Monthly Archives: February 2016

Bravissimo!: Not All Bastards Are from Vienna

29 Monday Feb 2016

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Review: Not All Bastards Are From Vienna, by Andrea Molesini
Grove/Atlantic, 2015. 348 pp. $26
Translated from the Italian by Anthony Shugaar and Patrick Creagh

If there’s such a thing as a thoroughly engaging novel about war–one that deals squarely with death, cruelty, injustice, and stupidity–this is it. It’s also easy to see why. Molesini’s characters live and die displaying forcefulness, ingenuity, weakness, strength, and, in many instances, mordant wit that keeps them sane. They feel at once larger than life yet wholly plausible and human, the ineffable secret of great fiction.

Some of the 250,000 Italian soldiers who surrendered at Caporetto in 1917 (Courtesy Digital Library of Slovenia via Wikimedia Commons).

Some of the 265,000 Italian soldiers who surrendered at Caporetto in 1917. The figure was so high in part because many detested their commanding general, Luigi Cadorna (Courtesy Digital Library of Slovenia via Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

The story takes place in Refrontolo, thirty miles north of Venice, following the disastrous Italian defeat at Caporetto in late 1917, which permits Germans, then Austrians, to occupy the town and commandeer the villa belonging to the Spada family. The key figures are Grandma Nancy and Aunt Maria, genteel women sure of their place in the world, equally certain that it’s above the invaders’. If the matriarchs bow to the power of the men who plunder their home and burn its furniture to keep warm, it’s because the soldiers have weapons. However, as grandma starchily informs the Austrian commandant, that doesn’t mean they have authority.

Consequently, how the Spada family, its retainers, and the local priest, Don Lorenzo, treat their unwelcome guests (and one another) turns a typical wartime tale into a novel rich with explorations of evil, social class, love, youth, religion, and patriotism. Narrating this wide-ranging story is Paolo, the seventeen-year-old grandson/nephew of the matriarchs. His parents having died at sea, he’s an orphan, but he’s anything but moping. He doesn’t miss them, having never received any love or even closeness, and his relatives do their best to make up for it.

Paolo spends much time with his Grandpa Guglielmo, an armchair philosopher who always has something pithy to say (“war and loot are the only faithful married couple”), and who encourages his grandson’s keen interest in his surroundings. In fact, it’s interest, rather than engagement, that describes Paolo at the start, for he seems detached. He observes everything but often keeps his emotional distance, and I wonder why; maybe it’s the parents who never gave him warmth. Even in his pursuit of Giulia, a woman eight years his senior who turns many heads, Paolo seems more lustful than anything else.

However, among other things, the novel is his coming-of-age story, for as the war tightens its grip on Refrontolo and the Spada villa, he comes out of himself. He becomes closer to his grandfather, whom he tries to understand; gets involved in resistance activities; and begins to see the people around him in more complex ways. He’s also the receptive ear for his elders’ wisdom, as when his aunt–who’s trapped in her hopeless attraction for the Austrian commandant–says:

The vanquished cannot forgive the victors . . . even if no one ever knows who really wins and who loses, because what’s at stake, what’s really at stake, the things that no one ever talks about, are unknown. Life goes on . . . but you lose pieces of yourself along the way, every day.

There’s so much life to this book, even as it describes the ugliest things humans do to one another. The characters just won’t be denied. Everyone has his or her angles and corners, and no figure is too minor to pass by without a distinctive detail, as with the innkeeper whose hair, accent, and complexion bring him to life, even for the sentence or two in which he appears. No scene is too brief to go without proper attention to ambience, scenery, or impact, yet the narrative flies by rapidly. In lesser hands, this novel could be twice its length, but, as with the resourcefulness his characters must show, Molesini gets a long way on very little.

Two aspects of Not All Bastards Are from Vienna bother me. If Paolo is indeed meant to be withdrawn and self-contained in the beginning, and we’re meant to understand that his cold upbringing caused that, he changes rather quickly. It’s a pleasure to watch him mature, but I’m not sure I buy it. Secondly, the end feels a little contrived, but it’s not unjust, and I suppose few readers will mind.

