I don't read much historical fiction, but my cousin, who does, recommended this book highly when I saw her a few weeks ago, and I thought, what the heck? I'm glad I picked it up. It's a very interesting story, based on a true one: of a young woman who becomes a man—in dress, in behavior, in profession, in standing, in self-understanding—in order to get somewhere in life. But as much as the story itself, I appreciated being able to inhabit a time so different from my own (and yet in some ways, sadly, still so similar), which allowed me to test my expectations, what I take for granted.
The story begins circa 1809 in Ireland, London, and finally Edinburgh, where the narrator, Margaret Brackley, and her mother, move so that Margaret can save the family by becoming a doctor. But in order to do so, she must also become a young man: Jonathan Mirandus Perry, so named after a much-admired Venezuelan benefactor and her artist uncle. She takes on the challenge of medical school with gusto, becoming one of the most accomplished students in her class—partly because, feeling uncomfortable being out in society where she might be found out, she spends all her time studying. But also, of course, because she's intelligent.
And here I will switch to "he," which may be how Perry (based on the actual John Miranda Barry) thought of himself as well. He went on to become a physician in the military, and was sent to South Africa (Britain's Cape Colony), where he was soon drawn into the social circle of the Cape governor, Lord Somerset. The two develop a great fondness for each other, though always gentlemanly—until one day, in the crisis of a sudden illness, Perry's secret is revealed. And then the two become lovers.
This may or may not have actually happened: Levy takes what few facts are known and spins them into a satisfyingly moving tale. The facts include the illustrious faculty and curriculum at the Edinburgh medical school, Dr. Barry's petition for hospital care for the less privileged residents of the Cape and for the credentialing of would-be physicians, his discovery of a cure for syphilis in local flora, a duel, a pregnancy (uncovered in autopsy), a sodomy scandal, and Barry's eventual return to London to care for Lord Somerset in his final months. Levy unweights the factual basis of the story by having Perry narrate: it is a work of fiction, after all.
But it is also an exploration of identity, of self-creation, also of loneliness and love; of being trapped by history, by context. The cover design evokes the mood and emotion of the contents nicely, I think.
Here is a passage from the time when Perry was still in Scotland, and had been befriended by a Lord Basken, who would invite the medical student to his estate at Dryburgh Abbey:
I discerned in my companions at Dryburgh Abbey, as in my classmates, something more important than wealth or formal education; I had the proper shirts, a fine coat and vest of green silk, beautiful shoes with buckles, books of my own to read by candlelight, but I lacked some more essential ingredient—authority, the sense of belonging not just there but anywhere in the world. I understood then that this was what those conversations with General Mirandus had been about. Those questions that seemed pointless at the time, speculative games at best, were all for this one end; in soliciting my opinion on books and art, on politics and history, he was not trying to ensure that I had been diligent in my reading, as I'd thought then. He was teaching me to have opinions, or rather he was teaching me what my companions possessed without thought or conscious awareness of it, entitlement: he was teaching me to believe that my opinion mattered, that something—law or policy—might come of what I thought, that my arguments counted, that I could, that I would, like him, shape history. Girl that I was.
Dr. Barry left instructions that he should not be undressed upon his death, but should be interred as he was, with no autopsy. The nurse who attended him did not follow those instructions (perhaps she did not know of them), and so discovered that he was, and always had been, a she. At least, anatomically—in terms of reproductive organs. But what about his brain, his heart? As the narrator remarks more than once, in the end we are all so very similar. When it comes to intelligence, accomplishments, needs and wants, abilities and desires, our reproductive organs matter little. Would that we could all be simply accepted as human.
18. Louise Penny, How the Light Gets In (2013) (8/22/22) (BB #5)
Book number 9 in the Armand Gamache series—and my third for this very year, it seems. I do enjoy the characters Penny has created, the tiny village of Three Pines, and the trouble she can get people into. Going for a visit there helps me relax. Even while I hope to help solve the mystery at hand.
This one involves a variation on the Dionne Quintuplets, when the last surviving one is murdered in her home—with a crucial link to Three Pines. But behind the scenes, there's rampant corruption in Quebec's police department to be fought, including the dismantling of Gamache's homicide division. There's the tragic dissolution of Gamache's beloved right-hand man Jean-Guy Beauvoir. There's also bacon, snow sloshing into boots, the difference between a bookstore and a librairie, satellite dishes and computer hacking, and the "Huron Carol."
