Category: Book Review

GoodReads meta-data is 383 pages and it is rated 4.06 by 1246 litizens.

Genre: Chick Non-fic

Verdict: A cackle! Then a bore.  

Executive Summary:  Dedicated introvert bites the bagel and tries to live as an extrovert for one year.  Disasters follow.  

Long Summary:  Self-diagnosed Shintrovert* (shy + introvert) goes all out to be a self-confident extrovert and talk to anyone and everyone on the street, on the bus, in the supermarket, in London. London!  That was bound to fail.  Luckily she was not charged with numerous violations of civil code of mutual indifference that rules Britannia. 

The phrase in the title ‘Sorry I’m late, I didn’t want to come’ is her main social gambit.  Maybe that explains a few things right there.  She seeks professional help from a variety of consultants, while using friend apps.  Do such things exist?  Yes, they do.  Both the consultants and the apps are real.

The social media apps match isolated loners with other isolated loners, although neither of them admits to it, with a view to a meeting.  Some of these meetings consist of awkward silences, others are trips to a film where nothing can be said.  Progress on extroversion scale: 0.  

The consultants are varied, one teaches her to be charismatic by smiling, nodding, and offering a firm handshake.  Was that Hitler’s method?  Gandhi’s?  Now we know.  Others heckle her to thicken the social skin.  Both get paid.  Another listens to her talk and then gets paid.  [No comment.]

She also reads the abstracts of social psychology journals to lard footnotes through the pages. Cargo cult: If is is in print, then it must be true, right?  Check out Pox News for the latest on that.  

I did keep flicking the pages but it got so-o-o-o repetitive.  It is like far too many clever pieces published in the New Yorker magazine that are then puffed up into a book.  Emphasis on puff.  At sixty pages it was an amusing ride, at 383 (!) it was as tedious as a continuous family get together for Thanksgiving that lasted a year (with no survivors.)  It went on and on for no other reason than to go on and on than to tear pages off the calendar. 

Alright already, I know that many readers take it seriously as a psychological self-help guide, but you don’t have to be sick to laugh out loud, and I did.  As usual the legion of GoodReads reviews are therapy for the writers and uninformative for the reader.  Par for that course. 

*Shouldn’t that then be ‘shy-introvert?’Autocorrect objects to both versions so nothing to choose there. 

GoodReads meta-data is 208 pages, rated 3.98 by 116 litizens. 

Genre: Travel

Verdict: languid and insightful.

Morris first set eyes on Trieste in 1946 as a soldier in the British Army, then near to fifty years later Morris returned.    

When Trieste had been in the Austro-Hungarian Empire for nearly a century it was the port of Venice at a time when the Hapsburgs, at the height of their powers, developed maritime ambitions in the Adriatic.  To link it to the capital, all-weather roads and railways were built over the mountains while the harbour was dredged, and made modern.  Vienna was the seat of a vast empire and home of a royal house that had once extended from the Carpathian mountains to the Pacific Coast of Mexico. It was rivalled only to London and Paris as a world capital at its peak, and Trieste was its nautical doorway for those years.   

Trieste only became Italian by dint of others, and like its neighbour, Venice, it has never felt itself to be Italian, but rather a world of its own with its own language, mōres, and manners.  And that is what it was in 1946 when a callow Morris arrived with the 2nd New Zealand Division, to a Free City under the aegis of the United Nations, while national borders were resolved in the jig-saw puzzle of the post-war Balkans.  Both Italy and Yugoslavia advanced claims for it, both for the same reason: as a buffer against the other, i.e., neither wanted it for itself. While those tensions played out the city was divided and occupied as Vienna was for a time.  In Trieste it was Kiwis on one side and Jugs on the other for a time in an uneasy fait accompli. 

Berlin was divided and occupied and so important no one would yield a centimetre thereby spawning a vast culture of art and literature about that long-divided city.  Vienna was divided and occupied for a time and Graham Greene immortalised it in ‘The Third Man.’ Trieste was divided and occupied and no one noticed, not even many Triestinos.  

