The Stranger, by Albert Camus

Here is the Symphony No 5 in B flat major, Op 55 by Alexander Glazunov.

My husband sat down next to me and sighed. 

"First books.  Now post cards?"

I have joined an international post card club, called "Post Crossing".  I send post cards to people around the world and receive international and domestic cards in return.  Going overboard as usual, I have bought a lot of post cards to send out.  I enjoy selecting the cards and mailing them more than even receiving them from others.  I try to cram as much about myself on the small space as possible.  I want people to know that in Texas we do more than just chew hay seeds while we sit on a fence and watch horses.  Although, in fact, I do that too.  

Here are a few of the cards I have sent out.  The two landscape photographs are by a Texan photographer:

The Stranger by Albert Camus

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Camus writes in a simple, yet mesmerizing style as he gives the first person thoughts of a socio-path. The narrator, a French Algerian, Meursault, tells us in an emotionless voice that his maman has died. He goes to the funeral because he has to. He feels nothing. He smokes and drinks coffee by the coffin.

The next day, he meets up with a girl, Marie and begins an affair with her. A man in his apartment has a dog that he abuses. He observes the man's treatment of the dog but does not care, because he does not think it matters.

Another apartment dweller, Raymond asks him to write a letter to Raymond's girlfriend to entice her back to his apartment so he can abuse her. Meursault does so. Raymond abuses the girl so badly that the police come. Meursault watches all of this without emotion.

The girlfriend's brother and his friends, who are Arabs, begin following Raymond and Meursault as they go to the beach with Marie.

On the beach Raymond and Meursault confront the Arabs. Raymond gives Meursault his gun and, without provocation, Meursault shoots and kills one of the Arabs. He is arrested and goes to jail.

His lawyer tries to get him to show remorse, all Meursault feels is annoyance. All he cares about is his physical needs, hunger, sex, etc..Staying alive is the only thing that has meaning for him. He does not understand why the lawyer is upset because he does not care that his mother died or that he killed a man. He does not know why he killed the man, he just did. That's all there is to it.

Meursault is condemned to die. He refuses to see the Chaplain, but the Chaplain comes anyway and tries to speak to him of God and the afterlife. Meursault is bored.

As his life finally comes to its conclusion (he is sentenced to having his head cut off in a public square), he thinks about small things: the sun setting, the shadows gathering in his room. He simply cannot seem to care about anything that actually matters.

I have not studied any commentaries on this book but it seems that Camus experienced some kind of emotional fatigue or bankruptcy after the World Wars and arrived at the conclusion that nothing matters and life has no meaning.

This book, I think, encapsulates life without God. There is nothing left.



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The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth

 I hope you enjoy this link to Bach's Flute Sonata in E-Flat Major performed by Emmanuel Pahud accompanied by Trevor Pinnock on harpsichord.

Note:  I have revised this review in order to take out a few spoilers.

The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is the third book I have read by Roth and it was very interesting. We begin with the Battle of Solferino, which was part of the battle for Italian independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Franz Joseph I is saved from a lethal bullet by a Lt. Trotta who throws himself in front of the Emperor and takes the bullet for himself, but survives.

The Emperor gives Trotta a Baronetcy, which thrusts Trotta and his progeny into the uncomfortable realm of aristocracy. Baron Trotta does not wear it well and continues to act like the peasant he was born as, retiring to his estates and burying himself there.

His son becomes a District Captain and his son becomes a Officer in the Calvary. While the District Captain upholds his aristocratic bearing, his son sinks into ignominy through the usual way of women, alcohol and gambling.

The lives of these three men parallel the rise and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which is the back drop for the story.

The first Trotta barely enters into the story while the focus centers on the second Trotta and his son. The father being the pinnacle of proper conduct and honor and his son the opposite.

The youngest Trotta is a tragic figure because his thinking is so simple. He has no friends, he does not connect to his fellow officers and when he finally makes friends with a man, it is complicated and tragic because the man is Jewish.

This friend is interesting. He is also an outcast because he is Jewish. Joseph Roth, while being Jewish himself, did not write "Jewish ethnic" literature the way Isaac Bashevis Singer or Chaim Potok does.  One would not necessarily know Roth was Jewish from his writing.  In this he is like Stephen Zweig.  In fact I find their writing similar.

Yet, they do bring Jewish characters into their writing and show the racism and discrimination against them during the time period.

By the time of WWI, the Trotta fortune is gone, the Archduke has been assassinated and when it's all over the Empire no longer exists.

The interplay between father and son and the personal relationships with others is what I found the most intriguing about the story. There is a sequel called the Emperor's Tomb which follows the Trotta family and Austria into Nazi Germany. I am looking forward to reading this book as well.



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The Feast by Margaret Kennedy

I randomly came across some Renaissance music.  The instruments are recorder and lute.  The piece is by Spanish composer Diego Ortiz (1510-1579).

The Feast by Margaret Kennedy

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Two Anglican Priests get together once a year to visit, play chess and otherwise enjoy each other's company. This year it is not to be. Father Bott must write a funeral oration. Father Seddon does not understand why this particular funeral should intrude upon their annual visit. Father Bott sits down with his old friend and explains the peculiarity of this funeral.

A once wealthy family owns a mansion at the foot of some cliffs, near the sea. It is 1947 and the Second World War has put many families in dire straits. The Siddal family has since had to convert their home into a guest house for tourists.

The war has also left something else: mines drifting along sea currents. One finds its way into a cave under the cliffs near the Siddal mansion. Fissures have been detected and inspected by government officials. A letter has been sent out to Mr. Siddal but no response has been received.

