{misc.} - - - - - speare

Poor old -----speare. 

Did his works go out that window? 

I would definitely have sacrificed Virgil first.

Wonderfully pretentious library from here via here)

I wonder if I could get away with a nicely gilded "BIGGLES" somewhere...

{review} aesop's mirror

Maryalice Huggins Aesop's Mirror (2009)

However wrong, it is always harder to feel sorry for the rich.

 

After my unhappy encounter with object biography in the form of The Hare with Amber Eyes (in sum: not a fan), I was a bit wary of another object bio. However, I wanted to read Aesop's Mirror because I had worked on Aesop as a graduate student. It suffers from rather a lot of the same thing that turned me off The Hare -- namely too much personal voice at the expense of the object, and an overemphasis on the amateur's delight in basic research -- but the story that the voice tells is an interesting one. 

An antique restorer with a special interest in mirrors stumbles on a very large figural mirror at a Rhode Island estate auction. It depicts, in vivid Rococo style, Aesop's fable of the Fox and the Grapes (which I am told by wikipedia is a story illustrative of cognitive dissonance). The mirror's history was murky (oh dear, I sense some mirror puns coming up) but Maryalice Huggins had a feeling that this find was special. At the same sale she also spent US50,000 dollars on a broken down couch which subsequently was on-sold after restoration for US190,000 dollars. One gathers that her eye for antiques is rather good.

Huggins sets out to track down the provenance of her mirror. Could it really be an important lost English piece by eighteenth century master carver Thomas Johnson? Or is it a product of a pattern-book, and nevertheless still - indeed, more - important as a very early piece of homegrown American carving of the 1830-1840s? The experts cannot agree at all, and Huggins has quite a battle on her hands against a number of the prejudices that automatically arise about something that just does not fit into the canon: as a major work on early American (fake) furniture advises, "Rare is an offensive four-letter word. Unique is an abomination." (source) 

Some of the experts she consults truly are beastly, but I felt a little uncomfortable in places with her remarks on the snobbishness of scholars towards her enthusiastic enquiries. (I can certainly sympathise: in the area of antiques, vast sums of money can be made courtesy of a scholarly stamp of authenticity.)

Huggins and her mirror (source - I'll be so pleased if anyone 

can answer the question on this link too)

Huggins' book explores a wide range of interesting topics, which as someone who knows zero about Rococo mirrors and the American antique industry, I found quite fascinating. The mirror itself, somewhat ironically, becomes less and less significant to the story as Huggins explores who might have owned it, and from where it might have come originally. She connects the mirror to the Brown family (of Brown University fame), and her archival research enables her to piece together a remarkable - albeit speculative - history involving furniture, Grand Tours ("The outset of the Franco-Prussian War sorely affected her shopping"), and even Charles Parnell, the Irish nationalist. The theme of the mirror, however, remains relevant:

The antiques business was changing, and I was growing a little tired of the politics and the market in general. The theme of the sour grapes now hit home. I half convinced myself I didn't want the mirror anymore and began not to care if I ever saw it again. The fruits it bore, the allure of its former owners, I believed no longer interested me. There was always something else to fall in love with.

This, for me, was perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book - the object becomes a burden and a responsibility and a cause of some professional ill-feeling, yet it had such an effect on Huggins that, in the end, although she has sent it for auction, she feels only relief that it is passed in and returned to her care:

Despite the use of technology in determining value, art's effect cannot ever be explained factually. It is really very simple. If a piece has life, people respond to it... After years of investigation, there was really nothing to be proved that could enhance the experience of seeing something I found beautiful. Everything I needed to know about the Fox and Grapes mirror, I knew the moment I first saw it.

So...? I liked the bold speculation backed up by historical research, even if it was pretty speculative. I learned a lot about early American furniture, Rhode Island society, mirrors and the dirty side of the antiques trade.

Anyone read any good object biographies lately? I think I'm hooked...

