Words, Words, Words.

A lord of the flies.

2007-08-17T21:49:00.000-07:00

Simon Leys, The Wreck Of The Batavia: A True Story (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2005).

In 1629, the Batavia was the pride of the Dutch East Indies Company, en route from Holland to Indonesia by way of the Cape of Good Hope, when it ran aground one night on a reef near some small islands well off Australia's west coast. Most of the 300+ aboard survived the wreck, and a small crew took the one seaworthy vessel that survived in the hopes of travelling more than a thousand miles to find help. The tragedy that followed was a human one, a frightening story of depravity among those that remained. In its day, the tale of the Batavia was as well known as the Titanic's was in the last century. The Batavia has resurfaced of late, and its physical remains are in a museum in Fremantle. Simon Leys began researching its story many years ago, but he took to long to write his book, and in the meantime, he says, another author beat him to the punch with the definitive account. If you want a 500-page account, read the other book. Leys' take is an elegant 60 pages, which was enough for me.

Also included is his account of a voyage on a French fishing boat in the 1950s, one of the last sailboats fishing for tuna.

Leys describe another Dutch wreck found on Australia's west coast.

This is a short little book, and I would have been grumpy had I paid for it what Amazon wants, like many of the commenters there. Happily, I found it remaindered for $5.

Mani, Corfu, Rhodes, and all over.

2007-08-14T17:47:00.000-07:00

"Mani Towers," by Flickr user cantaloupe99

Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani (NYRB, 2006).
Mani is the most remote part of mainland Greece, the middle of three peninsulas jutting south from the Peloponnese, and when Fermor visited it in early 1950s, it was unconnected by road to the rest of the country and relatively untouched by modernity. Having fought on Crete with partisans during World War II, Fermor was well suited to travelling throughout Mani on foot and by small boat, and was in his element visiting remote villages. An autodidact, Fermor cannot turn around without seeing signs of the past. From the ancient Greece of myth to Byzantine painting to Frankish castles to the struggles with Ottoman rulers, Mani's history lives on in Fermor's eyes. Alone, either his sympathy for Mani's inhabitants and his engagement his its past would be remarkable, but the combined effect makes Fermor an unparalleled guide. Reading Mani leaves me wanting to visit Mani, but I'm not the autodidact that Fermor is.

Here is Fermor on the trail of a gorgon, and here he describes a particularly cultured Athenian cat.

Lawrence Durrell, Prospero's Cell (E.P. Dutton & Co., 1960).
Lawrence Durrell, Reflections On A Marine Venus (E.P. Dutton & Co., 1960).
In the middle of Mani, I found an old volume with two of Lawrence Durrell's travel books about Greece. Prospero's Cell is an impressionistic account of Durrell's time in Corfu before World War II, while Reflections On A Marine Venus describes the two years he spent on Rhodes after the war. These are pleasant books, but the curse for me is that I read them after reading Fermor. Durrell was less interested in the local history, particularly on Corfu, although he ran with a cultured crowd and relates their interests in such matters. Compared to most travel writers, he comes across as relatively engaged with ancient history, but not relative to Fermor. Likewise, there is a culture gulf between most of the islands' residents and Durrell, and his anecdotes about the peasants smack of a certain scorn. They add local color, but he does not seem to have much respect or use for them as people. But then, who can compare with Fermor? Read Durrell first, and he likely will impress.

Durrell describes the Corfiot taste for water here. This passage is from Durrell's account of the festival of St. Soulas. Fermor visited Durrell on Rhodes, and had this to say about it.

Ryszard Kapuscinski, Travels With Herodotus (Knopf, 2007).

Kapuscinski travelled the world as a Polish foreign correspondent, and he has written some terrific accounts of his travels. Of those that I've read, this is the least of them. Early in his career, Kapuscinski was given a copy of Herodotus's Histories, which he carried with him hither and yon. The Histories are wonderful, but too much of this work is a retelling of Herodotus, with fairly few stories from Kapuscinski's career, perhaps some odd anecdotes that didn't fit into other books. Here, for example, is his account of seeing Louis Armstrong play Khartoum. Good stuff. Good stuff, but not enough of it. Sadly, Kapuscinski died last January, a real loss. Happily, a little Googling suggests that he has several other works that haven't been translated into English, and maybe some of these were written when he was younger and still peripatic.

What have I been reading?

2007-08-09T23:14:00.000-07:00

My original plan with this blog was to keep account of what I was reading, and to force myself to think through what I made of a book by writing about it at the end. Thomas Pynchon's two most recent novels dashed these plans, both because they took so long for me to read that they put the blog on indefinite hiatus for months at a spell, and because it was so hard for me to article thoughts about them. Be that as it may, now it's long past time to work through the backlog.

Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (Henry Holt & Co., 1997).
The most human of Pynchon's books, full of America's promise. George Washington and a parade of others come and go, but the story's arc follows the lives of Mason and Dixon.

Charles Clerc, Mason & Dixon & Pynchon (University Press of America, 2000).
Not without some useful insights, but if I thought there was any money in academic publishing I'd suspect that Clerc dashed this off to be the first to be able to sell a Mason & Dixon book to university libraries.

Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin, eds., Pynchon and Mason & Dixon (University of Delaware Press, 2000).
The first essays in this volume were much appreciated as I tried to make sense of Mason & Dixon, but then my copy disappeared, and when it finally emerged from behind the couch I had moved on.

Francine Prose, Reading Like A Writer (HarperCollins, 2006).
I eagerly snap up books on the craft of writing, but they leave no impression. Am I any wiser or smarter for having read this book? The thought that it increased my capabilities, however imperceptibly, will fuel me to go read the next one.

Here is Prose on gesture.

Thomas Pynchon, Against The Day (Penguin, 2006).
The scope and scale of this novel is overwhelming, but it is well worth it. A neighbor is a fairly well known book reviewer, and I mentioned to her that I was engrossed in Against The Day. She made a face, and suggested that it was just too big and inaccessible for a mass audience, for her audience. But she relented some when I suggested that it was terrific that Pynchon could find a publisher for such a work, be it from those of us who paid full freight (n.b. -- a hardcover copy can be had for $7 on Amazon.com [eta: or could be recently -- now I'm not seeing it]) or from the boost to sales of his other works. Against The Day did not win a particularly favorable critical reaction, but many of the reviewers seemed to have internalized their expectations of how the mass audience would react, rather than trying to come to turns with it on its own terms. For those willing to devote themselves to it (for example, John Clute), Against The Day has its rewards.

Roberto Bolaño, By Night In Chile (New Directions, 2003).
The deathbed confession cum memoir of a Chilean priest whose examination of his life includes a reconsideration of his complicity in Pinochet's regime. Bolaño writes like a song, but does this book deserve the posthumous praise he has received? It certainly left me wanting to read The Savage Detectives.

P.V. Glob, The Bog People (NYRB, 2004).
It's amazing what experts can do with 2000-year-old human remains found in Danish bogs, how much they can tell from so little. This book was written four decades ago, and I bet today's experts have learned even more, but they don't seem to be writing for us non-experts.

