cahn

E is at church camp and A just got the latest Percy Jackson: Senior Year Adventures from the library and has been reading it all evening, so I finally had time to write this up!

This is what I've actually been reading over the last six months/year and why I've been even slower than usual about reading everything else (although I did tell A. I had to take turns with the Hugo novels). For E this was mostly stuff she read for school that she wanted me to read so I could help her with her papers, while for A. this has been books he really likes and wants to... well, he doesn't want to talk to me about them really, he more wants to ask me questions about what parts I liked and whether I thought X was funny and so on.
( American Born Chinese, All American Boys, Frankly in Love, Raisin in the Sun, Keeper of the Lost Cities: 2-9.5, all of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson/Olympus/etc. series )

I am still working on Magnus Chase, and as I mentioned we just got the latest Percy Jackson: Senior Year Adventures (a much more low-key series) from the library, so I do have a few more to go...

Note: not the basis for the Nazi propaganda film of the same title! (Which I had never heard of before hearing about this book, lol, but as selenak pointed it out, I put this here for readers who are more culturally literate than I am.)

I found this one quite compelling. It takes place during the buildup to and the tenure of Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg, in the 1700's, and chronicles how Karl Alexander came to power, his stint as Duke, and the aftermath. Karl Alexander was... well, selenak described him once in salon as a "Rokoko party boy" and yeah, that pretty much covers it.

But that's not what the book is about, that's just the background. It is actually the story of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, the Finance Director for Karl Alexander. Süss rises very high as the "Court Jew" as Karl Alexander rises in the world, and becomes very rich and distinguished, and all without giving up his religion. The history, of course, does not end well for Süss, and the book follows that through to the end. selenak tells me that an influential contemporary review for the English translation called it "a composition of intrigue, corruption, tyranny, injustice, ignorance, cruelty, uncleanliness and fornication," and, um, yeah, that's not a bad description! From about 60% to 80% the book is absolutely riveting. I mean, it's interesting in the other spots too, but this is where it kicks into high gear, as everything that has come before converges into what seems like an inevitable structure. (I also assume that most of this plot structure -- the motivations, etc. -- was made up by Feuchtwanger.) In contrast, the last 20% or so is more elegiac in tone, wrapping up everything slowly to the inexorable (historical) conclusion.

Feuchtwanger himself, of course, was Jewish, and it's interesting reading this book that there are so many places where he is remorseless in depicting anti-Semitism, in a way that is quite uncomfortable to read sometimes. It's not that he paints the anti-Semites as horrible cruel people; it's that they are ordinary people, sometimes quite nice, who do horrible cruel things, often unthinkingly, but also often in a way where fears and stresses override the rational and humanistic parts of their minds.

The style is interesting. I kept thinking that stylistically it reminded me of a fairy tale -- something like Hans Christian Andersen, where there is something of a mannered distance between the reader and the people on the page, while still being descriptive and compelling. It also had that fairy-tale-ish quality of making things seem beautiful in an almost dreamlike way sometimes.

Süss is definitely a hero, or anti-hero? in the true Feuchtwanger mold; he's handsome, popular with the ladies, intelligent, and significantly flawed, with the flaws often being part and parcel of his virtues as well -- he does not convert to Christianity, and to be sure there is a (somewhat murky) element of religious piety in that, but that's depicted as much less of his conscious motivation than an overwhelming pride that he can rise so high without converting, that he is one of of a kind and not just another rich Christian.

The book is of course (given its English title) also extremely concerned with power -- what it means that Karl Alexander has power both over his country (one of the major plot threads is about how he seeks to gain autocratic powers over Württemberg) and his Jew (he calls Süss that a couple of times). And what power does Süss have, given the above, but also given the fabulous wealth that he has made from being Karl Alexander's Court Jew, which he uses more than once to drive Karl Alexander in the way he wishes him to go? But also, you know, not to go all Ayn Rand but she did actually have something of a point when she said that going after power is living second-hand through others and not living on one's own terms. Which relates to the arc -- I hesitate to call it a redemption arc, but it's not exactly not that -- that Süss goes through, when that power and riches are inevitably torn from him. There is a lot going on!

I still have yet to read a Feuchtwanger where the young child of the main character (or, in one case, the not-so-young child-proxy of the main character) did not die super depressingly.

