When I am really impressed with a fiction writer, I often endeavor to read all or most of their works. Alas, William Faulkner was too dense and too prolific for me to succeed, but if I live long enough I may crack that nut. I had better luck with Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Cormac McCarthy. I’m almost there with Haruki Murakami, who has quite the long catalog.
The problem with reviewing the same author of multiple works is that it is sometimes difficult to find new ground to cover. My latest Murakami read was After the Quake, a collection of six short stories – or are these long stories? – centered around the cataclysmic Kobe earthquake in 1995. Except they are not. The characters in these six stories, all narrated from the third person, do not actually experience the earthquake directly, but are made aware of it peripherally, primarily through television news. Still, the event clearly unsettles them all and it is a pronounced sense of resonating palpable unease that binds these tales into a coherent collection. Another natural adhesive is the fact that these stories were all written in 1999-2000, so we have a snapshot of the kind of writer Murakami was during this phase of his career as well as a logical rationale for including these in a single collection. That image is sharpened because we also know by the author’s own words that he never writes short stories and novels at the same time: he either works on one or the other.
Murakami has had a long writing career that dates back to 1979, which has seen a marked evolution in style and presentation while retaining some elements present at the creation, so to speak. After the Quake originally appeared in Japanese in 2000 (and in English translation in 2002), which for Murakami fans means the time between the novels Sputnik Sweetheart (1999) and Kafka on the Shore (2002). I have read two of his other short story collections – The Elephant Vanishes and Blind Willow, Sleeping Women – which together contain a medley of forty-one stories written over the long period of 1980-2005 that are neither arranged chronologically nor thematically. Like a carelessly arranged anthology album of a rock band that has been performing in various iterations since the 1960s, there is the potential for a kind of dissonance in this kind of jumble, even if the quality of the tracks are impressive. (Side note: no such dissonance in Hemingway or Faulkner, for instance, because their respective writing styles and thematic approach remained so similar over time.) Because After the Quake was written in the same era and orbit (however peripherally) around a central event, there is a logic that enhances the ability of the review process to effectively compare and contrast the contents. At the same time, it should be underscored, each of these stories can stand on its own and does not need to appear in a volume with the others in order to succeed.
“UFO in Kushiro,” opens the collection and makes reference to the earthquake more frequently and in more detail than the others. Here it serves as a tectonic shift (pun fully intended!) of sorts for Komura – one of those dull, passive Murakami male protagonists – whose wife walks out on him while he is at work five days after the earthquake with no notice, little explanation and an irrevocable determination to never return, in circumstances similar to that in the earlier novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Komura’s sudden divorce makes for a series of unlikely events to follow for him that include smuggling an unnamed object, cavorting with a couple of edgy young women, a funny story about a bear and a bell, sexual dysfunction and existentialism. Not bad for twenty pages of text! I cannot be certain what the story means, but I enjoyed it enough to read it twice through.
“Landscape with Flatiron,” perhaps the finest story in the collection, is also manifestly existential, involving a young woman’s platonic bond (but perhaps that could change …) with an older man who collects driftwood to build masterful fires on the beach that she is powerfully drawn to for emotional succor. This is an especially rich tale pregnant with metaphor that is enhanced by Murakami’s gift for crafting female characters who often are far more developed and complex than their male counterparts. “All God’s Children Can Dance” is a strange, disquieting tale of religion, the potential for incest, the prospect of virgin birth, an unusually large penis, and a man with a missing earlobe that has been bitten off by a dog – in a strange contrast to the author’s typical use of a woman’s ear as an object of sexual fetish. It is as if Japanese literary doppelgangers of Stephen King, Rod Serling, John Irving and Edgar Allen Poe got together for a weird collaboration. I’m not sure how I feel about the story, but it is by all means worth the read.
Of the remaining stories, I very much enjoyed both “Thailand” – which contains familiar Murakami elements of jazz music and a hint of magical realism – as well as the quirky love story “Honey Pie.” I was less impressed with “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo,” an attempt at magical whimsy that seemed to me to fall flat whether intended as an allegory, a comedy or a psychodrama. But perhaps I just missed something.
Whether you are a diehard Murakami fan or simply curious about an author who gets a lot of press in the literary world, I would recommend this slender volume for your reading pleasure.
Some months back, I relocated an antique bookcase long ago constructed from the headboard of some ancient bed to a wall in our bedroom just opposite my own pillow. It is packed full with scores of mass market paperbacks, a now mostly obsolete format that once thrived as a means to put both great literature and pulp into the hands of a wider population in inexpensive, portable editions. So it was that I went to sleep each night staring at my own eclectic array of mass markets – classics, literature, sci-fi and, yes, some pulp – collected almost entirely during my teen years. This is how it was that I came to read Shosha by Isaac Bashevis Singer, randomly plucked from that shelf between yawns one evening.
Singer, who was born in Warsaw when it was a part of Russia (Poland ceased to be a nation during its long partition from 1795-1918), left Europe on the eve of the rise of Hitler and spent most of his long life in the United States, where he established a reputation in the Yiddish literary movement based upon his themes of Jewish mysticism, morality, philosophy and vegetarianism that eventually earned him a Nobel Prize. Like much of his work, Shosha was originally written in Yiddish.
Shosha is an odd book, by any measure. Written later in life when Singer was in his seventies, the perhaps semi-autobiographical novel looks back through the eyes of its protagonist, fledgling writer Aaron Greidinger, at the Jewish ghetto of his childhood in one corner of the Russian empire where he befriends the eponymous Shosha, as well as the independent Poland of his young manhood defined by the ever-widening shadow of Hitler’s Nazi Germany. When Aaron – known by the affectionate nickname Tsutsik – is reunited with Shosha many years later he is a young man on the make, struggling to earn a living as a writer, moving in literary circles where conversations frequently turn to Spinoza, Kant and Schopenhauer, as well as the orthodox rabbinical tradition he has largely abandoned. Tsutsik, who lives on the margins barely scraping by, nevertheless has one Dickensian event of good fortune after another. Rich men want to sponsor him. Almost every woman wants to bed him – and he eagerly obliges them. Shosha, on the other hand, in the intervening years has endured some kind of catastrophic malady termed a “sleeping sickness” that has left her short and stunted with a body barely developed beyond that of a child. In fact, she is frequently mistaken for a child. She also seems to be at least mildly mentally challenged. Nevertheless, when Tsutsik finds her again, he immediately commences an obsessive love affair with Shosha that is incomprehensible to everyone he knows. And, I might add, to the reader, as well.
