Suggested reading: The first ten weeks edition

Protestors march in New York City on 5 April 2025. Image source: Associated Press

Yesterday hundreds of thousands of protestors gathered across the country to oppose the actions of the new administration. Its first ten weeks have been a spectacle of cruelty, crudity, corruption and mendacity that have exceeded, if that's the word, even my abysmal expectations. The attempted destruction of government services and vital data relating to health, education, social benefit programs, scientific research, environmental protection, worker and consumer safety, and financial fraud; the suppression of free speech, the arrest and deportation of legal immigrants for constitutionally-protected activities, and attacks on schools and academic freedom; the rampant self-dealing and conflicts of interest; the exposure of highly sensitive personal data; the defiance of court orders; the list could go on, and on.

This edition of "Suggested reading" takes a look at the current administration, our historical amnesia, and the state of our politics:

1. "From comedy to brutality," Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, 13 March 2025.

   In the days surrounding his inauguration, He Who Shall Not Be Named offered to buy Greenland from Denmark (and told reporters that he would not rule out seizing it by military force), suggested that he would annex Canada as "the 51st state," threatened to invade Panama to reassert U.S. control of the Canal, and proclaimed that the U.S. would "own" Gaza and resettle its population.

   You might think that these ideas were unique to the considerable idiosyncrasies of the current occupier of the White House. However, as Fintan O'Toole reveals in the New York Review of Books, all of these schemes have long and often ignoble histories:

• Greenland: After the U.S. Civil War, Secretary of State William Seward requested "A Report on the Resources of Greenland and Iceland," which was issued in 1868. The U.S. had just purchased Alaska from Russia, and Seward was contemplating a similar deal with Denmark for Greenland and Iceland (but nothing came of it).

  

  Arctic Boundary as defined by the Arctic Research and Policy Act (modified by geographic labels). Map author: Allison Gaylord. Image source: US Arctic Research Commission

  And after World War II, during which the U.S. military occupied Greenland to deny its use to Germany, President Harry Truman approached Denmark with an offer to buy it (but nothing came of it). Eighty years later the U.S. still operates a major military base there, now called Pituffik Space Base.

  Greenland is actually closer to Moscow (2390 miles) than to Washington, DC (2620 miles), and closer to Copenhagen (1860 miles) than to the nearest location in the U.S.: Madawaska, a town at the northernmost tip of Maine just across the St. John River from Edmundston, New Brunswick, Canada (1930 miles). [1]

  In short, whoever should have sovereignty over Greenland, geography would suggest that it isn't the U.S. A wild idea: perhaps the people who live there should govern themselves, and control Greenland's mineral and other resources? But as we know from many contexts, some discussed below, when you are occupying increasingly desirable real estate it is money, power, and violence that usually decide the outcome.

• Canada: From its very inception as a nation, the U.S. has had territorial designs on its northern neighbor. In the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the War of American Independence, the U.S. demanded and received all of the territory of the British Province of Quebec south of the Great Lakes; today, that territory comprises the states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, as well as eastern Minnesota, western Pennsylvania, and about half of New York. In 1787, the Articles of Confederation contained a clause admitting the rest of British Canada as a state if it voted to join the former colonies (it didn't).

  

  The thirteen original colonies in 1774 (detail), McConnell Map Co., 1919. Image source: Library of Congress

  During the War of 1812 the U.S. invaded Canada in a campaign to capture Montreal, the key to the rest of Quebec; the invading forces were defeated almost as soon as they crossed the border. But the dream didn't die; in the late 19th century William Seward, Henry Adams, and the poet Walt Whitman, among many others, envisaged a United States that encompassed Canada. HWSNBN's annexation plan is just the latest irruption of this idea—probably one of the very few ideas he shares with Walt Whitman.

• Panama owes its existence to U.S. intervention. In 1903, the U.S. encouraged Panama, then a province of Colombia, to declare independence, and then immediately bought the rights to the land through which the Panama Canal would be carved. By happy coincidence, the Panamanian representative in the negotiations also worked for the French company that had been given a concession to build the canal across the isthmus. The deal included a $10 million payment to the Panamanian government plus annual rent of $250,000; $40 million went to the French company for the land rights.

  

  "The Coup d'Etat," by Charles G. Bush, New York World, 8 November 1903. Image source: The Age of Revolutions

  As historian Justin J. Masucci writes on the website The Age of Revolutions, "Panama granted the U.S. the right to build and operate an inter-ocean canal and also gave the U.S. de facto sovereignty over a ten mile-wide territory around the canal in perpetuity — in effect creating a U.S. colony in Panama." Panama remained a client state of the U.S. until the 1960s. It didn't gain jurisdiction over the Canal Zone until 1979, or control of the canal itself until 31 December 1999.

  

  Panama Canal and Canal Zone. Image source: Project Gutenberg

  Under the 1977 Carter-Torrijos Treaty that eventually turned control of the canal over to Panama, the U.S. retained the right to militarily defend the neutrality of the canal. However, it pledged to "abstain. . .from any intervention in the internal affairs of the Republic of Panama." [2] But just a dozen years after the signing of the treaty, U.S. armed forces invaded Panama to depose and take prisoner its leader Manuel Noriega and re-establish a U.S.-friendly government.
  
  Panama City is conveniently located next to the Pacific entrance of the canal. Any U.S. military invasion of the Canal Zone would inevitably involve its capture and the replacement of Panama's leaders, extending a long legacy of U.S. dominance of the country.

• Gaza: While rhetorically disapproving of Israeli settlement on Palestinian lands as an impediment to a two-state solution, the U.S. government has continued to provide an uninterrupted flow of weapons to Israeli governments. [3] According to the Council on Foreign Relations, since the end of World War II, Israel has been the single largest recipient of U.S. military aid by a factor of two. [4]
  
  Aid has continued to flow since the Oslo Accords in 1993 as the number of Israeli settlements and "outposts" has more than doubled, as the number of West Bank settlers has increased by more than four times to nearly half a million, and as the number of settlers in East Jerusalem has grown to nearly a quarter of a million. [5]

  

  Settler population growth in the West Bank, 1993–2023. Image source: Peace Now

  U.S. aid has provided direct and indirect support for this expansion.

  

  U.S. military and economic aid to Israel since 1970. Source: Council on Foreign Relations

  And during the Israeli government's assault on Gaza in 2024 U.S. military aid more than quadrupled from 2023 levels, to $12.5 billion. That assault has resulted in an estimated death toll to date of over 50,000 men, women and children. The weapons and munitions that resulted in this death and destruction are largely supplied by the U.S. [6]

  

  Gaza in March 2024. Image source: United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East

  So HWSNBN's open endorsement of the forcible relocation of the Palestinian population of Gaza does not seem to many Palestinians to be a radical departure from decades of implicit U.S. policy. The mildest term for such an action is "ethnic cleansing" (implying that the existing population is filth that needs to be swept away), which came into use during the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The UN Commission of Experts stated that such actions "constitute crimes against humanity and can be assimilated to specific war crimes. Furthermore, such acts could also fall within the meaning of the Genocide Convention." [7]

  

  Palestinians walk amid the rubble of destroyed homes and buildings in Jabaliya, northern Gaza Strip, 14 March 2025. Image credit: Jehad Alshrafi/AP. Image source: NPR

  On 26 February, The Guardian reported that HWSNBN had posted a "bizarre AI-generated video" on his social media site depicting Gaza as a luxury seaside resort, or as he called it in a 4 February press conference, "the Riviera of the Middle East":

  Words fail.

