Book Report: Death in a Strange Country

7. Donna Leon, Death in a Strange Country (1993) (3/27/19)

If all Commissario Guido Brunetti did was wander around his native Venice for the entire duration of one of Leon's books, I'd be perfectly content. You learn so much about the history of both Venice and Italy, about social relations and government corruption, about food and drink. You meet Brunetti's family, the lovely Paola and teenagers Raffi and Chiara, and fellow police officers—including the somewhat ridiculous Vice-Questore Patta. The mystery to be solved is almost incidental.

Which is probably just as well, because the mystery in this book, involving, immediately, the death of an American serviceman from the nearby army post of Vicenza, and later the seemingly unrelated theft of several Impressionist paintings, ends up being not especially satisfying in its wrap-up.

Oh well! I still got a thoroughly enjoyable tour of Venice and met a few interesting characters. All good!

This is the second of twenty-eight Brunetti novels, written by an ex-pat American, now 76, who lived in Venice for twenty-five years. Apparently his character becomes more sharply delineated (and droller) as the series goes on, so I'm looking forward to continuing to get to know him.

The following paragraph encapsulates the reasonableness of Brunetti, who comes across as a sort of Everyman—likable, with few major faults; dedicated to his work and his family; compassionate yet a tad cynical. You'd enjoy bumping into him at a random bar in Venice and sharing a glass of wine and a bit of conversation with him.

The secret of police success lay, Brunetti knew, not in brilliant deductions or the psychological manipulation of suspects but in the simple fact that human beings tended to assume that their own level of intelligence was the norm, the standard, and to work on that assumption. Hence the stupid were quickly caught, for their idea of what was cunning was so lamentably impoverished as to make them obvious prey. This same rule, unfortunately, made his job all the more difficult when he had to deal with criminals possessed of intelligence or courage.

Book Report: The Friend

6. Sigrid Nuñez, The Friend (2018) (3/23/19)

The National Book Award–winning The Friend is an oddly moving book, exploring love, loss, and pain as well as literature, aesthetics, cultural expectations, and the gap—or rather bridge—between humanity and animals. Framed as a sort of journal-slash-letter to a close friend who has committed suicide, the book explores, sometimes in brief one-thought paragraphs, other times in longer accounts of specific memories or events, the nameless female author's relationship to the nameless male friend and mentor, both of them fifty-ish writers and teachers. There is also a dog, a 180-pound harlequin Great Dane named Apollo, whom the writer has inherited and must share her 500-square-foot apartment with, illicitly (she lives in rent-controlled Manhattan).

There's no real plot to speak of: it's largely a novel of ideas and impressions. The dialogue is not novelistic, but rather chunks of prose within quotation marks. There is relatively little descriptive detail. The book is divided into twelve "parts." The first begins with the last conversation the author and dead friend ever had, moves into his memorial service and a general, unflattering description of the friend—he was an unrepentant womanizer, one might say lacking in maturity—and ends with the conversation with Wife Three in which the author learns that she will be giving Apollo a new home. The next nine chapters range through, among other things, examinations of literature (J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace and J. R. Ackersley's My Dog Tulip, for example, both of them featuring dogs in a sorry fashion—but many, many writers, from Proust to Flannery O'Connor, Virginia Woolf to Heinrich von Kleist appear, even if only briefly); the act of writing as confession or catharsis; the nature of attachment, in part through the lens of human sex trafficking (the object of the author's research); political correctness and the notion that the world can be made "safe"
. . . and quite a bit about the nature of dogs: their opinions, their yearnings, their anxieties, their regrets, their sweet, sweet—or bittersweet—memories. Which, of course, reflect immediately back on the author—or, humanity writ large.

Not to give anything away, but the final two chapters bring the book onto a new plane and relieve some of the angst of the previous musings. They leave the reader feeling lighter and, dare I say, both glad to be alive and feeling a little more careful to enjoy this life as fully as possible.

