Blog - www.richardjespers.com

Past Is Still Present: AIDS

8/7/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Modern life has gotten so strange, we all get 150 emails and text messages a day, and it's hard when things are moving that quickly to keep that sense of wonder about being alive.
Brit Marling
Co-Writer for film Sound of My Voice
Born August 7, 1983

B. Marling

Guibert, Hervé. To the friend who did not save my life. South Pasadena: Semiotexte, 2020 (1990).

It’s difficult to know what I think of this book, thirty years after it is first published. On the one hand, it is a fair representation of what the times are like in 1991 Paris. When the author dies at thirty-six from AIDS, I am forty-three—very much a part of the same demographic. I’ve taken an HTLV test which claims I am negative. Whew.

Yet there is no real relief for anyone: neither the men and women who test positive and will soon die nor for their friends who have partaken of the same risky behaviors and remain free. Guibert portrays for gay Frenchmen, as do many American gay writers at the time, the devastation that overtakes our community from coast to coast. On the other hand, after thirty years, most of the scientific information Guibert possesses is redundant or has been proven wrong. It’s painful to read about either party.

Even if this work functions as a sort of roman à clef by not naming names, it certainly portrays the dastardly acts of treacherous friends. A character named Muzil is supposedly the noted philosopher Michel Foucault; Marine is based on the life of actor, Isabelle Adjani; and yet “Bill,” Guibert’s friend of the title remains a mystery, a traitor who brags about, as a Miami pharmaceutical executive, getting Guibert in on the ground floor of a vaccine, but cruelly fails to do so. This book, a combination of linear and nonlinear elements, takes us back to the past, but it strangely plops us into the present of yet another untamable virus and directs us toward a future of even more death and destruction. Not a gay book in the original literary sense, but so gay in a tragic way.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki

Fabulous Indeed

7/31/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Addiction isn't about substance—you aren't addicted to the substance, you are addicted to the alteration of mood that the substance brings.
Susan Cheever
Author of Drinking in America
Born July 31, 1943

S. Cheever

My Book World

Epstein, Joseph. Fabulous Small Jews. Boston: Houghton, 2003.

There is so much to like about these eighteen stories mostly featuring characters over the age of sixty. As the title suggests, each protagonist is short, yet Epstein never makes a to-do about it, and indeed it is a point of irony because many of them, though short in stature, are not small people. In fact, Epstein pulls readers into every narrative about poor Jews, poor Jews who become comfortable or well-off, or Jews who have always had money. Most everyone in these Chicago-based stories attends good schools, earns good money. But money alone cannot in any way make up for the heartache they suffer: marriages ending in divorce; fathers who die in war; widows looking (or not) for a man to fill their lives.

Fabulous small Jews have their own stores, their own banks, their own restaurants and delis, their own you-name-its. Epstein very quietly limns the lives of Jews almost anywhere in the world: because of prejudices held against them for thousands of years they must band together to protect, coddle, nurture, and love one another. And yet, readers can’t help but love these characters, too: an old man belatedly gets to know his grandson (I cried); a man secretly writes poems about a woman and the executor of his will, to preserve the woman’s reputation, instead of burning the manuscript, spreads it to the four winds from his car window on the freeway; a man quietly helps another man to end his life. Is the act one of suicide, euthanasia, or murder? Epstein does not answer that question but leaves it to each reader to decide, and I admire his courage in taking such a stance.

A must-read for Gentiles (like me) and Jews alike.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Hervé Guibert's To the friend who did not save my life

Those Who Oppose Die Alone

7/17/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
We spend the first twelve months of our children's lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next twelve telling them to sit down and shut up.
Phyllis Diller,
Author of The Joys of Aging and How to Avoid Them
Born July 17, 1917

P. Diller

My Book World

Fallada, Hans. Every Man Dies Alone. Translated by Michael Hofmann, with an afterword by Geoff Wilkes. New York: Melville, 2009 (1947).

This novel, originally published in German in 1947, is the fictionalized story of a true-life married couple who denounce the Nazi regime. The couple are solid followers of Hitler until their only son is killed in battle. They then turn their anger outward in a quiet manner by handwriting postcards of denunciation which they deposit all over the city of Berlin. They carry on for over two years, placing nearly 300 cards without notice. Yet their campaign is basically a failure because most people who find the cards turn them into the Gestapo so that they do not themselves wind up in trouble. Due to a bit of carelessness, the couple are caught and wind up in prison. Fallada deftly portrays their ending as fearful but brave souls who have no problem talking back to prison officials.

Fallada concludes the novel on a positive note by bringing back into view a boy who, because of his terrible home life, has begun a life of crime until he is adopted by a caring and loving couple who help to change his ways. Fallada’s writing is very nineteenth century by way of its omniscient point-of-view in which we know what every character is thinking. He is also quite skilled in creating a large number of characters, yet giving the reader periodic hints about who is whom, thus keeping the narrative moving. Finally, he, from time to time, repeats or skillfully echoes his title, Every Man Dies Alone, in ways that expand its obvious or concrete meaning. Fallada’s novel is a keen reminder that freedom requires sacrifice, that no matter what culture we live in, we must always be on guard against its being taken away from us, or worse yet, that we hand it over without question.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Reinaldo Arenas's Novel The Assault

Harrison's Novellas Are Perfect

7/10/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Writers get embarrassed sometimes in talking about how much fun writing can be, but drafting is often really enjoyable. Often, you're tumbling in the dark, and you don't know where the story is going to lead.
Karen Russell,
Author of Swamplandia!
Born July 10, 1981

K. Russell

My Book World

Harrison, Jim. The Summer He Didn’t Die. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2005.

These three novellas, each one striking for its individuality, are immensely satisfying. The longer-than-a-story-but-shorter-than-a-novel format seems to be perfect for each narrative. My favorite character in The Summer He Didn’t Die, the title novella, is Berry, a child who is born with alcohol fetal syndrome. She is mute but indicates by her actions, quick and sprite-like, how she shall act upon the world and its many rules. Most of the action is of her family (excepting her wayward mother) evading Michigan’s children’s protective agency and depositing their lives over the border in Canada so that Berry can live out her life in peace. Republican Wives, hilarious for its verisimilitude (uncannily written for a male writer), takes readers inside the minds of three different women, friends since childhood, who have been hoodwinked for the last time by a man (also a college acquaintance) with whom they have all had affairs (mostly at different times). Tracking tells the story of an author who outlines his literary career and personal life, from feckless yet ardent college boy to a grandpa, finally finished with world travel and content to be near his grown children and grandchildren. The collection is a great testament to the novella form in which it is just the right length to tell each one of these stories.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone

The Poisonwood Bible: Stunning and Timeless

7/3/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
The labor of women in the house, certainly, enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could; and in this way women are economic factors in society. But so are horses.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
Author of The Yellow Wallpaper
Born July 3, 1860

C. Perkins Gilman

My Book World

Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible. New York: HarperCollins, 1998.

