February 2011 Books

On the non-fiction front I've read Paul Ashbee's excellent Kent in Prehistoric Times. The bibliography provides further reading to learn about individual archaeological sites in detail. DW Crossley's Sidney Ironworks Accounts, 1541 - 1573 allows the reader to explore one aspect of that Penshurst-based family's activities. Miri Rubin's Mother of God is a brilliant book. It explores the way the cult of the Virgin Mary in the Catholic Church grew, mainly from the  12th century onwards. Expect to be made to think. And then there is A Voyager Out, a biography of the explorer of West Africa, Mary Kingsley, by Katherine Frank. It made me wish I could be transported back in time to have a very long conversation with her. The last real history I read this month was DS Richards' Conflict in the Crimea which covered the whole of this war in military terms, with some diversions into other aspects, such as the fact that only about 10% of deaths were from battle. The rest of the deaths were from illnesses caused by totally ineffective provision of supplies of food, clothing and housing of all sorts. It was refreshing to read an account of the Crimean War without any mention of Florence Nightingale.

 Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino's Chasing Aphrodite is a devastating description of how the Getty Museum indirectly, but knowingly, participated in the robbing of ancient sites in the Mediterranean for choice artefacts to conserve and display.

 

Chasing Aphrodite

Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, NY, 2011; xii + 364

ISBN: 978-0-151-01501-6

In his life John Paul Getty junior used his wealth to build up an extraordinary collection of fine art, sculpture and Greek and Roman antiques. These were partly on display in his houses and partly kept in stores. Before his death, however, he invested in a large museum in California which was a replica of a Roman villa on a large scale. When it opened to the public it had very little in the way of a reserve collection backing up what was on display that scholars could study. Jiri Frel, the first curator of antiquities realised that this was a major shortcoming of the museum and set about making it good. He used to buy items from dealers or individuals agreeing a priced and charging the museum rather more for the item. He used the surplus to buy in items to build up a substantial reserve collection of antiquities. What he almost certainly knew – as did other museum curators in America – that most, if not all, of the items he was buying had recently been looted from sites in Italy or Greece and sold through a series of dealers in Europe. The main ones were based either in Switzerland or London. Itwms coming from Italy were all documented as having been found before 1936 and kept by families in one country or another in Europe. Frel got into the habit of forging a lot of the paperwork relating to many of these items. He got his secretary to type up the documents on counterfeit papers. At least 800 objects had little or no documentation as a result. Eventually he was found out and was forced to leave the museum. Shortly after, all the documentation relating to his curatorship was removed from the museum.

            His successor, Marion True, was determined to stop the acquisition of looted items by the museum. She began to insist on proper documentation showing the succession of ownership from removing the item from the soil to its present ownership. Other museums in America adopted a much laxer attitude to the ownership question. A number were only concerned with the previous ten years of ownership, while others were even more relaxed. At the same time the Greek and Italian governments began to become much stricter in allowing people to sell antiquities to overseas collectors and museums. Unfortunately for True, she had accepted a loan from a dealer to help her buy a holiday villa on Cyprus. When the Italian police began to explore all the dealings of one man who had died unexpectedly, there was evidence that she had had contact with him. And that nearly everything he had sold or was preparing to sell was looted. She and the Getty faced minutely detailed examination by the Italian police. They were able to establish that the Getty held a large number of objects that could be shown to have been recently looted. Other museums were being given the same message by the Italian Police. Moist retuned the looted objects more or less straight away. True, however, had been fired by the Getty. Nevertheless the museum continued to fight the Italians but, in the end, had to face the fact that they did hold looted objects some of which were the finest objects in their collections. The net result was that they were able to profit from loan exhibitions of magnificent objects in  Italian museums that were not normally open to public viewing.

            This book is a detailed expose of the collectors, dealers and looters. It details the changing policies of the Getty’s curators, directors and board over time. It shows how corrupt collecting by both individuals and museums was in the four decades after the ending of the Second World War war.

I really enjoyed reading a Christmas present from an Australian friend. It was a collection of short stories by RM Winn called Up a hollow log. Novels include Leslie Thomas's Other Times and Scott Spencer's Endless Love.

Endless Love

Scott Spencer

First published 1979,

Open Road Integrated Media edition, 2010

ISBN: 978-1-4532-0523-5; vi + 345pp

This is a sort of letter from one lover to another, except that they parted some time ago under difficult circumstances: she called the police who incarcerated him.

            The story begins with David, whose parents and all their friends are avid communists. He regards their view of society as more or less normal until, as a teenager, he meets Jade and her family. They have a completely relaxed, attitude to society. More or less: if I let you do your thing, you let me do mine. They were well into drugs and explored them as a family. David became so attached to their ways that he ended up living with them. And in Jade’s bed. To start with they slept in her single bed, but later her mother bought them a double bed. Eventually her father decided that David and Jade’s relationship was getting too intense and they agreed that David would keep away from Jade and the house for thirty days. David struggled with this and, eventually, set fire to a pile of newspapers in the porch of their house. Everyone inside is so drugged up that he has to go inside to rescue them.

            He is committed to a psychiatric hospital where he spends three years. When he is released he goes back to his parents’ house. He is required to make no attempt whatsoever  to contact Jade or her family; to attend the local university; to get a job; to see a psychiatrist twice a week and to visit his parole officer at regular intervals. After a time he manages to move into a flat of his own. But then he decides to find Jade. So he starts to ring all the people he can find with her surname. Finally, he finds her mother and leans that she has divorced Hugh and that the family is spread out all over America. They start to correspond, writing long letters to each other, though Ann doesn’t let slip anything about Jade.

