In which urania detours . . . again (Part 2)

1 March 2009
Meanwhile back at the dacha, urania has been mysteriously absent. According to her spokesperson Jarek Ňadra (former designer of bras), urania has headed off to Bath to partake of the healing waters after straining her back in the Soviet issue comfy chair while reading Fyodor Sologub’s “The Girl Who Would Not Learn.” Sources close to urania are crying “reading ruse.” Mrs. Martha Mucus relic of the late Henry “Commodore” Mucus and aunt of the mysteriously missing woman remarked, “That girl has never missed an opportunity to learn . . . what she shouldn’t. If you ask me something other than reading was going on in that comfy chair.” Local comrade peasants claim to have seen urania slip out of the dacha on Feb. 23rd with a tallish, darkish, apparently male stranger. Lady Eugenia Eugenica-Zwisherstufen confirmed she entertained urania and one Baron von Kindle at her stately mansion in Bath in late February. “I’m not sure to which family Baron von Kindle is related,” she said. “One meets so many barons at my famous stately mansions; they all start to look alike after a while – you know tallish, darkish, and apparently male, although these days one can never be sure. urania and the baron seemed quite attached. She took him everywhere even to the baths.” Bath attendants deny having seen urania there; however, they did report that Mrs. Martha Mucus was seen emerging from the steam powered vibrator at the spa looking less sour than usual. Mrs. Mucus disavowed any sexual congress with the machine. “I am receiving medical treatment for a wandering womb.” At this time, the location of the womb is unknown. Mrs. Mucus reportedly was so pleased with the treatment she ordered a smaller, electrical home model for herself.

20 May 2009
A recent update from the highly regarded newspaper Long Dark Tea Times reports some friction between urania and the Baron over Oblomov. It seems he sold her an abridged version of the book. “I feel deeply saddened and betrayed,” said urania. “From now on, I shall tend to my garden. As for the vicious rumors circulating about my activities during my vacation from the dacha, I can only say this: May the instigators live in interesting times. As for me, I am currently immersed in gardening and reading high-minded literature about debutantes. Recently, I finished, Bab: A Sub-Deb, a heart-rending story about a young lady, who is a cross between Cassandra of I Capture the Castle fame and Nancy Drew. Although her family and her most unsympathetic older sister construe her innocent actions as indiscretions with THE OTHER SEX, she perseveres. As for Leila, the older sister, she is merely jealous because she cannot manage to land a husband. Altogether Bab is a charming young lady although her orthography leaves much to be desired. Additionally, I have just finished Dorothy Canfield’s The Squirrel Cage, a deeply moving story about a wealthy young debutante, who wishes to live in Thoreau-like simplicity in a one-room shack in the woods. Unfortunately, her family wishes to sacrifice her on THE ALTAR OF HIGH SOCIETY (and a wealthy marriage with the handsome Paul Hollister, an ambitious seeker of filthy lucre). Unfortunately, I have been too busy to keep up with my reading log; however, I am posting my reading to date to satisfy those persons who have so unkindly suggested I have been otherwise engaged.

Urania’s 2009 Reading List (to date) with brief comments about a few books not reviewed at http://www.librarything.com/topic/51688

African Love Stories: An Anthology edited by Ama Ata Aidoo
The Character of Rain by Amelie Nothomb
Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) by Ann-Marie MacDonald
Fat Skeletons by Ursule Molinaro
The Tsar’s Dwarf by Peter H. Fogtdal
Political and Social Issues in British Women's Fiction, 1928-1968 by Elizabeth Maslen
The Shortest Way to Hades by Sarah Caudwell
Our Spoons Came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns
Illyrian Spring by Ann Bridge
Going Out by Scarlett Thomas
Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker
Leaving Home by Anita Brookner
The Castle of Argol by Julien Gracq
A Mad Desire to Dance by Elie Wiesel
Cousin Pons by Honoré de Balzac
Sarrasine by Honoré de Balzac
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
The Seven Wives of Bluebird by Anatole France
In the Flesh by Christa Wolf
Mrs. Sartoris by Elke Schmitter*
Embers by Sandor Marai
The Pendragon Legend by Antal Szerb
The Mouse that Roared by Leonard Wibberly
Uncle Silas by Sheridan Le Fanu
Cosima by Grazia Deledda
Geisha in Rivalry by Kafu Nagai
Geisha, A Life by Mineko Iwasaki
A Geisha’s Journey: My Life as a Kyoto Apprentice by Komomo
The Gossamer Years: The Diary of a Noblewoman in Heian Japan by
The Kimono of the Geisha-Diva Ichimaru by Barry Till, Michiko Warkentyne, and Judith Pratt
The Sand Child by Tahar Ben Jelloun
Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marrillier
The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Netochka Nezvanova by Fyodor Dostoevsky
A Gentle Creature and Other Stories by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Village of Stepanchikovo by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov
The Belly of the Atlantic by Fatou Diome
The Tenants of Moonbloom by Edward Lewis Wallant
Geisha by Liza Dalby
The Technology of the Orgasm by Rachel P. Maines
Chalice by Robin McKinley
Count Zero by William Gibson
Couch by Benjamin Parzybok
Angels of Destruction by Keith Donohue
The Judgment of Paris by Gore Vidal
Practical Demonkeeping by Christopher Moore
The Jersalem File by Joel Stone
Gazelle by Rikki Ducornet
Lark and Wren by Mercedes Lackey
Bab: A Sub-Debutante by Mary Roberts Rinehart
The Squirrel Cage by Dorothy Canfield
Jettatura by Theophile Gautier

The Jerusalem File (not up to Europa Editions’ usual standards) is a pseudo murder mystery. What do I mean by pseudo murder? Well . . . someone actually is murdered early on . . . but the murder doesn’t really serve much purpose other than as a plot device to bring together one ex-Israeli intelligence officer turned private detective and the wife of an obsessively jealous academic. Under normal circumstances an obsessively jealous husband might provide some divertissement. In this novel, one suspects that husband’s life would be utterly dull, boring, and purposeless if he did not have a grand obsession with which to occupy himself. As for the detective and the wife? One cynical, detective who no longer believes in the cause to which he devoted his life and one beautiful, intelligent, but fragile woman . . . you do the math.

Mrs. Sartoris
For someone who does not particularly care for the murder mystery genre, I have delved into it quite a bit thus far. This short, elegant novel offers murder with a twist. From the beginning of the novel, one knows who did it . . . the eponymous Mrs. Sartoris. So what’s the mystery? Ah, herein dear readers lies the crux, the excitement, the issue if you will. We do not know the victim’s identity or Mrs. Sartoris’s motive. Our intrepid narrator leads us down first one blind alley and then another. A must read.

Couch
If during your daydreams about unlikely novelistic encounters, you have ever longed for a novel combining Three Men and a Boat and Lord of the Rings, seasoned lightly with Erich von Däniken Chariots of the Gods conspiracy theory, then Couch is the book for you. In this humorous novel, published by Small Beer Press, three men carrying a couch (with a mind of its own) embark on a mysterious quest (to save the world) that leads them from Portland, Oregon, to Mexico. Along the way, they meet with the usual assortment of unexpected friends, villainous villains, less villainous villains. And the couch? It just wants to go home.

Angels of Destruction
While not as good as The Stolen Child, Angels of Destruction still holds one’s attention. A mysterious child shows up one dark and stormy night on an aging and isolated woman’s doorstep. The woman passes the child off as her long-absent daughter’s daughter. But who is this child? What does she want? And who are the mysterious men following her? Mystery and miracle? Or mystery and something more sinister? “Mum” is my word. If you want to find out the answers to these questions, read the book for yourself.

Mrs. Hargreaves (pronounced “Hargraves” if you please)
On a summer’s outing, two young men (Norman and Henry) meet up with one of those pedantically talkative and tediously tiresome sextons, who insists upon telling the entire story of the dearly departed Rev. Archer. To shut him up, the two invent a character named Mrs. Hargreaves, purportedly a close friend of the reverend and his daughters. Just for fun Norman writes a letter to her supposed hotel inviting her to visit him. No harm done think Henry and he. Lots of amusing speculation on the responses of the hotel management. Lots of amusement that is until Mrs. Hargreaves shows up on Norman’s doorstep and refuses to leaves town. Mysterious, mildly menacing, hilarious, and sad. Read it, laugh and weep.

The Village of Stepanchikovo (and you thought I would never return to Russia)
Often referred to as Dostoevsky’s “comic” novel, The Village of Stepanchikovo humorously anticipates the major themes that dominate Dostoevsky’s later work: insult, injury, crime, punishment, and idiots. The plot? One cantankerously vile mother - along with a rag tag assortment of dogs, attendants, and ladies in waiting - moves in with her naive, good-natured son. Note: My reading group failed to see the hilarity of the book. I attribute their attitude to indigestion.

Oblomov
Another hilarious book from Russia (with love) in which very little happens.

Ciao,
urania

P.S. I can't manage to get out of The House of the Dead. Dodo has locked me in. I may be stuck in Siberia for an extended period.

For those readers desirous of curing their wandering wombs, I post the following advertisement.

Do they have a website?? I shall be placing my order immediately.

Almost sent a search party out for you...

Glad to see you enjoyed Mrs Sartoris!

Where is home to a couch?

>5 tiffin: Ah tiffin, therein lies the plot, the mystery, and the essence of the couch. If you wish to know the answer, you must read the book.

Wow! I can tell the waters at bath did you some good. Perhaps I should consider getting one of those electric manipulator contraptions myself.

Davushka,

Oh yes! Yes!!! YES!!!!!!

#6: well then, I shall.

Your list: Wow, wow, and wow!!

Urania, my dear, I'm glad that you're back and logging your reading. Your list is amazing. it will be nice to have someone in Russia with me.

I recommend to all readers with wandering wombs to look under the sofa. All manner of wonderful things can be found there.

A Note to Gentle Readers
Approach the underside of Murrushka's sofa with care. A least one terrified proctologist lives there. I'm not sure who or what else is hiding under there. Additionally, be careful when searching for wandering wombs. According to sources cited in The Technology of the Orgasm, some of these wombs are hysterical and dangerous. Hysterical wombs? Don't tangle with them. They're worse than slithy toves.

I live in terror of that which lurks under my own sofa, hiding behind the large, rolling masses of cat hair. I find it helps to make a running jump onto said sofa. I haven't seen any wandering wombs, but have heard faint, screechy noises late at night...

