Paging All Bookworms! discussion

I went well over my 120 book, 35,000 page goal last year, reading 134 books and over 38,000 pages; I fell one book short of my goal of twenty not in English. For this year I am upping my goals to 132 books and 36,000 pages, keeping the goal of 20 not in English.

Among my plans for the year are to continue reading Korean literature for the group I am in on Goodreads; working my way through the fake-Nobel winner Maryse Condé; trying to finish up my project on Balzac; and reading a certain amount of philosophy, popular science and history, among other nonfiction.

Jan. 3

1. Hwang Sok-yong, The Old Garden [2000, tr. 2012] 549 pages [Kindle]

The Old Garden begins in the present (at the time the novel was written) with the release of the protagonist, Oh Hyun Woo, a political opponent of the South Korean dictatorship, after almost eighteen years of imprisonment. Near the beginning, he discovers that his lover, a teacher and artist, Han Yun-hee, whom he has not seen since a few days before his arrest, has died of cancer a few years earlier. He returns to the house in the country where they lived together and finds her journals and unsent letters to him. The remainder of the novel is primarily flashbacks based on his memories and her writing, in a complex chronological structure reminiscent of the novels of Mario Vargas Llosa (especially La fiesta del chivo) but without the intentional disorientation of Vargas' writing. The way the novel is structured rules out any element of suspense as we know in advance that he will be captured and that she will die of natural causes without seeing him again; this focuses attention on the political ideas and the emotional reactions rather than on the plot.

The book initially concentrates on the events from 1981 on, starting with the aftermath of the Kwangju uprising, although for example through Han's memories of her father there is some context going back to the struggle against Japan. We see Oh as an underground activist for the next year, finally escaping to a refuge in the countryside and falling in love with Han, whom he lives with for a few months before "survivor's guilt" after his comrades are all captured or killed impells him to return to the now hopeless struggle in the capital. His experiences in prison are counterposed to her life on the outside, first waiting for him in the country, then returning to graduate school, and spending a few years in West Berlin as a student before returning home after the reunification of Berlin and the end of the Cold War. The tearing down of the Berlin Wall provides an emotional contrast to the still divided Korea.

This is a pessimistic book, as any realistic novel today must be; the capitalist liberalization of South Korea, which results in Oh's liberation as an old man, is shown as anything but what Oh and his friends had hoped for, and both the united Germany and the former Soviet Union are described as rather dystopian; and of course Korea was (and still is) divided between a poor and tightly controlled North and a corrupt and materialist if no longer dictatorial South. Nearly all the characters are tragic, dead or broken. It left me rather depressed. It's also a very powerful book, and I learned much that I did not know about the recent history of South Korea.

Jan. 6

2. Hwang Sok-yong, The Guest [2001, tr. 2006] 243 pages [Kindle]

The read for the World Literature group I'm in on Goodreads, this was the first of Hwang's novels to be published in English. The title, The Guest (Sonnim in Korean) is the name that was given to smallpox, a disease which was introduced from the west and reached epidemic proportions after the country was "opened" to western trade and exploitation. Hwang explains in the preface that he chose it to refer to Christianity and Marxism, the foreign ideologies which have divided Koreans from one another. I do have problems with his calling the Stalinist ideology of North Korea Marxist, and even more to his equating it with Christianity -- although I suppose it could be argued that modern Christianity, or at least the Korean version of Christianity, is equally distorted; unlike the situation with Marx, we don't have any idea what Jesus actually stood for. In any case, the forms in which these two western beliefs reached Korea were certainly both disastrous for the people of the penninsula. (I would also note, however, that the religion and culture they displaced were also largely a foreign import, derived from China.) Actually the novel itself does not treat the two sides as completely equal -- while there was overreaction on both sides, the guilt is clearly placed on the Christians, and the way the book is structured, it is largely about the repentance of the Christian characters.

This theme is not what made the novel so controversial; rather, it's that the book offers a revisionist view of the Sinchon massacre. Rather than simply present the novel as a fictional speculation, Hwang made the claim that he was revealing the real truth about the massacre. He apparently based his view on two alleged eye-witnesses, a minister who is the original of Reverend Ryu, the main character of the novel (and who according to some posters on the internet later said he was misinterpreted), and an anonymous person in North Korea. This hardly seems like conclusive evidence, and without questioning Hwang's honesty or sincerity -- it's obvious from his other novels that he is hardly an apologist for the United States or the South Korean government; The Shadow of Arms has a graphic description of My Lai -- I think it is better to treat the book as a fictional possibility rather than as a factual historical novel.

The official North Korean version of what took place at Sinchon is that there was a systematic massacre of almost forty thousand civilians by U.S. troops over a period of forty to fifty days. This certainly seems implausible to me; the two documented massacres by American troops, the 1950 massacre at No gun ri in Korea and the later more famous one at My Lai in Vietnam, were both carried out in a short time by small units and there were in both cases soldiers who refused to join in and eventually broke through the attempted cover-up. That a major operation against civilians was carried out by U.S. combat troops and no one ever spoke out about it, even after they had left the military, doesn't fit in with what I know about the mostly working class American citizen-soldiers -- only a highly professional elite corps like the European colonial armies or a highly fanatical military group like the SS could do something like this. On the other hand, despite U.S. and South Korean claims that it never happened, there seems to be real evidence of some sort of mass killing. That the U.S. military "advisors" may have participated in or even directed a massacre by the South Koreans is far more plausible, and would fit in with the atrocities in Vietnam carried out by Vietnamese troops under the supervision of the CIA in the "strategic hamlet" program. Another possibility of course is a right-wing paramilitary group of some sort, and this is essentially what Hwang is claiming -- an armed Christian youth group animated by religious and political fanaticism.

As presented in the novel, the underlying dynamic was one of class rather than religion, or rather the religious difference was the form taken by the class antagonism. The Christians according to the narrative were the more affluent farmers and petty bourgeois layers (the actual large landlords having already fled to the South), who had become wealthy through collaboration with the Japanese occupation; the Communists and their supporters were mainly among the tenant farmers, and the Christians were opposing the land reform which was giving the former tenants ownership of the land they had been working for the benefit of the landlords and the Japanese corporations. A violent opposition group made up of young Christians had fled to the hills after carrying out acts of terrorism, and armed themselves with the support of various groups such as the Anticommunist Youth Corps in the South; they returned ahead of the American invasion force and decided to exterminate the Communists and their families as agents of Satan. The returning Northern army troops then re-entered the area and suppressed the revolt, of course in turn going too far and killing many uninvolved Christians. The account seems quite familiar to anyone who has read about the alternating massacres of Christians and Moslems from Bosnia through the Middle East and into much of Africa, for example, or much of the violence in the former USSR after the collapse of the Stalinist regime. Some of the Christians at least belonged to a group called the Unification Corps; I couldn't help being reminded of the right-wing Unification Church of Rev. Moon, although I don't know if there is any direct connection between the two.

Leaving the historical controversy aside, the book has an unusual style, being based on the stages of a rite of exorcism; ghosts appear to the main characters throughout the book, and much of what we learn about the massacre is revealed supernaturally. The novel begins with the visit of the protagonist, Reverend Ryu Yosŏp, to North Korea after a lifetime in exile in the United States, and three days after the death of his older brother Yohan, an actor in the massacre. Apart from the ghosts, the narrative is made up of flashbacks and memories as in The Old Garden, but with many more characters' points of view; sometimes it is not immediately apparent whose memories are being given. There is much explicitly described brutality and this is a book that many people would have difficulty getting through. Despite putting the blame for the massacre on the Christians, the book seems very religious, being largely presented through the consciousness of the Reverend and concerned with repentance and forgiveness. There is much praying and many Bible quotations throughout. I have a problem with that whole theme too. It seems that from the original Athenian Amnesty to the recent Commissions on Truth and Reconciliation, the side of the rich and powerful always gets the benefit of any amnesty while the revolutionaries are always persecuted relentlessly. There isn't always forgiveness, of course, and one could point to many "red terrors", but if there is an amnesty it's always one-sided. Compare the treatment of the Shah of Iran or General Pinochet who tortured and murdered tens of thousands of innocent people with the treatment of say Leonard Peltier, convicted after a questionable trial of killing two armed FBI agents coming after him. I'm not for vengeance as such, particularly when the Stalinists punish people for their own and even their parents' and grandparents' class position, but when it comes to atrocities such as Hwang depicts (leaving aside whether events happened the way he depicts, I'm discussing this as a fictional narrative) there comes a point when one must ask, as one recent book on the Holocaust did, whether the living have the right to forgive crimes against the dead.

Although this is probably Hwang's most famous book, at least outside Korea, perhaps due to the controversies, I have to say that I thought the previous novel was better.

Jan. 12

3. Honoré de Balzac, Un grand homme de province à Paris [1839] 284 pages

The second book of the trilogy Illusions perdues, this follows Lucien de Rubempré to Paris, where he quickly (in a week or so) loses his illusions in Mme. de Bargeton, love, and life in Paris. As the novel progresses, he also becomes disillusioned with the commerce of literature, journalism and politics (first liberal, then royalist), rapidly succombing to the corruption of society. The biting satire on the book publishers, and the journals and their "criticism", is undoubtedly close to Balzac's heart and based on personal experience. I couldn't help but compare this novel written 180 years ago to the contemporary epidemic of "fake news"; it wasn't invented by Trump and Hillary and it's not due to the Internet. Reading Balzac is like reading about contemporary American politics; depite his own conservative politics, he is the expert at describing the phenomena of capitalist society in it's "advanced" centers. One of Balzac's most cynical novels, although there are contrasts in the family and friend he leaves behind in Angoulème (David, Eve, and his mother) and in the friends of the "Cénacle", particularly Daniel d'Arthez (but as with most "positive" characters, they are not portrayed as vividly or convincingly as the villains). Coraline, though wonderful, is too young to be more than a victim, and Lucien himself is hardly a very sympathetic character even if we feel he has been more than adequately punished for his faults.

I usually read quickly through Balzac's long descriptions of places, but the description of the restaurant and poor student hangout, Flicoteau's, was one of the best things in the book; anyone who went to college in the time I did knows a Flicoteau's. Perhaps no longer true in the age of identical fast food franchises. There is also some literary discussion which casts light on Balzac's own procedures. In criticizing Lucien's first novel, d'Arthez recommends that he abandon the procedures of Sir Walter Scott and begin in media res; Balzac begins using this technique about this time and his novels become much better because of it -- I hadn't realized until I saw a critical article on him recently that he was an innovator in this regard, so perhaps I was overcritical of his earlier works for the way they begin with long descriptions before reaching any action, the style that is criticized in this book.

Jan. 14

4. Honoré de Balzac, Les souffrances de l'inventeur [1843] 177 pages [in French]

The final book of the trilogy Illusions perdues, originally called Eve et David, returns to Angoulème, where it describes the persecution of David Séchard for debt and the cheating of him out of his invention of a cheaper way to make paper. After reading all three books, I'd have to say this is definitely one of Balzac's best works. Now I need to make a decision, whether to read the long, four part sequel, or move on to the next division.

Jan. 25

5. John D'Agata, The Next American Essay [2003] 475 pages

Another book for a friend's class (maybe someday I'll get to take one myself), this is a collection of "essays", mostly American, one for each year from 1975 to 2003. I put "essays" in quotation marks because the editor says that they blur the distinction between nonfiction and art -- and many of them seem more like poetry or fiction than essays. The selection is very subjective, and emphasizes "literary" writing. Like any anthology this one is very uneven; one or two selections I found boring, and a few were basically incomprehensible, but there were also some I really enjoyed reading. This is the third collection in the editor's New History of the Essay; I didn't actually find his comments and introductions very enlightening.

Jan. 28

6. Donald Culross Peattie, Green Laurels: The Lives and Achievements of the Great Naturalists [1936] 368 pages

This book was made up of short biographies of a selection of "naturalists" ("field" as opposed to "lab" scientists) from the Middle Ages to the late nineteenth century, written in a flowery literary style, and woven into a basic narrative frame; there were a few anecdotes I hadn't heard before but essentially nothing new. After reading a lot of depressing modern fiction over the past few months, though, this sort of "whiggish" popular history where there is actual progress instead of everything going from bad to worse was a kind of mental relaxation. The author notes that if some of the ideas of the earlier naturalists seem quaint or even bizarre in the twentieth century, the future would feel the same way about twentieth century ideas, and that is already the case with much of his reflection on the meaning and importance of some of these figures; in particular he seems to have a rather poor understanding of what evolution is about, apparently thinking that Lamarck has been vindicated against Darwinian natural selection (the mid-thirties were about the last time that anyone could seriously think that was the case, when the "modern synthesis" was still new and not fully accepted.)

