{review} a week of pineapples

*dusts off blog cobwebs*

'Georgy,' Mr Pasmore asks, 'may we come in?' He was already in. 'I’ve brought you two delightful visitors. They have been exploring the possibility of the pineapple. Do you like that? The possibility of? I mean we all know the positivity of, don't we? What we want, oh, what we all so want want want is the possibility of? Georgy, do you believe in the possibility of the pineapple?' (Thea Astley, Hunting the Wild Pineapple)

Last week I only read books with 'pineapple' in the title. This offered a wider variety than one might expect, and I think I did rather well and read some things I might not otherwise have tackled. So what did I read?

 

M. C. Beaton At the Sign of the Golden Pineapple (1987)

Charlotte Webster awoke during the night and lay shivering under her thin blankets. Food. Mountains of food. That’s what she had been dreaming of. A confectioner’s. She could see it now, the golden pineapple over the door, the piles of oranges and pineapples and dainty cakes. The smells of hot chocolate and coffee. Her stomach growled ferociously.

M. C. Beaton is terrifyingly prolific. This Regency series was originally published under the pen name Marion Chesney. I discovered this series thanks to Another Look Book's review of Beaton/Chesney's Minerva, which I thought could fill a Heyer-sized gap in my reading life. It was less-mannered, more overtly - perhaps one might suggest 'unbelievably' - socially boundary-pushing, and rather more risqué than a Heyer, but a fun - and quick - read. Likewise At the Sign of the Golden Pineapple: our heroine ("We are all kept in chains by the fact that we are genteel women") decides to make her own way by opening a confectionery shop/ices-and-tea-room in London with two lady acquaintances from unhappy homes - but can "ladies" ever resume their previous social and marital ambitions after working in a shop? 

The pineapple connection is that a pineapple was an emblem of the confectionery trade in the Georgian era (lots more on this here and a wonderful recreated pineapple 'ice' here). This is a (hmmm... tries to think of some relevant analogies...) wafer-thin read, stuffed sugarplum-like with sweet historical details, and easily digestible in one sitting. Not sure I'm hungry for more of the genre though, but that might be a result of the sugar overdose of read number two...

Betty Neels Pineapple Girl (1977)

  

And Mrs White, with a swift movement worthy of a magician, heaved at something under the blankets and produced a pineapple. ‘Oh!’ said Eloise, startled, and then: ‘Mrs White, what a simply lovely present—thank you, and your husband. I’ve—I’ve never had such a delightful surprise.’ She clasped the fruit to her person...

I've actually read this Mills & Boon before, and written briefly about it. Nurse falls down steps onto handsome foreign doctor while holding a pineapple; doctor replaces pineapple with THREE from Fortnum & Mason; coincidentally, poor nurse meets handsome doctor in foreign parts while on a job; does he love her or is he a bastard ("How could he talk about kippers when only a moment ago he had been kissing her as though he really enjoyed it?")? Will her clothes be good enough ("an elderly velvet dress the colour of a mole")? ... yada yada yada... You get the picture. I'm here for the pineapples, mostly, I guess. The period details (grimy 70s London) are great, and often rendered rather funny by time-passed:

‘Someone gave me a pineapple,’ she informed the table at large, and added apologetically: ‘I would have brought it down with me, but I thought it would have been nice to take home…’ There was a chorus of assent; everyone there knew that Eloise lived in a poky little flat behind the Imperial War Museum—true, it was on the fringe of a quite respectable middle-class district, but with, as it were, an undesirable neighbourhood breathing down its neck...

My favourite line is when the heroine is tossing and turning at night thinking about the mysterious doctor: "a fruitless exercise". I think NOT!

But I haven't only read pineapple 'fluff':

 

Thea Astley Hunting the Wild Pineapple (1979)

Once in Fixer’s cabin, one hour, one year, Fixer and I worked out the new coat of arms - a beer can rampant on a social security form couchant. Do we make it different, the people up here?

I don't read as much Australian literature as I feel I ought: I think this is a combination of the feeling that I "ought" (which makes me irrationally stubbornly resistant to doing so); a lack of empathy or resonance with the "bush" (I blame family camping holidays and a loathing of tropical weather), and a love of reading about places not as familiar as the home turf. Perhaps there's a bit of a block too because of difficult reading experiences with Australian lit at school and university? But I do keep trying. 

I can't say that I felt any sense of breakthrough after reading Thea Astley's take on Far North Queensland - hot, wet, uncomfortable, primitive, dangerous - a "soft porn" of a landscape - and filled with the lost and those not wanting to be found. This is a land where social boundaries break easily: "Carl’s fingers have been scratching the spines of Mac’s books. He wants to borrow a couple. I explain they’re not mine, but he’s oblivious to the protocol that goes with possession."

Astley's writing is absolutely superb, although sometimes one feels on the verge of drowning in it. (Whispering Gums discusses why Astley's language can also be confronting.) The book is a series of interlinked short stories about the inhabitants of the tropical Far North. Her descriptions of place can be claustrophobia-inducing - small artificially created physical and metaphorical spaces within which we imprison ourselves, and then the equally terrible world without: "a postcard tropadise (the greens are too green! the blues too blue!)". 

