Sep 20 2006

Noted With Pleasure: Reindeer People

One of the other books that I picked up while in Helsinki was Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia, by Piers Vitebsky. (US paperback coming in December.) He’s an anthropologist at the University of Cambridge, and the reindeer people are his research specialty. The book, however, is an engrossing synthesis aimed at a general audience. More than that, though, it’s a personal account of living with nomads, clashes of cultures (ancient, Soviet and post-Soviet) and vivid personalities, all played out in a beautiful and harsh land. I picked up the book in part because I had just missed meeting some reindeer people when I was in northern Mongolia a few years back, and I wanted to learn what their way of life was all about.

I got much more: how reindeer are partially domesticated, what the coming of Soviet power meant to the far North, how people are surviving its ebb, how reindeer migrate, what Arctic cold means in practical terms, to name just a few. Vitebsky writes well, he’s chosen interesting ground to cover, he can sketch people, relate key anecdotes and sustain narratives about their conflicts. Layer upon layer, like the clothing the Eveny wear in winter, Reindeer People envelops the reader, imparting something of those distant lands.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2006/09/20/noted-with-pleasure-reindeer-people/

Jul 18 2006

Mr Commitment

Mike Gayle is a British novelist. He writes books that, if you were feeling snarky, you might call chick-lit that guys can read too. Less snarkily, he writes light contemporary drama. I’ll admit to a small weakness for the genre, at least in its British variant. Although the plots are wildly predictable, the details of melodrama in a separated-by-common-language culture fascinate me. Plus Gayle is good with dialogue and doesn’t go for cheap ploys.

And there’s another thing: Gayle’s black. As are his characters. Or at least they might be, though I had to admit I did not picture them as black at first. He chooses not to make much use of physical description, so it seems clear that he’s at the very least quite aware of the ambiguity he’s creating. On the other hand, I wonder if there aren’t subtler cues–neighborhoods where the characters live, other parts of their background–that would tip off British readers. Anyone else have this experience? Or more broadly, what would tip you off that a London-based character was black, without being a physical description or too much of a stereotype?

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2006/07/18/mr-commitment/

Jun 06 2006

Overdue Evaluation (The Prize, by Daniel Yergin)

There is not much market for reviews of books published almost a decade and a half ago, so without further ado, my thoughts on The Prize, by Daniel Yergin. This evaluation is overdue because I started reading the book when I bought it, back in 1997. I put it down around page 400 (which is a little more than halfway), so this review is likely, very likely, to be stronger on the second half of the book.

Yergin’s subtitle is The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, which gives both theme and thesis. The title, if I am remembering an early part of the book correctly, comes from a statement made about oil by Winston Churchill: “The prize was mastery itself.” The argument is that understanding oil is central to understanding the twentieth century and, by extension, the world today. To complaints that the war in Iraq is “all about oil,” the only proper answer is “Of course.” The last century’s major conflicts, and many of its smaller ones, were driven by oil, determined by oil, or both. Without an understanding of oil, much of the period will remain opaque.

Yergin paints (and not in watercolor) on a large canvas, but he is not content with broad strokes. Instead, he conveys many details, deftly chosen anecdotes and key quotations from important sources. For an 800-page book of history, it’s a page-turner. He starts with a detailed sketch of how the oil industry began, in the woods of western Pennsylvania, where “rock oil” was first collected, for medicines and then for kerosene, as a source of light, not fuel. The first successful oil drill led promptly to the first boom, and then the first bust. It’s a cycle the industry has struggled with ever since. Yergin soon introduces John D. Rockefeller, and he follows the creation, supremacy and dismemberment of Standard Oil in considerable detail. (John D., incidentally, was probably the biggest beneficiary of the breakup of the Standard Oil Trust. Another reason I thought breaking up Microsoft was the way to go, but that’s another story.) For the legacy of Standard Oil reaches down unto the present day, both in the companies that loom large in the business that were once units of Standard Oil (Exxon and Chevron, to name just two), and in the practices from integration to price-cutting that were pioneered by the octopus of 26 Broadway.