It has not been received because none has been sent. The warning letter was never read. Mr. Siddal is an indolent man who can't be bothered to read his mail.

No warning is ever heeded and finally the cliff comes crashing down, burying the mansion and the people in it.

Of the guests and hosts, of which there are twenty-three, some are going to be buried and some are going to survive. If you have a copy of this book with the dust cover, be sure not to read the inside flap because it obnoxiously gives the ending away.

The suspense of wondering the fate of each person is increased as the story develops and we get to know each person. Some are people one really wants to get to know and be friends with, others are odious. I read later that some of them were supposed to represent each of the seven deadly sins. After reading that it was apparent which person embodies which sin and also the others who are plagued by them.

All in all, a fairly quick page turner. Kennedy has the ability to paint compelling characters and draw the reader inside their reality. Rather like a soap opera but with complex characters that demand our sympathy.

Except for seven who inspire our revulsion.



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In and Out of the Moon by Jeff Mcinnis

Mr. McInnis has come out with a new edition of his book and I agreed to re post my review of it and add links where you can purchase it at the end.

In and Out of the Moon is a tale filled with adventure and imagination.  Readers of fantasy worlds from ages seven to ninety-seven will enjoy reading it.

A young boy named Kabe with his sister Meg and brother Troy live with their father in a normal house, leading normal children lives.  

At least as much normal as is possible after their mother has passed away and their father has emotionally checked out.  Each cope in their own way.  The oldest, Troy, simply buries himself in video games, so in a sense, he has learned to deal with life the same way his father has.  No human interaction, just keeping his mind busy on the small screen he holds in his hands.

Meg is six and still has a lot of the guileless cheer and trust a little girl of that age has.

Kabe shares much of Meg's innocence and optimism.  He has a close relationship with his grandfather who has stepped in to be a parent to all three children.

This comes to an end when the grandfather becomes ill.  The story begins with the children visiting him in the hospital.

"Papaw, can you show me what light is?"

Kabe, you see, is blind.

These are our main characters.  They lead not so abnormal lives, though it is unusual to be blind from birth and though not everyone has a parent die when they are young, too many children grow up in single parent homes.

As you might guess, things are about to change.   While playing fetch with his dachshund, Daisy, Kabe picks up what he thinks is an ordinary stick and throws it to her.  It is, in fact, not a stick at all but a magical, musical type wand.  Not a wizard's wand but something more.

This magical wand leads the three children and Daisy into another world where they meet all sorts of fantastical creatures and people.  As it turns out, this world is in grave danger.  There are shadow creatures trying to overthrow the leaders and absorb the population.

There are also brave men, like the gardener, who turns out to be a King, and rises up to lead his army against the destroyers.

Troy finds he now has better things to do than play video games.  One of them is protecting his sister Meg as the travel through this strange world.  They end up crossing oceans and sailing library ships. That particular scene really resonated with me.  I would love to sail the ocean in a ship filled with books.

I won't retell the story.  Suffice it to say that there are all sorts of wonderful places and creatures that Kabe, Meg and Troy encounter while helping the King fight evil forces.

To me, it is the perfect kind of story.  A story where a child's fantasy comes true.  Didn't we all imagine ourselves meeting bears that could talk and unicorns that let us ride them and fighting along with centaurs? 

The story-line is of course the basic good vs evil. One reads a book like this for the vicarious experience.  McInnis spends a great deal of time describing the world the children have entered and succeeds in producing a highly satisfactory, charming setting.  If I could compare this story it would be to George MacDonald's fairy tales, C.S. Lewis' Narnia Chronicles, and The Never-ending Story all wrapped into one.

This is not surprising because the author is a MacDonald and Lewis scholar, receiving his PhD in English at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.  These authors' influence of McInnis' writing is unmistakable.

What I also appreciate about In and Out of the Moon is that it is refreshingly free of the dystopian angst that is so prevalent in fantasy novels today.  Our heroes suffer setbacks but never lose their hope or optimism.  There is a sense of overriding compassion  throughout.

Another thing I like is that there is no "heroine saving the world" which seems to be cropping up in a lot of YA today since The Hunger Games have been so popular. Each child rises to the occasion and shares an equal role in working with the citizens of this other world.  Even more importantly, Meg, Kabe and Troy become the family they needed to be before setting off on this extraordinary adventure.

The story ends somewhat mysteriously but there are supposed to be sequels which I hope will tell us more.

  It is a perfect book to read aloud to elementary age children but I encourage fantasy lovers of all ages to read In and Out of the Moon.

 Dr. McInnis is also the author of Shadows and Chivalry:C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald on Suffering, Evil and Goodness.  For my review you can go here.


To purchase the book in Kindle, print or audio, click on the links below:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWWwmZ9RxxQ

Print Version

Audio Version

Audio on Amazon

A Week Like Any Other Novellas and Stories by Natalya Baranskaya

Natalya Baranskaya is considered one of the Soviet Union's finest short story writers.  Most of her work was written in the 1960's but were eventually translated into English after the Soviet's fall.

A Week Like Any Other: Novellas and Stories is a collection of short stories. They are mostly about women and their lives in Soviet Russia.  It's important to remember she wrote these stories and they were popular in the Soviet Union during her lifetime.  Therefore don't expect any commentary on the harshness of living under a totalitarian regime.