Then there are moments of pure comedy (like the 'hunt' for the wild pineapple of the title) or the little vignettes of everyday life such as the blind date: "He was much older than she had expected. So was she." Elsewhere: "She always appeared formidably silked and hatted and her bust was frightening. ‘Breasts’ is somehow too pretty, too delicate a word to describe that shelf of righteousness on which many a local upstart had foundered."

Mr Waterman was, also, a foundation member of the metric society. He was the first in the district to think in millimetres of rain, kilometres of road, kilograms of body fat and the metric statistics of wanted criminals. When he and Mrs Waterman did their biennial culture junket to Europe, he took enormous pleasure in supplying details for his passport. ‘One point eight five four three metres,’ he wrote against ‘height’; ‘eyes’ – ‘blue’. He would chide his wife mildly. ‘No, dear. No, no. You are one point six four one two metres.’ Against ‘colour of eyes’ she wrote ‘glazed’.

A difficult but valuable read.

Kaori O'Connor Pineapple: A Global History (2013)

Pineapple is great. She is almost too transcendent - a delight if not sinful, yet so like sinning that really a tender conscienced person would do well to pause - too ravishing for mortal taste, she woundeth and excoriateth the lips that approach her - like lovers’ kisses she biteth - she is a pleasure bordering on pain, from the fierceness and insanity of her relish. (Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia [1823])

I have a copy of Fran Beauman's The Pineapple on my shelf, but I decided to read this shorter history first. It's part of a series of books devoted to single foodstuffs - nuts, pancakes, pies, soup, offal, etc. (Incidentally, Pie is by the always fascinating blogger Old Foodie.) Pineapple is basically all you need to know about the pineapple in the short form: where it came from, how it got everywhere, its role as a prestige and royal object, the craziness of growing it in England, the popularization of the fruit through canning, and so on.

Indeed, the gulf between the pineapple’s fame and the difficulty in satisfying curiosity as to its taste came to epitomize the nature of knowledge itself for the serious-minded. In his On Human Understanding, published in 1690, the empiricist philosopher John Locke used the pineapple to argue that true knowledge can only be based on experience. In Locke’s words: If you doubt this, see whether you can by words give anyone who has never tasted pineapple an idea of the taste of that fruit. He may approach a grasp of it by being told of its resemblance to other tastes of which he already has the ideas in his memory, imprinted there by things he has taken into his mouth; but this isn’t giving him that idea by a definition, but merely raising up in him other simple ideas that will still be very different from the true taste of pineapple.

I thought this a very readable book, although I think it dealt rather tentatively (but without omission) with some of the unpleasant aspects of the pineapple trade, for instance the connection with the slave trade. It was also weak, I thought, on the place of the pineapple in Australia. I am looking forward to finding out if Fran Beauman's book is better on this. I am also looking forward to an exhibition on the pineapple's importance to Queensland that will open in Brisbane this year. *plans a little holiday*

So, what did I get from my week of 'pineapple' reads? Predictable romance is enhanced by pineapples. Pineapple skin demonstrates the Fibonacci sequence. "In organoleptic terms, the pineapple’s great contribution has been the unique ‘sweet-and-sour’ taste." Pineapples have permeated all levels of society, and now I know why and how. Isn't abacaxi a great word? Pineapples feature in philosophical discourse. I can never holiday anywhere north of Brisbane. I'd really like a pineapple upside-down cake now. Here's one I made earlier...

{misc.} trains and buttered toast

John Betjeman Trains and Buttered Toast (2006)

(more info on the cover)

Trains and Buttered Toast is my current on-the-go non-fiction book. I haven't actually finished it, but last night I read a chapter that I can't resist mentioning here. The book is a collection of Betjeman's radio talks for the BBC mostly from the 1930s to 1950s. The talks cover a nice range of interests - modern architecture, urban planning, the pleasures of the seaside, churches, famous men and women, wartime life, and so on. It is a lovely book to dip in to, and quite funny in places (his views on modern town-planning are pretty snarky). 

But the chapter which caught my eye was the transcript of a talk called 'Yesterday's Fiction', delivered on the Home Service on Monday 21st August 1944:

Instead of telling you about the best of this week's latest books, because there are so very few being published just now, I am going to review some old favourites. I am going to review some Edwardian novelists - the sort of people who were very popular before the last war.

Of course my ears immediately pricked up at that!

The names I shall mention are probably to be found on the back of a book within three miles, possibly within three yards, of everyone listening this evening who lives in these islands. I shall choose authors who have never produced a wholly bad book and often produced a very good one. And while you are are going away to get a pencil to take down the new names I mention, I will indulge in a short background sketch of Edwardian novelists.