Today Trieste is in if not of Italy, but the city lies within a few kilometres from the successors of Yugoslavia, Slovenia and Croatia, once the hinterlands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  As the guns of August unlimbered in 1914, it was through the port of Trieste that the remains of the slain Archduke passed on the way to Vienna.   

But to revert, at the end of World War I Italy got title to Trieste as a spoil of war for being on the winning side after the blood bath at nearby Caporetto with the result that the city lost its raison d’état for it was then shorn of its hinterland and the capital it had been developed to serve, namely Vienna.  No longer glowing in the reflected glory of Viennese art, culture, literature, music, power, or commerce, Trieste fell into the torpor of a melancholy lassitude where it was content to remain far from any beaten path.

Proof of its irrelevance is that it was all but untouched in World War II, not being important enough for anyone to bomb it to smithereens, and when Italy changed sides in August 1943 neither partisans nor fascists bothered much with Trieste, since it had offered no material, strategic, or symbolic advantage.  Ergo there was no rush to get there and fight over it.  However it bears scars of that war in another way, as the locale of a Nazi charnel house at San Sabba.  

In the parade of names of Triestinos only Italo Svevo meant anything to me and that was very little, as the author of ‘The Conscience of Zeno.’  By the way ‘Italo Svevo’ is a pseudonym for Aron Schmitz. 

Marie-Henri Beyle (Stendhal) served as French Consul there. While his most famous novel is Le Rouge and le Noir, for my money far more interesting is the one set in Italy, namely La Chartreuse de Parme.  Though he preferred cosmopolitan Milano to the backwater of Trieste.     

James Joyce spent much time there pencilling his incomprehensible Ulysses, which Morris by-passes ever so delicately.     

Illy coffee stems from here where the family remains. We have been loyal imbibers of Illy for many a year in its red, blue, and pink banners.  

Much of the book is Morris musing on life, and it is so well done that I, curmudgeon first class that I am, have no complaints.  Indeed I hope to read more of Morris’s books in due course for sheer pleasure of the effortless prose. 

Effortless to read, but no doubt it takes quite an effort to achieve that. 

There is a story of an aspiring young writer visiting Anatole France, famed for his elegant yet simple prose in many novels.  The ingenue was shown into the master’s study where France was at work surrounded by a mass of pages, doodles, crumpled-up balls of paper, pages of cross-out done with such vigour as to tear the paper, and more discarded pages overflowing the bin.  Seeing the eyes of the would-be acolyte noting the mess, France said, ‘this writing, it is not so easy as it looks when it is done.’  

We spent four nights in Trieste in 2019 and enjoyed it.  I noticed several posters called for a Free State of Trieste.  

Goodreads meta-data is 39 pages, rated 3.93 by 594 litizens.

Genre: Musing.

Verdict: A period piece. 

Though it celebrates the grit of his comrades in facing the Nazi juggernaut of 1940, the pamphlet was banned in Vichy France because it was dedicated to St Ex’s very good friend and the captain whom he admired, Léon Werth, a Jew.  St Ex got out but Werth did not.  It takes the form of an extended letter, musing on life that does go on.  Ironically St Ex did not survive the war but Werth did.  Slight though it may be, St Ex has as always an uncanny knack for finding the le mot just each and every time, some lyrical, and some mournful.  

The first draft was to be the preface to Werth’s novel, Trente-trois Jours, about the Defeat and the flight of refugees.  But when Werth went into hiding in the Jura, and St Ex escaped to Lisbon where he revised it into a more general reflection on time and place and recast Werth a symbol of all of France.

That is why the Vichy authorities banned it. Treating a Jew as French was bad.  Explicitly admiring this Jew for his patriotism was worse.  But making him a symbol of FRANCE was intolerable.  

As always with St Ex the sky is there, and so is the sand of the Sahara.  

