Finalt thoughts and First/Last for The Winter Queen

I still want to look up the order of St. Valdimir and the crisis in the Balkans they referred to (the year is 1876.)

This is kind of a schizophrenic book. A cozy mystery with a typically complicated plot (tricking someone into suicide, pretending to be a ghost, a vast worldwide orphan conspiracy) that with few modifications could be Steampunk. But then there's that surprising turn at the end that reminds you, hey a Russian did write this. Poor Erast. Poor Lizanka's arm-nevermind the rest of her. I'll probably read more of this eventually although really, I'm kind of wanting to boo and throw tomatoes at that last chapter. I'm curious to see where the series goes from here and what happens to Erast. I'm guessing the tone of the next novel must be different.

First:

On Monday the thirteenth of May in the year 1876, between the hours of two and three in the afternoon on a day that combined the freshness of spring with the warmth of summer, numerous individuals in Moscow's Alexander Gardens unexpectedly found themselves eyewitnesses to the perpetration of an outrage that flagrantly transgressed the bounds of common decency.

Last:

No, the attention of those he encountered, especially the ladies, was attracted by one particularly intriguing feature of his appearance: despite his obvious youth the bon vivant's temples were a stark white, as if they were thickly coated with hoarfrost.

what I've looked up thus far for The Winter Queen

I love how this book opens:

On Monday the thirteenth of May in the year 1876, between the hours of two and three in the afternoon...numerous individuals in Moscow's Alexander Gardens...

Poetic, no. But perfect in its geo/temporal data. It's Moscow, 1876. The rule of Romanov Tsar Alexander II (he would be assassinated in 1881 after decades of various attempts on his life. He was famous for freeing the serfs but was a bastard to Poland and the Baltic States. However, he encouraged Finnish autonomy and language so they like him there. The poor son of a bitch died after escaping a bombing attempt on his carriage. A second bomber threw a bomb at his feet. There was a third bomber waiting in the crowd. They really wanted him dead, in little pieces.) He was followed by only two more Tsars: Alexander III and then Nicholas II.

The book opens at any rate with a suspicious suicide in the Alexander Gardens in Moscow. This was one of Moscow's first public parks. It was built from 1819-1823 in commemoration of the defeat of Napoleon at the request (or, probably I should say "request") of Alexander I, the uncle of the ill-fated Alexander II. The Gardens are adjacent to Red Square and the western wall of the Kremlin.

Here is the gate that commemorates victory in the Napoleonic Wars:

It was built on the site of a the former riverbed of the Neglinnaya River (the flow was diverted underground.)

Enjoy this Wikimap of the layout.

The book references a "Table of Ranks" at the back to show the standing of the protagonist, Collegiate Registrar Erast Fandorin, rank 14, as compared with others. It's a convoluted system established by Peter the Great in 1722. Among other things, it correlates military ranks with the civilian equivalents.

Many streets in Moscow are mentioned so, once again, I would have liked a map to be available. Fandorin travels up Mokhovaya Street a number of times. Here is what it would have looked like then:

It literally means "Moss Street" and was named for a market. It is still a major thoroughfare in Moscow. It's part of the ring road that circles the Kremlin area.

I believe the university he mentions visiting is Moscow State, purported to be the oldest university in Russia. Here is what it would have looked like about a century before:

I think the "yellow building" that Fandorin goes to is what is now called, factually, the Old Building. It was built in 1783. Here's what it looks like now:

Old, yellow. Those Russians get right to the point. Today, the journalism faculty and Oriental studies are located there.

Interestingly, after the October Revolution in 1917, anyone could be admitted (well, technically) and tuition fees were abolished in 1919. Now all you had to do was avoid studying or teaching the wrong thing and being sent to Vorkuta.

This site has an archive of historical maps. Here is one of 19th century Moskva.

Near the end, the book mentions there is trouble in the Balkans that is distracting the leadership. I think they are referring to the Balkan/Turkish crisis. The Balkans, including Greece, were under Ottoman rule at the time. The Slavs all hated each other but they hated the Turks more so they banded together in the Bulgarian Uprising in April of 1876 where Turkish troops killed up to 15,000 people (it's controversial-apparently the troops weren't regular Turkish army.) It was nasty business at any rate-people taking refuge in churches and being burned alive- and things snowball, the world gets wind of the Bulgarian massacre, the Russians are still pissed about the Crimean War, Slav nationalism flares up and by June Serbia and Montenegro have declared war on the Turks.

