Herta Müller's The Fox Was Ever the Hunter

 "Where does it come from, he asked, this sympathy?"

Adina is a schoolteacher in the late years of Communist Romania. Her circle of friends include Paul, a musician, and Clara, who works in a factory. Paul's band gets in trouble with the secret police because some apparatchik thinks their latest song is about the dictator Ceauşescu, and so Paul, even though he's not the lyricist, ends up in trouble dragging down Adina and the others.

Then somebody, surely the Securitate, start to invade Adina's apartment and cut off the tail and then one by one the legs of a fox fur she's sentimentally attached to. She and Paul decide to flee to a more remote part of the countryside. Do they dare to flee the country? Escapees are frequently shot at the border. 

But they're saved by the bell as it were: 1989 happens, and it's of pictures of the dead Ceauşescus that the question I opened with is asked. Sympathy is hard to imagine.

This is the second novel of Herta Müller's I've read, and the setup is somewhat similar to The Land of Green Plums, which I read earlier: a group of young people in the late years of Communist Romania, potentially intellectuals, oppressed by the secret police. Cooperate? Escape? Lie low? The Land of Green Plums takes place a few years earlier than this and there's no rescue in sight.

I thought this was good, but I was more impressed by The Land of Green Plums (1994 in German).  I felt the characters were better differentiated in that novel, which made the choices feel more poignant. This is a shorter book, only 220 pages, with fairly large margins, practically a novella in length. The opening started with quite a lot of folkloric elements: gypsies who are afraid of hares, the tooth fairy, who's a mouse in Romania, it seems:

"Mouse O mouse bring me a brand new tooth

and you can have my old one."

This felt a little odd at first, like it was more anthropological documentation than dramatically necessary, though in the end I did feel it helped set up the fairly folkloric bit about attacking Adina's fox fur. The novel got better as it went on. Still. The wisdom of the Internet suggests that The Land of Green Plums, The Appointment, and The Hunger Angel are her best works. I'll probably try one of the two of those I haven't read next, but I will try them. She's good.

Müller was born in 1953 to the German-speaking minority in Romania, got out of the country in 1987 and settled in Germany where she still lives. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009.

I was (grimly) amused by this joke one of the characters tells in the novel: a Romanian who's led a bad life is whisked off to Hell after his death where he's buried up to his neck in boiling mud. Once he's settled in, he looks around and sees Nicolae Ceauşescu in the boiling mud, but only up to his shins. Our anonymous Romanian complains to the demon in charge of the boiling mud department, What's up with that? The demon replies, What can you do? He's standing on the shoulders of his wife.

This came out in German in 1992, was translated into English by Philip Boehm in 2016, and is my visit to Romania for 2023.

Leah Horlick (#poem)

 

Guilt

At first, like a head cold--then, three glasses of wine--no five.

Hour twelve, a low-grade fever. Hour fourteen, your whole body is

on fire --

each joint snaps open, heat coiled inside your knees. A reaction to

the measles booster, days before the trip. Fades like a hangover,

then rears

its host of heads again. We chose not

to go to Chișinău -- We have no business

being here anymore. Reroute to Iași. It's the heat,

driving stick, a last hiss,

writing to the chief rabbi

I'm sorry we're not going to make it--

the GPS, the roads, Russian, the car

which really means

I'm sorry we are afraid

-Leah Horlick

I've never had a measles booster, but I had the shingles one not too long ago.  That's about how it was.

Leah Horlick's book Moldovan Hotel came out from Brick Books, a small Canadian press, in 2021. It's her third book of poetry. (I haven't read either of the earlier ones.) She'd gotten a fellowship to go to Romania and Moldova in 2017 to attempt to come to terms with the tragic history of her Jewish family in the region.

Ritual Instructions for Transnistria

Avoid all travel to Transnistria in northeast Moldova.

-travel advisory from the Government of Canada, December 2017

In your right hand, take the ten-hour tourist visa. Form a window with

your left, frame the last functioning hammer and sickle flag. Walk six

times around the last twenty thousand

tonnes of Soviet ammunition. A tanker spills cigarettes out of its side

like a whale and so we say May the memory of this whale be a blessing.

Wash your hands before you dunk your head

beneath the x-ray at the checkpoint, the x-ray that pretends not to notice 

you. Rabbi, is there

a blessing for the border?

A blessing for the border--

May God bless and keep the borders, seen and unseen, far away from us.

-Leah Horlick

Transnistria is that breakaway region in Moldova (across the Dniester River) that's propped up by Russia. 

She says in an afterword she lifted that final line from Fiddler on the Roof, but I knew that. 😉("Is there a proper blessing for the Tsar?" "May God bless and keep the Tsar...far away from us.")

The title poem is probably the best, but too long to quote. Interesting stuff.

Janwillem van de Wetering's Outsider in Amsterdam (#mystery)

"Killers are very scarce in Amsterdam so why should we suddenly run into a whole bunch of them?"

Piet Verbloom is found hanged in the Hindist Society building. Suicide? Could be, but then why was he banged on the head before he died?

This is the first Grijpstra and de Gier case; they're detectives on the Amsterdam force; the fat Henk Grijpstra is married with kids, and is the senior of the pair; Rinus de Gier is a sergeant, single and living with his cat Oliver. They're called in. They argue back and forth: is it suicide? But they both know that bump on the head means they will have to investigate. 

The Hindist Society is interested in a mishmash of Eastern religions--the book comes out in 1975--and their building houses a bar, a meditation center, a shop, and a commune. Verbloom sees himself as the chief priest. He's married, but should any other females appear on the premises, he feels authorized to pester them.

An early seventies society interested in Eastern religions? There's drugs, of course, hash at the very least. Are there more serious drugs? Maybe.

If it is a murder, the suspects are Piet's estranged wife, his pregnant lover, his accountant, a couple of drug dealers who frequented the bar, and the various people living in the commune, the bartender, a Papuan immigrant looking for cheap rooms. 

I've read one van de Wetering before, The Mind-Murders of 1981, the eighth in the series. I think I preferred this one. I started the series because I read somewhere it compared well with Edmund Crispin, one of my favorite mystery writers, and I continue to fail to see the comparison. It is a bit funny, but it has none of Crispin's inspired zaniness. I felt this one started well, and ended well, but I was less certain about the middle. It can't quite make up its mind whether it's a police procedural--other cases our detectives are involved with intrude--or a fair-play-cluing mystery. But if it was meant to be the latter, the red herrings weren't very red and I knew who the murderer was almost from the beginning, though the motive remained a bit mysterious until the end.

Read for the Vintage Mystery Challenge:

Vintage Mystery, Silver, Noose. That's our opening scene portrayed on the cover. With a very 70s shirt.

And for the European Reading Challenge:

It is pretty fascinating as a Netherlands book. Amsterdam was famous for its drug culture not so long afterwards. But as of 1975 (or presumably the novel represents the events of a little earlier) the city wasn't quite so ready for all that implied.

