I love travelogues. I love classical antiquity. So I really expected to enjoy Ryszard Kapuscinski's Travels with Herodotus, an attempt to mix modern lI love travelogues. I love classical antiquity. So I really expected to enjoy Ryszard Kapuscinski's Travels with Herodotus, an attempt to mix modern literary reportage with the writings of one of the greatest travelling reporters of all time, Herodotus. Sadly, however, the book was a bit of letdown. The old and new stuff didn't blend well, so the final result, while occasionally poignant and insightful, was a little underwhelming.
Maybe I went in with the wrong expectations. When I bought the book, I was expecting it to be something like Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah, a frightfully erudite book with quotes so absurd that they frequently made me howl with laughter (in public, which was rather embarrassing). Travels with a Tangerine is a very focused author's attempt to follow in the footsteps of Ibn Battutah, visiting the places the great fourteenth-century Arab traveller visited and trying to recreate the experiences he had there. It is a genuinely interesting, genuinely insightful and ever so entertaining book. I naively assumed Travels with Herodotus would be a similar read, only focusing on the places Herodotus described: Persia, Egypt, Eastern Europe, etc. Sadly, Kapuscinski took a different approach. Travels with Herodotus is not an attempt to retrace Herodotus' steps (admittedly a tall order, as Herodotus was probably the best-travelled man of his age, or many another age for that matter). Rather it is a loving tribute to the book Ryszard Kapuscinski, a Polish foreign correspondent working in Africa and Asia for most of the second half of the twentieth century, calls his greatest inspiration, his main source of sustenance and his favourite travelling companion: Herodotus' Histories. In between recollections of his own travels, many of them beautifully written, Kapuscinski quotes from the Histories, analysing Herodotus' method and explaining how it came to shape his own views of the world and travel reportage. Sometimes the quotes are tenuously linked with places Kapuscinski himself visited or historical events Kapuscinski himself witnessed, but most of the time they seem randomly chosen, with nary an attempt at contextualisation or analysis. In the end, I grew rather weary of this method. I found myself increasingly skipping the Herodotus quotes, not because they were dull (they weren't), but because I failed to see their relevance to Kapuscinski's muddled narrative. I finished the book thinking I would rather have read Herodotus without Kapuscinski's asides, or Kapuscinski's memoirs without his constant digressions on Herodotus. Judging from other reviews of the book, I'm not the only reader who feels this way.
It's a pity Kapuscinski chose such an ill-thought-out approach to his last book, because when he is not losing himself in overambitious homage, he is a fine writer. Travels with Herodotus contains some excellent reportage, most of it dealing with the African countries where Kapuscinski spent a considerable part of his life. Like Herodotus before him, Kapuscinski is an objective reporter who seldom judges the people he meets (even when they rob him). Also like Herodotus, he has an eye for telling detail, recounting small stories as well as monumental ones, and often instead of monumental ones. His Socialist background adds an interesting touch. And he does really understand the subjects he is dealing with. On the rare occasions when he does go into analysis, he makes interesting observations on life and politics in developing countries, observations of which Herodotus himself would be proud. Unfortunately, however, most of the analyses and anecdotes recounted in Travels with Herodotus are too fragmented and disjointed to be truly memorable or insightful. They focus so much on isolated moments in Kapuscinski's travels that they fail to provide an insight into the greater picture. There are some great anecdotes in the book, but since they don't really go anywhere, they ultimately leave the reader unsatisfied. I myself ended up feeling that I would have liked to read more about Kapuscinski's time in the Sudan than merely his recollection of a Louis Armstrong concert he attended there, and more about his experiences in civil-war-era Congo than just his nerve-racking meeting with two soldiers who walked up to him all menacingly, only to humbly ask him for a cigarette. I also would have liked to read more about his experiences in 1960 Egypt (which was just then in the grips of an anti-alcohol campaign) than his nervous attempt to get rid of an empty beer bottle while being watched by people who might well be police informants. Because as evocative as these anecdotes are (they are!), they don't tell the whole story of the place and the age, nor even a tenth of it. They are fragmented impressions -- interesting and well-written, but fragmented nonetheless. In short, I guess I'll have to read some of Ryszard Kapuscinki's other books to find out why he is considered one of the greatest reporters of the twentieth century. I'm sure he has written books in which he does go into detail, sticks to the topic at hand and really reports, rather than leisurely recounting disjointed memories. Unfortunately, Travels with Herodotus isn't one of them.