Yet even here idiocy is to be found.  One reviewer on Amazon says that St Ex ‘fought valiantly to keep France from becoming Socialist at the hands of Charles De Gaulle, and it probably cost him his life.’ Yep. Was that a Tweet from the Twit in Chief?  There is no point in trying correct this nonsense, best just to savour it.   

On the bridge of the starship Enterprise all eyes bored into the captain, who was locked in the most difficult negotiations of his career in space. Once again the Enterprise had found new life. The bald captain, determined to establish peaceful relations with it, bent all efforts to the task. Everything was on the table. At that very moment he had agreed to decommission all vacuum cleaners in the Alpha Quadrant! Why? Because the dust mites he was bargaining with had demanded it. That point conceded, the captain took a break and ordered a cup of tea from the wall, ‘Earl Grey, hot.’
Peter Singer belongs on the Enterprise. Members of its crew treat microbes with respect and eat energy, not matter. They have eradicated poverty by converting energy into matter in replicators from whence the tea came. This is the world Peter Singer wants.
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Good Reads meta-data is 286 pages, rated 3.59 by 393 litizens.
Genre: Novel set in the academy, so an academic novel

Verdict: Malice aforethought.

A series of picture post cards of the people and their activities in a progressive women’s college in the uplands. Benton College is populated by administrators, professors, spouses, children, and even some students who in the conscientious and self-conscious spirit of the times improve each other. All are observed by Gertrude, a neurotic and vitriolic New York City novelist, spending a semester as writer in residence (while collecting material for her next unsuccessful sarcastic study of the human condition), while she herself is observed by the narrator.

There is no plot and nothing happens as the academic year passes from the faculty reception in the fall and yet I kept reading. The incidents and types are so familiar, from the earnest college President who spends all his time raising money with a beneficent smile, encouraging everyone to call him by his first name, Dwight. Then there is his South African-born Boer wife who seem his antithesis: dislikes anyone and everyone and communicates that by looks, silences, and now and then word.

Some professors have attained their high position because no one has ever understood anything they have said, such is the thickness of the Viennese accents. Others are such relentless do-gooders that it surpasses belief. All peaked at the PhD which left them depleted and fit only for this backwater in the eyes of the aforementioned novelist. Well, one had published a review in ‘Dial’ in 1929.

Then there are the obligatory dinner parties among faculty members who revile each other but affect bonhomie to grease the wheels of life. No sooner have the guests arrived than everyone wishes they could leave but they cannot. There is no ‘Who is afraid of Virginia Wolfe’ drama, only a well rehearsed dance of words that pass the time slowly.

The haughty novelist is a stand-in for Mary McCarthy who had published ‘The Groves of Academe’ (1952) after being a writer in residence at Sarah Lawrence College. I have read it long ago without recollection.
What follows are some examples of Jarrell’s prose filleting. Since she is the centre of attention, we start with Gertrude:

She would have come from Paradise and complained to God that the apple wasn’t a Winesap at all. Page 9

For her mankind existed to be put in its place. Page 13

She looked at me the way you’d look at a chessman if it made its own move. Page 36

“That beige snake,” “that—that soulless woman,” as her two last best friends had called her. Page 74

Her mien was one of impatient astonishment at the stupidity of the world. Page 95

Malice lived in Gertrude as though in nutrient broth. Page 133

The Viennese music teacher’s speech’ was a pilgrimage toward some lingua franca of the far future.’ Page 13.

But he is given many bons mots, e.g., ‘De devil soldt me his soul.’ Page 136. Said to explain the ease with which he composed tunes for all occasions.

Benton College and its progressive education gets the knife, too.
While the faculty members indulged the students to the Nth degree, there was one allowance they never under any circumstances made—that the students might be right about something, and they wrong. Page 81

Education, to them (the teachers), was a psychiatric process. Page 82

The faculty at Benton longed for men to be discovered on the moon, so that they could show that they weren’t prejudiced towards moon men. Page 104

To get an A the student had to believe what her professors believed. They had to make up their own minds, true, but only when their own minds matched those of the professors were they educated. If they thought they had made up their own minds and it diverged from the Benton way, then they were in for more more study conferences, more careful and patient understanding, more mutual improvement, until that Day of Grace came. Page 105-6.