            He breaks parole and goes to New York where he stays in a hotel. Then he knocks on Ann’s door and, after some conversation, they go out together for a meal. He spends the night on her couch, even though she offers him her bed. They spend the next day together as well and seem to enjoy one another’s company. The next day, David sees Jade’s father in the street. He is with his new girlfriend. Hugh starts to cross the road to reach David but gets run over by a taxi and dies.

            He and Ann view the corpse. The children all gather at Ann’s flat for the funeral. Afterwards, in the gathering at the flat, David is forced by one of the children to leave. He meets Jade just arriving in New York. They have a meal and then go to his hotel where they continue talking. They are reacquainting themselves with their old love for one another. Eventually they make love again and again and again during the night. They leave New York and go to live in the house she shares with other university students. While she is at university, he works at various jobs.

Their life is pretty good until Jade finds out that her father died because he didn’t look before crossing the road to confront David. She blames him for this and locks him out of the house. She informs the police that he is being a nuisance. They remove him and find out that he has broken parole. So he goes back to the psychiatric hospital he was in before. He spends some time there during which Jade marries a Frenchman and goes to France and his father dies. He also has sex with two women and fails to form a relationship with a third. Eventually his mother has no more money for the hospital and so he is committed to a State run one. There he is visited by Ann, Jade’s mother, who manages to get him released.

And so he writes this book for Jade telling of their joint lives. It’s a really good read with quite a few unexpected twists. I can thoroughly recommend it.

           

 Finally, there is the fantasy novel by Jules Wellesley called  The Mask of the River King.

The Mask of the River King

Jules Wellesley

Smashwords Edition, 2009. 165pp

This is a fantasy novel and contains all the things I hate about fantasy fiction. There are multitudes of strange characters  - for want of a better word – who are, somehow, able to communicate with one another. Each set of these characters has its own appearance, laws, customs and language. They all seem to be at odds with one another, resulting in quite serious fighting and battles from time to time. Or torture. Or both. Having these elements on just one planet would be bad enough, but the heroes of our story are able to escape one lot of trouble for another by using a ‘nexus’ or ‘vortex’ to reach another planet and time and a new set of characters. And while they travel through the nexus they themselves can change shape and size. It’s like 3-D Lord of the Rings. Or a bit like some of the more sophisticated computer games. Nevertheless, you carry on reading to find out if the four heroes do finally get to the end and triumph. Oh – and did I say that it’s good versus evil. And that our four heroes are the ones on the good side.

            OK. So we start in a world where everyone/thing is in thrall to an evil overlord. Frey is one of his slaves who was found as a baby beside a spring in a cave. He has grown up as one of the slaves. A group of travellers appears who are most unwelcome. They are led by Niran who is patently good. He rides an Umsu which can talk to him. Frey manages to escape with them when they leave. A female character called Rana also escapes this world with them. And basically that’s the core heroes. They encounter all sorts of strange worlds and beings and win out over each one. Sometimes it’s a simple escape, other times they have to fight for it with friends they pick up for the occasion. We learn a little more about each character in each world they visit. It turns out that Niran has magic powers through his ability to manipulate soulstones. This means that he is one of a small group of optifexes. Soulstones are used for a multitude of purposes because they throw energy beams for want of a better word. I suppose they are the equivalent of the old ray guns of primitive science fiction.

            As the group pass through different worlds, thee battles they have to fight in one way or another get fiercer.  Frey and Rana fall in love with one another. Predictable, you might say. But they supply the only love interest in this story. And by the end she is pregnant. Towards the end Frey gets separated from the others and seems to travel in a different world from them. He meets a group of optifexes and is trained and initiated as one of them, having already received considerable training from Niran. The two groups unite and Frey finally meets the ultimately evil one in this strange universe. After a lengthy battle, he wins over the evil one and starts to rule the universe with Rana at his side, even though she has her doubts about his final appearance.

            At the end of the day this is a good adventure story which is well-written. It is also one of those un-put-downable books once you have got into the story.

January 2011 Books

I think the best non-fiction book I have read in a long time is Hugh Thomas's The Slave Trade. It explores in minute detail (850 pages) the history, development and decline of the Atlantic Slave Trade. If you want to learn about Slavery from the mid-15th century to the end of the 19th century, then this is the book to start with. Sian Rees's The Floating Brothel describes how the first transport ship of women was filled and sent to Australia. It made me want to find out what happened to the women once they arrived in that continent. Will Rees oblige us?After that comes Brenda Madox's George Eliot which kept me entertained and informed. My one regret was this biography was not longer. Gayle Lemmon's The Dressmaker of Khair Khana was interesting but derivative, considering The Bookseller of Kabul was published a couple of years before this one.

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

Harper Collins, 2011. 170pp

ISBN:  978-0-06-173237-9

This book is an account of life in a suburb of Kabul in Afghanistan during the Taliban era of 1996 – 2001. It was written using extensive interviews with one family gthat felt it essential to break up during this fundamentalist period. The mother and father migrated to northern Afghanistan to live in an area their families came from. One son went to Pakistan and a son-in-law went to Iran. There the sons were able to make livings for themselves. They left behind two younger sons and five daughters and a married daughter. The family home was in Khair Khana, a suburb of Kazbul.