Van de Wetering was Dutch, though he lived in the U.S. later on for quite a while. It seems he wrote his novels first in Dutch, but then did his own translating.

Josef Škvorecky's Sins for Father Knox

     "...the blonde turned to the detective. 'It's clear now, isn't it?'

     'What is?'

     'Everything. Don't you see?'

     Neils C. Kölln didn't see, but rather than making him humble, this annoyed him.

     'No,' he snapped. 'I'm not clairvoyant!'

     'Neither am I," said the blonde modestly. 'But when I'm bored, I read mysteries.'"

The 'blonde' is Eve Adam, a Czech lounge singer on a world-wide tour for Pragokonzert, who has to fight off (at least some of the time; at other times she doesn't fight) various men's groping hands. And all the while she's solving mysteries.

But not before she gets out of jail in Prague. Where she herself had been convicted for murder. Lieutenant Boruvka, the Czechoslovakian detective who was the protagonist of the first book in this series by Škvorecky, was responsible assembling the evidence and arresting Eve Adam, but in the first case in this book, he begins to have doubts, and with Eve's help, gets her cleared from that murder charge. Still Eve decides it's best to leave the country for a while and takes an offer of a tour to get out of Czechoslovakia.

There are ten stories in the book, and as the title might suggest, they follow a conceit: Fr. Ronald Knox, first Anglican, then Catholic priest, uncle to Penelope Fitzgerald, writer of mysteries, member in good standing of the Detection Club, composed in 1928 a list of ten commandments for the writing of Golden Age, fair-play mysteries. Each of the stories in Škvorecky's book violates one of Fr. Knox's rules. Those rules (fairly tongue-in-cheek) include things like, no more than one secret passage in a house or no previously unknown twin can suddenly show up.

At one point each story presents a challenge to the reader, like an old Ellery Queen mystery:

It's a pretty amusing collection of stories. 

But I will say I didn't think it as good as that first collection of mystery stories by Škvorecky. Mostly that's because there wasn't enough Lt. Boruvka. Now probably it's to Škvorecky's credit that he writes less well about a loose-living lounge singer than he does about a mournful but happily married man who still looks at girls but then doesn't act on those longing looks. Lt. Boruvka is just both more amusing and more convincing than Eve Adam, and I wanted more of the Lieutenant in this book. Still this was fun.

Škvorecky is an interesting figure in his own right. Born in 1924 in Czechoslovakia, he was a jazz musician as a young man, and wrote several novels in the Communist years, either unpublished or squelched after publication. He was a supporter of the liberalization in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and after the country was invaded by the Russians, he and his wife got out, to Canada, where he established a press, 68 Publishers, in Toronto, that specialized in banned Czech and Slovak literature--the press brings out the first Czech language edition of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He died in 2012.

This book comes out in 1973, when Škvorecky is in Canada, and the stories are set in a variety of places--New York, Stockholm, Paris--where Eve Adam tours, but the stories set in Prague are still clearly a communist Czechoslovakia. The book was translated into English by Kaca Polackova Henley.

And though the stories are set in several locations, it will be my visit to the Czech Republc for this year's European Reading Challenge.

And while that's the shadowiest of shadowy figures on the cover of that book, I've already used an Eric Ambler novel for the Shadowy Figure category in this year's Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt...

...so we'll have to go with the hat.

Vintage Mystery, Silver, Hat: the fifth story is 'Why So Many Shamuses?' and that guy with the hat on the cover looks pretty shamus-like to me...

The Alexiad of Anna Comnena

"The date was the first of December in the seventh indiction. [1083] He [Alexius I Comnenus] found the empress in the throes of childbirth, in the room set apart long ago for an empress's confinement. Our ancestors called it the porphyra--hence the world-famous name porphyrogenitus. At dawn (it was a Saturday) a baby girl was born to them, who resembled her father, so they said, in all respects. I was that baby."

Born in a room lined with purple marble, that baby was Anna Comnena, who went on to write a history of her father Alexius' reign as Emperor of Byzantium from 1081-1118. 

The Comneni were a prominent Byzantine family and Alexius' uncle had been emperor from 1057-1059. But to become emperor in 1081 he had to lead a coup. The previous emperor Nicephorus Boutaniates was elderly and had no clear successor. As Anna tells it, Alexius and his brother Isaac became worried at the machinations in the palace, and decided to simply leave Byzantium. Whether that was exactly so or not, they ultimately decided the safest thing for them was simply to seize power.

Alexius and Isaac were both senior figures in the Byzantine military, with Alexius, the younger of the two brothers, holding the more senior office, Great Domestic of the West, which meant he was the supreme commander of military forces in the European half of the Byzantine empire. After some discussion between them it was Alexius who became emperor, though his brother remained a top official. Alexius as a general had been successful in staving off the various threats, but still the state of the empire in 1081 was bad. The Byzantines had lost the disastrous battle of Manzikert in what is now eastern Turkey in 1071, and the lands they had firm control of were little more than the city itself by the time Alexius proclaims himself emperor:

"Alexius knew that the Empire was almost at its last gasp. The east was being horribly ravaged by the Turks; the west was in a bad condition, while Robert [Guiscard] strained every nerve to put on the throne the pseudo-Michael who had taken refuge with him...The Romans [for Anna, what's our Byzantine Empire is still the Roman Empire] had no worthwhile forces; in fact there were no more than 300 soldiers in the capital...In the imperial treasury there were no reserves of money with which he could summon allies..."

The first ten years are pretty much constant warfare. He has to beat back the Seljuk Turks, the Normans under Robert Guiscard, and both Cuman and Pecheneg nomads from north of the Danube. A Seljuk Turk attempts to create a new state centred on Smyrna and leads sea raids up the Turkish coast, taking over Lesbos and Chios. All of that has to be stopped.

As Anna tells it, Alexius has a number of quite competent military assistants and advisers, starting with George Palaeologus. He doesn't often listen to them, though, and hot-headedly charges into battle, leading from the front, and getting beaten, even after Palaeologus suggested maybe that wasn't wise. In particular he loses three times to the Normans before he finally manages to fight them to a standstill. In the end it's mostly the death of Robert Guiscard which slows that source of attack.

It gets easier after ten years, but still not easy. There are a number of internal rebellions and the Pechenegs haven't yet given up, but the empire's boundaries are a bit more stable. Then the First Crusade comes through town. This is both opportunity and threat. The avowed enemy of the crusaders are the Muslims, and in particular the Seljuk Turks, who were also a traditional enemy of Byzantium. But how committed are the crusaders actually to their stated mission? And anyway do the Western Christians actually think the Eastern Christians are legitimately Christian? It's in these years that Alexius' reputation for wiliness gets established--Anna admires wiliness, even in enemies such as Bohemond, Robert Guiscard's son--and Alexius mostly gets the Crusaders to move on towards Jerusalem, and some of their conquests end up in his hands.