In 1959, a Baptist minister, his wife, and his four daughters, leave their Bethlehem, Georgia home for a year of service to the Congo in Africa. The mother, Orleanna, opens the novel with a long lens; we learn right away she will lose one of her daughters, and so we read on patiently to see how such an event will unfold. Of course, we sort of forget, and we’re shocked when the youngest, Ruth May, is killed by a poisonous snake much later in the story after we have come, like her mother, to love her.

This expansive novel is divided into seven books, always a sign of what will be a sprawling narrative. Each book opens with a chapter narrated by Orleanna, the frazzled mother who dares not rile the ire of her preacher husband. The remaining chapters of each book are narrated alternatively by each one of the daughters: Rachel, a light-haired blonde, probably born about 1945, who has visions of high fashion and easy living in her life—having not much use for her father’s strict evangelical life; the twins, Leah and Adah, one a healthy adherent of her father’s ways (for a while), the latter injured before birth and who limps yet has a brain equal to her twin sister’s. The former will eventually marry a Congo native; Adah will return to Atlanta and become a doctor. Before her demise, Ruth May, the youngest, is a sprite, a child with her own language, her own worldview, a darting derring-do that will eventually serve to take her life.

Each chapter then widens our view of their village in the Congo as it survives an historical upheaval: one popular but revolutionary leader being killed within three months of his election, and the return to office of a corrupt man who will conspire with the West (mostly America) to spend thirty-five years amassing great wealth while his countrymen and women survive (or don’t) lives of poverty. One additional character, Mother Nature, or her evil sister, makes life at the least difficult, at the most, a disaster of magnificent proportions. In what feels like the climax, a giant wave of ants marauds their Congolese village, and its inhabitants must survive by, among other things, climbing trees until the rampage has passed. When this family returns to their house and accompanying buildings, they find only bones left where their chickens once roosted. The house is spotless, as if cleaned by a squad of maids. At this point, Oleanna gathers her three remaining children and abandons her husband. Now this is not as easy as it sounds. She has always served Nathan and his god with blind faithfulness, but now she sees that he is not well (think heart of darkness) and must save her remaining three daughters. Only she is not even able to do that. Rachel marries a South African man of questionable character (and three more men in serial monogamy). Leah marries her native. Adah returns to Georgia with her mother. It is a family broken in so many ways it takes an entire book to portray how. Oh, and the title? The poisonwood tree is an apt name because of the substance it oozes; its bible an apt metaphor for the despoliation of one family. A stunning, timeless read.

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Jim Harrison's The Summer He Didn't Die

Rule Follower or Skilled Manager?

6/26/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
We always look at the “Fortune 500,” and we say, men in power, but we don't look at the glass cellar as opposed to the glass ceiling and say, men also are the homeless, men are also the ones that are the garbage collectors. Men are also the ones dying in construction sites that aren't properly supervised for safety hazards.
Warren Farrell,
Author of The Boy Crisis
Born June 26, 1943

W. Farrell

My Book World

Murata, Sayaka. Convenience Store Woman. Translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori. New York: Grove, 2018.

A compact book at 163 small pages, this novel is a more substantive read than one would think at first. The simple language that the narrator Keiko uses may lull the reader into thinking this will be a simple story. In a way, it is. This young Japanese woman who works in a convenient store shifts to a flashback about her childhood. There she reveals her odd personality, a certain problem with affect, in which she would like to cook and eat a beautiful little blue bird that has died, much to the horror of her mother. Then in primary school, when no teacher appears to break up a fight at recess, Keiko takes it upon herself to hit one of the boys on the skull with a spade. At that point, after getting into trouble, Keiko decides to become a little rule follower, making her, upon high school graduation, a perfect candidate for convenience store worker.

Keiko is unusually attuned to the store’s needs, both at the macro and micro levels—responding to the store’s needs the way a mother might respond to her children. Remaining single, without much apparent interest in sex, Keiko works part-time and sustains a secularly ascetic existence until she’s thirty-six. Then she meets a man, creating the novel’s conflict, and I won’t reveal the ending because it’s pretty odd and yet satisfying. I do have a question for the author. Keiko is often more skilled in managing the store than her male, mostly younger managers (eight of them in eighteen years). Why does her demonstrated competency (all her colleagues acknowledge her abilities) ever put her in a position to become a manager herself? Is this author Murata’s point, a comment on Japanese culture? Or is she more concerned with portraying people who happen not to fit the mold of ordinary citizens and how society treats such people?

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Tobias Wolff's Novel Old School

Tolstoy's War with Art

6/19/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.
Tobias Wolff,
Author of The Night in Question
Born June 19, 1945

T. Wolff

My Book World

Tolstoy, Leo N. What Is Art? Translated from the Russian by Almyer Maude [sic] with an introduction by Vincent Tomas. Indianapolis: Sams, 1960 (1896).

I was assigned to read this book for a half-credit, pass-fail humanities class in college. There is little indication that I actually did so (a few underlined passages in Chapter Two). It seems like a challenging read for eighteen-year-olds who’ve had little exposure to argumentation or (unless they have studied art as children) art. In general, to summarize an often unclear thesis, Tolstoy seems to believe that art is a feeling that the artist would like to infect the watcher, listener, reader with.

He believes that high art is so only because it is heralded by the upper classes. Tolstoy goes on and on about how bad Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is, in part because Beethoven was deaf, and how could the composer possibly compose if he couldn’t hear? And besides, Beethoven is attempting to combine two arts: music and chorus (based on another’s lyric). Tolstoy abhors contemporary opera, Wagner in particular, again because it combines visual art, drama, music, singing, and more. When he uses the invective “filthy” to describe it, it seems he has a prejudice he can’t explain. In fact, he leaves a lot unexplained by way of sometimes poor or faulty logic, and by using terms he has defined to his own satisfaction. He asserts that beauty is not art. He asserts that the basis of art must be religious, i.e. Christian (I think).

