Bound in Venice: The Serene Republic and the Dawn of the Book by Alessandro Marzo Magno

Informative but disorganized, frequently digresses into trivia

Following the pioneering of the printing press (in the Western world) by Johannes Gutenberg and others in Germany, German immigrants soon brought the technology to Venice. At that time, Venice was more than just a city in Italy, which had not yet formed into the nation we know today. The Republic of Venice included a stretch of territories in Italy, Greece, the Balkans, and elsewhere in the Mediterranean. Venice’s unique position as a center of world trade, a mulitcultural melting pot, a hub of intellectual activity, and a religiously tolerant environment makes it the ideal blooming ground for the publishing industry. By the early 16th century, roughly half of the books published in Europe were printed in Venice. In his 2013 book Bound in Venice, Italian journalist Alessandro Marzo Magno chronicles the rising, thriving, and eventual decline of this publishing boomtown. Along the way, he provides mini-biographies of important historical figures, such as printer extraordinaire Aldus Manutius and blockbuster author Pietro Aretino, and highlights landmark books in the history of Venetian printing.

In substance and structure, Magno’s book is similar to The Bookshop of the World, Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen’s 2019 study of printing and publishing in the 17th-century Netherlands. Separate chapters cover different genres of publishing (e.g. religious books, medical books, music publishing, maps and atlases) or publishing in different languages (e.g. Hebrew, Greek, Armenian). However, unlike Pettegree and der Weduwen’s study, which is very articulate, logically organized, and really brings the time and place of its subject to life, Bound in Venice is a disorganized mess. Magno jumps all over the place chronologically, his prose lurches from one topic to another like a string of non-sequiturs, and he frequently goes off into digressions that amount to little more than trivia. He can’t seem to mention the name of a city, for example, without adding that oh, by the way, this is where some totally unrelated person comes from, be they athlete, actress, or politician of any century but the one he’s talking about. There are a whole lot of parentheses in this text, even parentheses within parentheses, and much of what’s printed between the covers of Bound in Venice could be considered merely parenthetical information. About the best one can glean from this incoherent stream of names and dates are the details of some historic firsts—first book published in Armenian, first medical book published with illustrations, first published geological treatise, first periodical, first board game, and so on. If all these firsts were compiled into an appendix, there would be no reason to read the book.

Bound in Venice is made even harder to endure by its atrocious grammar. This can likely be blamed, however, not on the author but on his translator, Gregory Conti. The English prose is replete with incomplete sentences, orphaned clauses, and unfinished thoughts. Repeated and unnecessary words abound. The punctuation is so haphazard that it almost reads as if the commas were placed by arbitrarily throwing darts at the manuscript. On the bright side, I didn’t notice many spelling errors.

Despite all its faults, those with an avid interest in the history of books are bound to find plenty of interesting nuggets of information in this miscellany of data and anecdotes. If anyone can find pleasure in a jumbled mishmash of arcane factoids, it’s a bibliophile. Just know what you’re in for. If you are looking for an authoritative history on 16th-century book production in Venice, expertly written with impeccable scholarly rigor, this isn’t it (at least not the English edition).
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The Country Beyond by James Oliver Curwood

A romance of the Northern forests, heavy on the sap

James Oliver Curwood is Michigan’s answer to Jack London. Both authors were famous for their wilderness adventures, which frequently take place in the colder regions of the North. Curwood’s novels are often set in the Canadian wilds north of Michigan, while London focused on Canada north of his native California. Both authors were also dog lovers and featured canine protagonists in their fiction. Curwood’s novel The Country Beyond, published in 1922, stars Peter, a pooch who’s half Airedale terrier, half Mackenzie hound. About half the book is narrated in the third person through the eyes of the dog, while the other half is related from the perspective of the human characters.

North of Lake Superior lies an idyllic patch of wilderness called Cragg’s Ridge. Life is not paradise for all who live there, however. There an orphaned 16-year-old girl named Nada lives with her two reluctant guardians who treat her as if she were an indentured servant. Jed Hawkins, her alcoholic foster dad, is particularly abusive and frequently strikes Nada and his wife. He has plans to soon sell Nada to a local laborer, presumably (it’s implied) as a sex slave. Nada has two bright lights in her life. One is her dog Peter. The other is her acquaintance with Jolly Roger McKay, a stranger who recently wandered into the vicinity of Cragg’s Ridge to occupy a neighboring cabin. Young Nada is in love with Jolly Roger, and the feeling seems to be mutual, though as yet unconfirmed. Hawkins injures Peter in a fit of rage, and Nada rushes the dog to Jolly Roger’s cabin. When Roger finds out how Nada’s been treated by Jed Hawkins, he vows to free her from her foster father’s clutches. Jolly Roger would love to make Nada his wife, but he is an outlaw, hiding from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Soon he will once again be on the run from the law, and the hard life of a fugitive is no life for a delicate young lady.