A marvelous book.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

A Man Divided: A Friend of Lincoln

22 Monday Feb 2016

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Review: A Friend of Mr. Lincoln, by Stephen Harrigan
Knopf, 2016. 411 pp. $28

On a recent trip to the nation’s capital, my son and I visited the place where Lincoln died, a boardinghouse across the street from Ford’s Theater. It’s a museum now, as you might expect, whose exhibits testify to the immense power Lincoln’s memory exerts, regardless of political belief. Conflicting visions of his motives and character roll off the presses year after year. In fact, the museum has built a pile of books two stories high, a brave project, given that sooner or later, the historical Babel must punch through the roof. What a fitting metaphor for the man who towered above his contemporaries in more ways than one.

Consequently, it’s fair to ask, “Why another?,” even as the echo rebounds, “Why not?” But Stephen Harrigan has made a  strong case with his novel about the political formation of his hero in 1830s and 1840s Illinois. However, for better and worse, the story begins just after his assassination in 1865, as the town of Springfield mourns over the coffin that has made its sad voyage from Washington. Two friends of his–one fictional, one real–talk about setting the record straight about their late friend, a task that Harrigan seems to have zealously taken up. That too, is for better and worse.

Thomas Hicks painted this portrait of Lincoln in 1859, a lithograph made from it figured in presidential campaign literature in 1860 (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons).

Thomas Hicks painted a portrait of Lincoln in 1859. This lithograph made from it figured in presidential campaign literature in 1860 (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons).

Narrating this tale is Micajah (Cage) Weatherby, a Springfield poet and businessman, the author’s brilliant creation, a man who befriends Lincoln during the Black Hawk War of 1832. As a convinced abolitionist, freer with his passions, less concerned with how things look than how they feel, he’s a perfect foil for Lincoln, who’s always looking over his shoulder to see what the electorate thinks and binds his heart to be ruled by law. It’s not that Lincoln the politico lacks any sense of right and wrong; on the contrary, he’s got a very highly developed one. However, it’s always subservient to his belief in order and justice, which is where he thinks honor lies, and honor means everything to him.

It’s no small task to write Lincoln’s character, but Harrigan does marvelously well, I think, partly by contrast to the young lawyer’s friends, all young men on the make:

Most . . . were smoother than Lincoln, not as raw, not as striking in appearance, not as obviously self-invented. During the [Black Hawk] war, when everyone had been clothed in rags and shriven by scant rations, he had not seemed so remarkable. Now that he was more or less respectably dressed, something in his appearance betrayed him. He looked like a man who did not quite fit in, whom nature had made too tall and loose-jointed, with an unpleasant squeaky voice and some taint of deep, lingering poverty. He seemed to Cage like a man who desperately wanted to be better than the world would ever possibly let him be. But in Lincoln’s case that hunger did not seem underlaid with anger, as with other men it might, but with a strange seeping kindness.

But to describe A Friend of Lincoln as a character study, even of such a momentous nature, does the book injustice. Harrigan has re-created the period and its tensions, whether over slavery, who gets what government contract, or who’s murdered whom. Everyone must take sides, which causes both personal and political animosities. Harrigan offers court cases, romances, near riots, a duel, and, most vividly, Lincoln’s stormy courtship of Mary Todd. Cage helps his friend through terrible bouts of depression and saves his life on at least two occasions, for which, one may argue, he was poorly repaid.

I dislike prologues and retrospective first chapters. I understand why Harrigan begins his story in 1865; he wants to show how the Lincolns, chiefly Mary, have thrust Cage out of their lives when once he was intimate friend to both. But that chapter is entirely unnecessary, and the “set-the-record-straight” talk is a timeworn device for telling a story. This one needs no excuses.

More seriously, I think, is Harrigan’s apparent ax to grind. He seems determined to accent the less attractive parts of Lincoln’s character, and though I like that as an antidote to the legend, I think the author may have gotten too caught up in his cause. What’s more, he often tells you what he wants you to think, perhaps as with the passage quoted above, when he’s more than capable of showing it. And from time to time, these statements confused me, because I’d come to a different conclusion entirely.

Nevertheless, I like this novel a great deal. As Lincoln himself might have said, it reminds me of a story; this one’s from the museum. When one of the president’s enemies accused him of being two-faced, he replied, “If I had another face, why would I show you this one?”

Stephen Harrigan has indeed shown us another face of Lincoln.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

What History Is (Or Isn’t): 1916

18 Thursday Feb 2016

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Review: 1916: A Global History, by Keith Jeffery
Bloomsbury, 2015. 436 pp. $32

As my regular readers may be tired of hearing by now, I care passionately about the First World War, and, like any historian, I also care about how my favorite subject is portrayed or perceived. I admit to being rabid about this, but I have my reasons, which, I like to think, go beyond the mud pie that I made with my own two hands (meaning my own book).