Another early center of the oil business that commands much attention is Baku, once in Imperial Russia, then the Soviet Union and now independent Azerbaijan. The Nobel fortune, Royal Dutch/Shell and other important aspects of the European oil industry either started or were shaped by events in and around Baku. (One Iosif Dzhugashvili got his start as a labor agitator in the Baku oil fields.) Soon, however, oil was a global industry. Gushers in Texas, Dutch explorers in Sumatra and speculators in the sands of Arabia are the springs of the world oil business as we know it today. Yergin gives a solid overview, laced with tales of the larger-than-life personalities the industry either drew or created.

The research is impressive, too. Much is drawn from period publications, personal papers, official archives and, for later periods, personal interviews with the people involved. The list of interview subjects covers the top league of leaders and policy-makers in global oil–president of Exxon International, Nigeria’s oil minister, deputy secretary general of OPEC, chairman of British Petroleum, and about 75 more at the same level. It’s an account told with an insider’s knowledge but a historian’s perspective.

History’s turning points appear, too. Churchill’s decision to convert the British navy from coal to oil. Rommel’s inability to get enough oil in North Africa. Eisenhower’s choice to give gasoline to Montgomery’s solidification of Allied lines in France, instead of Patton’s drive for a rapid crossing of the Rhine. Imperial Japan’s loss of oil supplies to American submarines. The Suez crisis. And on through the second half of the twentieth century.

There are interesting tidbits. Given current events, much is made of American involvement in the fall of Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh. One thing I did not know was how strong the communist party in Iran was at that time, and the fact that as Mossadegh became more erratic, the Soviets moved in a new ambassador, the same man who had been Soviet ambassador when communists seized power in Czechoslovakia in 1948. I had also only been dimly aware that the Soviets had occupied swathes of Iran after World War II.

I learned more about the formation of OPEC and the rise of the spot market.

The book was published at a particular moment: in 1991, after Iraqi forces had been dislodged from Kuwait, but before the coup against Gorbachev and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. This makes it an interesting artifact of perceptions at that time.

One of the book’s virtues is that it does not read as if history were an arrow pointing to the writer’s present position. Yergin is too smart for that, and his knowledge of the cycles in the oil business too encyclopedic. Interesting, too, are the things that are not in the book. Global warming appears once, in the epilogue, as part of the challenges of the third wave of environmentalism. India does not appear after its independence. China is mentioned only in passing after its role as a battlefield in World War II. If Yergin were adding another 150 pages to bring The Prize up through the present, I suspect that all three would see a significant increase in importance.

There would probably also be a great deal more about Russia. Part of the gap is that the archives were surely closed in the mid- to late 1980s when Yergin was doing the research for the book. The history of Soviet oil was secret. He does cite the intentions of the Soviet oil industry as a likely shaper of the global picture in the 1990s, but it’s significant that he thinks about it as the Soviet industry. When the book was published, it had less than a year to continue in its Soviet form. Another reminder of how very few people recognized that the end was at hand.

It’s a thorough, thought-provoking book, one that delivers a convincing argument about part of how the world works, what that means for political leaders, and what citizens of the industrial world have to come to grips with. After sitting on my bookshelf for more than seven years, it rewarded renewed attention.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2006/06/06/overdue-evaluation-the-prize-by-daniel-yergin/

Apr 18 2006

Premature Evaluation: The Hungarians

I suppose I should be happy that there is a recent, one-volume general history of the Hungarians. Their history is not exactly the stuff of bestsellers, even if Hungarians were crucial in everything from computers to the atomic bomb to Hollywood studios. Ten million people, give or take, speaking a non-Indo-European language in and around the Carpathian basin. Their exact origins unknown, their polity long divided, their armies prone to getting wiped out.

