as long as we're going down

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

D. E. Stevenson’s The House on the Cliff. This was Stevenson’s last novel, and although it’s technically set at the time it was written (the 1960s), it feels more like an interwar period piece. But otherwise it’s classic charming Stevenson. Young Elfrida Jane inherits a house in Cornwall from her estranged grandparents (who disinherited Elfrida’s mother after she married an actor), and the book is all about her settling into the neighborhood, reveling in the possession of her own home, learning about farming and gardening, and swimming on the delightful little beach at the base of the cliffs.

E. M. Delafield’s The Provincial Lady in London. Somehow Stevensons and Delafields often end up going together in my reading, although I think Delafield at her grimmest gets much darker than Stevenson, who doesn’t have a grim mode. In any case, the Provincial Lady books feature Delafield at her most sprightly. In this book, the Provincial Lady uses the funds from her first book (Diary of a Provincial Lady) to get a flat in London, and also meets many literary people on the strength of her newfound literary fame.

Finally, I zipped through Jane Langton’s Her Majesty, Grace Jones. After a neighbor tells Grace that she looks just like the little English princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, Grace Jones decides that she’s obviously a secret, third Windsor sister, growing up in secret in America to take the throne once she gets older! Mostly family hijinks. The kids put on a circus, which is always great fun.

What I’m Reading Now

Hilary McKay’s latest, Rosa by Starlight. Loving this book! Finally, a book that remembers fictional orphans are for Gothic Whump and Adventure and Magic. I believe we may be getting a literal magic cat and I’m so excited.

What I Plan to Read Next

I am going to give Project Hail Mary a try if it kills me. Baffling that I feel so resistant to it, because I really liked The Martian! But here we are.

Like many of Solzhenitsyn’s books, In the First Circle has a tortured publication history. It was first written in the 1950s, revised in vain hope of official Soviet publication in 1964, published in the West in 1968, and then republished for the first time in its full form in 2008, which is the version I read. So if you’ve read the book but this review sounds like it came out of an alternate universe, possibly you read the earlier version.

The biggest change was to the action that kicks off the novel. In the first published version, Volodin makes a telephone call to a doctor to warn him not to share information about an experimental drug with his Western colleagues, as the security apparatus would consider that a traitorous act. In the 2008 version, Volodin calls the US embassy to warn them that a Soviet spy is going to try to steal the secrets of the nuclear bomb.

In both versions, this telephone call kicks off a flurry of activity in a sharaksha - that is, a special secret prison where prisoners with scientific skills work on making inventions for the state. One of these inventions is a process for identifying the voice of a caller on an anonymous phone call, which has just jumped to number one priority for the security services.

In other hands, this premise might set off a suspenseful game of spy-vs-spy. In fact, the New York Times review quoted on the cover says the story is “filled with suspense,” which frankly makes me suspect that the reviewer read a synopsis rather than the book, which could not be less interested in suspense.

Instead, Solzhenitsyn uses this incident as a kaleidoscope to explore not only the world of the sharaksha, but all the many lives touched by the existence of this special prison: not just the prisoners themselves, but the guards, the guards’ supervisors, the entire security apparatus up to Stalin himself, not to mention the prisoner Nerzhin’s wife and her fellow grad students and the young man she’s been flirting with, even as Nerzhin flirts with one of the female state employees in the prison…

Ostensibly, the First Circle of the title is a reference to the sharaksha, Dante’s first circle of Hell where the virtuous pagans live: the nicest part of Hell, but still Hell. But in fact it seemed to me that this circle expanded to include the lives of everyone touched by the prison, perhaps everyone in the Soviet Union in 1950. A grad student struggling over whether to turn informer or risk having her thesis failed if she refuses. A minion of Stalin’s struggling to find a reply when Stalin puckishly suggests that if they bring the death penalty back, the minion might be the first to go! Stalin himself, miserable and alone, isolated by the terror he has created in everyone around him.