As for Herodotus, I'll obviously have to reread his Histories, for whatever the shortcomings of Travels with Herodotus, it did most definitely whet my appetite for more Herodotus.
Every once in a while when I return from a holiday, I fantasise about becoming a travel writer-cum-photographer. At the risk of sounding like an insufEvery once in a while when I return from a holiday, I fantasise about becoming a travel writer-cum-photographer. At the risk of sounding like an insufferable show-off here, I think I've earned my dues in the travel world. I've visited 36 countries in five continents, including a few stints as a tour guide in China. I speak my languages, have a fairly strong stomach, can deal with grotty hotels as long as they're not too noisy, and am both a decent writer and a decent photographer, a combination which I think might be of some interest to publishers of guidebooks and travel magazines. Needless to say, I occasionally dream of becoming a Lonely Planet writer, so you can imagine how eagerly I snapped up Thomas Kohnstamm's Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?, a tell-all tale of the author's first tour of duty as a Lonely Planet researcher in Brazil. It seemed the ideal book for me -- a book about a guy who had the job I want, although I fully expected him to tell me it wasn't a dream job at all.
What I didn't realise when I bought the book was that Kohnstamm was the guy who seriously embarrassed Lonely Planet last year when he admitted in an interview to plagiarising whole sections of his LP guidebooks and writing about places he had never even visited, forcing Lonely Planet to embark on a major revision of the books and chapters he had written in an effort to control the damage done by his widely publicised interview. Clearly, Lonely Planet takes its credibility seriously. However, I suspect that Kohnstamm's modus operandi is rather more common among guidebook researchers than LP wishes to acknowledge, judging from the number of times I've visited hotels recommended by LP only to find that they had been closed for years...
Anyhow, being a travel junkie and aspiring Lonely Planet writer myself, I had high expectations for Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?. Unfortunately, it turned out that the author and I were a bad match. Kohnstamm, you see, is the kind of traveller I loathe -- the kind of backpacker who only seems to travel to get drunk, stoned and laid (usually in that order), who only goes to Cambodia to find one-dollar bags of weed, visits Northern Thailand and Northern Laos to smoke opium with the hill tribes, spends most of his time in India comparing the relative effects of ganja and bhang lassis, and, when told that I'm from Holland, will say with glazed-over eyes, 'Holland, eh? I've been to Amsterdam. I love Amsterdam,' only to answer my 'Really? Whereabouts in Amsterdam have you been?' with a shrug and a non-committal 'Can't remember. I was stoned all the time.' I've met too many guys like that, and at the risk of sounding like a goody two-shoes, they annoy me. I'm not sure whether that's because I'm secretly envious of their freewheeling ways or rather because I'm genuinely repulsed by their attempts to be cool and 'out there', but either way, I find them annoying. I guess I'm old-fashioned that way.
Sadly, Thomas Kohnstamm is the very stereotype of the dreaded sex-and-drugs-and-rock-'n'-roll tourist, something I didn't realise when I bought his book because the blurb conveniently failed to mention it (although in retrospect, the subtitle, 'A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventure, Questionable Ethics and Professional Hedonism', should have been a bit of a give-away). Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? reads like a modern update of a Jack Kerouac or Hunter S. Thompson novel. Its first chapters contain so many references to sex, masturbation and binge-induced vomiting that I actually found it quite off-putting. The rest of the book is marginally better, but still, I don't think I'm wide of the mark when I say that one third of the narrative is about the drugs and alcohol the author ingests in Brazil, another third is about the women he beds (all gorgeous, obviously), and the remaining third is roughly divided between his attempts to sell ecstasy to fund the remainder of his trip (...) and his repeated vows to change his lifestyle and focus on the job at hand, only to be dragged to yet another booze-fuelled party half a page later. I'm sure this description sounds fabulous to people who like their travelogues Kerouac-style, but to my judgemental self, it got very tedious after a while. After just a few chapters of Kohnstamm's immature behaviour, I found myself wanting to read more about Brazil and its attractions, and less about the fuckheads with whom the author hung out during his trip (although I do admit that he drew those fuckheads very well). Kohnstamm's repeated assurances that he was basically doing an undoable job because Lonely Planet's deadlines are ridiculous and the pay is not nearly generous enough to cover all the expenses quickly began to grate on me, especially in the light of the long nights he apparently spent drinking and the long mornings he supposedly spent sleeping off his hangovers. I found myself increasingly annoyed with his constant excuses for not doing his job properly and with the weird decisions he kept making, such as staying in a flat for two weeks to have sex with a pretty prostitute when he was supposed to be researching hotels. So I guess you could say Kohnstamm wasn't the right author for me, nor I his intended audience. He's too much of a Hunter S. Thompson wannabe for me, and I'm not enough of a sleaze-loving frat boy to appreciate that kind of thing. I guess we were both to blame for the mismatch.
