Nicholas Blake's The Corpse In The Snowman

A cheesy cover for a cheesy mystery.

The Corpse in the Snowman (1941) takes place at a country house during the winter of the phoney war. There are a few references to blackouts and gas rationing, but the war hasn't really impacted anything, including the plot of the mystery, which feels like the thirties or even the twenties.

Now Nicholas Blake is the pen name for Cecil Day-Lewis, who went on to become the Poet Laureate of the UK, so it is to be presumed he can write. He was a friend of Auden at Oxford, and maybe had some connection with sophisticated bohemian circles. But he knows nothing about drugs, and that's a problem.

Because his plot is structured around assumptions he must have garnered from repeated viewings of Reefer Madness and titillating articles in the yellow press. The first victim, Elizabeth, has had her life ruined after she was offered a marihuana (sic) cigarette in high school and was thereby turned into a sex maniac. And now it's about to happen to the next generation of children, her niece and nephew. Oh, noetry!

She (and the suspects) are gathered at her older brother's country estate. Did he murder her because of the scandal? Or his wife, because her inheritance would revert to her older brother? Did her younger brother do the deed because he was obsessed with her fall? Or is her demonic drug dealer to be found among the houseguests? Oh, dear. I have the feeling I gave something away.

It's not quite as obvious as that, but still Day-Lewis is not as clever as he thinks he's being, and regular mystery readers will foresee the last reversals without too much trouble.

And Nigel Strangeways, the genius detective, is just not that interesting here. I first became interested in the series because Strangeways was supposed to be based on W. H. Auden. This is the fourth I've read (out of fourteen). The connection between Auden and Strangeways grew less after the first novel and it's hard to see at all in this one, the seventh. Instead Strangeways is just another eccentric, but without any particularly interesting eccentricities and little skill at dialog.

Other mysteries in the series have been better, I thought. This one was a weak entry.

But it is definitely a December sort of read. And it's the last category I need for the My Reader's Block Vintage Mystery Gold challenge:

Gold. When. During a weather event. There's a convenient snowstorm which both isolates the country house so that we know no outsider could have committed the murder, and provides an oversized snowman as a convenient place to hide a dead body...

Bram Stoker's Dracula

"...the world seems full of good men--even if there are monsters in it."

Maybe I shouldn't have been, but what did surprise me was how good a read this is. Why, I don't know...it's not only a classic, but it's been a major hit for more than a century. That was kind of the only thing that did surprise me since, of course, I knew practically everything in the book.

How do I know the story? I couldn't even tell you. I'm not much of a horror person, and movies less than books, but somehow this book is such a force we all know what's in it.

The story is told in the form of interlocking narratives from the major participants, though not Dracula himself. Mostly diaries--everybody in this book is a diarist--but also lawyer's letters, newspaper accounts, and a ship's log. I suppose Stoker got the idea from Wilkie Collins, though I don't think he does it as well as Wilkie Collins: his diarists all sound alike, except for the bit where Van Helsing speaks his improbable Dutch accent into an early recording machine and calls it a diary. But it's still successful in delineating the different characters, and in creating suspense.

And, oh, the suspense! It's still there, even though we know SOMEBODY is going to end up with a stake through his heart. I especially liked the early part of the book where Jonathan Harker, young lawyer, is first traveling to Romania and Dracula's castle on what seems an exotic, but perfectly possible, business trip. The ominous warnings he receives from the locals, the strange portents, the schedule that puts him at his destination at midnight--it all works very well. Later, the fact that the various characters seemed occasionally to forget they were dealing with a vampire was a little harder to overlook. Of course it is improbable that there's a vampire. But for us, now, reading a book, or watching a movie, vampires aren't any longer as improbable as all that. In fact, it seems like they're everywhere...

The only other thing to note is this Penguin edition, pictured above. The photo is great. It's the Victorian/Edwardian actor Henry Irving as Mephistopheles, not actually as Dracula, but it looks right. And it's appropriate because Bram Stoker worked as the business manager for Irving's theater company. I got that from the introduction, by Maurice Hindle. But mostly I disliked the introduction which comes down, far too heavily I thought and a bit incoherently, on the psycho-sexual interpretation of Dracula. That's hardly wrong, or unthought-of. But it was a bit obvious and not well done. Also the notes explained more things than I needed and not some of the ones I wanted.