Then in 1118, he dies. How old he was is not perfectly clear with a range of dates for his birthday from 1048 to 1057. He's succeeded by his son John.

It's actually a pretty lively read, especially the early battle scenes. Anna says her father didn't like to talk about his military exploits in public, but if it was just the family, he could be persuaded to yarn away at dinner. Palace politics were a little harder to follow, especially as there were far too many people named Nicephorus--her husband, her husband's grandfather, who'd also been an emperor, the previous emperor, at least two rebel leaders. Nicephorus is the Greek for bringer of victory, so it's a well-omened name, but still, what's wrong with a nice George or John? (Not that there aren't a couple of those...)

Anna writes this at the end of her life, after she's been sent to a convent: she led a rebellion against her brother after her father died and that was her punishment. She says she has some old veterans she can talk to and ask questions of; she's got some treaties that she reproduces. She frequently quotes both the Bible and Homer; her Bible quotes tend to be a little fuzzy; her Homer is pretty accurate. Make of that what you will. 

Edward Gibbon, he of The Decline and Fall, complains she's too biased a source to be trusted, but the translator E. R. A. Sewter writes in the introduction that he thinks she's pretty accurate, and that was the standard scholarly opinion of the time (1969).  She clearly likes her father, and acknowledges the possibility of bias:

"I regard him as dear, but truth is dearer still."

In any case Alexius did begin a century of rule by Comneni, which was a late good moment in the history of the empire. 

I've been meaning to read this since I read Sir Walter Scott's Count Robert of Paris. Scott says he uses Anna Comnena as a source, and she's a character in the novel as well; in the novel she's as a bit of a bore who insists on droning on at her literary teas. That felt a bit unfair, even as I was reading Scott, and now I've read the history, it seems quite unfair. She's engaging. One of the conspirators against Alexius is Anna's husband (a Nicephorus, of course), but that's unfair, too; he was loyal to Alexius and died of a fever while on campaign. The husband is also presented a bit of an anti-intellectual bonehead. Not true: he wrote a history of the period just before Anna's book, and Sewter says it's useful, though not as good as Anna's.

Some of Scott does clearly come from Anna, though. There is a crusader knight who hops on the throne in Byzantium and is just a general jerk, but his name is Latinus, according to Anna, and not Count Robert. Still that was the clear source for some of Count Robert's behaviour. Scott says he modelled Robert's wife Brenhilda on Gaita, Robert Guiscard's wife:

"Robert's wife Gaita, who used to accompany him on campaign, like another Pallas, if not a second Athena, seeing the runaways and glaring fiercely at them, shouted in a very loud voice: 'How far will ye run? Halt! Be men!'"

Hmm, maybe. I still say Brenhilda has more to do with some female warrior from Ariosto than any more realistic source.

Anyway, an enjoyable and interesting read. But one I meant to finish a week earlier because then it would have been a Big Book of Summer, one from my 20 Books of Summer list, and a good entry for Women in Translation month. Oh, well... 😉 Still it does count for the European Reading Challenge. It chronicles fighting in what is now Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, but Constantinople and many of the battles make it my trip to Turkey for the year.

Owen Matthews' Overreach

"We used to believe the Russians had the second-best army in the world. Now we know they have the second-best army in the Ukraine."

-Ukrainian soldiers' joke

A bit of bravado, funny, but not entirely wrong either...

Owen Matthews' book on the war in the Ukraine came out late last year. Matthews is a British journalist with deep ties to Russia: he lived there for twenty-five years, speaks the language fluently, was the Moscow bureau chief for Newsweek.

Also his mother, wife, and children are Russian. 

He starts with a quick history of the Ukraine. A lot of his information comes from Serhii Plokhy's The Gates of Europe, but some of it is also family history: his mother was born Lyudmila Bibikov, a Russian-speaker from the Ukraine; his grandfather Bibikov was an ardent communist (Matthews has an Aunt Lenina!) but his grandfather had the temerity to suggest that collectivization was proceeding too fast in the Ukraine; and so he was murdered in the Stalinist purges in the 30s. Matthews' grandmother was exiled to Siberia. Earlier Bibikovs were high-ranking military officers in the Tsarist army. "For two centuries the Bibikovs played a significant role in Russia's imperial rule over Ukraine, first as servants of the tsars and later as loyal lieutenants of the Soviet power." He goes on, "The connection is not a comfortable one."

But the earliest Bibikov in the historical record was born Bibik Beg, a Tatar warlord who swore fealty to the Russian tsar in 1486 and Russified his name to Bibikov.

This was all pretty fascinating and well-done, and I noticed one of Matthews' earlier books is a family memoir, which I'm now curious to find.

Then comes the lead up to the war. Matthews gives a coherent account of the different factions in Russian government. Matthews clearly has good sources in both the Foreign Affairs department under Sergey Lavrov and in the office of Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman. (Neither of his sources he names, for obvious reasons.) Putin was not necessarily the most aggressive (and Sergey Shoigu probably the least) but Putin had become isolated during Covid and no longer quite tethered to reality. (Why was he so isolated? There's apparently a rumour he had thyroid cancer, but nobody knows for sure.) This was interesting, but complicated.

Russia invades on February 24th of last year. Matthews is in Moscow and notes how quickly the mood in Moscow changed. Before the war he was able to talk relatively freely with friends and sources; after it starts he's shunned. At the end of March a friend tells him in strong terms he needs to get his son out: his son is 19 and not in university (he's working with a theatre troupe) and so is subject to call-up. Sanctions have started to bite and flights out of Russia are limited; they get to Istanbul on Turkish Air. Ticket prices have gone through the roof, but Turkish Air is still accepting frequent flyer miles. One advantage of being an international journalist, I guess, is you got lots of those... 😉

Everybody expected the Russian army to roll into Kyiv, not just Putin and Russian generals, but also most of the West. Early on Zelenskyy was prepared to negotiate with Putin, to offer neutrality, to stay of NATO, possibly to give up territory. But Putin believed he could get more. After the discovery of the atrocities at Bucha and Irpin north of Kyiv, Zelenskyy's willingness, but also room, to negotiate shrank.

Of course the Ukraine did fight, and with considerable success. In retrospect, Matthews notes how much military experience there was in the Ukrainian army and even in the general Ukrainian public by then, after eight years of an active war zone in the Donbas: 900,000 Ukrainians had done military service but were not in the army at the start of the war. And they were willing to fight. At the beginning, the Ukraine had more volunteers than weapons, and turned people away.

The Russians less so. It seems nearly a million people left Russia in the first month or so after the war started; possibly another million after the ramp-up in conscription in September of 2022. Putin still remains popular though, and the exodus may have only strengthened his popularity. Matthews discusses such independent polling as is available; it confirms Putin remains relatively popular with the average Russian.

