Category: 1925 clyb

The Polygots by William Gehardie

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The Polygots by William Gehardie

English fiction

Source – Personal copy

I looked through the books for the 1925 club, and this one jumped out at me as I’d love to be a polyglot, but unfortunately, I’m not. But when I read about William Gehardie from an Anglo-Russian family, he was born in St Petersberg. Studied in Russian. Then in Oxford. He served in the First World War in the Royal Scots Grey. He then served with the British mission to the white guard in Siberia. He won several awards, including an OBE. He then started to write, Evelyn Waugh said I have the talent, but you have the genius! He was also, in part, the model for William Boyd’s character Logan Mountstuart in his book Any Human Heart. All that made me pick this for the club year.

I stooD on board the liner halted in midstream and looked upon Japan, my native land. But let me say at once that 1 am not a Japanese. I am very much a European. Yet when I woke that morning, and, looking through the porthole, found the boat had halted in midstream, and Japan, a coral reef, lay glittering in the morning sun before me, I was touched and spellbound, and my thoughts went back to my birth, twenty-one years before, in the land of the cherry blossoms. I dressed quickly and ran up on deck. A faint breeze ruffled my hair and rippled the water. Like a dream, Japan loomed before me.

All last night I had watched for the approach of the enchanted island. Like sea-shells, islets began to bob up to right and left of us as we stood watching, heedless of time, as in a trance, the liner stealing her way on in the warm nocturnal breeze of July. They came and swam by and were like queer apparitions in the charmed light, and the boat, lulled to sleep, seemed to have yielded to dreams. And waking in the morning I looked and saw the cliffs-and gladness filled my heart.

The opening as he is in Japan at first .

“The book focuses on an English officer based in the Far East, Captain Georges Diabologh, born in Japan, who had spent time in Russia, as did the writer himself. Anyway, he ends up in a Belgian-run hotel in China, where a Belgian family are the other main characters in the book. Aunt Tersea and her Husband, a former Belgian officer, is, in part, like Poirot in the way he was described as a small dapper man with a wax moustache. But a sort of broken Poitrot.This is a book about the characters he meets along.The family, including his two uncles, all have little stories to tell and be observed by George.

the way —these people out of water in the far east, a sad family of odd Belgians and others, all stuck in the Chinese city of Harbin, in part of Russian-controlled China. It’s a book about nationality, identity, and being far away from your home. There isn’t much of a plot; it is more a collection of observations about the people he comes across. George, who is related to the family, is observant of those in the family.

“The war is over,’ said my aunt, and yet there will be men, I know, who will regret it. The other day I talked to an English Captain who had been through the thick of the Gallipoli campaign, and he assured me positively that he liked fighting-and simply carried me off my feet. And I don’t know whether he isn’t right. He liked fighting the Turks because, he said, they are such splendid fellows. Mind you! he had nothing at all against them; on the contrary, he thought they were gentlemen and sportsmen-almost his equals. But he said he’d fight a Turk any day, with pleasure.

Because they fought cleanly. After all,’ my aunt continued,

“there’s something splendid, say what you like—a zest of life!

—in his account of fighting the Turks. The Turks rush out of the wood with glittering bayonets, chanting: “Allah! Allah!

Allah!” as they advance into battle. Because, you see, they think they are already at the gates of Heaven, only waiting to be admitted. So they rush gravely and steadily into battle, chanting: “Allah! Allah! Allah!” I don’t know—but it must be, as he says, exhilarating!’

Accounts of wars play a part as well

I can see how this book fits with the time; it has a little of Waugh in the satire, and a sort of madness in families at times. Then there is also a pinch of Saki in the pithy observations of those family members —from the wax moustache to the aunt to the child —all of whom have their little hang-ups, as you would see in Saki. The two things I’d like more of are a little bit of a plot; it is a book you fall into, and at times, get lost among these odd little people. I didn’t mind that too much, as he also didn’t really make the place come alive. But I think he is a writer who needs to be better known; the two things I mentioned may be why he has fallen by the wayside. His writing is satirical and captures those little habits we all have that are funny, well. An intersting last book for club 1925. I can also see how he was part of the character in Any Human Heart. From this book, there are parts that you think could come from Any Human Heart. Tomorrow I will be looking back at my favourote books from the last ten years of Simon and Karens year club.