As she often does, Penny combines stories. I'm not sure I entirely bought the "motive" in the Quints murder, but who knows? In a situation that unique, anything might go, right? As for the corruption story, Penny pulls out all the stops. But thanks to our hero, well... I'm not going to give anything away. Gamache does, however (this isn't really giving anything away, because I don't believe it for a second), resign.
I wonder how book 10 will begin?
It's difficult to review a Louise Penny mystery. When I come back and reread these reports, I myself often wonder just what the book was about. But seriously: I don't want to give anything away.
Anyway, this one I rated 4 stars out of 5 on Goodreads. I didn't flag any passages to quote. Except possibly this one.
But he realized Henri already knew all he'd ever need. He knew he was loved and he knew how to love.
I haven't read all that much John le Carré: I may be too impatient for his suggestiveness, his sleight-of-hand. I tried A Perfect Spy not too long ago, which seems unanimously deemed to be his best book, but . . . well, let's just say I wasn't in the mood for the inimitable le Carré style.
Now, having successfully finished this rather short book of his (and his last published, though it was written ca. 2013), I might be primed for more. He is an awfully damn good writer.
The story here involves "the Service," and former spies, dying spies, janitorial spies, outraged spies, reluctant spies, vigilant spies. It centers (obliquely) on young Julian, who has fled London and a high-stakes life in finance and now, having made his fortune, has opened a bookshop in a quiet East Anglian town. Into his shop comes Edward Avon, and a friendship ensues. Though it's possible Avon has more on his mind than mere friendship. Another key character is Stewart Proctor, who in the first chapter is presented with a letter, the contents of which we are not privy to, but we know it arouses concern. Proctor proceeds to track down Avon's former handlers from their days during the Bosnian War. Stories are told.
Indeed, stories are told: that, surely, is le Carré's greatest gift—as a storyteller, a weaver of tales. The framing story is just a good excuse for the many, interlinked or merely tangential, stories of so many characters.
In one scene, Julian and Avon meet at a now-deserted former experimental military site, Orford Ness (and now a nature preserve).
[Julian] knew what to expect of the godforsaken loneliness of that outpost in the middle of nowhere. He knew that even fishermen supposedly found it unbearable. They followed a pedestrian walk past rubbish bins, climbed a rickety wooden stairway, and waded through a mess of mud and ships' junk to emerge on a littered quayside. Edward struck out left. The river wall forced them into single file. Pebbles of rain whipped off the sea. Edward swung round in his tracks. 'We are famous for our bird life here, actually, Julian,' he announced, with proprietorial pride. 'We have lapwing, curlew, bittern, meadow pipit, avocets, not to mention duck,' he declared, like a headwaiter reciting the day's specials. 'Look now, please. You hear that curlew calling to her mate? Follow my arm.' Julian made a show of doing so, but for some minutes he had been able to follow only the horizon: the remains of our own civilisation after its destruction in some future catastrophe. And there they stood: distant forests of abandoned aerials rising out of the mist, abandoned hangars, barracks, accommodation blocks and control rooms, pagodas on elephantine legs for stress-testing atom bombs, with curved roofs but no walls in case the worst happens. And, at his feet, a warning to him to stick to marked paths or reckon with unexploded ordnance. 'You are moved by this hellish place, Julian?' Edward enquired, observing his distraction. 'I too.' 'Is that why you come here?' 'Yes, it is,' he replied with unusual candour. And, taking Julian's arm, a thing he had never done before: 'Listen hard. Do you listen? Now tell me what you hear about the screaming of the birds.' And when Julian heard nothing but more screams and the skirmishing of the wind: 'How about the rumble of the guns of our glorious British past? No? No guns?' 'What do you hear?' Julian asked awkwardly, with a laugh to dispel the severity of Edward's stare. 'I?'—as ever, surprised to be asked. 'Why, the guns of our glorious future. What else?'
In an afterword, Le Carré's son, Nick Cornwell, muses about why the manuscript for this book, which was basically finished and perfect, languished in a desk drawer for so many years.