So who does Betjeman rate? First up is Anthony Hope ("top of my list... for consistent high standards") - I do indeed have him on my shelves within three yards (or close!), as I really rate his The Prisoner of Zenda as a classic tale of adventure and chivalry. I have also read the sequel Rupert of Hentzau (Rupert is a very naughty young man indeed), but the rest of Hope's novels have passed me by. Betjeman already notes that only these two seem to be still read, and recommends The King's Mirror and The Dolly Dialogues (the latter he suggests is a combination of Kipling and Wilde!).  

source

And then - another favourite I want to explore further - George Gissing. His The Odd Women is indeed as Betjeman describes, "a deeply agonizing book". He suggests Gissing's The House of Cobwebs (short-stories) as a taste of something different. 

Next? Someone I've not heard of, but surely some of you keen explorers of lost classics will know the name of the "lighter and totally forgotten author" Miss S. MacNaughton [sic - it is in fact MacNaughtan]. Betjeman tells us he was recommended her books by "Miss Elizabeth Bowen and Miss Rose Macaulay", which is a pretty good recommendation!

Miss MacNaughton specializes in good, kindly people in fairly easy circumstances and her novels have happy and probable endings.

(He suggests A Lame Dog's Diary, available free at project gutenberg; but the one which caught my eye was "The Fortune of Christina McNab, the story of a raw Scottish heiress let loose on smart London society" - that sounds just my cup of tea.) 

Who else?

...Conan Doyle, Booth Tarkington, Leonard Merrick (always good), E. F. Benson (nearly always), N. and A. M. Williamson, Rider Haggard, Stanley Weyman (according to taste), Seton Merriman (often good), 'Q', Somerville and Ross (to me, always good), H. A. Vachell, A. E. W. Mason and many, many more.

Of these, Conan Doyle will likely never be out of favour. I thought Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Amberson's was a good read (I reviewed it here). Benson still has plenty of fans (myself included). I've not read any Rider Haggard for what feels like a century, and really should revisit him. 'Q', of course, was reintroduced to a new generation by 84 Charing Cross Road. The only other one who rings a bell is Mason, with his The Four Feathers (and who knew there'd been what sounds like a ghastly Heath Ledger remake?).

Betjeman notes two other highly recommended reads: Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands as a classic spy story (true: but too much messing about on boats, and anything involving reading maps or train timetables is always wasted on me! - "there has probably never been written so alluring an account of the delights of the amateur yachtsman"); and - unknown to me - Mary Cholmondeley's (I assume that's a "Chumly" pronunciation?) Red Pottage. He adds the rather telling comment that "autobiographical novels are often an author's - and in particular an authoress's - best novel": apparently Red Pottage is "a picture of rectory life and mental cruelty and frustration and stupidity therein among the lush, lovely and uncaring landscape of Shropshire." Oh dear... 

(the Cholmondeley cover is an Arthur Rackham drawing and you can buy it for a mere $1750)

This was a nice little essay, which gave me quite a few ideas for future reading, and I am happy to note that the next chapter is 'Wartime Tastes in Reading', which I hope to find just as useful.

{review} creepy, noir, & memoir

What have I been reading? 

Michel Faber Under the Skin (2000)

I cannot actually say anything about this book as almost anything could be a spoiler! Um, it's about Scotland, hitchhikers, and a woman with a lot of scars. The setting is contemporary. I loved it. Anything else? It is nothing like The Crimson Petal and the White. If you like well-written, creepy books with slow and horrible revelations, this is for you. (Hmm. That rather sums up The Crimson Petal as well!)

Dorothy B. Hughes The Blackbirder (1943)

A fine, albeit highly melodramatic read for noir fans. The Blackbirder is someone who smuggles people and other cargo in and out of the United States during the Second World War. If you can afford the service, the blackbirder will organize your escape – whether that be from Nazi occupied France, or from justice.

"I didn't even know there was a Blackbirder, not really. It's all been whispers, a legend, something a refugee believes in because he needs to believe in it, because he might have a desperate need for such a man some day."

"To escape a murder charge?" Schein pointed.

Her mouth hardened. "To escape Gestapo agents who somehow manage to reach this country despite the F.B.I."

Blaike's voice was quiet. "Couldn't it be they enter by such a method as blackbirding?"

This was why the F.B.I. was searching for the Blackbirder. They couldn't chance the entrance of dangerous aliens among honest refugees. Nor the escape dangerous aliens over the same route. Somehow she hadn't thought of it that way. The Blackbirder to her had been only a shadowy figure of refuge. He was still that but a sinister blackness darkened his shadow. His helping wings could be abused. She shook away the tremor.

The heroine of Hughes' gripping thriller has been in hiding in the States since her perilous escape from France. She cannot take her safety for granted, for she is connected to some very powerful and very bad people. Moreover, she has lost contact with the love of her life. Then, one night in New York, she is recognised, and must flee for her life – south to New Mexico to find the blackbirder and search for her lover. But the FBI is on her track, and it looks like the Gestapo is catching up too… 

The atmosphere of a country that may not be sanctuary it seems is brilliantly evoked by Hughes – who can you trust? If you want to read some Hughes, I suggest In a Lonely Place {REVIEW} -- one of the best books I read in 2011.