{weekend words}

As it happens... we have a detailed account of the work habits of one of antiquity's more prolific scholars, the Elder Pliny. In a well-known letter (3.5), the Younger Pliny describes the solution to his uncle's (evidently unusual) desire for reading efficiency: he had a lector read to him over meals and scolded a friend who made the lector slow down to repeat a mispronounced word (11-12); when taken a bath he had a book read to him or dictated notes (14); he traveled with a secretary, who performed the same duties in any spare moments (15); to allow similar accommodation during the journey itself, he always used a litter in preference to walking (16).

William A. Johnson (2010) 

Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire

An instance of the ancient audio book? I wonder if this would improve my efficiency. You can read the letter in full in English (scroll down to 3.5), rather archaic English or in Latin.

{review} the song of achilles

Madeline Miller The Song of Achilles (2011) 

 

I turned. Thetis stood at the edge of the clearing, her bone-white skin and black hair bright as slashes of lightning. The dress she wore clung close to her body and shimmered like fish-scale. My breath died in my throat. ‘You were not to be here,’ she said. The scrape of jagged rocks against a ship’s hull. She stepped forward, and the grass seemed to wilt beneath her feet. She was a sea-nymph, and the things of earth did not love her.

Madeline Miller has produced a remarkable redaction of the story of the Greek hero Achilles - the 'best of the Achaians' [Greeks] of the Trojan War. Miller has a real feel for the stories behind the Trojan War saga, not least The Iliad. The result is a very much humanized presentation of the great hero, told from the perspective of his lover Patroclus.  

The Iliad is a hard read. It helps to like men and battles. It is a wonderful poem if you can stay the distance. Miller's great achievement is to take this material and rework it into something that makes one want to return to the original - she reminds the reader of how extraordinary are these stories.

The plot: Miller's narrator Patroclus (yes, it's first person) tells the story of how he met Achilles, their boyhood, adolescence, increasing sexual attraction, and their attempts to avoid Achilles' known fate: 

My hand closed over his. ‘You must not kill Hector,’ I said. He looked up, his beautiful face framed by the gold of his hair. ‘My mother told you the rest of the prophecy.’ ‘She did.’ ‘And you think that no one but me can kill Hector.’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And you think to steal time from the Fates?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Ah.’ A sly smile spread across his face; he had always loved defiance. ‘Well, why should I kill him? He’s done nothing to me.’ For the first time then, I felt a kind of hope.

Some characters really shone for me: Miller's Odysseus is wonderfully tricky - as he should be. Miller's presentation of Achilles' mother, the goddess Thetis, manages to surmount the problems of realistically presenting gods in a human world.

 Some things didn't work so well for me: I thought Miller had some problems with time: after all, there is a lot of time to get through during the Trojan War when nothing much is happening except battle, battle, battle. The segues from stasis to action seemed sometimes forced. I also found the love scenes a bit coyly soft focus; indeed, on one level, the whole book sometimes threatens to veer into 'romance' territory.

I handed him the last piece, his helmet, bristling with horsehair, and watched as he fitted it over his ears, leaving only a thin strip of his face open. He leaned towards me, framed by bronze, smelling of sweat and leather and metal. I closed my eyes, felt his lips on mine, the only part of him still soft. Then he was gone.

But, you know, I really enjoyed The Song of Achilles. I enjoyed Miller's take on the Patroclus-Achilles relationship (were they? weren't they? was always an issue in studying The Iliad and works of the epic cycle). I think it is fantastic that a book that is in its own way a love song to a far more ancient book is a contender for the Orange Prize and I think that Miller has done classical studies the sort of huge popularizing favour that ordinarily only comes about nowadays via the cinema - Gladiator et al.

‘Is it right that my father’s fame should be diminished? Tainted by a commoner?’
‘Patroclus was no commoner. He was born a prince, and exiled. He served bravely in our army, and many men admired him. He killed Sarpedon, second only to Hector.’
‘In my father’s armour. With my father’s fame. He has none of his own.’
Odysseus inclines his head. ‘True. But fame is a strange thing. Some men gain glory after they die, while others fade. What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another.’ He spread his broad hands. ‘We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory. Who knows?’ He smiles. ‘Perhaps one day even I will be famous. Perhaps more famous than you.’
‘I doubt it.’

