letters and sodas: booknotes

I’d been somewhat resistant to reading this book/series, in part because I am generally not crazy about dystopian fiction, and in part because the premise seemed so horrible/violent. Which, of course, it is: each year, twelve boys and twelve girls between the age of twelve and eighteen, called tributes, are made to fight to the death in a televised spectacle. The Hunger Games is set in a country called Panem, which is actually what used to be North America; Panem is ruled from the rich and technologically advanced Capitol, which is provided for by the twelve outlying Districts, which are rich or impoverished in varying degrees. District 12, where Katniss Everdeen lives, is in what used to be Appalachia; coal mining is still its main industry and it’s quite poor. (The Districts tried, at one point, to rebel against the Capitol, which subdued them harshly, obliterating a thirteenth District entirely. It was as part of the treaty between the Capitol and the Districts that The Hunger Games, the aforementioned televised spectacle, were established.) But enough plot and world-building: you probably already know all this.

What won me over was Katniss’s narrative voice, and the momentum of the story: the book is narrated in first-person, present tense, so the reader is with Katniss from the start. That takes away some suspense: clearly she’s telling the story, so clearly she lives. But there’s enough suspense otherwise that it doesn’t matter: it’s not knowing that she gets through the Games that’s important; it’s wanting to know how she gets through the Games. We know from the start that she’s a skilled hunter, and she also knows how to forage—she’s been supporting her mom and sister since her father died in a mining accident when she was 11. She knows from hunting how to be silent and patient, how to make plans and set snares. She’s practical. But she also has a temper. I can’t describe what it was about her voice that was so compelling, but it totally carried me through the book. Also compelling are her relationships with the other tributes, particularly Rue, the girl from District 11 who reminds Katniss of her little sister (whose place in the Games she volunteered to take) and Peeta, the boy from District 12, who Katniss knows but doesn’t know well. (There’s a whole romance subplot that’s alternately pleasing and frustrating, but I think more pleasing than not.)

The other interesting piece is the question of rebellion: of whether, and how, it’s possible for Katniss or anyone else from the Districts to rebel in a meaningful way. The Capitol is harsh with punishments: criminals are executed, or have their tongues cut out and are made to act as servants. The thought of not participating in the Games seems unimaginable, partly because of expectations—no one wants to seem weak, everyone wants their district to reap the rewards if they win, and everyone’s afraid of punishment from the Capitol—but also partly because of logistics: the tributes are guarded from the time they learn they have to compete until the time when the Games start. (This doesn’t seem like a totally satisfying explanation, but eh, I was semi-willing to suspend disbelief.) I liked the below passage, from right before the Games start, and I’ll be interested to see where Collins goes with this in the rest of the series:

While I’ve been ruminating on the availability of trees, Peeta has been struggling with how to maintain his identity. His purity of self. “Do you mean you won’t kill anyone?” I ask.

“No, when the time comes, I’m sure I’ll kill just like everybody else. I can’t go down without a fight. Only I keep wishing I could think of a way to…to show the Capitol they don’t own me. That I’m more than just a piece in their Games,” says Peeta.

“But you’re not,” I say. “None of us are. That’s how the Games work.”

“Okay, but within that framework, there’s still you, there’s still me,” he insists. “Don’t you see?” (142)

