Behind the scheme

Emily St. John Mandel's 2020 novel The Glass Hotel is a bit hard to peg. It covers a lot of years in relatively few pages. There are numerous characters. It is about a Ponzi scheme, yet it is also a ghost story

All this adds to the novel's charm.

The hotel of the title is where the novel begins and where it ends. Hotel Caiette is isolated on Vancouver Island, accessible only by boat. Only rich people stay there. Only those who prefer isolation can work there.

Early on Jonathan Alkaitis, a wealthy investor, meets Vincent, the bartender. Despite the misleading name, Vincent is actually a beautiful young woman. Alkaitis quickly makes her his pretend wife, never a replacement for his beloved late wife, but an attractive woman to keep on his arm and to share a bed with.

The life suits them both until authorities arrest Alkaitis for stealing from his many wealthy clients. He goes to prison. Vincent goes into isolation, working aboard ships where nobody knows her past.

Meanwhile Mandel looks into the lives of the scheme's victims, as well as those who worked with Alkaitis and suspected something was wrong yet were making too much money to take a stand. While all this is going on,  ghosts come and go, appearing to several people during the course of the novel.

This is not your usual crime novel — or ghost story — but it is a gem.

Why no ads?

Magazines and newspapers can have more ads than articles. Television interrupts every show every few minutes with several minutes of commercials. Even supposedly ad-free public television throws in ads at the beginning and end of programing. When you go to the movies, you must sit through several minutes worth of commercials before the movie finally starts. On the web, you can't watch YouTube videos, do a Google search or do much of anything else (reading this blog being an exception) without encountering ads.

So how have books survived all these years without advertising?

To be sure, each book's publisher probably promotes other books they publish, especially those by the same author, somewhere in each volume. But you don't find Pepsi ads between chapters. You never find a State Farm ad on the back cover. How can this be?

Other media survive thanks to advertising, but not books. Advertising makes mass communication free, or at least relatively cheap. Somebody has to pay for "free" television programs. Somebody has to pay for web searches. Film producers and movie theaters need extra income to stay afloat.

Yet publishers keep publishing books, more and more each year, without putting advertising between the covers. What gives?

First, many people like to see their words in print, meaning they are willing to write books for little financial return. For publishers, books are relatively inexpensive to print, but they are not inexpensive to purchase. We readers are the ones who pay the freight. Books might actually be less expensive if they contained advertising. We must now pay about $30, sometimes a lot more, for a hardback book and nearly $20 for a paperback. Perhaps some advertising would help publishers, authors and readers, at least financially.

We are spared advertising in books, in part, because most books aren't all that popular. Most books, in fact, sell only a few thousand copies, if that. Even bestsellers don't necessarily sell enough copies to make authors — or potential advertisers — rich. Thus advertising in books doesn't make much sense in the book business. Why buy advertising in a book that may sell relatively few copies? And if publishers ever became dependent on advertising, fewer books might be published.

The ad-free tradition helps. It's how books have always been. We don't want our books "sponsored" because advertisers may try to influence content. Sometimes, for example, we see certain products in films because the manufacturers of those products have invested money in the productions. We might possibly see something similar if books contained advertising.

Quite piossibly the future of book publishing depends upon the industry keeping books ad-free.

Underwater sound

We may have heard about humpback whales that sing in the ocean, but it may not have ever occurred to us that other forms of sea life communicate by sound, as well. It was Jacques-Yves Cousteau who coined the phrase "the silent world" in one of his films about the sea, and most people believed him.

Yet the oceans are a concert of sound, it turns out. Amorina Kingdon tells us about it in her 2024 book Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water. Many different species communicate by sound. These are not necessarily vocal sounds. Some species produce sound by rubbing body parts together or in other ways.

Kingdon writes, "Sculpins move their pectoral girdle. Toadfish, squirrelfish, and others drum on their swim bladder with special muscles or tendons, making resonant hums, moans, and boops. Blue grunt or beau-gregory scrape or grind special teeth in their throats. Some fish burp or expel gas from their anus."

Researchers have speculated that the songs of humpback whales may actually, in a sense, rhyme.

Whale sounds can travel many miles. It is how they communicate with each other. Some species use sound to attract mates or to find their young in dark water.