Rating: 8/10.

If you liked these: go on, read the original.

{review} the medici conspiracy

Peter Watson & Cecilia Todeschini The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities from Italy's Tomb Raiders to the World's Greatest Museums (2007)

I might still be laughing over this book, if the blatant turning of a blind eye by major museums to the provenance of antiquities was not so serious.  It is a cross-over book; sort of popular non-fiction, I suppose. I read it because I read a few blogs about looting (for example, looting matters) and because I am hopeful that we are witnessing a cultural shift in practices. Hopefully.

The core of this book is the story of the attempt to unravel the back-story of the "Euphronios vase". In 1972 the Metropolitan Museum in New York purchased the "Euphronios krater" for a million dollars. This was, at that time, an unparalleled sum for an ancient Greek vase.

The Euphronios Krater, c. 515 BC: 

Sleep and Death carry off the body of 

the dead warrior Sarpedon (source)

From the moment this vase appeared in the Met., a cloud hovered: where did this astonishingly well-preserved (and restored) vase come from? How did it make its way to the Met.? How many pockets were lined along the way? Which country had lost an apparently unrecorded part of its cultural heritage? Was it a fake?

'New' really good quality, previously unknown Greek vases most certainly are either fake or have come from illegal excavations. Most of the best examples of ancient Greek vases do not come from Greece, but were export wares to the Greek vase-loving Etruscans in Italy (just north of Rome). These people were buried in underground tombs carved from the soft stone of the region and they were buried with rich grave offerings including many Greek pots. One question we ask when a vase like this turns us is, what else might have come from a tomb which had contained such a splendid item?

Etruscan tomb at Cerveteri (source)

Etruscan wall-painting at Tarquinia ('Tomb of the Leopards'; source)

If an ancient object is taken from its original context in an illegal excavation, it is likely that all knowledge of this original context will be lost forever. We lose incredibly important information about the ancient culture when we lose the find spot of an object. We lose the ability to get as close to the ancient possessor of the object as we can get without actually being able to speak to them.

There are other couple of consequences: if the Met. is prepared to cough up a record price for an antiquity, the ripples are felt throughout the antiquities trade. A price like this encourages further illegal excavation; it encourages fakes; and it brings in a nice big fat commission to the middle men in their protected warehouses in Switzerland and to the auction houses. As the authors note, a new record for an antiquity with a dubious provenance quickly overcomes any moral impediment to the sale of further items.

From the Met.'s dodgy vase, the scene shifts to the purchasing practices of the John Paul Getty Museum in Malibu. The Italian government's painstaking work in building a case against the Getty curator Marian True is carefully laid out. True and the Getty were placed in an unfortunate position when a warehouse full of antiquities were discovered in the Geneva Free Port in 1995. The warehouse was associated with Giacomo Medici, an antiquities trader who had also been associated with the journey of the Met.'s vase to New York.

In the warehouse, authorities found a hugely detailed record of what had passed through Medici's hands, and this record included 1000s of polaroids showing the same antiquities in various states from fresh from the earth from their illegal excavation to partially restored to - unfortunately for certain museums - in their display cases.

The charges against True have been dropped by the Italian government but not before they had made their point that all future trade in antiquities illegally excavated from Italian soil would be pursued with a vengeance. A number of museums have since decided to return (sometimes as face-saving 'loans') items of dubious provenance, and it is likely that more will follow.

The authors build up a convincing picture of how the trade works and how it is possible to get around things like the 1970 UNESCO agreement (Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property 1970) that should protect new discoveries.

I thought it most interesting to see how auction houses (not necessarily unwittingly) participate in the laundering of antiquities: although bidding on your own lot is forbidden, your own shell company might buy it and the dodgy antiquity will then effectively be laundered - passed back to you with a pile of legitimate paperwork to go with it and thus assist in its sale onwards. Another trick is to provide a fake provenance that ensures that the antiquity was apparently in an obscure private collection somewhere before 1970.

