Month: January 2021

Secrets of the Seven Smallest States of Europe (2004) by Thomas Eccardt

GoodReads meta-data is 348   pages rated 3.78 by 65 litizens.  

Genre: History

Verdict:  The Micro Seven! 

Go ahead list them!  

Ordered by population.  

	Population	Area in km2	Per capita GDP US$
Vatican City	825	0.49	–
San Marino	34,232	61.2	60,551
Monaco	38,300	2.1	115,700
Liechtenstein	38,784	160	98,432
Andorra	77,543	467	42,035
Malta	514,564	316	48,246
Luxembourg	626,108	2,586	112,045

Source: Wikipedia

These entities have most of the features of a state, though the most dubious inclusion is Vatican City. While each is unique, in general they have survived largely as a convenience to their larger neighbours, usually because they had nothing those neighbours wanted. Their existence was written into treaties at one time or another.  Luxembourg was a buffer between France and Germany.  Monaco made many compromises with France to retain such sovereignty as it has. Only Malta and founding member Luxembourg are in the EU, but most accept the Euro.    

The only one with significant natural resources is Luxembourg which has long produced high quality steel.  None is self-sufficient in food. They have all issued post stamps for revenue.  Andorra made itself into tax-free shopping mall. Monaco has that casino. Liechtenstein has Swiss banking secrecy even if the Swiss no longer do.  San Marino has a nonpareil stone cutting and stone working craft. Malta has Maltesers. The other major asset Malta has, along some of the other micros, is an expatriate community that supports it.  

The micros represent collectively and individually a residue of European history.  The Knights of Hospitaller played a major role in making Malta European when Charles V of Spain gave the island to the Knights (in return for a first round draft pick [checking to see who is paying attention]). Then there are the 13th Century Grimaldis in Monaco who passed from pirates to princes, the come-lately Grand Duke of Luxembourg, and the co-princes of Andorra, and the fiefdom that is/was Liechtenstein, a country named after a family.  Only San Marino stands apart with its 13th Century origins as a republic (and by the way being a republic does not make it democratic, see a political science 101 textbook for the distinction). Of the Vatican, well it is a medieval monastery writ global.   

During the Spanish Civil War, to avoid that conflict Andorra pretended to be French, and then to avoid World War II to avoid that conflict it switched to pretend to be neutral Spain. Dual nationality can be handy. San Marino supported fascist Italy but did not declare war on anyone while the Italians lost their black shirts at the casino in Monaco. During the war many (of the few) Liechtensteineans (take that spell checker!) embraced Austrian Nazism, but after the war they dusted off neutral Swiss cow bells. During World War II the German dismembered Luxembourg and its steel went into tanks, while Malta was bombed to ruination.  

Luxembourg has laboured to integrate itself into Europe and the UN, and Malta has trod the path of de-colonisation along with many other African and Asian states though it seldom associated itself with them.  

I am ready for Eggheads! I can distinguish Monaco from Monte Carlo, and I know how the Grimaldis got the title prince, and I am telling all!  First, Mount Charles in Italian is Monte Carlo, and it is a rocky rise named for an earlier Grimaldi, and the area now is where the Croesus clan lives, as in ‘as rich as Croesus.’  Monaco City is where the casino and historic belle époque buildings are to be found. 

The first Grimaldis who seized the area and ruled by the sword were nautical pirates who tired of salt water.  One of them, trying to establish the legitimacy of his rule, wrote letters sent by couriers to all manner of dukes, kings, princes, popes, and signed himself as Prince of Monaco.  After doing this for years and getting little response, because it was convenient in a geopolitical struggle a king of Spain wrote back and addressed him as prince to secure access for shipping to and from Naples.

Well, thereafter this Grimaldi make sure anyone and everyone knew that the King of Spain said he was a prince, and that made it so!   Does that still work?  

Liechtenstein is the only country in the world named after a family.  Roy Licthenstein is no relation. or maybe he is and just cannot spell.    

It is alleged that San Marino hosted about 100,000 refugees from World War II, about ten times the resident population. Many were Jews escaping from the German killing machine in 1943. I did find that number hard to credit.     

The mechanical Turk consulted the algorithms and the stars and recommended this title after I had read concise histories of several European countries.  I bit out of (idle) curiosity.  

Death in Eden (2014) by Paul Heald.

GoodReads meta-data is 344 pages, rated 3.91 by 66 litizens.  

Genre: Hybrid – academic krimi.  

