Mrs Smith Reads

Archduke Wilhelm Franz of Austria aka Vasyl Vyshyvanyi or, Basil the Embroidered

The Red Prince is a book I read a blurb about somewhere and thought it sounded interesting and educational so I put it in my library queue. The book jacket also mentions that Archduke Wilhelm occasionally liked to wear dresses which piqued my interest even more. Archduke Wilhelm Franz of Austria, aka The Red Prince was a nephew of Emperor Franz Joseph, cousin of Franz Ferdinand (the man, not the band) and he himself set forth from an early age with a plan to become ruler of a Ukrainian state.

I wasn’t disappointed by Timothy Snyder’s deeply researched history of the decline of the Habsburg empire over the course of two world wars, as it was cunningly disguised as the biography of a very wealthy bisexual with poor financial skills and delusions of grandeur. Wilhelm, prompted by his father the Archduke Karl Stefan, devised a plan to unite Ukrainian nationals in Eastern Europe and release them from German and Soviet control, all with an eye to becoming their presumptive leader—hopefully as a King, and failing that, military dictator would be OK too. Wilhelm liked hanging out with soldiers, especially dark-haired, exotic looking ones.

The Habsburgs were an interesting bunch. A very powerful European royal family all the way back to the 10th century, there were branches of Habsburgs ruling in Europe for centuries, from Spain to Montenegro—not to mention being Holy Roman Emperors even into modern times. Wilhelm, though not destined to become an Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was born into a pretty good family tree. His father, oblivious to the changing views on monarchist state-building, aligned himself to become ruler of an independent Polish state, so Wilhelm had a look at the map and set his cap for the Ukrainian nationalists. Though a life-long effort, it was never to be.

At the turn of the twentieth century the Ukrainians were a people without a nation. Their agriculturally bountiful lands were repeatedly overrun and the borders were an ever shifting tug-of-war between Poland, Austria/Germany and Russia. Wilhelm saw a need, and shaped himself to become a perfect leader for the Ukrainian cause. He immersed himself in Ukrainian history and language, commanded a Ukrainian military legion and even took a Ukrainian name, Vasyl Vyshyvanyi, which was helpful when World War I came along and pushed the Habsburgs out of favor.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in knowing more about European history, particularly the Eastern front, and getting a very good grounding in the events leading up to World War I, then consequently World War II. Wilhelm is an appropriate representative of the shifting middle-european political dynamic of the World Wars era. He strove to be worthy of his adopted people, was an accomplished military man, but was not above using low level bribery and underhanded state craft to push his personal agenda to become king, a title he believed he deserved. He had no financial skills and his proclivities for unusual escapades often landed him in hot water, both legally and financially. He despised the Nazis and yet courted them with anti-semitic statements when he thought they would back him in another one of his plans for establishing a Ukrainian state. Unfortunately, it was the Nazis who brought him to an untimely end—he was tortured and imprisoned for refusing to claim German ancestry, though he was arrested for spying for the French—which he was—but that wasn’t as important to the Germans, who had a point to make with the surviving Habsburgs. Vasyl held fast to his adopted Ukrainian nationality to his dying day.

Motherless Brooklyn is a detective story with an interesting detective and a not so interesting story. There is something very endearing about Lionel Essrog, the story’s main character. Lionel, or Freakshow, as his friends call him, is an orphan and he suffers from Tourrette’s Syndrome. Jonathan Lethem does a remarkably credible job of explicating the running inner dialog, the tics and touches and the frustratingly uncontrollable exclamations that constantly ruin Lionel’s ability to blend in with Brooklyn’s Smith Street crowd.

Frank Minna, a small time Brooklyn hood, acquires Essrog and some of his fellow orphanage pals as teens to help assist him with his moving business, which mostly involves moving stolen goods from trucks to warehouses for some very old and old-school gangsters. It isn’t the easiest job on Smith Street, but it’s not the worst job either. As adults the boys evolve into the Minna Men and graduate to running a detective agency for Frank, which fronts as a car service. Strangely, Lionel’s Tourrette’s is like the gorilla on the basketball court, as people around him do their best to ignore his outbursts and assume he is either mentally unstable or just plain dumb, which gives him an incredible advantage for learning what he wants to know.

Frank is murdered in the first chapter, and Lionel takes it upon himself to solve the mystery of who ordered the hit and why. This is where things go off the rails. Lethem is a great writer, but the story isn’t crafted with nearly the same care as the characters and it takes both to keep readers engaged. The characters are believable, but the motivations that drive them are a little hokey and when Lionel finally figures things out it pretty much comes from left field. I enjoyed reading Motherless Brooklyn, but I would have loved it much more if the story had been as interesting as the characters who played it out. 

Note: Looks like Ed Norton has been in development for years to direct and star in the movie version and will play Lionel Essrog. I’m quite curious, and though Norton doesn’t match up too closely with the physical description of Lionel, he’s probably a spot on choice to carry off the affectations of Tourrette’s. Don’t hold your breath on this one though, he’s had the rights since before Fight Club was released.

