Books read January through December 1981
| Author | Krotkov, Yuri |
|---|---|
| Editor | Smith, Carol Houck |
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Mairs, Tanya E. |
| Publication | New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1979 |
| Number of Pages | 253 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Soviet Union |
| When Read | January 1981 |
A collection of fictional "scenes", each about ten pages, depicting incidents in the life of Stalin during the forties and fifties. They begin at Tehran and end at a writer's conference after Stalin's death at which Khruschev's secret speech is read.
Each scene has a different cast and often a different point of view. Many are told from the perspective of an impersonal narrator, others from the perspective of Beria, a film commissar, general of the bodyguard, the actor who played Stalin in films, etc.
The characterization of Stalin is superb. He is insane and capable at the same time, ruthless and conscience stricken, heartless and kind-hearted, realistic and surreal. He rehabilitates an old Bolshevik to tell him that he, Stalin, once worked for the Okhrana. He has his bodyguard killed for buying slippers. He makes the hapless fool tiptoe up to him to prove, and for Stalin to whip himself up into believing, that the slippers were bought for sneaking up on Stalin. Other scenes include meeting with Mao (badly overdone), altercation with his son, losing a billiard match to Beria and getting even, and much more. Everything is overstated and caricatured but yet still rings horrifyingly true - and consistent with Deutscher, Medvedev, Djilas, and others.
Using the magic of the Internet I am now able to find at least a bit of information about Krotkov. He was a writer and correspondent for TASS and a self-professed KGB agent. He has three novels published in English. He claimed that Wilfred Burchett, Jean-Paul Sartre, and John Kenneth Galbraith were all KGB agents. I can believe it of Burchett, I find Sartre possible but not probable, and I find Galbraith very improbable. But what do I know? What does anybody know? Krotkov was not a common sort of man.
| Author | Einstein, Alfred |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Mendel, Arthur; Broden, Nathan |
| Publication | New York: Oxford University Press, 1945 |
| Number of Pages | 492 |
| Extras | Kochel listings, portraits, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| Keywords | Music |
| When Read | January 1981 |
A biography of Mozart with a study of all of the works - both done in a rather sweeping survey form.
Mozart seems an ordinary and even foolish man in all other ways except his work - in which he was a surpassing genius.
E's book is not deep and not always critical. He is clearly taken with the master and concerned to confound his superficial critics. The musical survey covers so much that it does little deep analysis of the major works.
I read this book very fast - as a rapid reading exercise - and so missed much. E did give me certain basic concepts, such as chamber vs. concertante, etc. which have helped me.
The rapid reading exercise didn't really work. I have attempted it a number of times before and after but I'm still not a rapid reader. I can force myself to read at a higher than usual speed, but it's not enjoyable to me and I don't get as much out of it as I would at normal speed. I can't say if even the slender conclusions I drew in 1981 were accurate.
I took a music appreciation, or maybe it was a basic music theory course (or maybe I took one of each - it was a long time ago), in college. Almost all of the students were pretty good musicians. Many could sing. Many could play the piano or other instruments. Many could read music. We had to do things like be able to recognize intervals and chords - something I never mastered. In one of the courses we also studied various pieces of music, one of which was the Symphony No. 40 by Mozart. We learned to read the score and follow along with the music. The professor would put the needle down on a record (it was needles and records in those days) and play a few seconds and we had to write down where those seconds came from in the score. It was all beyond me, but I did get some appreciation for Mozart from the course and began to listen to Mozart recordings. When I saw this book in the library I thought, hmmph, maybe I can learn more about him. However I did not have high expectations of myself and so chose to use it for my rapid reading experience.
I still like Mozart a lot. He's still one of my favorite composers. I often listened to music on headphones while programming computers at work. For years, when I arrived at my desk, I would always choose a Mozart piece from my mp3 library as my first piece of the day.
| Author | Gardner, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980 |
| Number of Pages | 246 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 1981 |
A very finely written pair of stories, one within the other. Professor Winesap is in Madison Wisconsin to deliver a lecture on psycho-history. Afterwards, at the history department party, he meets Prof. Sven Aagard, who invites him to his house to meet his monster son. The son, Freddy, after much trepidation, shows Winesap a book he has written. The rest of the story is that book.
Freddy's book is about the period of reformation and nationalism in early 16th century Sweden. It is all allegory and philosophy. Lars-Goren Bergquist, eight foot tall knight and advisor to his kinsman King Gustav, watches in great fear as kings, bishops, millionaires, pretenders, and pirates all variously consult with the devil to scheme for power or wealth or love. The devil himself wants only to foment trouble - though sometimes he has trouble himself as when he is blinded by light or bored by pastry or has his throat cut by Lars-Goren.
Both parts of the novel are quite brilliant. In the first part there are marvelously acute images of academia and scholarly ego and cowardice. The two professors skirmish over the validity of psycho-history, one scornful and reactionary, the other conciliating and sly. In Freddy's book however the tone changes to one of serious straightforwardness. Playfulness is gone. The big issues of life are now at stake.
Gardner appears as a very spiritual man, deeply concerned over good and evil in the individual and in society. all his heroes are mythic archetypes - the villains though are debilitated, disillusioned men. All are struggling in a world of foreordained evil.
Very sophisticated writing and thinking. Very good.
Looking up "John Gardner" in the Wikipedia I learned, to my surprise, that thee were two novelists of that name. This shouldn't have surprised me. It explains why the John Gardner could have both written this book and a series of James Bond books. But he didn't. It was the American novelist, essayist, critic, and professor who wrote this book and another book that I read, On Becoming a Novelist. It was the British novelist who wrote the Bond books.
This book was published when Gardner was 47, two years before his untimely death in a motorcycle accident.
| Author | Clarke, Arthur C. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1972 |
| Copyright Date | 1955 |
| Number of Pages | 172 |
| Extras | Preface by Clarke written in 1971 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | January 1981 |
An early novel by C set 200 years in the future. Venus, Mars, the moon, and some moons of Saturn and Jupiter have been settled for some time. The settlers are still deeply dependent upon earth for heavy metals and circumstances are very close to war. An earthman accountant, Bertram Sadler, is sent as a counterspy to the moon to find a Federation spy. As usual in Clarke, both sides are wrong and after a battle of futuristic weapons, they realize their errors and come to their senses.
As in all of C's books, the science is continuous and informative, the theme a humanistic one, and the plot acceptably and reasonably developed. All of the usual small variations of the scientific personality appear as the characters.
The story is less interesting than his later ones, and less far reaching than, say, Childhood's End, but as with all Clarke, it is good to read.
| Author | Dostoevsky, Fyodor |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Garnett, Constance |
| Publication | New York: MacMillan Co., 1956 |
| Copyright Date | 1861 |
| Number of Pages | 333 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | February 1981 |
This is a story of thwarted, injured, defeated love. Vanya, the hero, a young writer, loves Natasha, his stepsister. She loves Alyosha, featherheaded son of the evil Prince Valkovsky. Alyosha loves Natasha but is incapable of fidelity and constancy. Nikolay Sergeyitch loves his daughter Natasha but is outraged by her love for the son of his persecutor Valkovsky. Finally, Nellie, the orphan daughter of a woman betrayed by Volkovsky, grows to overcome her deep bitterness and love others, but she dies.
The plot is unsatisfactory. The central love affair appears very forced to modern sensibility. The confluence of character and events around Prince V is stage managed to a high degree. The characters play out roles beyond their logical conclusions - perhaps in a 19th century Russian manner. Yet there is still the deep personality of Dostoevsky infusing the book with feeling and literary strength.
Part of this strength is the psychological depth of the characters and their coherence in different lights. Part is in the high morality of people struggling with difficult moral issues. Part is in D's appreciation for real life - of poor people, orphans, young lovers, alcoholics - not just for successes of the upper class. His deepest sympathy is always with the impoverished orphan and he never forgets her existence.
Finally, there are high scenes of first rate writing - dialog of great insight and subtlety - scattered in many passages throughout the book.
