Book Review: Hildegard of Bingen: A Visionary Life

Sabina Flanagan's Hildegard of Bingen: A Visionary Life had been gathering dust on a bookshelf at the Retirement Bunker for years. I'm not sure where it came from; it's a trade paperback so odds are that either I or the Younger Daughter ordered it from the Quality Paperback Book Club back in the '90s and then never got aorund to reading it. We both like history and we both have a passing interest in the Middle Ages, although it's not an area of specialty for either of us.

Hildegard of Bingen definitely falls into the Middle Ages. She was born in 1098 and died in 1179. There were a lot of passing pop culture references to her a decade or so back -- she apparently composed music which was suddenly influencing various New Age musicians -- and that may have piqued our curiousity at the time.

In any case, the book sat on a shelf for quite a while. Then in October, as I was packing the Guppy for an extended road trip, I went through the bookcases looking for books I either hadn't read yet or had read so long ago the details were now a blur. Hildegard of Bingen caught my eye. For a relatively slender tome, it turned out to be a remarkably hard slog. Having troubles with insomnia? I recommend this book. I don't mean to imply that it's necessarily a bad book. On the contrary, it's academic prose in full flower. Lots of speculating and theorizing and referencing other scholars' works. This is a book designed to garner a good time slot at academic conferences and to impress one's tenure committee. It is most definitely not written with the general reader in mind.

Why do I say that? Well, among other things, the age range dates provided above are about the only solid biographical details the author provides. Flanagan makes a classic mistake authors who are too close to their subject matter make: she knows so much about Hildegard of Bingen that she assumes the readers do, too. Similarly, she definitely glosses over the context. The book would definitely have benefited from a little explication of what exactly was happening with the medieval church, what the Benedictine rule was, and who some of the auxiliary players were. For example, she does a long explication on Abelard and Heloise and the perceived role of women in the 12th century. Well, if the only time you've heard those names is when they're a question on "Jeopardy" you may find the comments about women being assumed to be the weaker, dumber sex interesting but you're not going to really understand why the author chose to quote either of them.

Similarly, at one point Flanagan mentions that Hildegard was on the wrong side in the political maneuverings of the time, some dispute between the Catholic Church and Barbarossa. It probably would have been a good idea at that point for the author to have used the man's full name and title, Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor. If nothing else, it helps ground Hildegard in time and place.

So just who was Hildegard of Bingen? As far as I can tell from reading this book, she was a German woman who got shoved into a cloistered life while she was still quite young. Flanagan reports that Hildegard was described as sickly so she theorizes that Hildegard's parents dedicated her to the Church because they figured they had nothing to lose, the kid wasn't going to live long anyway. She may have been as young as 5 or as old as 8 when she got shoved into a cell occupied by an anchorite, a female hermit named Jutta, and stuck there until Jutta died over 30 years later. Anchorites never left their cells; in some cases they were literally walled in (the door bricked over after they entered) with only a small opening left for others to pass food and other necessities in and for the anchorite to pass the slop bucket out. The anchorite's job, so to speak, was similar to that of other cloistered religious: spend the bulk on one's time in contemplation and prayer. In exchange for praying for other people, the anchorite got fed on a regular basis, although some would indulge in fasting and other mortifications of the flesh in order to get closer to God. It was apparently fairly common practice to build a cell for an anchorite, either male or female, as an ell on a church. There would be a small opening in the church wall to allow the hermit to listen to services.

Hildegard became known for her "visions." My take on the whole thing tends to be, yeah, I'd experience a psychotic break and start hallucinating if I was stuck in a dungeon at the age of 5, too.
Flanagan notes that Hildegard didn't seem especially saddened when Jutta died. My thought was why should she have been? She got stuck in that cell as a child and had probably spent her whole life functioning as Jutta's servant, doing whatever grunt work needed to be done while getting to hear various petitioners at the window asking the holy woman (Jutta) to pray for them or their loved ones. Rather than mourning, Hildegard probably did the Happy Dance because she was finally free of the cell and able to get out into the world more, even if it was just within the walls of a convent. No more listening to mass being celebrated next door; she was finally able to actually go into the church.

Freed from the life of an anchorite, Hildegard went on to leave the monastery where she'd been imprisoned as a child and established a new convent where she served as abbess. In her early 40s she began to share the visions she'd apparently been experiencing since childhood. She began writing down (or dictating to someone who could write; Hildegard's own literacy has been questioned) the various visions and what she believed God was telling her about their meanings. In almost all of her writings Hildegard was careful to emphasize that what she said wasn't her personal opinion; it was what God told her to say. Flanagan notes that by doing so Hildegard made it likelier her writing would actually be published and discussed. The low status of women in medieval intellectual life meant that if she had ever said "This is what I think" instead of "This is what God told me to say" no one would bother reading her words.

So was Hildegard nuts? Was she crazy or just misinterpreting manifestations of a physical disorder? Back in the 12th century, of course, no one thought about psychotic breaks or mental illness in general. If someone had visions or started ranting about seeing angels or demons, that person either got labeled as a prophet (if she was lucky) or possessed by demons (unlucky). Hildegard was one of the lucky ones. She saw the "living light" and described her visions in terms that matched up pretty well with what the church wanted to hear at the time. She'd condemn corruption and abuses by the clergy but always did so in terms that were sufficiently general that no one ever felt personally attacked.

