The Ancrene Riwle

The Ancrene Riwle: A Rule for Religious Women, trans. by M. B. Salu

 I'm still making an effort not to type, so here we go with another dictated post.  (Note after finishing: voice software mostly does not get the word "anchoresses," but it sure does make some creative stabs at interpretation!)    

While I was reading The Fellowship, it mentioned that Tolkien had taken on a project of translating a rule for anchoresses written in Anglo-Saxon. It took him ages to finish, of course. I don't think he managed to publish until the 1960s, or even later. But I instantly needed to read the book. It turns out that Miss Salu got in ahead of him, and this translation from the 1950's is the most readily available. Tolkien put in a nice introduction, which I must say was gracious of him.  

This rulebook of instruction was written in a Western dialect of Anglo-Saxon in the 14th century, by an unknown author who was addressing three women - they seem to be sisters - who were going to be anchoresses. What is interesting about this rule is that the author says many times that the women should not overdo their asceticism. They should not fast too much, and their prayers should be moderated so as to fit their health and strength. 

The first chapter contains instructions on how to pray the offices every day, which takes up a large part of the day.  Then he goes on to  self control - it turns out that anchoresses are not supposed to peek out of their windows all the time. Nor should they listen to gossip, and they should never look at a man. An anchoress should be calm, and when she is not praying she can read uplifting books or work at sewing clothing for her household or for the poor. Surprisingly, she should not give a lot in charity; this rule presumes that she will be living in poverty, and will not have a lot extra unless she begs it from others. Begging alms from other people in order to look generous oneself is not okay, and "between an anchoress and the lady of a house there should be a clear distinction."

I had always thought of anchoresses as people living in tiny cells next to the church, with just one room and a little window to get food through. But these anchoresses are obviously not going to live that way. They have a house, and they have some maids as well. when I read The Quest for the Holy Grail last year, I was surprised by the description of the hermit lady who had an entire household, but this actually sounds very similar. Now I am curious as to how anchoresses lived in England, and whether there was a variety of anchoress lifestyles.

The rest of the rule talks about how to find a good priest (not too good-looking or young), and how to make confession and do penance. Most particularly, the author wants these anchoresses to remember that the point of their existence is to love God and others. External rules are completely secondary to this, and are flexible, able to be customized to the anchoresses' situation and strength.

The author spends much of his time on the temptations chapter, and it is filled with the kind of scriptural interpretations that medieval people loved to make. At that time, every scriptural story was considered to have at least two meanings: the historical event that had actually happened, and the symbolic meaning that could be drawn from it. God had placed these meanings into the stories for people to find.  Almost certainly, a good scriptorian could find more than one hidden meaning in any story and suit it to the situation at hand.   These get to be quite detailed and draw upon even the smallest Biblical incident:

...in the Book of Judges, after Josue's (Joshua's) death, when the people asked who should be their leader and lead them in battle...Our Lord answered then: Juda shall go before you and I shall delier your enemy's land into his hands."...'Josue' means 'health' and 'Juda,' like 'Judith,' 'Confession.'  Josue is dead when the health of the soul has been lost through any mortal sin.  The sinful self is the land of the enemy, our deadly foe, but Our Lord promises to deliver this land into the hands of Juda, and for that reason he goes before you.  Thus Confession is the standard-bearer and carries the banner before the whole of God's army, that is, the virtues.  Confession despoils the devil of his land, that is, of the man who has been sinful, and puts to rout Canaan, the army of the devil of hell.  Juda did this physically, and Confession, which is thereby symbolized, does the same thing spiritually....

There is a whole lot of this sort of thing, plus some fabulous stuff where he categorizes the seven sins into monsters with children, so that the Sow of Gluttony has five young, or different kinds of gluttony.  Covetousness is a fox, lechery a scorpion, and so on. 

On the whole, it's a pretty interesting medieval text, but it sure does drag in the middle over the temptations (once you get past the fun monsters).

We Believe the Children

We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s, by Richard Beck

Readers who were around in the mid-80s may remember that a lot of people were worried about Satanic ritual abuse of children, particularly preschool-aged children in daycare.  Some daycares were accused of being centers of ritual abuse; the children were interrogated, evidence searched for, and a lot of people went to jail.    This was big stuff, people.

