Back to the Classics 2016 Wrap-up Post

This is my wrap up post for the 2016 Back to the Classics challenge. I diverted somewhat from my original post on the books I intended to read, although that was what I expected would happen.
So here are the books I actually read:

1.    A 19th Century Classic - Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy (1874)

2.    A 20th Century Classic - Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (1943-1944)

3.    A Classic by a Woman Author - The Five Red Herrings by Dorothy Sayers (1931)

4.    A Classic in Translation - The Confessions of Saint Augustine by Augustine

5.    A Classic by a Non-White Author - Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh (1956)

6.    An Adventure Classic - The Tragedy of the Korosko by Arthur Conan Doyle (1898)

7.    A Fantasy, science fiction , or dystopian Classic - The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham (1951)

8.    A Classic detective novel - Cover Her Face by P.D. James (1962)

9.    A Classic which includes the name of a place in the title - Decision at Delphi by Helen MacInnes (1960)

10.    A Classic which has been banned or censored - The Metamorphosis by Frank Kafka (1915)

11.    A Classic you read in school (high school or college) - All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (1929)

12.    A volume of Classic short stories - A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354-430)

The Confessions of Saint Augustine is the final book I've read this year as part of the Back to the Classics 2016 challenge. It's taken me all this year to get through it, not because it is a difficult read, (except for Book Ten which made my head spin) but because it is meaty and needs time to be chewed.

For those unfamiliar with the story of Augustine's life, this book records the backward looking thoughts and musings of a gifted intellectual and sensual man who lived a dissolute life for many year before saw Christianity as a religion fit for a philosopher. He recalls his struggles with moral difficulties and inordinate desires, and the crucial events in his life leading up to his conversion to Christianity, all against the backdrop of the decaying Roman Empire.
The foreword to the above edition of the book says:

His stories serve as hooks on which he hangs his big ideas, so that his journey from first rejecting to eventually embracing the Christian faith acts as a structure for him to teach his readers what it means to remember, to be human, to fail, and eventually to make peace with themselves and with God.

Confessions is less autobiography, and more performed theology. It delivers weighty theology, but it refuses to separate dogmatics from devotion, and embodies within its firm the message it conveys - that Christianity is a matter of relationship, conviction and action, not merely of intellectual belief.

Confessions is made up of thirteen books but the edition I read only includes the first ten. Some editions end with Book Nine as that is where the narrative of Augustine's life ends. Book Ten is included in Blaiklock's edition as it highlights that Confessions was not merely intended as a story, but its purpose was to teach the Christian faith. Book Ten also recalls Augustine's comments on 'Remembering' in his opening chapters.

I won't attempt to 'review' this book but rather share some comments thoughts that stood out to me and to recommend this particular edition as very accessible and readable.
Each Book has a short introduction that gives us some background on the times, and the events of Augustine's life. 

Book One

...You made us for yourself and our heart is restless until it finds rest in you.

The house of my soul is narrow for your entry. Let it be enlarged by you. It is in ruins. Rebuild it.

On the beginnings of sinfulness:

That I was innocent lay rather in the frailty of my limbs than in my mind's intent. I myself have watched a very small child manifesting jealousy. It could not speak but glared, pale and hostile, at its companion at the breast.

In my very childhood, however...I had no love for learning and hated to be driven to it. Yet I was driven, and it did me good...

You have decreed, and so it stands, that every man's undisciplined spirit is his own punishment.

...some man seeking a reputation  for eloquence before a human arbiter, with an audience of men around him and in the act of assailing his foe with hate, takes the utmost care not to commit a fault of speech, but no care at all lest, through the rage if his spirit, he should destroy a fellow-man...

Book Two

On his parent's ambitions for him and his father's pains to ensure his education:

Their sole care was that I should make the best possible speech and be a persuasive orator.
For who did not praise the man, my father, when beyond his family's means, he provided whatever was needed for a long journey for my studies' sake? For many citizens of far greater wealth took no such trouble for their children. Yet the same father took no thought of the kind of man I was becoming in your sight, or how chaste I was, provided I was cultivated in speech - though uncultivated in your field, God, you who are the only true, good husbandsman of that field which is our heart.

My sin oozed like a secretion out of fat.

Emulation contends for the top place, but what is higher than you?

Book Three

Augustine goes to Carthage at the age of seventeen where 'a whole frying-pan of wicked loves sputtered all around me.'
He lives with a girl who bears him a son, '...not yet in love, but I was in love with love.'
Verse and poetry I can change to real nourishment - this sentence jumped out to me. Poetry is a form of nourishment, at least I know it is for me & is something I expressed here.

