Read, Ramble

Getting Started with John le Carré (Audio, Video, Film)

My introduction to John le Carré came through film and video: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold with Richard Burton and the two Smiley series starring the great Alec Guinness (from the late ‘Seventies and early ‘Eighties) that I watched for the first time just a few years ago on dvd.

The 2011 film of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy did a disappointing box office, but Gary Oldman made a superb Smiley. I suppose that a thriller involving character study as much as plot twists falls short of popular demand to be bombarded with special effects and noise. This is a film for "mature audiences" of a different sort than that term usually means.

The introspection and quietness of le Carré's Smiley series made me a little skeptical about how one of his novels might work as an audiobook. Too quiet, or too flat, and the narration could deteriorate into monotone, but my library did not have the book, and so I took a chance on Call for the Dead (1960), the novel that introduces British spy George Smiley--the frumpy, the fat, the rumpled, the laconic, the disappointed. (Read by Michael Jayston, 4 hours and 44 minutes.) It is, in fact, a quiet audiobook, but not too quiet. I enjoyed the book for the remarkable main character and for the insight into Cold War experience and thinking. Sometimes old genre fiction, well done, reads like historical fiction, and that is the case with Call for the Dead.

One plot element struck me as too improbable, but this was merely a flaw in the book, not a fatal flaw. See spoiler below.*

In the second Smiley book, the main character takes a break from spying and turns to sleuthing, when an old friend asks him to investigate a crime. Looking for a copy of A Murder of Quality (1962), I discovered the 1991 BBC tv production, with screenplay by le Carré and starring Denholm Elliott as Smiley. This sounded too good to pass up, and Elliott’s interpretation of Smiley is marvelous. The story itself, and the tv show, are nothing special, just mildly entertaining in the manner of British detective shows, but Elliott as Smiley is well worth seeing if you appreciate fine acting. Glenda Jackson plays the friend who asks him to take on the case. A very young Christian Bale has a part in this production. He must have been about 16 or 17 in this role. And another fine performance by Joss Ackland.

Next up in the Smiley series is The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which I plan to read in print, just for a change of pace and to get a sense of Smiley on the page. This book, I believe, was le Carré's first international bestseller.

Call for the Dead was written during the Cold War, and I followed that on audio with The Great Fortune by Olivia Manning (1908-1980). (Read by Harriet Walter, 11 hours and 28 minutes.) Manning was sometimes dismissed as a Cold War apologist in her historical novels of WWII, but a reevaluation of her work has apparently been happening over the past few decades. After reading only one of her novels, I am not yet ready to form an independent judgment about Manning's geopolitical point of view. She does not seem like a zealot of any particular camp, on first glance.

A review in The Times Literary Supplement of Imperial Refugee by Eve Patten says that "Patten persuasively reads The Balkan Trilogy as an examination of the British Empire, a 'rumbling  critique of British naivety and ego', 'an extended post-war narrative of  reproach' and 'a response to the Cold War'. She also makes a case for an  Irish inflexion, citing Gothic elements in Manning’s evocations of Romania  where her descriptions of refugees are seen as influenced by Bram Stoker and  Sheridan Le Fanu." So apparently Patten sees Manning not as a Cold Warrior but as a commentator on the Cold War, suggesting a different approach entirely. I can definitely see the stylistic link to the Irish authors she mentions.

The Great Fortune, an absorbing historical novel, is set in Bucharest, Romania on the eve of World War II. Harriet Pringle, married to Guy, a teacher, experiences the life of an expat among a colorful cast of characters. This is the first book in her Fortunes of War, two trilogies consisting of The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy. Although the other two volumes of The Balkan Trilogy are also available in audio form, I want to read the next novel in print. The narration was good, but the slow--sometimes almost dreamy--pace of this first novel in the series makes a print version seem appealing too.

*The notion that a Jewish concentration camp survivor would become a spy for East Germany following the war is too much of a stretch. I did not buy it.