            Much of the first half of the book is taken up with an account of how women were treated or mistreated by the Taliban. This is paralleled almost exactly by a similar, earlier account in Asne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul (2003). In the earlier book the author actually lived with the family she was studying for a period of about 6 months. She experienced their life problems and offered a very sympathetic account of the women’s lives. She also described how the father ran a bookshop that on the surface only sold religious literature but, dangerously, sold ‘illegal’ books under the counter. The bookseller was very unhappy with his portrait as a domestic tyrant in this book.

            The family described in this book seems not to have been so strictly regulated by the father. His daughters were educated and encouraged to go to university. Indeed. When the Taliban took power, one already had a degree and a job and a second daughter had just completed part of her studies. Then, in 1996, their lives stopped. When outside the house they had to be completely covered and also be accompanied by a male member of the family.

            The father and mother fled to the relative safety of northern Afghanistan and two of the sons fled to other Islamic countries. The daughters were thus left to fend for themselves.

            After a time money, and hence food, became so short that the eldest daughter decided to learn how to sew from her oldest, married, sister. She sold what she made to traders in the local market. As demand for her clothes grew so she taught her sisters how to sew and thus increase output. Then friends got drawn in to the clothes production. Finally, she established a small school where girls were taught essential skills in order to help, what can only be described as a factory producing women’s clothes, meet its targets. The only reason the Taliban didn’t close them down and punish the women was that senior members had bought wedding clothes here for their own daughters.

            When you read The Bookseller of Kabul you feel as though you are a member of the family, sharing their trials and tribulations. The same cannot really be said of this book which seems to be based on interviews rather than an extended period of living with the family. Nevertheless it does provide a useful counterbalance to the usual picture of helpless women under the Taliban. For this alone, it can be recommended.

Lana Citron's A Compendium of Kisses provides the reader with a sort of general classification of kisses and entertainment.

A Compendium of Kisses

Lana Citron

Harlequin, 7 Oct 2010, iv + 219

ISBN: 978-0-373-89242-6

Most houses have at least one reference book in it – a dictionary – even if it is just a minute pocket one that obsolete secretaries and typists used to carry in their handbags or baskets to quietly check their boss’s spelling.  It went with the job. But there are so many different types of dictionaries. I, for one, have straight English dictionaries ranging from a wonderful late 19^th century two-volume one that defines a velocipede but not a bicycle, right the way up to the 1979 Compact Oxford English Dictionary that has to be read with a magnifying glass (provided). And more recent dictionaries that include larger or smaller sections devoted to a Thesaurus.

However, dictionaries cover a multitude of subjects: Quotations, Music, Opera, History, Art and Artists, Literature, Archaeology, Biography (as in the Dictionary of National Biography) and more technical subjects such as those used by crossword solvers or Scrabble players. Poets, of course, have recourse to several Rhyming Dictionaries. My bias towards the humanities shows clearly here. I am sure there are scientific dictionaries, but I have never had cause to try and find any of them.

The point is that whatever our interests we all need a reference work at some point or other in our lives. Some people will never turn a reference page once they have left school. Others will be forever buried in the never-ending possibilities that these books offer.

I think A Compendium of Kisses should be classified as a work of reference. In its 219 pages it provides a seemingly endless collection of quotations about, and commentaries on, kissing.  It is divided into four sections: The Anatomy of a Kiss; The Nature and Geography of a Kiss; The History of Kissing; and Cultural Kisses. These cover every aspect of kissing that you could imagine and many that you never thought were possible. This book is fascinating to dip into and wander in the pages from time to time, a true reference book. Fortunately, it is not as long as Martin Von Kemp’s Opus Historicum de Osculis (roughly translated as a History of Kissing). It was published in Frankfurt in 1680 and consisted of over 1,000 pages of excerpts to form an encyclopaedic work on the subject. This is an entertaining and informative book.

On the fiction front, I've had a pretty good month. I started with Scarlett Thomas's Dead Clever and followed it up with Philippa Gregory's historical fiction The Red Queen. And then, Sebastian Faulks's Engleby. I'm afraid to say that, even though I normally enjoy reading his work, Gabrial Garcia Marquez's Leaf Storm failed to catch me. However, Robert Robinson's Naked Frame, a brilliant murder-mystery made up for that.

Naked Frame

Robert Burton Robinson

2010. 125pp

The first in a series of Rebecca Ranghorn novels.

This is a clever murder-mystery filled with murdered bodies. It’s very definitely goodies versus baddies,  greedy versus magnanimous, poor versus rich. At the centre of the plot is a greedy second wife who is much younger than her wealthy businessman husband who has his finger in many profitable pies. The story starts with Rebecca Ranghorn, a private investigator, who is surprised by a man who is shot with her own revolver while talking to her in her office (It’s complicated!). 

            She flees and spends the rest of the novel with her friend Gaby, a clothes designer, keeping a very low profile while solving this and a further sequence of murders, each of which leaves clues pointing to her and Gaby as the culprits. Their first escape is from Gaby’s shop which is set on fire by people they believe are chasing them for the first killing.

            In the course of their adventures we are introduced to a prostitute, a man who is a mechanical whizz but will only repair and rebuild classic American cars and a female scientist researching an advanced TENS machine.

            As part of the search for the truth Rebecca decided to work as a waitress in a restaurant because several clues point to thee people running it. The waitresses serve food and drink wearing very high heels and a thong and nothing else. Customers are allowed to look but not touch except when putting tips into the front of the thong.

            As you would expect, however, everything turns out right in the end and the guilty party is revealed through the restaurant owner’s extensive use of CCTV in every property and business he owns. But it’s not the person you expect from everything that has gone before!

