Vintage Pictures

Divided nation, divided books

The Partition of India by the British in August 1947 did more than create the two sovereign nations of India and Pakistan, displace millions of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs on either side of the newly-drawn border, and result in one of the world's largest refugee crisis leading to violence and slaughter by people who once lived together. It also divided the libraries in the new dominions. In the above photograph, published by Life magazine on August 18, 1947, a curator at the Imperial Secretariat Library (now Central Secretariat Library) in Calcutta, West Bengal, tries to divide some 1.50 lakh books into equal parts for each of the two countries.

BOOK REVIEW

The Continental Classics, Volume XIV, and 

The Vampire by Jan Neruda

These two literary works are my contribution to this Friday’s Forgotten Books edition over at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase. Don’t forget to read the fine mix of reviews of forgotten books by other bloggers over there.

“There is but one vast treasure-house of Eastern lore, and from its miraculous riches every bard and rhymer, every recounter of things marvelous and glad and sad, has drawn to his heart's content since the days of Babylon. No one can say how old these stories are. They are primeval. Some of them are as old as man. Some of them go back to those days when kindly spirits walked the earth among mortals, wondering gently at the new creature, with his fancies and his whims, and now and then touching man's work to unravel some knot of fate or to bring an unexpected blessing to some simple, good person. Of these tales of fairyland and its ministering visitants there is a web all round the world, and every wise child should believe them until he grows old and hard and incredulous.”
— Charles Johnston in his introduction to the section on Oriental Mystery Stories in The Continental Classics, Volume XIV.

Some of the world's best-known, and untold, stories are found in literary compendiums such as the twenty-volume The Continental Classics and the ten-volume The Best of the World's Classics. Written and translated in lucid prose, the stories cut across peoples and countries and races and continents, and cover nearly every literary category there is — from mystery and adventure, fantasy and horror, romance and satire to tragedy and philosophy.

Many of these folktales and fairytales are undated and have been passed down the centuries for readers like you and me to savour and want more.

One example of the wide and varied reach of literary anthologies is The Continental Classics, Volume XIV, Spanish, Italian and Oriental Tales, a 370-page assorted collection of early mystery stories from Europe and Asia.

These are divided into three parts: Italian and Spanish Mystery Stories, Oriental Mystery Stories, and Ancient Latin and Greek Mystery Stories.

The Spanish and Italian section includes stories by Italo Mario Palmarini, Camillo Boito, Antonio Fogazzaro, and Pedro de Alarcón among others. I have been reading about these unheard-of writers on the internet.

For instance, Camillo Boito (1836-1914) was an Italian architect and engineer, first and foremost. He was also an art critic and historian, and a novelist. He wrote many short stories that included a psychological thriller titled A Christmas Eve, “a tale of incestuous obsession and necrophilia” which is apparently similar to Berenice by Edgar Allan Poe. In 1882, he came out with his most famous work, Senso, a short novel about  “sexual decadence.” A few of his tales have been shot into film. 

Spanish novelist Pedro de Alarcón (1833-1891) was the author of El Sombrero de Tres Picos (The Three-Cornered Hat, 1874) which tells the story of village life in his native region of Andalusia, in southern Spain. Apart from another short novel, El capitán Veneno (Captain Poison, 1881), Alarcón also wrote four full-length novels, three travel books, and short stories. 

An illustration with the Arabic story
The Craft of the Three Sharpers

Coming back to The Continental Classics, Volume XIV, I was delighted to discover five traditional Sanskrit tales that included ‘The Brahman Who Lost His Treasure’ from a book called the Ocean of the Rivers of Stories, written some eight centuries ago. It tells the story of King Prasenajit of Sravasti who helps a miser recover his stolen wealth. The rich merchants of the place bestow all kinds of presents on the man they think is a virtuous Brahman (belonging to the highest of the four social classes of India). He hides his treasure at the foot of the medicinal nagabala tree till one day he finds that it has been stolen. Distraught over losing his wealth, the man decides to commit suicide. The king comes to his rescue by nailing the culprit who had used the roots of the tree to cure his headaches. 

Most Indian stories of old times are philosophical in nature. When the merchants learn that the miser is going to starve himself to death, one of them says, “Brahman, why do you long to die for the loss of your wealth? Wealth, like an unseasonable cloud, suddenly comes and goes.”