It's a pity Kohnstamm is such a shallow, self-congratulatory arsehole, because I suspect he's a decent writer underneath all the bluff and bravura. He has an engaging writing style, a decent sense of humour and a good ear for dialogue. Furthermore, he obviously has a brain on him, albeit an alcohol-addled one, and judging from some of the more outrageous descriptions in the book, he also has a lively imagination. When he is not bragging, whining, breaking half a dozen laws or generally being obnoxious, he actually makes some astute observations about travelling, guidebooks and being a guidebook contributor. He has insightful ideas on Lonely Planet users like myself (sheep who like to think of themselves as intrepid travellers but all end up doing exactly the same things), the way Lonely Planet has changed (and in some cases ruined) tourism in certain places, and the way Lonely Planet has sold out over the last fifteen years, a fact to which anyone who owns an LP guidebook from before the year 2000 can attest. He also provides some good insight into the compromised nature of travel writing, which tallies with my own experiences as a tour guide in China. Sadly, though, these observations are lost amidst increasingly repetitive tales of drunken debaucheries and sexual exploits. I'm sure the latter will appeal to many readers (judging from the staggering number of five-star reviews the book has received on Amazon USA, there is definitely a market for this sort of thing), but again, I would have preferred a less sleazy write-up of Kohnstamm's experiences in Brazil, one which told me more about travelling in Brazil and the job of being a travel writer and less about Thomas Kohnstamm's propensity to get himself into trouble. Call me holier than thou, call me a jealous wannabe travel writer, but really, this book could have been better, both as a travelogue and as a travel industry exposé.
2.5 stars, rounded down to two because I'm in an ungenerous mood. ...more
How is one to feel about a protagonist who frequently displays signs of elitism, sexism, bigotry and homophobia, finds himself worryingly attracted toHow is one to feel about a protagonist who frequently displays signs of elitism, sexism, bigotry and homophobia, finds himself worryingly attracted to young girls, has no goal in life except to make himself useful to damsels in distress, and drinks away his career and marriage, ending up a mere shadow of his former self? Is one supposed to regard him as a tragic hero? Is one to sympathise with him? And if one does sympathise with him, is that because of the way he was written, or rather because we are aware that he is a thinly veiled version of the author himself, a giant of early-twentieth American literature?
Those were some of the questions I pondered after reading Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald's last finished novel, and possibly his most autobiographical one. Set in France and Italy in the 1920s, it tells the story of two wealthy American expats, Dick and Nicole Diver (largely based on the author and his wife Zelda), who seem to others the most glamorous couple ever, 'as fine-looking a couple as could be found in Paris', but are finding their private lives increasingly less glamorous. We first see the couple through the eyes of Rosemary Hoyt, a young and naive American actress holidaying in Europe. Rosemary falls madly in love with suave Dick, but also admires angelic Nicole. After about 130 pages during which Rosemary hangs out with the Divers and nearly embarks on an affair with Dick, the narrative stops and goes back in time to tell the story of Dick and Nicole's marriage, which is considerably more complicated than Rosemary realises. Nicole, it turns out, has a history of mental illness, and Dick is both her husband and the doctor treating her -- a recipe for disaster, obviously.
Being a tale of needy people, broken relationships, loss of purpose and wasted potential, Tender Is the Night is quite a depressing read, and one's appreciation of it largely depends on one's tolerance for that kind of thing. If you like your books bleak and tragic, chances are you'll appreciate Tender Is the Night. If not, you might want to steer clear of it.