Here is a brief discourse on the life (and expectations) of a writer (the "you" in the following is the dead friend):

I remember the interviewer asked the usual question about audience, whether you wrote with a particular reader in mind. Which set you off about the relationship between writer and reader and how much that relationship had changed. As a young writer you'd been told, Never assume your reader isn't as intelligent as you are. Advice you'd taken to heart. You wrote with that reader in mind, you said, someone as smart as—or why not even smarter than!—yourself. Someone intellectually curious, who had the habit of reading, who loved books as much as you did. Who loved fiction. And then, with the internet, had come the possibility of reading the responses of actual readers, among whom you were pleased to find some who did indeed match, more or less, the reader in your head. But there were others—not just one or two but quite a number when you added them up—who had misread, or misunderstood, in some cases quite seriously, what you'd said. Troubling enough when the reader was someone who'd hated the book, but that was far from always the case. Like other writers you now found yourself regularly damned or praised for things that had never occurred to you, things you had never expressed and never would express, things that represented pretty much the opposite of what you actually believed.
 . . . You got customer reviews full of umbrage, suggesting that if a book didn't affirm what the reader already felt—what they could identify with, what they could relate to—the author had no business writing the book at all. Those hilarious stories that people loved, and loved to share—the book clubber who said, When I read a novel I want someone to die in it; the complaint against Anne Frank's diary, in which nothing much happens and then the story just breaks off—did not make you laugh. Oh, you knew that a lot of people, including other writers, would accuse you of being precious. Some would say that, after all, the one sure way for an artist to know his work had failed was if everyone "got" it. But the truth was, you had become so dismayed by the ubiquity of careless reading that something had happened that you had thought never could happen: you had started not to care whether people read you or not. And though you knew your publisher would spit in your eye for saying so, you were inclined to agree with whoever it was who said that no truly good book would find more than three thousand readers.

And what dog owner (and perhaps cat guardian as well) can't identify with this close to chapter 8?

Watching Apollo sleep. The peaceful rise and fall of his flank. His belly is full, he is warm and dry, he has had a four-mile walk today. As usual when he hunched in the street to do his business I guarded him from passing cars. And, in the park, when a texting jogger bore down on us, Apollo barked and blocked his path before he could run into me. I have played several rounds of tug-of-war with him today, I have talked to him, and sung to him, and read him some poetry. I have trimmed his nails and brushed every inch of his coat. Now, watching him sleep, I feel a surge of contentment. There follows another, deeper feeling, singular and mysterious, yet at the same time perfectly familiar. I don't know why it takes a full minute for me to name it.
 What are we, Apollo and I, if not two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other?
 It is good to have things settled. Miracle or no miracle, whatever happens, nothing is going to separate us.

Book Report: Black Is the Body

5. Emily Bernard, Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine (2019) (3/15/19)

I heard this book reviewed by Maureen Corrigan on NPR's Fresh Air. She said that each essay in it is "unforgettable." That was enough for me to want to read the book, but even better was the fact that it's on a subject I am trying to grapple with: race and racism; being black in this country. Or so I thought.

In the end, I liked the book fine, but I am left with a sensation of blandness. One goodreads reviewer, K (a 24-year-old queer black person), said they felt the book had been written for white people. I wouldn't say that. I think the book may have been written for people generally like the author herself: educated, intellectual, capable, successful, more in her head than in her heart. Someone like me, in fact. But not because I'm white.

Indeed, the author treads carefully along the black-white divide, describing her life as a professor of African American studies in the very white state of Vermont, in her happy marriage to a white man, as the mother of adopted Ethiopian twin girls, in her origins in the South—her grandmother's Mississippi, her own childhood in racially segregated Nashville. She does touch on racial issues, but it's as if she didn't experience prejudice or hatred herself; she seems to view these things through a telescope, rationalizing, distancing. She knows racism is part of her people's past, but it seems to be more "out there" than "in here."

