Happy New Year 2026

 

Happy New Year 2026

A new year is approaching, and it is time for my annual address to... whoever find their way to this blog.

2025 was not a particularly great year. It used to be a casual off-hand thing to say that the world is going crazy. In 2025 it felt as if it is really happening. I find myself increasingly shutting down on international affairs and while I know this ostrich mentality is not really doing any good, I find a lot of comfort in watching movies from the eighties and reading books from the nineteenth century.

I did slow down though on the movies. Only 45 reviews in 2025 of which 39 were List movies. That took me from 1985 to 1987, making this the shortest step so far on this mission. Some of this was due to some very long movies, but most of it was simply lack of time. I love the eighties and the movies have generally been great. Should I mention a particular movie that made an impression, it must be “Tampopo”, though watching “Shoah” with my wife felt very important.

On my book blog I managed 9 books which is pretty good. This took me from “Father Goriot”, 1835 to “Dead Souls”, 1842, a span of 7 years. Those have been very interesting books written some of the most famous classic authors. Maybe surprisingly, the best of them was “The Lion of Flanders” by a, to me, completely unknown author (Hendrik Conscience). This year also included the most difficult to find book-so-far, “Camera Obscura”, which I read in Google translated Dutch.

Anyway, I just want to wish everybody a happy New Year. May the Swartch be with you all (guess what movie is coming up...).

 

Camera Obscura - Hildebrand (1839)

 

Camera Obscura

This was the most difficult to find book on the List so far. “Camera Obscura” is a book by the Dutch writer Nicolaas Beets under the pseudonym Hildebrand. There is supposed to be an English translation out there and I asked my local bookshop to help me find it. This took them about half a year and several failed attempts to finally get it home... in Dutch. Resigned to this I used Goggle Lense to translate every page from old Dutch to English and painstakingly read through those haphazard translations. That was a weird and often confusing experience and one I am not particularly keen to repeat.

“Camera Obscura” is not a single story, but more of an anthology of short stories that have little if anything in common. The only recurring element is that the author often refer to himself. Some text appears to be letters to Hildebrand, others are essays on themes such as travelling, seeing friends from childhood and watching animals in menageries or at fairs. The longest and by far most interesting story is about Hildebrand spending some weeks with an uncle and aunt and particularly his cousin Pieter Stastok. Both are in this scenario students with Pieter an almost comically pedantic and helpless character. Hildebrand attempts to help him but whether it be al billiard or taking girls for an outing in a boat, Pieter Stastok manages to make a fool of himself.

While the individual stories are all quite different both in tone and topic, they all help to paint sceneries of daily life in The Netherland in the 1830’ies. We get portraits particularly of members of the middle class, but also glimpses of the serving class. We meet them in their homes and in their interactions with each other. We hear a lot about fairgrounds, about visiting farms, about travelling. I believe this is the first novel on the List to describe travel by railway, something entirely new and exotic at this time. All these scenes help explain the title of the novel. A camera obscure is used to project a view down on a flat surface to help a painter produce a rendition of the view. In the same way, the short stories project images to us of scenes in The Netherlands so that we can imagine them in the right perspective.

What are then the impressions we get? Mostly that people were in The Netherlands in the 1830’ies the same way as people are at any time in most of the places in the world. Some are pedantic, some think they are funny. Some are choleric and upset while others are embarrassed, either of themselves or their kin. The doctor who arrives on a blistering hot day in a small town to find his old friend from his student days, only to find that his family is a mess with unruly children and obstinate servants and after hardly an hour cannot wait to get away again. There is an essay on education of children that probably tells a lot about schools in those days and even a rant warning about trying to be amusing when you are not.

I am not entirely certain it is working for me though. Only the story of Pieter Stastok is long and detailed enough to make the scenes really come alive. To some extent I do blame to awkward reading process, but I did get enough out of it to catch the idea. There is something of interest in the short stories, but I do wish they would have been woven together in a coherent whole. Maybe you must be Dutch to really appreciate it.