2. "An Expanding Vision of America," Nicole Eustace, New York Review of Books, 27 March 2025.

   Of course, dispossession and genocide were foundational acts of the U.S. itself. As Nicole Eustace writes in her NYRB article,

   . . .at each point in the development of the political economy of the British colonies and the United States, exploitation of Native peoples, expropriation of Native land, and extraction of Native resources fueled Euro-American advancement.

   I have some disagreement with the way this statement is framed. First, it seems to anachronistically attribute to Native peoples a capitalistic ownership model of land and natural resources. Second, the phrase "exploitation of Native peoples" obfuscates how deadly the encounters between settlers and Native peoples were.

   

   California's indigenous history: Native people of this place. Image source: Digital Humanities at Santa Clara University

   Taking the state I live in as an example, in 1849 it's estimated that there were 150,000 Native people living in California. Drawing on Benjamin Madley's An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (Yale University Press, 2016), Eustace points out that this population had already been decimated: these were "survivors of the first waves of colonialism in the area, tens of thousands of Native people having died in and around Spanish mission towns after their first establishment in 1769." By 1870, after two decades of murder, starvation, disease, and the seizure and privatization of the land, the estimated Native population was reduced by 80%, to 30,000. Over that same period the settler population grew from around 95,000 to over half a million. [8]
   
   Today, people who claim at least some continental American or Alaskan native ancestry make up 3.6% of the California population, a lower percentage than the estimated 5.4% of 1870. The three California counties with the lowest percentage of people with native ancestry are in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live. [9] The Native peoples of California, as with others discussed in this post, had the misfortune to occupy land that other people wanted.

3. "A Self Divided," Laura Marsh, New York Review of Books, 27 March 2025.

   The appalling spectacle of our current politics may be partially understood through reference to a study conducted at the University of Virginia in 2014. As Laura Marsh explains in the NYRB, the researchers

   asked participants to spend six to fifteen minutes alone in a room without cell phones, laptops, or books. All they had to do was think. Sixty percent reported difficulty, and nearly half found the experience unenjoyable.
   
   In a follow-up study, the researchers added a twist: participants were given the chance to experience a negative sensation—a mild electric shock—during the quiet time. Sixty-seven percent of the men and 25 percent of the women in the study decided to take it. "Simply being alone with their own thoughts" was a deeply unappealing prospect for many people, the researchers found; they would "rather do an unpleasant activity than no activity at all."

   Two-thirds of the college-age American men in this study would rather give themselves an electric shock than be "alone with their own thoughts" for as little as six minutes.

   In The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource (Penguin Press, 2025), journalist Chris Hayes points to this study as a way to explain why many people spend a majority of their free time scrolling on their phones. As Marsh writes,

   The smartphone offers distraction so readily and abundantly that it's possible to spend hours every day skipping from tab to tab [app to app?], or from video to video, without enjoying a moment of it—often, in fact, feeling somewhat drained and diminished.

   For social media addicts, "the idea of facing the normal flow of time is unbearably depressing," the journalist Richard Seymour wrote in The Twittering Machine (2019). Or as the tech critic Max Read has put it, "The actual point of 'screen time' is the time part—the hours it allows you to numbly burn up."

   

   Image source: OpenAccessGovernment.org

   Hayes contrasts the social media model with the old television model. Decades ago TV producers needed to create programming that would hold your attention for 30 to 60 minutes at a time, or longer: I remember in the early 1970s regularly watching, along with my whole family, the entire three-hour Saturday night CBS lineup of All in the Family, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, and The Carol Burnett Show. A little later on I would follow this with the local 11 o'clock news and then switch to NBC for two new shows, Saturday Night Live (three Saturdays a month) or Weekend (one Saturday a month). The idea was to root you to the spot to provide a reliable audience for advertisers.

   The social media model is compared to playing a slot machine, "where the experience of a new stimulus every few seconds feels more important than the outcome of the bet." Hayes writes,

   What will hold people's attention? [Social media companies] don't have to have an answer. They can simply throw a million little interruptions at us, track which ones grab our attention, and then repeat those.

   HWSNBN is a master of using repeated distraction to grab attention. As Marsh notes,

   He has often drawn attention in ways that make him look reckless or cruel or untrustworthy. . .[but] the next day (or the next hour) brings a new story, another wave of attention, and another, and another. The news cycle becomes a blur in which individual incidents are hazy and only the unifying theme—wall-to-wall coverage of [HWSNBN]—sticks out.

   As Antonia Hitchens writes in the London Review of Books ("At CPAC," 20 March), in 2018 former HWSNBN strategist Steve Bannon called this technique "flooding the zone." As he put it, "If you're always consumed by the next outrage, you can't look closely at the last one."
   
   Of course, HWSNBN also has the advantage of almost universal name recognition from his "decades as a fixture of the tabloid press and a television personality"—combining the advantages of old and new media. HWSNBN is the first social media president; others must inexorably follow.
   
   Our 21st-century technological innovations are ironically returning us to the late 19th century, when the main features of our politics were cynical and corrupt party loyalty and grotesque smear campaigns, and when our economy was dominated by exploitative robber barons such as John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and Leland Stanford. It was a time of extreme anti-labor violence, inequality, anti-immigrant actions, and ideological conformity. Marx wrote that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. Only this time around no one other than the crew of billionaires, ideologues, enablers and toadies surrounding HWSNBN is laughing.

---

1. Air distances calculated from Greenland's geographical center on the Distance.to website.
2. "Treaty Concerning the Permanent Neutrality and Operation of the Panama Canal," U.S. Department of State Archive.
3. The only exceptions I've found: in 1982 the Reagan Administration refused to provide cluster bombs to Israel after they were used against civilians; in 1991 the Bush Administration delayed a $10 billion loan package for four months when Israel's government would not pledge not to use the aid to build more settlements; and in 2024 the Biden Administration paused a shipment of 2,000-lb bombs because similar munitions had been dropped on Gaza, causing many civilian deaths.
4. Jonathan Masters and Will Merrow, U.S. Aid to Israel in Four Charts. Council on Foreign Relations, 13 November 2024.
5. Peace Now Settlement Watch, 30 Years After Oslo – The data that shows how the settlements proliferated following the Oslo Accords, September 2023.
6. Hadeel Al-Shalchi, Anas Baba, and Daniel Estrin, Palestinian deaths in Gaza rise above 50,000 as Israel expands its military campaign, NPR, 25 March 2025.
7. Ethnic Cleansing, Definitions of Genocide and Related Crimes, United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. Note to idiots and trolls: my reportage of these facts does not imply support of Hamas.
8. Oakland Museum of California. Resource 6-1a: California Population by Ethnic Groups, 1790-1880.
9. U.S. Census Bureau. California 2020 census.

Lise Davidsen in recital

Lise Davidsen accompanied by Malcolm Martineau at Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, Tuesday 4 February 2025.
Presented by Cal Performances. Photo credit: Katie Ravas for Drew Alitzer Photography. Image source: KQED.org

In July 2015, at age 28, the Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen was catapulted into opera-world fame by winning the first prize, the Birgit Nilsson prize for singing Strauss or Wagner, and an audience award at Plácido Domingo's Operalia vocal competition at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden. A month later she went on to win first prize and two other prizes in the Queen Sonja International Music Competition in Oslo.