I assumed the timeless innocence of the character Shosha to be a an allegory to the lost world of the Warsaw of Tsutsik’s – and Singer’s – childhood, before the Great War, and perhaps a symbol of the fragility of the reborn yet hardly mature new nation of Poland, doomed to fall once more before the onslaught of Nazi tanks. But there is clearly more to it than that as Tsutsik’s romantic love for Shosha deepens and they become betrothed. While Shosha is biologically a grown woman, there remains something creepily Lolita-like about her as an object of sexual lust, especially as it is repeatedly made clear in the narrative that others perceive her as the child she appears to be. My discomfort grew exponentially in the graphic description of the wedding night scene, replete with bloody sheets, in which Tsutsik effectively rapes the terrified, resisting Shosha. This sense of violation is further exacerbated a few pages later, when a peevish Shosha confesses that she wants more of that marriage bed, as soon as possible. Perhaps I am more sensitive than I used to be, but none of this sat well with me at all. In fact, I could not shake a sense of disgust at being forced to serve as audience to a kind of literary voyeuristic pedophilia that was at best gratuitous, at worst repulsive.
Through all of this, I anticipated some sort of dramatic denouement, which was not to be. Suddenly, and without explanation, the narrative ends. It then picks up again in a disjointed “Epilogue” that finds Tsutsik thirteen years later, an established New York author visiting the new nation of Israel, which serves as an uneven vehicle for relating the fate of all of the significant characters from the novel: “anticlimactic” does not even begin to describe it.
I have never read Singer before, nor have I read other works from his Yiddish literary tradition, so I am possibly not qualified to properly judge the merit of this novel. It is clear that Singer was an extremely gifted writer working within a highly-developed intellectual milieu. Portions of the narrative devoted to existential explorations of philosophy, religion, politics and morality are well worth the read. Still, the episodes with the girl-child Shosha that come to dominate the book are deeply disturbing, whatever the author’s intent. If Shosha is indeed a metaphor for innocence, we cannot help but cringe at her defilement by the novelist as protagonist. Would I ever read Singer again? I can’t say. Would I recommend Shosha to others? Not so much.
Some 250 million years ago, the great supercontinent of Pangea formed, on the eve of a great extinction that bookmarked both the close of the Permian period and the Paleozoic era; the future belonged to the first dinosaurs. To the east of Pangea was a vast sea known as Tethys. When the forces of plate tectonics broke Pangea up into massive component land masses, Tethys formed a great equatorial sea between the northern Laurasia and the southern Gondwanaland, expanding east-west ocean circulation that saw the birth of modern marine life. By five million years ago, Tethys was no more; all that remains of her today is the Mediterranean Sea. In Vanished Ocean: How Tethys Reshaped the World, author Dorrik Stow – a renowned geologist and oceanographer who specializes in deep ocean research – not only traces the long lifecycle of Tethys but utilizes this structure as a framework to probe plate tectonics, evolution, extinction events, oceanic conveyor belts, geology, climate change, of origin of fossil fuels, and much, much more!
Vanished Ocean is a brilliant work and clearly a labor of love for Stow, whose elegant writing style turns complex scientific concepts into an immensely readable narrative that is comprehensible for the most part to the general reader with at least some familiarity with earth science principles. This is enhanced by a number of tables, illustrations and maps, as well as an ample “glossary of terms,” neatly accented by appropriate snippets of Pablo Neruda verse at the face of each chapter. It is clear from his passion that for Stow the processes of the earth and the evolution of both the organic and inorganic that it hosts represent a kind of poetry in motion, and his enthusiasm is eminently contagious for the reader, even in the occasional moments when the concepts are so complex that a paragraph may need to be re-read more than once. Still, if you know something about plate tectonics and evolution, there is nothing here that is not accessible. It is a real treat to listen to Stow relate the story – along with anecdotes of his life and travels that clearly reveal that even after a lifetime of research he remains as delightfully full of wonder as an eight year old child as the processes of the planet – much of these echoes of a far distant era — are exposed.
There is controversy here, as well. Stow does not buy into the accepted catastrophic theory of dinosaur extinction, which a scientific consensus today attributes to a massive asteroid collision 65 million years ago at the Chicxulub Crater beneath Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula in what is geologically referred to as the “KT Boundary Event” that marks the end of both the Cretaceous Period and the Mesozoic Era. Stow argues with great conviction that given the frequency of mass extinction events over the long geologic history of the earth, there are plenty of ingredients in place – such as climate change and the continental drift of plate tectonics – to account for such an extinction without introducing an extra-planetary event. I lack the expertise to parse Stow’s dissent. On the other hand, Stow is a distinguished scientist – not some talking head with a political axe to grind – and his opposing views are worthy of respect even if these defy the current accepted theory.
I will not pretend to have absorbed all of the complicated concepts of Vanished Ocean, but it was a most enjoyable read and I may one day even read it again in order to better comprehend the immense range of the material that Stow has packed into what is after all, a rather small volume given the enormity of its content. I would highly recommend this book both to scientists and non-scientists alike.
As the sesquicentennial fades, I sought to abandon binge-reading Civil War books and to move on to the postwar era of Reconstruction and Redemption. Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War, by Elizabeth R. Varon, randomly plucked from the shelves of a local bookstore, turned out to be an excellent choice for the transition.
Varon, professor of history at the University of Virginia and author of several previous books on the Civil War and the antebellum period, effectively asserts that Appomattox was a seminal event that has assumed a mythological place in both the history and the historiography of the war – so much so that its myth frequently but quietly intrudes and distorts historical accounts. How many times have we heard the story of Lee gallantly proffering his ceremonial sword to Grant, who graciously refuses it? It never happened, yet that singular imagery persists in historical memory so stubbornly that it has been repeated even in scholarly retellings. The story of the fictional sword is yet however only a metaphor in some ways for far more pernicious elements of the myth of Appomattox that even historians often have to struggle to shake off.
