Stars
*stars*
to titles that we've found to be of
"Especial Merit."
We list below those that have been so honored in the last ten issues of RALPH.
The Biography of a Language
Melvyn Bragg
(Arcade)
- Where people lived communally as the clergy did in monasteries and other religious orders, the incidence of infection and death could be devastatingly high.
review
At the Sun King's Court
(University of Wisconsin/ Terrace Books)
After a few pages, we become the dwarf, cleaning up the royal slops, spying on the royal family, carrying out the embossed shit-pot of Louis XIV, and, at night, since we can fit under the tables in the gaming room, passing cards back and forth to the nobility, listening to their coarse jokes and even coarser gossip --- the gentry who hang around whatever palace Louis XIV and his various wives and mistresses are inhabiting at the time.
The key to a dwarf's life, Hugues tells us, is that "life as observed at crotch-level beneath an apartment of tabletops presents a vastly different aspect from that of aboveboard ... where the appearance of at least a modicum of civility can be mustered up."
- But below! below, take heed: for here are to be found the least admirable pursuits of humanity; to wit, the passing of wind; the covert loosening of various articles of clothing, depending upon the heat of the evening and matters of girth; the scratching of bums, of _______s, of _______s, of groins, of feet, of _________s, of knees; the pursuit of fleas and other parasites in the lower hypogastric region ... manual stimulation of divers parts (I blush to write it); and lusts, lusts of various orders, all of them lower, much lower, and most of them manifestly apparent to one who was privy to the nether regions as I had indisputably become.
review
Love and Darkness
A Memoir
Amos Oz
Nicholas de Lange, Translator
(Harcourt)
- Now run along my dear, and do not steal any more of my time, as all the world does, having no thought for the minutes and hours that are my only treasure, and that are seeping away.
And throughout, there is Oz's gentle, writerly wit. He tells us that he never was much of a scholar, never "had any talent for research," one "whose mind always turns cloudy at the sight of a footnote. My father's books are rich in footnotes..." he continues. This statement appears in a footnote.
We've always had an affection for Oz since we stumbled across his short and very funny novel The Same Sea. The autobiography is not as unified, compact, and deft. But it has the virtue of being rendered in bite-sized pieces, perfect for picking up and leaving and picking up again.
I've been spending the last month doing just that. I've arrived just past page 300. I plan to spend at least another month or two wandering through this one.
review
Mario Vargas Llosa
Natasha Wimmer,
Translator
(Picador)
In addition to Vargas Llosa giving us these two characters, we get a fine lesson on 19th Century sweatshops, laws of marriage, the power of the Catholic church, the lives and ways of the Maoris before and after the coming of the French, various styles of Gauguin's painting, the Chartist Movement, the whorehouses of Lyon, the Bayaderes, the slave trade, Simón Bolívar, the long-term effects of syphilis, Flora's scheme for merging the efforts of exploited workers and exploited wives --- and, finally, the highly comic Battle of Cangallo, 1834, Peru. "Nieto's soldiers turned and ran in wild retreat towards Arequipa. At the same time, not knowing what was happening on the other side, and believing himself lost, General San Román also ordered his troops to retreat by forced marches, in view of the enemy's superior strength. In his flight, which was as desperate and ridiculous as Nieto's he didn't stop until he reached Vilque, forty leagues away."
- The picture of the two armies running from each other with their generals at their heads, each believing it had been defeated, was something you would always remember, Florita --- a symbol of the chaos and absurdity of life in your father's country, that endearing caricature of a republic.
review
An Encyclopedia
Margaret Barwick
(Timber Press)
"The ripe juicy fruit swollen with sweet mucilage that nourished Wellington's cavalry when they wintered along the north Spanish coast during the Peninsular War between 1808 - 1814."
- Perhaps the greatest fame, however, is the claim that its large seeds were the original carat weight used by jewelers and apothecaries. The fruit is fermented to make alcohol and the seeds have been used as a coffee and chocolate substitute, as a coloring for bouillon cubes or as a diabetic flour suitable as a baby food.
