The Perfect Garden

Italian Villas and Their Gardens
Edith Wharton
250 pages
Copy: mine; a super ugly used copy from the '70s that I bought off the internet
Read: April 3-10, 2015
Spoilers: there is literally nothing to spoil (unless "hates English gardens" is a spoiler?)

My only problem with this book is that I have absolutely no idea to whom this book is aimed. It isn't detailed enough to help you construct your own Italian villa and garden. There are no detailed garden plans. There isn't enough advice about gardening--so this isn't a manual.

It also isn't really a tour guide. Wharton is obviously interested in how gardens complement villas, but that interest does not necessarily translate to a logical and clear guide around Italy. (The book is divided into sections according to region, but her movement through a region isn't necessarily logical, nor is her movement between regions particularly clear.) She points out some history, describes some bits and pieces (too much for a tour guide, honestly--the details seem too thorough to be for people who are looking at the gardens currently), and then moves on.

So here's what I think--this book is for people making long term plans. Thinking about redesigning your garden? Here's a book that will tell you exactly which places to visit in Italy to go see gardens that might function as proper models. When you return home, this book has enough detail to remind you about what you saw so you might be able to recreate certain aspects of the gardens.

This book may also be for stir crazy gardeners who are slowly being driven nuts by winter weather.

At any rate, I really enjoyed this book. Wharton's complete dislike of English gardens is deeply amusing. Her all-consuming love of Italian architecture and gardening (and even, to some extent, Italian culture) is almost equally amusing. (She also really hates French gardens, which made me giggle a bit, considering her later love affair with France.) I also vaguely feel that her book is a time capsule. She first published this in 1903--I can't imagine many of the villas or their gardens survive today. Hers may have been the last recording of some of these buildings.

Her nascent environmental argument also intrigued me. The perfect garden harmonizes not just with the building it surrounds (indeed, some of Wharton's favorite gardens had little to do with their villas), but also with the nature it usurps. The best gardens incorporate natural features (especially hills and gorges), rather than altering them or eliminating them. She seems to reserve a special degree of scorn for those who work against nature, or think they can do better than nature (ahem, English gardens). Also, she hates lawns, something I appreciated in particular (I have a deep hatred of lawns, personally).

So who ought to read this book? Primarily people who are interested in the history of gardens, honestly. (I'm reading this because I am starting to draw up my comps lists and because I'll be writing my dissertation on 19th century garden-writing.) I'm not sure I'd even recommend this to Wharton fans--maybe only if you're a completist. Certainly her wit shines through in places, but overall this is a pretty straightforward text, without her trademark descriptions, diction choices, or even attention to detail. (If you want to try out some Wharton nonfiction, I'd recommend France, from Dunkerque to Belfort, her book on France during the early days of World War I. It is a truly glorious piece of war reporting, and deeply under-appreciated.)

Non Timetus Messor

On March 12th, 2015, in the early afternoon, I learned that Terry Pratchett had died. The news hit me right in the chest—for a moment or two, all I could do was sit and stare at the headline. In some ways, I’d been bracing myself for this (he’d been declining for quite some time), but seeing it, actually seeing the word “dead,” was so unexpected and so final that I couldn’t quite accept it. There’s no way, I thought to myself, but the evidence was overwhelming.

I never met Terry Pratchett—and now, obviously, I never will. This means that I don’t necessarily have the right to mourn him, as his family and friends do. But Terry Pratchett was a rebel, and he wrote about rebels, so I think I’ll follow his example and ignore societal expectations. He is a man worth mourning, after all. (He used to wear a shirt to fantasy conventions that read, “Tolkien dead. J K Rowling said no. Philip Pullman couldn’t make it. Hi. I’m Terry Pratchett.” The world needs more men like this.)Thus, after I had told the people who needed to be told, I turned my attention to mourning.