This is all fascinating (could have done with more images of the antiquities though) but this book is completely let down by its stereotyped players. I may be exaggerated a trifle, but almost all of the good guys (those trying to stop the trade or reclaim their country's lost patrimony) are short, jovial, witty, ebullient and dress with the style of Italians (even if they are Greek). They possess "a slightly academic temperament".

All the bad guys (tomb-robbers, middle-men, dealers) have lank hair but are tall, virile, dressed in leather, sweaty (no wonder) and/or closet homosexuals. They don't wear seatbelts. The bad girls use hair dye and fly to their philandering spouses' rescues with briefcases of cash.

The writing style is a form of modern sensationalism that one recognises from The Da Vinci Code. There are a lot of italics, just in case you don't get the point of things. The spelling is variable (Basle/Basel). There are some sentences which really ought to have been edited out, including my favourite: "Not everyone agrees with [X] in his judgments... but his... sheer resoluteness, has a certain magnificence."

I kept waiting for a self-flagellating albino to appear on the scene.

Bad writing and overcooked dramatics aside, this book is important because it offers a popular look at a really important issue - and one that is even more pertinent in the wake of the looting from, e.g., the Cairo Museum during the riots or the situation in Libya at the moment. What will happen to these stolen antiquities? You might think that the items are too well known to ever be passed on the antiquities market. However there are always people willing to acquire items of dubious provenance for their private collections. This book makes it clear, furthermore, that the curators of public collections are not immune to similar corner cutting when the collecting bug strikes.

You'll never look at a Greek vase in a museum in the same way again.

Rating: points for issue-raising; demerits for writing style, um 7/10?

If you liked this… I want to read the Jason Felch & Ralph Frammolino's Chasing Aphrodite. The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum (2011), a further exposé of the Getty Museum. 

{review} rogue roman

Lance Horner Rogue Roman (1965)

The semi-darkness behind the closed gate enveloped Cleon. For the first time in many months, he thought of his former privacy under the sandy ledge back on the oasis and longed to be alone in order to quiet the overwhelming desire that had taken possession of him. His fingers smeared the Greek's still-warm blood over his body. He did not want to kill him but. . . yes, he must admit, he enjoyed it; enjoyed plunging his sword into the soft flesh beneath him, thrilled when the hot blood shot up on him... He wanted, he needed, he must have a woman - any woman - or failing that, a few minutes alone with himself.

When I was packing up a lot of my books earlier this year (so I could see out the windows again), I found a small pile of trashy fiction which I'd bought because the books reflected a byway of my professional area of interest: the ancient world. I'm going to pass them onto a friend, but before they go off in the mail I succumbed to one of them, Lance Horner's Rogue Roman.

It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. I don't want to discuss its historical accuracy, as that's not really the point of reading this sort of book. Let's just say that the settings are remarkably detailed - they read a bit like a description of an I, Claudius set. The characterisation is vivid and there aren't too many sex scenes of such overwrought graphicness as to induce hysteria ("the reek of costly oils and rare unguents and the flat, alkaline animal odour of male passion fanned into heat"). It is completely over the top though (not least in its  homoeroticism). 

Our hero is Cleon, a sex-obsessed young man of mysterious descent (being tall and blonde in a land of short dark people) living in poverty in a Syrian oasis. 

Although he did not realise it, his own body was the only thing he loved, perhaps because it was the only thing of beauty he had ever seen.

...the slabs of muscles on his chest proudly displayed the copper rosettes of his paps...

By chance he is recruited to be a mime performer in the depraved city of Antioch, where his sexy rendition of the myth of Leda and the Swan earns him public acclaim in a city where "[n]owhere in the world had vice reached such exquisite refinements." Unfortunately he gets mixed up with pirates and is enslaved and sent to Rome as a gladiator. By chance he catches the eye of Agrippina - mother of the Emperor Nero -  who recognises that he is not only the bastard son of a Germanic prince she once slept with, but also the half-brother of her evil son Nero. She decides to pull a swap so that Cleon sleeps with Nero's virgin wife Octavia (Nero prefers boys) and produces an heir. Then she can bump off her son (her standard successional modus operandi) and as regent can control the new Emperor. It all goes badly wrong: Cleon is faced with death on the cross, but is saved by a Vestal Virgin and sets out to rescue Octavia, whom he now realises he loves and who has been sent into exile in Greece. A further strand of the story is a 'buddy movie' type scenario, where Cleon is assisted by his trusty mates Mamax (a former male prostitute in Antioch) and the Numidian stud Jano. They stick with the hero through thick and thin, and are also considerably brighter than their colleague. 

