Dark Star Safari

Paul Theroux wants you to know exactly how hopeless Africa is. To prove it he undertook a journey overland from Cairo to Cape Town, largely through East Africa, bringing his vastly cynical powers of observation to yet another trip.

As I said in our book group discussion, I am in awe of Theroux's writing -- his ability to observe and describe places, people and situations. He is a compelling writer with great talent.

His venturing into places like Ethiopia and Sudan, which most of us will never visit, gives the reader a precious view into these societies.

That said, I found I could read this book only in small doses. His unrelenting cynicism and condescension and general unlikability put me off. We discussed in the group whether you have to like a writer to like his or her book. The problem is that in travel writing, which is essentially a memoir,  the writer's personality will intrude, which doesn't necessarily happen in other genres.

I finished only about a third of the book before our discussion. And, though I consider it better than the 3 or 4 earlier books of his I've read, I will probably put it aside for a while, and finish it, if I do, at a later date.

One of the points I made about Africa is that we see it as ridden with ineradicable problems because we are demanding that they organize their society the way we do. Africans lived happily in more primitive circumstances until two centuries ago, when Europeans invaded in a serious manner. In a global economy, of course, there is no way to preserve that primitive society. But rather than let Africans evolve at their own pace and in their own way, we have imposed a Western template on them that does not seem well suited.

Perhaps, I suggested, the inevitable Chinese colonization of Africa, as that ravenous economy scours the planet for natural resources, will provide new impetus for modernizing African society.

Maybe Africa is hopeless. But at various points, India, China and Brazil also seemed to have insurmountable problems. They have not yet succeeded in overcoming all of them, but they have advanced considerably.

Theroux's anecdotal account of his idiosyncratic journey through Africa makes for entertaining travel writing, but it is hardly the basis for any considered judgement about the future of the continent. It may already be outdated and someday, no doubt, it will appear as quaint as the 19th-century travel journals do to us today.

Graham Greene

"One never knows when the blow may fall." Anyone who thinks the book can add nothing to the marvelous Carol Reed film "The Third Man," need read no further than this first line to realize that some of Graham Greene's genius could not be translated into film.

This was one of the revelations from taking part in Jim Grady's 2-hour "seminar" on Greene at Politics & Prose. Grady -- author of the novel that led to one of the best spy films of all time, "Three Days of the Condor" -- has a keen eye for what makes a book suspenseful, but also dramatic in the full sense of the word.

He said one of the keys to Greene's success was his insistence on the necessity of morality. "The writer takes a moral position," Grady said. He recommended John Gardner's On Moral Fiction for a further discussion of that aspect. (I have The Art of Fiction on my shelf, and have now ordered the other one.)

The mood of dark disorientation holds for the novel The Third Man as well as the movie. Oddly, the book was published after the movie came out. Greene said he needed to write a fuller treatment in order to write the screenplay. Differences between the two come from changes made in the course of filming.

The ability to suddenly drive home a universal truth with a dazzling economy of language makes this a far more finished work that the modest introduction might suggest. "We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us" is a sentiment almost anyone can identify with.

Then there is the great line delivered with such panache by Orson Welles in the movie: "In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace - and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock."

In discussing The Third Man together with The Quiet American and Our Man in Havana, Grady said he was looking for "noir" novels. The three books also took place at pivotal moments in American history -- Europe as the Cold War began, Indochina as surreptitious American involvement began, and Cuba before Castro's coup. And, Grady noted, in all three, the hero was responsible for the death of someone important.

I didn't have a chance to re-read American and Havana for this discussion, so I remained mostly passive. I felt, perhaps because I had read it recently, that the discussion on Third Man was more stimulating. I remember finding Quiet American chilling. At the time, it it fit in with a class I'd had in college where the teacher talked about the dangerous naivete of Americans, as illustrated in the class by Herman Melville's Benito Cereno. 

In the P&P discussion, one participant noted the similarities between Havana and Tailor of Panama, so exactly parallel you might think Le Carre was paying homage to Greene. The latest chronologically, it was the lest favorite of the group, seeming more like a satire or farce than a genuine noir novel.

The Inheritance of Loss

Kiran Desai's prizewinning autobiographical novel is a searing picture of how poverty and corruption can damage the human spirit. But the victims are not the poorest. While the young woman Sai -- even the name tells you who she's modeled on -- appears to be the main character, this is really a book about two men, the judge and the cook, known primarily not by their names but by the titles telling us their place in society.

The judge, Sai's grandfather, is a tortured, almost monstrous, human being, emotionally deformed by years of suppressed feeling. His violently misogynist treatment of his wife, shown in repeated flashbacks, and his generally misanthropic behavior cannot even be redeemed by his devotion to his dog, who bears the equally generic name Mutt. It is the cook who steals the show. He is the one who feels genuine affection for Sai when the orphan is taken -- somewhat inexplicably -- into the judge's semi-derelict mansion in Kalimpong. It is the cook who lives for his son and for his son's sake sends him away to make his fortune in America. It is the cook who pities the beggars who beseech the judge for help, the cook who searches the mountains for the missing Mutt, the cook in the end who is reunited happily with his son even while the province is gripped by civil strife.