            This is a clever, well-written and eminently readable novel. The only pity is that it is so short.

           

I've read two superb poetry collections this month. Elaine Feinstein's Daylight and Sandy Pool's Exploding into Night.

Exploding into Night

Sandy Pool

First Poets series: 6

Series editor: Elana Wolff

Guernica Editions Inc, Canada.  2009, vi + 49 pp

ISBN: 978-1-55071-307-7

Sometimes a collection of poems stands head and shoulders above the rest. This is one of them. While the 48 prose poems are usually short, they hold your attention from first word to the last. You feel the need to read the collection again as soon as you have finished the last word, imply because of its virtuosity.

            It tells the tale of a love story, a marriage, set beside a lake, a power plant and a settlement of sorts. It is not until the 24^th poem that you learn that the ‘I’ of the sequence is a woman with ‘a blighted ovum’ and thus that the ’you’ must be a male. Up to that point the poems lead you to understand that the couple not only enjoy making love but are married. But from about then onwards the reader is led to the questions the woman has about her husband. Dirty fingernails suggest he has been with other women. She imagines him loving other women. In the end they separate – perhaps only into separate rooms in the house. Other people still believe them to be happy. But:

            ‘The marriage didn’t end. It simply dissolved

            As soap in water. I left you sadly ….’

           

She can’t pretend she never loved him because every time she sees him she ‘falls to pieces’. She yearns for him.

            But then between poems 34 and 41 we learn that he murdered her, kept her body for three days and then threw her into the lake.

            ‘In the meantime, I had become beautiful. I

            Had grown scales and a black, liquid eye. You

            Couldn’t see past it, or didn’t want to …’

He has nightmares about carcases. And then he catches a fish with a hook through the lip – and it is her.

            This is a collection of poems that grows with every reading. You will never regret buying it.

           

Keep reading. What do you think of this lot?

April 2011 Books

On the non-fiction front I've only read five books. They are pretty varied, ranging from John Stuart Roberts's pretty comprehensive biography of Siegfried Sassoon to Edmund de Waal's multifaceted The Hare with Amber Eyes. The Sassoon biography does make you look at the man with fresh eyes. It explores his homosexual relationships in some depth and his rather crazy lifestyle in the 1920s and 1930s. His later marriage came apart, perhaps because of the nature of his personality rather than anything else. Edmund de Waal's story behind the 264 netsuke that he inherited from his great uncle is extraordinary for it not only covers how they were collected by one member of the family in Paris in the mid-19th century, but then how the passed to another member in Vienna and how, during World War II, a faithful servant saved them while the rest of the house was being looted by the Gestapo. And then Edmund inherited them following his great-uncle's death. And was - and is - utterly captivated by them to the extent that he dropped everything for the better part of two years to research the books about them and their connection to his family. Carol Lee's autobiographical Crooked Angels is about how she fell victim to a strange disease painfully affecting all her muscles. And how she recovered with the help of a masseur who asked the right questions about her past and kneaded the problems out of her until she was back to normal. Joyce Carol Oates's autobiographical A  Widow's Story is heart breaking to read. And yet everyone should read it.

A Widow’s Story, a memoir

Joyce Carol Oates

Harper Collins, 2011; xi + 423

ISBN: 978-0-06-201553-2

This is an extraordinary book that hurts to read. It tells the story of the illness and sudden death of Joyce Carol Oates’s husband, Ray. He was admitted to hospital on 12^th February 2008 with pneumonia in one lung. He was then infected with E. coli in that lung. Five days later he seemed to be recovering well, even though the infection had spread to his other lung. They were even talking about putting him in a convalescent home. Seven hours after she left the hospital, Oates was telephoned to say that he was critically ill. He died in the 20 minutes it took her to reach the hospital at 00.50 on 18^th February 2008.

            The rest of the book is a detailed account of her grief and its affects on her changed over the succeeding six months.

            While she was collecting Ray’s possessions from his hospital room with him lying dead in his bed, she thought ‘a widow is one who makes mistakes’. No one told her what to do or what to think. She was on automatic pilot that night.

            Once back home she was swamped by sympathy deliveries of flowers, plants and chocolate. All she wanted was to be with Ray. She couldn’t sleep nor could she eat more than snacks taken when she was hungry. She says that without Ray the meaning had gone out of her life. The only place she felt safe and comfortable was in their bed where she read and wrote and cried.

            Because Ray had managed their finances, house and garden, she suddenly had to face these without understanding how he had managed them. Good friends helped her get through this.

            About three weeks after his death she decided to return to teaching heer students. This became a lifeline because it forced her to think about something other than Ray and his absence. Over the succeeding months she kept all her appointments to give talks and do book signings and slowly began to surface from her grief. Nevertheless she thought of herself as a personality that collapses when unperceived by others and which immediately reassembled itself like magic when in company. She saw all wives as ‘widows-to-be’.

            A friend had painted a watercolour portrait of Ray after his death. She hung the original in the kitchen and a colour photocopy in every room.

            Her suicidal thoughts started right at the beginning of her grief and continued. They reached the point where she listed all the drugs in the bathroom cabinet. A suicide note scrolled round in her head. And then someone wrote to her saying they’d tried suicide and failed and that she’s never try it again.

            While she was struggling to write anything, others believed that she was writing another novel or, even, a memoir of Ray. An unexpected side of widowhood, she discovered, was a lack of patience and a rise in irritability. When she went to discuss this with her doctor, he gave her anti-depressants which worked.