Nevertheless, she does manage to convey the challenges people had trying to combine the ingredients every human wants for a meaningful life:  work, family, friendships.  Her writing is fluid and funny at times but mostly poignant.  It occurred to me that these stories couldn't really be classified as propaganda pieces because they don't spout tired cliches about how blissfully utopian life is under Communist rule.  I wonder if because, living inside that world, Branskaya thought she was presenting an idealistic life without realizing how hard that life was compared to Western countries.

In the first story, the best one I think, A Week Like Any Other, the narrator, a young woman, describes each day and hour of her week.  The pressures of getting up, getting the kids ready for school, breakfast for everyone, rush to work, rush to lunch, rush home to make a late dinner, get kids to bed, start over.

Inside that framework we see the woman's relationship with her husband --strained-- her children--neglected, although no more than any child who spends most of his childhood in daycare--her co-workers, the pressures to succeed and not miss any work regardless of her health or children sick.  She stays late, perpetually trying to get on top of her work, never quite succeeding.  

The story sounds tedious, but it is really quite interesting.  You are the invisible party to her life.  Sympathizing with her kids as they cry for her, hoping she and her husband stick it out, hoping she gets her work done and not get fired.

The other stories are shorter and perhaps not as interesting other than they show life in the Soviet Union.  One of the stories is much like the first one except it is told from a man's perspective.  A man who is trying to get ahead at work but is having to kow tow to ambitious bosses, watch what he says or how he reacts so there isn't a government investigation, and finally having to hide in exile until different leaders come into power that make it safe for him to return to work. 

  The government inspectors are not presented as people to be feared but rather as father figures who "take care" of everyone to make things right.  Nevertheless, there is an element of fear in knowing that there is an umbrella of authority watching every trite thing you do.  

I'm surprised the author got away with exposing such obvious intrusive tactics at the hands of the government.  Maybe this kind of intrusion was so normal under Soviet policy that it occurred to neither her or government censors there was anything wrong or abnormal about it.

What disturbed me was noticing how not very different life in America has become with all our "accountability" to government regulations.  We're not too far behind totalitarian regimes.

The remaining stories are about young women in love, not always requited, a young girl who wants to live with her father instead of her mother until she realizes he has mistresses, and a girl with a bad reputation in her village and how she copes with it, also how she causes it.

Each story provides a colorful view of Russian/ Soviet culture.  I don't know if I would read anything else by the author but I did enjoy this collection. 

The Dracula Book of Great Vampire Stories edited by Leslie Shepard

It's that time of the year again when I looooove to read spooky stories.  Even though most of these stories will be posted after Halloween, I read them during the month of October.  Anyway, I think cold wintry months are the perfect time to read scary stories. 

The Dracula Book of Great Vampire Stories does not have a large selection but they were well chosen.  These stories are mostly of the traditional: vampires symbolize evil that attempts to seduce humans to damnation.  Each story is developed along the lines of a predator, the vampire, stalking their prey in order to maintain their own earthly existence while dooming others to the same fate.

The vampire myth provokes a lot of questions.  In the Bible Satan is described as a "raging lion seeking whom he may devour." (1 Peter 5:8)  His own eternal destruction is pending and he rages against it by attempting to turn as many people away from God before that time comes.  The epitome of railing against hopelessness and striving to destroy.

The legends of vampirism, however they originated, came to become metaphors of this spiritual battle.  That's one of the reasons why I enjoy them.  The other is because a well written spooky story is just plain exciting.

Authors include Sheridan Le Fanu.  His Carmella is here.  Carmella is probably one of the best written vampire stories ever.  It is not long but very creepy.  It is told in first person narration by a young, lonely girl who develops a friendship with another girl.  Le Fanu uses the writing strategy called first person narrator, audience omniscience.  This is where the narrator is unreliable but the reader can see what's going on.  You want to dive in the book and save the person from what you can see is about to destroy them.  

This is true for the narrator in Carmella.  She informs the reader of facts that allow them to form conclusions even though she seems unable to form those same conclusions.  I don't want to give the story away.  Just know it is a tale of high suspense.

Good Lady Ducayne is different from the others because it takes place in the 19th century in New England.  Mary Elizabeth Braddon writes using colloquial dialect, giving the story an "Americana" feel. It's hard to believe it is a vampire story.  In fact the word "vampire" is never used.  A woman, Lady Ducayne, lives in a house alone, does absolutely nothing for herself, yet manages to get men to marry her and women of the village to do all her cooking and cleaning.  Every last person who helps her gets sick and dies.  It takes way too many incidents of this type to happen before finally no one in the village will help her. 

Other stories are F. Marion Crawford's For the Blood is the Life.  It takes place in Italy and involves a poor gypsy girl who is murdered but comes back as a vampire.  She waits for a young man who passes by on a certain road each day.  He has just lost all his money and friends and must now work hard all day and return to his lonely house each night.  The young man knows this woman is evil but the temptation is too strong.  I think in this case the temptation is that he has been utterly rejected by everyone else and a person will accept evil love if wholesome love is not available.

A couple of the stories are very Victorian, in that they are more melodramatic than scary, but E.F. Benson's The Room in the Tower is one of my favorites.  The first person narrator, a man, has a recurring dream throughout his life that finally comes to terrifying fruition.

The only one I didn't really care for was Guy de Maupassant's story, The Horla.  The Horla was more in line with the science fiction approach to the supernatural.  Which is to say, they write stories explaining how what we take to be supernatural has a natural explanation: like, say, aliens.  (That was sarcasm, by the way.) The Horla is a superpowerful being that is higher up on the food chain than humans.  Therefore it is not immoral for them to prey on us.  Well, according to Maupassant.  If one believes humans are made in the image of God and therefore precious to him, it's called murder.