Peter Katona, who at the time had been the casting director of the Royal Opera House for 30 years, was quoted in Opera magazine as saying, "She could be the next Kirsten Flagstad." [1] By almost universal consensus, Flagstad is considered to be the greatest dramatic soprano in history. Dramatic sopranos require the vocal power to sing over a 100-piece orchestra playing fortissimo, the stamina to perform at a high emotional pitch throughout a four-hour-long opera, and the musicality to sing the heavier roles of Strauss and especially Wagner while retaining accuracy of intonation and beauty of tone, without straining or screaming to be heard. No pressure, then.

Here is Davidsen's prize-winning performance of Elisabeth's "Dich, teure Halle, grüss ich wieder" (Dear hall, I greet you once again) from Wagner's Tannhäuser in the finals of the Queen Sonja competition on 21 August 2015:

https://youtu.be/U9TofuLQOuk?t=4

Impressive as this video is, in the intervening decade Davidsen's low- and mid-range have taken on a fuller, darker timbre. Her voice in that range is now even richer and more opulent, while her high notes can ring out with an almost shocking power. Her Cal Performances recital with the great accompanist Malcolm Martineau displayed all of these vocal strengths, as well as her ability to mesmerize an audience with her soft singing, attentiveness to words, and communicative artistry.

The recital opened with a group of three songs to German texts by Davidsen's countryman Edvard Grieg. From the first song, "Dereinst, Gedanke mein," it was clear that we were in for a very special evening indeed. Here is her 2021 recording of this song, accompanied by Leif Ove Andsnes. No recording, of course, can capture the full resonance and sheer lusciousness of a voice like hers heard in person:

https://youtu.be/3TonfA2SsKY

Dereinst, Gedanke mein (Emanuel Geibel)	One day, my thoughts
Dereinst, Gedanke mein, Wirst ruhig sein. Läßt Liebesglut Dich still nicht werden, In kühler Erden, Da schläfst du gut, Dort ohne Lieb' Und ohne Pein Wirst ruhig sein. Was du im Leben Nicht hast gefunden, Wenn es entschwunden, Wird's dir gegeben, Dann ohne Wunden Und ohne Pein Wirst ruhig sein.	One day, my thoughts, You will find peace. If love's passion disturbs your repose, In the cool earth You will sleep deeply: Without love And without pain You will find peace. What in life You have not found When it is ended Will be given to you; Then without wounds And without pain You will find peace.

This song also introduced a somber mood of love's suffering and anguish which threaded through Davidsen's selections, twinned with the theme of love's joys.

Following the Grieg set were arias from three operas, all expressing a longing for death: Dido's lament "Thy hand, Belinda, darkness shades me" from Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, Elisabeth's "Tu che le vanità conoscesti del mondo" (You who knew the vanities of the world) from Verdi's Don Carlo, and Ariadne's "Es gibt ein Reich" (There is a kingdom) from Strauss's Ariadne aux Naxos. Together they displayed Davidsen's vocal and dramatic range as the characters pass through sorrow, grief, regret, remembered joy, resignation, and resolve. As well as having a gorgeous voice, Davidsen showed herself to be a magnificent vocal actor. The Purcell in particular was immensely moving, and at the climax her "Remember me!" rang out powerfully.

It may be heresy, but in these arias, as well as those from Wagner operas in the second half of the program, I missed the accompaniment of an orchestra. No piano transcription can capture the full sweep of the emotions conveyed in this music. This was not the fault of Davidsen's accompanist Malcolm Martineau, who supported her throughout the evening with playing both beautiful and (that rarest of gifts among accompanists) subtle.

The final song of the first half was a glowing account of Richard Strauss's "Befreit" (Released). Searching for a Davidsen performance of this song to share, I discovered that she has not yet recorded it in either its original piano version or its later orchestral version, oversights that I hope there are plans to remedy soon.

The second half of the program began with a group of four Schubert songs, beginning with "Der Tod und das Mädchen" and "Der Zwerg." Davidsen sang both songs effectively, but they are Schubert in the hyper-dramatic mode that I confess I do not favor. Even her artistry could not make the latter song, about a murderous dwarf (!), seem anything but excessively histrionic. These were followed by lovely renditions of two of Schubert's most deceptively simple melodies, "Du bist die Ruh" (You are my peace) and "Ellens Gesang III (Ave Maria)," which suspended time.

The final section of the recital was devoted to Wagner, starting with Elisabeth's death-prayer from Tannhäuser, "Allmächt'ge Jungfrau" (Almighty Virgin). Following after Schubert's "Ave Maria," it showed the careful thought Davidsen had put into the sequencing of her selections. This was followed by a ravishing "Der Engel" from the Wesendonck Lieder. Here is Davidsen's 2021 recording of the orchestral version with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Mark Elder:

https://youtu.be/VpqD-aFdcGI

Der Engel (Mathilde Wesendonck)

The Angel

In der Kindheit frühen Tagen Hört ich oft von Engeln sagen, Die des Himmels hehre Wonne Tauschen mit der Erdensonne, Daß, wo bang ein Herz in Sorgen Schmachtet vor der Welt verborgen, Daß, wo still es will verbluten, Und vergehn in Tränenfluten, Daß, wo brünstig sein Gebet Einzig um Erlösung fleht, Da der Engel niederschwebt, Und es sanft gen Himmel hebt. Ja, es stieg auch mir ein Engel nieder, Und auf leuchtendem Gefieder Führt er, ferne jedem Schmerz, Meinen Geist nun himmelwärts!

In childhood's early days I often heard talk of angels, Who would exchange Heaven's bliss For the Earth's sunlight, So that, when a heart in sorrow Languishes hidden from the world, So that, when it wishes quietly to grieve, And melt away in a flood of tears, So that, when it prays fervently Only for release from life, Then the angel descends And gently raises it to Heaven. Yes, an angel has also descended to me, And on shining wings Bears aloft, far from every pain, My soul now heavenward!

Periodically throughout the recital Davidsen spoke directly and disarmingly to the audience, making the cavernous Zellerbach Hall seem like an intimate room. She announced that the final work in the program would be her first public performance of the Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Although it was the end of a long recital and, with just the piano as accompaniment, her voice was completely exposed, she showed no fatigue. Over the seven minutes of the aria she deftly employed both the richness of her lower range and her gleaming top notes to slowly build to a powerful emotional peak. Her interpretation will no doubt continue to develop, but hearing her essay this aria for the first time was a privilege I won't soon forget; with the full power of  a Wagnerian orchestra buoying her up on this flight of ecstasy, it would have been overwhelming. Davidsen has cancelled all of her engagements after mid-March because she is pregnant (with twins!), and so we will likely not see her Isolde on stage for another couple of years. We can only hope that it will not be that long before she is able to return to the recording studio.

After the final notes of Wagner's great aria faded into silence, the audience roared its appreciation in a lengthy ovation. Amazingly, after the marathon of the Liebestod, Davidsen and Martineau generously offered us an "extra": Wagner's "Schmerzen" (Anguish) from the Wesendonck Lieder, which brought the audience to its feet again.

In this memorable recital Lise Davidsen showed that she is not the next Kirsten Flagstad. She is herself, and that is quite enough.

"Schmerzen," with Mark Elder and the London Philharmonic:

https://youtu.be/MRru3QruKPQ

Schmerzen (Mathilde Wesendonck)

Anguish

Sonne, weinest jeden Abend Dir die schönen Augen rot, Wenn im Meeresspiegel badend Dich erreicht der frühe Tod; Doch erstehst in alter Pracht, Glorie der düstren Welt, Du am Morgen neu erwacht, Wie ein stolzer Siegesheld! Ach, wie sollte ich da klagen, Wie, mein Herz, so schwer dich sehn, Muß die Sonne selbst verzagen, Muß die Sonne untergehn? Und gebieret Tod nur Leben, Geben Schmerzen Wonne nur: O wie dank ich, daß gegeben Solche Schmerzen mir Natur!

