All reviews copyright 1984-2008 Evelyn C. Leeper.
THE ART OF WORLDLY WISDOM by Balthasar Gracian:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/11/2007]
I mentioned THE ART OF WORLDLY WISDOM by Balthasar Gracian (adapted from the translation by Joseph Jacobs, ISBN-10 0-87773-921-8, ISBN-13 978-0-877-73921-0) in the 02/16/07 issue of the MT VOID, and again last week. (The Spanish version I found online calls him Lorenzo Gracian, his brother's name, which he used as a pseudonym.) This book was written in 1637, and consists of three hundred aphorisms and elaborations on them. For example, number 22 is "Knowledge has a purpose" and then goes on to say, "Wise people arm themselves with tasteful and elegant erudition--a practical and expert knowledge of what is going on, not common gossip. They possess a copious store of wise and witty sayings, and of noble deeds, and how to employ them at the right moment. Often, more is taught be a jest than by the most serious teaching. Knowledge gained in conversation can be of more help than the seven arts, however liberal."
One sentence I found particularly apropos to today's publishing industry was, "Estiman algunos los libros por la corpulencia, como si se escriviessen para exercitar antes los brazos que los ingenios." ("Some judge books by their corpulence, as if they were written in order to exercise the arms rather than the brain." [my translation])
This book is of the same genre as Mushashi Miyamoto's THE BOOK OF FIVE RINGS, La Rochefoucauld's MAXIMS, or even Niccolo Machiavelli's THE PRINCE. At one point a few years ago, a business firm (AIG) used Gracian's aphorisms as part of an advertisement, including a selection of one hundred (without explications) as a bound-in pamphlet in the "New Yorker". They called it "Life 101", but it seemed as much a business manual as a general guide for living.
I attempted to practice my Spanish by reading this is parallel, each aphorism first in Spanish, then in English. I ran into more difficulties than I had in reading Jorge Luis Borges's Spanish though, for several reasons. First, there seem to be two versions of the letter "z" where the current alphabet has only one. (It appears that these are really two distinct letters, rather than parallel to how some instances of the letter 's' in 18th century English documents look like 'f', but I could be wrong.) Second, Gracian uses far more word play (alliteration, assonance, etc.) than Borges.
But a third problem was that the Spanish version I had (from the Web) retained Gracian's 17th century spelling. Gracian wrote *before* Shakespeare and anyone who has seen the original spelling of Shakespeare's texts will understand that spelling changes over time. For example, "there is/there are" in modern Spanish is "hay"; in Gracian, it is "ai".
As an example from Shakespeare, I read some of the "doubtful" Shakespeare plays in a book called THE SHAKESPEARE APOCRYPHA. These were taken directly from the various quartos, etc., and had not had the spelling regularized. So here is a sample speech from "Edward III":
Shee was, my Lord; and onlely Issabel Was all the daughters that this Phillip had, Whome afterward your father tooke to wife; And from the fragrant garden of her wombe Your gratious selfe, the flower of Europes hope, Deriued is inheritor to Fraunce. But note the rancor of rebellious mindes: When thus the lynage of (le) Bew was out, The French obscurd your mothers Priuledge, And, though she were the next of blood, proclaymed Iohn, of the house of Valoys, now their king: The reason was, they say, the Realme of Fraunce, Repleat with Princes of great parentage, Ought not admit a gouwenor to rule, Except he be discnded of the male; And thats the speciall ground of their contempt, Whereiwth they stufy to exclude your grace; But they shall finde that forged ground of theirs To be but dusty heaps of brittile sande. Perhaps it will be thought a heynous thing, That I, a French man, shoudl discouer this; But heauen I call to recorde of my vowes: It is not hate nor any priuat wronge, But loue vnto my country and the right, Prouokes my tongue, thus lauish in report. ...
Every edition of Shakespeare that I have seen for general use standardizes the spelling so that the last four lines, for example, would read:
But heaven I call to record of my vows: It is not hate nor any private wrong, But love unto my country and the right, Provokes my tongue, thus lavish in report.
Similarly, Gracian's spelling (at least from the site I found) is enough similar to make you think you can read it, but enough different from modern Spanish to cause problems.
To order The Art of Worldly Wisdom from amazon.com, click here.
