Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov

Inaction hero

Oblomov, a novel by Russian author Ivan Goncharov, was published in 1859. The title character, Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, is a member of the minor nobility (the English translation uses the word “barin” as the Russian equivalent of “baron”). He owns the family’s country estate, called Oblomovka, where he grew up. Oblomov resides, however, in a shabby apartment in St. Petersburg, where he lives the lazy life of a confirmed bachelor. Since Ilya has become the bearer of his parents’ estate, the Oblomov name has fallen in status, and the farm is not performing well financially.

The first few chapters of the novel are quite satirical. The running gag is that Oblomov refuses to get out of bed. From his prostrate position, he receives visits from a few friends who represent different segments of Russian society: a civil servant, a journalist, and fellow gentlemen, both Russian- and German-born. Oblomov’s failure to rise from his bed is indicative of the way he conducts his life in general. He is incapable of making decisions and committing to any form of action, neither in business nor personal matters. Like an overgrown man-child, he is utterly dependent upon his landlady, who takes care of his every need like a surrogate mother.

After this introduction, the novel flashes back to Oblomov’s childhood at Oblomovka. This is portrayed in heavily nostalgic realism. On the one hand, Oblomov enjoys his youth in an idyllic country setting. On the other hand, Goncharov pokes fun at this country-gentry life by exaggerating its quaintness, insularity, and simplicity. Growing up at his family estate, Oblomov’s every desire is catered to by his parents and servants, which contributes to his inactivity and ineffectualness as an adult. Following this trip down memory lane, the novel then takes another change in tone as it veers into a quite poignant romance. While at the beginning of the novel Goncharov wants the reader to laugh at Oblomov, over the course of the book one definitely comes to feel for him. As the novel proceeds, it becomes more realistic, less humorous, and as a result more compelling.

Oblomov was a popular novel in Russia, and the title character came to represent a recognizable type of Russian gentleman, as in “He’s such an Oblomov.” What this novel has to say about Russian society circa 1859, however, was largely lost on me, and probably will be unclear to most English-language readers. Only Russians themselves, or scholars of Russian history, will likely comprehend the social commentary. There is much made here of the distinctions between gentlemen of the landed gentry or nobility, and the lower peasant and servant classes. The attitude toward the latter segments of society ranges from sympathy to condescension. The rather generalized interpretation that I came away with is that Oblomov represents the minor nobility clinging to old ideas that are out of place in modern society, and as a result the dignity and standing of Oblomov’s class is sinking towards obsolescence as it phases into a lower-middle class.

Regardless of any social or political content, however, Oblomov is a novel that can be appreciated simply as a drama of human nature. People from different walks in society are shown living their lives in accordance with the hands they were dealt in life. Towards the end of the book in particular, the characters feel real, and they inspire real feelings in the reader. I would have preferred more naturalistic realism and less satirical humor—more Turgenev than Gogol, if you will—but I still found Oblomov quite engaging.

Lazarus Laughed by Eugene O’Neill

Strange multi-masked biblical tragedy

Lazarus Laughed is a full-length drama by American playwright Eugene O’Neill, winner of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. O’Neill wrote the play in 1925. It was published in book form in 1927 and first performed on stage at the Pasadena Community Playhouse in 1928.

Set in ancient times, Lazarus Laughed is based on the biblical story of Jesus Christ raising Lazarus from the dead. Or rather, it’s O’Neill’s speculation on what might have happened after that miracle took place. Christ does not appear in the play. He has already departed Lazarus’s house before the curtain opens, though he is discussed and debated in absentia. Here in O’Neill’s take on things, the resurrected Lazarus ascends to the height of a messiah to rival Christ himself. Lazarus defies Christian and Jewish teachings by leading a cult whose members deny the existence of death and live for laughter and pleasure. 

The drama begins in Lazarus’s hometown of Bethany, in present-day Palestine. Subsequent scenes take place in Athens and Rome, where Lazarus meets Emperor Tiberius and his successor Caligula. Stylistically, this drama is heavily influenced by Greek tragedy. O’Neill tries to evoke the experience of an ancient theatrical production. A chorus (actually more than one) chants narration and commentary throughout the play, and almost all of the actors are masked. Soon after completing Lazarus Laughed, O’Neill used such stylistic elements to again emulate Greek tragedy in The Great God Brown, a play set in modern times.

Lazarus Laughed has only been staged a few times over the past century, probably because O’Neill really didn’t make it easy to produce this drama. In some scenes, his stage directions call for as many as 150 actors on stage at once. Other than Lazarus and his wife, just about everyone else is wearing masks. One scene asks for 49 different male masks and 49 different female masks, and the actors change masks in each scene. O’Neill calls for masks varying in size, emotional expression, age, and ethnicity, and specifies multiple combinations of those characteristics, thus probably at least 500 detailed and well-crafted masks are required to pull this off the way he wanted it. I would imagine the few theatres and schools who actually staged this play likely cut corners in mask manufacturing because O’Neill’s specifications would be cost prohibitive and near impossible to follow to the letter.

Other than simply telling a story about Lazarus and Tiberius, what is the point of all this? I don’t know what literary critics might say about it, but for me personally, I get a message similar to that taught by the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics, that fear of death prevents us from truly living our lives. Lazarus’s repeated assertions in this play that there is no death can be taken two ways: 1) that eternal life in Heaven means there is no death, or 2) that death simply brings a nothingness that is neither to be felt nor feared, so enjoy yourself and live your life on Earth to the fullest. Based on the behavior of Lazarus’s followers in this play, and on how O’Neill lived his life, I’m guessing he meant the latter. There has to be a better way to get that across, however, than having Lazarus and his crowd of followers laughing and yelling, “There is no death!” many times over. If staged with all the grandeur that O’Neill intended, Lazarus Laughed might have been a sight to see, but on the page it mostly comes across as a bit silly.

The Flemish House by Georges Simenon

Ho-hum Maigret mystery

The Flemish House, first published in 1932, is the 14th book in Georges Simenon’s series of Inspector Maigret detective novels. Though the most recent paperback edition from Penguin Books is called The Flemish House, all previous editions were titled The Flemish Shop. The original French title is Chez les Flamands.

