What "The People" Means

from "The People"
in China in Ten Words
Yu Hua

This was a key moment in my life. I had always assumed the light carried farther than human voices and voices carry farther than body heat. But that night I realized that it is not so, for when the people stand as one, their voices carry farther than light and their heat is carried farther still. That, I discovered, is what "the people" means.

The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry--Kathleen Flinn

In a word, not to keep you in suspense, charming.  A memoir cum travelogue cum cookbook, Ms. Flinn tells the story of leaving corporate America and pursuing her dream of a degree from one of the most prestigious cooking schools in the world.

Ms. Flinn tells her adventures while attending all three courses at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris--basic, intermediate, and superior.  Along the way we learn about the Chefs, their moods, their modes, their recipes, their haunts.  We also learn a bit about Paris, a good deal about the school, and a great deal about Ms. Flinn, who sounds like a wonderful person--one both interesting and entertaining to be with.

Living in Paris Ms. Flinn plays host to any number of visitors--from one young man who bursts into her apartment to find the bathroom and spend much of the rest of his stay with her recovering from food poisoning picked up in London, to the visitation of two extremely trying young women who allow Kathleen and her husband to foot the bill for much of their stay.

Along the way, Ms. Flinn cooks, cringes away from some of the darker moods of some of the chefs, gets married, worries over her newly-wed husband. She also tells us something of the history of the school, of cuisine, of Paris itself.

And it all reads like one long love story--for Ms. Flinn gets married in the middle of it, but obviously loves Paris as much as Hemingway, though in a very different way.

Ms. Flinn, despite her high-flying career and her success at Le Cordon Bleu comes off as genuine, interesting, fun.  She offers to her readers this wonderfully considered piece of advice:

As in cooking, living requires that you taste, taste, taste as you go along--you can't wait until the dish of life is done.  In my career, I always looked ahead to the place I wanted to go, the next rung on the ladder. It reminds me of "The Station" by Robert Hastings, a parable read at our wedding.  The message is that while on a journey, we are sure the answer lies at the destination.  But in reality, there is no station, no "place to arrive once and for all. The joy of life is in the trip, and the station is a dream that constantly outdistances us."

Highly recommended--*****

House of Silk--Anthony Horowitz

Hmmm, I thought to myself as I glanced at the book, Anthony Horowitz, isn't he the author of a whole bunch of YA young spy kinds of things?  And here he is continuing the Sherlock Holmes Opus?

It's scary enough when great, well known writers of mystery decide to continue the opus--few of these are entirely successful--most are marginal.  And here is a person I know little--indeed next-to-nothing about presuming to tread on this sacred ground.

Well, I'm here to tell you that House of Silk is among the very finest continuations of the Holmes saga.  Perhaps a bit too much Elephants Can Remember, Sleeping Murder, or Curtain--but that's rather a matter of taste.  And to my taste, this was superb.  We start with a mysterious stranger, evidently a Boston thug threatening an Englishman who had only just recently returned from America--and we move on into murder, mayhem, opium dens, and conspiracy in high places to keep entirely hidden the secrets of the House of Silk of the title.

Mr. Horowitz deftly captures the spirit and even to some extent the language of the original.  His smooth, well-informed writing is such that it made reading a novel-length Sherlock Holmes adventure a real pleasure.  If you are a fan of the great one, you would do yourself a favor by reading this book!

****1/2

Later--Another view of the same--even more favorable than my own.  And I agree with the reviewer--the book is quite a stunning achievement--nearly as good as Doyle himself.  A truly seamless addition to the canon.

