Alan Furst, Blood of Victory

I had been unable to finish the last Alan Furst novel I tried to read.  It was too much seafaring, too boaty -- and those of you who recall my wedding will remember that I was very pleased with its setting at the Larchmont Yacht Club -- with the sole caveat that the lovely view was marred by all those stupid boats (I pray the boaty contingent of Berridges will not take offense).

At any rate, I picked up Furst's Blood of Victory at the Friends of the Chapel Hill Public Library sale for two bucks a few weeks back, and it has proven to be a good use of money.  This takes us back to dry land, with Furst's typical rag-tag group of Eastern and Western European resistance/intelligence agents toing and froing about Europe, trying to quietly stop the Nazis or their precursors or something.

Once again, our hero shacks up with a lady of shared interest, and they do the nasty in some cold rooms and other makeshift settings. This is one of Furst's great motifs -- the, if not quite transformative, at least salvative quality of staying warm and getting busy in the face of death. Not quite love, but necessary companionship at a time of maximum uncertainty, which grows into something more, almost love, good enough, deep enough for the circumstances. Much better than nothing.

Reading Alan Furst now

I have been making my way through Alan Furst's oeuvre, and specifically the "Night Soldiers" group of books about Europe between the wars, the set of books which have brought him success. I first blogged about them sometime around 2010, so it's probably safe to assume that I started reading them around then.

Not long after that, Xi Jinping came to power. Until then we were all operating under the Washington Consensus-The World is Flat-End of History mindset: the Cold War was over, globalism was bringing benefit to everyone, first and foremost by virtue of our having outsourced most manufacturing to China and also by tighter integration at the top end of the value chain as more Chinese and also Indians came to the US for technical and scientific education, with lots of them choosing to stay on H1B visas.

Since then, the world has changed markedly. China had already been emboldened by coming through the financial crisis in better shape than the West. Then came gulags in Xinjiang, the fall of Hong Kong, clearly stated desires to take back Taiwan, wolf warrior diplomacy... Then there's Russia. First supporting Assad and Maduro, then taking back Crimea, using cyberops to destabilize democracies around the world, finally invading Ukraine.

Now it is hard not to read Furst differently. There is a new urgency to his murky world of survivors and patriots with war drums beating first in the distance, then increasingly close, but also questions raised. Decades from now, will we come back to look at Xinjiang and think of it as our Sudetenland? Or was it Hong Kong? Or was the whole earth is flat/globalization mindset that lulled us into complacency?

Of course the West has never been pure as the driven snow. We have always been slipping along with our own moral ambiguities, doing deals with the devil whenever it suits us. Does this place us in a position of zero moral authority from the outset? Or can we claim a bit of innocence because at least we're trying? Or is China also trying, in its own, very different way?

Alex La Guma "In the Fog of the Seasons' End"

It's not clear where I found this book. There is a "4.50" penciled inside the front cover, so it could have been a used book store, or it could have been a Little Free Library or a coffee shop. Doesn't matter.

In any case, it languished on my shelf for a while, then I picked it up and read it. It was slow going at first. Published in 1972 as part of an African Writers series inaugurated by Chinua Achebe, this short South African novel tells the tale of a few ground level operatives in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa.

More than anything, it reminds me of Alan Furst and his faceless spies of the thirties as fascism knocked on every door in Europe. Though where the overriding motif of Furst is cold, of semi-random, furtive coupling by men and women of the continent-wide Resistance to an evil on the horizon, La Guma's world is one of heat, humidity, dirt, and smells. The protagonist never bathes and wears the same clothes throughout the novel, traveling around a South African city now on foot, now on crowded bus.

There are echoes of the great modernist urban novels of the early 20th century: Joyce, Bely, Dos Passos, Doblin. Pages of overheard dialog from street corners and buses with no speakers identified. But mostly quiet heroism and perseverance.

Wherever I found it, I'm glad I did. I was inspired by Gregory Michie, a UNC grad who teaches in Chicago and wrote a book about his experience who said in the UNC alumni mag that he had gone years reading only books by black writers. Not a bad idea, though I'm not sure I make it there.

