Author Mark Munger (Cloquet River Press)

                                                INTERVIEW OF ERIC PELTONEIMI

MM:

Let’s start with your Finnish roots.

EP: 

I was born in St. Paul while my Dad was in law school. Kip was, too. My Dad was born and raised in New York Mills which used to be a very Finnish town. You could hear the language spoken on the street, at the creamery and in the restaurant and barber shop. By the time I was four and a half years old we had moved back to the Mills area for a brief stay at my grandparent’s farm, then to nearby Wadena. My brother and sister and I often spent time at the farm in our younger days and would go into town with Grandpa where we heard him talking to his friends in Finnish. We also went to the farm for sauna. Grandpa sang songs to me when I was younger, but the Finnish side of the family were Apostolic so we didn’t hear much from them. They did have an old cylinder record player with some Finnish cylinder recordings. Later family friend Irja Hanson properly introduced me to Finnish songs and gave me songbooks from Finland. My Dad read to us from an English translation of Kalevala.

MM:

Like being a real estate novelist (my apologies to Billy Joel), choosing a career in music is a pretty risky endeavor.

EP:

When I was out at the farm, I often went through my Grandpa’s dresser so I could see his WWI medals and silver Colt revolver. He was a wounded and earned the Silver Star. My mother never knew, but he let me shoot the pistol when I got older. One day when I was 11 or 12, I crawled under my grandmother’s bed and discovered an old Sears mail order guitar in a dusty case. My Grandma told me it was hers and that she used play in a family band with her sister on fiddle and her dad on pump organ. They weren’t Finns but used to play ‘old timey’ country music at house parties and barn dances. Grandma’s mother was from Scotland so they also played Scottish songs like “Annie Laurie.” I tinkered with the untuned guitar every time I was at the farm and one day, she just gave it to me. My best friend got an old guitar from his grandparents, as well: his older brother already played and taught us how to tune the strings and showed us chords. We began playing old-time country: songs by Eddy Arnold, Ray Price, and others, and we were off to the races. Eventually, we played fairs, town dances, and appeared on local radio and television. We liked all kinds of music: early rock, doo-wop, folk, and started writing songs. We later got into old country blues artists, singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan, and some of the British Invasion bands.

MM:

Was Finnish spoken at home? What’s your proficiency in the language?

EP:

My mother wasn’t Finnish so it wasn’t spoken in the home. She was Swedish and Norwegian, although if she had lived a little longer, Ancestry.com would have showed she was also part Finn. Kip and I only heard Finnish from our grandfather, his brothers and friends, and the little bit of what my Dad knew. Finnish as a language was already disappearing. Our local music store in Wadena had a large section of albums imported from Finland and we bought a copy of every one of them. I started picking up Finnish from those songs and took Finnish classes as well. I have never been strong as a Finnish speaker. I was at my peak back in the 1990s and 2000s when I was in Finland more often. I’ve lost a lot of it in recent years, but when I go to Finland to hang out with my friends, comes back a little.

MM:

Watching the great Finnish film Ikitie (about Jussi Ketola) I noticed you wrote a song for the film, “Punainen”. Talk a bit about that song and writing songs in Finnish.

EP:

I didn’t write “Punainen” for the film. I’d written it in the 1990s in response to first hand stories of historic persecution and prejudice against Finns. I may have only sung it publicly a couple of times, but while in Finland, I taught the song to my friend Hannu Saha’s son, Topi, who began singing it. The song supervisor for Ikitie was Karri Miettinen and he happened to hear Topi sing it. He played it for producer Ilkka Matila and director AJ Annila. They loved it and asked me if it could be part of the film. After getting my OK, they decided I should be in the film, too. The scene in the film with the song wasn’t in Antti Turri’s novel, but he also loved the idea of creating a scene for the song. AJ, Ilkka, and Antti were great people to work with. The film is about a very dark chapter of Finnish, Finnish American, and Finnish-Canadian history in Karelia. But the film was expertly written, directed, and acted by some of Finland’s, Denmark’s, and Estonia’s best actors. It was shot mostly in Estonia and I had a ball doing it!

In the late 1980s or early 1990s, Finnish folklorists toured  the UP, Wisconsin, and Minnesota recording Finnish Americans singing Finnish songs. Someone turned them on to me and they came to my house to record me,  which led to me recording an album of Finnish and Finnish-themed songs for EiNo Records in Helsinki. The theme of that year’s Kaustinen Folk Festival was Juuret Suomessa, so  they brought a whole bunch of us over to sing and play at the festival.

I’ve been back several times, touring clubs and playing festivals. It’s kind of my second home and, honestly, I think I have more friends there than I do here! Finland is a very natural place for me demographically and culturally. It also happens to be ranked as one of the top five societies in the world.

MM:

An online biography indicates that, after honing your musical skills in the area you were raised, you migrated to folk/rock music and played in several bands, including Trova, Suomi Orkesteri, and Trova Ystavineen.