            Two months after Ray’s death she still felt guilty about being alive. At the same time, in workshops with her creative writing students, she is worried by the number who are obsessed by suicide. She knows that, without her friends, she would have killed herself by now.

            The garden stared at her. It was growing out of control. Ray used to fill it with brightly coloured annuals every year. She decides that she can’t do that herself, so changes the organisation of the garden by planting perennials. She hires a man to dig over the garden and then she plants her choice of perennials. While she is doing this, she feels that if Ray’s spirit is anywhere, it will be in the garden.

            She ends by saying:

            Of the widow’s countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband’s death the widow should think: I kept myself alive.

            This is an eminently readable book – as you would expect from Joyce Carol Oates – but it hurts to read it. It is full of such important observations and advice that everyone should read it before they become either a widow or a widower. And learn.

For most of my life I have been concerned with the past and, in particular, physical manifestations of it, whether as paintings, earthworks or buildings. Shelby Foote and Nell Dickerson's Gone is a wake-up call to all Americans. They tell us how important their Civil War was - but this book presents hard evidence that the houses the ordinary soldiers came from are slowly disappearing from the face of the earth. It is time someone did something about it. Today would be a good time.

                GONE, a heartbreaking story of the Civil War

                Shelby Foote and Nell Dickerson

                Belle Books Inc, USA; 2011; ix + 53; colour illustrations

                ISBN: 978-1-61194-003-9

This is a book about the American Civil War. At its heart is a short story, Pillar of Fire by Shelby Foote that describes how a detachment of Union soldiers set fire to a Confederate house, having given the occupants ten minutes warning. The Captain had cold-bloodedly and scientifically developed a most efficient method for totally destroying houses by firing them.

            Nell Dickerson is Shelby Foote’s niece. He encouraged her to explore and photograph the remains of houses that were built and occupied during the Civil War.  Her beautiful photographs bear witness to the aspirations of the builders of those houses a century and a half ago. Now, her photographs starkly record that many of them are covered by vegetation while others have half fallen down.

            As Nell Dickerson says in her Afterword we should honour our past; protect our history; respect our ancestors and preserve our own past culture. In the context of the Civil War, that doesn’t just mean preserving battlefields and documents, it also means preserving the houses the soldiers and their families lived in and which lay at the centre of the land they farmed. They won’t survive for a lot longer. And when they have gone, who will be to blame for their loss? YOU, dear reader.

Madness is weird.  I suppose we've all met someone afflicted with it to some degree or other. Only we didn't know in most cases. Catherine Arnold in Bedlam takes us through the history of madness/lunacy as it has been perceived over time and, in particular, how the afflicted have been treated in London's Bedlam. It does not make good reading. I felt very guilty about how my ancestors treated the mentally ill in the past. But I can't actually do anything about it now. Well, I don't think so. William Styron, in Darkness Visible, takes us on his personal journey through his mental illness. And it's not pleasant reading. But it is revealing.

               Darkness Visible, a memoir of Madness

               William Styron

               Open Road Integrated Media, NY, 1990; 2010; 44pp

               ISBN: 978-1-936317-30-1

This is a short book that describes how Styron went through a period of intense depression. It describes how he suffered more in the late afternoon and early evening than in the morning. How this led to a sense of dread, alienation and stifling anxiety. He knew something was wrong, but delayed seeking psychiatric help. He found himself unable to sleep, or only for short spells and so became extremely exhausted. The further this situation developed, the more he thought about death. And taking his own life.

            Some 10% of the American population suffer from depression. What is rarely mentioned is the effect this has on carers, family and friends who have to support the depressive.

            Styron had been abusing alcohol for about 40 years. Suddenly he found he couldn’t stomach any alcohol at all. His body rebelled and he found the experience traumatic. This led to the start of his really bad depression. The drink had kept his anxiety at bay. Now there was nothing to do that. He reached the point when he was unable to write. Which for a writer is a pretty disastrous situation.

            Eventually he began to see a psychiatrist who prescribed drugs. But nothing worked. He describes how the mental pain of depression is unrelenting ‘and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come. Ever.’

            He was hospitalised after seriously planning suicide but realising that he couldn’t actually do it.  What helped him in hospital was the fact that ghere was a stable environment. He thinks that Group Therapy is useless except for passing time and that Art Therapy is organised infantilism. Some people might disagree.

            Once he had recovered he saw how depression had always been on the outer edge of his life for many years.

            This is an extraordinary account of one man’s experience of a severe spell of depression. Anyone who has suffered from depression will recognise their own experiences. This book will help anyone who is living with a person suffering from depression.

            The book ends with a series of good photographs from Styron’s life.

I've managed to read a few novels this month. Two are fictionalised biographies of  authors and both are pretty good reads. Jay Panini's The Last Station which is about the last year of Tolstoy's life. It brings the life the stresses and strains in his household. Colm Toibin's The Master makes you look again at Henry James's life. Ali Smith's Accidental left me adrift, to be perfectly honest. It's well written and the characters have life, but somehow I got lost. Gunter Grass's The Rat, which I know is a golden oldie, is still a pleasure to read. And then I read Gretchen Craig's short story collection, The Color of the Rose.

The Color of the Rose

Gretchen Craig

2010; v + 26 + 17 pp author information

There are three stories in this collection, the first two of which are linked. They are all set in the Deep South of America.