26 May 2009
Reading Log

After a fiendishly long journey to Georgia (courtesy of Beloved’s shortcut), urania defied death returning via The Tail of the Dragon – a mystic route of 1001 hairpin curves on which many a brave rider has perished. For the last two days, she has neither gardened nor dallied with Baron von Kindle . . . okay so she has been dallying with the Baron, but not exclusively. After all, she has Beloved although she wasn’t most pleased with him when she finally arrived at her destination in Georgia. Fortunately several hundred miles separated them, so he escaped the full impact of her wrath. But apart from some dallying here and dabbling there, and playing with some dangling modifiers, urania has mainly languished languidly on her Soviet-issue fainting couch, during which time she has finished The Moon Opera and Muriel Barbery’s yet to be published Gourmet Rhapsody. Those of you who have read The Elegance of the Hedgehog are no doubt gnashing your teeth in a gloomy sort of way because urania has an ARC courtesy of ye local booke shoppe, while you must wait for publication. Those of you who have not read The Elegance of the Hedgehog, should hie yourself to the nearest convent immediately and start reading this marvelous book. Navel contemplation has also occupied no inconsiderable amount of urania’s time, which activity has led her to reassess her somewhat cavalier description of The Squirrel Cage. She has just finished reading Dylan Thomas’s poem “Love in the Asylum.” As she found the last verse particularly lovely, I will cite it below, after which will follow discussions of The Moon Opera, Gourmet Rhapsody, and possibly urania’s reassessment of The Squirrel Cage. The last item on the agenda is doubtful due to urania’s languid languidness. But to begin.

Last Verse of “Love in the Asylum”
And taken by light in her arms at long and dear last
I may without fail
Suffer the first vision that set fire to the star

The Moon Opera
Perhaps the story went this way. Once upon a time, back when myths were true and the gods walked and stalked on the face of the earth, a woman named Chang’e or perhaps it was Heng’e (the sources differ on this matter) felt a great longing for immortality. Or perhaps she had once been immortal and wished to return to that state (again the sources differ on this matter). In the grip of this longing she turned to her husband the great archer and hero Yi, who may have been tyrant instead of a hero or Chang’e’s husband (once more the sources differ on this matter) and begged him to bring her the elixir of immortality, or perhaps it was a pill, (and yes no agreement exists about this detail either). So the great archer hero/tyrant Yi went to Queen Mother of the West, a goddess (her deity being undisputed by any of the sources) and begged of her the elixir or pill of immortality, which she granted him. Perhaps she told him to divide the substance in half or perhaps not (oh how those source differ). At any rate, he returned home with the whatever it was of immortality safely stowed in a box, which he gave to Chang’e for safe-keeping, while he went out to do some more archering. But, he admonished her, “Do not open the box until I return home" (at least this is what some of the sources say). Well, we all know what happens next. We’ve heard that story even if the heroine’s name didn’t happen to be Chang’e but Pandora or Eve. Of course Chang’e opened the box and of course she devoured the entire contents. What happened next? You know those sources. They never agree. Some say Chang’e fled to the moon, having stolen the elixir, pill, herb, or whatever. Others say, she floated off to the moon wearing the sleeves of water. And next? Disagreement everywhere. Some say Chang’e took up residence in the Palace of Pervasive Cold, and awfully cold it was. So cold that every night Chang’e wept for the comfort of human warmth. Others say she became a toad. Still others passionately maintain she became a rabbit. Others say the Jade rabbit kept her company in her self-induced isolation.


Chang’e

However the story went, the characters knew who they were. They were the story, the story they.

But what happens if thousands of years later in Maoist China, an opera depicting this story oh so familiar to the Chinese – although not necessarily in the state-approved version – is written and performed. And what if the performer is a beautiful young woman “born to play the role of a Qingyi,” the quintessential woman. And what if a Qingyi must become Chang’e, must blur the lines between art and life. What then? And what if this Qingyi cum Chang’e commits an unforgivable crime early in her life, turning her life into the tragedy that is Chang’e’s? Such goes the plot of Bi Feiyu’s The Moon Opera. Twenty years later, Xiao Yanqui is given a second chance. Will she redeem herself. Can she ever be other than Chang’e? These are the questions that Bi asks.

A number of readers on LT have criticized The Moon Opera for failing to provide the back-story, the myth with which Bi plays. I find this complaint irrelevant. The book was written for a Chinese audience who know the myth as well as the Greeks knew the story of Oedipus even before seeing Sophocles’ play. I found the novel beautiful, which in turn moved me to research the origins of the myth. And then I reread the book, making all the lovely connections I had missed in my first reading. The book is short (117 pages), so the reread is doable, even enjoyable. One gets the unfiltered reading and then the filtered reading – an exhilarating experience for the aficionado of literature.

And now I find I have little time to discuss Gourmet Rhapsody, which is also a beautiful novel about total devotion to art, in this case the art of eating, and the pleasures and perils of devoting oneself to art at the expense of human interaction. A rhapsody on food and a rhapsodic translation. ****

My SO is very proud of having driven the Tail of the Dragon in his beloved 1962 era Morris Mini. I declined the invitation, having found the Newfound Gap adequate to my white knuckle needs. Still, after getting through the mountains, I pulled into a gas station to recover and found a live bluegrass band playing on the verge and many jovial Harley Davidson drivers milling about.

Love your review of Moon Opera and your amazing thread!

31 May 2009
Reading Log

So what’s been going on in the Dacha reading room lately? Urania has found herself a particularly uncomfortable Soviet-issue office chair (the sort of chair assigned as penance to nuns who stray) and has been growing increasingly furious with the cancer industry, more of which later. She has read lots of medical journal articles with exciting titles like “Risk of prostate cancer after detection of isolated high-grade prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia (HGPIN) on extended core needle biopsy: a UK hospital experience.” For the uninitiated, cancer research falls into two categories: detection/treatment methods and social/cultural responses. For example, the authors of “Masculinity and the Body: How African American and White Men Experience Cancer Screening Exams Involving the Rectum” unsurprisingly conclude that race does not affect men’s enjoyment of rectal exams. Really, urania feels like it’s old home day back at the ivory towers in which she, too, used to dwell and write long, incomprehensible titles with lots of colons in them.

She has also perused all the cancer propaganda material, with which doctors like to “gift” people who have been diagnosed with cancer, in this case prostate cancer. No, urania has not had a sex change. Having breast cancer and prostate cancer would be a little over the top even for her (although men do get breast cancer – a fact not commonly known). Alas Beloved has prostate cancer, and he and urania are currently playing the test and wait game so popular in cancer salons around the country. Urania is not fond of this game and has written extensively elsewhere about it under a nom de plume.

Given the current crisis, urania has told Baron von Kindle where he can put his . . . although they did share an “intellectually” exciting few hours reading Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women’s Literary Responses to the Great War. She has also been listening to Blackberry Winter composed by Connie Elisor, whose music urania plugged shamelessly on the music thread. Finding herself unamused by amusing literature, urania is currently reading really depressing stuff. She is also not “in” to Great Aunt Martha Mucus, who has angrily left her card and issued many curt demands to the butler, who has been programmed to say “Madame is “in” to no one to day” whenever GAMM drops by.

The Welsh terrorists? Well they are off terrorizing. Urania suspects one of them may have converted to Pooism in the last couple of weeks. She bases this suspicion on the large number of poo deposits she has been finding around the formerly pooless dacha. The only other hypothesis up which she can come is that a poodle in Welsh clothing is wandering around the premises.

But on to the reading log consisting of the following:

100 Questions & Answers about Prostate Cancer
Promoting Wellness for Prostate Cancer Patients
Understanding Prostate Cancer

The aforementioned books are presented to prostate cancer patients in a handy dandy box complete with a DVD on the daVinci Robotic Prostatectomy Method courtesy of TAP Pharmaceuticals Inc. Urania believes in looking gift horses in the mouth and asking questions about who profits from these “apparent” gifts. She is deeply suspicious of cancer gift horses.

Other reading includes two stories from The Collected Ghost Stories of E. F. Benson.

Current reading includes two uplifting works:
What Can I Do When Everything’s On Fire by Antonio Lobo Antunes
House of the Dead by our dear, dead Dodo (Will urania ever find her way out of this funhouse?)

Considering the events of the last two weeks - prostate intruders, Pooism or a suspect poodle wandering around the dacha, and her reading material - urania can only declare: “I’ve been down so long it looks like up to me.” Personally, I think she should make a beeline for a Baltic beach but no such luck. So on to the reading reviews.

For the purpose of brevity I shall group all of the cancer reading together to save my dear readers from a long diatribe about the cancer industry and my discontent with it.

100 Questions & Answers about Prostate Cancer
Promoting Wellness for Prostate Cancer Patients
Understanding Prostate Cancer

Although not given to paranoid conspiracy thinking, I sometimes suspect that “some” people “somewhere” would be quite happy if no cure for cancer were ever found because such a cure would interfere with the great forward march of the global capitalist cancer industry. Seriously though, I find little has changed since I had breast cancer five years ago including such linguistic high jinks as “cancer survivor,” which as far as I am concerned is about on par with the expression “peace-keeping forces.” Why does this term enrage me? It is deceptive; everyone diagnosed with cancer is a cancer survivor until he or she dies of cancer or something else. When people ask me if I am “cured,” I tell them I’ll know I’m cured when I die of “something else.”

My latest foray into cancer wonderland has also provided interesting food for thought, for example the differences and similarities in the way women and men with cancer are treated.

Differences: Women are infantilized. They receive cute little pink teddy bears courtesy of Cytoxan and Taxol manufacturers. They get invited to “free” cancer makeover sessions brought to them by the cosmetic industry. “Cancer,” women are told, “is a fashion opportunity.” BULLSHIT! (So ask me how I really feel.) Even worse are the local cancer wellness centers that let women make scrapbooks of their cancer journeys. Men, on the other hand, are not presented with pink toy racecars or invited to make-up parties, or scrap-booking workshops.
Similarities: The “free” cancer literature distributed courtesy of Big Pharma is amply illustrated with pictures of smiling men, women, and couples. I haven’t noticed any gay couples in these books, but maybe I don’t hang out in the really cool cancer circles. Based on the pictures in these books, one would think having cancer is the greatest opportunity in the world. I was particularly amused by the cover of Promoting Wellness for Prostate Cancer. It features pictures of four couples (all non-gay), who are engaged in various romantic activities such as embracing joyously on a wind-swept beach or giving each other romantic looks at the breakfast table. All of the couples look as if they are in states of pre-coital or post-coital bliss (and this printed by the company that distributes estrogen drugs for men). The subliminal message: “chemical castration improves your sex life.” When I was first diagnosed with breast cancer, I was “forced” to watch a film which, among other things, informed me that the only thing standing between me and a vigorous sex life during chemotherapy was the failure to drink eight full glasses of water a day. Clearly, the scriptwriters had never had chemotherapy. After an Adriamycin-Cytoxan cocktail, the only thing one wants to do is vomit (in a projectile fashion). As for the content of the books – all are remarkably similar. There’s probably a template out there for writing cancer feel-good literature. Most of the information in these books can be found on any reliable cancer website and is so generalized as to be worse than useless. At most, one learns what the inside of one’s breasts or prostate/urethra/rectum looks like, some basic cancer terminology, and information about treatment options. Medical journals and support groups supply far more specific and helpful information. The former does require perseverance and a medical dictionary for those unschooled in the medical discipline. The latter provides useful information about which doctors to avoid, upcoming treatment studies in one’s area, and real (as opposed to faux) support.

