Mendel's Dwarf

Simon Mawer's novel is almost Shakespearean in its scope, ranging from sly farce to a tragedy that takes on its own momentum. In this skillfully crafted and as always marvelously written story, he takes on big themes about determinism and identity and the role that choice does in fact play.

The narrator, Benedict Lambert, is a geneticist and great x 3-nephew of Gregor Mendel, the 19th-century Augustinian friar who founded the science of genetics. He is also a dwarf, the result of a small but fateful mutation in the DNA of his two normal parents. He is unhappy with his fate and makes it his mission to isolate the chromosome responsible for his condition. He tells people who condescendingly call him brave that he is not brave, because to be brave you must have a choice.

But of course he does have choices, and for the most part he makes good ones. The drama comes, however, from some bad choices he makes. In his willingness to tinker with genetic makeup, Lambert mirrors on a small scale (sorry for the pun, but it's the kind Ben makes all the time) the ethical quandary facing geneticists in our time -- where is the border between genetic screening and genetic manipulation?

The parallel narrative goes back in time to Mendel himself, and looks at how this priest, who was curiously lacking in the normal expressions of piety, patiently monitored his pea plants to formulate a theory of dominant and recessive genes that remains one of the most revolutionary scientific concepts in history. The depiction of Pater Gregor's devotion to his experiments is on a par with the passion for scientific discovery that Andrea Barrett portrays so well in her novels and short stories.

Like Barrett, Mawer immerses the reader authoritatively in arcane discussions of science, but these are woven so skillfully into the narrative that the reader is compelled to follow. Mawer is in fact a trained biologist and has taught the subject, so he is totally comfortable with the science and makes the reader feel the same way.

Ben's self-pity is never maudlin, but it is very real. It reminds us that even in a world where we admire film performances of an actor like Peter Dinklage, dwarfs in real life experience a type of rejection we can hardly comprehend. Mawer's portrayal is sensitive, never shying from silly or even crude observations, but avoiding any number of pitfalls. Ben remains a thoroughly sympathetic character even through a denouement that is intimated rather than actually shown.

Much as I liked The Glass Room, I think I might like this book even better. It is set primarily in London, with Mendel's life taking place in Brno, now in the Czech Republic. Mawer once again has an opportunity to feature the composer Leos Janacek and particularly his piano piece "On an Overgrown Path." The writing is terrific in both novels, but I think the seamless compression of so many layers of meaning is even more successful in this book.

Just a short sample of Mawer's art as Ben describes going to his new job at the Royal Institute for Genetics:

It is housed in one of those redbrick piles in Kensington that serve indifferently as museums, hospitals, Anglo-Catholic churches, or university colleges -- buildings reeking with that nineteenth-century neo-gothic conviction that almost everything has been done and proved, and anything missing is just around the corner and will be pretty straightforward when you come to it. 

The Institute is strung out uneasily between the old and the new, between tradition and innovation, between the imperial past and the empirical present. On the one hand there is the old building with its ogive windows and gothic vaulting and statues of long-dead scientists in niches like sex maniacs skulking in the shadows; on the other hand, very much on the other hand, accessible through the kind of elevated plastic walkway that you find in airports, gleaming and humming like a machine, are the Gordon Hewison Laboratories, a cathedral of the new age where priests and scribes decipher and transcribe the texts, and find damnation written there just as clearly as they ever did in medieval times.

As a personal footnote, let me add that I was a bit distracted early in the novel by Mawer's references to Mendel as a friar and his garb as a soutane. After my years in the Jesuits, I feel like something of an expert on ecclesiastical nomenclature and dress. I had it in my head that Augustinians are, like Benedictines, a monastic order whose members are more properly referred to as monks. Finally, I went to Wikipedia and found out that Augustinians are indeed a mendicant order like the Franciscans and Dominicans and are properly called friars. In an article on St. Thomas Abbey in Brno, Wikipedia even address the anomaly of it being called an abbey and its head an abbot, though by rights it should be priory and prior. Still a mystery to me is the description of Mendel's dress as a soutane, when it should be a habit. But in fact the standard images of Mendel show him in what looks like a normal cassock with buttons rather than a habit with scapular and hood. At this point, however, I'm ready to concede that Mawer has done his research and has his reasons for describing things as he does.

New Year's resolution

Looking over the past few months of my book blog, I'm a bit disturbed about the paucity of finished books. I blame the presidential campaign in part because I spent a lot of time watching cable television coverage for background for my twice weekly MarketWatch column and this cut into my prime reading time in the early evening.