Rather, as the event that arguably shaped the twentieth century, the First World War still lives within myriad conflicts, as in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, or the former Soviet Union, to name only three. I can’t imagine trying to understand those problems without the proper historical background, so I think historians (and novelists) who choose the First World War have a double duty. Not only should they try to dig past commonly held myths and misperceptions (because otherwise we won’t learn what we desperately need to know), writers should make the people and the era come alive (because otherwise we won’t bother to learn anything).

Sackville Street (now O'Connell Street), Dublin, after the Easter Rebellion (public domain, courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street), Dublin, after the Easter Rebellion (public domain, courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

To me, 1916 falls short on both counts, though in fairness, it’s a large task. Jeffrey starts with Gallipoli and ends with Rasputin’s assassination, also visiting Africa, Asia, Ireland, and Poland, among others. He covers the iconic battles of 1916 (Verdun, the Somme, Jutland), the Asian laborers recruited to toil in the war zone, and pays overdue homage to the hundreds of thousands of Africans who fought, fetched, or carried during the white man’s war. To get nerdy for three seconds, the author praises Hew Strachan, the Oxford historian whose excellent work has emphasized the war’s global breadth rather than just the Western Front, a focus Jeffery sets out to emulate, with some success. So far, so good.

Even better, Jeffery finds room for a raft of remarkable figures whom I’d never heard of. Frances Farmborough was an English governess in Russia who became a nurse on the Eastern Front; she even took photographs that enrich the historical record. Flora Sandes, born in England of Irish parents, served in Serbia as a nurse and as a soldier. John Henry Patterson, an Anglo-Irish veteran of the Boer War and a big-game hunter, raised, equipped, and (defying orders) armed a Jewish brigade.

Jeffery’s at his best, I think, where he seems most at home, Ireland. (He teaches at Belfast and has written about Ireland before.) I like his thoughtful, persuasive chapter on the Easter Rebellion, which captures the events, heartbreak, and passions, as well as their reach abroad, especially to the United States. He finds something new to say about Gallipoli and its impact on national feelings, no easy feat. And anyone who wants to know what Verdun felt like to the soldiers who rotated in and out every couple weeks will find it here, in horrific detail.

But 1916 is an odd book. If you blink while reading the introduction, you’ll miss the author’s scheme to base each chapter on an event in a given month. (Dating the chapters would have helped some.) Moreover, I’m not sure how you can select a single year, even one so significant, because global reach or iconic battles apply just as well to, say, 1917 or 1918.

Further, the reach is hardly global. The Germans nearly vanish, the French flicker in and out of sight, and the Belgians (my mud pie) might as well be trees. The Dutch never appear, though their neutrality influenced politics, economics, and the North Sea blockade. The chapter on the United States deals rather heavily with British intelligence officers and how they misled the American government–fascinating, but a peculiar emphasis. It’s also typical of 1916, whose voices are almost exclusively English or Irish. Not surprisingly, they usually express concerns and interests common to those nations, so that the worldwide lens has a peculiar, Anglo-Irish slant. Part of that has to do with available sources and what languages they’re written in, but still.

As for the story, 1916 can be hard going. Despite a profusion of facts, the vivid whole seldom materializes. The Anglo-Irish cameos offer a chance to add spark or provoke wonder, but they lack depth or face. Photographs help, but in the text, these men and women are talking heads, collections of statements and attitudes. People make history; that’s why it matters. Yet Jeffery pays little attention to character, even with a singular figure like Rasputin (though we get a blow-by-blow description of how British journalists broke the story of his murder).

One figure whom Jeffrey tries to sketch is Woodrow Wilson, an attempt that illustrates the unfortunate perpetuation of myth. Taking Wilson’s words about his Scotch and Irish heritage at face value–again playing the Irish legacy card–he casts the president as he wanted to be seen, a visionary statesman. Like many myths, this one has a grain of truth. But the larger truth is that Wilson’s less agreeable qualities, which included vain self-righteousness, doomed his vision from the start. Moreover, in that context, Jeffrey plays with another, related myth, that there could have been peace negotiations in 1916, had the Allies only been willing to listen. Again, the larger truth offers a more nuanced picture, and I wish Jeffrey had at least considered it.

