Book Review: CROSSING TO SAFETY by Wallace Stegner

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction? The people we are talking about are hangovers from a quieter time... their intelligence and civilized tradition protect them from most of the temptations, indiscretions, vulgarities, and passionate errors that pester and perturb most of us."

With all this chaos in the world around us, it was so nice to read an outwardly "simple" novel that can be summarized in one sentence: the intertwined lives of two college professors and their wives as they battled the Great Depression and the indignities of class struggle and illness. This novel is about their transcending all of this, about the beauties that friends and literature and art can bring even to a miserable era.

There is no melodrama here, no inappropriate embraces, no sordid affair. But Stegner's masterful writing shows us that life is precious enough: the dignity of honest work, the strength within men (and women!) to face misfortune head on, the joys of friendship that illuminates the passage of time with blessed companionship sanctifying life's milestones.

Be warned: The ending will have you weeping. Guaranteed.

"We're all decent godless people. Let's not be too hard on each other if we don't set the world afire. There's already been enough of that."



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Book Review: THE PALACE THIEF by Ethan Canin

The Palace Thief: Stories by Ethan Canin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Part of the reason I became a teacher was because of the Kevin Kline film "The Emperor's Club," and since it was based on the last of the four novellas in this book... I've been looking for this volume for almost as long as I've been teaching (13 years!). How wonderful to come across it on a local secondhand bookseller's page!

Canin's stories are almost musical in their beauty! I don't know what makes doctors such good writers (think Abraham Verghese or Irvin Yalom), but if I had to guess, it may be that constant exposure to mortality gives them a scalpel-sharp appreciation of the weight of each precious day in every person's life. And I love the fact that he throws in classical music references!!! Like this one:
"Sitting at the window in the library...I would look up from Samuelson and allow my mind to wander to the third movement of Berlioz's Requiem, or to the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, wherein the strings, though barely moving, weep for humankind."

A lot of contemporary writers have dated voices: distinctly modern patterns of phrase that come across as efficient instead of poetic, serviceable if a bit shallow, focusing on the destination instead of the journey. Canin, on the other hand, is contemporary but sounds classic; his prose is timeless in its elegance! Just take the opening sentence of "The Palace Thief" (the novella that inspired the film "The Emperor's Club"):

"I tell this story not for my own honor, for there is little of that here, and not as a warning, for a man of my calling learns quickly that all warnings are in vain."

And here's the opening line from "Accountant" :

"I am an accountant, that calling of exactitude and scruple, and my crime was small."

Such balance and grace! And it reels you right in.

The four short works inside are more of novellas than short stories, in that they encompass not just brief episodes but entire lives in a few pages, which is no easy task! But they all have to do with the idea that character is destiny, and how enormous the ramifications of what we think are small decisions truly are, decades later. He tells the stories of the everyman: the accountant who lives dangerously for a day, the insecure younger brother and the secret weakness of the superior older one, the middle-aged divorced man and the grown up son who teaches him about seduction, and of course, the History teacher and the student who teaches him a painful lesson. Canin challenges the assumption that the average life is mediocre. "What a noble creature is man," indeed.

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Book Review: BEYOND EUPHRATES by Freya Stark

Beyond Euphrates: Autobiography 1928-33 by Freya Stark
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Life is so infinitely rich, that whatever happens we can always find in it enough to keep our spirit busy."

My first Freya Stark book, which I came across randomly, isn't really a "proper" travel book but more of a collection of letters written to friends, with a short introduction at the start of each chapter to describe the circumstances of her life at the time. This was more of an introduction to this fascinating woman, and I'll be sure to look out for her other travel narratives in future.

