agog

From A to X, A Story in Letters, John Berger, 2008

This novel is a collection of love letters written by A’ida to a prisoner Xavier, serving two lifetime sentences for terrorism. The letters were found in pigeonholes along the prisoner’s cell wall when all prisoners were moved into a new prison facility. The letters were given to the author who doesn’t know if the two are alive or dead. He decides to publish the letters in the order they were found in the pigeonholes and manages by secret means to get a hold of additional letter A’ida never mailed.

The novel is thus a series of meditations without a clear reference to time or place that manages to be extraordinarily engrossing and challenging. References hint the characters are probably somewhere in Latin America and the repressive regime in power seems to have access to the latest American weapons like the Apache helicopter and M1 tank. A’ida is a trained pharmacist who continues to help the resistance, treating the wounded and sick who arrive at her store in the middle of the night.

A’ida continues to ask for permission to marry the prisoner so she can visit but her requests are denied. Her only means of communicating her life and her love are the letters. Some she cannot mail. In between letters are quotations and reflections presumably by the prisoner on a wide range of contemporary questions. A few examples on the subject of capitalism:

Today’s capitalism would be impossible without the very high return of the thick energy of fossil fuels, hence the question of what may happen in four decades when oil supplies are exhausted. Will there be only the thin solar energy?

The day that hunger disappears the world will see a spiritual explosion such as humanity has never known.

Only for the powerful is history an upward line, where their today is always the pinnacle. For those below, history is a question which can only be answered by looking backward and forwards, thus creating new questions.

All usurpers do their utmost to make us forget that they have only just arrived.

The sky a reminder of what may be temporarily forgotten - e.g. the private equity funds available for financial speculation are today worth 20 times more than the sum total of the world’s gross national product!

‘

These two novels revolve around the central theme of sport; big wave surfing in the first novel, and cricket in New York in the second. Both are quirky novels but the authors show intimate familiarity with their sporting theme. Coincidentally, both novels feature brief affairs with women addicted to kinky and dangerous sexual practices.

Breath, Tim Winton, 2008

Surfing at Margaret River

Winton specializes in taking his readers into the world of life in Western Australia. Breath is a coming of age novel of a small town boy who turns his developed ability to hold his breath for long periods under water into an ability to successfully surf the big waves which may hold the fallen surfer underwater for a very long time. Our main character is 14 years old at the start of the novel who together with a slightly older crazy brave friend insinuate themselves into the local small wave surfing fraternity. Their skill brings them to the attention of a legendary aging Australian (at least 30) surfer, a big wave guru who decides to take on a couple of adoring disciples. We are introduced to the use of off shore navigation charts to locate areas likely to produce big waves, and to meteorology, used to predict where and when the really monumental waves will be breaking. One of the guru’s favorite sites is a mile off shore and you have to paddle in and out to surf it. Another is an impossibly isolated cove where the big waves are shared only with a 15 foot shark. This novel tells us a lot about the obsession with big wave surfing and the never ending search for the biggest wave anywhere in the world. The guru’s retired (at age 25) free style skier American wife (she injured her knee) has an inheritance which allows the couple to live and travel anywhere without worry about work. Enjoyable read.

Netherland, Joseph O’Neill, 2008

Cricket at Van Cortland Park

O’Neill was born in Ireland, raised in the Netherlands, and lives in New York, which tells us how he came up with this quirky story. The main character is a Dutch oil and gas analyst working for big investment houses. He moves to London where he meets his wife, a corporate lawyer, who dreams of living in New York. They move to New York in 1999, buy a Tribeca loft and have a son.

The events of 9/11 force them out their loft into the infamous Chelsea Hotel and the wife decides to return to safe old London, leaving the Dutch husband on his own in New York. He spots a cricket bat in the trunk of a taxi driven by a South Asian and discovers that cricket is alive and well in New York, at least among West Indians and South Asians. He digs out his old childhood bat and gear and joins a team from Staten Island, the only white cricket player in New York. Thus begins a lonely man’s odyssey into the immigrant underground world of New York cricket lovers.

Cricket remains unfathomable despite the author’s best efforts but we do learn that cricket is largely a ground game and the field matters. Although the New York area has a cricket history dating from the American Revolution, their are no regulation fields and the grounds in New York are so bad that cricket can only be played by hitting the ball into the air like baseball. Other than that, cricket is as impossible to understand for the American reader as always. Maybe you have to have played cricket as a child. Still an entertaining book.

