I have been immersed in Robert Caro's epic biography of Lyndon Johnson--which is quite a reading experience. The first two volumes, The Path to Power and Means of Ascent are behind me and now I begin The Master of the Senate, which begins with Johnson's questionable victory in the 1948 Senate race in his home state of Texas. I can only hope that Caro is almost finished with the fourth and final volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson because I want to know the whole story.
I don't think I've ever read anything quite like these books, and I have to say that I started them under protest. But after only a few pages I was hooked, this despite the considerable physical challenges. So far I've tried a tray, a pillow and my knees--all of them only partially satisfactory; and when I picked up the third volume, the heftiest so far, I almost went straight to Amazon and ordered a Kindle.
There are so many reasons to find these books an absorbing reading experience that it's hard to know which to put first. But above all, Caro is a fine writer, with an eye and an ear for his topic. On the one hand, I can't imagine anyone doing a better job of making the Texas hill country from whence Johnson came so vivid, and on another, his sensitivity to Johnson's character and his knowledge of it seem extraordinary. He also convinces the reader that he has left no stone unturned in his research, in his account, for instance, of the 1948 Senate race that saved Johnson's political career and paved the way to the presidency. This part of the story reads like a thriller, filled with unforgettable characters.
On hearing that I was reading Caro, someone remarked that she didn't think Johnson was worth writing about, a comment to which I could not find an answer because there are so many reasons. Caro argues that LBJ's ascent marked a transformation of American politics, that there is a before LBJ and an after. Granted, he does not emerge as either an admirable or a likable man--quite the contrary--but in terms of his understanding of power and the growth of modern politics, well, one has to grant him a certain greatness, even if it's the greatness of a Mephistopheles.
So if you are interested in character, politics, American history, the role of political power in this country, or just fine writing, read Caro--you won't be sorry even if your knees hurt afterwards from the sheer weight of the books.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Two Vietnam Novels
A few weeks ago two novels about Vietnam were reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review by Danielle Trussoni. Somewhat reluctantly, I put both of them on my library order list. Trussoni is not my favorite novelist and lately I've grown suspicious of rave reviews. Who is scratching whose back, I always wonder. But now that I've read both books I'm eating a large dish of humble crow and telling others about them.
The first to arrive was The Lotus Eaters, a first novel by Tatjana Solis. For those of you who might have forgotten, in the Odyssey Odysseus reports that some of his fellow battle-weary Greek veterans were lured into eating the "honey-sweet fruit of the lotos," which made them forgetful of the "homeward way." Tennyson picked up the episode in his poem "The Lotos-Eaters," to imagine Odysseus/Ulysses bemoaning his fellow mariners' longing to languish on the Lotos-eaters' island rather than "labor in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar" to the point even of death.
Solis's lotus eaters are American journalists in Vietnam, drugged on the opiate of war and not eager to go home. Helen, a 32-year-old photographer who has abandoned her safe life at home for the chance to depict the war in which her brother has died, finds herself in an affair with Darrow, a prize-winning photographer with a complicated marital situation. He is killed, and later in the book there is a marvelous scene in which Helen takes a few of his possessions to his widow--it's not at all what one expects, and is all the better for it. Somewhere in the middle of all this, she falls in love with Linh, his Vietnamese assistant with a complicated past that includes some involvement with the other side and a dead wife and child. It's a good choice though, as he is by far the superior human being, wise beyond his years and deeply in love with her. What is unlikely about their relationship becomes totally believable in Solis's capable hands. Linh is a great character.
What stands out in this novel is the degree to which it conveys the hallucinatory, morally ambivalent, seductive atmosphere of wartime Vietnam--one can almost smell the place and feel the weight of the air. The notion that war is a drug that that turns its participants into addicts is not a new idea but this novel really shows how it happens, especially in the character of Helen, who knows better but shoots up anyway. Her semi-abandonment of Linh, partially selfish, partially not, exemplifies the contradictions in her character. But worry not, the novel has a satisfying ending, one that redeems her without simplifying. All in all, it's a great read.