Verdict:  Different.  

In which the untenured professor of industrial sociology Stanley interviews female workers about job satisfaction and is almost murdered, almost loses his wife, and does not get tenure.  But learns a lot about the specialised porn film industry in Los Angeles, far away from home in small-town, down-state Illinois.  

When the opportunity arises to go to LA and interview a cohort of workers the  hapless professor is quickly in way over his head, but perseveres.  After all he knows how to interview people, so he starts interviewing people and when one of them is murdered he keeps on interviewing, and adding things up.  

The investigating police officer starts out as a stereotype but there is more to him than meets the cliché, and that is nicely done. The character are differentiated, and the setting is, well, distinctive. Likewise his wife proves more than a match for the odd circumstances. These good qualities are diluted by a denouement that is too much deus ex machina for this reader. 

The author has many other titles. 

The Immortal Dracula (2020) by Robin Bailes. 

GoodReads meta-data is 305 pages, 4.67 by a paltry three litizens. Read faster you lot! 

Genre: Pastiche.

Verdict: Razor tongue strikes again. 

The redoubtable Maggie has been burrowing away in Romania when….  This is the fourth title in Bailes’s series of tributes to the Universal Horror films.  In her archeological pursuits Maggie usually works with Amy.  Confronted with a problem on a dig, they had a division of labor; Amy retires to the library to research it, while Maggie hits it with a spade to see what happens.  

The title gives away quite a bit, but Maggie didn’t read it and when trudging through the snow during a winter storm in the Carpathian Mountains she is glad of a welcome and a warm fire in the Gothic castle on the hilltop; she shows no surprise to meet the Lord….Dracula.  He’s kindly old gent, bit pale, but it is deep in a long winter, and he keeps telling her to unwrap the scarf from her neck…  Keep the spade handy, Maggie! Readers want you on deck for later titles in this series. 

The time line is fractured but immortals like Dracula don’t wear watches and the cast of characters got lost on me.  I did think too much was made of the English village doctor in the first third of the book and then he more or less disappears.  But in general Bailes ties up all the loose ends by the last page!  Can one say of the Count: The End?    

Bailes hosts a zinger You Tube channel called My Dark Corner of this Sick World on which he savages bad movies once a week, and more.  Highly recommended for the brilliant editing and razor sharp commentary in 5 – 7 minutes.  Plus you can chart his ever changing hair styles and speculate on the reasons why at no extra charge.   

A Concise History of Bulgaria (2d ed) (2005) by Richard Crampton.

Goodreads meta-data is 287 pages, rate 3.71 by 114 litizens.  

Genre: History

Verdict: Be glad, be very glad….  

Bulgars are not Slavs and they were not always all Christians either.  One early Bulgar ruler negotiated with the Roman Pontiff and the Byzantine Prelate for the best terms to convert the kingdom to Christianity.  This episode seems to prefigure much of the following history for the Bulgars, dealing with internal divisions between Bulgars and Slavs, while holding off two powerful neighbours. By the way he got the best deal from Constantinople though later it was reneged. That, too, recurred: Deal followed by no deal.  

When the Bulgarian Empire waxed it needed a common language for cadastral lists, i.e., tax collection by another name. Cyrillic script was developed within its borders for that purpose.  At times the Bulgarian lands reached from the Black Sea to the Adriatic Sea. 

The bigger it got, the bigger target it became for Magyars, Serbs, Russians, Greeks (inevitably Byzantine tax collectors), and finally the Ottomans who were less inclined to negotiate than the Byzantines had been. Later enemies of the Ottomans saw in the Bulgars an ally. 

Bulgaria and Bulgarians inevitably were sucked into the recurrent wars between Russia and Turkey, each side quick to take revenge on the smaller, third party. Bulgarians long saw Russians, because of Christianity, as saviours. In 1878 Russians and Ottomans agreed to permit a Bulgarian state, but later the same year the Treaty of Berlin pared down its territory to weaken it. The result was to dispossess many ethnic Bulgarians whose cause became the main foreign policy target for successive Bulgarian regimes, justifying the Serbian war (1908), the First Balkan War (1912), and the Second Balkan War (1913), and World War I allied with Germany and with the ancient enemy, the Ottomans in return from promises of new borders that would encompass all Bulgarians (and some others besides). 

