eileenlufkin

One nice thing about the Newbery project is that I learn so much about places that I previously knew nothing about. For instance, until I read Elizabeth Miller’s Pran of Albania, I knew nothing about Albania except the sworn mountain virgins, women who swear to remain virgins and hitherto go dressed as men with a rifle slung across their back.

(Miller, searching for a reference point her readers will understand, once describes them as “nuns,” which inevitably made me think of demon-fighting nuns from anime. Nuns! With guns!)

For a while it looked like this book wasn’t going to have any sworn mountain virgins, but I should have had more faith in the 1930s Newberies to go charging right into whatever Gender is available to their plucky heroines. Of course there are sworn mountain virgins in this book! Indeed, Pran herself is a sworn mountain virgin for five whole chapters!

Then she realizes that the man she is betrothed to IS in fact the boy she has a crush on and decides that after all she wouldn’t mind getting married, because at the end of the day it’s still the 1930s and the toys have to go back in the box at the end. But before that, she uses her sworn mountain virgin status to speak at a council meeting (only men and old women and sworn mountain virgins can speak) in favor of continuing the truce that has temporarily put a halt to the law of blood feud.

The truce is in place because the mountain tribes of Albania had to band together to fight off a Slav invasion earlier in the year. During this war, Pran had an epiphany about the futility and ugliness of all war, and her later speech against the blood feud is a step on the long, long pathway toward getting rid of war entirely.

Now, to be honest, I normally groan over children’s books with the message War Is Bad, simply because I’ve read so many of them at this point. Yes, yes, war is bad, tell me something I don’t know. But it worked for me here, I think because Miller is not simply parroting received wisdom but sharing her own passionate, personal conviction, in a literary world where children’s books will argue other sides of the question.

In Miller’s Pran of Albania and Kate Seredy’s The Singing Tree, war is bad. But Herbert Best’s Garram the Hunter is an argument that war preparedness is necessary for any people who means to remain free. In Julia Davis Adams’ Vaino: A Boy of New Finland, the people of Finland win their freedom through a war that is dangerous and frightening but above all necessary, a point she makes again in Mountains Are Free, a retelling of the tale of William Tell.

You don’t know what you’re going to get, and it means that whatever you end up getting is interesting. There’s a lot to be said for cultivating the unexpected.

A rare edition of What I Quit Reading. Last week I was struggling with Sebastian Smee’s The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art, but decided that might be because the first part was about two artists I’m not familiar with, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. So I went on to part two, which is about Degas (I love Degas!) and Manet (Smee’s other book Paris in Ruins made me interested in Manet!)... and unfortunately I didn’t particularly care for this section either. It lacks the firm grounding in the wider historical milieu and social world of the Impressionists that made Paris in Ruins so absorbing. So onward and upward to other books.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

My break from the Newberies lasted about two seconds, and then I was back in the saddle with Lesa Cline-Ransome’s One Big Open Sky, which is written in verse (ever since Out of the Dust, Newbery books written in verse have frightened me), and printed in eight-point font, which is not the author’s fault but MY EYES.

However, despite these unpropitious first impressions, I enjoyed the book as a whole. Like Out of the Dust, it’s historical fiction about a family in a hard time. In this case, Lettie’s Black family is migrating from Mississippi to Nebraska in 1879, looking for a new start. A covered wagon story with all the covered wagon trials (is someone going to get cholera?) plus the extra concern that white men might attack their caravan, but overall more successful than Out of the Dust at portraying hardship without slipping into misery porn.

I also read Patrick Bringley’s All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, which is about Bringley’s decade as a security guard in the Met after his brother Tom’s death.

There is a very moving passage about going to a museum with his mother soon after Tom’s death, and finding his mother standing in front of a painting of a Pieta, Mary holding the body of her dead son. Throughout the book Bringley insists on the importance of an emotional connection to art, the primacy of the personal above learning facts by rote - primacy in the literal sense that this is what comes first: why would we care to learn facts about Degas if his ballerinas weren’t so beautiful?

But, as with Paris in Ruins, sometimes learning more about an artist’s life can make you want to revisit their art - to feel that there is more to be seen in it than you have seen heretofore…

Anyway he’s not in any sense arguing against learning facts, just arguing that to really experience a work of art you have to bring not just your intellect and your facts but your whole self, your emotions; to allow yourself to be moved.

What I’m Reading Now

D. E. Stevenson’s Mrs. Tim Gets a Job, which is like a warm bath. Right after World War II, Mrs. Tim’s husband has been posted to Egypt and her children are both in boarding school. At loose ends, she takes a job helping to run a hotel in Scotland. On the train to the hotel, she meets a man who is baffled because his fiancee has just broken off their engagement after years of correspondence over the war. And then at the hotel, Mrs. Tim meets a girl who just broke up with her fiance, because she is simply so exhausted after years of looking after an invalid aunt that she feels she can never make a good wife…

What I Plan to Read Next

Eight Newberies left. The next one on deck is Ralph Hubbard’s Queer Person.