And it was almost entirely made up.  These huge, publicized cases were sparked by one person worried about a child--in at least one case, by a person with severe mental problems--and blew up into hysteria.  Almost certainly, some children who had actually been subjected to abuse were lost under the mountain of false conjecture and panic that mounted up.

Richard Beck has written up a history of the most publicized cases in which he also tries to explain--not really very satisfactorily--why this all happened.  I think that's the question we'd all like an answer for, but I'm not sure there is one.

Therapists and police questioned children--well, what they really seem to have done is badgered the kids until they gave in and made stuff up.  The rallying cry was "we believe the children," but the children were only believed if they produced elaborate stories that confirmed what the authorities thought.  The short excerpts of transcripts included in the book are awful to read, because it's so obvious that there is bullying and leading going on.  The scarier and more elaborate the stories, the more approval the children received, and so they came up with lots of amazing stuff (that would, incidentally, never fit into the few hours they spent at preschool; one kid said he'd been taken out of state in a plane).

Everybody went and searched for evidence--remains of sacrificed animals or babies, underground tunnels, elaborate costumes, weapons, and collections--and there was nothing.

The court cases dragged on for years and ruined quite a few lives; not only for the accused, but for many others too.  Imagine being a jury member!  Eventually much of it collapsed and some people were acquitted.  Others went to jail but were eventually cleared, or perhaps went free but remained registered as offenders.  Still others remain in jail today.

Still, it became an article of faith for many people that ritual abuse was a real thing that happened to children; I can recall that some adults I knew considered it to be a reasonable thing to fear.  The daycare panic led straight into the recovered-memory phenomenon of the 90s, in which adults went under hypnosis to recall their own ritual abuse as small children, this time usually perpetrated by their families.  Recovered-memory therapists considered almost anything to be evidence of repressed memories of abuse (thinking you had not been abused was one indicator) and this abuse was almost always supposed to be elaborately Satanic.  There was also a slightly less major panic about teens getting into Satanism and murdering people, often in obedience to death-metal bands.

Beck gives some fascinating description of all this.  He also delves into some history of psychotherapy, which I at least found helpful and relevant, especially in regards to multiple personality disorder.  He does also have an obvious bias, though, blaming all this hysteria on an anti-feminism backlash to the chaos of the 60s and 70s, and on the toxic nuclear family.  It becomes really obvious that he doesn't like the nuclear family one bit, though I'm unclear about what he'd like to replace it with...or really, several other things about his theories.  That's by far the weakest part of the book.

So here is the personal part.  I was very interested in this book, and in the whole issue of the ritual abuse panics, because I knew some people who believed it.  Reading this book was a very strange experience in some ways, really--it turns out that the first case started in Bakersfield, where we lived when I was a kid; we moved away just as it broke in the media.  (My mom says she read the accusations, but thought that nobody must know much about how preschools work--it all sounded so impractical.)

Much more to the point, when I was a teen, a family I knew fairly well believed that their youngest child had been subjected to Satanic abuse.  I never heard anything about a court case or publicity.  But I heard the story from the mother herself, and I believed her.  (I'll always tell you that my hometown contains a remarkably high percentage of really crazy things, and I can think of other moms who I would not have believed, but I considered her to be a sensible person.)  They moved and did not tell anyone where they went, but for at least the next 15 years, they continued to move periodically, believing that a network of Satanists were persecuting them.  I have no idea what to make of this now.  I've been wondering about it for a good ten years.  What was the real story there?

I, um, also managed to be a bit acquainted with a kid who actually was involved in a Satanic murder.  Reading this book made me realize that probably not everybody has these weirdo experiences in their background; I'd never really thought about it before.

So: read up on a strange chapter of recent American history, mentally argue (or agree if you want) with Beck's reasoning, and please comment below if you remember this happening.  Tell me I'm not the only one!