I generally love a good tragedy, but I confess I wasn't overly impressed with Tender Is the Night. For a book which has garnered so many rave reviews, I found it remarkably flawed. Fitzgerald himself seems to have somewhat agreed with me. Despite referring to Tender Is the Night as his masterpiece and being shocked by its lack of critical and commercial success, he began reconstructing it a few years before his death, placing the flashback chapters at the beginning and making all the textual alterations required by this change. However, he died before he could finish the project, or perhaps he abandoned the project as not worth completing (no one seems to know for sure). A friend of his, Malcolm Cowley, then completed the revision, and for years this was the standard edition of the book. However, the Cowley version has fallen into scholarly disfavour (or so Penguin informs me), and several publishers, Penguin included, now use the first edition, the one that Fitzgerald thought needed revision. Apparently, there are no fewer than seventeen versions of the novel extant, which says much about how satisfied Fitzgerald was with his own work. My guess? Not very much.
I read a version based on the first edition of the book, and to be honest, I can see why Fitzgerald felt it needed some work. Tender Is the Night felt very disjointed to me. To a certain extent, this was because of the aforementioned non-linear structure, which felt a bit jarring to me. However, as far as I'm concerned, that is not the book's only problem, nor even its biggest one. What most annoyed me was the way in which the perspective keeps shifting. Fitzgerald uses an omniscient narrator in Tender Is the Night, but not consistently so; the story is always written from a certain character's perspective. Sometimes the perspective is Rosemary's, sometimes it's Dick or Nicole's; even the minor characters have stretches of the story told from their perspectives, often on the same page as a main character's perspective. To me, these shifts in point of view often felt haphazard, not to mention a little jarring. I didn't think they were particularly effective, either, as they hardly build on each other and don't provide any information that couldn't be gleaned from a 'regular' omniscient narrator. I may be in a minority here, but I think the book would have benefited from a more consistent approach to perspective.
The story itself is a bit haphazard, as well. It occasionally drags, it has little plot, and there are quite a few scenes and storylines which don't really go anywhere. Among several other seemingly unlikely scenes, the book contains a murder, a shooting and a duel, none of which is fully integrated into the story, and none of which is given proper significance. Scenes are introduced and then left so randomly that you have to wonder why Fitzgerald bothered to include them at all. At the risk of being unkind and judgemental, I guess that's what being an alcoholic will do for an author: it gives you wild ideas, but prevents you from carrying them out properly.
Which brings me to the characterisation. I'll probably get a lot of flak for this, but I felt that Fitzgerald's vaunted characterisation was a bit 'off' in this novel. Many of the minor characters are sketchily drawn, whereas the main characters are described well (sometimes brilliantly so), but never properly explained. While Fitzgerald does a good (and occasionally excellent) job of sharing his protagonists' feelings, he hardly ever bothers to explain their motivations. This particularly bothered me in the parts written from Dick Diver's point of view, as Dick is supposed to be a psychiatrist. By rights, he should be analysing people actions and motivations all the time, and asking lots of questions. However, Dick hardly ever asks questions. He does not even ask himself questions. He never wonders why he is so drawn to young girls, or what it is in him that causes him to need to be their saviour. He just observes other people in a way of which any intelligent person (trained psychologist or not) would be capable, and then describes their behaviour in a few felicitous phrases. For this and other reasons, I didn't buy Dick Diver as a psychiatrist. Fitzgerald may have read up on psychology (and undoubtedly learned a lot from the doctors who treated his own wife), but I never found his alter ego convincing as a psychiatrist, let alone a brilliant psychiatrist. To me, Dick has 'writer' written all over him.
It's a pity I kept finding such flaws, because Tender Is the Night obviously had the potential to be amazing. It has all the right ingredients: interesting (albeit snobbish and bored) characters, powerful themes, evocative (albeit frequently vague) writing, you name it. And the story certainly doesn't lack in pathos. It is quite harrowing to watch Dick Diver, a supposedly brilliant and popular man who never lives up to his potential and is increasingly torn asunder by money, alcoholism and his failed marriage to a mentally ill woman, go to pieces, becoming, in his own words, 'the Black Death' ('I don't seem to bring people happiness any more'). The fact that this was Fitzgerald writing about himself, about his own frustrations and shattered dreams, adds considerable poignancy to the reading experience. Even so, Tender Is the Night ended up leaving me fairly cold, as I simply didn't care for Dick enough to be genuinely moved by his descent into failure. While others may find Dick a swell guy, I myself found his complacency and lack of purpose grating, his alcoholism exasperating, and his brilliance skin-deep. I seem to be alone in this opinion, but I stand by it.