Instead she writes about more universal experiences: her pleasure helping her daughters with their hair (African hair, to be sure, but not because it's African hair); attending the funeral of her grandmother and delving into family history; her and her husband's trip to Ethiopia to adopt their children; her first visit with her fiancé to her parents. Yes, he's white and they're black, and that difference arouses a certain uncomfortablenesses, but it's all . . . good natured? Even when discussing the word nigger with her (white) students, she views it as an academic exercise, an intellectual issue: "It has nothing to do with how it makes me feel."

The most riveting essay is the first, "Scar Tissue," in which Bernard describes an event during grad school where seven people were stabbed, including Bernard herself. Nothing racial about the attack; the perpetrator was of an altered state of mind, striking out at whoever was available. 

I remember stillness, the hum of low voices and the lights, bright yet soothing, like the talk surrounding me. People talking and laughing quietly. Students, professors, writers; I was the only black person present, but these were people just like me, who looked like me. So many moments like these over the years in coffee shops in so many cities; all forgettable, ordinary, and uneventful. But these particular moments on this particular evening stay with me more palpably than any other moments from that long night. The stillness, the quiet hum of low pleasant talk. The sensation of being inside of those moments—it is the only real memory I retain from that night. Yet, just beyond the borders of that quiet, pleasant memory, I can still hear the rhythmic, continuous sound of a dog barking outside, like a warning.
 . . . I saw the knife before it entered me. What was the sensation upon impact? I don't remember. But I do remember that when he pulled it out of my gut, I fell to the ground. What did it feel like? Strange. Weird. Unusual. Lying on the ground, I beseeched God for help. When I neither felt nor heard a thundering reply, I started to laugh. I knew that I needed a hospital, not God. But I call this a "God Moment" anyway, because when I laughed, my wound gaped open, and I looked down and saw and then felt the thick, warm blood rush over my fingers. It is time to get to a hospital, God was saying. I got up, and ran. . . .

As in that first paragraph, when Bernard does allude to herself as a black woman, she often quickly reasserts that she's just another person, trying to make sense of it all. Which may be true enough, but the book's title led me to expect something else. (And why is that? There's another question to ponder.)

To my mind, perhaps the most telling incident regarding Bernard's orientation to her story, and her audience, occurred in the essay "Going Home," where she describes attending an "authentic Southern Baptist church service" with her grandmother. Bernard is a college student at this juncture, and she was raised Episcopalian, so she looks forward to this "down home" experience. She describes how, after the unremarkable sermon "about faith, forgiveness, and the power of redemption," the preacher's voice changed:

First, he added a little vibrato. Then, a steady cadence emerged and held firm. Finally, his voice took flight.
 "I felt something," I wrote in my journal that night. I sat mesmerized, listening as the preacher balanced his words precisely in a sacred space between speech and song. He maintained that balance and opened the door wide to the new space he had made. The choir entered, took up his rhythm, expanded it, glorified it, and then the organ joined them. The church was ablaze with something big, something bigger than language, something I had never experienced before.

She goes on to describe the congregation, jumping, shouting, falling to the floor.

"I want so much to be a part of something like that. But I probably will never be," I wrote. "I was born to be a spectator, to watch and feel but to keep my mouth closed." The only release I could manage was to cry. I let the tears fall, overwhelmed by the show of organic, spontaneous vitality in the room, and awash in self-pity at my utter aloneness. So this was real life, I thought, from which I was doomed to stand forever apart. . . . I felt happy and guilty, as if I had stolen something precious and no one would ever know.
 We went to church again the next week. I tried to walk like an ordinary person up to our pew, but I wasn't an ordinary person anymore. I had been a witness to a miracle; I had experienced a true revelation. Nothing about me would ever be the same again.
 My excitement wilted as the service began and unfolded exactly as it had the previous week. The preacher spoke, then shook his words with vibrato, which cued the chorus, who matched his gait, which signaled the organist, who added dimension, which stirred the people, some of whom shook loose and dropped to the floor.
 What I had witnessed the week before was less an organism than an elegant machine; not chaos but perfectly crafted choreography. But fascination quickly elbowed disappointment off the stage of my imagination. This was real life—not magic, only practice, commitment, and labor. This lesson, about life, about art, is one I am still learning.