Classics Club Event: Women's Lit in 2016

...or now, really.  The Classics Club is running a long-term event/celebration on great literature by women.  And there's a questionnaire and all!  So I don't know that I'll point it out every single time I read a classic work by a female-type person, but at the very least I'll answer these questions and talk about it every so often.  My first post for this event was Wives and Daughters the other day!  It took me a while to get all this stuff written out.

1. Introduce yourself. Tell us what you are most looking forward to in this event.  I'm Jean, I'm a librarian and sewist and homeschooling mom, and I will most enjoy reading others' posts about women in literature.
2. Have you read many classics by women? Why or why not?  Yes.  The fact is that I gravitate towards women writers anyway; this is not exactly an event that will push me out of my comfort zone.  Maybe I will search out lesser-known works or something.
3. Pick a classic female writer you can’t wait to read for the event, & list her date of birth, her place of birth, and the title of one of her most famous works.  Let's go with Elizabeth Gaskell, because I read Wives and Daughters this week!  Mrs. Gaskell was born in Chelsea near London, and lived from 1810-1865.  I think she is most famous for North and South, a lovely novel about a refined rural Kentish girl who goes to live in an industrial Northern city.  Wives and Daughters is her crowning achievement, but is also unfinished, as she died before it could be completed.  It's almost done though.
4. Think of a female character who was represented in classic literature by a male writer. Does she seem to be a whole or complete woman? Why or why not? Tell us about her. (Without spoilers, please!) I guess that depends on which heroine you choose, hm?  Let's go with Isabel Archer, the subject of Henry James' Portrait of a Lady.  I think Isabel counts as a whole person, as in, she is a fully-rounded out and complex character who is as realistic as any of James' -- or literature's -- characters.  (Is a whole woman different than a whole person?  What is a whole woman?)  Isabel is an American lady who travels to England, charms every man she meets, and eventually chooses to marry an awful fellow who lives in Rome and collects beautiful objects (such as Isabel).
5. Favorite classic heroine? (Why? Who wrote her?)  I'm such a cliche; I love Jane Eyre best, by Charlotte Bronte.  She is just so principled and independent and stubborn about it.  
6. We’d love to help clubbers find great titles by classic female authors. Can you recommend any sources for building a list? (Just skip this question if you don’t have any at this point.)  I can only recommend looking at blogs, usually but not always by other Clubbers.  In fact I suppose if you looked over my "Index of Reviewed Books" (which is months behind reality) in the literature section, you could find some.
7. Recommend three books by classic female writers to get people started in this event. (Again, skip over this if you prefer not to answer.)  Agnes Grey, by Anne Bronte (lesser known, but a great book, and then move on to the utterly fabulous Tenant of Wildfell Hall); The Book of the City of Ladies, by Christine de Pisan, one of my all-time favorite medieval works; and 
8. Will you be joining us for this event immediately, or will you wait until the new year starts?  I was already starting Mrs. Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, so I guess I have joined.
9. Do you plan to read as inspiration pulls, or will you make out a preset list?  Inspiration!  At least until I've finished my current CC list, which has a lot left on it and I'm nervous about getting done in time (for me, March 2017).
10. Are you pulling to any particular genres? (Letters, journals, biographies, short stories, novels, poems, essays, etc?)  Hm, letters sounds fun!  Probably mostly novels and essays.
11. Are you pulling to a particular era or location in literature by women?  Era, not really.  I'll take whatever comes along.  I do prefer to seek out literature from other places and languages.
12. Do you hope to host an event or readalong for the group? No worries if you don’t have details. We’re just curious!  If I can think of a good one, I would be quite happy to.
13. Is there an author or title you’d love to read with a group or a buddy for this event? Sharing may inspire someone to offer.  Gosh, I don't know, but I'd be happy to participate in a group read for anything long or intimidating.
14. Share a quote you love by a classic female author — even if you haven’t read the book yet. I finally actually did read the source for a general favorite.  In Louisa May Alcott's Work, the heroine falls asleep in her servant garret while reading and leaves her candle alight, against house rules.  It sets fire to her clothing hanging nearby.  Her employers arrive home and run into her room just in time to prevent the fire from really getting going.  Christie, meanwhile, awoken by yelling to see all her clothing aflame, gets a little hysterical and laughs.  Her mistress cries:  "She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain!"
15. Finally, ask the question you wish this survey had asked, & then answer it.  This was pretty thorough!

