The White tiger Roars

The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga, introduces an exciting new writer who happens to be Indian. If it’s true—and I happen to think it is—that the quality of a writer’s voice is the key to success, then Adiga has a great future. The compelling and often terrifying but never dull voice in this novel belongs to Balram Halwai, the owner of a car service, who sits in his office in the middle of the night in Bangalore speaking to the premier of China, due to visit India shortly. He’s alone in his tiny office with only his chandelier for company. The room is filled with the flickering light that is thrown around the room by the turning fan just above it. Having heard on the radio that Premier Jiabao wants to learn the truth about Bangalore, to “meet some Indian entrepreneurs and hear the story of their success from their own lips,” Balram has determined that Jiabao hear his life story because he believes that the “future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse.” And what’s more, his story is the right one because, as he says, “I am tomorrow.”
Forget images of the Taj Mahal, incense, golden chrysanthemums, elephants padding through the jungle, or “lyrical India,” as one critic has described it; Balram’s India is a savage place, a country where he, the son of a rickshaw puller, can rise from “The Darkness” only by the most nefarious of means. Balram’s life reflects all the clichés—rags to riches, poor boy makes good, etc. You can’t listen to him without thinking of Dickens’s Pip, of David Copperfield on the one hand, of Horatio Alger stories, even Stendhal’s The Charter House of Parma or The Red and the Black. Except that, and it’s a big except, Balram gets where he gets in his own way, by conniving and cheating and murdering. And yet, and yet, it’s hard to despise him because his world is so vicious and corrupt. Balram compares it to a Rooster Coop, the box into which roosters are crammed in the market. Above them the butcher chops up chickens and the roosters smell the blood. But they don’t rebel or try to escape the coop, and as Balram says, the “very same thing is done with human beings in this country.”
And so he has become a White Tiger, the “rarest of animals—the creature that comes along only once in a generation,” in the jungle of his country." The angry outrage, the biting wit, the sheer power of Balram’s voice is so persuasive that readers are carried along, complicit in the acts that he carries out to achieve his office and his chandelier. Is he mad? Maybe. Is this the voice of the future? Possibly. Whatever else, his is a narrative of enormous power that keeps a reader turning the pages until the end just to hear where Balram will go next. Much as I have enjoyed books by other Indian writers such as Amitov Ghosh, Rohan Mistry, Karen Desai, and Manil Suri, this is the first one I’ve read that seemed to look to the future. Prophetically, it seems to suggest the world of the recent attacks in Mumbai rather than the world of a film like “Monsoon Wedding.” Finally, the angry energy of Balram’s voice reminded me a lot of Salmon Rushdie’s classic novel about partition, Midnight’s Children. Is Balram’s world the child of that 1947 midnight? This is not a happy thought.