The final story is a narration about a supposedly authenticated vampire occurrence.  This I found not too interesting either.  While I enjoy the metaphor of good vs evil, I'm not going to lose sleep over the possibility that vampires exist.  

This is the first of several "spooky" books I am going to review.  I hope I entice you to read some of them.

Kindle reading at Airports

Want an impetus to read all those books that have been accumulating on your Kindle?  Spend hours waiting for your flights at airports.  The last two weeks I have been traveling to Europe and back with my new husband, Josh.  Thanks to layovers, long flights, cancelled flights, more layovers and rescheduled flights, I had quite a bit of time on my hands.

That's where a Kindle really comes in handy.  I read seven books, five of which I am going to review in this post.

The first book I read was during our layover in Charlotte, North Carolina, and flying across the Atlantic to Ireland.  It was the perfect prelude to our vacation.  Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad describes Twain's own travels to Germany (our final destination) and all the idiosyncrasies of German culture from an American's perspective.  He describes university life at Heidelberg, with the customs and practices of students (they enjoy dueling and have their own prison for miscreants), Wagnerian Opera (he doesn't hide his distaste for what he considers a lot of incomprehensible screaming), the various Germans he meets while he floats along the Rhine, climbs the Alps, and tries to communicate in very bad German.  His funniest chapter is devoted to "That Awful German Language" in which he describes how miserably different German is to English and how long it would take an American to master the German language ("about thirty years").  Twain enjoys mocking other people but he balances it out by mocking himself just as much.

After a couple of days in Dublin, we rushed to the airport at 3
am only to discover our 5:45am flight had been canceled.  Over the next ten hours, in between dozing and conversing with Josh, I read a enjoyable book titled, The Best American Humorous Short Stories, by various authors of the nineteenth century.  Most of the authors I had never heard of but a few like O Henry, Bret Harte, and Oliver Wendall Holmes were familiar to me. It also includes Mark Twain's The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. Much of the interest I had in these stories was the time period in which they were set (post civil war).  Some would seem antiquated to a twentieth century reader but I found them funny and many of them endearing.  One such story was about two boys who try to court the same girl but haven't got the nerve and WI Lampton's How the Widow Won the Deacon.  In this story, a widow finally wins a man over by sacrificing her dignity by jumping out of his wagon as he races his horse against another man's in order to lighten the load.

By the time I finished that book we had finally arrived in Frankfort and were on the boat, floating down the Rhine River.  We spent most of our time in Germany biking down the Rhine  and visiting the medieval towns there.  After spending an afternoon in Worms at the Nibelungen Museum I spent the evening on our boat reading The Nibelungenlied by Anonymous.  I want to do full justice to reviewing this book, so I'll save my comments for the next book review post.

Two more books I read while we were in Frankfort and while spending a long, uncomfortable night back in the Dublin airport.  They are by R.C. Sproul.  The first was Five Things Every Christian needs to Grow.  The five things are:  Bible Study, Prayer, Worship, Service and Stewardship.  My own beliefs most closely align with Reformed Theology so I found a lot of useful insight in Sproul's discussion of these various topics and how to implement them in your life.

The other book by Sproul was The Prayer of the Lord.  Here Sproul takes the reader step by step through each statement in the Lord's prayer, what they mean, and how to use each in sentence personally when applying it to our own prayers.

One last book I read on the flight back across the Atlantic was by Ralph Adams Cram:  Black Spirits and White: A Book of Ghost Stories.  This collection, while written by Cram, are based on stories he heard during his world travels.  They include a demon possessed house in Paris, the wandering spirit of a nun in Italy and a horror tale told by a Swede that is worthy of Lovecraft.  Interestingly, Cram was a theologian a hundred years ago, so while his stories are interesting they are from a perspective that the supernatural and evil are real, unlike Lovecraft who attempts to apply naturalistic causes to the horrific beings he creates in his stories. 

One final book I read from Charlotte to Dallas was A Confession by Leo Tolstoy.  This book also deserves a longer review so I will wait to post it as well.

Next post I hope to have photos of our Honeymoon trip to an 1830 log cabin in central Texas and also our trip to Europe.

The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope

This is the first book I've ever read by Anthony Trollope and I thank Brian Joseph at Babbling Books for his interesting reviews of other Trollope novels which propelled me to download many of his works from Kindle (they're free!)

The Eustace Jewels is my kind of story in that it is not propelled by any profound plot but rather by the characters and the psychology behind what makes them tick.

The story starts out with a young girl, Lizzie, who is both neglected and spoiled by her dissipated father who dies greatly in debt,  in no little part to the jewels and clothes he bought for her.  He spent money but no time with Lizzie and when he dies, she is left alone while still a teenager.

An aunt takes her in, not out of pity or affection, but out of a sense of duty.  At least that is what the third party narrator of the story clearly states.  As I came to discover, the narrator misdirects.  He says one thing but shows another.  As I got to know the aunt through out the story, I came to the conclusion that the elderly woman was not so mean as hardened by the rough hand life had dealt her.

That is a common theme in The Eustace Diamonds:  how people survive when their prospects are bleak.  Trollope, through his third person narrator, shows how different people handle the cards they've been dealt.

First, Lizzie who, as I mentioned, has been orphaned and taken in by her crusty old aunt.  Lizzie's feelings toward her father are never described, but she hardly knew him.  She has nothing but contempt for the woman who keeps her from being a penniless orphan, calling her "the vulturess."

It should be mentioned that Lizzie is very beautiful and she does not reach twenty before marrying a rich baronet by the name of Florian Eustace.  He is young but sick with tuberculosis, a condition which is exacerbated by his wild and reckless lifestyle.  The reader finds him in the grave not a year after his marriage to Lizzie.