Varon argues convincingly that within minutes of the historic surrender, the military constituent of the “Lost Cause” myth was conceived. It is worth pausing here to reflect on the “Lost Cause,” born in the postwar era, which has both political and military components, and continues to resonate to this day. The political piece holds that the doctrine of states’ rights was the primary motivation for secession and discounts slavery as the central core of the rebellion. The authors of this well-constructed prevarication after the war were often the same prominent figures who were the primary architects of what was proudly advertised as a “slave republic” on the eve of hostilities, which is best made manifest by juxtaposing what they wrote in 1860 and in the years following the Confederacy’s defeat. This aspect of the “Lost Cause” myth has repeatedly been effectively rebutted by a consensus of scholars, but it remains alive and well and has seen an unfortunate resurgence in recent years as an element of contemporary right-wing ideology.
Varon focuses instead upon the birth of the perhaps less nefarious but yet equally misleading military component of the “Lost Cause” myth, which imagines the heroic defeat of the noble and valiant rebels, led by vastly superior generals, who nevertheless finally succumb to the overwhelming men and materiel of their more vulgar and less competent northern adversaries. No less invented than the fiction of its political complement, the military portion has proved a more difficult theme to rebut, largely because on the face of it the north did indeed possess greater manpower and resources than its southern counterparts. Still, the Confederacy did not need to win – only not to lose – in order to achieve its independence and prevail. It had several million slaves to serve as support behind the lines, freeing up more white men to serve as soldiers. It had the benefit of fighting on its own territory; on the two occasions when Lee left that comfort zone to go north – Antietam and Gettysburg – he was soundly beaten. Finally, while Lee can rightly be considered the greatest field general of the war, the south had as many or more bad generals as the north: Bragg, Polk, Pemberton, countless others. To Lincoln’s chagrin, all eyes tended to be in the eastern theater where the north had a true dearth of talent in McClellan, Burnside and Hooker, but the union was consistently triumphant in the west with the likes of Grant, Sherman and Thomas, and when Grant – whom historian Gary Gallagher rightly calls the “best soldier of the war” – came east he finished the job.
In Appomattox, Varon identifies the moment of creation of this military part of the “Lost Cause” myth with the deliberate understatement of the troops under Lee’s command at the time of surrender and its enshrinement in Lee’s “Farewell Address” known officially as General Order #9, which opens with: “After four years of arduous service marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude, the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.” Varon carefully deconstructs Lee’s words and the efforts of those around him to report an ever-shrinking band of tatterdemalions overcome solely by superior numbers. Early reports that Lee has a mere 8,500 men under arms are soon put to the lie when the much coveted written parole Grant had issued so that the former Confederates could venture home unmolested are claimed by an additional twenty thousand rebels! Yes, Lee was indeed still outnumbered, but this was a reality because of the many losses inflicted by Grant’s army on Lee’s in the past eleven months. Lee had not won a significant battlefield victory in nearly two years – since Chancellorsville in May 1863 – and had not been on the offensive since his great loss at Gettysburg in July shortly thereafter. Grant’s “Overland Campaign” of 1864 – often criticized then and now for the huge sacrifices of men to suit the strategic objective and the origin of the unfair “Grant-the-Butcher” myth – had choked off Lee’s options and forced him to the siege at Petersburg, which could only end as it did with the fall of both Petersburg and Richmond. Lee had been squarely beaten by Grant, and there was much more to it than an excess of supply wagons and greater numbers of boots on the ground.
Varon spends a good deal of time on the magnanimous terms offered by Grant with Lincoln’s blessing to Lee’s army in capitulation, which Lee himself had hardly anticipated. Rather than the harsh punishments Confederates had braced for, the generous terms of the surrender treated the defeated foe with respect, issued blanket paroles, and even (although it was not specified in writing) permitted soldiers to keep their horses. Grant also provided some 25,000 rations to the hungry Confederates. (Given the number of rations, it was obviously clear at the outset that Lee had more than the 8,500 men it was disingenuously claimed.) Before too long, early “Lost Causers” were claiming Grant’s magnanimity was spawned less by generosity and much more by his sense of shame at having bested such a noble and gracious foe. Nonsense, of course, but it made for great myth-making.
We often tend to forget how rapidly the northern celebration of Appomattox on April 9th was drowned out by the horror of Lincoln’s assassination only six days later. Calls by some for punishing the rebels – largely muted by the festivities of victory — grew more strident following Lincoln’s martyrdom by a known southern sympathizer. Still, reason ruled in the north and even in deep mourning calls for revenge were shunted aside; an official commitment to mercy upon the conquered prevailed.
Varon neatly chronicles how all of that mercy and magnanimity was manipulated by legions of former Confederates who sought to restore their respective antebellum power bases and rule the roost once more, even if their precious “peculiar institution” had to be abandoned along the way. With Lincoln dead – whose vision of reconstruction seems to have included both benevolence towards the defeated and provisions to protect their former slave property – the politics of the victorious north became polarized in a vicious clash between the new President, Andrew Johnson, who favored leniency for the secessionists but had little concern for the millions of newly freed but disenfranchised blacks, and the Congressional majority of Radical Republicans who advocated punishing the former rebels severely and demanding full and immediate citizenship rights for African-Americans. The closest to a great moderate of Lincoln’s stripe was Grant, and both sides sought to claim him for their own.
As all of this played out to shrill invective that eventually led to Johnson’s impeachment and narrow acquittal, the old guard of ex-Confederates quietly took control of southern political institutions, and the myth-making began in earnest: an outnumbered band of the chivalrous, dedicated to a Constitution that promised rights to the states, sought against all odds to create an independent nation devoted to the values that the republic was originally founded upon. Finally defeated due to overwhelming odds, they sought nothing more than to peacefully reassert their role in the United States as now loyal citizens. Conspicuous in its absence in this narrative was mention of the human chattel that their slave republic was founded upon, or reference to the millions of freedmen who found themselves in a vague purgatory of disenfranchisement, neither slave nor citizen. The seeds of another myth, of a greatly exaggerated oppressive era of reconstruction, took root at this time, as well. The reality was that Johnson’s leniency turned into a kind of appeasement: African-Americans were sidestepped and even as early as the summer of 1865 in Richmond were subject to oppressive “black laws” that were reminiscent of the old “negro laws” of slave days; and soon after former Confederate elites regained political power in a coup of restoration that surprised many by its swiftness on both sides. It was only to get worse: the true horror of “Redemption” for African-Americans in the former Confederacy was still some years away.
