Too Many Books...

...and not enough time. I am actually in the process of reading three books at the same time.
    One book I am dealing with by trying to read just one chapter a day. It is "Empire of Liberty--A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815," by Gordon S. Wood, a long-time professor of history at Brown University. We recently heard him talk about a new book he has written dealing with the relationship between Jefferson and John Adams. I know very little about the history of the United States in the period after the Revolution, and I am finding fascinating the chronicle of events and the problems of establishing the role of the President and the Federal Government.
That's book one. And it is 738 pages of text.
    Book two is an extraordinary novel called "The Sympathizer" by Viet Thanh Nguyen. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and a slew of other awards. More in another blog post.
    And the same for book three: "Katalin Street," by Magda Szabo, which I am slowly reading each night before we put the light out. I have read and noted in the blog her two other books that have been translated from the Hungarian--"The Door" and "Iza's Ballad," both of which I thoroughly enjoyed. The new one has got off to a rather shaky start--I was confused about the relationships between the various characters, but it is sorting itself out.

Elinor Lipman, "On Turpentine Lane"

     If you want a breezy, comedic, social satire, written with consummate skill--this is for you. Elinor Lipman is a brilliant writer, and the milieu in which she sets her novel is accurately portrayed--or perhaps skewered. 
     Faith Frankel has left Manhattan to go to work in a minor administrative capacity at Everton Country Day School, not far from Boston. She buys an old house on Turpentine Lane that proves to have historical skeletons in its cupboards, or rather in its cellar. Her job seems to consist of not much more than writing thank you letters to donors to the school, and the first crisis of the story is an accusation that she may have embezzled some funds because a donor has made out a large check to her. She has recently started to disengage from a relationship with a doofus who has set off to walk across the country wearing a sign that says "Free Hugs." Her father has left her mother to become a painter, and his talent lies in faking Chagalls. That's one of several problems for Faith to sort out while she is also learning of the history of the house on Turpentine Lane. 
     I needn't go on...the novel is a very agreeable, complicated, and enjoyable tale that will keep you amused until the end--although the resolution of Faith's love life is predictable from early on.

Penelope Lively, "Moon Tiger"

     There was an article I read somewhere about Penelope Lively, an English author, and it was suggested that her work had been overlooked. She had certainly passed me by, probably because she seems to have done her best work in the 'eighties. She is now 83 herself, and she has recently published a book that includes a couple of excellent essays on memory and on the changes she has seen over the years in England. When I googled her, I was puzzled by the fact that there seem to be two titles to the same book--'Ammonites and the Dancing Fish,'  or 'The Leaping Fish and Ammonites.' Maybe the same book published under different titles in the US and Britain. Whatever the exact title, which I forget, I read the first two essays with great interest, but I did not read the rest of the book, which seemed to be more evocations of her life prompted by objects she has around her house, including ammonites. But I did see that she won the Booker Prize in 1987 for her novel "Moon Tiger," and the Penguin edition was easily obtainable for a few dollars from AbeBooks.
     Claudia Hampton is dying, and the novel takes us back over her life--her intense relationship with her brother, Gordon; her pregnancy, the birth and upbringing of Lisa, her daughter: her on- and-off affair with Jasper, the father of Lisa; and the highpoint of her career as a war correspondent in Egypt during the Second World War, when she met the love of her life. The writing is great and the story compelling and it kept me reading to the end. But, like "The Little Red Chairs," the sort of coda--her life after that highpoint in Egypt--did seem to pall a little as the scenes from her later life lacked the urgency and interest of the earlier chapters. 
     But, all in all, a very good read