These stabs and others are brilliant, however, there is much dross as the book goes on and on and on. I did flick Kindle pages to the end, a tribute to dedication.

Jarrell made a name as a poet and a critic, and was famed for his barbed aperçus such are on display above. ‘Display’ is the right word because this a demonstration more than a novel. It demonstrates his many talents to make a cloud of words out of nothing at all. In this way it is rather like the pastiche of a middling Woody Allen film. There is much verbiage signifying nothing; it ends on page 236 because he stopped typing, not because of any conclusion. His poetry is spare and terse, but not this garrulous prose.

Jarrell’s most famous poem is the five-line ‘The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.’ Jarrell had served in the Army Air Corps during World War II. Many of his poems concerns army life and the fears and hopes of draftees, like ‘Eighth Air Force,’ ‘Gunner,’ ‘Mail Call,’ ‘Hope,’ ‘Losses,’ and more. He himself had volunteered. He survived the war to be killed in a car accident crossing the street.

‘Pilote de guerre’ (1942), translated as ’Flight to Arras’ (1942) by Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Good Reads meta-data is 168 pages, rated 3.9 by 1852 litizens.
Genre: Non-Fiction

Verdict: ‘Like glasses of water thrown onto a raging forrest fire,’ that is St X’s description of the futile and pointless actions of his Reconnaissance Group II/33 in May and June 1940 when half of the planes (seventeen in all) and crew (more than fifty men) were sacrificed in meaningless and often fatal efforts to stem the blaze that erupted from the impassable Ardenne.
Somehow St X and the other half of Group II/33 survived. He flew at least six combat missions at five hundred feet, well within range of small arms fire, to say nothing of anti-aircraft cannons. There is a remarkable description of a plane surrounded by a basilica of light with yellow candle flames rising to meet it. It is, of course, caught in search lights and the tracers of gunfire assail it.
He flew a Bloch 174. The navigator, photographer sat in the glass nose cone, while the pilot and the rear-facing gunner sat in the upper glass bubble.
The book is replete with his descriptions of flight, musings on life, and observations on death which he found a constant companion. He also emphasis the dutiful way in which members of his Group II/33 went about the business with neither histrionics, panegyrics, excuses, or delays. When it was one’s turn to fly, one flew, no matter how suicidal it seemed and sometimes was. St X took his turn and his chances along with the the others. It compares in the desiccated tone to Marc Bloch’s ‘Strange Defeat’ (1944).
As he sits in the cockpit warming the engines, he muses on his childhood bicycle rides through oak forests which he likens to clouds. As always his prose is elegant and elegiac. Then comes the harrowing moment in flight when the rudder will not respond and the tricks to free it do not work as the Messerschmitt 109s approach. Then at the last minute the Germans diverted to a better target.
That straight forward account of courage and grace under withering fire found a ready audience, and though the book was banned in Vichy France and worse in Occupied France, clandestine copies circulated widely. It was banned not because it portrayed the war against the Occupier so much as because in it St X praised a Jew who led by example, noted the thanked the dedicated communists in the ground crew who overcame impossible problems, and complained about the generals who orchestrated the chaos from a safe distance many of whom later found a billet with Vichy.
He wrote it, while in the States to explain, to justify the French after the Defeat by showing that many Frenchmen did their best in an impossible situation, leaving almost 100,000 of them dead. (Leaving aside of course the fact that the impossible situation had been made by a good many Frenchmen over several years, a lot more than just a few generals brewed the soup, and that St X himself never had any interest in the broader society until it impinged on him in Group II/33.
St X rejoined II/33 in Corsica in 1944 from when he flew into legend, perhaps landing on Asteroid 325 also known as Asteroid B-612.