Molly Lefebure Murder on the Home Front: A true story of morgues, murderers and mystery in the Blitz (1954 [2013])

I had very high hopes for this book, hoping it might be a bit of a World War Two meets CSI with better frocks. And it is that. Molly Lefebure was a journalist in the early 1940s when she accepted a secretarial post with the not-quite-as-famous-as-Spilsbury pathologist Dr Keith Simpson. She took her type-writer and shorthand pad into the mortuaries of London and the surrounding areas to take down Dr Simpson's autopsy findings verbatim. Throughout the war she was witness to some of the most famous investigations of horrible crimes; then, in 1954 she published this book as a record of her wartime service. 

The reissue comes at an interesting time, I think – as the romanticized vision of Londoners in the Blitz is being subject to a bit of a more or less candid debunking. Yes, people were tremendously brave – but the war also allowed a lot of clandestine activity to flourish under the blackout. It was also often hard to bring criminals to justice – given the ease with which they might be shipped out or return overseas or be blown to bits before they could be charged. Lefebure's narrative is perhaps not for the squeamish, though I was more troubled by something else, namely her constant air of occupying the higher moral ground to her victims: she has little sympathy for a fifteen year good-time girl who is strangled by two US soldiers, "more a matter of sordid accident than murder". The same judgement is not applied to a fourteen year old innocent, assaulted on her way home from Sunday School. Her remarks on prostitutes (that 'ancient but abysmal profession'), the lower classes, and the poor in general are achingly snobbish ("I wondered… why the State cannot prosecute people for being dirty"). She's quite a fan of hanging. 

However, if you can swallow that as a product of its time (and as part of a journalistic love of sensation, where everything is to be regarded as 'material'), the book is a fascinating insight into the daily dangers of life in the Blitz for a professional woman. Her writing is occasionally absolutely striking – such as the shrapnel at Southend which "fell in little showers, more cruelly than the summer rain", or the corpses of babies, "like weary imitation flowers". This memoir is apparently being turned into a TV series, and I shall be fascinated to see if our heroine becomes more empathetic and less judgmental in the transition.

Oh, and some July things... I'm gearing up for my third year of Paris in July, hosted by Karen at BookBath and Tamara at Thyme for Tea. Sadly this year I won't actually be in Paris, as I was last year. But I'm prepared to make the best of it... ;-)  And HeavenAli is hosting Anita Brookner Reading Month too: I'm hoping to find a Brookner I haven't read, but, it's long been my problem that they all seem to similar (in a good way) that I can't remember what I've read... Something to work on!

{review} islands of privacy & african millionaires

Lately I seem to be spending my time reading (with considerable enjoyment and great sabotage to my own reading plans) other people’s reviews and not writing any of my own. What have I been reading?

Grant Allen An African Millionaire: Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay (1897)

source

"He is a Colonel, because he occasionally gives himself a commission; he is called Colonel Clay, because he appears to possess an india-rubber face, and he can mould it like clay in the hands of the potter. Real name, unknown. Nationality, equally French and English. Address, usually Europe. Profession, former maker of wax figures to the Museé Grévin. Age, what he chooses. Employs his knowledge to mould his own nose and cheeks, with wax additions, to the character he desires to personate. Aquiline this time, you say. Hein!”

The African Millionaire in question, Sir Charles Vandrift, is a peer freshly minted for his services to industry (mostly exploitative mining projects in faraway corners of the British Empire). It is his bad-luck to have become the target of a wonderfully quick-witted con-man, and a master of disguise, one Colonel Clay. The ‘Colonel’ has decided to fleece the Sir Charles of as much of his fortune as he can – on the surface, not an easy task, given Sir Charles’ reputation as a cunning financier. But the Colonel plays audaciously on Sir Charles’ great weaknesses: a love of a good deal and the even greater love of an unscrupulous good deal.

The fact of it is, sir, your temperament and mine are exactly adapted one to the other. I understand you; and you do not understand me—which is often the basis of the firmest friendships. I can catch you just where you are trying to catch other people. Your very smartness assists me; for I admit you are smart. As a regular financier, I allow, I couldn't hold a candle to you. But in my humbler walk of life I know just how to utilise you. I lead you on, where you think you are going to gain some advantage over others; and by dexterously playing upon your love of a good bargain, your innate desire to best somebody else—I succeed in besting you. There, sir, you have the philosophy of our mutual relations."

From the glamorous hotels of the French Riviera, to the wilds of Scotland, to the plush clubs of New York, Sir Charles appears helpless to thwart his cunning opponent (and his extremely lovely sidekick: “However, a man of the world accepts what a lady tells him, no matter how improbable…”). Will Sir Charles ever understand that it is his own ethical shortcomings that have caused him to fall into Colonel Clay’s hands?

This is a very funny book, filled with a number of rather clever con jobs, set among a group of people, not one of whose morals can withstand too close a scrutiny. I thought it quite as good as the other Grant Allen book I have read, Miss Cayley’s Adventures, about the exploits of a strong-minded, educated young woman determined to make it in the world using her own wits (do read the reviews by desperate reader and tbr13). Both Allen books can be read for free thanks to Project Gutenberg.

*

And now for something completely different, but very relevant at the moment:

Christena E. Nippert-Eng Islands of Privacy (2010)

Gorgeous cover! 

