Good Dirt

Finally: a really good book! Just published this week (January 28, 2025). Have you noticed all my lukewarm or very cold reviews lately? This book is different.

Charmaine Wilkerson’s Good Dirt has likable characters, a good plot, and very beautiful writing. It’s full of fascinating historical detail, set in the context of one family’s experience. The central character in the novel is Ebby, a young woman who struggles because of a devastating trauma she experienced at the age of ten: witnessing the murder of her older brother. Most of the action takes place when she is around thirty years old. Recently, she has also suffered a humiliation when her fiancé abandoned her on the day of her wedding. 

Ebby’s parents are highly successful and wealthy descendants of Black and Native Americans who settled in New England during the nineteenth century. The author makes it very clear that the history of all races in the US is American history: not separate, but part of a whole. This theme of the book is both powerful and meaningful, and I enjoyed discovering the author’s viewpoint, which is integral to the novel and very much part of its appeal to me. Her choice of characters and events allows her to present many ideas without being in the least preachy — an impressive accomplishment.

A major character from the historic era in the novel is named Moses; he is a skilled potter who was enslaved in the South where he produced large storage jars of great usefulness and beauty. One of these jars remained in Ebby’s family until the tragedy: her brother’s murderers also toppled and destroyed the jar itself. As part of her efforts to forge a meaningful life after trauma, Ebby records the family stories about the maker of the jar and the family’s experiences in Africa, in the Old South, and in New England.

One good thing about this novel is that it doesn’t try to make everyone happy and satisfied at the end in a fake way, as sometimes happens in novels about bad things that happen to good people. The ending is realistic, acceptably provides a resolution to the story, but not forced. 

Inspiration for the Historic Era in this Novel

From the author’s afterward: “While writing the story of Moses, I visited an exhibit of nineteenth-century stoneware that originated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and traveled to other cities. The show, Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina, included key pieces by the real-life potter Dave (called David Drake following the end of his enslavement).”

Two Storage Jars, University of Michigan Museum of Art in 2023

As I read the novel, I was constantly thinking about the exhibit titled “Hear Me Now,” which was presented at our local museum last year. Remembering the exhibit contributed to my enjoyment of the novel, which brought a fictional version of the enslaved potters to life, including their search for “Good Dirt” with which to form their useful and beautiful creations. Here are two of the items that impressed me.

Text of the label for the depicted jar:

____________(Potter once known)

Likely enslaved at Phoenix Stone Ware Factory (about 1840)

Alkaline-glazed stoneware with iron and kaolin slip High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Purchase in honor of Audrey Shilt, President of the Members Guild, 1996-1997, with funds from the Decorative Arts Acquisition Endowment and Decorative Arts Acquisition Trust

Stamp: PHOENIX / FACTORY / ED:SC

This object stands apart for its striking decoration. A Black man and woman in fancy dress make a toast. Below, a nursing hog faces off against a two-handled pot evocative of this watercooler. Little is known about the object, and the significance of the imagery is not clear. Some interpret it as a wedding scene, while others read the pot as a presentation piece, intended to showcase the skill of the potters at the short-lived Phoenix Factory

A storage jar by the potter David Drake, probably like the one in the novel.

 

“James” by Percival Everett

 

Think about what it would mean to be enslaved — utterly enslaved — to a master/owner who detested you and everybody like you. Imagine the worst injustices, cruelties, and aggressions you would be subjected to by totally unrestrained bullys. Imagine how humiliated and angry and desperate you would be. Imagine also how you would feel if these outrages were perpetrated without restraint on your own family and those you loved. Imagine being aware that any response you made could not only result in more punishment and outrage against yourself, but also vast injustices against your family and fellow slaves, or even against enslaved people you didn’t know.

Have you tried to imagine all this? You haven’t come close to what Percival Everett’s brilliant and penetrating novel James can show you about how a slave owner (or any random white person) in pre-Civil-War America could demean a human being who was “owned” and destroy both body and spirit. The absolute power of whites over blacks, even free blacks, at that time is nearly unimaginable, but Everett forces the reader to visualize the horrors. 

James, of course, is a retelling of Mark Twain’s masterpiece Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain forced the reader to see slavery from the eyes of a naive boy with an innate sense of justice, despite his social background. James goes beyond the original for the modern reader because the author’s  eyes are twentieth-century eyes; further, the author gives the character James a dual perspective, both as an educated man (self-educated) and as a helpless victim. 

James is a totally different book, and totally different from most retold stories. Its power comes from the juxtaposition of two visions from two authors and two eras. Impressively, it also captures — and extends — Mark Twain’s humor. In both books, humor enriches and transforms the sadness embedded in the novel. At least that’s how I see it.

