Oct 07 2014

The Unquiet Ghost by Adam Hochschild

The Unquiet Ghost is both a terrific historical and journalistic investigation and a historical document itself, as the author acknowledges in a preface written in 2002, some eight years after the book’s first publication. More than eight more years have passed, and the conditions that made the book both possible and urgent slip ever further into the past. And yet. The memories, most now second-hand, remain; the glimpses of another possible Russia refuse to fade completely, no matter what the present leadership might wish; the ghosts are still unquiet.

The Russia where I had come to live, in 1991, was then a country where only in the previous few years had it become possible to read those long-forbidden books at last, to look the past in the face, and to ask the question that obsessed the Russians as much as it did me: How could the country that gave the world Tolstoy and Chekhov also give it the gulag? Everywhere I went, it seemed, people were thinking about this. In addition to the men and women I sought out to interview, I kept stumbling into other unplanned conversations about Russia’s Stalinist past…

And so 1991 turned out to be the right moment for my journey of exploration. It was a time when mass graves had been newly opened, and I was able to walk through several of them, seeing, in one, skull after skull with a bullet hole through it. It was a time when it was finally possible to see the old gulag camps, and I will never forget standing in the ruins of one of them, Butugychag, a place so cold and remote and surrounded by barren snow-streaked rock hills that it seemed like another planet. Even there, in that desolate moonscape with nothing but snowfields to escape to for dozens of miles, even there, the camp had an internal prison with thick stone walls and cross-hatched iron bars on the windows. Above all, it was a time when people who had survived such camps and the era that produced them were eager to tell their stories. It would be harder to gather such stories today [2002], because so many of those who spoke to me were in their seventies or eighties and are now dead.

In another way, also, I was unexpectedly luck in my timing. The very month I arrived in Russia, the government lifted prohibitions that for decades had placed huge swaths of the country off-limits to foreigners. This meant that in several places I visited in Siberia, I was the first American of Western European whom anyone there had ever seen. … The novelty of meeting their first Westerner made many people particularly eager to tell their stories. I was the first witness from another world.

Hochschild settles into a still-Soviet Moscow in January 1991, where waking up and falling down seem to be happening simultaneously all around him. Memorial, a now-beleaguered institution of Russian civil society was still a protean organization founded four years earlier — gathering names, publishing, archiving what it could digitally, assisting victims materially. “The core of Memorial’s work is to try to restore a set of memories the government worked for several decades to erase.” Much of it was still individual initiative and handcrafted work.

As the book progresses, he moves between Moscow and further reaches, ending with a visit to Kolyma, one of the gulag’s worst regions, described then and now as the dark side of the moon. Along the way, he meets former inmates, former administrators, and descendants of both, fated to live in the same place with the acts of their forefathers between them, seldom spoken but always known.

Hochschild brings the liveliness of good journalism — every page bristles with specifics — and the perspective of a historian. Fitting, then, that his book has become a testament to its times — the first flush of openness and the glimmerings of a new Russian state — as much as a document of the times before it.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/07/the-unquiet-ghost-by-adam-hochschild/

Oct 06 2014

Paladin Of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold

After reading The Curse Of Chalion to prep myself for this book, that had come highly recommended to me by various sources, I made the mistake of reading the Wiki page and discovering that the Chalion saga is based very much on the historical House of Trastamara, the royal family that wound up uniting Spain around the turn of the 16th century despite great personal tragedy. Of course, remember that the unification of Spain allowed the Inquisition to run unchecked and that religious minorities were, at best, expelled from the peninsula — not that you’d suspect any of that given the way the subjects of religion and politics are handled in Paladin Of Souls. Despite being mapped very closely to historical figures, the characters in general are given none of the nuance of motive that real people have, instead being either good or evil based on which nation they belong to. This is problematic because these characters, despite changes to the specifics of religion and the addition of magic, are clearly stand-ins for Iberian Catholics and Muslims, and the depiction of Quintarians/Catholics as being tolerant and cosmopolitan whereas Quadrenes/Muslims are savage zealots when any student of history knows it was the reverse was deeply disturbing to me. It’s as if someone wrote a fantasy take on the Civil War where the Union was intent on zombifying the poor Africans whom the Confederates had saved from lives of savagery, y’know? That kind of revisionism is not okay.

