The Kreutzer Sonata

It's not usual for a writer to mention, within a novel, a book that a particular character is reading or has read. The names of other writers often make their way into novels. I've discovered quite a few writers, coming upon their names in a novel I'm reading. Elizabeth von Arnim, Mikhail Bulgakov and Mayne Reid are three examples.

At one point in 2010: Odyssey Two , Dr. Heywood Floyd attempts, unsuccessfully, to read The Kreutzer Sonata in the original Russian. I was a bit confused by that. I was familiar with Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 9, known as The Kreutzer Sonata, but I was unaware of any book by that name - and certainly not a Russian novel.

With a little web search, I learned that Clarke was referring to a novella by Tolstoy named after Beethoven's sonata. According to the wikipedia article on the novella,"The work is an argument for the ideal of sexual abstinence and an in-depth first-person description of jealous rage. The main character, Pozdnyshev, relates the events leading up to his killing of his wife: in his analysis, the root causes for the deed were the 'animal excesses' and 'swinish connection' governing the relation between the sexes".

The work was banned by the Russian censors and in 1890, the United States Post Office Department attempted to prohibited the mailing of newspapers containing serialized installments of the translated novella. Theodore Roosevelt called Tolstoy a "sexual moral pervert."

Of course, with recommendations like that, I had to download a copy from Project Gutenberg.

I'm certainly no expert on Tolstoy - I've read Anna Karenina twice and attempted to read War and Peace more than that. I was not familiar with his somewhat bizarre take on Christianity. With The Kreutzer Sonata and the other four stories in the ebook I downloaded, Tolstoy goes full blast, bombarding the reader with his strange philosophy.

Reading the wikipedia article on Tolstoy's novella, I learned of a book by Arab Israeli author Sayed Kashua, Second Person Singular , which uses Tolstoy's novella as a major plot device. I'd never heard of Kashua prior to this, but now I'm currently reading Second Person Singular and I'm very impressed with his writing. His other books will (somehow) find their way to the queue.

The Headless Horseman: A Strange Tale of Texas

Of the dozen books I've read so far this year, four were written by the Spanish writer, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez and four were written by Edith Wharton .

In Blasco Ibáñez's novel, The Torrent (Entre Naranjos), it's mentioned that the protagonist, Rafael Brull had read the novels of Mayne Reid. Seeing that name, I wanted to learn more about this particular writer. I went on to read Reid's 1853 anti-slavery novel, The Quadroon. Although I enjoyed reading that adventure novel, I did not put any of Reid's other novels in the queue. I wanted to first read some of the novels of Edith Wharton.

In Wharton's autobiography, A Backward Glance she also mentions the writer, Mayne Reid. I saw this as a sign to go ahead and read something else by Reid.

Project Gutenberg has 61 novels written by Mayne Reid available for download. I decided that I would read the novel that had been downloaded most often - The Headless Horseman: A Strange Tale of Texas.

The Headless Horseman was first published as a monthly serial in 1865 and 1866. The action takes place in 1850, after the Mexican/American war and before the American Civil War.

There are quite a few similarities between The Headless Horseman and The Quadroon. The male protagonist in both novels is not American (one is "British", the other Irish). Many of the other main characters are (white-non mixed) French Creole from Louisiana and owners of slaves.

In both novels, there is a male slave named Scipio and a female slave, Chloe. In the The Headless Horseman, Scipio is the husband of Chloe. The two are only minor players in the story. In The Quadroon, Scipio is Chloe's father and both characters are central to the plot. Mayne Reid had spent time in Louisiana prior to the Civil War, and I can't help but think that Scipio and Chloe were names of actual slaves he may have encountered there.

In both novels, the principle antagonist has a financial hold over the family with whom the protagonist is involved. In both, the protagonist is at risk of being lynched.

There is love, betrayal and jealousy in both novels.

In my earlier review of The Quadroon I made note of Reid's giving the slaves a "negro dialect". He had also given the uneducated, white, redneck characters a stereotypical drawl. In The Headless Horseman this use of dialects makes the novel difficult reading in parts. There are the slave dialects, the white Kentucky accent, as well as German, Irish and Spanish accents through out. Translating these accents and dialects in my head makes for slow reading.

All that being said, the The Headless Horseman is filled with action and drama and an interesting read. The novel can be found at Project Gutenberg.

A Backward Glance

For purposes of this review of Edith Wharton's autobiography, A Backward Glance, I'll divide the book into three parts - naturally enough, beginning, middle and end.

This is an arbitrary division on my part, with the beginning and end taking up approximately 20% each, and with the middle taking up the remaining 60%.

In the beginning of the autobiography, Wharton writes on her early life and family background. She was born in New York city to a well to do, established family. She spent a good deal of her early childhood in Europe - mainly Paris and Rome - of which she writes fondly.

I enjoyed this first part, but I found the middle boring. In this middle section, she writes mostly of the people she knew and associated with at fashionable dinners. Although many of the people she writes of in the book may have been well known at the time, now most are forgotten. The two most famous dropped names are Teddy Roosevelt and writer Henry James. Too much of the book, I think, is spent on Henry James.

Unfortunately, although she does occasionally mention some of her work, she does not spend much time explaining her writing process. I would have much rather read how she came to write her novels than read about her dinners with celebrities of her day.

I did enjoy reading the final portion of her autobiography where she writes a good deal about her experiences before and during the First World War. She goes into her war experiences in greater detail in a collection of magazine articles for Scribner's Magazine in 1915, Fighting France; from Dunkerque to Belfort.

