Ship Fever: Embers: and Embers of War

   Well--it has been a long time since I posted anything, but the reading has gone on. We are now in London until mid-August, and since I have no employment--while Joan pursues her consultant work--I will have time to do a bit of blogging.

Ship Fever

 The last book I commented on was one called the Voyage of the Narwhal by Andrea Barrett. In 1996 she won the U.S. National Book Award for fiction for her collection of stories called Ship Fever, which was the title of a long story/short novella about a doctor who worked on Grosse Ile, which was the quarantine center in the St. Lawrence during the years of the Irish potato famine, when ships were pouring into Canada with Irish immigrants, of whom a high proportion were suffering from typhus, often the results of the appalling conditions on the ships that were bringing them over. On the quarantine island the death toll was very high, the conditions dreadful, the medical staff inadequate, and very little could be done for the patients The story follows a doctor who volunteers to work on the island, having been disillusioned with his desultory practice of medicine in Montreal. I thought the writing and the story were excellent, but I was not so taken with the other stories in the book. Ship Fever prompted some research on my part, and I was amazed at the flood of Irish immigrants into Canada and the typhus epidemic, which eventually crossed over to the mainland and caused a large number of deaths. Andrea Barrett, who was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001, obviously does extensive historical research in recreating the circumstances of her stories and novels, and her writing is first class. I still wonder why I had never heard of her until recently.

Embers

     A friend recommended me to read a short novel--Embers--by the Hungarian author Sandor Marai. I read it almost in a single reading after the $1.99 (no postage) paperback arrived from Abebooks. Let me quote from a review (cutting and pasting is easier than writing).

"Describing the story of Embers is almost to do it a disservice. An elderly aristocratic general, Henrik, invites a childhood friend, Konrad, who disappeared 41 years ago in mysterious circumstances, to dinner in his castle. That's it for action. The meal doubles as a trial of Konrad, an almost mute defendant in the face of Henrik's prosecution, which minutely re-examines their schooldays at a military academy, the years leading up to Konrad's vanishing and his unmilitary character: "One cannot be a musician and a relative of Chopin and escape unpunished." The reason for Konrad's flight, after a shooting party when the general senses that the Konrad's intended prey has two legs not four, is linked to Krisztina, the rich general's beloved wife."

The novel was originally published in 1942 and has recently been rediscovered. It had been translated into a number of European languages, but not English, and was recognized as a masterpiece. The English text has actually been translated from the German translation, not from the original Hungarian. But the result is, nevertheless, excellent.  To quote more from the Guardian reviewer: "This taut and exquisitely structured novel...conjures the melancholy glamour of a decaying empire and the disillusioned wisdom of its last heirs"

Embers of War

   When I was poking around trying to find out how to download to my I-Pad an e-book from the DC Public Library, I tried to find Embers, the book I mention above. And..wow..I thought I'd got it: click on download. But it was not the novel by Marai, but a book called Embers of War, which traced the history of Indochina, and particularly Vietnam, starting in WW2--when it was still part of Vichy France--and on to the defeat of the French and the deaths of the first Americans. The author is Fredrik Logevall, and the book won the Pulitzer Prize for history. I do not often read non-fiction, but this grabbed me from the start. It is a fascinating chronicle. And every mistake the French made seemed to me to presage similar mistakes by the Americans when they took over the fight against Ho Chi Min with the misplaced rationale of the domino theory. And the Truman decision to support the French led to what George Kennan described as "the most disastrous of all America's undertakings over the whole 200 years of its history." A great book. Long, but it held my interest to the end, and now I am searching around for the 'best' history of the American involvement. I am told one by Stanley Karnow is excellent.

Bedtime...but more tomorrow.