A Critic's Critic

For readers who want to go beyond the average review by delving deeper into criticism of the novel I recommend James Wood, a professor of literary criticism at Harvard. To put it simply, Wood is a believer in the power of the novel to express the reality of the human condition in a world without God. Although he goes to some lengths to argue that he is not substituting the novel for religion, he puts great faith in the capacity of literature to express reality. His latest contribution to the cause is a slim volume called How Fiction Works, which is refreshingly on the side of practice as opposed to theory. While not exactly easy reading, it’s well worth your time and effort. Woods is a concise writer with a vast knowledge of the literature from which he selects his examples.
As far as I go, however, Woods’ best book is The Broken Estate (1999), a collection of essays on literature and belief now available in paper. Most of the pieces were published elsewhere before appearing in book form, but reading them together leads to a deeper understanding of Woods’ and of his attentiveness to the works under consideration; in other words, he listens to the voices of the novelist rather than imposing a theory of his own, a surprisingly rare gift in a critic.
Subjects run the gamut from Sir Thomas More to Don DeLillo, and include writers as disparate as Iris Murdoch and Toni Morrison. Of course Woods has his pet peeves, such as Toni Morrison’s use of “false magic,” which he says corrupts “our ability to judge fiction, which is a measured unreality.” Yet he is open to D.H. Lawrence’s “occultism” because he, Lawrence, is a “mystical realist” who is a poet and preacher at the same time. Read together, these two essays went a long way towards making me understand what I have never liked about the former and loved about the latter. Thus Woods gives readers a critical vocabulary with which to express likes and dislikes.
There’s no obligation to agree with everything he says—that would be to miss the point. But Woods makes us think about what it is the novel does and how it does it. I, for instance, don’t agree with him about Murdoch or John Updike or W.G. Sebald, whom I will never read with y pleasure whatever Woods or anyone else says about his genius. But neither will I read Virginia Woolf again without remembering Woods’ impassioned claim for her. He argues that what she seeks in her art is an “indefinability” of something that can’t be found, but that we all sense, a meaning that is always elusive, “finlike,” that her art at its best is always moving toward. Woods sent me back to her novels with a deepened understanding of their genius. At the end of the book’s last essay, which is on the nature of the broken estate, Wood asks “Why must we move through this unhappy, painful, rehearsal for heaven, this desperate antechamber, this foreword written by an anonymous author, this hard prelude in which so few of us can find our way?” Why indeed, but thank the heaven that doesn’t exist for the literature that has been written in that antechamber.

Nowhere to Go

Nothing to Be Frightened Of, self-described as a “memoir of mortality,” displays the wit and linguistic facility readers expect of Julian Barnes, whose most recent book was Arthur and George, a novel based on a relationship between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and an unknown Anglo-Indian named George. Barnes’s latest begins with a bang suggestive of both its seriousness and its humor: “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.” What follows is Barnes’s self-examination of his irrational fear of death and the pointlessness of such an emotion, if one can reduce a profoundly troubling psychological state to h an inadequate word.
Readers learn a lot about Barnes’s family, grandparents, parents and philosopher brother who, by the way, sounds like a true British eccentric, and who regards his younger brother’s whinging about the inevitable with affectionate (I think) scorn. But Barnes also draws upon what other writers, especially French, have had to say about the grim reaper. One often cited is Jules Renard, the nineteenth-century French author whose sometimes mordant wit and brevity may explain Barnes’ attraction to him. Stendhal appears too, primarily in the context of Stendhal’s Syndrome, a supposedly near-death experience brought on by exposure to great art that overcame the writer the first time he visited Florence. Barnes debunks Stendhal’s description of what happened, pointing out that the details are all wrong, that it cannot have possibly transpired as Beyle/Stendhal claims; he does not, however, deny the worth of the experience. The story, he says, “is true, not least because we want it, we need it to be true.” Thus too we need to believe when we are told that death is not to be feared, in which instance it’s harder to accept the convenient lie.
The fraught question of the ephemeral nature of the novelist’s output and the unreliability of memory pops up throughout the book. Memory, Barnes says, begins to seem “less and less distinguishable” from the imagination as age sets in. The novelist—he cites Ford Madox Ford, who was known for his storytelling—“could be a mighty liar, and a mighty truth-teller, at the same time, and in the same sentence.” But does any of it endure? For a few generations perhaps, but seldom longer. Towards the end of the book Barnes describes a visit to Renard’s grave in the village of Chitry-les-Mines, which shows no signs of frequent visitations. “Is there anything sadder than an unvisited grave?” he asks, knowing full well that in time every grave is unvisited.
I liked this book. Barnes is at times too clever for his own good, but he is always intelligent, always provocative, and sometimes moving as he defends his fear of death and his lack of belief in an afterlife as perfectly rational if not inevitable for a thinking person. I share many of his views and the night I finished the book just before falling asleep I had a most unpleasant dream, the details of which soon faded, but from which I awoke speaking the words, “I have nowhere to go.” Having initially remembered them as “I want to get out of here,” upon reflection I realized I was wrong. It seems obvious now that my terror was a response to Barnes’s assertion that we die only to go nowhere.

