Having finished Rites of Peace, I’ve lurched back into fiction, and am well into both Sacred Games, by Vikram Seth, and Chang & Eng, by Darin Strauss. But I’m still working on David Gilmour’s informative but entertaining look at the Raj, The Ruling Caste. Every now and then, I look into Aline S Taylor’s Isabel of Burgundy: The Duchess Who Played Politics in the Age of Joan of Arc 1397-1471. I can’t help comparing it with Helen Maurer’s Margaret of Anjou, a completely different kind of history book.

Stalled Books: The Raw Shark Texts; There Goes My Everything; The Label.

I did read, practically in one sitting, Clotaire Rapaille’s The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy As They Do.

As for the Book Review:

¶ The Revelator.

Min Jin Lee’s Free Food for Millionaires appears to have come out some time in June. It was reviewed in the Book Review at the beginning of July. I suppose the publishers were hoping that the novel would be carried off on thousands of August vacations and digested as a thoughtful beach book. It happens to be a serious bourgeois novel with a strong (but utterly intelligible) Korean accent, and I think that I’d have enjoyed it more in cooler weather. If I were to reduce my judgment of the novel to one sentence, it would be this: I look forward to reading Ms Lee’s next book a little more than I look forward to re-reading this one. It’s that good.

¶ Free Food for Millionaries.

Here we are at the end of August. Tomorrow will see the last post at the old Daily Blague (www.portifex.com/DailyBlague/). Happy as I am about the new Daily Blague (www.dailyblague.com/blog) – which is what I hope you’re reading – I’m stung by the old leaving-school nostalgia. It is painful to outgrow things.

For my penultimate pointer, I’ve chosen a book that I read because I met the author herself, in the ophthalmologist’s waiting room. She was a handsome matron in tweeds who asked me if I knew what the music playing on the radio was. (They play WQXR at Dr Odell’s.) I did: it was Telemann’s delightful concerto for three oboes and three violins. We fell into a conversation of sorts, with her doing most of the talking. I don’t know how I captured the name of her book, because the doctor’s office knew her under her married name, but after my exam I walked round the corner to Lenox Hill books, which was still going, and found a copy of The All of It. The clerk told me that it is a “favorite in the neighborhood” – the neighborhood being 10021, the city’s ritziest ZIP code. (It’s still going, too, but in much reduced form.)

¶ The All of It.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to read a book about the Congress of Vienna, but the only one that I’ve ever found is Guglielmo Ferrero’s Talleyrand au Congrès de Vienne (1940), which, notwithstanding its considerable virtues, is not an introductory text. (I’ve just had a peek, and seen quite clearly why I haven’t got through it.) My delight, therefore, was extreme the other day, when, at Barnes & Noble, looking for something else, I came across Rites of Peace: the Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna, by Adam Zamoyski (HarperCollins, 2007). A glance at the book suggested that it was worth buying, and that judgment has only been confirmed by the text, which is lucid, engaging, and even a bit suspenseful.

I’ve been guilty, I confess, of the vulgar error of thinking that the principal item of business before the Congress was the disposition of France. But France had been dealt with, in Paris, earlier in 1814. The big headaches at Vienna were Poland – or, as the political correctness of the day had it, the Duchy of Warsaw – and Saxony. The major headache was Tsar Alexander I, a mystical man who could reconcile liberal outlook with autocratic behavior. Alexander, wildly popular at first, is a fine example of why hereditary monarchy of the unconstitutional kind is not a good idea. In any case, I broke down and cheated, checking the index to find out what happened to Poland.

I’m about halfway through, but the Congress only began a few chapters ago. Mr Zamoyski is careful (but never fussy) about beginning at the beginning, and his narrative starts with Napoleon’s return to Paris in December 1812, the disaster of his Russian campaign behind him. The complicated maneuverings of the following year, which ended with Castlereagh’s departure from London, were all news to me. I’ve reached the fall of 1814, and, if I was wrong about the Congress’s agenda, I was well-informed about its effervescence: when asked how the debates were going, a visitor was told, “Le Congrès ne marche pas; il danse.” This lovely pun on marcher (both “to walk” and “to work”) conveys the carnival atmosphere in which the Austrian capital was saturated.

About to start: Darin Strauss’s Chang & Eng. And Clublife, by Rob Fitzgerald, a/k/a Rob the Bouncer, which is also new from HarperCollins. Perhaps you’ve seen the blog? I meant to go to the signing two weeks ago, but didn’t write down the date. The book seems even saltier than the blog, but it’s also more coherent. The blog read like random notes. Well, here’s the book. What about a movie?

As for this week’s Book Review:

¶ Family Blessings.