            In Afternoon Tea Josie, aged 6, has a doll as a present from her wealthy father. She is playing with Cleo, also aged 6, her slave half-sister dressed in a sacking dress. When a black servant, Bibi, comes in to serve tea, the mother deliberately makes her spill the tea. She shouts at her and then beats her. He, however, sweeps up the two young girls and takes them to his room where he sits them on his knees. It is clear that he has been having an affair with Bibi and that his wife is aware of it.

            We return to the same family fifteen years later in The Color of the Rose. Cleo is now a house slave who has annoyed her mistress. As punishment she is made to hoe over the rose garden. She continues to work the rose garden all summer long after she has completed her housework because she found that she enjoyed the work.  It was certainly preferable to emptying spittoons and ‘night jars’. She is, nevertheless, worried that she will be sunburned as black as the field hands because of her exposure.  She loves the colour of the roses which are mainly red, but her favourites are yellow.

            Josie’s mother is determined to get her married off. One morning Cleo is told to get flowers for a corsage and two buds to put in her hair. Because a gentleman is calling for her later in the day.

            Cleo does this and takes a yellow bud for herself. In her room in the evening she put it in her hair and studied herself in the mirror. She knew there would be no gentleman caller for her. She crushed the rose and blew out the light.

            Summer heat on the other hand is set on a small farm in the great depression of the 1930s. A mother and daughter, Etta, 24, attempt to manage the farm following the death of the husband out in the fields.  Etta had taken charge of the kitchen and cooking when she was 15. Her mother effectively did nothing about the house or on the farm. All she liked was listening to President Roosevelt and hymns on the radio. She hated Etta listening to anything else, especially modern music.

Then, one day, a man passes by asking for work in return for a roof and food. Etta gives him the work her father used to do, a bed in the barn and meals on  the kitchen step.  In time, she made a pot of coffee for them to share after supper. He told her about the places he’d been and things he’d done. As is only to be expected, mthey fall in love and made love in the barn in the dead of the night.

Etta’s brother Earl appears on the farm at heir mother’s request. He takes  the man away with him to the nearby town where he lives. Etta is heartbroken.

            Several weeks later he reappears. When Etta sees him she runs down the road. He carried a present for them of a 40 lb block of ice. Her brother had got to know him and had found him work.

            After supper, he and Etta went indoors and listened to the radio and danced quietly.

These are three very different stories. The third is about family closeness and distrust of outsiders, while the first two are about slavery and the bad treatment of slaves. All three are eminently readable.

           

  I've only read two collections of poetry this month, which makes me feel rather guilty. I re-read Siegfried Sassoon's Counter-attack and other poems written about his experiences in the trenches in World War I. The second, Karen Shenfeld's My Father's Hands Spoke in Yiddish was a delight.

               My Father’s Hands Spoke in Yiddish

                Karen Shenfeld

                Guernica Editions Inc, 2010; viii + 61

                Essential Poets Series 179

                ISBN: 978-1-55071-330-5

 This is a fascinating collection of poems which celebrates the tiny things of daily life as much as the big, unanswerable,  questions of life.

            Land of Milk and Honey appears to be about the production of these materials from farms (or the Jewish Promised Land), BUT

            No groves here,

            but herds of cars,

            row upon row

            of promised bungalows.

            Sprinklered lawns greener than

            the Galilee.

Many of us would recognise the description of Living Room as one we might have seen in our grandparent’s house. One set aside for BEST.

            Sofa and chairs sealed from touch

            (lampshades also plastic-wrapped

            like your lunch-box sandwich)

            For Special Occasions Only.

A tour of Brighton Street takes you down the entire street, identifying the occupants by the colour of their front door. An ingenious variation on that Welsh problem of everyone called Jones, so it’s Jones the Milk, Jones the Cheese, Jones the Butcher.

            But you are brought up short by the next poem, In a Country called Canada, which suggests almost a touristy subject. It is, however, chillingly, about the area of Auschwitz set aside for sorting the piles of possessions taken from those about to be murdered by the SS. A cold, stark piece.

            The Sanding Prayer names the ten men making up the quorum in a synagogue and describes how each one prays.

            Israel prays with his eyes closed,

            the pages of his pearled book

            turning on the breeze of his breath;

            …..

            Nathan prays out loud,

            his recitation, a river,

            washing over polished stones;

            ….

Having discovered each of the men at prayer, the poetess shows her place

            (I pray where I cannot tempt

             And I cannot be counted,

            My praises and petitions, my thanks,

            heard and not heard, like those of all the rest.)

The title poem, My Father’s Hands Spoke in Yiddish, is a touching account of his last days and hours and his belief in God.

            My father’s hands spoke in Yiddish,

            ….

            Ever in motion

            they argued with themselves.

What a wonderful picture she paints!

There are two poems about the Bathurst Golem. In the first the Golem is instantly recognisable:

           

            The tall, silent one,

            long hair, love beads, an embroidered

            Indian shirt and jeans,

            the draft dodger,

            up from New York State.

Who

            Holds his prayer book,

            backwards and upside down.

In the second, The Golem and the Rabbi’s wife, the Golem catches the scent of the Rabbi’s wife ‘as he bent to do her will’.

            The Infinite Daily Things is a celebration of all those tiny things you see everyday and don’t really notice:

            These infinite,

            daily things –

            like the man you

            live with,

            but no longer see,

            until you open

            your astonished eyes.

This is a theme that runs throughout the collection.

Ode to Coffee is just that, reminding us what coffee does to us both during its preparation and its consumption. Canoeing Song is about companionship, pleasure from the physicality of paddling and listening to the silence of nature when drifting on the current.

