The Lost Pianos of Siberia by Sophy Roberts

I knew the entire endeavour had been inflected with a measure of madness.~from The Lost Pianos of Siberia by Sophy Roberts

I was intrigued. Pianos and Siberia--what a strange combination.

I love piano music. I have played (poorly) since I was eight years old. I love the piano music of Rubinstein and Rachmaninoff. I love Russian composers, from Tchaikovsky to Rimsky-Korsakov to Stravinsky to Prokofiev to Shostakovich.

But--Pianos in Siberia? The far land of exile and punishment for millions known as The Prison Without a Roof?

Just the kind of book for me.

Sophy Roberts spent several years traveling across the breadth of Siberia tracing an unlikely, but rich, musical heritage. Her book The Lost Pianos of Siberia is part travelogue and part Russian history, filtered through the impact of music.

Franz Liszt's Russian tour "turned the Russian love of the instrument into a fever in the 1840s," Roberts writes.

The diversity of Siberia's people, from the indigenous people who underwent repression, to prisoners including serfs and the Romanov family, fill the pages as Roberts sought the rumored, legendary pianos, including the piano Empress Alexandra played while held prisoner.

The book is also a compressed Russian history, especially of the 20th c. revolutions, and a history of the piano, including the rise of Russian factories.

It felt about as far from home as I could get while remaining on this planet. ~from The Lost Pianos of Siberia by Sophy Roberts

In the far-flung communities of Siberia, Roberts discovers the universal love of music. It is incredible to read about herders gathering to hear a brilliant pianist play a baby grand in a Mongolian gert.

The Lost Pianos of Siberia is a unique and mesmerizing read.

The publisher gave me a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

from the publisher

From acclaimed journalist Sophy Roberts, a journey through one of the harshest landscapes on earth—where music reveals the deep humanity and the rich history of Siberia

Siberia’s story is traditionally one of exiles, penal colonies and unmarked graves. Yet there is another tale to tell.

Dotted throughout this remote land are pianos—grand instruments created during the boom years of the nineteenth century, as well as humble, Soviet-made uprights that found their way into equally modest homes. They tell the story of how, ever since entering Russian culture under the westernizing influence of Catherine the Great, piano music has run through the country like blood.

How these pianos traveled into this snow-bound wilderness in the first place is testament to noble acts of fortitude by governors, adventurers and exiles. Siberian pianos have accomplished extraordinary feats, from the instrument that Maria Volkonsky, wife of an exiled Decembrist revolutionary, used to spread music east of the Urals, to those that brought reprieve to the Soviet Gulag. That these instruments might still exist in such a hostile landscape is remarkable. That they are still capable of making music in far-flung villages is nothing less than a miracle.

The Lost Pianos of Siberia is largely a story of music in this fascinating place, following Roberts on a three-year adventure as she tracks a number of different instruments to find one whose history is definitively Siberian. Her journey reveals a desolate land inhabited by wild tigers and deeply shaped by its dark history, yet one that is also profoundly beautiful—and peppered with pianos.

About the author

Sophy Roberts is a British writer whose work focuses on remote travel. She began her career assisting the writer Jessica Mitford, was an English scholar at Oxford University, and trained in journalism at Columbia University. She regularly contributes to the Financial Times and Condé Nast Traveler. The Lost Pianos of Siberia is her first book.

The Lost Pianos of Siberia
by Sophy Roberts
Grove Atlantic
Pub Date August 4, 2020
ISBN: 9780802149282
PRICE $40.50 (CAD)

Where in the World is Swampdoddle?

Between 1959 and his death in 1971 my grandfather Lynne O. Ramer of Milroy, PA wrote letters and articles published in the Lewistown Sentinel column We Notice That by Ben Meyers. Today I am sharing the article about the location of Swampdoodle.

*****

We Notice That by Ben Meyers
The Question for Today: Where is (Was) Swampoodle?

Natives Want to Know

Dear Ben:
Do you know the exact locale of a place once called Swampoodle? Was it up the east end of Kish Valley? That is, if it even actually existed.

Aunt Annie (Ramer) Smithers claimed that she as well as [her siblings] Howard, Emma, and Carrie were all born in Swampoodle. But none could verify the exact location.

It may even have been farther distance, anywhere in Mifflin, Union, yes, even Blair or Schuylkill Counties because Gramps Joe Ramer worked at clearing off the virgin timber in all those places.

