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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Next to Love” by Ellen Feldman

April 23, 2012

Photo source: Amazon.com

The title of Ellen Feldman’s novel is ascribed to Eric Partridge, the British lexicographer, who, as a young recruit, wrote of “war, which, next to love, has most captured the world’s imagination.” In the novel, Babe Huggins works for Western Union, snipping lines of telegram tape as they chug from the receiver, then gluing them in order onto light slips of paper before handing them off for delivery. The book opens on the harrowing day in 1944 when 16 telegrams from the War Department, each announcing a casualty, arrive in her small Western Massachusetts town. Since her own husband, as well as the young husbands of her two best friends Grace and Millie, are fighting in Europe, Babe feels a clutch of fear and a burst of relief as each name of a dead soldier comes across the wire.

“Next to Love” follows the three young women as they and their husbands grow up into a world at war. And while the book is about death, but it’s equally about sex:

Babe does not take long to learn the dirty little secret of war. It is about death. Everyone knows that. But it is also about sex. The two march off to battle in lockstep.

Her discovery is not original. Eros and Thanatos, she will read later . . . But Freud did not have her firsthand experience.

All three of the young women experience sex and marriage (sometimes in that order); all three are war brides. You will have guessed that at least one learns she is widowed on that day in 1944, but the book is not all about that. It’s about the effect of the war on these young women, and the children they will have, and the fathers of those children. And the burdens that the men who do return bring home with them.

In some ways, the war was liberating for women. In “Next to Love,” Babe leaves her Massachusetts home, following her husband Claude to training camp. She returns home when he is shipped overseas. She gets the job at Western Union because nearly all the men are away, but learns as the war winds down that she must give up her job once it’s over – the returning men will need all the jobs. It seems hard to explain now, the fact that only a few women stayed in the workforce in 1945, the rest easily giving up their jobs to the men.

All the same, it’s refreshing to read a book about the home front during the war, one that deals with the hardships then and in the aftermath: the secrets, the repression, the relationship of stepfathers to children who never got a chance to meet their biological dads. And this is a well-written one. Do you agree? Let us know in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics for people who hate numbers here.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” by Deborah Moggach

April 20, 2012

Source: Amazon.com

Until I came across a copy in the local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, I had no idea that “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” now a Major Motion Picture starring a slew of great British actors, started life as a book. But indeed it did, in 2004, and the book has just been reissued to tie in to the movie, with a bright orange-yellow cover. So of course I picked it up.

The story opens in London, where elderly Muriel has been getting a lot of publicity after having been left in an the emergency room cubicle of a crowded London hospital awaiting a bed. Her exhausted Indian doctor, Ravi, goes home to find that Norman Purse, his English father-in-law, has moved in. Norman has been kicked out of his most recent nursing home, for unspecified but easily imaginable misbehavior. As tensions rise between Ravi and his wife, Ravi and his cousin Sonny cook up a plan to develop a retirement home in India and eventually, though for very different reasons, both Norman and Muriel end up there. So do a married couple, the Ainslies, a BBC retiree named Dorothy, a Sussex widow named Evelyn, and various other single or widowed ladies.

Once they arrive, the new residents are taken care of by a manager who may or may not have their best interests at heart, a staff of decrepit retainers, and a former assistant to a podiatrist (it takes them some time to understand why the Best Exotic Marigold’s staff nurse, the manager’s wife, is interested mostly in their feet). They are subject to cross-cultural mishaps and some very funny misunderstandings. But in the best British tradition, they muddle through and make a go of things.

The book makes some gentle comparisons between Indian and English ways of treating the elderly, not to mention comparative ways of viewing poverty. There is personal growth, especially among the retirees; there is a bit less among their needy adult children. Things end happily for some, less happily for others, and a few souls go gently into that good night (well, many of the characters are elderly).

As you can tell, the new edition features famous British actors on the cover. I’ve yet to see the movie, (and I haven’t seen the trailer again since I read the book) so I am having a good time guessing which actor plays which character. Bill Nighy would be entirely in character as Norman Purse, but maybe he’s cast against type and is Doug Ainslie? Maggie Smith must be Evelyn, there just isn’t any other role for her. Judi Dench might be Muriel, or Mrs. Ainslie, or she could be Dorothy. Of course, movies being what they are, the entire story might have been rewritten with changed emphasis, so all my guesses might be wrong.

