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Phineas Finn by Anthony Trollope

Jan21

Trollope is fast making a bid to become my favorite of the British Victorian novelists. I love the story of how he worked as a civil servant in the post office for twenty years while writing novels on the side. “He trained himself to produce a given number of words an hour in the early morning before going off to his post office duties.” By this means, he eventually wrote and published 47 novels and 16 other books and became well known in the Victorian book world, especially for his series of six novels about clerical life in the made up county of Barsetshire.

I also like the novels themselves. Trollope lands somewhere between Dickens and Thackeray in tone. His novels are less sentimental and heart-rending than those of Dickens. The reader does begin to care about Trollope’s characters, but we see the flaws in each of them as well as the pathos, and we’re never too surprised or struck down when their lives are a jumble of good and bad as a result of poor and not-so-poor decisions and eventualities. I’ve not yet been moved to tears or deep emotion by any of Trollope’s novels.

Trollope’s heroes and heroines are human and flawed, but Trollope is not so cynical and world-weary as Thackeray on the opposite side. (Vanity, but enjoyable vanity.)Trollope’s books have a lot to say about marriage and romantic relationships, both prudent and imprudent, mercenary and idealistic. But his characters are generally multi-dimensional, not completely out to marry for love or for money or for social position, instead maybe for some combination of the three.

Anyway, I read all the Barsetshire Chronicles last year and the year before, and then I decided to continue on with Trollope’s political series of novels, The Palliser Novels. The Barsetshire novels take place mostly outside London among people who are country people even though they may rich and aspiring to be “citified.” The Palliser books are set in and around Parliament, and there is a great deal of talk about British politics and political maneuvering. It’s all very confusing for an American reader, and maybe even for a current day British reader. But I could just read through all of the political mumbo-jumbo and set it aside to get at the meat of the story, a tale in this second Palliser Novel of a young Irishman, Phineas Finn, who is flattered and cajoled into running for office in the British House of Commons and wins a seat therein. Then the rest of the book is about Phineas’s romantic adventures and entanglements with some parliamentary wrangling and angling thrown into the mix.

Phineas Fin is young and innocent and Irish when he comes to London to take his seat in the House of Commons. And by the end of the book three years later, he has become romantically involved with no less four different women, and yet managed to remain rather innocent, even if he is somewhat older and and wiser.

Phineas is a frustrating and endearing character, a “gentleman” working hard to maintain his own integrity and honor while swimming along in a sea of political intrigue and compromise and conflicting rules and societal norms. He becomes an outsider, then an insider, then an outsider again, all in the space of three busy years. And his romantic and monetary fortunes rise and fall just as quickly. He falls in and out of love several times, considers marrying for the sake of money or position, resolves to give up all money and position for the sake of the woman he loves, and finally ends up with the best of the four women he has been courting. But I wasn’t sure that in the end he would remain happy with the marital bargain he made.

It was a good story. One of the things it made me think about, on this day after the inauguration of our 47th president, was the responsibility that we have to pray for our politicians and elected officials. It’s not any easier now than it was in the nineteenth century to maintain one’s integrity and do the work of government in Washington, D.C. or London or even Austin, TX. I thought about praying especially for Vice-President Vance and for other younger men and women who have been elected to office for the first time. It really is something of a swamp up there, and it’s not easy to know when to compromise and when to stand firm and how to stay out of trouble and how to still keep the courage of one’s convictions.

So, Phineas Finn is the second of the Palliser Novels, and the third one is called The Eustace Diamonds, which I believe has nothing to do with Phineas Finn. Then comes a book entitled Phineas Redux, which I assume is all about our man Phineas Finn again. Will he return to Parliament? Will he become some other sort of public servant? Will his marriage work out? Will the other ladies that he didn’t marry reappear in his life? Stay tuned, as they say on TV.

