Rose of Jericho and Other Stories by Tage Aurell

Expressionist sketches of Swedish country life

From 1965 to 1970, the University of Wisconsin Press published its Nordic Translations Series, consisting of English-language editions of modern literature by Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, and Finnish authors. Eleven books from that series are now available for free at the University of Wisconsin Libraries’ website, where one can read the texts online or download free ebooks. One of these volumes, Rose of Jericho and Other Stories, is a collection of short fiction by Swedish author Tage Aurell (1895–1976). The volume includes nine short stories that were originally published in Sweden in 1946 and 1949.

Aurell grew up in the province of Värmland, a rather rustic area of Sweden, and wrote about rural and small-town life. Much like America’s William Faulkner, however, Aurell experimented with language to the point where his writings would probably appeal more to big-city and university intellectuals than to the simple country folk he depicts in his stories. In the level of obscurity within his prose, Aurell manages to be even more frustrating than Faulkner. In an attempt to capture a stream-of-consciousness interior monologue, Aurell frequently employs incomplete sentences, unfinished thoughts, and a liberal license with punctuation. His stories often switch back and forth between multiple narrative perspectives, providing disjointed snippets of information that create an effect similar to a cubist painting or collage. At times it’s difficult to ascertain exactly who is saying or thinking what, or even which character is dying in a given story. And in almost every story, there’s someone dying. As scholar Eric O. Johanneson explains in the book’s introduction, “Aloneness, illness and death, and sex are the three major motifs: the universal concerns of man.” Have no fear that these stories are relentlessly depressing, however, because Aurell does inject them with a sense of humor.

Aurell seems to be seeing just how little orientation he can provide to the reader while still delivering something that could be called a story. There often isn’t much of a plot in these selections, just the description of a situation that doesn’t go anywhere. According to Johanneson, again: “. . . some of Aurell’s stories are, in effect, as surprising and as inconclusive as life itself.” That’s a fancy way of praising the positive quality of Aurell’s writing: his realism. There’s nothing here in these stories that conforms to any artificial conventions of how a story should be told or what literature should be.

And sometimes Aurell’s strategy works, resulting in a moving story with characters that the reader really grows to care about. The title selection, “Rose of Jericho” is about a lonely older man who places an ad inviting a woman boarder to his country house for rest and relaxation in exchange for help with housework and garden chores. While the setup sounds picturesque, the relationship between the two characters is anything but predictable. Another effective story, “Gatepost,” interweaves a farmer’s tale of his lost calf with the inner thoughts of a man dying from a terminal illness. “True Confessions” is a poignantly realistic story about an aging widower’s relationship with his two grown daughters who have moved away to the big city.

The remaining half dozen stories left me less than impressed. In general, Aurell’s writing is just too abstract for my tastes, and I didn’t feel like I learned much about Swedish country life in the process. Readers with a taste for modernist, experimental fiction that bends formal conventions and embraces narrative ambiguity will enjoy these stories more than I.

Stories in this collection

Until the Ringing of the Bell

True Confessions

Rose of Jericho

Gatepost

The Whitsun Bride

Bachelor Party

The Old Highway

A Winter Day

A Summer Play

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American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1968–1969 (Library of America), edited by Gary K. Wolfe

These “classics” are mediocre at best

I’ve always been a big fan of the Library of America. Mostly I’m familiar with their volumes of classic literature in the black and white dustjackets. When it comes to that sphere of publishing, they put together the best-edited and best-produced books in the business. When I saw that this volume on American Science Fiction was being offered as a Kindle Daily Deal, I snatched it up, expecting that it would reflect the smart editorial choices and general excellence I’ve come to expect from the Library of America. American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1968–1969, however, proved to be a major disappointment. Although I enjoy reading vintage science fiction from this era, these selections did not impress me at all. Two of the books were terrible, and two were mediocre at best. The four authors featured are all well-respected in the genre, and these books have maybe won Nebula or Hugo Awards, but I don’t always agree with the arbiters of taste who hand out such accolades. If these four books are indeed regarded as “classics” of the genre, then they are vastly overrated.

