Something New

  We feature each month Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.  

FAST by Jorie Graham (first published in 2017) ; BLACK GOLD by Mark Pirie  (published by Earl of Seacliff Ark Workshop, NZ$30)

 

A good friend of mine sent me a copy of Jorie Graham’s Fast. At first I thought it must be a new collection of poetry - but then I looked at the press and I realised that it had been around for quite a while. In my ignorance I knew nothing about the poet, maybe because I have spent most of my recent time reviewing New Zealand, Australian and English poetry.  So I did what most reviewers do. I looked up who Jorie Graham was. Some facts – she is an American, but she grew up in Europe. She is now 77 years old. She has produced 15 collections of poetry. She taught at Harvard for years, and she has won many prizes like the Pulitzer. In her private life she has gone through three husbands and when she was younger she was traumatized by the death of her mother. And having said all this, I am sure that any poetry-reader in America would see me as an ignorant person. Jorie Graham is widely known and read in America.

            The poem Ashes shows how much of her writing is about working out who she herself is  - in other words she is uncertain of her identity “I spend a lifetime entering – the question of place hanging over me year after year…” but at the same time she is intrigued by animals. This idea continues in the following poem Honeycomb where she is examining the nature of human beings. She often writes in brief comments as in the poem Self Portrait at Three Degrees when she tells us “I cannot love any more….. I can’t hold it any more – you don’t want it – I don’t care…” etc. The poem Shroud seems to deal with either her mother or another woman. In The Enmeshments she appears to be having a fleeting moment where she wishes she had some standard to stand on thus “ Spellbound by the history – of god – unknowing – I feel my theory collapsing – I say I – I say too early too soon – the Greeks perhaps they say…” In other contexts she writes about “bots” - how we are being taken over by machines. There is also Reading to My Father, in which she writes something about her relationship with her father when she was a child. While I was confused by most of  the long poem The Medium, I was impressed by the final words “The day is long. It flirts with nothingness. It always does”, a genuine nihilism shown. I am also impressed by the poem Vigil where she gives us a very vivid image of the sun rising where “Daylight shows it. It pierces us with its red spear. It widens… run, it is day, run everywhere.” As for the poems With Mother in the Kitchen and Dementia we get to two images of a family’s tragedy. As for the poem To Tell of Bodies Changed to Different Forms we are told “We will never be happy with the body. Will exchange it for another.” 

            So I could continue with comments and ideas. Jorie Graham has many interesting things to say and she does have moments of earnestness. She is certainly worried about the nature of the current United States. Having said all this though, I find her style very difficult to follow. Too often – she writes – like this – as if – we are meant to – hold on to little statements – that could – have been said – more clearly – or could – have been expanded…

            By which I mean that it is very hard to understand what most of her poems are saying. 

 *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  * .  *.   *.   *.  *.  * . *.  *.  *.  *.  *. 

 

 Turning to a completely different collection of poems comes Black Gold by Mark Pirie. He is a New Zealander and he dedicated this collection to the long-gone James K. Baxter. Pirie has much wit, knows much about New Zealand history and is concerned with many things. Read the wrong way you might think that he is flippant. Take for example The Great New Zealand Poetry Debate which reads in full “It happened at some point. / It was well organised and well run / with very few attendees, / most choosing to ignore it.” Could it mean that not many people read poetry? Or could it mean that some very good poets are ignored? Or could it mean quite a number of things?

Pirie dedicates many of his poems to poets. The collection’s name Black Gold is dedicated to Clive James. Pirie writes “Black Gold / is the name / of my Notebook. / It’s apt for poetry. / Poets mine / for gold in the hills/rivers / of similes, metaphors, symbols, / onomatopoeia, rhetoric, metonymy… / What does it take / to find that nugget / that will bring riches: / distinction or fame?” In the poem The Song Maker, dedicated to Richard Reeve, he says “ Like Baxter / and Curnow, you seek elaborate but traditional / forms to contain your philosophy, the mind’s / colossus. You are digging into the mud, / into the beach sand, the pumice, driftwood / and sea-bark. You are your own song.” And I must add that he is dead right.

A section of this collection deals with personal memories of family - Grandmother, being taken to the shops when he was a kid, the whole life of his Grandfather, holidays, and an interesting poem about Ghosts, as seen by children.

He moves on to other poets… poems about meeting Hone Tuwhare and a very heartfelt  poem about the death of the Maori Queen. But he is at his best when he writes poems about historical events in New Zealand, such as the Ballantyne fire, the Depression and the work of Edward Tregear…. And there is much more. I greatly enjoyed this collection, open minded, sometimes happy, sometimes angry, but always very readable.

 

Somthing Old

    Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.  

MY ANTONIA by Willa Cather (first published in 1918)

            After writing O Pioneers Willa Cather wrote another novel set in Nebraska called The Song of the Lark. After this came My Antonia, much of which also deals with struggling farmers; but unlike the first two novels, My Antonia is also set as much in the towns as in the fields. These three novels are often called “The Prairie Trilogy”, but when My Antonia was first published in 1918 it was immediately seen in America as a masterpiece. It is still read in American high-schools and colleges and it is still being regularly published. This time, Willa Cather makes the central narrator a man –  perhaps because Willa Cather herself had a male demeanour.

