Monday, March 18, 2024

Star Trek Memories by William Shatner with Chris Kreski



More of a TV production history than a personal memoir
Star Trek Memories
was published in 1993, after the completion of the sixth Star Trek motion picture, the last to focus exclusively on the original Star Trek cast. Seeing his career as Captain Kirk coming to an end, Shatner felt inclined to wax nostalgic by publishing his recollections of the making of the original Star Trek television series. A sequel published the following year, Star Trek Movie Memories, covers the making of the film franchise. I’m not a Trekkie who obsesses over all the trivia on each episode, but I do enjoy the show, and I like Shatner.


Star Trek Memories is packaged like a Shatner memoir, but that’s not really what it is. This is a behind-the-scenes history of the production of the first Star Trek television series. It begins with Gene Roddenberry’s childhood, and ends in 1968 with Star Trek’s cancellation after three seasons. Shatner doesn’t even get involved with the series until a quarter of the way through the book. Although there are plenty of first-person interjections, this doesn’t really read like it was written in Shatner’s voice. One suspects coauthor Chris Kreski had a heavy hand in this. If you are expecting a lot of secrets and gossip about the cast of the show, you’re not going to find much here. The crew actually gets more coverage than the cast. You learn more about the set decorator and the script editor than you do about any of the actors, with the exception of Leonard Nimoy. He gets a fair amount of ink, even more than Shatner himself. The rest of the cast members pretty much get one good anecdote each. There are several tales of practical jokes among the cast and crew that strike the reader as being surprisingly unfunny, and in some cases just mean.

The refreshing thing about this TV memoir is that it’s not just a relentlessly positive lovefest for the show or a pat-on-the-back “look what we accomplished” story. There is a surprising amount of negative criticism of the show and the people involved with it, including some directed towards Shatner himself. It is forthrightly acknowledged that while some of the Star Trek episodes are masterpieces, quite a few are terrible schlock. The book recounts the constant struggles between the Star Trek production team and its parent studio, who demanded that this ambitious science fiction program be made under a paltry budget. The network also often interfered in the creative direction of the show by censoring stories, pushing for dumbed-down content, and trying to shape the characters to their liking. At the beginning of the book, Gene Roddenberry is portrayed as a veritable saint, but by the end of the narrative he has morphed into a sort of villain. His widow was still alive when the book was published, however, so one gets the idea that Shatner and Kreski had to hold back on any unflattering revelations of the Star Trek creator.

This book is kind of like reading a rock and roll autobiography where the star doesn’t talk much about his famous bandmates but instead says more about his manager, publicist, lawyer, and accountant (I’m looking at you, Pete Townshend). This book wasn’t quite what I expected, but I found it all very interesting nonetheless. Star Trek was first broadcast shortly before I was born, but I did grow up on old-school television, back when there were only three networks. This book gave me a good idea of how shows were made in those days, for better or for worse.  
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Friday, March 15, 2024

Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán by John Lloyd Stephens



Dueling presidents and Mayan ruins
John Lloyd Stephens (1805-1852) was an American diplomat and travel writer. In 1839, President Martin Van Buren appointed him Ambassador to Central America. Soon after, he traveled to Central America to assume his new post. It’s unclear what exactly his mission was, however, since Stephens just seems to travel around doing whatever he wants. Stephens’s journey lasted several months, during which time he also ventured into Mexico. His account of his expedition, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán was published in two volumes in 1841. This book should not be confused with his 1843 publication Incidents of Travel in Yucatán, which covers a second trip Stephens made to Mexico.

In 1839, the several nations of Central America were united under one government, the Federal Republic of Central America. When Stephens arrived in Central America, however, the presidency of that government was in dispute between two warring generals, Rafael Carrera and José Francisco Morazán. Stephens doesn’t seem to favor either would-be presidente but rather curries the favor of whichever he happens to be facing at the time. Stephens spends much of the book chronicling the political and military conflict between these two figures. He met with both generals and witnessed some battles fought and atrocities committed by both parties. Although borders may have been different back then, I believe Stephens’s travels took him through every country in Central America except maybe Panama. He doesn’t venture into Mexico until halfway through Volume 2.

