Paging All Bookworms! discussion

Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art [1769-1790] 254 pages

Sir Joshua Reynolds was the first President of the Royal Academy, and these fifteen discourses were delivered to the students of the Academy at the annual prize-giving ceremonies, between 1769 and 1790. The discourses are mostly about the studies which Reynolds recommends to students, but it also contains a certain theory of the nature of art and criticisms of the artists he recommends or does not recommend for imitation. They were influential in turning the attention of British artists from the Flemish and Dutch schools to the painters of the Italian Renaissance, particularly Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian. Most importantly, they are a last protest of the Enlightenment against the rise of Romanticism, which began earlier in art than in literature or music. Since my temperament has always been more toward the Enlightenment than towards Romanticism, I found much in the discourses that I could agree with, although they also show some of the negative aspects which the Romantics were trying to correct. This is definitely a book that anyone interested in the arts should read.

The Expectant Detectives – Kat Ailes – 2.5**
A debut mystery featuring a group of VERY pregnant women who bond during prenatal class. Okay, there’s a reasonably cute premise here, but I thought Ailes was trying too hard. I never connected with any of the characters, and really didn’t care about their personal dramas, or, frankly, all that much about the murder. I didn’t even really warm up to Helen (the dog), despite her tendency to run off and return with an important clue.
LINK to my full review

Rocky Mountain Heat – Lori Wilde – 2**
Originally published as All of Me , this is book four in the Wedding Veil Wishes series. This is a typical enemies-to-friends-to-lovers plot with a little “magic” thrown in. It's a bit of a slow burn, but they do eventually have fantastic sex, after which they break up. But the magic of the wedding veil (and of the sweat lodge) will not be denied. It’s a pretty fast read, despite being very predictable.
LINK to my full review

Tom Lake – Ann Patchett – 5*****
This character-driven story set during the COVID pandemic is the kind of literary fiction that I love. I was completely captured by this tale about love - the reckless abandon of youth, the quiet strength of long-term relationships, the fierce protection of a parent for a child. I loved the relationships between the Nelson family members. Their solid foundation of love and respect gives them the grace to open their hearts to others, which is so beautifully shown in the ending.
LINK to my full review

Tiny Tales – Alexander McCall Smith – 3***
Subtitle: Stories of Romance, Ambition, Kindness and Happiness. This is a lovely collection of short stories and cartoons on a wide range of subjects, set in a variety of locations. I like Smith’s writing and the way he ponders philosophical questions. He doesn’t seem to take himself, or life, all that seriously, choosing to find joy and happiness in everyday life. Like all such collections, this is probably best enjoyed as one of those volumes you pick up now and again, to read one or two stories, rather than reading the entire book as one would a novel.
LINK to my full review

John Ruskin, Modern Painters v.1 [1843, “new edition” 1872, this ed. 1903] 758 pages [Kindle]

In 1736, the seventeen-year-old John Ruskin wrote an angry letter to the editor of Blackwood’s Magazine, protesting a negative review of some of J.M.W. Turner’s paintings. (Ruskin seems to have been obsessed with Turner’s paintings since he began copying his works when he was thirteen.) It was never sent (it’s included as an appendix to this edition of the book), but over the next seven years Ruskin expanded it into this more than six-hundred page treatise (not counting the editorial matter in the present edition) on “truth in art”, first published anonymously in 1743. It was revised several times; the edition I read from 1903 reprints the last edition supervised by Ruskin (1872), but gives the earlier version texts in footnotes or endnotes to the relevant chapters. Over time, he also added four more volumes.

Written between the ages of seventeen and twenty four, the first edition had all the strengths and all the faults of youth; on the one hand, a freshness and passionate enthusiasm for his subject matter, on the other a tendency to stridency of polemic and dogmatism in his own opinions. Given its origins, it has a near-hagiographic admiration for Turner and is somewhat unfair to everyone else. Subsequent editions toned down the faults somewhat, but Ruskin later more or less repudiated it as it stands and intended to rewrite it completely, which he never did.

The book is very organized; it is divided into Parts, which are subdivided into Sections, which are divided into Chapters, which are divided into numbered subheadings. Part I, Of General Principles, summarizes his theory of art; it is of course entirely representationalist, and actually limited almost entirely (at least in this first volume) to landscape painting. At times, it is obviously a kind of dialogue with the last book I read, Reynold’s Discourses on Art. (Ruskin later as a Professor lectured on the Discourses.)The first chapter is an introduction explaining his reasons for writing it; the second chapter is a very general account of his theory; the third through seventh chapters describe the hierarchy of “ideas” which he considers can be expressed in art: “Of Ideas of Power”, which are essentially the technical merits of execution, and which he considers the least important, although necessary, aspect of art; “Of Ideas of Imitation”, that is “mere imitation” or “illusion or deception” which he considers a lower form of art, and does not treat further except incidentally in contrasting it with the higher idea of truth; “Of Ideas of Truth”, that is imitation of the true nature of the subject, which is still not the highest goal of art, and which will occupy the rest of this first volume; “Of Ideas of Beauty”, which is higher; and “Of Ideas of Relation”, the highest goal, which is essentially the message the artist is intending to express by his painting. These last two ideas are left for later volumes. Section II goes in more depth into Ideas of Power, explaining the major “excellencies” to be looked for in an artist’s technical accomplishment considered without reference to the higher ideas.

Part II is titled “Of Truth”, and makes up most of the volume. Section I consists of two general chapters, four chapter giving a hierarchy of types of truth and which of them he considers more or less important, and a long final chapter applying his theories to specific painters, and explaining why they are all inferior to Turner in all respects. I should mention here his peculiar use of the terms “the ancients” and “the old masters”, by both of which he means neither the art of Classical Antiquity nor the Renaissance masters, but only the landscape painters of the seventeenth century, such as Claude, Nicholas and Gaston Poussin, and his particular bête noir, Salvator Rosa; by “the Moderns” he means the contemporary English landscape artists of the early nineteenth century, and he is always thinking particularly of Turner. Section II is entitled “Of General Truths” and contains chapters on Truth in Tones, in Colour, of Chiaroscuro, and two on Truth in Space (how to suggest distance); all of these have bad examples from the “ancients” and good examples from the “moderns”, mainly of course from Turner.

Section III is about the Truth of Sky, ie. how to paint clouds (five chapters); Section IV is about the Truth of Earth, or how to paint mountains and hills, and rocks (four chapters); Section V is about the Truth of Water, or how to paint lakes, rivers, waterfalls, and the sea (three chapters); Section VI has one chapter about the Truth of Vegetation, essentially about how to paint trees and foliage, and two chapters of conclusions (one on the Truth of Turner and one on the criticism of art).

In addition to Ruskin’s text, the book I read has a long introduction, copious notes, and an Appendix containing various letters and other texts relevant to the volume.

This was Ruskin’s earliest and most popular work. It is an extremely interesting study, which should be read by anyone interested in the representational art (especially landscape painting) of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, or in the philosophy of art. I plan to continue reading Ruskin chronologically, with volume two, the three volumes of The Stones of Venice, and then the last three volumes of this.

Lord Dashwood Missed Out – Tessa Dare – 2.5**
A typical regency romance with a devilishly handsome gentleman (who isn’t much of a gentleman), and a prim lady of impeccable reputation, forced to endure a potentially compromising situation, and then embracing the compromise wholeheartedly. Bodices heave, knees go weak, their passion overcomes any hesitancy. A fun, fast read.
LINK to my full review

I feel kinda bad posting my latest review after James's much more erudite review of Ruskin's Modern Painters.