Silverview does something that no other le Carré novel ever has. It shows a[n intelligence] service fragmented: filled with its own political factions, not always kind to those it should cherish, not always very effective or alert, and ultimately not sure, any more, that it can justify itself. In Silverview, the spies of Britain have, like many of us, lost their certainty about what the country means, and who we are to ourselves. As with Karla in Smiley's People, so here with our own side: it is the humanity of the service that isn't up to the task—and that begins to ask whether the task is worth the cost. I think he couldn't quite bring himself to say that out loud. I think, knowling or not, he choked on being the bearer of these truths to—of—from—the institution that gave him a home when he was a lost dog without a collar in the middle of the twentieth century. I think he wrote a wonderful book, but, when he looked at it, he found it cut too close to the bone, and the more he worked on it, the more he refined it, the plainer that became—and here we are. You can form your own opinion, and it will be as good as mine, but that's what I believe. My father is in these pages, striving as he always did to tell the truth, spin the yarn, and show you the world.
Last night I wrote to my niece in France, Erica, asking if she'd like to do a collaborative sharing project. I don't even know exactly what I meant when I suggested it—I had my old 365 projects (photography, daily blog) in mind, but maybe more expansive? Here's how I described it: "It could be as simple as a daily photo, or a haiku, or an account of an outing, or a recipe you cooked, or something that caught your attention on TV, or the taste of a ripe peach. It could be a daily photo of Chloe [Erica's dog], for 365 days (or a month! let’s not get too ambitious). Or a daily slice of sky. There’s no parameters."
In any case, she liked the idea, and responded immediately, with the following YouTube video: "How to Cook Beans and Resist Dread," by John of the vlogbrothers.
This struck me as perfect! Something that's both amusing and reassuring ("You're basically an advanced squirrel"!), and something I would never have stumbled on on my own. It even looks like a darn good chili recipe.
In response, I sent her this photo of a watercolor my mother made, probably in the 1980s, of a weeping willow that lived in the backyard of our family home. I'm starting the Herculean task of cleaning out the garage. It is daunting, but I'm also hoping that I run across treasures that I'd forgotten about—just like this. Erica has several of my father's (her grandfather's) watercolors, so I figure she will find this of interest as well.
Anyway, let's see what happens. I will continue to post on this page as the week progresses.
Friday, August 12
From Erica:
I should know by now that any sentence that starts with "put your shoes on" rarely ends well. The baby swallows nesting in our barn - thankfully in the rafters - are beginning to poke their little heads up over the edge of their home. Today one of them (lets call him George) decided to take the Darwin Challenge in a fit of ambition, and is currently in the process of becoming a cat.
So, this photo is for George. His tiny life was filled with nonstop excitement and adventure, and I'd like to think he enjoyed every moment.
And from me:
This afternoon we went over to Salinas to do an "adventure lab" (a geocaching offshoot) based on John Steinbeck. Among other places, we visited the house he was born in in 1902 and his grave (he died in 1968). The person who created the lab punctuated it with various quotations from his books, including these:
"If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule—a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last." —Sea of Cortez, by John Steinbeck and Doc Ricketts (1941)
"When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you've got two new people." The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
"I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found, nor much identification from shapes which symbolize continents and states." Travels with Charley (1962)
"I think I would like to write the story of this whole valley, of all the little towns and all the farms and the ranches in the wilder hills. I can see how I would like do it so that it would be the valley of the world." Letter to a friend, 1933 (this quote is actually carved on a rock in front of the National Steinbeck Center in downtown Salinas)
Here's a mural about Steinbeck at one of our stops:
Saturday, August 13
From me:
After my father, a devout atheist, died, my mother converted to Catholicism. She was in her mid-sixties, a little younger than I am now. She had been raised Methodist, and in her own adulthood had belonged to Westwood Hills Congregational Church. But she always remembered the Catholics in her small Midwestern town growing up as being kinder than the Protestants—kinder to her, specifically, as an adopted child. Newly widowed, she started going to a Paulist church in Los Angeles and having conversations with a priest whom she found sympathetic. He basically told her that she was an adult and if she embraced Catholicism, that didn’t mean she had to swallow Catholic dogma on such controversial social subjects as abortion. If she converted, it would simply be in order to celebrate God. And so she did. When she told me, I’m afraid I wasn’t especially understanding, which I have since regretted. That said, her romance with the Catholic faith never seemed to me to be especially serious. I think she mostly liked the music that was played at the Mass. Eventually, she pretty much stopped going to church. When she died, we asked the priest to say a few words and to play Mozart—which he did. I was not there, but Cathy [my sister-in-law, Erica's mother] and Susan [my mother's caregiver] went.
