Anabasis (Xenophon)

 
Meanwhile, back in the Persian Empire...

Yes, I have deviated from my top 105 books yet again, motivated in part by my recent reading of "The Histories" by Herodotus.  If you'll recall from my recent post on that book, which I KNOW you've read, Herodotus describes the invasion of Greece by the Persians, under the kings Darius and Xerxes, from about 493-479 BC.  But what happened to the Persian Empire after the invasions of Greece failed?  Well, in 404 BC Xerxes great grandson Artaxerxes II was crowned leader of the Persian Empire, much to the dismay of his brother Cyrus the Younger.  Cyrus was the Satrap (ruler) of Lydia, a kingdom in what is now western Turkey, but Cyrus was not happy with that.  He wanted to be leader of the whole damn empire, and so he formulated a plan...and that's where the story in "Anabasis" opens.

"Anabasis", or "The March Up Country", is a memoir by the Xenophon, written in the third person.  Xenophon was a wealthy aristocratic young Greek...what we might refer to as a "country gentleman".  He was clearly ferociously intelligent and charismatic, and was a friend of Socrates.  When Cyrus the Younger hires an army of 10,000 Greek mercenaries to allegedly fight enemies in Ionia (the Greek region on the west coast of Asia Minor) Xenophon decides to go along and check out the action.  Little does he or the army know, but Cyrus has other plans for them.  The army marches east, but doesn't fight anyone.  Hmm, that's odd.  They keep marching east.  "WTF?" asks the army. "Where the Sam Hill are we going?"  Soon it becomes clear...Cyrus is taking the army east to attack his brother and claim the throne of Persia for himself.  The army rebels...it's one thing to fight for booty in Ionia, but to go into the heart of the Persian Empire and overthrow the king...now that's way too much for them.  Heated discussion ensues, but Clearchus, a Spartan, convinces the Greek mercenaries to continue with the expedition.  After all, imagine how generous Cyrus will be to them if he becomes leader of the Empire.  The booze, the broads..totally worth it.  So the army marches on, deeper into the Persian Empire.

Meanwhile, Artaxerxes II hears of this, and assembles an army to go meet his brother's forces.  Their armies clash at Cunaxa.  The Greek mercenaries rout their Persian foes, but Cyrus and his bodyguatds spy Artaxerxes II and charge in to kill him.  A javelin is thrown, piercing Cyrus through the eye, and he dies.  Uh oh.  It is not immediately apparent to the Greeks what has happened, because they won their part of the battle, but when they learn about Cyrus's death it dawns upon them how totally fucked they are.  Now they're deep in Persian territory, Cyrus is dead, and they have no food, friends, or supplies...so all they can do is run for their lives.  They start to retreat, but are pursued by the Persian army.  Artaxerxes II would like to see them all dead, to teach a lesson to any would-be revolutionists.  The general of the Persian army, Tissaphernes, has a problem, though.  The 10,000 Greek soldiers are to large a force to directly attack, and they need a lot of food, since 10,000 mouths are a lot to feed.  So Tissaphernes comes up with a plan.  He tells the Greeks he will make peace with them and lead them out of Persia, and the generals of the Greek army should come to his tent and have a feast to celebrate and make plans for the assisted withdrawal.  So the leaders of the Greeks all go to Tissaphernes' tent, where he has them seized and beheaded.  If General Ackbar had been there he would have shouted "It's a trap!", but alas that did not come to pass.  Now the Greeks are so totally fucked it's not even funny.  They could have split up and been picked off one by one, but somehow they pull their shit together and elect new leaders from the within ranks...and Xenophon is chosen to lead the whole army.  Which he does.

What follows is an incredible tale of adventure.  I don't want to go into a lot of details, because I highly recommend this book and you should read about what happens yourself.  But imagine Xenophon's problem...you have to lead 10,000 men on a very long trek home through enemy territory.  And we're talking 10,000 men!  Xenophon's army is basically a wandering plague of locusts, stripping the countryside bare of food, firewood, and other provisions (including, probably, women) and no doubt leaving behind a trail of garbage and, well, human waste.  They pass through some barbarian lands, where the barbarians run into the surrounding mountains and throw rocks down upon the army.  I mean, what else could they do...you can't fight a 10,00 man army, but you don't want them to stick around and destroy your crops and villages and then move on.  Xenophon tries to keep the army in line, and not have them suck up everything in their wake, but what can he do...there's 10,000 hungry young men to feed!

As the army marches along it's one damn thing after another.  Attacks!  Treachery!  Snow and bitter cold!  The story reminds me a bit of the Shackleton story...adventure upon adventure, with each escape miraculous, often involving cunning, strategy, or brilliant oratory by Xenophon.  Someone should seriously turn this book into a comic book or graphic novel.  It's unbelievable, and yet it all really happened.  Of course, in Shackelton's ill-fated Antarctic expedition not a single man was lost.  In Xenophon's case, only about 6,000 of the original 10,000 made it out alive.  Still, that's not bad, given the obstacles they faced.  Even once they make it "safely" back to Greek territory they are still in danger.  The Greek cities don't want them around, again because they're like locusts.  People try to hire them, but there's always a catch.  Finally, a Spartan hires them and the army, now being gainfully employed once again, sets off to fight.  It is here that Xenophon takes his leave.

This is a much more personal book than Herodotus.  You can imagine yourself with Xenophon and his men, battling their way from WAY behind enemy lines.  If you ever saw the movie "The Warriors" you'll know what I mean.  And if not, just read the damn book.  It's a good one.

Homage to Catalonia (George Orwell)

I was reading in the news today that Spain is having some kind of financial crisis or something.  Greece, Italy, Spain...come on Europe, get your act together.  Although actually I don't follow the financial news all that thoroughly, which combined with my hobbies of reading, blogging, and drinking fine American whiskies probably accounts for why I'm not going to be able to retire for another 94 years.  Nonetheless, even I know that something is amiss in Spain, and it sounds like no good will come of it, whatever it is.  Bonds, maybe...something to do with bonds.  Or banks, or maybe the Euro.  Whatever.  But as bad as it might be at the moment, and we'll just assume that it really is dangerous, it can't be anything like the Spain that George Orwell describes in "Homage to Catalonia", his memoir of the Spanish Civil War.  I mean, as he describes it that place was seriously fucked up.

