China To Me by Emily Hahn

I can't do this book justice, which is a pity, because I'm in such a rush.

Emily Hahn was an American writer who accompanied her sister to Shanghai in the early '30's, on her way to Africa (which she loved).  She fell in love with Shanghai and couldn't bring herself to leave.  Shanghai in the thirties was full of foreigners and had an intriguing cafe society that mixed folks of many nationalities and classes.  I can see why she found that a heady and fascinating mix.

After several years in Shanghai, she traveled to Chiangking (sp?) to write a biography of the Soong Sisters (Mrs. Sun Yat-Sen (sp?), Madame Chang Kai-shek, and Madame Kung, three sister married to the most important politicians in China at that time).  Through her contacts she knew an amazing number of people. 

Then she traveled to Hong Kong, planning to return to Shanghai shortly thereafter .. but her plans changed and she ending up staying in Hong Kong much longer than she intended and was there when the Japanese took the city. 

Emily Hahn had a fascinating love life, which she touches on glancingly here.  As much as I might have liked details (okay, I longed for them, and explanations, too), I think that she took care to tread a fine line between honestly and openness .. after all, she had a child by the time she wrote this account, shortly after returning to America in 1944.

In Hong Kong, there was an amazing diverse population as well.   Her account of the Japanese occupation is fascinating, as well.

Hahn's fascinating life seems to have grown out of her fascinating character.  She was described, on the back of my paperback copy of China to Me, as a "citizen of the world," and I think that must be true.  She got on with an amazingly diverse group of people and I think part of this must have been a writer's fascinating with observation.  To my view, she was far ahead of her time and a great adventuress, and this story reads like an adventure story, full of event.  She's a wonderful storyteller, and if you like tales of wartime hardship or adventuresome lasses, I recommend this book to you.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

I enjoyed The Eyre Affair.  It centers on Thursday Next, a war veteran and police officer who investigates the loss of a time/fiction travel machine, the "prose portal," and the kidnapping of Jane Eyre from the novel of the same name.

This is fantasy, obviously, and alternative history - here, the authorship of Shakespeare's plays is hotly debated, Richard III is an interactive event like singing along to the Sound of Music, the Crimean War has been dragging on for 131 years, Winston Churchill never survived to adulthood, and literature is so popular its popularity would rival a combination of reality TV, NASCAR, and pop music - if that were possible.  Jane Eyre ends with Jane resignedly marrying St. John Rivers and taking off to Africa.  The novel's passionate admirers admit, when forced to do so, that the ending is unsatisfying.

Did I mention that there are vampires in this world?  And, almost everyone has an interesting name.

Thursday is another in a long line of detectives with personal problems. Her character's assertion, bravado, and independence reminded me a little of Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski.  Unlike many detectives, while she is lonely, and lovelorn, really, she's far from alone:  she has her pet dodo, her ex-fiancee, both parents, an aunt and uncle, and even a brother.

Thursday is a veteran of the Crimean War and of a pivotal battle in which her brother was killed.  She's been traumatized by the war, and her life has been on hold since she broke up with her fiancee, also a veteran of her unit in the Crimea.

Her uncle Mycroft is an eccentric, a brilliant inventor who has devised a machine called the "Prose Portal."  To test the machine, he sends his wife, Polly, to the poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," but has trouble bringing her back.

Her father is a fugitive ChronoGuard operative who is looking into the death of Nelson; he fears history has been rewritten by the French revisionists.  Meanwhile, Thursday's mother is convinced that her father is having an affair with Emma Hamilton.

There is a lot of exposition in this novel:  we also get to meet Joffy, Thursday's brother and another improbably named relation.  I found myself feeling that the plot didn't really get rolling until around page 250 and still didn't display any sense of urgency.

In Thursday's work she encounters many frustrating bureaucratic problems, but the worst is Jack Schitt of the Goliath Corporation.  The Goliath Corporation has its fingers in many pies; one of them is a 24-hour news network.

