Book One set in 1849-50. The narrator, Daniel Quinn, orphaned by cholera, is 15 when we first meet him, though it’s clear he’s recounting his escapadeBook One set in 1849-50. The narrator, Daniel Quinn, orphaned by cholera, is 15 when we first meet him, though it’s clear he’s recounting his escapades from the vantage of maturity. The traveling courtesan-cum-entertainer La Ultima must cross the Hudson River from Albany to Troy New York for her next engagement. It’s a bad day for river ice. No one wants to cross. But La Ultima tempts one mercenary boatman with $100. They proceed, they founder, they are rescued by Quinn and his boss, John the Brawn. La Ultima is dead. Quinn though has saved 13 year old Maud from a spectacular death. Naturally, she is grateful.
Maud suggests they retreat with La Ultima’s body to a great Gothic house where they were guests of Hillegond Staats. Shortly thereafter the dead are raised; I won’t divulge the means, except to say it has a lurid García-Márquezian flair. There are moments when the ebullient first-person narration recalls Jane Austen. Daniel is separated from Maud by nefarious means and it’s some time before he can resume his promise to her to “steal her” away from her reprobate aunt. Thus begins his picaresque adventures. The second part of book one drops the gripping first-person narrator for third person. This is too bad since we lose the sense of the individuality of Daniel Quinn. Suddenly the measure of narrative pleasure plummets.
Ugh. I stopped at p. 200. Had no wish to go on. Sex is nothing more than text in a novel, a simulacrum at best. I was turned off by this book, but for others it might be a great read. There’s a lot of good writing in it. I just don’t like the pseudo-dated language, the obeisance to Victorian and Gothic literature, or the sex....more
This is a historical novel not in the sense that it follows the lives of famous people, like Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell novels, but simply in itsThis is a historical novel not in the sense that it follows the lives of famous people, like Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell novels, but simply in its medieval setting. There are a few historical persons—Raymond of Poitiers, Pope Urban II etc—but they appear only briefly in cameos. One wonders, though, since in an opening note Hertmans boasts about his deep research, to what extent Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millenium was a consulted source? Certainly the story of Pope Urban II’s declaration of holy war in the fields near Clermont, France, is found in Cohn, but the author may have gotten it elsewhere. Some background also seems pulled from Steven Runciman’s trilogy on the crusades.
The story begins in 1091. It’s the story of a young highborn noble (Catholic) woman living in Rouen who seduces a local Jewish boy outside his yeshiva. Then they must flee. Because in those days young women of rank were merely objects to be traded for power and prestige. The sex is wonderful, and sex in literature is usually poor. But here it’s ecstatic and wild and naïve and crazy. They are pursued by knights. If caught, the new husband will be hung by the neck until dead, and the young woman hauled off to a convent, if they aren’t both burned at the stake. It’s a wonderful time In the development of our civilization.
This narrative of the young lovers’ flight alternates with a present day storyline about the author tracing their long lost trail through France, which is difficult to do, but the jaunt fills him with superfluous imagery. For instance, he talks about many rivers the lovers would’ve had to cross, or the marshes, no longer extant, or the forests etc. I don’t think the present day sequences grip. It seems a Sebaldian attempt to live in the interstices of the story. I’m not sure why I should care about this guy, supposedly the author. He just seems intrusive. I enjoyed his previous book War and Turpentine from page 1. This narrative by contrast seems very thin. It speculates a lot on how things may have been.
Not until p. 140 does the story start to grip. After Pope Urban II’s call for a holy war, an army of crusaders on their way to retake Jerusalem marches into Monieux and slays the Jewish population. The convert’s Jewish husband David is slain. Two of her children are kidnapped. The synagogue is destroyed. Monieux is stripped bare by the passing Crusaders and its residents must endure a savage winter. In the spring Humental, our convert, decides to go to the holy land, too, in search of her children. She goes with her infant son whose needs seem understated. I stopped reading on p. 171—a slog....more
Let me give you the upside first. Wallace Stegner shows here an astonishing gift for narrative continuity and character. The structure swings between Let me give you the upside first. Wallace Stegner shows here an astonishing gift for narrative continuity and character. The structure swings between present day (1970) Grass Valley, California, and a number of late 19th century western U.S. boom towns. Despite the rough hewn pioneering aspects, the story is highly domestic; you might even call it a love story. And the only thing that glues it together is Stegner’s prodigious gifts for character and continuity. He has no wit to speak of; at least he doesn’t display it here, the only book of his I’ve half read. Neither is his skill at metaphor very zingy; if anything, it’s plodding. But I found it thoroughly enjoyable until about p. 317 when it fell from my hands. It’s too marital, too family centered and earnest. Though a deft writer his subject matter is a stone bore to me....more
I read this as a schoolboy and was captivated by it. I’d like to read his A Lesson Before Dying, which is said to be his master work.I read this as a schoolboy and was captivated by it. I’d like to read his A Lesson Before Dying, which is said to be his master work....more
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