One problem that I had with the book was his tendency to present pairings of "good" and "bad" figures, and suggest that there were "conspiracies" to suppress ideas because of personal animosities -- this is still a theme of much pseudo-scientific rubbish, that the authors of new (usually crank) ideas are suppressed by "official" science; not that it never happens, but it doesn't succeed for long except for proprietary or classified research. Some of the pairs he treats that way are Buffon vs. Réaumer, Cuvier vs. Lamark, and Audubon vs. Wilson. It was worthwhile however to learn more about the less well-known figures, who do often deserve more consideration.

This book certainly doesn't take the place of a real history of biology (I would recommend Ernst Mayr's The Development of Biological Thought for that), but as I said it was an enjoyable relaxation.

Feb. 16

10. Toni Morrison, Beloved [1987] 275 pages

A powerful novel about the continuing effects of the heritage of slavery on Blacks after the Civil War, this is generally considered Morrison's best book. It won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and is on virtually every list of "contemporary classics". While her previous novels all have more or less contemporary or near-contemporary settings and a basically realist style (if with some light "magical realist" elements), this is a definitely non-realist historical novel. The "present" setting of the novel is 1873 near Cincinnati, and much of the plot is revelations concerning events that happened about 1855 on a plantation called "Sweet Home" in Kentucky. The story opens with the description of a haunted house and the family that occupies it -- Sethe, a former escaped slave, and her teenage daughter Denver; we also learn about a deceased grandmother, Baby Suggs, and two other children, Buglar and Howard, who have run away -- and the ghost of a baby. Soon after, two other important characters arrive, Paul D., a former slave from Sweet Home, and a mysterious twenty-year old woman called "Beloved". Their interactions with the original inhabitants of the house result in the revelations about the past, and also change the characters of Sethe and Denver, ultimately (we hope) in a positive way.

This is not a straightforward historical novel about slavery or reconstruction; while the scenes on the plantation are written in a seemingly realistic style, they are selected for their impact on the psychology of Sethe and Paul, and for certain symbolic goals related to the theme of the novel. Neither is it a traditional "ghost" story, although it uses the conventions of that genre. The style is highly literary, and works much better than in the previous novels which occasionally seemed to be trying too hard to be literary; in this novel Morrison has found the right balance. The psychology of the characters doesn't always seem real, because there is a certain amount of symbolism or trying to make general points about the effects of slavery; but they are real in that all the characters, major and minor, have ambiguities -- there are no moral either-ors, all good or all evil (apart perhaps from "schoolteacher" and his nephews at Sweet Home), everyone has limitations and a major theme of the book is guilt and overcoming it.

I would recommend this book to anyone who does not expect every novel to tell a clear story in direct order, which seems to be the reason for most of the negative reviews I've seen, other than by white readers who aren't comfortable with books that are about race.

Feb. 19

11. Harold Bloom,ed., Toni Morrison's Beloved [1999] 223 pages

A volume in Bloom's Modern Critical Intepretations, this contains fourteen critical articles on Beloved, which I just finished for the library's February book discussion. It is a tribute to Morrison's complex and multi-layered novel that each of these interpretations finds something completely different in the book.

The interpretations of the title character Beloved are especially diverse; of course we know who she is literally -- Sethe's murdered daughter -- but she is obviously something more. What else is it that she symbolizes? Answers here include the embodiment of Sethe's guilt feelings, the Freudian return of the repressed, the longing of slaves for their mothers, the African ancestors, all the victims of slavery, memory, history or the past in general. Is she evil, a succubus or vampire figure; neutral, an infantile "pre-Oedipal" personality seeking love; or positive, a catalyst for the confrontation of Sethe, Paul and Denver with their memories and hence of their ultimate redemption?

Is the novel about the nature of history, the legacy of slavery, a Freudian or religious ritual overcoming of trauma, an analysis of sexual politics or a critique of liberalism? Is it an apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic novel? Are its roots in African oral/aural literature, slave narratives, or modernist writers like Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner?

Probably it can be read in all these ways, and all of them find some support in Morrison's own descriptions of the writing of the book. I seldom get much out of critics, but despite some academic jargon, this collection actually added to my appreciation of the novel.

Feb. 20

12. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination [1993] 91 pages

The printed version of the 1990 William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization, possibly somewhat expanded or revised, this short book argues that the most important works of American literature, whether or not they have Black characters, are positioned in a space defined by the experience of an America with Blacks, that the existence of the Black population in effect determined the character of white Americans as it was seen in the literature and ideology of "Americanism". The white Americans are seen as individualistic, democratic or empowered not only by contrast with Europeans but even more so by implied contrast with the slave population. The examples she gives, from the writings of Twain, Poe, Melville, Faulkner, Cather, and Hemingway, are more suggestive than convincing, but the thesis itself seems to be fairly obvious once one thinks about it. She points out that even when the "great" American novels have important Black characters, critical books and articles about them tend to ignore the Black characters, considering them as "local color" or ornamentation if they mention them at all. She says that she is not interested (in the lecture) in the question of whether the authors took a "good" or "bad" position on slavery or racism, which is a separate question, but simply in how the Black presence (explicit or not) influences the characterization of the whites.

In the discussion of Morrison (based on Beloved) at our library book club, we (all whites) talked about how when we were in high school, our history courses would mention Blacks and slavery in two chapters, one on slavery as a cause of the Civil War and one on Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement (actually in my case the Civil Rights movement was still "current events" that hadn't gotten its one chapter yet), as something separate and aberrant that happened in the South, and the rest of the course would be about the "real", white history of the country. No mention that the economy during the entire period under discussion was based on slavery not just in the South where the slaves lived but in the North as well (Southern slavery was the major investment of Northern capital). The same thing of course was true of Native Americans -- part of a chapter and then ignored. Morrison makes the point that if one mentions, for example, South Africans, one would be asked, "White South Africans? Coloured? or Black?" but when someone says Americans, there is no question, the word just means "white Americans." I mentioned one liberal high school teacher I had saying that Southerners were all racists -- I asked weren't many, if not most Southerners Blacks? But the word Southerner to him just meant "white Southerner". Think of all the books that talk about "the American attitude toward Negroes" as if the Blacks weren't equally American. There are "Americans" and then there are also "minorities". I remember reading a book by a Jewish German about the Third Reich where he pointed out that the first and most important lie of the anti-Semites was just using the word "German" in a way that excluded Germans who were Jewish from the meaning of the word "German". What everyone knew was excluded from direct consciousness by the use of the language.

A number of interesting and important questions raised in a short book.

Feb. 26

13. Yom Sang-Seop, Three Generations [serialized 1931; rev. bk. pub. 1948; tr. 2005] 489 pages

An influential Korean novel, though perhaps more as popular fiction than as a literary work like the other Korean novels I have read for the same Goodreads group. While the Japanese occupation and the discrimination against Koreans by the Japanese are always present as background, and the conflicts of traditional Confucian culture with the (even more negatively presented) Christians are of major importance, the book concentrates on domestic and romantic crises -- in fact the crises in every chapter gave it almost the feel of being the novelization of a television soap opera. (Like much Korean fiction it was originally serialized in the press.) The writing seems very awkward, although probably some of that is the fault of the translator rather than the author; I had the impression that some of the information was originally expressed by the social level of the language and the verbal endings of words which the translator has to make explicit. Since the novel was described as a "family saga", I thought it would be a chronicle tracing a family through three generations, but instead it is a novel about the conflict between the three generations of the Jo family at one particular point in time. (The action lasts for a few months at most, and the earlier events are narrated by the author rather than being shown in actual memory flashbooks.) The author is very discursive, constantly telling us all about the characters and how we should be reacting to them rather than allowing us to discover their personalities from their own actions and dialogue. The characters do spend a lot of time speculating about each others' motivations, which is somewhat ironic because they don't actually seem to have motivations; rather they bounce around from one emotional situation to another without any sort of plan in advance.

The younger generation is represented by the more "positive" character Jo Deok-gi (and his unnamed wife who plays little role in the book), his poor activist friend Byeong-hwa, and their friend Gyeong-ae, who is the abandoned former mistress of Deok-gi's father. (While a more literary novel would have probably held this information back until the other characters discovered it, this book tells the reader everything before the characters learn about it.) These three, together with another young woman, Pil-sun, are the main characters. The middle generation is made up mainly of Deok-gi's hypocritical Christian father Jo Sang-hun and his mother (never named), and the parents of Gyeong-ae and Pil-sun, while the older generation is represented by his wealthy Confucian grandfather (who has a much younger second wife called only "the Suwon woman"). Most of the female characters apart from the younger generation are referred to by the author with phrases like "step-grandaughter-in-law" and we don't ever learn their names; perhaps this is part of the culture of the times, but it helps to give the writing an awkward feel to a non-Korean reader.

About half-way through, the novel begins to incorporate some episodes about the political struggle for independence. There were previous allusions to Byeong-hwa as an activist, but we were never shown him in that capacity until a mysterious visitor shows up briefly from abroad and decides to entrust Byeong-hwa -- a complete stranger -- with a sensitive (but never really described) mission and a good deal of money. Although the author apparently was involved in the independence struggle and spent some time in jail, the politics never actually makes sense or seems credible, and the groups seem less like socialist organizations than like apolitical warring gangs. According to the Afterword, the novel was revised at the time of the book publication to cut down the political material and focus more exclusively on the family conflicts, so this may somewhat explain the unclear references in the political chapters. In any case, as the novel now stands I would have preferred it without those chapters. (The Afterword also explains that Yom's other novels were more political, and that he was consciously part of a literary conflict against a more politicized "proletarian" tendency in the literature of the time.)

I don't want to give the impression that this was not an interesting and worthwhile read, because it was; it just wasn't at the same level as for instance the novels I have read recently by Hwang Sok-yong.

I don't know what happened to these three reviews.

Feb. 5

7. Carol Tuttle, It's Just My Nature!: A Guide to Knowing and Living Your True Nature [2015] 249 pages

Once or twice a year my boss decides everyone needs to read some sort of "self-help" book for our "personal development", which usually gives me a great opportunity to write a sarcastic review. Actually, we have two we need to read before the staff meeting in April, and this was one of them. I have to admit this one drove me crazy. It reminded me of the eighteenth-nineteenth century pseudoscience of "physiognomy" which claimed it could tell a person's character from their facial features -- Tuttle makes the same claim, that people fall into four "Energy Types", called imaginatively "Type 1", "Type 2", "Type 3" and "Type 4" -- actually they are always printed with little superscript symbols because she claims they are her "trademarks" -- which are obvious from looking at the shape of their faces and the way they move. We are supposed to decide what "type" we are and everyone else is, and this should help us to get along and communicate better with each other. It must work, because the book is filled with little "testimonials" from people who cried for days when they found out what "type" they were, but thank the author profusely for saving their marriages, making them successful in business, and generally turning them into happy, satisfied people by revealing which type they are. Of course she has many other books, and websites, and gives classes and lectures and so forth -- she has a whole business called "Dressing Your Truth" which tells you how to dress based on your "energy type".

The other thing the book reminded me of was newspaper horoscopes, because the description of the types are vague enough that you can see something of yourself in whatever description you want to be your type, and all the descriptions of course are in very flattering language. (And metaphors -- one type is like the Ocean and one is like the Mississippi River, and then there is the type like oaks and the type like maples and so on.) The basis of her theory is that the world is made up of ("created from" -- throughout she uses religious-sounding language, as well as "new age" ideas like "yin" and "yang") the four elements, earth, air, fire and water (cutting edge science from 300 BCE), which she brings up to date by calling them oxygen, nitrogen, carbon and hydrogen, and which correspond to her four types of energy. If you don't quite fit the description completely, then you are living your "secondary" type, so actually she says there are ten possibilities (because 4x3=10?).

If you're curious, I'm a type 2 -- and I didn't even cry much when I found out.