            Jim Burden – the narrator - is an orphan who has come from Virginia. His cousins live in Nebraska and that is where he is sent. His Grandmother and Grandfather look after him well, they have a good house in Black Hawk and they also farm. The family’s hired man is a German man, Otto Fuchs. Young Jim gets to understand how hawks behave, watching  out for rattle-snakes, and helping his Grandmother dig up potatoes. How he loves the earth when he gets used to it. And Jim gets to be interested in the soil itself. He says “The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers.  Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me.  Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could.  Nothing happened.  I did not expect anything to happen.  I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more.  I was entirely happy.  Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge.  At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”

            He is introduced to a Bohemian family the Shimerdas, who are Catholic. Unlike the Burdens, they are very poor. They do not have a house. They live in a dug-out built of clay and they shelter their few animals in their house. Jim Burden in introduced to this family - a mother who is always angry that they live in such a poor house and who envies the Burdens; a father, Krajiek, who is getting old and often laments that they had left Poland; and a rather aggressive son called Ambrosch who hopes he will become a great farmer. But the youngest of the family is Antonia. She is a little older than Jim but not much. She is learning the English language slowly and better than the rest of her family. Jim takes to her, teaches her the English language better and the two of them often go walking in the fields and rambling near the streams and sometimes visiting people. Jim sees her as his best friend. But  “Much as I liked Antonia, I hated a superior tone that she sometimes took with me. She was four years older than I, to be sure, and had seen more of the world;  but I was a boy and she was a girl, and I resented her protecting manner. Before the autumn was over, she began to treat me more like an equal and to defer to me in other things than reading lessons.  This change came about from an adventure we had together.  One day when I rode over to the Shimerdas’ I found Antonia starting off on foot for Russian Peter’s house, to borrow a spade Ambrosch needed.  I offered to take her on the pony, and she got up behind me.  There had been another black frost the night before, and the air was clear and heady as wine.  Within a week all the blooming roads had been despoiled, hundreds of miles of yellow sunflowers had been transformed into brown, rattling, burry stalks.” 

            In one ramble, Jim kills a rattle-snake which came too near to Antonia…. but there are other things that Jim hears of. There are two Russian brothers, Peter and Pavel, and he hears from them the hair-raising story of a crowd of people, in their way to a wedding feast, being attacked and killed by wolves in old Russia. Jim also hears from old-timers about the “Indians” who used to be in the prairie nearby, but they are no longer there.

            The winter is very, very cold – so much so that the creeks freeze over… but there is some joy at Christmas. The Burden family take gifts to the Shimerdas and for some time there is joy… but the father, Krajiek Shimerda, is more and more despairing, wishing he was still in his home country, believing they will get nowhere, and some months later he commits suicide. How is Krajiek going to be buried? There is no Catholic priest nearby but the Catholics get together and bury him carefully, say prayers, and some Protestants sing hymns.

            By this stage both Antonia and Jim are growing into adolescence. Antonia is working in the fields. It is very hard work. For a short time there is a fight between Ambrosch – her brother - and the worker Jake, but Antonia smooths it over and she keeps on working.

Jim was very amazed by the hard work that Antonia does. “If I rode over to see her where she was ploughing, she stopped at the end of a row to chat for a moment, then gripped her plough-handles, clucked to her team, and waded on down the furrow, making me feel that she was now grown up and had no time for me.  On Sundays she helped her mother make garden or sewed all day.   Grandfather was pleased with Antonia.  When we complained of her, he only smiled and said, ‘She will help some fellow get ahead in the world.”   Nowadays Tony could talk of nothing but the prices of things, or how much she could lift and endure.  She was too proud of her strength.  I knew, too, that Ambrosch put upon her some chores a girl ought not to do, and that the farm-hands around the country joked in a nasty way about it.  Whenever I saw her come up the furrow, shouting to her beasts, sunburned, steady, her dress open at the neck, and her throat and chest dust-plastered, I used to think of the tone in which poor Mr. Shimerda, who could say so little, yet managed to say so much when he exclaimed, ‘My Antonia!’  ”

Time goes by. Otto and Jake go away and are never seen again. Aged 13, Jim is sent to school in Black Hawk, where is grandfather is a Baptist deacon. By this time, Antonia no longer works in the fields. She is working in the town for Mrs. Harling, basically as a maid. Jim often visits the Harling family. At which point we are introduced to the Swedish girl Lena Lingard. She causes much bother and almost scandal because the young men are bewitched by her… and wives are angry as she is such a flirt. Lena wants to get away from being a cow-herder and she aims to work for a dressmaker in the town.