EP:

I like playing solo and with bands equally. I like the interaction with other musicians, but playing solo allows you to dive deeper into a song.  I left full-time playing with a band to focus at Red House Records which was demanding more of my time. But I wouldn’t rule out playing in the right group again. In 1969, I’d been in college, but not very focused in my studies (I mostly played music in coffeehouse). The Vietnam War was on and I got tired of renewing my student deferment so I enlisted in the Air Force. To my surprise, I was rejected from the services as 4F. I immediately dropped out of school, headed to New York City, and started to play my songs around Greenwich Village. There has been no looking back.

MM:

You’ve worked in musical theater, writing music and lyrics for the stage. I note that one of the most influential works you had a hand in, Ten November (working with playwright Steven Dietz) not only drew regional accolades for the work but the music from the play became an album featuring yourself and some great regional names in folk music: Prudence Johnson, Ruth Mackenzie, Peter Ostroushko, and others.

EP:

Writing songs and music for film and the theater differs only in that I’m more often writing about something specific to the plot or general theme; the tools and skills I have accrued over the last 60 years are the same. I’ve never written a theatrical song for an already existing plot. I’ve always been a full partner working side by side with the playwright creating the play.

Ten November was a life-changing experience–very meaningful to me and probably the highlight of my career. Its Great Lakes theme dealt not only the Edmond Fitzgerald story, but with other shipwrecks: the power of nature and loss. It also examined potential causes of the sinking, the legal ramifications, and the human components. I met people who’d lost a family member on the Fitzgerald and other wrecks. Their positive response to the show was a humbling experience.

MM:

In addition to all your creative work, you took over the reins of one of the most beloved (at least by me!) folk/Americana labels in the music industry, Red House Can you give the readers of FAR a short history of Red House and its work in promoting musicians that aren’t always household names? I believe the notion of an independent label headquartered in St. Paul, MN started as idea that Greg Brown, another legendary singer/songwriter, shared with Bob Feldman.

EP:

After going to New York for a couple of years as a performing artist, my management moved our operations to Los Angeles. While there I had a day job working for an artist studio that designed many of the iconic LP packages of early 70s rock and pop music. I was just a lackey there but I picked up a lot of skills relating to the music business. After LA and a short time in San Francisco I moved back home, got married and had a child on the way. I decided to stop actively performing then and focus on the album production side of the music. I produced two albums for Flying Fish Records in Chicago and a well-received album for Spider John Koerner. In the course of the Koerner project, I met Bob who had recently started Red House Records with Greg Brown. Bob was a terrific entrepreneur but was doing all of the label work from his dining room. He wanted the Koerner project at Red House. I agreed and we became friends. At some point I noticed I was actually working at Red House and had become the first employee. My skills and Bob’s skills complimented each other, and due to a convergence of many factors, like the emergence of A Prairie Home Companion (our national platform), our artist roster and own talents, Red House grew into an internationally-distributed record label earning Grammy Awards.

MM:

Red House promoted and sold music written and performed by some of America’s best: Jorma Kaukonen, John Gorka, Eliza Gilkyson, Lucy Kaplansky, Spider John Koerner, and many others. What was your day-to-day role in signing performers and supervising the production of their music at the label?

EP:

I either produced a recording session in the studio myself or interacted with outside producers we brought in for a specific project. Originally, everything was recorded in the Twin Cities. But soon our artists were being recorded in New York, Austin, Nashville, Los Angeles, Canada, Scotland, and England. Part of my job was trying to make sure we got the best results we could, without running up too much cost¾a lot of time on the phone and staring at a computer screen! I also interacted with artists at the recording stage, discussing their projects and what they hoped to achieve. Finally, I coordinated designers around the country commissioned to design album packaging.

MM:

One of the founders of Red House passed in 2017 and eventually, the label was purchased from his estate by Compass Records, a Nashville, TN label. Talk a bit about that process and what led to you leaving Red House? What have you been doing to keep your own creative juices flowing since Red House was acquired by Compass and you left your post as President of Red House?

EP:

Bob died in 2006 and I became president of the label with the mission of carrying on our vision. I stayed on as president for over ten years but longed to get back to my own creative work. The record industry was changing, and I thought the label could use some younger leadership. I took a sabbatical and went to Spain. My wife’s family is from Spain; most of her relatives are there. I spent time with them and walked the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage by myself. It was a fantastic experience and when I came back, I’d pretty much decided to retire from Red House. The label carried on for a couple more years, and then Bob’s wife Beth decided to sell it to Compass. Garry West and Allison Brown, who run Compass, are old friends and have a similar mission so it was the perfect hand off.

MM:

Any chance we’ll see you and/or your musical brother, Kip, performing at the upcoming Finn Fest in Duluth? Where can folks find your music?

EP:

Kip and I will both be there, though not performing together like we often do. I’m looking forward to it. I hope folks can come.