And so . . . on to more intellectually stimulating reading. Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women’s Literary Responses to the Great War is one of the most fascinating books I have read this year. This book deals with war literature written by women (and a few men) during (not after) WWI. The “during” as opposed to “after” distinction is important as literary depictions of the war changed radically after the war. Potter conveniently divides her book into four chapters. Chapter one provides a look at the cultural and literary context preceding WWI. As Potter shows, the propaganda war began well before WWI began: the images of Germany and Germans presented in WWI had their origins in the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1901).

Potter also relates the suffrage and eugenics movements to British preoccupations with decadence in British culture. In much propaganda literature of the period, suffragists, gay men, and aesthetes bear the brunt of blame for turning Britain into an effete nation incapable of turning back the next big German onslaught: Suffragists feminize men, undermining their masculinity thus producing a population of degenerates. Propaganda writers of the period believed only a vigorous eugenics program could forestall this onslaught. I found it interesting that another war with the German was pretty much a given from 1901 on. As a result of the perception of growing decadence and weakness among the British population, a propaganda campaign ensued, focused on issues of empire, the “masculine ideal” (the soldier), and the proper role for women.

This propaganda campaign extended all the way to children’s literature as well as to the marketing of food and fashion. Some of the examples of the latter are amusing in a grim sort of way: “FOR FASHIONABLE MOURNING remember that COURTAULD’S CRAPE Is Waterproof and therefore IS NOT DAMAGED BY A SHOWER.” Another example from “Soldiers’ Wives,” written by Rev. E. Hardy, Chaplain to the Forces, includes the following exchange between a wife and husband as he departs for the Boer War: “‘Keep your pecker up Dick!’ ‘Taint me,’ replied the guardsman, ‘as needs keep my pecker up, but Kruger.’” “Sweethearts and wives,” notes Hardy “have a great influence in keeping up or keeping down the ‘pecker’ of soldiers.” In this context “pecker” means “remaining cheerful,” but the double entendre is clear. Moreover, we see what the proper role of the woman is: to encourage men to be soldiers, thus rescuing them from effeminacy and degeneracy. Bad women, according to Hardy and many other writers, infantilize men and turn them into effete degenerates.

The most disturbing aspects of the anti-German, pro-British, pro-Empire, pro-war propaganda campaign are the misogyny, the homophobia, and the extent to which this campaign infiltrated children’s literature. Potter returns to these issues in the chapters that follow: “‘Is Your Boy Wearing Khaki’: Publishing and Propaganda,” “‘Putting Things in Their Right Places’: The War in Romance Novels,” and “‘I Alone Am Left to Tell the Tale’: Memoirs by Women on Active Service.” The most surprising revelation in Potters is the failure of most popular writers to criticize the horrific waste of human life during the war. Of the popular writing which Potter examines in detail, only Enid Bagnold’s memoir A Diary without Dates offers a truly critical assessment of the war. Note: Potter does not include memoir writers like Vera Brittain, who wrote memoirs after WWI.

Overall, I give this book four stars.

And finally, I will leave my dear readers with the following quotation from E.F. Benson’s short story “How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery”:

Church-Peveril is a house so beset and frequented by spectres, both visible and audible, that none of the family which it shelters under its acre and a half of green roofs takes psychical phenomena with any seriousness. For to the Peverils the appearance of a ghost is a matter of hardly greater significance than is the appearance of the post to those who live in more ordinary houses. It arrives, it knocks (or makes other noises), it is observed coming up the drive (or in other places). I myself when staying there, have seen the present Mrs. Peveril, who is rather short-sighted, peer into the dusk, while we were taking our coffee on the terrace after dinner, and say to her daughter: “My dear, was that not the Blue Lady who has just gone into the shrubbery. I hope she won’t frighten Flo. Whistle for Flo, dear.”

Your indictment of the cancer industry is brilliant and confirms my opinion of the medical industry in general. You should expand it to book length.

I am intrigued with E. F. Benson. I must know if the Blue Lady frightened Flo. The Ghost Stories of E. F. Benson is rather scarce in book form. I have placed it high on my wish list.

Also, as an infantile effete degenerate I refuse to keep my pecker down.

HAHAH me too! Let us wave our peckers aloft dear boy! Courage!

I agree with David. I think your writing on the cancer industry is excellent: you should definitely expand it. This kind of book really sells and could get a whole debate going. No doubt you have read Susan Sonntag on the cancer industry. Your remarks about the term 'cancer survivors' reminded me of what she has to say in Aids and its Metaphors. It's interesting that there are no gay couples in the pictures in the cancer literature (any of the couples you mentioned mixed race or black or Hispanic btw?). Gay people do not get cancer, for, as any fule now, the only illness gay people get is AIDS. And that's another huge forward capitalist march for pharma, let me tell you.

I hate big pharma as much as I hate big insurance and big tobacco. I used to do a lot of consultancy for the pharmas in Taiwan and gained a good insight into their shocking practices in this market.

The Potter book sounds excellent, and I love Mapp and Lucia!

Long live Mapp and Lucia . . . or should I say Lucia and Mapp . . . .

Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print sounds fascinating, it's going on my wishlist. I have a copy of Women's Writing on the First World War which I haven't yet looked at...it has now moved higher up the TBR mountain.

Best wishes to you and your man.

Well, Urania,

first of all I am thrilled to see your relatively good spirits considering the circumstances and once again admire your writing, and even humour where others may see none.

I am also pleased, though not surprised, that the Four Musketeers have identical views on "cancer research" and the whole pharma industry. I loathe everything about them. The angriest I have been in years is when I watched the President of the Canadian Cancer Society lecture on the great things they are doing, and the need for our support. It is a totally self-serving, self-propagating industry whose only motive is profit, and for whom patients are pawns. Cures must all be defeated since they would decrease profits. Anyone doing real research must be either quickly seduced by profits, or silenced. And the populace must be fed pablum about going on walks and runs for cancer, buying daffodils and such, because fundraising will make us all feel better, and as long as we feel better, we can continue doing useless research producing more chemicals, with more side effects and more profit.

Dante does not have enough circles in Hell for this industry. "A pox on all your houses!"

(So how do you Really Feel, P.?)

Keep Your Pecker Up is wonderful advice for all of us. I shall endeavour to do so. A little Viagra, anyone, speaking of Pharma and profits :-)

And what could all the non-peckered people do? Shall we keep up a metaphorical one?

yes, wave it aloft, girl, in all its metaphorical glory!!!!!! The rallying cry for the Club Read anti-pharma brigade: the Association of Proud Chemical Luddites (APCL) shall henceforth be:

Peckers aloft!!

Peckers aloft!!

Why won't the abuse button delete this immoral posts! Lawd help us all! ;-)

That was a brilliant commentary on big pharma and the doctors who perpetuate and benefit from its greedy tactics, urania.

My metaphorical pecker is aloft. My other pecker is limp. Robbie's pecker will be fine until the cancer cops get a hold of it. Damn those cancer cops.

Last night, urania collapsed on her soviet-issue fainting couch prostrate about Robbie’s prostate. Revivifying smelling salts and uplifting novels had to be applied before urania regained her senses. She spent the remainder of the night wracked with horror because things, she knew not what, were going bump in the dark and the cicadas were cicadaying ominously. Possibly the Stalking, Stockinged, Swedenborg (one Emmual by name) had invaded the dacha as he had done several weeks ago at the dreadful, aborted, thwarted LT séance held by the four devoted underground musketeers (well one musketeer was asleep but his intentions were good).

This morning, a loud insistent rap tap tapping on her dacha door aroused urania from her troubled slumbers. Upon opening the door, she discovered a curious old man clad in doublet, hose, and medieval doctor’s cloak standing on the porch. He seemed to be wearing spectacles, although this might have been an illusion. Under both arms, he carried possibly innumerable scrolls inscribed with kabalistic symbols. These he kept dropping, as they were possibly innumerable. “Professor E. Rectus Fraxious at your service,” he replied in answer to urania’s unspoken (but “pure”) look of inquiry, “descendent of the great (but always late) 12th century alchemist and quackist Dr. Fraxinus de Ornus Ornière Rectus. I come bearing gifts.” At these last words, urania slammed the door in his face and ran shrieking into the depths of the dacha. Right now, she has barricaded herself inside the dacha. The professor has taken up residence on the entry porch and has been muttering “prostatus peckerus” in a mantra-like fashion for the last two hours. As for the Welsh terrorists, they have spent the morning sitting on the best sofa looking about in an interested fashion. (I should say Welsh terrorist, as one Welsh’s recent conversion to Pooism involves eschewing terrorism, eating plastic and offering peacefully friendly welcomes to ominous strangers.) . Urania has sent out an SOS to Murrushka’s Vagrants and Vagabonds Brotherhood (Maryville Chapter).

To distract herself, urania has spent the morning, flitting from one uplifting text to another: What Can I Do When Everything’s On Fire, Dragon Lady:The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China, Enlightenment, and The House of the Dead. Alas, this distraction is proving to be too uplifting even for such a high-minded and high-spirited reader as urania. The first text is narrated by an insane man, so who knows what it signifies; in the second two books, the ends are foregone conclusions; as for the fourth book, it is sticky. Urania has been stuck there for weeks. All books are highly interesting and posts may possibly proceed from urania’s pen someday.

Hilarious post in the midst of adversity!

As I said elsewhere, but you may not have seen, perhaps Candide on Kindle might amuse you, Marienka.

Your hilarious posts keep cheering ME up. I wish I possessed the necessary wit to return the favor. You are magnificent in a crisis and your metaphorical pecker is of colossal proportions.

I've heard laughter dispells malevolent spirits. Perhaps the same applies to Swedenborgian Professors on your front porch.

Reading Log
6 June 2009

Dacha Dementia

Alas poor urania. Too much time spent in doctors’ offices of late has resulted in early onset stupidity (EOS). Until recently, health care professionals associated EOS with excessive grading of freshmen compositions. However, more recent investigations reveal that health care waiting rooms may be major contributors to EOS. Preliminary study attributes the coincidence (C=E^3) of EOS with the ubiquity of People magazines (generally believed to lower reading IQs by 50 points) and to the recent increased use of televisions in waiting rooms. For reasons not fully understood, over the past decade health care professionals have decided that multiple flat screen televisions, each set on a different channel, with sounds exceeding 3000 decibels contribute to patients’ calm (see Quackerus 2004). Before losing her 50 IQ points, urania hypothesized the televisions served to drown out screams of pain and terror coming from within the inner sanctum of MD madhouses. Note: Ask kizdoc about this one. However, since losing her 50 IQ points, urania is unable to hypothesize about anything (which her Great Aunt Martha Mucus believes is a “good” thing”). So . . . poor urania’s reading has sunk to an elementary level. In the last two days, she has read Wet Magic by that famous Fabian children’s authoress E. Nesbit. She has also read E. M. Delafield’s The Provincial Lady Goes Further.

