Fiction, Reviews

‘Fool’s Errand,’ by Jeffrey S. Stevens

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Writing this review, I find myself in the odd position of not remembering what the narrator/hero’s name is. The Amazon synopsis doesn’t say either. Maybe Jeffrey S. Stephens, author of Fools Errand, never tells us that – or maybe I just missed it. But if Stephens held it back, that’s an interesting authorial tactic.

The narrator’s last name, though, is Rinaldi. He comes from a “colorful” New York Italian family. His father and uncles were involved in organized crime – not as kingpins but as lower functionaries. His father, a mercurial, charismatic alcoholic, ran numbers. The story is set in the 1970s, after his father has been dead several years. One day, his mother informs him she has a box of his father’s papers that was meant for him. When he goes through the material, he finds a letter addressed to himself, written not long before his father’s death. The letter tells of something the old man had bragged about many times, when drunk. It speaks – vaguely – about some “Money” that he, his friend Benny, and a Frenchman stole while he was in the army during the war, working on repatriating stolen artworks.

Our hero contacts Benny, who’s living in Las Vegas. Benny gently suggests he leave the whole matter alone, but (knowing he won’t do that) he gives him the name of the Frenchman.

Soon he’s on a plane to Monte Carlo, accompanied by Donna, a young woman he met and struck sparks with on the plane back from Vegas. Once there (where he is shadowed by employees of his mobster cousin Frank, who thinks he has a claim on this “treasure” whose nature he has no clue about) he meets his father’s old friend, and begins to put together the very strange story of his father’s wartime adventures.

Fool’s Errand was, simply put, a really good story. Fascinating. Well-written. Insightful. Suspenseful, but not a thriller. A character study and a love story.

I liked it a whole lot. Jeffrey S. Stephens is an extremely good (and smart) writer. Recommended, with cautions for mature content.

Fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘The Screwtape Letters,’ by C.S. Lewis

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And now for your blunders. On your own showing you first of all allowed the patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his new friends.

I was in high school when I first read C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. It had been recommended by a Sunday School teacher. The story of two devils consulting on a human’s damnation set off something like a series of small explosions in my brain. I’d never run across Christian thought anything like this before (pleasures weren’t necessarily sinful? Who knew?), and it dispensed a guilty thrill of possible heresy. It was for me the beginning of a lifelong grappling match with both Lewis himself and with orthodox Christian theology.

I’m not sure how many times I’ve read it in my life. The depressing part of revisiting it again is observing how little progress I’ve made in resisting my own personal Wormwood. To make it more uncomfortable, I understand the nature of sin and temptation better now than I did when I was in high school. The knives, therefore, are sharper.

I was also impressed, in reading the sequel essay, “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” to note how prescient it is. Writing in the 1950s, Lewis observed trends in society and in education that have since metastasized in a way no one could have conceived of at the time.

The Screwtape Letters is a clever, masterfully written, insightful book about temptation that is actually extremely uncomfortable for anyone with any moral insight. And it gets more uncomfortable as you get older.

So I recommend it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Damage Man,’ by Gregg Hurwitz

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And so you, you will mediate the space between what is sanctioned and what is not. And to do that, part of you must belong to what is not. That is the sacrifice you must make. You must be half-darkness while not serving darkness.

Gregg Hurwitz has gotten into the generous habit of providing Orphan X novellas once a year, to give us a little hit in between the great feasts of the novels. The novella The Damage Man was just released, and I tore through it like a Doberman on a Beggin’ Strip.

Evan Smoak, our lone wolf hero, is not summoned by a call on his high-tech phone this time around. He happens upon a middle-aged man, Rusty, who is being threatened by a loan shark’s collector in an alley. The collector is telling Rusty that his son Blake will get no delay; he has to pay up or he’ll be hurt. Evan intervenes, and when the collector pulls a gun, Evan puts him in the hospital. Then he asks Rusty about Blake’s problem, and informs him he’s going to take care of it. Because that’s what Evan does.

He learns that Ray and Blake are alienated. Ray abandoned his family when Blake was young, and Blake has never forgiven him. Though the two men have to hide out together temporarily, they can barely keep from coming to blows. Ray is desperately remorseful, but Blake’s anger runs deep. They are two inarticulate men, needing each other but unable to make contact.

