Books Reviews
The House of Ulloa by Emilia Pardo Bazán, trans. and intro. by Paul O’Prey and Lucia Graves
The House of Ulloa (1886) is one of the great Spanish novels of the 19th century, a saga filled with memorable characters, descriptive detail, and dramatic events told in a naturalistic style with gothic touches. It is a rich and rewarding read.
Its author, Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921), was a prolific, wide-ranging, and influential Spanish writer as well as professor and chair of Romance Literature at the University of Madrid. Inspired by French literary Naturalists Émile Zola and the Goncourt brothers along with Russian writers Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, she introduced those French and Russian literary movements to Spain in her essay, “The Critical Issue” (1883).
Born into a wealthy, educated family, Pardo Bazán’s father was elected as a Progressive Party deputy to the Cortes (Spanish legislature). At age 16, she married José Quiroga Pérez Pinal with whom she would have three children before separating discreetly from him. She read broadly in philosophy, theology, natural science, and politics. She was a devout Catholic and a feminist, who edited the Women’s Library, a book series to educate women, and in her own writing depicted the injustice of the female experience.
Pardo Bazán published 19 novels, 21 novellas, more than 500 short stories, along with essays, literary criticism, and two cookbooks. The House of Ulloa (Los pazos de Ulloa, 1886) and its sequel, Mother Nature (La madre naturaleza, 1887) are considered her best novels, followed by Sunstroke (Insolación, 1889) and The Blues (Morriña, 1889). Despite her achievements, she was denied membership in Spain’s all-male Royal Academy. (O’Prey-Graves, Introduction)
The events of The House of Ulloa occur during a tumultuous time in Spain’s history. After a decade of revolts, Queen Isabella II abdicated, and a provisional government was established in what is known as the Glorious Revolution of 1868. A short-lived constitutional monarchy (1870-73) was replaced by the First Republic (1873-74), which was soon succeeded by the reestablishment of the monarchy under Alfonso XII, Isabella’s son, in December 1874. (O’Prey-Graves Historical Note)
Set in Galicia in northwest Spain, The House of Ulloa follows a young, naïve priest, Fr. Julián Álvarez, in his new post as chaplain at the manor house of Don Pedro Moscoso, known as the marquis of Ulloa (although without legal claim to the title).
After the death of his father while Don Pedro was a boy, he was raised by a maternal uncle, Don Gabriel, to “scorn humanity and abuse his power.” Never properly educated, the youth “went on hunts, fairs, and fetes.” (p. 30) The uncle squandered his sister’s inheritance, requiring the estate to be mortgaged after his death. That state of affairs reflects the economic decline and moral dissipation of the Spanish aristocracy.
Selected by the uncle to oversee the manor is the calculating Primitivo, a skilled hunter, who manages the estate in his own interest. Primitivo’s voluptuous daughter, Sabel, is the cook, house servant, and Don Pedro’s lover by whom she had a son, Perucho. During cold weather, she holds court among the local women who gather in the manor kitchen.
When Fr. Julián first sees Perucho he mistakes him for a dog because of his filth and wild behavior. The priest is horrified when Don Pedro, aided by the abbot, get the boy so drunk he passes out. The marquis says not to worry because the boy will sleep it off.
When Fr. Julián sees his messy room, the author explains that the priest sought not only spiritual but physical purity. “He belonged to the vanguard of the excessively prudish, along with those whose sense of virtue is easily shocked, who have the scruples of a nun and the modesty of an untouched maiden. … all Julián knew about life was what could be learned from religious books.” (pp. 18-19) Serving at the manor house will be an enlightening experience for him.
Fr. Julián dislikes the flirtatious familiarities of Sabel, who came frequently to his room, where he was trying to teach Perucho the ABCs and catechism. He thought she and her father were plotting a trap. Although Primitivo did not display outward hostility toward Fr. Julián, he had “a kind of watchful observation, the calm lying in wait for a prey one does not hate, but wishes to catch as soon as possible.” (p. 37)
When Fr. Julián realizes that Don Pedro and Sabel are having an affair and Don Pedro is Perucho’s father, he decides he cannot stay at the manner because of its immorality. Intending to inform Don Pedro, Julián sees Pedro hitting Sabel with a rifle butt for dancing and cavorting at a local festival, while Perucho is crying with blood on his forehead. Pedro stops when he spots the horrified priest.
Later that night, when Fr. Julián says he must leave, Pedro replies, “Nonsense!” and explains that Primitivo and Sabel have the upper hand because Primitivo is so valuable to the manor’s operation upon which rests the livelihood of the entire parish. Fr. Julián responds that “… it’s Primitivo who rules here!” Don Pedro does not agree. He could kick them out if he wanted. “The logic of savagery confused Julián.” Don Pedro realizes Primitivo is spying on them. (pp. 60-64)
Fr. Julián considers a plan for leaving, and Don Pedro, dressed in a tweed suit and looking like a “new man,” travels with him to the home of Pedro’s uncle, Don Pardo, in the provincial capital of Santiago de Compostela. During the journey, Pedro realizes they are being followed and averts Primitivo from shooting Julián in the back with buckshot.
Don Pardo has four daughters and decides that Pedro should become his son-in-law. Don Pedro is most captivated by Rita, the eldest, who has a perfect body, which Pedro notes not for pleasure but for producing sons. Fr. Julián had grown up in the house, where his mother was the housekeeper, so knew a lot about the family. He dissuades Pedro from Rita in favor of Marcelina (“Nucha”) because of her moral rectitude. Initially rejecting the advice because Nucha is cross-eyed and thin, Pedro soon distrusts Rita for her coquetry with other men. Don Pedro held to the “purely Spanish view, indulgent in the highest degree toward the husband, and wholly intolerant … to the wife.” (p. 87)
After a month, Pedro shocks his uncle by asking to marry Nucha. After getting a papal dispensation, the couple wed, the bride wearing black in the current fashion. The solemn atmosphere at the reception made it seem “like the last meal of criminals sentenced to death.” (p. 97) The marriage fulfilled Fr. Julián’s “greatest wish … but, none the less, his heart was heavy, overwhelmed by a sense of dark foreboding.” (p. 98)
Don Pedro sends Fr. Julián back to the manor to prepare for his bride but warns him about Primitivo. “Julián went pale and shivered. He was not the stuff heroes are made of …” (p. 100) However, Primitivo disarms Julián of his suspicions by being submissive and respectful, while still getting his way in manor management.
When the newlyweds finally arrive at the manor, Nucha is pregnant. Her labor is very long and painful, and Primitivo delays in carrying out Pedro’s order to fetch the doctor. After seeing Nucha, the doctor says to Julián that although there’s revolution and talk of freedom and rights in Spain, “’… in fact there’s still tyranny, privilege and feudalism, everywhere you look!’” (p. 137) Julián insists he’s not political, which surprises the doctor to find a priest without political views.
Nucha finally gives birth to a baby girl, greatly disappointing Pedro, who returns to hunting and becomes more selfish. He and Sabel resume their affair, provoking Julián to decide again that he must leave the “den of corruption and sin.” (p. 159) He starts packing, but “like all irresolute people he tended to act impulsively at first, only then to adopt certain measures designed to deceive no other person but himself.” (p. 160) Realizing that Nucha needed a friend and defender, and adoring the baby, Julián stays.
Nucha’s recovery from the birth is slow. She’s depressed and easily frightened. However, she dotes on the baby and on Perucho, who is fascinated by the baby as the baby is of him. The boy calms the baby when she is teething and bring her toys, especially living ones, such as a frog. When Nucha is bathing the children, she remarks how they look like brother and sister. She notices the change on Julián’s face and understands the implication to her amazement and fear. She screams at Perucho to leave and never return. Julián tries to comfort the sobbing boy and lies to Nucha about his parentage.
Several chapters focus on the complex, corrupt, and often violent machinations of local and national politics when Don Pedro decides to stand for election as a deputy to the Cortes. The intricate scheming of Primitivo will have wide-ranging effects. As one local politician observes, “There’s no fox more cunning than him in the whole province.” (p. 206)
The author’s opinion of politics generally is negative: “Everywhere … politics is a cloak for self-interest, hypocrisy and lack of principle.” She concedes, though, that in the larger arena of a city some dignity and ideas may emerge. But not in the countryside, where politics is characterized by “petty grudges, personal enmities, miserly gains and primordial vanities. In short, a full-scale naval battle staged on the village pond.” (p. 193)
As the election unfolds, Julián and Nucha work on repairing chapel adornments, which Primitivo uses to start a whispering campaign of an affair. As Nucha’s health continues to decline, she fears for the well-being of her baby and asks Julián to help her return to her father’s house. She argues that her marriage was from the start bound to end badly, and that men—her father, Pedro, and Julián—made the decision for her. She tells Fr. Julián that leaving such a situation is not a sin. Their confrontation with Pedro in the chapel provokes Perucho also to fear for the baby’s safety and takes matters into his own hands.
The novel whirls to a climax with the convergence of the fates of the election, Primitivo, Perucho, the baby, Nucha, and Fr. Julián. Ten years later, the poignant epilogue includes a curious, ambiguous scene that sets the stage for the novel’s sequel, Mother Nature.
A Perfect Hoax by Italo Svevo
Italo Svevo (1861-1928) was born Ettore Schmitz in the Adriatic port city of Trieste, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and after World War I part of Italy. The son of an Italian mother and German-Jewish father, he wrote under the pen name Italo Svevo, which means “Italian Swabian” (Swabia is a German region).
Svevo is credited with being an innovator in Italy of the psychological novel, fiction in which the protagonist’s inner life—feelings, thoughts, motivations—is equally or more important than action. His most well-known work is Zeno’s Conscience (or The Confessions of Zeno, 1923). It concerns a neurotic businessman writing confessions to his psychiatrist in which he reveals emotional struggles with his marriage, affairs, and numerous attempts to quit smoking.
Svevo’s novels were initially self-published and unsuccessful until promoted by James Joyce, two French literary critics, and Italian poet Eugenio Montale. Svelvo was killed in a car crash in 1928, and his novella A Perfect Hoax (1929), short story collections, and an unfinished sequel to Zeno were published posthumously.
