Reading Wednesday
Aug. 17th, 2016 12:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane: A True Story of Victorian Law and Disorder: The First Unsolved Murder of the Victorian Age by Paul Thomas Murphy. In 1871, on a secluded road just outside of London, a young woman named Jane Clouson was violently murdered. Suspicion immediately turned to Edmund Pook, the young man of the house where Jane had been working as a maid, who was arrested and brought to trial but ultimately acquitted. Some of the most damning evidence (including that Jane had told multiple people that she was pregnant by Edmund, that he had promised to marry her despite the class difference, and that she was supposed to meet him the night of her murder) was ruled inadmissible "hearsay" in court, since no one had actually seen Jane and Edmund together – they only had what Jane had told them. The case became a media frenzy, with sympathy for or against Edmund dividing along class lines; the title of the book even comes from a penny dreadful written at the time.
I like to read historical true-crime not so much for the detailed accounts of the crime itself, but for the way a good author can use a single event to illustrate larger issues of social context and historical change. Murphy does a good job of that, particularly in discussing the place of "maids of all work" like Jane. They were often the only servants in a middle class household and thus were forced to interact and depend on their employers in a very different way than servants who were part of the large workforce of noble households. The account of the legal process of accusation and trial were also fascinating. At the time, England did not have an official public prosecutor's office. This forced the police into the role of both investigator and prosecutor, roles that necessarily came into conflict; you can't be both an impartial seeker out of all knowledge and engaged in proving the guilt of one specific individual. This difficulty is a large part of why Edmund eventually went free, since the police were accused of misconduct both for focusing on him and letting other potential leads go and for not prosecuting him as zealously as Jane's supporters wished. The ultimate damned if you do, damned if you don't situation!
I would have liked a bit more social context, particularly regarding what happened after the trial, but overall the book is well-written and interesting. I recommend it if you already like the genre, but it's probably not the one to convert non-believers.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Love in Exile by Ayse Kulin. Translated from Turkish by Kenneth Dakan. A (very slightly) fictionalized account of a family living in Istanbul in the 1920s and 30s – that is, immediately after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and during the early establishing years of the Turkish Republic. The focus is very much not on politics, but on the internal life of a family: marriages, pregnancies, achievements in school, parties, clothes, food, living arrangements, and so on.
It's hard to summarize this novel, because there's not much of a plot; it's a series of disconnected incidents, very much like if you tried to write down all the various stories and legends of your own family verbatim – which indeed seems to be more or less the case. So many scenes appear and disappear without any connection to what happens before or after: "oh, here's the story about the time our aunt had a bad time at a party", "here's the story of our cousin's graduation", "here's the day we discovered sister's diary behind a dresser and read it secretly". There's no particular beginning or end, and no momentum from one to the other. The closest thing to an overarching thread is the relationship between Sabahat, the youngest daughter of a rich, formerly aristocratic Muslim family, and Aram, a Christian Armenian (the Armenian genocide, despite being fairly central to Aram's backstory, is handled with the briefest of mentions, but not denied). However, they frequently drop from focus and the book ends without resolving their story – it's apparently continued in another book by Kulin – so it's hard to credit that as the central plot.
My other complaint – also probably related to this being about the author's real family – is the sheer number of characters thrown at the reader. The first five pages literally introduce sixteen named characters (I counted!), which is a hell of a hurdle to get over before one can sink into the book. And then ninety pages later Kulin does it again, switching focus to an entirely different family with its own family tree that needs to be memorized. That said, the writing is quite nice on a sentence level, and it's certainly an easy, enjoyable read. The setting and time-period is fascinating, even if I would have liked slightly more about politics and other outside events.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
What are you currently reading?
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. I've had this book sitting on my shelf waiting for me to read it for literally years, and now I have finally gotten around to it. Mainly propelled by my theory that the best thing to read about during the overwhelming heat of August is people suffering in the cold.
Rusalka by C.J. Cherryh. Also theoretically part of my 'cold weather' reading, but I guessed wrong – it might be fantasy set in Russia, but it's spring, not winter.
Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane: A True Story of Victorian Law and Disorder: The First Unsolved Murder of the Victorian Age by Paul Thomas Murphy. In 1871, on a secluded road just outside of London, a young woman named Jane Clouson was violently murdered. Suspicion immediately turned to Edmund Pook, the young man of the house where Jane had been working as a maid, who was arrested and brought to trial but ultimately acquitted. Some of the most damning evidence (including that Jane had told multiple people that she was pregnant by Edmund, that he had promised to marry her despite the class difference, and that she was supposed to meet him the night of her murder) was ruled inadmissible "hearsay" in court, since no one had actually seen Jane and Edmund together – they only had what Jane had told them. The case became a media frenzy, with sympathy for or against Edmund dividing along class lines; the title of the book even comes from a penny dreadful written at the time.
I like to read historical true-crime not so much for the detailed accounts of the crime itself, but for the way a good author can use a single event to illustrate larger issues of social context and historical change. Murphy does a good job of that, particularly in discussing the place of "maids of all work" like Jane. They were often the only servants in a middle class household and thus were forced to interact and depend on their employers in a very different way than servants who were part of the large workforce of noble households. The account of the legal process of accusation and trial were also fascinating. At the time, England did not have an official public prosecutor's office. This forced the police into the role of both investigator and prosecutor, roles that necessarily came into conflict; you can't be both an impartial seeker out of all knowledge and engaged in proving the guilt of one specific individual. This difficulty is a large part of why Edmund eventually went free, since the police were accused of misconduct both for focusing on him and letting other potential leads go and for not prosecuting him as zealously as Jane's supporters wished. The ultimate damned if you do, damned if you don't situation!
I would have liked a bit more social context, particularly regarding what happened after the trial, but overall the book is well-written and interesting. I recommend it if you already like the genre, but it's probably not the one to convert non-believers.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Love in Exile by Ayse Kulin. Translated from Turkish by Kenneth Dakan. A (very slightly) fictionalized account of a family living in Istanbul in the 1920s and 30s – that is, immediately after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and during the early establishing years of the Turkish Republic. The focus is very much not on politics, but on the internal life of a family: marriages, pregnancies, achievements in school, parties, clothes, food, living arrangements, and so on.
It's hard to summarize this novel, because there's not much of a plot; it's a series of disconnected incidents, very much like if you tried to write down all the various stories and legends of your own family verbatim – which indeed seems to be more or less the case. So many scenes appear and disappear without any connection to what happens before or after: "oh, here's the story about the time our aunt had a bad time at a party", "here's the story of our cousin's graduation", "here's the day we discovered sister's diary behind a dresser and read it secretly". There's no particular beginning or end, and no momentum from one to the other. The closest thing to an overarching thread is the relationship between Sabahat, the youngest daughter of a rich, formerly aristocratic Muslim family, and Aram, a Christian Armenian (the Armenian genocide, despite being fairly central to Aram's backstory, is handled with the briefest of mentions, but not denied). However, they frequently drop from focus and the book ends without resolving their story – it's apparently continued in another book by Kulin – so it's hard to credit that as the central plot.
My other complaint – also probably related to this being about the author's real family – is the sheer number of characters thrown at the reader. The first five pages literally introduce sixteen named characters (I counted!), which is a hell of a hurdle to get over before one can sink into the book. And then ninety pages later Kulin does it again, switching focus to an entirely different family with its own family tree that needs to be memorized. That said, the writing is quite nice on a sentence level, and it's certainly an easy, enjoyable read. The setting and time-period is fascinating, even if I would have liked slightly more about politics and other outside events.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
What are you currently reading?
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. I've had this book sitting on my shelf waiting for me to read it for literally years, and now I have finally gotten around to it. Mainly propelled by my theory that the best thing to read about during the overwhelming heat of August is people suffering in the cold.
Rusalka by C.J. Cherryh. Also theoretically part of my 'cold weather' reading, but I guessed wrong – it might be fantasy set in Russia, but it's spring, not winter.
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