Books read January through December 1982
| Author | Rybakov, Anatoly |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Shukman, Harold |
| Publication | New York: Viking Press, 1981 |
| Copyright Date | 1978 |
| Number of Pages | 381 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Soviet Union; World War II; Holocaust; Jews |
| When Read | January 1982 |
A story of a family of Russian Jews in a small town from the period before World War I through the end of World War II.
The narrator is Boris Ivanovsky, son of Yakov and Rachel, grandson of bootmaker Alexander Rakhlenko, nephew of ridiculous retired sergeant Khaim Yagudin, brother of Dina, Sasha, Yefim, and several others. Yakov is the son of a wealthy Swiss physician but falls in love with the beautiful Rachel and settles into life as a bootmaker and store manager in Russia. The family survives and grows during the 20's and 30's. There is a setback when Yakov is accused of theft and tried on the basis of his bourgeois and foreign background, but he is saved by an alcoholic attorney who insists on the facts instead of the politics. The children become workers, Party people, professionals, soldiers - all successful in their ways.
Then come the Nazis. The town is occupied, a ghetto formed, and a train of atrocities culminating in genocide are visited on the family and the town. The fine gentle Yakov, the beautiful upright Rachel, the innocent young ones, all die horrible deaths. But unlike many ghettos in this one there is massive resistance. A breakout, an escape to the forest, and a desperate battle with stolen guns. Most die but they manage to kill some Nazis and to get a few hundred people out of a community of 7,000.
It is a beautiful book. Beautiful in its respect for fineness and decency in common people. Beautiful in its commemoration of heroic resistance to evil. Beautiful in its treatment of the limitations and obligations of ordinary life - through which these fine people persevere.
Very well written. Very mature.
I particularly remember Yakov's trial in this book. All of the lawyers for anyone accused of counter-revolutionary activities take the same line - confess, repent, throw yourself on the mercy of the court, hope for a relatively light sentence. There is no other hope. Yakov's lawyer however goes through the facts of the case, proving conclusively that Yakov could not have stolen what he was accused of stealing. One of the Communist Party judges on the court accepts the evidence and insists on freeing Yakov, in spite of the fact that he had been accused by well connected people. It was a brilliant scene in which the victory of manifestly obvious truth in this topsy turvy world surprises us.
Rybakov was the real deal. Exiled to Siberia in the 30's, proletarian worker, heroic tank commander, winner of the Stalin Prize, samizdat publisher, unafraid to write about Jews in an antisemitic society. I think he was a great writer and I would like to find more of his books.
| Author | Dahl, Roald |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1946 |
| Number of Pages | 182 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Short stories |
| Keywords | Aviation; World War II |
| When Read | January 1982 |
Most of these WWII flying stories center on men who have already gone beyond the limits of pain and suffering and are now facing ultimate disaster. They suffer and die. In some cases they live only to die in a subsequent story. One is of a wife of an airman who apparently dies of anxiety (!) and one a very odd story of death by snake bite in Africa.
[No comment]
The stories were written and individually published in magazines during the war, from 1942-45, when Dahl was working in Washington DC after completing some combat missions as a fighter pilot. The stories must have been popular. Searching Amazon I see five different covers for books with this title.
I don't know why I wrote so little about this book. Sometimes it happened because I got behind in my book cards, had to return the book to the library, and couldn't check any details of what I thought about writing.
| Author | Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Bouis, Antonina W. |
| Publication | New York: MacMillan Co., 1981 |
| Number of Pages | 231 |
| Extras | Introduction by Theodore Sturgeon |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | February 1982 |
A collection of episodes of the journey of the spaceship Takhmasib with its crew of communists - Inspector General Yurkovsky, Captain Bykov, Helmsman Zhilin, Navigator Kritikov, and Cadet Yura Borodin = the apprentice vacuum welder. They visit Mars, a colony of life risking scientists, an American company exploiting workers for high wages but overexposure to radiation (where they overthrow the director and his thugs), a station of backbiters, and finally, the Inspector General and the Navigator die while trying to contact life in Saturn's rings.
The whole approach is very heavy handed compared to Ugly Swans and self-important compared to Tale of the Troika. Perhaps this is an early work or one by the wrong brother. There is much emphasis on being a "real man", one who lives for his work and his friends and who reads great literature on the side. Drinking, sex, money, and all forms of self-concern and self-indulgence are totally out. The leading communist authorities are almost always right and are always justified in taking sudden and extraordinary measures - including cracking the American company director over the head with a chair.
The small subtleties and nice touches, of which there are a number, are overwhelmed by the coarse brush.
Perhaps I am too cynical but the book seems constrained to a political line of support for the socialist vision in its dogmatic and bureaucratic form.
Always hoping to find books by communist bloc writers that reveal individuals and groups to be fully human and free, I was much attracted to the books I read earlier by the Strugatskys. It seemed, at last, that I had found socialist writers who wrote genuine works, not tightly constrained by censorship. However this book showed that even the Strugatskys, who became extremely popular in the USSR, had had to deal with censorship and the arbitrary rewards and punishments handed out to writers by the Party and its censors.
| Author | Hinckle, Warren |
|---|---|
| Author | Turner, William W. |
| Publication | New York: Harper and Row, 1981 |
| Number of Pages | 342, x |
| Extras | notes, photos, bibliography, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Cuba; Fidel Castro |
| When Read | February 1982 |
Reportage on the many Cuban exile and CIA plots against Castro and Cuba by Hinckle, a former Ramparts magazine editor and now journalist, and Turner, a former FBI agent. Both are experts on the "paramilitary right." They gathered their material through extensive interviews with Cuban exiles as well as from published documents.
The most striking aspect of the Cuban exile phenomenon is the degree to which the freakish politics play a role in major U.S. government activities. The CIA, the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Bebe Rebozo, and many other American political institutions and events are connected. Further, the genie unleashed cannot easily be stuffed back in the bottle. Organizations, money, arms, right wing corporate and bank contacts, CIA penetrations and covers, FBI, etc. all interweave into a powerful institutionalized right wing militarism in which genuine spooky craziness plays a significant role.
These people are dangerous - and men like Haig and Nixon are up to their eyes in them.
Nixon was, of course, Richard Nixon, President of the U.S. from 1968 until his impeachment in 1973. Haig would have been Alexander Haig, White House Chief of Staff for a period under Nixon, then NATO supreme commander, then Secretary of State for a year under Ronald Reagan.
| Author | Mansfield, Peter |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 572 |
| Extras | maps, oindex |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Middle East |
| When Read | February 1982 |
A survey sort of history beginning with 50 pages or so of brief history leading up to the modern era with the rest on 19th and 20th century. M includes a brief chapter on each Arab country from Morocco to Iraq to Yemen, and an explanation of the Arab view of Arab society.
M has few statistics - no hard quantitative data on economics, education, society, etc. Rather it is a more subjective, impressionistic view based on travels, reading the literature, and conversations with intellectuals.
