Where Simonini Crimes Through Life

The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Umberto Eco has brilliantly assembled the story of a (mostly-true) series of frauds, deceptions, forgeries, and violent crimes that, together, tell us a lot about European society, about prejudice, about hate, and all of that ugliness comes together to make a tedious and difficult novel. I struggled through it, and I was really trying to like it. It's like a finely crafted symphony so full of intentional dissonance and unpleasant themes that the only pleasures are intellectual--like, why did the composer do that? Where is this going? Will there be any resolution at all? Can I go home now?

IMO: this is 5-level brilliance and maybe 2-level enjoyment. I gave it a 3. That will satisfy no one.

I mean, it is seriously an incredible achievement. That's not irony. The amount of complexity, first of all, in the story itself is pretty impressive, and clearly based on massive amounts of research. Parts of the novel deal with Italy's efforts at unification under a republican government, with our despicable MC working with various partisan groups to achieve certain political/military ends, mostly by forging documents that others use to sway public opinion. Much of the rest is in France, dealing with changing governments and international affairs of the late 19th century, with the MC working with spies and intelligence officers in creating false documents and lurid propaganda of many types--anti-catholic, anti-Masonic (full of demonic and satanic stories invented out of whole cloth and turned into bestsellers), and especially antisemitic material of many types. That includes the famous Dreyfus affair. So many characters, so many social movements, so many details. It's a lot.

And the organization of the story is wild. Most of it is told like two people writing letters, but the two people are living in the same house and never see one another and are actually writing in the same diary. Both have lapses in their memory and are trying to piece together what is happening. Of course, it's just what you think is happening--that's not much of a spoiler. But it makes following the story very tricky, enough that the author put a chart in the back to help you make sense of who is doing what and what part of the character's history is being dealt with. It's more than one can easily absorb in a single read-through, in my opinion. As a reader, you're wondering about the point of the double perspective; what does the author want us to make of all this? What, beyond the themes of hatred and prejudice and deception, does this format tell us? I have ideas; I don't have much confidence in the answers. But it's interesting, I suppose--intellectually, again.

It's just such a drag to read, though. I knew it was about the creation of the blood-libel fake book called "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," and I was curious about how that happened and how it was exposed. That's in the book, in pieces here and there, but really it's about one man's long career as a forger, along with all his crimes and his racism, his antisemitism and misogyny. Nothing good happens. Nothing fun. Nothing enjoyable. No kindness. No humanity. No love. The reader has nothing to root for or look forward to, nothing to nod over, nothing to applaud except maybe the very last page. (That's not snark. There is one event hinted at at the very end, and that is the only sort of good thing in the book.)

I'm sure it's useful, for most of us, to think deeply about these matters, about intentional acts of social sabotage, looking at the methods by which unscrupulous people sway public opinion, the way they stoke the flames of hate with lies, and how they poison society. But it's like a long soak in a sewer. Maybe it helps to really internalize that smell to learn firsthand how bad it is, but I kinda already knew.

Like I say, this is a brilliant book, in a way, but the amount of enjoyment found in the hours I spent reading this (over many weeks, widely spaced out) was almost nothing. I am glad to have read it, but it's too much like eating your spinach.

People read for different reasons--you may find much more to enjoy than I did.

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Where Evadne Has a Point. And Stabs the King With It.

The Maid's Tragedy by Francis Beaumont
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Set in a Medieval version of Rhodes that seems more like England or Western Europe, this is the story of disappointed lovers and a king taking advantage of his power. I liked it and I didn't, but I'm going with 4 stars after a lot of internal debate. :)

To cover for secretly taking beautiful young Evadne as his mistress, the king makes her marry a young man, Amintor, who the king supposes (somewhat accurately) he can push around. The couple are married just ahead of the action of the play. Amintor was in love with Aspatia and she was in love with him, but he went along with the marriage to Evadne because the king wanted it. He didn't hate Evadne, though, so he was sorta okay with it. This act of unfaithfulness creates tension between the families of the two women, breaking Aspatia's heart and nearly leading to fighting, but the real tension is between the newlyweds when Evadne makes it clear on their wedding night that theirs is a sham marriage and she will never sleep with her new husband.

Ouch.

Amintor is furious and embarrassed and ashamed, but vows to tell no one and do nothing, because again, it's what the king wants, besides the fact that he doesn't want his shame to be broadcast to the world. Eventually, though, his brother-in-law (and old friend) sees he's not as happy as he's pretending and forces the truth out of him. This leads to a series of actions that are pretty predictable if you know this is a tragedy and not a comedy. Lots of stabbing.