There’s a lot wrong with this book. Jolly Roger’s age is never specified, but he’s clearly a grown man romancing a teenager. He also seems to have the hots for an Indian maiden, but Curwood seems to imply that that’s OK because she’s an Indian and therefore no competition for the white bride. The plot hinges on a fair amount of Native American mysticism that just feels like a lot of unnecessary mumbo-jumbo. There are long stretches of the book where nothing much happens. A lot of words are wasted on Jolly Roger’s (and thus Curwood’s) thoughts on love and womanhood. Nada is depicted as so simple and innocent that she almost seems mentally ill, and her whole purpose in life and in the story is to just be totally submissive to Jolly Roger. There’s never any disagreement between the two lovers that might have made the story more interesting.

Even more annoying is the fact that there’s no good reason for these two lovers to be separated for most of the book other than sheer prudery. If the two went on the lam together, they’d have to sleep in close proximity to one another without a chaperone. God forbid. The whole book feels as if it is constricted by Victorian-era mores. Jack London would have simply disregarded such puritanical conventions, but Curwood’s writing is much more genteel. The reader can tell early on that law and order must prevail in Curwood’s world, which makes the ending a predictable foregone conclusion. A wilderness adventure should have an edge to it, a sense of danger, of which this novel has very little. The scariest scene in the book is the dog’s fight with an owl.

Having read a handful of Curwood’s books, I find his writing hit and miss. I preferred his novels The Alaskan and The Gold Hunters, but neither was great. For another Michiganian writer of wilderness adventures, check out the works of Stewart Edward White. The Blazed Trail is one of his better efforts.
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The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard

A long, slow tease that ends with a bore

Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard is one of the most critically acclaimed authors in world literature in recent years. He became quite famous for his six-volume series of autobiographical novels entitled My Struggle (Min Kamp). His novel The Morning Star (Morgenstjernen), also received a heap of accolades upon its publication in 2020. This is my first experience with Knausgaard, so I can’t comment on My Struggle, but The Morning Star definitely left me feeling like maybe it doesn’t deserve all the awards it’s won.

The novel follows the lives of several Norwegian characters, each of whom narrates their own chapters in the first person. The story takes place in Western and Southern Norway over the course of two days. An abnormally large star unexpectedly appears in the sky. Scientists conjecture that it may be a new supernova or similar astronomical phenomena, but Knausgaard leads the reader to suspect there may be a more supernatural reason for the star’s sudden appearance. The star seems to have sparked strange behavior and abnormal activity among Norway’s wild animal populations, and some of the characters are troubled by unsettling hallucinations.

The bulk of the book is comprised of the characters describing their daily lives. Knausgaard does a great job of crafting compelling characters and painting authentic pictures of real life. I don’t believe there’s a single character in the book that I couldn’t identify with in some way. None of them are boring, and each individual’s psychology is believably rendered. They often express profound and provocative thoughts. In a typical chapter, you read about one character’s activities for a half hour to an hour. A minister performs a funeral service. A teenager throws a party in the hope of making friends. A jerk cheats on his wife. A caregiver performs her shift at a mental hospital. Then, on the last page, there’s a hint of something that belongs in a Stephen King novel. Then you move on to the next character. All the little bread crumbs of horror that Knausgaard drops at the end of each chapter don’t add up to much of a story. Thus, the book is mostly a series of disconnected scenes, admirably well-drawn, that never coalesce into anything resembling a plot. Many of the book’s chapters end in cliffhangers that are never followed up. That makes for the kind of ambiguity that literary critics praise as deep, but most readers will just find annoying.

Knausgaard makes a halfhearted attempt to tie things together in the last two chapters. The penultimate chapter is an overdone piece of supernatural fantasy that feels familiar and clichéd. The final chapter is written in the form of an essay, and spends a lot of its length lecturing the reader on ancient Greece. I enjoyed the character of Egil in his earlier chapter, where he really showed a unique way of looking at life and had some interesting things to say. In that last chapter, however, he bored the devil out of me.