Audiobooks: Gaskell and Austen Read by Juliet Stevenson

Over the past six months, audiobooks have played more of a role in my "reading" than they had in the last ten years. Ratings of these books are more subjective than reviews of books in print, since so much depends on the response of the reader to the style of the narrator. I have also come to understand my own impatience with nonfiction audiobooks, which move too slowly for my attention span. In my experience, the books that adapt best to the audio format are character-driven novels.

After only two of her performances, Juliet Stevenson has quickly become my favorite audio reader. An accomplished actress, she knows when to tone it down and when to pour it on. She understands character, pacing, and the dynamics of scenes. In addition to reading as an actress, she also brings to audiobooks the outlook of an intelligent reader.

Here are two audiobooks I thoroughly enjoyed.

North and South (1855) by Elizabeth Gaskell, read by Juliet Stevenson, 18 hours and 18 minutes. North and South interests me more as social history than as fiction, but it is another fine novel from Gaskell. She addresses issues of class and gender in the factory town of Manchester, through the experience of a young, transplanted, formerly middle-class woman. Making the protagonist an outsider sets up a suitable angle for social commentary.

My least favorite thread of the book is the part that concerns a dying child, but we must remember the high incidence of child mortality in Victorian England. This plot element is not as sentimental as it may seem to today's reader, and I have to remind myself of that fact every time another Little Nell shows up in Victorian fiction. Not my favorite Gaskell, but an important Victorian novel that I am happy to have experienced at last.

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, read by Juliet Stevenson, 8 hrs and 16 mins. Still on sale at Audible.com for $2.99 (for members). Stevenson matches Austen's wit and irony perfectly. What more can I say?

All That I Am by Anna Funder (2011)

Occasionally a book comes along that is worthy of a review or recommendation, but for some reason I am not inspired to write a blog post about it. About a year ago, Anna Funder's All That I Am was such a novel. This fine historical novel won Australia's Miles Franklin Prize in 2012, and searching now I find that it received some highly positive reviews outside Australia, including here in the USA, although the words "dry" and "turgid" appear more often than seems fair.

However, it could have been a sense that my fellow American readers might not relate to the style or story of the book that gave me pause. It could have been that I doubted that today's American readers could empathize with leftist protagonists, even if those characters were hard at work trying to defeat German fascism during World War II. My hesitation in discussing the book was based on an awkward sense of an American readership; it was frustrating to try to identify the readers, at any rate the American readers, who might want to read the book. If I cannot visualize a receptive readership, then what is the point of a positive review?

Still if you enjoy historical fiction, well-written historical fiction, and are open to something different from the same-old, same-old, you might want to give All That I Am a try. It is a powerful book, for the right reader. The Independent in the UK gave it a positive review. Or check out the synopsis at the website of the Miles Franklin Prize. It says, in part, and I concur:

"Based on real people and events, All That I Am is a masterful and exhilarating exploration of bravery and betrayal, of the risks and sacrifices some people make for their beliefs, and of heroism hidden in the most unexpected places. Anna Funder confirms her place as one of our finest writers with this gripping, compassionate, inspiring first novel."

An Australian blogger who liked the book wrote an interesting review too: Jonathan Shaw. He calls it a "gripping yarn," in which "slow burning emotional truth comes through about the importance of resistance, even in the face of apparently sure defeat."

So, here you had a non-review of a book I liked a lot. A simple thumbs up, but I am wary of encouraging others to read it, not knowing exactly how to identify the American audience who would appreciate it.

All That I Am by Anna Funder, 2011, Penguin Group (Australia).
I read the first American edition, 2011, Harper Collins.
267 pages.

Pearl S. Buck on Writing for the Common People

"No other American writer, before or since, has so powerfully shaped the way in which Americans view another culture." – Peter Conn, professor of English, University of Pennsylvania, on Pearl S. Buck and China.

Just getting started on the audiobook of The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck (read by Anthony Heald, 5 hours and 19 minutes), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. Had not realized this was the first book in a trilogy.