As for my music, my Finnish albums are out of print. The only two recordings currently available are my solo English-language album, Songs of Sad Laughter and the cast recording of Ten November. Prudence Johnson, Ruth MacKenzie, Claudia Schmidt, the late Peter Ostroushko, Dan Chouinard, Jeffrey Willkomm and I toured a concert version of the play’s music three times around the Great Lakes states under the name “Gales of November” to differentiate our concerts from the actual play.

Like the shoemaker’s children who go barefoot, I’ve been slow to make new recordings (COVID partly being to blame), but I have some new stuff in the works that might be ready by Finn Fest. I also love doing house concerts. Folks can Contact me if they’re interested in producing such an event at [email protected] !

(This interview first appeared in the April 2023 issue of the Finnish American Reporter.)

I’m at it again. After spending two decades exploring Finnish, Finnish American, and Finnish Canadian culture; and after writing three historical novels from that experience and research (Suomalaiset, Sukulaiset, and Kotmaa); I’m returning to my maternal grandfather’s roots in hilly, southern Slovenia. My first novel, The Legacy was part historical novel set in WW II and part present-day murder mystery/thriller. I’m following that pattern in my present manuscript (working title, Slovenec: The Slovenian) and crafting a very rough draft of a fictional story while researching the Slovenian Partisans, the Croatian Ustashi, the Serbian Chetneks, and the Holocaust as it happened in the former Yugoslavia. That’s the projected first half of the book. The second half will take the characters (those that survive!) from the war to present day.

Anyway. 

The Heretic is a fine biography of Josip Broz’s (Tito’s) life from birth through the book’s release (1957). This extensive volume takes the reader through the war hero’s formative years as a young Communist, to his break with the Soviet Union (after WW II), and ends analyzing the upset caused by Poland’s and Hungary’s challenges to U.S.S.R. Marxist-Leninist primacy during the late 50’s. Maclean, who ended his career in the British Army as a brigadier general (and also served in Parliment) parachuted into Yugoslavia during the war to meet and work with Tito and the Partisans. Much of his writing about the Field Marshall of Yugoslavia comes directly from Tito’s mouth through the leader’s personal stories and the interactions between the two men. In addition, the geopolitical aspects of Yugoslavian story are well-researched and based upon Maclean’s exhaustive review of Balkan history. The book is well-written, gives a fair and balanced view of Tito’s faults and talents, and will be the cornerstone for my writing about the post-war situation in the reformatted Yugoslavia.

A must read if you are interested in a fascinating man and nation, no longer in existence, with a tortured past.

4 and 1/2 stars out of 5.

 

Not to be confused with movies bearing the same name, this novel is not a book I would have purchased for myself. I’d never heard of it despite the novel being on the NYT’s Bestseller list. I’d also never heard of the author. But someone gave The Matrix to me as a gift, it was in my “to read” stack for quite awhile, and I finally plucked it from fictional purgatory and to give it a read.

Marie, the protagonist and heroine in this tale, is a tall, strong, strapping and not-so-very-pretty young woman when the novel begins. She’s infatuated (likely sexually) with Eleanor, a Queen of both France and the rough and unruly hinterlands of England. There is only one Christian faith and church during the story’s timeframe (approximately around the time of the last of Crusade) and ultimately, because Marie is a bastard (the product of the rape of her mother by a nobleman) and unmarriageable, the girl is sent to live in a convent across the English Channel. This is, in essence, the life story of a girl turned nun turned force of nature who transforms her dreary existence as a novice to become Abbess, eventually wielding great power and authority; a standing in the world that the Queen herself cannot break or harness. 

Written in a tone and style that reminds the reader of the best fairy tales and ancient legends, it is easy to respect and admire Marie’s pluck, resolve, and grit. Harder is the task of grasping exactly what her faith is, the basis of her beliefs, and whether she is actually, deep in her soul, a good Catholic or a heretic. In one very moving scene, when there’s no opportunity for a priest to make his way to the Abby to conduct Communion, Marie puts on priestly vestments, hears confession, and conducts Mass, all to murmurs of apostasy and horror amongst her most ardent followers.

I liked this book’s style, story, and pacing a great deal and found it a hard tale to put down despite my early reservations that it might not be, as the English say, “my cup of tea.”

5 stars out of 5. A great bookclub read!

 

Another one of my Audible “listens” while working out at the local Y. Also a book club pick by a member of my book club. I will be frank. I would have never read this novel, one filled with speculations about life’s origins, meanings, astrophysics featuring a fairly unlikeable father and his savant/genius autistic son. But because it was selected by one of my book club guys, well, I gave it a listen to fulfill my duty.

