Landscape, 1930 Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) The Museum of Modern Art

   

For a short time there was a great little travel bookstore here in DC. What made the store unique is that they would tuck in amongst the travel guides and travel writing works of fiction representative of each country. It was there that I stumbled across my first Heinrich Boll, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. I ended up loving the rather spare, precise way that the story unfolded. Since then I have read two other Boll works and liked them less. And with this most recent title I am left wondering if I truly like Boll or just liked that one book. At only 206 pages I assumed that I would fly through End of a Mission. But that wasn’t the case. Since I bought the book sometime back in 2009 it has been in my nightstand. There have been many times I thought I was in the mood to read it. I even took it on several vacations. Yet it stayed unread for a long time, always returning to my nightstand. Several months ago I finally got into the rhythm of the book and started to enjoy it. But even then I got distracted by some other book about half way through it and so it sat for at another couple of months until the TBR Dare made me face all of my nightstand reading with renewed committment.

So what is this book about? The whole of the narrative follows the trial of a father and son who have been arrested for setting fire to an army vehicle. I think part of my disappointment in the book is that I was expecting a different kind of book. I thought that there was going to be some great reason for their action and expected more of a plot. Instead End of a Mission is like a tableau of personalities. Taking place in a small village every character is truly a character. All of the quirkiness of village life and relationships are played out in the descriptions and actions of everyone from judge to bailiff, to lawyers, police, witnesses, innkeepers, observers, the press and of course the accused father and son. It also took me a while to realize that much of the book is meant to be humorous. Throughout the book Boll shows the somewhat absurd juxtaposition of a society that likes rules at the same time that it seems to be rebelling against them. Perhaps it is in the wake of World War II and the role of law and order in the Holocaust that prompts these small town Germans to want to thumb their noses at authority. But even then there is an almost orderly quality to their small acts of rebellion. Being at least one quarter German and one quarter control freak, I often feel an affinity for the stereotype of German precision and linear thinking. I had a history professor in college who abhorred any attempts to define a national character, either for individuals or for the collective society. But darn if it isn’t satisfying to trade in generalities sometimes.

There were moments that I enjoyed, and there are many aspects that would make End of a Mission a good book for discussion. But not a book club discussion. I think it would do much better in a more academic setting, and one that was focused more on German post-WWII history rather than one specifically about literature. For these reasons I am wavering between giving this book a 5 (ambivalent) on the My Porch Scale or a 6 (almost liked it).

I first read The Professor’s House by Willa Cather in 2003. At the time I was captivated by the novel and ranked it as one of my all time favorites. Since then I have recommended it widely and have been happy to see it crop up with some frequency on various book blogs. Most recently Karen at Books and Chocolate read it during Virago Reading Week. Reading Karen’s review made me want to go back and re-read the book to see if my initial love of the book would stand. Thankfully I had a paperback edition of it in my nightstand so I could remain true to the TBR Dare.

In the latter days of his academic career at a small university on the western shore of Lake Michigan, Professor Godfrey St. Peter decides he isn’t quite ready to leave behind his quirky old study when he and his wife are meant to be moving into their new house. He contemplates his career, his wife, his grown daughters and their husbands, and most significantly, his relationship with Tom Outland a protege who was much like a son to St. Peter and who was killed in World War I. After convincing his wife, daughter, and son-in-law to go off to Europe without him, St. Peter means to edit Outland’s diary. As he prepares an introduction to the diary, St. Peter recounts Outland’s life before they met. A major chunk of the book is about Outland’s life in New Mexico, where among other things, he discovered a group of abandoned cliff dwellings. St. Peter’s summer alone with his thoughts brings new clarity to his life, both past and future.

When I first read The Professor’s House back in ’03, I saw it mainly as the story of someone who wanted a little solitude. Being quite independent myself with a tendency toward being a loner, I really identified with that. Now seven years later, I can still see that in the book, but it seems like a minor detail given all of the other thoughts and emotions St. Peter processes. Through Outland’s story St. Peter comes to terms with what his own life has turned out to be and how different it is from what St. Peter thinks is truly important. There is much that could be considered melancholy in this book, but I find that the overall feeling is really about hope and possibility. As the blurb on the book notes, St. Peter turns emotional dislocation into renewal.

I feel an affinity for St. Peter’s intellectual and emotional outlook. He is someone I would like to know, or be. For that reason alone, The Professor’s House is wonderful. But there is also something about the section on Tom Outland’s life in New Mexico that I find breathtaking at times. Cather does a brilliant job evoking the beauty and spiritual timelessness of New Mexico. Several years ago I was lucky enough to spend two weeks in Las Cruces in southern New Mexico. While I was there I went up into the Gila National Forest alone and saw some cliff dwellings for myself. Set on a green wooded mountain, on a beautifully crisp, sunny February morning, I felt like I had been transported to another time, and not just in an intellectual and historical sense. There was something about the dry, clean air, the brilliant blue sky, and the amazing quiet that I found quite moving. The contemplation of geology and nature, and geologic time in particular, is perhaps the closest I come to any sort spirituality. I find something oddly comforting in the fact that my life is just an infinitesimal blip in the billions of years of geologic processes that happened before me and will happen after me. And that my body will become part of that geology. I should be clear that I am conflating Tom Outland’s story with my own experience in New Mexico. Cather’s text doesn’t really strive to be so lofty, but it does say important things about what is truly ours and what is important in life. Having said that, one does not need to find or even want to find something spiritual in this book to thoroughly enjoy it.

