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I have four very different books to share this issue-- all simply things that interest me for various reasons: an important book of nonfiction about the Middle East; a collection of excellent poems; a novel of what might be called Appalachian Gothic; and a re-read classic.
The nonfiction book is
Among the Ruins: Syria Past and Present by Christian C. Sahner. This 2014 book from Oxford University Press should have received far more attention than it did. Christian Sahner was in the Middle East working on his Ph.D. thesis on the role of non-Muslims in Islamic societies when the Arab Spring and the present civil war in Syria broke out. He is an historian, not a journalist, but his deep knowledge of
the history, art, and architecture of the region along with his personal experiences living in Syria and Lebanon, make him a wonderful guide to these places and these events.
This is the book I had been waiting for as a way to address my ignorance: what is the difference between the Sunnis and the Shias? What is an 'Alawite (the Muslim sect of the Assad family, recent dictators of Syria)? What is a Druze? Why were the Maronite Christians the ruling elite of Lebanon for so long (they were closely associated with colonial France and involved in Lebanon's separation from Syria in the mid twentieth century)? What were the issues of the Lebanese Civil War thirty years ago, and how do they reflect the issues in the present Syrian civil war?
This is a wonderful, informative yet personal introduction to the history of Greater Syria. Sahner tells how Syria was the center of the early Islamic empire, and how, while it is a Sunni nation, the head of Hussein, the prophet's grandson and hero of the Shia, is entombed in Damascus. He alternates this lively, many layered version of history with personal story that center on real people like his Arabic teacher, the pious Muhammad who is later caught up in the vicissitudes of the Syrian Civil War and ends up as a refugee.
The book makes no predictions about the political future, which truly appears grim, but offers us the history and the culture and the people-- and at least a little hope that some of this will be preserved.
The poems in
Denton Loving's collection Crimes Against Birds have a freshness and clarity that
is never simple but always tremulously open to observation and experience. He names the plants and trees with admirable precision, and turns even the most quotidian lists (what his father likes for breakfast in "Where I'll find My Dad After He Dies!") into something rich and striking. One of my favorite poems comes toward the end ("Elemental"), and it features how "There is no way to tell you..." about so many natural beauties: light, of course, but also April winds blowing blossoms off pear trees. The end of the poem has a Renaissance style turn into a message to the beloved: There is no way to tell how often I think of you, either. You never feel that Loving is showing off his skills, just that he has found the only images (mostly natural) and the only forms for saying what he has to say.
There are a number of oblique but deeply felt love poems: "Morning Light" is about waking and finding last night's dishes cleaned and drying on a tea towel while the lover is absent, perhaps still abed. I also like very much the animal and farming poems like "Reasoning with Cows" in which the narrator's cows shove and bully each other, trying to get the best hay:
I try but can't reason with these brute beasts,
can't make them know this pile and that pile
come from the same bale of hay, and each bale
comes from the same June cutting of summer
grass, fed by the same sun and rains, all
from the same field where their hay has grown
for years and years-- all their many lives.
This poem has a Biblical epigraph and includes an attempt to quote Jesus to the recalcitrant cows. It's charming and witty. There are more cow poems; and bird poems, as the title suggests; dream poems; and lots of poems about light. There are losses of individual people and places, like the wonderful "Horse Cemetery" about a mysterious place on the family farm where past inhabitants executed their old horses, which is also about the subdivision of farms and the end of a way of life.
These are not poems with the natural world as a backdrop, but fully human observations and explorations of a world in which human nature is natural, if often pain-inducing and destructive. As Loving writes in the title poem:
Man cannot walk through life outside the company of birds.
Well, I re-read
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, and while I know I read it long ago, and while you can't have any kind of literary life and not hear references to its characters and famous scenes, and while I certainly remembered it is about a
petit bourgeois doctor's unhappy, romantic wife and her affairs and suicide–it felt like a brand new book to me. I read eagerly, thinking, "How beautiful! How despicable!" I was reacting to Emma herself,
of course, but also to the Bovary's friend the chemist, to stupid husband Charles, to his quarrelsome mother, to Emma's lovers– there is a sense of ugly people and gathering despair through the whole thing.
Halfway through, I stopped to read A.S. Byatt's old
discussion of the book online (the introduction to a Norwegian edition), which was very helpful. Byatt says the novel is all surface, there is no depth, there are only objects and things and Emma's vague yearnings and inevitable steps toward ruin. She and the others are objects, Byatt says, and the book "opened a vision of meaninglessness and emptiness, which was all the more appalling because it was so full of things, clothes and furniture, rooms and gardens."