Sun, every evening you weep Until your beautiful eyes turn red, When sinking into the sea's mirror You are touched by early death; Yet you rise again in your former splendor, Glory of the gloomy world, Each morning you reawaken, Like a proud victor! Ah, how can I lament, Why, my heart, do you ache so, When the sun itself must despair, When the sun itself must sink down? And if Death always gives birth to Life, And anguish always to bliss: I am thankful that Nature Has given me so much pain!

Update 16 February 2025: After publishing this post I learned that just four days before her Berkeley recital Davidsen had appeared as Ariadne in the final performance (of four) of Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos at the Staatsoper in Vienna. At short notice she had replaced Anna Netrebko, who withdrew because of illness. On Bachtrack, Mark Pullinger wrote of her "triumphant" performance on 28 January, "Lise Davidsen and Richard Strauss are a match made in heaven. Hers is a Rolls Royce soprano, luxuriously rich and powerful, filling the house. She rode the long gleaming lines of 'Es gibt ein Reich' with ease, a molten glow that I can still feel now. The final duet with [Michael] Spyres [as Bacchus] was sublime. . .An outstanding portrayal." For more on the production, please see "Lise auf Naxos: Davidsen makes a triumphant return to Vienna's Ariadne" on Bachtrack.

---

1. Henrietta Bredin, "Competitive Instincts," Opera Vol. 66 No. 10, October 2015, p. 1387.

Mad, bad, and dangerous to know: Three historical novels

Emma Donoghue. Image source: The Idle Woman

Jorge Luis Borges' 1939 story "Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote" brilliantly illustrates the impossibility of writing historical fiction without anachronism. After a vast number of rough drafts and "thousands of manuscript pages" Pierre Menard produces a fraction of Cervantes' Don Quixote: "the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of Part One, and a fragment of the twenty-second chapter." In the translation of Anthony Bonner,

He did not want to compose another Don Quixote—which would be so easy—but the Don Quixote. It is unnecessary to add that his aim was never to produce a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable ambition was to produce pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes. . .

'To compose Don Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a reasonable, necessary and perhaps inevitable undertaking; at the beginning of the twentieth century it is almost impossible. It is not in vain that three hundred years have passed, charged with the most complex happenings—among them, to mention only one, that same Don Quixote'. . .The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is infinitely richer. [1]

As Borges' droll thought-experiment demonstrates, a present-day novel set in the past, even if it is impeccably accurate, is inflected anachronistically with both the author's and reader's knowledge of the intervening history, and with our experience of vastly different cultures (both material and non-material), sensibilities and conventions. When such a novel introduces inaccuracies of diction or fact, the sense of falsity is heightened.

So with the understanding that anachronism in the genre is unavoidable (but also has degrees), below I comment on three historical novels. Each of the three novels has a female protagonist, who could be described respectively by the three adjectives in Lady Caroline Lamb's description of Lord Byron: "mad, bad, and dangerous to know."

Mad: Margaret Cavendish of Margaret the First

Cover of Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton, Catapult, 2016. Image source: Catapult Books

. . .I am not covetous, but as ambitious as ever any of my sex was, is, or can be; which is the cause, that though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second; yet, I will endeavour to be, Margaret the First: and, though I have neither power, time nor occasion, to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did; yet, rather than not to be mistress of one, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made a world of my own. . .

—Margaret Cavendish, "To The Reader," in The Description of a New World,
called The Blazing World (1666) [2]

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, lived during a time of cataclysmic social upheaval. As Margaret Lucas, a maid of honor to Queen Henrietta Maria during the English Civil War, at age 21 in 1644 she went with the queen into French exile. There Margaret met and married William Cavendish, Marquess (later Duke) of Newcastle-on-Tyne; he was a recently widowed Royalist general and 30 years her senior.  

Seven years into their marriage Margaret began to write and publish books under her own name, which was highly unusual for the time. What was also quite unusual was that her writing had the full support and financial backing of her husband. In his prefatory poem to The Blazing World, after comparing her to Columbus, who "only discovered" a new world, he wrote of his wife, "But your creating Fancy, thought it fit / To make your World of Nothing, but pure Wit." Ultimately Margaret produced a dozen volumes of poetry, plays, romances, utopian fantasies, philosophical essays, biography and autobiography.

After the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 Margaret became a well-known figure in London, and was the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society. Crowds would gather at her public appearances; she was nicknamed "Mad Madge" for her eccentricities in dress, behavior, and thought. Samuel Pepys described her in his diary as "a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman," and Dorothy Osborne wrote in a letter to Sir William Temple that "there are many soberer people in Bedlam." In the 20th century, Virginia Woolf wrote of her that "there is something noble and Quixotic and high-spirited, as well as crack-brained and bird-witted, about her." [3] 

Of course, women have always been under greater pressure to conform to social expectations, with contempt and ridicule among the milder punishments for overstepping their bounds. As Kate Lilley writes in her introduction to The Blazing World and Other Writings, "the number of substantial, elaborately produced books she wrote and published under her own name and at considerable expense, in a career spanning twenty years, constituted her most radical and deliberate infringement of contemporary proprieties." [4]

"Margaret Daughter to Thos. Lucas Esqr. of Essex 2d. wife to Wm. Duke of Newcastle," portrait by Peter Lely, 1665. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Danielle Dutton's slim novel Margaret the First recounts Margaret's story from her own perspective. She is portrayed as prefiguring our time in multiple ways: a proto-feminist writer of fantasy fiction unconstrained by traditional gender expectations (Cavendish described The Blazing World as "hermaphroditic" and on occasion wore men's clothes, like the disguised character "Travellia" in her novella "Assaulted and Pursued Chastity" (1656)). The novel does not attempt to delve deeply into Margaret's psychology, but portrays her largely through her extravagant self-presentation.

To give the flavor of the book, here is Margaret relating her reception among the Dutch (she and her husband moved to Antwerp in 1648):

To my growing delight, I was a hit, my mind, I wrote, a "swarm of bees." That August I cast off my years of mourning, sent maids scurrying down the halls with stacks of black gowns in their arms. To the final parties of the season I wore a rainbow of new dresses I'd had made—one bright as a fiery beam, one as green as leaves. "After all," I told my husband, "dressing is the poetry of women." He heartily agreed. Had I heard it somewhere? I couldn't say. I took to wearing feathered hats like ladies in the streets. (p. 56)

This scene occurs in August 1649. However, Margaret would have been unlikely to don colorful, festive dresses little more than six months after the trial and execution of Charles I, and only five months after her husband's estates had been confiscated. 

By the way, the word "hit" employed to mean "a popular success" dates from the early 19th century, not the mid-17th. Danielle Dutton, doubtless, does not care. Her project is to bring Margaret into our time, rather than transport the reader into hers—to recuperate "Mad Madge" as a genderqueer literary pioneer. But I confess that I find Margaret's voice and thoughts as expressed in her writing to be far more strange and wonderful than Dutton's imagined version of her.

