Random Harvest (1941), by James Hilton*****

James Hilton

I finished reading it again today. This is another of my "best novels ever written," and this might really be the one. The story is set in England in the 1930's, and the atmosphere when Hitler is rising to power is so much like our situation in the U.S. today. "These are the last days," he said to me once. '"We are like people in a
trance--even those of us who can see the danger ahead can do nothing to avert it--like the dream in which you drive a car towards a precipice and your foot is over the brake but you have no  physical power to press down."'

In the course of the book, Charles Rainier loves two women, and I am never quite sure that the one who wins is the right one for him.

The character Rainier seems very similar to the hero of an earlier Hilton novel, Lost Horizon. They both recover from amnesia. They both want what neither can have: a quiet life, more spiritual than physical. However, the end of Lost Horizon may not have been the end for Conway; he might have made it back to Shangri-La--which, itself, existed under a shadowy threat for the future.

How much more?

Tuesday night I fell and bumped my back. Prayed the Jesus Prayer till daylight, then spent all day yesterday being driven by my sisters from one clinic to another, as I couldn't get in touch with my doctor to ask him what I should do. In severe pain most of the time. The final opinion was that I may or may not have a small fracture of a rib or something, and I should take Tylenol. Don't know if I should continue all those other medications on top of the Tylenol, but I'm doing so. For the time being, I'm tired of trying to ask medical opinions.

Thanks to the Tylenol I did sleep several hours this morning.

Marlowe's Mephistopheles may have been wrong, but it sure feels like Purgatory.

Vachel Lindsay, Poet

Apropos of the the Congo River, I like Vachel Lindsay's poem "The Congo: a Study of the Negro Race." Lindsay died in 1931; he didn't know such words were politically incorrect. I love "the cake-walk princes lean" and the "hats that were covered with diamond-dust," and "coal-black maidens with pearls in their hair."

"THEN I SAW THE CONGO CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK,
CUTTING THROUGH THE JUNGLE WITH A GOLDEN TRACK.. . .

"Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM!
A roaring, epic, rag-time tune
From the mouth of the Congo
To the Mountains of the Moon.
Death is the Elephant,
Torch-eyed and horrible . . .



"Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you,
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you,
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you."






Sometimes I get so impatient with the spacing, I just give up.

The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, by Maya Jasanoff****

"Tumbling down the rapids from Kinshasa to the Atlantic, the Congo River bursts out of Africa with such force that you can see its sediment churning into the sea for hundred of miles offshore, tinting the blue ocean brown. That was the first violence Konrad would have witnessed as he approached the Congo Free State on the Ville de Maceto in June 1890." - TDW p. 186

Joseph Conrad was born in 1857 and died in 1924. He was born Josef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, in Poland which was part of the Russian empire. Early in his adulthood he went to live in England, became a naturalized British citizen, and considered himself an English writer. He worked as a sailor, holding various posts, for twenty years, then quit to write full-time. He married a Miss Jessie George; the book says she was homely, but her photograph is lovely.

Conrad's major novels were written after his retirement to England. They included Almayer's Folly, Nostromo, Lord Jim, and Heart of Darkness. His only "best-seller" during his lifetime was Lord Jim, which was immensely popular soon after its publication.

One Saturday morning in August 1924, Conrad went to see a house that he was thinking about moving to. He had a bout of chest pain during the trip. He went to bed with the doctor's diagnosis of indigestion. His breathing became difficult, and he was placed on oxygen. Next day he felt well enough to get up and sit in his chair; Jessie was laid up in the next room with injured knees from an earlier accident, and she and Conrad called to each other from their rooms. Then "everyone in the house heard a thump. Conrad had fallen dead from his chair...." He was buried in "the kind Kentish earth." TDW

A quotation by the author regarding Heart of Darkness: "Anyone could be savage. Everywhere could go dark."

Joseph Conrad's works that I have read:

The Secret Agent
Lord Jim

An Outcast of the Islands

Falk

The Nigger of the Narcissus

Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

Conrad and his cousin

                                                                                         Jessie George Conrad

                                                                                             From a Getty image

Turtles All the Way Down, by John Green****

To me, this seems the most complex and interesting of all the John Green books I have read. The four teenagers, Aya, Daisy, Davis, and Noah react in different ways to the disappearance of Mr. Pickett, the boys' billionaire father. Aya's father died several years earlier, and she knows something of what the boys are going through. She sympathizes especially with Noah, Pickett's younger son, who grieves for his father, whereas Davis the older son knows his father's darker side and has moments of being glad the man is gone. Aya and Davis love each other, at least as good friends, and their relationship is affected by Aya's lifelong mental problems. Daisy is more practical minded than her friend, and she tells Aya to forget about the search for Mr. Pickett, but Aya refuses and eventually finds a solution to the mystery.

This is a wonderful book. It's strange that the most recent two books I've read were both about a disappearing person and an obsessive searcher who solves the mystery.

Jed came over yesterday. He brought me the John Green book, and I read it last night and today. Yesterday we drove to Moody and explored a large, very nice retirement community. I've been thinking about whether I should give up my house full of junk and stairs in favor of an orderly and patterned residence for my late years. So far, the answer is "no," but who knows what I'll think tomorrow.

Leaving Time, by Jodi Picoult****

"Ghoulies and ghosties and ill-tempered beasties, and things that go bump in the night." Jenna is a teen-aged girl whose mother disappeared ten years earlier, and Jenna keeps searching for her. She is aided in her search by two people she meets, Serenity who has been a real working psychic but thinks she has lost her abilities, and Virgil who worked with the police when Jenna's mother disappeared. Jenna's mother, Alice, was a professional scientist and writer, working with African and Asian elephants, and some of the pachyderms are real characters in the story.

This is our book for the August book club meeting. I think this it's a very good choice. I've read two other books by Picoult, Nineteen Minutes and My Sister's Keeper. I think it's impossible to say which is the best of the three.