Stephens also explored the ruins of several Mayan cities, three of which are discussed at some length: Copán in Guatemala, Palenque in Chiapas, and Uxmal in the Yucatán. Accompanying him on these explorations was the artist Frederick Catherwood, who documented the sites in drawings and paintings. Stephens had no archaeological training, so his discussions of the Maya don’t really hold up to today’s standards. Catherwood, on the other hand, is the real deal. His illustrations of Mayan ruins are quite remarkable in their attention to detail, particularly when you consider he had almost no precedent to build upon. This book contains dozens of engravings of Catherwood’s drawings, but he also published his own book Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan with color lithographs. I don’t want to overemphasize the archaeological content of the book, however, because it’s really only a small portion of the text. The bulk of the two volumes deals with the politics and military matters of Central America, which will likely be of interest mostly to historians of Latin America.


There’s also quite a bit of complaining about unsavory accommodations, incessant mosquitos, and unsatisfactory hired hands. Stephens is more interested in getting to know wealthy Spaniards than the poor Indigenous population, because the former can offer him better lodgings and dinners than the latter. As an explorer and travel writer, Stephens is no Alexander von Humboldt. You’re not going to get a really liberal and enlightened account of Latin American culture and politics, but Stephens is at least a conscientious observer and chronicler of what he sees.

This book is valuable as an outsider’s historical account of what Central America, Chiapas, and the Yucatán were like during this time period. Much of the information imparted, however, won’t hold much interest for today’s reader. Before reading this book, one really needs to consider if it will be worth roughly 24 hours of your reading time. For those only interested in the archaeological sites, just read the illustrated chapters on the Mayan cities.
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Wednesday, March 13, 2024

The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College by Eva Díaz



A very academic study of three Black Mountain faculty
Robert Rauschenberg is one of my favorite American artists, and I’ve done much reading on his life and artistic career. By association, I’ve also learned a fair amount about his colleagues John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Buckminster Fuller. At one point circa 1950, they all converged at a mysterious institution in North Carolina called Black Mountain College. Though a small school in an obscure location, Black Mountain had a profound influence on American art. What the Bauhaus was to modern European art, Black Mountain could be thought of as the equivalent force in late-twentieth-century American art. I have always been rather fascinated by this nexus of creativity, but accounts I’ve read of the school have been rather vague and sketchy. I was happy, therefore, to stumble upon Eva Díaz’s 2015 book The Experimenters, hoping it would shed some insightful light on the goings-on at Black Mountain.

The Experimenters is not a comprehensive history of Black Mountain College. From what I gather from this book’s notes, that story may have already been written and published. This, rather, is a narrower monograph focusing on the ideas and careers of three members of Black Mountain’s faculty: Joseph Albers, John Cage, and Buckminster Fuller. While their time at Black Mountain is emphasized, this study looks at their entire careers, including the time before and after their semesters at the North Carolina college. In this book, one doesn’t learn much about the students who studied under these teachers. Black Mountain alumni like Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning, and Cy Twombly are mentioned briefly but not much delved into, save for a few quotes about their time at the school. One learns more about the influences of the three central figures of the book—Erik Satie as a precursor of Cage, for example, or Laszlo Moholy-Nagy as a colleague of Albers’s at the Bauhaus. Only on rare occasions does the reader really get an idea of what it would have been like to be a student at Black Mountain, attending one of Cage’s theatre productions, for instance, or assisting Fuller with the erection of one of his geodesic domes. Instead, the text focuses more on the intellectual development, artistic philosophies, and pedagogical techniques of the three protagonists, drawn largely from their own published writings and statements from prior interviews.


The writing of this book is very academic. That doesn’t mean you need a PhD to understand it, but you may need a PhD to enjoy it. It is written as if the intended audience were a dissertation committee or a tenure board, not a general reading audience. Díaz’s introduction is very jargon-heavy, to the point where you may find yourself wondering if you really want to go through with the rest of the book. She spends much time contemplating the meaning of the word “experiment.” The average art lover, however, probably couldn’t care less and just wants to know what went on at Black Mountain. Thankfully, the chapters that follow are less esoteric and more engaging as one learns about the work of these three featured artists. Still, the thesis is reiterated constantly throughout the book, and the same points are repeated again and again to support that thesis. One wonders how much more information could have been delivered without so much tedious repetition of the same conclusions.