He also notes those Russians who do not like him may be even more nationalistic; much of Putin's opposition is from the nationalistic right-wing. In the end Matthews isn't very optimistic about how all this turns out. The sanctions have hurt Russia, but not hurt enough to be a game changer. Putin probably won't fall, but should he fall, he's more likely to be replaced with somebody worse.

Matthews quotes Andrei Kolesnikov of the Moscow Carnegie Center, "...and so we continue our steady movement down the world's garbage chute."

Matthews closing:

"Not only would Putin leave no lasting ideological legacy, but any legacy of prosperity and stability that he may have created had been destroyed by his own decision ot make war on Ukraine. He had gained a fifth of Ukraine [less now--me] and increased the size of Russia by half a per cent. The price of his illusions was not only thousands of lost lives, but also a lost future for Russia. Most ominously of all, the misbegotten war had opened a Pandora's box of alternative futures for Russia that were much more scary than Putin's regime had ever been."

This could do for either Russia or Ukraine for my reading challenge, but I have another Andrey Kurkov novel out from the library that I should read soon, so that will be Ukraine and this will cover Russia. 

It was a pretty good look at an unfortunate topic.

Ivo Andrić's Omer Pasha Latas

"After all sorts of hints and rumors, the day finally came when the Ottoman commander in chief, the seraskier Omer Pasha, entered Sarajevo with his army."

That's the opening of Ivo Andrić's Omer Pasha Latas. Omer Pasha spends close to two years (1850-1851) in Bosnia as the agent of the Ottoman sultan; his mission is to implement the sultan's reforms and to get the local feudal aristocracy in line. Whatever it takes is the watchword, and he's led successful missions of this sort before in the Ottoman lands, in Syria, in Kurdistan, in Wallachia.

Omer Pasha Latas is Andrić's last novel, published after his death, maybe not quite complete, though it felt complete to me in this translation by Celia Hawkesworth. 

What is the Bosnia of 1850? 

Of one of the characters, a wandering painter, we're told: 

"Before he left Zagreb, people had given him only negative reports about Bosnia, the terrible roads and uncomfortable inns, the strange people and unusual circumstances,..."

Or:

"Bosnia. Not naturally lush or abundant, a land where few sow and toil, it had been eaten away by both local and foreign idlers, and trodden down by warring armies, so that over the years it had been stripped bare and now resembled stables in which hungry horses gnawed the wood of their mangers."

Those are the thoughts of Idris Effendi, the number two lawyer on Omer Pasha's staff. Or:

"'What is this? What kind of country is this that will devour all? And what kind of scoundrels and criminals have gathered in this residence? All degenerates! Even angels would be corrupted by these idlers and perverts!"

That's the cry of Omer Pasha's wife.

The novel is structured like Andrić's acknowledged masterpiece, The Bridge on the Drina; it's really a collection of stories organized around a central figure. In that novel the central figure is the bridge itself, and the stories take place over four hundred years; in this novel, the central figure is Omer Pasha, and the events take place over that year and a half. But Omer Pasha is not always on the scene.

The back of my copy of the novel gives the backstory to Omer Pasha, but I won't: in the novel itself, it's only gradually revealed over the length of the novel. He was a real historical figure and I linked the Wikipedia article above. But I knew nothing about Omer Pasha Latas before I read this (and I imagine you know nothing, too...😉) and it's likely even to the original audience of the novel he was a bit obscure. So the revelations would and should be revelations and I won't spoil them. But we learn them as we go: Omer Pasha reveals himself to a Montenegran grandée as he's trying to win him over; he meditates on his past while that painter is trying to capture the fire in his eyes; we hear the story of how he met his wife.

At the end of his two years, Omer Pasha and his army march off. Some of the local beys have been killed, some marched in chains to Istanbul. Did the sultan consider the mission a success? We're not really told. But the historical Omer Pasha is still trusted and plays an important role in the Crimean War two years later, though that's outside the frame of the story.

I said the novel is structured like The Bridge on the Drina, and that's true, but it's much darker even than the already quite dark Bridge. Well, a backwater in the later years of the Ottoman empire was probably not a very appealing place. The novel is not quite as good as The Bridge on the Drina, but still awfully good.

Ivo Andrić was born in Sarajevo in 1892, but mostly grew up in Višegrad (also in Bosnia). He got a Ph.D. after WWI in South Slavic history and literature, then served in the diplomatic corps of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961, and died in 1975.  

Covering Bosnia for the European Reading Challenge.

Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob

"But does not every religion have some truth in it? All of them, even the most barbaric, have been permeated by the holy sparks."

Chuck is feeling a little triumphant that he's conquered so large a Nobel-prize winning book...

The Jacob of The Books of Jacob is Jacob Frank (1726-1791). He was born Jacob Leibowicz (spellings vary) in Korolivka, now in the Ukraine, but then in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. His family were Sabbateans, that is, followers of the doctrine of Sabbatai Zevi, the Jewish mystic who converted to Islam in 1666. They were a merchant family, and Frank himself traveled and traded in the Ottoman empire, where he became fluent in Turkish. He met the leaders of the Sabbatean movement at the time, then in Salonika. It was while in Ottoman lands, he took on the name Frank; a frank to the Ottomans was any Western, non-Islamic foreigner.

He also underwent several religious experiences, and eventually proclaimed himself the heir to Sabbatai Zevi, the third in a series of Jewish Messiahs. It might take a fourth to bring about salvation, a female to embody Shekinah, or wisdom. 

Frank considered the Talmud to be outdated--this was also the belief of Sabbateans in general--and it was a virtuous act to violate Mosaic law: eat pork, not fast on holy days, speak the name of the Lord. Expectedly enough this got him in trouble with more orthodox Jewish rabbis, and he was declared a heretic. Political in-fighting ensued, and Frank with his followers converted to Christianity, while still intending to retain something of their separate Jewish identity. (Sabbatai Zevi had converted to Islam, but the Sabbataean community remained largely separate.) This was the ultimate repudiation of Mosaic law. You can imagine this as either evil apostasy or noble ecumenicism, and both points of view were to be found at the time and are present in the novel. 

Converting to Christianity brought Frank protectors, but they weren't strong enough or didn't care enough, and Frank ended up jailed for thirteen years, only released by a Russian general at the first partition of Poland in 1772. Frank and many of his followers left Poland, settling first in Austro-Hungarian lands, before being pushed on to Offenbach-am-Main, now in Germany, where he died.

The novel has a few modes: much of it is in a standard free indirect that follows Jacob Frank, his followers, or other historical figures; there are also sections from the writings of Nahman of Busk, who is the theologian to Frank's mystic. There are letters, particularly those between Fr. Chmielowski, a Jesuit and author of the first Polish encyclopedia, and Elżbieta Drużbacka, a poetess. (Both historical figures, though the letters are imaginary.) Tokarczuk takes the religious experiences seriously, and within the framework of the novel, one is meant to believe they are real. Jewish folk magic also works in the novel, with particular impact on Jacob Frank's grandmother. 