"H H H H" by Laurent Binet

    Laurent Binet is a French author, and a new novel of his--"The Seventh Function of Language"--was recently published and well reviewed. I had never heard of him, but checking the Library I found that he had written an extraordinary novel entitled: 
                                   "H H h H."
    Yes--that's it. The four aitches stand for "Himmler's Hirn heisst Heydrich," which translates as "Himmler's brain was called Heydrich." The novel is about the rise of Reinhard Heydrich, known as "the butcher of Prague," in the Nazi hierarchy and his assassination in the streets of Prague at the hands of two agents--one Czech, one Slovak--who were parachuted into Czechoslovakia by the British RAF. And there is much about the history of Czechoslovakia and the brutality of the German takeover, culminating in the massacre of the people of Lidice.
    But it is difficult to decide whether to characterize the book as a novel. It is perhaps more like a documentary, with the story woven in with the difficulties of a writer trying to sort out truth from falsehood. This duality is reflected in the blurbs on the cover. David Lodge--one of my favorite authors--sums it up as follows: "Laurent Binet has given a new dimension to the nonfiction novel by weaving his writerly anxieties about the genre into the narrative, but his story is no less compelling for that, and the climax is unforgettable."
    Martin Amis writes, "HHhH is a highly original piece of work, at once charming and moving and gripping." And someone else 
writes, "A work of absolute originality."
    It kept me glued. Now I must take it back to the Library and wait for the hold I have placed on the new novel by Binet.

Jonathan Rabb, "AmongThe Living"

    I took this book out from the Library 'on spec,' as it were. It did not have much in the way of glowing blurbs on the cover, and I had never heard of the author--Jonathan Rabb, though he does seem to have won the odd award. 
    The scene is set in Savannah, Georgia, a year or two after the war, when Yitzhak Goldah, a concentration camp survivor, arrives to live with a married couple, Abe and Pearl, one of whom (I forget which) was his cousin and had sponsored his emigration from Europe. They quickly tell him to use Ike rather than Yitzhak. 
    Abe runs a shoe shop and there is a sub-plot that I never quite understood about shipments of shoes from Italy and dirty work at the docks, which leads to a black employee of Abe getting beaten up and his hand mangled.
    Yitzak falls for a beautiful widow, who is a member of another Jewish congregation with which Abe and Pearl's congregation is in some form of conflict. The rivalry between the Conservative and Reform Jewish congregations in Savannah (which is, apparently, historical fact) plays an important role in the development of the plot. And throughout the narrative it is clear just how white Savannah is systematically suppressing the black Savannah.
    It's not a 'must read' by any means. But I stuck with it, and Rabb kept me dangling as how it would end. I did find one brief review that was half-heartedly praiseworthy--"...an overly schematic novel about suffering, trauma, and healing."
    As a footnote, I checked Savannah's Jewish history and discovered that it was the home of one of the first Jewish communities in the United States. In 1733, there was an epidemic of what was probably yellow fever, and ships were barred from the port--but one from England carrying a party of Sephardic Jews from the famous Bevis Marks Synagogue in London was permitted to land because they had a doctor on board--Samuel Nunis. I also read that at one time the Jewish population of Savannah reached 35 percent.

Edna O'Brien--"The Little Red Chairs"

    Anything by Edna O'Brien (now 85) has to be read. She is an absolute wizard--or witch, I suppose--with words.

    In Cloonoila, a western Irish village by the sea, a 'healer and sex therapist' arrives--a Dr. Vladimir Dragan of Montenegro, who turns out to be a fugitive war criminal from the Balkans conflict. The women of the village are fascinated by him, and a childless married woman--Fidelma--becomes pregnant by him. After his exposure as a war criminal, Fidelma is viciously punished,  and she goes into exile in London, where she lives a form of penance, working at odd jobs and spending time assisting refugees. The first half of the book gripped me much more tightly than the second half--the London penance--and I lost a little interest in the detail of Fidelma's slow progress back to Ireland via the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague where "Dr. Dragan" is on trial.

    But, (a big 'but') if you have not read it--read it. It is an amazing piece of writing, especially in its examination of the inner life of both Fidelma and Dr. Dragan and of the questions of guilt and innocence that are explored.