Carry on Jeeves by P G Wodehouse

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Carry on Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

English fiction

Personal copy

I am going to do a quick post for this book as most people are aware of PG Wodehouse. I have been a fan of his book. They capture that carefree air of the interwar years of the early 20th century. He has created several well-known characters from the Blanding castle books, and of course, this, which is part of maybe his best-known two-character series, Berit Wooster and his butler Jeeves. It was one of the books that leapt off the list of books that came out in 1925, especially as it is the second Jeeves and Wooster book, but it has several stories from the first collection, like the opening story, which is the tale of how the two men meet and Jeeves becomes Bertie’s butler.

Return immediately. Extremely urgent. Catch first train.

Florence.

‘Rum!’ I said.

“Sir?”

‘Oh, nothing!’

It shows how little I knew Jeeves in those days that I didn’t go a bit deeper into the matter with him. Nowadays I would never dream of reading a rummy communication without asking him what he thought of it. And this one was devilish odd. What I mean is, Florence knew I was going back to Easeby the day after to-morrow, anyway; so why the hurry call? Something must have happened, of course; but I couldn’t see what on earth it could be.

Jeeves, I said, ‘we shall be going down to Easeby this after-noon. Can you manage it?

‘Certainly, sir’

You can get your packing done and all that??

•Without any difficulty, sir. Which suit will you wear for the journey?’

“This one?

Jeeves and Woosters first meeting

I don’t know about you, but if you are, like me, and grew up in the UK in the 80s, you have the two main characters in your head as Fry and Laurie; they did a lot of the stories from Wodehouse. The first tale shows how Jeeves takes charge and becomes Bertie’s man after Bertie has had a series of butlers steal and try to rip him off. It is the start of a relationship we all know, then we have one of his friends, an artist struggling to get by, until, with the help of Jeeves and Wosters, he happens on a plan for a book of birds. Then we meet one of the great foes of Berite, his Aunt Agathe, when one of her friends joins them in New York. They ned to keep them on the straight and narrow.. In other disasters, he gets a couple together, finds servants for his friends, and is saved from taking in three relatives, all thanks to Jeeves’ insights and knowledge more than Bertie’s, as the two get out of scrapes and help others along the way.

Why should not the young lady write a small volume, to be entitled – let us say – “The Children’s Book of American Birds” and dedicate it to Mr Worple? A limited edition could be published at your expense, sir, and a great deal of the book would, of course, be given over to eulogistic remarks concerning Mr Worple’s own larger treatise on the same subject. I should recommend the dispatching of a presentation copy to Mr Wor-ple, immediately on publication, accompanied by a letter in which the young lady asks to be allowed to make the acquaintance of one to whom she owes so much. This would, I fancy, produce the desired result, but as I say, the expense involved would be considerable?

I felt like the proprietor of a performing dog on the vaudeville stage when the tyke has just pulled off his trick without a hitch.I had betted on Jeeves all along, and I had known that he wouldn’t let me down. It beats me sometimes why a man with his genius is satisfied to hang around pressing my clothes and what not. IfI had half Jeeves’s brain I should have a stab at being Prime Minister or something.

When they help the Artist Corky get some money for an art project !

As I said, in my head I have Fry and Laurie in my head when reading so  I loved this collection, it may be my favourite of the Wodehouse I have read I have a number of the Everyman Library ones as I think they are very nicely made and have great cover art, and long term are a collection I want to collect. I have reviewed him for another club year and have actually brought other books for the years, but haven’t got to them. I think this collection works as it shows what is great between Bertie a loveable oaf of an upper-class man with a heart of gold, but a real habit of putting his foot in his mouth and needs Jeeves, the man who sees it all, knows it all and has the inside track on everything that Bertie gets involved in. I think it is one of the best partnerships in fiction, second maybe to Holmes and Watson.This is maybe a great intro to the pair. Do you ever have actors in your head for a character you are reading ?