What will you do to make yourself comfortable? Who will you hurt to make your own life better? Solzhenitsyn is not an ascetic for asceticism’s sake - some of the most charming scenes in the book are little moments of comfort that the prisoners have managed to scrape out - but he is absolutely opposed to purchasing comfort, safety, or indeed even survival at the cost of someone else.

(Once Solzhenitsyn was exiled to America, Americans were apparently distressed by his disdain for American materialism, but we really should have seen it coming. We are after all a nation of people largely happy to treat “Well of course Amazon exploits its workers and undermines local businesses and is simply overall evil, but it’s so convenient” as a clinching moral argument in favor of shopping at Amazon.)

A note about how to read this book: I struggled for the first hundred pages or so because I was trying to keep track of all the characters. As Solzhenitsyn introduces a new batch of characters every five chapters or so, this swiftly becomes impossible, especially because he never stops doing this. You might expect that at some point he’d decide he’s assembled the whole cast, but no, right up till quite near the end he’s happy to hare off for two chapters to go on a digression (fascinating! Rich in psychological and philosophical detail!) about a character we’re never going to see again.

As you can imagine, trying to keep track of all these characters (each of whom has their own little cast of side characters) is very frustrating, and my reading experience became much more pleasant when I realized it was also unnecessary. Much better just to read the book like you’re floating down a river. The most important characters will bob up again and again, so you’ll come to know them quite well. Other characters may just be islands that you’ll float past, interesting in their own right of course, but it’s also fine if you can’t remember all the details about Yakonov and his ex-girlfriend who goes to church because the regime is anti-church, which all occurred decades ago so why are we having two chapters about it now? Well, because it’s another little chip of colored glass in our kaleidoscope, that’s why.

And if it turns out a character you thought was an island is actually a boat who keeps floating along, so you do need to know that name after all? Well, that’s why there’s a character index at the start of the book.

Solzhenitsyn is not the least interested in suspense, in plot. He’s interested in character, in exploring different viewpoints on how to live in the world, and in exploring different facets of that world until it feels like a real and breathing place. The book is nearly 750 pages, but in the end, I still wanted to keep on exploring.

When we first began to discuss Year of Sail, littlerhymes and I knew we wanted to give the Aubrey-Maturin series a try. But we approached it with some trepidation, as we have each separately attempted Aubrey-Maturin before and bombed out.

I don’t know the details of littlerhymes’ first attempt, but I first tried it in the early 2000s, when I was a young teenager, after I read sartorias’s post about the series. I struggled through chapter three, in which Stephen Maturin receives an incredibly technical tour of the ship’s* rigging, and then he and Jack Aubrey discuss the case of a seaman who is supposed to be court-martialed for committing sodomy on a goat (!). The combination defeated me utterly.

*The ship is not in fact a ship but actually a brig, another point that agonized my tiny teenage brain. “Aren’t they all boats?” I wailed, thus sending all seamen within hearing distance into a state of apoplexy.

I am happy to report that this time we made it past chapter three! Made it all the way to the end of the book, and indeed enjoyed it enough to plan to read the next one! I still have no idea what’s going on with the brig’s rigging or why there’s a type of boat called a snow, but as an older and wiser reader I simply drift past these technical details. Possibly over time it will all fall into place. By the end of Year of Sail I might be talking about topgallants with the best of them.

In the meantime, let me introduce our protagonists.

Jack Aubrey, master and commander of the brig Sophie, which is like being a captain but also, technically, not a captain. The anti-Hornblower. Where Hornblower is cool, logical, awkward, and good at math, Jack Aubrey is warm, loud, emotional, terrible at math, and actually also kind of awkward but in a way where he is almost always completely unaware of it. Witness the scene where he complains to Lieutenant Dillon that lots of new sailors of Irish Papists, remembers that Dillon is Irish and realizes with horror that Dillon might take this as an insult to the Irish, so tries to cover himself by doubling down on how much he hates Papists. JACK.