Karl Marlantes' Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War, also a first novel, is very different. Focused on Bravo Company, a rifle platoon of 40 Marines led by second lieutenant Waino Mellas, it is about war, plain and simple, and a complicated war that the US lost at that. Marlantes served as a Marine and it shows; I'm not sure I've ever read any account of war that convinced me it was the real thing as this one does.
Matterhorn is the name given to a hill between Laos and the DMZ where Mellas's company is ordered to build a fire-support base, only the first of almost impossible tasks they are meant to carry out--it will only get worse. There were moments when I wondered to myself if I really wanted to know so much about leeches, jungle rot, fever, rotting corpses, immersion foot, etc., but what kept me reading was the human factor, beginning with the appealing Mellas, a reservist with a Princeton degree and an understandable lack of self-confidence in the face of the impossible tasks asked of him by the unsympathetic brass who give them their orders.
The Marines of Bravo Company are a polyglot lot with some big racial problems that frequently turn violent, only complicating an already complicated situation.
Mellas growing understanding of the tragedy, the futility, the uselessness, the horror of the war is the crux of the book and Marlantes is very good at tracing this process, always in human terms. In this sense, it's a heartbreaking book with a universal impact. In one sense, The Lotus-Eaters, fine as it is, is a narrower novel. Yes, addiction to war, or war porno, as it has been called, is universal, but not to the extent that the human experience of battle is. In this respect, Matterhorn brought to mind Caroline Alexander's wonderful The War That Killed Achilles, a reading of the Iliad with an emphasis on its implications for our understanding of the boundless human cost of war.
In short, Marlantes has written what seems to me a major novel, one that goes well beyond the Vietnam War. And it does have, fortunately, an excellent glossary for those of us less familiar with the terminology of the conflict.
The first to arrive was The Lotus Eaters, a first novel by Tatjana Solis. For those of you who might have forgotten, in the Odyssey Odysseus reports that some of his fellow battle-weary Greek veterans were lured into eating the "honey-sweet fruit of the lotos," which made them forgetful of the "homeward way." Tennyson picked up the episode in his poem "The Lotos-Eaters," to imagine Odysseus/Ulysses bemoaning his fellow mariners' longing to languish on the Lotos-eaters' island rather than "labor in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar" to the point even of death.
Solis's lotus eaters are American journalists in Vietnam, drugged on the opiate of war and not eager to go home. Helen, a 32-year-old photographer who has abandoned her safe life at home for the chance to depict the war in which her brother has died, finds herself in an affair with Darrow, a prize-winning photographer with a complicated marital situation. He is killed, and later in the book there is a marvelous scene in which Helen takes a few of his possessions to his widow--it's not at all what one expects, and is all the better for it. Somewhere in the middle of all this, she falls in love with Linh, his Vietnamese assistant with a complicated past that includes some involvement with the other side and a dead wife and child. It's a good choice though, as he is by far the superior human being, wise beyond his years and deeply in love with her. What is unlikely about their relationship becomes totally believable in Solis's capable hands. Linh is a great character.
What stands out in this novel is the degree to which it conveys the hallucinatory, morally ambivalent, seductive atmosphere of wartime Vietnam--one can almost smell the place and feel the weight of the air. The notion that war is a drug that that turns its participants into addicts is not a new idea but this novel really shows how it happens, especially in the character of Helen, who knows better but shoots up anyway. Her semi-abandonment of Linh, partially selfish, partially not, exemplifies the contradictions in her character. But worry not, the novel has a satisfying ending, one that redeems her without simplifying. All in all, it's a great read.
Karl Marlantes' Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War, also a first novel, is very different. Focused on Bravo Company, a rifle platoon of 40 Marines led by second lieutenant Waino Mellas, it is about war, plain and simple, and a complicated war that the US lost at that. Marlantes served as a Marine and it shows; I'm not sure I've ever read any account of war that convinced me it was the real thing as this one does.