The letters are an uneven mix of the mundane and the mysterious. One comes away with such respect for a European lady who "hovered between respectability and the charms of independence" by traipsing around the Middle East in the 1920's and 30's, ALL ALONE. *gasp*

It was interesting to read of how she travelled to locations found on no map at the time, placing herself at the mercy of the hospitality of Bedouin tribes. It takes such trust in humanity, and courage bordering on recklessness, to seek out situations where one has very little control. It's enough to leave this modern reader with a feeling of horror mixed with admiration. Freya Stark would very often get sick ("One never knows whose cup one is drinking out of and must be grateful for catching only colds.") and injured, sometimes to the point of near death! But always, she would press on, seeking jobs when money would run out, living amongst the natives and learning to speak several languages along the way.

What a character! What a life she lived!

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Book Review: GOODBYE MR. CHIPS AND OTHER STORIES by James Hilton

Good Bye Mr. Chips & Other Stories by James Hilton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"You cannot judge the importance of things by the noise they make... These things that have mattered for thousands of years are not going to be snuffed out because some stink merchant in his laboratory invents a new kind of mischief."

I have found a new favorite character in Mr. Chips! Short for Mr. Chipping, the name of the school teacher protagonist, the 1934 novella and accompanying short stories have been turned to film four times over the years. Timeless and essential, this book touched the deepest parts of this teacher's heart. Have your handkerchief ready, onions abound! And it's SO POWERFUL and MAGNETIC... I just HAD to read it in one sitting!!

It's easy to dismiss this book as "boring" upon reading the synopsis. After all, it is "only" about the life of a teacher spent in service to his school and country, with every life's ups and downs.

But what a magnificent life!! Because of the magnificent kindness, courage and humor of the man, whom no tragedy, no German bomb could stop from teaching. This gentle hero was based on the author's teachers and his own father, who was a headmaster (Principal) as well.

I suppose this book hit hard because it's about teaching in a time of war. And make no mistake, we are in the middle of one.

"All over the world today the theme and accents of barbarism are being orchestrated, while the technique of mass hypnotism, as practiced by controlled press and radio, is being schooled to construct a facade of justification for any and every excess... but there are other and fiercer fires."

The fire to pass on knowledge and kindness is ever burning in the hearts of educators all over the world. And we will let nothing quench it.

"Let us resume our work. If it is fate that we are soon to be interrupted, let us be found employing ourselves in something really appropriate."

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Book Review: LOST HORIZON by James Hilton

Lost Horizon by James Hilton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"But what are the opinions of reasonable men against iron and steel?"

This was another secondhand classic purchase that proved to be worth the hype (translation: turned to a movie, three times)!!!

In the years leading up to World War II, an Englishman is found by a former schoolmate in a hospital in China. He has lost his memory, only to recover it upon hearing a performance of Chopin's music, and proceeds to tell a story so magical, it's like a grown up version of Narnia!

He starts with a hijacked airplane that "accidentally" crash lands high up in the mountain ranges of Tibet. The four survivors are saved and taken into a most peculiar lamasery where Christianity and Buddhism seem to coexist, as well as other faiths, where the inhabitants speak dozens of languages, play dozens of instruments, and the library houses practically every important work of music (including unpublished Chopin manuscripts) and literature known to man! But mysteries abound. If the lamasery is so old, why do they have indoor plumbing? Why are there modern luxuries despite the ancient architecture? And how come the people in the lamasery of Shangri-La live for hundreds of years?!?

"This storm you talk of..."
"It will be such a one, my son, as the world has not seen before... It will rage till every flower of culture is trampled, and all human things are levelled in a vast chaos..."
"And you think all this will come in my time?"
"I believe that you will live through the storm. And after, through the long age of desolation, you may still live, growing older and wiser and more patient. You will conserve the fragrance of our history and add to it the touch of your own mind...Here we shall stay with our books and our music and our meditations, conserving the frail elegancies of a dying age, and seeking such wisdom as men will need when their passions are all spent. We have a heritage to cherish and bequeath."

Originally published in 1933, the book is a jewel, a treasure trove of elegant turns of phrase. To me, it was as if each sentence exuded fragrance... such a welcome break from the brutal and angry language of the Internet!