The Best Adult and Young Adult Fiction I Read in 2024

Jan7

If it’s good for young adults (older teens) it’s probably good for adults, too, and vice-versa. So, these are the adult fiction books I really enjoyed in 2024. (Links are to reviews here at Semicolon)

  • Joy in the Morning by P.G. Wodehouse. I read this one for Cindy Rollins’ summer course. Wodehouse is always good and funny and just all-around delightful.
  • Flambards, The Edge of the Cloud, and Flambards in Summer by K.M. Peyton. I’ve wanted to re-read these British young adult romance/horse books for a long time, and I finally found copies this year and read them. Just about as good as I remembered them to be.
  • The Small House at Allington by Anthony Trollope. I read a lot of Trollope in 2024, and I’m reading another book by Trollope now in the first days of 2025. Almost as good as Dickens and Thackeray.
  • Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope.
  • Stateless by Elizabeth Wein. Pair this book about the early days of aviation with the Flambards trilogy. They are all good.
  • The Swedish Nightingale: Jenny Lind by Elisabeth Kyle. A lightly fictionalized biography of the famous singer.
  • Girl With a Pen: Charlotte Bronte by Elisabeth Kyle. Another fictionalized biography, but mostly factual. And clean. And not iconoclastic or deconstructionist.
  • Pastures of the Blue Crane by H.F. Brinsmead. An Australian classic.

That’s it. I read a lot of thrillers by Ruth Ware and by Susan Hill (Simon Serraillier series) and by Ann Cleves and by Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series), but I can’t really recommend any of them. They were all to some extent gritty with bad language and horrific crimes and bad language. I think it’s time I gave up on that genre.

The Silver Donkey by Sonya Hartnett

Oct15

It’s easy, almost inescapable, to find children’s books set before, during and after World War II–fiction, adventure stories, Holocaust stories, biography, memoir, nonfiction about battles and about the home front. I have about three shelves full of World War II books. But when I am asked to recommend books about or set during World War I, the task is harder. There are some good books about World War I, fiction and nonfiction, even picture books, but that war just doesn’t live in our collective imaginations in the same way that World War II does.

Someone recommended The Silver Donkey to me, and I thought, what with the comparative dearth of books set during that war in comparison to the Second World War, I’d add it to my library. Sonya Hartnett, the author, is an Australian writer. Her books, mostly written for children and young adults, have won numerous awards and prizes, including for the author the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award from the Swedish Arts Council in 2008, a sort of lifetime achievement award in children’s literature. Knowing all of this, I was primed to enjoy The Silver Donkey.

And enjoy it I did. However, I must say that it’s an odd sort of book. Two sisters who live on coast of the English Channel (do the French call it the French Channel?) in France, find a man lying in the forest who appears to be dead. The sisters, Marcelle, age 10, and Coco, age 8, are deliciously thrilled with their discovery, brimming with “anticipation and glee.” Their response feels very French, and somewhat true to the nature of children. As they approach the man, they find that he is not dead, but merely sleeping. He also tells them that he cannot see.

Marcelle and Coco have found a British deserter who wants nothing more than to go home across the Channel, to see his family, especially his younger brother who the soldier believes is calling to him to come home. Marcelle and Coco, and later their brother Pascal, find a way in their childish simplicity to help the soldier by bringing him food and eventually by discovering means for him to cross the Channel to England. In return for their help, and to pass the time, the soldier tells the children stories–stories about donkeys.

These are not perfect children, nor are they role models. They take food from the family larder and lie to their parents about what has happened to the food. They keep secrets. They aid and abet an army deserter, and they squabble with one another. They are somewhat ghoulish; Pascal in particular wants stories about war and battles and violence and heroism. The donkeys in the stories are more admirable. The first story the soldier tells is about a faithful old donkey who takes the expectant Mary to Bethlehem for the census and brings her and her baby home safely. The second story is about a humble donkey whose humility saves the world from a terrible drought. And the war story that Pascal begs for ends up being about a donkey who carries the wounded to safety in the midst of battle–at the cost of his own life.

The whole book is bittersweet. The heroes are all fictional donkeys. The children are funny and very human; somehow they feel as if they could only be French children with a sort of French attitude toward life. The soldier is a hero who calls himself a coward, and he is both brave and tired, tired of war. He is so tired that he decides one day, after having fought courageously in the war for a year or more, to leave the battlefront and walk home. His blindness seems to be a psychosomatic response to the horrors of war.