Haruki Murakami, After Dark (Knopf, 2007).
The events in Murakami's latest novel occur in the space of one night and weave together a motley cast of Tokyo characters. Whether it was the compressed duration of the story or the way he divided the focus between a number of characters, After Dark felt lacking to me compared to many of his earlier novels. That said, after I'd finished it, moments in it would come back to me later.

Ruy Castro, Rio de Janeiro (Bloomsbury USA, 2004).
A short little book, much cheaper than a trip to Rio but, sadly, much less fun.

Jim Thompson, Wild Town (Corgi Books (UK), 1989).
An entertainment, but perhaps not one of Thompson's best. It took me longer than it should have to figure out that the novel's center of attention is not its protagonist. Good beach reading.

Joshua Ferris, Then We Came To The End (Little, Brown, 2007).
An excellent first novel, told in the first person plural, the voice of the underlings at a failing Chicago ad agency. A reader who hasn't worked in a traditional office may miss some of the resonances of, e.g., the machinations that surround office chairs when someone leaves the company. About two-thirds of the way in, there was a shift in the narrative voice which confused me and made me fear that Ferris couldn't sustain the promise of the early chapters, but he pulled it all together with an ending that at once was bittersweet and made sense of the earlier shift. Not many books make me laugh out loud on public transportation. Thanks to the folks at The Elegant Variation for recommending this one.

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (Houghton Mifflin, 2006).
A graphic memoir, which is to say a memoir of Bechdel's childhood and particularly her relationship with her father, told in the format of a graphic novel. Just tremendous, for its realization of a novel form, for its structure, for its use of allusion and repeated motifs, and for its emotional impact. Highly recommended, and it takes only a few hours to read, so you really have no excuse.

John Lukacs, Confessions Of An Original Sinner (Ticknor & Fields, 1990). Lukacs grew up in Budapest, almost too young to serve in World War II, and emigrated to the United States not long after the end of the war. He soon found a teaching position at a small Catholic commuter school in the Philadelphia suburbs, and although he seems to have toiled in some measure of professional obscurity for many years, he has found a broad audience for his work. Characteristically, he does not dwell on his professional success. I have always enjoyed Lukacs' histories, and while his memoir does not match the best of them (in my eyes, Five Days In London), it does give a more personal perspective on what he has written elsewhere.

Here is Lukacs on Hungarian populists of the 1930s.

Edmund Wilson, To The Finland Station (NYRB, 2003).
An intellectual history of revolutionary thinkers after the French Revolution and before the Russian Revolution. Wilson spends a bit of time clearing his throat about French thinkers of the 19th century who do not seem to interest him much except as they suggest that non-communist thinking had reached a cul de sac of sorts by the end of the century. The bulk of the book chronicles Marx and Engels, and he does a masterful job lending texture and context to a life often -- unfairly -- reduced to slogans. Marx owed early intellectual debts to German philosophers and later material debts to Engels, who himself was a surprisingly engaging fellow. Wilson displays Marx's formidable academic mind, but sometimes falters in depicting his failure to lead other people. Even Marx, however, seems to be but a prelude for Wilson to the main act, Lenin. And yet the greatest flaw of the book, as Louis Menand suggests in the introduction, is Wilson's blindness to Lenin's brutality once in power. Indeed, Lenin doesn't fit the mold of the thinkers to whom Wilson has devoted the rest of the book, as he saw ideas as a tool to grab power, and not as an end in themselves.

Here Wilson sees Prometheus in Marx, and here he describes American socialists.

Alan Furst, The Foreign Correspondent (Random House, 2007).
Another thriller from Furst, capturing the last years before World War II, this time from the perspective of an Italian emigre living in Paris, where he reports for Reuters and helps to publish an anti-Fascist newspaper. I've written before about what Furst does well, and it's all here again, including some suspense. Most of his books have sections where the protagonist's peril has me wanting to skim ahead to find out what happens, even though thinks usually work out, more or less, at least for the moment.

That doesn't catch me up, but it gets me closer . . . .

Down and out in America.

2007-01-20T20:22:00.000-08:00

David K. Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible In America (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).

Being poor is a lot of work, so even the people who David Shipler met while he wrote this book who aren’t working are still working hard. Shipler used to be a reporter for The New York Times, and it would appear that he left so that he could devote himself to deeper, more sustained reportage that can appear in even a good newspaper. For this book, Shipler spent serious time on the ground with people whose stories don’t often make it into the Times, and he often got them to open up to him.

Some of the early chapters are the best. Shipler captures the way that the lack of access to transportation, health care, social capital, and other resources all feed on each other, and he does it by telling individuals’ stories. There’s plenty of humanity, but no pity. The chapter on immigrants is strong. Some of the later chapters fall a little flat, since Shipler can’t always find people to open up to him. This is true with his chapters on education, where he has a hard time getting beyond the classroom, and on substance abuse, where he tells the stories of some who have been down and have made it back up, stories that sometimes sound just a little too affirming and heart-warming.

The book closes with an attempt to identify policy solutions to the conditions of the poor. While the impulse to translate recognition into action is entirely understandable, Shipler’s discussion of policy is short, abstract, and out of touch with how things actually work – the polar opposite of the rest of the book.

Here’s one excerpt from The Working Poor, and here’s another that prompted me to find out more about Reach Out and Read on the internet and give them money.

Living in books.

2007-01-08T20:46:00.000-08:00

Carlos Maria Dominguez, The House Of Paper (Harcourt, 2005).

A little novella about those of us who grow too passionate about books as possessions rather than things to read. The arresting image at the heart of this work is of a house on a lagoon in Uruguay, built of books:

”But he did take his books to Rocha with him. To the strip of sand between the lagoon and sea. It was an expensive move, because the books had to travel more than two hundred kilometers in covered trucks. They had to go in along the earth road and then be taken across the dunes by cart, until, finally, they arrived at the lean-to shack almost on the beach.

“Then what do you think he did with them? He set about finding a local out-of-work laborer, one of those men who are as competent working with wood as they are with cement, who can put in a window or thatch a roof, hammer in nails as big as your finger, drill for water or chisel stone, although you can never be sure of the results. The kind of man who asks no questions but follows instructions, whatever they may be, providing he gets paid, because he won’t have to live there.

“Brauer told his laborer to build the supports for the windows and two doors on the sand. He got him to build a stone wall, and a chimney. Once the chimney was built at the side of the shack, and the door and window frames completed, he asked him to put in a cement floor. And on that floor—you can imagine the horror that fills me as I say this—he told him to turn his books into bricks. . . .

“I can see Carlos sitting, hands on his lap, in a chair between the huge pile of books the cart had left and the shoreline, wearing a straw hat to protect him from the fierce Rocha sun, listening to the sound of the laborer’s trowel on the backs of books whose margins he had scrawled on with useless references to other works, commentaries he could never again check, consult, or cast light on with a further reading. He is neither happy nor sad, more dumbstruck by his own brutal act, and lulled by the laborer’s whistle, the radio playing, or the ocean waves breaking on the shore, the gulls on the beach.

pp. 69-71.

