Jennifer Calderone

Delightful

Revisado: 03-25-24

This is the fabulous Laura Kinsale’s attempt at retelling Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in the context of a Regency romance. She can write, folks. She is so good.

In no way does Kinsale attempt to recreate the entire play — the work is a novel and adheres to the form and conventions of a Regency romance, but the tone is of high comedy. Just as in the Shakespeare play, there are several sets of lovers, intersecting story lines, and love potions. One of the characters is called Thaddeus Flowerdew, and another character is likened to an Amazon, in case you need a little extra prodding to relate this novel to 9th grade English class. There is also a duke, and a heroine who is building a flying machine, just like Woody Allen’s character in his homage to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy.” If you look close enough, there is also a play within a play, as some of the characters are spies, and all of the characters have to engage in social subterfuge to uphold the duke’s family honor. One of the characters is actually an actress. There is literally an audience of guests at the duke’s castle who never interact directly with the main characters, but who are consistently referred to by them. (The young-people-putting-on-a-play-in-an-English-Great House thing is also a plot device in “Mansfield Park,” so I want to point out that Kinsale is also giving her nod to Austen, but now I’m just be re-stating the obvious in pointing out Austen’s influence on Regency Romance.)

As for what we all expect from a romance novel, the characterizations are at least three-dimensional, as I have come to expect with Kinsale. She invests attention and emotional weight to the non-romantic relationships as well as to the romantic relationships. As for spice-level, one of the best sex scenes she has written in any of her books comes toward the end.

Plus there are some nice Napoleonic war-era jabs at the French, which are always welcome. I laughed myself silly.

Kinsale is so smart. She clearly knows that despite Romance’s bad rep that she is writing in one of the greatest literary traditions of all time (literature in the English language) and she claims a place at the table for her genre and for herself by conversing with the great Shakespeare himself. (And Austen, but let’s face it, everybody who writes Romance converses with The Mother.)

As for the narration, my observation is that it’s easier to do tragedy than it is to do comedy for actors (see also Harrison Ford for a professional’s take on the subject), and if you can do comedy, you can do tragedy just fine. Nicholas Boulton can do both, and proves his comedy chops in this reading. He never overdoes anything and is somehow able to deliver every sentence with perfect pitch — honestly a hard thing to do with Romance. I’ve both read and listened to this book, and his narration led me to discover some of its funniest lines and situations that had gone unnoticed at first. This guy is good.

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Heartbreaker, as Always

Revisado: 03-25-24

Extremely well-written, one of my favorite of Laura Kinsale’s novels.

I had to think twice about reading this novel as the setting — the Arabian desert — had me worried about what the representation of the hero would be like. Would he be another white savior a la T.E. Lawrence? I have loved almost all of Kinsale’s novels, so I took a chance. It was worth it. Kinsale sort of turns the white-adventurer-in-the-desert conceit on its head by inserting into the story a couple of real-life white-adventurers-in-the-desert into the story as characters (mostly in flashback) and as foils to the fictional lovers.

So, go ahead and subject this novel to Saidian (“Orientalism”) analysis if you want, but also notice the relationship that Kinsale develops between the hero and the heroine. It is so deep and heartbreakingly beautiful, especially in the early chapters.

In addition to creating such interesting characters and relationships between them, Kinsale has had the good sense to employ Nicholas Boulton to narrate her work. This guy can act. He never hits a false note emotionally and has that way of all British thespians (how do they do it? Is it because they do so much Shakespeare from early in their training?) that can make the most literary turn of phrase sound like something people would actually say to each other. He also has the most mesmerizing voice.

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A Picture of Mental Health Struggle

Revisado: 11-24-23

By far the best of the series so far, this book is a true picture of mental health struggle. There is fantasy and romance, of course, but the main character's journey renders much of that metaphorical. The dialogue is some of the most realistic that has been written in this series, and in many places the emotions are true, not overwrought and dramatic, as they can be in the rest of the series.

