman, was the first American woman to speak in public to a mixed audience of men and women, when she spoke in Boston in 1832 on behalf of black civil rights.
In 1836, both of the Grimké sisters broke the taboo of women speaking in public and began speaking about abolition to women’s groups, both small and large. The backlash against the Grimkés’ speaking in public led to the beginning of the women’s rights movement in the United States, when the Grimkés responded to their critics by asserting that women have souls, are spiritually equal to men, and have a responsibility to speak out and petition against slavery. After they were criticized for speaking in public, the Grimkés began to include the subject of women’s rights in their abolitionist lectures.
In 1837, the sisters toured Massachusetts giving abolitionist lectures to audiences that included both women and men. The overwhelming success of this lecture tour led to an increase in membership for the Anti-Slavery Society. Garrison’s group had 100,000 members in 1837, but a year later, following the Grimkés’ speaking tour, membership had grown to 250,000.
A major attack on the Grimkés came from the Congregational minsiters of Massachusetts in the form of a public Pastoral Letter. The clergymen denounced the sisters as "unnatural," as having abandoned their "appropriate duties," threatening "permanent injury" to womanhood, which was in danger of falling "in shame and dishonor into the dust." The sisters defended themselves against this and other attacks and in doing so launched the American women’s rights movement.
At first their arguments were Bible-based, and assertion of their spiritual equality with men was the dominant theme of their women’s rights message. Then they expanded the defense of their right to speak in public, incorporating ideas from the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.
At Angelina’s last public lecture in 1838, at a women’s anti-slavery convention in Philadelphia, an anti-abolitionist mob of 10,000 men gathered outside the hall, throwing stones and breaking windows. The next day the mob, especially outraged by the inter-racial composition of the meeting, burned the building to the ground.
The abolitionist movement split into followers of Garrison, who admitted women as voting members in their anti-slavery organization, and other groups that allowed women to participate only in an auxiliary capacity. The historic women’s convention at Seneca Falls, New York in 1848 came about, in part, because a regional Quaker group voted down a proposal "to grant equal power to women and men in local Quaker meetings." Lucretia Mott and friends then began to organize the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention.
Although the Grimkés had added secular arguments in favor of women’s rights to their original religious ones, it was Elizabeth Cady Stanton who began systematically to formulate women’s rights more in legal terms. Daughter of a judge, she was well-informed about the inequities women experienced under the law. The Seneca Falls Declaration reflects her vision of the civil and political approach to women’s rights.
Abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass, an early supporter of women’s rights, attended the Seneca Falls Convention, but he broke with the movement after the Civil War when women wanted to press for the right to vote, while Douglass believed the voting rights of black men should take precedence. He saw the civil rights of black women as part of the larger campaign for African-American rights in general.
Women’s rights conventions continued to be held throughout the 1850s, but they were suspended during the Civil War. Sojourner Truth, whom I usually associate with the abolitionist movement, actually made her first public speech at a women’s rights convention in 1850. After the war, the established networks of the women’s rights convention movement became the basis for the women’s suffrage associations that formed in 1869.
Following the Civil War, the question of the vote for black men divided the women’s movement, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony opposing the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which enfranchised black men, but not white or black women. Elizabeth Blackwell and Lucy Stone supported the amendment, and the division in the women’s suffrage movement was not healed until 1890. Women who came to the movement following the Civil War had not necessarily been involved in abolitionism prior to the war, and some of those white women were less interested in civil rights for blacks than their abolitionist sisters had been.
Black women divided in their support for the new suffrage organizations, with Sojourner Truth supporting Stanton and Anthony, while Frances Harper–a leading African-American writer of the 1850s–went with Stone and Blackwell. By 1870, other black women activists such as Ida B. Wells reacted to their marginalized status within the women’s movement by forming their own suffrage associations.
This was a terrific read. Every volume I have read in The Bedford Series in History and Culture has been worthwhile, with half of the book presenting an overview written by a scholar and the second half giving representative documents from the era–letters, speeches, convention notes, etc. Well done. Highly recommended to general readers of history.
Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement 1830-1870: A Brief History with Documents by Kathryn Kish Sklar.
Bedford/St. Martin’s (2000).
216 pages.
Today marks the centenary of Barbara Pym's birth, and yesterday kicked off Barbara Pym Reading Week. What a great idea! Unfortunately, my reading stack is teetering at the moment, and I may not be able to participate, even though a few of her novels are still on my TBR shelf. Still, just in case visitors to the blog may not have heard about the read-along, it deserves a mention. Her wit and powers of observation always give pleasure.
Yesterday's post at the Dictionary of National Biography site was about Barbara Pym. It should be available to non-subscribers for a week.