The fragmentary, half-baked, and arbitrary style of the narrative was surely intentional on Knausgaard’s part, and may even be a savvy marketing ploy. The Morning Star feels incomplete, like it’s just begging for a sequel. Sure enough, Knausgaard published a sequel, The Wolves of Eternity, in 2021. A third novel in the series has since been published in Norway, and a fourth is on the way. Perhaps when all is said and done, the complete saga will be a masterpiece. This book does indeed deliver some beautiful passages of writing. On its own, however, The Morning Star leaves one feeling like they’ve been cheated out of a complete novel and left wanting more.

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Red Star by Alexander Bogdanov

Ingenious Bolshevik utopia on Mars

Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov was one of the founding members of the Bolshevik party in Russia and a friend of Vladimir Lenin until they had a falling out. Bogdanov was also a physician, philosopher, and a writer of science fiction. His first and best-known work in that genre is his novel Red Star. The book was published in 1908, after the failed Russian Revolution of 1905. Bogdanov nevertheless kept Bolshevik hopes alive with this novel about a utopian Communist society on Mars. An English translation of Red Star by Charles Rougle was published in 1984 by the University of Indiana Press, in a volume edited by Loren Graham and Richard Stites.

Leonid, the narrator of Red Star, is a mathematician living in St. Petersburg and, like Bogdanov, a Bolshevik revolutionary. Through his political party activities he meets an unusual man named Menni, who claims to be a visitor from the South. After they strike up a friendship, however, Menni reveals to Leonid that he is a Martian. His people have already conquered the problem of space travel, and he invites Leonid to join him on a journey to his home planet. In fact, Menni confesses that he has intentionally recruited Leonid as a possible cultural exchange ambassador through whom the two cultures can learn about one another before the Martians reveal their existence to the people of Earth. Leonid, or Lenni as the Martians call him, agrees to the trip and accompanies Menni to Mars, where he finds an ideal communist society in operation, the likes of which he and his Bolshevik comrades have envisioned in their dreams.

I read a lot of utopian and dystopian science fiction from the early years of the genre. I enjoy experiencing the futuristic visions of antiquated writers and seeing how those visions measure up to subsequent history. Old sci-fi literature, however, is often unrealistic in its speculations and clunky in style. Sometimes this can add to a book’s charm, but sometimes it merely annoys. Bogdanov’s Red Star, however, reads as remarkably intelligent, eloquent, and relevant more than a century after it was written. Some credit for that is likely due to Rougle, who’s translation renders Bogdanov’s prose as lively and articulate as if it were written last week.

Bogdanov himself, however, deserves commendation for how well thought-out his utopia is. Nothing in Bogdanov’s vision of the future is there without a reason. When he describes the fictional technological advances of Martian society, his speculations are supported by reasonable scientific justifications. There’s no superfluous fantasy just for the sake of “Wouldn’t it be cool if . . .” The same holds true for the book’s political content. Every element of the story is specifically designed to express Bogdanov’s ideas on Bolshevism. When the characters talk about events in Martian history or policies of the Martian government, there is always a well-conceived reason for those decisions, within Bogdanov’s conception of Marxism.

Unlike a lot of utopian novels, Bogdanov does actually include a satisfying fictional narrative amongst all the political, scientific, and economic theory. The book doesn’t read like a stuffy treatise. An unconventional romance livens things up and doesn’t feel gratuitous. If there is an aspect of the book that feels a little overdone, it’s the focus on the narrator’s mental health. Lenni’s propensity for mood swings and hallucinations is at times a bit too histrionic. That is a small complaint, however, in what is otherwise a fascinating and entertaining read. Having not only influenced many subsequent authors in the genre but also the very development of the Soviet Union itself, Red Star is truly a landmark work of Russian science fiction that will be of interest to more than just Bolsheviks.

An Editor’s Tales by Anthony Trollope

Overlong tales of publishers dealing with difficult authors

An Editor’s Tales, published in 1870, is a collection of short stories by English author Anthony Trollope. The half dozen stories included here are all narrated by editors of books or literary journals. The stories deal with the publishing business and often center around the editor in question having to deal with a difficult author. For example, there’s the young author who needs nurturing (“Mary Gresley”), the pushy and arrogant author (“Josephine de Montmorenci”), the very nice but unfortunately talentless author (“The Turkish Bath”), the talented scholar with personal problems (“The Spotted Dog”), and the aggressively entitled and litigious author (“Mrs. Brumby”). Having only read a few of Trollope’s novels, I hesitate to generalize about his writing, but he has always seemed to me to be a writer of lighthearted dramedies punctuated by moments of poignancy and pathos. The stories in An Editor’s Tales are of that vein, but in this case most of the attempts at humor fall flat.