The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat, by Paul Lendvai, does have much to recommend it. First, it’s written by a journalist for a general audience; that means it’s not as academic and cumbersome as one might worry. Second, it was published (originally in German) ten years after the collapse of Communism, so there is an open-endedness to the story that it might not have had if the book had been written a few years earlier. Third, Lendvai has lived outside Hungary a long time, so his perspective is not too insiderish. Fourth, it moves at a brisk pace and will wrap up in about 500 pages. (True to the title of this post, I’m about forty percent of the way through.) Fifth, it’s quite good on the early history, what is known about the migration, and it brings the early medieval period convincingly to life.

But I can’t shake the feeling that the book ought to be better than it is. In some cases, the virtues of the book bring corresponding vices. It is brisk and limited to one volume, but some parts feel hurried, as if the author knows he has to mention such and such a person or certain events, but does not take the time to put them in much context. For me, this was particularly true of the period between the fall of the Arpads (Hungary’s first ruling dynasty) and the Habsburgs’ firm establishment in the region. It’s a complex set of issues, but I’m not much smarter about them after reading this than I was before, which seems a shame.

Part of this hurry certainly stems from the choice to keep the history down to one volume. For me, Lendvai’s book stands in contrast to the two volumes of Norman Davies’ history of Poland, God’s Playground. Because Davies has more room to work with, he is free to delve into detail on complicated periods, and the story benefits. I’m sure it was a business decision as much as an aesthetic one, but I think Lendvai’s tale would be better if he had told more of it.

The second problem is translation. I say this with much regret, because I know very well how hard it is to translate 500 pages of German into good English. But goodness, the book needs one more thorough round of untangling syntax to make this into really nice English. I can tell from the sentences that the German is just fine–not overly ornamented or excessively academic. English, however, needs more movement and fewer digressions into dependent clauses. There’s also occasional antecedent confusion, where things that are artfully ambiguous in German just look unclear in English. Finally, there have been nearly a dozen typos in the first 200 pages. They’re almost all periods where commas are called for, but aren’t publishers supposed to take care of that sort of thing? (For readers of German, the answer to the stylistic questions is obviously to go to the original.)

One thing that Lendvai is good at is drawing connections between very early parts of Hungarian history and attitudes that are part of the culture today. He’s not just telling a story, he’s reflecting on contemporary society, and I like that aspect of the book very much. On the other hand, the story that he is telling is very much the tale of who ruled where, when and how. It’s mostly a top-level political history. There some culture and some society involved, but these are definitely secondary. Again, this is a choice made at the outset, and obviously not everything can fit into one volume. Greedy reader that I am, though, I would like to have a bit more of both.

It’s a good history, and it’s good that there is a recent and accessible history of the Hungarians, but at this point in the actual reading, I’m wishing it were a bit better than it is.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2006/04/18/premature-evaluation-the-hungarians/

Apr 06 2006

Premature Evaluation: The Fatal Shore

What to do when you haven’t finished a book but find yourself with something to say about it?

Convention dictates that one should finish a book before reviewing it (although I have my doubts about any number of published reviews), but on the other hand, The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes, was published 20 years ago; this is not breaking news. So out with the convention, in with the thoughts.

I was vaguely aware of The Fatal Shore of course–it had been a big seller when I worked in the book business, even four years after its initial release–but hadn’t ever had cause to read it. The spur came from Patrick O’Brian, and his acknowledgement of Hughes’ book as an unusually helpful background source for the Aubrey-Maturin novel Clarissa Oakes. (And how should we recognize O’Brian’s place as a contemporary European author? Does it matter that much of his personal history was invented? Or that he found his greatest popularity in America?)