I’m pretty sure I’ve read most, if not all of the Scarpetta novels over the years, so when Red Mist was sitting on the coffee table at the beach house we were staying in last week, I just picked it up and dove in. The good thing about these stories is, Patricia Cornwell does a pretty good job of reminding readers of the general details of what happened in the last one and getting readers caught up with current events. Within a few pages I knew I had read Port Mortuary, and I was reasonably caught up with the story where it picks up, so, on I went.

Red Mist takes place mostly in Savannah, Georgia. Scarpetta is headed south from her latest job in Boston, to meet with the incarcerated mother of Dawn Kincaid, the “genius psychopath” who tried to kill Scarpetta in the last book. There’s a bit of backstory on both the inmates and the prison and Scarpetta feels suspicious that she is being both hindered and followed in her travels. Then, people start dying, which is good, because Dr. Scarpetta is a forensic pathologist, and she figures out why people die for a living, so yeah.

All the usual characters are there, Benton Wesley, Scarpetta’s raised from the dead FBI-agent husband, Marino, fat cop, Lucy, her genius, computer hacker niece, and former NYC prosecutor Jaime Berger (also Lucy’s former girlfriend). It’s pretty formulaic and anyone paying attention will suss out the plot in the first few chapters. Cornwell goes into the cliché mystery twist bag pretty willingly to make this story happen. She’s done it before and will probably do it again. If bio-terrorism makes things seem fresh and innovative, this story is in a good place.

Honestly, for a beach read it was fine. I was done in three days and I didn’t feel like my mind had been overly taxed. Cornwell has certainly been prolific; she’s working hard to keep books coming out and it doesn’t seem like things have gotten to the point of diminishing returns if sales numbers are to be believed. Honestly, if you find yourself holding a copy and you’re reasonably invested in the Scarpetta cannon—read it, but, otherwise, meh.

Cecilia Beaux, Mrs Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes (Edith Minturn), 1898

When telling the story of Edith Minturn Stokes and her equally elegant husband I. N. Phelps Stokes, it’s hard to know where to start. They were honestly a real-life Edith Wharton couple, born heirs of New York’s 400, growing up in gilded-age extravagance, wanting for nothing, yet instilled with Progressive values that would be the beacon of their lives to the end of their days together. 

Love, Fiercely tells the story of entwined childhoods, marriage and missions and reads like a drawing room romance, full, in equal measures of grace, pleasure, art, passion and intelligence. As a couple, Edith and Newton are both the colloquial archetype of the 1% of an earlier age, and yet singularly representative of the best that age had to offer.

Edie Minturn, or Fiercely, as her brother called her, was a beauty of her age. At 24, she posed for Daniel Chester French and was the model for The Republic at The World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893. Throughout her life she was painted by the best of the day, Fernand Paillet, Cecilia Beaux (pictured above), but most famously, in a portrait with her husband, by John Singer Sargent, a wedding gift, which now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Edie had brains as well as beauty. She was a life-long advocate of education, especially for young children and was a founding member and president of the New York Kindergarden Association.

Newton was himself a bit of a renaissance man. A builder and engineer from childhood, he graduated from Harvard and studied in Paris to become an architect. He designed elegant buildings and homes for himself, his family and friends, but his true calling lay in devising a livable habitat for the lesser privileged of New York City. He was active in housing reform, co-authored the Tenement House Law of 1901 and was the designer of the University Settlement House. In his later years, Newton researched, wrote and published the exhaustive The Iconography of Manhattan Island, comprising six-volumes, published between 1915 and 1928.

Zimmerman uses a deft touch and vividly brings the stunning couple to life. It would be easy to simply paint them as wealthy patrons of art and society, but they were so much more. Zimmerman’s exhaustive research frames the lives and work of this thoroughly modern couple and fills the canvas with details and minutiae as crisp and fresh as the folds of Edie’s white skirt in the Sargent portrait.

I’m combining three book reviews plus a documentary review into one post as they all deal with similar subject matter—namely health, fitness, diet and obesity. Be warned, it’s a bit long and somewhat personal, but hopefully not in a bad way…

Loathe as I am to admit it, in less than six months, I will be 50 years old. I don’t feel old, and I’m often told I do not look my age, which I really appreciate because I’m having a hard time thinking of myself as being “middle-aged.” Though I have been an avid excerciser since my 20s, and have instructed group fitness classes for the last ten years, I definitely can’t do as much of, or the same types of exercise as I used to do. Over the last five years, my weight has climbed, probably more due to stress and uncertainty than strictly bad eating habits but it has taken a toll on my overall fitness, strength and agility. Since my family has had no health insurance for over six years, and it doesn’t seem likely we will have it again any time soon, I decided I needed to take better control of my health and I knew that I had some antithetical habits that needed correcting. I’m a long-time expert at dieting and can lose 20 pounds just by cutting back on calories and alcohol, though it takes longer and longer to do as I get older, and now, those pesky pounds always come right back as soon as I find myself in another stressful situation, which these days, is pretty much all the time. I found myself ready to make a more steadfast change.

