"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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"Jenny Kidd" by Laury A. Egan

 

 

 

 

 

In Jenny Kidd author Laury A. Egan expertly assembles colorful, but not-quite-what-they-seem characters to animate this dark thriller. Set in Venice, her story features art forgery, theft, multiple murders, and an age-old noble family awash in mystery and decadence. It’s a slender piece, paced like lightning, and edge-of-your-seat suspenseful — a truly gripping read.

The eponymous character, a gifted young American artist, has abandoned New York in favor of Venice for a couple of months so that she can sharpen her skills. The attractions, both personal and cultural, exert their irresistible pull on Jenny immediately on her arrival. In short order, she meets an enigmatic but charming British woman, two young aristocratic members of Venetian society (under whose spell she can’t help but fall), and a pushy American man who seems to turn up wherever Jenny goes. And even that’s not all: add in her fretting, emotionally distant, and disapproving parents, back in America, and you have a young woman whom trouble will inevitably find. And sure enough, in very short order Jenny’s apartment is burgled, she is seduced — and learns a lot about herself in the process — and ultimately, imprisoned.

Egan taps this bewitching cast with her magic wand, and they misbehave in quite unexpected ways. And she keeps us, her breathless readers, pulled this way and that in suspense. We guess at who’s guilty of crimes and who isn’t; sometimes a character’s activity paints them in a suspicious light, and sometimes we suspect them for reasons of our own. Jenny’s captivity stretches out, occupying a considerable portion of the narrative; her multiple attempts at escape come a cropper, one after the other. 

Come for the culture, the world-class scenery, and the plucky heroine. Stay for the ingenious skulduggery. Don’t miss this chilling, and emotional, adventure!

 

 

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"The Bookshop" by Penelope Fitzgerald

 

In The Bookshop (1978) author Penelope Fitzgerald presents the determination shown and the obstacles faced in her English heroine’s path as she moves to coastal Suffolk and opens a humble bookshop. She spices her story with generous doses of wryly observed humor, but beneath it all is England’s ossified class structure, with its nasty  oppressive dealings, small and large. It is a slender volume, full of quirky observations, laugh-out-loud humor, and all of it done with exemplary economy.

Set in 1959, the story of widowed Florence Green’s foray into retail contains the minutely observed challenges she faces in running the town’s only bookshop. She must deal with such vicissitudes as a vicious and implacable local society matriarch, an onsite storage facility with permanently wet floors and walls, and a cranky poltergeist. 

Along the way, Fitzgerald manages the utmost clarity with the stingiest word use. Florence meets Milo, the slouching, somewhat glamorous BBC employee, whom she captures as going “through life with singularly little effort.” The evil society matriarch has a nephew in Parliament (who facilitates her aunt’s scheming); Fitzgerald sums him up as “brilliant, successful, and stupid.” We learn from David Nicholls’s 2013 introduction that the protagonist shares liberal political views with the author, in that she divides the world into “exterminators and exterminatees, with the former, at any given time, predominating.” 

The author allows us a peek into the internal dialogue of a charming, ambitious, and kindly heroine. Unfortunately she must contend with English village tastes (provincial), rural characters (quirky and plainspoken), and mores (circumscribed). Fitzgerald won the 1979 Booker Prize for her novel Offshore. Clearly, this was a novelist who knew her craft, and plied it with world class skill. The Bookshop is unblinking, economical, charming, and brilliant. Set aside some time, and get acquainted with this lovely accomplishment.

 

 

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"Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line" by Deepa Anappara

Debut author Deepa Anappara follows the lives of a handful of school children in a slum in northern India in Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line. She graphically chronicles their lives in the poverty and utter squalor in which they grow up. They and their struggling families number among the tens of millions of unwanted, willfully neglected human afterthoughts in India.  It’s cruelest for the youngest, the children who are born into the endless cycle of lack of education, systemic apathy, and by the economic and caste prejudice that plagues their society.