I am reproducing below the table of contents to give you a fair idea of the kind of stories you can expect in The Continental Classics, Volume XIV. You’ll find this and most of the other volumes at Project Gutenberg.

Part I: Italian and Spanish Mystery Stories

J.M. Palmarini — Shadows
Camillo Boito — The Gray Spot
Giovanni Verga — The Stories of the Castle of Trezza
Antonio Fogazzaro — The Imp in the Mirror
Luigi Capuana — The Deposition
Pedro de Alarcón — The Nail
Alfredo Oriani — The Moscow Theater Plot

Part II: Oriental Mystery Stories (with an introduction by Charles Johnston)

The Power of Eloquence (Japanese)
The Dishonest Goldsmith and the Ingenious Painter (Turkish)
The Craft of the Three Sharpers (Arabic)
The Cheerful Workman (Arabic)
The Robber and the Woman (Arabic)
The Wonderful Stone (Chinese)
The Weaver Who Became a Leach (Arabic)
Visakha (Tibetan)
Told by the Constable (Arabic)
The Unjust Sentence (Chinese)
The Scar on the Throat (Arabic)
Devasmita (Sanskrit)
The Sharpers and the Money-lender (Arabic)
The Withered Hand (Turkish)
The Melancholist and the Sharper (Arabic)
Lakshadatta and Labdhadatta (Sanskrit)
The Cunning Crone (Arabic)
Judgment of a Solomon (Chinese)
The Sultan and His Three Sons (Arabic)
Tale of a Demon (Sanskrit)
The Jar of Olives and the Boy Kazi (Arabic)
Another Solomon (Chinese)
Calamity Ahmad and Habzalom Bazazah (Arabic)
A Man-Hating Maiden (Sanskrit)
Told by the Constable (Arabic)
The Clever Thief (Tibetan)
The King Who Made Mats (Persian)
The Brahman Who Lost His Treasure (Sanskrit)
The Duel of the Two Sharpers (Arabic)
The Lady and the Kazi (Persian)
Mahaushadha (Tibetan)
Avicenna and the Observant Young Man (Turkish)

Part III: Ancient Latin and Greek Mystery Stories

Herodotus —
The Thief Versus King Rhampsinitus
The Oracle Its Test by Croesus
The Oracle Its Repulse of the Persians
The Oracle Behind the Scenes

Lucius Apuleius —
The Adventure of the Three Robbers

Pliny, the Younger —
Letter to Sura

Scroll down for The Vampire by Jan Neruda or click here.

The Vampire by Jan Neruda

“The air was as clear as a diamond, so soft, so caressing, that one’s whole soul swung out upon it into the distance.”

There is no vampire in The Vampire, a six-page undated short story by Jan Neruda (1834-1891), the Czech journalist, writer and poet of the 19th century. The ‘vampire’ is a young Greek artist or a creature in human form, with supernatural powers. He has an uncanny ability: sketching corpses. In other words, he sketches the doomed beforehand and completes it the day they die, as if prophesying their death.

Jan Vilímek/Wikimedia Commons

The Vampire, which is and isn’t a fantasy tale, is about six people who go on an excursion from Constantinople to the island of Prinkipo, in modern-day Turkey. They include a Polish family of four consisting of a man and his wife, their beautiful but ailing daughter and her handsome husband, and the narrator and his (or her) companion. On the way they meet the mysterious Greek artist who, later, sketches them on the beach from afar.

Back in their hotel, the Pole and the narrator ask the innkeeper about the identity of the artist and are told, “We call him the Vampire” because “he sketches only corpses” and “he never makes a mistake.”

The artist certainly doesn’t make a mistake when he sketches the girl with her eyes closed and a wreath on her brow.

I am assuming the translation is true to the original in the Czech language in which case the story reads quite well and manages to hold your interest, though it could have been longer.

A word about Jan Neruda
Jan Neruda was born in Prague, Bohemia. He was the son of a grocer who lived in the Malá Strana (Lesser Quarter) district of Prague. He studied philosophy and philology (the humanistic study of language and literature) and worked as a teacher until 1860. Thereafter, he became a freelance journalist and writer. He was a leading light of Czech Realism and promoted the idea of rebirth of Czech patriotism.

Neruda’s most accalimed work is Povídky Malostranské (Tales of the Little Side), a collection of short stories which “takes the reader to the Lesser Quarter, to its streets and yards, shops, churches, houses, and restaurants” and known for their “satirical depiction of the petty bourgeois of Prague.”