Monkalong V: The Deadening

Mission accomplished!  We've finished The Monk!  At least, I hope you have; I know I did.  Here's
the final installment:

We last left Ambrosio in the now-familiar crypt, where he has interred Antonia.  Everybody thinks she's dead, and he plans to keep her imprisoned in a dungeon where she can be his slave.  He thinks she will probably enjoy it!  Antonia wakes up, and surprise, she is not very happy with her situation.  Ambrosio, monster that he is, therefore goes ahead and rapes her.  Of course then he looks at her with revulsion and blames her for the whole thing--yes, according to him, it is Antonia's fault that Ambrosio is a depraved criminal.  He's trying to figure out how to get rid of her when Matilda bursts in with the news about the burning nunnery and everyone running around like mad.

Matilda offers to kill Antonia to get her out of the way, but Antonia manages to run away into the rest of the crypt, where she screams to attract attention.  Unfortunately Ambrosio gets to her first and stabs her, so that Lorenzo only finds his true love near death.  She does get to explain, so he knows all--and discovers both the monk and Matilda, who is a girl!  Off to the Inquisition with them!

Now Virginia and Agnes are spending a lot of time together, and Agnes tells the story of her imprisonment, which is pretty grim.  She and Raymond get married; Virginia and Lorenzo get to be very good friends and will marry sometime; and the other two are being put to the question in prison. 

Well, Ambrosio is.  Matilda appears to him in a vision, looking ravishingly beautiful, and announces that she has escaped by selling her soul to Satan.  If he does too, they can be together!  Ambrosio hesitates, but in the end he is too much of a coward to face his punishment.  Just before he's taken to execution, he makes a pact with Satan, who whisks him off to a cliff...and then reveals, in a speech in the best Evil Villain tradition, that a) Matilda was a demon sent to tempt him (and "scarcely could I propose crimes so quick as you performed them"), b) Elvira was his mother and Antonia his sister, and c) now he's going to die and go to Hell, since he forgot to stipulate anything about living once he'd escaped from prison.  The joke's on you, Ambrosio!  The end.

Well, that was a story that, taken all together, was pretty dang crazy.  Unhinged, in fact.  Thanks a bunch to Alice at Reading Rambo for hosting, because that was quite fun in a deranged sort of way.  Ambrosio is THE WORST.

Wives and Daughters

Wives and Daughters, by Elizabeth Gaskell

This novel has been on my pile all year. I wanted to read it for the Back to the Classics Challenge.       A couple of weeks ago, I was going to spend several hours on a bus, and I needed some nice wholesome reading to pass the time. Wives and Daughters seemed the perfect choice, and it turned out lovely.

Molly Gibson is the village doctor's daughter, and she's been raised very simply (this is in the 1830s).  When she is seventeen, her father starts worrying that he can't chaperone or guide her properly, and so he marries a pretty, insinuating widow who is in fact shallow, manipulative, and selfish.  Molly does her best to get along with her new stepmother, but it's a continual struggle.

Her comfort is her new stepsister, Cynthia, who is charming and sophisticated, having grown up largely in French boarding schools.  The two become very close, but Molly does not always understand what Cynthia is up to and she insists on becoming involved in Cynthia's 'scrape' with a man who won't leave her alone.  It is Molly's reputation that suffers.

Sadly, the novel is not quite finished.  It appeared serially in Cornhill Magazine, and Mrs. Gaskell died before completing it, though only the final wrapping-up remains.  It's clear enough what Molly's fate will be, but I wish we could really read it.

It's a wonderful novel that explores the difficulties (and joys) of family relationships, especially where mothers and sisters are involved--very nuanced, careful, and realistic.

Mrs. Gaskell also spends a lot of time dividing the world into two sorts of people.  It's actually easiest to make two lists.  Things Mrs. Gaskell doesn't really approve of include: finicking snobbery or aristocracy, fancy poetry, old-school education in the classics and nothing else, hatred for the French, overzealous love of all things French, and over-interest in fripperies and dress.  Things Mrs. Gaskell does approve of include: plain English sense, science and mathematics, interest in the wider world, progress, simple dress, straightforward friendship with the French, interest in the poor, and plain English sense.  (Did I mention plain English sense?)

