Ernest Hemingway's awful yet lovable "Across the River and Into the Trees"

Across the River and Into the Woods, by Ernest Hemingway. Listened to on CD as I drove to and from work.

Harry, 50+ army colonel a few years after WW II, takes a holiday in Venice to shoot ducks, drink, eat, sleep with his 19 year old Venetian girlfriend (she's from Venetian noble family), talk nonsense with Italian war comrades who adore him for leading them in battle during WW I, drink some more, punch out a couple of sailors, squeeze the girlfriend, drink again, reminisce about Rommel and Patton, eat some venison and cheese...well, that all doesn't sound so bad, does it?

What kept my attention was that Harry is such a created character, a literary construction. Every conceivable aspect of the macho, world weary, hard bitten soldier is here in one man. It's absorbing and ghastly at the same time. The couple's relationship is at times howlingly funny (the language Hemingway used to describe their sexual groping in the gondola nearly killed me -- I shouldn't have been driving 65 mph on the turnpike).

But...it's still Hemingway. The torment described, and the will to move forward is still there, and still worth reading.

I read that E.B. White wrote a parody in the New Yorker, called Across the Street and Into the Grill. A good title. Hemingway deserved it. But I still liked the book.

Thea Halo's suprisingly gritty and intimate "Not Even My Name"

Not Even My Name, by Thea Halo (Picador, 2000)

Thea Halo surprised me. I expected a sad, sentimental biography of her mother, Sano Halo, and a sad, horrific re-telling of what her mother suffered in the death marches forced on Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians in the last years of the Ottoman empire, just before the final expulsion of the Christian populations from Turkey in 1922. Instead, Thea presents the characters of her family as she saw, heard, and experienced them, as both loving and hurtful, generous and petty. The book is full of scenes of intimate family dramas.

Sano Halo's girlhood in the Pontic Greek village of Iondone in Asia Minor glows in her memory like a kind of Eden. I've heard many old Greeks describe their villages in the same way.

The death march that Sano, her family, and the Greeks of her village endured under the whips and guns of Turkish soldiers is agonizing to read. How could people do such things to other people?

Thea Halo, the daughter who wrote the book, is a capable and intelligent writer. She knows her mother well, has heard and researched her life's story, and produced a readable and gripping book about a young girl's loss of her family. As the book's title says, even her name was lost, as she was placed as a ten year old with an Arab family in a desperate attempt to save her life and escape the fate of the rest of her family. Her eventual marriage to a harsh Lebanese-American man, Abraham, and their life together in America, made for surprisingly good reading in the tradition of becoming-an-American novels.

Sano's recalled narrative forms the center of the book. The beginning and end involve mother Sano and daughter Thea on a late 1990s trip to Turkey to find Iondone. The village had largely disappeared. All that's left were a few ruined foundations. Not unlike the empty villages you see in Greece, the remaining inhabitants old people, the young having left for the cities. Or America, or Australia.

The book is valuable if only for its many insights into village life in the Pontic Greek world, circa 1900. We read about how the villagers work, how the farms and animals are maintained, how the family grew their own food, how they cooked, how they subsisted on bare essentials -- and it's all fascinating. Sano's narrative describes clear-eyed depictions of family quarrels, village disputes, petty n, andeighbors, and the presence of threatening forces at the edges of their lives. (Sano refers to oddly dressed strangers, unexplained outsiders, who appear and lurk in the shadows of trees and rocks in the months leading up to the expulsion from the village by Turkish soldiers.)

I don't doubt the details of the death march, though they are written from a memory long past. They are too vivid and distinct not to have been lived.

The main story (from the village, to the death march, to life in America) is ostensibly told by Sano herself. Yet, I was aware of Thea, the creator of the book, with her literary gifts, taking on Sano's voice for her. The book might have been stronger had Sano been allowed more of her own speech, with her own inflections and vocabulary.

Abraham, Sano's husband (whom she married by an arrangement), can be a hard man to love, yet he seems noble and loving in his own befuddled way. Sano and Thea love him. I think there is a perspective here that illuminates the old immigrants from that generation-- rather than rejecting him for his obtuseness, his roughness, his obstinacy, for better or worse Sano and Thea love and protect him.

King Lear: more sinned against, but still quite a sinner

King Lear, by William Shakespeare.

I listened to the exceptional recorded CD set produced by Arkangel Shakespeare, and supplemented the performance with the Everyman Shakespeare edition of the play.

I loved the play and the production. I hope to listen or see it performed again soon.

There are lots of oddities and logical lapses, however, none of which prevented me from the loving the thing.

In the play's opening, when Cordelia fails to express her filial love for Lear in the exaggerated fulsome terms used by Goneril and Regan, Lear throws himself into a rage. He disowns her. Yet, isn't she his favorite daugher? She is. So he must already know how she feels about him. Dramatic foreshortening and all that aside, it's an odd premise that he decides to demand this kind of vocal fealty from the daughters. I suppose this establishes our view of him as an aged arrogant fool.

And Cordelia -- I don't quite understand her coldness. "Nothing" is her reply. We understand that she sees through the oily praise of her sisters, but isn't her reply needlessly cold? If she's the favorite and most loving daughter, wouldn't she express that love a bit more warmly?

So Goneril puts up Lear and his one hundred rowdy camp followers. They like to party. She can't take it any more. Well, who could? Put up a hundred fun-loving knights indefinitely? After three days the fish stinks, the Mediterranean saying goes. Hard to blame Goneril for clamping down on the old blowhard. It's hardly abusing him!

Of course, he does eventually understand what an arrogant bastard he's been, in those sad scenes out in the storm, in the open, and finally with the dead Cordelia in his arms.