About a third of the way through, I’m taken by both the scope and the details. Hughes is not a historian by trade, but an art critic, and a popular one rather than an exclusively academic one. (The same mix makes his Barcelona absorbing and informative.) Most directly, that means that he’s used to making pointed judgements and writing clearly about them. That means he gets off some terrific one-liners, and generally draws vivid characters. For example, Rev. Samuel Marsden, one of the colony’s early wealthy landowners and a thoroughgoing prejudiced conservative, was “a grasping Evangelical missionary with heavy shoulders and the face of a petulant ox …[he] showed few … instincts to mercy, but focused his considerable energies on getting land, breeding sturdy suffolk sheep, preaching hellfire sermons and (as magistrate at Parramatta) subjecting convicts to dramatic punishment–hence his nichname, ‘The Flogging Parson’.” (p. 187)

Sometimes Hughes exercises his drollery on the broad sweep of history:

The colonization of Ireland … had been going on since the twelfth century, when the first English Pope, Adrian IV, encuoraged his fellow Anglo-Norman, King Henry II, to invade Ireland and “proclaim the truths of the Christian religion to a rude and ignorant people.” When the English knights landed and started hewing their red way through the Gaelic resistance, Ireland had been Christian for seven hundred years. (p. 183)

Or, relating the unhappy fate of a liberally-minded early transportee: “Palmer died [near Guam] of cholera in June 1802. The Spanish priests, hearing of his radical opinions, refused his body Christian burial; and so the most civilized and liberal-soulded gentleman to breathe Australian air in early colonial days was buried among pirates in a common grave on the beach, until an American captain (himself a man of reforming opinions) took the trouble in 1804 to retrieve Palmer’s body and bring it back to burial in a Boston church.” (p. 180)

Or, on justice in the old country: “Robert Macqueen, Lord Braxfield, Lord Justice Clerk of Scotland … was a coarse cunning old drunk whose remarks during this trial won long notoriety. (When one of the Jacobins pointed out that Christ himself had been a reformer, Braxfield chuckled and snorted: ‘Muckle he made o’ that–He was hanget.’)” (p. 176)

These selections are drawn from a fairly brief part of the text, but it is like that the whole way through. Hughes has no fear at all of pungent judgements, and that makes his history both personable and lively. It’s not a perfect book. For instance, the transition from the “starvation years” of the colony’s beginnings to the slightly more stable situation about two decades later is more assumed than described. I would have liked more on how that came about. And treating many things topically means that he runs back and forth through time quite a bit, and someone not familiar with the territory can sometimes get lost in the differences between the 1820s and 1850s.

Still, these are small quibbles with an enormously satisfying book. It offers insight into class, colonization, trade in the early 19th century, the clash of European empires, how quickly developments can come and much more. Hughes is an opinionated guide to early Australia, one who makes the journey all the more pleasurable with brilliant observation.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2006/04/06/premature-evaluation-the-fatal-shore/

Mar 31 2006

Greatness, Andante

Two years ago, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung began publishing a series of 50 great novels from the 20th century. It’s a good list, and I’ve been slowly reading my way through it. Emphasis on slowly. The newspaper never planned on keeping the editions in print indefinitely, and indeed, the smartly designed and inexpensive (EUR 4.90!) hardbacks are officially out of print. (The series’ original home page is now 404, just to add to the indignity.) The Sueddeutsche has followed up with series of popular music (mostly mediocre because of rights issues), children’s books (inviting, but not yet inviting enough for me to actually buy one) and now mysteries (a genre I tend not to read much of).

I’ve been writing capsule reviews periodically as I make my way — shortest to longest as a general rule — through the list. It’s been a while since the last installment, so here goes.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers, no. 35. Yes, I made it all the way through school and a bachelor’s degree in the South without reading this book. On the one hand, it might have been a formative experience, as it apparently is for many younger readers (though not as many as the other classic Southern one-hit-wonder, To Kill a Mockingbird). On the other, with a few more years’ perspective, I can appreciate the accuracy of McCullers’ portraits, how difficult it must have been to capture aspects of black culture as they were, not as white culture of the time would have seen them. The hard times in the South, the harshness, the peculiarities and the warmth of a vanished way of life, all of these are vividly presented; the human stories in the novel transcend their setting, but it is the note-perfect realization of that setting that gives them much of their power.