One thing that really comes home to the modern reader is how incredibly narrow and confined village life was, before fast transportation and communication made it easier to escape.  These people--well, most especially the women--are always with each other; the average day involves spending most of the waking hours with each other.  Only visits to other local residents, equally well-known, offer relief.  In the several years of the novel, Molly's stepmother leaves home for a visit to another city once.  To Mrs. Gaskell, this was normal life (though she emphasizes that Molly's stepmother, being a selfish woman, keeps Molly at her beck and call more than is normal).  To us, it sounds horribly confining, no matter how much we love our families.

Molly's town, like Cranford, is based on Mrs. Gaskell's home of Knutsford in Cheshire. 


I actually have a whole bunch of books to write up, and the Classics Club is having a celebration....there is all sorts of stuff to post about.  But I've been staying very strictly off the computer because of sore arms.  They're a lot better now, but I'm still going to stop typing before they start again.  I'll just have to wait.

Classics Club Spin: A Bend in the River

A Bend in the River, by V. S. Naipaul

This was my Classics Club Spin title!  V. S. Naipaul is a British writer, born in Trinidad, who started off writing Trinidad-based novels and moved to international waters.  He's pretty international himself, being of Nepalese descent by way of India and Trinidad.  He has won a Booker Prize, a Nobel, and a knighthood.

A Bend in the River, published in 1979, describes ordinary life in modern, post-colonial Africa through the eyes of one man.  He does little himself; he is an observer of the events around him.  The location is deliberately general; it's not too far from Uganda and South Africa, and inland, so I guessed at western Tanzania, but the point is that it's Post-Colonial Anywhere, Africa.  The colonial government is gone, there has been violence, and now a new president promises a new life, but he progresses from popular leader to tyrant.  Naipaul shows us what that looks like for the ordinary people of a small town.

The narrator, Salim, is an outsider.  He is part of a once-wealthy Arabic family that has lived on the east coast of Africa for generations; they are acclimated, but not fully African.  Salim seeks his fortune by purchasing a general store; the inland town at the bend of the river has been destroyed by the violence accompanying independence and the ejection of European officials, but it's a natural trading location and he can expect the business to revive over time.  So at first he's living in a burned-out wasteland with just a few other inhabitants, but he ekes out a living selling useful items to the villagers who come down the river to trade.

As the town slowly revives and grows, Salim gets to know people at all levels of society.  Each of the new president's actions have a strong effect on the town as he establishes a college, or brings in military troops, and so on.  Salim is introduced to Raymond, a European scholar of Africa who has been serving as an advisor to the president but is now being shoved to the side.  Raymond has studied and written on important African issues for years, but Salim comes to realize that he only understands the top layer of events--what the newspapers spin--and has no idea what people truly think or feel.  Salim is an outsider, but he's a lot closer in than Raymond, who doesn't really understand anything at all.

As the country's condition deteriorates and violence revisits Salim's town, he remains passive.  Salim almost never does anything himself; he simply watches.

It's an interesting novel, very 70s.

Monkalong IV

There's only one more week in our Monkalong event! This week ended in a real cliffhanger so I can't wait to finish the book. But meanwhile, on with our story....

Raymond and Lorenzo are so busy trying to find Agnes that they totally neglect to pay any attention to Antonia and Elvira. This is a bit unfortunate, because Ambrosio is doing some plotting. He's got this magic myrtle branch that the Devil gave him to get into Antonia's room. There is a very suspenseful section where he magically enters the apartment and gets into Antonia's locked room, and he's looking at her and he's about to make his move. But! Elvira has been on the watch. She is the only competent adult around here. Her only flaw is that she keeps failing to tell Antonia the facts about Ambrosio, or any facts in general. Antonia needs to know these things, and her ignorance is not helping her!

