They All Came

The Iraqi flag circa 1950

Diplomats, ambassadors, presidents, archaeologists, spies, counter-spies, saboteurs,  clerks and secretaries, tourists, and a somewhat dipsy, adventuresome, and almost mythomaniacal  Victoria Jones--they all came to Baghdad around 1950--and Agatha Christie put them all in her almost farcical thriller novel, They Came to Baghdad, published in 1951.

This is neither your typical whodunit, nor a typical Agatha Christie whodunit, nor a spy suspense novel such as John LeCarré writes.  It is somewhere in between all of these with the added Christie touch.  By no means is it her best-written novel (her best ones are found in her earlier mysteries), but it is something with enough fascination and twists to make it a very readable page-turner.

Victoria Jones, the main character, wheedles her way to Baghdad and winds up being involved in a whirlpool of intrigue and counter-intrigue and false identities.  Why everyone comes to Baghdad is not clear (at least I didn't pick it up), but it has something to do with an international plot and all these important diplomats, ambassadors, and presidents are meeting to try to defuse the situation.

The backdrop to all this is Baghdad in the early 50s when the city (and the country) was more of an idyllic place than it is now after the "shock and awe" and its seemingly never ending consequences.

Christie minimally, but deftly, interweaves the Iraqi background with the suspense of the story.  Her descriptions are not finely detailed but still provide some interesting color: "She wandered at random through the souk, passed out of the Copper Bazaar, came to the gay striped horse blankets, and the cotton quilted bedcovers.  Here European merchandise took on a totally different guise; in the arched cool darkness it had the exotic quality of something strange and rare.  Bales of cheap printed cottons in gay colours made a feast for the eyes."

Not the most generous of details (and a touch clichèd), but enough to highlight some of the atmosphere that she must have encountered during her time in the Middle East.  A much more elaborate description of the city and the country can be found in her autobiography (a review of which will appear in some future post).

And in amongst all this, Christie, in the guise of one of her characters, an archaeologist named Dr. Rathbone, adds: "There must be an end of all the savagery in the world, the wars, the misunderstandings, the suspicions."  Sadly, more than 60 years later, there has not been an end.

Be forewarned:  in the first three chapters most of the main characters appear doing various things in different countries and it is not too difficult to get lost among all the names and locations.  But, stick with it and, being the good writer she is, Christie will tie everything together like a carefully packaged Christmas gift.

The Present is Now

"It was a dark and stormy night..." begins the famous (or infamous) opening sentence of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Paul Clifford.  As bad as that may be (and it is considered by many to be the worst ever opening sentence in all of literature) it is still better than, "It is a dark and stormy night..."  A much more attractive opening sentence is the well-known one from Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."  Now, try it this way: "It is the best of times, it is the worst of times..."

It just doesn't work--at least for me.  I am a traditionalist (in most cases) and was trained that to tell a story one must tell what happened which by default means something in the past.  By reading a story that has happened I am sucked into that reality of events that starts in the past and finishes in the past.  Thus, I am "beamed up," in Star Trek speak, and out of my present life, my present situation, my present problems.

On the other hand, a theater play automatically drops the audience into the situation, whether past, present or future.  Thus, from the opening line of Shakespeare's Richard III, "It is the winter of our discontent," it is perfectly sensible to use the present tense because then we are taken to the "now" of Richard III's time.

Don't call me Ishmael but if you want you can call me arrogant or call me old-fashioned or call me a literary Luddite, but I refuse to read any novels written in the present tense. When I check the opening page and see the present tense used, the book immediately comes off my "to-read" list. There are so many other books out there anyway (see my post "Re: re-reading) that I do not think I will miss many present tense ones that I have passed over.

De Niro, de catcher

Since I just recently wrote a post relating to baseball, I'll keep this in the same vein and mention Bang the Drum Slowly, an early (1973) film starring a young Robert De Niro as a tobacco-chewing, slow-drawling professional baseball catcher.  Bruce Pearson (De Niro) is a second-stringer on the New York Mammoths (the interwoven "N" and "Y" on the caps of the players could almost be the symbol for the New York Yankees but they are reversed) and learns that he is dying of Hodgkin's disease, a health issue which he is trying to avoid telling the rest of the team.  Keeping his secret is Henry Wiggen, the best pitcher for the Mammoths, room-mate, and friend of Pearson.  There are really very few baseball scenes and most of those are from genuine baseball clips, although the professional players are difficult to distinguish except to those who are extremely familiar with the swings and demeanor of those playing in the 1970s.
De Niro does get a few chances to bat and his swing is a weak one, but that is in fitting with the skills (or lack of) of Pearson.  Also, in this film De Niro is very thin--maybe even scrawny--and not bulky as most catchers are.
Baseball, though, is secondary.  It is the human, heart-warming (and heart-breaking) story of two friends trying to live out their lives and their professions delicately and philosophically in the face of a much-too-early approach of The Grim Reaper.
De Niro and the story are supported admirably by Michael Moriarty (Wiggen) and Vincent Gardenia (Coach Schnell), as well as by some brief appearances by younger versions of Danny Aiello and Barbara Babcock.
Perhaps the only fault that I could find with the film is that it can be a little dated at times, especially when Wiggen asks for a contract of $125,000. In today's world of multi-million dollar contracts, this wouldn't even buy a cup of coffee.  O tempora o mores.
All in all, though, it is a wonderful (and hard to find) film that for me beats out Bull Durham for the best baseball movie ever, but only by the width of a catcher's mitt.

