Reveiw: "The Palace", by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Chelsea Quinn writes, among other things, vampire novels. But these are vampire novels with a twist: her vampire, the Count Saint Germain, is the good guy. So, if you like your vampires menacing, cruel, and villainous, you probably want to give The Palace (St. Martin's Press, 1978; 376 pages) a miss. But, if you like good writing, a great story, well-researched historical backgrounds, and vampires that don't sparkle, you'll likely enjoy Yarbro's series of vampire novels, most of which feature the Count.

The Palace is the second in the series, which has grown to a number of volumes since she wrote the first installment, Hotel Transylvania, which is also very good. But The Palace, which is the second book in the series, is my favorite, and the one I've gone back to read most often since I discovered these novels quite by accident. I was at the library, and just cruising the fiction stacks and pulled it off the shelf and read that it is set in Renaissance Florence. I'm a huge Michelangelo geek, so that was enough to get me to check the book out of the library and give it a chance; the fact that it was a vampire story was of secondary importance to me.

The story begins as Saint Germain, who is a friend to Lorenzo de'Medici, the unofficial ruler of Florence, is building a palace in Florence. But Lorenzo the Magnificent's health is failing, and Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican monk whose fire and brimstone preaching comes with a heavy dose of guilt and prophecy, is starting to hold sway over more and more of Florence's population. Savonarola has predicted both that Lorenzo will die, and when, and that the French will come and try to rule the city. When both predictions come true, Savonarola is on his way to several years as the de facto dictator of the city.

This development makes it more and more difficult for Saint Germain to live in Florence, because along with more and more rigorous religious laws, foreigners are less and less tolerated. Finally, after the sister of Sandro di Filipepi, known to the art world as Botticelli, with whom Saint Germain has had an ongoing liaison, confesses her sins in a way that implicates the Count in her debaucheries, Saint Germain must flee the city. He returns, posing as his own nephew, to rescue his student, Demetrice, who has come to live with Saint German after the death of Lorenzo and because of her ties to him has been accused of heresy.

It is worth reading The Palace for the wonderful writing and exciting story alone. But besides good storytelling and history that is impeccably researched and woven into the story without the huge passages of info-dumping that so many historical novels suffer from, Yarbro has inserted into the story a major subtext regarding the dangers of excessive and fanatic religious devotion. She explores, without sacrificing story or storytelling, the dangers that can come when religious fervor overtakes good sense and mixes with politics.

Savonarola is presented as a sort of a Renaissance version of a televangelist, preaching doom and gloom and prophesying the end of the world, or at least the end of Florence. He insists that any pleasure is vanity and offensive in the sight of God. He urges detailed confessions of sins, especially those of a sexual nature. He demands that the citizens of the city destroy anything that isn't strictly utilitarian, that they wear drab plain clothes, and that they attend church and strictly observe all feast days. If you are not familiar with the career of Savonarola, as I was not when I first read The Palace, Yarbro's portrayal of him threatens to read like an anachronistic parody. It is not.

Long after my first reading of The Palace, I wrote a paper and did a class presentation on the career of Savonarola. As part of my research for that project, I read translations of some of the sermons Savonarola gave in Florence during the period in which the novel takes place, and the words that Yarbro puts in his mouth sound very much like the records of his sermons read. There is no exaggeration there, as far as I can see; he really was that fanatic, that judgmental, that full of fervor.

It is a mark of Yarbro's skill as a researcher and a writer that she has managed to insert this subtext, this social criticism, into The Palace without making it read like an historical treatise or a propaganda piece on the dangers of fanaticism of any sort. It is all integral to the story.

I will warn you of one thing. If you do read The Palace, there is a strong possibility that you will find yourself looking for other books in the series. I've not liked all of Yarbor's Saint Germain books as much as I like The Palace, but I've not regretted the time I've spent reading any of them.

Review: "Weird California"

A couple of months ago, I read a book called Weird Hollywood and enjoyed it a lot. I picked it up at the library because I like reading about Southern California, since I was born there and because I like reading about, the, well, I suppose unusual is a good enough word for it.

I was also drawn to it because I remembered seeking another book, Weird California (Sterling Publishing Co., 2006), by Greg Bishop, Joe Oesterle, and Mike Marinacci, in a bookstore a few years ago. The covers were very similar, and I figured both were part of the same series. In paging through Weird California back then, I saw that a site just down the street from where my grandmother lived when I was growing up was in the book. So, after reading and enjoying Weird Hollywood, I decided to track Weird California down and read it as well.

