'Woman Reading' by Lex Veen; oil on canvas
This has been a busy month around here, fortunately we haven't been slammed with the extreme heat and wildfire haze so much of the country has and I've even snuck in some reading time. The books have been good to me this month and have arrived at the perfect time, as they do—July's reading included three nonfiction books, two histories and a book of letters; a family saga, a historical novel set during a transition time in China, a book of stories set around an apartment building on an imaginary avenue on Manhattan's Upper East Side, and a prize-nominated novella that started as a short story and is set in my part of the world. If a title is linked it will take you to my full review.
Heritage - Miguel Bonnefoy (tr. Emily Boyce) When a winemaker's Jura region vineyard is destroyed by wine blight, he puts a cutting from his one healthy vine in his pocket and boards a ship bound for California. When he falls ill the captain puts him off in Valparaiso, Chile, where not understanding the immigration officer's questions, he is inadvertently rechristened California Lonsonier (he's from the village of Lons-le-Saunier). He never does continue his journey, instead, like the cutting, he puts down roots in the soil of Chile and flourishes and produces. When his three sons read that Germany has declared war on France they get on a ship bound for the country they have never seen, but think of in the loftiest terms.
Their children, who hadn't a drop of Latin American blood in their veins, were more French than the French. Lazare Lonsonier was the first of three boys born in bedrooms with red sheets which smelled of aguardiente and snake oil. Despite growing up surrounded by old women speaking Mapuche, their mother tongue was French. Their parents had not wanted to refuse them the heritage they had clung to along their journey, a legacy saved from exile. The French language was a kind of secret refuge, a code they shared, both a relic and badge of victory from a former life.
The stories of Old Lonsonier's son Lazare, Lazare's daughter Margot, and Margot's son Ilario Da are told, and each of them have a deep connection to Chile, but something also pulls them towards France. Each undergoes traumatic, life-changing experiences that tip them very close to the edge of death, and each finds an all-consuming obsession which pulls them back into life. Two world wars come and go, the frighteningly brutal regime of Augusto Pinochet takes over in Chile. This is a family saga that feels almost dream-like, but with nightmare sequences, has vivid characters and descriptions, and is written in sensuous, crystalline prose, all in 160 pages. Highly recommended.
Other Press, 2022
Last Letters: The Prison Correspondence 1944-1945 - Freya & Helmuth James von Moltke (tr. Shelley Frisch) The remarkable, uncensored 'long written conversations' between a couple who were a part of active resistance against the Nazis from the beginning. These are the letters they wrote each during the last few months before Helmuth James von Moltke was put on trial for treason, defeatism, and attempt to overthrow the regime. Highly recommended.
NYRB, 2019
Peach Blossom Paradise - Ge Fei (tr. Canaan Morse) I haven't found it easy to engage with some of the Chinese literature I've tried, but with this novel I didn't have that problem. In Chinese myth the peach blossom paradise was a utopian community that was unaware of political turmoil taking place elsewhere, and was accidentally stumbled across by a fisherman. At the center of this novel is the comfortably off Lu family, the village of Puji where they live, and their only child Xiumi, who is fifteen. When the book opens she finds her father leaving, but frightened of this man that everyone considers mad she doesn't do anything to stop him. Not long afterwards her mother's lover, Zhang Jiyuan, is presented to the household as a relative by Mrs. Lu and moves into Mr. Lu's studio. What isn't immediately obvious is that he's part of a revolutionary group in the area. When he must leave in a hurry, his journal, which was left behind, ends up with Xiumi and her eyes are opened by his feelings for her and his utopian ideas.
Xiumi had long suspected that while the world beyond held innumerable secrets, it consistently refused to reveal any of them to her. She felt as if she were trapped in a windowless room, and could barely make out the contours of the walls by the faint light that managed to sneak inside.
Xiumi is captured by bandits when she's on her way to an arranged marriage, and she's taken to an island immediately across from a community founded as a utopia, but has become more of a hell, especially for the young women kidnapped for ransom. If the money is not forthcoming from their families the women are sold on after the leaders of the place break them in sexually. When Xiumi is next encountered she's come back to Puji with grand ideas on how to provide the village with education and health care. The consequences of her efforts on the villagers, Xiumi herself, and her family round out the novel.
Classical Chinese literature is often referenced as are real-life figures (notes give a bit of background on them), and time almost feels stagnant perhaps because of the years the story takes place in. From 1898 when the sclerotic Qing Empire tried to modernize with the failed Hundred Days Reform to the Republican Revolution in 1911, these are interim years. Old beliefs still rule and women are still treated as chattel. Xiumi doesn't ever come completely into focus, not even to herself, but there are a number of fascinating characters and an interesting picture of rural China at the time. This book is the first in a trilogy and I'm curious to see where the author takes the story next.
NYRB Classics, 2020
Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It - Janina Ramirez With the new combinations of ways to understand the past, the study of the medieval age has been especially fruitful, and unsurprisingly it's far more complicated than popularly thought of. Using various branches of archaeology, the study of cultural artifacts, the finding of documents that had been overlooked or misinterpreted, and putting different branches of research together has changed how the period is now understood. Something that has helped the process along are female scholars who have questioned standard interpretations. For a myriad of reasons the stories of women have been among those deliberately suppressed, rewritten or destroyed.
