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| During WWI, Hervey Allen’s unit of the National Guard (from Pennsylvania) fought in France. Many military and cultural historians consider Allen’s Toward the Flame: A War Diary to be the best combat memoir of WWI by an American. This is not a mud and blood memoir of the trenches since by the time Hervey and the men he served with got to fight, it was a war of movement. Allen was keen observer and gives descriptions of men dealing with shelling, anxiety, boredom, and ordinary but wonderful activities such as eating. Hervey gets across that in battle the individual infantryman’s survival depended on a combination of training, comrades, lay of the land, and luck. Allen gives a powerful account of the battle for Fismes and Fismette during the Aisne-Marne offensive of 1918. Some historians of the war call that battle the worst five days of fighting faced by the American forces in WWI. Allen is best-known as the author of the historical novel Anthony Adverse in the 1930s. It sold like hotcakes for its stirring story and spicy parts.
One time I heard PBS' Rick Steves interview an Englishman who takes tour groups around the beaches of Normandy. The English guide says American tourists don't usually know what side the US fought on in WWI
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| Moe Berg: The Spy Behind Homeplate (Vivian Grey) is a biography was written for the YA audience.
To say the least, Moe Berg's father frowned on his son's passion to play baseball, assuming it was a Jewish son's duty to study hard and become a professional and be his own boss. Blessed with a photographic memory, Moe learned many foreign languages and obtained a law degree. Being a brainy guy, he had his eccentricities so Casey Stengal, who knew many odd people, said Berg was the strangest man to ever play pro baseball. Moe played 15 years in the majors, but with WWII raging, he became a spy for Wild Bill Donovan's OSS, the mother of the CIA.
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| Mon (The Gate) is the last novel in Natsume Soseki’s First Trilogy. The first two installments, Sanshiro and Sore Kara (And Then), covered alienated intellectuals that could not find a place in the rough and tumble of modernizing Japan at the beginning of the 20th century.
Mon (The Gate) departs from the parentally-supported characters and focuses on two adults that make up an unlucky couple. They lead a drab, uneventful life, barely able to make ends meet on his salary as a government clerk. He works five and half days a week and his too exhausted to deal with basic family problems, much less live the examined life. They only positive aspect the couple has is their love for each other but for his part even the stance of “us against the world” is not enough to keep his unlived life from stirring and making trouble with guilt, anxiety and depression. He takes a spiritual retreat to a Zen temple, thus the title of the novel, the gate that lead to the monastery.
Granted, a portrait of middle-aged people in a lower-middle-class marriage sounds like unpromising stuff for a whole novel. Such is Soseki’s art that he takes this mundane material and makes us readers turn the page in aroused expectation that something surprising is going to happen. Skillful modernist that he is, Soseki uses time shifts to reveal gradually, with great control, how the couple find themselves in such a narrow world.
The translator was Francis Mathy. Though a glossary and biography list are included, they are not needed by somebody who knows already what geta and o-zoni are. Unlike the other Soseki novels in the Perigee editions from the late 1980s, this one has no forward or afterward by the translator.
I read this for the Japan Literature Challenge 3.
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| At the start of the Great Beastly Cultural Revolution in 1966, Mao Zedong exploited idealism and urged youth to smash the Four Olds, that is, anything like priceless cultural treasures or anybody like strict teachers that youth, in its arrogant stupidity, didn’t like. Imagine Mao’s surprise by 1972 when power struggles and political instability brought the country to near chaos. A piece of the solution was to get youth out of cities and into the country where they could be controlled more easily by slovenly violent peasants.
The novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie is about the two teenage boys who are sent down to the country. They experience the hardships of lugging nightsoil and plowing fields with stone age technology. They are victimized by the sadistic village headman. Their souls are saved when they discover a cache of Western classic novels in translation. They also get a idea of the ups and downs of romantic love from the seamstress of the title. The novel is fairly light-weight but to Dai’s credit he implies that not all the effects of reading great literature are beneficial.
I’d recommend this novel to those interested in the Cultural Revolution or serious readers looking for a slender middle-brow read for a change of pace. I read this novel as the 7th book for the China Challenge.
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| In Savage Reprisals: Bleak House, Madame Bovary, Buddenbrooks, Peter Gay argues against the idea that novels are accurate or objective reflections of a culture’s social, political and psychological worlds. Gay says, "[W]hoever enlists fiction to assist in the hunt for knowledge must always be alert to authorial partisanship, limiting cultural perspectives, fragmentary details offered as authoritative, to say nothing of neurotic obsessions." He examines three early modern novels closely to support his thesis. But these lectures given for W.W. Norton/New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers went into print without fussy editing that I like. He puts the Cheeryble Brothers in Oliver Twist when they should be in Nicholas Nickleby and there’s a metaphor that involves a “gunshot marriage.” Those that have read the novels may want to read this but if the thesis - "novels ain't history" - seems hardly earth-shaking, maybe not.
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