That quest for "real life," which each of us can only experience in our own unique way, is what underscores the essays in this book. But there is a certain lack of a center in this quest, a lack of self (or self-awareness), of feeling, that I found a tad offputting. The yearning to be part of something remains just that: a yearning. That said, there is also something admirable about Bernard's vulnerability, about her laying her quest (and her yearning) out for all to see. In the end, I felt that Bernard and I could be friends, discussing these very questions. Maybe that's why K felt it was written for white people, but I wonder if it isn't more accurate to say it was written for people puzzling out the meaning of it all. There's bound to be overlap, and insight—universalities—in what any of us conclude. At least, I would hope so.

Maybe my feeling of dissatisfaction comes from my wanting something more particular, by which I mean, something unlike my own experience. I wasn't looking to nod my head and say, "Yeah, I get that; me too." I wanted my understanding of the kaleidoscope that is humanity to be enlarged; I wanted to be surprised, or maybe confounded.

Book List from In Between

During my "Hodgepodge" blogpost-a-day challenge, I posted book reports—in between my more formal reading challenges. I realized today that I never compiled that short list. Here it is. Just for (my) reference.

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (12/7/16)*
Ross Gay, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (12/11/16)*
Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (12/13/16)*
Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air (12/24/16)
Jenni Desmond, The Polar Bear (12/26/16)
Steve Hamilton, The Lock Artist (2/11/17)
Ari Shavit, My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (4/14/17)
George Saunders, Tenth of December (5/17/17)*
Colum McCann, Letters to a Young Writer: Some Practical and Philosophical Advice (6/16/17)
Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (7/8/17)*
Neil Gaiman, American Gods (7/27/17)*
James E. Ryan, Wait, What? and Life's Other Essential Questions (8/3/17)
Timothy Hallinan, Breathing Water (8/817)*
Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give (8/28/17)
Rene Denfield, The Child Finder (9/12/17)
Donna Leon, Death at La Fenice (9/29/17)

*Favorites

Book Report: Dissolution

4. C. J. Sansom, Dissolution (2003) (3/7/19)

Dissolution, set in 1537, is the first in Sansom's "Shardlake" series of Tudor mysteries. I picked it up on the recommendation of a British birder I met in Vietnam, and finally got around to reading it thanks to the recent excitement  of a Facebook friend upon learning of a brand-new installment (the seventh) in the series. The books feature a hunchback lawyer, Matthew Shardlake, who, in the first episode at least, is a loyal follower of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's fixer (more formally, his vice-gerent and vicar general). In the context of this book, Cromwell's main purpose seems to be religious "reform": that is, exerting the new, anti-papist rules of the land, which includes the breaking-up, or dissolution, of the monasteries. It also involves not a bit of beheading, extraction of confessions on the rack, and distribution of wealth to the haves. Hence, the "dissolution" of the title may be seen as both material and moral.

The action gets going in a deep and snowy winter, when Shardlake is sent by Cromwell to an isolated Benedictine monastery on the Sussex coast, where one of Cromwell's commissioners, bearing news of the dissolution to come, has been brutally murdered: his head severed from his body by a sharp sword. The senior officials, or obentiaries, of the monastery range in character from the bursar, in charge of abbey finances, Brother Edwig, humorless and grasping, to the infirmarian, Brother Guy, a Spaniard of dark complexion who seems caring and attentive of his charges. There is an ineffectual abbot, Fabian; a cruel prior and novice master, Mortimus; and a crazy Carthusian, Jerome—as well as various others. Shardlake is struck both by the relative opulence of the living quarters, especially the abbot's, and by the relatively small number of residents, many of them elderly. It is a far cry from St. Benedict's notions of austerity, and from the bustling community that thrived here not all that long ago. He also takes care not to be moved by the monks, whether in sympathy, as with Guy, or in antipathy, as with the prior and the bursar, among others. He strives to remain neutral. But that proves difficult, and not necessarily effective. A few non-religious characters have important roles as well.

