The Diary of Napoleonic Foot Soldier by Jakob Walter

In 1812, by Illarion Pryashnikov, via

Reviewed by Susanna Allred

Published: 1991

It's about: The Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier is the memoir of Jakob Walter, a German conscript in Napoleon's Grand Army. While many veterans of the Napoleonic Wars eventually wrote memoirs of their military service, Walter's is unique among them because it is written from the point of view of a private foot soldier. All first-person accounts to have surfaced so far have been written by men of the officer class who were more educated, cultured, and ideologically invested than he. Consequently, Walter's diary is especially valuable for its candid insights into the day-to-day experiences of a lowly conscript in Napoleon's massive military campaigns.

The Diary itself is divided into three sections; the 1806-7 campaign in Poland, the 1809 campaign in Austria, and the 1812 campaign in Russia. All three are a mix of Walter's casual anthropological observations of Eastern European culture, his accounts of combat in various battles, and personal reminiscences of military culture among foot soldiers. By far, the bulk of the Diary focuses on his memories of the retreat from Moscow, and the long months of starvation, cold, disease, and reprisals from Russian cossacks that it entailed. This section is rendered especially vivid though Walter's focus on his unending efforts to scavenge enough food to keep himself and his friends from starvation: a handful of raw meat from a slaughtered horse one night, a bit of cabbage boiled with dog fat the next. Nevertheless, the visceral nature of his memories is balanced by an off-hand and modest tone. 

I thought: Jakob Walter's memoir is a concise and engaging account of a foot soldier's observation of the turmoil wrought by Napoleon's wars. By this point in history, most people's mental image of those wars is heavily influenced by fiction: War and Peace, Horatio Hornblower, and Master and Commander study the Napoleonic Wars through the eyes of ideologically engaged and aristocratic literary heroes. By contrast, the historical Jakob Walter embarked on his first campaign as a foot soldier conscripted out of private life as a stonemason. Furthermore Walter was remarkably indifferent to Napoleon's personal charisma and political principles for two reasons. First, Walter's native German principality of Swabia had recently been made a tributary state of Napoleonic France; second, as a low-ranking private citizen, Walter had little to gain from his participation in the wars.

For the most part, the Diary actually benefits as a work of literature from Walter's political indifference and lesser education. His prose style is plain, direct, informal, and completely readable. Walter generally restricts his attention to his own experiences, generally refusing to speculate or comment on the political context of the war or the motivations of the generals and princes who directed its progress. While he does not shrink from fully recounting the shocking deprivations of the retreat, he is never stoops to self-pity or recrimination. However, this same limited scope can become frustrating. As a reader, I very much wanted to know what Walter thought of his own conscription and Napoleon's military projects, but the author is generally silent on these matters.

Walter's self-portrait is filled with intriguing contradictions. In the 1806-7 portion especially, he casually recounts drinking binges, brutally requisitioning supplies, and violently forcing Polish peasants to act as guides and translators with little  embarrassment. This unapologetic roughness is offset by pious allusions to his Catholic beliefs, and his evident affection for the brother and two sisters from whom he is separated by war. At one point, he finds a book he deems insulting to his faith and "bound a stone to this book, and sank it in the big lake." When Walter, nearly dead from typhus and malnutrition, is finally able to visit with his younger sister after the retreat from Moscow he mentions that they "tarried as a loving brother and sister for an hour's time and then parted again with tears." However, Walter's personal contradiction add up to a convincing portrayal of a conflicted, complex human.

Verdict: Stick it on the shelf. 

Reading Recommendations: For an interesting historical comparison, read In Deadly Combat: A German Soldier's Memoir of the Eastern Front Gottlob Herbert Bidermann's account of his military service to Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union.

Warnings: Some mild references to alcohol.

Favorite excerpts:

He [Napoleon] watched his army pass by in the most wretched condition. What he may have felt in his heart is impossible to surmise, His outward appearance seemed indifferent and unconcerned over the wretchedness of his soldiers; only ambition and lost honor may have made themselves felt in his heart; and, although the French and Allies shouted into his ears many oaths and curses about his own guilty person, he was still able to listen to them unmoved.