This brings Evan’s own absentee father to his mind. He found the man once, discovering him to be a wholly superficial and contemptible human being, who only warmed to him when he lent him money. This operation involves phone conversations with Joey, the girl hacker who Evan has sort of adopted, and she’s intuitive enough to do a search for Evan’s father. She discovers that he’s dying.

Now Evan is faced with somethig he fears more than any number of terrorists or gangsters – the risk of reaching out again to his father.

Nobody matches Gregg Hurwitz when it comes to writing stories that not only excite you but probe your heart like a catheter. If you find yourself a little misty-eyed when you’re finished with The Damage Man, I can tell you (from a friend) that you’re not alone.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Thank You, Jeeves,’ by P.G. Wodehouse

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He made a noise like a pig swallowing half a cabbage, but refused to commit himself further.

In the pantheon of P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories, the novel, Thank You, Jeeves holds a unique and equivocal place. It’s unquestionably a clever book, full of pratfalls and twists, with a plot nearly as tight as that of The Code of the Woosters. It features, however, an inherent problem for the modern reader. More of that later.

The setup goes like this. Bertie Wooster has taken up playing the banjolele. Not only do his neighbors object to the noise, but Jeeves himself finds it intolerable – to the point where he gives notice. Jeeves departs, Bertie acquires a substitute (and much inferior) valet, and he heads off to his friend “Chuffy” Chuffnell’s seaside estate, to spend a holiday in a cottage on the property. To his surprise, Bertie finds that Jeeves has now found employment with Chuffy.

Meanwhile, Chuffy is engaged to Pauline Stoker, the daughter of an American millionaire who’s interested in buying Chuffy’s estate (which he’s eager to unload). Pauline, as it happens, was briefly engaged to Bertie himself, some time back when he was living in New York. Also on hand is Sir Roderick Glossop, an old nemesis of Bertie’s, who has a plan to manage the estate as a mental hospital.

In Wodehouse’s world, it’s inevitable that Chuffy and Pauline must break up, and Pauline announces that she’s going to marry Bertie on the rebound. Under the circumstances, Bertie is desperate to heal the rift in the lute (as Jeeves might have put it), but what hope does he have without Jeeves’ assistance?

Thank You, Jeeves is fast-paced and funny and implausible and irresistible like all the best Wodehouse. The big problem with it is that it is perhaps the supreme example among the list of Wodehouse works that people are talking about “cleaning up.” The sad fact is that it features a subplot involving a “minstrel band” of black (or black-faced, I wasn’t sure) musicians, and what we call “the ‘N’ word” gets used multiple times.

For the record, I’m against revising it. We live in history, and must deal with our ancestors, as we do with foreigners, as representatives of a different culture. Get used to it. You don’t have to approve to understand.

Otherwise, highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

Jo Piazza’s “The Parisian Heist”: Cramming Feminism Into Art Frames

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A besieged socialite, her super-hot grandson, and a house-cleaner plan an art heist and try to save a Van Gogh legacy.

Guest review by Adam H. Douglas

When most people hear the name “Van Gogh,” they typically think only of Vincent, the famous artist, but know nothing about his sister-in-law, Johanna “Jo” van Gogh-Bonger.

Jo was a widow at twenty-nine, after her husband Theo, Vincent’s brother, died at only 33 years. She was left with an infant son and roughly three hundred seemingly worthless paintings by her brother-in-law. Rather than let his work molder in an attic, Jo spent the rest of her life engineering his posthumous fame. She cultivated critics, staged exhibitions, and eventually published his private letters.

In the process, Jo built the market that still prices a single Van Gogh in the tens of millions today. Internationally bestselling author Jo Piazza stumbled onto Jo’s story secondhand, from a friend researching his own book on color, and immediately recognized its potential.

In the notes at the end of the book, Piazza explains how she saw a woman written out of the very legend she created, and decided that story was, in her own words, “ripe for a feminist novel,” which eventually became the art-heist-slash-historical hybrid “The Parisian Heist.”

Paris Conspiracy

The framework of “Heist” toggles between two timelines. In 1990s Paris, Emma, a broke American art student still nursing the effects of a bad affair with her manipulative professor, cleans apartments to make ends meet. That includes the penthouse of Stella Swanson, an elderly, seemingly frail widow of an art-dealing tycoon.