From the Reformation onwards, libraries were scoured for controversial texts. Various shorthand terms were used in catalogues to indicate which should be considered and potentially destroyed. Books were recorded as containing 'witchcraft', 'heresy' and 'Catholic' subject matter; the destiny of many of these texts is unknown, with the lists the only record of their existence. The title of this book - Femina - was the label scribbled alongside texts known to be written by a woman, so less worthy of preservation.
In this survey the author organizes her material by chapters that cover specific topics. Moving from the earliest years of the medieval period to the later years, each focuses on a particular place, and often a specific person so we move from several locations in England, on to Sweden, the Rhineland, the Languedoc region, to Kraków, and back to England. There are well-known figures like Hildegard of Bingen, those less so like Herrad of Landsberg, and those whose names are unknown. There isn't anything particularly new here, but Ramirez gathers together interesting histories, and it was interesting to read about the various methods being used to gain a fuller picture of the past. I appreciated learning about the individuals who have been instrumental in preserving or recovering work, or simply asking pertinent questions. It's not a book to find out about the most recent research, but one that presents a well-balanced perspective on our changing perceptions of the time.
Hanover Square Press, 2023
The Doorman's Repose - Chris Raschka; illus. by Chris Raschka Ten lovely, humorous stories for middle-grade readers about an apartment building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, 777 Garden Avenue, a building done in a neo-proto-Aztec-Egyptian-Gothic style. This imaginary avenue is a truncated one between Lexington and Third. The first story is about Mr. Bunchley, a new doorman who might lose his job unless he learns how to talk baseball. But he does have many vital talents that a doorman needs.
It nearly goes without saying that a doorman must possess the skill, so mysterious to the out-of-towner, of being able to spot a taxicab four blocks away and by sheer willpower make it stop in front of his building and no other.
Each succeeding story revolves around a resident of the building, human or not. There's Fred who has a theory about the role pigeons play in regulating gravity, a boiler named Liesl that is unhappy, the goings-on of resident mice families, an elevator that seems to have a mind and heart of its own, the interfering Mrs. MacDougal, and the stressed building manager.
This ex-New Yorker thoroughly enjoyed these stories which have plenty of little in-jokes and an appreciation for the endless not-so-obvious connections between residents of the city no matter who or what those residents are.
NYRB Children's Collection, 2017
Arboreality - Rebecca Campbell Shortlisted for this year's Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction this novella began life as a prize-winning short story. Set on Vancouver Island, Canada, in the not-too-distant future it's a celebration of connections, community, and creativity during a time when they will be essential for survival as the effects of fundamental changes in the natural world start to bite. Highly recommended.
Stelliform Press, 2022
Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope - Sarah Bakewell Only connect! is what Sarah Bakewell sees as the basic rallying cry of the different types of humanism over the centuries across the world. As she points out, the term humanist can be defined in all sorts of ways, depending on who is doing the defining.
It all seems gently foggy—and yet I do believe that there is such a thing as a coherent, shared humanist tradition, and that it makes sense to consider all these people together. They are linked by multicolored but meaningful threads.
She sees humanist ideas reaching back to the Cārvāka school of thought in India before the sixth century BCE, in the concept of ubuntu found in cultures across Africa, Confucian philosophy in China, and Democritus and others in ancient Greece, but this book focuses on the story of humanism in Europe starting in the 1300s in Tuscany with Petrarch and Boccaccio traveling back in time to find the wisdom of the ancients, study it, preserve it, and create work that emulated it.
Bakewell covers a lot of ground in this book and does so by giving brief descriptions of the lives of the people who engaged with humanist ideas, both advocates and detractors, and in this way explores the history of humanism and the different paths it has taken. Lorenzo Valla set an example of not seeing anything as being beyond question. His questioning concerned manuscripts but others expanded the scrutinizing and questioning to human beings themselves and the world we live in. This kind of questioning has never been popular with the powers that be of any age, and humanists through history have incurred their wrath as they still do today.
I enjoyed Bakewell's brief, vivid descriptions of the many people who get mentioned including the description of two of my favorites, Desiderius Erasmus and Michel de Montaigne as being 'fanatically nonfanatical'. It's also reminded me to read Christine de Pizan's City of Women, which I've been meaning to read for some time.
Humanism is a 'work in progress' as it should be as it is based on trying to understand and provide our flawed human selves with pathways to develop into our fullest potential. In this book Sarah Bakewell has told the story of humanistic ideas in Europe from the 1300s through 1900s with brief excursions elsewhere with her usual clarity and panache. It's a good introduction to the history of the on-going story of humanism and a salutary reminder of what humanists have faced in the past and yet the 'frail craft' of humanism keeps going on.
The reality, however, is that history and the human world are neither stable and good on the one hand, nor hopelessly tragic on the other. They are our own work, so if we want it to proceed well, we have to exert ourselves to make it happen.
Penguin Press, 2023
Also this month I've been sampling poems from the Library of America's newly released volume of Ursula K. Le Guin's Collected Poems, and have just finished reading a novel from an author whose last book I loved. I've started reading for August's Women in Translation event and taking a look at my TBR for other possibilities for WIT month. Have you read any books so far this summer that you've especially enjoyed?
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