The Torrent by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

Spanish politician drowns in love

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez was a prominent figure in Spanish literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and also found some international success through English translation. His novel Entre naranjos (“Between Orange Trees”) was published in 1900. It was translated into English as The Torrent. The Spanish title refers to the orange orchards of Valencia, the province of Spain where Blasco Ibáñez was born and raised and where this novel is set. The English title, The Torrent, is mostly metaphorical, as in a torrent of emotions. A flood does take place over the course of one or two chapters, but it is not the main focus of the novel.

Rafael Brull is the pride of his hometown of Alcira, in Valencia near the East Coast of Spain. He represents his district as a deputy in the Spanish Cortes (parliament) in Madrid. Rafael inherited his political clout from his grandfather and father. Grandpa Don Jaime was a shrewd wheeler-dealer, and papa Don Ramón was a macho gangster, but Rafael is a kinder, gentler sort of politician and somewhat of a pawn in his family’s game. The real political strategist in the family is Rafael’s mother Doña Bernarda, assisted by the family’s “fixer,” Don Andrès, both of whom supervise and guide the dutiful Rafael’s every move. Needless to say, the young deputy would be quite a catch for some lucky young lady of Alcira. Rafael’s mother has arranged a marriage for him with the daughter of the richest man in the region. One day, however, an exotic and beautiful woman arrives in town: Leonora, a world famous opera star who captivates Rafael’s attention. His mother disapproves of the woman, as the townspeople see her as a loose, libertine adventuress. Rafael, head over heels in love, is willing to risk all for Leonora, but despite constantly toying with him, she denies him any reciprocation and insists that they only be friends.

In his early works, at least, Blasco Ibáñez wrote in a naturalist style likely influenced by French writer Émile Zola. Zola is my favorite novelist (I have reviewed his complete works at this blog), and Blasco Ibáñez is the one writer I’ve found who can do naturalism just about as well as Zola, as proven by such excellent novels as The Cabin and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Zola himself didn’t always hit the bullseye with his naturalism but sometimes ventured into more romantic, melodramatic, and less realist works, particularly when love affairs are concerned, as in his novels The Kill and The Sin of Father Mouret. Such is the case here as well with Blasco Ibáñez’s The Torrent. The character of Leonora is a bit over the top. She reads more like someone’s ideal of a femme fatale than a real person. Rafael’s abject enslavement to her may have been more accurate to chivalrous love affairs of 1900, but it’s hard to identify with today.

There are basically two main plots entwined throughout the book. One is Rafael’s love for Leonora. The other is his political career. This latter aspect of the book is handled well, with pure naturalistic realism. Blasco Ibáñez presents a cynical backroom view of political machinations that points out the problems with party politics, political machines, and nepotistic dynasties. When reading the works of Blasco Ibáñez, I can’t help thinking that he must have influenced the writers who arose during the Latin American literary “boom” of the 1960s and ‘70s. The Torrent’s political narrative calls to mind some of Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa’s political works like The Feast of the Goat, and Rafael’s father Don Ramón shares some character traits with Mexican author Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo. That’s just me drawing parallels, however, not actual evidence of direct influence.

The Torrent is not Blasco Ibáñez’s best work, but it is still clearly the work of an expert practitioner in the art form of the novel. Having read three of his books so far, I have only dipped my toe into the depths of his body of literature, but I am looking forward to diving deeper into that pool and discovering more long-lost treasures.  

Dr. Adriaan by Louis Couperus

Full house in Holland

Dr. Adriaan, published in 1903, is the fourth and final novel in the Books of the Small Souls series by Dutch author Louis Couperus, having been preceded by 1) Small Souls, 2) The Later Life, and 3) The Twilight of the Souls. This fourth installment takes place ten years after The Twilight of the Souls. Adriaan (Addie) van der Welcke, now 26, has realized his dream of becoming a physician. He is a general practitioner, which at the time included the treatment of various nervous disorders which are now under the domain of psychiatrists. In such cases, Addie has become known for his adept use of hypnotism as a treatment technique. He now has a wife, Mathilde, and two toddler children.

