September Wrapup

I've been reading plenty, but not blogging much. Oh, well... Here was my month's reading:

Thrillers

Hammond Innes/The Trojan Horse

Brits dueling with Huns in World War II. A great one, I thought. More here. 

E. Philips Oppenheim/The Great Impersonation

Brits dueling Huns in World War I. I was under the impression this was one of the greats, but just so-so for me. The politics are, of course, archaic, but I was expecting that. Maybe I read too many mysteries/thrillers/spy novels, but I also saw the final surprise twist a mile away.

My first Oppenheim. And I really wanted to like this one better because of the great George Starbuck poem:

Said

Agatha Christie to

E. Philips Oppenheim,

"Who is this Hemingway,

Who is this Proust?

 

Who is this Vladimir

Whatchamacallum, this

Neopostrealist

Rabble?" she groused.

 

Prydain

 

Lloyd Alexander/Taran Wanderer

Lloyd Alexander/The High King

Lloyd Alexander/The Foundling and Other Tales

Prydain is a disguised Wales. High fantasy for a younger audience. The High King completed the series of five and won the 1969 Newbery Medal; the stories came after. (I read the first three novels in the series earlier.) Based on Welsh mythology, with a strong dash of Tolkien, of coure; Taran is assistant pig-keeper for the oracular pig Hen Wen. He fights evil in the form of sorceresses, undead, and a dark king. Pretty fun stuff, with maybe Taran Wanderer being my favorite.

 

I could have read the series as a kid, but didn't know of it until I saw it on Lark's blog.

 

Poetry

 

Anne Carson/Nox

 

This may be more -ish than actually poetry. The genre is sort of undefinable. About the death of her brother and her half-failed attempt to translate Catullus 101, which was about the death of his brother. Just now I think this is her masterpiece, though I'd still start with Autobiography of Red. Lithub the other day quoted her odds of winning the Nobel Prize this year at 33-1. She'd be a good choice as far as I was concerned.

 

Shakespeare/Measure for Measure 

 

Saw a superb production of the play a week ago here at Crow's Theatre, and reread it before going. 

To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside

In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice

That's either Claudio's idea of a Dantean hell, or an ordinary spring day in Toronto, I'm not sure which... 

 

Criticism

 

Philip Lopate/On Sontag

 

From 2009. Quite solid if you're interested in Sontag. He likes the things that are good and dislikes the things that aren't.

 

Lopate is a novelist and essayist. He's got a new book out about Washington Irving, and I was reading a review. That review said his new book was just OK, but to see Lopate really shine in literary criticism, you should read his book on Sontag. So I did.

 

Emily Eakin/The Frenchmen, or My Life in Theory

 

Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Althusser, etc.  Eakin's book came out this year and is a good introduction to deconstruction and other French literary theoretical constructs. Her approach is mostly biographical rather than theoretical, and includes some autobiographical material about her own expericnce of Theory. Unlike quite a lot of actual French theory, it's readable.

 

She says she was influenced by Sarah Bakewell's At The Existentialist Café, and it shows. (Which I think a good thing.) If you liked Bakewell, you'll like this--it could be thought of as a sequel.

 

W. E. B. Du Bois/The Souls of Black Folk

 

My spin book was Du Bois' Autobiography, and this will show up in that upcoming post. This is on the Modern Library best non-fiction books of the 20th century, and deservedly so. 

 

Other Novels

 

Lidia Jorge/The Wind is Whistling in the Cranes

 

Jorge won the Camões Prize earlier this year--a lifetime award for writers in Portuguese, similar to the Cervantes Prize for Spanish writers. This came out in Portuguese in 2002. Sort of a three generation family novel, with a white property-owning family, and a black family of Cape Verdean immigrants, but told out of order. I tried to write about it but it didn't come together. It was interesting, but I didn't love it.

 

Martin Hansen/The Liar

 

A Danish novel that came out in 1950. The war is over but not forgotten or even forgettable. Johannes Lye is a schoolteacher on an island that is inaccessible in winter due to sea ice. Lye is not an accidental name; he's not to be trusted.