Augustine writes about his mother Monica's prayers for him, especially when he became deceived with the Manichaean cult. When Monica went to a saintly bishop for counsel, he advised her to pray to the Lord for him. The bishop himself had been deluded by their teachings at one stage but she still pressed him, weeping, that he should speak to Augustine. His reply was, 'Leave me, and God go with you. It is not possible that the son of such tears should perish.'

Book Four

This book covers Augustine's life from the ages of nineteen to twenty-eight where he taught the art of rhetoric in Thagaste and Carthage. He tells of the 'disgusting an unruly lack of discipline' among his students, the illness of his close friend, his scorn of his friend's baptism and then his anguish as that friend had a sudden relapse and died.

For I felt his soul and my soul were one soul in two bodies. That is why life was a horror to me, because I did not wish to be only half alive.

Book Five

Augustine 'escaped' to Rome in 383, tricking his mother by going secretly by night so he could get away from her without her knowing. Later he became ill and almost died. He wrote of this episode:


If my mother's heart had been struck with such a wound, it would never have been healed. I cannot find words to express what her love for me was...I cannot then see how she would have been healed, if a death like that had struck through the heart of her love.

At this time too, Augustine became disillusioned by the Manichaeans when their great leader, Faustus, couldn't address Augustine's intellectual difficulties.
Augustine took up a position at Milan as a professor of Rhetoric where he met Bishop Ambrose, a man he admired and who was to greatly influence him.

Book Six

Monica arrives in Milan with Alypius, Augustine's former pupil, to find her son deeply influenced by Ambrose, who had been helping the young man address his moral difficulties. Monica also came under his influence and renounced her superstitious practices.
Alypius, although he had avoided such sports, was dragged along by some friends to a gladiator show. Augustine said that although Alypius forbade his mind to contemplate such things, it was his ears that he should have closed . As a result he becomes intoxicated with the gladiator shows and encouraged others to go as well.

The noise entered through his ears and unlocked his eyes...the sight of blood was like drinking barbarity. He did not turn away but fixed his eyes on it. Unknowingly he gulped down the Fiends of Hell.

Book Seven

Augustine is thirty-one and still wrestling. His is an inquisitive but undisciplined mind and I found it so interesting that he was influenced by Platonist writing to seek for 'incorporeal truth.'

With strongest hunger then I laid hands on the venerable writings of your Spirit, above all the apostle Paul...I began and found that whatever I had read in the Platonists was said in Paul's writing along with the praise of your grace...

He also takes pains to enumerate those things that the Platonists knew nothing of:

Those pages do not hold the face of holiness, the tears of confession, 'your sacrifice, a troubled spirit, a broken and contrite heart', the salvation of your people...No one sings in those books: 'Shall not my soul be subject to God? Of him comes my redemption, he is my God and my salvation...
In the Platonist writings no one hears him call:'Come to me all that labour.' They scorn to 'learn of him because he is gentle and quiet in heart.'

Book Eight

"Give me chastity and self-control but not yet."

Augustine's story comes to a climax as he hears the story of Victorinus, a former idol worshipper, who makes an open profession of faith in Rome. This inspired Augustine to want to do the same but the chains of his own making bound him.

...for I was afraid you might quickly hear me from afar, and swiftly heal me from the malady of lust, which I preferred to be sated rather have have extinguished.

Augustine is very honest and doesn't flinch in acknowledging his wilfulness and moral dilemma. This is so refreshing to read.
Augustine converts to Christianity and the rest is history, literally. Today he is regarded as one of the greatest fathers of the church and also one of the most important figures of Western Christianity.

Book Nine

There is an overview of Monica's life: her upbringing, marriage, conversations with her son and then her death.

Those who would find heir happiness outside themselves fade easily away and dissipate their persons on the ephemeral things before their eyes...If only they could see the eternity within their hearts.

Book Ten

My soul's Virtue, enter my soul, and shape it to yourself to have and to hold it without spot or wrinkle.

Men go to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the huge billows of the sea, the broad sweeps of the rivers, the curve of ocean and the circuits of the stars, and yet pass by themselves...

Augustine's thoughts on memory makes up the bulk of Book Ten. This was the most difficult part of the book for me and I had to continually go over what I'd read to make sense of it.

What shall I say when I am convinced that I remember forgetfulness? Shall I say that what I remember is in my memory? Shall I say that forgetfulness us in my memory fir this very purpose, so that I shall not forget?

Late I came to know you, Beauty ancient yet new.

Augustine returned to Africa in 387 A.D. and later became Bishop of Hippo. He died while the town was besieged by the Vandals in 430 A.D.