The ending was very satisfying, however, so I'd say it was worth the wait.  This is yet another book for lovers of literature; the novel Jane Eyre doesn't appear much until the last quarter of the book. But those readers who love the romance of Rochester and Jane will enjoy the ending hugely.

Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Burrows

This is a fun and fascinating book, as its mixed-up title suggests, full of contrasting elements.

It appeals to me because it's set on Guernsey, a place about which I know little.  It has an interesting history.  It came to England as a Norman possession with William the Conqueror.  When England lost its French territories, it chose to remain with England even those it's quite close to the French coast and closer to it than to England.

Not surprisingly, Churchill felt he could not spare the resources to defend it from the Germans and so it was occupied from the fall of France to the end of the war.

Juliet Ashton is a writer touring England, and tiring of touring, to promote her new book.  Her new book is a collection of comic essays she wrote during the war, meant to humorize the hardships and privations of the war years.  As she wraps up her tour, she writes to her publisher that she is concerned about what she'll write next.  She's looking for ideas.  And, she's eager to turn her back on Izzy Bickerstaff, her nom de plume when she wrote her wartime pieces.

Out of the blue, she receives a letter from the island of Guernsey, from a pig farmer no less, who is writing her because he found a book, second-hand, with her name on the flyleaf.  He writes her because he wants more books, something of which there's a shortage in Guernsey after the war.  In particular, he wants a biography of a writer he's grown to greatly admire, Charles Lamb.  Ashton shares his interest in Lamb and is intrigued.  She comes to correspond with him and other natives of Guernsey.  She soon decides that her next book will be about Guernsey during the war years, and she decides to visit the island.

The novel contains many comic and cozy elements:  a close-knit community of eccentrics, a romance, an orphan child being cared for by a community.

It also contains very dark elements:  starvation, internment in labor camps, execution.

It is a story told in letters, a form I particularly love.  Letters are a particularly fine and economical way to convey comic vignettes, of which there are many in this novel.

The plotting is eventful, if predictable.  Predictability, however, is what many readers want.  The think the fact that this book has been a big best-seller around the world and is a book club favorite proves that.  Winningly, it's not too long, either.

I found the style to be accomplished, but the characterization to be uneven.  Somewhere after the one-third mark I found myself enjoying it less.

A word about the literary society:  early on in the book, one character talks about his great interest in Charles Lamb.  I had not thought about Charles Lamb since taking "Romantic Poets" in school.  Lamb's own life story is poignant, and I found it to be an agreeable element in the novel.

This is a good book for folks who like cozy communities, eccentric characters, stories about literature, stories about writers, stories about World War II and stories set in exotic locales.

Maeve Binchy

Ms. Binchy died on July 30, I believe, and of course, I was very sad.  Selfishly, I minded that I would not be able to read any more of her books (except for Minding Frankie and one or two others I hadn't gotten around to reading yet - Quentin's, I think).  I also mind knowing that now that she has passed, her work will likely be quickly forgotten.

In a way, it is what it is and can't be helped:  part of what made her work exciting to me was the casual but profound way in which her fiction reflected some of the enormous social change going on in Ireland over the last 4 or 5 decades.  The very timeliness and currency of her books mean that in ten years they may seem very dated.

It will not seem shocking but quaint to read a woman's dilemma when her shiftless, alcoholic husband who had deserted her years before appears on her doorstep and asks her to care for him in his final illness.  Social convention in the past would have robbed her of her choice; if shame didn't compel to take her wayward husband in, her priest would.  Today, women have choices but that doesn't mean that they're easy to make.

Maeve Binchy's cheerful grasp as a storyteller was pretty darn big - full of chiches, melodrama, self-help bromides, and breathless run-on sentences that captured the flavor of conversation.  But her books created joy:  her stories made you laugh and cry and you consumed them at a breakneck speed, dying to know what was going to happen.

While some novels, like Tara Road, had an ending that was entirely too neat, other novels like Glass Lake, Circle of Friends, and Scarlet Feather had elements that reflected the complexity and complication of real life.