However, Tolstoy does make a prescient remark when he argues that art (music, drawing, creative writing and more) should be taught to all children so that they may create art for all their lives, in order to enrich their lives and the lives of the people they love. That seems to be the most positive assertion that he makes, and, because many American school districts have abandoned the teaching of art, the result being a certain poverty, I believe he is right. The rest of this work seems like a highly subjective opinion he took fifteen years to develop; if he’d tried hard he probably could have done it in four or less.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman

Alison Smith Memoir Always Timely

6/12/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Well, isn't Bohemia a place where everyone is as good as everyone else—and must not a waiter be a little less than a waiter to be a good Bohemian?
Djuna Barnes
Born June 12, 1892
Author of Nightwood

D. Barnes

My Book World

Smith, Alison. Name All the Animals. New York: Scribner, 2004.

If I had had the time, I would have read Name All the Animals in one sitting. In this memoir, the author begins benignly by sharing with readers in great detail how close she and her brother Roy are at ages nine and twelve, respectively, so close that their mother names them Alroy. Together, they explore an abandoned house in their neighborhood. And then, in a similar way to how it must shock the narrator and her parents, it shocks the reader to learn of Roy’s death at eighteen. The rest of the book covers several years following in which Alison finishes high school. She demonstrates how her family, good Catholics, avoid all the questions that should be asked and tackled. Alison develops an inner and outer world of her own making, all in aid of forgetting and yet commemorating her brother. In failing to grieve, however, she cuts herself off from most people until she meets one she can’t resist. Smith tells this harrowing story without sentiment but with all due regard for the truth. She structures it in such a manner that readers discover along with her how she must grow up, how she must proceed without Roy in her life.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Leo N. Tolstoy's What Is Art?

Cole Porter Letters Reveal a Vibrant Life

6/5/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
The poem, the song, the picture, is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink—and in drinking understand themselves.
Federico García Lorca, Spanish Poet
Born June 5, 1898

F. García Lorca

My Book World

Eisen, Cliff and The Letters of Cole Porter. New Haven: Yale, 2019.

If you are a fan of Cole Porter and his music, you will probably enjoy this collection of letters. Though some of them refer to his bisexuality, most of them pertain to his many professional and personal connections. Such communications illustrate many characteristics about Mr. Porter. One, he is a consummate professional, in spite of his propensity to play and play hard during vacations and between gigs on Broadway or Hollywood. He answers every bit of mail himself, except when he occasionally calls on his secretary to take care of something. He is a team player, important for anyone working in a collaborative arena like the theatre. Second, he is also fierce but polite about not doing anything musically that would (in his opinion) ruin a show. At the same time, when overpowered by those above him, he sometimes gives in, particularly, it seems, when the issue does not matter that much to him.

In a business that can be crass and cold at times, Porter is also very caring and thoughtful of everyone he comes in contact with. He sends thank you notes for the smallest favors, and, because he often runs short of money before he makes it big, he is generous with cash gifts and loans later in life. Third, his wit and sharp tongue are unmatched with regard to the social whirl of the 1930s through the 1950s. Though he wouldn’t dream of hurting anyone publicly, he does not mind getting off a zinger or two during a personal letter to a dear friend. Perhaps most interesting is how Porter shares some of his methods for songwriting:

In a related matter, of what compels him to accept a job or assignment, he says:

“My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a producer. If Feuer and Martin phoned me today and asked me to write a new song for a spot, I’d just begin thinking. First, I think of the idea and then I fit it to a title. Then I go to work on the melody, spotting the title at certain moments in the melody, and then I write the lyric—the end first—that way, it has a strong finish . . . I do the lyrics like I’d do a crossword puzzle. I try to give myself a meter which will make the lyric as easy as possible to write without being banal. On top of the meter, I try to pick for my rhyme words of which there is a long list with the same ending” (499).

A friend who travels with Porter in 1955 relates this story: “We were not stopped very long at the border. On the Spanish side, one of the soldiers came out with Cole’s passport in his hand, looked in the car, and said, ‘Cole Porter . . . Begin the Beguine!’ and kissed his fingers to the air, and began to sing the song. Cole’s music is known everywhere we go—even in the remote spots” (507).

I think that just about says it all about Cole Porter, his music, and how many fans he still has in the world!

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Alison Smith's Name All the Animals

'Mules and Men' a Treasure Trove

5/29/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
I loathe heterosexual weddings. The wedding cake, the party, the champagne, the inevitable divorce two years later. It's just a waste of time in the heterosexual world, and in the homosexual world I find it personally beyond tragic that we want to ape this institution that is so clearly a disaster.
Rupert Everett
Born May 29, 1959

R. Everett

My Book World

Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men with a preface by Franz Boas, a foreword by Arnold Rampersad, illustrations by Miguel Covarrubias, and afterword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.

Part I consists of African-American folk tales that Hurston collects in the late 1920s and early 1930s in Florida. She begins in her hometown of Eatonville, primarily African-American. Amazing it is the number of times the word “mule” does appear in these tales, as if the beast is a metaphor for the “beasts” that white people take black men and women to be: though compliant, also stubborn, and intelligent. On the face of it, the tales might reflect a certain ignorance, but I think they simply reflect that slaves had to develop their own language because the whites refused to educate them in their own (if they themselves were versed well enough in English to do so).

Part II is about hoodoo (or voodoo), and Hurston heads for what she calls its capital, New Orleans, Louisiana. These passages are fascinating, as well. All throughout Hurston includes herself as a character. In order to retrieve the information she wants, she must become one of hoodoo’s adherents and spends much time and effort seeking to know its ways. She recreates for readers exact formulae for getting rid of one’s husband, for getting him back if she changes her mind, for many ways of dealing with one’s neighbors. Hurston never judges but fully participates, absorbing its, at times, headiness, as when she dizzies herself from dancing for forty straight minutes as part of a ceremony.

In his afterword Henry Louis Gates (PBS’s Finding Your Roots) identifies Hurston’s proper historical place in American literature. After having achieved a higher education and published seven important books, she is virtually ignored or denounced by leading black male literary figures during the time she should be receiving accolades (among them Richard Wright). This happens, in part, because she identifies herself in a more "conservative," Clarence Thomas-like stance, in which she refuses to be defined by white people. It takes Alice Walker’s landmark 1975 article in Ms. to resurrect Hurston and bring her to the fore of American literary studies. As happens to many whose ideas are published ahead of their time, Hurston’s work languishes for decades amid a poverty of thought. If only she had not been shunned, she might not have died amid a more corporeal sort of poverty at age sixty-nine.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | The Letters of Cole Porter

'Cleanness' a Superb Novel

5/22/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Let the bullets that rip through my brain smash through every closet door in the nation.
Harvey Milk
Born May 22,1930

H. Milk

My Book World

APOLOGIES to my readers: At the last minute I substituted my profile of Garth Greenwell's book for Alison Smith's. I shall post one of Smith's Name All the Animals in the near future.

