The Lost Generation -- The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

   Welcome to one of today's stops on The Classics Circuit's Lost Generation Tour!

  I have to admit that I have not been interested in the authors most closely associated with this period -- especially Ernest Hemingway -- but I recently read and enjoyed The Paris Wife, a novel told from the perspective of Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, and it inspired me to give Hemingway another try.

  The Sun Also Rises was Hemingway's first novel, first published in 1926.  A Moveable Feast was his last "novel"  (defined by him as such but I see it as a type of memoir), published after his death in 1964 but based on writings made during his time in Paris.  I didn't enjoy the first, I absolutely loved the last.

  The Sun Also Rises is about group of expat Americans and Brits living the good life in Paris and in Pamplona, Spain.  Told from the first-person perspective of Jake Barnes, a journalist, to me this novel read like a soap opera of spoiled rich kids; drinking and partying well into the night without fear of consequences, lots of money though nobody seems to work, and nothing about any of the characters made me like or dislike them.  I suppose it is a novel of its time, but I didn't see the point that Hemingway was trying to make with this novel.

  As mentioned above, Hemingway described A Moveable Feast as a novel, because to him, ".. all remembrance of things past is fiction".  The way the book is set up -- as a collection of vignettes about his life in Paris and those famous and not-so famous people he encounters -- does not seem like a novel at all, but since he didn't start writing it until just before his death, after receiving a collection of his papers he had left stored at The Ritz in Paris, I suppose referring to it as a novel permitted him to rely more on his memory rather than facts to recount the stories.   

  Personally, I enjoyed the style of his writing in A Moveable Feast more; it is more descriptive and the stories are told with more emotion than what I felt in The Sun Also Rises.  Referring loosely to the term The Lost Generation - which seems to have been coined by Hemingway's mentor, Gertrude Stein, referring to the young people who served in World War I and which seemed to have upset him - Hemingway argues that "all generations are lost by something and always had been and always would be". 

  And, of course, being the Francophile that I am, I loved his descriptions of cafe life in Paris; just to be able to find a quiet table in a neighborhood "boite" with only a cafe creme and the entire day to read and write is my idea of bliss.

  I'm not sure if I will read more Hemingway anytime soon, but I think I'll check out some other works of The Lost Generation.  I'm looking forward to getting ideas of where to start from other posts on this Circuit and I hope you will too.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Murder on the Orient Express

 Welcome to today's stop on The Classics Circuit Golden Age of Detective Fiction Tour!

 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Murder on the Orient Express are two of Agatha Christie's best known novels featuring her eccentric Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot.  Both are true murder mysteries, but the resolutions of the crimes in each story are very different than anything I have ever read before or since

 In Ackroyd, a gentleman (Roger Ackroyd) is murdered at his home in a small English town to which M. Poirot has (conveniently) retired.  Poirot is hired by Mr. Ackroyd's niece, Flora, to help find her fiance (and Ackroyd's stepson) Ralph Paton -- who mysteriously disappeared after Ackroyd's death and is as a result the prime suspect.  The detective is assisted by Dr. James Sheppard, the town's physician and Poirot's neighbor, who dined with Ackroyd the evening he was killed. 

 In the Orient Express, a man is murdered in his train compartment, and because the train is stuck in the middle of nowhere due to a snowstorm, his killer must be another passenger on the train. Monsieur Poirot - a last minute passenger on the same train - is again asked to assist in the investigation.  When the true identity of the victim is revealed, a motive becomes clear; determining who among the remaining passengers would have that motive for murder requires the use of Poirot's infamous "little gray cells".

 I read both of these books for the first time when I was a teenager and remember being surprised by the endings.  Reading them again for this Circuit post, I was able to pick up on the subtle and not-so-subtle clues Christie provided throughout the novels.  I also didn't realize how witty her novels can be and how nice it is to read a novel simply to escape into its story.  They are fun to read.

J'accuse!

Welcome to today’s stop on the Emile Zola Classics Circuit.

First, a confession:  I have not read any of Emile Zola's novels - yet.  In fact I know very little about him; my only knowledge of Zola is through is association in the Dreyfus Affair, one of the most polarizing events in late-19th century France.

In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French Army, was arrested, then subsequently court-martialed and imprisoned for espionage. So what, you say – happens all the time. This case, however, was unique for a number of reasons:

•   There was little concrete evidence linking Dreyfus to the crime; in fact evidence strongly pointed to someone else but was ignored; and
•  Dreyfus was Jewish and in some circles deemed not a true Frenchman

Over the next several years, The Dreyfus Affair, as it became known, divided France.

Emile Zola, at this time a celebrated French novelist, was a Dreyfusard (believing in Dreyfus' innocence), as were most writers and intellectuals, and wrote several open letters in French publications in support of Dreyfus and to call for his exoneration. The most famous of these letters was “J’accuse” (Letter to M. Felix Faure, President of the Republic), published in L’Aurore on January 13, 1898.

