My Grandmother: An Armenian-Turkish Memoir (Turkish 2004, English 2008) By Fethiye Cetin

Sometimes basic history is not what people want to hear, it upsets the status quo.  But, how does one present the history of genocide without doing it in accusation form, as if “upsetting” the status quo should even be a consideration?  Fethiye Cetin manages this challenge in a brief, very personal, and very powerful, book titled My Grandmother: An Armenian-Turkish Memoir.  She does not restate the horrifying statistics of the genocide itself, but the facts are just beneath the surface throughout her book, visible to all who care to focus their eyes. Her goal is to tell the story, and get on with the reality of today.

The genocide of 1.5 million Armenians in eastern Turkey during World War I by the fading Ottoman Empire remains a hot topic even today, and the official response is denial – not that people died, but that it should be termed a genocide.  As a response, it is an attempt to distinguish between war-related mass murder, and an attempt to destroy and eliminate a culture.  By detailing not only what happened, but also what came after, Cetin debunks the denial.

What comes after in the case of her Grandmother, is the memory of what happened, suppressed by the day-to-day necessity of what came next.

As the Ottoman Empire was under attack on all borders, an out of control attempt was made to unify the country by making it “pure” – ironic when one considers that one of the major markers of the Empire's power was its diversity, though not necessarily its equality.  Cosmopolitan is the term one could use to describe the Empire, perhaps more so than any time since Alexander.  Unlike Alexander however, they didn’t quite understand the concept of assimilating cultures, they tried to eliminate them instead.

In the case of the Armenians, some 2 million of them in the northeastern corner of today’s Turkey, assimilation was not a consideration even though they were Ottoman citizens.  As Christians they were suspect, potential/likely/probable allies of the Empire’s many enemies.  The result was a campaign to systematically eliminate them.  At first the able bodied men of Armenian villages were rounded up, and then mysteriously disappeared.  Then the remaining citizens were to be relocated to present-day Syria.  Their property and possessions were seized and “redistributed.”  During the forced long march across the country, anyone unable to keep up – those in poor health, seniors, small children -- were left behind and then slaughtered on the roadside when the main body of marchers were out of sight.  Along the way, men who needed a strong woman as a servant or concubine picked out their preference.  When the group arrived, dramatically reduced in number, those who survived were assigned.  The adult women became servants, the children were adopted, all were forced to convert Islam.  It was cultural genocide by any definition, though not at all unusual in the annals of history. 

Cetin’s Grandmother was one of those children.  She grew up as the adopted child in a then Ottoman, now Turkish household.  She was raised in the Islamic faith.  Everything before her adopted family life became a distant and very suppressed memory.  It was not until she was an adult preparing to go away to college that Cetin discovered that her Grandmother’s name was not what she thought it was; and so began her investigation of what happened to her Grandmother’s extended family. It is a story of discovering a nightmare the world would like to ignore, while looking for a family history.

It is important to note that this book, while presenting the facts about the final days of the Ottoman Empire, is not an attack on Islam or modern Turkey.  It does however, with commanding moral authority, recognize that history is what it was, regardless of what those who deny it might want you to believe. 

Silent House (Turkish 1983, English 2012) By Orhan Pamuk

I’m normally a stickler about reading things in their written sequence, but this was not possible with Silent House by Orhan Pamuk.  Written in 1983, it is the third book by this prolific and award-laden Turkish writer.  The book wasn't translated into English until 2012 after many of his later works had already been translated, including: The White Castle, My Name is Red, and the Museum of Innocence, and the now classic Snow.  His first two books have yet to be translated into English; his most recent book, A Strangeness in My Mind, I reviewed last November.

Pamuk’s works are intimate stories told on top of fascinating bits of Turkish geography and history. Silent House was no different.  It is set in Cennethisar, a resort village south and east of Istanbul, on the Asian side of the Bosphorous. The time span is near 1980, with the country on the verge of a coup, one that would lead to no end of personal troubles for Pamuk. The story profiles the urban & western faction of the population, the old elite if you will; and the rural & mostly poor faction, with an eastern/conservative world view.  Their differences are a key backdrop in seemingly all modern Turkish literature and film.

The story tells of the annual visit of three adult siblings to their aged grandmother's home. Their parents had died years ago; a visit to the cemetery is one of the early chapters of the book.  The siblings, two brothers and a sister, are residents of Istanbul and western in outlook.  They are personally stressed by the country’s political uncertainty, and the possibility the country’s religious majority will assert control.  Change the calendar by 40 years -- in either direction -- and you have the same political uncertainty.  The grandmother is an anchor to a past that no longer exists.

The personal history of the family provides some wickedly sharp tales. Their stories, told collectively, are a representative stand-in of a country having a nervous breakdown.  Each of them will have first person narrative chapters in the book, as does Recep, the grandmother’s live-in loyal/hated housekeeper, caregiver and cook.  Recep is a dwarf, which provides an interesting subplot.  He is also apparently the illegitimate child of the long deceased grandfather.  A psychological analysis of the entire family and some of their friends would find some serious issues, not all of them comic in nature.