There is one scene as Tom contemplates the cliff dwellings that reminded me of the A Month in the Country, the last book I read. In that book, Tom Birkin feels a certain connection to the the painter of a work he is uncovering five hundred years after its creation. Tom Outland’s experience discovering the cliff dwellings is similar:

To people off alone, as we were, there is something stirring about finding evidences of human labour and care in the soil of an empty country. It comes to you as a sort of message, makes you feel differently about the ground you walk on every day.

For a interesting analysis of this book and some great photos check out Nearly Lucid.

Tom Birkin, a Londoner, and a somewhat shell-shocked veteran of World War I arrives in Yorkshire to uncover a suspected wall painting in the village church. Written as a memoir, Birkin’s story is equal parts country idyll, love story, and ethnographic sketch. Over only 135 pages, Carr’s poetic writing conjures up so many moving, beautiful, and humorous images, I feel very clumsy writing about it.

Through Birkin’s experience we meet the people of Oxgodby and are introduced to their various quirks and natural distrust of a city boy from the South. We learn the value of vocation and art for their own sake. And we see Birkin slip almost imperceptibly into the life of the village. He takes up Methodism despite working and literally living in an Anglican church, becomes close friends with Charles Moon a fellow WWI vet who has been hired to unearth the grave of the ancestor of an important local family, becomes an honorary member of the Ellerbeck family, and falls in love with the vicar’s wife.

There was so much time that marvelous summer. Day after day, mist rose from the meadow as the sky lightened and hedges, barns and woods took shape until, at last, the long curving back of the hills lifted from the Plain.

…their mother worked out how it was with me and usually sent a bit of whatever was being manufactured in her kitchen–rabbit pie, a couple of currant teacakes, two or three curd tarts. So, over the weeks, a splendid repertory of North Riding dishes was performed amanti bravura to an applauding Londoner, dishes Mrs. Ellerbeck had helped her mother bake, who had helped her mother bake who…Sometimes I’d share this bounty with Moon and it was he who suggested that we were eating disposable archaeology.

“How are you two getting on together?” Moon would say, waving a hand at my wall. “Do you ever feel him breathing down your neck, nudging you–‘Good lad, Birkin! Attaboy!’ You must know him pretty well. Go on–tell me about him. who was he?”

And the idea that his work might be minutely observed five hundred years after his death would have been preposterous. In his day, buildings were being drastically remodeled every fifty years as fashions changed, so that my man would calculate his painting, at the longest would last no more than a couple of generations.

…was fair-headed; hairs kept turning up where his beard had prodded into tacky paint, particularly the outlining in red ochre which he’d based in linseed oil. There was no mistaking it for brush hair which was recognizable from its length, an inch, never more than an inch and half. Sow’s bristle for the rough jobs, badger’s gray for precision.

Fascinating book overcomes deep-seated reading quirks.

Each of the linked stories are wholly compelling. As I often discover when I read outside my comfort zone, I was fascinated by the contrast between the action and setting of the stories and my own comfortable life. Interwoven around a modern day feudal landowner, his family, his employees, and his servants, the stories run the gambit from the halls of wealth and power to the basest of living conditions. What was most surprising to me was the corrupt, wild west kind of mentality that pervades most of the stories. Either as background, or as a major component of the plot, and in every socio-economic strata, corruption is everywhere. And for so many of the characters, rich and poor, the corruption is both the reason for their situation as well as the avenue for escaping poverty or maintaining wealth. Some of it is garden variety greasing the wheels of justice and business with bribes, but in other cases it is violent and desperate. And as with women all over the world, the women in the stories are the ones most often at the biggest disadvantage, many resorting to sexual favors for survival. (Now that I reflect on it, I am struck by how well Mueenuddin writes about the plight of women.)

As gloomy as some of the scenarios can be, they are not without beauty and humor.  And Mueenuddin paints a vivid picture of life in Pakistan. One can almost feel the heat and smell the food. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders was a National Book Award finalist and it is easy to see why. I am glad I overcame my natural disinclination to read this book. Had I not, I would have missed out on a fascinating world and a well written book. And it will make me less resistant the next time someone hands me a book. (But don’t do it until after April 1st when the TBR Dare ends.)

*TBR = to be read

   
If you are like me you couldn’t care less about football and the Super Bowl. So I thought I would try a different kind of super bowl Sunday. Also check out this week’s Sunday Painting, and my TBR Dare update.

Footed Bowl by Frances Palmer

Hammered Stainless Steel by Simon Pearce

Ceramic bowl made by a friend.

Urchin Bowl by Element Clay Studio

A bowl in the spa at our hotel in Chiang Mai, Thailand

Basalt bowl by Wedgwood

Ancient Celtic bowl

Beautiful, simple ironstone bowl found on Faded Plains

Lots of bowls at John Derian

And how could I forget hotty Jeremy Northam holding this golden bowl from the movie adaptation of Henry James’ The Golden Bowl

Of these books (my nightstand TBR pile), the following are listed in the 1001 book:

The Amis, Bowen, Cather, Coetzee (Petersburg), Eliot, Le Carre, both McEwan, both Mitford, and the West.

The cover contest also turned into a random draw since everyone who sent me an email got all four titles correct. It must have been easier than I thought. How did you all do it? What was your technique?

Both of you have one week to email me and let me know which Virago currently in print you would like to have and where it should be sent.

Thanks to all who entered. It was a lot of fun.