Blaiklock writes:

This us what fascinates the classical historian. Augustine's cameo pictures of Thagaste, Maduara, Carthage, Rome, and later of Hippo are of sombre interest...
How little does the present know of the future! No one knew, when Augustus was establishing the frontiers of an imperial world, frontiers which were to hold precariously through four vital centuries of history, that the pivot of the human story had been moved one night from the Palatine to Palestine. No one knew in Thagaste that the frightened schoolboy, who was bad-tempered Patricius' son, was to leave behind him writings six times as voluminous as the whole corpus of Cicero himself, established theology through a millennium and more of strife and strain, and form one of the bridges between a dying world and that world's rebirth.

The Vandals scattered and slew Augustine's parishioners. Two centuries later the Moslems came that way with the desert trailing behind them. Augustine's work did not perish. It was blowing in the air. It steadied Medieval Christendom in varied ways, shaping Gregory, Charlemagne and Aquinas, and gusting more widely to touch Calvin, Luther, Pascal...


This is my Classic in Translation entry for the Back to the Classics 2016 challenge. (Confessions was originally written in Latin)

Also linking this to the 2016 Reading Europe Challenge

Back to the Classics: Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh (1956)

The Partition of India in 1947 is something I've been interested in for a long time but it wasn't until I read Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh that I had any idea of the scope of the tremendous upheaval, tragedy and heartache it caused. An arbitrary line drawn by an 'Empire on whom the sun was setting,' divided a nation and created the twins countries of India and Pakistan. Former neighbours and friends became deadly enemies, people lost their homes, and an estimated one to two million lost their lives.
The author chose a true-to-life work of fiction to tell his story. Every character in the story was modelled on a real person that passed through Khushwant Singh's own life. He was about 32 years of age at the time of Partition and witnessed firsthand the atrocities committed by Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, and records them without taking sides or showing favour. He and his family were forced to flee from Lahore in 1947, leaving behind his home, his belongings and his closest friends.

The Story

In 1947 the new state of Pakistan was formerly announced, setting in motion the mass exodus of ten million Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. Northern India was in chaos and only in the remote villages on the frontier was there any semblance of peace.
Mano Majra was one of these villages, known mostly because it boasted a train station. Not that many trains stopped there. In fact, it was only two slow passenger trains, one from Delhi to Lahore in the mornings and another from Lahore to Delhi in the evenings, that were scheduled to stop and then only for a few minutes. The express trains and the morning mail train rushed through without pausing. Goods trains shed and collected wagons on the sidings, and throughout the night the villagers could hear the whistling and puffing of engines and the clanging of metal couplings. The trains were the villagers' alarm clocks, signalling their mealtimes, their siestas and their prayer times. That is, up until the summer of 1947.

After Partition, the trains became less punctual, disturbing the rhythm of the village. A unit of Sikh soldiers arrived and machine guns were mounted at the railway station. Trains coming from Delhi stopped and changed their drivers and guards before continuing on to Pakistan. Trains from Pakistan heading to Delhi with their Hindu and Sikh refugees would run through without stopping.
But one morning, the train from Pakistan stopped at Mano Majra and the only person to emerge alive out of the fifteen hundred on board was a guard from the tail end of the carriages.

It was a botched up surgical operation. India's arms were chopped off without any anaesthetic, and streams of blood swamped the land of the five rivers known as the Punjab.

An order came to evacuate all the Muslims in Mano Majra to a refugee camp and from there, be placed on a train to Pakistan. Sikh agitators arrived in the village after the Muslims had left and drummed up support for a revenge attack on the next train to Pakistan. For hundreds of years the Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims had lived together as neighbours in this village and now those former neighbours and friends who had just left were to be murdered.

Iqbal, born a Sikh and educated in England, came to Mano Majra with his head full of theory to spread his message of communist reform. Learning that the train to Pakistan was to be sabotaged, he found he had nothing to say to the people of Mano Majra:

Should he go out, face the mob and tell them in clear ringing tones that this was wrong - immoral? Walk right up to them with his eyes fixing the armed crowd in a frame - without flinching, without turning...
Then with dignity fall under a volley of blows, or preferably a volley of rifle shots. A cold thrill went down Iqbal's spine.
There would be no one to see this supreme act of sacrifice...It would be an utter waste of life! And what would it gain? A few subhuman species were going to slaughter some of their own kind - a mild setback to the annual increase of four million...
In a state of chaos self-preservation is the supreme duty.

If you really believe that things are so rotten that your first duty is to destroy- to wipe the slate clean - then you should not turn green at small acts of destruction. Your duty is to connive with those who make the conflagration, not to turn a moral hosepipe on them - to create such a mighty chaos that all that is rotten like selfishness, intolerance, greed, falsehood, sycophancy, is drowned. In blood, if necessary.