The book is a best-seller and award winner, so there are plenty of reviews that unlike this one actually summarize the plot and compare the two versions in detail.

Blog post © 2024 mae sander

A Memory of Colonialism

May, 1954, Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam (Le Monde)

French colonialism in Vietnam is currently being remembered in the obituary of an “angel” — the once-famous nurse who tended the French troops during the last stand of the French colonial occupation of Vietnam. This was the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The withdrawal of the French after this battle was the end of nearly 70 years of French colonialism in Indochina (as it was formerly known). It also led to the next Vietnam war, fought by the anticommunist forces in the south of the country, supported by the Americans, in opposition to the Communist forces of the North under the rule of Ho Chi Minh. Americans old enough to remember this war may also think of the last stand of the American forces in 1975 — a long time after the final French defeat. 

The headline of the obituary in the New York Times:

Geneviève de Galard, French ‘Angel’ of Dien Bien Phu, Dies at 99

A nurse, she tended to the wounded as the French were under fateful attack by Viet Minh forces in 1954. Hailed in France and the U.S., she was given a ticker-tape parade down Broadway

This New York Times article (link) summarizes the battle where the French army made its last stand along with the long life of the woman who personified the spirit of that struggle. I have vague memories of those headlines, probably from Life Magazine which for Americans was the major source of images of the news of the world at that time. 

In the Times obituary, I learned about a very interesting part of this story that I had never heard before. For years, it was believed that the “angel” had been the only woman at the scene of the battle, where she bravely tended and nursed the hideously wounded French soldiers. That was a myth. Here’s the real story from the obituary:

“Dien Bien Phu, like other French military bases, housed not one but two ‘military field brothels’ — army-maintained bordellos that in this case sheltered dozens of Vietnamese and North African women. During the siege, with artillery raining down, the women ‘converted themselves into nurse-assistants,’ a military doctor, Jean-Marie Madelaine, wrote in a letter unearthed by Le Monde, ‘volunteering for dangerous water transport, getting rid of the garbage, the vomit, the excrement, the bandages dripping with blood and pus, giving water to those who no longer could use their arms, giving their hand to the dying. They were admirable.’

“Traces of the women have been effaced by history and a French military establishment not eager to remember them; the women don’t appear in a memoir by Ms. Galard.”

The first page of many in the Life Magazine coverage of the final battle in 1954.

Reading a Book About This History

As it happens, just as I read this obituary invoking the 1954 French Vietnam war, I have also been reading a book about the background of this very struggle — a strange fictionalized biography of Ho Chi Minh titled Faraway the Southern Sky (translated from the French and published May 21, 2024). The title is taken from a line in a poem by Ho Chi Minh, who was a poet and many other things in his early life long before he became the leader of Viet Nam. 

The author of this book, Joseph Andras, writes somewhat confusingly in the second person; that is, the book seems to be addressed to the reader, or at least the reader is made out to be the actor of the book. After a while of reading, however, it’s clear that the “you” in the novel is not the reader, but the author himself — or a fictitious narrator of the work. This quirk of writing serves to create a strange distance between “you” the reader and the voice that is addressing not you but himself and describing his own action. In a way this makes it challenging to be sure just what the subject of the book is, but let’s assume that the subject really is Ho Chi Minh and the early history of the struggle against colonialism, capitalism, and European dominance of the third world.

What is this action that this somewhat alienated “you” takes? The author/narrator is walking around the areas of Paris where Ho Chi Minh, then known under many pseudonyms, lived and worked for several years from around 1916 to 1920. How many years? That’s a mystery, like almost everything about Ho Chi Minh’s early life — except that he was increasingly active in the Communist, Socialist, and anti-Colonial movements, and eventually moved on to a more political life, especially living in Russia which was developing its own socialism. His early days were isolated — as in these passages:

“Cramped lodgings shared with a Tunisian man by the name of Moktar, an anticolonial militant who worked at an ordnance factory. Nguyên’s [Ho Chi Minh’s name at the time] documents weren’t in order; he steered clear of neighbors, hiding between his four walls for fear of running into law enforcement. These first few weeks, he wouldn’t turn on the light or touch the stove in the absence of his comrade, who, upon his return from drudgery, would prepare Nguyên’s meals for the next day. The apartment was humid, walls wept, wind blew between doors and windows. The typesetter would stop by and read the day’s headlines to him; they played cards, then drank wine when night fell—white? red? no matter—until the Tunisian returned.” (p. 17)