Must one be a bibliophile to surmise that this doesn’t end well? A cautionary tale, if you will, of living in books.

Peter Sis, whose work I adore, illustrated this book, and my chief complaint would be that his illustrations are too small, though I suppose it’s a function of publishing such a cute, little book.

Early Frayn.

2007-01-02T20:55:00.000-08:00

Michael Frayn, A Landing On The Sun (Picador, 2003).

Brian Jessel, an English civil servant, is asked to look into the untimely death of another civil servant years ago. Summerchild was found one morning, evidently having fallen to his death from a top floor of a ministry building, under puzzling circumstances. Jessel once knew Summerchild, and his life has come to parallel Summerchild’s in certain respects. Both became absorbed in their work, however humdrum and mundane, and both come to find their home lives to be unfulfilled and unfulfilling.

Jessel soon learns that Summerchild had been seconded to an odd, ad hoc project in the months before his demise, and and as the novel progresses he pieces together what Summerchild was doing and how it led to his death. Suffice it for these purposes to say that Summerchild carved out his own domain in an unexamined corner of the bureaucracy, but that he was unable to negotiate a separate peace.

A Landing On The Sun came recommended by a trusted source, and I have enjoyed Frayn’s later works quite a bit, but I never quite got the point. The story-within-a-story never paid off, in that Jessel’s own circumstances remained unresolved at the novel’s end. As an entertainment, it has its moments but is nowhere near as fun as Headlong. From an intellectual perspective, there was much less to chew on than there is in Copenhagen. All in all, a disappointment.

IBG YBG.

2006-12-02T21:37:00.000-08:00

Jonathan A. Knee, The Accidental Investment Banker (Oxford University Press, 2006).

In 1996, Jonathan Knee left United Airlines to join Goldman, Sachs, then and now the preeminent investment bank. Knee joined the London outpost, for one partner in particular. After a few years there and a transfer to the New York office, Knee left for Morgan Stanley, which would let him develop business in the publishing sector. He had some good years there, but the economic downturn in Bush's first term hit Morgan Stanley hard. Knee was a witness as Morgan bankers fought to avoid the axe.

Knee slipped into this line of work through the side door, and kept something of an outsider's perspective. The book sheds some light on what investment bankers do and on internal politics at Goldman and Morgan Stanley, including some background on former Goldman CEO and current Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. (White House chief of staff Josh Bolten rates a quick mention as a friend in Goldman's London office, but does not make the index. Obviously, the book was written before Paulson and Bolten assumed their present positions.) But this is not Liar's Poker. Knee is more interested in the banks' institutional decline in the last decade.

In the 1980s, investment banks were the center of the financial universe, but these days the hot talent heads for the hedge funds. Knee's focus is "[t]he fundamental shift in investment banking to a more aggressive, opportunistic, and transactional business model from one rooted in long-term client relationships and deeply held business values." As a result,

many of these institutions became unrecognizable from their former selves in the space of a few short years.

At one time, the investment bank viewed his interrelated obligations as to the client, the institution, and the markets. The client might have been with the firm for generations. The institution's reputation was viewed as its most important asset. Internal standards went well beyond any regulatory requirements to protect investors. And investment bankers advanced based largely on their success in simultaneously serving the client, preserving the franchise, and protecting the public.

In place of this idea a culture of contingency emerged, a sense not only that each day might be your last, but that your value was linked exclusively to how much revenue was generated for the firm on that day -- regardless of its source. . . .

The bankers who pressed . . . questionable telecom credits at Morgan in their quest for market share, fees, and internal status coined an acronym that could well be a rallying cry for what the entire investment banking industry had become more broadly. "IBG YBG" stood for "I'll Be Gone, You'll Be Gone." When a particularly troubling fact came up in due diligence on one of these companies, a whispered "IBG YBG" among the banking team members would ensure that a way would be found to do the business, even if investors, or Morgan Stanley itself, would pay the price down the road. Don't sweat it, was the implication, we'll all be long gone by then. (pp. xvi-xvii)

Some of the reasons for this shift were external -- in particular, the repeal of the Glass-Steagel Act in the mid-1990s left Goldman and the others with new, formidable competitors. But Knee suggests that the bigger problem was that the banks' culture shifted, that the banks suffered as bankers placed made themselves stars at the institutions' expense. With the riches to be made in the late 90's, i-bankers were no longer willing to subordinate personal short-term gain to their employer's long-term interests. These temptations surely were always been there, but the cultural and institutional antibodies to them were no longer up to the task.

Unlike the mercenaries who grew the most famous and rich, Knee was drawn to investment banking less for the money than by the prospect of advising senior executives, a doubtless rewarding role which is not nearly as lucrative for banks as the selling of the banks' various other products and services. As his account of these conflicts of interest continues, it becomes increasingly clear that Knee would have to leave Morgan Stanley, and the reader sheds no tears for him when he finally cuts the cord. Knee apparently has landed at a boutique investment bank, where perhaps he can give the sort of advice that Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley built their reputations on.

In this excerpt, Knee explains how Goldman kept all of its bankers thinking that they were outperforming their peers.

Meta- yet gripping.

2006-11-19T16:10:00.000-08:00

Jennifer Egan, The Keep (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).

At the start, Jennifer Egan's novel is the story of Danny, a New Yorker in need of a fresh start and trying to find it in Central Europe, where his cousin Howie is renovating a castle into a hotel. Where in Central Europe is unclear:

Talking on the phone to his Cousin Howie, who owned this castle and had paid Danny's way to help out with the renovation, he'd tried to nail down some details.

Danny: I'm still trying to get this straight--is your hotel in Austria, Germany, or the Czech Republic?

Howie: Tell you the truth, I'm not even clear on that myself. Those borders are constantly sliding around.

Danny (thinking): They are?

Howie: But remember, it's not a hotel yet. Right not it's just an old--

The line went dead. When Danny tried calling back, he couldn't get through.

Communications failure is one of several recurring themes in The Keep, especially for poor Danny, whose struggles to reach out and touch New York are only the start of it. Howie's casual grasp of the borders -- or maybe you believe that he just bought a hotel but he doesn't know what country it's in? -- is also typical. Egan supplies just enough concrete detail to let you know that she could take it away. You never forget for long that she's there behind the curtain.

Even so, you're sympathizing with Danny, and then all of a sudden the curtain has dropped to the floor and the narrator is talking directly to you:

He was heading into memory number two, I might as well tell you that straight up, because how I'm supposed to get him in and out of all these memories in a smooth way so nobody notices all the coming and going I don't know.

And then it's back to the story.

Before too long, Egan's novel is running on parallel tracks, with Danny's story progressing alongside that of a prison writing class. Off course, both stories manage to both head in similar directions and intersect. To say more would be unfair, so I won't.