Say it ain't so....

 Yesterday, the Canadian writer W.P. Kinsella passed into his own field of dreams.  A lot of people may have never heard of him but his novel Shoeless Joe went on to become the film Field of Dreams, with which many are familiar.  As often is the case, the book was better than the film, although the film wasn't awful, just a touch on the "schmaltzy" side and personally I think it was Kevin Costner's best movie next to his Bull Durham.

Shoeless Joe, with its reference to the infamous "Black Sox" scandal of 1919, is in my opinion one of the best baseball books ever written along with Philip Roth's The Great American Novel, and The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover. But one doesn't have to be a baseball fan to enjoy any of these books, although some knowledge of the 1919 scandal would help put things into a Shoeless Joe perspective.  The film Eight Men Out (1988) would be a good starting point to acquire a little background on the true story of the Black Sox scandal (but, of course, with a few fictitious items added for the sake of the film).

So, WP, wherever your field of dreams is now, R.I.P. there.

Man, that Booker

It is coming around again--that time for the nominations and the final selection of the "best" book for the Man Booker Prize--a nomenclature which I will never get used to because it sounds sexist, even though it is not.  For me it will always be the Booker Prize.

And for me, it will often be a disappointment.  I really cannot fathom how the jury makes its selection.  I think the criteria is so often subjective (as most book reviews are anyway) and therefore those who compose the jury are simply looking at the books from their own perspective and not from the perspective of the potential reader.  Various sources have also hinted at political or political/personal in-fighting which, if true (and will we ever know?), means that the books themselves take second place in the final decision.

Whatever the final verdict is this year, it is highly unlikely that I will read it.  Since its inception in 1969 I have only read a few of the winners, have rarely liked any and have always been confused as to why the book was selected.  The only ones I have enjoyed and which I have felt worthy of the prize are Oscar & Lucinda (1986), Midnight's Children (1981), Possession: A Romance (1990), and The Ghost Road (1995).  Three others marginally fulfilled my criteria: The Line of Beauty (2014), The Sea, The Sea (1978) and The Remains of the Day (1989)  The rest of the winners I never made it to the first page because the subject of the story did not interest me or I never got past the first 50 pages because the style or the theme fell way short of my expectations, e.g: The Finkler Question (2010), The Life of Pi (2012), and especially disliked, Vernon God Little (2003).

So, I will not waste my time and money on this year's winner.  There are other good books out there that don't carry the weight and prestige of the Booker but which are much more worthy of my time.

Re: Re-reading

There have been so, so many books published since the first time some hirsute human being scrawled lines and pictures on a cave wall that, obviously, one cannot read them all.  Being selective is the key--but how to be selective?  The best advice in my estimation is still the one Francis Bacon gave in his famous essay "On Studies:" Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.  The key phrase here is "some few."
But that still creates the problem of deciding which are to be tasted, which are to be swallowed and which to be chewed and digested.  Some people, for example, would feel that the Harry Potter books are to be chewed and digested whereas I feel they should only be tasted.  And what about something such as Fifty Shades of Gray?  This one should not even grace (or disgrace) the dinner table.  To each, then, to his or her own taste buds.

The only books which should be chewed and digested are those that can be read and re-read--and there are so few of those that one probably doesn't need all 10 fingers and toes to count them.  Some of the "classics" or course (and by "classics" I mean those books which have traditionally been considered in the past by scholarly readers to be worthy of study--not the literary period--or, for the purposes of this blog, anything before 1900). But how about the more contemporary novels?  How many of those can be read again and still throw up surprises to the reader?

Very few from my perspective. Of course, there are the Hemingway books, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, etc., i.e. the "standards."

Apart from those standard ones, I only have three modern novels which I have read three times or more:  Catch-22, Losing Nelson (to be reviewed in a future post), and A New Finnish Grammar.  An interesting book to chewed and digested must provide the reader with something new on almost every page.  With Catch-22, for example, one always seems to discover another quirk among its quirky characters and with Losing Nelson I keep learning new things about Admiral Lord Nelson, even though I have absolutely no interest in British naval history.  In A New Finnish Grammar, I discovered something about the ending that I had missed the first time around

So, in sum, one should use one's time wisely and judiciously and don't waste parts of a life reading only "tasty" books and not "digestible" ones.

