Thursday, October 27, 2016

Nuns Behaving Badly: Tales of Music, Magic, Art, and Arson in the Convents of Italy

The title of Craig Monson's work on naughty nuns doesn't leave much to the imagination. It is, as stated, a compilation of incidents involving Italy's nuns in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries  - taken straight from the Vatican archives, no less. Some were rather mundane, certainly by today's standards: a nun who loved to sing, for example, and had to be barred from doing so by formal decree, only to fall afoul of the decree. Others - such as the Calabrian nuns who set fire to their convent in order to escaped the cloistered life - are admittedly more shocking.

As Monson discovered in the course of his research, a typical nun's life was rather dull. Surprised? I wasn't either. I was surprised to learn, though that the life of a nun often began at the age of six or seven, and sometimes as young as two. Also, that there were aristocratic convents, convents for converted prostitutes (the appropriately named Convertites), and for everyone in between. What's more, the convent was the usual choice for younger daughters, as the Church's dowry requirements were significantly less than a husband's.

All of which is to say that as much as I enjoyed reading about the episodes themselves (sneaking relatives into convents! sneaking out to the opera! an escalating dispute over convent cushions!), I enjoyed even more learning learning about this aspect of life during and after the Renaissance. I've commented before of being impressed by the power of the Church and its total and utter domination of life; I come away from Nuns Behaving Badly amazed again at the acts committed in the name of God.

Amen.

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Mr. Wilson's War: From the Assassination of McKinley to the Defeat of the League of Nations

So here's the thing: 200 pages in, the only war Mr. Wilson had fought was against Villa, in Mexico. And I think he was still fighting it when I finally called time. I can't say I wasn't warned. The title clearly states that this book chronicles events from 1901 onward, but I am guilty of not taking the title at face value. Thus far, Woodrow Wilson's upbringing, years at Princeton, first marriage (death did them part), and remarriage while in her first term as President have been chronicled at length, along with events more closely related to war, albeit not necessarily the one raging in Europe.

More than the plodding pace, what did me in was the poor grammar and punctuation. I'm not sure whether this is unique to the electronic (Nook) format or if the print version suffers from the same dearth of commas and apostrophes, but I was nearly driven to distraction by this issue.

In short, I come away more disappointed than anything. I had high hopes, as I've heard wonderful things about the author, John Dos Passos, but I just couldn't make this one work for me. Perhaps that's a testament to some of the wonderful World War I writing I've already done: The Guns of August and The Beauty and the Sorrow, which both present a holistic view of the war, particularly the causes; Dead Wake, which chronicles the Lusitania disaster; and, of course, The Last of the Doughboys, which is a collection of memoirs from the Americans who served in Mr. Wilson's war - including one who was stationed on the Mexican border.

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

The Summer Before the War

It's not often that I finish a book, only to return to the beginning to begin rereading it (albeit quickly!) with an eye toward anything I missed the first time around. Helen Simonson's The Summer Before the War is just such a rare book.

On one level, it is the story of the inhabitants of the Rye, a quintessential English village, as they come to terms with this new war - and the new world it ushers in. It is peopled with rich characters and not a few petty rivalries. The Kent family is the heart of the story, with Aunt Agatha and Uncle John and their nephews Daniel and Hugh. Into their midst enters Beatrice Nash, come to town to teach Latin, a proposition which many in the town find downright scandalous. She arrives in Rye in the middle of that last summer when England was "Old England," and when the English, and the upper classes in particular, had every faith that war could be averted. Simonson captures the end of the age as well as those who lived it.

On a deeper level, The Summer Before the War is the story of stigma: the stigma of insufficient patriotism; the stigma of acts that mar an otherwise upstanding reputation; the stigma of loving the wrong person - or loving the right person at the wrong time; the stigma of not being British (or not being British enough). The stigma of being a Gypsy. From war crimes to homosexuality, Simonson handles heavy topics with a deft touch. In fact, her work is so fine that it was not until I'd finished this novel that I realized how consistently this thread runs through the book. Moreover, and like Simonson's last novel, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, Simonson's characters are multi-dimensional and feel entirely real. Their adventures are fun, touching, and highly readable. The relationships that she crafts are a strong point of the story.

I have read many  novels with World War I as the backdrop, and no small number of these British. (The Walnut Tree and Somewhere in France are but two that trade on this setting.) To my mind, though, The Summer Before the War is the richest, most involved, and most emotionally charged of those I have read. From the presence of the Belgian refugees to the emergence of women's rights, Simonson has created a story in which going over the top is only part of the story of England's war.

Tuesday, October 4, 2016

West With the Night

Born in 1902, Beryl Markham was a woman ahead of her time. A champion racehorse trainer, author, and bush pilot, Markham was the first female pilot in Kenya and flew solo across the Atlantic during the early years of the aviation age. She is also a fine author, as evidenced by this memoir, in which she writes what must be one of my all-time favorite lines. Writing of an encounter with low-level Italian bureaucrats in the years immediately preceding World War II, Markham writes that there is "no hell like uncertainty, and no greater menace to society than an Italian with three liras worth of authority." I'll have to remember that the next time I'm bemoaning a peon on a power trip.

West with the Night offers not only a glimpse into Markham's own remarkable life (if Gertrude Bell was the Desert Queen, perhaps Markham is the queen of the savanna), but also into British colonialism. Unlike White Mischief, which focuses almost entirely on the British experience in Kenya, West with the Night includes extensive memories of Markham living the "authentic" Kenyan experience, including being "moderately eaten by [a] large lion." Although I was most interested in Beryl the bush pilot, Beryl the bush hunter is also a fascinating study, particularly as this phase of life preceded the former by many years - making Markham but a girl when she would join native tribesman on boar hunts!

Markham may have been ahead of her time in some respects, but in her regard for native populations, she was very much a woman of her time and place. The early pages, in particular, reek of colonialism; Markham's description of the various Kenyan people are jarring, and the depth of British imperialism is something to behold. To say it is a long way from West with the Night to The Last Resort is to rather understate things.