In the final chapter of the book, Flanagan discusses speculation that Hildegard experienced migraines and that what she interpreted as visions were actually some of the phenomena migraine sufferers see on a regular basis. I find that theory believable. One of the warning signs a migraine is about to hit is a visual shimmering, a distortion in your field of vision. I get an occasional migraine, although they've gotten rarer as I've gotten older, and when they first started hitting the visual shimmering reminded me of a dragon. I read a lot of fantasy and science fiction and was an Ann McCaffrey fan; dragons made sense to me. Hildegard was totally immersed in a Christian belief system; it would be totally logical for her to believe she was seeing the face of God or the wings of angels. Does the fact her body of work -- her lengthy writings on various subjects, interpretations of her visions, the advice she gave to people who wrote to her, her songs, etc. -- are somehow diminished? Probably not. She was sincere in her beliefs, and her readers at the time knew it.

What I actually find moderately amazing, and it's something that Flanagan doesn't touch on at all, is that Hildegard's writings survived. Back in the 12th century every letter, every manuscript, every document, had to be handwritten. If you wanted multiple copies, a copyist had to sit down with a quill and an ink bottle and do that copying. Given the number of wars that swept over Europe, the demolishment of monasteries and convents following the Protestant Reformation, and just the passage of time in general it's moderately astounding that any of Hildegard's work is still around after almost 800 years.

Bottom line: If you're fascinated by 12th century Catholic theological minutiae, you might like this book. In general, though, this particular work is one I'm strongly tempted to quietly slip into a recycling bin. I read it because, as I noted above, the book wasn't actively bad and once I'd started it I felt compelled to keep reading. I kept hoping the author would provide a little more social or cultural detail. It never happened, but there are worse fates than wasting an hour or two reading the lyrics to medieval hymns. I cannot picture anyone else doing that, though, so don't think it's even worth dropping into a St. Vincent de Paul or Friends of the Library donation box.

Pulitzer Project: The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford

As I've been working my way up the Pulitzer list, every so often I hit a winner that has me wondering if the Pulitzer committe does lifetime achievement awards. The book that wins isn't particularly good, but the author has been around for decades and has done good work in the past. The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford seems to fall into that category. It's not a bad book, but for sure it doesn't make it on to the really good end of the spectrum.

So what's wrong with it?

Basically, it's incredibly depressing. Stafford writes reasonably well but her characters are all just so unlikable it's impossible to stay interested in what's happening to them. Either that, or if the characters are halfway human, something terrible happens to them for no particular reason. The whole book is one example after another of "Life's a bitch and then you die." A young woman is happily planning her move away from her nosy, interfering elderly relatives, she's barely a week away from her wedding, and then she gets a phone call that her fiance dropped dead that morning from a heart attack. A lonely child finally makes a friend, except the friend turns out to be a manipulative thief who steals things from the kid's house and also manages to get her blamed for shoplifting she didn't do. A woman escapes a bad marriage, is engaged to a decent fellow, ends up having that engagement end abruptly, and then enters into another bad marriage. And so it goes -- every silver lining has a cloud.

Then when you add in the dated language and the not so subtle racism, it's definitely slides towards the "don't bother" end of the scale. In one short story, a little boy who's been orphaned is put a train to go to a government run Indian school in Kansas. When he gets to the school, every Native American he encounters there has a a ridiculous, remarkably offensive name, names that strike me as being a 1950's era attempt at humor but that come across now as just flat out stupid. They might have been appropriate in an episode of "F Troop," a show that spoofed Western cowboys and Indians stereotypes, but dropped in an apparently otherwise dead serious story? Nope. If the story dates from after World War II, Stafford should have known better.

Then again, when most of the characters are drawn from what was apparently Stafford's own milieu, poorly paid intellectuals and writers who muddle along as adjunct faculty or starve in garrets in Paris while feeling smugly superior because they've read Proust, maybe the clunkiness and general dreary tone are understandable. What I don't understand is why the book circulated as much as it did back when the Spies Library in Menominee first accessioned it.

As usual, I had to request the book through Interlibrary Loan. The L'Anse Public Library did not have it in its own collection (and for a change I'll say that was a smart move by whoever was ordering books back in 1969). The back of the book still has the original checkout card pocket with the due dates stamped on it. This book circulated like crazy for about 3 years -- it definitely wasn't gathering dust on the shelves. Then the date stamps stop, and they stop early enough that you can tell interest waned long before libraries went to computerized systems that don't use rubber stamps. (Slight digression: the L'Anse library still stamps due dates in books, but the L'Anse library is small and poor.) I don't recall ever hearing about the book before I saw the title on the Pulitzer list so I am mildly curious about what type of promotion the publisher did. Then again, I hadn't heard of House Made of Dawn either, and back then I was old enough to be paying attention (sort of) to best seller lists and whatever was being pushed by Book of the Month.

So what's my recommendation for this book? Don't bother. Unless you're doing some weird obsessive thing like I am, working your way up or down the Pulitzer fiction winners list, it would be a waste of time.

Next up? Technically, Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, but it's one I read back in the '70s. So I'll skip over it and hope I can manage to read Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter. Wish me luck. Several friends have recommended Welty over the years, but so far I've found everything of hers that I've tried to be close to unreadable.

