Author: Kat

A Space Odyssey: Reading Charles Fishman’s “One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon”

On July 20, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.  In 1969, the odyssey of Apollo 11 seemed to some of us the realization of the American dream. I have a joyful remembrance of watching the grainy TV footage, and nowadays I feel a deep sadness that NASA’s space shuttle program was canceled. I will attend a  Moon Landing theme party on July 20, where we will play Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” on vinyl; make a batch of imitation Space Food Sticks (a predecessor of energy bars); and play a round of Moon Trivial Pursuit (we all bring trivia cards).

And let me recommend Charles Fishman’s new book, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon, a meticulously researched history entwined with vivid details that tell a fast-paced story. Fishman begins by telling us the moon has a smell. After walking on the moon, the astronauts, Neil Armstrong and and Buzz Aldrin, noticed the dust they had tracked in smelled “like wet ashes,” or like “a firecracker” that had gone off.

Did you know that John F. Kennedy was, in some respects, responsible for the moon landing? In 1961 he told reporters at a press conference that Americans would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. In part, this was a reaction to the Cold War space race: Russians had just sent the first man into space, and Europeans were mocking the Americans.  Kennedy’s advisors and NASA scientists had first confirmed to him that putting a man on the moon was the only way to beat the Russians.

This was an incredible achievement. In 1961 NASA had not done even the preliminary researh for travel to the moon, so hundreds of thousands of scientists, engineers, MIT geniuses, seamstresses, computer whizzes, craftsmen, and builders worked together. The craftsmanship was prodigious. The spaceship was built by hand, women were hired to knit the wires for the computer by hand, the Playtex bra company designed the space suits and women sewed them by hand , and the parachutes were also sewed by hand.  And eight years the first men landed on the moon.

Fishman stresses that the Apollo missions had a revolutionary effect on the culture of the ‘60s, which simultaneously embraced rock music, the Civil Rights movement, the Women’s movement, the environmental movement, protests against the war in Vietnam, science, science fiction, popular TV shows like Star Trek, Lost in Space, and  Laugh-in.  It was a time of daring and boldness, as well as a time of the terrible tragedies of the assassinations of JFK, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King.

And  NASA drove the computer chip business, which powered the space shuttle computers and drove the price of chips way down,  which drove the market for home computers eventually.  The chips began to be used in electronic appliances.  Before Apollo 11, transistors were cheaper.

The trip to the moon was hailed by some as thrilling and necessary, by others a waste of money. But Fishman points out that the money spent on Apollo 11 would never have gone to the fighting of poverty and other important issues anyway.

Did you approve of putting men on the moon, or resent it because you thought the funds would be better-spent elsewhere?

I learned so much from Fishman’s book.  An excellent page-turner!

A Weekend Giveaway! Simenon, Jane Bowles, Leonora Carrington, Christopher Tilghman, & H. R. Cross

Happy Weekend!  It’s warm, but not too warm, and I hope you’re enjoying the garden or sitting in front of the fan with a good book.  It’s giveaway time!   I can affirm the first four books are worth reading; the other two are unsolicited review copies, which I don’t have time to read.

Pick one  or all six and I’ll put your name in the hopper! Leave a comment or email me at mirabiledictu.org@gmail. com

Here are the six books:

Simenon’s Maigret Bides His Time.  Everybody likes a fast-paced Simenon.  In this one, Maigret investigates the apparent suicide of a Corsican immigrant.

Jane Bowles’s Everything Is Nice, a collection of stories, plays, sketches and letters.  Although I prefer her husband Paul Bowles’s books, Jane Bowles is an accomplished writer in her own right, and this is a beautiful edition.

Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet.  Virago hails this posthumously-published novel by the surrealist painter and writer  a masterpiece.

Eleanor Dark’s The Little Company, an Australian novel set during World War II (Virago).