Maigret is invited to look into a case in Givet, a town on the border between France and Belgium, along the Meuse River. A friend of a friend, Anna Peeters, asks Maigret to help clear her family name. A young woman named Germaine Piedboeuf has gone missing. It is known that she has an illegitimate child by Anna’s brother Joseph, who is engaged to marry another woman. The locals feel that the Peeters family killed Germaine to get rid of her and any claims she may have on Joseph. Anna Peeters argues that there is no hard evidence connecting her family to the woman’s disappearance. They are merely the victims of prejudice based on nationality and class.

In this border town, animosity and resentment exist between the French and Flemish residents, which, here on the French side of the border, amplifies the locals’ dislike of the Peeters family. The Peeterses run a successful grocery store/bar serving mostly Flemish customers, and as a result they are relatively well-to-do, financially. The Piedboeufs, on the other hand, are a family of working-class factory employees, so Joseph Peeters’s seduction of Germaine leaves a bad taste of the rich man exploiting the poor girl. All this fuel added to the fire contributes to Anna Peeters turning to Maigret for help in clearing this matter up.

Beyond the mystery, these Maigret novels are often enjoyable for what Simenon shows us of French life of the time period in question. The River Meuse is a thoroughfare for barge traffic, and Givet one of its more popular stops, so Simenon once again gives some glimpses into the lives of the bargemen and families who ply this trade. Canal life is also covered in Lock 14, Maigret and the Headless Corpse, and Maigret and the Bum. In The Flemish House, the Meuse is “in spate,” with high flooding and strong currents that have halted any boat traffic and left the barges stranded along the riverbanks. The depiction of Givet is similar to that of other provincial towns in Maigret novels (The Grand Banks Café, for example). The majority of the residents are shown as close-minded conspiracy theorists. The Belgian border adds a touch of uniqueness to this novel, as the reader gets an inkling of insight into Flemish culture through the daily lives of the Peeters family in their home and shop.

Upon finishing the book, I really have no idea how Maigret solved this case. He just kind of hangs out with the suspects until he gets a feel for them. There’s no case-cracking clue that tips the scales in his favor. The reader can make an educated guess as to who may have committed the crime, and in the end it seems like that’s just what Maigret does. The solution is neither obvious nor surprising. When the perpetrator is revealed, the reader just feels apathy. Habitual readers of Maigret novels know that the inspector always solves his case, but he doesn’t always subject the culprits to the full extent of legal justice. Sometimes he makes a moral judgment that the crime was justified or committed under extenuating circumstances, and he cuts the criminal a break. In this case, however, it is difficult to understand why Maigret would exercise leniency to the extent that he does. The Flemish House failed to capture my attention the way most Maigret mysteries do. This is just an average mystery novel, and a below-average book for Simenon.

The Metropolis by Upton Sinclair

Lifestyles of the rich and stupid

The Metropolis, a novel by Upton Sinclair, was published in 1908, just a couple years after his controversial breakthrough book The Jungle. The two novels are written in a similar muckraking, pro-socialist style, but The Jungle is much more eye-opening, compelling, and insightful than this tepid successor. By comparison, The Metropolis feels shallow and poorly thought-out.

Allan Montague is a lawyer born and raised in Mississippi. Despite his Southern upbringing, his father fought in the Civil War on the side of the Union. After Dad’s death, Allan moves to New York City, along with his mother and cousin Alice. Allan hopes that, through his deceased father’s connections, he can find some profitable work in the big city. Allan’s younger brother Oliver already resides in New York. He lives the life of a wealthy man, but it is unclear what exactly he does for a living. Oliver is active in high society, and he introduces Allan, Alice, and Mom into his high-dollar social circles. The Montagues attend a series of lengthy and lavish parties in which no frivolous expense is spared. The hosts of these parties expend enormous amounts of money in an attempt to outdo one another. It’s unclear why exactly these millionaires would welcome the Montagues into their circle, since the family from Mississippi are merely upper middle class. Nevertheless, Allan Montague is the reasonable man through whose eyes we view the outrageously extravagant lifestyles of these kings and queens of New York society. 

The bulk of this book is just Sinclair rattling off examples of insane things the rich spend their money on, and how much those luxuries cost. This goes on for chapter after chapter. For example, a woman had a million-dollar coat that was made from the feathers of rare Hawaiian birds. Is this really the problem that’s plaguing American society? Not until Chapter 11, when Allan is hired as a lawyer to work on a lawsuit, does some semblance of a story actually begin. That plot thread, however, barely goes anywhere. If Theodore Dreiser wrote this novel, he would concentrate on the business, legal, and financial aspects of the story, perhaps to the point of inducing boredom. Sinclair, on the other hand, rushes through the legal case rather sketchily because he just wants to rant about the rich. He succeeds in getting his point across that the wealthy waste a lot of their money on stupid and useless stuff. There is a brief passage on the idiocy of fashion that’s rather well-said, but then Sinclair just resumes his catalog of expensive oddities: “There was a woman who had her teeth filled with diamonds; and another who was driving a pair of zebras,” and so on and so on.

Sinclair never acknowledges the fact that all this expenditure of wealth might trickle down to the artisans who make these luxuries, the merchants who sell them, and the servants who clean and maintain them. He will try to shock you with the fact that a rich old woman employs 32 servants, but that’s 32 people who have jobs. (I’m a liberal, and I’m making these arguments. That’s how annoying this novel is.) Sinclair’s typical modus operandi would be to contrast his exaggerated rich people with some exaggerated poor people­—i.e. look at what the wealthy are doing while these workers starve—but in this book he never gets around to the poor people, other than a few brief comments the aristocrats make about labor strikes. Sinclair is too busy reciting all these Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not examples of extreme wealth and waste.

In general, I like Sinclair’s work (The Jungle is a masterpiece, in my opinion), but at times he can get carried away with his exaggerated black-and-white socioeconomic rhetoric to the point of campiness. Such is the case with The Metropolis, and it’s not even fun.