Trees died for this? Ultimate Sacrifice

See end note.

I finally made it to the end of Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for A Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of J.F.K. I'm not sure why I bothered pushing on through the incoherence, tautologies, and general weirdness for almost 800 pages, but I did. I think I kept hoping that the authors would actually tell me something interesting.

For example, the authors say the Central Intelligence Agency (a misnamed agency if there ever was one) indulged in multiple "let's kill Fidel Castro" schemes. The plans ranged from sending in hit squads armed with machine guns to sneaking in various poisons lurking in mundane items: cigars, lotions, pens. Reading that the CIA wanted to assassinate Fidel Castro through the use of a poison pen intrigued me. How exactly was that going to work? What type of strange James Bondian technological wonder had the agency dreamed up? The poison pen plan gets mentioned multiple times, but the authors never do provide more than vague references. I had to Google it. Turns out the pen was rigged with a hypodermic that would supposedly inject poison. mentalfloss.com managed to describe it in one brief sentence; why Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann couldn't do something similar is a mystery.

The pen, incidentally, is one of at least ten methods the CIA has admitted to either trying or planning to try in their attempts to assassinate Castro. If they've admitted to ten, there were probably a whole lot more, all of which quite obviously failed given that Fidel is now 90 years old and still tottering out of the Aging Dictators Nursing Home to make occasional public appearances. We can see just how effectively the Agency managed to spend our taxpayer dollars. I ask again: why does the CIA still exist? (And, yes, I am willing to make the completely amoral argument that if they're going to be evil they should at least be good at it.)

Back to the book. Ultimate Sacrifice is one of the many books that have been written that attempt to explain why President Kennedy was shot. It's a long, rambling, badly focused, repetitive, and rather murky explication of the Mob Hit Theory. The version of the Mob Hit Theory I was most familiar with prior to reading this book is that mobster Sam Giancana had JFK assassinated because JFK was banging Sam's girlfriend, Judith Campbell. This is a theory that always struck me as ridiculous. If Judith Campbell had been anything other than a casual girlfriend to a mobster, she'd have been the one who got whacked for screwing around and not Kennedy for taking advantage of her availability. If anything, if the mob knew about Campbell's intimate encounters with Kennedy, the logical thing to do would be to use it as a blackmail tool. Still, quite a few people apparently believe it.

This book is a variation on the Mob Hit Theory. The authors claim that Kennedy was shot by the mob, but it wasn't because of his love life. Nope. The motive was Bobby Kennedy's emphasis on fighting organized crime. As a Senator, John Kennedy had been aggressive in holding hearings to expose gangster activity, and after he was elected and appointed his brother Attorney General the crime fighting continued. Various mafioso began to feel threatened. Eventually the "godfathers" who controlled Chicago, Miami, and New Orleans got together and decided that much as they'd like to get rid of Bobby Kennedy, the more logical approach was to off JFK. With JFK dead, Bobby wouldn't last long as Attorney General because he and Lyndon Johnson hated each other.

As conspiracy theories, go it's not a bad one. What makes it slide over the line into the tinfoil hat territory pretty quickly is the combination of the authors' tendency to kitchen sink (every little factoid about any of the people involved, no matter how tangential, gets treated with equal seriousness), to rely heavily on hearsay that definitely falls into "a friend of a friend" urban legend category, and to speculate over and over that there are still a gazillion classified documents lurking in the filing cabinets at the CIA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and elsewhere. You know, there are way too many paragraphs that contain outright speculations, in essence saying "We haven't seen the actual documents, but we're sure they're there." Right. I've known people who believed in the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot who I thought were sliding pretty deeply into wishful thinking and fantasy, but in retrospect they were hardcore realists compared with Waldron and Hartmann.

How does their explanation actually play out? Well, it involves the CIA hiring mafioso to work with Cuban exiles on a plan to overthrow the Castro government. Supposedly, one particular action, a combination coup and invasion, was planned for December 1, 1963. Because the Kennedys wanted to get rid of Castro, Bobby Kennedy was deeply enmeshed in the coup/invasion planning. Why are the mafioso involved? Because they weaseled their way in on purpose so they could set up the Cubans to take the blame. They're going to use the planned coup to help cover up their plans to whack JFK. The reasoning is supposedly that if Bobby Kennedy thinks the Cubans did it, he won't push for a thorough investigation because that would reveal that JFK and Bobby had been plotting to overthrow Castro. It all struck me as unnecessarily complicated as well as illogical. If Kennedy hadn't been whacked, the coup planning would have gone forward as planned, Castro would have been gone, and the gangsters could have gotten their Cuban casinos back. If they had their Cuban casinos, brothels, and drug running safe havens back, they wouldn't have to worry as much about the Justice Department going after them for racketeering in the U.S.

It is true that a number of gangsters were openly gleeful when JFK got shot. So was Jimmy Hoffa, who was so far in bed with organized crime he came close to qualifying as a mobster himself. Does that mean they would have bothered to have come up with a plot with as many moving parts as the plots Waldron and Hartmann propose? I'm doubtful. 