The flow of reading

In recent correspondence with a couple of college friends about reading lists, I've been a little bit surprised at their admissions that they have been having trouble reading. Both of them PhDs in literature, one of them runs a comparative literature department at a pretty well-known university, the other now a lawyer. I obviously quasi live to read. And play sports, but that's another post.

During the pandemic, admittedly, I have been reading more mysteryish novels, so not the heaviest fare. And yet, there's something to each of them, things to learn, things to absorb. Just the process of reading fiction, giving ones self over to an author/narrator, saying, in effect, you drive, I'll ride shotgun. There is something to it that is so liberating and fruitful. And cheap!

I was looking for an Alan Furst novel to share with Graham (he pushed it aside and said "that's like the sixtieth book you've suggested....") and I came across a volume of Erskine Caldwell stories that I had picked up somewhere. I've only read one book by him, some novel I came across somewhere, but I fondly remember a scene about a son and dad buying a bag of fried chicken and eating it in the car somewhere in the South in the 40s. So I took the Caldwell upstairs and read the intro and a story -- the first story Maxwell Perkins ever bought from him and published in Scribners. It was not a great story, it was frankly pretty wierd, but upon reflection it mapped kind of interestingly onto something I had read from Lorrie Moore's Self-Help in another moment of using short stories to cleanse my palate between larger books. No time to go into it right now. Back to the coal mine. 

Ramping it back up

After a week away, back in the saddle this morning and back in the fray: a client newly divorced who wants to sit down and talk budgeting, a client in Brooklyn starting chemo today, money to disburse to pay for a client's kid's college, a wire to Germany for Mary's book to check up on, etc. And then there are the markets.

It was a fine week away, getting on the road a little, seeing some towns and corners of America I'd never seen before. Lancaster, Pennsylvania was particularly interesting. Same population as Chapel Hill in the town proper, but three times as dense, so really it was a small city. Block after block of row houses in varying states of repair. It was clear there were some interesting businesses and stories in some of them. Amish in the surrounding countryside, a couple of small colleges, beyond that it wasn't clear who the anchor employer was. Maybe some people commute to Philly. I wouldn't be sad if Graham ended up there for college.

Finished an Alan Furst novel, moved forward in Andrew Solomon's Far From the Tree. 

But eating dinner in hotel rooms sitting on the floor got old, so I am certainly hoping that the vaccines outrun the variants and also looking forward to the approach of warm weather everywhere, which will let us eat and meet outside. 

Low on ideas

Being away from my kids, and no longer commuting, it becomes tougher and tougher to generate ideas for blogs, as the sources of randomness are largely removed from my existence, being replaced by grinding routine.

At JFK's shiny Jet Blue terminal last week, I sat and watched people walk by, looking for something bloggable.  There was very little, aside from a four-year old boy lagging behind his parents while wheeling a small suitcase in the shape of a hound dog's head, complete with droopy ears.  But we can file that right under missing my kids.

I did note that Jet Blue and Dunkin Donuts have apparently executed a strategic alliance of some sort.  In the terminal and on the plane, there wasn't a dram of Starbucks to be had.

Here at home, I've begun another Alan Furst novel, Red Gold, and must say that it's starting out even better than the first one I read (Dark Star ??).

Also, the guy who looks like Jeff Daniels from Dumb and Dumber at the deli at the supermarket has stooped to new lows of sadistic languor. It's as if he's performed a reverse time-motion study (time-stasis?) of the sandwich-making process, and has sought out and attained new ways of making a sub even more slowly.  I have to give it to the guy for thoroughness.

R & R

Getting ready to head to the West Coast tomorrow to see Mark and Karena in Seattle, then Natalie in San Francisco. For the most part I have otherwise failed to fill my calendar for my trip out there, perhaps it's for the best. Unlike much of North America, I am not fairly bursting at the seems to get out and travel. I've been to the Northeast four times under COVID, to the mountains once, and Down East a couple of time, so I guess I'm spoiled enough.

Perhaps just as importantly, I don't really feel highly motivated to grow my business out West. A few years into the business has led me to an understanding that having clients elsewhere just adds travel requirements to my schedule. If they aren't truly special to me (as most of my far-flung clients are), why bother? Perhaps just as importantly, it's hard to serve them properly, to stay on top of changes in state or local tax code that may be pertinent. And keep a curated stable of CPAs, attorneys, etc. who can help.