What Lizzie felt about Sir Florian isn't made known either, although the Sir Florian discovers on his sick bed that Lizzie lied about her feelings for him and just about everything else about herself.   Even though, Lizzie's attachment to the count appears largely to be mercenary, through out the book she exerts a lot of energy sentimentalizing her marriage and her late husband's adoration for her.  But what the reader is made to understand is that Lizzie is a great liar.  We also know that her motives are ulterior.  I believe today psychologists would label her with a narcissistic personality disorder.

When her husband dies, Lizzie is left property in Scotland, four thousand pounds a year (over $500,000 today), and a necklace made up of diamonds worth 10,000 pounds (you do the math).  

Or so Lizzie, now Lady Eustace, claims. The lawyer representing the Eustace family, is of the opinion that the diamonds cannot leave the estate, therefore while they are hers to wear during her lifetime, she may not sell them.

This is a problem for Lizzie because she did not learn the virtue of good financial stewardship from either her father or her husband.  The story's backbone is this contention between Lizzie and Mr. Camperdown, the Eustace attorney.  All sorts of things happen to the diamonds as Lizzie travels with them on her person, not trusting them to a bank or a jeweler.  Each episode makes Lizzie's character clearer to the reader.

Lizzie is a young widow and doesn't really need to marry for money, but she is a great romantic and also opportunistic.  A young man, Lord Fawn, comes to court her.  Lord Fawn, we are made to understand, is not the brightest of bulbs in the room, nor does he have much of a spine.  He is a man with a title but no money.  He must marry money to make a living.  Lady Eustace is rich and pretty to boot.  When he proposes, she accepts, not out of love, mind you.  She wants the title she would acquire by marrying a Lord.

Unfortunately for Lord Fawn, he soon finds he has engaged himself to a woman he didn't really know.  He afterwards is informed of Lady Eustace's shady character through one of his sisters.  When he learns of the necklace scandal he repents of wanting to marry her.  He tells her so.  Enraged, Lizzie refuses to release him of his promise.  

To make things more uncomfortable for Fawn, Lizzie's cousin, Frank Greystock, has taken her side and helps blacken Fawn's character about town (both are lawyers in Parliment.)

Frank Greystock is an intelligent young man who decides to marry for love rather than for money and, even though his family is against it, engages himself to a penniless governess, Lucy Morris who lives with Lord Fawn's mother and sisters.

But this is where things become complicated.  Fawn made a mindless blunder and he doesn't know how to honorably, or even legally get himself out of it. The engagement remains in limbo for most of the novel.

Frank Greystock, on the other hand, clear-sightedly obligates himself to Lucy, a young woman, as we shall see has all the strength of character and honesty and dumb love as any virtuous woman of the 19th century.

Frank, in his noble efforts to defend his cousin ends up spending a lot of time with her.  A naive thing to do on his part, because Lizzie doesn't just want a title, she wants an adventure.    That Frank really has no money, doesn't matter to her, neither does the fact that she is still engaged, at least tenuously, to Lord Fawn.  She brazenly flirts with and manipulates Frank and gets him in all sorts of incriminating situations, some of which, if they were found out, would give Fawn more than enough grounds to break off the engagement.

One would think that Frank would be revolted at his cousin's intentions.  Not only is he not, but he ends up spending most of his time with his cousin and doesn't see his Lucy for months.

This is what I find fascinating.  We're made to understand that Frank is a good man, with a strong and noble character.  He certainly views himself that way.  Fawn is a weak man, though of good moral character.  Frank despises Fawn for how he believes Fawn is treating his cousin.  Yet he doesn't seem to be aware of how he is treating Lucy.

What strikes me the most about Lizzie is that she has no friends.  She has companions, all of whom need her to financially support them.  She has a live in companion, Miss Macnulty, who puts up with all sorts of verbal abuse because she would be living on the streets if not with Lizzie.

There is also a Mrs. Carbuncle and her niece, Lucinda.  They have no money either, but because they are a part of society, they make the rounds of rich people's houses and attend all the best parties and look the part of rich Americans.  Mrs. Carbuncle is a strong, determined and heartless expert at extracting money from people, helping to increase her friends' debts while never diminishing her own.

Her primary objective in the novel is to marry her niece off to a rich man and rid herself the financial burden she causes, as well attaining a secure income for herself.  Mrs. Carbuncle treats Lizzie the way she treats everyone else and when they finally part ways, Lizzie is several hundred pounds the poorer.

There are many aspects to this novel and the commentary on Victorian life that I noticed.  First, there seemed to be a class in English society during the 19th century that was rich, but had no money.  Trollope never explains how they got rich or became poor, except that some of them got there by extravagant lifestyles they could not afford. There were people that were actually rich and stable such as Lizzie's brother-in-law, John, but their part in the novel is peripheral.  

Another observation is on the corrupted and ungodly reasons just about everyone had for marrying.  I know this is not a new theme and one that has been elaborated on from Jane Austin to Downton Abbey.  Still, it is amazing to me how the church was an established part of English culture as the Hindu religion is part of the Indian identity.  Nevertheless, it seems to be delegated largely as a cultural practice rather than a personal one.  

Everyone was a member of the church of England.  No doubt it would be shocking if one wasn't.  But Trollope shows what an empty ritual it is for most of his characters.  On the one hand, Lord Fawn is a cad if he breaks his promise to Lizzie, but no one questions taking vows before God and man with someone you couldn't care less about.  Marriage is reduced to a business transaction.  The fact the Frank's family and all of Lucy's friends find their engagement unrealistic and impractical because all they have is love to recommend it, highlights this point.