An Ottoman army officer in the First Balkan War, Kemal Ataturk, envied Bulgarians their unity, nationalism, and language.  While the Ottoman Empire was gigantic in comparison, it was also disorganised, dispirited, and disunited. There was nearly nothing in common to rally the troops. Later when he became the philosopher-king of Turkey, he created a Turkish language and a panoply of national symbols to match those he had seen among Bulgars.  

In the Great War Bulgarian troops held off an Allied Expeditionary Force operating from Greece for years, despite being outnumbered and outgunned at times.  But the human and material cost was considerable with dead, wounded, and displaced refugees.  In the Treaty of Versailles it lost considerable ground and several hundred thousand ethnic Bulgars migrated into its new, reduced borders, causing many dislocations. Tsar Boris III initiated a long period of authoritarian rule in 1918.    

With the intrusion of German hegemony in the Balkans, Boris III entered into a passive alliance with the Nazi regime.  In return for this association Bulgaria was to occupy Macedonia, lately part of Yugoslavia, and Thrace, taken from Greece, and there was a complicated arrangement with Rumania, too.  True many residents of these territories were ethnic Bulgars, but not all. These early gains were popular until resistance in them occurred and casualty lists arrived.  Boris insisted that the Bulgarian army, undertrained and ill equiped with few capable officers, was totally committed in these territories, and had to remain as a buffer and deterrent to any attack from Greece or Turkey.  Ergo Bulgaria did not take part in the war on the Soviet Union, though German troops and supplies for the East passed through its lands. Pressure from the Germans led to anti-Jewish measures but Bulgaria made little effort to enforce them.  Also to placate Hitler it did declare war on England and the USA, a symbolic gesture that led the Allies to seize Bulgarian assets, few as they were, and to bomb Sofia and elsewhere. It never did declare war on the Soviet Union despite increasing German pressure.   

In the 1930s there had been parliamentary elections in Bulgaria in which voting was compulsory for men and optional for married women.  These affairs were carefully managed, administered, and manipulated to get the result Boris desired (as in Florida and Texas), but nonetheless they occurred and sometimes threw up surprises. Remember it was not until 1979 that woman got the vote in enlightened, Western, and democratic Switzerland.  

In August 1943 upon returning from a meeting with Hitler, who raged at him about deporting Jews more than fighting the Soviets, at age 49 Boris died. Rumours of poison soon circulated. He was succeeded by his six year old son and a coup d’état followed. Thence came a succession of governments, some self-appointed, and efforts to steer between the Soviets and Nazis, pleasing neither. Bulgarian Jews who were Bulgarian citizens in Bulgaria had the best chances of survival, but not the Bulgarian Jews who were not Bulgarian citizens even if in Bulgaria, still less those from areas outside the map lines of Bulgaria at the time. It is no doubt a more complicated and messy story.  In latter 1944 the Bulgarian government dominated by communists changed sides and declared war on Germany in a desperate effort to assuage the all-conquering Soviets. Italy’s 1943 switch saved it from much Allied retribution but the Bulgarians had no such luck with the Soviets who used the Bulgarian Army in the remainder of the war as cannon fodder and then in the subsequent peace punished Bulgaria as a defeated enemy.   

While there were plenty of home-grown anti-semites, Germanophiles, and fascists in Bulgaria in these pages they never seemed to have much influence on the government or army.  Don’t know quite why even after reading this book, when such types were so influential in other places. 

The Western allies left Eastern Europe to the Soviets and by 1947 Bulgarian was a one-party state with a monotone press.  The repression that followed was, well, repressive, violent, erratic, relentless….  Bulgaria became more Red than Moscow most of the time.  When regime change came to Moscow, Bulgaria’s north star was gone.  The incredulous response of Bulgarian communists to the indifference of Gorbachev’s Russia would be amusing were it not so destructive. As long as Bulgaria was Red, Moscow had subsidised it, but with Gorbachev the subsidies stopped…abruptly.  The result was a disaster that got worse over the following years of the New World Disorder. 

With Russia indifferent, the only choice was the West, i.e., the EU and NATO, and Bulgaria has tried to fit into both, but, well, the rule of law is one problem it has in common with Romania (and now Washington DC).   

The book ends with a nice reflection on the vexed history of this crossroads, that inevitably is at the margins of either East or West.    

It seems to have been my week in the Balkans. On the night table is Robin Bailes’s The Immortal Dracula (2020) set in contemporary Transylvania and on the day table is this title.  

Bulgaria has tried to manage two large, aggressive neighbours in Germany and the Russia.  When I read about Finland’s efforts during World War II to work with but not join the Nazi Axis powers, there were a few allusions to Bulgaria’s efforts to ally with Nazi Germany on its own terms.  How did that work? Time to find out. See above.   