Guess what? I actually enjoyed the story. It challenged me in ways similar to how I’d been challenged as a young college student when I reading Ursula LeGuin as part of a political science course on utopias. LeGuin, a fine, fine literary writer who chose to write fantasy and science fiction, is my bellwether when it comes to speculative fiction like Bewilderment. I thoroughly enjoyed following Robin’s, the autistic child’s, meanderings in and around genius and his emotive angst regarding the status of our fragile Earth. I was less enthralled with the character of Theo, the father, who, to my tastes, was a cardboard cutout of a man. Oh, I’ll concede that he’s dedicated to his son, having been made a widower by a car accident that claimed his wife and Robin’s mother, and spends every moment when not at work trying to mentor and father his child. But he is one angry, unpleasant, self-centered, mess of a human being. In addition, the ancillary characters don’t really add a whole hell of a lot to what is, at it’s core, a rumination on planet Earth, human existence, faith, science, and the unknown.

Good writing, not great writing, a passable plot line (though be warned, the ending is very predictible), and one memorable character who will stick in your mind in the manner of Owen Meany.

4 stars out of 5.

That’s it for now, folks!

Peace

Mark

Another of my listens while exercising at the local Y. Here’s my pitch: Don’t be swayed away from this great piece of writing by those who have panned the book, including Bill Steigerwald’s “exposés” concerning the narrative and timeline that form this travelogue. This is an exemplary piece of “road writing”, one that lays out an America Steinbeck encountered when he packed up his pickup truck and its camper, placed his standard poodle Charley in the cab’s passenger seat, and set off to explore his native country. 

Steinbeck spent his youth and much of his adulthood in California and New York. The journey he depicts in Travels starts on Long Island and ends there as well. In between, the author navigates two-lanes, and the occasional expressway, from Maine to the West Coast, through Texas and the Deep South, before returning home. The ending will bring a smile to your face so I won’t spoil it here. But the storytelling to be found in Steinbeck’s greatest prose, Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, Of Mice and Men is on full display here. Critics, like Steigerwald, who pan the itinerary and factual basis of these terrific essays, miss the entire point of the book. Who cares if Steinbeck met or didn’t meet the folks he portrays? Who cares if he spent more nights in motels and hotels than roughing it in his camper? The yarns he tells and the landscapes he paints give us a glimpse of the America he discovered along the way: the beautiful and the ugly; the kind and the racist;  the confined countryside (New England) and the breadth of the West (especially Montana, his favorite state). 

In particular, his depiction of the sadness and the anger he witnessed in the Deep South, where he drove smack dab into the midst of Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement, are touching, telling, and fist-wrenching. Steinbeck’s recounting tale of watching a young Negro (his term, not mine) girl, a “mite of a thing” as he puts it, being escorted from a federal marshal’s car by big, burly, serious white men who are there to protect her from “the Cheerleaders” (white mothers and grandmothers who scream at the little girl) inside a formerly all-white elementary school in Louisiana) is the best of the lot. Whether the event happened exactly as depicted, on the day depicted, or whether it’s a collage of what the author read in local newspapers or saw on the local news during his travels isn’t of interest to me. I’m interested in the larger story, real or imagined, placed upon the page by one of our greatest 20th century writer commenting on America and the Americans he may have (or may not have) met and distilled.

Readers and Steinbeck scholars who attack the “facts” contained in this work need to understand: this is memoir, the blending of fact and lyrical narrative that may or may not be exactly so. In my own memoir, Duck and Cover, I have hundreds of conversations in quotations and recount a similar plethora of events I believe I experienced during the beginning stages of my life. That such dialogue, settings, and events portrayed may not have happened exactly as I recall or depict doesn’t diminish the truth of my story. In similar fashion, the larger truths of Steinbeck’s travel memoir must be read with the same eye.

The fact that Gary Sinese is the narrator of the Audibile version of the book only adds frosting to this finely baked cake of a travel story.

5 stars out of 5. Don’t listen to the detractors.

Peace

Mark

Given F. Scott, the husband of Zelda, is a Minnesota author, I’ve always had a certain fascination for his work, his life, and his marriage. So, when I was in need of an audio book to listen to while walking the track and working out at the local Y, I used some of my Audible credits to load this novel into my phone.

The tale Zelda writes here is supposedly her own take on her marriage to Scott and mercurial the time they spent in France during the 1920s and 1930s. Save Me is seen by some Fitzgerald scholars as a preemptory strike against her husband. How so? The faintly autobiographical Tender is the Night was in the process when Zelda, after heavy editing by her husband to remove passages that painted him in an unflattering light (he’s the model for the husband in Zelda’s tale), found herself a publisher and launched this book into the world. There are many experts of the Fitzgerald legacy who decry Save Me the Waltz as limited in scope and value due to its fairly mundane plot and pacing. Others claim that F. Scott borrowed many of the themes from this novel (boredom, infidelity, the rigors of child birth and child rearing, and so on) and adapted those to his purposes for Tender. I’m no Fitzgerald scholar but what I will say, having listened to both books, Tender is by far the more complex and more completely executed tale. 

Save Me is, in  the end, mildly interesting, decently written, but never captivating in the manner of the author’s husband’s best work.

3 and 1/2 stars out of 5.

Peace

Mark

 

Someone gave this book to me as a present. Likely for Christmas. I don’t know for sure who gifted it to me but I am grateful. Here’s my take.

