The Song Of The Lark by Willa Cather

The Song Of The Lark is the story of how a small town girl becomes a famous opera singer by staying true to her instincts and artistic vision. Thea Kronberg is a difficult person to like: her talent and sensitivity mark her as a tall poppy to her detractors, but also attract the interest of those who can, and do, help her along on her path to education and success. It’s an interesting novel in that most protagonists celebrated in this way are men. Despite my own dislike of Thea’s personality (supposedly, she’s the kind of woman who gets along better with men than with other women, which made me roll my eyes each of the several times it was mentioned,) I enjoyed the fact that she was not punished merely for being female. Which isn’t to say that she doesn’t suffer the indignities flung at women from time immemorial: just that she was allowed to be evaluated on her talent and personality as opposed to her gender. I’m honestly not used to that from books of the period or earlier, so it was refreshing.

I was also impressed with Willa Cather’s ability to dissect what it means and how it feels to possess a restless talent. Her depiction of Thea’s drive and self-doubt but ultimate determination was encapsulated perfectly in Thea’s speech here to a benefactor/lover, as they are on the brink of a new chapter in their lives, “The past closes up behind one, somehow. One would rather have a new kind of misery. The old kind seems like death or unconsciousness. You can’t force your life back into that mould again.” Speaking of lovers, tho, I thought it odd how Thea kept attracting married men, and why this was never discussed in terms of her personality.

That aside, I enjoyed Ms Cather’s incisiveness and overall generosity in depicting the majority of the supporting characters. Maybe it’s just Asian Daughter Guilt, but I was comforted when Thea’s mother says to Dr Archie, “The children you don’t especially need, you have always with you, like the poor. But the bright ones get away from you. They have their own way to make in the world. Seems like the brighter they are, the farther they go.” Of course, this doesn’t apply to all children in all families, but it was nice to have this thought to counterbalance the fear of a lack of familial piety, particularly in the service of an ambition, even one so commonplace as personal happiness.

Anyway, not a book I would recommend to just anyone, as it’s a long, not entirely simple read. But definitely the kind of book to give to someone with a talent who might be afraid of pursuing it. Probably a good book for opera lovers, as well. Oh! And I found this fascinating article on the woman who inspired the book, and her relationship with Ms Cather, which was a great supplement to the novel.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/04/22/the-song-of-the-lark-by-willa-cather/

Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett

Fourteen books into Discworld, Lords and Ladies is the first time Terry Pratchett deemed it necessary to put in a note connecting the event in the book at hand to a previous volume. It hasn’t hurt that I have been reading them in order of publication, but it hasn’t been particularly necessary either. And in fact, it’s not terribly necessary to have read Witches Abroad, whose events lead directly into those depicted in Lords and Ladies. There are a few pieces of information it is helpful to know—there are witches not only abroad but also involved, indeed at the center of the action; the youngest of them had reached, or at least hinted at, an Understanding with the local king—but truth to tell, those aren’t all that necessary either.

Lords and Ladies is the fourth Discworld book centered on the witches: Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and Magrat Garlick. One of its strengths is that Pratchett doesn’t have to spend time establishing either the characters or the particular part of the Discworld where the story is set; he can get straight on with the tale, which happens at the intersection of the characters’ characters and external events in the small kingdom of Lancre.

The witches return from abroad, and Magrat finds that the king has not only accepted their Understanding, he has set wedding preparations in motion and advanced them to quite an advanced degree. The wedding will take place on Midsummer, just a few days hence. Guests are already converging on Lancre, including a deputation from the Unseen University, led by the Archchancellor, who turns out to have his own connection to the kingdom from long ago in his youth. Jason Ogg, one of Nanny’s numerous progeny, is shown in his smithy. As a smith, he is privy to a special and very old kind of magic, closer to that of witches than of wizards, but not dependent upon either. He is a particular kind of smith, who can shoe anything someone brings in, but at the cost of being required to shoe anything someone brings in. Pratchett plays the ability once for laughs by describing how Jason once shoed an ant. Then he gives a darker twist, showing one night when Jason shoes a horse for someone who isn’t named, but whom Discworld readers recognize BY THE WAY THAT HE SPEAKS.