Then “Winter comes down savagely over a little town on the prairie.  The wind that sweeps in from the open country strips away all the leafy screens that hide one yard from another in summer, and the houses seem to draw closer together.  The roofs, that looked so far away across the green tree-tops, now stare you in the face, and they are so much uglier than when their angles were softened by vines and shrubs.   In the morning, when I was fighting my way to school against the wind, I couldn’t see anything but the road in front of me;  but in the late afternoon, when I was coming home, the town looked bleak and desolate to me.  The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify – it was like the light of truth itself.  When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy roofs and the blue drifts, then the wind sprang up afresh, with a kind of bitter song, as if it said:  “This is reality, whether you like it or not.  All those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath.  This is the truth.’  It was as if we were being punished for loving the loveliness of summer”

We understand how Antonia thinks of her mistress Mrs. Harling. “There was a basic harmony between Antonia and her mistress.  They had strong, independent natures, both of them. They knew what they liked, and were not always trying to imitate other people.  They loved children and animals and music, and rough play and digging in the earth.   They liked to prepare rich, hearty food and to see people eat it; to make up soft white beds and to see youngsters asleep in them.  They ridiculed conceited people and were quick to help unfortunate ones.  Deep down in each of them there was a kind of hearty joviality, a relish of life, not over-delicate, but very invigorating.  I never tried to define it, but I was distinctly conscious of it.  I could not imagine Antonia’s living for a week in any other house in Black Hawk than the Harlings’.”

Comes summer and there is a kind of festival where Danes, Italians, Swedes, Bohemians and others gather together. More girls are now leaving the farms and finding work in the town where they are paid well. Antonia, Lena and three other Bohemian girls now work in the town. Antonia leaves the Harling house because Mrs. Harling is too severe and will not let her and other girls go to a dance…. And after this she goes back to working in the farm…. By this stage Jim is about to go to [what Americans call] College … but first there is an unpleasant fight between Wick Cutter, a nasty money-lender, and Jim who is badly beaten. But off he goes to College. By this stage we see the gap between a young working woman (Antonia) and a young middle-class man (Jim) on his way to being a lawyer.

Now at Lincoln University Jim has a very helpful tutor, Gaston Cleric, who is head of the Latin Department [remember that right up to the late-twentieth century lawyers had to know all Latin terms]. Perhaps Gaston Cleric was too fixed to ancient poetry… and then Jim is surprised that Lena Lingard is also working in Lincoln. She is doing well and she runs a dressmaking store. She visits him a number of times.  Indeed they go to plays together often – and they are both moved by a performance of  “Camille” [which says something about the tastes of the late 19^th century.]. But they are friends only. Indeed Lena makes it clear that she never wants to marry any man. Lena tells him about how Antonia is getting on. Apparently Antonia has a boyfriend back in Black Hawk. By now Jim is 19. He is reluctant to say good-by to Lena.   He is on his way to Harvard… and well on his way to being a lawyer.

Jim visits Black Hawk again. he sees that “The wheat harvest was over, and here and there along the horizon I could see black puffs of smoke from the steam threshing-machines. The old pasture land was now being broken up into wheatfields and cornfields, the red grass was disappearing, and the whole face of the country was changing.  There were wooden houses where the old sod dwellings used to be, and little orchards, and big red barns; all this meant happy children, contented women, and men who saw their lives coming to a fortunate issue. The windy springs and the blazing summers, one after another, had enriched and mellowed that flat tableland;  all the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines of fertility.  The changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a great idea.  I recognized every tree and sandbank and rugged draw.  I found that I remembered the conformation of the land as one remembers the modelling of human faces.”

 

Under the heading “The Pioneer Woman’s Story” Jim learns about Antonia when he visits Black Hawk again. Hers was a tragic one. Her boyfriend had promised to marry her and said he had much wealth – but before she was married she was pregnant and her man ran away. He had claimed to be wealthy, but that was a lie. She went back to her Bohemian family where they looked after her and they welcomed the new child. They had prospered by hard work. Jim, visiting from Harvard, drops in on Antonia and once again he remembered their youth when they walked in the fields…. Years later Jim, now a prospering lawyer, once again visits Antonia. She is now married to a Bohemian man Anton Cuzak and – being good Catholics – they have ten children who are also hard workers. Once again Jim and Antonia talk of their childhood. When he goes back to his work, he can’t help thinking of her as “My Antonia”.

What I have given you is a mere synopsis. Among other things, there are stories that are not central to the novel. There is, for example, the story of Wick Cutter, the nasty money-lender, who kills his wife just before he dies rather than letting her have any money after he has gone. And there is the brief tale of d’Arnault, the Negro pianist who entertains hotels. And all the while Willa Cather celebrates the many ethnicities who have come to the United States.

There is a strong possibility that anyone first seeing a book called My Antonia would think that it is going to be a romantic novel about two lovers. Far from it. What Willa Cather does is showing us two strong women who have made they way in the world in spite of difficulties. Lena Lingard has decided that she does not want to be pawed by men and has made her way as an entrepreneur in the town. Antonia has always wanted to be a mother and have a family, as well as knowing the necessity of work. Both of them have reached their goal. In that respect My Antonia is a feminist novel. Note too that the novel has a man as the narrator… but maybe this shows how much Willa Cather prefers women.