Overall impressions:

Wet Magic
Fabian children (FCs) were in general better behaved than the current variety. They were also more easily amused. Palling around with mermaids and playing with magic left them quite content. For some reason, FCs invariably had unsympathetic aunts variously named Enid, or Agnes, or Hyacinth. Fortunately, sympathetic adults, who were apparently oblivious to all the magic going on under their very noses also abounded, a circumstance that undoubtedly contributed to FCs’ contentedness. And in closing, FCs did not care much about wearing the latest fashions; indeed, they seem quite oblivious to clothes except for their woolen underwear, which they gladly shed as soon as Aunt Enid’s, or Agnes’s, or Hyacinth’s back is turned. Final notes: urania believes this book was, in fact, adult fantasy (every adult fantasizes that somewhere, despite the invariable laws of logic and nature, good children exist). Not one of E. Nesbit’s better efforts. Three stars (but only because she’s E. Nesbit).

The Provincial Lady Goes Further
Much ejaculation and recrudescence in this book. While recrudescence sounds like the stuff one wipes up after ejaculation takes place, our dear readers are advised that no relationship exists between the two words (although due to EOS and loss of IQ points, urania thinks a relationship between the two would be quite convenient as the two words sound as if they were made for each other). But alas, ejaculation only occurs during conversations and recrudescence is merely the act of occurring again. “Recrudesce” can also mean “to become raw again,” but that definition leads urania back to hypothesizing, which given the current severity of her EOS is unadvisable. For those of you who have read Diary of a Provincial Lady, E. M. Delafield dishes out more of the same, with the addition of Pamela Pringle, resident nymphomaniac and melodrama diva. To be truthful, no actual nymphomania takes place. These were interwar novels after all. But one can read between the lines and “SEE ALL.” As for the Provincial Lady she has two children (usually dirty), a cat named Helen Wills, one bored husband content to let PL earn the money, masses of unpaid bills, cooks and housemaids who constantly resign, friends no one needs, and multiple overdrafts on her bank account. Regarding the latter. The olden days were so pleasant. No nasty $35.00 “courtesy charges,” only a stern lecture from one’s banker. As for PL, she has a keen wit and a sweetly satiric pen. She’s a P.G. Wodehouse who is in touch with his inner woman and consequently somewhat (but only somewhat) more grounded.

Even with EOS you are amazing. I am dazzled, as usual, by your wit.

I just found this article Gore Vidal wrote about E. Nesbit from '64. I am intrigued. He quotes a biographer of Nesbit who says she "wasn't particularly fond of children".

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/13132

Diary of a Provincial Lady sounds delightful. I should like to read more about this lady with a cat named Helen Wills.

Ah, to recrudesce.
Now that spring is in the air.

Your posts have me crying with laughter. What happened to Professor E. Rectus Fraxious? is he still camping on your veranda?

Did you know, Davushka, and Marenka, that the verse quoted above is actually from "De Symptomus Insanitas" a late work of Dr. Fraxinus de Ornus Ornière Rectus, and one of the earliest clinical descriptions of EOS that have come down to us?

The full poem goes thus: (forgive my clumsy translation from the Latin)

Alas, the fever burns within
my blood is in a spate
I feel as if the world doth spin
and I must needs ejaculate!

I am swollen, I tumesce
I feel God's glory in my hair!
Ah, my soul, to recrudesce
Now spring is in the air.

He was an early influence on John Donne, I believe.

Peckers ahoy, I mean aloft!

oh, and I forgot to add, I adored E. Nesbit when I was child. The Phoenix and Carpet in particular. I wanted my family to be like the Bastables....

I do, dearest friends, have an early manuscript of "De Symptomus Insanitas" a late work of Dr. Fraxinus de Ornus Ornière Rectus. Although it was later suppressed, in my manuscript the poem continues thus:

The air is swollen, spring is nigh
Recrudesce we must
The hairy arm upon my thigh
Peckers aloft with lust.

Fever abates:
Slow exhale
Damned Fate’s
Visage pale.

“Tis the Grim Reaper’s role, alas
To end the tale, sadly crass.

Eos is the dawn, bringing a new day.

Alas poor urania. Too much time spent in doctors’ offices of late has resulted in early onset stupidity (EOS). Until recently, health care professionals associated EOS with excessive grading of freshmen compositions. However, more recent investigations reveal that health care waiting rooms may be major contributors to EOS. Preliminary study attributes the coincidence (C=E^3) of EOS with the ubiquity of People magazines (generally believed to lower reading IQs by 50 points) and to the recent increased use of televisions in waiting rooms. For reasons not fully understood, over the past decade health care professionals have decided that multiple flat screen televisions, each set on a different channel, with sounds exceeding 3000 decibels contribute to patients’ calm (see Quackerus 2004). Before losing her 50 IQ points, urania hypothesized the televisions served to drown out screams of pain and terror coming from within the inner sanctum of MD madhouses. Note: Ask kizdoc about this one.

Ah, urania has discovered one of our secret tactics. Therefore, she must be eliminated, incarcerated, or at least hospitalized. I will be contacting the owner of The Halfway House to arrange for a bed for our poor, deluded friend. In the meantime, I will prescribe sufficient quantities of vitamin H (a/k/a Haldol) to keep her calm and comfortable.

kizdoc,

I have five houseguests arriving tomorrow (for a five-day visit). Each has different food allergies, food religions, food regimens etc. Please, send Haldol and Hospital immediately. I cannot cope!!!!!!

39 - I have one word for you my dear...Twinkies...lots and lots of Twinkies. And a big hug with a side of whisky for you. :)

Plan A: Your houseguests might consider doing the cooking so that you can get some much needed rest.

Plan B: I'll drive over there and park down the road a bit. When I flash my headlights, you and Robbie climb out a window and run for it. Then we'll drive to a safe house at an undisclosed location until the houseguests have departed.

Plan C: Make a pitcher of mint juleps. Repeat as necessary until everyone passes out on the veranda. Then lock the door and go to bed.

Or have each of your guests make reservations at a different restaurant and take YOU out to eat. Though I must say the mint julep plan is a good back-up.

Jane,

Unfortunately, Twinkies do nothing for me. I come from the state where people freeze and then deep-fry them. It's horrid. Whiskey? I'm afraid me sainted meds only allow for the occasional glass of wine, but it still makes me slightly sick the next day.

Davushka,

Plan B sounds like the best of all presented.

Jane,

Guests and hosts all have depleted pocketbooks thanks to the economy. Eating out is not an option.

Food Preferences of guests and hosts:
one five-year-old who only eats macaroni and cheese and hot dogs
three omnivores - one of whom suffers from diverticulitus (so no nuts or seeds)
two vegetarians of varying types
one eater of kosher food

HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I need drugs!!!!!!!!!!!!

P. S. Never (and I do mean never) host a class reunion.

never hosted, hell, never, ever gone to any school reunion. i'm a total homeless about such public events.

I think ummm .5 mg of klonopin sprinkled in the mac/cheese should do the trick for the kid; maybe 2 mgs for the adults. They'll get v. relaxed and sleepy and you won't need to waste any good wine or other decent alcohol. You can have .5 for yrself and that'll probably be just fine. Or pot brownies all around. But then they'd just start wanting to eat ice cream.

Good luck. I guess you really don't want to scare them off w/ Nancarrow?

Umm what about a HUGE amount of mac and cheese? then you can have various sauces and salsas on the side. Tenn. mac/cheese, Texas mac/cheese, Minnesotan mac cheese????(terrifying thought). One of my favorite young ladies, whom i've known since her infancy, grew up (w/ a gourmet cook dad) basically living on mac/cheese and white bread.

OMG Bob. Three of the HGs are from Minnesota.

I agree with Bob -- no class reunions ever -- serve macaroni and cheese (or pasta and olive oil) ala everything on the side -- that should do the trick for everybody -- if that gets boring there are always salads....

I'm a total drug dunce -- what's klonopin??

Klonopin aka Clonazepam is one of the benzodiazepines. As it happens i used it on and off for it's anti-convulsant properties as, esp. as i am falling asleep, i'm prone to massive "myoclonic jerks" - that is i'm liable to kick my legs, esp, w/ vigour and predjudice - which i'm usually totally unaware of, unlike Patty who finally couldn't take getting victimized by my sleep any more and sent me to our family doc about 5 yrs ago. It's a very minor and not serious form of epilepsy - except for the bruises sometimes left on one's bedpartner. I really felt silly going to the doctor for something that i was totally unaware of, but a v. small dose of Klonopin at bedtime evidently reduces both the frequency and (more importantly) the intensity of the kicks. (as reported by one's sig. other).

It's a very "abusable" drug, but when i've stopped taking it for any period of time, i've never noticed any rebound effect - though Patty has. But for Urania's purposes, assuming no one is going out driving after dinner, and guests are not served alcohol, a low dose (assuming the guests aren't currently taking other drugs in the same class - Valium is the most famous, i'd guess) should relax them and perhaps make them a little more compliant than they might otherwise be, if she says it's time for bed around 9 pm.

Of course she could just get a nice dose of Versed and she won't have any memory of her experience as a hostess, though it might be memorable for her guests. It's a very strong amnesiac - if one has had the pleasure of, say, a colonoscopy, or other sorts of outpatient surgery there's a good chance the MD had the anesthetist (sp) slip Versed in via the IV - and required that there be someone on hand to drive the victim..err patient home.

Definitely mac & cheese for all, salad on the side.

There is a bonus to serving your guests mac and cheese. None of them will be having any bowel movements during the rest of their stay, thus saving on bathroom maintenance and TP.

And you can torture them in this condition by reading Rabelais to them!

Here is a hilarious article for those frustrated and harassed cooks out there.
We are with you in spirit.

http://www.slate.com/id/2219243/pagenum/all

Mary,

of course we continue to be with you in spirit.

I must say I love the sound of that Ratio book and just may have to buy it. Along similar lines I came across two memoir/cookbooks that also appeal to me greatly.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105162978&sc=nl&cc=...

Hi Mary,

I'm still with you too. I hope you and Robbie are doing well and will be houseguest free soon.

Davushka,

The houseguests leave on Saturday morning . . . early Saturday morning. I have scheduled time Saturday afternoon for a complete and total collapse on the Soviet-issue fainting couch. Revivifying elixirs, large quantities of coffee gelato, a comely lad with shapely calves to administer the elixirs and feed me the coffee gelato while I read semi-torrid novels will be required. In the meantime, I am drowning my sorrows (and culinary fatigue) with Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave, a much loved and much-read favorite from me semi-sainted childhood.

>50 DavidX: That does depend, of course, on the cheese. I would recommend a very sharp Vermont cheddar.

>54 urania1: Your revival plan seems a bit over-the-top, Mary. Perhaps, you should skip the shapely calves until you are fully recovered? Oh, wait! I see you will be reading "semi-torrid" novels - the 'semi' part drops it down a notch. I think you are good to go.