Greenwell, Garth. Cleanness. New York: Farrar, 2020.

I didn’t make one annotation on first reading of this novel (and I shall read it again), in part because it held me spellbound and in part because I wanted to experience vicariously the joyride the unnamed narrator (except for Gospodar, the Bulgarian word for Mister) is taking through his young life.

Gospodar (Gospodine to his pupils) teaches accelerated English at a high school in Sofia, Bulgaria, sometime in the last decade, and unravels his story of love and loss. At the same time, our Gospodar employs the powers of travelogue to acquaint readers with a post-Soviet culture still burdened with its corrupt architecture (crumbling worse than the geopolitical realm itself). The novel is part language lesson: Gospodar translates (upon first mention) each Bulgarian word or phrase and in such a way that one is acquainted with the word’s fullness. At one point, a male sex partner Gospodar has met online calls him Bulgarian for bitch. But the narrator doesn’t leave it there, massaging the meaning within the context of the indigenous culture. The novel is part love story, in which the narrator meets a man he only calls R (every character is reduced to a single initial, in some way protecting the identities of his co-characters, almost creating the feel that one is absorbing a roman à clef). I’ve never read such sensual yet meaningful sex scenes (for want of a better term). At one point, the narrator makes love to his lover, R, taking perhaps twenty minutes to kiss every part of the man’s body. When he is finished, his partner is attempting to hide his tears, the fact that perhaps no one has ever loved him so completely. These scenes, though graphic, serve a larger purpose, never feeling pornographic (if there is such a thing) or gratuitous.

Ultimately, the narrator and R end their relationship, because R hails from Lisbon, and cannot see finding a way to earn a living in Bulgaria. In the last major scene of the novel, the narrator parties with a few young men who have graduated from his school the year before. The three of them get very drunk, and the teacher, Gospodar, makes a play for one of the young men. He is horrified by his own behavior yet is willing to give into it at the same time, if enticed or encouraged by the student. He withdraws from the party just before making a fool of himself or endangering his reputation as a responsible adult. Gospodar does this throughout the book, brings himself to some sort of brink, only to pull back after exploring the full impact that the act is about to make (sometimes within a few seconds), thus making the character more like all of us, ready to jump yet waiting to defer to a better angel.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men

Hyacinth Blue Is TimeLess

5/15/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
The mind and heart sometimes get another chance, but if anything happens to the poor old human frame, why, it’s just out of luck, that’s all.
Katherine Anne Porter
Born May 15, 1890

K. A. Porter

My Book World

Vreeland, Susan. Girl in Hyacinth Blue. New York: Penguin, 1999.

In contemporary times, a Philadelphia professor calls a colleague (who is an art scholar) into his locked study to reveal what he claims is an original work of the Dutch artist, Vermeer. The colleague argues against such a claim, but the man insists. He is in a bind because his father has confessed that he himself stole it from a Jewish home while he was working for the Nazis in WWII, but he cannot reveal such indicting provenance. Each succeeding chapter takes the reader farther back in history (à la the film The Red Violin) to reveal previous owners, right up to, the reader must assume, Vermeer himself. All owners are fascinated by the painting and yet must depend on its sale to save themselves or their family from financial disaster. The author explores the value of art. Is it entirely intrinsic, or is it monetary, or is it a bit of both? Vreeland manages to explore this unique idea in a poetic manner which is both compressed, yet expansive, a valuable topic for discussion. The novel is a timeless read, and I’m glad a friend recommended it to me long ago and that I finally took the time to read it.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Alison Smith's Name All the Animals

Mississippi In Depth

5/8/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Beneath words and logic are emotional connections that largely direct how we use our words and logic.
Jane Roberts
Born May 8, 1929

J. Roberts

My Book World

Walton, Anthony. Mississippi: An American Journey. New York: Viking, 1996.

This combination of “travel writing, history, and memoir,” as blurbed on the back cover is a profound work. Walton, noted poet and author, takes the reader on a multilayer journey. One of those journeys may be the physical. He tells of the move his Mississippian parents make from their home state to Chicago as young adults to establish a better life for their children. One is always aware of the physical: the hot Mississippi summer days, the fields of blindingly white cotton, the cool of air conditioning and iced drinks. Walton takes pains to give us a full history of the state, beginning with the Native Americans who occupy the land for centuries before others arrive and kill or move them off. He doesn’t stop there but gives us a history of the slave, the African-American: lynchings, beatings, the cold war that Whites take up against Blacks after the Civil War. But Walton’s journey of Mississippi, which begins mostly after he is an adult, includes memories of visiting family there, interviewing a broad range of white and black citizens. He describes the “polite” way that citizens treat each other, as long as one observes one’s role. He also describes the fight for the vote, which continues to this day. Included in his personal comments are original poems of note that help to illuminate his narrative. History. Travel. Poetry. He appeals to the broad spectrum of human perception and sensibility. I regret that it took me this long to read a book I bought in 2006, ten years after it was published. Yet Walton’s message is still a vibrant one of truth.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Garth Greenwell's novel, Cleanness

This Book of Daniel Is Not in the Bible

5/1/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
One reason to fashion a story is to lift a grudge.
Bobbie Ann Mason
Born May 1, 1940

B. Mason

My Book World

Smith, Aaron. The Book of Daniel: Poems. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh, 2019.

This poet's persona clearly has a crush on actor Daniel Craig and cleverly weaves together nearly fifty poems with pop culture in mind. A couple deal directly with our eponymous persona, Daniel, but many cover other icons. In “I Need My O’Hara Frank” he idolizes other poets:

I Need Sharons:

Tate and Olds,
but mostly Olds,

and never, ever
the Rose of.

In “Celebrity,” he, stream-of-conscious style, connects the deaths of various celebs with himself:

Anne Sexton died in 1974, the year I was born.
Thomas James died in 1974 and was born
in Joliet, Illinois, where I was born. He wrote
Letters to a Stranger before he killed himself.
I’ve written three books few people read
and wanted to kill myself. He was 27 like
Joplin Hendrix Morrison Cobain.