Now I know, you're thinking "WTF is he writing about this book for, because it's not on his list?  Maybe he's so addled by old age at this point that he doesn't even remember he has a list, or something like that".  Well, I may indeed be addled, but as I've said before in this blog, I will occasionally read a book not on my master list just because I want to.  In this case, this book has been sitting on my shelf for about 25 years (I kid you not).  I was stirred into reading it after watching "Hemingway and Gellhorn", a made-for-HBO movie about Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, a war correspondent who eventually became Hemingway's wife and later went on to become Hemingway's ex-wife.  It was an amazingly shoddy movie, especially given the cast and given that it was HBO, but regardless it stirred my interest in the Spanish Civil War and so I decided to read Orwell's book since I really did buy it about 25 years ago and figured it was now or never for reading it.  Especially since my brain apparently is becoming addled with age.

The Spanish Civil War was unlike any war today.  For one thing, artists, writers, filmmakers, and other creatives of all caliber seemed to flock to the thing and pick up rifles and fight.  Boy, that would never happen now.  I don't see Seal or J.K. Rowling picking up some body armor and rushing off to Afghanistan.  In fact, if anything, they'd stay as far the fuck away from that place as they could, or from any other war zone for that matter.  But something stirred the creatives of the world to flock to Spain in the 1930s and pick up arms against Franco and the Fascists.  I guess everyone could agree that the Fascists were bad, but then can't we all agree that the Taliban is bad?  Whatever.  But as we all might suspect, it turns out that artists and poets make pretty crappy fighters because eventually Franco and the fascists won.

Orwell, however, did not know the eventual winner of the war when the events in the book take place, and he didn't even know when he wrote the book.  That in itself is poignant enough, but what really makes this book memorable is his descriptions of life at the front, and life in Barcelona during a period of street fighting.  Orwell headed to Spain and signed up to fight with a regiment made up of members of a political party called P.O.U.M.  No, that's not the Pomegranate Juice...P.O.U.M. was the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, or the Worker's Party of Marxist Unification.  There was a whole alphabet soup of political parties in revolutionary Spain, and while Orwell goes into great detail about the different parties, this was one part of the book that was hard to follow, and frankly a bit dry.  It seemed like P.O.U.M. were communists associated with Trotsky somehow, as opposed to other communist parties which were not, and possibly associated with Anarchists, but also maybe not.  I don't know.  The take-home message was that there were a lot of parties all struggling against one another and trying to position themselves, while maybe they all would have done better if they just focused on fighting Franco and the Fascists together.  Which they did, when they weren't undermining and fighting one another.

Orwell talks about when he arrived in Spain there was truly a revolutionary atmosphere.  Workers had seized all the buildings and communist, revolutionary, and anarchist flags were everywhere.  Everyone called each other "comrade".  No one was allowed to tip, and even in the army everyone was assumed to be equal (which would seem to make it hard to fight a war if everyone could question their commanders).  In short, a revolutionary worker's paradise.  Unfortunately of course, it didn't last.

Orwell joined a P.O.U.M. militia unit and was sent to the front to fight the fascists.  He describes what it was like to fight at the front in very evocative details.  He talks about the sights and smells of living in the trenches (to sum up: it's all bad) and he talks about the ubiquitous rats and lice that plague everyone (memo to self: avoid lice.  Also avoid trench warfare).  These parts made the most interesting parts of the book.  Orwell alternates between (1) telling his story and describing what his life in wartime Spain was like, and (2) describing in detail the political machinations between the various parties and factions.  In other words the chapters alternated between gripping and not so gripping.

After spending time at the front, Orwell returns on leave to Barcelona, where he notices the revolutionary fervor that was so rampant when he first arrived is completely gone.  The workers have been beaten down and are back in their places.  But more importantly the P.O.U.M. party that he has been a member of is suddenly outlawed, which is not good for him.  They have been accused of being Stalinist sympathizers, or maybe Trotsky sympathizers, or maybe fascist sympathizers.  As a result, the government militia, or maybe its the communists, have turned against them.  But wait, are the communists and the government working together...or do they hate each other?  Ah, who the fuck knows.  Why couldn't these fricking Spaniards have a regular civil war like we had in the good old U. S. of A...you know, the North against the South, Yankees vs. Johnny Reb, freedom vs. slavery...with just two sides, making it easy to figure out who's who and what's what?  That would have made things a lot simpler in Spain, and who knows, maybe the good guys would have won then.  But now I'm getting off track.

And speaking of which, I just need to say that I'm drinking a Margarita in order to salute my Spanish heritage, which consists of having ordered burritos in taquerias all over California.  Those things are Spanish, right?  Along with the Spanish flu and Spanish fly...

So where was I?  Oh yeah, so P.O.U.M. gets outlawed and street fighting breaks out all over Barcelona.  Of course in all the revolutionary confusion it's not clear who is street fighting against whom.  That's the problem with street fighting, as opposed to two armies facing one another across no man's land while hunkered down in lice-filled trenches.  Nonetheless, Orwell survives the fighting and confusion in Barcelona, and survives the P.O.U.M. purge, and makes it back to the front lines of the war, where in short order he is shot in the neck.  He is seriously injured but he survives (as evidenced by the fact that he wrote this book).  His doctors tell him that "a man who is hit through the neck and survives is the luckiest creature alive", but Orwell wonders if it would even be luckier not to have been hit at all.  So Orwell lingers in Spain for a short time longer, but then leaves the country in order not to be killed in the continuing P.O.U.M. crackdown.  The End.

One can think of the Spanish Civil War as a prelude to World War II, with communism and democracy fighting against the fascists.  Yet the fascists won the Spanish Civil War, and his experiences lead George Orwell to write "1984".  I suppose all ideological moments end in frustration and apathy, and this one was no exception.  Still, one can't help but wonder what would have happened if Seal had picked up arms and joined Orwell on the front lines of this conflict.  Perhaps history would have turned out completely different and this whole financial crisis thing would have been averted.  Or not.

Book #52 - The Histories (Herodotus)

These kids today I swear...they throw around terms like "old school" when referring to things that are from 2007.  Well screw that..."The Histories" by Herodotus was written sometime around 450-420 BC.  Now THAT'S frickin' old school.  In fact, Herodotus is often referred to as "The Father of History" since his is the first work of western history that we have, and one that he extensively researched and systematically arranged.  Now, by research I mean he traveled all around the ancient world, talked to everyone he could corner in a bar, and wrote down their stories.  Which leads me to wonder...what did he write stuff down on?  Paper?  Papyrus?  Did he use a pen?  Did he carry all his notes around with him in a backpack?  Because he was so old school that he didn't have a MacBook, or even a Commodore 64 running WordPerfect, on which to take notes.  In fact, this was before people made notebooks, or index cards.  So the practical aspects of writing a history like this in 450 BC are troubling to ponder.  Unless he just had one helluva freaking amazing memory.  But who knows...so let's just drink our whiskey and get on with it.