In any case, the authors argue that the mob planned to pin the assassination on Cuba, hoping for an American invasion that would have the same end result as the aborted coup attempt. They manage to fill hundreds of pages of remarkably repetitive text with descriptions of various losers being set up to be patsies with Cuban connections. Lee Harvey Oswald was just one of several who would be manipulated into a position to take the fall. Unfortunately for the mob (and fortunately for the rest of us), LBJ worried a lot more about what the Russians might do than he did about impulsively avenging Kennedy's death.

In the end, the only surprising thing about this book was just how empty of actual content it was. The authors seem to think that the readers are already so thoroughly familiar with the various players involved that they can omit details like just exactly when did Oswald go to the Soviet Union? How long was he there? When he did move back to the U.S.? When did he start working at the Texas Book Depository? How much did he pay for the gun? How did he get the job? Turns out that if I want to know the answers to those questions, once again Google will be my friend.

As for my own thoughts, I can understand why so many people are reluctant to believe that Oswald acted alone. By today's standards, the postmortem examination and forensic investigation following the assassination were a disaster. Potential evidence wasn't secured, the Secret Service actually washed the blood out of the limo before investigators had a chance to do thorough documentation, and numerous other mistakes were made. It definitely did not help that J. Edgar Hoover pushed hard for the single shooter explanation -- he was in full CYA mode because he didn't want it coming out that the FBI had received multiple reports of potential attempts on JFK's life and had basically ignored them all. There was enough bureaucratic ineptitude and silo-ing of information that to anyone who assumes that law enforcement (especially federal law enforcement) knows what it's doing it does look suspiciously like deliberate attempts at obfuscation took place.

I'm skeptical. To me, Oswald strikes me as fitting the profile of semi-delusional misfit so well that I find it totally believable he was the only one involved. We've seen a fair number of these poor saps in the past few decades: John Hinckley thinking he was going to impress Jody Foster by shooting Reagan, Mark David Chapman shooting John Lennon, various celebrity stalkers, some of the guys who go on mass shooting rampages. Maybe Oswald really did think he was striking a blow for some ideology, maybe he had deluded himself into believing he was secret agent on a mission, who knows? And, to be blunt, at this late date (almost 53 years after the fact) who cares?

I do know that having read one "who shot JFK?" conspiracy theory book, I am unlikely to ever read another. If this one was typical of the genre I won't be missing much.

Note: Back in 1996 I was living in Blacksburg, VA, and dependent on public transportation to get to and from the Virginia Tech campus. Got on the bus one morning and a seemingly normal-looking (no visible tinfoil) dude was talking to the driver about the X-Files episode he'd watched the night before. It was a long enough ride into town that it slowly dawned on me that the dude thought the X-Files were real. He really did think the television show was a documentary series. No doubt this year he's waiting impatiently to cast his ballot for Trump.

Publishing mysteries

Every so often I stumble across a book that leaves me figuratively scratching my head and wondering how on earth the author ever managed to snag a publishing deal. The Keepers of the Library by Glenn Cooper definitely fell into that category. The whole premise behind it is so mind-boggling in its bizarreness that I'm still not sure why I bothered to keep reading. Maybe it was because the book is competently written albeit riddled with logical holes big enough to drive a tank through. Even more mind-boggling than the existence of this particular book, though, is the fact the author apparently managed to peddle several others that are based on the same notion: a library exists that contains the birth and death dates of every person currently alive on the planet and for every person who's going to be born in the next several centuries.

It is, to say the least, a truly bizarre idea. The background premise is that at some point during the Dark Ages, an idiot savant monk began writing down birth and death dates. For some reason, the abbot of the monastery where this happened decided it was a sign from God; ergo, the monk needed to be protected. Even stranger (and even more unbelievable) that ability to write down the days when people not yet born were going to die turned out to be a heritable trait -- although how they discovered that is not spelled out in the book. All the reader is told in The Keepers is that by the 14th century the monastery had several dozen monks laboring away in an underground chamber (sunlight apparently bothered them) where they'd do nothing but write, eat, sleep, and occasionally relieve themselves. The supply of monks was perpetuated through a breeding program: they'd bring in poor peasant girls with "good hips" and let the monks impregnate them. If the child was a boy, that kid was destined for the cellars and a lifetime of scribbling on parchment. Then they screw up -- they bring in a girl who's less than thrilled by the notion of spending years locked up with nothing to do but serve as brood stock until she's either worn out or dies in childbirth. She escapes while pregnant; the dudes in the dungeon promptly commit mass suicide.

A few centuries later, the library is discovered. The fact that it ends on a specific day in 2027 (which was as far as the monks had gotten before they offed themselves) leads many people to believe that's when the world ends. As that date draws closer, the belief the world is going to end leads to what one might expect: an increased rate of suicides, more people deciding it's not worth working, an increase in crime as lowlifes figure there will be no significant consequences, etc. Except it turns out that all the date in 2027 signifies is that the monks in that particular abbey stopped writing on that date. It doesn't mean the Library itself ended. The pregnant peasant girl founds a whole new line of scribblers, one that apparently relies heavily on incest for its efforts at perpetuation, although I'm not sure that thought ever crossed the author's mind. 