In any case, I cannot say I found reason enough for this book to be on the List. It is not a bad book, just not enough. From my movie list I have learned that if something is difficult to find, it is usually for a reason. So apparently it is with books.

    

Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol (1842)

 

Dead Souls

“Dead Souls” is the second novel by Nikolai Gogol on the List after “The Nose”. This time he toned down the absurdity, but only by a notch. Where most people will agree that a nose cannot just leave the owner, the characters of “Dead Souls” are just about plausible even if they are caricatures and for this reason it is a novel that works so much stronger than “The Nose”.

The novel consists of two parts which share little but the main character, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov. Chichikov is a man on a mission, which is to create wealth for himself, but every attempt of his eventually sours because it is just on the other side of the acceptable, either by social or by legal standards, yet ironically the palette of characters Chichikov encounters are practically all further on the wrong side of that boundary, but seems to get away with it.

The first book serves as a particular case. Chichikov arrives in a provincial town and manages to befriend all the gentility of the town with his friendly manner. Chichikov’s ploy to make money involves buying up “dead souls”, meaning peasants who have died, but are not yet registered as dead and so their owner, meaning the landowner of the village, still must pay their tax. I do not know exactly how that ploy works, but clearly the locals do not know either and so seeds of mistrust for Chichikov are being sown, despite Chichikov’s insistence that what he is offering actually helps them.

Every single one of the characters Chichikov meets are odd, in one way or another, and I suspect they each describe archetypes in caricature among the Russian gentility in the first half of the nineteenth century. They may be spendthrifts, drunkards, niggards, or outright corrupt or, in the case of the women, gossips, halfwits or primadonnas. By comparison Chichikov is a boy scout and he becomes our eyes experiencing this zoo of characters, which means that he becomes the hero we associate with and his reactions to these people largely reflect our own. Only rarely does his own oddities pop up, and when they do they appear harmless and innocent compared to those around him. When in the end he is run out of town, it is not because we see him as transgressing any boundaries of significance, but because everybody else make him up to be that transgressor.

The second book is a disjointed affair, partly because large sections are missing, including the ending and partly because it jumps around almost at random. We learn some of Chichikov’s backstory, placing him in a less flattering light then the first book and his transgressions also become more tangible. Still, they are peanuts compared to the characters around him who are all fools in different ways, even the hard working and outward sensible Konstanzhoglo.

While the second book continue to expose the odd characters of Russian gentility, it is more difficult to see the deeper point of this part. Chichikov does get in trouble, but this time not so much from the frenzy of the mob as from actual criminal actions that he really should not have done but have been led to by his own wish for fortune and the examples of all around him.

I much enjoyed the first book. It is amusing in its parody of Russian society, a parody we can understand even not being Russian because these traits are not exclusive to Russians. It is also coherent and realistic enough that I as reader get caught up in the story. The second book, however, often lost me. Every time I thought I had recentred the story, it took me somewhere else, leaving me disoriented and that meant getting disassociated from the story. I still enjoyed the characters, but they became vignettes rather than a coherent entity. This is a shame, and I think “Dead Souls” would have stood stronger had it only contained the first book.

I can only guess at what contemporary Russians may have thought of this satire of their society. The peasants would have been largely illiterate, so the readers would be the very same gentility Gogol was satirizing. Would they have found that amusing? And would it at all have been safe, given the repressiveness which have always pervaded Russian systems of any name? As an outsider it is hard to come to terms with people being the property of somebody else, but that element is never questioned by Gogol and that in itself leaves me baffled.

I have finally found a copy of “Camera Obscura”, an earlier book I have bypassed. It took the bookshop half a year to track it down, but now it is finally here... in Dutch. This will be a reading through Google Len

A Hero of Our Time - Mikhail Lermontov (1840)

 

A Hero of Our Time

Most stories have a plot and the characters in them are serving the plot. “A Hero of Our Time” is the opposite. Whatever plot there is serve to portrait the lead character. The book is composed of a number of shorter stories that barely interlink, but has that in common that they tell of the character in focus, Pechorin, though from different viewpoints.