Farrow is the son of actress Mia Farrow and the step-son of Woody Allen. His sister, Dylan, rocked the world in 1992 with allegations that Allen had sexually abused her as a child. Ronan is Dylan’s brother and, though he originally disbelieved her version of events, he ultimately took her side in things. That case was investigated by local authorities and was the subject of a lengthy custody trial, which included testimony about Allen’s affair with the couple’s adopted older daughter, whom he ultimately married. The family court found no credible facts to support Dylan’s allegations but she has maintained it happened and Ronan has supported her. That’s the backstory for Ronan’s work on allegations regarding Harvey Weinstein’s rapes, assaults, and sexual misconduct against young models, actresses in films he produced through his company, Miramax, and similar incidences of conduct involving female staff at Miramax.

At the time he received tips regarding Weinstein’s behavior, Farrow was a reporter for and contributor to the Today Show on NBC. With the support of a co-worker at NBC, Rich McHugh, Farrow began interviewing the women whose names he heard or learned were allegedly abused by Weinstein. In the mix of his investigation, he ran across connections between Weinstein and David Pecker, editor of the scandal sheet, The National Enquirer, as well as snippets of information involving Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, including the story of Stormy Daniels that’s now playing out in Trump’s indictment. Many of the names he discovered as having had nonconsensual sexual interaction with Weinstein are not well known but he was able to confirm the producer’s conduct with Mira Sorvino, Roxanne Arquette, and Daryll Hannah amongst others. The writing in this nonfiction exposé that details the length and breadth and determination of Farrell’s investigation and reporting is tightly drawn, tense, and in places, reads like a James Bond script. As women begin to open up, as new sources come to light, the author begins to believe he is being followed; that someone attached to Weinstein is tailing him, sending him false leads, and trying to infiltrate confidential sources in hopes of intimidating them. Turns out, he was right to be suspicious. A notorious Israeli security firm known as Black Cube was investigating the investigator and even hired a couple of folks to pose as sympathetic ears to lure Farrow and one of his interviewees into relationships meant to undermine the investigation.

Fun stuff, this spy angle. But the real meat of the story is narrative regarding the hierarchy of NBC; from the director of news operations to the highest levels of 30 Rockefeller Plaza; and efforts from inside the network to kill the story. What is striking about the tale, when one finally closes the back cover and sits in reflection, is the fact that if NBC, with is history of brilliant, all-hands-on-deck reporting, can be swayed by one powerful predator to walk away from a story, what else have the major networks (and perhaps even PBS) been manipulated into ignoring? 

Besides Ronan Farrow and his partner at NBC, there are other heroes in this tale, most notably, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC who didn’t bow to an order from on high not to ask the fateful question: What did the hierarchy of NBC know about Weinstein and when did the bosses know it? She bluntly, and bravely asked that question and, to his credit, Farrow answered it, costing him his job.

A brilliant piece of nonfiction writing. My only criticism is that the Matt Lauer story, though important because it shows the culture of “don’t ask, don’t tell” within NBC, doesn’t really belong in this book to the depth it’s included. It’s tale that deserves its own telling in a separate book.

4 and 1/2 stars out of 5.

Peace

Mark

 

I “inherited” this hardcover (JPEG and ISBN above relate to the paperback version) from my maternal grandfather’s collection of outdoor books. I found it when I was pulling books from my 94-year-old mother’s shelf, getting things ready for an estate sale because she was moving from her lovely townhome on the St. Louis River into assisted living. Hard move, for sure. For all concerned, especially for Mom, who grew up skipping stones and catching frogs at the family resort on Bear Island Lake between Babbitt and Ely. Anyway. It’s a signed copy (by both the author and her illustrator/husband) but lacks the dust jacket, making it less a collectible and more of a family heirloom. I’d never read Hoover but had heard of her writing in the context of outdoor/wilderness writers such as Sig Olson and put the reclaimed book on my “to read” shelf, promising to get to it. And I did.

This is a bit different from say the writings of Olson or Sam Cook or Doug Wood, writers who spend considerable time exploring the spiritual value of wild places, hunting, fishing, camping, canoeing, and the like. Here, we are gifted a more domesticated view of living in a rustic cabin/home “off the grid” in the 1950s and early 60s. Hoover is quite clear that neither she nor her artist husband hunt or fish. The scenes painted by the author involving wildlife, from fisher to bear to deer mice to ruffed grouse to deer to black bear involve interactions between the animals and the human characters on rustic property up the Gunflint Trail. (I believe; she never really tells us where the cabins are) and do not involve stalking and killing animals for sustenance. This remains true even when the couple becomes snowed in, witnesses the dwindling of their food supplies, and things appear dire given they have no vehicle, no phone service, and no real neighbors close enough to assist them in times of need. But despite this personal reticence towards hunting and fishing, Hoover recognizes that such pursuits are part of the north wood’s heritage and doesn’t object, for example, to rendering aid to a wandering fur trapper who needs a place to stay, a warm fire, and food for his belly. 