 

Qntm/There Is No Antimemetics Division

 

A sci-fi novel that came out this year that's been getting some buzz. I'm not much of a sci-fi reader, but I liked this pretty well.

 

This books still around the house:

 

 

Both The Great Impersonation and The Souls of Black Folk come from Project Gutenberg.

 

And next month? I've mostly finished my spin book, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois. There's also the 1949 Club coming up, hosted by Simon and Kaggsy. 

 

I'm looking at Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World, but, heck, that's still a week away, and everygthing could change... 😉

 

 

Hammond Innes' The Trojan Horse

"As a criminal court barrister you will know my name. You will, therefore, realize how urgent it is that I see you."

Paul Severin, as he introduces himself, or maybe Frank Smith, or Franz Schmidt, is wanted for the particularly grisly murder of his partner and is now on the run. He forces his way into the office of Andrew Kilmartin, a noted defense lawyer. But he doesn't want to turn himself in and go to court. The case is more complicated than that.

It's London, early in 1940. Germany has invaded Poland, but France and Norway still stand. The Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union has started.

Schmidt (as he's usually called in the book, though Franzie to his daughter) is an engineer of genius and he's discovered a new alloy both light and strong that will revolutionize airplane engines. He's a Jew who was born in England, but mostly grew up in Austria, and got out only after Anschluss. Germany wants that alloy and Schmidt doesn't want to give it to them. He was framed for that murder, he says. But the Nazis have agents in high places and he can't go to jail.

This was a mystery/spy thriller with lots of good chase scenes. That's Kilminster emerging from the London sewers into the Thames basin (fortunately low-tide) after being captured and pursued. In the final chase there's a shipment of military cargo, including the prototype airplane engine, supposedly on its way to support Finland, but the bad guys plan on sending it to Germany instead. The final showdown starts in Norwegian territorial waters. This chase involves two British destroyers, both German and British air support, and a tank blasting away onboard that ship.

This was the first Hammond Innes I've read and I thought it was really good. Do you know: did I just happen to hit one of the best or are they all so good?

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Golden Age (1940).  Body of Water.

Daryl Hine

Perpetua Dormienda

Another day, another power outage

Rolled across the sky and through the dawn,

Bringing as well obscurity and outrage,

Thousands of darkened houses and big trees down.

 

Another and another and another

Circuit failure, when the borrowed power

Of the storm, lightning's domestic brother,

Flickered and fell to bits hour after hour!

 

This morning has been as if it not had been,

The world scrubbed clean, the sky a spotless blue,

And all the pointless vacancy between,

Not so much lived as thoughtlessly slept through.

 

-Daryl Hine

 

Daryl Hine (1936-2012) was a Canadian poet born in British Columbia. He got a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, was the editor of Poetry magazine for a decade, and taught at various Chicago area universities. He lived in the Chicago area with his partner, Samuel Todes, a professor of philsosophy at Northwestern University.

 

A Reliquary and Other Poems was Hine's last book and came out in 2013 after his death. 'Perpetua dormienda' - 'to be slept forever', roughly - is an allusion to Catullus 5, the one that begins, "Let us live, Lesbia, and let us love" and ends in an uncountable number of kisses. Lines 5 and 6, though, remind us, "quum semel occidit brevis lux/nox est perpetua una dormienda." Peter Green translates as: "once our brief life's quenched, there's only/one unending night that's left to sleep through." But Hine is not (quite?) feeling so dark as all that: the storm has left "the world scrubbed clean, the sky a spotless blue," and while the morning may have been lost 'thoughtlessly' that doesn't sound necessarily so bad.

 

I've been meaning to post a Daryl Hine poem for a while, and I pulled a book off the shelf this evening, and this was the page it opened at. (Sortes Vergilianae!) We had a serious storm recently, with golf ball sized hail and 'big trees down,' so it seemed to fit. Our power was out for about ten hours, but was back by the following morning, so I couldn't (alas!) sleep it entirely away.