So, how about a feminist interpretation? No need to wait for Buffy. Our four strong and good men, and their leader Van Helsing, are the vampire-hunters, but every time they decide to hide the facts from the ever-competent Mina, something bad happens.

"...the very first thing we decided was that Mina should be in full confidence;"

If only they'd listened to their own advice...

Read for a whole bunch of challenges!

Classics Club

Back To The Classics

RIPXIII

Mount TBR

Though since I finished it before the Classics Club October Dare, I'm now dreaming of a (first) visit to Manderley...

Muriel Barbery's The Elegance Of The Hedgehog

The Elegance of the Hedgehog is Muriel Barbery's second novel. It came out in French in 2006, won several awards, and was a huge success; it was translated into English by Alison Anderson in 2008, where it also succeeded, and led to her first novel Gourmet Rhapsody coming out in English a year later.

It's told in two alternating voices, that of Renée, the widowed concierge of a hôtel particulier, (a high-end condo as far as I can tell) and of Paloma, the twelve-year-old daughter of one of the rich residents of the hôtel. Both are preternaturally thoughtful and well-read, and both are determined to hide that fact. Renée listens to Mahler and reads Marx, but knows that no slothful, irritable concierge can be seen doing any such thing. Paloma can see no way to use her haiku-writing and her disdain; she plans to commit suicide on her next birthday.

And both do hide their intelligence and their goals and their dissatisfactions, until a rich Japanese man, Kokuro Ozu, buys a vacant floor, and sees through the both of them.

It's the voices in this that make it work. It's a funny book--but alas all too accurate--about the fact that smart people, and especially smart women, find it socially difficult to demonstrate and use in public their intelligence. Especially true, as in the case of Renée, where the class background is 'inappropriate.' Each of the two women present the events of the story (which overlap) in little mini-essays that are intelligent and thoughtful and funny.

But I do feel the plot needed some work in this. There is one, but it starts late and then rushes to a not very satisfactory conclusion. Paloma has an insufficiently justified epiphany that makes things OK again for her; Renée's fate was equally rushed and unjustified by events.

Still I found it amusing and insightful enough that I got the new one by Barbery (The Life Of Elves) from the library, where it will be the subject of the next book club meeting at my local branch.

It also fits WomenInTranslation month, which, though I hadn't planned it, I'm proud to now be part of.

Mary McCarthy's The Group

There was a side of Sloan, she had decided, that she mistrusted, a side that could be summed up by saying he was a Republican.

I admit to laughing out loud when I read that, though I'm quite sure that what you (and I) are thinking of right now is not what Mary McCarthy was thinking of in the 1950s or early 1960s when she was writing it nor what the character was thinking of in the 1930s. Although, now that I think about it, maybe that was what McCarthy was thinking...that is, thinking about her namesake, Tail-gunner Joe...

Anywho, Mary McCarthy's The Group is the story of eight Vassar graduates from the class of 1933. Which was also the year that Mary McCarthy graduated from Vassar. The novel was shocking when it came out in 1963 with its frank discussion of female orgasm, birth control, and Lesbianism, and it got banned in a bunch of places. It was also an enormous bestseller that went on to be made into a popular movie.

It is often a funny book, but it's not a Funny Book; McCarthy was famously, savagely witty, but things can be dark for her characters, and not just because one's husband is Republican. It ends, in 1941, with a final reunion of the group in tragic circumstances, and with war looming.

With its shock value long gone, the most innovative thing now about the book is its narrative style. McCarthy often speaks in the voice of the group, even about a single member of the group. Here's an example of what I mean:

Yet Helena was intelligent, the group discovered, and in some ways very mature for her age. She had read a tremendous lot, particularly in modern literature, and listened to modern music, which went over most of the group's heads; she collected limited editions of verse and rare phonograph records of pre-polyphonic church music. The group considered her quite an asset, almost a little mascot, in her neat Shetland sweater and skirt, riding across campus on her bicycle or chasing butterflies with a net in the Shakespeare Garden.

But Helena is a member of the group! And other members get this same treatment. I find it quite a successful approach: it gives the reader an outside view of the character while at the same time conveying (amusingly) the basic prejudices of a bunch of recent Vassar graduates. It's a knife that cuts both ways.