The novel was a major bestseller and perhaps for that reason was generally dismissed as lightweight, sentimental claptrap by some of my professors back in college days. I remember reading at some later date that the novel had undergone a critical reevaluation and was taken more seriously as literature by academic critics. I wonder how much sexism or elitism had to do with the casual dismissal, by critics decades after its publication, of her novel about Chinese peasants, or if Buck was seen as a colonialist writer at a time when post-colonialism dominated academic interest. Probably some of the people I remember laughing at Buck's work assumed that any book as popular as The Good Earth could not possibly be a serious work of art. I doubt if they had even read it.

In several accounts, Buck comes across as highly empathetic with the common people of China, where she spent her childhood with missionary parents. After returning to the States for college, she went back to China and lived there for many years. For whatever reason, my impression is that Buck’s reputation has suffered from the patronizing attitude of at least some of the literati. Now listening to the audiobook, I am curious to figure out what Americans in the early 1930s found so fascinating about the book and why some academics held it in contempt, at least for a time.

Buck won the Nobel Prize in 1938. In her Nobel Prize lecture, she talked about the history of the Chinese novel, an entertainment for the common people, emerging from popular storytelling traditions and not taken seriously as art by the highly educated. Then she turned to her own work. She makes clear her preference for a popular audience over recognition as a literary artist. I wonder if the ordinary American reader of 1931 really did have "unspoiled senses" and "free emotions." That sounds a little questionable, but perhaps she is only contrasting the way most people read to an over-intellectualized approach to literature. Anyway, here is what Buck said.

"Like the Chinese novelist, I have been taught to want to write for these people [ordinary people, not the literary elite]. If they are reading their magazines by the million, then I want my stories there rather than in magazines read only by a few.  For story belongs to the people. They are sounder judges of it than anyone else, for their senses are unspoiled and their emotions are free. No, a novelist must not think of pure literature as his goal. He must not even know this field too well, because people, who are his material, are not there. He is a storyteller in a village tent, and by his stories he entices people into his tent. He need not raise his voice when a scholar  passes. But he must beat all his drums when a band of poor pilgrims pass on their way up the mountain in search of gods. To them he must cry, «I, too, tell of gods!» And to farmers he must talk of their land, and to old men he must speak of peace, and to old women he must tell of their children, and to young men and women he must speak of each other. He must be satisfied if the common people hear him gladly. At least, so I have been taught in China."

Tales from China Retold by Cyril Birch (1961)

After reading, over time, some fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm through DailyLit emails, I turned to Tales from China, retold by Cyril Birch and originally published in 1961 as Chinese Myths and Fantasies. The inventiveness and magic of these sparkling tales entertain throughout. I was due for some carefree, escapist reading, and The Tales from China delivered. Although the Worldcat library catalog includes this book in the Juvenile Audience category, it makes excellent adult reading as well. I actually think adults would appreciate the tales more than children would, and you know the old question. Are the original Brothers Grimm tales really suitable for today’s children? Unlike the German tales, these stories do not generally include children as principal actors and, although dramatic and lively, would probably not inspire nightmares.

Also, unlike the way of Greek and Roman myths, the action in these ancient Chinese tales relies more on the deeds of "spirits" than on gods and goddesses, except in the creation stories. Here form emerges from Chaos through the agency of the god P’an Ku, who slept for 18,000 years before waking to nothing but darkness and confusion. Angry, he struck a blow against "the murk," separating earth from sky, which he held apart for another 18,000 years while the universe took shape.

The gods came down from Heaven and roamed about the earth, but they were lonely. And so, for the amusement of the gods, the goddess Nü-ka (body of dragon, head of human) shaped tiny creatures out of clay, the first humans.

Among the first gifts the gods gave to humans were marriage and procreation, weaving for fishing nets, the lute for music, and fire for cooking and warmth. For keeping records, humans received eight symbols, combinations of solid and broken lines familiar to readers of the I Ching.

A great battle in heaven between the gods of fire and water spread havoc on earth, with order restored only by godly intervention.

