"The Elephant's Journey" by José Saramago

 Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa (2010)

 

 In 2008’s The Elephant’s Journey, Nobel Prize winner José Saramago recounts the 1552 handing-over of adult Asian elephant Solomon (or Suleiman or Solimon), from Dom João III, the king of Portugal, to Archduke Maximilian of Austria. Told with tongue firmly in cheek, it leaves no social stratum un-hoisted on the petard of our clever author’s sense of irony. It’s funny cover to cover; it strictly maintains a 21st Century point of view, and doesn’t let latter-day foolishness go unpunished, either. I can’t remember laughing out loud so often while reading a semi-serious work of fiction.

Dom João III, mighty king of the vast Portuguese trading and military empire, puzzles at the outset, wondering what kind of gift he can give his friend and ally Austrian Archduke Maximilian to further cement their relations. It would be difficult to name two more august royals in Europe at the time — Portugal nearly at the height of its global power, and the Holy Roman Empire that epoch’s European colossus. 

However, Saramago portrays these august personages as insecure, petty, self-aggrandizing and sometimes downright silly. However, the author reserves his most barbed observations for the two military contingents, one from each empire. The way they torture themselves over minute details, and whose pride will be damaged by whom, is simply beyond the pale — in the hands of this world-renowned author, it’s  gorgeous, and gorgeously funny. in this  Saramago imagines they turn the simplest of transactions into trouble over trifles about who will stand where, and who will be allowed into the Portuguese outpost for the transfer. Spoiler: NOT the Austrians!

Our Nobelist author saves his most open-hearted passages for the two characters at the center of his narrative: the elephant and his mahout, or handler. The elephant is cooperative and rather quick to learn; and Subhro, the handler, learns about European rivalries, Catholic hypocrisy and showmanship during the bloody Lutheran Reformation and its religious wars, and tries to monetize his main asset by selling elephant hair as a cure for baldness. 

Needless to say, I’m recommending this tour de force comic novel in the highest terms possible. Take and enjoy.

 

 

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"After 1177 B.C." by Eric H. Cline, PhD

 

Dr. Eric H. Cline’s second book on the Late Bronze Age Collapse, called “After 1177 BC,” follows up his popular 2014 chronicle of the Late Bronze Age Collapse, “1177 BC.” In the previous volume he adopted an arbitrary date for the well-known calamity that brought several ancient civilizations to their knees, and others to the dustbin of history. In his new compendium Dr. Kline picks eight flourishing, civilized Eastern Mediterranean cultures and provides serious, nuanced accounts of which these civilizations adapted and thrived, which survived but barely, and which simply disappeared. It is a highly illuminating read.

As you might expect in an academic treatise, he lays out the facts of dates, regimes, industrial and trade practices, migration, and warfare methodically. He always couches his facts in terms of reliable sources, and where his sources lead to doubt, Dr. Cline faithfully reports the reasons for and the extent of the uncertainty. The result is a closely reasoned, well-organized recounting, that gains credibility as we go along. 

At volume’s end, he presents a table to list the ancient civilizations and the fate of each in the wake of the Late Bronze Age Collapse. He presupposes that the reader is aware of the episode, but in case you need a refresher: early in the 12th Century BCE some combination of unanticipated forces: a spate of powerful earthquakes, climate change leading to drought and famine, and/or multiple waves of mysterious invaders from faraway lands, resulted in the simultaneous collapse of trade, economic depression, war, revolution, the splintering of populations, and the retrogression of technological standards. It was the end of the world as the well-established cultures of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean knew it.

But Professor Cline’s mission is to provide a closer, more nuanced look at the effects of the calamity, and his combination of rigorous analysis and careful filling-in-the-blanks works superbly. His ultimate recap, a carefully laid-out table featuring the cultures of the time and how each weathered, or failed to weather, the Collapse, adds to the general public’s understanding, and provides a nexus for the professional archeological and historical work which will follow. (I will quibble with the professor’s use of the term BC instead of the more current BCE to describe the time period. Presumably the title of the initial volume of 11 years ago led to the practice, but it’s too bad.)

In the end, Professor Cline urges the general public to drop the idea that the period led to an early Dark Age, and simply refer to the emerging epoch as the Iron Age. His book is at once encyclopedic and daringly speculative. A terrific effort from a foremost expert.

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"The New Wilderness" by Diane Cook

 

In The New Wilderness Diane Cook explores the sometimes fraught relationship between a mother Bea, and her daughter, Agnes. She plays this relationship out on a dystopian landscape, stripped of all modernity’s distractions. She warns us about mismanaging our home planet and simultaneously lays human nature and human interaction open to review and judgment. The author celebrates and grieves over the eternal give and take between mother and daughter; Cook tackles this essential chore brilliantly, showing all its depth and tenderness, and not sparing us the painful moments. In fact, she handles this volatile relationship so perfectly that the novel was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize.