Strange News from Another Star by Hermann Hesse

Modern-day fables for grown-ups

Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), winner of the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in the Black Forest of Germany. He eventually emigrated to Switzerland and became a Swiss citizen. Hesse is best known for novels like Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and The Glass Bead Game, but he also published two volumes of short stories. His collection entitled Strange News from Another Star was published in 1919. The eight stories contained within were written from 1913 to 1918. Despite the book’s title, there’s no science fiction here. These tales do, however, exhibit a touch of fantasy like one would find in fairy tales or an episode of The Twilight Zone.

The stories here read like Aesop’s Fables if they were written for adults of the modern world. Hesse’s writing could be characterized as neo-romantic, meaning it is heavily influenced by, but slightly more realistic than, the old-school German Romantics like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and company. In these stories, Hesse never aims for a realistic portrait of what life was like in a specific region of Germany. Instead, he strives to express universal truths about human nature. Hesse’s fiction tends to take place in vaguely unspecified quasi-medieval settings that could be anywhere in Europe. Often his characters don’t even have names, they’re simply “the young man,” “the girl,” or “the old man.” Hesse frequently presents a utopian vision of a simpler life, one where intellectual pursuits and an appreciation of nature take precedence over the more realistically pressing concerns of earning a living. Within these idyllic surroundings, however, the characters act out dramas in which peace and contentment are disturbed by the darker forces of human nature and modern life, thus forcing the protagonist to embark on some sort of soul-searching quest.

In the title story, “Strange News from Another Star,” a citizen of one of such Hessian utopia makes a journey to our real world of post–World War I devastation, contrasting the paradise of peace that might have been with the death and destruction of modern Europe. Although the word “star” is used, there is no space travel involved. “Star” could easily be rephrased as “another country” or “another [metaphorical] world.” Hesse was a writer who was always searching and experimenting, and as a result, his experiments don’t always pay off. In “Hard Passage” and “A Dream Sequence,” for example, the stories start out well enough but then veer off into too much surrealism that obscures the moral of the story. “A Dream Sequence” is just that, a dream scene that feels as if it were lifted out of some novel and presented out of context.

The strongest entries in the collection appear at the end of the volume. In “Fuldam,” residents of the titular town gather for their annual fair, where a mysterious stranger appears who has the power to grant everyone one wish. In “Iris,” a young boy spends his time daydreaming, studying flowers, and observing the natural cycles of the seasons. When he grows into a man, he loses his childish spirit and grows dissatisfied with life. These two stories, and most others in this volume, successfully combine elements of romanticism, fantasy, and realism. If this book had been published a half century later in Latin America, the style might have been dubbed “magic realism.”

Hesse’s other collection of short stories, entitled Stories of Five Decades, was published after his death in 1972. It is a career retrospective of sorts, containing 23 stories from over the course of his long career. That volume is every bit as good as Strange News from Another Star. Though Hesse is best known for his novels, he was a quite masterful practitioner of the short story, as evidenced in both of his fine short fiction collections.

Stories in this collection

Augustus

The Poet

Flute Dream

Strange News from Another Star

Hard Passage

A Dream Sequence

Fuldam

Iris

Lessons in Pictorial Composition by Louis Wolchonok

Forgotten gem of a how-to art book

If you habitually haunt used bookstores, then you are no doubt familiar with the publications of Dover Books. This is doubly true if you are to any degree an artist. Dover publishes cheap, no-frills reprints of a wide variety of old books, from the greatest classics in world literature to wordless books full of clip art. The Dover catalog includes many obscure and forgotten old books, one of which is Louis Wolchonok’s 1961 book Lessons in Pictorial Composition. As an art school graduate and occasional would-be artist, I find most how-to books on art to be pretty useless. Not so with this book from Wolchonok, however. Although it’s an odd duck in the genre, this book actually has some really useful content for painters and draughtsmen.

Wolchonok (1898–1973) was a professional artist in New York City and taught at City College of New York. There is hardly any information on him to be found online except auction records of his works. He doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry. Both the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the National Gallery of Art have works by Wolchonok in their collections. To my knowledge, he published three books on art, the others being Design for Artists and Craftsmen and The Art of Three Dimensional Design.

Over 700 sketches by Wolchonok illustrate his Lessons in Pictorial Composition. Almost all of these are entirely black and white, using only line-art hatching effects for shading. Only a few of the illustrations use halftone grays. Although Wolchonok does discuss color towards the end, the book contains no color illustrations. The 700 sketches in this book exhibit a wide variety of styles, from non-objective abstractions similar to something Wassily Kandinsky, Robert Delaunay, or Werner Drewes might produce, to realistic landscapes and figures reminiscent of Ben Shahn, early Stuart Davis, or Reginald Marsh. Are they all beautiful? No, but they are all very well thought-out. Each one of these little drawings, most smaller than a credit card, could serve as the basis for a completed painting. I’ve seen some of Wolchonok’s paintings online, and I don’t like them much. These sketches, however, though dated to an earlier modernist period, are quite impressive. It would be difficult for any artist to fill a sketchbook with such a high quantity and wide variety of potentially productive thumbnails. Any artist who can learn from Wolchonok’s workmanlike example would no doubt experience a notable increase in inspiration and productivity.

When I went to art school decades ago, we were required to take many drawing and painting classes, of course. We were also required to take “design” classes, in which we worked through visual exercises to learn about concepts like line, shape, color, form, tension, balance, etc. Lessons in Pictorial Composition would be a fine textbook for such a course. Wolchonok’s Lessons only applies to good ol’ fashioned two-dimensional art—drawings, paintings, prints—not to today’s artworld landscape of found-object sculpture, conceptual art, and other high-falutin gallery fare. Theoretically, however, Wolchonok’s lessons could apply to digital art, which is also 2D.

