2023 - Your Historical Fiction Adventures

The second week of February and I'm first to a 2023 thread? Oh, well . . .

I've just finished Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry. This is a beautiful reverie of a novel about life in the small, rural Kentucky river town of Port William, the people who live and, especially, farm there and the changes that gradually drain the life out of the town's way of life over the years, from the 1910s through the 1980s. The story is told via a sort of fictional talking memoir by the title character. Born near the town in the 1914, Jonah Crow is orphaned not once, but twice. His parents are killed by the Spanish flu when he is a small boy, and Jonah is taken in by an aunt and uncle. But when they die, too, Jonah lands in an orphanage at age 10, finally returning to Port William as a young man and quickly becoming the town barber. Jonah, whose name gradually evolves until he is known by one and all as Jayber, is an outsider many times over. As an orphan, he is separated from the general flow of life of Port William, which flows via family life from generation to generation. As the proprietor of a business that will barely support one person, he has sentenced himself, knowingly, to a life of bachelorhood in a community that, again, values family. All this is an effective strategy by Berry to create in his character the ultimate observer of and commentator about the life of the town and the gradual death of its way of life.

The wonderful strengths of this book are Berry's powers of observation and description, his obvious love of his fictional town, its people and rhythms and its natural setting. Berry is also a poet, and as one of the blurbs on the back of my edition of this book points out, that poetic facility is readily evident in the ebb and flow of Berry's sentences and paragraphs. There is love and sadness in this book, but also much gladness and humor.

I am not absolutely sure if this was intended as historical fiction, but The corner that held them is set in the 14th century in a remote corner of East Anglia in a convent of nuns, and the times and the location are lovingly evoked.

Been marching through 19th C. England, following two featured families, the Carboys and the Graces, in a saga by Thomas B. Costain, The Tontine, which explores the rise (and fall) of the characters who pursue big business, investment, and entrepreneur careers during the period of Britain's expanding financial class and economic boom.

Yesterday I finished Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red. An extraordinary novel. And a murder mystery to boot ! Unforgettable characters (my favourite is Esther) all of whom are portrayed with all their flaws. Set in Istanbul, 16th century. Brilliant.

I finished The Lady from Zagreb, the 10th book in Philip Kerr's excellent historical noir Bernie Gunther series that takes place just before, during and after World War 2, in Germany and elsewhere.

Working on Mrs. Lincoln's Rival, which centers around Kate Chase, the daughter of Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury. While the story proceeds in a fairly straight line without much twisting, it's a well-researched look at the women behind the politicians in Civil War-era Washington.

>6 gmathis:, I read and own a paperback copy of that novel.
If you'd like to know what happens to Kate Chase Sprague after the novel ends, check out the biography American Queen: the Rise and Fall of Kate Chase Sprague Civil War Belle of the North and Gilded Age Woman of Scandal by John Oller (2014)
Jennifer Chiaverini wrote a few Civil War era set novels including one about Mary Todd Lincoln titled Mrs. Lincoln's Sisters (2020)

>7 princessgarnet: I read Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker years back, also by Jennifer Chiaverini and liked it. Some of her "Quilters Apprentice" novels also have Civil War-era twists and turns. There may be more, but the two that come to mind are The Sugar Camp Quilt and The Runaway Quilt.

Finished Helen Dunmore’s The Siege about the siege of Stalingrad in WW2. Incredible writing, but a difficult subject. I’m sorry to see she’s died, her books are the kind to make me love historical fiction.

>9 Lightfantastic: I know what you mean; beautiful writing by someone who did the research and got the subject, but it's so difficult to deal with the human cost.

I finished Bruce Chatwin's On the Black Hill, which is about two-thirds an historical novel, as it follows a Welsh farming family, and particularly a pair of twin brothers, from the turn of the 20th century into the 1980s. Lovely writing with lots of acute insight into human nature.

I read Great Circle for my local book club. It's mostly historical fiction although there is a parallel timeline set in the present. It was ... fine. The historical sections were much more interesting than the contemporary ones for me.

I spent a murderous Christmas in Calcutta 1921 with Captain Wyndham and Sergeant Banerjee in Smoke and Ashes. It's a great series.

I just listened to Freeman by Leonard Pitts. The story takes place at the very end of the Civil War and revolves around Sam, a free Negro living in Philadelphia who is determined to find his enslaved wife Tilda, who he presumes is still living in the south. Another thread involves Prudence, a White woman living in Boston and her sister Bonnie, a Negro purchased and then freed by Prudence’s father. They travel to Mississippi to start a school for the newly-freed Blacks.

The story seems to be well-researched and I am very interested in the lives of former slaves who were often turned out with absolutely no resources in a hostile land.

Very highly recommended.