A more academic and detailed approach with similar thoughts can be found in Gabriel Zaid's, So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance.

Danish, anyone?

Photo source: By Yohan euan o4 - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4901044
 
As mentioned in my introduction, occasionally I will post something about my other hobby--film. Thus, I offer up the delicious The Danish Girl.  This is a very "quiet" film based on the true story of the Danish artists Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener.  Eddie Redmayne is wonderful and his transformation into first the transvestite Lili and then to the transexual Lili [I am avoiding mentioning the spoiler at the end] is subtle, sweet, and mesmerising. And, BTW, Redmayne is also fantastic in The Theory of Everything where he also transforms himself, this time into Stephen Hawking.

When in Rome (or Pompeii).....

There is something that has always fascinated about the fated city of Pompeii even before living in an apartment south of Naples and being able to see the shadowy outline of Vesuvius on a clear day.  I visited the Naples museum which contains some of the Pompeii artefacts and even got to the less well-known lava-washed city of Herculaneum.  But never Pompeii itself.  Instead there was, initially, a vicarious visit through the fiction of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's ponderous Victorian The Last Days of Pompeii--twice started and never finished and the more contemporary Pompeii by Robert Harris--also never finished.

And then came Mary Beard's Pompeii: The Life and Death of a Roman Town, which presented a clear and palatable picture of the town and its people.  I highly recommend it along with watching Roberto Rosselini's 1954 Journey to Italy, much of which is set among the ruins of Pompeii.

Pompeii led me to her most recent book, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, of which I am halfway through at this writing and and am also finding fascinating and accessible--and this coming from a person who hated Roman history in high school and who almost failed Latin.  Beard takes an academic (but far from impenetrable) approach to the story and breaks it down into bit-sized sections in chapters such as "The Kings of Rome" and "Rome's Great Leap Forward."  Thus the book can be easily picked up and put down without losing the thread of the whole history.

But, if you are looking for the drama of the pseudo-Roman stories presented in such films as Spartacus, Caligula, Gladiator, Ben-Hur and the like, look somewhere else.  If you are looking to gain intellectual and well-researched insight into Roman history, then SPQR is the place to turn.

For: words

So, here I am just passing 70 (speed limit is 60) and trying to fill in some of my semi-retirement time with some book reviews of current and past reads.  Generally, I prefer what is termed as "literary fiction," i.e. not the stuff you find in airport book stalls.  As a "break" from the literary fiction genre I supplement with crime fiction, mostly by British authors such as Ruth Rendell, P.D. James, and Peter Lovesey.  At the moment, though, I am being sidetracked by non-fiction historical books, specifically SPQR and Pompeii by Mary Beard because she is giving a presentation next month in the city where I live.

This, then, will be the primary focus of the blog, although I will add in some other things such as DVD and TV show reviews and even occasionally let go with an opinion on some topical issue related to books.  In all cases, though, I am planning to do my utmost that this blog maintains quality writing.

And, as I become more experienced, I will upgrade the site and make it more attractive, although I am basically a minimalist so there will be no fancy graphics or outlandish colors.  The blog is called "Reads" and that is what is all about--not about delirious looking formats.

Come to me with your suggestions.

Frank

Murder, She Wrote (about).....

 

Just finished This House of Grief:  The Story of a Murder Trial by Helen Garner. The photo above is of the accused murderer as published in The Guardian newspaper.

I really enjoy non-fictional (and fictional) accounts of jury trials, especially of those which are of somewhat gruesome events; this one is of a man accused of driving off into a small lake near a dam somewhere not too far from Melbourne, Australia.  The car sank and he escaped--but his three children with him drowned and he was put on trial for murder, accused of deliberately creating an accident because he wanted to kill his children.  This book was written by Helen Garner as sort of a personal reflection on her experiences as a member of the court audience.  And this is the problem I had with it.  First of all, she often drops into some personal feelings which I think takes away from the trial itself.  Secondly, I didn't feel that there was enough given to the actual questioning and answering of the lawyers and the witnesses.  She often summarised the give and take in her own words and I believe this distracted from the hard-nose questioning. She could have accessed the transcripts to provide more exact quotations.
This book had so much potential of being a great, compelling thriller but for the reasons listed above and because Garner often slipped into cliche after cliche, the suspense, for me at least, was diluted.  I liked the book overall, but I think it did not deserve some of the outstanding reviews that it received.  It lacked the hard-hitting impact of the fictional Anatomy of a Murder or the semi-fictional play, Inherit the Wind.

If you decided to read this book anyway, watch out for the frequent Australian colloquialisms.  Having lived in Australia for 10 years, I understood them but they may be a bit of a bump in the road for some.