Grant was largely disappointed in Lee, whom Grant had hoped would assume a leading role in a genuine peace of reconciliation, but Lee was held in such esteem even in the north that he was asked to testify before Congress, where he lobbied for the unconditional restoration of rights to southern elites. Blacks would remain … well . . . invisible. Soon, the surrender at Appomattox came to be viewed by many in the north – including Grant – as a “golden moment” that was squandered in a rush towards reunion at any price. By 1866, already it was seen that the north had won a long costly war yet had very quickly lost the peace. Johnson had vetoed the “Civil Rights Bill” in Congress. Unrepentant Confederate elites served as unapologetic architects of newly restored southern political institutions. Myths of the war, of an outsized gallant Lee and his noble army, of a brutal Grant, of the “Lost Cause,” of a proud but defeated south only seeking a helping hand as they gratefully rejoined the union – myths that effectively erased the visages of millions of African-Americans, slave and free – all of these were born and thrived in the months that followed Appomattox, and sadly, a good deal of these persist to this day.
Varon’s Appomattox is an excellent work, although somewhat hampered by a structure that at times reads like a long research paper. Extremely well documented with abundant notes, occasionally the narrative relies too much on quotations from notable historians in the abundant catalog of historiography on this era rather than a focus upon the primary sources that while considered are yet less frequently cited. Still, I would highly recommend this book for those seeking to comprehend more fully how the memory of the Civil War continues to resound in this nation a century and a half after that tumultuous and still somewhat unresolved day at Appomattox.
All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, is a novel I probably never would have picked up had it not come to me as a gift from my daughter Sara, whom I am ever hounding to read the many books I send her way. So it was with a certain sense of obligation that I took this heavy volume out to my deck on a recent sunny Saturday morning with a cup of coffee and turned to chapter one. It was dusk on the next day with an emptying bottle of beer in the fading crepuscular light when I finished it. In between, I did little else but read this book, a complex work of literary fiction that runs well over five hundred pages yet is so compelling and so well-written that it seems impossible to let it go. I cannot recall the last time a book of this merit and intricacy has gripped me with such force, literally from cover-to-cover. No wonder that All the Light We Cannot See was the winner of both the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the 2015 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, as well as other prestigious awards.
Doerr, an otherwise little-known author, has written a dazzling multifaceted masterpiece that cannot adequately be described or deconstructed in a review format. The premise of the storyline sounds simple and perhaps so sentimental that it might make the potential reader turn away: the lives of a blind teenaged French girl and a brilliant young orphaned German soldier intersect in unlikely circumstances during the tumultuous liberation of World War II German-occupied France. But there is virtually nothing simple or sentimental in this multilayered narrative that in a microcosm manages to trace the growth of fascism in Depression-era Germany, explores the art of the locksmith, the science of electromagnetic waves, the evolution of mollusks, the construction of a radio from spare parts, the literature of Jules Verne (in Braille!), the methods of a small-town French Resistance cell, the architecture of a medieval city, the perils of combat on the Russian front – and even includes as its central character a legendary and priceless diamond that could possibly bestow upon its owner both a unique blessing and a terrible curse.
There is so much to extol about this extraordinary book! What appears to be an obvious metaphor in the title turns out to be a wide panoply of allegory embedded in the narrative structure of the tale, but – in a testament to the craft of the writer – much of it is hardly evident until the closing stages of the work. All of the characters are exceedingly well-drawn with a sophisticated dimensionality not weighed down by unnecessary detail. And the prose – well this is the shining glory of it all because Doerr writes so well that the complicated architecture of the novel never slows down the pace, so paragraphs and chapters can be gulped down by the reader as if it was pulp, which it most certainly is not. In this and in many ways I am reminded of Hemingway, although the author’s voice could not be more different in its expression. Hemingway too used complex literary techniques like the objective correlative, but these were often only palpable for the reader on reflection and never slowed the narrative down. Like Hemingway, there is not a single extraneous bit of information in the entire novel: Doerr imparts only and exactly what you need to know, about the characters, about the place and time, about the plot. Thus Doerr takes apart and rebuilds a radio the way Hemingway would a rifle, not only to add veracity to the tale but because it is essential to the story.
This novel truly is almost perfect. The only fault I could find is with the protagonist’s agoraphobic great-uncle, who strikes me as perhaps just a bit too old to be a veteran of the Great War in his youth as portrayed. But this is such a minor quibble that it is perhaps hardly worth mentioning, except by way of illustrating that only in such nitpicks can we locate flaws, and even these are so minor as to barely warrant attention. I highly recommend this superlative novel to every audience.
I have reviewed other novels by Anthony Doerr here:
Death of a River Guide is the fourth novel that I have read by Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan, who ranks – along with Cormac McCarthy and Haruki Murakami – as one of my top three living authors of literary fiction. I am not alone in my admiration: Flanagan has won a number of prominent awards for his work, and his most recent tour de force, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, was the recipient of the prestigious Man Booker Prize. [My review of The Narrow Road to the Deep North is here: http://regarp.com/2015/02/02/review-of-the-narrow-road-to-the-deep-north-by-richard-flanagan/]
My first encounter with Flanagan was a serendipitous stumble upon Gould’s Book of Fish, truly one of the finest works of literature of the new millennium in my opinion, which boasts a distinctive brand of magical realism that perhaps can be said to sail in the same sea of this genre with a Murakami or a Gabriel Garcia Marquez yet remains a unique vessel of unmatched craft. Gould’s has the distinction of being the only novel that I have ever read through and then – after the final paragraph on the final page – turned back to page one and started all over, reading it straight through for a second time!
Death of a River Guide may not qualify as the same brand of masterpiece as Gould’s, but yet it handily earns superlatives in its own right, especially because it was Flanagan’s first novel. It is truly so rare as to be remarkable for a first novel to contain such kinds of complexity, characterization, narrative structure and commanding prose. I do not typically cite other critics in my own reviews, but in this case the blurb on the jacket cover – “The sort of stunt Faulkner and Ambrose Bierce together might have concocted …” (Raleigh News & Observer) – is worth reiterating because it is both telling and spot on the mark. Like Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury, for instance, Death of a River Guide time hops effortlessly, although here the very dimension of time is far more epic. Like Bierce, there is imagination, irony and sometimes horror. I might also add to that the comedic mockery of a Kurt Vonnegut and the biting sarcasm of a Mark Twain. Yet, none of it is derivative. Readers of Gould’s will no doubt detect the roots of the magical realism that come to define the latter work, the echoes of passion and tragedy that form surprising links between individuals in disparate times and places who otherwise might appear unrelated yet in fact share human experiences – often heartbreaking – that despite their distances resonate profoundly among them.