M expects a gradual progressive development of Arab society. He does not believe it can leap into atheism, communism, or democracy, yet still does insist that progress is inevitable and that throwbacks to feudal fundamentalism are necessarily temporary phenomena.
An Amazon reviewer writes that Peter Mansfield died in 1996. He did write A History of the Middle East in 1991, which is still in print with a new edition updated by other authors as late as 2012.
In 1973, at the University of Illinois, a friend specializing in Middle Eastern history told me that she thought Islam was a much more powerful force in the Arab world than we imagined. I told her that I couldn't believe that the peoples of the Middle East would fail to modernize, or that women would long stand for the role that they had been assigned in Islam. Now it appears that she was right, at least for the foreseeable future, and that I, and maybe Mansfield, were wrong. Maybe his concentration on intellectuals in the Arab world produced the same sort of misperception as my concentration on them in the U.S. in the age of Donald Trump has done.
| Author | Littell, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978 |
| Number of Pages | 219 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Soviet Union |
| When Read | March 1982 |
An unusual novel of modern Soviet political life. It is a satire about a Jewish huckster in Moscow who lives by ticket scalping, black market sales of jeans and records, sponging at parties (which he crashes), selling bogus stories to American journalists, and other hole and corner economic activities. He is manipulated by a mysterious character called the Druse - who seems to be a double agent for two warring Politburo factions and/or the CIA/KGB - into living in the next to last wooden house in central Moscow, where he meets Mother Russia and mute Nadezhda and discovers a manuscript proving that honored artist of the Soviet Union Frolov is in fact a plagiarist.
Because of his sympathy for Mother Russia and love for Nadezhda he puts himself out to prove the case. He is then crushed by the authorities and driven insane in an asylum from which he emerges into a happier, withdrawn life.
The comedy is very black and very bitter. Robespierre Isayevich Proudin is a most comical and most humane character who is manipulated and crushed in a most uncomic way. And it is all handled very effectively with a very convincing caricature of many aspects of Soviet society.
The writing is almost better than is suited to the comic style and crazy plot. There is much impressive repartee and satiric description. Disturbing, funny, and almost brilliant in style - though not a major book.
Littel is one of my favorite authors in the spy/thriller genre. This was the first book by him that I read. As of this writing, I've read five more. He's still alive and, according to Wikipedia, he published a book just last year. He's now 82 years old. I hope that he lives on and writes ten more books.
| Author | Douglass, Frederick |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Collier Books, 1979 |
| Copyright Date | 1892 |
| Number of Pages | 640 |
| Extras | Copyright 1962, 1979. Reprinted from 1892 ed with a new introduction by Rayford W. Logan |
| Extras | index, annotated bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | Race and slavery |
| When Read | March 1982 |
An important book by an outstanding man. D was born a slave on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and worked as a house slave in Baltimore, a field hand on the Eastern Shore, and then a rented out shipyard worker in Baltimore again until his escape at age 21. As a slave he endured horrifying conditions of beatings, starvation, cold, and all manner of abuses. Yet he stood up and already by age 16 had established himself as a slave who could be shot, but could not be whipped.
As a free man he was equally brave, facing mobs, talking in town after town, fighting for equal rights on trains, in hotels, in restaurants, among politicians and public figures. He demonstrated that the oppressed person who fights for his rights almost always does better than the one who passively accepts his role.
The book is very beautifully and intelligently written. D expresses himself very effectively. Furthermore, he is a fair and open man with as much concern for whites as blacks and with no trace of pettiness in him.
The slave chronicle in particular should be required reading for young Americans.
This book and its author had a big influence on me. I consider Frederick Douglass to be a great hero among Americans and among all peoples.
| Author | Bester, Alfred |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Berkeley Publishing Corp (G.P. Putnam, Dist.), 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 254 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | March 1982 |
Eight short stories, originally published from 1942 to 1974. The earliest and longest, "Hell is Forever" (100 pages) is a religiously set allegory (though Bester is entirely agnostic and anti-"swords and sorcery" fiction) in which five people murder a sixth and are punished by the demon Astaroth in five separate hells. While the mode of story telling is rather tough to take, the writing is not too bad. "5,271,009" also has a hellish figure in it. "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed" and "Disappearing Act" have time travel in a quasi-real, quasi-imaginary time. "The Four-Hour Fugue" is about a strange compulsion among some strange folks in a strange future. "MS. Found in a Bottle" is a funny story of the last survivors of a revolt of the machines. "Fondly Fahrenheit" is perhaps the best story, of a murdering android who developed his complex from an insane master. It always appears that it is the android who is insane and only towards the end is the master's psychosis unraveled.
Bester has little science in this fiction. It's not what I read SF for. The stories shed no light on the future but rather are social commentary on the present.
The quality of the writing is best described as "professional storyteller". B will touch big themes and write interesting things, but he remains a good plot mechanic producing stories to sell.
I like that notion of "plot mechanic". I see that I used the concept again in 1995, but only that once. Maybe I'll add it back to my repertory of critical terminology.
| Author | Elon, Amos |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden city: Doubleday and Co., 1980 |
| Number of Pages | 264 |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Egypt; Middle East |
| When Read | March 1982 |
Elon writes his impressions as the first Israeli journalist to fly into Egypt after the 1979 signing of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.
E is a sensitive observer. He seeks out intellectuals, especially novelists and other writers. He approaches them through their works as well as their interviews with him, thus getting something deeper than the superficial and unsympathetic view that other journalists might get. On the other hand he seems to have little contact with common people. It's almost as if he is embarrassed to confront a farmer or worker (maybe I'm making all of this up.)
Egypt is a highly civilized place. "Affability" is the word E uses to describe the national character. People are polite, tactful, careful not to offend. Almost all were genuinely in favor of the Camp David peace treaty. Losses in the wars with Israel were huge. Among the lower classes almost every family lost a member, a relative, or an acquaintance. Among the upper classes, hardly anyone was killed. Yet these same lower class people treated E very "affably" and with genuine warmth.
Only a handful of Jews remain in what was once a country with 150,000 Jews. There are a few old people. A few communists stayed out of principle to struggle in the country of their birth. Many were accused or arrested.
Sadat is an autocrat and, in many ways, a frivolous one. Nasser was apparently worse in that there was less freedom to write, read, or speak. Now the political police are disbanded - so they say.
An interesting book. E is always an interesting writer.
I read Elon's The Israelis: Founders and Sons six years earlier in 1976. That was after I began making "book cards" in 1974, and so I have a record of my reactions to the book, which were very positive and led me to read this one when I saw it on a library shelf.
As is now my habit, I looked up Elon in the Wikipedia after transcribing these notes into XML. I discovered that, in the 1990s, Elon began living in Italy, "citing disillusionment with developments in Israel since 1967." This doesn't surprise me. Had he not been a man who was sensitive to the flaws in Israeli society I wouldn't have been much interested in his thinking.
| Author | Reeman, Douglas |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 318 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | April 1982 |
Another World War II sea story by the specialist in the genre. This book was written 16 years after the first one I read (Prayer for the Ship.)
