"Middlemarch" by George Eliot

The charms of this lovely classic are many and varied: all characters are superbly drawn, and they act strictly in accordance with who they are; sometimes that leads them to nefarious activity and sometimes to virtuous. The plot shows balance, suspense, logic, intrigue, and pace; the historic milieu—the book is set in the early 1830s, which saw the tumult of the first Reform Bill, the initial expansion of the voting franchise in Britain—is explicitly stated. Local partisan debates mirror the national dust-up. And Eliot samples for her readers a full cross section of English society.

Society plays a crucial role, as it typically does in English fiction of that century (initial full publication of the book was in 1872). Principal characters include Dorothea Brooke, a beautiful, headstrong, right-thinking young woman; her much older husband, a clergyman named Casaubon; and her sister Celia. We also follow  Middlemarch’s mayor Walter Vincy and his family, featuring son and heir Fred, his sister Rosamund, and Rosamund’s husband, Doctor Lydgate. Their internal dialogues, decisions, motivations, and actions all ring true as a bell, as do the choices made by every other character in the book. We can see their hindrances and disappointments as they unfold; we know they will face trials, and their trials all result from understandable and predictable human impulses. It’s extremely well known and justifiably extolled as a realistic and true-to-life novel.

I found the first fifth of the book somewhat arduous, as Eliot’s characters are first presented—we don’t have the background for everyone’s position in life, or motivation. Once these are established, though, and events begin to take flight, the novel takes on a charm and an irresistible momentum toward its various outcomes. Eliot sometimes inserts author’s asides regarding a character, or a general point of human nature, into her narrative. Sometimes these asides are convoluted and reflect mores and terminology unfamiliar to 21st Century readers. A second reading will usually suffice to clarify these thoughts, when necessary.

However, she reigns as an omniscient author, and, more importantly, as a wise and indulgent seer, much too canny about human nature to excoriate or condemn. No one doubts Middlemarch merits its exalted place in the canon of classic English novels. And I am glowing in its aftermath, too, and turning around to heartily recommend it to all serious readers. I am glad that I waited until I was a mature, experienced reader to encounter this gem. Its delights will thrill and satisfy every discerning reader. 

 

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To My Handful of Loyal Readers

Good day, everyone! I have been busy setting up another blog, called Basso Continuo. (Basso continuo is defined as a foundational musical accompaniment system, used almost universally during the Baroque era, approximately 1600-1750. It's Italian for "continuous bass.") Link: https://literaturefiction.blog/ 

I'm loading in-depth essays of recent fiction there. I will still be reviewing books here, but the pace of my output may flag a little as I work on in-depth pieces for Basso Continuo.

 

Thank you all so much, and keep reading! 

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"Evelyn in Transit" by David Guterson

 

David Guterson’s 2026 novel Evelyn in Transit is grand example of storytelling in plain, unadorned language. It contains the story of a woman from Indiana who proves you never know a person’s worth until they reach their potential. Educated in a Catholic elementary school, Evelyn, whose character is at base blameless, exhibits mild behavior problems, and is an uninterested pupil. Later on, she shows fearlessness at expressing herself in group therapy sessions for teens, and is a tireless laborer at odd jobs she takes, at restaurants, fruit picking, and helping build a sacred Buddhist peace monument on a mountain in New Mexico.

Alternating chapters deal with Evelyn and with a child Buddhist monk in Tibet, named Tsering Lekpa. Tsering is admitted to a monastery as a young boy and learns his principals well, and matures into an abbot, but accepting all the subservience and notoriety grates on him. He feels unworthy of it and much of his life seems pointless. He accordingly travels to Seattle after meeting a Buddhist professor who teaches at the university there, and goes to work translating manuscripts.  

Evelyn’s and Tsering’s stories entwine when three Buddhist monks arrive at Evelyn’s Evansville home, with the surprising news that they think her son Cliff, roughly six or seven years old, is the sixth reincarnation of a holy monk, called Norbu Rinpoche. Tsering, who had grown old and died, was the fifth. Something about this news stirs Evelyn to travel with her little boy to Nepal.