I didn’t even know there was a prequel to the Mysterious Benedict Society books, until I happened to be looking at books in Target while waiting for my boyfriend to finish his shopping. Clearly, once I knew about it, I had to read it: I really liked the rest of the books in the series, which feature the exploits and adventures of four very smart orphans. This book is about the childhood of Nicholas Benedict, whose adulthood we see in the other books: he brings the orphans together, and we know he was an orphan himself. but here we actually get to see a formative episode of his life. At the start of the book, Nicholas, age 9, is headed to the latest in a string of orphanages: his parents died when he was just a baby, and he’s lived in orphanages ever since. Nicholas is incredibly smart, incredibly observant, and has an unfortunately large nose and narcolepsy, which means he tends to get picked on by other kids. The new orphanage, known as the Manor, is actually called “Rothschild’s End—or ‘Child’s End, as it is often abbreviated”—which should give you a taste of this book’s variety of humor (4). ‘Child’s End has money woes, strict but fair staff, and three nasty bullies called the Spiders; it also has, supposedly, a hidden treasure—the inheritance of Mrs. Rothschild, the wife of the Manor’s former owner. Nicholas learns about the treasure, realizes that the orphanage’s director is trying to find it, and sets out to find it first himself: in the course of trying to do so, he learns more about himself and other people than he would have expected, and it’s sweet to watch Nicholas learn about generosity, about using his intelligence to benefit others as well as himself. (That sounds more smarmy than it comes across in the book, I think.) The book really picked up for me about halfway through, as Nicholas makes friends and the story becomes about the friends as a group, rather than just Nicholas by himself: the way Stewart depicts friendships and group dynamics are a big part of the appeal of the rest of the series, and I liked when that same kind of energy came into play in this book. I probably would have appreciated this book more if I’d re-read the rest of the series first: I read the other books in 2007, 2008, and 2009, and I’m sure I missed things in this book because it’s been so long. (For example: this review on Goodreads points out that this book shows the origin of the grown-up Mr. Benedict’s “passion for green plaid”—oh! Totally! How did I not think of that?)

In her introduction to Berlin Stories, Susan Bernofsky notes that “while we tend to call these texts “stories,” Walser himself described them as “prose pieces”; this hybrid of story and essay remained his genre of choice for most of his writing career” (xi). The pieces are short—many are just two or three pages—and they read, largely, as sketches or impressions or scenes. Most have a narrative voice that could be Walser’s own: male, young, a writer. (“The Little Berliner,” narrated by a twelve-year-old girl, is an exception.) And that narrative voice is a strong part of this book: it’s sometimes matter-of-fact, sometimes sly or tongue-in-cheek, and often feels extremely precise, extremely considered. The book has four sections, arranged thematically by Walser’s German editor, Jochen Greven, and the first and third sections (“The City Streets” and “Berlin Life”) appealed to me more than the others (“The Theater” and “Looking Back”). What I liked most about this book were the city-moments, the sense of time/place/atmosphere, the briskness of Berlin streets on a cold morning or the conviviality of a restaurant or a crowded tram car or the scene of a building on fire, with onlookers multiplying by the moment. Walser is great at capturing the humanity and motion and interest of the city, as in the below two passages from “Good Morning, Giantess,” the first piece in the book:

Cold and white the streets lie there, like outstretched human arms; you trot along, rubbing your hands, and watch people coming out of the gates and doorways of their buildings, as though some impatient monster were spewing out warm, flaming saliva. You encounter eyes as you walk along like this: girls’ eyes and the eyes of men, mirthless and gay; legs are trotting behind and before you, and you too are legging along as best you can, gazing with your own eyes, glancing the same glances as everyone else. (3)

Now you are walking in the park; the motionless canals are still covered in gray ice, the meadows make you shiver, the slender, thin, bare trees chase you swiftly on with their icily quivering appearance; carts are being pushed, two stately carriages from the coach house of some person or other of official standing sweep past, each bearing two coachmen and a lackey; always there is something, and each time you wish to observe this something more closely, it’s already gone (5)

One of my favorite pieces in the book is “Something About the Railway,” in which Walser writes of the “pushing, pressing, shoving, racing mayhem” of the station, and how pleasing it is to idle there and watch everyone else rushing past (87). The piece also includes some great passages on traveling by train instead of just sitting at the station, like the two passages below:

Or else one has a book and would like to read a bit of it, but one cannot quite, until in the end one can. The rectangle of window keeps displaying fresh new images. You watch vineyard-covered hillsides slowly falling away, houses sinking down, trees suddenly shooting up out of the earth. Clouds and meadows alternate amicably, meaningfully. (88).

And how marvelous it is to ride the train in winter! Snow everywhere, snow-covered rooftops, villages, people, fields, and forests; on rainy days: dampness everywhere, fog and darkly veiled views; in the sunny springtime: blue, green, and yellow sweet sunlight shimmers through the beech forest, high up in the blue sky float the gayest, whitest clouds, and in the garden and fields there is such a blossoming, humming, and splendor that one is tempted at every station to get out and lose oneself in all this warmth, color, and beauty (89).