I don't usually care for these sort of meta-fiction tricks, but Egan pulls it off because I never stopped caring about her characters. Even as Danny's plight is revealed to be a tale within a tale -- doubly fictive -- and even when his experiences verged on the allegorical, I kept suspending my disbelief. Even as she reminds you that she's telling a story, she tells a story well.

Months later -- I read The Keep in August -- Egan's work seems less of an accomplishment than it did when I put it down, but I think that's only because the next book I picked was Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon. The Keep is a terrific little work.

Driftless.

2006-08-31T19:26:00.000-07:00

Tom Drury, The Driftless Area (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).

Tom Drury's novel is a slender one, but it takes a while to get started. His hero, Pierre Hunter, a bartender in his 20s, comes into a large sum of money almost by accident and then must worry about those who want it back, but these things do not start to transpire until almost halfway into the novel. Drury takes a while to let us grow familiar with Pierre and the little of the Upper Midwest (Iowa? Minnesota?) where he lives. Pierre has a strange encounter with Stella, who pulls him out after he goes skating across an insufficiently frozen lake, and the two start up a private romance. Unbeknownst to Pierre, Stella has unnatural secrets in her past, and these set the stage for the denouement when the prior owners of Pierre's windfall finally track him down. Reviewers compare this angle to the Coen brothers or David Lynch, but Drury has a tone all his own, and it's neither as madcap as the Coen brothers or as twisted as the best of David Lynch. In The End Of Vandalism, Drury's first novel, he told a story set on this turf in a wry and heartfelt way. The Driftless Area finds Drury back in the same neighborhood but trying out a different song.

Before the towers came down.

2006-08-28T19:01:00.000-07:00

Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower (Alfred A. Knopf 2006).

For those of not employed by intelligence agencies, Lawrence Wright has written the definitive account of the road to 9/11. Wright focuses on four individuals involved in the attacks – Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, John O’Neill and Prince Turki al-Faisal – and uses them to tell the story of the creation and evolution of Al Qaeda and of the United States’ response. Wright has done a wealth of research and he tells his story well. The Looming Tower sits next to The Age Of Sacred Terror and Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies in the small library of necessary books on Islamist terror.

There is quite a bit here that I didn’t know, or that corrects what I thought I knew. Osama bin Laden’s PR has been more impressive than his military successes. For example, it has been reported that Al Qaeda operatives were in Mogadishu in early 1993 during the fighting recounted in Black Hawk Down, and Al Qaeda has claimed credit for teaching Somalis to down helicopters with RPGs, but Wright says that there were only two Al Qaeda men present and that they fled when the helicopters were shot down. Another example: When Osama bin Laden left Sudan for Afghanistan, he was broke, thanks to Sudan’s government, which used his duress to strip him of his assets. And while Wright does not contradict the reports that bin Laden and Al Qaeda were funded by private donations from Saudi Arabia, it does not appear that he was nearly as rich or well funded after his arrival in Afghanistan as had been reported, though Wright suggests that he was supported by the Pakistani government to foment trouble for India in Kashmir. Also, I had always understood bin Laden’s anti-Americanism as a means to a political and religious end, a strategy to bring Islamists to power in the Middle East. But Wright shows that bin Laden’s world view is as Manichean as, say, George W. Bush’s.

Wright’s approach is not without its shortcomings. Wright provides a more complete picture of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri than he does of O’Neill or Prince Turki, both because his access to sources concerning the institutional activities of the FBI and Saudi intelligence necessarily has been limited, but also because those institutions are far less dependent on charismatic individuals than Al Qaeda is. Wright is able to weave into his account a useful history of Al Qaeda and its antecedents, but he is far less effective at conveying U.S. counterterrorism efforts outside the context of scattered episodes. He paints a full picture of O’Neill as a person, but he is less successful at portraying how he approached his job, or how his colleagues at the FBI and in the government interacted with him, high praise from Richard Clarke notwithstanding. In this regard, a book like Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars provides needed context by focusing on U.S. policy rather than colorful individuals. When it comes to Al Qaeda, Wright has done an impressive job of gathering information about what is, after all, a secret organization. At times, he tries to do too much with too little, as with his discussion of Mohammed Atta’s will:

. . . Atta constantly demonstrated an aversion to women, who in his mind were like Jews in their powerfulness and corruption. [His] will states: “No pregnant women or disbelievers should walk in my funeral or ever visit my grave. No woman should ask forgiveness of me. Those who will wash my body should wear gloves so that they do not touch my genitals.” The anger that this statement directs at women and its horror of sexual contact invites the thought that Atta’s turn to terror had as much to do with his own conflicted sexuality as it did with the clash of civilizations.

Atta’s will is an odd document, but it is a slender reed for the weight Wright places on it. At yet this is hardly the only place where The Looming Tower hints at sexual repression behind Al Qaeda. Wright’s biographical focus on Al Qaeda’s leaders leaves the book wanting for more sustained analysis, and more context – more on Saudi society, say, or on immigrants in Hamburg, where Atta was a graduate student (in urban planning) in the fall of 1992.

But it seems ungrateful to wish that Wright had written a different book. The book he did write is worth reading.

One last puzzle for the master.

2006-08-28T19:00:00.000-07:00

Michael Chabon, The Final Solution (Harper Perennial 2005).

When I headed to the bookshelf after finishing Austerlitz and pulled down The Final Solution, little did I realize that the plot of Michael Chabon’s book also revolves around the mysterious past of a Jewish boy from the Continent orphaned in England during World War II. This parallel was the kiss of death for my reading experience, for it exposed Chabon’s book as little more than an entertainment. Surely the comparison is unfair. While Sebald uses Jacques Austerlitz’s past to confront the Holocaust, Chabon uses his young refugee’s origins as little more than the key to a hidden treasure in a mystery starring an aged Sherlock Holmes who comes out of dotage keeping bees to solve one last mystery, one hinging on the secret of the refugee’s pet parrot.

There is nothing to dislike about The Final Solution, but although Chabon’s writing is lovely there’s not an awful lot going on beneath the surface either. Perhaps Holmes aficionados will plumb greater depths here than I did. And what was Chabon thinking with that title?

The past.

2006-08-19T20:32:00.000-07:00

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Modern Library 2001).

It is hard to find the words to describe Austerlitz. Sebald's novel is the story of a man whose life's work is to attempt to discover where he came from. As a child in Wales, he learned that he had been adopted by his parents, and that his real name is Jacques Austerlitz, but nothing of how he came to them. I'm giving away nothing more than the back jacket of the book, and hardly diminishing the reading of it, to say that through Austerlitz's efforts to find his parents, Sebald confronts the enormity of the Holocaust. Sebald's tone is like no other writer's I've ever read, surely a credit to his translator, Anthea Bell. A sense of loss, an elegaic quality, pervades. For me, the text also is haunted by Sebald's untimely death a few years. A wonderful, incomparable book

A fall from grace.