An art historian might very well find this to be a five-star read. I certainly have no problems with Díaz’s scholarship, and I am not qualified to argue with her if I did. I merely offer the perspective of the general reader who’s interested in the history of American art, as I’m sure many of the people who read this review may, like myself, fall into that category.
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Tuesday, March 12, 2024

The One-Act Plays of Eugene O’Neill



Short sketches from a master playwright
Eugene O’Neill
One-act plays are the short stories of drama. These are brief stage plays lasting perhaps 15 to 30 minutes. American playwright Eugene O’Neill, winner of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature, is best-known for his full-length plays like The Hairy Ape, Desire Under the Elms, and The Iceman Cometh, but he also wrote 21 one-act plays. I don’t know if any book has ever been devoted exclusively to these short plays, but they can be found in complete-works collections of O’Neill’s writings, or in the three volumes on O’Neill published by the Library of America. In O’Neill’s day, one-act plays would have been staged for theatre festivals and variety nights, which served as opportunities for up-and-coming playwrights to establish a reputation and perhaps win some awards. Nowadays, one-act plays seem relegated to high school and college students performing them in theatrical competitions. While you are unlikely to ever see most of these short plays performed on an actual stage, they are worth a read. O’Neill is one playwright whose works come across well on the printed page. His well-crafted dialogue and detailed and descriptive stage directions often read like prose fiction, calling to mind the works of novelist contemporaries like John Steinbeck or William Faulkner. 

With the exception of the final play on this list, Hughie, all of these works were written early in O’Neill’s career, before he achieved fame and critical acclaim with plays like Beyond the Horizon (a Pulitzer Prize winner) and The Emperor Jones. The first four plays listed below comprise a series with recurring characters, the crew of the ship Glencairn. Many of O’Neill’s early plays deal with nautical travel or the lives of sailors, either at sea or on shore. Seafaring tales were more popular in the early twentieth century than they are today, and the genre allowed O’Neill to deliver popular dramas to the audience while honing his craft towards more mature sailor plays like Anna Christie. In the later plays on this list, one can see the development of O’Neill’s interest in dysfunctional families and their psychological problems, which would lead to later, greater plays like Mourning Becomes Electra and Long Day’s Journey into Night. Through no fault of O’Neill’s, many of his one-act plays present scenes that will seem very familiar from films of the last hundred years, so familiar that they often come across as predictable and clichéd now. It’s hard to tell, however, how they would have been received by theatre audiences a century ago.

Bound East for Cardiff (1914) - 3.5 stars
The first of a series of four one-act plays set on the ship Glencairn. This one presents a death scene in the ship’s forecastle. One crewman lies dying, injured from a fall, while his shipmates converse around him.

In the Zone (1917) - 3 stars
Set during World War I, the ship Glencairn is carrying munitions and has entered “the war zone.” The crewmen are suspicious that one of their own, Smitty, may be a German spy. Not badly written, but utterly predictable to anyone who’s seen enough old war films.

The Long Voyage Home (1918) - 4 stars
Men from the Glencairn stop in a waterfront tavern in London, where the barkeep and his friends hope to shanghai an unsuspecting drunk into servitude on another vessel. This is a familiar scene from literature and film—such as the nautical writings of Jack London or Robert Louis Stevenson, for example—but well done here.

Moon of the Caribbees (1918) - 2 stars
The Glencairn is docked in the West Indies. The crewmen wait for some Black women to show up bringing liquor and sex. Drinking and dancing ensues. The women represent the exotic temptations of the nautical life and wanderlust amid the tropics, but the depiction is racist and the plot is pointless for the most part.

A Wife for a Life (1913) - 2 stars
Two partners work a gold mine in Arizona. The younger of the two gets a telegram from an old sweetheart summoning him home. This leads to a conclusion that is not at all surprising. The dialogue is bogged down with a lot of clumsy explanation.

The Web (1913) - 3 stars
A New York prostitute with a child lives at the mercy of her abusive boyfriend/pimp. At first this reads almost like a piece of muckraking realism, but it gets very heavy-handedly melodramatic towards the end. Again, this is like a scene you’ve seen in countless movies.

Thirst (1913) - 3.5 stars
Three survivors on a life raft are dying of hunger and thirst and fighting off insanity. There’s some racism here, not uncommon for the era, but it is a decently written melodrama. This reads as if it were written for film because the set directions seem as if they would be impossible to execute on a stage.