Liars, Rogues and Thieves

Company of Liars by Karen Maitland—a specialist in psycholinguistics, whatever that may be—is a chilling account of a group of strangers forced to flee together from the ravages of the Black Plague that struck England in 1348. Advertised as a reinterpretation of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, it has little in common with that great chronicle other than being structured as a journey during which some of the travelers tell their tales. In this instance, however, the tales are primarily a fictional device for filling in their backgrounds. That said, the novel is a fascinating narrative of what the arrival of the plague on England’s shores signified. A large portion of the population died and abject fear took over the country. Maitland creates a believable portrait of life in a country still largely rural in nature that does not make one long for the past, which she portrays as brutal, diseased and filthy. The novel puts paid to the myth of the medieval world as a place of minstrels, castles and Christmas feasts. Although it uses some of the same devices, Company of Liars is head and shoulders above the usual “medieval world come to life” novel.
The travellers’ tale is told by Camelot, a seller of relics who ends up leading the disparate group of pilgrims, most of whom either dislike or distrust each other, as they wend their way across England, the plague always on their heels or even ahead of them, always forcing them to rethink their route. His fellow travelers include a young couple expecting a baby, two Italian musicians, a young man with a swan’s wing for an arm, and a distinctly unsettling very blond little girl with a nasty habit of knowing what is about to occur, usually something terrible, usually death. Every one of these refugees from the mainstream has a secret to keep, all of which are divulged in time. Many of them come to a bad end so all in all it’s a grim tale, but very readable. Camelot’s secret is told only at the end, and is the least convincing in that it seems like too handy an end to the novel’s journey, a journey which, like Chaucer’s before it mimics man’s progress through life. A pilgrimage is a very handy metaphor around which to build a novel and Maitland makes good use of it.

Appointment in Eastwick

John Updike’s The Widows of Eastwick has its comic moments but the shadow of the grim reaper hangs over it. “We all have ends. The heart beats time. Time beats us,” notes one of the widows bleakly and as it turns out, prophetically. Jane is one of the three of women whose history continues after the long hiatus since Updike introduced them in The Witches of Eastwick (1984). Her story ends this time around, but Sukie and Alexandra live on. At the novel’s end the narrative voice—the collective voice of Eastwick, the chorus as it were—primly rejoices that the three “unholy wantons” have once again left. It regrets, however, that they seem to have shed the guilt of their former sins—recounted in the first novel—“as casually as when they shed their clothes.” Yet time beats for the two survivors just as surely as it did for Jane, and in the face of death, what does a little guilt matter—we’re all guilty of something. The nature of the women’s’ witch hood—were they really witches and what did Updike mean by it?—that hung over the first novel seems a side issue this time. Like the frightened man in Somerset Maugham’s re-telling of the tale of the servant who flees to Samarra to avoid death only to find him there, these three women return to Eastwick not only to re-live their past, but to prolong their lives by re-discovering their younger selves. In a sense they do find the past, or the fragments of it that exist in the rather sad New England village that Eastwick has become, but it fails to revive them.
As always, Updike writes like an angel yet there were moments when my attention wandered. In the first part of the novel the women do some traveling, including to Egypt and China. The sections read as if Updike had dug out his old itineraries and incorporated his characters into them—I’ve been both places and I could almost have done the same myself. I could not, however, have re-created tired old Eastwick as he does, or the scene in which the three attempt to summon up their supernatural powers once again, complete with a circle dribbled onto the carpet with dishwasher soap. Nor could I have near to creating the immanence of death that pervades the novel—the sudden sharp reminders that this is Updike’s subject. As one of the women says, “Weddings and funerals. Graduations and divorces. Endings. Ceremonies get us through. They’re like blindfolds for people being shot by a firing squad.” That’s us, dear readers, standing in front of the firing squad with our eyes tight shut.