…for the people I interviewed, it can be quite difficult these days to claim any place, time, or activity as well and truly private. There is a general feeling now that the condition of privacy has become relegated to rather tiny islands of one's existence, few and far between, scattered across the vast ocean of accessibility that dominates so much of our lives. 

This was a fascinating read: Nippert-Eng is interested in how we can maintain an acceptable level of personal privacy (“privacy is a condition of relative inaccessibility”) in a world gone mad for sharing and interrupting and demanding instant responses. How can one carve out a space, establish boundaries, and choose what we disclose and what we conceal? 

One thinks immediately of the Internet in this context, but a number of Nippert-Eng’s case-studies are of much more intimate territory – a woman’s handbag; the sanctuary of one’s bathroom or yard or verandah/porch; the secrets of other people which we must keep (medical history, for instance); when we choose to take phone-calls (during sex? 14% in one survey said that they would do this!); email vs. more instant communications, and so on. “Interruptability is a key measure of how much privacy one has.” 

What is the connection between privacy and status? Does a decrease in privacy through an increase in ‘cross-realm communication’ actually result in a more ‘integrated’ life? Given the recent brouhaha about the NSA leaks, it is interesting to consider Nipper-Eng’s comment that, 

…privacy violations also remind us that privacy is seen as an entitlement for any respectable citizen in this country - an empowering symbol of one's good social status. When others deny us privacy, they also deny us status. 

This is a nicely accessible book, with some theory applied lightly and unmystifingly, and written in a very (sometimes overly) colloquial style. It is mostly drawn from interviews in Chicago. I thought Nippert-Eng rather pushed her metaphor about islands (“As John Donne reminds us, no man (or woman) is an island”), beaches, sand, etc. a bit too far, but it did function as a readily understandable image for how she viewed privacy and its concerns. One criticism relates purely to the e-book: there are a lot of very small tables to back up Nippert-Eng’s research, and they don’t blow up very well electronically. That might be a problem is, unlike me, you were reading this book for serious reasons! 

So, do you let others look in your hand-bag?

{review} australian pie

I'm off on a road trip today: Adelaide to, eventually, Dunkeld in Victoria, but via a very roundabout route so that I can tick off as many Big Things of Australia as I can: Big Olive, Big Ram, Big Orange (my favourite, but sadly closed), Giant Koala, etc. I'm also going to revisit a childhood favourite, the terrifying Bunyip of Murray Bridge... 

Source; more on the mythological bunyip.

By way of travel research I have been reading about meat pies, both historical and practical. Turn away now if you don't fancy a pie. 

Robert Macklin The Great Australian Pie: a history and culinary adventure (2012)

Robert Macklin, perhaps better known as a historical and a biographer of prime ministers, Jesus, and Australia at war (versatile guy!), has produced a little account of the meat pie's importance in his life and in Australian culture: "its glowing golden crust, its mouth-watering aroma of baking pastry and rich beef filling drifts across the inner landscape of Australian psyche." 

Allegedly Australians eat 240 million pies a year! 

This is a light read, but contains some meaty observations about the delicacy as well as a bit of pie p*rn:

The object of our desire is round, oval, square or even oblong. The pastry lid is probably a little flaky but not so much that the flakes will break away and stick around the mouth. The base is firm and beautifully smooth to the touch, lighter in colour than the top, the pastry shorter and more solid. The sides rise from a corner curve and the pie sits neatly in the hand snuggled alongside thumb and forefinger, the base resting on the long middle finger to hold it steady. Slowly the true pie lover raises it to the mouth, breathing in that glorious aroma to the trembling taste buds, selecting just the spot to take that first gorgeous bite that will open up the little treasure house of flavour and…oh, the wonder of it, that first taste of luscious minced beef and gravy lapping round the tongue and mixed with the buttery pastry that almost melts in the mouth. Oh heaven…

I feel able to answer any questions put to me about the pie now, and there is even an accompanying phone 'app' so that one can track down the nearest prize-winning Aussie pie on the go. (This book is only available as an ebook, I think)

Tony Clancy & Paul Clancy The Pie Buyer's Guide to Australia (2012) 

Practical research obviously has to be done on the ground. Thankfully these blokes have done the hard yards, and I am hoping that The Pie Buyer's Guide to Australia will direct me to the best pies on my travels. Sometimes one is also recommended another delicacy (I have a keen eye for vanilla slices [a custard filled mille-feuille]), but basically it is pies: "a good meat pie has the 'wolf' factor; a combination of characteristics that make it so irresistible that it is wolfed down immediately, straight from the paper bag on the footpath outside the bakery." 

The authors travelled 1000s of kilometres and ate many, many, many pies in their search for the best. They even resisted the temptations of more gourmet-type pies in their hunt for meat pies and meat pies alone (I'm a bit of a fan of beef and mushroom, myself). Each pie is ranked from one to five 'pies' and photographed. I've already discovered a four-pie ranked pie just down the road from my house that I'd never have known about without this book. 

Let us just say that this book is not going to be good for my waistline, but oh what fun I shall have!