Interestingly, one of the siblings is a historian who spends much of his one week vacation visiting the dusty basement of the town’s civic building, reading decades-old records of property transfers and court actions, viewing them as a way to piece together the everyday life of the locals -- perhaps realizing that years from now future historians will view his life in the same way. He states “I would have gladly agreed to spend my whole life in that cool basement if only three square meals could be brought at appropriate intervals, as well as a pack of cigarettes and in the evening a little raki left by the door.”  Novelists, like Orhan Pamuk, are like that -- one could consider that scene an early conceptual draft of his future book Museum of Innocence.  

Recommendation:  You bet.

The Story of Ireland (2011) By Neil Hegarty; and The MacMillan Atlas of Irish History (1997) Edited by Sean Duffy

I did not pick up The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People by Neil Hegarty as a pleasure read, I found it to use as a stepping stone to a larger project, but it is a pleasurable read.

I’ve blogged before about my goal of conquering James Joyce’s Ulysses, a book that I’ve started, and abandoned, several times.  I find myself ill equipped to tackle it.  A few months ago I began taking the incremental approach to it by reading and reviewing Joyce’s early book of short stories Dubliners.  Satisfied, I then took the next step, attempting A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; but, by the end of the first chapter realized I needed a primer on the history of Ireland before I could quite grasp the elusive asides in A Portrait.  Hence, my latest reads.

In searching for a book on Irish history, the selection process alone was time-consuming. It seems everyone, and their brother/sister, has written a book on Irish history.  Inevitably, these books are in reality about their family history, interesting, but not what I was looking for.  What I wanted was a readable history of the island, except not a thesis.  I found 80% of that with Hegarty’s book, which is almost entirely text.  I found the other 20% with a phenomenal little book titled The MacMillan Atlas of Irish History edited by Sean Duffy and consisting primarily of maps.  These two books weren’t written together, but they complement each other perfectly.

The histories do an admirable job of outlining the complexities of a people born of the influence of endless invasions from the outside world, yet also often insulated from it. One witnesses Celtic and Viking interactions (most of the cities on the coast that we know of today, including Dublin, are renamed Viking settlements) and, one also witnesses the countless back and forth migrations across the Irish Sea that resulted from subsequent invasions of England, by the Romans, the Normans, and the needs of British imperial expansion.

(And, as if talking politics is not dangerous enough, let me delve into religion…)

Then there is Ireland's religious history, which started not in the pews, but in the bedrooms of England – politics, disguised as theology.  It was played out in colonial economics then; and it lingers forever more, while continuing to be sold to the outside world as religious differences, an aspect, not a cause.

For purposes of reading Joyce, this religious history is what I was looking for -- not the Catholic/Protestant divide of the north, but the internal Catholic division.  What I did not understand when beginning A Portrait was the many references to internal squabbles about “The” Church.  Ireland has a deeply Catholic people with an innate independence born of a monastic tradition.  Yet, it saw that monastic tradition stamped out by a politically corrupted Vatican-imposed diocesan structure that was more often than not in bed with the imperial overlords – an administrative structure accepted by some, but never to be trusted by all. This helps explain a great deal about the legendary skepticism found in many Irish Catholics worldwide vis-à-vis the Vatican. 

Recommendation:  I don’t know that I’ve ever spent as much time searching for the correct book on a subject. The time was well spent, The Story of Ireland by Neil Hegarty, coupled with The MacMillan Atlas of Irish History, is precisely what I was looking for, detailed, not dense.

Before The Fall (2016) By Noah Hawley

“They are flying. And as they rise up through the foggy white, talking and laughing, serenaded by the songs of 1950s crooners and the white noise of the long at bat, none of them has any idea that sixteen minutes from now their plane will crash into the sea.” That’s the closing sentence of the preface to Before The Fall by Noah Hawley. His book is easily the most riveting I’ve read in ages, and far from spoiling the suspense, the sentence merely sets the stage.

Hawley is not a stranger to writing for suspense. He’s a bestselling author who has penned four other novels: The Good Father, The Punch, Other People’s Weddings, and A Conspiracy of Tall Men. If you aren’t aware of that portfolio, try this one: he was the writer/producer of the television hit show Bones. He’s also the creator of Fargo, which won an Emmy for Outstanding Miniseries in 2014. Hawley knows both how to make you turn the page, and tune-in next week.

As the title implies, Before The Fall, is about the lives of the passengers and crew on a private jet which mysteriously crashes into the Atlantic as it is flying to NYC from Martha’s Vineyard. All but two will die in the crash; the survivors will be a less than successful painter, and JJ, a four year-old who is the son of the multi-millionaire television CEO whose company owns the jet. 

In telling their pre-flight stories and reporting on the investigation of the crash, Hawley’s book creates a thriller that includes high-finance international money-laundering, offshore bank accounts, political corruption, wire-tapping, the working dynamics of airline professionals, and the on & off-screen workings of editorial “news” programming of the Fox News variety.  

