Jo Graham, Black Ships

Reading (and translating) the Aeneid was one of the highlights of my high-school Latin classes, but somehow I was never able to warm up to Aeneas, perhaps because of how he treated Dido. Even at that early (and for me, somewhat unenlightened!) age, I was completely sympathetic to Dido’s side of things; she showered love and affection on Aeneas, and he said that he loved her too, and then it was all “nope, have to go found this mystical city off in the wilds of Latium, sorry!” Thanks to that episode, I must confess that I was always secretly cheering for Turnus in the end, even though he was doomed to lose his life and his fiancée, Lavinia, since Aeneas was the mystical great-great-great-something-or-other-granddaddy of Augustus Caesar for whom Virgil was providing this mythopoetic rival to the Iliad and the Odyssey in order to provide Caesar with divine descent.

Jo Graham’s Black Ships is a re-imagining of the Aeneid from the POV of Gull, who apparently is destined to become the Cumaean Sibyl after having many adventures with Aeneas and his gang along the way. Graham actually makes me really like Aeneas, and by substituting a kind of nutty Egyptian princess named Basetamon who wants to keep Aeneas’s corpse around to join her in the afterlife for Dido, this Aeneas is a bit less of a cad to me! I love the simple, yet powerful language that Graham uses, and she won me over right from the beginning by stating that one of her main inspirations was Michael Wood’s marvellous TV series (and accompanying book), In Search of the Trojan War (though given that this was written in 2007-2008, I think she might have used a bit more recent scholarship too!) Gull herself is a fascinating (and not too anachronistic-sounding) character, and I like the glimpses of others whom we meet along the way, as well as Graham’s explanation of the “Sea Peoples” and the Sack of Troy Redux.

I only have two relatively minor quibbles with the book: The first is that, unlike Homer, Virgil was inventing a mythology from whole cloth in many ways, and that’s why, anachronistic or not, the princess whom Aeneas loves and leaves HAD to be Carthaginian, because that’s Virgil’s explanation for the sworn enmity between Rome and Carthage (and it was victory over Carthage in the end that made Rome a great power, not victory of Egypt.) So I find the Egyptian interlude a bit unsettling, though fascinating. Secondly, and this point is REALLY minor, but I wish that she hadn’t decided to make Aeneas tromp around under the rather silly-sounding nickname of “Neas.” No one else (except Xandros, but that one actually sort of makes sense!) has a nickname, and it keeps making me think the character is a little boy. (I know he’s meant to be young, not the patriarch of Virgil’s imaginings, but still …)

(Read from May 5 to May 6, 2010)

Marjane Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis

It took me a while to get used to the graphic format of Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical Persepolis in which she tells the story of her childhood in revolutionary Iran and her adolescence in staid Vienna and eventual return to Iran. I’m still not sure I LOVE the format, but I did really like the book, and I appreciated that Satrapi was always fairly unsparing of herself and her own behavior (which, sometimes, was a bit reprehensible!)

I did wonder, at the end, though, how young people who don’t come from the privileged background of Satrapi’s family felt about the religious regime and its draconian rules. Were poorer families – who could not afford to send their sons abroad to escape obligatory military service – more or less bitter about the Iran-Iraq war? Did they accept the regime’s version (that their sons were martyrs) or did they yearn to speak the truth as well? All interesting questions that I hope further reading will help me to parse.

(Read from May 4-May 5, 2010)

Diana Abu-Jaber, The Language of Baklava

I’d never even considered making my own pita bread until I read the seemingly simple recipe in Diana Abu-Jaber’s wonderful memoir The Language of Baklava. In beautiful, resonant language, and delicious-sounding recipes (well, maybe not the Velveeta grilled-cheese sandwich one!) Abu-Jaber explores growing up between the culture of her expansive Jordanian father and that of her reserved and calm Irish-German-American mother. I too grew up in a multicultural household (not Arab in my case, but South Asian) and her experiences and words really resonated with me; I can still remember the utter shock of coming back to the US when I was nine years old!

Highly recommended if you like Arabic culture, yummy food, or interesting characters!

(Read from May 3-May 4, 2010)

Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land

I first read Nicholas Lemann’s excellent The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed Americamany years ago and at the time it was a revelation to me, in its unsparing account of the self-interested machinations of the white political elite in Washington, as well as its look at how cotton culture in the South indelibly marked race relations in the North of the United States.

Re-reading it recently, in light of the 2008 Presidential election, made me think about how certain things have changed a great deal in this country, though sadly, some things have remained rather similar.  It’s still a bad place to be a poor person, particularly a poor person of color!