Mamushka,

I think I might also require a comely lad with shapely calves to administer elixirs and feed me gelato while I read semi-torrid novels.

Enjoy your weekend and spare yourself no indulgence.

Avaland,

I actually had some really fantastic mac and cheese last night with five different gourmet cheeses, and so rich I almost couldn't finish it,...almost.

Also, my waiter was quite a comely young man. His calfs and other parts were very shapely indeed. Unfortunately there was no gelato involved.

Alas as one can see, urania is behind on her reading log. As usual her good intentions have led her in the wrong direction. Perhaps two posts can be combined in one, but urania does have a short attention span.

17-27 June 2009
Reading Log

Due to circumstances beyond her control, urania had to postpone her scheduled breakdown complete with coffee gelato, a handsome youth with shapely calves, and semi-torrid literature. “Why?” inquiring readers ask inquiringly. More company arrived (this pair unexpected). Fortunately for urania, who is now suffering from severe kitchen fatigue, their requirements involved no desperate search for a Soviet-issue vegetarian cookbook complete with separate chapters on DIVERTICULITIS and kosher cooking. And a good thing too, as the Soviets never issued such a cookbook. No -- the most recent pair of guests merely wanted cups of caffeinated coffee. For some undisclosed reason, they also recited large portions of Paradise Lost to urania. At first, she thought they might be Mormon missionaries until closer investigation revealed they were former students of hers out for a late night revel.

After spending a heady evening hearing and reciting PL, urania forced herself to set aside the semi-torrid literature for another occasion—perhaps the end of the summer. Two more sets of houseguests will be arriving within the next three weeks. Whether they will be fed remains an open question as urania’s body is covered with kitchen allergy hives. However, sources close to the famous dacha hostess suspect the guests are expecting to be fed. Disaster is possibly imminent.

In the event of disaster, urania has been reading strengthening serious literature, some nonfiction, and two pieces of utterly depressing fiction. Diluvian tears have been pouring from her eyes for days causing schisms between the diluvians and anti-diluvians in the neighborhood. Since the neighbors around the dacha take seriously their right to bear arms, possible loss of arms threatens to ensue as no constitutional language exists suggesting that people have the right to keep their arms, hands, fingers, etc. A rather curious omission when one thinks about it.

So on to the part of this post for which anxious readers have been anxiously awaiting. What exactly has urania been reading? The sainted reading list includes the following:
Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery by Bahaa’ Taher – reviewed below

Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories by Michael Gorkin and Rafiqa Othman – to be reviewed later. An excellent book

The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist Until I Forgot – What do you think about organ harvesting? If you liked Never Let Me Go, you will like this book too.

The Attic: Memoir of a Chinese Landlord’s Son – one former landlord, Maoist China, the former landlord’s family. Recognize the plot? You do the math.

The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart, This book is a rereading, which some nitpicking readers might argue counts as semi-torrid. However, if one discounts Uther and the off-page sex, the novel hardly counts; thus the nitpickers’ case is weak.

What I Forgot by – a Finnish novel with abundant doses of sadness and child abuse

Post June 17th books

That Mad Ache by Françoise Sagan – lots of aching in hearts and in genitals

A Girl’s Guide to Modern European Philosophy by Charlotte Greig – chicklit with philosophy thrown in. Susie makes up her mind with a little help from Nietzsche, Feyerabend, Heidegger, Husserl, and Kierkegaard. Oh and John Martyn for background music.

Dog Years by Mark Doty – I’ll put off comments as I hope to review later.

Madame Aubin by Paul Verlaine – a one-act play, possibly the worst play I have ever read in my life

How I Became a Nun by César Aires – hmmm . . . I’m still thinking about this one.

My Household of Pets by Théophile Gautier . . . a light and fun read for those who have had or are currently having love affairs with their non-human companions.

Ongoing Grazing with Possible Intent of Finishing (NB: when urania finishes a book she has a hard time setting on another, hence the grazing and generally unsettled state f her mind)

The Letters of Noel Coward – probably will be finished
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card – hmm – rather irritated with it at the moment, but 60 percent through it so the likelihood of completion is possible
Dona Perfecta by B. Perez Galdos -- a free online e-book (probably a bad translation), which if finished will be due to sheer doggedness on the reader’s part
Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson – hmmm – another year perhaps
A Dead Man in Deptford – a good book to finish while Robbie is in surgery? . . .

In reviewing the preceding titles, it occurs to me that certain themes predominate. Animals, Arab literature, abusive practices, and three books one would not immediately think of linking together. And then all the rest.

Of all the aforementioned books, the two most rewarding were Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery by Bahaa’ Taher and Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories by Michael Gorkin and Rafiqa Othman both available as free online reading on the University of California’s eScholarship website. I am sorry to report urania copied them, converted them to mobi files, so she could read them on her Kindle (but only because prolonged sessions with online reading leave her with eye tics and other tics (of which the less said the better).

But I digress. Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery is the book for which I’ve been waiting for the last five or six years – an Arab novel that focuses neither on human rights violations or the exoticism of veiled women, but rather on ordinary life in an Egyptian village consisting of Muslim villagers and one monastery populated by Coptic monks. At the center of the novel are two dreamy but wily philosophers - the Coptic monk Bishai and the narrator’s father; Harbi, a man unjustly punished; Aunt Safiyya a woman whom hell hath no fury like hers; and an assorted cast of bandits and Nasser army representatives. So why does Aunt Safiyya dislike the monastery? Why is she willing to stop at nothing to destroy the monastery? I will give you one hint – religion does not figure here. The other mystery – whence comes the mysterious accusation that Harbi wishes to murder the infant son of his uncle, the influential and wealthy bey counsel? At turns comedic and tragic, this books offers a vision of reconciliation of human differences. As the translator notes in the introduction, “a delicate ambiguity” pervades this book, in which “neither Taher’s characters nor the narrative context in which they exist can be pinned down to a system of values in which right and wrong, good and bad, or true and false are defined in absolutes. . . . Taher poses questions setting out certain problems . . . but although he has an unmistakable purpose in mind – he does not serve up tidy resolutions.”

One note – although I commented above that this book does not offer up the usual political fare typical of Arab novels being published today, it is political, although subtly so and only to those who understand the political context in which the novel takes place and in which Taher writes. Again Barbara Romaine does an excellent job of providing the context in her introduction as well as offering a concise biography Taher, a writer who did write more overtly political novels than this, suffered censorship in Egypt, and eventually was forced to leave.

I give this book five stars.

I fear I must depart without discussing the other novels, time being short, the coffee shop in which I am writing being on the verge of closing (as soon as I finish), and a temperamental home modem that has decided it no longer wishes to function as a modem

Perhaps Monday . . .

I have added The Crystal Cave(Mary Stewart sounds like great comfort reading to me) and Aunt Safiyya(this one sounds really, really interesting) to my read soon list.

The Burgess book sounds interesting too. I loved A Clockwork Orange as an eighteen year old lad in 1983. I've never read any of his other works and an historical murder mystery sounds like a fun read.

Secret paragraph: For Urania's eyes only.

Don't tell anyone, but William Gibson is a supersecret guilty pleasure of mine. Mona Lisa Overdrive is one of his better ones. I really like his characters, gadjets, and wacky plots. Gibson's endings can be weak sometimes(like Eco), but the ride is always fun. Best read while listening to minimalist techno with headphones on a train.

Last paragraph may self destruct at any moment.

Re: Dog Years. I have heard this was a very good book. But I can't handle dog tragedy. I'm still broken up from reading Old Yeller and Where The Red Fern Grows as a wee lad. I regularly watch old Lassie movies with my dog Jack and I cry every single time.

Davushka,

I, too, have a hard time handling dog tragedy. However, it's like a scab at which one can't stop picking. I read dog tragedies and weep.

P.S. William Gibson is a guilty pleasure of mine as well. I agree about the minimalist techno.

why on earth would one feel guilty about reading William Gibson? Le Carre? Graham Greene? or am i missing something in the original intonation??? (charles goren (?), iirc, requesting that the bidding of a bridge hand be repeated accurately). i'm feeling esp. clueless this evening i'm afraid.

*early on Greene regarded his spy novels as "entertainments" rather than serious fiction - but there's a big difference between the ministry of fear - great title though - and the human factor or the quiet american.

Just jokin Bob. I love William Gibson. I just like to play the foppish dillitante. I have an image to maintain around here. Didn't you notice the cravat?

I have read all of Gibson's stuff except his latest one, Spook Country, which I will get to soon.

Bob,

We were just playing.. I have taught Neuromancer in a couple of classes. Obviously, I wouldn't teach someone who I felt was not a good writer. As for Graham Greene, I really enjoy his work. I don't really go for LeCarre though.

i was just waking up to note that i was obviously stupider than a wombat. sigh.

Wombat??? Wombat??? Did someone say wombat???? Oh no, there's a wombat gone missing on LT!!!!! I think I'm having the vapors (urania falls gracefully on the Soviet-issue fainting couch).

I'm sorry Bob. I'm afraid another of my foolish attempts at wit and humour has failed miserably causing me to resemble the rear end of a mule...yet again. (sigh)

I wish I resembled a wombat instead. Wombats are adorable!

since software always asks for your "business" when you register - for many years my business was "Wombats uber alles." I still get mail from ESRI (ArcView, GIS) addressed to me @ my Wombat office.

I'll stick up for Le Carre here. His book A Perfect Spy is a really penetrating analysis of the self masquerading as a brilliant thriller. The George Smiley trilogy is also superb.

The wombat is here under the sofa with me. We are getting acquainted.

Davushka, (your cravat is a bit skew. Have you been at the Vodka?) If you have not yet read Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers, I highly recommend it. It's your kind of book, trust me.

Bob, how are your eyes? Are you reading again?

i am, albeit a bit carefully. Reading on a computer is easier than a book just because i'm far enough away that my eyes don't jump around nearly as much as my left eye does when i read a book held 5" from my face. But the eye IS getting better. It took me about 5 evenings to read Geoff Ryman's terrific novel of Cambodia facing war and its aftermath during the 12th and late 20th C (the king's last song. Three interleaved stories:1. life in Cambodia after the PolPot geneocide, centered around the people working in archeological dig who find a 2: MS etched in gold, relating events (wars, political jockeying, religious conflict (buddhism/hinduism) if the 12thC. And then there is a historical novel based sketchily on what is known of one Buddhist "small king" (sort of a SE asian feudal system), eventually decides he needs to establish himself as the "universal king" in Buddhist state whose people have long before been brought into the Hindu fold of near infinite categories.

Both past and present stories have intriguing charactacters whom Ryman handles well and somewhat convoluted, but not difficult to follow, plot lines. At the bottom, there's the question of what constitutes good/evil or "merit" in different settings and is expiation for sin possible? And the whole serves as an exemplar of the "past never being past - but instead permeating the present in unpredictable fashion. The book is MUCH better than this pedestrian description. 4.5 stars.