Past Master is the debut novel by R. A. Lafferty. In the 26th century, an Earth colony on a far-off planet is facing unrest in their utopian community, so they reach back in time to abduct Sir Thomas More, author of the original Utopia, to rescue their government. The book is filled with bad ideas, nonsensical language, meaningless dialog, and silly attempts at humor that aren’t funny. Even worse is Picnic on Paradise by Joanna Russ. This novel is ostensibly a wilderness adventure, devoid of adventure, in which Alyx of Tyre (a recurring character for Russ) leads a band of frequently weeping idiots on a pointless trek through the mountainous terrain of a planet ironically named Paradise. Like Lafferty, Russ takes so many liberties with the English language that her prose reads like fruitless nonsense.

The other two selections in the volume fare better by at least being readable. Like the two aforementioned, both take place in a distant future after mankind has populated many worlds. Samuel R. Delany’s novel Nova has a decent story about interstellar voyagers aiming to fly through a star as it goes nova. It just gets too bogged down in an overly melodramatic space opera and a bunch of tangential digressions about Delany’s pet interests (tarot cards, for example) that in no way contribute to the main plot of the narrative. The best novel in the collection, and that’s not saying much, is Jack Vance’s Emphyrio. Man’s interstellar colonies are governed by a sort of medieval feudalism, which Vance uses to advance his libertarian theories of economics. Inspired by the legend of a Christ-like martyr named Emphyrio, a young hero decides to resist the ruling empire. Unlike the other showings in this collection, Vance is at least a good craftsman of the English language and a thoughtful storyteller who can write science fiction that doesn’t defy logic.

The Library of America has published at least three other volumes in this series of American Science Fiction collections, all edited by Gary K. Wolfe. I am familiar with a few of the novels included in those other volumes, such as the excellent Way Station by Clifford D. Simak in the 1960–1966 collection. After being disappointed by Wolfe’s selections in this 1968–1969 volume, however, I don’t have confidence that another volume of science fiction from the LOA would be worth my money or time.

Novels in this collection (all previously reviewed at Old Books by Dead Guys)

Past Master by R. A. Lafferty 

Picnic on Paradise by Joanna Russ 

Nova by Samuel R. Delany 

Emphyrio by Jack Vance

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Simón Bolívar: A Life by John Lynch

Not so much a biography as an administrative history

I didn’t know a whole lot about Simón Bolívar before reading John Lynch’s 2006 book Simón Bolívar: A Life. After reading the book, I can certainly say that I learned much about Bolívar from Lynch’s comprehensive account of the South American Liberator. This probably isn’t, however, the best book for a beginner to start with, since I often felt like I was in over my head.

Although the subtitle, “A Life,” indicates that this book is a biography, this Bolivarian life and times weighs more heavily on the side of the times than the life. Large portions of the book are not so much about Bolívar as about what South America was like during his lifetime—the political landscape, socioeconomic climate, and relations between the races and classes, for example. A sizeable roster of Bolívar’s generals gets much coverage as well, with their own minibiographies scattered throughout the chapters. Lynch does not seem to have written this book for a general reading audience but rather for readers with prior knowledge on the subject, like college students in Latin American Studies. One is just expected to be familiar with many of the soldiers and politicians mentioned in the book, and Lynch references other biographies of Bolívar, arguing various points against them, with the assumption that the reader has already read them. The academic nature of the book is not a flaw, but something that prospective readers should be aware of before making the decision to purchase.

There isn’t a lot in this book about Bolívar’s early life. One chapter covers his childhood, another his time spent in Europe as a young man. By Chapter 3 Bolívar is already in full freedom-fighter mode, which is Lynch’s main concern. There isn’t much about Bolívar’s personal life, other than a few brief mentions of some mistresses, including one in particular who played a major role in his life. One doesn’t really get much of a sense of Bolívar’s personality or what he was like as a human being. Instead, this book focuses almost entirely on Bolívar’s career as a warrior and statesman, making it not so much a biography as a history of Bolívar’s military and political administration, for lack of a better word. By comparison, Ron Chernow’s biographies of George Washington or Alexander Hamilton are patchworks of the political history, military careers, public statesmanship, personal lives, and intellectual development of their subjects. Simón Bolívar: A Life is about 80 percent political, 20 percent military, with almost nothing about its subject’s private life.