It was left to another, a most unlikely character, the local 'budmash' or worthless thug, to put his life on the line for the sake of someone he cared about. 

Final thoughts

This was a brutal, gross, and at times crude novel. It's not the sort of book you'd leave sitting on your coffee table and I don't recommend it unconditionally, but it was a heartfelt, candid and literary account written by an excellent author. I learnt more from this one book of fiction than I would have gleaned from a shelf-full of political or historical titles. It was a powerful and awful account. Although there wasn't a political theme to the book, I couldn't help imbibing the political atmosphere of those days. Mano Majra was a miniature India that mirrored the whole nation. It also mirrored humanity in its portrayal of the fluidity of human reasoning - we can justify anything we decide to do. We are so readily manipulated by the opinions of others and the voices of those who stir and agitate.

The photography in this edition of the book is the work of Margaret Bourke-White who lived and travelled in India during 1946 and 1947. She was sent by Life magazine to cover the emerging nations of India and Pakistan after spending four years in Europe during World War II where she witnessed the Nazi concentration camps. According to one of the articles below, some British soldiers and journalists who had witnessed the Nazi death camps claimed Partition’s brutalities were worse.

The copy I have above is out of print but available secondhand or there is this edition here which doesn't include the images by Margaret Bourke-White. The images are online here.

Further reading:

The Great Divide: The violent legacy of Indian Partition

Khushwant Singh (1915-2014) - Obituary

BBC article - The Hidden Story of Partition and its Legacies




Train to Pakistan is my pick for the Back to the Classics 2016 category for a Classic by a Non-White Author.

Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy (1874)

I was a little way into this book before I realised that I had confused authors. I knew the book had been written by Hardy, but as I was reading I was thinking 'George Eliot.' I read Adam Bede by Eliot last year and Far From the Madding Crowd has a very similar feel to it. One of the things that aided my confusion was the humour in the early section of the story. I've read Tess of the D'Urbervilles and didn't think Hardy had a sense of humour.

Far From the Madding Crowd begins with an almost lighthearted tone, especially in the first chapter (which is a delight) but becomes more pensive over the course of the story as Hardy explores the choices and passions of his characters.
Bathsheba Everdene was beautiful, independent and headstrong, and inclined to be impulsive and thoughtless. She had three suitors: a plain-speaking, hardworking but luckless farmer; a wealthy, mature bachelor; and a dashing, reckless soldier. Bathsheba's vanity and immaturity led her into making some careless decisions that resulted in consequences she never imagined nor intended.

Bathsheba:

'...I shouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding if I could be one without having a husband. But since a woman can't show off in that way by herself I shan't marry - at least yet.'

...she felt her impulses to be pleasanter guides than her discretion.

...some women only require an emergency to make them fit for one

The Farmer:

He had lost all he possessed of worldly property: he had sunk from his modest elevation down to a lower ditch than that from which he had started; but he had now a dignified calm he had never before known and that indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man is the basis of his sublimity when it does not. And this the basement had been exaltation and the loss gain.

The Bachelor:

She resolved never again to look or by sign to interrupt the steady flow of this man's life. But a resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.

The Soldier:

Never did a fragile tailless sentence convey a more perfect meaning. The careless sergeant smiled within himself, and probably the devil smiled too from a loophole in Tophet, for the moment was the turning-point of a career...the seed which was to lift the foundation had taken root in the chink...

Other Characters:

'Ay, sure,' said his son, a young man about sixty-five, with a semi-bald head and one tooth in the left centre of his upper jaw, which made much of itself by standing prominent, like a milestone in a bank.

The maltster's lack of teeth appeared not to sensibly diminish his powers as a mill: he had been without them for so many years that toothlessness was felt to be a defect than hard gums an acquisition.

We learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb, but those which they reject that give them the colours they are known by, and in the same way people are specialised by their dislikes and antagonisms whilst their goodwill is looked upon as no attribute at all.

Hardy's Wessex settings and his poetic style of writing are draw cards for me even though I've found some of his books rather bleak and sometimes fatalistic. Far From the Madding Crowd was a very enjoyable read and revealed another side to Hardy that I hadn't noticed in his other books.

Far From the Madding Crowd is my selection for a 19th Century Classic for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2016.

Ambleside Online has scheduled this book as a free read in Year 10.

The Metamorphosis by Frank Kafka (1915)

As Gregor Samsa awoke from unsettling dreams one morning, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.

With these words Frank Kafka begins his bizarre, dark fantasy.