I wouldn’t recommend this book for younger readers, but for children thirteen and older it might be a good introduction to the controversies surrounding the entirety of World War I. Was it a wasteful stalemate of a war, initiated and perpetuated by old men who sent young men to die for no reason? Is honor worth fighting for? Should a soldier be like the donkey, brave and humble and faithful, or are humans called to be more discerning and wise than donkeys can be? What is the proper response to a war or to a soldier who has abdicated his responsibility in a war? These are certainly questions for older children and adults to think about, and The Silver Donkey gives rise to thought and discussion about questions of this sort.

The donkey stories are the best parts of the book, though.

This book can be borrowed by member families from Meriadoc Homeschool Library.

Girl With a Pen: Charlotte Bronte by Elisabeth Kyle

Mar29

“This being Charlotte Bronte’s story and not her biography, I have taken a few liberties. Some minor happenings have been transposed in time, other omitted or invented. . . . But this is Charlotte’s story. I have written it in the hope of awakening interest in a remarkable girl who wrote remarkable books.”

~Afterword by Elisabeth Kyle

I can’t decide whether it would be best to have read Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre before reading this fictionalized biography or whether Jane Eyre might flow even better if the reader were to know something about the life and times of its author. Either way, Girl With a Pen is a book not to be missed by Bronte fans. Making the story of Charlotte’s life into a fictional narrative while keeping the broad outlines and many of the details was a good choice on the part of a good author herself, Elisabeth Kyle. Ms. Kyle writes vividly and fluidly of Charlotte’s young adulthood and her rise to fame, telling the story of Charlotte Bronte’s growth as a person and as an author with understanding and an affinity for Charlotte and her sisters.

I’ve read several books about the Brontes, fiction and nonfiction. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. This one emphasizes Charlotte’s life in the parsonage at Haworth as a young adult, covers her time as a student in Brussels, and shows us her rocky, yet triumphant road to becoming a celebrated novelist, all without speculating about modern obsessions with Charlotte’s love life or her relationship with her father. Mr. Bronte is this book, is a typical Victorian father, rather over-protective of his daughters by modern standards, but loving and beloved by those same daughters. And Charlotte goes to Brussels to learn French and to teach English and does not indulge in any love affairs whilst there.

This biographical fiction novel is especially appropriate for junior high and younger high school readers who are interested in learning more about Charlotte Bronte’s life since the author omits the more sordid details of Branwell Bronte’s life and death with Branwell appearing only as a minor character in the story. The book also ends before the deaths of Emily and Anne, thereby avoiding those twin tragedies as well.

And Charlotte herself is indeed the focus of the narrative. Ms. Kyle tells Charlotte’s story vividly and memorably. In this book, Charlotte Bronte, who thought of herself as a rather nondescript and even ugly young lady, is is bright and personable and full of life. I would recommend this fictionalized biography to any teens who are readers, introverts, or aspiring writers. And adults like me, librarian-types, should find it fascinating as well.

This book can be borrowed by member families from Meriadoc Homeschool Library.

Other Bronte books I can recommend:

Sir Gibbie by George Macdonald

Apr30

I got a rotten version of this book, or else George Macdonald wrote a dud. The story is there, and it’s a good one. But the “edited” version I read was tedious and much too explanatory, over-simplified and dull. Kathryn Lindskoog, a C.S. Lewis scholar and an author herself of literary and critical works, was the editor of the book I read, in the Classics for Young Readers series, published by P & R Publishing. She also edited several other classics for this series, including  Little Women, The Little Princess, Robinson Crusoe, Hans Brinker, and Black Beauty. If they are all written in the style that I read in her version of Sir Gibbie, I would not recommend them. And honestly, I am not sure why any of those other classics need updating or editing in the first place. They were all readable and lovely in the original for me as a child or young adult.

I do understand why Macdonald’s work is often edited to translate the Scots dialect that is prominent in many of his novels, including Sir Gibbie. I’ve only compared the version I read with the original (from Project Gutenberg) in few places, but I’m fairly sure that a lot of the dialogue, instead of being translated into modern English, is just explained. And most of the descriptive passages are simply left out or edited down to near-nothings. The back of the book says that Lindskoog “stepped up the pace of each chapter.” Also it says “this edition is a winner of the Gold Medallion Book Award in recognition of excellence in evangelical Christian literature.” Ouch! I don’t know why this rather wooden and tedious retelling won such an award, but I’m just not a fan.