Some reviewers have argued that this book doesn’t have enough military content for a biography of Latin America’s greatest warrior. I thought there was plenty for my tastes, but I’m not interested in the specifics of troop movements and battle strategies. Lynch delves into much interesting analysis of Bolívar’s political thought. For all his glory in achieving independence from Spain, Bolívar was a failure as a founding father and head of state. He envisioned a united South America (minus Brazil), but he was never able to overcome the internal strife, class conflict, and racial tensions in and between Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and beyond. His political philosophy was a strange jumble of liberalism and conservatism. Though he believed in freedom, equality, and the abolishment of slavery (and put his money where his mouth was more so than Thomas Jefferson), Bolívar believed in absolute monarchy, particularly with himself as the ruling dictator. Lynch thoroughly analyzes all these issues in a manner that will be satisfying to scholars in Latin American history, but for the average general reader the individual human being of Bolívar himself gets lost among the policy debates and administrative details.
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Epilog and Other Stories: The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak, Volume Fourteen

Capstone to an essential series

At long last, Open Road Media has finally released the final two volumes of The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak series. The series was designed to encompass fourteen volumes, but editor David W. Wixon has made us wait six years since Volume 12 was released. In the meantime, I got tired of waiting for Wixon, so I tracked down the rest of Simak’s science fiction stories (all the old pulp magazines have been scanned at the Internet Archive). It is nice, however, to finally see the series reach completion, and Wixon includes a western and a war story that I was unable to find. Because Volume 14 was offered as a Kindle daily deal, I read it before Volume 13.

Simak’s best-known novel, entitled City, was assembled from previously published short stories, and those stories have been distributed throughout the volumes of the Complete Short Fiction series. “Epilog” is an afterword to City that Simak wrote decades later and has since been added to subsequent editions of the novel. Taking place tens of thousands of years in the future, “Epilog” reveals the fate of Jenkins, the robot protagonist of City, and is one of the better stories in this collection.

“Rule 18,” a story about an interplanetary football game, won a retrospective Hugo Award 76 years after its original publication. I think it’s one of the less impressive stories in this volume, however, and it contains some unfortunate racial stereotypes. Among the best entries in Volume 14 is “Limiting Factor,” in which explorers discover the remnants of a technological civilization and attempt to reconstruct the details of the extinct alien culture. I generally wouldn’t consider overt comedy to be among Simak’s strengths, but Mr. Meek Plays Polo is a successful humorous effort in an interesting setting. The title character is a bookkeeper turned space tourist who stops for fuel at a Wild Western colony on the ring rocks of Saturn, where he is roped into participating in a “space polo” match. This volume also contains the novelette “The World That Couldn’t Be,” in which an Earthling homesteader on a far-off planet hunts down the alien beast who is eating his crops. The astrozoological aspects of the story allow Simak to propose an alternative theory of evolution that might exist on a distant world.

The western story in this volume, “Smoke Killer,” is fine but nothing special. Same with the World War II air combat tale, “A Bomb for No. 10 Downing,” which is built on an exciting premise but is too brief for much development. It is interesting to see these stories alongside Simak’s science fiction, but the latter genre is clearly where his talents lie.

To be honest, this isn’t one of the better volumes in this fourteen-volume series, but the series as a whole is so good overall that even a disappointing installment is better than most of the sci-fi anthologies out there. While Simak wrote a few excellent novels, the quality of his short stories on average surpasses that of his longer-form fiction. Thanks very much to Wixon and Open Road Media for publishing The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak series. It stands as an impressive monument to this sci-fi grand master’s prodigious talent and boundless visionary imagination.