Stella turns out to be sharper and more purposeful than she lets on. Cut out of her husband’s estate by his vindictive son and threatened with institutionalization, Stella recruits Emma—along with Emma’s roommates and Stella’s own devastatingly charming step-grandson, Matthew—into a scheme to reclaim what’s hers.

That plan requires infiltrating the Swanson family’s inner sanctum even as it draws Emma into a romance with the very family she’s conspiring against.

Woven through this is the story of Claire, a nineteenth-century Parisian prostitute who saves Jo van Gogh from an assault one night and becomes her closest confidante. Jo, however, doesn’t know that her late husband, Theo Van Gogh, used to hire Claire for her services. The two became close, and Theo ends up begging Claire on his deathbed to watch over his wife after he’s gone.

Claire evolves into Jo’s business partner in all but title, doing things like bookkeeping, damage control, and strategy, while Jo focuses on a public campaign to make Vincent famous.

The connective tissue between the two timelines turns out to be genealogical: Claire is Stella’s grandmother, and a long-lost Van Gogh Sunflowers painting passed down through the family becomes the linchpin of Stella’s plan.

Now all the heist team has to do is survive the attempt and make sure no one lands in jail or an asylum along the way.

Continue reading Jo Piazza’s “The Parisian Heist”: Cramming Feminism Into Art Frames →
Fiction, Reviews

‘The Inklings Detective Agency,’ by John R. Kelly

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I think Tolkien writes somewhere of “the willing suspension of disbelief.” I’m not sure if he originated the term. But I find it a little ironic that a novel in which he’s a major character makes such a suspension so difficult.

Reviews of The Inklings Detective Agency by John R. Kelly seem to be mostly laudatory. I wanted to join in the praise, but I just can’t do it.

Here’s the premise – we’re asked to believe that the members of the famous Inklings writers’ group dabbled in solving crime in their spare time. (Anyone who knows about Lewis’ life in the late 1930s, when this book is set, will laugh at the idea that he had any free time at all.)

But they’ve never investigated a murder before, until a surprise visitor to one of their meetings (I won’t spoil the secret of his identity for you) asks them to look into the recent deaths of two men, dismissed by the police as suicides. Both men had been involved with a secret society led by the infamous black magician, Aleister Crowley. Various members of the group will pursue different lines of investigation, and such figures as Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie will also make cameo appearances.

Why didn’t I like The Inklings Detective Agency more? First of all, the writing was weak. Sometimes the grammar stumbled, with phrases like “me and MacDougall.” The book was sometimes overwritten, and many speeches could have been shorter. Sometimes the prose was florid, as when we read of “someone with such nefarious evil and darkness in their heart.”

Worse, for me, was the number of linguistic anachronisms. Slang and catch phrases that didn’t originate until decades later abound here – “lights out—that’s all she wrote.” “Letting us crash your bachelor pad” “Food to die for.” “Macro.”

Worst of all was that all women are given the title of Ms. Note for younger readers – up until the 1970s, all women (unless they had professional titles like “Dr.”) were addressed in English as “Miss” or “Mrs.” “Ms.” was confined to southern US dialect back in the 1930s.

The characterizations, as far as I could tell, were pretty good. Lewis acted like Lewis, Tolkien like Tolkien. I know less about the other Inklings, but they seemed to be behaving authentically within the scope of a fictional story.

I did read the book through to the end, because I was curious to find out who the culprit was, and because it’s always pleasant to spend time with the Inklings, even viewed through a glass darkly.

So I can’t say it’s a bad book. I will say it’s clumsily written and poorly tailored to its period. I can’t recommend it, but I won’t deny there was some fun in it.

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

La Mancha in the rear view mirror

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“…which the Queen Doña Maguncia, the Princess Antonomasia’s mother, so took to heart, that within the space of three days we buried her.”

“She died, no doubt,” said Sancho.

Though I have no personal experience of it, I’m told that people who complete marathons customarily get a tee-shirt announcing their accomplishment. I think anyone who finishes Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote ought to get one too (mine would be XXXL), featuring the date and illustrated with an image of the Knight of the Rueful Countenance tilting at windmills. Henceforth let no man call me illiterate.

What do I think of the whole thing? DQ is certainly a book worth having read. Like the Bible, it’s full of cultural references an informed person ought to know about. And there are certainly funny moments, as in the excerpt above.