What do you make of my predictions? The book? Have you seen the movie? Let us know in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics for people who hate numbers here.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Sea of Poppies” by Amitav Ghosh

April 16, 2012

‘Sea of Poppies’ is the first book in Amitav Ghosh’s ‘Ibis Trilogy.’ In this historical novel, set in 1838, Ghosh tells the intertwined story of Indians, Europeans, and Americans, all affected by the opium trade. First, there’s Deeti, who manages to farm a few acres, mostly dedicated to opium poppies, while her husband, an addict, works at the processing plant a few miles away. Then there’s Paulette Lambert, the orphaned daughter of a French botanist, and Jodu, the orphaned son of Paulette’s wet-nurse and nanny. Paulette is taken in by the Burnhams, wealthy shippers and shipowners, but yearns to escape their restricted life. And there’s the Raja of Raskhali, whose estates have caught Burnham’s eye.

Ghosh brings them all together on the sailing ship Ibis, and their complicated and sometimes interrelated routes to the ship comprise the novel. The Ibis has come from Baltimore, and is on its way back, via the island of Mauritius. Jodu is taken on as a crewman on the Ibis, under the orders of Zachary Reid, a mixed-race crewman who has risen to the position of second mate. The cruel first mate, Mr. Crowle, has it in for both of them, and there are some gripping and frightening passages in which he lets them know it. Deeti and her husband are among a group of girmitiyas, migrants on their way to Mauritius as indentured workers. Since Hindus who cross the ‘Black Water’ lost caste, the reader can imagine the hardships of life at home that might induce an Indian to migrate. Of course, Ghosh also relates some of the promises made to them as well.

Getting them all to the Ibis allows Ghosh to explore issues of caste, both English and Hindu. The English ranks are very clear to the English themselves, as well as to others like Paulette who come in contact with them, and Zachary, who may have something to hide. All Westerners look the same to the Indians. Ghosh also illustrates the devastating effect of the opium trade on Indian farmers — the action takes place just before the start of the Opium Wars. There are also love, and lust, opium, greed, and chicanery, financial and other types.

A great deal of the book is written in dialect; it took some time to become accustomed to it. The book includes a chrestomathy, whose second definition, per The Free Dictionary, is “an anthology used in studying a language.” I referred to it quite a bit, especially at first. Oh, and Ghosh also doesn’t use quotation marks, but in his skilled hands, I didn’t even notice until I was more than 150 pages into the book.

Are you excited about this book? The sequel in a projected trilogy, called “River of Smoke”? Let us know in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics for people who hate numbers here.

Photo source: Amazon.com

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Events

Weekend Geological Walk from Proteus Gowanus

April 13, 2012

An Urban Geological Study of the Gowanus

Sunday,  April 15, 4:30-6:30 pm

All ages are welcome
We will meet at Proteus Gowanus before going out to explore.
Perfect weather anticipated.
Please be prompt!
​
Geology is the the study of materials contained within the Earth and the processes by which they evolve. The Urban Geological Study will lead participants on a hands-on exploration in the Proteus Gowanus neighborhood to gather materials, identify, classify, and tell a new story of objects found in the local urban environment. How did these objects arrive here? What are their uses? Where will they end up?
During the workshop we will create new systems of nomenclature based on historical fact or future fiction to form new connections with our surrounding environment through migratory geological narratives. An informational handout, worksheet, and survey materials will be provided.

Proteus Gowanus is located at 543 Union Street at Nevins.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Alice in Bed” by Cathleen Schine

April 13, 2012

“Alice in Bed” is one of Cathleen Schine’s early novels, having been published originally in 1983, and reissued in 2012 after the success of Schine’s 2010 novel “The Three Weissmans of Westport.” “Alice in Bed” tells the story of Alice, a college student who is, for some reason, unable to move her legs without pain, and is hospitalized while doctors search for a cause or, at least, a cure. Halfway through the book, Alice moves to a rehab center, where she realizes that there are people a lot worse off than she is.

Alice is a lively young woman, and clearly does not like being cooped up in the hospital. But when her friends, family, and lovers come to see her in the hospital, she’s spritely all the same. She fights with the nurses and doctors, particularly about pain medication and its timing. She has inappropriate sex. She reminisces about an old boyfriend, whose mother comes for a visit. She writes letters to a friend who is in a psychiatric hospital, and possibly also worse off than she is. And life goes on around her – during Alice’s year in the hospital, her parents separate and divorce.