I think the Joseph trilogy is still my favorite Feuchtwanger because Joseph is such a WTF character, but I felt like of the Feuchtwangers I've read so far (Joseph trilogy, Oppermanns, Proud Destiny, and now Jud Süß) this one is the one I was the most impressed by. I can totally see how it became a best seller!

From selenak. Ted Hughes doing a poetic translation of Ovid. This was an interesting read and I'm really glad to have read it. I was familiar with most of the stories (though there were a couple that were new to me) from D'Aulaire and Edith Hamilton and so on, but it's been a while since I have thought much at all about Greek/Roman mythology.

I was struck, on reading these, how differently the people/gods in these stories think about what is right or what is fair. Might seems to make right, and there is often something of a lack of judgment, or at least certainly authorial commentary, of those who engage in what we'd call harassment or abuse or assault. For example, Peleus rapes Thetis -- now that was a story that got left out of my kid-friendly D'Aulaire! -- at Zeus's command, so that the prophecy of "son greater than his father" is neutralized, with no one registered as protesting all that much, including Thetis herself. Though at the same time there is always the knowledge that if someone more powerful or more cunning decides to take revenge (e.g. Apollo and Artemis taking revenge on Niobe), then, well, sucks to be you, even if what they do is not at all proportional to what you did.

For a couple of them I went back to look at the original Ovid. It was striking to me how closely Hughes followed the original, while still using evocative language that was his own.

selenak has an excellent post on this book, which I highly recommend, where she quotes various bits, including one comparing translations and also including a couple of quotes where Hughes tantalizingly adds a bit to Ovid.

3+/5. Courtesy of selenak, this is a saga primarily concerned with the French author Pierre Beaumarchais (he of the original play version of Marriage of Figaro, which indeed is a significant plot strand in this book) and his quest to help finance the American Revolution. (My understanding from selenak is that Feuchtwanger wrote it after emigrating to the US as sort of a thank-you present to his new country.) Beaumarchais is a hero who is in many ways like Feuchtwanger's other heroes without at all being identical: a complex, not always likeable guy who has strong opinions which are not always correct, and who is interesting without always being entirely sympathetic. He also, like the other Feuchtwanger heroes I've seen, is also quite attractive to the ladies.

There are a lot of different strands and characters, as you might expect, in addition to Beaumarchais: Benjamin Franklin and his visit to France to solicit money; the various news of the American Revolution battles, etc. coming at various points; Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette (called Toinette in the novel) and their struggles with financing, well, both Toinette and the American Revolution; Voltaire's last visit to Paris culminating in his death; Emperor Joseph's visit to France and his taking care of Louis and his sister Toinette's problem with Louis not doing sex correctly to impregnate her ( <-- !! true fact I have learned from salon! though Feuchtwanger blames a surgery that Louis needed, which I believe was older scholarship, and apparently newer scholarship has revealed that the actual problem was that Louis just, er, didn't know how to do sexual intercourse properly, which I'm so sad wasn't known scholarship at the time because I would love to know how Feuchtwanger would have written that). There is, also, the death of a young man, though not as young as in the other Feuchtwangers I've read, and because it's telegraphed from the beginning it's not as dreadful as the other ones.

Anyway, this all sounds like it would be wildly interesting, and parts of it were, though I must admit that this is the Feuchtwanger that took the longest for me to read and that I have found least compelling so far, even though in subject matter it should be right up my alley. I think that part of this is that the disparate plot pieces and characterization arcs didn't come together for me in the same way that they did in The Oppermanns and the Josephus trilogy, which may well be a me problem (I read the bulk of this in a few planes and hotel rooms on three different trips, so that may be part of the disconnect).

I think another part of the issue may have been that -- well -- I mean -- we all know it didn't really turn out that great for the French nobility in the end, so this makes a bit hard to root for the whole endeavor when we're seeing it through the French nobility's eyes, even though of course as an American I do root for it :) And I don't think that Feuchtwanger wholly intended us to root for it (though the novel is of course at its base a story about the American victory). selenak pointed out to me that Feuchtwanger makes Louis the voice of the impending doom -- and in so doing makes him a somewhat different, both sharper and more depressed personality than I have otherwise seen ascribed to him, which unfortunately also makes him less likeable to me. (My strong headcanon is that Louis XVI was on the spectrum, though obviously no one knows.)