According to Wikipedia, Lindskoog wrote, about her edited versions of classics:

I’m as much of a purist as you. I absolutely love these authors. That’s why I’m hand-polishing them for today’s readers and performing what I call literary liposuction – removing flab and fat. I keep every bit of the original story, the style, and the values – even restoring parts cut out in other versions. I know my work would make the author happy; otherwise, I wouldn’t do it

Sir Gibbie, a mute orphan with a heart of gold, is an engaging character, and the plot, although somewhat convoluted, is interesting and even surprising at times. But again, I just couldn’t enjoy the story as it was told in this edited version. I plan to try the original at some point. What I’ve read of George Macdonald’s writing shows him as a much better writer than this “literary liposuction” version displays.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Mar30

I didn’t know that Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. I must have been busy the day that was announced. At any rate, I’m fairly sure he deserves the honor. There are layers of meaning in his latest novel, Klara and the Sun, and I’m not at all sure I got all or even most of them.

I don’t want to write too much about the plot of the novel because half of the fun is figuring out as you read what exactly is going on, who Klara is, what her abilities are, what this society and culture she lives in is like. We do know from the beginning of the story that Klara is an AF, and Artificial Friend, and what that means for Klara and for the teenager for whom she becomes an AF, is played out over the course of the novel.

The book asks some important questions about life and death: is death something to be avoided at all costs? What would you sacrifice to avoid dying? What would you sacrifice to keep someone you love alive?

Also there are questions about life and love: what is the essence of a human being? What is it you love when you say that you love someone? Is human love eternal, lifelong, and if it’s not, is it really love at all? Is the essence of love self sacrifice or imitation or something else? Is love letting go or holding close or both?

And finally, the questions are about technology and our relationship to it: is technology good or bad? Is it killing us or replacing us or enhancing our humanity? Can we become, through technological means, gene therapy or some other futuristic tinkering with our bodies and brains and genetics, something superhuman, better than human? Or are we losing something precious, our very humanity, when we try to create (super)man in the image of a god instead of living as a created being, under the authority of God, imago Dei?

My reviews of other books by Sir Ishiguro:

I look forward to reading more books by Kashuo Ishiguro, and I will be thinking about the implications of the story of Klara and the Sun for a good while. (Fell free to discuss details and spoilers in the comments. I’d love to hear your thoughts if you’ve read the book.)

The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Jan30

I am working through a reading project, a Century of Reading —reading one book published in each year from 1851-1950. My choice for a book published in 1852 was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance. It’s not a long novel, a little over 200 pages, but it took me the entire month of January, reading a couple of chapters at a time, to finish it. And then, I was confused.

Questions (with spoilers): What was the relationship between Zenobia and Westervelt? Why was Priscilla so docile and weak-willed? Was Coverdale actually in love with one of the two women in the story? What was the meaning of the masquerade scene at the end? How did Zenobia lose her money? Why does Zenobia commit suicide? What kind of person is Coverdale really? Is he a reliable narrator or an unreliable one? What do the personal love lives of these four main characters have to do with the experimental farm called Blithedale? Is the failure of such a utopian community inevitable? Why?

I already knew about the connection between Hawthorne’s experiences at Brook Farm, the failed Transcendentalist experiment in communal living, and this novel written many years later. I read the Introduction by John Updike in my Modern Library edition and found not much to illuminate or answer my questions. I read the Wikipedia article, and a few other pieces, mostly feminist musings on the character of Zenobia, and still no answers. Then, I found this article, Love Conquers All, at an online journal called The New Atlantis. Although it didn’t answer all of my questions, it certainly was helpful, giving me some perspective on the novel.

I think, whether he knew it or not, Hawthorne was writing in part about the dangers of idol worship. Each of the main characters in the novel is looking for someone or something to worship, someone or something to give his or her life meaning and purpose. And God, for the most part, is ignored or given short shrift. Hollingsworth is completely wrapped up in his scheme of reforming criminals. Zenobia worships Hollingsworth and accommodates even her most cherished views to his overpowering sermons. Priscilla silently worships Zenobia and Hollingsworth, but her high god is shown to be Hollingsworth. Coverdale flits from one god to another: the community and its high purpose, his own poetry, his own individuality, the beauty he finds in Zenobia and in nature itself, maybe Priscilla. Coverdale can never commit to anything or anyone, and that is his tragedy.