“A book published in Hanoi, that you in fact acquired there, shows his business card: ‘Photographic Portrait-Enlargements.’ The address that detains you today appears on it, along with his name, spelled thus: ‘Nguyên Aï Quâc.’ … The young man lived on the first floor; a room, a bed, a table, a dresser, an oil lamp, a wash bowl; no electricity, a window with swing shutters—he had to stretch his neck just to see a bit of sun or moon. The neighbors hung their laundry upon taut clotheslines, he washed his outside, and to his visitors offered jasmine tea and green vegetables cooked with soy. Not too hard to imagine him here.” (p. 66)

The reader is assumed to know the last part of Ho Chi Minh’s life when he was the leader of the revolution in Vietnam and the dictator of North Vietnam during the two Vietnam wars (French and American). The book looks forward and back, in a somewhat abstract way; for example:

“You would almost feel it, this pride, in reading reports from the meeting a century later: you need only think of the world war, barely two years behind, of letters from infantrymen hoping that their feet would freeze so they could be evacuated, of the eyes of mangy horses wasted by the gases, of the hoofs of mules sinking in the mud, of messenger dogs caught in barbed wire, of widows left without even God to talk to, all of that the single, solitary fault of the powerful (you wrote ‘of the rich,’ first, and perhaps one shouldn’t balk at such Christlike simplicity); you need only think of women bartering their bodies in the obscurity of moist bedrooms, of smoked-out indigènes, of black-skinned amputees, of girls in Tongking pinned under foreigners’ genitalia, of kings, queens, magnates, usurers, speculators, shits in muslin and ascot ties, manure in gold-leafed makeup; you need only catch a glimpse of the gardens of great palaces and those there, in their millions, who were told things couldn’t be any other way, property owners and beggars, that’s how it is, such is life; there, for sure, is all you need to measure the exact weight of these three words, world proletarian revolution. You have reasons to hold Lenin at a distance from your heart, but you know why, at this very instant, the room could only erupt in raucous applause.” (p. 45)

The reviewer in the Washington Post (link) points out that besides the young Ho Chi Minh, the real subject of the novel is Paris: both the Paris of today and the Paris of 100 years ago:

“As the walk unfolds, it becomes clear that Paris is as much the protagonist of the story as Ho. Political ruptures (past, present and future) that occurred steps away from the apartments the future Vietnamese leader reportedly occupied haunt and shape the city — the Paris commune of 1871, the massacre of Algerian protesters in 1961, demonstrations by the Gilets Jaunes in 2018. … For Andras, the very geography of Paris offers a political education for the hungry and curious.”

It’s a difficult book, and as I began to read I was very confused. Eventually, I began to see how the author was shaping his tale of expanding political awareness and making the reader see what he saw. After finishing, I went back and reread the first third of the book (which is quite short) and finally began to feel I understood a bit about it.

Review © 2024 mae sander

Photos as credited.

Reading and Enjoying Spring Weather

 Julia Alvarez: The Cemetery of Untold Stories

Julia Alvarez is a wonderful story teller! In this novel, a successful New York writer decides to return to her childhood land: the Caribbean country of Dominica — which is also the birthplace of Alvarez. The character brings with her many boxes of notes and materials from novels that she hasn’t written, and creates a “cemetery” for these unrealized projects and the characters they were going to develop. She commissions a talented sculptor make a monument to each persona whose story she didn’t finish. 

The characters who now inhabit these monuments come to life and tell their stories to a local woman who has never read fiction (in fact, she can’t read at all). I loved reading these intertwined tales, along with the story of the illiterate woman herself, and of her family, which also has some members who have become successful American immigrants.

There’s so much in this novel — themes of identity; themes of chances and of opportunities both taken and missed; themes of good and bad family relationships; and themes of the history of the island, which is divided into two countries: Dominica and Haiti. Really good reading!

Claude Izner: Murder on the Eiffel Tower

This is a historical novel that takes place in Paris in 1889 during the great exposition for which the Eiffel Tower had just been built. The painstaking historical detail in the novel is fascinating — I assume it’s accurate, but I didn’t check. For example: 

“I was lucky enough to see the exhibition of Japanese prints organised by the Van Gogh brothers. The Great Wave by Hokusai made a real impression on me.” (p. 17)

“The Colonial Exhibition was made up of numerous buildings, either standing alone or grouped into indigenous villages. Victor did not wait to look at the seven pediments of the temple of Angkor but hurried towards the red structure of the Colonial Palace, an architectural mish-mash of Norwegian, Chinese and French Renaissance styles topped by green roofing.” (p. 60)

