May Reading

 Here is what I read in May:

Mr. Mac and Me by Esther Freud.   Real life Scottish architect Charles Rennie MacIntosh and his artist wife Margaret MacDonald have retreated to a village on the Suffolk coast to recuperate and paint.  An unlikely friendship arises between them and a local (fictional) boy named Thomas Maggs, son of an alcoholic pub keeper.  When World War I breaks out, life changes for the village and strangers are viewed with suspicion.  Even Mr. Mac.  A lovely portrait of a coastal village at war, Freud also vividly portrays the artistic process as Mr. Mac and Margaret work on their studies of local plant life.  This novel sent me to Google to look at some of their work and once again despair that I arrived in Glasgow the day after the School of Art (MacIntosh's masterpiece) burned and, thus, never had a chance to see it. 

Faithful and Virtuous Night by Louise Gluck.    The latest collection of poetry by Louise Gluck is concerned with death, aging and the act of dying.   Parents die in a sudden collision with a tree, leaving two children to be brought up by an Aunt.  A painter is dying and can no longer use his arm to paint - it seems the painter is one of the children all grown up.  At some point the Aunt dies.  But each poem could also stand on its own.  Is the voice female or male?   Is the voice the poet's or her creation's?  Sometimes it is hard to tell - and really, what does it matter?  Time itself seems mutable - the present and the past confused in the way that they often are for old people.  Is the poem representing reality or a dream?  Again, hard to say.

The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters.  With the end of World War I many formerly upper middle class women found themselves in straightened circumstances.  The men in the family were dead, money was often tight and good help was hard to find.  The Wrays are just such a family of women, living in a fine old house in a genteel suburb of London - a house that they can no longer afford.  They are forced to take in lodgers, or "paying guests" as Mrs. Wray would prefer to call them.  In the first third of this novel, Sarah Waters creates the world of 1922 in great detail with appropriate atmosphere.  If you, like I, have little interest in novels about obsessive love or criminal trials you might find the last two-thirds of the novel somewhat hard going.   The twist here is that the love affair is between two women, but otherwise it reads something like an early Alfred Hitchcock thriller.  I truly love the way that Sarah Waters strings together her sentences, but the plot of this novel just did not grab me.



 The Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust by Alan Bradley.  Flavia de Luce has been shipped off to boarding school in Toronto, Canada, a foreign land that uses dimes and nickels rather than good old English money.  Of course the first night she arrives a body is discovered in the bedroom to which she has been assigned.  In addition, the school is not all that it seems.  More strange is the fact that she misses Feely and Daffy back at home.  This particular mystery suffered from the need to introduce a new country, a new school and an entirely new cast of characters.   This is a story that seems meant to take Flavia to the next level.  Flavia is as enjoyable as ever but I hope she can return to Buckshaw and her friends in England.





St. Louis Rising:  The French Regime of Louis de St. Ange de Bellerive, by Carl J. Ekberg and Sharon K. Person.   A book about the founding of St. Louis that focuses on the first Commandant of Upper Louisiana to live here.  Louis de St. Ange de Bellerive lived a fascinating life.  Born in Canada, he came from a military family and followed his father and brother to the new colony of Louisiana.  They were the first French to try to permanently settle the Missouri River Valley.  After the death of his brother, Louis was put in charge of the post at Vincennes.  After the end of the French and Indian War he was moved to Fort de Chartres and made Commandant of Upper Louisiana where one of his principal jobs was to hand over the fort to the British.  After the handover he moved his command to the west side of the river to the new settlement of St. Louis.  I reviewed this book here.

St. Louis Rising: The French Regime of Louis St. Ange de Bellerive

When the history of St. Louis is written, historians inevitably begin with the "journal" of Auguste Chouteau.  Not really a journal but a memoir written many years after the event, Chouteau gives a version of the founding of St. Louis in which he and Pierre LaClede are the major players.  And why not?   Chouteau would become one of the most important businessmen in the young town of St. Louis, his family becoming very rich in the fur trade.  The Chouteau family were definite "winners" in the economic race run by the first founders of the City.   And, as we know, history is written by the winners.