Anyway, although I seem not to have connected with it on the book-wide level that I'm sure Feuchtwanger intended, I both loved a lot of the disparate scenes (Voltaire's death! Putting on the Marriage of Figaro!) and learned a lot (I really hadn't known at all about Beaumarchais' role here, or really much about Beaumarchais at all). Feuchtwanger is a detailed and proficient author (to the extent of the scholarship available at the time, etc.), and I was able to put a lot of things into context I hadn't quite figured out before or had seen before but, well, it's very useful to see it all in the same place like this, and I'm glad I read this.

So I've been reading At Bertram's Hotel as part of rachelmanija's ongoing Agatha Christie read/reread. I hadn't read this one before. I really liked it, actually, but mostly I wanted to tell you all about the Most Unfortunate Typo in my library's edition (one of those fancy black leather-bound ones, they have a whole bunch of her books in this edition).

First, some background (no typo here that I know of; all ellipses in this first quote are me eliding text):

"How nice to see you again. Er-- it is General Arlington, isn't it?"

But with great courtesy the old gentleman declined being General Arlington. Lady Selina apologized, but was not unduly discomposed...

Miss Marple smiled to herself... So like Selina! Always convinced that she knew everybody [at Bertram's Hotel]. She herself could not compete. Her solitary achievement in that line had been the handsome and well-gaitered Bishop of Westchester whom she had addressed affectionately as "dear Robbie" and who had responded with equal affection and with memories of himself as a child in a Hampshire vicarage calling out lustily, "Be a crocodile now, Aunty Janie. Be a crocodile and eat me."

(Btw I find that image awfully sweet!)

Now, we come to the typo, a couple of chapters later (here, the ellipsis is Christie's):

All those elderly people [at Bertram's Hotel]--really very much like those she had remembered when she had stayed here fifty years ago. They had been natural then--but they weren't very natural now. Elderly people nowadays weren't like elderly people then--they had that worried harried look of domestic anxieties with which they are too tired to cope, or they rushed around to committees and tried to appear bustling and competent, or they dyed their hair gentian blue, or wore wigs, and their hands were not the hand she remembered, tapering, delicate hands--they were harsh from washing up and detergents...

And so--well, so these people didn't look real. But the point was that they were real. Selina Hazy was real. And that rather handsome old military man in the corner was real--she had met him once, although she did not recall his name--and the Bishop (dear Robbie!) was dead.

I hit that last word and was like, "Wait, what?? Miss Marple said nothing about him being dead before?? Is this book going to be about the unexpected death of Robbie, or maybe Robbie was actually SOMEONE ELSE who wasn't real and the person that Miss Marple addressed was someone else entirely and both of them were lying about it for Reasons????"

Spoiler: the book is not about Robbie at all, and this is the last mention of him. I am pretty sure it is a typo and the word that was supposed to be there was "real."

Conclusion: if you're going to make a typo in an Agatha Christie book, it should not involve the word "death" or any related word!

(Speaking of which, I totally typed "died" for "dyed" the first time around, but I think that this typo would have been a bit easier to find.)

I am SO behind on book posts; these are from... a month or two ago?

Tales from Hollywood (Hampton) - From selenak. This is the script of a play, deeply researched, about European emigres to California in the wake of WWII. It's an AU, in the sense that the main POV character is Ödön von Horváth, who actually died in a freak accident in 1938 in Paris; in the play, the freak accident happens to another bystander, and Horvath survives to come to the US and work at Hollywood and hang out with other displaced writers, like Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger (who gets to be in scenes but I think does not actually get any lines), and Bertolt Brecht. (I must admit that before hanging out with selenak, I did not know who Heinrich Mann was, though I had heard of his brother Thomas Mann. Which is... a thing.) The parts about Heinrich Mann, especially the suicide of his wife Nelly, are just heartbreaking -- and side by side with hilarious parts where I was laughing really hard; it's a very funny play as well. It never loses sight of life's absurdity, and it also never loses sight of life's tragedy, and that double lens is really interesting.

selenak convinced me to read this by linking me to scenes available on YouTube of this play made into a TV movie version, with Jeremy Irons as Horváth and Alec Guinness as Heinrich Mann: clip 1 and clip 2 and now I am low-key involved in trying to find a copy of this because I want to see the whole thing :P
(Content note: one character is (historically) anti-Semitic; the first clip does include Heinrich finding Nelly and trying to get her to a hospital; nothing super explicit, but it's all rather horrible and wrenching.)

