Tag Archives: book-review

‘Unorthodox’ by Deborah Feldman

Posted on December 29, 2024 | 1 comment
2020 (originally 2014) 256 p.

I recently watched the Netflix series based on this book, and instantly wanted to read the memoir on which it was based. My curiosity was piqued by a comment in the ‘Making of’ documentary, also on Netflix, that they had changed the modern day part in the television series because the author is still a young living, working, active writer in Germany, and they didn’t want the series to affect her present-day life. When I was about 7/8 of the way through the book, and she was still in New York, I realized that the book and the series were quite different.

Deborah Feldman was raised by her grandparents in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Her family was part of the Satmar sect of Hasidic Judaism, a sect with Hungarian roots that had been very much shaped by the Holocaust. Believing that God had allowed the Holocaust as punishment for assimilation and Zionism, the group embraced extreme conservatism in custom, dress and language, speaking only Yiddish. Her father, who was largely estranged from his daughter, seemed rather intellectually and socially challenged, and her mother had deserted the sect while Deborah was small. Although her aunts, particularly Aunt Chaya, have an influence on her upbringing and prospects, it is actually her grandmother Bubby and grandfather Zeidy, who bring her up in a loving but strict environment, where family and religion are paramount. Being brought up by elderly grandparents gives her freedoms that she would not have had in a family of siblings: she is well-educated for a Satmar girl, and she becomes an inveterate reader. As she approaches womanhood, the family orchestrates her arranged-marriage to Eli, a man equally in thrall to his own family and religion. Although Eli is in many ways more liberal than some other men, he can veer between domination and permissiveness, and when they cannot consummate their marriage, they are both under pressure from each other and their families.

There are some important differences between the book and the television series. In the book, her liberation comes not through music but through surreptitiously attending higher education, and it occurs in America, not in Germany. She leaves after she has her child, not before; indeed it is her desire to protect her son from the misogyny and strictures of Hasidic Judaism that impels her to leave her husband who, initially at least, seems just as happy to have the marriage fail as she is. She is largely silent about the custody arrangements for their son, Yitzy.

The memoir (i.e. book) was written in 2012, when she was still in the midst of act of leaving. The entire memoir is written in the present tense, but the present becomes closer and closer. As a result, the pacing of the book moves from fairly slow reflection and narrative, to a present-day rush of emotion. Because it is a memoir, the narrative is shaped completely by her viewpoint and her own flaws and strengths. (An interesting critical review of the book by another Satmar woman who also left the community can be found here.) Is it a well-written memoir? Possibly not: there is no overarching theme, beyond that of grievance and longing for freedom, perhaps. For a memoir, it has a lot of dialogue which tips it into some other genre.

Nonetheless, I found this memoir fascinating, and hard to put down. Part of that stems from my curiosity about Hasidic Judaism, particularly within enclaves like in Williamsburg. (There’s an interesting photo-essay about Williamsburg here). Yes, I have borrowed her sequel as well, a recent retelling of her 2014 follow-up Exodus.

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: I enjoyed the Netflix series.

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‘The Best Catholics in the World’ by Derek Scally

Posted on December 16, 2024 | 1 comment

2021,310 p.

It amazes me that, of all countries in the world, IRELAND should have voted for gay marriage and legal abortion. My impression of Ireland is that it is mired in religion and conservatism, and I don’t think that I’m alone in this perception. In this book, Derek Scally, after many years of living in Germany, returns to Ireland, the land of his childhood, and asks himself how these changes came about. It is a story both of his own personal journey from a weakly-held Catholicism into a consideration of how Ireland, as a country, can come to terms with its past.

The book is divided into three parts. In Part I, ‘The Leaning Tower of Piety’, he writes of his own Irish upbringing and his own contact through St Monica’s Church with Father Paul McGennis, who was later to plead guilty to four counts of indecent assault. In going through the church archives, he learns of the league table on donations that existed between the parishes, and through speaking to old parishioners he learns of the suspicions about Paul McGennis, and the inability of parish priest Michael Geaney to impose any authority on him. In Part I he challenges the perception that there is a special type of ‘Celtic Christianity’, suggesting that this is the result of previous centuries’ public relations, generating important political momentum, emotional comfort and offering touchstones against historical events like the Penal Laws and Protestant/English occupation. It was not enough: he suggests that Irish Catholics perceived themselves the Most-Oppressed-People-Ever. Yet, when he looks back to his own education within the Catholic system in the 1980s by revisiting the text books used at the time, he feels patronized and short-changed by the experience.