The Russians proposed a peace agreement in 1877 called the London Convention (Austria-Hungary are involved too) but the Turks rejected it. Now the Russians declare war. The bottom line is the Turks, being neither the first nor last to do so, severely underestimate the Russians and finally in 1878 peace is declared with some intervention from the British as the fear of Pan-Slavic fervor spreads through the rest of Europe. At the Congress of Berlin, the Balkans get re-diced with Bulgaria split into 3 pieces and Austria granted the right to occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina. All of this pisses Russia off because they want the Balkans for themselves. A Second Balkan Crisis will follow in 1885 and, of course, there will be more.

Incidentally, this conflict also led to the Red Cross/Red Crescent split which continues today.

At the end of the book, before everything goes to hell for Erast, he is awarded the order of St. Vladimir. Naturally, there is a website dedicated to Russian medals. Here is an example of what it looked like:

It was awarded for life-saving acts or famine relief (it was also awarded for military valor during the Crimean War.) There are different degrees of the order which can be seen in the Wikipedia article.

Great lines from The Sun Also Rises

Damn you, Paris Wife. Now I have to re-read this book which I barely remember from 20 years ago (also to re-read: A Moveable Feast although that's not in the cards in the immediate future.) I want to read more of Hemingway actually and since I plan to eschew anything that involves slaughtering bulls or African wild life, I think the list should be quite manageable.

One of my favorite literary scenes from a movie, btw, was in Peggy Sue Got Married when teen Peggy asked the local beatnik guy why he was so enamored with Jack Kerouac. He said "He [Hemingway] is the perfect American author: fat, violent and drunk.....Jack Kerouac doesn't have to KILL a BULL to have something to write about." I fell a little in love with that guy then, even if I have no intention of ever reading On the Road and do like me some Papa now and again.

Here's an article about the real life inspirations for the characters. The Paris Wife also goes into some detail on the trip to Spain that inspired this novel. Interestingly, Ernest was married to Hadley at the time but she does not appear in it. According to McLain's book, Ernest said this was because she was the only well-behaved person on the trip and was too above the muck to include in the story.

And here is a study guide with further links, courtesy of Grand Valley State.

Great lines:

On the writer Robert Cohn (he was someone in Hem's circle named Harold Loeb who slept with Duff-Lady Brett in the book-and went insane with jealousy when she slept with someone else):

Then there was another thing. He had been reading W. H. Hudson. That sounds like an innocent occupation, but Cohn had read and read "The Purple Land." "The Purple Land" is a very sinister book if read too late in life. It recounts splendid imaginary amorous adventures of a perfect English gentleman in an intensely romantic land, the scenery of which is very well described. For a man to take it as thirty-four as a guide book to what life holds is about as safe as it would be for a man of the same age to enter Wall Street direct from a Paris convent, equipped with a complete set of the more practical Alger books. Cohn, I believe took every word of "The Purple Land" as literally as though it had been an R.G. Dun report. You understand me, he made some reservations, but on the whole the book to him was sound. It was all that was needed to set him off. 

(this was a real 19th century novel, btw. Borges called it the best example of "gaucho literature." It involves an Englishman's misadventures in Uruguay. R.G. Dun is the predecessor of Dun and Bradstreet.)

On Lady Brett's early morning visit:

This was Brett, that I had felt like crying about. Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

On the bad vibes of certain streets:

It was like a certain stretch on the PLM between Fontainbleau and Montereau that always made me feel bored and dead and dull until it was over. I suppose it is some association of ideas that makes those dead places in a journey. There are other streets in Paris as ugly as the Boulevard Raspail......Perhaps I had read something about it once. That was the way Robert Cohn was about all of Paris. I wondered where Cohn got that incapacity to enjoy Paris. Possibly from Mencken. Mencken hates Paris, I believe. So many young men get their likes and dislikes from Mencken.

Final thoughts on Horns, + first and last

Well, nothing to look up for this book. Ok, not exactly true. The book takes place in the fictional town of Gideon, NH near Portsmouth so I looked up a map of NH. It's right across the bay from Maine actually so I wondered if the reference to Derry might have been a shout-out to his dear old Dad's Derry, Maine. Evidently though, there is a very real Derrry, NH so just as likely not. Especially since the name Pennywise didn't come up.