Read Hew Strachan’s single-volume history, The First World War. It’s a terrific introduction to the subject but also a fine addition to other books.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Self-Flagellation As an Art Form: The Photographer’s Wife

15 Monday Feb 2016

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Review: The Photographer’s Wife, by Suzanne Joinson
Bloomsbury, 2016. 334 pp. $26

Eleven-year-old Prudence Ashton has been dragged by her self-absorbed father, Charles, to Jerusalem in 1920, with no thought to her happiness, formal education, safety, amusement, or social isolation. (Prue’s mother is somewhere back in England, perhaps institutionalized; Prue fondly remembers her storytelling, though also her brutalities.) But to Ashton, Prue’s a nuisance, an encumbrance. The only thing that matters is his lunatic scheme to remake the ancient city along British lines, blowing up whatever’s in the way, to create parks, green spaces–desert? What desert?–and orderly neighborhoods. His colonial nightmare might be funny, if people weren’t dying because they oppose the regime that dreamed it up.

British soldiers search Arabs during anti-Jewish pogroms, April 1920 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

British soldiers search Arabs during anti-Jewish pogroms, April 1920 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Meanwhile, Prue roams the city almost at will, lonely but fascinated. Jerusalem’s sights, sounds, colors, smells, and myriad faces draw her in, and she understands the city better than any of the English trying to bulldoze it. Prue’s only companions are Ihsan, a kindly man who tutors her in Arabic (for which she has a knack), and Eleonora, a beautiful, severely depressed Englishwoman. Like Ihsan, Eleonora’s husband is an Arab nationalist, which pulls Prue into witnessing and unwittingly participating in underground political activity, for which people are being butchered like cattle.

A pilot shows up to work for Ashton, but his real motive is to pry Eleonora away from her “mixed-race” marriage, which to him is “wrong.” Like the other Englishmen in this novel, he’s completely out of touch, expecting Eleonora to agree and takes it hard when she doesn’t. On the other hand, her husband stays away from her for weeks at a time, photographing British brutalities. He wants a child, but she’s too scared to have one; her mother died giving birth to her.

If you’re thinking these people are a dreary, listless bunch, you’re right, and then some. What kept me going were Joinson’s terrific prose and her enviable gift for creating character. For instance, here’s the pilot, recalling his school days:

Willie had experienced a series of vivid fantasies in which a man, for some reason Italian, would magically arrive at helpful moments and offer to be his intermediario. This middle-man, a fixer or wizard, would plant himself between Willie and the rest of the world and sort everything out. He charmed the loathsome housemaster, tricked bullies, coaxed his father back from his ships, and then, when his father’s presence was altogether too much, cast him away again for four years and a day.

But, like Willie, I find nothing to hold onto in the world of this novel, much of which takes place in England in 1937, when Prue has her own child to ignore.

I sometimes believe that we are designed to betray the people we love, just as sometimes we hand everything over, like a bright unclipped purse, or a secret part of our body, to a stranger

I disagree with Prue. I don’t think her life illustrates betrayal. Rather, I see criminal neglect, sadism, manipulation, and craven silence, perpetrated by monsters with whom I can’t identify. As the chief victim, Prue’s a born masochist, which gets very tiresome–Say something, damn it–but of course, she doesn’t. Masochists don’t. But after a while, when all she gets is more and more punishment, to which her silences grow longer and longer, I want to scream. Philandering, abusive husband, jealous of her artistic success as a sculptor? Sure; why not? Government agents pursuing her for reasons they refuse to divulge, in ways that seem flagrantly illegal? Oh, all right.

The Photographer’s Wife claims to be about politics, but I’m not sure what the message is. Part of my confusion comes from the narrative style, which chops the story into irritatingly unfinished bits set in different decades, so that it’s hard to get a coherent picture. Maybe Joinson adopted the mixed-up order to keep a secret, but if so, it’s a gimmick that doesn’t work. The secret seems decidedly weak and anticlimactic, yet the narrative uses it to take an unearned about-face. Even odder is that this turnabout has to do with German persecution of Jews in the late 1930s, when the novel fails to mention its Arab counterpart in 1920. But maybe the real problem politically is with Prue, who’s a total airhead about anything except art. Just as in 1920, she understood nothing of the dangerous currents wracking Palestine, in 1937, she neither knows nor cares what’s happening to the world–except she’s no longer a child, and so has no excuse.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Fugitives from Injustice: Fallen Land

08 Monday Feb 2016

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Review: Fallen Land, by Taylor Brown
St. Martin’s, 2015. 276 pp. $26

It’s 1865, and the Confederacy is on its last legs. Brigandage rules swaths of the Deep South, unleashing “foragers” from either army (or neither), who plunder farms or towns, hunt runaways for bounty fees, and satisfy their lusts for blood or female flesh. Callum, a member of one such Confederate gang, already has a checkered past, even at age fifteen. Of Irish birth, parents dead, he’s worked as a crewman on a Confederate ship running the Union blockade; been shipwrecked; killed men older than himself; and become an accomplished horse thief.