Part Two ‘Implosion’ looks at the effect of the clerical sexual abuse revelations in the 1990s. He focuses on Fr. Brendan Smyth, who was investigated in 1975 but went on to abuse children for a further sixteen years. The fallout, when it came, spread beyond his own activities: Cardinal Brady, who was involved in the 1975 investigation, was also accused of cover- up. He interviews Sean Brady, a man whom some see as a modest figure who knew which boats not to rock; while others see him as a coward and an accomplice to a predatory paedophile priest. Australian readers will see parallels with Archbishop George Pell. He goes on to explore the Magdalene laundries and the treatment of inmates in religious-run institutions. He argues that when the Catholic Church lost its monopoly on giving meaning or creating a sense of community, coupled with the sense of betrayal over the hypocrisy and intransigence of the church regarding sexual abuse, many left the church.

In Part Three ‘Among the Ruins’ he talks about the reformulated religion that transformed Famine-era faith into an earnest, Rome-focussed Sacred Heart Catholicism. He draws on his experience of living in Germany to wonder if Ireland does not need some form of national reckoning, as a form of healing and reconciliation. He considers the roles of museum and memorials in this process. At the end of the book he writes:

This journey has taken me from apathy to ambivalence, then anger to acceptance…[For] whatever anger I harbour towards the Irish Church, echoing the anger of those whose lives were ruined by its institutional inhumanity, I see remnants of its noble aspirations through the many ordinary Irish people who tried- and try- to lead better, Christian lives. No one can draw a line under the past, or airbrush away their role in it, but- for perhaps the first time ever- Irish people can approach their history on their own terms. That is, if they want to. (p. 307)

I’m not quite sure how to rate this book, and my reading was interrupted by a two-week holiday and so I did not read it as a continuous whole. I was happy enough to pick it up again, but I don’t know if I really grasped his argument well. In fact, summarizing it here gives me a better shape of the argument than the actual experience of reading the book did.

My rating: 7?

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

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‘The Erratics’ by Vicki Laveau-Harvie

Posted on November 19, 2024 | Leave a comment
2019, 224 p.

I confess that I started this book warily. “Mad as a Meat Axe” write two daughters on their mother’s medical chart at the end of the bed, sniggering at the thought that the initials MMA might prompt some medical profession to treat their mother for MMA and kill her. The two daughters, who are never named, are visiting their mother in rehab for a broken hip, even though their mother denies their existence, and has had nothing to do with them for eighteen years. I would not want these daughters.

Obviously much has gone on in this family, but we are never told. Our narrator tells us that, for her:

My past is not merely faded, or camouflaged under the dust of years. It’s not there, and I know a blessing in disguise when I see one. I have managed to shake free and flee to far-flung places where I feel reasonably safe because I do not carry a lot of my past. (p.140)

And yet, after 18 years, this Canadian academic returns home to see her father, whom her mother has announced “doesn’t have long”, and her mother whose hip has disintegrated. Along with her sister, who has remained in Canada despite the 18 long years of estrangement from her parents, they arrange (conspire?) for their mother to be moved into some form of care, so that their father can escape from her clutches. Her mother has long since given power of attorney to someone else, and she announces that her daughters are only after her money. Are they? Who is mad as a meat axe here?

It took a while for me to shake my suspicion of the narrator. I wonder if this book is some sort of Rorschach test: I have been the child left (albeit in a completely different situation) and so perhaps I read it differently. As older sister, the narrator has fled to Australia and established a marriage and career there, while her younger sister, just by virtue of being in Canada, carries the memories, the hurt and responsibility. The narrator knows this, but this does not change her actions:

…However different we are and however badly she judges me, whatever gulf already separates us, she is my sister. I do not want the gulf to fill with the seething resentment she will feel because she is doing it all, but I know this will happen. I am telling her that I know this will happen. I know she will feel violent annoyance with me when I suggest something because I’m not there and I don’t know, and I’m not the one doing it and I, on my far away island continent, will sit quietly, gnawed by guilt. (p. 157)

We never learn what has happened in this marriage and family. We have little back-story for her parents, beyond the fact that her father made money through the oil industry and that he fought in WWII. We have no images of a courtship, a marriage or a family life with young children. Everything is refracted through the narrator’s rage- which oddly enough, she deflects onto her sister.