The food details are especially fun:

“Fried-fish vendors and left-over food sellers were setting up their stalls in the wind. Dishes of beetroot sat alongside rounds of cold black pudding.” (p 161) 

 

“In the kitchen, Germaine, with tousled hair and apron askew, was stirring the contents of a saucepan with a wooden spoon. Victor sniffed, recognising the aroma of partridge and cabbage in a cognac sauce.” (p. 207) 

Unfortunately, as a detective story this novel is too complicated. One murder after another piles up, and one man becomes obsessed with the murders and tries to figure out how they are linked and who is the perpetrator. At a frantic pace, he follows one suspect after another, becoming exhausted and confused. He also falls in love with a woman who is also enmeshed in the goings-on. He keeps having migraine headaches, or being hit over the head, or being baffled and overtired, or pursuing the love interest instead of the mystery. He’s always trying to think of some elusive insight that he can’t quite bring to the surface. There’s too much of this type of description:

“An idea was taking hold, but just out of his reach. He put on his frock coat as his mind worked on. … His memory was still teasing him: it was something to do with a name he had glimpsed recently, a name … But what name?” (p. 203)

I found the author’s mystery skills somewhat clumsy, and the piling-on of details and events somewhat unbelievable. Compared to Agatha Christie or other classic writers of the twentieth century, Izner just isn’t quite as good at creating a plot, embedding clues, or building suspense. I’m thinking of the well-formed detectives, victims, by-standers and witnesses in the novels of Martin Walker or Elly Griffiths or Donna Leon, and I just don’t find Izner’s focus and clarity to measure up.

Spring Pictures from This Week

Sunrise outside my bedroom window.

Just before the rain.

The beaver lodge at Matthaei Botanical Gardens.
Last year, the beaver built a dam across the stream, but a winter storm washed it away.

Michigan students painting “The Rock” — maybe in anticipation of finals during the next two weeks.

The magic spoon turns purple when the frozen ice cream touches it.
After a spring walk in the woods, we stopped for ice cream.

I enjoyed a scoop of each of these flavors.

Blog post and all photos © 2024 mae sander

Shared with Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz.

Zadie Smith: "The Fraud"

Zadie Smith: The Fraud

Genteel British society in the 19th century is at the center of a wide variety of fiction. Many famous authors at the time documented the ways of the British aristocracy and upper middle class, and many authors have continued to be fascinated by this era. It has featured in many TV treatments as well as novels. Rarely have these authors fully faced the source of the wealth and privilege of their subjects: many of them made their money as "planters" — and thus as slave owners — in the Caribbean island sugar and rum trade. 

Enslaved Africans in the Caribbean, harvesting sugar cane (source)

Sugar cultivation, sugar refineries, and rum distilleries all functioned because they depended on the insanely brutal system of slave labor. The native populations of the islands had been driven to extinction by the early settlers through disease and slavery. By the 1800s, the enslaved workers were all African Black people and mixed-race African-British people. The system was utterly inhumane, and most writers who documented the white beneficiaries of the system didn't choose to mention the fundamental horrors of the system or to acknowledge the abolitionist movement that opposed slavery. The slave trade — that is, bringing enslaved Africans to the British colonies, officially ended in 1807. Continued enslavement of human workers was abolished in the 1830s when the British government generously repaid the slave owners for the loss of their human property, and their wealth was preserved. The slaves were never compensated for their losses. The British upper class beneficiaries quickly forgot the brutality of slavery, as well as the rebellion that preceded emancipation. Here’s a link about the rebellion that preceded emancipation.

Slaves working at a Caribbean rum distillery, 1800s. (From a rum advertisement: source)

In her recent novel, The Fraud (published last September) author Zadie Smith portrays a family of genteel white English folks very much like the ones in so many earlier novels. The details of the plot are based both on historic characters, particularly on a successful novelist of the time, now totally forgotten. and also on historic events, particularly a court case about a fraud that fascinated the public in the 1870s, as well as looking back on the lives of the characters from the 1830s onward. Themes in The Fraud include the relationships of literary figures of the time, as well as many political and social issues: it’s a complex novel with a complex central character, Eliza Touchet, through whose eyes we see political, social, and personal relationships. In the rest of this review, I'm concentrating only on the topics of race and slavery as the author presented them, but there is much more.

Smith uses the many events and characters with great success to illuminate these issues, including the attitudes of white people towards black people and towards the institution of slavery, for example, white women including Eliza who belong to abolitionist organizations. Smith explores the way that the black residents of England, who were often former slaves from the Caribbean plantations, reacted to a profoundly racist society, and how they formed their own way to see themselves. It’s subtle and detailed.