On the one hand, I ask myself is Trollope trying to convey an accurate or holistic picture of Victorian society or is he merely accentuating the worst of it?  If so, why?  Do bad characters create more interesting plots?  Or is this all he saw of the culture he lived in?  That would say more about the social circles he associated with than Victorian culture as a whole.

If, in fact, Christianity had become largely a cultural practice rather than a personal, meaningful belief and practice, I can understand how this paved the ground for Nietzsche, Freud, and other secular humanists.  When Nietzsche had the mad man in Thus Spoke Zarathustra say, "God is dead,"  he was not commenting so much on reality as he was saying how Christianity in Europe had deteriorated to the point of meaninglessness.  I think this is what the mad man means when he says, "We have killed Him."

The final thing I noticed is how the British leisure class not only disobeys Biblical truth in spirit but also in practice.  St. Paul said, "If one doesn't work, he doesn't eat." (2 Thessalonians 3:10) England and all of Europe had created a whole society where a group of people had all the money without earning any of it.  They inherited it and, as is usual in such cases when one doesn't work for what they get, they squandered it.

Hence there developed a class of "poor rich" people.  These people were in dire straits because their particular class didn't allow them to work (except maybe in Parliment) and furthermore, they were expected to maintain their place in society by spending money they didn't have to keep up appearances.  I would very much like to know how this class system developed and how it led up to the current socialized states that now exist in Europe.  A state which, ironically, has produced a leisure class at the other end of the class spectrum.  The end result is the same:  people living off the earnings of others. 

The end of the story sees Lizzie finally abandoned by all her friends and relatives.  Her reputation becomes so infamous that Lord Fawn unequivocally withdraws his attachment.  Frank comes to his senses and returns to Lucy, begging her forgiveness, and we already know about Mrs. Carbuncle.  There's more characters and sub plots but I don't want to give everything away.

Lizzie finally meets a man who has absolutely nothing to recommend him and she knows it.  She knows he is shady, greedy, mean, out for her money, and a liar.  He's a clergyman no less, but I guess that is consistent with the social commentary Trollope is making about the church. 

Lizzie sees this man clearly, but she doesn't think clearly.  She has lived in a fantasy world and plans to stay there.  In this man, she tells herself, she has finally found her corsair.  Here the story ends and we will have to imagine the rest.

The Visitor by Maeve Brennan

I recently read an article in the New Yorker about one of their writers from the fifties.   Maeve Brennan wrote a series of articles for their paper called The Long Winded Lady:  Notes from the New Yorker which has been compiled into a book.  The article compared Brennan to James Joyce in her ability to capture the essence and flavor of her native Ireland in her stories.  In fact, the writer of that article quotes several Irish authors who considered Brennan as taking up Joyce's mantle.  This piqued my curiosity and as a result, I've bought a few of her books.

The first one I have finished is called The Visitor.  The story is told in third person from the view point of the protagonist.  The story begins with a young lady on a train.  She is heading back home to Ireland.  The woman, Anastasia King,  has been living with her mother in Paris for the past six years.  Now that her mother has died she is returning home to Ireland to live with her grandmother.

When she arrives at her grandmother's house she comes to know that her grandmother doesn't want her there.  The story unfolds slowly like a blooming flower on a timed camera.  Bit by bit, the reader becomes aware of the facts.  Anastasia's mother deserted her father who died broken-hearted.  Anastasia, at the age of fourteen, chose to leave with her mother.  They both stayed in Paris until her mother's death.

The grandmother cannot forgive her daughter-in-law.  She does not want her granddaughter there as a sore reminder of painful circumstances.

But more than that, the grandmother wants simply to live in the past.  She's kept her son's room as a perpetual shrine to him. 

Through glimpses of conversation both present as well as remembered conversations, we come to understand that the grandmother wielded a lot of influence over her son.  She viewed her daughter-in-law as competition and was careful to hold her in contempt.  Her son took his cue from his mother and treated his wife contemptuously as well.

Anastasia's mother comes across as delicate and extremely sensitive.  Eventually she runs away to escape her mother-in-law's dominion. 

Even so, no one is caricatured.  The grandmother is a human being with several sides to her rather than simply an ogre. She is not heartless.  She cares about her granddaughter and will always provide for her.  But she wants her to return to Paris.   I can't judge her bitterness.  If someone left me without bothering to contact me for six years until they had no other place to go, I would be a little hesitant to welcome them back into the fold as well.

This raises a question, however.  Was Anastasia really so self-absorbed?  She was very young when she left with her mother.  Did her mother hold some kind of sway over her that prevented her from contacting her father or grandmother?

While Anastasia wanders around her hometown, and going to church she sees her mother.  She sees her walking near her.  She sees her kneeling in the church in a pew in front of her.  Is she mentally unstable?  Is she seeing a ghost?  Because the story is narrated from Anastasia's point of view, we don't know.

Throughout the story, the Irish culture permeates each page.  Reading the book, one has entered into Ireland, into an Irish family-at least one from the 1930's.  One sees how the Catholic faith is a strong, integral part of the culture.  How family relations affect each life.

There is a side story of a family friend whom Anastasia visits.  This woman, Miss Kildare, tells Anastasia her story.  She spent her entire life caring for her sickly mother.  She met a man and fell in love with him but her mother refused to sanction the marriage.  So they never married but they did continue to see each other in secret.  The man even gave her a ring.

