I am sure there is rhyme and reason for all of her choices. For instance, I suspect that Matthew Mayhew (the historical name of the model for one of her characters) clanged in her literary ear. “Makepeace Mayfield” maintains alliteration but allows her to inject some Native American influence onto the colonists. The name change also separates the fictional Makepeace, something of a villain in the book, from the historical figure of Matthew Mayhew who she likely did not want to disparage. But something about the choice is discomfiting to me.

Whispering Gums has an excellent review of the book and compares it to a Kim Scott book that attempts a similar thing with respect to contact between early European settlers and Aboriginal Australians. I share Whispering’s tolerance for “loosely based” historical fiction. I loved Wolf Hall, for instance. Yet, I did not love this book.

One difference, I think, is that Mantel did not go around changing principal players’ names even if so many Catherines or Thomases can get confusing. Mantel’s project is entirely different, of course. Much is known about that time and many people know the players. Changing their names would be confusing to those who know something of the time.

Another difference is that I believe Mantel had something to say about Cromwell. She made Cromwell into a character who says something both about us and about the time. Brooks does not manage that. She manages an engaging, sometimes exciting, historical story. She does not challenge us the way Mantel does. Cromwell is not all likeability (though Mantel gives him a soft spot for small children and dogs), whereas Caleb and the narrator (Bethia Mayfield) are likeable in the extreme. They are two of the most attractive characters in the book, two of the most intelligent, two of the kindest, and two of the strongest-willed. I am suspicious of “perfect” characters. The sins of which Bethia is ashamed (e.g. questioning her Christian beliefs, not “knowing her place” as a female) are things that will endear her to most readers as an inquisitive and open-minded person.

Basically, Brooks makes it easy for the reader to know for whom they should cheer. The good people are almost always right. Bad people are almost always wrong. Still, I liked the book. Brooks has excellent pacing, does wonders with early American English (maintaining the flavor, but still generating smooth prose), and entertains. She does not do more than that. As an example of the prose, read this sample relating how Bethia learned, with her twin brother Zuriel, bits of the Wampanaontoaonk language while Joel Iacoomis taught it to her father:

For a time, when we were still very small, Zuriel and I made a covert game of learning it, and spoke it privily, as a kind of secret tongue between the two of us. But as Zuriel grew bigger he was less about the hearth, tearing hither and yon as boychildren are permitted to do. So as he lost the words and I continued to gain them, the game withered. I have often wondered if what happened later had its roots in this: that the Indian tongue was bound up in my heart with these earliest memories of my brother, so that, on meeting with another of his same age who spoke it, these tender and dormant affections awoke within me.

As Whispering points out, Brooks’s foreshadowing can be “rather heavy-handed” and the sexual tensions between Bethia and Caleb definitely needed “some resolution.” I would also add that the conceit of Bethia looking back does not completely work. She remembers details in the retelling, but then, a few pages later, seems to have difficulty recalling them. The book is not only Brooks’s work of imagination, Bethia is actively shaping the past too. These glimpses of Bethia’s reshaping of history, whether to fill gaps or for another person, are never developed beyond that. One might even think they are authorial mistakes. Brooks could have gotten more out of the device than she did. Without using her narrator’s occasional slips, she only manages to pull the alert (pedantic?) reader out of the story.

A particularly interesting aspect of Whispering’s review involves the question of whether writers should or should not “put[] modern attitudes into the mouths of historical people”. I am one of those people who is wary of that sort of thing.

Bethia goes out of her way to lament the suffering of a beached whale carved to death by the colonists. My concern is that this sort of thing could be added to endear Bethia to us. Modern readers will generally, if not unanimously, laud a character’s sentimentality towards animals, particularly those as intelligent as whales. Brooks vividly evokes the great creature’s mournful eye as the colonists begin butchering it while it lives. And Bethia’s concern for the whale is consistent with her character. Her empathy for “the other” is why she becomes a unique friend to Caleb, for instance, rather than condescending to him or regarding him with suspicion as an outsider.