{review} aesop's mirror

Maryalice Huggins Aesop's Mirror (2009)

However wrong, it is always harder to feel sorry for the rich.

 

After my unhappy encounter with object biography in the form of The Hare with Amber Eyes (in sum: not a fan), I was a bit wary of another object bio. However, I wanted to read Aesop's Mirror because I had worked on Aesop as a graduate student. It suffers from rather a lot of the same thing that turned me off The Hare -- namely too much personal voice at the expense of the object, and an overemphasis on the amateur's delight in basic research -- but the story that the voice tells is an interesting one. 

An antique restorer with a special interest in mirrors stumbles on a very large figural mirror at a Rhode Island estate auction. It depicts, in vivid Rococo style, Aesop's fable of the Fox and the Grapes (which I am told by wikipedia is a story illustrative of cognitive dissonance). The mirror's history was murky (oh dear, I sense some mirror puns coming up) but Maryalice Huggins had a feeling that this find was special. At the same sale she also spent US50,000 dollars on a broken down couch which subsequently was on-sold after restoration for US190,000 dollars. One gathers that her eye for antiques is rather good.

Huggins sets out to track down the provenance of her mirror. Could it really be an important lost English piece by eighteenth century master carver Thomas Johnson? Or is it a product of a pattern-book, and nevertheless still - indeed, more - important as a very early piece of homegrown American carving of the 1830-1840s? The experts cannot agree at all, and Huggins has quite a battle on her hands against a number of the prejudices that automatically arise about something that just does not fit into the canon: as a major work on early American (fake) furniture advises, "Rare is an offensive four-letter word. Unique is an abomination." (source) 

Some of the experts she consults truly are beastly, but I felt a little uncomfortable in places with her remarks on the snobbishness of scholars towards her enthusiastic enquiries. (I can certainly sympathise: in the area of antiques, vast sums of money can be made courtesy of a scholarly stamp of authenticity.)

Huggins and her mirror (source - I'll be so pleased if anyone 

can answer the question on this link too)

Huggins' book explores a wide range of interesting topics, which as someone who knows zero about Rococo mirrors and the American antique industry, I found quite fascinating. The mirror itself, somewhat ironically, becomes less and less significant to the story as Huggins explores who might have owned it, and from where it might have come originally. She connects the mirror to the Brown family (of Brown University fame), and her archival research enables her to piece together a remarkable - albeit speculative - history involving furniture, Grand Tours ("The outset of the Franco-Prussian War sorely affected her shopping"), and even Charles Parnell, the Irish nationalist. The theme of the mirror, however, remains relevant:

The antiques business was changing, and I was growing a little tired of the politics and the market in general. The theme of the sour grapes now hit home. I half convinced myself I didn't want the mirror anymore and began not to care if I ever saw it again. The fruits it bore, the allure of its former owners, I believed no longer interested me. There was always something else to fall in love with.

This, for me, was perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book - the object becomes a burden and a responsibility and a cause of some professional ill-feeling, yet it had such an effect on Huggins that, in the end, although she has sent it for auction, she feels only relief that it is passed in and returned to her care:

Despite the use of technology in determining value, art's effect cannot ever be explained factually. It is really very simple. If a piece has life, people respond to it... After years of investigation, there was really nothing to be proved that could enhance the experience of seeing something I found beautiful. Everything I needed to know about the Fox and Grapes mirror, I knew the moment I first saw it.

So...? I liked the bold speculation backed up by historical research, even if it was pretty speculative. I learned a lot about early American furniture, Rhode Island society, mirrors and the dirty side of the antiques trade.

Anyone read any good object biographies lately? I think I'm hooked...

{review} consider the oyster

M. F. K. Fisher Consider the Oyster (1941; 1954)

 

Oh M. F. K. Fisher, how I do love your writing.

I am not even particularly fond of oysters, yet MFKF makes me want to knock back a couple of dozen - despite knowing exactly what would happen should I do so - so seductive is her case for being 'broadminded' about that alarming mollusc "and its fine salt juices, more like the smell of rock pools at low tide than any other food in the world".

I was amused to read MFKF on the topic of "the smoked oysters people give you now at cocktail parties, excellent little shriveled things on toothpicks which make your mouth taste hideous unless you drink a lot, which may also make your mouth taste hideous." I prefer oysters raw, on the shell, which I think may have something to do with once having bravely consumed a repulsive canned smoked oyster on a camping trip as a child. In aside: as a result of camping, I also cannot stomach canned ham, certain varieties of cup-a-soup, dehydrated vegetables, 4WDs, and a large chunk of the Australian desert. 

Consider the Oyster, like so much of MFKF's writing, is a quasi-memoir of her eating and cooking experiences, combined with a lively overview of - always from her quirky viewpoint - of the history and myths of oysters: you know, oysters and months with 'R', oysters and lust (linked with "an oyster's odor, its consistency, and probably its strangeness"!), bad oysters, oysters and pearls, and so on. Interwoven with this are recipes and descriptions of what could have gone into a dish MFKF ate and what would definitely go into a dish should MFKF turn her hand to it.