Next to the judge's travails and the cook's quiet triumph, Sai's adolescent crush on her immature tutor, Gyan, is something of a subplot. Sai realizes she wants a life with wider scope in a foreign country and Gyan learns he wants a life with a much narrower scope and prefers the cowardice of tranquility to the boldness of revolution. Their brief fling is nothing more than the typical coming of age love affair. Even Gyan's betrayal of the judge's family seems relatively trifling against the larger backdrop of the social turmoil depicted in the novel, though it could have ended tragically.

Desai's uncompromising look at the squalor and cruelty of Indian society beneath the thin veneer of civilization was found to be depressing by most members of my book group. The situation seems virtually hopeless. The only escape is literally to leave the country -- as Sai plans and as we know from Desai's success is what she does -- or to accept the limited human happiness available in the small things of life, as the cook, his son, Biju, and Gyan ultimately opt for.

However, Desai is equally uncompromising in her scathing depiction of Biju's exploitation as an illegal immigrant in the U.S. Far from making his fortune -- or having any chance to do so -- Biju scrapes through the underbelly of New York, living in circumstances more squalid even than he would have at home. India, as his eventual homecoming makes clear, also offers the luxury of familiarity, in every sense of the word.

The book is beautifully written. Some book club members said the book was slow, at least at the beginning, but I found the powerful writing compelling from the first page. The descriptions, the insights, the turns of phrase carry the reader on a torrent. So many examples, but to cite just one:

[The judge rejects the supplications of two beggars] In this life, he remembered again, you must stop your thoughts if you wished to remain intact, or guilt and pity would take everything from you, even yourself from yourself....This was why he had retired. India was too messy for justice; it ended only in humiliation for the person in authority....If you let such people get an inch, they's take everything you had -- families yoked together because of guilt on one side, and an unending greed and capacity for dependence on the other -- and if they knew you were susceptible, everyone handed their guilt along so as to augment yours: old guilt, new guilt, any passed-on guilt whatever.

The historical setting -- a separatist uprising in the 1980s to establish an independent Gorkhaland -- provided further education in the multi-ethnic composition of India and the resulting tensions that we remain largely oblivious to. The racial strife and the recurring resistance to the overlay of British colonial administration create a toxic brew that occasionally overflows into violence. The drama of this uprising gave added depth to the novel.

Likewise, the portrayal of the monsoon period -- the relentless corrosion of the constant rain -- was so vivid you felt drenched and lent further drama to the action of the novel.

The book, in short, is a consummate piece of writing and a very satisfying read.

William Trevor

Some 48 of Trevor's short stories from various earlier volumes are collected in Selected Stories, which is the latest book for my serial reading after short stories by Hemingway and Somerset Maugham.

I'm still early in the volume but certain patterns in the stories are already clear. They deal with ordinary people and their ordinary desperation. They are quiet stories about the disappointments, the betrayals large and small that accompany even the seemingly most insignificant lives.

"The Piano Tuner's Wives," the first story in the collection, relates the revenge the second wife of a blind piano tuner takes on the first wife by revising her husband's picture of the world, robbing him of the tangible memories he has of that first marriage. Another story has an old, tired couple's gay son stand them up for his annual birthday celebration, sending instead his current protege, who manages to betray all of them. A story called "Child's Play" portrays a boy and a girl in what we now call a blended family re-enacting the illicit affair and messy divorces that brought them into the same family until each of the "wronged parties" rights themselves. This meant the children were no longer able to control their own world through their fictional play. This gift was now lost and, the author concludes "Helplessness was their natural state" -- a line that can stand for all of Trevor's characters.

The writing is both closely observed and suggestive, economical and evocative. The characters take on layers of personality in the quick, telling sketches. The stories are literary watercolors, not oils, but satisfying vignettes of lives that scrape by with only the barest glimmer of hope.

I'll have more to say as a I finish more stories.

The Hare With Amber Eyes

Updated July 21
This is one of the best books I've ever read

This memoir by Edmund de Waal is enjoyable on several levels. It is a captivating account about a family, the Ephrussis, that once enjoyed the fame of the Rothschilds, but, mysteriously, has vanished from history. It is a history of art collecting written by a ceramicist. Best of all, it is beautifully written. One of the blurbs alludes to W.G. Sebald and I had already recognized the similarity of this memoir to the dreamy fiction or fact narratives of this German writer turned Englishman (though presumably De Waal's is all fact). The author manages the same blend of specific and universal, and in this case the specific is also reminiscent of Patrick Leigh Fermor's virtuoso use of language to describe places far removed in space and time.

De Waal's tracing the Ephrussi family to the Rue de Monceau and Parc Monceau, which I got to know well when I worked for Edouard Cointreau there, was icing on the cake for me. All the reading I've done about the Rothschilds and the history of finance also makes this memoir resonate in a special way.