His bibliography
Hrbitovní kvítí (Cemetery Flowers), 1857
Knihy veršu (Books of Verses), 1867
Zpevy pátecní (Friday Songs), 1869
Povídky malostranské (Tales of the Little Quarter), 1877, translated into English for the first time in 1957 by mystery writer Edith Pargeter (aka Ellis Peters).
Písne kosmické (Cosmic Songs), 1878
Balady a romance (Ballads and Romances), 1878-83
Prosté motivy (Plain Themes/Simple Motifs), 1883
The Vampire, a short story

I’m looking for the translated version of Tales of the Little Quarter.

Interesting facts
The Chilean poet and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda (real name: Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto) took “Neruda” as his pseudonym.

Jan Neruda once said, “Men are jealous of every woman, even when they don’t have the slightest interest in her themselves.”

In his first spaceflight in May 2009, American geophysicist and astronaut Andrew J. Feustel took a copy of Cosmic Songs with him.

The Jan Neruda Grammar School in Prague is, obviously, named after the Czech intellect.

You can read more about Jan Neruda here and here. The above profile has been culled out from these two sites.

Vintage Pictures

Roundup on the Sherman Ranch

A cowboy in Genesee, Kansas, USA, with lasso at the ready maintains a vigil on the herd on the open range, in 1902. His fellow cowpunchers are seen on the horizon.

This image, culled from The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, is a stereographic card that can be seen through a stereoscopic viewer, an optical device for viewing similar images or photographs. The picture is attributed to Keystone View Company, of Meadville, Pennsylvania, which produced and distributed educational and comic and sentimental stereoviews, and stereoscopes from 1892 through 1963.

According to an article at the Collectors Weekly website, “Stereoscopes use two nearly-identical images, each taken a few inches to the side of the other. When viewed through two lenses set 2.5 inches apart, approximately the space between the eyes, the result is the illusion of a three-dimensional picture. In fact, stereoscopes are seen as the precursors to 3D entertainment.”

Sir Charles Wheatstone of Great Britain is credited with inventing the first stereoscope in 1833.

Todd Mason has generously included this post in Tuesday's Overlooked Films/Television over at his blog Sweet Freedom. Don't forget to read the many fascinating entries over there.

BOOK REVIEW

The search for Georges Simenon

“Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don’t think an artist can ever be happy.”
— Georges Simenon in an interview to The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No.9, Summer 1955

Patti Abbott has thrown a mean challenge for this week’s edition of Friday’s Forgotten Books — Georges Simenon and his work — over at her blog Pattinase. So pardon me if this post reads like an author review.

© Erling Mandelmann/Wikimedia Commons

Weeks after the announcement, I have drawn a complete blank on the renowned Belgian author of 220 novels that include 86 featuring his most famous character, Parisian police detective Jules Maigret, who has been described as the Sherlock Holmes of France, and about 200 novellas under all kinds of pseudonyms.

Simenon smoked a pipe, so did Maigret, whom he described thus, "His build was plebeian. He was enormous and bony. Hard muscles stood out beneath his jacket… Above all, he had his very own way of planting himself in a spot... He was a solid block and everything had to break against it." For the uninitiated like this blogger, that is a vivid description of Maigret.

Simenon was a prolific writer who authored some half-a-dozen novels a year though, it is said, he was capable of producing much more. He wrote his first novel at the age of 18. 

This FFB seemed like a good opportunity to acquaint myself with Jules Maigret or at least with some of the non-Maigret novels which, I read somewhere online, have been reprinted. I don’t know how far that is true.

Now Simenon is not the kind of author whose novels you’ll find easily in India unless you borrow them from a friend, a discerning reader, or from a library. So, in a frantic effort to locate at least one of his 200-odd novels before Friday the 20th, I contacted the two secondhand bookstores I frequent but neither of the booksellers had even heard of him — “Georg who?” I don’t blame them: while I have heard and read about Simenon, I have never read anything by him. I then got in touch with two reliable new bookstores and their response was identical — “Georges Simenon? Sorry, out of stock. Would you like us to order any of his books?”

Simenon’s novels are still under copyright and, I suspect, they are going to be tied up in legal knots for a long time. Giving him good company will be Margaret Millar whose books are as elusive as the God Particle. No, they found that one at least, didn’t they?