Bea gives birth to Agnes in the City, and like so many children in that toxic, dangerous pit, she becomes critically ill, to the level of coughing up blood. Desperate, Bea and her husband Glen win passes to join a group of like-minded pilgrims and leave the City permanently behind, and make their collective way in the Wilderness State. The Wilderness State is a vast tract of natural environment—free of the devastation that has left the City uninhabitable. This group, called the Community, generally succeeds at living off the land. Yes, they run afoul a few times of the Rangers, the formal authority over the Wilderness State, but things don’t really spiral out of control until other groups violate the borders of this reserve, after which daily subsistence becomes too much of a challenge.

Cook’s kernel remains Bea and Agnes. Other plot directions orbit this way and that, but Bea and Agnes continually return front and center. The author always portrays these two women with such logic, such love, and, after Agnes grows to approximate independence, at high stakes loggerheads—it simply isn’t possible that it could have been handled any more fairly, or with any more love or mercy.

The author crafts her love story in admirable and direct prose. Speech and reasoning within the group progresses in blunt terms, because decisions have direct consequences when you’re a migrant group living off the land. There’s no higher power, no magisterial narrator to describe beautiful scenes, or give hints about advisable survival strategies, which is exactly how it should be.

The book contains at length a subtle hint at a higher symbolism, but I won’t speculate about it, because I think it would remain a minor feature, and not a very influential one. But if you sit down to this book, it will take you on a journey through human nature in the face of the natural world, and plot out for you the parabola of love’s trajectory of two willful women, tied together by love. Memorable and merciful, true to life and thought-provoking, the Booker committee was right to honor this one. A true winner.

 

 

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"Old God's Time" by Sebastian Barry

 

Sebastian Barry invents a confounding and remarkable protagonist in Old God’s Time (2023). He presents an older man whose life has not been kind to him; he’s a challenging, rather unmoored protagonist, who has faced more than his share of violence and tragedy, and who may perhaps be forgiven for his lapses. If that’s what they are.

Tom Kettle is our character, a retired detective, having plied his trade with a modicum of distinction on the Dublin police force. He sits by himself in his beloved wicker chair in a splendid seaside flat and works at not thinking. A visit from two young detectives throws him off—he feels alternately pleased, doubtful, and panicky. He knows old cases are going to rear their heads, and that’s what panics him. 

Right from the outset, the author works brilliantly to inure us to the rickety fancies of this shambling, awkward man. We begin to learn not to trust all that he sees, and in effect we learn it at the same time as Tom learns it about himself. The happy and not so happy days of his past ambush him, and he must determine how they affect his current days. For one thing, he still idolizes and yearns for his late wife; he aches with the sad remembrance of this loss. Some of Barry’s most poignant passages are uttered or thought by Tom about his dearly departed June: 

As if no one had been crushed, no one had been hurried from the halls of life, and the power of his love could effect that, could hold her buoyant and eternal in the embrace of an ordinary day. 

Passages like these, with the soaring emotional force urgently felt by Tom, crowd this stunning book. The diction, the lilt, the typical phrasing of Irish idiom and culture, all contribute to a memorable, rewarding read. That they share the page with such timeless and weighty human issues is a tribute to Barry’s art. The author pays deep homage to his character and what he stands for, and is utterly justified in doing so.

Old God’s Time is densely plotted, humane in its treatment of careworn characters, and grandly finessed from beginning to end. Very highly recommended.

 

 

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"Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead" by Olga Tokarczuk

Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones in 2018.

Name a prestigious literary award, and Olga Tokarczuk has won it: the Nobel Prize and the International Booker (both in 2018); Slovenia’s Vilencia Prize (2013); the Internationaler Brückepreis (2015), for contributing to better understanding among  nations; the Jan Michalski Prize, awarded from Switzerland in 2015; the Prix Laure Bataillon (2019), for literature translated into French; and Poland’s own highest literary award, the Nike, in 2008 and 2015.

Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead combines a quirky purported madwoman/astrologer, an insular village on a plateau in southwestern Poland, five gruesome deaths (four by murder), and a riotously funny first-person protagonist in a hilarious, sometimes gloomy, treat. I left out sublime and mood-altering descriptions of nature—the forest, the harsh winter, the wildlife, (including beetle larvae)—and apt observations of modern trends and class differentiation. All of it serves the author’s purpose, which is obviously to amuse her readers, while shining an unblinking light on hypocritical modern practices in all their rough-hewn cruelty. It’s quite the variegated pleasure, a multi-layered romp.