Matterhorn is the name given to a hill between Laos and the DMZ where Mellas's company is ordered to build a fire-support base, only the first of almost impossible tasks they are meant to carry out--it will only get worse. There were moments when I wondered to myself if I really wanted to know so much about leeches, jungle rot, fever, rotting corpses, immersion foot, etc., but what kept me reading was the human factor, beginning with the appealing Mellas, a reservist with a Princeton degree and an understandable lack of self-confidence in the face of the impossible tasks asked of him by the unsympathetic brass who give them their orders.
The Marines of Bravo Company are a polyglot lot with some big racial problems that frequently turn violent, only complicating an already complicated situation.
Mellas growing understanding of the tragedy, the futility, the uselessness, the horror of the war is the crux of the book and Marlantes is very good at tracing this process, always in human terms. In this sense, it's a heartbreaking book with a universal impact. In one sense, The Lotus-Eaters, fine as it is, is a narrower novel. Yes, addiction to war, or war porno, as it has been called, is universal, but not to the extent that the human experience of battle is. In this respect, Matterhorn brought to mind Caroline Alexander's wonderful The War That Killed Achilles, a reading of the Iliad with an emphasis on its implications for our understanding of the boundless human cost of war.
In short, Marlantes has written what seems to me a major novel, one that goes well beyond the Vietnam War. And it does have, fortunately, an excellent glossary for those of us less familiar with the terminology of the conflict.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Lenin, etc.
Conspirator: Lenin In Exile by Helen Rappaport is the story of the "making of a revolutionary." Although the basic material has been well covered by Robert Service's definitive (and fascinating) Lenin: A Biography (2002), this account of the early years is an accessible survey of the rise of the man who might be said to have turned the world upside down. He didn't do it alone, but without him the Russian Revolution would not have happened, at least not as it did. Reading Rappaport, I still found it hard to accept that the raggle-taggle group of refugees she describes, poverty-stricken, given to infighting, and pursued by secret police, accomplished what they did.
Nobody has every pretended that Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was a lovable man; in fact, it's hard to feel any sympathy for him. Yet one can't help admiring his intellect, drive and capacity to persuade his followers of the inevitability of the socialist revolution. His relentless drive is on full display in Rappaport's description of his years of exile along with the long-suffering Nadezhda Krupskaya and her faithful mother. Always short of money, the three went from one spartan lodging to another across Europe. The tales of doctrinal arguments between the numerous factions in convention after convention, always in smoke-filled rooms, make--believe it or not--for lively reading. I was especially taken with the tale of Lenin's visit to Maxim Gorky on Capri, where Gorky's villa was a "magnet for every Russian exile on Capri." Lenin enjoyed playing chess on the terrace and walking around the island. It's hard to imagine.
But there are a few such human moments, the most telling when he returned to Russia in the infamous sealed train. Rappaport writes that on "that cold night in April 1917, on the huge square outside the Finland Station, Lenin finally saw the Russian masses as they really were and witnessed what Nadya called 'the grand and solemn beauty of the Revolution' in all is visceral power and immediacy--an experience he had missed in 1905."
Ah, but if he could only see St. Petersburg today, with its luxury hotels and affluent shops. When we were in Russia a few years ago we dined one sunny evening on the edge of Red Square, right across from Lenin's tomb. What a contrast--the Italian-style cafe where we ate, and the somber red block that we all remember from old newsreels. From where he lies the old man has an excellent view of the glitzy shopping mall that has taken the place of dreary Gumm. How he would hate it.