Stories in this collection

Lulu

Smoke Killer

Shadow Show

Epilog

A Bomb for No. 10 Downing

Limiting Factor

Masquerade

The Fence

Rule 18

Mr. Meek Plays Polo

The World That Couldn’t Be

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American Warsaw: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Polish Chicago by Dominic A. Pacyga

The epicenter of Polish American history

Since the first major wave of Polish immigration in the mid-19th century, the city of Chicago has been home to the largest concentration of Poles outside of Poland, making it the de facto capital of Polonia (people of Polish descent living outside of Poland). In his 2019 book American Warsaw, Chicago native and historian Dominic A. Pacyga provides a detailed history of this Polish American community. The importance of this ethnic enclave is heightened by the fact that for much of the last two centuries Poland has been conquered, occupied, and partitioned by various subjugating powers—Prussia, Russia, Austria, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union. Many of Chicago’s Poles were exiles or refugees who fled political upheaval and oppression in their homeland. The Polish community in Chicago, therefore, often served as a sort of polity in absentia who lobbied and fought for Polish independence, upheld Polish customs, and organized massive charitable efforts to support Poles in Europe.

I am one-quarter Polish American; not via Chicago but rather from a heavily Polish town in Wisconsin. Even though I have no direct connection to the Windy City, I still found this to be a very good history of the Polish American experience in general. Because of Chicago’s high population of Poles, many of the major Polish American political, cultural, and charitable organizations are headquartered there. Pacyga’s account of the ways in which Polish Americans and Polish exiles in Chicago responded to events occurring in their Old World homeland is in many ways relevant to other Polish American communities throughout the United States. Major events in Polish history such as the two world wars, the Soviet occupation, the election of Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II, and the Solidarity labor movement inspired strong feelings and noble actions on the part of Polish Americans, and Pacyga does a fine job of recreating the experience of these decisive moments in time.

Throughout the book, Pacyga examines the changing perception of Polskosc (with acute accents over the last s and c) or Polishness. The collective idea of who could really be considered Polish changed over time as a result of conflicts between Polish immigrants and American-born Poles, Catholic Poles and non-Catholic Poles, working class Poles and aristocratic Poles, Jewish Poles and anti-Semitic Poles, old-timer immigrants and latecomer immigrants, nationalists and assimilationists, Polish speakers and English speakers, or inner city Poles and suburban Poles. Even with the outbreak of World War I, there was at first a split between those Poles who supported Russia and those who supported Germany and Austria. All these schisms between factions contributed to the molding of Polish identity within Chicago’s Polish American community.

Pacyga draws much of his research from Chicago’s Polish newspapers. Poles love a parade, and sometimes the text reads like a series of parades, neighborhood festivals, and political rallies, as chronicled in those papers. Due to the prominent role of Catholicism in the lives of many Poles, there’s also quite a bit about church history. At times, the text can get bogged down in demographic and financial statistics, but for the most part American Warsaw is an engaging and interesting read. The publisher overlooked an awful lot of typographical errors in the ebook, however, which is a shame.  

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By Bread Alone by I. K. Friedman

Prototype of the American muckraker novel

Isaac Khan Friedman was a socialist and settlement house worker in Chicago before becoming a journalist and novelist. He published a handful of novels about the working class and labor issues. Literature professor Walter B. Rideout, in his book The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900–1954, called Friedman’s By Bread Alone, published in 1901, the first radical novel of the 20th century. As such, By Bread Alone is a sort of prototype of the muckraking literary movement that would soon follow, marked most notably by Upton Sinclair’s landmark labor novel The Jungle of 1906.

By Bread Alone is based on the real-life events of the Homestead Strike which occurred in Homestead, Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh, in 1892. Friedman sets his narrative, however, in the Chicago area, specifically in the nearby fictional town of Marvin, Illinois, which, much like Gary, Indiana, is named after the family that owns the local steel mills. Steel tycoon Henry Marvin has thousands in his employ, but he cares more about his own profits than the lives of his workers. When he refuses to pay his laborers fairly or improve their working and living conditions, they form a union and strike.