This is all true, as is Whispering’s observation that “modern” attitudes do not just spring into existence from nothing. Sixteenth century colonists remain, though, products of their time and their communities. However special Bethia is, it is stretching credulity to place her well ahead of her time with respect to feminism, animal rights, racial equality, and the “many paths” approach to religion. Bethia was raised in the community by a minister father and she never left the community. Not that there then existed any communities which would have embraced any, much less all, of her relatively radical sentiments. Given the narrator’s many other admirable qualities, making her right about questions which were hardly even questions at the time, seemed to me to go too far.

Some people will really enjoy the book for the authenticity of its language, the beauty of its descriptions, the adventurousness of the story, and the likeability of most of the characters. This is a good book about mostly good people doing interesting things. There is little challenge though. Those few times where Bethia is uncertain of the right answer, the reader knows. All this makes me think Brooks was aiming at the bestseller audience rather than the literary crowd. I hope she gets her sales, because those looking for popular storytelling can do much worse than Brooks and Caleb’s Crossing.

I don’t plan to try to get to them all this year, but I will read the eight I find most enticing.

In other news, I will be posting my reactions to books here again soon. My next book-specific post in awhile is scheduled to appear tomorrow. Presumably, others will follow closely on its heels.

Slate, where he was a regular columnist, has a moving obituary. I can do no better.

Slate writer June Thomas also has a nice piece linking to a number of his writings.

And then there is this by the man himself:

“Trial of the Will” – Vanity Fair (January 2012 issue)

The world is a worse place today, December 16th, 2011.

“Albert Camus, who died an atheist at 46, had surprisingly deep ties to Judaism in his life, his political activity, and his philosophy.” (Tablet)

“The King of Human Error” – Michael Lewis discusses the Nobel-winning researchers who established the scientific foundation for Money Ball(Vanity Fair)

Peter Sis is a well-known and highly regarded illustrator, having won the New York Times Book Review Best Illustrated Book of the Year seven times and many other awards as well. I have neither read nor, to my knowledge, browsed any of those books. This does not prevent me from declaring that Peter Sis is an extremely talented artist. This book is evidence enough.

Sis’s The Conference of the Birds is an adaptation of a 4500-line Persian book of poems originally written in the Twelfth Century by Farid ud-Din Attar. Sis’s version incorporates the poet into the story, turning Attar into the hoopoe of the original:

When the poet Attar woke up one morning after an uneasy dream, he realized that he was a hoopoe bird…

The story itself is simple and allegorical. The hoopoe gathers all the other birds together and takes them on a journey of enlightenment to the Mountain Kaf to find the wise King Simorgh. They pass seven valleys: Quest, Love, Understanding, Detachment, Unity, Amazement, and Death. On their way, the flock loses most of its members, dwindling, in the end, to thirty birds. The thirty arrive at the Mountain Kaf and find nothing but a pool. In the pool, they see their own reflection and realize that they are King Simorgh.

The story strikes me as very Buddhist or, even, Spinozan before Spinoza was cool. What is striking to a Twenty-First Century reader, particularly when recalling that Attar was a Persian Muslim born around 1145, is the radical interpretation of Islam contained in this poem. Attar’s views, unfortunately, were too unorthodox (for those in power at the time). Sis relates the final details of Attar’s (largely unknown) life:

Attar was tried for heresy and banished, his property looted. In the 1220s, he was back in Nishapur, where he died at the hands of Mongol invaders.

I can add little about the poem other than that it does not come across, in Sis’s re-telling, as particularly religious. In Sis’s adaptaion (and I believe the original), the poem undermines traditional Judaic/Christian/Islamic notions of God and the Divine. In The Conference of the Birds, the birds naively begin on a quest to find a distinct being of power and wisdom but, after passing through the seven valleys, realize that they have attained the power of enlightenment and need no separate divinity.

Sis is an illustrator and, frankly, the illustrations are even more powerful than the story. They are stunningly beautiful.

The large flock which begins the journey is made, in a bit of visual foreshadowing, to look like a bird’s head.

Each of the valleys is given an aesthetically-pleasing personality that, for all the lushness of the art, sometimes jars one out of settled expectations. The desolate, burning desert of love, is a good example.