When you have no choice, you do the predictable thing: you read what others have written about Simenon and his work or what the author himself has said over the years, which isn’t much.

Strand Magazine profiled Georges Simenon’s hero in a lengthy article titled ‘The Great Detectives: Maigret’ by Peter Haining. You can read it here. It is one of the better articles on Inspector Maigret.

Likewise, The New York Times paid a fine tribute to the author following his death in September 1989. You can read that piece titled ‘Georges Simenon Dies at 86; Creator of Inspector Maigret’ right here.

The two articles provide an excellent insight into the master storyteller’s life and his fiction. 

Georges Simenon unveiled Jules Maigret’s statue
in Delfzijl, The Netherlands, in September 1966.
© Wikimedia Commons

Simenon’s fiction has received heaps of praise. As American playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder observed, “The gift of narration is the rarest of all gifts in the 20th century. Georges Simenon has that to the tips of his fingers.”

Wilder’s remark must be seen in the context of Simenon’s own views on writing fiction and on the way he likes to write fiction, which is keeping it simple. “I have always tried to write in a simple way, using down-to-earth and not abstract words,” he says. I don’t know when he said this but in 1955 he told The Paris Review, “Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence — cut it. Every time I find such a thing in one of my novels it is to be cut.”

It is possible Simenon may have been influenced by Hemingway’s plain and uncomplicated narrative style.

© University of Liege, Belgium

 
Can you write without the use of adjectives and adverbs? I knocked off a few over the course of a fourth revision of this post and I am quite satisfied with the result. Now if only I had read just one of Georges Simenon’s novels, I could have added substance to this piece as well.

FILM REVIEW

The Beast (1988)

The Beast is my contribution to Tuesday’s Overlooked/Forgotten films and television over at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom. Don't forget to check out the other fascinating reviews over there.

Konstantin Koverchenko (Jason Patric) to Daskal (George Dzundza), his commander: “Sorry, sir. Not much of a war. No Stalingrad. How is it that we're the Nazis this time? How is it? I tried to be a good soldier. But you can't be a good soldier in a rotten war, sir. Now I want you to live to see them win. Go...I said go!” 

The Beast, or The Beast of War, is a compelling film based on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The film, directed by Kevin Reynolds, who made Red Dawn, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Waterworld and The Count of Monte Cristo, tells the story of a feisty band of mujahideen (Islamic insurgents engaged in jihad or holy war) who set out to blow up a Soviet T-55 tank that has lost its way in the desert terrain after destroying an Afghan village.

Khan Taj (Steven Bauer), whose family is wiped out in the attack, swears vengeance and, accompanied by a handful of mujahideen fighters, goes after the menacing tank — the beast — with a mad zeal and rocket-propelled grenades that are no match for the armoured vehicle and its powerful guns.

Commanding the tank is Daskal (George Dzundza), a cold-blooded Russian officer, who drives the tank and its crew on a suicide mission against the rebels in one of the most hostile terrains in the world. Daskal is proud and ruthless and puts his tank’s interests before that of his soldiers in his battle against the insurgents.

The cat-and-mouse game between the Russians and the mujahideen, led by the turbaned Khan and played out in the treacherous mountains of Afghanistan, runs through much of the nearly two-hour long film. Assisting the Khan and his men is Konstantin Koverchenko (Jason Patric), the tank driver, who gets on the wrong side of his commander, on matters of principle, and is left to die in the scorching desert. The bespectacled Koverchenko is stoned by Afghan women out to seek revenge against the invaders but is saved in the nick of time by Khan. 

The Khan’s noble deed of rescuing the Russian soldier is an allusion to the famed principles of Pashtunwali, the Afghan people’s code of honour that, among other things, includes nanawatai which means giving sanctuary even to the enemy.

The Russian soldier is torn between his loyalty to his country and his desire to help the Afghan people in a war he knows isn’t right. He chooses the latter. Khan and Koverchenko strike up a friendship and the verbal communication between the two battle-hardened men is what makes this film quite entertaining. Koverchenko teaches Khan how to use the RPG with deadly effect.

The Beast, released in September 1988, five months after Mikhail Gorbachev ordered his troops out of Afghanistan, is a low-budget film with (pardon me) a second-rung of decent actors which, apart from Jason Patric, include Stephen Baldwin who plays one of the tank’s soldiers and Steven Bauer who is convincing as the Pashto-speaking mujahideen leader.