8. D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form [[1917; rev. 1942; rev. and abr. 1961] 345 pages

This is an abridged version; the 1942 edition is over a thousand pages. The editor has taken advantage of the abridgement to cut out passages he considers outdated. The book is apparently considered a classic of sorts; it deals with the growth and forms of living organisms, from microbial life to the bones and skeletons of larger animals in terms of mathematical and physical patterns. It was actually quite interesting; although the author occasionally engages in polemics against "natural selection" which he considers to be a catchphrase for ignoring the specific development of various organisms, the patterns he suggests actually can be explained in terms of modern genetics as differential rates of growth in the couse of development and so on. Undoubtedly purely mechanical causes do explain much of morphology -- how else could the genome regulate so many different features? He deals mainly with math and physics, with much less chemistry than one would expect -- of course DNA was not yet identified as the genetic material, much less analyzed.


Feb. 6

9. E.B.White, Charlotte's Web [1952] 184 pages

Another book I had to read for work, because there is thought of using this as the basis for a program this summer. I have to say that as an unmarried senior citizen I rarely read, let alone review, children's literature (except for incidentally reading very short picture books and so forth while cataloging them -- it would probably increase my reading statistics twentyfold if I counted them all, but I couldn't tell you about any of them the next day). However, since I had to make a special effort (for an hour or so) to read this, and it's a "classic" on all sorts of lists of "great books", I'll make an exception. I imagine I probably read this, or had it read to me, back when I was three or four -- it was published the year I was born. Most people who were children once or have had children of their own have already read it, so I won't give a plot summary. I have to say that it's a good well-written story for the age group it's designed for, with a lesson included about friendship. I don't generally like children's books which anthropomorphize animals, but it's well-done here, the personalities of the animals seem to fit them and they behave somewhat as animals and not exactly like four- or eight-legged people. The language doesn't insult children's intelligence and there aren't any jokes about underwear. I suppose that people who think a lot about children's books could tell me what makes it a good read for children.

March 2

14. Jang Eun-jin, No One Writes Back [2009; tr. 2013] 213 pages

Another novel for the Goodreads group that is reading Korean literature this year; the first modern work we have read by a woman author, and I must say the first that wasn't basically depressing. No One Writes Back strikes me as a good, somewhat postmodernist novel, in that it is a significant novel in a rather experimental or at least not quite realist style "disguised" as essentially a love-story (though it somewhat departs from the expectations of the genre).

The main characters are a young man (the narrator, Jihun -- I can't believe the reviews on Goodreads that say he is unnamed, since he signs every letter) who has been traveling around the country for three years, living at motels and writing a kind of travel journal in the form of letters to people he meets along the way; his blind dog and traveling companion Wajo; and an unnamed woman novelist he meets along the way (he refers to her as 751, the 751st person he has made acquaintance with since starting out -- he refers to himself significantly as 0). He has a friend at home who checks his mailbox, and it seems that no one will ever write back, but he never gives up hope.

There are descriptions of some of the other people he has met along the way, and we find out much about his family and early history from his letters and memories -- what we learn however is not always true and constantly being revised. As a child, Jihun was a stutterer who felt he was not as good as everyone else, and he is surrounded by defense mechanisms so that while he makes acquaintances easily he seems to have no real or lasting relationships; his meeting with 751 and his opening up to her, exposing the vulnerabilities that he otherwise can only express in his letters, begins to change him and allow him to develop a more normal personality.

The book is a fun read, with many reversals of normal behavior and expectations, as with the people who are numbered and the motel rooms that have names. I won't give any details of the plot because this is the kind of twisty book where spoilers would be a problem, and the ending is not exactly what I would have predicted -- actually some of it is and some isn't. There are many references to The Moon and Sixpence and I might have gotten even more out of the book if I had ever read that -- I'm adding it to my TBR list.

March 9

16. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers [1927] 592 pages

Maybe I'm too harsh on this, but I found it very disappointing. I acknowledge that it is a biographical history of a few (fifteen) "great" philosophers, written for a popular audience, with no academic pretensions, by someone who was a historian rather than a professional philosopher (or even historian of philosophy.) Actually, the fact that he was a historian is part of the problem, because the historical background in this book is basically what "everyone knows", that is stereotypes about vigorous, masculine Greeks, stagnant feminine orientals, refined Frenchmen, abstract scholarly Germans, and pragmatic Americans; the middle ages are rejected totally as "scholastic", Marxism is ignored and so on.

His accounts are very subjective and moralistic; basically he gives us an account of what "everyone knows" about a philosopher -- usually not what I know about them from having actually read them -- and then criticizes them from the perspective of what "everyone" (or at least every early twentieth century American liberal intellectual) believes. It's often difficult to know when he's paraphrasing a philosopher and when he's commenting or expanding. Everyone from Plato to Schopenhauer "discovered psychoanalysis before Freud."

Although he lists some of the better known original works in the bibliography (usually in multiple translations) and has a few quotations, his interpretations seem to be based largely on other popular secondary works. His understanding of Nietzsche, for example, seems to be based on his anti-Semitic sister's tendentious biography. His selection of the "greats" is also dubious, although perhaps understandable in the 1920's -- was Herbert Spencer really the "greatest" philosopher of the nineteenth century? None of my philosophy courses even mentioned him. Was Schopenhauer really more important than Hegel?

I'll give two stars because some of the biographical anecdotes were interesting -- although no real historian would credit some of his sources -- but this is not a book I would recommend for anyone who's interested in the story of philosophy, even at a "light" level. There are children's books that are better.

March 16

17. Maryse Condé, Ségou: Les Murailles de terre [1984] 492 pages [in French, Kindle]

An early novel of Maryse Condé (I think it was her third, out of more than thirty), this is a sprawling historical novel about the last decades of the Bambara empire of Ségou, a fragment of the earlier and even larger empire of Mali in Northwest Africa (beginning in 1797 and ending in 1856). It is quite different from any novel I have read about Africa; while most others -- even those which are anticolonial -- present African cultures as traditional, not to say backwards and stagnant, and the major event is always the arrival of the Europeans, this book shows a dynamic history with major ongoing changes having nothing to do with the Europeans. It is apparently based on actual events and places, and the author has obviously done a lot of research.

The main conflict in the novel is between the traditional "fétichiste" West African religion of Ségou and the surrounding areas and the penetration of Islam (with its attendent literacy and commerce) from the north. The book takes one noble Bambara family, the Traoré, through three generations, as the sons disperse through much of West Africa, from the more inland Islamic centers of Tombouctou and Djenné to areas nearer the coast having more contact with the Europeans. Even the one son (Naba) who is captured and enslaved is sent not to the southern United States or the Caribbean, as with most novels about slavery, but to Brazil, where the relative weight of slaves to slaveowners and other whites created a much different environment than in the north, with greater survival of African culture -- and even in Brazil, the conflict between traditional beliefs and Islam plays a major role, with the additional complication of voluntary or forced conversions to Catholicism.

Christians also play a role in Africa itself with one of the sons (Malobali, a.k.a. Samuel) somewhat ambivalently converting to Catholicism and Naba's son Eucaristus becoming an Anglican priest. The traditional religion seems to be taken much more seriously in the novel, and we are shown ancestral spirits actually taking part in the plot, for example informing relatives in Ségou about the deaths of the sons elsewhere in Africa and Brazil, or appearing as old men to give advice to the sons in crises; the apparent coincidences, such as Malobali meeting Naba's widow (Ayodele, a.k.a. Romana) after her return to Africa from Brazil (and I had not realized that there were communities of returned slaves in Africa long before Liberia) are attributed to the intentional designs of the ancestors, and there are supernatural signs such as the thunder and red rain when the marabout El-Hadj Omar enters the city of Ségou. On the other hand, there are no supernatural signs performed by the Islamic or Christian gods, yet they continue to increase their influence. (I don't want to suggest that Condé presents religion as an ultimate cause; she shows that the religious differences are an excuse for wars over ethnic, and in the last analysis economic, causes, such as the revolt of the of the subjugated Peuls against the Bambaras of Ségou, envy of the prosperity of the Bambara's by the northerners, and so forth.)

Most of the action is set in urban areas, with schools, temples and mosques, and considerable organized commerce (increasing both from the Maghreb [Islamic northern Africa] and the Europeans), rather than in the small self-contained villages of other novels. All in all, this is a very different and more diverse history of Africa than I was expecting, and the content is very interesting. To the extent that, as with any historical novel, there is a political dimension to the book, I think it would have to be taken in connection with the debates over pan-Africanism and Négritude versus the recognition of many separate cultures in Africa.

While the great extent of this epic novel is what makes it interesting, it also has its downside. The novel alternates up to five different (and essentially independent) plots at a time, all in different places with many different minor characters, and each section is long, so that by the time one episode returned I had often forgotten details or even lost interest in those characters. The many different places and cultures described and the large number of minor characters also made it difficult at times to follow. I wish I had realized when reading this (it was a Kindle book so I never looked at the end until I finished) that the appendices included maps of the places involved, as I am not familiar with the political geography of early nineteenth century Africa and had trouble picturing the spatial relationships of the different cities and countries; a genealogical table of the various characters; and notes about the historical events and characters (nearly all of the characters in the book other than the Traoré family and their wives' families were actually historical). If you read the Kindle version be sure to bookmark these from the start.

I nearly abandoned the book about 80% of the way through when Eucaristus, who had been introduced (as a very minor character) as a child in a returned Brazilian Catholic community, reappears at thirty in an English, Anglican mission in Lagos as the major figure of a new episode (which moves the action to London), with essentially no explanation of how he had gotten there, making it very obvious that the characters are just being moved around to provide an excuse for describing various different aspects of African history. His story, like many of the other episodes, is simply dropped after one or two chapters. I would have to say that in terms of content this was a very good book, but that in terms of the construction and writing style it was perhaps somewhat too ambitious for the author's writing abilities at the time.

The novel ends with the beginning of a battle (in 1856?) between the forces of Ségou and El-Hadj Omar; to learn the outcome, you need to read the notes (or the sequel, Ségou: La terre en miettes, translated as The Children of Segu, which continues the history after the fall of Ségou, but was less popular and now seems to be out of print both in French and English).

March 25

18. Mia Couto, Rain and Other Stories [1994; tr. 2019] 163 pages

Mia Couto's third collection of stories, published in Portuguese in 1994 but translated into English this year, the book consists of 26 very short stories (most six pages, two eight pages and a few four pages). Set during or immediately after the civil war in Mozambique, most are concerned with war and peace, but in a very symbolic way -- nearly all are "magic realist", and even those which have no magic elements are written in a way that makes the events seem strange or having a reference beyond the literal occurence.

Another one that got lost.
Feb. 28

14. Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are [2010] 137 pages

This is the second book I had to read for our "professional development" training at work. I'll give it three stars because it was so much better than the other one, and might well be a good choice for those who like "psychological" self-help books. I admit that this is not a genre that I would ever read without external constraint, and from my own perspective it would probably get two stars. Unlike the first book (the Carol Tuttle book I reviewed earlier this month) it isn't silly or wrong; much of it is useful advice that I've learned myself (usually too late) over the past fifty years. It's just not very original.

The basic premise is that "wholehearted" people accept their imperfections and are willing to risk being vulnerable, while other people are controlled by "shame", a word she uses to mean the feeling that you are "not good enough", a "failure", etc. This is true, but really just another way of talking about what other writers call high and low "self-esteem", and ultimately goes back to Adler's concept of the "inferiority complex". She gives some advice on how to overcome "shame" and live in a more "wholehearted" way. It took me decades to figure this out, so maybe the book will actually help some people.

The criticisms I have -- beyond the way she relabels well-known platitudes and claims they are discoveries from her own research -- are that, first of all, she doesn't actually describe or document any of her research, although she refers to it constantly (granted this is a popular rather than academic book, but I would have welcomed some indication of what supports her viewpoint -- it would have been fine if she openly presented it as wisdom from her own life experience, but if you're going to claim to be a "researcher" presenting scientific results, you need to show that.)