Wombats are basically A-OK, but not terribly bright. When i was ~6 i had a jones for peculiar, but cute pets and was heartbroken when my folks didn't get me an armadillo for C'mas, which i'd seen advertised in Natural History Magazine. My sister has done her best to remedy this grievous parental failure by providing me w/ Armadillos in varouis media (cut stone, stuffed cloth) over the decades. I think my mom was rather less thrilled my my subsequent long term projects involving reptilian (mostly snakes) pets than she might have been w/ an armadillo.

66. LOL! You are awfully clever, for a wombat, armadillo, or human.

67. I have added The Perfect Spy and Earthly Powers to my shopping list. And yes, I have been hitting the absinthe a bit too much lately. I guess it shows.

68. So glad to hear you are recovering and are reading again. :)

Ryman is unknown to me. The Kings Last Song sounds most interesting. I will check it out.

News from the Dacha Forthcoming (just not right now)

In the meantime, a review of Alien Hearts by Guy de Maupassant (review also posted on LT):

What does it mean to say “I love you”? What does it mean to say “I love you” in the glittering salons of fin de siècle Paris? These two questions loom at the center of Guy de Maupassant’s Alien Hearts. As the title suggests, the truth of the human heart, as Hawthorne would say, is an isolated truth, never fully comprehensible either to the lover or the beloved. The central character André Mariolle, an independently wealthy dilettante, falls in love with Madame de Burne hostess of a celebrated Parisian salon in which she gathers her human bibelots (mostly men) to compliment the material bibelots she has collected. Both serve as mirrors to her own fascinating beauty and wit. And mirrors she needs to assure herself of her own reality. As her maid remarks ironically, “Madame will wear out every mirror in the house.”

A wounded woman, damaged by an abusive first marriage, Madame de Burne defends her heart and maintains its safety by demonstrating her absolute power to control the hearts of men. In return she offers friendship, brilliance, beauty, and flattery, but never her true self or her body. In a deft turn of gender roles, she hunts; the men fall prey – at least until she meets Mariolle, who proves to be prey of a rather different sort.

Cautious almost to the point of hostility, Mariolle initially resists her overtures. She “intrigues” and “repels” him, for “in principle he dislikes players who never pay up.” However, finding himself incapable of resisting her charms, he resolves to leave Paris . . . too late. Against her will, Mme. de Burne finds herself “falling in love” with him. However, their mutual “love” hits cold reality as each means something different by the term. In this regard, each speaks a language alien to the other. And each ultimately resorts to a betrayal of sorts. Herein lies the drama and the mystery of the novel. If the meaning of “love” is uncertain, what can “betrayal” possibly mean? Sadly, all too much, but the “too much” the reader must discover for him or herself.

This beautiful new translation by Richard Howard, the first in over one hundred years, skillfully evokes the atmosphere of the late nineteenth-century salons, in which the doyennes of high society imperiously wielded their power. A Proustian air of melancholy, ennui, and unsatisfied desire lingers long after the reader has completed the novel.

Bravo to Richard Hughes for a lovely translation. Bravo to New York Review Books for resurrecting a lovely book.

Bravo on your wonderful review and bravo to NYRB for bringing us yet another lost treasure! I am ordering a copy tommorrow. Thanks.

omg I'm seeing double...

Great review(s)!

Just sitting here, doing nothing in particular, wondering whence all the LTers have fled. Wondering what aluvalibri is doing with her ersatz count, who poses absolutely no threat to the charming Baron von Kindle.

Apparently rubbing kindles with the aristocracy has it's advantages. I attempted to order Alien Hearts yesterday and discovered it will not be released until October.

July 12, 2009: Reading Log
Review of Wandering Star by J.M.G. Le Clézio

News from the Dacha must wait. I need to comment upon J.M.G. Le Clézio’s Wandering Star while it is still fresh in my mind.

Le Clézio’s Wandering Star is a beautiful, troubling book. The novel follows the lives of two young women: Esther, a WWII holocaust survivor; and Nejma, a Palestinian refugee. Of the two stories, Esther’s life is the more developed and her character more fully realized than that of Nejma. Ultimately Nejma vanishes from the novel leaving no trace but a name scribbled on a piece of paper, a woman who has become more invisible than all those who vanished in Hitler’s death camps. They, at least, have been memorialized with historic sites and museums. The Palestinians? They are the disappeared ones, the invisible men and women.

The book begins with Esther (Estralita, the “wandering star”), a child hiding with her parents and other Jewish refugees in a remote village in France near the Italian border. Esther is a child of nature, of the fields, woods, rivers, and most especially the sun. She revels in, dances with nature in the dreadful summer of 1943, while death waits temporarily arrested by the presence of Italian soldiers in Saint-Martin-Vésubie. In this last summer before the Germans arrive, life goes on as usual punctuated by the awe of certain moments thrown into high relief because of the nearness of death: the celebration of the Madonna by the locals and a Shabbat service near the end of summer. The descriptions of these services are gorgeous, allowing the reader to share the ecstasy that momentarily holds off death. Of the Shabbat service, Le Clézio writes:

The smell of the soot from the candles mingled with the smell of sweat, the rhythmic chant, and it was like being drunk. . . . The voices rose, rang out, faded, then surged up elsewhere. At times a voice spoke alone, the clear voice of a woman chanting a long phrase. . . . Then a man’s voice responded elsewhere, bellowed out strange words, words like music. For the first time, Esther knew what prayer was. She didn’t know how it had come to her but she was absolutely certain: it was the muffled sound of voices, suddenly bursting forth with the incantation of language, the rhythmic rocking of bodies, the star-flamed candles, the warm darkness filled with smells. It was the vortex of words

With the Italian defeat, the German arrive and thus begin Esther’s wanderings, which will take her to Italy, to France, to Israel, to Canada, back to Israel, and finally and fittingly to Saint-Martin-Vésubie.

Le Clézio devotes a much smaller portion of the story (65 out of 315 pages in this edition) to Nejma’s story. Like Esther, Nejma is a displaced person violently forced from her home by the Jewish settlers. She meets Esther only briefly (a few minutes on the road to and from Jerusalem): Esther riding a convoy into Jerusalem and Nejma headed away from Jerusalem to Nour Chams, a refugee camp - in reality a slow death camp for Palestinian Arabs. As the convoy passes the refugees, Nejma briefly makes eye contact with Esther:

Suddenly a very young woman broke away from the crowd. She walked toward Esther. Her face was pale and haggard, her dress covered with dust . . . The girl walked up close enough to touch Esther. There was a strange gleam in her eyes, but she didn’t speak, she didn’t ask anything. For a long moment she stood still with her hand resting on Esther’s arm as if she were going to say something. Then she pulled a blank notebook with a black cardboard cover out of her pocket and on the first page in the top right-hand corner she wrote her name in capital letters like this: NEJMA. She handed the notebook and the pencil to Esther, so that she too would write down her name. She stood there for a moment longer, hugging the notebook to her breast, as if it were the most important thing in the world. Finally without saying a word, she went back toward the group of refugees who were already walking away. Esther took a step toward her, to call her, to hold her back, but it was too late.

Nejma’s silent attempt to leave her name somewhere on the face of the earth mirrors the question on the desperate faces of Jews being rounded up for the death camps: “Will anyone remember my name?”

Tragically, the settlers have not learned from their own suffering. Just as they were dehumanized by the war, so they dehumanize the people whom they displace. “Arabs,” says one woman callously, “No one is innocent, they’re the mother and wives of the men who are killing us." Esther asks, “But what about the children?” No one answers her. Later, one of the refugees in the camp asks “Does the sun not shine for us all?” No answer. Only slow steady death by starvation and neglect.

Thus Esther, “the child of the sun” briefly touches the life of Nejma on whom the sun no longer shines.

Le Clézio offers no answers, no judgments. Those, the readers must make for themselves.

Five stars

P.S. I am posting this as a review on LT.

Another brilliant review. This book sounds very timely and thought provoking. I am adding it to my wishlist.

Wow. Great review...I'll put this on my list of books to read next month.

BTW, I finally received a copy of Desert today, which is supposed to be one of Le Clézio's best novels.

Terrific review, thanks.

I have had LeClezio's The Prospector close to the top of my TBR list for a long time. (Thanks, lriley.) Perhaps I will actually get to it this year :-)

A report about the happenings at the dacha is eagerly awaited.

Sounds like a beautiful, heartbreaking book, Mary. I've often wondered how the Israelis could so objectify the Palestinians after the experience of the Holocaust. The mysteries of survival seem so amoral....

I just got notified by Amazon that my order for the English translation of Desert by Le Clezio would soon be arriving. I'll be looking forward to it after reading that review of Wandering Star.

Fabulous review. Prayer as the vortex of language: brilliant. Thank you for drawing this book to my attention. I have yet to read any le Clezio

NEWS FLASH

All activity at the dacha has been temporarily suspended while urania plunges precipitously through a perilous plethora of pages (983) known as The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell. Guests are going unfed, their linens unchanged. The Welsh terrorists are making deep dark noises that do not augur well. Wilkie, Welsh chief of the dreaded Dacha Office of Guerilla Gulag Yaptivities (DOGGY for short), has his feared and famous mind-meld stare trained on urania even as we report. Persons close to urania suspect that no one in The Kindly Ones will escape unscathed, not even the reader. We will post updates as events unfold.

The Kindly Ones

I put in a touchstone for you. Which didn't bloody work. did you post your review of Le Clezio on LT?

I did post my review of Le Clézio on LT. I couldn't get the touchstone for The Kindly Ones to work either.

See what I mean. It registers on touchstone but it doesn't show up in the post.

Infuriating. Let's thump our computers in unison, and then go thump Tim's Balding and his henchmen. See if that does the trick.
Ready steady...

Here's an interesting article about The Kindly Ones from the Nation.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090323/moyn

In Which Urania Falls Off A Garden Wall, Interrupts Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting, And Guests Go Without Their Dinners

As some of you may have heard through the LT grapevine, all has not been quiet at the dacha. Last week, while gathering vegetables for dinner and practicing random back flips on the garden wall, I unexpectedly took a tumble off the garden wall, fell no inconsiderable distance and cracked the back of my head on another garden wall. I will not go into much detail. Suffice to say, my dexterous maneuver resulted in a satisfyingly dramatic mess of blood and guts – a good thing since the sight robbed the dinner guests of their appetites, which the cook clearly was not going to satisfy, because she was annoyingly unconscious.

As I was unconscious for five hours, I must rely on the kindness of Beloved and Baron von Kindle for the details. Strapping young paramedics with bulging muscles and shapely calves arrived in an ambulance. After a quick assessment of the situation, they decided paramedics in helicopters and flight suits were better suited to handle the situation. Unfortunately (or not), the blessed dacha on the hill was not designed for assault by air, so I was taken to the little brown church in the dell (also known as Six-Mile Baptist Church – six miles from what I’ve always wondered), which has space enough to land several helicopters if Wednesday prayer meeting is not in session, which it was. Not to fear, before the ambulance arrived, local county sheriffs had stormed the sanctuary and demanded that cars be removed in an orderly fashion, which surprisingly, the congregation being Baptist, they did. Immediately upon removing their cars, they returned and began to pray for yours truly as my survival was in some doubt at this point. Whether or not the helicopter paramedics were comely, I do not know. I do know they had a doctor with them and that they ripped off (literally) my clothes somewhere over the skies between Maryville and Knoxville.

