Bosnian Chronicle, by Ivo Andrić

Ivo Andrić's name first came to my attention in my early research for my world books reading project; I had noted him as someone to read for Bosnia. He won the 1961 Nobel Prize for Literature and is probably Bosnia's most well-known writer. Then in 2016, I stumbled across and later read Meša Selimović's The Fortress, and so seeking out Bosnian novels was no longer a top priority for me. I really can't remember what exactly it was that prompted me to order Selimović's Death and the Dervish early in quarantine, but I did and I started reading it in August. I brought it with me on the trip I took to the Finger Lakes in upstate New York, and while browsing at Buffalo Street Books in Ithaca, I came across Bosnian Chronicle. Like the two Selimović books, Bosnian Chronicle is set during Ottoman rule. I was really enjoying Death and the Dervish and thought it would be interesting to compare the books' perspectives, so as soon as I finished the former, I started on Bosnian Chronicle. This was back in October, and I read about half of it then, before I set it aside to read a succession of book club books and some other books I was more in the mood for. But I was determined to finish it in 2020, and so in the last 3 days I read the second half. (What remains to be seen is if I will finish the other book I had hoped to finish in 2020 by the end of tomorrow.)

Despite their common settings and, frankly, similarly slow pace, Bosnian Chronicle is quite different from Death and the Dervish. The title of the book is sometimes translated as The Time of the Consuls, because the book centers on the French, and to a lesser extent the Austrian, consuls who have settled in the regional capital Travnik to advance their governments' respective interests with the local Ottoman authorities. Bosnia was a strategic location, with the French controlling the Dalmatian coast to the south and with the Austro-Hungarian border to the north, but it was also a backwater. Not just the French and Austrian consuls, but also the Ottoman viziers (local governors) feel that they've been relegated to an out-of-the way place, uncivilized and lawless. The characterization of Bosnia as backwards and forlorn struck me as surprising, coming from a Bosnian writer.* The book really seems to take the view of the consuls, who come from the heart of civilized Europe and are infected with "Oriental fever," a sense of malaise and helplessness on the Eastern frontier. 

I also had some trouble reconciling the populace in Selimović's books with that in Andrić's. I learned somewhere in relation to my reading of Death and the Dervish that Sarajevo at roughly the turn of the 19th Century, was divided into neighborhoods/districts. I forget the exact numbers, but something like 80 of these districts were Muslim, 12 Orthodox Christian, and 4 Jewish, which suggests to me an overwhelmingly Muslim country. And yet, in the Andrić (which I will grant, takes place in a different city), regular Muslims (i.e., not Ottoman officials) seem barely present. Though perhaps it's just that the consuls don't interact with them. Meanwhile, they do interact with the local Catholics, the Orthodox leaders, and with the Jews.** 

Bosnian Chronicle spans a seven year period, during which world events far from Bosnia loom large, but not much changes in Bosnia itself. There is unrest in Istanbul, there are two wars between France and Austria, there is Napoleon's attempted expansion into Russia, and his eventual downfall and change of government in France. The local Ottoman vizier is replaced, then replaced again. Through all of this, the consuls sit in Travnik awaiting news and sending reports of local activity out into the ether, where there is no suggestion they are ever read. Which is very much the mood of the book itself: not much happens. What Andrić does beautifully is deep character studies, not just of the central figures in the story, but here and there of regular people as well, some of whom have no bearing on the events in the book. 

This is rather incidental to the book overall, but I've long had a fascination with the survival of the Ladino language into the 20th Century and there was an odd but really beautiful moment at almost the very end of Bosnian Chronicle where one of Travnik's Jewish elders comes to visit the French consul to offer his help for the consul's return trip to France. They have a stumbling conversation, but then Andrić goes on to write a two-page approximation of what the elder would have said if he could articulate himself better. He writes about the Jewish expulsion from Spain and the sense of loss that survived over generations and centuries. "Cut off completely from our own people and those close to us, we endeavour to preserve what is Spanish -- songs and food and customs -- but we feel everything in us changing, being spoiled and forgotten. We remember the language of our country, as we brought it with us three centuries ago and as it is no longer spoken even there, and we stutter comically in the language of the rayah with whom we suffer and of the Turks who rule us." This bit is extracted from somewhere in the middle, but the whole thing was so moving for me. Andrić wrote Bosnian Chronicle during World War II, which makes this passage feel particularly significant. I was very surprised to learn that Andrić was in fact the Yugoslavian ambassador to Germany at the start of the war, but perhaps this gave him extra insight into its methods. The Sephardic population of Bosnia was almost completely decimated in the war. According to this article, there were only four Ladino speakers left in Sarajevo in 2016. 