Holy wah. That was definitely a what the hell moment. Talk about having to indulge in willful suspension of disbelief. Young woman recognizes that breeding scribblers is a horrible way to spend a life, manages to get out, and then turns around to voluntarily replicate the mess? And for what? That's actually the part that I didn't get. Just what was the point of the Library? What good was it? It was kept secret for centuries, no one actually got to know the date of their own deaths so it wouldn't help any individual do some long range planning. And, although there was a lot of blathering about strategic importance, just exactly how would governments use the information? Okay. Say someone gets elected President. The Secret Service checks the book -- the person who's going to occupy the White House is shown as surviving for two full time terms. Does that mean they get to slack off on the security details? No -- because just knowing when someone is going to die doesn't tell you a thing about their quality of life. A would-be assassin might not kill the President but could still put him or her in a wheelchair. So you have to keep doing everything you would anyway because all the Library actually does is tell you what we all know already: no one lives forever.

As for longer range planning, how would any analyst know who's going to be important 10 or 20 or 30 years into the future? Granted, there are conspiracy theorists who seem to think Marxists plotted back in the 1960s to hide the fact of Barack Obama's Kenyan birth so he could be America's first socialist President, right down to planting fake birth announcements in the Honolulu, Hawai'i, newspaper, but out here in the reality-based world, it's pretty hard to predict that someone who's in high school now is going to be in the Senate or heading the CIA or in some other position of power 40 years in the future. When Barack Obama was 18, by his own admission he was a dope smoking slacker. He could have easily dropped out of college and gone back to Hawai'i to be a beach bum. There are lots and lots of people with potential for great things, but only a few of them actually end up in the history books.

In short, this is a book that made no sense whatsoever. In fact, even me reading it makes no sense. I knew by the end of the first chapter that the book wasn't going to be very good: the author's wordsmithing skills are mediocre at best. His lead character is a retired federal agent who, despite his supposed backstory (super good FBI agent), seemed remarkably incompetent, was prone to impulsive behavior, and did most of his thinking with his dick. On the other hand, it was rather refreshing to see a male character portrayed as being as clueless as the female heroines in books usally are and doing the dumb stuff like ditching his partner and heading off into a potentially dangerous situation without doing much recon or letting anyone know where he was going. Still, I did read the whole thing -- and now am thinking, crap, that's at least 2 hours of my life I'll never get back. Once again I'm grateful I read fast -- at least when I make the mistake of reading dreck, I don't waste too much time on it.

For what it's worth, the author of this piece of mediocre fiction apparently has more fans than I would have thought possible: this book was the third part of a trilogy and he's written half a dozen other novels that apparently sold reasonably well. There's definitely no accounting for readers' tastes.

Niche marketing in the publishing world

I discovered a new genre of fiction this week: the non-romance for menopausal women. It's like the opposite of a bodice ripper. Instead of a young heroine who spends most of the book fending off the advances of a studly cad who turns out to be a good guy, the middle-aged heroine of the non-romance spends her time remembering her love life (she gave great head), thinking about what a jerk her ex-husband is, suffering from hot flashes, and fantasizing about hot monkey sex with a seemingly nice guy who turns out to be a cad. The novel ends with the heroine lolling on the beach with a couple of female friends and agreeing that men are more trouble than they're worth, especially when there's always the adult toy store with its stock of industrial strength vibrators.

I found the book, in a word, Bizarre, but then I'm not a bitter divorcee whose spouse ran off with a pole dancer. Maybe if I were single and miserable,  I'd find a book that celebrates learning to live with the fact there are worse things than being alone a little more appealing. Then again, I'd have to be single, miserable, and "a woman of a certain age" because I'm pretty sure female readers in their 20s and 30s really don't want to read musings about vaginal dryness and chin hairs.  

Queen Bee of Mimosa Branch isn't a bad book. The writing is competent, if not great. Haywood Smith is unlikely to ever have to worry about finding space on the mantel for a National Book Award or even a Pulitzer, but she doesn't actively insult a reader's intelligence, which is more than can be said about a lot of the dreck taking up shelf space in public libraries. On the other hand, her protagonist is a remarkably shallow, materialistic woman. She spends a lot of time missing her stuff -- her $6000 coffee table, her lovely ormulu something-or-other piece of furniture, her antique Persian rug -- that she stashed with various friends back in Buckhead when her marriage fell apart. How much sympathy is the typical reader going to have for someone who sits around pining for the days when she lunched at high dollar restaurants and whiled away her hours by shopping? Or, for that matter, how much sympathy does anyone have for someone who apparently made it into the 21st century without mastering any computer skills?

I also wasn't too keen on the way the character's response to her elderly parents' problems -- her father is in the early stages of Alzheimer's -- has been to avoid going home until she suddenly needs a place to live. But even when she sees first hand how hard it's been on her mother, her initial reaction is to withdraw and feel embarrassed by her father's dementia rather than to try to figure out a way to help. The author keeps talking about what a nice person the heroine is, but, nope, that isn't how she comes across. She's nice to people outside her immediate family, the public type of nice that can be remarkably ego-stroking, but her response to family problems is Denial and Avoidance.

The character does grow, manages to develop some self-awareness and moves away a bit from being as self-centered as she starts off, but even so. . . this is not a genre of fiction that I can see myself dipping into again any time soon. I checked it out of the library thanks to the title, which does illustrate that the cover of a book makes a huge difference when the author is someone you've never heard of, but I won't be reading anything else by Haywood Smith.