I had seen Dr. David Agus interviewed about The End of Illness a couple of times on TV and was very intrigued by his observation that the medical profession is very good at treating conditions caused by outside influences such as the flu, but does a horrible job of curing or preventing illnesses such as cancer and genetic disorders that are caused by and created within the human body itself. He posits that it’s time for the medical profession, both practitioners and researchers, to begin approaching illness in a more holistic way—that is, not just treating someone once they are ill, but using preventative measures, specifically tailored to individual circumstances both internal, e.g. genetic and external, e.g. environmental, and work towards keeping the human body healthy and viable in all it’s parts, throughout a lifetime. It makes a lot of sense, but is completely incompatible with the current methods employed by today’s health insurance industry, which offers few opportunities for proactive testing and preventative care and relies almost entirely on reactive medical treatments of the pharmaceutical or surgical variety, or, to put it more succinctly, using the most expensive and least effective methods, as late as possible. As medical technology improves, length of life extends but quality of health degrades from an ever younger age.

Agus believes that medical science must do a better job of understanding the human machine, not just at the set-for-a-lifetime genetic level, but also from an ongoing, day-to-day perspective. Agus has pioneered the development of some amazing technology that moves us toward having a full spectrum of information for understanding our individual benchmarks. He also offers good advice that everyone can use to lessen the impact of both internal and external factors that may affect us. I liked his admonishment to become knowledgeable about one’s personal health history and making informed lifestyle choices and I felt I could easily follow his directives for proactively protecting myself from poorer health as I age. The End of Illness gave me a strong foundation for living healthfully for my next fifty years. 

Next, I needed to address my weight and it’s impact on my fitness, strength and flexibility. I come from a family of mostly overweight, and in some cases morbidly obese women. All my adult life, I have committed to maintaining a high fitness level, regardless of the ins and outs of my waistline and I am fairly active with a VO2max more commonly seen in women half my age. Still, my BMI is firmly in the overweight range. At home we eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables and lean meats, so I assumed it wasn’t because I was eating the wrong things, and most of the time, I wasn’t eating too much. Knowing of the propensity for obesity (and constituently, thyroid issues) in my family history, I started researching metabolism and found two books that offer a nutritional model based on metabolic types. Both books offered excellent and pertinent advice with diet and exercise programs geared for improving health, not necessarily losing weight.  

I read The Metabolism Advantage first and I liked it’s non-diet book language. There were success stories, but the information was thoughtful and linear without a lot of hype. I think this is partly because the book is aimed at a primarily male demographic, and is more about becoming fitter than losing weight, which actually made me like it better. The moves in the training section looked like workouts I am familiar with, essentially interval exercise combined with strength training. Berardi discusses how, as we age, our bodies become less effective at burning fuel and gives good lessons in how to stoke the fires and rev metabolism back up. He encourages the use of some supplements to help support healthy eating, many of them also suggested by Dr. Agus in The End of Illness. I was starting to feel like a path was emerging.

Next, I dove into The New ME Diet: Eat More, Work Out Less, and Actually Lose Weight While You Rest by the Teta brothers, Jade and Keoni. I had started reading their Metabolic Effect blog a few months before and was really impressed by the amount of research and practical experience they offer to support their nutritional plan and training regimen. Once again I found straightforward and clear information about the benefits of combining a tailored nutritional plan with a training program geared toward lifelong fitness and weight control, not a quick-fix diet. I took a short quiz to determine what type of burner I am (combined type) and then I just had to stick to the suggested food list. Nothing is expressly forbidden, but certain types of foods are limited. All very doable over the long term. The whole family (OK, not my teenaged son, who lives on peanut butter, pizza and ice cream) has been eating to the plan; I’ve added fish oil and aspirin to my morning vitamins and I’ve dropped a few pounds in two weeks without changing very much at all. 

I don’t think I will ever weigh 135 pounds again; as much as I would like to set that goal, it’s not realistic and at my age, I’d be pretty happy just to lose that twenty and keep it off for good and keep teaching fitness classes till I’m 65 or so.

Which brings me to The Weight of the Nation. This documentary, which premiered on HBO this week, scared me, and I mean it really made me frightened for the future of the US. Forget politics, (though politicians have some ‘splainin to do on this issue) the food industrial complex is out to take all of our money while it happily kills us dead, but not before the healthcare industry takes the rest of our money, by plying us with drugs and surgeries to stabilize our fat livers, high blood pressure, cardiac arrests, failing joints and never-healing wounds. Our bones and organs are the wounded soldiers on the battleground of our fat, and growing ever fatter bodies.

The statistics in this series were astounding. One in three children born in the year 2000 will have diabetes—one in two for Black and Latino children. Preventing the onset of diabetes in children begins with establishing healthy eating habits and providing spaces and opportunities for play and movement. In today’s current economy the food lobbyists will do everything they can to keep sugary drinks and high calorie, high fat foods in your’s and your children’s mouths from cradle to (an early) grave. Low income families have little access to fresh fruits and vegetables and school children are bombarded with advertising for low nutritional value drinks and cereals each and every day—not to mention the food lobby deeming pizza a vegetable in school lunches, because it has tomato sauce on it. They know that tomatos are fruits, right?

