Picking up where I left off more than two months back (not a great deal has transpired in the mean time, if you don't count medical adventures, but I leave those for another time), my foray into the world of Louise Penny and her favorite Francophone Canadian detective, Armand Gamache, turned out to be a bit more of a journey than I had expected. After reading A Rule Against Murder (2009), the fourth book in her ongoing series of mystery novels featuring Inspector Gamache, and our book club's selection for August, I decided to fill in some background and read the first three books in the series: Still Life (2005), A Fatal Grace (2007), The Cruelest Month (2008). From these I learned more details about the Gamache family, the small Québécois town of Three Pines, and the inspector's political battles with the bureaucracy of the Sûreté du Québec. I'm not really an avid fan of mysteries or detective fiction, but I always seem to enjoy my excursions into the genre. Louise Penny's formula (at least in these four novels) seems to include the following more or less essential elements: someone murdered in rather bizarre fashion, the exacting police procedural practices of Inspector Gamache and his hand-picked team of misfits, interesting settings in rural Quebec with a cast of local characters often befriended by Gamache and his wife Reine-Marie, and, of course, an ingenious and (perhaps) unexpected solution the crime. Penny also seems to enjoy including many references to food and drink and the enjoyment thereof by the various characters in her stories, most especially Armand Gamache. I began to wonder how long he would last given the way he eats and drinks in these novels. These first three books also include a back story arch that concerns corruption within the Sûreté which threatens to expose Gamache in retaliation for the way he has handled an earlier investigation of a fellow officer. The fourth novel provides a sort of coda in which Armand and Reine-Marie go on vacation at their favorite resort, where they run into one of the couples they've come to know from the village of Three Pines, the setting of the earlier novels. Penny seems to enjoy populating her mysteries with familiar characters from previous books. I won't go into any details about the plots, but the settings, the village of Three Pines and the Manor Bellechasse, are essential elements of the stories and contribute to a cozy quality that often contrasts with the brutality of the crimes. This also appears to be part of the appeal of the genre and of Louise Penny's mystery novels.
Once I'd done with my mystery vacation, it was back to book club assignments. For September we discussed Adam Rutherford's A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold through Our Genes (2016). Over the last few years our club has read a number of books on the human genome, DNA, and human history, so we've gone into this subject before, but Rutherford, despite a certain breezy verbosity, makes it interesting, and drives home his points with anecdotes and thought experiments that emphasize the absurdity of such things as racism and eugenics. While human beings seem to delight in separating ourselves into tribes and clans and denying our obvious inter-connectedness, our genes tell a very different tale. Just as each of us is genetically unique (with the possible exception of identical twins, but even there Rutherford wants to introduce qualifications), we are all more or less essentially the same, even sharing DNA with Neanderthals and other early humans. Given the mathematics of genealogy, we're also likely to be genetically related to one another and to most of the other humans who have ever lived. Anyone who has dabbled with Ancestry or 23andMe will have discovered just how many relationships we share, especially when we go back a few generations. Alas, I suspect none of this will make the slightest difference to our politics or sociology. The other thing that seems to be encoded in our DNA is the penchant for forming small groups and fighting with everyone else. That explains our love of sports, but also our love of warfare. My school's better than yours, my team's better than yours, my country's better than yours. It sort of reminds me of that old Star Trek episode, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, in which Loci was black on the left side while Bele was black on the right. Both were essentially the same, but for that single difference which drove them to destroy each other and their entire world. I fear we're headed the same way, but what's to be done? Simply knowing the absurdity is not sufficient to prevent something that is hardwired into our very being.
When I'd finished reading Rutherford's Brief History, I picked up Daniel Mendelsohn's An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017). I'd read his excerpt "A Father's Final Odyssey" in the New Yorker last year, and probably would have left it at that, but a good friend and former teaching colleague told me how much he'd enjoyed reading the book and thought I would as well, so I decided to give it another go. I'm glad I did. In the guise of telling a story about a classics professor's experiences teaching an undergraduate course on Homer's Odyssey while his 80 year old father, a gifted mathematician and computer scientist, sits in a corner of the classroom and kibitzes from the sidelines, Mendelsohn gives the reader an interesting interpretation of Homer's epic; he also uncovers many of the reasons The Odyssey continues to resonate so many centuries later, and in the process writes a wonderful memoir of his father and his family. But the capstone experience, for Mendelsohn and his father, is the Mediterranean cruise they take together the following summer, retracing Odysseus's voyage home. Although their nautical adventure doesn't unfold quite the way they expect, the bonding that takes place between father and son almost makes me rethink my antipathy toward cruises.
Once I'd finished reading Mendelsohn's book, my inclination was to go straight to Homer and start re-reading the Odyssey. But first I had to tackle Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot (1984). This was the novel that really launched Barnes, at least in this country, and I remember reading and enjoying it shortly after it was published. That's long enough for me to have forgotten all but a few details, so to prepare for our book club discussion (this is the book for October), I re-read Barnes's book and then quickly read Gustave Flaubert's Madam Bovary and A Simple Soul (the little novella in which appears the famous parrot). I'd read A Simple Soul before, the first time I read Barnes's novel, but this time I thought I'd give it go in French, Un Coer Simple, but while Flaubert's French is fairly easy, my fluency has diminished considerably over the years and I found myself double checking the English so frequently that I abandoned the attempt to read the little book in its original language. Still, I got a good sense of Flaubert's style, and an appreciation for the task he presents translators who want to capture his directness and apparently unaffected naturalness. Now I'm curious to see how our discussion goes when we meet tomorrow to compare our reactions. I think this must be the third or fourth book by Barnes our group as read, although this one we'll have to tackle on our own, without the guidance of our favorite Julian Barnes specialist who is away doing research.
When I concluded my study of Flaubert, surprisingly instead of going back to Homer, I turned to William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness (1951), which I recently downloaded to my Kindle as a result of one of those deals they have from time to time. It's a novel I've always intended to read but had not gotten around to, so I'll save my reactions for another blog post and bring this one to a close.
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