A thousand or so are represented here, with at least five photographs awarded to each --- usually of the plant as a whole, its bark, and the male and female parts. The description is complete with Latin name, country of origin, height, status (both threatened or in some cases, "undesirable"), tolerance for dry climate or salt water, form of propagation, and in which zone --- between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn --- the tree is to be found.
review
Tales from the New Century
Alexander Kluge
(New Directions)
Or there is the tale of a high-ranking officer at the Pentagon who seriously contemplated the idea of the United States dyeing the Arctic and the Antarctic bright red so that the climate in the world would change ... perhaps to the disadvantage of the Russians (it had to do with the reflective value of red snow over white snow). No one was quite sure what it would have done to you and me and the rest of the world.
There is also the story of astronomer Fred Zwicky who said if he stopped looking at "the central red light of a spiral galaxy [to] where he could see the speckled distribution of pale blue stars and of nebulæ shimmering in the winds, he could hear a kind of VIOLIN MUSIC."
review
Stephen Elliott
(Picador)
And Happy Baby has its own strange logic: the daily fears of his youth were so profound that peace now only becomes manifest in regular (and controlled) pain. While Theo was being raped in prison by the guard, a Mr. Gracie (sic), none of the other prisoners would dare to assault him.
Twenty years later, when Theo finds out where Gracie lives, he starts to shadow him, until the man stops him, and says:
- "Don't follow me anymore, Theo. I can't take care of you. I have my own family. You wanted this talk. Fine. Remember I kept you safe. You were safe when I was around. None of those boys did anything to you when I was there. You know why I kept you safe, right?"
And the old bastard turns and leaves. And Theo does nothing.
review
Lt. Colonel J. H. Patterson, D.S.O
(Lyons Press)
The Man-Eaters of Tsavo ostensibly about lion-hunting is, more exactly, a chronicle of the Good Old Days of Colonialism, when Great Britain was at the height of its powers, when it could send in a single ambitious officer to design and build a railroad and keep an army of workers and "natives" under control. Outside of the simple tale of murdering as much wildlife of Uganda as possible in two short years, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo is a fascinating document on colonial power --- a power that struck both ways.
Plain Tales from the Raj, which we reviewed several years ago, revealed that fully seventy-five percent of the front line soldiers from England were to die in India. Likewise, Patterson had to deal with not only lions, hippos, crocodiles and bustards, but malaria, dysentery, yellow fever, typhoid, leprosy, sleeping sickness and, in one case, the plague:
- I gave the natives and Indians who inhabited it [Nairobi] an hour's notice to clear out, and on my own responsibility promptly burned the whole place to the ground. For this somewhat arbitrary proceeding I was mildly called over the coals, as I expected, but all the same it effectually stamped out the plague, which did not reappear during the time I was in the country.
"Mildly called over the coals." Ah, shades of Kipling.
review
Sebastian Barry
(Viking)
The facts of war are presented simply, free of the burden of besotted rhetoric. There is the inarticulate language of the men, a language of the field and dying and blood and anger ... heavy with expletives but rarely touching on the truth of what they are going through. Then, suddenly, there are nervous attacks from too many days of unrelieved combat, in which Willie "couldn't stop his head jerking about, and his left arm had a mind of its own, the mind of an arm that wanted to dance a jig all the blessed day."The facts of war are adroit and believable: the breaking of arms of cadavers in order to be able to stuff them in the ground quickly; the rules under which they operated: "In one raking stream [of a machine-gun] two of the new boys of Gardiner Street were removed from the line; one was left screaming behind, but no one could stop to help him, it was forbidden;" and the simple pleasures: the feeling of a hot, steaming bath after months in the trenches. At Messines ridge, "they were given two water bottles that night and the second they found was full of tea. Their boys at the kettles and the big pots far behind at the field kitchens hasn't let them down. A big stew came up after them and a double ration of rum. It wasn't the war they knew." It wasn't the war they knew.