I put down Rappaport's book and picked up Elena Gorokhova's memoir, A Mountain of Crumbs. Gorokhova, who lives in the States now, was born in Leningrad in the mid-1950s. Her father having died early, she and her half-sister were raised by their mother, a doctor and a faithful child of the Soviet Union--Lenin would have applauded her dedication to his revolutionary values. But the world he made, with the help of Stalin, is depicted here as a place with barely enough to eat and of sensual and material deprivation.
It is also a place of regimentation and adherence to the government line. Elena, for example, describes the ritual of becoming a Young Pioneer. The children are encouraged to admire Pavlik Morozov, the apochryphal son of a rich peasant who turns his own father in for hoarding wheat. In her own mind, Elena begins to question authority. In time she learns English and guides foreign students around her city, seeing it through their eyes. Still, it's her home and her country, but feelings of loyalty are not enough to prevent her from marrying one of the foreigners, an American, who suggests marriage as a way of escape for her. Marry him she does, and begins a new life in the US.
The pleasures in this book, and there are many, lie in Elena's descriptions of how and and her mother and sister lived. She writes of her beloved grandparents and their dacha, where they hunted for mushrooms. Less happily, she describes trips to the communal dentist, the search for proper food for a party, and the struggle to find color in their daily life. One can argue that her life was better not because of but despite the revolution, but then there is her mother's deep and unspoken disillusionment with the ideals to which she gave her life.
In the end, I longed to know more about Elena's later life here--all we know is that she divorced her savior, married again, had a child, and brought her mother and sister here--the photos show happy women enjoying life--I hope so.
Nobody has every pretended that Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was a lovable man; in fact, it's hard to feel any sympathy for him. Yet one can't help admiring his intellect, drive and capacity to persuade his followers of the inevitability of the socialist revolution. His relentless drive is on full display in Rappaport's description of his years of exile along with the long-suffering Nadezhda Krupskaya and her faithful mother. Always short of money, the three went from one spartan lodging to another across Europe. The tales of doctrinal arguments between the numerous factions in convention after convention, always in smoke-filled rooms, make--believe it or not--for lively reading. I was especially taken with the tale of Lenin's visit to Maxim Gorky on Capri, where Gorky's villa was a "magnet for every Russian exile on Capri." Lenin enjoyed playing chess on the terrace and walking around the island. It's hard to imagine.
But there are a few such human moments, the most telling when he returned to Russia in the infamous sealed train. Rappaport writes that on "that cold night in April 1917, on the huge square outside the Finland Station, Lenin finally saw the Russian masses as they really were and witnessed what Nadya called 'the grand and solemn beauty of the Revolution' in all is visceral power and immediacy--an experience he had missed in 1905."
Ah, but if he could only see St. Petersburg today, with its luxury hotels and affluent shops. When we were in Russia a few years ago we dined one sunny evening on the edge of Red Square, right across from Lenin's tomb. What a contrast--the Italian-style cafe where we ate, and the somber red block that we all remember from old newsreels. From where he lies the old man has an excellent view of the glitzy shopping mall that has taken the place of dreary Gumm. How he would hate it.
I put down Rappaport's book and picked up Elena Gorokhova's memoir, A Mountain of Crumbs. Gorokhova, who lives in the States now, was born in Leningrad in the mid-1950s. Her father having died early, she and her half-sister were raised by their mother, a doctor and a faithful child of the Soviet Union--Lenin would have applauded her dedication to his revolutionary values. But the world he made, with the help of Stalin, is depicted here as a place with barely enough to eat and of sensual and material deprivation.
It is also a place of regimentation and adherence to the government line. Elena, for example, describes the ritual of becoming a Young Pioneer. The children are encouraged to admire Pavlik Morozov, the apochryphal son of a rich peasant who turns his own father in for hoarding wheat. In her own mind, Elena begins to question authority. In time she learns English and guides foreign students around her city, seeing it through their eyes. Still, it's her home and her country, but feelings of loyalty are not enough to prevent her from marrying one of the foreigners, an American, who suggests marriage as a way of escape for her. Marry him she does, and begins a new life in the US.