It is quite a fun read, all in all, though as Kyle Onstott (with whom Horner wrote the gay 'classic' Child of the Sun) writes in the Foreword, "Incident follows vivid incident until one wonders that so much could happen to one young man." Indeed.

Rating: it wasn't as bad as I thought. 5/10.

If you liked this... you might enjoy Glorious Trash (Rogue Roman is here). Two others in my classical-reception-trashy-novels-pile are The Roman by the Finnish writer Mika Waltari (1966: an abridged Pan edition but the typeface is too small for comfort) and one I read a few years ago, A Greek God at the Ladies' Club by Jenna McKnight (2003), a variation on the Pygmalion story styled as romance literature and set in St. Louis (quite amusing). Woohoo! Love reading trashy books and pretending they're relevant to my studies.

 

  

{wishlist}

While this book concentrates on the scandal that enveloped the Getty Museum regarding unethical/illegal collecting practices, apparently it also notes some issues with an Australian antiquity collection. Interesting.

Jason Felch & Ralph Frammolino (2011)

Chasing Aphrodite: 

The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World's Richest Museum

{weekend words}

Would we admire the Parthenon if it still had a roof, and no longer appealed to the modern stereotype taste for an outline emerging from rough stone? If we repainted it in its original red, blue and gold, and if we reinstalled the huge, gaudy cult-figure of Athena, festooned in bracelets, rings and necklaces, we could not avoid the question that threatens our whole concept of the classical: did the Greeks have bad taste? When, in the 1950s, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens spent $1,500,000 building a copy of the Stoa of Attalus in the old market place they were faithful to every known detail except one - they couldn't bring themselves to paint it red and blue as it had been in the original. To have been authentic would have made it seem untrue to the modern stereotype of the classical.

Donald Horne: The Great Museum: The Re-presentation of History (1984).

This is a plaster cast of a kore (maiden) in the Museum of Classical Archaeology in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge (UK). It has been painted to give an idea of what ancient Greek statuary may have looked like. The original dates from c.530BC Athens.

{wishlist}

Begging to join the groaning shelves this week:

David Watkin's (2009)

The Roman Forum

This encapsulates a dilemma: 

buy a book or put the money towards 

GOING THERE AGAIN.

I've enjoyed the Wonders of the World series 

(e.g. The Parthenon, The Alhambra, etc.).

{review} rome & a villa

Eleanor Clark Rome and a Villa (first edn. 1950; revised edn. 1992)

Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, near Rome, is well worth visiting, especially if you also squeeze in a trip to a more modern take on the lust for civilised country living and visit the Villa d'Este with its unbelievably beautiful water gardens. Italian gardens are a particular shade of green which seems resistant to the seasons; even in winter, when I visited, these gardens were spectacular. Water features were very important to the ancient Romans and turn up on both small, large and enormous gardens. Hadrian's Villa, the emperor's bolt-hole from the Roman rat race, easily qualifies as ginormous. Built for the Emperor Hadrian, who reigned from AD 117-138, this villa is astounding.

Eleanor Clark (1913-1996) went to Rome on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947. She planned to write a novel. Instead she fell under the spell of the city and her surrounds and produced the most idiosyncratic account of the world she discovered that I have read. Her description of a meander through Hadrian's Villa lies at the core of her book: it is a deeply personal interpretation of what she saw as she wandered (and doesn't stand up too well to hard-nosed archaeological analysis) and she perfectly captures the bewildering maze of buildings in the complex as she tries to link what she sees with what she knows about Hadrian and his egomaniacal project: "the sick screaming I." 