What I'm reading next: If On a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner, via

 Reviewed by Susanna Allred

Published: 1971

It's about: In the spring of 1970, historian Lyman Ward begins writing a biography of his deceased grandmother, Susan Burling Ward, an acclaimed illustrator of the American West in the heyday of its settlement. However, the project assumes a profoundly personal nature beyond mere ties of family affection. Ward has recently suffered through an illness that left him disabled, and an unexpected divorce from his wife of over twenty-five years. He believes that studying his grandmother's own unhappy marriage, he can find some solace for his own failures as a husband. Moreover, Ward feels displaced and disgusted by the rapidly changing social norms of the nineteen-sixties and -seventies, blaming them for the dissolution of his former life as a family man and respected professor.

A century earlier, Ward's grandmother, Susan Burling abandons a burgeoning career as a New York artist to marry a soft-spoken, kind-hearted mining engineer named Oliver Ward who feels compelled to make a name for himself in the still-unsettled West. Susan's faith in Oliver as a husband gradually fades over the first decade of their marriage: Oliver neither shares her cultural sophistication nor possesses the business acumen to procure a comfortable income for their growing family. Susan is frequently forced to support the family through her efforts as a writer and artist, even as Oliver's career requires that they endure primitive and dangerous living conditions in mining camps scattered throughout the remotest parts of the West. Gradually, Susan begins to fall in love with Oliver's friend Frank Sargent, a fellow cultured ex-patriate from the East Coast. Nevertheless, both Oliver and Susan struggle to maintain their faltering union.

I thought: Angle of Repose deserves a place in the canon of great "adultery" literature. Beneath the narrative, the novel concerns itself with the problem of compromising personal happiness in order to fulfill the responsibilities of marriage. Like Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, Angle of Repose finds a fruitful source of dramatic tension in the psychological differences between two halves of a married couple. Susan Burling is a vivacious, emotionally volatile woman with a voracious appetite for culture and conversation. Oliver Ward is a relatively uneducated and introverted man so averse to disagreement that he can scarcely bring himself to object when his employers cheat him or his wife begins to fall in love with his best friend. Individually, the two hold themselves to high standards of comportment, but united in the harsh conditions of the West, the two become a study in complementary weaknesses. Oliver retreats into silent brooding and alcohol, while Susan drifts into a platonic affair and writes impassioned letters and novel chronically her unhappiness.

The novel distinguishes itself through Lyman Ward's acerbic commentary comparing the conservative morality of his grandparents to the shifting morals of mid-century America. Embittered by his own divorce and made skeptical of the very idea of progress by his career as a historian, the curmudgeonly Ward looks on seventies-era liberality towards morality with amused disdain. At one point Ward's secretary, a twenty-year-old divorcee who possesses vague ideals of sexual liberation and little talent for introspection declares "I know, all that business about never seeing your wife naked. They were so puritan about their bodies in those days, it was bound to have screwed up their minds." Ward demands to know what Shelly sees in his grandmother's portrait.

Hypocrisy? Honesty? Prudery? Timidity? Or discipline, self-control, modesty? Modesty, there's a word 1970 can't even conceive. Is that a woman I want to show making awkward love on a camp cot? Do you want to hear her erotic cries? Is that a woman to snicker at because she was fastidious?

Angle of Repose is much more than stirring defense of Victorian morality or an indictment of seventies liberality. It sympathetically draws out the difficulty of attempting to reconcile personal ambition within the strictures of a committed relationship, a problem universal to all marriages, regardless of time or place. The vivid juxtaposition of the two eras in question also serves as a warning against caricaturing previous generations in order to justify the contemporary cultural changes. Stegner unflinchingly depicts both the failings of Susan and Oliver's rigid, formal commitment; and Shelly's feckless, on-off relationship with her husband.


Verdict: Stick it on the shelf.

Reading Recommendations:

Warnings: Some academic discussions of sex, a few swear words.

Favorite excerpts:

1970 knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator  will click and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off the windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead. 