No, I see rage here. A rage expressed by staying on the other side of the world, and by allowing her younger sister to carry this burden. A justified rage, from the snippets that we received, but rage nonetheless, despite protestations of guilt.

This is a memoir, and as such the author has ultimate freedom and responsibility to shape the narrative however she wishes. The memoir starts with a preface, describing the Erratics, huge boulders deposited by the Cordilleran Ice Sheet as it moved through Alberta and Montana. The Erratic that sits in the Canadian town of Okotoks, where the memoir is set, has cracked and fallen in on itself, posing danger to anyone approaching it. On the final pages, we revisit this image of the Okotoks Erratic with the spirit of her mother sitting atop it, beside Napi the Trickster.

To be honest, I’m still not sure who the Erratic is here: mother or daughter. But either way, it feels as if there is some sort of space here for release.

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: purchased e-book

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‘Homage to Catalonia’ by George Orwell

Posted on October 18, 2024 | 6 comments
1938, 296 p including appendices

I’m fascinated by the Spanish Civil War, but other than Giles Tremlett’s Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country’s Hidden Past , the joint Australian/Spanish approach in Amnesia Road by Luke Stegemann and Amanda Vaill’s Hotel Florida I haven’t really read much about it. But spurred on by seeing The Teacher Who Promised the Sea a couple of months ago, I turned to a book that I’ve been meaning to read for some time: George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.

To be honest, I thought that Homage to Catalonia was a novel, and it never even occurred to me that it might be an eye-witness account, written in the year after his return from fighting in Spain. The book starts in Barcelona, where he embarks on rudimentary training using antiquated equipment before heading for the front. He had joined to support the Republican government from an ideological commitment, entering Spain under the auspices of the Independent Labour Party and by chance ended up with the POUM militia (Partit Obrer d’Unificació Marxista) an anti-Stalinist communist party.

His account, which was written after the event, traces his arrival in Barcelona, and his time on the front first in the hills around Zaragoza and his later deployment with a group of Englishmen to a position at Monte Oscuro, within sight of Zaragoza. He is then sent 50 miles away to Huesca where he takes part in an attack, throwing two bombs which he thinks may have hit their target. After three months on the front, which seem mainly to have been a time of lice-picking and boredom, he returns to Barcelona where the Republican forces have turned on each other. Disillusioned by the political infighting, he returns to the front, where he is shot through the throat, shuffled from hospital to hospital and finally discharged from duty. At this point, the internal Republican politics mean that he is in danger because of his previous involvement with POUM and so he and his wife decide to leave Spain.

The political infighting amongst the Republicans was completely unknown to me. I had always thought of the Spanish Civil War as being Republicans vs. Franco’s Nationalists. But the battle was just as much one within the Republican forces. At one stage while reading, I became completely overwhelmed by the acronyms for the various Republican groups and just happened to notice a footnote that referred to ‘Appendix 1’. (I was reading this as an e-book, and footnotes at the bottom of the page are awkward, clunky things). Lo and behold, there were two chapters attached as appendices, completely about the politics and machinations of the various Republican groups that had previously been part of the text, but had been later shifted to be appendices lest they disrupt the flow. I found these two fairly long chapters illuminating, describing the ideological differences between the Russian government and the other communist groups over the role of proletariat and whether they were ‘ready’ for Revolution. Once I had this sorted out in my mind, I could return to the rest of the book.

[Was it the right decision to excise these chapters from the main text? Probably, because he does get into the ideological weeds here. But I would have struggled on with the acronyms had I not followed up on the footnote to the appendices. Perhaps he should have sign-posted the appendices better.]