Built up around the chapter on the villa are Clark's impressions of Rome as she makes her way about the city. Clark's Rome is one dealing with the aftermath of fascism and standing on the cusp of the la dolce vita. In sometimes a mere paragraph she pins down a building, a curiosity, a custom, a saint, a martyr, a prince, a staircase, an icon, a genius (Raphael: "Died aged thirty-seven, of overwork."), ruins, cats, gardens, law and order, whatever captures her skilled eye in "the great assault of Rome... total and terrible." There are also chapters on the pilgrims at Holy Year celebrations (1950; and revisited by Clark in 1975), the Pyramid of Cestius and the Protestant Cemetery in Rome (where Keats and Shelley have grave monuments), Roman poetry and Rome's take on Sicilian banditry, among other things. 

Piranesi - Pyramid of Cestius

The sheer jumbledness of this offering can be off-putting and I experienced a few moments of "not another list" irritation. Yet Rome is jumbled and Rome is irritating. But if you let yourself wander, forget your schedules (and don't write that novel!), you'll agree with Clark that in Rome, "You walk close to your dreams." 

Rating: 7/10.

If you liked this... bear in mind that it lacks almost all practical application as a travel guide. In this category I would also include such delightful early 20th century travelogues as those by E.V. Lucas in his series 'A Wanderer in...' (sc. Florence; Venice; Rome; etc.).  These seem to be available as e-books about the place.

Keat's grave monument in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome

{weekend words}

I was reminded of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's gorgeous, sexy poem 'Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal' while reading (the excellent) The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark:

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font;
The firefly wakens, waken thou with me.
Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.
Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.
Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts, in me.
Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake.
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.

Titian's Danaë (1553: Prado, Madrid)

{review} a woman in berlin

Anonymous A Woman in Berlin (1st English edn 1954; new translation Virago 2005)

Then I... came across [Aeschylus'] The Persians, which, with its lamentations of the vanquished, seems well suited to our defeat. But in reality it's not. Our German calamity has a bitter taste - of repulsion, sickness, insanity, unlike anything in history. The radio just broadcast another concentration camp report. The most horrific thing is the order and the thrift: millions of human beings as fertilizer, mattress-stuffing, soft soap, felt mats - Aeschylus never saw anything like that.

One can see why doubts were cast on the authenticity of this polished memoir of events surrounding the fall of Berlin from the 20th of April to the 22nd of June 1945. It is indeed polished – but who wouldn't tart up their diary for publication, for Heaven's sake? Moreover, the anonymous author is suspected to be a female journalist; that is, a professional writer. She also speaks some Russian, which lends her another level of access to her experience (for instance, she is able to get some work translating). But it is the content which seemed to concern the doubters most. Why would a woman offer such a blatant account of her multiple rapes at the hands of the Russian invaders and her attempts to achieve a compromise that will keep her alive ("sexual collaboration for survival", as Antony Beevor aptly phrases it)? 

He gave me a little notebook, a German-Russian dictionary for soldiers, assuring me he could get hold of some more. I've looked it over; it has a lot of very useful words like 'bacon', 'flour', 'salt'. Some other important words are missing, however, like 'fear' and 'basement'. Also the word for 'dead'... which I find myself reaching for quite often in recent conversations.

This is not a coy memoir, by any means. It is shocking and, despite its polish – or perhaps the polish serves to highlight the rawness of the events? – it is emotionally raw. The horror in the text is often evoked less by the narrator's terrible plight (she maintains an extraordinary level of coolness, even calculation) but by the appalling events overtaking those around her. 

...out of the male beasts I've seen these past few days, he's the most bearable, the best of the lot. Moreover, I can actually control him... I can actually talk with the major. Which still isn't an answer to the question of whether I should now call myself a whore, since I am essentially living off my body, trading it for something to eat... It goes against my nature, it wounds my self-esteem, destroys my pride- and physically it makes me miserable.

Starvation, suicide, sexual assault – this is a difficult read: "We washed our sheets so my bed is freshly made - a much needed change after all those booted guests."