My introduction to John le Carré came through film and video: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold with Richard Burton and the two Smiley series starring the great Alec Guinness (from the late ‘Seventies and early ‘Eighties) that I watched for the first time just a few years ago on dvd.
The 2011 film of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy did a disappointing box office, but Gary Oldman made a superb Smiley. I suppose that a thriller involving character study as much as plot twists falls short of popular demand to be bombarded with special effects and noise. This is a film for "mature audiences" of a different sort than that term usually means.
The introspection and quietness of le Carré's Smiley series made me a little skeptical about how one of his novels might work as an audiobook. Too quiet, or too flat, and the narration could deteriorate into monotone, but my library did not have the book, and so I took a chance on Call for the Dead (1960), the novel that introduces British spy George Smiley--the frumpy, the fat, the rumpled, the laconic, the disappointed. (Read by Michael Jayston, 4 hours and 44 minutes.) It is, in fact, a quiet audiobook, but not too quiet. I enjoyed the book for the remarkable main character and for the insight into Cold War experience and thinking. Sometimes old genre fiction, well done, reads like historical fiction, and that is the case with Call for the Dead.
One plot element struck me as too improbable, but this was merely a flaw in the book, not a fatal flaw. See spoiler below.*
In the second Smiley book, the main character takes a break from spying and turns to sleuthing, when an old friend asks him to investigate a crime. Looking for a copy of A Murder of Quality (1962), I discovered the 1991 BBC tv production, with screenplay by le Carré and starring Denholm Elliott as Smiley. This sounded too good to pass up, and Elliott’s interpretation of Smiley is marvelous. The story itself, and the tv show, are nothing special, just mildly entertaining in the manner of British detective shows, but Elliott as Smiley is well worth seeing if you appreciate fine acting. Glenda Jackson plays the friend who asks him to take on the case. A very young Christian Bale has a part in this production. He must have been about 16 or 17 in this role. And another fine performance by Joss Ackland.
Next up in the Smiley series is The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which I plan to read in print, just for a change of pace and to get a sense of Smiley on the page. This book, I believe, was le Carré's first international bestseller.
Call for the Dead was written during the Cold War, and I followed that on audio with The Great Fortune by Olivia Manning (1908-1980). (Read by Harriet Walter, 11 hours and 28 minutes.) Manning was sometimes dismissed as a Cold War apologist in her historical novels of WWII, but a reevaluation of her work has apparently been happening over the past few decades. After reading only one of her novels, I am not yet ready to form an independent judgment about Manning's geopolitical point of view. She does not seem like a zealot of any particular camp, on first glance.
A review in The Times Literary Supplement of Imperial Refugee by Eve Patten says that "Patten persuasively reads The Balkan Trilogy as an examination of the British Empire, a 'rumbling critique of British naivety and ego', 'an extended post-war narrative of reproach' and 'a response to the Cold War'. She also makes a case for an Irish inflexion, citing Gothic elements in Manning’s evocations of Romania where her descriptions of refugees are seen as influenced by Bram Stoker and Sheridan Le Fanu." So apparently Patten sees Manning not as a Cold Warrior but as a commentator on the Cold War, suggesting a different approach entirely. I can definitely see the stylistic link to the Irish authors she mentions.
The Great Fortune, an absorbing historical novel, is set in Bucharest, Romania on the eve of World War II. Harriet Pringle, married to Guy, a teacher, experiences the life of an expat among a colorful cast of characters. This is the first book in her Fortunes of War, two trilogies consisting of The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy. Although the other two volumes of The Balkan Trilogy are also available in audio form, I want to read the next novel in print. The narration was good, but the slow--sometimes almost dreamy--pace of this first novel in the series makes a print version seem appealing too.
*The notion that a Jewish concentration camp survivor would become a spy for East Germany following the war is too much of a stretch. I did not buy it.
Over the past six months, audiobooks have played more of a role in my "reading" than they had in the last ten years. Ratings of these books are more subjective than reviews of books in print, since so much depends on the response of the reader to the style of the narrator. I have also come to understand my own impatience with nonfiction audiobooks, which move too slowly for my attention span. In my experience, the books that adapt best to the audio format are character-driven novels.
After only two of her performances, Juliet Stevenson has quickly become my favorite audio reader. An accomplished actress, she knows when to tone it down and when to pour it on. She understands character, pacing, and the dynamics of scenes. In addition to reading as an actress, she also brings to audiobooks the outlook of an intelligent reader.
Here are two audiobooks I thoroughly enjoyed.