It has long been alleged that during the drowning process the victim sees their life “flash before their eyes,” and this imaginary mechanism is the foundation of the narrative structure in Death of a River Guide, which also employs the more familiar literary device of the “journey motif,” as the protagonist, hapless river guide Aljaz Cossini – who has known far more misfortune than not in his life to that point – finds a rare moment of courage and purpose rewarded with the awful calamity of finding his head trapped between rocks beneath the violent waters of a rushing river, awaiting certain death yet granted dramatic yet disjointed visions that showcase his own history and the lives of those who preceded him, both immediate antecedents and far distant ancestors, which reverberate with the palpable atavism of sometimes unlikely forerunners not only of kinship but of geography and spiritual commonality.
Make no mistake, this novel contains great complexity on multiple levels, and as such while the prose is quite engaging this is by no means an easy read. As in Faulkner’s Sartoris-Sutpen novels, critical details of similar but related characters over several generations are subtly revealed throughout the narrative, so I found myself more than once thumbing back through the pages wondering if I had missed a key particular that in fact had not yet been disclosed. But it is truly worth the effort. In the final chapter, I pondered whether the tale had not perhaps gone on too long after all, if I was about to happen upon some jagged flaw that would reduce the fine estimation I had for the novel thus far. Then, reading the second to the last paragraph on the penultimate page, my eyes suddenly and quite unexpectedly filled with tears. And it was not cheap. And it was not sentimental. Flanagan can do that … and he does. Death of a River Guide is a truly great novel. Don’t miss it.
I may possibly have been the last Civil War enthusiast yet to read The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara, a historical novel I have heard repeatedly referenced by historians, battlefield guides, reenactors and Civil War buffs of virtually every stripe. Now I can officially proclaim that I have read it too! But what took me so long?
I was actually reared on historical fiction – Michener, Clavell, Vidal – and I read voraciously in this arena, which had a profound effect upon my intellectual development with regard to both history and literature. Later, as I determined to become a historian, I deliberately eschewed this genre. Why? Because quality historical fiction tends to deeply ingrain its impressions in the synapses: to this day I have to vigorously resist identifying as authentically biographical the characters of Burr and Lincoln that Gore Vidal so brilliantly conceived in those marvelous eponymous historical novels.
The Killer Angels was actually pressed upon me by a friend who had often nagged me to read it. Finally, he mailed me a copy, which thus enforced a sense of guilt and obligation upon me. I still did not turn to it immediately, but I did take it along with me on a recent trip. My Master’s Degree in History was conferred at a ceremony held in National Harbor, Maryland, and it seemed fitting that my next stop post-commencement should be in the realm of the multiple Civil War battlefields at Fredericksburg, Virginia. It was in that vicinity, overlooking a tranquil pond on the deck of a rented 1830s-era log cabin in Spotsylvania, with a cup of coffee in the early morning sun just prior to a battlefield tour, that I began The Killer Angels. And I could not stop reading it.
As promised by its many fans, it is an outstanding read on a variety of levels, not least in its talent for recreating the time and circumstances, effortlessly placing the reader in that milieu to walk with the characters on those crucial days that saw what was the largest land battle in North America. A complex yet engaging storyline that never grows dull, perhaps its greatest strength is in its skilled characterizations that truly bring colorful animation to a long-dead cast of otherwise monochromatic figures. The grand scale of Gettysburg is resurrected, as well as what this battle would mean for each side in a clash that while hardly deciding the war nevertheless placed a pronounced exclamation mark in the course of how its narrative would be writ ever afterward.
Although the characters were exceedingly well drawn, I did not need to fear that I would confuse fiction for biography here, since I have previously read more than a little about central players such as Lee, Longstreet and Chamberlain. I have visited the battlefield, once with a guide in my car and on foot, and again on a walking tour with the legendary Ed Bearss. I had not believed that a novel set on those grounds on those days would hold much value for me, but in this I was mistaken: Shaara’s deliberately understated prose that deftly wove history with literature made me “feel” the events there as I never thought possible. I was indeed stirred in a way I never could have anticipated.
In the end, I do not regret waiting this long to read this fine novel. While I am thankful that I had a firm historical foundation in place prior to entertaining the drama, I am yet even more grateful then for that drama. If it turns out that I was not truly the absolute last person to read this book, I would urge those who have taken my place to pick up a copy: you truly will not regret it.
After a lifetime of reading and studying the Civil War that was even more profoundly focused by the sesquicentennial years, I have been ranging around looking for books to put an exclamation mark on the final phases of the war. I had read Jay Winik’s masterful April 1865 some time ago, and more recently the impressive work Richmond Burning: The Last Days of the Confederate Capital, by Nelson Lankford, but in the hopes of locating something with perhaps a wider compass I selected Their Last Full Measure: The Final Days of the Civil War, the latest book by Joseph Wheelan. A reporter rather than a historian, Wheelan has built a fine reputation writing narrative histories about Jefferson, the Mexican War, and the Civil War, including last year’s well-received installment about Grant’s famous “Overland Campaign,” Bloody Spring: Forty Days that Sealed the Confederacy’s Fate.
Their Last Full Measure – an engaging, generally well-written but occasionally uneven and by some measures deeply-flawed narrative – surveys the critical events in chronological chapters with titles for each of the final months of the war. This is a welcome technique in that the full sweep of the war is brought to bear in much of its several theaters, the way it might have been viewed by its contemporaries on both sides of the conflict, rather than the more traditional approach that tends to segment events by geography. The only drawback to this approach is that some chapters – such as “April 1865” – will of necessity be substantially longer than others, but this is a quibble.