One aspect I found particular intriguing was how the victims of these multiple and multiplied sexual assaults (Beevor offers the figures of between 95,000 to 130,000 woman in Berlin and an estimated 2 million in Germany) supported each other by talking about their trauma and comparing notes (that is a harsh-sounding phrase, I know, but that is what it is: "In answer to the standard question, 'How often did they...?'") The moment their menfolk returned from the front, all discussion became verboten and their trauma became internalised, unspeakable and shaming. The double standard is at work here – revictimising the victims for their apparent cooperation in their violation, although it saved their lives. There is presumably an element in this shaming of the shame of the men who could not protect them. Or who have, perhaps, been behaving similarly in other conquered lands?

All my feelings seem dead, except for the drive to live. They shall not destroy me.

This book makes you ask yourself what you would be prepared to do to survive. 

In the queue at the pump one woman told me how her neighbour reacted when the Russians fell on her in her basement. He simply shouted, 'Well why don't you just go with them, you're putting all of us in danger!' A minor footnote to the Decline of the West.

What moral compromises are you willing to make for, e.g., one square meal when you and your household are starving? At what point does your own survival require you to sacrifice another? This memoir provides some frank and brutal answers.

Rating: 10/10.

If you liked this… I'm slowly reading Antony Beevor's Berlin: The Downfall 1945. Beevor wrote the excellent introduction to A Woman in Berlin and includes some information on the purported author.

 

{weekend words}

Next month I am 42... I don't care, I am settled in life now, & anyway for a woman 30 is the rubicond (or rubicon? Pity not to be educated, & it comes out more in writing than in speaking when one can slur things over a bit).

Letter from Nancy Mitford to Evelyn Waugh (31 October 1946) in The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh edited by Charlotte Mosley (Hodder & Stoughton, 1996), p.60. 

 

{wishlist}

Begging to join the groaning shelves this week:

Maurizio Bettini (1999):

The Portrait of the Lover

I've wanted to read this since I read this review.

I reckon this would go with it:

 

George L. Hersey (2009):
Falling in Love with Statues:
Artificial Humans from Pygmalion to the Present.
Reviewed here.

{review} todd + goodman

Charles Todd A Test of Wills (1996)

Carol Goodman The Lake of Dead Languages (2002)

 

One yea; one nay.

A Test of Wills has an interesting premise: a Scotland Yard detective with PTSD from service in the First World War who hears in his head the argumentative and malicious voice of a young soldier whom he was forced to execute for refusing to fight in the trenches. We are used to, indeed sometimes bored by, dedicated detectives with a typical series of problems (pick from marital, disciplinary, weight, substances, etc.) but this was a new one for me. The story - the detective sent to investigate the murder of one war hero by another war hero - is well-plotted too, with plenty of suspects to choose from. It took me a long time to guess the murderer and I wouldn't have picked the twist in the tail in a million years. A very satisfying read. I'll definitely read a few more from the series.

Rating: 8/10.

If you liked this... Maisie Dobbs is the WW1-traumatised heroine of the series by Jacqueline Winspear.

I know that I should have liked Carol Goodman's The Lake of Dead Languages simply because I must like anything that promotes the study of ancient world. But unfortunately the murderer was completely obvious within the first 45 pages and that left 355 more pages of figuring out to go down the drain. This book reminded me of Donna Tartt's The Secret History: there was a lot of classical stuff going on (much Latin; ironically, the Latin gave the murderer away at page 44...), and a fair bit of class warfare, but it never really achieved The Secret History's level of suffocating malevolence. On the plus side: interesting setting (girl's school; freezing weather); neat classical allusions; the structure really tried very hard (interweaving of the unreliable past and the present). But I never liked the narrator, although I realise that I was intended to care about her fate. In sum: OK, but it didn't grab me. A coincidence: this is the third book by a Vassar author which I've read lately (with Daddy-Long-Legs and The Group). My tendency is to listen to and follow up these coincidences.

Rating: 5/10

If you liked this... it's got to be its big brother, The Secret History (1992), which came out when I was beginning my MA in classical studies and made the study of the ancient world seem almost sexy.