I noticed one reviewer mentioned that Glass Lake and Evening Class were her favorite novels; they were mine, also.  In Glass Lake, it seemed to me that she took on her most audacious question:  is there ever a time when a mother may be forgiven for abandoning her child?  I think the ending was hard for her and I would have preferred a stronger one but it was bold and brave to write that novel.

I can't really tell you why I loved Evening Class.  Perhaps it was merely that while I have taken many evening classes that did not result in friendship or friendships, the nourishment these friends take from each other is nourishing, cozy and completely wish-fulfilling.  Is that wrong?  Can it be wrong?

I recall that the heroine of Scarlet Feather was married to the master's son; her mother was that family's longtime housekeeper.  Her resentment of her mother's status and treatment was so greatly present in her mind that I could not wonder if that, as well as her career (and her husband's) contributed to the breakup of that marriage.  I've always wondered what Binchy was saying there:  Was she saying that we should not marry outside of our class?  (Surely not!)  Was she simply creating a good story, knowing that many of her readers would identify with the heroine's nose-pressed-against-the-glass feeling?  I wonder.  This character was strong, independent, hard-working, ambitious and truly competent.  Perhaps this little unresolved complexity was another intriguing element of Binchy's work.

I loved reading her books, I greatly admired her combination of gratifying plots and profound reflection on women's choices, I will miss her and someday I hope I'll write something that was inspired by her.  

What I'm reading now

I'm reading Emily Hahn's China to Me, Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair, and the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Burrows.

Escape from Camp 14 by Blaine Harden

This nonfiction book is an account of the life of Shin Dong-Hyuk, a North Korean man who has the distinction of being the only North Korean born into servitude in a North Korean concentration camp who escaped to the West (or the east, depending on your point of view).

Camp 14 is a very large concentration camp located in the mountains of North Korea.  The North Korean government denies the existence of these camps, but their existence has been verified through satellite photographs.

There are a few former North Koreans who have given accounts of these camps; Shin Dong-Hyuk has the distinction of having escaped from North Korea with very little knowledge of North Korea as a country or of the propaganda surrounding its ruling dynasty and the ruling party.

Blaine Harden, the journalist who wrote this book, presents a narrative that is short, incredibly easy to read, and one in which he seems to strain to be objective.  I think he himself does not know exactly what to make of Shin Dong-Hyuk. Harden resists shaping the narrative.  I admire his integrity and restraint; I found myself feeling a little confused.

Harden clearly feels that Shin Dong-Hyuk may have a credibility problem in the eyes of some readers and goes to great pains to talk about any corroboration our current knowledge of North Korean labor camps gives Dong-Hyuk's report.

As a journalist, he may also be troubled about the difficulty of simply corroborating most of Dong-Hyuk's story, something that would normally not only be relatively easy but not nearly as important.  As it is, Harden and the reader are forced to acknowledge that it's difficult to know if Dong-Hyuk is telling the truth.

On the one hand, the story of his escape is both far-fetched and gruesome.  Its horror seems unlikely.  It's so horrifying that it seems natural to me that some readers would question its veracity.

On the other hand, Dong-Hyuk's account includes admissions so shameful that they support the idea that this is an honest account.  Dong-Hyuk was ignorant of the kind of knowledge of his world that we take for granted.  Nevertheless, he sometimes succeeded in manipulating camp officials to his own personal benefit, so he did not seem innocent.

This book does offer a view of a chaotic society roiled by starvation.  Oddly, I think that had I been asked to guess whether widespread starvation would lead to the collapse of the state, I would have said yes.  North Korea has not collapsed.  (Clearly, I would have been wrong.  Had someone else been present, I'm sure they would have said something like, "You're a very poor student of Irish history," and I would have had to agree.)  I have been wondering, "What's the secret of this dictatorship's success?"  Perhaps it is the combination of manipulation of information and communication so effective it would make Stalin blush, poverty, and lack of education.

Harden asserts that North Korean authorities have at times, during these recent years of famine, permitted black market trading, and even a porous border with China,  He argues that the government's granting of this level of freedom may have been a "safety valve" tactics that removed some of the motivation for unifying against the government.