A Perfect Hoax (trans. J. G. Nicols) is set in Trieste during and just after World War One. The protagonist is Mario Samigli, a literary man whose self-published novel from 40 years prior was unsuccessful. Nevertheless, Mario believes himself destined for glory. However, “… a profound inertia—the same inertia which prevented any rebellion against his lot—held him back from the effort of destroying a conviction formed in his mind so many years ago. And so in the end it became clear that even the power of destiny has its limitations.” (p. 3) Having written the novel in his youth, he wrote little subsequently except for fables, yet “those were his happiest years …” (p. 4)
Despite setbacks in his life, Mario kept his self-respect and “to some extent his respect for others…” He did not share with them his dream of literary acclaim, although “at times [it] became apparent…” (p. 4) When Italy entered the Great War in 1915, Mario feared the Austrian police would persecute him for he believed himself to be the leading literary man in Trieste. "This filled him with terror and … with hope …” (p. 7) However, Austrian authorities “left poor Mario in peace, disappointed and reassured.” (p. 8)
Readers are informed early that Mario will learn of the hoax, although not the details of his reaction. Reflecting the genre of the psychological novel, it is Mario’s mental and emotional states that dominate and, indeed, fascinate. A central theme is the constancy of Mario’s commitment to literature. In the end, he will learn a valuable lesson that what is truly important about his dedication is not what he had assumed before the hoax.
Mario lives with his elder brother, Giulio, who has gout and is confined to bed or a chair. The brothers have had a lifelong affection for each other. Mario reads aloud to Giulio when he prepares to sleep, but Mario interrupts the reading with criticisms of the authors. Because that disturbs Giulio’s attempt to fall asleep, he asks Mario to read from his novel, One Man’s Youth. He does and is inspired to write a fable called “The Surprising Success.”
When Giulio falls asleep during the reading of Mario’s book, he insists it was not from boredom but from pleasure. In fact, Giulio did not want Mario to stop reading the book because he did not interrupt it with criticisms, so asks him to reread it. “And Mario, going from success to success, showed himself all the more defenceless against the plot which was about to be hatched against him.” (p. 24)
“Mario had two old friends, one of whom was about to be revealed as his bitterest enemy.” (p. 25) Signor Brauer is Mario’s boss who acts more like a colleague. Mario writes letters for his firm and does the bookkeeping. “Neither envied the other.” (p. 26) The other friend, Enrico Gaia, is a traveling salesman who had been a poet briefly in his youth. Mario does not like that Gaia forsook literature for business, while Gaia, having given up his dream, envies Mario for keeping his. It “oozed through every pore” of Mario’s skin. (p. 31) “Gaia would have loved to tear that happy dream out of his eyes, even at the cost of blinding him.” (pp. 31-32) The friendship endured primarily due to sentiment for their shared youth.
Gaia had become a sort of artist at playing tricks on others, and the one “he played on Mario was loaded with real hatred…” although the perpetrator was probably not aware of it. (p. 30) The initiation of the hoax coincides with the armistice date, November 3, 1918, between Italy and Austria-Hungary. Gaia had convinced a German-speaking traveling salesman to pose as a representative of an Austrian publisher who wants to buy the publishing rights to Mario’s novel. When Gaia tells Mario of the allegedly chance encounter he had with the publisher’s agent, Gaia “bent forward as though he was about to start a race.” (p. 37)
Believing that interest in his book after many years is natural and deserved, Mario creates in his mind a personality for an assumed literary critic who contacted the publisher: “What a great man!” (p. 42) Mario is so confident of success that he tells no one of the offer except his brother and boss-friend Brauer, which undermines the impact of the hoax.
With certitude of publication, Mario starts fretting over whether he should revise parts of the novel, which leads to acrimony between the brothers when Giulio resists assisting. Regarding his relationship with Gaia, however, Mario regrets having despised his friend who is now the bestower of such a blessing. “Remorse is the specialty of the man of letters.” (p. 60)
When the promised money from the publisher fails to appear in Mario’s bank account, Gaia offers excuses related to the confused postwar situation, but Brauer urges Mario to send a telegram. He does not follow the advice because from experience he knew it was dangerous to send inquiries to patrons. Mario had experience in business and in literature, but not in the business of literature, which is the only reason that the hoax was not uncovered.
When the hoax is revealed, Mario realizes he saw signs and should have guessed. But his clear-sightedness is followed by doubt. “However obvious something may be, when it brings so much grief, it is never accepted without some attempt to obscure it. Everyone fights against his destiny as well as he can …” (p. 82)
The anticipated publication of his novel had destroyed Mario’s love for fables. “Success was a golden cage.” (p. 77) But when he accepts the reality of the hoax, Mario returns to writing unpublished fables, finally understanding they are not a diversion from more important work. “And it was a great comfort to him to find himself ready to reject … the ridiculous notion that he deserved applause and admiration—and ready to accept the destiny imposed on him as something human and not despicable.” (p. 78)
He writes a fable about a sparrow and a swallow. “Mario modestly placed himself among the creatures that walk … very useful creatures that can, in truth, despise those that fly, whose pleasure in flying takes away any desire for improvement …” (p. 100)
.jpeg)
The Legend of the Holy Drinker by Joseph Roth, trans. by Michael Hofmann
Joseph Roth’s The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1939) is a charming tale, easily read in one sitting, about a homeless man (“vagrant”) chosen to deliver money to a saint’s shrine. The Granta edition (2013) is rendered into English by poet Michael Hofmann, an award-winning translator of several German-language works by Roth and other writers, including Hans Fallada and Franz Kafka. This edition is nicely illustrated with black-and-white woodcut prints by Frans Masereel from the book Mein Student Buch 165 (1928).
Born in Galicia, Austria-Hungary (now in Ukraine), Roth was a journalist and novelist, whose most well-known work is Radetzky March, a three-generation family saga depicting the declining days of the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy. When Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany in January 1933, Roth, working as a journalist in Berlin, boarded a train for Paris, where he lived in exile for the rest of his life. An alcoholic, he suffered a heart attack in 1938 and received “bungled treatment” in the hospital (“Translator’s Note,” p. 3). Roth completed The Legend of the Holy Drinker a month before his death in 1939 at the age of 45.
Set in spring 1934, the novella opens with an elderly, well-dressed gentleman walking down the stairs from a bridge above the Seine to the banks below where homeless people spend the night. The man offers to pay one of the homeless men, Andreas, 200 francs for a favor. Andreas admits he could use the money, but being “a man of honour,” rejects the offer because he does not know the man and could not repay him. (pp.-7-8) The elderly man explains that he recently converted to Christianity after reading about St. Thérèse de Lisieux and has decided to give away his wealth to live a life of poverty. He convinces Andreas to take 200 francs to her shrine in a Paris church.
[Note: St. Thérèse de Lisieux was a Carmelite nun who, despite depression and doubt, remained pleasant and unselfish even while suffering from tuberculosis from which she died at age 24 in 1897. In 1925, she became the youngest person canonized by the Catholic Church. In her writings, she often used natural imagery, such as calling herself the “Little Flower of Jesus.” She is the patron saint of florists as well as missions.]
After accepting the offer, Andreas gets drunk. However, the next morning, he goes not go to a bar, as usual, but to a café for coffee and a roll. Looking in the mirror, he is shocked by evidence of his dissipation, so leaves for a barbershop. When he returns to the café, the waiter is now respectful, and a man seated next to Andreas gives him 200 francs to help move his household. Leaving the café, Andreas buys a used wallet and then the services of a prostitute.
With the first payment for helping with the move, Andreas sleeps in a hotel. But after receiving the second payment for his work, he drinks enough to cloud his judgment and stays in a more expensive hotel. He awakens too late for the first mass at St. Thérèse’s church, so waits in a nearby café, drinking several Pernod. There, he reunites with Caroline, a former lover. They take a cab and have lunch, after which Andreas realizes he does not have enough money left for the saint. The couple goes to the cinema, then dancing, and spend the night together.
The next morning, Andreas, leaving Caroline sleeping, notices he only has little more than 50 francs. His attitude toward money has changed. Previously he was used to having no money, but now he felt poor because he had less money than in the past few days. “And all at once he … began to have a sense of what money was worth.” (p. 39) He decides to ponder that perspective over a Pernod.
Andreas blames Caroline for his lack of funds, but is also upset that fate is not letting him earn money. “There is really nothing that people get used to so readily as miracles, once they have experienced them two or three times. Yes! In fact, such is human nature that people begin to feel betrayed when they don’t keep getting all those things that a chance and fleeting circumstance once bestowed on them.” (p. 45)
Returning to life under the bridge, Andreas dreams of St. Thérèse asking him why he has not visited her. He awakens refreshed and is granted another money miracle that would allow him to fulfill his promise.
Yet, Andreas is tempted again by worldly pleasures, which he rationalizes. “The almost uninterrupted stream of miracles of the last few days had convinced him that he must be in a state of grace; but by that same token, he believed himself entitled to a little excess of zeal on his own behalf, and he rather thought he would pre-empt grace, out of deference to it, as it were, and without causing it the slightest offence.” (p. 71)
Divine favor and fall from grace cycle to a felicitous end for the “Holy Drinker.”
A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov, trans. Natasha Randall
In her informative introduction to Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (1841), translator Natasha Randall characterizes protagonist Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin as “a hero without a cause … He is a cynical young man who fights duels, seduces maidens, hunts wild boar, and stirs up trouble …” (p. xiii) Her last point puts it mildly. Yet for all Pechorin’s self-serving behavior, he is an introspective and fascinating character thanks to Lermontov’s skilled prose rendered deftly in English by Randall.
A Hero of Our Time is often considered the first Russian novel, and Randall hails it as “a pivotal book that sits on the cusp between Romanticism and Realism…” (p. xv) She points out that there are three narrators: an anonymous travelling companion of Maxim Maximych, an older captain acquainted with Pechorin; Maximych; and Pechorin through his diaries. In addition, the episodes of the novel (originally published in literary journals) are not in chronological order. However, rather than resulting in confusion, each is a rollicking read and together reveal the amoral psychology of a great literary creation.