This letter asks the President to consider how his legacy would be viewed if he let the Dreyfus affair continue as it had for four years.  Zola explains the affair in detail (no doubt already familiar to M. Faure) and goes so far as to name the men he feels are responsible for this miscarriage of justice. 

Zola was aware of the potential repercussions of this public accusation - he stated in the letter that he was aware of the libel laws to which he was potentially exposing himself.  But he had no personal  ill will against any of the accused:

"As for the people I accuse, I do not know them, I never saw them, I have against them neither resentment nor hatred.  They are for me only entities, spirits of social evil.  And the act I accomplished here is only a revolutionary mean for hastening the explosion of truth and justice."

Zola was tried and convicted for libel, however he fled to England to avoid serving his sentence.  He returned to France after a change in goverment, and died suspiciously of carbon monoxide poisoning in 1902.

I genuinely felt the passion that Zola felt for Dreyfus' cause and found "J'accuse" and his other Dreyfus-related writings very interesting to read.  It is a look into an event in history that I've heard of but not known much about.  I am also going to start reading one or two of Zola's novels.

The Unfinished Clue

Welcome to today's stop on the Georgette Heyer Classic Circuit!

  A country house.  Guests arriving for the weekend.  A host whom almost everyone dislikes for one reason or another.  An ideal set-up for a classic 1930s English murder mystery. 

  General Sir Arthur Billington Smith and his young wife, Fay, are entertaining a group of relatives and acquaintances at their home in the English countryside.  Among the guests are Fay's sister, Dinah Fawcett, the General's son Geoffrey and his fiance, Lola de Silva, the General's nephew Francis, Basil and Camilla Halliday, and Stephen Guest, who appears to have feelings for the young Mrs. Billington-Smith.  Several local neighbors join in the party at various times, including the local Vicar and his wife, and Mrs. Twining.

  The General is not happy with just about everyone in his house, especially his son for bringing a woman of "questionable" character into his home and his own wife for extending the invitation in the first place.  After a morning obligatory socializing with some of his guests, the General retreats to his study to work on his household accounts.  Several hours later, he is found there slumped over his desk -- murdered.

  Everyone is shocked at this violent event, but nobody is particularly upset at the General's death.  In fact, suspicion falls upon just about everyone in attendance at the house as each person had a reason to see the man dead.  A key piece of evidence at the scene - the unfinished clue of the title - is the beginning a word the General started before he died.

 The Unfinished Clue had all of the key pieces of a classic murder mystery - an isolated setting, many suspects with motive and opportunity to commit the crime, and interesting characters that leave the reader (or at least this reader) guessing almost to the end who the murderer might be.  It was missing a strong investigator, in my opinion; Inspector Harding of Scotland Yard certainly did his job and solved the crime but he seemed like a background character. 

 This was my first Georgette Heyer novel, and I did enjoy it.  It reminded me a little bit of Agatha Christie's mysteries, which I loved; and I think given the opportunity I'd like to read more of Heyer's mysteries.

Home to Harlem

Welcome to today's stop in the Harlem Renaissance Circuit!



Home to Harlem by Claude McKay, originally published in 1928, was the first novel written by an African-American to become a best-seller. That is a somewhat (pleasant) surprise, not because of the quality of the book, but because of the fact that for it to have become a best-seller I’m sure a fair number of white people would have had to buy it.

The novel does not have a plot to speak of, but its central character is Jake, a man just returning from Europe after serving in World War I. Upset that he wasn’t able to see real “action”, he deserted his unit, travelled through France and up to England where he found work and settled into the East End of London. However once the Armistice ended the war and life returned to some semblance of normal, Jake became homesick for Harlem and headed back:

“Take me home to Harlem, Mister Ship! Take me home to the brown gals waiting for the brown boys that done show their mettle over there. Take me home Mister Ship.”

Once back in Harlem, Jake heads to a bar and meets a cabaret singer, who disappears after their one-night stand. Other lovers come and go, but throughout the book Jake is constantly searching for his “heart-breaking brown of the Baltimore”.

McKay’s description of Harlem is not pretty, perhaps offensive, but it is realistic. Men and women drink too much, fall in with the wrong sorts of people, spend money frivolously, fight – but they seem to be happy. They are where they feel comfortable. It was a shock to see words that I view with an extremely negative connotation being thrown about almost as terms of endearment, but thinking about it a bit more I wonder if this combined with the classification of fellow blacks by their shade of blackness is a feeling of inferiority that has been rooted in their minds after so many years of oppression.

Reading this novel over eighty years after its publication, I received a glimpse into a society unfamiliar to me. This was a novel definitely outside of my comfort zone, and perhaps that was McKay's aim: to make readers uncomfortable with a depiction of how life really was for black people in urban America during that period.