Monthly Archives: March 2022

Reconstructed Mystery: The Unknown Woman of the Seine

28 Monday Mar 2022

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Review: The Unknown Woman of the Seine, by Brooks Hansen
Delphinium, 2021. 261 pp. $26

This much is true. Sometime during the late nineteenth century, a young woman drowned in the Seine, and the gypsum death mask created to memorialize her face became famous. What a face it was — serene, people said. Others spoke of her innocence, her beauty. The poet Rilke wrote of her deceptive smile and what knowledge might lie behind it. Artists studied the re-created face as a model; copies of her likeness could be found in Parisian studios and academies. Nabokov had a character write a poem about her. Camus, it was said, showed her off at parties. Man Ray photographed her.

Photograph of the famous death mask, ca. 1900, photographer unknown (courtesy http://totenmasken.com/totenmasken/html/body_galerie.html, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

To all, the dead woman’s mask represented a quality that touched them, so they invented her story, a biography, a mystery, and how she might have met her end. That background brings us to the current novel, beguiling, occasionally baffling, which offers a coherent explanation, as tense as any whodunit and as meticulously observed as any narrative of any kind.

Hansen’s story begins with a scene in a morgue, November 1889, after the unknown woman’s body has been on display for a month — yes, they did that, apparently — after which the mask maker plies his craft. It’s a prologue, therefore unfortunate by nature, and a bit confusing, at that. But Hansen skillfully rewinds the intrigue from there, chiefly through the eyes of Émile Brassard, a gendarme who’s had a checkered career, partly because his brilliance upsets people, a circumstance the author understates with deft hand.

In fact, if any single word describes The Unknown Woman of the Seine, it’s understated. I admire novels in which nothing is predictable, yet whose randomness derives entirely from characters with opposing goals (not authorial convenience). I also admire those novels that ask me to draw inferences rather than explain themselves, which involves me in the narrative and lets me meet the story halfway, rather than have it spooned into my mouth.

That said, Hansen demands a lot of his readers, and I’m not always up to it. A dose of bewilderment works wonders, though, for you share Brassard’s curiosity and puzzlement. He first sees the woman in the woods far from Paris, while she’s burying a corpse — and none too deep, because subsequently, the wolves get to it easily. Brassard might arrest her, but he can’t, because he’s applying to be reinstated in the gendarmerie after military service in Indochina, so he’s not officially on duty. Moreover, he’s traveling to his reinstatement hearing, so his time isn’t his own.

Consequently, he must walk a tightrope, following the woman while covering his tracks from both the participants and his superiors. Hansen does a marvelous job integrating his hero’s employment troubles with the mores and politics of the time, folding that into the detective’s quest to figure out who the woman is and why she was burying the dead man. If she killed him, as is likely, Brassard assumes there are extenuating circumstances, and he wants to know the story. So do you.

However, he, and the reader, must have infinite patience before things start to make sense. Also requiring patience are references to images of Buddhist philosophy, which go above my head, and which seem — to me, at least — to have little relation to the story. No doubt I missed something.

But the reader who can stick it out will be well rewarded, especially those who like dogs — Brassard’s is quite the canine investigator, perhaps a little too good to be true, yet their relationship is marvelous. The journey the narrative follows could not be more beautifully rendered, whether Brassard’s thoughts, the landscape, or the city of Paris, particularly the presence of that newly built tower, Eiffel’s monstrosity, as some think of it.

Here, the detective considers his reinstatement, as variable and hard to fathom as the heavens themselves:

If the sun said, All is well, all will turn out in due time, the moon knew better. The moon said, Beware. The moon shed light on the darker and more difficult truths, and he could feel them this evening as he wrote — the low clouds of doubt drifting into his brain, or looking like wolves just behind the tree line, grinning and shimmering with the knowledge that his confidence was without ground; he was fooling himself; the matter of his reinstatement is not nearly as simple or assured as he liked to think.… There were men out there who doubted him, and who made it their business to undermine him.

Such magnificent writing rolls easily into your mind, creating inner life, physical setting, and tension, all at once. The narrative’s final pages lack the clarity I would have liked, but the essentials are there. The manner in which Brassard — and Hansen — pull together the evidence makes for a thoroughly satisfying and remarkable tale of mystery.