But I can see where the allure of it would be hard to deny, in a way that isn’t explicitly bigoted against a particular people. The story of the Trastamarans is compellingly high drama, and if you just wanted to write a high romance with elements of fantasy in it, where you could explore your philosophical leanings but didn’t want to write something ridiculously long and probably overly complex, it’s easy to reduce the enemies of the main characters to being Bad People so you could get on with telling an exciting story. It just seems unethical, sort of the opposite side of the coin of what I complain about when I complain about Guy Gavriel Kay. GGK is too cautious as he retells history as fantasy. Here, I feel, Lois McMaster Bujold takes too many liberties. Both ways, it’s still pretty lazy.

History aside, would I have liked the book better? Maybe if Ista weren’t so awful. I tried so hard to like her: we’re both mothers, of middle age, with dim views of our “traditional” roles in society. But it bothers me that she doesn’t show actual remorse over dy Lutez’s death: she only seems upset that killing him didn’t end the curse, and she spends way too much time blaming him for not having the will to… what exactly? Live again so he could die again for her children? As much as I love my kids, I couldn’t kill someone on the off-chance it would save them. A person, for example, who would kill an organ donor in hopes it would help extend the life of her terminally-ill child is a fucking psychopath. As one of my favorite TV characters recently said, “Cool motive. Still murder.”

And then I didn’t care for her treatment of Cattilara. I get it, Catti is annoying and self-involved and hysterical, but maybe if Ista weren’t such a psychopath, she’d see how similar she and Catti are and try to relate to her that way. Instead, Ista is completely high-handed and awful to her, never even trying empathy and kindness as she forces Catti to do the right thing.

A friend compared this book to a sort of high fantasy Eat Pray Love and that probably also explains my dislike of the book, as well — the only thing worse than memoirs of privileged men in their angsty 20s are the memoirs of privileged women “finding themselves” in their 30s. Unlike my friend, I did enjoy the action sequences, which I thought were done better than in TCoC, or were at least more believable/coherent in their magic. And don’t get me wrong: I didn’t dislike the book, as critical as I sound. The prose is beautiful, the plot is great and when the religion/magic is unmoored of its historical roots, it’s really appealing. If Ista were only less of a psychopath, I would have liked the whole thing a lot more.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/06/paladin-of-souls-by-lois-mcmaster-bujold/

Oct 06 2014

Glamour in Glass by Mary Robinette Kowal

Glamour in Glass is the second novel in Mary Robinette Kowal’s Glamourist Histories series. This review contains spoilers for Shades of Milk and Honey, the first in the series.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/06/glamour-in-glass-by-mary-robinette-kowal/

Oct 04 2014

The Cider House Rules by John Irving

This is a highly acclaimed novel, but I found it somewhat disappointing. The characters mostly are sweet, uncomplicated people, the kind of people who are nice to know but not very interesting to read about. This is basically the life story of a fictional character, but like the life story of a real person it goes on for quite a while without seeming to have much point to it. The story does pick up at toward the end, and finally you see what this rambling narrative was leading to, but I found most of it rather dull and unsatisfying. Not a totally wasted effort, but I loved *The World According to Garp*, and I definitely expected more from this author.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/04/the-cider-house-rules-by-john-irving/

Oct 03 2014

The Curse Of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold

An almost perfect fantasy novel, with one major exception. Cazaril is a compelling hero but there are parts where his heroism seems less a function of himself than of the story. I loved that he had personality and flaws, but the author sometimes seems to forget those flaws and forego realism for the epic, when a few more lines explaining the manifestation of his inner strength might have served to ground his actions in the believable. I spent the whole book rooting for him, but in scenes such as his last confrontation with dy Jironal, I couldn’t suspend my disbelief long enough to really enjoy what was happening, which quite drew me out of the book altogether. Otherwise, it’s an excellent novel, and I loved the philosophical underpinnings of the religious system. Lois McMaster Bujold writes beautifully, with the occasional intrusion of the hero-on-steroids trope the only flaw in this otherwise excellent book.