- The guns had stopped a good few hours and the land about had returned to itself. It was like a new country, a fresh place. The summer rain had loosed the smells of everything, the new grass that was boldly coming up everywhere like a crazy green beard, the briefly drenched woods all about. There were even nightingales in the woods that any man could hear for himself and wonder at.
"What's that bird going on?" said Willie Dunne.
"Fucking nightingale," said Christy Moran.
review
Was Young
A Memoir
Barbara Holland
(Bloomsbury)
She grew up in Washington, D. C. --- her father was a lawyer at the Labor Department --- and she spent many of her summers in Florida. Not far from where I spent the first twenty years of my life.
She remembers the black-outs where, starting at sundown, we hung dark curtains on the windows and doused the lights before going outside. Gas for our cars was rationed --- "A" "B" and "C," all depending on your importance (or your connections.) She remembers (as I do) the white sands of the beach being soaked in crude oil from the tankers sunk by the German submarines, and the signs hung in the schools, at the bus stops, in the train stations: "Loose Lips Can Sink Ships."
She remembers reading, always reading, seeking places where she could read all night without being found out ... and then going off to school in the morning and not being able to manage simple algebra or "sociology." Which in those days was concerned with teaching girls how to grow up and make babies and raise families and not even think for a moment of being a professional, seeking a job, working the way that men worked.
review
José Saramago
(Harcourt)
We opined,
- Saramago got a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, and as far as I am concerned he should have gotten at the same time the Nobel Prize for Psychology and another one, the Wise Prize, for Knowledge of the Workings of the Heart & Soul...
-
... plus, and in addition, any other prizes around --- the Booker, the Pulitzer, the Prix Fixe de France and whatever remaining bookish prizes they have hanging around --- to give to those who through some sterling ability that you and I will never ever be able to comprehend can take a story and words and characters and twist them around and down inside you with such force that they belong to you ... no ... they become you.
I suspect that Saramago's forte is the shaggy dog story, one that goes on (and on) with enough wit and style and verve to make one want it to last forever, and it is not just because of mots that pop up: "Chaos is order waiting to be deciphered," or "All great truths are basically trivial." No: it's the story line and falling in love with the characters and all of them being so salty and funny that you want to jump right in and become part of it.
review
Alan Furst
Read by George Guidall
(Recorded Books Unabridged)
His novels are heavily peopled with wise, all-too-wise, all-too-brutal secret police, along with brutal Communists, Marlowe-like heroes, fiendish Turks, astute peasants, vile Fascists, wise aristocrats, powerful women ... always with a dollop of the American presence: the Americans usually fresh and optimistic, usually foolish.
Thus Furst and I have been together now, going to and from work, for ten days, 18-½ hours, 13 cassettes. He tells a dandy story. I mean dandy, but not the walking stick, fancy-dress dandy.
Go to the complete
review
Henry Roth
(Picador)
from the Introduction
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Joseph Singer, Elaine Gottlieb, and
Herman Eichenthal, Translators
(Terrace Books/ University of Wisconsin)
Maybe we should call it 'Yiddish Magical Realism.' The pages are overflowing with characters, weird, funny, sassy, greedy, hungry, pompous characters. As with most of Singer's writings, it spares no one: the rich, the fallen gentry, the poor, nor even some of the all-too-pious rabbis.
- "After awhile you get used to such things," he said. "Why, I sometimes had to boil human heads on my own stove."
review
Sex the Measure
Of All Things
Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy
(Indiana University Press)
- It is here, above all, sharpened obviously by autobiography, that there is passion in the Report. Kinsey had seen how these men had been harmed by society for their sexuality --- he had seen them in prison, blackmailed, made to feel guilt and anxiety, even made outcasts, and it had made him very angry. This never led him to falsify his figures; it did dictate his presentation.
review