#1925Club: The Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov
Simon and Kaggsy’s classics reading weeks always get me picking up older books. I found this unusual Russian novella on a giveaway pile a few years ago and it’s been on my #NovNov possibility shelf ever since, but now turned out to be the perfect time for it. This review also fits into the Hundred Years Hence challenge.
Sharik is an abused stray dog, living on scraps on the snowy streets of Moscow until Professor Philip Philipovich Preobrazhensky takes him in. The professor is a surgeon renowned for his rejuvenation procedures – implanting monkey ovaries into a middle-aged lady, for instance – and he has designs on the mutt. His new strategy is to take the pituitary gland and testicles of a just-deceased young man and transplant them into Sharik. The central chapter is composed of medical notes taken by Preobrazhensky’s assistant, Dr. Bormenthal. Gradually, a transformation is achieved: The dog’s bark becomes more of a human groan and his fur and tail fall off. Soon the new man is fully convincing: eating, dressing and conversing. Even in a matter-of-fact style, the doctor’s clinical observations are hilarious. “The dog[,] in the presence of Zina and myself, had called Prof. Preobrazhensky a ‘bloody bastard’. … Heard to ask for ‘another one, and make it a double.’” The scientists belatedly look into the history of the man whose glands they harvested and discover to their horror that he was an alcoholic petty thief who died in a bar fight. Sharikov follows suit as an inebriated boor who pesters women, wants to be known as Poligraph Poligraphovich – and still chases cats. Is it too late to reverse a Frankenstein-esque trial gone wrong?
This was a fairly entertaining fable-like story, with whimsical fragments of narration from Sharik himself at the start and close. The blurb inside the jacket of my 1968 Harvill Press hardback suggests “The Heart of a Dog can be enjoyed solely as a comic story of splendid absurdity; it can also be read as a fierce parable about the Russian Revolution.” The allegorical meaning could easily have passed me by, being less overt than in Animal Farm. Reading a tiny bit of external information, I see that this has been interpreted as a satire on the nouveau riche during the Bolshevik era: Sharikov complains about how wealthy the professor is and proposes that he sacrifice some of his apartment-cum-office’s many rooms to others who have nowhere to live. But yes, I mostly stayed at the surface level and found an amusing mad-scientist cautionary tale. I’ll read more by Bulgakov – I’ve had a copy of The Master and Margarita for ages. Next year’s Reading the Meow week might be my excuse.
[Translated from Russian by Michael Glenny, 1968]
(Free from a neighbour, formerly part of Scarborough Public Library stock) 
I also intended to read An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser from the university library, having a dim memory of a black-and-white film version starring Montgomery Clift (A Place in the Sun). But the catalogue’s promised 400-some pages was a lie; there are two volumes in one, totaling 840 pages. So that was a nonstarter.
But here are some other famous 1925 titles that I’ve read (I’m now at 7 out of the top 15 on the Goodreads list of the most popular books published in 1925):
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Trial by Franz Kafka
The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham
Emily Climbs by L.M. Montgomery
Carry On, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
I’ve previously participated in the 1920 Club, 1956 Club, 1936 Club, 1976 Club, 1954 Club, 1929 Club, 1940 Club, 1937 Club, 1970 Club, and 1952 Club.
Six Degrees of Separation: From a Redhead to a Blue Dress
This month we begin with Redhead by the Side of the Road (2020). (See Kate’s opening post.) Anne Tyler’s lackluster latest somehow got longlisted for the Booker Prize. Still, I’m a solid Tyler fan and I’m taking advantage of Liz’s readalong to get to the books of hers that I own but haven’t read yet. Currently reading: The Clock Winder (1972).
#1 Sorry to break it to you if you haven’t read the book yet, but the title refers not to a person with red hair but to a fire hydrant: Micah, a typically useless Tyler antihero, makes this visual mistake commonly when he’s out running without his glasses on.
The Unlikely Redemption of John Alexander MacNeil by Lesley Choyce (2017) is beloved of a couple of Canadian book blogger friends, including Naomi (here’s her review). I came across it on my Goodreads TBR the other day and the blurb caught my eye. An old man starts doing peculiar things, like picking up a hitchhiker … except that it’s actually a neighbour’s mailbox. This reminded me of Micah’s folly, not least because of the glasses on the cover.
#2 One of the key images in The Great Gatsby (1925) is of the eyes of optician Dr. T. J. Eckleburg peering out from an old billboard. They’re explicitly equated to the eyes of God looking down on the immoral lifestyle of characters blinded by the pursuit of money and happiness. Gatsby was our neighbourhood book club choice this month. Whether we’d read it multiple times before (it was my third read) or not at all, we found a lot to talk about – and two members took the opportunity to dress up in vintage 1920s fashions for the Zoom meeting!
#3 Although those bespectacled eyes appeared on the copy I read in high school, the book group set cover featured a couple of 1920s figures: a woman on the front cover and a man on the back. They look rather like a young Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, but I can’t find evidence that it’s an original photograph. In any case, I thought the image looked awfully familiar, and finally located it as the cover of Fred & Edie by Jill Dawson (2000), which is set in 1922 and was inspired by a true crime. In a sensational trial, Edith Thompson and her lover, Freddy Bywaters, were found guilty of murdering Edith’s husband and the pair were executed the following year. Cathy’s review whetted my appetite to read it.