A IS FOR ALIBI by Sue Grafton:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/27/2004]
Our mystery discussion group read Sue Grafton's A IS FOR ALIBI, and the only thing worth noting is that one woman found the idea of a woman detective who went around with a gun in sort of Philip Marlowe style totally unrealistic--she didn't know any women who could do that. However, after several people said that they did, and pointed out that there were certainly woman soldiers these days, she conceded that younger readers (meaning younger than forty, I suspect) might not find it so unbelievable.
To order A Is for Alibi from amazon.com, click here.
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/04/2003]
The GRANTA BOOK OF TRAVEL is a collection of travel writing from Granta magazine (one of those magazines that looks like a trade paperback). Several of the articles were duplicated in the first issue of Granta that had been devoted to travel writing, which I bought at the same time. The stories vary from the humor of Bill Bryson to the more serious articles about coups in Africa, the "Shining Path" terrorists in Peru, and the conditions in Castro's Cuba.
To order The Granta Book of Travel from amazon.com, click here.
I, CLAUDIUS: FROM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF TIBERIUS CLAUDIUS, BORN 10 B.C., MURDERED AND DEIFIED A.D. 54 by Robert Graves:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/02/2006]
Our original discussion group read I, CLAUDIUS: FROM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF TIBERIUS CLAUDIUS, BORN 10 B.C., MURDERED AND DEIFIED A.D. 54 by Robert Graves (ISBN 0-679-72477-X). I had to keep reminding myself that this was a novel. Yes, it was strongly based on Suetonius and other historical sources, but there is a lot of fiction and conjecture in it as well, so it would be a mistake to believe everything in it was true. That Graves manages to write in such a way as to have a work of fiction appear to be a genuine historical memoir of the Roman Era is quite an accomplishment. This (and its companion/sequel, CLAUDIUS THE GOD, were first published in 1934, and probably inspired such later writers as Gore Vidal (*) and others who write novels that appear to be almost factual histories. Considering the enormous popularity of I, CLAUDIUS, it is ironic that (according to Wikipedia), "Graves later professed a dislike for the books and their popularity. He claimed that they were written only from financial need on a strict deadline."
(*) At a continuing education class a couple of years ago, the professor presented as fact a claim made in Vidal's BURR that was actually something that Vidal made up. [-ecl]
To order I, Claudius from amazon.com, click here.
10 TALES TALL & TRUE, UNLIKELY STORIES, MOSTLY, and POOR THINGS by Alasdair Gray:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/17/2004]
Alasdair Gray recently achieved fame (or notoriety, depending on your point of view) with his introduction to the Canongate edition of the Bible's "Book of Jonah", which many denounced as blasphemous. However, his other works tend to be a bit less controversial--and unusual, in that he also does illustrations and interesting layout designs for his book. I enjoyed 10 TALES TALL & TRUE (ISBN 0-156-00196-9), and also UNLIKELY STORIES, MOSTLY (ISBN 0-862-41737-6), but found his novel POOR THINGS (ISBN 1-564-78307-3) (about a female creation a la Frankenstein) not enough to hold my interest. It may be that Gray is an author who works best in short fiction.
To order Ten Tales Tall & True from amazon.com, click here.
To order Unlikely Stories, Mostly from amazon.com, click here.
To order Poor Things from amazon.com, click here.
THE SCIENCE OF MICHAEL CRICHTON edited by Kevin R. Grazier, Ph.D.:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/04/2008]
THE SCIENCE OF MICHAEL CRICHTON edited by Kevin R. Grazier, Ph.D. (ISBN-13 978-1-933771-32-8, ISBN-10 1-933771-32-1) is a collection of essays about the science in Michael Crichton's novel (*not* the movies made from them!). Beginning with THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN, and ending with NEXT, each book is analyzed from the point of view of the accuracy--or at least plausibility--of its science. And while the comments on the earlier books are favorable, each succeeding book seems to generate more and more criticism. This is unfortunate, because I suspect too many people get their notions of science from the novels of Michael Crichton (and others--he is not the only one at fault, but he is probably the most popular).
To order The Science of Michael Crichton from amazon.com, click here.
"The Clockwork Atom Bomb" by Dominic Green:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/19/2006]
"The Clockwork Atom Bomb" by Dominic Green (INTERZONE May/Jun 2005) could have been another quintessential ANALOG story, with its heavy dose of physics and technology. But the tone and direction of the story makes it unlikely to have been found in that other magazine. This is a much darker story, and if one grants the one major science-fiction premise, all too believable.