Addie and his family reside with his parents, Baron Henri van der Welcke and Constance (née van Lowe), who have inherited the Van der Welcke estate in Driebergen, a country town outside of the Hague. In the previous novel, Constance’s brother Gerrit van Lowe died, leaving behind a wife and nine children. Addie, who has always been mature beyond his years, has assumed the guardianship of this family, even though he is only six years older than the eldest of Gerrit’s children. They all live in the Driebergen mansion, as do elderly Mama van Lowe and a few cousins with various ailments whom Addie is treating for free. At one point in the book, I counted 19 residents in the Driebergen house, not counting servants, plus a few other relatives living nearby who show up for dinner almost every night. Addie’s wife Mathilde does not fit in with the Van Lowe family and resents the fact that she has to share her husband with his numerous aunts, uncles, and cousins. This causes problems in their marriage. Addie is happy living in Driebergen, generously offering his medical skills to the country poor, but Mathilde would prefer they move back to the Hague, where Addie can become a fashionable big-city doctor and grow a prosperous practice serving the urban wealthy.

The closest literary analogy I can make to Couperus’s Small Souls series is the Jalna novels by Canadian author Mazo de la Roche. Both feature a large family of distinct personalities whose lives revolve almost entirely around each other and their family dinners at Grandma’s house. The Jalna novels are a little prone to soap-opera melodrama, however, while the Small Souls books read more like real life. Dr. Adriaan doesn’t have many of the momentous or scandalous events one can frequently count on in family sagas: love affairs, deaths, crimes, divorces, etc. Instead, these small souls tend to live small quiet lives like most of us do. Couples question their relationships. Siblings quarrel. Young people try to find their direction in life. Aging people come to terms with old regrets and resign themselves to contentment. Some deal with pesky, non-fatal illnesses, both physical and mental. If this were the first novel in the series, such prosaic happenings might be too boring to be justified. Couperus, however, has developed these characters over the course of four volumes, so that the reader has come to know them, identify with them, feel for them, and become invested in their lives and struggles. Anyone who’s read the first three Small Souls novels will be thoroughly engaged from the first page of Dr. Adriaan.

Although Couperus could have kept this series going for at least another novel or two, he does conclude Dr. Adriaan with a touch of finality, and he never returned to the Van Lowe family. A naturalist in a similar mode as Emile Zola or Theodore Dreiser, Couperus enjoyed some popularity in English translation in the early 20th century, but I think it’s fair to say he has since largely been forgotten by American readers. That’s a shame, because he really is a very talented and accomplished novelist who deserves worldwide recognition, as evidenced by his compelling Books of the Small Souls.

Journey into Fear by Eric Ambler

Stayin’ alive in World War II Europe

English spy novelist Eric Ambler is one of the most respected authors in the history of the genre. His novel Journey into Fear was published in 1940. The story takes place at that present time, when World War II is underway in Europe. An Englishman named Graham works as an engineer for a British arms manufacturer and travels frequently for business. He has recently completed some work in Turkey and is scheduled to depart for England the following day. On his last night in Istanbul, Graham spends the evening in a nightclub with Kopeikin, a Turkish coworker. There he strikes up a friendship with an attractive dancer and also notices a suspicious man who seems to be watching him all evening. At the end of the night, when Graham returns to his hotel room, he is startled at finding someone in his room, hidden in the dark. The mysterious stranger fires three shots at Graham, one of which grazes his hand. The would-be killer then flees out the window into the darkness.

Colonel Haki, the head of the Turkish secret police, shows up to investigate. (Haki also appeared in Ambler’s previous novel, A Coffin for Dimitrios.) Haki informs Graham that he is a target for assassination by German spies. Because of his occupation, Graham holds vital information in his head pertaining to the improvement of Turkey’s naval defenses. Killing Graham would delay those improvements for several weeks, allowing enough time for the Nazis launch an invasion of Turkey. It is imperative that Graham return safely to London, not only to save his own life but also to protect Turkey and prevent a Nazi victory over the Allies. Haki and Kopeikin change Graham’s travel plans and sneak him onto a small ship leaving Turkey for Genoa, Italy. There are about a dozen passengers on the boat, all of whom the reader becomes well-acquainted with. Although no one was supposed to know that Graham was traveling on this particular ship, he soon finds that the secret has apparently gotten out, and he is in danger of being murdered by one of his fellow passengers.

Ambler writes very realistic spy thrillers, without any pulp-fiction heroics. What makes this story compelling is that Graham acts in a realistic way to the threats he faces, and nothing happens that’s beyond the realm of reason. Nowadays, nearly every spy thriller involves potential world domination or nuclear armageddon, and every crime film is about a serial killer or a mass murder. When this novel was written, however, around the time Alfred Hitchcock made Foreign Correspondent, the killing of one person was still considered shocking and terrifying. When reading Journey into Fear, the reader lives vicariously through Graham, imagining what you would do if your own life were similarly placed in jeopardy. Graham is by no means an action hero, but he has enough courage to keep his wits about him and employ his brains for self-preservation.