What I'm reading next: Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier

The Last Man by Mary Shelley

 

Mary Shelley, via

Reviewed by Susanna

Published: 1826

It's about: The year is 2096. In the past few decades, England has retired the monarchy in favor of a republican government, Greece has reconquered Constantinople, and men have begun to travel long distances by hot air balloon. Now, however, plague ravages the globe, upending law and order, breaking down social barriers, and giving rise to a deadly messianic cult.

The end of the world is observed by Lionel Verney, an English historian who, by accident of fortune, is both immune to the plague and uniquely placed to document its progress. Verney's account begins as an autobiography: he spends the first third of the novel relating his and his sister Perdita's impoverished youth as orphans in the rugged countryside, his eventual friendship with the former Crown Prince of England, Adrian Windsor (who paradoxically cherishes republican beliefs); his courtship of Adrian's vivacious sister Idris; and Perdita's marriage to the brooding, tempestuous Lord Raymond.

The pastoral romance of the first third takes an abrupt, Gothic turn when a seemingly-abandoned ship drifts into an English harbor. Its lone surviving crew member lives only long enough to spread a deadly, voracious contagion to London. As England's population rapidly dies off, Adrian attempts to stave off chaos and lead the few survivors to safety across the English Channel, only to encounter warfare, accident, and further sickness.

I thought: Mary Shelley is better known for Frankenstein, but The Last Man is her lost masterpiece. At the time of its publication in 1826, the possibility of humanity's extinction was considered grotesque and almost offensive. Consequently, the novel languished in obscurity for over a century. It was only after the possibility of a nuclear holocaust was realized in the mid-twentieth century that critics began to revisit The Last Man and recognize its innovative and prescient nature. Specifically, Shelley is the first major writer to treat the theme of apocalypse as a primarily secular, scientific event, and to thoroughly explore is social repercussions. Novels like The Walking Dead and The Road, which prominently feature dwindling bands of survivors attempting to preserve some semblance of morality and civilization in the face of a dubious future, can claim The Last Man in their literary ancestry.

Nevertheless, The Last Man is a highly unique work that differs significantly from its modern descendants. Unlike the emotionally spartan works of fellow post-apocalyptic writers Cormac McCarthy, George Orwell, and Ray Bradbury; Shelley is an unabashedly emotive writer. She ably demonstrates her place in the pantheon of Romantic writers with numerous, rapturously beautiful descriptions of pastoral abundance and rugged wilderness. She is also adept at turning debates on moral philosophy between her characters into riveting, poetic exploration of psychology. These two qualities are united in Shelley's exploration of the psychological differences between Raymond who believes that

Our virtues are the quick-sands, which shew themselves at calm and low water; but let the waves arise and the winds buffet them, and the poor devil whose hope was in their durability finds them sink from under him.

While Adrian muses that

The choice is with us; let us will it, and our habitation becomes a paradise. For the will of man is omnipotent, blunting the arrows of death, soothing the bed of disease, and wiping away the tears of agony.

Shelley's skill at crafting elaborate Gothic thrills only fully comes to the fore in the latter two thirds of the novel, as she expertly conjures up bizarre and unsettling images, increasing their intensity and frequency as the horrors of the plague ramp up. They foreshadow social chaos by disturbing the orderly progress of natural events. As the survivors cross the English Channel

three other suns, alike burning and brilliant, rushed from various quarters of the heavens toward the great orb; they whirled round it. The glare of light was intense to our dazzled eyes; the sun itself seemed to join in the dance, while the sea burned like a furnace, like all Vesuvius alight, with flowing lava beneath.   

Her ability to seamlessly combine political commentary, horror, romance, and nature writing makes for a unique, complex reading experience that readers return to repeatedly. Fans of Wuthering Heights, The Road, and Edgar Allan Poe should make this lost classic a priority. 

Verdict: Stick it on the shelf!

Reading Recommendations: The Wordsworth Classics edition has an engaging introduction and notes by Pamela Bickley and the Wikipedia entry contains a detailed plot summary and character list.

Warnings: None.

