Art Davidson, Minus 148⁰ **** 1/2

Minus 148⁰ tells the story of the first winter ascent of Mount McKinley in 1967. The title refers to the windchill-adjusted temperature on Denali Pass when three climbers bivouacked there, I first read it in high school alongside other classic mountaineering tales such as Annapurna.

Most mountaineering books emphasize the heroic nature of the undertaking and the participants. They focus on the elaborate logistics (Everest, The Hard Way), the technical difficulties (The White Spider), the strange psychology of climbers (Beyond the Mountain; Touching the Void), or the anatomy of a disaster (Into Thin Air). The eight climbers in Minus 148⁰ are more relatable characters. In their enthusiasm they underplan the expedition; the climb is more a matter of endurance than climbing skill; and the author honestly admits to the petty divisions that spring up between teammates under stress. The nominal leader of the expedition loses his passion for the climb while still on the lower slopes.

The title aside, Davidson doesn't dwell much on the temperature or the short days. Yes, they suffer from frostbite and sometimes have to travel in the dark, but the factor that brings them near disaster is the 150-mph winds at the pass.

Davidson and a couple of the others had climbed McKinley in the past. I would have liked to hear more about how the trip differed from a summer climb. For example, they were able to travel more quickly over the glacier because the colder snow was more firm.

Annika Norlin, The Colony ***

The Colony is a novel about a motley group of seven people who live together in a remote house in the Swedish countryside. A burnt-out journalist spies their odd behavior from her campsite and befriends the teenager who seems cut off from the rest of the group.

In the early chapters, I found the characters' motivations intriguing. In various ways they feel oppressed by the demands of social interaction. Emelie is tired of justifying her burn-out to people; Jozsef feels compelled to comfort people and broker peace when there are conflicts; Sara has the magnetism of a natural leader and hates the feeling of responsibility it gives her. These characters have interpersonal skills that make them successful sought-after companions, but they find those skills burdensome. They seek to create a community in which no one imposes expectations on the others.

This theme comes in and out of focus as the story progresses. The other Colony members have more clichéd trauma. The group's vision shifts from self-sufficiency to environmentalism. The members do have expectations of each other. Sara emerges as something of a cult leader. Arguments for the superiority of their lifestyle are unconvincing (to the reader). It becomes hard to believe that the Colony would stay intact for as long as it does.

The final unraveling of the Colony is fast and rather too convenient from a plot perspective.

Jeremy Denk, Every Good Boy Does Fine ***

This memoir from concert pianist Jeremy Denk covers his musical education from his first lessons at age seven through his doctorate from Julliard. He describes his piano teachers and what he learned from them in the context of his family and school life.

Denk is a very good writer, especially talented at capturing the day-to-day details of living as a young musician: finding the time (and motivation) to practice, questioning how important music is relative to other life goals, learning your teacher's personality, reconciling conflicting feedback, staying even-keeled in the face of (constructive?) criticism. He effectively conveys the mix of arrogance and insecurity he felt as a clearly talented pianist. I enjoyed the earlier parts of the book best, before Denk knows for sure he wants to become a professional musician.

I was less impressed with Denk's writing about music. He describes what he learns from his various teachers, but the lessons tend to be either generic (pay attention to the composer's dynamics markings, vary the attack on the keys, "make it sing") or specific to a particular piece of music (don't play Chopin's "Raindrop" sonata exactly in time). I appreciate the countless factors that a musician needs to balance, both technical and interpretative, but didn't gain much for my musical appreciation. The chapters on harmony, melody, and rhythm are far too metaphorical to be useful to me.

For me, one of the most fascinating rhythmic comparisons in the classical canon is between Mozart and Beethoven, who composed at close to the same time, and using related language, with astonishingly different results. ... Mozart balances stoppage and flow. He knows when to interrupt, when to elide (an underrated virtue), when to gently turn a corner. ... But if Mozart wrote the ideally timeless, Beethoven managed to write something quite different: music in search of time.

This excerpt starts with a promising notion but fails to elaborate on it.

P.S. I feel I have to note that Every Good Boy Does Fine has the most amateurish cover design I've ever seen from a major publisher. An unbalanced layout, clip-art pasted into the upper right, mismatched fonts. Denk explicitly thanks the designer in his acknowledgements, which makes me question his aesthetic taste.

Michael Crummey, The Adversary ***

An engaging enough story about a brother and sister vying for control of an isolated town on the north coast of Newfoundland. The brother is a drunken bully, the sister a ruthless antagonist. The townsfolk endure their violent rivalry, the plague, bad weather, marauding pirates, and poor fishing seasons. 

The story has a fairy-tale or morality-tale quality to it, with the genre's flat characters to match. The narrative often takes unexpected turns, usually when an unexpected tragedy upends the anticipated plot development. Crummey revels in Newfoundland slang; the Acknowledgements section lists primarily works of linguistic scholarship. 

Paul Hendrickson, Hemingway's Boat ****

Hemingway's Boat is not a biography of Ernest Hemingway nor a literary analysis of his work nor a character portrait of the man. It's a bit of all these things, anchored by an account of his 38-foot fishing vessel Pilar. The heart of the book describes Hemingway's purchase of the boat and the early years during which he used it as a pressure-release valve for his volatile personality. During the years 1934 to 1937, Hemingway wrote The Green Hills of Africa, became a world-class marlin fisherman, and raged against the mixed critical response to his recent work.

