Giants and those who know them
Hello, hello . . . it seems the corporate giants just keep getting bigger, but what does it mean? Are the barbarians upon us?
Imagine an economic system in which the mere mention of your political party affiliation to a competitor will cause them to instantly sell out to you. This part of the February newsletter is devoted to a mostly-forgotten title which is, indirectly, about the German business world in 1934, back when the world was just waking up to Modernity and the Twentieth Century, a post-revolution Russia, and a decimated world population due to the Spanish Flu pandemic and WWI. The book is about a time back when some Germans were already suffering the unmitigated horror of the camps and the Holocaust was not only foreseen but preventable. The book is The Oppermanns and the writer is Lion Feuchtwanger. A reviewer for The New York Times, writing on March 18, 1934 (Fred T. March) says of the book in his closing line: ". . . it is addressed to the world outside bearing the message, "Wake up! The barbarians are upon us!"
The middle book of a three-title series, also including "Success" and "Exile," the book's plot demonstrates the methods for removing successful yet undesired business people from an economy, arresting them on largely trumped up charges, then detaining, torturing, and relocating them to camps. The story centers on a business-savvy trio of brothers, the Oppermanns, and specifically Gustav Oppermann, tracking his downward progress from high-functioning mogul and employer to camp resident. Gustav's story makes it clear that atrocities don't always look like atrocities from outside. They can start quietly and at first seem like innocent shifts in business ownership from one group to another.
One of the open secrets in families is that, sometimes, not every child is loved. The second book featured this month is about such a secret and it's called O Caledonia, the only novel by the writer Elspeth Barker. It takes the form of a long flashback to a girl's truncated (truncated because she is murdered) sentimental education in 1940s Scotland.
Another thing notable about this book is the romantic, Gothic feel of the settings mixed with the modern, loveless childhood suffered by the overwrought heroine (who's overwrought because she's unloved) crossed with the comedy -- a post-modern touch -- of Janet's misadventures in trying to get love from people determined not to love her. Published in 1991, its plot fits with other anti-romantic bildrungsromans of the time (think Less Than Zero by Brett Easton Ellis) yet its heart stays true to the Gothic and harkens back to irascible heroines like the illegitimate daughter, Norah, of Wilkie Collins' No Name.
Act Three of this newsletter is devoted entirely to Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature by Charles Baxter, a title whose launch was announced in this space in 2022. Collected here are 12 essays -- a thoughtful melding of craft knowledge and deep personal experience -- about the reading and writing life and what pleasures and pains such a life affords and exacts when you live that life as Charles Baxter (Charlie to his friends).
With Baxter's essays, expect craft topics and terms unlike anyone else's ("The Request Moment," "Narrative Urgency," "Charisma and Fictional Authority," "Wonderlands," "Toxic Narratives," "transit sentences," "horizoning."). He has coined new terms here, just as he did in The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot and in Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. Baxter notices patterns the rest of us might vaguely sense are there, but we can't come up with the language needed to talk about it. He invents that language. Who else talks about "one-way gate action" or an action a character performs that makes it impossible for her to "get back to the place where she started from?" There are also harrowing accounts of his darker rites of passage as a novelist and insights gleaned from surviving a rollover crash rounding out the book's dramatic arc.
A series I'm touting lately is Kleo, about a Russian spy who specializes in missions across the Berlin Wall into the West -- until the wall suddenly comes down, an event that forces her to evaluate all of her allegiances, the Cold War itself, and what she has always believed about the virtues of East over West.
But wait, there’s more: “Resurrection City” by Catherine Browder
Winner of the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction, Catherine Browder’s latest novel is a must-read.
"There was something deeply troubling about looking at a photograph that had outlived the very people who had so recently and abruptly died," thinks a young Japanese soldier in "Lost and Found," one of the nine beautiful, unsettling and superbly-arranged stories by Cate Browder collected here.
Browder offers us a multitude of distinct, affecting and deeply intimate ways of looking at Japan's recent "three sorrows" (the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown of 2011 that killed 19,000) from the vantage of Japanese and Westerners intrepidly working to resurrect and find new ways forward for a devastated Japan.
For any new readers: My new novel, Tania the Revolutionary, is available on Amazon for Kindle and paperback or Barnes & Noble for eBook.