I love that – the exuberance of it. The other sections of the book sometimes felt more abstract, more concerned with talking about how people are/how society is—but there was enough glorious concrete detail in the pieces I liked to make me glad to have read this.

In a section at the end of this book called “Thoughts on Myths,” A.S. Byatt quotes Nietzsche, who wrote about myths as “presiding over the growth of the child’s mind” (158). Byatt writes about Ragnarök, the end of the gods and the end of the world, as presiding over the growth of her own mind, after she discovered a copy of Asgard and the Gods as a child. I liked Byatt’s telling of the myth and the way she juxtaposes it with the telling of the story of a wartime childhood, of a family evacuated to the countryside in WWII and of the “ordinary paradise of the English countryside,” even in wartime (3). Myths are often creation myths, about the world came to be as it is, and the Norse creation myth is part of Byatt’s story. I like how full of lists the book is, how lists of living things are part of what unite the frame of an English wartime childhood (with “meadows covered with cowslips, buttercups, daisies, vetch, rimmed by hedges full of blossom and then berries, blackthorn, hawthorn, dog-roses, the odd ash tree with its sooty buds” (3)) and the world as it is told in the myths, with the World-Ash, Yggdrasil, and all the creatures of land and air living in it, and the bull-kelp, Rándrasill, and all the sea-creatures living in it (crabs and sharks and seaweeds: bladderwrack, sea-girdle, devil’s aprons, tangleweed). I love passages like this:

The branches and the sky were inhabited by birds. The skylark went up and up out of the bare earth into the blue sky, singing. Thrushes banged snails against stones and left a crackling carpet of empty shells. Rooks strode and cawed and gathered in glossy parliaments in the tree-tops. Huge clouds of starlings went overhead wheeling like one black wing, coiling like smoke. Plovers called. (35)

There are other things I like about Byatt’s style and tone: how in the telling of the myth she often makes use of sentences in iambic pentameter, how the story flows because of that. And I like her concern with stories, with reading, with acts of reading and how to read and the shapes that stories can take. There is the charm of a bookish child, who is “given to reading books from cover to cover,” and so reads the scholarly introduction to Asgard and the Gods, not just the myths themselves (8). There is the recollection of staying up past bedtime reading, with the added frisson that in the book the child doing this is doing it during the wartime nighttime blackout. There are the engravings from Asgard and the Gods, some of which, like this one, are reproduced in the book. (Of the rocks in that picture, Byatt writes that “The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended” (10). Reading Asgard and the Gods, and looking at the images it contains, is a lesson in learning to read the world in a mythic way, as a creator of myths not just a consumer of them: “This way of looking was where the gods and giants came from” (ibid.).) But the myth has its own power: Byatt writes, elsewhere in the book, about stories as being “ineluctable,” as having a shape, of running their course: even the gods and goddesses, in Norse myth, are ultimately powerless to reshape the story (89, 97)

And then there are the myths themselves. I haven’t read any other tellings of Norse myth, and know only bits and pieces, but oh, I loved the bits about Loki in this book, trickster shapeshifting Loki. Byatt describes him as “inordinate” (51) which I like a lot. Merriam-Webster defines inordinate not just as “immoderate” but also “disorderly” or “unregulated,” though those last two are marked as archaic: Byatt is clearly using the word in all those senses. Elsewhere, she says that Loki “liked things to get more and more furious, more wild, more ungraspable, he was at home in turbulence.” (115). There is something about that phrasing that sticks with me, that makes me think about how being “at home in turbulence” might feel.

Imagine the relief there’d be, in just stepping through the door of a spare room, a room that wasn’t anything to do with you, and shutting the door, and that being that.
There’d be a window, wouldn’t there?
Were there any books in there?
What would you do all day? (44)

There’s the premise, in a nutshell, of There but for the. A man named Miles goes to a dinner party. He doesn’t know the hosts at all, and hardly knows the person who invited him, who’s a man he met when they happened to be sitting next to each other at a play that was interrupted by a ringing cell phone. The dinner party is hilarious/awful, full of awkward moments and idiocy and stereotypes and prejudice, the kind of dinner party where you’d expect that everyone’s going to leave with the person they came with, shaking their heads and moaning on the walk/train ride/car ride home about how ridiculous it was. But that isn’t what happens. After the main course, before dessert, Miles excuses himself from the table, but then he doesn’t come back: he locks himself in the hosts’ spare room, and doesn’t come out.