Pratchett basically gave up on cheap japes about fantasy after The Light Fantastic, but in Lords and Ladies he plays with a fantasy staple, elves, in a more serious way.

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are marvelous. They cause marvels. Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies. Elves are glamorous. They project glamour. Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment. Elves are terrific. They beget terror. The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.

Long ago, elves were driven out of the Discworld and into a reality next door, but they would like to come back for some fun. In their own particular view of what fun entails. There are some places where the realities are closer to each other; one of them is a hilltop not too far from Lancre town, a hilltop demarcated by a particular group of standing stones. There are times when the realities are closer to each other; Midsummer, for example. And there are things that can call to the Lords and Ladies, the fair folk; young women chafing at the confines of a small kingdom and playing at witchcraft by dancing near certain standing stones, for example, or a smith and his friends—rude mechanicals all—rehearsing in that same place the Entertainment for a king’s upcoming wedding.

There’s the danger, more keenly felt for being on the intimate scale of Lancre, and for the unwitting, normal behavior that put all of the characters in harm’s way. Whether and how Lancre escapes from its peril is the rest of this well-told tale.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/04/17/lords-and-ladies-by-terry-pratchett/

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

I remembered three things from when I read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress long, long ago: the taxonomy of jokes (not funny, funny once, and funny always), that dropping rocks onto earth from the moon was an important part of the revolution, and the significant death at the end. I also remembered liking the book a great deal, enough to have retained a rough outline of the plot and a few significant aspects more than 30 years later. But that was about it, and I am sure that I hadn’t re-read it in at least 20 years, more likely 25 or more.

Re-reading, I can see the book that I liked then, and I saw some of the things that made it stand out back in the 1960s. I also saw the reasons it’s much more of a period piece than its near contemporary, The Left Hand of Darkness — and just look at that run of Hugo winners: 1967 The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; 1968 Lord of Light; 1969 Stand on Zanzibar; 1970 The Left Hand of Darkness. From falling rocks and computing trajectories with the Heinlein straight into a mashup of SF and Indian deities, followed by an explosive stylistic masterpiece, and an anthropological look at power and gender. Only three years later, Moon was already looking a bit old-fashioned.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/04/16/the-moon-is-a-harsh-mistress-by-robert-a-heinlein/

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

Like the human aliens of the planet Gethen, The Left Hand of Darkness is first one thing and then another, encompassing all of them yet remaining bounded by its humanity.

The inhabited worlds of Le Guin’s interrelated Hainish novels are tied together by membership in the Ekumen, eighty-odd planets in something like a trading federation, linked by communication that is faster-than-light communications but travel that is relativistic. When an inhabited world is newly discovered, the Ekumen sends scouts who work discreetly; when they want to make formal contact, they send a single person to act as an envoy.

Genly Ai, a Terran man who is described as dark-skinned but whose ethnic background is not otherwise specified, is the Envoy to the planet Winter, known to its inhabitants as Gethen. The planet is in the depths of an ice age; the human nations there all struggle against the cold, have adapted to it in various ways, and have some customs in common that cross barriers of culture because all cope with harsh conditions. The story opens just before a ceremonial event in the capital of Karhide, a city known as Erhenrang. (The name is very close to German for “rank of honor,” though Le Guin does not, to my knowledge, otherwise play much with alien names that have meanings in Earth languages.) The first chapter is cast as part of Genly’s report back to the Ekumen.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/04/15/the-left-hand-of-darkness-by-ursula-k-le-guin/

The Ballad Of Black Tom by Victor LaValle

I haven’t actually read much Lovecraft, so wasn’t aware of how problematic some of his works, such as The Horror At Red Hook, are in terms of dealing with minorities and immigrants. When this novella was recommended to my Ingress Book Club, I felt that, as a matter of due diligence, I ought to read first the short story it was based on. I’m not, if truth be told, the biggest fan of tales of eldritch horror, and THARH had little to make it noteworthy to me besides the unrelenting bigotry of the story. That said, I was curious to see how Victor LaValle could possibly make something decent out of the source material, and pleasantly surprised when he far exceeded my expectations.

