Paging All Bookworms! discussion

I just made my book goal last year of 145, so I will keep the same goal this year. I fell short on my non-English goal with 27 out of 35, so I will put that back to my usual 25 for this year. My page goal was very much short so I will put that back by 1000 to 36,000.

Jan. 4

1. Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed By Kindness [1603] 41 pages

One of the most famous plays of the period, A Woman Killed By Kindness is an early example of the domestic tragedy which would become more frequent in the reign of King James.
The major plot deals with the marriage of Frankford and Anne and the latter’s adultery with Wendoll, while a minor plot deals with a feud between Anne’s brother Sir Francis Acton and another nobleman, Sir Charles Montford. The play investigates many social issues concerning marriage, honor, and revenge. This was a re-read for me and was in all four of my anthologies, Fraser, Kinney, Brooke and Paradise, and Works of the British Dramatists.


Jan. 5

2. George Chapman, Bussy d’Amboise [1603 or 1604] 36 pages

Another play from the beginning of King James’ reign, Bussy d’Amboise tells the story (based on an actual occurrence) of a talented, bold, reckless and somewhat amoral nobleman (I was reminded of Benvenuto Cellini) whose sudden rise to royal favor makes him powerful enemies, and eventually alienates his patron, the King’s brother. He becomes involved in a love triangle with his patron and his mistress, which leads to his downfall and murder.

The play begins well, with some impressive, if perhaps rather didactic, speeches, and good characterization, but by the end it rather degenerates into bombast and melodrama. There are also some supernatural scenes involving the raising of demons and the ghost of a friar, which ultimately do not change anything that happens.

This was in the Brooke and Paradise anthology, and was a re-read for me.


Jan. 7

3. John Marston, The Malcontent [1604] 35 pages

A very influential and popular play, The Malcontent is a complicated intrigue which pits the ousted Duke Altofront of Genoa, disguised as a “malcontent” named Malvole, against the usurper, Duke Pietro, and his favorite, Mendoza. The plot and characters are not historical. A central element in the intrigue is the adultery of Duke Pietro’s Duchess Aurelia with Mendoza. The play is called a “tragicomedy” and there is a happy ending with the rightful Duke restored, the usurper voluntarily giving up the throne and reconciled with Aurelia, Mendoza banished, and even the seemingly killed characters proving to be alive after all. The play is full of witty dialogue, which makes it better than the plot description would suggest.

The play, another re-read, was in the Brooke and Paradise, and Kinney anthologies.

Jan. 7

4. Rutebeuf (various spellings), Oeuvres complètes, v. 1 [13th cent., Jubinal ed. 1839] 577 pages [Kindle, Wikisource(Fr.)] [in French]

Rutebeuf was the nom de plume of a thirteenth-century trouvère; I think his relationship to the tradition was somewhat similar to that of Bach to the baroque, one of the greatest exemplars coming at the very end, when the later styles of the fourteenth century were already beginning to appear.

In one important respect, he differs greatly from the earlier trouvères: love poetry, which was their stock in trade, is totally absent from his extant works. This first of two volumes contains mainly satirical complaints, mostly against the clergy and especially the Dominicans, as well as eulogies of various crusaders and exhortations for the crusades.

The edition I am reading from the French Wikisource is from early in the nineteenth century; it is well-annotated, and the endnotes contain a number of other, mostly anonymous poems which are analogues of those of Rutebeuf.

Dec. 8

5. “William Shakespeare”, The London Prodigal [pub. 1605] 76 pages

Although The London Prodigal was published as by Shakespeare (I read it in a collection of Shakespeare Apocrypha) and was included with other apocryphal plays in the Third Folio, few scholars have ever considered him the author. There is a good discussion of the authorship by Karen Britland in the Cambridge edition of the Works of Ben Jonson online (it has sometimes been attributed to Jonson, as well as to Marston, to Dekker, to Lodge, to Drayton, to Heywood, to Wilkins, and to others known or unknown); apparently the most recent view based on stylistic analysis is that it is a collaboration of two authors, one of whom may have been Dekker. The date is also disputed, with some dating it to around 1590, while most consider it to have been written shortly before it was published.

Whoever wrote it, he must have been having a bad day, because this is one of the most boring plays ever written. The plot, concerning three suitors, one of them a total villain, a disguised father and a fake will, is trite and frankly repellant, and the events have no credibility; there is no redeeming wit or word-play of any sort, and the only comic relief is a rather unfunny character who speaks in what is supposed to be a Devonshire dialect. (The disguised father and faked will were borrowed by Jonson for a much better play, The Staple of News.)

Jan. 15

6. Ernest Samuels, Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur [1979] 477 pages

My last book of 2024 was the “authorized” biography of Berenson by Sylvia Sprigge; Samuels’ biography is more objective and far more detailed, but this first volume only goes as far as the turn of the century, a little less than halfway through his life. (There is a sequel covering the rest, which I do not have.) Samuels also gives a better description of the early influences on Berenson, especially Ruskin and Pater, whom I have added to my TBR list for later in the year.

Jan. 21

7. Rutebeuf (various spellings), Oeuvres complètes, v. 2 [13th cent., Jubinal ed. 1839] 523 pages [Kindle, Wikisource(Fr.)] [in French]

The second volume (of two) contains poems in honor of the Virgin Mary, including Rutebeuf’s verse play, Le Miracle de Théophile, one of the first plays written in French, and two long poems about the lives of St. Marie the Egyptian and St. Elizabeth of Hungary. This volume is harder to relate to, since the ideas are so foreign to the modern reader, even for a modern Catholic, let alone someone as secular as I am. Perhaps for that reason, it is a very useful illustration of thirteenth-century popular beliefs, as opposed to the official theology we are more familiar with from Duns Scotus or Thomas Aquinas.

About half the volume is taken up with notes and “additions”, that is to say analogues of Rutebeuf’s poems from other authors; there are two versions of the original Greek prose account of Théophilus by Eutychion from the sixth century (I was gratified that I could read them without a dictionary, not having read anything in Greek for about a decade), the poem about Théophilus by Rutebeuf’s almost exact contemporary Gauthier de Coincy, a long anonymous poem about St. Elizabeth, and several shorter poems which are relevant to Rutebeuf’s work.

I followed this up with two articles from the mediaevalist journal Sénefiance on Gauthier de Coincy and Rutebeuf.

Jan. 25

8. Ananda Devi, Le sari vert [2009] 256 pages [Kindle] [in French]

Le sari vert is a very intense novel. An old, bitter man has arrived, dying of cancer, to spend his last days with his estranged daughter. She has called her own daughter to come. The novel is told entirely through the consciousness of the old man, in a stream-of-consciousness style. He is one of the most unpleasant characters one could imagine; egotistical, misogynistic, brutal. The entire novel is basically him ranting against women and trying to justify his violence against his wife and daughter. The more he tries to justify his life, the more the reader is repelled, and the more we learn about his past crimes; but we also get some idea of the psychological origins of what can only be called his mental illness. We also see, distorted from his perspective, the struggles of his daughter and granddaughter to escape from the prison of memories of abuse. The daughter is in her sixties and has basically had her entire life destroyed by her father; we may conceive some hope for the granddaughter, still only about forty, and with a relationship and dreams, but the perspective of the novel is entirely bleak.

Jan. 30

9. Israel Joshua Singer, The Brothers Ashkenazi [1935, 1st Eng. tr. 1936, this tr. (Joseph Singer) 1980] 460 pages [Kindle]

This novel about Jewish twin brothers in the city of Lodz in Poland from the late nineteenth century to shortly after the First World War is one of the most important novels in the Yiddish language, as well as a good example of the Realist novel. It is divided into three more or less equal parts, “Birth”, “Chimneys in the Sky”, and “Cobwebs”. The first two parts trace the careers and rivalry of Max and Yacub Ashkenazi as they claw their way from a humble beginning to become the most important capitalists of the city, and along the way we learn about the economic and political development of Poland, the “primitive accumulation of capital” and the class struggles between the capitalists and their workers. There is also much about the position of women in Jewish and gentile society, and how they influence events. The last part describes their fall, due to war, revolution, and economic depression, combined with the anti-Semitic policies of the new, independent postwar Polish government.

Most of the reviews I have read are by readers who came to the book after reading his more famous younger brother Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Nobel prize-winner, and concentrate on comparing Israel’s writing with his, as does the introductory matter to this book, and interestingly most of them prefer Israel’s novel. Since I have not read anything by I .B. Singer except one short story last year in a fantasy anthology, I will not deal with that question.

Israel J. Singer was a socialist, both small and capital letter, and the novel was originally serialized in The Forward, an organ of Jewish Socialists in New York City. It was translated soon after, in 1936, and became a major best-seller. The edition I read is a later (1980) translation by the author’s son, Joshua Singer. The introduction to this translation is by Irving Howe, who, though he never completely abandoned a certain kind of socialist politics, became increasingly less radical over time, and more oriented toward the Democratic Party, as a leader of the “Democratic Socialists of America”; I think he presents Singer as more conservative than he was.

Karl Marx famously described anti-Semitism as “the socialism of fools”, and the novel illustrates this well. There is a strike of workers in Lodz which begins by being against the capitalists as such, then turns against the Jewish capitalists in particular, and finally ends up in a drunken pogrom against the Jews in general, including the very Jewish agitators who organized the movement to begin with. The main Jewish revolutionary character, Nissan, begins to doubt his Marxist beliefs and to question whether the major problem of society is really economic oppression or human nature, an ineradicable tendency of gentiles to hate Jews. Howe takes this as Singer’s own final position.

However, the character’s doubts only last for a night, and there is a later strike, in 1905, in which the workers, now more class-conscious and organized into unions, control the city. The strike movement culminates in a mass funeral procession for a Jewish martyr killed by the police. This is a wonderful description of how a working class insurrection takes place, although in the end it is crushed. My only quarrel with it is that Singer doesn’t mention that there was a revolutionary movement in Russia going on at the same time, which is obviously the context for the events in Lodz. (See Trotsky’s 1905.) Singer is actually very good at showing the economic roots of anti-Semitism.

This is not to say that Singer was a revolutionary himself. He was a social democrat, and despite his obvious sympathy for working class action, he is skeptical about what it can (or perhaps should) try to accomplish, beyond purely economic demands. This is most obvious in his treatment of the Russian Revolution of 1917. He makes no mention of the Petrograd or pan-Russian Soviet Congresses, which were the heart of the revolution, focusing his attention on the Duma and the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly much later; he caricatures Lenin (whom he never names, but refers to by insulting descriptions such as “slant-eyed”) and the Bolsheviks, treating the democratic decisions of the Soviets as if they were individual actions by Lenin. Nissan reflects that the workers have “finally” gotten their own assembly, only to be immediately deprived of it by the Bolsheviks, who demanded that it recognize the Bolsheviks (which he reduces to Lenin individually) as the only true authority. This is absurd; the workers had had their own assembly – the Soviet – for months, the Bolsheviks had won a majority in the Soviet elections, and the Constituent Assembly, elected early in the revolution, was dominated by the Cadets, who were a bourgeois liberal party; the demand of the Bolsheviks was that it recognize the authority of the Soviet, not the Bolshevik Party. He describes Russia after the revolution as if it was all chaos and corruption; undoubtedly there was some, but this is definitely a deliberate exaggeration. Granted, he is describing the country through the experiences of an expropriated capitalist, but this doesn’t completely explain it.

Partly this is a result of Singer’s own disillusionment after visiting the Soviet Union and finding much anti-Semitism remaining among the peasants and more backwards workers, and even some of the party cadres (this would later be exploited by Stalin and the bureaucratic faction in their struggle against Trotsky, Zinoviev, and other leaders of the party who happened to be Jewish), but it also represents the limits of his social-democratic milieu. While this is only a few chapters, probably no more than five percent of the novel, its location near the end gives it prominence and the total lack of even minimal factual accuracy in the description caused me to lower my rating of the novel considerably.

This is not the only fault of the third part; it feels “rushed” compared to the pace of the first two parts, and the plot is less credible, more dependent on coincidences, more Romantic rather than Realist. In short, the book begins much better than it ends. Despite this, it is a generally very good account of the experience of Poland and particularly its Jewish community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and I would recommend it, with the above reservations.

Jan. 31

10. Anthony Munday, The Triumphs of Re-United Brittania [1605] 13 pages

This short dramatic pageant was performed in the streets for the inauguration of Sir Leonard Holliday as Lord Mayor of London in 1605. It contrasts the division of the island among the three sons of Brutus, according to the legendary history of Geoffrey of Monmouth (perhaps also influenced by the anonymous play Locrine, which I read last year) with the reunification of Scotland and England by King James. I read it in the Kinney anthology which I am slowly working my way through.