The Black Swan: the Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2007.

Taleb wants us to know that we are genetically wired to organize information in our minds so that the information “makes sense” to us, that we can explain to ourselves what has happened in the past, to tell stories. Then a herd instinct selects those stories and explanations that become accepted by the largest number or are promoted by the “authorities or experts”. Unfortunately, those soothing stories and explanations arise only after the fact and only look backward. They often ignore or are based on incomplete information and are useless to help us operate into the future.

He gives the example of William Shirer, author of the definitive The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Shirer had previously published Berlin Diary: The Journal of a foreign correspondent, 1934-1941 in 1941. The journal was written in real time as events unfolded, and while no doubt edited for publication, clearly indicates that neither Shirer, nor any other European power had an understanding or appreciation for what was unfolding in Germany, nor any ability to anticipate any of Hitler’s moves. The definitive story could only be written long after the facts in 1960.

The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. (From A to X A Story in Letters by John Berger)

Taleb’s central thesis is that the world abounds in highly improbable events that cannot be predicted. Taleb desperately wants to believe that to some extent they can at least be anticipated by the open minded empiricist.

Impish Black Swan

The title of the book comes from a centuries old assumption that all swans are white which was taken as an accepted fact or law until black swans were discovered in Australia. Taleb’s own black swans were the outbreak of a long war in historically peaceful Lebanon during his childhood, and the various economic crashes and downturns during his career as a wall street trader. He hopes that the enlightened observer/empiricist may be able to anticipate the unanticipated which he calls the search for the gray swan.

Maybe Taleb has uses the wrong metaphor with his black swan. John Le Carre’s novel A Most Wanted Man uses the Lipizzaner horse as the code name for a money laundering scheme because of the breed’s ability to turn from black to white as it ages. When faced with an unexpected black horse all we need to do is wait for the horse to turn white and all will be well.

Much of the book is a diatribe against the incorrect use of the Gaussian Bell Curve, particularly in the social sciences and most particularly in the economics of practitioners like Paul Samuelson, whose textbook Economics: An Introductory Analysis, first published in 1948, has been used as the fundamental introduction to economics for generations. The last edition was published in 2004. In the real world, the outliers, far from being ignorable as they are in the Bell Curve, can outweigh the whole curve altogether, as does a Bill Gates or Google.

He also insists on poking fun at the Nobel Laureates, particularly those in economics. He has a general dislike for experts and future forecasters who in study after study have been shown to be so wrong that advise from a taxi driver or even other primates is as accurate.

Bell Curve of SAT Scores

For Taleb, the Gaussian Bell Curve is best suited to betting in a casino, one the rare environments, where the laws of probability truly apply - so long as the gamblers are not whales willing to risk millions on a single bet, or card counters able to change the odds in their favor.

Taleb also takes on game theory models pioneered by John Nash, which have been used improperly by economists, corporations, and wall street actors to justify greed and selfish behavior as the best way to optimize the results for all players. Not so says Taleb but he doesn’t dwell on the subject.

Taleb favors Mandelbrot fractal distributions using the law of powers to be able to model systems with extreme outliers such as the uneven distribution of wealth where a Bill Gates can outweigh the wealth of wholes cities or countries of individuals; where a Google can be worth more then the rest of the internet players combined; and where a J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter) can single-handedly outsell all other books in print. These are unpredicted successes due largely to luck according to Taleb. Taleb hopes that the use of fractal models can turn these black swans into gray swans.

PBS NOVA recently featured the discovery of fractals in their Hunting the Hidden Dimension.

The above photo from the book illustrates how scale can be deceptive. Without the man in the picture, the image looks like a camera lens cap dropped on the ground.

The book is useful in helping us understand how little we can really know about our unpredictable lives and how little we should trust the experts. He asserts that the more we read and listen to the experts the less we will know about our world except perhaps in physics although even physics is increasingly entering the realm of uncertainty.

Less helpful is his advise on what we should do as free-will actors to navigate this unpredictable world successfully. Knowing that highly improbable events will continue to happen - even if our fractal models can deal mathematically with extreme outliers - still does not really help us to respond or act until the unlikely events actually unfold. The consequences of improbable events can vary enormously. A Microsoft, bad and buggy as their software may be, does not carry the same impact as a melting ice cap or a meteor strike or a new virulent virus, or even a mad terrorist.