That's the part I don't care for. I really enjoyed reading the play, and found it much more readable than most drama out of that era--just overlapping with Shakespeare--but I pretty much hate tragedy. I hate a sad ending. I understand bad things happen in real life, but I don't understand wanting to see a play that shows it to you. I don't want to dwell on misery and sadness and misfortune. It just doesn't work for my brain. (So why do I read such things? Kind of a curiosity or literary FOMO, I guess.) Anyway, I wish it had ended with bad guys down and good guys up, but that's not the story. I still liked it, mostly. A surprising amount.

Just not the end.

I'm still giving it a 4. Well written, interesting, entertaining, and fun--right until it wasn't. And since I'm reading it out of this a very cool little edition from (probably) 1887, a beautiful book with cool old-fashioned wingdings between scenes and acts, I enjoyed the reading experience way more than if I'd read it online.

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Where William Wouldn't Take No For an Answer

The Conqueror by Georgette Heyer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a good book, one well worth reading, even though it took me quite a while to work through it. Rating it for fun, I'd lean more 3, due to some pacing issues (IMO). But there's more to this novel than entertainment. For historical scholarship, its finely crafted setting, its welcome complexity, and a very educational narrative, I'd give it a 4 at least.

I know Heyer mostly from her Regency romances, the books I was sent to when I asked other lovers of Jane Austen what author they thought wrote most like Austen. Since then, I've read maybe 9 or 10 of them, and I've enjoyed them collectively more than I originally expected. I've also read a mystery or two of hers, and I'd say those were okay; I'm not a huge fan of country estate murder mysteries, though I'll read one here and there. What I didn't know until now was that Heyer wrote straight-up historical novels. That's what this is. There's no more than a touch of romance here, and there's no mystery at all. There are women, and lovers, and love stories found in these pages, but this is book is closer to a biography of William the Conqueror. Told mostly from the perspective of Raoul, one of his closest supporters, the book covers about 20 years of William's life, ending shortly after the invasion of 1066.

(Hope that's not a spoiler.)

The beginning wasn't what I expected. Grimmer, maybe. The focus seemed odd. (This was all my fault, btw.) Even 50 or 100 pages in, I started to think the book would turn out to be a romance (of the bodice-ripping, chest-heaving, raven-haired tresses sort that I don't have much interest in), with a melodramatic tone and low stakes. But no. This is a no-nonsense historical novel with a very serious tone and heavy themes. It's about war and battles and strategy and putting down rebellions. It's about friendship and trust and honor and keeping one's word. It's about a man driven to make his mark on history and the people who gradually learned to believe in him, trust him, and follow him, helping him go from a beleaguered warlord to the leader of a stable regional power to the sovereign of a whole nation.

It was pretty fun to read, but not super fun. I didn't relish every page. However, there is nothing I could point to and say should have been edited out or abridged, and overall I'm glad I read it. Yes, I wish it moved a little quicker or varied in tone a bit more, but maybe it's better this way--leaning more toward an educational work of scholarship. This is no textbook, though; it's a novel, and I think a good one. Perhaps the greatest pleasure I've gotten from it is having a fuller picture of the historical setting and the Norman Invasion, filling in a picture that has been very sketchy most of my life.

So, yes, recommended.

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Where Reacher Hunts an American in Germany

Night School by Lee Child
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I liked it quite a bit. I found this one more rewarding to pick back up than the first couple I've read; either it's a little better or I'm more in the groove with the series.

Reacher is a good character, and I feel like Lee Child uses him well. He's not unstoppable or a super genius, but he's good at the things that an investigator should be good at--like reading witnesses and guessing how a suspect might be thinking and getting ahead of them--and he's especially good at not getting beat up by a random bad guy. And he's not just good at that; the author uses those things in the plot. You can count on him to come out on top in most hand-to-hand encounters, which so far are found in every novel I've looked at.

(I point this out because I've read a few books lately where the main characters are supposed to be good at something but then we don't see it much or at all in the story. Sherlock has got to see clues nobody else sees. Elizabeth Bennet has to say witty things. Captain Kirk better win against the odds. And Reacher needs to show out. He's a good investigator, so he's gonna figure some stuff out in a clever way, and he's a great big guy who can fight, so he better be fighting somebody or I'm gonna be disappointed.) ;)

This novel is set earlier in his career when he was still in the army, and I found that difference interesting. He had to work with a number of people instead of just doing everything his way, and he had to restrain himself in some cases. The constraints made him have to be even more creative than usual, and I think it made the plot work.

I thought it was pretty fun. 4 stars.

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Where It's Nine Hibiscus's Story

A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a good book, in a lot of ways, which I was expecting; the first book was really great. But even though I mostly enjoyed reading this, the flaws and bad decisions (as always, in my opinion) nearly overshadowed everything else. This was a four, but a disappointing four, which is my rarest score...