Conveying with words or pictures the experience of holding the book is impossible. The book is printed on textured paper which lends an artsy feel to the pages and enhances the illustrations. The book has to held to be fully appreciated. I was and am awed by the absolute beauty of the book. Physical books will continue to exist so that we can hold stunning objects like this.

I am no art critic nor any sort of artist. I draw stick figures if I must use a pencil to represent people. Yet, even I can recognize the quality, the attention to details, the originality of Sis’s work. Sis uses a vivid and colorful style which, despite the modern appeal, recalls to mind the art of ancient times. Sis and his publisher have wisely chosen not to skimp on the construction of the book.

I am gushing, but the book warrants it. I am extremely pleased to have been exposed to this work and I, in turn, will share it, first with my daughter (who is quite artistic) and, hopefully later, with grandchildren. This is an adult book, though, so I will be sharing it with adults too, starting with my significant other. In the meantime, I will return to it occasionally myself to bask in the beautiful pictures. I was and am awestruck.

Alas, the book was not one I would gift. I have relayed the basics (German, crime, thriller) to my one and only, she can choose to read it or not. I am not vested nor am I risking my credibility as a book recommender. The last time I tried this (vetting before wrapping a potentially gift-worthy detective novel) the novel also failed to grip me, so no gift. My ambivalence in making her aware of that one proved wise. She abandoned it. She will probably make it through this one, if she tries it. Still, I am done scavenging for recent release detective fiction that, in some way, can be linked to the literary.

The story begins with protagonist Kemal Kayankaya and a gentleman named Slibusky “crammed into the china cupboard, emptied for the purpose, of a small Brazilian restaurant on the outskirts of the Frankfurt railway station district, waiting for a couple of racketeers to show up demanding protection money.” Kayankaya wise-cracks his way through the wait to the confrontation, noting Siblusky’s smell and the ridiculousness of two grown men hiding in a china cabinet.

This small job, which Kayankaya assumed would require only scaring a couple of low-level punks, turns into something much bigger. The Frankfurt mafia/gang scene soon becomes the focus of Kayankaya’s single-detective agency.

The reason I am not a good reader of this type of crime thriller is that I find jarring the deux ex machina of an author who noticeably intrudes in the story to save his protagonist from that protagonist’s own incredibly bad and entirely unlikely decisions.

A momentary digression: I love The Usual Suspects in which Verbal tells the police detective a tale about an elusive and sinister man named Keyser Soze. Verbal has been arrested, he has to convince the police that he is more victim than perpetrator. In other words, he did not walk into the police station just for kicks, to see what would happen. Moreover, he escapes by his own sharp wits rather than the convenient dullness of his would-be murderers.

Kayankaya’s thought process seems to be: “What is the course of action most likely to end with my body being discreetly disposed of by powerful criminal organizations who do not hesitate to chop off the fingers of shopowners or start gun battles in the streets? Then I will do that and hope for the best.” Of course, with the author on his side, the best usually happens, in the long run. There are, I am told, four of these. I won’t be verifying the claim.

It is interesting (dismaying?) to me that German audiences are, apparently, as immune to ridiculousness in plots as are Americans. Though the thriller does seem to provide a glimpse into modern German culture, I am sure Jenny Erpenbeck, Martin Walser, Eva Menasse, or any number of other contemporary authors provide a more nuanced and insightful depiction of German life. For that matter, I am still slow getting to Thomas Mann and his Magic Mountain. (Footnote to self: Significant dread at tackling the monster suggests Rat’s Chance in Hell Challenge.)

Kismet uncovered for me pitfalls several book-selection pitfalls to which, it appears, I am not immune. First, relying solely on the translator (the esteemed Anthea Bell) is insufficient for ensuring that a particular translated work will match your or a beloved’s taste. Second, that a particular publisher (the also esteemed Melville House) prints the book does not mean, again, that you and the novel will run through flowered fields holding hands. Third, when you know you tend not to find a particular genre satisfying, do not keep blasted trying with unknown, unproven books/authors. Instead of reading books that I know I likely won’t love but hope my intended giftee might like, I should gift books that I love and that she might like. I will let her recommend to me those books from her favorite genre that she loves. Passing mediocre books back and forth would be idiocy. Luckily, I am the only idiot in the house.