Bad: Mary Saunders of Slammerkin

Cover of Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue, Virago, 2000. Image source: Delphine Woods

In her 2001 New York Times review of Slammerkin, Laura Jamison wrote that it was "a heady, colorful romp of a novel." Um, no. A "colorful romp" makes it sound like a female version of Tom Jones; instead Slammerkin is more like a version of William Hogarth's "The Harlot's Progress" from the perspective of its doomed heroine Moll Hackabout.

Donoghue, a scholar of literature and sexuality, knows her historical setting (her Passions Between Women and Inseparable were two of my favorite books of 2022), and the novel is based on an actual 1764 trial. The title is an 18th-century term with a double meaning, both "a loose gown" and "a slovenly [with the additional implication of unchaste] woman." But Donoghue wears her learning lightly. She writes with all the fierce energy of her 14-year-old protagonist's yearnings, and brings both 18th-century London and her flawed heroine to vivid, visceral life.

Was it any wonder, then, that she preferred to dawdle away the last of the afternoon at the Dials, where seven streets thrust away in seven different directions, and there were stalls heaped with silks, and live carp butting in barrels, and gulls cackling overhead, and the peddler with his coats lined with laces and ribbons of colours Mary could taste on her tongue: yellow like butter, ink black, and the blue of fire? Where boys half her size smoked long pipes and spat black on the cobbles, and sparrows bickered over fragments of piecrust? Where Mary couldn't hear her own breath over the thump of feet and the clatter of carts and the church bells, postmen's bells, fiddles and tambourines, and the rival bawls of vendors and mongers of lavender and watercress and curds-and-whey and all the things there were in the world? What d'ye lack, what d'ye lack? (p.8)

It's the allurements of the Seven Dials that are Mary's downfall: as she tries to purchase a red ribbon so that she can have something pretty in her life, the seller demands a kiss in exchange, and then backs her against a wall and rapes her. She becomes pregnant, and is thrown out of her house by her mother. She returns to the Seven Dials, but this time to become one of the girls walking the streets and luring cullies to survive. An (only slightly) older and (much) more experienced prostitute, Doll Higgins, shows her the ropes, and a fierce friendship develops.

Expelled from her family, Mary rejects them in turn:

Was that hard-hearted? Well, so what if it was. She'd been through enough to harden anyone. It was none of her choosing; all she'd done was clung on to her life like a spar from a shipwreck. Better to be hardened than crushed to nothing. (p. 84)

The simile of the shipwreck is perhaps a touch literary for the unspoken thought of the now 15-year-old Mary, but Donoghue makes few such missteps.

Although Doll and Mary watch out for each other, appalling things befall the pair, and soon Mary is forced to flee London and a murderous pimp. Although she reinvents herself in a remote town, finding work as a maid and seamstress, her past inevitably catches up with her.

The novel depicts the crushing social and economic forces and sexual double standards that ruled women's lives in the Georgian era. As a maid or a seamstress, Mary Saunders faces a life of unremitting toil. The 19th-century sociologist and reformer Harriet Martineau wrote that "prostitution is fed by constant accession from starved or overwearied dressmakers"; in seeking a better life Mary is trapped by her class and her gender. [5] 

Donoghue portrays Mary in all her complexity. She shows us that Mary is not only a victim; she has agency and makes choices, even if many of them are unwise, or bring harm to herself or others. Be forewarned: Mary's world, and her fate, are hard and grim.

Dangerous to know: Elizabeth Cree of The Trial of Elizabeth Cree

Cover of The Trial of Elizabeth Cree by Peter Ackroyd. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 1995. Image source: Internet Archive

Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950) notoriously includes a flashback, narrated by one of the characters, that turns out to be false. Some viewers feel that the sequence violates an unwritten law of cinema: if we see something onscreen, it must actually happen in the world of the characters. However, Hitchcock signals from the opening credits, in which a stage curtain rises on a view of modern-day London, that the distinction between role-playing and real life is itself illusory. The film is also set in the world of the theater, and the two main characters are a famous actress (played by the famous actress Marlene Dietrich) and a drama student (Jane Wyman). As critic Robin Wood describes the film, "Acting is a leading motif: both women act parts continually and habitually, so that there is constant doubt about the real nature of each." [6] Or, I would say, the film suggests that our "real nature" is often malleable, unstable, and shaped by circumstances. Actors just visibly embody this truth that the rest of us strive to conceal.

Literature has a much longer tradition of unreliable narrators, of course. And particularly when a narrator (or even a character) is an actor—a professional dissembler—the reader must be on guard: disguises, false identities, and falsehoods are sure to follow.

Peter Ackroyd is a biographer (Dickens, 1990) and historian (London: The Biography, 2000) as well as a novelist. The Trial of Elizabeth Cree (to give the novel its U.S. title [7]) mixes real figures from 19th century London, such as Karl Marx, George Gissing, and the cross-dressing music-hall star Dan Leno, with Ackroyd's inventions. These include the title character, who in 1881 is hanged for killing her husband Jack by poisoning him with arsenic—not a spoiler, as the hanging occurs in the novel's first sentence—and a Jack-the-Ripper-like serial killer who mutilates his victims and creates gruesome tableaux with their body parts. There is a dual mystery in The Trial of Elizabeth Cree: who is the serial killer stalking the Limehouse district, and why does Elizabeth Cree murder her husband?

Be forewarned that Ackroyd describes the serial killer's murders, narrated in the first person, in grisly detail. There's a reason for the repellent relish with which the killings are described, as it obscures the identity of the murderer. But should you be tempted to read The Trial of Elizabeth Cree, I recommend skipping these sections unless you find entertainment in descriptions of torture and dismemberment.

For a historian, Ackroyd makes a number of surprising errors. Early in the novel, Jack Cree records in his diary a visit to the attic room of a prostitute:

There was a soiled mattress upon the floor, while on the walls she had pasted photographs of Walter Butt, George Byron and other idols of the stage. (p. 28)

This is an odd detail for Ackroyd to include. The entry is dated "September 6, 1880," but in 1880 it would be highly unlikely for an impoverished prostitute to own photographic prints. The photographs on the walls would had to have been cheap reproductions cut from newspapers or flyers. However, the mass reproduction of photographs on paper using the half-tone or rotogravure processes only became widespread after 1880; the first rotogravure newspaper supplements were published in the 1910s. [8]

It's possible that these could be photographic cartes de visite or cabinet cards bought at a photographer's or stationer's, which could feature actors or other public figures; in the Victorian era middle-class families collected these cards and preserved them in albums.

Dan Leno in female costume by William Davey, early 1900s, published by J. Beagles & Co. Image source: National Portrait Gallery London NPG Ax160245

However, such cards would seem to be beyond the means of a street prostitute: a Victorian advertisement lists the price of a cabinet card (about the size of a modern postcard) as three shillings, nearly a week's wage for a factory worker, while the smaller carte de visite cost a shilling and sixpence. It's very doubtful that an alcoholic prostitute barely surviving in a dismal garret and drinking her gin out of a chamberpot (!) would have such costly items pasted to the walls.

More egregious errors: "Dan Leno. . .was no longer the anxious young comic whom Lambeth Marsh Lizzie first met in 1864; now, sixteen years later, he was the established star of the halls who was billed as 'The Funniest Man on Earth'" (p. 168). Dan Leno might well have been anxious when onstage in 1864, as he was then only 3 years old; the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography gives his birth date as 20 December 1860. Elsewhere Lizzie describes him during their first rehearsals together as "only fifteen" (p. 108), but this is off by a dozen years. It's strange that Ackroyd, the author of histories of drag (Dressing Up, 1979) and the theater (The English Actor, 2023) should make such an easily-checked mistake.