#4 Also featuring a murder committed in 1922 is The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters (2014). I will say no more – not least because I don’t fully remember what happens, though I have a vague sense that it is quite similar in plot to the Dawson – except that this was a stand-out from Waters. (My review for BookBrowse.)
#5 “Paying guests” was an old-fashioned euphemism used by people who didn’t like to admit they had lodgers. Another random recent find on my virtual TBR was The Dress Lodger by Sheri Holman (2000), which is about a 15-year-old prostitute trying to provide for herself and her disabled baby boy during a cholera epidemic in Sunderland, England in 1831. Victorian pastiches can go either way for me, but when they’re good I adore them. There are enough positive friend reviews of this on Goodreads for me to keep it on the list: it sounds reminiscent of The Crimson Petal and the White, and the epidemic theme sure is relevant.
#6 The blue dress on the cover led me to Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold (2008), a novel about Charles Dickens’s longsuffering wife, Catherine. (Though the central pair are given different names, it’s very clear who they’re based on.) I’m a sucker for any book about Dickens. Like Redhead, this was longlisted for the Booker Prize.
This month I’ve gone round to a different primary colour, by way of a classic and much historical fiction (with 1920s settings aplenty, and lots of marcelled hair!).
Where will your chain take you? Join us for #6Degrees of Separation! (Hosted on the first Saturday of each month by Kate W. of Books Are My Favourite and Best.) Next month’s starting point is Phosphorescence by Julia Baird.
Have you read any of my selections? Are you tempted by any you didn’t know before?
#1920Club Classics of the Month: Agatha Christie and F. Scott Fitzgerald
I’m sneaking in a couple of quick reviews on the final day to join in with Simon and Karen’s latest reading week, The 1920 Club. Speaking of books that were published a century ago, I happened to review Chéri by Colette as one of my monthly classics last year, and I’m currently reading The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton in advance of our May book club meeting.
The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
I don’t think I’ve read an Agatha Christie mystery since I was about … 13? (It was And Then There Were None.) But over the years I’ve watched countless Poirot and Miss Marple cases on TV with my mother. This was Poirot’s first outing, and it’s narrated by Hastings, the slightly dim Watson to the Belgian detective’s Sherlock Holmes.
One July, invalided home from the war at age 30, Hastings goes to visit old family friends at Styles, their Essex manor house: brothers John and Lawrence Cavendish and their elderly stepmother, who has recently (and somewhat shockingly) remarried. When old Mrs. Cavendish is found dead of strychnine poisoning, Poirot is brought in to sort through the potential suspects. Coffee and cocoa cups, a fragment of a charred will, a fake beard, a candle wax stain and a bolted door will be among his major clues.
Like Hastings, we as readers are quick to point to the obvious: hey, that foreigner who happens to be an expert on poisons, it’s him, right?! But as Poirot carefully explains, again and again, “If the fact will not fit the theory, let the theory go. … Real evidence is usually vague and unsatisfactory. It has to be examined, sifted. But here the whole thing is cut and dried.”
I rarely pick up a mystery novel, though when I can get stuck in I do tend to enjoy them. This was a super-quick read and I found myself turning to it more often than to other books on my stack that felt weightier in subject matter. In the end I find crime novels inconsequential, so can’t imagine needing to try another Poirot or Marple for another 20 years or so. But if you’re struggling to read in a time of anxiety, you could certainly do worse than a Christie novel.
My rating: 
This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald has long been one of my literary blind spots. The Great Gatsby is a masterpiece, sure: I studied it in school and have read it another couple of times since, as well as lots of background nonfiction and some contemporary novels that riff on the story line. But everything else of his that I’ve tried (Tender Is the Night was the other one) has felt aimless and more stylish than substantive.
Amory Blaine is a wealthy Midwesterner who goes from boarding school to Princeton and has literary ambitions and various love affairs. He’s convinced he’s a “boy marked for glory.” But Monsignor Darcy, his guru, encourages the young man to focus on developing his character more than his dashing personality.
Hugely popular at its first release, this debut novel won Fitzgerald his literary reputation – as well as Zelda Sayre’s hand in marriage. What with the slang (“Oh my Lord, I’m going to cast a kitten”), it felt very much like a period piece to me, most impressive for its experimentation with structure: parts are written like a film script or Q&A, and there are also some poems and lists. This novelty may well be a result of the author cobbling together drafts and unpublished odds and ends, but still struck me as daring.
In a strange way, though, the novel is deliberately ahistorical in that it glosses over world events with a flippancy that I find typical of Fitzgerald. Even though Amory is called up to serve, his general reaction to the First World War is dispatched in a paragraph; Prohibition doesn’t get much more of a look-in.
I understand that the book is fairly autobiographical and in its original form was written in the first person, which I might have preferred if it led to greater sincerity. I could admire some of the witty banter and the general coming-of-age arc, but mostly felt indifferent to this one.
My rating: 
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 