"The Histories" chronicles the story of the rise of the Persian Empire and the invasion of Greece by Persia.  The Greeks heroically, and rather remarkably, won the war against the huge Persian armies which vastly outnumbered them.  Herodotus opens the book with these lines:

Here are presented the results of the enquiry carried out by Herodotus of Halicarnassus.  The purpose is to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time, and to preserve the fame of the important and remarkable achievements produced by both Greeks and non-Greeks...

How poignant is that: "To prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time"?  That's depressing when you think about it, especially when it comes to our own lives.  All the traces of our pain and heartache and joys and thrills and loves erased by time.  Crap, maybe I need to drink some more whiskey to help that process along.  Hold on...ahhh, better.  Anyway, Herodotus did a good job at meeting his objective because he is the sole source for much of the history and incidents he recounts.  He did indeed prevent the memory of these things from being erased by time.  Good going, dude!

As one starts reading "The Histories" it quickly becomes clear that Herodotus's work is not what would today be called a history book.  For one thing, Herodotus is much more anecdotal.  While the book does recount the origins and history of the conflict between the Greeks and Persians, it's not a dry recounting of a chronology.  Instead the book is laden with stories about individuals and events, many of which are fun and interesting to read, and some of which are probably not true (like the story of large ants that dig for gold). But they're fun to read anyway, so what the hell.  The second big trait of Herodotus's work is that he often goes off on long tangents that really digress from the narrative of the historic events.  The most notable of these is in Chapter 2, where he goes on and on about the customs, culture, and religion of the people of Egypt, whom the Persian Empire invaded before they turned their eyes to Greece.  These digressions are fun, and contain valuable anthropological and ethnographic information, but in our modern era of book editors and ADD drugs they are quite unexpected.

Herodotus chronicles the rise of the Persian Empire under its first great leader, Cyrus the Great.  One of Cyrus's early conquests was of the ancient kingdom of Lydia, whose leader was Croesus.  Croesus ruled from 560-546 BC, and was a very happy and wealthy man (hence the phrase, still in use, "as rich as Croesus").  I mean, this dude was so loaded with dough that Herodotus tells us he let his guests leave the palace with as much gold as they could carry, and Croesus didn't sweat that one bit.  Croesus conquers some Greek cities in Ionia, and then thinks that maybe he should invade Persia.  So like any good king back 2500 years ago, he first consults an oracle (no, not the software company) and asks whether he should invade Persia.  The oracle tells him that if he invades Persia he will destroy a great empire.  So Croesus gets all amped up, does a double fist pump, and proceeds to invade Persia.  Of course it turns out that the great empire he destroys is his own, as he loses his kingdom to Cyrus and becomes his prisoner.  (Lesson:  always think through carefully what an oracle tells you).  This story seems to be a parable of one of the great truisms of life, that good fortune is not immutable, and that happiness and good fortune and wealth can all disappear in an instant, depending on both chance and bad choices.  This theme of course is also mirrored in the defeat of the rich Persian empire at the hands of the poor Greeks.

Cyrus goes on to conquer other lands, including Babylon.  Then, when he is killed in battle, his son Cambyses takes over as head of the Persian Empire.  Cambyses invades Egypt, and it is here that Herodotus goes into the great diversion I've already mentioned, going on for pages and pages about the people and culture of Egypt.  It's interesting, and no doubt of great importance to ethnographers and anthropologists and Egyptologists, but some of the reading here was a bit dry for my tastes.  Nonetheless, the story picks up again when Cambyses conquers Egypt, and then according to Herodotus goes insane.  He tries to invade Ethiopia with disastrous consequences, kills a sacred Egyptian bull, kills his brother, and then marries and subsequently kills his sister.  Good times.  Eventually some folks have had enough, and conspirators kill Cambyses, and one of the conspirators, Darius, takes over as head of the Empire.

Under Darius, the Greeks living in Ionia revolt against Persian rule (500-494 BC).  Darius clamps down hard on the situation, but then is so pissed off at the Greek peoples that he decides to attack Athens and burn the place to the ground as retribution.  This lead to a showdown between the Greek and Persian armies at the Battle of Marathon (490 BC)...about 20,000 Persians vs. 10,000 Athenians and their allies.  The Greeks charged and routed the Persians, resulting in 6400 Persian dead and only 192 Greeks dead.  Go Athens...WOOOO!!!  The Persians scampered away, and Athens had saved all of Greece from Persian enslavement, paving the way for classical Greek civilization to flourish and give us Plato, Socrates, and all the other greats who formed the basis of western civilization.  

So now everyone lived happily ever after in peace and harmony, right?  Uh, well, no.  Turns out Darius was now even more pissed at the Greeks.  "#*$^$% Greek motherf#*$^#!!  I'll #&$% kill those @&*^$" he allegedly said, or something to that effect.  So he decides to put together a HUGE army and totally subjugate all of Greece.  Then he dies suddenly.  Ah well, so all is forgotten then and everyone lives happily ever after in peace and harmony, right?  Um, no...no such luck.  His son, Xerxes, is even more of a hothead than his old man, and decides to put his father's plan into action.  So he takes his HUGE army, which Herodotus claims has 2,641,210 men in it (which seems like stretch to me, but whatever) and invades Greece.  But two things happen before the invasion which illuminate Xerxes's personality for us.  First, an old rich guy who's always been a loyal and trusted supporter of Xerxes comes to him and says "Xerxes, dude, my five sons are all in your army.  Do you mind if the oldest one stays home with me to look after the farm because I'm old and can't do it any more?  The other four sons will gladly fight and die for you".  Xerxes tells him to bring the eldest son to him, and when the father does Xerxes has the son killed and his body chopped in half, and makes his entire army march between the two halves of the son's body as they march out of Persia.  Lesson learned:  don't fuck with Xerxes before he's had his morning coffee...or afterwards either.  Then, Xerxes has his engineers build a bridge across the Hellespont, a narrow strait (located in modern day Turkey) that separates Asia from Europe.  So they build the bridge but then a storm comes along and destroys the bridge before the army can cross.  This does not sit well with Xerxes, so after chopping the engineers' heads off, he instructs his men to whip the waters of the Hellespont and then throw chains in the water to symbolically tell the Hellespont that it is his slave.  Now in those days, when there were Gods watching over everything, that was just not cool.  But that's Xerxes for you.  No one messes with him, consequences be damned.