On a side note that didn’t affect my enjoyment of this novel: I was somewhat horrified at how easily Ista passed off the (truth of the) death of dy Lutez. I’m hoping it’s addressed in the sequel, Paladin Of Souls, which I’m about to gleefully devour.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/03/the-curse-of-chalion-by-lois-mcmaster-bujold/

Oct 03 2014

St Joan Of Arc by V Sackville-West

What student of English literature hasn’t felt the slightest prurient interest in the personal lives of the Bloomsbury group? My fascination with Vita Sackville-West stems, of course, from her role as muse to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, but I found her own novel, All Passion Spent, to be tedious rather than reflective. But here in this biography of St Joan of Arc, one sees clearly Ms Sackville-West’s genius, in presenting with clarity and sympathy — though not unduly so except at times, I felt, with Cauchon — the known facts and reasonable suppositions that can be drawn therefrom of the life of one of the most remarkable women to ever live. The only failing of the book is hardly the fault of the author, in that the medical and psychological advancements of her time would not be able to advance other theories of Joan that have come since to supplant or support some of those Ms Sackville-West discusses. Overall, though, this is an excellent biography of a controversial figure, well-researched and -written, intelligent and illuminating and, above all, interesting from start to end.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/03/st-joan-of-arc-by-v-sackville-west/

Oct 03 2014

Just Send Me Word by Orlando Figes

From the Preface to Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag, by Orlando Figes:

Three old trunks had just been delivered. They were sitting in a doorway, blocking people’s way into the busy room where members of the public and historical researchers were received in the Moscow offices of Memorial. … Noticing my interest in the trunks, they told me they contained the biggest private archive given to Memorial in its twenty years of existence. It belonged to Lev and Svetlana Mishchenko, a couple who had met as students in the 1930s, only to be separated by the war of 1941-5 and Lev’s subsequent imprisonment in the Gulag. …
We opened up the largest of the trunks. I had never seen anything like it: several thousand letters tightly stacked in bundles tied with string and rubber bands, notebooks, diaries, documents and photographs. The most valuable section of the archive was in the third and smallest of the trunks, a brown plywood case with leather trim and three metal locks that clicked open easily. We couldn’t say how many letters it contained – we guessed perhaps 2,000 – only how much the case weighed (37 kilograms). They were all love letters Lev and Svetlana had exchanged while he was a prisoner in Pechora, one of Stalin’s most notorious labour camps in the far north of Russia. The first was by Svetlana in July 1946, the last by Lev in July 1954. They were writing to each other at least twice a week. This was by far the largest cache of Gulag letters ever found. But what made them so remarkable was not just their quantity; it was the fact that nobody had censored them. They were smuggled in and out of the labour camp by voluntary workers and officials who sympathized with Lev. Rumours about the smuggling of letters were part of the Gulag’s rich folklore but nobody had ever imagined an illegal postbag of this size. …
As I leafed through the letters, my excitement grew. Lev’s were rich in details of the labour camp. They were possibly the only major contemporary record of daily life in the Gulag that would ever come to light. Many memoirs of the labour camps by former prisoners had appeared, but nothing to compare with these uncensored letters, composed at the time inside the barbed-wire zone. Written to explain to his sole intended reader what he was going through, Lev’s letters became, over the years, increasingly revealing about conditions in the camp. Svetlana’s letters were meant to support him in the camp, to give him hope, but, as I soon realized, they also told the story of her own struggle to keep her love for him alive.
Perhaps 20 million people, mostly men, endured Stalin’s labour camps. Prisoners, on average, were allowed to write and receive letters once a month, but all their correspondence was censored. It was difficult to maintain an intimate connection when all communication was first read by the police. An eight- or ten-year sentence almost always meant the breakings of relationships: girlfriends, wives or husbands, whole families, were lost by prisoners. Lev and Svetlana were exceptional. Not only did they find a way to write and even meet illegally – an extraordinary breach of Gulag rules that invited severe punishment – but they kept every precious letter (putting them at even greater risk) as a record of their love story.
There turned out to be almost 1,500 letters in that smallest trunk. … These letters are the documentary basis of Just Send Me Word, which also draws from the rich archive in the other trunks, from extensive interviews with Lev and Svetlana, their relatives and their friends, from the writings of other prisoners in Pechora, from visits to the town and interviews with its inhabitants and from the archives of the labour camp itself.