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Escape from Reality: Don't Think Too Much

Revisado: 01-21-22

A prescient idea -- a man under house arrest in the most luxurious hotel in Moscow. Who knew when this book was published that within the decade we would all have been faced with political upheaval, travel restrictions, supply-chain irregularities, and ourselves been confined to our own, if we are middle-class Americans, relatively luxurious homes? This book asks those questions that we have all had to ask in the last few years: What do we value? What do we keep? What do we let go? How do we make life matter when nothing exists that mattered before? Who do we belong to and who belongs to us? The book alights on these questions, and answers them, though not with a heavy hand. I enjoyed this book thoroughly as an escape from the realities of these last several years and some of its scenes and images have stuck with me even after it ended. It was delightful to imagine how it could be to sit down to eat a bouillabaisse that required three people to call in favors to assemble the correct ingredients or to see a waiter gesture to a menu with a soft wrist and delicately spread fingers. Such are the pleasures of this book.

Some not so delightful moments I had while listening to this book had to do with the nagging thought that the author had just not done his research. It is presumptuous of me, a graduate of lesser universities, to wish that the author, a graduate of Yale and Stanford, might have a Google search to discern some of the more obvious differences between Eastern and Western Christianity, but I will make the suggestion anyway. I kept wondering, does Russia, an Orthodox country, really celebrate Christmas just after the solstice as we do in the West, or don't they celebrate it starting the second week in January? Furthermore, would the daughter of a Soviet bureaucrat in the 1920s know to celebrate the holiday with an exchange fo gifts?

The characters, too, don't seem to be living out their roles. Again, the author might have read some Isak Dinesen for good primer on how the aristocracy really thought and acted at the time he has set his story, for the predilections of the title character, for example, -- eating in fine restaurants, wine pairings, good service, smugly dropping names and correcting misapprehensions -- seem to be less the tastes of an actual scion of Russian nobility (a cohort that would never imagine having to prove anything) than the pretensions of the American meritocracy (a cohort that is anxious to prove everything). I wondered what other pleasures of the body or otherwise this nobleman would miss that he does not try to replicate -- horses, dancing, the harvest, the hunt, the peasants, the folktales, the incense used in Orthodox rites, his Right.

There are two love stories, both of which could have been deeply sensual and at least one, tragic, neither of which go anywhere. These relationships are so thinly drawn that one wonders if Proust was indeed consulted, as is alluded to in the book; and I'm left to wonder if the the author fully understood all of the Tolstoy and Turgenev that he quotes throughout the novel, or is that for show?

The Americanisms in this book, however, are spot on. Humphrey Bogart as Rick is the real model of how this gentleman is drawn, not any Russian nobleman, and "Casablanca" takes a fun turn on this stage, as does an American general in his military-issue olive drab underpants. Of course, there is Eloise, the little girl who lives at the Plaza, whose own story undergirds this story and whose spirit, if not her imperiousness, lives in the characters of two little girls whom our gentleman befriends.

The performance is fine, and captures the spirit of the novel. Read by a Brit, the voices of the narrator and the main character are just what we might expect of a "gentleman" -- David Niven in "Casablanca" --, but the American accents are just a little off. A well-bred American diplomat has a little too much James Cagney in his voice not to grate on the ears, like somebody revving a car.

This novel requires a deep commitment to the suspension of disbelief, but it gives you a good story, sympathetic characters, and a satisfying listen.

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Comedy of Manners and Morals

Revisado: 01-16-22

Where do we belong? Who is our family? If we realize our ambitions are we really going to be happy? To whom are we responsible? This novel asks these questions and gives us some answers, but leaves other answers in the ether. Diane Johnson proves again that she sees our blindspots, sees through our little lies to ourselves, and still can write about it all with compassion. I used to think that you had to hate all of your characters to produce good satire, but this novel has shown me that that isn't the case at all.

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I Think Michael Pollan Just Likes Getting High

Revisado: 09-17-20

I listened to this audiobook while putting together IKEA furniture, and that is about the worth of its intellectual weight. While I found Pollan's earlier books like The Omnivore's Dilemma interesting and informative, Caffeine seemed simply like a quick reporting job -- not a lot of effort involved. The book certainly does not reach far enough to explain the modern world, going no farther than drawing conclusions from mere correlation and providing only few examples. There were a few revelations -- like caffeine adds to the perception of flavor, which I didn't know before -- but otherwise, Pollan's main preoccupation in the book is his withdrawal from caffeine and his abstinence from it, which he treats as a significant hardship though it comes across as a stunt -- and not a very dangerous or daring one at that. I think the author just likes getting high. There's nothing wrong with that, but it makes for a very boring book.