The Corrections catapaulted writer Jonathan Franzen to the top of the tree, where, in the manner of literary greats, he will remain until he dies, no matter what he does or does not go on to write between now and then. He is not famous enough for me, though. He’s not yet famous enough to have attracted a massive reading of his second novel, Strong Motion (1992). I’ve read it twice, and look forward to reading it again. Its well-matched but mismatched lovers, Renée and Louis, tap into a nasty environmental hazard that gives the novel the coloration of a thriller, even though they’re much too hip and well-developed (as characters) to be at home in a page-turner. Even that dissociation strengthens the book.

¶ Strong Motion.

This week, I’m reading Indian. History: David Gilmour’s The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj. It’s extraordinarily well-written and full of answers to questions that you didn’t know you had. I had never heard of Haileybury, for example. That was the training school that the East India Company set up in 1806; it ran for about fifty years, before the merit system was introduced. Fiction: Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games. This lively novel, centtered on a policeman in Mumbai, Sartaj Singh, is studded with local dialect; happily, there is a glossary. I haven’t got very far. Backround: Dorling-Kindersley Eyewitness Travel Guide, India. It’s very fat, but then the usual DK guide covers a single city, not a massive subcontinent. I’ve also got a map of Mumbai, largely to help me navigate what I can see at Google Maps.

As for this week’s Book Review:

¶ On the Road Again.

Of the three novels by Walter Kirn that I’ve read, Up in the Air is the most unsettling. A contained but quietly cocky consultant flies from one Western town to another on a mission that is not entirely clear even to him. But the plot is a McGuffin. Up in the Air is a meditation on the depersonalization of the American atmosphere wherever corporations control the climate.

¶ Up in the Air.

What am I reading? That depends on which pile you look at. My official pile, on the bedside table, hasn’t been touched in weeks, except to be dusted. I’ve got issues with every book in it. That’s why they’re still there, and that’s why I’ve gone on to other things, such as Christian Jungersen’s The Exception and Tessa Hadley’s The Master Bedroom – both great reads. At the moment, I’m not committed to anything (excepting, of course, the difficult books on my bedside table). So I’ve plucked a couple of books from other piles around the house. As long as it’s 15 August, I may as well read about India. Now is the time to get through Vikram Chandra’s very thick Sacred Games. It’s about a gangster in Mumbai, I believe. Or perhaps it’s about a policeman. The other book is what might be called High Gossip: history at its most social. The book in question is David Gilmour’s The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj.

As for the this weeks Book Review:

¶ The Boy Who Lived.

Here’s a short page about a thriller that was subsequently turned into a film starring Daniel Craig. You’ll also have a look at what Portico looked like a few years ago, before the blogging. I see from my database that I have given the book away. I suspect that one of these days I’ll buy it in paper and read it again. What, exactly, is the pleasure that books like Archangel provide? Could it have something to do with all the hard work – the tedious preparation – that their unconsciously glamorous heroes put in, alongside the derring-do? Come to think of it, I haven’t yet read the copy of The Day of the Jackal that I picked up a while back, to take the place of the lost review copy that I got at the radio station.

¶ Archangel.

One might well ask why I have shelved, as it were, my page about Joseph Duveen among the history books. Surely the man responsible for the greatest transfer of European art from the Old World to the New ought to be visited among artists and other creative types in the Audience branch of Portico. Perhaps. I might put a link up over there someday. But the page belongs where it is. Duveen’s achievement as a top-of-the-line art dealer, working at a time when the publicity of auctions was distasteful, was acutely historical, in that it couldn’t have happened much before or after his allotted term on Earth. Although a man of great culture, Duveen is best understood as a virus that found its window of opportunity. Conditions were propitious; Duveen attacked; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art itself, boasting the Bernard Altman collection that Duveen assembled, would be a far poorer place without the legacy of Duveen’s opportunism.

And then there’s the National Gallery in Washington. The founder and principal benefactor was the unhappy Andrew Mellon, but the guy who did all the legwork was Joseph Duveen. Both men died before the museum opened its doors, in 1941, but it remains a joint monument.

I hope that this page will inspire you to seek out a remaindered copy of Meryl Secrest’s flawed but impressive biography. Duveen is an ultimately unknowable man to know about. 

¶ Dates>History Books>Duveen.

The other day, I finished reading Alexander Waugh’s Fathers and Sons, and came away thinking that the Waughs are almost as interesting a dynasty as the Mitfords – although with the Mitfords the magic was confined to a single brilliant generation of sisters. As it happens, Evelyn was a good friend of Diana’s right at the beginning of his career; he dedicated his masterpiece, Vile Bodies, to her – having read sheets of it to her during her confinement (in the West End, while she was pregnant; not at Holloway). Later, he got to be good friends with Diana’s older sister, Nancy. and their correspondence, which has been published, is great fun to read. So politically incorrect! Worse than Mad Men, even!

My Mitford page is getting to be too lengthy, and undoubtedly the current file will one day be reduced to a menu leading to many others.

¶ Reading Matter>Reading Matter>Shrieks (Pavillon Mitford).