Various historical figures you might know do show up: for example Empress Maria Theresa and Kasimir Pulaski (who also fought in the American Revolution) are perhaps the two most notable. Frank meets both of them.

It's the third Tokarczuk novel I've read; it's easily the biggest, but also the best. (Though I think I'd start with Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead. Flights was my least favorite of the three, though still impressive.) It's a fascinating and convincing look at a historical place and period that I knew next to nothing about, with multiple generations and characters that change, grow and/or shrink, over the course of forty years. No character is a moral saint, no one is a thorough-going villain. (Though some very bad things do happen.) It does not end with a bang: Frank dies of ill-health at 65 or so, his followers, acquaintances, enemies and supporters do as well, each in their turn.

I thought the translation (by Jennifer Croft) was superb.

At 965 pages, it's definitely a Big Book of Summer, and though I have hopes for at least one more big book this summer, it will certainly be the biggest.

There's also my European Reading Challenge. It's one of those border-crossing books that could fit into practically any slot. Frank spends significant periods in places that are now in the Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, and Germany. Still, Tokarczuk is Polish and writes in Polish; it's in Warsaw that Frank converts, and those thirteen years he's imprisoned it's in Częstochowa in Poland. So Poland it is!

And one I actually put on my 20 Books of Summer list!

-o- 

"If people could read the same books, they would inhabit the same world."

-o- 

    "'Is all this true?' the lovely and talented Maria Szymanowska, née Wołowska, the pianist, asked him many years later,...

    'Madam, it is a novel. It is literature.'"

-o-

"Nonetheless it is written that any person who toils over matters of Messiahs, even failed ones, even just to tell their stories, will be treated just the same as he who studies the eternal mysteries of light." 

Robert Aickman's Go Back At Once

"It seems likely that Cressida would never have encountered the greatest man of his age (some, including the man himself, said, of any age) but for Vivien's enthusiasm and drive in the early stages of the project."

Cressida Hazeborough and her friend Vivien Poins have just finished school. "Both Cressida and Vivien were perfectly clever enough to go on to university and, having arrived there, to excel; but there was no question of that for either of them." It's 1920, and Cressida is expected to go home and wait to get married. This does not appeal. Cressida decides to get a job in a shop instead, because that's her only alternative; Vivien, of a wealthier family, does the same, because it's something to do. They both settle in London, moving in with Vivien's Aunt Agnes, scandalous because divorced.

But the 'greatest man of his age' (self-proclaimed) is Virgilio Vittore, and he's just taken over the city of Trino, which he proposes to govern according to the laws of music. Vittore, ugly but magnetic, once had an affair with Aunt Agnes, and when he takes over Trino, he invites Aunt Agnes to come to Trino and do something useful, maybe nursing, not that Aunt Agnes has any particular experience nursing. Vivien--and Cressida--encourage Aunt Agnes to go, because...adventure!

I found the book a riot. I don't really remember where I came across it, but the library could deliver it. It came out last year from And Other Stories press. I'd never heard of Robert Aickman before, but he's supposed to be best known for his tales of the supernatural. He wrote this in 1975, but died in 1981 with it unpublished. It was eventually discovered among his papers and issued at last. I was giggling away as I read it, and The Other Reader picked it up subsequently and has now nearly finished it, and found it just as enjoyable as I did.

Virgilio Vittore is clearly based on Gabriele D'Annunzio, also ugly but magnetic, a precursor of Italian Fascism, who invaded the neutral Fiume (modern Rijeka, in Croatia) in the aftermath of World War I. He wanted to give it to Italy, but the Italian government, embarrassed by this clearly illegal gift, wouldn't take it. 

But, while that's all true, that makes the book sound heavy in a way that it's not. Cressida and Vivien and a few other nice English girls looking for adventure meet a bunch of oddballs, a few of whom aren't very nice, in Trino, but are perfectly capable of dealing with them. Does Cressida meet Vittore? And is he all he's cracked up to be? Well. I do recommend you find out for yourself!

Time Shelter

"The point of the experiment was to create a protected past or 'protected time.' A time shelter. We wanted to open up a window into time and let the sick live there, along with their loved ones."

Gaustine, with the assistance of the narrator, 'Georgi Gospodinov', is looking to create a therapeutic safe space for those suffering from Alzheimer's disease. If the sufferer's happy time was in the 1960s, for example, they'll be treated in a wing of the clinic furnished like the 60s, with the furniture, the music, the cigarettes (there's a lot of talk about the cigarettes of different eras) and whatever else will be most effective. Gaustine is the clinical psychologist (though is he?) and 'Gospodinov', a Bulgarian novelist, is the presumed expert in telling the stories of the needed era.

That's the premise of Georgi Gospodinov's novel Time Shelter, which came out earlier this year in English, translated by Angela Rodel, and recently won the Man Booker International. If you've read other Gospodinov, you'll know that Gaustine is a recurring character in his fiction and has a way of moving from time to time at will.

But that's only the first section (of five). Gaustine sets up his clinic, in Switzerland, at least partly under the influence of Mann's The Magic Mountain, and we get the case history of the first two patients, one a dissident in Bulgaria in the 60s, and the second a woman who was a child during World War II. The therapy seems to help, family members are impressed, though of the second one, the 'Gospodinov' character says, "She's remembering, I say, that's why she's crying." Is a doubt creeping in for the reader?

In the second section, the treatment is so successful that even people who do not have Alzheimer's are eager to move to Gaustine-style clinics. (Others than the first in Switzerland are now open.) Whole countries are eager to move to a different point in time. But when? The various E.U. nations decide each will hold a referendum to determine their preferred era. The U.K. wants to join in as well, but the E.U. says, no, you've already left, and anyway, wasn't Brexit a referendum about to moving to an imagined earlier era? Switzerland wants to join in as well, and is allowed, but in the end punts due to their traditional neutrality.

The third section is a case of study of one referendum, that in Bulgaria. (Naturally enough for our Bulgarian author.) None of the countries are seriously considering anything prior to 1900, but what's the best decade in Bulgaria in the 20th century? There are partisans for most decades, but the polls show that it comes to two: the 80s, the stagnant but relatively safe end of the communist era and the 30s, Bulgarian nationalism at its most successful. (In the 20s in Bulgaria there was apparently a military coup, and fighting broke out for a couple of years.) Which will win? The Socs? or the Heroes? Polls show it's close.

The fourth section is a swift overview of the referendum outcomes across Europe. Europe is divided into camps. The 70s are popular, as are the 50s. Only Italy chooses the 60s, la dolce vita, don't you know? Will anybody actually choose the 40s? Things were pretty good then in Sweden for instance.