I read The Brothers Karamazov while studying in the Philosophy Department at the University of Illinois and was tremendously impressed. It led me to read more of D's books. I imagine that I have read most of his work. I encountered some books like this one and The Adolescent (also published under the English title The Idiot), that were problematic as novels, but I read them anyway, believing that it was important for me to know as much of his work as possible. I still think it was a good decision.
| Author | Sheckley, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1978 |
| Number of Pages | 234 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Comedy |
| When Read | February 1981 |
A zany S-F comedy about a paranoid schizophrenic divided at age 12 into three separate people. At 35, the main one, Crompton, decides that he must reintegrate with the other two in order to become a whole man. He rips off his employer, Psychosmell Inc., for money to travel to two distant planets and find the other two.
The other two are Loomis - a sensualist working in a sex show, and Stack - a psychopath misanthrope in a wild frontier area. The combination of them with the studious and fastidious Crompton offers ample opportunity for hilarity.
Sheckley's writing is more than just cute. It's urbane and sophisticated. He can cut apart the California lifestyle from the inside and rise out of the story to act as critic and observer. There are scenes of fantastic imagination and of high comedy.
Certainly this is not traditional science fiction. S-F is used more as a license for the fantastic than as an examination of future possibilities. The targets are psychological and sociological - and the restricted imagination of the reader.
I'll read more.
This was a delightful book, representative of Sheckley's best.
| Author | Asimov, Isaac |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1954 |
| Copyright Date | 1953 |
| Number of Pages | 224 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Robots |
| When Read | February 1981 |
Elijah "Lije" Bailey is a New York City cop - several thousand years in the future. The city is now a huge underground structure of steel and concrete, entirely self-contained with its nuclear power plants and yeast farm/food factories. Life is relatively poor. Space is limited, bathrooms are all communal, transport is via crowded moving pathways, food is largely synthetic with occasional small supplements of real chicken or fish. All people now live in such cities and only robots work in the surface world.
In this setting a "spacer", a human being from the "Outer Worlds", is murdered and Lije is ordered to investigate. He is assigned a highly humanoid robot partner. Ultimately the murderer, the police commissioner Julius Enerby, is exposed.
The general theme of the story is the need for humans to look out towards new worlds and new life - even life with robots. The cities are fragile, stagnant things which cannot develop the soul. Even the Outer Worlds with their great wealth and science have become stagnant, ending the great explorations of the past. Now it is time to resume them.
A writes a very well crafted plot. The pieces mesh well. The characters stay more or less in character. The science is very good. The theme is interesting. His greatest failing is that he does not pursue the important philosophical issues - such as the issue of robot humanity - to their ends.
I seem to recall that I loved this book. Asimov created a world that was overcrowded and poor in resources. People lived in gigantic apartment complexes in tiny apartments with common bathrooms called "men's personals", where men never said anything to each other, and "women's personals", where women spoke freely. People got around on a system of parallel conveyor belts. They stepped onto a slow moving one, then crossed to faster and faster ones, until they were moving quite fast. Then they stepped the other way as they approached their destination. They never went outside in the open air and never saw the sun or the weather.
For reasons that I can't explain, this world appealed to me. It still does. I wouldn't have a problem living in a tiny apartment - as long as I had my sweetie, my computer and my books and now, I didn't know about it then, my Internet connection. I'd prefer a private bathroom but sharing would be okay as long as I could sit on the pot for as long as I needed to. A private car, a house, land, even the great outdoors - I don't think I really need any of that.
I also loved Asimov's robot, R. Daneel Olivaw. Sane, rational, highly intelligent, not given to irrational emotions, never violent, non-human perhaps, but a likable character for sure.
There were a number of follow-on books to this one and I read and enjoyed them all.
I have a number of books by other authors that are based on Asimov's robot future. I liked the ones by Roger MacBride Allen. Maybe I should try out some of these others. Perhaps I'll start with the Robot City series by Kube-McDowell.
I read the first couple of books in the Robot City series. They were written with the blessings of Asimov and I wouldn't be surprised if Asimov received some of the royalties. The demand for Asimov robot books may have been too high for A, prolific as he was, to satisfy. Or maybe Asimov himself had had enough of them and was happy to turn the problem over to his publishers to recruit other authors. The books were more adolescent than A's own writing, but they were undeniably Asimovian robot books and satisfied some of the need for more and more.
| Author | Woolf, Virginia |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harcourt Brace World |
| Copyright Date | 1925 |
| Number of Pages | 296 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | March 1981 |
An experimental novel of its day relating the thoughts of a half a dozen characters on a single summer day - the day of Clarissa Dalloway's party. Clarissa herself is a rather shallow, 52 year old socialite, blessed with all of the finer social graces but lacking in deep intellectual or emotional qualities. The others are Peter Walsh - a man who pursued Clarissa in their youth - a minor intellectual; Miss Kilman - the exact opposite of Clarissa - intellectual, religious, political, lesbian, totally lacking in grace; Elizabeth - the very beautiful young daughter; Septimus Warren Smith - shell shocked suicide and his wife Lucrezia - lovely warmhearted woman.
The writing is mixed stream of consciousness and narrative. It is extremely ably done with a superb ability to convey simple (and complex) feeling quite apart from thought. Transitions from one character to another are perfect and natural - two people pass each other or two people look at a car or an airplane and the stream of consciousness shifts from one to the other.
The feelings expressed are all existential wonderings. They range from the superficial - Clarissa, to the overwhelming - Septimus. Each character is perfectly distinct. Some marvelous characterizations are done in just a few sentences. In short, the writing is outstanding.
Finally, the content is also most impressive. These are revealing people, telling us much about the nature of society as a whole.
I don't remember much about the book, though I seem to remember that it was complex and difficult. It took some effort to read and understand. That's really a point in its favor, though it's not the kind of book one wants to read to the exclusion of easy books.
I seem to recall that I read this for a book group that met in our house at Rockridge Road, but I'm not certain that's true.
This book appears as number three on a BBC list of the 100 greatest British books, as ranked by a collection of critics who are not from the U.K.
I'm now quite sure that we read this book for a book group that met in our house. I'm now in a book group at NCI that is considering reading more Woolf. I think I'm going to vote for reading To the Lighthouse, number two on the 100 greatest list.
| Author | Uris, Leon M. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 1955 |
| Number of Pages | 249 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | March 1981 |
A very simply, even mediocrely, written novel.
A widowed American writer in Greece to collect on an inheritance is given a list of anti-Nazi agents during the last days of the British occupation in early WWII. He is trapped in Greece and must commit himself to the fight in order to keep the list out of German hands. After some harrowing adventures, he and a beautiful Greek woman escape to Egypt.
The writing is surprisingly simpleminded and poor. It is below the quality of U's other books. Nevertheless the genuine concern for ordinary people mixed with the real anti-Nazi content rescues the book.
It looks as if U decided from here to go into extensive research and realism as the raison d'etre of his writing - leading to Exodus, QB VII, Trinity, etc.
This was U's second novel. The first, Battle Cry was founded on U's personal experience in the Marine Corps fighting the Japanese in the Pacific. Perhaps I should think of The Angry Hills as a something of a training novel, his first effort to write about something outside his personal experience, something that he got very good at later.
I am surprised to discover that U never finished high school and that, according to the Wikipedia, he failed English three times.
| Author | Doyle, Arthur Conan |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Doubleday and Co., 1974 |
| Copyright Date | 1901 |
| Number of Pages | 196 |
| Extras | Foreword and afterword by John Fowles |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Sherlock Holmes |
| When Read | March 1981 |
A decent Holmes / Watson story with the usual charm of Doyle's writing. it was later made into one of the better Basil Rathbone - Nigel Bruce movies.
Of particular interest is Fowles' afterword. It is an excellent analysis of the story, of Doyle's writing, and of our interest in it.
There were only four Sherlock Holmes novels. I thought I read them all, saving this, his most famous one, for last. However, looking at my book cards, I don't think I read The Valley of Fear. I have just downloaded it from gutenberg.org and copied it to my phone. It will be an unexpected treat.