This was a slow read -- sometimes painfully so, but I'm very glad I kept at it. The end, where the French consul realizes that things have come full circle for him and the path forward he had always imagined is does not go forward at all, was particularly beautiful. 

*When I was reading Death and the Dervish I somewhere came across a reference that said Andrić and Selimović as well, toward the end of his life, allied themselves with Serbia though they were both from Bosnia. What exactly this meant for people living in then-unified Yugoslavia is not entirely clear to me (I really feel I need to read more about the history of the region), but I gather that Serbia was the cultural and intellectual center and that even in unified Yugoslavia, Bosnia's status as a backwater remained. (The events after the breakdown of Yugoslavia seem to suggest this to me as well.) In fact, Serbia hangs in the background of Bosnian Chronicle quite a bit, and it's hard not to read into it a little. The Christian Serbians resisted Ottoman rule, and year after year the Ottomans of Bosnia wage war in Serbia against the infidels, but the subjugation of Serbia is elusive. 

**In looking for the source of those numbers I estimated, I pulled out Death and the Dervish, and something like what I've just written is actually addressed in the introduction. Says Henry Cooper, Jr., who wrote the introduction in 1996 or thereabouts, "Selimović's Bosnia is extraordinarily uniform. In this regard it bears no resemblance whatsoever either to the colorful variegatedness of Andrić's Bosnia, or to the reality of the country, which was once celebrated as a multiethnic, multicultural, multireligious society and is now being punished for it."

Roseanna, by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

I said I was going to go back to one of the books I started earlier this year but have yet to finish, and I did read one more chapter of Ivo Andrić's Bosnian Chronicle (I still hope to finish it this year), but then I decided to do the other thing I said I might do, which was read one of the Sjöwall/Wahlöö Martin Beck mysteries. Maj Sjöwall died in May of this year, having outlived Per Wahlöö by 45 years, which somehow strikes me as really sad. I'm a completist by nature, which means that my impulse when approaching novel series is always to start at the beginning. With mystery novels, this usually isn't strictly necessary, but it's hard for me to do otherwise. In fact, I think this impulse sometimes keeps me from reading mystery novels because I feel I must start in the right place, and then what if I don't have book two? And perhaps I wait until I have a good chunk of the series from the beginning before I start, which means I never start because the way I acquire books is mostly happenstance.*

With Martin Beck, I broke my own rule. I don't think I ever thought I would read others in the series, or perhaps when I read The Locked Room (the eighth of ten in the series) I didn't even know it was part of a series. I can't remember. It seems to me that I had gotten it into my head that The Locked Room was an important book. At the time, I think I'd read very few mystery novels and also was not completely hooked on BBC mystery TV programs. Although I had previously read -- many years before -- Paul Auster's The Locked Room, I didn't know "the locked room" as a mystery trope. I thought it was all down to this book. But Sjöwall/Wahlöö's The Locked Room is a lot more than a locked room mystery. The detectives get it wrong -- and it's truly satisfying. (I always say I love TV murder mysteries because there's a formula and you know you will have the satisfaction of a resolution in 45-90 minutes. My appetite in books is different, and I wonder if I would enjoy The Locked Room if it were a TV program?) 

Anyway, several years ago, I read The Locked Room. I liked it. I moved on. Then, a couple months ago I found Roseanna at my local Little Free Library. A few weeks after that, I found the second of the Martin Beck novels, The Man Who Went Up In Smoke at a thrift store. So, here I am with the first two books in the series and my impulse toward completion and a couple days ago I decided to start at the beginning. I didn't think Roseanna was nearly as interesting as The Locked Room, but I enjoyed reading it and found particular satisfaction in picking out clues as it went along. I don't think I'll jump right into book two, but at least I have it for when the mood strikes.

* They're not mysteries, but for years, I've intended to read Émile Zola's complete Rougon-Macquart books. Of the 20 book cycle, I have 13, including the first but not the second. I've actually already read books 8 and 17, but this completist impulse makes me feel I need to start at the top and proceed from there. Maybe 2021 will be my Zola year? (I say this every year. If anyone wants to start a Zola book club, please ... join me.)