But the book isn’t really about Miles and what he’s done and why he’s done it: it’s about the people around him, the people tangentially connected to him and how they’re affected by his act, but also about much bigger questions of history and memory and forgetting and epistemology, certainty and uncertainty, what we know or don’t, and connection and how to be in the world. It’s told in four sections, each starting with/sort of centered around one of the words from the title, and each centered around a different character. There’s Anna, who knew Miles when they were in their late teens (they met on a trip to Europe). There’s Mark, the man Miles met in the theater and who invited him to the dinner party. There’s May, a woman in her eighties who lives in the town where Miles grew up. And there’s Brooke, a precocious child who was at the dinner party with her parents, who are both academics. The structure of the book is wonderful, the way it follows not just different characters but different words/moods/themes. I loved this, in the “but” section of the book:

Mark: Is it always but? Can it be and?
Miles: Yeah, but the thing I particularly like about the word but, now that I think about it, is that it always takes you off to the side, and where it takes you is always interesting. (116)

And I loved Smith’s style: so smart and so funny, so much wordplay, jokes and puns and flights of language and recurring phrases (“There was once,” or “The fact is”) and parenthetical asides that go on for pages. So good!

I liked the last two short stories in this book the best, because one is a fairy tale and the other’s a spy story gone strange. Emmanuel’s style, which is sometimes dreamy but sometimes just trite, works for me when it’s playing with a genre like that: the other four stories in this book sometimes felt like they were trying too hard, like they were too self-consciously attempting to be literary, without quite managing it.

The first story in the book, “The Invitation,” is a single sentence that goes on for seven pages. I liked the very beginning (“You wrote me letters on fine paper, yellowed”) and some of the images (the narrator keeping his lover’s letter in his inside jacket pocket, waiting for the right place/moment to read it) (7-8). But the bits about the affair itself are fairly cringe-inducing: phrasing like: “there was a curtain of thick cotton between the guest room and the bedchamber, I could only graze with words that other intimacy that unveiled itself within the penumbra, there where you gave your beautiful cry” or, worse, “that silence we knew whenever we entered the somewhat sacred chamber of our lovemaking” (12, 13-14).

I don’t have much to say about the middle stories: there’s one about an old man who hires a private investigator to provide him with details about a woman he’s obsessed with from afar; there’s another in which a man surveying the health of lichens in northern France meets a mysterious old man who practices “deep cartography” and claims he’s mapped “all the fountains in downtown Vancouver” and “the silences of London” (63). Another, “Woman in a Landscape,” is about an artist who’s obsessed with a place, an ordinary patch of ground near her home. These stories are sometimes pleasing—the narrator’s tone in “Love and Distance: A Fragmentary Report” (the one with the private investigator) in particular was sometimes clever and satisfying, but sometimes just irksome. (In that same story, the woman is more a cipher than a person, a screen onto which the male characters’ desire is projected: which I realize is part of the story, but which still bugged me.)

“The End of Prose,” the spy story gone strange, is funny and fun: I think the first two sentences of it, which set up a certain expectation of style and genre then partially subvert it, capture the style nicely:

The organization had taken care of everything, bills in small denominations, an itemized itinerary of locations, and a perfectly plausible circumstantial introduction, thanks to which my presence would arose no one’s suspicion. What the organization had not accounted for was the fog, a kind of milky tar that stranded trains in the middle of open vistas and transformed the landscape into a scene of floating islands and evanescent bridges. (79)

“The organization,” it turns out, has arranged for our narrator to be a writer-in-residence at an artists’ colony that our narrator is sure must be a front for some nefarious activity—if it weren’t, why would the organization have sent him there, right? But just as the narrator’s surroundings are obscured by the fog, his whole trip becomes hazy and uncertain. And is he really reliable? Is this a spy story gone strange or something else, after all?

And then there’s the last story, “On Horseback upon the Frozen Sea,” which plays with “Bluebeard”: a woman the narrator is friends with has just rented a manor in the country for a song, though there’s a big room that she’s told she can’t use. Still, the house is so nice, what trouble can one locked room be? Right?