A lot of how-to art books try to idiot-proof the creative process by telling you where to put your brush and what color to choose. The best books in the genre, and there are few, actually help you to think like an artist. Wolchonok’s writing in this book will not excite you, but he does competently get his points across. The images do most of the talking. Much like Edgar Payne’s Composition of Outdoor Painting, Lessons in Pictorial Composition largely succeeds as a visual reference of examples that artists can learn from, emulate, and build upon.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel García Márquez

Dirty old man finds inappropriate love

Memories of My Melancholy Whores is a novella by Colombian author and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014). It was published in Spanish in 2004, and an English translation was released the following year. This is a very short work that really belongs in a collection of short stories rather than a stand-alone book. This novella is not set in the fictional village of Macondo where many of García Márquez’s other works take place, like his famous novel One Hundred Years of Solitude and his other three novellas. Instead, Memories of My Melancholy Whores takes place in an urban setting. The city is unspecified, but based on the names of streets, parks, newspapers, etc., it’s a safe bet to say the story is set in Colombia. 

The novella is narrated by an elderly man who I believe is unnamed. Some refer to him as “the scholar.” He appears to be a writer and perhaps a former academic of some sort. He writes a weekly column for his city’s newspaper. This man has never married. He states that in his entire life he has never been in love and has only slept with prostitutes—around 500 different prostitutes by his count. On his 90th birthday, this man decides that he wants to celebrate the landmark event by deflowering a young virgin, so he calls up his favorite madam, who agrees to procure the virgin for him. When he shows up at the whorehouse, he is led into a room where he finds a naked 14-year-old girl lying asleep. Rather than claim the service he paid for, the old man decides to simply watch the girl sleep. The way this is presented, García Márquez seems to want us to find this charming, but the old man also fondles the girl while she sleeps, which is not charming. Even though the two do not speak, the man falls in love with the girl, or so the author would have us believe. The scholar returns to the bordello for repeat rendezvous with this girl, who remains a sleeping beauty during their encounters.

Obviously, there’s some problematic subject matter here. Even García Márquez, one of the most highly acclaimed authors of the last 75 years, did not get a free pass on this creepy sex fantasy. The work was met with some critical and public backlash upon its publication. This is not really an erotic tale, and the sexuality is more implied than graphic. García Márquez uses the whore scenario to comment on old age, lost youth, masculinity, and mortality. The story is told with an attempt at humor that includes dirty-grandpa jokes about the old man’s sexual prowess. Prostitution, even child prostitution, is romanticized in this book as if it were some kind of cultural touchstone. Love between old men and young women has been a common theme in literature since ancient times. The way García Márquez tells this story has a feeling of mythology or fable about it, like when Zeus used to come down from Olympus and deflower virgins. It’s not quite the clueless pedophilia one finds in a lot of Victorian novels, but it’s pedophilia nonetheless, and García Márquez should have known better. An esteemed author might have gotten away with this in 2004, but two decades later it’s unlikely a man could publish a story like this without it inspiring some well-deserved outrage.

Regardless of its controversial subject matter, Memories of My Melancholy Whores just isn’t that great of a read. It’s not only offensive but also feels inconsequential. It just left me wondering what’s the point?

Hombre by Elmore Leonard

A riveting classic Western

Elmore Leonard is famous for his crime novels, many of which have been adapted into popular films in recent decades, but back in the 1960s and early ‘70s Leonard was known for his Westerns. Leonard’s fifth novel Hombre, published in 1961, is likely his best-known Western, due largely to the 1967 film adaptation starring Paul Newman, one of the best American-made Western movies of the 1960s—a decade that was full of great Westerns. The film Hombre changes some of the characters’ names and relationships, but the overall story is very faithful to the novel. Just as the movie is one of the all-time classics in the genre of Western film, Leonard’s novel is an outstanding work that holds a similar position in the Western genre of literature. Hombre the novel is riveting from start to finish.

For various reasons too complicated to explain here, a half dozen folks are riding in a stagecoach headed South towards Bisbee, Arizona. Among them is John Russell, whom some call by the nickname of Hombre. Russell is three-quarters White, one-quarter Mexican. As a child, he was abducted by Apaches and lived with them for several years, becoming accustomed to their way of life. As a young man, he reentered White society, but many of the townspeople still consider him an “Indian,” which, among most Whites in those days, was not a compliment.

When the passengers in the stagecoach find out about Russell’s Apache background, they decide they don’t want him riding in their presence anymore, so he is asked to sit outside with the driver. When the stagecoach encounters trouble, however (as stagecoaches often do in Western stories), and lives are in danger, to whom do they turn to save their bacon and guide them to safety? Russell, of course; he being the most capable man in the party. Russell hasn’t forgotten, however, the insult and ill treatment from his fellow passengers, and it’s unclear how much he’s willing to help them. As for the trouble encountered by the stagecoach, that’s better left unspoiled. The danger is multiplied, however, by the fact that this party is in the middle of the Arizona desert, and water is scarce.

Hombre is a revisionist Western, in that it takes a nontraditional approach to heroism and a more honest look at the status of Native Americans and Mexicans in American society than you’re likely to find in an old John Wayne movie of the 1940s or ‘50s. Although there is still a touch of Wild West romanticism to this story, for the most part Leonard’s novel is very realistic. There are no white-hatted saints among this cast of characters, and no one performs any heroic feats of gunplay that are outside the realm of reason. Unlike many Westerns of the 1960s, Leonard chooses not to ramp up the violence. In fact, the objective of the characters in this book seems to be to fire as few shots as possible and make them count. The plot is a cat-and-mouse game between Russell and his adversaries. Everyone’s actions and reactions are realistic and ring true to the natures of the individual characters. My eyes were glued to the page as I couldn’t wait to see what would happen next. As is often the case in Leonard’s books, the dialogue is pitch-perfect—clever and sharp without being ostentatiously so, and with a slight touch of humor that doesn’t belie the peril of the situation.

I’m not a habitual reader of Westerns, but I love Leonard’s work in this genre. Hombre is one of the best Westerns I’ve ever read, up there with Charles Portis’s True Grit. Leonard’s novels Valdez is Coming and Last Stand at Saber River are also top-notch entries in this genre.

The Later Life by Louis Couperus

Midlife crises in The Hague

The Later Life is a novel by Dutch author Louis Couperus (1863–1923). It is the second book in a four-novel quartet called Small Souls or The Books of Small Souls. (The first novel in the series is also titled Small Souls). The Later Life was originally published in the Netherlands in 1902, which is the time period in which the novel is set. It was first published in English in 1915.