The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain

I started my extended holiday break from work this afternoon around 2:30. I'm off until January 4. With the eight days left in the year, I plan to finish at least 2 of the books I've started but not yet finished this year. But this morning, I decided to clean my apartment before starting work instead of picking up a book. When I logged off this afternoon, I thought about picking up one of those books and I just wasn't in the mood. And so I looked at my shelves and I considered Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (and it has just come to my attention that Sjöwall died this year, so maybe I should read one of their books next!), but I looked to the left on my shelf and saw the slim copy of The Postman Always Rings Twice and thought I could probably finish it in an afternoon. I did, in just over two hours. 

I am, at this moment, listening to a recording of Maria Callas performing an aria from Don Carlo and I had a thought: The Postman Always Rings Twice could be an opera. I didn't have this thought when I was reading it, or when I started writing this over two hours ago (I broke for dinner), but now that I've had this thought, I'll expand on it. A quality of many operas that I've always found rather hilarious, when I step back and look dispassionately at it, is the spareness and speed of plot development. This was exactly the feeling I had reading The Postman Always Rings Twice. This book was all plot, there's no character development: you only understand them (if you understand them, which is an open question) through the plot. Nearly every new development seems to come out of left field. This may sound like criticism, but it's not entirely. (Have I mentioned that I love opera, and the humor I find in the sparse plots is one of the things I find endearing about it?)

I read Mildred Pierce several years ago, and it was not at all what I was expecting. Reading it, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it never quite did. I was anticipating destitution, but that's not where it went. Thinking back on it now, maybe that ominous feeling I had while reading it was one of the book's strengths. My only other exposure to James M. Cain comes from the movie adaptation of Double Indemnity, which I've seen more times than I can say. There was a fleeting moment, while reading The Postman Always Rings Twice, where I remembered Mildred Pierce and thought maybe things would turn out okay for the protagonists. Unlike Mildred Pierce, though, they're murderers, so of course it doesn't. Double Indemnity is the closer relation. (The murdered husbands even have the same insurance policy! Was it actually routine that getting killed in a railway accident paid out double in the 1930s?!) But where in Double Indemnity, one character is played and one is the player, The Postman Always Rings Twice is actually a bit more complex. The deed the protagonists share turns them against each other, just when their interests should be aligned. 

Anyway, if someone wants to make a tragic opera from The Postman Always Rings Twice, please credit me. Thanks!

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong

I proposed reading On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous for my book club, in a way, so I could read it and get it off my shelf. And it's good to see that some others really liked it. My own reaction boils down to, "It's not for me." (A phrase I use most often, which is quite often indeed, to excuse myself for not being interested in prestige television.)

Should I enumerate the ways I feel I was perhaps unfair to this book? Firstly, I was never sure I wanted to read it in the first place. A friend sent it to me with a tepid appraisal (she was sending me The Nickel Boys anyway and offered to throw this in too, noting her own ambivalence about it). My friend's assessment -- and also the assessments I kept seeing was, approximately, "The language is beautiful, but..." So, yes, I was biased against it going in.

Secondly, I was rushed. I intended to start reading it at least a day or two earlier than I did. But, as I have written, I set aside all other reading last week to devote some time to John le Carré. So, as it turned out, I started reading On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous the day before yesterday, and didn't get very far that first day. I read a bit more yesterday, but I read the bulk of it today -- before work, at lunch, and after work. 

Furthermore, knowing I had to get to this ahead of my book club meeting today, I really crammed in the le Carré immediately before turning to On Earth... I read 300 pages of The Constant Gardener on Saturday (which is more pages than the entirety of On Earth...), finishing it after 10:00 that night. Le Carré left me craving action (I watched two Jason Bourne movies in as many days for satiation), so the Vuong could hardly be further from what I wanted in the moment. (Perhaps it will at least serve to change my frame of mind as I attempt to read the two other books I hope to finish in 2020, neither of which is heavy on action.)

There were pieces that I found beautiful. There were pieces that resonated. But I have the sense, partly, to be sure, because of my haste in reading, but also I think because of the book itself -- its form and style -- that in a few months, a few years this will be a book that I remember I have read but can't tell you a thing about.

The Constant Gardener, by John le Carré

Before my friend Michael, a fellow karaoke enthusiast, left New York (and in the days when one could still do karaoke), we had a tradition of honoring the deaths of beloved musicians by going out for karaoke and singing their songs. When we got the news of a death, we would convene for an "emergency" karaoke outing. In this way, we celebrated George Michael, Tom Petty, David Bowie, and some others that I'm surely forgetting. It was in the spirit of this tradition that I read The Constant Gardener this week.