I’m guessing the stories assembled in this collection were previously published in magazines, because they don’t read as if they were intended to go together. It’s not necessarily the same editor who narrates each and every story. In all cases, the editor is unnamed, but you can tell they are different people by the publishing companies and literary journals for which they work. For a reason that’s never satisfactorily explained, Trollope has chosen to narrate these stories in the first person plural—what he calls “the editorial we”—which proves to be an annoying convention that wears on the reader’s patience before the first story is even over.

I work in book publishing (I’m not an editor, but I work with editors). The absurd situations in which the editors find themselves in these stories are unfortunately all too true. That ring of truth, however, did not enhance my enjoyment of these stories. Rather, I found the emphasis on unreasonable authors and the nuisances of the publishing industry just depressing rather than funny. “Mrs. Brumby” is a particularly ugly story in which an aggressive harpy of an author with no talent whatsoever demands that her work be published and threatens a lawsuit when her article is rejected. Trollope tries to put a funny spin on that scenario, but it just reads like an arduous ordeal. In “The Panjandrum,” a half dozen pretentious but untalented men and women of letters decide to start a literary journal, but can’t decide what sort of material they want that journal to contain. The story is entirely comprised of their tedious arguments. The fact that all of the stories in this volume are inordinately long does not help matters. More than one of these stories is as lengthy as a novella, and they all feel sluggishly padded with unnecessary filler.

The depiction of women in these stories is iffy. In Victorian England of the 1870s, opportunities for women were very limited in most endeavors. Trollope does admit, however, that literature was one discipline were women could compete with men. These stories, therefore, frequently feature women writers in an era when working female protagonists were almost nonexistent in literature. On the other hand, women are also often singled out as “the problem” in these stories. A woman’s irrational behavior is the cause of an author’s trouble or the obstacle that the editor must overcome. Any crediting of Trollope with feminist leanings for his depiction of women authors would therefore be premature. In fact, one finds little to praise or recommend in An Editor’s Tales. Trollope may be one of England’s most renowned novelists, but in this volume he demonstrates little skill in the art of the

Stories in this collection

Mary Gresley

The Turkish Bath

Josephine de Montmorenci

The Panjandrum

The Spotted Dog

Mrs. Brumby

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Wolverine by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller

From X-Man to Samurai

Back in the 1980s when I used to pick out comic books at the drug store after school, Marvel invented the limited series. This was an opportunity to take supporting characters from superhero groups and highlight them in their own magazines, usually for a four-issue run (though some were two, six, or twelve issues). Thus, everyone from the Vision and the Scarlet Witch to Machine Man to Hercules to Iceman headlined their own miniseries. It was about this time that the character of Wolverine was really rising in popularity. What Eddie Murphy was to Saturday Night Live, Wolverine was to the X-Men. There was no doubt he was the star of that magazine, and sometimes it seemed like the rest of the team were just his back-up band. If any of Marvel’s characters seemed worthy of his own magazine it was Wolverine. While a lot of Marvel’s limited series of this era were not exactly high quality productions, Wolverine had the benefit of two of Marvel’s hottest creators, writer Chris Claremont and artist Frank Miller. The Wolverine limited series (now known as Wolverine Volume 1) was published in 1982.

The story takes place in Japan. Wolverine is in love with Mariko Yashida, a Japanese woman. Her father does not approve of the romance, however, and he happens to be one of Japan’s richest and most powerful crime bosses. After beating Wolverine up himself, Dad hires ninjas from The Hand to hunt Wolverine down and kill him. Wolverine, on the other hand, is concerned about Mariko’s safety and strives to free her from the clutches of her evil father. Marvel’s hardcover full-color reprint of this limited series, published in 2006, also includes two issues of the Uncanny X-Men (#172 and 173) in which this story is continued. While Miller draws the four issues of the Wolverine miniseries, Paul Smith pencils the pages of the Uncanny issues. All issues are written by Claremont.