Favorite excerpts:

There were few books that we dared read; few, that did not cruelly deface the painting we bestowed on our solitude, by recalling combinations and emotions never more to be experienced by us. Metaphysical disquisitions; fiction, which wandering from all reality, lost itself in self-created errors; poets of times so far gone by, that to read of them was as to read of Atlantis and Utopia....

What I'm reading next: Angle of Repose

Review: Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar, via

Reviewed by Susanna

Published: 1963 in Spanish, translated into English in 1966

It's about: Horacio Oliveira, a disaffected Argentine intellectual, wanders the streets of 1950s Paris, meeting occasionally with a group of beatniks and bohemians to sip mate, listen to jazz records, discuss modern art, and debate politics. He is accompanied by his uneducated mistress, La Maga, an aspiring singer and single mother to a baby boy she has fancifully named Rocamadour. Aside from La Maga, each member the group (which has dubbed itself the Serpentine Club) appears to exceptionally well-educated but exhibits little genuine pleasure in art and literature. The only real enjoyment they seem to derive from their meetings is in weaving intricate webs of allusions to esoteric artists and philosophers (Anacreon and Piet Mondrian among them) in which to entrap and mock the ignorant Oliveira's mistress, who has high ambitions for cultural sophistication. The group abruptly disbands when Rocamadour dies in the middle of one such gathering and La Maga, crushed by grief, disappears. Oliveira, heretofore cold and withdrawn towards his mistress, departs on a journey back to Argentina to search for her and gradually descends into madness.   

I thought: Plot summary feels almost entirely beside the point when discussing Hopscotch because the novel's "point," so to speak, is communicated more through its experimental style than its story. Some critics have classed Hopscotch as a sort of anti-novel for its flgrant abandonment of traditional structures and language. Case-in-point, Cortazar prefaces the book with this curious bit of advice on the possible sequences of chapters in which readers can approach the novel:

In its own way, this book consists of many books, but two books above all.

The first can be read in a normal fashion and it ends with Chapter 56, at the close of which there are three garish little stars which stand for the words The End. Consequently, the reader may ignore what follows with a clean conscience.

The second should be read by beginning with Chapter 73 and then following the sequence indicated at the end of each chapter.

Cortazar's other innovations on the traditional novel's conventions leave the reader disoriented and floating in a playfully dissonant wash of citations, dialogue, allusions, references, and sudden shifts in narrative voice. For example, Chapter 34 tells two stories, one is the personal reminiscences of a retired businessman, and the other is Oliveira's stream-of-conscience mourning for his lost mistress. The catch is that Cortazar alternates one line on the page of the first story with one line of the other until the end of the chapter. Individual chapters appear that have, superficially at least, nothing to do with the plot of the novel. Many of them, labeled Morelliana are the philosophical musings of a fictional literary critic and writer named Morelli. The ninety-nine expendable chapters at the end of the first book, skip unpredictably among the Serpentine Club's debates, Oliveira's thoughts as he settles into the mental institution, and quotations from various post-modern writers, presented without further explanation. At various points, Cortazar invents new spellings for words, invents new words entirely, or abruptly slips into a new language.

So, if this deliberately difficult style communicates the purpose of Hopscotch more than the plot, what is the purpose? Hopscotch is the sort of novel that, like Ulysses, uses the author's encyclopedic knowledge of arts and letters to evade easy summation. But one persistently recurring theme is finding authenticity in a world where passions and desires are articulated through cliche. Oliveira's suspicions of his authenticity run so deeply that at the moment he realizes Rocamadour has died, he coolly asks himself "why turn on the light and shout if it won't do any good?" and curses himself for being "an actor", rather than raising the alarm. The desire for authenticity underlines each emotionally void meeting of the Serpentine Club, just as it drives La Maga's search for intellectual fulfillment. And it is evident in Cortazar's experimental style. Every departure from traditiona is meant to expose the artificiality of the conventional novel and challenge the reader's assumptions of how a novel ought to be composed and why they read.