JB had said this book was good, if blasphemous. I guess I can see someone thinking it's blasphemous, although the only part that bothered me was the animal cruelty (too many gruesome snake killings-especially the poor rat snake who gets tricked into swimming into the killer's gullet.) We all have our bailiwicks. I wonder was it the scene where the newly demonic Ig gives a loopy speech to a forest full of snakes:

"I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman's power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be. the author is unworthy of His own characters. The devil is first a literary critic, who delivers this untalented scribbler the public flaying He deserves."

Well, this goes on for pages. Or maybe it was the remark Ig made near the end about why wasn't the devil the hero of the Bible since he rescued Adam and Eve from a bucolic prison run by a megalomaniac? That actually was kinda funny. Or maybe it was just that the devil isn't nearly as bad as some people in this book.

Anyways, this is good but for scares, nothing can top his short story "Twittering From the Circus of the Damned." It's crazy that a story told in Twitter format worked for starters, nevermind that is is piss your pants scary.

First:

Ignatius Martin Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things.

Last:

"Poor devil," Terry said before he got into his rent-a-car and drove away.

First and last for After Dark

First:

Eyes mark the shape of a city.

Last:

There will be time until the next darkness arrives.

Some great lines from After Dark

This was my first Haruki Murukami. I've known about his him for a while, chiefly because of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but I've been interested in him more since PRI's The World ran a story about the extreme devotion of his fans. Some even write him letters asking him for advice. This confuses him but he answers them.

I liked this book, especially any scene that involves Mari, a 19 year old student who speaks Chinese. She's a strangely passive choice for a narrator but she works and I love the conversations she gets into with Takahashi (a young jazz musician who clearly likes her), Kaoru (the manager of a love hotel called Alphaville-Godard references are intentional-who seeks Mari's help with a beaten Chinese prostitute and illegal immigrant) and Korogi (a worker at the hotel on the run from vague but sinister villains.) The story also follows Mari's sister who is in some kind of metaphysical sleep and-possibly?-is having her soul sucked out through her (unplugged) television and it seems to be going to the office of the businessman who beat the prostitute. Yeah, that part was not very clear to me at all. Mari's sister is a model named Eri.

The thing about Mari is that she's so impassive in her interactions with others, it's easy to mistake her as disdainful, particularly in her first interaction with Takahashi-by the way, if everything in the novel was as strangely compelling as his conversation with her about Denny's menu, the book would have been a home run. She's just not disdainful though, she's just...I'm not sure. Weighed down by worries: why do others want to interact with her, are they trying to get to her pretty sister, why won't her sister wake up, how is she going to summon the courage to leave on her exchange program to China next week.

I really liked the way the intimacy of the late night/early morning hours sparked the deep metaphysical conversations between near or utter strangers. I fear the meaning of the book might be largely beyond me but part of it seems to be the intimacy engendered by the dark. Something about memory. Uhm, I don't think I totally got it but I liked it even if I'm not yet ready to embrace the cult of Murukami.

Some lines I liked:

Korugi stands there holding the remote control.

"You know what I think?" she says. "That people's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn't matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned They're all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed 'em to the fire, they're all just paper. The fire isn't thinking, 'Oh, this is Kant,' or 'Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition,' or 'Nice tits,' while it burns. To the fire, they're nothing but scraps of paper. It's the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there's no distinction-they're all just fuel."

Korugi nods to herself. Then she goes on:

"You know, I think if I didn't have that fuel, if I didn't have these memory drawers inside me, I would've snapped a long time ago. I would've curled up in a ditch somewhere and died. I would have curled up in a ditch somewhere and died. It's because I can pull the memories out of the drawers when I have to-the important ones and the useless ones-that I can go on living this nightmare of a life. I might think I can't take it anymore, that I can't go on anymore, but one way or another I get past that." 

Takahashi leaves a convenience store at 5:24 am (part of the literary device is the precise marking of time between midnight and 7am):

The new day is almost here, but the old one is still dragging its heavy skirts. Just as ocean water and river water struggle against each other at a river mouth, the old time and the new time clash and blend. Takahashi is unable to tell for sure which side-which world-contains his center of gravity.

It's funny how you can watch a movie or read a book and know that it's intended for you to care about what is happening, but you just don't (I'm thinking about the movie "Crazy Heart" which I just watched this weekend.) And on the other hand, there's this understated goodbye between Takahashi and Mari is so melancholy and touching to me:

"I don't really want to go," Mari says.