As a journalist, Orwell is a keen observer, and he captures well the boredom of trench warfare, interspersed with times of frantic, bumbling terror. His description of being shot reminded me a little of Tolstoy’s account of the battlefield in War and Peace. I must say, though, that he seems to be a particularly inept soldier, with little solidarity with the Spanish soldiers he was fighting alongside, with whom he could barely converse with his rudimentary Spanish.

And I can see why Anna Funder in Wifedom looked at the space around “my wife” in Orwell’s work and wondered about Eileen O’Shaughnessy. In Orwell’s book, she is this nameless, shapeless figure bobbing around behind the lines (literally), sending parcels, warning her husband, fleeing with him, but always just “my wife”.

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: free as part of Kobo subscription. Inspired to read it by the film ‘The Teacher Who Promised the Sea’.

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‘Madame Brussels: The Life and Times of Melbourne’s Most Notorious Woman’ by Barbara Michinton

Posted on October 15, 2024 | 3 comments
With Philip Bentley, 2024, 254 p. with notes

This book is both companion and expansion of Barbara Minchinton’s The Women of Little Lon (my review here) which looked at the sex work industry in nineteenth century Melbourne. Madame Brussels is one of the brothel keepers that Minchin described in the earlier book as part of the ecology and economy of Melbourne’s brothel precinct, but here she deals with Madame Brussels as biography, rather than one name among others.

Madame Brussels is probably the best known of Melbourne’s ‘flash madams’, now immortalized with her own lane and roof-top bar. She was certainly well known in the late 19th century, too, through her political and policing contacts that largely shielded her from prosecution, court appearances and notoriety. Caroline Hodgson nee Lohmar was born in Germany, married in UK and arrived in Melbourne with her husband ‘Stud’ Hodgson in 1871, shortly after her marriage. She rode the exhilaration of the ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ land boom, suffered the 1890s recession, and was increasingly hemmed in by the ever-tightening moral strictures of the early 20th century.

Soon after her arrival in Melbourne her husband left her to work as a policeman ‘up-country’, returning twenty years later in the depth of the 1890s depression in poor health. Left in a strange city as a deserted wife, she opened a boarding house in Lonsdale Street and gradually began accumulating property adjoining her original purchase, later purchasing property in South Melbourne, Middle Park and Beaconsfield Parade in St Kilda. She presided over her brothels, but there is no evidence that she worked as a sex worker herself. Her brothel attracted politicians and magistrates and there were rumours that Alfred Plumpton, then music critic for The Age and composer, was her lover. Although she appeared in court several times, she was always well represented and almost magically the magistrate’s bench filled up with worthy JPs who were not otherwise active in the courts (but may well have been active in her brothel). She remarried after her first husband’s death, but this marriage to fellow-German Jacob Pohl was no more successful than her first, as he soon left her to live in South Africa for several years. After a couple of years’ absence from the brothel scene, she started up again but times and politics had changed.

In the years preceding the turn of the century she became increasingly name-checked by moral reformers, particularly Henry Varley, and became a regular object of scandal in John Norton’s Truth newspaper (which had plenty of the former, and little of the latter, despite the name). In April 1907, after appearing in court charged under new laws with “owing and operating a disorderly house”, she closed her brothel in Lonsdale Street, and died soon after in 1908. Despite an extravagant funeral, she had little to show for the wealth which had passed through her hands.

As might be expected of a notorious entrepreneur, the sources for her life are skewed by real estate transaction documents and court appearances reported breathlessly by the newspapers. There is a genealogical record, although it is patchy: for example, it is not clear whether her ‘adopted’ daughter Irene was actually her own daughter. There are the annual ‘in memoriam’ notices that she placed in the newspapers after her first husband’s death, as was the practice in the early 20th century. But in terms of letters, diaries etc, there is nothing.

