Fever Dream, by Samanta Schweblin

In Fever Dream (2014), by Samanta Schweblin, who knows what is happening?  It’s not enough to say nothing is what it seems.  There’s no baseline for what is or isn’t.  We can guess and speculate, and we can make assumptions.  It appears that the novel is a conversation between a woman named Amanda and a younger person named David.  David might be a child, or an adult.  He might be Amanda’s brother.  He might be real or imagined, living or dead. Amanda’s daughter is Nina, and as the novel moves on we deduce that she has disappeared or died.  Amanda herself is worried about dying.  She’s worrying about worms taking over her body.  Worms suggest death, mortality.  Amanda is in fact near death, dying in a trauma center.  David seems to be preparing her for death, and for other realizations. She’s the victim (we think) of poisoning, environmental poisoning or perhaps deliberate poisoning.  David was poisoned too, as was Nina.  David grew sick and nearly died, but a woman with certain abilities transferred half of his spirit into another body so he could recover.  This may have happened to Nina as well, or she may have died. Carla is Amanda’s mother, whom she reviles and loves.  Carla rescues David and takes him to the spirit changer.  She may have done the same for Nina.  The narrative really does have the quality of a fever dream, a hallucination or a delirious imagining.  It’s deftly, brilliantly executed.  The tension builds throughout, even though we’re not sure what generates it.  The novel is relatively short, fortunately so, because such a book couldn’t sustain this approach over a greater length.

Ghost Wall, by Sara Moss

A 17-year-old girl named Sylvie narrates Ghost Wall, by Sarah Moss (2019). Her father is obsessed with the Iron Age of northern England some 2000 years in the past. This is the area north of Hadrian’s wall, which separated supposedly uncivilized inhabitants from the supposedly civilized invading Romans. The girl’s father rules over his wife and daughter with a tyrannical, abusive hand. His wife has been reduced to an almost faceless mass of subjugation while his daughter chafes against his domineering presence in looks for a way to escape. His wife often shows bruises, and if she violates his rules he whips her violently. The novel takes place during a two-week long vacation for the family, which the father has decided they will spend accompanying an experimental archaeology class from a local college on a retreat where they will try to live like prehistoric men and women might have lived 2000 years ago. They dig roots, hunt for edible vegetables, wear rough tunics, and otherwise try to live as ancient people. The point for the experimental archaeology class is to learn about ancient ways of life. The point for the father is to exercise his obsessions and to find further reason to dominate his daughter.

Ghost Wall reminds me of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, James Dickey's Deliverance, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, all of which show supposedly civilized humans sink to a state of savagery. Moss frames this narrative in terms of patriarchy. It is no surprise that the father is obsessed with a historical period during which women were the chattel of men, subject to physical abuse and injury, and sometimes death. The men in this novel act out what they believe to have been ancient rituals and practices while the women stand off to the side, either looking on in astonishment and disgust or following the orders the men give them. The narrator's language reflects the brutal treatment she receives from her father, and also her upbringing in northern England.

In the final scenes the father and the professor leading the students decide to enact a human sacrifice, and they select Sylvie as the sacrificial victim. They don’t mean, at least at first, to harm her, but midway through the ceremony the father has already cut her with a knife. One of the students—the only woman in the group alerts local constables.  They arrive in time to stop the ceremony and arrest the father. They should also have arrested the professor who encouraged his students to take part and who did not try to stop the father’s numerous instances of abusive behavior.

This is a powerful and beautifully written novel. About halfway through, during a scene where the father and professor discuss human sacrifice and the burial of bodies in peat bogs, you begin to suspect what could happen. The novel’s opening scene, which describes the ritualistic killing of a young woman two thousand years in the past, suggested this possibility. Tension grows from the anticipation and dread the reader feels.

One might say that the father’s obsessive behavior and his abuse of his wife and daughter are simply examples of an extreme form of male behavior. But in this case, perhaps, the extreme becomes a way of defining the norm. It's also clear that the father's treatment of his wife and daughter stems from a disgust with female sexuality.

The ghost wall is a symbol that through the title envelops the entire novel.  A ghost wall is both an echo of the past, and a persistence of the past.  It’s a dividing line between past and present but because it’s ghostly (without form or matter) it’s no divider at all.  It links past and present. Through it the past is continuous with the present, and practices of the past persist into the present.  Hence the male characters become so involved in building the ghost wall, with its animal skulls reminiscent of the human skulls that might have sat atop it two millennia in the past.  Its ghostly nature signifies that male dominance over females in the prehistoric Iron Age persists in the present.  Sylvie who unhappily plays the pretended sacrificial victim in the ceremony is at the end almost an actual victim.  But she was a victim from the start.