Anyway, Xerxes has his fits and then his HUGE army invades Greece.  It's only the largest freaking army ever raised!  Greece is doomed, right?!?  And to make matters worse, many Greek city states said "Fuck it" and decided not to resist the Persians or help in the fight.  This pretty much left mostly Athens and Sparta to fight the Persians on their own.  Fortunately Sparta helped put together an alliance called the Hellenic League, with Athens, Sparta, and some other city states all agreeing to stop fighting one another and to pool their resources to fight the Persians.  They first met the Persian army head on at Thermopylae, a narrow pass in the mountains where the Persian army had to pass through to get to the rest of Greece.  About 6,000 Greek defenders were there to fight the several million Persians.  The Greeks had the high ground in defending the pass, so they had an almost impregnable position, but then most of the Greeks freaked out and ran away, leaving only a small ragtag defense lead by 300 Spartans and commanded by the Spartan king Leonidas.  Despite being hugely outnumbered, the Spartans and friends held the enemy at bay for two days.  But then on the third day, the traitor Ephialtes told the Persians of a pass through the mountains by which they could surround the Spartans.  Goddamn those traitors...they're always fucking things up!!  This lead to the downfall and defeat of the small Greek contingent.  Herodotus describes how the Greek defenders heroically fought with their swords, and then with their hands and teeth, until they were finally killed to the last man.  While this battle was a terrible defeat for the Greeks, it assumed legendary status almost immediately, and thus fired up the Greeks.  This battle sparked the legend of Spartan bravery, illustrated by a story Herodotus tells of the Spartan Dieneces, who when informed that the Persian archers were so numerous that their barrage of arrows would completely block out the sun, said "So much the better...then we shall fight our battle in the shade".  Years later, a memorial would be put at Thermopylae, with the famous epitaph "Oh stranger, go tell the Spartans that here we lie, obedient to their decrees".

Meanwhile the fighting raged elsewhere.  The Greeks fought the Persians to a partial victory at the naval battle of Artemisium, which happens at the same time as the Battle of Thermopylae.  With the Persian army advancing, Athens was evacuated and was then plundered by the Persians.  The Greek fleet withdrew to Salamis, and when it heard that the Acropolis in Athens had been sacked, many grew disheartened and decided to leave and just go and settle elsewhere.  But the Greek Themistocles persuaded others to stay and fight, leading to the decisive naval battle at Salamis.  The Greeks were outnumbered by the Persians (so typical), but since the battle was fought in a narrow strait, the large number of Persian ships made it difficult for the Persians to maneuver.  The result was that the Persian fleet was decimated.  Xerxes suddenly freaked out, and worried the Greeks would destroy his bridge across the Hellespont, stranding him and his army in Europe.  So like a little girl he turned and fled, leaving a smaller army under command of the general Mardonius to see if they could make a last ditch effort against the Greeks.  But the Spartans and the Athenians and the rest of the Hellenic League again pooled their efforts and defeated Mardonius at the Battles of Plataea and Mycale (479 BC), which happened on the same day (there's a lot of these same day battles in Herodotus...odd).  The Greeks decisively win both battles, and Mardonius is killed at Plataea, and the Persian threat to Greece is thus ended!  Yay!!  So everyone lived peacefully happily ever after, right?  Well, no, of course not...a generation later Athens and Sparta went to war with each other.  But that's not in Herodotus...that's chronicled in the work of Thucydides...also on my "to be read" list.  And that's a story for another day.

The work ends curiously.  First, back in Persia Xerxes attempts to seduce his brother's wife, and then his brother's daughter (the latter successfully).  This leads to the destruction of his brother's family.  Oops.  Herodotus does not mention it in his book, but Xerxes is eventually assassinated.  Then the book ends with a flashback to an anecdote about Cyrus the Great.  An adviser suggested to Cyrus the following (and I paraphrase):  "We're a big and powerful country now and can invade anyone we like.  Let's conquer a rich, fertile country where the living is easy, and then we can all move there instead of living in this Gods-forsaken desert".  Cyrus replies something like "Soft lands breed soft men", and says it is better to stay in a harsh land and rule rather than move to a soft and fertile land and be others' slaves.  Why does Herodotus end on this note?  This may be a warning to the Athenians, who had become very powerful after the Persian Wars and had somewhat of an empire of their own.  Or it may be a warning to the effect that happiness never lasts, and that even when people are in a good position they get restless and then want something better; but that can lead to something less happy than what they had in the first place and to their eventual downfall.  And that's pretty much what happened to Persia.  Don't let it happen to you.

I read part of this book when I was in college, but never finished it.  For anyone who has started this book and then put it down, I recommend picking it back up and seeing it through.  Reading it now has been an awesome and rewarding experience.  Sometimes we leave things uncompleted, through boredom or perhaps wanting something more captivating and fast-moving, sleek and sexy, easy and fertile.  But often it turns out that we didn’t fully realize what we had in our hands and tossed it casually aside because it was too much work, or took too much effort.  Tossing something aside because the initial thrill has gone, or because we’re distracted by something else that comes along, or because the going is not as easy as it was at first, is a good way to miss out on the best things in life.  Sometimes it pays to stick it out in the harsh lands and work on something that will stay with one for life, to struggle against its being erased by the inevitable passing of time.

Book #51 - An American Tragedy (Theodore Dreiser)

When you pick up a book called "An American Tragedy" you know pretty much know right away that it's gonna be a downer.  And yep, no amount of whiskey could keep this book from totally harshing my mellow.  You know from the start that it's going to end badly, and believe me this one does not disappoint.  Towards the end it just gets grimmer and grimmer.  Don't get me wrong...that's not all bad, and Dreiser does it well, but it's probably not a good book to read if you're feeling kinda low and looking for something to lift your spirits.