The Fatal Eggs by Mikhail Bulgakov

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The Fatal Eggs by Mikhail Bulgakov

Russian fiction

0riginal title –  Роковые яйца

Translator – Hugh Aplin

Source – Personal copy

I added this last minute to the 1925 club as I had the book and it wasn’t among the four books I had picked, but with finishing one book quicker than expected, I managed to read this book. It was actually the cover that caught my eye initially. I also hadn’t yet reviewed a book by Bulgakov on the blog. I thought I had, but looking back, I mustn’t have reviewed one a few years ago. I haver a few of his books on my tbr. He is best known for The Master and Margarita, which he wrote after this book. He actually had a sprint of writing, as he had three books available for 1925, written but not published til this year. This book was finished in 1924 but came out fully in 1925, and is hard to pigeonhole. It has sci-fi elements, satire, commentary, and critique of the early years of Soviet rule.

The start of the horrifying catastrophe must be considered as having been made specifically on that ill-starred evening, just as the first cause of that catastrophe should be considered to be specifically Vladimir Ipatyevich Persikov.

He was exactly fifty-eight years old. He had a remarkable head, pestle-like, bald, with tufts of yellowish hair sticking out along the sides. He had a clean-shaven face, the lower lip poking forward. Because of this, Persikov’s face eternally bore a rather capricious stamp. On a red nose were small old-fashioned glasses in a silver frame, he had brilliant little eyes, was tall, rather stooped. He spoke in a thin, squeaking, croaking voice and had, among other oddities, this one: when he was saying anything weightily and confidently, he turned the index finger of his right hand into a hook and narrowed his little eyes. And as he always spoke confidently, since his erudition in his field was absolutely phenomenal, the hook appeared very frequently before the eyes of Professor Persikov’s interlocutors. Whereas outside his field, i.e. zoology, embryo-logy, anatomy, botany and geography, Professor Persikov said almost nothing.

The events follow after his wife had left him

The book focuses on a scientist, Professor Presikov, who studies Amphibians. I laughed at the early pages when there was a note left by his wife, saying how unhappy she’d be remembering the frogs he kept.I was reminded of the UK comedy series League of Gentlemen, which had a man who kept toads as pets. Anyway, after his wife left, he lost rooms in his house under the new soviet system, then fell out of favour, then back into favour. Still, one day, he was gone, his quality Ziess lens microscope. He finds that some of the red light from it, left in the sun, has triggered a reaction during binary fission. This is the early days of discoveries like X-rays and early nuclear ideas, so when the amphibians produce lots of spawn, it leads to a frenzy of press, and other agencies want to use this discovery for their own ends. So when they want the ray tried on different farm animals, it has unexpected consequences, and then some eggs are done, and it goes from bad to worse. This is a book that captures every nugget of the time and some of its ideals.

On the second evening the professor, looking pinched and pale, without food, keeping himself going only with fat roll-ups, studied the new generation of amoebae, while on the third day he moved on to the primary source, that is to the red ray.

The gas hissed quietly in the burner, again the traffic shuffled along the street, and the professor, poisoned by the hundredth cigarette, half closing his eyes, leant onto the back of his revolving armchair.

“Yes, it’s all clear now. They were brought to life by the ray.

It’s a new ray, studied by nobody, discovered by nobody. The first thing that will have to be cleared up is whether it results only from electricity, or from the sun as well,’ Persikov muttered to himself.

the ray is an accident really .

This book has already been translated four times. This is the third translation; a newer one came out a few years ago. He read the book out when it came out, and it was well received, with parts of it giving nods to specific policies in the soviet union at the time. It also captures that early sci-fi of unknown rays. What is the red ray he has found? Ideas about science and improving or increasing food production. It is comic in places when things go wrong. He did worry that this satire might have gone too far with its nods to specific Soviet policies of the time and the way the characters might be thinly veiled reflections of actual people of the time. I felt this would go well after cement, as this is the sort of book the Soviets would have hated; they loved the social realism fiction, not Sci-fi satire like this. Have you read any of his books this year ?