Not surprisingly (this is a relatively long book, at 439 pages: things have to happen), a second murder ensues, this one of a young novice by poisoning, belladonna. Then, a body is discovered in a fish pond, that of a woman, along with the sharp sword. Lights are seen in the night, off in the treacherous marsh that borders the monastery. There are whisperings of sexual indiscretion, as well as of hushed-up land transactions. Certain recent goings-on at court—Anne Boleyn was beheaded not too long before the action of this book, and her successor, Jane Seymour, dies as the story gets going—figure in as well. There is a secret passage and a bell tower.

As with any good mystery, the details mount in a pleasing fashion, and ultimately everything falls into place for Shardlake, and for us, in surprising ways. (I was gratified that I guessed one key detail confirming one bad guy. Always a pleasure when you notice such things, even if they don't immediately have meaning, but ultimately they add up.) The writing is solid, if somewhat pedestrian. Conversations are carried out without literary flourish, and the characters lack depth. But, it's a mystery, not literature.

Tintern Abbey, Monmouthshire

Perhaps the most satisfying thing about this book is the way history comes alive: the sights and sounds of sixteenth-century London and of the coastal backwater of Scarnsea; the machinations of Cromwell and of the "reformists"; the power dynamics of poor and wealthy, religious and reformist, courtly, political, and lay. I knew nothing about the Dissolution, which was a real thing, lasting from 1536, when the first, smaller monasteries were destroyed, to 1540, when the last of the large religious communities surrendered to the king and were disbanded. Many were granted, as valuable land, to loyal followers of the king; many others simply fell into ruins (such as Tintern Abbey, alluded to in the famous poem by Wordsworth). Sansom, the author note says, earned a BA and PhD in history before becoming a solicitor (lawyer) and then full-time writer.

Here is a conversation, early in the book, in which the friction between the monks and the reformist commissioner Shardlake, who comes upon the brothers enjoying drinks and a card game, can be seen:

The tall, thin monk stepped forward, bowing again obsequi-ously.
 "I am Brother Jude, sir, the pittancer."
 "Master Matthew Shardlake, the king's commissioner. I see you are enjoying a convivial evening."
 "A little relaxation before Vespers. Would you care for some of this fine liqueur, Commissieoner? It is from one of our French sister houses."
 I shook my head. "I still have work to do," I said severely. "In the earlier days of your order, the day's end would have been taken up with the Great Silence."
 Brother Jude hesitated. "That was long ago, sir, in the days before the Great Pestilence. Since then the world has fallen further towards its end."
 "I think the English world does very well under King Henry."
 "No, no—" he said hastily. "I did not mean—"
 A plump monk from the card table, his face disfigured by a warty growth on one cheek, joined us. "Forgive Brother Jude, sir, he speaks without thinking. I am Brother Hugh, the chamberlain. We know we need correction, Commissioner, and we welcome it." He glared at his colleague.
 "Good. That will make my work easier. Come, Brother Guy. We have a corpse to inspect."

And here is a more philosophical bit, toward the end, when Shardlake is beginning to realize that loyalty can be misplaced if one is not sure exactly what one is being loyal to. In a church in London, he has just encountered a century-old cadaver tomb, with two tiers: on top,

the effigy of a rich merchant in his fine robes, plump and bearded. On the lower tier lay the effigy of a desiccated cadaver in the rags of the same clothes, and the motto: "So I am now; so I once was: as I am now; so shall ye be."
 Looking at the stone cadaver I had a sudden vision of [the decomposed body found in the pond] rising from the water, then of the diseased rickety children at Smeaton's house. I had a sudden sick feeling that our revolution would do no more than change starveling children's names from those of the saints to Fear-God and Zealous. I thought of Cromwell's casual mention of creating faked evidence to hound innocent people to death, and of Mark's talk of the greedy suitors come to Augmentations [a newly created law court] for grants of monastic lands. This new world was no Christian commonwealth; it never would be. It was in truth no better than the old, no less ruled by power and vanity. I remembered the gaudy, hobbled birds [parrots brought from South America as novelties for the wealthy] shrieking mindlessly at each other and it seemed to me like an image of the king's court itself, where papists and reformers fluttered and gabbled, struggling for power. And in my wilful blindness I had refused to see what was before my eyes. How men fear the chaos of the world, I thought, and the yawning eternity hereafter. So we build patterns to explain its terrible mysteries and reassure ourselves we are safe in this world and beyond.

