May 26 2016

The History of Polish Literature by Czeslaw Milosz – The Twentieth Century

Czeslaw Milosz was born in 1911 on a farm in what was then part of the Russian Empire and is now near the center of independent Lithuania. He died in 2004 in Krakow, Poland’s old capital, which had been under Habsburg rule when he was born, but which was one of several second cities in free and independent Poland by the end of his life. He attended university in Vilnius (Wilno), and spent World War II in Warsaw. He joined the postwar government, but defected to the West in 1951, living first in Paris and then California, where he was a professor at Berkeley for many years. After 1989, he spent part of each year in Poland.

Milosz

In writing about Polish literature during interwar independence, during the war, and during Communism, Milosz is writing about his peers, his fellow artists who engaged with their times, with the inheritance of Polish literature that he has described in the book’s earlier chapters, and with each other. He is, perforce, required to reckon with his own stature and legacy as well.

Poland began the twentieth century as it had begun the nineteenth: divided among Russian, Austrian and German rule. The First World War and the collapse of the three empires provided an opportunity for Poland to return to the map of Europe for the first time since 1795. The ideals of the rebellions, of the romantic writers, of the tradition of upholding Polish language and culture under foreign rule seemed to have come to fruition. “The joy, even euphoria, that followed the recovery of independence in 1918 was faithfully noted by literature.” (p. 384) This is the period Milosz describes in some of his essays in To Begin Where I Am (which I read and liked immensely) and his first novel, The Issa Valley (which I have not yet read). Looking at the literature of independent Poland, he begins with his vocation, poetry, and notes that while some writers of Young Poland were still active, a new generation was also emerging, centered on a review called Skamander.

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May 25 2016

Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson

Soon after reading The Collapse was just the right time to pick up Europe at Midnight, Dave Hutchinson’s second book set in a Europe that kept right on collapsing after 1989 and, by the unspecified date of the story, sends more than 500 entrants each year to the Eurovision Song Contest. Europe at Midnight splinters further than its predecessor, Europe in Autumn, alternating between first-person and third-person points of view. It’s not just Europe and the narrative that have broken down, however; the world itself has been rent asunder, or at least some parts of it have been hived off into something like pocket universes. It’s not magic, one of the characters assures another (and the readers); it’s a matter of topology. At least he didn’t say it was a simple matter of topology, because it isn’t.

Europe at Midnight

Hints of this state of the world were dropped in Europe in Autumn. The second volume is not coy. The story starts on a peculiar Campus, one far more insular than even the most self-contained university in Europe. This one exists within tightly secured border controls that would have made East Germany shudder. It has recently had a revolution, but the even new regime’s head of Intelligence, who is the first-person narrator of much of the book, cannot find a way beyond the borders. Like any post-revolutionary regime, they are struggling — with questions of justice, what to do with the former oppressors; with reconstruction, as fighting damaged key points on the Campus; with exhaustion, as too few people are trying to do too many things all at once; with expectations, because the revolution was supposed to make lives better, not worse; with unreconciled centers of power, in this case a Science Faculty that is wealthy and secretive and seems to run on totalitarian lines; and with unexpected events, such as a deadly flu in a remote area that threatens to turn into a pandemic. Rupert of Hentzau is in over his head, as probably anyone would be, and his situation keeps getting worse. The former Medical Faculty had been engaging in gruesome genetic engineering. As shortages spread, so does hoarding, to say nothing of a drug connection with apparent ties to people very high up in Campus power circles.

Hutchinson leaves Rupert at the very edge of a crisis and switches to third-person narration, from the perspective of Jim, an officer in English Intelligence, who has to deal with an unusual stabbing on a bus. This bit reads like a good police procedural, very nitty-gritty, establishing a scene carefully, and then going through it one step at a time, showing different aspects from different people’s perspectives, all circling around a key event, at once known in detail and unknowable. In Jim’s debriefing things go a bit sideways.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/05/25/europe-at-midnight-by-dave-hutchinson/

May 18 2016

The Ruins of Gorlan by John Flanagan

The Ruins of Gorlan is a splendid introduction to fantasy, especially for readers who like fast-moving stories but who may not be ready for the canonical masters of the genre. There aren’t any surprises for experienced readers, except to see how deftly and economically Flanagan moves his story and characters along. He does both, and with enough heart that the youngest reader in the household here — who may be a bit on the young side of the target audience according to the calendar, but was smack in the middle of it as things turned out — devoured all 12 books in the series in just a couple of months.