Libraries

I believe in libraries because they have been a lifeline for me. Libraries provide books; they embody the idea that books are the vehicles of knowledge and pleasure, essential elements in the pursuit of happiness, and this I also believe. The Brownell Library in Little Compton RI, to which this blog is linked, is about the tenth library I have known since my mother took me as a small child to the library in Aurora, New York and introduced me to the joys of picking out books. There were plenty of books in our house, but we always went to the library. Today libraries, ours included, offer computers, audio materials, story hours, etc. But the Tudor Revival building that housed the Aurora library was a quieter place. The librarian ruled with a firm hand on the date stamp and warning looks at disturbers of the peace—as did the stern-faced woman behind the desk at the Brownell when I first went there some 50 years ago. Yet I felt at home, and that Christmas I asked for a date stamp so I could play library, which I did, thus defacing a number of my books.
As an only child who was home schooled for a while, books were my companions. After Aurora I got them from the library in Northfield Minnesota, today one of the few remaining Carnegie libraries that is still a library—its website shows an elegant space but what I remember is the dusty smell of the books and the sunlight on the reading room tables. My mother persuaded the librarian to give me access to the adult literature, believing that the more widely I read the sooner I’d be equipped to separate the good from the bad. I went to a high school I chose primarily for its library, a room with a fireplace and leather couches in which I could hide of an afternoon and read. I married early and kept on searching out libraries, now with my children in tow. A voracious reader’s appetite knows no bounds, and libraries provide the needed food.
When we settled in Providence I discovered the Athenaeum, one of the oldest private libraries in the country, where I worked both as a volunteer and an employee; I finally had an official date stamp. I loved observing the patrons, young and old, like the gentleman who came in every afternoon whose routine depended on touching certain objects in order, and the children whose heads barely reached over the top of the desk, their harassed mothers laden with armloads of overdue books.
The staff at the Brownell is anything but stern. I rely mostly on interlibrary loan and make my requests on line, but I still love walking into the library and seeing all that goes on now; there is a direct line between the child who loved books and the woman who believes in libraries as repositories of companionship, possibility and life-enhancing pleasure and knowledge.

Fact and Fiction: Mayer and LeCarre

I recently read two books that went together like cakes and ale, although not quite so pleasantly. One, Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side is, as the sub-title says, “The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals.” The other is John Le Carré’s new novel, A Most Wanted Man, a chilling page turner featuring a British banker and a young German lawyer who try to save a Muslim refugee caught up in the “War on Terror” described so eloquently in Mayer’s book.
Mayer offers ample proof for her thesis that the Bush Administration “invoked the fear flowing from the attacks on September 11 to institute a policy of deliberate cruelty that would have been unthinkable on September 10.” Allowing that extreme measures were “perhaps understandable” in the dark days right after the attack on the Twin Towers, Mayer argues that years later the Administration’s “counterterrorism policies remained largely frozen in place.” She also details the legal machinations that went on to ensure that those involved at the highest levels would escape prosecution at a future time. Not surprisingly, she identifies the villain in the story as Vice-President Cheney
Mayer’s book, which spares its audience few details of the evils done in America’s name, is troubling reading. A Most Wanted Man echoes its message in fictional form, giving the administration’s doings a human face. Issa is a ill young Muslim refugee with a mysterious history and a claim to money deposited long ago in a private bank in Hamburg by his Russian father—not that he wants the money for himself, no, he wants to help his fellow Chechens. His lawyer, an idealistic young woman called Annabel, determines to save him and enlists the help of Tommy Brue, the aging proprietor of a private bank that is on the outs. Together they battle the German and British and American intelligence services—each with a different agenda--that are determined to use Issa to capture bigger fish. In the end the good guys fail, and they fail in large part because of the demands of the Americans, who consider Issa dispensable even if he isn’t guilty. The last Annabel and Brue see of the boy, he is spread-eagled on the floor of a van as it speeds away, guarded by men in black balaclavas and jumpsuits. The scene brings to life Mayer’s description of the renditions that the US has carried out under the auspices of the Bush administration.