In an afterword Phillip Bentley, who is credited as co-author writes:

…we have remained resolute our desire for all conjecture to have a basis in fact and so have resisted the temptation to speculate on how she overcame her early education towards ‘moral earnestness, humility, self-sacrifice and obedience to authority’ in order to become Melbourne’s most famous brothel madam of the nineteenth century (p. 253)

I’m not absolutely convinced that the authors fulfilled this resolution. There are many times that they raise questions which they leave hanging in the absence of evidence, but the questions are raised nonetheless, couched in “may” and “could” statements. The chapter ‘A Curious Gentlemen’s Club’ I found particularly unconvincing, where the question of flagellation is raised, largely on the basis of her first husband’s uncle’s involvement in the ‘Cannibal Club’ and the presence in Melbourne of journalist George Augustus Sala, who was said to have coined the phrase ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ as well as being the anonymous author of flagellation pornography. As the final paragraph of the ten-page chapter says:

In all the records and writings and newspaper reports examined to date there is no suggestion that Caroline’s establishments offered anything other than ordinary common-or-garden variety male-female sex. There are no wild rumours, no snide passing remarks from journalists or parliamentarians under privilege, in fact no hints at all of anything alone the lines of the ‘fladge brothels’ in London. That does not mean it was not happening of course: it means that if it was, we simply can’t see it. (p. 82)

Likewise the chapter where they raise the question of whether her first husband Stud was homosexual raises the question but then admits “There is no way we can know for certain whether Stud was gay” (p.140). I’m not sure that raising questions, identifying parallels and possible networks is sufficiently rigorous, although surely a temptation when writing a life of such notoriety which provided relatively barren and biassed documentary evidence.

This book stands on its own two feet, but I think that I appreciated it more for having previously read The Women of Little Lon, a book which has firmer evidentiary foundations than this one. But I guess that’s part of the challenge of biography: finding the individual person while confronting the dearth of evidence. Even Phillip Bentley admits that perhaps they have not unpacked her personality as much as they would have liked (p. 253), but certainly the authors have succeeded in bringing out the person behind the name now adopted by popular culture with such glee.

My rating: 7.5/10

Sourced from: Review copy from Black Inc.

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‘A Dirty, Filthy Book’ by Michael Meyer

Posted on September 29, 2024 | 1 comment
2024, 331 pages & notes

Some people seem to live not just one life, but many. Annie Besant was one such woman who went from parson’s wife, to public speaker and publisher, social worker and activist, to university student and Theosophist. Michael Meyer’s book, subtitled ‘Sex, Scandal and One Woman’s Fight in the Victorian Trial of the Century’ focuses particularly on the court case in which she and her colleague Charles Bradlaugh were charged with “unlawfully wickedly knowing wilfully and designedly” printing and publishing “a certain indecent lewd filthy bawdy and obscene book called Fruits of Philosophy” which would bring the subjects of Queen Victoria into “a state of wickedness lewdness debauchery and immorality”, as well as offending against the peace and dignity of the Queen. (p. 140)

Neither of the accused had actually written the book, which was quite an old text written forty years earlier by an American doctor, Charles Knowlton. In fact, Charles Bradlaugh didn’t think much of the book at all, but it was more the principle of making knowledge available at a cheap price (sixpence) that drove Annie and Charles to defend publishing the book in court. They wanted a high profile case, and they got it. Conducted in Westminster Hall (before it burnt down), it was a jury trial held before the Lord Chief Justice Sir Alexander Cockburn. Already an accomplished public speaker, albeit completely untrained in the law, Annie conducted her own defence, and from the extracts published in the newspapers in this widely-discussed trial, she did a damned good job of it too.

She, even more than her co-accused Charles Bradlaugh, had a lot to lose. She had married a clergyman, Rev. Frank Besant at the age of 18, without actually loving her husband but hoping, as a devout Christian, that the role of minister’s wife would be a way through which she could serve the Church and her fellow man. It was an unhappy marriage from the start. She had two children, a son Digby and daughter Mabel, and managed, through her brother, to procure a separation from her husband but he kept custody of her son, and refused a divorce. If found guilty, Annie would lose custody of her daughter as well.