I ended up having to request the book from the library because none of my local branches carried it. But, it finally came, and it ended up being my Labor Day weekend reading. It was perfect for that, nothing too deep, not much that was very serious, and entertaining throughout.

Of course, the first thing I did when I got my hands on the book was to look through it to see if I had remembered correctly about the Bottle Village down the street from my grandmother's house was really part of the book, and it was. That brought back memories of watching the woman who built the place, Mrs. Prisbrey, now known as Grandma Prisbrey, going back and forth to the dump in town to gather building materials for her work. To be honest, I think she was regarded as an eccentric back then by the people in the neighborhood, but that was a more live-and-let-live time in the United States. If she were building today what is considered folk art and has been featured in books and exhibits worldwide, there would have probably been people after her to tear it down because it was an "eyesore". And, in fact, there were once plans to tear the place down, and the Northridge earthquake in the early 1990s did a fair job of wrecking the place. But, it is now on the California and National Registers of Historic places and a preservation group owns the property and is making an effort to restore Bottle Village to its former glory.

But I digress. There is all sorts of weirdness in Weird California, from the expected hauntings, monsters, and UFO stories here. There are cults and murders and oddities of various kinds. There is a roll-call of cemeteries for people, for pets...and one for airplanes, in Mojave.

There are also other places I know besides the Bottle Village. There is Maze Stone, near Hemet, which as far as anyone knows is an example of Native American petroglyphs. There is Zzyzx, a defunct health spa out in the high desert near Baker. While I've never been there, the sign for Zyzzx Road, which leads to the site, was always a landmark we watched for on Interstate 15 during family trips to Las Vegas. There is a long section on Mount Shasta, which is reportedly the site of many odd occurrences, including UFO sightings and sightings (and mysterious disappearances) of supposed survivors of the lost continent of Lemura and of a race of Lizard People. Which all sounds very woo-woo'y. On the other hand, a couple of years ago I drove by Shasta on a trip to Oregon, and I have to say that the area gave me an uneasy feeling and I was glad to get past the area. Same for the supposed curse of Pacheco Pass. I've never seen or experienced anything odd the times I've traveled that road. On the other hand, it can be eerie and unsettling to drive through there at night.

Aside from the usual logical reasons for taking the stories in Weird California with a grain (or a full shaker) of salt is that there is one story there from a town I lived in for 28 years, a story of a ghost that haunts a stretch of road looking for her children after they were all killed in a car wreck in the area. The implication is that everyone in town knows the story and is spooked by the area. Except that, as long as I lived there, I never heard a word about it. Additionally, I drove past the road near where the haunting is supposed to take place on a regular basis for a couple of years on my way to school in Reedley, the next town over, and I never saw, heard, or felt anything strange. On the other hand, it seemed like some of the smaller roads down there in the river bottom seemed to have a habit of disappearing. I'd find an interesting stretch of road on drives in the area, and then not be able to find them again when I went back to look for them. So, you know, who knows.

It isn't actually required to believe in any of the odd things presented in Weird California in order to enjoy the book. Really. It's a fun journey through some of the out-of-the-way parts of the state, and a reminder of some of the weirdnesses that have become legendary parts of California culture.

Review: "Treasure Box" by Orson Scott Card

Treausre Box (HarperPaperbacks, 1996; 372 pages), by Orson Scott Card, tells the story of Quentin Fears (pronounced, it is pointed out more than once, as "fierce"), a software millionaire and recluse who turned his back on most of humanity after his sister was killed in an accident when he was a teenager. He has reached his thirties without ever having had a real relationship. Then he meets Madeleine, who appears to be the perfect woman. She is smart, beautiful and is as reclusive as he is.



It only takes a short time for them to marry, and then Madeline finally takes Quentin to meet the family that she has so far carefully kept him from meeting. They are an odd family, eccentric to the point of strangeness, living in a remote old house along the Hudson river. Madeleine has warned Quentin that she is "not herself" when she visits there, and it doesn't take him long to discover exactly how accurate that characterization is, and Quentin soon finds himself fighting to keep an ancient evil from being unleashed on the world.