This is a huge book, divided into three sections, with each one ending in a death.  In Book I we meet Clyde Griffiths, a young boy in Kansas City whose parents are street preachers.  Clyde accompanies them on their preaching missions, and he hates it.  When he's a teenager, as soon as he's old enough, he gets a job as a bellboy in a fancy downtown hotel, both so he can get away from the street preaching and his parents, but also because he's sick of his parents' poverty and he wants money.  And the job totally opens his eyes..his fellow bellboys introduce him to the joyful world of nice clothes, booze, fine dining, and loose women (both dates and prostitutes).  He starts dressing like a dandy and living the high life...well, as high as one can on a bellboy's salary in Kansas City.  And the more money he makes, the more he wants, because then he can buy things for Hortense, the woman he lusts after.  Hortense is hot, and she knows it, and she keeps stringing poor Clyde along, hinting she'll sleep with him if he just buys her one more thing.  Finally it's a gorgeous coat she sees in a store window...she has to have it and Clyde desperately saves his money so he can buy it for her and maybe, just maybe, get laid.  But then fate, or rather idiocy, intervenes.  One of Clyde's bellboy pals "borrows" a fancy car from a rich man (unbeknownst to the owner) and convinces Clyde and their fellow bellboy buddies to grab some babes and head out to the country for a day.  So they do so, but they stay out a bit too late, and then have to drive like crazy to get back to the hotel in time for their bellboy shift.  The driver is reckless, and in his hurry he hits and kills a little girl in a downtown intersection.  He doesn't stop, and drives away frantically, with Clyde and friends freaking out in the passenger seats, and finally the driver wrecks the car and the boys and girls all flee separately, at least those who are uninjured enough to do so.  Because of this Clyde leaves town to escape the long arm of the law, and Book I ends.  And this is Clyde's first mistake...he's not guilt of anything but fleeing, and if he'd just waited for the cops he would have been fine, since he wasn't driving, nor was he the one who "borrowed" the car.  But poor Clyde is not the sharpest tool in the shed.

When Book II opens, Clyde has moved on to Chicago, where again he has found work as a bellboy.  But as fate would have it, at this hotel he runs into a guest who turns out to be his rich uncle, Samuel Griffiths from Lycurgus, New York.  Here I have to pause for a rambling aside...Dreiser gets my kudos for naming his fictional upstate New York town "Lycergus".  This is a Greek name, and there are a couple of people named Lycergus in classical Greek history...one from Athens and one from Sparta.  My point is that anyone familiar with upstate New York knows that many of the towns there are named for places or people from classical history...Rome, Utica, Troy, Ithaca...so I tip my hat to Dreiser for noticing this.  I dunno, maybe that's a small irrelevant point but what the fuck, it's my goddamn blog and I can make any stupid observation that I damn well please.  Hmm, OK, better stop and have a sip of whiskey here to get me back on track.  Ahhhh...Blanton's Single Barrel, an excellent bourbon and because of the distinctive shape of its bottle known as the Holy Hand Grenade of bourbon.  But I digress.  Yet again.  Dammit.  Sorry, this bourbon is really great.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, so Clyde meets his rich uncle and asks him for a job in the uncle's shirt collar factory in Lycergus.  The uncle is impressed by Clyde's forthrightness, and also by the fact that he looks like his own son.  Plus the uncle feels that Clyde's father got a raw deal when their parents died and he was cut out of the will.  So the uncle tells Clyde to come to Lycergus and he'll give him a job.  Clyde then makes his way to Lycergus and his uncle gives him a menial job in his factory.  The uncle would like to treat Clyde better but his son Gilbert, Clyde's cousin, is very jealous of Clyde and does what he can to thwart him.  So Clyde goes to work and is forgotten for awhile.  But then his uncle remembers him, and feels bad that he's treating shabbily someone who, despite his being born in poverty, is after all still a family member.  So he gives Clyde a raise and a promotion and has him supervising one of the groups of women in the factory who are involved in making collars. The only catch is that Clyde is told that management is strictly forbidden to get involved with any of the women working in the factory.  Uh huh, you can see where this one's going.  Soon Clyde finds himself attracted to a beautiful young woman who has come from the country to work in his group.  He strikes up a conversation, they start meeting in secret, and soon enough Clyde has talked her into "going all the way".  The woman comes from an even poorer family than Clyde's (her father was a poor farmer) but she's sweet and innocent and very loving.  They both seem very much in love.  Yay, love!  But of course, they must keep their love secret from everyone, because Clyde risks his job should people find out.

Oh, but then shit starts to happen.  Clyde's uncle is unsure how to deal with Clyde, since he's family but he's not a member of high society like the Lycergus Griffiths are.  But he invites Clyde to dinner one night and there Clyde meets the young, rich, gorgeous socialite Sondra Finchley.  Sondra starts asking Clyde to attend society events with her and her friends, mostly to get back at Gilbert who she's pissed off at.  But slowly and surely Sondra starts liking Clyde more and more...despite his lower class upbringing Clyde is friendly and well-spoken and earnest, and handsome as well.  In fact, folks mention how much he looks like Gilbert, but better looking, a fact which has to piss off Gilbert even more.  Clyde quickly becomes totally infatuated with Sondra...not just because she's beautiful, but because she's rich as well.  Clyde is enthralled by high society and wealth and money...in fact he's been enthralled and excited by money and what it can buy since the early chapters of the book...so naturally he's overcome by this opportunity to love and be loved by Sondra, and hopefully marry her.

But what about Roberta, you ask?  Yep, there's the rub.  Clyde quickly starts to forget about Roberta, and spends less and less time with her, much to her bewilderment.  But less time doesn't mean no time, and they are still "doing it" (as the kids say today), and yep, Roberta gets pregnant.  Dammit, I hate it when that happens!  Clyde and Roberta freak out, and when the drugs they get from a pharmacist don't end the pregnancy, and when they can't find a doctor to perform an abortion (this was pre-Roe vs. Wade, after all) they are out of options.  Roberta gets sad and angry and demands that Clyde marry her, telling him they can get divorced after the baby is born but that she wants the child to be legitimate.  If he refuses to marry her, she says she'll tell everyone that Clyde is the father and cause a huge scandal.  Clyde is terrified and angry, because the marriage or scandal will of course end his chances of living happily ever after in a wealth-filled future with Sondra.  He has absolutely no desire to marry Roberta...he only wants Sondra now.  But what can he do?

Whiskey time again...ahhhh, love this Blanton's.

Anyway, as Clyde is tortured by all this he chances upon an article in the newspaper about a young couple who drowned in a boating accident, and he then gets a brilliant idea...he can kill Roberta!!  WOOO, brilliant...problem solved!!!  He will take her out in a boat, make her fall overboard, and she will drown (she cannot swim).  He'll make it look like he drowned too, and then he'll sneak back to town and all will be right again.  Since no one knows of their involvement, and since he will make sure no one knows it's him on the boat with her, he will not be suspected.  What an awesome plan!

