Oct 29 2022

Premature Evaluation: The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson

In the first hundred pages of the book of her translation of The Odyssey, Emily Wilson introduces readers to this three thousand year old epic poem that is one of the foundations of Western literature. She opens doorways to the poem for readers not already well versed in Homer, but she also makes clear that what readers find through those doors will be a strange and different world, where people act differently because the things that matter to them are different from modern concerns. Wilson explores some of the long-lived questions surrounding the poem — Who was Homer? When was The Odyssey composed? — and some of the concepts that run through the poem that modern readers might want to know more about before sailing on Homer’s seas of verse: the Homeric world; gods; friends, strangers, guests; the roles of women; becoming a man; slaves; Odysseus’ choices; people in the poem who hate Odysseus; endings; how The Odyssey has been seen through the centuries. Before that, though, she bids readers welcome.

The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson

Modern connotations of the word “epic” are in some ways misleading when we turn to the Homeric poems, the texts that begin the Western epic tradition. The Greek word epos means simply “word” or “story” or “song.” It is related to a verb meaning “to say” or “to tell,” which is used (in a form with a prefix) in the first line of the poem. The narrator commands the Muse, “Tell me”: enn-epe. And epic poem is, at root, simply a tale that is told. (p. 1)

Odysseus, for anyone who would like a brief refresher, is one of the men who went off to fight in the Trojan War, a story told in The Iliad, the other Homeric epic (which I still have not read, despite several attempts). He left his wife Penelope and infant son Telemachus behind on their home island of Ithaca. This edition of The Odyssey provides several maps of the ancient Greek world, so readers need never feel lost, at least geographically. The war lasted ten years, and another ten years have passed since its end, and still Odysseus has not returned. The Odyssey tells the story of his attempts to return. It also tells the stories of the people left behind, and indeed the first several books of the epic follow his son, Telemachus, as he makes his own journey to try to find out what has happened to his father. Penelope has remained faithful to Odysseus, but she is beset by aggressive suitors, who want her to declare Odysseus dead and choose one of them to take his place. In the meantime, they are abusing Greek laws of hospitality and eating her out of house and home. Telemachus, though nearly grown, is not strong enough to battle the suitors alone.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/10/29/premature-evaluation-the-odyssey-translated-by-emily-wilson/

Oct 28 2022

Smurf Tales #5: The Golden Tree And Other Tales by Peyo

There are four different stories collected in this volume and I was kinda surprised by which ones my favorites were!

It seems almost churlish to say that the two that were fine but not otherwise astounding were the tales that bookend the volume, both classic Smurfs tales created, if not completely birthed, by comics legend Peyo himself. The shorter one, which he wrote and did the art for, was actually my preferred of the two, as The Miniature Smurfs tells its cute tale of a green witch miniaturizing and kidnapping various woodland denizens, including several Smurfs, as a gift for her granddaughter. The tale is punchy, sweet and not over-long, with a comeuppance for series nemesis Gargamel to go with the lesson the granddaughter learns about empathy and kindness.

In contrast, the titular opener feels like it drags on for quite a while. After the Smurfs’ ceremonial golden pole, made from the remains of a rare tree, is struck by lightning and burnt to a crisp, bad luck seems to plague their village. Papa Smurf knows this is nonsense, but try persuading the superstitious Smurfs that they make their own luck. So off Papa Smurf goes to find them a new rare tree around which to dance and ensure prosperity for the village for another year. Hijinks ensue.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/10/28/smurf-tales-5-the-golden-tree-and-other-tales-by-peyo/

Oct 27 2022

Love From Mecca To Medina (Love From A To Z #2) by S.K. Ali

First, I want to say that I really did eventually enjoy this book but OMG, the parts I hated were so aggravating!

I think about 75% of my irritation with the first half of the book would have been eliminated if this had been marketed as a contemporary romance instead of a Young Adult. Because not only are Zayneb and Adam in their 20s when this novel starts, they’ve also been married for a while, so it’s deeply weird that this book is marketed at teens instead of a general audience.

But here’s the other weird thing. If I’d known this was meant to be a romance novel, with a HEA or HFN guaranteed, I would have been mentally prepared to put up with the absolute shit decisions our protagonists make over the course of the story, all in service of “not worrying” the other. The genre is well known for its manufactured drama, and if I had been assured that the protagonists would sweetly reaffirm their commitment to each other by the end, I wouldn’t have felt so stressed out at how deeply stupid they were being in the process. I want Muslim novels and Muslim romances to succeed, but going in cold (i.e. not having read the first book in the series — I meant to, but my TBR pile is too large!) made me fear that this would be a cautionary tale against getting married young and for lust-filled reasons.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/10/27/love-from-mecca-to-medina-love-from-a-to-z-2-by-s-k-ali/