Both praised and criticized when published, Lermontov characterizes his novel as “bitter medicine, the pungent truth” about “the flaws of our whole generation…” But he cautions that he had no “impulse to remedy human flaws. God cure him of such audacity!” (p. 2)
Set during the 1830s, Pechorin is a Russian military officer in the Caucasus, a crossroads of various ethnic groups and shifting alliances, where Russian troops are trying to quash resistance from some of the mountain tribes.
Throughout the novel there are chromatic passages describing the landscape, beginning with the Koyshaursky Valley on the opening page: “on every side there are unassailable mountains and reddish promontories, hung with green ivy and crowned with clumps of plane trees; there are yellow precipices, covered with the line of gullies; and right up high: a gold fringe of snow. Below, the Aragva River, having gathered another nameless rivulet which noisily unearthed itself from a black and gloomy chasm, extends like a silver thread, glittering like a scaly snake.” (p. 5)
The unnamed narrator of the story titled “Bela” is traveling up a mountain with Maxim Maximych, who introduces Pechorin through a story: “A wonderful fellow, I dare say. Only a little strange, too …” (p. 11) The tale centers on rivalry for the affection of Bela, the daughter of a tribal leader in alliance with Russia. Kazbich, leader of another tribe, desires Bela, while her brother, Azamut, yearns for Kazbich’s magnificent horse to the point of offering to sell his sister for it. After Kazbich considers but rejects the proposal, Azamut tries to stab him as Kazbich gallops away.
When Maxim tells Pechorin what occurred, Pechorin stirs the pot of discord to gain for himself what someone else desires. Whenever Azamat visits, Pechorin praises the exceptional nature of Kazbich’s horse. Azamat eventually becomes so heartsick for the horse that he agrees to give Bela to Pechorin in exchange for assistance in obtaining the horse. When Kazbich realizes the theft, he kills Azamat’s father in revenge.
The narrator and Maxim resume their journey, passing a stone cross engraved with a note that it was erected in 1824 by orders of a Russian general. Yet, “a strange but universal legend” attributes it to Peter the Great (r. 1682-1725). The narrator concedes, “we aren’t used to believing engravings anyway.” (p. 30)
The travelers stop at an inn and the Bela tale continues in which Pechorin tries unsuccessfully to woo her affections. He then admits how easily he is bored, even by Bela, though he professes he would give his life for her. Pechorin claims he is “worthy of pity … The soul inside me is corrupted by the world, my imagination is restless, my heart is insatiable. Nothing is ever enough.” (p. 37) The story culminates in a violent confrontation with Kazbich. Three months later Pechorin is reassigned to a regiment in Georgia.
In the next episode, Maxim Maximych has returned to the narrator’s camp. Pechorin’s fancy carriage arrives, and he dines with the camp’s colonel that evening while Maxim waits a long time, eager to greet him.
The narrator interrupts with a detailed description of Pechorin’s physique and demeanor: “He was … neither defeated by the debauchery of life in the capital, nor by storms of the soul … he didn’t swing his arms—a clear signal of a certain secretiveness of character… He sat the way Balzac’s thirty-year-old coquette would sit … after an exhausting ball. … His skin had a sort of feminine delicacy to it… [His eyes] didn’t laugh when he laughed! … This is a sign either of an evil disposition, or of deep and perpetual sorrow … [His eyes had] a glint similar to the glint of smooth steel: dazzling but cold.” (pp. 50-51)
Maxim runs to see Pechorin, who is polite but not friendly, then departs abruptly. Maxim is “sad and angry” about the cool reception, predicting a bad end for Pechorin: “I always said that those who forget their old friends are no good!” (pp. 53-54)
The narrator asks for Pechorin’s papers, previously left with Maxim, who throws the diaries to the ground in disgust. Their content convinces the narrator of Pechorin’s sincerity because he “so relentlessly displayed his personal weaknesses and defects for all to see.” (p. 57)
In their pages, Pechorin affirms, “I have lived according to the head, not the heart. I consider and analyze my personal passions and actions with a strict curiosity, but without sympathy. There are two people within me: one who lives in the full sense of the word, and the other who reasons and judges him.” (p. 142)
The diaries begin with a fable-like tale in Taman, “the foulest little town of all the seaside towns of Russia.” (p. 59) A blind boy leads Pechorin into his quarters, a shack. Pechorin admits “a strong prejudice against the blind” and other handicapped people. (p. 60) Later that night, he secretly follows the blind boy down a steep path to the sea, where the boy meets a girl. Pechorin hears them discuss whether the smuggler, Yanko, will arrive in the fog.
The next morning, the same peasant girl is standing on a rooftop, singing. Pechorin looks away momentarily, and when he looks again, she’s off the roof and, later, circles Pechorin’s quarters the rest of the day, singing and skipping. Enchanted by her beauty, he reveals that he saw her at the shore. Laughing, she responds, “you have seen much but know little.” Pechorin will again intervene in private affairs with dire consequences for others.
The novel’s longest story, also from Pechorin’s diaries, is “Princess Mary,” set initially in the spa town of Pyatigorsk at the foot of Mt. Mashuk. Pechorin meets a young acquaintance of his, Grushnitsky, a wounded cadet. The two are frenemies, friendly on the surface while disliking each other in truth.
Pechorin classifies Grushnitsky as a Romantic, “one of those people … who grandly drape themselves with extraordinary feelings, sublime passions and exceptional suffering. They delight in producing an effect.” (p. 77) Pechorin spots a useful deficiency in Grushnitsky: “He doesn’t know people and their weak strings because he has been occupied with himself alone for his whole life. His goal is to be the hero of a novel.” (p. 78)
When Grushnitsky becomes infatuated with Princess Mary, Pechorin falsely denies he finds her attractive. “I wanted to infuriate him. I have a congenital desire to contradict… When faced with enthusiasm, I am seized by a midwinter freeze.” (p. 82) He admits in his diary that he felt envious that Grushnitsky had gained Mary’s attention.
Pechorin is visited by Dr. Werner, a Russian (with a German name), “an excellent person … a skeptic and a materialist, like almost all medics, [with] … a wicked tongue, expressed through his epigrams …” (p. 83) The two “quickly understood each other and became friendly,” although Pechorin admits he is “not capable of true friendship...” (p. 84) Pechorin tells Dr. Werner that they both realize “that, without fools, the world would be very boring … Sad things are funny to us. Funny things are sad to us.” Because they are both self-centered, “there cannot be an exchange of feelings and thoughts between us.” (p. 85)
Pechorin has Dr. Werner circulate biting yet flattering epigrams about himself to pique Princess Mary’s interest. He also avoids her and distracts her suitors to rouse her frustration. When Pechorin sees Mary desiring a fancy rug, he buys it, puts it on a horse, which he leads past her window. To sow further trouble, Pechorin tells Grushnitsky that Princess Mary is in love with the young cadet.
Meanwhile, Pechorin sees Vera, a former lover, now married to an older man. Pechorin alleges he was married when they were having an affair. Becoming upset, Vera declares that Pechorin only gives her suffering. He thinks, “Perhaps … this is exactly why you loved me: joys are forgotten, but sadness, never.” (p. 94) They embrace. Pechorin wonders in his diary why he is so attractive to women yet has “never been a slave to any woman.” (pp. 94-95)
When Pechorin notices Grushnitsky and Mary exchanging affectionate glances, he vows to put an end to it. Pechorin ingratiates himself with Princess Mary and protects her from a drunk. Yet, he is meek when Grushnitsky is present, angering Mary. Pechorin responds that he is “sacrificing my own pleasure to the happiness of a friend…” To which she, now in love with Pechorin, replies, “And mine, too.” (p. 108) Pechorin does not speak to Mary for three days.
Pechorin asks himself, “why I strive so doggedly for the love of young ladies whom I don’t want to seduce and whom I will never marry!” He also ponders whether he is going to such lengths with Mary because of envy or to “destroy the sweet delusions of a dear friend …” (p. 109)
Pechorin then reflects at length on his vampiric inclination, the “unbounded pleasure to be had in the possession of a young, newly blossoming soul! It is like a flower … you must pluck it … breathing it in until you’re satisfied, and then throw it [away] … I feel this insatiable greed, which swallows everything it meets … I look at the suffering and joy of others only in their relations to me, as though it is food that supports the strength of my soul … my best pleasure is to subject everyone around me to my will… The soul, suffering and taking pleasure … knows that without storms, the constant sultriness of the sun would wither it. … And it is only in this higher state of self-knowledge that a person can estimate the value of divine justice.” (pp. 108-109)
When Mary chastises Pechorin for his malicious gossip he spins a yarn of how everyone misunderstood him in childhood, making him into “a moral cripple.” (p. 113) Mary weeps in sympathy.
After Grushnitsky is make an officer and appears in full dress uniform, Pechorin intensifies his plot. “I love enemies, though not in the Christian way.” (p. 120)
He wonders if his “single purpose on this earth is to destroy the hopes of others?” He deflects responsibility for his actions: “I have been the necessary character of the fifth act; I have played the sorry role of executioner or traitor involuntarily.” (p. 117)
The novel’s main characters travel, separately, to another spa town, Kislovodsk, which “disposes one toward love … And everything … is mysterious. The thick canopies of the linden avenues lean over a stream … cutting itself a path between the verdant mountains. The ravines, full of mist and silence … And there is the constant sweet and soporific sound of the very cold streams … chasing one another amicably, flinging themselves finally into the Podkumok River.” (p. 123)
At Kislovodsk Pechorin’s intrigues culminate in tragedy. It is the most riveting section of this thoroughly engaging and often mordantly witty novel. At its conclusion, as Pechorin leaves for a new assignment, he observes: “I am like a sailor, born and bred on the deck of a pirate ship. His soul has got used to storms and battles, and, when thrown ashore, he pines and languishes much …” (p. 156)
The final short story, “The Fatalist,” takes place in a large Cossack village. Pechorin wagers with a Serbian gambler, Lt. Vulich, on whether predestination exists. Pechorin was not sure he believed in predestination, but says he did so after the events of that night. “But who knows for sure if he is convinced of something or not? … And how often do we take a deception of feelings or a blunder of common sense for a conviction!” (p. 168, ellipses original)
Having risked his own life, Pechorin observes: “I love to doubt everything: this inclination of mind doesn’t hinder the decisiveness of a character—on the contrary … I am always braver going forward when I don’t know what to expect. After all, nothing can happen that is worse than death—and you can’t avoid death!” (p. 168)
The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, trans. André Aciman, ed. Peter Graf
The Passenger (1939) begins in Berlin in November 1938 after Kristallnacht, the Nazi Party’s orchestrated assault on German Jews and their property following the assassination of a German diplomat by a Jewish teen in Paris.