GoodReads meta-data is 285 pages rated 3.85 by 310 litizens. 

Genre:  Mythology. 

Verdict:  The beginning and the end.

Life is a battle and life is a journey, it is often said. If so, then Homer covered it all.  Ten years of battle followed by ten years of journey.   

Manguel passes lightly over the caltrops that plague classrooms, was there anyone called Homer, did he live at the right time, were the texts written, could he have witnessed anything, was there a Troy,…? (We visited the site of Troy in 2015.)  These obstacles often obstruct college readers.  Well, I know they impeded my first readings, but Homer rises above the pygmies and prevails.  While those controversies come and go with the tide of tenured controversialists, Homer endures.

The book charts the passage of the two books through European culture with the sure hand that Manguel always displays, and with some of the most compelling insights this reader has ever encountered in a lifetime of reading (about) these texts. The obvious comparison is the essayist Umberto Eco, who has become a showman, all form and no substance; in contrast, Manguel has both form and substance to spare.  

For example, he lays bare the love stories within the Iliad, missed by those who see only a war story, that is, Achilles for slave girl Briseis, Patroclus for comrade in arms Achilles, Hector for wife Andromache and she for him, Priam for son Hector, and Paris for ineffable Helen.  All of these are blotted out by the dark fate that brings them into collision. Love does not conquer all but is omnipresent.  By the way, the only survivor in the foregoing list of lovers is Briseis.    

When Hector and Andromache, he holding their young son, Astyanax, embrace Homer closes this scene of familial love by saying ‘the bright helmet lay at his feet.’  The fate it betokens is inescapable.  

Yes, it is war, and there is killing, but as Manguel notes Homer describes the deaths of warriors individually and no two of them are the same.  He gives to each of the fallen a name and a distinctive turn of phrase, more than sixty of them. There are no unknown soldiers here in mass graves. Each of them is a tragedy in which a noble spirit becomes a thing dragged in the dust. If it is a war story it is also the first anti-war story in its merciless detail. 

Both Achilles and Odysseus tried to dodge the draft.  Achilles hid among women while Odysseus feigned madness by plowing sand.  But neither could escape fate. In the afterlife Achilles laments the fate that befell him, though he partly chose it, making it all the more bitter.  

In his decade-long return Odysseus remained staunch to Penelope, giving way only to goddesses where he had no choice.  The one mortal woman who came to him, he politely declined. Circe and Calypso he could not decline.  (Try that one sometime with Mrs and see what happens.)  

I liked the story of Alexander Pope’s rendering of the Iliad. Pope knew no Greek (and only some autodidact Latin) and thus did not work from a Greek text or an early Latin version, but rather compiled the existing English translations and synthesised them into a single text, and then edited it to get the right effects. While the result is thus not a translation from the Greek text, the emotional resonance is perfect.  

While Manguel covers much he could not mention Madeline Miller’s beautiful novel Circe (2018) and I wish he could have done so.  Perhaps in a second edition.  What would he make of this splendid novel?  Nor does he mention the drum-beat cadence of Christoper Logue’s War Music (2003), a translation of parts of the Iliad. Nor does he mention any of the audible versions now available, though he does note some of the public recitations that have become a fashion. I was tempted by one in Sydney last year until I realised that it was standing room only.  That is, to say the audience was to stand for three three-hour sessions over three nights.  Include me out.  

Nor does he mention Homer’s contention that heroes need poets more than vice versa for without poets to tell the story and make it memorable no one would know what heroes have done. Poets can versify other things, if there are no heroes, but for heroes without poets there is only oblivion.  I looked for the passage just now but could not find it readily.  Perhaps a reader can lay eyes on it.

There is no discussion of the philology of the foundation text of either poem.  Indeed, is there a foundation text somewhere in the world?  I assume the Homeric texts came to Europe through Spain via Arabic translations, but have no confirmation for that assumption from these pages.  Hold on, Wikipedia has it that the oldest complete, authentic text was middle Greek from the Tenth Century AD in Byzantium. It was the basis for Latin translations at the time, but has since itself been lost, either to a private collector, or – more likely – to destruction. A Latin translation might have been taken to Florence when the Medici’s offered a bounty for such treasures.    

A title in a series concerning books that changed the world, I have read at least two others in this series.  One was adequate and the other not, but this one rises well above the series as a stand alone title.