Oct 26 2022

Native Realm by Czeslaw Milosz

Czeslaw Milosz has a captivating mind. In Native Realm he invites readers to join him on what his subtitle calls “A Search for Self-Definition,” and is a journey from the wooded interior of what is today Lithuania, where he was born into a family of Polish-speaking gentry, through his young adulthood in interwar Warsaw, past the terrible crucible of the Second World War in Nazi-occupied Poland, and finally into postwar political exile after he broke with the Communist government and his own socialist tendencies. When Native Realm was first published in 1959 (the English translation dates to 1968), his long and fruitful years in California were ahead of him, as was his Nobel Prize. The Communist yoke seemed firmly settled on Poland. Milosz could see where it fit poorly, but even he could not see it being loosened. Twenty-one years after Native Realm was published in English, Poland held its first semi-free elections since World War II; every Communist candidate who was on the ballot was voted out. Milosz eventually returned to his native country, dying in its ancient capital of Krakow in 2004.

Native Realm by Czeslaw Milosz

The beginning of Native Realm is far from that, in so many ways. At Milosz’s birth in 1911, the area where his family lived was part of the Russian Empire. The Great War came and upended much in that part of the world, not least because it was soon followed by war between Soviet Russia and a Poland that returned to Europe’s map for the first time since 1795.

The process that was taking place in Eastern Europe, more or less simultaneous with the building of the railroads, was not paralleled in other parts of the continent; it is closer to what happened in the American South after the Civil War. It was not accidental that I mentioned Faulkner earlier. Poles find the atmosphere of his novels considerably more familiar than that of Balzac’s or Zola’s. In Poland as in the American South, the equilibrium of a whole community was disrupted by a sudden shock. The impoverished gentry fled to the cities, but their former customs and habits did not altogether disappear. Far from it. They left their stamp on all classes; thus, the Polish proletariat, not to speak of the intelligentsia, which maintained close ties with the surviving members of the nobility, inherited many of the gentry’s characteristics. (p. 31)

That attachment to the values of the nobility — Poland’s was an elected king, and the electorate of the time was a larger share of the populace than the share of the British people who could vote for Parliament — made many Poles keen on democracy even during long years of Communist oppression. Milosz shows how other values from the old Polish gentry, namely disdain for money and commerce, could also open people to the changes promised by the government the Soviets installed after the war. Many paragraphs, throughout Native Realm are like this one: ranging forward and backward to trace connections, relating art to politics and daily life, supporting sharp judgments, and offering details from Milosz’s own background to illustrate all of the forgoing elements. They make the book a delight to read actively, to argue internally with Milosz, or just to consider his perspective and the many unexpected notions he brings.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/10/26/native-realm-by-czeslaw-milosz/

Oct 25 2022

Sea Serpent’s Heir, Book 1: Pirate’s Daughter by Mairghread Scott & Pablo Túnica

Siiiiigh. I’m sure lots of people will love this book but it is not, unfortunately, for me.

Premise: young Aella hates living on her remote fishing island, and longs to run away and have real adventures. Her mother Ryanna is constantly away at sea herself, leaving Aella to be raised by a coterie of friends and neighbors. Ryanna keeps promising that she’ll take Aella with her on one of these journeys, but the years pass and she never does.

Then a ship of knights from the Church of Thenas show up. The knights are demon hunters, and they’ve come to the island of Kinamen in order to find and kill the greatest demon of all. The sea serpent Xir is the daughter of the moon and sea, and is prophesied to destroy the world. The knights are here to ensure that that doesn’t happen, and to behave as boorishly as possible in the process. The townsfolk put up with their behavior, as there is no other choice really. The youngest and still most idealistic of the knights, Bashir, is apologetic, so is set to double guard duty by his more cynical superiors while the others rest.

Aella comes in from fishing and instantly falls in love with what she sees as a literal knight in shining armor. The innsfolk try to shoo her off home, but she decides to sneak back in and see if she can meet Bashir and set off on the adventure she’s always craved. Bashir listens to her story of dreaming about demons and tries to introduce her to his superiors. They, however, see the scales on her arms and immediately assume she’s the demon they’ve been looking for.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/10/25/sea-serpents-heir-book-1-pirates-daughter-by-mairghread-scott-pablo-tunica/

Oct 24 2022

Freestyle by Gale Galligan

This was my first Gale Galligan but y’all, I’m in love! From the sweet middle school shenanigans to the absolutely adorable art, I was all in for this story of young Corey Tan navigating eighth grade with old friends and interests and new.