Feb. 1

11. George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, Eastward Ho! [1605] 38 pages

Chapman, Jonson, and Marston are among the best playwrights of the late Elizabethan/Jacobean period, and this is one of the better plays of the period. A “city comedy”, the play has some witty dialogue but no real comic characters or scenes; it’s a fairly serious comedy about Touchstone, a London goldsmith, his two apprentices, Golding who is a model of industriousness and sobriety, and Quicksilver, who is a rake and associates with the dissolute and spendthrift knight, Sir Petronel Flash, and keeps a mistress named Sindefy. Touchstone has two daughters who are equally diverse; the older, Gertrude, dreams of becoming a “lady” and marries Sir Petronel, while the younger is a model daughter and bourgeois character who marries Golding. Other characters who play an important if secondary role are Touchstone’s wife, a usurer named Security, and Security’s young wife Winifred. The main point of the play is to set off the industrious and honest bourgeoisie against the decadent nobility; the authors were jailed for writing it. It ends with the “prodigal” daughter and apprentice being forgiven, with the appropriate moral speeches at the end.

This was in the Brooke and Paradise anthology, and I think I had read it before, but probably decades ago.

Feb. 2

12. George Chapman, The Gentleman Usher [1606] 95 pages [Kindle]

A and B are in love with each other, but the old, rich and powerful C also wants to marry B, and her father supports the marriage. With the help of one or more comic characters, generally servants, A and B finally triumph in the end. How many comedies from Plautus to the present, in novels, plays, operas, movies and television shows, are built on this formula? Plug in Vincenzio for A, Margaret for B, and Duke Alfonso for C and you have this play by Chapman. It is well done, and the comic character of Bassiolo, the Gentleman Usher, is quite funny.

I had not read this one before; it was on the elizabethandrama.org website.

Feb. 6

13. Barbara Strachey & Jayne Samuels, edd., Mary Berenson: A Self-Portrait from Her Diaries and Letters [1982] 319 pages

This is an example of what I usually think of as a nineteenth-century genre, the “Life and Letters”. The editors are Mary’s granddaughter Barbara Strachey, about seventy when this was written, and who possessed most of the letters and diaries of her grandmother, and Jayne Samuels, whose husband Ernest wrote the biography of Bernard Berenson that I read last month.

Unlike the two biographies I read of her husband, this contained almost nothing about the Berensons’ views of art, and so to be honest it was somewhat of a waste of time for me, since that was what I was interested in. Instead, it is a witty but gossipy book about her love affairs, her husband’s love affairs, their dysfunctional relationship and many quarrels, and the various celebrities, friends, enemies and “frenemies” who occupied their time and attention at their villa. It did present an overview of the relationships among the English and American émigré non-academic intellectual mileux of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but again without much about their ideas.

Feb. 8

14. Guillaume de Machaut, Dit de la Fontaine amoureuse, ou Livre de Morphée [ca. 1360] about 200 pages [in French]

I read this in a Middle French edition (Machaut is writing at the beginning of the Middle French period, which conventionally begins in 1339) which I downloaded long ago in the early days of the Internet; I haven’t been able to find any versions on Goodreads which do not include translations and other material, but I assume my version, if it were formatted as a normal book with normal fonts, together with some other short poems I found elsewhere, would come to about 200 pages.

Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300-1377) is best known as a musician and composer, one of the originators of the Ars Nova, but he was also a major poet. La Fonteinne amoureuse is one of the best fourteenth-century poems I have read, other than Chaucer (whom he apparently influenced.) In fact, in reading it I was often reminded of Chaucer. The poem begins with a complaint of a knight who is forced to leave his love to go overseas and fight (not explained in the poem, but we know from external sources that the lover is supposed to be Machaut's patron the Duc de Berry, who is going to England to replace his father as a hostage to the English.) The long conceit of Morpheus as a messenger between him and his love is very original compared to much of the formula love poetry of the time. The second half of the poem (the fountain and the vision of Venus) is more conventional, but very good poetry if I can judge.

Feb. 13

15. Guillaume de Machaut, Le Livre du Voir-Dit [ca. 1363, 1875 ed.] 408 pages [Kindle, FrWikiSource, in French]

Sometime around the end of 1362, just after Machaut finished the previous poem (La Fonteinne amoureuse), he was approached through a friend by a young noblewoman, evidently also a developing poet and singer, whom the nineteenth-century editor, Paulin Paris, first identified as Peronnelle d’Armentières, proposing that they exchange poems and love-letters. We should understand this in the context of the literary motif of “courtly love”, where a poet represents himself as being passionately in love with an unapproachable “dame”, generally of a higher social class, who inspires his poetry. The difference in this work is that it is two-sided, with the lady responding with her own letters and poetry. The letters and poems are included within a verse narrative by Guillaume. It was essentially a literary game; Machaut was in his sixties, while Peronelle was “between 15 and 20.” Undoubtedly, both were flattered by the situation, he by the adulation of a charming young woman and she by the attentions of a man who was already one of the most famous poets and musicians in France, if not all of Europe. Unfortunately, the editor in his introduction and extensive notes takes the relationship far too seriously, comparing it to Bettina von Arnheim’s infatuation with Goethe. The fourteenth century was not the Romantic early nineteenth century! He suggests that their “relationship” was broken off by Peronelle’s impending marriage (we actually know very little about her.) Now, it is certainly plausible that such a game might be considered awkward in a married woman; it is even more plausible that the duties of a married woman would leave her little time for literary games; and it is most plausible of all that the literary collaboration was never intended to be of a longer duration than the composition of what is already a very long book (more than twice the length of La Fonteinne amoureuse.)

This was apparently the work of Machaut’s which was most popular among his contemporaries, who would have understood the convention, and for long after his death, until the Renaissance made all mediaeval literature unfashionable. It was widely influential on other works, including Chaucer’s Book of the Duchesse. I think it is much less to the taste of the modern reader than La Fonteinne amoureuse; in fact to be honest I found it very long-winded, repetitious and frankly boring in many places. When there is a hiatus in Peronelle’s letters, he fills in the poetry with dreams and mythological stories which tend to be rather confused. The editor, convinced that this is a “real time” correspondence, tries to explain away discrepancies between the dates of the letters and the actual events they mention; actually, if we understand that this is a fictional correspondence, it is perfectly understandable that two letters exchanged a week or two apart might be supposed to have come after a break of several months, since these long absences are an important part of the plot. The writing of the book seems to have lasted about a year.

Feb. 17

16. Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism [1974] 304 pages

Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism has been on my TBR list forever, at least several decades, and I finally got around to reading it. I wish I had read it much earlier, because it makes a lot of the history and the background of the mediaeval and early modern literature I have been reading lately much clearer. What Anderson gives is a sketch of the economic, social and political development of Europe, from a historical materialist (Marxist) perspective, beginning with the origins of the “slave mode of production” in archaic Greece, through its height in the Roman Empire and the contradictions which led to its final collapse, and the origins, development and eventual crisis of the feudal mode of production which followed. The book was written as a prelude to the much longer study, Lineages of the Absolutist State which I am now beginning.

The book is divided into three parts; the first part is the background in Antiquity, the second part gives a description of what feudalism is and shows how it originated and developed in various parts of the former Roman Empire as a fusion between the dissolving slave mode of production and the primitive agrarian mode of the barbarian invaders, how it developed, why it was initially progressive and why it eventually went into crisis itself, and the third part does the same thing for Eastern Europe beyond the limits of the Roman Empire and shows the differences due to the lack of the classical legacy in those regions. I was impressed by the way he discusses the variations and the reasons for them (and his conceptualization of “social formations”) rather than simply forcing them all into a single scheme.

What I have read previously about pre-capitalist history from a Marxist perspective is very little and very old, and generally by authors who were not professional historians (e.g. Kautsky). I have read somewhat more from non-Marxist historians about Antiquity and the Middle Ages, also mostly old; apart from the classic works of Marx and Engels themselves, I have read only two or three of the books he cites in his footnotes (unfortunately the book has no bibliography.) I knew nothing at all about the eastern regions in the Middle Ages. Some (actually quite a bit) of what he is arguing is controversial in detail (especially the very interesting question of relations between the town and countryside), and he discusses the controversies in his footnotes; clearly I have no basis to judge, but what he says made sense to me.

Feb. 28

17. Alhierd Bacharevič, Alindarka’s Children: Things Will Be Bad [2014, tr. 2020] 325 pages

Alindarka’s Children is the first reading from Belarus in the World Literature group I am in on Goodreads. It is probably significant that the only Belarusian author I had read previously (Svetlana Alexievich) wrote in Russian (although of course I read her in translation) and mainly about Russian or Soviet events. Bacharevič on the other hand is a Belarusian nationalist, writing in Belarusian. The theme of Alindarka’s Children is Belarusian resistance to Russification, especially in language. This is the one thing I can say about it with certainty. Maybe.

The author’s technique is to begin with mysterious events which are only explained later, sometimes much later, so almost everything I can say about it will be “spoilers” to some extent (be warned). My review will probably also be confusing to anyone who hasn’t read it. That’s just the kind of book it is.

It is a very difficult novel to try to classify. First of all, I’m not sure whether to call it magical realism or an out-and-out fantasy. The setting is hard to pin down; a few references suggest the Stalinist era, but mostly it seems to be in the period under current pro-Putin president Aleksandr Lukashenko, or perhaps in a near future, or a close alternative reality that exaggerates the (very real) tendencies of both toward Russification. The multiple story lines and constant reversals of chronology are high modernism, but there is also a postmodernist intertextuality run rampant.

The paranormal brother Avi, who arose spontaneously from a lump of magical clay derived indirectly from a Jewish magician, seems to be a reference to the myths of the golem. “Avi” is short for “Aviator”, but perhaps the nickname, being a Jewish name, is a reference to his origin; except that it is not in the original, where he has a different name, which only sounds like the Belarusian word for pilot. The two children’s wanderings in the forest are full of references to the fairy tales of the Town Musicians of Bremen and Hansel and Gretel, but Avi’s finding of the corpse with the pocket-knife could be an allusion to another story of children without adults, The Lord of the Flies. The title is a reference to the poem “Things Will Be Bad” by the nineteenth-century Belarusian poet Francišak Bahuševič, whose central character is Alindarka. There are quotations from the poem throughout the novel.

The English translation – perhaps it would be more accurate to say adaptation – adds to the complexity. The original book is written in a combination of Belarusian and Russian (in fact mostly in Belarusian, with occasional Russian passages); the translator translates Russian (and actually most of the Belarusian) to English and some of the Belarusian to Scots, so there is in addition to the Belarusian nationalism a layer of Scottish nationalism as well, making the book a discussion of linguistic nationalism in general. The protagonist, the “Faither” of the two children Alicia and Avi, although he shares the antisemitism of the uneducated, has an admiration bordering on adoration for “the Jew”, Eliezer Yitzhak Perlman (later Eliezer Ben-Yehuda), who revived Hebrew, then a dead language, and whose daughter became the first native speaker of Hebrew since the third century BCE; he even has his portrait on the wall of his apartment. Alicia (originally named “Sia”, supposedly for an ancient Egyptian goddess – but this was not her name in the original Belarusian novel either) was likewise raised as a native speaker of “the Leid”, Belarusian or Scots. Russian/English is referred to in contrast as the “Lingo”. This is the starting point, but not the beginning, of the whole novel. Throughout the book there are quotations from Scots poetry, especially Robert Burns, probably substituted for Belarusian poetry in the original, which counterpoint the events of the narrative. Scots words in the text are footnoted and there is a glossary in the back, but neither include the poetry, which is occasionally very opaque.

The plotline of the novel is that Faither and Alicia lived for several years more or less in hiding, to ensure that she grew up speaking the Leid with as little influence of the Lingo as possible. Eventually, thanks to an overzealous teacher who is a psychologist (perhaps more what we would call a guidance counselor), Alicia is taken away from her father along with her “brother” Avi, who suddenly appears for the first time while she is being seized. They are put into a kind of linguistic re-education camp. The origins of the Camp and its Doctor form one of the other story lines. The endnotes tell us that his thoughts are slightly modified from Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The novel begins with them in the Camp. Faither, together with his girl friend, Kenzie (another, less important story line), rescues the children from the Camp, but they escape from them (suggesting that perhaps Alicia wasn’t thoroughly in accord with Faither’s plans for her life) and disappear into the forest. They are using an old atlas to try to go to Bremen to become musicians. The main plotline follows their adventures wandering in the forest, based largely on fairy tales. This alternates with the other storylines, which are largely in flashbacks and provide some backstory.