Class Trash

And just what is class trash? As far as I’m concerned it’s a book like Godchildren, Brit novelist Nicholas Coleridge’s 2002 saga about a self-made billionaire, Marcus Brand, and his six godchildren. Although there are many differences between out-and-out trash and something better, an ability to write and the sophistication of the narrative voice are key. Coleridge, for instance, endows his characters autonomy while simultaneously viewing them ironically, thus giving readers license to be absorbed in the lives of totally useless people, conscience free—we align ourselves with the narrative voice’s implicit moral superiority.
Meanwhile the (obviously) above-it-all reader is free to enjoy all the mouthwatering features of real trash—exotic settings, the best brand names, sexual high jinks; you name it, it’s here. The novel unfolds chronologically and centers on the rare times when Brand, purportedly childless, gathers together his godchildren in places like the Bahamas, Paris and finally, Bali. The story moves back and forth between the godchildren, following them from early childhood until adulthood. Among them are Charlie, the boorish son of a titled but decrepit Scots family, Stuart, the determined middle-class achiever, Jamie the charming drifter, and Saffron, the beautiful daughter of a mother who specializes in sleeping around. The plot follows them through school, first jobs, marriage, and their complicated relationships with each other. Meanwhile Brand is consolidating his fortune and often unbeknownst to them, manipulating the godchildren. In time it turns out that he is connected to most of them in ways well beyond having sprinkled water on their heads in a church.
Aside from his ability as a writer, what saves the novel from inanity is Coleridge’s sharp eye for social nuances. If nothing else, the book is a primer to what was smart in London in 2002. This reader was caught between feeling guilty for enjoying a book that adds up to precisely nothing and turning the pages hypnotically. Reading Godchildren is like eating too many expensive chocolates, a lot of fun in the doing but kind of a letdown afterwards.

Looking for the Cross

Once in a while something takes me back to a piece of literature I haven’t thought of for ages. Not long ago I read an article about medieval art that referred to the Ruthwell Cross, which is in a church near Dumfries in southern Scotland. There was also mention of an Old English poem, The Dream of the Rood, some verses of which are inscribed on the cross. I hadn’t thought of that poem for ages, probably not since reading it in college, when it was the second item in the first volume of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, a staple of English department syllabi. Except there, at least in my ancient edition, it is in prose. In search of another version, I turned to the internet and found a more appealing poetic rendering (http://faculty.uca.edu/~jona/texts/rood.htm if you’re interested).
Although authorities do not agree, some credit the poem to an Anglo-Saxon poet called Cynewulf about whom little is known. But as the Norton editors point out, the poem “may antedate its manuscript by almost three centuries,” precisely because some passages are carved on the Ruthwell Cross, which is earlier—the manuscript is tenth century. But in one sense none of this scholarly where when and who matters much, nor is it necessary to be a believer to comprehend the beauty of the poem; what counts is the power of the language, and of the dreamer’s vision of the cross on which Christ died. I was struck anew by the immediacy of the imagery, as in, for instance, the following lines: “the young hero stripped himself—he, God Almighty-- / strong and stout-minded. He mounted the high gallows, / bold before many, when he would loose mankind. / I shook when that Man clasped me. I dared, still, not bow to earth, / fall to earth’s fields, but had to stand fast. / Rood I was reared. I lifted a mighty King, / Lord of the heavens, dared not to bend.”
It’s all there, the mix of the concrete and the literal with the visionary that makes the little art we have of so early a time compelling. Curious to know more about the Ruthwell Cross, I followed the original article’s reference to art historian Meyer Schapiro’s essay and found it in Late Antique, Early Christian and Medieval Art . Insightful and thorough as always, he leaves no stone unturned in detailing the religious meaning of the cross, which in turn helps to expand the meaning of the poem—even if the two reflect slightly different periods. My journey from the original article to the poem and then to Schapiro was a reminder of the satisfaction of pursuing some small matter with the help of a few books, the internet, and a library.