I'd like once again to envisage reading at least a book a week, as I did after discovering the blog from Nina Sakovitch and her project to read a book a day. This doesn't mean I won't continue to read a number of books at the same time -- one or two in print, maybe an e-book and an audiobook. But I would like for books finished and reviewed here to average four or five a month -- one a week.

I consider film and television to be viable alternatives to the benefits we derive from good books -- entertainment, information, a feeling for real-life issues, a widening of horizons, and, often, emotional catharsis. But too much of the time I spend in front of the TV is wasted on vacuous programming. Yes, we are all entitled to down time -- wasted time -- but I think I overindulge.

Some of the books I read may be as empty as these TV shows, but generally they have some redeeming quality in a sense of place, a sly humor, a quality of writing that is entertaining and, for me as a writer, instructive. Most of the books I read offer the benefits listed above in far greater measure than all but the very best on TV, so I think my time is better spent with them.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union

It's hard not to like Michael Chabon and to appreciate the rambunctious quality of his prose. After the dazzling The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, he succeeds again in this book in creating a world that is coherent in itself while outside the bounds of normal experience.

The bestseller is famously about an alternate history of a Jewish homeland after the war, when the attempt to establish a Jewish refuge in Palestine fails. Instead, a sizable population is settled in Alaska, where, in a cross between an American Indian reservation and Hong Kong, they are leased a specific district in Sitka for 60 years. The action of the novel takes place in the weeks just before the Reversion -- the end of the lease -- when the district reverts to American control and most of the Jews must find a different home.

But this is much more than just an entertaining alternate history, clever as it is. This is a largely successful effort to capture in a story that is equal parts satire and thriller the entire sweep of Jewish history, from the irony of being the Chosen People to the undying hope for a Messiah.

The protagonist, Meyer Landsman (the first of many punny names, with Willie Dick being one of the most awful punned names since Pussy Galore), is a detective who, in the manner of all hard-boiled detectives, has gone to seed over a woman. When a junkie is murdered in his flophouse hotel, Landsmann sets out to find the killer even as the countdown begins for his jurisdiction to vanish. The search for the murderer, which he must eventually pursue after he has been suspended from the police force, leads him to discover a conspiratorial plot to change history and give Jews a new homeland.

Chabon's alternate history, like all good works in this genre, is not that different from real history. The Sitka district, with the Jewish population crowded into a tightly limited space, is a fanciful version of the ghettos in Warsaw and other cities prior to the war. The establishment of a post-Sitka territory is depicted as a heinous act of terrorism, sponsored by a certain Western government for blatantly cynical motives. In the view of many, of course, this description fits the establishment of the state of Israel.

Chabon luxuriates in the language and traditions of Central European Jews, punning in Yiddish, extrapolating and inventing from real traditions to create new arcane customs and foods. His language is prolix and florid, and at times tiring, but relentlessly imaginative and usually compelling. His descriptions are gritty and detailed, his images vivid, the overall atmosphere tellingly rendered.

There are many strands woven into the plot -- the theme of chess and why people are obsessed with it, the racial rivalries between Alaska's native Indians and "Americans" as well as with the transplanted Jewish population, the relations between fathers and sons and between husbands and wives, and ex-wives. All together, these plot lines create a rich texture for the reader while unraveling the mystery moves the plot along.

Fittingly, it all ends on an ambivalent note with the future very uncertain. Landsman seems to have found his footing again, and probably regained the love of his ex-wife, so it can all be seen as a redemption, but in the sense of being a vindication of the redeeming sort of life Landsman had always attempted to live.

Reading and drinking

Having made the point in the previous post that I am widening the scope of this blog partly to avoid giving the impression that I spend all my time eating and drinking, given the much greater frequency of posting on my food blog, here my first post is about drinking.

It doesn't make much sense to call interim posts "Current reading" and for lack of a better title, much of my current reading is concerned with drinking. I'm regularly reading Philip Greene's To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion and I have started a Hemingway countdown on the food blog, akin to the famous Julia Child blog -- 52 weeks, 55 cocktails! At the present rate, I'll be done in far fewer than 52 weeks.

I'm using the cocktail entries then as a way to explore Hemingway's short stories, most of which I've never read. I've had the Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway sitting on my shelf for eons, and now when Greene cites one of the stories as mentioning the cocktail in question, I read that story. Needless to say, the stories themselves go well beyond the mention of the cocktail. More on them later.