Clyde decides to go for it...he tells Roberta they are going on a trip and that he'll marry her afterwards, and he takes her to a remote lake resort in the Adirondacks.  He gets her out in a boat and then...and then...Dammit, he has a failure of nerve, and he realizes he can't do it.  ARGH, so close!!  But as he's looking down in the boat and beating himself up for being so weak-willed, Roberta sees he's upset (for reasons she obviously doesn't know) and stands up in the boat to come towards him to comfort him.  He is angry at his own weakness, and angry at her for forcing him to marry her, and he unconsciously lashes out at her with a camera he is holding.  She is hit in the face, she falls overboard, and she drowns.  He could have saved her, but he just watches her as she drowns and then swims ashore.  He thus ends up carrying through with his plan, even if by an accident, sort of.  And so Book II ends.

But despite all his planning, his plan actually sucked.  There were all sorts of angles he never thought through, because he's not all that smart, and within about a day the authorities realize this wasn't an accident and that Clyde Griffiths was the man in the boat who killed Roberta.  Bummer.  When the police catch up with Clyde a few days later, he's at another lake with Sondra and her society friends.  That's the last he ever sees of them.

The rest of the novel is both rather dull and yet exciting at the same time.  There is a very extended account of Clyde's trial, much of which rehashes the previous plot points.  But it's also interesting to see these events through the point of view of the prosecution and the defense.  Clyde of course never remotely has a chance...the jury hates him, especially after the prosecutor reads them Roberta's very poignant letters to Clyde.  The prosecution even fakes some evidence just to seal Clyde's fate.  Clyde is found guilty, and sentenced to die in the electric chair.  And after an extended stay on death row, and despite much effort by his mother and a sympathetic preacher and his attorneys, he is finally executed, and thus Book III ends with yet another death.  Heavy stuff.  This last part of the novel, the descriptions of Clyde's agonizing stay on death row, and the portrayal of his mother (who turns out to be a surprisingly strong character, by the way), are very poignant and gripping.  Memo to us all from Dreiser:  avoid death row whenever possible.

So what's the point of all this?  Dresier's story is based fairly closely on a real life crime...but why did he choose this material for such a huge novel?  I think the key lies in the book's title.  This is not just a tragedy, but an American one.  And why is that?  Because Clyde's motivation for all this is money...the urge to have money, the urge to have material things...nice clothes, nice cars, beautiful women.  The urge to get ahead, to be a Horatio Alger story.  But to get that position in high society, to get those riches, to move from lower class to upper class, he gets into a position where he's forced to kill someone.  Her death means less to him than the dream of being with Sondra, the beautiful rich girl.  Poor Clyde is driven to kill by the American dream.  Someone with more wits, or a stronger sense of morality, may have been able to figure a way out of all this and achieve some happiness, but poor Clyde is too weak and naive and inexperienced to solve the problems he faces, and it ends up resulting in Roberta's death and his own execution.  America tempts him, he takes the bait as best he can, and then America sends him to the electric chair.  Oops.  God Bless America.

Book #50 - Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)

It's a beer night tonight, in this case Humming Ale made by my local Anchor Steam Brewery here in San Francisco. It's a nice ale, with a bold strong taste, and since it's made locally it fits in with this book, which takes place within a couple of hundred miles of here, right in the Great State of California, in what is often referred to as "Steinbeck Country". How many other authors can you name that have a geographical region that is named for themselves? I mean, Dickens had England and Dumas had France, but no one refers to Great Britain as "Dickens Country" or France as "Dumas Country". So what am I getting at? That John Steinbeck was a badass, and one of my homies, so back off motherfucker.

By the way, I love using the word "motherfucker" when discussing the great literature treasures of western civilization.

Anyway, I just finished John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men" which took me all of two days because it's a short novel...probably the shortest on my list. It was a quick read, and a powerful story, although I could tell after reading the first page or two that things were going to end very, very badly, and I certainly was correct in that assumption. The story concerns two migrant ranch workers living in California during the Great Depression. George is a crafty, wiry, and small man, and his sidekick Lennie is a huge man of great physical strength, but who is mentally handicapped. He's not bright at all, and he loves to pet soft things, like puppies and rabbits and mice. He doesn't care if they're alive or dead, which is for the best since he doesn't know his own strength and usually ends up killing whatever he is petting. In fact when the story opens, Lennie is petting a dead mouse that he keeps in his pocket. At the opening, George and Lennie are on their way to a new ranch near Soledad, California in the Central Valley. They had to leave their last job in Weed when Lennie petted a woman's dress because it was soft, and when she started to get mad he got scared and wouldn't let go, so naturally everyone assumed he was trying to rape her. Which he wasn't, because he wouldn't intentionally hurt anyone, he just wanted to pet her soft dress. This is how it goes with Lennie.

George and Lennie have a dream of saving up enough money to buy a small farm and live off the land. This would also give Lennie the chance to raise rabbits to help satisfy his urge to pet soft things. Lennie constantly asks George to tell and retell the story of how they will live on this farm, and it's clearly a powerful dream for both of them.

Anyway, at their new job there are two threats. One is the boss's son, Curly, who is a former prizefighter, and a very mean and belligerent man. The other is Curly's wife, who interestingly is never given a name in the novel. Curly's wife is young and beautiful, and she's also bored and lonely living on the ranch, and so she endlessly flirts (and maybe does more) with the ranch hands. George's goal is to keep Lennie away from any troublesome situations, because he knows Lennie cannot control his strength. We meet other characters too. Candy is an old one-armed ranch hand, who has to endured his dog being shot because he is old and useless. When Candy hears George telling the story to Lennie of how they will get their land and farm it, Candy tells them he wants in too, and offers his entire life savings if it will help them buy a place. It will help, in fact, and the dream seemingly moves closer to reality. We also meet Crooks, the crippled black ranch hand who is befriended by Lennie (since he's the only one to not understand that you shouldn't go into the black man's sleeping quarters to hang out). Crooks at first scoffs at Lennie's land-owning dreams, but soon he too is caught up in the dream and is asking if he can come work on their farm when they get it.

But of course, trouble does ensue. Lennie is teased by Curly who wants to draw him into a fight. When he does, Lennie crushes Curly's hand, not so much because he wants to harm him, but because when he gets scared he can't let go of things, like Curly's hand. And then Curly's wife comes in to talk to Lennie in the barn as he's petting a dead puppy (sigh...yes Lennie accidently killed the puppy). When she tells Lennie he can pet her hair he does so, and then when she tells him to let go he gets scared, and when she starts to scream he shakes her and accidently breaks her neck. This is not good for Lennie. Anyway, when she's found everyone knows Lennie is the one who killed her, so the ranch hands set out to look for Lennie and lynch him. Fortunately George finds him first, and as he once more tells Lennie the story of the farm they will have, he puts a bullet through the back of Lennie's head, so that Lennie won't have to suffer. Now that's friendship. Yep, a happy story.