North and South (1855) by Elizabeth Gaskell, read by Juliet Stevenson, 18 hours and 18 minutes. North and South interests me more as social history than as fiction, but it is another fine novel from Gaskell. She addresses issues of class and gender in the factory town of Manchester, through the experience of a young, transplanted, formerly middle-class woman. Making the protagonist an outsider sets up a suitable angle for social commentary.
My least favorite thread of the book is the part that concerns a dying child, but we must remember the high incidence of child mortality in Victorian England. This plot element is not as sentimental as it may seem to today's reader, and I have to remind myself of that fact every time another Little Nell shows up in Victorian fiction. Not my favorite Gaskell, but an important Victorian novel that I am happy to have experienced at last.
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, read by Juliet Stevenson, 8 hrs and 16 mins. Still on sale at Audible.com for $2.99 (for members). Stevenson matches Austen's wit and irony perfectly. What more can I say?
Occasionally a book comes along that is worthy of a review or recommendation, but for some reason I am not inspired to write a blog post about it. About a year ago, Anna Funder's All That I Am was such a novel. This fine historical novel won Australia's Miles Franklin Prize in 2012, and searching now I find that it received some highly positive reviews outside Australia, including here in the USA, although the words "dry" and "turgid" appear more often than seems fair.
However, it could have been a sense that my fellow American readers might not relate to the style or story of the book that gave me pause. It could have been that I doubted that today's American readers could empathize with leftist protagonists, even if those characters were hard at work trying to defeat German fascism during World War II. My hesitation in discussing the book was based on an awkward sense of an American readership; it was frustrating to try to identify the readers, at any rate the American readers, who might want to read the book. If I cannot visualize a receptive readership, then what is the point of a positive review?
Still if you enjoy historical fiction, well-written historical fiction, and are open to something different from the same-old, same-old, you might want to give All That I Am a try. It is a powerful book, for the right reader. The Independent in the UK gave it a positive review. Or check out the synopsis at the website of the Miles Franklin Prize. It says, in part, and I concur:
"Based on real people and events, All That I Am is a masterful and exhilarating exploration of bravery and betrayal, of the risks and sacrifices some people make for their beliefs, and of heroism hidden in the most unexpected places. Anna Funder confirms her place as one of our finest writers with this gripping, compassionate, inspiring first novel."
An Australian blogger who liked the book wrote an interesting review too: Jonathan Shaw. He calls it a "gripping yarn," in which "slow burning emotional truth comes through about the importance of resistance, even in the face of apparently sure defeat."
So, here you had a non-review of a book I liked a lot. A simple thumbs up, but I am wary of encouraging others to read it, not knowing exactly how to identify the American audience who would appreciate it.
All That I Am by Anna Funder, 2011, Penguin Group (Australia).
I read the first American edition, 2011, Harper Collins.
267 pages.
"No other American writer, before or since, has so powerfully shaped the way in which Americans view another culture." – Peter Conn, professor of English, University of Pennsylvania, on Pearl S. Buck and China.
Just getting started on the audiobook of The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck (read by Anthony Heald, 5 hours and 19 minutes), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. Had not realized this was the first book in a trilogy.
The novel was a major bestseller and perhaps for that reason was generally dismissed as lightweight, sentimental claptrap by some of my professors back in college days. I remember reading at some later date that the novel had undergone a critical reevaluation and was taken more seriously as literature by academic critics. I wonder how much sexism or elitism had to do with the casual dismissal, by critics decades after its publication, of her novel about Chinese peasants, or if Buck was seen as a colonialist writer at a time when post-colonialism dominated academic interest. Probably some of the people I remember laughing at Buck's work assumed that any book as popular as The Good Earth could not possibly be a serious work of art. I doubt if they had even read it.
In several accounts, Buck comes across as highly empathetic with the common people of China, where she spent her childhood with missionary parents. After returning to the States for college, she went back to China and lived there for many years. For whatever reason, my impression is that Buck’s reputation has suffered from the patronizing attitude of at least some of the literati. Now listening to the audiobook, I am curious to figure out what Americans in the early 1930s found so fascinating about the book and why some academics held it in contempt, at least for a time.
Buck won the Nobel Prize in 1938. In her Nobel Prize lecture, she talked about the history of the Chinese novel, an entertainment for the common people, emerging from popular storytelling traditions and not taken seriously as art by the highly educated. Then she turned to her own work. She makes clear her preference for a popular audience over recognition as a literary artist. I wonder if the ordinary American reader of 1931 really did have "unspoiled senses" and "free emotions." That sounds a little questionable, but perhaps she is only contrasting the way most people read to an over-intellectualized approach to literature. Anyway, here is what Buck said.