Recommendation:  If you are looking for something to take your mind off “real” news and maybe lower your anxiety level, look no further.

Heart of Darkness (1899) By Joseph Conrad -- Illustrated edition (2013) By Matt Kish

The publication of this edition of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is different than previous print runs of the novel in that it is/was an artistic release – it’s illustrated. And it’s not just illustrated, its every-other-page is a full color illustration, a visual rendering of the text on the facing page. All in all, artist Matt Kish’s treatment of the book is a fascinating, and successful, endeavor.

At first thought one might think the novel – a telling of an early-European exploration of the Congo River – is an odd topic for illustration. Conrad’s book isn’t a travelogue, it’s an intense psychological study of the mind of Marlow, the expedition leader, and of the mindset of colonialism. Yet, that is exactly why the illustrated-treatment of the story works. When Conrad’s book was written in 1899, Africa was "the dark continent" – nothing but imagination. No one (a.k.a. Europeans) knew what lay beyond the coastal areas of Africa. As a result of this lack of information, they created fantasy nightmares of the interior. These “white-man fears” (some real, some not) lend themselves quite well to illustration. 

I picked up this book because it relates to two of my recent reads: Into Africa by Martin Dugard, and a later Conrad book, the Secret Agent, written in 1907.

Dugard’s book is a telling of the Stanley & Livingstone story. In his epilogue, Dugard credits Heart of Darkness as the “first” telling of that story, a claim that proved debatable when I repeated it -- having now read it, I think I side with those who question that claim. Yes, Livingstone once explored the Congo, but that was before he got “lost.” And, while Livingstone studied the vast cultural difference (vis-à-vis Europeans and Africans), he did so as an explorer. In Conrad’s book, Kurtz (the so-called Livingstone character) was an advance guard of exploiters, not explorers; and Marlow (the Stanley counterpart) was a professional sailor, not an international journalist.

Comparing Heart of Darkness with The Secret Agent is another issue. These are two vastly different storylines, yet both are told with Conrad’s exhaustive/exhausting writing style. The author is enamored with compound sentences that often come across as run-ons, endless run-ons. Yet, when one is telling the story of a living nightmare, a fast-paced endless run-on works.

Recommendation: Interesting from two standpoints, its illustrated treatment of a classic; and as documentation on the western mindset about Africa – in this case negative (contrasting sharply with the Tarzan treatment a few years later).  

Click on Amazon to purchase this book.

Dubliners (1904-1907) By James Joyce

On several occasions I have attempted to read James Joyce’s classic Ulysses, considered one of the greatest literary works of the 20th century. Each time I’ve tried, I have given up long before page 100.  It has been just too dense, leaving me drowning in its stream of consciousness. But, sometime before I die, I intend to successfully read Ulysses. Reading Dubliners is a stepping-stone toward that goal.

Dubliners, is a collection of 15 short stories written by Joyce early in his career.  They were first published in 1914.  Colum McCann, who wrote the Foreword to the centennial edition of the book, acknowledges the difficulty of Joyce’s writing.  He refers to Dubliners as the “laboratory” used to begin Joyce’s body of work.  Many of the character studies in the stories, he says, will appear again in Ulysses.  So, my plan is to begin, at the beginning.

The short story selection includes some literary scenes that remain recognizable over 100 years later. 

For Chicago readers the story Ivy Day in the Committee Room should be particularly familiar.  It covers get-out-the-vote conversations between election workers.  The “committee room” is what we would call the ward offices of Chicago’s still powerful Irish-dominated Democratic Machine, home to such names as Daley, Madigan, Cullerton and Hines – Irish clans that span generations and continue to control much (all?) that goes on in Chicago, Cook County, and Illinois.  They didn’t write the book on elections, but they definitely read it, offered edits, and added chapters.

Another story, Eveline, is short and powerful.  It tells of a young woman who has been swept off her feet by a fast-talking young man.  She is about to run away to Argentina with him when she considers everything that makes her so willing to do so; which in the end are the same things that hold her in Dublin.  It is followed immediately by After the Race, a revealing story about class.

The collection ends with what was my favorite, despite its name: The Dead.  The story takes place the day and night of an annual dinner party.  In very many ways it reminds me of Virginia Wolfe’s book Mrs. Dalloway, which was written a generation later.  As the dinner party is coming to a close, one of the guests begins to sing a song The Lass of Aughrim that reminds a married woman of her first real love in life – someone who died before she ever met her husband. 

Next up on my James Joyce list:  The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

The Fire of His Genius (2001) By Kirkpatrick Sale

This’ truly the season (presidential election season) to scrap the standard way of telling history. Let's forget Washington, Jefferson, King David, Napoleon, Justinian, Caesar, Laozi, Voltaire, and the Greats: Alexander, Catherine and Peter.  People are tiresome, and they die.  Maybe we should give primacy in history to inventions:  the wheel, the abacus, the computer, flight, vaccines, and the steamboat.  Okay, maybe we keep the multi-dimensional Ben Franklin and his kite.