Gregor is a hard-working travelling salesman, the sole provider in his family; his parents and sister dependent upon him. He loathes his work and admits that he is the 'boss's creature, mindless and spineless.'
On the morning of his transformation, his family are alarmed that he is still in his room at quarter to seven and knock on his door. He lies in bed, expecting the illusion he thinks he is under to gradually dissolve, and even as he makes a reply to his concerned family, he doesn't doubt that the change in his voice is due to a severe cold coming on.
Meanwhile, the head clerk arrives to find out why Gregor hasn't turned up for work, and is also waiting outside the bedroom door.
Gregor gets out of bed after a great exertion and manages to get to the door and eventually unlock it and so his metamorphosis is revealed to the horrified group standing there.
At first his family, especially his sister, cares for him and brings him food, but gradually he is neglected and expected to keep to his room. After a while they think of him no longer as a son or brother but as 'it.'
Gregor had decided he was going to send his sister to the Conservatory the next year, even though it involved considerable expense, and was planning to announce his intentions on Christmas Eve. A very poignant moment occurs when her parents ask her to play the violin for their three boarders. As she performs, Gregor advances into the room, mesmerised by her playing.

Her face was tilted to one side and she followed the notes with soulful and probing eyes. Gregor advanced a little, keeping his eye low so they might possibly meet hers. Was he a beast if music could move him so? He felt as though the path to his unknown hungers was being cleared.

This is definitely an unusual story, fascinating, but in the end not very satisfying. Even the author thought this and said it had an 'unreadable ending. Imperfect almost to its very marrow.'
Kafka was born in Prague and spoke both Czech and German, but he wrote in German. As with any translation, choices are made by the interpreter. The 'monstrous vermin' of the translation I read, has been rendered 'unclean animal not suited for sacrifice' and 'gigantic insect' in other translations.
Kafka was intentionally vague about the metamorphosed Gregor and when the book was going to press he told his publisher, "The insect itself cannot be depicted. It cannot even be shown from a distance." (Endnotes of the Barnes & Noble Classics edition above)
I spent the whole book wondering how large Gregor the 'insect' was. He managed to reach the lock on the door but he could hide under a sofa. He could also be pushed around the floor with a broom. If he had been the size of a regular insect, even an very large one, he wouldn't have been so obvious to everyone and no one would have equated him with once having been a man. It sounds rather illogical - but Kafka doesn't make sense! This comment from the introduction to the book above partly explains why:

Kafka's fiction examines a universe largely unexplored in the literature preceding him, one full of implications that venture into the remote regions of human psychology. It's a universe with different rules than those governing our reality. And there's no map. 
 

According to the writers of Invitation to the Classics, Kafka's worldview is Nihilism, that is, he rejects all meaning, so he is left with a great nothingness:

Human beings, once seen as a link in the Great Chain of Being connected both upward to God and downward to animals, are now connected only downward. Without the image of God, humans beings are dehumanised. With the death of God has come the death of humanity. This is Kafka's central lesson.

Frank Kafka (1883-1924) was only forty-one years of age when he died of tuberculosis. His family was Jewish and although at first he was indifferent to  his religious heritage, he later became fascinated by it.
In 1933 the Nazi's banned and publicly burned Kafka's work. In 1942 they put two of his sisters into a Polish ghetto where they died. His youngest and closest sister was married to an 'Aryan' and was not deported, but in an act of defiance, she divorced her husband and was sent to Auschwitz and died there.

Further reading:


Invitation to the Classics: A Guide to Books You've Always Wanted to Read - edited by Louise Cowan and Os Guiness. There's a chapter devoted to Kafka, mostly relted to another of his books, The Trial, but it offers some insights into his life.

How Should We Then Live: The Rise & Decline of Western Thought & Culture by Francis A. Schaeffer. I love this book and how the author weaves in history, music, art, and literature. Although first published in 1976, this book is just as pertinent for our times.

The Barnes & Noble edition I read had a short bio and some notes which enhanced my understanding of Kafka.



This book is my entry in the Back to the Classics Challenge 2106 for a Classic which has been banned or censored.

Mercy & the Hard Heart: A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)

Bizarre, disturbing, violent and peopled with freaks and unpleasant characters - this seems to be a common consensus about the content of Flannery O'Connor's writing. I've just finished reading ten of her short stories contained in the selection above. If I'd stopped after only reading the first few I  might have described them in that way also. Some of her stories left me wondering what it was she was getting at, and her characters certainly weren't appealing. At the same time, though, I sensed there were significant themes tucked below the surface that needed some stretching of my moral imagination before I could interpret their meanings.
The first story in this collection was 'A Good Man is Hard to Find.' I knew what to expect, having heard about it beforehand, so it didn't have the shock value it might have had if I hadn't been prepared. Still, my reaction to the story was "What ?? Is that the end of it??"
I went on to the next story, and then the next.
Emm...??
Then I came to story number six, the one with the unfortunate title of The Artificial N***er, and all of a sudden, O'Connor's theme of violent mercy, grace and redemption is so clear.
Mr Head takes his belligerent grandson, Nelson, to the city, intending for him to see everything there is in a city so that he would be content to stay at home for the rest of his life. An incident occurs in which Mr Head, in the grip of fear, denies that Nelson is related to him.

