{paris in july} cimetière des chiens et autres animaux domestiques

This is a post for Paris in July 

hosted by bookbath and thyme for tea

The absolutely favourite thing I have done so far during this trip to Paris is to visit the Cimetière des Chiens et Autres Animaux Domestiques, which is a pet cemetery. Not just a pet cemetery, the oldest one in Paris (there's a little more information here). It was an amazing place: burials of pets have been held there - at Asnières-sur-Seine - since the end of the nineteenth century. 

I mostly photographed the cat graves, but dogs were in the majority. There was also a monkey and a budgie (?). Quite remarkable, and I thoroughly recommend it if you have somewhat macabre Parisian tastes! 

Here are some photos:

{review} this republic of suffering

Drew Gilpin Faust This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008)

Another soldier, asked by a doctor for his last words to send home, responded by requesting the doctor to provide them. "I do not know what to say. Well, tell them only just such a message as you would like to send if you were dying."

I read this book a long time ago, but it has stuck with me and I would really like to read it again one day. I almost didn't want to share it, I liked it so much. That isn't a great help for a blogger! I was attracted by a review in the LRB (a terrible source of temptation) and sought it out because, first of all, I'm interested in ways of memorializing both the living and the dead in the ancient world; second, I don't know nearly enough about the American Civil War (apart from Gone With The Wind). It seemed a good kill-two-birds choice. And it was: this is an excellent book and I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is an academic book which is also accessible to the lay reader, and this is a rare combination in my opinion: many academic titles are branded in catchy ways to bump up sales, but prove, on exploration, as impenetrable as the Rosetta Stone to a non-specialist. 

This book charts the transition from the individual management of death to what might be termed the professionalization, even the industrialisation, of the management of war dead. Gilpin Faust (incidentally, the first woman president of Harvard) brings her subject to life by threading her historical narrative with extracts from letters and diaries and records of personal - often heartbreaking - experience from the battlefields. The core of the book concerns the ways in which both the military, the soldiers' families and the soldiers themselves dealt with the mammoth task of managing the Civil War's huge death tolls. 

Gilpin Faust explores how this necessity establishes, by trial and error almost, future management of mass war casualties - how the dead are identified (and how the living seek to mark themselves against future misidentification as a consequence); who buries the dead; how the graves are marked; record-keeping; transport of the dead (and innovations in the accoutrements required); repatriation of remains. How do the victors treat the remains of the vanquished? Can the establishment of national organisations to commemorate (and, sadly, just to find) the dead assist in healing the wounds of a country torn apart by civil war? What happens to the families, the widows, the children of soldiers presumed dead? 

The author makes use of a fascinating range of primary sources: diaries and letters as well as some chilling photographs, along with local and national archival sources. One thing I found terribly moving was the presence of members of the family at the scene of battles seeking their dead. One instance is that of Oliver Wendall Holmes Snr., seeking his son's body after the Battle of Antietam (23,000 casualties in one day). Holmes Jnr. had been shot and as he lay wounded he scrawled his name, rank and family on a scrap of paper. He survived and kept the little note, commenting, "I wrote the above when I was lying in a little house on the field of Antietam which was for a while within the enemy's lines, as I thought I might faint & so be unable to tell who I was." Walt Whitman was another visitor to the battlefield whose life (the "very centre, circumference, umbilicus") was changed by his experience in search of his brother George. 

Others were not so fortunate as the younger Holmes or George Whitman, and there are many profoundly moving stories in this book of parents who never gave up the search to find their sons' final resting places. There is a particularly well constructed section on condolence letters and the presentation of the 'Good Death' which "structured the imperatives of Christianity, military courage, and masculinity into a hierarchy of solace." 

Rating: wonderful. Hugely informative and moving. (I've given up numerical ratings)

{review} also seen (& read)

Also known as: books that I'm pretty sure that everyone else in the entire world has already reviewed so that I am paralysed by my inability to say anything original, but I can't put these books away until I mention that they were quality reads and well worth a go.

Alan Bradley The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag (2010)

 

For a moment there seemed nothing to say. And then the woman spoke:
'You wouldn't happen to have a cigarette, would you? I'm dying for a smoke.'
I gave my head a rather idiotic shake.
'Hmmm,' she said. 'You look like the kind of kid who might have.'
For the first time in my life, I was speechless.
'I don't smoke,' I managed.
'And why is that?' she asked. 'Too young or too wise?'
'I was thinking of taking it up next week,' I said lamely. 'I just hadn't actually got round to it yet.'

The first Flavia de Luce mystery (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie) set such a high standard that it is doubtful that any sequel could live up to the hype. I enjoyed this book mostly for its wonderful setting - the archetypal, almost Utopian, English village of the 1950s. I wonder if it could only have been written by someone who was not English. It contains a sort of nostalgia that, as a colonial, I sometimes feel for the 'motherland'. The plot had holes the size of, um, really big holes in it and Flavia herself is a bit of a pain. Read it for the evocation of England, My England and the wonderful light touches of humour. On Mrs Mullet's awful cooking:

'I knew you'd like it, she said, 'It was no more than this morning I was sayin' to my Alf, "It's been a while since the Colonel and those girls 'ave 'ad one of my lovely jells. They always remark over my jells [this was no more than the truth], and I loves makin' 'em for the dears.'"

She made it sound as if her employers had antlers.

{Have I mentioned that I HATE dialect?}

Jo Nesbø The Snowman (English translation 2010)

At that moment Harry felt it again. The sensation he had had at Spektrum, earlier that evening. The sensation that he was being observed. Instinctively, he switched off the torch, and the darkness descended over him like a blanket. He held his breath and listened. Don’t, he thought. Don’t let it happen. Evil is not a thing, it cannot take possession of you. It’s the opposite; it’s a void, an absence of goodness. The only thing you can be frightened of here is yourself.