The novel features Otto Silbermann, a Jewish but Aryan-looking businessman trying desperately to leave Nazi Germany. Through a serious of shifting circumstances, he spends much time riding trains throughout Germany. This represents the tortuous and often torturous difficulty that Jews had leaving Nazi Germany, especially after Kristallnacht. The theme of confused flight is also symbolic of the main character’s frequently changing state of mind.
In the “Afterword,” editor Peter Graf discusses the short life of author Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz (1915-1941). With passage of the Nuremberg Race Laws in 1935, Boschwitz and his mother moved to Sweden, then Norway. In 1937, aged 22, he published his first novel, People Parallel to Life, the success of which allowed him to move to Paris, where he attended the Sorbonne. After Kristallnacht, he wrote The Passenger in only four weeks, and it was published in England in spring 1939.
When World War Two began in Europe that September, Boschwitz and his mother immigrated to the United Kingdom, where they and most Germans fleeing the Nazis were interred in camps. In 1940, he was sent to an internment camp in Australia, then released in 1942 after agreeing to join the British military. Sadly, he died returning to England when his ship, the Abosso, was sunk by a German U-boat.
Graf explains that Boschwitz’s letters reveal he had thoroughly revised the book and, understanding his life might be cut short, encouraged his mother to hire someone with literary experience to incorporate the changes. Unfortunately, the manuscript was lost with the sinking of the Abosso, but Graf received permission from Boschwitz’s family to make revisions. Graf stresses that he did so “with the utmost respect and in accordance with the underlying original version. And I want to believe I’m not mistaken in this judgement, and … [this] version … allows all the qualities of this important work to come to light.” (p. 266)
I will leave it to literary scholars to compare Boschwitz’s earlier publication to Graf’s version, but I suspect a fair degree of editing for literary merit, although one that is likely true to the spirit and substance of the original. The result is the work of a talented early-career writer giving insight into an important, horrific historical episode.
Graf explains that the story incorporates some family history. Boschwitz’s father was a well-to-do Jewish merchant who converted to Christianity. His mother was from a prominent Protestant family. Similarly, the Jewish protagonist Silbermann is married to a Protestant.
The story begins as Silbermann’s business partner, Becker, is leaving for Hamburg to close a deal for the firm. Becker is a National Socialist (Nazi), but does not consider Silbermann “a real Jew…” (p. 3) One of Silbermann’s neighbors, Frau Zänkel, a councilor’s widow, sympathizes that it is a difficult, terrible time for Silbermann because he’s Jewish, but stresses it is also a great time for Germany. She urges him to turn the other cheek. “There’s no doubt that you’re being treated unjustly, but that’s exactly why you need to be fair-minded and compassionate in your thinking.” (pp. 6-7)
In his apartment, Silbermann negotiates to sell a building to Theo Findler, who wants to buy cheaply. The Silbermann’s son, Edward, phones from Paris to say he has not been able to get permits for his parents to enter France but will continue trying. After Silbermann tells Findler, “For the moment I don’t have any intention of leaving Germany.” Findler responds, “I really wish something better for you than the current circumstances. It’s Jewish blood that’s bringing the German people together. And I fail to see why my friend Silbermann of all people should wind up as glue. Running for your life, on the other hand—that I understand completely.” (p. 13) Findler concedes the Jews are suffering an injustice, but “[t]hat’s the way of the world.” (p. 14)
Silbermann’s sister calls to say her husband has been arrested, and Silbermann’s Protestant wife urges him to leave Germany. The SA (Nazi Party paramilitary) pound on the apartment door, yelling “Open up, Jew!” Findler offers Silbermann 10,000 marks for his building, far less than it is worth, which Silbermann reluctantly accepts. Findler answers the door while Silbermann escapes out the back, beginning his circuitous odyssey.
One theme of the novel is how Silbermann’s Aryan looks allow him more freedom of movement, which, in turn, makes him reluctant to associate with other Jews on his escape. Wending his way through Berlin, he gives the Nazi salute and avoids dining with a Jewish friend who “look Jewish.” Yet, at a hotel restaurant where he often dined, he is asked to leave by the apologetic manager. He later calls his brother-in-law, who says Silbermann’s wife is fine, but warns Silbermann not to stay with them because he is putting them in jeopardy.
Silbermann angrily contemplates the complicity of ordinary Germans. “They’re all backstabbers and sellouts … No one resists. They all cringe and say: we have no choice, but the truth is they’re happy to go along because there’s something in it for them. … We’ve become a business opportunity for our enemies, and a danger for our friends.” (p. 202)
Aboard his first train, Silbermann wins five chess matches against a man wearing a Nazi party badge. They shake hands at departure and Silbermann thinks the man is decent. Silberman is still hopeful that the current anti-Jewish reaction is temporary. “Things are hard, and there’s harassment, that’s certain. But sooner or later they’ll leave us alone again, and I’ll just emigrate. Things aren’t all that bad, when it comes down to it. Despite everything, I’m still alive.” (p. 52)
However, as the story continues Silbermann becomes uncertain who to trust, imaging evil intent, then feeling remorse for those thoughts. Had Becker known about the visit to Silbermann’s house in advance or is he an honest business partner? He follows Becker to Hamburg and sees him sitting at a table with two uniformed SA. Silbermann wavers whether to trust or fear Becker, following him onto the train for Berlin. Becker reveals he extorted money from Jewish clients by having his SA friends there. Silbermann strenuously criticizes this, provoking Becker to say their friendship is over and giving Silbermann only half the previously agreed amount of the deal (not the extra extorted money).
Silbermann finally realizes the situation is only getting worse and that he must leave Germany. “My optimism was nothing but cowardice!” (p. 85) He boards a train for Aachen, near the German border with Belgium. Although his wife is a Christian, he is still worried that something might happen to her. Silbermann also remembers he did not say goodbye to his sister nor find out what happened to his brother-in-law: “… when all is said and done, people are simply hard-boiled egoists.” (p. 94) Yet, he remains uncertain what to do. “Ach, whatever I do is a mistake.” (p. 95)
On the train to Aachen, a poor-looking man with no suitcase is in Silbermann’s compartment. He surmises the man is “a Jewish tradesman trying to escape.” (p. 100) He questions the man “like a perfect inquisitor … how easily the situation could be reversed. But now he felt that he was the stronger person, and he was resolved to be merciless in his quest for information.” (pp. 101-102)
The man, Lilienfeld, admits he is Jewish and that his cabinetmaking shop was attacked. Silbermann reveals he, too, is Jewish. Lilienfeld has an address of a man who, though a Nazi, will for 200 marks help him cross the border into Belgium. Silbermann offers to pay Lilienfeld’s fee if the cabinetmaker arranges his crossing, too. The man says they can only take ten marks across the border, so Silberman rejects the idea.
Another theme of the novel is the importance Silbermann places on money and whether he is correct to do so. Earlier in the novel, Silbermann asserts, “Money means life, especially in wartime. A Jew in Germany without money is like an unfed animal in a cage, something utterly hopeless.” (p. 25) Nevertheless, his large suitcase of money is a physical burden and security risk on his travels.
Silberman gives the cabinetmaker 200 marks in exchange for the Nazi’s address, in case he reconsiders. Later, deciding to contact the human smuggler in Dinkelberg, he arrives a day after the man’s arrest. Dismayed, Silbermann buys a third-class ticket back to Aachen. Awaiting the train, he contemplates suicide, only to berate himself and then give himself a pep talk.
On the train, Silbermann recounts his travels, “Berlin—Hamburg … Hamburg—Berlin. Berlin—Aachen. Aachen—Dortmund. Dortmund—Aachen.“ That thought comforts him at first. "I am no longer in Germany. I am in trains that run through Germany. That’s big difference. … I am safe, he thought, I am in motion. And on top of that I feel practically cozy.” (p. 148) Then he grasps it is an inescapable maze. “I’m stuck in the same place, like a person who takes refuge in a cinema where he sits in his seat without moving as the films flicker away—and all the while his worries are lurking just outside the exit.” (p. 149)
Among the passengers in Silbermann’s compartment is a young woman going to see her fiancé, Franz, a chauffeur, in Aachen. They need 1000 marks to get married and settled, but they cannot get a loan because the young man was in a concentration camp for political activity (communist), though he has now given up politics.
Later, Franz agrees to drive Silbermann within a half-hour walk of the Belgian border for 1000 marks. Afraid that Silbermann, lugging his heavy suitcase of money, will be caught, Franz takes him part way on the path and points out the safe house. Silbermann makes it to Belgium only to be caught by border guards who refuse a bribe and force him to walk back to Germany.
Once again on a train to Berlin, Silbermann is depressed about the failed crossing. “There are too many Jews on the train, Silbermann thought. And that puts every one of us in danger. … I’m not one of you … we really have nothing to do with one another!” (pp. 172-173) He feels guilty for thinking that, but “… it’s easy to get infected with the general opinion.” (p. 273)
At a train stop, Silbermann overhears through his window a conversation between a woman, Ursula Angelhof, and her friend indicating that Ursula is separated from her husband. Later, slightly drunk, he starts a conversation with Ursula on the train and tells her he is Jewish and his story. He admits overhearing her conversation. He is surprised and annoyed at himself for being so open, but considers her sympathetic curiosity genuine. He then notices she repeatedly responds, “That’s terrible.” He comprehends, “My fate is turning into a figure of speech, that’s all.” (p. 188)
Silberman tells Ursula that he is a proper middle-class citizen, indicating his faith in the system and his lingering unwillingness to admit that status will not save him. As he later exclaims, “There are laws!” (p. 244.) At this time, though, Ursula responds, “Following your high morals, I’m sure you managed to save a large part of your fortune … [but] sooner or later you’ll have to risk it and take a chance. You won’t have any choice.” (p 193) He admits that, yet this will be hard to do in fact.