In summary, then, I enjoyed and admired aspects of Tender Is the Night, but I don't think they add up to a great whole. While I appreciate Fitzgerald's brutal honesty and the masterful way in which he evokes mutual dependence, isolation and frustration, I can't shake off the feeling that the book could have been much better than it ended up being. And this pains me, as I hate wasted potential as much as Fitzgerald himself seems to have done. As it is, Tender Is the Night is in my opinion not just a book about wasted potential, but an example of wasted potential. It is fitting, I suppose, but no less disappointing for that.
3.5 stars, rounded down to three because I really didn't like it as much as many of the books I have given four stars lately. ...more
I wanted to like this book. I really did. After all, how can one fail to be drawn in by a story about a German boy, the son of a high-ranking Nazi offI wanted to like this book. I really did. After all, how can one fail to be drawn in by a story about a German boy, the son of a high-ranking Nazi officer, who makes friends with a Jewish boy at Auschwitz, only to fail to understand his new friend's situation and meet a gruesome end with him? It's a great premise with plenty of scope for drama. A writer looking to fictionalise ignorance of the Holocaust would be hard-pressed to come up with a better idea.
Sadly, I found myself rather underwhelmed by The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, for several reasons. Firstly, I didn't care for the main character, who is meant to pass for young and naive but really is rather selfish and obnoxious. Secondly, I found the faux-child-like tone of the book cloying and unconvincing, and thirdly, I was annoyed by the plot holes which kept popping up with alarming regularity. So while I admit the book is a page-turner and that I was keen to finish it to find out how it ended, I can't in good conscience give it more than two stars. To give it more than two stars would be an insult to better written books.
I'll start with the plot holes. There are so many of those in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas that I hardly know where to begin. For starters, it beggars belief that a nine-year-old German boy from a prominent Nazi family should never have heard the word 'Jews', nor be aware of what the Nazis think of Jews. Even if his parents tried to shield him from the nastier aspects of war, which Bruno's parents certainly seem to do, he would have been indoctrinated with Nazi propaganda from a young age onwards and would have been quite familiar with the main tenets of National Socialism and its leader, Adolf Hitler. Thus Bruno's complete ignorance of the Führer and the fact that Germany is at war is hard to buy. Similarly, it beggars belief that our young 'hero' could have near-daily conversations with a Jewish friend at Auschwitz for a year without having the faintest idea of what is going on in the camp. After over three hundred conversations with an obviously hungry and filthy friend, you'd think that even a self-centred boy like Bruno would realise that the camp is an unpleasant place where people starve, disappear and die, right? After all that time, it would also have to be blatantly obvious to him that the camp guards aren't very nice people. I know children aren't the most astute observers, but I refuse to believe that a nine-year-old boy who sees prisoners cower before guards, obviously scared, and then hears gunshots, would be surprised at the people on the ground not getting up, having to be carried away instead. Even in the 1940s, when children weren't exposed to action flicks to the extent they are now, boys surrounded by soldiers on a daily basis would have known what a gun was and what it did to the person it was pointed at. So the part of the book where Bruno watches Jewish prisoners being killed and thinks they are 'rehearsing a play' rang completely untrue to me. Quite frankly, I found it a little insulting to be expected to buy that kind of abject ignorance.
Other plot holes? Well, I refuse to believe that a Jewish boy at Auschwitz could meet up with his friend outside the fence nearly every day for a year without ever being detected, or that there could be a hole in the fence big enough for a boy to slip through without any or indeed many of the other Jewish prisoners trying to escape through it. There is simply no way that could have happened in real life, and I scratch my head at Boyne's asking us to believe it. I also scratch my head at some of the less prominent historical plot holes in the book, such as the fact that Hitler and Eva Braun apparently visited people's homes without bodyguards (really?), or that the Germans apparently didn't check their officers' family backgrounds before putting them in charge of their largest concentration camps. Yeah, right. Like that would have happened.
The book doesn't just contain historical inaccuracies, though. Another thing that put me off was the linguistic inaccuracies. For example, Bruno keeps calling Auschwitz 'Out-With' and the Führer 'the Fury', ad nauseam, despite being corrected several times. These are mistakes no German child in his right mind (least of all the child of a high-ranking Nazi officer) would make, and they seriously got in the way of my appreciation of the story, as linguistic inaccuracies tend to do. To make matters worse, Boyne seems to expect us to believe that Shmuel, a nine-year-old boy from the Jewish ghetto in Cracow, Poland, is fluent in German, which is unlikely, even if his mother is a language teacher. In my opinion, such mistakes are inexcusable, even in works of fiction. I can't believe Boyne's editors didn't pick up on these things and make the necessary corrections.