I'm also reading How to Love Wine by Eric Asimov, the wine critic for the New York Times -- and Isaac Asimov's nephew! He has a refreshing take on wine appreciation, debunking the wine snobs and their slavish devotion to points and trends. It's music to my ears. I stopped going to Calvert Woodley, at least on Saturday mornings, because I couldn't stand the press of balding, gray-haired, pot-bellied men (like myself!) airing their opinions (unlike me!) about wine and chasing the latest recommendation from the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post. There's too much good wine out there and taste is too subjective to pretend that there is a canon of wines that one must have and those that must be avoided.

The other nonfiction book I'm reading is Napoleon: Life, Legacy, and Image: A Biography, which I'm reviewing for the Washington Independent Review of Books. It's a good read, but I'll save my comments for the review, which I'll cross-post here.

I'm having another go at Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union, and I'm making much better progress than when I tried before and abandoned it. Chabon is unquestionably a good writer, but his prolix language is sometimes tough going and his characters are not always so sympathetic -- like the protagonist Meyer Landsmann in this book. But his wit and irony are engaging and this is a marvelous alternate history. It was a recent conversation with Fred Pollack that sent me back to this book, as he was praising Chabon's newest, Telegraph Avenue. Fred, a poet who teaches creative writing at George Washington University, has never steered me wrong.

Bedside reading is The Chester Chronicles by Kermit Moyer, one of the discoveries I made recently on the remainder shelf at Politics & Prose. The writing is elegant, if a bit studied. I'm not big on coming of age stories, but the appeal for me here is the re-creation of the world of the 1950s -- the world I grew up in. The format of linked stories is also just right for periodic reading.

On audiobooks, I'm "reading" Robert Kaplan's The Revenge of Geography. I'm still not ready to listen to books while I'm walking the dog, but I am now making more of an effort to listen to books when I'm in the car for longer than 10 or 15 minutes. Kaplan is something of a soulmate for me because he pays so much attention to geography, which is the basis for my book, The New Superregions of Europe.

Blog posts

I've decided I need to widen the scope of this blog. Up until now I have generally only blogged a type of book review when I finish a book. As a result, the rate of posts has been pretty low. I read most every day, but there are many books I start and put aside, especially since I'm usually reading a number of books at once.

Also, in the meantime, my blogging has evolved. When I started it was almost grudging -- I resisted blogging for a long time because I write for a living and this seemed like writing for a hobby. In the meantime, I've come to see blogging as a professional activity. I am a writer and blogging has become a major medium for writers. I have several of my own blogs and have started ghostwriting a blog for Andrea about her practice. I've re-jiggered my mediabistro profile to feature blogging, though admittedly I've had no queries since I did.

I'm posting like crazy to my food blog -- now called my food and drinks blog -- and people may well get the idea I'm so busy eating and drinking I never have time to read. But, as I said, I'm reading all the time. So I'd like to make this blog more supple, posting more often about books I'm reading, more or less as the spirit takes me. A book may be mentioned once and never again if I lay it aside. Or when I finish a book, the final comment may not be the same complete review as before because of previous comments I've made. I can perhaps try to link to earlier comments, but given the spotty nature of the search function of blogspot -- odd, considering it is a Google product -- that may not always work.

The Devil's Waters

This thriller by David Robbins has a lot going for it. It involves the very topical Somali pirates and features a little-known crack military team, the U.S. Air Force Pararescue jumpers. The action is situated in Somalia, Djibouti and a French freighter in the Gulf of Aden, all suitably exotic.

Robbins is an accomplished writer and keeps the pace moving. His descriptions are crisp and his grasp of military operations and hardware is authoritative, so that the book has a solid feel to it. Interestingly, he alternates the point of view between the Somali pirates, led by Yusuf Raage and his cousin, and the American "PJs", led by LB DiNardo. Robbins gives Raage a surprising depth of characterization with a certain amount of sympathy for what drives the Somalis to piracy. The airmen are placed in some brutal situations, and even though they are hard-bitten, they don't remain unaffected.

Perhaps because Robbins has set the bar so high in this altogether compelling thriller, I found myself missing a little more depth in the American protagonists, and especially LB. What we see of his interior life is fairly flat and the banter among the PJ team doesn't really substitute for characterization that gives the reader any empathy. In fact, I found I had more sympathy for Yusuf and his clan than for the PJs. As a result, LB -- this "call signal" stands for Little Bastard -- lives up to his nickname, unfortunately for a reader who would like to identify more with the hero.