Secondly, her advice makes some assumptions about the situations people are in -- most importantly, that they have intimate friends they can be "vulnerable" with and discuss their feelings of "shame" and so forth. In reality, people who have low self-esteem also tend to be isolated by the very "defense mechanisms" she talks about (of course she calls them something else.) She also largely ignores social issues -- although she does recognize that people are influenced by the media and advertising images of unrealistic lifestyles, she ignores the fact that the dominant ideology constantly tells certain groups -- women, minorities, and the working class in general -- that they are inferior to other groups, and that many of us to some extent or another internalize this. I have the distinct impression that, like the Tuttle book (and nearly every other "self-help" book I have ever had to read) she is thinking only of a white, upper middle class audience. (Her first example of "shame" -- feeling that a meeting of Fortune 500 CEOs didn't like your talk.)

My bottom line is that any "self-help" book that suggests that ALL your problems are due to your own attitudes and doesn't include advice to become involved in social action to change the social problems is missing an important aspect; people change their own individual attitudes most effectively in the process of working to change the society around them. Of course, in extreme cases you have to concentrate on the personal first -- we find toward the end that she is a "recovering Alcoholic" and much of her thinking is modeled on the AA Twelve Step approach, while I'm thinking of more general, less extreme problems than actual addictions. (And she doesn't address the book to alcoholics or addicts, but to the general public.) The Twelve Step approach is also evident in her insistence that to be "wholehearted" must be based on a "spiritual" belief in "a power greater than us," which would certainly have prevented me from ever getting any benefit from her book.

On the positive side, it's not full of "testimonials" -- you can find those in the five star reviews here -- and there's no Yin-yang and other "new age" ideas.

March 30

19. Chigozie Obioma, An Orchestra of Minorities [2019] 448 pages

It's unusual for me to read a new book which has just been published, but I read Obioma's first novel, The Fishermen, last year and when I saw this one listed on the Goodreads "New Books by Authors You Have Read" list I requested the library to purchase it. It is very different from his first novel. The last novel I finished was Maryse Condé's Ségou, which was largely about the traditional West African religion from the "outside", as a historic phenomenon in conflict with the rise of Islam and the introduction of Christianity. Obioma's novel is about West African religion from the "inside"; the book is narrated in a spiritual realm before the pre-eminent deity Chukwu by the protagonist's chi, a spiritual double which is less like the Christian idea of the soul than the ancient Egyptian idea of the ka. I can't help but think that this is a very old idea in African religion which has diffused throughout the continent. The book is filled with references to the religion of the ancestors and with traditional Igbo proverbs. (Obioma, like most of the Nigerian authors I have read other than Wole Soyinka and Elnathan John, is an Igbo ethnically, from the part of Nigeria that once tried to secede as Biafra; although like most of the "third world" novelists I have read he's presently a professor in the United States).

The atmosphere of the book is very fatalistic. The protagonist, Chinonso, is a small poultry farmer, who according to his chi was given the gift of luck at birth, that he would somehow gain everything that he persevered in seeking. The reality is just the opposite; he loses everything he has or ever gets, and everything he does somehow has the opposite effect from what he intends. The book begins with him meeting a girl on a bridge, who is about to commit suicide, and convincing her not to kill herself. This is Ndali, and they meet again and fall in love -- but her rich family is contemptuous of his poverty and illiteracy and opposes their relationship. We know from the beginning that the book will end in some sort of tragedy, since the chi is pleading his case to Chukwu, and it is strongly suggested all along that he is going to kill Ndali. The narrative is full of stories, many flashbacks from his childhood, about his relationship to birds, especially a gosling that he cared for and then killed as a boy, suggesting that he is prone to jealousy and violence. I don't want to go into the details about the story to avoid "spoilers", but his entire life is spent suffering in one way or another because of his love for Ndali.

The title, an "orchestra of minorities", is a literal translation of an Igbo phrase which refers to the sound the chickens make when one of them is killed or taken away to be sold; the idea is of a certain solidarity of victims, not a solidarity in resistence but a solidarity of defeat and dispair, a recognition of the hopelessness of the powerless before the powerful. The only element of "hope" in the novel is that justice will be accomplished in a future reincarnation. Although the book is interesting and very well-written, the theme was such that I could not really relate to it.

Apr.5

20. Honoré de Balzac, L'envers de l'histoire contemporaine> [1848] 378 pages [in French]

The last novel of the Comédie humaine to be published, this is one of the two books I am reading from the division Scènes de la vie parisienne. The novel is divided into two parts, Madame de la Chanterie and L'Initié; it was written at different times and sections were published separately, which may explain why there are more inconsistencies in the chronology and details than in any of the other novels I have read of Balzac.

The first part begins by introducing the protagonist, a young man named Godefroid; the summary of his previous life in the first twenty or thirty pages is like a resumé of the life of Lucien de Rubempré in Les Illusions perdues. He then comes in contact with a group of lodgers on the rue Chanoinesse, and takes a room there. It turns out that this is not any ordinary pension, but the headquarters of a secret organization of Catholics. The novel then turns to a long flashback about the previous history of Madame de la Chanterie in the Royalist struggle against the Napoleonic government.

The second half is the story of Godefroid's "initiation" as a member of the secret society, and focuses on the misfortunes of a family consisting of an aged grandfather, his granddaughter who suffers from an unknown illness, and her adolescent son.

Balzac's novels are transitional between Romanticism and Realism, with the Realist elements usually predominating, but this novel seems like a complete relapse into Romanticism, with an unrealistic plot and situation, and extreme rather than typical characters and events. It is also his most religious and conservative of all the novels I have read by him. The story is usually interesting enough but the sermonizing on politics and religion become obnoxious. All in all, I though this was the worst novel of the collection.

Apr. 9

21. Yi Mun-Yol, Son of Man [1979; tr. 2015] 242 pages

A critique of religion incorporated in a historical novel embedded in a mystery novel, this became very popular among students in Korea. The murder mystery didn't really appeal to me, although it was sort of destroyed to begin with because the translator revealed who the murderer was in the introduction. The historical novel was based on the legend of Ahasuerus, the "Wandering Jew"; the take of the author was that he rejected the Old Testament religion of Yahweh and searched through Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, India and Rome for a new god, then had a revelation in the desert, met Jesus and became his opponent. There are parallels between Ahasuerus and the supposed author, Min Yoseop, who was murdered at the beginning of the novel. The religious arguments against Christianity were interesting but nothing new, not entirely clear and don't go far enough; basically they just portray Yahweh (and by implication, Christianity) as self-righteous and too concerned with prohibitions, and in the end Min Yoseop appears to have returned to Christianity. A worthwhile book but probably of more interest in the context of Korean Christianity than to a worldwide audience.

Apr. 13

22. Marcia Bartusiak, Einstein's Unfinished Symphony: The Story of a Gamble, Two Black Holes, and a New Age of Astronomy [rev. ed. 2017] 280 pages

Four years ago, the first gravity waves were detected by the LIGO detectors in Washington and Louisiana; by coincidence, the same day the detections were announced I finished reading the 2007 book by Daniel J. Kennefic, Travelling at the Speed of Thought, about gravity waves and the efforts to prove that they existed. This book by Marcia Bartusiak was written even earlier, in 2000, but revised in 2017 to include the developments in the intervening 17 years including the first detections. (I looked up the latest information on the Internet about the LIGO and VIRGO detectors; they have now detected eleven waves before recently being shut down to install new and more sensitive equipment.)

Bartusiak's book, as I expected from reading some of her other books, was more popular and less technical than Kennefic's, without the mathematical treatment of general relativity, but it gives a good qualitative and historical account of the theory and the history of the search; it has more (and more up to date) information about the actual technology of the detectors, which is the main thrust of the book.

I would definitely recommend this to anyone who enjoys popular books about physics or astronomy.

Apr. 17

23. Lee Smolin, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum [2019] 322 pages

One thing is axiomatic -- Lee Smolin's books are always fascinating. He is a prominent physicist with legitimate credentials, but always somewhat outside the mainstream. One of his main concerns is with trying to reconcile what we know about quantum physics with a realist philosophy that assumes there is a real world independent of human consciousness.

This book, just published, reviews the development of quantum physics with an emphasis on the realist alternatives to the Copenhagen interpretation(s) of quantum mechanics, such as the pilot wave theory proposed by deBroglie and later revived by Bohm, spontaneous physical collapse theories, and the multiple worlds theory with its variations.

Smolin then suggests a possible way of going beyond quantum mechanics to something more fundamental -- a theory he calls "energetic causal sets" which sees the world as composed of causal networks of events which create spacetime through their "views". He likens this account to Leibniz's theory of monads.

While I am not a physicist and certainly do not have the background to judge these theories (which are presented here without the mathematics necessary to really understand them anyway), I did find it interesting to learn that there are such approaches to going beyond the current views of quantum mechanics.

Apr. 20

24. Zora Neale Hurston, Selected Stories [1921-1939] 121 pages

Zora Neale Hurston was one of the key figures in the "Harlem Renaissance" of Black writers, as well as one of the first Black anthropologists. I'm in the process of reading her books because I'm leading a book discussion at the library next month on Their Eyes Were Watching God. Her four novels, and this collection of short stories are published in a single volume in the Library of America series, so I'm borrowing that from the library as one of my readings, but I'm going to count the five books separately since the novels were published that way and I have a couple of them myself in separate editions. I'm also reading the Collected Plays (since those are mostly short I'm only counting it as one book) and possibly a couple of her nonfiction books; I'm reading everything in chronological order but since all but one of these stories were written before the first novel I decided to read the last one and review the stories first.

The nine stories chosen here were written between 1921 and 1939; all but the last were written by 1934, the date of the first novel. In probable order of writing, the collection begins with three early stories, "John Redding Goes to Sea" (1921) and "Drenched in Light" (1924), which deal with adventurous children whose families try to hold them back to the traditional impoverished life of their small towns, and "Spunk" (1925), a tale of violence and revenge which she later made into a play of the same title. "Sweat" (1926) is about a dysfunctional marriage. "The Bone of Contention" (1929), a comic story about a trial, was the basis of her plays "De Turkey and de Law" and (in collaboration with Langston Hughes) "The Mule Bone". "The Book of Harlem", one of my favorites, is a very short story about a young man who comes to Harlem from the South, written as if it were a book of the Bible. "The Gilded Sixpence" (1933)is a story about a marriage; "Fire in the Cloud" (1934) is a new take on Moses at the end of the wanderings; and the final story, "A Story in Harlem Slang", is about two "pimps" (the word didn't mean what it does today) written as the title says in Harlem slang.

Reading these stories together with the plays written at the same time, I was struck by the connections between them, and I'm sure that there are also foreshadowings of the novels. The stories are all worth reading.

Apr. 22

25. Zora Neale Hurston, Jonah's Gourd Vine [1934]

Hurston's first novel, this is a moving narrative of the rise, fall, and ultimate redemption of a basically good but weak man. The husband, John Pearson, is a Baptist preacher like Hurston's own father, the first wife is named Lucy Potts, the name of Hurston's mother, and the second wife is trashy (Hurston left home at fourteen after a fight with her stepmother), so this may in part be based on her own family; I will need to read her biography (on my possible-read list for next month) to be sure. There is some "conjure" material that is obviously based on her ethnographic research.

Apr. 25

26. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God [1937] 286 pages

A classic of Black literature, this novel follows the life of Janie Mae Crawford (supposedly narrated to her friend Phoeby in a frame story that makes up the first and last chapters) from her first marriage at the age of 16 to a well-off farmer, Logan Killicks (about 1898), through her marriage to Joe Starks, the founder and mayor of Eatonville (the Joe Clark of her stories), to the death of her third husband, Tea Cake, when she was about 40 (about 1922-23). The novel is set in Florida, mainly in Hurston's native town of Eatonville and in the Everglades.

Black literature prior to Hurston (and for a quarter century after) was nearly all concerned principally with racism and race relations, and often depicts an upper class "elite"; Hurston was strongly criticized by the major Black writers of her time, such as Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, because she declined to write that kind of books. Of course the racism is there in the background; the novel would hardly be true to the Black American experience if it weren't. Hurston, however, chooses to foreground the internal relations within the Black community, the culture of Blacks in its own terms, and without leaving out the supposedly "negative" aspects of working class and small farmer culture that the other Black novelists of the time omitted in their zeal to show that Blacks were just as educated and "civilized" as whites.