Infatuated with Ursula, Silbermann invites her to a café. He procrastinates, worrying about the propriety of their meeting, so arrives late and she is not there. He heads for the train station, concluding “Everything has changed, after all. That inner security is now gone, and my life is nothing but a series of accidents—I’m completely at the mercy of chance.” (p. 197)
The fast-paced story builds to a dramatic end over the final chapters as Silbermann decides whether to contact Ursula, what to do about his money, and whether to attempt another escape from Germany.
The Absolutist by John Boyne
Written by contemporary Irish author John Boyne, The Absolutist (2011) centers on Tristan Sadler, a gay soldier in World War One. The chapters follow his experiences training in England and service at the Western Front, interspersed with flashbacks to his youth and flash-forwards to post-war meetings with Marian Bancroft, sister of the title character, Will Bancroft.
Boyne is a talented writer who has crafted an interesting, well-plotted narrative, with good development of the main character, Tristan. Most aspects of the military training and war experiences seem reasonably realistic (at least to this non-military reviewer). Several incidents and behaviors of the characters are ripe for discussion, dealing with questions of morality in wartime and what constitutes courage in several contexts.
There are, however, less convincing or less developed facets of the book. Will’s seductions-rejections of Tristan may reflect in part typical boarding-school and middle-class attitudes toward homosexuality in early-twentieth century England, but readers are never given an understanding of Will’s personal motivations and feelings. Also, the setting of the second encounter strains plausibility.
Similarly, Will’s ultimate decision about the war, though arguably conceivable given incidents during military training and on the war front, is treated superficially. As with the (apparently) one-sided romance, the author does not divulge enough to allow readers to comprehend Will’s fateful decision more fully on a psychological level. Our view from the outside is obscured.
Will’s sister, Marian, is treated in greater length, but, again, lacks the character development of Tristan. Her irritating manner makes it difficult to sympathize with her, despite the tragedy she must bear. The final chapter, however, reveals an interesting parallel with her brother’s behavior.
The Absolutist is a thought-provoking story, but has flaws, which linger in this reader’s memory. Yet, it’s good enough to make one wish it was better.
A Voice Like Velvet by Donald Henderson
Actor, playwright, and novelist Donald Henderson died at the age of 41 in 1947 from the long-term result of lung damage caused by a German bomb that destroyed his London home during World War II. His books were soon forgotten until his best work was reissued in 2018.
First published and set during World War Two, A Voice Like Velvet (1944) is an amusing, well-paced light comedy (touching on serious themes) about a well-loved BBC news announcer, Ernest Bisham, who moonlights as a jewel thief. Compelled by the thrill of the caper and outwitting the police, he aims to be a sort of Robin Hood, robbing from the wealthy—but never “the poor-rich or the nice-rich” (p. 61)—and ultimately planning to send the loot to the Soviet (“Russian”) government to fund its efforts to defeat the Nazis.
Readers learn of the childhood origins of Ernest’s penchant for burglary. His widowed father was the silent type, rarely speaking to his son and feared by others. Once when Ernest threw a book to get his father’s attention, the old man waited four minutes before asking, “Well?” At his school, Ernest is challenged by his chums to steal and later return the headmaster’s birch rod. He does so calmly and successfully.
In young adulthood, Ernest steals jewels from a shop, disappears into the crowd, then mails the jewels back to the shop. He stole for the thrill and to prove his belief that he would not be caught. Sometimes he threw jewels into the Thames after he became bored looking at them or sent money to insurance companies if he felt their loss had been too great. He never sells them.
A family friend arranges for young Ernest to join a banking and insurance house, for which he quickly realized he was not suited. After working there only two days, he gave a week’s notice. “It was at these vague and dangerous moments that life was shaped.” (p. 51)
Ernest decides his thieving days are over, then he sees an open window, goes through, but does not take anything. Even when, later in the book, he’s almost caught, burglary has become like an addiction he can’t give up. There’s always just one more time. Eventually, “it came to him that he was a cat burglar because he was disappointed in himself…” (p. 77)
His sister, Bess, gets Ernest a job at the BBC, the workings of which the author conveys from experience. Another theme in the novel is celebrity influence on the public. Previously, as part of his school’s debating club, Ernest had criticized and pointed to similarities in the public school system and the prison system. He was labelled a pansy and a socialist. Once he became a well-known radio announcer, he would get applause in speeches for the same views he was derided in his youth for espousing. He admitted, though, that the applause was really for his voice. When Ernest’s name is connected to several places that are burgled, his celebrity shields him from serious scrutiny. Inspector Hood has difficulty considering him a suspect, while Mrs. Hood is eager to meet the famed announcer.
A significant portion of the novel deals with marital relations: between Bisham and his second wife, Marjorie, as well as each of them with their former spouses. Marjorie’s first marriage, less than a month after the death of her father, was to Captain Bud, an older man who spent much of her money at pubs and on other women. She fled that marriage, but Bud refused her divorce until three years later under the charge of abandonment.
Ernest “met his first dangerous woman” (p. 37), a 16-year-old neighbor, Violet. They talk across the fence, where Violet always stands near a manure pile for her family’s garden. Later, after trying to sneak out of her house at night, he tumbles down the stairs, waking the household, and is hit by her angry father. Violet is sent away by her family.
Ernest then meets his future first wife on a bus, 21-year-old Celia, known as “Seal.” “He didn’t even yet know he was a person who did things he only thought he wanted to do.” (p. 54) Bess urges him against Celia, which has the opposite effect, although he accepts responsibility for the marriage. Seal begins sleeping with other men but uses a woman friend to lure Ernest into a hotel room, so Seal can serve him with divorce papers on the false charge of infidelity.
Bess then introduces Ernest to her friend Marjorie. Unlike the younger Violet and Seal, Marjorie seems to be about the same age as Ernest. The resulting marriage had affection and mutual respect, but neither was initially in love with the other. However, when Marjorie is surprised to find a revolver in Ernest’s room, she wonders if he is in the secret service, and is more convinced when she later finds the gun missing. That thrilling discovery makes her fall in love with her husband because he “was not the mere automaton he pretended to be.” (p. 96) As Ernest fears that finally he may be caught and sent to prison, he realizes that he is in love with Marjorie. Marjorie had sought security in marriage, but wanted excitement. Ernest had sought excitement in his burglaries, but realized he wanted the security of his marriage.
As the story unfolds the action becomes more intense. Ernest begins making mistakes resulting in humorous chase scenes reminiscent of cinematic screwball comedies of the 1930s and ‘40s.
Will Ernest be caught? Will the jewels get to Russia? Will Marjorie find out she’s married to a burglar? Read, and find out!
Coup de Grâce by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated by Grace Frick
Although unfamiliar to many American readers, Marguerite Yourcenar is often considered by astute literary critics as one of the finest writers of the twentieth century, particularly for The Memoirs of Hadrian (1951). Mavis Gallant, herself a talented writer, rightly calls Yourcenar’s novella Coup de Grâce (1939) “a brief masterwork.”
Written in French, Yourcenar worked with translator Grace Frick on the English edition and wrote an incisive preface, which may be read either before or after reading the novella, or, as I did, both. Coup de Grâce is a fictionalized account of actual events told to the author by a close friend of one of the participants. Emotionally moved by the story, Yourcenar describes it as having “all the structural elements of classical tragedy, and therefore to fit admirably into the framework of traditional French recit, retaining … certain characteristics of French classical tragedy, unity of time, of place, and … unity of danger …” (Preface)
The main setting of Coup de Grâce is the northeast Baltic region during the civil war following the Communist Revolution in Russia and the end of World War One. The story concerns three main characters: Erick von Lhomond, his best friend, Conrad de Reval, and Conrad’s sister, Sophie. The mixed backgrounds of the three indicate the author’s lack of interest in “a particular social group” yet conveys the complicated history of Eastern Europe peoples. To avoid “the stylized setting for classical tragedy … [in which] gory episodes of civil war … [are a mere] backdrop for a love tale …” Yourcenar decided that their story could only be told in its original setting, as historically accurate as possible. (Preface)
The story is Erick von Lhomond’s retelling of the events. Now 40 years old, he is a wounded soldier, just released from an Italian hospital ship and waiting at 5 a.m. in a train station bar to return to Germany. [Yourcenar published Coup de Grâce just three months before World War Two began in Europe, but seems to have anticipated the conflict.] Exhausted, Erich’s narration in the bar is interspersed with him slamming the table with his palm, “repeatedly startling his comrades and setting the glasses a-tingle. … the interminable confession which he was making, [was] in reality, to no one but himself.” (p. 5)
Yourcenar cautions against a naïve reading of the text. “… Erick von Lhomond habitually questions his own motives; … in case of doubt, [he] … offer[s] the least favorably interpretation of his actions; his fear of exposing his feelings locks him in harshness … [but he is] a man resolved to confront even the most atrocious of his memories …” [Preface]
The past events begin in Kratovitsy, a small Baltic town where Erick and Conrad grew up together and are now soldiers for the White Russians against the Red Bolsheviks. Erick believes that period was “[t]he fullest ten months of my life ...” (p. 7) He sees himself as an adventurer, not ideological: “… it is only for causes in which I do not believe that I have been willing to risk my life … the plight of the White Russians … stirred me very little, and the future of Europe has never kept me awake nights…” (pp. 9-10)
Erick convinces Conrad to join a volunteer corps fighting the Bolsheviks in response to the Reds’ brief occupation of Kratovitsy. Erick considers Conrad an ideal companion in war as in childhood: “Friendship affords certitude above all … It was only for his sake, actually, that I ever got into that Baltic brew, where all the chances were against us; and it soon became apparent that he was staying in it only for me.” (pp. 18-19)
Most of Erick’s retelling of events focuses on his relationship with Sophie, not Conrad. Erick characterizes Conrad, a poet, as a sensitive soul whose frail nature was best “clad in armor” because it would decay in “insidious dissolution” in the social or business world. (p. 125) Yourcenar explains that the “rather vague portrait of this friend so ardently loved” is because of its intensity, which she compares to a chivalric brotherhood, and Erick’s “indifferent auditors” in the train station bar. (Preface)
At Kratovitsy, the corps members are staying in a barracks near the home of Conrad and Sophie’s elderly aunt, where Sophie had been raped by a drunk, Lithuanian sergeant. Her situation with the White soldiers is difficult because of her sympathy for the Reds, “doubtless struggling to maintain some kind of balance between personal conviction … the one thing she had of her own, and the comradeship in which she felt bound with us still …” (p. 48). Erick describes her as “infinitely generous and warm” but “not tender-hearted …” (pp. 26-27). She had, for example, watched Bolshevik prisoners being executed without protesting.