I recently finished The Trackers by Charles Frazier. I knew of Charles Frazier as the author of the best-selling novel Cold Mountain as well as a book I liked even better, Thirteen Moons. Those aren't his only two, but they were the two I knew of. The Trackers takes place in the later stages of the Great Depression. Valentine Welch is a young artist, recently graduated from college, who, through the auspices of his college professor and mentor, gets a job painting a WPA mural on the wall of a post office in remote Dawes, Wyoming. In addition, he has been offered lodging on the nearby Long Shot Ranch, owned by a wealthy landowner, John Long. Long, who has political ambitions, has a younger wife, Eve, with a past that includes years spent on the road, picking fruit, surviving in hobo camps, and eventually singing in traveling country bands. To Val they seem an unlikely couple and during the course of story, no one who has ever read a novel will be surprised to learn, their relationship begins to fray in dramatic fashion.

I found the beginning stages of The Trackers to be its most satisfying section. Frazier's writing style is very engaging, and Val's long musings and observations about the nature of the Depression and the damage it has done to millions of lives in the name of greed and irresponsibility I found very well done. Val's description of the Wyoming landscape and Eve's description of the horrors (and satisfactions) of her earlier life are all quite good. Another memorable character is Faro, the Long Shot's foreman who has a colorful and dangerous past of his own.

Once the plot line gets going, however, as Eve takes off with a small Renoir of her husband's to parts unknown and for reasons obscure, and Long hires Val to go find her, things begin to get a bit more pedestrian. The storyline stays engaging, and Frazier's writing overall remains strong, but I began to wonder what it was all for. Also the common trope of the innocent abroad, much less worldly than he believes himself to be and constantly in error, began to wear on me a bit. Time and again I would say to myself, "You know nothing, Jon Snow."*

However, I don't want to overemphasize the novel's faults. All and all I found it entertaining and fun, with some stretches of really lovely writing and a good if not particularly believable plot.

* Game of Thrones reference

New here. Pocket bio: Retired humanities teacher, residing in Tlaxcala, Mexico, with two dogs and six indoor cats. Passionate about literature, history, philosophy, classical music and opera, jazz, cinema, and similar subjects. Nostalgic guy. Politically centrist. BA in American Studies from Yale; MAs in English and Education from Boston University. Born in northern New Jersey. Have lived and worked in San Francisco, Chicago, northern Nevada, northeast Wisconsin, South Korea.

Just finished and highly recommended: Edna Ferber’s Come and Get It. Having greatly enjoyed the 1936 movie version, I took up the novel and was interested to discover that it is very different in many respects and covers a much longer time-span than even the two generations of the movie. A rich and wonderful reading experience, completely absorbing. One startling development that is not in the film knocked me right off my chair.

I especially relate to this novel because I have lived on its Northern Wisconsin turf. “Butte des Morts” is Neenah in the northeast, close to where I resided in Little Chute. “Iron Ridge” is Hurley in the northwest, the great northwoods area that I often visited. The timber and paper industries are at the core of the narrative.

Ferber is adept at what critics call “solidity of specification”, description of exterior elements as in Balzac. You always know how the rooms are furnished, how the characters are dressed. (I was surprised to have it pointed out that Trollope, even writing at the length he does, doesn’t much bother with this, and it is true.)

I finished The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer. The opening setting is the remote rural mountains of southern Poland in the late 17th Century in the years immediately following the Chmielnicki (often spelled Khmelnytsky) Uprising, an invasion by Cossack forces in rebellion against Polish domination. In Jewish history, these events are known as the Chmielnicki Massacres, as the Cossack forces, aided often by the Poles themselves, perpetrated widespread and massive pogroms. Whole villages were essentially obliterated. Our protagonist, Jacob, is a survivor of one such attack on his native village, Josefov. His wife and three children, he believes, have been murdered, but instead of being killed himself, Jacob is captured and sold into slavery to Jan Bzik, a farmer in remote mountain town. Escape into the mountains, whose ways are unknown to him, means certain death, and the villages have sworn to kill Jacob on sight if he is spotted on the wrong side of the river that borders Bzik's land.

For five years Jacob spends his winters in a high mountain cabin tending to Bzik's cattle. His only source of food and water is what is brought up the mountain to him daily by Bzik's daughter, Wanda. Far from Jewish community and the holy books he loves, Jacob strives to maintain a pious Jewish life as best he can, and that include resisting the strong physical attraction that Jacob and Wanda feel for each other. Marriage is out of the question. Jacob would surely be excommunicated by the rabbis for cohabitating with a Gentile, and either or both of the two could be burned alive by the Church. Well, but as we know, such temptation cannot be resisted forever, and certainly not in fiction. And so our tale is launched. The Slave was first published in 1962 and allegorical references to the Holocaust are impossible to ignore. Highly recommended

Barnaby Rudge is set during the time of the Gordon Riots, which I knew nothing about, and I found it to be a great read.