Christopher Tilghman’s Thomas and Beal in the Midi. Here’s the Goodreads blurb:  A young interracial couple escapes from Maryland to France in 1892, living first among artists in the vibrant Latin Quarter of Paris, and then beginning a new life as winemakers in the rugged countryside of the Languedoc.  An unsolicited review copy.

H. S. Cross’s Grievous seems to be about a secret society at a school.   A  blurb by Jen Baker compares the book to C. P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers series and Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending.  It is an unsolicited review copy.

Do We Need War Memorials? Cicero Honors the Dead

Cicero

As a pacifist, I take a dim view of the war culture. Military holidays and war memorials celebrate death and killing. If you’re a lucky warrior, you return unmaimed but with PTSD; if you’re unlucky, you are metamorphosed into a name on a war memorial.  (Dead civilians are overlooked.)

And yet I wonder:  Why do I read war literature?  Am I a hypocrite to prefer Homer’s Iliad to the Odyssey (I think the Iliad is the better poem); to love Tolstoy’s War and Peace; think Virgil’s Aeneid is the best poem ever written; and realize that Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War may be more informative than Winston Churchill’s six-volume history of World War II, which I once read during a long illness?

Oddly, it is Cicero the orator who has compelled me to appreciate the value of the war memorial. I recently read his Fourteenth Philippic, the last of a series of fourteen orations against Antony (the Roman general who fell in love with Cleopatra). In this speech to the senate in 43 B.C., Cicero proposed that a war memorial be established to honor the generals and legions who had recently—and temporarily—defeated Antony in three battles.  Cicero and Antony were bitter enemies.

The history of this time is complicated, so the following paragraph from Michael Grant’s excellent History of Rome can be your Who’s Who for  the Philippics.

After Caesar’s murder, his right-hand man Antony, consul in 44 B.C., used a variety of methods, including the falsification of the dead man’s papers, to gain control of events; and he took steps at the same time to arouse the people against the assassins, Brutus and Cassius, who before long retreated to the east. Yet for all the growing power and popularity of Antony, who in spite of a taste for riotous living was a politician and general of considerable gifts, Cicero, true to his distaste for autocrats large and small, attacked him fiercely in a series of brilliant speeches, the Philippics.

I was very moved by Cicero’s argument that the monuments comfort the families. And so I have translated a Latin paragraph into English for you.  Cicero is an elegant writer, but his sentences are very long, and he employs figures of speech that elucidate the Latin but seem incongruous in modern English. He often uses a  a figure called hendiadys (which means “one through two”) in which he uses two words to express one  idea.   The following paragraph is actually two very long, graceful Latin sentences;  the first is seven lines, the second ten tines.  And since Latin is concise, this English translation is longer than the original. Such a great writer!  But he is not read in English, because even the best writers cannot capture the effects.

Anyway, here’s my translation  of a paragraph of Cicero’s argument.

But since, O senators, the gift of glory is bestowed on the greatest and bravest citizens by the honor of a monument, let us comfort the dead men’s relatives, to whom this is the best consolation: their parents, who have given birth to these protectors of the republic; their children, who will have examples of courage in their family; their wives, who are deprived of men so brave that it is better to honor them than mourn them; and their brothers, who will realize that, just as they are similar in body, so they are in mind. And I wish that we could wipe away all tears by our ballots and votes; or publicly give these relatives such a speech, that they would put aside their grief and mourning. I wish they could rejoice instead: though many different kinds of death fall to men, the finest has befallen theirs. Their men are neither unburied nor deserted—and to die for one’s country is is not considered pitiable— nor were they cremated in a humble tomb with their ashes scattered, but they are covered by public gifts and works and a building which will be an altar of courage to hand down to the memory of  eternity.

A Revolutionary War Novel: “The Linwoods” by Catharine Maria Sedgwick

Sometimes we lose ourselves in old-fashioned  novels. We like to read about honor and manners of the kind Americans of the nineteenth century extolled. And so I enjoyed The Linwoods by Catharine Maria Sedgwick, a little-known American writer whose peers were Washington Irving and James Fennimore Cooper. She wrote dramatic historical novels about American life and regional manners: her most famous is Hope Leslie, the story of a friendship between a Puritan woman and a Pequot Indian woman in the seventeenth century.