Taleb points out that in the war on terror, acting from the “lessons” of an improbable event is rarely helpful - the event is already behind us and we should expect that the next event will be equally unlikely and unpredictable. Locking the cockpit doors on airlines is a proverbial case of closing the barn door after the horse has escaped. Yet our new President is as determined to go after Osama Bin Laden as his predecessors, even at the risk of war with Pakistan. We likely don’t even know who the next big terrorist is going to be, much less from where he/she will launch an attack, on what target, and using what weapon. Taleb says our intelligence (anticipating the future) is awful and there are no signs it will get any better. For a novelist’s take on the state of modern intelligence in dealing with Islamic extremists, again see John LeCarre’s A Most Wanted Man.

As a skeptic and iconoclast Taleb is at his best. Advising what we should do about our uncertain plight is less than satisfying. How can you model something, even with fractals, if you don’t know what, when, or how bad it will be. Whatever it is, it will be unexpected, and it will be big.

It’s like the Bob Dylan song says: “Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones.”

The Truth Commissioner, David Park, 2008

Belfast Peace Wall

Novel by talented writer largely unknown outside Ireland is unusual for detailing four protagonists.

Henry Stanfield is a lawyer specializing in international criminal justice (war crimes). His considerable reputation leads to his personal selection by the prime minister of Ireland to be the Truth Commissioner in the upcoming truth and reconciliation proceedings meant to bring some closure to the endless cycles of hatred, violence, and revenge that has crippled northern Ireland for so long. Henry and his team of young, able assistance heads to South Africa for training in the methods of the reconciliation process. A South African judge has been retained to hear the trials in which participants are guaranteed immunity from prosecution if they tell the truth. Henry is a widower with an estranged daughter who blames his serial infidelities for her mother’s early death of cancer.

Belfast Courthouse

Gilroy is a former high level official in the IRA with a lot of blood on his hands. In the new Ireland he has been appointed, ironically, minister for children and culture. He and his long time sidekick (consigliere) are paranoid in the extreme imagining every office and conference room they enter to be bugged and go to great measures to alter their routines and movements to throw off the assassins they assume follow them everywhere. As if the pressure to simply stay alive isn’t enough Gilroy’s youngest and favorite daughter is about to be married to a London based hated English accountant.

Toys for Romanian Orphans

Fenton is a former police officer with a reputation for aggressively pursuing the IRA. He often retained touts (stool pigeons) in his work. The new Ireland is trying to clean up the image of its police force and Fenton has been retired and pensioned off even though he is quite young. He and his wife put off having children because of the danger of his work and it is now too late. Fenton now does charity work, several times driving a van loaded with food, clothing, and toys, from Ireland to an orphanage in Romania.

Florida Lake DeForrest

Danny is hiding in the Florida lake district as an illegal alien and with an assumed name. He works in maintenance at an expensive private college. He has fallen in love with a colored woman, she is pregnant, and they plan to marry. He has never told the woman the truth about his past. We presume he has a history with the IRA.

The novel concerns the case of a 15 year old petty thief who was forced to tout for the police even though he had no way of obtaining useful information. The IRA discovered this, picked the boy up and he disappeared forever. The boy’s sister now works as assistant to Stanfield’s daughter who is teaching in Belfast. The sister and boy’s mother want to know what happened to the boy and to recover his body for burial. Stanfield’s daughter meets her father who hopes for a reconciliation and he promises to find the truth about the boy.

Stanfield’s assistance do their jobs and summons are issued by the court to compel attendance by the other three protagonists in this story. They even succeed in tracking Danny down in Florida. The Irish government, realizing how explosive this one case is, moves quickly to get the protagonists to coordinate their cover up stories. The government even has obtained photos of Stanfield in an expensive Belfast hotel with an Eastern European prostitute to force his cooperation.

Stanfield writes his letter of resignation to be submitted after the sham hearing on the boy’s case. What will happen? Will the four protagonists all play their role to sweep the case under the rug as the government wants? Entertaining but with insight into northern Ireland after the peace.

The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, Peter Orner, 2006

Jewish American volunteer finds himself teaching school at a remote desert school in forgotten African country of Namibia in this marvelous first novel. More a collection of vignettes of the teachers, students, and other characters encountered in this school, a failed farm left to the catholic church and now converted by the government into a school for poor boys.