Candide – Voltaire – 4****
This is perhaps Voltaire’s best-known work. The novella follows the callow Candide as he travels the world searching for his true love, Cunégonde, accompanied by his faithful servant / companion Cacambo. Voltaire managed to skewer virtually all “important” institutions of the day in this satirical fable. Among his adventures across the globe, Candide comes across Jesuits, the Inquisition, cannibals, El Dorado, pirates, an old woman, healers, merchants, etc. He frequently relies on the teachings of Pangloss to see him through, maintaining optimism in the face of adversity.
LINK to my full review

The Stonekeeper – Kazu Kibuishi – 3***
Book one in the Amulet graphic novel series for middle-school readers. There are strange creatures, secret passages, robots tasked with protecting the family, and evil forces obviously out to get them. The illustrations are very good. Not too dark for these old eyes to see clearly what is happening. This is a good thing as the speech bubbles are few and far between.
LINK to my full review

Uladzimir Karatkevich, King Stakh’s Wild Hunt [1964, Eng. tr. 1989] 273 pages [Kindle]

King Stakh’s Wild Hunt is a 1964 novel translated from Belarusian; it was the second book from Belarus for the World Literature group I am in on Goodreads. I downloaded the pdf for free from a site called Knihi-online.com. (The link to the pdf download was labeled in Belarusian (I think), but I took a chance and the pdf turned out to be in English.)

The novel is set in 1888, when Belarus was part of the Russian Empire; when the novel was written, it was a republic within the Soviet Union. The book contains much patriotic praise and description of the countryside, and much about the oppression of the peasantry and the decadence of the nobility not long after the formal abolition of serfdom. It is narrated by the protagonist, Andrei Belaretsky, long after the events, at the age of ninety-six. In 1888, he was a young but already noted ethnographer traveling to a wild part of the country to collect folklore, who finds that an ancient legend has seemingly returned to life.

The legend is the “Wild Hunt” of King Stakh. The “Wild Hunt” is a common theme of folklore throughout Central and Eastern Europe; the Belorussian version associates it with an early fifteenth-century rebellion against the Grand Duchy of Lithuania by a nobleman called “King Stakh”, who is betrayed by Roman Yanovsky, the ancestor of the current owner of the castle where Belaretsky finds himself. Although I believe the “King Stakh” version existed before Karatkevich, I have not been able to find any evidence of a historical King Stakh.

The novel begins in a Romantic style with Belaretsky making his way through a quagmire in a thickly forested region during a wild storm. After a near disaster to his carriage, he finds himself in front of an ancient, almost ruined castle, which turns out to be owned by an seventeen-year-old girl named Nadzeya Yanovsky. Initially, he sees her as much older and very strange, but later he realizes that she is just a girl who is terrified; but of what? He learns that the castle is visited by three supernatural characters, the “Little Green Man”, the “Blue Lady”, and most terrifying of all, the “Wild Hunt.” All three are supposed to be omens of death; the legend of the “Wild Hunt” is that it is lead by the ghost of King Stakh, who has vowed to destroy all Roman’s descendants to the eleventh generation. Nadzeya of course turns out to be the eleventh generation and the last of the Yanovskys, and she is convinced she will die around he eighteenth birthday.

After reading so many novels about the horrors humans inflict on each other, a mere supernatural horror story seemed less disturbing; in fact, the novel turns out after a few chapters not to be a horror story at all, but a detective story as the skeptical Belaretsky, aided by a young revolutionary who is in love with Nadeya and a peasant leader, determines to solve the mystery of the supposed apparitions. This novel, while not the most significant thing I’ve read lately, is undoubtedly one of the most enjoyable, and despite one or two elements of tragedy, it even has a happy ending.

Friend of My Springtime – Willa Cather – 3***
This is a lovely little story, but not particularly memorable. A mature woman writes about the residents of their “terrace,” particularly the Professor and Jack-a-Boy, a child who moves with his parents into the complex that has few children. It's rather sweet but predictable. Not her best effort.
LINK to my full review

Esperanza Rising – Pam Muñoz Ryan – 5 stars and a ♥
A middle-school novel that explores the experiences of Mexican migrants working the fields of California at the beginning of the Great Depression. What I really love about this story is that Esperanza is a realistic 13-year-old. Esperanza does finally realize that it is up to her to change her attitude; she must learn to let go of the past and to embrace that she is rich in the love of family and friends. The author note at the end is well-worth reading for the history lesson it imparts.
LINK to my updated review

The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society – C M Waggoner – 1*
Waggoner seemed to throw every idea she had at the wall, hoping something would stick. It sounded like it might be a fun, slightly different, kind of cozy, however, the result was dreadful. The plot was thin, the character development completely lacking. I finished only because it fit a specific challenge.
LINK to my full review

Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights [1847] (Norton Critical Ed., 1963) 372 pages
Lettis, Richard, and Morris, William E., A Wuthering Heights Handbook [1961] 246 pages

Preparing to read Maryse Condé’s La Migration des Coeurs, a retelling of Wuthering Heights, I decided to re-familiarize myself with Emily Bronte’s classic novel, which I hadn’t read for a half-century. I remembered little about it except for the basic plot, and I am sure back then I didn’t really understand it at anything beyond a simple plot level; certainly I had not read enough other English novels from that time period to realize how different Wuthering Heights actually was. In fact, I don’t think I really liked the book, as far as I can recall. This time around, with a lot more experience, I got somewhat more out of it, especially aided by the critical articles in the back (it was a Norton Critical edition) and another book of critical articles. If it still doesn’t impress me as much as her sister’s Jane Eyre, it is certainly better than, say, anything by Charles Dickens.

With a book that most people have read, either in High School English or in college, there isn’t much point in summarizing the plot, and I’m not enough of a literary expert to give an original interpretation, so I will limit myself to commenting on it by way of the critical material. Between the two books, and taking account of three duplicated articles, there were twenty-five articles. Given that both books were published in the early sixties, there were happily no examples of post-modernist literary theory jargon; most of the articles were helpful, although there were a few that seemed to miss the point of the book entirely.

The three articles that were in both books were C.P. Sanger’s 1926 article on “The Structure of Wuthering Heights”, which worked out the chronology of the events, Carl Woodrings’s “The Narrators of Wuthering Heights”, and one of the two best articles, John K. Matthison’s “Nelly Dean and the Power of Wuthering Heights”, which dared to describe Nelly Dean as a negative character and unreliable narrator, who by her own narrative is constantly lying, spying, and betraying both the children and her employers – my own impression of the book. He makes the good point that our constant disagreement with the narrator forces the reader to actively think about the novel rather than simply reading for the story. Another article went even further: James Hafley’s “The Villain of Wuthering Heights”, which argues that Nelly Dean is actually the Iago of the novel; I think that is a bit too extreme – there are many villains in the book, but Nellie is certainly one of the worst.

The article that I agreed with most (in other words, the one which came closest to my own experience reading the novel), however, was Arnold Kettle’s “Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights (1847)”, a chapter from a two-volume book, An Introduction to the English Novel. Kettle argues that the characters of Heathcliff and Catherine are not some sort of abstract symbols of “storm” and “calm” or “Nature” and “civilization”, or (just) passionately in love in some romantic sense, but are united in a common rebellion against the class-bound conventions of the other characters; that Catherine’s marriage with Edgar is not only a betrayal of her love for Heathcliff but more importantly a betrayal of their common values for the values they had been in unity against. This seems to me to make the most coherent sense out of the whole novel.

There were articles on all the major and minor characters, with one exception: Mr. Earnshaw; which I thought was a curious exception, since he is the “protagonist” of the novel in the literal sense – the character whose decisions initiate the entire action of the book.