I read The Valley of Fear. It will be written up in the entry dated 2017-03.05
| Author | Singer, Isaac Bashevis |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Yiddish |
| Translators | Sloan, Jacob |
| Publication | New York: Noonday Press, 1979 |
| Copyright Date | 1955 |
| Number of Pages | 239 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Judaism |
| When Read | March 1981 |
A very unusual novel about the Jewish community in Poland in the hard times of the mid-seventeenth century, and particularly of the mass hysteria associated with the would be messiah Sabbatai Zevi.
The story begins after a Ukrainian peasant revolt in 1648 turned into a pogrom against the Jews. The Jewish town of Goray was decimated, its people scattered and its thriving commerce destroyed. Twenty years later many of the people have returned but the life of the town has not recovered.
Gradually more and more rumors of the messiah and salvation reach the town, rumors originating in Jerusalem or elsewhere. The people become more and more swept up in an expectation of miracles and engage in every kind of foolishness from orgies to flagellation. They also divide into factions and fight each other. A few personal stories are pursued - the poor mad girl with mystic visions, the jolly ritual slaughterer who becomes the new town leader, an old intellectual rabbi and his two worthless sons.
S writes with considerable appreciation of the mystic and hysteric mentalities. The book is a kind of record in the actual Yiddish of those people, of a time, place, and people who could not be recorded by any other writer. It is especially a record of suffering which swept a whole people and which has vanished with few traces left in the current era.
In 2010 I read a book, History of the Jews in Modern Times by Lloyd P. Gartner. The book begins with the events that Singer begins with in his book, a Cossack / Ukrainian revolt against Polish rule, joined by Russians, that resulted in the massacre of 90,000 Jews. Gartner said that no political or self-defense response was even possible. The only possible response was withdrawal into mysticism and religion.
I don't think many people know about this, not even many Jews. But Singer did.
| Author | Forsyth, Frederick |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Viking Press, 1971 |
| Number of Pages | 380 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | April 1981 |
A procedural thriller about an anonymous professional killer hired by the French fascist OAS (secret army organization) to assassinate de Gaulle. He forges or steals multiple identity papers, has a special gun created, and sets up a perfect crime in Paris. The French find out about his existence and setup a gigantic worldwide manhunt which eventually finds him just in time to prevent the murder.
Aside from the suspense thriller aspects of the book, it has two special characteristics. First, there is an inside and authentic seeming view of the OAS and the French security forces - the latter even more disgusting (if possible) than the former. None of them have any other principle than to use any means whatever, no matter how criminal, to achieve one's political end. There is some feel for the mentality of the ex-Legion gunmen of the OAS and the mafia like character of the French Action Service.
Secondly, there is a mass of detail on how a professional killer works - from forged papers to special contacts, ways to cross borders, disguises, casing locations, choosing weapons, hiding, etc. It is clearly the product of extensive thinking and research.
A very good book of its kind - not strong on character (though adequate) but very strong on procedure.
This book made a strong impression and quite a bit of it remains in my memory. F built up the tension higher and higher as the authorities learned more and more about the assassin, but the assassin had considered all dangers and eluded every trap. It is my recollection that, in the end, the assassin fires his one shot rifle at de Gaulle but, just at the moment of the trigger pull, de Gaulle bends down to kiss a child, or something like that, and the bullet flies over his head. The Jackal then reloads but a cop opens the door and the Jackal shoots him instead of de Gaulle. The police close in and kill him before he can escape.
Every effort has been made to identify just who the Jackal really is. In the last scene, the man the police were sure was the Jackal, comes home from vacation - leaving them back where they started.
It was quite a book. It was the first, but not the last, book I read by Forsyth.
| Author | Niven, Larry |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Ballantine Books, 1979 |
| Copyright Date | 1970 |
| Number of Pages | 342 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | April 1981 |
Four creatures, two humans, a kzin, and a Pierson's Puppeteer go off to explore the Ringworld, an artificial circular strip, one million miles wide and 186,000,000 miles in diameter - constituting more livable surface are than all of the rest of known space combined. They find it inhabited by a race of humanoids who have lost the high technology which sustained their civilization. Their ship crashes, they have many interesting experiences, and they all escape except the human good luck charm Teela Brown, who remains, perfectly in her element.
The book is extravagant in its conceptions and shallow in its characterizations, yet is imbued with enormous scientific imagination. The conception of the Ringworld itself is magnificent and it is filled with marvelous detail from the floating building to the horizontal thunderstorm, to the sunflower to the sunshades. Further, while the characters are shallow, they are reasonably consistent and noble enough to accept (unlike Pohl's Gateway). The scientific explanation, which pervades the book, mixes the known with the imagined in a very effective way, in spite of such extravagances as the stasis field, the disintegrator, the General Products hull, boosterspice, breeding people for luckiness, etc. As S-F it is quite well done.
Doing the calculations, it seems to me that the surface of Ringworld would be 2,967,132 times the area of the surface of the earth, where the earth measurement includes all the water and ice surfaces as well as the land. I won't bother calculating it, but the time it would take to map the land via airplane, and the amount of digital storage it would require to hold the images, never mind using film, are enough that no existing collection of science fiction authors would run out of separate little places in which to create separate Ringworld stories. It is indeed a bold conception.
I probably did at least some of the same calculations when I read the book. That's the way I tend to think about these things - though I admit that I have become more scientific and quantitative as I've grown older.
| Author | Vonnegut, Kurt |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Delacourte Press, 1981 |
| Number of Pages | 330 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | April 1981 |
"An autobiographical collage", also, a "blivet".
V has thrown together a collection of previously unpublished, and in some cases rejected for publication, speeches, book blurbs, a story, and a play, all tied together with ad hoc transitional material. He talks a lot about his forebears in Indianapolis and a little about his first wife and his children. He is very selective, revealing nothing about his current situation, his deep feelings, or whatever. In fact he makes no attempt to think deeply here about anything at all.
Some of the writings, such as his play version of Jekyll and Hyde are silly trash. Others, like most of the speeches, are just pointless. All that is of interest is his engaging personality. V rates the book as a C. I concur. His other ratings were:
B Player Piano
A The Sirens of Titan
A Mother Night
A+ Cat's Cradle
A God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
A+ Slaughterhouse Five
B- Welcome to the Monkey House
D Happy Birthday Wanda June
C Breakfast of Champions
C Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons
D Slapstick
A Jailbird
C Palm Sunday
I don't think I've ever seen any other author offer a report card on his own writings as Vonnegut has done here. I'm glad I copied it out. I've read some of these books but I'm not sure I remember them well enough to compare them to the ratings.
The most recent book I read was Slaughterhouse Five, which I discussed in some detail in my notes on it. V rates it as one of his two best. I concur in the high rating and called it "captivating", however it was certainly an unusual book that is not easily compared to other books.
I'm sure that it was Vonnegut and not me who called this book a "blivet". See the Wikipedia article on "impossible trident" for an explanation of the term.
| Author | Vidal, Gore |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 1973 |
| Number of Pages | 430 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | May 1981 |
A fictionalized autobiography of Aaron Burr as told to journalist and law student Charles Schuyler, who turns out in the end to be one of Burr's several illegitimate sons (another of which is Martin Van Buren - "Matty Van".)
Two stories intertwine, Burr's biography and Charlie's present life. Each is interesting. Each has a common thread of striving - Burr striving for greatness and ambition - but always possessing human dignity - Charlie striving for some kind of personal success and finally achieving some of Burr's dignity.
The "biography" itself is personal and gossipy. The personal qualities of Burr, Washington, Jefferson (the most important figure in the book in Burr's life), Hamilton, Madison, Jackson are as or more important than their politics. Burr is clearly a political adventurer. While possessing personal scruples and personal dignity, he cannot be said to have any real political philosophy. Neither democrat nor "monocrat" he is rather an opportunist. Even Jefferson, the fanatical democrat (and slaveholding "Massa Tom") has blind sides and opportunist tendencies. The whole effect is to reduce myth to mundane terms.
The writing begins slowly but becomes very good. There are moments of pathos in Burr's old age. The treatment of burr's aging, stroke, and death, and Charlie's love for the whore Helen Jewett and for Burr are all sensitive and successful. The feeling of human dignity is well developed.