I confess my favorite is The Linwoods, her fast-paced fourth novel, published in 1835 and set during the Revolutionary War.  It  follows the fortunes of two families.  The wealthy Linwoods of New York cast out their son Herbert  when he joins the American rebel army, though his  sister Isabella attempts to mediate for him.  In New England, the Lees are a poor refined family who support the Revolutionary War; the widowed Mrs. Lee approves of her Harvard-educated son Eliot’s decision to join George Washington’s army.  And so he rides away on his horse, worried about leaving her alone to care for his fragile, pretty sister, Bessie, and the younger siblings.

Sedgwick is not a graceful stylist, but in The Linwoods, she skillfully interweaves scintillating dialogue, dexterous letters, and vivid chronological scenes. She begins with an unforgettable walk through New York City: Isabella Linwood, a strong heroine who could easily star in a George Eliot novel, and her younger friend Bessie Lee are walking through a bad neighborhood to a fortuneteller’s house. Bessie resists, due to religious reasons, and so does Jupe, the black slave who attends them, but Isabella is too strong-willed for them. And when they meet Herbert (Isabella’s brother) and his shallow, handsome friend Jasper, they tease Bessie mercilessly.  This smart set of young upper-class friends do not understand Bessie’s fragility and fervent morals.   Fortunetelling is fun for them, but almost traumatic for Bessie, who is visiting from the country.

Then there is a series of affecting letters between Bessie Lee and Isabella. Isabella’s boyfriend Jasper visits the Lees and flirts wildly with Bessie.  (He knows Eliot from Harvard.) He has not thought twice about “making love” to Bessie, but Bessie’s letters to Isabella reveal her pain and obsession.  “I can tell nothing but what I see, and I see so little! The outward world does not much interest me. It is what I feel that I think of and ponder over; but I know how much you detest what you call sentimental letters, so I try to avoid such subjects.”  But of course she cannot avoid writing about Jasper.

Jasper is the villain of the piece. When he receives a letter from his mother chiding him for the flirtation with Bessie, he returns to New York.   “His conscience was easy. He had not committed himself!”

And Bessie has a nervous breakdown.  These scenes are tragic and heartbreaking.  She reminds me of Ophelia, if Ophelia had had the energy to go on the road.

The war scenes are exciting, and the Rebels are always honorable: at one point, Eliot Lee gallops in the middle of the night to the aid of a widow with two blind children. She blows a loud horn three times when the “skinners” attempt to burgle her house (she has nothing) and abducts her daughter.

If you like historical novels, you will also be intrigued by the character of George Washington.  Biographers don’t seem to write about him anymore, but Sedgwick characterizes him as clear-minded and kind, if reserved and misunderstood because of that reserve.

You don’t read Sedgwick for the style but  for her portraits of women and portrayals of American frontier life.  She is an expert plotter, if not a brilliant writer,and her concern with American issues of race and gender influenced Harriet Beecher Stowe.

So Many Books: What I’ve Been Reading & the “Should-I-Bother” Pile

WHAT HAVE I BEEN READING?  So many books.

I’m very much enjoying a new summer novel, Honestly, We Meant Well, by Grant Ginder.  It is light, realistic, well-written, and comical, a literary novel that can double as a beach read.  Ginder is a master of fast scenes and witty dialogue in this adroit portrayal of a  family vacation in Greece.  When Sue Ellen, a classicist, accepts a gig lecturing in Greece, she isn’t entirely happy that the family is accompanying her.  She’s annoyed with her philandering husband and grieving  the death of Christos, a former lover who ran the inn where they’re staying.  Her husband, Dean a writer and creative writing professor, is worried about his next novel and, unbeknownst to her, is cheating on her again.   Their  son, Will, is in agony over a breakup with his boyfriend and has also plagiarized a short story. Then there’s  Eleni,  Christos’ daughter, about to sell the inn.  The novel is also a  kind of guide to Greece.  Delphi, Athens, Aegina…  Great fun.