I wouldn't recommend this autobiography to the general public who are not familiar with Wharton. I don't believe reading this will bring the casual reader to her novels. There may be some Wharton fans who would find this autobiography entertaining, but as a Wharton fan, I was disappointed.

As a side note, early in the autobiography, Wharton mentions Mayne Reid . I've basically read two novelists this year - Edith Wharton and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez - both of whom mention the adventure writer in a novel. I've read only one of Reids' books -The Quadroon- Seeing his name mentioned in A Backward Glance, I downloaded another of his novels from Project Gutenberg [The Headless Horseman: A Strange Tale of Texas] which I've put in the queue for reading later this month.

January's Book List

As I mentioned in my first blog post for 2021, it's been an annual tradition of mine for ten years, to publish a list of the books I had read the previous year. These lists would be posted onto my sorryalltheclevernamesaretaken blog on January 1st. This year, the list was also posted onto my new blog.

As of this month comes to an end, I'll be adding another dimension. Starting today, I'll be posting, on the last day of the month, a list of the books I've read during the month.

I've written blog posts on a few of these books already this month.

Forever Amber                                           Kathleen Winsor
The Cabin (La barraca)                              Vicente Blasco Ibáñez
The Torrent                                                 Vicente Blasco Ibáñez
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse      Vicente Blasco Ibáñez
Blood and Sand                                           Vicente Blasco Ibáñez
The Quadroon                                             Mayne Reid
Twilight Sleep                                            Edith Wharton
Caritas in veritate                                       Pope Benedict XVI
The Children                                              Edith Wharton
Glimpses of the Moon                                Edith Wharton

The Quadroon, by Mayne Reid

Finishing Forever Amber on the first day of January, I searched my computer files for another book to read.

I had a file containing ebooks that were set aside to be read in 2018, but had somehow not made their way into the queue. Several of these ebooks were translations of the novels of  Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. I transferred a number of the ebooks to my Kindle and began reading The Cabin (La barraca). I went on to read The Torrent (Entre Naranjos), Sangre y arena (Blood and Sand) and reread  Los cuatro jinetes del Apocalipsis (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse). 

In The Torrent , Blasco Ibáñez mentions that the protagonist, Rafael Brull had read the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Mayne Reid. Not being familiar with Reid, I immediately typed his name into a search engine and came upon a wikipedia page about him.

Mayne Reid (April 4, 1818 – October 22, 1883) was born in Ireland, and lived for a time in the U.S., - even fighting in the American-Mexican War (1846–1848).

The wikipedia article goes on the explain that Reid wrote several action filled, adventure novels along the lines of Robert Louis Stevenson. Reid's novels were an inspiration to Teddy Roosevelt, Arthur Conan Doyle, and obviously, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez.

Reading such high praise of Mayne Reid, I knew I'd want to read at least one of his novels. Project Gutenberg has more than 50 of Reid's novels available for download; I did not know where to begin.

The same wikipedia article lists his anti-slavery novel, The Quadroon as one of his best selling. No better place to start, I thought.

Published in 1853, the story takes place in Louisiana. For reasons unclear to me, the protagonist chooses to go under a false name - Edward Rutherford. Coming from Britain, Rutherford is appalled by the brutality and atrocities inherent in slavery. Rutherford falls in love with a slave named Aurore who is described as a "quadroon". In slave societies, a quadroon was a person with one quarter African and three quarters European ancestry. Rutherford wishes to marry Aurore, but cannot because she is a slave and because of  her African ancestry. The two, of course marry in the end, but not in the State of Louisiana.

The novel does contain quite a lot of action and is surprisingly suspenseful at times. I was a little put off by Reid having the need to describe the flora and fauna of Louisiana in such detail. His foreign born, 19th Century readers may have found the descriptions interesting, but this 21st Century reader thought such descriptions slowed the pace.

In the beginning, I found Reid's "negro dialect" for the slaves off-putting as well. However, Reid also gave his uneducated, white, redneck characters a stereotypical drawl, so I was willing to give him a pass.

All in all, although obviously dated, I give The Quadroon a positive rating.

Mayne Reid

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had "rediscovered" the work of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. At the time of that writing, I had just finished reading The Cabin (La barraca) and had begun reading The Torrent (Entre Naranjos). As I write this today, I've begun re-reading Blasco Ibáñez' most famous work, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Although well written, I didn't find the story in The Torrent (Entre Naranjos) to my taste. Star-crossed lovers, unrequited love and Spanish politics are not really my cup of sangria.

Of special interest to me, however was the mention of two American writers that were favorites of the protagonist Rafael Brull - James Fenimore Cooper and Mayne Reid. Even though I've never read any of his books, James Fenimore Cooper's name is familiar to me. Mayne Reid, on the other hand, was new to me.

Thomas Mayne Reid was a Scots-Irish American novelist who specialized in adventure novels, much like Cooper and Robert Louis Stevenson. Reid was especially popular with boys in Europe and Russia. He was a childhood favorite of Arthur Conan Doyle and an influence on Conan Doyle's writings.

 After reading such high praise, I'm obliged to read at least one of Reid's novels. Project Gutenberg has more than 60 novels written by Mayne Reid available for download. The question remains, where to begin?

The wikipedia article on Reid lists one of his best-selling books as an anti-slavery novel, The Quadroon. That seems like a good place to start. I've downloaded the novel and I've placed it in the queue.