Then she complains about how "Madame Bovary appeared in a British newspaper listing of the 'fifty best romantic reads.' It was, and is, the least romantic book I have ever read."
Amen to that, and yet, I remember reading it as a young girl and thinking I was supposed to identify with Emma (all the other books were like that!) and then being shocked by the ending.
Byatt also has some good analysis of the place of this seminal work among realist novels: "Fairy stories end with the lovers marrying and living happy ever after. Jane Austen's novels keep that pattern. The great realist novels study at length what happens after marriage, within marriages, within families and businesses. One of the great subjects of the realist novel is boredom–narrow experiences in small places and unsympathetic groups. There is no greater study of boredom thanMadame Bovary–which is nevertheless never boring, but always both terrifying and simultaneously gleeful over its own accuracy."
Probably I didn't give myself over fully to reading the novel this time until near the end. I was deeply moved by Mme. Bovary's long, slow, ugly dying. This section is the great counterweight: Emma loved beautiful objects and sensuality; now we see the senses and objects in dissolution. It is also a wonderful rendering of the social and cultural aspects of dying in this time and place: people constantly come in and out of the death chamber. The effects of the poison are painstakingly described, and then there are elaborate details of the funeral.
The book ends with the brief sad narratives of the other characters' lives. Emma's daughter (who no one bothered to teach to read), for example, ends up as a factory girl. (There's an alternative literature story to write).
I'll end with a quotation from Flaubert's own letters (taken from the A.S. Byatt piece referenced above) about writing one of the big scenes in Madame Bovary. Flaubert asserts that he spent from July to the end of November in 1853 working on this one scene of an agricultural fair. He spoke of it in terms of orchestration. "If the effects of a symphony have ever been conveyed in a book it will be in these pages. I want the reader to hear everything together in one great roar– the bellowing of bulls, the sighing of lovers, the bombast of official oratory. The sun shines down on it all, and there are gusts of wind that threaten to blow off the women's big bonnets. I achieve dramatic effect simply by the interweaving of dialogue and by contrasts of character."
If you've never read Madame Bovary, give it a try. You can get it in any library and free or almost free as an e-book.
Finally, I read
John Michael Cummings' Don't Forget Me, Bro. This novel is set in West Virginia, albeit not the West Virginia I grew up in. He creates a fast-paced, quirky world just this side of Southern Gothic– maybe something more like Appalachian Gothic, which I would suggest is more grounded in this real world than the other kinds.
The novel begins when the narrator, Mark Barr, comes home to a fictional county in the eastern
section of West Virginia upon the death of his schizophrenic brother from diseases related to obesity and alcoholism– related also, the narrator is convinced, to the poor management of his medications. The story takes place during the week between Mark's arrival from New York City, where he has an unsatisfying life in a long term but dysfunctional relationship, and the family's final disposal of his brother's remains. There is a lot of event and rich
mise-en-scène, which captures the world as Mark apprehends it. The interiors of houses are stuffed with clutter and cluttered with stuff. Cummings gives long, entertaining descriptions of the old furniture and boxes and stacks of magazines. There are also wonderful passages of landscape that never drift from the intense darkly humorous vision of the main character:
An old, familiar melancholy returned. Did sorrow live in these hills, in the black rocks and brittle brown brush? Did it somehow kill Steve? All around me, mountains were streaked brown like stained commodes and skeleton-shell barns flashed by, as if retreating. In that moment, I felt that this land had never stopped waiting for me to return. That like an enemy, it had me for life.
(p. 11 manuscript galleys)
The tight time frame and story line hold together Mark's picaresque rambles through the tiny towns of his youth-- and his memories. He is on a quest for his brother Steve and, of course, for his family and for himself. Along the way he encounters a number of vivid characters like the possibly pederastic wheel-chair bound neighbor who took hundreds of photographs of Steve in symbolic outfits and Steve's mentally challenged girl friend. Most especially there is the angry, abusive father Bill who lives separately from his wife in a mini-survivalist wing--nut world. Mark's mother is vague and weak, but comes into focus as she obsessively arranges the trove of photographs of Steve in costumes. At one point Mark imagines her thoughts as she observes her husband and two surviving sons working on a truck:
....Why her family was working on poor Steve's truck, finally, how nice. So important the men of the family lean over a smelly, dirty truck engine with the backsides stuck out like cows at a watering trough. Mercy, men and their mechanical contrivances!