The Stonekeeper’s Curse – Kazu Kibuishi – 2**
Book two in the Amulet graphic novel series for middle-school readers continues the adventure with the group making its way to the City of Kanalis in hopes of getting help. Kibuishi’s illustrations are stellar. And I also like that the dialogue bubbles are well designed, graphically speaking. However, I didn’t like the storyline as much as the first one. I guess the novelty has worn off for me.
LINK to my full review

John Ruskin, Modern Painters
v.2 [1846, this ed. 1903] 457 pages [Kindle]

After reading the first volume, this was an extreme disappointment. Whereas that gave us a concrete description of truth in art based on specific traits of specific paintings, presented in straightforward if sometimes overly poetic and enthusiastic language, this book is completely abstract and written in a very affected language, trying to imitate Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, which is at times almost as incomprehensible in language as it is in content.

Ostensibly, this second volume is a continuation of the first volume; that was divided into two parts, Part I being a general introduction and Part II being on Truth. This volume is Part III, On Beauty, and is divided into two sections. The first section is called the Theoretic Faculty (from the Greek “theoria” meaning mental observation) and is a very schematic theological theory of beauty, itself divided into Typical Beauty (by “typical” he means what mediaeval theologians called “typological”), which considers different aspects of beauty as “types” of the “attributes” of God (infinity, unity, comprehensiveness, justice, etc.), and Vital Beauty, or the appropriateness of things to their supposed “functions”. There is almost nothing concrete here, and he basically suggests (though not in so many words) that no one can be a great artist, or even understand great art, without being an evangelical Protestant.

The second section is a philosophical disquisition on the “faculty” of Imagination. This section is also fairly abstract, but it has somewhat more examples, and ends with a chapter on “exaggeration.”

While the first volume is concerned mainly with landscape painting, this volume deals also with the human figure. Instead of Turner, the examples, to the extant that there is anything concrete at all, are taken from what he refers to as the “religious school” of early Renaissance Italian painting and the Venetian school – the place of Turner is taken by his new enthusiasm, Tintoretto – and he sees the decline from Beauty as beginning with the later works of Raphael.

As with the first one, he later repudiated this volume and at one point resolved publically never to allow it to be reprinted, though he later changed his mind about this and decided that the content was mainly right even if the style was embarrassing. Nevertheless, this kind of Romantic religious theorizing, which really seemed largely nonsense to me, apparently appealed to the early Victorians; the book was an influence not only on later criticism but on artists as well, particularly the English school which called itself the “Pre-Raphaelites.”

The editors of this edition included other material relevant to the volume in a series of Appendices, including an early partial first draft; apparently he would have gone into more depth on the Beauty of Colour, and included a chapter on the Sublime, but the main difference seems to be that it was written in normal English prose. I think the book would have been better if he had just finished with that draft instead of imatating Hooker.

In any event, he waited another ten years before continuing with the third volume, writing other things (most importantly the three volumes of The Stones of Venice), and I will follow his example and read The Stones of Venice before coming back (if I do) to the third, fourth and fifth volumes of Modern Painters.

April 9

26. Maryse Condé, La migration des coeurs [1995] 336 pages [Kindle] [in French]

(There is an English translation by Condé’s husband, called Windward Heights.)

Condé’sLa migration des coeurs is an “homage” (in the words of the author; the publisher’s description calls it a “free variation”) to Wuthering Heights, set on the island of Guadeloupe just before1900 – the explosion of the Maine in Havana Harbor takes place as Rayzé (Creole for “heath”) is returning to L’Engoulvent (Wuthering Heights) – so about a hundred years later than Bronte’s novel, which is set in northern England around 1800.

When I first read Wuthering Heights, some fifty years ago, I read it very superficially, just as a story. When I re-read it last month, I realized that it actually had much more depth, although I admit it is not one of my favorite classic novels. Condé’s novel copies the superficial aspects and leaves out the depth and the mystery. On the other hand, it adds a very different social and political content.

In Wuthering Heights, there are two mysteries connected with Heathcliff: his origins, and the period when he leaves the Heights and returns wealthy. La migration des coeurs, in contrast, begins with the missing period, with Rayzé in Cuba, making his fortune in a Chinese laundry business and trying to become a Santeria sorcerer, thus showing an interest in ghosts before the death of Catherine. (We are told later that Rayzé and Catherine’s favorite place as children was the local cemetery.) There is a particular historical setting: the deaths of José Marti and Antonio Maceo are mentioned, and people are speculating about the reason why the Maine is in the harbor. I thought that perhaps the Spanish American War would play a role in the book, but it never returns to it. To be honest, I was already put off from the novel by these first two chapters. In the third chapter, Rayzé leaves his Cuban mistress and decides to return to Guadeloupe to “get revenge”, although we have no idea for what and the decision just seems as arbitrary to the reader as to his mistress. In fact, much in the novel is not really motivated, relying on the reader’s memory of the older book to accept that things happen the way they do.

On the boat back to Guadeloupe, he encounters by chance coincidence Nellie Raboteuse, fired, as we later learn, by Aimeric de Linsseuil (the Edgar Linton of Bronte’s book) and now working for a poor family elsewhere, and a fellow-passenger asks her who he is. She then launches into the beginning of the story of Wuthering Heights. Her account basically follows the earlier novel, but with differences, some trivial but others major.

While in Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff’s origin is mysterious – his appearance leads to the surmise that he may be a gypsy, but in any case he is something exotic to late eighteenth-century England – in La migration des coeurs, he is described as “a Black or half-Indian”, which is hardly exotic in Guadeloupe, where they are the majority of the population. This is the basic difference between the two novels; where in Wuthering Heights, the conflict is a clash of values between the rebellious Heathcliff and Cathy and the affluent upper-class Lintons, in La migration des coeurs it is recast as essentially racial, between the Black/Indian Rayzé and the de Linsseuil bekés (whites), with the mulatta Catherine torn between them in terms of ethnic rather than moral identity. The relationship of Heathcliff to Catherine, which is the center of the older novel, is far less important in this book; essentially it is just treated as a sort of background, and mainly for its racial aspect. While Heathcliff is always present in the older novel, either in fact or in the minds of the other characters, Rayzé tends to disappear from the narration for long stretches.

From then on, many of the events very loosely follow Wuthering Heights, but the characters of all the persons involved are totally different. While in the older book, Mr. Earnshaw is a gentleman farmer from an old family, although at a lower social level than the Lintons, who is concerned to educate his family and Heathcliff, in Condé’s novel Hubert Gaigneur (French for “earner”) is a coarse mulatto parvenu who is essentially held in contempt by his neighbors, and who, hating education, does not give either Catherine or Heathcliff any education at all. It is Justin (Hindley), an intelligent, forward-thinking intellectual, who after his father’s death (in a horseback accident) insists on giving the “savage” Catherine a proper education (from a live-in nun.) He also repairs L’Engoulvent and turns it from an impoverished sugar plantation into a prosperous model of multi-crop agriculture, with an Indian workforce specially imported from Calcutta. But not to worry; in the next chapter he is the unintelligent drunkard and wastrel of the original novel.

Among other differences, the personalities of Justin-Marie (who should be equivalent to Hareton) and Aymeric/Rayzé II (who should be equivalent to Linton) are exactly reversed. I won’t go into detail about the later developments, to avoid spoilers.

While the original novel is unified by the device of Nellie as narrator (relayed by Lockwood), Condé shifts between dozens of narrators, and often the narration strays from the supposed narrator into an anonymous third-person voice, which causes the book to basically fall apart into confusing and seemingly unrelated episodes with uncertain chronology. (This technique could have worked in the historical novel aspects, if it had been better done, as it is in many of Condé’s novels, but not in the Wuthering Heights plot.) The narrative voice is not consistent even within particular narrators; for example, Justin speaking to Rayzé about Catherine’s marriage (and incidentally telling us at length all about his past and what he thought and felt about everything, which Bronte lets us work out ourselves from the action and dialogue) goes on and on with poetic description of scenery and weather, and anachronistic sociological commentary, totally out of character, but then Condé seems to recollect that it is being spoken by Justin and suddenly we get a barrage of slang, Creole phrases, and foul language (with what I particularly dislike, words replaced by ellipsis marks).