Tragically, the man is killed and the woman, with no one else in her life, cares for her mother until her death.  Miss Kildare is now elderly and sick  but with no one to care for her.  She knows she is about to die.  The woman asks Anastasia to place on her finger- after she is lying in her coffin- the ring the man gave her.

The Visitor story is really about human loneliness.  Brennan shows four different women and their loneliness: Anastasia, her grandmother, the family friend and, indirectly through Anastasia's reflections, her mother. Each has different reasons for being lonely but the result is the same.  At the same time each woman possesses a spirit that refuses to be defeated.  It turns what might otherwise be a dreary story into a sweet, melancholy one. 

I agree that Brennan is able to capture the Irish spirit through her writing. Even though she died unknown, her work is making a comeback.  I look forward to reading other books by her as well.  

One of Life's Slaves by Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie

Edward Munch, The Storm 1893

First, I apologize to my readers who have commented that they have not received new posts from me.  I’m a free lance pianist/organist and I am currently working four jobs:  twenty singers and twenty-four instrumentalists I play with, an opera, and pipe organ for church.  Just a leetle busy. 

And…I’ve recently become engaged so time I usually reserve for reading has been otherwise occupied.  (Insert huge smile here). 

I have managed to read one book finally.  Thanks to Zohar over at Man of laBook, I have become aware of a Norwegian author whose books, at least some of them, are free downloads at Amazon.  The first one I’ve read is called, One of Life’s Slaves.  It is a rather grim story and I’m not sure what the author’s reasons were for writing it, but I’ll speculate on this after the review.

A young woman, Barbara, gets pregnant out of wedlock.  Since in the 19^th century, this is considered a scandalous condition, Barbara is hard put to find work.  She finally procures a job as a wet nurse and nanny at a well-to-do household on the condition that she get rid of her own child.  This she does by paying a local village family, the Holmans, to care for her son, Nikolai.

Barbara’s life takes a turn for the better where she becomes a pampered, spoiled and imperious “servant” of the family that hired her.  She raises the two children as if they were her own, while rarely visiting her own blood child.

Nikolai’s fortunes go from bad to worse.  He is exploited, neglected and abused at the hands of his foster mother, Mrs. Holman.  He is treated like a slave and any minor infraction is severely punished with prolonged beatings and being made to spend terrifying nights in a coal cellar.

Still, Nikolai manages to grow up, run away from his foster family and get work as a black smith.  He returns to the Holman household in secret, however, because he has formed an attachment to their daughter, Silla, who grew up with him. They meet in secret for as long as they are able.  Though his life takes many adverse turns, Nikolai manages to earn enough money to ask for Silla’s hand in marriage. 

Mrs. Holman tries to intimidate Nikolai with her usual imperious, demanding and sanctimonious manner and speech but he has become hardened to them.  Furthermore he is determined to marry Silla.  Doing her best not to show Nikolai, Mrs. Holman is secretly hopeful of the prospective marriage.  Her own husband has since drunk himself to death and she has had to rely on doing the washing of town folk.  Because of her caustic attitude she loses as much work as she gains.  She begins to think that if Silla and Nikolai were to marry, she’d have a source of financial security by moving in with them.

The fly in that ointment is that Nikolai’s mother, Barbara, who has by this time moved in with him.  The family she worked for finally developed enough of a back bone to throw her out and her attitude of entitlement has successfully ostracized her from any other employers.

Demanding that Nikolai cannot abandon his very own mother, she persuades him to let her move in.  Plus he gives her his hard earned savings to buy a store.  This forces him to postpone his marriage plans. 

Barbara eats more of her products than she sells and the store goes under.  Oblivious as to the reasons her store is going bankrupt, she demands more money from Nikolai.  He refuses to give her more and the reader, with a sigh of relief, hopes that finally Nikolai has wised up and will boot his parasitical mother out.

This is not to be, however.  After blaming Nikolai for all her life’s misfortunes, Barbara threatens to seek help from Veyergang, the boy she wet nursed.  Nikolai cannot tolerate this so he gives her the money.  He understands that this ruins his chances of ever marrying Silla.

Things finally come to a head when Nikolai reviews the hardships he’s had to endure his entire life.  Who made his life hard?  Mrs. Holman who abused and neglected him through out his childhood?  His mother, Barbara, who abandoned him and, literally, ate up all his money?

Common sense would dictate that this was the case.  Nikolai, as tragic as he is, is made even more so by an amazing lack of common sense.  After reviewing all his misfortunes he arrives at the conclusion that it is Veyergang who is the cause of them all.

Part of his prejudice could perhaps be explained by the fact that this rich young man has enjoyed everything Nikolai lacked:  a wealthy, privileged home, the love of Nikolai’s own mother, and finally he has begun wooing Silla.

Silla is a young, silly girl.  She loves Nikolai but also loves fun and dancing.  Nikolai provides the former without any of the latter.  Who does?  Young Veyergang.  It is at a dance where Nikolai find Silla and Veyergang together.

Nikolai hurls a large stone at Veyergang’s head and kills him.  What is the conclusion to Nikolai’s life?  A life time of hard prison labor.  The final words of the novel are uttered by Nikolai as he swings his pick:

“If I got out (of prison), it would only be to come in again.  For either the world ought to go to prison or I ought, and I suppose it may as well be the last!”

I have wondered what the point to this dismal tale could be.  Is Lie hoping to show people their pious hypocrisy?  Is he trying to awaken their compassion for the misfortunate?  Is he hoping to strike their consciences by recognizing their own pharisaical and heartless attitude?