Part of the charm of the book is its regular reminders of Life Before – not life before Alice’s illness, life before the electronic age. The TV remote is wired to the TV (which is tiny, black and white, and fastened to the ceiling high above Alice’s bed). Telephones are wired and have rotary dials; no one has cell phones. People write actual letters, and mail is delivered to patients in the hospital. Patients don’t have computers or Internet access; visitors bring books and plants. (I guess we still bring flowers.) Patients didn’t control their pain medication through pumps; they gritted their teeth and waited for pills or shots. It was also the days before managed care, and Alice stays in the hospital for months; even after the move to rehab she returns once or twice to the hospital.

In his blurb, John Updike (yes! Updike blurbed the book) calls the book a caricature. But maybe it’s more of a metaphor? There are some references to “The Magic Mountain,” which Alice struggles with and gives up on, so it’s probably not a metaphor for life. Any other ideas? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics for people who hate numbers here.

Photo via Amazon.com

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Conundrum” by Jan Morris

April 9, 2012

A few weeks ago I reviewed Jan Morris’s novel “Hav.” Reading that book and her book about Sydney, Australia, made me more curious about Morris, one of the earliest and best-known personalities to undergo gender reassignment surgery. So I read her book “Conundrum,” published in 1974 (and reissued in 2002). “Conundrum” begins with a vignette of the little boy James Morris, aged three or four, realizing “that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl.” In what is deeply felt and surely the most graceful of writing about transsexuals, Morris explains how she moved from James Morris to Jan Morris.

This book is the only vehicle Oxford-educated, Army-serving, Everest-climbing Morris has used to explain a story that riveted interest across the world. After the initial insight, Morris assumed nothing could be done about this conundrum, and describes a childhood and young adulthood of keeping a secret while attending the choir school of Christ Church, Oxford, and public school at Lancing. As James, Morris went into the Army at 17 during World War II, describes himself, “like a spy in a courteous enemy camp . . . caught up in the fascination of observing how the other side worked.” Morris put these observations to good use, building on them to become a writer. There was clearly sexual ambiguity, though as James, Morris married (and fathered five children). Morris clearly owes a huge debt of emotional gratitude to her children, who are described empathetically but whose privacy is carefully respected, and to her former wife (now her partner in a civil union). The book, while deeply felt, also skates across what must have been some thin emotional ice as Morris allowed her femininity to emerge, first through drugs, and then through several surgeries.

Morris’s sense of humor is evident throughout the book, particularly during the years when she had begun hormone therapy and was intersexual, sometimes appearing as male, other times as female. Morris clearly enjoys the pleasures of femininity, to an extent that, from the vantage point of 2012, is a little disturbing to a feminist – she writes of the comfort of slipping into being cared for from being the one doing the caring, in terms of doors opened and bags carried. As she acknowledges, she has missed the full experience of periods and pregnancy. And she movingly describes the process of moving towards acceptance of her often confusing self, suggesting that she must have suffered some serious depression. Since the book’s publication, Morris has not written or spoken much about the surgery, letting the book speak for itself. She makes the point that the process did not change her as a person, except in outward form; after the surgery she felt integrated and that she had gained her identity.

Morris has discussed in an interview with the Paris Review whether her sensibilities were changed. It’s a complicated answer, so I am quoting the question and answer in full:

INTERVIEWER
The very heart of this question is: do you feel your sensibilitiies at all changed?

MORRIS
That is a different question. The trilogy: I started it and finished it in the same frame of mind. But I suppose it is true that most of my work has been a protracted potter, looking at the world and allowing the world to look at me. And I suppose there can be no doubt that both the world’s view of me and my view of the world have changed. Of course they have. The point of the book Pleasures of a Tangled Life is to try to present, or even to present to myself what kind of sensibility has resulted from this experience. I’m sick to death of talking about the experience itself, as you can imagine, after twenty years. But I’ve come to recognize that what I am is the result of the experience itself. The tangle that was there is something that has gone subliminally through all my work. The one book I think isn’t affected is the “Pax Britannica” trilogy.

(Morris began “Pax Britannica,” a three-part history of the British Empire, as James, and completed it as Jan.) Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics for people who hate numbers here.