Small Souls introduced us to the extensive Van Lowe family of The Hague, and the family drama continues in The Later Life. This second novel begins about two months after the end of Small Souls. In that previous book, Constance van der Welcke (née van Lowe) had a confrontation and a falling out with the rest of the Van Lowe family. After fleeing to Paris to be alone for several weeks, she returns to her husband and son in The Hague. Soon, the Van der Welckes patch up relations with Constance’s relatives and resume attendance at the family dinner parties.

The Later Life seems quite a bit shorter than Small Souls, and there is less going on in this second outing. Instead of bouncing around the entire Van Lowe family, here the focus remains primarily on the Van der Welckes: Constance, her husband Henri, and son Adriaan. Shortly after returning from Paris, Constance comes to the realization that her husband and her niece Marianne are in love with each other, though so far the interaction between the two has remained innocent. Meanwhile, an old school chum of Henri’s named Brauws returns to The Hague and becomes the frequent dinner guest of the Van der Welckes. Despite his history with Henri, Brauws forms a closer bond with Constance, and she falls in love with him. Much like her husband’s budding romance, there has been no physical affirmation of the relationship, just conversation. Will either of these harmless infatuations develop into full-fledged infidelity?

The title “The Later Life” may seem to imply that the novel is about senior citizens, but the three main players in this love quadrangle only range in age from their late thirties to their early forties (Marianne is about 19 or 20). Constance, Henri, and Brauws, however, all go through some sort of midlife crisis in this book and find themselves contemplating their lost youth. They are all dissatisfied and depressed by their present state of living. They’re lonely, trapped in loveless relationships, and/or depressed by the lack of meaning in their lives. Each wonders if he or she can finally find true happiness in later life, or is it too late to make a fresh start?

The phrase “small souls” is brought up more than a few times in the first two novels of this series. Couperus uses these words to signify the restrictive societal conventions under which these characters have developed and continue to live their lives. While somewhere in the world surely people are truly living lives that matter, the Van Lowes’ lives revolve around petty aristocratic concerns over what is proper or what people might think. “The world is full of mighty problems; and we . . . we are pigmies . . . in the tiny world of our own selves. . . .” says Brauws. Whatever was the equivalent of the Victorian era in the Netherlands, Couperus’s novels don’t so much rebel against it as rather critically acknowledge it as a pervading fact of life. Constance is the only one in her family who even questions the established order of things—whether these dinner parties or social engagements even matter. At 43, she realizes that she’s never really been in love, that she’s never even really lived. In the Small Souls series, which has proven a great read so far, Couperus reveals the existential angst beneath the veneer of upper-class respectability.

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel

My kingdom for a clock!

Long before the days of ubiquitous GPS devices, when sailors first started voyaging to distant parts of the world, it was very difficult to determine just exactly where one was. While latitude could be determined by measuring the height of the midday sun above the horizon, longitude was quite a bit trickier. Without an accurate determination of longitude, ships could not only get lost aimlessly at sea but also wrecked on the shorelines of unforeseen islands and continents. This was such a costly and frustrating problem that in the early 18th century, England, the world’s leading maritime power, established a Board of Longitude to encourage efforts to find a solution to the longitude puzzle. The Board promised a large cash prize to whomever could come up with a reliable and accurate method for determining longitude. The book entitled Longitude by science writer Dava Sobel, published in 1995, recounts the story of the long and arduous quest to solve the longitude problem and claim the prize.

The surest method for finding longitude is to compare the solar time (noon, for example, the point when the sun is highest in the sky) of a known point (usually the port of departure) with that of your present location. Just as modern time zones tell us that New York is roughly an hour ahead of Chicago, the difference in minutes and seconds between point A and point B can be converted to a measurement of degrees indicating how far east or west you’ve traveled. The only way it is possible to measure this, however, is if you have an accurate timepiece that can remain synchronized to the exact solar time of your home port. Up to the early 1700s, this was not possible because there weren’t any clocks that could keep sufficiently accurate time when subjected to shipboard motion and temperature changes. What was needed was something we take for granted these days: a reliable timepiece. An English carpenter and self-taught clockmaker named John Harrison (1693–1776) set about to create such a marine chronometer that could withstand seaborne conditions and allow for accurate and reliable navigation. Harrison would end up devoting decades of his life to the project. 

Longitude was a New York Times bestseller and won several prestigious book awards. It is deliberately written for an audience of general readers, perhaps too deliberately at times. This is a very small and short book that one can read in a day or two. It’s written at about a high school vocabulary level. Wherever possible, complex scientific concepts are explained in layman’s terms, and there are no footnotes or endnotes. Longitude is at its best when it’s discussing the biography of Harrison and all of the politics behind the awarding of the coveted prize. It’s not so great, however, at explaining how exactly geographical coordinates are measured or what mechanical advancements made Harrison’s clocks so special. In the interest of simplification, such topics are glossed over in a sentence or two so as not to strain the brains of casual readers. Some simple black and white diagrams might have been helpful, but the book has no illustrations. Perhaps such diagrams would intimidate prospective readers by being too “sciency.” The result of too much popularizing is that the science and mathematics behind this story get inadequate and what feels like half-baked coverage. This is science history that succeeds as history; it’s about scientists but not so much about science.

The story of John Harrison is really fascinating, and this book made me want to learn more. Longitude is much like a National Geographic article (albeit a long one). You know you’re not getting quite the full story because the account has been condensed for reasons of space and accessibility. Nevertheless, you still learn a lot, enough to satisfy most curious general readers and pique the interest of those willing to pursue the subject further.

The Fate of the Corps: What Became of the Lewis and Clark Explorers After the Expedition by Larry E. Morris

The later lives and deaths of America’s intrepid explorers

I’ve read a few books recounting the 1804–1806 expedition of Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery across America to the Pacific Coast and back. Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage is an excellent summation of the voyage, and the original 1814 published account of the journey, edited by Nicholas Biddle and Paul Allen, certainly yields many interesting details. The most complete account to date would be the 13-volume edition of the Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition edited by Gary E. Moulton, which you can either buy for a few hundred dollars or read online for free. Following up on all of these accounts of the expedition, Larry E. Morris’s 2004 book The Fate of the Corps takes a unique and interesting look at the Corps of Discovery by asking what happened to all these guys after the expedition was over?