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Genius Idea to Cast Nick Offerman to Read

Revisado: 05-03-20

Wendell Berry writes insightfully about what we have lost. Every time I think he is writing from nostalgia -- oh, this is terrible, where are the good 'ol days? -- , he underscores his claims that what we have lost is due to choice -- a million, billion little choices -- the choice of carelessness rather than care for our bodies and for the land. In terms of performance, inside whoever thought of Nick Offerman for this job is the genius of casting. Whether Mr. Offerman takes Mr. Berry's ideas to heart in his real life doesn't matter, as Ron Swanson certainly has this book on his shelf in one of his Tammy-proof bunkers. Mr. Offerman's voice itself gives Mr. Berry's words an organic, believable sound.

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Just as Fun as I Remember It

Revisado: 11-15-19

My eight-year-old son was hooked on this book at school -- he's reading it with his reading group -- and he asked if he could listen to it with me. For several nights we stayed up well-beyond bed time just to see what was going to happen next.

I remember it vividly from when I read it in elementary school. The characters are deep and well-drawn ; they have actual inner conflicts that they have to overcome, pasts that have to be reckoned with, and sins that need to be forgiven -- all of which are rare phenomena in children's literature these days (think Harry Potter's very flatly drawn good guys and bad guys). I think that I remember this book so well from having read it 40 years ago because of these characters. It was clear to me as I listened to the book this time around that the author, Ellen Raskin, knows that children can understand and forgive unreliable narrators and flawed human beings. She also knows that they don't have to be as sheltered from real life as many grown ups insist on doing.

Even beyond the character development, this book is a great introduction to the genre of murder mystery. When we finished listening, my son suggested giving the hard copy to my mother as a birthday gift as she loves Agatha Christie and her literary descendants.

The performance was good with one major flaw. Why give the character of J.J. Ford a southern accent? We know from the description of her background that she grew up in Wisconsin. No drawl there.

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We Learned This Already in High School

Revisado: 07-09-18

If you are looking for a textbook on the subject of totalitarianism, have never before heard of HItler, Mussolini, and their ilk, and did not pay attention to current affairs during any part of the 20th or 21st centuries, this book is for you. Otherwise, it reads like a textbook, bland, dry, and full of facts that may or may not matter to history. I would have been more interested in a book that sheds light on how people come to accept, trust, and follow totalitarian leaders at the expense of their personal freedoms and freedoms of their children -- what popular thought leads to such leaders coming to power? Secretary Albright is an intelligent and interesting person, and she's been at the center of much recent history, but she is not a voice actor, and this recording suffers for it.

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Nobody Writes Like This Anymore

Revisado: 07-09-18

I'm doing a cruise on the Danube later this summer so I decided to do some research. The first book I read was a natural history of the river, long on descriptions of hydroelectric dams, but in between the descriptions of the river's current and the Roman ruins there were references to Patrick Leigh Fermor's trip through Eastern Europe. Same with the second book I consulted -- the one that was supposed to be the armchair travel book on the Danube, but turned out to be flat and purposeless. Now acquainted with more than one writer chasing this one, I decided to investigate this Leigh Fermor. It turns out he's one of the last of his kind -- classically educated, straight out of the English middle class, ready to be trained for the peace-time cavalry, and so poor he has to borrow his evening clothes. This is a guy who has inherited the the wealth of Western learning, but has nothing to lose. That's what makes this book both beautiful and exciting. The young Leigh Fermor in this book is just out of school, but he hasn't lost his English public schoolboy's yen for the prank and the reckless adventure. He has his whole life and the entire continent of Europe ahead of him. He also has access to the dying aristocratic class of Eastern Europe. He spends months of his life in their townhouses, on their manors, in their libraries, and at their dining tables and in his recollections -- this book was written from his memory and from the aid of his travel journals well into his middle age -- show us a world at the end of time, ready to be wiped out by the second world war and by communist expansion. So, "A Time of Gifts" is a illustration of two things we've lost from this world.

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