by Richard Subber | Jun 25, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Joys of reading, Language
the good folks prevail
Book review:
Saint Martin’s Summer
by Rafael Sabatini (1875-1950)
Pinnacle Press, 1909
270 pages
Saint Martin’s Summer, published in 1909, is a historical romance. This is Sabatini’s signature style. Think of it as a very high-toned beach book…
Spoiler alert: if you think you’re going to get a big helping of heaving bosoms and sweaty ravishment, maybe you should pick another book…
If you are familiar with Sabatini’s novels or his genre, you already know that knowing the ending—that is, anticipating with confidence how the good folks will prevail—is not necessarily an obstacle to full enjoyment.
Consider my most recent reading of Saint Martin’s Summer.
Grenache is the diffident, honorable cavalier sent by the Queen in Paris to contrive the rescue—effect the “enlargement,” do you love the language tones as I do?—of Valérie, the sweetest damsel you can imagine, from her desperate affairs of the heart in the godforsaken backwater of Dauphiny.
The designing Dowager, the feckless Seneschal, the callow son (Marius), and the worldly and unfaithful son (Florimond)—and believe it or not, too much money and power—round out the cast and the motive forces in Sabatini’s completely predictable and marvelously fulfilling mainstay of Romance literature.
Did I mention love? In Saint Martin’s Summer, you will relearn the potency of plighted troth, the lonely loyalty of unrequited love, the degradation of love in the minds of the loveless, the blossom of unexpected love in the heart of a forlorn girl, and the slowly rising heat of first love in the nobly bewildered and barren soul of an older man, who suddenly realizes that he can welcome a better life with an eager bride who is suddenly ready to be a woman.
I guess, technically, I had to mention “spoiler alert” at the beginning of this review. If you’ve read this far, I think you normally don’t pay attention to spoiler alerts, or, in this case, you didn’t mind.
I like to re-read Sabatini (e.g., Scaramouche) because I know how the stories are going to end,
I know what the lovers are going to say,
and I like the way Sabatini tells a story.
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Here’s my first take on Saint Martin’s Summer, after my first reading:
Jason Bourne would be bored in Dauphiny.
Dauphiny is a sleepy, rural French province, but there is occasional sword play, and some moat diving, so Bourne wouldn’t be bored all the way to tears…
Let’s just face up to it, in your classic Romantic novel about 18th century French dowager marquises and blundering bounders and dashing heroes and cherishable maidens and fat, simpering seneschals, you’re going to get more talk than titillation, and more argument than action. So be it.
Sabatini deftly creates his tale of principled, introspective people trying for success, both villainous and otherwise.
His characters have deep appeal—they’re always trying to do the right thing, or at least trying to do a bad thing the right way…e.g., Grenache knows he must save the girl, and he knows he will love her deeply…
They care deeply—about the ones they love, about their success in a milieu that maximizes opportunity for deception and ultimately minimizes the prospect of getting away with a betrayal or self-dealing or moral weakness.
Sabatini is a colorful storyteller,
and he tells a great story about things that count.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: An Empire on the Edge
by Nick Bunker
The British wanted to win
the Revolutionary War,
but they had good reasons
for not trying too hard…
In other words: Poems for your eyes and ears with 64 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Jun 13, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, Language, Poetry, Reviews of other poets
dry tears, is all…
Book review:
All of Us: The Collected Poems
by Raymond Carver (1938-1988)
American poet, short story writer
386 pages
Repeat after me: à chacun son goût.
This is my first experience with Carver’s poetry.
I’ll say this right out: I do not disdain Carver’s poems, neither do I feel any urge to read them again.
He didn’t bother with the lyric voice. Don’t look for any sparks. Occasionally, one will feel moved to dry tears.
Carver offers a monochrome oeuvre. It’s prose in disguise. In some dusty corners Carver is included in the loosely defined group of poets who write so-called “dirty realism.” Think Bukowski (but Carver isn’t as strident as Bukowski, not nearly as imperious as Bukowski).
Carver’s poetic efforts are better than dirt, but what he writes really isn’t poetry in any flavor that appeals to me.
…à chacun son goût
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: Shakespeare’s Wife
Germaine Greer went overboard a bit…
As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Jun 9, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, Joys of reading, Language, Poetry, Reviews of other poets
Milking cows and dad music…
Book review:
A Sense of Wonder:
The World’s Best Writers
on the Sacred, the Profane, & the Ordinary
Edited by Brian James Patrick Doyle (1956-2017)
Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2016
192 pages
If Brian Doyle thinks you’re a good writer, ‘nuff said.