It took Erick weeks to realize Sophie was in love with him, a sentiment unrequited. While he remained unresponsive, she, to his irritation, continued to hope for a romantic relationship. He considers “that Catholic theory is right in placing more or less innocent souls in Purgatory, precipitating into Hell only those who have lost the power to hope. Of the two of us, she is the one whom people would have pitied, but actually she had the better part.” (pp. 45-46)
When Erick tells Sophie she’s the last woman he would want, she is shocked. Later returning from a trip, Erick recounts to her his four days with a Hungarian woman he picked up at a bar. Afterwards, Sophie begins taking lovers among the soldiers, which Erick interprets as her attempt to become like the prostitutes she assumed he favored.
When Sophie becomes ill from exhaustion while caring for soldiers sick with typhus, she is tended by Erick. “She suffered all the torments of an unfaithful wife punished with kindness …” (p. 70)
During a night bombing, Erick and Sophie go out on a balcony, where he embraces her: “my one thought … was that if we were to die that night, then I had chosen, after all, to die at her side.” (p. 75) They kiss, then he wrenches himself away from her “with a violence that must have seemed cruel …” She cries, and afterward “it was as if one of the two of us were already dead….” (p. 77)
Sophie remains affectionate and generous to Erick, but develops a relationship with another soldier, Volkmar, which she initially hides from Erick. He had known and detested Volkmar since they were both 15, considering him “correct, dry, ambitious, and out for gain.” (p. 80) Erick reflects that he had failed to see her love for him coming to an end. At a Christmas Eve party Sophie kisses several men under a mistletoe, then she sees Erick and gives Volkmar a passionate kiss. Erick slaps her. He and Volkmar fight until pulled apart and they are forced to shake hands. Erick curses himself for being a fool.
Despite Sophie’s recent promiscuity, Erick sees her as a “solid as earth” type who would commit to a man for a lifetime. (p. 88) He debates the wisdom of marrying her, concluding that he would eventually abandon her for his “begetting sin” of solitude. (p. 92) He understands that he “probably lost out on one of the main chances of my life. But there are also some chances which, in spite of ourselves, our instinct rejects.” (p 93)
In the final third of the novella, Erick’s controversial military decision deepens his rift with Sophie and provokes one with Conrad. Erick observes, “Brother and sister had the same absolute integrity, and were equally intolerant and stubborn.” (p. 106) When Sophie disappears all the soldiers, including her brother, conclude she was a Bolshevik spy. Erick admits he is less pure-of-heart than Conrad, but he trusts Sophie and is sure of her integrity. “The fact is that pure hearts nurse not a few prejudices from which the cynic is free, just as he is free of scruples.” (p. 120)
The war situation worsens as the rest of Europe turns its back on the White Russians. Yet, Erick compares the time with the happy days of his childhood. He remarks that danger brings out both the best and worst in people, with the bad dominating in the debasing atmosphere of war. Nevertheless, “that is no reason to undervalue the rare moments of grandeur that it affords … the virtues of loyalty and courage …” (p. 125)
Returning to the front, Erick will have a final moment of comradeship with Conrad and will cross paths with Sophie in a heartrending ending.
Although Coup de Grâce is a brief work, it is a penetrating look at human relations and emotions.
Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose by Kay Ryan
Kay Ryan brings the same creative talent, humorous touch, and wisdom about the human condition to her prose as to her poetry. Synthesizing Gravity (2020) collects the best of her essays, a jewel of which is a wickedly funny account of her reluctant visit to the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, “I Go to AWP.”
Discussing the panel on “The Creative Writer as Teacher,” Ryan critiques the widespread use “of the word ‘mentor,’ both noun and verb.” In contrast, she considers that “a mentor is a wise counselor,” concluding that the mentor-mentee relationship would be “deep and intimate … [between] two people who found some particular affinity, a relationship that would develop gradually. It would rarely occur.” (p. 53) When panel and audience members nod “in agreement … that they are actually nourished by student work, and stimulated to do their own,” Ryan, a teacher herself, is left “speechless.” (p. 55) Guffaw!
In “Reading before Breakfast,” Ryan’s chosen books “dispatch ordinary ideas of ‘community.’” She praises Martin Buber’s introduction to his The Legend of the Baal-Shem for giving writers “some elbow room … not to be oneself” and quotes Milan Kundera quoting Marcel Proust: “A book is the product of a self other than the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices’” and “the writer’s true self is manifested in his books alone.” (pp. 277-278) Reading William Bronk, who extols the Inca’s incredible achievement of Manchu Picchu, “One is freed of the oppression of ‘progress.’” (p. 278) Similarly, Kundera argues that “the demands of art may … lie in some direction other than the one everybody sees as progress.” (p. 279)
Reviewing a biography of Stevie Smith, in the chapter entitled “The Authority of Lightness,” Ryan explains the wonderfully offbeat poet’s perspective with her own unexpected analogy: “Stevie Smith knows she is locked in on the nursery side of the baby-viewing window, over there where life is new, cold, novel, alien, filled with competing cries, every baby an enemy.” (p. 123) In “Radiantly Indefensible” (pp. 231-216), she effectively mimics Stevie Smith’s style.
Reviewing The Poems of Marianne Moore, in “Inedible Melons,” Ryan praises Moore’s scientific methods of “precision, economy of statement … [as] a grease-cutting alternative to the poetry of self-occupation.” (pp. 134-135).
Ryan’s “All Love All Beauty,” provide a penetrating explication of Philip Larkin’s “Dublinesque.” (pp. 239-244) She helps us realize the extraordinary nature of poetry. When reading William Carlos Williams, “we hear this arrestingly authentic, direct voice. It’s such an interesting, paradox: we can see a voice; we hear through the eyes.” (p.259).
On the other hand, Ryan implicitly criticizes the poetry of Annie Dillard with tongue-in-cheek adulation. (pp. 206-216) More directly, Ryan’s assessment of Walt Whitman falls on the negative side of “Con and Pro,” perhaps also an allusion to the “confidence man” (con artist) of the 19th century (the “Pro” is William Bronk). “When I think of Whitman I think of bulk. Page after page of the same poem … Whitman just begs to be followed.” [p. 264] As we now know, Whitman was a shameless self-promoter who wrote anonymous reviews praising his own work.
Although Ryan’s prose is studded with gems of insight, she insists: “This is wisdom I gleaned from experience. And when I say gleaned I mean picked up off the ground after the commercial harvesters had come through. This is wisdom nobody much wanted; I surely didn’t. Of course, much wisdom is things we never wanted to know. (Itself an additional piece of wisdom, again demonstrating how discouraging wisdom is.)” Alluding to the biblical Jonah, she cautions, “if you [are] … trying to have a very small life … you only excite a small whale to swallow you.” (p. 280)
Anyone who values good prose and stimulating thought, whatever your familiarity with poetry, should enjoy Kay Ryan’s Synthesizing Gravity.
Mary by Vladimir Nabokov
Patrick Kurp’s excellent literary blog, Anecdotal Evidence, has introduced me to talented writers of the past, such as William Maxwell and Flann O’Brien, and encouraged me to read authors known to me by name but whose works I had never read, such as Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977).
I decided to save Nabokov’s most well-known novels, Lolita (1955) and Pale Fire (1962) for last and started with Pnin (1957), a hilarious look at a Russian-born professor’s awkward adjustment to life in America. I then moved on (or chronologically back) to a novel originally written in Russian, Glory (1932), about a young Russian émigré studying at Cambridge who attempts a clandestine return to his native country. Next came Bend Sinister (1947), a dark comedy that spoofs the blind allegiance of party men to a crackpot ideology and a deranged dictator. It is Nabokov’s bitterly funny indictment of totalitarian regimes.
Mary is Nabokov’s first novel (1926), although not published in English until 1970. It is set in Berlin in 1923 with a small cast of Russian emigres living in a boarding house run by Lydia Nikolaevna Dorn, the Russian widow of a German businessman. The main character is Lev Ganin, a young veteran of the White Russian army during the Russian Civil War. Other boarders are Anton Podtyagin, an elderly poet trying desperately to get a visa for France; two gay ballet dancers, Gornotsvetov and Kolin; Klara, a young woman secretly in love with Ganin; and Aleksey Alfyorov, a crass older man who is anticipating the arrival of his young wife, Mary, from Russia.
The story opens with Ganin and Alfyorov stuck together in the boarding house’s stalled and darkened elevator. Ganin soon realizes that Alfyrov’s wife was Ganin’s first love when he was a teenager in Russia. The narrative then shifts between the present and Ganin’s memories of that brief romance. “He was so absorbed with his memories that he was unaware of time… It was not simply reminiscence but a life that was much more real, much more intense than the life lived by his shadow in Berlin.” (p. 56)
Although his debut novel, Nabokov’s prose already displays a talent that would make him one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Erumpent through the text are memorable metaphors and similes, sometimes startling so.