So, I did not fall in love with the book. If you do not mind a few absurdly irrational choices by your protagonist for the purpose of an adrenaline rush, then this could be up your alley. For a more positive, less curmudgeonly review, there is always the Washington Post (very possibly to blame for putting this on my radar…though I kept thinking it was a blogger in my sidebar, it wasn’t) or The Independent. Better though, try a blogger who gives a nice, objective overview of the entire series, highlighting both the positives and the negatives.

The Giller Prize Winner has been announced.

The formation of the Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize has been announced! The Shadow Jury is made up of the wonderful bloggers: Whispering Gums, ANZ LitLovers, Winston’s Dad, Read,Ramble, and A Novel Approach.

As if I need more reasons to read The Sense of an Ending, the excellent review by Tony’s Book World fairly demands I go read it right now.

Australia’s National Year of Reading (via ANZ LitLovers LitBlog): A search for eight books “that together paint a picture of the Australian people and the land [they] live in.” This dovetails well with my plan to start in on some too-long neglected (by me) Australian writers. My selections will come from blogger friends, but this whets my appetite.

Geoff Dyer’s Footnotes are Worth Reading (Times Flow Stemmed excerpts the Paris Review)

Steph of Steph & Tony Investigates has a review of David Guterson’s Ed King in BookPage.

Shelf Love gives some to Pnin (“…Nabokov’s wonderful, delightful, lovely novel…”). I love Nabokov and, by extension, everyone who loves Nabokov.

My Rat’s Chance… (Reviews from a Serial Reader)

Song for Night by Chris Abani (Reading Matters adds to my TBR)

More pieces of Woolf.

Reading parties instead of book clubs?

Do It Yourself: Self-Published Authors Take Matters Into Their Own Hands (The Millions)

Favorite things:

The Magic Mountain of German Literature (Lizzy’s Literary Life)

Heinrich Boll Giveaway at Beauty is a Sleeping Cat (hat tip: Lizzy’s Literary Life)

The Kind of Face You Slash – Day 30: Watched it Burn – basically, about Hitchcock and Daphne du Maurier.

A Small Gallery of Literary Giants (The Millions)

Private Book Collectors Try to Preserve History (Kyiv Post) (hat tip: The Literary Saloon)

A Joke From God (Part 1, Part 2) (n+1)

Captain Bellodi hails from the North, so the locals distrust him. A man is gunned down while trying to board a packed bus on a busy street. The many witnesses are not easy to find. As the police attend to the dead man and try to get a handle on the scene, those who saw the shooting quietly disperse:

With seeming nonchalance, looking around as if they were trying to gauge the proper distance from which to admire the belfry, they drifted off towards the sides of the square and, after a last look around, scuttled into alley-ways.

The sergeant-major and his men did not notice this gradual exodus. Now about fifty people were around the dead man: men from a public works training centre who were only too delighted to have found such an absorbing topic of conversation to while away their eight hours of idleness.

The people who cannot escape so easily are no more helpful. A sergeant-major’s attempt to interrogate the bus driver and the conductor provides amusement rather than clues. He tries to strongarm the conductor with threats of making him remember names “in the guardroom”. The sergeant-major wants names.

‘You know this town better than I do…’

‘Nobody could know the town better than you do,’ said the conductor with a smile, as though shrugging off a compliment.

‘All right, then,’ said the sergeant-major, sneering, ‘first me, then you…But I wasn’t on the bus or I’d remember every passenger one by one. So it’s up to you. Ten names at least.’

‘I can’t remember,’ said the conduct, ‘by my mothers soul I can’t remember. Just now I can’t remember a thing. It all seems a dream.’

Living in a post-Godfather world, we know what all this scattering and trauma-induced amnesia means. There is no secret here for us to uncover, nor for Captain Bellodi. The question is what to do about it or, more likely, how to work around it to attain some justice.