Humans have a way if interfering with the natural world without meaning to, such as by simply cutting down  dead trees. This is true of underwater sound, as well. The engines of ships, sonar and windmills, for example, can make life difficult for sea life and may be responsible for those mysterious beached whales.

Kingdon gives us the good and the bad of underwater sound.

Caught in a blizzard

Iceland is a small country that has produced some remarkable writers of thrillers and mysteries. One of these is Ragnar Jonasson, whose Outside (2021) makes compulsive reading.

The plot seems simple enough. Four friends go on a mid-winter hunting trip when an unexpected storm sweeps in. Yet the blizzard is just the first, and perhaps the least, of many surprises.

They seek shelter in a cabin, where they find a still, silent man holding a gun. Gunnslaugur may be a respected lawyer but he is also an alcoholic who, this being a hunting trip, has his own gun. In a panic, he shoots the silent man. Now what do they do?

It turns out that the four friends are not as friendly as we were first led to believe. In fact, one of the novel's big mysteries is why these four people would ever go hunting together in the first place. Nobody really likes Gunnslaugur. Daniel left Iceland to become an actor in London. He doesn't like guns and isn't that fond of any of his "friends." Armann is an outdoorsman and a professional guide, and it is he who organized the trip, but he has a violent past. Helena, we learn, is Armann's twin sister, and she carries grudges against both Gunnslaugur and Daniel.

One disaster leads to another in Jonasson's story. The brief chapters, each told from the point of view of one of the four main characters, will keep every reader turning the pages as quickly as possible.

Whose rules?

The English language has always been tolerant of contributions from elsewhere. So many of the words we use, other than the basic Anglo-Saxon ones, come from other languages. English speakers may change them and pronounce them differently, but we keep them and make them our own.

Yet trouble seems to follow whenever other languages become too highly regarded by English speakers, often supposed language experts. Many of the silly language rules we older folks learned in school were imported from Latin as late as the 19th century. These include not splitting infinitives and not ending sentences with a preposition. Yet English is a Germanic language, not a Romance language. Latin rules do not apply to English.

After the Normans conquered England in 1066, numerous French words entered the English language — at least the English spoken by aristocrats. Thus, chickens became poultry and pigs became pork, among many others. Again, English welcomes words from anywhere.

But there are many words and phrases that English speakers have adopted simply because they sound French, yet they are not French at all. We just like to pretend they are French because they make us sound more sophisticated. These include such expressions as piece de resistance, nom de plume, affair d'amour and even negligee. These are unknown in France. The British simply made them up.

Over the years the British were quick to accept French spellings of English words. In fact, Americans spell many English words in a more traditional English way than the British do. The British now use the word honour because of French influence. Americans spell it as honor, the way the English used to. Similarly, Americans use theater, center and fiber, while the British, under French influence, now spell these theatre, centre and fibre.

But the English language isn't French, any more than it's Latin. We English speakers can take their words, but we should follow our own rules.

Picking up the pieces

So many brave young men died in World War I, yet yet the trials for those who survived, both men and women, continued even after the war was over. Somehow Helen Simonson produced a light-hearted novel, The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club (2024, out of this serious situation.

During the war, young British women had to step up and do many of the jobs young men had done before the war. Some of them discovered they liked doing these jobs, but when the war was over they were expected to quit and get married, never mind that there were fewer men available to marry. Meanwhile, wounded veterans found themselves unwanted for the many jobs newly available. Soldiers from India who had contributed to the war effort were less welcome in England once the war was over.

Set in the summer of 1919, Simonson's novel centers on Constance Haverhill, who did her part during the war, but now her bookeepping skills are unwanted. She is employed as an aide to a wealthy elderly woman who will soon need her no longer. Mrs. Fog is set to marry a sweetheart from long ago.

Constance doesn't know what she will do with herself, but then she befriends Poppy, an outgoing young woman who rode motorcycles during the war and wants to continue doing the same. She has several friends, female riders or mechanics, with similar frustrated ambitions. Poppy's brother, Harris, was a pilot in the war, but now he has a wounded leg, and the bank job promised to him before the war is no longer available. And although he is a gifted pilot despite his bad leg, nobody wants him flying their planes.