This was another novel that happened to be set in an area I'm moderately familiar with. As usual, I had a few quibbles about geographic descriptions. Example: if you drive down Peachtree Industrial from the general direction of Flowery Branch (which I suspect is the real life equivalent of the Mimosa Branch of the title), you don't end up in Dunwoody. You end up in Doraville. But that's a minor quibble compared to the overall "meh" feel of the book. It's readable, but definitely not worth anyone taking the time to go looking for. If you find it sitting in a pile of free books, it's better than nothing. . . but not by much.

And then Elo begat Toivola: History of the Finns in Michigan

Back when I was in grad school, my professors would rant about "History is more than just one damn thing after another!" Pastor Armas K. E. Holmio never got that message. Either that, or his training in the seminary meant his writing style was influenced way too much by the Old Testament and its long lists of begats. History of the Finns in Michigan has some fascinating tidbits buried in it, but it can be a hard slog finding them.

Every chapter reads like something out of the Bible, except instead of Adam begetting Cain it's the Hancock Co-operative begetting the Bruce Crossing and the Mass and the Trout Creek co-ops or the South Range temperance society begetting Negaunee and Rock and Trenary. The founding of Suomi College calls for what reads like a summary of the personnel records, i.e., "Faculty were . . . " starting with John Nikander in 1896 and wrapping up with who the archivist is at the time of publication (Holmio in 1967). When did the first Finns arrive in Michigan? Who knows, but in 1880 certain Finns lived in Calumet, and we're treated to another long list of names. No doubt people doing genealogy love the name index at the back of this book, although it is incomplete -- not every person mentioned in the text got indexed, which leads me to believe the copy editor got as burnt out on the list of names as I did.

History of the Finns in Michigan was first published in 1967. It was printed in Finnish; if I'm reading the information in the book correctly, an English translation did not appear until 2001.Why is an intriguing question, particularly when one of the interesting themes in the book is the rift developing between the older Finns -- folks who had emigrated from Finland or who were the first generation born in this country and could speak and read Finnish -- and younger generations. The intense nativism in the United States following World War I meant that children were discouraged from learning Finnish, either spoken or written, so by the time History of the Finns in Michigan was published, the number of potential readers under the age of 60 had to be fairly small. Holmio mentions this rift in a number of chapters: its effect on church going (English speaking young people had no interest in sitting through sermons preached in Finn), fraternal orders (membership in the Knights and Ladies of Kaleva began dropping as older Finns died and younger people had minimal interest in an organization that insisted on conducting all business in Finnish), and cooperatives. In the latter case, larger economic forces played a role, but the insistence on the part of older co-op members on conducting business meetings in Finnish may have hastened the end for some stores.

Another interesting portion of the book discusses the reasons for immigration: emigrants left Finland for multiple reasons, but there were two that were key: economics and avoiding the Russian draft. In the last half of the 19th century, immigrants went to the United States and Canada almost purely for economic reasons. For example, the first Finns arriving in the Copper Country in the 1860s came because they were experienced miners and were recruited by one of the mining companies. As the mining industry grew, so did the stream of immigrants looking for work in Michigan. That first wave of immigration tapered off in the late 1880s. Then the Russians changed the rules in the Duchy of Finland. Russian military service had been voluntary; the Russians made it compulsory in the early 1900s, and, not surprisingly, young men began leaving. That was the second big wave of immigration. With the first wave of immigration, quite a few men stayed in the United States only long enough to save the money they needed to buy land or establish a business back home in Finland; they didn't see themselves as permanent immigrants. The second wave came to stay. This is a section that could have benefited from an editor telling Holmio, "Hey, you've listed almost every parish in Finland in the tables; you don't need to mention each one in the text, too."  

History of the Finns in Michigan is one of those books you may find worth reading if you have Finnish ancestors, live in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, are interested in social movements like temperance or cooperatives, or have a burning desire to know the difference between Evangelical and Apostolic (aka Laestadian) Lutherans. Pastor Holmio was a Suomi Synod Evangelical minister; his take on the Apostolics is almost worth suffering through the begats. The Laestadians begat a lot: apparently it was impossible to form an Apostolic congregation without it splintering into two or three separate congregations in fairly short order,  kind of like Pentecostal and other fundamentalist congregrations in the South.

As I read the chapter on churches, I couldn't help thinking about the old adage that "history is the stories the winners tell about the losers." At the time Holmio wrote the book, the Evangelicals thought they were the winners; the Laestadians were the crazy people who didn't allow dancing or frivolity in their homes but did shout and dance in the aisles at church, the Finnish equivalent of Holy Rollers. Too bad Holmio is dead or he'd know it doesn't pay to gloat. The Apostolics may not have emphasized higher education and advanced degrees for the ministry, but they definitely knew how to begat: they were practicing quiver-full Christianity long before other fundamentalists coined the term: the family car for many Apostolic families is a 15-passenger van. They may not have won the doctrinal war, but they've triumphed in the demographic one.