Namibia School

Mavala Shikongo, the title character is a former SWAPO (revolutionary) soldier, beautiful, tall, mysterious, the only single woman at the school, surrounded by bachelor priest and teachers. Other characters are Theofilus, the anonymous albino handyman who single-handedly keeps the school running, assuring water and electric generator, as well as caring for the goats, chickens, and cows on the farm; Antoinette, wife of a teacher, maternal, quiet, but the real force keeping the school running; teachers Vilho, Pohamba, Obadiah, Festus and his wife Dikeledi; the nameless principal and step brother of Mavala, locked in a power struggle with the mostly absent nameless priest over who controls the farm-school; neighboring auntie, and her whelps, who steals whatever they want from the teachers; Prinsloo and his wife, old time Boer farmers who raise and sell vegetables to the school.

Herero Woman

Ever present as characters are the desert and the drought, threatening the continued existence of the school and farm. Occasional characters are children refugees from the fighting in neighboring Angola, who walk 800 km to attend the school. They don’t want shelter or food, only the privilege of attending classes.

Namibia Dunes

A very gentle, very humane work exploring the everyday lives of unforgettable, forgotten characters.
Also by Orner Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives. See review at jtwine.

The Forgery of Venus, Michael Gruber, 2008

What does a talented artist do in the age of the death of art? He turns to the forgery of old masters. A very clever and readable novel. The main character Chaz is the son of a famous Saturday Evening Post cover painter who, despite his great talent, is struggling along as a divorced commercial artist. The art scene in New York is in chaos. The artist living in the loft below Chaz is hospitalized when his 9/11 performance piece including repeatedly inflating and deflating world trade towers and falling figures complete with actual dust from the 9/11 disaster causes a riot at the gallery.

Chaz has a drug problem and has been committed a couple times for rehab. He signs up for an experimental program using Salvinorin A derived from a plant used by the Mazotec Indians of Mexico. The drug induces time travel and Chaz finds himself drifting back in time to relive the life of Valazquez, his favorite painter.

Chaz gets a commission to paint some celebrities including Madonna and Kate Blanchett, J LO, and Kate Winslet in the style of various old masters. The magazine declines to use the paintings but they sell quickly, coming to the attention of the German son of a Nazi art thief at the center of post war investigations into the fate of lost and stolen masterpieces. The shady son decides that the forging of lost war booty masterpieces (maybe destroyed in allied bombing of the cities) is a good way to amass a real fortune.

Tiepolo The Sacrifice of Isaac

As a test Chaz is hired to repaint a ceiling masterpiece originally done by Tiepolo in a Palacio in Venice. He succeeds and is offered $1 million to paint a lost masterpiece of Valazquez; the Rokeby Venus painted in Rome. Chaz time travels to become Valazquez for a prolonged time while he paints the Venus masterpiece. The German hides the Rokeby Venus forgery under a worthless forged painting from the same era which he has purchased quietly from a Museum which has become aware that the painting is a forgery yet sells it as authentic. The German then “discovers” the hidden Valazquez masterpiece under the forgery and sells the Rokeby Venus at auction for $110 million. The German’s confederates are dangerous mafia figures who would not hesitate to kill Chaz to protect the secret of the big Forgery. As long as the world believes Chaz is crazy as a result of his drug abuse, no one will believe any fantasy he tells and he is safe from the hit men.

Valazquez Rokeby Venus

A cynical, clever look at the contemporary art world in the age of the death of art.

The Age of Dreaming, Nina Revoir, 2008

A novel of two Japanese theater and silent film actors in early 20th Century Los Angeles. Jun leaves Japan to study at UM Madison where he sees a traveling Japanese theater based in Los Angeles group perform. He stops in Los Angeles in 1907 on his way home to Japan and accidentally gets involved in a local theater production despite having no experience in theater. Hanako, leader of the traveling theater group, joins him in the production where they are both spotted by a silent film director. Jun gets larger and larger roles and soon finds himself under contract to one of the largest studios in Hollywood at $10,000 per week. Hanako continues to land small roles and continues her work in the theater.