Stephen Maturin, who becomes the Sophie’s surgeon, even though technically he’s a physician which is WAY better than a surgeon. “We call this thing by a thing that is not its name” is a definite theme here. Part Irish, part Catalan, all naturalist. Loves birds, beasts, medicine, music, and Jack. “He’s so stupid (affectionate),” he explains to Lieutenant Dillon, whom he knew previously when they were both members of the United Irishmen, a non-revolutionary party that perhaps became revolutionary? I’m unclear about the details. Anyway, now quite a dangerous association to have in one’s past.

James Dillon, lieutenant of the Sophie. Not over Jack’s attempt to apologize for the Irish thing by emphasizing that it’s PAPISTS he has a problem with. All but accuses Jack of cowardice, which is almost as wrong-headed as accusing Stephen of not loving insects enough. Realizes Jack is not a coward, briefly likes Jack, then hates Jack again for reasons that are in fact unrelated to Jack.

( spoilers )

Queeney. A childhood friend of Jack’s who helps him get his appointment as captain of the Sophie. Not a protagonist, but I had to include her because I was so proud of recognizing her as a real life person: Hester Thrale’s eldest daughter! Evidence: Hester Thrale’s eldest daughter was called Queeney. Hester Thrale was a great friend of Samuel Johnson’s, and Queeney mentions the family friendship with Samuel Johnson. Jack goes on about how Queeney’s mom married a PAPIST, and indeed after Hester Thrale’s first husband died, she married an Italian Catholic music master named Piozzi, to the horror of Queeney and everyone else in England. (They were so horrified that she’s still usually referred to as Hester Thrale even though actually she should probably be called Hester Piozzi, since that’s the name she published under and the husband she actually loved.)

Both Queeney and the subplot about the United Irishmen are good examples of Patrick O’Brian’s total mastery of his period, as of course is literally everything he says about the rigging. Just casually tosses in Hester Thrale Piozzi’s daughter! A bit of tragic Irish backstory just for fun! Sometimes I do yearn for him to slow down just a bit and explain, but of course that would make the story far less immersive. We are perhaps getting a small taste of the landlubber’s experience of finding oneself at sea and having no idea what the heck is going on.

And so we sail onward. For now the plan is to bop back and forth between Hornblower and Aubrey-Maturin, but over time one series may win out. We shall see!

At certain moments in Hampton Sides’ The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, one feels that one has stepped into the middle of a barfight that’s been running for decades and shows no sign of stopping.

This barfight has a number of different sub-fights (Captain Cook: heroic scientific explorer or wicked vanguard of British imperialism?), but because this book is focused on Captain Cook’s final voyage, it deals most prominently with one question: did the Hawaiians actually believe that Cook was a god?

Arguing for the affirmative: Hawaiians had a well-established cultural tradition of men who were also gods. Their own high kings were considered gods, so it would not have been a stretch to look at the leader of an expedition from overseas and go, “Hmm, maybe this guy is also a god.” When Hawaiian historian Samuel Mānaiakalani Kamakau gathered evidence from Hawaiian elders in the mid-1800s, they did indeed tell him that they had all believed (at first) that Cook was Lono. Mark Twain learned the same thing when he visited in the 1860s. The crews of Cook’s two ships also believed that Cook had been acclaimed as a god.

Arguing against: saying the Hawaiians believed Cook was a god makes them look gullible and naive, and plays right into paternalistic, racist, imperialist beliefs about “primitive natives.”

Readers, I would like to suggest a third way. What if Cook was Lono?

When he walked into that ceremony in Kealakekua Bay, accepted the homage of the Hawaiian people, and ascended the tower where the priests spoke to the gods, he became Lono. He stepped into the role of Lono; he was inhabited by Lono. One may quibble about the exact mechanism, but the basic fact remains that the Hawaiians were right.

But in becoming Lono, Cook stepped directly on the path to his own destruction. In his own cultural terms, he had committed blasphemy, broken the first commandment: thou shalt have no other gods before me. In inhabiting the role of a man who was also a god, he had committed a crime against the One True God.

But, at the same time, he was stepping into a role that every Christian child knows. In Cook’s belief system, there was once a man who was God, and He died a violent death.