Harden seems to have become interested in the story of Shin Dong-Hyuk because of the scarcity of any information about North Korea.  Ironically, as Harden points out several times in this account, Dong-Hyuk knew next to nothing about the world outside his labor camp before he escaped and is therefore not in a position to offer much insight about his country or its government.

Remembering Dong-Hyuk's escape I am astounded at his success in undertaking a cross-country journey and crossing the border without being caught and without having much help.  I am astounded at how well and quickly he adapted to life in northeast China (which has a large ethnic Korean population).

This book reminded me of Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird and Elie Wiesel's Night.  It also reminded of Truffaut's L'Enfant Sauvage, which I think was based on a nonfiction account of a doctor to attempted raise a boy who had been found living in the woods as an animal, without human contact.  My recollection is that in real life, the child died before reaching adulthood.

I cannot offer an unbiased opinion of this book myself, however.  I do not enjoy books that recount traumatic events.  In fact, I do not understand their appeal.

Gretchen Rubin talked a little bit about "catastrophe memoirs" in her book, The Happiness Project.  I believe that she viewed them as having a salutary effect and the power to give the reader a greater sense of perspective, as the saying goes, and an appreciation for the comforts and joys of his or her own life.  Interestingly, some of the memoirs she mentioned were memoirs of divorce.

This is a memoir of murder, abuse, corruption, starvation, theft and moral degradation.  Perhaps it could not be termed a "catastrophe memoir".  

In the Garden of the Beasts by Erik Larson

This is a wonderfully readable and entertaining book. A caveat: Before you start reading it, look up Goebbels and Goring in Wikipedia. Having some sense of them as individuals may make it possible for you to keep them straight while you're reading the book. I'm pretty good at keeping the cast of characters straight in almost anything I read (I didn't struggle with 100 Years of Solitude, for instance) but I was pretty confused here. It's the story of a University of Chicago history professor who became FDR's ambassador to Berlin (a job no one else wanted, it seemed) and that of his daughter, a "free spirit". A few oddities. This is the story of a father and his daughter, though their relationship is not the story told in this book. Mom and Junior don't really figure much in this history. The first year of the Dodds' residency in Berlin is recounted in great detail; the rest of their story is barely summarized. The Dodds are real American characters in both the best and worst ways, I would say. To me, I would say that his ambassadorship gave him an opportunity to do something heroic which ended his career as an ambassador but which he would never had had an opportunity to do had he stayed in Chicago. And, that are many episodes in this book that are chilling. So it's not for everyone. Also, I personally thought that the first two chapters' exposition dragged. Oddly, for all that exposition, I thought that Larson should have offered some definition of the term "Jeffersonian democrat" and considered the question of whether Dodds' work as an ambassador was affected by his self-image.

The Wagon by Martin Preib

I greatly admire Martin Preib's writing. I enjoy the tension between his working life as a police officer and his mental life as an observer and writer.

I found out about it because a friend took a course at the Newberry Library where it, along with City on the Make by Nelson Algren, was one of the assigned texts. This book is a rumination on Preib's work as a Chicago cop, and primarily his work running the "wagon," the vehicle that is called to take dead bodies to the morgue. In Preib's writing he combines a practical account of the work of being a cop with his own emotional inner life, his relation to the city of his birth and his own unanswered questions about some of the choices he's made and places them in the larger context of our literary tradition. I think he perceives a greater need for ceremony and connection.

Eva Trout by Elizabeth Bowen

I've been dipping into, in a non-linear way, Elizabeth Bowen's Eva Trout. I can't quite get a fix on these characters - are they nice? They seem so prickly. No one seems to like each other - And really, who is Eva? Is she unfeeling because she's surrounded by odd, careless, and unconventional people?

 I've read another Elizabeth Bowen novel, The Death of the Heart, and Eva Trout reminds me of it in some ways. If you go to her Wikipedia entry, you'll find that that author finds Bowen's work to be frequently concerned with the difference between appearances and the underlying, behind-closed-doors reality.