The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan by Stuart Palmer. This quick American novel, first published in 1941, is a Golden Age Detective novel. The amateur sleuth, Hildegarde Withers, is a New York schoolteacher on vacation in L.A. When a Hollywood agent recruits her as an expert advisor for a film about Lizzie Borden, she starts finding dead bodies, beginning with the scriptwriter in the office next door. Rollicking adventures, humor, and suspense:  I do hope I can find other books in this Miss Withers series. In Otto Penzler’s introduction, he compares Miss Withers to Miss Marple. This book is in the American Mystery Classics series, chosen and introduced by Otto Penzler.

THE “SHOULD-I-BOTHER?” PILE

L.A. Woman by Eve Babitz. I loved Babitz’s self-described confessional novel, Eve’s Hollywood (my post is here), but put aside L.A. Woman.  Some of it is a little bit coarse. For instance, the narrator Sophie’s dog, Tango, has a kind of affair with her on the bathroom floor.  And a friend gives Sophie advice on how to “give head”: “Spit,” Ophelia concluded, “That’s the whole trick to giving head. Just spit.” Okay, it’s funny but… not that funny. Should I bother?

Georgette Heyer’s Cotillion. All of Georgette Heyer’s novels are elegant, witty, and very much alike. I enjoyed the first 285 pages of Cotillion, then lost the book behind a chair.   Eureka!  I vacuumed!  Heyer’s novels are billed as Regency romances, but they’re more like Regency comedies.  I  guarantee the girl will get the guy.  Should I bother?

The Magus by John Fowles.  This is always mentioned on summer reading lists. Last summer I read the first 300 pages.  It’s haunting and boring at the same time. Should I pick it up again?

What are you reading and what’s on your “Should-I-Bother” pile.

The Poet Statius on the Death of a Lion

I love to read Latin, but I seldom write out a translation.  It occurred to me, however, that readers today may be unfamiliar with Statius, a  stunning Roman poet of the first century A.D. and the author of Silvae, an innovative collection of “occasional poems” that celebrate or describe many subjects: sleep, a party thrown by the emperor Domitian, a statuette, the anniversary of the death of the poet Lucan, even the construction of a highway.

The following poem is addressed to a lion who died fighting in the arena.  I love this lion so much.  Domitian mourns.  Even the tame lions in cages growl their grief over his death.

I have not attempted to turn this poem into verse, first, because I am not a poet, and second, because the meter in Latin poetry is determined by the quantity of the vowels (long and short) rather than  the stress on syllables. This is a prose version arranged in lines that follow the lines of the Latin more or less—less than more—but I attempt nothing but to show the character of the lion.

“A Lion Tamed” (Silvae II.5)

What good did it do you to be tamed, you who had shown your rage?
What good did it do to forget crime and human killings
and endure command and obey a lesser master?
What good, the fact that you were accustomed to leave your den
and return to a cage and withdraw freely from captured prey
and let go the trainer’s hands from a lax bite?
You die, expert killer of giant beasts,
not encircled by the Massylians of Numidia with their curved net,
not goaded in a dreaded jump over hunting spears,
nor deceived by the blind gaping of a pit,
but conquered by a fleeing animal. Your unlucky cage
stands open, and around the locked doors on all sides, the tame lions 
swelled with rage that this disgrace had been allowed.
All their manes fell and they were ashamed to see your body brought back, and they brought their foreheads
down to their eyes in a frown.
But that new shame did not destroy your character as
your life poured out with the first blow:
valor remained and courage returned to you
from the middle of death as you fell.
Just as a dying soldier conscious of a deep wound
charges the enemy and threatens and raises his hands with the sword falling: so the lion, slow in step and stripped of dignity.
stares, panting, and looks for his breath and the enemy.
And yet you, conquered lion, will bear the solace of sudden death, because the sorrowful people and senators
have mourned you as if you were a well-known gladiator
falling in the sad sand of the arena; and because the loss of one lion has touched Domitian—one lion among so many insignificant wild beasts from Scythia, Libya, Germany, and Egypt.

