Book report: Anthony Powell's "Venusberg"

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There’s a certain kind of novel that was produced in great quantity by British writers in the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s and 1950s.  They are usually brief, and set in Asia, or Eastern Europe, or Africa.  The characters are almost entirely expatriates – not only British, but Canadians, Americans, exiled Russians, and are often diplomats, or con men, or spies.  The atmosphere is usually light, until something oddly serious happens: an assassination, a declaration of war, some tragic event. 

 

 

These novels were (I think) a response to the British Empire’s expansion through the world.  There were enormous numbers of British people working in countries all over the world, living in unfamiliar environments, clinging to one another (and to other English-speakers and Europeans) for a sense of community.

 

 

Think of Kipling’s “Kim” as a progenitor of the genre.  Think of Graham Greene, with his African and Asian and Caribbean comedy/dramas like “A Burnt-Out Case” and “The Quiet American” and “The Comedians” and “Our Man in Havana.”  Think of Olivia Manning’s “Balkan Trilogy” (did I ever tell you that I knew someone who knew her?).  Think of Lawrence Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet.”  Think of Doris Lessing’s “Children of Violence” series.  Think of Muriel Spark’s first story, “The Seraph and the Zambezi,” and her novella “The Go-Away Bird.” Think of Rose Macaulay’s wonderful “The Towers of Trebizond."

 

 

I recently discovered a prime example of the genre: Anthony Powell’s “Venusberg.”

 

 

It’s a simple story: a British journalist, Lushington, goes to an unnamed Baltic country on assignment.  Lushington is in love with a Englishwoman who is, in turn, hopelessly in love with the local British attaché, who (perversely and carelessly) doesn’t care about her at all. 

 

 

Whom do we meet in our unnamed Baltic country? Not one but two displaced Russian counts, one melancholy and doomed, the other probably a fake.  A local woman who’s only too eager to have an affair with Lushington.  Her husband, a clueless eminent local professor.  An American embassy worker who rattles on endlessly about virtue and progress and the future, while pronouncing himself a man of few words.  A local military officer named Waldemar, who is very pleasant and sincere, and who is trying very hard to learn how to be a true European.

 

 

We never discover the name of the country we’re in.  Everyone is speaking English most of the time, with a little bad French thrown in.  Now and then we’re told that someone speaks “in an unknown language”; the joke is that it’s probably the local language, which few of the main characters speak.

 

 

Love affairs happen.  Death happens.  Lushington goes back to England.

 

 

All in one hundred and sixty pages.

 

 

Here is Powell’s epigraph for the novel, which explains the title:

 

 

“Here, according to popular tradition, is situated the grotto of Venus, into which she enticed the knight Tannhauser; fine view from the top.”

 

 

From the sublime to the absurd: from the airy beauty of folklore and mythology to the flat pronouncements of a travel guide.

 

 

"Venusberg" is sad and funny and lovely, and gave me a few hours of pleasure, and it will stay with me.

 

 

Try it, if you can find it in your dusty old public library.  You may like it.

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Food

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I adore food. I like looking at it, and making it, and thinking about it, and reading about it. Sometimes I even like to eat it.

 

 

I’m not alone in this. Do a Google search for restaurants in your immediate vicinity. Go to your nearest bookstore (which is probably Amazon.com, I know, brick-and-mortar bookstores are a thing of the past) and check out the variety of cookbooks. My local newspaper has a food section on Wednesdays; does yours? I’ll bet it does.

 

 

We’re animals. We need to eat. We have romanticized this primal desire into something aesthetic, I suppose. If you starved me for a couple of days, I would gladly eat raw frogs and shoe leather and tell you that they were delicious. As it is, in our modern affluent world, I am choosy, and prefer fried scallops and whole-wheat pasta.

 

 

This bothers me sometimes. I was first brought up short against this by our pal, Nobel Prize-winner Doris Lessing, in her science-fiction novel “Re Colonized Planet 9: Shikasta.” In a footnote, she has her narrator – an enlightened alien from the Canopean Empire – say this: “Earth people are obsessed with food. They even write books about it.”

 

 

I’d never thought about this before. We don’t write books about how we breathe, or how much we enjoy sunlight. But we write books about food.

 

 

Food is a subtle pleasure. It can be sustenance, or it can be ecstasy. It can be a heavy blast of fat and carbs and flavors, like a Big Mac, or a blast of heat from a Mexican entrée, or a savory mix of flavors like paella. It can be sweet and bitter like chocolate. It can be hauntingly flavorful, like parmesan cheese or Portobello mushrooms (both of which belong to the umami flavor family).

 

 

We spend a good deal of our time eating. Some of us (including yours truly) spend a good deal of time cooking, or reading about cooking, or thinking about cooking.

 

 

A couple of questions: Are we doing the right thing? Are we spending our time wisely?

 

 

Another question: What’s for dinner?

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To serve man

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Doris Lessing, in her novel “Shikasta,” looks at Earth from the point of view of an enlightened alien race. The aliens are perturbed by (among other things) our love of food. No other race in the universe thinks and talks about food as much as we do, apparently. We even write about it, and we actually travel from place to place for a good meal.