The great tragedy for all of the characters in this novel is that they try to create heaven without God, and they all end up without any meaning or purpose at all. They give lip service to a Creator, but like all of us, their foolish hearts try to find Him in the worship of the things and people He has created. I recently heard a story about a Bible study group that was studying the book of Romans, and one of the members asked incredulously, “You mean good people who try to do everything right are not righteous in God’s sight? A good person will not necessarily go to heaven?” This novel (and the book of Romans) show how being good, having good intentions, trying to worship good things, is never enough. We are more deceived, even as we look into our own hearts, than we can know.

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles. . . . But you see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.  Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die.  But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Romans 1:21-23; 5:6-8

And yet there is hope. Here’s what Hawthorne wrote about Zenobia’s body, recovered from the stream after her suicide.

“One hope I had; and that, too, was mingled half with fear. She knelt, as if in prayer. With the last, choking consciousness, her soul, bubbling out through her lips as it may be, had given itself up to the Father, reconciled and penitent. . . . The flitting moment, after Zenobia sank into the dark pool–when her breath was gone, and her soul at her lips–was as long, in its capacity of God’s infinite forgiveness, as the lifetime of the world.”

p.213, The Blithedale Romance

10 Best Adult Novels I Read in 2021

Dec28
  • Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry (re-read)
  • That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis (re-read)
  • The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
  • The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham
  • Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
  • His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik
  • The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
  • Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  • Reunion by Fred Uhlman
  • Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (re-read)

First there are the re-reads: Hannah Coulter, That Hideous Strength, and Mansfield Park. Hannah Coulter was just as good as I remembered it. This fictional memoir of an old woman remembering her life and the lives of her children made me think about my grown children and how their lives have taken such different turns and directions from what I expected. Russell Moore writes about “why you should read Hannah Coulter”, and I second his motion.

“Most people now are looking for a ‘better place’, which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one. . . . There is no ‘better place’ than this, not in this world. and it is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it, and keeping of it, that this world is joined to heaven.”

~Hannah Coulter, p. 83

I re-read all three of Lewis’s space trilogy books this year: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. I must say that I enjoyed That Hideous Strength the most of the three, whereas previously I thought Perelandra was my favorite. That Hideous Strength is just so prophetic. How did Lewis know that men and women would become so confused about gender roles or that mixing Christianese (talk) with pagan concepts would become such a problem? Or that many would move past naturalistic materialism straight into the occult? Just like 1984 by George Orwell, which I understand was written partially as a response to Lewis’s book, That Hideous Strength is full of images and ideas that speak directly to today’s issues: the manipulation of the press/media, police brutality and accountability, psychological techniques used for rehabilitation, crime and punishment, education, gender roles, procreation or the lack thereof, and much more. I read That Hideous Strength with Cindy Rollins’ Patreon group, and we had lots of good discussion about all of these ideas.

The Death of Ivan Ilych and Reunion were two more books I read along with the Literary Life podcast folks (Angelina Stanford, Thomas Brooks, and Cindy Rollins), and I’m sure I enjoyed them extra-specially because of the podcast discussions. Both books are novellas, rather than full length novels, and both are well worth your time.

“He felt that he was trapped in such a mesh of lies that it was difficult to make sense out of anything. Everything she did for him was done strictly for her sake; and she told him she was doing for her sake what she actually was, making this seem so incredible that he was bound to take it to mean just the reverse.”

~The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham was a book read back in February, about a woman torn between fidelity to a seemingly loveless marriage and adultery with a seemingly exciting and passionate man. The keyword is “seemingly.” I didn’t review this book, but here’s a review at Educating Petunia that includes thoughts on the movie version as well. I think I’d like to watch the movie sometime, and I was reminded of this reading project that I’d like to restart in 2022. So many projects, so little persistence.

“You know, my dear child, that one cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one’s soul.”

~The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham

Our Mutual Friend was my Dickens novel for the year, and although it’s not my favorite Dickens, any book by Dickens stands head and shoulders above the pack. I also watch duh mini-series of OMF and enjoyed that quite a bit. I plan to read Hard Times (with the Literary Life folks) and maybe re-read David Copperfield (my favorite Dickens novel) in 2022.

