Briefly Noted

Recent reading and TV: a few more books and series from BBC TV. I don't feel like doing a full review of these: I want to move on and read and blog other things. So here's a little bit about each one:

Another book that found me because it
was in a Little Free Library!

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout (published 2016).

Here is a quote that I feel captures the spirit of the character Lucy Barton, a fragile woman who can't believe she's worth anything:

"This is not the story of my marriage; I have said that I cannot write the story of my marriage. But sometimes I think about what first husbands know. I married William when I was twenty years old. I wanted to cook him meals. I bought a magazine that had fancy recipes, and I gathered the ingredients. William passed through the kitchen one evening and looked at what was in the frying pan on the stove, then he came through the kitchen again. "Button," he said, "what's this?" I said it was garlic. I said the recipe called for a clove of garlic to be sautéed in olive oil. With gentleness he explained that this was a bulb of garlic, and that it needed to be peeled and opened into the cloves. I can picture the unpeeled big bulb of garlic now -- so clearly -- sitting in the middle of the olive oil in the frying pan." (p. 172-173)  

The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It by Tilar J. Mazzeo (published 2008). 

Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin was born in 1777, and thus came of age during the French Revolution. With her husband François, she started a champagne business in Rheims, France. When he died, she became known as Veuve Clicquot, or the Widow Clicquot. With force and initiative she figured out how to improve the methods of making champagne, to find markets, and to create brand identity for her product, making it wildly successful. Her name still is on bottles of Veuve Clicquot Champagne.

Author Tilar J. Mazzeo, using the scant information available about the early life of Barbe-Nicole, and researching the archives of the business from later in her life, creates an amazing biography, though sometimes a bit gushing in describing Barbe-Nicole's imagined emotions.

"We know this wine as champagne. François and Barbe-Nicole would have called it just vin mousseux— sparkling wine. It wasn’t regularly called champagne even in France until the 1860s, when it had all become big business. What is most surprising is how different champagne looked and tasted at the end of the eighteenth century. It would have been virtually unrecognizable to most of us." (p. 25). 

A remarkable woman, a workaholic to the end of her life:

"Years later, the traveler Robert Tomes remembered 'Madame Clicquot [as] a dwarfish, withered old woman of eighty-nine years, whose whole soul was in business, scanning over each day to her last the ledger of the commercial house to which she had given her name." (p. 160). 

This book is labeled by amazon.com as an "oenobiography" -- a wonderful word! Remember, the prefix oeno- means wine! As in oenophile, a lover of wine. Or my made-up word oenophony, a wine poseur.

If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes (published 1945).

An NPR review describes this novel:

"In 1945, Himes' novel If He Hollers Let Him Go was published — both his first, and the first in the vein of what some contemporaries would deride as protest novels. And they were. Himes never soft-pedaled his disdain for the systemic racism of the day or for black integrationists, whom he referred to as 'whining beggars.'" (source)

If He Hollers is a very powerful book. As I read, I was amazed at how well it holds up to the test of time, how completely Himes' sentiments about racism and alienation are in tune with the attitudes and problems our society, sadly, continues to harbor. Its almost unbearable to read it and know that we are in fact losing the tiny advances that we may have made for a while.

Himes is more famous for his series of hard-boiled detective fiction, the Harlem Cycle, featuring NYPD Detectives "Coffin" Ed Johnson and "Grave Digger" Jones. I've read some of these, but was curious about this one, which conveniently turned up in the Little Free Library.

The Muralist by B.A.Shapiro (published 2015).

I only read half of this. With what's happening in the world, especially in Pittsburgh, I couldn't read another word of a Holocaust novel. The following quote illustrates what type of book it is.

"Grand-mère was sitting in a chair in the communal living room, sun brushing her right shoulder, the rest of her in dusk. When I was a child, my favorite thing was to bake with her. She taught me how to make pain d’amande and challah; dripping the melted butter over the braided loaf is one of my sweetest memories. I still bake the cookies, often when I’m feeling a little lonely; the intoxicating aroma of almonds and butter never fails to lift my spirits. It hurt to see Grand so small, so pulled inward, so vacant. I wondered if the large woman who made potato latkes so rich and crisp they melted and crunched in your mouth at the same time, who beat the pants off her friends at the poker table, who loved her family with a fierceness that was scary at times, was somewhere inside this tiny husk of a woman. If she still existed at all." (p. 66). 

Strike and Ellacott as the BBC casts them.  

Galbraith's Cormoran Strike on BBC TV.

Also recently, we watched the BBC dramatization of the first three Cormoran Strike novels by Robert Galbraith. The executive producer is J.K.Rowling, who also admits to having written the books under the name Robert Galbraith.

The series stars Tom Burke as Cormoran Strike and Holliday Grainger as Robin Ellacott, the two main characters from the books. They and all the rest of the cast seem perfect to me, and sometimes I had the feeling that I had already "seen" the sets when I read the books. And yes, they do show the two partners in detection eating Pad Thai or the like, and drinking wine or beer at many bars with lots of English pub atmosphere.

I'm now looking forward to the next in the BBC series: four promised episodes of Lethal White, the new Cormoran Strike book which I read in September (review here). After reading Lethal White I reread the first two novels in the series as well. I guess I'm really hooked. Can't wait for the fifth novel!