There was something I thought about when I read this story, aside from pondering what I would be drinking as I wrote my blog entry. Oh crap, which reminds me, my beer glass is empty. Hold on a second. Ahhh, OK, I switched from beer to an ice old nightcap of Limoncello. I dunno why, I just felt like something sweet, and actually it's tasting really good after that beer. I'll have to remember this pairing.

Crap, where was I? Oh yeah...what I really noticed about the story was how everyone in the book is lonely. I mean, really lonely and isolated. George and Lennie are the only ones who have someone else they can lean on, but we all know how that turns out for them. The crippled misfits, Candy and Crooks, are lonely too, and this is probably why they latch on so strongly to George and Lennie's dream of a farm, and want to be a part of it. But also Curly's wife is lonely, which is what sets everyone's downfall up to begin with because it causes her to end up talking to Lennie in the barn. The book is actually pretty bleak this way...no one is really happy and everyone is lonely and only their dreams keep them looking to the future. Of course, this book was written during the depression, so that was probably the overall ethos at the time. But I think it also speaks to the human condition in general.

The friendship between George and Lennie was also interesting to ponder in light of when the story was written (i.e. the Great Depression years). There's something about their relationship that stuck me as an idealized, almost political version of male-male friendship. It political in almost a socialist way, as in "workers of the world unite". George and Lennie paired up because they could look out for each other (well, at least George could look out for Lennie), much as workers in labor unions look after each other. In 1934, Sinclair Lewis, a writer and socialist, won the Democratic nomination for governor of California, and communists were active in California during the 1930s. Radical (at least in today's views) notions of labor and the plight of the working man were rampant in California and seem to me to have infused themselves into Steinbeck's portrayal of George and Lennie. Yet the story is still read today, even in an America gone almost radically conservative. This speaks to Steinbeck's ability to transcend his time and place (the Great Depression in Steinbeck Country) and speak to universal themes that we all struggle with...loneliness, isolation, the futility of many of our dreams, and the sweet, sweet softness of a dead mouse.

Book #49 - The House of the Seven Gables (Nathaniel Hawthorne)

Sometimes it's hard to start these blog posts. Whiskey can help, beer can help, martinis can help, but this time all of the above fails me for unknown reasons. If I were a younger man maybe I'd try some "shrooms" or "e" or whatever these crazy kids are taking these days, but that's never been my style and I'm too old to change now. Nope, when good old American booze fails me for inspiration then I'm pretty much fucked, and so are you dear reader, because you have to read this drivel. Anyway, inspiration or not, I've gotta give it a shot, because I have a blog to run here.

I just finished Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The House of the Seven Gables". This was one odd book. Not odd in a bad way (actually odd is never bad in my book), although parts of the book were a bit hard to get through. The writing could get very moody and impressionistic, and there were points where page after page would go by with nothing happening plot-wise. But that was OK because the moodiness of the writing would draw me in, at least for awhile. OK, at some points it got to be a little much, but hey, I'm a modern reader with internet access and cable television, so my attention span to moodiness is probably much shorter than a man living in Hawthorne's time, whose idea of a fast-paced evening would have been sitting in silence in an armchair for hours on end, poking at the fire once in awhile, and watching his wife knit a scarf.

The story concerns the Pyncheon family, a wealthy family that built and lives in a large drafty old house with seven gables, located in a small New England town (probably based on Salem, Massachusetts). The land the house was built on was previously owned by a small-time farmer named Matthew Maule. When Colonel Pyncheon decided he wanted Maule's land to build his house on, and when Maule stubbornly refused to sell, the Colonel had Maule accused of witchcraft, resulting in his execution by hanging. But on the gallows, Maule points to the Colonel, and says "God will give him blood to drink". After the Colonel takes over Maule's land and builds his seven-gabled house, he is found mysteriously dead in his easy chair on the night of his housewarming party, with blood in his throat. From there on in the family's fortunes are troubled...they loose a huge part of their wealth as a land grant they purchased from Native Americans gets taken from them in the north, and when one of the Pyncheon descendants asks one of the Maule descendants to help him find the deed to the lost land, the Maule man puts the Pyncheon daughter, Alice, into a hypnotic trance, which allows him to control her at will. This inadvertantly causes her death, much to Maule's dismay, but nonetheless, the curse against the Pyncheons seems to go on. And we learn other Pyncheons over the years die mysteriously, with blood gurgling in their throats.

The bulk of the novel takes place about 200 years after Colonel Pyncheon's death, when the house of seven gables is inhabited solely by Hepzibah Pyncheon. Now there's an old-timey name for you! That's actually one of the cool things about this book...there are flashbacks in the book that take place 200 years earlier, and yet nowadays the whole book is about 150 years old. It makes the events and descriptions in the book seem like they are from the distant past...as though the whole story is musty and distant, which adds to the general moodiness and creepiness and sense of decay in the novel. And that's a good thing.

Anyway, where was I...oh yes, at the book's start Hepzibah lives alone in the house except for a lodger who has an apartment in a remote corner of the house. Then a distant cousin comes to visit, Phoebe, who is an innocent young girl from the country, and one of the few Pyncheon descendants still remaining. Phoebe immediately brightens up the musty dark old house, and helps out Hepzibah with the general store she's opened in part of the house, because while Hepzibah would prefer to remain a hermit, she is almost out of money. Soon Hepizbah's brother Clifford comes to join them. Clifford, we slowly learn, is just out of prison, having been sent away years ago for murder. In jail he has pretty much lost his mind, and is now very much out of it. But Hepzibah loves him dearly, and Phoebe helps to take care of him.

Complications ensue...well, sort of. And they ensue slowly, because that's the way this novel flows. There's an evil relative, Judge Pyncheon, who wants information from Clifford. We eventually learn just exactly how evil Judge Pyncheon really is, and it's pretty evil. It turns out that Clifford and not the Judge was supposed to inherit the family fortune, and that he had Clifford framed for the murder of an Uncle who actually died from the family curse. And then there's the mysterious lodger, who is a dauggereotypist, and who we eventually learn is a descendent of the Maule family. I won't say what happens to all these characters at the novel's end, since I don't want to completely spoil things, except that the novel has a surprisingly upbeat ending for such a moody and meditative book. That upbeatness really took me by surprise actually, since it was quite unexpected.

One of the things Hawthorne seems to be saying in this book, at least according to this half-senile middle-aged white guy, is that immoral deeds done by family members get passed down to haunt succeeding generations. It's almost Darwinian; bad traits get passed down to screw up the offspring, although in this case the traits are evil deeds and not inherited random mutations. Still, it's a bit of a weird concept...that the sins of the father will forever taint his descendants. At least until the end of the novel, where all pretty much seems to be resolved.

