wahistorian's Reviews (506)

What an extraordinary life actress and screenwriter Salka Viertel lived! I had to read this book with Wikipedia open next to me, because Veirtel’s career intersected with so many 20th-century notables in Europe and the U.S. (I could have wished the NYRB had invested in some footnotes, but OK they rescued this fascinating book from obscurity.) Born Jewish in Ukraine in 1889, her life was shaped by all the dislocations one could imagine: two World Wars and the resulting poverty, famine, and destruction; anti-semitism; and American McCarthyism. But she also had her art, her family, and her friends, which together formed a solid center around which all the troubles swirled. For me the story really took off when she and husband Berthold Viertel settled in Santa Monica in 1928, thinking they’ll return to Berlin or Vienna or Switzerland after making a nest egg in Hollywood. Hitler rearranged those plans, and the longer Salka remained in California, the stronger her ties became. (Berthold’s roving eye and restless intellect was another story.) Her home became a center of exiled artists, writers, and intellectuals, while she fought for a fair writing deal from MGM and Warner’s. Her simpatico with Greta Garbo made her the go-to gatekeeper for any producer who wanted to work with Garbo, and their friendship endured until the end of Viertel’s life. The wartime treatment of actors and writers by studios alone is worth the read. Viertel’s matter-of-fact writing style sometimes makes it difficult for the reader to discern what was important in her life, but perhaps it *all* was; it wouldn’t surprise me if this remarkable woman dedicated the same passion to everyone in her life.

I picked up this book to see how Jane Harper handles climate change in a first novel. Australian federal agent Aaron Falk is called back to his rural hometown from Melbourne to consult on the triple homicide of his best friend from school and his family. The case appears to be a murder-suicide by a farmer under stress from a long-term drought; there are lots of those desperate farmers in Kiewarra, and friend Luke appears to have snapped. But Falk also has a murder from his past to come to terms with, and two investigations—one official and one personal—move forward in tandem. Harper deftly illustrates how the drought strains the bonds of community—such as they were—and reshapes what should have been a familiar landscape. When he interviews the elementary school principal, for example, Falk is taken aback by the school kids’ drawings of brown crops, dying cattle, and unhappy parents. The Kiewarra River, a landmark and a key setting for the story, is gone altogether; that absence at the center of the town is a metonymy for a global human crisis.

I don’t know how many books I’ve read that were published in the 1930a, but the straightforwardness of the desire in this novel was... not shocking, but surprising. Drifter Frank Chambers and truck stop owner Cora Papadakis are both restless, grasping, and even desperate for a different kind of life, Frank for a life unfettered by conventional expectations and Cora for material success. They share a physical hunger for one another, but ultimately although they know their desires will make them incompatible, they are powerless to resist one another; the only thing standing in their way is Cora’s husband Nick. The novel is short, speedy, and uses simple language to recount their tragic relationship. I would recommend Cain’s novel to writing instructors as a compelling example of voice. I know it’s not read much anymore, but for devotees of film noir and pulp fiction, it is a must-read.

This is my second time reading this book, because it’s a fascinating combination of noir novel with a race angle. Dr. Hugh Densmore sets out in a conspicuous white Cadillac on a relaxing drive from Los Angeles to Phoenix to attend a family wedding. When he picks up a teenage hitchhiker in Indio, he instantly knows he’s done the wrong; this simple action begins a chain of events that has him suspected of her murder and fighting for his reputation. If you haven’t read the blurb, it’s not until p.80 or 90 that you find out Dr. Densmore is an African-American in a racist Southwest of the 1960s. Racism colors his every encounter with the justice system for the rest of the novel, which streets he drives on, what restaurants he dines in, and, most importantly, who he trusts. It’s a bit of a historical document from an improbable source. As a white middle-class woman, Dorothy Hughes was an unlikely crime novelist, and yet this one was thoroughly enjoyable on many levels.

Allyson Hobbs does a convincing job of opening a window into the phenomenon of “passing,” when light-skinned African Americans successfully live as White. Her history begins in slavery, when those with white slave-holding fathers and enslaved mothers were most easily able to escape bondage. In Reconstruction Blacks very briefly had hope that their identity would not hold them back, hope that was dashed in the South by the backlash against Black office-holders. One of the most fascinating chapters looks at three writers of the Harlem Renaissance—Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, and Langston Hughes—and how they navigated their mixed race heritage. Ultimately, she argues, passing pits a network of heritage and social networks against one’s ambitions in a racist society; to pass, in most cases, is to be out of the history of one’s people. But hers is a sympathetic and non-judgmental history of a complex phenomenon.