A squadron of destroyers participates in two nearly suicidal raids in Norway and France. Losses are huge and, in the end, only one ship survives of eight. The story is about the two battles and the crew of the surviving ship.
Half a dozen characters are credibly drawn. The courageous commander of the destroyer Warlock, his bitter second in command who learns to overcome his petty disappointments, a young boy in love with a showgirl, a petty tyrant sublieutenant, a seaman murderer, and most importantly, a cowardly Captain of the flotilla who poses as a hero and eventually redeems himself by a suicide attack on the enemy.
The writing is still awkward and inelegant. There is always some clumsiness - mention of a person or thing which we don't expect to be in a room - or similar things. Still, Reeman is deadly serious about caring for his people and his subject. This overcomes many faults.
I have not wavered in my view of authors like Reeman. They are decent men, captivated by the achievements of those (in this case his own comrades in arms) who fought for freedom and democracy against Nazism.
I see that Reeman died just one month ago, on January 23, 2017. He would have been 93 years old. I should say to Reeman, in the spirit expressed by many Americans these days, Thank you for your service, and also for your many books.
| Author | Tolstoy, Leo |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Duff, J.P. |
| Publication | New York: Signet Classic, 1960 |
| Copyright Date | 1859 |
| Number of Pages | 93 |
| Extras | Published in The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories. |
| Extras | Afterward by David Magarshak |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 1982 |
A story, published when Tolstoy was 31, of a beautiful young woman from the provinces who falls in love with an older man and goes through several stages of romance and disillusionment before arriving at a stable sense of the meaning and value of love.
The young woman, Maria, is orphaned at age 16 or 17. She lives in solitude on her estate with Katya - some sort of a guardian - and her young sister. She is brought out of her solitude and despondency by Mikhail Sergeyitch, a man of almost 35, who is a former friend of her father's. At first she has high ideals of a life of shared love and self-sacrifice. Gradually she becomes merely bored. Her husband takes her to Petersburg where her beauty and simple charm make her the toast of society. She thrives on admiration and empty social success. She is gradually estranged from her retiring husband. Then she meets a younger, more elegant woman who displaces her in society, she is frightened by a would be rakish lover, and she retires to the country in continued boredom and estrangement. Finally she grasps the simple wholesome values of family happiness - love for her husband and child based on experience of the emptiness of society rather than on romantic illusion.
It is a moralistic, not entirely convincing tale. Still, T has many passages of deep psychological insight and fine treatment of scene, place, and nature. Good straight writing. Great projection of the Russian life of that period and class.
My observation that the novella seemed moralistic and not entirely convincing may have been accurate or there may have been some portion of personal outlook in it based on my age and stage of life. I would have been 35. I believed in "family happiness" in those days, but I was still in the throes of career and advancement - which is not true today in 2017. Against that, Tolstoy was only 31 when the story was published. I presume that he was himself involved in building his career as a writer. He had not yet written his great novels. However, Tolstoy was a more perceptive man than most of us. He had already seen more deeply into individual, family, and society life than most of us do at any time in our lives.
I imagine Tolstoy at a dinner party of relatively high society - not Tsars but people of T's own class - lower nobility and bourgeoisie. Perhaps it is the soiree of Anna Pavlova Scherer at the opening of War and Peace, or one of the other parties in that novel. He looks at all of the people before him and sees into them. He penetrates to their essence. Later in life he turns his gaze on humbler folk in Master and Man, Alyosha the Pot, Resurrection, and other stories. I could be at the same dinner party and in front of the same characters of the later works but would be blind by comparison.
| Author | Simenon, Georges |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Hamilton, Alistair |
| Publication | New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974 |
| Copyright Date | 1965 |
| Number of Pages | 143 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | April 1982 |
The manager of the "foreign trade department" (he reads Sears catalogs to get samples and ideas) of a plastics factory comes into possession of a million and a half francs taken from dead people - smugglers? thieves? spies? he never knows. He is a limited, conventional man who cannot handle this big an event in his life. He hides the money (which he acquires quite by chance from a man on the Venice train.) He lies to wife and friends. He gradually involves himself in one compromise and contradiction after another. His furtive life becomes unbearable.
When all goes totally wrong and he is stupidly seduced by a stupid woman and then stupidly discovered, he impulsively jumps out the window to die.
There is no suspense in this book, no return of criminals after their money, no police, no conflict, only a slow and inexorable slide into certain destruction. More a character study or long short story than a novel, it is not badly done.
This is one of Simenon's relatively few non-Maigret novels. It struck me at the time and now as reflecting a depressed and pessimistic view of mankind - something also encountered in the Maigret mysteries.
This was the first book by Simenon that I read. It's not too hard to convince myself now that I picked it because I was interested in reading something, short in this case, that was by this author that seemed so popular, but not in his mystery series. Surely the library shelf had many Simenon mysteries at that time. Perhaps I wanted to know if I liked the author before digging into a series of books where I wouldn't know where to start.
| Editor | Aldiss, Brian |
|---|---|
| Editor | Harrison, Harry |
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Pres, 1978 |
| Copyright Date | 1975 |
| Number of Pages | 213 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | April 1982 |
Eight SF stories from the 1940's, some poor, some quite good. Best were: "Reason" - Asimov's robot story of QT (Cutie) who has to keep a space station performing exactly right and does it because he believes it is the master which created him, rejecting the poor human theory that the whole is a human creation - very Cartesian in outlook. "The xi Effect" by Phillip Latham - It is discovered in the course of the story that the solar system is rapidly collapsing to below the wavelength of light - scientifically absurd but beautifully done with a fine satire on science and ordinary life, ending in fatalism. "Hobbyist" by Eric Frank Russel - about an astronaut landing on a strange planet full of wondrous creatures, no two alike. They all turn out to be creations of a supermind who also rebuilds the astronaut and send him on his way none the wiser. "Huddling Place" is rather poor in its premise. A man lives in his house, totally dependent on his robots, and does not leave even to save the greatest philosopher. The writing is quite decent though.
[No comment, I've put it all in the abstract.]
If the Asimov story was the same as the one appearing in the I Robot collection, I remember it. I don't really remember the others. I also don't remember why I thought the Asimov story was "Cartesian in outlook".
I'm wondering why I thought it was absurd for the solar system to collapse to a point smaller than the wavelength of light. Was it because I didn't believe that an object with the mass of the solar system could collapse into such a small space? Or was it because I didn't believe that forces in the solar system, such as gravity, were sufficient to cause such a collapse? As far as I know now, a black hole might be small enough, or if not, the mass/energy density of the stuff of the big bang might be. However, as far as I know, there is not enough mass in the solar system for gravitational forces to create the object. Either Aldiss knew more than me, or he was exercising creative license.
| Author | Kidder, Tracey |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1981 |
| Number of Pages | 293 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Computer science |
| When Read | May 1982 |
K studied the development of the MV8000 at Data General during the period of its creation by a team working in the basement at DG. The leader of the group was Tom West, an eccentric man of great ability with an unusual drive to succeed. While guiding the overall design, he stayed essentially out of the day to day work - most of which was done by young engineers immediately out of college.