The Eagle's Daughter (Tarr) - This must have come out around the time that I stopped reading every single Tarr that came out, because, well, I never read it until now. It's set in the Holy Roman Empire at the end of the first century, and is about Theophano, a Byzantium woman who is given to Emperor Otto II as a Byzantium wife. (In the book and in older scholarship, Theophanu is a Byzantium princess "born in the purple"; I am given to understand that modern scholarship does not think she was "born in the purple" and is not a princess that grew up in a palace, etc.) The book goes on to relate the regency of Theophano and Otto II's young child Otto III when Otto II dies young and unexpectedly: his mother Theophanu, and Otto II's mother Adelheid join forces, and it's great and I can see why Tarr wanted to write about it :D I can also see why this book wasn't as popular as, say, her Cleopatra book. Of course far fewer people know about Theophano than do about Cleopatra, but also in addition to that I felt like there was a lot of telling-not-showing about the relationships between the characters: I never was fully convinced of Theophano's relationship with the POV character Aspasia, for instance; we're told that Aspasia basically raised Theophano, but we don't really see much of that relationship going on. The non-romantic part of the ending is great especially if you know the historical fate of Otto III (which I was dubious about how that was going to work), though Aspasia's romance ends in a way I did not foresee (and which, though not wholly unhappy, isn't very happy either).

Notes on what things are and aren't backed up by modern scholarship here, though this thread contains spoilers for the whole thing.

The Oppermanns (Feuchtwanger) - Also from selenak! This is a book that was written in 1933 about a well-to-do Jewish family in Germany (and various people around their family), and how things change for them, almost overnight, as a not-explicitly-named-until-very-late-in-the-book "Leader" and his party comes to power. Yeah. It took me forever to read it, not because it's not a compelling and interesting book (which it is), but because -- well -- one rather knows what's going to happen, and it's not... good. But anyway once I got through that block it really was compelling and I finished it quite quickly, actually. It's... kind of horrifyingly impressive, how accurate it is, when you remember that he wrote it in 1933! (And even though he didn't see how bad it would get -- he saw enough to be horrifying.)

Of note given my recent fandom, Voltaire and Frederick the Great get a cameo as busts in a head of school's office, where (and I wouldn't have realized this before) they are symbolic of the Enlightenment, as well as a more overt talisman of how Frederick the Great got co-opted by what selenak and mildred_of_midgard like to refer to as the Worst Fanboys Ever.

The characters keep saying things like, had not someone recently calculated that Goethe's works alone circulated in German-speaking territories to the extent of more than a hundred million copies? Such a people did not listen long to the shouting of barbarians. (And the US doesn't even read Goethe. :( )

One thing that is sort of weird is that due to Reasons, I have both a print copy and a kindle e-book; the print copy is an older translation, and the e-book is a new translation that came out this year. I don't know why they didn't bother to hard-copy print the new translation! Or, maybe amazon has a backlog of the old copies and is getting rid of them?? Who knows. Anyway, mostly the two translations are pretty similar, though the e-book also has an alternate ending (which ending is more prevalent in Germany? The translator said that Marta Feuchtwanger and others thought the original ending was too sentimental. I liked the original ending better, though!), and also there are some little things where maybe usage has changed over time. (For example, I have never heard Mein Kampf referred to as My Battle as it is in the older translation, and only very rarely even seen the title in translation at all; the new translation refers to it simply as Mein Kampf, which is how I usually have seen it.)

Anyway, I highly recommend it, although you might want to try to get the e-book rather than the print book. Also, content note for -- okay, look, it's a Feuchtwanger, and it has a personable young person in it, and this book makes it now 3 of 4 of his that I've read where the personable young person does not make it all the way through the book, and the fourth book Josephus (as far as I remember) didn't have a personable young person. (I was spoiled for this, and I'm rather glad of it.)

[Edited 4-23-23 to point out that Tales is also really funny!]