She had lost her faith during her marriage, and after her separation became heavily involved in the National Secularist Society, where she met Charles Bradlaugh. They were very close, although Meyer does not explore whether their relationship was sexual or not. Both were still married, and as public figures, could not expose themselves to scandal. She wrote numerous articles for the National Reformer weekly newspaper published by the NSS and was an accomplished public speaker. It was this experience of debate and public discourse that stood her in good stead in the courtroom at Westminster Hall, but did not shelter her from the fallout of the case. Charles Bradlaugh went on to have a successful political career, being repeatedly re-elected and repeatedly refused being able to take his seat in Parliament because, as a secularist and atheist, he refused to swear on the Bible. As their lives split off in different directions, the obloquy of her atheism prevented her from being able to graduate from the University of London, once they accepted female students, even though she was clearly a brilliant student. She threw herself into social activism in the East End, particularly in leading the Match Girls strike about working conditions and the use of white phosphorous in making lucifer matches at Bryant and May. Over her life, she had been a devout Christian, a strident atheist, and eventually she moved into Theosophy, to which she devoted the latter part of her life. She abjured her earlier publications, and especially the book about birth control methods that she wrote after the court case which was even more explicit than Fruits of Philosophy. It really is as if she had several careers.

In the book, there are parallels drawn between Besant and two other women. The first of these is circus performer Zazel (Rossa Richter) who drew fame for being shot out of cannon, night after night. The second is Queen Victoria herself, who had a much happier experience of married life than Annie Besant did, and whose politics were diametrically opposed. Queen Victoria was not particularly aware of Besant, but she did record her disapproval of Bradlaugh in her diaries.

When I first started reading this book, I enjoyed its breezy tone and discursive narrative but I soon tired of it. In trying to contextualize Besant and her various campaigns, he draws on newspapers to illustrate what else was occurring at the time, and in the end it became a distracting lack of attention- as if he couldn’t bear to let a juicy tidbit pass, without reporting it. I enjoyed his reporting of the court case itself, but the lack of discipline elsewhere in the book detracted from his analysis of the case and its aftermath. Like the court case itself, it all felt a bit tabloid.

The author is a travel writer, which did not surprise me. He is also Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, which did.

Nonetheless, it’s a really interesting story and, despite his digressions, Meyer tells it in an engaging and entertaining style. I just wish that there had been a little less ‘colour’ and more analysis.

My rating: 7.5/10

Read because: I heard a podcast about the book

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

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‘The Iliad’ by Homer

Posted on February 5, 2024 | Leave a comment

I’ve never read The Iliad. I knew bits of it, most particularly the final scenes where the enraged Achilles is dragging the body of Hector around behind his chariot, but I’ve never read the whole thing. I’m not a big audio-book listener either, but in this case I decided to listen to it, knowing that it was originally an oral story. I had audios of the Fagles translation downloaded from who knows where, but they were many separate files and I kept getting lost. So in the end, I succumbed to the prose version by W.H.D. Rouse which felt a bit like cheating. However, I had first been drawn to finally tackle it after listening to a podcast on Achilles, where extracts from The Iliad were read out, and if that narrated version was not prose, then it certainly sounded that way. (The show notes don’t reference the translation). At the same time, I listened to an excellent series of lectures by Michael Dolzani at the Expanding Eyes podcast Episodes 44 to 56, which I have referenced in my I Hear With My Little Ear postings between 23 Oct 2023 and 16 January 2024.

It took me several weeks. Was it worth it? For much of the time, I would have said ‘no’. There are whole books devoted to call-outs to various warriors and their families: you can just imagine the listeners sitting, waiting for their family’s name to be called out, and their triumphant glances when it was. There are many chapters devoted to battles as men are run through the shoulder with swords, eyes plucked out etc etc etc. There are oddly placed chapters that describe ceremonial games held to celebrate a fallen warrior, with the results told in tedious detail.

Above all, there is the image of the hero: brave, fearless, unswervingly loyal. The obverse of the coin: proud, arrogant, stubborn. The image of hero has lured whole contingents of men to their death in its wake.

But there are also moments where we see the heroic ideal held up against other more human traits, most particularly the bond of father and son. This plays out most strongly in the last books of the epic, and these books alone make the rest of the testosterone-driven gore worthwhile.

And worth reading (listening to)? Yes.

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Six degrees of separation: from ‘The Great Fire’ to…

Posted on February 3, 2024 | 7 comments

This month the Six Degrees of Separation meme run by Kate at BooksAreMyFavouriteandBest is a bit different. Instead of her choosing the starting book, she has invited us to start with a book that we have just finished, or read in the last month.

Well, the last book I read was Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire and even though I know that some people love it and have read it multiple times, I wasn’t particularly impressed. But I haven’t posted my review yet, so you’ll just have to wait to find out why.