The last chapter explains much, and there is a surprise ending; but it is ambiguous. Is it a happy ending, or the worst ending possible? The reader has to decide.

This is a very difficult novel, but difficult in a way that is fun to read. It has a fairy-tale, dreamlike logic that isn’t always coherent if you try to analyze it. I’m not sure the decision to use Scots in the English version was a good idea; most readers in Belarus would understand both Belarusian and Russian without any difficulty, but for an English reader the Scots is much more difficult to follow (even for me, and I have read some Scots poetry and have some background in linguistics), and the result is that the book is obscure in a different and less literary, less intended way, and that unsympathetic characters are easier to understand than the protagonists. I saw in one internet review that the French translator considered a similar approach using Breton or Provençal but ultimately decided against it, just using different levels of the language.

In any case, I did enjoy the novel and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys experimental fiction with a political point.

To elaborate somewhat on the ambiguity of the novel with regard to linguistic nationalism, because it made me think more about some of my assumptions (which is the sign of a good book):

The novel shows well the way that a colonialist or imperialist power uses linguistic oppression to disempower the colonized people; the imposition of Russian in Belarus and Ukraine, English in Scotland and Ireland, or Quebec, the suppression by the far right of Spanish in our own Southwest today, the persecution of Native North American languages in the Indian schools and so forth are examples. The colonized people are made to feel inferior because of their language and customs. The Camp is a symbolic treatment of this, while it is also shown in a more realistic fashion elsewhere in the novel.

For this reason, nationalist movements in the oppressed countries often appeal to language as a form of patriotism. Frequently, the winning of independence results in an immediate flourishing of literature in the native language; Belarusian after the fall of the USSR, with its Stalinist Russification policies, is one example; poets and writers like Bacharevič, who was himself brought up speaking Russian, rediscovered Belarusian as a literary language. The renaissance of literature in Catalan after the fall of Franco is another example; and there was a brief flourish of Irish literature after independence from England, and there is some writing in Scots today. This is undoubtedly a good thing. But while Catalan may have revived as a real language, that did not happen with Irish and I seriously doubt it will happen with Scots.

The reason is obvious: a monolingual speaker of Irish or Scots is at a disadvantage with regards to a speaker of a major world language like English. The apartheid regime in South Africa, which liked to pretend that its racial policies were a form of diversity, preserving native culture, mandated that the education of Black South Africans be in the native African languages, the opposite of the usual colonial policies. One of the demands of the uprisings was that Blacks should be educated in English. They understood the trap that their small language enclaves represented, isolating them from the rest of the world. No matter how much effort may be put into translation, they will always be limited to a small subsection of what is available, in the original or in translation, in a world language like English or French (or Russian); and conversely, only a small portion of their own writings will be available to influence people who speak other languages (how much Belarusian literature has been translated into English, compared to Russian literature?).

This is where the ambiguity comes in, especially in the last chapter. As much as we may be outraged at the Camp and the treatment of the Leid, and see Alicia and Faither as victims of Russification, and as much as we would like to see their struggle as heroic resistance, we can’t help but see that there is an element of abusiveness in the way Alicia is forced to be isolated from her schoolmates and pretend to be a mute. She is being deliberately limited in her choices, essentially sacrificed to a political idea. I noted in my review that she and Avi flee from Faither and Kenzie (and do they somehow know, at least Avi in his golem subconscious, that mother is in Bremen?); and in the last chapter she returns with a certain sense of relief to the Camp. Throughout the book, the few allusions to Alicia’s mother suggest that she is dead or locked up because of her use of the Leid in her singing, which appeared to be the origin of Faither’s monomania about the Leid. So it is a shock in the last few pages of the novel when we find her alive, powerful enough to intimidate the Camp officials, wealthy enough to buy airline tickets for herself and Alicia, and living in the West, a complete contrast to the destitute and alcoholic Faither. She says that the episode with the Leid is forgotten, and it is clear that Alicia will learn the Lingo and abandon her “mission” which was imposed by her father. This is the complete defeat of her father’s project for her life – and yet we can’t help but see it as a happy ending for her as an individual, whatever the political implications.

So in the end, what is Bacharevič really trying to tell us?

March 2

18. Ananda Devi, Danser sur les braises suivi de Six décennies [2020] 89 pages [in French]

Danser sur les braises is a collection of prose poems, dedicated to and partly addressed to her mother, written over the nine months following her death. It is concerned mainly with the relationships of the generations. Six décennies is a shorter group of poems in free verse, which could be considered a meditation on aging. As usual, I find it difficult to review contemporary poetry.

March 6

19. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State [1974] 573 pages

Last month I read Anderson’s Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, of which this is a continuation. It is considered one of the best modern Marxist surveys of the period, giving an economic explanation of the historical developments. The book takes us from the crisis of the feudal mode of production and describes the rise of the absolutist states which followed it. Like the previous book, it begins with a general survey and then examines each of the major countries, divided into Western and Eastern Europe, and emphasizes the differences in the history as well as the similarities. There is also a chapter on the “House of Islam”, primarily the Ottoman Empire. I learned a lot from this. The book ends with two “Notes”, one on Japanese feudalism and how it was both similar and different from feudalism in the West, and one, the longest single chapter in the book, on the concept of “the Asiatic mode of production”, which he argues should be abandoned. This is from a theoretical point of view the most interesting part of the book; it also contains a fairly detailed comparison of the Islamic countries with Imperial China.

I would recommend both volumes to anyone with an interest in history.

March 10

20. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art [1769-1790] 254 pages

Sir Joshua Reynolds was the first President of the Royal Academy, and these fifteen discourses were delivered to the students of the Academy at the annual prize-giving ceremonies, between 1769 and 1790. The discourses are mostly about the studies which Reynolds recommends to students, but it also contains a certain theory of the nature of art and criticisms of the artists he recommends or does not recommend for imitation. They were influential in turning the attention of British artists from the Flemish and Dutch schools to the painters of the Italian Renaissance, particularly Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian. Most importantly, they are a last protest of the Enlightenment against the rise of Romanticism, which began earlier in art than in literature or music. Since my temperament has always been more toward the Enlightenment than towards Romanticism, I found much in the discourses that I could agree with, although they also show some of the negative aspects which the Romantics were trying to correct. This is definitely a book that anyone interested in the arts should read.

March 19

21. John Ruskin, Modern Painters v.1 [1843, “new edition” 1872, this ed. 1903] 758 pages [Kindle]

In 1736, the seventeen-year-old John Ruskin wrote an angry letter to the editor of Blackwood’s Magazine, protesting a negative review of some of J.M.W. Turner’s paintings. (Ruskin seems to have been obsessed with Turner’s paintings since he began copying his works when he was thirteen.) It was never sent (it’s included as an appendix to this edition of the book), but over the next seven years Ruskin expanded it into this more than six-hundred page treatise (not counting the editorial matter in the present edition) on “truth in art”, first published anonymously in 1743. It was revised several times; the edition I read from 1903 reprints the last edition supervised by Ruskin (1872), but gives the earlier version texts in footnotes or endnotes to the relevant chapters. Over time, he also added four more volumes.

Written between the ages of seventeen and twenty four, the first edition had all the strengths and all the faults of youth; on the one hand, a freshness and passionate enthusiasm for his subject matter, on the other a tendency to stridency of polemic and dogmatism in his own opinions. Given its origins, it has a near-hagiographic admiration for Turner and is somewhat unfair to everyone else. Subsequent editions toned down the faults somewhat, but Ruskin later more or less repudiated it as it stands and intended to rewrite it completely, which he never did.

The book is very organized; it is divided into Parts, which are subdivided into Sections, which are divided into Chapters, which are divided into numbered subheadings. Part I, Of General Principles, summarizes his theory of art; it is of course entirely representationalist, and actually limited almost entirely (at least in this first volume) to landscape painting. At times, it is obviously a kind of dialogue with the last book I read, Reynold’s Discourses on Art. (Ruskin later as a Professor lectured on the Discourses.)The first chapter is an introduction explaining his reasons for writing it; the second chapter is a very general account of his theory; the third through seventh chapters describe the hierarchy of “ideas” which he considers can be expressed in art: “Of Ideas of Power”, which are essentially the technical merits of execution, and which he considers the least important, although necessary, aspect of art; “Of Ideas of Imitation”, that is “mere imitation” or “illusion or deception” which he considers a lower form of art, and does not treat further except incidentally in contrasting it with the higher idea of truth; “Of Ideas of Truth”, that is imitation of the true nature of the subject, which is still not the highest goal of art, and which will occupy the rest of this first volume; “Of Ideas of Beauty”, which is higher; and “Of Ideas of Relation”, the highest goal, which is essentially the message the artist is intending to express by his painting. These last two ideas are left for later volumes. Section II goes in more depth into Ideas of Power, explaining the major “excellencies” to be looked for in an artist’s technical accomplishment considered without reference to the higher ideas.

Part II is titled “Of Truth”, and makes up most of the volume. Section I consists of two general chapters, four chapters giving a hierarchy of types of truth and which of them he considers more or less important, and a long final chapter applying his theories to specific painters, and explaining why they are all inferior to Turner in all respects. I should mention here his peculiar use of the terms “the ancients” and “the old masters”, by both of which he means neither the art of Classical Antiquity nor the Renaissance masters, but only the landscape painters of the seventeenth century, such as Claude, Nicholas and Gaston Poussin, and his particular bête noir, Salvator Rosa; by “the Moderns” he means the contemporary English landscape artists of the early nineteenth century, and he is always thinking particularly of Turner. Section II is entitled “Of General Truths” and contains chapters on Truth in Tones, in Colour, of Chiaroscuro, and two on Truth in Space (how to suggest distance); all of these have bad examples from the “ancients” and good examples from the “moderns”, mainly of course from Turner.

Section III is about the Truth of Sky, i.e. how to paint clouds (five chapters); Section IV is about the Truth of Earth, or how to paint mountains and hills, and rocks (four chapters); Section V is about the Truth of Water, or how to paint lakes, rivers, waterfalls, and the sea (three chapters); Section VI has one chapter about the Truth of Vegetation, essentially about how to paint trees and foliage, and two chapters of conclusions (one on the Truth of Turner and one on the criticism of art).

In addition to Ruskin’s text, the book I read has a long introduction, copious notes, and an Appendix containing various letters and other texts relevant to the volume.

This was Ruskin’s earliest and most popular work. It is an extremely interesting study, which should be read by anyone interested in the representational art (especially landscape painting) of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, or in the philosophy of art. I plan to continue reading Ruskin chronologically, with volume two, the three volumes of The Stones of Venice, and then the last three volumes of this.

Mar. 22

22. Uladzimir Karatkevich, King Stakh’s Wild Hunt [1964, Eng. tr. 1989] 273 pages [Kindle]

King Stakh’s Wild Hunt is a 1964 novel translated from Belarusian; it was the second book from Belarus for the World Literature group I am in on Goodreads. I downloaded the pdf for free from a site called Knihi-online.com. (The link to the pdf download was labeled in Belarusian (I think), but I took a chance and the pdf turned out to be in English.)

The novel is set in 1888, when Belarus was part of the Russian Empire; when the novel was written, it was a republic within the Soviet Union. The book contains much patriotic praise and description of the countryside, and much about the oppression of the peasantry and the decadence of the nobility not long after the formal abolition of serfdom. It is narrated by the protagonist, Andrei Belaretsky, long after the events, at the age of ninety-six. In 1888, he was a young but already noted ethnographer traveling to a wild part of the country to collect folklore, who finds that an ancient legend has seemingly returned to life.

The legend is the “Wild Hunt” of King Stakh. The “Wild Hunt” is a common theme of folklore throughout Central and Eastern Europe; the Belorussian version associates it with an early fifteenth-century rebellion against the Grand Duchy of Lithuania by a nobleman called “King Stakh”, who is betrayed by Roman Yanovsky, the ancestor of the current owner of the castle where Belaretsky finds himself. Although I believe the “King Stakh” version existed before Karatkevich, I have not been able to find any evidence of a historical King Stakh.

The novel begins in a Romantic style with Belaretsky making his way through a quagmire in a thickly forested region during a wild storm. After a near disaster to his carriage, he finds himself in front of an ancient, almost ruined castle, which turns out to be owned by an seventeen-year-old girl named Nadzeya Yanovsky. Initially, he sees her as much older and very strange, but later he realizes that she is just a girl who is terrified; but of what? He learns that the castle is visited by three supernatural characters, the “Little Green Man”, the “Blue Lady”, and most terrifying of all, the “Wild Hunt.” All three are supposed to be omens of death; the legend of the “Wild Hunt” is that it is lead by the ghost of King Stakh, who has vowed to destroy all Roman’s descendants to the eleventh generation. Nadzeya of course turns out to be the eleventh generation and the last of the Yanovskys, and she is convinced she will die around he eighteenth birthday.