Guterson’s genius dictates that he portray both characters, particularly Evelyn, in flat, starkly mundane prose, that keeps us nevertheless reading on because of the sympathy we feel for both. He spends most of his energy and resources on Evelyn, and with excellent reason. I’ll leave you the joy of learning the reason on your own. The journey is well worth it.

Guterson’s work is straightforward, but develops a surprising depth and subtlety in its development and resolution. Evelyn inspires a deep loyalty in the reader, and she gets a confirming affirmation by story’s end. Rather than run the risk of giving too much away, I will end by confidently recommending Evelyn in Transit, an accomplished, worthy read by a superb author too little appreciated. 

 

 

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"The Shapeless Unease" by Samantha Harvey

In The Shapeless Unease Samantha Harvey recounts an interval in her life in which she suffered severe insomnia, describing struggling with the condition of getting little or no sleep over several months’ time. She describes her nights—filled with repeated plagues of watching her digital clock, of almost getting to sleep only to have a noisy truck pass on the street, rattling her awake, of the ever-deepening dread and self-fulfilling prophecy of the impossibility of getting any sleep again tonight. 

I can attest to the accuracy of her telling, both of the deepening desperation through the nights and weeks and months, and the zombie-like trance of dealing with people during the day who have actually slept.

She distinguishes her narrative by presenting it with honesty, and the sense that there’s an end to the vicious cycle (there is). 

She also intersperses passages of stories she’s writing, or thinking about writing, and of random-seeming observations and reflections on consciousness and philosophy. For example she disagrees with William James about how life can be conquered with reason and intellect.  She dwells for a time on the Parahã tribe in the Amazon, unencroached upon by the modern world. This group has no concept of the past or the future, no words for before or after; the concepts “tomorrow” or “yesterday” are utterly foreign. They never put a dependent clause in a sentence.

Her memoir includes snippets of a story she’s tentatively writing of a man who robs cash machines, calling it “jackpotting” them. She describes her frustrating visits to the doctor—she alternates between thinking she must sound like a crabby child, and feeling rage at being so helpless and living in Britain, where health care can apparently feel like a constant struggle with a vast bureaucracy. 

She gets better for a few weeks on sleeping pills, only to quickly relapse. Finally she describes the process of swimming in a lake, where she concentrates on currents and waves, and how to counter them, and how to go with their flow. She finishes by writing about getting over it all through some subtle inevitable, natural process, and how the memory of the interval faded into an unreality. 

The Shapeless Unease is vivid, sympathy-inducing in those of us who’ve suffered sleeplessness, and so real that it I worried I might start a spell of insomnia of my own. (I didn’t.) To anyone who’s wondered about the disorder, Harvey’s book is exceedingly honest and accurate, and her odd musings intriguing. Her writing, of course, reinforces what we know about her matchless talent.

 

 

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"House of Day, House of Night" by Olga Tokarczuk

 

Olga Tokarczuk first published House of Day, House of Night in Poland in 1998 under the title Dom dzienny, dom nocny. The current translation, by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, came out in the UK in 2024, and in the US in 2025. A little reminiscent of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, this book is a compendium of startling, vivid anecdotes whose focus and significance become clear as you go along. It’s highly entertaining, challenging, and awe-inspiring. This steaming dish of cassoulet has rich helpings of odd characters doing odd things, philosophic musings about abstruse subjects, and is seasoned with a generous dose of humor. A grand tour for the discerning reader.

Set in southwest Poland in the last half of the 20th Century, the story includes portraits of some unusual characters: there’s a gender-fluid monk called Paschalis who in the 16th Century writes the life of a saint; Pieter Dieter, who dies on the border between postwar Germany and Poland; Franz Frost, a German who is driven to worry in the early 1930s, and begins to wonder how life could proceed unaffected after a new planet is discovered. (Spoiler alert: it can’t.) And there’s Ergo Sum, a Classics teacher who suffers from lycanthropy.