2006-08-11T19:14:00.000-07:00

Magnus Mills, The Scheme For Full Employment (Picador, 2002).

This is the story of The Fall. Once, there were good jobs for everyone who was in on the Scheme. Drivers, mechanics, assistants, supervisors; all get comfortable, safe jobs with regular hours and decent pay. Of course, it couldn't last. Some liked to get off early. Some fit in other work on the site. It sounds like a spoiler to say it can't last, but since Mills says as much in the novel's first few lines this hardly is giving anything away.

As a matter of style, Mills' most recent effort didn't break new ground. Perhaps it's interesting, though, that Mills' has gone from depicting a Kafkaesque distopia in his first novel to a workers' paradise -- albeit the fall thereof -- in his most recent.

Rick Bass.

2006-08-10T18:23:00.000-07:00

Rick Bass, The Hermit's Story (Houghton Mifflin, 2002).

Rick Bass has written a lot of books now in a variety of genres, but I came to him first through his short stories and so it is a small delight to see that he has a new collection. The Hermit's Story has been out for four years, and though I snapped it up immediately I haven't read it until now.

In many of these stories, Bass's characters find themselves encountering the wild, unknowable and profound. In the title story, a dog trainer recalls a winter trip in Canada years ago when the temperatures dropped and she found herself walking beneath the ice cap of a drained lake. In "The Cave," a couple shed their clothes and possessions and descend into an abandoned mine, emerging hours in a new, green world. "Swans" tells the story of a couple living in rural Montana, as Bass does; Bill, takes ill and declines, leaving Amy to care for the swans on their pond. Bass even finds the wild and unknowable in the most civilized of American built environments, Monticello, the scene for "The Distance." These stories did not excite me the way The Watch did fifteen years ago, but only because I my expectations are so high now.

Lots of sand.

2006-07-28T19:14:00.000-07:00

Saul Kelly, The Lost Oasis: The Desert War and the Hunt for Zerzura (Westview Press 2003).

Saul Kelly has written a solid and respectable, albeit unexciting, history of the exploration of the desert that fills western Egypt, much of Libya, and northwestern Sudan. Equipped with automobiles, Europeans started to venture into these wastes in the 1920s, and their efforts quickened in the 1930s, particularly after Italy invaded Libya, bringing a strategic significance to routes and oases between Libya and the Nile. The exploration continued after 1939, and several of the most accomplished explorers helped to create the Long Range Desert Group, the Desert Rats, who raided far behind the Axis lines through the desert campaign.

Zerzura was a fabled lost oasis, best known now from The English Patient, whose protagonist was loosely based on the Hungarian Count Almasy. Almasy explored the desert in the 1930s, usually from Egypt, but he passed information to the Italians and ended up in the Afrika Korps during the war. Almasy tried his hands at long-range desert operations, including a mission to infiltrate spies into Egypt. Though the Afrika Korps did not match the British successes in the desert, the problem was that there were not more of Almasy. But for this reason, he does not have the stature or depth to bear Kelly’s decision to make him the book’s focus. Kelly does not have the sources to bring him to life.

For that matter, I imagine that the North African desert was a more interesting place that Kelly manages to convey. The telling detail – about the terrain, the natives, the weather, the fauna – is all too rare. Alas, The Lost Oasis turns out to be a little too dry.

Three for the Cup.

2006-07-25T21:34:00.000-07:00

Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains The World (Harper Perennial 2005).
Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch (Riverhead 1998).
Bill Buford, Among The Thugs (Vintage 1993).

Inspired by the World Cup and finding myself in a Barnes & Noble, I picked up these three books. All three were shelved with the soccer books but all three focus less on the sport itself than on its milieu – each book uses soccer as a prism, a device to bring the game’s surroundings into focus.

The title of Franklin Foer’s book promises quite a bit, and if it sounds like he bit off more than he could chew, well, just be assured that the book is not quite so ambitious, for better or worse. In the preface, Foer explains:

This book has three parts. The first tries to explain the failure of globalization to erode ancient hatreds in the game’s great rivalries. It is the hooligan-heavy section of the book. The second part uses soccer to address economics: the consequences of migration, the persistence of corruption, and the rise of powerful new oligarchs like Silvio Berlusconi, the president of Italy and the AC Milan club. Finally, the book uses soccer to defend the virtues of old-fashioned nationalism – a way to blunt the return of tribalism.

Notwithstanding the title and these promises, those looking for an explanation of much of anything will be disappointed. Foer is not even particularly clear about what he means when he talks about globalization. But who cares? Maybe non-sporting social theorists, but the rest of us will ignore the overlay of social theory to read about soccer.

Foer’s book reads like a collection of magazine articles about related subjects; it never coheres as a book. There is some good stuff, including a chapter about Red Star Belgrade’s role in the ugly side of Serbian nationalism. (A particularly ugly side – was there an attractive side?) Some of the chapters – for example, the one about the rivalry between Rangers and Celtic, and the one about professional soccer’s failings in Brazil – touch on interesting subjects that might warrant a book, but evidently Foer learned enough to say enough, and then was ready to move onto the next thing. And then a few chapters have the punch of, say, the Iranian national team. All in all, a mixed bag. Were I Foer’s editor, I would have suggested that he think harder about the social theory, or spend more time on the ground in Glasgow and Rio de Janeiro.

I thoroughly enjoyed Fever Pitch while I was reading it, but now it’s hard to know what to say about it – not the first time Nick Hornby has induced that reaction in me. Hornby went to his first Arsenal match years and years ago as a young boy, and he has been obsessed with the team every since. He faltered now and then, but when he wrote the book he had seen every home match for years, with only the prospect of obligations to his wife or unborn children in the future to stand between him and his side.

There’s more soccer in Hornby’s book, and he seems to love and appreciate the sport in a way that Foer and Buford don’t share or can’t express. And then there’s the obsession, a devotion to the sport and his team that I can only vaguely fathom. Some of the rituals, perhaps, but Hornby long ago left the sort of territory I been through. Fever Pitch is a worthy guidebook.
California-bred, Bill Buford brought an outsider’s anthropological eye and detachment when he first encountered hard-core British soccer fans – hooligans or thugs, if you will – in the mid-1980s, and he made a project of trying to understand the phenomena. Among The Thugs is a remarkable exploration of organized mayhem, alcohol abuse, pathology, and a form of class consciousness. At the start of the book, Buford runs along with Manchester United fans rioting in Turin following a match against Juventus; at the book’s end, he runs with England fans rioting on Sardinia during the 1990 World Cup. When he returns from Sardinia, Buford has had enough, and it’s hard to understand how he stomached so much for so long. Or, indeed, how England did.
Both Fever Pitch and Among The Thugs left me wanting an update fifteen years on. Hornby’s team has changed as English soccer has changed, with Arsenal starring foreign players such as Dennis Bergkamp, Thierry Henry, Jens Lehmann and now Tomas Rosicky. Meanwhile, the hooliganism that was so pervasive when Buford wrote largely is a thing of the past, from what I know. I would love to know how the changes in English soccer have changed Hornby’s affections for his team, and I would like to hear what was done to stop the hooligans.