Mark's father has decided to cremate Steve and not allow the remains to be buried in the family plot, as Steve appears to have wanted. Steve's end-of-life phone calls to Mark and others may or may not have been rational, but Mark is determined to follow his wishes. He cannot bear the idea of cremation for his brother:
....the word didn't sound like itself, but rather something... I might do with food: cremated chicken soup, cremated apple pie. No: fire, industrial-sized oven, Steve vaporized, gone, no casket, no body in the ground, nothing. Poof.
The final phase of the novel is how Mark both fails and succeeds as he tries to get hold of Steve's ashes, and then finds a way to deal with them. In the end, the novel is a comedy in the classic sense of having a kind of happy ending. Mark's neurotic relationship ends, and he thinks he is going to stop wandering around the country and stay in Appalachia. But mostly, the family – amazingly together for the first time in decades– turns a deteriorating parlor in a deteriorating house into a shrine for Steve's ashes.
It's not a lot, but enough for Mark, and to satisfy us readers.
SHORT TAKES (by MSW Unless Otherwise Noted)
Song of West Virginia by Marc Harshman
This is beautiful limited commemorative edition of West Virginia poet laureate Marc Harshman's long poem was written in honor of the 150th anniversary of the great state of West Virginia. There are only 1,000 copies (numbered), printed on glossy paper with magnificent photos of the state by Steve Shaluta (you can order directly from Quarrier Press at
www.wvbookco.com).
The poem sings its song of the mountains, the music, the history, and the ordinary people. It highlights everyone from Chief Logan to Sid Hatfield and Mother Jones, from Chuck Yaeger and Mary Lou Retton to Anna Jarvis and John Henry. It is a poem of celebration, not political protest or even criticism, but near the end, Harshman exhorts us all to
...Take up the patterns
of those who've given us their lives. Take up the patches of this history quilt, this
dream-flagged quilt. Wave it high and walk proud these crumpled folds and crags of
mountain and valley, these green, rolling hills. And let no man haul it way, no
coward with a bankroll buy us out, no circus fast-talkers take what's ours.
It's a splendid book and a stirring poem-- even if you don't have the good fortune to be a native of West Virginia!
Canada by Richard Ford
I read this because it came up as a very cheap e-book in a promotion from Amazon. I haven't' read much of Ford's work, so I tried Canada, and generally liked it with a few reservations about too much faux philosophy. It begins as a study of a family that goes extremely wrong when the parents decide to deal with their financial problems by robbing a bank. They do it stupidly, out of a kind of contempt for the people in the small town where the bank is. Their action destroys the family as a family, and comes close to destroying the lives of the children as well, a twin brother and sister.
The narrator of the novel is the boy twin, and his flight from being a ward of the state (in Great Falls, Montana) takes him across the border into Canada and an association with a crime much worse than bank robbery. He survives this too, and the story moves well with its mid nineteen sixties background and wonderful landscapes in Montana and Saskatchewan.
Thomas Eakins by Fairfield Porter
This little monograph has been sitting around in my mother's house for thirty years or so. The reproductions aren't great, but they are ample. A lot to learn about Eakins, whose dates are 1844 to 1916. He was very practical and severe, determined to make his art into work (possibly suffering from guilt over how his father supported him) but also to present a severe truth. His casual but important work on creating a method of using a single camera to photograph motion was seminal but unappreciated by the film industry.
I particularly liked his portraits of Americans, and the famous realistic images of medical events:
Scenes from Village Life by Amos Oz
A collection of Oz's stories, which I admire exceedingly, although I never warm to his work as much as I feel I ought to. I very much recommend the
wonderful memoir of growing up in Israel and his mother's death, but even that one feels just a little distant to me. These stories have more magical realism than I expected, and each piece is brilliant and sad. It's also an inside look at Israeli life in a little town that has become popular with weekenders and antiquers. Oz is a life long, patriotic Israeli who also thinks that the government has been largely mistaken in its politics. The political is only peripheral here, though: just sad people struggling in a vaguely twilit atmosphere, thwarted loves, loss and yearning.
JOHN BIRCH E-READER REPORT: SALES OF E-BOOKS STILL HAVE A WAY TO GO BEFORE THEY OUTSELL TRADITIONALLY PUBLISHED BOOKS
More readers this past summer were still reading traditional "old fashioned" hard cover and paperback books than e-books, according to the worldwide ratings firm Nielsen, who report that digital book purchases accounted for only 21% of all industry sales. Paperbacks accounted for 43% of all book sales, while hardcover sales stayed "fairly steady" at 25%.
These figures pretty much prove that digital books still have a way to go before they ever beat print. It seems, too, that readers would rather wait for the traditionally published paperback version to come out, rather than shell out extra money for the hardcover. Nielsen's quarterly book surveys show that out of the 21% of people buying e-books, 57% bought the Kindle editions from Amazon, and that Barnes & Noble's Nook was the only other major competitor, garnering 14% of all digital book sales. Apple had a modest 6% market share.