Corey is not the greatest student, to the disappointment of his Filipino American parents. When his latest report card comes back with mostly Cs, his parents hire a tutor to help bring up his grades so he can do well on the upcoming high school placement tests. Trouble is, the tutor is Sunna, his annoying new lab partner. Sure she’s top of their class, but Corey’s frustration with her standoffish choice to do their partner-work solo and not give him a chance to even try the experiments spills over to their first tutorial session, leading to a huge fight overheard by his mother. Corey is swiftly grounded for being wildly disrespectful.

This is especially unfortunate because Corey’s dance crew is practicing hard for what might be the last competition of their middle school career. Tess, their crew leader and choreographer, is super gung ho about winning, freaking out at any deviation from the steps she’s assigned each member of Eight Bitz. Corey doesn’t know how to tell them that he can’t make it to rehearsals any more, a dilemma that’s further complicated when he discovers Sunna’s hidden talent at the yo-yo. Soon, she’s bribing him with yo-yo lessons to do his actual tutorial work, even as a sweet friendship develops between them. But what will Corey do when his awkward attempts to integrate all the things and people he likes into his life goes horribly wrong, leaving everyone mad at him even as he’s just honestly trying his best?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/10/24/freestyle-by-gale-galligan/

Oct 23 2022

Inhuman Land by Jozef Czapski

Seldom does a book’s title fit so perfectly, so terribly as Inhuman Land by Jozef Czapski (pron. “Chop-ski”). He was born into an aristocratic Polish family in Prague, at a time when that city was ruled from Vienna as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Czapski grew up near Minsk, in present-day Belarus; he finished his schooling in 1915 in St. Petersburg when it was still the capital of the Russian Empire. He witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution, but soon relocated to Poland, which had declared its independence at the end of World War I, and took up studies of art in Warsaw. During the war between Poland and Soviet Russia, Czapski undertook a mission back to St. Petersburg as well as fighting as part of a crew on an armored train. With Poland’s independence secured by battlefield valor, he returned to art, spending eight years in Paris and also adding skills as a writer and critic to his talents in drawing and painting. In 1939, when Czapski was already 43 years old, he re-enlisted in the Polish army. Much of this background is related in Timothy Snyder‘s excellent introduction to Inhuman Land.

Inhuman Land by Jozef Czapski

World War II began when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Just over two weeks later, the armies of the Soviet Union fell on Poland from the east, carving up the country with its Nazi allies. The Soviets captured Czapski, as they did many thousands of other Poles. Czapski was held in a camp called Starobilsk for six months. A large share of the Polish army’s officers were held there and at two other camps, Kozelsk and Ostashkov. Snyder’s introduction continues:

In March 1940, Lavrenty Beria, the director of the Soviet secret state police (NKVD), received Stalin’s written approval to shoot the prisoners of Starobilsk, Ostashkov, and Kozelsk. They were mostly officers, and the officers mostly from the reserves: educated men, professionals, and intellectuals; physicians, veterinarians, scientists, lawyers, teachers, artists. After a quick review of their files, 97 percent of these people were sentenced to death. Czapski and 394 other prisoners from the three camps were spared and sent to Gryazovets, some because a foreign power had intervened on their behalf, others because they were Soviet informers. (p. x)

He adds in a footnote, “Czapski seems to have been spared because of the intervention of German diplomats. This was mysterious to him and remains so.” This massacre and other closely related mass executions became known as Katyn, and they weigh on Poland even today. The Soviets claimed during the war that the Nazis had shot thousands of Polish officers at Katyn, and they kept up the lies for decades, only acknowledging the truth during Gorbachev’s time of glasnost. In April 2010 an official Polish airplane carrying dignitaries headed to a commemoration of the 70th anniversary of Katyn crashed in a forest outside of Smolensk. The crash killed Poland’s president, his wife, a former president of Poland’s government-in-exile, the president of Poland’s national bank, 18 members of the Polish parliament, Poland’s military chief of staff, senior members of the Polish clergy, and relatives of the Katyn victims. Katyn, already a raw wound in Polish-Russian relations, acquired new resonance for the 21st century.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/10/23/inhuman-land-by-jozef-czapski/

Oct 22 2022

Before the West by Ayşe Zarakol

“How would the history of international relations in ‘the East’ be written,” asks Ayşe Zarakol, “if we did not always read the ending — the rise of the West and the decline of the East — into the past?” (frontispiece) Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders is her effort to answer that and related questions. For all that the book is an academic effort firmly situated within the discipline of International Relations (IR), Zarakol aims to both broaden and transcend the discipline. As she summarizes her purposes in writing the book, “First, I wanted to create a non-Eurocentric version of international history and world politics as understood from an Eastern vantage point. … [Second] Given the political and economic resurgence of Asia and the numerous dangerous alleys Asian historiography can travel down in the near future, I wanted to provide an account of Asian history that is not owned by any one ‘nation’, ‘civilisation’, ‘race’ or ‘religion’.” (p. 271)