But one of the things a modern reader learns from reading it is how different our world, and our thinking, are from those of Miguel de Cervantes. This is a man who respects the Inquisition, and takes it for granted that trashy books ought to be burned. He’s not evil – he’s a man of his time and place.

There’s the case of the Moriscos, for instance. The Moriscos were descendants of the Spanish Moors who had – ostensibly – converted to Christianity from Islam. A few years back, the king had banished them all, based on accusations of plots against himself. The novel includes two separate subplots concerning Christian gentlemen who fall in love with beautiful Morisco girls. In each case Cervantes strives to find resolutions by which the individual girls, who are always true Catholics, might be allowed to marry their sweethearts and remain in the country. But it’s taken for granted (and even the Moriscos themselves admit, in Cervantes’ account) that the expulsions were entirely justified.

There’s also a sequence where, with the encouragement of the Duchess, who loves to put Don Quixote through his mad paces, a young lady of her court pretends to fall passionately in love with him, to test his faithfulness to his lady Dulcinea. Don Quixote withstands the temptation to go to bed with her. We are informed, matter-of-factly, that the girl is 14 or 15 years old. There is, in Cervantes’ world, nothing scandalous about her age.

There’s a strange quality of metanarrative present in the second book of Don Quixote. Cervantes was largely goaded into finishing the book by the appearance of an unauthorized sequel, which was (according to him) unimaginative and poorly written. Don Quixote himself is told about this book in the course of the story, and goes so far, in one episode, as to choose to ride to Barcelona instead of to Salamanca, simply because the bogus book sent him to Salamanca. The intrusion of real life into the novel timeline raises all kinds of questions of subtext and alternate realities, which have no doubt been dealt with by critics. I’m not sure the scenario described by Cervantes is actually self-consistent, but trying to puzzle it all out seems like more work than I care to take on.

What impressed me most in my reading, though, was something I’ve mentioned before. While the duchess delights in playing tricks on Don Quixote, she reserves actual physical insults for Sancho Panza. We’re meant to laugh when Sancho is poked with pins, or lashed until he bleeds. Because Sancho is a peasant, his body doesn’t deserve the respect accorded the body of a nobleman. He’s a buffoon, the clown of the story, made of rubber like a character in a cartoon. His pain is meant to be hilarious.

My egalitarianism is, of course, another anachronism I shouldn’t try to impose on Cervantes, who knew nothing of such things. It’s unjust of me, really.

But I can’t quite avoid it.

So do I recommend Don Quixote?

I recommend it for anyone who wants to read it. If you don’t, I can’t criticize you greatly. You should probably read a condensed edition, though.

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R.I.P. King Harald V

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I’m kind of tired of posting about my reading of Don Quixote, and I think you may be too. Tonight something else has come up, though I can’t say I’m happy about it. King Harald V of Norway is dead.

If you watched Atlantic Crossing, the PBS-broadcast Norwegian miniseries I helped translate, you may recall Crown Prince Olaf’s and Princess Martha’s little boy. That was Harald. He achieved several historical distinctions – he was the first Norwegian prince to be born in the country since the 14th Century (due to the unions with Denmark and later with Sweden, which we like to skip over). He was the last European monarch to have lived during World War II. He was also Norway’s longest-living king.

He had broken tradition by insisting, against considerable family pressure, on marrying a commoner, Sonja Haraldsen. Since the tradition among European royalty has always been to marry cousins (Harald’s parents were first cousins), I have to think that was a wise innovation.

I saw him once, from a distance. I was living in Florida when the Norway pavilion at Epcot Center had its grand opening, and I decided to be there. I was some distance away in the crowd when he and Crown Princess Sonja came out of the building, escorted by Mickey Mouse and Goofy in a Viking costume (to Disney’s credit, there were no horns on the helmet). Crown Prince Harald (his father was still alive at the time) gave a short address.

His health had been failing for some time, and his death was not unexpected. He is succeeded by his son Haakon VIII. My condolences to the people of Norway.

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

Don Quixote’s biggest fans

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“…so Samson Carrasco told me, and he’s at any rate one that’s a bachelor of Salamanca, and people of that sort can’t lie, except when the whim seizes them or they have some good reason for it.” (Sancho Panza)

It’s getting to the point where I have trouble remembering a time before I was reading Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. According to my Kindle, I’m about 75% through it now, and I still have nearly 7 hours of reading to do. I don’t imagine I’ll be finished before sometime this weekend.