Mr. Head began to feel the depth of his denial...He knew that if dark overtook them in the city, they would be beaten and robbed. The speed of God's justice was only what he expected for himself, but he could not stand to think that his sins would be visited upon Nelson and that even now, he was leading the boy to his doom.

Mr Head had never disgraced himself before and he hadn't known what mercy felt like because he had always been too good to deserve any!

Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but this time he knew that there were no words in the world that could name it...
He understood it was all a man could carry into death to give his Maker and he suddenly burned with shame that he had so little of it to take with him. He stood appalled, judging himself with the thoroughness of God, while the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it. He had never thought himself a great sinner before but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair...
He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved him in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that moment to enter paradise.

Mercy...

'He had so little of it to take with him.' 

It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not.

 They are new every morning...

Lamentations 3

Out of all the stories in this collection, this one was my favourite and I think it would be a good first introduction to Flannery O'Connor.
'The Displaced Person' would be my next pick - a haunting sort of piece about a Polish refugee:

...she felt she had been tricked by the old priest. He had said there was no legal obligation for her to keep the Displaced Person if he was not satisfactory, but then he had brought up the moral one.

The old priest...sat on her porch, taking no notice of her partly mocking, partly outraged expression as she sat shaking her foot, waiting for an opportunity to drive a wedge into his talk. "For," he was saying, as if he spoke of something that had happened yesterday n town, "when God sent his Only Begotten Son, Jesus Christ Our Lord" - he slightly bowed his head - "as a Redeemer to mankind, H..."
"Father Fynn!" she said in a voice that made him jump. "I want to talk to you about something serious!"
The skin under the old man's right eye flinched.
"As far as I'm concerned," she said and guard at him fiercely, "Christ was just another D. P."

I enjoyed O'Connor's ironic sense of humour and the names she gave to some of her characters:

Mrs Hopewell who 'had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people's in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.'

Mrs Freeman: 'Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings.'

Mrs Shortley: 'Her arms were folded and as she mounted the prominence, she might have been the giant wife of the countryside, come out at some sign of danger to see what the trouble was. She stood on two tremendous legs, with the grand self-confidence of a mountain, and rose, up narrowing bulges of granite, to two icy blue points of light that pierced forward, surveying everything.'

Not to mention Mr. Shiftlet and Mr. Paradise and a host of other unlikable and offensive individuals.

Flannery O'Connor was a devout Roman Catholic from the Bible Belt of the South, and is considered to be one of the most important short story writers in American literature. He first story was published when she was twenty-one and she died eighteen years later of an auto-immune disease at the age of thirty-nine. She said of her own work:

Many of my ardent admirers would be roundly shocked and disturbed if they realized that everything I believe is thoroughly moral, thoroughly Catholic, and that it is these beliefs that give my work its chief characteristics.

Heidi @  Mt Hope Chronicles has a comprehensive post about the author with many and varied links. I listened to the Circe Podcast she linked to earlier this year and it gave a good introduction and overview of the author.

Invitation to the Classics edited by Louise Cowan and Os Guinness contains a short chapter on her life and work.

I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. 

Their hearts are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work.

Invitation to the Classics

This is my Classic Short Stories entry for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2106

Back to the Classics - The Five Red Herrings by Dorothy L. Sayers (1931)

Lord Peter Wimsey, although an Englishman, was well-received in the close-knit fishing and artistic community of Galloway and had passed many a season in the area. One night when he was having a drink at the local pub, a dispute broke out between Campbell and Waters, two of the resident artists, and they came to blows.
Campbell was universally disliked, 'a devil when he's drunk and a lout when he's sober,' and since his arrival in the community there had been nothing but rows and bickering. After the men were forcibly separated, Campbell stormed off in high dudgeon into the night.
The next day he was found dead at the bottom of an outcrop of granite; his body lying face down in the burn and an unfinished painting on a sketching easel on the rock ledge above. There seemed little doubt that Campbell had accidentally fallen as he stepped back to observe his painting. But then Wimsey noticed something everyone else had missed. He declared that it was a case of murder and that it had been committed by an artist.

'...I don't mind betting this is the most popular thing Campbell ever did. Nothing in life became him like the leaving it, eh, what?'