As the plot about the trial continues to unfold, there's a kind of a pause for a sequence of chapters about the life and family of Andrew Bogle, a former slave who played a big role in the notorious court case. Bogle’s father was forcibly brought as a slave from Africa, and his biography includes his experiences of slavery on Jamaican plantations and sugar mills. Bogle himself begins life as a slave and then as a freed man in England and Australia. 

Bogle’s story begins thus:

“‘My life has had many parts,’ said Bogle. ‘It is difficult to say how many lives I have lived, or where my story truly begins. One thing I know for certain: my story is not what it should be. I should have been a great man. I come from great men, on my father’s side. But I hardly remember my father and can only speak of what Myra told me. Myra was my mother, and much of what I know of my father’s life she gave to me. Poor woman, that she should have nothing else to give me but that!” (p. 239)

Bogle's father was born as an elite member of a tribe in Africa. As a boy, he was kidnapped and taken to Jamaica on a slave ship. Through the events of his father's life, Smith illustrates the way that all the enslaved African workers on the plantation were subjected to hardship, cruelty, and inhumanity. Bogle's story reveals the hardships of laboring on a plantation in the overwhelming heat of Jamaican summer, whether assigned to work in the offices, in the fields, or in the sugar refineries and distilleries. Eventually, he moved to England with his master and later, as a free man, went to Australia as a settler. Finally, he returned to England where he became a witness at the notorious trial that is central to the novel. 

Bogle is very aware of his place in English society as a black man, a son of an African tribal elite, an ex-slave, a witness in a highly popular trial, and as a relatively literate and politically aware person. Here are his thoughts as he reads about the 1831 slave uprising in the newspapers — at that time he was in London working for his former owner, Mr Doughty:

“Every evening, in the newspapers, the tale of this negro uprising expanded, and Mr Doughty expressed some variation on his relief to no longer be in any way involved with the ‘cursed sugar trade’. Bogle snuck the newspaper back to his quarters after dark and read the long columns by the light of a single candle, trying to understand if only the north coast was burning and who exactly was being executed in the town squares for refusing to work. But of all the negroes in Jamaica there was only one with a name, as far as The Times was concerned – Sam Sharpe – and after a while he understood that he was only upsetting himself. What he wanted to know no English paper would ever tell him.” (p. 308)

The rewards to the planters of using slave labor for growing sugar, refining it, and making rum are all very clearly described, but there’s little in the novel about the British side of this trade; for example, about the consumption of sugar and rum in England at the time. When the genteel people in the novel drink an alcoholic beverage, it would be an after-dinner glass of port, not rum! Though the content of their meals is sometimes described, the role of sugar isn’t much mentioned — in their world, sugar is mentioned only when the abolitionists ask housewives to boycott this product of slave labor. Sugared tea (I know from other sources) was the mainstay of the lower classes, but not relevant to the novel’s literary and social elite. I think this is an interesting choice on the part of the author.

The Guardian reviewer last August thus summarized the novel:

“Smith presents a coruscating picture of twin societies in flux, the ways in which 19th-century England and Jamaica were ‘two sides of the same problem, profoundly intertwined,’ joined at the hip by Andrew Bogle’s ‘secret word’: slavery. But she is also devastatingly good on the lesser delusions, the ways in which we are consistently blind to our own privileges.” (source)

Review © 2024 mae sander 

Media: Watching and Reading

Death Comes to Pemberley

Though usually not a fan of twenty-first century sequels to Jane Austen's books, I enjoyed reading P.D.James' Death Comes to Pemberley.  This novel is a sequel to Pride and Prejudice, and takes place at the stately home of the wealthy Darcy family, now headed by Austen's characters Darcy and Elizabeth, nee Bennet.  Death Comes to Pemberley was published in 2011, and made into a BBC series in 2013. We have now (finally) watched the miniseries and enjoyed it very much. 

The TV series is full of wonderful scenes with fine horse-drawn carriages and Georgian elegance.

The Bennett family from Pride and Prejudice continue to be quirky and amusing: Elizabeth, sensitive and responsible; Mrs. Bennet, self-centered and hypochondriacal; Lydia Bennet, a self-absorbed adolescent (even though she has reached her twenties by the time of this sequel); and also Darcy, still arrogant because of his money and social status. As the matron of a huge establishment with a large staff of servants, Elizabeth Bennet shows her calm and confident maturity.

At the beginning, Pemberley is buzzing with preparations for a ball, including incredible food scenes.
Here, Elizabeth is reviewing the food in the kitchen.