Following a succinct prologue, in the first chapter, “January 1865,” Wheelan admirably constructs a skeleton of the essentials requisite to bring the reader up to the first days of that calendar and then competently and colorfully puts flesh upon those bones with the events that follow. All eyes may have been on Richmond – or more accurately the besieged Petersburg which was the real gateway to the Confederate capital, and the stalemated forces of Lee and Grant before it – but it was not the only show in town. There was Sherman wreaking havoc in the Carolinas. There was increased pressure by Union forces on the dwindling rebel presence in the west. There was the critical fall of Fort Fisher in North Carolina. The Northern public was growing impatient with Grant, with whom so much faith had been placed the year before, and Richmond still stubbornly held under the auspices of the increasingly delusional Confederate President Jefferson Davis, but the reality was that the Confederacy was on the brink, in tatters on all of its fronts, and it was Grant’s strategic vision that had delivered this outcome.
Wheelan is a talented writer who carries the reader along effortlessly through a great deal of material in multiple arenas with prose that rarely gets bogged down or boring. The exception possibly is in the description of battles, where he switches his narrative gear so drastically that it feels as if another writer has taken his pen: fans of military history will appreciate the careful fine detail, the general reader perhaps less so. This is exacerbated to some degree by the dearth of maps included in the volume, which makes military maneuvers more difficult to follow without resort to outside references.
Sometimes, it should be said, the narrative is heavy with anecdote, some familiar, some less so. Is there anyone who still has not yet learned the story of Wilmer McLean’s luckless move from his house on the Manassas battlefield to Appomattox, where his home hosted the surrender? Perhaps fewer have heard about Confederate Secretary of War John Breckenridge’s ire at Sherman’s alleged stinginess with his whiskey at the less familiar surrender of Joe Johnston’s army. Such stories indeed add color and personality to the drama, and as such are welcome, but what is missing of more value to historians that might have filled these paragraphs instead?
Conspicuous in its absence is any kind of detailed coverage of African-Americans in this critical period of the war’s conclusion, either as slaves, or free, or contraband, or as the proud members of the United States Colored Troops (USCT) that made up a full ten percent of Union forces by 1865 and were pivotal to the end stage of the war effort. This is highly unusual for a Civil War history published in 2015. Blacks are referenced rarely and typically only peripherally, such as in the accusations leveled against Sherman with regard to their treatment. I honestly thought I must have overlooked something, so I later turned to the index for confirmation. There is no listing for “African-Americans” or “USCT;” there are listings for “blacks” and “slaves,” but only with a mere handful of referenced pages. I looked to other recent books on the era to confirm my theory, and in the end it has to be concluded that Wheelan essentially overlooked the vital African-American dimension to the final months of the Civil War. As such, there is an outsize block missing in the narrative that leaves an unfortunate gaping hole that the average reader might stumble past but that the trained historian cannot help but stumble upon.
The greatest weakness to Their Last Full Measure, however, is the “Epilogue” – which to my mind should never have been written. It seems obvious that once his central story was told, Wheelan hoped to write a grand conclusion, not only about end of the war, but about the Civil War itself, about its aftermath, about how it resonates to this day. He is not the first to attempt this, but he may be the latest to fall flat with his effort, which unfortunately – as it is the penultimate chapter – drags the rest of the work down with it, perhaps unfairly. Still, the “Epilogue” is so flawed that it cuts a grove across the entire volume, and it at last betrays the fact that Wheelan after all is not a professional historian, because it becomes increasingly obvious in these final pages that he is largely unfamiliar with the latest scholarly historiography.
In this concluding flourish, Wheelan seems to have fallen victim to many of the incorrect notions of decades past which have been firmly discarded by today’s generation of Civil War historians. For instance, Wheelan asserts that “The Confederacy’s military leaders were superior to the Union’s during the war’s early stages, and so were their troops …” [p338] This anecdotal observation has been thoroughly discredited and even at the time was known to be a fully false assumption. All eyes were indeed on Richmond throughout the war, to Lincoln’s great frustration, but for all the bad generals and lost battles in the east that captivated the public’s eye, the western theater showed a string of Union successes: Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Memphis, New Orleans. The South had bright lights like Lee and Longstreet and Jackson in the east, but they also had dreadful generals like Polk and Bragg in the west and a grand strategic failure in the martyred Albert Sidney Johnston. The Union had such bumblers as Burnside and Hooker in the east, as well as the timid, tentative George McClellan, but they also had Grant and Sherman and Sheridan and Thomas in the west – and some of these later came east and crushed the Confederacy in the end. Noted Civil War historian Gary Gallagher rightly credits Lee as the greatest general in the field on either side, but counters that Grant was the greatest soldier.
Wheelan also recycles the core “Lost Cause Myth” excuse – a central tenet of Lee’s “farewell address” – that “The North’s daunting advantages in manpower and resources … were decisive over the course . . .” of the war, and repeats the misguided assertion – I think it was coined by Shelby Foote – that the Union “… fought the South one-handed.” [p339] While the north did indeed generally enjoy greater resources, this argument has repeatedly been disallowed by modern scholars, who note that the south’s slave property serving as support freed up a greater number of men for military service, and that the Confederacy never needed to conquer the United States, only to avoid being conquered by a weary and divided north in order to maintain their independence. It was, on many occasions, a very close call, and they might very well have prevailed.
There are finally, in the epilogue, grave historical errors. Wheelan claims that the Confederacy’s enactment of the draft, internal taxes, and a focus upon government centralization were all in reaction to similar moves by the Federals. Actually, most of these components were innovations of the ever wary yet determined rebels. Of greater consequence, he insists that Richmond reacted to Washington’s enlistment of black troops by recruiting slaves to the army. In fact, the Union had enrolled African-Americans since 1863 while it was not until the final weeks before Richmond fell that the Confederate Congress, despairing of its crippled manpower, gave in to the pleas of the exalted Robert E. Lee and there were then visible drilling in the streets of the doomed capital the strange anomaly of blacks recruits, men who never actually saw service.
In the end, while there is great value in much of the book its flaws are somewhat fatal. I do not regret reading Their Last Full Measure and I would not discourage readers from it, but there are so many top-notch Civil War histories that I would suggest it belongs more properly to the middle of your list than at the top of it.