This re-ordering of history telling seems to be the plot of Kirkpatrick Sales’ biography of Robert Fulton The Fire of His Genius.  And, he has a point.  Fulton, the namesake of numerous locales in the United States (including Fulton, Kentucky, a.k.a. “the banana capital of the world,” the cause of my review of Peter Chapman’s Bananas), is all but forgotten to modern times.  Yet, he perfected the all but forgotten but exceedingly historically significant steamboat, and proved it could be a commercial success.

Let’s see, without the steamboat:  no Manifest Destiny, no Hudson River Line, no upstream Mississippi River traffic, no Show Boat nor Old Man River; and alas, no backdrop for Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer.  And to jump industries, without his financial success running a steamboat line, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt would have never had the capital necessary to give us the New York Central Rail Road, or the Biltmore for that matter.

As is often the case with a genius, focus was always a problem for Fulton.  His work on steamboats more times than not was delayed, much to the irritation of his business partner, by Fulton’s dalliance with naval warfare.  He was fascinated with and did much of the earlier engineering work on submarines, torpedoes and water mines – all three of which would make their mark, for better or worse, on world history (and this interest was strictly as an engineer, not as a patriot, he serially and sometimes simultaneously tried to sell these ideas to the French, British, and American governments while they warred with each other).

Oh, and then there is Fulton’s personal life (1765 – 1815), which would raise a few eyebrows even today.

Sales’ book is interesting, his research is exhaustive – his writing is dull.  Yet, The Fire of His Genius is still a worthy read, helping to connect the historical dots of many of those dead people.

A Sand County Almanac (1949) By Aldo Leopold

At age 63, I keep telling friends my retirement plans involve moving to a rural environment and becoming a hermit. They question my ability to do so, not to mention my very sanity. I follow-up with a question of my own: have you read Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac?

Their questions address a legitimate concern, and I confess I share it. I’ve spent 40-some years living in urban environments -- Chicago, New York, and DC -- and mostly in high-rises. I can tell you in minute detail how the city comes alive in the morning. As the sun just begins to peek at Chicago from across the lake, the garbage trucks shift into gear, the El trains increase their schedules, and the birds begin to chirp (yes, cities have birds other than pigeons). By the time the rising sun starts to reflect off the glass towers, the coffee baristas and maintenance crews start arriving for work, joggers head for the lakefront, and the celebrants from the night have stumbled home. These raw urban scenes have their own beauty, and hold many memories – I have loved the city.

This contrasts sharply with Aldo Leopold’s description of sun rises on his farm in Sand County, Wisconsin.

Leopold is a founder of what we call the environmental movement. He’s credited with the philosophy of Land Ethic – viewing the natural habitat not as a commodity to be harvested, but as a community that we are a part of. The Almanac is about his farm from January through December. It is beautifully written, in a calming, folksy way.

It is interesting to note that John Muir, who is considered the “founder” of Yosemite National Park, was raised on a farm in Portage, Wisconsin, not far from Leopold's. This area, known as the Wisconsin Dells to most Chicagoans, can arguably lay claim to being the birthplace of the American environmental movement.

Members of my family will recognize that an interest in nature, botany and environmental issues is not new to me – though it has been an interest largely neglected most of my adult life because of a need to live in a big city. Throughout my Northwest Indiana childhood the big local debate was environmental: did we want “progress” defined as Bethlehem Steel, or “tree-hugging” defined as the creation of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. The grand compromise won out – we got them both -- and for the most part it has worked out well, the exception to the rule on similar compromises.

So the question remains, when I retire in a few years, what do I want to wake up to: coffee in a garden, or coffee on a balcony?  I’m leaning heavily toward the garden.

The Taxidermist's Daughter (2014) By Kate Mosse

I am not a particularly fast reader, yet I sped through The Taxidermist’s Daughter by Kate Mosse in only two sittings.  It’s a rather compelling and fun blending of several British literary genres save one, it spares readers any lead characters from the self-absorbed aristocracy.  Oh, and it includes nursery rhymes.

The book is equal parts Sherlock Holmes, Oliver Twist, and Macbeth; stirred into the cauldron with a sampling of British women mystery writers from Agatha Christie forward, and then adding a bit of American Edgar Allan Poe for spice.

The main character is named Connie, and as one can guess from the title, she is the daughter of a taxidermist, a once respectable occupation that has fallen out of fashion to the point that its mere mention frightens people.  She lives with her widowed father in Blackthorn House near the coast of England, an area heavily impacted by tidewaters and summer storms.  Her aging father is losing his faculties, and Connie, in her twenties, is still trying to piece together her past, she had some kind of accident when she was young, resulting in amnesia.  Her father has not been helpful in providing information about what happened, and she suspects that what little she has been told has been fabricated. 

Without a spoiler alert, I can go no further, but you should. 