I have to suspend my reading for a week or two to focus on a book for book club, but I wanted to put down some of these initial impressions while they were fresh. I'll add to them when I finish the book.

Update July 21

The charming Paris story continues in Vienna as De Waal moves on from Proust to Musil and Roth, evoking a magical history of cafes and society as his collection of Netsuke move from Paris to "Zionstrasse" in Vienna and the Palais Ephrussi on Schottengasse and Ringstrasse.

It turns out that this idyll of wealth and luxury is building to a climax that is as moving as it is horrifying, as De Waal chronicles in his measured understatement the consequences of the Anschluss and the humiliation and expropriation of his rich ancestors. The exile of his great-grandfather Viktor and his wife Emmy is moving, as is the narration of the persecution of Jews that brought an end to the Vienna of Freud and Mahler. The pitiful fate of an assimilated Jewish family that proved its loyalty by keeping its money and its life in a city threatened by Nazism is moving. The poignancy of how the Gentile servant secreted the little Japanese figurines and preserved them for the family is a miniature act of courage and generosity in a world turned upside down.

De Waal mentions that the Ephrussi summer home in Kovecses is recalled by Leigh Fermor during his trip across Europe in 1938. The Ephrussi bank figures in The Radetzky March. The Ephrussis in fact are a thread through European history, a transnational family that mocks the artificial divisions of borders and nations.

The short episodes of the netsuke with his great-uncle Iggie and their move to De Waa;'s house in London are followed by an short and elegaic visit to Odessa. Elegy in fact describes the book as a whole, for it is a vivid portrayal of a ghostly parallel universe, now forgotten, where fame and wealth were always hedged by a fragile acceptance in society.

It is an epic story, told with modesty and understatement through the narrow lens of a collection of Japanese sculptures and what they witnessed.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience

This posthumous edition of Carl Sagan's 1985 Gifford Lectures, rediscovered and edited by his wife Ann Druyan, was our book club selection for June. It stimulated an interesting discussion on natural theology, agnosticism, religion and ethics. I didn't read the whole book but a good part of it, including the key chapter on "The Religious Experience."

My view was that Sagan's ability as an astronomer to vividly describe just what a pathetic speck in the universe mankind is doesn't really help me much. I'm just as much an agnostic regarding man's place in the universe and his momentary existence in the epochs of time as I am about religion and God in general.

Certainly, given what we know now about the universe, all religion is revealed to be a social mythology. The notion of a personal God who is attentive to mankind's prayers, intervening in our lives and taking us up into heaven is, in the context of the entire universe, as improbable as the idols and superstitions of primitive tribesmen.

Just as certainly, there is a spiritual dimension to the human personality and real experiences that can only be called religious. For me personally, Teilhard de Chardin's effort to reconcile his religion with his scientific understanding in the teleological notion of God's becoming is as close to satisfying as a natural theology is likely to get. Some in our group argued against it, saying evolution does not in fact mean progress. But I'm not sure Teilhard was speaking of just progress as part of the becoming.

In any case, what is more important to me is the ethical consequences of whatever belief or value system one has in life and I found this missing in Sagan's book (it might have been in a chapter I didn't read but no one corrected me when I said this in the meeting). For this reason, I could just as well have skipped it, since I already accept his scientific view of the universe.

But the book occasioned a good discussion about things you rarely get a chance to talk about, so that alone made it worthwhile.

Under the Color of Law

This is my second Michael McGarrity novel featuring Kevin Kerney, who is embarking in this book on his new job as police chief in Santa Fe. I downloaded it to read during my trip to Santa Fe and it was a hoot to have the hero driving down Cerrillos and investigating at the College of Santa Fe (since closed), all very near to where I was staying.

McGarrity is an engaging writer and he captures New Mexico well -- and that is enough for me. Just as well, because there's not much else. Kerney, who debuted in Tularosa, which I enjoyed, is a bit more robotic in this book, though he was not particularly colorful in the other one. His improbable long-distance marriage to an Army intelligence officer doesn't really work on any level -- not as romance, not as dramatic counterpoint, not as plot device. In fact, it is more distracting than anything else.

The plot is also improbable. A Washington insider on the make mobilizes his minions to cover up his involvement with a new technology that will make him very wealthy. While a plot involving government operatives carrying out "sanctioned removals" seems less far-fetched every day, the depiction of the psychopathic hit person here is fairly two-dimensional. Ditto for Kerney's police cohorts, who greet their new chief with suspicion but are converted into loyal followers by his sagacious decisions.

The novel -- not quite thriller, not quite police procedural -- falls into a genre crack. Tularosa also had an adventure story element missing in this book. It was, as is generally the case with series, better than this new book.

Perhaps I'll read another McGarrity on another trip to New Mexico, or sometime when I'm homesick for Santa Fe. He provides a reliable read with a great sense of place for some easy-going relaxation.