Her concerns in this novel were very much about relationships between men and women, and it has become a classic as much of feminist as of Black literature. The novel was largely ignored until it was "rediscovered" by Alice Walker. Hurston had a major influence on Walker (The Color Purple has very little about race relations and focuses, like Their Eyes Were Watching God, on the relationships between Black men and women) and also influenced other Black women authors, including Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eyes and Sula have very little to say explicitly about race relations, and focus on the internal conflicts of Black women; Tar Baby and Beloved foreground race relations to a greater extent, but I can't imagine any of Morrison's novels without Hurston.)

As an anthropologist, Hurston describes Black culture in a way that emphasizes the African elements; her use of folklore and proverbs throughout the book reminds me more of African authors I have read (for example the new novel of Chigozie Obioma, An Orchestra of Minorities) than it does of other Afro-American writers. I also was interested in the "oral" style of the book, having read about it in some of the critical articles I read earlier this year on Morrison's Beloved.

Apr. 27

27. Cheryl A. Wall, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Casebook [2000] 191 pages

This "casebook" consists of an introduction, a brief autobiographical article by Hurston, and seven critical articles. The most important and best selection is Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s "Zora Neale Hurston and the Speakerly Text", a chapter from his book The Signifying Monkey, which takes up about a third of this collection and deals with the "voice" of the novel and its relation to oral culture; it also contains a very useful close reading and commentary. The last article in the book, Daphne Lamotte's "Vodou Imagery, African-American Tradition, and Cultural Transformation in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God" was also quite interesting. The other five were less worthwhile, full of empty "literary theory" jargon and mainly criticizing Hurston for not having written another sort of novel altogether, one more explicitly ideological (either in respect of race or of feminism.)

Apr. 30

28. Hwang Sok-Yong, Shim Chong, fille vendue [2007; Fr. tr. 2010] 562 pages [in French, Kindle]

Shim Chong is a Korean folktale heroine, possibly of supernatural origin, who is born as the daughter of a poor blind man. Her mother dies in childbirth and Chong grows up begging with her father. When she reaches adolescence, a Buddhist monk tells her father that his blindness will be cured if he donates a certain amount of rice to the monk’s monastery. The amount is well beyond what they can earn begging, so Chong sells herself to some sailors to be a sacrifice to the Sea God. The gods are impressed by her filial devotion and so when she is thrown into the sea, she is kept alive in the Palace of the Sea God. Eventually, she is returned to the world in a lotus blossom and becomes the wife of the king. She convinces her husband to hold a banquet for all the blind men of the kingdom; her father, still poor and blind (the monk is a fraud), attends the banquet. Chong exclaims to him, “See your daughter” and he is suddenly cured of his blindness.

Hwang Sok-yong in this novel turns this folktale into a realistic historical novel set in the nineteenth century. Shim Chong in the novel is also the daughter of a blind beggar; she is sold at fifteen to a Chinese merchant. She is thrown into the sea as a mock sacrifice to the Sea God, but is recovered and renamed Lenhwa (Lotus) and taken to China to become the concubine of an aged rich tea farmer. After his death, she undergoes a variety of adventures, working in various “pleasure houses” and brothels in China and Formosa, becoming the concubine of a rich British official in Singapore, and the owner of her own place in the Ryukyu Islands, where she eventually marries the local prince. In the end, she returns to Korea.

Despite the references to the folktale, which would be more apparent to a Korean audience, this is essentially a realistic description of the sex “industry” and trafficking in the nineteenth century, set against the background of colonialism, the Opium War, the Taiping Rebellion, the “opening” of Japan by Commodore Parry, and the Japanese domination of the Ryukyu Islands.

I read this in a French translation; as far as I can see, the novel is not yet translated into English.

May 4

29. Young-ha Kim, Your Republic Is Calling You [2006; tr. 2010] 339 pages

At first sight, this seems to be a spy thriller, about a long dormant North Korean "mole" in Seoul who suddenly receives an unexpected order. It doesn't really fit the usual pattern of that genre, however; the emphasis is far less on the pursuit and far more on the characters and relationships of the spy and his wife and daughter. The character frequently contrasts his reality to spy films and novels. Like the spy himself, the book is in disguise. (In other words, postmodernist fiction.) The plot in the end doesn't make sense the way one would expect in a traditional spy novel; it reminded me more of Kafka's The Trial in that the counterintelligence agency is more a mysterious presence for its own sake than subordinated to any practical or intelligible end.

Each chapter is divided into three parts, one about Kim Ki-yong, an abandoned North Korean agent who runs a film importing agency, one about his wife, Ma-ri, who works as a salesperson at a Volkswagen dealership, and one about his middle-school daughter Hyon-mi. The three parts occasionally intersect at the same place and time, but are essentially almost three independent novels. The parents of the husband and wife, mentioned in flashbacks, and nearly all of the minor characters are described as either mentally or physically ill, which is undoubtedly symbolic.

If there is a real theme to the novel, it is to compare the North, the South at the time Ki-yong is sent down, and the contemporary South, with their three different but equally pointless styles of corruption and alienation.

It was probably a more interesting novel to me than if it had been the "thriller" it pretends to be.

May 6

30. Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica [1938] 311 pages

Tell My Horse is an account of Hurston's stay in Jamaica and Haiti studying folklore and religion, particularly the beliefs and rituals known as "voodoo". The book is more a memoir of her experiences than a real ethnography; the material is not really synthesized and there are many contradictions in what she relates. It seems very disorganized, as if it were put together directly from a journal or notes, and it doesn't follow in a chronological order, so that she frequently assumes the reader knows things (including creole words) that aren't related or explained until a later chapter. The political and social background is superficial and occasionally very naive. The voodoo material is fascinating and certainly an improvement over the "Hollywood" view of the religion, but she is often very credulous. This book was being worked on at the same time as she was writing her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God; she is definitely more of a novelist than an anthropologist, and her anthropology seems to me more important as background to her fiction than for its own sake.

May 8

31. Zora Neale Hurston, Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings of Zora Neale Hurston from the Federal Writers' Project [1999] 199 pages

A collection of short writings mainly on Florida Black folklore which Hurston wrote in 1938-39 for the Florida Unit of the Federal Writers' Project, a part of the New Deal Works Progress Administration. Interesting. Preceded by a fairly long biographical introduction.

May 10

32. Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain [1939] 261 pages

Hurston's third novel, this is the story of Moses -- partly the Biblical Moses, partly the Moses of Black folklore, but mainly a Moses of Hurston's own imagination. Although less well known, I think this is in some ways a more important book than Their Eyes Were Watching God. It's also a good story with a good deal of humor.

The "Hebrews" of the novel speak Black dialect and are undoubtedly meant to represent Black Americans; of course Moses and the story of the Exodus were an important part of the folklore of Blacks under slavery, and Hurston shows the Pharaoh and his advisors behaving like the slaveowners in the South, willing to suffer almost anything rather than abandon slavery, but what is significant is that the novel puts less emphasis on the delivery from the Egyptians than on the period of wandering in the wilderness: the effort to turn a mass of ex-slaves into a people with its own dignity, responsibility and self-reliance. Basically, this is Hurston's view of what the real Black struggle in her time was about, not the external struggle against the whites for civil rights but the internal struggle of the Black community to see itself as capable of making its own decisions and validating its own culture. This is what in my opinion underlies Hurston's disagreements with other writers and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance, and for all her seeming and occasionally real conservatism aligns her with the later Black nationalists. Reading this also helps in understanding her two previous novels, especially the symbolic meanings of the hurricane in Their Eyes Were Watching God.

May 11

33. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography [1942] 322 pages

Hurston's autobiography, although perhaps it should better be described as an autobiographical novel; she changes the chronology and some of the other facts to make the story she wants to tell -- and it is a good story. Some of the episodes she tells here are the same as episodes in her stories and novels, and it isn't really clear whether the fiction is always based on her life, or whether her "life" is based on the fiction. Perhaps more disturbing is that some of the fantasies she makes up as a child here reappear as folktales in her collections.

The book has been criticized for its one-sided ignoring of racial discrimination, and accused of pandering to a white audience; however, we now know that, being published at the height of wartime patriotic frenzy, it was heavily censored by the publisher for anything that didn't fit in with wartime "unity" (as well as any explicit sexual passages); apparently there are later versions which are based on her manuscript, but the version here seems to be essentially the one originally published by Lippincott. It's certainly clear, however, that her views are quite different from those of other Black intellectuals of the time.

34. Zora Neale Hurston, Collected Plays [2008] 389 pages

A collection of fourteen plays written between 1925 and 1944, including all of Hurston's plays except her collaboration with Langston Hughes. It's a very uneven collection; most of them are more in the nature of variety shows, with a minimum of actual plot, the earliest ones mainly commercial, the later ones with the purpose of presenting her collected folksongs, dances, and folktales in a dramatic fashion. The four that are most like real plays are De Turkey and de Law (1930), based on one of her stories and growing out of her controversial collaboration with Hughes; The Fiery Chariot (1932), which foreshadows her novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain; Spunk (1935), also based on one of her stories; and Polk County (1944) which is based on her visit to a sawmill community to do collecting -- this is the one which is most likely to continue to be performed.

May 14

35. Zora Neale Hurston, Seraph on the Suwanee [1948] 499 pages

The last of Hurston's four published novels, Seraph on the Suwanee differs from her other novels in that the major characters, Jim Meserve, his wife Arvay Henson and their three children Earl, Angeline and Kenny, are white. The experiment is not entirely successful, though not really due to any misunderstanding of white characters, although they sometimes seem too much like the Black characters of her other novels, and the lack of overt racist attitudes (though there is certainly a good deal of the patronizing kind) is perhaps more a reflection of Hurston's ideological position than realistic for the time and place.

The novel is told from the perspective of Arvay and is really the story of her transition from a timid girl with low self-esteem to a self-confident woman who has respect for herself. Through much of the novel, neither Jim nor Arvay are particularly likeable characters; it seems at times like a parody of Their Eyes Were Watching God -- Jim is a lot like Joe Starks, and Hurston even reuses some of his dialogue from the earlier novel, and like Joe he treats Arvay as if she has no mind of her own. Unlike Janie, however, it often seems true; Arvay, as she eventually realizes, acts "dumb" and is frequently petty and stubbornly self-destructive, until near the end she comes to a realization that she is following in the footsteps of her father and sister and frees herself from their influence, symbolically burning her old family home. The book is difficult to like until the end, when it becomes clearer what Hurston was trying to describe, and the change is too sudden to be entirely credible. It's certainly not a novel that would be popular with feminists the way the earlier novel has been. Nevertheless, once I finished it, I thought it was a worthwhile book to have read.

May 15

36. Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" [2018] 171 pages

In 1927, Hurston interviewed Cudjo Lewis (Kossula), the last living survivor of the "Middle Passage". The story is Cudjo Lewis told is almost unique among "slave narratives", which generally were written by slaves born in the South and focus on the plantation and the attempts to escape from slavery; there are only three or four other works which tell the story of the slave raids in Africa and the "Middle Passage" from the perspective of the slaves rather than the slavers. He was transported illegally on the last slave ship before the Civil War, the Clotilda, in 1859. Unfortunately, no publisher was interested in the book, and it was not published until last year (2018).

May 17

37. Deborah G. Plant, Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography of the Spirit [2007] 241 pages

After reading most of Zora Neale Hurston's books, including her autobiography, for my library's book discussion on Their Eyes Were Watching God, I decided to finish up with a biography. Plant's book is the one the library had, and it was a good one. Although the series it is part of, Women Writers of Color, describes itself as being for the general reader, the book did have a somewhat academic feel, but there was no "literary theory" so it was fairly readable. The first two chapters were based largely on Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road, only silently correcting the chronology; the rest of the book had new details and integrated the life with discussions of the novels and stories, which I generally agreed with. Plant occasionally was a bit too "spiritual" for me, but she is very enthusiastic about Hurston as a writer and a person and increased my appreciation of both.