GHOSTS IN BAKER STREET edited by Martin H. Greenberg, Jon Lellenberg, and Daniel Stashower:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/28/2007]
GHOSTS IN BAKER STREET edited by Martin Harry Greenberg, Jon Lellenberg, and Daniel Stashower (ISBN-13 978-0-786-71400-1, ISBN-10 0-7867-1400-X) is the third in the "New Tales of Sherlock Holmes" series. The first two are MURDER IN BAKER STREET and MURDER, MY DEAR WATSON; this one is considerably shorter than either of those, containing only ten stories and three essays. The introduction by John H. Watson, M.D. says that of Holmes's cases "a few ... seemed to defy rational explanation." Because of Holmes's insistence that they must have had a rational explanation, however, he says of the notes for these, "I locked them away in my old dispatch box that I kept in the vaults of a bank at Charing Cross." Overlooking that Watson writing this must now be upwards of 150 years old--itself a fairly supernatural situation--I figure that if one tallied up all the notes for all the stories which claim to have been stored for years in this dispatch box, one can only conclude that the dispatch box itself has the supernatural property of being considerably larger on the inside than on the outside (unless there is a scientific explanation, such as that it is a mini- TARDIS). But in any case, the real problem with the introduction is that in fact, almost all the stories in this volume *do* have a rational explanation at the end of them, with no hint that there is anything more. Only two of the ten are clearly supernatural, and two others have rational explanations with only a hint of possible supernatural elements at the end. I suspect when it came down to it, most of the authors respected Holmes enough to feel it necessary to ground their stories firmly in reality rather than the spirit world. (The SHADOWS OVER BAKER STREET anthology combined Holmes with Lovecraftian themes, but even these are really more science fictional than supernatural.)
(In passing, I have to wonder how theologically sound is the notion that person A can grant or wager person B's soul to the Devil. If the Devil could get souls that way, he would only have to tempt one person in selling him everyone else's souls.)
To order Ghosts in Baker Street from amazon.com, click here.
MORE HOLMES FOR THE HOLIDAYS by Martin Greenberg et al:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/13/2002]
I'm working my way through Martin Greenberg et al's MORE HOLMES FOR THE HOLIDAYS, a so-so collection of Sherlock Holmes stories set during Christmas. One problem is that because there is no controlling hand anymore, all sorts of contradictions arise. For example, one story will say Watson and his wife always spend Christmas alone together, while another will say Watson is on his own because his wife is spending Christmas with an aunt. (Which is also off, because she supposedly had no relatives, but that's a larger complaint.) Still, I'll read just about anything Holmesian unless it's truly wretched. (Mark read this and noted, "You imply a controlling hand would keep things consistent. How come even with a 'controlling hand' the bullet moved around in Watson's body?" Well, yes, but still . . . .)
To order More Holmes for the Holidays from amazon.com, click here.
MURDER, MY DEAR WATSON edited by Martin H. Greenburg:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/19/2004]
MURDER, MY DEAR WATSON, edited by Martin H. Greenburg (ISBN 0-7867-1081-0), is yet another anthology of new Sherlock Holmes stories. I am beginning to feel that these themed anthologies have run their course--the stories in this are rather pale and anemic for Sherlockian tales. This is not to say that no one is writing good Sherlockian stories--last year's Neil Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald" was great--but Greenberg does not seem to be managing to collect or commission them. I am glad I checked this one out of the library instead of buying it.
To order Murder, My Dear Watson from amazon.com, click here.
PAST IMPERFECT edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Larry Segriff:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/24/2003]
I read the short fiction in the anthology PAST IMPERFECT (edited by Martin H. Greenberg--of course--and Larry Segriff). It's yet another argument against themed anthologies with a lot of just average stories about time travel, with the only memorable story being "The Gift of a Dream" by Dean Wesley Smith--and it seemed to include time travel merely as an afterthought, something needed to place it in this anthology. It would have been every bit as good without it, or indeed without any fantastical element whatsoever.
To order Past Imperfect from amazon.com, click here.