Personally, I always found Wolverine’s Japanese storyline to be somewhat unnecessary. In a brief introduction, Claremont says he and Miller envisioned Wolverine as “a failed Samurai,” but didn’t Marvel try the same thing with Daredevil, Hawkeye, and who knows what other Marvel heroes? Wolverine already had plenty of back story with his Canadian history, his prior work as an intelligence agent and mercenary, his bloody rivalry with Sabretooth, and his connection with Alpha Flight. All of that could have been explored further before going down this Samurai road. Thankfully, this limited series was apparently successful enough to spawn an ongoing Wolverine series (now known as Wolverine Volume 2), which was one of Marvel’s best titles of the 1990s. Through that solo series, Marvel creators like Larry Hama were able to fully explore the possibilities of Wolverine’s past.

Frank Miller is one of the greatest superhero/action comics artists of all time, but this is not his best work. Chronologically, this Wolverine miniseries is sandwiched in between his run on Daredevil and his Batman: The Dark Knight Returns graphic novel. Miller’s art here isn’t as good as either of those works. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t have the benefit of Klaus Janson’s inking. One thing Miller does really well, however, is draw martial arts battles, and there are plenty of those in this Wolverine series. They just feel a bit like retreads of Daredevil’s battles with the Hand. In summation, this Wolverine limited series isn’t quite the masterpiece it’s often hailed as being, but it is a good solid piece of work from two of Marvel’s most talented creators and a whole lot better than a lot of the forgettable stuff Marvel cranked out in the ‘80s.
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The Travels of William Bartram

Botanizing the civilized South

Back when Thomas Jefferson and colleagues were signing the Declaration of Independence, naturalist William Bartram was exploring the wilds of the Southeastern United States. From 1773 to 1777, Bartram, a Philadelphia naturalist, traveled throughout the South, from Charleston, South Carolina to Baton Rouge, and from the Everglades to the Great Smoky Mountains. Bartram published an account of his Travels (the original title is much longer) in 1791. His primary pursuit was botanizing—collecting and describing the plant species of the region. Bartram also, however, noted many observations about the animal life, topography, and human inhabitants of the places he visited. Although one might imagine Bartram trekking through remote, pristine wilderness, the picture he paints of the South is surprisingly populated and civilized. He never seems to lack for a hospitable plantation, convenient trading post, or sizable Native American settlement at which to spend the night or eat a hearty meal at the behest of generous hosts.

One really has to be a botanist to appreciate all of what Bartram has to say in his Travels. As many a nature-loving hiker might do, Bartram noted the different species of plant life he spotted on his outings. Each chapter contains about three or four of such species lists, but they are all in Latin. He also uses many Latin botanical terms to describe the characteristics of various plants. When he’s discussing animals, however, he writes in plain English, using the common names (some of which have changed over the past two and a half centuries). In particular, he has a lot to say about crocodiles, which were plentiful and hostile.

The Revolutionary War is not mentioned at all in Bartram’s Travels. Slavery is mentioned, though not as much as one would expect, given the locale. More often than not, when Bartram visits a plantation in Georgia or Florida, he just doesn’t mention the Black population at all. Only when he is loaned a slave as a temporary guide or paddler does he ever single out a Black person for mention, and never by name. Bartram gives much attention in this book, however, to the Native American population of the American South. He interacts with and discusses at length the people of the Cherokee, Seminole, Creek, Choctaw, and Muscogulge nations. Bartram frequently expresses a great respect for the Native peoples and takes particular care in his detailed descriptions of their lifestyle, customs, government, and society.

Many scholars consider the modern genre of nature writing to have begun with the writings of Alexander von Humboldt, the German Romanticist who combined empirical scientific observation with subjective emotional reflection in such works as Views of Nature. Bartram, however, writing a few decades earlier, was at least making baby steps in that direction. Though he doesn’t digress into extended flights of personal philosophy like Henry David Thoreau is wont to do, Bartram does take the time to note his personal impressions of place and often praises the glory of God as manifested in His natural creations. Bartram also mixes plenty of travel anecdotes among his scientific descriptions of the land and its wildlife.

Unfortunately, much of Bartram’s Travels consists of tedious descriptions of topography and waterways that wear on the reader after a while. The nature writing on plants and animals is much more interesting, even if one doesn’t have a fluent knowledge of botanical Latin. The most valuable aspect of Bartram’s Travels, however, is his writing on the Native Americans of the South. This book amounts to a time capsule of the delicate balance that existed between frontier settlers and Native civilization before the former drove away the latter.