The novel’s title is a slightly paraphrased quote from William Blake; our heroine recites it to herself as she watches winter take over her village on All Saints’ Day. She thus observes the inexorable change of seasons; winter seems to last the longest, while spring and summer go by in a flash. She gives everyone pet names, which sometimes become the actual names people go by: Big Foot, Dizzy, Oddball, and Miss Good News, among others. These add to the quirkiness of the character and of the novel; it’s just one more layer of delight on offer.

Be all that as it may, a magisterial justice meted out by nature holds this energetic, told-by-a-dubious-protagonist tale together. And it gives it its lance-like point. I’m all over the lot here, I know, because this book gave me so much pleasure. But the novel is tightly organized, while seeming random; it is wise while seeming silly. The heroine’s internal dialogue is always truly hers: it relies on a shaky foundation of superstition, folklore, and tendentious evidence, but never loses its way toward justice.

Take up this slim volume by one of this moment’s true luminaries. And then move on to the genre-bending Flights, and the comprehensive Books of Jacob. I am somewhat ashamed to say that’s the limit of my exposure to this superb artist. All three are more than worth your while; I’m sure she’ll never produce anything that isn’t.

 

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"Between Two Rivers" by Moudhy al-Rashid

As a reader on, and ponderer about, ancient cultures, my favorite has always been Sumer. They built the first cities, (probably) invented the wheel for transport, and most magnificent of all, invented writing. I wouldn’t call myself a buff, but I do have a 35,000-foot familiarity with the Sumerians. But gosh, has my knowledge grown by leaps and bounds because of Moudhy al-Rashid’s delightful, relatable book, Between Two Rivers.

I didn’t know, for instance, that the cultures that occupied the area after the Sumerians faded, Akkadia, Assyria, and Babylonia, among others, held the Sumerian culture in awe, used Sumerian as a lingua franca long after it was dead (the way Latin functioned in Europe through the Middle Ages), and that cuneiform writing evolved over a couple of thousand years to serve as the typescript for Akkadian, Elamite, Hittite, and Old Persian, and other languages. It finally faded out just as the Common Era began and the Phoenician alphabet gained in use.

This is a scholarly book; it has not only the main text, but a) a listing of Selected Artefacts Cited; b) a Timeline of Ancient Mesopotamian History; c) 23 pages of Bibliography; d) copious endnotes, and e) an index. But not only is Dr. Al-Rashid thorough, she is engaging and relatable. Her delight at holding ancient clay tablets in her hand, her wonder at the advanced math the Sumerians applied to understanding and predicting Jupiter’s orbit … this Oxford University lecturer infects us with her energy and enthusiasm. We cannot help share her delight as she recognizes the feelings, aspirations, and timeless issues experienced so long ago. 

In addition to praising the accomplishments of these clever ancients, al-Rashid singles out certain individuals for focus or special comment. In the 7th century BCE, a Neo-Babylonian king re-instituted the long-abandoned practice of naming a high priestess to the moon god. His daughter was re-named Ennigaldi-Nanna, and we know her because archeologists unearthed clay tablets about the event, and because an archeologist found a room in her newly built palace. The room contained objects from an astonishing range of time, from decades prior to 1500 years in the past. Was Ennigaldi-Nanna a curator of a museum? Were these objects just there together by random chance? We’ll never know, but the author takes this example and shows how it reflected a culture of honoring the past. The ancient princess inspires the author — she represents a kindred spirit from long ago. The author even asks, is it possible she  curated an ancient museum, preserving pieces that were archaic even so long ago?

I’ve read academic texts before, but never one with this kind of personal slant. We learn much about al-Rashid, just as we learn to appreciate the ancient day-to-day women and men trying to get on with life, and apparently succeeding  brilliantly. This book is a multivariate joy: informative, brightly descriptive, and engaging. Take it up!



 

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"The Memory Police" by Yoko Ogawa

 

Translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder 

 

Yoko Ogawa first published The Memory Police in Japan in 1994, under the title Hisoyaka na kesshō; Stephen Snyder’s translation bears a 2019 copyright. This unique tale recounts the strange goings on on a small Japanese island where things are forgotten. More accurately, I should state that things are “disappeared.” And the Memory Police administer people’s compliance with these orders in their iron-fisted way. If this sounds awkward, it’s because it is.

