www.richardjespers.com - Blog

Rosshalde: Story of a Child

5/20/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
A working definition of fathering might be this: fathering is the act of guiding a child to behave in ways that lead to the child's becoming a secure child in full, thus increasing his or her chances of being happy and fruitful as a young adult.
Clyde Edgerton
Author of Walking Across Egypt
Born May 20, 1944

C. Edgerton

My Book World

Hesse, Hermann. Rosshalde. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Bantam, 1956 (1914).

Spoiler: This novel is primarily about the death of a young child, a son named Pierre. But it is also about the death of a family, how a husband and wife drift apart and divide their love between two sons, the elder “belonging” to the wife and Pierre belonging to his father. But there isn’t much belongingness for any of the family members. The book overall is about the end of their life together at the estate called Rosshalde, an expansive property, a mansion, that seems to have a life of its own. An enchanting but sad read.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | J. R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip

A Writer's Wit: Malcolm X

5/19/2022

We are not fighting for integration, nor are we fighting for separation. We are fighting for recognition as human beings. We are fighting for . . . human rights.
Malcolm X
Author of By Any Means Necessary: Speeches, Interviews, and a Letter
Born May 19, 1925

Malcolm X

TOMORROW: My Book World | Hermann Hesse's Rosshalde

A Writer's Wit: Tina Fey

5/18/2022

When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do?” If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you.
Tina Fey
Author of Bossypants
Born May 18, 1970

T. Fey

FRIDAY: My Book World | Hermann Hesse's Rosshalde

A Writer's Wit: Jill Johnston

5/17/2022

Man is completely out of phase with nature. Nature is woman. Man is the intruder. The man who re-attunes himself with nature is the man who de-mans himself or eliminates himself as man.
Jill Johnston
Author of Lesbian Nation
Born May 17, 1929

J. Johnston

FRIDAY: My Book World | Hermann Hesse's Rosshalde

Highsmith's Diaries and Notebooks

5/13/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Take it from someone who fled the Iron Curtain: I know what happens when you give the Russians a green light.
Madeleine Albright
Author of Fascism: A Warning
Born May 13, 1937

M. Albright

My Book World

Von Planta, Anna, ed. Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks. With an introduction by Joan Schenkar. New York: Liveright, 2021.

This more than fifty-year compendium of Highsmith’s 8,000 pages of diary and notebook entries is a stunning read—particularly if you savor the voyeuristic practice of reading someone’s private thoughts. Her diary entries are brutally honest about everything from her current girlfriend(s) with whom she is madly in love to resentments toward her mother, estranged father, and stepfather. Though bright enough to graduate from Barnard, she never quite masters the art of achieving a meaningful love relationship; her tone seems the same for fifty years. I can’t understand why this relationship has failed. And yet, I believe she does know why: her profession requires much alone time, which is not compatible with a needy lover.

Her notebooks, on the other hand, are about her current and proposed works, sometimes a poem here and there. She also talks business. About her agent(s), once her sales go international. Her publishers. Friendships, lasting ones at that, with a broad range of writers. Strong female writers (mostly part of a lesbian group of professionals) mentor Highsmith on how to navigate the heady waters of being a single woman sometimes writing about being queer. Early on, when she is young, she has sex and “love” relationships with a few men, but none of them is every satisfying.

What may be most fascinating is to watch how her life and living influence particular books. The Ripley series of five novels has such an authentic, European backdrop because besides being multilingual, Highsmith lives in Europe much of her life. Still, having been born in Fort Worth, Texas, she does return there to visit once her parents move back from New York. Yet she harbors deep resentments against her abusive mother, who lives to be ninety-five (PH nearly perceives it as a punishment), and, because of her own health problems, fails to visit upon her mother’s own funeral. A sad but triumphant ending for a triumphant but oft-times sad and lonely life. If readers have time, it is well worth theirs to read these 1,000 pages, especially if they’re curious about the writer who authored Strangers on a Train and the Ripley series of five novels, a total of thirty-two books.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Hermann Hesse's Rosshalde.

A Writer's Wit: Clementina Suárez

5/12/2022

If there are no conditions for an active art scene, it is our duty to create them.
Clementina Suárez
Honduran Poet
Born May 12, 1902

C. Suárez

TOMORROW: My Book World | Anna Van Planta, Ed. of Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks 1941-1995

A Writer's Wit: Mari Sandoz

5/11/2022

. . . Indians still consider the whites a brutal people who treat their children like enemies—playthings, too, coddling them like pampered pets or fragile toys, but underneath always like enemies, enemies that must be restrained, bribed, spied upon, and punished. They believe that children so treated will grow up as dependent and immature as pets and toys, and as angry and dangerous as enemies within the family circle, to be appeased and fought.
Mari Sandoz
Author of The Battle of the Little Bighorn
Born May 11, 1896