Mourning authors, in some ways, is easier than mourning close family members and friends because a) often the only connection you have to an author is their books, so what you’re really mourning is the fact that you will never have a new book by Terry Pratchett or Maya Angelou or P.D. James (or whichever literary light you’re most attracted to) and b) you still have their books. It’s a big decision, of course, which book you’ll read right after an author’s passing. Did I want to read Going Postal, a book I tend to read when I’m stressed and overwhelmed? Did I want to read Guards, Guards, which I tend to read when I’m happy and relaxed? Perhaps I ought to do the obvious thing and read one of his books about Death, the only character who appears in every Pratchett book. Eventually I stumbled onto the proper book, with a little help from my best friend (who, by the way, choose to read Reaper Man in the wake of Terry Pratchett’s death). I am currently reading the first Terry Pratchett book I ever read: Good Omens.

(In some ways, this is a terrible choice, since Pratchett only co-wrote it, but it is still the book that introduced me to Pratchett-land and it holds a very special place in my reading world.)

Of course, there is another way to mourn. An event like this always sends people out to stores to amass more of an author’s work—and I am no different. The day after, I got myself to my local used bookstore—and discovered a blank shelf where the Pratchett books would have been. This actually pleased me more than if I had been able to buy myself some more Terry Pratchett books. I would have been sadder if I had been able to buy Pratchett books, because that would have meant that no one cared he was dead.

One of Terry Pratchett’s characters has the family motto “Non Timetus Messor,” which translates roughly into “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” A lot of people have referenced this motto in the wake of his death as a particularly appropriate one. I certainly think it is. But, just as with his books, it is impossible to simply have one favorite Terry Pratchett quote. So I’ll leave you with another, one that I think clearly demonstrates Terry Pratchett’s wisdom and humor. “Getting an education,” he writes in Hogfather, “was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.”

Good-bye, Sir Terry Pratchett. You’ll be fervently missed.

-Benvolia

Crossposted on: Readers' Books Facebook

Over-scheduled girls are the new bored boys

The Lost Track of Time
Paige Britt
320 page
Copy: ARC, publication date: 31 March 2015
Read: not sure; probably back in January
Spoilers: A fair bit, including ones for The Phantom Tollbooth
Crossposted: Life Piled on Life, Librarything

I adored this book. Scholastic has really hit it out of the park for the 2015 (more on this in later reviews), but this one has the making of a classic. Remember The Phantom Tollbooth? Or, at any rate, hopefully you remember it? (When I finished reading this book, and gushed about it to my best friend, she informed me that she hadn't actually read Tollbooth, and if she were living near me, I would have thrown copies at her. As it was, I just mailed one)

Most of the point of Phantom Tollbooth, aside from the word-play--complete with vocabulary: that's how I learned words like dodecahedron and din and doldrum and a lots of words starting with letters other than d--and the sheer adventure of the story, was that one needs to use one's mind. It was aimed at teaching young readers that boredom is laziness and that intelligence creates the best kind of adventure. It is, in short, truly inspiring.

But in multiple re-readings over time, I came up with a few quibbles. Firstly, the main character Milo is a boy. Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with being a boy. I suppose we need a few of those hanging around, and, frankly, at this point in children's literature, it is actually becoming more and more difficult to find books for intelligent boys who don't like spaceships or Greek gods. However, Tollbooth was published in 1961, and the only female characters are the Princesses of Rhyme and Reason, who have disappeared and are waiting to be rescued up in their Castle in the Air. Although I love the book, we don't need more princesses-in-need-of-rescue and, to be perfectly frank, why the fuck didn't a pair of sisters named Rhyme and Reason rescue themselves? (In more sympathetic moments, I suspect that they were taking a nice vacation and Milo's rescue was something of a nuisance). So: feminism is quibble one.

Quibble two: from what I can see, as neither child nor parent, kids don't seem to have any time to be bored. Sports, and lessons, and enforced hobbies; camps, clubs, classes; the horror that is smart phones: I don't actually think that middle class kids with well meaning parents actually have time to get bored. Getting bored is really important--as long as one doesn't get too bored, of course. Getting bored is what makes one's imagination kick into gear, it's what makes us go on adventures. No one goes on a true adventure because it would look good on a college transcript.

The Lost Track of Time addresses both of these quibbles. To be honest, my beef with Tollbooth was mostly subconscious until I came across this book. Penelope, the intrepid adventurer, suffers under a well-meaning organizational development type mother who runs her daughter's life like Penelope is another event to plan. Their various schedules--during which every fifteen minutes is accounted for--might be humorous to the target audience (8-12), but was verging on tear-jerking for me. To never have any free time! It is bad enough as an adult(ish), but for a child! Heartbreaking and all too much a part of reality.