Sanctuary, William Faulkner, no. 25. If the McCullers was the Sueddeutsche‘s American South for beginners, this is the advanced book, though accessible compared with Faulkner’s more daunting works. (This last is presumption on my part, as I haven’t actually read any of his other books, even though my family comes, in part, from the Mississippi county that Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha is modeled on. It’s Yalobusha, though I can’t say anything about closer correspondences.) At any rate, I have a hard time seeing how this one will work in translation. It was hard enough as someone who knows the period and places intimately. That’s because much of the import of the action is in what people don’t say. Like another book in the list, Uwe Johnson’s Speculations About Jacob, you have to know a good bit about what’s not being shown on the page to get a firm grasp on what is. This is probably a good way to include a Faulkner book, pay homage to his innovations, introduce people to what’s great about his work, but not scare them off completely.

All Souls Day, Cees Nooteboom, no. 33. At first, I thought I had wandered into the book of a Wim Wenders movie, probably Wings of Desire because of the Berlin setting. The connection to film is no accident, as the lead character is a Dutch filmmaker who finds he is spending more and more of his time in the German capital. This book is one of the most recent on the Sueddeutsche’s list, and I’m glad they made this foray into the contemporary. The action also appears a bit aimless, as in Wenders’ movies, but plot is not what the novel is about. It’s all about getting to know the characters, seeing the world through their eyes, spending time with them as they interact. That’s all there is, but it encompasses a great deal of life, post-war Europe’s history, the uncertainties of love.

The Assault, Henry Mulisch, no. 19. In the waning days of World War II, the Dutch resistance attacks a German officer on a side street of a small suburb. His body is dragged from where it fell to a different place in front of another house. Shortly thereafter, other German soldiers retaliate. This is no grand action in the scheme of the war, but it is the starting point for a lifetime of repercussions. Who did what to whom, and what became of most of them in the decades that follow. Man’s inhumanity to man, but also mercy in the unlikeliest of places. Gripping. Challenging.

This last book is also a reminder of how many of the post-1950 books address World War II, directly or indirectly. Of the ones that I have read, or know enough to say something about, 13 of the 33 books published in 1950 or later center on the war.

Jurek Becker, Bronstein’s Kinder
Elias Canetti, Voices of Marrakesh
Friedrich Duerrenmatt, The Judge and His Executioner
Guenter Grass, Cat and Mouse
Graham Greene, The Third Man
Wolfgang Koeppen, The Greenhouse
Siegfried Lenz, German Hour
Primo Levi, The Periodic System
Harry Mulisch, The Assault
Cees Nooteboom, All Souls Day
Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
Jorge Semprun, What a Beautiful Sunday!
Andrzej Szczypiorski, The Beautiful Mrs Seidenmann

Perhaps it’s not surprising that World War II is so central, but sobering nonetheless.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2006/03/31/greatness-andante/

Mar 16 2006

Wisdom of the Ages

The Roman Empire has won significance, and its rulers became famous and mighty, because numerous nobles and sages from various countries congregated there […] As settlers come from various countries and provinces, they bring with them various languages and customs, various instructive concepts and weapons, which decorate and glorify the royal court, but intimidate foreign powers. A country which has only one language and one kind of custom is weak and fragile. Therefore, my son, I instruct you to face [the settlers] and treat them decently, so that they will prefer to stay with you rather than elsewhere, because if you were to destroy all that I have built and squander what I have collected, then your empire would doubtless suffer considerable loss.

Thus King St Stephen I of Hungary, to his son, in an exhortation probably drawn up by a German monk. As quoted in The Hungarians by Paul Lendvai. Emphasis added.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2006/03/16/wisdom-of-the-ages/

Feb 11 2006

Premature Evaluation: Grace and Power

What to do when you haven’t finished a book but find yourself with something to say about it?