For example, Ganin’s room faces a train track from which the engine’s billowing smoke “would slowly dissolve … revealing the fan of the railway tracks that narrowed in the distance between the black, sliced-off backs of houses, all under a sky as pale as almond milk.” (p. 9) When he is shaving, “the bristles on his taut skin steadily crepitated as they fell to the little steel ploughshare of his safety razor.” (p. 28) One morning when dancer Kolin is making tea, “the untied laces of his boots pattered against the floor with a noise like fine rain.” (p. 65)
The opening paragraph of chapter 14 deserves to be quoted at length:
The black trains roared past … with a movement like ghostly shoulders shaking off a load, heaving mountains of smoke swept upward … The roofs burned with a smooth metallic blaze in the moonlight; and a sonorous black shadow under the iron bridge awoke as a black train rumbled across it, sending a chain of light flickering down its length … the rail tracks lay like lines drawn by a moonlit fingernail … (p. 98)
As the story nears its conclusion, landlady Lydia dreams about Ganin though she did not know “who he was and where he had come from. Indeed, his personality was surrounded by mystery. And no wonder: he never told anybody about his life, his wanderings and his adventures of recent years—even he himself remembered his escape from Russia as though in a dream … like a faintly sparkling sea mist.” (p. 102)
Mary is an engaging read, populated by an assortment of quirky characters, with insight into memory’s construction, alternations, and effects on present self-identity, motivations, and actions. This book, like Nabokov’s other work, can elicit elation from the reader.
Standing by the bed of the ailing Podtyagin, Ganin “saw life in all the thrilling beauty of its despair and happiness, and everything became exalted and deeply mysterious …” (p. 112)
The Wars by Timothy Findley
The Wars (1977) recounts the life of Robert Ross, a young Canadian who joins the army to serve in World War One. The story begins before his enlistment, at the family home, where he considered himself the guardian of his hydrocephalic sister, Rowena. When she dies from a fall, he blames himself for leaving her unattended.
Because of Robert’s guilt-ridden love for his sister, his mother cruelly orders him to kill Rowena’s pet rabbits, which he refuses to do. His father secretly hires another man to do the deed. When Robert realizes this, he attacks the man until being restrained. Although a brief episode near the beginning of the book, it gives insight into Robert’s character and reflects the importance of animals as elements and symbols in the plot: rabbits, toads, and, especially, horses.
The story follows Robert through his military training in Canada, time in England, and service at the Western Front. Some events are told through reminiscences of other characters, especially Juliet d’Orsey, who eventually becomes a devoted companion of the injured Robert, echoing his earlier devotion to Rowena. There are early hints of a controversial wartime act by Robert, which is revealed at the end of the novel.
The Wars is an interesting story, notably in its multiple perspectives, symbolism, and the analogous nature of the Ross and d’Orsey families as well as of early and later events.
Look at Me by Anita Brookner
Anita Brookner’s novel Look at Me (1983) examines several months in the life of Frances Hinton (“I do not like to be called Fanny”), an unmarried librarian who recently inherited a substantial legacy from her late mother, including an apartment where she lives with an elderly housekeeper, Nancy. Look at Me is a perceptive story of the sometimes conflicting desires for distinction and acceptance, the difficulty of breaking patterns of thought and behavior, and of ulterior motives.
The opening chapter is set in the medical research institute where Frances and her friend Olivia catalogue photographs related to the past treatment of “melancholy” (depression) and other psychological problems. It also introduces two colorful secondary characters, Mrs. Halloran and Dr. Simek. “Mrs. Halloran is a wild-looking lady with a misleading air of authority who claims to be in touch with the other side and who is trying to prove her theory that the influence of Saturn is responsible for most anomalies of behaviour. Dr. Simek is an extremely reticent Czech or Pole … working … on the history of the treatment of depressions …” (pp. 9-10)
Frances is unhappy with the dull routine of her life: “it was unendurable, and I trained myself to endure it.” (p. 31) She hopes that becoming a writer will result in a new life. Noting her dissatisfaction is Nick Fraser, a physician researching at the institute, and his wife, Alix, “one of those fortunate women…” (p. 35). This polished, convivial couple, “adopt” Frances to break her cloistered existence, one byproduct of which is a developing romance between Frances and James, another research doctor. The relationship of this foursome is at the heart of the novel.
Frances’ first impression of Nick and Alix was “of royal expectation…” Then “came a second impression … much more persuasive … that they were impervious, that one could not damage them…” (p. 42) Alix prances into the library to convince her husband that she should wear her hair up, demonstrating the style and looking in a hand mirror. Frances tries to act as if that were normal behavior in libraries. She accepts an invitation to dinner at the couple’s flat to “see how the others, the free ones, conducted their lives, and then I could begin my own.” (p. 51) As she is drawn into the Fraser’s web, Frances found herself “striving to capture their attention, their good will … They soon became an addiction.” (p. 59)
A recurring theme is Frances’ isolation and outsider status, particularly evident at traditional family times of holidays and Sundays: “a day I had dreaded for as long as I can remember…” (p. 62) She contrasts her readiness for Mondays against the reluctance that others felt, and sardonically labels loneliness as a medical malady, “Public Holiday Syndrome.” (p. 66)
When Frances begins spending time with James, considering it at first a casual relationship, Alix believes Frances is withholding information, so acts more coolly toward her. Having introduced James and Frances, Alix had “a certain feudalism in her attitude … not only … emotional droit de soigneur … [but] perpetual suzerainty.” [p. 92] After failing to persuade Frances to move into the couple’s spare bedroom, she convinces James to do so. Frances, fighting against her inclination to begrudge the three, arranges a post-Christmas getaway for James and herself.
Alix begins calling her at work, claiming Frances is putting up a barrier against them and being deceitful. She also warns Frances not to string along James in their romantic relationship. Frances turns down an invitation from Alix to have dinner with James and, afterward, leads him to the bedroom, only to have him stop the lovemaking before it begins.
That event is part of a powerful chapter (8) with much interior dialogue and speculation, delving into Frances’ memory and imagination, the recreating and creating of events in her mind. She realizes she has been manipulated but second guesses herself. At the chapter’s end, Frances has a dream: “I was a child and I was waiting for the adults to come back … and to allow me once again into their company.” (p. 131) Like a lonely child, she is starved for attention and wants approval, especially from Alix. Frances worries “of reverting to the role of observer rather than participant [a possibility which] filled me with dread and sadness.” (p. 132)
Frances periodically visits Miss Morpeth, a former librarian and now bitter old woman. Frances updates her on library personnel and activities until a frustrated Miss Morpeth declares frankly that she does not care about the library. When their gift exchange reveals they have chosen similar scarves, Frances laments: “… we had evidently thought of each other in exactly the same way. The thought chilled me to the bone.” (p. 140)
Frances hurries from Miss Morpeth’s place in a panic to be with Nick and Alix, to be like them. When she arrives, they are watching television, so she sits, ostracized, behind them. When Frances suggests that Nick call Miss Morpeth (who has a fatal disease), they indicate that she should leave.
Frances later enjoys a Sunday afternoon with Olivia’s family, the Benedicts, who, she assumes, expect her to marry their son, David. But she supposes David will wait for her, so concentrates her thoughts, instead, on James, whose mother she would like to meet “to be the daughter of the house once more.” (p. 152)
Returning to the Frasers, Frances is again ignored as Nick and James are absorbed observing Alix prepare her hair for the evening. When they all join the Frasers’ flirtatious friend, Maria, at a restaurant, Frances is excluded by the inside jokes and boisterous behavior of the other four. As the group leaves the restaurant, Alix asks Frances what she will do on Christmas, to which she responds that she will go to Olivia’s. Alix says it must not be fun because Olivia is “crippled.” Frances ripostes: “Only physically.” (p. 161) She then walks ahead of them to the door, gives a brief wave, and continues alone.
Returning under the overcast evening sky to her home exhausted and distraught, Frances will have a dark night of the soul, sleeping fitfully. The novel culminates with her decisions about her relations with James and the Frasers and the direction of her life.
Twelve Nights by Urs Faes
Written by Swiss author Urs Faes and translated into English by Jamie Lee Searle, Twelve Nights (2018; 2020) is a novella set in Switzerland in the days between Christmas and Epiphany, a time when it was traditionally believed that ghosts and evil spirits roamed the earth. It is the tale of two brothers, Manfred and Sebastian, estranged over an inheritance and subsequent act of revenge. Decades later, Manfred has returned home to reconcile with his brother, who has become reclusive after the death of Minna, Sebastian’s wife, and former love of Manfred.
Told from Manfred’s perspective, the story interweaves past and present. He remembers his mother burning incense and performing other folk rituals to thwart the evil spirits of Twelve Nights, provoking the displeasure of the local pastor. Manfred’s reappearance in the present is an attempt to bury the specter of the past. Select events in the brothers’ youth are sketched briefly, but with little insight into their characters and no indication of underlying trouble in their seemingly affable relationship at the time.
The catalyst for the breach was the father’s surprise announcement that his younger son, Sebastian, would be heir to the family homestead despite having shown no interest in or aptitude for farming as Manfred had. Readers are never informed why their parents made the decision nor precisely how Manfred takes retribution against Sebastian’s prized horse.
Responding to the act of revenge, Minna ends her relationship with Manfred who, after failing to gain her mercy, moves to Germany. He later reflects: “After Minna, the paths remained empty and untrodden; the longing for arrival unfulfilled. You’re the kind of person who spends their whole life waiting, he had sometimes thought to himself.” (p. 67)
With Manfred’s return to an inn near his childhood home, he plans to hand-deliver a letter informing his brother that he is ill and seeks reconciliation. With unsubtle foreshadowing, the landlord warns, “Many a person has misjudged the storms and fallen in the snow …” (p. 41)
The writing has whisps of pleasant passages—“… when the fields were fallow and sallow…” (p. 4)—and an occasional interesting simile: “… into the grey mist … the tips of dark firs soared, their trunks veiled, making it look as though they were hanging, dangling, from invisible washing lines.” (p. 1)
Lexical ornamentation, however, cannot mask what is a rather thin, formulaic story with contrived moments, such as Minna’s letter to Manfred. The fault is not brevity; Vladimir Nabokov, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Muriel Spark, and other talented writers honed gems of novellas. Sandor Marai’s Embers is a tale of reunion, broadly similar to Twelve Nights, but told compellingly well.
The hardback edition of Twelve Nights (Harvill Secker) has a pretty cover, but there’s not much inside.