The pressure was very intense, 60-80 hour weeks were often the rule. The young people worked just for the satisfaction and recognition of designing an important machine. They put it together with some very clever but hasty designs under an unrealistically short schedule, often with inadequate resources.
All of the men were driven to do a good job in spite of mediocre wages, little recognition, and tough conditions. They truly "signed up" as West put it to work like dogs on the new machine. Many had reservations - Why kill themselves? Why do this for Data General? Who will use this machine and for what? Will it be used by the military? But they were driven all the same. If they won, as much as anything else, they could look forward to getting to do it again on the next machine.
A simply written and honest book, though not a deep one. We have observed these people well - at least at work - but we still don't understand them. Still, just this much is more than I have had before to understand my own position.
I think that I remember this book that I read 35 years ago as well as I remember any book I read last month. Here are some of the ideas and themes that I remember:
Data General (DG), the second largest vendor of "minicomputers" in the U.S., and maybe the world, put together a team of experienced computer scientists and engineers in North Carolina. Their job was to design a new, advanced, 32 bit minicomputer to replace the 16 bit machines that DG was selling and to compete against the new 32 bit VAX produced by the number 1 minicomputer vendor, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). The future of DG was on the line. They had built the Eclipse line of 16 bit machines with some cost and performance advantages over the popular DEC PDP-11 series. But the 32 bit project was a failure. The machine wasn't ready. It didn't meet all of the requirements. DG was in a panic. Not knowing what else to do they gave Tom West, one of the key designers of the Eclipse, the go ahead to lead his own pickup team in Massachusetts to build a new 32 bit development of the Eclipse.
West certainly knew what he was doing but he had to be sure that he could build something as good as the VAX. He got a friend who was a systems engineer at a company that had one to let him in one night after everyone had left the premises. West disassembled the VAX, inspected it carefully, estimated that it contained $27,500 worth of parts (do I remember details or what?) and decided that it was not cheaper or more advanced than his own design. He could proceed with some hope of commercial success if the new design worked.
The DG engineers worked like crazy. The computer used a "firmware" design, meaning that the hardware instructions executed by the computer would actually be implemented in "microcode", primitive instructions that operate below the visibility of the machine assembly language to coordinate the processing, memory, instruction decode, and other primitive operations that made up what appeared to the assembly language programmer to be the native instructions of the computer. The designers were under intense pressure to optimize every microsecond in these microcode instructions. One young engineer, cracking under the pressure, went off to a commune in Vermont (I think), leaving a note on his machine that he was gone, was not coming back, and from then on would measure no time shorter than a season.
The design worked. It was not a wild success. DEC probably increased its lead in the commercial sphere with its very cleanly designed VAX series. But West and his boys saved the company and prevented DG from going under, at least at that time.
Why did this book make such an impression on me? I think that I read it at a critical time in my own career. I was, at age 36, coming into my own as "Director of Information Systems" at Online Computer Systems. I, myself, was working 50, 60, and sometimes 70 hour weeks. I too was working for a company that didn't offer me any real long term financial rewards, but did introduce me to exciting work with high profile clients. I think I identified with Tom West and his young engineers. I think I understood them.
| Author | Bebey, Francis |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Hutchison, Joyce A. |
| Publication | Westport, Connecticut: Lawrence Hall and Company, 1981 |
| Copyright Date | 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 176 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Africa |
| When Read | May 1982 |
A very fine novel of change in a Cameroon village in the period of the beginning of independence - the early 60's? Several new sorts of people have become priminent in the area. Albert, called the King because of hearing of a King Albert in Europe, has opened a store in the town and become very modestly well to do. Bikounou the Vespasian (he owns a Vespa) is a petty official in the administration. Toutuma the unionist (some say communist) is a worker for the railroads. The 50 year old Albert and 25 year old Bikounou vie for the pretty daughter of Toutuma. Then later all three stand for election in the new government.
There is gossip, foolery, maneuvering for public sympathy, and so on. The whole community is involved in both affairs. In the end the pretty girl does fall in love with her husband Albert because of his fine intelligence and understanding of life.
A charming book about charming people - still living traditional village lives but being gradually forced into new ways. We see the community, the complex social relations and obligations, the parochialism of the village. The people are fine and intelligent and yet almost stupidly unsophisticated in any ways beyond those of village tradition.
A very well written book.
In 1982, without the Internet and the Wikipedia, I could have found out who Bebey was or when Cameroon gained its independence, but the process would have taken time and required travel to libraries. Now I know that Bebey was a "Cameroonian artist, musician, poet, and writer", and independence was granted by France in 1960. The Wikipedia article says much about Bebey's music but nothing about his writing. The article lists 31 different music albums by Bebey.
Born in 1929, he studied mathematics in Cameroon and studied broadcasting in Paris and New York and also lived in Ghana for a time, moving back to France to work as a musician, sculptor and writer. He would have been about 47 years old when this book was published.
What an interesting man!
| Author | Smith, Martin Cruz |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 1981 |
| Number of Pages | 365 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | May 1982 |
Chief Investigator Arkady Vasilievich Renko of the homicide squad of the Moscow Militia investigates the murders of three young people in Gorky Park in Central Moscow.
This unusual novel combines an exotic police procedural with social/political commentary on both the USSR and the USA.
It appears to be a strong attack on the Soviet system, exposing petty careerism at all levels of state, party, police, courts, and KGB. Most of the people are moderately decent as individuals, but as functionaries in the bureaucracy it is their role to serve the status quo. When Renko probes too far and attacks a powerful person he is himself held incommunicado for interrogation with drugs and terror for months.
Eventually he is sent to New York in a strange deal involving the FBI, the killer (a double agent for the FBI and KGB) and his girlfriend who wants badly to live as an American. There Smith treats America as being as bad or worse than Russia.
In the end, many people are killed and Renko, badly wounded and doomed in any case, releases some captive sables in New York that were the motive for the murders.
A very strong and effective book. Unusually well done and serious for the genre.
I went on to read all of the Martin Cruz Smith Arkady Renko novels after this one. As a Marxist, or at least a person influenced by Marxism, I suffered from significant cognitive dissonance between my attraction to the ideals of socialism and my criticism of the first socialist state. When I encountered a book like this one that tried to penetrate the iron curtain and shed light on what lay beyond it, I was attracted. I hoped for a better understanding than what I could get from the partisan pro or anti-Soviet authors. I think I got at least a little of that from Smith and Renko.
| Author | Simon, Pierre-Henri |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Hare, Humphrey |
| Publication | New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961 |
| Number of Pages | 154 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 1982 |
A long running philosophical conversation between a professional soldier, Jean de Larsan, and an unnamed professor, on the ethics of colonial war. The soldier is from a long line of French officers, bred to military service from childhood. He fights hard and well in World War II and then begins a long, slow process of disillusionment, first in occupied Germany, then Indochina, and finally Algeria. In the end he cannot any longer participate in a war of torture and brutality for dubious goals.