I had to look up the word "monocrat". It's a term used at the time of Burr to mean government by one man, what we might call today an autocrat.
I think Vidal's interest in people like Burr, or the Roman emperor Julian (in Julian) and the characters in his Creation showed a kind of atypical curiosity that offered his readers an atypical view of history and of historical persons. I liked that in him.
| Author | Kattan, Naim |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Fischman, Sheila |
| Publication | New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1980 |
| Copyright Date | 1975 |
| Number of Pages | 191 |
| Genres | Fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | Jews |
| When Read | May 1981 |
A memoir of childhood and adolescence in Baghdad by an Iraqi Jew. The library had classified it as fiction - though it is written as if it were straight autobiography.
Several social and personal themes form the backbone of the book. One is the stultifying sexism and sex role stereotyping of Arabic society. The position of women is to be veiled and repressed sisters and wives, or brazen prostitutes. No middle ground is tolerated. Another theme is the inability of Jews to integrate - in spite of their having lived in Iraq for 2,500 years (longer than Islam by far) and having absorbed a great deal of Arabic culture. Both an institutionalized chauvinism of the ruling class and the primitive barbarism of the Bedouins (unleashed in the "Farhoud", a pogrom of 1941) prevented it. The rise of Zionism and the Israeli/Arab conflict sealed their fate.
Then there are personal themes - the awakening of sex, the thirst for Western literature and ideas, the aspirations to win a scholarship to France and become a writer. It all ends with an exit to France at age 18 (?) around 1947.
The writing has a soft and sensitive quality. K is more interested in the hesitant, anguished, and yet intellectualized feelings of the adolescent than in the blunter passions and ambitions of adults. It is good writing.
I don't know how much about the pogrom was in this book or how much I knew. I just now looked it up on the Internet and found an excerpt from the book Full Circle by Saul Fathi, a Jewish boy in Baghdad during the pogrom. Here's a summary from that book:
"By Sunday afternoon, there were 180 Jews dead, 240 children orphaned, and 2,120 wounded. Countless numbers of women and girls had been raped and kidnapped. Babies had been disemboweled before their parents’ eyes. Rioters broke into marked Jewish-owned stores, especially those on Shorja Street, looting and destroying. Two thousand homes had been plundered and 2,375 shops had been looted. The property damage was estimated at £3 to £3.5 million."
It says that British forces outside the city declined to intervene, though the "regent" finally sent a division of Kurdish troops into the city to stop the violence and guard the Jewish quarter.
There are unjustified beliefs that the situation of Jews was okay in the Arab world prior to the rise of Zionism, and okay in Germany prior to the rise of Nazism. In fact, the situations were undoubtedly better than they became, but very, very far from equality.
| Author | Clarke, Arthur C. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 303 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | June 1981 |
In the year 2276 (300 years after publication) Duncan Makenzie, 3rd "generation" clone of Malcolm and then Colin Makenzie, prepares to leave his home on Titan (moon of Saturn) for a voyage to Earth. There is a view of Titan where several hundred thousand humans live in a "corridor culture", a good space voyage with a beautifully conceived microscopic black hole drive, and a tour of earh through the eyes of a semi-alien intellectual. There is also a rudimentary plot involving and old love triangle with Karl Helmer and "Calindy", a political rivalry between the Makenzies and the Helmers, some Titanite smuggling, and the discovery of long wave radiation in space. All thin, but kept going in a perfectly acceptable fashion with both light moments (the ladies DAR luncheon and the farm scene) and a bit of drama (especially Helmer's death.) There is also a touch of race and sex shock - we learn halfway through that the hero is black and bisexual.
The usual Clarke fare. Hard science, high idealism, a very informed and highly detailed view of the near term technological future, a straightforward main character with a dimly seen supporting cast, and the fine Clarke humanism.
A perfectly acceptable example of its type. It's what I read Clarke for.
I shall elaborate on the last sentence of my comment.
I consider Clarke to have been a man of grand ideas. He had a grand scientific vision of the future of humanity and of the possibilities of life in the universe. He embedded those ideas in his novels, but not always perfectly comfortably. As far as I was and am concerned, that was okay. I didn't need a Clarke story to be all that great if the ideas were interesting. Just sharing Clarke's vision of the future would be enough to keep me entertained, enlightened, and satisfied.
| Author | Percy, Walker |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Noonday Press, 1972 |
| Copyright Date | 1960 |
| Number of Pages | 242 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 1981 |
An existentialist novel about a week or so in the life of 30 year old Jack "Binx" Bolling, New Orleans stockbroker, of a wealthy aristocratic family, bachelor, chaser of secretaries, and moviegoer. He is a man with no purpose in life and no visible rots (though in fact he has very strong unacknowledged bonds to his two families.) His main pleasures in life are making money, pursuing girls, and appreciating the "resplendent reality" of well done movie actors and movie cliches - such as Clint Walker's soft drawled "Mister, I wouldn't do that if I were you."
Despite all expectations of the reader and all thoughts expressed by Binx in his first person narrative, he abandons his secretaries and movies, his mad barbiturate addicted cousin Kate Cutrer, and goes to medical school.
The ending is a surprise and requires some reflection before it can be accepted. The marriage and medical school show that Binx's subconscious motivations - his bonds to the family and to Kate, his emulation of his doctor father, his self-suppressed intellectuality, are all much stronger than he would have us believe.
The novel is brilliantly written. Subtle, full of moods and hints, very evocative of time and place.
This is another book I read twice, once in 1981 and once again in 2001 without having remembered that I read it once before. This has probably happened to me a half dozen times, though is less likely to happen again since it's quicker to check my computer book notes than my index card file and, having had it happen enough times, and having enough years of books passing through my head, I no longer trust myself to have remembered every book I've read.
My write-up from 2001 is much better than this one, even though it too is just a 3x5 index card. As time went by the importance of my book notes grew and I began taking more care with them.
The other reading is recorded as 2001-07.03.
| Author | Kemp, Peter |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Elsevier-Dutton, 1978 |
| Number of Pages | 184 |
| Extras | photos, index, bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Naval; World War II |
| When Read | June 1981 |
A publisher's series ("Men In Battle") World War II factual account of the Atlantic convoy theater of the U-boat war, with some episodes from the Arctic, Mediterranean, and English Channel. Kemp is a former intelligence officer from the Royal Navy's U-boat Tracking Room, and currently is a naval writer.
The book was clearly done quickly but reasonably well. There is much expression of feelings towards, and gratitude for, the men who died at sea.
I was surprised at some of the details - such as the fact that the Germans never realized that their radio transmissions were tracked around convoys and that they never went after escorts until it was too late in the war.
See also Top Secret Ultra by Peter Calvocoressi, 1981-07.04, in which Calvocoressi says that the Germans knew nothing about the Enigma code breaking and believed that high frequency direction finding ("HFDF" or "Huff-Duff") was the main method by which the positions of U-boats were determined by the Allies.
I didn't say why I was surprised at "the fact" that the Germans never realized that their radio transmissions were tracked around convoys. Hufff-Duff was a passive system. The Germans should not have been able to detect it. But they were shortening their transmission times and I'd think the German engineers would have suspected it. So I expect that Calvocoressi was right and Kemp was wrong on this specific issue. Historians often disagree about what happened, even if they were all on the scene, involved in the events of which they write. It's hard to see the whole picture from any one vantage point.
| Author | Sheckley, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1971 |
| Number of Pages | 191 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | June 1981 |
Sixteen stories written over a ten year period, many previously published in Playboy or other magazines. Not all are S-F per se. Many involve hallucination or perceptual reversal where a man is either an alien or a deluded human, a hallucinating human or a hallucinating reptile, in a dream world or in reality.