The profound literary insight that’s made me so rich and famous has enabled me to identify plot parallels between Book 1 and Book 2. In each book, a large portion of the story’s latter half is taken up with a kind of a drama. In the first book, the drama isn’t labeled as such, but the story takes on the form of a stage play. A large group of people are gathered in an inn, and the Aristotelean unities of place and time are observed – three (if I remember correctly) pairs of sundered lovers just happen to be present at once, and obstacles to their love are overcome, leading to happy romantic endings.

In Book 2, the drama is more overt. Don Quixote and Sancho happen upon a hunting party led by a duke and duchess, who turn out to have read Book 1. They are Don Quixote’s and Sancho’s Biggest Fans, and they proceed to merrily torture them, somewhat in the style of Kathy Bates in Misery, though with more charm.

Employing their considerable financial resources, the couple stage scenarios where costumed players present themselves as devils and wizards and ladies in distress, purposely enabling the old madman’s delusions, for the pure entertainment derived from seeing how far he’ll go in his self-destruction. The duchess delights in toying with Sancho, playing on his desire to be governor of an island, testing how far he’ll debase himself in exchange for that prize.

I’m almost embarrassed to admit I found some of it funny.

Being a professional social conservative, I tend to be somewhat sympathetic to the old class system. But as I contemplate the humor in Don Quixote, Book 2, I begin to feel like a Jeffersonian Republican. I even start to sympathize with the French Jacobins. Whom I loathe.

But there’s more of Don Quixote to read, so maybe this stage will pass.

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

Quixotic beauty

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My opinion of Miguel de Cervantes’ classic novel, Don Quixote, based on reading a condensed version long ago, has always been that it’s a very long, difficult book that people read out of a sense of duty, but that few actually enjoy much.

I’m almost 70% through reading it now, and to be honest my opinion hasn’t changed a lot. It was a hilarious book by 17th Century standards, but it’s mostly plain hard work today. Despite amusing moments.

Today’s reading was highlighted by two major scenes. In the first, Don Quixote wishes to view a famous cave, and is lowered into its mouth on a rope by his servant Sancho Panza and their guide. While in the cave, the knight apparently loses consciousness and has a vivid hallucination, which he afterwards relates to his companions. It involves – of course – a castle and a couple famous knights, along with a brief vision of his own lady fair, Dulcinea.

Another big scene is a puppet show presented in an inn (I wish the author had described it in more detail – I couldn’t figure out whether the puppets were marionettes, hand puppets, or shadow puppets. No doubt Cervantes scholars have worked it out). Don Quixote, overwhelmed by the excitement of the drama, comes to the main characters’ rescue, smashing several puppets with his sword. He lives his life poised on the knife edge of delusion.

A topic I meant to discuss in an earlier post, but lost track of, was that of beauty. In a scene in Book 1, Don Quixote discusses with his friend the curate whether books of Chivalric Romance were true stories or not. The curate points out that the books are full of impossible creatures and incidents. Don Quixote’s response appeals to the spiritual – the stories must be true, he argues, because they’re so beautiful.

That’s a fascinating point, so packed that I can’t begin to deal with it here.

Keats wrote in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” that “beauty is truth, truth beauty.” All my life I took that as a poet’s hyperbole. More recently I’ve been thinking there’s more to it.

Andrew Klavan’s book, The Truth and Beauty is one I’ve read several times without entirely figuring its point out. But it’s something to do with the idea that Beauty is a real expression of God Himself. In our mundane world, many beautiful things are corrupted by sin, but Beauty in itself is always a pointer to the Gospel. This is particularly notable in the experience of transcendent beauty, as when Wordsworth beheld a field of daffodils, or when Keats contemplated his Grecian urn. Wordsworth’s ecstatic experience of the daffodils actually led him on the road to Christian faith. Klavan thinks Keats would have become a Christian if he’d lived longer.

And it occurs to me that when a sinner repents and turns to Christ during an altar call, breaking down in remorse and suddenly in love with Christ, he’s having an experience not entirely different from those.

Nevertheless, Cervantes insists Don Quixote is wrong. In this world we live in, a thing can be both beautiful and bad. Beauty can be seductive, in a woman or in a story, or in an ideology. Socialism, for instance, is a beautiful ideology that springs from Romantic aspirations. But it leads away from God, and ends in death.