2011 Reading in Review

• Adiga--Last Man in Tower--12/16/11 *****
• Bell--The Reapers Are the Angels--2/10/11 *****
• Bennett--Pay Me in Flesh--9/12/11 ***
• Berry--The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford--7/21/11 *****
• Blackthorne--Edge--5/6/11 ***
• Bohjalian--The Night Strangers--11/15/11 ***
• Boyle--When the Killing's Done--4/29/11 ***1/2
• Brockmeier--The Illumination--5/22/11 ****
• Castro--Z is for Zombie--2/4/11 ***
• Cline--Ready Player One--8/21/11 *****
• Connolly--The Gates--10/27/11 *****
• Dashner--The Death Cure--12/20/11 ***
• Eugenides--The Marriage Plot--11/23/11 ****1/2
• Fisher--Shockaholic--12/28/11 ****
• Flew--There Is a God--1/8/11 *****
• Grann--The Lost City of Z--12/07/11 *****
• Hearne--Hammered--8/15/11 ****
• Hearne--Hounded--6/25/11 ****
• Hearne--Hexed--7/5/11 ****
• Henry--Lime Creek--11/26/11 ***1/2
• Hemingway--The Green Hills of Africa--1/18/11--abandoned
• Johnson--Train Dreams--11/27/11 *****
• Kadrey--Sandman Slim--3/16/11 ****
• Keilson--Comedy in a Minor Key--2/1/11 *****
• Kerouac--On the Road--10/7/11 ***1/2
• Lawrenson--The Lantern--10/26/11 ***1/2
• Lianke--Dream of Ding Village--3/15/11 *****
• Littlefield--Aftertime--10/10/11 ****
• Maberry--King of Plagues--4/4/11***1/2
• Maberry--Rot & Ruin--2/3/11 *****
• McEuen--Spiral--5/1/11 *****
• Mann--The Affinity Bridge--2/7/11 ****
• Martinez--Gil's All Fright Diner--6/21/11 ****
• Maugham--The Painted Veil--6/13/11 ****
• Moser--Washington's Lady--8/12/11 ****
• Mullen--The Revisionists--11/8/11 *****
• Palma--The Map of Time--11/2/11 *****
• Parks--On the Banks of the River of Heaven--4/16/11 ****1/2
• Preston and Child--Gideon's Sword--10/1/11 ***
• Pym--Excellent Women--1/26/11 *****
• Ross--Listen to This--2/7/11 ***1/2
• Ruden--Paul Among the People--1/11/11 *****
• Scherman (ed.)--Artscroll English Tanach--3/14/11 *****
• Soseki--Kokoro--1/16/11 *****
• Stegner--Crossing to Safety--12/16/11 ****
• Straub--The Special Place--4/22/11
• Thompson--The Killer Inside Me--7/8/11****1/2
• von Le Fort--Song at the Scaffold--12/26/11 ***
• Weisel--Rashi--11/29/11 ****
• Wells--Variant--11/20/11 ****1/2
• Williams--This Is Not a Game--2/12/11 ****
• Williams--Muzzled--abandoned
• Wilson--Jack: Secret Histories--4/17/11 ***1/2
• Wilson--Jack: Secret Circles--4/21/11 ****
• Wilson--Midnight Mass--3/28/11 ****
• Wilson--Soft and Others--4/29/11 ****
• Wodehouse--The Mating Season--6/26/11 ***1/2
• Zadoorian--The Leisure Seeker--12/29/11 *****
• Zeltserman--A Killer's Essence--11/19/11 ****1/2

Last Man in Tower--Aravind Adiga

One of the blurbs on the back of Mr. Adiga's latest book compares him with Charles Dickens--and perhaps this comparison is more apropos than might seem at first glance.  The White Tiger, Mr. Adiga's first book, won the Man Booker Prize the year it came out. It was a savage indictment of the current regime in India with a sharp look at the cost and benefits of "outsourcing."  One might think about it as the inside story of outsourcing.  Between the Assassinations, a kind of novel in short stories, I have not read.  This third work, is larger in volume and yet somewhat smaller in scope than either of the first two.

Mr. Adiga takes us into the lives of the residents of an apartment house that comes to the attention of a building constructor who wants to place on the site new luxury apartments.  The developer offers the people in towers A and B a princely sum for their houses.  Almost all of the residents want to take him up on it.  But there is a single hold-out--Masterji.

The story charts the early benevolence/indifference of the residents and their gradually increasing concern as Masterji's reluctance to leave his home endangers the deal for everyone.

Adiga gives us a story of corruption, greed, desperation, poverty, family, and friends.  It is exemplary of the adage that "The Love of Money is the root of all evil."  For in this book it is the deep love of money that drives the residents to their actions, which include all manner of inducements and punishments to force Masterji to change his mind.

Adiga obviously loves his native India and is rightfully concerned about what is happening there--to the culture, to the people, to the city.  His story is Dickensian, as I said above, because his chief concern (other than telling a fantastically good story) is to address the evil rife in India and in the hearts of all of those who choose to value the material at the cost of the human and the humane.  Just as Dickens looked with mordant eye upon the morals and mores of the straight-laced but sometimes conflicted Victorian society he was part of, Adiga does the same for the society of India right now--and by extension through out-sourcing and other connections for the world at large.   As with The White Tiger, Last Man in Tower is an often savage indictment of society and an intimate portrait of the human heart.