(In fact, one of Cook’s men argued that Cook died a genuine martyr, accepting his death - “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do” - but he was almost certainly trying to cover his own ass for cowardice. He was in a boat just offshore when Cook died, and rowed away rather than rowing in to help.)

In the Hawaiian belief system, meanwhile, Cook’s identity of Lono did not make his death inevitable - yet. As long as he inhabited Lono’s role properly, he was safe.

But first, Cook outstayed Lono’s season, which lasts for four months and then departs. But Cook did not depart punctually. Great tension had grown up before he left.

And once he left, storms forced him back to Kealakekua. He arrived months before the time for Lono’s return, at which point the Hawaiians began to wonder: was this man Lono after all? Now both cultures were aligned, and Cook’s death became inevitable. The theft of one of Cook’s launches led to a confrontation on the beach at Kealakekua, which ended with Cook’s violent death.

What I Just Finished Reading

Kate Seredy’s The Open Gate. Driving toward their destination for summer vacation, a New York City family pauses at a farm auction. No one is bidding on the farmland itself, so Granny cunningly suggests to Dad, “Why don’t you bid? Just to get things started?”

“DON’T YOU DO IT, BOY!” I shouted, but as so often happens, the characters ignored my wise advice.

Of course Dad wins the farm. Of course, the family has to stay the night, and having stayed one night, they have to keep on staying. And then Granny goes to another farm auction, promising piously not to open her mouth to bid–

“YOU DON’T HAVE TO OPEN YOUR MOUTH TO BID AT AN AUCTION!” I shouted at Dad, who once again foolishly failed to listen to me. He accepted Granny’s promise, and Granny promptly rules-lawyered the farm into two cows (both pregnant) and two horses (also both pregnant) by bidding with a twitch of the hand.

I am all for people going back to the land if they want to, but I prefer stories about it to feature people who actually want to, rather than people who get bamboozled into it by Granny.

Multiple people have recommended Uketsu’s Strange Houses (translated by Jim Rion), and it did NOT disappoint. The book is a mystery based around floor plans, and I am happy to report that there are indeed MANY floor plans (I love a floor plan), which makes the book an even zippier read than you might guess from its size.

Now, do I think the mystery is “plausible” or “makes psychological sense”? Well, no, not really, and if it took longer to read that might have bothered me. But the floor plans and the pacing make the book fly by, and I enjoyed it for what it was, which is an amusingly bizarre puzzle box mystery with, let me repeat, enough floor plans to satisfy even my floor-plan-mad self.

What I’m Reading Now

After years of procrastination, I’ve begun Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Happy to report that this ALSO features a floorplan in the endpapers. All the rooms are lettered, but curiously the key only includes some of the letters, so we are left guessing just which room Q might be.

What I Plan to Read Next

Obviously I need to read Uketsu’s Strange Pictures, too.

I’ve been enjoying Dorothy Lathrop’s books so much that I checked the university catalog to see if they had any other books by her, and discovered that she illustrated a book of poems by Sara Teasdale! Teasdale has been one of my favorites since we read “There Will Come Soft Rains” in high school, so of course I had to give it a go.

I’m working my way through the book slowly, a poem a night. I ought to save this one till next October, but I haven’t the patience, so here it is.

Late October
By Sara Teasdale

I found ten kinds of wild flower growing
On a steely day that looked like snowing:
Queen Anne’s lace, and blue heal-all,
A buttercup, straggling, grown too tall,
A rusty aster, a chicory flower–
Ten I found in half an hour.
The air was blurred with dry leaves flying,
Gold and scarlet, gaily dying.
A squirrel ran off with a nut in his mouth,
And always, always, flying south,
Twittering, the birds went by,
Flickering sharp against the sky,
Some in great bows, some in wedges,
Some in bands with wavering edges;
Flocks and flocks were flying over
With the north wind for their drover.
“Flowers,” I said, “you’d better go,
Surely it’s coming on for snow,”–
They did not heed me, nor heed the birds,
Twittering thin, far-fallen words–
The others through of to-morrow, but they
Only remembered yesterday.