I expect I will read more in the Shardlake series—though I understand the books get increasingly long (the newest one is 800 pages), so it may be a while. This book also reminded me of the Ellis Peters Brother Cadfael series that I read decades ago, set in the twelfth century during the Anarchy in England. They were entertaining too. There could be worse ways of learning about history than through a romping good murder mystery.

Book Report: The Fishermen

3. Chigozie Obioma, The Fishermen (2015) (3/2/19)

This book took me a while to complete: I found it difficult to sink into. The first half jumped around in time and scene, often filling in context with backflash. I imagine that that was a device, allowing us to assemble past memories into a whole constellation of meaning along with the narrator. But I still found it disorienting.

Not until halfway through, following a set of major crises, did the story achieve a momentum. But take off it did, and I was able to wrap up the second half of the book in one sitting.

The story, narrated by nine-year-old Ben, concerns a family of humble but respectable means in the southern Nigerian city of Akure, especially the four oldest boys (of whom Ben is the youngest). Tragedy unfolds, incident on a prophecy uttered by a madman, Abulu, one day while the boys are illicitly fishing at the river: that the eldest, Ikenna, will "die by the hands of a fisherman"—which Ikenna interprets to mean one of his brothers.

The prophecy comes to pass, and the family is thrown into painful turmoil. Though in the end, I believe, a form of restitution, or redemption, holds sway. The family, despite being torn asunder, will survive in its new form.

The story is undergirded by Nigerian history—of which I know very little, but it seems to be marked by chaos and violence, which are mirrored in this tale. Superstition plays a strong role as well, as indicated by the fact that a prophecy can take on such life force. There is also a strongly mythic quality to the descriptions. The chapters are all titled after metaphors, many descriptive of the individual characters: Ben is a moth, a "fragile thing with wings, who basks in light, but who soon loses its wings and falls to the ground." His mother is a falconer, "the one who stood on the hills and watched, trying to stave off whatever ill she perceived was coming to her children." His father is an eagle; Ikenna, a python, but ultimately becoming a sparrow; the second oldest brother, Boja, a fungus. Hope is a tadpole; grief, a leech; and the beasts of grief are spiders. Obioma does a nice job of keeping these metaphors potent as he tells his story.

That said, sometimes the figurative language fell flat: for example, "All we did for the rest of that evening was sing, the dying sun pitched in a corner of the sky as faint as a nipple on the chest of a teenage girl a distance away." No.

Here is a passage from early in the book, in which the father, having just meted out punishment to his four boys for fishing in the dangerous river, explains his hopes for them:

"What I want you to be is a group of fishermen who will be fishers of good dreams, who will not relent until they have caught the biggest catch. I want you to be juggernauts, menacing and unstoppable fishermen."
 This surprised me deeply. I'd thought that he disdained that word. Grasping for meaning, I looked at Obembe [Ben's next-older brother]. He was nodding his head at everything Father said, his brow tinged with the hint of a smile.
 "Good boys," Father muttered, a wide smile smoothening the rough creases that anger and fury had strewn over the yarn of his face. "Listen, in keeping with what I have always taught you, that in every bad thing, you can always dig up some good things, I tell you that you could be a different king of fishermen. Not the kind that fish at a filthy swamp like the Omi-Ala, but fishermen of the mind. Go-getters. Children who will dip their hands into rivers, seas, oceans of this life and become successful: doctors, pilots, professors, lawyers. Eh?"
 He gazed round again. "Those are the kinds of fishermen I want to have as children...."

This passage is echoed at the very end, in a way that suggests that Ben, at the very least (and perhaps Obembe as well), will find the strength to come into his own—if not necessarily as the professor that his father envisions him one day to become, but as someone who can accept responsibility for his own destiny.