Our unnamed first-person protagonist is a woman in her 30s who is a novelist. Early on we encounter the process of when something is disappeared; the first memorable disappearance is roses. On a sunny morning, the stream outside the novelist’s home bears a curious series of brightly colored, uniformly shaped flat objects flowing on its surface. As people, including our novelist, approach for a closer look, it turns out that rose petals by the hundreds of thousands are floating along the stream, out to sea and oblivion. Immediately afterward, there are no more rose bushes, but the curious thing is, that the people accept it as a matter of course, shrug it off, and plant something new in the space.

Every once in a while something else “is disappeared” (Ogawa’s term for the odd occurrences). Not long after roses disappear, photographs share the same fate, and people, faced with having these odd pieces of paper with images they can’t place, simply burn them all. Not long after that, birds disappear, along with everybody’s memory of them. But: not everybody loses their memories. Rather than be rounded up by the Memory Police, these poor people with healthy memories have to live in hiding, fearing discovery. If the Memory Police find you and cart you off in one of their green trucks, you are never seen or heard from again.

The restraint with which Ogawa tells her tale chills us to the bone. Clearly the book  contains strong elements of totalitarianism and people’s passive acceptance of its ever-more-outrageous depredations. But her novel also treats human memory, society, groupthink, and consciousness. The sheep-like population, including our protagonist, awaits its ultimate fate with hardly a whimper.

Also, Ogawa gilds her story with a novel within the novel — a surreal inversion of her main plot — which adds a frightening fillip to the lessons in the frightening main story.

Told in plain, almost gentle, language, The Memory Police posits its principal lessons for us all to see, and warns us in magisterial terms about bowing to the state’s bullying caprice. This novel will edify you with its through-the-looking-glass approach to modern life and particularly, life in a modern totalitarian state. I rode a roller coaster reading this, and ended up at a high point of appreciation: I had that frisson that I get when I come across reverberant, cunning, effective fiction — when the roller coaster came to a stop, I found myself at a high point of awe and tentative understanding. Read this book; take the ride I did, and join me at the sparkling, enlightened finish.

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"The Geography of the Imagination," Essays by Guy Davenport

 

Dr. Guy Davenport studied at Duke and Oxford, and received his PhD at Harvard in 1961, with a dissertation on Ezra Pound’s poetry. The Geography of the Imagination compiles 40 erudite, closely reasoned essays, and I will readily confess that I have not read all of them. Each piece is filled with such vast background and erudition that, even for a culture vulture like me, it became overwhelming — too much to review. But there is a lot I can tell you:

Grant Wood’s well known and much-parodied painting American Gothic is over-rich with graphic references, according to the professor, from Scots-Presbyterian geometric fabric patterns, to the seven trees being a reference to those of King Solomon’s porch; the style of the house in the background gives the piece its title, American Gothic, as it is a classic of the American Gothic Revival style; a bamboo sunscreen on the porch has been purchased from China via Sears Roebuck; it rolls up, and suggests nautical technology applied to the prairie. Davenport takes some length to extol the eyeglasses, invented in the Thirteenth Century, the same era that the buttonholes came into use in the configuration seen in the painting. The farmer’s modest wife secures her Reformation collar with a cameo brooch which recalls a style from the Sixth Century BCE; she is the product of the ages: she has the hair-do of a Medieval Madonna, and besides the collar and cameo, wears a Nineteenth-Century pinafore. The stock market crash of 1929 has put that look in her eye.

In a piece called “The Symbol of the Archaic,” Davenport points out that in the Western historic scheme“archaic” for more than a millennium meant ancient Greece and Rome. It wasn’t until the 20th Century that science helped the humanities dispel this myopia, and establish the true archaic in cave paintings from 40,000 years ago. He cites Pablo Picasso as one of the principal beneficiaries of this discovery: the artist apparently copied the lines sketched long ago on a wall in a cave in Spain in some of his most famous human figures. From this runway he soars into a discussion of Pablo Neruda and the historian William H. Prescott, who, he says, were “appalled by the brutality with which the indigenous cultures of the Americas were murdered.”         References to Melville and the poet Charles Olson on the “ruins of the Second World War,” who in turn was one of the most insightful readers of Melville, whose “Clarel was one of the great (and greatly neglected) meditations on ruins (of Christianity as well as of cultures which he greatly expected he might have found more congenial than his own, if mankind had allowed them to survive)…”

Each essay that I read had these paths and tracings to cultural guides — readers and cognoscenti who understood the great artists — their great observations on culture, morals, antiquity, literature, society, and art, and fed these appreciative insights to those of us (like Professor Davenport), who thirsted for them, and who could explicate and appreciate them and do their bit for the rest of us in their turn.