 The Ring, the very last poem in the collection, tells the story of how she dropped a ring which slipped between two floorboards. She’d bought the ring in Addis Ababa and worn it for years. She had always imagined how it had passed from mother to daughter over the generations. Now someone else could start a similar speculation when they recovered her ring from between the floorboards.

This is a superb collection of poems that takes you deep into the poet’s understanding of the world she lives in.

  And, finally, a delightful children's story with a gentle moral in it.

               I am Tama, Lucky Cat

               A Japanese Legend

               Wendy Henrichs

               Illustrated by Yoshiko Jaeggi

               Peachtree Publishing, 2011; iv + 18

This is an excellent children’s story with a gentle and caring cat as its hero.  First, it finds and then looks after a poor monk living alone in a dilapidated temple. Later, in a thunderstorm, a warrior is about to turn away from the temple because it is so dilapidated when he sees the cat and moves forward. A moment later, a huge branch of the tree he had been sheltering under, crashes to the ground. He takes this as a sign. He and his family repair the temple which becomes rich and helps the poor.

The illustrations by Yoshiko Jaeggi form an integral part of the story, for they provide the emotional aspects of the story. A true union of storyteller and illustrator.

December 2010 Books

Let's start with the Non-Fiction.

Robin McKie's The Face of Britain is an excellent exploration of the DNA make-up of the UK. It looks to try and find out where we all came from originally. He thinks that now is the last time anyone can do what he has been, and is, doing because there will soon be too many 'foreign' genes in the mix by the time the next generation comes along. Borrow this book from the library or, if you are feeling wealthy, buy it and read it from cover to cover at least twice. It's really interesting and does throw light on our history that documents normally can't. Will Kaufman's Woody Guthrie: American Radical explores his life through his attitudes to the rest of  society and how these changed throughout his life. A good read with plenty of excerpts from his songs and some pretty good black and white photos.
 

                               Woody Guthrie, American Radical

                                Will Kaufman

                                University of Illinois Press

                                2011

Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia and the greatly exaggerated achievements of the new communist regime in the mid-late 1920s, people around the world admired Communism. Communist Parties sprang up around the world, including in the USA.  They attracted people who wanted to improve their living and working conditions. In the USA a number of newspapers and radio stations developed which were sympathetic to communism. Many also expressed this by joining the International Brigades on the side of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939).

            In the late 1930s Woody Guthrie had a live radio show in Los Angeles in which he composed and sang left wing songs, He also had a regular column, called Woody Sez, in a left wing newspaper.

            As part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, several large building programmes were undertaken to employ the unemployed. One such project was The Grand Coulee Dam which started in 1933 and was completed in 1941. Towards the end of the construction period a film was made which showed what had been achieved. Guthrie was commissioned to compose and sing songs for the sound track. While the film was never completed, Guthrie revised and recorded several of the songs in 1944 and 1947.

            In 1940 Guthrie, Pete Seeger and others performed at a benefit concert in New York for John Steinbeck. This is said to have been the spark leading to the revival of American folk song. Up to now Guthrie’s songs had been strongly anti-capitalist. Like many anti-capitalists he revised his views of communism following the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1940.

            Alan Lomax promoted the work of several ringers in the 1940s. As a result, Guthrie  won a commercial radio contract which paid well. But, after only a month, he left New York to return to Los Angeles.

            During 1941 Guthrie was heavily involved with a group of singers called The Almanacs. They formed the hub of an American folk revival. Guthrie was concerned to stop their songs becoming too wordy and sermonising. At the same time he wrote some very strong anti-Hitler songs that were very popular.  The group quickly won influential left-wing cultural followers in large measure because some of their songs supported trade unions.

Following Pearl Harbour in December 1941, Almanac found a new audience with their songs which bolstered the anti-fascist/anti-Japanese war effort. They were catapulted into the national spotlight when they became the resident musicians on the programme called This is War. They also won a recording contract with Decca and a management contract. Because of the strong political content of some of their songs, people began reporting them to the House Un-American Activities Committee. They said the songs were seditious. As a result they lost their recording and broadcasting contracts.

During 1942 Guthrie began to focus on pro-USA, anti-fascist songs and, at the same time, began a large scale rewriting of his songs. By late 1942 he had about 60 songs which went under the title of War Songs are Work Songs. He poured hate and violence into them. The opening of a second front against Germany became an obsession for Guthrie. As a result, he joined the Merchant Martine.  Between June 1943 and June 1944 he completed three tours across the Atlantic.  His ship was torpedoed twice, on the first and third voyages. Because of the amount of free time on board ship he was able to do a huge amount of writing and singing. Between the second and third voyages he wrote a ballad-opera called The Martins and the Coys. He was unable to find a producer in the USA, but the BBC in London broadcast it.

            After his third voyage he won a prestigious slot on New York’s WNEW radio station. His first broadcast was on 3^rd December 1944. Guthrie openly back Roosevelt’s campaign for a fourth Presidential term.  The losers began to single out communism as a scare tactic. Guthrie was considered too left-wing and so lost his radio programme in February 1945. His seaman’s papers were withdrawn following an unsubstantiated accusation of belonging to the Communist Party. Shortly after, he was drafted into the army.

            Following the dropping of the Atom Bombs on Japan in August 1945, Guthrie became an anti-war, anti-A-bomb activist.