A Powerful Image

“You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with scenes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have thought of to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.” Wallace Stegner in Crossing to Safety.
Struck by the power of this image when I first read Stegner’s novel some years back--it came out in 1987--I tried it; yes, the slug dissolves. And yes, I‘ve thought of it often. Stegner’s story of two couples, the Langs and the Morgans, is worth a read, or a re-read if it’s been a while. A thoughtful look at love, survival and marriage, it has much to say about our ability to absorb and move beyond the tragic without dissolving or in essence, our capacity to reconstitute ourselves.

A Lost African Childhood

The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood. By Helene Cooper. 352 pp. Simon & Schuster. $25.00
Cooper’s memoir of her tumultuous childhood in Liberia and her life after fleeing to this country as a teenager in the 1980s is an uneven book saved by the power of its story. Cooper’s resume is impressive; she has been the Diplomatic Correspondent at The New York Times since 2006 and wrote for The Wall Street Journal for twelve years before that. I have been struck by the incisiveness of her reporting and by her ability to make complex political issues comprehensible. But in this book Cooper confronts more personal material, a challenge evidenced in the sometimes jarring juxtaposition of past and present that characterizes the tone of the narrative.
Some readers may remember the excerpt of Cooper’s book that appeared in The New York Times Magazine earlier this year. It ended with her return to Liberia to find her lost foster sister Eunice, whose memory she had blotted out in remaking herself as an American. It focused on Cooper’s early life as a member of the Liberian elite and her relationship with Eunice, who was brought into the family to keep her company, and also described the country’s sudden descent into chaos capped by the soldiers’ arrival at the house at Sugar Beach, an event detailed with emotional restraint that does little to diminish its horror. The book fills in the rest of the story, including Cooper’s reunion with Eunice, who had experienced the full brunt of a country gone mad.
What emerges is a picture of a colorful but hopeless country and of a bright indulged child whose parents loved each other but could not stay together, whose extended family defined her identity and whose survival skills enabled her to remake herself into an American woman with a successful career in a high-powered profession. All you have to do is read Cooper’s description of herself as a stranger in an American high school—in the south, no less—to realize the extent of her achievement. Yet I can’t help wondering if the immensity of her experience helps to explain the tonal inconsistencies that one reviewer identified as a disconcerting flipness, most evident to me in her description of being embedded with the troops in the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003 in which her Humvee was crushed by a tank. “Flipness” suggests an attitude of dismissal on the part of a writer, a reduction of deep emotion to something less. In Cooper’s case I sense no lack of feeling; rather, it’s as if she can’t find the language to join together the extremes of her relatively short lifetime. But I can’t believe she won’t keep trying, and I expect she will succeed. This book is so good that it seems cruel to ask for more, but few reporters have her life experience, and if she can bring together her powers of observance, her linguistic gifts and her obvious depth of feeling Cooper will astonish readers even more than in The House at Sugar Beach.