Speaking of errors of chronology, in his diary entry for "September 26, 1880" Jack Cree records that "I went back to New Cross and listened to my wife playing a new tune by Charles Dibdin on the piano" (p. 192). A new tune by the prolific Dibdin would be remarkable indeed in 1880, since (according to the ODNB) he died in 1814; he was one of the favorite songwriters of Jane Austen.

"Let Bucks & let bloods to praise London a-gree / Oh the joys of the country my Jewel for me / Where sweet is the flow'r that the May bush adorns / And how charming to gather it but for the thorns. . ." Charles Dibdin's "The joys of the Country," from a manuscript of vocal music in Jane Austen's hand, copied c.1790–c.1805. Jane Austen House Museum CHWJA/19/3. Image source: Internet Archive

But my main objection to The Trial of Elizabeth Cree isn't the sloppiness of Ackroyd's evocation of its period. It's that Ackroyd exchanges the slow building of suspense (about how the lives of the serial killer and the other characters will intersect) for a surprise twist at the end (the killer isn't the character whom we've been led to believe). Perhaps this is Ackroyd's homage to Victorian melodramas and sensation novels, but I found it to be the final miscalculation in a disappointing book.

Ackroyd's novel has been adapted as a feature film, The Limehouse Golem (2016), starring no less an actor than Bill Nighy as the police inspector pursuing the murderer. It's also been adapted as an opera, Elizabeth Cree (2017), composed by Pulitzer-Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts with a libretto by Pulitzer- and Grammy-winning librettist Mark Campbell. Clearly, then, my negative reaction to the novel is not shared by everyone.

---

1. Jorge Luis Borges. Fictions. Edited and with an Introduction by Anthony Kerrigan. Calder & Boyars, 1974, pp. 42–51. UK edition of Ficciones, Grove Press, 1962.
2. Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World and Other Writings, Penguin, 2004, p. 124.
   
3. Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Wednesday 18 March 1667 [Old Style] / 1668 [New Style]; https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1668/03/18/; Dorothy Osborne, in Kingsley Hart, ed, Letters from Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, Folio Society, n.d., p. 58; Virginia Woolf, "The Duchess of Newcastle" in The Common Reader: First Series, Harcourt, Brace & World, p. 78. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31822010374056&seq=92
4. Kate Lilley, "Introduction," in Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World and Other Writings, p. xi.
   
5. Harriet Martineau quoted in Samantha B. Vance, Revisiting Dickens, "Prostitution in Victorian Britain - Presentation Page." https://revisitingdickens.wordpress.com/prostitution-victorian/
6. Robin Wood, Hitchcock's Films Revisited. Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 80.
7. The U.K. title is Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. The U.S. title seems a distinct improvement.
8. Rachel A. Mustalish, "The development of photomechanical printing processes in the late 19th Century," Topics in Photographic Preservation, Volume 7, Article 10, 1997, pp. 73-87. https://resources.culturalheritage.org/pmgtopics/1997-volume-seven/07_10_Mustalish.html; Library of Congress, "The Rotogravure Process," in Newspaper Pictorials: World War I Rotogravures, 1914 to 1919. https://www.loc.gov/collections/world-war-i-rotogravures/articles-and-essays/the-rotogravure-process/. By the way, "Walter Butt" and "George Byron" seem to be Ackroyd's inventions; I've been unable to trace any performers of those names in the 1870s.

January 20, 2025

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Favorites of 2024: Books

Fiction Favorites of 2024

This week LitHub published a list of its editors' favorite stories of the past year. The first entry on the list was Bradford Morrow's "In Search of the Rarest Book in American Literature." You might suspect that first editions of Walt Whitman's self-published Leaves of Grass (1855), Herman Melville's Moby-Dick; or The Whale (1851), L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), or F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1928) in dust jacket would top the list of the rarest volumes in American letters, but no. While they are all extremely desirable (and costly), the rarest book in American literature is Edgar Allan Poe's 40-page-long first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), published in an edition of perhaps 50 copies when Poe was only 18.

Cover of Susan Jaffe Tane's copy of Edgar Allan Poe's Tamerlane (Calvin Thomas, 1827). Image source: Wikimedia Commons (erroneously identified there as the Cornell University Library copy)

Only eleven copies are known to have survived; a twelfth was stolen from the McGregor Room rare-book collection in the University of Virginia's Alderman Library in 1973 and may never be found.

One of the two known copies of Tamerlane in private hands recently came up for auction at Sotheby's. At the sale in June of this year Tamerlane was bought by the premier Poe collector today, Susan Jaffe Tane, who already owned the only other copy of Tamerlane in a private collection; she told Morrow that she plans to donate one of the two copies to "the right home."

The auction was the subject of Morrow's follow-up story, "What's worth more than the rarest book in American literature? The answer may (not) surprise you." As the title of Morrow's piece implies, Tamerlane, despite its rarity, did not sell for the highest price. In fact, though astronomically expensive, it was a relative bargain: when this copy had come up for auction in 2009 it had been bought by Dr. Rodney P. Swantko for $682,000 (the equivalent today of U.S. $1 million). But another item from Swantko's library sold for

a higher price than Poe’s Tamerlane ($420,000), a first edition of Melville’s Moby-Dick in the rare blue first binding ($21,600), a first issue of Leaves of Grass ($132,000), Lolita inscribed by Nabokov to Graham Greene with a butterfly drawing ($264,000), Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol inscribed to his close friend Walter Savage Landor in the year of publication ($228,000), The Great Gatsby in its rare and iconic dust jacket, gifted to Zelda’s sister and brother-in-law ($336,000), an inscribed first edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz ($108,000), Kerouac’s On the Road inscribed to [his lover] Joyce Johnson ($120,000), and the earliest known Poe autograph manuscript in private hands, "In an Album—to a River" ($216,000) combined.

The priciest item? Thomas Taylor's original cover art for the first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Bloomsbury, 1997), which sold for $1,920,000.

Thomas Taylor’s original cover illustration for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Courtesy of Sotheby’s Books & Manuscripts Department. Image source: LitHub

I bring up Morrow's LitHub pieces because in them he mentions that he first met Tane while researching his 2020 novel The Forger's Daughter, "which centers on a complex scheme to counterfeit a thirteenth Tamerlane. . .[and] involves in-the-weeds details about Tamerlane's printing and hand-stitched binding."

Cover of Bradford Morrow's The Forger's Daughter (Mysterious Press, 2020). Image source: BradfordMorrow.com

This, I instantly thought, is a novel that I have to read. But The Forger's Daughter is the sequel to The Forgers (Mysterious Press, 2014), and so I thought I should read the series in order (the third and final volume, The Forger's Requiem, will come out in 2025).

Biggest disappointment

I picked up The Forgers in a state of high anticipation, and at the very first sentence was immediately dismayed. The book opens with a description of a gruesome murder scene: the victim, book collector Adam Diehl, has had his head crushed with a marble rolling pin and his hands severed. It's a graphic introduction to the bibliographic mystery I was expecting, and I felt my heart sinking at its generic conventionality. The novel also ends with a violent and bloody scene, and—although this doesn't necessarily destroy my enjoyment of a mystery—I was pretty sure I'd guessed the murderer on page 4. I turned out to be right.

