When there’s no time to read: four brief reviews

The fallout from the illness and death of my sister in Mexico which I mentioned in a December 2018 post, still dogs me, cutting into both writing and reading time. After making a downward adjustment to my annual self-imposed reading challenge at Goodreads, here’s what I found myself reading this January: one “serious” novel for a reading group, one audiobook biography, one book of semi-popular science, and a cozy mystery I found among my late sister’s books while sorting them for donation to the San Miguel de Allende biblioteca.

Snippets only posted here – and despite readers’ kindness in asking me to review their books, I must still decline. My schedule is only getting tighter as more issues about my sister’s estate crop up.

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First up: When We Were Orphans, by Kazuo Ishiguro. While searching for a compatible reading group years ago, I came across one in Dallas that specializes in reading books by non-U.S. authors and non-U.S. cultures. The reading choices of its members tend to be more high-brow than those I would pick if left to my own devices, which is not a bad thing. As it happens, I’m a fan of historical fiction (preferably of the non-bodice ripping kind) and Ishiguro’s depiction of the inter-war British colony in Shanghai and the Sino-Japanese war of 1937-1945 is a masterpiece of historical research. 

Beginning with the mysterious disappearance of a British couple in Shanghai, Ishiguro follows the career of their young son, Christopher Banks, ripped from his life in China and friendship with the young Japanese boy next door in the insulated international colony to the care of an elderly aunt in England.

Always the odd one out in school and society (perhaps like Ishiguro himself, a Japanese national brought up in England), Christopher becomes a professional consulting detective, joining the likes of Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Whimsey, and a myriad of other heroes from the golden age of English detective fiction. But despite his fame in England, Christopher’s guiding ambition is to return to China and solve the mystery of his parents’ disappearance. 

I found When We Were Orphans plodding in its early stages and disliked what seemed to me to be Ishiguro’s tendency to use his protagonist as a mere way to display the history. However, the story’s intensity increased with Christopher’s return decades later to Shanghai, where he learns that things are not – and never were – the way he remembered them from childhood. Ishiguro’s depiction of Christopher’s journey through a city and its people on the verge of collapse is almost hallucinatory in its horror and strangeness. Grade: 4/5.

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Next: Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and his Last Muse, by Andrea di Robilant. I listened to this on an audio CD, a favorite method of whiling away the tedium of long drives – in this case, to and from the airport from which I travelled to my sister’s former home in Mexico. The book traces approximately the last decade of Hemingway’s life, and his emotional – although possibly Platonic – love affair with young Adriana Ivancich. When they first met in 1948, following Hemingway’s off-the-cuff decision to return to scenes of his World War I service in Italy, he was nearing fifty (and married to his fourth wife, Mary Welsh). Adriana was only 18, and barely out of convent school. 

image: pixabay

Hemingway was also almost a has-been to American audiences. He had not published a book since For Whom the Bell Tolls, nearly a decade previously, and by the late 1940’s a new post-war generation of writers were rising to the top of the best-seller lists. Was it really his infatuation with a woman young enough to be his daughter (and who he sometimes addressed as Daughter) that prompted a rebirth of his writing juices – culminating in his late-period masterpiece, The Old Man and the Sea (as well as such lesser but still memorable works as Across the River and Into the Trees, Islands in the Stream, and parts of A Moveable Feast)? 

In the #metoo era, Hemingway’s relationship with Adriana looks creepily like the sexual “grooming” of abusers, although in her memoir published after his death, Adriana insisted they got beyond kissing and cuddling. And perhaps my experience with my sister’s descent into alcohol-fuel rages and mental collapse colored my nightmarish impression of Hemingway’s final, booze-soaked years. 

Still, Autumn in Venice is a memorable account of the last bloom of a literary icon, as well as life with the jet-set of post-World War II Italian aristocracy. A bonus – the Italian author’s great-uncle was one Hemingway’s drinking pals of the era! Grade: 4/5.

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Next: I, Mammal: The Story of What Makes Us Mammals, by Liam Drew. This book by British writer (and former neurobiologist) Liam Drew caught my eye when a local branch of the Dallas Public Library featured it on its new books shelf. The evolution of the mammalian scrotum and placenta? How about the evolution of the mammary glands, the organs which have given their name to the vertebrate class to which Drew, I and presumably you readers belong?

If this sounds like heavyweight reading, it’s not. I originally planned to major in biology in college (before quickly changing to journalism!) but even a high school course in the science should be enough to carry the average reader through Drew’s discussions. 

Even those who sometimes feel their minds being stretched by the subject matter – not a bad thing – will find themselves hooked on the charm of Drew’s writing, with personal illustrations throughout of the organs that nurtured his daughters through fetal and early childhood development.

And after all, why shouldn’t gonads share the “sex appeal” that more common discussions of brains usually usurp in evolutionary discussion? Try dropping a hint or three into your next cocktail party conversation and watch what happens. Although, by the way, how did mammals and birds – that other warm-blooded (oops – endothermic) vertebrate class with which we mammals share the planet – find different ways to develop their brainy intellects? Grade: 5/5.

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Finally, A Murder is Announced, by Agatha Christie. Yes, it’s just occurring to me as I write that this final read of the month, like the first, When We Were Orphans, is a detective story, and one from a writer who might have inspired Ishiguro’s protagonist. I found it in one of the many cupboards and cabinets where my sister had stashed her books. The last time
I visited her before her cirrhosis-fueled decline, she had complained that she couldn’t find a book club because of a shortage of books – presumably English-language books – in San Miguel. So, I was amazed at the stacks of books – probably numbering in the hundreds – I found in her house during her days.  Among them was this Christie classic, whose tattered cover I hope was testimony of the solace my sister found in reading it.

In what must be one of the most compelling hooks in detective fiction, the inhabitants of the English village of Chipping Cleghorn find the following announcement in the well-read “Personals” section of the local newspaper: “A murder is announced, and will take place Friday, October 29, at Little Paddocks at 6:30 p.m. Friends, accept this, the only intimation.”

Their amazement is nothing compared to that of the inhabitants of the house known as Little Paddocks themselves – retired financial secretary Letitia Blacklock and old schoolmate, Dora “Bunny” Bunner.

Silly though the notice seems, Miss Blacklock realizes it will draw all her curious neighbors and prepares her household, which also includes her two 20-something cousins, a boarding “lady” gardener, and a flighty refugee who claims her current status as cook is far beneath her educational and social standing in her (unspecified) Central European country of origin, for visitors on the announced date and time. 

As a crowd gathers inside the Little Paddocks drawing room, the lights suddenly go out, a masked man throws the door open and dazzles the eyes of the company with a flashlight beam. Shots ring out and the masked man drops to the floor. When the lights are restored, Miss Blacklock’s ear is bleeding, apparently grazed by a bullet. However, the only person shot dead is the intruder himself. 

But if the would-be murderer is dead, why do more bodies pile up as the days go by? Luckily, amateur sleuth Miss Jane Marple is visiting old friends in Chipping Cleghorn and steps in to aid the baffled local police. But can she find the killer before the killer finds her?

“Queen of crime” Christie was still at the top of her game in 1950’s A Murder is Announced, but the solution to this whodunnit involves too many bizarre coincidences for my taste. On a side note, xenophobia and disdain for even the most pathetic refugees of the recent war exhibited by the inhabitants of Chipping Cleghorn is, still seems pertinent in 2019. Grade: 4/5.