Shermans March to the Sea, Alexander Hay Ritchie, 1868

Sherman’s March to the Sea, Alexander Hay Ritchie, 1868 (Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain in the U.S.)

One day, however, Callum tries to break free. He steals his colonel’s stallion and makes off with Ava, a girl two years older than he, whom the gang captured as booty, and whom the colonel has taken for his own. Ava, though wary, goes willingly with Callum, because she sees no other future. But in the firefight whose confusion allows the pair to escape, the colonel is killed, and Callum knows the others won’t rest until they run Ava and him to ground.

What follows is a fast-paced, compelling story that never flags for an instant. The fugitives suffer intense physical privations, endure injuries, make difficult moral choices, and endure hair-raising escapes. Their greatest ally is their horse, Reiver, a loyal, hard-working beast, perhaps the truest soul in this book.

Brown’s often beautiful prose helps propel the story:

Here and there a spurt of the brightest otherworldly red marked the hillside. The color explosive, lifting, like a hemorrhage from the earth. Callum looked hard for these sights, and they made him ache. He knew the falling land was telling him something, and the message yearned in his throat to be spoken. But he would not speak it. Could not. When Ava fell asleep on the back of the horse, he took her cool white hand in his for a long moment. Her palm was calloused like a boy’s, her finger bones delicate. He placed her hand back in the pocket of his coat, where she kept it warm.

It’s a lovely scene, but a good editor would have caught two mistakes here, the type that pepper this novel. Calloused should be callused, and I don’t believe Callum, who has little formal education, would even know the word hemorrhage. I don’t mean to be picky. Brown has painted a vivid narrative that ranges over a landscape he knows and loves, and which he renders in gripping detail. Nevertheless, it’s startling, especially given such skill, to run across misused words, those that sound too modern, or alien concepts. For instance, I don’t believe Ava when she talks about Charles Darwin or the rather baldly stated theme she derives from his theories. And speaking of theme, I think the reader already gets that in this shamelessly bloody world of 1865 Georgia, the only thing that matters is love; the characters need not spell it out as they do.

Unfortunately, that love is more complicated than Brown allows. I hate to say so, because Ava and Callum are sweet together, a winning pair, and I understand Brown’s desire to rescue redemption from the terrors he’s so faithfully rendered. But Fallen Land, despite its gory, realistic grounding, sometimes reads like a story cleaned up, with characters groomed to appeal. It’s not just that certain fight scenes work out too smoothly (or that, early on, Callum receives serious facial injuries that heal quickly, without trace). Nor is it only that the two main characters seldom have occasion to express their attitudes about race, and when they do, seem more like abolitionists than Confederate sympathizers. Rather, it’s that the narrative has handed Ava and Callum to one another too easily.

Whether the colonel takes Ava by brute force or implied threat isn’t clear. But rape is rape, and what’s more, she’s pregnant by him. Yet despite this abuse–and a pretense of a hard exterior–she craves love and tenderness and readily accepts them from the next man who treats her decently, even if he’s a boy. Nothing beneath the surface is allowed to intervene, so that, when Ava worries–but once–that she’s carrying another man’s child, Callum empathically but naively replies that she should just pretend it’s his. Case closed.

I don’t know why Brown chose this path. Ava would have made much more sense as a character, and heightened the tension tenfold, had she held herself aloof, making Callum wonder whether he’s risking his life for a dream of happiness with her that he can’t fulfill. His insecurity would have added a fresh dimension to the novel. Then, too, Callum kills repeatedly, yet never seems troubled by it, though he has bloody dreams involving Reiver, Ava, and their pursuers. I get that he’s grown up too fast to tear himself to shreds over these killings. Yet, like Ava, he exists too much in the moment, in which the past has no place in his psychology.