And yet, Anappara tells their story with considerable humor, through the eyes and voice of a nine year-old boy. The boy, Jai, decides, after a couple of young children have disappeared, to investigate, the way they do on TV police dramas. He enlists the help of a couple of friends, but they wind up sharper and more observant than he could hope to be, much to his embarrassment and frustration. But the tragic story comes frightfully close to home, and the author makes extremely effective use of her character’s point of view to make the tragic story crystal clear and immediate.

In an afterword the author cites the shocking statistic that India loses as many as 180 children each day to traffickers, organ harvesters, and other seekers of easy gain. The author trains her unerring focus on so effectively that no one who reads this book will ever forget it.

I honor Anappara. She took the mission to draw the world’s attention to this appalling story, and executed it extremely well.

 

 

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"The Leaning Tower," and other stories by Katherine Anne Porter

 

Katherine Anne Porter demonstrates both her uncommon mastery of the short story form, and the idiom in which Americans speak, in this collection. This group was first published in 1944; the stories are at that date timely, topical, thought-provoking, and deep. She tackles childhood physical and psychological trauma, family dynamics, and international relations in crisis. Additionally she covers race issues in America, Depression-era political corruption, and rampant xenophobia in 1930s Europe.

This is truly a wide-ranging collection, and it benefits from Porter’s wise and all-encompassing treatment of the issues involved. Two stories stand out in this sampling. The title story features a bootless young American man who has traveled from the U.S. to interbellum Berlin on an ill-advised search for culture, or maybe a muse to move him. He finds a small group of men his age, but each individual signifies the frozen, even ossified, position of European countries caught in the grip of the prior war’s waste and economic ruin. 

Another story, “Holiday,” has a full and vivid description of a close-knit Texas farming family from the viewpoint of a visiting woman on holiday. It cites the patriarch’s worldview, strongly influenced by Das Kapital, and his decision to lend out money at less than market rates, so that young people can get started with a farm of their own. But principally, the visitor watches the family from up close; the climactic drama, with its outsider’s charity and its reverberant observations, is worth the price of admission by itself.

This brief five-story collection shows great depth and vivid storytelling. Highly recommended.

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"The Children's Book" by A.S. Byatt

 

Author A.S. Byatt leads us on a tour of the artistic and social zeitgeist of the end of the 19th Century in The Children’s Book; the War to End All Wars explodes across Europe  and alters forever the hopes, schemes, artistic ambition, and most of the social activism of the time. The book presents its idyll that will only lead to a catastrophic end; it wrenches all the principals out of their self-absorption, and forces Europe out of its untenable standoff.

The author introduces us to a handful of families, concentrating on the younger generation and its juvenile and coming-of-age issues. Olive, a children’s book author in the south of England, is the matriarch of a goodly brood, and we learn of her children’s quirks and talents as they encounter neighboring families, and their children. Each has talents and exercises them in their own way. As the book progresses these children endure their growing pains; some shine in their various arts and crafts but others must make do in more prosaic ways.

Byatt constructs a multi-level narrative: in one, she paints vivid stories of various families as the young ones and their elders run afoul of life’s harsh realities. Principally it’s the young people who have the hard knocks along the way, but as usual, these knocks result from negligence, or wickedness, or failings, of the elder generation along the way.

The second level deals with Europe’s ultimate hard knock, the Great War. A number of the young hurtle themselves into the conflict, both as combatants and as medical staff. The war makes casualties of everyone: every family is ground under the heel of the great catastrophe. The war puts paid to the fantasy of the international socialist movement, but also breaks the grip of gender-centric roles to which women had been assigned. Their service in England’s war effort smashed the stereotype of women’s aptitude and function in society, and these changes led ultimately to full suffrage for women in 1928.

Byatt uses specific lives and relationships to spin a sprawling tale of English society leading up to the maelstrom of the war that shreds it. We get a full and desolate sense of end times as the dreams and illusions of the fin de siecle fade and evaporate. This is an ambitious book, and meets all expectations which the author set for herself. It triumphs over its rough and rugged subject matter with grace and force and clarity. Well recommended.  

 

 

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