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Stalin and the Scientists: A History of Triumph and Tragedy 1905–1953 by Simon Ings

The twisted politics of Soviet science

Published in 2016, Stalin and the Scientists is a science history book by English novelist and science writer Simon Ings. The book is essentially a detailed history of the Soviet Union’s attitude and policies towards science, and how scientists and other academics were treated under the Soviet regime. Although so absurd at times it’s almost funny, it amounts to a horror story of what happens when an authoritarian government, led by a despotic dictator, deliberately denies scientific truth in order to further its political aims.

It wasn’t just Stalin who made life hell for many of the Soviet Union’s scientists. It was the very ideology of Bolshevism itself. A scientists’ research had to fit in with that ideology, or it wasn’t allowed to continue. Academics who didn’t toe the party line faced denunciation, blacklisting, exile, imprisonment, or execution. Anyone with a university education was suspected of being a bourgeois liberal, so the Communist government and the press favored “citizen scientists,” such as farmers who came up with one good idea in plant breeding or laborers who increased efficiency in their factories. These folk heroes were hailed as authorities in scientific disciplines, even when their unscientific methods didn’t merit such accolades, and the government appointed them to positions of authority over more capable researchers.

From the title and the propagandistic cover art, I imagined sinister master plans for the development of military technology, and there is a bit of that here. Mostly, however, the book focuses on the biological sciences, and genetics in particular. Why genetics, you might ask? For a nation that faced decimating famine several times in the 20th century, the breeding of productive agricultural crops was of vital concern. The fundamental basis of genetics, however—that some individuals are born with advantageous characteristics—was antithetical to Bolshevik philosophy. Instead, the Soviet regime favored a Lamarckian approach that insisted that characteristics acquired during one’s lifetime could be passed down to one’s children. This more Communistically palatable view was carried to the point of denying the very existence of the gene itself. Geneticists who experimented with fruit flies were denounced as anti-patriotic, time-wasting quacks while citizen scientists little better than snake oil salesmen were allowed to perpetuate their erroneous, fraudulent, and damaging theories of plant and livestock breeding. Meanwhile, research into eugenics—the “science” of selectively breeding the perfect human—was encouraged until the Nazis became known for it, at which point it was deemed a fascist undertaking.

The catchy title really doesn’t do justice to the scope of this book. For starters, Ings’s narrative begins before the Russian Revolution. Stalin doesn’t really show up until halfway through the book. Many of the scientists whose lives Ings traces over the course of the book began their careers under Lenin and ended their careers (and often their lives) under Stalin. After Stalin’s death, Ings continues his study into the reign of Khrushchev and beyond. The book ends with a very thought-provoking epilogue that suggests the whole world is now operating under misguided and politicized science similar to the Soviets’ mistakes of the 20th century. We continue to disregard the signs of catastrophic climate change, burning voraciously through natural resources, while hoping that some future utopian technological miracle will make everything OK. Thus we are guilty of the same scientific sins that amused and horrified us throughout the preceding book.

Ings describes himself as “not an academic,” and his writing is very accessible to general readers. He does not, however, sacrifice scholarly rigor in his historical research. This is a complex history with multiple branches to follow, but Ings renders it all in very understandable and lively prose. I learned much from Stalin and the Scientists, and it is truly a fascinating read.
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Maigret and the Headless Corpse by Georges Simenon

Partial John Doe found in Paris canal

Published in 1955, Maigret and the Headless Corpse is the 75th novel and/or story published by author Georges Simenon featuring his recurring character Inspector Maigret. Sometimes the titles of these Maigret novels can be a little vague, but this one is spot on. A barge passing through Paris is too heavily laden, causing it to drag in the mud on the bottom of the canal. In an attempt to free the vessel, the bargemen discover a disembodied arm underneath the murky waters. Inspector Jules Maigret, superintendent of the Police Judiciaire, is sent to investigate. He calls in a diver who discovers more body parts—a leg, a torso, but no head, making it very difficult to identify the victim, much less figure out who killed him and chopped him up into pieces.

Maigret canvasses the neighborhood, which fortunately for him includes quite a few taverns. (Drinking on the job was apparently never an issue for the Paris police of Maigret’s era.) He becomes particularly fascinated by one tavernkeeper whom he questions, a peculiar woman who minds the bar while her husband is away. This woman, named Aline Calas, has a strangely ambivalent manner. She willingly and uncaringly answers Maigret’s questions, but in the tersest and most mechanical manner possible. As he learns more about her lifestyle, she displays such an attitude of resignation and a lack of self-respect that nothing seems to phase her. When she tells Maigret that her husband has gone away on business for the weekend, he gets the sneaking suspicion that the headless corpse from the canal might just be Mr. Calas.