Penelope, like Milo, escapes her predicament into an allegorical world of word-play and adventure, complete with anthropomorphized puns (my favorite was the Wild Bore), and a mythic figure to be rescued (The Great Moodler, moodling being day-dreaming). Her journey teaches the reader that schedules, just like boredom, can always go overboard.

Recommended for over-scheduled girls (if they can sneak away from their mothers to read it); for grandmothers to give to over-scheduled girls; and for anyone who has been an over-scheduled girl (warning: in that case, there could be tears.)

-Mercutia

The Book of Lost Things

The Book of Lost Things
John Connolly
469 pages
Copy: Mine, birthday present from my sister's boyfriend
Read: 10/10/12
Spoilers: nothing that I could avoid
Crossposted: Librarything

I read this book for a bookclub a few months ago and was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked it. It's right up my alley, but much more serious than most scifi/fantasy fairy tale rewrites. For example, one doesn't have to feel embarrassed reading it around a bunch of English majors, who aren't necessarily the most fantasy friendly people in the world. Connolly does a lovely job combining a literary mentality with a strong background in fairy tales and the art of adaptations. He even uses fairy tales I have never heard of, which was humbling and exciting. ("The Three Army-Surgeons" for anyone who's counting). Luckily for us, the copy I own (trade paperback, Washington Square Press, 2006) contains a detailed appendix, titled "Of Fairy Tales, Dark Towers, and Other Such Matters: Some Notes on The Book of Lost Things", which is a treasure trove of fairy tales, complete with Connolly's reason for working with each story, details of the themes as they relate to The Book of Lost Things and a complete extract of each fairy tale. It is possibly the best notes section I've read and definitely my favorite.

As for a plot summary, I'm loath to ruin any of the story. It is far too much of a journey to even begin to summarize. But, for the sake of provoking interest, I will mention that it is a bildungsroman centered around a young boy in Britain during WWII. After losing his mother, David begins to lose himself in books, leading to an adventure in a world that may or may not exist outside of his head. It is, of course, so much more complicated than that, encompassing themes as small as a child's slightest fears and as large as the embodiment of evil. It is a story about growing up and a story about how to live one's life as bravely as possible. 

Honestly, I'd recommend this for anyone, at any age, who has ever been afraid of facing the meaning of life. But it is especially powerful for those who love fairy tales, who will rejoice in this powerful novel.

-Mercutia  

Coping with Books: "The End of Your Life Book Club"

Book: The End of Your Life Book Club
Author: Will Schwalbe
Pages: 336
Copy: library book
Read: I finished this book on December 26
Spoilers: the mother dies at the end--but you know that from page one

I still can't figure out why I don't love this book. I mean, I read it quickly and enjoyed it well enough. But something about it is off. This partly may be because I've read few memoirs--I may just not know quality when I see it. But I don't think that's it. It could be the writing style--though I usually abandon books that aren't written in a way I like. It's not death--I've read about that before. It might be the cancer--my mom went through breast cancer--but I don't really think that would bother me. Something about this book niggles at me, like a vaguely sore tooth.

The premise is engaging--a man starts a two-person book club with his dying mother. They read a wide variety of books, and he writes about each book and his mother's reaction. These stories are intertwined with stories from his life and his mother's life. At times the organization is a little unwieldy--I think Schwalbe is trying to accomplish an awful lot--but it's always pleasant to read.

In many ways, Schwalbe has provided an engaging guide to caring for a dying parent. He is so careful and so thoughtful, it is clear that he loves his mother and wants the best for her. I don't know that this book would help anyone who's had a parent recently die cope, but I think this book would help some who is going through the final stages of a parent's life--or even just preparing for the day when that comes.

This is a moving elegy, a thoughtful tribute. It doesn't take many pages before you are as in love with Mary Anne Schwalbe as Will is. Her death is moving. Schwalbe lets you into his private thoughts and feelings through his mother's illness, and such vulnerability is quite amazing. The reader isn't held at arm's length through this book; the reader is brought into the hospital, into the house, into chemo therapy. I appreciate that. Schwalbe has provided another way to cope with an ill parent, and I'm grateful he is as open as he is.