I wrote a paragraph comparing Lessing's The Golden Notebook and The Group, but I couldn't quite convince myself, so I've deleted it. Still I think there's something there, about the way both novels were read as titillating tracts, but had more literary substance than that. Lessing's is, however, the greater novel; The Group more peters out than ends despite McCarthy's attempt to supply a bang-up finish.

Lots of fun information about the book here.

It's counting as my monthly motif summer read. What is a summer read for a retired person? My Saturdays are much like my Tuesdays, and the seasons, too. But we do have a cabin in the north where there is no Internet and I take long TBR books so I can read them without distraction. At about 400 pages, The Group isn't all that long, and I still have some monsters I hope to read at the cabin later this summer. But it will do, and did do, very nicely, for a summer read. When I could take my eyes away from the view:

Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard

So good.

And no, I don't mean that appalling cover on my Time/Life edition of 1966.

Giuseppe di Lampedusa's novel The Leopard came out in Italian in 1958, and in an English translation by Archibald Colquhoun in 1960. Di Lampedusa died in 1957 and had garnered nothing but rejections (Mondadori, Einaudi) at the time of his death. It went on to become the second great success of the then-new publishing house Feltrinelli. The first was Doctor Zhivago. (Publishing details from Carlo Feltrinelli's biography of his father.) It is Giuseppe di Lampedusa's only novel and it won the Strega Prize (Italy's premier book prize) for its year.

The Leopard is the story of Don Fabrizio, prince of Salina. A leopard is the sign of his house, and the house owes its loyalty to the Bourbon kings of the Two Sicilies. But the main events take place in 1860, and the Garibaldini have just arrived on the island; it's the opening event in the successful reunification of Italy and the fall of the Bourbon kingdom. Don Fabrizio is not especially impressed with the Bourbon kings, not the father who died recently, nor the son, but he knows them personally and they are his kings. But his nephew Tancredi puts a red cockade in his hat and runs off to join Garibaldi's invasion, and Don Fabrizio isn't put off by it, both because Tancredi is his favorite, even more than his own children, and because it's a sort of insurance. As Tancredi tells him (a famous quote): "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."

And things do both stay as they are and also change. Sicily remains hot, dusty, and dry--and impoverished. But Tancredi marries not his cousin, Don Fabrizio's daughter, but the beautiful and rich Angelica, daughter of the corrupt (but successfully so) mayor of the town where Don Fabrizio has one of his estates. Don Fabrizio says of the father: "his family is an old one, I am told, or soon will be." In fact Angelica's maternal grandmother was an illiterate peasant on Don Fabrizio's estates and may very well have been murdered, as an embarrassment, by his rising son-in-law.

But the book is also quite funny. Both the narrator and Don Fabrizio employ a dry irony; Tancredi, too, picks it up from his uncle. Of Concetta, the daughter Tancredi didn't marry, the narrator says:

...a nephew of hers, having caught sight in some book or other of a picture of the famous Czarina, used to call her in private "Catherine the Great": an unsuitable name made quite innocent by the complete purity of Concetta's life and her nephew's total ignorance of Russian history.

But also sad. Sicily does not change; the poor remain poor; Don Fabrizio, sophisticated and learned, but saddled with estates he can do nothing with but sell off piecemeal, is replaced by a grand-nephew totally ignorant of Russian history. When a representative of the 'Piedmontese,' the king of a now-unified Italy, Victor Emmanuel, comes and offers Don Fabrizio a seat in the newly constituted Senate, Don Fabrizio refuses, for nothing can be done with Sicily. "They never want to improve. They think themselves perfect. Their vanity is greater than their misery."

And so it goes. Highly recommended.

My reading the book right now was completely overdetermined: I had made it a Classics Club choice, a Back To The Classics choice, and it fits my Monthly Motif challenge, a book made into a film. It's a great Luchino Visconti film, with Burt Lancaster as Don Fabrizio and Claudia Cardinale as Angelica.

Matt Cohen's The Bookseller

A couple of blocks from my house there are a series of signs in a parkette about Matt Cohen, the Canadian novelist who died young-ish of cancer in 1999. One of the signs gives his biography; it tells us he won awards, that he helped found the Writers' Union of Canada, that he was chair of the literary committee of the Toronto Arts Council, and that he lived within a few blocks of these signs for 'most of his writing life.'

The other signs have quotes from three of his books; one of those books quoted is The Bookseller.