When I finished Buford’s book, I pulled my copy of Ryszard Kapucinski’s The Soccer War off the shelf and re-read the title piece, an account of the five-day war in July 1969 between Honduras and El Salvador, sparked by rioting during a World Cup qualifying match. There’s very little soccer beyond the title, but Kapucinski is always wonderful.

A glimpse from the inside.

2006-07-04T17:52:00.000-07:00

Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine (Simon & Schuster, 2006).

When Ron Suskind wrote The Price Of Loyalty, it was the first in-depth look inside the Bush White House, and in the intervening years what he reported has shaped the conventional wisdom about how the administration operates. Suskind wrote with the full cooperation of Bush's first Treasury Secretary, Paul O'Neill, and it is hard to imagine a more helpful source. A believer in openness, O'Neill left government service with an archive of documents which he handed over to Suskind. With O'Neill as a witness and the documents as a foundation, Suskind showed a White House in which a small circle -- in particular, Vice President Cheney -- controlled access to the President, and thereby controlled policy. Cabinet secretaries were outsiders. By now, the story is familiar.

Suskind is back with another inside look at the administration, this time with a focus on foreign policy and the global war on terrorism. Once again, Suskind has gained impressive access, and the stories his sources have told him are worth the price of admission. I've posted some excerpts here, here and here, but there's plenty more all over the blogosphere. Truly important stuff. In particular, Suskind cultivated sources inside the CIA -- although many of them seem to have left before and during the purge launched by Porter Goss -- not the least of whom is George Tenet. Indeed, the book closes with Goss assuming the position of DCI. Among other revelations in the book is that the White House set up Tenet to take the fall for the missing WMD by feeding Bob Woodward the "slam dunk" line. According to Tenet, he never said it, although even now he is still too loyal to Bush, or simply classy, to put it quite so bluntly. (Tenet and others at the CIA told Woodward that they differed with the White House's account of the "slam dunk" meeting, but you would not know that from reading Plan Of Attack.)

What this book lacks, however, is a compelling narrative arc or focus to tie these anecdotes together. The book's scope is too broad, and would have challenged even a writer with full cooperation from his subjects and ready access to the pertinent archives. Lacking these, Suskind struggles to place the episodes he relates into a larger context. In this way, The One Percent Doctrine reminded me of Seymour Hersh's Chain Of Command. It's hard to fault Suskind for this: The so-called war on terror is hardly over, and surely there is much that his sources did not dare tell him or that he chose to omit. For now, we will just have to take what we can get.

Suskind often fills the gaps with florid prose about big ideas, and I could have done with a lot less of this. For example, he often takes up the strain between the secrecy integral to foreign affairs and the openness integral to a well-functioning democracy. He's surely onto something here, though he's hardly the first. Unfortunately, he hasn't approached this tension with any rigor. I finished the book in full agreement that the Bush administration has abused national security for political gain, but it was his reportage of concrete facts that made the case. (I saw Suskind do a bookstore appearance on C-SPAN a few days ago, and although he appears to be an effective public speaker, he had the same tendency to grab hold of Big Ideas without really grappling with them.)

Big Ideas aside, Suskind's book also fails to settle on an explanation for the conduct of the war on terror. Instead, I see three: (1) Having disregarded the threat posed by Al Qaeda before 9/11, Bush has determined never to be caught out again having not done enough; (2) In response to the threats posed by nuclear and biological weapons, Cheney has developed an intellectual framework for policy -- the title of which is that of Suskind's book -- to replace more conventional cost-benefit analyses; and (3) The administration's political instincts, on full display in The Price Of Loyalty, have its tendrils throughout the war on terror as well, causing policy to be either driven for partisan gain or misrepresented to an unknowing public.

Or maybe the problem is not Suskind's, but the administration's. The three alternatives above -- one driven by personality, one by policy, and one by politics -- belong most to Bush, Cheny, and Karl Rove, respectively. (Rove seldom appears in this book, but I suspect that this is because Suskind's sources did not encounter him much.) And in practice, the three reinforce each other.

For more, Suskind's site is here. Michiko Kakutani reviews it ("riveting"), as does Barton Gellman. An excerpt from TIME is here. Suskind appeared on Fresh Air to discuss the book, and you can listen to the program here.

Prague.

2006-06-02T18:00:00.000-07:00

John Banville, Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (Bloomsbury, 2004).

As with Don DeLillo, I have never quite liked John Banville's books as much as I feel I should, and Prague was no exception. It's certainly not bad, but it wasn't great, and I hoped it would be great.

Prague is from The Writer and the City, a quirkly series of little books about major cities. I had previously read Peter Carey's 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account and Edmund White's The Flâneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris, and enjoyed them both, although both approach their subjects in very different ways. (Other books in the series describe Rio, Florence and New York.) Perhaps the book didn't resonate in the same way because I've never been to Prague, unlike Sydney and Paris. Banville certainly didn't leave me wanting to go there any less, although I worry that the last ten years have made Prague more like its counterparts in Western Europe.

On page 87, Banville describes Emperor Rudolph II, born in 1552 and ruler of Prague until he abdicated in November, 1611 (two months after which he died):

Jealous, paranoid, hypochondriacal, incurably melancholy, obsessed with the passage of time and terrified at the prospect of death, Rudolf was a compulsive collector, filling room after room of Prague Castle with talismanic objects meant to stave off mortality and be a barrier against the world, all sorts of rubbish and kitsch tumbling together with exquisite objets d'art. As is so often the case with weak men who inherit vast power, he was obsessed with things in miniature, hiring entire schools of craftsmen to carve and emboss and inlay the tiniest surfaces, of pearls, nut shells, cherry pits, flakes of amber, birds' eggs, sharks' teeth, gallstones. No expense was spared, no effort was thought too great. He purchased a painting in Venice, Das Rosenkranzfest, by one of his favourite artists, Albrecht Dürer, and had it carried on foot across the Alps by four stout men, one at each corner.

It may be unfair to say that this passages evokes some of my feelings about this book: brief glimpses of many wonderful things, arranged in a way that never quite comes alive.

The publisher posts some passages here. Ann Skea reviews the book, as does Tim Adams.

Purchase books mentioned above at Amazon through these links:

In rural Connecticut, a story of old artifacts.

2006-05-21T19:34:00.000-07:00

Jon Fasman, The Geographer's Library (Penguin, 2005).

Here is a novel that with all sorts of good ideas worked into it -- a small-town reporter in rural Connecticut researches an obituary that leads him into odd places, a collection of storied relics lost for years but re-emerging. Fasman has some characters with potential, including the reporter, the decedent, and a private-school music teacher. But the parts do not come together, and the promise is not fulfilled. Chapters in The Geographer's Library alternates between the Connecticut narrative and the histories of the relics, a device that intrigues at first but ultimately impedes the story's flow -- these histories become interruptions, and Fasman never ties them back into the main story enough to make the interruption worthwhile. Nor do the characters develop. They proceed along their various trajectories; they do not develop -- instead, their facets are revealed. In this, they are more like pieces of a puzzle than human beings. There was a lot of promise here, but not enough pay-off.