A good tartar sauce can be bought in a bottle, like several other things, but a better one can be made from this recipe, which is easy if you have an herb garden, and impossible, but still fun to think about, if you do not...

(This sort of sort-of-cheating is also a marker of MFKF's recognition that her readers may well be time-poor working women, like herself. She was ahead of her time).

MFKF is so good at investigating her own sense of nostalgia about food - why she feels like she does about certain foodstuffs, and whether it is possible to recreate what is essentially something between a feeling and a memory about a perfect dish - "an almost affectionate nostalgic liking". So, her quest to find a recipe that resembles a story that her mother told her about the perfect boarding school oyster loaf midnight feast (!), leads her a recipe that I think I might even dream about a little:

Oyster Loaf
Cut off the top of crusty loaf of bread, and hollow out the center. Brush with butter, and put into a hot oven to heat through and toast slightly. While this is going on, coat medium-sized oysters with egg and crumbs, and fry them brown in deep or shallow fat. Fill the loaf with the oysters, pour melted melted butter over them, put on the lid which also has been toasted, and it is ready to eat. . . or to wrap thickly in wax paper and take on a picnic. A small loaf to serve two people is most convenient for serving.

Wow. Fried things inside bread and all soaked in butter. Marry me, MFKF!!

MFKF, despite investigating all of the best ways to consume the oyster, wants her reader to break the rules and to discover the magic of the oyster for herself. So, on wine bores who insist it is Chablis or nothing with oysters - 

On the other hand, I have had Pouilly-Fuissé, various kinds of champagnes nature, a pink Peau d'Onion, and both bottled and open wines of Anjou with oysters in France, and whether they were correctly drunk or not, I was. Nobody knew it except my own exhilarated senses and my pleased mind, all of which must enter into any true gastronomic experience.

I suspect that MFKF's writing may not be for everyone (just as oysters may disagree with some). Occasionally I think, 'ooooh that's pretentious', but MFKF's wit and naughtiness make bearable her occasional inaccessibility. I think she'd be a terrifying dinner companion.

If you liked this... a good starting place is her Alphabet for Gourmets which can be read online at the Gourmet archive.

{misc.} learn to fly like biggles

I was sorting out some photos of my trip to the U.K., and this one made me laugh. It was in the window of The Haunted Bookshop in St Edward's Passage in Cambridge.  

The book is summarized here. W. E. Johns is given the rank F/O (Flying Officer) on the cover. The book dates from 1932, the year the first 'Biggles' book appeared (we've just missed the 80th anniversary of The Camels Are Coming). Johns published as "Captain", but never in fact held that rank. 

{review} beautiful for ever

Helen Rappaport Beautiful For Ever: Madame Rachel of Bond Street - Cosmetician, Con-Artist and Blackmailer (2010)

  

This is the first book that I've read by Helen Rappaport, but it most certainly will not be the last. It was a thoroughly enjoyable and quick read and - even better - it tied in really nicely with some other reading I've done. It's always good to add a few facts to fiction, I say. 

'How frequently we find that a slight blemish on the face, otherwise divinely beautiful, has occasioned a sad and solitary life of celibacy, unloved, unblessed, and ultimately unwept and unremembered.' [from a Madame Rachel advert, c.1859] 

Madame Rachel was an infamous purveyor of dubious potions and lotions to the well-heeled ladies of London. Her most famous beautification sell was 'enamelling' which involved coating her willing victims in Heaven knows what to make them all whitely stuccoed for - generally - the ball. But Madame Rachel had another lucrative sideline in fleecing sillier sorts of every penny they possessed. Whether she was merely facilitating the meetings of ladies with their paramours, or actually running a knock-shop, isn't entirely clear. Perhaps there are hints that she was helping ladies get rid of other embarrassing problems than just bad skin. Certainly she seemed to making ridiculous amounts of money simply from cosmetics that made one Beautiful For Ever (but, then, what's a pot of Crème de la Mer go for these days to an equally silly market? AUD$250 for 30mL). Oh, and then there was that nice source of income in allowing gentlemen to watch ladies receiving her full body Turkish bath services... 

Madame Rachel and the ‘before and after’ hard sell (source) 

This book is good on the sensational aspects of the various legal trials in which Madame Rachel and her victims became enmeshed. Rappaport also has a good handle on the less savoury aspects of Madame Rachel's own treatment by a anti-Semitic media and establishment. Other interesting themes weave through the biography: contemporary concerns regarding cosmetics and female amorality; debate surrounding the much-delayed Married Women's Property Act (why allow women to control their money when they just spent it running up huge bills at Madame Rachel?); contemporary bias towards women in court for any reason whatsoever. I particular liked Rappaport's use of the 'popular culture' ephemera (racy song, cartoons) surrounding Mme. Rachel's run-ins with the law. Mme. Rachel also featured in Wilkie Collins' Armadale (his 'Mother' Oldershaw is close-to-libellously based on Mme. Rachel) and there is a reference too in Mrs Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (one of my favourite sensational reads).

Rating: a very entertaining historical read, even more so if you love a good legal trial or two.