In the title poem, the persona levels with readers about Daniel Craig:

I made a Daniel Craig scrapbook
called The Book of Daniel. For years I bought
every magazine with him on the cover. In Interview
he’s stripped to the waist, hopping around on the beach.
Jamie Dornan was in Interview, too: arms behind his
head in a bathtub. I fell in love with Daniel Craig
when he was stalked by a man in Enduring Love--
before he was Bond-hot and too famous.

I rarely read a book of poetry in one sitting. To me, that’s like eating an entire box of chocolates in thirty minutes or less (which I’ve never done but know better than to try). Yet I found myself turning page after page, getting Smith's poetry when often I do not get what a poet wants me to. And when I was finished, it may also be the only book of poetry I turned around and read all the way through again. There.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Anthony Walton's Mississippi: An American Journey

I Celebrate National Library Week

4/23/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Cutting libraries during a recession is like cutting hospitals during a plague.
Eleanor Crumblehulme
Library Assistant, University of British Columbia

E. Crumblehulme

How the Library of Congress Helped Me Organize My Personal Library

In 2010, during a visit to Washington DC, Ken and I visited the Library of Congress. I wasn’t expecting much, just another bureaucratic governmental building of a nondescript nature. But I was surprised and delighted to discover its Beaux-Arts classical façade and elaborate interior. At that time, I began to wonder if I might organize my own library by way of the LC system. After all, by 2020, I owned over 1,300 volumes. Through the years, I had given away books I knew I would never read or read again. I finally gave away some of the assigned texts I had read at Southwestern College (making sure that the TTU Library had a copy in case I ever wanted to revisit those books).

In the summer of 2019, I took a short break from writing, about five hours a day over five weeks in order to catalog my collection. I touched every hardback, examining its dust jacket or blurbs on the back of each paperback to see if I wanted to keep it. I touched each book again as I wrote the determined call number in pencil following the copyright page, touched it again as I labeled the spine, and touched it once more as I made a Word document accession list of my holdings. That would be so that in the future I could find what I wanted when I wanted it, something I had not always been able to do with my previous rather free-form mode of organization. (I also found duplicates of books I’d bought, not recalling that I already possessed a copy.)

The undertaking was an awesome (despite the weakening of that word) task to follow that procedure for every book, then reshelve the entire collection in the correct order. But since then, the job has proven valuable because I can quickly locate or reshelve a book and it has a “permanent” place, as do certain bytes in my laptop, as do certain memories in my brain. My collection is an integrated whole yet one that welcomes a new book by reserving a unique place for it.

How did I locate or generate all those LC call numbers? one might ask. I checked the copyright page of each book, especially if it was published sometime after the late 1980s. Very often the publisher had already acquired an LC number and all I had to do was copy it out. If the book did not have a call number, I consulted the TTU Library online catalog. I would say that I retrieved at least fifty percent of my numbers from there. Last, I discovered that the Library of Congress (duh) also sported its very own online catalog of vast holdings. That source gave me nearly the rest (or often I could “generate” a number similar to a different book by the same author). What about new books? They are often a bigger problem than old ones. Many publishers now seem to rush a book to publication without waiting to receive a call number from LC, and so it must sit on a separate shelf of mine until one day the LC catalog will list its call number. A librarian’s job is never done. Yay. It means one is always acquiring and reading new books.

I’ve enjoyed writing about my lifetime of library experiences this week. I might briefly say that the Lubbock City/County Libraries support one main building and three branches. I’ve used the main Mahon Library from time to time, particularly when reading fiction; my writing group has met in a small room there. If you have a comment or a library experience you would like to share with my readers, please leave it in the Comment section. If you enjoyed any of these posts, please copy the URL and send a link to your friends. Thank you.

TOMORROW: My Book World | Will Fellows's Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest

Continuing to Celebrate National Library Week

4/22/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Libraries always remind me that there are good things in this world.
Lauren Ward
Personal Finance Writer

L. Ward

Texas Tech University Library:
1.7 Million Volumes Strong

Texas Tech University Library | Photo by TTU

In 1973-74, I earned my state certification in elementary teaching at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. The University Library building of contemporary architecture had opened in the fall of 1962, and I was impressed with its sheer size, that the multiple floors of stacks would take a long time to fill, such a liberal amount had been accounted for. At that time, because of my having worked in the Southwestern College Library, one organized by the Library of Congress system, I easily procured a student job at the TTU Library (there is also a Law Library, an Architecture Library, and the Southwest Collection/Special Collections building). I worked exclusively for cataloging, which, at the time occupied the sprawling south wing. Again, I reshelved books and “read” the shelves, but I also worked for the cataloging librarian whenever she had projects for me. Perhaps because I was a bit older than most student workers, she trusted me to hunt down information in large Union Catalogs so that she could develop a call number for certain volumes. Once more, I found the library to be sort of a temple to learning, the heart of the university. Among other duties, however, I also ironed on call number labels to new or recataloged books. I strolled out to the large stand of card catalog cabinets and interfiled cards for those new books. Because of my class schedule, I worked an eight-hour day on Tuesdays and Thursdays. One of the younger librarians in the department wasn’t much older than me, and she would invite me to break with her in the faculty lounge over in the student union building. She advanced my LC training by giving me faster ways to recognize the correct order of books. I worked in the library that summer, and even after I had taught one year, I was given a job during the next summer when the extra money came in handy.

Beginning in 1983, I began working on an MA in English, and the TTU Library once again became a necessary haunt of mine. The books I checked out largely came from the “PQ,” “PR,” or “PS,” sections. Since I retired in 2002, I visit the library infrequently, largely because of access. Oh, I do have circulation privileges as an alumni member. However, if I want to visit the library during the day, I must park off campus (at most a three-block walk) if I can’t garner one of the coveted Visitor spots. If I want to come after hours I can park in the library parking lot free but only after eight p.m. I’ve found the best time for a nonstudent to go is on weekends or during student holidays when the library maintains business hours only. And I learned NOT to go late on a Sunday afternoon because that’s when a lot of students begin thinking about the research paper that’s due Monday. Still, within those parameters, I’ve been able to conduct research projects related to my reading and writing. For example, a few years ago I tackled all works—twenty-four—of author Christopher Isherwood. I was able to check out about half of them from the TTU Library, thus saving me a bit of money. When I study the TTU Web site now, I am astounded at the changes that have taken place over nearly fifty years, for one, the digital experiences students can tap into. It has held onto and continued to add to its traditional core but also added a number of valuable digital sources. In short, the TTU Library is fabulous source for information.