Arkady Martine is a wonderful writer of prose. Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, cool idea by cool idea, she is great writer. Her style is brisk and entertaining, even when little is happening, and that kept me coming back.

But.

Okay, for one thing: Eight antidote, the little kid who will be the next emperor, is just a really boring character. Every time the POV switched to him, the book slowed to a crawl. At the very end, the author gave him something cool to do, an interesting bit of action, and that almost redeems the long, dull pages filled with trivial nothings. Except no, it doesn't. Almost every page devoted to him, except the last handful, could have been simply cut to improve the pacing a ton without losing anything.

Worse, Mahit Dzmare is supposedly the main character, but she's entirely forgettable and pointless in this novel. She's there for a lot of the action, like a fly on the wall or a purse under someone's arm, but she contributes almost nothing. She's spoken of and treated like she's brilliant and special and remarkable, but the author gives her nothing brilliant or remarkable to do. Three Seagrass drags her along on this war adventure, and everything they accomplish could have been done by Three Seagrass alone. Except for their love scenes, obviously. I wanted the Mahit we had in the first book, and she just wasn't here.

The real main character is Nine Hibiscus, the fleet commander, and she is interesting. If the book had been just about her, leaving Mahit out of it entirely, it would have made more sense. She makes a sort of Jean Luc Picard series of decisions, and that was the best part of the book.

If you want an action story with movement and brisk pacing, it's a bit hit-or-miss. If you were looking for spectacle, which an interstellar war promises, you'll get very little, hardly more than a few scattered pages. If you want to see your favorite MC be awesome, you'll have to squint, because it's kinda there, but it's more suggested than shown. But if you read the book for fine prose, or for ideas on language and identity, or for themes such as sacrifice and nationality and cultural hegemony, you'll probably be rewarded.

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Where They Should Just Wake Up

Slightly Married by Mary Balogh
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Pretty good. I still like the book and the author, but this is my least favorite of her novels so far. 3 stars.

I liked Aidan and Eve--by the very end. But it took me a long time to warm up to them (and them to each other). They were admirable all the way through. Honorable. Good people, trying to do the right thing. But I didn't care much about them. Both of them were so cold to each other, outwardly, anyway, and formal, and uncommunicative. It wore me out. In the other books I've read by Mary Balogh, I liked and enjoyed and rooted for the main characters almost from the beginning, and that didn't happen here. (Could have been me, obviously.)

Aidan promises a dying soldier to protect his sister, Eve. He brings her the news of his death and discovers by a quirk of their family's will that she will lose everything if she isn't married by a certain date--in about a week. Because Eve makes a home for servants who have been cast off by the world and a pair of orphaned children that she is more or less parent to, it is not just for herself but for their sakes she wants to keep her home and property. So... Aidan marries her, promising to leave her alone as soon as the wedding is over. Problem solved!

Complications arise, obviously. Everyone learns about the marriage, and they have to follow through on more than just saying "I do." They hang out, and she meets his family and wins them over. But both of them think, until almost the end, that the other one wants to be left alone to go back to their regular, single life once everything is done. He thinks she does; she thinks he does. Even though they have been growing closer during all this time together, learning to admire and care for one another, they keep that feeling hidden. Really hidden. Smashed down deep. A smidge of communication could have fixed this much sooner.

It ends well, and I almost gave it a 4, but 3 is right--it was good, good enough to read and recommend to people who like this type of story.

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Where Joliffe Goes to Rouen

A Play of Treachery by Margaret Frazer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A good book. It has some quirks, maybe flaws, but I still enjoyed reading it.

This series has been very entertaining, but this book took a turn, and it almost didn't work for me. Joliffe has been with his traveling troupe of actors in the first four, solving mysteries while they're putting on plays in rich houses or village greens. Here, he gets hired to go to France (to Rouen, in the part England still governed back then) to serve in a rich household and learn how to be a spy, basically. It's a good idea, opening up cool possibilities for the series, but it takes a lot of time.

It makes this a sort of hybrid book--training for a job first and solving a mystery second. In fact, probably 2/3 or 3/4 of the book is about Joliffe learning how to be a spy while pretending to be a kind of losery drunk guy who's about to get fired. He trains in spycraft and weapons in the night while working as a scribe and watching everybody during the day. All this is fine--but it's meant to be a mystery series and the first part isn't all that fun. It isn't until quite near the end that we get a mystery, which is where it gets good. (I was gonna give it a 3 until that point.) There's a murder and an attempted murder, and at last Joliffe is doing his thing, bringing his skills to bear.

I guess the author wanted to give Joliffe more scope for those skills, and I agree with the idea. I expect the next novel jumps into the action quicker.

It's still a brisk read, even the early parts, and by the end it's quite fun. Recommended--in order.

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