I didn't overly care for Boyne's style of writing, either. While I will (again) admit that I couldn't put The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas down (the premise is good and the tension is ramped up quite adequately), I disliked the pseudo-childish tone of the writing, which felt contrived and unnecessarily cutesy to me, and occasionally made me groan. Furthermore, I found the occasional excursions into Gretel and Shmuel's minds jarring; a more unified point of view (to wit, Bruno's) would have been preferable, in my opinion. Finally, I thought the final chapter felt rather tacked on, and several plot lines weren't tied up well enough for my liking. What was the point of Maria, for instance? What was her background, and what was her role in the story? I'm not sure I understand. I also think much more could have been made of several of the male characters -- Pavel and Bruno's father come to mind, or the eponymous boy in the striped pyjamas. As they are, they are cardboard cut-outs with no personality of their own. To be sure, this is partly because they are described from the point of view of a sensationally unimaginative nine-year-old, but still, I think Boyne could have done a better job infusing his characters with some personality. It would have made a flawed reading experience a bit more memorable.
Finally, like other reviewers I'm having a hard time figuring out the point of the book. What are we supposed to take away from this story? That people can be staggeringly blind to evil, even when it is perpetrated right in front of them? Er, OK. Point taken. It could have been made in a less cloying and mistake-riddled manner, though.
Way to ruin a promising premise, Mr Boyne. ...more
I seldom abandon books after reading just a couple of pages, but in this case I had no choice. Two pages into the book I was so annoyed by McCarthy's I seldom abandon books after reading just a couple of pages, but in this case I had no choice. Two pages into the book I was so annoyed by McCarthy's random use of apostrophes and near-total lack of commas that I felt I had better stop reading to prevent an aneurysm. I'm sure McCarthy is a great storyteller, but unless someone convinces me he has found a competent proof-reader who is not afraid to add some four thousand commas to each of his books, I'll never read another line he's written. I can only tolerate so many crimes against grammar and punctuation. ...more
I must have missed something. Either that, or some wicked hypnotist has tricked the world (and quite a few of my friends, it would seem) into believinI must have missed something. Either that, or some wicked hypnotist has tricked the world (and quite a few of my friends, it would seem) into believing that One Hundred Years of Solitude is a great novel. How did this happen? One Hundred Years of Solitude is not a great novel. In fact, I'm not even sure it qualifies as a novel at all. Rather it reads like a 450-page outline for a novel which accidentally got published instead of the finished product. Oops.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not disputing that Marquez has an imaginative mind. He does, unquestionably. Nor am I disputing that he knows how to come up with an interesting story. He obviously does, or this wouldn't be the hugely popular book it is. As far as I'm concerned, though, he forgot to put the finishing touches to his story. In his rush to get the bare bones on paper, he forgot to add the things which bring a story alive. Such as, you know, dialogue. Emotions. Motivations. Character arcs. Pretty basic things, really. By focusing on the external side of things, and by never allowing his characters to speak for themselves (the dialogue in the book amounts to about five pages, if that), Marquez keeps his reader from getting to know his characters, and from understanding why they do the things they do. The lack of characterisation is such that the story basically reads like an unchronological chronicle of deeds and events that go on for ever without any attempt at an explanation or psychological depth. And yes, they're interesting events, I'll grant you that, but they're told with such emotional detachment that I honestly didn't care for any of the characters who experienced them. I kept waiting for Marquez to focus on one character long enough to make me care about what happened to him or her, but he never did, choosing instead to introduce new characters (more Aurelianos... sigh) and move on. I wish to all the gods of fiction he had left out some twenty Aurelianos and focused on the remaining four instead. With three-dimensional characters rather than two-dimensional ones, this could have been a fabulous book. As it is, it's just a shell.
The Victorian attitude towards sex ought to be a good topic for an interesting book. After all, we all know the clichés and stereotypes, and they're sThe Victorian attitude towards sex ought to be a good topic for an interesting book. After all, we all know the clichés and stereotypes, and they're so outrageous that any attempt to confirm or debunk them or put them into a historical context ought to make for an interesting read. Especially if the person tackling the clichés is someone who has obviously spent years doing his research, reading more Victorian documents and examining more census figures than any modern scholar before him (allegedly).