All that said, it's my opinion that Hopscotch is not the kind of book one reads for pleasure, at least not on the first attempt (I honestly can't say that I enjoyed it). It takes expansive knowledge of the art and literature of, and influential to the post-modern era to grasp the majority of Cortazar's references. At five hundred and sixty-four pages, the purposefully difficult style will try the patience of even the most die-hard wannabe-beatnik. For reasons I can appreciate without necessarily enjoying the book, Hopscotch has been hailed as one of the most important twentieth -century novels, and for professional students of literature, it undoubtedly is. However, there are many other brilliant and innovative books that open themselves up to readers more willingly. 

Verdict: Stick it on the shelf. 

Reading Recommendations: Browse the Wikipedia entry on Hopscotch; it gives a thorough outline of the novel's themes, characters, and plot.

Warnings: Some veiled descriptions of sex and some swearing.   

Favorite excerpts:

I swallow my soup. Then, in the midest of what I am reading, I think: The soup is in me, I have it in this pouch which I will never see, my stomach." I feel with two fingers and I touch the mass, the motion of the food there inside. And I am this, a bag with food inside of it.

Then the soul is born: "No, I am not that."
No that (let's be honest for once)
yes, I am that. With a very pretty means of excape for the use of the finicky: "I am also that." Or just a step up: "I am in that."

What I'm reading next: The Last Man, by Mary Shelley.

Review: Eight Pieces of Empire by Lawrence Scott Sheets

Chechen rebels in Grozny, 1995. (via)

Reviewed by Christina
[I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.]

Published: 2011

It's about: "Not with a bang, but with a quiet, ten-minute address on Christmas Day 1991: this is how the Soviet Union met its end.  But in the wake of that one deceptively calm moment, conflict and violence soon followed.  Some of the emergent new countries began to shed totalitarianism while others sought to revive their own dead empires or were led by ex-Soviet leaders who built equally or even more repressive political machines.  Since the late 1980s, Lawrence Scott Sheets lived and reported from the former USSR and saw firsthand the reverberations of the empire's collapse.  Eight Pieces of Empire draws readers into the people, politics, and day-to-day life of the region, painting a vivid portrait of a tumultuous time.
Sheets's stories about people living through these tectonic shifts of fortune- a trio of female saboteurs in Chechnya, the chaos of newly independent Georgia in the early 1990s, young hustlers eager to strike it rich in the post-Soviet economic vacuum- reveal the underreported and surprising ways in which the ghosts of empire still haunt these lands and the world."  (back cover of my paperback edition)

I thought: I loved it.  I've never been particularly interested in war reporting, and I didn't really realize that's what I was getting into when I requested a copy of Eight Pieces of Empire.  I didn't know that this book would be difficult to read, and if I had I probably would have politely declined.  BUT.  I'm so glad it came my way.  You know those books that force you to examine how little you know about the world?  This is one of those books.

Lawrence Scott Sheets is a strong, journalistic writer (he covered the former USSR, especially the Causasus, for Reuters and NPR) and he fills these dire conflicts with some bizarre characters and absurd situations.  I can totally get behind the stories and the people in them; in a lot of ways, things weren't so different where/when I lived in Kazakhstan.  And despite the innately foreign and occasionally gruesome subject matter, Sheets makes his material human and relatable. 

There are a few stylistic things that grated on my nerves- the overuse of scare quotes,  Sheets' inconsistency in referring to characters sometimes by their given names and sometimes by their surnames, and a few other minor quirks.  But the book itself is excellently paced and so well-written.  Combine that with important and interesting recent history- I would never not recommend this.  It is interesting and worthwhile, especially for a reader who has any connection to or special interest in ex-Soviet countries.

Verdict: Stick it on the shelf!  сейчас!

Reading Recommendations:  Be ready for the war violence.  Technically this is a quick, easy read.  Emotionally, not so.

Warnings:  Appropriately grisly descriptions of war violence.  And a couple of swears.

What I'm reading next:  McSweeney's Issue 11

(P.S. - Sorry for not doing something funny today.  As you may have noticed, all the BB writers have a little preoccupied lately.  If you need a laugh, you can check out last year's post.)