The title story is bout an intelligent vacuum cleaner that falls in love with a girl. She thrills to his touch but pulls his plug anyway because she didn't initiate the relationship. "Cordle to Onion to Carrot" is about a man who periodically becomes nasty, offensive, and horrible to others who have dumped on him. "The Cruel Equations" is about a space explorer locked out of the ship by his robot because he forgot the password. "Same to you Doubled" about Edelstein, granted three wishes by a representative of Hell only if his worst enemy get the same doubled. He eventually wishes for the sexiest woman he can handle. "Game: first schematic" about a professional game player who can't remember the rules in the middle of a game and plays by instinct. "Aspects of Langranak" about a visitor to an alien planet with no interest in exploring. He suffers from anomie and sits in his ship.
None of the stories are outstanding and some of the role reversal / perceptual reversals are overdone - especially when several are collected in one volume. Still, Sheckley is interesting for his satiric view of America, his feel for the schlemiel.
The story that springs to my mind after all of these years is "Same to you, Doubled". Each thing Edelstein wishes for, money, prestige, possessions, becomes dust in his hand when his friend (with another Jewish name) comes excited and beaming to his door with twice as much. Then at the end he asks for the sexiest woman he can possible stand. We never meet the one that doubles that, but I spend some time trying to imagine what that would be like, though I must admit that Marcia has often seemed to me to be right at, or over, the tolerable limit.
I have some memory too of the vacuum cleaner. If I remember correctly, the machine is a combination salesman and vacuum cleaner. He (it?) comes to the door of an apartment, knocks, and instantly begins a combination sales pitch and seduction with some vibrating machine moves. The reader is titillated along with the young woman at the door, but maybe she's seen it all before and, anyway, she's got other things to do.
Sheckley doesn't always hit the sweet spot but, when he does, he's a real hoot.
| Author | Kusniewicz, Andrzej |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Polish |
| Translators | Wieniewska, Celina |
| Publication | New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980 |
| Number of Pages | 197 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | July 1981 |
An unusual but beautifully written novel about a young person and a decadent society on the eve of World War I. Emil R is a young 21 year old (?) aesthete, in love with his strange and sadistic sister Elizabeth (or Liesbeth). He joins an Austro-Hungarian cavalry unit, the 12 Sicilian Lancers, possibly murders a young gypsy girl, and commits suicide on the way to the front.
Much of the writing is visual description, in strong color and sharp detail, of individual scenes - of the Lancers last battle, the defeat at Solferino in 1859; of train stations; of horsemen riding by; of the street, the tavern, the garden - "... all show that the moment we have experienced passively, looking at these unimportant acts, will never again be repeated with an identical composition of the elements. Which is why this moment is relevant..." (p.78). None of the sordid details - Liesbeth's torments of their sister, the murder of Marika the gypsy girl - are baldly described. They are suggested, with hints of horrible details, as in the description of Solferino where we hear te blended soft moans of the wounded from a distance, without seeing them.
The sense of decadence, of incest in family and society, of false values, of inherited privilege, are all very strong and effective. An intricate, deep, and partly obscure - but sound and effective piece of writing. Very impressive.
This book is now 37 years old. I just checked the Baltimore, Montgomery, and Carroll County libraries, and Baltimore City - Enoch Pratt Free Library. None of the county libraries had it in their catalog. Pratt had one copy in the central library. It's not currently checked out.
Looking in the English language Wikipedia, I found one occurrence of the name Andrzej Kusniewicz in an article on the French Medaille de la Resistance. The medal was given to a man of that name for his membership, and presumably courageous service, in the resistance movement against the Nazis. The Polish Wikipedia had much more, including an article on a poet who is undoubtedly this author. Using the Wikipedia and Google Translate I was able to learn that he lived from 1904 to 1993. He was a Polish diplomat and was in France during the war, where he joined the French Resistance. In 1943 he joined the French Communist Party and in 1944 was arrested by the Gestapo.
The machine translation is not very good, but it appears that K had a stormy career. He survived the war, was expelled from, and then readmitted to the French Communist Party. He was charged with working for the French counter-intelligence. "After the events of March 1968 denounced his fellow writers and journalists of Jewish origin who planned to emigrate from PRL"
I don't know what this all means. Was he a hero? A spy? A Jew? An antisemite? A deep thinker? A selfish man? A broken man? I only intended to find out if his books were still being read. I don't know the answer to that, even in Poland much less the U.S.
Nobody should say that literary history is boring.
| Author | Djilas, Milovan |
|---|---|
| Original Language | sr |
| Translators | Kojic, Vasilie; Hayes, Richard |
| Publication | New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980 |
| Number of Pages | 185 |
| Extras | photos, biographical notes |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Politics |
| When Read | July 1981 |
Djilas' reflections on Tito, rather randomly and perhaps hurriedly written, on the occasion of Tito's death. It is not a biography, does not have any account of Tito's life, and is not structured. Mostly it is an evaluation of Tito's approach to politics and a discussion of Yugoslavia and communism.
D considers Tito to be a Leninist (i.e., Stalinist) and seems to regard that as the inevitable fate of all the communist movements. The pure struggle for power required to overcome reaction sets forces in motion and brings people to the fore who will not yield it later.
D is certainly forthright and courageous. It is an experience to read his straight out accounts from inside the movement.
(I read Djilas' Conversations with Stalin but don't see a card for it.)
I looked at some Amazon reviews of this book. One or two of them were interesting. All the rest said that the book was boring, poorly organized, uninteresting. The poorly organized part of that may be true, though I would dispute the boring or uninteresting. The interest here is that we're reading something written by a man who knew and fought alongside of Josip Broz Tito, a man who sat in on meetings of the Comintern and with Stalin. Maybe he's not the best reporter of what occurred in these events but there is nothing else available, and Djilas was not just inside, he was an insider. An outsider's report would also be fascinating, but one from an insider has insights that outsiders can't have. I don't know if any other insiders have written about all of this.
I did another search for a book card on Conversations with Stalin but still haven't found one. Perhaps I read the book before I started making book cards or, more likely I think, I just forgot to write one. It's a book that I have some memory of but not enough. I wish I had created a card.
| Author | Kafka, Franz |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Muir, Willa; Muir, Edwin |
| Publication | New York: New Directions, 1946 |
| Copyright Date | 1927 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Extras | Preface by Klaus Mann |
| Extras | Afterword by Max Brod |
| Extras | Illustrations by Emlen Etting |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | July 1981 |
A disorganized and unfinished novel about a young man from Germany, Karl Rossman, not quite 16, who lands in New York to flee from a pregnancy disgrace.
There are eight chapters, each practically a story in its own right and some almost entirely unrelated to the others. The final one, "The Nature Theater of Oklahoma", is completely separate with the unfinished intervening chapters left out of this edition.
In many of the episodes Karl is placed in an impossible situation in which powerful people (usually very small, petty tyrants, powerful only in relation to Karl) are determined to abuse him. When he is saved at all, it's almost always through the intervention of some kind hearted soul rather than by self-defense.
He is a very attractive person, forthright, upright, willing to bend but not to break. His ingenuousness and innocence are laughable but attractive.
The vision of America is full of impossible places and scenes - all portrayed in the exaggerated style of an imaginative European who had never been there.
Very good writing, often depressing, sometimes comic, always satiric. It shows K's ability to create caricatures and his strong sympathies. Lighter than The Trial or Metamorphosis but with the same vision.
Kafka died in 1924. This book was first published (according to the Wikipedia) in 1927, after some editing by Max Brod, Kafka's friend and literary executor who wrote the afterword for this edition.
I read some other works by Kafka and appreciated them, though now, when I hear the name "Kafka", I think of Isaac Bashevis Singer's story "A Friend of Kafka".
The Wikipedia has an excellent article about Kafka. It includes the following paragraph:
Michiko Kakutani notes in a review for The New York Times that Kafka's letters have the "earmarks of his fiction: the same nervous attention to minute particulars; the same paranoid awareness of shifting balances of power; the same atmosphere of emotional suffocation—combined, surprisingly enough, with moments of boyish ardor and delight."
| Author | Calvocoressi, Peter |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Pantheon Books, 1980 |
| Number of Pages | 132 |
| Extras | photos, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | July 1981 |
A short, simple account of the breaking of Germany's high grade ciphers encoded on the Enigma coding machine during World War II. C was an intelligence officer working on the translation, interpretation, and prioritization of Luftwaffe decodes. He relates very little technical knowledge of coding but gives a little of the flavor of some of the elements that went into it. There is also a very balanced assessment of the role of "Ultra" in the progress of the war (though interestingly, he says that the German navy attributed allied intelligence of submarine activity to its high frequency direction finding equipment rather than breaking of codes, whereas Peter Kemp says H/F, D/F was not understood or recognized by the Germans.