Does the book live up to the promise of its preface? Yes. Yes, it does.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/03/just-send-me-word-by-orlando-figes/

Oct 02 2014

The Origins of the Second World War by A.J.P. Taylor

The author has done his homework. He marshals volumes of diplomatic correspondence and documentation in support of his argument. But what he ends up with is clearly a reductio ad absurdum. As Tony Judt has pointed out, the conclusion that Hitler was not the primary agent responsible for starting World War II simply defies common sense. Taylor would have us believe that the inept statesmen of Britain, France, Poland, and the Soviet Union all blundered into a war that no one, not even Hitler, wanted. Much of the blame is put on the obstinacy of Poland and the pusillanimity of the French, but he also says some scathing things about the moral hypocrisy of the British government, for whom taking the high road to peace meant sacrificing the smaller countries of Europe. As implausible as the thesis is, this book has the virtue of not being boring; it is written with a lot of dry English wit that makes it a pleasure to read. But unfortunately it gives fuel to revisionists.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/02/the-origins-of-the-second-world-war-by-a-j-p-taylor/

Oct 01 2014

Shades of Milk & Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal

Delight is something I probably shouldn’t inquire too deeply about, so I will simply say that Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal was a delight. I knew that Regency romances were a Thing, and I knew that not having read Jane Austen is a gap in my education, and so I am sure that there are conventions of the genre that Kowal is playing around with that went past me, but for all of my not really being the target audience, I enjoyed the heck out of the book.

Jane is the plain daughter of the Honourable Charles Ellsworth, a well-to-do landowner in the neighbourhood of Dorchester during the English Regency. She is versed in the womanly arts, particularly music and glamour, a kind of magic-making practised by pulling upon strands within the ether; mostly this work is done individually, but sometimes it can be done collectively. It is largely an art of illusion, sometimes stationary, sometimes accompanying music, and sometimes being more like a short movie.

The Honourable Charles’ other daughter, Melody, has “a face made for fortune” and far better marriage prospects, as a maid of 18, several years younger than Jane, who is nearly reconciled to becoming a spinster. Events, of course, intercede.

There are wealthy and noble neighbours, the FitzCamerons; there is a captain in the Royal Navy, one Henry Livingston, with whom the sisters played when they were children, now grown handsome and dashing in HM service; there is a Mr Dunkirk, in whom both sisters appear to have an interest; there is his sister, Miss Beth Dunkirk, who becomes a friend, but has a mysterious and likely tragic history; there is a nearly invalid mother, with convenient fainting spells; there is a Mr Vincent, itinerant and slightly disreputable glamourist retained by the FitzCamerons; there are also various servants, who do not rate.

Everyone, of course, has a secret, and some characters have several.

The FitzCamerons give a ball; everything is not as it seems. Intentions are hidden, then misconstrued, then deliberately played false. Lives are callously put in danger, but saved in the nick of time. Unfortunately, that puts still more in danger and the ending arrives in a rush, with thudding heartbeats and the likelihood of a deadly duel, first hindered and then abetted by the magic of glamour.

Is there a happy ending? Well of course there is, but not for everyone, not even some of the more sympathetic characters.

Kowal has a deft touch with the characters, none of whom is without a flaw, and the misunderstandings that arise from social convention are key to several points in the plot. The pace is one of the particular pleasures of the novel, leisurely as a country walk at first, then quick as a duellist’s draw at the height of the action. There are pairings and some droll commentary to analyze in things such as the chapter titles, but that would get in the way of the delight. And for now, I am happy to be charmed, and delighted, and just come along for the ride.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/01/shades-of-milk-honey-by-mary-robinette-kowal/

Sep 30 2014

The Chaos Walking Trilogy by Patrick Ness

Now this is how young adult science fiction should be written!

The three books in this trilogy are The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer, and Monsters of Men. They were wonderful. These books addressed wide-ranging topics from terrorism and tyranny to morality and how difficult love can be, all while telling a fast-paced science fiction tale of human colonization on a planet that already had a sentient species existent. The writing was very good, the characterization was excellent, the little bits and pieces of world-building that make a place different and yet real were all there. I thoroughly enjoyed reading these and they’ll probably end up on my to-be-read-again pile.

It wasn’t hard science fiction, which is usually one of my favorite genres (space opera FTW!), but the science bits that were in there were completely believable and didn’t distract me by popping my suspension-of-disbelief bubble.

I’ll be looking for more books by this guy.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/30/the-chaos-walking-trilogy-by-patrick-ness/