But most important of all is the enigmatic Marta, whose offbeat view of the world is perhaps the most telling morsel of wisdom in the entire book. (It’s not laid out plainly; stay alert to the clues.)

This region of southwestern Poland is called Silesia, and during World War II, it was annexed by Germany, with land and property coming into the hands of German citizens. After the war, the border with Germany was shifted back westward, and the Germans who’d moved there were moved back. This swinging over and back is a regular theme, in all its varied guises; the title suggests it, as well.

Since this is not a detailed analysis, but a simple review, I will simply report that it is replete with possible philosophical approaches to the universe, even going to far as to contain, in the words of the unnamed narrator, a detailed Greek philosophy of two warring cosmic forces, chthonos, the generative, out-of-control procreative urge, and chaos, the force of destruction and decay. In the middle, like the eye of a hurricane, is the happy and well-balanced chronos. Compare and contrast this scheme with Marta’s statement about all the world’s creatures spending half their lives in the dark, and half in light. So, House of Day, House of Night, is a lumpy, delicious gravy, hinting at answers to difficult, head-scratching questions. It contains laugh-out-loud moments and sober moments of reflection. It is a book of bifurcation. 

But mostly it’s another triumph from Nobel and International Booker Prize-winning Olga Tokarczuk. Set out on your own adventure and take it up right away.

 

 

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"Beasts of the Sea" by Iida Turpeinen

 

Translated from the Finnish by David Hackston

Iida Turpeinen’s first novel goes deeply into 18th Century scientific practices, treating historical people and events vividly, bringing her readers to a shipwreck in the Aleutian islands, a murderous winter in Siberia, and finishing off at the Baltic Sea coast near 1950s Helsinki. She recounts the tragically wrong-headed beliefs about wildlife husbandry prevalent during the 1700s, the too-late discovery that extinction is a real thing, and concludes with a latter-day example of a heroic quartet of brothers who save a Finnish island near Helsinki from overhunting. Her account contains reliable information on official policy, and is vivid and effective while rendering her characters’ flaws, beliefs, and motivations. It’s a very affecting piece. 

Her cast includes renowned naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller, documenter of at least nine different species, eight of which bear his name (Steller’s Jay, Steller’s Sea Eagle, Steller’s Sea Lion, to name only a few). Prominent roles are also played by Anna, the put-upon wife of J.H. Furuhjelm, the last governor of the Russian America colony (Alaska); Professor Alexander von Nordmann and his assistant, the illustrator Hilda Olson; and 20th Century Finnish conservator John Grönvall. 

This book beats to the pulse of conservation, and its cast of characters all reflect  beliefs and attitudes of the time toward wildlife and the natural world. Steller discovers the Sea Cow in 1741, while on an island in the Bering Sea. By 1769, this gentle giant has breathed its last. Twenty-eight years! That’s all it took for the planet’s best hunters to slaughter it out of sight. It was docile, sluggish, and apparently delicious, although only roughly a fifth were taken for consumption. The rest? For furs, perhaps. 

As the Eighteenth Century turned to the Nineteenth, prominent scientists like Georges Cuvier and Alexander von Humboldt warned of the disastrous results of untrammeled human exploitation of the natural world. This brought to the public consciousness the actual danger inherent in waste and bloodthirstiness, though perhaps not prominently enough. 

In spite of its subject, Beasts of the Sea has an engaging manner, perhaps even a charm to recommend it. Take it up if your interest runs to cultural and scientific shifts in our approach to the natural world. But also, you will experience a moment in time when naturalists were often celebrities, and when, in the wake of discovering thrilling fossils, the hunt for dinosaurs began in earnest.