Perhaps a second reading, some day, will help me figure out what it is that is bothering me about this book. Perhaps this is just a prickly book that needs to grow on me. I will certainly think about this book often. I will certainly try to sell this book at work. I think this book is good for everyone--people with parents still living, people with parents dead, people with ill parents, people with healthy parents. Young people who don't need to worry about their parents; people who do worry about their parents. This book is quite readable and I think people who only read sparingly will still enjoy it. Find a copy and give it a shot--it may change the way you think of fatal illnesses.

--Benvolia

Not As Messy As You'd Think: "In Praise of Messy Lives"

Book: In Praise of Messy Lives
Author: Katie Roiphe
Pages: 261
Copy: library copy
Read: mid-December
Spoilers: back to essays!

I requested this book from the library because I read a review that discussed how controversial Katie Roiphe is. I was excited--a woman essayist who starts fights! This is the woman for me! Naturally, her book was a complete disappointment.

Her writing style isn't that interesting. She may attack Joan Didion in a long essay, but her own style isn't so different. She uses some personal details, but never fleshes them out (she complains that Joan Didion's memoir is described as "'deeply and intensely personal,' and yet what is striking is how impersonal the book actually is." Roiphe's essays may be "deeply and intensely personal," but they're still strikingly impersonal). She has little in the way of style--I didn't linger over any of her sentences, the way I did with Joan Didion and even Anne Fadiman. Her writing style is academic and utilitarian. There is little color and no music in her sentences. This is the style of modern academic essays, but I expect more from personal essays--especially essays sold to the wider public.

Perhaps the most aggravating part of this collection of essays is the banality of Roiphe's insights. It is no compliment to myself when I say I could have made the same observations as Roiphe. She doesn't enlighten--she points out the obvious. There are few interesting criticisms and almost no intriguing social commentary. George Orwell could take a very basic and very boring part of culture and make astonishing claims about what those things said about society as a whole. Roiphe can't do that.

What intrigued me the most is the fact that Roiphe seems secretly conservative. She writes all about her unconventional family--she is raising two children on her own--and writes at great length about all the criticism she gets. But I never got the feeling that she actually accepts her situation. To me, it seems that she actually agrees with all the criticism. But there's also the sense that she loves to be a martyr. "Look at poor me, raising two fatherless children! Give me your pity and your criticism, because I deserve it!" In more capable hands, Roiphe's life story could have been striking. (I couldn't help but think that if Cheryl Strayed had written Roiphe's book, it would have been absolutely the most stunning book of the year. In Roiphe's hands, everything falls utterly flat.)

Only one essay from this collection has stayed with me. In "Making the Incest Scene," Roiphe writes about the way that incest has become the go-to "dark secret" of modern literature and how no one does it believably. While I think her criticism is spot on, I'm not sure incest is as pervasive as she imagines. Still, while I've thought about that essay once or twice since I read this collection, her analysis and observations in that essay are as superficial as all the other essays. The essay has no point but to point out incest. It goes no deeper.

I really can't figure out what is so controversial about Roiphe. Once or twice I caught myself frowning as I read her essays, but I never felt the need to rail against her. Her essay on Joan Didion bothered me a little, but I thought she made fair points. How does this woman start fights? Perhaps it is the way she writes about her family--I could see some "family values" readers becoming irate about that. Still, how she's earned a name as a "bad girl" eludes me. Orwell says more outrageous things, and he's been dead for almost 63 years. Roiphe is going to have to try a lot harder if she wants to make a lasting impression on American letters.

I don't hate this book, exactly, I'm just disappointed. Yet again another essayist has failed. Perhaps the essay form is just too out-of-date; it seems like no one knows how to do it right anymore. How can a collection this light and shallow cause any sort of controversy at all? Is it because a woman is expressing her opinions? I can only hope that isn't the only reason. Surely women are allowed to express their opinions without being labelled a "controversial writer." George Will writes his opinion all the time, and he's been called "the most powerful journalist in America."

This might be a good introduction to essays--I mean, Roiphe is readable, and shallowness of interpretation might help a person get use to reading cultural essays. Still, I'm not sure exactly who the target audience here is. Women? I hope not. Women deserve well-written essays too. I suppose I can only recommend this to people who want to stay abreast of pop literary culture. I really don't care what is written, it has to be written well. Roiphe needs to learn more about craftsmanship before she can become truly enduring.