Recommendation:  great summer read.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007) By Sherman Alexie

My first exposure to author Sherman Alexie was through the Chicago Gay & Lesbian Film Festival many years ago.  I went to see his movie The Business of FancyDancing.  It was multi-cultural at its strongest.  The main character grew-up on a reservation, but “abandoned” the tribe by taking school seriously and winning a scholarship to college.  In college, he comes out as a gay man, and ends up in a relationship with a white man.  The book covers his return to the reservation for the funeral of a friend.  Based on the book, I started being a regular at the annual pow-wows that are held in Chicago – fascinating events when you take them more seriously than as a mere tourist attraction.

Alexie would go on to become quite the independent film director, prominent poet, and novelist.  His credits include the movie SmokeSignals & book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and the autobiographical book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

The Absolutely True Diary tells of his childhood on the Spokane reservation in the northeastern corner of Washington State.  He, as were the other kids on the “rez,” was culturally raised to expect nothing out of life.  When he independently decides that he is going to the high school in Reardon, an entirely white school 22 miles from the reservation, it changes his childhood and life.  He is accused of abandoning his tribe, and becoming a white-lover … an “apple,” red on the outside, but white on the inside.  Yet, at Reardon High School, he’s the Indian kid that shouldn’t be there.  RHS’s school mascot of course is the “Redskins.”  He’s caught in-between two cultures, which will become a running theme in Alexie’s body of work.

The trials and tribulations that he faces as a kid were endless – teenage angst, coupled with unquestioned and often internalized racism.  To tell the story, Alexie uses comedy to make it bearable.  (See my review of A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka to see how this formula plays in a different cultural setting).

Arnold, the Alexie character in the novel, turns out to be extremely good at comedy.  Arnold draws cartoons, and they are sad, hilarious and on-target.  The book has enough cartoons to qualify as a comic book, and needs them.

It would be easy for me to relate this book to so many “other” of America’s ills – not the least of which is the subject of what society does to psyche of people raised on the reservation, or in the inner center “ghetto,” or in the “white-trash” trailer park.  Hope is destroyed.  One of my favorite passages in political literature is Harvey Milk’s “Hope Speech.”  The crux of the speech is that you must give people hope, because “without hope, life is not worth living.”  Sociologists point to this need whenever discussing alcoholism or drug abuse, or suicide.  Part-Time Indian puts this in personal terms.

Recommendation:  Absolutely.

Click on the movie trailer for The Business of FancyDancing and watch an interview of Alexie by Bill Moyers.

Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (2003) By Martin Dugard

For my long Fourth of July weekend I was looking for something relaxing to read, something in my usual lines of interest, only as far removed from the year 2016 as possible.  I found it with Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone. by Martin Dugard.

For those of you living in the modern day equivalent of “the heart of Africa,” Dr. David Livingstone, a Brit from back when Great Britain was at its greatest (the Victorian Age) is one of the world’s most renowned explorers, ranking with the likes of Captain Cook, and Charles Darwin.   The ultimate and final exploration of his career was to be determining the source of the Nile River. While on that quest, he went missing. Henry Morton Stanley, a Welsh born American and journalist, was secretly tasked by the publisher of the New York Herald to find Livingstone.  The rest, as they say, is history, not to mention one of the best quotes of all recorded time: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

The book is a fictionalized history of the story that kept government administrators, the science community, and everyday newspaper readers throughout the British Empire, the rest of Europe, and the United States on edge in the 1870s.  It’s not the first fictionalized version of the Stanley & Livingstone story – that distinction, as explained by the author in the epilogue, belongs to Joseph Conrad’s book The Heart of Darkness.  

Dugard’s Into Africa excels as an adventure story – despite the fact that most readers know the ending before turning the first page.  It covers a range of topics: empire building, the slave trade, the American civil war, the height of newspaper wars, cultural racism, the coming colonialism, the inner working of the British Geological Society, Gladstone & Disraeli; and serves as an incredible geography lesson for readers (with maps).  I’ll quote one paragraph to show the book’s period setting and topic range:

“It was October 31 when Stanley traveled onward again.  In America, Cochise and his Apache warriors were being hunted in the Arizona Territory, Chicago had just been destroyed by fire, and President Grant was about to issue a proclamation making the Ku Klux Klan illegal.  In England, Darwin’s The Descent of Man was just days away from publication.  In Paris, the first exhibition of impressionist painting was about to get under way.  If Stanley were back in the world, he would likely have been covering one of those events for the Herald with great gusto and self-importance.”

Dugard’s telling of this story never lost my interest.   And as it turns out, he is quite the eclectic author.  While his body of work includes Farther than Any Man: The Rise and Fall of Captain James Cook and other books about explorers, it also includes a book about running, a book about sailing, and a series of “Killing” books he co-authored (ghost wrote?) will Bill O’Reilly:  Killing Kennedy, Killing Jesus, Killing … fill in the blank.  When he’s not writing, he’s a track & field coach at a high school in California.  

Recommendation:  a great summer read.

Click on Amazon to purchase this book.