It is a mark of how rare it is to encounter a book on the American Civil War that offers an entirely fresh perspective, adds measurably to our understanding of critical aspects of the conflict, and yet is extremely well written, that I found myself championing its merits well before I had actually finished it. Such a volume is Our Man in Charleston: Britain’s Secret Agent in the Civil War South, by Christopher Dickey – published in the final sesquicentennial year of the rebellion that left such a deep scar on the nation that it still resonates in the contemporary political landscape – which I had the privilege to obtain in the form of an uncorrected proof as part of an early reviewer’s program. The official publication date is scheduled for July 21, 2015.
I have had mixed luck with books obtained through the early reviewer program; more than one I forced my way through out of obligation rather than enjoyment or intellectual enrichment. Our Man in Charleston was a thoroughly delightful exception to what has been trending towards a somewhat dreary rule, and it could not have arrived at a better time. While I have spent a lifetime reading and studying about the Civil War, I have devoted the sesquicentennial years to a deeper appreciation that has included battlefield tours and even a weekend seminar with noted historian Ed Bearss in his ninetieth year, who giddily ran ahead of me and a devoted group of the less physically fit on rocky outcrops at Antietam and windy overlooks at Gettysburg, all the while steadily lecturing us in his inimitable stentorian voice. I am fresh from walking at the commencement ceremony for my Masters in History from APUS, obtained partially by fulfilling the final program requirement of an internship that in my case entailed spearheading a project with a local museum for digitizing a lost trove of Civil War diaries, memoirs and correspondence – which also earned me the Academic Scholar Student of the Year Award from the School of Arts and Humanities. On the way home, I spent time at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Courthouse. In other words, I am invested in the larger topic at hand, one that according to some sources has been the subject of more than 70,000 books, with new ones published all the time; that may in fact be a low reckoning. So, as they say on the block, I don’t impress easy. This book thoroughly impresses me.
Dickey, a journalist rather than a trained historian who has an impressive resume that includes works both of fiction and non-fiction, managed to target an extremely unique character and perspective and put these to pen admirably, drawing the reader into the narrative in the first few pages and never letting him or her go until the tale is complete. Our Man in Charleston is literally Robert Bunch, a relatively minor character who has until now essentially been lost to history, the British consul stationed in Charleston, South Carolina through much of the final decade of the antebellum years, who remained at his post until 1863. The view is decidedly a British one, which is both unfamiliar and highly informative for students of the era who in general do not look to the war from the vantage point of foreign soil. Bunch finds himself a witness – and sometimes more – to key events that include the explosive Democratic convention held in Charleston which resulted in the terminal fracture of the party that was to ensure Lincoln’s eventual win, the lead up to secession in the very nucleus of its inception, the bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor that inaugurated the war, and a host of other events of great significance as the rebellion and the Confederacy took shape. As a journalist, author Dickey must have deliciously imagined what it must have been like to have been an eyewitness to history taking shape in this way; as a writer of a solid book of history that contains a thick sheaf of citations, rather than imagination Dickey relied upon outstanding resources in the paper trail that Bunch left behind. The author admirably sets Bunch’s perspective into the broader context of war, diplomacy, politics and much more, and it is clear that he is no novice to the wider arena in which these events occurred.
The first third of the book is focused upon something that seems at first to have nothing to do with the later secession of South Carolina, which is some years away when Bunch arrives in Charleston in 1853 with instructions from his government to use all diplomatic means to urge a change in policy that up to that time had seen black British seaman seized and held by the authorities when ships with such crews flying the Union Jack were in port. Under the “Negro Seaman Act,” first enacted in Charleston in 1822, which inspired similar acts elsewhere in the south, free black British sailors – primarily of West Indian heritage – were seen as a kind of contagion that could potentially inspire slave uprisings: “Liberated blacks were seen as carriers of an insurrectionary plague that must be quarantined.” [p12] The law provided for this “quarantine” by mandating that such seaman be incarcerated as long as the ship was in port and holding the captain liable for the expenses this entailed; a refusal to cover such costs could result in penalties that included seizing and selling these sailors into slavery. There was also the very real danger that during incarceration they could be kidnapped and sold as human “livestock.”
Two critical elements present here that were to assume much larger significance in historical retrospect. The first is that the British, who economically represent a huge market for southern cotton, are nevertheless appalled by slavery, which has been abolished throughout their empire. The second is that the Charlestonians cannot comprehend that there is an alternative perspective to their own, which holds that per God and man the optimal role of blacks is to serve as human chattel property. The contrast in these essentially irreconcilable positions is underscored as Bunch learns that not only is there zero sympathy for even the mildest antislavery position, but the South Carolinians are leading advocates of the reopening of the slave trade, outlawed since 1807, to fuel their massive appetite for plantation labor. Curiously, their concern is less for international outrage than the opprobrium they might invite from the more northerly southern states, like Virginia, where since Jefferson’s time slave labor had become economically unfeasible but slave breeding thrived; prices would likely plummet once importation began anew. In the meantime, Bunch learns, there was such a thing as smuggling.