The setting is of course a warmed-over England that wears its feudalism very lightly, or at wears it pleasantly enough that noble lords provide for orphans, and the worst that most characters have to worry about are the other young people they don’t get along with, and whether Choosing Day — when masters select new apprentices — will bring the assignment they hope for. At least those are their greatest worries until signs appear that an evil baron, banished to a corner of the isle (in one of the few nods toward grown-up humor, the southeast is the home to all things malevolent), may be returning to the kingdom with revenge on his mind.

The series follows Will, an orphan, who is taken in to be an apprentice to the Rangers, the elite corps who serve as the King’s eyes, ears, and champions. In the course of the first book, he begins to learn what it is to be a Ranger. As he grows, he finds both unexpected courage and humility, and he finds that the first choices he makes as a young adult have real consequences, but also that people he had thought were enemies might have more to them than meets the eye.

It’s fun, it’s quick, and there’s plenty more where The Ruins of Gorlan came from. Flanagan started writing the stories of Araluen to entertain his son Michael, who was not a strong reader at the time. The world pulls in younger readers, and keeps them happily there. What more could one ask for?

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/05/18/the-ruins-of-gorlan-by-john-flanagan/

May 17 2016

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Some of the people I have mentioned this book to love Neil Gaiman’s work because he tells stories that draw on the mythical, the archetypal, pulling on deep threads of human experience and weaving it into contemporary settings. Others find that he pulls on those too quickly, that there isn’t enough context around the story to give it the kind of heft that Gaiman appears to want. I’m somewhere in the middle, though I have read less than half a dozen of his books, and have only just approached the first two volumes of Sandman. Mine is an incomplete education. Good Omens is an all-time favorite, one of those books I have to be careful about picking up if I want to do anything else at all in the next couple of days. Neverwhere I remember as dark and clever, but I’ve only read it once, back when it was new.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane begins with a man driving away from a funeral; readers are not told whose, only that

I had done my duty in the morning, spoken the words I was meant to speak, and I meant them as I spoke then, and then, when the service was done, I got in my car and I drove, randomly, without a plan, with an hour or so to kill before I met more people I had not seen for years and shook more hands and drank too many cups of tea from the best china. (p. 3)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/05/17/the-ocean-at-the-end-of-the-lane-by-neil-gaiman/

May 13 2016

The Magician’s Tower by Shawn Thomas Odyssey

The mystery was a bit more predictable here, and the book overall took on a much more Harry Potter-slant than the first, but still a tremendously charming and engaging supernatural mystery, ostensibly for children, but definitely enjoyable for those well past that stage in life. In this installment of the series, Oona Crate enters a competition held every five years to solve a riddle that no one in the past few centuries has been able to crack. The competition itself is enthralling, with neat little puzzles, and once again the mysteries have been carefully constructed. Character motivations are believable and often hilarious, such as arch-rival Isadora’s adolescent insistence on stressing the word BOYFRIEND in conversations. The only thing that really took away from this book was the lack of editing for things such as use of the word “assent” when describing an upward motion: very jarring in an otherwise elegantly written book. That said, I gobbled up this book in a day, bought the final installment immediately and am planning on devouring that, as well.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/05/13/the-magicians-tower-by-shawn-thomas-odyssey/

May 13 2016

The Wizard Of Dark Street by Shawn Thomas Odyssey

This book was so darn charming that I immediately went and got the next in the series. Oona Crate lives in Victorian-era New York City, or on a street adjacent to it anyway. Magic is inherent in her blood, but she would rather spurn her natural talents and the unreliability of magic for the cold, reliable reason of deduction. When her uncle — the titular Wizard of Dark Street and the man responsible for protecting humanity from the vengeance of faeries — is viciously assaulted, Oona is on the case!

Aimed at young readers, The Wizard Of Dark Street is a vastly entertaining read for all ages, with a very well-constructed mystery in a novel full of charm and heart. Oona is a plucky 13 year-old grappling with the loss of her family and her distrust of her own abilities. The supporting cast are fleshed out nicely, and the setting is that perfect blend of fantastic and familiar. I can see why this book was nominated for the Edgar and Agatha, and I’m really looking forward to plunging into Book 2!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/05/13/the-wizard-of-dark-street-by-shawn-thomas-odyssey/

May 12 2016

The Collapse by Mary Elise Sarotte

In The Collapse, Mary Elise Sarotte engages in a very close examination of the events in East Germany that led up to the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, and a nearly minute-by-minute analysis of the day itself. Not quite an eyewitness to the events herself, though she is of an age where she well could have been, she has interviewed many of the principals to the action, and she has combed both archival sources and contemporary media to paint a photorealistic picture of what the people involved were doing and thinking during those crucial days and hours. Such care is important, not only because people’s later testimony tends to shade events in their favor, but because of the argument that Sarotte is making, as revealed in her subtitle, “The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall.”