The Secret Agent (1907) By Joseph Conrad

While Joseph Conrad is highly regarded as an author, I’ve not previously read any of his works, not even his classics Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness.  A friend however sent me a copy of Conrad’s The Secret Agent, so I decided to give it a try. 

The book had many good points and a solid story line, but I found it very difficult to read.  While it is only 249 pages, it took me a couple of weeks to complete, partly because I’ve been busy, and partly because I found it a challenge to maintain interest long enough to finish each chapter.   And believe me, he’s not the type of writer one can put down mid-chapter, because if you do, you must start the chapter over again at the beginning.

Conrad, one could say, likes compound sentences.  In fact, he excels at them.  They are grammatically correct mind you, but several of them are two and three pages long.  I often found myself losing the noun and verb, long before I found the period.

This is not to say the story itself was bad, quite the contrary.

Set in London, the main character is a Mr. Verloc.  He is a secret agent in the employ of a never named foreign embassy. In reality however, he’s not a secret, in fact he has a close working relationship with a London police inspector – a sort of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch your back” kind of relationship.  The plot commences when both of them end up with new bosses. They share in common an exceedingly low opinion of their new directors.

Verloc is pressured by his new boss to find someone who can set off a bomb at the Greenwich Observatory (don’t ask why, it’s detailed, in detail, in an early chapter).  When he does, the story unfolds, and the final chapters read as fast, as the early chapters read slow.  The chapter near the end of the book when Verloc’s wife finds out what is going on is an excellent and memorable piece of literature.

The book does touch on some fascinating issues however: the difference between an anarchist and a revolutionary, the role of women in the late 1800s early 1900s, and (no spoiler here) the character Stevie.  

Recommendation:  For literature majors only; and even then just long enough to finish your coursework.

Click on Amazon to purchase this book. 

Nazim Hikmet: The Life and Times of Turkey's World Poet (English, 2013) By Mutlu Konuk Blasing

While Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s biography of Nazim Hikmet makes for an interesting read today, my guess is it will be an even more interesting and educational read 100 years from now when removed from the lethal politics of this era.

The book’s subtitle is: The Life and Times of Turkey’s World Poet.  It is one part literary critique, and one part political history.  Some might think that an odd combination, but it’s not.  Literature has always played a central role in political movements.  Could democracy be understood without “When in the course of human events” or communism without “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” or the forever relevant: “What happens to a dream deferred?” 

Literature defines society, and more often than not, it is penned by a poet.

Hikmet is a Turkish poet revered by the Turkish people. He spent much of life as a political prisoner, or in exile in Soviet Union.  As an unrepentant communist, he was feared by the Turkish government because his writings could steer the hearts of the country as it was still trying to find its way in the world after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

Hikmet died in Moscow in 1963 and is buried there, though his request was to be buried in a village in Anatolia.  His love affair with his native country and its native language is what has endeared him to its people.  His verse, particularly his epic Human Landscapes from My Country, tells of the average citizen, without romanticizing their existence – an antidote to the “orientalist” viewpoint of Turkey exported to the western world.  Significantly, his work was banned in Turkey until two years after his death.  It was through illegal copying and sharing that Hikmet was widely read in his home country.  He was read by both the intelligentsia and the working class – he spoke to both of them.

Linguistics is not usually my area of interest; but it is covered in depth in Blasing’s book.  Her chapter on Turkey’s conversion to the Latin alphabet is fascinating.  The Turkish language has never been Arabic, but because the Ottoman Empire was an Islamic state, Arabic was used for the alphabet.  Problem was, a lot of the sounds used in the Turkish language, don’t have counterparts in Arabic – and a lot of the sounds used in Arabic, aren’t used in the Turkish language.   One of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s, founder of the Turkish Republic, lasting modernizations was converting Turkey’s alphabet, to one which more closely matched its spoken language.

Why is that important to this story?  Because Hikmet wrote his work in this new alphabet, making it accessible to the entire population, not just the elite who could read Arabic.

I mentioned earlier that my belief is this book will become more interesting in the years ahead.  I say this because so much of Hikmet’s life’s story is tied up in the politics of his time, the peak of Communism, and the rise of Fascism.  What is lost when one reads through these filters is that Hikmet was popular with the people because he spoke to their needs, which were not being met by any of the powers of the day – and this included his disillusionment because of the unfulfilled agenda personified in Lenin.

For an American who grew up in the 1950’s and 60’s, these are powerful and hard to undo filters.  The meanest taunt one could use when I was a kid was “pinko commie…”  The politics of this was black & white, there was no gray area.  While Hikmet was a “card-carrying” communist, his actual philosophy veers closer to socialism – an ideology that Americans are still not able to differentiate.

Recommendation:  One has to have a strong interest in either poetry or political history for this book.  I recommend it highly. 

American Treasure (1994) By Harold J. Drake

In many ways American Treasure is your typical war memoir – though for me there is an important distinction: the author is my uncle, Harold J. Drake.  He was an Infantryman in World War II.  While reading about his military record was interesting, it was not the reason I read the book.  I read it because I don’t recall having ever met him (or most of my other Drake relatives for that matter) -- maybe once, I’m really not sure.