The British were committed to interdicting the illegal slave trade out of Africa and vigorously employed their navy to prevent slavers from making it to the Americas – sometimes these were ports in the US, more often Brazil and Cuba. The United States was technically committed, as well, but the effort was lukewarm at best as the Buchanan Administration sought to avoid raising southern ire. The exception was the capture of the Echo, a slaver that was towed into Charleston Harbor. In today’s south – where remarkably the Confederate Battle Flag still flies at the South Carolina State House*, roads named after Confederate politicians and generals crisscross the landscape, and there has been a new and vehement resurgence of the “Lost Cause Myth” that promotes the lie that the rebellion was predicated upon states’ rights rather than the proud creation of an independent “slave republic” – slavery is commonly downplayed and the treatment of slave property has been euphemized as generally beneficent. As historians of the antebellum period are well aware, this is nonsense: slaves were often treated cruelly and always arbitrarily, frequently whipped or otherwise mistreated and sometimes murdered with no legal repercussions. In 1830, a slave named Jerry accused of rape was duly sentenced by a South Carolina court and subsequently executed by burning alive! Still, a full knowledge of these realities hardly prepares the reader for what awaits when Bunch and others see the Echo in the harbor:
“Vomit and urine and feces and blood had seeped deep into the raw wood of the sunless, slapped-together slave decks in the hold, staining them indelibly with filth. Cockroaches by the millions seethed among the boards, and clouds of fleas and gnats rose up from them. The stench that came from this vessel wasn’t the smell of a ship full of cattle and horses, but that peculiar smell that surrounds humans, and only humans who are very afraid and very sick or dying or dead . . . Some 455 Africans had been taken on board the Echo near Kabinda on the African coast. More than 140 had perished during the weeks at sea and were thrown overboard. (“The shark of the Atlantic is still, as he has ever been, the partner of the slave trader,” wrote a British editorialist.) It took the U.S. Navy prize crew six days to sail the Echo to Charleston Harbor, the most important American port within reach of the fetid vessel. By then, another eight captives had died. And they just kept dying . . . ‘Their condition on leaving the brig Echo was painful and disgusting in the extreme. They had been huddled together closer than cattle, and slept at night in as close contact as spoons when packed together. Privation of every kind, coupled with disease, had reduced all of them to the merest skeletons, and to such a state of desuetude and debility that on entering the fort they could not so much as step over a small beam, one foot high, in the doorway, but were compelled to sit on it and balance themselves over. It is impossible for you to imagine their sad and distressed condition.’” [p90-94]
The survivors were herded into the still incomplete Fort Sumter. The death of nearly three dozen more under the watchful authority of the U.S. marshal, formerly a proud supporter of reopening the slave trade, changed his mind for good. Most Charlestonians, however, were decidedly unfazed: in fact their dander was up over the humiliating treatment afforded to the captain and crew of the vessel when paraded through town upon their capture. Bunch, like any modern audience reading this account, was horrified.
As British council, Bunch does his best to form positive relationships with his American hosts, but his correspondence reveals that he clearly detests most of them. Perhaps he most admired James Petigru, the politician who opposed secession and famously declared that: “South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.” But even Petigru was a slaveholder. Bunch’s visceral antislavery orientation, shared by most key members of the British Parliament in both parties, was an anathema to almost all South Carolinians. Bunch was present in Charleston through the secession crisis, the firing on Sumter, the formation of the nascent Confederacy, the diplomatic crises with Britain over blockade and the seizing of Mason and Slidell by an overeager Union navy captain, and much more. He even took part in some “undercover” diplomacy with Richmond in the interests of the British, which sadly backfired and unfairly characterized him in the eyes of the Lincoln Administration as a Confederate sympathizer. South Carolina – and the entire Confederacy – bet that a British hunger for southern cotton would trump any opposition to slavery on the other side of the Atlantic and foster both recognition and even military assistance. As history has demonstrated, this was hardly a sound gamble, especially as southerners burned their cotton in the early stages of the war to increase demand. The British sought and located alternative markets, and at the end of the day it was very difficult for British politicians to trumpet support for the Confederacy, whose economy and in fact raison d’être was predicated upon the human chattel slavery Britain was committed to oppose on every shore. South Carolinians, as revealed by the Dickey book, could never possibly comprehend any of that.
It is impossible to find anything significant to criticize in this fine work. Our Man in Charleston is original, well-written, carefully documented and presented as only the very best narrative history is meant to be: it offers a unique perspective on a critically important subject in a thoroughly original manner. I highly recommend this book and I predict that it will earn more than one award for its contribution to American Civil War studies.
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*Postscript: On July 10, 2015, spurred by the shooting massacre at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Confederate battle flag was finally removed from the South Carolina Statehouse grounds. Less a Civil War relic than a modern symbol of racism – the flag was raised in 1961 and flew primarily to celebrate the state’s stubborn resistance to Civil Rights – the cynical on each side of the flag debate can claim that the move was either opportunistic or politically correct, yet it nevertheless represents a step forward for the state that spawned secession and the sanguinary struggle that was to follow. As President Obama tweeted that day: “South Carolina taking down the confederate flag – a signal of good will and healing, and a meaningful step towards a better future.”
Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami is the twelfth of his eighteen published works that I have read to date. Two more beckon to me from a nearby shelf in my study. Obviously I am a fan.
Despite its complexity, I usually recommend Kafka on the Shore to those who have never read Murakami, because it is in my opinion his finest novel. I would now offer Sputnik Sweetheart as an alternative that is shorter, less convoluted and a much easier read yet still captures the quintessential Murakami. There is a passive, complacent male protagonist. There are well-drawn complicated female characters, in this case two of them. There are cats, or at least stories about cats. There is a passion for music, either jazz or classical. There is awkward sex and unrequited love. There is a sense of dark foreboding. There are puzzling circumstances. There is the author’s unique brand of magical realism that is trademark Murakami, although it is far less manifest in this 1999 work than it would be in Kafka on the Shore (2002) or 1Q84 (2010); still there remains a wisp of a hint of some kind of parallel universe that occasionally intersects with our own. And, in typical Murakami style, it closes with issues unresolved and questions that linger.
The title of the novel is derived from an ironic conflating of terms in an early conversation between fledgling young writer Sumire and a beautiful older woman named Miu, for whom Sumire develops a powerful lesbian attraction. Sumire brings up Jack Kerouac, which Miu comically and mistakenly places in the “sputnik” rather than the “beatnik” genre. The original Sputnik, of course, was actually the Soviet satellite that launched the Cold War space race in 1957, the year of my own birth. Sputnik is a Russian word meaning “satellite” that translates literally as “fellow traveler” and in the novel it serves as a larger metaphor with a dual significance.
I felt like I had read parts of Sputnik Sweetheart before, and it turns out that I had: certain ingredients of the novel were plucked from the pages of Murakami’s short story “Man-Eating Cats” that appeared in The New Yorker in 1991 – which ironically I had only very recently read as part of his short story collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. [For my review of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, see http://regarp.com/2015/05/17/review-of-blind-willow-sleeping-woman-by-haruki-murakami/] The novel is actually quite different from the short story, but the elements he incorporates are both striking and memorable. This is a much shorter and easier book to read than the novel that preceded it, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994-95), or the one that followed it some seven years later, Kafka on the Shore, but it nevertheless remains as rich with complexity and nuance in its style and presentation. Since I have reviewed Murakami previously, I will not risk redundancy by restating my own personal love-hate relationship to the author based upon his brilliant prose and often frustrating lack of plot resolution. I will state unequivocally that this is one of Murakami’s best novels and one that I would highly recommend both to those who are veteran readers of his fiction and to those who are new to his work.
