Rushfield Babylon

BOOK REPORT: THE WARDEN by Anthony Trollope

It’s been at least five years since I last read a Trollope and I enjoy them always, but can’t remember a single thing about any of them - other than the odd supporting character here or there. Unlike Dickens where everything is so broad it all is grafted onto your consciousness, Trollope is about situations that are so slippery and conflicted, that just like life, once it passes, you can’t remember what all the fuss is about.

Given that, what I think all of Trollope is basically about, what The Warden is about anyway, is how life would be a lot better if people would just try to make the best out of what they are handed and be good to people around them then to get a lot of ideas in their heads. In Trollope, when someone gets an idea in their head - and they usually do for the most noble reasons - it means everyone around them is soon going to suffer and no one is going to come out for the better.

Which is more or less how I see life, so Trollope and I stand together.  As I get older, I see most of the problems in the world are caused by people getting ideas in their heads: She wants a big wedding; he’s got this vision there should only be one person at their wedding. Neither can let go of the idea in their head, so they don’t have a wedding at all and break up and their children are never born on down into infinity. At work, someone has a notion things have to be this way, despite the fact that that way is clearly not working and the way they are doing it is making life miserable for everyone around them and their boss has told them they need to change it. But they get themselves fired because they just can’t let go of this is the way it has to be.

On a societal scale, of course, the last hundred years has seen people with utopian schemes (of both the left and right varieties) cause more death and misery than all the previous conquests and religious crusades in history combined.

The plot of The Warden is too complicated to rehash - although the book is short - but basically an old reverend is living comfortable as the custodian of a charitable trust set up hundreds of years before.  It wasn’t originally intended that the custodian should live quite so well, but intentions are hard to get at over hundreds of years, and that’s how its evolved, he is doing good work for it, everyone is fairly happy, until this young reformer comes to town and even though he’s in love with the warden’s daughter, he some how gets it in his craw that its his duty to stick his nose in and make this right; but right, as Trollope best of all sees, is rarely an all or nothing, clean sweep proposition, but a 55/45 thing, requiring lots of compromises and humility.

Anyway, not the splashiest Trollope I’ve read. (Folks wanted to dive in would do well to being with Phineas Finn), but a good romp through moral ambiguity.  

"Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better."

"Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."

"In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer."

"At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things."

HAPPY 100TH BIRTHDAY ALBERT CAMUS!!

(Standing on the Beach listening party at my cubicle at lunchtime)

BOOK REPORT: I WILL HAVE VENGEANCE. The Winter of Commissario Ricciardi by Maurzio de Giovanni

Commissario Ricciardi is the saddest detective in Mussolini’s Italy. He is so sad that he was driven despite his wealth and aristocratic status to become a detective on the police force.  Like Haley Joel Osment, the Commissario sees dead people, who tell him a little about how they were murdered. Not quite enough to solve the crime but sort of a hint, enough to give him a head start and seem like a genius to his colleagues.

In this book, actually, the victim doesn’t even give a full-fledged hint, just more of a shove. In fact, the hint is so ambiguous it gets you wondering what these dead people are good for if they can’t even point you towards their murderers. The gimmick of the book is the cop who sees dead people, but a lot of good that actually does him.

It does make for a good detective character though. Because he sees dead people everywhere, Commissario Ricciardi is very sad. And since he is so sad, every woman he walks past falls in love with him. But he dare not bring his sorrow into their lives, dares not infect it with the things he’s seen, so he walks his lonely path, solving murderers for unhelpful and confusing dead people.

The mystery itself was workable but not much. I think in the end I’m a sucker for any Italian detective series - the Andrea Camilleri Sicilain ones being the best. The high drama and low comedy of Italian life lends itself perfectly to the mystery genre; much more so in the end than those morose, self-absorbed and pedantic Nordics do. This book was not the best Italian detective novel I’ve read, but it was something. Enough to make me give the Commissario one more try.

BOOK REPORT:  ELECT H MOUSE STATE JUDGE By Nelly Reifler

It is my honor today to recommend a book by my old friend Nelly Reifler, and to recommend it without reservation. In fact, to demand you all read it.  I finished reading this about a week ago but haven’t logged my thoughts until now because I’ve been flummoxed at how possibly to describe it. A mystery within a children’s story?  What you would get if a demented six year old got ahold of a bunch of Raymond Chandler novels? What you would get if Dashiell Hammett decide to write a sequel to Good Night Moon at the end of a long long bender?  Something like that.  

The book is impossible to describe - you’ve got a mouse elected ruler of a state while hiding his own dark secrets, his daughters kidnapped by a cult and Ken and Barbie as the sex crazed detectives on their trail while a brooding Skipper lurks in their wake. You know, one of those books.

Reading it made me worry deeply about my old friend Nelly and what’s happened to her that her mind should go such places, but her lost marbles are our gain.  Every page is a bloody delight.  It is like no book you’ve ever read and you will not be able to turn away from its brilliant ability to capture the demented syntax of a child storyteller.  Hilarious, thrilling and terrifying. Make this the last book you read.