A Random List: Books I’ve Read on May 28

Do you keep a book journal?   If so, you know what you’ve read on May 28 each year for the last decade (2010-now).

It is a very odd list:  I’ve included links to posts at my old blog, Mirabile Dictu, where relevant.

MAY 28, 2010: The Days of Abandonment, by Elena Ferrante  (my favorite book by Ferrante)

MAY 28, 2011: The Needle’s Eye, by Margaret Drabble

MAY 28, 2012: Doctors and Women, by Susan Cheever

MAY 28, 2013: Ursule Mirouet, by Balzac

MAY 28, 2014: Off Course, by Michele Hunevan

MAY 28, 2015: The Professor, by Charlotte Bronte

MAY 28, 2016: Uncle Silas, by Sheridan le Fanu

MAY 28, 2017: Golden Days, by Carolyn See

MAY 28, 2018: Love in a Cold Climate, by Nancy Mitford

MAY 28, 2019: Franny and Zooey, by J. D. Salinger

Does this list have meaning?  Well, it’s a random date, and I’m disappointed by the results.  If I’d included 2009, the title would have been Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which would have added flair.  But these are good titles, all thoroughly enjoyable, more or less classics, with the exception of Susan Cheever’s clever novel, which is long forgotten  and out-of-print ( hence not a classic) but worth reading if you can find a copy.

Summer Reading: In My Armor, on a Quest

It’s Memorial Day, the first real day of summer.

We are obsessed with summer reading.  What will we peruse?  Classics or light books? Some prefer the Modernists; others the Victorians;  others enjoy cute beach romances with cover art depicting Adirondack chairs. And I would too if I hadn’t already lost one of Elin Hilderbrand’s Nantucket novels—at the beach!

Summer is also an ideal time for long-term projects.  You can read The Tale of Genji (did it), The Death of Virgil (spoiled my  idea of Virgil, who is portrayed in the first 30 pages as a dying man ogling a boy fan),  the worst of Dickens (Martin Chuzzlewit), or Robert Harris’s  Cicero trilogy (which I’m not as crazy about as most people).

The worst of my beloved Dickens.

But this year I have a far, far tougher quest: catching up with at least three books published in the last few years.

I’m in my armor, on my horse. I’ve got some books.  Alas, the regrettably simple style of 21st literature is often colorless and dull. Blab, blab, blab: I like the classics. But this summer I’m going partially for new “pop,”  new “literary, and “new” nonfiction.  Maybe I can even read four new books.

Before I go on to trash new books,  let me recommend some brilliant new books I’ve read this year. 

  1. Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife, a brilliant feminist retelling of Beowulf.
  2. Brad Leithauser’s The Promise of Elsewhere, an academic satire in which a professor goes rogue on vacation in Europe.
  3. Tessa Hadley’s Late in the Day, a novel about two couples’ complicated relationships.
  4. Pam Houston’s graceful collection of essays, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country.
  5. Vita Nostra, a pretty good SF novel by Marina and Sergey Dychenko, translated by Julia Meitov Hersey.

And here is a list of mediocre new books I’ve read parts of but then rejected.  This doesn’t mean they’re bad.