Though this intimacy of scale is refreshing, for those of us raised on those James Bondish armageddon spy thrillers, it can also feel slow-paced and at times less than thrilling. Journey into Fear was adapted into a 1943 film, and the story is just right for a movie of roughly an hour and a half in length. When you spend a few days reading the book, however, it feels less than satisfying when the 270-page read is wrapped up with a climactic scene that lasts about all of two pages. That adds up to a lot of conversations with Graham’s fellow passengers that one has to sit through just for a small payoff of exciting action. Nevertheless, Ambler’s realistic style makes his espionage thrillers worthwhile. Because the reader can identify with Graham, and the perils he faces are credible, his fear and anxiety are palpably felt.

Understanding History and Other Essays by Bertrand Russell

Three unrelated articles from the 1940s

British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell won the 1950 Nobel Prize in Literature, back when philosophers used to be considered for that award. Understanding History and Other Essays was originally published in 1957 by the Philosophical Library, whose books have been recently rereleased as ebooks by Open Road Media. This volume consists of three of Russell’s previously published essays: “How to Read and Understand History” (1943), “The Value of Free Thought” (1944), and “Mentalism vs. Materialism” (1945). I believe the first two essays were originally published as Little Blue Books by the Haldeman-Julius publishing company. “Mentalism vs. Materialism” is from The Rationalist Annual of 1945. Although the history essay is the title selection, I was attracted more by the subject matter of the latter two essays.

The essay “How to Read and Understand History” is nothing special, probably because Russell is not a historian. He starts by stating that a study of history is useless to most people’s daily lives, and the only reason to read history is if you simply enjoy doing so. He briefly discusses the works of some notable historians, such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch, and a few modern scholars. Russell criticizes philosophers like Hegel and Marx who attempt to come up with a unified theory of history, characterizing them as “mythologizers,” and offers some thoughts on how he thinks history should be written and taught.

In “The Value of Free Thought,” Russell begins by defining what exactly is “free thought.” The term is not synonymous with atheism or agnosticism, as some might think, but rather with scepticism. A freethinker can believe whatever he chooses to believe, but to be a freethinker, that choice must be based on evidence and rational inquiry. The antithesis of free thought, as Russell asserts, would be William James’s argument: Why not believe in religion when believing is more convenient, comfortable, and who’s to say you’re wrong? Russell goes on to critique religion because of its denial of rational inquiry. Like many atheist writers (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens), Russell sometimes lapses into smugness. I agree with the message, but not always the tone. Also, if you’re already a free thinker, then this primer on free thought tells you much of what you already know. Overall, however, “The Value of Free Thought” is a good concise manifesto of sorts for the modern freethinker.

“Mentalism vs. Materialism” is exactly what it sounds, contrasting dualism (matter and mind or spirit) with monism (just matter). Russell, as one might expect, is on the side of the materialists, or “physicalists,” the label he prefers. He starts with an explanation of physics that is forgivably outdated and unforgivably confusing. Once he gets into the epistemology of consciousness, however, his argument is well-stated. This essay is very brief, only about half the length of either of the other two selections.

I bought this ebook as a Kindle Daily Deal. Whenever possible, I look over the table of contents before I purchase an ebook. In this case, the table of contents makes it look like there are 18 essays in this ebook. In fact, however, there are only three, the longest of which is maybe a 45-minute read. The remaining 15 lines of the table of contents are just subheads within the last essay. Open Road could have done a better job formatting that. Had I paid more than a couple bucks for this ebook, I would have been a little disgruntled by the discrepancy between what I thought I was buying and what I actually got. Given that these writings are not in the public domain, a few bucks for a few essays is reasonable. These are not earth-shatteringly revolutionary essays, but those sympathetic to Russell’s atheist, materialist, and skeptical views will appreciate his eloquent and intelligently reasoned discourses.

Essays in this collection

How to Read and Understand History

The Value of Free Thought

Mentalism vs. Materialism

Beasts, Men, and Gods by Ferdynand Ossendowski

War memoir and Mongolian travelogue

Ferdynand Ossendowski (1876–1945) was a Polish scientist, explorer, and political activist who led a complicated and adventurous life. He was born in what is now Latvia. Sometime around his teen years, he moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, with his father. He taught science courses at a university in Tomsk and traveled to many different parts of Asia. Around 1905, he was sentenced to death for organizing communist activities in opposition to the tsar, but his sentence was commuted, and after some years of hard labor, he was released. Much like the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror that followed, the Russian Revolutions of 1917 were followed by a period of political extremism, persecution, and executions. This led to the Russian Civil War, in which Ossendowski fought on the side of the Whites (conservative nationalists) against the Reds (Bolsheviks, Communists, Soviets). In 1920, Ossendowski was living in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. This is where his memoir Beasts, Men, and Gods begins. The Bolsheviks consider him a counterrevolutionary and set out to capture and likely execute him. Ossendowski gets wind of their coming, however, and escapes. He decides to flee Russia through Mongolia, hoping to eventually reach a port city where he can emigrate to a safe place in Western Europe.