Most likely you’ll recognize at least a few names among Doyle’s collection of “the world’s best writers.”
In A Sense of Wonder, you can go straight to Mary Oliver (“Do You Think There Is Anything Not Attached by Its Unbreakable Cord to Everything Else”), or Pico Iyer (“A Chapel Is Where You Can Hear Something Beating Below Your Heart: I Came to the Chapel at the University as the Light Was Failing…”), or Paul Hawken (“Healing or Stealing? The Best Commencement Address Ever”), or, of course, Doyle himself (“The Late Mister Bin Laden: A Note”).
I especially like Connor Doe’s “Perfect Time: A Note on the Music of Being a Dad,” and if you’re not a dad, and you read it, you’ll start wishing right away that you could be one.
My choice for best “feel good” selection is
“An Elevator in Utah: On How Children Make Despair Look Stupid.”
Reading it creates the strangest urge to learn how to milk cows.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: Shantung Compound
They didn’t care much
about each other…
by Langdon Gilkey
My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 53 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Jun 1, 2024 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, World history
imagine that you had been there…
Book review:
Countdown 1945:
The Extraordinary Story of the Atomic Bomb
and the 116 Days That Changed the World
by Chris Wallace with Mitch Weiss
New York: Avid Reader Press, 2020
312 pages
There is quite tolerable intensity in Countdown 1945, in tandem with the horror of the use of the atomic bomb in Japan at the end of World War II.
There are gripping revelations from all of the principals involved in the development of the bomb and the decision to use it. There is dialogue more or less on every page. Countdown 1945 is not so much a book as it is the integration of tales told by the men and women who were there, doing it, and living through it.
This is one of the very few books I’ve read from cover to cover in the past several years.
It was a learning experience, and I was completely aware that I was vicariously sharing the terrible experiences of the folks who had anything to do with Little Boy and Fat Man.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
“The beginning is always today.”
(quote, Mary Shelley)
so get started…
Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 73 free verse poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | May 28, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, Joys of reading, Language, Tidbits
“…turn the unspeakable into words…”
Book review:
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
by Anne Lamott
New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1994
239 pages
I prefer to think of Anne Lamott’s free-spirited commentary on writing as “some encouragement” and “some guidance.”
If you want to be a writer and don’t have a clue about how or why you want it, I guess that reading Bird by Bird may be entertaining but I think probably it won’t give you the mojo.
Lamott is talking to fellow writers when she’s probing the yin and the yang of the whole messy, oh so personal business of committing the right words to paper. Her tidbits about life will be mostly familiar to just about anybody, and sometimes they seem like they originated in post-it notes on her fabulous collection of index cards that she uses to jot down those special words and insights and dream talking.
Bird by Bird seems to be an appealing excuse to feel good about the tribulations and the ecstasies of writing, and all the stuff that happens in between. It’s a gossipy, comfortable walk through Lamott’s life of writing. She mentions this: “John Gardner wrote that the writer is creating a dream into which he or she invites the reader, and that the dream must be vivid and continuous.”
Her passion for writing is mostly obvious, and motivational if you’re inclined to be motivated.
I think this line is as good a summary as the reader can hope for: “…the writer’s job is to see what’s behind [the closed door], to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words—not just into any words but if we can, into rhythm and blues.”
Did you hear the drum riff?
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
“…and dipped in folly…”
only Poe knows how to say it…
Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | May 16, 2024 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Politics, Power and inequality
“credit” is P.C. for “lending money”
Book review:
American Bonds:
How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation
by Sarah L. Quinn
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019
288 pages
Quinn writes plain academic prose, and she has a lot to say.
“Credit” is a very polite way of saying “lending money,” which is a very polite way of describing what is elsewhere called “usury.”
It’s no surprise that lending money has been part of the social, economic, and political landscapes since money was invented, and certainly credit markets have always existed in America since colonial times.
American Bonds is a deeply engrossing text (it’s not a casual read) about how folks with money and businesses and the government have used credit availability for personal, corporate, and policy advantages. Credit has always been part of the American story.
You might try reading it a chapter at a time.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Home Team: Poems About Baseball (book review)
Edwin Romond hits another homer…
Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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