“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it for anyone else.”

Our Mutual Friend, Mr. Rokesmith

I discovered Naomi Novik’s fantasy novels early in 2021, both Spinning Silver and her Temeraire series about Napoleonic era dragons and men working together to defeat Napoleon and remake the world, especially England, as a comfortable and welcoming place for friendly working dragons. These book are just fun, and if you like adult fantasy, with some non-explicit hanky-panky going on (not the focus of the novels), then I recommend these.

I also read Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive trilogy in early 2021 while I was coughing with Covid, beginning with The Way of Kings. It was good, absorbing, with lots of good character development and plot twists that I didn’t see coming. This author is so prolific, more than thirty, mostly huge, sprawling novels published, that I will never read all of his books, but I may dip back in again to his Cosmere (fantasy world), from time to time. The following quote was particularly timely:

“There are worse things . . . than a disease. When you have one, it reminds you that you’re alive. Makes you fight for what you have. When the disease has run its course, normal healthy life seems wonderful by comparison.”

Brightness Shallon in The Way of Kings, p. 506

Fanny Price and Mansfield Park. I knew I had read Mansfield Park before, but all I could remember was the play-within-a-novel that turns into a disaster. I initially found both the book and the protagonist somewhat lackluster and plodding, but the more I read, and the more I listened to The Literary Life podcast episodes about the book, the more I grew to love Fanny. I can only aspire to the humility and servanthood that she exemplifies. (Aspiring to humility is something of an oxymoron, but it actually makes sense in a Chestertonian sort of way.) Anyway, I would like to be able to keep my mouth shut more often as Fanny does and to think of myself less and others more. I think that sort of attitude comes by practice, though, and it’s hard to be willing to practice humility.

So, what are the themes that emerge from all this fictional reading? Endure hardship patiently. And brighten the corner where you are. If I could learn these two lessons, deep in my soul, by means of story or situational experience, I’d be, well, certainly better, farther along the path to virtue. Not that I read to become virtuous, but stories do seep into the soul.

What fiction formed your life in 2021? What novel(s) will you be reading in 2022?

The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Aug30

Our family–me, some of my adult children and their spouses–are participating in a book club together this year. We’re taking turns choosing a book a month. The July book was The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel. It was a novel about a Ponzi scheme and the people who become enmeshed in it, both before and after the scheme goes bust. In August we read a book of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who also wrote the novels Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, and Americanah. She is a good writer, and although I always enjoy full length novels more than I do short stories, these stories were well worth the read.

I started a couple of weeks ago and read one story each night before bedtime. It was a good way to digest a book of seemingly unrelated short stories that are at least somewhat tied together by theme if not characters or plot. Reading only one story at a time gave me an opportunity to reflect and learn from each one.

The stories are about cultural encounter and clash between men and women, parents and children, Christian and Muslim, younger and older generations, modern and ancient, Nigeria and the United States. For the most part the tone and the outlook of each story are rather bleak. With one exception, the cultural and generational encounters in each of the stories are fraught with misunderstanding and even tragedy. In the first story “Cell One” a young man learns a lesson when he is imprisoned for a few days. In the second, “Imitation”, a properly submissive young wife confronts her husband’s blatant adultery. Another story is about a black woman from Nigeria who becomes the girlfriend and lover of a white man in Hartford, Connecticut. As in the other stories, the romance/story ends sadly, not with bang but rather a whimper.

The one story that shows two people coming to some sort of bridge of cultures is called “A Private Experience.” Two women are trapped together in a small store by violence and riots in the streets of a small market village in Nigeria. One is a Hausa Muslim woman, a mother; the other is a young Christian college student from the city. They are different is so many ways: economic status, religion, age, experience. And yet as they are thrown together, the two learn to trust and help each other, and they survive. This tale, too, does not have a happy ending, and yet there is a spark of hope in the patient endurance of the Muslim woman and the awakening understanding and empathy of the young Christian student.