If you liked this... definitely Armadale. I can't remember why on earth I didn't review it when I read it a few years back, especially since it has the heroine-villain to end all heroine-villains in it. Teresa and Jenny at Shelf Love sum it up nicely.

{review} the technology of orgasm

Rachel P. Maines The Technology of Orgasm: 'Hysteria', the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (1999)

When did God make men?
When she realised that vibrators couldn't dance.

Maines' book is a really well adapted women's studies/social sciences dissertation. It is amusing and grotesque in almost equal measure. Maines looks at how the vibrator has been used, abused and misused as a 'scientific' instrument for managing women's illnesses by mechanical means, particularly in the nineteenth century. Some of these mechanisms are quite eye-watering: the steam-powered vibrator, is a case in point. Did you know that the vibrator was electrified for the home market nine years before the vacuum cleaner?!

Rests, strengthens, renews, repairs. Every vital organ is crammed full of vitality. The clogging waste is swept away by the coursing blood which the marvellous force sets leaping through every vein and artery with the virile strength of perfect health. You sleep as restfully as you used to. You awaken, refreshed mentally - physically - strong in mind and body and glad to be alive. [Advertisement for 'White Cross Electric Vibrator' in The American Magazine, January 1913]

Maines asks some really good questions: about the development of the 'disease paradigm' of hysteria; about women's diseases as cash cows for the unscrupulous; about the medicalization of normal conditions for reasons of belief and profit ("the patients neither recovered nor died of their condition but continued to require regular treatments"); about why there are so many hysterics in the nineteenth century; about the long-held belief that vaginal intercourse is required for orgasm (and the concomitant subsumption of the clitoris within "androcentric definitions of sexuality and the construction of ideal female sexuality to fit them"). And how can the same device cure nymphomania and frigidity?

Rating: this is a really enjoyable read, with some nice bits of gender and social theory made accessible to the general reader. There is no bibliography (which was sad), but the notes are very rich and worth reading in full.

If you liked this... I have this book on my wishlist: The Female Body in Medicine and Literature, edited by Andrew Mangham & Greta Depledge (2011).

{review} blessed days of anaesthesia

Stephanie J. Snow Blessed Days of Anaesthesia: How Anaesthetics Changed the World (2008) 

 

I have had the pleasure of reading a couple of really astonishingly good non-fiction books so far this year. Stephanie Snow's popular history of anaesthetics is one of the best.

Life (and death) really sucked before anaesthetics, and the only thing that is really astonishing is how reluctantly it was embraced. Looking back, can we even imagine a time when it was thought that "pain was necessary and functional in surgery"?! If you have a strong stomach, try reading Fanny Burney's account of her mastectomy without pain relief: "…when the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast - cutting through veins - arteries - flesh - nerves - I needed no injunctions not to restrain my cries. I began a scream that lasted unintermittingly during the whole time of the incision - & I almost marvel that it rings not in my Ears still! so excruciating was the agony." (more here)

Anaesthesia challenged Victorian understandings of pain at the most fundamental level. What was its purpose? How could medical control of suffering be reconciled with the Christian view that human pain was God's will? Doctors, clergymen, and writers debated the subject passionately. Because inhaling ether and chloroform could be fatal, it struck deep into one of medicine's central questions: what were the risks versus benefits of medical intervention?

Snow has a great grasp of the big picture - how anaesthetic reforms filtered slowly downwards to change society as a whole:

Beyond medicine, anaesthesia became a touchstone for humanitarianism, fuelling public distaste of pain and concern about the morality of inflicting suffering. It is no coincidence that from the 1860s onwards public executions became private events, legislation was introduced to reduce cruelty to animals in scientific experiments, and ideas of pain in Christian doctrine were reworked.

Snow works her way through the slow development of various types of more or less (usually more) dangerous anaesthetics - from opium to laughing gas, ether, chloroform and then onto the modern drugs we take so much for granted. The tendency of innovators in the field to experiment on themselves and their friends is remarkably consistent throughout history:

Liston was convinced of ether's potential: it had 'the most perfect and satisfactory results' and was 'a fine thing for operating surgeons', he wrote… Then he hosted a celebratory dinner party at which he demonstrated the effects of ether on one of the guests.

The big breakthrough in anaesthetic PR was Dr John Snow's management of Queen Victoria's labour with chloroform in 1853, although this in itself should tip the reader off to the social inequalities that still continue in medical treatment. {Incidentally, John Snow is my medical hero for his work on cholera - REVIEW}

Even after announcements of the Queen's use of chloroform and the publication of Snow's article, Dr Sheppard, a physician living in the provinces, felt strongly enough to write to the Association Medical Journal saying he would not change his view of chloroform. 'No female for whom I have any regard shall ever, with my consent, inhale chloroform,' he vowed, 'I look upon its exhibition as a pandering to the weakness of humanity, especially the weaker sex.'

Anaesthetics, along with a better understanding of antisepsis and the development of endotracheal intubation, revolutionized surgery. Snow has written a really readable and sensible account of the history of anaesthetics and also the place of anaesthetics in the modern world.  

Rating: excellent. 

If you liked this… definitely Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks (2006), on John Snow, cholera and the Broad Street pump.