Fallen Land, despite its promise, fails to deliver. But I expect to hear more from Taylor Brown.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Amputation of the Self: My Name Is Mary Sutter

04 Thursday Feb 2016

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Review: My Name Is Mary Sutter, by Robin Oliveira
Viking, 2010. 364 pp. $27

More than anything, young Mary Sutter wants to be a surgeon, for which she’s eminently qualified. Like her mother, Mary’s a gifted midwife, known throughout the Albany, New York, region for her skill, tenderness to her patients, and success rate. From a young age, she accompanied her mother, Amelia, on her midwifery rounds, from which she learned to observe, study, and interpret the human body. Mary devours Gray’s Anatomy and other textbooks with a passion other young women of her generation might devote to cooking, music, or embroidery.

But the year is 1861, and mainstream medicine belongs entirely to men, who dismiss Mary’s attempts to apprentice herself–the typical path to medical practice–with contempt, puzzlement, or both. Even Amelia, her sole surviving parent, sometimes wonders why her daughter doesn’t simply accept the barrier, unfair as it is, and continue to do what she does best. Maybe she could also find a husband–not that Amelia’s was a paragon, but Mary locks many feelings inside her, including a yearning for love, hidden beneath a superior mien.

She knew that it was said of her that she was odd and difficult, and this did not bother her, for she never thought about what people usually spent time thinking of. The idle talk of other people always perplexed her; her mind was usually occupied by things that no one else thought of: the structure of the pelvis, the fast beat of a healthy fetus heart, or the slow meander of an unhealthy one, or a baby who had failed to breathe. She could never bring herself to care about ordinary things, like whose pie was better at the Sunday potluck, or whose husband she might covet should the opportunity arise, or what anyone was saying about an early winter or an early thaw . . . .

However, the outbreak of war between North and South changes everything. Mary figures, correctly, that medical practitioners will be in great demand, so she bolts for Washington to look for a posting without telling anyone at home. With typical deftness, Oliveira handles her bold action in its implied feminism: Mary’s flight raises consternation and moral censure, whereas her brother and brother-in-law may go to war without anyone batting an eyelash. Unfortunately for Mary–and the soldiers who don’t know what’s coming-nobody has counted on the complete lack of preparation to care for the sick or wounded. To call the effort disorganized would be a compliment; Oliveira captures this negligence with shudderingly vivid detail.

Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross (and the most famous Civil War nurse), around 1866 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross (and the most famous Civil War nurse), around 1866 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Such disarray might have offered Mary her chance to serve and learn, as she hopes, but there again, she faces stupendous obstacles. Among them is the fear, not entirely groundless, that a woman among hundreds of unruly men would be preyed upon. Even Dorothea Dix, who lobbies for a nursing service along the lines of Florence Nightingale’s, will have nothing to do with Mary: Miss Sutter is too young, she has no letters of recommendation, and just isn’t the right sort. That Oliveira cuts a feminist icon down to size on feminist grounds says a great deal.

In the apparently growing subgenre of novels about socially awkward young women who love science–When the World Was Young and The Movement of Stars come to mind–My Name Is Mary Sutter stands out. I like how the author reveals the inner lives of Mary and two doctors with whom she works closely, and how the relationships with her mother, sister, and brother-in-law have dangerously sharp edges. Oliveira also captures the suffering of wounded men, the incompetent army leadership, and what it takes to tend the maimed and dying despite insuperable odds. The hospital scenes are heart-breakingly raw–be warned–but I, who am squeamish, had to read every word. Meanwhile, the narrative retains an impressive grasp of the historical background, as battles unfold and the confusion and rumor become ever more blinding.

I don’t want to give too much away, but when you have a fictional midwife/nurse with a newly married twin sister and two family members who enlist, certain things are just bound to happen. Mostly, Oliveira gets away with these predictable occurrences through vivid storytelling. But she falls short, I think, in her portrait of Jenny, Mary’s twin, who feels more explained than alive, and I want to know more about what drives Amelia, besides her devotion to family. It’s also a little hard to swallow that Mary gets her foot in the nursing door through a chance meeting with John Hay, Lincoln’s private secretary, though such things did happen in wartime Washington. What’s less forgivable, I think, is how quickly certain characters reconcile their differences. When there’s that much fury and hatred between people who love one another, the author owes the reader a fuller, and perhaps not entirely complete, peacemaking process.

