Mermaids and Ikons - Gwendolyn MacEwen

A short poetic memory of her time in Greece.  She evokes some nice images and some playful ideas.  You can here the 60s speaking in their search to break out of Anglo constraints.  You can also hear the long gone Greek coffee shops with music on the old Danforth Avenue in Toronto.  A forgotten world.

The Other Paris - Luc Sante

A history of Paris over the past few hundred years, though mostly focused on the 19th and early 20th centuries, because this period has much richer information sources.  The book looks at various aspects of the city (Ghosts, Zone, Canaille, Le Business) in each chapter, with an historical view of that aspect.  Very much a history of the people - which for most of this period implies poor people.  What I see underlined in this book is the fact that so much of what we consider picturesque or essential to our view of "Paris" is based on poverty and misery.  The idealized street life is in part a life of poor people with no other place to be, except a miserable hole to sleep in.   Or trying to cobble together some kind of sustenance scrambling after opportunities in the street.  There is some kind of dissonance between this idealized view of free, wide open Paris (or New York) and the poverty and misery that underlies it.  Free and wide open because so many of the inhabitants have nothing to lose and nothing to look forward to?  No future?
On the other hand, you can see how buckled down, narrow and safe life has become as western societies have become wealthier across the board, and have accumulated more things that can be lost. There has been some kind of taming of humanity, a hollowing out in some way, a domestication.  In a sense we have become farm animals - safe, secure but oh so dull.  Trade it for uncertainty, instability but ever so much excitement and stimulation?  Hmmm.  No society has made this reverse choice yet. This is what is happening in Istanbul right now actually.  As the middle class grows, the society becomes more enclosed and more homogeneous.
Hard choices.

This book also underlines how Vanishing New York by J. Moss is a bit naive in its complaint.  There is still a whiff of the white middle class tourist on a slumming run (though a small whiff, as the author has his reasons for searching out the freedom and openness of New York City).

I suppose, in a sense, there  are two types of people in this swirling mass of humanity that gave New York and Paris their character and flavour.  One, the people who are genuinely different somehow, who don't fit in - for them, the jumble and mishmash of the city represents some kind of freedom to be.  The other type are the poor and miserable for whatever reason - drugs, lack of education, generational poverty, psychological problems.  They live on the margins, not by choice, but by necessity, or through inevitability.  These are the people who are ignored when you romanticize this older time period.

The one thing that is radically different though, is the way rich and poor mixed in Paris - at the theatre, in the street, in cafes and bals.  This does not happen in Toronto (or New York any more) by the sound of things.  Probably not in Paris either, as lower income people are pushed further and further out from the centre.

This book also touches on art and its role in gentrification.  This may have actually started in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century.  Before then, artists were in the orbit of the rich and the wealthy (theory) but when art moved away from representation and tradition, (and buyers) artists ended up in the poorer areas like Montmartre.  As the artists get discovered (and also establish centres in cafes and restaurants), their milieu gets discovered, and seems so much more exciting than the run-of-the-mill.  This draws money, draws moneyed people, and we go on from there.

The Rings of Saturn - W. G. Sebald

I have finally found an image to explain Sebald's fiction.  He is a flâneur but a flâneur in the worlds of culture and history.  A melancholy flâneur, with a penchant for savouring lost time.

This book is ostensibly an account of a walking holiday around a small section of the East Coast of England, south of Norwich.  Through his wanderings he connects with former inhabitants and recounts their lives, their artistic accomplishments and the usually sad state of their former homes and mansions.  He explores the rise and fall of towns as fishing dies out, as farming fades, recounting both their heydays and their decline.   Fallen aristocratic families eking out an existence in the dilapidated remains of once glorious homes; the story of Joseph Conrad, who once worked on ships in the area; Swinburne; other smaller artists, collectors, authors who live in the area.

He is like a traveller, and his books a record of the meeting of his mind with the ghosts of the past.

A Strangeness in My Mind - Orhan Pamuk

The most beautiful ode to a city I have ever read.  Rich in details of the streets and the lives of ordinary people.  He also weaves the social and political history of Turkey and Istanbul into the background of the story.  It is a sad story, though, a lament for a lost city and a lost way of life, essentially the death of community and human warmth and the triumph of greed and materialism.
Mevlut is a beautiful character, sufi-like.

Well-written as well, with a narrator as well as characters that pop in and give their view of events or other characters in the story.

Fenland Chronicle - Sybil Marshall

A reference from the book "Fields".
A lovely chronicle of life in another time - a small village and farming community on the fens at the end of the 19th C and the beginning of the 20th C.  The original manuscript was started by the author's father in the wonderful voice of a man of little education of the time - lovely vocabulary and turns of phrases.  It reads more as spoken word than as writing.  The author finished off the book after her father's death and then went on to collect her mother's story.

A great evocation of life in another time before so much of what has shaped our life in the course of the 20th century, when people's worlds were much smaller.