"Quellers of the Flood," China’s version of the great flood story, introduces elements typical of these tales: shape-shifting spirits who take the forms of animals, objects or elemental stubstances with magical powers, large scale battles between spirits, correspondences between terrestrial features and heavenly meaning. Supernatural circumstances of birth portend great future events.

In "The Great Archer," the supreme ruler confronts a serious problem created by his children. Each of his ten sons takes a turn crossing the sky as the sun, but one day all ten sons decide to take their turns simultaneously, scorching the earth. Their father employs an archer to clear the sky of extra suns, thus averting catastrophe and restoring order to the universe.

Ch’i, the son of a heavenly spirit and a human mother, is born by emerging from a splitting boulder. Ch’i’s father frightened his mother when he transformed himself into a bear. She ran away and transformed herself into a boulder to be safe from the bear, and from this rock her son is born. Ch’i traveled back and forth between heaven and earth, bringing divine music to humankind.

I have outlined a few stories to give a sense of the type of content these stories involve. The book continues with colorful tales of ghosts and fairies and a cycle of stories, "The Revolt of the Demons," about a family of evil spirits who set out to dominate the world through black magic but are ultimately defeated by human armies, a cracking of the evil spells, and the trickery of the White Monkey spirit, who guides the leading demon to her doom.

This book is one of Myths and Legends series from Oxford University Press. We had several of the excellent collections around when the children were little, both for exposure to other cultures and because folklore can be satisfying reading for children who are reading above grade level, but who are not ready for the mature content of much adult fiction. Some of the other Oxford titles in this series cover Africa, West Africa, West African Trickster Tales, The Norse Gods, Japan, India, England, Scotland, Wales, One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, Tales from Hans Andersen, and the Brothers Grimm.

The only drawback to this China collection is that OUP does not include any information about author (or translator and reteller) Cyril Birch. If the intended audience is children or teens, that omission is understandable, but I was curious about his background. Birch was the chairman of the Oriental Languages Department at UC Berkeley, where he taught from 1960-1991, after teaching for twelve years at the University of London. He published numerous scholarly works and translated Ming drama and stories. He also published a two-volume anthology of Chinese literature.

Tales from China by Cyril Birch, 1961.
I read the Oxford University Press paperback edition, 2000.
Illustrated by Rosamund Fowler.
195 pages.

Trollope on Shakespeare

Anthony Trollope wrote this note in his copy of Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

"This, perhaps, is the prettiest comedy that ever was written in any language. It is like a fairy tale, perfect in grace and beauty, but without fairies. The poet has dared to throw all probabilities to the wind. Fathers do not know their own children under the thinnest disguise; nor lovers their own sweethearts. Villains become good men at a moment’s notice. Hearts are changed and given away at a word. Lions roar where no lions ever were. The nature of snakes is made anew.  But for all this the thoughts and language are as true to life as in any work that ever came from a man’s pen. As a pastoral, it beats all pastorals. As a love story it is most charming. For comedy nothing can equal Touchstone and Audrey. The play is equally good whether acted or read;–only that actors for such parts as Rosalind, Orlando, Jaques, and Touchstone can hardly be found." –19 July 1875.

This quote is from Anthony Trollope’s Notes on the Old Drama by Elizabeth R. Epperly (1988). To compile this volume of Trollope’s comments on Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, Epperly visited the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. and reviewed Trollope’s comments and marginalia in books from his personal library. She reports that between 1866 and 1882, Trollope read more than 270 of these plays and annotated 96 of the 130 volumes now owned by the Folger Library.

Trollope is frank and opinionated, appealingly so, and he does not always find Shakespeare’s plays to his liking. On Troilus and Cressida: "I do not much care for this play. Cressida is too abominable." His favorite Shakespearean play was Macbeth, and he singles out Brutus in Julius Caesar as "perhaps the finest character ever drawn by Shakespeare."