The Ballad Of Black Tom not only subverts the ugly prejudice of THARH but creates a stunning commentary on the rage of the disenfranchised. I had only two real quibbles with it: first, the utter disappearance of Mrs Suydam in the retelling, and second… well, I guess this isn’t a quibble so much as a point of philosophical discomfort. When Black Tom goes to visit the Victoria Society once again, he realizes that the respectability he’d been striving for was there all along, a conclusion that I was totally down with. However, it concerned me that Black Tom, in his melancholy, then seemed to favor a policy of isolation, as if staying insular would have protected him and his loved ones from the terrible things that had happened to them. Perhaps avoiding a life of crime would have spared them police attention, but that doesn’t mean that brutality comes only to the wicked and to the ones around them. Apart from that, a terrific novella overall, and one I wish could have been longer (especially since a longer version might have included a reinterpretation of Suydam’s honeymoon instead of just ignoring it.)

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/04/13/the-ballad-of-black-tom-by-victor-lavalle/

Aunty Lee’s Deadly Specials by Ovidia Yu

So many fiction series start out well then hit a sort of sophomore slump: Ovidia Yu’s Aunty Lee mystery series manages not only to avoid this pitfall but to improve (vastly, in my opinion) on her debut. While the food writing and observations regarding Singaporean mores and personalities are as excellent as before, the mystery is much stronger, with a denouement that felt far less contrived than in its predecessor. It’s not a perfect book by any means — it doesn’t feel like a seamless read due to several rather odd transitions — but it was an incredibly satisfying read for a crime novel junkie like myself, who misses her Southeast Asian homeland.

I also felt that Ms Yu was getting more comfortable with her characters, and with saying perhaps unpopular things. Her first book in this series felt much more circumspect in her treatment of homosexuality; Deadly Specials, however, has a liberal tone in addressing the subject. Similarly for her gentle poking at both government and Singaporean rigidity, exemplified by Aunty Lee’s casual, “Suitable art is just propaganda” when warned that the portfolio she’s about to look at may contain art that’s not very “suitable” for a lady of her age and station. But what I really enjoyed were Ms Yu’s observations, via a discouraged Aunty Lee, regarding the purpose of life

Why bother cooking chicken curry and catching murderers and exercising to lose weight when at the end of it all you wound up dead and not caring about anything?

(don’t worry, she bounces back and tells you) and, even better, her critical examination of class and privilege and religion, extrapolating the issues in the book to hint at how they’re a universal problem

“According to [her], the laws necessary to maintain social order are not the same as God’s laws. To her, that meant she had a God-given right to save her son by any means that did not upset the social order.”

Heady stuff for a cozy mystery, and very promising for future installments. I already have the third book on my wish list!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/04/12/aunty-lees-deadly-specials-by-ovidia-yu/

The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra

Nearly a month after reading The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra, I am still thinking about what made me uneasy while reading it. The nine interlinked stories themselves are a fabulous artistic achievement. Set primarily in Russia’s far north and far south, an Arctic mining center and Chechnya, they range back and forth across Soviet and post-Soviet generations, giving readers portraits, actions and repercussions in ordinary lives of the larger events of Russian history. Marra captures both the absurdities and the hideous choices that people surviving Stalinism faced: a censor wonders whether his new assistant will denounce him to secure a promotion; a ballerina is deported to the far North based on reports that she is involved with a Polish conspiracy to overthrow Bolshevism, once there, she finds that the camp director will see that she gets extra rations if she lends him her talents and herself; a teacher of Polish instructs political prisoners in the language, so that they may use it for their confessions in show trials.