            During 1946 the trade unions became extremely militant and several held long-lasting strikes.  Guthrie fought for the cause of non-unionised singers who were paid pittances. He was particularly interested in securing proper payment for radical singers like himself. Pete Seeger also fought for this cause. They and others formed People Songs. They wrote and sang songs of labour and encouraged people to send them similar songs that they had heard. As a result a library of about 20,000 songs was created. The trade unions weren’t interested in their activities but the FBI were. By the end of 1946 militant trade unions were damned for communist interference in their affairs. Guthrie was disillusioned by the crumbling of the militant labour movement. By late 1947 the House Committee of Un-American Affairs was revived.

            During the late 1930s Guthrie was sensitised by racism. Between then and the end of the war he learned how much the development of white songs owed to Negro singing. He memorialised racist miscarriages of justice in song and championed anti-racism. It is in this context that his album of 12 songs about the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti on trumped up charges in 1927 was written. Guthrie thought it was one of the best albums he had ever written but it was not released until 1964 because of its attitude to authority.

            In 1949 Paul Robeson was due to perform at an outdoor concert but was unable to because of police tactics. Shortly after he managed to perform at Peekskill. Guthrie was there and witnessed the police tactics personally. In the months following he wrote 21 songs. The following year he supported the integrationist presidential campaign of Stetson Kennedy. In 1951 he and his family spent time at Kennedy’s house in Florida. Kennedy was forced to go to London by the Ku Klux Klan which burned his house.

            By 1952 the entire radical wing of American folk music was under siege by the anti-communist movement. But Guthrie was increasingly debilitated by advancing Huntington’s disease. In September he bought a plot of land in Topanga, California for his family to live on. He was unable to play but could still write music. In 1951-2 Jack Eliot had become a virtual member of Guthrie’s household and learned to sing Guthrie’s songs exactly like Guthrie. He went to Europe between 1955 and 1961 where he raised people’s consciousness of Guthrie’s music through live performances and influential recordings.

            In March 1956 there was a tribute concert for Woody Guthrie in New York. Two months later he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in New York. People continued to write and meet him.

            The folk revival of 1963-4 spread his music worldwide. His achievements were widely acknowledged and his music was played on TV and radio shows.

            He was celebrated for his musical achievements but damned for his radicalism. In the course of his life he wrote about 3,000 songs of which only a limited number are vigorous protest songs.

            This book is well worth reading to explore the radical background to Guthrie’s music.

Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Teheran is a fascinating account of how a group of educated Iranian women managed to keep their interests in English Literature going in spite of the Iranian mullahs.

Now for the Historical Fiction.

The incomparable CJ Sansom's Sovereign fell to my eyes this month. He is a remarkable writer and provides you with all the tiny details of Henry VIII's London and wherever the latest case takes his lawyer/detective Matthew Shardlake If you haven't read any of his books before, you have a treat in store..

Solving murders is the task of the heroes in David Hewson's Death in Seville and in Minette Walters's Disordered Minds. And then, of course, there is the amazing work of Elizabeth Salander in Stieg Larsson's The girl with the dragon tattoo.

Normal novels are down to one this month: Peter Stamm's Seven Years.

                         Seven Years

                         Peter Stamm

                         Translated from German to English by Michael Hofmann

                          Pub in Germany 2009

                          Other Press, NY, 2010; iv + 264

This story, set in Munich, concerns an architect couple, their daughter and the wife’s aunt as well as a Polish woman. It is told large measure as a series of flashbacks which fit smoothly into the present.

            Sonia and the narrator meet as architecture students at university. They spend the next year working as interns for different architecture practices. He is in Munich and she is in Marseilles where she lives with her aunt.  He visits her and, in time realises that she loves him. Rather more than he loves her. Nevertheless, they marry and, in time, found their own architecture practice which flourishes. However hard they try, they are unable to have children.

            In parallel to this story is that of the relationship between the narrator and a Polish girl called Ivona. She is desperately in love with him, even when he is a student. However hard he tries she refuses to let him have penetrative sex with her but she will do anything else for him, however humiliating.

            Once he and Sonia are married and working, he loses contact with Ivona for seven years. Then she finds him again and they continue their affair. Eventually he forces her to have penetrative sex. In consequence, she becomes pregnant. As a staunch Roman Catholic she refuses to countenance abortion. The very difficult solution, involving a meeting between Ivona and Sonia, is for her to let Sonia and the narrator to adopt the baby on the day of its birth, Ivona is to be allowed a very short time with the baby before handing it over. When the baby arrives it is a girl who Sonia and the narrator name Sophia.  He has agreed to have nothing further to do with Ivona.

            Sonia fell in love with the baby and is soon back at work with a nanny caring for Sophia. Their practice flourishes and all seems well. Then comes the disaster of 2007. The firm struggles and eventually goes bankrupt. An adviser helps them slowly regain solvency. Sophia goes and works for six months for the Marseilles practice to earn regular money. The narrator oversees the conclusion of a building project in Munich. Living with Sophia, the narrator starts to drink heavily and tries to find Ivona again. Eventually he traces her to an apartment she shares with another Polish woman. But he never meets her.

            He and Sonia work extremely hard, no job being too small for them. After three years they manage to clear all their debts. The novel ends shortly after this, perhaps predictably, but it is still a surprise when it comes.

            This is a tightly written novel with very few spare words and no superfluous action at all. The translation is in beautiful English which makes the story unputdownable. It is well worth reading not just for the story but also for the complex relationships between the characters.

And Jack Mapanje's extraordinary poetry collection Beats of Nalunga.