The servants are all ready and at attention as their work is reviewed.

Unlike in any actual Jane Austen novel, Death Comes to Pemberley soon sees a major act of violence with a murder in the dark woods in the middle of the night. While the original novels are domestic stories, mostly of young women who must make their way in a highly challenging social world, P.D.James' novel is a mystery full of action and impending danger, especially to the irresponsible and unlikeable rogue Wickham, husband of Lydia Bennet. 

I especially enjoyed the post-marriage portrait of Darcy. Although as I said, he’s still arrogant, he continues to love Elizabeth and in a way to obey her. I think the Austen character — who obviously would have embodied the values of his era — wouldn’t have been quite so easily managed. In the Washington Post, there’s a review of a new book that analyses the character of Darcy and his limitations, and also how the character influences modern ideals of boyfriends. (See this review)

While Austen almost never refers to the current events of her time, particularly the Napoleonic was and the earlier French Revolution, the characters in Death Comes to Pemberley are both aware and involved in these historic times. In both the novel and in the TV version, I enjoyed the drama and the re-imagined characters. I found both versions very true to the original novel while now in a totally new type of plot.

Not surprisingly, the costumes are also wonderful.

Land of Milk and Honey, A Foodie Dystopia

Land of Milk and Honey by C. Pam Zhang takes place after a global disaster has destroyed all wild and domestic animals, all crops and wild plants, and all possibility of restoring them. Or so it seems. What's left of humanity has only artificial, bioengineered food which tastes terrible. The narrator of this miserable post-apocalypse is a trained chef, and she finds a job in a restaurant at a secret location where the rarest delicacies have been preserved:

"Despite its vast store of ingredients, my employer’s restaurant defaulted, like others in that age, to familiar symbols of prestige. French classics with lots of cream, lots of butter, expensive ingredients, just money glopped on the plate. Money." (p. 19). 

High in the Italian Alps, the destroying smog that's killed everything but humans is mysteriously absent,  creating an end-times garden of Eden with underground storehouses full of heirloom produce and preserved game and domestic animals. This retreat belongs to an obscenely wealthy man, who is enjoying his private stash of gourmandise. He hires the narrator to be his chef for a restaurant where he woos investors in some secretive project to make him even wealthier and more powerful. 

Once this post-apocalypse scenario is set up, there's a plot, but it's kind of secondary to the food and wine descriptions, which read like a very exaggerated version of the old Gourmet magazine in its glory days. Like this: "To me that wine was fig and plum; volcanic soil; wheat fields shading to salt stone; sun; leather, well-baked; and finally, most lingering, strawberry." (p. 99).

Before the evil smog descended on mankind and on everything that grows, the narrator grew up in Los Angeles. As an adolescent, she defied her immigrant mother and trained to be a chef, but prior to that, she didn't live in a food paradise either. The predecessor of her gourmet life:

"Autumn was a harvest of big-box stores and their back-to-school sales: fruit leather, instant mac ’n’ cheese, and bread that we unhusked, crinkling, from its plastic sleeve. My mouth watered for the sweetness of processed wheat sown thick through gas stations from California to New York. Honey Buns and Wonder Breads, in perfect squares and machined circles, and the ripe weight of a Danish, mass-produced, that attempts no fidelity to the country after which it is named—no country but this one ambered by waves of industrial grain." (p. 154).

After the set-up of the catastrophic end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it and the secret stash of real food, the demands on the narrator's culinary skills get kind of weird with a lot of demand for cooking exotic animals that have been reconstructed through some kind of DNA science. She even is forced to prepare a meal of wooly mammoth which is disgusting, and other meat that's even more disgusting. 

A complex plot involving the employer and his young daughter seems to me to be kind of an afterthought to enable a wide variety of food descriptions. Maybe, I sometimes thought while reading, the author really just wanted to set up this imagined human fate. So I won't bother to describe it or the too-pat ending.

News

Recently, I have been spending a lot of time reading international, national, and local news and commentary. So much is going on in the world around me. A few of my obsessions: 