Hendrickson is a master at vividly describing prosaic incidents such as the day Hemingway ordered Pilar. He imagines all the thoughts and feelings his characters are having at the time. The book includes full portaits of minor characters such as the boat builder, the young writer who served as his ship's steward, and the foreign service officer who married Hemingway's secretary. The last third of the book focuses primarily on Ernest's youngest son Gregory.

Hendrickson has at least three distinct goals, and is largely successful at all three:

• Reconstruct the mental life of Hemingway and his compatriots during a critical period
• Show that he could be supportive, loyal, and compassionate alongside his well-documented and undeniable egotism, boorishness, and malice
• Propose that his lifelong struggle with mental illness made his successes (as well as Gregory's) heroic

Hemingway's Boat has an idiosyncratic (lack of) structure. It's too long and goes too far afield, but it has a great humanity to it.

Henrik Ibsen, Six Plays ****

When I made a tour of Norwegian literature last summer, I omitted its biggest name, Henrik Ibsen. He wrote plays rather than novels, and I felt like I should see stage productions instead of reading them.

One of the books I read, Dag Solstad's Shyness and Dignity, featured a high-school teacher who has an epiphany while teaching Ibsen's The Wild Duck to a roomful of bored students. I shopped around for a collection of Ibsen plays that included A Doll's House and The Wild Duck. I found a used copy of a leather-bound Franklin Mint edition with these two plays plus Ghosts and Hedda Gabler.

A Doll's House is Ibsen's most popular play. Like most of his plays, it was controversial: it ends with a woman leaving her husband and children, unthinkable at the time. I enjoyed the play and appreciated Nora's courage of conviction, although I'm not sure her behavior in the early acts is consistent with her final decision. She is clearly acting the part of a supportive wife but seems a bit insecure even in private moments.

Ghosts feels like it goes out of its way to be controversial, with its explicit exploitation of servants and congenital syphilis. The major theme is the passing of trauma from one generation to the next.

The Wild Duck has a more sophisticated structure than the previous plays, and a more sophisticated message ("Rob the average man of his basic lie and you rob him of his happiness as well"). In the earlier plays, the truth or "Claim of the Ideal" is an unqualified good; The Wild Duck recognizes the value of self-delusion. My complaint about the play is that its setting includes an implausible attic in which people can go hunting.

Hedda Gabler features a manipulative title character that actresses surely love to play. By this point in Ibsen's development, the repressed woman has figured out how to use her position to her advantage. She gets her comeuppance in the end, so I imagine this play was less controversial.

These four plays from Ibsen's middle period find their characters pushing against social pressures. They share common elements such as unhappy marriages, knocked-up servants married off to other men, and principled suicides. After finishing them, I decided to add a couple of Ibsen's later works, Rosmersholm and The Master Builder. In these plays, the characters push against their own inner conflicts.

Rosmersholm tells the story of a landowner and pastor who has lost his faith and shifted his sympathies to the Radicals. He argues about this change with his conservative brother-in-law and with the editor of the Radical paper, and discusses its consequences with the young woman who led him to his new viewpoint. Almost nothing happens in this play beyond conversations and a few principled suicides at the beginning and end. I think its subtle messages would be better conveyed in a novel.

The Master Builder has a bullying title character who is afraid of losing his power to "the next generation." Like Hedda Gabler and Rosmersholm, it has a young female character demonstrating her power from within the confines of her social role. The final act has several reverses to our interpretation of the master builder's motivations. 

All six plays have something to recommend them. Dramatically, the best are A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, and The Master Builder. Thematically, the most interesting are The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm.

Wendy Hinman, Tightwads on the Loose ***

Tightwads on the Loose is a terrible title for this account of a Seattle couple's "seven year Pacific odyssey." Sure, they can just barely afford their sailboat cruising lifestyle and often need to economize. Their 31-foot boat they can afford is too small for the voyage and for her tall husband. However, financial difficulties are not a key focus area in Hinman's story. Other challenges are more prominent: enthusiasm leading to a lack of proper preparation; equipment breakdown; unpredictable conditions and schedules; differing travel styles and life goals.

The first half of the book consists of fairly typical cruising stories like those you would read in Latitude 38 (a publication that Hinman has apparently written for). They buy a boat, sail to Mexico with the Baja Ha-Ha, swap stories with other cruisers, continue on to the South Pacific, and watch America's Cup and Volvo Ocean races in New Zealand. Their voyage in the second half of the book is more unusual as they abandon the popular westward route and sail north toward Japan. The hinge between the two halves is an electronic "meltdown" that leaves them without navigational equipment; to pay for repairing the boat, they work for a couple of years (!) at mundane jobs on an American military base in the Marshall Islands.

What I appreciated most about Tightwads on the Loose was Hinman's forthrightness about the tensions between her and her husband. She is an extrovert who relishes the social aspects of cruising; he is an engineer who relishes tinkering with the boat. She wants to keep cruising forever; he is ready to move on to the next phase of their lives. The book addresses questions about the value of the cruising lifestyle by showing the couple's differing views on the subject.

The descriptions of sailing adventures and anchorages are serviceable. For me, the most vivid sequence came when they sailed Kanmon Kaikyo, the channel between the Japanese islands of Kyushu and Honshu. It's a busy thoroughfare with a strong current, so they had to make their move on the dying ebb. Their engine dies (again), forcing them to short-tack in the narrow area outside the shipping channel... and make a beeline across when they reach the narrowest point. Meanwhile Hinman is trying to explain their situation to the Coast Guard, pausing every couple of minutes to grind in the jib on the new tack.