Something Thoughtful

   Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.   

                        CAN YOU READ REAL NOVELS?

I don’t know if you saw some weeks back an article written in the Listener by a woman called Leah McFall. She was amused by the fact that, whenever she is traveling in a plane, people are surprised that she would be reading a book. Others would simply be watching a film or scrolling their phones. Reading a novel is not thought of.

Isn’t it true that reading real novels [not kiddies books, not short stories in magazines] has become passe? Yes, there are still many novels being published and many readers, but not as many as there used to be. Why should this be so?  Obviously there is for some people the lure of movies, television and phones to be scrolled… but this leads to not reading long books and especially not reading classical books [by which I mean books written in the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th  centuries]. In the United States, it has recently been shown again and again that students who come to university to study the humanities now find it difficult to read full-length novels, whether it is Harvard, Princeton or any other illustrious university. Previously students had to read at least one full-length classical novel each week, and then critique it. Now this is seen as too difficult for the students. And two things happen. A: students look up  synopses of the book rather than reading the book; or B: lecturers give them “notes” about the novels rather than reading the book.  Recently I came across an essay written by a young woman, an American student, who was deeply upset that her tutors said you didn’t have to read any book in full because it was too difficult. She thought that she was being cheated.

Alas, this is not only an American phenomenon. It is seen in New Zealand and elsewhere. Some many years back, when I was a high-school teacher, I went to a teachers-only day in which we were to think up ideas to help teenagers understand literature. One bright fellow said that reading can be too difficult for teenagers, so what you should do is pick a novel that has been turned into a movie, show the movie, then give the class some notes about how the movie was different from the original book. See folks – you don’t have to read the book at all. All of which means that many school-children grow up thinking that books are boring anyway… and literature in unimportant. Wonder why, in Auckland’s University, few people now choose literature as their major?

Something New

   We feature each month Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.  

Mr. SIDHU’S POST OFFICE by Amman Brar ( Harper-Collins NZ$34.99 )

There is absolutely nothing wrong having a novel about a very good man. Mr. Sidhu’s Post Office has such a man. But this is not a simplistic story. As the novel develops we understand his travails, how he deals with people who do not understand his ethnicity, and how he has to deal with his children.

Mr. Sidhu [full name Mantinder Singh Sidhu] is a Punjabi Sikh who was born and raised in Pakistan but who has come to England after studying mathematics. He hoped to become an academic, but he could not get a place, so he buys a shop in Hounslow where he sells foodstuff but he is also a sub-postmaster - that is a man who looks after money, checks, pays etc. He always wears Sikh clothes including his turban. His wife Sarabjit has died years before. His adult children are his daughter Meenu and his son Raju. They live a separate life from their father, even though they both like him. Meenu and Raju see themselves as English citizens  - as they are – and they have cast away some Sikh traditions. Raju aspires to become an actor though it is hard to get work. Raju is also a bit of a layabout. He wants his father to give him money so that he can have a house of his own. Raju is aware that over the years his father has, by thrift, accumulated a reasonable amount of money . And in all this Mr. Sidhu looks after other people. There is the old pensioner who was almost cheated out of her money by a thief. Mr. Sidhu stepped in and set things right. He looks after old people who do not know how to look after their money.

But there is another important character. Working in his shop is Rose, a Cockney woman, herself a widow. Mr. Sidhu gradually falls in love with her, but he is too shy to say so. What would his children say? Rose lives in Richmond – a little better than Hounslow. Rose tells Mr. Sidhu that she would like him to come her house and meet her friends on Christmas Day. Mr. Sidhu picks up her offer… but he does not fit in with all her friends. It is not that they are unpleasant to him, but that he does not understand their jokes and there is a very annoying dog in the house. [By the way, Mr. Sidhu’s English friends for some reason call him David.] After the party is over, Rose and Mr. Sidhu go to the pub. She tells him about the lives of some of the people he had met at the party. Some of them had gone through tough times… and then she tells him her own story. When she was a teenager, not married, she had a baby. Because she was not married, she was made to adopt her child out… and it was only many years later that she once again met her son, now fully an adult. His name is Jay. Jay is a rather lazy fellow but he gets on well with his mother.