This is a book I’ve browsed occasionally over the past ten years, and now and then Trollope’s comments have led me to seek out an old play. At one point the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher caught my fancy. Trollope regularly expresses disgust with their coarseness, but he commented on about three dozen of their plays (many, many more than I have read). You can see why he liked the parts he did enjoy, and for all his protestations, Trollope’s sense of humor shows an affinity with the humorous turns in B&F (just not the bawdy parts). He often praises their poetry. Epperly notes that Trollope read 42 Beaumont and Fletcher plays in 1874 alone, 16 of them while he was writing The Prime Minister!

Trollope makes pointed observations about the women in the plays he reads, interesting comments for their own sake, but also for the possible illumination of Trollope’s own approach to writing female characters. This book should appeal to devoted Trollopeans, but the more Elizabethan and Jacobean plays you have read, the more pleasure you will derive from AT’s jottings.

Anthony Trollope’s Notes on the Old Drama by Elizabeth R. Epperly (1988).
Published by the University of Victoria (Canada), a monograph in the English Literary Studies series)
143 pages.

James Beard Cookbook Awards 2013

This year's James Beard cookbook awards have been announced. I have sampled recipes from a couple of the winning books that were available at the library, including the Cookbook of the Year: Gran Cocina Latina: The Food of Latin America by Maricel E. Presilla. This is a massive tome, 901 pages of deliciousness, and yes, I just broke my book-buying fast and ordered it online.

Another Beard winner that I had tried won the International category: Jerusalem: A Cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi. This lavishly photographed recipe collection also includes absorbing and informative culinary history, making for good reading as well as good cooking. I found it at the library and resolved to buy it after first spending more time with another Ottolenghi cookbook, his vegetarian collection, Plenty, which rapidly became a favorite here. Often dazzling presentation. Always sublime flavor. Often surprising blending of ingredients.

Other book winners that are now on my wishlist:

• Cooking Light The New Way to Cook Light: Fresh Food & Bold Flavors for Today’s Home Cook by Scott Mowbray and Ann Taylor Pittman. By the editors of Cooking Light Magazine.
• Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking by Nathalie Dupree and Cynthia Graubart.
• Yes, Chef: A Memoir by Marcus Samuelsson.

Several of the other books look appealing, but I already have a couple of bread books to work through before starting another, and I am not that interested in books about wine or about professional technique that may not translate well to home cooking. Something for everyone here. As a home cook interested in culinary history, I always find some gems among the Beard cookbook winners.

Once again, a hearty congratulations to Anne Willan, inducted this year into the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame. She was a fairly recent discovery for me. Her Country Cooking of France was a fine book to add to my collection after reading Waverly Root's culinary travelog The Food of France. Her book on the history of cookbooks, The Cookbook Library, is another essential volume that includes updated versions of classic recipes as well as a wealth of food history. Over the past few months, used copies of some of her earlier works have been added to my collection. I cannot wait to read her memoir, coming soon.

Congratulations to all of the James Beard honorees. The link above takes you to the complete list of book, blog, and journalism winners.

Visit Beth Fish Reads for links to more Weekend Cooking posts. These usually include recipes, beautiful photos, book reviews, and other food-related posts.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple (2012)

Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple might not have come to my attention without its inclusion on the shortlist for the Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize). Our local public library here in rural Montana has had a copy of it for three months, and I was the first reader to check it out. How odd. Perhaps because the only copy on the shelf is the large print edition? The novel appeared on quite a few "Best of 2012" book lists, and it has been picked up for filming, but I had missed the buzz, so my thanks to the jury of the Women’s Prize for giving this book a nod.

A novel this full of fun and wit generally does not land among the top contenders for a major literary prize. I did laugh out loud a few times. Semple can be uproariously funny, especially when she is sending up the corporate culture of Microsoft, the tribal narrow-mindedness of private middle-school parents, or the shallow pieties of psychobabble. She knows Seattle inside and out. If you have ever visited the city, you will recognize its many charms as well as the quirky community standards that may give residents a sense of  individuality and difference, but are instead represented here as more akin to enforced norms within groups of people who cannot recognize or accept true creativity and originality.