I am now home with the blessed command to rest for the next month. I plan to follow this advice scrupulously . . . except when I am not traveling endlessly to doctors. ER trauma doctors are busybodies and feel obliged to send reports to one’s other doctors. Now all my other doctors want to see me, scan my body, and doubtless make me drink vile-tasting contrast. I may refuse to cooperate about the contrast.

Despite their inconveniences, near-death experiences (NDEs) do have their advantages. One gets to enjoy all the advantages of death with none of the tiresome side effects (i.e., one gets to eat one’s funeral casseroles and have them too; all those lovely flowers are not wasted on a corpse; and one receives lots of attention). All in all, I recommend one non-disfiguring NDE per year for everyone. They are so relaxing. The only drawback is that one must remove oneself from serious literature as brains refuse to take in the information. Hence, my reading of The Kindly Ones has come to an abrupt halt.

Not to fear, I have been lolling around decoratively on my soviet-issue convalescent couch reading romance novels, fiction that is no better than it should be, and science fiction.

Since the NDE, I have read Nightingale Wood (a romance) by Stella Gibbons of Cold Comfort Farm fame; Kate Morton’s The Forgotten Garden – one of those novels that is no better than it should be; and Beggars in Spain, a curious piece of science fiction by Nancy Kress, an author with whom I was hitherto unacquainted. Herewith follow the reviews, after which I may submit to the caresses of Count Hydrocodone, who is such a comfort to have around when those nasty TBI (traumatic brain injury) headaches turn up, usually about the same time as Great Aunt Martha Mucus, who has visited twice since the accident, written several volumes of improving letters, and altogether made a nuisance of herself. Fortunately, her visits have been short as she is still chasing one wandering womb through the Finer Spas of Europe. She has also been bombarding me with books about techniques used in the South Seas for improving one’s fecal transit time. If I were one to read between the lines, I would say Great Aunt Martha has constipation; however, none of the Vermont Mucuses would ever stoop to something so common. Now the Oklahoma Mucuses, that’s another story. In any case, Great Aunt Martha would disinherit me for using the “c” word in connection with the Mucuses Vermont or otherwise. But then she disinherits me on a daily basis, so I guess I can shout the message to the world "GREAT AUNT MARTHA HAS CONSTIPATION!!!"

At any rate, I have digressed too long. Herewith follow reviews of my convalescent reading (Hmmm . . . the phrasing sounds odd as if the reading were convalescing; however, as I am walking around in my own personal fog these days I can’t think of a solution at the moment).

Nightingale Wood by Stella Gibbons
Those readers expecting another Cold Comfort Farm should stop right here. The nightingales lack the sly wit and imagination of Flora Poste, and one will certainly find nothing nasty in the woodshed here. More’s the pity. However, for lovers of light romance, who shun the tawdry covers and cheap paper of Harlequins and Silhouettes, and who would not be caught in a woodshed with Sweet Savage Love, Nightingale Wood fits the bill. It is tasteful, amusing, and lightly funny. Daughters and daughter-in-law run around, struggling with their repressed bosoms at the grim family home of which the author writes:

It is difficult to make a dull garden, but old Mr. Wither had succeeded. . . . The result was a poorish lawn and a plaster rockery . . . a lot of boring shrubs. Mr. Wither also liked the garden to look tidy, and on a fine April morning he stood at the breakfast-room window thinking what a nuisance the daisies were. There were eleven of them out in the middle of the lawn. Saxon must be told to get them up.

In short, The Eagles under Mr. Wither’s watchful eyes is not the ideal place for two young daughters (ages 35 and 39) and one daughter-in-law and former shop girl (age 21) to contain their amorously heaving (yet repressed) bosoms.

But bosoms will heave no matter how dimly crotchety old fathers view such heaving. And . . . given the introduction of someone new, in this case Viola the shop girl cum daughter-in-law now widow, something is bound to happen. Chauffeurs and daughters, daughters and dogs, a daughter-in-law and a less-than principled Prince Charming, and Prince Charming’s brainy yet discontented cousin Hetty – where will it all end? Read the book and find out for yourself.

The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton
If one enjoys page turners, if one takes pride in announcing, “I have just finished reading a 560-page book” (8854 locations on Kindle), if one enjoys literary allusion delivered with a brick bat, then rush out and buy this book. Ignore those stop signs. Let the other drivers wait. If, however, one is a more reflective reader who prefers her literary allusion straight and tolerates length only if said length is justified, then pause a while. Wait for the dollar-sale at Habitat. Or just wait. Had I been in my right mind, I, too, would have waited and waited and waited. However, my brain had been shaken (although not stirred); consequently, I thought deep-fried Twinkies and unremarkable fiction seemed like good ideas. For the record, neither is.

In fact, I am being much too hard on Kate Morton’s book, probably because I think that with careful editing, this novel could have been quite good. Morton certainly understands how to construct an engrossing novel, one that keeps the reader turning the pages. However, had she judiciously cut twenty percent of the text, she would have had a much better novel. Additionally, Morton subtly promises more than she delivers – loose ends never tied up, loose ends that suggest a much more complex family romance than she actually pulls off. Finally, Morton’s introduction of Frances Hodgson Burnett at family celebration is simply awkward. If the reader has not read The Secret Garden, then the allusion to Burnett will be lost anyway. Further, to suggest that this garden inspires Burnett to write her book deprives both books of their magic. Finally Morton refers to Burnett as “the famous American authoress.” In fact, Burnett was born in the slums of Manchester. She immigrated to the United States in her early teens. Both countries claim her as their writer.

Finally, Morton tries unsuccessfully to interpolate mythopoeic elements into her book via a handful of children’s stories written by the elusive Eliza Makepeace, a character in the story. This technique has become quite popular over the past few years. The Book of Lost Things comes to mind as one such example. However, rather than weaving these tales seamlessly into the book, Morton sticks them forcefully in front of the reader and practically shouts “Symbolism!” Enough.

Am I sorry I read the book? No. These days, I don’t bother to finish bad books except under extenuating circumstances. Did I enjoy the book? Had my brain been capable of focusing on anything more challenging, I doubt I would have read the book. My recommendation? Nice, light fair for the beach, long air flights, and TBIs.

Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress
Nancy Kress’s novel Beggars in Spain is not what I would call great science fiction (i.e., writing that would qualify as literary no matter what the genre); however, I did find it interesting. The writer was completely unknown to me before the wicked Baron von Kindle obtained a bootleg copy for me. I probably would never have read the book otherwise. (Just for record, I now own a legal copy). Briefly, the book concerns a new species of biogenetically engineered humans who do not sleep. The Sleepless as this new species is called are, with one exception, intellectually superior to Sleepers (us). Initially hailed as miracles of modern science, the Sleepless quickly become the targets of bigotry and fear because the Sleepers feel that the Sleepless violate the concept that all people are created equal. Eventually, all but a handful of Sleepless retire to Sanctuary – a space orbital. They go on to create yet another species, the Supers. You can probably guess where this story is headed. What makes the novel interesting is the author’s attempt to reconcile Ayn Rand’s (ugh) thought with a more communitarian method of co-existence. Kress fails here, principally because she uses Rand’s notions of individualism to frame the conflict. More sophisticated theories exist, which might have made the problem a more nuanced one.

Well, my dear, the nde may have shaken and rattled the brains, but it obviously had no effect on the wit or sense of humor! Thank goodness... Enjoy your convalescence.

No doubt the Welsh Terrorists were as glad for your return to the dacha as we are for your return to LT. The combination of brain-rattling and special drugs seems to have sharpened your already keen humor and creativity. Wishing you a speedy recovery!

Welcome back. Your wit is dazzling as always.

I'm going to go do a backflip off the roof and see if it makes me smarter.

Enjoy your rest and get well soon.

P.S. You know full well that the Oklahoma Mucuses can't afford laxatives and don't even know how to spell fancy five dollar words like "constipation". The entire Oklahoma branch of the family have been sharing the same jug of mineral oil for over 30 years now. Every wednesday after church the family line up and old Aunt Ida Mucus gives them each a teaspoon of mineral oil and a slice of government cheese.

Goodness! I am glad you are home and enjoying your convalescence. As others have already noted, you are sharp and hilarious as ever! By the way, as a fellow devotee of the Kindle, I cracked up when I saw that you had listed the number of locations in the book, rather than pages.

I'm with fanny: Goodness! Glad you are now recovering though!

Have read other Kress novels: entertaining, sometimes thought-provoking, but not high end stuff.

Urania, I had wondered where you were. I'm glad you are back.

Wow. I am speechless...but, I'm glad that you seem to be recuperating as well as can be expected. I'm amazed by your ability to keep your wit and humor post-TBI; I don't think I'd be able to construct a complete sentence!

Can only repeat what they all said -- and glad you're recovering!

Urania,
I read your missive aloud to the annual gathering of the Vagrants and Vagabonds Society. We all admired your bravery and catlike poise, and revelled in your sharp and comely wit. The Order of the Vanquished Rat, which earlier you were awarded by the Society, has been ratified unanimously by all. A huge midnight orgy was held in your honour. All the members drank copious amounts of vodka, toasting your praises, and schools of fresh young herring were consumed. A rendering of Aida's Triumphal March was then given on the rooftops, to the noisy and appreciative delight of the local neighbourhood dogs.
The ensuing annual battle was one of the most spectacular in memory.

Privately, not in my position as General Secretary of the Society, but in my capacity as Murr, etudiant des belles lettres, I would like to say how disappointed I am that the Stella Gibbons book is not as good as Cold Comfort Farm. I adore that book and always hoped that there were more like it up her sleeve.

However, I console myself by reading your marvellous posts.

(Please could someone change my sand before the typhoon comes.)

one should probably just stick w/ all the good feelings/thoughts/laughs that are engendered by Cold comfort farm and leave Ms Gibbons other oeuvre alone. Wtf - producing one of the great comic classics is more than enough to justify the persistence of one's literary memory!

Jeez Mary - this has been an, ummm, eventful season for you and yours to say the very least. Do see if you might strive to possibly keep life and limb intact for another decade or so!

It would be greatly appreciated by many.
xo from all

ps Do you think the Baron might be less benign in his attentions than his outward appearance would suggest?

Thanks all for your kind wishes. You guys are the greatest.

Hugs,
Mary

I hope your recovery is continuing. I so enjoy your posts. I could do without the NDEs or TBIs though.

Rumors and Accusations Are Swirling at the Dacha.
Was urania’s “Accident” an Accident?
Has urania Eaten Forbidden Fruit?