Recklessness (1913) - 2 stars
An ugly marriage scene, perhaps foreshadowing O’Neill’s later dysfunctional family dramas but not very successfully. A rich older man with a lovely young wife finds out she is cheating on him with their chauffeur. The depiction of the woman is deliberately cruel, indicative of a woman-is-the-root-of-all-evil mindset that plagues some of O’Neill’s other plays.

Warnings (1913) - 3 stars
A telegraph operator for a steamship discovers that he is losing his hearing. He decides to sail on one last voyage, even though he knows his deafness might endanger the ship and its crew. This features a good family scene up front, worthy of O’Neill’s better efforts, but a pretty straightforward, expected ending.

Fog (1914) - 2.5 stars
Another lifeboat drama. Two men talk while a poor woman hugs her dead child. One of the men is a businessman and one a poet, and they carry with them all of the clichés that go along with those professions. This play is ambitious for its supernatural ending.

Abortion (1914) - 4.5 stars
A college baseball star cheats on his fiancée and gets another girl pregnant. His father helps him pay for an abortion. When the girl dies, her brother comes looking for revenge. Surprisingly dark and risqué subject matter for the time. 

The Movie Man (1914) - 2 stars
A comedy set in the Mexican Revolution. A movie director has a contract with a rebel general to film all of his battles. The general is a thinly veiled parody of Pancho Villa. The humor isn’t very funny, and the depiction of the Mexicans is a bit racist.

The Sniper (1915) - 4.5 stars
Set in Belgium during World War I, in a cottage destroyed by shells. A peasant mourns over his dead son, a soldier killed by the Prussians. The peasant vows vengeance against the Germans, but a priest tries to dissuade him from rash violence. Brief but powerful.

Before Breakfast (1916) - 2 stars
A trashy alcoholic shrew of a woman bitches at her husband, a poet (who is offstage, never seen). Reading as if it were written to punish some ex-girlfriend, this is another woman-as-the-root-of-all-evil story, yet it still might be provide a meaty monologue for some character actress.

Ile (1917) - 3.5 stars
In the arctic, a whaling boat is blocked by ice. The captain refuses to turn back until his ship is filled with whale oil (“the ile”). The crew, starving and overworked, threaten mutiny. The captain’s wife, also along for the ride, pleads with her husband to turn the ship back towards home as the voyage weighs on her sanity.

The Rope (1918) - 4 stars
A dysfunctional family drama, heavy on the white trash. A bitter old man is losing his sanity. He keeps a noose hung in his barn so that his estranged son can someday return and hang himself with it. Meanwhile, his daughter and her husband scheme to get the old man’s farm and money. A good surprise ending.

Shell Shock (1918) - 2.5 stars
A World War I hero suffers from PTSD after some horrific trench warfare, as evidenced by his compulsive obsession for hoarding cigarettes. This feels a bit like an after-school special with a rather simplistic take on its issue. It hints at a bleak and cynical ending that would have risen it above the mediocre but ultimately backs out in favor of a crowd-pleasing expression of patriotism.

The Dreamy Kid (1918) - 3 stars
A blaxploitation film in one-act play form. An elderly Black woman lies ill on her death bed. She waits for her grandson Dreamy to show up before she succumbs to death. Dreamy, however, is a hoodlum on the run from the law. The dialogue is penned in heavy Black accents, but otherwise this isn’t noticeably racist.

Where the Cross is Made (1918) - 3.5 stars
A former sea captain, obsessed with a buried treasure, is losing his sanity. He has built a replica of a ship’s cabin on the roof of his house and confined himself to it. His son wants to get him committed to a mental institution. 

Exorcism (1919) - 2 stars
Two roommates live a drunken existence in a squalid New York apartment. One is depressed over his impending divorce and considers suicide. It’s hard to see the point in this one.

Hughie (written in 1941, first performed in 1959) - 3 stars
A boisterous professional gambler lives in a run-down hotel in New York. In the wee hours of the morning, he accosts the new night clerk on duty and bombards him with conversation. Mostly, he regales the new kid with tales of his night clerk predecessor, the recently deceased Hughie. Written later in O’Neill’s career, this is a fine character study, but rather devoid of plot.

Monday, March 4, 2024

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke



Everything you’d want to know about living in a cylinder
Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Rendezvous with Rama was first published in 1973, and it won just about every major science fiction award for that year. It was Clarke’s first published novel after the book and film combo of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Rendezvous with Rama is unrelated to the 2001 series, but it likewise tells a story of mankind’s first encounter with an alien intelligence.