Convention dictates that one should finish a book before reviewing it (although I have my doubts about any number of published reviews), but on the other hand, I’m not trying to sell a review of Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House, by Sally Bedell Smith. So out with the convention, in with the thoughts.

Isn’t it neat to read a book of history and biography that nearly dispenses with the politics and the policy? It really is all about the private world, and the political only occasionally intrudes to give a frame of reference, or to explain why Jackie and her sister Lee went off to India. (Because they had promised Nehru that they would. Only Jackie didn’t really want to, was pouty about it for a while, but eventually went and charmed both Nehru and Indira, had a grand time and totally helped out US-India relations.)

There’s quite a bit about who did what with whom, which is tasty, because the whos and the whoms were doing a lot with each other. On the other hand, it’s neither scandalmongering nor salacious. There’s a reason the Camelot legend has stuck: the Kennedys really were glamourous, they really were smart and rich and stylish, they really were quite a break from the Eisenhower years. And at the end of JFK’s first year in office, his approval ratings were still around 75 percent. But there I go, letting the political back in.

The book is about the people, their traits, their foibles and their experiences. What did JFK and Macmillan talk about in private? Who danced the twist when it was introduced to the White House? How did Jackie handle the press, and the pressure?

If there were only one book on JFK’s presidency, this one would be inadequate. But there are thousands, and this one fills a unique niche. I’m glad I’m reading it, even though I’m still only half-way through.

And boy does this portrait of smart, energetic people make me think GWB is the anti-JFK.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2006/02/11/premature-evaluation-grace-and-power/

Feb 06 2006

Premature Evaluation: On the Brink: The Trouble with France

What to do when you haven’t finished a book but find yourself with something to say about it?

Convention dictates that one should finish a book before reviewing it (although I have my doubts about any number of published reviews), but on the other hand, the market for reviews of revised editions of books on France originally published in 1998 is bound to be small. So out with the convention, in with the thoughts.

On the Brink: The Trouble with France, by Jonathan Fenby, is meant to be an exploration of France’s uniqueness, and its importance for Europe. As he writes in the preface, “Without a healthy France, there is no Europe.” What I actually found in the first several chapters, though, was a description of the specifically French versions of common European tropes.

Attachment to the land? Check. (Everywhere I’ve ever been.) Pride in a long and improbable history? Check. (Again.) Distinctive regions? Check. (Even Latvia has regions.) Harkening back to a glorious golden age? Check. (Remember the great Moravian empire? The Moravians do.) Possibly exaggerated sense of its role in world history? Check. (The Estonians, with a population barely bigger than metropolitan Munich, think they took down the USSR.) Distaste for its political class? Long struggle to separate church from state? Declining rural populations? Demographic worries? Far right parties regularly drawing about 15 percent of votes? Check, to one and all. And so on and so forth.

It’s nice to learn more about how these general characteristics manifest themselves in France — since I know far too little about the place — but the implied argument is that they make France different, whereas I saw them as illustrating how much France resembles other European countries.

Don’t get me wrong, the specifics are important; indeed, they are much of what Europe is about. And chapter 9 makes some of the contrasts specific by comparing France with England. On the other hand, given how England differs from much of the rest of the continent, there may not be too much gained for readers from other countries.

I’m interested in the stories Fenby tells, in the details he marshals and in the overall portrait that he paints. I’m just not convinced that he’s showing how France is either different or important. I’ve got another 150 pages to go, and this is a premature evaluation.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2006/02/06/premature-evaluation-on-the-brink-the-trouble-with-france/

Dec 18 2005

Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff

  • Filed under General

  • December 18, 2005

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single quotation on the cover of a book is not a reliable guide to its contents. Nevertheless, when the quotation clearly comes from a review, and the review comes from a reasonably reputable newspaper, for such I imagine the Independent to be, some credence could be allowed.…

Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff was originally published on The Frumious Consortium

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2005/12/18/terence-this-is-stupid-stuff-2/