I don't mean to be stingy with praise: The story has its rewards, but it would be best not to say to much and spoil it. This is not a bad book by any stretch of the imagination, but I hoped for more.

In debt in olde Virginia.

2006-05-07T18:44:00.000-07:00

Charles Royster, The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company (Knopf, 1999).

The Great Dismal Swamp lies where the border between Virginia and North Carolina starts at the coast, more north of the border than south. From the first survey of the border in the 1720s, colonists schemed to cut the timber, drain the swamp, and sell the land, and within a few decades a company was formed to this end, its shareholders having convinced their peers in the government to grant them the land, conditioned on its development. Charles Royster's history uses the company, and its succession of shareholders, as a window into the business dealings of Virginia's nascent aristocracy -- primarily landowners, who made their money in speculating on land and growing tobacco. Royster has surveyed a stunning volume of historical records, mostly of business records. My main criticism of the book is that these business records are often not sufficiently leavened with other materials, leaving the narrative little more than a welter of transactions lacking context. Especially in the earlier decades, Royster apparently did not have much else to work with, and the result can be dry and overwhelming, little more than a succession of names and business relations between a small cast of characters. And not just in business -- in marriage, too, generations of Virginia's upper class throughout the eighteenth century entered into a thicket of interlocking ties.

As Royster nears the Revolutionary War, he draws on more and more political history to put the transactional records in context, and a thicker picture emerges. In these periods, the central thrust of the book is a welcome alternative to the traditional narratives of the Revolution, in which figures such as George Washington and Patrick Henry strut their role on the political stage without any sense of their life before or later, save perhaps for the obligatory mention of Mt. Vernon. Washington was a longtime investor in the Great Dismal Swamp Company, a venture less successful than his efforts to win landgrants in the Ohio River Valley for veterans of the French and Indian Wars, many of whom assigned their rights to him. Henry first appears as a firebrand lawyer defending a Virginian debtor from British creditors.

If Royster synthesizes political and business history, other perspectives are lacking. With all the discussion of Virginians' dealings in land, tobacco, and British goods, I would have welcomed more of an economic perspective, some synthesis of the repeated patterns of trade: in particular, British capital lent to Virginian landowners and the exchange of tobacco for manufactured goods. Nor is there enough social history for my taste. Royster can look back into the office better than he can the kitchen or the bedroom. While the perspective he provides here is a new one to me, I would prefer a guide who can take me beyond the business district and tell me more about what I am seeing.

The blue crab.

2006-04-30T19:33:00.000-07:00

William W. Warner, Beautiful Swimmers (Back Bay).

William Warner wrote this book about the blue crab and the men who go out on Chesapeake Bay to catch them in the early 1970's, and it is a classic in the mold of Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert. Warner completely masters his subject. A researcher at the Smithsonian Institute then and today (as near as I can tell), Warner spent many a night sleeping in odd spots to wake up hours before first light so that he could join Maryland and Virginia crab fisherman on the water. It's hard to say whether Warner has more affection for the blue crabs or the men who fish for them. He digests and relates an impressive array of scientific and learning about the crabs and their environment, but I was no less impressed by his ear for the local dialect and his ability to win the trust of and relate to the fishermen. Perhaps things fall slightly flat when Warner turns to the business of shipping and selling the crabs; if so, it is only because his heart is on the water, not at the market.

Europe, on foot.

2006-04-19T20:44:00.000-07:00

Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time Of Gifts (NYRB, 2005).
Patrick Leigh Fermor, Between The Woods And The Water (NYRB, 2005).

As a teenager, Patrick Leigh Fermor was a rare combination of talent and trouble. After many brushes with authority, he got himself expelled from school for consorting with a local girl in the town near his boarding school. Studying on his own to gain admission to Sandhurst, Fermor was struck with the idea of a Wanderjahr, a walk across Europe to Constantinople (which he never calls Istanbul). With the most basic of provisions, he caught a freighter from London to Rotterdam in the winter of 1933, and when he got to Holland, he struck out on foot. A Time Of Gifts takes him from the start of this trip to a crossing into Hungary, where the tale continues in Between The Woods And The Water.

Fermor did not write the story of his trip until many decades later, after a heroic turn fighting with insurgents in Crete during World War II (of which more here) and writing other books on the Caribbean and Greece, fiction and non-fiction. A Time Of Gifts was published in 1977 and Between The Woods And The Water was published in 1986. Particularly as his journey continues, he steps out of time to relate later experiences or learning, or simply to apologize for a stretch about which his memory has failed and his notes have been lost. The hindsight and additional learning of an older man inform his account of his exploits, but do not intrude. On the whole, his writing is like a song, a pleasure to read but rarely obtrusive.

A autodidact and a polymath, Fermor's explusion from school in no way dampened his interest in learning. When Fermor found hospitality on his trip -- he struck up key acquaintances in Munich and Vienna, and spent the night in many a schloss thereafter; likewise with Budapest -- he often ended up in his host's library. A self-taught polymath, Fermor roams freely across the humanities, taking interest in the art, history, language, and architecture of the lands he walks through. One frequently suspects that he has left the travelogue to relate things he learned later, but he was so precocious -- for example, consider his deja vu experience of walking through a Holland he had seen in art -- that one is never sure. Nor does it matter. Perhaps to Fermor's biographers, but not to this reader.

Fermor has a facility with languages that I envy, although he has a harder time with vernacular tongues as the number of German speakers around him falls off. (Even in Transylvania, there were long-established communities of ethnic Germans, so German carries him a long way.) He picks up some Hungarian, a notoriously difficult language unlike any of its neighbors, brought from far to the east by the Magyars. Fermor is also fascinated with history, and in particular with the movements of peoples -- Romans, Goths, Slavs, Magyars, and so on -- who passed before him, and entomology is often a portal to such things. Even with language, he has a remarkable knack for finding signs of this history in the landscape and built environment around him. One wonders how much of this history has been destroyed or paved over since Fermor passed through -- in particular, motor vehicles do not intrude all that often in his journeys, something that has surely changed quite a bit.

At that point in his life, Fermor was more interested in matters historical than current events, which is to say, do not turn to this book for an eyewitness account of European politics in the 1930s. The nature of his trip was to spend more time in the countryside than in cities, which keeps him away from most political activity. (To be fair, his itinerary included some long stays, but of these he says less, perhaps because notes or memories are no longer with him.) He describes an encounter with a Nazi in a bar in Germany which seems prophetic in retrospect, and he arrived in Vienna in the midst of street-fighting, but at the time he lacked the broader perspective to place these events in context. All the same, that Europe's fate looms over the book, making Fermor's youthful wonder all the more of a gift.