But there are always, of course, others who were important in history.  Perhaps those who do not have descendents to write about them.  Or those for whom the written records is scattered.  If those records can be gathered they often document lives of great interest.

Carl J. Ekburg and Sharon K. Person have written about such a life in this book. Louis St. Ange de Bellerive led one of the most interesting lives in French colonial history - and possibly in all North American colonial history.  The Groston de St. Ange family came from Canada where the father, Robert, had immigrated in 1685.  Robert was a member of the French Marines.  (Despite most of the French North American colony being landlocked, the area was under the jurisdiction of the Marines.   This probably made sense as supplies needed to be sent by ship.)  He would spend his entire career in service to the French crown and his career would take him and his family all over what is today the American midwest.

In 1720, Robert, his second wife and two adult male children, Pierre and Louis, were at Post St. Joseph at the bottom of Lake Michigan near present-day Niles Michigan.  From that posting, Robert (and presumably his sons) accompanied the Jesuit Father Charles Charlevoix down the Mississippi to Kaskaskia and Fort de Chartres.   The St. Ange family were now a part of the colony of Louisiana.  In 1723, Robert and his son Pierre were ordered to accompany a man named Bourgmont who was tasked with setting up a post on the Missouri River  - Fort d'Orleans.   Louis St. Ange eventually joined the family there and remained as commandant of Fort d'Orleans in the 1730's while his father returned to Fort de Chartres and became commander there. 

When Louis' brother Pierre was killed in action against the Chickasaw, his now retired father requested that Louis be given command of the post at Vincennes.  Louis St. Ange remained as the commandant at Vincennes from 1736-1764 when the end of the Seven Years War resulted in the transition of all the land east of the Mississippi to the English.  St. Ange was then moved from Vincennes to Fort de Chartres and was made commandant of all of Upper Louisiana.  It was he who eventually handed over the fort to the English and moved his troops across the river to the new settlement established on the west bank where he remained commandant of "Spanish Illinois" until an actual Spaniard could show up to take over.  An old man, he died a few years later in St. Louis in the home of Madame Chouteau.

As a genealogical researcher with family living in Upper Louisiana during that time, including in Vincennes, I've been well aware of St. Ange's history.  Ekburg and Person are to be commended in putting the history of the St. Ange family into one place where it can be easily accessed by the general public and where Louis de St. Ange might finally get his due. 

In addition to the history of the St. Ange family, Eckburg and Person have also spent time researching the written records of the village of St. Louis in the years leading up to 1770 when Pedro Piernas finally arrived in St. Louis to institute Spanish governance.  They write a fascinating social history of the village, examing births, deaths and marriages.   They discuss the architecture of the village and include a creditable discussion of the law of the land:  the Coutume de Paris.  They include a full chapter on slavery in early St. Louis and describe the foundations of the fur trade. 

For anyone interested in the founding of St. Louis this book is a must-read.  My only complaint is that, in their zeal to show that the story of Laclede and Chouteau are not the only important, or even the most important, story to know about the founding of St. Louis, they sometimes get a little petty. Every book has a point of view - even history books.  But far better to show that St. Ange was more important than Laclede by writing about St. Ange than by editorial comments about Laclede.  If you can ignore that editorializing, this is a book well worth reading. 

April Reading

 April was a busy month.   Here's what I was reading.