 

 

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"The Loneliness of Sonia and Sonny" by Kiran Desai

Get ready for a rollicking, maximalist ride through End-of-20th-Century India. Kiran Desai sets her novel at a time when India’s struggle to attain the prosperity achieved in Western countries, runs squarely up against its labyrinth of societal and family morés, corruption, and its quirky, hidebound worldviews. In her handling, these forces exert their never-ending pressure against one true thing: young love. In telling this tale, she has brought out a rare gem of a novel: she dives deeply into her native country, warts and all, and lets her central characters attempt to find solutions. It’s a heroic battle, and the tome stuns us with its comprehensive treatment and its hints of where hope might be might be found, against all odds.

This is a tremendous book, a book over-brimming with ambition. Our author juggles so many objects—plot, character, theme—with unerring balance and focus, even as we (I) had to go back, more than once, several pages to figure out how we got where we are. Desai has performed a bravura, spectacular feat with Loneliness. Take up this great, Booker-shortlisted book and be enriched.

India’s ghosts conspire against good intentions and justice—what can young people do? And what can they do against a hex loosed on them by an insane, megalomaniacal sorcerer-artist? Both our protagonists hallucinate and have paranoid episodes under its power. Our eponymous young people also hesitate, misread the forces keeping them apart, and live separately even after having experienced a brief joyful intimacy. Sonia and Sonny careen and ricochet past each other, propelled every which way by family and cultural forces well beyond their control. India at that time suffers paroxysms of sectarian violence, as well. Desai sets up her prospective lovers on opposite sides: Sonny is Hindu, Sonia Muslim. This led me to wonder: is Desai trying to guide this populous, complicated country to a promised land of a peace?  

This book overflows with image, ambition, cosmopolitanism, human nature portrayed with pinpoint accuracy, and modern impulse trying to push past traditional restraint. Without doubt, it will hold your interest, both in the general storytelling sense, and in the sense of wanting the favorable outcome. It’s a tribute—its exhaustive treatment of India’s people, culture, and self-defeating inconsistencies reflect that country’s plurality and  multilayered humanity. And Desai harnesses it all brilliantly. Take this one up!

 

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"My Name is Emilia Del Valle" by Isabel Allende

 

Translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle.

Isabel Allende presents us with a stirring adventure story in 2025’s My Name is Emilia del Valle.  She conjures up an old fashioned hero for her first-person protagonist, an adventurous, iconoclastic young woman from 19th Century San Francisco. The product of a tryst between her novice nun mother and a mysterious progenitor who immediately leaves, she lucks out with doting, freethinking Papo, a stepdad who engenders in her a confident, not to say fearless, outlook. This brash worldview gets her into some extremely deadly jeopardy when she ends up on the losing side in the  the Chilean civil war. It’s vivid, captivating, enthralling work. 

As Emilia’s mother prepares to take a nun’s vows she’s swept up in a random tryst and immediately abandoned by a wastrel Chilean aristocrat. Emilia’s mother, Molly, earns the sobriquet “Saint Molly” for the good work she does teaching the children of impoverished Spanish-speaking denizens of the S.F. Mission District and for providing free bread to the neighborhood every day. Her marriage of convenience to don Pancho is a stroke of pure luck for Molly and especially for Emilia.

Emilia grows tall and strong and bilingual, and her Papo encourages her impulse to write down her thoughts and impressions. Grown into womanhood, she takes a male nom de plume and publishes dime novels in the 1880s, adding to the family coffers. This leads to journalism, working for the Hearst newspaper, the Examiner, where she meets reporter Eric Whelan and begins a reporting/column-writing partnership. The two partners travel to Chile to cover its civil war of 1891, and the adventure shifts into high gear. 

Allende writes adventure with pace, realism, and an unblinking eye toward human nature in all its wartime butchery. Our hero suffers physically and emotionally: she is beaten, starved, imprisoned. She must decide at length whether to investigate the spurious inheritance her biological father left her — it’s impossibly remote in southern Chile. 

You must read this faced-paced, gritty tale of a young woman’s determination and pluck, to find out. I heartily recommend this careening adventure tale, from a storyteller who proves her worth over and over.

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"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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