A badly damaged Sopwith Camel, purchased by Poppy, gives Harris incentive to live again, and with Constance as his unexpected flying partner, he begins to see a brighter future for himself. Will that future include Constance?

There are complications, of course, all of which result in an absorbing novel with just the ending readers want.

The right word

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

We think of Ruth Bader Ginsburg more for her legal commentary than her literary commentary, yet she once wrote something that must ring true to writers everywhere: "Even today, when I read, I notice with pleasure when an author has chosen a particular word, a particular place, for the picture it will convey to the readers."

Words matter to a writer, as well as to a discerning reader. Why one word and not another? Why one descriptive phrase and not another? Why set a story in one location and not another? Such choices matter, and often they matter a great deal.

In Muse of Fire, Michael Korda's book about World War I poets, he tells in detail how Siegfried Sassoon influenced changes in one of Wilfred Owen's most famous poems. Even the title was changed dramatically with one word choice. "Anthem for Dead Youth" became "Anthem for Doomed Youth." That single word change made the title more powerful, more mysterious, more memorable.

Sassoon suggested the poem be written in third person, rather than second person, as Owen originally wanted. The poem's first line changed from "What passing bells for you who die in herds?" to "What passing bells for those who die as cattle?" You became those; in herds became as cattle. These changes widened the scope of the poem somehow.

And so on.

The poem remained Owen's, yet Sassoon's editing made it immortal. All this demonstrates the importance of good editing, but it also illustrates Bader's point that a particular word choice can make a world of difference.

The poets' war

World War II produced several novelists of note, including James Jones, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut. World War I, however, was the poets' war. It produced one of the greatest war novels of all time, All Quiet on the Western Front, yet poetry still ruled the literary world, even though it was all but dead just a few years later when the second big war erupted.

Michael Korda, the author of a number of wartime histories, including With Wings Like Eagles, has written a fine book about World War I seen through the eyes of its poets, Muse of Fire (2024).

He focuses on six poets who fought in the war and wrote verse about their experiences: Rupert Brook, Alan Seeger, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Only Graves and Sassoon survived the war.

Their poetry changed as the war went on and on. To Brook and Seeger, the only American in the group, the war was a great adventure. "What bloody fun!" Brook wrote in a letter. In one of his best-known poems, he said: "If I should die, think only this of me:/That there's some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England."

Seeger, related to folk singer Pete Seeger, was even more romantic about combat. "I have a rendezvous with death ...," he wrote. And "that rare privilege of dying well."

The others viewed the war more realistically. No less patriotic that the other two, they nevertheless saw the war as pointless and a terrible waste of human life.

They were also shockingly blunt about what soldiers did in war. Writing about killing an enemy soldier with a bayonet, Sassoon wrote: "Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this;/That in good fury he may feel/The body where he sets his heel/Quail from your downward darting kiss." In another poem he wrote the phrase, "The place was rotten with dead."

Authorities strictly censored letters, books and anything else written about what was actually going on in the trenches. Yet for whatever reason — perhaps because the censors had little patience for poetry — the poems of these men somehow got through.

Translater, traitor?

There is an Italian adage that goes, "Traduttore, traditore." It means "Translator, traitor," but of course, that is a translation.

It means simply that something is always lost in translation. Of course, if you are someone who needs the translation because you can't read the original language, then you will never know if the translator is really a traitor or not.

I have read many books that have been translated into English. I am presently in the middle of one that has been translated from Icelandic. I think it's a terrific novel, but am I missing something? I will never know if the translation has betrayed the original or not.

I have mentioned in this blog that I sometimes write and even preach sermons, and a few months ago I preached one that relates to this topic. (Actually all sermons relate to the subject because all sermons are based on translations of either Hebrew or Greek texts. We can always wonder, what has been lost in translation?)

I found that Job 35:10 has been translated very differently in different Bible translations. For example, the New International Version translates it as "But no one says, 'Where is God my Maker, who gives songs in the night ...'"

The Complete Jewish Bible says that God "causes glad songs to ring out at night.," which is more specific than simply "songs." The Good News Bible puts it this way: "God their Creator gives them hope in their darkest hours."