Friedman’s writing bears much resemblance to Upton Sinclair’s, but a bit more archaic in tone and clumsy in its delivery. Friedman frequently employs bizarre, outdated vocabulary, and his sentences are often structured in pointlessly convoluted syntax. Friedman is also guilty of one narrative mistake that Sinclair committed often in his career. The protagonist of the story is not a proletariat but rather an educated, wealthy “gentleman” who decides to slum it in the mills as a sort of sociological experiment. The events of class war and labor strife are not revealed through the lives of the workers but rather through the eyes of this labor tourist. Many of Sinclair’s labor novels, such as King Coal or Boston, are related through this same sort of upper-class intermediary. The only novel in which Sinclair tells his story directly through the workers themselves is The Jungle, which is why that book is his masterpiece. The greatest labor novels in American literature—The Jungle, The Octopus, The Grapes of Wrath—are the ones that dispense with the gentleman protagonist. In writing By Bread Alone, Friedman had yet to learn that lesson, and as a result the reader has to sit through an awful lot of clichéd Victorian romance to get to the scenes of class struggle. Much of the novel revolves around hero Blair Carrhart’s romance with a wealthy young “lady,” the mill-owner Marvin’s daughter. Much like Sinclair’s The Coal War, Friedman can’t even seriously entertain the idea of his gentleman hero hooking up with a working woman beneath his class. So much for sympathizing with the workers.

As a work of social realism, By Bread Alone may have been pioneering for its social aspects, but it fails in the realism department. The most effective scenes in the book are those of the strike and subsequent class violence, but such episodes never really seem to ring true. There’s too much heroism and not enough blood. Friedman’s work can’t compare with the gripping and visceral scenes of labor warfare in Emile Zola’s epic strike novel Germinal. When characters die in By Bread Alone, you recognize them as symbols but you don’t feel for them as human beings. His plot feels too facile; particularly the last couple chapters, which read like they’re from a different book entirely, and many problems are resolved in deus ex machina fashion. Historically, By Bread Alone may hold pride of precedence, but there are many other novels of muckraking naturalism more worthy of a reader’s time.
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Maigret Afraid by Georges Simenon

Murder and class conflict in a provincial town

First published in 1953, Maigret Afraid is the 70th of 103 Inspector Maigret mysteries published by Belgian author Georges Simenon (counting the novels and short stories). The rather generic title refers to when Maigret twice utters “I am afraid” when expressing concern for the safety of one of the witnesses involved in the case.

Returning from a policeman’s convention in Bordeaux, Maigret feels obligated to stop in the Vendée region and visit his old school chum Chabot, who is now Examining Magistrate for the town of Fontenay-le-Comte. Unbeknownst to Maigret when he gets off the train, a series of murders has recently occurred in the town. When it becomes public knowledge that the Superintendant of Paris’s Police Judiciare is in town, Maigret is reluctantly roped into participating in the investigation. The murdered persons include the black sheep of Fontenay’s wealthiest family, an old widow, and the town drunk. Given the random assortment of victims, it is feared that a serial-killing madman may be on the loose.

Integral to the story is Maigret’s relationship to Chabot. Maigret looked up to his classmate when they were in school together, but now in their old age the tables have turned. Maigret is clearly the more competent law enforcement professional of the two. Though he has his own ideas of how the investigation should be handled, he doesn’t want to step on Chabot’s toes, even when the latter practically begs him to take over. Maigret perceptively recognizes a tense divide between the haves and have-nots in Fontenay. He can see that Chabot’s judgment is not impartial but rather biased by his friendships with some of the wealthier families in town.