  1. The Heartland: An American History, by Kristin L. Hoganson. This  history of the midwest by a professor at the University of Illinois has been well-reviewed—and kudos to Hoganson for taking on the Midwest! But it seemed narrow, concentrating almost entirely on research in Illinois, which doesn’t take into consideration the differences between groups of immigrants in different states or problems endemic to different landscapes. She does make interesting parallels between the Kickapoo Indians and itinerant pioneers.  But ye gods!  She devotes an entire chapter to the breeding of livestock.  That’s where I gave up.
  2. All the Lives We Ever Lived, by Katharine Smyth. How could I not love a bibliomemoir about Virginia Woolf? But Smyth is too richy-rich for me. I tired of her father’s “varnishing the teak of the cockpit” of their yacht.  I abandoned this book after 30 pages..
  3. David Means’s Instructions for a Funeral, a collection of short stories. Too verbose for me.
  4. Marie Benedict’s The Only Woman in the Room, a historical novel about Hedy Larmarr, the actress, and a Barnes and Noble Book Club selection. Actually, I finished this, but found it formulaic.

So on with the quest for great new books!   The most-promoted new books will not necessarily be the best.

Why the Planet Can’t Be Saved

Something positive for the planet!

Last week, we pulled over at a rest stop. Sheet lightning was flashing and the wind was so strong it shook the car. We sat in our shuddering car wondering what to do. A woman in a car beside us looked out her window anxiously.

We couldn’t save her, we regret.

No one could save us, either.

This is the way it’s going to be.

Storms come up suddenly. Furious storms, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes.  We’ve never seen so many.

This week, it’s raining. Everybody has water in the basement. Everybody hopes it won’t flood, though there has been terrible flooding this spring in Nebraska and western Iowa.

After 2030, climate change will be irreversible. But it could be reversed now. Remember the hole in the ozone layer?  NASA and other agencies around the world have fixed it by phasing out the industrial production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). They signed an international agreement in 1987.

Now, we need to stop burning  fossil fuels.  We need to go VERY green.  Yet there’s resistance to green energy like wind turbines (which spoil the landscape or kill the birds, according to rich men of different political parties, among them Trump (it spoils the view on his Scottish golf course), Robert Kennedy, Jr. (it spoils the view on Nantucket or wherever), and Jonathan Franzen (who worries about the birds, which will all be dead if we don’t change to green energy).  There is similar resistance to  the huge solar farms:  rich people in a gated community in Virginia oppose them because the solar panels spoil their view.

HERE’S WHAT HUMAN BEINGS CAN DO:  Every time you DON’T drive you help.  Take the bus or bicycle. According to the EPA, motor vehicles  cause 75 percent of carbon monoxide pollution in the U.S.   And yet people cannot make the connection that driving is killing the planet.  They blithely move to the ex-urbs, which means even MORE driving. And the next generation is being trained to do the same. The driving age here, if you can believe it, is 14.

We have all known for decades that walking, bicycling, and mass transit are good alternatives to driving.  After a lifetime of NOT driving a car because of environmental concerns, I begin to wonder why I’ve done it. I despair over the stupidity and greed of human beings.  But what about the plants and animals?  Yes, they are worth saving.

Drivers do not want you to save the planet.  Pedestrians and bicyclists are viewed not as role models but as eccentrics IN THE WAY.  Drivers become more and more hostile:  road rage.  A car hit my husband  last year (the driver veered suddenly left into the bike lane) and broke my spouse’s collarbone and punctured his lung.   A car also hit the Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for governor last year (I voted for him) on his bicycle and he will not walk without a walker for six months.

In the Netherlands, drivers are trained to watch out for bicyclists.  The New York Times said last October that they’re trained in a maneuver called the Dutch reach.:

When you are about to exit the car, you reach across your body for the door handle with your far or opposite hand. This action forces you to turn toward the side view mirror, out and then back over your shoulder to be sure a bicyclist is not coming from behind. Only then do you slowly open the door.

This is one of many things which should be stressed in the U.S.

So now we’ve almost killed the planet, you might as well read a dystopian novel.  I strongly recommend John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up, which I wrote about here at my old blog, Mirabile Dictu.  In this terrifying post-modern SF classic,  pollution has rendered the U.S.  a wasteland.  The poisoned air blows into Canada and sometimes across the ocean to Europe (sound familiar?);  everyone is sick; antibiotics no longer work; fleas and rat infestations in houses and apartment house can no longer be controlled because they are immune to poison; the acid rain in NY is so bad that you need to wear plastic outside; the water is poisoned (there are frequent “no-drink water” days); intelligence levels are dropping (lead in the air and water); a virus causes spontaneous abortion; the oceans are so polluted that people vacation in Colorado rather than California; and big businesses are profiting by selling air filters, water filters, etc.