TOMORROW: How the Library of Congress Helped Me Organize My Library

Continuing to Celebrate National Library Week

4/21/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of a library.
Jorge Luis Borges
Born 1899. Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator.

J. Borges

SOUTHWESTERN COLLEGE LIBRARY --
SMALLER DOES NOT MEAN INFERIOR

Reading Room, Southwestern College Library, c1966 | Photo from 1967 Moundbuilder Yearbook

For three years in the late 1960s I worked in the library of my undergraduate school, Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas. In part, I was trained by a young woman whose husband had just been hired as an instructor. She possessed a quiet, “library” voice, but if you displeased her, she would certainly let you know. She trained me to work circulation, checking in and out books at the front desk, but mostly my work was done in the stacks. The woman taught me that the SC library was catalogued according to the Library of Congress system, and once I learned it, I spent much of my time reshelving books. After a while, I was assigned to “read” the shelves. It was a tedious job in which I checked to make sure that books within an assigned section were arranged in the correct shelf list order. There were signs that asked people NOT to reshelve books, but often I would find books out of place and felt a certain satisfaction in returning them to their proper home. Sometimes the book would be off by a spot or two, a shelf or two, and sometimes it would belong to a shelf on the next floor! Among other things, I may have labeled the spines of new books with call letters. I would inevitably become curious about one and spend a bit of the college’s dime studying its contents. I was often one of the first to check out a book, and I would feel very privileged. Though I was a music major, I sometimes entertained the idea of going to library school or becoming a music librarian after graduation. That's how much I enjoyed my work.

The Deets Library, Southwestern College, Today — Stephen Woodburn, Photos

I was fascinated with the LC system, how it had a category for every subject in the world. As a pupil, off duty, I would roam the stacks, and once I learned what was what, I would browse, searching for what I needed. Just as often as not, this proved as good a method for research than merely studying the card catalog. If, say, I knew where a certain author’s books or a certain subject’s books were housed, I could go there immediately and find what I needed, searching through the books’ indexes or tables of contents. Even though the library contained only 250,000 volumes (I believe), I never seemed to have any problem locating what I needed to write my papers. The stacks also housed carrels where one could study in silence. Most weekday evenings, to avoid dormitory noise, I would head for one of those spots and spend three or four hours before the building closed at ten p.m. The library wasn’t just a place where I worked and studied. It felt like the heartbeat or perhaps the brain center of my education. I worked there until after graduation early into the summer. I soon missed it and the people I had gotten to know there.

TOMORROW: I Celebrate National Library Week | Texas Tech University Library

Continuing to Celebrate National Library Week

4/20/2020

A WRITERS' WIT
Google can bring you back 100,000 answers, a librarian can bring you back the right one.
Neil Gaiman
Born 1960. English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre, and films.

N. Gaiman

The Many Wichita Public Libraries

The city of Wichita, Kansas, where I grew up, has always seemed to put libraries at the top of its list of civic responsibilities. One of the first libraries was completed in 1908 where it was housed on the fourth floor of the City Building. It and the next two iterations of the central library are all located on the same block of Main Street (there are now six branch buildings located throughout the city).

I began visiting libraries early. At Wichita’s Longfellow Elementary, where over six hundred students filled a building constructed for fewer pupils than that, there wasn’t much room for a library, but toward the end of my time there, in 1960, I believe two classrooms were combined to form the library.

Still, especially in the summer, it was not enough library for me. My mother would load my siblings and me in the car and take us downtown to the Wichita Carnegie Library (opened 1915), about twenty blocks from our home. Later, I would board a public bus and make the trip by myself. I relished the smell of old books, paper thinned by all those fingers turning pages down the path of the next exciting plot. And in those days I mostly read for plot. I mean, I did fall in love with the characters I read about. I loved the settings the authors created. But mostly, I wanted to know where those characters were going, what they were doing or what they were going to do to solve their myriad problems. I adored climbing the stairs to search for books in the stacks, attempting to read all the books of a favored author before moving on to another.

Students Transfer Books to Wichita Library c1966 | Wichita Photo Archive

In 1965, with one year left before I went away to college, a new library opened across the street on Main. Note the photograph where public high school students create a chain by which they move books from one building to the next. I didn’t get to use that building much, but I appreciated that it was air conditioned and admired the open architecture, which today still maintains a decidedly twentieth-century if not “contemporary” look. In 2003, even though I had not lived in Wichita for decades I emailed a research librarian to help me find information about the old Miller Theater, as I was in the process of writing a fictional piece around the long defunct building. For a modest fee, I received help from an efficient young woman when she mailed me photocopies of material about the Miller. The story was later published in an online journal, Eclectica, as “Tales of the Millerettes.” And just recently, the 1965 library building was replaced by yet another edifice called the Advanced Learning Library, a building I’ve yet to visit.

No matter how small, libraries maintain important places in our lives. They can fill certain voids from which our individual lives may suffer. Today, in honor of National Public Library Week, think about your first library, and what it contributed to your life. Make a donation!

TOMORROW: I Celebrate National Library Week: Southwestern College Library

Educating Ourselves About Implicit Bias

4/17/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
You can't change the past, but you can ruin the present by worrying about the future.
Isak Dinesen
Born April 17, 1885

I. Dinesen

My Book World

Eberhardt, Jennifer L. Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do. New York: Viking, 2019.