Later on, Rayzé (who, like the original Heathcliff, is supposed to be reserved about anything concerning himself) meets two complete strangers and immediately tells them his entire life-story in detail, from his relationship to Catherine to his studies in Santeria. Of course, he is actually telling the reader. The book is full of this kind of inconsistency of tone and level, and of obvious anachronisms (would Nellie, who has certainly in rural Guadeloupe never seen a “horseless carriage”, really have described someone as “leaving in fourth gear”?)

About two-fifths of the way through the book, Rayzé, for no apparent reason (apart from the needs of the plot), decides to take his family away from L’Engoulvent to one of the larger cities, and the book takes a political turn. The political situation is not shown through the plot, but rather we get out-of-character monologues by various minor characters telling us about the racial history and current conditions on the island. In most cases there is no obvious occasion or audience for these monologues within the novel; they are just addressed to the reader. The actual events as they enter the story of Rayzé and the Linsseuils are unclear and the politics are confused and more superficially dealt with than in her other novels.

My most general impression is that Condé is trying to combine two different sorts of novel within the same book, the homage to Wuthering Heights and a historical novel about Guadeloupe in the period after the abolition of slavery, and perhaps for that reason neither is done well; the two aspects do not coalesce into any coherent whole.

I almost DNF’d this several times, but having liked many of Condé’s novels I persisted, hoping it would improve. It does have some good moments, especially in the second half which completely diverges from Wuthering Heights, and largely abandons the political plot as well, but on the whole it is far below her usual standards.

Death of a Pumpkin Carver – Lee Hollis – 2**
Book # 8 in the Hayley Powell Food and Cocktails Mystery series has Hayley’s ex-husband Danny back in town and suspected of murder. This is only the second book from this series that I’ve read. This one is better than the first one, but not stellar. There are several recipes, some of which I thought sounded delicious. But I thought that using pumpkin in each and every one of them was overkill. Lee Hollis is a pen name for a brother-sister writing team. Perhaps the disconnections in the book are a reflection of having more than one author contributing to the effort.
LINK to my full review

The Cloud Searchers – Kazu Kibuishi – 3***
Episode 3 in the Amulet series of graphic novels for the pre-teen crowd. The adventure continues with Emily, Navin and Leon enlisting a ship’s captain to take them in search of Cielis, the city hidden in the clouds, where they hope to find and join the Council. Whom to trust? And, can Emily channel the amulet’s power without being corrupted by it?
LINK to my full review

The Wind Knows My Name – Isabel Allende – 4****
Allende explores the immigrant experience, and particularly the heart-wrenching separation of children from their parents with a dual timeline: 1938 Austria and 2019 Arizona. My heart broke for both these families. I particularly liked how the two storylines eventually connect, improbable though that may be. It’s an emotionally difficult book to read and made me sad to recognize how little we have learned from history.
LINK to my full review

Bibby, Geoffrey, Looking for Dilmun [1969] 367 pages

Geoffrey Bibby was a British-born archaeologist who led a series of Danish expeditions into the Persian Gulf and the coastal regions of the Arabian Peninsula. This book is an excellent introduction to the archaeology of the region. It is well-written, neither too difficult nor too “popular”, and is careful to separate the facts of the excavations from the historical theories derived from them. It has some description of popular interest about the conditions of the excavations, combined with the archaeological detail of the seals and pottery which date the various layers (by analogy with similar seals and pottery from Mesopotamia), without becoming too technical. The book was written at the same time as the official publication of the archaeology, and probably incorporates as much as possible in a book for the general reader. I think Bibby has managed to strike a good balance.

The first of the expeditions from the University of Aarhus was begun in 1953 to investigate burial mounds on the island of Bahrein, which there is good evidence to identify as part of the “Land of Dilmun” which is mentioned in Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, both in literary tablets as the mythological home of the first humans and of Ziasudra/Utnapishtum, the original version of Noah, and later in many commercial documents as a major trading partner of the Mesopotamian civilization.

A series of expeditions from then up to the time of writing (1968, though a few sentences were added in press in 1969) discovered a city site with seven layers. City I, the earliest level, was dated from the early Sumerian period around 2800 down to around 2300 BCE (i.e. from the legendary time of Gilgamesh down to the time of Sargon of Akkad), with the grave mounds beginning probably from about the middle of that period; City II, apparently continuous with City I, went from that time down to around 1800 (the time of Hammurabi), and a temple of the god Inzak (probably identical with the Sumerian Enki) in the same area dates from that time. After a period of abandonment, the site is occupied again by City III, shown by the pottery to be contemporary with the Kassite period in Babylonia. After another, uncertain but probably longer hiatus, City IV is occupied during the Assyrian period in the eighth century; another hiatus and City V is occupied from about 500 to maybe 200, and there are more grave mounds. Cities VI and VII are basically Islamic and Portuguese forts.

In addition to the work on Bahrain, later years of expeditions extended our knowledge of the “Dilmun” culture north to the island of Falaika off the coast of Kuwait (and another Greek period city, which was identified by inscriptions as the city of Ithakos known from classical writers), while another culture, possibly ancient “Makan” was discovered in Abu Dabu farther south. There were also stone age flints discovered in Qatar, and at the very end of the last expedition mentioned, they discovered Ubaid culture artifacts as well as “Dilmun” culture contemporary with the oldest level in Bahrain at Tahut on the Arabian coast.

There is far too much information in this book to summarize in a brief review. I particularly liked the caution with which Bibby titled the book “looking for Dilmun” rather than “finding Dilmun”; despite the evidence that the finds on Bahrain and Falaika are almost certainly the land of Dilmun he refuses to be more certain than the evidence warrants.

Nicholas Clapp, The Road to Ubar: Finding the Atlantis of the Sands [1998] 342 pages

The Road to Ubar is a complete contrast to the previous book [Bibby’s Looking for Dilmun which I read last week]. Nicholas Clapp is not an archaeologist, but a documentary filmmaker; his wife, Kay, is a probation officer. After a trip to Muscat, they were looking for an excuse to return to Arabia, and fixed on the idea of looking for the legendary lost city of Ubar. After some research (mostly in ancient and mediaeval sources, including the Thousand Nights and a Night), Clapp concluded(mainly through wishful thinking) that Ubar (or Wabar), the Quranic Irem, and Claudius Ptolemy’s Omanum Emporium referred to the same place, somewhere in the Rub’ al Khali (the Arabian desert or “Empty Quarter”). He recruited a team of other explorers, including polar adventurer Sir Ranulf Fiennes, a JPL satellite expert, Ron Blom, and a few others. The self-image of most of the team was not as archaeologists but as explorer-adventurers in the tradition of Wendell Phillips, Lawrence of Arabia, and Bertram Thomas, whose adventures in Arabia were one of his main “sources”. They managed to get funding and permission from the Sultan to explore for the lost city. They also recruited one real archaeologist, Juris Zarins.

The first third of the book is taken up with myths, legends, fiction and even records of his own daydreams, as well as searching radar maps from the shuttle Challenger and various satellites, and of course the quest for funding and so forth. The second third is about the actual expedition in 1990. They spent a few days looking for Ubar in the desert, gave up after finding nothing and returned to the oasis and modern town of Shisur. While there, Zarins noticed that the fifteenth-century fort there, on the rim of a large sinkhole, seemed to have been re-built on top of an older fort. Immediately, Clapp decided that they had after all “found” Ubar.