--Benvolia

Elminating the Mystery: "A Gun for Sale"

Book: A Gun for Sale
Author: Graham Greene
Pages: 184
Copy: Penguin Classic that I stole from my brother years ago
Read: early December (I read this for my noir mystery reading group)
Spoilers: nothing extraordinary--I mean, you already know people die

I think it's interesting--and by that, I mean I vaguely regret--that I assigned this book as a noir mystery. First off, there really isn't any mystery. There's suspense, there's uncertainty--but because the book is primarily from the point of view of the murderer, there isn't much mystery. There's a little unraveling that needs to be done, but Greene lays everything out, so it's easy enough to predict what is going to happen. I doubt Greene truly wants to leave people in the dark. Second, there isn't really a central detective the way there is in most noir mysteries. Third, the woman isn't a femme fatale in the usual sense.

I was surprisingly pleased with this book. I tried to read Brighton Rock a couple years ago and got completely bogged down. This book is more snappy, and has a little less of the Catholic moralizing that makes Brighton so gloomy. In the place of Catholicism, there's war. War infects the whole novel, from first page to last. The frenzy, the fear, the release--Greene captures the entire pre-war experience perfectly. He also knows why wars happen now--the book is an indictment of industrial warfare and the effect it has on common people.

What I found particularly interesting was the use of the sole female character. Noir mysteries are almost painfully sexist--women are sex objects, or they're manipulative, or they just want to control men, or they're just there to make phone calls and post letters. Anne is a femme fatale--men are captured and die because of her--but she isn't one in the way, say, Brigid O'Shaughnessy is. She really tries to avoid causing death and mayhem, but she gets trapped and has no choice. She makes morally ambiguous choices, tries to help the criminal, and ultimately makes choices that are in her best interest, not in anyone else's. In many ways, she occupies the space usually held by the detective. It is an interesting move on Greene's part, and it does a lot to upend usual noir tropes.

Greene's use of noir cliches accomplishes that which Chandler was never able to. Green transcends the conventions of genre fiction and manages to make a noir mystery into literature. He does this without the literary flourishes that Chandler attempted. His writing is understated and calm, moving ahead without those cringe-inducing metaphors and similes. His dialogue is stilted, though, and characters tend to monologue in a way that isn't particularly realistic. Additionally, even the criminal speaks like a well-educated, well-off man, which complicates the character. Is Raven as well-educated as he claims? Is he affecting a persona? Or is Greene making all the characters equal by making them all speak in relatively similar ways? There are clear class divisions in this novel, but the divisions aren't marked by the way a character speaks.

Noir mysteries rarely explore political issues. They are usually too wrapped up in the mystery at hand to comment on the wider world. Chandler may mention war a few times, but he doesn't comment on why the war is happening or how it impacts common citizens. Hammett seems to forget any other world exists, other than the world of the novel. Greene uses noir conventions to make a political statement and in doing so, he not only elevates the genre, but he also reveals how pervasive politics can be. Just because a man is a murderer doesn't mean he won't feel the impacts of an impending war. Just because a woman has to make ambiguous moral decisions doesn't mean war won't mean anything to her. The novel barely contains these complexities--if Greene had made his story much longer, it no doubt would have shattered--but that it manages to speaks to its power and its writer's talent.

I'm going to try some more Greene now. I know part of the reason I hesitated to read him is because George Orwell wrote a rather damning review of The Heart of the Matter for the New Yorker. He writes elsewhere about "Catholic writers" and how much he dislikes their work. I'll perhaps avoid the more Catholic of Greene's work at the beginning, but I'll still give him a shot.

As for recommending this particular novel, I can see it appealing to anyone interested in industrial warfare or anyone who is interested in noir mysteries but not in genre fiction (a small population, to be sure). Like most noir, this book is unlikely to appeal to most women, just because the woman (and there is really only one, though there are a couple supporting female characters) isn't well drawn or particularly believable. Still, any woman who likes noir mysteries will find something to like in these pages. This might be a good way to introduce a person to noir mysteries, but only if they know that few other noir stories are as literary.

--Benvolia