The Bookseller is the story of Paul Silvers, who narrates and becomes the titular bookseller. Paul grows up the younger of two sons in a lower-income broken home; his mother left his father, perhaps because of his father's haplessness, and Paul's older brother Henry does what he can to help Paul weather the difficult times. Mostly Henry teaches Paul to box, and to shoot pool, but though Paul never becomes more than ok at those two activities, he's still pretty attached to his older brother.

Henry gets married, buys a garage, and looks to be making good; Paul works in a used bookstore, has a girlfriend Judith he becomes obsessive about, and starts following her on a downward path toward heroin addiction. Eventually Paul leaves Toronto for Kingston, Ontario to clear himself of Judith's baleful influence. When he returns, Henry's situation has deteriorated and Judith has straightened herself up; there's a complicated, but well-plotted, denouement.

It was interesting seeing a novel set almost entirely in my current neighborhood. Paul mentions several times that he lives near the Wing On Funeral Home. When I first moved to Toronto twenty years ago, the Wing On Funeral Home was still operational; since then the building has been taken over by the University of Toronto's main campus for the 'Architecture Commons.' Whatever that is.

Paul Silvers' friend Leonard works the press at a small publisher. There used to be two small publishers in this neighborhood, The House of Anansi and Couch House Books; one or the other or both were no doubt models for the fictional press mentioned in the novel. Couch House Books is still there. It's just four or five blocks from where I live; I don't think I'd ever walked by until today because it faces on to an alley (a laneway in Canadian-speak) and I'd just never had reason to go down that alley. But Paul ends up there in the middle of the night at one point to get Leonard's help.

It's a classic Toronto coach house that no doubt once held a carriage and horses. You can't tell from my picture, but now it's full of books in the window, and you can see an old-fashioned press in the

background if you peer in.

It's interesting seeing a novel set where you live. I've read other Toronto fiction, Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride for example, but nothing has been quite as local as this was for me. I grew up in Chicago, and I think of that as more a town where novels occur, but still the Chicago novels I read were mostly set elsewhere in the city: James T. Farrell's masterpiece Studs Lonigan takes place on the south side; Nelson Algren's Frankie Machine (The Man With The Golden Arm) lives on the northwest side; the climactic murder of Richard Wright's Native Son takes place in Hyde Park. (I did live in Hyde Park for about six months at one point, but still that's not my part of Chicago.) I always thought of Hurstwood in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie as working at Berghoff's downtown, a restaurant my family would go to, but that may have been wishful thinking. It wasn't until I saw David Mamet's American Buffalo on stage that I thought, this is my town, this is the Chicago I know, the north side near the lake, but not the expensive high-rises right on the lake. (It's a great play. Before David Mamet became so crotchety.)

As for The Bookseller it was pretty good, I thought, but maybe not perfect. It started very well, and really, it ended well, too. Cohen's handling of time left me a little confused, but maybe I wasn't reading it as closely as I could have. The outer frame of the novel takes place in the early 90s, I guess, around when it was written. (It came out in 1993.) At that point Paul Silvers is married to Judith and they've settled down. But it flashes back to a couple of different times in his troubled 20s and also to his teenage years. It wasn't always clear to me where we were.

That may have been my fault. The bigger problem was Constable Detective Nicko Ross, a corrupt, but still self-righteous cop, who stands at the center of the plot. He just wasn't very convincing. He walked in out of some genre novel, or maybe more likely a movie, say L.A. Confidential or Training Day. And if he'd been played by Kevin Spacey or Denzel Washington, it could have seemed more convincing, but as it was, I don't think Cohen pulled it off. Worse, Ross was at the center of things; he had to be convincing for this to be an entire success. Oh, well. "The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it." So says Randall Jarrell.

For a more professional photographer's view of my neighborhood, see the movie Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. (Which is quite enjoyable in its own right. Wasn't everybody just a little in love with Michael Cera?) That movie is almost entirely filmed within a mile of where I live; one day I was walking home and the street was filled with artificial snow in front of the local Pizza Pizza (which I definitely don't recommend.) Though I didn't realize it at the time, they were filming Scott Pilgrim.

I'd read another Matt Cohen; in fact, a local Little Library box had his The Spanish Doctor with a blurb by Alberto Manguel on the cover, so I have one at hand. Maybe even soon.