After reading so many novels about the horrors humans inflict on each other, a mere supernatural horror story seemed less disturbing; in fact, the novel turns out after a few chapters not to be a horror story at all, but a detective story as the skeptical Belaretsky, aided by a young revolutionary who is in love with Nadeya and a peasant leader, determines to solve the mystery of the supposed apparitions. This novel, while not the most significant thing I’ve read lately, is undoubtedly one of the most enjoyable, and despite one or two elements of tragedy, it even has a happy ending.

March 30

23. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights [1847] (Norton Critical Ed., 1963) 372 pages
24. Lettis, Richard, and Morris, William E., A Wuthering Heights Handbook [1961] 246 pages

Preparing to read Maryse Condé’s La Migration des Coeurs, a retelling of Wuthering Heights, I decided to re-familiarize myself with Emily Bronte’s classic novel, which I hadn’t read for a half-century. I remembered little about it except for the basic plot, and I am sure back then I didn’t really understand it at anything beyond a simple plot level; certainly I had not read enough other English novels from that time period to realize how different Wuthering Heights actually was. In fact, I don’t think I really liked the book, as far as I can recall. This time around, with a lot more experience, I got somewhat more out of it, especially aided by the critical articles in the back (it was a Norton Critical edition) and another book of critical articles. If it still doesn’t impress me as much as her sister’s Jane Eyre, it is certainly better than, say, anything by Charles Dickens.

With a book that most people have read, either in High School English or in college, there isn’t much point in summarizing the plot, and I’m not enough of a literary expert to give an original interpretation, so I will limit myself to commenting on it by way of the critical material. Between the two books, and taking account of three duplicated articles, there were twenty-five articles. Given that both books were published in the early sixties, there were happily no examples of post-modernist literary theory jargon; most of the articles were helpful, although there were a few that seemed to miss the point of the book entirely.

The three articles that were in both books were C.P. Sanger’s 1926 article on “The Structure of Wuthering Heights”, which worked out the chronology of the events, Carl Woodrings’s “The Narrators of Wuthering Heights”, and one of the two best articles, John K. Matthison’s “Nelly Dean and the Power of Wuthering Heights”, which dared to describe Nelly Dean as a negative character and unreliable narrator, who by her own narrative is constantly lying, spying, and betraying both the children and her employers – my own impression of the book. He makes the good point that our constant disagreement with the narrator forces the reader to actively think about the novel rather than simply reading for the story. Another article went even further: James Hafley’s “The Villain of Wuthering Heights”, which argues that Nelly Dean is actually the Iago of the novel; I think that is a bit too extreme – there are many villains in the book, but Nellie is certainly one of the worst.

The article that I agreed with most (in other words, the one which came closest to my own experience reading the novel), however, was Arnold Kettle’s “Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights (1847)”, a chapter from a two-volume book, An Introduction to the English Novel. Kettle argues that the characters of Heathcliff and Catherine are not some sort of abstract symbols of “storm” and “calm” or “Nature” and “civilization”, or (just) passionately in love in some romantic sense, but are united in a common rebellion against the class-bound conventions of the other characters; that Catherine’s marriage with Edgar is not only a betrayal of her love for Heathcliff but more importantly a betrayal of their common values for the values they had been in unity against. This seems to me to make the most coherent sense out of the whole novel.

There were articles on all the major and minor characters, with one exception: Mr. Earnshaw; which I thought was a curious exception, since he is the “protagonist” of the novel in the literal sense – the character whose decisions initiate the entire action of the book.


April 5

25. John Ruskin, Modern Painters v.2 [1846, this ed. 1903] 457 pages [Kindle]

After reading the first volume, this was an extreme disappointment. Whereas that gave us a concrete description of truth in art based on specific traits of specific paintings, presented in straightforward if sometimes overly poetic and enthusiastic language, this book is completely abstract and written in a very affected language, trying to imitate Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, which is at times almost as incomprehensible in language as it is in content.

Ostensibly, this second volume is a continuation of the first volume; that was divided into two parts, Part I being a general introduction and Part II being on Truth. This volume is Part III, On Beauty, and is divided into two sections. The first section is called the Theoretic Faculty (from the Greek “theoria” meaning mental observation) and is a very schematic theological theory of beauty, itself divided into Typical Beauty (by “typical” he means what mediaeval theologians called “typological”), which considers different aspects of beauty as “types” of the “attributes” of God (infinity, unity, comprehensiveness, justice, etc.), and Vital Beauty, or the appropriateness of things to their supposed “functions”. There is almost nothing concrete here, and he basically suggests (though not in so many words) that no one can be a great artist, or even understand great art, without being an evangelical Protestant.

The second section is a philosophical disquisition on the “faculty” of Imagination. This section is also fairly abstract, but it has somewhat more examples, and ends with a chapter on “exaggeration.”

While the first volume is concerned mainly with landscape painting, this volume deals also with the human figure. Instead of Turner, the examples, to the extant that there is anything concrete at all, are taken from what he refers to as the “religious school” of early Renaissance Italian painting and the Venetian school – the place of Turner is taken by his new enthusiasm, Tintoretto – and he sees the decline from Beauty as beginning with the later works of Raphael.

As with the first one, he later repudiated this volume and at one point resolved publically never to allow it to be reprinted, though he later changed his mind about this and decided that the content was mainly right even if the style was embarrassing. Nevertheless, this kind of Romantic religious theorizing, which really seemed largely nonsense to me, apparently appealed to the early Victorians; the book was an influence not only on later criticism but on artists as well, particularly the English school which called itself the “Pre-Raphaelites.”

The editors of this edition included other material relevant to the volume in a series of Appendices, including an early partial first draft; apparently he would have gone into more depth on the Beauty of Colour, and included a chapter on the Sublime, but the main difference seems to be that it was written in normal English prose. I think the book would have been better if he had just finished with that draft instead of imitating Hooker.

In any event, he waited another ten years before continuing with the third volume, writing other things (most importantly the three volumes of The Stones of Venice), and I will follow his example and read The Stones of Venice before coming back (if I do) to the third, fourth and fifth volumes of Modern Painters.

Maryse Condé, La migration des coeurs [1995] 336 pages [Kindle] [in French]

(There is an English translation by Condé’s husband, called Windward Heights.)

Condé’sLa migration des coeurs is an “homage” (in the words of the author; the publisher’s description calls it a “free variation”) to Wuthering Heights, set on the island of Guadeloupe just before1900 – the explosion of the Maine in Havana Harbor takes place as Rayzé (Creole for “heath”) is returning to L’Engoulvent (Wuthering Heights) – so about a hundred years later than Bronte’s novel, which is set in northern England around 1800.

When I first read Wuthering Heights, some fifty years ago, I read it very superficially, just as a story. When I re-read it last month, I realized that it actually had much more depth, although I admit it is not one of my favorite classic novels. Condé’s novel copies the superficial aspects and leaves out the depth and the mystery. On the other hand, it adds a very different social and political content.

In Wuthering Heights, there are two mysteries connected with Heathcliff: his origins, and the period when he leaves the Heights and returns wealthy. La migration des coeurs, in contrast, begins with the missing period, with Rayzé in Cuba, making his fortune in a Chinese laundry business and trying to become a Santeria sorcerer, thus showing an interest in ghosts before the death of Catherine. (We are told later that Rayzé and Catherine’s favorite place as children was the local cemetery.) There is a particular historical setting: the deaths of José Marti and Antonio Maceo are mentioned, and people are speculating about the reason why the Maine is in the harbor. I thought that perhaps the Spanish American War would play a role in the book, but it never returns to it. To be honest, I was already put off from the novel by these first two chapters. In the third chapter, Rayzé leaves his Cuban mistress and decides to return to Guadeloupe to “get revenge”, although we have no idea for what and the decision just seems as arbitrary to the reader as to his mistress. In fact, much in the novel is not really motivated, relying on the reader’s memory of the older book to accept that things happen the way they do.

On the boat back to Guadeloupe, he encounters by chance coincidence Nellie Raboteuse, fired, as we later learn, by Aimeric de Linsseuil (the Edgar Linton of Bronte’s book) and now working for a poor family elsewhere, and a fellow-passenger asks her who he is. She then launches into the beginning of the story of Wuthering Heights. Her account basically follows the earlier novel, but with differences, some trivial but others major.

While in Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff’s origin is mysterious – his appearance leads to the surmise that he may be a gypsy, but in any case he is something exotic to late eighteenth-century England – in La migration des coeurs, he is described as “a Black or half-Indian”, which is hardly exotic in Guadeloupe, where they are the majority of the population. This is the basic difference between the two novels; where in Wuthering Heights, the conflict is a clash of values between the rebellious Heathcliff and Cathy and the affluent upper-class Lintons, in La migration des coeurs it is recast as essentially racial, between the Black/Indian Rayzé and the de Linsseuil bekés (whites), with the mulatta Catherine torn between them in terms of ethnic rather than moral identity. The relationship of Heathcliff to Catherine, which is the center of the older novel, is far less important in this book; essentially it is just treated as a sort of background, and mainly for its racial aspect. While Heathcliff is always present in the older novel, either in fact or in the minds of the other characters, Rayzé tends to disappear from the narration for long stretches.

From then on, many of the events very loosely follow Wuthering Heights, but the characters of all the persons involved are totally different. While in the older book, Mr. Earnshaw is a gentleman farmer from an old family, although at a lower social level than the Lintons, who is concerned to educate his family and Heathcliff, in Condé’s novel Hubert Gaigneur (French for “earner”) is a coarse mulatto parvenu who is essentially held in contempt by his neighbors, and who, hating education, does not give either Catherine or Heathcliff any education at all. It is Justin (Hindley), an intelligent, forward-thinking intellectual, who after his father’s death (in a horseback accident) insists on giving the “savage” Catherine a proper education (from a live-in nun.) He also repairs L’Engoulvent and turns it from an impoverished sugar plantation into a prosperous model of multi-crop agriculture, with an Indian workforce specially imported from Calcutta. But not to worry; in the next chapter he is the unintelligent drunkard and wastrel of the original novel.

Among other differences, the personalities of Justin-Marie (who should be equivalent to Hareton) and Aymeric/Rayzé II (who should be equivalent to Linton) are exactly reversed. I won’t go into detail about the later developments, to avoid spoilers.

While the original novel is unified by the device of Nellie as narrator (relayed by Lockwood), Condé shifts between dozens of narrators, and often the narration strays from the supposed narrator into an anonymous third-person voice, which causes the book to basically fall apart into confusing and seemingly unrelated episodes with uncertain chronology. (This technique could have worked in the historical novel aspects, if it had been better done, as it is in many of Condé’s novels, but not in the Wuthering Heights plot.) The narrative voice is not consistent even within particular narrators; for example, Justin speaking to Rayzé about Catherine’s marriage (and incidentally telling us at length all about his past and what he thought and felt about everything, which Bronte lets us work out ourselves from the action and dialogue) goes on and on with poetic description of scenery and weather, and anachronistic sociological commentary, totally out of character, but then Condé seems to recollect that it is being spoken by Justin and suddenly we get a barrage of slang, Creole phrases, and foul language (with what I particularly dislike, words replaced by ellipsis marks).

Later on, Rayzé (who, like the original Heathcliff, is supposed to be reserved about anything concerning himself) meets two complete strangers and immediately tells them his entire life-story in detail, from his relationship to Catherine to his studies in Santeria. Of course, he is actually telling the reader. The book is full of this kind of inconsistency of tone and level, and of obvious anachronisms (would Nellie, who has certainly in rural Guadeloupe never seen a “horseless carriage”, really have described someone as “leaving in fourth gear”?)

About two-fifths of the way through the book, Rayzé, for no apparent reason (apart from the needs of the plot), decides to take his family away from L’Engoulvent to one of the larger cities, and the book takes a political turn. The political situation is not shown through the plot, but rather we get out-of-character monologues by various minor characters telling us about the racial history and current conditions on the island. In most cases there is no obvious occasion or audience for these monologues within the novel; they are just addressed to the reader. The actual events as they enter the story of Rayzé and the Linsseuils are unclear and the politics are confused and more superficially dealt with than in her other novels.

My most general impression is that Condé is trying to combine two different sorts of novel within the same book, the homage to Wuthering Heights and a historical novel about Guadeloupe in the period after the abolition of slavery, and perhaps for that reason neither is done well; the two aspects do not coalesce into any coherent whole.