History of the Finns in Michigan does have some distinct flaws. One is that it was obviously updated before its publication in 2001, but there is no mention of who did that updating. Pastor Holmio died in 1977; the person credited with the English translation, Ellen Ryynanen, passed away in 2000. Did she do the translation as one of her final activities before dying, or did she translate the book at the time it was first published? Was she also the person who updated the manuscript by adding recent dates to some sections, but not others? And if there had been a decision made to update the manuscript, why not go all out and give complete histories for organizations like the Copper Country Dairy (a farmers' cooperative that shut down in 1986)? As it is, the random pieces of more recent data are jarring. They feel anachronistic or like typographical errors. How could the author know that a certain event took place in 1999 when at that point he'd been dead for 22 years?

Another flaw is the selection of photographs. I've seen the Finnish language edition. It has numerous photographs salted throughout the book, and the photos cover a wide variety of subjects. The English language edition seems to be a lot thinner when it comes to photos, and they're all clustered in one section in the middle of the book.

As for my overall assessment of History of the Finns in Michigan? I'm glad I read it, I learned some interesting and useful information, but I'm also really happy it's a library book and not something I spent actual money to obtain.

Note: Elo and Toivola are actual town names; Elo means "life" and Toivola is "land of hope." 

The folly of one-upmanship in writing

I started reading Cold Days, a novel by Jim Butcher, last night. It's number 14 in his Harry Dresden series. I kind of like the character of Harry Dresden; I've read several other books in the series and I enjoyed The Dresden Files during its brief one-season run on Syfy a few years ago.

Unfortunately, I'm not overly impressed with the direction the series has taken. Butcher has fallen into the same rabbit hole that's sucked in a number of other authors in genre fiction. Laurell K. Hamilton, Charlaine Harris, and Janet Evanovich are the three I'm most familiar with, but I'm sure there are others. I think of it as self one-upmanship, an irrational impulse to top whatever was in the last book in a series with something that's even more shocking, unusual, terrifying, funny, or sexual. Butcher keeps introducing new totally evil and ever more powerful supernatural beings that are out to get Dresden; Hamilton has turned Anita Blake's love life into something close to an Olympic sport complete with team uniforms*; Evanovich keeps pushing the envelope on the eccentricities of her characters in an attempt to milk more cheap laughs out of her readers.

Whatever causes it -- an unwillingness to invest time or energy in doing more character development or playing too many video games where you advance from level to level -- it strikes me as evidence of a lack of some basic writing skills. An author shouldn't have to resort to cheap tricks to hold the reader's interest. Just because they're called "novels" doesn't mean an author has to try hit new levels of novelty in every work. It is possible to write novels with recurring characters who deal with variations on the same theme over and over and at the same time have the books become better and better. Most mysteries, after all, are variations on the same theme: something gets stolen or someone gets killed, and the lead character gets to figure out who did it. The mystery is what sucks you in, the various plot twists, and not one upmanship, e.g., in the last book the hero got clubbed with a baseball bat so in the next one the author's going to up the ante by having him shot.

Of course, if you're weak at coming up with a decent plot line and your characters are all rather flat, then what's left? You fall back on novelty and the equivalent of special effects, just like in a bad movie, and hope that your readers stick with you.

The readers won't, of course, but it usually takes quite a few pallet loads of remaindered books for the authors to figure that out.

[*Is Anita Blake's vagina Teflon-lined? After reading some of the sex scenes, you have to wonder how the woman can still walk, let alone go out and slay vampires.] 

Pulitzer Project: In This Our Life

Every so often I'll read a book and find myself mentally casting the movie, but it usually doesn't happen immediately. The 1942 Pulitzer winning novel, Ellen Glasgow's In This Our Life, was an exception. As soon as the author introduced two of the characters, it hit me: this book was a Bette Davis movie. The physical description of the younger daughter, Stanley Timberlake, just screamed Bette Davis. So did the personality of the character. Of course, it helped that the book is a classic soap opera: a family that at one time had been wealthy but is now just barely getting by; a head of household who's been married for many years to a hypochondriac that he doesn't especially like, let alone love; two sisters with radically different personalities who end up in love with the same man. Soap opera at its best.

In This Our Life  is set in the 1930s in a Virginia city not far from Washington, DC. The Timberlake family had actually come out of the Civil War in pretty good shape but by the 1930s had hit the economic skids. Asa Timberlake's grandfather had owned a tobacco factory that was doing quite well but then was somehow squeezed out by a larger firm; Asa saw the family go from being one of the wealthiest in town to his mother having to take in boarders. Unable to afford college, as a teenager Asa went to work at what had been his family's factory and was still there almost 50 years later. Despite his own penury, he had managed to marry a woman with a rich uncle. It was thanks to the uncle that the family had a decent house, among other things. At the time the novel opens, Asa's  three children are adults: his son Andrew is married with children of his own; the two girls, Roy and Stanley, live at home, although Roy is also married. Roy and her husband, Peter, are living with the Timberlakes to save money until Peter's medical practice is more solidly established.