I know this is a silly stunt and I’m three decades past my Catcher in the Rye period, but somehow the idea of a BIG JD Salinger documentary that has some secret twist excites me more than any other movie news out there right now.

BOOK REPORT: A Perfect Spy by John Le Carre

Well, if you’re going to be a reader of spy novels then there is no point in reading Le Carre because it pretty much ruins everyone else for you.  You read one of his books and you just say, well, that’s it, isn’t it. What the hell more are you going to do after that?

There is no one else, for instance, for whom you’d put up with the story taking 300 pages just to reveal what it’s about, but with Le Carre you wish it took even longer. It’s because no one captures like him this sense that the spy trade is all about these hidden depths - boxes within boxes that have to be hidden even from their own bearer; with every revelation the awareness that if we found that, it was likely because someone wanted us to find it. So was it planted there to lead us in the opposite direction?  Or was it planted there, knowing we’d find it and knowing that we’d see right through how easily we found it and look in the opposite direction so the truth is in the original direction after all.  And so the only way to really know anything - not that you can ever be absolutely sure is to trace the threads within every story back to the very beginning of time to find the clues before there was anything for there to be clues about.  

Yes, like that. Anyhow, Perfect Spy is almost as good as the Smiley Trilogy.  Not quite totally, but close. His books leave you exhausted, feeling like you’ve been turned inside out tracing his path, but the world never quite looks the same again after you’ve read them.

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Nantucket Blue: A beautiful, surprisingly emotional coming of age story that exudes so much island charm you’ll want to hop a ferry to Nantucket immediately.

(via Book Review: Nantucket Blue by Leila Howland | Alice Marvels)

If you are a young adult, or a young adult at heart, you need to read this new book by my great friend Lelia Howland. A touching, funny, beautifully told tale of friendship and all the other things that get young adults all worked up and bent out of shape, this is your non-guilty summer reading.  Get on board today, before you look like an idiot for reading it after all your friends are already talking about.  Truly, a beautiful work.  Don’t believe me. Alicemarvels says so!

"Classical associations made me think, too, of days at school, where so many forces, hiterto unfamiliar, had become in due course, uncompromisingly clear."

- Anthony Powell, Dance to the Music of Time

Every ten years or so, the time comes around for me to read Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time.   12 volumes written over the course of 30 years.  The story of three school friends, and 2000 supporting characters, the books follow them from the 1920’s all the way through to the 1970’s   Sometimes called the British Proust, (but funny) Dance pretty much explains every situation that will ever occur in your life.

BOOK REPORT:  THE AGE OF DOUBT by Andrea Camilleri

How can one do anything but love a detective who no matter how horrific the murder he’s investigating, still finds room to worry that he might get stuck having a second rate meal that night.    As he walks the seedy streets of Sicily, crumbling from generations of half hearted corruption, Montablano carries civilization with him by never letting whatever tawdry case he’s gotten dragged into distract him from the urgent concern of figuring what he’s going to have for lunch.  Letting a murderer slip away might elicit a frustrated sigh, but being forced to take a quick meal at an incompetent tourist restaurant leaves him simmering with rage, a terror to the entire force. I can’t think of what more I could possibly want in my detective and who could be a better tour guide to the island than this man steeped both in moral decay and culinary excellence.

Camileri, who still thinks of himself as primarily a poet and playwright, said he keeps writing  Montoblano novel to appease the characters so he can go on and do his other work.  I’ve read six of the books now and one feels that need to give the characters their time in your life.   The mysteries themselves are so-so; I can rarely recall anything about them five minutes after I put the book doing.  But navigating the frustrations of the Inspector’s life is something you never forget, and details of his perfect meals come back to haunt long after.

BOOK REPORT: LIFE AND FATE by Vasily Grossman

This has been sitting on my shelf for a while now, its 800 page girth daring me to take it on.  When finally I did, immediately, there was no looking away.   You almost can’t believe this book is real and that it was actually written under Stalin.  It’s just a superhuman work that took superhuman courage and sanity to produce.  So superhuman that it doesn’t seem possible, but there it is.

Everything written about Life and Fate compares it to War and Peace, so there is no reason I should break that rule.  A sweeping panorama of war on the Eastern front, the two books stand alone in the grandeur of their scope, painting the full brutal effects from top to bottom on war, the people it crushes, the people who try to guide it.  

But Grossman’s task is even harder, depicting not only the effects of war, but the effects of war on a totalitarian society, where life, truth and identity are already harshly circumscribed before the madness of war sets in.   The book is formally a very old fashioned 19th Century sort of novel.  But in the sensitivity of its depictions of people it is absolutely timeless and as good an evocation of the lowest depths of the 20th Century that we’ll ever have.   No one that I know of has so beautifully painted in one book the fragility of the human spirit,  the preciousness of human life and how those things are  snuffed out by war and totalitarianism.  This book is tragic and heartbreaking more times than you can count.  More absolutely devastating scenes then you’ll read in a decade.

WG Sebald said that no serious person now thinks about anything other than Hitler and Stalin.  And here you got a novel about both of them.  It’s damn long, but by the time it ends, you’ll wish it were longer.