I almost DNF’d this several times, but having liked many of Condé’s novels I persisted, hoping it would improve. It does have some good moments, especially in the second half which completely diverges from Wuthering Heights, and largely abandons the political plot as well, but on the whole it is far below her usual standards.

April 10

27. Bibby, Geoffrey, Looking for Dilmun [1969] 367 pages

Geoofrey Bibby was a British-born archaeologist who led a series of Danish expeditions into the Persian Gulf and the coastal regions of the Arabian Peninsula. This book is an excellent introduction to the archaeology of the region. It is well-written, neither too difficult nor too “popular”, and is careful to separate the facts of the excavations from the historical theories derived from them. It has some description of popular interest about the conditions of the excavations, combined with the archaeological detail of the seals and pottery which date the various layers (by analogy with similar seals and pottery from Mesopotamia), without becoming too technical. The book was written at the same time as the official publication of the archaeology, and probably incorporates as much as possible in a book for the general reader. I think Bibby has managed to strike a good balance.

The first of the expeditions from the University of Aarhus was begun in 1953 to investigate burial mounds on the island of Bahrein, which there is good evidence to identify as part of the “Land of Dilmun” which is mentioned in Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, both in literary tablets as the mythological home of the first humans and of Ziasudra/Utnapishtum, the original version of Noah, and later in many commercial documents as a major trading partner of the Mesopotamian civilization.

A series of expeditions from then up to the time of writing (1968, though a few sentences were added in press in 1969) discovered a city site with seven layers. City I, the earliest level, was dated from the early Sumerian period around 2800 down to around 2300 BCE (i.e. from the legendary time of Gilgamesh down to the time of Sargon of Akkad), with the grave mounds beginning probably from about the middle of that period; City II, apparently continuous with City I, went from that time down to around 1800 (the time of Hammurabi), and a temple of the god Inzak (probably identical with the Sumerian Enki) in the same area dates from that time. After a period of abandonment, the site is occupied again by City III, shown by the pottery to be contemporary with the Kassite period in Babylonia. After another, uncertain but probably longer hiatus, City IV is occupied during the Assyrian period in the eighth century; another hiatus and City V is occupied from about 500 to maybe 200, and there are more grave mounds. Cities VI and VII are basically Islamic and Portuguese forts.

In addition to the work on Bahrain, later years of expeditions extended our knowledge of the “Dilmun” culture north to the island of Falaika off the coast of Kuwait (and another Greek period city, which was identified by inscriptions as the city of Ithakos known from classical writers), while another culture, possibly ancient “Makan” was discovered in Abu Dabu farther south. There were also stone age flints discovered in Qatar, and at the very end of the last expedition mentioned, they discovered Ubaid culture artifacts as well as “Dilmun” culture contemporary with the oldest level in Bahrain at Tahut on the Arabian coast.

There is far too much information in this book to summarize in a brief review. I particularly liked the caution with which Bibby titled the book “looking for Dilmun” rather than “finding Dilmun”; despite the evidence that the finds on Bahrain and Falaika are almost certainly the land of Dilmun he refuses to be more certain than the evidence warrants.

April 15

28. Nicholas Clapp, The Road to Ubar: Finding the Atlantis of the Sands [1998] 342 pages

The Road to Ubar is a complete contrast to the previous book [Bibby’s Looking for Dilmun which I read last week]. Nicholas Clapp is not an archaeologist, but a documentary filmmaker; his wife, Kay, is a probation officer. After a trip to Muscat, they were looking for an excuse to return to Arabia, and fixed on the idea of looking for the legendary lost city of Ubar. After some research (mostly in ancient and mediaeval sources, including the Thousand Nights and a Night), Clapp concluded(mainly through wishful thinking) that Ubar (or Wabar), the Quranic Irem, and Claudius Ptolemy’s Omanum Emporium referred to the same place, somewhere in the Rub’ al Khali (the Arabian desert or “Empty Quarter”). He recruited a team of other explorers, including polar adventurer Sir Ranulf Fiennes, a JPL satellite expert, Ron Blom, and a few others. The self-image of most of the team was not as archaeologists but as explorer-adventurers in the tradition of Wendell Phillips, Lawrence of Arabia, and Bertram Thomas, whose adventures in Arabia were one of his main “sources”. They managed to get funding and permission from the Sultan to explore for the lost city. They also recruited one real archaeologist, Juris Zarins.

The first third of the book is taken up with myths, legends, fiction and even records of his own daydreams, as well as searching radar maps from the shuttle Challenger and various satellites, and of course the quest for funding and so forth. The second third is about the actual expedition in 1990. They spent a few days looking for Ubar in the desert, gave up after finding nothing and returned to the oasis and modern town of Shisur. While there, Zarins noticed that the fifteenth-century fort there, on the rim of a large sinkhole, seemed to have been re-built on top of an older fort. Immediately, Clapp decided that they had after all “found” Ubar.

He gives four reasons for the identification, although he never seems to have doubted it. First, location. It was in the right place. Except of course that it wasn’t; the legends all put Ubar where they originally looked for it, deep in the heart of the Rub’ al Khalit. Shisur is just outside the Rub’ al Khalit. Secondly, it was the right age. This was before the excavation had even been dated (and we’re never told exactly how it was dated, as opposed to the detailed accounts of pottery and so forth in Bibby’s book.), while the legends of course don’t date Ubar or Irem at all. Thirdly, it had the right “characteristics”; Irem is described as “many-columned” and the Shisur ruins had many towers (he tells us that the word translated as “columned” could actually refer to any tall structure.) Of course, the legends also claim that Ubar and Irem were cities full of gold and precious stones and all the paraphernalia of fantasy, nothing of which was ever found at Shisur; in fact it turned out not even to be a city as the word is usually understood. Finally, it was spectacularly destroyed by falling into the sinkhole, which agrees with one of the many accounts of Ubar’s destruction (it sank into the sands).

Zarins began excavating the north rim of the sinkhole and found a wall with several towers. He and some of his students would return for four seasons of digging. The story of the excavations was the only more or less worthwhile part of the book; it takes up at most about thirty pages. What they actually found was a fortified oasis, a watering-hole for frankincense-bearing camel caravans before entering the desert route north toward Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean. As it turns out (and the book never mentions) it was one of several such stations along the incense route. Certainly, it was worth excavating, but not a really important site, without the hype about Ubar. Another thing the book never happens to tell us (but is easy to discover in about five minutes of Internet research) is that Zarins himself, the only actual archaeologist of the group and the one who did the actual excavation, does not consider it to be Ubar. This to me is particularly significant, since Zarins’s own reputation would be much higher as the excavator of legendary Ubar than as the excavator of a fortified water-hole.

In the third part, Clapp gives us a highly speculative and in places actually fictional narrative of what he considers the history of “Ubar”. In all, the subtitle, "finding the Atlantis of the sands" (and Fiennes also wrote a book about the expedition called The Atlantis of the Sands, claiming credit for the whole expedition) seems to be unconsciously ironic; like Atlantis, Ubar is probably a completely legendary place, which attracts over-imaginative people to "search" for it.

As I said above, the only part of this I would consider worth reading is the thirty pages or so about the actual excavation, and even that only because there is so little popular writing on Arabian archaeology.

April 18

29. Harriet Crawford and Michael Rice, edd., Traces of Paradise: The Archaeology of Bahrain 2500 BC-300 AD [2000] 223 pages

After finishing Bibby’s Looking for Dilmun last week, as always when I read an older book of archaeology or any other science in which progress is still being made, I wondered what new discoveries had been made in the fifty years since it was written. When I saw the title of this book, I naturally thought it would be a book about the archaeology of Bahrain thirty years farther along, but that’s not exactly what it is. It is actually the annotated illustrations of an exhibit which was held in London in 2000 of artifacts from the National Museum in Bahrain. Nevertheless, it is a very good book and the introductions and captions do give some idea of what has been found since the time of the Danish expeditions.

The first thing to note is just that there is a National Museum in Bahrain, and a Directorate of Antiquities, both developments that Bibby was hoping for at the time of the first expedition. As far as the archaeology goes, in the eighties and nineties there were a series of new expeditions, especially by the French, which further excavated the settlement which Bibby and Glob had begun to dig in the sixties; they also excavated a smaller settlement called Saar. Archaeologists from Bahrain itself have done much work in the necropoleis. There have also been additional excavations in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and other parts of the mainland, which have given the work in Bahrain more context.

The book consists mainly in over 360 color photographs of artifacts, many half or full page, as well as other photographs and maps, compared to a handful of black and white photos and line drawings in the Bibby book (which was actually quite good for a 1960s era paperback); I would recommend reading the two together, Bibby for the account of the excavation and this book for the illustrations and some updated information.

April 22

30. Richard W. Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel [1975] 327 pages

“Traditional wisdom holds the wheel to be one of mankind’s cleverest inventions, and the camel to be one of God’s clumsiest . . .”

Richard W. Bulliet, a historian of the Islamic period, sets out in this book to resolve a paradox that most people aren’t even aware of: after thousands of years using the wheel, sometime in the fourth or fifth century (in any case, well before the rise of Islam) wheeled vehicles entirely disappear from North Africa to the border of India, not to return until the incursions of Western imperialism in the nineteenth century (and not fully until the invention of the truck.)

The first chapter of the book documents this claim and offers a solution: the use of the camel as a pack animal was just economically more advantageous than any possible animal-drawn vehicle of the time, in any area where the camel was widely available and suitable to the climate. The remainder of the book explores related questions: why were wheeled vehicles replaced when they were, rather than much earlier or much later; why was the replacement so total, rather than wheeled vehicles and camels coexisting for different purposes; why did replacement not take place in India and Central Asia, in the range of the Bactrian (two-humped) camel, etc.

In the course of discussing these questions, Bulliet gives a fairly comprehensive account of the first domestication of the dromedary (one-humped) camel in Southern Arabia, the evolution of various types of saddles, the use of camel caravans in the incense trade, the spread of the camel north into Northern Arabia, Northern Africa, Mesopotamia and Iran, the relations between the nomads and settled areas in different times and places, the differences between the dromedary and the Bactrian camel, the effects of the rise and spread of Islam on camel distribution, and many other topics.

He explicitly insists that the cultural attitudes, religious and otherwise, towards camels and wheeled vehicles were derived from the material, economic realities rather than the other way around. One of the most interesting chapters details the differences in city planning between wheeled and non-wheeled societies.

April 23

31. Ruodlieb, der älteste Roman des Mittelalters [mid-eleventh century; Seiler ed., 1882] 349 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in Latin and German]

To be honest, judging by what little is extant, and what little of that little I have actually read, the eleventh century was not a highpoint of European literature. Ruodlieb may have been one of the best Latin poems of the time. It is hard to tell, because it is mostly lost; some twenty-one fragments have been discovered, used as binding material for later books, and even these have much of the text cut away or illegible. They are parts of two manuscripts; one is full of changes and corrections and was probably the author’s rough draft; the other, only two fragments from another library, are from a more finished copy. The poem is usually considered to have been left unfinished. What we make of it is very dependent on how the editors arrange the surviving leaves and “complete” the cut away lines.

The edition I read from Open Library is the first critical edition edited by Friedrich Seiler, with a 200-page introduction and notes in German, and a glossary of the more unusual words or meanings, published in 1882; after I finished it, in looking for some details on the Internet, I discovered that there is a freely downloadable recent edition (Edwin H. Zeydel, ed., Ruodlieb, The Earliest Courtly Novel (after 1050), 1959) with an introduction and translation into English. This would have been quite useful to me; although the language of the poem is simpler than most other surviving poetry of the eleventh century, it is a much more difficult sort of Latin than the tenth-century works I read last year (e.g. the Waltharius and the works of Hrotsvitha). I will probably read at least the introduction to Zeydel’s version; skimming through the text and translation, it seems that his guesses as to the missing words are often quite different from Seiler’s.

The author of the poem is unknown; Seiler disposed of some earlier guesses, and modern scholars haven’t made any progress since. It is probable that he was a monk at the abbey of Tegernsee, where the manuscript may have remained, although even this is not absolutely certain. The first editors (including Jacob Grimm) dated the poem (rough draft) to the late tenth century, Seiler to around 1030, and Zeydel and most recent scholars to sometime after 1050. The finished fragments were probably recopied about ten years after it was written.