If I did meet him it would have been at his father’s, my grandfather’s, funeral.  I was quite young then, and I’m pretty sure it was my first funeral.  I’d never met the man in the casket before either. My paternal grandfather, Elmer Drake, was a World War I veteran and is buried at Camp Butler, just east of Springfield, IL.

Let me explain.

My father was born in Lincoln, IL, one of six children.  My paternal grandmother died in a TB sanitarium in Ottawa, IL when they were all still kids.  My grandfather took off for who knows where, and the kids became part of what at-the-time amounted to Illinois’ foster care system -- which explains the lack of tears at this funeral. In Harold Drake’s book he touches on this subject the one and only time he mentions my father, his older brother.  It was during a conversation he was having with his foxhole buddy their first night on European soil, as part of the second wave of Americans soldiers, sent in to fight in the Battle for Normandy, once the path had been made possible by the D-Day invasion.

“I tell Herman that my home town was in Illinois and that I lived and worked on a dairy farm.  My family had become scattered around and only my brother, Kenny [my father], a Marine now in the Pacific, maintained a family relationship through letter writing.  I didn’t miss anyone except my mother who had died in 1932 leaving my father the impossible task of supporting six kids when she entered the sanitarium.  The State had been forced to place the whole family in an orphanage during the Depression.” 

The point in reading the book was to find clues about what happened in the lives of my father's siblings.  Some information was gleaned, but not much – it was clear Harold’s childhood was an unpleasant experience that he’d rather not talk about, he states as much in the book, explaining why he avoids the subject.  In those days, foster care for boys usually meant being farmed out as child labor for all practical purposes.

Harold, it is worth noting, was a redhead (as am/was I) and went through much of life being called “Red,” and, as was the case with me and all of my siblings, often called “Ducky," or a variation thereof.

I know my father lived with a family in Marengo, IL and worked in a bakery.  From the book I’ve learned that Harold and their younger brother Jackie went to live on a farm near Morris, IL.  But, Harold did not get along with the foster family, and ended up working on a farm in Hebron, IL and living in a hotel/boarding house while finishing high school, before joining the Army.  One of the girls, Betty (Elizabeth Jean) apparently was adopted by a family in Aurora, IL – my Uncle Bud (Leo), the only one I actually knew, isn’t mentioned, nor is the other sister.

In addition to the genealogy aspects of this book, it ended up being an interesting read.  Harold was wounded twice.  On the second occasion he was used by his commanding officer as a guinea pig to see if there was a possible path through a minefield outside of Brest, France.  He lost one of his legs as a result of that.  The book covers in great detail the two years of repeat surgeries he went through for his wounds, including the amputation, plastic surgery on his nose, and being fitted for and learning how to walk with an artificial leg.  Next to nothing is mentioned in the book about his post-Army years, though we know that he worked for the U.S. Bureau of Mines in Washington, DC and lived in Maryland. 

Recommendation:  I will share the book with my siblings, finding another copy is probably not possible.  The one I obtained was decommissioned from the National Library of Scotland, and it shows up on the “out of print” list everywhere else.  As it was printed by Minerva Press, a vanity publisher, there probably weren’t many copies to begin with.

Young Turk (2004) By Moris Farhi

My world history education covered the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, but provided next to nothing on what came after.  It’s as though the piece of geography these two empires occupied disappeared along with them.  It did not.  For the record, after the calamity of picking the losing side in World War I, the Ottoman Empire came to an end, ceding much territory to the victors, and eventually being deposed by a demoralized military at home.  In the aftermath, the Republic of Turkey was declared in 1923, with a military commander, Mustafa Kemal becoming its first President.  Known to history as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, he was a surprisingly forward thinking leader.  He died in 1938.

I’m always hesitant to comment on the history and politics of other cultures, because I’m really not qualified to do so. I know this much however: the politics and history of Turkey are controversial beyond dispute, and interpretation is truly in the eyes of the beholder.

To start, let’s remember that Ataturk holds the same status for Turks that George Washington does for Americans – not perfect by any means, but with good that vastly outweighs the bad (George Washington, for those getting ready to slam me, was a slave owner and killer of Indians, in addition to being a Founding Father).

Ataturk’s personal mission as the founder of the Republic of Turkey was to restore the country to its rightful place on the world stage, not through Empire, but through modernization, of a secular and western bent.  Until its final decades, the Ottoman Empire had been, for the most part, an ethnically plural place where Muslim Turks lived in (relative) peace with Greek Christians, Kurds, Jews and numerous other ethnicities. The Ottoman’s did not however, have any qualms about using force against ethnic minorities – the Armenian Genocide occurred on their watch, with many future leaders as active participants). 