There were six suspects, all of whom detested Campbell and had grievances against him. Five of the suspects were red herrings; one was the killer, and it took all the ingenuity of Wimsey and the local 'pollis' to piece events together and decide who was responsible.

It was a marvellous day in late August, and Wimsey's soul purred within him as he pushed the car along. The road from Kirkcudbright to Newton Stewart is of a varied loveliness hard to surpass, and with a sky full of bright sun and rolling cloud-banks, hedges filled with flowers, a well-made road, a lively engine and the prospect of a good corpse at the end of it, Lord Peter's cup of happiness was full. He was a man who loved simple pleasures.

I relished the setting of The Five Red Herrings - a part of Scotland about 180 km south of my birthplace, and there is quite a bit of Scottish brogue in the dialogue, which I know sometimes causes problems if you're not familiar with the tongue. The BBC audio version is good and is narrated by Patrick Malahide who does a pretty decent Scottish accent, for a sassenach, although two of the police detectives sound almost identical.

Elizabeth George, a mystery writer herself, had this to say about Sayers:

While many detective novelists from the Golden Age of mystery kept their plots pared down to the requisite crime, suspects, clues, and red herrings, Sayers did not limit herself to so limited a canvas in her work. She saw the crime and its ensuing investigation as merely the framework for a much larger story, the skeleton - if you will - upon which she could hang the muscles, organs, blood vessels and physical features of a much larger tale.

George said that Sayer's writing was like a tapestry and this is so true. I've read a number of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels and there is a  richness and attention to detail that you don't usually find in detective fiction. I enjoy her literary allusions, Latin quotations, the intellectual stimulation and the humour woven into her novels.
Speaking of humour, in The Five Red Herrings Wimsey decides to re-enact the crime, having guessed the murderer's identity but having insufficient evidence to make an arrest. The Chief Constable, Sir Maxwell, is chosen to be the corpse and Wimsey plays the murderer.

'Now, corpse, it's time I packed you into the car. I probably did it earlier, but you'd have been so uncomfortable. Come and take up your pose again, and remember you're supposed to be perfectly rigid by now.'

'This may be fun to you,' grumbled Sir Maxwell, 'but it's death to me.'

'So it is,' said Wimsey. 'Never mind. Ready? Up you go!'

'Eh!' said Macpherson as Wimsey seized the Chief Constable's cramped and reluctant body and swung it on to the back seat of the Morris, 'but your lordship's wonderful strong for your size.'

'It's just a knack,' said Wimsey, ruthlessly ramming his victim down between the seat and the floor. 'I hope you aren't permanently damaged sir. Can you stick it?' he added, as he pulled on his gloves.
'Carry on,' said the corpse in a muffled voice.

A nice little extra included in the Hodder and Stroughton editions of Sayer's Wimsey novels, (pictured above) but not in the HarperTrophy or Dover copies, is a short and entertaining 'biography of Lord Peter Wimsey, brought up to date...and communicated by his uncle Paul Austin Delagardie.'


Sayer's Lord Peter Wimsey's mystery classics are scheduled as free reads in the Ambleside Online Year 12 curriculum, although we've used them at a younger age after Agatha Christie's novels and the Father Brown series by Chesterton had been read to death.


This is my entry in the Back to the Classics 2016 - Classic by a Woman category

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970)

Where do I start?  Where do I begin with my thoughts on this grim, harrowing, exquisitely written novel of World War I?

This is my third encounter with this story. The first was in my late teens; the second about fifteen years ago. The book made a deep impression on me when I read it previously, but even so, I wasn't prepared for the strong emotional impact it had the third time around. 
An outline of the story doesn't do the book justice. Quotes are difficult to extricate without losing the flow of the passages. You really need to read this compelling work of literature to understand its power.

Although All Quiet on the Western Front is not a memoir, the author drew on his own first-hand experience of the First World War. Erich Maria Remarque (formally Erich Paul Remark) was born in Northern Germany in 1898. He was sixteen when World War I started in 1914. He was called up for military service in late 1916, and sent to the front in mid 1917. Wounded by shell fragments during the offensive in Flanders, he was evacuated to a military hospital and worked there as a clerk for some time afterwards. The war ended before he saw further action.

This book is intended neither as an accusation nor as a confession , but simply as an attempt to give an account of a generation that was destroyed by the war - even those of it who survived the shelling.

All Quiet on the Western Front was first published in Germany in 1929 under the title 'Im Westen nichts Neues.' Its literal translation is 'Nothing New on the Western Front,' and it is the first person account of a nineteen year old soldier, Paul Bäumer.
At the age of eighteen, Paul and six of his school companions were marched down to the local recruiting office by their schoolmaster, Kantorek, to enlist.