Through Holland and much of Germany, Fermor makes friendly acquaintances, but as when he reaches central Europe -- as noted, especially in Vienna and Budapest -- Fermor someone falls in with the upper class, and makes friends. As his trip continues, his stops at the odd schloss or country estate grow longer and longer. Since he was not wealthy himself -- indeed, he is completely out of funds when he reaches Vienna and spends his first few days there figuring out how to earn small change -- I marvelled at his ability to cross over social barriers. I think the reason that he could do this is that the premise of his trip reflects a certain luxury of spirit, even if he lacked funds, and placed him apart from the working and middle classes in the lands he passes through. Too, his learning and education signal a background shared with Central European nobility. However he did it, as Fermor travels through Hungary and Transylvania, he spends more and more of his time with aristocrats. Of course, their Europe was fated to pass soon as well.

At the end of Between The Woods And The Water, Fermor has crossed through Transylvania and reunited with the Danube at the river port of Orsova, hundreds of miles from Constantinople, about to cross into Bulgaria. He closes the book with the words, "TO BE CONCLUDED." Fermor, recently knighted, is living in Greece, and one hopes he has been writing.

[May 16, 2006:]
In the May 22 issue of The New Yorker, Anthony Lane profiles Leigh Fermor, and raises "the enticing prospect of a third and concluding volume. Long planned, it would take the author to the banks of the Bosporus and thus to the gates of the East. 'I'm absolutely long to get at it,' he said to me." Lane's profile, which is well worth reading, is not posted on-line.

Hong Kong.

2006-04-10T10:14:00.000-07:00

Martin Booth's memoir of growing up in Hong Kong in the early 1950's, Golden Boy, was favorably reviewed in The New York Times Book Review this weekend. I read a copy purchased overseas (published as Gweilo) some months ago and thoroughly enjoyed it, but have not found the time to write up books I read before I started this blog. Were I looking for something to read on a flight to Hong Kong, I probably would recommend it over Travelers' Tales: Hong Kong (a decent anthology) or Jan Morris' Hong Kong, and definitely over Paul Theroux's Kowloon Tong, a miserable little novel.

Early flight.

2006-03-10T21:36:00.000-08:00

Peter Demetz, The Air Show at Brescia, 1909 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002).

The summer of 1909 found young Franz Kafka working as an Aushilfskraft -- a temporary assistant -- for the General Accident Insurance Company in Prague, a job with office hours from 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., which gave Kafka plenty of time once the work day was done, but which left him ineligible for vacation time. He had not taken a vacation for three years. Claiming that he was suffering from a nervous condition, Kafka obtained permission to take a nine-day vacation. He and two friends, Max and Otto Brod, set off by train for Riva, "on the north shore of Lake Garda, the last outpost of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and deep in Italian-language territory."

Between swims they liked to read, enjoying their little Italian, and the Sentinella Bresciana, the Italian daily published across the border. The issue of 9 September, to which Kafka later referred, immediately caught their interest. It would have been impossible, anyway, to ignore the headline splashed over page one: La Prima Giornata del Circuito Aereo (The First Day of the Air Show).

In 1909, aviation was new, modern, unreliable, dangerous, exciting, and the Brescia airshow was the first chance many Italians had to see the new aviators. Louis Blériot was the first to fly across the English Channel; he was there. American aviator Glenn Curtiss was there too. And so were cultural figures. Kafka and Brod had not published their novels yet, but Giacomo Puccini and Gabriele D'Annunzio were well-known, and wanted to see the new new thing. (Indeed, both Puccini and D'Annunzio both wanted to experience flight. Puccini was too large for the planes of the day, but D'Annunzio prevailed upon Curtiss to take him along, and when that flight barely left the ground, he persuaded Italian avaitor Mario Calderara to take him.)

Peter Demetz has done an admirable job of piecing together a picture that week in Brescia, and of something of the lives before and after of many of aviators and other figures who were there. But it's plain that he had to work with disparate sources, none of them as comprehensive as one might wish. You can see him working within the limits of his sources, straining to gain speed, and then he's up off the ground for a few graceful moments before he touches back down. Had he been Curtiss, almost a hundred years ago, one might watch him and think that time was on his side. But the Circuito Aereo is falling behind us now as we gain speed and altitude.

Amazon is selling new hardcover copies of this book right now for only $5.99 (or click through the box).

Churchill, once more.

2006-03-08T18:44:00.000-08:00

John Lukacs, Churchill: Visionary. Statesman. Historian. (Yale, 2002).

I picked up this book because John Lukacs wrote it. I previously read two of his books about Churchill and Hitler, Five Days in London and The Duel, and there may have been others. I also bought Krisztian Ungvary's The Siege of Budapest after having read a version of Lukacs' Foreward published in The New York Review of Books. So, I'm a Lukacs fan.

That said, this book was something of a disappointment, though it had its moments. Each of the nine chapters stands alone as a short essay: Churchill the visionary; chapters about Churchill 's relationships with Stalin, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower; Churchill, Europe, and appeasement; Churchill's historianship; a chapter on his failures and critics; one on two recent biographies; and a final piece remembering Churchill's funeral in 1965. I'll confess that I didn't even read that last one, figuring that I would leave it until I finally get to Roy Jenkins' recent biography, as a coda. Maybe this is what I should have done with the whole book, since this volume clearly was not intended as a comprehensive account of the man.

Notwithstanding, there were points here that stick with me. For example, the glimpse of Eisenhower captures something of the man that departs from the usual portrayal. Discussing the correspondence between Churchill and Eisenhower from 1953-1955, Lukacs writes that these letters

reveal serious flaws in Eisenhower's judgment and his character. In none of his numerous biographies is there a substantial description of how and why this seemingly simple (though in reality complicated and calculating) military man, with his easygoing and liberal reputation, shed his pro-Russian and and sometimes pro-Democratic opinions to become a rigid anti-Communist, a Republican, and eventually even a self-styled "conservative." But then Eisenhower's conversion only accorded with the conversion of much of American public opinion, and with a revolution in American political attitudes that began in 1947 and developed fast thereafter. In 1948 Eisenhower was still suggested for the Democratic presidential nomination; four years later he declared himself a Republican and an anti-Communist (and, during the campaign, a churchgoer -- for the first time in his adult life).

Churchill 68-69.

Lukacs' discussion of Churchill the historian makes me want to turn to some of those works, although not his six-volume history of World War II, which Lukacs suggests is unreliable at crucial points, as one would expect from the memoir of a participant, which this history approaches. For example, in 1952 Churchill assured Eisenhower that he would soften (or, indeed, remove) portions concerning their disagreements in 1945, which in retrospect could have been used to paint Eisenhower as soft on Soviet communism. I'm sure it's well written -- Churchill did win the Nobel Prize for Literature for it -- and maybe I'll come around again. But the Churchill work I want to read now is his history of his ancestor, Marlborough, one of England's most successful generals. I'll have to add it to the pile.

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