The danger doesn’t end, however, when Ossendowski crosses into Mongolia. Whites and Reds are active on that side of the border as well, where the Mongolians are also fighting for their independence from Chinese occupation. Ossendowski joins up with a band of Whites consisting of other “foreigners” (Ossendowski identifies as a Pole) who, while still hoping to make their exit from the region, engage in military battles against the Reds and Chinese. The landscape is littered with corpses, and torture and atrocities are ubiquitous. In an environment of rampant paranoia where spies are found everywhere, Ossendowski is equally in danger of being killed by White officers who suspect him of leaning towards the Reds.

Beasts, Men, and Gods was published in 1922. While Ossendowski’s life was certainly exciting, the way he tells his story here does not make for easy reading. This account reads as if it were written for an Eastern European audience who would have been intimately familiar with the events of the Russian Civil War. To those not in the know, the text often reads like a confusing barrage of unfamiliar proper nouns: geographical place names, various Red and White factions, government agencies and military units, the names of Russian generals, and various Chinese and Mongolian ethnic groups. At times it’s difficult to keep straight which groups are fighting for which side. In order to fully appreciate this book, I think I would first have to read a comprehensive overview of the Russian Civil War and another volume on the history of Mongolia.

While the war narrative is difficult to get through, the book is more successful as a study of Mongolian culture. While in Mongolia, Ossendowski spent much time in Buddhist monasteries. He met the Living Buddha, the highest Buddhist personage in Mongolia, distinct from the Dalai Lama in Tibet. The most vividly drawn character in the book is the White general Baron Ungern von Sternberg (1886–1921), a German aristocrat who has “gone native” and embraced the Buddhist religion. Ossendowski himself does not profess to having adopted Buddhism, but he relates Buddhist teachings and history with respect and an attention to detail. Fortune telling was a common practice in Mongolia, and Ossendowski writes about prophecies as if they were real and accurate. After the travel narrative ends, another eight chapters are solely devoted to the religion, myths, and legends of Mongolian Buddhism. As Beasts, Men, and Gods progresses, and becomes less about Russia and more about Mongolia, I found it more interesting and accessible. I felt lost for much of the first half of Ossendowski’s memoir, but I came to like it more towards the end.

The Great Divide: Nature and Human Nature in the Old World and the New by Peter Watson

Long-lost cousins with vastly different upbringings

When Europeans first discovered the Americas, it was the meeting of two vastly different cultures, two populations that were entirely alien to one another. In his 2012 book, The Great Divide, British intellectual historian Peter Watson investigates how and why the peoples of the Old and New Worlds developed so differently. Watson makes the case that differing environmental conditions in the two hemispheres—climate, topography, flora and fauna—forged two diverging trajectories of civilization and culture. In The Great Divide, he has compiled compelling evidence to that effect into a sweeping overview of human history. Some factors that he considers are the role that natural disasters played in the creation of gods and religions, how different flora and fauna affected the rates at which agriculture and cities developed, how the use of psychotropic plants influenced cultural ideologies, and why was human sacrifice such a widespread practice in the Americas?

As I’ve come to learn from previously reading his books Ideas and The Modern Mind, Watson is a master generalist who can pull together concepts and data from a wide variety of fields in the sciences, humanities, and the arts and unify them into a remarkably cohesive whole. The Great Divide, however, is pretty much all about archeology, anthropology, and paleontology. I thought this book would have something to say about the cultures of the Old World and the New after the first transatlantic contact, but with the exception of some brief coverage of the Spanish Conquest, it is entirely concerned with events prior to 1492. Watson’s investigation begins with the dawn of humans and spends a lot of time in the Ice Age. Socrates, Buddha, and Confucius don’t show up until chapter 18, and the Spaniards don’t reach America until the 23rd and final chapter. The Great Divide is basically a comprehensive summary of world archaeology, as much as we knew in 2012. I enjoy reading about archaeology, but because I read quite a bit on that subject, a lot of this was review for me. Nevertheless, as is always the case with Watson’s books, he enriches the general narrative with plenty of interesting facts and connections that will be new and intriguing to most general readers.