The subtitles to both editions call it the first romance or courtly novel; actually, it combines features of both epic and romance. Seiler’s introduction gives analogues/possible sources for much of the material, but the anonymous author has combined and expanded his sources in a very original way, and also includes much realistic description based on the actual life of his time, including peasant life which is seldom included in any kind of mediaeval literature, which makes it a very important document independently of its literary value. In any case it is a precursor of the romance form which arose in the twelfth century in the vernacular languages, although it may not have actually been known or had any influence on them (it was written in Germany and the earliest romances of the next century are in Old French, and no existing source mentions or quotes it.)

The plot as far as we can figure it out begins with the hero Ruodlieb, unappreciated in his own country and with many enemies, setting out for a neighboring kingdom (called “Africa”, although it is obviously based on Bavaria) to try his luck. He is hired as a hunter and warrior and becomes a favorite of the king. There is a war between the “major” king and a neighboring “minor” king, which ends with a reconciliation and gift-giving, based according to Seiler on an actual event in 1023.

He then receives a letter, which he gets a cleric to read to him; the cleric makes out the gist of the letter (a realistic detail, the laity is completely illiterate and the clergy reads with some difficulty.) The letter is from his mother, and reports that his enemies are all dead or mutilated and it is safe for him to return. He takes his leave of the king, who gives him the choice of a material reward for his long service or good advice. He chooses the advice and the king takes him aside and gives him twelve precepts. The remainder of the poem is presumably based on his following or not following each of the twelve precepts, although only four or five are illustrated in the surviving fragments.

He makes his way home after some adventures, and then starts on a new adventure to find a wife. This is the point at which the poem breaks off.

April 27

32. Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories [1859-1895] 304 pages [Eng. tr.]

Leo Tolstoy is one of the greatest writers in the nineteenth-century Realist tradition. He was also the creator of a very confused theory of Christian anarchism. This Signet paperback had four of his best-known stories (actually more or less novellas) in English translation (unfortunately I have never managed to learn Russian.)

Family Happiness is one of his earlier stories, about a failed relationship between an older man and a young woman who misunderstand each other’s values. The Death of Ivan Ilych is the best of his stories I have read; it describes the death of a judge who has devoted his life to ambition and doing what is expected of him, but realizes at the end that it has been at the cost of his never having really lived the way he should have. The Kreutzer Sonata is his most famous story, or at any rate the one which was the most controversial when it was written. I did not like it as much, and I think it exhibits all the contradictions in his thought; on the one hand, he understands that the institution of marriage as it existed in the Russia of his time was oppressive, and has some very modern sounding criticisms of the “meat market” and using women as mere sex objects, but on the other he has an Christian ascetic opposition to sex which causes him to misunderstand the causes, and of course none of his stories have any usable solutions. Master and Man deals with the relationship between a landlord and one of his workers; it is a great story artistically but reduces the problem to one of Christian altruism.

April 28

33. Karel Čapek, War with the Newts [1936. Eng. tr. 1937] 241 pages

War with the Newts is a literary, comic and satirical science fiction novel, written in Czechoslovakia. It satirizes capitalism, colonialism, war, and nationalism as well as other aspects of political and everyday life. Written in the thirties, it satirizes fascism and naziism as well as the Western “democracies”.

The premise is that a small remnant population of nearly human-size marine salamanders is discovered off the coast of an island near Sumatra in Indonesia by a ship looking for new resource-areas for pearl-fishing. These “newts”, who appear to be relatively intelligent, trade pearls for knives to defend themselves against their only natural enemies, sharks. They are transported to various other islands to harvest pearls, and without any natural enemies they reproduce quickly. As a result of economic considerations, they are soon used as slave labor around the world for underwater construction. Eventually, with access to human technology, they rebel and begin a war against their human masters.

This is a real classic, which anyone should read whether or not they are interested in science fiction as a genre. I re-read this for a group on Goodreads.

April 30

34. Alain Chartier, La Belle Dame sans mercy [1424 or 1426, ed. Charpennes, 1901] 101 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in Middle French]

Alain Chartier’s La Belle Dame sans mercy is one of the best-known poems of the late Middle Ages in France. It gave rise to a number of continuations and replies (referred to collectively as the Querelle de La Belle Dame sans mercy) and remained popular longer than most other poetry of the period; along with the Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s massive Roman de la Rose it was read up until the Renaissance reached France. Chartier’s poem is much shorter, about fifty pages in the edition I read. (The first half of the book is an introduction by the editor, Lucien Charpennes,, which discusses the poet’s life, arguing that after having been a high official of the King for a time he was in disgrace up until about the time this was written – something that I have not seen any evidence for in anything else I have read about him; he was of course in exile with the court of the Dauphin during the war with Henry V and Burgundy – and his other works, both poetry and prose in both Latin and French.)

After a short prologue, the poem is a debate between a lover and his maistresse; his part of the debate is a fairly normal example of courtly love poetry, similar to what I read last month by Guillaume de Machaut, professing his service to the lady, but hers is quite outside the norm for mediaeval poetry. She basically considers this rather pathetic lover to just be annoying, and tells him essentially to get over her, she doesn’t believe his verbal claims and in any case doesn’t recognize his service as obliging her in any way. Charpennes describes the poem as “feminist”.

The book also includes the Excusation, Chartier’s defense of the poem which hardly seems convincing or even sincerely meant.

May 4

35. Dominique Locas, Franchise et franchise dans La Belle Dame sans Mercy ou l’endroit et l’envers de la Rose [2006] 125 pages [Kindle] [in French]

In looking for Chartier’s La Belle Dame sans mercy online last week, I happened to find this Université de Québec à Chicoutimi Master’s thesis which interprets the poem in comparison with the Roman de la Rose. As often with this sort of academic document, it was more useful for the discussion of the recent literature about the poem than for the author’s own peculiar reading of it.

Honestly, I could not imagine anyone naturally understanding it the way this author does, particularly the claim that the narrator’s maistresse betrayed him rather than actually having died. The comparison with the Rose was interesting, although I think it is a mistake to simply assume that because a passage alludes to the earlier poem, it must be saying the same thing, rather than for example implicitly criticizing it. Certainly later poems in the “querelle” took it as a reply to the viewpoint of the Rose. The discussion of Chartier’s own Complainte contre la Mort makes the opposite error, assuming that Chartier means completely different things by the same language.

There was also discussion of other ancient and mediaeval literature, including Boethius, Chrétien de Troyes, andLes Éschecs d’Amours (the last I haven’t read and will add to my TBR for the next time I make a pass through the fifteenth century). Locas considers the Dame to be the villain of the poem and considers the “feminist” reading to be anachronistic, but considering that Chartier was contemporary with Christine de Pizan, who was certainly a feminist, and that there were explicitly feminist responses in the fourteenth century itself, I’m not so sure. If the poem was a conservative affirmation of traditional values, it is hard to see why it was so controversial

May 10

36. Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul et Virginie [1788] [in French]

While Paul et Virginie is somewhat important in the history of eighteenth-century French literature, which I am beginning to read (trying to fill in my gaps), I have to admit that I didn’t like it at all. It is a proto-Romantic novel based on a Rousseauean opposition of Nature (and sentimental religion) to Society. The protagonists are two young people who grow up together in an isolated, “natural” community on the Isle de France (what is now Mauritius) with their single mothers and their slaves, a few goats and a faithful dog. There is also a neighbor who is the narrator of the events, many years later, to a casual tourist on the island.

There are only three actual events in the book: when the two children return a runaway slave to her master and ask him to “forgive” her for running away; when Virginie leaves the island to visit her rich aunt in France, and when she drowns in a shipwreck on her return. The majority of the book is pious sermonizing by the narrator, especially at the end.

The book condemns greed and class prejudice, although in a rather vague way, but offers no alternative except to live alone in a tropical paradise with your slaves to do all the work. Although the book advocates treating your slaves humanely, it takes slavery for granted as part of Nature rather than Society. To be honest, I found it really boring.

Bernardin published a deluxe edition by subscription in 1803, with a “Preamble” almost half the length of the novel, which is partly a self-pitying autobiography and partly a presentation of his bizarre theories of geology and astronomy which he claims refute Newton’s idea of gravity. This is also printed in the Flammarion paperback edition which I read.

May 13

37. Arvède Barine, Bernardin de St. Pierre [1893] 209 pages [Eng. tr.]

A few years ago, I decided to start reading eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature starting with Blake, but I immediately pushed it back to Voltaire, and then to the seventeenth-century, and then to the sixteenth, and occasionally back to the fifteenth – my usual infinite regress. As of now, I have at least two or three years left for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so I decided to split the two projects and start the eighteenth century as a separate project again: Paul et Virginie, a couple by the Marquis de Sade, Phyllis Wheatley, and then finally to start Blake as I intended so long ago, then, if I don’t add anything else (which I know I will) Robert Burns, Mme. de Stael, and on to the nineteenth century with Wordsworth and the other Romantic poets.

In any case, I read Paul et Virginie Monday, and I decided to read this short biography of the author which I had sitting in my garage. It is an old book from 1893 and some of the ideas are somewhat outdated, though not as much as Bernardin’s own. What I got from this was that Bernardin was basically a stubborn and unlikeable person who throughout his life quarreled with nearly everyone he came in contact with (I had already guessed this from the Preamble he wrote to Paul et Virginie ). The chapter on his Études de nature was the longest in the book and provided some understanding of his pseudo-scientific theories (he essentially began from the premise that the world was created for the happiness of man, and explained everything by final causes; his views on volcanoes and the tides for example were devised to make them fit the idea of human happiness.) The most interesting of course was the chapter on Paul et Virginie, which explained what he intended by it (to demonstrate that living in “nature” results in happiness, while reason and knowledge lead to unhappiness – he was a disciple and personal friend of Rousseau), which made it appeal to the religious sentimentalists of his time, and why it is considered important in French literature (it was the first novel to use detailed observation and description of landscape and flora and fauna, which influenced the later Romantic writers.)

This would be a good introduction to Paul et Virginie, except that it is long out of print and probably unavailable outside my garage.

May 17

38. Gally, Michèle, and Basso, Hélène, edd., Être poète au temps de Charles d’Orléans (XVe siècle) [2012] 295 pages

This is a collection of eleven articles by different authors, together with an Introduction and Postface, dealing with different aspects of the poetry of Charles d’Orléans and his contemporaries (e.g. François Villon and Michault Taillevent).

May 18

39. Articles on Mediaeval Literature (25 articles, approx. 500 pages)

Every so often because some work I have read is particularly interesting or particularly difficult, I download some secondary articles and call it a “book” if there are enough pages. Unfortunately, our state library no longer offers access to Ebsco’s Academic Source Premier (it has been replaced by Gale’s OneFile, which is hardly a real substitute, and oddly, according to what I’ve read on the Internet, is actually more expensive), but on the other hand I have discovered openedition.org which has journals and university press books (mostly from French or Francophone publishers) available for free. You win some and lose some. Over the past few months I have read poetry by Gauthier de Coinci and Rutebeuf (13th cent.), Guillaume de Machaut (14th cent.), and Alain Chartier and Charles d’Orleans (15th cent.) and have read these articles.

[ Gauthier de Coinci ]

Colombani, Dominique, La chute et la modification: le renversement diabolique chez Gauthier de Coinci (in Le diable au Moyen Âge, Sénefiance 6, 1979) 22 pages — Discusses the role of the devil in the Miracles de Notre Dame. He is a power of reversal, of inversion or perversion of the will of God and the character of the saints. This is demonstrated with many quotations.

[Rutebeuf]

Combarieu, Micheline de, Le diable dans le “Comment Theophilus vint à penitance” de Gauthier de Coinci et dans le “Miracle de Theophile” de Rutebeuf (in Le diable au Moyen Âge, Sénefiance 6, 1979) 29 pages — Compares the treatment of the devil in the two works. Leaving aside differences due to the form (narrative poem vs. play), the author sums up the difference as, Gauthier’s devil is a force, Rutebeuf’s is a person.

Barre, Aurélie, Le renard de Rutebeuf (Cahiers de recherches médiévales, 14, 2007) 14 pages — Argues that Rutebeuf’s “Renart le Bestourné” is responsible for the transformation of the character of Renard the Fox from the trickster-hero of the Roman de Renart to the later allegorical representation of hypocrisy. Discusses the poem in connection with other poems of Rutebeuf on the subject of hypocrisy and the friars, and the tradition of Renard before and after Rutebeuf.

Sung-Wook Moon, Les mouches blanches, qui piquent-elles? Rutebeuf sous la neige avec les Ribauds de Grève (Questes, 34, 2016) 30 pages —Discusses the poem Ribauds de Grève in relation to Rutebeufs other poems and as an example of dramatic poetry.