I will not tell you every episode of the novel, but some of them. The relationship of Mr. Sidhu and Rose blossoms. Rose says they should take a holiday together – but twice Mr. Sidhu runs up against Punjabi people who want him to act as if he is still in the Punjab. A couple want him to find somebody who will pay a dowry for the marriage of their child. Mr. Sidhu has to explain to them that that is not how young people choose to get married in England, even if their parents came from the Punjab. Later, when Rose and  Mr. Sidhu are well on their way to their holiday, they run up again with not only the same people but also a whole Punjabi festival. Rose and Mr. Sidhu are drawn in … but Rose is annoyed because this is holding them up from the holiday that they had planned. Finally they have their holiday. They go to a hotel for dinner but they had to listen to bad Bollywood music when they were eating. What was more, the food was bogus and nothing like real Indian food.  Mr. Sidhu complains … so as compensation the waiter gives him free whisky… and, not being used to drinking alcohol he gets drunk. Rose is appalled by his behavior… but later they get into bed together … and become very intimate…

Now I could tell you all the things that happen to Rose and Mr. Sidhu and his children and what they did ; but in a way I have cheated you. So far, I have told you only about the ethnicities in England and how, on the whole, they get on well together. This novel is giving you an image of a sunny community and only occasionally are there moments of unpleasantness. But the fact is that Mr. Sidhu, for no fault, is in deep trouble; and the trouble is based on real events. Amman Brar has put Mr. Sidhu into one of the scandals that upset England between 1990 and 2015. This was when about 900 sub-postmasters were convicted of theft and false accounting, many going to jail. What had happened? The sub-postmasters insisted that the new computers that were being installed were coming up with false tallies, making it seem that the sub-postmasters had stolen much money. Some pointed out that the Fujitsu systems were often unreliable.

Early in the novel, a breezy fellow called Alan Dankworth installs the new computers in  Mr. Sidhu’s shop saying cheerfully “The new system saves the government billions, because each transaction they save money. Now you don’t need paper books any more and the money can only be collected by the person with the card. There’s no book, no date stamps, no fraud, no filling out forms – everything is electronic.” But as the months go by, matters get worse and worse for Mr. Sidhu. Like so many others he is finally accused of major theft.…. And so he faces the law. I will not spoil your reading by telling you how things end, but it is surprising.

Perhaps Mr. Sidhu is more forbearing than most men are; and perhaps he is more generous to people than most people are. Nevertheless he is an agreeable character. This book is a little long maybe, but thoughtful.   

Something Old

  Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.  

O PIONEERS by Willa Cather (first published in 1913)

On my shelves I have four novels by Willa Cather which I had never read. When I looked up her history, I discovered that she had written a total of twelve novels as well as seven collections of short stories, not to mention much journalism. She died at a ripe old age, being born in 1873 and dying in 1947. Part of her life was growing up in what was then called by Americans “The West”, although it was far from the real West. Where she grew up was in Nebraska, down south, though much later she moved up to New York. I am not going to read and write about every one of her novels. I am sticking with the four novels that I have on my shelves – but I am reading two of her earlier novels and two of her later novels. O Pioneers was the first of her novels to be greatly admired. The title O Pioneers was taken from a poem by Walt Whitman. So to the novel.

Willa Cather is interested in the people who had settled as farmers in the prairie of Nebraska - the great variety of those pioneers who had come from many countries in Europe. She is always interested in the flora and fauna and the good earth itself, and often she tells us about the little town called Hanover that people had come to. This is how she begins : “One January day, thirty years ago the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away.  A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky.  The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod;  some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain.  None of them had any appearance of permanence, and the howling wind blew under them as well as over them.  The main street was a deeply rutted road, now frozen hard, which ran from the squat red railway station and the grain “elevator” at the north end of the town to the lumber yard and the horse pond at the south end.” 

John Bergson and his family have come from Sweden. He has a farm and has worked hard but he is dying even though he is only 46. He has a wife and four children. Before he dies he gathers his children and tells them that his daughter Alexandra is to be the master of the house. It is clear that she is the most intelligent of the family. The older boys, Oscar and Lou, agree to that. They are happy to be working in the fields while Alexandra works hard organising everything to do with money and with crops that can be planted; indeed she knows more than her brothers do about how a farm works. The youngest of the family, young Emil, is going to be sent off to school in the hope that later he will become a lawyer.

So we learn about how the family lives once the father has died. Alexandra, her mother and her brothers have outings when the weather is good. The older boys are always looking for girlfriends when they go to town. The family visits an old Russian man, Ivor, almost a hermit, who reads his bible every Sunday and is a pacifist, but he knows how to make hammocks and they need them for their barn… and later old Ivor lives in the Bergson’s barn. Alexandra always protects him from people who treat him as an oddity. She learns how to raise pigs with her brothers helping. So far, everything is going well. But then there is a drought … and it lasts for two years. The older boys want to leave the house, sell it off and go somewhere else, but Alexandra persuades them that things will improve. She takes out a number of mortgages and is able to buy a number of farms.

While walking with young Emil she says  “The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.”

The years go by. It is sixteen years since John Bergson died. The mother dies.  Alexandra now has a fine house quite different from the log house that she grew up in. She can afford to hire some young Swedish girls to be her maids for cooking and cleaning. She now has a foreman, an Irish man called Barny Flinn. We are now aware of the many ethnicities that there now are in Nebraska and its Hanover… French, Bohemian, German as well as the Swedes, the Irish etc. And Alexandra now has many children about her – the children of her older brothers. One man with whom she sometimes talks is a thoughtful man called Carl Linstrum. He has a hard time working out what he wants to do in his life, and he comes and goes as he tries to find peace in different places in America – including Alaska. Quite different is her rowdy brother Lou, a loudmouth who wants to talk about politics although he does not know much about them. At the same time she is proud of her youngest brother Emil and how he diligently studies.