An excellent book for every American to read. Why? Dr. Eberhardt addresses the concept of implicit bias, and she begins with some great examples that lead to a clear definition:

“Whether bad or good, whether justified or unjustified, our beliefs and attitudes can become so strongly associated with the category that they are automatically triggered, affecting our behavior and decision making. So, for example, simply seeing a black person can automatically bring to mind a host of associations that we have picked up from our society: this person is a good athlete, this person doesn’t do well in school, this person is poor, this person dances well, this person lives in a black neighborhood, this person should be feared. The process of making these connections is called bias. It can happen unintentionally. It can happen unconsciously. It can happen effortlessly. And it can happen in a matter of milliseconds. These associations can take hold of us no matter our values, no matter our conscious beliefs, no matter what kind of person we wish to be in the world” (31-2)

Eberhardt doesn’t come to the topic without a personal story of her own. As an African-American she is raised in a middle-class home in Cleveland, Ohio, and attends noted Shaker Heights High School, which leads to a first-class education. On the night before she is to receive her PhD and head the procession as flag bearer, she and a friend are stopped by a white Massachusetts policeman because her Ohio license plate is over six weeks past expiration. I can imagine him saying (to a white person), Did you realize your tag has expired? Oh, you’re about to graduate? Congratulations. Since you’re leaving town, you might want to put that renewal high on your list when you get back to Ohio. I normally issue a warning, but I’m going to let it slide today. This is NOT what happens to Jennifer Eberhardt. She is so shaken by the policeman’s demand that she get out of her car that she refuses. He not only drags her out of the car but slams her slight body on top of it so hard it creates a dent (and not a few aches and pains for her), now in full sight of bystanders and a policeman of a higher rank who claims to see nothing. Fortunately, Eberhardt is allowed to call her dean at Harvard and the woman bails the two students out. But the experience mars the graduation experience for Doctor Eberhardt and renews her resolve to continue studying implicit bias.

And study she has. Eberhardt teaches at Stanford University and is a well-respected scientist in her field. In this finely written book, she combines research (hard statistics) with personal examples (her own plus observations of others). She begins the book speaking about the Oakland, California police department whose leadership is attempting to address bias. She addresses a small auditorium of polite, white officers, most of whom have their arms crossed, body language for Show me. It may be the most difficult lecture she ever gives. In wrapping up her book she speaks once again of the Oakland police, after ten years of training, and she views things from their perspective, demonstrating, I believe, her global understanding of the problem and of human nature. Again, a must-read for all of us.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Will Fellows's Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest

A Cautionary Tale That Never Dies

4/10/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.
Paul Theroux
Born April 10, 1941

P. Theroux

My Book World

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. with translation by Thomas P. Whitney. The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation I-II. New York: Harper, 1974.

In some ways I’m embarrassed to say that this book has been on my shelf since 1974—unread. It is a paperback of such vintage that I had to be careful about cracking the ancient glue in the spine or pages would have fallen out. Though the read was a slog—not having a Russian history background—I was able to glean much of its purpose. The writer wishes for people in the West to know that Russian citizens experienced a purge probably as horrendous as what took place in Germany in the 1940s, if not worse. At least a million Soviet citizens held in custody by the Allies at the end of World War II were handed over to officials at the end of the war. This does not include other enemies of the people.

One must remember scads of acronyms in this book, and yet they are based on the Russian words, not the English version, so it is more difficult to recall the connections. For example SMERSH stands for Soviet counterintelligence but means “death to spies.” GPU stands for Russian words meaning State Political Administration. Also difficult to recall for an English reader are people’s names; except for Stalin, most are quite multisyllabic.

Yet there is much the naïve reader can take from this book. Solzhenitsyn speaks bluntly of many things.

“I smiled in pride that I had been arrested not for stealing, nor treason, nor desertion, but because I had discovered through my power of reasoning the evil secrets of Stalin. I smiled at the thought that I wanted, and might still be able, to effect some small remedies and changes in our Russian way of life” (167)

Perhaps Part II, about the prison conditions themselves, is most understandable of all, the most universal. Solzhenitsyn calls the trains that take people to the prisons “ships.” I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything as painfully disgusting as his descriptions of the conditions: men literally sitting on top of one another; few if any toilets so men must soil themselves; at best, a kind of gruel to eat, if anything at all; unbearable cold or heat. Then there are the prisons themselves: again little or no heat; no healthcare; poor food and sanitation. Draconian punishments for the tiniest of (sometimes manufactured) infractions. And the people must bear these sentences, most begin as tenners (ten-years), with great aplomb, hoping they will in one way or another escape the hell they are in (even death would be prefable).

The Russians present to the world such a mixed and puzzling heritage. On the one hand, we treasure great Russian literature and drama, superb music including ballet, fine visual art and more. On the other, Russians, either by way of their isolation from the rest of the world, and its inherent paranoia, have a mean streak in their DNA, whether it is by way of the Czarist leaders, the Soviets, or post-Soviet PutinWorld. They desire to be respected as a substantial part of the world, but simply put, do not know how to play nice. And it seems to be a cycle that is difficult to break.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Jennifer L. Eberhardt's Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do

One Citizen's Days Are Numbered

4/3/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
What people see the first family do has an effect. And from a slightly different aspect, I think that family living in the White House is going to have a profound effect on many Americans.
George Stevens, Jr.
Born April 3, 1932

G. Stevens, Jr.

Cenziper, Debbie. Citizen 865: The Hunt for Hitler’s Hidden Soldiers in America. New York: Hachette, 2019.

Cenziper focuses her book on two main groups. First, she tells the story of Polish Jews who, during World War II, become Hitler’s pawns. Hitler is looking to expand Germany’s borders so that his people have more space in which to live, so he annexes Poland. After the war, some of these displaced persons flee to the US, for they have no one or nothing left at home. The other group Cenziper develops is the people who work for the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), one of whom is a fresh new historian, Peter Black. Historians are relentless researchers, so they make a good team along with others, lawyers, in particular.

Their work is to ferret out particular ex-Nazi’s, particularly “Citizen 856,” who later minimize their involvement with killing Jews to US Immigration officials, and thus gain illegal entry into the country—a frightening idea to the legal immigrants living nearly side-by-side their torturers in some cases. The OSI spends decades building cases against this group of Ukrainians and Russians who are recruited and rewarded by the Nazis for carrying out their orders to exterminate about 1.7 people. The OSI’s work is arduous and their results are mixed. Because most of the accused Nazis appeal the decision to be returned to their native countries to face trial there (except in Germany, where officials do NOT want these people back), some of them die before deportation, but a few do have to face justice in their home countries.

Some Americans, like Pat Buchanan, oppose the OSI’s work, want to dispose of the OSI. They believe those mass murderers should be forgiven and forgotten. It is difficult to see how these usually conservative people, can form such a free-and-easy view of what should happen to war criminals—when otherwise they are usually such hawks. Is that really a Christian posture? Maybe someone will write a book about them to figure out why they would hold such a position.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation I-II

Look at Her!

3/27/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Quite casually I wander into my plot, poke around with my characters for a while, then amble off, leaving no moral proved and no reader improved.
Thorne Smith
Born March 27, 1892

T. Smith

My Book World

Egan, Jennifer. Look at Me. New York: Doubleday, 2001.