SLIPSTREAMS edited by Martin H. Greenberg & John Helfers:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/13/2006]
SLIPSTREAMS edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers (ISBN 0-7564-0357-X) is a collection of original "slipstream" stories. However, since "slipstream" is such a vague term, this is really just a general original anthology, with the one limitation that you probably would not find a story that was strictly within a sub-genre (e.g., military science fiction) in it. For example, "Biding Time" by Robert J. Sawyer is a straight-forward mystery set on Mars, "Venting" by Alan Dean Foster and "From Gehenna" by Isaac Szpindel are fantasies, and so on. There are some that I would call meta-fiction, which may be a subset of slipstream (e.g., "Critical Analysis" by Tanya Huff and "Psycho Physics" by Donald J. Bingle). It's a mixed bag, but has the advantage of giving the reader a variety of stories, rather than the repetition one finds in a theme anthology.
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WHITE HOUSE HORRORS edited by Martin H. Greenberg (DAW, ISBN 0-88677-659-7, 1996, 316pp, mass market paperback):
Four years ago, during the 1992 Presidential campaign, I saw Mike Resnick's Alternate Presidents in a window display along with the books by and about the various candidates. So I fully expect to see this in a similar display. Certainly the picture of the "President" on the cover, with a grinning half-face, half-skull, fits in with the image people are starting to have of politicians.
Unlike Alternate Presidents (of which this seems to be, if not the child, then perhaps the niece), many of the Presidents here are future Presidents rather than (real or imaginary ) past ones. Perhaps it's that my tastes don't normally run to horror that makes me say that this collection is not as good overall. There are, however, some very good stories here. "Healing the Body Politic" by Brian Hodge is a strong lead-off, Gary A. Braunbeck's "And Somewhere I Shall Wake" is a memorable idea well-executed, and "The Cabinet of William Henry Harrison" by Barbara Collins and Max Allan Collins also makes an impression. "The Ghost and Mr. Truman" by Bill Crider, while perhaps not as historically accurate (I don't think the Truman renovations of the White House gutted it quite that much) does have some very strong images.
But many stories are sabotaged by anachronisms. For example, were doughnuts really purchased in bags 150 years ago, rather than just being wrapped with paper and string? Minor, perhaps, but I am of the opinion that a story set in 1860 should feel like 1860, unless there is some conscious stylistic reason to do otherwise. Some stories were a bit too predictable from the very beginning. And some stories which I think were supposed to be humorous just didn't tickle my funny bone. (One didn't even seem to have anything to do with the White House.)
Do I recommend this book? Well, if you like horror stories in general you may like this more than I did. And there were four good stories that even I liked. Still, when one considers some of the Presidential candidates we've had in my lifetime, one can't help but think that the authors could have come up with more convincing horror stories than these.
[Not surprisingly, assassinated Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy show up either as characters or references fairly often. Even Garfield gets a story. But poor William McKinley seems to be completely ignored. People interested in pursuing the assassination theme should seek out Stephen Sondheim's musical, Assassins.]
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CLASSIC MYSTERY STORIES edited by Douglas G. Greene: [From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/02/2006]
CLASSIC MYSTERY STORIES edited by Douglas G. Greene (ISBN 0-486-40881-7) is an anthology of thirteen detective stories from 1841 through 1920 (not coincidentally, just about the most recent year for works to have passed into the public domain). Some may be overly familiar (Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", for example, but most are far less well known, by such authors as Baroness Orczy, Susan Glaspell, And Rodrigues Ottolengui. Even the better-known authors are represented by less familiar stories; for example, Jacques Futrelle's story is *not* "The Problem of Cell 13", but "The Phantom Motor". While I suspect aficionados of this era's detective fiction will be familiar with a lot of these stories, they are a good introduction and overview for the reader wanting to expand their range from just post-World War II works. (And since it is a Dover Thrift Edition, it is a very cheap way to do it.)
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THE THIRD MAN by Grahame Greene:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/05/2005]
The script for the film of Graham Greene's THE THIRD MAN is available from Faber & Faber (ISBN 0-571-12634-0), and even if you are familiar with the film, it is worth reading, because this edition is annotated to indicate the changes from the original script that were made in the film. For example, Anna was originally Estonian, but the filmmakers decided that people were more familiar with Czechoslovakia. The part of the British Cultural Officer (played in the film by Wilfred Hyde-White) was originally written as two parts, intended for the British comedy team of Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne (probably best known to fantasy fans as the golfers in DEAD OF NIGHT or to thriller buffs as the cricket fans from THE LADY VANISHES). And the "cuckoo clock" speech was not in the original; it was added by Orson Welles himself.
To order The Third Man from amazon.com, click here.