Closer to the present, he shows Russian soldiers in Chechnya just trying to get by in a war none of them believe in, their superiors more concerned with creature comforts and skimming money than anything else. There’s a portrait of growing up in a small, isolated city, familiar to anyone who wouldn’t be kept down on the farm, but with the specific attributes of heavy industry in a climate that’s barely amenable to human habitation. A girl falls in with a man who will become an oligarch, catapulting her to heights of unimaginable wealth, landing her in a gilded cage.

The links among the stories are another fine aspect of Marra’s art. People and objects recur, showing the same events from different perspectives, or tracing themes in Soviet and Russian history. The recurrences never felt forced to me, but they are, I think, part of my unease. As vast as his stage is, the work felt small, self-contained, a tightly wound counterpart to the cassette tape shown unspooling wildly on the book’s cover. Small spaces predominate: the censor’s work space, the well in which the soldiers are eventually kept prisoner, the room where a matron counts the money for letting gangsters use her apartment while she is out during the day. Even the book’s most important outdoor space is fairly small: an unassuming meadow in Chechnya, close to but not in the region’s majestic mountains.

The alignment of the pieces, the interlocking lives, the mirroring of places and subject matter all show Marra as an artist in full control of his medium, perhaps remarkably so for someone’s second book. Certainly coincidences of the kind he depicts took place in the periods he is writing about. Practically every gulag memoir I can recall has at least one moment like that — encountering an acquaintance thousands of miles later, or hearing that someone the writer knew had recently passed that way, swept along by the unfathomable tides of Soviet bureaucracy. They’re hardly the solve province of the past, either. Last fall, Marras was a visiting fellow at a Berlin institution not 20 minutes from where I live and work (I missed any public events he may have had); a Moscow friend went hiking in the mountains visible from the Arctic town Marras describes, though I don’t think her group used it as a base. But the collection of alignments suggests an order, a closedness to the kinds of real lives that Marras is writing about that I just don’t think is there. He has polished his stories to a degree that even the ugliness, even the ample tragedies have a certain beauty about them. I think I would have been left less uneasy, would have liked the book even more than I admired it, if it had been a bit more of a mess. It is, to take its structure’s metaphor, a mix tape; I would have preferred a live performance.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/04/09/the-tsar-of-love-and-techno-by-anthony-marra/

Salvage and Demolition by Tim Powers

Salvage and Demolition is the other Tim Powers novella that I read in an afternoon or so last autumn. It’s a fun mashup of genres: It starts as a noir mystery with a splash of Bukowski and a studied bookishness; it veers [spoilers] into time travel and Lovecraft, with just a little bit of Snow Crash Sumerian.

Is the dame trouble? Of course she is. Should our hero have stayed sober? Almost certainly. Have the old dead gods gone mad? You know it. Does the Ace Double paperback hide the means for saving the world? That would be telling.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/03/24/salvage-and-demolition-by-tim-powers/

Mussolini’s Italy by R.J.B. Bosworth

I had set aside Mussolini’s Italy for the better part of a year after writing about the first third of it, and then I picked it up again just a few weeks ago. Zeitgeist, I suppose.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/03/23/mussolinis-italy-by-r-j-b-bosworth/

The Paper Magician by Charlie N Holmberg

A rather slight novel given the rather amazing magic system on display. I love the fact that magicians can manipulate man-made objects but bond to only one category, and thought the pseudo-Victorian era intriguing, but thought there was a lot of fast and loose played with the society’s rules. Ceony’s journey through the heart was pretty awesome (as was the entire scene that led up to and included the folding of the paper heart) but the romance felt a bit forced, tho maybe that was just my personal discomfort with the balance of power at play here. Perhaps I would have been more comfortable with it had it been paced better: as it was, everything happened so quickly that it was hard to suspend disbelief, particularly with Ceony’s magical skills, her photographic memory notwithstanding. An entertaining book, sure enough, but I’ve been told by a friend who’s read the rest of the series that the other books aren’t even as good as this, so I’ll likely pass on reading more.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/03/23/the-paper-magician-by-charlie-n-holmberg/