Before the West by Ayşe Zarakol

International Relations as it is practiced today descends from studies of diplomacy, politics and history that attempted to generalize from the experience of European states, mostly in the 19th century. As the discipline developed, it worked out definitions and analyses of concepts such as statehood and sovereignty, and looked further back in time, and somewhat further afield geographically. As social sciences go, IR is closely tied to practice, with many diplomats and other leaders making scholarly contributions, while many academics have advised or joined governments to put their ideas into action in the real world. Conventionally, IR dates the modern state system to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that largely settled the issues of the Thirty Years War in Central Europe. As the field developed Europe — later the trans-Atlantic community, and later still what is known as the West — was considered self-evidently the measure of all things. In the first decades of the 20th century, when Europe’s technological, intellectual and material dominance was at its apogee, this perspective was understandable. A century later, this just looks out of date. But as Zarakol notes, work to undermine Eurocentrism can, perversely, leave Europe still at the center of the intellectual project, simply inverted.

Zarakol is after something else: “an account of the history of Eastern ‘international relations’ that understands actors of the past in that part of the world primarily through their relations with each other and not with Europe.” (p. 6) Importantly, some of these actors had intentions that went well beyond relations with their immediate neighbors, and of course given the immense size of some Asian land empires, even just the immediate neighbors comprised a significant share of humanity. “Such actors did in fact exist in Asia/Eurasia, and, as we shall see, not only did they aspire to universal sovereignty but they also came close to dominating (and thus ordering) the world — such as it existed — from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries.” (p. 10)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/10/22/before-the-west-by-ayse-zarakol/

Oct 21 2022

The Casagrandes #4: Friends And Family by The Loud House Creative Team

While the subtitle of this latest installment of The Casagrandes series is “Friends And Family”, the book mostly focuses on Abuelo Hector, our main character Ronnie Anne and her naughtiest brother Carl. There are, as always, plenty of cameos from each member of the Casagrande family as well as their friends and neighbors, but these three definitely take center stage, appearing in all but one of the vignettes included here.

Hector is probably the star of the show, especially in the very cute story The Meet Up, where he drags his grandkids to the flea market to buy him presents for Abuelo Day. He’s also great in Back To The Boogie, where Ronnie Anne and Carl stumble across a treasure trove of outdated items. I loved as well how Hector and his teenage neighbor Cory bonded in All Nighter, as the reasons that kept them up converged to help them both weather another sleepless night.

While Carl is mostly entertaining for being his usual obnoxious self, it was nice to see Ronnie Anne get to spend time with both family (including Carl himself, in the adorable Meow Or Never) and friends. The stories with Lincoln Loud, whose series she and her family spun off from, were particularly entertaining. The two good friends have not one but two stories where they try to hang out via the Internet, with the one with the scavenger hunt being, like their efforts at conversation, the slightly more successful of the two.

The art hews closely to the Nickelodeon series, with extra large lettering to make understanding what’s happening easier for young readers. That said, I did find the art in the first two stories a little confusing, tho that might be a flaw in their storytelling overall: panel breakdowns to sync story to art are far more difficult than they look, and require a lot of cooperation and communication between writers and artists!

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/10/21/the-casagrandes-4-friends-and-family-by-the-loud-house-creative-team/

Oct 20 2022

Zara’s Rules For Finding Hidden Treasure by Hena Khan

with delightful illustrations by Wastana Haikal.

I’m a huge fan of the first book in this series, Zara’s Rules For Record-Breaking Fun, and finally, finally got my 11 year-old to start reading it when I asked him if he’d like to go to Hena Khan’s book signing with me. He was enthused, but I warned him that he’d have to have read at least book one first. The gratification I felt when he called out to me his excitement that the book was set in Maryland was extremely vindicating (even if his favorite character so far is Zayd, whom I’m hoping to gently point out to him is a lot more like his younger brother Joseph than he is, and so maybe he should be nicer to Joseph then?)

Zara’s Rules For Finding Hidden Treasure picks up from where the first one left off, with Zara getting a snazzy new bike for her birthday, then promptly having it stolen when she forgets to lock it at the park. Granted, she never had to lock her old beater bike, so it’s just a really unfortunate, if decidedly crappy, occurrence. Her parents, understandably, don’t want to just go out to buy a replacement for her. So with the help of her best friend Naomi and the other kids on her street, she starts brainstorming ways to raise money to buy a new bike.

After a few false starts, a travelling garage sale seems to be the best bet, with discarded items from both her household and Naomi’s. But when Zara discovers she’s made an awful mistake, will her dream of quickly getting a replacement bike disappear as swiftly as her last bike did?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/10/20/zaras-rules-for-finding-hidden-treasure-by-hena-khan/