And it's also interesting that while Maule casts this curse on the Pyncheon family, and they seem to suffer under it, there also are non-supernatural ways of explaining the curse and its effects. The mysterious bloody deaths of the Pyncheons could be a hereditary condition in the family, like apoplexy or something like that, that Maule recognized. And the Maule family has seemed to have inherited a propensity to be able to hypnotize people, which while seemingly supernatural today, may have not seemed so otherworldly in Hawthorne's day, when Mesmerism was in vogue. The book is a supernatural story with a rational explanation behind it. Which is pretty refreshing, actually, when compared with the current outpouring of vampire and supernatural movies, books, and shows. In any case, "The House of the Seven Gables" may seem strange and supernatural at times and a bit gothic, but the slow, brooding pace of it, while perhaps difficult for the modern reader to get used to, really pays off if one sticks to it and listens to the story Hawthorne tells.

Book #48 - Emma (Jane Austen)

Once again a long void has passed since my last blog post. Speculation has run rampant on the interwebs over the possible death of this slowly aging blogger...was it too much whiskey and fast driving, or did he finally hook up with Chloe Sevigny only to find that she was too much for his middle-aged heart to handle? No, the answer is none of the above...he was just slacking off, busy with work and life, and not focusing on the important things like fine rye whiskey and the greatest literature ever fucking written. And speaking of rye whiskey I'm drinking a glass of the new Bulleit rye on the rocks. I paid $20 for this bottle and it's pretty damn good. It's not Van Winkle rye, but then what else is? For $20, this is a pretty awesome value...quite drinkable and bloggable!

Anyway, where was I before I got distracted by talking about the booze? Oh yeah, I was drinking the booze. Wait no, I just finished Jane Austen's "Emma". Yes that was it. "Emma", Jane Austen. Man, things were different back in Jane's day. Aside from the lack of $20 rye whiskey (adjusted for inflation), people had manners, and society had all these classes that people had to deal with. The upper class ignored the middle classes who turned down their noses at the lower classes. At least in England. And Jane Austen is all about England.

The only other Jane Austen novel I've ever read previously was "Pride and Prejudice". I remember I read this when I first moved to San Francisco about 20 years ago. I was riding on BART (the subway) waiting in a station for a train, and reading the book when an old homeless guy came up to me and asked me what I was reading. I replied "Pride and Prejudice", and he then asked what the book was about. I told him it was about some aristocratic English sisters who were trying to marry eligible bachelors. He replied "Oh, I get it...goldiggers!"

In "Emma" the title character Emma Woodhouse decidedly does NOT want to get married at the novel's outset. Emma is 21 years old, and "handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition". She lives with her father, who is perhaps one of the funniest characters I've come across recently. He's the quintessential English eccentric. He hates change of any kind, and when his oldest daughter (Emma's sister) and Emma's governess both get married and move out of the house he's convinced they've ruined their (and his) lives. Emma loves her father dearly, and wants to protect him, and as a result she has determined that she will never get married. Emma is smart, opinionated, and often wrong in her interpretations about other people.

At the novel's opening, Emma's best friend is Harriet Smith, a middle class girl, daughter of a tradesman, whom Emma takes it upon herself to marry into upper class society. Harriet has an offer to marry a local farmer, but Emma convinces her that this just won't do, and then tries to set up Harriet with the local clergyman. She fails miserably when the clergyman first asks Emma to marry him, and then goes and marries someone else. This is typical of Emma at the novel's outset...she has good intentions, but she doesn't read people that well, and often ends up in misguided interactions with others. Later on in the novel she ends up screwing over Harriet again by trying to fix her up with Mr. Knightley, only to find out that he is in love with Emma. Poor Harriet.

And who is this Mr. Knightley? He's the brother of the man who married Emma's older sister. He's also one of Emma's best friends, and has known her since she was little (he's older than her). He's the model of common sense and good judgement, and for the most part is very good at understanding people and their motivations and their character. He serves as a guide and mentor to Emma, and admonishes her when she's thoughtless or mistaken. She doesn't always appreciate this right away, but in the end Knightley always seems to be right. Of course, in the end Knightley marries Emma, after he confesses he's always been in love with her. I suppose this is a case of the times changing, but for me it's a little creepy that an older man who watches someone grow up would then fall in love with her. But hey, Emma is smart and hot, and I'm sure the pickings of women among the local landed gentry in England was not so big.

There are other characters in the book who are central to the novel's romantic intrigues, mistakes, and schemings. Frank Churchill is the son of the husband of Emma's former governess, who has recently come back into the community after being raised by an aunt and uncle. Frank is somewhat of a snake...he's very charming and dashing, and always seems to have the right word for everyone. At first I thought he was going to turn out to be some kind of grifter, but that never comes to pass. Everyone is taken in by him, except for Knightley, who sees through him and doesn't like him at all. We eventually learn that Frank is secretly engaged to Jane Fairfax, another main character. Jane is a smart woman, and an incredibly talented pianist, but she is very reserved and so Emma doesn't really like her at first, thinking that she is aloof. However, we eventually learn about the secret engagement between her and Frank, and we come to feel for both of them a bit, because they've had to suffer by hiding their love (there's a legitimate reason why they had to hide their love away for most of the book, so it's not just whim).

This all leads to what I think is the great talent of Jane Austen...she has a real mastery of character and human behavior. Her characters are so very life-like...their motivations are as clear and as screwed up as people in real life, and I think this is one big reason why she has stayed in the canon. Her characters are just so damn plausible, and human. And she makes us realize that despite the very different world these characters live in from our own, people are people and their foibles are no different now than they were 200 years ago in the English countryside.

Having made that last point, though, I have to say I was a bit disappointed with the novel's end. Emma marries Mr. Knightley, and a spark seems to have gone out of her. Where is that tempestuous girl who vowed she would never marry? She and Mr. Knightley also decide to live with her father, so he doesn't get upset about losing the last female household member (Dad even balks at this at first, but he likes Knightley and eventually is able to be convinced of the advantage in this situation). And she and Knightley aren't the only ones to get married...everything is tied up in a neat little package of marriages and everyone presumably lives happily ever after. Maybe it's just me but after such a rich landscape of the misguided behaviors and human error, to have it all tied up in such an almost fairy-tale ending seems a bit less than satisfying. Still, I'll let that go because the rest of the book IS so damn satisfying. I'm definitely happy I have more Jane Austen on my list.