Hmm. I have a lot of mixed feelings about this book, which I read for a book club. It's about an academic astrobiologist father Theo and his nine-year-old son Robin, set in the near-and-only-kicked-up-one-notch-dystopian-compared-to-reality future. The wife/mom Alyssa has recently died, which is a major dynamic in the book. The son is cognitively brilliant and emotionally challenged (presumably exacerbated by his mother's death), so you can see the appeal for me, and there were a lot of times reading it where I flinched away from feeling like our family was kind of seen. Eventually Robin starts a kind of experimental therapeutic treatment that involves using neurofeedback based on the (much more mature and centered) emotional responses of, interestingly, his own dead mother. (This sounds kind of awful when I say it like that, but it's really quite well done in the book -- although yes, there is a sort of weird quasi-incestual subtext to it that was clearly intentional.)

It's a gorgeously written book, as one might expect from Powers (I've read another book of his, but I can't remember which one now), and the experimental treatment given to Robin sound amazing and I would sign E up for it in a moment if it existed, but there were a couple of things that just really bugged me. First, this whole bit was driven by Theo not wanting to medicate his son, and saying things like "if eight million people are on medication, doesn't that mean that something is wrong with the system?" and I'm like... maybe? Or it could mean that evolution is kind of crap? (This reminded me of the time when I felt super inadequate that my body wasn't able to provide my child with enough food for the first week of her life. How could I possibly use formula?? Before formula people coped! My sister pointed out that, well, actually, before formula a lot more babies died.) And -- of course being against medication is a view that a lot of people hold, so it's not off-the-wall that Theo thinks that too; but it's hard for me to tell whether this was an author-endorsed stance or not. (Theo's views on politics, mind you, are very clearly author-endorsed, which leads me to suspect that this might be too.) Either way, I just... really had a strong visceral negative reaction as to how Theo keeps going on and on as to how he couldn't possibly give his child any medication at all, especially as I know multiple cases where medication really really helped people. (To be fair, someone in reading group was from a place where apparently kids were over-medicated, and also someone else pointed out that in the book the school system was all but forcing medication on the parent. So this is at least somewhat a kneejerk reaction on my part, but, well, there it is.)

The other thing was the ending, starting with the part where the social workers are all, "Are you abusing your child??" ( Major spoiler. On the other hand, it's the kind of thing I might have liked to know going in. )Not, of course, that it would be at all tidy in real life, of course, I'm not saying that at all, but I did feel like for the book it was a cop-out ending that didn't engage with all the hard questions I guess I wanted it to engage in.

Since you guys have been amazing at book recs, do you know about books (fiction or memoir) about parenting kids with needs like giftedness, emotional sensitivity, ASD, ADHD, etc.? (The parent who organizes book club would prefer books about the parenting rather than about the kids, but it's not necessary.) She brought up the book The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon, also The Gifted School by Bruce Holsinger which sounds rather awesomely popcorn-y (which means I'll probably read it if I can get it from the library, and won't if I can't).

So I had this Goethe-shaped hole in, well, my literacy in general, but in particular in my experience of Faust, despite having seen the Gounod opera a couple of times at this point and having read other Faust treatments (about which more later). selenak pointed me to this translation for stage, abridged but which does have both parts. It took me a while to get into it (not its fault, I'm pretty sure, but mine; reading paper books has been all over the place for me, sometimes really quick and sometimes really slow), but once I got hooked, I was riveted.

This translation plays around with rhyme but doesn't end-rhyme every couplet, choosing instead to sometimes play with internal rhyme. I suspect that this is a little less accurate in terms of meaning and in sheer sound, but it's never boring to read. And it's really funny, especially Mephistopheles -- his sardonic wit practically leaps off the page. (He really does steal the show.) He makes fun of everything!