The opening of the Wall was a cock-up of epic proportions, to exaggerate her view slightly, the result of a series of missteps, overreaching, and miscommunications that quite literally changed the world, practically overnight. The book is a model of historical argument, brief at under 300 pages in its main text, densely sourced and clearly referenced. Sarotte opens the book with examples of the brutality that the Wall both required and made possible. Gunfire along the Wall meant that guards were shooting at a person trying to escape East Berlin. Even in 1989, it was a regular occurrence.

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May 11 2016

Einstein — His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson

“Did he have an interesting life?” asked a friend when I mentioned that I had started reading Einstein — His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson. Yes, he did, very interesting, and Isaacson is an able chronicler. More interesting than previously known, in fact; Isaacson used sources that were newly available at the time of writing (the book was published in 2007) to show that Einstein fathered a daughter with his first wife, Mileva Maric, prior to their marriage. The two went to considerable lengths to ensure that there was no official record of the girl, and both Mileva’s pregnancy and the birth are mentioned only in a very few letters. From the fragmentary evidence that survives, it is not clear whether the girl was given up for adoption, or if she died of scarlet fever in 1903 while in the care of friends or relatives.

From the historical point of view, the discussion of the unknown daughter, referred to as “Lieserl” in the few bits of remaining correspondence, is the most significant new element of this biography. Some FBI files were also newly accessible after 50 years had passed, and Isaacson uses them to show how the Hoover-era Bureau suspected Einstein of subversive tendencies. They also show how a quasi-fascist organization first called Einstein to the FBI’s attention and the bureaucratic after-effects of such a denunciation. Neither of these aspects reflects well on the FBI’s role in a free society, nor in its judgement about political matters. That, unfortunately, is a tale with many chapters.

As the foregoing makes clear, Isaacson writes as much about the private and political Einstein as about the scientist. In his telling, they are all of a piece. Einstein was reflexively anti-authoritarian from an early age, and it was a matter of personality and disposition as much as education. Indeed, his non-conforming personality drove his education, causing him difficulty in the systems of the German-speaking world in the late nineteenth century, but ultimately leading to his momentous insights in physics.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/05/11/einstein-his-life-and-universe-by-walter-isaacson/

May 10 2016

Young Poland – The History of Polish Literature by Czeslaw Milosz

“Modern Polish literature,” writes Milosz, “begins with the generation that emerged from adolescence around 1890.” (p. 322) If Romanticism is the first literary movement with which Milosz and his contemporaries were in dialogue, this generation, called “Young Poland” (Młoda Polska) after 1899, are his immediate forbears, the literary uncles (and much more rarely aunts) who shaped the culture in which Milosz was raised and educated. Young Poland had parallels across Europe, although not always contemporaneously; Milosz mentions Young Germany (Junges Deutschland) and Young Scandinavia, while Young Italy (La Giovine Italia) and the Young Turks offer other points of comparison. “Cosmopolitanism is the proper word here, because European culture, in an age when one traveled without passports, was felt to be all of a piece, and young people, whether they were Frenchmen, Poles, or Russians, pored over the same Latin and Greek classics, read the same German philosophers and French poets.” (p. 322) Milosz’s invocation of free travel highlighted the differences between the period about which he wrote, and the time in which he wrote his history (1969), when the Iron Curtain divided Europe. Almost fifty years on, openness across Europe is closer to the era before the first World War.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/05/10/young-poland-the-history-of-polish-literature-by-czeslaw-milosz/

May 09 2016

The Balkans by Mark Mazower

As part of a series published by the Modern Library, Mark Mazower wrote a 200-page history of The Balkans, and it appeared back in 2000. It’s a handy little book, and it makes me want to take a look at the rest of the series, which feature well-known and opinionated authors writing about subjects on which they are experts, but writing for a general audience, and at a length that encourages them to concentrate their arguments.

I’ve read and enjoyed two of his longer books (Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century, which I read right around the end of said century, and Salonica — City of Ghosts, which I read but did not review back in 2007), and I have his World War II book Hitler’s Empire on my to-be-read shelf.

The Balkans fits in squarely with the rest of the oeuvre: carefully researched, fluently written, clearly argued. The argument in this particular case is that the Balkans are not noticeably more barbaric than the rest of Europe, and that understanding broader currents of European is more important to understanding the Balkans than vice versa. In particular, over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, political groupings in the region have harnessed the interests of the Great Powers for their own ends, and trying to grasp Balkan politics without keeping the Great Powers in mind is a fool’s errand.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/05/09/the-balkans-by-mark-mazower/