It's pouring down rain so no tennis today, which is probably good. Sometime yesterday afternoon I yoinked my back. It was sometime between riding my bike and lunch, most likely because I rode hard on account of hustling to get back to our YABS/Madonna Fan Club Zoom call and then wasn't sufficiently mindful of my body's signals somewhere in there.

Speaking of, before I leave I must decide whether to continue on with Lionel Shriver's The Motion of the Body Through Space, which feels like a pretty wooden roman a these. Honestly, it reminds me a little of reading Chernyshevskii. In many ways I am plodding forward in it now first and foremost because we paid retail for it.

I would be very surprised if it traveled West with me. Once more I will likely have recourse to the ever self-refreshing pile of mystery and espionage novels (mostly Alan Furst for the latter) on the shelves off to my right just now, despite the feeling that by reading these things I squander precious time.

  

The meeting

Went back to Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowlands after some time away to read a couple of suspense novels (an Alan Furst after the Highsmith I mentioned). Shortly back into it, the heroine meets with a professor who lavishes great praise on a paper she had written and tells her to go to grad school. This is the second time I've read such a passage recently, the prior time being in Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot, and each time I've been profoundly moved, wishing that some professor had given me such a talk. Not that I was treated unkindly in grad school or even college, mind you, I just never had that talk. Well, OK, my undergrad advisor did promise to get my senior essay published, and actually saw to it that it happened, but still.

Clearly I still identify all too strongly with the hole that Lahiri's heroine has in her ego, which needs to be filled in, even all these years after I have passed beyond academia. Oh well.

Also, my back hurts, I am lying in bed, and a storm is blowing in, which promises to make it difficult to grill, as Mary had hoped I would. But it's pretty.

Maigret

Of late I had begun to feel like I needed a new set of mystery/spy novels to read, that the ones on which I've subsi(sted in recent years had either begun to run out (Rendell's Wexford series, Furst's Night Soldiers series) or start to get stale (Tana French, Elizabeth George). Then I read Adam Gopnik's piece on the greyness of the world of Simenon's Maigret novels and thought, "oh yeah, there's that."

Per Wikipedia Simenon wrote 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring Inspector Maigret between 1931 and 1972. Gopnik praised in particular those published in the fifties, so when I went down to the Chapel Hill Public Library -- that beloved institution which I have been neglecting since the beginning of the pandemic -- and perused its shelves, I found one from that period, checked it out and brought it home.

"Maigret and the Man on the Bench".... no, let me spare you any and all plot details. If anything, Gopnik slightly spoiled Maigret for me when he pointed out that the mysteries are typically resolved not with an "aha!" moment but with an "ah..." one, and this novel bears that out. But in the end as with so many things in life, it's not about the destination but the journey. Maigret takes us onto the workaday streets of Paris, a place that it's all too easy for the tourist (the default mindset for Americans in Paris or even Europe, but it physical or notional) to forget must exist, captivated as we are by the blaze of history and culture we're there to imbibe.

And look at the clock. Gotta shift into work gear. More later.

Being Frank Bascombe, or not

I'm about halfway through Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land, the third novel in his trilogy about Frank Bascombe.  So far, maybe 12 hours have passed. On the one hand, not a ton has happened, on the other, it's been a pretty eventful 12 hours. But still. It's dragging on.  The guy has seems to have never met a doorknob he didn't know from earlier in his life, and which reminds him of something.

It's raining outside, and I might have to take a break to read a mystery novel. I kind of wish I had one about someplace sunny, though I think what I have in my to be read stack is Henning Mankell, Josephine Tey, and Alan Furst, all of whom are kind of North Atlantic and brooding. Hmmm.

Havana Blue

This book by Leonardo Padura has been languishing around my study for weeks now, waiting to be reflected upon.  I don't know where I heard about this Cuban mystery writer, probably the New Yorker or the Times.  Wherever it was, I think the praise was overexuberant.

That said, now that it has stewed a bit, I won't say that I won't keep reading the series.  The guy has a gift for writing about pork with garlic, memories of high school rivalries, and long-simmering lust.  Which are important things.

In fact, it made me reflect upon the fact that these root pleasures are ones that are difficult to take away from people, even in dire circumstances.  We see that as well in Alan Furst's novels of WWII and the period preceding it, where European resistence fighters eat and fuck and snuggle in cold drafty rooms all around the continent, ever mindful of the fact that the next day could be their last.