Good Reads meta-data is 256 pages, rated 4.0 by 40 litizens.
Genre: krimi

Verdict: Albert, shut up!
While Albert Campion never shuts up, he says very little, and he has never said word one about what he did during the War 1939-1945. He talks and talks, sometimes even in English, but there is little sense in it. Rather it is adolescent wit, word games, bon mots, Latin tags, fragments of misremembered poetry, and so on. To say he is loquacious is just the beginning.
In these pages he is full flight on his seventieth birthday in the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane in London surrounded by admirers and acolytes, well, family and acquaintances whose tolerance is high. They all know each other, having endured Albert in different configurations over the years. There is Plod from the Yard, too. Lugg the man mountain and bounded retainer is also there to be make a nuisance of himself, and he does.
But among all these Britishers there are, there in England, in 1970, there are….foreigners. They are the Spanish Vidals, mother and daughter, a glacial French woman, a wall flower Frenchman who is quickly forgotten, and an avuncular German, and among them the talk turns to the War. Have these foreigners come all this way to wish Albert a happy birthday? Well, maybe… ‘Ha!’ That’s a laugh. They have come for their foreigner purposes. Or have they?
We have a parallel progression. Albert spills his tale from 1942 in every second chapter, while in the next the guests at the party mix and (mis)match. It takes a scorecard to keep track of everyone at the party, and it turns out that most of them are blue herrings, but not all. The two stories merge when the very large, very sharp knife for cutting the cake disappears, only to reappear in the German.
Quibbles I have a few. No one seems to take much notice of the disappearance of the very sharp knife early in the piece. C’mon, haven’t they read any krimis? This the beginning of an opportunistic crime for sure. Course if they had investigated the case of the missing knife, the story would have ended with that.
Nor does anyone seem much interested in the German once he has been stabbed.
Supernumerary Lugg ambles about being rude and crude, and that’s it. He serves no purpose. His speciality it seems is serving no purpose, but he (dis)attracts a lot of the reader’s attention.
Because the three foreign women have different, married names in 1970 than those in the 1942 telling this reader was never quite who was what and why. Ripley does not emphasise them because he is holding them for the denouement, that much I could see, but still…. Nonetheless I felt cheated.
As usual I found Campion all too much like one of my college roommates who loved the sound of his own voice twenty-four hours at a time. Does Campion ever breathe one might ask, such is the lava flow of words. And it is that bright young thing sort of tosh favoured in the 1920s by insouciant young men who had a right to such absurd irreverence, having survived the trenches. Albert has no such warrant.
What I liked was the representation of life in Vichy France around Mentone and Nice where the story started, though the scene shifted all too soon to Marseille and that big city is like other big cities, whereas Mentone and Nice are different, as much Italian as French with the Alps on one side and the sea on the other. (Plus I have been to both Mentone and Nice.)
The insularity of the British of a certain age and outlook is also nicely done. Well, overdone, but still, shades of Captain Hastings, it is tasty.
The plot about the book-keeper stuck me as farfetched but that is what fiction is.
Nothing competes with J. Robert Janes accounts of life under Vichy in his numerous books, but the key one in this context is ‘Flykiller’ (2002).
Many Krimiologist will remember Margery Allingham well. She penned about twenty novels featuring the supercilious and verbose Albert Campion, who seemingly never got to the point but did somehow. These were set mostly between the Wars, as used to be said. (Readers who do not know which wars are invited at this point to click away, and stay …. away.) As with Agatha Christie and others, her character — the annoying but somehow tolerable Albert Campion — has outlived her. By the legerdemain of a literary executor, since Allingham’s death, he has had further adventures written by Phillip Carter (Allingham’s widower) and he in turn brought the talented Mr Ripley into the fold. This is the fifth title from the Ripley keyboard. The novel is well written and has a nice premise in Vichy. But Campion can be taken only in small doses. Might try one of Ripley’s other krimis. Did so. No sale.
Allingham also wrote ‘The Oaken Heart‘ (1941) when a German invasion was expected any day on the Essex coast and she and her neighbours would be on the front line.
Here she is at home about that time.
That will be on my reading list.