"Like the Chinese novelist, I have been taught to want to write for these people [ordinary people, not the literary elite]. If they are reading their magazines by the million, then I want my stories there rather than in magazines read only by a few. For story belongs to the people. They are sounder judges of it than anyone else, for their senses are unspoiled and their emotions are free. No, a novelist must not think of pure literature as his goal. He must not even know this field too well, because people, who are his material, are not there. He is a storyteller in a village tent, and by his stories he entices people into his tent. He need not raise his voice when a scholar passes. But he must beat all his drums when a band of poor pilgrims pass on their way up the mountain in search of gods. To them he must cry, «I, too, tell of gods!» And to farmers he must talk of their land, and to old men he must speak of peace, and to old women he must tell of their children, and to young men and women he must speak of each other. He must be satisfied if the common people hear him gladly. At least, so I have been taught in China."
After reading, over time, some fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm through DailyLit emails, I turned to Tales from China, retold by Cyril Birch and originally published in 1961 as Chinese Myths and Fantasies. The inventiveness and magic of these sparkling tales entertain throughout. I was due for some carefree, escapist reading, and The Tales from China delivered. Although the Worldcat library catalog includes this book in the Juvenile Audience category, it makes excellent adult reading as well. I actually think adults would appreciate the tales more than children would, and you know the old question. Are the original Brothers Grimm tales really suitable for today’s children? Unlike the German tales, these stories do not generally include children as principal actors and, although dramatic and lively, would probably not inspire nightmares.
Also, unlike the way of Greek and Roman myths, the action in these ancient Chinese tales relies more on the deeds of "spirits" than on gods and goddesses, except in the creation stories. Here form emerges from Chaos through the agency of the god P’an Ku, who slept for 18,000 years before waking to nothing but darkness and confusion. Angry, he struck a blow against "the murk," separating earth from sky, which he held apart for another 18,000 years while the universe took shape.
The gods came down from Heaven and roamed about the earth, but they were lonely. And so, for the amusement of the gods, the goddess Nü-ka (body of dragon, head of human) shaped tiny creatures out of clay, the first humans.
Among the first gifts the gods gave to humans were marriage and procreation, weaving for fishing nets, the lute for music, and fire for cooking and warmth. For keeping records, humans received eight symbols, combinations of solid and broken lines familiar to readers of the I Ching.
A great battle in heaven between the gods of fire and water spread havoc on earth, with order restored only by godly intervention.
"Quellers of the Flood," China’s version of the great flood story, introduces elements typical of these tales: shape-shifting spirits who take the forms of animals, objects or elemental stubstances with magical powers, large scale battles between spirits, correspondences between terrestrial features and heavenly meaning. Supernatural circumstances of birth portend great future events.
In "The Great Archer," the supreme ruler confronts a serious problem created by his children. Each of his ten sons takes a turn crossing the sky as the sun, but one day all ten sons decide to take their turns simultaneously, scorching the earth. Their father employs an archer to clear the sky of extra suns, thus averting catastrophe and restoring order to the universe.
Ch’i, the son of a heavenly spirit and a human mother, is born by emerging from a splitting boulder. Ch’i’s father frightened his mother when he transformed himself into a bear. She ran away and transformed herself into a boulder to be safe from the bear, and from this rock her son is born. Ch’i traveled back and forth between heaven and earth, bringing divine music to humankind.
I have outlined a few stories to give a sense of the type of content these stories involve. The book continues with colorful tales of ghosts and fairies and a cycle of stories, "The Revolt of the Demons," about a family of evil spirits who set out to dominate the world through black magic but are ultimately defeated by human armies, a cracking of the evil spells, and the trickery of the White Monkey spirit, who guides the leading demon to her doom.
This book is one of Myths and Legends series from Oxford University Press. We had several of the excellent collections around when the children were little, both for exposure to other cultures and because folklore can be satisfying reading for children who are reading above grade level, but who are not ready for the mature content of much adult fiction. Some of the other Oxford titles in this series cover Africa, West Africa, West African Trickster Tales, The Norse Gods, Japan, India, England, Scotland, Wales, One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, Tales from Hans Andersen, and the Brothers Grimm.
The only drawback to this China collection is that OUP does not include any information about author (or translator and reteller) Cyril Birch. If the intended audience is children or teens, that omission is understandable, but I was curious about his background. Birch was the chairman of the Oriental Languages Department at UC Berkeley, where he taught from 1960-1991, after teaching for twelve years at the University of London. He published numerous scholarly works and translated Ming drama and stories. He also published a two-volume anthology of Chinese literature.
Tales from China by Cyril Birch, 1961.
I read the Oxford University Press paperback edition, 2000.
Illustrated by Rosamund Fowler.
195 pages.
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