So Elvira interrupts Ambrosio, and she announces her plan to expose his hypocrisy to the world. We figure Ambrosio is actually her son, but he doesn't know this and he murders Elvira. Horrified, he leaves her corpse on the floor and flees away. The next morning, when Antonia wakes, she finds her dead mother on the floor. But everyone assumes that Elvira has died of her illness, and so no one suspects a murder. Antonia collapses anyway, and succumbs to a bout of brain fever, or whatever the 18th century equivalent of brain fever was.  (According to the Monk, illness is largely a result of emotional distress.)  She is now completely friendless and penniless, while Lorenzo and Raymond are both out of town. Not only that, Ambrosio is still plotting away, only temporarily daunted by his crime.    

After some recovery time, Antonia visits her mother's empty chamber, reads some ghost poetry and gets scared. Just then her dead mother visits her in a highly spooky manner and announces that in only three days, they will be together again! Ominous.

Ambrosio, a man of but one thought, uses this as an excuse to spend the night at the house, where he gives Antonia some poison that will make her look dead. Antonia is interred - surprise! - in the crypt under the monastery, and Ambrosio impatiently awaits her awakening.

Meanwhile, in other news, a nun has passed a message to Lorenzo that she has terrible information for him. In the middle of a fancy Catholic procession, Lorenzo and Raymond grab the prioress and the nun tells her story to an enthralled public - which is of the deliberate murder of poor Agnes! The crowd riots, pounding the evil prioress to a jelly and then getting completely out of control.

Lorenzo runs off to the nunnery to save the innocent nuns from getting murdered in the riot.  He gets caught in a fire and winds up down in the crypt--the same one Ambrosio is in, but they don't seem to run into each other.  It's the world's biggest and most labyrinthine crypt. He hears the same forlorn voice that Ambrosio heard so many weeks ago, but  Lorenzo is no superstitious coward like everybody else in this story, and so he finds his way down to a dungeon, where he discovers Agnes and her newly dead baby. So Agnes is not dead after all! But she is starving and sick. In all the tumult Lorenzo particularly notices another lovely young woman, Virginia, and it's emphasized that if Antonia had not already captured his heart, he would have fallen in love with Virginia. I think we know where that's going.

So this installment of the month has included secret messages, improbably elaborate Catholic processions, a terrifying ghost, some terrible poetry, and a scary secret dungeon, complete with fancy secret entrance. And demonic magic. Can't wait to finish this next week!

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage

The Thrilling Adventures of  Lovelace and Babbage: the (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer, by Sydney Padua

I should have written this post for Ada Lovelace Day last week, but I've been having some trouble with my arms and repetitive stress. So I've been putting off writing any posts. I'm now experimenting with voice recognition on my tablet, and I'm pretty impressed by how well it works. I could type these posts - I'm not that badly off - but I need to save my typing for work. Of course, the voice recognition doesn't work anywhere near perfectly, but I can get a good amount of material down and then go back and edit it by hand.

The author of this graphic novel says that she wrote one comic for fun and then responded to popular demand by producing the entire work. It is a whole lot of fun to read. Padua posits that Ada Lovelace did not die at a young age, but survived, built the Difference Engine with Babbage, and then had some wild adventures with it. The book claims that they all live in a tiny pocket universe. This allows the author to play with time and history, bringing people like George Eliot in to the comic. Everybody in Victorian England seems to have known everybody else anyway; it's exactly how like today there are only about 10 British actors and they are all in everything. So you can find letters where Dickens tells a funny anecdote about Babbage, and someone else mentions lady Lovelace.

There are several adventures collected into the graphic novel, such as when Queen Victoria visits, the time when George Eliot's latest masterpiece was ripped to shreds, and my favorite episode: the day that Mr. Boole came to tea--librarians will rejoice. The author puts in lots and lots of fun footnotes explaining the history, who knew Babbage and Lovelace (everybody), and bits and bobs about other memorable Victorian characters. I also love how Wellington keeps showing up, always with his horse, even though they are indoors. It's a very funny graphic novel, and anyone with nerdly predilections would love it.  Thanks to my mom for making me read it!