The pleasures in this book, and there are many, lie in Elena's descriptions of how and and her mother and sister lived. She writes of her beloved grandparents and their dacha, where they hunted for mushrooms. Less happily, she describes trips to the communal dentist, the search for proper food for a party, and the struggle to find color in their daily life. One can argue that her life was better not because of but despite the revolution, but then there is her mother's deep and unspoken disillusionment with the ideals to which she gave her life.
In the end, I longed to know more about Elena's later life here--all we know is that she divorced her savior, married again, had a child, and brought her mother and sister here--the photos show happy women enjoying life--I hope so.
A Magical Room
I enjoyed Simon Mawer's The Glass Room. Strictly speaking it's historical fiction, in the sense that the author focuses on the impact of the political on the personal. Yet for the most part Mawer avoids the rigid quid pro quo that too often makes such work rigidly obvious. Chechoslovakia commissioned by Viktor Landauer and his bride Liesel in the years between the two world wars. Landauer, a wealthy (and Jewish) manufacturer of motor cars, is intrigued by the possibilities of a different sort of life that he finds inherent in the work of Rainer von Abt, a fictional architect clearly influenced by the Bauhaus movement. In fact, in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books there was a photo of a house that looked very much like what von Abt designs for the Landauers.
The glass room is the heart of the house, open to the light, and with windows that disappear to let nature in. As such, it becomes a symbol of what is best about the Landauer's life, such as their freedom, and also what is most threatening. For both of them, it becomes a symbol not just of beauty and the good life--the Landauers have two children--but of sexual fulfillment and transgression--as the years past, Liesel has a lesbian affair with her best friend, Hana, and Viktor begins a long and complex affair with a woman he picks up off the streets in Vienna and whom later becomes a central part of the Landauers' lives. The glass room figures significantly in all of this, both literally and figuratively.
The reader knows all along that the war is going to disrupt this family's life and soon it does. In time they begin a new life in America, but not before the house is taken over by the Nazis and used for quasi-scientific experiments to establish the degeneracy of the Jews. After them come the Communists, with a former servant reinvented as a Commissar there to greet Liesel when she returns years later, blind but still able to feel the power of her beloved house and room.
All in all, Mawer's novel is good reading. The Landauers are both believable characters, as is the all-important Hana. The town in which they live, their friends and family, the scene in Vienna, all this is vividly shown. There are two scenes on the ferris wheel in Vienna--remember The Third Man?--that took me right there. I felt, however, that the ending was much too contrived, as if Mawer was determined to tie everything up, to provide a tidy closure to a situation that was anything but.
The glass room is the heart of the house, open to the light, and with windows that disappear to let nature in. As such, it becomes a symbol of what is best about the Landauer's life, such as their freedom, and also what is most threatening. For both of them, it becomes a symbol not just of beauty and the good life--the Landauers have two children--but of sexual fulfillment and transgression--as the years past, Liesel has a lesbian affair with her best friend, Hana, and Viktor begins a long and complex affair with a woman he picks up off the streets in Vienna and whom later becomes a central part of the Landauers' lives. The glass room figures significantly in all of this, both literally and figuratively.
The reader knows all along that the war is going to disrupt this family's life and soon it does. In time they begin a new life in America, but not before the house is taken over by the Nazis and used for quasi-scientific experiments to establish the degeneracy of the Jews. After them come the Communists, with a former servant reinvented as a Commissar there to greet Liesel when she returns years later, blind but still able to feel the power of her beloved house and room.
All in all, Mawer's novel is good reading. The Landauers are both believable characters, as is the all-important Hana. The town in which they live, their friends and family, the scene in Vienna, all this is vividly shown. There are two scenes on the ferris wheel in Vienna--remember The Third Man?--that took me right there. I felt, however, that the ending was much too contrived, as if Mawer was determined to tie everything up, to provide a tidy closure to a situation that was anything but.
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