In addition to Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and the men they assembled for the journey, the scope of Morris’s study includes Clark’s slave York, as well as Native American guide and interpreter Sacagawea and her French-Canadian husband Toussaint Charbonneau, both of whom joined the expedition in midstream. Morris considers 34 people to be the core of the Corps, and he investigates each of their post–expedition lives. Along the way, many other recognizable historical figures who associated with Corps members are brought into the narrative, including Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Stephen Austin, Sam Houston, and about a half dozen U.S. Presidents. Lewis and Clark’s team members took up a variety of roles after the Corps split up—fur trappers, farmers, soldiers in the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War, lawyers, politicians, and more. In learning about the lives of these Corps members, one learns quite a bit about the broader history of 19th-century America, Western expansion, and Native American relations.

While the lives many of these figures led were quite fascinating, their deaths are often equally intriguing and sometimes poignantly tragic. The best-known case is the death of Lewis himself, who exhibited signs of mental illness and committed suicide (or, as some argue, may have been murdered). Clark, on the other hand, lived a longer life in which he held important political positions in the West and also served as the guardian of Sacagawea’s children. Morris examines Clark’s attitude toward Native Americans (somewhat progressive for his day) and his problematic relationship with his slave York (not the least bit progressive).

I recently read Robert M. Utley’s 1997 book A Life Wild and Perilous, a history of “mountain men” that covers similar subject matter and several of the same individuals as Morris’s book. I found Utley’s storytelling very confusing and rather boring. Morris, on the other hand, really brings these characters to life. The biographical scenes are lively, often exciting, and sometimes moving. Morris’s accounts are grounded in fact, but they don’t read as simply a relentless barrage of facts. Morris does jump around quite a bit, chronologically and geographically. There a lot of life threads intertwined here, which can sometimes be disorienting. Unlike Utley, however, Morris assists the reader by providing a useful chronology up front and an appendix that recaps the pertinent details of each member of the Corps. As a result, you come away from this book knowing exactly what happened to these men and woman (except in cases where nobody knows exactly what happened to these men and woman). When there are conflicting views among historians about the ultimate fates of, for example, Lewis and Sacagawea, Morris explains the pros and cons of each side’s arguments.

If you want a history of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, this isn’t it. Read Ambrose or Biddle’s books. If that’s not enough to satisfy your interest, however, and you’d like to follow the ripple effects of that landmark journey through subsequent American history, then Morris’s The Fate of the Corps is a great read that will tell you everything you want to know and more.

The Atlas of Atlases: Exploring the Most Important Atlases in History and the Cartographers Who Made Them by Philip Parker

Can’t decide if it’s a coffee-table book or a textbook

Ivy Press publishes a series of books on bibliographic history called Liber Historica, which as of now consists of seven volumes. I have previously read and reviewed two books from this series, Scientifica Historica and The Philosopher’s Library, about the history of science and philosophy books, respectively. Having an avid interest in book history, I liked this series enough to come back for more, and as a map enthusiast I was eager to lay my hands on The Atlas of Atlases, published in 2022. Although the title indicates that this book is about the history of atlases (because Atlas of Atlases sounds cool), the book actually covers the entire history of cartography, not just maps bound into book form. Book-length atlases didn’t really exist before the mid-16th century. This book, however, starts with the first topographical lines scratched into a prehistoric rock and ends with Google Maps and other online geographic information systems.

All of the books in the Liber Historica series are in a mini-coffee-table size (8" x 9.5") and loaded with scores of color illustrations. It’s not just a series of picture books, however. Each volume also contains a full-length scholarly monograph on its subject. In the case of The Atlas of Atlases, the text by Philip Parker is a long and difficult slog. While Parker certainly provides a sufficient history of maps an atlases, he tries too hard to sum up practically the entire history of the Western World in 270 pages. Each map presented gets a paragraph or two of description crammed with names and dates—not just who made the atlas but who financed it, to whom it was dedicated, who was king or pope at the time, and what wars were going on. There’s nothing wrong with what Parker has to say (unlike The Philosopher’s Library, where I thought there were plenty of problems with the text). The way he says it, however, often put me to sleep. This is a case where I definitely would have preferred less text and more images. A chronological list of important maps and atlases with some pertinent facts about each would have been enough for me, rather than this dense prose narrative in paragraph form. John Noble Wilford’s The Mapmakers is a better history of cartography—more comprehensive and more pleasant to read—but that book doesn’t have all of the beautiful color illustrations that adorn The Atlas of Atlases.

The 8" x 9.5" page size was fine for Liber Historica’s other books, but it doesn’t really do justice to many of these maps. Because there’s so much text, most of the illustrations aren’t even full page size. The reproduction quality is very good, but the images are just too small to make out much detail. The best use of this book is to bring your attention to landmark maps and atlases that you can then look up elsewhere. Everything prior to the 20th century is probably digitized online somewhere (Try the David Rumsey Map Collection).

From what I’ve seen so far of the Liber Historica series, the initial flagship volume, Scientifica Historica, is still the best book in the bunch. I do like the Atlas of Atlases, however, more than The Philosopher’s Library. In general, if you like books about books, these volumes will make nice additions to your shelves, and they are rather inexpensive for the production quality that you’re getting. Recent additions to the series include The Botanist’s Library, The Astronomer’s Library, and The Mathematician’s Library.

The Purple Land by W. H. Hudson

An Englishman’s adventures in Uruguay

William Henry Hudson (1841–1922) was born and raised in Argentina. His parents were immigrants of English and Irish origin. At the age of 32, Hudson emigrated to England, became a British citizen, and started a literary career. He wrote many books about South America, both fiction and nonfiction. He was also an ornithologist and published numerous books on birds and nature. Hudson made his authorial debut in 1885 with his novel The Purple Land. From the preface, however, it sounds like the book was not widely read until a couple decades later when Hudson hit it big with another novel, Green Mansions.