When Carl Linstrum looks at all the things Alexandra has done and how she has shown other farmers how to do things, he says “How in the world have you done it?  How have your neighbours done it?” She replies: “We hadn’t any of us much to do with it, Carl.  The land did it. It had its little joke.  It pretended to be poor because nobody knew how to work it right;  and then, all at once, it worked itself.  It woke up out of its sleep and stretched itself, and it was so big, so rich, that we suddenly found we were rich, just from sitting still.”

More years go by. And here we are introduced to a very different tale. A Bohemian man, Frank Shabata, is married to Maria, but she is flighty. Frank is jealous of boys who flirt with her. Alexandra and her siblings often visit the Bohemian people and she often enjoys their company… and young Emil takes a shine to Maria….

At about the same time, Carl Linstrum stays at Alexandra’s home… for quite a long time. Oscar and Lou think that Carl Linstrum is going to cheat Alexandra in some way and take over her house and the many fields she owns. They say that a man should always be in charge of house and home, not a woman. She calmly reminds them that for all these years it was she who had kept the homestead going, dealt with all the money and had the ability to make them prosper. Her brothers went away. More years go by. Alexandra is on her way to being fifty. Often she finds herself dealing with old people.

 Willa Cather gives us many depictions of the land, such as her description of winter: “Winter has settled down over the Divide again;  the season in which Nature recuperates, in which she sinks to sleep between the fruitfulness of autumn and the passion of spring.  The birds have gone.  The teeming life that goes on down in the long grass is exterminated.  The prairie-dog keeps his hole.  The rabbits run shivering from one frozen garden patch to another and are hard put to it to find frost-bitten cabbage-stalks.  At night the coyotes roam the wintry waste, howling for food.  The variegated fields are all one color now;  the pastures, the stubble, the roads, the sky are the same leaden gray.  The hedgerows and trees are scarcely perceptible against the bare earth, whose slaty hue they have taken on.  The ground is frozen so hard that it bruises the foot to walk in the roads or in the ploughed fields.  It is like an iron country, and the spirit is oppressed by its rigor and melancholy.  One could easily believe that in that dead landscape the germs of life and fruitfulness were extinct forever.”

Later “Alexandra was well satisfied with her brother.  As they drove through the rolling French country toward the westering sun and the stalwart church, she was thinking of that time long ago when she and Emil drove back from the river valley to the still unconquered Divide.   Yes, she told herself, it had been worthwhile:  both Emil and the country had become what she had hoped.  Out of her father’s children there was one who was fit to cope with the world, who had not been tied to the pow, and who had a personality apart from the soil.  And that, she reflected, was what she had worked for.  She felt well satisfied with her life.”

There is a festival - a Mardi Gras organised by the French and others. It is a wonderful example of people from many ethnicities getting together… and young Emil is about to go off and become a lawyer … but he and Maria had too often been taking long romantic walks together. It is too much that Frank can bear. In a fit, he takes his gun and shoots them both dead. So in one sense the novel almost ends at a very gloomy way. There are sad funerals. Frank goes to jail almost for life. After the tears and after some months Alexandra gets permission to see Frank in jail. Why should she do this? Because she knows that Frank was a hard-working man who could never get ahead as a farmer and was always shamed. She says she forgives him for what he had done.

O Pioneers ends with Alexandra having a long talk with her friend Carl Linstrum. Sentimental readers might think that they would marry but no such thing happens. However they remain good friends. Alexandra speaks of the earth and the homestead and says:  “Lou and Oscar can’t see those things….Suppose I do will my land to their children, what difference will that make? The land belongs to the future, Carl; that’s the way it seems to me.  How many of the names on the county clerk’s plat will be there in fifty years?  I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother’s children.  We come and go, but the land is always here.  And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it for a little while.”

 And the last words of the novel are “They went into the house together, leaving the Divide behind them, under the evening star.  Fortunate country, that is one day to receive hearts like Alexandra’s into its bosom, to give them out again in the yellow wheat, in the rustling corn, in the shining eyes of youth!”

Now that I have read O Pioneers I can see it as a story of struggle and failure and sometimes success.  In that respect, Willa Cather gives us a view of those who came from many countries and had to make something of the bleak prairie of Nebraska. Willa Cather also has a strong sense of the land itself - flowers, birds, fish, trees, hills. Sometimes it almost reads like poetry. Towards the end though, there is a bit of melodrama in the deaths of Emil and Maria.  

 In telling you all this I am missing one major thing. It was unusual to have, as the main character, a woman who is in charge of men. In Alexandra we have a strong woman who is more intelligent than her brothers. Willa Cather was an early feminist and in a way she was man-ish. Biographies of her tell us that as a child she got on better with her brothers than with her sisters because she thought girls games were silly. She never sort a husband for an obvious reason. She wanted a female partner – not a man - and for most of her later years she had one. Was she a lesbian? Probably, but then people were more discreet in those days.  