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

The Revolution Gone Wrong: Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

21 Monday Mar 2022

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Review: Chimes of a Lost Cathedral, by Janet Fitch
Little, Brown, 2019. 730 pp. $30

It’s March 1919, and the Bolshevik state totters because of civil war, the leaders’ incompetence and corruption, and deprivation deep enough to make people regret the tsar. Marina Makarova Kuriakin, though born to a wealthy bourgeois family, sympathizes with the revolution’s goals but believes they’ve gotten lost and fears the common people will once more pay the price.

Too outspoken for her own good, at a time when a carelessly uttered word can have fatal consequences, Marina constantly puts herself on the line, whether by arguing in public or insisting on learning facts that other people would rather not talk about. More immediately, however, she’s pregnant by someone other than her husband, and neither man knows she’s having a child. Her first concern, therefore, is to find a safe place to wait until the birth.

The sequel to The Revolution of Marina M., Chimes of a Lost Cathedral tells the heart-breaking story of ideals betrayed by humorless, dogmatic, power-hungry manipulators who, when human behavior fails to match their theoretical framework, kill the humans they hold responsible. Stark suffering, paranoia, and oppression abound, usually in combination.

Among other Bolshevik cruelties or acts of negligence, Fitch addresses the plunder of the peasantry for their foodstuffs; overcrowded orphanages that make the Dickensian versions look like paradise; or censorship and suspicion of poets, of whom Marina is one. Through her trials and travels, which must eventually lead her back to Petersburg, her birthplace, Chimes provides a wide lens on one of modern history’s greatest upheavals.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, in a July 1920 photo by Pavel Semyonovich Zhukov (courtesy Russian Federation via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Marina also lives as fully as she can under the circumstances, which means, in part, that she has many love affairs. Sexual freedom belongs to her own revolution, and though I sense a sharper feminist edge in Marina M. than I do here, you can see still see it. Marina searches for partners who understand how please a woman, and she points out where the Bolsheviks have reneged on promises to value women’s contributions to their society as well as men’s.

For all that, though, I think the previous volume does better. Much as I like the later narrative, it’s got too much in it, not all of which fits comfortably. Marina’s penchant for argumentation seems forced at times; would she really be that careless? But the real problem is the overall approach. Chimes feels less coherent and incisive than its predecessor, and I can think of at least one plot point that’s both predictable and convenient, though Fitch integrates it emotionally. (I don’t want to give it away; suffice to say it involves one more loss of many.) Though this book is somewhat shorter than its older sibling, it feels longer, maybe because I sense that the author is saying, “Okay, now, let me show you this.”

To be fair, I like a lot of the this. I’ll never forget the orphanage scenes or those on the awful, overcrowded trains, which stink even more of hatred and backbiting than they do of bodily secretions. Also, when Marina meets literary lights like Anna Akhmatova, Maxim Gorky, and Osip Mandelstam, plus many more whose names I didn’t know, I get that keen sense of betrayal among writers who numbered among the first Russians to support Lenin, for all the good it did them or their country.

In that regard, I suspect the author intends a jab at cancel culture, considering how much discussion there is of politics perverting art. In that line, I note that one writer who makes a cameo appearance, Yevgeny Zamiatin, has surfaced in recent debates about censorship, and his 1921 ground-breaking, dystopian novel We, said to have influenced both Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, has been reissued. Is Zamiatin’s presence in the narrative a coincidence? Maybe not.

I also admire Fitch’s prose, as I did with Marina M. Passages like this one, about the need to tell stories and what purpose they serve, take flight:

Humans tell stories about themselves, where they’re from, what they do in their work, what they’re doing here instead of home with their families. Everyone has some sort of story. Each human being walks around with an epic poem of himself, just waiting to stand up after dinner and recite it, poor bards that we are. Something about humans, we want to be known. We think we’re a story: beginning, middle, and end — and this is how it ended up. But of course, our stories have no sense, no rhythm, no meaning — an unfolded fan made more sense than human life. In any case, I didn’t want to tell my story. It was as bitter as uncured olives.