Not really a novel, this is essentially a conversation - or better - a discourse in dialog. There are few elements of fiction, only a few episodes of scenes from the wars.
The merit of the book is that it takes seriously all of the arguments for colonialism, and then overcomes them with reality. It is appropriate reading for the French colonialist in ways that a more modern book may not be.
Not knowing how to classify this book, I put it under "Fiction".
The Wikipedia has an article about Simon and a bibliography. The titles of the books are in French. The title that seems closest in meaning and time to the content and publication date of this English language book is Portrait d'un Officier, published in 1958. The Wikipedia author classifies that as fiction.
The Wikipedia says of Simon, "Pierre-Henri Simon (16 January 1903, Saint-Fort-sur-Gironde – 20 September 1972) was a French intellectual, literary historian, essayist, novelist, poet and literary critic. He won the Prix Ève Delacroix in 1963."
The French did not finally leave Algeria until 1962, so this book was not a historical record but a living polemic aimed at changing French policy and public opinion.
| Author | Anderson, Sherwood |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Viking Press, 1976 |
| Copyright Date | 1919 |
| Number of Pages | 247 |
| Extras | Introduction by Malcolm Cowley |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 1982 |
A collection of 24 vignettes of lives in a small town in Ohio. Only one character, George Willard, recent high school graduate and newspaper reporter, runs through most of the sketches.
Each life is summed up in each story. The plots are very ordinary and mundane, yet very dramatic commonplace occurrences - the temptation of a preacher, a woman reviewing her wasted life, a young man resenting his father, a declaration of adolescent love, an older man trying and failing to give advice to a younger one - are the substance of the stories. These things are treated as almost inevitable events with inevitable outcomes. They appear to be turning points to their characters but in fact they are fully determined from first to last.
A reduces all his characters to very elemental qualities, mostly involving hunger for love. All of them are frustrated by the lack of any conceptual framework within which to understand either their own need or the needs of others. Although they are fully formed adults, they have no way to reach out to each other and do what must be done. Each is essentially and invariably locked in a lonely struggle with himself. Only George Willard, the healthiest of the lot, has any chance to escape. He leaves the town, the girl, the paper, and goes to the city.
The writing is effective, with good, straight, physical and psychological description. It is always plain and clear. Sometimes there are lapses. Times and names are off. Some errors are made. But it is easy to see why this book influenced other writers.
Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Booth Tarkington, and others helped preserve the culture of what we now call "middle America". When I read this book in 1982 I don't know that I thought of it as much as an insight into history that I expect I would today. Does this culture still exist? I don't know. Midwesterners from small towns in Ohio and other "red states" (as we now tend to call them, "red" for "Republican", not to be confused with "red" for "communist") may still think of themselves as "middle Americans", preservers of the "true" American values. But the people my age (now 70) looking back are looking back at child's eye views of the U.S. of the 1950's. I'm not sure that Anderson's Ohio wasn't quite different from the Ohio of 30 or 40 years later. In any case, I don't think that Anderson, Lewis and Tarkington had the same nostalgic illusions that we have today.
| Author | Forester, C.S. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Los Angeles: Pinnacle Books, 1980 |
| Copyright Date | 1946 |
| Number of Pages | 243 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Naval; Napoleonic Wars |
| When Read | June 1982 |
"Number Nine in the Hornblower Saga" as the paperback cover advertises. Horny quells a mutiny by tricking the French and the mutineers and personally killing the leader. He occupies Le Havre and tricks the garrison into declaring for Louis XVIII, sends Bush to his death, then visits the old Comte de Cracay and his old flame Marie for an affair while Barbara plays hostess for Wellington in Vienna. When Napoleon returns from Elba, Sir Horatio leads a ragtag guerrilla column tying down a few regiments of Imperial troops. In a final gesture, Marie is shot, Hornblower is captured and sentenced to die, but is saved by Napoleon's demise at Waterloo.
F is grimmer here than in the earlier books. There is little delight in seafaring or action and more dwelling on the dark, determined, distorted side of Hornblower's nature. He sympathizes with the mutineers. Hornblower says over and over again that he would do exactly as they did. He presents their leader as a man of high integrity, old in the service. Yet Hornblower ruthlessly tricks and destroys them, personally killing the fleeing leader and seeing many others hanged - all in the name of the war. He (Hornblower) works to restore a corrupt monarchy, pressing men into its service with tricks and threats and false slogans.
We see Hornblower as a man totally consumed by years of disciplined service to a single goal, with no longer much thought of the reason for it. He ruthlessly sacrifices himself and others. Only his infidelity and his reflexive self-doubt are human.
A rather ugly character. Maybe I will be finished with him at the end.
I read one more posthumously published book in 1994. Otherwise, the Forester books I read after this were not in the Hornblower series. I'd have to check to see if I read all of them. I probably did.
Perhaps Forester was reacting against his own earlier work. Perhaps he felt obligated to tell more of the truth about war to his readers. Perhaps his divorce the year before this book was published darkened his mood. Someone may know, but I don't.
I did not find the book enjoyable in the way I enjoyed, say, Ship of the Line, but the book had some qualities that the earlier ones did not, or did not emphasize. It rounds out the series in a useful way.
| Author | MacDonald, Ross |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969 |
| Number of Pages | 243 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | July 1982 |
A very straight, very conventional mystery / private detective novel about the usual American type of straight, conventional, private detective.
Lew Archer is called in to look for a stolen gold box - which he locates very early in the story, and stays on to uncover four murders over a 25 year time period in which the guiltiest person turns out to be an outwardly harmless soul with an inner psychopathic streak (who commits suicide when discovered.)
A typical American cast includes Archer - experienced, able, jaded, but essentially and irrevocably straight; Betty Truttwell - beautiful girl torn between her accused boyfriend and her lawyer father, and many old folks with long intertwined and shady pasts.
Despite a clear and easy style and a good ability to handle complex plots, M refuses to develop his character or provide any thematic interest. Archer has a brief love affair and a bullet in the shoulder - both opportunities to develop his role, but nothing is done. The "love" is a distracting grope in the dark. The wound is opportunity only for a swoon or two.
It's a shame for such a competent writer to do so little.
| Author | Miller, Walter M. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1960 |
| Copyright Date | 1959 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | August 1982 |
A religiously oriented SF novel of the history of America after complete devastation in a worldwide nuclear war. After the war, the remaining people burn all books and kill all scientists. 600 years later the story opens in a monastery in Utah where the monks preserve the "memorabilia", fragments of writings from before the war, almost all completely ununderstandable in the primitive dark age. There are several episodes of nice writing, after which the sweetest middle aged monk is killed for meat by a half-wit radiation mutant and the story jumps 600 years to the beginning of a Renaissance. Finally it jumps 600 more, to a fully industrialized society again facing nuclear war. The bombs fall, everybody is dying, and a handful of monks and settlers blast off for the stars with a new set of memorabilia.