• Primarily, I'm following the news of the war in Israel, which changes every hour, and I keep hoping that somehow either diplomacy or battle will free the kidnapped hostages. Then maybe negotiations can take place. Unfortunately I've read all too many explanations of how Hamas wants a war that will keep them in power, not a peace that will replace them with more responsible government of their people. I fear the stated goal of Hamas: "a sustained conflict that ends any pretense of coexistence among Israel, Gaza and the countries around them." (source)
• The controversies about this war are dividing our country, as illustrated by the censure vote of the Palestinian representative in the US Congress. Her endorsement of extremist views of the war (especially quoting a slogan that has always signified a wish for the destruction of Israel and expulsion of all its Jewish citizens) is the most exaggerated example of divisions in our society. The outbreak of antisemitic rhetoric and even violence on college campuses is also very concerning.
• Tuesday's elections in various states, especially Ohio and Virginia, were very important. I'm glad that the voters expressed such strong support for women's rights to control their own bodies. 
• The many court cases against Trump are interesting and at the same time horrifying: how could we have put such a criminal in charge of our government, and how can it be possible that he might return to power and take revenge on all of us? 
• I was also interested in the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency flim-flam man, and the revelation of how he spun such a con on people who should have known better. Unfortunately, putting him in jail for decades won't stop the next con man from preying on the same willing victims.

I guess I'm just a news junkie these days!

Blog post © 2023 mae sander

Photos from screen shots and BBC publicity.

Recent Reading

The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish

There are two stories in The Weight of Ink (published 2017). Within these stories the author combines several genres including romance novel, historical novel, novel of ideas, feminist novel, and academic-professor novel. (A bit heavy! The word weight in the title is like a warning.) 

The frame story is about two people doing academic-literary-historic research in the year 2000. These scholars, one a professor of history about to retire, the other a graduate student, are called to look at a collection of seventeenth-century manuscripts discovered in a historic mansion near London. They are tasked with reading and interpreting the documents. A predictable story of discovery and rivalry among scholars ensues, with lots of memory and personal anguish. 

Interspersed with this classic tale of academic politics, jealousy, self-doubt, and ambition is the second story: a historic novel, the story of a Sephardic Jewish family in Restoration London. One of a few Jewish families who escaped the Portuguese Inquisition and found refuge in Amsterdam, these individuals then moved to England where Jews were just beginning to be tolerated. It is the post-Cromwell era, and these refugees lived through the plague and the great fire and quite a lot of drama!

The central character of the seventeenth-century events is a young woman who has managed to be educated despite the usual prohibitions of her time and her milieu. Her story to me seems to be the expression of the author's wishful thinking. As the two readers in the year 2000 read her letters, and as the narrative of her life is presented in alternate chapters, she becomes more and more philosophically accomplished, writing down many thoughts on contemporary philosophical developments, including famous thinkers  and early scientists of the age. Her papers are a major part of the document collection being interpreted by the twenty-first century scholars. There are several themes that also seem designed to suit the twenty-first-century reader, including a gay character whose life story is also something of an anachronism in the 17th century.

It would be nice if a woman could have found a way to accomplish so much as this character did, but based on my own reading about the history of that era (which I did intensively for a time), I don't feel as if the story is really plausible. In other words, it's a pleasant fantasy. To tell you more I would have to put in some spoilers, as the plausibility becomes more and more tenuous right up to a surprise ending.

The Mill House Murders  by Yukito Ayatsuji

The Mill House Murders is one of a number of Japanese classic mystery novels, based on the love of the American and British classics, especially locked room mysteries. Originally published in Japanese in 1988, this new edition was just published this year.

I think this is one of the best and most suspenseful and relatable of these Japanese classics that I've read. Every character in the isolated and eccentric mansion in the wilds of Japan is a potential murderer. They were in the habit of meeting at this forlorn place only once a year, on September 28, and they all suspect one another. Two meetings are included: September 28,1985, when a murder and a disappearance took place, and September 28, 1986, when the survivors return again and attempt to discover exactly what happened one year earlier. In 1986, a detective figure also arrives at their gathering unexpectedly. Determined to find the culprit, he disbelieves the police conclusion about what had taken place. The explanation of the murder and disappearance are totally wonderful -- and no, I won't give away anything!

I have read an earlier mystery by this author called The Decagon House Murders. I didn't like it as much as I like this one. (Reviewed here: link.)

Four Hundred Souls edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain

Will I ever read through all of the vignettes in this book about the history of Black people in the US? I want to read it, but it's very hard to concentrate on such a wide variety of writers and poets. This is one of many books published this year in response to numerous troubling events recently, and to the unfortunate resurgence of racism in our society.

From the introduction by Kendi:

"Black America can be defined as individuals of African descent in solidarity, whether involuntarily or voluntarily, whether politically or culturally, whether for survival or resistance. Solidarity is the womb of community. The history of African America is the variegated story of this more-than-400-year-old diverse community." (p. xiv).

To reflect the diversity and complexity of this community, Kendi and Blain chose 90 writers and poets to write brief essays that connect to each five-year period in the history of Black Americans, beginning with 1619. These essays do not form a connected narrative, but a reflection of each author or poet's perception and historic consciousness. It's a fascinating idea, but hard to follow as there's no total focus for all the material. I'm really trying to read it, but my mind doesn't really work this way.

Reviews © 2023 mae sander

Shared with the Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz

Reading

A quick read: Sarah Caudwell’s light-hearted mystery novel The Sirens Sang of Murder (published 1989). Improbably, this book is about a group of lawyers and financial advisers, and is chock-a-block full of really uninteresting details about British tax law. The characters are somewhat eccentric, and the plot, though somewhat thin, is not too bad. What kept me reading was some of the funny British eccentric parody. Some examples:

• “The chagrin of a woman displaced in her lover’s affections is as nothing compared with that of a barrister superseded in the favour of a leading firm of solicitors.” (p. 15)
• “We were driving through one of those bits of France where the hills have vines growing all over them and the names on the signposts make you feel as if you’re driving through the wine list in a rather high-class restaurant.” (p. 165)
• “It seems to us that the readers who want fiction to be like life are considerably outnumbered by those who would like life to be like fiction.” (p. 11)
• “I told her she was talking bilge, because even if she isn’t being followed, it doesn’t mean she’s loopy. People do follow people, so if you think you’re being followed by someone and you’re not, that’s not being loopy, it’s just being wrong—being loopy is if you think you’re being followed by purple elephants, unless you are of course.“ (p. 51)

I have read one other of this series of novels, titled Thus was Adonis Murdered. I may not read more.

Finding more books to read.

My stack of library books ready to check out. This branch library is architecturally beautiful, and serves many purposes besides the traditional library functions. The low bookcases make it very spacious looking.

First Library Book I Read.

"A 'historical novel' is a novel which is set fifty or more years in the past, and one in which the author is writing from research rather than personal experience." -- Historical Novel Society

This excellent and concise definition applies well to each of the historical novels by Susan Vreeland that I have read. Lisette’s List (published 2014) is set in Paris and in a village in Provence beginning as World War II was threatening to begin, in 1937, and continuing until the post-war era. The characters suffer numerous bereavements and deprivations during the war, particularly the loss of many men who have gone to fight. 

Villagers in the novel suffer from the lack of many essentials, such as gasoline for transportation and such as construction materials. There are many descriptions of the food shortages they experience, even though they live in an agricultural village: a French version of the wartime rationing that I wrote about earlier this week. However, the author downplays many of the atrocities of the war: vicious Nazi reprisals happened in other villages, not this one, and serious issues of the occupation, especially of the disloyal collaboration by French citizens, are glossed over in order to create a more romantic story. This soft-pedaling of wartime suffering is a flaw of the book.

For me, reading Lisette’s List evokes many memories, as over the years I have visited Paris and a number of cities and villages in the area where the story takes place. I also love the artists who are at the center of the story: Chagall, Pissarro, Cézanne, and Picasso and works by these painters all are important to the narrator. Lisette actually (fictitiously of course) meets Chagall and his wife as they are fleeing the Nazis; another character, her husband’s elderly grandfather, shares his own memories of the impressionist painters, as well as owning several of their paintings, which play a major role in the novel.

The beauty of France and the losses caused by the war are central to the novel, and to the title character/narrator, Lisette. She is a warm, intelligent and deeply thoughtful human being. Her day-to-day experiences and her deep passions are portrayed in a fascinating way, mingled with larger themes of art and history. Tomorrow I will post some photos illustrating the novel's connection to my memories and experiences in the French countryside.

Note: I found a good review with images of the paintings and places that appear in the novel here: American Girls Art Club.

One of Chagall’s painting that Lisette loves.

More Library Books.

More library books that I intend to read: another historical novel, a Donna Leon mystery, and a history book.

Also, I watched a film.

A great Paris classic: Irma la Douce.

Blog post © 2023 mae sander

Shared with the Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz.

Dinner and a Movie

A vegan dinner.

Dinner was simple and vegetarian. Then we watched a movie about the excesses of the aristocracy in France just prior to the revolution: "Delicious" (2021). According to the blurb: 

"France, 1789, just before the Revolution. With the help of a surprising young woman, a chef who has been sacked by his noble master finds the strength to free himself from his position as a servant and opens the first ever restaurant."

Really the film is more visual than dramatic, as they say, a feast for the eyes. There's a bit of melodrama, though. Historically it's a travesty; the less said about accuracy the better! 

Some images from the film via IMDB:

The French poster for the film

The French poster for this totally foodie film!
We are grateful to our friends Mary and Marty for suggesting that we watch it.