Sung-Wook Moon, Rutebeuf ou la fabrique d’une poésie de résistance dans la crise universitaire (1254-1259) (Questes, 39, 2018) 31 pages — Discusses various issues connected with Rutebeuf’s interventions in the university crisis and how he generalizes his critique into a condemnation of hypocrisy in the church and society.

Gros, Gérard, Le Miracle de Théophile de Rutebeuf et la prière du clerc (Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes, 36, 2018) 19 pages — Discusses Theophile’s confession and prayer with particular reference to their verse forms.


[Guillaume de Machaut]

Calin, William, La Fonteinne Amoureuse de Machaut: son or, ses oeuvres-d’art, ses mises en abyme (Senefiance, 12, 1983) — Discusses how allusions to material wealth function within the poem.

Drobinsky, Julia, Effets de miroir dans La Fontaine amoureuse de Guillaume de Machaut: Texte et iconographie (in Pomel, Fabienne, Miroirs et jeux de miroirs dans la littérature médiévale, 2003) 18 pages — Argues that the fountaine plays the role of a mirror, and that the poet and the nobleman are doubles of one another. Discusses various symmetries in the poem, especially with regard to the illustrations to the manuscripts.

Heinrichs, Katherine, The language of love: overstatement and ironic humor in Machaut’s Voir Dit (Philological Quarterly, 73, 1, 1994) — Argues that the Voir Dit is intended as a comic treatment of an elderly lover’s attempt to ignore the evidence of his young maistresse’s infidelity.

McGrady, Deborah, Le Voir dit: résponse à l’Ovide moralisé? (CRM, 9, 2002) — Discusses the use of the Ovide Moralise in the Voir Dit, especially the fable of the Crow and the Raven, and Machaut’s conception of the relationship of truth to fiction.

Fasseur, Valérie, “Nes qu’on porroit espuissier la grant mer. . .”: autour d’un vers du Voir Dit (Senefiance 52, 2006) — In fact not just about this one verse, but discusses the “adynaton” theme generally in the poem, and its possibly ironic development.

Huot, Sylvia, Reading the lies of poets: the literal and the allegorical in Machaut’s Fonteinne amoureuse (Philological Quarterly, 85, 1-2, 2006) 25 pages — Discusses Machaut’s poem as an example of what the fourteenth century understood by poetry, with reference to Evrard’s treatise from the end of the century. As in McGrady’s article, there is a discussion of Machaut’s use of the Ovid Moralise and the relationship of truth to fiction.

Duhamel, Pascale, Le Livre dou Voir Dit de Guillaume de Machaut et la transition de la tradition orale vers la tradition écrite en musique (CRMH, 26, 2013) — Discusses the question of whether musical notation was used in the composition and transmission of music in the late middle ages, or whether it was simply used to record music which had already been composed and learned and performed by memory. Shows that in the Voir Dit newly composed written music is exchanged and learned from the noted partitions without any personal contact.


[Alain Chartier]

Urdékian-Gassier, Nathalie, Déconstruction de La Belle Dame sans mercy dans le ms. Regina Latina 1363 (Babel, 16, 2007) 30 pages — Discusses the continuations and imitations of the poem. Attempts to explain the particular selection made by whoever put together this ms. and why they adopted an order which does not correspond to the chronological or logical order of the texts. Proposes that the criterion was to include only poems in which la Belle Dame was not actually present.

Midoriko Kageyama, La défiance dans La Belle Dame sans mercy d’Alain Chartier (Questes, 23, 2012) — A close reading of the poem as a combat of two persons who do not believe one another.

Delale, Sarah, Qui ne dit mot consent: autorité des grands noms et poide communautire dans la querelle de la Belle Dame sans mercy (Littérales, 51, 2024) — A very interesting article which discusses fourteenth-century feminist responses to the literature around the poem.


[Charles d’Orléans]

Planche, Alice, Charles d’Orléans: l’exclusion et ses métaphores (Senefiance, 5, 1978) 18 pages — Discusses the allusions to imprisonment as metaphor in Charles’ poetry.

Planche, Alice, Approches de la conscience de soi dans l’ouevre de Charles d’Orléans (Senefiance, 7, 1979) 15 pages — Argues that the poetry of Charles d’Orléans is among the first to show consciousness of the self in the sense of subjectivity. She discusses this as part of a process that begins with philosophers like Alain de Lisle and William of Ockham. (It reminded me of the claim of Gerald Galgan that subjectivity begins with Thomas Aquinas, although she is undoubtedly more correct in connecting it with the Ockhamites; however, personally I think that the philosophy and literature is more a reflection of changes connected with the rise of urban culture in the West for the first time since antiquity.) She also discusses the relationship of language and subjectivity in Charles’ poetry.

Planche, Alice, La Babel intérieure (CRM, 11, 2004) 6 pages — Discusses the metaphor of translation in the poems of Charles d’Orl;éans

Cristina Noacco, La surface métaphorique de la mer dans le Livre de pensée de Charles d’Orléans (Senefiance,51, 2006) 11 pages — Discusses metaphors of ships and navigation in the poetry of Charles d’Orléans.

Vigneron, Fleur, “L’omme esgaré qui ne scet ou il va”: l’errance mentale chez Charles d’Orléans et les poètes de son temps (in Bouloumié, Arlette, ed., Errance et marginalité dans la littérature, 2007) 14 pages — Discusses the image of the forest in the poetry of Charles and his contemporaries.

Haley, Gabriel, Charles d’Orléans as Vernacular Theologian (CRMH, 29, 2015) 27 pages — Discusses the English poetry of Charles, as an unsuccessful attempt to use contemplative religious themes to create a new form of secular lyric not tied to courtly love poetry.

Sieffert, Matthias, Les “chançons” de Charles d’Orléans (CRMH, 34, 2017) 20 pages — Discusses the meaning of the word “Chançon” in Charles’
work and the reason why there is blank space at the top of the manuscript O above the poems.

Mühlethaler, Jean-Claude, Jeux de pistes: reflets d’auteurs dans le manuscrit français 19139 (CRMH, 36, 2018) 22 pages — Discusses the MS français 19139 and what it tells us about how the late middle ages viewed authorship.

Barbaccia, Holly, Charles d’Orléans’s “Fowle Langage” (Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 63, 3, 2021) 20 pages — Discusses Charles’ mentions of birds in his poems.

May 19

40. Jean Molinet, La Ressource du Petit Peuple [after mai 1481] 25 pages

Jean Molinet (1435-1507) was a poet in the service of Charles Duke of Burgundy; this work is essentially an argument for supporting the Burgundians as the “peace party”. It includes a number of short poems in an allegorical prose framework. The allegory describes a personified Justice and her infant, the Small People (i.e. the non-nobles), who have been beaten and starved by personifications of various disasters under the command of Tyranny. Her sister, Truth, finds her and attacks the warring nobles in a poem which is often reprinted as the Discours de Verité, and is a stirring description of the woes of the common people at the end of the Middle Ages. Then Counsel takes up the poetry, along with Justice, and the poem ends with a eulogy of the Burgundian Power which will allegedly make peace and restore justice and prosperity for the people (rather questionable, to say the least.) The poetry is very artificial and involves long lists of terms.

May 20

41. Tadeusz Różewicz, Sobbing Superpower: Selected Poems of Tadeusz Różewicz [2011] [Eng. tr.] 364 pages [Kindle, Open Library]

Sobbing Superpower is a translation from Polish of 125 poems from twenty-six collections. The poems were written between 1945 and 2008. I wish I were better at reviewing contemporary poetry; these are among the best I have read in the last few years. The language is simple and direct; the poetry is of course filled with imagery, but not the kind that needs to be decoded to be understood. The earliest poems deal with the Second World War and the Holocaust; later he turns toward satirizing consumerism, and the last poems contain more literary and personal allusions, which are all either obvious or explained in the abundant notes at the end of the volume. I'm not sure why the title was chosen as the poem of that name was not one of the best, in my opinion.

May 25

42. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice: v.1. The Foundations [1851] 403 pages

The first of Ruskin’s three volumes on the architecture of Venice, this is a basic introduction to architecture in stone and brick with particular reference to Mediaeval architecture (the so-called Gothic style). The first half (after an introduction which is basically an attack on the Renaissance and the Catholic Church) describes the constructional principles, beginning at the base and going up through shafts, the wall, the cornice and the roof, then dealing with arches and apertures (doors and windows). The second half describes principles of ornamentation in the same order.

Ruskin has the merit of being one of the first critics to appreciate the art and architecture of the Middle Ages; in that respect he is the antipode of Vasari, my first reading in my art history project, who repudiates the entire period from the end of the Roman Empire to Cimabue and Giotti. On the other hand, he is one of those people who is temperamentally incapable of acknowledging more than one way as “right”, so he can only praise the Gothic style by repudiating the Renaissance and all later architecture and art (before Turner, of course.) For him, Cimabue and Giotti are not the beginning of the Renaissance but the final gasp of the Middle Ages before the Decline.

Ruskin is obnoxiously Christian and fanatically Protestant; again, there is only one way. He devotes part of his introductory chapter to a screed against Parliament for having recently allowed some civil rights to Catholics in England; he asks what would happen if that were applied to Ireland, and laments that the government lacks the moral courage to deport the majority of the population of Ireland (he doesn’t say where to) and replace them by “hard-working Protestants”. Throughout the book he brings in arguments from religion at the most unlikely places, and clearly as in the second volume of Modern Painters he bases his aesthetic preferences on religious considerations. He sees the Church of the Middle Ages as a composition of Protestant tendencies (responsible for what is good in Gothic art) and Papist tendencies (responsible for whatever is rigid or formalistic), and dates the decline of art to the separation of the two at the Reformation, when the Papists (or as he also calls them, the “Heathen Popes”) came to dominate art at the Renaissance.

Leaving aside the Renaissance and Catholic-bashing, and some of the value judgements, the book seems to be a good introduction to the principles of Gothic architecture, at least in its Italian incarnation, to the extent that I can judge (I have only read one other book on Gothic art, and that was about fifty years ago.) I learned a lot from it.

May 30

43. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice: v.2. The Sea Stories [1853; 3rd ed. 1874] 397 pages

In this second volume, Ruskin turns to the architecture of Venice. After a sort of prologue dealing with the churches of Torcello and Murano, he divides the book into two parts. The first part deals with the Byzantine (Romanesque) architecture of the early Middle Ages; it begins with a long general essay on the nature of Byzantine architecture and then proceeds to the examples, St. Marks cathedral and what little ruins remain of the domestic architecture. The second and longer part begins with another long essay on the nature of Gothic architecture and then deals with the domestic architecture and a long chapter on the Ducal Palace.

Ignoring as usual the religious polemics, the book is a good introduction to Romanesque and Gothic architecture.

June 2

44. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice: v.3. The Fall [1853; last ed. 1886] 489 pages

I learned much from the first two volumes of The Stones of Venice, but nothing from this third volume. Ruskin has decided to spare the reader the details or any illustrations of a style he considers “vile” and “immoral”, that is to say the Renaissance, and instead edify us with his opinions on religion, with digressions on education and various other subjects having little if any connection with architecture or Venice. If I hadn’t invested the time to read the first two volumes, I probably wouldn’t have finished this one.

The text is divided into four chapters. The first chapter, entitled “The Early Renaissance”, tells us that the Late Gothic style degenerated into over-ornamentation and as a reaction the architects returned to an imitation of the earlier Byzantine style. I don’t mean to say he describes this or elaborates on it; the previous sentence is all the architectural content of the chapter, the rest is just religion. The second chapter is entitled “The Roman Renaissance”, in which the architects imitate “pagan” architecture; again no actual description. The third chapter is called “The Grotesque Renaissance”, in which the Renaissance style itself degenerates. The only architectural feature mentioned is a single ugly head which he gives as an illustration; the rest is a general theory of the “grotesque” with no reference to actual examples. The fourth chapter is called “Conclusion” and is just a miscellaneous rehashing of the religious discussion of the first three chapters and an argument that modern architecture is entirely bad and should be replaced by a return to the Gothic. In the later edition, he adds a fifth chapter called “Castel-Franco” after a painting by Tintoretto which is mentioned in two or three sentences; this is basically another miscellaneous chapter with the same content as the “Conclusion”.