( Goethe, Gounod, a tiny bit of Marlowe, and Dorothy Sayers. )

I was in the middle of a couple of books (for instance, was kind of stuck halfway through the fourth Gap book for quite a while, though that's moving again) but books I did manage to finish last month:

Piranesi (Clarke) - I really liked this! rachelmanija's review (points to tag list so that spoilers don't show) was what got me to read it -- in particular she said that it was narratively much more compelling than Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (which I liked quite a lot, but which took me forever to read even at the time and which I probably wouldn't be able to read at this point, what with everything) and it is. I finished it in a day because it was just that compelling. She also says, and I agree, that it's much better to read without any spoilers at all, so. I won't say I liked it as much as rachelmanija, but I liked it quite a lot, and I did adore that ( extremely mild implicit spoiler )

Desdemona, if you had only spoken! (Brückner, trans. Bron) - part of selenak's awesome if quixotic effort to get some cultural literacy into my brain :) These are a set of monologues from historical and literary women across the ages -- ranging from Lysistrata from her eponymous play to Goethe's wife to Sappho to Desdemona; they evoke a bit for me what I think of as the best part of fanfic, where it makes you think about the source material.

I of course have read Othello (though I have never seen it, and hilariously my fingers typed "Otello" for, uh, Reasons -- and which I have seen and loved), but a lot of these I know from osmosis rather than by direct experience, like Lysistrata, or Petrarch's Laura (I mostly have heard of Petrarch and Laura from my love affair with Dante). Effi Briest (from the book of the same name) I knew only from previous conversation with selenak, and there were a couple I'd never heard of at all: Malvida von Meysenbug (an idealist and thinker and friend to famous guys) and Gudrun Ensslin (a terrorist -- and there's a grim humor in how her monologue talks about how she will be forgotten). And then there was Christiane von Goethe, who was the one I was originally given to read and whom I knew pretty much zero about; her voice is quite entertaining. Desdemona's monologue is a bit of an AU, which is rather nice :P There's one of the Virgin Mary which is quite interesting, as I'd never thought that much about her after Jesus's death/resurrection, whoops -- really thought that one was neat.

I enjoyed most of them -- interestingly, the monologue I liked least was Katharina Bora, the wife of Martin Luther -- for some reason I didn't like the voice assigned to her -- and it's interesting because maybe because I didn't like that one as much, that was the one where I got most invested in finding out about her in real life, and where I have this bio of the Luthers by Michelle DeRusha in my shopping cart. (I looked around a bit -- depressingly though not surprisingly, biographies of Martin and/or Katharina seem like they're generally either religious hagiographies or feminist manifestos, and I just want someone to tell me the history! WHY SO HARD. Frederick the Great salon has totally spoiled me This looked like the best of what amazon had to offer, but if anyone has a good rec...)

October: (aside from finally finishing the Oster Wilhelmine bio for fandom, and Yuletide canon review)

-Le Petit Prince, read in French and (reread in) English to anticipate French-reading-group someday in the near future. If I had stayed at my first high school (with Awesome French Teacher) I would have read it as part of the third-year French curriculum (which is probably why I have my copy at all); as it was, this was the first time I'd read it in French. I have read that book enough times in English that for large portions of it I barely had to consult the translation. (Hmm, maybe I should try this for The Dark Is Rising series; I bet I also have large swathes of those books all but memorized.) ( This book is about love and grief. )

-Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs, Emily's Quest - Another reread. It struck me on this reread that Dean Priest is really skeevy, which apparently I'd failed to wholly pick up as a kid -- that is, I never liked him much, and I definitely never forgave him for what he said about Emily's book, but I don't remember actually recoiling from the page like I did this time. Like, he meets Emily when she's... thirteen? twelve? He was a FRIEND OF HER FATHER'S. And he says -- this is a literal quote -- "I think I'll wait for you." (And he, of course, does.) AUGH.

The perennial question for Emily's Quest is, who do you ship Emily with? (Which in and of itself tells you why it's my least favorite of the three.) In that elementary-to-high-school-ish period, I shipped a lot of people in various books -- Will/Jane in The Dark is Rising was always my ship, I was firmly on the side of Jo/Bhaer at the time -- I think this may have been my first experience with a book where I never did ship Emily with anyone in the book, really. She ends up with Teddy, but he's pretty... boring and just not that great. Perry isn't boring and I like him rather better than Teddy, but Emily just seems so uninterested in him! (Of course, an AU would be interesting...) Dean is Right Out, of course.

November: my concentration, attention span, and available time are pretty much totally shot until... Christmas :P But I did a lot of rereading, at least. ( Uhura's Song, L.M. Montgomery, Darkspell - mentions of (book-textual) pandemic, depression, severe drug side effects, (possible) suicide, and war. Also mentions of music and doing one's best. )