But, my disappointment in the book notwithstanding, where did it take me?

Despite the title, Hazzard’s book is not about the Great Fire of London at all- instead it’s set in Japan, Hong Kong and China in 1947 as the victorious Western powers occupy the territory. But Claire Tomalin’s Samuel Pepys: the Unequalled Self does deal the Great Fire of London because diarist Samuel Pepys wrote about it. In her biography, Tomalin gives us a rounded view of this 17th century Londoner and although many others have written about Pepys, I don’t think that anyone else could do it better than she has. My review is here.

John Lanchester’s Capital is set in Pepys Road South London in December 2007, just before the Global Financial Crisis. The book follows the little dramas of the inhabitants of Pepys Road in short chapters of just a couple of pages each. Somehow Lanchester filled over 500 pages largely about ordinary lives where nothing much happens and yet left me wanting more. I just loved it, and my review is here.

While we we’re in London, who else should we turn to but Peter Ackroyd, who has written several books about the city. London Under is atmospheric and erudite, steeped in literature and popular culture, especially that of the nineteenth century as he explores the river systems and infrastructure existing like a network under London Streets. The language flows seductively and smoothly in a very easy, beguiling read. My review is here.

Colum McCann’s This Side of Brightness is set underground as well, but this time amongst the men tunneling under the Hudson River for the subway system in 1919. I read it before I start blogging, but I really enjoyed it.

And thinking about New York leads me to Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn. I enjoyed the book enough the first time, but I absolutely loved the movie, and I went back and enjoyed the novel much more on a second reading. There is no back story; small events are told simply and in detail; every little act is described by a narrator who seems to be hovering up in the corner of the room, watching everything. It’s about a young girl who emigrates from Ireland to Brooklyn, and I felt that he described homesickness so well . My review is here.

The main character in Brooklyn left Ireland, while Claire Keegan’s books are firmly set there. They are only short- they’re novellas really- but they’re so beautifully crafted. She wrote the short-story, expanded into a novella that became The Quiet Girl movie which I howled the whole way through. Small Things Like These is set in 1985 as Bill Furlong, a fuel merchant with five children who has lived in his small village all his life, becomes aware of the convent and its power over the children in its ‘care’ and the complicity of the village in turning a blind eye. My review is here.

So, although I might have been less than enamoured with The Great Fire, it has certainly taken me all around the globe!

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 25- 31 December 2023

Posted on January 8, 2024 | 1 comment

Expanding Eyes Episode 51 The Embassy to Achilles deals with Books 9-11. The three men sent to encourage Achilles out of his man-cave all used different approaches: self-interest, guilt and just bewilderment. Achilles responded as if he had been holed up an reading existentialism: that nothing mattered anyway. The Achilles Heel story does not appear in the Iliad, although there is a prophesy of a double fate facing Achilles- either dying in glory or having a long and unremarkable life. Note that Agamennon’s list of gifts to encourage him back does not include an apology for running off with Achilles’ wife (probably the one thing Achilles wanted). Although it seems very to-and-fro, there is a pattern to the interminable fighting in Book 10. Book 11 reveals the aristeia (i.e. high point) of Agamennon’s role in the battle. By now the main people in the Achaean army had received injuries which take them out of the battle. It’s in fact Nestor who first suggests that Patroclus take Achilles’ place on the battlefield.

Episode 52 The Horrors of War and the Value of the Heroic Code There’s a speech about the Heroic Code in Book 12, but it’s hard for me to find anything to admire in it. Michael Dolzani suggests that perhaps one good thing that comes out of it is a sense of competition, but it also spurred countless thousands of British men into the meat grinder of the WWI trenches. William James once suggested that we need a moral equivalent to war. Zeus decides to “look away” and the gods intervene, helping out their favourites, but the battle is going the Trojans’ Way. Meanwhile, Hera, who favoured the Greeks, distracts Zeus with sex.