He gives four reasons for the identification, although he never seems to have doubted it. First, location. It was in the right place. Except of course that it wasn’t; the legends all put Ubar where they originally looked for it, deep in the heart of the Rub’ al Khalit. Shisur is just outside the Rub’ al Khalit. Secondly, it was the right age. This was before the excavation had even been dated (and we’re never told exactly how it was dated, as opposed to the detailed accounts of pottery and so forth in Bibby’s book.), while the legends of course don’t date Ubar or Irem at all. Thirdly, it had the right “characteristics”; Irem is described as “many-columned” and the Shisur ruins had many towers (he tells us that the word translated as “columned” could actually refer to any tall structure.) Of course, the legends also claim that Ubar and Irem were cities full of gold and precious stones and all the paraphernalia of fantasy, nothing of which was ever found at Shisur; in fact it turned out not even to be a city as the word is usually understood. Finally, it was spectacularly destroyed by falling into the sinkhole, which agrees with one of the many accounts of Ubar’s destruction (it sank into the sands).

Zarins began excavating the north rim of the sinkhole and found a wall with several towers. He and some of his students would return for four seasons of digging. The story of the excavations was the only more or less worthwhile part of the book; it takes up at most about thirty pages. What they actually found was a fortified oasis, a watering-hole for frankincense-bearing camel caravans before entering the desert route north toward Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean. As it turns out (and the book never mentions) it was one of several such stations along the incense route. Certainly, it was worth excavating, but not a really important site, without the hype about Ubar. Another thing the book never happens to tell us (but is easy to discover in about five minutes of Internet research) is that Zarins himself, the only actual archaeologist of the group and the one who did the actual excavation, does not consider it to be Ubar. This to me is particularly significant, since Zarins’s own reputation would be much higher as the excavator of legendary Ubar than as the excavator of a fortified water-hole.

In the third part, Clapp gives us a highly speculative and in places actually fictional narrative of what he considers the history of “Ubar”. In all, the subtitle, "finding the Atlantis of the sands" (and Fiennes also wrote a book about the expedition called The Atlantis of the Sands, claiming credit for the whole expedition) seems to be unconsciously ironic; like Atlantis, Ubar is probably a completely legendary place, which attracts over-imaginative people to "search" for it.

As I said above, the only part of this I would consider worth reading is the thirty pages or so about the actual excavation, and even that only because there is so little popular writing on Arabian archaeology.

Harriet Crawford and Michael Rice, edd., Traces of Paradise: The Archaeology of Bahrain 2500 BC-300 AD [2000] 223 pages

After finishing Bibby’s Looking for Dilmun last week, as always when I read an older book of archaeology or any other science in which progress is still being made, I wondered what new discoveries had been made in the fifty years since it was written. When I saw the title of this book, I naturally thought it would be a book about the archaeology of Bahrain thirty years farther along, but that’s not exactly what it is. It is actually the annotated illustrations of an exhibit which was held in London in 2000 of artifacts from the National Museum in Bahrain. Nevertheless, it is a very good book and the introductions and captions do give some idea of what has been found since the time of the Danish expeditions.

The first thing to note is just that there is a National Museum in Bahrain, and a Directorate of Antiquities, both developments that Bibby was hoping for at the time of the first expedition. As far as the archaeology goes, in the eighties and nineties there were a series of new expeditions, especially by the French, which further excavated the settlement which Bibby and Glob had begun to dig in the sixties; they also excavated a smaller settlement called Saar. Archaeologists from Bahrain itself have done much work in the necropoleis. There have also been additional excavations in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and other parts of the mainland, which have given the work in Bahrain more context.

The book consists mainly in over 360 color photographs of artifacts, many half or full page, as well as other photographs and maps, compared to a handful of black and white photos and line drawings in the Bibby book (which was actually quite good for a 1960s era paperback); I would recommend reading the two together, Bibby for the account of the excavation and this book for the illustrations and some updated information.

The Last Council – Kazu Kibuishi – 3***
Book # 4 in the Amulet graphic novel series has Emily hoping to join the Guardian Council, she has to endure several challenges to prove herself worthy, and in order to succeed she needs to find a way to trust others. The key is trusting the correct source / entity, when she has both allies and enemies where she didn’t expect them.
LINK to my full review

The Storm We Made – Vanessa Chan – 3***
This work of historical fiction, tells the story of the Pacific Theater in WW2 with a different focus. Chan explores personal choice, desires, memories, anxiety, desperation and the relationships between oppressors and the oppressed. She also writes about “the ambiguity of right and wrong when survival is at stake.” Her images are stunning, at times frightening. And the tension never left this reader. Even during scenes of relative peace, one knew that danger was just around the corner.
LINK to my full review

Just Mercy – Bryan Stevenson – 4****
Subtitle: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Bryan Stevenson was a young attorney when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need. This was compelling and inspiring. Stevenson was up against a system that had been born of deeply entrenched fear and hatred and racism. For him “liberty and justice for all” are not just words but a call to action.
LINK to my full review

Richard W. Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel [1975] 327 pages

“Traditional wisdom holds the wheel to be one of mankind’s cleverest inventions, and the camel to be one of God’s clumsiest . . .”

Richard W. Bulliet, a historian of the Islamic period, sets out in this book to resolve a paradox that most people aren’t even aware of: after thousands of years using the wheel, sometime in the fourth or fifth century (in any case, well before the rise of Islam) wheeled vehicles entirely disappear from North Africa to the border of India, not to return until the incursions of Western imperialism in the nineteenth century (and not fully until the invention of the truck.)

The first chapter of the book documents this claim and offers a solution: the use of the camel as a pack animal was just economically more advantageous than any possible animal-drawn vehicle of the time, in any area where the camel was widely available and suitable to the climate. The remainder of the book explores related questions: why were wheeled vehicles replaced when they were, rather than much earlier or much later; why was the replacement so total, rather than wheeled vehicles and camels coexisting for different purposes; why did replacement not take place in India and Central Asia, in the range of the Bactrian (two-humped) camel, etc.

In the course of discussing these questions, Bulliet gives a fairly comprehensive account of the first domestication of the dromedary (one-humped) camel in Southern Arabia, the evolution of various types of saddles, the use of camel caravans in the incense trade, the spread of the camel north into Northern Arabia, Northern Africa, Mesopotamia and Iran, the relations between the nomads and settled areas in different times and places, the differences between the dromedary and the Bactrian camel, the effects of the rise and spread of Islam on camel distribution, and many other topics.

He explicitly insists that the cultural attitudes, religious and otherwise, towards camels and wheeled vehicles were derived from the material, economic realities rather than the other way around. One of the most interesting chapters details the differences in city planning between wheeled and non-wheeled societies.

Ruodlieb, der älteste Roman des Mittelalters [mid-eleventh century; Seiler ed., 1882] 349 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in Latin and German]

To be honest, judging by what little is extant, and what little of that little I have actually read, the eleventh century was not a highpoint of European literature. Ruodlieb may have been one of the best Latin poems of the time. It is hard to tell, because it is mostly lost; some twenty-one fragments have been discovered, used as binding material for later books, and even these have much of the text cut away or illegible. They are parts of two manuscripts; one is full of changes and corrections and was probably the author’s rough draft; the other, only two fragments from another library, are from a more finished copy. The poem is usually considered to have been left unfinished. What we make of it is very dependent on how the editors arrange the surviving leaves and “complete” the cut away lines.

The edition I read from Open Library is the first critical edition edited by Friedrich Seiler, with a 200-page introduction and notes in German, and a glossary of the more unusual words or meanings, published in 1882; after I finished it, in looking for some details on the Internet, I discovered that there is a freely downloadable recent edition (Edwin H. Zeydel, ed., Ruodlieb, The Earliest Courtly Novel (after 1050), 1959) with an introduction and translation into English. This would have been quite useful to me; although the language of the poem is simpler than most other surviving poetry of the eleventh century, it is a much more difficult sort of Latin than the tenth-century works I read last year (e.g. the Waltharius and the works of Hrotsvitha). I will probably read at least the introduction to Zeydel’s version; skimming through the text and translation, it seems that his guesses as to the missing words are often quite different from Seiler’s.