M. Sandoz

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Anna Van Planta, Ed. of Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks 1941-1995

A Writer's Wit: John Scalzi

5/10/2022

As a reader, I have a very short attention span and a low tolerance for boredom, and I find that comes in handy with my writing. If I get bored writing something, I pity the people who will then try to read it.
John Scalzi
Author of The Collapsing Empire
Born May 10, 1969

J. Scalzi

FRIDAY: My Book World | Anna Van Planta, Ed. of Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks 1941-1995

Latinos Love Kissing Stories: Bésame Mucho

5/6/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
The great tragedy in the new feminist theory in America is the loss of a sense of public commitment . . . . Hungry women are not fed by this, battered women are not sheltered by it, raped women do not find justice in it, gays and lesbians do not achieve legal protections through it.
Martha C. Nussbaum
Author of Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach
Born May 6, 1947

M. C. Nussbaum

My Book World

Manrique, Jaime, ed. With Jesse Dorris. Bésame Mucho: New Gay Latino Fiction. New York: Painted Leaf, 1999.

On my shelf for a long time, I finally took this collection down and enjoyed most of the stories very much. Among the best, I believe, are Manrique’s “Señoritas in Love,” “What’s Up, Father Infante?”, a gripping story by Miguel Falquez-Certain, and “Ruby Díaz” by Al Luján. The entire collection blends together a beautiful chorus of gay Latino voices, from South America to New York to California. So much that the non-Latino community has to learn what gay Latino men face with regard to their families, their communities, and their relationship to the Roman Catholic Church. They face immense pressures to conform to cultural norms, even more so than the Anglo population, I would dare say. Kudos to these men for sharing their stories by way of lively and enlightening fiction. It never dates.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Anna Van Planta, Ed. of Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks 1941-1995

A Writer's Wit: Karl Marx

5/5/2022

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.
Karl Marx
Author of Das Kapital
Born May 5, 1818

K. Marx

TOMORROW: My Book World | Bésame Mucho: New Gay Latino Fiction

A Writer's Wit: Kate Garraway

5/4/2022

If you said, “I’m giving up smoking,” people would put on a parade. If you said, “I’m going to eat more healthily,” people would say, “Good for you.” If it’s drinking, the first reaction is, “That’s so boring. You’re going to be so boring.”
Kate Garraway
Author of The Joy of Big Knickers
Born May 4, 1967

K. Garraway

FRIDAY: My Book World | Bésame Mucho: New Gay Latino Fiction

A Writer's Wit: Rick DeMarinis

5/3/2022

Kings and cabbages go back to compost, but good deeds stay green forever.
Rick DeMarinis
Author of The Art and Craft of the Short Story
Born May 3, 1934

R. DeMarinis

FRIDAY: My Book World | Bésame Mucho: New Gay Latino Fiction

Meridian of Blood Still flows

4/29/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.
Humphrey Carpenter
Author of J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography
Born April 29, 1946

H. Carpenter

My Book World

McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian: Or The Evening Redness in the West. New York: Vintage, 1985.

It might be that McCarthy brings to fruition that which Hemingway and Fitzgerald could not—due not only to publishing constraints concerning swear words and graphic violence but also the reins the authors may have held tight on themselves. The makings of complete literary honesty were there via Hemingway’s forthright sentences, at times extended to paragraph length (with little inner punctuation) and Fitzgerald’s fortitude in portraying the brutality of capitalism’s clutches on early twentieth-century America. But in this novel, McCarthy returns to the latter half of the nineteenth century of the West to extend his page-long sentences lyrically to rival the two authors mentioned before. And he does so in a way that somewhat softens the inherent mayhem of this novel.

At first, I had some difficulty in following the plot: that a sixteen-year-old Tennessean (the kid) ventures to the Southwest to see what’s in store for him there. The kid is tough, though, and becomes tougher as time passes. He joins a band of men who seek to scorch the earth of natives and anybody else with dark skin (the N word, due to Twain’s use of it in his books, seems to be used without restraint by these characters). But as the book shifts from one episode of killing to another across this physical and moral wasteland, I sense that the narrative is largely impressionistic. I am reminded of Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage—the wildly episodic nature of war—for that’s what this book is about, the White Man’s war to tame the West and all its human and animal critters.