Garden of the Brave in War - Terence O'Donnell

This is a wonderful book on so many levels.  Foremost, it fills me with nostalgia for a time when the world really was a different place, and travelling really meant experiencing a feeling of complete "dépaysement".  It must have been a wonderful time to travel.  What is amazing is that this other world managed to survive in Iran until the '70s outside of the big cities.  I suppose I experienced a bit of this world the first time I travelled to Turkey, and even those first one or two times a I went to France.  Sad that this is gone - at least in the countries I am interested in visiting.
The picture of Islam that emerges from O'Donnell's book is also fascinating.  It is such a different Islam from the one presented by the post revolution mullahs of Iran.  Tolerant, kind, wise, generous, forgiving, open to the joys and pleasures of the world, and the richness of human emotion.  In a way, this new hard-edged Islam is their version of the Protestant revolution.  I'm not sure it is an improvement.  There is something inhuman in that world view that links it to the new corporate social ethos that seems to be taking over our world - both are joyless, inhuman, impersonal and all about rules and regulations (that work to the institution's benefit.
The epilogue of the book also reveals the seed that has destroyed much of the richness of the world's cultures.  His wonderful traditional garden home is to be destroyed by the landlord to build a pseudo-western suburb for Iran's emerging middle class with cars.
The book is full of wonderful anecdotes with a collection of memorable characters.

Silent House - Orhan Pamuk

As usual, a very dense book.  Pamuk is very good a evoking in detail the lives and thoughts of his characters.  While this book purports to portray the 1980s leading up to the military coup, I don't get the feeling of another time, another place.  The one thing that marks this looking back is the politics between the nationalists and the communists.  But I think this schism between poor traditionalists and westernized elites still goes on (perhaps this is his point?)
The contrast of the character of Fatma Hanım in her dilapidated house on the Marmara with her visiting Istanbul grandchildren, Pamuk does create a sense of how much turkish society has changed in three or four generations, both materially and culturally.  It has been an enormous voyage.

Pamuk has included a wonderful apology for reading and writing in the last page of the book.  The thoughts of Fatma Hanım....
"You can't start out again in life, that's a carriage ride you only take once, but with a book in your hand, no matter how confusing and perplexing it might be, once you've finished it, you can always go back to the beginning; if you like, you can read it through again, in order to figure out what you couldn't understand before, in order to understand life, isn't that so, Fatma?"

Gabriel Dumont - George Woodcock (1975)

A book with some points of interest, but for a view of the Métis rebellion the biographies of Louis Riel give a better overview.  If you have already read a Riel biography, most of the historical information in the Dumont book is very much a repeat.  In the early part of the book there is a bit of a picture of the life of Dumont and the Métis before the railroad, but it is a limited picture.  I'm not sure if it is because of a lack of historical sources (this was an illiterate culture) or simply it is not Woodcock's focus.  It would be interesting to have more of a picture or a flavour of that life.
Gabriel was obviously a forceful and very intelligent man - naturally so - both in politics and in his world of hunting and living in the land.  It would also be interesting to see more of this side of him, but again he and most of his circle were illiterate, so I suppose there are  no sources.

Yet again, the church and organized religion look bad in this story, siding with the authorities in a situation where the Métis were so obviously being unjustly treated.  The same is true of politics and politicians, both during the rebellion and when Gabriel was travelling later in the States and in Quebec - no interest in the man, his people and his cause beyond the short term political usefulness he might have to them.
The end of the book is, for me, the most compelling part.  I would love to know what Dumont thought of his time with Buffalo Bill, his time in New York and the other big cities of the east coast - such a different world and not only physically, but socially and emotionally as well.  Dumont also mentions the Sioux that worked with Buffalo Bill - I can picture them there is New York with Dumont, who they would have known or at least heard of, talking of the vanished world they knew together, and maybe laughing incredulously and the world of New York and theatre.  There is also a beautiful image of his last years living in a small cabin on his nephew's farm, spending his days fishing, hunting, wandering in the prairies and hills, visiting friends and companions from his past.  He still owned his land, but he made no attempt to live the life of farming.  A stranger in this new world, it is as if he rejected it utterly and kept alive the last elements of the life, now lost, that he had loved so much.  "The years passed, and now they were uneventful, for Gabriel was no longer a man to whom his fellows called for leadership, though sometimes they asked his advice, nor did he wish to lead them.  He withdrew into the rhythms of the hunting years, doing a little trading, catching his own meat and fish, and always pleased when he had a few skins to sell at one of the stores in Batoche or Duck Lake... He thought of that past without guilt and without rancour, glorying in his own deeds as Homer's heroes must have done, yet sad always for that vanished primitive world to which he had been so superbly adapted. (p. 250 -251)
As an aside, I wonder if that is not the fate of all older people in our modern world.  Things change so much, the world you loved and knew so well disappears, leaving you marooned with your memories and your past...  Ties in with immigrants too, and with developing countries where people crowd into the big cities, leaving their life and culture behind for a completely unfamiliar universe.