The writing is easy to follow, though at times, the author’s digressions to her past life in Chicago as a scientist intrude upon the meat and potatoes of the storytelling: which is essentially the tale of two city folk trying, without much experience or knowledge, to make a home and live their lives in NE Minnesota’s rugged and remote Arrowhead country. When she gets down to describing the sights, smells, and surroundings of her adopted land, she is every bit as good a writer as the others I’ve mentioned. The fact she writes with a more, as I’ve said, inward-looking, domestic eye, is not pejorative towards her gender: her perspective as a professional, a woman, and a wife simply gives us a different perspective. And that, in my view, makes this book well worth reading.

The concluding scenes (I won’t ruin it for you here) are riveting and leave a reader (me!) wanting more. Isn’t that what good writing, nature or otherwise, should do?

4 stars out of 5.

Peace

Mark

I cheated again. I listened to this biography of Steinbeck while doing my walking/work out/stretching (in that order!) at the local YMCA (thanks, Audible!). I’m a huge fan of Steinbeck, placing East of Eden in my top ten of favorite novels. And, as a novelist and writer myself, I always enjoy peeking under the tent to see how it’s done. Here goes.

Souder’s book is as literary as it gets. His writing style is immaculate, precise, concise, and well, just plain marvelous. The portrait he paints of the tortured life of one man, banging away at the keys, trying to write stories that others will enjoy, stories that will carry a message-for certain-but entertaining and well-received, is masterfully told. We journey with the author of Of Mice and Men, Travels with Charlie, Grapes of Wrath, The Red Pony, and countless other novels and short stories, from his humble California upbringing, to Stanford, to LA, to San Francisco, back to the Monterey area, to NYC, to Europe, and elsewhere all the while being a witness to the difficulties confronting those who write with an eye towards publication.

The personality quirks of Steinbeck, including his abhorrence at, yet pursuit of, fame; his seemingly manic-depression reeling from the pinnacle of happiness to the well of despair; are all chronicled here in bold and honest fashion. His loves, his friendships, his connections to other writers, his fear of rejection, his seeming lack of pride in his success (including his blasé reaction to being awarded a Pulitzer and a Nobel) are well described, detailed, and explored. 

For me, a struggling author who has now lived a longer life than the greats I admire (Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald) how others deal with the pain of literary rejection and/or criticism is in my wheelhouse and Souder does a fine job of laying out the tortured path John Steinbeck trod in this regard.

My only criticism of the book is that, in the end, after Steinbeck’s passing is chronicled, the author doesn’t explore the man’s legacy, his current standing amongst other significant writers of the 20th century. I would’ve appreciated learning what, if anything, current academics and scholars and critics think of the man’s body of work. I have my opinion but I would have liked to have heard from other readers of the man’s classic works as to what his legacy is some fifty years after his passing.

4 and 1/2 stars out of 5. A biography all writers need to ingest and digest.

Peace

Mark

The Contested Country by Aleksa Djilas (1991. Harvard. ISBN 0-674-16698-1)

Diljas answers many of my questions about why and how the relatively new nation of Yugoslavia emerged from the aftermath of WW II. And while he doesn’t enlarge the topic to include why and how that same nation disintegrated a decade after Marshall Tito (the titular head of the country from 1945 until his death in 1980) ended his long reign, the seeds of understanding the nation’s demise are indeed reflected in the political history chronicled by the author. 

I ordered a used copy of this scholarly work not for my reading pleasure or on some whim of trying to understand my own Balkan heritage (I’m one-quarter Slovenian) but because the writing bug has me pointed in the direction of my first novel, The Legacy. In that story, I somewhat innocently beatified Tito and his prowess in forging an army and a nation. I did not, for example, delve into the reasons behind Croatian and Serbian atrocities against each other during WW II nor explore the massacres, murders, and heavy-handedness of Tito towards the vanquished once his Partisans (Communist guerrillas) emerged as the clear power during their war against the Germans, Italians, Croat Ustashi (Fascists aligned with the Axis Powers), and Serbian Chetnik forces. That history, I think, is a fine setting for, if not a sequel, than at least a sequential novel, which I’ve just begun to work on. Research, as Mitchener has taught those of us seeking to write fictional truth, forms the bones of a historical novel. And so, this book became a “must” read.

The Contested Country is a scholarly read. By that I mean Diljas offers a plethora of footnoting to support his essential argument: that both Croatia and Serbia, the larges components in terms of the population of what became Yugoslavia, harbored nearly magical thinking when it came to interpreting the importance of their history. The medieval kingdoms of Serbia and Croatia were never world or regional political powers when they did exist as independent nation states. Ultimately, both were absorbed by larger empires; the Croats into Austro-Hungry and the Serbs into the Ottoman body politic. Serbia managed, before WW I, to wrest itself free from Turkish control and, at the end of the war, as a member of the victorious alliance, carved out the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (the South Slavs), leading to the imposition of Serbian monarchs, who, on the cusp of the 1930s, turned the constitutional monarchy into a dictatorship. Imposition of Serbian rule against the Croatian national will, coupled with traditional Croatian animosity towards the Serbs (not based upon language, culture, or even religion but ethnicity) led to an explosion of intraSlav terrorism and slaughter, the extent of which, given the mists of history, remains largely difficult to document even today.