 

Yes, okay.

 

Partner and I (both Earthlings) were lucky enough to have not one but two superb meals over the Thanksgiving weekend. One was a home-cooked meal, the other a restaurant meal. Both were memorable, and in true Earth fashion, they deserve to be documented.

 

Meal #1 (cooked by a very kind member of Partner's family in New Hampshire on Thanksgiving):

• Appetizers: Cheese, crackers, and assorted relishes, including the hostess's own homemade bread-and-butter pickles, to which I am very partial.

• Main course: a beautiful brown twenty-pound turkey, with stuffing.

  
  

• Sides: mashed potatoes, green-bean casserole with crunchy French-fried onions, sweet potatoes, pearl onions in white sauce, cranberry sauce.
• 
  
• Desserts: too many to count, or to remember. Pumpkin bread baked by the hostess's son. Pumpkin pie. Lemon meringue pie, with the meringue lightly (and perfectly) browned, like an illustration in a cooking magazine. Cookies. Blueberry cheesecake.

 

 All-around heavenly.

 

Meal #2 (at a steakhouse in downtown Providence):

• Caesar salad made with a nice lightly-bitter romaine lettuce, with Alaskan king crab crostini on the side.

• Filet mignon (mine medium-rare, Partner's medium-well), with olives and mushrooms, and baby carrots on the side.

• Australian lobster tail with drawn butter (and a cunning little candle under the butter to keep it warm).

• Carrot cake with caramel sauce and crème de Chantilly, with coffee for Partner and espresso for me.

 

I love Doris Lessing, but her aliens are squares. They need to live a little. Also, they need to try those bread-and-butter pickles. And those crostini.

 

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Reading list

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I have a confession. I don't read novels much anymore.

If my thirty-year-old self could hear me saying that, he'd kill himself. Novels, up until recently, were a vital part of my reading diet. I actually learned things from them. The really good ones are well-written too; you can actually read a sentence aloud without embarrassment. (All together now: “It is a truth universally acknowledged . . .”)

But novels tire me now. One more saga of failed marriage, one more Bildungsroman, one more academic mocking Academia. And they go on, and on, and on.

I'm talking about Novel Novels, you understand: the things they review in the New York Times, the big chunky things you talk about with your friends at the Explorer's Club. I still feed on a steady diet of Other Stuff, as do we all: for me, it's biography (especially autobiography and letters), diaries, popular science, spirituality (go ahead, mock me!), history, and cultural stuff. And young-adult fiction, which for me fills the need that some people fill with crime novels or science-fiction novels. As Alice noted very astutely, books should have pictures and conversations.

But we're talking about Novel Novels.

Here's what I've read over the couple of months:

English, August. Upamanyu Chatterjee. Okay, this wasn't bad. It's set in modern India, about a guy taking a civil-service job in a city he hates. It's funny, and the depiction of Indian life is interesting. But he repeats himself too much: too many trips back and forth from the office to the hotel, too many long digressions. I know it's supposed to depict the main character's boredom, but all it did was stimulate my own boredom. I put it down about two-thirds of the way through, but I still remember a couple of the scenes vividly, so I'll probably go back and finish it one of these days.

The Towers of Trebizond. Rose Macauley. A reread. A laugh and cry book. “All camels are insane, but this one is more insane than most.” I think, when I die, I want a copy of this book in the coffin with me.

Against the Day and Inherent Vice. Thomas Pynchon. I feel about Thomas Pynchon the way you feel about someone who saved your life. I love him, and I will buy every book he writes, and I will tote it around with me, even if (like “Against the Day”) it weighs eighty pounds. But I will never finish “Against the Day.” It's too scattered, and I'm not sure what he's getting at (I even tried annotating it, as if it were “Finnegans Wake,” to no avail). “Inherent Vice,” on the other hand, had some good stuff in it, and a little hint of “Crying of Lot 49,” and one of those almost-happy endings that Pynchon does very well. (Most of his endings are pretty dark; when he ends something on a positive note, it's a good day.)

The Violent Bear It Away. Flannery O'Connor. Another reread. Vicious, evil, funny. I picked it up, and I had to finish it, I couldn't stop. Can you think of a better name for a character than “Tarwater”?

What's For Dinner? James Schuyler. I'd never heard of it. I took a chance on it, and it paid off. Funny, dry, unsentimental, and unexpected. Worth reading.

The Western Lands. William Burroughs. I wish I were William Burroughs. I have a copy of his last diaries; he cried for days when his cats died. His books are dark and self-consciously perverse, but I love them anyway, because he was a good writer, dammit.

The Summer Before the Dark. Doris Lessing. She throws words at you like lawn darts, and her sentences are long and clumsy. But her books are amazing. The plots don't matter; people come and go, things generally go downhill, oh well, that's life. But the people – ah. Remember what I said about actually learning things from novels? I learned something from this one. I coudn't tell you what it was, but I did. Haunting.

Okay. So maybe Novel Novels are okay after all. I just get a sinking feeling sometimes when I walk through the Fiction section in the bookstore, that I'm letting the team down. But I guess we're okay for now.

And what have you been reading lately?

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