The biggest problem with this mystery is that it’s not really much of a mystery. There are really only two viable suspects for the murder, and the motives and methods behind the three killings are not very difficult to unravel. Like many a Simenon crime novel, this is really more of a psychological study of a crime than an actual whodunit mystery. Though the Maigret novels reside firmly within the mystery genre, in many ways they comprise something like a mid-twentieth-century version of Balzac’s Comédie Humaine—a reflection of French society during the author’s lifetime. In Maigret Afraid, Simenon shows us life in a provincial town and its class conflicts between the nobility and the common folk, and between the working class and the nouveau riche aristocracy. The resentment of Fontenay’s lower and middle classes towards their self-proclaimed “betters” is palpable and threatens to explode at any moment into a hang-the-rich lynch mob. As he often does in these books, Simenon reveals aspects of French society that lie behind the rosy facade presented to tourists.

Maigret Afraid is thoroughly engaging for most of its length, though it may leave the reader wishing for a more thrilling ending. From a detective fiction standpoint, this may not be one of Maigret’s most fascinating cases, but the lives of the characters are compelling and poignant. This novel is a good solid entry in the mystery genre, and any book by Simenon is better than the vast majority of crime thrillers out there.  

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Emphyrio by Jack Vance

Another Christ-like slayer of oligarchies

Jack Vance’s science fiction novel Emphyrio was first published in the June 1969 issue of Fantastic Science Fiction and released in book form later that same year. The story takes place in the distant future, after mankind has mastered interstellar travel and populated many worlds. The teenaged protagonist Ghyl Tarvoke lives in the city of Ambroy in the country of Fortinone on the planet Halma. Despite the technology for space travel, the civilization on Halma is rather medieval in nature, calling to mind the worlds of Game of Thrones or The Witcher, but without the magic or monsters. The lives of Ambroy’s citizens are determined largely by their affiliation to one of numerous trade guilds. The planet is renowned for its export of handicrafts, so much so that the wealthy lords who govern the world have outlawed all forms of mechanical duplication, such as printing and photography. Ghyl belongs to the woodcarvers’ guild and works as an apprentice to his father, Amiante, an expert in the art of fine carving.

As a young boy, Ghyl learns of a folk legend about a rebellious, Christ-like figure named Emphyrio. The story becomes somewhat of an obsession for Ghyl, and he determines to investigate the historical fact behind the legend. Who was this great people’s hero, and what was the cause of his martyrdom? As Ghyl grows into manhood, he begins to question the rigid caste structure of Halman society and the lords’ domineering trade regulations. He becomes an entrepreneurial rebel himself, emulating the inspirational figure of Emphyrio. The novel is filled with so much talk of trade regulations, taxes, and tariffs that I’m sure there’s an economic message here. Quite frankly, I didn’t care enough to pin it down, but the book seems to push a libertarian message. For the most part, however, Emphyrio primarily reads as another young-hero-versus-the-empire story that is overly familiar from Dune, Star Wars, and many other science fiction works. One interesting bit of trivia is that Vance actually uses the phrase “Star Wars” in this book published eight years before the release of the popular film by that name.

Emphyrio is included in the Library of America’s volume American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1968–1969. It is easily the best of the four novels in that volume, but to be honest, none of the four selections are particularly impressive. Ghyl’s coming-of-age journey is engaging enough. He encounters his first love, commits his first juvenile delinquencies, and realizes his father isn’t perfect. The reader, however, never becomes as invested in the vaguely biblical legend of Emphyrio to the extent that Ghyl does, so whenever the story follows that thread it feels like a distraction from the more interesting trajectory of Ghyl’s life.

As is common in science fiction novels, Vance peppers the text of Emphyrio with many fictional words and place names. That can make for a difficult read at times, but to his credit Vance writes real sentences with recognizable syntax, which is more than can be said for a lot of the more ostentatiously avant garde sci-fi writers of this period, whose works suffer from self-indulgent attempts at poetic prose. I wish that Vance had given Emphyrio a better ending, however, one that would bring us around full circle to the book’s flash-forward prelude. Overall, Emphyrio is a solid sci-fi novel for its era, but it lacks the excitement and psychological depth necessary to make it stand out as a memorable entry in the genre. It probably influenced later works more entertaining than itself.

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