That’s where our heroine Bernadette comes in. She is the forgotten genius who ends up in Seattle, because her husband (a tech wiz who gave the fourth-most-watched TED Talk ever–wowie zowie!!) takes a job at Microsoft. I’ll not spoil the plot by regurgitating Bernadette’s history, since that turn does not happen until the story is well under way. Although the surface of the narrative is light and amusing, the book is tightly plotted with some vividly drawn characters. The central questions Semple investigates are weightier than her flippant delivery, as she explores the experience of a talented woman operating within a constraining social environment, married to a man she loves but who spends so much time at work that he seems to be more married to Microsoft than to her. Without much noise, that is, with subtlety, Semple also gives a beautiful portrait of a rock solid mother-daughter bond, unlike anything I can recall seeing elsewhere.

The back-and-forth written communications of the characters fold into another narrative in the voice of Bernadette’s fourteen-year-old daughter Bee. Her tender, innocent running commentary about subjects silly and serious gives us another view of her mother, not objective certainly, but valuable to the reader in understanding who Bernadette is. Semple leads the reader to care as much about the concerns of the daughter as the mother. When has a fiction writer treated the point of view of an adolescent this respectfully? It took some thinking, but the only character in recent memory who compares is the young man in Steve Hamilton’s 2010 crime novel The Lock Artist, another strong, bright, endearing teen narrator.

Bernadette is also a powerful character. She is an iconoclast and an outcast, who–just imagine–does not volunteer in her daughter’s classroom! The other mothers gossip maliciously about her, and a couple of these women are significant minor characters in the book. In the epistolary sections of the narrative, often presented as email exchanges, these women serve as a sort of Greek chorus, commenting on Bernadette’s behavior and character. She is not one of them. Bernadette’s husband, brilliant and affectionate, but frequently unaware of what is happening around him, rounds out the cast of characters.

Since the author reveals this plot twist at the beginning of the book, and the publisher mentions it on the back cover, it does not give too much away to say that a major development in the story involves the disappearance of Bernadette. Knowing this from the start, the reader approaches the story with a mystery hovering beyond the currently unfolding events. What eventually causes Bernadette to go? Where does she go? Semple, in her title, gives the reader reason to ask, How much of this nonsense will Bernadette endure before she goes?, thus tapping into the empathy of many a loving wife and mother, who might occasionally fantasize about running away from home.

Don’t be fooled by the wicked humor in Where’d You Go, Bernadette. This is a serious novel, addressing vital subjects of importance to women--especially artists--at work, women in strict and unforgiving social environments, women in relationships, women in families. Semple gives us reason to cry as well as laugh. As a former employee of several Silicon Valley companies, I admit to laughing most often at Semple’s send-up of Microsoft. Every tech company has its own operating style, and the biting detail she includes about Microsoft, the overall tenor of the corporate personality, rings true.

Semple is an experienced tv comedy writer, and that approach to pacing and rhythm shows in her style. An audio version of this book is available, and I suspect the novel would adapt especially well to that format.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple.
Originally published by Little, Brown and Company, New York (2012).
Also available in paperback from Back Bay Books, reprint edition (April 2, 2013) .
352 pages.

 

 

2013 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction: The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson

Congratulations to Adam Johnson on winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Orphan Master's Son. When he was interviewed on public television in January, 2012, the book looked interesting, but I was still reeling after reading a novel by Herta Müller and lacked the backbone at that time to embark on another story about the de-humanizing effects of a repressive dictatorship.

The video from that interview is still online, or you can read a transcript of the piece: "Author Adam Johnson Envisions a Life Inside North Korea Under Kim Jong-il."

The library waiting list for the book could mean it will be a couple of months before I can read it, but this award may lead to the purchase of some additional copies.

Women's Prize for Fiction - Shortlist

The Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) has announced this year's shortlist. There goes all resolution to stop buying books. Zadie Smith. Barbara Kingsolver. Hilary Mantel. Kate Atkinson. A.M. Homes. Maria Semple. The local library has three of six, not bad for a rural Montana library.