One is a story told to the main narrator of the book by Pechorin’s friend, Maxim Maximych, This is a story about a local girl, Bela, “captured” by Pechorin and then discarded. A second is the narrator and Maximych meeting with the actual Pechorin. A meeting greatly disappointing to Maximych. The rest are extracts from Pechorin’s diary “published” by the main narrator. In these parts, Pechorin is therefore himself the direct narrator and the perspective is his own. These three stories are in turn his stay in a Black Sea port where his interference in a smuggling operation leads to the doom of several locals. The second, and longest, of the stories concerns his stay in a resort town where Pechorin sabotage his friend’s, Grushnitsky’s, courtship to the aristocratic Princess Mary by making his own competing courtship, ending in a duel to the death with Grushnitsky. Finally, there is a short story where Pechorin meets an officer who believes in fatalism to the point of betting on it in a game of Russian Roulette.

The actual plots in these segments are, as mentioned, of less interest. What is of interest is how Pechorin appears in the different viewpoints.

I cannot say that I myself has made up my mind, neither of what I think of Pechorin myself, nor indeed what the various observers think of him. What remains after reading these different stories is a complex character who is neither good nor bad, but transcends that sort of simplistic categories.

The outside view is indeed puzzled. There is admiration for his skill and tenacity but also abhorrence for his inconstancy and disrespect. In the story about Bela, Pechorin seems to have gotten it into his mind to obtain the pretty daughter, Bela, of a local lord. In the process he ruins the lord’s son, a local warrior and Bela herself while Pechorin himself seems to tire of the game and discard it as uninteresting. In the same way, Maximych is discarded where he thought he was a friend with Pechorin’s confidence,

This nihilism is challenged when Pechorin himself tells his stories. While they would still appear to be about Pechorin ruining other people for kicks, there are some deeper layers at play. Pechorin is a victim himself, but in a complex manner. He navigates in the world both controlled by his feeling and searching desperately for feelings. He claims he cannot feel love, yet all he does, he does in a passion. The man without emotions is entirely guided, indeed commanded by his strong emotions.

I cannot find a good way to describe it. Pechorin is a character apparently without the loyalties and values the society around him expects of a man, but at the same time a man with clarity of insight on himself and integrity for himself that keeps him to a higher standard than most other people.

Pechorin is both alien, from a conventional point of view and very familiar from a human point of view and that makes him a fascinating character and one that i myself has not entirely decoded. The title, A Hero of Our Time” seems to indicate that he is a product of his time, of his society and by implication represents a typical character of this environment. In that case, this is not just a character study but a society study.

It could also be ironically meant. That Pechorin is hardly a hero and therefore this being a warning against a character type in the environment.

Either way, this is a fascinating read and one not like anything I have read before. “Citizen Kane” is probably the closest I can think of.

Recommended.

 

The Fall of the House of Usher - Edgar Allen Poe (1839)

 

The Fall of the House of Usher

It was a surprise to learn that “The Fall of the House of Usher” is not a novel but a short story, 27 pages in the collection I found. Considering its standing and that Netflix created an entire TV-series on it, let me to expect something... bigger. It is however not its volume that matters here but its quality, or perhaps rather ambience. A quality the world of literature is forever indebted to.

The story is told from a first person view of an unnamed narrator. He has been invited by his old friend Roderick Usher to the Usher estate. Things are not well with Roderick, though, and he is changed. There is a gloom and sense of doom to him, which extends to the entire manor house. It is described as dark, old and musty, with creaking strange sounds and is more of a mausoleum than a house to actually live in. Even the weather is grey, dark, windy and ominous.

The narrator catches a glimpse of Roderick’s sister, Madeline Usher, who is suffering from a wasting disease, and she dies shortly after. Her sickness and eventual death is partly the reason for Roderick’s poor state. They entomb her in a deep basement of the house and then the narrator set about trying to cheer up his old friend.

This attempt is largely unsuccessful. Instead, both seem to slide into madness where the storm, the house and the corpse merge into a final collapse.