Dread Journey by Dorothy B. Hughes
​
Recently republished as part of the Penzler Press series of American Mystery Classics, Dorothy Hughes’ Dread Journey (1945) is more accurately described as a noir thriller and crime story. Readers are informed early of movie producer Vivien “Viv” Spender’s plan to murder his leading star, Kitten Agnew, described as “tarnished glitter” (p. 69), and replace her with unknown ingenue Gratia Shawn. Despite fearing for her life, Kitten refuses to be bought out of her contract, insisting on the next starring role or marriage. As leverage, she has detailed incriminating evidence against Spender, including trafficking underage girls.
Besides Hughes’ skill at heightening tension, the author is adept at giving insight into diverse personalities, motivations, and perspectives. For example, Spender’s ability to control his outward emotions and play the role of the brilliant director masks his megalomania: “…he’d made mistakes but never on the magnitude of Kitten … he created her, she was bad; he should be able to destroy her.” (p. 48)
Other important characters include Spender’s female assistant with the masculine name Mike (Dana), who loves the movie mogul despite realizing his secrets; alcoholic journalist Hank Cavanaugh, compelled but reluctant to play the hero; noted bandleader and playboy Leslie “Les” Augustin; one-hit novelist and failed screenwriter Sidney Pringle, returning to New York to sell ties—“a hard shell formed on his sadness” (p. 153); and black porter James Cobbett, a keen judge of character who sees what he does not want to see.
The novel’s suspense is intensified by confinement on a cross-country train trip. Cobbett “understood the hopelessness of travelers … Familiarity with ceaseless motion reduced the high speed … to a tortoise crawl. The unchanging horizon line of Arizona and New Mexico had the unending and fearful sameness of crossing eternity. Engendering something that bordered on atavistic fear. Moving, always moving; yet the movement was to no avail. The scene pasted on the windows was ever the same, wasteland and sky.” (p. 136)
One night on the observation deck when Kitten “flattened herself against” Hank Cavanaugh, he responds, “You want danger.” She denies it: “No. No. … I’m afraid … Of death.” In their conversation, she rejects the “Sunday School” notion of heaven, but wonders what will happen when she dies. It is the seemingly jaded reporter, having witnessed hell during famine and war in Asia, who argues that “there must be heaven. There must be the balance.” (pp. 77-79).
Despite her dread, Kitten is determined to confront Viv to get what she wants. Nevertheless, Hank concludes that her resolute demeanor is a façade. “It was Kitten with all her brazen world wisdom who was helpless. What was stalking Kitten wasn’t of the world … [but] the spirit of evil which had dominance in this generation because good was lost.” (p. 109) His thoughts reflect the bleak viewpoint of noir in a world recently emerged from World War Two. “Man had destroyed man, not only in his body but in his soul. Man was no longer large enough to defy… He had forgotten that Good was an absolute. He believed in evil and not evil, but he no longer had knowledge of Good.” (p. 106) An astute observation of a mindset that perhaps underlies Google’s choice of “Don’t be evil” rather than “Be good” as a motto.
The author makes clear that the protagonist is no selfless heroine. Early in the story while in the dining car, Kitten ignores Pringle who longs for her attention: “His tongue licked his salty lips and his eyes lapped her face begging a crumb, one word. She withheld it. She left him gnawing the barren bone of anonymity.” (p. 65) Yet later, in order to avoid being alone, Kitten solicits his company at dinner. Walking ahead of Pringle to the dining car, “She carried her head like a lady and her body like a snake.” (p. 98)
In Dread Journey, Dorothy Hughes crafted a masterly tale of suspense and a critique of unchecked, amoral ambition. Although a judgment particularly against Hollywood, three of her other fourteen novels, The Fallen Sparrow (1943), Ride the Pink Horse (1946) and In a Lonely Place (1947), were adapted into successful films starring John Garfield, Robert Montgomery, and Humphrey Bogart, respectively. In 1978, the Mystery Writers of America named Hughes a Grand Master and the next year awarded her an “Edgar” for her biography and literary criticism, Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Real Perry Mason (1978).
Time after Time by Molly Keane
The novels of Molly Keane are not for everyone, but for those who like dark humor and eccentric characters. Set in Ireland, Time after Time (1983) is a novel of ill manners, the story of four elderly siblings of the Protestant landed gentry: sisters April, May, and June, and brother Jaspar. Compelled by financial constraints to live together, they avoid each other when possible and exchange barbs when together, particularly at meals. The inter-sibling alienation is such that when, after a series of distressing revelations, Jaspar offers wine to console May, she thinks, “Kindness again. She could have struck him.” (p. 198) The family conflict extends to their pets—the sisters’ dogs and the brother’s cat.
Each sibling has some physical handicap—Jasper lost an eye in a childhood tragedy, April is nearly deaf, May has a deformed hand, and June is dyslexic and unusually short. Jaspar oversees the estate, cooking and gardening. April funds the place with money inherited from her late husband and the secret sale of family antiques. Punctilious, chain-smoking May demonstrates flower arrangements in part to display manual dexterity of the hand she hates and loves. June, a former champion rider, tends the horse she now fears to mount, assisted by Christy Lucey, a young Catholic talented in horse-training but indolent in his other duties.
The routine of the siblings’ lives is unsettled by the surprise arrival of Austrian cousin Leda from a convent where she had been living recently. They had assumed that she, being half-Jewish, had died in a concentration camp, although her real experience of the war was quite different. Leda, now blind, still retains the confidence of her youthful beauty unknowingly lost to her. With ulterior motives, Leda charms them all (except June), exacerbating the sibling rivalry. Ultimately thwarted in her scheme, Leda erupts with hurtful accusations at the breakfast table before being taken back to the convent by her daughter, who has her own disclosures to share. The book ends with fitting fates for the main characters.
Charis in a World Of Wonders by Marly Youmans
​
Marly Youmans is a novelist and poet, the latter a talent which shows in the lyrical, beautifully crafted prose of her novel Charis in a World of Wonders.
"The starlight spilled on me … A thousand thousand bees had been set alight and were floating in the deep blue-black tunnel of night. Whiter than a candle of sun-bleached beeswax, the moon gleamed at me, and the most delicate silk scarf of cloud moved infinitely slowly across the sky. [p. 265]"
Set in Puritan New England during the early 1690s, the author has clearly done serious historical research to paint a richly detailed picture with more accuracy in context and particulars than most historical fiction. At the end of the book is a glossary of Puritan-era terms unfamiliar to most readers today. Occasionally, she includes a bit more information in the story than necessary, such as when readers are given an inventory of a spilled medicine bag amid an intense scene. Those interruptions, however, are few and do not detract overall from the engaging narrative.
In the title character, Youmans has created an intelligent, independent, and intrepid young woman. Charis was educated by her father alongside her brothers in subjects that included Greek philosophy and mythology. “The Greeks did not know what we know, but they were wise.” [p. 124] From a neighborhood woman, Charis learned German folk tales, and is familiar with local flora and fauna: “so the things of this world tell us a tale …” She also believes, though, in the existence of an enchanted world of unicorns and other fantastic creatures in less familiar realms.
Youmans’ story-telling ability and generally good pacing result in a lively read as the plot follows Charis’ hardships and joys. The story begins with a tragedy in which Charis’ family at Falmouth is attacked by members of the Wabinaki Confederacy, and she is forced to flee into the wilderness. She eventually finds temporary sanctuary in the Puritan settlement of Haverhill before taking residence in Andover.
While the author depicts the standard Puritan attitudes, assumptions, and prejudices, the title character and, in Charis’s memory, her father present a more sympathetic view of Natives and other socially maligned people. The French are blamed for stirring up the Wabinaki, who (as explained in the glossary) were allies during King William’s War. Charis’s father had spoken of Puritan encroachment on Native lands. When Charis encounters a young dead brave on her flight, she reflects on their common humanity. “Though intending to regard him with disgust as monstrous and condemned, I was surprised to find that his face appeared open and shorn of any anger.” [p. 38]
The novel conveys the sincere, thoughtful, and evolving spirituality of Charis in a convincing way. Conflicting sides of Puritanism are reflected in Andover’s two pastors, the younger Mr. Barnard with his vehement fire-and-brimstone Calvinism, and the elder, Cambridge-educated Mr. Dane with his emphasis on love, mercy, and grace. “Some prideful new-minted men of Harvard College … are remarkably prone to believe their own half-digested reflections correct. They wish to be the mirror that displays what all others should think—or better, the one others consult and are led by.” [p. 142] The community will eventually become embroiled in accusations of witchcraft.
The importance of class in the Puritan communities is most strongly embodied in the characters of Goody Holt and her elder daughter, Lizzie. Having risen in life, Goody Holt is obsessively determined to make well-connected marriages for her daughters. She treats Charis, who is from a such a family, as a servant when she becomes a hired seamstress in the Holt household.
The novel considers post-partum depression through the character of Phoebe Wardwell. Her husband fearfully relates the words of Pastor Barnard that the depressed and physically ailing Phoebe is beset by “the realm of witches and demons and powers … fighting to possess her.” To which Pastor Dane clicks his tongue, responding, “It is a flaw in our Massachusetts divines to be always to set on thoughts of writhing and furious devils who pitch trouble at us from the invisible world … bereft of tenderness … Likewise … that so many suffer from melancholy, deadness of heart, and over-anxiety as to sin.” [p.202]
One manifestation of Charis’ independence is learning the metalworking craft of her new husband, Jotham. On the broader topic of women acting in traditionally male roles, Youmans presents (as so deftly on other topics) the traditional view with a dissenting or questioning one.
"Those well-born, well-educated ladies, Mary Dyer and Anne Hutchinson, were busy in the cause of liberty, but our ministers preached that each of them suffered an unnatural birth because they abandoned the right role of woman and usurped a man’s duty. That our pastors were right in claiming them as heretics, I knew, yet I have a fellow feeling for the two, with their passion for truth and grace and desire to act for the good. Was I not a woman who longed to be like a boy eagerly riding off to Harvard, and who wishes to make beauties not just in cloth and thread but in a man’s prerogative of silver and gold? (p. 224)"
As with other authors who capture my fancy, I am looking forward to reading more of Youmans’ books.