So find four hours and watch the entire series. They are highly informative and will make you both angry and motivated, or at least I hope they will.

Everyone wants to live to a ripe old age and my father-in-law is always saying, “If I’d known I would live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.” Well, it’s never too late to start.

Update: Here’s a link to a really good review of Weight of the Nation.

If I had read Shame by Karin Alvtegen before I read her novel Missing, I would never have read another thing by her. I hated this book and found it left a very bad taste in my mouth when I got to the end.

Shame tells the stories of two Swedish women, Maj-Britt, a morbidly obese woman who lives alone and relies on care workers to provide for all of her needs, and Monika, a well-respected doctor with no self-esteem or personal life. Each is living with the burden of an assumed responsibility for the death of a loved one, which causes them constant mental dispair and crippling shame and leads them both to life decisions which only serve to push them to reject the good things that come into their lives as they believe themselves to be wholly undeserving.

Maj-Britt comforts herself with food and uses her extreme obesity to separate herself from others, both physically and psychologically. She was raised by ultra-conservative Christian parents in a close-knit religious community and from an early age was persecuted both mentally and physically for having impure thoughts and touching herself. She falls in love and marries a boy from another congregation and is shunned by her parents. When her daughter is born blind, then dies in a fall down un-gated stairs, Maj-Britt takes this as a sign that she will never be deserving of love or care and the wanton, wicked feelings of her youth are the reason she will be forever punished.

Monika is the perfect daughter in a perfect family, but one weekend she and her brother are spending the night at a friend’s house and Monika forgets to turn off the sauna. The house burns to the ground and though Monika escapes, her brother and others are killed in the conflagration. Neither Monika, nor her mother can ever forgive her for the sin of being a survivor, so she compensates by becoming a slave to her mother’s devotion to her dead son and a dishrag of a person who can never claim her own feelings and needs.  

Flash forward to present day—Maj-Britt receives a letter from her childhood best friend Vanja, who is serving a 17-year sentence for murdering her abusing husband and their children. She is convinced that Vanja is taunting her with her failures and forcing her to remember her childhood sins. Maj-Britt’s caretaker, Ellinor, is concerned about her health and offers bring in a doctor to examine her and find the source of her extreme pain. Maj-Britt comes to the illogical conclusion that Vanja and Ellinor are colluding to humiliate her.

Monika, on the other hand, has met Thomas, a wonderful man who professes to love her. She must leave him for a weekend management seminar and in a bizarre twist, she switches places in the carpool with humble, heroic Matthias—because of course she must return home early to ferry her mother to the cemetery—and Matthias is killed in a car crash, leaving behind a handicapped wife and infant daughter. Monika determines this means she must break up with Thomas and give all of her savings (and more) to Matthias’ widow and orphan.

In the midst of all of this, Monika is the doctor Ellinor recruits to come examine Maj-Britt. I expected that the two of them would bond and support each other and bring the novel to a satisfying conclusion. I was wrong. Maj-Britt blackmails Monika because she intuitively guesses the truth of her misguided attempts to support Mattias’ family. Because she has given all of her life savings to them, she decides it would be better to embezzle from a charitable fund at her hospital, than risk exposing herself as the benefactor of Matthias’ family, even though exactly one other person knows that Monika changed places with him that night. 

Both of these women become increasingly unhinged and psychotic in their actions and I really got to the point where I wanted to throw the book against the wall. In the end, Monika ends up in prison with Maj-Britt’s old friend and neither character has received any help or support or is given any mental health treatment at all.

Unfortunately, neither Maj-Britt nor Monika is truly redeemed or saved in the end and I personally felt there were so many opportunities for the author to shift the downward spiral. Frankly, it felt as if Alvtegen herself believed neither character deserved any sympathy or outreach. Alvtegen seems to write stories of women in crisis with childhood experiences that push them to make radical life decisions primarily from a lack of parental love and support, which creates a faulty understanding of social and moral behaviors. Personally, I don’t have any room in my life for stories about these types of women. Novels don’t have to be all sunshine and rainbows, but honestly, this whole story was cruel; not just to the characters, but to readers as well.

Painting: Lucian Freud, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (Sue Tilley), 1993.

Sybilla isn’t your every day homeless person. She made a choice to be indigent, to live off the social grid and ignore her wealthy parents and their luxurious lifestyle.

Missing begins as we meet Sybilla, casually drinking a glass of wine in the bar of the Grand Hotel in Stockholm. She appears to be a well-cared for and successful businesswoman and it’s a disguise that will enable her to cadge a room for the night—a warm shower, a soft bed and a place to relax and enjoy the little pleasures that most homeless people could never even dream of. Sybilla engineers a meeting with a travelling businessman who’s staying at the hotel and pretends to lose her wallet so he will buy her dinner and secure her a room for the night. He is, of course hopeful that she might reciprocate with some sexy times, but Sybilla has done this before and knows how to handle the situation with a minimum of embarrassment for either party. It’s a successfully executed ruse, but in the morning, her benefactor is found dead and mutilated in his hotel room and the staff all remember her being with him. When the police come knocking, Sybilla has to get out quick, and thus begins the tale.