When is a Western not a Western? When it’s a Northern!

The Wikipedia article on this subject is quite good:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_(genre)

“The Northern or Northwestern is a genre in various arts that tell stories set primarily in the late 19th or early 20th century in the north of North America, primarily in western Canada but also in Alaska. It is similar to the Western genre, but many elements are different, as appropriate to its setting. It is common for the central character to be a Mountie instead of a cowboy or sheriff. Other common characters include fur trappers and traders, lumberjacks, prospectors, First Nations people, settlers, and townsfolk.”

Some authors that are associated with this genre are Jack London, Rex Beach, Robert Service, Ralph Connor, and James Oliver Curwood. I am reading Beach’s The Spoilers at the moment, famously filmed five times (1914, 1923, 1930, 1942, 1955), the highlight always being an epic fist-fight towards the climax. The novel is rousing good fun, based on an actual incident of corruption during the Yukon Gold Rush * , which Beach had witnessed first-hand.

* The key malfeasor was Alexander McKenzie (1851-1922), whom I encountered in my recent reading in North Dakota history. A very nasty guy and machine politician who served prison time for corruption. He conspired, in collaboration with officials he helped place in office, to cheat Alaska gold miners of their winnings by fraudulently claiming title to their mines.

I recently read The Book Spy by Alan Hlad which focuses on an American librarian Maria Aves whose specialty at the the New York Public is microfilm and how she is sent ro Lisbon and works with Tiago Scares to help the World War II effort for the United States. A suspenseful and informative read focusing on a little known war effort.

Working through My Name is Resolute, which begins with the kidnap of the child of a Jamaican plantation owner, her experiences as a maltreated indentured servant in a Puritan community, a resident of a French Catholic orphanage where she learns a trade, the ward of well-to-do Massachusetts aristocrats...and we're just halfway in!

The Royal Windsor Secret by Christine Wells I won. Researching after I read the book, I found the Duke of Windsor was a governor in Nassau, Bahamas 1940-1945. Their home is now up for sale. I was at the Windsor Castle in May.

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus explorers the issues for the role of women in the STEM fields in particular chemistry in the 1950's. Balancing it with her personal life and struggles.

I just finished Rot ist mein Name, set in the 16th century in the Ottoman Empire, and what an amazing trip it was. I want to read up now on so many things.

Discovered The Exiles by Christina Baker Kline recently. It's a fairly light read, but the author has done her homework: right now we're balancing two separate storylines--a governess being transported to Australia on a prisoner ship due to a series of unfortunate events, and a young indigenous Australian girl taken in by English aristocrats--more as a novelty than as foster daughter. Will be interested to see how their paths cross as the book unfolds.

Has anyone read the author's other novel, Orphan Train?

>26 gmathis: I read Orphan Train and enjoyed it, although the historical sections were more interesting to me than the present-day sections (it's really hard to make dueling timelines equally compelling, in my experience, and I certainly wouldn't say it's so bad as to ruin the overall book).

>27 rosalita: I agree--time travel tends to be distracting. This one doesn't have any contemporary elements.

Next up: The Miller's Dance by Winston Graham. It's a late entry in the Poldark novels, which I enjoyed in print and (at least partially) via PBS. I'm interested to see how much the recent PBS version veered from or stayed with the original storyline.

I watched the "Poldark" adaptation (on PBS "Masterpiece" 2015-19) and enjoyed it. I bought the original "Poldark" starring Robin Ellis (1977) on DVD for my dad as a Christmas present.
The newer Poldark series stopped at The Four Swans (the 6th book) with story lines from The Angry Tide, #7. Winston Graham's surviving son was the literary consultant for the show!

>29 princessgarnet: Thanks for setting me straight! Loved the early seasons of the newer Poldark ... toward the end, I was a little less enamored. Either way, I like Winston Graham's writing. This'll be a good tea and blankie book over the holidays.

>9 Lightfantastic: The story of the siege of Stalingrad is one of the most amazing stories unknown to most of the west.. the sacrifices of the Russian people are indiscribable... 25 plus million died in WW11...

I stuck my nose in Jackson by Max Byrd and it ended up on top of the pile. So far, we haven't been in the presence of Jackson much; instead following the interesting investigative trail of the biographer who was assigned to write an honest account of Jackson's exploits just ahead of Jackson's 1828 election.

The Nurse's Secret by Amanda Skenandore was engaging read about the first hospital based nurses educational program with many twists and turns plus characters that you might want to cheer for because of their ambitions they might fight for.

One of my favorite science fiction authors recently switched gears and published Granger's Crossing, which is an historical fiction/murder mystery set in US revolutionary war times. Tiedemann really brings the setting to life in this meticulously researched novel.