Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is a balm for the reading soul. After spending the last few weeks slogging through a couple of books that I still have decided whether to finish (no titles yet, in case I do!), Alexandra Fuller's Cocktail Hour felt like coming home.

Part memoir, part biography, this book is a clear-eyed look at the lives and choices of Fuller's parents, Tim and Nicola Fuller, whose African lives began in the era of British colonialism - the Happy Valley set comes in for more than an occasional mention - span the final, bloody years of Rhodesia, and continue into the sub-Saharan Africa of the twenty-first century. It is a fascinating account of British colonialism and the choices, which Fuller seems to both understand and be unable fathom, of those like her parents who fought so desperately to hold onto their piece of Africa.

It is also a daughter's ode to her mother, all the more poignant for the tragedies and madness that have dotted the landscape of Nicola Fuller's life. Few lines have struck me with more power than Alexandra Fuller's observation that "the pathos and the gift of life is that we cannot know which will be our defining heartbreak, or our most victorious joy."

Initially, I was expecting Cocktail Hour to unfold along the lines of The Last Resort, probably, foolishly, because both are set in Zimbabwe, which is not exactly a hotbed of travel writing or memoirs or literature these days. The books are quite different - Fuller's Cocktail Hour is much heavier than the often-laugh-out-loud The Last Resort - but it is a satisfying read in every respect.

Four stars.

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club

Dorothy L. Sayer's The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club is quite the opposite: a pleasant little read, in traditional, British-cuppa-by-the-fireside fashion. Written in 1928, it's in league with Dame Agatha and other contemporaries of that era. (The afterward notes that the 1920s were the golden era of detective fiction.)

So...elderly General Fentiman is found dead in his favorite chair in his favorite club on Armistice Day. Having suffered from heart trouble for some years, the case would appear to be open and closed, and would have been, except that his also-elderly sister has died on the same day, and the timing of the deaths has important implications on her estate. If he died before 10:07am, the money goes to the young woman who's looked after her for many years; if after 10:07am, it goes to the general's grandsons. And so begins Lord Wimsey's association with the case, as he unravels what should have been a tidy little death.

The Unpleasantness at Bellona Club is an excellent rainy day read for those who enjoy the genre. Mind candy, as it were.

Four stars.

Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip

I was in China last month, and I was in awe. Shanghai, at least, is everything I love in Asia and lots of things I don't. It is high tech, and it is inefficient as hell. It is souped up Ferraris and ancient mopeds, the latter not infrequently usurping the pedestrians' right-of-way on sidewalks. It is gleaming skyscrapers and ancient temples and back alleys that were formerly opium dens. Gucci and Prada and "Gucci" and "Prada." You get the idea. And, yet, Peter Hessler makes me feel I have missed the essential China. (Admittedly, I felt the same after reading Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper.)

Hessler's Country Driving is a compilation of his adventures in China 15-20 years ago, when cars were rare(ish), roads were new, and farmers regularly tossed crops into the middle of the road, where vehicles could not miss them. (As Hessler observes, "there's no other act that so publicly violates both traffic safety and food hygiene," but the practice was tolerated "because threshing is easiest when somebody else's tires do the work.") Also, Hessler encounters a licensed Zhejiang Province Demolitioner, who he notes was fully licensed to blow up the province. Literally: mountain upon mountain met its end at the hands of this particular demolitioner, who carried a separate certification attesting to the fact that he'd never had an accident - no small thing in a place where Hessler repeatedly witnesses flame in close proximity to natural gas.

Some of the tales were familiar from his Strange Stones, and the commentary on immigration from farm to factory was slightly reminiscent of Factory Girls (whose author, I learned in the acknowledgements is Hessler's wife), but on the whole, Country Driving was a look at lighter and funnier side of life in China.

Five stars for those who love travel writing and tales of the wider world. 

The Pursuit of Love

Admittedly, I was drawn to The Pursuit of Love because of the author - I was curious about Nancy Mitford's work, given that I'd read much of her, and a book about her (and her sisters), but nothing by her. Happily, the book lived up to my hopes, and it's a delightful, period "classic" in the same vein as Evelyn Waugh or Irène Némirovsky.

As Amazon notes, "The Pursuit of Love is a classic comedy about growing up and falling in love among the privileged and eccentric." In that sense, the Mitfords are just one in a long line of English aristocrats run amok (the Mountbattens and Carnarvons being others of the same "species"), whose dysfunction makes for entertaining reading, particularly from this distance. Mitford was widely known to have drawn liberally from her own family's quirks in creating her characters, particularly Uncle Matthew, the blustering patriarch; contemporaries mourned the passing of both the real man and the fictional one when David Bertram Ogilvy Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale died in 1958.