More episodic than its predecessor, yet giving a vivid taste of time, place, and character, Chimes of a Lost Cathedral is worth your thought and effort. But do read the other novel first.

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

Does the Threat Exist, Or Is It Paranoia?: The Vixen

14 Monday Mar 2022

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Review: The Vixen, by Francine Prose
Harper, 2021. 316 pp. $26

In June 1953, the federal government executes Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for giving atomic weapons secrets to the Soviets. Probably few families take the news harder than the Putnams, a Coney Island family, Jewish despite the name. Simon, the only child, worries about his mother, who grew up with Ethel and suffers debilitating migraines, possibly because of the political and cultural atmosphere.

With Joseph McCarthy riding high and roughshod over civil liberties, due process, and common decency, conformity means safety. You never know who will attack you, or why, only that suspicion, fear, and paranoia have gripped country. That’s enough to give any sober citizen headaches.

Young Simon wangles an entry-level job at a Manhattan publisher through a family connection. His assignment is to go through the “slush pile,” unsolicited submissions, and write rejection letters for them. Presumably, he’ll start to learn the business that way.

One manuscript, however, has been marked for greatness, and Simon is to edit it. Titled The Vixen, the Patriot, and the Fanatic, the novel portrays a thinly disguised Ethel Rosenberg as a sex-crazed Soviet agent who does her best to seduce her all-American nemesis and destroy the nation at the same time. Naturally, Simon’s appalled, doubly so when his boss swears him to secrecy and confides that The Vixen will save the company, known for producing literary masterpieces but now on the brink of financial ruin.

The photograph taken of Ethel Rosenberg on her arrest, August 1950 (courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Prose’s novel, a trenchant satire about power, truth telling, and the 1950s reads like a psychological thriller once it gets going, with obvious yet unstated parallels to the present day. Our hero never knows what’s true or not, or what consequences the lies might have. And his life is based on lies. As a Jew at a white-shoe firm, he’s trying to pass. His boss, Warren Landry, a charismatic, narcissistic, vicious bully and womanizer, repels Simon to the core, yet the younger man envies the elder for his power and sense of command. Warren also offers drama and force, commodities that Simon can only wish he understood:

Standing in my doorway with his arms braced against both sides, Warren was partly backlit by the low-wattage bulbs in the corridor. He had a Scrooge-like obsession keeping our electric bills low. His white hair haloed him like a Renaissance apostle, and the costly wool of his dark gray suit gave off a pale luminescent shimmer. He was a few years older than my parents, but he belonged to another species that defied middle age to stay handsome, vital, irresistible to women. I spent my first paychecks on a new suit and tie, cheaper versions of Warren’s, or what I imagined Warren would wear if the world we knew ended and he no longer had any money.

In that larger-than-life atmosphere of deceit and power plays, Simon knows he’s out of his depth, yet can’t help himself. The author of the book he’s supposed to edit, the beautiful, seductive Anya Partridge, lives in a low-security mental-health facility, which tells him something but not enough. She also seems to wish to do everything except talk about her book.

Consequently, the ground under Simon’s feet constantly shifts, and whenever he tries to find out the truth, his informants talk out of both sides of their mouths. He wants to do the right thing, whatever that is, yet to keep his job, all while trying to look as though he knows what he’s doing. After all, everyone else seems to.

I wish that Simon were less of a nebbish, that brand of ineffectuality that makes you want to shake him. Also, at times, it’s hard to know whether the novel intends parody or realism, particularly concerning his lustful interests, which seem rather easily engaged, even repellent. Warren, however, is all too real and gives me shivers; I used to work for a publisher who shared a few of his character traits and political views. What a horrible time of my life.

Without giving anything away, I can tell you that Prose has re-created an era when the most outlandish theories gained credence, and intelligent, thoughtful people had to wonder who was minding the store, and to what end. I’m sure she intends that as a window on our current mess. Maybe too she’s asking how it is that the Rosenbergs were called traitors and executed, whereas the insurgents who stormed the capital a year ago are somehow judged either garden-variety vandals or heroes exercising their constitutional rights.

The Vixen stretches credibility in a few places but remains a compelling, provocative novel. Take a look.