Japanese Silent Stars

We jump to 1964 and a journalist is researching a piece on the silent film era and is trying to locate the few remaining living stars from that period. He tracks Jun down and tries to interest him in a new movie project involving an aging Japanese man suspected by his neighbors of being a war criminal. Jun hasn’t acted since 1922 and we slowly unravel the reasons why. The story involves women, the murder of an English director, and a studio cover up.

Hidden carefully in the account is the almost invisible romance between Jun, a party giver and womanizer, and Hanako that resembles the relationship between the butler and house keeper in Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day right down to the understated and indirect voices of the actors. Against a backdrop of increasing anti Japanese sentiment in California, (Jun flees to England during the war while Hanako is interred in Manzanar where she continued her theater productions.) we see Jun accumulate real estate holding through indirect ownership so he is able to retire from acting in 1922 yet live comfortably.

Manzanar Relocation Camp

Jun had used his fame to sell U.S. bonds in WWI but is strangely absent as anti-Japanese sentiment gains momentum after WWI. A nostalgic look at old Los Angeles, it hot spots, hotels, and restaurants in the early film days. Also a look at an out of touch old silent film actor wearing out of fashion clothes and driving his antique Packard as he nostalgically revisits old run down establishments.

Setting the Desert on Fire; T.E. Lawrence and Britain’s Secret War in Arabia 1916-1918, James Barr, 2008

Col. T.E. Lawrence

A detailed history of Britain and Lawrence covering the same material that comprised the David Lean movie masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia. Arabia was a minor theater in WWI where the British, based in Cairo, were primarily concerned to protect and keep open the Suez Canal to assure continued trade with India and her other eastern colonies. When the Arabs started a disorganized uprising against the Turks, France and Britain saw an opportunity to use the Arabs in a limited effort to overthrow the Ottoman Empire. France and Britain’s oral and written agreements with the Arabs were disingenuous and designed to cover the true Imperial Colonial intentions of the the two Western powers should the Ottoman Empire be destroyed. Controversy over these agreements and letters continues to this day.

As it transpired, Britain had an emotional interest backed by influential Zionists at home in turning Palestine into a British colony. The discovery of oil in Mesopotamia lured Britain into wanting a colony in this area as well. The French were interested in establishing colonies in Syria and Lebanon. Oil had not yet been discovered in the area called the Hijaz which include the Muslim holy cities of Medina and Mecca and neither France nor Britain had any particular colonial aspirations for this area.

The Turks using German engineering had built a railway from the northern city of Aleppo through Damascus, parallel and East of the Jordan River and Red Sea all the way to Medina. Arab Tribal raids prevented the Turks completing the railroad to Mecca. This railroad was critical for supplying Arabia from Turkey and was the key to Ottoman control of the Arab lands. The British wanted to capture the Red Sea port at Aqaba from which they would be able to launch raids on the railroad and disrupt Turkish supply and control. Because Aqaba was heavily defended against the sea, the British were unwilling to mount a serious attack with their limited Cairo resources.

Alec Guiness as Prince Feisal

British or any foreign (infidel) visitors were unwelcome in Arabia but the British did manage to send at least one raiding party to attack the railroad. They desperately needed to evaluate Arab leader Sharif Husein ibn Ali and his four sons who were fighting in the Arab uprising. Enter the young, Oxford educated, Arabic speaking intelligence officer Lawrence who was finally invited to accompany a small group setting out to meet one son Sharif Feisal ibn Husein and offer his evaluation of the relative merits of the four sons. Lawrence had his own ideas about fighting strategies which he shared in long discussions with Feisal with whom he hit it off. Lawrence was soon traveling on other missions to meet other tribal leaders and study ways to disrupt the railroad. When he met the fearsome outlaw Auda Aba Tayi, a wild plan was conceived to attack Aqaba from behind, a plan memorably captured in Lean’s movie. The plan worked and Aqaba became the principal supply route for attacks on the railroad throughout the remainder of the war.

Auda Quinn as Auda
Lawrence learned to use gold to buy the temporary allegiance of tribe members for a raid after which the tribe members could share the loot taken in the raid itself. The tribes would disburse into the desert until Lawrence got the money to finance further raids.

After the British suffered a costly defeat attempting to capture Gaza, General Edmund Allenby was given command of the Arab operation. He immediately recognized the importance of the Arab revolt and Lawrence’s ability to cut the railroad and pressure the Turks from the East if coordinated in time with British attacks from the West. In this way, Allenby successfully captured Jerusalem.