Karin Alvtegen has written an intriguing story with a pretty solid plot, likable characters and some surprising twists that keep things moving right to the end. We learn, not only how it’s possible to live beneath the radar and outside the Swedish government’s purvue, but also what made Sybilla Forstenström abandon her upper-class life of wealth and privilege for the anonymous, hard-knock streets of Stockholm. We know she is innocent, but when three other, seemingly unconnected people all turn up murdered and mutilated, Sybilla has to use cunning and acumen to elude the authorities and figure out who is killing these people and why.

I enjoyed reading Missing. It’s a quick read, almost to the point of being over too soon. Alvtegen does a nice job of getting us into the story, then filling in the details and history of Sybilla’s life with alternating chapters. When she befriends a fifteen year old boy, who helps her investigate, it feels good to know she has found a true friend and ally. It all ends in ways better than expected, with a satisfying conclusion that feels just right.

I love a story that can teach. Lisa Alther’s Washed in the Blood presents readers with three affecting stories, each one tracing the history of Appalachia and the racially-mixed Melungeon people who subsisted and endured there from America’s earliest existence. Her stories are personal and small, and yet, encompass the vast historical lineage of a largely misunderstood group of ethnically diverse people, who have lived in the Appalachian cradle of North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee since the Spanish Conquistadors first came to American shores.

In it’s first part, “The Swine King,” Alther introduces us to Diego, a hog drover from Spain, part of a 1567 expedition, intent on following De Soto’s trail on a quest for gold in La Florida, as the area was called in those early days. Diego pines to return to his home in Galicia, though he is fascinated by the Native Americans who live in this stunningly beautiful place. Diego’s leaders are interested only in mining the supposedly abundant riches of gold, which the Indians always promise are just over the next mountain top, in an effort to get rid of these Spanish marauders who have no problem taking both the lives and the livelihoods of the local inhabitants. The Spanish bring both life and death, as they impregnate the local women and the African slaves they have brought with them and Smallpox often decimates entire tribes and villages in the Spanish wake. When Diego is abandoned by his troop, he and a pregnant African slave are taken in and sheltered by a group of Indians that have already assimilated with Africans abandoned by previous expeditions and shunned for the resulting, unusual-looking offspring, some of whom have an extra thumb on each hand. Through Diego, Alther tells a story that illustrates the presumed beginnings of the Melungeon people.

“The Squabble State” revolves around Daniel Hunter, a Quaker from Philadelphia, who comes to Appalachia to set up a school in Couchtown for the disadvantaged children of the locals, who are sometimes referred to as porterghee indians. Daniel finds himself falling for a local girl, Galicia Martin, whom we can assume is a descendant of Diego and his Native American wife. To his dismay, Daniel quickly becomes involved in local squabbles with the northern bounty hunters who know the area is a haven for escaped slaves. In this backwoods area, racial identity runs on a sliding scale and even siblings and cousins from the same family might range from very pale to deeply complected skin, with black hair and piercing blue eyes. Everyone who can, claims white ancestry, and failing that, Indian. We begin to see the wonderful melange of genetic possibility, and when Daniel and Galicia marry, a new hereditary line is added to the stew.

In the final part, we have moved on to the early twentieth century and are introduced to Galicia Hunter, pale and light-haired, living with her parents in Daniel’s former home. They consider themselves, as descendants of Daniel Hunter, to be part of privileged, upper-middle class society in an increasingly divided Couchtown. Will Martin, dark-skinned, with piercing blue eyes and an extra thumb on each hand, hails from the poorer side of the Martin clan and lives on Mulatto Bald, where families struggle to survive on subsistence farming and live in shacks where the chinks have been filled with newspaper to keep out the cold. As you might suspect, Will and Galicia meet and fall in love, never suspecting they are cousins. They marry, to the dismay of both sets of parents and move to the city, where Will studies to become a doctor and Galicia goes to teacher college. They are the first in both families to get a higher education and are exceptionally proud of their ability to move up in society in a way that had never been possible before. We follow Will and Galicia into their marriage and the birth of their daughter, Hunter. While Galicia is pregnant, Will takes a job in Tennessee as they fear their daughter may be born with dark skin and miscegenation laws were strongly enforced and lynchings were common. The story comes around beautifully as Galicia becomes ever more society conscious and embellishes her family history with tales of imagined Tidewater Virginia roots and Mayflower ancestors. Will, on the other hand, must continually deal with his racially ambiguous appearance and is shocked when in medical school he is asked to move to a “colored” trolley car more than once. His past comes back to haunt him when a son from a teenaged relationship appears and he must decide whether to acknowledge the dark-skinned child as his. You might correctly guess that once again, fate throws a new generation together.