The book is well written, the characters very attractive. The religious sensibility is presented, as in Willa Cather, as civilized and high-minded. There is a heavy sprinkling of Latin and even a little Hebrew to keep everything looking and feeling right.
Of course the book sees God and religion as our salvation. What can one say to that?
This was a very popular and influential book in its day. The "cold war" was in everyone's consciousness. People were building bomb and fallout shelters in their back yards. Miller wanted to scare us into sanity. I guess he succeed in scaring us, or perhaps he just entertained us. It was a pretty good book.
| Author | Holland, Cecelia |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982 |
| Number of Pages | 305 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | August 1982 |
A historical romance of the Dutch revolt against Spain in the 16th century. A petit bourgeois family of Antwerp is caught up in the events. The father is arrested and executed for no real reason by the Duke of Alva, commander of the Spanish Army, in a roundup of all Calvinist leaders. The son Jan runs off to sea to become a pirate, then a patriot. The daughter Hannecke van Cleef flees to Germany and later returns as a gaunt, mystical patriot. The mother turns mad and dies.
There are a number of events, several half baked love affairs, and a big battle at the end which the Sea Beggars win in the first successful holding of a Dutch town.
H makes efforts at realism. Hannecke is raped but does not become pregnant. Main characters do die. Some obvious temptations to the writer are not yielded to.
The writing is professional, the research just passable, the story acceptable - in short, a very average novel. There is no political insight, no explanation of the Spanish purpose.
I like historical novels. I wish there were better - or perhaps I should say - more better ones.
I don't remember much if anything of this book but, oddly, I do remember the cover and do remember picking the book off the shelf in the library and deciding to bring it home. I just now looked at the cover on Amazon and it was not the same as I remembered it, but I found the 1982 edition and, sure enough, that's what was in my mind.
I chose the book because, in my regular visits to the library I had seen a fair number of her books, all historical novels. I was always on the lookout for new authors of historical novels, hoping to open a new source of multiple interesting books. This book had a theme of war, sea adventure, Spanish Inquisition, and so on, all topics I had read about even before reaching my teen years. So I borrowed it. As my comment above indicates, the book didn't satisfy me and have read no more of her books since then.
In the last sentence of my comment I used the phrase "more better ones." What I meant, of course, was that I wanted more of the better books, not books that were "more better". I think I was making a little joke on a phrase that was "in" at the time.
| Author | Clarke, Arthur C. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 273 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Science; Autobiography |
| When Read | August 1982 |
A collection of 25 essays, speeches, and articles, not previously included in his other book collections. They are on a variety of subjects - mostly light, many personal - explaining why he lives in Sri Lanka, what his life is like there, why he no longer writes short stories or non-fiction. There is no hard science at all but some articles promoting science or interest in space.
As always, his views are very idealistic - in both the positive and the negative ways, and they are thought provoking.
He points out that space is less hostile than the deep sea - it is just hard to get to, that $10 worth of energy could put a man in orbit if the technology were advanced, etc.
Clarke has called himself the world's number one _science fiction_ writer, poking a bit of fun at Asimov, whom no one could keep up with in a raw count of books written. But Clarke was pretty good at plain old non-fiction as well.
| Author | Canetti, Elias |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Neugroschel, Joachim |
| Publication | New York: Seabury Press, 1979 |
| Copyright Date | 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 268 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | September 1982 |
An autobiography covering the period from C's birth in Bulgaria in 1905, through Manchester 1911-13, Vienna 1913-16, and Zurich 1916-21. After his father's death in 1912, the child's life is totally dominated by two basic processes - a struggle with his mother, and the ever more rapid acquisition of learning.
The book is interesting and unusual because of the documentation of these two processes. The struggle with his mother is unhealthy. He becomes totally dependent upon her. She, in a neurotic way, lives only for him - not for herself and not for her other two children. They pry into each other's lives and attempt each to cut off the other from anyone else who might inspire affection. They read plays late at night, lost in the drama.
C's writing is unusual because his personality is unusual (perhaps his writing is actually quite ordinary.) He is honest about the fears and neuroses of childhood which most of us suppress. He faces them. He is intellectual - well read in many languages, scientific, musical, artistic. He is most humane, understanding and forgiving of his own childish foibles as well as those of others.
I really don't know what to make of it all but am prepared to try his novel. Also made comments in my diary.
The diary entries show that I was less tolerant of Canetti's intense self-absorption halfway through. Perhaps I was relived of the burden of reading the stuff and became more generous at the end. Or maybe "generous" is an ungenerous term in this context. He was an intelligent man and a good writer. His sensibilities weren't the same as mine, but so what?
I read Earwitness: Fifty Characters by Canetti in 1986. So far, I have still not read Auto-da-Fei or any others of his output.
To me, the paradigm of self-absorption in a writer was Marcel Proust in Swann's Way. I started reading it several times but always gave up, unable to stomach any more. This book had some of that character. Not being as long as Proust's book, it was easier to fight my way to the end. I discovered from Proust and Canetti that it is possible, at least for me, to greatly admire a writer's skill and ability and yet feel some antipathy to his writing.
| Author | Simenon, Georges |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Ellenbogen, Eileen |
| Publication | New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978 |
| Copyright Date | 1942 |
| Number of Pages | 139 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Maigret |
| When Read | October 1982 |
A trivial but pleasantly written mystery in which middle aged, stolid, Chief Superintendent Maigret must concern himself with a ridiculous 24 year old servant girl who will not tell all the facts and is totally absorbed in foolish fantasies.
The murder that is the movie of the story is absolutely run of the mill underworld stuff. S's real interest is Maigret's attraction for the peaceful and rather absurd little retirement community of Jeanneville - with its little gardens and straw hats and cool glasses of wine; and also with his handling of Felicie, the servant girl, whom he cannot stand but is kind to nonetheless.
I presume that this is an early Maigret. It is the first I have read. Although I was not entranced, I did like its trivial charms. I will read more.
It was written in 1942! In France!, at L'Aiguillon-sur-Mer. Is it a reaction against the terrible disturbance of the war, or the product of an undisturbable spirit?
Or perhaps it is neither a reaction against the disturbance of the war or the product of an undisturbable spirit ("unperturbable" would have been a better word.) Perhaps it was something S had to do to keep the dinner pot boiling. The town where S was working is on the Atlantic coast, just north of La Rochelle. All of the Atlantic coast was occupied by the Germans.
As intended, I did read a couple more of these novels, and then more again when they were mentioned in The Neruda Case by Roberto Ampuero.