I think that I don't understand Eva Trout and perhaps, without starting the book at the beginning, reading it all the way to the end, and not leaving anything out, I never shall. Above all, I find it elegaic if the grievers were distracted by traffic and a bad odor coming from an unknown source.

My Modern British Literature professor told me once that he had seen Elizabeth Bowen read (probably at Columbia, where he was a student).  He said that she had a terrible stutter.  "Poor Elizabeth Bowen," he said.

For the first time I have learned that Elizabeth Bowen struggled mightily to make enough money from writing and giving readings to avoid having to sell her father's house.  To me, this is quite a gripping story.  Was it pride that caused her to do everything she could to avoid selling?  Or was it loyalty to him?  How I long to know.  To me, it's quite as thrilling as the Olympics.  

The Last Girls by Lee Smith

This is a charming book by Lee Smith, who was a teacher of Haven Kimmel.

I've also read Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies, set in the Appalachians and reflecting Smith's interest in and talent for rendering dialectal speech.

This novel tells the story of five women (and one husband) who decide to recreate a river raft trip, inspired by reading Twain's Huckleberry Finn, down the Mississippi that they took in college.  This permits them to reflect on the 30 or so years that have passed since then, and allows us to reflect on the diversity of their life stories which reveal some of the profound changes that have taken place in the lives of women in this country since the fifties.

The edition I read was a book club edition (I love these things) with an interview with Smith and book club discussion questions.  In her interview, Smith says that while the new freedom that women of her generation enjoyed gave women much greater freedom and enjoyment of their lives it also placed a certain kind of burden on them:  given more freedom, they were forced to make choices and accept more responsibility for their lives. They lost a certain comfort zone of polite conduct and restraint that their mothers had enjoyed and did not anticipate all of the changes that they would encounter.

Smith is the author of one of my favorite short stories, "Intensive Care," which perfectly captures the language and the changes of how we live now.

The Big Short by Michael Lewis

I've finally just finished the first chapter, dealing with Steve Eisman, in Michael Lewis' The Big Short.

It's an interesting counterpoint to both Margin Call, which explicitly deals with some of the same issues as those raised by Steve Eisman (the tradition of selling in the financial markets, the contradictory ideas that gave rise to the subprime mortgage debacle, the notion that for the first time, in the securities back by subprime mortgages, you are selling something that has no or very little value), and to Steve Jobs.

At this particular moment, I'm reflecting that some of the charm of this chapter is that Steve Eisman is such an outlier himself:  someone who's abrasive and without manners.  And I'm very interested in him.  Why is it that I find Steve Eisman interesting, and Steve Jobs a fraud?  If I'm honest, I'd have to say that it's hype.  That hype is a powerful tool, and that's why we use it.  But it can have a backlash - that at the same time that it's so persuasive to so many people, there will always be some people who just won't get it, or more accurately, just won't feel it, and will first marvel and then recoil at the enthusiasm of others.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

I haven't finished this book yet; in fact, I've just started the chapter called "Restoration," (a great title and absolutely the one I would have chosen for this chapter).

But at this moment I feel moved to make a comment.  I imagined that this book would help to explain why Jobs  was so admired by so many people.  So far, I wouldn't say that the book is really explaining that to me; instead, I find myself wondering why so many people around Jobs allowed themselves to be manipulated by him.

In the place in the book I'm at right now, Gil Amelio has decided to bring Jobs back into the company by buying NeXT.  The reason he did that was because he wanted Apple's software.  But I find that I'm astounded by that decision.  For one thing, I find myself feeling that he should have foreseen that Jobs would want to take over the company and that Jobs' desire to take over the company would create destructive conflict.  It would have been more efficient to simply offer Jobs the title of CEO from the outset if Amelio didn't mind Jobs taking control of Apple.  If he didn't want Jobs to take control of Apple, it seems to me that he should at least have tried to structure the deal differently.