Treasure Box isn't a bad book. But as I read there were things that bothered me about it, things that I couldn't quite put my finger on at first, and I was over halfway through the book before I realized what wasn't sitting right with me. What was wrong is that Card falls back on the old stereotype of women as manipulating their innocent, noble male victims. It doesn't just appear in the relationship between Quentin and Madeleine, but is hinted at in the relationship between Quentin's parents and stated more boldly in the relationship between Quentin's attorney and his wife, who is portrayed as cheating on the attorney while insisting that he is the one who is cheating.



I probably wouldn't have finished the book if it had become clear earlier exactly what Card was using the story to say about male-female relationships, but I kept reading in hopes that the subtext wasn't really what I was interpreting it to be. Yet, there it was, right up until the end of the story, with the added jab that the women who were manipulating Quentin were witches but the woman who he finds himself attracted to at the end of the story is not.



I don't know if Card did this consciously, or if such attitudes are so ingrained in him that he wasn't aware that he was dividing his female characters in the traditional bitch-whore/virgin dichotomy, with the whore presenting as virginal, literally in this case, in order to manipulate him before he saw through the deception. He is a man who holds very conservative values regarding family, and portrays his "good" characters as living out those values.



Despite the ideology lurking in the story, Treasure Box is a well-told tale, although I prefer a little more ambiguity in characters, and not the kind that was used here, where any contradictions in the characters' behavior was explained by their being "enthralled" by the witches rather than by the fact that few people are consistent in their behavior all the time.

Reading update...

I picked up a couple more books by Patricia Cornwell at the library the other day, thinking that because I enjoyed reading The Scarpetta Factor, I would give more of her work a try. Yeah. Not so much.

I gave Predator (Berkley Books, 2005) most of 100 pages, but I could not stick with it. The main problem with the book, from my point of view, is that it is written in the present tense. That hardly ever works, and in this case it not only did not work, it bugged the crap out of me. My brain kept switching the verbs to past tense, but then reading along that would mess the whole sense of a paragraph off. I refrained from throwing the book against the wall, because the wall hadn't done anything to me and I couldn't see inflicting that on it. But, the book is now back on the library, no doubt lurking on the shelf and ready to snag some other unsuspecting reader.

I still have Scarpetta (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2008) out of the library and might give it a try later today. I hope it is better...and not in present tense.

Meanwhile, I've been reading in Medieval Women Writers (University of Georgia Press, 1984), edited by Katharina M. Wilson, not as recreational reading, but in beginning the research for a project called (I think) the 50 Challenge, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Society for Creative Anachronisms (SCA), of which I am a member. The idea is for members of the SCA which, for those of you who are not familiar with the organization does medieval re-enactments, to celebrate the founding of the group by doing 50 of something tied in to each person's interests in the Middle Ages. For example, to learn to do 50 things that someone living in the time of the individual's society persona would know how to do, or to make 50 items that their persona would have used or, in my case, to write a 50-page research paper on some aspect of the medieval period.

Choosing to write about women writers in the Middle Ages was a fairly easy decision for me, as I am both a woman and a writer, and because I don't really know that much about women who wrote in that era. So far, what I'm finding is fascinating. There were more women writing in that period that I expected, and not all of them were nuns. This surprises me, I suppose, because of the general perception that the only way a woman in the Middle Ages could gain an education was by entering the religious life. Apparently, this was not always the case.

I expect, however, that it will be a challenge to find sources for research, and that I'll probably end up spending some time in the library at the local CSU. Which is fine, since I love to play in libraries. The parking situation over there is hideous (knowledge I gained while living right across the street from the school for five years), but a main bus line goes right to the campus, so I'll probably just take advantage of that.

I've also been doing some other reading in history, as I'm gearing up to do some general writing on history, part of which will land up in a blog (once I figure out what to call the blog), and which is meant to end up as a book about exploring various aspects of history.

Reading Update: The Scarpetta Factor, by Patricia Cornwell

I just finished reading The Scarpetta Factor (Berkley Books, 2009; 572 pages), by Patricia Cornwell. I'm not completely sure how I feel about it.

There's no doubt that it kept me turning the pages. However, 572 pages to tell a story that takes place in about a day and a half sometimes seemed a bit excessive. And there were places in the story where two or three things were taking place all at the same time, and it was, occasionally, slightly difficult to follow. This could also have had to do with the fact that I have not read all of the other books in the series, and so probably lacked some background that could have made some of the relationships between characters easier to follow.