The first Maigret novel was written in 1930, so this has to be called a mature work.
| Author | Farrington, Benjamin |
|---|---|
| Publication | Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1961 |
| Copyright Date | 1944 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Extras | index, bibliographies |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Science |
| Keywords | Greece |
| When Read | October 1982 |
A superficial but comprehensive survey of Greek science from Thales to Galen in 199 A.D. F covers the subject from math to medicine, physics, geometry, geography, pneumatics, music, and many others. Contributions of each of the great personalities are discussed, including Plato and Aristotle, whose influences are, to F, generally detrimental, especially Plato who opposes the use of the senses as an instrument for acquiring knowledge.
Farrington, who is clearly a Marxist, is primarily concerned to show that science, divorced from application, can never develop very far. He holds that the dependence upon slavery and the divorce of the ruling class and its intellectuals from production doom their science to failure.
This thesis undoubtedly contains much truth. However F has not sufficiently explored the social conditions of science for us to fully establish his case (see my diary for more on this.) He does provide many examples of the work of the Greeks and his heart is in the right place.
There is much more in the diary than in the notes above. The entry from September 19 describes the book and the one from October 9 gives some of my misgivings about Farrington's approach to the subject.
Reading these notes now makes me think that F was too much of a dialectical materialist, that he went too far in attributing intellectual progress, or lack thereof, to the underlying social relations of production. Or maybe, and this is also in the October diary entry, his materialist approach didn't succeed, not because the project was doomed but because the information we had about Greek society was too limited to support a valid analysis of any social and economic causes of the rise Greek science, and because F didn't acknowledge that and instead went ahead and drew conclusions that he couldn't support.
In 2015 I read Steven Weinberg's To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science. Weinberg is a Nobel prize winning physicist who understood the Greek math, physics, and astronomy in great depth - using both ancient and modern mathematical and conceptual techniques. He, of course, was able to give a far superior appreciation of the Greek achievements, and a more telling critique, while giving virtually nothing of the social and economic background of those achievements. With Weinberg's account there is no need for the reader to ask: Is this right? W gives us the physical evidence and the mathematical proofs to show exactly what's wrong and what's right in Greek science. The only room left for conjecture is upon what the Greeks may have known, and even written, that is lost to us now.
The Wikipedia article on Farrington, who died in 1974 at around age 83, contains excerpts from five different critiques of F's work. My doubts and questions are common in all of them.
| Author | Asimov, Isaac |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1975 |
| Number of Pages | 206 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | October 1982 |
24 stories, published from 1950 to 1973, with brief autobiographical introductions. They are all minor stories, short, often built around a pun or some very short surprise at the end.
All the stories have A's charming characters and conversations. He has the ability to jump into the story with all of his characters fully formed and in mid-conversation. His people are full of enough foibles - and individualized enough, to really enjoy. The science, even where preposterous (and it often is) is so wonderfully and completely developed as to always add to, instead of detract from, the stories.
So what if it's all light and trivial.
I just happen to have a copy of Buy Jupiter so I found it and re-read the first story, "Day of the Hunters". Asimov introduces it as a version of one of his very early stories and, after the story is finished, criticizes the ending as pounding its moral over the readers head. He was right. But leaving that aside the story was sheer delight. Three guys walk into a bar and talk of this and that and then of time machines, and a drunk professor at the next table comes over and tells them of the time machine he invented. The science was, of course, preposterous, but that was fine. The story wasn't about being believable, it was about being fun. And fun it was.
| Author | Sjowall, Maj |
|---|---|
| Author | Wahloo, Per |
| Original Language | se |
| Translators | Blair, Alan |
| Publication | New York: Random House, 1970 |
| Copyright Date | 1968 |
| Number of Pages | 211 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | October 1982 |
A very well done "police procedural" mystery in which Detective Superintendent Martin Beck and his crew of middle aged detectives hunt down the perpetrator of Sweden's first mass murder and cop killing.
A huge amount of leg work is done and all sorts of trivial clues are fitted together until, in the end, the criminal is discovered. He turns out to have been killing two people, a cop and a witness to an old crime, and killed seven others just to confuse the police
The writing is clear and professional. Several of the police are treated from more than one side. Beck himself (always "Martin Beck") has a dead marriage which is occasionally run over - though never discussed.
The plot is well done though and the small psychological sketches are acceptable fare.
This is another famous, catchy title, like Stainless Steel Rat. I have forgotten the story but remember the title well. I think the book was quite popular at one time.
| Author | Harrison, Harry |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Walker and Co., 1970 |
| Copyright Date | 1961 |
| Number of Pages | 158 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | October 1982 |
A very juvenile story of a con man and master criminal, Slippery Jim Di Griz, who is eventually caught (at the beginning of the story) and forced to join the super police "Special Corps", where his talents are needed. He pursues "Angelina" - beautiful young killer - and, after numerous adventures of the far fetched sort, catches her. In the end she is reformed and becomes his partner in the police - and presumably in bed.
H's talent is already revealed here, though his literary ability - and he does have some - is nowhere to be seen. The plot is silly. The treatment of danger, love, death, crime, etc. are all purely exploitative. There is no effort to explain or develop these things, only to use them as ready made values for good or ill, to be picked up wherever it is convenient. The common work of a hack.
Yet H does show some story telling talent.
Part of the book appeared in Astounding Stories and in Analog.
I think this book has one of the catchiest titles in fiction. I've remembered the title very well, along with the very catchy name of the author. How interesting that the book is so forgettable.
| Author | Oz, Amos |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Hebrew |
| Translators | deLange, Nicholas |
| Publication | New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1975 |
| Number of Pages | 167 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 1982 |
Two novellas.
Crusade is a strange, eerie tale of a knight with his group of retainers, soldiers and hangers-on, all on their way to fight in the Holy land. On the way they rape and steal, fight another crusader band, and torment and kill Jews. They also turn on themselves, degenerating into superstitious hysteria and paralysis. In the end, with most of them dead and the rest demented, the last little band sets out again for Jerusalem.
Late Love is a marvelous first person story of a paranoid but sympathetic old man who travels the country of modern Israel as a representative of the Kibbutz movement central organization. He speaks to the handful of older kibbutzniks who come to hear his lectures on the threat of Bolshevism.
The charm of this story is in the combination of weakness and strength, singlemindedness, and self-doubt, monomania and concern for his own poor condition. This old fellow, Shraga Unger, for all his bad breath and ridiculousness, is a fine fellow.
Oz's themes are more limited here than in his longer books. He is exploring more specialized subjects. But he still shows himself a great writer.
See also the diary.
There is a little passage in Late Love that I wrote about in the diary entry and that I have recalled and thought about again and again over the years and still think about today. In the diary I mention that, "Our thoughts, once formulated into words and expressed, can never be taken back. They can never not have existed and so never cease to exist." If I remember it correctly, Shraga is thinking of the woman he loved and is asserting that his love will never die. It's hard to be sure after all of these years that I have accurately captured Oz's intent, but I can speak more authoritatively of my own intent.