The E.U. (and Gospodinov the author) take the terms of these referenda seriously: if you've moved to the 80s, do you have to get rid of your cellphones? If to the 30s, do you have also get rid of your televisions? Travel across country lines is forbidden until these questions are sorted. Europe is once again broken into camps, but on different lines.

In the last section, 'Georgi Gospodinov' is losing his memory (or is he?) and in need of treatment. What's his preferred era? Gaustine writes,

"While writing a novel about those who have lost their memory, he himself begins to lose his memory. He rushes to finish it before he forgets what he was writing."

Can I say I think the novel is silly and also still say, I think it's a pretty major novel? Perhaps I should say absurd, a better lit-critty term, but that word comes with a lot of baggage and feels more ponderous than Time Shelter actually is. The whole premise is silly, but it's quite an inspired and suggestive silliness. And, as befits a novel about aging and losing one's memory, there's also a strong streak of melancholy throughout, most pronounced at the end.

[One thing it's not, though, is 'macabre', which was part of the description of the novel when it appeared on the Man Booker International shortlist, and is just absurd. Or silly.]

So: a novel about our relationship to the past, to history, to memory, to Europe. Maybe some other things, too. In a funny, serious package. At this point I haven't read any other of the Man Booker International shortlist novels, but this seems a solid choice.

I've liked Gospodinov in the past. Some other Gospodinov books on the blog.

A few other quotes that didn't quite fit in anywhere else, but I liked: 😉

"For a Bulgarian, complaining is like talking about the weather in England, you can never go wrong."

"I...sink into the cold cave of the library as if into another time, a time shelter."

"The less memory, the more past.

    As long as you remember, you hold at bay the times gone by. Like lighting a fire in the middle of a forest at night. Demons and wolves are crowding all around, the beasts of the past are tightening the circle, but still they don't step into it. The allegory is simple. As long as the flame of memory burns, you are the master."

"The end of a novel is like the end of the world, it's good to put it off."

Covering Bulgaria this year for me for Gilion's European Reading Challenge.

Victor Gruen's Shopping Town

"For readers who hope to be entertained by description of adventures, or for those want to be enriched by reports of the success and various detours of a contemporary, I hope my story will suffice. After all, this contemporary was part of the first eight decades of the twentieth century."

-Vienna, March 8, 1979

"...one of the ten best architects of the twentieth century."

-Time Magazine

Victor Gruen (1903-1980), born Viktor Grünbaum in Vienna, is known today, if at all, as the 'father of the shopping mall.' As a title, it's ambiguous, not entirely admirable. He would agree. 

On the way to acquiring that title, there were indeed some adventures. Gruen was born to an upper middle class family in Vienna; his father was a lawyer. They were assimilated Jews, not practicing. (Gruen says he was in synagogue only for the weddings of family friends.) In 1918, at the end of the war, his father died of the Spanish Flu. Austria in general, and the Gruens in particular, were impoverished. 

Gruen had always been interested in architecture, but with no money for education, he apprentices himself as what seems to be basically a bricklayer. At the same time (this is the 1920s) he organizes a left-wing (Socialist) cabaret for which he functions as the MC. He wangles a year at a university architecture department, but the anti-Semitism as well as what he considers the lack of imagination on the part of the teachers keeps him from completing a degree. 

The cabaret is squelched with the rise of Austrofascism (Gruen calls it a 'dictatorship tempered by sloppiness') when Dollfuss becomes Premier in 1932. Still Gruen is managing some more architectural commissions, most notably shop fronts, and has nearly qualified as an official architect by means of experience and exams. But it's now 1938, and when in March Karl Schuschnigg says the Austrian military will not resist should the German army force Anschluss, Gruen realizes he has to be ready to run at a moment's notice.

This is the moment of the 'description of adventures' Gruen promised in the introduction (quoted above). US immigration law required an affidavit from a US resident, with a promise of financial support, to acquire a visa to enter the US at the time. Gruen had an uncle who'd emigrated to the US in 1914, but the uncle, while well-meaning, was still impoverished. But Gruen had made friends with a woman, Ruth Yorke, who'd come to Austria to learn German in the 20s. She became a star on a radio soap opera, and had rich friends; one of them agrees to become Gruen's sponsor. He gets the necessary  exit visa, now a German one, and the required transit visas: his plan is to travel via Switzerland, France, and the UK. (Anna Seghers' Transit covers some of the same visa complications.) But when he's about to go, he learns that the Gestapo has occupied his apartment in his absence, and he's advised not to go home. But everything he needs to leave is still there. 

Earlier a non-Jewish friend had told him that he was joining the Nazi party to keep his job, but that he was still a friend and if Gruen ever needed any help... So Gruen calls up this friend and explains the situation. A few hours later the friend shows up in a Storm Trooper uniform--Gruen is terrified--but he has the luggage and visas and tells him to go, go, go. It's only after the war, when he meets this friend again in Austria, that he learns the story: his friend had stolen a uniform, shown up at the Gruen apartment, and said, These are the belongings of the Jew Viktor Grünbaum and henceforth confiscated, carrying them all away. 

The story even has an amusing (?) denouement: this friend was labeled politically unreliable for this, was immediately drafted into the German army, and sent to various dangerous fronts. Promotions to officer class were refused for him. Still, he survived. At the end of the war, when the Russians occupied Vienna, he was arrested as a Nazi, but was able to prove that, though he had been a Nazi, he was also politically unreliable, and so was let go. 

Anyway, those were the thrills...now we're on to the successes and various detours. 😉

Actually, maybe a moment about the story of the book. Gruen did have an interesting life, wrote some works about architecture and city planning over the course of his professional career, and later in life, various people told him, you should write an autobiography. He wasn't especially interested, he says, made a few half-hearted stabs at it, but then his doctor told him he was near the end, and he took it more seriously. This is the book. It was originally written in German, but this English translation is from 2017. It's pretty finished, but wasn't published during his lifetime, and it's a bit imbalanced. It's clear the thrilling parts engaged him more. He writes about the first several projects that got him established in the US, but he doesn't say much about his professional career after about 1956. Instead he discusses a few failures: a plan to make central core of Fort Worth pedestrian-only, his plan for a residential development on the old Newhall Ranch in Valencia, California, (Suburban L.A.), and a plan to revitalize Teheran that collapsed when the Shah was deposed. (Though it was already going south before that.) The last third of the book discusses his idea of environmentally-oriented city planning: pedestrian-only downtown cores; electric trams and subways; but massive parking garages on a ring road that surrounds that core. After his part finishes, there's a couple of reminiscences by his children, and a rather annoyingly theoretical (Walter Benjamin! Gilles Deleuze!) afterword by the translator, who is an Austrian academic.

He started in the US, with changes to shop fronts to invite browsing:

These were on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Lederer, of the store on the right, was also a Jewish emigrant from Vienna. 