This beautifully written slim story could just as easily have been called ‘Rules for Passing,’ and it might have had a happier ending. Larsen’s Harlem Renaissance classic traces a year in the renewed friendship of childhood friends Irene Redfield and Clare Kendra Bellew. They become reacquainted by accident in a Chicago restaurant where both are passing as white women; they discovered that for Clare passing is a way of life—her racist husband doesn’t even know her true heritage—and for Irene it is an occasional convenience. The two could not be more different in other ways as well: Irene is controlling and proper, and the author intimates that only her dark husband and son stop her from passing “over” to Clare’s style of duplicity. Clare is vivacious, elegant, and sexual, sides of herself she rediscovers when she attaches herself to Irene and her husband Brian’s Black social life in Harlem, while her white husband travels on business. ‘Passing’ outlines the many rules for convincing others that one is *not* African American, and the many ways one could be tripped up. Clare especially exemplifies a kind of existential loneliness that comes from cutting oneself off from community, heritage, and culture. Her end is tragic, but Irene’s fate is also complicated by her understanding of the depth of her own lack of honesty and authenticity. Glad I finally read this one; it’s been on my shelf for years.

Jurors C-2 and F-17 start an affair at the beginning of a tabloid murder trial. She is in her early 50s and married to a man thirty years older; she wants a last chance at a “dalliance.” F-17 is lonely and looking for love. The body has its own needs and rhythms, Climent’s book suggests, separate and apart from the logic of the rest of our lives. The novel alternates between the trial and sketches of its physical evidence, and their encounters while sequestered. ‘The Body in Question’ is an unusual novel, simultaneously contemporary *and* philosophical, concerned as it is with big questions about life and mortality and obligation.

‘Family Secrets’ is an interesting effort to uncover the evolving history of privacy and its relations to secrets in British families, from the Victorian era to roughly the 1960s. Deborah Cohen has uncovered some rich sets of sources including adoption records, Mass-Observation data, court records, and personal diaries. She uses these to explore areas of shame in family life: illegitimate and mixed race children as a result of colonialism; adoption; mentally disabled children and the institutions that cared for them; divorce; and homosexuality. The result is a telling portrait of the shifting line between what can be shared widely, what less widely, and what never spoken about. The book also, not incidentally, is a description of how painful it is when we cannot meet our own or others’ expectations. Cohen’s book does demonstrate that much of the shame created by secrecy exposed came from well-meaning notions about the social interest of providing abject examples of behavior people should avoid and the cost of making mistakes. Not so now. “To have privacy, as we now define it,” Cohen writes in the Epilogue, “is to be able to conduct one’s affairs and develop one’s personality without significant social detriment.... In the twenty-first century, privacy is not the ability to hide but the right to tell without cost” (268).

A quick read that expresses Mediterranean noir author Jean Claude Izzo’s love of Marseilles, its good, its music, its poets, and its landscape. Lovely.

This is not a trendy book—because after all, who cares about European-ness in an age of isolation and Brexit?—but it is a rich and dense description of a the nineteenth century knitting together of music, art, and literature into “the ideal of a coherent European cultural identity” (479). What the author describes is the constant tension between distinct national and local art forms and trends that worked to smooth out differences and allow the “best” to rise to prominence. Figes uses the lives of opera singer Pauline Garcia Viardot, her impresario husband Louis Viardot, and their writer-partner Ivan Turgenev as threads through the story, demonstrating how technology transformed artistic life and how they in turn coped with the changes. Turgenev met the unbeautiful-but-charismatic Pauline in 1843 on her tour in St. Petersburg, and it was love at first sight; for the rest of his life he remained the third partner in the Viardots’ marriage, sharing homes with them with Louis’s acquiescence. Their relationship stimulated Pauline to use her operatic fame to promote Russian literature in Paris and other European capitals. The expansion of the railroads, increasingly sophisticated methods of cultura dissemination, and a growing audience of literate and sophisticated consumers of art all revolutionized culture in the nineteenth century, and artists struggled to keep up. Because what Figes explains is the rise of the arts as consumables, the book also demonstrates the ways in which these innovations pressured artists to use whatever business skills they had to ensure they could make a living. Not incidentally the reader also learns about nineteenth-century opera, Russian literature, the Franco-Prussian War, music publishing, and copyright. A thoroughly enjoyable cultural history.