I would like to be able to say that I will love Marcia forever and ever. Amos Oz taught me a way of thinking about that in which the statement can be true. My love for Marcia, and for Robin and Dan and Jim and the kids exists now. It is true for all eternity that it has existed and it can never be the case that it didn't exist. In that sense, it is eternal. I appreciate Oz and his Shraga Unger for giving me those thoughts.
| Author | Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Lange, Victor |
| Publication | New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1949 |
| Copyright Date | 1774 |
| Number of Pages | 128 |
| Extras | Introduction by Victor Lange |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | November 1982 |
Young Werther falls in love with the beautiful and charming Charlotte, who is betrothed to, and then marries, the solid and steady Albert. Werther tries to distract himself, tries to win her back, and then finally commits suicide.
How odd are the sensibilities in this story by modern standards! He pines and moans. She uses only the faintest of discouragements. All parties are civilized to a fault. None face the facts squarely. All three in some sense do the right thing. Yet all are clearly doing the wrong thing. Charlotte never tells Werther that she doesn't love him and he is making her mad. Albert never tells him to shove off.
Why did this tale achieve such popularity in the 18th century?
There is no doubt that the writing is of high quality and the sensibilities very fine. I even feel some of the tragedy in spite of my cynicism about such romantic characters. Yet still, it is at least in part, unable to move me as it should.
Near the end there is a German Gothic tale woven in about heroes of the mythic age, all doomed to heroic failures.
Of course I take it all too literally. Goethe must have meant to decry the stolidity of his time - and I am such a stolid person that I can hardly see it.
The Wikipedia article answers most of my questions. The book was written when Goethe was 24 years old and in love with one Charlotte Buff, who did not requite his love. He was, according to the Wikipedia authors, rather embarrassed by the book even though it brought him great fame and was a seminal work in the "Sturm und Drang" "German proto-romantic" movement.
My abstract is also inadequate and did not capture the story as accurately as the Wikipedia plot summary. This is no doubt partly due to the limitations of the 3x5 index card space, but mostly due to the jarring dissonance between G's sensibilities from a different era and my own. It appears that I failed to get into the proper historical spirit.
| Author | Simonov, Konstantine |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Barnes, Joseph |
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945 |
| Number of Pages | 421 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | November 1982 |
A novel of the siege of Stalingrad by a Russian author, written during the war. Captain Alexei Ivanovich Saburov leads his battalion across the Volga in the early days of the siege and fights through to the day after the beginning of the counter offensives. They begin by capturing several apartment buildings which they hold with ever decreasing strength as the buildings are totally pulverized. In the end, with a last burst of pride, the survivors retake one building that had been captured by the Germans.
The novel is a fine example of its type. There is a realistic war time love affair and "marriage", and very nice portrayals of decent people, heroes, traitors, courageous good people, and courageous stubborn bastards. Politics are kept in the background.
I enjoyed it very much.
| Author | Bayley, Barrington J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 189 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | December 1982 |
A very unusual and intellectually interesting SF novel.
The story involves a "sartorialist" (tailor) of the far future who discovers a suit with extraordinary power to give him confidence and inspire confidence in others - plus many other qualities. Ultimately it turns out that the suit, like four others made by the genius Frachonard, is made of an intelligent plant material which is bent on overpowering the universe - all of which sounds silly to tell.
Yet the interest of the book is in its subtle observations on man and culture. B imagines a clothes conscious culture in which the "Art of Attire" is the most important characteristic of the culture. People wear clothes to attain certain moods, feelings about themselves, convey certain impressions to others, etc. It enhances their experience enormously.
This unusual conception is very convincingly and even attractively developed, along with offshoots and predecessors - such as the "Sovyan" and "Shoji" cultures of people physiologically adapted to life in space - offshoots of ancient Soviet and Japanese cultures.
Several interesting characters are developed. Alexei Verednyev, the Sovyan, the sartorialist, the Ziodean expedition leader, etc.
All in all, one of the better SF novels. All difficulties are forgiven for its unusual conception and high approach to the genre.
I remember this book surprisingly well. There are scenes in which the sartorialist is in trouble with authorities and he puts on his Frachonard suit. The police are so impressed with him that they walk away without arresting him, which was their original intent. In another scene the man is sick or badly injured, I forget which. He cannot get up to pilot his spacecraft but the Frachonard suit recruits a horde of insects to inhabit the suit, providing the physical motion the suit needs to manipulate the spacecraft. In still another scene, the ship lands on the planet Caean where the man debarks into a swirl of fashion, color, elegance, and grace. Everyone is dressed beautifully and looks healthy and attractive. The Frachonard suit is still the best of them. The others are, after all, just articles of clothing, not of intelligent life embedded in the garments.
After reading this book I decided to keep my eye open for others by Bayley. I only found one at the libraries, The Pillars of Eternity, q.v., which I read almost two years later.
| Author | Kautsky, Karl |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Hartmann, Jacob |
| Publication | Monthly Review Press, 1972 |
| Copyright Date | 1908 |
| Number of Pages | 472 |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Politics; Religion |
| Keywords | Marxism |
| When Read | December 1982 |
A Marxist history of the foundations of Christianity ranging from the time of Christ through the first couple of centuries. K divides the subject into parts - the personality of Jesus (which he regards as irrelevant), the nature of Roman society (which is critically important), the Jews, and the beginnings of Christianity.
K attempts to explain why Christianity arose, out of what socioeconomic antecedents and with what social roles.
K holds that Christianity was founded as a primitive communist and Jewish revolutionary nationalist movement (albeit filled with primitive and mystical ideology) which was rapidly transformed into its opposite - an anti-proletarian, anti-Semitic, international movement to preserve the status quo. He also holds that neither the story of Jesus nor the original character of the movement had much to do with its later development. It was the character of the times and social dynamics of the society and the movement itself which forced its development. Had it not been for Jesus, something else would have taken its place.
This is an "Authorized translation from the 13th German edition", copyright International Publishers, 1925."
K's approach is wonderfully verstehen. He give marvelous explanations of social mechanisms which, if not always convincing, are always worth attention.
I can't feel any sentimentality about Christianity any more. See the diary for several months for more.
The latter two diary entries are fairly extensive with much more information about the book than is included above. For the most part, I had attempted to record what Kautsky said, as I understood it, rather to judge whether what he said was right or wrong.
Just a month ago I read Mikhail Rostovtzeff's Rome with a quite different interpretation of the rise of Christianity. Where Kautsky saw it as a moral repudiation of the corruption and disgusting consumption by the ruling class at the expense of the working class, slave and free, Rostovtzseff saw it as a reification of the yearning for happiness in an afterlife. The two interpretations do not seem to be incompatible to me.
One section of K's book that I still remember as characteristic of the work as a whole was his description of a dinner given by an emperor at a cost of what, presumably at the time of translation in 1925, or maybe at the time of later publication in 1972, would be 20 million dollars. One course served was nightingale's tongues. We can only imagine how many slaves were put to work to produce this one night's entertainment, the only purpose of which was to impress the guests with the wealth, power, and importance of their host.