A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories, by Lucia Berlin

Lucia Berlin, in the stories collected in A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories (2015), shows a great talent for description. It’s not merely the details she notices. It's how she presents them, the clarity of her descriptions, the beauty of her sentences. She's a good writer. Her stories are sometimes as brief as a couple of pages and sometimes much longer. Many if not most of them are anecdotes rather than fully developed narratives. Her method is to introduce a situation, develop one or more characters, and end the story. Usually there's no real plot. In some of her stories the narrative develops through emotional resonances and subtle changes in attitude. Some stories end with a kind of twist, a form of epiphany, that illuminates the situation or the people Berlin describes. She returns often to the same characters and situations, in part because she is drawing from the events of her own life.

An underlying motif in some of her stories is the approach of Berlin’s sister towards death from cancer. A group of stories are set in Mexico or South America, where Berlin lived for periods of her childhood and adult life. Others occur in Southern California or northern Colorado. They span a time in Berlin's life from her 20s until just before her death in her late 60s. Most of her main characters are women, although at least one story has a male protagonist. Many of the characters are recovering addicts or alcoholics, or at least they are recovering from failures in their personal lives. For the most part the stories seem to be autobiographical even when Berlin goes to some lengths to camouflage the characters. There is a novelty to the stories in their nuanced treatment of people and difficult situations and problematic lives. Because Berlin often reuses characters or situations, after a time the stories blur together.

The Indispensable Composers: a Personal Guide, by Anthony Tommasini

The Indispensable Composers: a Personal Guide (2018), examines the composers whom the author Anthony Tommasini, a New York Times music critic, considers to be the most important in Western music. It is also a kind of memoir in which Tommasini recollects his musical education, first encounters with great works of music, his favorite professors, the performers such as Rudolph Serkin who have influenced him. The book is self-indulgent in this regard, but the personal information give the book an additional layer of interest. Tommasini devotes each chapter to a different composer or group of composers. There's a certain free-form skipping about as he moves from personal anecdotes to music by the composers to biographical details. Most of those details come from biographies which he scrupulously acknowledges. The most significant omission among the composers, I thought, was Gustav Mahler, who is mentioned a few times and whose omission, Tommasini does not excuse. There are no great revelations here. The book introduces us to the lives of these composers and their music. You can use it as a guide for listening, or not.

I've often found in music criticism, and this book is no exception, that there is no good way to describe music in words. One can talk about the key in which a work is written, the time signature, the dynamics, the tempo. One can point out where the violins enter or the horn section begins to diminish. But there is no way, I think, to replicate in words the effects of music.

This book would have been more useful had a set of CDs including the works Tommasini discusses accompanied it.

RBG

RPG (2018; dirs. Julie Cohen and Betsy West) provides an admiring overview of the life and career of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  Of particular interest is her advocacy for the rights of women as a lawyer defending cases during the 1960s and 1970s, then as a member of the US Court of Appeals, and finally as a justice on the Supreme Court.  A second stage of her career began in the 2000s as the Court shifted to the right with the appointment of conservative justices by George W. Bush.  In those years she became a strong dissenting voice on the Supreme Court.  The documentary also explores Ginsburg’s private life, especially her fifty-year marriage to her husband, Martin, who proudly supported his wife and willingly took a secondary role as her career flourished.

The documentary focuses on Ginsburg’s quiet, reticent style.  She is not a firebrand, but her quiet pursuit and defense of cases involving discrimination on the basis of sex made her one of the most effective and recognized jurists of the last 100 years.

The documentary presents Ginsburg as something of a 2-dimensional figure.  You get glimpses of her inner life, of her pleasure in her husband and family, but it would be useful to have more.  And it would be useful as well to know more about her profile as a lawyer in cases that did not involve gender rights (one would assume that there are some, at least early in her career). RBG takes the usual CNN approach to documentaries about famous figures: interviews with the subject, members of her family, her friends and associates, and photos and films of important moments in her life.  Were Ginsburg a less interesting and significant figure, such a format could prove banal.  In Ginsburg’s case, the documentary opens up and explains her life and career and accomplishments.

On Desperate Ground: The Marines at The Reservoir, the Korean War's Greatest Battle, by Hampton Sides

1.  Gen. Douglas MacArthur believed that the invasion of Korea in late 1950 by US and UN forces would be the glorious culmination of his career. An immense cult of personality surrounded him. He relied on aides and assistants who told him what he wanted to hear rather than what he needed to know. Some of his aides were toadies. As a result, he did not receive (and did not want to hear) intelligence about Korea, especially about the arrival of 200,000 Chinese soldiers from Manchuria, that would interfere with his plans for conquering Korea and having troops go home by Christmas.