John Brunner was prescient.

Memorial Day Reading: A Beowulf Marathon

It’s Memorial Day Weekend!

Some love summer holidays.  Some do not.

Three days of drinking beer and grilling hot dogs  with the relatives from Kansas may be a trial for an addicted reader. I have been reduced to perusing People magazine at the picnic table. And don’t forget: Cousin Myrna, her husband Mickey, and their grown-up kids, Dakota, Dylan, and Donny, WILL be camping in the backyard.  Tattoos WILL be compared.  Too many marshmallows will be roasted.

Personally, I’m doing a Beowulf and Beowulf retelling marathon this weekend. (Do I think the relatives are monsters?  But I may eat some bratwurst.) I can’t recommend too highly the novel I am reading, Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife, a feminist retelling of Beowulf.

Whether you know the Beowulf story or not does not matter.  The Mere Wife is a compelling book.  Somewhere, we do have  a copy of Seamus Heaney’s translation. (It has been a LOT of years.)  But you can always read a  summary of the poem at Encyclopedia Britannica.

People love retold myths, poems, and fairy tales.  The Mere Wife, touted by critics,  is no exception. Set in a suburban gated community called Herot Hall, this version focuses on the women characters, especially the mothers.   Dana, an ex-soldier with PTSD, lives in a cave under the mountain with her son Gren (Grendel), a boy born with teeth and claws; her suburban counterpart, Willa, is the miserable wife of the heir of Herot Hall, who is cheating on her with a neighbor, and Willa is also the ice-cold mother of Dylan, a lonely friendless boy.

The women don’t have much power, or so it seems. Dana, who volunteered as a soldier sometime after 9/11, has survived rape and torture in a hostage situation and returned to the U.S. with only one eye and pregnant by an unknown captor.

Headley writes so insightfully about PTSD that I did really wonder if the author was a veteran. (I haven’t looked it up.)  She lyrically, impressionistically describes Dana’s state of mind.  You are immediately in Dana’s chilling world in the first paragraph of the prologue.

Say it. The beginning and end at once. I’m facedown in a truck bed, getting ready to be dead. I think about praying, but i’ve never been any good at asking for help. I try to sing. There aren’t any songs for this. All I have is a line I read in a library book. All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things will be well.

And Dana understands how the military recruits young ignorant people who want to be heroes.  The reality is different.

Back in the U.S., Dana returns to Herot Hall, where she grew up (though her modest family’s house has been bulldozed), and in a harrowing scene, gives birth in the mountain cave to her “monster” son, Gren.  He will never fit in, so she protects him by living in isolation under the mountain.

But the blond, gorgeous trophy wife, Willa, is the really violent one. Boiling with repressed rage at Herot Hall, where she has nothing to do, she wants her glass house–glass walls and no curtains–to remain perfect.  Her willful misinterpretation of what she has seen—Gren as a monster rather than a child playing with her son during her perfect party—drives her berserk. And she goads the Beowulfian hero, Ben Woolf, a policeman and war veteran, to investigate.

Sometimes there is a chorus of the zoned-out wives of Herlot Hill, who do Pilates, boxing, and are in shape for whatever  happens. They don’t have power, but they insist on action here.  They want blood.

The most famous retelling of Beowulf is John Gardner’s Grendel, written from the point of view of the monster. I have had a used copy on the shelf for many years, but I am ashamed to say I have never read it.  And I just discovered that there is WRITING in it. You cant imagine how unhappy this makes me. But it’s in pencil, so I plan to erase it.

Have you read Beowulf ? Have you read The Mere Wife or Grendel? And what are you reading this weekend?

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