There had apparently always been a strong sibling rivalry between the two girls. Roy is described as being a quiet brunette; Stanley is an extroverted, perky blonde. Stanley is also the spoiled one. The rich uncle dotes on her while basically ignoring her older, quieter sister, Roy. Uncle William showers Stanley with lavish gifts and even treats her to a Grand Tour of Europe after she finishes school. (Uncle William has a thing for blondes; it's mentioned in passing several times that he kept a blonde mistress in New York.) Despite being everyone's pet, Stanley is never satisfied. Anything Roy has, Stanley wants. When they were children, Stanley would snatch Roy's toys away. Now that they're adults, you guessed it -- she wants the husband. Stanley had been in Europe when Roy married Peter, but once she's back under the same roof as her sister, it doesn't take long for old patterns to resurface. The soap opera begins. Before it ends, we're treated to a jilting, an adulterous relationship, a suicide, a terminal cancer case, a fatal hit-and-run, a wrongfully accused black chauffeur (played by Ernest Anderson in the movie), and a second jilting. It must have been a blast for the actors involved in the film -- lots and lots of opportunity for scenery chewing (and Bette Davis was one of the great scenery chewers; Olivia DeHaviland, Billie Burke, and Hattie McDaniel were no slouches either).

In This Our Life definitely does not qualify as Great Literature. It's soap opera, a fine tradition in American letters but not exactly material that spawns academic dissertations or conferences devoted to the life of the author. It's competently written, albeit a bit odd in places (female characters named Roy and Stanley?), and qualifies easily as "light reading." It's the equivalent of a beach book, although its discussion of race relations and the unfairness of the justice system does introduce a serious note about society as a whole. I've no idea why the Pulitzer judges decided this was the best novel they'd seen that year. Maybe its normalcy appealed to them. The previous winner, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, has to set some sort of record for being one of the most depressing books of all time. Maybe, given the social climate (in 1942 the U.S. was embroiled in a World War) a best seller that was basically fluff held a lot of appeal. The Timberlakes have their problems, no one is really happy, but in general they're surviving.

Would I recommend this book to other readers? Probably not. It's not bad, but it does feel dated. It's better than some of the other Pulitzer winners -- I was, after all, able to finish it -- but not by much.

Next up on the list, Dragon's Teeth by Upton Sinclair.

Pultizer Project: The Able McLaughlins

Well, I'm up to 1924. Margaret Wilson's The Able McLaughlins marks the seventh one* I've read since starting this project, and I'm beginning to think that Pulitzer winners are like Star Trek movies -- only every other one is actually worth spending time with.

The Able McLaughlins is a post-Civil War novel, sort of. The war doesn't actually enter into the story much beyond the fact one of the main characters serves in the Union army. The hero, Wully McLaughlin, is a hard-working Iowa farm boy, one of the older sons of a humongous family of Scottish immigrants who are establishing farms on the prairie, and grows up surrounded by a zillion aunts, uncles, and cousins. Apparently where one McLaughlin went, several hundred soon followed, so when one McLaughlin left Scotland to start farming in the midwest, he wasn't alone very long. The McLauglins are a lot of things -- honest, devout, incredibly fertile -- but communicative doesn't make the list. They do a lot of thinking and brooding, but actual conversations don't seem to happen very often.

Wully, for example, comes home from the war briefly, on an unofficial leave (he was captured by Confederates and escaped, and decided to come home to rest up for awhile before reporting back to the Union army), and while at home falls in love with the girl next door. As far as I could tell from the book, their interpersonal communications consist basically of them staring at each other, being instantly smitten by love at first sight when they both suddenly realize they're no longer children, and then Wully goes back to the military having decided that Chirstie (and, yes, I know all the names look like typos; I think it was part of the author's misguided attempts to add some folksy and/or ethnic charm to the tale) is his One True Love. A few months later the war is over, Wully comes home for good, and is dismayed to find Chirstie giving him the cold shoulder.

There are Reasons, of course, and a low-life villainous cousin lurking in the shadows. Once Wully blunders upon the truth he insists that Chirstie marry him immediately. His parents are puzzled and shamed by the sudden marriage (they believe Wully has been less than honorable), but eventually the facts emerge and his mother is able to be quietly proud of him again. Long before that point, though, the Reader finds herself losing patience with the incapable-of-speech McLaughlins and thinking dark thoughts about authors who persist in creating characters whose only function seems to be inspiring irritation in the audience.

Good points about The Able McLaughlins: it's easy reading, definitely much, much lighter than the first five winners were, and one of the minor characters (Chirstie's stepmother) does add some comic relief.

Negatives? It's not very good.

*I read Gilead (2004 winner) way out of order; otherwise I'm working my way up the list from oldest to most recent.

Bulwer-Lytton Lives

Every so often I screw up big time when I hit the library. This was one of them. The cover art should have been a clue, the hyphenated author's name another, but the fact it was published by Tor rather than Harlequin led me astray. I have a weakness for an occasional dip into sword and sorcery type books that goes back to when I first discovered Fritz Leiber back in high school. With a few rare exceptions, of course, most of what gets printed as sword and sorcery these days is a waste of paper, but I'm always hoping that I'll stumble across an author new to me who can actually write.

Dart-Thornton, unfortunately, doesn't qualify. This particular piece of dreck includes deathless prose like "If you stay here, I shall long for you as a fledging longs to fly, yet I will be as happy as a pig in mud, knowing you are safe. But if you come with me, I shall be as happy as a lark in flight and tragic as a fish in a dry riverbed, fearing for your security."

The truly depressing part is this volume is part I of a trilogy. This woman got paid for writing not just one awful book, but three.