Something Thoughtful

    Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.   

Reid’s Reader NOW ONLY ONCE A MONTH

Back in 2011, when I first set out to review books in my Reid’s Reader, I thought it would be easy. Each week I would read and review a new book; read and review an old book [usually a classic book but sometimes more recent]; and write a comment about anything that interested me. In other words what I called Something New, Something Old and Something Thoughtful. What made it easy was the fact that for years I had always made detailed notes about the old and classic books that I had read, and so I could present Something Old easily. But running out of my old notes, I now had to read other old and classic books before writing Something Old .

It became more difficult for me to write Something New, Something Old and Something Thoughtful in time. The late Vincent O’Sullivan told me that I was working too hard at reviewing every week. Later I agreed with him. So instead of reviewing books every week I was now reviewing books etc. every fortnight. This gave me less difficulty in getting book reviews on time. On top of this there were all the distractions of life, such as going on journeys to Australia or elsewhere, visiting our many grown-up children, etc. etc. And you will already know that I always took a writing break between Christmas and the end of January.

Now I find it hard to review books even in a fortnight. So I have decided to produce Reid’s Reader only once a month. You are still welcome if you want to make comments about this…. And you might have noticed that for the last week I had not sent books reviews.

Read me late next month.  

Something New

   We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.  

CITY OF WIDOWS by Nadia Hashimi ( Harper-Collins NZ$66.99 )

Let’s be honest. How many of us know anything about Afghanistan? I always knew that Afghanistan has Pakistan on its right and Iran on its left and a little bit of Russia on its north. I know this because I have often looked at maps. And I did know that in the 19^th century both the British Empire and the Russian Empire tried, without success, to take over or tame Afghanistan. But as for more recent history I have only a very limited knowledge of Afghanistan. So before I read Nadia Hashimi’s novel City of Widows, I checked a number of things. The recent history of Afghanistan goes something like this. Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and took over until they retreated in 1989. While the Russians tried to allow girls to go to high-school and university they found themselves against a growing Islamic Republic of Afghanistan which was made up of many different ideas – most wanting democracy. At the same time there were the Mujahideen insurgents who harassed the Russians… and then there was the Taliban, which can only be seen as an extremist version of Islamic ideas. While some women were accepting the idea that men only could become politicians, doctors, etc. more women were wanting their place in the nation. At first it seemed that the Taliban would accept a place in the parliament , but it was soon clear that the Taliban wanted to take over. At which point the U.S.A. invaded in October 2001 and stayed there for some years. There was an Afghan National Army ready to fight the Taliban and there was a Female Tactical Platoon which was trained by the Americans. And that is my account of what happened.

So to Nadia Hashimi’s novel City of Widows. Hashimi lives in America and she is the daughter of Afghan immigrants. The story she tells – in all 418 pages of it – is very much a feminist story, with an emphasis on how the intelligent women got by when it was clear that the Americans were about to withdraw. Some people still think that the Taliban will not take over but will become parts of the government.

There are some dominant women. There is Rahima who had been a warrior but her child was locked up. She is one of the many women who want to know where their fathers are. Many people shout Allahu Akbar in the street [God is Great] but “The Taliban have usurped the phase, manipulated the devotion into a battle cry.” There is also a brave woman called Mina who runs a radio bulletin explaining how the Kabul could still be saved by the Afghan National Army. At one point the Taliban almost break into her station, but they are repelled.

But the major character is Marjan. Even before the Taliban took over, Afghan men took it for granted that they were able take children away from a mother without her consent.  As one character says “Birth certificates intentionally did not bear a mother’s name until only a year ago, and many still grumbled about the impropriety of seeing a woman’s given name on an official document.” Marjan has a little girl called Hawa. Marjam’s husband was Abdul Khalig who was something of a thug when he wanted to be. Marjan decided to get her little child away from Abdul Khalig but “every mother in Afghanistan knew that in the rare case of a dissolved marriage, the law sided with men in the issue of custody.”… so Hawa was put into orphanages, much as she did not want to. But at least she could keep in touch with her child.

And there is a side of Marjan that we understand only gradually. Marjan has had  training as a member of the Female Tactical Platoon – attached to the Afghan National Army, as taught by the Americans. She has been a soldier. But her first priority is to save and look after her child. Hawa grows… and as she does … so do more and more people think that once the Americans leave, the Taliban will destroy anything like democracy.

But who have the documents that would allow one to board an American plane? There are armed members of the Taliban, waiting outside the perimeter to check documents and ready to grab anyone who says something they do not like. There are two incidents in this novel where Marjan, with her child, tries to pass the perimeter. The first time there is a very huge crowd of people waiting and waiting… and then a fanatic Talib throws a bomb into the crowd, killing many and no more people are allowed in. The second time Marjan and her child do get through…. And there follow conversations among those women who had been able to get to the American planes… and they have much to say about how terrible the Taliban regime will be for women.