That said, it would be interesting to see novels analogous to Padura's coming out of North Korea or Rumania in the peak of the Ceausescu era, would we see similar stories?  Now that I think about it, the Rumanian New Wave, from Lucian Pintilie's The Oak forward, which looks backwards at the Ceausescu times, suggests that it is in fact may be possible to squelch even these carnal pleasures. And the literature and films of the concentration camps (with the perhaps singular exception of the must-see The Night Porter) certainly does not trend towards the celebration of food and sex as ways of maintaining a sense of presence in the face of pain.

At any rate, back to Padura, the guy has a gift for conjuring, if not "the real Cuba" -- and even years of detox from literary theory have not made me begin to believe in that -- then certainly a Cuba he knows, loves, and values.  And that's worthwhile.

The mystery part of the book was surprisingly wooden.  But, after all, the mystery novel has long since been a favored way to move a narrator around an environment to let the author write about the latter.

Fiction, FOMO, and the male ego (at least this one)

Sometime recently, my contemporary Liesl Schillinger made a comment on Facebook about guys of a certain age not reading much fiction anymore, and I said to myself "Hmmmmm."  I fall into that bucket myself.

For the last little bit of my life, I've been reading predominantly if not exclusively nonfiction, and for the last year or so it has been dominated by biography.  Admittedly, not just any biography, ones by Robert Caro.  I just got to the end of the 2nd volume on LBJ, and not a minute too soon, because I'm about ready to shoot the guy.  And when I've not been reading nonfiction or bios, I've been cleansing my palate with mysteries and post-espionage fiction, mostly Ruth Rendell, Alan Furst, and Olen Steinhauer. Admittedly, I did somewhere slip in Jhumpa Lahiri's most recent collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, which was quite good, until she started writing in the 2nd person, which I just have limited tolerance for.

But, by and large, for the last couple of years, I've had a hard time biting into serious fiction and chewing, preferring (to extend the Francis Bacon metaphor) those that are predigested by their genres.  And I have to wonder:  what's up with that?  For me, at least, there's an odd utilitarianism at work. Given my limited time to read non-professional books (nights, a little during the the weekend), I find myself nonetheless grasping for ways to explain things to myself, and if when I was younger I worked more in a speculative, abstract vein, pondering the evolution of society, the psyche, etc., by now I'm just trying to get a handle on shit.  What's up with China?  How does power work?

The younguns have the concept of FOMO (fear of missing out), and I remember it well.  When I was in my 20s, any weekend night when I was single, I was desperate to figure out where the party was at, lest I might miss meeting the One. Or, failing that, an opportunity to tie one on.  Now I'm experiencing an adult form of FOMO.  What if the world passes me by and I don't get diddly done by the time I get carted off?  And so, the focus on the concrete, history, deeds of the great and grand, as a yardstick for myself.  I reckon.

But of course, as I say it, I realize how silly it is.  Comparing my insides to other peoples' outsides, as they say...

 
At least, in the case of Caro's second volume, we have LBJ set off against Coke Stephenson, from whom Johnson stole the 1948 Texas Senate race.  Stephenson is a great figure, an utterly mythic self-made guy, stoic cowboy who rises in politics because he is serially called by the citizenry to ever-higher office, but maintains his love for his self-built ranch with a river running through it, and who returns to his ranch when defeated by Johnson to dig post holes, fall in love again, try cases in court, swim in the river, and drink whiskey by the fire.  It is, no doubt, a romantic portrait if perhaps not exaggerated, and it is set off against the manic amoral efficacy of LBJ by Caro, who is posing a very clear question about the ends of life.

But for now, I'm on to some fiction.  Haven Kimmel's The Solace of Leaving Early.  Am liking it.

Nostalgia for the war

Picked up another Alan Furst -- one of the pile of books I snagged a couple of weeks back at the excellent used book store in Pittsboro -- as my quick read for the holiday weekend. As with all of these books, it's set in the 30s, as the Nazi threat moves across Europe, and is deeply nostalgic. Just read a lovely paragraph about the hero's dog, which came from the hills around Salonika and is a shepherd, so it escorts the kids from its block to and fro from school, likewise the postman, etc., much to the delight of the old ladies who watch it from kitchen chairs on the sidewalk each day.