If this seems like I am exaggerating, I will quote from his own description of what The Stones of Venice is about:

“The advent of Christianity for the first time rendered possible the full development of the soul of man, and therefore the full development of the arts of man.
“Christianity gave birth to a new architecture, not only immeasurably superior to all that had preceded it, but demonstrably the best architecture that can exist; perfect in construction and decoration, and fit for the practice of all time.
“This architecture, commonly called “Gothic”, though in conception perfect, like the theory of a Christian character, never reached an actual perfection, having been retarded and corrupted by various adverse influences; but it reached its highest perfection, hitherto manifested, about the close of the thirteenth century, being then indicative of a peculiar energy in the Christian mind of Europe.
“In the course of the fifteenth century . . . the Christianity of Europe was undermined; and a Pagan architecture was introduced, in imitation of that of the Greeks and Romans.
“The architecture of the Greeks and Romans themselves was not good, but it was natural . . . , good in some respects and for a particular time.
“But the imitative architecture introduced first in the fifteenth century, and practised ever since, was neither good nor natural. It was good in no respect, and for no time. All the architects who have built in that style have built what was worthless, and therefore the greater part of the architecture which has been built for the last three hundred years, and which we are now building, is worthless. We must give up this style totally, despise it and forget it, and build henceforward only in that perfect and Christian style hitherto called Gothic, which is everlastingly the best.
“This is the theorem of these volumes.”

About half-way through I realized who he reminded me of: William F. Buckley, Jr. The Appendix VII in particular could have been called “God and Man at Oxford”. If you are old enough to remember Buckley, you know all you need to know about Ruskin in the text of this volume.

I say “in the text” because he follows it with an 82 page “Index” giving the principle buildings of Venice in alphabetical order with comments on the architectural features of interest and the sculptures, and especially the paintings, which they contain; this travel guide was the only partially redeeming feature of the book, although it can give the impression that Tintorello was the only painter in Renaissance Venice. There is a very long ordinary index to the three volumes; there is no bibliography.

June 7

45. Berry, Robert Elton, Yankee Stargazer: The Life of Nathaniel Bowditch [1941] 234 pages

Last year, I read a history of early New England science and engineering which talked about Bowditch and inspired me to add this biography to my reading list.

Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838) was one of the earliest scientists in the United States. He was a mathematician, astronomer, navigator, ship’s captain, businessman and member of the Harvard Corporation. His New American Practical Navigator, first published in 1802, is still a major reference for seamen, now published by the U.S. Government and in its 53rd edition as of 2017, which is carried on every U.S. Naval vessel. He spent the last years of his life translating the first four volumes of Laplace’s Mécanique Céleste.

Berry’s biography is well-written, not too technical and seems to be fairly complete. The “Foreword” claims it is the first biography of Bowditch, although I found an earlier one (1927) by Alfred Stanford listed on Amazon. I read it in the print edition, which is of course long out-of-print, but it is also available online from Open Library.

June 8

46. Maryse Condé, Desirada [1999] 280 pages

Reynalda, a fifteen-year-old, is rescued from drowning by Ranélise, a poor woman in Guadeloupe. Pregnant, she is afraid to return home and lives wih Ranélise until after the birth of her daughter, Marie-Noëlle. Shortly thereafter, she announces that she has signed up with BUMIDOM, a government employment agency, to go to work as a domestic in Paris, leaving Marie-Noëlle with Ranélise. The novel begins like Paul et Virginie without Paul; Marie-Noëlle grows up in a seeming garden of Paradise, loved by Ranélise and her sister Claire-Alta. When she is ten, her mother sends for her and she has to leave for Paris; her mother has no affection for her and she hates Paris. The novel is the story of Marie-Noëlle and her eventual quest for her identity. Gradually, through the stories of various persons in her life, we come to understand something of the life of Reynalda, and come to see that Marie-Noëlle is repeating the same pattern as her mother and her grandmother, and even farther back. The small and barren island of Desirada off the coast of Guadeloupe becomes a sort of symbol. Desirada is one of Condé’s best novels; all the characters are very well characterized although the novel is somewhat loosely constructed. As one might expect from Condé, there are no final answers or neat solutions.

June 10

47. Arabian Humanities, 19, 2024: Bahrein et ses voisins about 145 pages [Online, mostly in French]

I returned this week to my study of ancient Bahrain (the Dilmun of the cuneiform texts), which I read about in two books earlier this year. Arabian Humanities is an annual publication which is often devoted to a single theme; the 2024 issue is devoted to the papers from a colloquium on the history and archaeology of Bahrain and the neighboring regions of the Persian Gulf. (It is available online free at openedition.org) It contained nine articles of varying interest. (Pages are approximate.)

Cotty, Marianne, Chronique du Golfe: “Bahrein et ses voisins” 8 pages — the general introduction to the issue, gives a brief overview of the geography and history of the island and the nearby coastline

Lombard, Pierre, Highlighting Bahrain’s Ancient Heritage 15 pages — describes the work of government and private institution in regulating excavations, protecting and preserving the sites, displaying the artifacts and educating the population and foreigners about the heritage of the island. Written by a government official, it may take too optimistic a view.

Carter, Robert, Pearl Fishing in Bahrain:new evidence from the archaeological collections and archives 21 pages — summarizes the history of pearl fishing on Bahrain from the earliest times to the mid-twentieth century, based on pearls and jewelry and historical documents located in the Bahrain museums

Mashashi Abe and Akinori Uesugi, Early Dilmun Burial Mounds in Bahrain: The Wâdî al-Sail Archaeological Project and the Dilmun Mapping Project 23 pages — Describes the work of the Japanese archaeologists in the Wâdî al-Sail necropolis and in mapping the entire burial grounds on the island. Classifies the types of burial mounds and gives statistics on which types prevail in which parts of the island.

Gelin, Mathilde, L’Établissment hellénistique d’Ikaros-Falaika au Koweït 14 pages — Describes the discoveries of the joint French-Kuwait excavations on the island of Falaika (ancient Ikaros) and gives a synthesis of what is now known about the history of the island in Hellenistic times.

Laguardia, Marie, La mort en Arabie du Nord-Est: Synthèse des pratiques funéraires entre 1000 av.-700 apr. n. è. 17 pages — Describes eight necropoli along the coast and the way that burial customs changed over a seventeen hundred year period from the iron age to the coming of Islam.

Robin, Christian Julien, Nouveaux jalons dans l’histoire politque de l’Arabie orientale pendant les premiers siècles de l’ère chretienne 18 pages — Investigates the history of northeast Arabia from the time of the Characene Kingdom through the seventh century C.E., based on newly discovered inscriptions. Probably the most interesting of the nine articles.

Dorso, Louise, Du Pays de Cocagne au pays oublié? Dilmun/Bahrein dans les sources cunéiformes 15 pages — Another very interesting article, which summarizes the history of Dilmun in the first millenium B.C.E., particularly its relations with southern Mesopotamia and Elam, in alliance against the Assyrians.

Chevalier, Nicole, Jacques de Morgan et André Jouannin: Les premières recherches archéologiques de la France au Bahrein 12 pages — Describes the first slight French excavations at the end of the nineteenth century.

June 13

48. Mark Bowen, The Telescope in the Ice: Inventing a New Astronomy at the South Pole [2017] 424 pages

The Telescope in the Ice is a popular account of the building of the AMANDA and IceCube neutrino detectors at the South Pole. The book is divided into four parts. The first part gives a brief history of the concept of the neutrino up to its first discovery; the second part discusses early attempts to build detectors, including DUMAND, underground or undersea; the third and longest part is the history of the building of AMANDA, the first neutrino telescope in the ice, in the late 1990s and early 2000s; and the last part is about the building of IceCube, the present neutrino telescope, completed at the end of 2010, and the first results. There is an epilogue bringing the story up to 2016. It is mentioned that there are proposed upgrades; as of the present time (2025) they have not yet been approved, and with the drastic cuts to all scientific research under the Trump regime they are unlikely in the near future.

Most of the book is concerned with details of the construction, and there is a lot of biographical and anecdotal material about dozens of people who had some connection with the projects; I would have personally preferred more emphasis on the science and the results, which are somewhat sketchily described. The thread of the science and even the construction is frequently difficult to follow because of all the personal matter, and there are frequent digressions out of chronological order. Despite this, the book is an extremely interesting look at a major scientific project which is perhaps less known to the general reader than the LHC, LIGO, or the various satellite projects.

June 23

49. Jean Piaget, The Origins of Intelligence in Children [1936, tr. 1952] 419 pages

The next book chronologically in my reading of Piaget, The Origins of Intelligence in Children deals with an earlier period than the previous five. While those books began with the acquisition of language or later, this one covers the period between birth and about two and a half years. It is also much more theoretical. Although there are interesting observations on his own three children, three siblings raised in the same household is not a particularly large or representative sample for drawing the major conclusions he draws.

The focus of the book is to prove an epistemological theory about how intelligence originates from the interplay of “assimilation to schemata” and “accommodation of the schemata”, which he contrasts to four other theories, which he describes as “Associationist Empiricism”, “Vitalistic Intellectualism”, “Apriority and the Psychology of Form” (essentially Gestalt theory), and “The Theory of Groping”. His own view he calls “The Theory of Assimilation”. I would say the book requires a background in philosophy rather than psychology, which fortunately is my case. Even so, it is a difficult book.

After a very abstract introduction, which I only understood after reading the final chapter of the book, he as usual divides the development into sequential “stages”. In this case there are six, which, to use his chapter headings, are: I. The Use of Reflexes, II. The First Aquired Adaptations and the Primary Circular Reaction, III. The “Secondary Circular Reactions” and the Procedures Destined to Make Interesting Sights Last, IV. The Coördination of the Secondary Schemata and Their Application to New Situations, V. The “Tertiary Circular Reaction” and the “Discovery of New Means Through Active Experimentation, and VI. The Invention of New Means Through Mental Combinations. He ends with a long chapter of conclusions, titled “Sensorimotor” or “Practical” Intelligence and the Theories of Intelligence.

According to the reviews, this was his most influential book, and it is worth reading for anyone with an interest in epistemology.

June 23

50. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich [1962, tr. 1963] 203 pages

The first published novel of Solzhenitsyn (although not the first written), One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich created a sensation in the Soviet Union as the first novel detailing Stalin’s repression and the Gulag system to be openly published during the short-lived period of (relative) intellectual freedom under Khrushchev. It was banned after the fall of Khrushchev, and Solzhenitsyn was later exiled.

The novel was based on his own experiences as a political prisoner under Stalin. It was written in a straightforward realist style, and simply follows one day in the life of a prisoner in a “Special” high-security prison camp in Siberia. The tyranny of Stalin and the arbitrary treatment of those who had the misfortune to escape from German POW camps as spies is a major theme. The treatment is purely factual and there is no analysis of causes, which would not have been allowed even during the Khrushchev “thaw”; and given Solzhenitsyn’s politics in exile, it was probably just as well.

Apart from its political and historical importance, this is also a very well-written work of literature. I am moving on next to his actual first-written novel, In the First Circle, which was only published in exile, and is the reading for the World Literature group I am in on Goodreads.

June 29

51. Han Kang, We Do Not Part [2025, tr. 2025] 256 pages

The latest novel by the 2024 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Han Kang, We Do Not Part is another powerful book similar to her earlier novel, Human Acts. On one level, it is a magical realist novel about two friends. Kyungha-ya, a novelist who has written a book about a massacre and is suffering from deep depression, having lost the will to live, receives an urgent text message from Inseon, a friend she has not seen for several years, to come immediately to see her in the hospital. Inseon asks her for a favor, to go to her home on a northern island and save her pet bird, whom she has left with only a day’s food and water.

This, however, is basically just a frame story; the real essence of the novel is in the memories of Inseon, which reveal the massacres of hundreds of thousands of Koreans carried out by soldiers, police and right-wing paramilitary groups between the end of World War II and the beginning of the Korean War. I would suggest reading this alongside Hwang Sok-yong’s The Guest.

June 30

52. Ananda Devi, Fardo [2020] 65 pages [in French]

Le Musée des Confluences de Lyon has a project which commissions writers to produce literary works inspired by items in its collection. Ananda Devi’s Fardo is a series of meditations on death and funeral customs, and the fragility of human cultures, including our own, based on two items involving human remains, a woman buried in the Caucasus region of Russia sometime between 967 and 813 BCE, and the mummy of a woman weaver from Peru dating from sometime between 900 and 1470 CE. The book is a good short read, interesting and written in very poetic language, with quotations from Coetzee, Camus and René Char, but not as powerful as her fiction.

July 2

53. William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra [1606] about 130 pages

After missing a year due to my cataract surgery, I am going to the Utah Shakespeare Festival again this summer. The only play I hadn’t reread in the past ten years was Antony and Cleopatra. There’s probably not much point in reviewing one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays.

July 2

53. William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra [1606] about 130 pages

After missing a year due to my cataract surgery, I am going to the Utah Shakespeare Festival again this summer. The only play I hadn’t reread in the past ten years was Antony and Cleopatra. There’s probably not much point in reviewing one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays.