New Little House Series

 

Publicity shot from the new “Little House” series, released this week.
We have watched the first episode.

 In the 1970s, our family read aloud the “Little House” books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, beginning with Little House in the Big Woods, set at the time when the narrator, Laura, was four to five years old. As we read through the series, we were captivated by the characters and by the way Laura experiences the frontier as her family moves onward. It’s impressive how the books reflect the history of the American West as it was is being settled. We were quite aware of the author’s negative views of non-white people, especially the original Native Americans who were being displaced by settlers of European descent. 

The first episode of the new TV series starts at the time of the third book in the Little House series. The TV script has depicted Laura as around 11 years old, which gives the entire story a different point of view. The new script depicts more clearly the author’s views about race, downplaying the mother’s hostility to Native Americans. Historically, the Black doctor who plays a large role in this episode was a real person, though I don’t think he was depicted in similar detail in the books. From Wikipedia: 

“Dr. George A. Tann: An African American physician and veteran of the Union Army, Dr. Tann ran a homeopathic medicine practice in Kansas and the Osage Diminished Indian Reserve. He became well known as a pioneer physician in the region and treated both Black and white families on the frontier, including acting as a neighbor to the Ingalls family.”

It seemed to me that the focus of this episode was emphatically turned to “Pa” — the father and head of the household. As in the book, Pa was a restless and ambitious man who wanted to move west and settle the frontier, while “Ma” was loyal but not happy to leave her settled life in “the big woods.” The TV family seems to have been forced to leave for the frontier, though in the books this was not the case. 

In sum, I see many differences between the characters and situations in the script and in the original books as I remember them. More importantly, I’m not sure the TV show captures the spirit of the original — and maybe isn’t trying to do so. There are a whole lot more episodes, which I may or may not watch.

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

Jane Eyre Revisited

Original illustrations by F.H.Townsend

Jane Eyre, which I have just read, is a much more complex book than I remembered, but that’s not surprising since I haven’t read it since I was in junior high school! The plot seems simple if you summarize it, but in fact Jane, the narrator, is a multi-faceted personality. She can be both self-effacing and self-respecting, with moral and physical confidence in just about everything she does. Mr. Rochester, her employer and later her lover, is equally multi-faceted and complex.

Both characters are unforgettable right up to the end when we read the sentence no one could ever forget, “Reader, I married him.”

Just one or two quotes. First, her description of seeing the beautiful ladies and gentlemen guests at an evening party in the home where she works as a governess:

“A soft sound of rising now became audible; the curtain was swept back from the arch; through it appeared the dining-room, with its lit lustre pouring down light on the silver and glass of a magnificent dessert-service covering a long table; a band of ladies stood in the opening; they entered, and the curtain fell behind them. There were but eight; yet, somehow, as they flocked in, they gave the impression of a much larger number. Some of them were very tall; many were dressed in white; and all had a sweeping amplitude of array that seemed to magnify their persons as a mist magnifies the moon. I rose and curtseyed to them: one or two bent their heads in return, the others only stared at me.” (p. 214)

Now for the passage in the novel that preoccupied our very young minds when I first read the book. My fellow pupils and I had never previously learned that the standard British marriage text would allow anyone present at the ceremony to immediately bear witness if they knew a reason why the ceremony should be stopped and the marriage not to be completed. In fact, to this day, I have never heard another example of such an objection, either in literature or in life. The unforgettable reaction in the middle of Jane’s wedding begins with the unexpected statement “The marriage cannot go on: I declare the existence of an impediment.” The narrative continues:

”The clergyman looked up at the speaker and stood mute; the clerk did the same; Mr. Rochester moved slightly, as if an earthquake had rolled under his feet: taking a firmer footing, and not turning his head or eyes, he said, ‘Proceed.’ Profound silence fell when he had uttered that word, with deep but low intonation. Presently Mr. Wood said— ‘I cannot proceed without some investigation into what has been asserted, and evidence of its truth or falsehood.’” (p. 362)

 

The setting of the story, in grand mansions of the 19th century British gentry, is also unforgettable now. Back then, it was especially impressive considering that this was the first (or one of the first) times that I read about such a place. I suspect that our teachers may earlier have assigned us to read one or two novels by Charles Dickens, where some of the same stately houses appear — but the atmosphere of the great houses in Jane Eyre is even now overwhelming!

The Accomplished Brontë Family

As you no doubt know, Charlotte Brontë, the author of Jane Eyre, was one of three sisters who all wrote still-popular novels, along with a brother who didn’t produce any lasting literature. All their novels were initially published under masculine pseudonyms: Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.

• Charlotte (1816–1855) is best known for Jane Eyre, which has been made into at least sixteen movies beginning in 1910.
• Emily (1818–1848), wrote Wuthering Heights, which is currently in the news because of a new movie version that was released last month. At least ten earlier movies have been based on the novel.
• Anne (1820–1849) wrote Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which are less famous than her sisters’ works, but they have been the subject of a few TV series. 
• Patrick Branwell Brontë (1817-1848) was an alcoholic and an opium addict — despite early promise, he turned out to be quite a loser in contrast to his accomplished sisters.

As you can see from the dates, all four siblings died very young. They were all victims of tuberculosis, though the immediate cause of Charlotte’s death may have been complications from her pregnancy. 

Review ©  2026 mae sander

 

Recent Watching and Reading

We watched Dr. No — the very first time that Sean Connery played James Bond: 1962.
Better than we remembered it. The script was pretty faithful to the book (unlike some of the later films).

 

I’m still in the middle of reading some of these books, but I hope to finish them soon.

A.S. Byatt, Ragnarok
I expected a better narrative from A.S.Byatt than this book offers.
Not much more than a somewhat tedious retelling of the myths.
This one, I did finish — it’s short.

Edward Berenson, Perfect Communities: Levitt, Levittown, and the Dream of White Sububia.
There’s a lot of good social history in this book, but it’s way too long.
I was very interested in the final years of Levitt and his giant subdivisions of affordable homes.
Speculation: The author never saw a note card that he could bear to omit.

Victoria Redel, I Am You — still reading
A historical novel about a woman artist in the Dutch Golden Age.

Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman: The Stoics
I didn’t read much of this book as it’s really more a reference work,
ho-hum summarizing what’s known of each philosopher.
I hoped for a readable account of these early philosophers’ thoughts.

Eskimo Folk-Tales and Memories

Eskimo Folk-Tales collected by Knud Rasmussen (1879 – 1933), 
a Greenlandic–Danish polar explorer and anthropologist

Small sculpture of a Tupiak, a monster that plays a role
in the Greenlandic Inuit folk tales.
We bought this when we visited Greenland a few years ago.

Inuit art that we saw in the museum in Greenland.

From Eskimo Folk-Tales: “A tupilak frightening a man to death in his kayak.”

Illustration of kayaks from Eskimo Folk Tales.

Caption on above photo: “Hunters encountering Sarqiserasak, a dangerous troll, who rows in a half kayak himself, and upsets all he meets with his paddle.” p. 35

A kayak demonstration that we saw in Greenland.

Blog post and photos © 2026, 2022 by mae sander 

Doing Things

 In Ann Arbor

A cup of coffee at Argus

… we told them to find another way to trim the trees away from the power lines!

Favorite News Item

In the Salish Sea near Seattle — AP photo:
A little seal escapes a pod of orcas that wanted to have it for dinner.

Story of the seal in the Guardian. (This is only a screen shot of the video).

When we were there…

We saw seals furiously barking at a pod of orcas when we took a National Geographic cruise
 there: my photo (© 2018).

From Miriam in China

A mural on a street in Shanghai. More of Miriam’s photos will be posted here.

Recent Reading

The narrator of Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (published 2014) seemed very unsympathetic to me, and so did almost all the other characters. The narrator was an assistant to a famous (obviously fictitious) pop singer: a woman with an enormous ego and not much else to her. The other assistants and employees were uniformly impressed by their employer, and utterly empty-headed. A major theme of the novel is race and its importance to the narrator, her friend, her employer and quite a few others, all of them brown or black individuals dealing with the emerging racism in England towards the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century.

The novel alternates between the narrator’s description of her relationship with her employer and her childhood and friendship with a girl who eventually became a successful dancer and then a failure. Here’s her eventual insight into her friend, around half way through the book:

“She was a dancer: she’d found her tribe. I, meanwhile, was caught completely unawares by adolescence, still humming Gershwin songs at the back of the classroom as the friendship rings began to form and harden around me, defined by color, class, money, postcode, nation, music, drugs, politics, sports, aspirations, languages, sexualities . . . In that huge game of musical chairs I turned round one day and found I had no place to sit. At a loss, I became a Goth—it was where people who had nowhere else to go ended up.” (p. 215)

 I had to force myself to keep reading. In fact, I don’t know why I did, but I persisted. I remember liking her earlier book White Teeth.

Blog post © 2025 mae sander

Shared with Eileen’s Critters,

Sami’s Monday Murals, and 

Deb’s Sunday Salon

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.

Update Oct 31, 2025: One of the storage jars in the museum’s collection has been returned to the family of the potter. See this story in the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/30/us/mfa-boston-david-drake-pottery.html

 

“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.