It is curious that the time around WWII, a time of almost unprecedented calamity, death and disruption on the world stage -- is the focus of so much contemporary nostalgia. Perhaps it's because it was a time when the fruits of modernity were beginning to be shared more broadly across the populace, but still everything was relatively direct, person-to-person, and unmediated. The size of the boomer cohort and the longevity of the "greatest generation" and its children probably also plays a role. Will this specific nostalgia outlive those generations, just because we've all experienced the imprint of the good old days tone associated with its styles?

It's also likely that the sheer destruction of so many buildings and the cold anonymity and lack of geographic particularity of modernist architecture plays a big role.

Book list

A couple of people have either asked for book recommendations or cited the blog as a source of reading ideas recently, so I'm gonna share a list of recent reading (last year or so) I drew up the other day when prepping for a question from a humanist regarding a job at UNC (the question, malheureusement, never came).

Non-fiction
Peter Hessler, River Town, Oracle Bones, Country Driving (all 3 are great, the middle is the best, read in order)

Ron Susskind, The Price of Loyalty (awesome), Confidence Men (stopped 80 pages in, too much rehash of crisis)

Tom Friedman, That Used to Be Us (utterly unreadable)

Alice Schroeder, The Snowball (on Warren Buffett -- good book, a little too gushing and gawkish maybe)

Howard Bryant, The Last Hero:  A Life of Henry Aaron (very good, slows down in the middle, but solid detail on both the man and race relations in our lifetime)

Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker (re-read it, still good), Boomerang (good, but he's coasting)

Books by people I know
Wade Graham, Jesus is My Gardener (A Kindle Single, very good), American Eden: from Monticello to Central Park to Our Backyards, (A very ambitious book.  I'm stalled about 70 pages in, maybe because it's too academic, or maybe I just don't care enough about gardening to push on through)

Frank Ryle, Keeping Score: Project Management for the Pros (on the nature of project management, allegorized to golf.  In the vein of 7 Dysfunctions of a Team. Not the best book in the world, but still as readable as you're going to get and still learn something about project management.)

Jay Leutze, Stand Up that Mountain (both an infectious paean to nature, a tale of life lived otherwise, and a solid procedural on what could be the most boring stuff in the world -- how state and federal regulation work -- but it works here)

Fiction
Olen Steinhauer, The Confession (mystery novel set in cold War Slovakia or something like that. Builds slowly, but in the end it's really good)

Alan Furst, I don't know which one of his novels I read. They are all similar, and similarly good.

PD James, Original Sin (I read it because Ruth Rendell said it was the greatest mystery ever. I don't know about that, but it's pretty good)

John Lanchester Capital (A good novel, aspires perhaps to be The Novel of The Financial Crisis. Doesn't quite get there, but is nonetheless worth reading. He creates characters you can care about, which is saying something).

Business books
Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto (an important and useful book. Gawande has a brain, a heart, and the ability to write)


Vivek Ranadive, The Two-Second Advantage (he really wants to be Malcom Gladwell and sell Tibco's software at the same time.  Somewhat convincing, lightweight)


Eric Ries, The Lean Start-Up (good, solid, well thought out book bringing process and discipline to the wooliest of domains)

Ellen Schutz, Retirement Heist:  How Companies and Plunder and Profit from the Nest Eggs of American Workers (an important book written, sadly, by a journalist without enough editorial help to turn it into a good book.  I am 60 pages in and should finish it, though it's just so boring)

Things left undone

Back in September, I posted about how I haven't undertaken many of the tasks others have during the pandemic, for example thoroughly cleaning out the basement, shredding old tax documents, etc. When I last wrote on this topic I speculated that the months of cold and short days and colder and longer nights might be a great time to do some of that stuff.

Indeed it might have been, but it wasn't to be. Admittedly I have done a few things and have made some incremental progress towards paring and being better organized. But not much. Who knows, today may be the day I get lucky.

But really what I want to do is finish reading this Alan Furst book so I can start something else and maybe get Graham to walk uptown with me to get burgers at Al's, since I have not had my statutory one serving of red meat per week and Al's is a great place to do it.