Book Report: The Beautiful Mystery

7. Louise Penny, The Beautiful Mystery (2012) (3/22/22)

This book takes Chief Inspector Garmand and Inspector Beauvoir away from Montréal, never mind the village of Three Pines, to a remote monastery where a monk—the director of the twenty-four-voice choir practicing plainchant in honor of God—has been found murdered. The suspects are easy to keep track of, though the clues are few. One day in, Garmand's boss—and nemesis—arrives, stirring things up. The story refers us back to an incident in a previous book, to add an extra layer or two. 

All in all, it was a satisfying enough read, though a bit slow, with too little texture. I'm not sure I bought some of the premise—a long-lost book of Gregorian chants figures in, as does a recording these monks made that turned them from "long lost to the mists of time" into instantaneous celebrities. Some of the more philosophical points, like how to balance reliance on the will of God with material needs like roof tiles and heating ducts, or ego with community, were nicely done. The motive of the murderer I did not find convincing. 

The book ends with a crisis between Garmand and Beauvoir, so I am now keen to read the next in the series—which I am glad to see, from the coming-soon excerpt at the end, takes us back to Three Pines. There's plenty of texture in that little village.

By way of a sample passage from The Beautiful Mystery (a reference to plainchant), here's a conversation between Beauvoir and one of the monks, Antoine.

     "You don't like the monastery?" [asked Antoine].
     "Of course not. You do?"
     "I wouldn't be here if I didn't," said Frère Antoine. "I love Saint-Gilbert."
     It was such a simple statement it left Beauvoir dumbfounded. . . . No confusion, no ambuguity. It just was. Like the sky just was, and the stones just were. It was natural and absolute.
     "Why?" Beauvoir leaned forward. It was one of the questions he'd been dying to ask this monk with the beautiful voice and the body so like his own.
     "Why do I love it here? What's not to love?" Frère Antoine looked around his cell as though it was a suite at the Ritz in Montréal. "We play hockey in the winter, fish in the summer, swim in the lake and collect berries I know what each day will bring, and yet each day feels like an adventure. I get to hang around men who believe as I do, and yet are different enough to be endlessly fascinating. I live in the house of my Father and learn from my brothers. And I get to sing the words of God in the voice of God."
     The monk leaned forward, his strong hands resting on his knees.
     "Do you know what I found here?"
     Beauvoir shook his head.
     "I found peace."

Which is something that Beauvoir could use a dose of . . .

Book Report: Wilful Behaviour

6. Donna Leon, Wilful Behaviour (2001) (3/7/22)

I broke my rule of reading all the Donna Leon books in order, simply because this book jumped into my hands (I may have taken it recently from a Little Library?) and then because I figure there's not that much character development in these stories—they're mostly about Venice, and it's already got all the character it needs—so I wouldn't be missing anything crucial. I was right. This book was right in the same mold as the last few I've read (#s 1–5; this one is #11), which means there's some good food, there's an interesting geographical feature or two, there's corruption, and there are likable (as well as a few not-so-likable) characters. And of course there's a murder that must be solved. In this case, there is also some history stretching back to WWII. And art.

I'm afraid I didn't find the motive of the killer very compelling—or, more to the point, believable. But as always with the Commisssario Brunetti books, the mystery itself is somewhat beside the point. It's the richness of Venetian society that is the pleasure.

Here's the only passage that I dog-eared:

He recalled . . . something he had seen with Paola [Brunetti's wife], it must have been four years ago. They'd been at an exhibition of the paintings of the Colombian painter, Botero, she drawn to the wild exuberance of his portraits of fat, pie-faced men and women, all possessed of the same tiny rosebud mouth. In front of them was a teacher with a class of children who couldn't have been more than eight or nine. As he and Paola came into the last room of the exhibition, they heard the teacher say, 'Now, ragazzi, we're going to leave, but there are a lot of people here who don't want to be disturbed by our noise or talking. So what we're all going to do,' she went on, pointing to her own mouth, which she pursed up into a tight, tiny circle, 'is make la bocca di Botero.' Delighted, the children all placed single fingers on their lips and drew their mouths into tight imitations of those in the paintings as they tiptoed giggling from the room. Since then, whenever either he or Paola knew that to speak might be indiscreet, they invoked 'la bocca di Botero', and no doubt thus saved themselves a great deal of trouble, to make no mention of time and wasted energy.