I really enjoyed reading Washed in the Blood; the characters are interesting and fully fleshed-out and Alther weaves in American history with a deft touch and gives readers touchstones that remind us that society is a complicated thing. I never felt that historical events were dropped in simply as markers, but to frame the three stories to give them weight and honesty. Alther didn’t shy away from painting a picture that could be harsh and yet remarkably positive. The existence of the Melungeons stands as a case for human rights for all races and types and I was fascinated that an area of the US that is often considered one of the most historically racist is surprisingly, one of the most racially mixed and diverse. Perhaps, it’s not so surprising considering the amount of justifying and obfuscating that had to be done over the centuries, to satisfy strict color lines that for the most part, still exist today.

Note: I first heard about Washed in the Blood when I listened to this interview with Alther on NC Public Radio. She reads a passage from a chapter in the second part, called “The Five Chicken Baby” and talks about her long-running interest in the Melungeons and their history in her native state of Tennessee. It’s worth a listen.

“Are you there Satan? It’s me Madison.” 

According to Madison Spencer, the bar for getting sent to Hell for all eternity is pretty low. Maddy knows, because at 13, she’s one of the Damned; sentenced to roam the unending landscape of misery, punctuated by the Sea of Wasted Sperm and the Mountain of Toenail Clippings, where candy is currency, call-center operators really are Satan’s minions and The English Patient is projected everywhere on an endless loop.

Each chapter begins with Madison addressing Satan, reminding him of events leading to her demise, or asking questions about life in Hell. It’s clear she expects Satan will accept her overtures of friendship, mostly due to her prepubescent affection for being hopeful in all things. Maddy makes friends with some of the other younger inhabitants of Hell and they guide and instruct her on how to survive eternal damnation. I guess one of the reasons Palahniuk made Madison only 13 is because his imagined Hell is pretty juvenile and not terribly artful.

We learn during the first half of the book that Madison is the daughter of a billionaire and a very famous actress, known for adopting children from the world’s most horribly destitute destinations. Maddy is jaded from the constant travel and living the extravagant lifestyles of the rich and famous and only enjoys spending time with her Mom as a particularly youthful girlfriend rather than as her child. 

Madison is immediately intrigued by her newest adoptive brother, Goran, a punkish teen from an un-named east-european state, known for tying unwanted orphans to their beds for years and giving them little or no affection or stimulation. Madison falls head over heels and on the night of the Oscars, she plots to spend the night alone with him in the hotel suite her parents are occupying for the festivities. The night does not end well, but it takes a while before we get the skinny.

I’ve only read a couple of Palahniuk’s books, and I did enjoy reading this one, but from the beginning it felt samey and similar to his other novels, albeit with less sex and a much younger, female protagonist. Madison is not terribly interesting as a character and her evolution from hopeful young girl to avenging demon-slayer is a bit overplayed. It did make the second half of the book more entertaining, but not by much. Basically, he’s written twelve novels, so there are better choices, but if you really must read everything by Palahniuk, it’s not a complete time suck.

Image: George Grosz. Cain, or, Hitler in Hell. 1944. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

As a teenager my favorite books were Jane Eyre and anything by or like Anya Seton, Daphne DuMaurier or Mary Stewart that I could get my hands on. Gothic themes, orphaned heroines and forbidden love stories were just my cup of tea. The Thirteenth Tale is a story after my teenaged, romantic heart and I enjoyed every minute of reading it.

Margaret Lea is a studious young woman who lives over the bookshop she manages with her father. She is estranged from her mother after the death of her twin sister and she pines for connection and emotional involvement with someone who can make her feel whole again. Her life has been barren of romance or intrigue and she spends her time reading, researching for clients and writing literary biographies destined for small print runs and even smaller sales numbers.

Out of the blue, Margaret receives a letter from Vida Winter, one of the most well-loved and prolific writers of the day. Miss Winter requests that Margaret come and stay with her at her home in Yorkshire, so that she may record the life and times of this most private author as she nears the end of her life. No one has ever been able to penetrate the enigmatic history of Vida Winter and she has fooled more that one interviewer with tales of mystery and woe that, while entertaining, were never true.

The true story that Miss Winter finally reveals is fascinating and sad, gothic and gruesome. Margaret is enthralled with the tale, especially as she begins to unravel some of the mysterious, missing details on her own. Vida begins with her grandfather at home on the Angelfield estate, raising his motherless children, the willful and spoiled Isabelle and her older brother Charlie, who harbors an unnatural and destructive affection for his sister. There are twins, Adeline and Emmeline, a governess who disappears, abandoned children, a possible ghost, fires and much sadness. Angelfield plays it’s part by becoming the physical representation of the dysfunctional family that lives within.

Diane Setterfield writes with ardent skill and the story kept me laser-focused through every page. The story is vivid and beautifully written, easy to see in the mind’s eye. The characters are engaging and entrancing, coming to life through the sibylline narrative, especially as we learn more about Margaret Lea through her search to find out who the real Vida Winter is. There are, as expected, unexpected plot twists and the story will definitely keep you captivated to the very end.