I had started another book after finishing Love, but on hearing the news of John le Carré's death a week ago, I decided to stop everything and read something of his. Over the years, I'd read what I think of as the biggies: The Spy Who Came in from The Cold; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; and A Perfect Spy. Some years ago I heard or read an interview with le Carré in which he was asked which were his favorite of his own books and he included among them The Constant Gardener. This must be what prompted me to buy it used in a crappy mass market movie tie-in edition on some trip; I don't remember where. 

I had seen the movie in theaters when it was new, but it was so long ago I was pleased to find I only recalled the barest details of the story. In fact, for the first 100 pages or so I was so confused about how the story was centered that I stopped to look up the movie's cast to confirm what I thought I remembered: that Ralph Fiennes, who graced the cover of my book, played the widowed husband, a comparably minor character until the story starts to follow him on page 119. And this brings me to one of the brilliant things about the book: le Carré manages to give the reader an almost first-person intimacy with his characters, while writing in the third person. The narrative also deftly jumps through time, weaving memories and apparitions into present day. Another thing that surprised me in the book with my sparse recollection of the movie was that at the opening of the book, Tessa Quayle (Rachel Weisz) was already dead. It's strange to have a central character already dead, but the past features strongly in the book and at its core, this is a murder mystery. The end was perfect and heartbreaking, and I feel like the movie can't possibly have ended in the way the book did though I honestly don't remember. I was anticipating justice, and its absence caught me off guard: until I remembered every other John le Carré book I've read (particularly The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which ends like a punch in the gut). 

So, even though I have a stack of books I've started but not finished, plus another book I need to read by Tuesday for my book club, I'm glad I set everything aside to read The Constant Gardener and to spend the week after his death with John le Carré.

Love, by Elizabeth von Arnim

I've lost a lot of my vanity as I've aged, and I've truly found it to be very freeing. If anything, these last 9 months have cemented my anti-vain impulse more firmly. I started cutting my own hair in April and chopped off most of it in August. I often lamented how a professional life in New York seemed to demand make-up, so going without it for most of this year has been a welcome change.  I suspect there's been an increase in the number of grey hairs I have, but beyond that, I don't feel like this year has aged me. Of course, I have no exposure to a young person in the bloom of health to tell me otherwise. In fact, I don't really see anyone, particularly bare-faced, so who might look at me and say, "Wow, these months have aged you?" (I could veer off course here to finally write my angry screed about the cult of skincare, through which good skin seems to have been imbued with the weight of morality, but I won't.)

Love is a book about the relationship between Catherine, a woman a couple years older than I am, and Christopher, a man in his mid-20s. To further complicate things, Catherine is a widow with a daughter, aged 19, whose husband is Catherine's age (in fact, a year older) and is a minister. And her daughter is pregnant -- about to make Catherine a grandmother. The first half of this book, which follows Catherine and Christopher's courtship, is a comedy of manners. Christopher is a persistent, insistent admirer, who seems to have no care for Catherine's age. Even when she tells him she has an adult daughter, he's not put off. His attention and affection rejuvenate her, after a decade of never being seen as a woman independent of her role as a mother. Following her daughter's marriage, she's become even more inconsequential as she's been forced to relocate to her late husband's London apartment, while her daughter and her husband move into the family estate. With Christopher, she finds a new enjoyment of life, and a youth she never experienced in her own youth, thanks to the fact that she also had married a much older man when she was quite young. After a misunderstanding leads Catherine's son-in-law to believe she's having sexual relationship with Christopher, he pressures them to marry with the threat of not allowing Catherine to see her daughter otherwise. Christopher is thrilled and Catherine accepts it as a necessity in order to see her daughter, and decides she loves Christopher besides. Up through this moment, Love is hilarious. But in the second half of the book, things take a darker turn. Catherine feels herself aging and becomes preoccupied with the fear that Christopher will one day wake up and see her as she really is (or as she really sees herself) -- a tired, old woman. I had mixed feelings through much of the second half, and particularly bristling was the suggestion that Catherine really had aged so much -- perhaps because she was just a couple years older than me (though I'm not a widowed mother, to be fair). But then things took a totally unexpected turn in the last few chapters, and I actually found myself loving the way the book ended -- though it was a long way from the lighthearted first half.

Love was evidently loosely based on a real relationship that Elizabeth von Arnim had when she was in her 50s (a decade older than Catherine) with a man in his early 20s. I'm not sure why, but I've always find myself oddly drawn to traditional-gender-swapped May-December relationships. But reading this makes them sounds a bit heartbreaking. Do women, already under disproportionate pressure to maintain beauty and youth, in this circumstance apply that pressure to themselves doubly to keep the interest of a young partner?