Anyway, in my garage undertaking, I came across a good-sized inlaid Indian box with some of Loraine’s jewelry (none of it of any value). One compartment holds a number of crucifixes. I don’t recall her ever wearing a cross around her neck, or handling a rosary, so I was surprised she had so many. Here’s a photo of a few of them.
From Erica:
First, her response to mine: "I remember having always found several rosaries in my mother's various jewelry boxes. Her mother was also a Catholic, but I wonder if a few may have been gifts from Lorraine. It was an interesting topic of conversation nonetheless. I always liked Catholicism, possibly due to my general distance from it. When I went to Mount St. Mary's College I found the nuns and 'true' catholics to be the most love-filled and accepting people. There's an odd practicality to old religions I find appealing."
Then, her daily offering, which she titled "Saviors amongst the killers":
[Beginning with the link to a Radiolab episode from July 29, "The Humpback and the Killer," which I proceeded to listen to on my afternoon walk]
A couple of weeks ago, one of our (me and Kim) favorite podcasts did a wonderful episode about a fascinating dynamic between humpback and killer whales. If a god exists, it might be one of them. This exercise has forced open my interest in writing as well, and I've started a little story on the theme of Water.
Lady had one recurring dream, and it was quite odd. She would often picture herself in her childhood home, at night, looking out the big front windows. This was a comfortable place for her, an odd setting for a nightmare. Nevertheless as she gazed into the hazy outside, she suddenly realized it wasn’t saturated air she was looking through, but water. Her house wasn’t sunken, but a tank had been constructed around it, like a snow globe. Through the window she could see the most interesting and unexpected mammals. Manatees and whales swam together, twirling around, accentuating their quiet dance with ominous bubbles. Waves of seagrass swayed slowly, giving up the strength and depth of the current. Animals swam above and below her, demonstrating their quiet eminence, their ultimate prowess. Lady shook. She couldn't escape, there was nowhere to go. Each room had windows to the outside, and therefore the risk of witnessing her own mortality, a risk she could not take, not right now.
Sunday, August 14
From Erica (subject: 1971? Never heard of 'er)
No story today, just a clever website. What were the adults up to? ;-)
A lazy Sunday share today: from the afternoon walk.
Your post [I replied to Erica], meanwhile, has me queuing up an old Ezra Klein Vox conversation about neoliberalism, but I think I'll save it for tomorrow and go ponder what's for dinner instead. ;-)
I'm not sure about my feelings on this. I must admit I enjoy a
country that doesn't care about collecting taxes.
To which I responded: "I’m of the social democratic persuasion that believes the government has a responsibility to its citizens (unlike those neolibs who’d just like to watch 'em all starve to death), so do believe in collecting taxes. If only they could get the megabillion/trillionaire corporations to pay their share… But I guess the recent climate and healthcare bill includes some provisions to this end. Now to see if they have any teeth."
From me:
I love August in part because it’s the month when naked ladies—aka Amaryllis belladonna, South African natives—bloom. They’re called that because the flowers grow atop a tall “naked” (leafless) stem. There’s a clump across the street from the Frog Pond. It’s in its glory now.
Tuesday, August 16
Today I posted a compilation video of Trevor Noah talking about accents and language (and at the end, about dual identity and nuance):
Wednesday, August 17
Well, this experiment lasted a few days—which was more than I anticipated. It was interesting. It's surprisingly difficult to come up with something to share with someone you don't know all that well. Will they be interested? Will they even care? Does it matter? In yesterday's message, in a P.S., I said, Let's just do this sporadically, as we stumble on something that we think the other might find interesting. So, we'll see how that goes. I certainly did enjoy each email I got from Erica, with the links and shares.