It’s possible.  The characters certainly weren’t meant to portray the complexities of actual people.  They all seem to represent types.  Two types, really:  the selfish and the innocent victim whose life suffers as a result of others’ selfishness. In this sense the story reminds me of the short stories of the Indian writer, Rabindranath Tagore.

There were not any compassionate people in this story to counterbalance the bad.  All of them were the worst of any bad guy Charles Dickens could conjure up without any of his good characters to provide relief and ultimately hope.  Dickens always gave us the ending we wanted.  Lie feels no need to provide the reader with any sense of good triumphing over evil, rather the opposite.

Reading a biography of Lie, he is known for creating characters and story that colorfully depict the folk life of the Norwegian people in the 19^th century.  That he certainly does.  The writing is impeccable and the characters are vivid.  And I must say that the story, for all its sordidness, drew me into the time period and culture quite effectively.

And for that reason alone, One of Life’s Slaves are worth reading.

Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley

Halloween is over but who says I can't write another review on a scary book.  Besides, Frankenstein can't be said to be a "Halloween" book in the sense that those kinds of books involve the supernatural.  Frankenstein is not a horror book in that sense, but it is a deeply psychological, disturbing account of one woman's idea of humanity.

A young scientist, Victor Frankenstein, becomes obsessed with the idea of creating life.  He neglects his family, friends and himself for over a year until he finally achieves what he has devoted every waking hour to accomplish.

The moment his creature comes to life, Frankenstein is immediately horrified at what he has done.  He deserts his creation and tries to forget about him.  As time goes by, he becomes hopeful that his horrible creation has simply gone away.  He soon discovers his mistake when the creature murders his younger brother and frames the nanny, who hangs for the crime.

The creature eventually  approaches Frankenstein and fills him in on all that he's been doing since Frankenstein abandoned him.  What follows is the thrust of the entire novel.  The monster pours out his heart to Frankenstein.  The reader discovers that the monster is intelligent, articulate, eloquent and desperately lonely.  His yearnings and desires are the same as humans.  He longs to be loved and to belong to people.

But his looks make him an outcast.  All who see him are repelled by him.  Not only repulsed but develop an absolute hatred for him and try to kill him.  No one asks questions first.  They all believe he should be destroyed based purely on his exterior appearance.  This point is clear  when the monster meets a blind man with whom he has a conversation and who shows him kindness and compassion.  So it's not his personality or any primitive thinking or behavior on the monster's part that turns people against him.

The rejection and murderous antipathy against him enrages the monster and makes him desperate.  He demands that Frankenstein make him a mate so he will not be desolate.  This at first Frankenstein agrees to do but later destroys the woman creature before he brings her to life.  The reason is because he fears that together they would create a race of fearsome "uber creatures"  that could potentially take over the world.

In revenge, the monster kills directly or inadvertently, every family member and friend of Frankenstein's, including his bride on their wedding night.

What I find interesting is that it is not considered wrong by Frankenstein or anyone else to try to murder the monster (or "creature" or "daemon" or "fiend" as he is also called-but never "Frankenstein") based solely on the fact that he is grotesque looking.  But Frankenstein asserts that the reason his creation deserves to be destroyed is because of the crimes he has committed.  The monster did not commit any of these crimes until after his isolation and alienation drove him to it.  I'm not justifying what the monster did but only trying to point out the double standard.

Now that he is equally alone and desperate, Frankenstein's one purpose in life is to destroy what he made.  He hunts the monster all over the world.  The monster stays just out of reach, but not so far that Frankenstein gives up.

Both the monster and Frankenstein end up in the arctic regions of the world where they are discovered by the captain of an ice bound ship.  By this time, Frankenstein has driven himself beyond his strength and health.  He collapses and is taken aboard the ship where, dying,  he relates the entire story to the Captain, who is the original narrator of the book.

When he dies, the monster appears in the Cabin and confronts the captain.  Upon learning that Frankenstein's vengeful obsession has finally killed him, the monster bounds out of the window of the cabin and disappears...to end his own life?  Who knows.

Mary Shelley started writing this book when she was nineteen and it was published when she was twenty-one.  Her husband, Percy Blythe Shelley heavily edited the novel but an edition came out in 2008 that removed Percy's additions and contains only Mary's original story.  It would be interesting to compare.

I looked up the origins of Prometheus.  In Greek mythology he was a titan who brought fire to the human race.  For doing so he was punished by being chained to a rock where an eagle would come and devour his liver every day.  Prometheus also came to symbolize the human quest for scientific knowledge when it over reaches itself.

I am not sure what Shelley's point was in writing the story (other than her dream and the writing contest she participated in one night in Geneva with her husband and other writers).  She was not a Christian but she seems to implicate God in some respects.  Is she saying that man's fall from Eden was due to their Creator's rejection of them? Is she saying man shouldn't try to play God?  

Does she believe in the human soul or that life can be created without it?  Did the monster have a soul?   If there is no soul, then what makes murder wrong?  You've simply turned an animate life form into an inanimate one.  What makes life valuable?  Surely more than the need to simply preserve the human race.

What she does successfully portray, either intentionally or not, is humanity without mercy or compassion for the desperate or the fallen.  Frankenstein's abhorrence of his creation seems to be based on the presumption that he himself is not fallen.  The Bible says all are desperately wicked. Romans 3:23

I compare this to the life of Jesus who forgave even the most sinful when they fell at his feet in repentance. 

If Mary Shelley's book typifies secular philosophy then even though it maintains a certain moral code,  it certainly provides no hope for those who can't keep to that code.

.99 on Kindle