The New Catholic Bible makes it more personal: God "protects me during the night." In the New Revised Standard Version, God "gives strength in the night."

Then there is The Message, which says, "God puts spontaneous songs in their hearts."

That's the same Hebrew text translated six very different ways. Some mention songs; others do not. Some mention the night; others do not. Some simply translate the metaphor; others attempt to interpret the metaphor. I liked all six translations, and I preached six mini sermons, one on each of them.

Are all six translators traitors to the original? Or does each bring out something different that was there all along?

A place to tarry

When dining in a restaurant, the server will often place the check on your table and say something like, "There's no hurry." We already know this, of course, and when I have had a good conversation partner, I have sometimes sat at the table for two hours or more. During busy times, however, when people are lined up waiting for a table, the management probably wants desperately for you to move on, whatever the servers might say.

Speed is a priority at a number of business, such as the one that promises a "10 minute oil change." Nobody likes standing in a long line at the grocery store or sitting in a crowded waiting room at a doctor's office.

So I am impressed by the slogan of the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago: "Stranger, here you will do well to tarry, Here our greatest good is pleasure." The line comes from Epicurus in reference to his school, but it seems ideal for a bookstore. The more time people spend in a bookstore, the more books they are likely to find that they cannot resist.

And while books are often about instruction and reference and guidance, they are mostly about pleasure. We usually read what we enjoy reading.

The best bookstores encourage customers to stick around. They have chairs, for example. They serve coffee. Some have cats or even dogs. Some have authors signing books or giving talks. Children's departments have story times, giving parents a chance to browse. The more books a store has, the more time book lovers are likely to spend there, and of course the more money they are likely to spend.

One does wonder, however, whether the "here you will do well to tarry" motto still applies as closing time approaches.

A courtesan's story

Juhea Kim's sweeping novel Beasts of a Little Land (2021) covers much of 20th century Korean history, mostly from the point of view of a courtesan named Jade. The novel all but ignores the Korean War, oddly enough, focusing mostly on the years of Japanese occupation, which ended with Japan's defeat in World War II, although the story continues to 1965.

Jade is just 10 years old in 1918. Before long she becomes an apprentice courtesan, training to entertain wealthy men. She develops into a beauty, beloved by many, including two boys closer to her own age who both want more from her than she can give.

JungHo is a homeless ruffian when he befriends Jade. He later becomes a communist enforcer, even though he lacks communist sympathies, returning from time to time to help Jade until, many years later, she is in a position to try to help him.

HanChol meets Jade as a teenager who takes Jade home each night in his rickshaw. They become lovers, though she eventually must reject him. He goes on to become one of the wealthiest men in postwar Korea, yet never far from Jade's mind.

Although there is much here about hunting tigers, the human beasts in this little land are mainly the Japanese oppressors, who try to dominate every aspect of Korean culture and commerce.

This is a powerful story told with grace by the young author, now a Princeton grad living in the United States. "Death was such a small price to pay for life," she writes near the end, and her novel makes you believe it.

The soul laid bare

Guy de Maupassant

Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.

Guy de Maupassant

Are those words by Guy de Maupassant really true? Or is the opposite true? Are spoken words more or less likely to be truer than written words?

Since the great French writer of short stories said those words, technology has confused matters even more. Now we have the telephone, allowing us to hear words without the benefit of seeing the face saying them. We have email and texting, allowing spontaneous reactions, which may often be more truthful because the writer often acts before thinking of a more diplomatic way of saying what was said.

Certainly we can be dazzled and deceived by words spoken to our face, but can't we also be dazzled and deceived by words written on paper? Writers have more time to deliberately craft their words than speakers do. Written language, in fact, is better designed for dazzling, at least in the hands of a skilled writer, than plain speech is. As with texts and emails, people tend to speak before they have thought it through, not giving themselves time to consider the best way to say something.

People often lay the soul bear in arguments or when making cruel jokes that they later regret. On the other hand, it may be easier to write a Dear John letter (or email) than to break up a relationship in person. It may also be easier for someone to say "I love you" in writing. Very soon people will be sending each other valentines to say things they cannot bring themselves to say in person.

I don't know if Guy de Maupassant got it right or not.