C recommends: Very Special Intelligence by Patrick Beesly, and Convoy Battles in 1943 by Jurgen Rohwer.
This is the wrong place to make the following comments, but I'm thinking of them now and will write them now.
In the tremendous conflict of World War II, possibly the worst war in human history, the Germans had a number of ways to win. One of them was the Battle of the Atlantic. If the U-boats could starve Britain of food and supplies, that might have driven the British people to overthrow Churchill as Prime Minister (he would never have made peace with Hitler) and accept German dictated terms. Churchill himself wrote that he was more afraid of the U-boat menace than of any other German threat to the UK.
It was an odd sort of war. For the British and Americans, the greatest danger was to the non-combatant sailors on the merchant ships that were the targets of the U-boats. The navy men fought on warships or aircraft that were only rarely harmed by the U-boats, or like Calvocoressi, the author of this book, worked on shore with codes, maps, radio intercepts and communications, and convoy planning. For the latter group, all of this sometimes became very abstract.
| Author | Asch, Sholem |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Yiddish |
| Translators | Super, Arthur Saul |
| Publication | London: MacDonald, 1956 |
| Copyright Date | 1955 |
| Number of Pages | 331 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Religion |
| Keywords | Judaism |
| When Read | August 1981 |
A story of the second Isaiah, a Jewish prophet in Babylon at the time of the end of the Babylonian captivity and the rise of the empire of Cyrus of Persia.
This is a mystical book about the mission of the Jewish people and their purpose in suffering. It is clearly motivated by the Holocaust and the foundation of the state of Israel, as well as by the Biblical story.
Isaiah is a visionary and seer, full of dreams and voices. He aims to bring the Jews back to Jerusalem in Judah, to instill in them the belief in the messiah and the hope of redemption, and ultimately to save the world. For the suffering and the lost there is the consolation of God's love, the inner rewards of faith.
As a statement of faith, the book is quite consistent. Asch does not offer a promise of reward, only a faith in a long term future "redemption", one which is obviously more than 2,500 years in coming.
As history the book is thin. Very little of ordinary life and culture are presented. Except for the prophet, all of the characters are presented from the outside, with no insights into their consciousness. Even the religion is thin and over reliant on a few devices. More could have been done.
I read this book four years after reading The Nazarene, a book that I liked very much. This one was written when Asch was 75, just two years before his death. Perhaps, like many of us, Asch was still trying to figure out the meaning of life, or perhaps he was trying to interpret and preserve something of Jewish, and all human, history. Perhaps he was ... what? I seem to be wandering off into pure speculation, something that I might have done much better immediately after reading the book than now, so many years later.
| Author | Niven, Larry |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 214 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | August 1981 |
S-F novel of a cancerous contemporary man, frozen to preserve his body in hopes of a future cure. His consciousness is restored in the future to be made a kind of slave of the state. Niven type extravagant things happen. He is sent on a long trip, he visits the galactic core, comes back three million years later to a world of highly advanced technology regressed to low population and partial barbarism.
Again, the characters are very shallow and the story is pure space opera. It is readable and even riveting in its cliff hangars and chase scenes. Yet it is also boring in its inability to depart from pure plot.
There is much in common with Ringworld The pursuit of immortality, sex, and other purely personal and quite simple goals - the extravagance - the imagination - the suspense.
Not an especially good book.
There is a lot of science fiction like this - lots of attention grabbing tricks, but not much more.
Maybe I'm too hard. How many books have I written? Who am I to criticize? If I read it today would I be as harsh? I don't know but I guess that I would.
| Author | Dostoevsky, Fyodor |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Garnett, Constance |
| Publication | Garden City: Anchor Books, Doubleday and Co., 1960 |
| Copyright Date | 1846 |
| Number of Pages | 176 |
| Extras | Revised and edited by Avrahm Yarmolinsky, in Three Short Novels of Dostoevsky |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | August 1981 |
Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, middle aged titular councilor office clerk, is psychologically unfit for life. Self absorbed, bumbling, shy, neurotic, always slightly panic stricken, he is a social outcast working at a low paid dead end job.
At the beginning of the story he crashes a party, only to make an utter ass of himself and get thrown out in the snow - where he begins a psychotic experience of meeting his own double - a man exactly like him who is totally evil and out to destroy him.
D never outright states that the double is in Golyadkin's imagination. He writes it as a straight story, as if the double is actually there, always maintaining a point of view close to Golyadkin's. In the end, Golyadkin is taken off by a doctor to an insane asylum.
D's object is attained. We see a completely impossible personality from the sympathetic point of view. We understand a relationship between individual neurosis and society which makes us feel that the neurotic is not solely to blame for his sickness.
The writing is not as brilliant or as deep as in others of D's works. The scope is much narrower, more like a short story. Yet it seems to be a pioneering work - effective at what it does.
It seems to me that the 19th century Russian writers generally, and Dostoevsky in particular, had an intimate acquaintance with neurosis and wrote about it more thoroughly and insightfully than their English language counterparts. Perhaps there were fewer constraints on writers in Russian society than in proper English and American societies. Perhaps there were greater psychological stresses on both writers and the people they wrote about. Perhaps Russian society offered more tolerance for non-conformity or more forces that drove people to non-conformity and neurosis. Or perhaps I'm making all of this up and I just don't have enough experience with 19th century literature written in English.
Dostoevsky was very important to me in this period of my life.
This book bring's Gogol's The Overcoat to mind.
| Author | Clarke, Arthur C. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972 |
| Number of Pages | 193 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | August 1981 |
A collection of 18 pieces written from 1962-1971, all of almost uniformly high quality (though many have a punch line device at the end. My favorites were: "Transit of Earth" - An astronaut is marooned on Mars by a ship malfunction. His comrades have all already committed suicide so that he can have the remaining oxygen in order to complete their scientific experiments. He is afraid of death and considers an easy suicide, but in the end simply turns on a Bach recording in his helmet and walks off into the Martian plain. All the experiments are complete and he will give his body to any Martian life forms that want it.
"A meeting with Medusa" is one of Clarke's tour de force examples of science writing. A balloonist takes a balloon ship into the Jovian atmosphere where he meets strange weather and stranger creatures. He is himself mostly machine. "Food of the Gods" is one of C's vegetarian pieces. "Maelstrom II" is about a man orbiting the moon in a suit - just making it. Good science and fine characterizations (in C's style.)
All in all it is a good C sampler. Full of his internationalism, interspeciesism (if we can say that), and his fine, intelligent, upright, moral human beings.
Clark and Asimov, the two most popular science fiction authors in America of the period of the 1950s to 1990s formed the backbone of my SF reading education. I liked both of them quite a lot.
| Author | Forsyth, Frederick |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Viking Pess, 1972 |
| Number of Pages | 337 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | August 1981 |
A story of a freelance reporter who acquires the diary of Salomon Tauber, German Jew, who suffered in the concentration camp at Riga and recorded the crimes of the camp commandant, SS Major Eduard Roschmann. The reporter, Peter Miller, discovers in the diary that Roschmann also killed Miller's father, a Wehrmacht war hero. He goes on a hunt for Roschmann.
The hunt is both an adventure story and a tour of Nazi influences in modern Germany. Miller finds no help from the police in Hamburg, whom he later learns are all themselves former SS. Newspapers don't want such a story. Many existing records are hard to get and many more are destroyed. The SS organization "Odessa" has dozens of top people in industry, government, law, police - in positions of significant power in the modern state.
The Israelis also want Roschmann because he is leading a project to produce missiles for Nasser to use against Israel. Miller's main assistance is from a partly independent Jewish revanchist group, an Israeli spy, Simon Wiesenthal, a British jurist, and a few Germans.
In the end, Roschmann and other SS officers escape to Argentina, but their work in W. Germany is exposed.
The writing is effective with a riveting interest maintained through the last half of the book. There is also a feeling of conscience, of concern for the characters of Miller, Tauber, the Israeli spy, and so on, which raise this book above the pure procedural thriller in Day of the Jackal. It is a first rate book of its kind.
For the benefit of readers younger than myself, "Nasser" refers to Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of Egypt (then calling itself the United Arab Republic) from 1956 until his death in 1970, and an adversary of the Israeli government.
If I remember the story, and am not confusing it with others, Miller's father was a highly decorated army officer who was organizing the evacuation of wounded soldiers, on a train. Roschmann attempts to commandeer the train for his own personal use and, when Miller won't give it to him, shoots him in the back. Thus Forsyth successfully builds a portrait of a criminal who, like so many others, isn't really even a committed Nazi, but just a criminal opportunist and sociopath who will commit any crime and hurt any number of innocent people in order to advance his own personal interests.
This was a book that combined good writing with a progressive political point of view. Always a winning combination in my eyes.
| Author | Gann, Erest K. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Simon an Schuster, 1966 |
| Number of Pages | 342 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Aviation; World War I |
| When Read | September 1981 |
A World War I flying novel about two men, Sebastian Kupper, German ace squadron leader, and Paul Chamay, French fighter pilot who specifically wants to kill Kupper because of his having killed Chamay's helpless friend.
Kupper is the better developed character. He is already old (36) for his job. He is intellectual, highly moral, has an upper class idealistic fiance, is committed to preserving the lives of his men. He has lost all stomach for fighting and flies on will power alone. Chamay is younger, simpler, and driven by bitterness. Eventually they meet in the air. K's guns jam and he is helpless but C lets him live, finally rid of his burden of bitterness. K returns to earth confirmed in his desire to escape the war and applies for his long overdue leave.
Several subsidiary characters are quite well done. Babain the French mechanic with no feel for machines but a good understanding of men, Pilger the German brute orderly who loved the war, and Groos, the German sergeant who knew how to get by. Also some pilots, venal rear depot types, a hilltop observer, a faithless lover.
The book is surprisingly well done. A good range of characters are successfully created. There are several effective scenes of introspection. The basic emotions of the story are consistently managed. The technical flying part is authentic and exciting.
Very decent type of ordinary novel.
I read this book again in 1991 (see the record for 1991-11.01.) At that time, I wrote a book card, went to file it in my card file, and discovered that this record from 1981 was there. I noted that I had no memory of having read the book 10 years before. Now, 26 years after the second reading, I have some memory, not bad at all given the number of years that have passed. Perhaps it is due to two readings, or perhaps the shock of the discovery burned more of the story into my memory.
| Author | Asimov, Isaac |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1957 |
| Copyright Date | 1956 |
| Number of Pages | 187 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Robots |
| When Read | September 1981 |
A second "Lije" Bailey, R. Daneel Olivaw future space mystery. In this one, Bailey is sent to one of the "Outer Worlds", Solaria, to solve a murder mystery. A genetics scientist has been killed by his wife through the instrumentality of a robot - all planned by a power mad roboticist.
The strange world of Solaria is an earth like planet with 20,000 widely separated estates, each inhabited by a single human and hordes of robot servants. The humans never "see" each other, only "view" via 3D advanced televiewers. Urges towards companionship and sex are suppressed in childhood and people may become physically sick at the thought of breathing air that someone else has breathed. Though of course the prime suspect, the victim's wife, is a sexually frustrated woman and the prime mover behind the killing, a jealous man - all with sublimated and neurotically repressed feelings.
Again, there is Asimov's finely crafted work - a consistent (relatively) plot, characterization and theme. There is also his theme of courage and curiosity - all good S-F
Most interesting of all is the Earth / Solaria contrast. Each is a perversion of contemporary life and each is viewed only through the other, giving the contemporary man the smug satisfaction of knowing the synthesis. This is more important than the human / robot interplay which dominated Caves of Steel.
I don't remember the plot of this story but I do remember the world of Solaria and the personalities of Bailey and his robot assistant, R. Daneel Olivaw. This robot struck me as one of Asimov's finest inventions, appearing in four Asimov novels that I have read. He is also the inspiration for Donald and other robots in Roger Allen MacBride's very good robot trilogy.
| Author | Dostoevsky, Fyodor |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Garnett, Constance |
| Publication | London: William Heinemann, 1957 |
| Copyright Date | 1845 |
| Number of Pages | 115 |
| Extras | In The Gambler and Other Stories |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 1981 |
D's first novel, told as correspondence between Makar Alexyevitch Dievushkin and Varvara Alexyevna Debroselov, both poor people living in tenements near each other in St. Petersburg. He is a down at the heels copyist grown old in a low position in government service. She is a seamstress, once of the family of a provincial estate supervisor brought down to poverty. They share a deep platonic love - he giving her all that he has, she doing likewise when necessary.
They suffer very hard times. He is disgraced. She is forced by circumstances to marry a boorish tyrant who will surely mistreat her and destroy her already fragile health. In the end she goes off with her husband to probable death, leaving Dievushkin to pine and grieve for her.
The writing is crude by D's standard, as is the characterization. Varvara is a typical Dostoevskyan fragile female, pure in heart, pining away in the flesh. The epistolary format is unsatisfying. The behavior of the man is grating in its stupidity.
The importance of the book probably lies in its serious treatment of poor folk. The people are not such caricatures as in Gogol (to which this story is apparently a response.) Although they are handled in a highly stilted plot, there is a real attempt to probe their humanity and their circumstances.
(I started with the Hogarth translation and switched to Garnett.)
This was part of my working my way through D's works. His poor folk lived dark and depressing lives, lacking in all of the psychological as well as physical comforts of middle class life. I always felt, when reading his books, that he was writing about a life and a people that he knew personally. However I don't actually know if that's true, or if it was true at the young age of 24 or 25 that he had attained when he wrote this novel. I'm guessing that it was true.
I noted a publication date of 1957 for the copy I read and a copyright date of 1914. I presume that was a copyright date for Constance Garnett's translation. The Russian edition was published in 1845
While working at the central Pratt Library I made an effort to get the best English translations of the books I read that were written in foreign languages. For French, if the library had a copy of the original French I could compare translations with each other and with the original and at least determine which translation seemed most literal to me. For Russian, I could only look at the English versions and base a decision on other factors. One was that Garnett was closer to being contemporary with the Russians she translated and actually met some of them. If her language seemed Victorian I thought that might be okay. Why would a Russian writing in 1845 or 1870 use expressions and sentence structure peculiar to mid-twentieth century English? And besides, Garnett's language appealed to me.
| Author | Brunner, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Ace Books, 1972 |
| Copyright Date | 1969 |
| Number of Pages | 397 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | October 1981 |
A near future sociological S-F novel extrapolating the race explosions and other trends of the 1960's U.S. into a world 50 years later of acute racial antagonism, segregation, and social atomization.
Various strange characters, a pythoness (trance mind reader), two spoolpigeons (TV muckrakers), a psychiatrist, and a professor confront the evil Gottshalk gun merchants, prevailing mental hospital practices, etc., and triumph mainly because the evil institutions fall to their own inner contradictions.
The writing is fair. Characters are separate and sometimes effective. The plot is too extreme, but B is at least conscious of the extravagance. The social consciousness is progressive even though the targets are straw men. The worst of the writing characteristics are the unrelieved high energy of the mood, and the quite needless mysteries about new words and made up institutions.
| Author | Childers, Erskine |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1955 |
| Copyright Date | 1903 |
| Number of Pages | 278 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | October 1981 |
A very dated story presented (perhaps truly?) as a true account of two British citizens' discovery of a German invasion plan. A young foppish fellow in the Foreign Office misses his usual holiday and so accepts a yachting invitation from an old school acquaintance who, it turns out, is single handing a small sailboat in the German Frisian islands. After getting over the shock of the hard life, "Carruthers" chips in to uncover some strange plot which, in the last few pages, turns out to be an invasion tryout.