It is a short story and for that reason, not a terribly lot is happening in the story. Instead, it is all about the ambience of the scene. Poe makes a lot out of painting the setting and manage to get the external setting to match up with the despair and gloom of the mental state of the characters of the story. The house itself, which appears like an old gothic castle the likes of which belong in Europe, not in nineteenth century America, is a reflection of the mind. It is a living thing that breathes, is getting old and tired and prepares to die.

In the climactic scene, Roderick and the narrator are reading from an old volume in a dark room with a storm raging outside, when they both hear and feel something terrible approaching. There is a blend here of reality and lunacy that transports both of them to a horrific place where the dead comes alive to ensnare them and drag them into their tomb.

In this single setting, Poe refines the gothic genre to its condensed essence. Poe did not invent the gothic novel, it was a popular genre even back in the eighteenth century and I have reviewed a few of them, but when we think gothic today, it is not “The Castle of Otranto” or “Melmoth the Wanderer” we think of. It is “The Fall of the House of Usher”.

I bought a collection of Poe’s short stories, which includes one of the later entries on the List, and sort of expected that all the stories would be gothic, but that is not at all the case. Poe wrote quite varied, even comedies, but what all the stories have in common is that they in relatively few pages manage to condense a single message into a clear picture that manages to stand alone, completed. I do not know the history of the short story, but my guess is that Poe’s contribution to that genre is as great as that of the Gothic novel.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” is a short and rewarding read. My only reservation is that I would have loved to read an entire novel rather than a short story. That is just me being greedy.

The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal (1839)

 

The Charterhouse of Parma

We are in the process of moving to a new apartment so my blogging on movies is on hold for the moment. I did, though, have a chance to finish “The Charterhouse of Parma” so after a long and exhausting day of cleaning up our old place, I can relax with a bit of blogging on my book site.

“The Charterhouse of Parma” is the second novel by Stendhal on the List and it is quite a bit different from “The Red and the Black”, not least in its tone, which is blatantly irreverent and even satirical rather than understated as in “The Red and the Black”.

This is a big and sprawling story with the character Fabrice del Dongo at the centre. Fabrice is the second son of a Marquis and, being full of life and romantic ideas, is scorned by his father. Instead, he is attached to his aunt, Contessa Gina Pietranera, a similarly vibrant woman.

Much inspired by the glory of the French, the very young Fabrice endeavours to join in Napoleon’s final campaign at Waterloo. A combination of being Italian, very young and incredibly naive, his exploits in that battle are more comical than dramatic and when he returns to Italy at least he is a bit wiser.

Meanwhile, Gina, a widower, is getting attached to Count Mosca, the prime minster to the Prince of Parma and is relocating there as a way to keep the now wanted Fabrice out of the clutches of the Austrians. Parma is a tiny principality, led by an absolute ruler, where intrigues are rampant, but also very provincial and as a result often absurd and comical. The scheme is that Gina gets married to the old Duke of Sanseverina, who immediately moves abroad and shortly after dies, leaving his estate, title and fortune to Gina, Duchesse de Sanseverina. Count Mosca is her lover and companion from the outset and together they scheme the shit out of Parma.

From then on things get complicated. Mosca is in love with Gina. Gina is in love with Fabrice. Fabrice is in love with Clelia Conti and Clelia is promised to the wealthy Marquis de Crescenzi. Fabrice is arrested for killing a former rival to an actress, he was dallying with, though in truth the guy assaulted Fabrice and for that Fabrice is imprisoned in a fortress held by Clelia’s father.

Th story is in fact much more complicated than this and there are a dizzying number of characters coming in and out of the story and it is clear that Stendhal had a lot of fun with this story. He has placed it in Italy, allegedly because the Italians can and will act differently than the French, but just as likely, it is a way of creating a fable using imaginary characters in a far away place that are still easily recognizable for the French reader. With this move, Stendhal can attack absolutism, scheming nobility and various injustices at will. And that he does, big time.