”[…] That’s my score to date.  Three.  I haven’t killed anybody for years, and I don’t intend to ever again.  It was just a stage I was going through.”

The Wasp Factory is a hard book to review. You might already know about the big reveal at the end, as it was first published way back in 1984 and it’s a popular art school illustration assignment, as well has having been rewritten as a play, produced in the UK in 2008. When I read it the first time, around 1994, I had no idea. To this day, it is one of my favorite books and will probably always be in my Top 10, but it’s not a story that’s easy to summarize or explain. My well-worn copy has this review from the Irish Times.

It is a sick, sick world when the confidence and investment of an astute firm of publishers is justified by a work of unparallelled depravity. There is no denying the bizarre fertility of the author’s imagination: his brilliant dialogue, his cruel humour, his repellent inventiveness. The majority of the literate public, however, will be relieved that only reviewers are obliged to look at any of it.

As well as this one, from the Mail on Sunday.

If a nastier, more vicious or distasteful novel appears this spring, I shall be surprised. But there is unlikely to be a better one either. You can hardly breathe for fear of missing a symbol, or a fine phrase, or a horror so chilling that your hair stands on end. Infinitely painful to read, grotesque but human, these pages have a total reality rare in fiction. A mighty imagination has arrived on the scene.

If you’re like me, you are thinking, “I’ve got to read this book.” but The Wasp Factory is not for everyone.

Iain Banks first novel is all about Frank Cauldhame, a 16-year-old living on the isolated north-east coast of Scotland. He lives with his father and proudly announces early on that he had killed three of his family members, all children like himself, before he was ten years old. He has one surviving half-brother, Eric, whom we are informed is crazy, after experiencing something very unpleasant while working in a hospital. It is Eric’s escape from the asylum the precipitates the action of the novel.

In these days of torture porn and gross-out television it’s possible to believe that the extreme violence of the story might today fall flat and seem tame and relatively Gothic. Banks however, does not shy away from pushing the boundaries and Frank, because he is a sympathetic character, allows us to be drawn in to the violence, even as we’re trying to imagine what could possibly drive someone to do such sick things. What we do learn is how Frank’s life is dominated by his strict adherence to his personal rituals and totems—the wasp factory, built from an old clock face, being the most significant. To Frank, the wasp factory guides him through a life of confusing parental dictates, shifting sands of personal history and a conflicted mental struggle to maintain an outer facade that is at complete odds with his true nature.

Banks is a gifted writer and it was no small feat to craft this brilliant, caustic, breath-taking novel that scared the crap out of quite a few people, sickened others and captured life-long fandom of a great many. I recommend this book only to friends I have known for a while, who know me and appreciate my taste in fiction. I think you would love it.

If you’re still undecided, John Mullen wrote a piece for The Guardian in 2008 that gives enough exposition to guide and help you decide if it’s worth putting on a must-read list.

I originally picked up The Snow Child as a possible read for my daughter, but once I got it home and took a peek at the first chapter I was hooked. Eowyn Ivey writes a sweet, gentle tale about Mabel and Jack, an older couple who have moved to start a new life together in the rough wilds of Alaska in the 1920s. They have no children and both of them yearn for a sense of togetherness that seems to be slipping ever further from their grasp.

Jack struggles daily to work the land and prepare it for planting in the Spring. Mabel works at home, making the most of the little they have but feeling inadequately prepared for the bareness of living without the everyday conveniences she is used to.

Ivey captures the loneliness of the couple in the opening chapters and when the snow finally comes I could sense the dread of a long, dark winter looming over the couple. Jack and Mabel get excited as the first fat flakes begin to fall and they build a snow child as the snow accumulates in the dark. The next morning, the snow child has fallen apart and there are tiny footprints moving away into the forest beyond their land. This reminds Mabel of the Russian fairy tale her father used to read to her and she and Jack both begin to believe that even a make-believe child can fulfill their dreams and return the overwhelming affection they have to share.

Is the snow child a figment of their collective imagination, or does she really exist? Ivey’s story keeps the reader invested as Jack and Mabel nurture Faina, the child who only returns with the snows each year. The main story and the sub-plots are interwoven beautifully and though I could sense the ending might not be all happiness and light, it felt real and right as events unfolded. I enjoyed reading The Snow Child and would recommend it to anyone who likes family stories and fairy tales.

Snowdrop (n):

1. An early-flowering bulbous plant, having a white pendent flower.
2. Moscow slang. A corpse that lies buried or hidden in the winter snows, emerging only in the thaw.

Nick Platt needs to make a confession to his fiancé. Snowdrops is that confession. A.D. MIller’s Booker Prize-nominated first novel is the small, intimate story of a man, who, while working as an expat lawyer in Moscow in the early 2000s, makes a bad habit of looking the other way when a pair of beguiling sisters (who aren’t really sisters) lure him into a simple plan to help an old auntie exchange her lavish Moscow apartment for a newly built flat in the country. 