And on it goes. A Nigerian nanny misunderstands the actions of her artist employer. A young wife whose son has died is applying for asylum in the United States, but she is unable to explain the complexities of her situation to the customs official who is taking her application. There’s a Cain and Abel story featuring a girl and her older, favored brother. Two Africans in college housing become friends and bond over their grievances about past lovers in spite of their differing religious perspectives. An arranged marriage sours very quickly.

Then, the last and culminating story , “The Headstrong Historian”, tells of a grandmother and the granddaughter who carries on her strength and cultural awareness even though the interceding generation has been Christianized and diminished by white colonization. In all of these stories, when it appears, Christianity is dour and powerless, never a fulfillment of African destiny and understanding, but rather a threat to the deep roots of African greatness or an empty husk to be discarded in the wake of modern twentieth century wisdom. This story begins when the grandmother is young in the late nineteenth century, immersed in African thought patterns and African religion and African community life. The next generation, the son and his wife, accept Christianity, Catholicism, and are made weak and pitiful and rigid by the tenets of the new religion. Then, finally comes the granddaughter, a new, educated, strong woman who learns her true history and goes back to her roots “reimagining the lives and smells of her grandmother’s world.” She writes a book, subtitled A Reclaimed History of Southern Nigeria. But nothing in the story indicates that the granddaughter understands the darker elements of attempted murder and revenge and slavery and mistreatment of women that form part of her history just as much as the depredations of colonialism. The granddaughter changes her name from Grace to Afamefuna, “My Name Will Not Be Lost”, but I wonder if she really knows the meaning and background of her new-old name.

July 30th Thoughts

Jul30

Today is the birthday of Emily Bronte, author of Wuthering Heights, which seems to be a rather polarizing book. One person on Facebook who was reading it asked, “Does it ever move beyond unhappy people causing misery to themselves and others?” Someone else said, “Anyone who says they love Wuthering Heights is lying to sound smart.” But yet another reader said, “The prose just wraps me up and sweeps me away and I can’t help but love it. My relationship with that book is such a mess.”

I’m not lying when I say that I liked the story, even though I found almost all of the characters unsympathetic and sadly unlikeable, especially Heathcliff and Cathy. I’m not sure what that opinion says about me as a reader or as a person, but nevertheless I recommend you form your own opinion by reading Wuthering Heights. If you get fifty pages in and you hate it, I give you permission to quit and go read Jan Karon or P.G. Wodehouse to get the taste out of your palate. (Or you could try Diary of a Nobody. See below.)

Allan Wesley Eckert (not born on this date), author of Incident at Hawk’s Hill, a Newbery Honor book in 1972, “spent much of his youth hitchhiking around the country, living off the land and learning about wildlife from direct observation.” He was born in 1931, so this hitchhiking would have taken place in the late forties/early fifties. I wonder what his family thought about his choice to wander about and live off the land. This was before the era of the hippies and free-spirited sixties peaceniks. He wrote a lot of books. I wonder if he wrote one about his youthful experiences hitchhiking about the country.

I read the first couple of chapters of Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith, a book I picked up while Engineer Husband and I were in Oxford. It’s a fictionalized diary of an ordinary man in the late nineteenth century who lives in a small house outside the City (London?) with his wife Carrie. The man’s name is Charles Pooter, and he’s a perfectly ordinary little man who takes himself quite seriously, which makes the book quite funny. The humor is dry and unassuming, but definite. For example, it begins:

“Why should I not publish my diary? I have often seen reminiscences of people I have never even heard of, and I fail to see—because I do not happen to be a ‘Somebody’—why my diary should not be interesting. My only regret is that I did not commence it when I was a youth.”

CHARLES POOTER
The Laurels
Brickfield Terrace
Holloway

George Grossmith went on to become a famous comic actor, starring in many of Gilbert and Sullivan’s most famous operas: as The Sorcerer, The First Lord in H.M.S. Pinafore, Ko-Ko in The Mikado, Robin Oakapple in Ruddigore, Bunthorne in Patience, and Jack Point in The Yeoman of the Guard. George’s brother, Weedon, illustrated Diary of a Nobody, and the illustrations are a great part of the charm of the book. I’m looking forward to savoring it over a period of several days.

This post is probably the first time that Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff and Cathy and George Grossmith’s Mr. Pooter have been referenced in the same piece of writing, but perhaps there will be connections as I continue reading Diary of a Nobody.