The protagonist of The Pursuit of Love is Linda, the most beautiful and wayward daughter, who has been denied a traditional upbringing, never been to school, and falls for a succession of wildly inappropriate men (at least by her family's standards): first a pompous City man, then a deep red Communist, and finally a French duke whose reputation precedes him.

Still, this is a light, fun read, and I was happy to learn upon its conclusion that this is the first of three novels Mitford wrote with this set of characters. I've already added the others to my reading list.

Five stars. 

Rich People Problems

Kevin Kwan's Rich People Problems is a deliciously satisfying end to the trilogy that began with Crazy Rich Asians. The book opens with family matriarch Su Yi on her deathbed, and the Shang-Youngs descending on the family estate from all corners of the globe to stake their claim to their share of her fortune. Kwan has more in store for readers, though, as the story twists and turns through Singaporean history, and Su Yi's role in events of many decades ago.

As Su Yi lives out her final days and the frenzy over her fortune intensifies, Kwan weaves is wickedly fun sub-plots that range from a pot of laksa being overturned most ingloriously to a wedding proposal at an Indian palace captured by the paparazzi. Kitty Pong, Colette Bing, Oliver T'sien, and even Carlton Bao all have their moments, which makes Rich People Problems such a satisfying end to a series that started out strong, but was followed by the middling-by-comparison China Rich Girlfriend.

Five stars.

The Girls in the Picture

Melanie Benjamin strikes again! After taking on the Lindberghs, Mrs. Tom Thumb, and Truman Capote, Benjamin turned her attention to Frances Marion (like Babe Paley, I asked myself, who??) and Mary Pickford. Frances Marion, I learned, was one of the first - and best - screenwriters in Hollywood. She also happened to be one of few women to ply the trade in the early days of movie making. More inexplicably - although Benjamin certainly does her darnedest to explain it - she was best friends with Ms. Pickford (née Gladys Smith) who was, it seems, rather despicable. 

As always, Benjamin has done her homework and brings her characters fully to life, their fun, fame, and flaws equally on display. Hers is a no-holds-barred style and goes a long way toward capturing her protagonists as they really were (one imagines). She did omit Pickford's children, which is perhaps understandable given that, according to Wikipedia, "Both children later said their mother was too self-absorbed to provide real maternal love. ... Ronnie recalled that "Things didn't work out that much, you know. But I'll never forget her. I think that she was a good woman." 

Her topic - the golden days of Hollywood - has certainly been thoroughly mined (West of Sunset and All the Stars in the Heavens came to mind regularly), but in Frances Marion, Benjamin has found a sympathetic character whose story is likely new to her reading audience. (That said, I do live under a pretty big rock, pop culture-wise, so maybe I've just revealed myself as a complete ignoramus.) On occasion, some of Fran's thoughts seemed forced, or overly filtered through the lens of 21st century America - maybe the actresses resented the patrician attitudes and wandering hands, or maybe 100 years ago, women couldn't envision the world to be otherwise. Who knows? I wasn't around, so I won't pretend I do. More interesting is that the type of people drawn to Hollywood, or more to the point, the types of behavior they seem to openly espouse, hasn't changed in the past century.

I liked The Girls in the Picture and read it quickly. I did think that at times it felt Benjamin was writing just to write; that is, whatever point she'd been working to establish or image she wished to evoke had long been accomplished, but the words still flowed and so she committed them to paper. This is a relatively minor flaw, but enough to say that, had the book been 50 or so pages shorter, I'd have been that much more disposed toward it.

Four stars. 

Lilac Girls

I could not finish Lilac Girls. A little background: the three protagonists are Carolina, an American socialite whiling away the years in a plum positions in the French consulate; Herta, an ambitious doctor with a dark past who accepts a post in Ravensbrück to advance her career; and Kasia, a naïve Polish teenager who joins the Polish resistance for love and for excitement. Their paths begin to intersect when Kasia is arrested and shipped to Ravensbrückalong with a goodly number of those she knows. 

Lilac Girls is beautifully written, the characters well-developed and sympathetic (yes, even Nazi doctor Herta). It’s a visceral, moving story. And therein lay the problem. At the end of the day, I simply didn’t want to read anymore horrors, real or embellished or otherwise. Enough terrible things fill our newspapers and news feeds for me to force myself through a book, thoughtfully written and engaging or no. That’s not a criticism of the author or her work, and I’m certainly not recommending against reading it. But me, today, I need lighter fair, words that feed the spirit rather than ravage it.