The author of the poem is unknown; Seiler disposed of some earlier guesses, and modern scholars haven’t made any progress since. It is probable that he was a monk at the abbey of Tegernsee, where the manuscript may have remained, although even this is not absolutely certain. The first editors (including Jacob Grimm) dated the poem (rough draft) to the late tenth century, Seiler to around 1030, and Zeydel and most recent scholars to sometime after 1050. The finished fragments were probably recopied about ten years after it was written.

The subtitles to both editions call it the first romance or courtly novel; actually, it combines features of both epic and romance. Seiler’s introduction gives analogues/possible sources for much of the material, but the anonymous author has combined and expanded his sources in a very original way, and also includes much realistic description based on the actual life of his time, including peasant life which is seldom included in any kind of mediaeval literature, which makes it a very important document independently of its literary value. In any case it is a precursor of the romance form which arose in the twelfth century in the vernacular languages, although it may not have actually been known or had any influence on them (it was written in Germany and the earliest romances of the next century are in Old French, and no existing source mentions or quotes it.)

The plot as far as we can figure it out begins with the hero Ruodlieb, unappreciated in his own country and with many enemies, setting out for a neighboring kingdom (called “Africa”, although it is obviously based on Bavaria) to try his luck. He is hired as a hunter and warrior and becomes a favorite of the king. There is a war between the “major” king and a neighboring “minor” king, which ends with a reconciliation and gift-giving, based according to Seiler on an actual event in 1023.

He then receives a letter, which he gets a cleric to read to him; the cleric makes out the gist of the letter (a realistic detail, the laity is completely illiterate and the clergy reads with some difficulty.) The letter is from his mother, and reports that his enemies are all dead or mutilated and it is safe for him to return. He takes his leave of the king, who gives him the choice of a material reward for his long service or good advice. He chooses the advice and the king takes him aside and gives him twelve precepts. The remainder of the poem is presumably based on his following or not following each of the twelve precepts, although only four or five are illustrated in the surviving fragments.

He makes his way home after some adventures, and then starts on a new adventure to find a wife. This is the point at which the poem breaks off.

Likely To Die – Linda Fairstein – 3***
Manhattan DA Alexandra Cooper gets a high-profile case when a leading neurosurgeon is brutally murdered in her office at a major medical center. I really like that Fairstein has given us such a strong female heroine. Alex is an independent, intelligent, strong woman who excels at her job and has a wide range of colleagues and friends who support and admire her. I particularly like her relationship with detective Mike Chapman. I was sure I had it figured out … only to be completely surprised at the reveal. Good job!
LINK to my full review

This Is Going to Hurt – Adam Kay – 3***
Adam Kay wanted to be a doctor. He was drawn to the idea of helping people in distress. When he was a medical student and a “junior doctor” (residency in the USA), he kept a diary of his experiences. This memoir is based on those entries. I’ve always been interested in medicine and the work done by medical professionals. This promised humor along with information. He delivered on both those promises but I wasn’t a great fan of the diary-entry format. I thought it lacked narrative flow.
LINK to my full review

Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories [1859-1895] 304 pages [Eng. tr.]

Leo Tolstoy is one of the greatest writers in the nineteenth-century Realist tradition. He was also the creator of a very confused theory of Christian anarchism. This Signet paperback had four of his best-known stories (actually more or less novellas) in English translation (unfortunately I have never managed to learn Russian.)

Family Happiness is one of his earlier stories, about a failed relationship between an older man and a young woman who misunderstand each other’s values. The Death of Ivan Ilych is the best of his stories I have read; it describes the death of a judge who has devoted his life to ambition and doing what is expected of him, but realizes at the end that it has been at the cost of his never having really lived the way he should have. The Kreutzer Sonata is his most famous story, or at any rate the one which was the most controversial when it was written. I did not like it as much, and I think it exhibits all the contradictions in his thought; on the one hand, he understands that the institution of marriage as it existed in the Russia of his time was oppressive, and has some very modern sounding criticisms of the “meat market” and using women as mere sex objects, but on the other he has an Christian ascetic opposition to sex which causes him to misunderstand the causes, and of course none of his stories have any usable solutions. Master and Man deals with the relationship between a landlord and one of his workers; it is a great story artistically but reduces the problem to one of Christian altruism.

Karel Čapek, War with the Newts [1936. Eng. tr. 1937] 241 pages

War with the Newts is a literary, comic and satirical science fiction novel, written in Czechoslovakia. It satirizes capitalism, colonialism, war, and nationalism as well as other aspects of political and everyday life. Written in the thirties, it satirizes fascism and naziism as well as the Western “democracies”. It is a real classic, which anyone should read whether or not they are interested in science fiction as a genre. I re-read this for a group on Goodreads.

The Man Who Died Twice – Richard Osman – 3***
I really loved the initial book in the series but was less enamored with this sophomore effort. I’m sure it’s partly due to all the stuff going on in real life right now which keeps my brain occupied elsewhere than in the pages of a good story. Still, the group is just as endearing as they were in the first outing, and, of course, they still get the best of the bad guys. There are some moments of humor to break the tension, and a very satisfying ending. LINK to my full review

A Nobleman’s Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel – K J Charles – 3***
This is the second in the Doomsday Books series of Regency romances, but I think it can easily be read as a standalone work. This was quite a fun and steamy romance. The passion between Luke Doomsday and Rufus d’Aumesty, Earl of Oxney, could easily heat the entire drafty manorial compound! Of course, there are several twists and turns in the basic plot to keep one turning pages. But let’s be serious … the best parts are the naughty ones!
LINK to my full review

In the Land of Second Chances – George Shaffner – 3.5***
In Ebb, Nebraska, life is slow, and people are nice. That’s the way they like to live. Wilma Porter runs the Come Again Bed-and-Breakfast, and her newest guest, Vernon Moore, is about to change Ebb in ways no one expected. I was completely charmed by the residents of Ebb, and by the mysterious Vern Moore. This little book made me think while it entertained me. It’s a wonderful fable about hope and faith and community.
LINK to my full review

Alain Chartier, La Belle Dame sans mercy [1424 or 1426, ed. Charpennes, 1901] 101 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in Middle French]

Alain Chartier’s La Belle Dame sans mercy is one of the best-known poems of the late Middle Ages in France. It gave rise to a number of continuations and replies (referred to collectively as the Querelle de La Belle Dame sans mercy) and remained popular longer than most other poetry of the period; along with the Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s massive Roman de la Rose it was read up until the Renaissance reached France. Chartier’s poem is much shorter, about fifty pages in the edition I read. (The first half of the book is an introduction by the editor, Lucien Charpennes,, which discusses the poet’s life, arguing that after having been a high official of the King for a time he was in disgrace up until about the time this was written – something that I have not seen any evidence for in anything else I have read about him; he was of course in exile with the court of the Dauphin during the war with Henry V and Burgundy – and his other works, both poetry and prose in both Latin and French.)

After a short prologue, the poem is a debate between a lover and his maistresse; his part of the debate is a fairly normal example of courtly love poetry, similar to what I read last month by Guillaume de Machaut, professing his service to the lady, but hers is quite outside the norm for mediaeval poetry. She basically considers this rather pathetic lover to just be annoying, and tells him essentially to get over her, she doesn’t believe his verbal claims and in any case doesn’t recognize his service as obliging her in any way. Charpennes describes the poem as “feminist”.