Cover of Bradford Morrow's The Forgers (Mysterious Press, 2014). Image source: BradfordMorrow.com

But even more disappointing than the generic elements of the plot, the brutal but undermotivated violence, and an occasional "because the plot requires it" implausibility is the quality of the prose. Perhaps this was a deliberate attempt on Morrow's part to make his narrator sound like a real person, but I don't know anyone who speaks or writes like this, with one cliché thudding after another:

Once we're dead, secrets that we so carefully nurtured, like so many black flowers in a veiled garden, are often brought out in to the light where they can flourish. Cultivated by truth, fertilized by rumor, they blossom into florets and sprays that are toxic to those who would sniff their poisonous perfumes. While I did my best to shelter Meghan from certain unsavory discoveries that were made about her brother's life. . .some damning details would soon enough vine their strangling way into the light. Details that, as fate would have it, I had already surmised about Adam but could not before his death practically or honorably reveal to her. Details that I myself was duty bound to help transit from that darkness of secrecy into truth's awkward glare. Salt on the wound, I know, and yet it would prove to be an unavoidable seasoning. (p. 13)

So are secrets poisonous flowers, strangling vines, or salt on wounds? And should "vine" ever be used as a verb? And this is hardly the only passage of metaphor run wild. From just a few pages later:

. . .as in any vocation, those who truly love their work would embrace it with every fiber of their being even if there were nothing but a plug nickel at the rainbow's end. For me, the pot of gold was in the act itself, even if the act produced but fool's gold. (p. 25)

And yet the narrator is someone who is supposed to be able to produce forged inscriptions and letters by well-known and stylistically distinctive writers—in The Forger's Daughter he names "Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, W.B. Yeats" as his specialties—that are accepted as genuine by experts.

He also sprinkles his text with technical terms such as "holograph manuscript" (one in the author's handwriting) and "eidetic memory" (which before Photoshop commonly used to be called photographic memory). But here's his description of his parents' house in Irvington, New York:

A classic brick Tudor whose upper story was fashioned of white stucco with traditional wooden crisscross decoration. . . (p. 154)

Does our super-sophisticated narrator really not know the standard architectural term "half-timbered"?

Although The Forgers improves a bit when it focuses on the details of rare book collecting and dealing, it feels emblematic of the disappointing year it's been for me in fiction reading. So my apologies that the list of favorite fiction that follows is shorter than in some past years. In alphabetical order by author:

Alasdair Gray: Poor Things (1992)

Cover of the paperback of Alasdair Gray's Poor Things (Harcourt Brace, 1994).

It had been many years since I'd read Scottish writer Alasdair Gray's Poor Things, and so when I re-read it after seeing the Yorgos Lanthimos film it was like reading it anew. Poor Things is narrated by a Glaswegian doctor who describes reanimating a pregnant suicide victim by giving her a transplant of her own unborn baby's brain. He then describes "Bella"'s rapid mental development from infant to adult woman, and her traumatic encounters with exploitation, injustice, and man's inhumanity to man. It's a brilliant twist on the coming-of-age novel.

A minor caveat is necessary: the novel has one metafictional frame too many. Gray's "editorial" Notes Critical and Historical at the end of the book, after Bella/Victoria's own version of her story, are distinctly anticlimactic. Also, there is nothing in the text to indicate when there is an associated note, so if you read straight through you encounter the notes as a block. If Gray felt the notes were integral to the novel, they would have worked better as footnotes placed throughout the text than in their own 30-page section as endnotes.

Haruki Murakami: Manga Stories, Volume 1, adapted by Jean-Christophe Deveney, illustrations by PMGL (2021/2023)

Cover of Haruki Murakami's Manga Stories, Volume 1 (Tuttle, 2023).

Despite the title, these adaptations are actually bandes dessinées (French/Belgian comics) rather than manga (Japanese comics). Adapted by writer Jean-Christophe Deveney and artist PMGL (Pierre-Marie Grille-Liou), the stories contained in Volume 1 include "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo" (from after the quake, 2000/2002) and "Where I'm Likely To Find It," "Birthday Girl," and "Seventh Man" from Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2009/2006).

Panels from "The Seventh Man."

As I wrote in my full review of Manga Stories, "Comics are a perfect medium for representing the sudden shifts in Murakami's fiction between everyday life and an alternate reality."

Volume 2, containing the stories "The Second Bakery Attack" (from The Elephant Vanishes, 2005/1993), "Samsa in Love" (Men Without Women, 2014/2017), and "Thailand" (after the quake), was issued this year. Volume 3, with "Scheherezade" (Men Without Women) and "Sleep" (The Elephant Vanishes) is scheduled for publication this spring. "Scheherezade" is one of the stories on which Ryūsuke Hamaguchi's film Drive My Car (2021) was based.

Zadie Smith: The Fraud (2023)

Cover of Zadie Smith's The Fraud (Penguin Random House, 2023).

The case of the Tichborne Claimant, a man who presented himself as the long-lost heir Roger Tichborne, fascinated 19th-century London. As I wrote in my full review of The Fraud, Zadie Smith "explores the idea of fraudulence as it relates to multiple characters, on stages both public and private. If you're wondering which character the title refers to, the answer is pretty much all of them."

The Tichborne Claimant, c. 1872. Photo credit: Maull & Co. Image source: National Portrait Gallery, Australia

The review went on, "The Fraud is almost compulsively readable. Its short chapters of, at most, a few pages—very un-Victorian—jump back and forth in time over the nineteenth century, and take place in both England and Jamaica. As expected and hoped-for from Zadie Smith, the novel is very much alive to the class, racial, and sexual dynamics of that time, and ours."

Fiction: Honorable mention

Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two (2024)

Cover of Emil Ferris's My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book Two (Fantagraphics, 2024). Image source: Bookshop.org

Book One of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters came out in 2017, seven years after Ferris started working on it. Its long gestation was due in large part to the intricacy of its story and artwork, rendered as the sketchbook of its 10-year-old narrator Karen growing up in 1960s Chicago. Its many layers include Karen's own coming-of-age story, her homage to the horror comics that constitute her main reading, a diary of her mother's decline from cancer, and the slow uncovering of the mystery of the violent death of her Holocaust-survivor neighbor Anka.

As I wrote in my full review of Book One, "To encompass such a wide range of narrative registers and tones Ferris deploys an equally wide range of drawing styles: highly detailed and finely cross-hatched realism, comic-book fantasy, corrosive Weimar-style expressionism, dashed-off sketches, and renderings of famous artworks." The latter derive from her trips with her older brother Deez to the "art castle," the Art Institute of Chicago. Deez is hiding his own secrets, including his possible involvement in the events surrounding Anka's death.

Book Two was originally and optimistically scheduled for publication in October 2017. The publication date kept getting pushed back, and for some time no expected date was given at all. (It turned out that Ferris and her publisher Fantagraphics were involved in a lengthy legal dispute.) Finally issued last spring, Book Two picks up where Book One left off. It's 1968, and Karen is experiencing an awakening of both her sexual identity and her political consciousness. She participates in the tumultuous protests at the Democratic National Convention that are violently attacked by the Chicago police, and continues her investigation into Anka's death.

Panels from My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book Two. Image source: Cărturești Carusel

The artwork is as rich and varied as in Book One. However, the storytelling felt less taut to me. The narrator keeps breaking off various subplots and saying that she'll return to give more detail later, and never does. Despite its 400-plus pages the book ends without any major new revelations, and with Deez and Karen planning a road trip. So clearly we can await My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book Three. Let's hope it doesn't take seven more years to appear; given the transitional nature of this volume and the success of the series so far, there's a good chance that there's also a Book Four on the distant horizon.