As they say, hindsight is 20/20, and any reader will quickly intuit that Platt is being played by Masha and Katya when he rescues them from a purse snatcher on the subway and Masha slowly reels him in with false affection and dreams of a future together. Everything Nick hears from these two sounds stitched together, but he’s so smitten he’s happy to ignore his conscience as long as Masha is willing to continue the charade of never-ending affection.

Miller was the Russia correspondent for The Economist in those days, so his observations of the fast and loose deals and corruption rampant during the time feel authentically smarmy. The small story of Nick’s entanglement with the girls plays nicely against the eyes wide shut corporate oil debacle he’s working on at his law firm during his work days. Nick just seems to be one of a million dupes frantically hoping to find some personal happiness and success in a country where corruption and malfeasance are so rife that he honestly believes he is doing the right thing to help perpetrate a fraud because it will help an old lady—he even throws in $25K of his own money.

Snowdrops was a fun read. Even knowing things were going to twist and fall slowly off a cliff just made it more exciting as I got to the end. It’s funny, I don’t often notice the physical qualities of a book I’m reading, (unless it’s a cheap paperback that the pages are falling out of) but I really loved the small size of the hardcover I read; it created a tangible connection to the story for me and helped support the confessional tone of the writing. I’m not sure I would have enjoyed it as much if the physical characteristic of the book hadn’t felt so aligned with the story, so kudos to the book designer/publisher for that decision, even if it was unintended.

By the time Irene Spencer was twenty years old, she had three living children, had moved to Mexico to live in abject poverty, shared her husband with two sister wives (and would eventually have seven more) and had had intercourse exactly seven times in her entire life. Sounds awesome doesn’t it!

I really enjoyed reading about Irene and her life with Verlan LeBaron, who, with his four brothers and sister established Colonia LeBaron in Mexico to escape prosecution for polygamy in the US. I was enraged by what I learned about the horrible treatment of women by the polygamist Mormon groups and was surprised how easy it was for these men to continue to add newer and ever younger women to their bevies with the promise of celestial paradise and eternal glory. 

Irene grew up with parents who believed in the Principle, though her mother, a second wife, as Irene would become, divorced her husband early into their relationship. Irene was raised in poverty with her many brothers and sisters, always needing to be cagey about their lifestyle and constantly being questioned and harassed about who their father was, since most plural marriages were not legal or acknowledged by the mainstream Mormon community or local governments. Polygamist families often subsisted on welfare and handouts and Irene complains that her weekly allowance for herself and all of her thirteen children was only about $20 a week, and that was when times were good.

Irene makes it clear that the life of a sister wife is not at all about cooperation and shared experiences. All of Verlan’s wives were suspicious of one another and competed constantly for Verlan’s attention, even when they were friendly. It didn’t help that Verlan’s belief in the Principle extended to include the notion that sexual intercourse could only be for procreation, which meant that any wife that was pregnant or nursing got no attention, even if it was Verlan’s night to stay with a particular wife. Verlan had to spend a lot of time trying to keep the women in his life happy, and failed miserably most of the time. Since he was most often working construction in Nevada for months at a time, it’s not much of a surprise that conflict, stress, hunger, depression and illness were pretty much the soup of the day, every day.

Shattered Dreams paints a grim picture of modern polygamy and I would guess that even without the extremes of intermarriage, underage brides, shunning and excluding boys/young men and the overwhelming burden on society of families with so many children, life as a plural wife could never be anything but miserable and interminably exasperating.

Note: Colonia LeBaron still exists in Mexico and has become quite prosperous. Unfortunately, they have been ensnared in the current Mexican drug wars. You can read more here and here. And they have a Facebook page too!

Jennifer Cody Epstein bases her first novel on the life of Pan Yuliang, a Chinese woman sold into prostitution by her uncle at fourteen, who then became one of the first important woman painters of the twentieth century.

Epstein tells Yuliang’s story well and with wonderful details that pull us in and allow us to understand the life of a young Chinese woman, orphaned, then sold into a life that could be both opulent and demeaning. Yuliang’s early life is spent learning the ways of satisfying men and she is taught well by her mentor and friend Jinling who takes her under her wing and treats her with both compassion and love. When Jinling is abruptly and unexpectedly murdered by one of her clients, Yuliang ascends to the position of top girl and is taken up by a local magistrate, Pan Zunhua. He takes Yuliang away from the flower house and establishes her as his concubine, since he is already married to someone else.

Zunhua soon recognizes Yuliang’s artistic abilities and encourages her to learn more and work on improving her drawing and painting skills. This leads to an opportunity for Yuliang to live and study in Paris where she is recognized as an emerging talent in the post-impressionist movement. Though critics recognized her as a thoroughly talented and accomplished figure painter, she was often criticized for her intimate depictions of the female nude, particularly when she returned to China where the public felt much less accommodating toward her subject matter.

Yuliang lived in exciting times, both in China and Europe and The Painter from Shanghai paints the fictional portrait of her life with vivid detail and resplendent language. I enjoyed reading this book; it was similar in many ways to Memoirs of a Geisha, though I think personally that Cody Epstein does a better job telling the story of Yuliang, so it’s definitely worth a look.