(Read from May 1-May 3, 2010)

Justin Cartwright, The Song Before It Is Sung

Justin Cartwright’s The Song Before It Is Sung is a fictionalized retelling of the relationship between the great political philosopher and Oxford professor Sir Isaiah Berlin and the German diplomat Adam von Trott zu Solz, who was executed for his part in the July 1944 plot to overthrow Hitler spearheaded by Claus von Stauffenberg.

In this version, Berlin becomes Elya Mendel and Adam von Trott zu Solz is called Axel von Gottberg, who is given a (as far as I know, entirely fictional!) English mistress in addition to his long-suffering German wife. Mendel, who was sceptical about the officers’ plot, has felt guilty about his own potential role in Gottberg’s death, and when he himself dies, he leaves his papers to Conrad Senior because of his “human qualities” (which may possibly mean Senior’s striking physical resemblance to Gottberg.) Senior himself doesn’t really know what he’s supposed to do with the papers or why Mendel chose him to tell the story, but he spends the novel searching for a missing film of Gottberg’s execution (and along the way, his own marriage breaks up and other, rather uninteresting, things happen to him.)

Although parts of The Song Before It is Sung were very moving and well-written enough that I want to find out more about Mr. Cartwright’s writing, the story of Conrad Senior in no way approached the power of Axel von Gottberg’s journey. And because of this, I spent all the pages dealing with Senior’s tedious love-life wishing we could back to whatever was going on with Axel, even though it was clear from the beginning that Axel wouldn’t have a happy ending. I wish Cartwright had eliminated Senior entirely and written more about Mendl, actually, but perhaps he didn’t want to tread on anyone’s toes with a too-close portrait of Sir Isaiah Berlin.

(Read on April 16, 2010)

Glen Duncan, A Day and a Night and a Day

Glen Duncan’s A Day and a Night and a Day is a thinly disguised essay about terrorism and extraordinary rendition dressed up with tattered characterization, florid metaphor and a plot that barely hangs together. The main female character is a compendium of traits that don’t add up to an actual person, and the ways in which Duncan chooses to make the main character sympathetic are so blatantly obvious that I reacted contrarily by despising him.

From the Guardian review:”On a larger scale, he seems to have persuaded himself that hackneyed plot manoeuvres can be justified by making the characters’ sensitivity to the hackneyed a subject of debate in the novel. He comes across as a writer who’s become so absorbed by sentence rhythms on the one hand and grand themes on the other that he’s lost all perspective on his performance as a whole.” Exactly!

(Read from April 7-April 10, 2010)

Val McDermid, A Place of Execution

I had never read anything by Val McDermid before I happened to pick up a copy of A Place of Execution, and now, on the strength of this one book, she’s one of my favorite mystery/suspense novelists. The plot twist in A Place of Execution was beautifully executed, and I loved the characters in the small English village who have to cope with the disappearance and presumed murder of one of the village’s teenaged children. I kept thinking about this novel long after I’d finished it and about the question it poses of whether justice and the law are always the same thing.

(Read from April 7-April 8, 2010)

Philip Hensher, The Northern Clemency

As a rule, I love multi-generational family sagas, and Philip Henscher’s The Northern Clemency was no exception to that rule. Although nothing earth-shattering happens to any of the middle-class people in a suburb in Northern England (well, except for the shocking execution of a hapless reptile early on!), the weight of detail Henscher gives us about their lives makes them all memorable.

(Read from March 31-April 7, 2010)

C. J. Sansom, Dark Fire

Dark Fire is the second Matthew Shardlake novel set during the reign of Henry VIII. This time, it’s the summer of 1540, and Shardlake is desperately trying to save a young woman who remains silent about a terrible murder she has supposedly committed while also trying to save his erstwhile master, Lord Cromwell, from the wrath of the King. If Shardlake can piece together the secret of “dark fire”, a weapon used by the Byzantines that has disappeared from existence after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, then Cromwell promises to help with Shardlake’s other case. Dark Fire is suspenseful, moving, and introduces Jack Barak, a character who quickly became a favorite of mine. He and Shardlake make a brilliant team, even as Shardlake displays (yet again) his propensity to fall for the wrong sort of woman.

(Read from April 3-April 4, 2010)

C. J. Sansom, Dissolution

I had heard great things about C. J. Sansom’s mysteries set during the reign of Henry VIII and starring a “crookbacked” lawyer named Matthew Shardlake, and indeed, Dissolution, the first in the series, did not disappoint. Dissolution sees Sharlake sent to a desolate monastery on the south coast of England; his predecessor, who was sent to assess the monastery’s revenue with a view to its dissolution, has been murdered. Sharlake arrives with his assistant, Matthew Poer, and they stumble into a world of intrigue, where Shardlake learns that not all monks are hypocritical men of the senses.

I think I was a little less sanguine about the dissolution of monasteries than Shardlake was at the beginning, but by the end, we had a meeting of the minds!

(Read from March 31-April 2, 2010)