A Graveyard in Avignon

Occasionally I’d like to comment on something of a literary nature that has caught my fancy. Recently I read a review of a biography of Victorian notable John Stuart Mill, perhaps best knownfor his resounding defense of civil and social liberty entitled “ On Liberty.” The biography is Richard Reeves’ John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand and the reviewer was Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker. Published in the UK, Reeves’ book is not yet available here yet but given what Gopnik says of it, I hope it soon will be. Mill himself is a fascinating figure, as is his wife, Harriet Stuart Mill, a formidable feminist thinker and writer in her own right. Married in 1849, they enjoyed only a few years of happiness before she died in 1854. Shortly after their union, John Stuart Mill published an article called “The Enfranchisement of Women,” which came out under his name but was written primarily by Harriet, his beloved intellectual equal.
The Mills are buried together in the cemetary of St. Veran on the outskirts of Avignon, where they were living when Harriet died. Many years ago when I was there with my husband, I determined to find her grave. It was a hot September Sunday and we had enjoyed too much good French wine the previous night, but undeterred, we set off from the center of the town, map in hand. Neither of us is an expert map reader and a somewhat quarrelsome few hours passed before we reached the cemetery, inconveniently located on the fringes of the city. And in time, we even found the grave, a white marble tomb surrounded by greenery and lit by the late afternoon sun. I thought of it when I read the following quotation from Mill in Gopnik’s piece: Claiming that few would really want “the lure of immortality” if they thought about it, he writes that the “mere cessation of existence is no evil to any one: the idea is only formidable through the illusion of imagination which makes one conceive oneself as if one were alive and feeling oneself dead. What is odious in death is not death itself, but the act of dying, and its lugubrious accompaniments: all of which must be equally undergone by the believer in immortality. Nor can I perceive that the skeptic loses by his skepticism any real and valuable consolation except one; the hope of reunion with those dear to him who have ended their earthly life before him. That loss, indeed, is neither to be denied or extenuated.” That last sentence, albeit understated, is rich with felt emotion.
Thanks to the internet and

Mrs. Woolf Goes Below Stairs

Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury. By Alison Light. 362 pp. Bloomsbury Press. $30.00.
Just when you thought there is no more to say about Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury, along comes Light with a new slant on the subject, except this time it’s below stairs in the spotlight. It’s obvious enough if one thinks about it—especially if one is female--that Woolf’s writing life was made possible by the women who emptied her chamber pot, mended her clothes and cooked her meals. It was their labors that allowed her to shut the door on the rooms of her own to produce such masterpieces as Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, to name my two favorites.
Light looks at Woolf’s often uneasy relations with her servants from both a social and a literary perspective. She has unearthed some interesting material about these women, such as Sophie Farrell, who worked for Virginia’s parents and who remained in the family until 1931. Woolf was a woman of her time, and however advanced she may have sounded in print, she and her husband Leonard—an avowed socialist—often treated their servants as lesser beings, as a barely tolerated necessity. Although Light points out the sometimes disconcerting disconnect between the political opinions of both Woolfs, she allows that neither can be blamed for being creatures of their time, an era when few regarded their household staff as social equals. Light also correlates Woolf’s over-fastidious reaction to bodily needs and her sometimes appalling attitude towards the lower classes as smelly and worse, a perspective that surfaces in her fiction and non-fiction alike.
Ultimately, as Claire Messud, a novelist herself, points out in a perceptive review in The New York Times Book Review (10/19/08), “we must be grateful that Virginia had the good fortune to have help” because her emotional condition was such that “she would have written little without it.” Thus it boils down to the eternal trade-off, especially for women artists; does one stick to one’s principles and get little done, or accept help and live with the guilt?

Forbidden Love in Catherine the Great's Russia

October 15, 2008

The Pearl: A True Tale of Forbidden Love in Catherine the Great's Russia. By Douglas Smith. Yale University Press. 328 pp.

This is a quirky little book about an "illicit" love affair between Russia's richest aristocrat, Count Nicholas Sheremetev (1751-1803), and Praskovia Kovalyova, his serf and the greatest opera diva of her time--quite a contradiction there, or so it seems until learning what Smith asserts about the tradition of serf theaters. Many aristocrats like Sheremetev maintained elaborate theaters, with their serfs as actors, musicians, scene painters, etc. Praskovia joined his theater as a little girl and their affair began when she was barely in her teens. Soon renowned for her talent and beauty (and intelligence it seems) as "The Pearl," she sounds like an amazing woman. Many years later Sheremetev freed her and eventually married her. Sadly, she died shortly thereafter giving birth to their son Dimitry. The book is full of information about life among the Russian aristocracy, but often Smith seems to be stretching what little is known about The Pearl and about the relationship between her and Sheremetev. If you're interested in anything and everything Russian, and have read widely in the field, this book has its charms; otherwise, go for a bigger picture.