2. At least as far back as World War II, bad intelligence has been a key factor in drawing US forces into armed conflicts. Some historians argue that Franklin Delano Roosevelt overlooked intelligence reports that hinted at a possible attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Bad intelligence was a constant issue in the Vietnamese conflict. In 2001 the Bush administration overlooked or ignored intelligence suggesting the possibility of an attack on the World Trade Center. Incorrect intelligence about weapons of mass destruction led to the US invasion of Iraq in 2001. A key factor in the campaign that led to the battle for the Choisin reservoir was faulty intelligence about the presence of Chinese troops. The fault was not in the intelligence but in the unwillingness of commanding generals to heed it. Generals in the field knew the Chinese were there, but their commanding officers regarded their reports as rumors and did not take them seriously.

3. Major General Edward Almond was in charge of the campaign and at the same time belonged to MacArthur's inner circle. He admired the general so deeply that he was willing to carry out his orders without question. Gen. Oliver Smith, on the other hand, commander of the UN forces, was an expert in amphibious landings. He was knowledgeable about tactics and a deep and careful thinker. He intuited and later knew for certain that the campaign he was assigned to carry out would be difficult if not impossible. But Gen. Almond regarded his reports as alarmist and until the late stages of the campaign he ignored them. The rivalry between these two generals, their mutual dislike for each other, was a major factor in this campaign. Gen. Smith’s ability to, on the one hand, obey Almond's orders and, on the other hand, protect his troops was one of the main reasons why the Choisin campaign was not a complete disaster.

4. Ethnic and racial stereotypes played another role. Gen. Almond was a racist who did not believe that black or Puerto Rican troops could be good soldiers. He thought the Chinese were unsophisticated and incapable of carrying out a well-planned campaign. In fact, the Chinese forces were not well armed or trained, but there were hundreds of thousands of them. In China the cult of individualism didn't exist. Chinese generals were willing to expend hundreds and thousands of lives to achieve their goals in battle. Wave after wave of Chinese soldiers attacked US and UN forces and were immediately gunned down only to be followed by other troops who were also gunned down. Some 3000 American deaths resulted from the campaign, but the toll for the Chinese was 35,000.

On Desperate Ground: The Marines at The Reservoir, the Korean War's Greatest Battle (2018), by Hampton Sides, moves back and forth between accounts of soldiers in the field to generals in their offices and homes. Sides illustrates his accounts with specific narratives of soldiers and officers in the field. This is an approach to narrating a battle similar to what Mark Bowden uses in Hue 1968 (2017). It makes this informative, carefully researched, and well written book more accessible for lay readers.

Selected Stories of Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker’s subject is New York and its social classes. Many of her characters are from a vaguely defined middle class.  They’re aware of the upper class but also aware of their inability to rise economically or socially. They are partially sensible people who lead dreary lives. The women are defined by dissatisfaction with their station, their marriages, their futures. In one story a young woman in her late 20s who after a socially active period of years meets a man and after six weeks marries him. He is a salesman and a heavy drinker, which she sees no problem with. Theirs is a marriage of convenience: she wants to get married and so does he. But he soon grows tired of her, and she finds friends elsewhere. She takes to drink. When he leaves her, she becomes the lover of a man whom she met at a social gathering in a neighbor's apartment. He later abandons her, and she has a series of dreary meaningless relationships with men and finally finds herself in her 40s exhausted and depressed. She tries to commit suicide but fails. Parker sees such women as morally empty, as spiritually bankrupt (she would probably hate that phrase). Another story focuses on a man in his late 40s who seduces a young woman in her early 20s who works in his office. He is married and has children. She is, as the story makes out, a virgin who's had no relationships with anyone. Because she has no experience, she never realizes his clumsiness or his apparent paunch and succumbs to his entreaties. She becomes pregnant, and he sees this as a horrible inconvenience and an insult to himself. Another secretary in the office arranges an abortion, and the young woman goes home to her family. The man is totally insensible to her feelings and her situation. It's pretty clear that this event for her has been a horrible episode. He is glad to have her out of his life. He goes home to his family and discovers that his wife has allowed his son and daughter to bring a young dog into their house. He is open to the idea of his children having a pet, but when he discovers that the dog is a female, he's enraged. He remonstrates with his wife and tells her that after the children go to bed he will simply put the animal out the door. The next day they will tell the children it ran away. His attitude towards the female dog is exactly his attitude towards the young woman whom he got pregnant. It's a rather obvious parallel on the one hand, but it's vicious accuracy works well.

These stories are well told and skillfully written. Some of them go on too long. The characters are dry and two-dimensional for the most part, and partially I think this is Parker’s intent. But it may also be a matter of her disposition as a writer. One senses that she hates the people she writes about, that she sees them as deserving targets of sarcasm and irony rather than as human beings.

The audiobooks edition of the Selected Stories of Dorothy Parker (2018) is narrated by Elaine Stritch. The combination of Stritch's caustic often sarcastic voice with Parker's satiric, often sarcastic tone is a problem. It's difficult to separate Parker from Stritch. On the other hand, if you don't worry about that separation, Elaine Stritch reads the stories well enough.