Sadly, Michael Mason, the author of The Making of Victorian Sexuality, is not a good story-teller. Rather than aiming, journalist-style, to inform his reader in a readable and light-hearted way of the truths and untruths of the myths surrounding the Victorian era, he set out to write a scholarly treatise and succeeded rather too well. He spends a long first chapter detailing his research methods, which I'm sure is vital from a scholarly point of view but doesn't make for very exciting reading. He also frequently loses himself in technical details and theoretical debates of a kind which may be of interest to fellow scholars but won't interest many lay readers. And on top of that, he has a maddening tendency to bring up potentially good stories only to refuse to go into detail. For instance, on several occasions he describes at length dull practices which were apparently common in England and closes by stating that 'things were quite different in Scotland'. He then completely fails to explain how things were different in Scotland, which might have made for a better read than the preceding paragraphs. Likewise, he has a habit of mentioning fascinating-sounding titbits about prostitutes, kept women and their men, only to declare primly that they are not the subject of this book and drop the subject altogether -- an act of literary sadism if ever I saw one. And finally, he completely fails to acknowledge homosexuality in the book. I know homosexuality wasn't particularly well documented during the Victorian era, but surely it's worth some mention?
To be fair, there are interesting facts in the book, in between pages of stultifying tedium. I was quite startled to learn, for instance, that comparison of dates of marriage and dates of baptism of first child has shown that around 40 per cent of English brides in the first half of the nineteenth century were pregnant; in some areas the rate pushed up past the half-way point as the century advanced. So much for Victorian girls being chaste, then. These eyebrow-raising numbers are backed up by statements from contemporary foreign visitors who asserted that English girls were much freer than their American and continental European counterparts and that they were generally given ample opportunity to indulge in 'vices' (especially in the upper classes, it would seem). Interestingly enough, the tables were turned after marriage. While nineteenth-century American and continental European women generally gained much freedom upon marriage, English brides allegedly largely lost theirs, being kept on a tight leash after getting married. Apparently, that too was different in Scotland, but as usual, Mason refuses to go into detail, focusing instead on far less interesting material. He does, however, do a creditable job proving that England's harried housewives might have had better sex lives than previously assumed. Think the term 'female orgasm' is a recent coinage? Not true. Apparently, Victorian men were all too aware that women were capable of climaxing, too, and tried hard to make their wives/mistresses come -- not just because this meant they had succeeded in giving pleasure, but also because female orgasms were said to be a prerequisite for conception. The latter belief may have inhibited a few women (I'd think twice about enjoying sex, too, if I believed it might lead to my fifth pregnancy in as many years), but overall it seems that many Victorian wives enjoyed the act of love-making, and that their husbands did their best to satisfy them. So much for 'lie back and think of England', then.
Mason also convincingly debunks a few other clichés about Victorian prudery, such as the one that sex was absolutely unmentionable in Victorian households. He comes up with a good many quotes from perfectly non-seedy sources which indicate that not only was sex a popular topic of discussion, but it was considered a good activity to partake in, if only for married couples. Apparently, even at the height of Victorian prudishness sex between married partners was advocated as something healthy and pleasurable, something in which all couples should indulge frequently, and not just to produce offspring, either. There was much concern over the fate of those who never had sex, such as old spinsters. Allegedly, one of the reasons why Victorian girls were so often married off at a young age was because it was believed that suppression of their sex drives would lead to all sorts of physical maladies, neurosis, hysteria, etc. It was also believed (even by some eminent doctors) that semen had a positive effect on women's health, so to rob women of this powerful medicine would be an act of cruelty (or so many doctors said). Apparently, the healing properties of semen were a hotly debated topic in the Victorian era. Who would have thought?
Mason also has some interesting things to say about illegitimacy, birth control, the differences between the classes, male masturbation and the way it was dealt with by both legitimate doctors and quacks, but they are few and far between and hidden so expertly among page upon page of theoretical discourse and arguments which don't really seem to go anywhere that I really can't recommend the book to anyone except die-hard historians, sociologists and anthropologists, or people who are thinking of writing a novel set in the Victorian era and need some historical background. Pity -- an awful lot of research clearly went into the book, and it had the potential to be good. ...more
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