If the purpose of this book is to compare and contrast the pre-1492 trajectories of the Old and New Worlds, it is not entirely successful. Watson presents a few chapters on the history of the Old World, followed by a couple chapters on the history of the New World, and back and forth, and back and forth. Only in the conclusion of the book, when recapping all the evidence presented, does Watson really take the time to make side-by-side comparisons between the two domains and draw generalizations and theories from their differences. The two hemispheres, not surprisingly, do not get equal time and consideration. It seems like the book is about two-thirds Old World and one-third New World, simply because there’s so much more pre-16th-century information available on Eurasia than there is on the Americas.

The Great Divide is an excellent synthesis of human history that draws interesting parallels and deviations between the peoples of the Eastern and Western hemispheres. This book will not, however, captivate the general reader to the same extent as Charles Mann’s excellent 1491 or perhaps Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (which I haven’t read, but it was a popular bestseller). Although Watson does generate similar wow-factor by delivering insightful revelations to curious readers, The Great Divide has more of a textbook execution to it, rather than the more investigative science journalism feel of Mann’s work. Notwithstanding, if you are at all interested in the ancient history of world cultures, this book’s breadth and depth make it a must-read.

The ebook claims that an Appendix 2 is available online at the Harper Collins website, but it’s not there, and that’s really annoying.  

Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian

An aimless wanderer (or two) in Southwest China

Chinese-French writer Gao Xingjian won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was born in China in 1940, emigrated to France in 1997, and writes in the Chinese language. His novel Soul Mountain was published in 1990.

An unnamed writer of literature has gotten into trouble with the authorities in Beijing for the controversial content of his writings. He leaves the capital and takes an extended journey out west to Sichuan, sometimes venturing over the border into Tibet and other surrounding areas. He lived in this region when he was younger, so he knows much of the local history and folklore. This writer tells the people he meets that he’s looking for material for an upcoming literary work, but that really just seems like an excuse for him to do some soul searching. He gravitates towards remnants of pre-modern China—old-growth forests, isolated Daoist temples, and lonely mountaintops—and he searches for a legendary location called Lingshan (Soul Mountain). Along the way he meets a woman, also a solo traveler, and they become romantically, or at least sexually, involved. Actually, there is more than one woman over the course of the book, but there seems to be one who predominates over the others. It’s unclear what this woman is doing while he’s off visiting historical and archaeological sites. Is she just waiting in the hotel for him to return? Or, perhaps, are the chapters arranged in nonchronological order?

One of the annoying aspects of Soul Mountain is that none of the characters have names. At times, stories are related in which historical and mythical personages are named, but no one in the primary present-tense narrative has a name, just “the woman,” “the lawyer,” “my friend,” etc. Even more frustrating is the way that Gao switches the narration from first-person to second-person seemingly indiscriminately. The protagonist is known only as “I” or “you.” Later in the book there’s a “he,” and I don’t know who the hell was supposed to be the antecedent for that pronoun.

The summary above is how I read the novel, but I found out afterwards from Wikipedia that “I” and “you” are supposed to be two different characters, and Soul Mountain is actually two novels intertwined. If I have to find that out from Wikipedia, then the author hasn’t done his job very well. In chapter 72, Gao breaks the fourth wall and briefly touches upon his use of pronouns, but it’s the very definition of too little, too late. I think most people reading Soul Mountain (in its English translation, at least) would interpret the book exactly as I did.

The novel is set in the 1980s. The Cultural Revolution in China was over by then, but it is mentioned frequently by the characters as a recent memory. Soul Mountain is critical of many aspects of life under Chinese Communism—restrictions of civil liberties, unwieldy bureaucracy, degradation of the environment, censorship of literature and journalism, cruel and unusual punishment, and more. I liked Soul Mountain for what it taught me about China. It functions as an insider’s travelogue to this region of China during a certain period in history, but I could have probably gotten the same experience from a Lonely Planet guidebook or some travel memoir. I enjoyed the travel chapters much more than the chapters that chronicle the relations between the writer and his female partner(s). The sex scenes are off-putting, not because of any graphic sexual content but because of the odd and disturbing conversations they have. As a fictional narrative, there isn’t much of a novel here at all, just a collection of scenes. At first, it seems as if an actual story will be told, but as the book progresses it gets more abstract until Gao is just writing down seemingly random thoughts. I didn’t care about the characters, who never seemed to develop or progress or learn anything over time.