Lawrence pioneered the extensive use of camels, some imported from Egypt and Sudan, the use of armored Rolls Royce cars for rapid movement in raids, and the use of air reconnaissance, cover, and bombing in support of raids.

Feisal and Lawrence at Peace Conference

A final, very successful push by the Arabs and Allenby allowed the Arabs, led by Feisal, to enter Damascus in triumph. During the peace negotiations in Paris, Britain folded to pressure from France and Syria and Lebanon were ceded to France. The British appointed Feisal King of newly created Iraq and his brother Abdullah was appointed king of newly created Jordan. The British retained control of Palestine. After the war, the Turkish commander remained in control of Medina until the influenza epidemic wiped out his troops and he was forced to leave. Shortly thereafter, ibm Saud, rival for power to Ali Husein swept into Medina to oust Husein and create today’s Saudi Arabia. ibm Saud had had his own British champions, led by Harry Philby, throughout this period, so Britain was financing both rivals simultaneously. Ali Husein went into exile on Cyprus. Oil was discovered in newly created Saudi Arabia shortly afterward.

Current day Iraq American strategists have been studying the tactics of Lawrence and learning from his experience. Their primary lesson learned seems to be the value of paying tribal leaders cash for their support in insurgency battles.

The Enchantress of Florence, Salman Rushdie, 2008

Akbar Red Fort Agra

A very white blond European adventurer finds his way to the Mughal court of Emperor Akbar bearing a letter from Queen Elizabeth I (which he has stolen). Unimpressed by the letter Akbar orders the adventurer to tell him the truth about himself. Terrified, the young man blurts out that he is a blood relative of Akbar and then realizes he will have to come up with a story to explain this wild claim. The longer the story, the longer he may be able to escape whatever punishment Akbar may have in mind.

The remainder of the book is this tale, involving three young Italian boys from Florence in the time of the Medicis where even the pope (Leo X) is a Medici. One of the boys, seeking adventure, becomes a cabin boy on the flagship of captain general Andrea Doria. When the Ottoman fleet surrounds Doria, the captain sets the boy adrift in a small boat in a deep fog to blow the captain’s horn and confuse the Ottoman’s about the Italian fleet. When the fog clears the boy is alone with the entire Ottoman fleet surrounding him. He is taken captive, given a Muslim name, and raised as a Turk. He becomes a talented fighter and is given his own small army of Janissaries, including four giant albinos Swiss guards named Otho, Botho, Clotho, and D”Artagnan. When the Shah turns on the young warrior, he kills the shah and takes his favorite concubine who claims to be descended from Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. The enchantress, who bewitches men wherever she goes is accompanied by her look alike maid Mirror. They escape to Italy and Florence where the ruling decadent Medici hires him and his mercenary army.

Medici Palace Florence

The tale continues until it is revealed that the blond boy is the grandson of the Italian Janissary and the enchantress. Akbar’s favorite wife is a mythical woman who is therefore perfect and the source of great jealousy in Akbar’s court. Akbar is so impress by the tale that the mythical wife suddenly vanishes to be replaced by the equally mythical enchantress who also knows the secret of eternal youth. An entertaining read. Rushdie is not lacking in imagination.

The World Before Her, Deborah Weisgall, 2008

George Eliot

Novel by a writer well versed in the arts takes us on an intimate tour of Venice through the eyes of two women, married apparently for financial security; Marian Evans (George Eliot), who visited Venice on her honeymoon in 1880 at age 60; and fictional sculptor Caroline Spingold, who accompanies her financial wheeler-dealer American husband to Venice in 1980.

Whistler’s Venice

The author imagines a meeting between Marian Evans and the painter James Whistler who was in Venice at the time of her honeymoon. Marian Evan’s circle includes her deceased long time lover George Henry Lewes, probable lover Herbert Spencer, John Chapman, Franz Liszt, Robert and Clara Schumann, and other luminaries of the age. The writing of these sections is in a style typical of the period of Henry James.

The sections dealing with American Caroline suffers by comparison though both take us inside rare Churches and Palazzos of Venice including the Jewish ghetto and the lagoon where rare glimpses of the Dolomites can be seen. We wait impatiently to return to the Marian Evans tale. Still, this work is well researched and well imagined and worth reading.