The novel begins in the year 2131. By that time, mankind has established colonies on several planets and moons in the solar system. The government of Earth has also developed a system to track the trajectories of asteroids that may potentially impact with Earth or its colonies. (We now have the beginnings of such a warning system, but none existed when Clarke wrote the book in the ‘70s.) The Spaceguard system detects an unusual object heading toward the inner solar system. This celestial body is named Rama, after a Hindu deity. A calculation of Rama’s trajectory indicates that it has come from outside our solar system—a true interstellar visitor. Scientists deem Rama worthy of investigation and divert an existing unmanned space probe to perform a flyby. The first photos taken by the probe reveal that Rama is more than just an unusual asteroid. It is a rotating cylinder, fifty kilometers long and twenty kilometers in diameter, so geometrically perfect it could only have been created by an advanced intelligent civilization.

The nearest manned spacecraft, the Endeavour, is sent to investigate. The crew only has a short period of time to examine Rama before its course takes it out of our solar system. Landing on one of the flat ends of the cylinder, the crew finds an entrance to the spacecraft and proceeds to explore its interior. Though technologically advanced, Rama appears to be uninhabited, but the expedition nevertheless searches for archaeological evidence of the spacecraft’s creators.

The problem with Rendezvous with Rama is that it never really lives up to its philosophical potential. This isn’t really so much a novel about what it would be like to find evidence of an intelligent alien civilization. The bulk of the book is just Clarke describing what it would be like to live inside a giant rotating cylinder—the gravity, the climate, the atmosphere, the logistics of getting around, and so on. For example, there are three or four chapters devoted entirely to descriptions of staircases and the astronauts’ challenges in traversing them. Is that really necessary? And is that really what anyone is hoping for when they pick up a book like this? Clarke is so obsessed with the physics of this cylindrical spaceship that the idea of alien intelligence or extraterrestrial archaeology doesn’t seem to hold much interest for him.

Mankind underwent a Rendezvous with Rama moment in 2017, when an interstellar object with unusual characteristics, dubbed ‘Oumuamua, was discovered in our solar system. Rather than a cylinder, it was shaped more like a pancake. This is not the year 2131, however, and we don’t have a surplus of spacecraft out studying the solar system, so we’ll never know for sure if ‘Oumuamua could have been our Rama. The opening chapters of Rendezvous with Rama provide a commendably realistic look at how the process of investigating an interstellar craft might actually proceed. As the novel goes on, however, it starts to dilute its realism by accumulating sci-fi novel cliches, like the captain’s space romance with a buxom female scientist and an act of war between feuding planets. Such tropes prevent the novel from being entirely satisfying, but there is still enough interesting, serious science in Rendezvous with Rama to make it well worth reading.
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Friday, March 1, 2024

United Nations: A History by Stanley Meisler



Engaging, balanced overview of the UN’s successes and failures
Stanley Meisler’s book United Nations: A History was first published in 1995. A revised edition was published in 2011 with additional material that continues the history of the UN through the first decade of the 21st century. Meisler was a foreign and diplomatic correspondent for the Los Angeles Times for thirty years, and he published a biography of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2007. Meisler’s historical narrative of the United Nations begins with the initial conception of the organization at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference of 1944. From there, Meisler chronicles all the major diplomatic crises and peacekeeping missions in which the UN became embroiled, including Israel, Korea, the Congo, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Somalia, the Gulf War, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, and more. In addition, Meisler’s institutional history reveals the interior power struggles and personality conflicts behind every secretary-general election, many policy debates, and the occasional accusation of corruption.


From his preface to the book, you can tell that Meisler believes in the mission of the United Nations. He is not a conservative or isolationist naysayer. Even so, his hopes for the organization don’t prevent him from providing a balanced assessment of the UN’s accomplishments and failures. In fact, the way Meisler tells the story, it would seem that the failures outnumber the successes. As Meisler puts it, in summation, “Throughout its history, the United Nations has never fulfilled the hopes of its founders, but it accomplished a good deal nevertheless.” Meisler’s telling of the UN story is heavy on the American perspective, both because he is an American journalist and also because the United States has played such a large role in the UN. Since so much of the UN’s work is carried out in what used to be called “the third world,” however, the coverage extends far beyond New York and Washington. One ends up getting more recent history on developing nations than you are likely to find in many world history textbooks.