(Image source: Amazon.com)

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “How It All Began” by Penelope Lively

April 6, 2012

A mugger pushes 70-something Charlotte, who teaches English to immigrants, over on the sidewalk, breaking her hip and setting off a chain of consequences in lives that should be unrelated. Charlotte’s married daughter, Rose, is unable to accompany her elderly employer, retired academic Lord Henry Peters, to a speech out of town, so his niece Marion goes instead. Marion and Lord Peters miscommunicate, and his speech and the train tickets are left behind. Marion sends a text changing some plans to her married lover, and his wife reads the text – he has left his phone in his jacket pocket. Lord Peters is unable to reconstruct or recite his speech and so humiliates himself. At the luncheon before the disastrous speech, Marion is seated next to a charming hedge fund manager, and he hires her to decorate an apartment for him. Since she can no longer go out to teach her classes, Charlotte has one of her students come to Rose’s house for tutoring. He and Rose become friendly and. . . you get the idea.

Many unexpected consequences ramify in all sorts of directions and dimensions from these beginnings, and all the characters’ lives are changed as a result. Lord Peters, for example, spends much of the novel plotting to find a way back into the public eye. Since his chosen vehicle is television, things do not go quite as he had hoped. But his efforts create an opportunity for Mark, a young researcher who is clearly on the make. Marion thinks that she has hit pay dirt with her hedge fund manager until he stops returning her calls and, more relevantly, paying her bills. Marion’s lover and his wife struggle on, unable to divorce, unable to resolve their issues. Things work out well for some characters, and turn out in unexpected ways for others – ‘How it all Began’ is not a dark story. The mugger appears only briefly, on the first and last pages, an elfin figure who sets the plot in motion and is then of no further interest to any of the others whose lives he has upended.

Though the writing is blithe and, well, lively, this is not a glib novel by any means. It provides a thoughtful view of a cross-section of contemporary English life. We get a peek at a fairly broad swath, from the Upper Middle Class (unless his life peerage thrusts Lord Peters into the upper classes) through to the rough working class life of economic immigrants working construction jobs. Penelope Lively has a strong grasp of her craft, switching points of view readily and keeping the plot moving along nicely. This is a perfect book to give a convalescent, and is a pretty good option for a plane.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also have a blog making numbers palatable to people who hate numbers here.

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Events, Kids

Mini-musical ‘Sharin’ a Ride’ at the Transit Museum over Spring Break

March 28, 2012

Looking for something to do with the kids over spring break? The Transit Museum will be presenting a 30-minute long, kid-friendly original musical, ‘Sharin’ a Ride,’ twice a day from April 10 through April 15 (show times are below). The musical, which knits together Earth Day and the transit system, make concepts like sustainability and carbon footprint accessible for children using sing-alongs and skits.

Suitable for children of all ages above age 4, the performance is free with Museum admission ($5/child, $7/adult).

Performance times: Tuesday, April 10 through Friday, April 13 at 11 am and 1:30 pm
Saturday, April 14 and Sunday, April 15 at 1:30 and 3:30 pm

The Transit Museum is located inside the subway station on the corner of Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street, Brooklyn. More information is available here.

Image courtesy of the New York Transit Museum

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “The Perfect Nazi: Uncovering My Grandfather’s Secret Past” by Martin Davidson

March 23, 2012

Many of the books about the Holocaust that have recently found their way to this household have described what happened to particular families after 1939 (“After Long Silence” by Helen Fremont), or about searches made long after the war to discover what happened to one’s family (“The Lost” by Daniel Mendelsohn, “Walking Since Daybreak” by Modris Eksteins). I highly recommend all three of those books. And now I’m adding another to the list, “The Perfect Nazi” by Martin Davidson.

Like Fremont’s and Mendelsohn’s books, Davidson’s memoir traces what befell his family during the Second World War. As is obvious from the title, however, Davidson’s family wasn’t lost. His father was Scots, his mother German. And what was lost, or buried, or perhaps just ignored, as Davidson describes it, was his German grandfather’s history as a Nazi.

It’s not as if Davidson and his sister, who accompanied him on his quest, didn’t wonder. They went on summer holidays to visit their grandparents (who had separated after the war) in Berlin. There were other family members, too, “family traces, the names of people whom, though they were still alive, we never met.” These included a great-uncle, a great-grandmother, and a step-great-grandfather. It was as if there were a shared family will not to discuss what happened.