He came up with the idea for what would be a shopping mall--a pedestrian shopping center--during World War II, but it couldn't be built then. But he keeps the idea in mind for after the war. His first completed was for the owner of Hudson's, then the major department store in Detroit (and the second largest in the country); they built the Northland Mall in suburban Detroit, completed in 1956. His second, for the Dayton family, owners of the large department store of Minneapolis, was the completely enclosed Southdale Center, the first of its kind. This the maquette for it:

The raised access roads were for buses to get to the center. The interior was meant to be walkable and inviting; while this wasn't his vision, it seems obvious to me in retrospect that the acres of parking around it would inevitably lead to its being isolated from the community. But maybe he can't be blamed for the outcome? In any case he recognized the subsequent negative aspects of what he'd initially designed and had hoped for something different.

His idea of his relationship to his clients:

I was a bit surprised when he quoted from an early article by Jane Jacobs that praised his Detroit mall; I would have thought she would have objected. I wondered if she later changed her mind on Gruen, and I looked him up in the index of The Death and Life of Great American Cities of 1961 (A wonderful book! Read it if you care about US cities.) and he's there, but she's still quite impressed, and discusses his Fort Worth plan at considerable length. If you know the Jacobs, you'll know she's quite capable of doing down city planners she doesn't like. (Robert Moses, Lewis Mumford.)

Anyway, an interesting book about which I've gone on long enough...Though his second wife, Elsie Krummeck, was pretty fascinating in her own right: his business partner until they divorced, a talented designer in her own right, mother of his two children, and I could have devoted more space to her.

A couple of quotes:

[From a description of his Matura thesis]: "I argued that Faust could have saved his soul with a grand vision of liveable homes on land reclaimed from the sea. The idea was a little far-fetched, I now admit."

"They could not believe a Californian would take a train instead of a car." [In regard to the Valencia project--whoever 'they' were, they may have been right.]

"The mass use of individual transport machines [cars] within a collective is an absurdity, a life-endangering breach of all the values of a city. It means that all citizens may also insist on possessing their own wells, septic tanks, rifles." [Though it is the US: all citizens may insist on possessing their own rifles...]

Anyway, born in Vienna, he lived there until he was 35; later in his life when he was a successful architect, he had an international practice with homes in L.A. and New York, but he also had a place once again in Vienna, where he primarily lived after he retired at the age of 65. So I'm calling it the Austria book for my European Reading Challenge:

I first saw the book mentioned here which has more information.

Eric Ambler's The Levanter

"My name, Michael Howell, may look and sound Anglo-Saxon, but, with a Lebanese Armenian grandmother and a Cypriot mother, I am no more than fractionally English."

Michael Howell is the Levanter. He's the son in a third generation running Agence Howell, a successful trading business in the eastern Mediterranean. It's around 1970, and Syria, where a good deal of his business takes place, has gotten much more difficult to work in. He struggles to keep on the good side of Syria's various government factions.

One faction is supporting the Palestinian Action Force, a group splintered off from the PLO, led by Salah Ghaled. Without quite realizing what he's doing, Howell gets lured into assisting Ghaled. One of Howell's initiatives in Syria is the manufacture of ceramic batteries, but his wife notes there have been some purchases by the factory that don't quite jibe with what they're supposed to be making. What's up?

The novel comes out in 1972, written before the attack at the Munich Olympics. So you can probably guess the sort of thing that's going to happen.

The novel won Ambler's second Gold Dagger from the Crime Writers Association in the UK, and I saw Alan Furst said it was one of the spy novels he most admired when setting out to write his series. But for me, while I enjoyed it, I wouldn't say I thought it one of Ambler's best: his later novels start with fifty pages of exposition (the union of Egypt and Syria in 1958, anyone? industrial engineering?--a subject Ambler knows about, but still...) that don't feel entirely useful. Once the story does get going, though, it's a good one, but you do have to plow through a bit at the beginning.

Good for a couple of challenges:

Vintage Mystery, Silver, Shadowy Figure. I'm going to call that Arab in a keffiyeh a shadowy figure. I'm not entirely sure what's supposed to be in those bottles, but they could just be the raw ingredients for batteries.

And...

Most of the novel takes place in Syria or Lebanon and the grand finale at sea, but a couple of key scenes do take place on Cyprus.

Robert Gerwarth's November 1918

"In the early morning hours of 10 November 1918, a small convoy of cars crossed the Belgian-Dutch border near the village of Eijsden, carrying the last German Kaiser and King of Prussia, Wilhelm II, into exile. The previous day, his head of government, Chancellor Max von Baden, had publicly announced, without the Kaiser's authorization, that Wilhelm had abdicated."

And thus ended the German Reich, a revolution of sorts that led to the founding of the new German Republic, centred in Weimar. Robert Gerwarth's book is about that revolution. 

The revolution that led to the Weimar Republic is usually viewed as a failure, but Gerwarth wants to change that, at least a bit. "...commonly referred to in the existing historical literature, political speeches, and journalistic op-ed pieces as a 'failed' or 'half-hearted' revolution, the events of late 1918 have long been viewed as part of Germany's 'special path' towards the abyss of the Third Reich...This book suggests an alternative interpretation of the November Revolution--one that does more justice to the achievements of the events of 1918-19, which constituted both the first and the last revolution in a highly industrialized country worldwide prior to the peaceful revolutions in Eastern and Central Europe in 1989-1990." 

Gerwarth notes that the new German republic was the first large industrial country to give women the right to vote, that three quarters of the electorate voted for parties committed to democracy, and that the initial government was a coalition of centre-left parties. That while homosexuality was still illegal, the atmosphere was considerably liberalized. 

The book covers the years from 1917 to 1923. Gerwarth starts with the revolution in Russia, which was both example and warning. But it also considerably changed the battlefield situation. Lenin took Russia out of the war; the generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff decided to gamble on complete victory--and lost their gamble. Germany went from its strongest position militarily to its weakest quite quickly in early 1918. Hindenburg and Ludendorff had been running the country as well as the army, but after the collapse of their attack in France, Kaiser Wilhelm appointed the liberal aristocrat Max von Baden as Chancellor in an attempt to salvage things.

The war was clearly lost, and the left hoped to negotiate with the allies, particularly with Wilson, on the basis of the Fourteen Points. Gerwarth suggests there was considerable optimism in Germany in the first half of 1919 until it became clear that the Treaty of Versailles would be punitive.  Friedrich Ebert, a moderate socialist, became Chancellor, succeeding von Baden, via some extra-constitutional juggling in November of 1918, but when elections were held in 1919, he was legitimately elected to the office.

There were challenges over the next few years, violence instigated by both the Communist left and by the nationalist right. Gerwarth thinks it was managed adequately, though the use of the Freikorps soldiers of the right to put down the Communists, though maybe necessary, was also problematic in the long run. The book ends with Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, which was successfully quashed.