Sciascia was a brave man to point out some truths which everyone else, contemplating belfries across the country, would not acknowledge. This book has been extremely important in Italy and, too, must have been influential in American film and literature. Sciascia was lauded throughout his life for giving voice to the corruption within Italian society and politics.

The views of the common man, at least the common criminal, are provided through an informer:

The informer had never, could never have, believed that the law was definitely codified and the same for all; for him between rich and poor, between wise and ignorant, stood the guardians of the law who only used the strong arm on the poor; the rich they protected and defended. It was like a barbed wire entanglement, a wall….[T]he informer asked only to find a hole in the wall, a gap in the barbed wire…Once over the wall the law would no longer hold terrors. How wonderful it would be to look back on those still behind the wall, behind the barbed wire.

These little twists in the tail, “it all seems a dream” and “How wonderful…to look back…”, are delightful. Sciascia jostles expectations slightly or adds just the garnish needed to turn a fine but ordinary observation into something deeper. The insight on what a culture does to one’s outlook is an enduring gift of Sciascia’s work.

The informer is wrong about the law, though, at least as enforced by Bellodi. The captain “regarded the authority vested in him as a surgeon regards the knife: an instrument to be used with care, precision and certainty.” Whereas the informer has been converted to a perverted, if realistic, view of law, Captain Bellodi has, so far, held fast to the idea that “any action taken by the law should be governed by justice.” To that end, he treats suspects and even known criminals with respect as men. For that, mafioso Don Mariano acknowledges Captain Bellodi as a fellow man rather than “a half-man or even a quacker”, though this recognition does not lead him to cooperate.

Their interview recalls to mind the diner scene in the movie “Heat” in which the Pacino and DeNiro characters meet as men, each respectable in their own way. The cat-and-mouse between Bellodi and Mariano ranges from the case at hand to, frustrating the sergeant who sits in, “the Church, humanity, death.”

‘What do you think of [the Gospels]?’

‘Beautiful words: the Church is all beautiful.’

‘For you, I see, beauty has nothing to do with truth.’

‘Truth is at the bottom of a well: look into it and you see the sun or the moon; but if you throw yourself in, there’s no more sun or moon: just truth.’

The interview is one of the highlights of the novel, though there are plenty of those. For me, even little asides regarding America (there are several) were amusing. But the true strength of the novel is in the many ways Sciascia broadens the scope of the novel beyond Bellodi’s hunt for justice with respect to a single murder. Whether the transformation of commuters into admirers of church architecture or an old man’s deriding of democracy and “the people” as “things dreamed up at a desk by people who know how to shove one word up the backside of another, and strings of words up the backside of humanity, with all due respect”, Sciascia helps the reader feel what it is like to live in an ostensibly free and democratic country which, in reality, is controlled by tyrannical forces on both sides of the law.

This was an important book at the time of its publication and remains an excellent read.

With three of ten down, this is the challenge and how I plan to tackle it. Any suggestions on item 6?

My tentative list:

1. The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco: A book that has been previously abandoned

2. The Trial – Frank Kafka (I told my friend Pat I would, but have not yet…..better late…): A re-read.

3. Native Son – Richard Wright: A book that has been sitting on the shelf, like, forever.

4. Poetry (particular collection TBA): A book that paralyses one with dread.

5. A Fringe of Leaves – Patrick White: Investigate a canonical writer hitherto most shamefully overlooked.

6. Undetermined: Seek out a book by an author who has earned ostracism by being so good that any further novel could surely never measure up…?

7. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez: That author who was supposed to be really good, but didn’t go down too well? Give him/her another go!

8. Skippy Dies – Paul Murray: Take a chance. Read a book which you would rather not.

9. Neuromancer – William Gibson (following the lead of Pechorin’s Journal who knows sci-fi): A book from an unfamiliar genre.

10. The Underpainter – Jane Urquhart: Ask a friend (preferably a person of impeccable taste, and definitely not someone who might have an axe to grind) to choose a book that you will, in their opinion, like.

I plan to update my progress at the end of each month until I finish. (Hopefully, that will be by the end of the year, but, if not, I will continue reading and posting until I do finish.)