"To China?"

"Uh-huh."

"Why not?"

"Cause I'm scared."

"That's only natural," he says. "You're going to a strange, far-off place all by yourself."

"I know."

"You'll be fine, though," he says. "I know ou. And I'll be waiting for you here....You're very pretty, did you know that?"

Mari looks up at Takahasi. Then she withdraws her hand from his and puts it into the pocket of her varsity jacket. her eyes drop to her feet. She is checking to make sure her yellow sneakers are still clean.

"Thanks. But I want to go home now."

"I'll write to you," he says. "A super-long letter , like in an old-fashioned novel."

"Okay," Mari says.

She goes in through the ticket gate, walks to the platform, and disappears into a waiting express train. Takahasi watches her go. Soon the departure signal sounds, the doors close, and the trains pulls away from the platform. When he loses sight of the train, Takahashi picks his instrument case up from the floor, slings the strap over his shoulder, and heads for his own station, whistling softly. The number of people moving through the station gradually increases.

6:40am:

The lavish morning light washes every corner of the world at no charge. Two young sisters sleep peacefully, their bodies pressed together in one small bed. We are probably the only ones who know that.

Final thoughts on Madame Bovary, + first and last

I am glad to have read this book as it has such cultural weight and is such a reference point. I kind of got Emma Bovary references before (some unhappy 19th century French chick who had affairs and killed herself) but I'll really get them now. Yes, she was all of those things but she was also kind of a shitty person. She's vain, adulterous, materialistic, a shitty parent and possibly bipolar. Actually, that last part doesn't make her shitty, per se, and kind of explains the other behaviors. Anyways, as I said on Goodreads perish the thought this slutty, whiny cow is a feminist icon. And while the book was entertaining (the town of Yonville and its citizens were definitely more fleshed out than I expected them to be), I was glad to turn the last page on it for sure.

Her husband was a nice guy but was undeniably a dullard-and thanks to Dennis' clarification, he wasn't a doctor but a public health officer which clears up some scenes like Homais and Bovary having to call the doctor when something went wrong. I also could understand why the operation on Hippolyte was so outrageous-he should never have been doing it. Per the linked article above, a public health officer receives somewhat less training than an LPN.

The story takes place in and around Rouen, where Flaubert lived with his mother for much of his adult life. He never married but he did have a mistress for several years who apparently was pissed at him for some personal details he used in Bovary. Flaubert himself came to resent the book in later years as he felt it overshadowed his other writing. He's buried in Rouen. Fun fact: the 19 year old Joan of Arc was burned at the stake there in 1431 (the area was under English control at the time.) It's also the location of the Cathedral that inspired Monet's series of paintings. It's the church where Leon and Emma meet and Emma attempts to break up with him (instead, it's implied he bangs her like a Salvation Army drum as they take a carriage ride through town. Classy!)

Oh well. Before I mention first and last, here is what Dennis' literature professor friend (and Bridge partner had to say on the subject:

I think you restate what I said pretty accurately, though I also said something about the compelling characters, the depth and plausibility of Flaubert's psychological realism. The difficulty of adequately answering your question about why Madame B is considered a great novel, of course, is that it involves the larger question of what constitutes greatness in any novel, and that question immediately invites platitudes for answers. If we turn to novels for the pleasures of escaping our own cultural confines by entering into a radically different culture and reality, then Madame B is a great novel because it so plausibly represents its world, provincial France in the mid nineteenth century. If we turn to novels to gain access to another human mind in ways that exceed our own imaginative grasp of real human minds (even our own), then Flaubert's psychological realism is great because it so powerfully presents the illusion of full access to psychological depths. If we want more fully to understand the interweaving of mind and culture, Flaubert provides such a compelling paradigm that the word Bovarisme enters the French (and English) language to describe the achievement. If we want to experience the tragedy of balked yearning, of what Browning calls the "infinite passion and the pain of finite hearts that yearn," it can be argued that Flaubert's stark realism offers us access to these emotions in ways unsurpassed even by Sophocles or Shakespeare. 

First:

We were in Study Hall when the Headmaster entered, followed by a new boy dressed in regular clothes and a school servant carrying a large desk.

Last:

He has just been awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor.

(That refers to the apothecary Homais of course, not Charles Bovary who dropped dead basically because he married some skeeze.)