The book also includes the Excusation, Chartier’s defense of the poem which hardly seems convincing or even sincerely meant.

Dominique Locas, Franchise et franchise dans La Belle Dame sans Mercy ou l’endroit et l’envers de la Rose [2006] 125 pages [Kindle] [in French]

In looking for Chartier’s La Belle Dame sans mercy online last week, I happened to find this Université de Québec à Chicoutimi Master’s thesis which interprets the poem in comparison with the Roman de la Rose. As often with this sort of academic document, it was more useful for the discussion of the recent literature about the poem than for the author’s own peculiar reading of it.

Honestly, I could not imagine anyone naturally understanding it the way this author does, particularly the claim that the narrator’s maistresse betrayed him rather than actually having died. The comparison with the Rose was interesting, although I think it is a mistake to simply assume that because a passage alludes to the earlier poem, it must be saying the same thing, rather than for example implicitly criticizing it. Certainly later poems in the “querelle” took it as a reply to the viewpoint of the Rose. The discussion of Chartier’s own Complainte contre la Mort makes the opposite error, assuming that Chartier means completely different things by the same language.

There was also discussion of other ancient and mediaeval literature, including Boethius, Chrétien de Troyes, andLes Éschecs d’Amours (the last I haven’t read and will add to my TBR for the next time I make a pass through the fifteenth century). Locas considers the Dame to be the villain of the poem and considers the “feminist” reading to be anachronistic, but considering that Chartier was contemporary with Christine de Pizan, who was certainly a feminist, and that there were explicitly feminist responses in the fourteenth century itself, I’m not so sure. If the poem was a conservative affirmation of traditional values, it is hard to see why it was so controversial

The Supreme Macaroni Company – Adriana Trigiani – 3.5***
This is the third installment in the story of the Angelini Shoe Company in Greenwich Village, New York. I really like Trigiani’s books. She features strong heroines with complex backgrounds and conflicted feelings. They almost always end happily, or at least hopefully … even though there is plenty of tragedy involved (and isn’t life, itself, like that?).
LINK to my full review

Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul et Virginie [1788] [in French]

While Paul et Virginie is somewhat important in the history of eighteenth-century French literature, which I am beginning to read (trying to fill in my gaps), I have to admit that I didn’t like it at all. It is a proto-Romantic novel based on a Rousseauean opposition of Nature (and sentimental religion) to Society. The protagonists are two young people who grow up together in an isolated, “natural” community on the Isle de France (what is now Mauritius) with their single mothers and their slaves, a few goats and a faithful dog. There is also a neighbor who is the narrator of the events, many years later, to a casual tourist on the island.

There are only three actual events in the book: when the two children return a runaway slave to her master and ask him to “forgive” her for running away; when Virginie leaves the island to visit her rich aunt in France, and when she drowns in a shipwreck on her return. The majority of the book is pious sermonizing by the narrator, especially at the end.

The book condemns greed and class prejudice, although in a rather vague way, but offers no alternative except to live alone in a tropical paradise with your slaves to do all the work. Although the book advocates treating your slaves humanely, it takes slavery for granted as part of Nature rather than Society. To be honest, I found it really boring.

Bernardin published a deluxe edition by subscription in 1803, with a “Preamble” almost half the length of the novel, which is partly a self-pitying autobiography and partly a presentation of his bizarre theories of geology and astronomy which he claims refute Newton’s idea of gravity. This is also printed in the Flammarion paperback edition which I read.

Arvède Barine, Bernardin de St. Pierre [1893] 209 pages [Eng. tr.]

A few years ago, I decided to start reading eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature starting with Blake, but I immediately pushed it back to Voltaire, and then to the seventeenth-century, and then to the sixteenth, and occasionally back to the fifteenth – my usual infinite regress. As of now, I have at least two or three years left for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so I decided to split the two projects and start the eighteenth century as a separate project again: Paul et Virginie, a couple by the Marquis de Sade, Phyllis Wheatley, and then finally to start Blake as I intended so long ago, then, if I don’t add anything else (which I know I will) Robert Burns, Mme. de Stael, and on to the nineteenth century with Wordsworth and the other Romantic poets.

In any case, I read Paul et Virginie Monday, and I decided to read this short biography of the author which I had sitting in my garage. It is an old book from 1893 and some of the ideas are somewhat outdated, though not as much as Bernardin’s own. What I got from this was that Bernardin was basically a stubborn and unlikeable person who throughout his life quarreled with nearly everyone he came in contact with (I had already guessed this from the Preamble he wrote to Paul et Virginie ). The chapter on his Études de nature was the longest in the book and provided some understanding of his pseudo-scientific theories (he essentially began from the premise that the world was created for the happiness of man, and explained everything by final causes; his views on volcanoes and the tides for example were devised to make them fit the idea of human happiness.) The most interesting of course was the chapter on Paul et Virginie, which explained what he intended by it (to demonstrate that living in “nature” results in happiness, while reason and knowledge lead to unhappiness – he was a disciple and personal friend of Rousseau), which made it appeal to the religious sentimentalists of his time, and why it is considered important in French literature (it was the first novel to use detailed observation and description of landscape and flora and fauna, which influenced the later Romantic writers.)

This would be a good introduction to Paul et Virginie, except that it is long out of print and probably unavailable outside my garage.

Mrs Nash’s Ashes – Sarah Adler – 3***
This was a contemporary rom com, a road trip, and an historical F/F love story all wrapped in one novel. I was much more interested in Mrs Nash’s story than in the push / pull attraction between Millie and Hollis. I wish Adler had just told the story of Rose and Elsie who met and loved one another while serving as WAVES during WW2. Still, it held my attention, and I enjoyed it.
LINK to my full review

Gally, Michèle, and Basso, Hélène, edd., Être poète au temps de Charles d’Orléans (XVe siècle) [2012] 295 pages

This is a collection of eleven articles by different authors, together with an Introduction and Postface, dealing with different aspects of the poetry of Charles d’Orléans and his contemporaries (e.g. François Villon and Michault Taillevent).

Articles on Mediaeval Literature (25 articles, approx. 500 pages)

Every so often because some work I have read is particularly interesting or particularly difficult, I download some secondary articles and call it a “book” if there are enough pages. Unfortunately, our state library no longer offers access to Ebsco’s Academic Source Premier (it has been replaced by Gale’s OneFile, which is hardly a real substitute, and oddly, according to what I’ve read on the Internet, is actually more expensive), but on the other hand I have discovered openedition.org which has journals and university press books (mostly from French or Francophone publishers) available for free. You win some and lose some. Over the past few months I have read poetry by Gauthier de Coinci and Rutebeuf (13th cent.), Guillaume de Machaut (14th cent.), and Alain Chartier and Charles d’Orleans (15th cent.) and have read these articles (listed in my thread).

Jean Molinet, La Ressource du Petit Peuple [after mai 1481] 25 pages

Jean Molinet (1435-1507) was a poet in the service of Charles Duke of Burgundy; this work is essentially an argument for supporting the Burgundians as the “peace party”. It includes a number of short poems in an allegorical prose framework. The allegory describes a personified Justice and her infant, the Small People (i.e. the non-nobles), who have been beaten and starved by personifications of various disasters under the command of Tyranny. Her sister, Truth, finds her and attacks the warring nobles in a poem which is often reprinted as the Discours de Verité, and is a stirring description of the woes of the common people at the end of the Middle Ages. Then Counsel takes up the poetry, along with Justice, and the poem ends with a eulogy of the Burgundian Power which will allegedly make peace and restore justice and prosperity for the people (rather questionable, to say the least.) The poetry is very artificial and involves long lists of terms.