Anyone who is seeking to understand the Balkans as they exist in the 21st century should start here. The book is not a pleasurable read but it is succinct, well drawn, and sets the stage for what took place once Tito died.

4 stars out of 5.

Peace

Mark

 

Confession time. I supported Senator Klobuchar when she was a candidate for the presidency in 2020. I cast my primary vote in support of her by mail only to have her announce her withdrawal ahead of the primary. So it goes. Any way, my daughter-in-law gave me this book a Christmas ago and it’s been sitting in my “to read” pile for over a year. I finally got to it. Here goes.

The first half of the book, chronicling Amy’s childhood, schooling, family woes, law school education, courtship, marriage, birthing of her only child, and her private legal career is very well written. Often, the senator lets her hair down and even cusses a bit, which, given her father’s Iron Range roots and lengthy career in the newspaper business, makes abundant sense. I was especially taken by her description of working at Dorsey, a law firm I spent two years at (working full-time days as a litigation legal assistant while attending night law school), and her appreciation for our mutual mentors (and later, Dorsey lawyers) Fritz Mondale and Warren Spannus (former MN AG). Both men are exemplars of what was once the pride and joy of public service: dedication to the people who voted you into office, their concerns, and the greater good. There’s a lot of those two men in the way the author ran for, won, and managed the Hennepin County Attorney’s position: her springboard into politics. 

Klobuchar’s discussions regarding the justice system, as seen by the chief prosecutor of the largest Minnesota county (in population), the cases that came before her, the decisions she made, including the decision to prosecute Minnesota Court of Appeals Judge Roland Amundson (who taught ethics, of all things, to my Baby Judge class in 1999) and seek prison time for the judge’s financial thievery (from a disabled person he was supposed to be protecting) was riveting. Those passages displayed her ability to lead her prosecutorial team “without favor” (her words). Her run for the senate, the parades, the decisions about campaigning, and the fervor of seeking one of the most powerful offices in the land, is also enlightening and educational without being dull or preachy.

The only failing in the book is that it came out four years too early. What do I mean? The later portion of the book, where the senator details the bipartisan bills she worked on and passed with the assistance of her Republican mentor, John McCain, while recognizing DC gridlock and a trend to making law only when pushed to do by crisis, still rings with optimism, a “we’re all in this together” cheeriness that, sadly, disappeared with the 2016 presidential election. I wish she’d waited a bit longer to discuss and digest what the Orange Prankster means to our nation and its future. She couldn’t have known and yet, reading her optimistic end chapters, her belief that there will be many, future opportunities for the two sides of the aisle to come together and do great things had the opposite effect on me as I closed the book. She intended positivity concerning our collective future; a commodity I believe impossible in a political world that includes Faux News, the Orange Imposter, Little Kevie, and the Turtle Man. Yes, there are some good people in politics on a national level. Senator Klobuchar is one of them. But other than a handful of old-style, moderate Republicans (Romney and Collins come to mind), the other side of the aisle is full of lunatics and crazies and those who seek power, not answers to national problems. Not her fault. But the ending to her story has yet to be written.

Peace

4 stars out of 5

Mark 

Minnesotan. Iconic member of the Paris scene from the days of Hemingway, Stein, and a host of other ex-pats. Husband to Zelda, whom some claim was the real, if tortured, genius in the family. I’ve listened to this classic novel through Audible now at least three times and despite the familiarity such usage brings, even the third trip through Europe at the head of F. Scott’s pen was worth the time.

Love triangles tend to be, in real life and in literature, messy affairs (pun intended). In this, one of Fitzgerald’s most autobiographical works, Dick Diver, M.D., an up-and-coming psychiatrist from the States who survived WW I’s horrific trenches, becomes infatuated with Nicole, another American ex-pat who is being treated at the Swiss Clinic where Diver works. Originally, the scheme of the author’s storytelling included much back and forth, past and present, which, to the critics, made the storyline confusing and didn’t help sales of the book when it debuted in 1934. A later revision of the novel (the one I was listening to) was completed in the 1940s by a friend of the author’s using Fitzgerald’s notes to create a more linear piece of fiction. This later version of the tale is listed as one of the great novels of the 20th century. 