The writing is pleasant and amusing - especially Carruthers' spoiled London life and the very nice shallow water sailing information. Technical detail is good and interesting. The characters are nicely drawn though incredibly stereotypical of the upper class English world view. The girl is a sweet ingenue, the renegade English spy a ruined man who literally dies of shame. The stolid yachtsman Davies, a thick but true blue patriot and gentleman and an extraordinarily decent man (also a great seaman.) Plus much talk of German efficiency and racial qualities, Imperial grandiosity, etc. - All quite absurd from today's perspective (mine anyway.)
Childers was listed as the "editor" of this book rather than the author, as if the story really was lifted from official records. However, even without looking it up, I find it impossible to imagine that my "perhaps truly?" remark in the first sentence of the abstract could be answered in the positive.
Oh alright, I just looked it up. The book is pure fiction.
| Author | Hough, Richard |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: William Morrow and Co., 1979 |
| Copyright Date | 1978 |
| Number of Pages | 297 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Aviation; World War II |
| When Read | November 1981 |
A rather simple minded story of two young fighter pilots in World War II just prior to the Battle of Britain (described in a sequel to this novel.) One is an upper class American, the other a middle class born Englishman raised in an upper class family after the death of his parents. There are two simple love stories - done with a shocking (not really) double standard, and some quite good flying and technical description.
The two young men are too good, too pure, too heroic in the air, too successful in combat, too lucky in their narrow escapes, too successfully recovered from serious injury. The writing is too simple, too straight, too ingenuous.
But what the hell. I read it for the flying and was satisfied with that. I'll probably read the sequel too.
I never did read a sequel to this novel but I did read a non-fiction work The Battle of Britain by Richard Hough and Denis Richards. I concluded that it was "a fine book."
Many Brits feel proud and thankful for the pilots and other RAF and other personnel that beat back the Germans in the Battle of Britain, and for all of the men and women who fought against Nazism, fascism, and imperialism during the war. I feel that way too. I identify with the Brits, the Russians, the Americans, the Canadians, the French, Poles, Norwegians, and others of the resistance movements, and everyone that fought against evil in that greatest of wars. It was a grand coalition of good against evil and I am prepared to say that "we" won.
| Author | Lem, Stanislaw |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Polish |
| Translators | Marszal, Barbara; Simpson, Frank |
| Publication | New Yok: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980 |
| Copyright Date | 1961 |
| Number of Pages | 247 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | November 1981 |
An astronaut, Hal Bregg, returns from a mission with others after 127 earth years, 10 relativistic years, to find a transformed society. All people have been "betrizated" to eliminate anti-social or violent emotions. all labor is done by robots. Everyday life is so paradisaical that incredible luxury and beauty are routine and mundane.
Bregg finds no home and no place in the society. The people are literally and figuratively small in comparison with the astronauts. There is no place for ambition, for effort, for trials of strength. The other astronauts plan another expedition to the stars. Bregg, unhappy in his memories of the horrors of the voyage and unhappy in his life of passivity on earth, has nothing. In the end he is left on a hillside in the forest, lying in the snow, trying to find again the earth he remembers.
The story is surprising in its clipped, modern tone for an S-F novel written in 1960. The conception of the future is thorough and literarily effective. It is full of detail - in fact overflowing with so much rich detail that it floors the reader, leaving him in the same state of sensory shock as Bregg. Like all Lem characters, Bregg is an excellent blend of rational and impulsive. Intellectual in his observation of the world, always striving for an integrated vision, yet emotional and self-defeating in the handling of his own feelings.
Very good. Very thought provoking. Very serious. Very well written.
As with all of Lem's books, even those read so many years ago, I remember this one very well. As I often do, after transcribing the above book card, I looked up Lem in the Wikipedia and read the entire entry. I learned some things that I probably knew at one time and forgot, though perhaps I never knew them. One was his ultimate disappointment with science fiction, with the Internet ("information technology drowns people in a glut of low-quality information") and his general pessimism about technology, artificial intelligence, and robotics. These seem surprising in a man who wrote books like Mortal Engines and The Cyberiad. He came across in the Wikipedia article as a prickly man, pessimistic about the state and future of the human race. But he sure was a wonderful writer.
| Author | McCutcheon, Philip |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975 |
| Number of Pages | 184 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Naval |
| When Read | November 1981 |
[See comment.]
A ridiculous book - one of the worst of its type that I have ever read, as bad as Brian Callison.
There is only one even slightly rounded character, Lieutenant Halfhyde. Out of thousands referenced, only about 7 or 8 are even allowed to have names.
The "action" is a race to claim a new volcanic island with an old British warship and a modern Russian squadron in 1895. The characters and events are so preposterous as to be hard to repeat. The moral dilemmas are ridiculous. It's terrible. I'd be a fool to read another.
I never read another novel from the Halfhyde series, but I did read another by McCutcheon, The Convoy Commander, published 11 years later in 1986. I quite liked it. Perhaps he got better, or perhaps the Halfhyde series were quick pot boilers in which he invested no time and wrote tongue in cheek.
Working at the Pratt Central Library and having access to a very fine and substantial fiction collection, I saw many popular fiction classics. One that strongly appealed to me was the C.S. Forester "Hornblower" series. To avoid blowing through them in a short time, I looked for other authors who wrote in a similar vein, discovering Dudley Pope and C. Northcote Parkinson. McCutcheon's Halfhyde series was popular just then and quite a few titles had appeared. I finally decided to try one, but it was a bust. I read it to the end, feeling that I had to give the author his full chance to redeem himself. McCutcheon didn't manage that.
| Author | Asimov, Isaac |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Walker and Co., 1980 |
| Copyright Date | 1966 |
| Number of Pages | 305 |
| Extras | photos, diagrams, index, bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Science; History |
| Keywords | Astronomy |
| When Read | December 1981 |
A highly readable popular history of astronomy, starting with ancient Greek deductions about earth, moon, and sun and ending with simplified theories of quasars, black holes, pulsars, and modern cosmology.
A is superb at this kind of writing. Although he absolutely avoids mathematics (he won't even use exponential notation) he nevertheless renders the central concepts of one discovery after another understandable and exciting. His historical approach is especially satisfying since it primes the reader with knowledge to prepare for each new discovery, while treating each as a great discovery and not merely an element in a body of theory. He is sensitive to controversy and criticism in the advance of science, as well as the accretion of new facts.
I now have some very primitive knowledge of black holes, quasars, pulsars, cosmic rays, degenerate matter, red giants, white dwarfs, novae, cepheid variables, red shift, galactic evolution, fusion reactions, big bang, steady state, and the limits of observability.
Asimov is a favorite author of mine in both science fiction and popular science. We lost a great person with his untimely death at age 72.
I still know some of what I learned from Asimov's book, but I suspect all of it is material that has been reinforced by other reading since then. Well, whatever I've lost I'm sure I could refresh quite easily.
| Author | Deighton, Len |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 224 |
| Genres | Fiction; Spy |
| When Read | December 1981 |
A rather convoluted spy story in which the hero, Patrick Armstrong, War Studies Center employee, marches blithely along through increasingly ominous events until he is finally completely sucked in. It is never made absolutely clear who the players are. They appear to include CIA, British intelligence, and KGB, plus a British group which is acting somewhat on its own and yet in unwitting control of CIA and UK intelligence.[sic - verbatim transcript of the 3x5 card. What did I mean to say?]
There are several very strange events. The setup of a Russian admiral in Armstrong's identity, a Russian spy group search of Armstrong's apartment after a big fight, a mysterious cafe, etc.
When all is finally explained it seems to me not to be credible and not explained. There is not the great depth of Le Carre's characters, or the powerful plotting.
D is an acceptable tradesman at his craft. No more, and yet not less. He is attempting to write serious spy fiction and, while not fully succeeding, he is at least not ridiculous in his efforts.
Looking through the books I later read by Deighton, the one I published in 1963 The Ipcress File also seemed non-credible to me. However the books published later struck me as much better. Deighton improved, at least in my eyes, over time.