This book seems to be an anti-war tract, a call to civility, a return to simpler and nobler pursuits. And we desperately need more of these!

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Book Review: THE SAMURAI by Shusaku Endo

The Samurai by Shūsaku Endō
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"I believe that being alive means living fervently... Just as a woman seeks fervent passion from a man, so God seeks passion in us. A man cannot live twice. To be neither hot nor cold, but merely lukewarm... is that what you want?"

Written fourteen years after SILENCE (which Martin Scorsese turned into a film starring Liam Neeson and Andrew Garfield), THE SAMURAI is also based on a true story in the same period: the Tokugawa shogunate -- when Japan was cut off from the world for 200 years, and Christianity was brutally, cruelly supressed.

While SILENCE told the story of Jesuit missionaries in Japan, THE SAMURAI focused on the true-to-life samurai, Hasekura Rokuemon (aka Hasekura Tsunenaga) and his ill-fated travels from Japan to Mexico, Spain, and Rome, along with a Franciscan missionary. Together, they idealistically sought to strengthen economic and religious ties between East and West, while unbeknownst to them, they had become unwitting pawns in a deadly game they had no chance of winning.

"Do you think He is to be found within those garish cathedrals? He does not dwell there. He lives... not within such buildings. He lives in the wretched homes of these Indians... That is how He spent His life... I have finally been able to grasp an image of Him that conforms to my own heart."

I think it was fitting that I read this on Easter Sunday, a day when the sibling sectors within Christianity show different ways to celebrate the focal point of the faith: His death and rising, and all that it means.

Shusaku Endo himself was baptized Catholic at a very young age and had trouble accepting the key tenets of his faith growing up, and his personal experience with doubt is what makes his novels ring true. Endo is unafraid to ask questions and state painful truths we do not dare voice out, as if he knew that God is closer to Doubting Thomas than a Pharisee swollen with complacency.

If you could only read one Endo novel, SILENCE is generally acknowledged to be his masterpiece, and I have to agree. But I thought THE SAMURAI was more accessible, while still containing elements from SILENCE: the emphasis on the crucifix as a visible, tangible sacramental of God made weak, visible everywhere in the world, wherever there is suffering... the contrast drawn between 2 cultures and 2 very different worldviews... and always, the haunting memory of men who, wittingly or not, bore witness to One who suffered unto death, even as they too walked that same path.

To read an Endo novel is to be haunted with more questions than answers, with hearts made heavy and souls made light at the same time... and if that isn't what makes literature great, then I don't know what does.

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Book Review: BORN TO RUN by Christopher McDougall

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, The Ultra-runners, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Perhaps all our troubles -- all the violence, obesity, illness, depression, and greed we can't overcome -- began when we stopped living as Running People..."

I borrowed this book, thinking it would help to read about the outside, especially now that lockdown restrictions no longer permit us to go out for walks.

I thought it was about running and fitness, but it turned out to be so much more. It's anthropology, history, biology and travelogue all wrapped in an exciting frame narrative: how one athlete kept getting injured, learned another way to run from an almost superhuman tribe in Mexico's Copper Canyons (who run practically barefoot), and got back into running pain-free. It also talks about the evolution of running, how Homo Sapiens emerged supreme, versus Neanderthals, and why our nuchal ligament is so important (useful for stabilizing the head when animals like dogs and horses... and men! move fast).

This book will make you swear never to buy branded shoes, want to buy chia seeds, and yes, go out and run as soon as it is safe to do so again! More than a book about running, it's a manifesto. A call to action, to return to our evolutionary roots.

"Know why people run marathons? Because running is rooted in our collective imagination, and our imagination is rooted in running. Language, art, science... they all had their roots in our ability to run. Running was the superpower that made us human -- which means it's a superpower all humans possess."

To hear the author summarize the book, watch his TED Talk here: https://www.ted.com/talks/christopher...

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