The tortured romance between Diver and Nicole, whom the doctor eventually “cures” and marries, profiles Diver’s plunge into alcohol abuse and Nicole’s re-emergent psychosis (either schizophrenia or manic-depressive disorder), as well as the doctor’s brief yet destructive affair with young American actress, Rosemary. Though Dick is the mature one in the tryst, it is Rosemary’s strength of character, and Nicole’s eventual recovery and affair with soldier-of-fortune Tommy Barban that convinces the disintegrating doctor that his marriage, and his time with Rosemary are over. The writing is crisp and moves with rapidity, mirroring the “Jazz Age” vintage of the work. One comes away from the tale’s ending wishing that, someway, somehow, Fitzgerald’s friends could have saved he and Zelda from disaster, a disaster foreshadowed in this novel. But such was not to be …

5 stars out of 5. A classic tale of hubris, lust, longing, and downfall.

 

 

I’ve not read Mary Evans (pen name, George Eliot) before so I thought I’d give a listen. This is a very long audiobook: coming in at over thirty hours, perfect for listening to when walking the track at the local YMCA. Eliot weaves a comprehensive tale of life in the fictional English village of Middlemarch during the early-19th century (circa 1820s-30s), a time when, despite having lost the United States as a colonial territory, the Brits rule the waves and most of the world. In this lengthy, sprawling, domestic novel, Eliot centers her prose on a fairly remarkable young woman, nineteen-year-0ld Doreathea Brooke, who marries a man of means, Rev. Edward Casaubon, a codger nearly thirty years her senior. Casaubon is the most unloveable of the myriad characters Eliots sets upon her stage: an old fuddy-duddy who, given his youthful bride’s beauty, is convinced Doreathea is in love with a vagabond traveler, Will Ladislaw, a distant cousin of her husband’s. Though those suspicions are not, at that point, based on fact, Casaubon’s vitriol forces him to include provisions for disinheriting his wife should she remarry Ladislaw upon the old man’s demise.

There are many other subplots and minor and major characters woven into the privileged, gentrified life of the plot’s principles. In its setting and characters, a reader might consider this to be the gentrified equivalent of Dickens. Each personage in the tale has his or her own story to tell and Eliot does a masterful job of merging varied storylines into a coherent, conclusive plot. While the language is, given the time period, somewhat foreign to today’s ear, and the setting of the tale in an English village is somewhat limiting in terms of the social and economic backgrounds of the characters, I found the book, as a whole, very satisfying, and well worth time spent walking the Y’s track to find out what happens to Doreathea and her companions.

4 stars out of 5

Finally, to prove I still actually read the written word, there’s this collection of essays written in the late 1970s and early 1980s by former newspaper and Door County (Wisconsin) resident Norbert Blei, to consider. 

Last fall, as the leaves on the maples, oaks, aspen, and birch turned to glory, my wife René and I towed our travel trailer to a destination we both had never explored: the tourist mecca of northern Wisconsin, Door County. We camped at the KOA just south of Sturgeon Bay, the largest municipality on the peninsula, and by bicycle and car, explored the apple orchards, vineyards, fishing villages, and eateries of the storied county. At the infamous Al Johnson’s Swedish Restaurant in Sister Bay, I picked up this book while perusing the restaurant’s gift shop while waiting for a table. I was not disappointed by the food nor Blei’s prose.

Each chapter in th book is a vignette of someone whom Blei became acquainted with when he moved from Chicago to the county in the late 1960s. Some, like painter Charles “Chick” Peterson, a watercolorist, are internationally known. Others, like neighbor Charley Root, are simply, in the truest and kindest sense of the word, characters who the author became close to before his death in 2010. Many of the pieces were published as newspaper articles or profiles during the author’s lifetime but only later were compiled into a comprehensive volume with the assistance of editor and publisher David Pichaske. I always love buying quality local fiction or creative non-fiction when I travel. It allows for a more in-depth inquiry into the places that René and I visit. In that respect, this collection is well worth reading by anyone traveling to or staying in Door County.

Throughout Blei’s essays, the theme of inexorable progress, the gentrifying of a water-contained thumb of land thrust into Lake Michigan, surrounded on three sides by Green Bay and the vastness of the lake, is a constant refrain. But it’s not only the landscape that is changing, day by day, acre by acre, as more restaurants and condos and shops squeeze out fishermen, dairy farmers, orchards, and ordinary working folk living in the place:

The specifics of melancholia Chicago set in. How do I look these days? Strange, strange. That’s one of the last changes to take effect, though Door worked on the dress of the former Chicagoan from the very beginning. Back-t0-earth can play havoc with a man’s manner of dress-a whole wardrobe goes to seed. I hardly recognize myself these days …

If you are at all interested in the changing of rural America into something folks who passed on just a generation ago might not recognize; if you have any interest in visiting Door County; or if you’ve been to this still somewhat (despite the progress lamented by Blei) removed and rural piece of Wisconsin to fall in love with the God-painted leaves, flights of noisy Sandhill cranes flying overhead and landing on neighboring fields by the thousands, or platoons of grim, serious fishermen and fisherwomen lining the lazy rivers of the county in hopes of latching on to gigantic Chinook salmon during their fall spawn, well then, these stories are for you.

5 stars out of 5.

Peace

Mark