Ataturk rhetorically believed diversity to be good, and a component of nation building.  Put in modern terms, one could say he believed hyphenated citizens were okay, with the mantra that they be Turks first.  He is credited with inspiring Turks of all backgrounds to “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” a philosophy made famous decades later with John Kennedy’s immortal quote. The new generation of leaders Ataturk sought to create was referred to as the Young Turks, a name originally given to junior members the Ottoman military who had worked to abolish the Sultanate.  [Adding to the complexity of Turkish history, the Young Turks moniker is used for two polar opposite political viewpoints: those who like Ataturk believed in nationalism by nation building, and those who believed in nationalism by ethnic cleansing, as in the Armenian genocide, and the expulsion of Greeks from Turkey.] 

Moris Farhi’s historical novel is about the nation-building Young Turks and how Ataturk’s dream has been stolen from them.

Farhi’s book covers a group of Turkish youth who came of age during World War II.  They are an ethnic hodgepodge:  Muslim, Jewish, Greek, Christian, Gypsy, Kurd, Armenian, even a Turkish-Scottish guy – boys and girls.  This book can be judged as excellent based merely on their coming of age stories, but the book is much more than that, it is a spell-binding political commentary on modern Turkey. 

An important chapter occurs late in the book when Asik Ahmet, a man who served as a professor-mentor-friend to many of the youth, holds an end of semester gathering for them.  At it he asked them what occupation needed by the country they were willing to devote their lives to.  Once someone chose an occupation it was no longer available to anyone else at the party, which posed a problem for some of the students because the question was asked of them in alphabetical order.  Last to be called was Zeki, a Turkish Jew, who is clearly the stand in for the book’s author, Moris Farhi.  Zeki chose the occupation of professor.

Like Zeki, Mr. Farhi was born in Turkey, but moved early in his academic career to the United Kingdom.  Young Turk was (apparently) written in English, and first published in 2004 by Saqi Books in London.  The copy I bought while vacationing in Istanbul earlier this year was an English edition – one must wonder if it is even available in Turkish.

Recommendation: On the back page of the edition I have is a pull quote from Nicholai Murray, author of Kafka, it reads: “Everyone should go out immediately and buy Young Turk. Warm, witty, wise, humane, it’s a delightful book.”  I couldn’t possibly agree more.

The Alchemist (1988 Portuguese, 1994 English) By Paulo Coelho

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho was/is one of those trendy books everyone, and I do mean everyone, was reading back in the 1990’s -- only I never read it, until now.  As is my usual habit, I read some reviews of the book after I finished it.  What I discovered was that some 50,000 reviews of The Alchemist have been written, which underscores just how big of an international best seller it has been.

Many of the reviews insisted on categorizing it as a “self-help” book because of its “pursue your dream” message.  While I’m okay with that, I think it might be a bit simplistic – call it a related collection of philosophy essays, with more than a few religious undertones, and you get my vote.

The book follows the adventures of a shepherd boy living in Andalusia.  He has a vivid dream which repeats itself.  When he goes to a Gypsy for help in interpreting the dream, the adventures begin: he sells his sheep and follows his dream.  It’s a fun story that includes traveling across the Sahara Desert from Morocco to the Pyramids.  It includes tribal warfare, love, lots of hard work with business success, robbery and mysticism of the natural environment.  It includes shepherds, Gypsies, bakers, kings, crystal merchants, an Englishman, and caravans. 

While it’s not an original plot, it is a beautifully written version of it.

The 25^th Anniversary edition of the book, which is what I read, contains an introduction by the author that is interesting when placed in the context of the book.  Apparently when it was first written it did not sell many copies, but Coelho never gave up on his Personal Legend of being a major author.  

Recommendation: Make some tea, grab an afghan and pull up a chair.  Enjoy.

The Girl on The Train (2015) By Paula Hawkins

Earlier this year I thought I had read a book recommended by my friend Angela; it ended up I had picked up the wrong book.  I read The Girl on “A” Train, by A.J. Waines; while what she had recommended was The Girl on “The” Train, by Paula Hawkins.  But, we both agree: “A” is good, “The” is much better.

The Girl on The Train is a psychological thriller, somewhat similar to Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.  And like Gone Girl it is being made into a movie, to be released later this year (2016).

The girl in The Train is named Rachel, and she’s a mess, as you’ll figure out no later than the first chapter.  She’s a heavy drinker.  No that’s not right, she is an alcoholic.  She’s been on a binge ever since her divorce ... two years ago.  She’s also been fired from her job, but instead of telling her roommate about her work situation she gets up every morning and takes a commuter train into London, pretending to be going to the office.  What she sees each morning and evening through the train’s windows, at it passes through the town where she once lived with her ex-husband, is the plot of the book.

Of course, as an alcoholic, she has a credibility problem.  Life is frequently a blur to her, and complete blackouts are part of her history – or are they?

I had trouble with the beginning of this book because I had difficulty working up any sympathy for Rachel.  I (wrongly) have little patience for people who can’t seem to pull it together.  By the end of the book however, Rachel was the only character I had any empathy with.  She's clearly still trying to get her life in gear, but by the final chapter I’m pulling for her, and thinking she’s going to succeed.

Recommendation:  Great read.