I'm puzzled by how startling the "warts and all" view of Steve Jobs presented here is, given the reverence and real sense of loss when he died.

Trying to make sense of it all, I started to look around at reviews on the web.  Sue Halpern's piece reflects my concerns and I think her answer is correct:  We have such high regard for people who are successful in business:   http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jan/12/who-was-steve-jobs/?pagination=false

I think that Isaacson's account emphasizes event and what Jobs has to say about the events of his life and especially his business career.  I'd say that I personally feel a little whipsawed between Jobs' assessment and that of others.  At times Isaacson does address the question of why Jobs is idolized and or identified with - that is, why he's a popstar himself.  Isaacson points out that Jobs saw himself as a rebel and that this idea was the centerpiece of the "1984" ad for the Macintosh.  As I write this, I find myself wondering if my lack of identification with the concept and Jobs' persona is more remarkable than his success.

I still haven't finished the book, but I can't help feeling that a theme, intended or not, is that of failure.  The Lisa was a failure, the Macintosh had many serious problems that prevented it from being as successful as it could have been (lack of storage and lack of processing power), NeXT lost its hardware division and was headed toward bankruptcy or dissolution before it was sold to Apple.  The oft-mentioned "reality distortion field," was clearly helpful in some instances and clearly not in others.  Finally, one thing that I feel that the Macintosh episode showed was that Jobs was clearly interested in the intersection of aesthetics and technology but not as interested as he ought to be in whether and how things worked.  I can't help if he learned the lesson of Detroit auto culture from his father too well, in a sense.  In a world in which there are many brands of a product that work, essentially, equally well, brand differentiation through design, color, and features may seem like everything but it isn't.  The question of how well something meets the needs of the consumer is important, too.

Andrew Sullivan argues that Steve Jobs is important because he fuses the counterculture with what he calls the "counter-counter culture" (presumably, today's young people):

The reason he strikes such a huge chord with an entire generation lies, it seems to me, beyond his immense technical and business and design skills. It was because he became the bridge between the 1960s and the 1980s, the counter-culture and the counter-counter-culture. He was the hippie capitalist. He was the fusion of two great American forces - personal actualization and a free market. 

All I can say is that right now, I'm still not feeling it.

Reading now

I've just read/skimmed Border Crossing by Pat Barker.  This is the wonderful serendipity of having remaindered and withdrawn books around .. at some point, I find myself surprised by joy or wonder.  I couldn't really recommend this novel because reading it isn't really a good time.  It's about a very dark subject, and the very fact that the protoganist is getting divorced while the action of the novel takes place is no coincidence:  he's struggling with everything including loneliness and disappointment.  His wife moves her furniture out and now his voice is in an empty room.

But I think this book is sublime.  It's beautifully written, and is the reflection, I feel, of a novelist who is deeply thoughtful and deeply curious about the essential nature of things and how that is reflected in how we live now.  Love her.  Simply love her.  (Pat Barker is, of course, the author of the Regeneration trilogy and I highly, highly recommend Regeneration.)

I'm still reading around in Tomalin's Pepys, and I haven't made any progress on Steve Jobs and I know I won't today ..

A week or two ago I began reading True Grit by Charles Portis.  I think this is a wonderful novel.  I think Portis is a masterful realistic novelist, on the basis of the few pages I've read.  More so than almost all of the writers I've read in the past two years, he convincing paints a portrait of a real person in the first few pages.
What's real about her?  She interrupts herself in the middle of telling her tragic, life-changing story to digress and tell the story of an acquaintance that includes a brief summary of his life story and her thoughts about his interesting name.  I would never interrupt a story about my father to tell any other story -- but she would.  That feels real to me.

However, as much as I admire Portis' skill as a novelist, I'm almost certain that I will never care enough about this novel to finish it before it has to go back to the library.  Why?  I don't know .. perhaps if I didn't have to take it back to the library I would eventually finish it.

I am, of course, beginning the Big Short which I enjoy so much, I think, because Lewis' own personality comes through the pages and I find it entertaining and, because, for some reason this is the kind of book I like now.