May 19

38. Hwang Sok-yong, Princess Bari [2007; tr. 2015] 248 pages

Another retelling of a Korean folk-tale by Hwang, this time the story of Princess Bari, a shamanistic figure who is abandoned but later travels to the underworld to bring salvation to her royal family and the kingdom's people. The Bari of the novel is also a seventh daughter, whose family dies during a famine in North Korea and in exile as refugees in China. She ends up in London, and the second half of the book describes her life there. Unlike Shim Chong, which although mirroring the folktale was told entirely in a realistic manner, this book contains a good deal of the supernatural, with Bari having unusual powers and trance-like visions, which parallel events in both her life and the story of the Princess. Throughout, there are descriptions of the hells of modern wars and religious persecutions, both narrated as they happen and told second hand by others, which correspond to the hells of the visions. I wasn't really satisfied by the ending, which, as in The Guest, basically just preaches forgiveness as the solution to all the evils of the world.

May 21

39. Hwang Sok-yong, Familiar Things [2011; tr. 2017] 216 pages

Although not a folktale retelling like the previous two novels I read by Hwang, this novel also blends fantasy with reality. It is the coming of age story of a fourteen year old boy, Bugeye, who lives in a shantytown and works on the garbage dump called Flower Island on the outskirts of Seoul, with his mother and his younger friend Baldspot. The supernatural element is their friendship with a family of dokkaebi, who are a kind of ghosts with some of the characteristics of fairies. The main story shows the misery and exploitation of the garbage workers.

May 22-23

40. William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, part 2 [1590-91?] approx. 175 pages? [Kindle]
41. William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, part 3 [1590-91?] approx. 175 pages? [Kindle]

As usual this year I am planning to go to the Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City on my vacation, and have begun re-reading the plays that will be performed. I don't think I've read these two since I was in grade school.

The Henry VI plays are among Shakespeare's earliest, probably written in collaboration, and certainly not his mature work. Unlike his other histories, they have no clear theme and include every random detail of the history and more characters than I could keep straight. The only reason for reading or performing them is completeness, and it's unfortunate that these plays are performed so often just because they have the name "Shakespeare" attached when even the best plays of Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, and others of Shakespeare's contemporaries are virtually never seen on the stage.

Anything by Shakespeare is too well known and has too much written about it to be worth my reviewing; I assume that as with all his plays they will be better in performance than in print. These were Kindle versions and there was no indication of pages; the various editions on Goodreads range from less than 100 to more than 500 pages, so I'm just guessing that a reasonable figure would be about 175.

May 25

42. Phyllis Rackin, Shakespeare and Women [2005] 168 pages

When I saw Henry VI part 1 last year at the Shakespeare Festival, I asked for suggestions to read about the trilogy, since I could not find very many articles about these plays, and this book was the one that was recommended to me. I'm really not sure why, because it has very little mention of these three plays, but it was one of the best secondary works on Shakespeare I have read (and I've read dozens in the last few years.) The book is concerned largely with arguing against other scholars, something I generally don't like, but Rackin's arguments, despite the obligatory nod to postmodernism, are based on facts and common sense rather than theory. She is largely trying to defend the political feminist theory of the 1970's, which emphasized the agency of women that has been partly hidden by male oriented historical writings and documents, against the apolitical academic feminism of the 80's and 90's, which forced the plays (and the historical context) into a straitjacket of "exposing" the texts as arguments for patriarchal ideology.

She begins by admitting that the official ideology of Shakespeare's time was patriarchal and restrictive of women, as has been amply documented in works of the time (largely of course written by clergymen -- what would future historians think about the role of women today if their main sources were fundamentalist preachers and Demopublican politicians?); but she shows (with evidence) that that official ideology was not universally accepted, and perhaps not even the belief of the majority of the population, and that it certainly did not describe the historical actuality. Among the interesting statistics she gives, from various regions of England, are that 16% of all the households were headed by women (perhaps not surprising when one considers that there are far more widows than widowers even today, and that was even more true following the Wars of the Roses and the religious wars and persecutions which followed them under Henry VIII, Edward V, and Mary I); 48% of the known apprentices were girls rather than boys; most of the executors of wills were women (so great a preponderance that the female term "executrix" is often used incorrectly even when the executors were men). She points to texts and drawings showing that women were working outside the home, and even in what are now considered as "traditionally masculine" trades. She argues that the confinement of women to the domestic sphere was just beginning in the seventeenth century, largely due to the rise of Puritanism (and of course, though she doesn't emphasize it, nascent capitalism, which is hard to distinguish from Protestantism at that time). (Another interesting statistic she quotes, although it's not relevant to Shakespeare, is that about 17% of all the mass-market paperbacks sold in North America are Harlequin or Silhouette romances. Ugh)

While many critics interpret the plays as intended to appeal to the insecurities of a male audience, she points out that at least half and perhaps more of the paying customers in Shakespeare's playhouses were women -- even on a purely economic basis, it makes sense to interpret the plays from the perspective of women spectators. She then shows how the standard recent interpretations have twisted the obvious meanings of the plays to fit the thesis that they were arguments for patriarchy. She uses the example of recent interpretations of As You Like It as about the "exchange" of daughters to make alliances among fathers, when in fact none of the marriages in that play are arranged by fathers. She also has good (and iconoclastic) discussions of the use of boys to play women's parts, of the references to breast-feeding in the plays (which was a controversial topic at the time), and new analyses of, among other things, Antony and Cleopatra and Sonnet 130. While she sometimes exaggerates and there is some academic jargon, this is a refreshing antidote to some of the academic articles I have read over the years.

May 31

43. Articles on Shakespeare's Henry VI trilogy [1990-2018] 355 pages [Kindle]

Fifteen articles downloaded from Academic Search Premier, on the three Henry VI plays of Shakespeare, which I will be seeing this summer at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. Some of them also include discussion of Richard III, as part of a "tetralogy". There are articles on the plan of the plays as a group and on each separate play, about the authorship (it's probable all were collaborations, but there is little further agreement except that the first act of part one is probably by Nash), and about specific scenes (particularly those about the Cade uprising). Compared to the articles I have read on other plays, there was refreshingly little academic jargon or "literary theory" in any of these, and some of the historical information about Cade and the reign of Henry VI in general was useful in understanding the plays, which are so full of events that were probably better known to their original audiences than to a nonhistorian just reading or seeing them today.

[General articles on all the plays together]

Randall Martin, "Elizabethan Civic Pageantry in Henry VI" (University of Toronto Quarterly, 60, 1, Winter 1990/91) -- discusses pageantry in Shakespeare's time as a model for the structure of some of his scenes.

Katherine Heavey, ""An infant of the house of York": Medea and Absyrtus in Shakespeare's First Tetralogy" (Comparative Drama, 50, 2/3, Summer/Fall 2016) -- discusses the relevance of the reference by Clifford to Medea and his later murder of Rutland; Senecan influence on Shakespeare's early plays.

Kavita Mudan Finn, "Bloodlines and Blood Spilt: Historical Retelling and the Rhetoric of Sovereignty in Shakespeare's First Tetralogy" (Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 30, 2017) -- argues that the rhetoric of lineages and legitimate succession in the beginning is replaced by a "revenge play" motif which bases kingship on successful violence rather than descent.

Charles Bell, ""Masculine Margaret?": Margaret of Anjou's Gender Performance in Shakespeare's First [Tetralogy]" (Journal of the Wooden O Symposium, 16/17, 2018) -- Argues that Margaret's behavior is less a question of gender reversal than an example of maternal defense of her family against external threats and the incompetence of Henry. Bell makes many assumptions about what Elizabethans believed about gender roles -- he's one of the people Rackin is polemicizing against in the book I reviewed a few days ago (he cites her book for specific information but ignores her basic arguments.)

Maria Valentini, "Shakespeare's Problem Wars" (Journal of the Wooden O Symposium, 16/17, 2018) -- discusses Shakespeare's attitude toward war as expressed especially in the history plays, with particular reference to the Henry VI plays.

[Articles on part one]

Brian Vickers, "Coauthors and Closed Minds" (Shakespeare Studies 36, 2008) -- Argues that Elizabethan drama was generally collaborative, and there is no reason to suppose that Shakespeare was somehow "above" collaborating with other playwrights, especially at the beginning of his career when these others had a more established reputation than he did. Argues for the role of George Peele in Titus Andronicus and Thomas Nash (at least) in Henry VI part 1. Vickers is somewhat extreme in some of his arguments in other books and articles, but this one seems fairly solid.

Lawrence Manley, "Eagle and Hound: The "Epitaph" of Talbot and the Date of 1 Henry VI" (Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 26, 2013) -- discusses the eulogy of Talbot by Lacey in the play; argues convincingly that the historically inaccurate epitaphs in contemporary chronicles are based on this passage, rather than vice versa; suggests that the source is a contemporary epitaph for a later descendant of Talbot, who is connected with the acting company of Lord Strange, and argues that the play was written for Lord Strange's company and at least partially as a tribute to Gilbert Talbot at the time of his induction into the Order of the Garter.

Warren Chernaik, "Shakespeare as Co-Author: The Case of 1 Henry VI" (Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 27, 2014) -- A reply to some of Vickers' books and articles, which divide the play into many short parts by different authors; Chernaik admits to Nash's authorship of Act 1 but argues that Shakespeare probably wrote most or all of the remaining acts.

[Articles on part two]

Nina S. Levine, "The case of Eleanor Cobham: Authorizing history in 2 Henry VI" (Shakespeare Studies 22, 1994) -- discusses the political basis of the trial of Eleanor Cobham for witchcraft in the context of historical political uses of accusations of witchcraft, both in the mediaeval period and in Shakespeare's time.

Ellen C. Caldwell, "Jack Cade and Shakespeare's Henry VI, part 2" (Studies in Philology, 92, 1, Winter95) -- At 62 pages, the longest of the articles I read. A very interesting comparison of the historical accounts of Jack Cade and Shakespeare's version, trying to understand how Shakespeare is using the episode dramatically. Interprets the episode as a carnivalesque allusion to the "Lord of Misrule" tradition, and shows that some of the details which seem most absurd are actually only exaggerations of the coronation ceremonies of a new king (for instance, the conduits of London did run with wine during such festivities, though not for the months that Cade proposes).

Chris Fitter, ""Your Captain is Brave and Vows Reformation": Jack Cade, the Hacket Rising, and Shakespeare's Vision of Popular Rebellion in 2 Henry VI" (Shakespeare Studies, 32, 2004) -- The second longest article (47 pages), this also deals with the dramatic purpose of the Jack Cade episodes. He shows that there are echoes of the very recent "uprising" of the religious fanatic Hackett and his two disciples, who used ludicrous rhetoric similar to that that Shakespeare unhistorically attributes to Cade (i.e. the claim to kingship or "overkingship").

Roger Chartier, "Jack Cade, The Skin of a Dead Lamb, and the Hatred for Writing" (Shakespeare Studies, 34, 2006) -- discusses Shakespeare's presentation of Jack Cade as anti-writing; gives the history of the trope of animal skins as an argument against writing, and of the preference of oral testimony over written documents. While not true of the historical Jack Cade, the earlier Peasant Revolt of the fourteenth century did indeed target some written documents -- not books, but the records of land grants and criminal proceedings, which were used to exploit the illiterate peasantry. Shakespeare conflates the two revolts, and Chartier discusses possible reasons. He points out that by Shakespeare's time literacy was much higher and the lower classes were demanding, not abolition of literacy, but access to it.

Hillary Ecklund, "Revolting Diets: Jack Cade's ''Sallet'' and the Politics of Hunger in 2 Henry VI" (Shakespeare Studies, 42, 2014) -- discusses the scene of the death of Jack Cade, and the role of hunger in revolts.


[Articles on part three]

Larry S. Champion, "Developmental Structure in Shakespeare's Early Histories: The Perspective of 3 Henry VI" (Studies in Philology, 76, Summer79) -- discusses how Shakespeare structured the play. Maybe it is better structured than it seemed when I read it, but I still don't think it was as well-organized as most of the later plays.

Thomas J. Moretti, "Misthinking the King: The Theatrics of Christian Rule in Henry VI part 3" (Renascence 60, 4, Summer 2008) -- One of the most interesting articles I read, this reinterprets the character of Henry VI in terms of the Erasmian ideal of pacifism and Christian rule. Moretti argues that Shakespeare is not travestying Henry VI as simply a "weak" ruler, but seriously considering the relationship between Christian belief and the necessities of rulership, a problem which was actual in the age of Elizabeth and in somewhat different terms today.

June 5

44. Han Kang, Human Acts [2014; tr. 2016] 218 pages

A powerful novel about the Gwangju massacre in 1980 and its aftermath, by one of the foremost women novelists writing in South Korea today. The book is written in a highly advanced style. It begins with the story of Dong-ho, a middle school student who is guarding the bodies of the victims of the first day of murder of the unarmed demonstrators in the city. It then moves backwards and forwards in time, from the perspectives of different actors in the events of the struggle in Gwangju, coming ahead to the present and then in memories back to Gwangju. The novel shows the absolutely unnecessary brutality and cruelty of the government soldiers, which seems to have no rationale even from the perspective of the dictatorship. It also shows the effects of "survivor's guilt" on those who remained alive. If I have any criticism, it is that the violence and brutality is so unrelieved that the book is difficult to read for long stretches of time -- it took me five days to get through the 218 pages, but this is a subject that people need to know about, especially those who see South Korea as a democratic contrast to the dictatorship in the North; while the dictatorship was overthrown and formal democracy established later in the decade, note that when this novel was written five years ago, the dictator Park Chung-hee's daughter was president of South Korea (she was later impeached for corruption and abuses of power).

June 9

45. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark [about 1600; Signet Classic edition, ed. by Edward Hubler, 1963) 271 pages
46. William Shakespeare, Hamlet: An Authoritative Text, Intellectual Backgrounds, Extracts from the Sources, Essays in Criticism [about 1600; Norton Critical edition, ed. by Cyrus Hoy, 1963] 270 pages
47. J.C.Levinson, ed., Discussions of Hamlet [1960] 113 pages

Two modernized editions of Hamlet based on the Second Quarto, with additions from the Folio, together with selections of critical articles, and a third book of critical articles. There was a great deal of overlap in the three; all contain a selection of "classic" excerpts, from Johnson (2), Coleridge (all 3) and Hazlitt (2) through Bradley (all 3), Eliott(2) and Stoll(2), two have excerpts from Dover Wilson, two have Mack's "The World of Hamlet"; the Norton has more background and sources and about a dozen articles not in the others, Levinson's book has four, and the Signet two. Obviously by the dates there is nothing recent, and much of the criticism (as well as Hamlet of course) I had already read, but it was worth reviewing before reading more modern articles and seeing the play again next month.

June 14

48. Harley Granville-Barker, Preface to Hamlet [1946] 284 pages

I'm still reading about Hamlet before seeing the USF production next month. A classic of criticism and one of the best books I've read on the play, Granville-Barker's Preface to Hamlet treats the play first and foremost as a play, designed to be represented in a particular theater, and making uses of the conventions of its time and place, an approach which was somewhat novel at the time. He begins with several interesting chapters on various aspects of Elizabethan/Jacobean theater as they relate to the play, including the convention of soliloquoy and the use of "boy-actresses", then follows with a close explication of the text itself. He rejects the folio editiors divisions and divides the play into three rather than five parts. Throughout the analysis he emphasizes the effects that would be made on the stage and gives much good advice for directors and actors. He ends where so many earlier critics of the play begin, with discussions of all the characters and their roles in the structure of the play.

June 15

49. Harry Levin, The Question of Hamlet [1959] 178 pages

Levin also divides the play into three parts, but in terms of themes: he uses the Elizabethan rhetorical theory to discuss it in terms of Interrogation, Doubt, and Irony. The discussion is definitely interesting, though not especially original or different (although he has new insights into many specific passages), and the book would probably be a good introduction to the play for students reading it in a high school or undergraduate class. The additional matter at the end would be more challenging as it makes comparisons not only with Shakespeare's other plays but also with a number of his contemporaries.

June 19

50. James L. Calderwood, To Be and Not To Be: Negation and Metadrama in Hamlet [1983] 222 pages

I had this one in my garage from some library booksale. As is obvious from the subtitle, this is a very academic study, and what's worse, one from the 1980's, quoting everyone from Bergson, Wittgenstein and Ryle to Saussure, Jakobsen, Derrida, and of course James Joyce. Nevertheless, it was a bit better than I expected. The author uses linguistic analysis as a means of explaining some of the more obscure questions one might ask about the play, such as why Claudius isn't called Claudius and why Claudio is named at all, why father and son are both called Hamlet when they have different names in the sources, and why the King is killed twice at the end. The first two parts aren't bad, the third part just repeats the same arguments with more jargon (especially the metaphor/paradigm vs. metonymy/syntagma opposition). The basic idea is that the play is about Hamlet becoming an individual self rather than being defined as a "son" or a revenger.

June 26

51. Articles on Hamlet [1975-1999] 325 pages

Another made up book, 17 articles from Academic Search Premier from the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Godshalk, W.L. "Hamlet's Dream of Innocence" (Shakespeare Studies 9, 1976) 12 pages -- general interpretation, the play is about Hamlet learning to act in a world of "seeming".

Kincaid, Arthur Noel, "Hamlet's Cue For Passion in the Nunnery Scene" (Shakespeare Studies 10, 1977) 15 pages -- Interpretation of the Nunnery scene; argues that both the idea that Hamlet has overheard the plot involving Ophelia, and the idea that he sees or hears Polonius and the King behind the arras, are improbable for dramatic reasons, and suggests that Hamlet's change of attitude when Ophelia tells him her father is at home is not because he knows or believes she is lying, but because he believes her and thinks that she has come unchaperoned to look for him, which in light of the ideas of Shakespeare's time would be the sort of immodest behavior Hamlet proceeds to charge her with. This makes sense, given Hamlet's jaundiced view of women after he learns of his mother's behavior with Claudius, but the article relies too much on the religious descriptions of women's proper behavior (see my review of Rankin's book).

Helgerson, Richard, "What Hamlet Remembers" (Shakespeare Studies 10, 1977) 31 pages -- An interpretation of the play focusing on the images of remembering and forgetting. The most interesting parts are his parallels between the play and the tradition of prodigal son plays and stories (the advice of Polonius to Laertes on his departure, the expectation that he is squandering money in Paris, and his return, most overtly, but also Hamlet's "disobedience" to his father and his return "poor and naked" from the trip to England), and the pervasive use of the momento mori traditions.

Belsey, Catherine, "The Case of Hamlet's Conscience" (Studies in Philology 76,2 Spring 1979) 22 pages -- Argues that "conscience" in the play, including the line "so conscience makes cowards of us all", and in Shakespeare generally, means "conscience" and not "consciousness" or "introspection" as the notes to some modern editions claim. Compares the play with the morality plays featuring a conflict between personifications of Conscience and Wrath.

Goldstein, Philip "Hamlet: Not a World of His Own" (Shakespeare Studies 13, 1980) 13 pages -- Criticizes the straw man of psychological interpretation (Coleridge to Bradley), and identifies the problem of the play as one of public ethics rather than private character failings, which is probably true as far as it goes. Annoyingly claimes to be a better "Marxist" than Paul N. Siegel and other Marxist interpreters, mainly because he throws around the term bourgeois, but actually misinterprets the nature of the early modern bourgeoisie (he thinks that they are corrupt and hence oppose law and order, when in fact they were at that time the champions of law and order against the arbitrary actions of the nobility -- i.e. he confuses the bourgoisie on the eve of the bourgeois revolutions with contemporary capitalists after centuries of bourgeois rule. Actually he's even more confused than that, because he talks about the "bourgeois aristocracy" and opposes it to the Protestants/Puritans as anti-bourgeois(!))

Bennett, Robert B., "Hamlet and the Burden of Knowledge" (Shakespeare Studies 15, 1977) 21 pages -- Argues that the play is actually a comparison of Christian Humanism in the sense of Erasmus, Colet, and More with the older (and revived) Christian tradition of contemptus mundi. Has some good points about the relation of passages in the play to these traditions, but in the end not convincing as a general interpretation.

Evans, G. Blakemore. "Two Notes on Hamlet": ll. 2. 357-58; lll. 1.121-31" (Modern Language Review 81,1 Jan1986) 3 pages -- Points to contemporary evidence for the Hercules bearing the Globe as the sign of the Globe theater, and the slang meaning of "nunnery" as a brother.

Wilks,John S. "The Discourse of Reason: Justice and the Erroneous Conscience in Hamlet" (Shakespeare Studies 18, 1986) 28 pages -- Discusses Hamlet in the light of the Protestant casuistical tradition of the time, particularly the distinction of syndereisis vs. conscientia. Interesting account of the religious topic but doesn't seem to me to be what Shakespeare is intending in the play.

Kasten, David Scott, "His semblable in his mirror': Hamlet and the Imitation of Revenge" (Shakespeare Studies 19, 1987) 14 pages -- A discussion of the play in relation to the concept of imitation, obviously indebted to the book by Calderwood. Has a good commentary on the Pyrrhus-Priam-Hecuba passage.

Peterson, Corina, "To Be or Not to Be: A Study of Ambivalence" (Journal of Analytical Psychology 32, 2) 14 pages -- A psychoanalytic (but Jungian more than Freudian) interpretation of Hamlet's ambivalence toward revenge in the light of the psychological theory of ambivalence.

Malone, Cynthia Northcu, "Framing in Hamlet" (College Literature 18, 1, Feb 1991) 14 pages -- The different "frames" or boundaries in Hamlet, i.e. the physical dimensions of the theater, the ghost's commands, the play as a frame of the play within the play, etc. Not much substance.

Fisher, Philip, "Thinking about the killing: Hamlet and the paths among the passions" (Raritan 11,1, Summer 1991) 35 pages -- A psychological approach based on the idea that Hamlet's conflict is caused by trying to move from mourning or grief to anger, the reverse of the normal sequence of passions. Claims that Hamlet is modern in that he has no strong passions, but then argues that his mourning is such a strong passion it excludes both rage and love.

Wilson, Luke, "Hamlet: Equity, intention, performance" (Studies in the Literary Imagination 24, 2, Fall 1991) 23 pages -- Notes that the words "perform" and "performance" were originally legal terms going back to the Middle Ages referring to the carrying out of an obligation; the theatrical meaning is found first in Shakespeare. Discusses the question of whether the Folio text's differences from the Quarto represent Shakespeare's "intention", with a good deal of theoretical discussion of the meaning of the word. Compares changes to the script in the course of performance to the legal concept of "equity". A worthwhile discussion but could have been clearer.

Jacobs, Henry E., "Shakespeare, revenge tragedy, and the ideology of Memento Mori" (Shakespeare Studies, 21, 1993) 13 pages -- Discusses the use of skulls, skeletons, and other relics of the dead in several other Elizabethan revenge tragedies and contrasts it with the use in Hamlet. Shows that the other tragedies reverse the meaning of the mediaeval Christian momento mori tradition turning it into a reminder for vengeance rather than a meditation on death leading to repentance and faith in God, while Hamlet in the Gravedigger scene returns it more or less to the original context.

Habib, Imtiaz, "`Never Doubt I Love': Misreading Hamlet" (College Literature, 21,2, June 1994) 14 pages -- Points out the ambiguity of "doubt" in Hamlet's poem to Ophelia; interprets the play as about the attempt to read others without being read oneself. Ends with the idea that the play is about destroying textuality.

Gross, Kenneth, "The rumor of Hamlet" (Raritan, 14, 3, Fall 1994) 24 pages -- Considers the references to rumor and slander in Hamlet in relation to contemporary writings about those subjects; an interesting allegorical explanation of the ghost as both victim and source of slander; explanation of Hamlet's "madness" as an attempt to deflect slander onto others (to "read" without being "read" as in the article just above).

Stone, James W., "Androgynous "union" and the woman in Hamlet" (Shakespeare Studies 23, 1995) 29 pages -- The play is about Hamlet's struggle against his feminine self. Just about every line in the play refers to something in Freudian theory. No comment.

July 1

52. Michael Pennington, Hamlet: A User's Guide [1996] 216 pages

Hamlet from an actor's viewpoint. Five chapters summarizing the play, a section on the characters, and a conclusion. Not nearly as good as the book he wrote on Twelfth Night, a kind of routine interpretation but some interesting ideas.

July 2

53. Harold Bloom, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited [2003] 154 pages

I don't really understand why Harold Bloom has such a reputation as a great literary critic, unless it is the sheer quantity of books he has published. This book hardly seems worthwhile; it is divided into twenty-five very short chapters, each of which seems like a separate, random meditation on some character or aspect of the play. About half of each chapter is one or two long quotations from the play; the rest is bons mots or arbitrary opinions, usually obscure and "profound", and when they actually say something it seems wildly off.

July 3

54. Articles on Hamlet film adaptations [58 pages]

I took time from my reading of Hamlet criticisms to watch five film versions -- One was from 1913, which was just quotations in the intertitle followed by scenes which looked as if the cameraman just filmed a stage version played in front of a static camera; the tableau is held while the unheard actors declaim the dialogue. The second was Sven Gades' from 1920 with Asta Nielsen as a female Hamlet in love with Horatio, who was in love with Ophelia. (These were on youtube; the Gade was unfortunately a horrible print.) Then the three the library had: the Zeffirelli version with Mel Gibson, the Branagh version (the only complete film of the play), and the RSC version with Captain Picard and the Doctor -- I mean Patrick Stewart and David Tennant. (Stewart was believable but Tennant used so many of the same expressions and gestures he used on Doctor Who I wasn't sure if I was watching Shakespeare or science fiction, especially whenever he mentioned "time". Then I read seven more articles from Academic Search Premier, all originally from Literature Film Quarterly, about the film versions. Again, see my thread for reviews of the specific articles.

Duffy, Robert A., "Gade, Oliver, Richardson: Visual Strategy in Hamlet Adaptation" (Literature Film Quarterly 4,2, Spring 1976) 12 pages -- Compares three film versions of Hamlet. I recently watched Sven Gade's film on youtube; I haven't seen Olivier's unless it was when I was in college (all four examples on youtube are dubbed in Spanish or Portuguese) or Richardson's. He points out that Gade's version was the only successful silent film Hamlet precisely because it isn't Shakespeare, but an independent work which makes use of Shakespeare, Saxo and Belleforest and departs from all of them, creating an interesting if melodramatic plot that doesn't depend on Shakespeare's dialogue, while more "faithful" plays end up being like the one I watched from 1913. (Of course between 1913 and 1921 film technique improved immensely anyway.) The Olivier version was the first successful sound version, which according to Duffy introduced the cinematic technique for Shakespeare adaptations; the Richardson takes a different approach, and Duffy considers that it is not as bad as critics generally say, though "certainly not a great film and decidedly not a great Shakespeare adaptation."

Kliman, Bernice, "Olivier's Hamlet: A Film--Infused Play" (Literature Film Quarterly 5,4, Fall 1977) 10 pages -- Considers Olivier's film as a hybrid of theater and film techniques; discusses the decisions he made in some detail.

Homan, Sidney R., "Criticism for the Filmed Shakespeare" (Literature Film Quarterly 5,4, Fall 1977) 9 pages -- A general discussion of critical approaches to Shakepearian film adaptations, not specific to Hamlet although Olivier is used as an example.

Kliman, Bernice, "The Spiral of Influence: 'One Defect' In Hamlet" (Literature Film Quarterly 11,3, 1983) 8 pages -- Discusses the mutual influences of John Dover Wilson, Ernest Jones, Lawrence Olivier, and Peter Alexander.

Simmons Jr., James R., "`In the Rank Sweat of an Enseamed Bed': Sexual Aberration and the Paradigmatic Screen "Hamlets"" (Literature Film Quarterly 25,2,1997) 8 pages -- After a discussion of Sven Gade's silent version, which makes the film focus on the sexual ambiguity of a female Hamlet, it traces the "Oedipal" versions of Olivier, Bennet (BBC teleplay), and Zeffirelli, and the increase in sexual imagery in the Closet scene in the three films. Notes that Dover Wilson was the first to miscall the Closet scene the "bedroom" scene; Gielgud was the first to introduce an actual bed into the play at that point. Of course the three films (and Branagh and the RSC production with David Tennant, which were later than this article) all play the scene on the bed, which now seems to be taken for granted.

Weller, Philip, "Freud's Footprints in Films of "Hamlet."" (Literature Film Quarterly 25,2, 1997) 6 pages -- Similar to the Simmons article, discusses the "bedroom" scenes and Oedipal nonsense in films of Hamlet.

Burnett, Mark Thornton, "The `Very Cunning of the Scene': Kenneth Branagh's "Hamlet."" (Literature Film Quarterly 25,2, 1997) 5 pages -- A summary of what Branagh does new in his film version, good and bad.

July 7

55. Articles on Hamlet [2000-2009] 388 pages

Another "made-up" book, a group of eighteen articles from Academic Search Premier, from the first decade of this century (one more group to go); about a dozen worthwhile to some degree and the rest were just academic jargon and "theory". Lord, save us from Lacan and Derrida. Again, see my thread for the individual articles.

Levy, Eric P., "'Things standing thus unknown': The Epistemology of Ignorance in Hamlet" (Studies in Philology 97,2, Spring 2000) 18 pages
Levy, Eric P., "The Problematic Relation Between Reason and Emotions in Hamlet" (Renascence 53,2, Winter 2001) 13 pages
Levy, Eric P., "The Mind of Man in Hamlet" (Renascence, 54,4, Summer 2002) 16 pages -- Three articles by Levy which investigate philosophical questions in Hamlet in relation to Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy. The first deals with the nature of knowledge, the resistance to knowledge and the effects of knowledge in the play, arguing that the play investigates the methods of and barriers to knowing and revises the nature of knowledge by discovering its limits; the second with the dialectical relationship between reason and the emotions, especially anger and fear, which are both controlled by but also initiated by the reason; and the third (somewhat similar to the first) with the nature of the reason itself. Interesting interpretations but perhaps over interpret what Shakespeare intended.

Parker, Patricia, "Black Hamlet: Battening on the Moor" (Shakespeare Studies, 31, 2003) 38 pages -- Begins with the idea that the word Moor in the description of Claudius is a pun on the meaning of Moor as Black person, and procedes to investigate a whole complex of images of blackness and whiteness, together with images of soiling, and other related images throughout the play. Interesting and in depth -- so much so that in the end the complex means so many things it is not clear whether it has any one overreaching theme.

Hassel Jr, R. Chris, The Accent and Gait of Christians: Hamlet's Puritan Style" (Religion & the Arts, 7, 1/2, March 2003) 25 pages -- Argues that Hamlet's moralizing speeches, and other aspects of his behavior are modeled on the representation of the Puritans.

Loberg, Harmonie, "Queen Gertrude: Monarch, Mother, Murderer" (Atenea, 24, 1, June 2004) 13 pages -- Argues that Gertrude poisoned Ophelia. Because she was pregnant. And it is very obvious, but no one else noticed because they are all limited by patriarchal gender assumptions. The silliest article I have read in a while (not the idea of the murder or the pregnancy, which can be argued for, but the "explanation" of why others don't see it as obvious.). [Interestingly, the production I saw at USF this week suggests that Ophelia was pregnant and has an interpolated scene of soldiers drowning her -- the dramaturge told me that it was intended to be by order of Claudius, but obviously with the knowledge of Gertrude.]

Tiffany, Grace, "Hamlet, Reconciliation, and the Just State" (Renascence, 58, 2, Winter 2005) 23 pages -- One of the best argued articles I have read; the basic theme of the play is Hamlet's internal ethical struggle to replace personal revenge by legitimate civic execution (which has always been what I thought it was about). Discusses the parallels between Hamlet I and Claudius, and argues that Providence is using Hamlet to try to achieve the salvation of Claudius (unsuccessfully), Gertrude, and Hamlet I (as well as his own?). Hamlet I's crime was the deprivation of Fortinbras' lands out of pride, and Hamlet II by returning the land (and Denmark as well) to Fortinbras makes amends and achieves his father's reconciliation with God. Makes reference to contemporary debates about resistence, succession, and so forth.

Spinrad, Phoebe S., "The Fall of the Sparrow and the Map of Hamlet's Mind" (Modern Philology, 102, 4, May 2005) 25 pages -- The conflict is ethical/religious, Hamlet oscillates between the revenge ethic and the Christian ethic, but finally acts correctly as a legal executioner after seeing the murder of the Queen and his own murder, explicitly confessed by Laertes.

Romanska, Magda, "Ontology and Eroticism: Two Bodies of Ophelia" (Women's Studies, 34, 6, Sept 2005) 19 pages -- Argues that the "to be or not to be" soliloquoy was actually intended as spoken to Ophelia, since the stage directions neither indicate an exit for he before the speech or a re-entrance afterward, and that this is related to her own suicide. Also discusses Ophelia's death as presented in art. [The USF production has Ophelia on stage listening; the dramaturge said they originally intended to have it spoken to her but decided it didn't work after the rehearsals.]

Flachmann, Michael, "Acting Shakespeare: A Roundtable Discussion with Artists from the Utah Shakespearean Festival's 2006 Production of Hamlet" (Journal of the Wooden O Symposium, 6, 2006) 16 pages -- A conversation between the director and the main actors, about what you would expect.

Mellon, Lorna, "Death and the End of Testimony: Trauma Theory in Shakespeare's Hamlet" (Journal of the Wooden O Symposium 6, 2006) 8 pages -- Analyzes the play in terms of "trauma theory" which is apparently an approach based on Derrida. If you're interested in Derrida this may be understandable but has nothing really to do with what Shakespeare intended. To be fair, it is marked as an "undergraduate paper" so may just be intended to prove she's read Derrida.

Wallenfels, Immy, "Gertrude as a Character of Intersection in Hamlet" (Journal of the Wooden O Symposium, 6, 2006) 10 pages -- Another incomprehensible (to me) academic feminist analysis, but does include an interesting comparison of Ophelia with the May Day Queen traditions.

Pignataro, Margie, "Unearthing Hamlet's Fool: A Metatheatrical Excavation of Yorick" (Journal of the Wooden O Symposium, 6, 2006) 16 pages -- Discusses the contrasting style of comedy of Will Kemp and Robert Armin; argues that the advice to the players about comedians who go beyond what is set down is an attack on the recently departed (on a less than friendly basis) Kemp, and that Yorick, with his "gibes" and "gambols" and his physical style of comedy (the flagon of Rhenish poured on the Gravedigger's head) is also intended for the dead (to Shakespeare's company) Kemp. (The Gravedigger of course was played by Armin, with his more witty verbal style of comedy.)

Kumamoto, Chikako D., "Gertrude, Ophelia, Ghost: Hamlet's Revenge and the Abject" (Journal of the Wooden O Symposium, 6, 2006) 17 pages -- While I admit I'm not familiar with Kristeva's writings (and this article assumes a familiarity with that sort of theory), I don't think the play is any more about "abjection" than it is about the Oedipus complex.

Stegner, Paul D., ""Try what repentance can": Hamlet, Confession, and the Extraction of Interiority" (Shakespeare Studies, 35, 2007) 25 pages -- Discusses images of confession and repentance in the play in connection with the differing views of Catholics, Protestants, and the Church of England. Hamlet is presented at times as a "father confessor" figure, trying to get at the consciences of others in the play without revealing his own.

Levy, Eric P., "The Mimesis of Time in Hamlet" (Philological Quarterly, 86, 4, Fall 2007) 28 pages -- An analysis of references to time in the play; considers different aspects of time, using McTaggert's distinction of A-series and B-series, and the ideas of reversing or stopping time in the "revenge morality" vs. accepting the flow of time in the later part of the play.

Orkin, Martin, "Speaking Process" (Shakespeare Studies, 37, 2009) 24 pages -- More academic jargon without much insight into the play as Shakepeare wrote it. All I could get was that the author doesn't like "binaries".

Grady, Hugh, "Hamlet as Mourning-Play: A Benjaminesque Interpretation" (Shakespeare Studies, 36, 2008) 31 pages -- An interesting analysis of the play as a Trauerspiel as Benjamin discusses it in Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, a book I read a long time ago and don't claim to have fully understood. Unfortunately the author "updates" Benjamin with a lot of references to Lacan.

July 14

56. William Shakespeare, Macbeth [1605?; 2nd rev. Signet ed., 1998] 214 pages

The last of the plays I'm re-reading this year; I saw this on the 13th at the Utah Shakespeare Festival (a good production). I won't try to review the play itself; everyone knows what it's about and most English speakers with a high school education have read it or seen it performed. The edition I read has excerpts from the classic commentaries of Johnson, Bradley and Stoll, Mary McCarthy's "General Macbeth", and newer articles by Klein and Sinfield, as well as a survey of the most famous stage and film versions.