But to end this, I will include a link to a Vox podcast with Ezra Klein and his guests Wendy Brown, professor of political theory at UC Berkeley, and Noah Smith, an economist and Bloomberg contributor, called "Neoliberalism and Its Discontents." I called it up in response to Erica's post the other day about 1971. Graphs are all well and good, but graphs of a single year exist within a larger historical context—indeed, how far back can we go? Certainly WWI, the New Deal, WWII, the Civil Rights movement, etc. inform what started to happen in the 1970s politically. The conversation brings us squarely into the present day with its crises of climate and environment and the question of whether we can (capitalistically) continue to grow, grow, grow. Their answer is no. But how to do we turn this humongous ship of a planet, composed of multiple nations of multiple needs and goals, in a new direction? Is it even possible?
To which I always answer, "I'll be dead soon." But I'm really sorry I can't know what humanity has managed to achieve—or, maybe, completely lose—in the next hundred, two hundred, or more years. I wish the future generations the best. What more can I objectively do? I will be dead soon. But then, so will we all. It's just a matter of time.
8/29
Last week, Erica and I continue our sharings, with a couple of poems, an account of a weekend park fete and a couple of videos. It's just nice having started up this comfortable exchange in the first place. It doesn't have to be anything other than that. Just... connection.
16. Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays (2016) (8/10/22)
What an intelligent, fascinating book! Comprising 55 brief essays and pieces of criticism, it is divided into three parts, "Reading Things," "Seeing Things," and "Being There," covering my own obsessions—with literature, with the visual arts (especially photography), and with place. The pieces were written over the course of some eight years, in which the Nigerian-American Cole traveled, thought, and wrote constantly. They cover a multitude.
The authors Cole examines in part one include James Baldwin (who feels like a red thread through the entire work), V. S. Naipaul, the poets Tomas Tranströmer and W. G. Sebald, the Sri Lankan memoirist Sonali Deraniyagala, Derek Walcott, the South African novelist Ivan Vladislavić, and Aleksandar Hemon, in conversation. Many of these were new to me, and he made them all sound worth pursuing. In the conversation with Hemon, Cole says:
I rarely sit down to write a poem, not the kind you can submit to Poetry magazine or the New Yorker. But I think poetry and its way of thinking does infect a lot of my work. I certainly read a lot of it—there's a discipline and tightness in the language that very few prose writers can achieve. So, yes, people like Tranströmer and Ondaatje and Wisława Szymborska are touchstones for me. It's a long list: George Seferis, Anne Carson, Charles Simic, Sharon Olds, Seamus Heaney: anyone who has found a way to sidestep conventional syntax. And for this reason, I take pleasure in reading those writers whose prose also contains the elusive and far-fetched.
The same is true of the second part: so many photographers I'd not heard of, plus a few I had. The book includes two color insert sections, so I was able to see examples of some of the photos he discusses—and of course I spent time googling many others. Artists such as Wangechi Mutu, Malick Sidibé, Alex Webb, Roy DeCarava, Gucorgui Pinkhassov, Richard Renaldi, Saul Leiter, and Penelope Umbrico—and many, many more. He also writes more philosophically about the act of photography, or of representation generally, and about technology. Can a photograph be neutral? What does aerial photography offer us? Or the videography of death? One essay, "Object Lessons," examines photographs of conflict, as encapsulated in ordinary objects: a coffee mug, lace curtains, a Boko Haram victim's favorite blue blouse.
Proust once wrote in a letter, "We think we no longer love the dead because we don't remember them, but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears." Objects, sometimes more powerfully than faces, remind us of what was and no longer is; stillness, in photography, can be more affecting than action. This is in part because of the respectful distance that a photograph of objects can create between the one who looks, far from the place of trouble, and the one whose trouble those objects signify. But it is also because objects are reservoirs of specific personal experience, filled with the hours of some person's life. They have been touched, or worn through use. They have frayed, or been placed just so. Perhaps the kind of "object photography" made by [Sam] Abell, [Sergei] Ilnitsky, [Glenna] Gordon, [Gilles] Peress, and many others in conflict zones cannot ever effect the political change we hope for from highly dramatic images. Perhaps their photographs don't make us think of the photographers' bravery, the way other conflict pictures do, or urge us to immediate action. We look at them anyway, for the change that they bring about elsewhere: in the core of the sympathetic self. We look at them for the way they cooperate with the imagination, the way they contain what cannot otherwise be accommodated, and the way they grant us, to however modest a degree, some kind of solace.
