Powell, Dilys: The Villa Ariadne
This is a memoir that centers on a house rather than on a person. From that house spin of tales of archeology, war, and travel. Although it purports to be a unified book, it is fairly obviously separately written pieces cobbled together. We have, for example, the personal reminiscences of the author, Dilys Powell's involvement with the Villa Ariadne on Crete, a center of archeological research established by Arthur Evans; the stories of some of the people involved with the villa, most notably the archaeologist and war hero John Pendlebury, assassinated by the Nazis during their occupation of Crete; and a bit about Powell's wanderings around Crete in the post-war years and her reunions with some of the people involved with Pendlebury and other British during the war years. I found myself wishing that Powell were a little less good-natured. She mentions but shies away from discussing, much less taking a side on, the controversies over Evans's reconstructions at Knossos or the controversies to do with the decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris. She even finds it difficult to say a bad word about the German occupiers of Crete, the only exception being the butcher of Crete, General Müller. It was his replacement, the apparently less brutal General Kreipe who was kidnapped by Paddy Leigh Fermor and his colleagues, and it is one of the book's disappointments that, though he is mentioned and discussed, Fermor does not make a cameo appearance in The Villa Ariadne.
Holdstock, Robert: Mythago Wood (The Mythago Cycle, 1)
I don’t read much fantasy, mostly because too much of it is swords-and-lords Tolkien knock-offs. This one’s different and better. The author’s deep knowledge of the myths and legends that England has given us, it’s deep psychic history, make it as rich as the wood where much of the action transpires. I found the early pages, in which a young Englishman, just back from his service in the Second World War, feels his way into the strangeness that has engulfed the family home the most compelling part of the book. Things lag a bit when the quest (books in this genre always have a quest) gets underway.
Harris, John: No Voice from the Hall: Early Memories of a Country House Snooper
Following on from Denton Welch’s wandering around England, this is a memoir by an architectural historian who wandered with purpose, from hall to manor house to stables, most of which, in the wake of having been requisitioned during World War ll and owned by families who could no longer afford to keep them, had become picturesque ruins, often filled with rubble composed of destroyed furniture, pictures, ornaments, books and other evocative bric-a-brac. Harris writes about this well; he is at once nostalgic, angry, funny, and hopeful.
Moorcock, Michael: The Laughter of Carthage: The Second Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet (2)
The Laughter of Carthage is the second volume of a four-volume series of historical novels. The conceit is that it's not a novel, but that Michael Moorcock has edited a series of memoirs written by an aging London shopkeeper about his years as sort of a malevolent Zelig present but peripheral at all sorts of key historical moments. I say "malevolent" because he's a racist antisemite and entirely deluded about what he thinks of as his genius. An unreliable narrator to say the least. What makes the novel fascinating is that Moorcock, though he shares none of his protagonist’s more outrageous notions, and would surely condemn all of them, is also a bit in love with the monster he has created. This tension keeps the novel from being simply another unreliable narrator being put through his paces.
- Johnson, Jeffrey: Conjurers Dream of Voyages
This collection of poems, much of it inspired by the interesting places Jeffrey Johnson has lived, is uneven. One delights in his “Sketches of Spain,” including: “Toledo when I die / I will convert to Judaism and pray to Allah / at dawn in your beds of flowers in springtime,” but is less excited by his more explicitly political work: “ . . . the expedient lies / of businessmen in towers / and ideologues quite insane . . . .” The description seems at once accurate and trite.
Weinberger, Eliot: Angels & Saints
Eliot Weinberger looks at things Christians have believed and in some cases continue to believe: their myths and legends of saints and angels.. He makes no explicit argument for, against, or even about angels and saints. Rather employing his usual montage he allows the poignant, the ridiculous, the horrific, and the hilarious to bounce off each other in a way that gives us a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Weinberger, Eliot: An Elemental Thing (New Directions Paperbook)
Eliot Weinberger writes a lot, though not for American publications, about politics. Tired of that ephemera, he wanted to write about more elemental things. Thus: An Elemental Thing. The entire collection is part of his ongoing essay series of that title, bits of which we’ve seen elsewhere. He writes about winter, and rhinoceroses, Chinese mythology , stars, and many other things. His method is montage: the essays are made of fragments that interact with each other at the same time that each essay is a fragment that interacts with the other essays that form the never to be finished (I guess) elemental thing. As I said not too long ago, Weinberger is our finest essayist.
Pounds, Wayne: 寒山の新詩集: No Mountain: Improvisations from Han-Shan’s New Home in Ueno Park Tokyo
“It is the image of Hanshan as a Beat poet that has primarily appealed to me,” writes Wayne Pounds in the introduction to this collection inspired by Hanshan, aka No Mountain, various translations of his work, and also the author’s neighborhood park, Ueno Koen, and especially a small island in Shinobazu Pond, Shotenjima. Pound captures, both when writing in his own voice, but also when he writes in No Mountain’s voice, or in the voice of the “broken figure of a Koshin” that he finds on the island for that matter, the lightness of the crazy wisdom that No Mountain is known for.
“There never was a road to No Mountain / don’t they know it’s a place in the heart.”
Hand, Elizabeth: Generation Loss: a novel
Someone I respect recommended the fourth novel in a series Elizabeth Hand is writing about the burned-out ex-punk photographer, Cass Neary. Worth checking out, I thought, so I looked at some reviews of the first in the series. It was roundly criticized because the protagonist is not "likable" and because the novel has (in these readers' judgment) less action than atmosphere. Both of these criticisms, of course, made me want to read the book. I can't imagine why it should matter whether characters are likable (Cass is not, at least in this first outing) so long as they are interesting, and I'm all about atmosphere. The novel did not disappoint. The portrait of Cass is a well-crafted vision of a very damaged person, the atmosphere, dark and gothic Northern Maine, is compelling. Damaged punk investigating what went down around a hippie commune in the far North meshes perfectly with the gray, the cold, the fog.
Denton Welch: In Youth Is Pleasure & I Left My Grandfather's House
William Burroughs is dead right when, in the introduction, he writes that Denton Welch has nothing to do with Ronald Firbank, with whom he’s often been grouped, but a real kinship with Jane Bowles. Reading In Youth is Pleasure, a fictionalized account of Welch’s adolescence, and From my Grandfather’s House, a memoir of a walking trip in England composed long after the walk, one sees a similar originality of perception (quirky, it might be crudely described) and prose style. Their prose is similar to each other’s in that they each use language in ways that seem dissimilar to all other writers: absolutely fresh. For me the memoir of his walk, circa age 18, was more pleasurable than In Youth is Pleasure, but both made me want to read more Denton Welch.
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by Robert S. Lopez:
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