Cement by Fyodor Vasilievich Gladkov

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Cement by Fyodor Vasilievich Gladkov

Russian fiction

Original title – Цемент

Translator – A S Arthur and C Ashleigh

Source – Personal copy

I am on to the second book for the 1925 club. This jumped out at me as I had planned to read a lot more classics in translation. This was the sort of book I had in mind when doing that. This is a writer, a little lesser known now and this is a book that, when it came out, was well received and considered the first piece of socialist realist fiction. He had fought in the Red Army during the Russian Revolution and was expelled from the communist party. After this book came out, he was taken back in, and this was held up as an example of what soviet literature should be. He was the secretary of the journal Novy Mir and later became the director of the Maxim Gorky Institute. This is one of the two of his books that seemed to have been translated.

He immediately recognised two of them. The old woman was the wife of Loshak the mechanic; the laughing one was the wife of Gromada, another mechanic. The third was a stranger whom he had never seen before.

As he approached them on the narrow pathway he stood aside in the high grass and gave them a military salute.

“Good morning, Comrades! “

They looked at him askance as though he were a tramp and stepped past him. Only the last one, the laughing one, gave a screeching laugh like a scared hen: “Get on with you!

There’s enough scamps like you about. Must one say ‘ Good-day to everybody? “

” What’s the matter with you, wenches? Don’t you recog-

nise me? “

Loshak’s wife looked morosely at Gleb-just as an old witch would do—then murmured to herself in her deep voice:

“Why, this is Gleb. He has risen from the dead, the rascal !” And went on her way, silent and sullen.

The first day or so as he returns Gleb

Cement depicts the main character in the book, Gleb, as a soldier who fought in the Russian Revolution for the Red Army. He has returned to his hometown and to take up his job in the Cement factory, only to find that since he has been at war, the way the factory is run has changed, as it is now part of the soviet machine. Added to that, his wife Dasha has, since he left, become the head of the women’s section of the communist Party in the factory. She is the new woman of those soviet posters. Added to this is Polya, another strong woman, but she is more drawn to Gleb as the returning hero from the war. She has sacrificed having a husband to fight for the party and is drawn when Gleb returns to this man especially as Gleb and his wife seems to have grown apart Added to this there is Kleist a man that sold out Galeb during the war sold him out to the white guard Gleb has to accept he is been taking back in and the fact that he is a scientist. The book sees how Gleb adjusts to the return to civilian life and the soviet era.

In the morning, Gleb, still asleep, felt that the room was not a room but an empty hole. A breeze was blowing between the window and door, whirling in gusts, redolent of spring. He opened his eyes. It was true; the sun was blazing through the window. Dasha was standing at the table, adjusting her flaming headscarf. She glanced at him and laughed. An amber light shone in her eyes.

“We don’t sleep as late as this here, Gleb. The sun is beating down like a drum. I’ve already worked out a report for the Women’s Section on the children’s crêches and the estimate for the linen and furniture. I’ve got it worked out, but where’s the money coming from? We’re so beggarly poor.

Our Party Committee should be given a jolt, so they’ll squeeze something out of the bourgeois. I’m going to kick up a row about it from now on. And you, remember you haven’t seen Nurka yet. Do you want to go with me to the Children’s Home? It’s close by.”

The party runs everything he finds out !

This has it all, really: a hero returning to a post-war landscape of Soviet-era Russia to find a different world. The fact that his wife has changed is significant. I was reminded of the books and films I have seen about the post-World War II era, when women had to return to domestic life. This is the other side where they didn’t have the conflict between the scientist Kleist, a white guard man who had sold out Gleb, but now back in the factory, adding to Gleb’s woes, then the two women, his wife, who has changed without him, and the two of them adjusting to his return. Then Polya, a woman who had given up a relationship, is drawn to the returning hero. Add to this the party line on everything as we see one man trying to find his place in soviet era in the cement factory, trying to find his place and be part of the whole maybe the choice of the Cement factory was a good metaphor for what they wanted a bond workforce  Post the revolution of men and women working along side enemies alongside one another. I enjoyed this. I have read a couple of other soviet realist novels, but if you know of any others, let me know!