But . . . all this will have to wait until later. I must review two notable books while they are still fresh in my memory.

Yesterday by Maria Dermoût

Although courtesy of NYRB, Maria Dermoût’s luminously beautiful novel The Ten Thousand Things is once again widely available for those who prefer reading off the beaten track, Yesterday remains obscure. Non-Dutch readers wishing to read Yesterday must first discover the novel’s existence and then find a copy. Like The Ten Thousand Things, Yesterday takes place in the Dutch East Indies. In fact, Yesterday, a fictional memoir, preceded The Ten Thousand Things. Dermoût wrote both books when she was in her sixties, so there may be hope for those of us who are still armchair writers. Unlike The Ten Thousand Things, which beautifully incorporates magical realism into the thread of the story, Yesterday is a more straightforwardly realistic tale – although the island gods are never far away.

The tale, related from a child’s point of view, deals primarily with her immediate family: the servants who take care of her, her parents, uncles, aunts, and the mysterious “old man” (her mother’s stepfather). Like many colonial narratives, the tension between love and loyalty to one’s daily caretakers – the servants – and to one’s biological parents is compromised. Early in the novel, the writer remarks, “Rick loved her parents, but not much really. They were always together; she didn’t belong with them.” A sense of belonging comes from the servants: from Urip who calls Rick “heart of mine” and from Mangun, the houseboy who walks her home at night, when the ghosts of the old ones swirl around.

The old ones, the ghosts and the gods are a natural (if sometimes frightening) part of Rick’s life – a world derided (perhaps feared) by the Dutch colonizers. These ghosts endlessly question one another:

‘Where are you going?’ and always the answers – from and to, the North or the South, the East, the West. Seldom more than that. Rick didn’t know why they frightened her. These strangers, in the dark, and the way they said the North, the South, the East, the West – as if they were creatures frozen at those four points. Rick held on hard to Mangun’s hand and she never said anything, but Mangun always answered quietly the ‘where from?’ and ‘where to?’: ‘from the big house and ‘to the big house.’

At the end of each evening’s trip, Mangun always says, “It’s better not to be afraid.”

Not only ghosts but also family secrets swirl about Rick. The love between Uncle Fred and his married cousin Aunt Nancy. The cruelty of the sugar plantation owners to the indigenous population. The growing restlessness of the exploited Javanese. The tensions between Rick’s parents. Pedophilia. Although the reader understands the secrets, Rick does not.

Narratives about colonialism are also narratives about heartbreak for everyone, colonizers and colonized alike. Love between children and servants rendered uneasy and ultimately compromised. The divided loyalties of servants to their masters for whom they have affection and for their people, who are beginning to rise in revolt, to burn plantations, to kill the colonizers. Whose tragedy is greater? The children of colonizers but born in the colony, who must inevitably leave their beloved countries, forever cast out of paradise? Or the exploited and disenfranchised colonized, whose paradises will finally be turned to fields of blood?

Tomorrow’s review The Bass Saxaphone by Josef Škvorecký

Delicious review, urania! I've just ordered a used copy from Amazon.

I loved The Ten Thousand Things -- must pick this one up!

Great review as usual! I look forward to your review of The Brass Saxophone.

THe Ten Thousand things and Yesterday sound excellent. Beautifully written review. I love colonial memoires.

So was Urania pushed or did she fall?

Now Murrushka,

We know what curiosity does to cats. Perhaps urania neither fell nor was pushed. Perhaps, something even more fell and mysterious happened.

>108 urania1:, Perhaps a mischievous kitten wound itself around your ankles? ;)

Dacha Doings
July 1, 2009

Note: Somehow (censorship probably) this posting was not posted at the proper time. The censors will be tracked down and properly and appropriately punished.

Those old post-solstice summer blues have struck at the dacha. According to reports from local comrade peasants, urania has been wandering disconsolately through the dacha gardens. Despite Baron von Kindle’s and Beloved’s exhortations to “Sigh not so,” urania sighs. When not sighing, urania has spent much time draped gracefully across her Soviet-issue fainting couch plucking the petals from roses and reading Religio Medici. “Suffice to say, her family is worried about urania’s prolonged melancholy,” Jarek Ňadra, bra designer for the glitterati and urania’s personal spokesperson, announced at a press conference on Monday. However, Mrs. Martha Mucus, relic of the late Henry “Commodore” Mucus and great aunt to the disconsolate one, staunchly denied Ňadra’s statement. “Worried humph. If you ask me, what that girl needs is a strong dose of castor oil and a stern lecture. Wandering disconsolately my foot,” said Mrs. Mucus who has been wandering extensively through Europe’s Finer Spas searching for a wandering uterus. The mysterious appearance of a displaced wombat (see posts 63-66 above)in the dacha library has done nothing to dispel the dacha gloom. On Tuesday, The Long Dark Tea Times reported that one bobmcconnaughey (aka bobmcnaughty was “a person of interest” to the local DC (Dacha Constabulary) in the AWOL wombat case. Wanderings, worries, and wombats – where will it all end? I, for one, do not know. In times of trouble, one can only wait, watch, and read.

So what should one read, when the torpor of hot, humid July days sets in, leaving a thin coat of gelatinous slime on all? At this time of year, I find myself taking refuge in Virgil’s Eclogues. Like old Meliobious cast out of Arcadia, I think back to better times when shepherds sighed and sang of other sighing shepherds and their shapely sighing sheep.

Other Books Read?

Other People’s Letters: In Search of Proust by Mina Curtiss

In Other People’s Letters: In Search of Proust Mina Curtiss drops names faster than an aging society beauty. While searching through the once stately homes of the once stately beau monde circles in search of Proust lost, Curtiss gathers letters and gossip by and about Proust and his circle of friends - mainly gossip about his circle of friends. If the reader seeks insight into Proust, s/he will find this book altogether unsatisfying. However, if the reader belongs to that select circle of people who eavesdrop on conversations in coffee shops and enjoy the occasional snide remark about this or that, then this book will will warm the cockles of the heart.

Curtiss is at her best, when she reveals her own private thoughts (usually the ungracious ones). For example, after attending a performance of Hamlet directed by Jean-Louis Barrault and translated by Andre Gide, Curtiss notes:

For the scene with his mother the whole huge stage was used as a bedroom with the widest bed and the most colossal headboard imaginable. The climax of the scene was not the killing of Polonius but Hamlet jumping up and down on the bed tearing an endless amount of bedding to pieces.

When not conducting research for her book, Curtiss spends an inordinate amount of time primly avoiding the seductive intentions of famous and/or fabulously wealthy men. Does she succumb? She appears to say “no,” but here and there intimations slip out suggesting otherwise. Of Prince Emmanuel Bibesco, she humorously (or is that coyly) remarks, “I must hand it to the Rumanians. Their idea of impotence in old age is the Anglo-Saxon notion of potency in the prime of life.” (NB: Find out Baron von Kindle’s nationality).

The most informative part of the book does not concern the letters by or about Proust, but rather the interconnectedness of the principle publishers, writers, and performing artists of the time. David Garnett, son of the famous translator Constance Garnett, when not making love to various members of the Bloomsbury circle (both male and female), wrote and published many of the books of now dead notable authors. (He also made an attempt on Curtiss’s virtue - unsuccessful the reader is told.) Curtiss’s brother, Lincoln Kirstein was instrumental in bringing George Balanchine to the United States and together with Balanchine founded the famous New York City Ballet. Between them Curtiss and her brother knew most of the famous writers and artists of their generation.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have a bit of wealth. Curtiss, Kirstein, and their brother Edward were part of the Filene’s Department Store dynasty.

Lady into Fox by David Garnett
This charming (or disturbing) tale by David Garnett, concerns a man whose young bride turns into a fox. How does a man deal with a fox for a wife? What happens when the wife becomes too foxy? Read and discover.

Princess Priscilla’s Fortnight by Elizabeth von Arnim

Once upon a time, there lived a princess who was practically perfect in every way if you discounted her mother, “by birth an English princess of an originality uncomfortable and unexpected in a royal lady that continued to the end of her life to crop up at disconcerting moments.” But apart from this small flaw, not really Priscilla’s in any case, Princess Priscilla was a credit to her duchy (and much nicer than her sisters).

Fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be, the most exalted Princess Priscilla had an old tutor, the ducal librarian Fritzing (known as Herr Geheimarchivrath Fritzing to his underlings). Now old Fritzi, as the Princess called him, was supposed to be teaching Priscilla English grammar, but what with one thing and another he ended up teaching her Greek philosophy and the beauties of the simple life. And unsurprisingly, Trouble turned an eager ear because whenever young princesses, practically perfect though they may be, learn philosophy and the virtue of simplicity, Trouble is bound to follow.

And trouble does, indeed, follow. Princess Priscilla decides to give up princessing and run away, a grave but perhaps natural inclination for as the narrator tells us:

If it were not considered awful, placed by the world high up on its list of Utter Unforgivablenesses, there is, I suppose, not a woman who would not at some time or other have run. She might have come back, but she surely would have gone.

Naturally, Priscilla picks poor old Fritzi as her accomplice in royal and womanly crime. And although “very ignorant of the art of running away,” they make their way to England where Priscilla learns . . .

Although originally written for her children, this novel of 244 pages (4501 locations when reading with Baron von K.) is a charming and amusing fairy tale

The Double Hook by Sheila Watson
As this book has already received glowing and well-deserved reviews, I have nothing more to add.
*****

In Which urania Eats of Forbidden Fruit and Sinks into the Cesspool of YA Fiction

Yes, much as I hate to say it; urania's TBI has done something to her brain. Since the fateful TBI day, she has bathed in the YA cesspool eight times and sometimes with persons around whom one would prefer to wear crosses suspended from necklaces of garlic . . . but not at twilight praise the lord.

She was last seen bookstore hopping in Toronto with one shady-looking character named Andrushka. Reliable witnesses report she purchased two books by Josef Skvorecky The Swell Season and The Cowards. While on her book-shopping spree she also obtained Tahar Ben Jelloun's The Last Friend, Junichiro Tanizaki's Some Prefer Nettles, Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country . . . and she gave in to temptation and purchased the newly released hardback version of Catching Fire sequel to The Hunger Games, which she read during her TBI YA moments.

Baron von Kindle is beside himself with jealousy. Is a rift in the making? A Kindle Killer on the Horizon? Or are the two merely having a lovers' spat?

#110: Oh goodness! I just swore to myself that I wouldn't buy another book for at least a month. And here you go with something Proust-related and Lady Into Fox, which I've wanted ever since I saw a description of it in the Collins Library series blurbs, and then wanted even more when Forster mentioned it in Aspects of the Novel, and now I want it even more. You're killing me.

I will go to the library and have a look at both those books. Must... not... visit... Amazon...

Urania,
I can't help feeling that your reviews are a good deal more entertaining and better written than the books which occasion them.

May we soon expect a full length exposition of the doings of the Mucus clan?

merely under suspicion or formally charged?
eeeeek.