Nonfiction Favorites of 2024

Jane Glover, Mozart in Italy (2023)

Jane Glover, Mozart in Italy: Coming of Age in the Land of Opera (Picador, 2023). Image source: The Hanbury Agency

Between the ages of 13 and 17 Mozart made three journeys to Italy with his father Leopold, and sought permanent employment there. Although during these journeys he composed his early operatic masterpieces Mitridate, re di Ponto (1770), Ascanio in Alba (1771), Lucio Silla (1772), and the sacred motet "Exsultate, Jubilate" (1773), all for Milan, he ultimately failed to find the court appointment he sought. Had he succeeded, the history of music would be profoundly different.

"Al destin che la minaccia" (From the fate that threatens me / Free, O God, my oppressed heart) sung by Yvonne Kenny accompanied by the Concentus Musicus Wien conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, from the 1986 film of Mitridate directed by Jean-Pierre Ponelle:

https://youtu.be/s_gHjv3jZJ4

(For more on the opera and film, please see "'The insane frenzy of an illicit love': Mitridate, re di Ponto.")

In my review in Part 5 of my series Mozart in Italy, based on my reading of her book (and other sources), I wrote that although Glover sometimes opts for a simpler version of events rather than a more complex one, she "knows how to tell a good story, and Mozart in Italy—in which we see a teenaged musical genius trying to make his way in an adult world of politics, money, favoritism, and social and artistic hierarchies—is packed full of them."

Deirdre Le Faye, Jane Austen's 'Outlandish Cousin' (2002)

Cover of Deirdre Le Faye's Jane Austen's 'Outlandish Cousin': The Life and Letters of Eliza de Feuillide (British Library, 2002). Image source: Abebooks.com

Eliza Hancock, later de Feuillide, later Austen, was Jane Austen's cousin and sister-in-law: Eliza (after much hesitation) married Jane's brother Henry. She was born in India as the result of her mother's adulterous affair with Warren Hastings, who was the East India Company's Governor-General. Eliza was a flirtatious, pleasure-seeking, harp-playing, and theatrical-loving woman who lived a "gay," "dissipated," "racketing" life. She may have served as a model for several Austen characters, including the foundling Eliza of "Henry and Eliza" (ca. 1787), the attractive but self-interested and manipulative Lady Susan of Lady Susan (ca. 1794), the attractive but self-interested and manipulative Isabella Thorpe of Northanger Abbey (completed 1803, revised and published 1817), and especially the flirtatious, pleasure-seeking, harp-playing, theatrical-loving but self-interested Mary Crawford of Mansfield Park (1814).

Eliza never stopped flirting, even after her marriage to Henry Austen, then a militia officer. As she wrote to her cousin Philly Walter,

I have not yet given you any account of my brother officers of whom I wish you could judge in person for there are some with whom I think you would not dislike a flirtation—I have of course entirely left off trade but I can however discover that Captn. Tilson is remarkably handsome, and that Messrs. Perrott & Edwardes may be chatted with very satisfactorily, but as to my Colonel Lord Charles Spencer if I was married to my third husband instead of my second I should still be in love with him—He is a most charming creature[,] so mild, so well bred, so good, but alas he is married as well as myself and what is worse he is absent and will not return to us in less than a month.

As I wrote in my review of Jane Austen's 'Outlandish Cousin,' "Le Faye's book draws heavily on Eliza's letters to Philly Walter (as well as other sources) to tell the story of her life and its many intersections with the Austen family. As I hope the excerpts I've included show, Eliza's letters are thoroughly delightful and just a little bit wicked, as she must have been in life." And as I also wrote, Eliza lived to see the publication of Jane Austen's second novel, Pride and Prejudice (1813): "That novel features Jane's liveliest, wittiest, and most resolute heroine. Her name, of course, is Elizabeth."

Lucy Worsley, Jane Austen at Home (2018)

Cover of Lucy Worsley's Jane Austen at Home: A Biography, 250th Birthday Edition (Hodder & Stoughton, 2024). Image source: Jane Austen Centre, Bath

In my review of Jane Austen at Home I wrote that it is a "highly entertaining, vividly written, and deeply researched biography. . .one of the best biographies of Austen I've read. Her emphasis on Austen's different homes over the course of her itinerant life is a fascinating framework through which to view her experiences and her fiction. Worsley's book also silently corrects some errors in Claire Tomalin's Jane Austen: A Life, which on its publication in 1997 was widely regarded as the definitive Austen biography. Even if you've read Tomalin's excellent book, Worsley's Jane Austen at Home will provide many additional insights and pleasures."

Lucy Worsley: Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (2010)

Cover of Lucy Worsley's Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (Faber, 2010). Image source: Historic Royal Palaces

The King's Grand Staircase at Kensington Palace in London is lined with murals depicting 45 men, women, and children looking down over a railing at anyone climbing or descending the stairs. The mural's figures, painted by William Kent in the mid-1720s, are all thought to depict actual members of the royal households of George I and George II (Kent even included himself and his mistress, the actress Elizabeth Butler). In Courtiers Lucy Worsley, chief curator of the Historic Royal Palaces, provides the stories of sixteen courtiers. These include Peter the Wild Boy, an autistic feral child captured in the woods near Hanover, Germany, and his guardian, the physician and writer Dr. John Arbuthnot; two of George I's most trusted servants, Mustapha and Mohammed; the pretty Mrs. Elizabeth Tempest, milliner to Princess Caroline, and, hanging off the painted balcony railing, a mischievous page boy of George II's mistress Henrietta Howard.

It's a fascinating glimpse of the society that developed in and around the Georgian court. Since each courtier's life intersected with those of many others, Worsley is able to give a cross-section of court life, from the servant's quarters to the King's Gallery. Because she focusses on particular courtiers in turn, a certain amount of repetition is inevitable—but also helpful, as there's a large cast of characters. The book is thoroughly researched but Worsley's style is engaging and unacademic.

https://youtu.be/-9IwJus6ESQ

Nonfiction: Honorable Mention

Lucy Worsley, The Art of the English Murder (2014)

Cover of Lucy Worsley's The Art of the English Murder (Pegasus Crime, 2014). Image source: Simon and Schuster

I haven't yet found a subject that Lucy Worsley can't write a highly entertaining book about. The Art of the English Murder is a companion volume to her BBC series A Very British Murder. Bookended by two essays, Thomas De Quincey's "On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts" (1827) and George Orwell's "Decline of the British Murder" (1946), Worsley's survey covers the continuing public fascination with murders, murderers and detectives both factual and fictional, such as:

• the Ratcliffe Highway Murders, which inspired De Quincey's essay;
• the Elstree Murder, whose sites were visited by "murder tourists" including Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton;
• the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's Waxworks, a hugely popular display of historical and contemporary murderers (Dr. Crippen remains on display to this day);
• the Bermondsley Horror, whose married perpetrators were hung at one of the last public executions in Britain;
• the development of crime, detective, and sensation fiction by writers such as Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Arthur Conan Doyle;
• the Golden Age of crime fiction created in the 1920s and 30s by women writers such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh;
• and the early films of Alfred Hitchcock such as The Lodger (1927), Blackmail (1929), and Murder! (1930).

Given its 150-year span, both real-life and fictional scope, episodic structure and intended audience, Worsley's book can't go into great depth on any particular topic. But it's a lively and very enjoyable survey of the place of British crime in the collective imagination, as I'm sure is true of the television series as well:

https://youtu.be/aT2vrK6bPDU

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