The
blouse of Hauwa Mutah, one of nearly 300 girls who were kidnapped from a
school in Chibok, Nigeria, April 2015, by Boko Haram. Photo by Glenna Gordon
Part three takes us to Switzerland, to Harlem on the evening of the election of Barack Obama, to East Jerusalem, to Alabama, to Rome, to São Paulo, to South Africa, to Nigeria. It includes his notorious piece "The White Savior Industrial Complex," stemming from seven tweets he posted in response to the Kony 2012 video, as well as "A Piece of the Wall," a 4,000-word report about the U.S.-Mexico border that he posted entirely on Twitter. (He talks about it here.)
I'm just sorry the essays are now older; I'd love to read what Cole thinks about the past eight years. But for that, of course, I can go to his website, where he has posted (at least some of?) his recent writings. I'm pretty sure I will. I find his writing and thinking so stimulating. (P.S. Yes, there is a new volume of his short writings: Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time. It's on my list.)
The blurbs for this book invoke Elmore Leonard, Walter Moseley, Lee Child, and Attica Locke, citing skillful action and plotting and "incredibly authentic and compelling main characters," and commend Cosby for being "one of the most muscular, distinctive, grab-you-by-both-ears voices in American crime fiction." Indeed, the main characters are, if not "incredibly authentic," quite sympathetic, and the story plays out in a satisfying (if violent) fashion. Cosby's writing is great. (I should probably just stay away from blurbs. They always disappoint.)
The story begins in Virginia with the funeral of two young men, Isiah Randolph, an African American journalist, and his husband, Derek Jenkins, a white baker. They were murdered, one might say assassinated, and their fathers want to find out why—and then punish the perpetrators. The story is really about the fathers, Ike and Buddy Lee, both of whom are ex-cons, both of whom had difficulty accepting their sons' life choices, and who now, together, go on a quest to find understanding and forgiveness—forgiveness of themselves more than anything, perhaps. Ike left his former life of crime behind fifteen years ago and in the meantime has run a lawn maintenance company; his wife is a nurse at the local hospital. Buddy Lee is a bit of a ne'er-do-well, living alone in a ramshackle trailer. They rub each other the wrong way from the git-go, and need to overcome their prejudices as they figure out how to work together.
The plot clicks along. Things happen too quickly to be realistic, decisions are made on the fly that definitely deserve at least some deliberation, and the grand finale is beyond believability—but heck, this is genre fiction. There is a lot of violence, helped along by a mercenary motorcycle gang. I can't say as I really bought the bad guy's motives, but the story isn't about him. It's about acceptance and love, even if too late, and about moving forward.
This is Cosby's second book. I might check out his first one, Blacktop Wasteland. I enjoyed his voice. Here's a sample. Buddy Lee has just had a run-in with a potential witness and is recounting the events:
Ike cocked his head to the side. "He say he was pressing charges?" Ike asked. "Nah. His two comrades are scared shitless. They ain't backing up his story, and the place don't have no video cameras. So we should be alright there, but Detective Egg Roll told me if he hears about us kicking any more millennial ass, he gonna put us both in a holding cell until daylight saving time is over," Buddy Lee said. Ike frowned. "Why you call him Detective Egg Roll?" "What? It's just a joke. Ya know, because he's Chinese," Buddy Lee said. "I don't even think he's Chinese. I swear you white boys got a joke for everybody, but if I said your family tree ain't got no branches, you'd be ready to fight." "Shit, nah. I got an uncle who's my cousin," Buddy Lee said. Ike rolled his eyes. "I'm joking. Everybody too damn sensitive these days." "We ain't sensitive. Back in the day nobody could say shit or one of your uncles would've tried to hang 'em from a tree. Now I can tell you to kiss my entire ass," Ike said. Buddy Lee scratched at his chin as he considered Ike's abbreviated history lesson. "Alright, I'll give you that. But let me ask you this: You extending that courtesy to people like Isiah and Derek, too? Could they have told you to kiss their ass?" Buddy Lee said. Ike shifted in his chair and crossed his arms. He didn't answer Buddy's Lee's question. "Be careful you don't hurt yourself falling off that high horse there, Ike," Buddy Lee said.
