Books I Read In January

 Fiction

'My Name is Red' by Orhan Pamuk

It was highlighted that this book translated from Turkish was written very much in a Turkish style. I have to confess I found that hard going. There are multiple points of view and we move between them at random almost like a game of 'tag' rather than in a structured way.  In addition, drawings and even a colour appear as 'characters' in the book. The murderer has two identities that we see through the eyes of at different times.

The book is set in Constantinople in the 1590s and rotates around book illustrators, one of whom is murdered near the start of the book, and their various relatives. It informs you a great deal about the style of book illustration of the time and the stories which were most popular. The style of a particular artist is used in part to determine the killer. There is also the background tension of the traditional approach to illustration inherited from Persia and other regions east of Anatolia and the 'new' more realistic approach coming from western Europe via the Venetians which is a more realistic rendering of people's features and perspective. This then touches on religious questions around the representation of people in Islamic art. 

Though the cast of characters is well drawn, at time the book descends into soap opera territory especially about the wife of a missing soldier husband and whether she can remarry - and who - and whether she should live in her father's house or her in-laws house and so on. While this aspect tells us more about the characters it does become rather laboured, piling an extra layer on top of the murder mystery and all the discussions about art. The investigation itself also goes off into philosophical paths using a formula which I imagine may be familiar for Turkish readers but for Western readers just adds further complications.

There is a lot in this book and it is informative. The characters are believable. However, the very slow pace of the book and constant diversions from one or other of the main threads makes it quite tiresome to read. I admire the work that went into this book but did not enjoy reading it.

'The Vampye and Other Tales of the Macabre' ed. by Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick

This is a collection of stories and articles published in literary magazines, 1819-1838. While following on from the Gothic mania of the previous century, these stories, notably 'The Vampyre' (1819) by John Polidori really developed horror tropes which remain with us even some 200 years later. It was written during the same competition at Villa Diodati near Geneva where Mary Shelley wrote 'Frankenstein' (1818). Indeed when  'The Vampyre' was first published it was attributed to their host Lord Byron rather that Polidori, the doctor of Byron's friend, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Polidori is acknowledged for changing the character of the vampire from being undead peasants to a lord, a man of society. Interestingly, the vampire antagonist, Lord Ruthven as well as drinking blood, also works to ruin decent men and to promote nefarious ones, so you have the sense of his evil beyond the standard vampire diet.

The stories in the collection are written in a style and language of the time, but fortunately the editors provide a lot of background information on each, if the reader is unfamiliar with the context, and translations of archaic terms. In the case of 'Sir Evelyn's Dream' by Horace Smith this is particularly necessary as it is set some 200 years earlier still and he seeks to use language of that time. While many of the stories are supernatural in nature, featuring ghosts, others are more accounts of grim happenings of the time 'Confessions of a Reformed Ribbonman' by William Carelton is simply the account of a vigilante killing in Ireland and 'Some Terrible Letters from Scotland' collected by James Hogg, is largely accounts of the spread of cholera. 'Life in Death' featuring a reanimation potion with only partial effects, in fact can be considered a science fiction story.

Others such as 'Monos and Daimonos' by Edward Buller, 'The Master of Logan' by Allan Cunningham, 'The Curse', 'The Red Man' by Catherine Gore, 'The Bride of Lindorf' by Letitia E. Landon and 'Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess' by the better known Sheridan Le Fanu, are all satisfyingly either supernatural or of a horror nature for the reader looking for short classic Gothic stories. They also remind me of Roald Dahl's 'Tales of the Unexpected' (1979), the sequels and TV series based on them. Overall this was an interesting collection of often forgotten stories which impinge on Gothic and horror writing long after they were published.

Non-Fiction

'The Hare with Amber Eyes' by Edmund De Waal

This is the second time in two months that I have mistaken a non-fiction book for fiction. In fact this was an investigation by the author, a descendant of the incredibly wealthy Ephrussi family. The linking aspect are the 264 intricate netsuke - ornate Japanese ornaments made of wood or ivory, to keep cords in place on someone's clothing in the 19th Century - that he inherited. You have to admire his effort in finding how they first arrived in Europe during the mid-19th Century fad for Japonisme and the context in which they were housed in Paris before moving to Vienna as a wedding present and then to the care of De Waal's uncle who lived in Japan following the Second World War. It is an interesting account of an incredibly wealthy family who were destroyed by the coming of Nazism and the persecution of Jews. Their wealth did allow most to escape into exile. A dedicated servant preserved the netsuke during the Second World War so they could be reunited with the family afterwards. However, vast quantities of artwork sold to help pay for passage into exile or seized by the Nazis are now housed in galleries across the world.

I really admired the hard work De Waal put in digging up the story of his ancestors especially in the turbulent times in which they lived. However, you quickly have had enough of all the details of the vast houses they built and the extensive art collections they assembled. While their wealth did not exempt them from persecution, most of the family came away alive. In addition, it is clear that De Waal is rather unaware of his own privileges. He works as a potter and yet owns a house in London and clearly has the time and the money to fly off across Europe and into Asia, whenever he wishes. While it is an interesting story it is one that left me feeling uneasy, particularly for those Jewish people living in Vienna and Paris who were unable to get away.

'The Hitler State' by Martin Broszat

This is a good supplement to the four volumes on the rise and maintenance of power by Noakes & Pridham that I read in 2022/23, notably Volume 2: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-books-i-read-in-november.html Broszat goes a level deeper and shows just how complicated Germany was under the Nazis. We are familiar with the sense that the regime was chaotic and that Hitler was happy to foster competing organisations often overlapping. This book provides the detail of those and how different bodies ebbed and flowed throughout the period, particularly in the pre-war years. It features many of the second- and third-rank Nazis which tend not to get featured even in specialist books on the regime and shows how different characters and ambitions, and the arguments among them, fuelled the chaos. In particular Broszat addresses the balance between Party and State, contrasting Germany with the USSR in this respect and articulating the contests between authoritarian - due to the persistence of so much from the previous state systems - and totalitarian trends. In the fields of the economy and industry, he shows how the entwining between official positions and private business was 'messy' but in fact allowed the German economy and output to continue. Ironically this mashing together of the private and the official was very much how Britain ran its wartime economy too. Overall this is a detailed account which really demonstrates the every-changing 'machine' of the Nazi regime. However, it does beg the question how much more deadly Nazi Germany would have been to the world if it has been organised effectively or even just on a rational basis.