Nadia Hashimi has written a clear account of what life was like for women  in Afghanistan and it is understandable that she presents Americans positively. At the same time, I can’t help remembering seeing on television the horror of crowds desperately running along runways in the hope of being taken on board… and being ignored. It is very like what happened when the Americans left Vietnam…

Any main flaw? It is not only rather too long, but often it is written in the present tense which can be confusing.

Something Old

    Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.  

THE DEFINITIVE JUDGEMENT OF GEORGES BERNANOS’S WORKS                                            [No other judgement will be accepted.]

 

 For the last nine weeks I have read my way through all the novels by Georges Bernanos with one exception – the first novel he wrote, L’Imposture, appaired in 1927. It was about a priest who had lost his faith and set out to recover it. Regrettably I was not able to find a copy of this novel. But I did read and commented on all his other seven novels. To give my own view of this novels, it goes like this:  Sous le Soleil de Satan (Star of Satan),             Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette (Mouchette) and his masterpiece Journal d’un Cure de Campagne (The Diary of a Country Priest) are his three most readable novels, all of them dealing with mis-treated women, a lack of charity and a need for saintly help. (Priests are essential in two of these novels.).   Un Crime (A Crime) is lighter, being a whodunnit, very readable but also laced with religious ideas.  The two most difficult of his novels to read are Les Tenebres (Joy) and Monsieur Ouine (The Open Mind), the first riding on long philosophical conversations and the second being filled with characters who come and go for little reason.   As for Un Mauvais Reve (Night is Darkest), his posthumous novel, it is often reviled because it was not polished before he died; but I champion it because it is the only novel in which Bernanos not only criticised himself but he also looked at the young Parisian men who have big ideas of themselves but go nowhere - the tale of nihilism.

So much for my round-up of Bernanos’s novels. But there was much more to the man. To begin with there were the many other non-fiction books he wrote. Most famously was his Les Grande Cimetieres Sous la Lune, in which he condemned the violence and murder Franco was using in the Spanish Civil War. Then there were the many historical books that he wrote, two of the most thoughtful being The Great Fear [about what happened during the French Revolution] and Joan of France. He wrote his play Dialogues Des Carmelites, about the murdering of nuns in the era of The Terror. Later it was turned into an opera by Poulenc.

Bernanos, still living in Brazil, wrote very long essays during the Second World War, aimed at making sense about what was going on in France and other parts of Europe. Letters to the English was published in December 1940. Letters to the Americans was published in September 1941. Letters to the Europeans was published in November 1941. Overall these essays were made part of his Plea for Liberty, hoping that Europe would become democratic but also preserving its traditions. But after the end the Second  World War he had to write what was the most and difficult long essay Reflexions sur le Conscience Francais, in which he had to deal with how there had been heroes and partisans in France, but there had also been many French collaborators and members of the Vichy regime… and the mass of the French simply hoped for the best and sat back.

To put it simply – Bernanos had some ideas on the importance of France, but he was not so deluded as to imagine that France was unique in its many flaws. He was equally aware of the importance of religion. But, if you have been annoyed by the many religious matters in his novels – and especially the Catholic ideas – he at no time said his priests were perfect, and you can find in his novels corrupted priests.

     

Something Thoughtful

    Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.   

                                                             HOME HORRORS

It doesn’t rain. It pours. You know the old idea. One damned thing comes after another. So here I go with my tale of woe. But don’t worry. It ends well… sort of…

Four weeks ago I underwent a colonoscopy. This is not surprising. Other members of the family into which I was born regularly have had colonoscopy’s. Our forebears were prone to being killed by cancer.  So in I went, this being the third time I was to have a colonoscopy. There is always trepidation in entering a surgeon’s room, so of course I thought for the worst… but that was nonsense. Of course I was knocked out by the anesthetics so that when I woke up I was happy and smiling. No pain whatsoever.  The surgeon told me that he had snipped off three little polyps, but for the rest I was in good health. So my bowels were in good order. 

So that was four weeks ago. But more recently was something far more annoying.

My good wife teaches piano to young students… and alas, some of them bring coughs and sniffles with them. So one day my wife came home sniffing and coughing and blowing her nose… and the sniffing and coughing and blowing her nose continued for more than a week with her throat being raw. Now we sleep in the same bed and I was sure that I was not going to catch her ailment simply by looking the other way. For a week it worked – I was in good health. And then I got the evil bot - dripping nose, endless coughing, phlegm and an endless use of handkerchiefs until I realised that it was better to use throw-away tissues. But I coughed so much in the night that I moved to a different bedroom so as not to wake my wife. It’s strange but true that coughing is most violent in the night and various medicines went down my gullet to help me out. Some angry words did not help me out.

I’m glad to say that the horror has mainly gone now. As I sit here I write and then look out the window and see a blue sky and feel a warm sun. Life is good – or it seems to be.

Next time I will try to deal with something more important – like the intelligence of ants.