There's a beautiful meditation of family in John's blog. Read "A CHRISTMAS TO FORGET " in John's December post at www.JohnBirchLive.blogspot.com
READ AND LISTEN ONLINE
ANNOUNCEMENTS, BOOKS RECEIVED, CONTESTS, WORKSHOPS, READINGS ETC.
The Ginosko Literary Journal is accepting short fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, social justice, literary insights for Ginosko Literary Journal. See http://GinoskoLiteraryJournal.com/ . Editorial lead time is 1-2 months; they accept simultaneous submissions & reprints; length flexible, accept excerpts. Receives postal and e-mail submissions—prefer e-mail submissions as attachments in .wps, .doc, .rtf. —or by Submittable, https://ginosko.submittable.com/submit/ . Authors retain copyrights. Read year-round.
Now available: Valley At Risk: Shelter in Place, a Novel by Dwight Harshbarger, at http://valleyatrisk.com.
See www.longreads.com for the best of the New Yorker, Gawker, etc.–nonfiction of the week
Fred Skolik (writing as Fred Russell) has a new novel, The Links in the Chain. It is available at Amazon or through the publisher at http://www.cclapcenter.com/linksinchain .
In the late 1980s, the Arab-Israel conflict reaches the streets of a pre-gentrified New York City when an Israeli minister visits his sister in Brooklyn and rival assassins play a deadly game of cat and mouse with the minister's nephew, a young horse-playing slacker by the name of Arnold Gross. Gross may be sharp and wise in the ways of the street but finds that he has bitten off more than he can chew when he comes up against the PLO, the Israeli secret service, fugitive Nazis and more money than he knows how to count. Written with stylistic flare and an insider's knowledge of the Middle East, this Elmore-Leonardesque crime caper is a pitch-black yet smartly hilarious look at a bygone age, a droll retro thriller that enhances the growing reputation of American-Israeli author Fred Russell.
Norman Julian's award-winning novel Cheat has gone to a third printing and is available for the first time on Amazon.com. as a new book. An adventure tale first published in 1984, it takes place in the severe winter of 1975-76 in the Cheat River area. Ken Sullivan, head of the West Virginia Humanities Council, called it "a thrilling adventure story set in the upper Cheat River Country...a far more sympathetic portrayal of mountain life than James Dickey's book and movie, `Deliverance.'" Paul Atkins, professor emeritus of the WVU School of Journalism, said, "It has a lot of suspense. You wanted to get back to it after you put it down." The late Ruel Foster, past chair of the WVU English Department, said, "It has something of Jack London's sense of the wild earth and the wild life that moves upon it." Julian says, "It is heartening that `Cheat' continues to sell year after year. The hope is that now that it is available on Amazon, more readers can be reached." The book is published by Trillium Publishing in cooperation with CreateSpace. http://www.amazon.com/Cheat-A-novel-West-Virginia/dp/1468181378
ABOUT AMAZON.COM
The largest unionized bookstore in America has a webstore at Powells Books. Some people prefer shopping online there to shopping at Amazon.com. An alternative way to reach Powell's site and support the union is via http://www.powellsunion.com. Prices are the same but 10% of your purchase will go to support the union benefit fund.
For a discussion of Amazon and organized labor and small presses, see the comments of Jonathan Greene and others in Issues #97 and #98 .
WHERE TO FIND BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS NEWSLETTER
If a book discussed in this newsletter has no source mentioned, don’t forget that you may be able to borrow it from your public library as either a hard copy or a digital copy. You may also buy or order from your local independent bookstore. (To find a bricks-and-mortar store, click the "shop indie" logo left).
To buy books online, I often go first to Bookfinder or Alibris. Bookfinder gives the price with shipping and handling, so you can compare what you’re really going to have to pay.
A lot of people whose political instincts I respect prefer the unionized bricks-and-mortar bookstore Powells (see "About Amazon.com" above) that sells online at http://powellsbooks.com.
Another source for used and out-of-print books is All Book Stores. Also consider Paperback Book Swap, a postage only way to trade books with other readers.
If you are using an electronic reader like Kindle, Nook, or Kobo, don't forget free books at theGutenberg Project—mostly classics, but free, free, free!
Kobobooks.com sells books for independent brick-and-mortar bookstores.
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Books for Readers Newsletter by Meredith Sue Willis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.meredithsuewillis.com. Some individual contributors may have other licenses.
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