The Rest is History The Fall of the Aztecs: The Night of Tears (Part 6) This episode focuses on the night of 30th June 1520, La Noche Triste, when the Spanish tried to break out of Tenochtitlan. Montezuma had been killed and they were surrounded by angry Mexica. They made their escape at night and were successful, but it was a bloody event. The Tlaxcalans rejected the Mexica’s pleas to join forces with them to get rid of the Spanish, and instead they joined forces with the Spanish. But another enemy was stalking: smallpox which had already wiped out the Taino people in the Caribbean (necessitating the importation of Africans as a replacement labour force- but that’s another story). It was probably introduced by Narváez, rather than Cortez. The harvest collapsed because there were insufficient workers, so when more Spaniards arrived, the place was deserted. Cortez was determined to wage a European style War, but the Tlaxcalan’s sacrificed and cannibalized their Mexica captives- but Cortez was powerless to stop them. In late 1520 ships were arriving all the time. Meanwhile, in Europe, Charles V was showing off the gold that Cortez had sent to him. A shipbuilder, who had survived La Noche Triste arrived with 12 ships that he had built and had carried overland, and so Cortez was set….

Roger Kidd Georgian House, Lewes, East Sussex https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1111791

History Extra Georgian Grand Houses: the forgotten women who built them. Featuring Amy Boyington, the author of Hidden Patrons: Women and Architectural Patronage in Georgian Britain, this episode highlights the autonomy of heiresses, mistresses and widows in directing the design and construction of houses. Although the men in their families usually paid the accounts, a different picture of women’s involvement emerges from their correspondence (often with other women) where they display their practical concerns over, for example, where the sun would be shining in a dining room on a summer’s night, or how cold a room might be in winter etc. She gives many examples of women and houses, many of which were unfamiliar to me, but would probably be well known among British listeners.

The Philosopher’s Zone (ABC). Richard Rorty and America. I don’t often listen to this program, because it’s often too heavy for me, but I was attracted to the episode on Richard Rorty. I didn’t (don’t) know much about Richard Rorty, but I had heard of him because Inga Clendinnen responded to one of his books where he omitted history from his list of genres which could encourage the growth of our imaginative capabilities. (Inga’s essay Fellow Sufferers is available here). This episode features Chris Voparil who has co-edited a recent collection of the late Rorty’s essays (he died in 2007) called What Can we Hope For: Essays on Politics. In an essay that Rorty wrote in 1996 called ‘Looking Back from 2096’, he predicted the rise of a Trumpesque strongman. He was critical of identity politics, and especially compulsory college courses to raise awareness of Black, Women’s and LGBT identities, pointing out that ‘Trailer Trash’ was never seen as a marginalized group to be championed. Nonetheless, he argued that we get our moral stance from the group that we identify with- literally a form of ‘identity politics’.

Literature and History Episode 11 Who Was Homer? looks at Books 17-24 before then addressing the question of who Homer was and if he even existed. Aeneas pops up in the battle before being whisked away by Poseidon, which went down a treat with the Romans who were to later claim Aeneas as their own. We need to remember that Hector didn’t kill Patrocalus (instead the minor character Euphorbus did), but he did steal Achilles’ armour from him and disrespected his body. The funeral games, which seem to us to be completely incongruous and which take ages are part of a set piece to break up the narrative, and such a device appears in other similar epic poems. The ending is very inconclusive, but that’s because what we know as The Iliad is part of an 8-book poetic cycle, of which we have only Books 2 and 7. From flashbacks in these two books, we know that in Book 3 Achilles is killed, in Book 4 the Trojan Horse appears, in Book 6 Agamennon and Menelaus return, Book 7 is the Odyssey and Book 8 deals with Odysseus’ later adventures. He then moves on to the question of Homer’s identity, something you might have thought he would have done at the start. He suggests that Homer was probably not one man, but the works instead spring from a collective oral tradition. There are many narratives where a band of mates sack a wealthy trading city (Cortez and Tenochitlan spring to my mind) and it is in effect the story of the collapse of the Bronze Age in miniature. Troy was probably part of the Hittite empire. There have been many attempts to date The Iliad, using archeology of weapons mentioned in the narrative; linguistic patterns and the meter of poetry. Although there might not be one Homer the writer, it’s possible that there was one Homer to reciter. Milman Parry (the so-called Darwin of Homeric studies) basing his approach on Yugoslav oral folk songs, looked to the use of formulaic descriptions, rhythm and repetition as a mnemonic aids to remember such a long oral poem.

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