Other than superficial features, the characters, as such, show little traditional development, but that may be McCarthy’s intent. These killers act as a single body, it would seem. In fact, little tolerance for the individual exists here. You act with the others, or you are fighting for your own life. And as an impressionistic work can be dreamlike in which a figure returns to you dream after dream, these characters keep running into each other, regardless of the miles and days or months between them. They can’t seem to remove themselves, if they should desire to, from this wanton way of life or death. And in most cases, it is the latter that guides them through their days heading toward McCarthy’s oft-cited orange sunset or that blood meridian.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Jaime Manrique & Jesse Dorris's Bésame Mucho: New Gay Latino Fiction

A Writer's Wit: Simin Daneshvar

4/28/2022

I wish the world was run by women. Women who have given birth and know the value of their creation.
Simin Daneshvar
Author of A City Like Paradise
Born April 28, 1921

S. Daneshvar

TOMORROW: My Book World | Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

A Writer's Wit: August Wilson

4/27/2022

All you need in the world is love and laughter. That's all anybody needs. To have love in one hand and laughter in the other.
August Wilson
Playwright, Fences
Born April 27, 1945

A. Wilson

FRIDAY: My Book World | Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

A Writer's Wit: Carol Burnett

4/26/2022

When I was in college at UCLA, I took a playwriting course. I was all set to be a writer. But I had to take this acting class as a theater arts major. I had to do this scene in a one-act comedy. I just said this line, and then . . . this laugh happened. I thought, “Whoa. This is a really good feeling. What have I been missing?”
Carol Burnett
Author of One More Time: A Memoir
Born April 26, 1933

C. Burnett

FRIDAY: My Book World | Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

Kicked Out of Your Country

4/22/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita . . . . “I am come Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
Julius Robert Oppenheimer
Author of Uncommon Sense
Born April 22, 1904

J. R. Oppenheimer

My Book World

Batsha, Nishant. Mother Ocean Father Nation: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 2022.

I received this book by entering a goodreads.com giveaway sponsored by the publisher, Ecco (HarperCollins). A galleys edition, this book is scheduled to be released June 2022, so it may be subject to revision depending on its prepublication reception.

The novel is set in a nameless South Pacific Island in the 1980s. Said island is occupied by “Nativists” and “Indians.” When a military coup occurs, putting the Nativists in power, life becomes challenging for the Indians (their ancestors plopped there several generations earlier). The natives claim that Indians have stolen all the jobs, the property that should be theirs. From the Indian perspective, they themselves have worked industriously as farmers and merchants to better their lives, and have gained a certain amount of wealth. One family is split apart, when the only daughter, Bhumi, two years into her university career on the island, must escape to the United States to begin a new life. This leaves her brother, Jaipal, and her parents behind. Their father is an alcoholic who owns his own small grocery, and their mother is a strong but quiet woman nearly worn down by her husband’s abuse. Jaipal’s life is complicated by the fact that he is gay, against which there exists an official stricture. If he is to meet anyone, he gathers with others of his ilk in “hotels” (largely abandoned one must assume) at night with no lights, only their widening irises as they become accustomed to the dark (nice metaphor). Bhumi’s life in northern California is no picnic either. She applies for asylum with the U.S. government but will hear nothing for months and months. In the meantime, to support herself as a would-be student (she audits classes) she works as a nanny for an Indian family. Even so, the woman who hires her is condescending, and the child she must care for is a brat. She ultimately leaves. To tell how the plot is resolved would be to spoil the ending, which is a realistic yet satisfying one.

Nishant Batsha’s writing is commendable, combining excellent plotting in which there is little or no coincidence; most events seem to lead by way of a natural cause and effect to the next event. His characterization is satisfying, he releasing more and more information about characters as time passes. Readers have a sense of what they look like, who they are. He tackles the subjugation of one group by another (hinting of a genocide to come if the last 50,000 Indians do not leave the island when ordered to) with sensitivity and warmth. It provides a certain resonance for our own times, consider what Russia is doing in Ukraine, and what has happened to people of color in our own country for centuries. I wish Mr. Batsha good luck with Mother Ocean Father Nation. It is a new must-read.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Cormac McCarthy's Novel, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

A Writer's Wit: Nell Freudenberger

4/21/2022

I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn't have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private—a comforting thought.
Nell Freudenberger
Author of Lost and Wanted
Born April 21, 1975

N. Freudenberger

TOMORROW: My Book World | Nishant Batsha's Novel, Mother Ocean Father Nation

A Writer's Wit: John Paul Stevens

4/20/2022

Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law. [Dissenting opinion in U.S. Supreme Court, Bush v. Gore, December 12, 2000]
John Paul Stevens
Author of The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years
Born April 20, 1920

J. P. Stevens

FRIDAY: My Book World | Nishant Batsha's Novel, Mother Ocean Father Nation

A Writer's Wit: Martha Haddix

4/19/2022

At any rate one can say that equal status has been achieved when women, like men, are still allowed to appear on television when they’re old, with all their wrinkles. There’s practically no age-limit for men, you know.
Lilli Gruber
Italian Journalist
Born April 19, 1957

L. Gruber

FRIDAY: My Book World | Nishant Batsha's Novel, Mother Ocean Father Nation

'The American' Never Changes

4/15/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Dogmatizing about punctuation is exactly as foolish as dogmatizing about any other form of communication with the reader. All such forms depend on the kind of thing one is doing and the kind of effect one intends to produce.
Henry James
Author of The American
Born April 15, 1843

H. James

My Book World

James, Henry. The American. With an introduction by R. P. Blackmur. New York: Dell, 1960 (1877).