Stendhal has a wonderful way of writing and in “the Charterhouse of Parma” he uses it more satirically than in his earlier book. There is a glee to his writing as if much of it was written on an inspiration and a need to prove a (or several) point(s). At times the story goes out on a tangent before being reigned in and while it indicates an unstructured flow of mind method of writing, it never becomes annoying though sometimes the story appears to have dead ends or vital people suddenly appear. I would not be surprised if the book is a first write through, but if so, it is mighty impressive.

The characters are always very much alive, although compared to his earlier work, in “The Charterhouse of Parma” there is an element of caricature to the characters. Where the characters of “The Red and the Black” felt like real human beings, the characters here are a little too fantastical for realism, but in return they are so much more entertaining. I understand it as Stendhal’s mockery of the upper classes and their silly intrigues.

I enjoyed reading “The Charterhouse of Parma”, it was fun and easy to read, but I do find “The Red and the Black” the better book. Probably it is that satirical bite which, fun as it is, also distance me as a reader from the story.

Still, definitely a recommendation from me.

 

The Lion of Flanders - Hendrik Conscience (1838)

 

The Lion of Flanders

One of the wonderful things about doing this list of books is that I get to learn about things that I knew nothing about. I have now learned that around 1300 there was an epic strife between Flanders and France that the Flemish won and which, at least for a while, earned them freedom from the rule of the French. This strife culminated in the “Battle of the Golden Spurs” at Kortrijk (or Courtrai) in 1302.

I also understand that it was this book, “The Lion of the Flanders”, by Hendrik Conscience which fuelled a renewed interest in this old conflict, exactly at a time when the state of Belgium was trying to carve out an existence on its own, squeezed in by the French and the Dutch. Whether the Walloons also take pride in the story, I have no idea.

The stage at opening is the ducal palace of Flanders. Flanders has lost a war to the French who has now come to occupy the land, led by the brother of the French king, Charles de Valois. He is a noble knight who convinces the old duke that if he and his nobles go visit the king and beg forgiveness, they will be reinstated as rulers of Flanders. Charles is convincing, but at the king’s court, the spiteful Queen Joanna of Navarra rules and she hates the Flemish. She makes the king take all the nobles hostage, including the son of the duke, Robert de Bethune, the renowned “Lion of Flanders”, a mighty hero.

The major nobility out of the way, Joanna sets out to destroy the Flemish, to begin with by imposing a rule of tyranny in the Flemish towns. The book focusses on Brugge, the most important town at the time and likely the richest in western Europe. Here the guilds holds sway, defending hard earned rights of freedom, and the leaders of the clothworkers, Deconinck, and the butchers, Breydel, set up a resistance. When Joanna’s lapdog, de Chatillon, moves in to crush the resistance, the French get their asses kicked and Flanders is in rebellion.

In Brugge we also find Robert the Bethune’s daughter Mathilda and the young knight, Adolf van Nieuwland and yes, a budding romance.

This is a very interesting story, and it has all the elements of an epic struggle. It is almost Star Wars in medieval times: The good versus the bad, the underdog against the giant and a struggle for freedom from the tyranny of an evil empire. It also holds all the right characters with the four mentioned representing the types we would like to follow. In other words, this is fundamentally a good story and was born to be made into a Hollywood movie.

Unfortunately, Conscience decided to write this in the tone of a medieval romance. This means declamatory speeches, one-dimensional characters and an emotional range that is always extreme. People are either ultra patriots (country before family) or treacherous cowards, heroic noble or base villains. Women laugh excitedly or swoon of sadness. There is no middle ground, and the characters easily get reduced to cartoonish characters. This is such a shame, and I would love to read a rewriting of this story in modern style. Or even the natural style of the 1830’ies.

This does not mean that I did not enjoy the book. For me, premise is a big thing and the premise here is awesome, but it was with increasing irritation as I got through it and I kept thinking what this could have been.

I have been to Brugge, and I would have loved to have known this story before I went. Instead, I recognize many of the landmarks as places you can still find today. Brugge is a very interesting town, and its history has gotten yet another layer for me with this book.

Nationalism can be an ugly thing and if you think about it too much, this book may go to some ugly places, I believe it should be read as a heroic epic and just leave it at that. In that light, I recommend it.