I liked this film because it is, in many ways, a Cold War film, and because of its realistic portrayal of Afghanistan, its hostile land under a merciless sun, and the courage of a people who desperately want their freedom back. There is plenty of action as the T-55 and the mujahideen play hide and seek in the "dust bowls" of the mountain country.

BOOK REVIEW

Run, Mann, Run! By James Keenan (1975)

This novel is my contribution to Friday’s Forgotten Books meme over at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase. Hop over and check out the fine mix of reviews by other bloggers.

“It was a hot day in Dornville when Mann drove in; it got a lot hotter when he was framed for murder!”

Run, Mann, Run! by James Keenan is probably the most forgotten book I am writing about since enrolling in FFB. There is absolutely nothing about either this novel or its author online, as far as I know, except for its availability on a handful of book retail sites. Even then, there are no images of the book cover or the author. I have no idea who James Keenan is or if he has written other books. My copy of the paperback (left) simply begins and ends with his story (Major Books, Chatsworth, California).

However, my search did throw up a book and a film that sounded exactly like this title, only it wasn’t the same. The book Run, Man, Run is a crime novel written by Chester Himes in 1966 and is about racism in New York City. The film of the same name is a spaghetti western directed by Sergio Sollima in 1968. Note the missing ‘n’.

The Mann in Keenan’s story is Perry Mann, an ex-Vietnam soldier, who travels hundreds of miles to a dark cabin in the hills of Dornville, a sleepy Ozark town, to meet his close friend and business partner, Pearl Dobson. The two men served in Vietnam together and have been crop dusters in Salinas, California, after the war till, one day, Dobson leaves for the hills where he grew up, to make millions for himself and his friend. Mann finds Dobson strapped to a chair and tortured to death. His grandparents and their dog have been shot dead too.

Mann, a tall, lean man in his late twenties, drives down to Dornville to report the murders and steps right into hell he hadn’t bargained for. His nightmare begins as soon as he comes face to face with Deputy Sheriff Merl McKinstry who is built like an ox and is crooked as a fish hook. He controls everything and everyone in the county whose folks, including the attorney general and the judge, are too terrified to oppose his mean and wicked ways. If McKinstry says “Squat!” people squat.

McKinstry had his henchmen, fellow deputies, kill the Dobsons and later set their cabin on fire because he had found out Pearl Dobson’s secret — a hidden cave called Witch Cave on the Dobsons property that has uranium deposits worth millions of dollars. McKinstry frames Mann for the murders but doesn’t kill him because he thinks the brave young man knows the exact location of the cave.

Mann finds no friends in Dornville whose inhabitants don’t like strangers in their midst, especially those accused of murder. His attempt to escape from the town, with the help of the lovely Penny Gay Parsons, who McKinstry boasts he has had since she was fourteen, fails, and he is back at the sheriff's mercy. Mann is unarmed and uses only his wits and fists to get out of situations. 

McKinstry’s grand visions of rolling in money, however, come to a naught when Margaret Nome, a tall and handsome woman and the editor of the local paper, enters the scene. Her agenda is as sinister as that of the sheriff: she wants Witch Cave all to herself. The cave is her route to riches and a new life far away from Dornville.

Maggie Nome kills McKinstry in cold blood and pins the blame on Perry Mann who then sets out to clear his name and get out of Dornville with Penny Gay.

Run, Mann, Run! reads like a western novel. The small county has an attorney general, a judge, and a sheriff, but no law. Mann tries to escape because Penny Gay’s timid father warns him that McKinstry’s hoods are going to lynch him. The people of Dornville are not law-abiding citizens; they are a mob willing to hang anyone they are told is guilty of crime. The county, set among the hills, is reminiscent of a western town in many ways, with its small establishments like a telephone office, a beer parlour, a little grocery, and a Missouri Pacific depot with only one train a day.

James Keenan portrays a stark picture of Dornville, a town more dead than alive. You don’t want to be there even if you were elected mayor. In contrast, Perry Mann is a man of virtue, of grit and purpose, whose singular aim is to avenge the murders of Pearl Dobson and his grandparents without taking the law into his hands. In the end Mann doesn’t run, he stands his ground.

Run, Mann, Run! is a rather predictable story with an unpredictable end, that is if you haven’t guessed it halfway through. While it is well-written and fairly gripping, I wouldn’t recommend it as a must-read.

So, does anyone know who James Keenan is?