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.

Stendhal, The Red and the Black ** 1/2

The Red and the Black delivers on Stendhal's reputation for ironical social commentary and psychologically complex characters, but it also shows how weak his writing is. I thought perhaps I'd  chosen the wrong translation (from Catherine Slater), but the most notable shortcomings of the prose are independent of the translation.

My biggest complaint is that Stendhal tells us about conversations that reveal his characters' natures but rarely shows us any of it. This issue is particularly acute with respect to Matilde, whose personality and moods drive the narrative. 

As soon as anyone displeased Mlle de La Mole, she had a way of punishing the offender with a joke so measured, so well chosen, so seemingly on the surface, and so appositely delivered, that the wound grew greater every moment, the more you thought about it.

The reader has to imagine these cutting remarks, which lessens the impact of the social satire.

Stendhal's vaunted psychological complexity manifests itself through the changeable moods of the characters: rapturously in love one minute, angry and miserable the next. Again the reader needs to suss out the reason for the reversals because the story doesn't provide sufficient detail.

The one area where there is more than sufficient detail is contemporary French politics. I gather that's what made The Red and the Black so controversial in its time.

Julian's final actions were pleasingly thought-provoking but it took too long to get there.

Hugh Raffles, The Book of Unconformities ***

Geologists call a discontinuity in the deposition of sediment an unconformity. It's a physical representation of a gap in the geological record, a material sign of a break in time. ... Life is filled with unconformities—revealing holes in time that are also fissures in feeling, knowledge, and understanding...

The Book of Unconformities is a book centered around geology, written by an anthropologist, inspired by the deaths of the author's two sisters in a span of three months. Each chapter is named for a type of stone (marble, sandstone, magnetite) that Raffles uses as a jumping off point for wide-ranging digressions. For example, the first chapter introduces the Inwood marble that underlays Manhattan and goes on to describe the history of the native Lenape; the "Sandstone" chapter mostly concerns the Neolithic standing stones in the Orkney Islands.

In its best moments, The Book of Unconformities achieves its goal of evoking the theme of disruption on multiple scales at once (geological, societal, and personal); it briefly captures a Sebaldian tone. Most of the time, though, it is telling an interesting story about the history of a place and a people, but without a clear connection to the author's larger concerns. I often found myself asking how we got onto this subject.

I felt a bit smug while reading this book because of how many of its tangents I was already familiar with: eruptions in Iceland, the Clearances in Scotland, Norwegian polar exploration, whaling at Svalbard.

Carys Davies, Clear ***

An impoverished Scottish minister travels to a remote northern island to evict its sole resident. He is seriously injured, and as the resident nurses him back to health the two men develop a bond.

Clear takes place against a rich historical background: the minister "became a poor man by throwing in his lot with the Free Church of Scotland"; the island resident Ivar is being evicted as part of the Scottish Clearances; Ivar is the last speaker of the language of Norn. Most of this context is window-dressing for a straightforward tale about a growing friendship.

Clear is a short novel that probably could have been a short story. It lacked the layering of themes that I expect from a novel. Its narrative beats were predictable via the principle of Checkov's gun.

Elias Canetti, I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole ** 1/2

This collection of writings from the Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti opens with selections from his memoirs about his childhood in pre-WWI Bulgaria. They were excellent, vividly capturing his experiences and noting how they shaped his future development. I was particularly intrigued by a couple of his observations about language: he first heard Balkan folk tales from his Bulgarian nannies but remembers them in German, how and when did the translation take place; his parents spoke German to each other so he associates the language with love and secrecy.

Unfortunately I didn't find any of the other selections compelling. The modernist novel Auto-da-Fé lacked characters I could care about, the treatise Crowds and Power makes questionable leaps in its arguments, and the later Aufzeichnungen (briefs) felt like personal notes that Canetti never developed further ("I would love to study the faces in heaven. Otherwise I'd know of no reason to want to show up there. The faces in hell I already know well, as I wear them all at various times myself.").

Richard J. King, Sailing Alone: A History ***

The preface states clearly that Sailing Alone is not a typical adventure book:

My own solo crossing was not an exceptional feat of seamanship. ... I'm quite proud of the voyage in terms of endurance, and my will and energy to make the whole adventure happen, but the passage across the Atlantic took longer than projected, I did not sail efficiently, and the skills that I lacked the most were exposed in embarrassing fashion. ... This book is not the story of individual excellence, nor is it a compendium of sailing records or a practical manual on how to do it if you are considering a solo voyage yourself.

King includes stories about prominent solo sailors such as Joshua Slocum, but he talks about their motivations (which he calls their why go) more than about their adventures. He describes mundane details about day-to-day life alone on a boat while eliding storms and dismastings. The overall effect is pleasantly conversational and tones down the heroic aura surrounding single-handed sailors. It's amazing how ill-prepared the early circumnavigators were!