Their grandfather, Bruno Langbehn, liked to cause trouble in the family, taking the adolescent Davidson and his sister out for dinner, then plying them with alcohol and bringing them home drunk. He talked a little, about his favorite leisure activity, the apparently benign act of “meeting his Kriegskameraden (his wartime buddies) around a regular Stammtisch, the table that many German pubs have, reserved for use” by regular customers. And, once he died, Davidson’s mother started to let out the tale: her father had not been in the regular army. He’d been in the SS.

So, using archives and records, interviewing family members and relying on histories, Davidson traces his grandfather’s progression. Langbehn’s fascist activities started early; he joined the Nazi Party in 1926, at the age of 19. His low membership number of 36,931 stood him in good stead later, after the Nazi Party had taken power. In the 1920s it made him an outlier. That year, he joined the Nazi paramilitary force the SA, the brownshirts. He was among the throngs who marched at the Nuremberg rallies, and fought in the streets. After brutal, violent marches, he would repair with the members of his Sturm to the local pub, where they would drink and sing, celebrating the violence they had inflicted. In 1937, he applied to and was accepted by the SS. He was injured during the fight for France early in the war. He ended the war years in Prague, working for the SS.

Langbehn was trained as a dentist, and was not a particularly competent or organized monger of SS cruelty. He was, in Davidson’s words, “ a compulsive joiner, a man at his happiest inside institutions, a natural committee member.” And that’s what makes the story so harrowing. As Davidson describes his grandfather’s war years, the ease with which any German could become enraptured by, and convinced of, Hitler’s horrid vision emerges from his factual, historical discussions. Davidson is careful not to speculate about what his grandfather’s state of mind might have been at any point in this trajectory, letting Langbehn’s actions speak, which they do, quite clearly. This can’t have been an easy book to research, or write. It is one that everyone should read.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics for people who hate numbers here.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Girl Reading” by Katie Ward

March 19, 2012

We forget, often, that artifacts survive us, but survive they do, and that is one of the points that Katie Ward makes in her fascinating new novel, “Girl Reading.” Each chapter is about a work of art, usually but not always a painting, always involving a woman and a book. Who are the women in the pictures? What brought them to the artist’s attention? Starting with the work of art, and some known facts about the artist’s life, Ward imagines a story that results in the work’s creation. The book starts in the 14th century with Simone Martini’s Annunciation, and runs until 2060 with an ‘enmeshed,’ that is to say digital, image of a Sibil.

After 14th century Italy, the book moves to 16th century Netherlands (where the painter has a memory of a painting he saw as a student in Italy) and then on to 17th century England. Thereafter the book remains in the United Kingdom. The stories vary in quality. The 14th, 17th, and 18th century stories are labored and distant. I’m not sure why – perhaps the author’s believes that these works of art are less accessible to the modern viewer? (I personally disagree, particularly about the Dutch painter Pieter Janssens Elinga. Or those other wondrous painters of Dutch interiors, Vermeer and Saenredam.) Or maybe they were less accessible to her? The novel comes alive in the 19th century, when it contrasts a pair of twins, one a photographer and the other a medium. From then on, the stories become consistently better.

The stories are linked thematically, rather than through character. There’s also a more literal link, as an object, or the thought or memory of an object, from the previous story turns up in its successor. It’s an original and imaginative approach, both to the works of art and to the stories. At the same time, I needed to see the pictures to understand the story, so I looked them up online. I have pinned pictures of as many of the works of art Ward mentions in her text and a note at the end (perhaps underlining the point of her final story, which explores the loss when all we see are images in the web instead of the physical object) on a Pinterest board. (Pinterest is free but you have to join; you can use your Facebook or Twitter account.)

One feature of the writing increased the emotional distance throughout the work: Ward joined a modern trend and did not include quotation marks, leaving it to the reader to decide what is spoken, and what is interior. I can see how, used sparingly, this technique can have an impact; but used throughout a book, as in this case, it’s off-putting. I’m not the only person who feels this way about quotation marks; here’s the author Lionel Shriver on the issue.

Towards the end of the book, Ward has one of her characters say (or so the context suggests anyway), “Sibil makes you experience, in mesh real or fictionalized aspects of what is already there embedded within a real-world object.” For the character, as for Ward, the work of art is a starting point. Ward, like her artist, shows us the work in a new way. Do you agree? Let us know in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics for people who hate numbers here.

Photo source: Amazon.com

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