Tadeusz Różewicz, Sobbing Superpower: Selected Poems of Tadeusz Różewicz [2011] [Eng. tr.] 364 pages [Kindle, Open Library]

Sobbing Superpower is a translation from Polish of 125 poems from twenty-six collections. The poems were written between 1945 and 2008. I wish I were better at reviewing contemporary poetry; these are among the best I have read in the last few years. The language is simple and direct; the poetry is of course filled with imagery, but not the kind that needs to be decoded to be understood. The earliest poems deal with the Second World War and the Holocaust; later he turns toward satirizing consumerism, and the last poems contain more literary and personal allusions, which are all either obvious or explained in the abundant notes at the end of the volume. I'm not sure why the title was chosen as the poem of that name was not one of the best, in my opinion.

Woman of Light – Kali Fajardo-Anstine – 3***
An epic covering five generations of an indigenous Chicano family in the American West. The back-and-forth in timeframe and location made for some confusion at times. But it reminded me of an oral history, the way my grandparents, aunts and uncles would regale us kids on a summer night with stories of our ancestors.
LINK to my full review

Whiskers Of the Lion – P L Gaus – 3***
This is book number nine in the Amish-Country Mystery series, but the first one I’ve read. It was an interesting mystery with a great cast of (I presume) regular characters. Readers who might assume that “Amish” means a cozy mystery will be wrong. This is a hard-hitting crime novel, that happens to be set amid the Amish communities of Ohio. I would recommend reading the series in order, beginning with number one.
LINK to my full review

John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice : v.1. The Foundations [1851] 403 pages

The first of Ruskin’s three volumes on the architecture of Venice, this is a basic introduction to architecture in stone and brick with particular reference to Mediaeval architecture (the so-called Gothic style). The first half (after an introduction which is basically an attack on the Renaissance and the Catholic Church) describes the constructional principles, beginning at the base and going up through shafts, the wall, the cornice and the roof, then dealing with arches and apertures (doors and windows). The second half describes principles of ornamentation in the same order.

Ruskin has the merit of being one of the first critics to appreciate the art and architecture of the Middle Ages; in that respect he is the antipode of Vasari, my first reading in my art history project, who repudiates the entire period from the end of the Roman Empire to Cimabue and Giotti. On the other hand, he is one of those people who is temperamentally incapable of acknowledging more than one way as “right”, so he can only praise the Gothic style by repudiating the Renaissance and all later architecture and art (before Turner, of course.) For him, Cimabue and Giotti are not the beginning of the Renaissance but the final gasp of the Middle Ages before the Decline.

Ruskin is obnoxiously Christian and fanatically Protestant; again, there is only one way. He devotes part of his introductory chapter to a screed against Parliament for having recently allowed some civil rights to Catholics in England; he asks what would happen if that were applied to Ireland, and laments that the government lacks the moral courage to deport the majority of the population of Ireland (he doesn’t say where to) and replace them by “hard-working Protestants”. Throughout the book he brings in arguments from religion at the most unlikely places, and clearly as in the second volume of Modern Painters he bases his aesthetic preferences on religious considerations. He sees the Church of the Middle Ages as a composition of Protestant tendencies (responsible for what is good in Gothic art) and Papist tendencies (responsible for whatever is rigid or formalistic), and dates the decline of art to the separation of the two at the Reformation, when the Papists (or as he also calls them, the “Heathen Popes”) came to dominate art at the Renaissance.

Leaving aside the Renaissance and Catholic-bashing, and some of the value judgements, the book seems to be a good introduction to the principles of Gothic architecture, at least in its Italian incarnation, to the extent that I can judge (I have only read one other book on Gothic art, and that was about fifty years ago.) I learned a lot from it.

John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice : v.2. The Sea Stories [1853; 3rd ed. 1874] 397 pages

In this second volume, Ruskin turns to the architecture of Venice. After a sort of prologue dealing with the churches of Torcello and Murano, he divides the book into two parts. The first part deals with the Byzantine (Romanesque) architecture of the early Middle Ages; it begins with a long general essay on the nature of Byzantine architecture and then proceeds to the examples, St. Marks cathedral and what little ruins remain of the domestic architecture. The second and longer part begins with another long essay on the nature of Gothic architecture and then deals with the domestic architecture and a long chapter on the Ducal Palace.

Ignoring as usual the religious polemics, the book is a good introduction to Romanesque and Gothic architecture.

John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice : v.3. The Fall [1853; last ed. 1886] 489 pages

I learned much from the first two volumes of The Stones of Venice, but nothing from this third volume. Ruskin has decided to spare the reader the details or any illustrations of a style he considers “vile” and “immoral”, that is to say the Renaissance, and instead edify us with his opinions on religion, with digressions on education and various other subjects having little if any connection with architecture or Venice. If I hadn’t invested the time to read the first two volumes, I probably wouldn’t have finished this one.

The text is divided into four chapters. The first chapter, entitled “The Early Renaissance”, tells us that the Late Gothic style degenerated into over-ornamentation and as a reaction the architects returned to an imitation of the earlier Byzantine style. I don’t mean to say he describes this or elaborates on it; the previous sentence is all the architectural content of the chapter, the rest is just religion. The second chapter is entitled “The Roman Renaissance”, in which the architects imitate “pagan” architecture; again no actual description. The third chapter is called “The Grotesque Renaissance”, in which the Renaissance style itself degenerates. The only architectural feature mentioned is a single ugly head which he gives as an illustration; the rest is a general theory of the “grotesque” with no reference to actual examples. The fourth chapter is called “Conclusion” and is just a miscellaneous rehashing of the religious discussion of the first three chapters and an argument that modern architecture is entirely bad and should be replaced by a return to the Gothic. In the later edition, he adds a fifth chapter called “Castel-Franco” after a painting by Tintoretto which is mentioned in two or three sentences; this is basically another miscellaneous chapter with the same content as the “Conclusion”.

If this seems like I am exaggerating, I will quote from his own description of what The Stones of Venice is about:

"The advent of Christianity for the first time rendered possible the full development of the soul of man, and therefore the full development of the arts of man.
"Christianity gave birth to a new architecture, not only immeasurably superior to all that had preceded it, but demonstrably the best architecture that can exist; perfect in construction and decoration, and fit for the practice of all time.
"This architecture, commonly called “Gothic”, though in conception perfect, like the theory of a Christian character, never reached an actual perfection, having been retarded and corrupted by various adverse influences; but it reached its highest perfection, hitherto manifested, about the close of the thirteenth century, being then indicative of a peculiar energy in the Christian mind of Europe.
"In the course of the fifteenth century . . . the Christianity of Europe was undermined; and a Pagan architecture was introduced, in imitation of that of the Greeks and Romans.
The architecture of the Greeks and Romans themselves was not good, but it was natural . . . , good in some respects and for a particular time.
"But the imitative architecture introduced first in the fifteenth century, and practised ever since, was neither good nor natural. It was good in no respect, and for no time. All the architects who have built in that style have built what was worthless, and therefore the greater part of the architecture which has been built for the last three hundred years, and which we are now building, is worthless. We must give up this style totally, despise it and forget it, and build henceforward only in that perfect and Christian style hitherto called Gothic, which is everlastingly the best.
"This is the theorem of these volumes."

About half-way through I realized who he reminded me of: William F. Buckley, Jr. The Appendix VII in particular could have been called “God and Man at Oxford”. If you are old enough to remember Buckley, you know all you need to know about Ruskin in the text of this volume.

I say “in the text” because he follows it with an 82 page “Index” giving the principle buildings of Venice in alphabetical order with comments on the architectural features of interest and the sculptures, and especially the paintings, which they contain; this travel guide was the only partially redeeming feature of the book, although it can give the impression that Tintorello was the only painter in Renaissance Venice. There is a very long ordinary index to the three volumes; there is no bibliography.