In this novel, Maigret confesses to himself that he became a detective not so much for the thrill of figuring out who done it, but rather for a personal fascination with why they’ve done it. In another life, Maigret might have been a psychologist. Maigret might as well be speaking for the author Simenon, who likewise demonstrates over and over again in his novels, Maigret or otherwise, that he is more interested in the psychology behind criminal behavior than in the cat-and-mouse game of clues and detection. In Maigret novels, the police work often proceeds in a very methodical, almost mundane manner. The real thrill of the mystery—for Maigret, for Simenon, and for the reader—is uncovering the back story behind the crime. This is very apparent in Maigret and the Headless Corpse, where the solving of the crime is almost a foregone conclusion, but the insight into the characters’ minds and motivations is what proves to be enthralling and memorable about the story.

This is the 21st Maigret novel that I’ve read, and I would count it among one of the better ones I’ve encountered thus far. The characters in this book are very interesting, and Simenon really makes you care about their lives. The conundrum of identifying a headless corpse adds to the complexity and uniqueness of the investigation. I had a hard time putting this book down. The Maigret novels are all short, well-written, and suspenseful, which often makes them an addictive read. That’s true of Maigret and the Headless Corpse even more than most of Maigret’s adventures.
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The Recording Angel by Edwin Arnold Brenholtz

Ridiculous labor novel

So-called radical novels of labor realism were plentiful in early 20th-century American literature, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle being the most famous example. Published a year earlier than The Jungle, in 1905, The Recording Angel was written by an actual proletariat, Edwin Arnold Brenholtz, who worked as a civil engineer for railroad and mining companies. The story involves a strike at an iron and steel mill in the fictional city of Steelton, Missouri. The title of the novel refers to when one character makes a vow to “the recording angel of God,” which apparently is a thing in Judeo-Christian mythology, but I had never heard the expression before. I enjoy reading the muckraking novels of this period because they provide an interesting look into a time in history when an American socialist movement challenged the trust-holding oligarchs of their day and fought for much-needed reforms (with mixed success). In The Recording Angel, however, the discussion of labor issues is so divorced from reality it’s absolutely bizarre.

For starters, the main reason for the workers’ strike in this book is not low wages or long hours but rather the fact that the management insists upon addressing the laborers by numbers rather than by names. Was that ever really a common problem? And would anyone have cared as long as they had food on the table? Nepotism is another complaint, since the children of the wealthy are granted management positions over more qualified workers. One rich, benevolent stockholder takes the side of the workers and supports them with his financial resources. His son, however, an executive at the mill, is an iron-fisted and abusive employer. Was this really labor’s problem in the early 20th century, that the boss’s son was a jerk? The reasons behind the strike, however, are barely relevant, since the strike hardly plays a role in the plot. Instead, Brenholtz opts for exaggerated melodrama and gives us an attempted murder, a contested will, a blackmailing scheme, and poisonings. The novel also includes a Jules Verne-type science fiction element in the employment of a technological device that would have been brand new and rather rare at the time of the novel’s publication but has now been commonplace for at least a century.

I don’t believe there is a single working-class character in the entire book, just a confusing assortment of lawyers, detectives, politicians, and oligarchs, many of them painted as broadly as a Batman villain. So much of the novel is taken up by interminable conversations between the blackmailer and the capitalist whom he is blackmailing. Chapter after chapter, the blackmailer reiterates the hold he has over his victim. Enough already, we get it. Could you please stop beating this dead horse so we can move on with some semblance of a story? After all that nonsense, the main thrust of the plot climaxes early, which leaves the reader having to plod through half a dozen epilogues.

The word “socialism” is used in this book as a miraculous cure for all societal ills, but The Recording Angel doesn’t actually teach the reader anything about socialism like the works of Upton Sinclair or Jack London do. From reading this novel, one would think that the socialist movement depends on wealthy industrialists who magnanimously decide to bequeath their riches to “the workers’ cause.” The cast of this novel includes at least three such unrealistic benefactors. If that’s what the success of the radical left in America rests upon, then they’ve got a long wait ahead of them before that pipe dream comes to fruition. The Recording Angel is not just a failure within the specific realm of the radical labor novel. It’s an example of bad writing in any genre.