*****

Song at the Scaffold Gertrud von Le Fort

I have to admit that this short novel came as something of a disappointment.  Perhaps my expectations were set much too high by so many reviewers.

Ms. von Le Fort tells the story of the Carmelite Martyrs of Compiegne--seventeen Carmelites who were executed just before the end of the Terror.  She tells the story from the point of view of one who, while desiring most of all martyrdom, is trapped in the martyrdom of the one who escaped.

Short, easy to read, but not at all what I expected from a book so highly praised.  It suggests that I need to go back and reread. Or perhaps better, return to the short opera by Fracois Poulenc which the work inspired--"Dialogue of the Carmelites."

***

The Leisure Seeker--Michael Zadoorian

Sometimes you're browsing through the fiction in the library and for no reason at all a book falls off the shelve and into your hands.  You look into it, evaluating, wondering.  You're caught by a sentence on the first page, or perhaps your eye crosses a paragraph further on in the novel and you're caught.

I have many such experiences, but, like most blind dates, they don't work out.  You take them home for a leisurely read and you wonder, "Now what exactly did I see in this book?"  I bring home piles of books every week.  In fact, I am single-handedly responsible for keeping the library funded in my county--I keep those books and other materials moving in and out at a pace defying imagination.  Bring home two bags with thirty potential candidates and wind up returning sixteen of them the next week.  The others age well on my to-be-read shelf, but eventually they too make it back to the library--mostly unread.

Michael Zadoorian's book was one such blind date that worked it--spectacularly.  I found something of interest while at the library--got the book home and devoured it in one evening.  It just worked for me.

The story of an older couple--the woman with metastatic cancer and the man with Alzheimer's, but not completely lost to it yet.  The woman decides against conventional wisdom, doctor's orders, and pleading children that what she and her husband need is a break--so John and Ella load up the Leisure Seeker and set out from Detroit to explore what is left of route 66--heading from its starting point to its end in California.

So yes, it's a geezer's road-trip novel and despite all that is working against it, it succeeds, beautifully.  You become involved with John and Ella and you recognize that some of the heartbreakingly beautiful things that Ella realizes along the way would serve us well in life today.  The novel is about love, about the extremes of love and hope, and about coming to terms with who you are and where you are in life.  There is so much that is so beautiful about the novel that I can even forgive the ending--which actually surprised me--surprised me so much that I had to wonder whether or not it was true to the characters themselves.  It was certainly true to explicitly stated intent, but. . . I'm not quite certain about whether or not these characters would do that.

That said, the problem I have with the end of the novel did not undo the delight I discovered in the rest of it.  Join John and Ella on their many adventures through the American West and see if they aren't delightful if somewhat curmudgeonly and occasionally quite disagreeable companions. 

*****

Shockaholic--Carrie Fisher

I've read the previous memoir, Wishful Drinking and. . . well. . . I suppose enjoyed is not quite the right word for my experience with it--although my recollection of it was enough to make me pick this up when in the library.

This continues the story begun in Wishful Drinking and the title refers directly to Carrie Fisher's treatment for near suicidal depression and related psychiatric problems.  While the book does talk about and illuminate this aspect of her life, it doesn't stop there and dwell on things.  Indeed, the most substantial part of this book is a loving and in many ways compassionate memoir of her later life with her famous father Eddie Fisher.

I don't follow celebrity news or entanglements, so it came as something of a revelation to me (not of the fireworks and sudden dawn variety) that Elizabeth Taylor was, for some small part of Ms. Taylor's life, the step-mother of Carrie Fisher.  And you all say, "Well, duh!"  Told you I wasn't connected.

One point I did want to make about the book comes from a cover blurb, as this says it far better than I could:

"[Fisher] has a talent for lacerating insight that masquerades as carefree self-deprecation. . . The effect, ultimately, is extraordinarily painful while being extremely entertaining."

I enjoyed this book as well--though I'm not certain that enjoyed is again the right word.  I learned from it--I learned from it something about what it means to be famous, something about what it means to travel in the circles of the famous, and something about what it means to be human--especially a human being in pain.  Whether she intended to do so or not, Ms. Fisher's observations in the book can teach each of something about what it means to love and to be loved.

