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.").