OK. Really gripping, high quality stuff. Great plot. Excellent build up of tension. Serial killing. Who could ask for anything more? Less: I could have done with a little less police politicking, but I can live with that for some really inventive and grotesque crimes. The murderer also belongs to my favourite occupational category for a serial killer but I can't say any more than that (apart from that when you both live and work with this group of people, nothing much they do can surprise you). Fabulous crime novel. I've now read all of the Nesbøs that have been translated so far and this one is by far the best (IMHO. I loved The Redbreast next best: better plot, more interesting subject matter, but not so scary).

Mabel Maney The Case of the Not-So-Nice Nurse (1993)

"It's all my fault," she sobbed, collapsing on the bed in tears. "People are always disappearing around me. Why, when I was a dude ranch nurse-in-training, an entire family disappeared and was never found!"

Were you brought up on Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames? Do you like a tongue-in-cheek girl detective parody with some spoofy lesbians thrown in for good measure? Join Nancy Clue and Cherry Aimless as they search for Cherry's missing aunt and a gaggle of lost nuns. Eat a lot of pie. Always carry a clean handkerchief. Accessorize. These books are very funny and spot on in their take-offs of the ultra-nice, well-fed, immaculate good girls of 50s' young adult fiction. There's a Hardy (Hardly!) Boys spoof out there too. Verdict: amusing. But maybe not in large doses. You'll never read a Cherry Ames' story again with a 'straight' face. Warning: very small font. The next one I'll get on the Kindle, I think.

Audrey Niffenegger Her Fearful Symmetry (2009)

'Ahem,' she said. 'What are you doing?' Jessica had a voice that rose and fell like a swooping kite. The children instantly stopped what they were doing and looked self-conscious, like cats that have fallen off something ungracefully and now sit licking themselves, pretending nothing has happened. Jessica walked carefully to where Robert and James sat. Two of her friends had broken their hips recently, so she had temporarily modified her habit of striding boldly wherever she went.

I hope that this book makes a lot of money for Highgate Cemetery because the cemetery is the big star here. This book is completely freaky, and for ages I kept oscillating wildly between love/loathe. I think, on the whole, if not 'love', then 'definitely liked' wins out. Certain passages were so beautiful that they carried the book for me. But what a strange creature it proved to be: love story, ghost story, horror story, family history, local history. The story of two American identical twins and their inheritance of a flat in Highgate from their dead aunt receives a twist in the tail of the tale (another feline reference) that is astonishing, spooky and absolutely fitting. I've not read any other of Niffenegger's books. Should I? Not sure...

{review} necropolis

Catharine Arnold Necropolis: London and its Dead (2006)

Hmmm... anyone think it ought to be "London and her Dead"?

This is an easy read - a popular history of the burial grounds and cemeteries of London. It contains a good deal of fascinating information presented in an accessible style and is a nice introduction to the mechanics of dealing with the dead in London from pagan times until the here and now. It is by no means a dry academic tome. Arnold has pulled the plums out of her source material and the book is studded with interesting and often gruesome anecdotes such as that told of the body of Katherine de Valois who "lieth here [Westminster Abbey], in a chest or coffin with a loose cover, to be seen and handled of any who will much desire it." (John Weever, 1631).  Consider, too Pepys, in February 1669:

...here we did see, by particular favour, the body of Queen Katherine of Valois; and I had the upper part of her body in my hands and I did kiss her mouth, reflecting upon it that I did kiss a Queen and that it was my birthday, thirty-six years old, that I first kissed a Queen. 

Ewww...

Yuck.

[My comment, not Pepys'!]

One section that I found particular interesting (read 'gruesome') was on the methods of dealing with plague deaths (including those of animals - apparently the average London household had half a dozen cats which had to be slaughtered). It is extraordinary to think how many London landmarks are built on top of plague pits. This has posed some problems for future generations:

At the spot where Brompton Road and Knightsbridge now meet, excavations for the Piccadilly Line between Knightsbridge and South Kensington Underground stations unearthed a pit so dense with human remains that it could not be tunnelled through. This is said to account for the curving nature of the track between the two stations. 

The demise of inner metropolitan burial grounds in the face of huge population growth and the rise of the large (once outer suburban) cemeteries is well covered, with many interesting insights. Arnold's chapters on the Victorians and their dead are particularly strong. I'm still chuckling about the music hall song entitled "They're Moving Grandpa's Grave to Build a Sewer". The dead, we realise from Arnold's book, are still very close to the living in a continuously populated, ever-expanding city like London. 

I have a few quibbles. As I say, this is not an academic tome, but I would have liked a few more references (for example, the passage quoted above on the underground has no reference to the source). I thought there was quite a lot of reliance on Mrs. Isabella Holmes' 1896 survey of the burial grounds of London. In some places there were some irritating 'filler' statements (designed to move the narrative from one subject to another by enlisting the aid of an inapt comparison), some superfluities (do we really need it spelled out that Mrs. Henry Wood was "far from politically correct"?), an odd sentence that wasn't a sentence and - horror! - some dodgy Latin which a quick googling would have sorted out.

But it was, as I said, an easy and fascinating read and it has given me quite a taste for some more death-related reading.

Rating: 6/10.

If you liked this... A really well done book on strategies for dealing with mass death  in history is Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. I highly recommend this book and I must review it soon. I read Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry while I was reading Arnold's book and enjoyed having a bit more information about the development of cemeteries like Highgate.