I’m not opposed to feeling adrift when reading, but this book, on my first read-through of it, made me feel more than adrift: I struggled to find a way in, or anything to hold on to. I haven’t read much by Ashbery: before A Wave I’d only read Notes from the Air, which I remembered only dimly, and only as being difficult. (When I look back at what I wrote about it, though, I can see there were bits I liked, and I can see why I liked them.) I didn’t like this book much after my first read-through of it, but I think the final/title poem helps cast light on Ashbery’s approach: the last line of the book is “But all was strange.”—which is I suppose a bit of comfort to take into a re-reading. Also heartening was the first paragraph of Christopher Middleton’s 1984 review of this book in the NY Times, which starts like this: “Reading John Ashbery’s poems is a bit like playing hide-and-seek in a sprawling mansion designed by M. C. Escher.”

The book starts with uncertainty: the opening line of “At North Farm” is this: “Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,”—which I actually kind of love, how it’s very matter-of-fact language that nevertheless starts the book with questions and with motion. Each stanza of the poem, too, ends with a question, and the start of the second stanza is something of a puzzle, implying a question. Which is interesting, but I still get a little stuck on the vagueness of it. But OK: I kept reading. I quite like Ashbery’s rhyming rendition of this poem by Baudelaire, but I think the bits I like best of it are Baudelaire’s: images like “chimneys and steeples, those masts of the city.”

There are prose poems, too, like “Descriptions of a Masque,” which is several pages long and mostly bewildering to me except when there are flashes of brilliance. It features characters from myth, from film, from nursery rhymes, from literature, with this great conceit:

Then we all realized what should have been obvious from the start: that the setting would go on evolving eternally, rolling its waves across our vision like an ocean, each one new yet recognizably a part of the same series, which was creation itself. Scenes from movies, plays, operas, television; decisive or little-known episodes from history; prenatal and other early memories from our own solitary, separate pasts; events yet to come from life or art; calamities or moments of relaxation; universal or personal tragedies; or little vignettes from daily life that you just had to stop and laugh at, they were so funny, like the dog chasing its tail on the living-room rug. The sunny city in California faded away and another scene took its place, and another and another. And the corollary of all this was that we would go on witnessing these tableaux, not that anything prevented us from leaving the theater, but there was no alternative to our interest in finding out what would happen next. (27)

And this lovely sentence:

Mostly there were just moments: a street corner viewed from above, bare branches flailing the sky, a child in a doorway, a painted Pennsylvania Dutch chest, a full moon disappearing behind a dark cloud to the accompaniment of a Japanese flute, a ballerina in a frosted white dress lifted up into the light. (28)

There are poems in different traditional forms or variations thereof: haiku, and haibun, and a pantoum, and there are implicit and explicit references to writing, to poetry: I like this, from “Never Seek to Tell Thy Love”:

You can’t read poetry,
Not the way they taught us back in school.
Returning to the point was always the main thing, then. (56)

And then there’s “A Wave,” the long title poem, which seems to be about love and living and about writing, about how to love and live and write. The poem “demands to be met on its own terms now” (79) and “the issue/Of making sense becomes such a far-off one” (70): so maybe feeling adrift is fine. And there’s this: these are probably my favorite lines in the poem, almost my favorite lines in the book:

and we sit down to the table again
Noting the grain of the wood this time and how it pushes through
The pad we are writing on and becomes part of what is written. (73)

Well, there goes my idea of maybe keeping the TBR Double Dare challenge going through to May. I went to the library today, and the shelves of new books were so very tempting, and so very full of things I want to read. I walked out with this delightful stack:

• Schematics: A Love Story by Julian Hibbard: I hadn’t heard of this book, but the unusual format (it’s a board book! for grownups!) and size caught my eye. It’s apparently about “love and loss,” and the publisher’s site says this: “Every spread pairs a quietly unfolding, enigmatic narrative with a visually arresting schematic diagram. Whether they plot simplistic dance steps or chart chemical decomposition, the illustrations complicate and supplement the deceptively simple narrative.” Sounds neat, right?
• Invitation to a Voyage by François Emmanuel is another new-to-me book, but from a publisher I’m fond of. Dalkey Archive Press publishes a whole lot of interesting works in translation, and this book of short stories apparently includes, among other things, an “artist who tries to paint fog and ends up by disappearing inside it,” as the back cover blurb puts it.
• Ragnarok by A.S. Byatt: I haven’t really read much of the Canongate myths series—I think the only ones I’ve read were The Penelopiad and Weight—but I like Byatt and when I read about this one in a “new releases” email from goodreads, I figured I’d probably end up reading it eventually. And there it was, just waiting for me.
• Barley Patch by Gerald Murnane is another Dalkey Archive book I hadn’t heard of before. The back cover says it’s “in the spirit of Italo Calvino and Georges Perec,” both of whom are authors I quite like.
• Dani Torres mentioned Berlin Stories by Robert Walser a while back, and it sounded excellent. I like books about cities.
• And last but not least is Ali Smith’s There but for the, which I think I first heard about last year via Litlove’s excellent post on it. More recently, Erin, who knows my taste in books, was reading it and mentioned she thought I’d really really like it. I expect I shall.

Happy April! It’s the end of C.B. James’s TBR Double Dare, and I’m pleased to report that all the books I read between January 1st and today were books that I either a) already had on hold/checked out at the library as of midnight on New Year’s Eve or b) already owned and hadn’t read yet. I suspect that I read more slowly when I don’t have a looming library due date, which can be a good thing, and I’ve enjoyed exploring my own shelves. I sort of feel like I should keep the challenge up until May, because all three books I read in January were my TBR Double Dare exceptions, those previously-mentioned already-checked-out library books. But we’ll see: I have a DVD to return at the library tomorrow, and the temptation of the shelves of new books may prove overwhelming. I also just put myself on the hold list for The Hunger Games, which I never did get around to reading and now am sort of curious about, but I’m hold number 559, so, uh, that might be a while, although my local library system has 271 copies of the book, so maybe it won’t actually take that long to get to my turn.

April, meanwhile, is National Poetry Month, and I always try to read and write some poems during April (while also always thinking that it would be nice to have a poem-reading and poem-writing practice that lasted longer than a month, but somehow, for me, that’s easier said than done). I’m subscribed to two different April poem-a-day email lists, one from Knopf and the other from someone who likes a whole lot of interesting poems. I also am thinking that the next book I start reading will probably be poetry: probably A Wave by John Ashbery, though I guess that also depends on what temptations I see at the library tomorrow.

And you? Anyone else who did the TBR Double Dare, how did it go for you? Did you notice any change in your reading habits? (I think in addition to reading more slowly, I also read more nonfiction than usual.) Do you have any April reading plans, poetry-related or otherwise?

I was reading this book on the train last night, and the woman next to me asked if I was an artist—because I was reading a book about color. “No, just interested,” I said, and then she asked about the subtitle, which is “How One Man Invented a Color that Changed the World.” “So, how did it change the world? Or maybe you’re still getting to that part?” So I told her a bit about the book, and then it was my stop, and I hadn’t managed to ask if she was an artist (probably!) or what kind of art she made. But nevertheless, I was pleased to have one of those bookish encounters one sometimes has in the city. And I was, mostly, pleased with this book, which tells the story of William Henry Perkin and his discovery of mauve aniline dye in 1856, and the future scientific advances that were related to that initial discovery.

Garfield’s writing style is mostly matter-of-fact, with a few flashes of oddness or romance, which I wanted more of: I liked, for example, that he gave the recipe for Perkin’s dye alongside a recipe for Nesselrode pudding (served at a jubilee dinner in New York celebrating Perkin’s invention). I wanted more of that: my absolute favorite thing in the book was this passage, in a section about a celebration/convention put on in 1956 by the American Association of Textile Chemists and Colorists and other related trades:

The most interesting new analysis came from Deane B. Judd at the National Bureau of Standards, Washington, DC, who found that Perkin and his successors had made a significant contribution to the English language. Of the 7,500 colour names identified by this time, over 100 originated directly from synthetic dyes. (That is to say, while almost all the 7,500 could be made artificially, there were over 100 names—including anthracene green and naphthalene yellow—that originated purely from the chemist’s workbench.) The other sources include 528 flowers (from amaryllis to wisteria), 427 proper names of places (Antwerp brown to Zanzibar brown), 340 pure colour names (black, blue, red), 290 pigments (chrome green), 254 fruits (apricot, banana), 239 foods (brown sugar, yolk yellow), 221 peoples (Tyrian purple, Dutch blue), 214 substances (amber, asphalt), 200 personal names (Robin Hood green, Salome pink), 183 botany (acacia), 149 common things (brick red), 144 natural dyes (indigo, madder), 133 birds (bluejay) and 133 animals (buff—from buffalo). There were 125 jewels (amethyst), 123 metals (brass), 121 geographical elements (glacier blue), 117 alcoholic drinks (absinthe), 107 trees (willow green), 105 atmospherical features (aurora yellow), 83 weather aspects (smog), 82 moods (blue funk), 79 abstract things (triumph blue), 72 romance and passion (golden rapture), 64 minerals (agate), 60 old things (antique brown), 59 end-use (battleship grey), 56 fable and superstition (goblin scarlet), 55 time of day (midnight blue), 50 marine life (coral), 50 undyed textiles (ecru), 46 mythology (Bacchus), 36 ceramic (Wedgwood blue), 31 religious occupations (cardinal purple), and 20 human (nude). (pp 176-177)

Which isn’t to say that the central story of Perkin, who made his discovery by accident at the age of eighteen, wasn’t interesting in itself. Perkin studied and worked in the lab of August Wilhelm von Hofmann at the Royal College of Chemistry, and one of Hofmann’s interests was showing “how well the study of chemistry could produce the artificial synthesis of natural substances” (29). One of the substances he wanted to synthesize was quinine, which was in huge demand for the prevention and treatment of malaria; Perkin’s discovery, which came about at home over the Easter holiday because of his curiosity about the results of a failed experiment, was not synthetic quinine, but rather a way of treating coal-tar to make a distinctive powerful and color-fast purple dye with aniline as its base. Mauve inspired many imitators: other aniline dyes in similar shades and other shades were developed, and were manufactured (especially in Germany) on a huge scale, bringing more and brighter colors to more consumer goods.
And aniline dyes like Perkin’s mauve weren’t just used to dye textiles: they were used to stain cell and tissue samples, and were useful in staining and therefore identifying and studying specific bacteria associated with specific diseases. They even were the starting point for chemotherapy, as scientists realized that the dyes weren’t just staining the cells but reacting with matter in them.

I wasn’t so into the parts of this book about industry (I especially could have done without all the bits about corporate buyouts and mergers) though I did like some of the more lively bits, particularly a section on the Victorian-era dye industry’s publicity battle. As more and more people made aniline dyes in various colors, worries about health risks grew: some colors used arsenic, which could pollute local water supplies and might also cause skin irritations; some doctors and concerned citizens claimed that even arsenic-free colors were irritating because of the coal-tar itself – especially in cheaper dyes that were less color-fast than Perkin’s mauve. There was a push to encourage a switch back to natural dyes, but that didn’t really make financial/logistical sense, and besides, the manufacturers of artificial dyes pushed back. I love this: “Williams Bros and Ekin, from Hounslow, Middlesex, mentioned that an analytical chemist from London called Antony Nesbitt fed his rabbits for many weeks on oats which had been steeped in strong solutions of magenta, violet, brown and orange. The rabbits seemed to like it, and stayed white” (108).

Mostly I liked the bits of this book about the history of dyes and dying: I knew that cochineal was made from insects, for example, but had no idea that it took “about 17,000 dried insects for a single ounce of dye” (40). And I’d heard of Tyrian purple, but I loved this passage about it:

Pliny described how, during autumn and winter, the shellfish were crushed, salted for three days and then boiled for ten. The resultant colour resembled ‘the sea, the air and a clear sky,’ suggesting that Tyrian purple defined not one particular shade but a rich spectrum from blue to black. The dying process varied from port to port, and might have water or honey mixed in to achieve different hues. (39-40)

That’s what I wanted more of: color as product/process and color as evocative, bits of shell conjuring sea and air and sky.