THE JIGSAW MEN by Gary Greenwood:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/30/2004]
Moving on, Gary Greenwood's THE JIGSAW MEN (ISBN 1-902-88077-3) assumes that the events in both Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN and H. G. Wells's THE WAR OF THE WORLDS were real, and constructs an alternate world based on that. While as an alternate history it is not particularly successful (too much remains unchanged between that world and ours), it succeeds as a story of "jigsaw men"-- soldiers (mostly) who are resurrected when they die, and what that does to them and to society. Published by a small press in Britain, it is probably a novella rather than a novel, and may make it to the United States eventually as part of an anthology.
To order The Jigsaw Men from amazon.com, click here.
IN RAJASTHAN by Royina Grewal:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/04/2003]
Royina Grewal is an Indian woman who decided to travel through Rajasthan and write about her experiences. Since most travel writing about India is done by non-Indians, IN RAJASTHAN gives one a new and different view of that region. Grewal clearly has more access to the everyday life of the region, both in the villages (she ends up at weddings, in temples as a participant in ceremonies, etc.) and with the upper classes (she meets with the rajputs, talks to all sorts of government officials, and discusses the future of handicrafts with various artisans). She also presents what some might consider too balanced a view (for example, explaining why child marriages may not be the total evil everyone outside seems to think they are).
To order In Rajasthan from amazon.com, click here.
THE DIRTY DUCK by Martha Grimes:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/04/2004]
Martha Grimes's THE DIRTY DUCK (ISBN 0-440-12050-0) is not exactly a historical mystery. Set in modern Stratford, several of its threads involve knowledge of 16th century poets and playwrights, but Grimes wisely has the detective *not* be an expert in this, so there are "expository lumps" as the various characters explain what, for example, happened in an inn in Deptford. I find this period interesting, so I enjoyed all this "business", though admittedly if you don't, the rest of this mystery about a serial killer might not be enough. (This is a re-issue of an older book rather than a new one.)
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THE ANNOTATED BROTHERS GRIMM by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, with notes by Maria Tater:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/30/2005]
THE ANNOTATED BROTHERS GRIMM with notes by Maria Tater (ISBN 0-7394-5173-1) is a much more academic approach to annotations than some of Norton's other works, with more notes about the variations on the tales, the psychology of the tales, and the ways that the tales were modified in various editions. The last is actually perhaps of the most general interest, proving that even back then authors were concerned about catering to the public. If the public wanted tales stressing the importance of obedience to parents, then the Brothers Grimm would oblige. If the public wanted negative stereotypes of Jews, it would get those too, as one of the stories in the appendix of currently "suppressed" tales indicates. What may surprise most people are the tales themselves, which almost all end with some very unpleasant and graphic punishment for the evil-doers (e.g., being sealed in a nail-studded barrel and rolled down the hill). Most collections of fairy tales these days have much milder endings-- the good are rewarded, but the bad are not punished except by *not* being rewarded: Cinderella marries the Prince, and the stepsisters have to stay where they are.
To order The Annotated Brothers Grimm from amazon.com, click here.
CODEX by Lev Grossman:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/23/2005]
Lev Grossman's CODEX (ISBN 0-15-101066-8) sounded very promising, a book described as similar to THE NAME OF THE ROSE or THE CLUB DUMAS. The story is that of Edward Wozny, an investment banker who somehow gets chosen to catalog a library of old books and search for a volume that may be there--or it may not even exist. And the book (the codex of the title) being sought may be a puzzle with hidden meaning. For the first three-quarters or so, this works very well, but then, at the end, Grossman fails to wrap up the story. I don't mean that he doesn't write an ending--I mean that I can't figure out from what he wrote what happened. (And it's not just me--quite a few amazon.com reviewers expressed the same confusion.) There's also a parallel plot having to do with a computer game which does not really add very much, but probably makes this book fantasy rather than realism.
To order Codex from amazon.com, click here.
BRASS KNUCKLES by Frank Gruber:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/19/2004]
Frank Gruber's BRASS KNUCKLES had a United States publication, but so long ago (1966) that it has no ISBN. Still, lots of copies are available used. You also might run across some of these stories in anthologies. Gruber wrote a lot of pulp fiction; this book collects some of his stories featuring "Oliver Quade, the Human Encyclopedia." Quade knows everything, apparently from having read a set of encyclopedias through--four times. And so he solves murders (or escapes from deathtraps) using all sorts of arcane knowledge, (The escapes usually involve chemistry and being able to construct an explosive from whatever odds and ends happen to be there.)
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