Funny, biting, tender, forthright, utterly fascinating, truly, deeply, compassionately human and humane--the book is all of these things.  I wish Ms. Fisher health, well-being, and a continuation of the ability to inform and enlighten.

The Death Cure--James Dashner

Mr. Dashner rounds out the trilogy begun in The Maze Runners and continued in The Scorch Trials.  These are of the YA genre that seems to have escalated in popularity in recent days--bad adults put young people in serious danger for some perceived good or order in society.  It is understandable why they appeal to young people, because we all remember the times when the adult world was out to subvert us and to harm us "for our own good."  But it does become a trifle tiresome after a while, and this third book of the series bears this out.

While the series ends, it doesn't seem finished.  This last book seemed somewhat overlong and rambling without really getting to a critical point.  Mr. Dashner seemed not to know where he wanted to be with the book--Teen Angst or ZA (Zombie Apocalypse--for those not up on the terminology).  As a result, the book seemed a bit of a muddle to me.

However, if you've read this far, you'll want to finish out the series, so enjoy.  A light enough read with a few annoying aspects (language and plot) but it completes the story.

***

Crossing to Safety--Wallace Stegner

I should preface the bulk of my comments by saying that I finished this book on the way home from a trip to Austin.  When I completed it my initial impulse was to hurl it across the room.  My secondary impulse was to want to shred--eviscerating it, destroying it page by painful page--to inflict upon it some of the relentless damage it inflicted upon my psyche in the reading of it.  All of which is to say I had a very personal and substantial reaction to it.  If one follows Harold Bloom's notion that great literature "reads the reader" then I am left with the interesting quandary of wondering whether I want to know what it found out in the reading.

Crossing to Safety is the chronicle of two couples.  They meet in depression era America in a university setting and the story follows them as one couple, affluent and gracious, welcomes the other couple into their family circle. We see the couples in good times and in bad for each of them--through loss of job and success as a writer.

The book is at times over-written, as though the author is striving much too hard to pull from the reader some emotion.  But for the vast majority of the book, it is extremely well-done and hits the notes just perfectly.  They recall the time in the lives of each one of us when we've shared a closeness with our friends that can only be state simply--for to do more is to overstate.

So--why my reaction to the book?  Well, to say the full extent of it would be to tell too much of the story--but let it stay at the fact that one of the characters isn't merely a control freak--she is the template of all such.  There is much good about her--but this one flaw is so vast and so all-encompassing that the entire story was darkened for me.

On the basis of reading this work, I am convinced that it will take an army to make me pick up another work by the same author.  Nevertheless, I recognize this as a personal reaction and can nevertheless highly recommend the book to people with broader tolerances than my own.

****

The Lost City of Z--David Grann

I had read about this book last year when there was a huge amount of hype.  I'm highly allergic to hype--I break-out in all sort of unpleasant spots and rashes.  I stayed far, far away for fear of the hype-allergens.

Strolling through the Library looking for books to support my son in his study of the civilizations of Peru, I saw this.  The hype had died down, everything was safe for approach, so I grabbed it off the shelf opened it up and fell in.

Fell in completely--so much so that midway through reading I went out and purchased the book.  For those of you who as children read the "lost worlds" novels of Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and most prominently H. Rider Haggard, this is a treat beyond imagining.  It tells the true story of a Amazon explorer who was dedicated to the task of finding the legendary lost city of Z.  Sometimes called El Dorado, sometimes thought to be completely impossible, the Lost city of Z became the personal obsession of Percy Harrison Fawcett and his family.

Fawcett had spent many years and had taken many trips to the Amazon river basin--one to map the boundary between Bolivia and Brazil.  In the course of his explorations he encountered all of the horrors of exploration (something often glossed over in the more romantic versions we're used to)--insects, predators, disease, and near starvation.

I think if anything came as a kind of ah-ha moment to me (though given my training it shouldn't have) it was the paucity of food available in the green darkness.  It is a kind of anti-paradise--so much so that many anthropologists concluded that no sophisticated civilization could have taken root in the hostile environment.

Normally I read non-fiction exceedingly slowly and in measured amounts so as to take notes and fully absorb what I am reading.  I read this one in big gulps and relished every moment.

In this case, the hype was right--good writing, good adventure, remarkable conclusion--satisfying all round.

*****  Highly, highly, highly, highly recommended to everyone who has enjoyed a lost-race novel and who has relished the thought of being an explorer themselves.