Because of its often bureaucratic subject matter, Meisler’s book isn’t always exciting, but it delivers everything I expected and more. At least half of the events covered in this book took place before my adult memory, and Meisler provided me with a thorough education filled with interesting details. As for the more recent events, I was due for a refresher course, and this book gave me one. In the United States, UN happenings often get page-three treatment behind the doings of our president and Congress. In this book, crucial moments of world politics, policy, and diplomacy are placed front and center to give the reader a broader perspective and understanding of what was happening throughout the rest of the world.

I enjoyed reading Meisler’s mini-biographies of the UN secretary-generals and other major players in the organization—figures like Dag Hammerskjöld, Ralph Bunche, and Kofi Annan. Also, through Meisner’s behind-the-scenes insights into the workings of the UN, I gained a better understanding of what it is that diplomats actually do. Out of necessity, Meisler had to heavily condense a great deal of history to fit the UN story into one volume. The entire Vietnam War, for example, is dispatched in about half a chapter. Nevertheless, I feel like I got a comprehensive, engaging, and well-written history of the first 65 years of the UN.
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Wednesday, February 28, 2024

The Woodcarver and Death by Hagar Olsson



Melancholy and the infinite sadness
From reading the introduction to this book, I learned that the nation of Finland has a minority Swedish population that has produced a considerable body of literature in the Swedish language. Author Hagar Olsson was born into this Finland-Swede community and became one of its prominent modernist writers. Her novel The Woodcarver and Death was published in 1940. It was translated into English by George C. Schoolfield and published in 1965 as a volume in the University of Wisconsin Press’s Nordic Translation Series. The UW Press has since released the books in this series as open access publications, available for free download from the website of the UW Libraries. This provides an opportunity to freely sample some works by modern Scandinavian authors who aren’t very familiar to English-language readers.

In The Woodcarver and Death, there isn’t much woodcarving going on, but there sure is much contemplation of our ultimate demise. The story opens in the home of a young woodcarver named Myyriäinen who lives with his mother. She works in a factory, and he carves little wooden figures that he sells. The father/husband of the family is deceased. The mother worries about her son because he doesn’t seem to have any friends, doesn’t talk much, and doesn’t do much other than carve wood. He appears depressed, and she worries that he may be suicidal, though her concerns remain unsaid. One day the boy decides to leave home and embark on a pilgrimage to his birthplace in another region of Finland, hoping that he might discover some meaning to life. He is undergoing an existential crisis and obsessed with thoughts of death, the pointlessness of life, and the futility of religion. The book calls to mind some of the soul-searching wanderer novels of German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse, such as Siddhartha or Narcissus and Goldmund, but drearier and less interesting. Myyriäinen meets up with a group of pilgrims heading to a holy site to cure their illnesses. Among the crowd he befriends a father and his dying daughter. Although Myyriäinen doesn’t believe in religious miracles, he is touched by the faith of these pilgrims and decides to accompany them on their journey.


From reading Schoolfield’s introduction, one gets the idea that you need a doctorate in Finland-Swedish studies to understand what’s going on in this novel. Most of the story takes place in Carelia, or Karelia, a region on the border of Finland and Russia. Not long before Olsson published The Woodcarver and Death, Carelia was taken by the Russians in the Finnish Winter War of 1939 to 1940. Schoolfield informs the reader that Carelia is a region much romanticized by the Finns, and Olsson, as “the holy place of Finnish culture.” In this novel, Carelia serves as a bastion of the Eastern Orthodox faith. The essential purpose of the novel (as Schoolfield tells me) is for Olsson to champion the Eastern Orthodox faith as a superior alternative to Catholicism. Rather than focusing on the suffering of Christ, the Orthodox faith has a healthier attitude toward death (in Olsson’s opinion) as a natural part of the cycle of life.

Of course, I wouldn’t have gotten all of that if Schoolfield hadn’t spelled it out for me. For the typical English-language reader, this is basically a coming-of-age novel about a young man looking for the meaning of life. This young man just happens to be more morbid than most. Olsson demonstrates literary skill in her drawing of characters and in crafting the emotions and conflicts stirring inside Myyriäinen’s mind. For my taste’s, however this novel was a bit too contemplative, to the point of navel-gazing. This is not one of the better works in the Nordic Translation Series. It may be very meaningful to a Finnish or Swedish audience, but much is lost on the foreign reader.
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