Ben Lerner's Leaving The Atocha Station

Leaving The Atocha Station is the debut novel of Ben Lerner, author at that point of three volumes of poetry. It came out in 2011, though the events take place in 2003, 2004.

The Atocha station is the main train station in Madrid, Spain. "Leaving The Atocha Station" is a poem in John Ashbery's book The Tennis Court Oath.

The novel is told by Adam Gordon who's living in Spain on a fellowship; the goal of his fellowship is to study the Spanish Civil War and produce an epic poem about the subject. Instead he seems to smoke a lot of hash and take some sort of unspecified pills. He tells us his Spanish isn't very good and maybe it's not; in the beginning he seems uncomfortable talking to actual Spaniards, though he remains interested in the girls; gradually that changes. He gets involved in the poetry scene. Towards the end of the novel the Madrid train bombings and the subsequent protests occur. Gordon's friends are involved, though he's not otherwise directly affected.

The novel is funny; it has that sort of confessional humor where you reveal embarrassing things about yourself. Adam tells us of his lies and his lusts, his drug use, his doubts. Think There's Something About Mary.

This confessional humor is compounded by the clear connection between Adam Gordon and Ben Lerner: both are young poets, both won fellowships to study in Spain, both have a pair of psychologist parents living in Kansas. You squirm and say, did he really do that?! Or is this just a novel?

This seems to be a thing these days, this flirtation with the confessional. Is it memoir? Is it a novel? An obvious comparison is Sheila Heti's How Should A Person Be? On a more monumental scale, there's the Knausgaard series, which I haven't read any of. The modern root of the phenomenon at least in English is maybe Chris Kraus' I Love Dick. David Shields' Reality Hunger tries to provide an intellectual defense. It does add a feeling of trueness that the character is so close to the author; the confessional adds to that sense this must be real. I think I Love Dick is the best of the ones I've read. But I also have a real suspicion of this trend.

At its worst it becomes just solipsistic, and that seems to me just a way of abandoning what the novel is best at, what it's most unique strength is: the ability to present the interior world of multiple people in conjunction.

I felt the solipsism strongly in the first half of Lerner's novel. It was probably intended; the book is funny about the limitations of an imperfectly understood language. Then later the injection of important political events alleviates it and reminds us that the Adam Gordon character is a bit jejune, that he is (possibly) coming out of a shell by the end of the novel. But it's a risk and one I don't think the novel entirely overcomes.

N. K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season

N. K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season is the first of a fantasy trilogy that takes place in a seismically active mega-continent. The third volume The Stone Sky came out last fall, which is how I heard of it. In this world, there are people who are attuned to this seismic activity and are able to manipulate it, both with conscious intent, but also as a side effect of their emotional state. With training their control can improve and can be used by others. These people are called orogenes.

Then there are normal humans,  also called stills, who are mostly indistinguishable from orogenes. (There are also stoneeaters, though who exactly they are and what their intentions are remains a bit mysterious in the first volume.)

The orogenes are feared and dreaded by the rest of society; they're either enslaved for their power, or neutered if that power can't be controlled. A few manage to escape to the margins of society, but not many and not necessarily for long. The orogenes are derogatorily called roggas (sounds like...) and I assume the experiences of N. K. Jemisin, the black woman author, inform the role of orogenes in this world's society.

The novel is told in three interlocking time streams which tie together quite successfully in the end. I didn't anticipate the connection and I'm going to avoid saying too much to spoil the surprise. The fifth season is death, a world cataclysm, and in one of the threads, it's started and people are fleeing; in another two mature orogenes are doing what they can until the fifth season is full in swing; the third is the story of a young orogene as she discovers her powers and is taken away to have them trained and/or controlled.

I thought it was very good and I immediately put the second and third volumes on my library hold list, but I'm a little late to the game so I'm going to have to wait. I thought it was very powerful. In some ways it compares to a common trope in fantasy novels, a young person, probably from the provinces, discovers that she has magical talents. Those talents are powerful and can be an object of dread to family and society. Think Wizards of Earthsea or, one I just read fairly recently, Mercedes Lackey's Arrows trilogy. In that young Talia escapes a provincial fundamentalist society to use her power. Demaya is the corresponding character in The Fifth Season and  Jemisin is much more brutal and much more convincing about the complex psychology such a person would feel. She's also much stronger on the relationship between society and the individual.

Now all I need to do is wait for the next two.