The Hand of a Great Master

The Hand of a Great Master, by Konstanineh Gamsakhardia


When I was reading Eight Pieces of Empire a little while ago, the author mentioned that Georgians place a great value on their literature. He mentioned one of their favorite national authors, Konstanineh Gamsakhurdia, and I thought I would like to read one of his books. The particular book I was looking for doesn't seem to be available in English. In fact, I could only find one book that had been translated into English at all. And so I read that. I got it through InterLibrary Loan, and it came all the way from Kansas. It was kind of a cool book, since it was printed in Moscow in 1962. As far as I can tell, it's the only time Gamsakhurdia has been printed in English.     
 

Svetitskhoveli Cathedral

The Hand of a Great Master is historical fiction, set an 11th century Georgia. It deals with the construction of the great Svetitskhoveli Cathedral, which still exists today. Although the story seems to spend most of its time focused on the king, Georgi I, he is actually the antagonist of the novel. The hero is young Konstantineh Arsakhidse, the builder of the cathedral, who is in love with Shorena, the daughter of a rebel duke. The king wishes to marry her himself.

The names in the story are quite difficult for an English speaker, and I sometimes had a hard time telling everyone apart because of that. There is a lot of very interesting stuff about the different Georgian factions; it's a tiny country, yet it has many different groups who dress and live differently, and who are not necessarily friendly to one another. And their names are quite hard to pronounce too; one of the main groups is the Pkhovians, and if anyone can tell me how to pronounce that I would really like to know.

Svetitskhoveli Cathedral, inside

It was an interesting novel to read, about a time and place I know nothing about, and I wish I could get hold of more books by Gamsakhurdia, especially the one I was hoping to find in the first place, which has a title something like The Smile of Dionysus.  He didn't always (or even usually) write romantic historical fiction, I don't think; usually he was criticizing the Soviets or something.

The Fellowship

The Fellowship: the Literary Lives of the Inklings, by Philip and Carol Zaleski

The Zaleskis have written a sort of group biography of the four main Inklings: C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Owen Barfield.  They only touch very lightly on other members of the group, and really Lewis and Tolkien take up the lion's share of the space.

 The subjects are tackled sort of chronologically, so you skip between childhoods and educations.  If you are already a big Lewis/Tolkien fan, you will know quite a bit of the material, but the Zaleskis have a solid common-sense approach to the wishes and speculations that have built up around the two in the last 50 years or so, which is a nice help.

Where I mostly learned a lot was in the material about Barfield and Williams.  I've read some of their writings, so I was not totally unfamiliar with them, but I didn't know much.  Barfield was a talented man whose talents were not what people wanted.  For one thing, he was an enthusiastic follower of Rudolf Steiner* and Anthroposophy and he wanted to share those insights with an uninterested world.  Poor Barfield also spent much of his adult life trapped (as he saw it) working in a law office, which he mostly hated.

Charles Williams--well, I knew he was kind of an oddball, but wow.  He had some issues!  Williams was quite a strange person, charismatic, high-strung, manic, and troubled.  He invented some very interesting theology and Lewis had a tendency to think that he was more amazing than he actually was.  I liked the Zaleskis' descriptions of his novels as "highbrow pulp**," which is pretty good, and of his poetry as often "a nearly impenetrable thicket of obscurities."

The Zaleskis also take a good look at the Inklings' place in literature and history.  Christians all, they fostered something of a revival, but they also garnered a good deal of scorn from those who thought they were too escapist.  The authors reply:

Yet although the Inklings were guilty of the heresy of the Happy Ending, they were not optimists; they were war writers who understood that sacrifices must be made and that not all wounds will be healed in this life.  Their belief in the Happy Ending was compatible with considerable anguish and uncertainty here below.  One may be as gloomy as Puddleglum or as convinced as Frodo that "All my choices have proved ill" without losing hope in a final redemption.

It's a very interesting book and I enjoyed it quite a bit.  But it's huge and fairly exhaustive, so most likely only big Inklings fans will want to read it.



 *The only remnant of Steiner's teachings you will find in the popular realm today is Waldorf education.  But Steiner was a hugely prolific writer/philosopher, and wrote about all sorts of things, from dance to Lemuria and Atlantis to the nature of the universe.

**A phrase which reminds me of that movie, Dead Again, with a cast of highbrow British actors and a B-movie plot.