Book Report: The Word for World Is Forest

5. Ursula Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest (1972) (2/24/22)

I finished this book a week ago now, and I've dragged my feet on logging a report. I think, mainly, because it's such a sad, sad book. Which has weighed on me.

It's a story of colonizers and oppressors (yumans), trying to take over a world of peaceful beings (the Athsheans, aka "creechies"—three-foot-tall fur-covered people with deep deep eyes) in order to mine their resources—in this case, trees, since the yumans have denuded their own home planet of Terra of anything resembling lumber—and to prepare the logged areas for future agriculturalist settlers. 

Sound familiar? Well, maybe except for the furry people. Though in Le Guin's world, these beings all evolved from the same pregenitor. 

Again: sound familiar?

I have been curious about Le Guin, and have read a few of her many, many books (including, recently, this one). Not too long ago I ran into someone's list of favorite books by Le Guin. The Word for World was number 1. I bit. 

(I just now googled such lists and came up with a few. The Word  is on some of them, but not all. Obviously, Le Guin, in her richness, means different things to different people. Here are a few of those lists: 1, 2, 3, 4.)

Anyway, this one. It involves an awful opportunist (yuman, of course), a not awful anthropologist (also yuman: so we get the extremes on the scale), and Selver, an Athshean (for a while, an Athshean god), who does the unthinkable—murders—in order to save his home. 

This book is #5 in Le Guin's Hainish Cycle, so it's part of an entire ecosystem. Apparently the books can stand alone, and no, I didn't feel at a disadvantage for not having read #s 1–4. But now I'm curious about them too.

From this book and the one I read not too long ago, I sense a great depth of thought and feeling, and of the notions of truth and justice, in Le Guin's approach to her imaginary worlds. These places are rife with conflict, but balance is achievable—though, at least in this case, at a serious cost. 

Here is a passage I flagged:

Like most Terrans on Terra, Lyubov [the anthropologist] had never walked among wild trees at all, never seen a wood larger than a city block. At first on Athshe he had felt oppressed and uneasy in the forest, stifled by its endless crowd and incoherence of trunks, branches, leaves in the perpetual greenish or brownish twilight. The mass and jumble of various competitive lives all pushing and swelling outward and upward toward light, the silence made up of many little meaningless noises, the total vegetable indifference to the presence of mind, all this had troubled him, and like the others he had kept to clearings and to the beach. But little by little he had begun to like it . . . and now after four years . . . he was completely at home under the trees, more so perhaps than anywhere else.
     He had also come to like the Athsheans' names for their own lands and places, sonorous two-syllabled words: Sornol, Tuntar, Eshreth, Eshsen—that was now Centralville—Endtor, Abtan, and above all Athshe, which meant the Forest, and the World. So Earth, Terra, meant both the soil and the planet, two meanings and one. But to the Athsheans soil, ground, earth was not that to which the dead return and by which the living live: the substance of their world was not earth, but forest. Terran man was clay, red dust. Athshean man was branch and root. They did not carve figures of themselves in stone, only in wood.

Geocaching souvenirs

If you've followed me at all, you will know that I enjoy geocaching as a pastime. Well, today we were at it again: just the two of us, plus Milo the geodog, in Mt. Madonna Park, Santa Cruz County, on a nice loop trail that took us among redwoods, tan oaks, and eucalypts. We found 13 caches on our hike, plus 9 on our drive in and out of the park, for 22 in all (plus 3 DNFs...). Here are a few photos from the day:

An old pumphouse

I can't help it, I like graffiti

An astonishing number of cars were on
this dirt road, which we had to take back
to ours: we suspected that an event had
just let out—until we saw that huge line
of cars driving around in confusion up above
and finally turning down an adjacent road,
at which point we decided they were just lost
getting to wherever they were going...
But the dust they kicked up made for
a pretty sight.