The callous cynicism behind a plot that involves a secret shipment of a super-weapon to Iran is just credible enough and there are other highlights -- such as the bitter and broken Russian captain of the freighter, Drozdov. The enigmatic Russian scientist, Irina, is less convincing. Her appearances are too intermittent and too much of her story is told rather than shown. And the tease of a potential relationship with LB helps neither plot nor characterization.

The action is good but the post-climactic denouement involves too much telling as a new character comes in to tie up the loose ends.

I came across this book because Robbins had a review in the Washington Independent Review of Books and his bio described him as a novelist living in Richmond. For the first time, I took advantage of my Amazon Prime privilege of "borrowing" an e-book. It turns out that these can only be read on Kindle devices, not apps -- I guess so that they are able to take it back -- which is not ideal for me, since my first-generation Kindle is not always convenient to read. (Authors, btw, do get a payment each time a book is borrowed.)

Remainders: Get 'em While They Last

My riff on remainders appeared today in The Washington Independent Review of Books under the appealing new heading of "Slow Reads":

I’ve discovered a partial cure for the condition that afflicts many of us: not being able to go into Politics & Prose, our great local independent bookstore, without buying a bag full of books. Now, I go directly to the remainder shelves and do my shopping among the bargain books. I still come away with several books but spend a lot less money.

Remainders are those copies of hardcovers and trade paperbacks that the publisher sells at a steep discount to make room in the warehouse and get inventory off its account books. Because they are the end game in a production method that is in the process of disappearing, remainders will soon be an historic artifact.

What I like about shopping for remainders at P&P is that somebody has made an effort to find good books to put on the bargain shelf. These may be by well known authors, but often they’re by writers you’ve never read.

In a book culture too often in the grip of group-think — book clubs all reading the same handful of bestsellers that get reviewed and promoted just for that audience — it may seem quaint to pick up a book and buy it just because you like what you see in sampling a few pages. We all consider our time so precious that the idea of reading a book that hasn’t been vetted by one of the arbiters of popular culture seems extremely risky.

At Barnes & Noble, which seems to acquire its bargain books by the container load, you are indeed taking your chances on buying something that could be a waste of time. But at an independent like P&P, which has already filtered out much of the detritus, dipping into remainders can be quite rewarding.

In earlier forays on the remainder shelves, I have discovered new writers and reconnected with others I’d forgotten. For instance, I once picked up Simon Mawer’s The Gospel of Judas as a remainder. It was an intriguing book that I liked well enough to buy another novel of his (at full price!), The Glass Room, which I loved. He is now one of my favorite authors. Another time, I came across Forgetfulness by Ward Just, which was apt enough, because I’d forgotten that I really liked his novel The Translator when I’d read it years earlier.

Just, of course, is a prolific and well established mid-list author who fortunately has a base of readers who consistently buy his books at full price. Authors don’t get any money from the sale of remainders, so he’s hardly relying on my purchase of a remainder copy to make a living. But it made me much likelier to look for his new books and consider buying them. For his part, Mawer has advanced to being a certified book-club-worthy author.

On a recent trip to the remainder shelves, I picked up four books — for the price of one! One was I Curse the River of Time by the Norwegian author Per Petterson, who became relatively well known in this country for Out Stealing Horses. Another was The Chester Chronicles by Kermit Moyer, whom I’d never heard of but who utterly charmed me with the opening pages of this book. A third novel was City of Veils by Zoë Ferraris, a mystery thriller set in Saudi Arabia.

I hadn’t seen reviews of any of these titles and never heard of two of the authors. It may well be that I won’t like the books as much as I did the opening pages. But I only paid a little more for each than I would for a triple-grande cappuccino.

The fourth book was nonfiction, The Battle for Christendom by Frank Welsh, an account of the crucial role in European history played by the Council of Constance in the 15th century. Welsh argues that we pay too much attention to Western Europe in our study of history and ignore important events in Central and Eastern Europe. Constance, he claims, was more important than Agincourt in European history. In any case, it appealed to my fascination with the invisible borders running through the continent that I discovered while researching my own book, The New Superregions of Europe.

So a good haul, I think, which may end up just adding to the unread volumes on my bookshelf but could well afford me hours of pleasure, enhanced by the fact that I discovered these all on my own (with a little help from the P&P elves).

Darrell Delamaide is a writer and journalist in Washington, D.C. His latest book is The Grand Mirage.