...there were thousands of Kantoreks, all of them convinced that they were acting for the best, in the way that was the most comfortable for themselves.

But as far as we are concerned, that is the very root of their moral bankruptcy.

...We were forced to recognise that our generation was more honourable than theirs; they only had the advantage of us in phrase-making and cleverness.

I found an audio version of the book narrated by an Englishman with a distinct English colloquial accent. It annoyed me at first and I almost decided to stop listening as it didn't seem authentic. But as I got further into the story, I realised that if you just changed the names, the soldier could have been German, English, Russian, Croatian...French. It was irrelevant for the most part, although there were some aspects that related mainly to German soldiers (e.g. the rations they received were much inferior than those supplied to the English).

Listening to someone else tell the story this time around allowed me a different view that I didn't get previously. It is a universal story that could have been told by any number of young men caught up in the insanity of war.
When I read the book years ago, I didn't have four boys who were similar in age to many of the unfortunate youths who were conscripted into the army, therefore some of the most emotionally moving scenes for me were those between Paul and his Mother:

Paul  goes home on leave. His sister hears him and leans over the stairwell:

'Paul - ' she shouts, 'Paul - '
I nod, my pack bangs against the banisters, my rifle is so heavy.
She throws the door open and shouts, 'Mother, Mother, it's Paul -'
I lean against the wall and grip my helmet and my rifle. I grip them as hard as I can, but I can't move another step, the staircase blurs before my eyes, I thump my rifle-butt against my foot and grit my teeth in anger, but I am powerless against that one word that my sister had just spoken, nothing has any power against it. I try with all my might to force myself to laugh and to speak, but I can't manage a single word, and so I stand there on the stairs, wretched and helpless, horribly paralysed and I can't help it, and tears and more tears are running down my face.

Paul's mother has been ill for months. The doctors say she probably has cancer. On his last night at home she comes into his room and sits there, often bent double with pain, until it is nearly morning. Paul makes out he is asleep but in the end he can't take it any longer and pretends to wake up.

...she asks softly, 'Are you very frightened?'
'No, Mother.'
'I wanted to say something else to you. Be careful of those French women. They're no good, those women out there.'

Oh Mother, Mother, to you I'm still a child - why can't I just put my head in your lap and cry? Why do I always have to be the stronger and calmer one, I'd like to be able to weep for once and be comforted, and anyway, I'm really not much more than a child - the short trousers I wore as a boy are still hanging in the wardrobe. It was such a little while ago, why did it pass?

'I shall pray for you every day, Paul.'

Oh Mother, Mother! Why can't we get up and go away from here, back through the years, until all his misery has vanished from us, back to when it was just you and me, Mother?

'You really mustn't send me your rations, Mother. We get enough to eat out there. You need it more here.'
How wretched she looks...this woman who loves me more than anything in the world...
Oh Mother, Mother, it is quite incomprehensible that I have to leave you! Who has more right to have me here than you?
...there are so many things we should say to each other, but we shall never be able to.

Remarque's writing is realistic in describing the war and the common soldier's lot, but it is interspersed with complex thoughts and ideas. The loss of dignity, terror, hopelessness, the tenuous hold on life - there is so much in this book. It has relevance for every generation and has the power to speak into our modern conflicts.
All Quiet on the Western Front is said to be the greatest novel written about the First World War, which doesn't surprise me. The fact that it was written by a man who was on the 'other side' also makes it quite unique.
The Nazis burned Remarque's novel when they came to power in 1933. It was seen as 'degenerate,' and a betrayal of the German military.

The factory owners in Germany have grown rich, while dysentery racks our guts.

The months drag on. This summer if 1918 is the bloodiest and the hardest...Everyone knows that we are losing the war. Nobody talks about it much. We are retreating. We won't be able to attack again after this massive offensive. We have no more men and no more ammunition.

Remarque moved to Switzerland a day before Adolf Hitler became chancellor and in 1938 was stripped of his German citizenship by the Nazis.
Later, his sister was tried for making anti-Nazi and 'defeatist' comments. She was convicted, sentenced to death and beheaded in 1943.

In 1942, George Orwell wrote:

The picture of war set forth in books like All Quiet on the Western Front is substantially true. Bullets hurt, corpses stink, men under fire are often so frightened that they wet their trousers. It is true that the social background from which an army springs will colour its training, tactics and general efficiency, and also that the consciousness of being in the right can bolster up morale, though this affects the civilian population more than the troops. (People forget that a soldier anywhere near the front line is usually too hungry, or frightened, or cold, or, above all, too tired to bother about the political origins of the war.)



Linking this to Back to the Classics 2016 - Re-Read a Classic From School or College,  Reading Europe and Keeping Company