I read Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad in 2012 to study how nonlinear plots work and enjoyed it very much. This earlier book, her second novel, is a bit more traditional although she does some very interesting things like presenting the main character’s chapters by way of first person but the rest of the chapters in third person; she also cuts, rotating quickly from one character’s point of view (omnisciently) to the next in one of the final chapters, to sustain suspense and perhaps coalesce their views into one. It would seem that the basic plot is that one Charlotte Swenson, a beautiful young fashion model is involved in a car accident, and the surgeon who puts her face back together does so (and I find this hard to believe) with eighty titanium screws just beneath the skin. Her face is still beautiful, but it is no longer her face. People don’t recognize her. She is invisible.

But Charlotte is not without curiosity, a certain inventiveness, to keep her life interesting after losing her livelihood (her booker can no longer get her any modeling jobs)—including a festive sex life. By her own recognizance she can identify what she calls the shadow self of almost any person with whom she comes in contact. Later in the novel, she encounters a man who will now direct a television special about her accident and recovery, in which she plays herself. Even though outwardly he is somewhat fit and sophisticated, she limns his shadow self as an insecure fat kid, the one lurking just beneath the surface of his life, his skin. Though Charlotte’s character is flawed, she leads us to believe she is an astute judge of character, and we tend to believe her.

As with any fine novel, there is a lot going on here. Egan weaves together the story that Charlotte and two other characters are destined to tell, along with a cast of supporting characters, who, in themselves, are fascinating: for one, Z, a young Middle Eastern would-be terrorist who seems to adapt to America quite well; also, a recently recovered alcoholic detective; a mysterious teacher who is seduced by a young female pupil (one of the three main characters) and has also come from some distant or foreign background (one almost thinks that he and Z could be one, but no, ‘tis not true). Jennifer Egan is one of those novelists who meticulously create plot, who meticulously create believable characters to carry it out, all in the service of larger literary themes which are also captured by a title as apt as Look at Me.

By the way, this is an “Advance Reading Copy” that claims it is “Not for Sale.” However, I paid twelve dollars for it at a used book store, and I wuz robbed. I can now see at least one good reason publishers do not want readers to see this sort of copy sold. It had (I always mark them) a variety of twenty-one typos, averaging more than one per chapter. And those are just the ones I caught.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Debbie Cenziper's Citizen 865: The Hunt for Hitler’s Hidden Soldiers in America

Four Tough Brothers

3/20/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become.
David Malouf
Born March 20, 1934

D. Malouf

My Book World

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Andrew H. MacAndrew and with an introductory essay by Konstantin Mochulsky. New York: Bantam, 1970.

Another book that sat on my shelf unread, this time since 1986. 936 pages. This was nineteenth-century entertainment: a book that might take readers twenty hours to read. I’m not sure twenty-first century readers believe they have twenty hours to spend on one book. Even the denouement and epilogue take up the last one hundred pages. My mental image of this book was always four brothers kicking their heels up, Cossack style, in great revelry, but, ah, no.

One of the four is said to be illegitimate, Smerdyakov. The eldest of the remaining brothers is Mitya or Dmitry. Next is Vanya or Ivan. And the youngest is Alyosha or Alexei. The Russian literary custom of assigning multiple names to a character broadens his or her dynamic, more so than the Anglo/American Bob and Robert or Jim and James. I’m not sure why. Perhaps the author uses a different name depending on the context.

No need to belabor the plot: Readers become acquainted with all four brothers. Certain conflicts arise between father and sons, particularly father and Dmitry. Father is found dead and one of the sons is accused of his murder. Like all epic novels, the author spends a great deal of leisurely time acquainting readers with each character, even the minor ones, so that one’s curiosity nearly rivals the curiosity one has in waiting to see what happens next in, say, a soap opera or an evening TV series. Only with much more gravitas. I’m certainly glad I spent the time reading this novel with a time-worn theme that surprisingly still reads fresh almost two hundred years after its writing.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipeligo

Cap Arcona: A Ship Like No Other

3/13/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Sometimes I can be walking down the street, or riding a bus, and suddenly I see somebody who reminds me of somebody I know back home, and I close my eyes and find myself thinking of the sea, or the taste of grafted mango, or the smell of saltfish frying, and then I come back to myself and open my eyes and realize where I am.
Caryl Phillips
Born March 13, 1958

C. Phillips

Watson, Robert P. The Nazi Titanic: The Incredible Untold Story of a Doomed Ship in World War II. Boston: Da Capo, 2016.

Even as a child, I was a sucker for disaster reads, particularly those taking place at sea: Titanic, Andrea Doria, and others. Watson seizes upon the fame of the Titanic to make a case for his story about the German ship, Cap Arcona (German for Cape Arcona). Without the Titanic reference in the title, the book might not have much shelf appeal. I’m not sure that there are too many real parallels between the two ships except that they both sank.

Nevertheless, Watson’s book is a fascinating one about the extraordinary history of a German luxury liner that services travelers from the Baltic to South America from 1927 until 1939. At that time the Nazis expropriate the ship and transform it for war purposes. Its most important history comes at the end of its life, in 1945, and I’m not going to spoil the read by giving away the ending. Suffice it to say that the Cap Arconastory is one that has been overlooked, and we have Robert Watson to thank for keeping it and its historical significance alive.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov

All Traveling in the Same Direction ... Yet Not

10/11/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
There are 500 million people on Facebook*, but what are they saying to each other? Not much. [*Make that 2.3 billion. Google 10/11/19]
Elmore Leonard
Born October 11, 1925

E. Leonard

My Book World

Porter, Regina. The Travelers. New York: Hogarth, 2019.

This barely three-hundred-page novel contains a cast of thirty-five characters and spans nearly fifty years of American life from the 1970s until President Obama’s first term in office. At times, one must check back at the beginning to see who is whom. But for the most part, Porter does a remarkable job of refreshing the reader’s memory when the time comes. Even more remarkable, she paints a picture of our country as it really is: a world inhabited by white and black people who intermarry, have children, some of whom belong to the LGBTQ community. Is it all love and roses as our hippy friends of the seventies (including me) had hoped our future would be? Not by a long shot. The life she unearths is as messy as an all-white or an all-black one, but it is a life that is also marked with joys and trials of raising children, finding one’s own place in the world. This is a novel of high and low culture, one in which Stoppard’s play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, becomes a major motif throughout the book, but a work in which current argot makes a place for itself without being annoying. It is a novel that requires the reader to put the nonlinear pieces together, a novel for now and always.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-50 Oregon