Also, I've had a sort of variable relationship with the books of Cornwell's that I have read. I've liked some of them a lot; others, not so much. This one probably isn't one I'll read again, but the journey was interesting, and I'm glad I picked it up at the library and read it.

Review: My Name is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok

When I read Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev (Knopf, 1972; 369 pages) years ago, I loved it at least enough to buy a copy so that I could read it again someday. So, without anything else I wanted to read the other day, I picked it up and reread it. I hadn't been expecting it to capture my attention in the way it did, and spent a couple of nights up reading much later in the night than I should have done because I couldn't put it down until I got so sleepy that my eyes wouldn't stay open any more.

It is the story of Asher Lev, an Orthodox Hasidic Jew, who also happenes to be, almost despite himself, an artist. He shows promise in his drawings from a very early age, but in his community his talents - his genius, for he is a child prodigy - are not valued and in fact are considered a waste of time better spent doing other things. Those other things, in Asher's case, include following in his father's footsteps in promoting his branch of Judaism all over the world at a time (during the Cold War) as well as bringing Russian Jews out of the Soviet Union, which was a difficult and hazardous undertaking in the 1950s and 1960s, when the story takes place. He does this at the behest of his Rebbe, the spiritual leader of the branch of Hasidic Judaism that Asher's family belongs to. Asher is expected to go to school and learn the things he must to take over for his father someday, as Asher's father took over for his own father in doing this work on behalf of the Rebbe.

But art has hold of Asher and, after not drawing at all during the first years he in school, the art does not just take hold of him again. It seizes him. He sometimes draws without even knowing that is what he is doing. This is not just a problem for Asher, but for his whole community, which is very conservative and has set ideas of what boys like Asher should and should not be doing, with the "should not's" including drwaing picutres of the Rebbe in one of his religious books.

As Mr. Potok pointed out in a talk in 1986, "The Jewsih tradition is essentially an anti-iconographic tradition for the most part. Certainly it opoposes the making of any human image." He explained that this goes back to Mosaic monotheism and continued, saying "Therefore Jews have never participated in art of any kind that was connected to worship."

The Rebbe, though, sees that Asher has a talent that will not be denied and arranges for him to study with Jacob Kahn, an acclalimed artist who is a non-observant Jew but who counts the Rebbe as among his friends. Inevitably, the clash between Asher's artistic vision and his community becomes too much for the community to take, and as the book ends, Asher, still a young man, has acclaim as an artist but is asked to leave the Brooklyn community he grew up in and to return to Paris, to the yeshiva there where, the Rebbe says, "You did not grow up there. People will not be so angry in Paris."

In Mr. Potok's hands, Asher's story becomes about being an artist in a community that does not approve of being a visual artist and does not really understand what it means to Asher to be an artist. It is also about being an alien child to one's own parents. This is something I understand very well, having been my own mother's "alien child", who she did not understand after having grown up in a family that did not value any of the things I was interested in as a child and still am interested in as an adult. She never disapproved of my interests, as Asher's father does in Mr. Potok's novel, but she did not understand, either, why I couldn't be a "normal" child. We used to have what became a sort of ritual exchange when I was growing up.

My Mother: (to me, when I was reading, which was most of the time): "Go do something."
Me: "I am doing something. I'm reading."
My Mother: "Go outside and do something."

She wasn't a reader and to her, reading wasn't "doing something."

My Name is Asher Lev is a good book, told in Asher's voice and from his point of view. He never strays from his religious beliefs but, after his childhood break from drawing, never seriously strays from his determination to be an artist, although he wonders from time to time if his gift is, as he is told from time to time by others, from the Other Side, meaning that it is not from God but from more malevolent forces in the universe. The main flaw of the novel, from my point of view as a reader, is that sometimes years are glossed over in a few sentences. It is a trivial complaint, though, and I recommend this book highly.

There is a sequel, by the way, called The Gift of Asher Lev, and I'm looking for it right now so that I can read it again, as well.

And...I'm back

Yeah. It's been strange the past month or so, and I haven't been reading much. So there hasn't been anything to write about.

But...

I just finished reading "My Name is Asher Lev", by Chaim Potok. It's a re-read, actually, and I loved this book as much as I did the first time I read it, but I suspect that the reasons this time are entirely different from last time. I've got to go think about it for a little while, and then I'll be back to write more about this book and what it meant to me when I read it this time.