Nevertheless, My Name Is Mary Sutter is a very fine novel indeed, especially for a debut effort, and I’m doubly pleased to say that about a fellow Seattle author.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

The Grandeur That May (Or May Not) Have Been: SPQR

01 Monday Feb 2016

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Review: SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, by Mary Beard
Liveright/Norton, 2015. 536 pp. $35

I’ve been waiting for this book from the library for quite a while, and I’m happy to say it’s magnificent (from Latin, magnificare, “to magnify”). Lately, I’ve been trying to learn Latin, which involves chores like repeating, ad infinitum, the ablative ending in the imperfect tense, but also treats, like deciphering snippets of Julius Caesar’s account of the Gauls. SPQR reminds me why I bother, and why Rome matters, even for people who would never get within a mile of a Latin grammar.

But if you venture here–and I heartily recommend that you do–be prepared to abandon preconceived ideas. “Rome,” as Beard declares early on, “was not simply the thuggish younger sibling of classical Greece,” devoted to engineering, war, and moral absolutes, whereas the Greeks favored intellectual inquiry, theater, and democracy. Morever, she notes, praise for Greece at Roman expense began with the Romans themselves; throughout SPQR, she quotes skeptics who criticized laws, common behavior, military misadventures, garish buildings, or corruption. So much for absolutes.

The so-called Prima Porta statue of the Emperor Augustus, 1st century CE, now in the Vatican. Note the martial attire and the baby, probably an image of Romulus, the city's legendary founder (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

The so-called Prima Porta statue of the Emperor Augustus, 1st century CE, now in the Vatican. Note the martial attire and the baby, probably an image of Romulus, the city’s legendary founder (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

SPQR is the acronym for Senatus PopulusQue Romanus (“the senate and the Roman people”), the motto of the republic that the empire largely ignored. However, if the senate in imperial times ceased to be a legislature, in a typical delightful passage, Beard argues that it still had a function:

Senators were essential to the running of the empire. Among their number were most of the emperor’s friends, advisors, confidants, dinner guests and drinking partners–as well as the men who, second only to his own family, were likely to become his successful rivals, vociferous opponents and assassins.

She also corrects or casts doubt on many stories handed down over generations. Apparently, the dying Julius Caesar did not say, “Et tu, Brute,” as Shakespeare has it, but admonished Brutus in Greek, perhaps calling him a child. (The meaning is ambiguous.) Nor was Brutus “the noblest Roman of them all,” having left a trail of murder and extortion as governor of Cyprus. Was the Emperor Claudius the just, forward-thinking, moderate ruler Robert Graves portrays in his marvelous novels? Not if you include the executions of thirty-odd senators and a dice habit for which Claudius had his carriage rebuilt so he could play while on the move. Did Nero really make his horse a senator? Probably not.

A more nuanced portrait emerges in these pages. Despite xenophobia, which could be extreme, Rome expanded the definition of citizenship well beyond the Greek model to include not only residents of lands far outside the city but, by 212 CE, thirty million others living in provinces throughout the empire. Like all ancient cultures, the Romans took slaves, but they also freed many, an unusual policy that drew admiring commentary from contemporaries, an explanation of how the Romans insured political loyalty in their vast empire. Under the republic, a system of checks and balances among the senate, the consuls who had monarchical powers, and the common folk assured that no one force would always have the upper hand–at least, according to Polybius, the astute Greek historian who lived in Rome. Once an adult woman’s father died, she could own property, buy or sell, inherit, make a will, or free slaves, legal rights that compare favorably with those of any Englishwoman before 1870.

But Beard insists that Roman accomplishments or failures aren’t what make its history worth knowing and discussing. Their legacy, she says, goes far beyond political structures, art, famous public works, literature, or philosophical ideas. It’s that they talked about the same issues we do, so much so that the questions they asked sound as if they were taken from today’s headlines.

For instance, despite severe income inequality and upper-class snobbery toward the poor, under the republic, politicians spent large sums courting lower-class voters. They also honed rhetorical techniques to win them over at public meetings called contiones, said to be noisy, stormy occasions. That in itself raises comparisons to our political system, but there’s more. At one such contio, around 125 BCE, the hot issue was whether to grant citizenship to the Latin tribes outside the city. Beard quotes one opponent haranguing the crowd, “‘I mean, do you think there will be any space for you, like there is now, in a contio or at games or festivals? Don’t you realise they’ll take over everything?’”

Beard has convinced me. To consider Roman history means to reflect on our own problems.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.