In the King's Service by Katherine Kurtz.  This article caused me to remember how I had enjoyed Katherine Kurtz when I was young.  I looked her up and realized that I had never read the last three books she published.   Kurtz is a fantasy writer who began writing back in the late 60s/early 70s.  She created a world of historical fantasy loosely based on medieval England, including a strong pre-reformation Catholic Church.  The fantasy involves a group of people with the ability to read minds and do some magic, called The Deryni.  I remember loving the world that she built.  Back in those days people didn't write fantasy novels that were 1000 pages long (a la George R. R. Martin) so, instead, she wrote in trilogies.  Each trilogy totaled about 1000 pages.  Each trilogy takes place in the world she created but often at different time periods.  It has been years since I read them and maybe that's why I found many of the "family trees" hard to follow in the first part of this novel.  But eventually I got into it and am ready to move on to the other two books.  The article compared her to Dorothy Dunnett but I don't really see it.  Her style and language is much simpler and, in fact, sometimes too simple; her characters are interesting but the side characters are not as deeply developed as Dunnetts' and her plots are not nearly as complicated.   And she tends to "tell" and not "show.   But I do love the world she created and am happy to go back to it. 

How to be Both by Ali Smith.   This Booker Prize longlisted novel has a gimmick.   The dual story of a teenage girl in the 21st Century and a yohttps://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1974275832677042000#editor/target=post;postID=4052206831820001768;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=0;src=postnameung female artist in the Rennaissance, half of the book is told from the point of view of one character and half the book is told from the point of view of the other character.  That isn't really the gimmick.  The gimmick is that in some editions of the novel, one story is first and in other editions the other story is first.  I read it in the NOOK version so I was asked to pick which half I wanted to read first.  I ended up with the renaissance character first.   Since that character is a dead consciousness come back to life in the 21st Century, the first 20-30 pages are a little confusing; not to mention that you don't know that the character is female.  And the "ghost" thinks that she's following a boy, but she's really following George, the girl from the other part of the novel.  But once I caught on to what was happening, it worked fine for me.  A meditation on how the past is always with us, there was a lot to think about in this novel.

The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches by Alan Bradley.   The sixth Flavia de Luce novel.   Turns out I wasn't quite right in my guess about Flavia's mother's demise but I was close.   Some loose ends were tied up, but not all.   Flavia's sisters are getting much more human and Flavia has grown slightly less annoying in her ways.  When Alan Bradley began the series he clearly did not intend to be writing a series.   He's done a good job of opening up the characters little by little, while still keeping them the stereotypes that girls of Flavia's age think people are.  Again, the mysteries are really beside the point.

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell.   An unexpected delight chosen by my reading group.  Eleanor is the new girl at school and Park is the only Asian American boy.  Both ride the bus and eventually become friends and then more than friends.  Rowell's depiction of the slow way in which people get to know each other was spot on.   The two studiously ignore each other on the bus until Park realizes that Eleanor is reading along with him as he reads his comic books.  Even then the conversations are limited as they very slowly get to know each other; each holding back from the other the harder aspects of his or her life.   Rowell does not tie up the ending with a bow, which seemed appropriate. 

Aimless Love by Billy Collins.   I received this collection of poems by the former US Poet Laureate for Christmas and I read it very slowly - one poem a day.   It is not, technically, a completely new book as two-thirds of the poems were previously published.   Collins is known as our "accessible" poet and he certainly is.  But his poems are humorous and sometimes poignant and often don't end where you think they are leading.   It seems that he can turn anything into a poem and, apparently, people are always pointing this out to him: 

In the afternoon a woman I barely knew
said you could write a poem about that,
pointing to a dirigible that was passing overhead.

West of the Revolution:  An Uncommon History of 1776 by Claudio Saunt.   In our Anglo-centric view of American history we focus on what the British and their colonists on the east coast of the North American continent were doing in the 1770's.   In Alaska, the Inuit were dealing with abusive Russian fisherman; in California the Spanish were moving up the coast to found San Franciso as a result of the threat that Russia would move down the west coast of North America.  In the north, British traders were exploring the vast Canadian wilderness in search of trade.  And in the south, the Creeks were seeking help from Spain to fight the English.   This relatively short book (about 200 pages before the end notes) gives a good overview of what the rest of the North American continent  was dealing with in 1776.   And what is clear is that they weren't at all concerned about the civil war that was going on in the East between the British.