Sorry to say, but this is the first book of Henry James that I have read. I expect to read others. Set mainly in Europe, the novel concerns the American character, under much scrutiny in the nineteenth century. Briefly, Christopher Newman, thirty-six, takes great advantage of his earned wealth as a canny businessman to travel the world, beginning with Paris. He is offered the opportunity to join a financially failing aristocratic family by marrying a young widow whose first marriage was arranged by her parents. After being smitten with this woman, Newman is then forbidden to marry her by her mother and brother. It may or may not have anything to do with a deep dark family secret. But the rest of the narrative is more or less how Newman comes to terms with not getting what he wants, having his heart broken, as we say.

The book’s language seems fresh, even now, almost 150 years after publication. James reverts to no clichés. His narration is a rich mixture of the American, the British, and French idiom. His characters’ names seem symbolic but not obvious: Newman (from a new country); Mrs. Bread (a servant who spends a lifetime nurturing the woman Newman is to marry); Bellegarde (nice guard, the family “guarding” their wealth, their name, their history). James may depend a bit too much on coincidence, in that often a character who has disappeared for a number of chapters seems to appear out of nowhere, particularly, when Newman leaves Paris for London and there runs into a young woman and her father who are present in the early part of the novel. This incident could occur, but it seems unlikely, yet as readers we buy it by way of the author’s convincing method. Although Newman is brash, he’s brash in his own manner, not being subject to stereotype, and his character does become transformed throughout the novel. By observing the best and worst of European and American cultures, he comes to see himself lodged in a larger context. He accepts the fact that with regard to this one event, losing his fiancée to a convent, he cannot control his life. Wealth means little, an ineffective salve for his eternal ache.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Nishant Batsha's Novel, Mother Ocean Father Nation

A Writer's Wit: Peter Elbow

4/14/2022

Producing writing is not so much like filling a basin or pool once, but rather getting water to keep flowing through till finally it runs clear.
Peter Elbow
Author of Writing with Power
Born April 14, 1935

P. Elbow

TOMORROW: My Book World | Henry James's The American

A Writer's Wit: Seamuś Heaney

4/13/2022

I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
Seamuś Heaney
Author of Death of a Naturalist
Born April 13, 1939

S. Heaney

FRIDAY: My Book World | Henry James's The American

A Writer's Wit: Beverly Cleary

4/12/2022

My mother always kept library books in the house, and one rainy Sunday afternoon—this was before television, and we didn't even have a radio—I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered I was reading and enjoying what I read.
Beverly Cleary
Author of over 40 books, including Ramona the Brave
Born April 12, 1916

B. Cleary

FRIDAY: My Book World | Henry James's The American

Freya: An Independent Woman

4/8/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
The artist who really creates something creates it forever, but the scholar is at the mercy of expanding knowledge and changing habits of thought.
C. M. Bowra
Author of The Romantic Imagination
Born April 8, 1898

C. M. Bowra

My Book World

Quinn, Anthony. Freya. New York: Europa, 2017.

This novel, full of twists and turns, could perhaps, only have been written by a Brit—someone trained in reading and writing wordsmithing-worthy work. The plotting is superb. Characterization sparkling. Quinn gives readers the proper clues, subtle though they may be, and astute readers store them away and can say (or not), I knew it. I knew it was him. Two young women, the titular Freya and Nancy, meet at Oxford during WWII and develop a lasting friendship. But it is not an easy alliance. They both date the same Oxford boy who eventually marries his second choice of the two, Nancy. Freya realizes he is a scoundrel, but her friend can’t see it, not at first. There is a pattern of betrayal among these three characters, each deception crescendoing into a climax that may blow your bobby socks off. Spoiler: Only one false note seems to prevail and that is Freya, in the end, realizes she loves her friend, not in a platonic manner, but as a lover. This does not come out of nowhere; Quinn does subtly, perhaps too subtly, drop breadcrumb clues along the way, but there seems to be no inner struggle for Freya, no clues to the character herself that she could be a lesbian.

Others might argue that the author does inform. After all, Freya puts career ahead of all; she wishes not to marry (while having lots of sex with men) or have children; she blasts off into her life in any direction she wants with little regard for family or friends. She only has one other physical relationship with a woman, and it is in the context of a drunken orgy in which any woman might have sex with another woman. Again, very subtle. And perhaps it is as it should be. The period is late 1940s to late 1960s, a time of awakening, an explorative era in which women, even adventurous ones like Freya, may not know who they are inside and must be whacked up the side of the head by life itself to understand who they are.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Henry James's The American