But what I came here today to write about is geocaching "souvenirs." Because Geocaching HQ likes to dream up challenges—be it finding a cache at the end or start of a year; celebration of May 3, 2000, the day the "Blue Switch" was flipped and the first cache was planted; various nation days; geocaching milestones such as 3 million active hides; special dates like 10/10/10 or, coming right up, 2/22/22; International Geocaching or EarthCache Day; the annual GIFF (Geocaching International Film Festival); Pi Day. You get the picture: pretty much anything can serve as an excuse for a souvenir.

And the reason I bring this up is that today's outing finished off the latest series of souvenirs, called Reach the Peak: collecting points that equal or surpass the heights in meters of the world's highest mountains. Because today we climbed Mt. Everest! Yes, indeed. And it was a breeze! We started this quest in August with Puncak Jaya in Indonesia (representing Oceania), then successively, month by month, worked our way up Mt. Vinson (Antarctica), Mt. Elbrus (Europe), Kilimanjaro (Africa), Denali (North America), Aconcagua (South America), and finally, today, Everest (Asia). Huzzah! Here is the final bonus souvenir, for completing all seven, plus a base camp and a summit souvenir. So many—15 in all. And they are quite attractive, I must say. Kudos to the artist.

And no, don't worry, I don't put any stock in these "souvenirs." They are silly. And yet, they do often get us out caching. So those geniuses at HQ aren't earning their big fat paychecks for nothing. 

A few other series we've completed have, despite being pretty much totally arbitrary, been fun, simply because of the anticipation of collecting the souvenirs, which translates to a job well done. For example, the Natural, Ancient, Modern, and Solar System Wonders of the World, seven wonders each:

The final-final souvenirs being, WORLD and ULTIMATE EXPLORER! Yes! Of course we are!

Last year we had The Science of Discovery—rocket science, environmental science, futurology, and geology:

There may have other sciences celebrated, but those four souvenirs are all we got.

The "challenge" of these last ones was simply to find a cache of a particular designation, as randomly assigned by HQ. But I imagine HQ also hoped we would read the descriptions as we collected our milestones and ultimate prizes. Learn a little something?

Back in August 2013 they had a month-long series, 31 Days of Geocaching—as in 31 consecutive days. Of course we got them all. It was a challenge—not in the sense of being difficult, more in the sense of "be there or be square." Maybe we do take these silly souvenirs a little too seriously...

My favorite souvenirs to collect are, arguably, the geographic ones: the states of the US and the countries of the world. So far, I've got CA, AZ, NM, NY, NC, MN, WI, HI, WA, VT, MA, OR, AK, MD, DC, VA, PA, WV, and DE. Nineteen. I've got a few more to go. And as far as the world is concerned, I've got hundreds to go, but so far under my belt: USA, UK, Norway, New Zealand, Israel, Italy, Vietnam, France, Chile, and Antarctica. 

All together, I've amassed 181 souvenirs. I wonder what those wacky kids at HQ will dream up next?

Update 2/22: Make that 182!

Book Report: A Gentleman in Moscow

4. Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) (2/15/22) (BB#3)

The other day I met my friend Barb for lunch and a walk, and we, as always, talked books. She mentioned this one, said she loved it. I knew I owned it. (Turns out, I owned it twice over: in paperback and in hardback.) When I got home, I sought it out. And dived in.

The pundits on the back cover call it transfixing, irresistible, delightful, beautiful, joyful. It is all those things. I totally enjoyed this book: gobbled it up in a few days. 