A side note I have to add: in the piece “The Symbol of the Archaic,” Davenport includes a coinage by Ezra Pound: pejorocracy, ruling by the worst of men. These rulers are put in place because of rampant and willful stupidity, “as it [modernity] has no critical rules for analyzing reality such as the ancient cultures kept bright and sharp.”

Some of my few readers will appreciate literary essays; I eat them up for sustenance. They reach me in ways no other written thing can. I’ve just gleaned a little idea of the topography of the tip of the iceberg here; this review is simple reporting, moreso than my other reviews. Thanks for your support.

 

 

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"A Knock at the Door" by Peter Rowlands

 

Author Peter Rowlands has produced a number of thriller/mystery titles, including 2023’s A Knock at the Door. If this book is any indicator, his other mysteries will entertain, show off the writer’s knack for the genre, and stretch the reader’s own sleuthing skills. This is a rewarding, entertaining entry.

One evening, as heavy rain and thunder oppress his uncle’s stately residence in Gloucester, cautious, right-thinking, 30-ish Rory Cavenham opens the front door to a soaking, bedraggled young person who seeks shelter from the weather. Naturally, he lets this poor soul into the house, and hunts up tea and a change of clothes. As it happens, this person is a woman near his own age, has a dreadful fear of the police, and a serious case of amnesia. The trauma she’s escaping from, and her lack of memory, so debilitate her that she can’t even properly identify herself. 

Thus starts Rory’s long quest to help this woman — who eventually goes by the name Rebecca — rebuild her past, navigate her present, and safeguard her future. It’s not easy. As we follow his campaign, we encounter secretive security thugs who won’t identify whom they work for, a local company performing research into arcane human biology and physiology, a fifty year-old murder case, and much more. Rowlands traces his hero’s solo efforts in enough detail, and with sufficient realism, that we can’t help but invest in his success. He and his damsel in distress become quite sympathetic as they work together — but also sometimes at loggerheads — to reconstruct her life.

Rowlands weaves a great many twists and turns into the story. Cavenham encounters a balanced roster of helpful and unhelpful characters along the way, and we never really know who will actually help him, and who wants to block his efforts. The vulnerable Rebecca holds a surprise or two for him, also, even as he tries to find her best interests through the thicket they encounter. Suffice it to say that you may get turned around as you read this book, and even if you aren’t, the end will surprise you anyway. 

I’m discussing the plot more than I normally would, because it’s mainly the point — how do our heroes get to the end, given their entirely murky start. However, I have read enough mysteries over the years to know that this one succeeds, entertains, and pays off with a very memorable outcome. If mystery/thrillers are your thing, pick this up by all means.

 

 

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"Paris Echo" by Sebastian Faulks

 

I’ve seen Sebastian Faulks’s Paris Echo (2018) described as a “love letter to Paris,” but I’m not sure that’s the point of this novel. I’m sure Faulks is totally fine with Paris, but his first love is for his characters: Hannah, a post-doctoral historian researching the experiences of women during the Nazi occupation, both within the Resistance and outside of it; Tariq, a callow youth from Tangier, who follows a mysterious impulse and travels to Paris on a lark; and Hannah’s friend Julian, an English professor of literature. It’s a generous book, both toward its characters and its readers. 

Years ago, Hannah was jilted at a very young age, and is still trying to get past it. Her research, however, provides a strong dose of perspective as she listens to audio files of survivors’ life-and-death experiences.  Tariq winds up at her apartment, and his ingenuous, non-threatening manner helps him inveigle a place to flop. We see much of Paris through his youthful, unjaded eye. Julian pursues Hannah, in his reserved English way, quite often failing to say the right thing, too proper to truly advance his campaign. They’re endearing characters, particularly Tariq, who plays an innocent in perhaps the most cultured city in the world.

The city during World War II captures our attention, too. Hannah is writing about women during the Occupation, and Faulks manages quite adeptly to add color and nuance to a time, which, like most things in history, are only partially understood. The choices women have to make under the assumption that Germany will win the war — a completely reasonable belief until the Battle of Stalingrad — and the way they greeted British and American forces (not always enthusiastically), receive treatment here, and demonstrate that sometimes later judgments are inevitably harsh and unwarranted. Hannah’s own opinion evolves as she digs more deeply.

The author draws out his themes of wartime hardship among non-combatants, of French atrocities against Algerians, including their shoddy treatment of those who supported them during Algeria’s war for independence (gained in 1962), and gives them a human face. This is a balanced treatment of both private and public behavior in mid-century France.

But more than that, Paris Echo engages the reader in the lives of highly sympathetic characters, and reflects the human emotions and aspirations in a bright and memorable way. Highly recommended. 

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