Richard Lamb is an Englishman in Argentina who falls in love with a local girl named Paquíta. They elope against her parents’ wishes and flee from Buenos Aires to escape persecution. They cross the Río de la Plata to Montevideo, in Uruguay, where they temporarily take up residence with an aunt of Paquíta’s. Lamb has trouble finding work in the city and decides to venture off on his own into the countryside in hopes of finding work at an estancia (ranch or farm). This was a time when a traveler (at least an Englishman) coming upon a country house could expect to find hospitality, food, and shelter. As a result, Lamb doesn’t really do much work at all, but he does visit several different estancias where he is welcomed with mostly open arms. Along the way he lives a bit of the gaucho life, gets involved in a revolution, and experiences other adventures.

Hudson provides some historical context in a brief appendix. You’d be better off reading that first. At the time of this novel, Uruguay was governed by the Colorados (a.k.a. the Reds, liberals). This follows a long period of Civil War against the Blancos (a.k.a. the Whites, conservatives), who continue their rebellious resistance against the Red regime. The “Purple Land” of the title refers to the region being “so stained with the blood of her children.” The territory that now comprises Uruguay was also known as the Banda Orientál. Hudson uses the word “Oriental” quite a bit throughout the book. Here it simply means “Eastern,” as in Eastern South America, east of the Río de la Plata. Hudson also mentions ostriches several times in this novel. Although he was an ornithologist who should know better, I think he’s referring to the native rhea, which at the time might have been more commonly referred to as the “South American ostrich.”

Even more so than many inappropriate writers of the Victorian era, Hudson had a thing for young girls. I haven’t come across a book of his yet where some adult male isn’t romancing a girl of 14 or 15 (Hudson was 44 when this book was published). Even though Lamb is a newlywed, he’s constantly on the lookout for another woman, the younger the better. Such unfaithful behavior is unusual for a “gentleman” protagonist in British literature of this era, but Lamb falls in love with four or five girls or women over the course of this novel. The puritanical conventions of the Victorian novel, however, prevent him from getting very far with his infidelities.

I have read three other books by Hudson and found them mediocre at best, but I enjoyed this one quite a bit. The contents of this novel read like an assortment of Hudson’s own experiences, second-hand stories, and folklore. Every time Lamb moves to a different estancia, it’s like starting a new short story, which may last two, three, or several chapters. One of the more memorable chapters is just a half dozen guys sitting around a campfire telling tall tales and ghost stories. Hudson succeeds in providing the reader with colorful and revealing glimpses into Uruguayan life and culture. This not only works for “tourist” readers like me; this novel has even been praised by the great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, and Ezra Pound were all fans of Hudson’s work, and after reading The Purple Land, I can kind of understand why.

A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler

The Citizen Kane of spy novels

Eric Ambler (1909-1998) is a highly respected British author of spy novels whose career spanned almost half a century. A Coffin for Dimitrios, often regarded as his finest work, was published in 1939. The book has also been published as The Mask of Dimitrios, which is the title of the 1944 film adaptation starring Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet.

Englishman Charles Latimer is a former professor of political economy turned successful writer of mystery novels. While vacationing in Istanbul he meets a Colonel Haki of the Turkish police, who happens to be a fan of his work. As the two get to talking, Haki tells Latimer about an infamous criminal named Dimitrios whose body was discovered in the Bosporus Strait. Given Latimer’s interest in crime and detective work, Haki asks Latimer if he’d like to go to the morgue to view the body. Latimer agrees. The more the writer learns about Dimitrios’s criminal career, the more intrigued he becomes. He decides to investigate Dimitrios’s past, with the idea that he might discover something that would be useful for a future novel. Latimer retraces Dimitrios’s known whereabouts, traveling from city to city looking through police records and interviewing people with some knowledge of the notorious criminal. Along the way, Latimer finds that someone else has been following the same trail and making similar inquiries into Dimitrios’s past.

The plot of the book calls to mind the classic film Citizen Kane in that the title character is dead in the opening scene, and the rest of the book is a series of glimpses into his past. Through his investigation of Dimitrios’s life, Latimer uncovers a history of espionage, drug dealing, human trafficking, and murder. These crimes are revealed almost as a series of short stories, told to Latimer by various law enforcement personnel and unsavory characters. Ambler ties these fictional flashbacks into real-life political intrigue of Europe’s interwar period. The drawback to this series of flashbacks, however, is that Latimer is never really in any danger until at least two-thirds of the way through the book. He’s not really doing any ingenious detective work, either, but rather just listening to stories that are voluntarily related to him.

There are two kinds of spy thrillers. One includes those of the highly skilled, expertly trained, killing-machine sort of hero (e.g. James Bond, Jason Bourne). The other is that of the regular guy who accidentally gets involved in an espionage plot (e.g. just about every Alfred Hitchcock movie). A Coffin for Dimitrios falls into the latter category. The problem with the regular-guy approach, however, is that if you’re regular guy is too regular, he ends up being just boring. Such is the case with Latimer, who doesn’t have much of a personality at all. He is also still somewhat bound by the literary conventions of the English gentleman, which means he’s predictably going to do the right thing. It would be interesting to see what an author like Georges Simenon could have done with this premise by adding some ungentlemanly moral ambiguity.

Overall, however, I enjoyed this novel enough to make me want to read some more of Ambler’s work. This is an intelligent, realistic espionage thriller in the vein of John Le Carré’s work. It’s not simplistic potboiler pulp fiction, but it reads very briskly and lively and doesn’t get bogged down in too much political details (unlike, perhaps, some of Le Carré’s work). If you like those old Hitchcockian thrillers of the ‘40s and ‘50s, there’s a good chance you’ll like this.

Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science by Jim Endersby

How natural science was conducted in Darwin’s day

Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911) was an important figure in the history of botany and in British science in general. He was a close friend and supporter of Charles Darwin, and the two exchanged over 1300 letters. In a career move similar to Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, young Hooker served as naturalist on the ship Erebus in its exploration of the Antarctic and many Southern islands. Joseph’s father, William Hooker, was the founding director of the Kew Gardens, and Joseph succeeded his father in that post in 1865. Although he may have started out as a nepo baby, Joseph’s accomplishments in botany eventually surpassed those of his father. In his 2008 book Imperial Nature, science historian Jim Endersby looks at Hooker’s life and what it reveals about science and scientists in Victorian England.