It's the story, tout court, of a Russian aristocrat hauled before a Soviet tribunal in 1922 at age thirty-three and sentenced to eternal house arrest: in the luxurious Metropol Hotel in downtown Moscow. He'd already been living there for four years, but now he is consigned to the garret—a hundred square feet (which he soon doubles, by accessing the next room over through his closet). 

Over the next thirty-plus years, he makes many friends—the hotel chef, the maitre d', the concierge, a nine-year-old girl who grows up to become a comrade, a seamstress, another small child whom he fathers, a Party monitor. We learn about his life before, about his homeland of Nizhny Novgorod, land of apple trees, and his sister and his old apartment mate. In the end, his life is as rich as any could be, regardless of the circumstances.

Towles is a wonderful writer, both technically (his language!) and in terms of imagination. 

I did feel a bit hermetically sealed into the hotel (our hero, Count Alexander Rostov, is not allowed, on pain of death, to set foot outside—though at one point, or maybe two, he does leave, to our great relief). We hear nothing about the atrocities committed by Stalin, or about WWII (though the story ends in 1954). But nevertheless, the joy of this book is seeing all the life that can happen without the possibility, or even necessity, of escape from a confined space. 

Towles himself says he wants to "gather together a pile of brightly colored shards of glass" and swirl them into a kaleidoscopic view. He does this well. The historical import of place and time may be somewhat elusive, but the life he conveys is lovely.

I flagged many passages, and may transcribe one or two later on. For now, I just want to count this big book (not quite 500 pages, but close enough) done. Huzzah!

Here is an interesting interview with the author.

Ōtagaki Rengetsu, potter and poet

In The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki, there is occasionally a chapter of a fictitious book called Tidy Magic by a female Zen monk. At one point she tells about her master's favorite teacup, "an antique cup, very old and very beautiful, with a poem inscribed on it," which she accidentally drops. His only calm comment is, "Already broken"—though in fact, the cup is fine. When she asks why he said it was already broken, 

he held up his cup and admired it. "It's quite old, you know. Maybe two hundred years. It was made by Rengetsu. Do you know who Rengetsu was? She was a great beauty, but she had a very sad life. She was an illegitimate child and was given away for adoption when she was just an infant. Later, she married twice, but both husbands and all of her five children died, and so she shaved her head and became a Buddhist nun. She was poor but creative, and so she started making pottery and writing poems on her cups and bowls. They became very popular, and she made a lot of money, but she gave it all away to the poor."
     I listened to him impatiently. He often did this. Went off on some tangent and forgot about my question, but this time I was determined to get an answer. He was reading the nun's poem on the side of the cup.
     "The world's dust, swept aside here in my hermitage. I have all I need, the wind in the pines—"
     "But Hojo-san! The teacup isn't broken!"
     He looked up, surprised. "To me, it is," he said. "It is the nature of a teacup to be broken. That is why it is so beautiful now, and why I appreciate it when I can still drink from it." He looked at it fondly, took a last sip, and then placed the empty cup carefully back on the tray. "When it is gone, it is gone."
     That day, my teacher gave me a priceless lesson in the impermanence of form, and the empty nature of all things.

Years later, the cup does break: during the magnitude-9 earthquake that hits Japan on March 11, 2011, causing such destruction and loss. 

The earthquake shook us awake, and the tsunami washed away our delusions. It caused us to question our values and our attachment to material possessions. When everything I think of as mine—my belongings, my family, my life—can be swept away in an instant, I have to ask myself, What is real? The wave reminded us that impermanence is real. This is waking up to our true nature.
     Already broken.
     Knowing this, we can appreciate each thing as it is, and love each other as we are—completely, unconditionally, without expectation or disappointment. Life is even more beautiful this way, don't you think?
     Much later, I found a traditional craftsman who could repair that Rengetsu teacup with gold and lacquer to hold the pieces together. Now, in the cracks, there are delicate seams of gold, which honor the cup's brokenness. To my eyes, it is lovelier now than ever.