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

A Not-Quite-Faustian Bargain: The Outcasts of Time

07 Monday Mar 2022

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Review: The Outcasts of Time, by Ian Mortimer
Pegasus, 2018. 386 pp. $26

Devon, 1348. Two brothers, John and William, walk through a plague-ridden country, past rotting corpses and scenes of destruction that presage the Apocalypse. When the sickness overtakes them too, they realize that their lives are forfeit, and they fear that their souls may not be ready for death. However, as they sense their strength wane, a disembodied voice tells them they have six days to live and offers them a choice.

They may struggle home with their remaining strength to see what has happened to their town and loved ones. Or they may spend the six days in time travel, as each day will advance another ninety-nine years, during which brief moment they may redeem themselves. After arguing whether they have listened to the Devil and are being led astray, John and William accept the offer. It’s a twist on Faust, without a contract or sale of a soul.

Harry Clarke’s illustration for the Bayard Taylor translation of Goethe’s Faust, 1870-71 (courtesy Project Gutenberg Open Library System, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

I seldom, as in never, review historical fantasy and rarely read any. But The Outcasts of Time caught my fancy, and maybe it’ll catch yours. As a literary conceit, time travel has grown a long, white beard by now, but I like it that Mortimer has cast his century-spanning mechanism as a matter of conscience rather than a gizmo. Also, no abracadabra changes the scenery or chases away evil people, of whom there are plenty, for our travelers often land hard as the centuries pass.

The year 1447 seems miserable; 1546 brings the brothers to Henry VIII’s time; 1645 places them smack in the Civil War. Consequently, they must choose a face to present without knowing what’s prudent, because so much has changed. What was counted sinful in 1348 may now be virtuous, and what passed for virtue may now be treason. They have a lot of explaining to do.

That’s partly the point, for The Outcasts of Time has much to say about good, evil, and how material wealth or the progress of learning affect them or are used or misused. The novel also explores the human desire for permanence, proof of our passage on this planet that someone else will find after our deaths. John, a stonemason who worked on the Exeter Cathedral and created sculptures he’s proud of, is conscious of this desire in himself and of how futile it is. As he observes more than halfway through his time journey:

It is a salutary thought that something as insubstantial as a name can endure so long.… Tradition, like a centuries-old creeper of ivy, slowly winds its way into the crevices of our conversations and fastens itself onto such words, holding them firmly in place. You’d have thought that it was the private property, kept away from prying eyes and jealous fingers, which would endure. But all the houses from my time have been replaced. As for possessions, fires consume them, thieves steal them, and time erodes them. Common things, like names and roads, last for centuries.

John’s quest to perform a good deed to redeem himself before death takes various turns. That poses several questions, not least whether goodness can be conscious, or whether such acts can serve a redemptive purpose.

Among other pleasures, The Outcasts of Time offers historical detail in a light but authoritative hand. You see through John’s eyes what has changed, what would strike him most strongly, and why, which makes you think. For obvious reasons, Mortimer has updated the brothers’ language, or nobody in later centuries would have understood them. Yet he’s hewed to simplicity of tongue, for the most part, and seldom does the language jump out and stop the reader.

I do wonder, though, how John, who is excellent at ciphering but illiterate, and his brother, who can read, a little — how that happens, I don’t know — dispute the way they do. Free of superstition, seemingly also of common prejudices, they sound sophisticated. They lack any notion that the world is, and has always been, what they know, and appear ready to step outside it enough to judge the future centuries shown them. They sound like relativists ahead of their time, perhaps too tolerant of what they find.

William, the sensualist of the two, comes across less clearly or deeply than John, and though he’s supposed to represent a person who chooses pleasures over an examined life, I still want to see his dreams and desires beyond the next cup of ale or the next woman. Further, though the brothers remark bitterly on the priests’ flight from their plague-ridden land of 1348, they don’t seem perturbed at the likelihood that they’ll die unshriven, their sins unconfessed. I would have expected terror at the prospect.

However, the narrative and the philosophy within it demand a stretch from the characters, and if plausibility suffers to a mild degree, remember that we’re talking about a story with Faustian overtones, a legend to begin with. The Outcast of Time’s an engrossing novel, worth stretching for.

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