As Endersby soon admits in his introduction, this is not a full biography of Joseph Hooker. Rather, it focuses on a specific period in Hooker’s early career, from the late 1830s to the mid-1860s. Endersby’s research is drawn largely from letters and publications of that period. Though he focuses primarily on Hooker, Endersby provides a broader view of how natural science was conducted in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century. What he reveals on this subject could be applied to just about any of Hooker’s British contemporaries studying biology at this time, including his father William Hooker, Darwin, George Bentham, Robert Brown, Edward Forbes, Asa Gray, John Lindley, Richard Owen, and Hewett Cottrell Watson—all of whom are discussed frequently in the book.

Endersby provides much interesting insight into how these botanists practiced their profession—collecting, preserving, classifying, drawing, writing, and publishing—but he also reveals much about the social status of science and scientists at this time. During this period in history, science was largely the domain of independently wealthy “gentlemen.” Conducting science for money was considered crass and menial. Even medical doctors were looked down on as lowly blue-collar laborers. Hooker, however, needed to earn a living, so he had to navigate the difficult transition from aristocratic “men of science” to professional “scientists” that took place in the 19th century. Even the word “professional” was considered derogatory; Hooker and his colleagues preferred to be called “philosophical” botanists.

In his leadership role at Kew, with its extensive herbarium (collection of plants), Hooker was the foremost authority on botanical matters, such as naming plant species, in the British empire, if not the world. As Endersby describes him, Hooker was somewhat of a dictator over his domain. Endersby closely examines the relationships between metropolitan (London) and colonial (e.g. Australia, India) botanists. During his Erebus voyage, Hooker met two skilled amateur plant collectors, William Colenso in New Zealand and Ronald Campbell Gunn in Tasmania. For decades thereafter, these two men supplied Hooker and Kew with dried and preserved plants from these islands, which Hooker then analyzed, classified, and described in his botanical books. Through a deep dive into their correspondence, Endersby shows how Hooker was dependent on these colonial collectors but also strove to keep them in their place, asserting himself as the real botanist and big-city authority while condescendingly quashing their ideas.

I enjoy reading biographies and histories about the glory days of the naturalist explorer, so I found Endersby’s book quite interesting and informative. I will caution the reader, however, that Imperial Nature reads very much like a dissertation or a scholarly treatise intended to win over fellow historians or a tenure committee, not a general audience. There is much repetition in the text, frequent hair-splitting, and a lot of cross-referencing from one chapter to another. Endersby cites nine examples to defend a point he’s making, when three would have sufficed for the general reader. It’s very workmanlike prose, but Endersby delivers the goods. Those who are interested in the way these nineteenth-century scientists plied their trade will certainly learn plenty here.

Small Souls by Louis Couperus

Compelling start to a Dutch family saga

Name a Dutch author. I dare you. If you’re an American, chances are it’ll be Anne Frank or maybe Spinoza. Not much Dutch literature has been available to English-language readers, although there has been an increase in the last few decades. One notable Dutch author, however, did enjoy worldwide success in the early 20th century: Louis Couperus. His novel Small Souls was first published in 1901, then came out in English in 1914. It is the first of four books in a series also called Small Souls.

The Van Lowe family lives in The Hague. The family patriarch, “Papa” van Lowe, is deceased when the novel opens. He is survived by his widow, eight children, and numerous grandchildren. The elder Van Lowe was formerly the Dutch governor general of the colony of Java, a very prestigious position through which he might occasionally rub elbows with the King and Queen. None of Papa’s children, however, have quite lived up to his level of distinction. The eight Van Lowe siblings now find themselves in varying levels of social status and class, which sometimes inspires envy and resentment among them. Because they’re well-to-do, they spend most of their time visiting one another, throwing parties, criticizing and gossiping about each other. (Some of the men have careers, but we don’t really see them at work.) Twenty years ago, one daughter, Constance, married a diplomat forty years her senior. She cheated on her husband with one of his subordinates, causing a divorce and a scandal that forced her and her lover to flee to Brussels. Now, after 15 years in exile, she has returned to The Hague to reconnect with her family and her homeland, but not everyone is willing to overlook her shameful past.

Small Souls reminds me of British author John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga (I have only read the first book in that series). In both cases, the reader is introduced to a large, rather wealthy family. An extramarital scandal threatens the family’s respectability, and the various siblings all have deep-seated beefs against one another. Often these squabbles feel like much ado over rich people problems.

What makes Small Souls interesting, however, is its quintessential Dutchness. There are thousands of novels set in London, but The Hague? In English, hardly any. Couperus’s novels provide a welcome look into Dutch life, one unique aspect of which is the Netherlands’ relationship to its colonies in Indonesia. The East Indies played an important role in the Dutch economy. The Van Lowe children grew up in Java, and the family still has agricultural interests on the island. In this novel, the adjective “Indian” is used to describe anyone or anything from Java. Couperus’s writing also exhibits a sensibility that’s more Northern than Western European. There’s an understated yet authentic psychological sensitivity here that reads more like the writings of Scandinavian authors such as Knut Hamsun, Jens Peter Jacobsen, and Henrik Ibsen than that of English or French novelists.

Much like Galsworthy’s Forsytes, the difficult aspect of reading Small Souls is just getting a grasp on the huge roster of Van Lowes. One really needs to chart out a family tree to keep them all straight. Since I couldn’t find hardly any information on this novel online, I’ve done that for you (image attached below). As a member of a large family myself, I found Couperus’s depiction of brother-sister, parent-child, and husband-wife relationships quite authentic and insightful. As the first novel in a tetralogy, much of Small Souls is spent introducing us to this clan, thus setting the stage for further developments in the subsequent novels. I found myself thoroughly engaged in the Van Lowe family dynamics, enough to make we want to follow their fortunes through the next three books: The Later Life, Twilight of the Souls, and Dr. Adriaan.

Van Lowe family tree (click to enlarge)