I wrote about this sort of repair, known as kintsugi, here. It's a beautiful practice.

And I was, of course, curious as to whether Rengetsu was a real person. Why, yes! Not only was she a waka poet and a potter, specializing in tea and sake vessels, but she was a master of martial arts (her adoptive family were well known as trainers of ninja), dance, sewing, and the tea ceremony. She lived from 1791 to 1875, in Kyoto.

Here are a few of her creations, and you can find more, some with translations of the poems written on them, here and here. (Click on the images to see them larger.)

Book Report: The Book of Form and Emptiness

3. Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness (2021) (2/6/22) (BB#2)

Ruth Ozeki was ordained a Zen priest in 2010, and the two books she has written since then, A Tale for the Time Being (2013) and this one, certainly embody that philosophical tradition, in a most pleasing way: you come away feeling a bit wiser, more empathetic, looser and yet more grounded. 

The story here does involve a book, and a fourteen-year-old boy, Benny, who hears objects (like books, but also like shoes and windows and scissors) talk—though in this case, there is a special Book that is his story, which spins out as his life proceeds apace, and he converses with it. 

And his life is complicated. He recently lost his father, a Japanese jazz clarinettist, in a dumb accident. His mother, Annabelle, comfort-eats and has piled all manner of garbage all over their small duplex (ostensibly for work—she follows breaking news stories and must archive the materials, but still: she has a problem getting rid of stuff). When he starts hearing voices—everywhere—he is committed for a time to a Pediatric Psychology ward, where he meets eighteen-year-old Alice, aka the Aleph (a nod to Jorge Luis Borges's famous story). At Pedipsy (pe-DIP-sy), he learns some coping mechanisms, and is sent back home. But normal life eludes him. Instead of going to school, he goes to the main library (modeled on Vancouver's) and reads about medieval armor and fairy tales—when he's reading, the voices die back somewhat. He also starts discovering little slips of paper with instructions on them (à la Oulipo)—courtesy, it turns out, of the Aleph, who soon appears at the library with her pet ferret and takes Benny under her wing. She introduces him to a one-legged, wheelchair-bound Slovenian poet, Slavoj aka the Bottleman.

And events ensue. The elements of magical realism combine with real-world troubles: threats of eviction, rioting following a disastrous election, homelessness, and Annabelle's efforts at cleanup, aided by a self-help book very reminiscent of Marie Kondo's, but more practically by a new friend she meets while worrying about Benny. (For a little more on the self-help book, or at least the person who "wrote it," see my next post.)

Throughout, the Book tries to teach Benny lessons about acceptance, and about agency. What is real? becomes a guiding question. The problem of material consumption is another theme: "What makes a person want so much? What gives things the power to enchant, and is there any limit to the desire for more?"

The book's title is alluded to in various ways. For example, here is Slavoj:

"Let me tell you something about poetry, young schoolboy. Poetry is a problem of form and emptiness. Ze moment I put one word onto an empty page, I hef created a problem for myself. Ze poem that emerges is form, trying to find a solution to my problem." He sighed. "In ze end, of course, there are no solutions. Only more problems, but that is a good thing. Without problems, there would be no poems."

Later, Benny tells Slavoj about the voices and the stories they tell, which "are more like memories or dreams."

I told the B-man all this, and he said poetry was like that, too, like breezes or winds in the mind. At first you might not feel much, not whole words or sentences, but more like currents of air moving across an open wound. You have to keep your mind open and try to feel the voice of the poem as it blows by, even if it hurts a little. He said the trick is not to grab at the wind because as soon as you do, it won't be there.

Or as the Book puts it, "What is a story before it becomes words? Bare experience, a Buddhist monk might answer. Pure presence. The sensation, fleeting and ungraspable, of being a boy, of losing a father."

I enjoyed this book (though the Book did pontificate a bit too much), and pretty much sacrificed the last few days to simply sitting and reading. Now, I need to get a few things done. Like, clearing out a bit of the material detritus around here.