This book came out in 2020. I wanted to read it because I enjoyed his book of 2016 The Vanquished about the years after World War I. While I found this book pretty interesting, I don't think it was quite as fascinating as his earlier one.

Henry James' The Wings of the Dove (#ccspin)

"We shall never be again as we were!"

Four young people and their watchful elders, first in London, briefly in Switzerland, and for most of the last third of the book, in Venice, where there's a death.

Kate Croy, the 'handsome girl', starts us off. She's maybe 25, has £200 a year from her late mother's estate, though she gives half of that to help her widowed (and impoverished and ungrateful) elder sister with four kids. Our first scene shows her hunting up her scoundrelly father and proposing to move in with him. Her father's a bankrupt and has done something (?) that makes him unpresentable in society. Still, she prefers him to her controlling aunt. But he refuses her, because if she can squeeze money out of the rich aunt maybe some of it will drift on to Pops. Why does she not want to live with Aunt Maud? Is it because Kate's in love with somebody inappropriate? Well, yes, she is.

Merton Densher, a 'bland Hermes' according to Henry James himself in The Art of the Novel, seems like a nice enough guy. He has a respectable job as a journalist, but does not come from money, does not have money, and, then as now, as a journalist, does not have much prospect of acquiring money. But he's definitely in love with Kate, and though the coy Croy generally hides it, she's in love with him. £200 a year, even £100 a year, plus the income of a steady job, oughtn't be so difficult, but Kate wants more, and then Aunt Maud does have money. But will Aunt Maud fork over or does she have other plans? Ah, she has other plans.

Meet Lord Mark. ("...he was, oh, yes, adequately human.") Mark's a pretty minor lord, and doesn't have any money himself, but he is a Lord, and Aunt Maud has more than enough money, and Maud's determined to propel Kate (and presumably herself, by connection) into aristocratic circles. If Kate wants to live with adult protection, and not in her sister's Chelsea hovel. she's going to have to entertain and encourage any overtures Lord Mark might make.

(I've been to Chelsea. Not hovels no more.) It is amusing that Chelsea means hovels to the Londoner Kate, but for our next character, the American, it means Carlyle. (Well, I'm an American, of sorts, too.)

Introduce into this circle Milly Theale, in her early 20s, an American orphan from New York, rich beyond any European's furthest imaginings. She's traveling about Europe (Switzerland at first) with her older companion, Susan Stringham, a writer from Burlington, Vermont, 'which she boldly upheld as the real heart of New England, Boston being "too far south"'. We learn almost right away that Milly had been sick in the States before she started traveling, and it's not giving too much away--it's the one thing I was sure of before I read the novel--that it's her death (in Venice) that provides the climax.

(Boston is not too far south to be the heart of New England.)

Milly decides to go to London where Susan's old school friend Maud lives.

In Lord Mark's family estates there's a Bronzino portrait of a young woman, whom everyone says looks exactly like Milly Theale. And maybe the woman looks rather ill? Anyway, Milly has a fainting fit when she sees the portrait. The internets agree the portrait James intends is that of Lucrezia Panciatichi, so you can imagine that's our American heroine above on the left. 

Sir Luke Strett, a noted London doctor and surgeon, shows up to look after Milly, though everyone pretends he's just a great friend.

You can see the outlines of a plot taking shape and I don't want to give away too much; as I said, I didn't know how it would go exactly myself--I have not (yet) seen any movie version--and while this is one of those novels much discussed--it's a major example in Sontag's Illness as Metaphor--it may be possible to come to it naively, as original readers did. And as I mostly did. There is suspense, surprising perhaps... 😉 in late James, and I'll leave it there. Though I can say, as a good friend of mine frequently does, it's all about the money. Well, almost all.

It is late James, and I have occasionally snarked about that prose style before. Here's an example from around halfway through the novel. Merton Densher is back in London; he's been away in New York, working, where he had met Milly. (From Book VI, Chapter 5, near the beginning)

"She [Milly] had been interesting enough without them [Kate and Aunt Maud]--that appeared to-day to come back to him; and, admirable and beautiful as was the charitable zeal of the two ladies, it might easily have nipped in the bud the germs of a friendship inevitably limited but still perfectly open to him."

This is Merton thinking, but yet it isn't Merton. We'll set aside that nobody thinks in such rounded phrases because everybody does that in James. One of those 'two ladies' is Kate, with whom Merton is more or less secretly engaged. Would he think of her as just one of 'two ladies'? And 'admirable and beautiful' and 'full of charitable zeal', Aunt Maud is not, and Merton knows it perfectly well, since she's the reason he and Kate are keeping their engagement secret. As well as the fact that Aunt Maud's zeal is about pimping Milly on the social circuit for societal advantage. (We'll come to have our doubts about Kate, too.) As for that 'friendship inevitably limited but still perfectly open', well, it's limited by that secret engagement, but Milly's already half in love with Merton (though it's not clear how well Merton understands that at this point) and 'friendship' and 'perfectly open' mean very different things to Milly and to Merton. 

So James is ironically complicating our relationship with the characters in ways we have to work out to get there, while at the same time sounding like 'Everything is Awesome.' (Cue that Lego movie song here...)

It must be said that James knows:

"'Then what,' he demanded, frankly mystified now, "are we talking about?"

That's Merton Densher. 

I don't know if Thom Gunn was thinking of The Wings of the Dove when he wrote this couplet/quip, but he very well could have been. (Though it would apply to other late books as well.)

Jamesian

Their relationship consisted

In discussing if it existed.

It also struck me how close in theme this was to The Ambassadors, James' novel of the next year (1903). It's Lambert Strether from that novel who advises, "Live all you can, it's a mistake not to," a statement also deeply ironic. It could have fit into this one. Sir Luke Strett to Milly:

"My dear young lady, isn't 'to live' exactly what I'm trying to persuade you to do?"

I reread Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor now that I've read The Wings of the Dove, (well, the Sontag at least is short) and I do think she's a little hard on James, whose irony complicates everything, but, of course, Sontag's basic point is correct: a will to live might help Milly, but what she really needs is antibiotics, and putting too much emphasis on her will feels like blaming the victim. (Way oversimplifying Sontag here.)

I'll leave you with a picture of the Palazzo Barbaro in Venice, which becomes the Palazzo Leporelli in the novel, rented by Milly as her (modest) domicile when she was there. I understand it's used as the set for scenes in the movie version with Helena Bonham Carter. James used a writing desk still there to compose The Aspern Papers.

It was my spin book. (I somehow had it in my head the spin ran to the 31st. Oh, well.) It is late James, with all the noodliness that implies, but I quite liked it, after having dreaded it a bit, and I think it's replaced The Ambassadors as my favorite of that period. 

If you've read it, what did you think? Are our couple actually redeemed? What, in fact, do you think was their final decision? (Because, of course, it ends without entirely telling you, as I, too, am now doing...)