Mrs. Alice (nee Ramer) Mickey sent me some newspaper pictures of a sawmill supposed to be located in Swampoodle. Gramps Joe, then aged and blind, wearing a broad-brimmed Amish-type hat, with full beard and cane, was sitting on a log near the sawmill, while playing around were some kids. Some mountain men and mules were there, too.

Won’t you see what you can find out about Swampoodle, as Aunt Carrie Bobb, near 92, wants to know where she was born for sure?

Sincerely,
Lynne O. Ramer

Who Can Help Them?

Dear Lynne: Personally we can’t be of much help in answering your questions. However, maybe some of the WNT readers can give an assist. If so we’d be glad to hear from them.

The very names itself implies Swampoodle was in or close by a swamp terrain—consisting of soft, wet, spongy ground. The handiest such place we know of in this immediate vicinity is of course Bear Meadows. There the land is boggy and unfit for growing much else than trees, bushes, flowers and suchlike. Also such a place isn’t so good for pasturage. And of course unsuited for human habitation, unless a person was to build his dwelling on piles, which sometimes is done.
Anybody know where Swampoodle is—or was?

*****

We Notice That by Ben Meyers

Yes, Virginia, There Are (or were) Swampdoodles

Several Turn Up

Yes, Virginia, there is indeed a Swampoodle!

At least, there was a Swampoodle, a flourishing little community. And it may be still existent.

Not only one such place, but actually three, have been reported by as many different readers.

This was all in response to Lynne Ramer’s yelp-For-Help appearing in the WNT column lately.

Tom Harbeson of Milroy, our ex-District Forester for the state, says that the Swampoodle he is familiar with was located in Buffalo Township, Union County.

“Some of my folks were born in the village known as Forest Hill,” says Tom. “Near by Forest Hill was another settlement. It was called Swampdoodle because it was situated on low, swampy ground.

“There wasn’t much to say in favor of Swampoodle as a site for a village to be located upon, but some folks actually did just that. One family I remember bore the name of Mook. There were quite a few members of the clan. I don’t know whether it is called Swampoodle any more.”

Pinpointing the locale as being in Union Country by Tom Harbeson fits in neatly with this having possibly been the place where Gramps Joe Ramer lived for a while when some of his children were born.

The old photo of Joe Ramer at his cabin quite definitely fixes the location as Union County and that was where he had lumbered on the virgin timber. Lynne Ramer’s Aunt Carrie Bobb could well have been born there, also Annie, Howard and Emma.

George Zeigler tells us he remembers the time when Joe Ramer hauled timber off the mountains in the far-eastern portion of new Lancaster Valley. That ties in with the general direction of the Swampoodle mentioned by Tom Harbeson as being in Union County.

George remembers there was a settlement in that section of New Lancaster. he isn’t too sure of its name, but it was a swampy, spongy place and might have been the site of another Swampoodle.

Another Swampoodle is reported by Jim McCafferty, ex-hotelman. However, its locale is too far distant in another direction to have been the one the Ramers are interested in.

However, Jim’s report verifies the belief that not only was Swampoodle once used as the name of a certain location, but it had a more general usage to describe sections that might be of a boggy nature.

In other words, Swampoodle was for real, not just something dreamed up.

“I remember Swampoodle well,” says Jim McCafferty. “It was when I was living in Philadelphia. The place was situated at a spot near 13th and Oxford Streets.

“The distinguishing feature of that Swampoodle was an old cemetery at a higher-than-average spot. It was some five feet higher than the street level and there was a fence around it. My aunt told me that the old name for the area was Swampoodle.

“I don’t suppose it’s still known as Swampoodle. Doubtless it was finally taken into the corporate limits of the city of Philadelphia, just exactly what has happened to various other areas which were absorbed into the city as its limits were pushed further outward.”

Joseph S. Ramer and his second wife
Rachel Barbara Reed

Jo & Laurie by Margaret Stohl and Melissa De La Cruz

Jo & Laurie by Margaret Stohl & Melissa De La Cruz
with my Little Women Storybook Quilt
showing Jo March and Laurie

Jo & Laurie: A Romantic Retelling was a fun, escapist read that I looked forward to picking up every evening.

I don't read many YA books--this is rated for 7-9 grades--but I had a chance to read the beginning of the novel on BookishFirst and liked it enough to trade in my 'points' and claim a copy.

A good knowledge of Little Women and Louisa May Alcott was a must for this reader, and the authors passed the test. Nothing felt improbable, the characters were not twisted into someone unrecognizable.

The authors take up Alcott's characters, loosely based on her real family, and melds Alcott's family story onto the March family. It can get slightly confusing if you try to keep fact and fiction separate. You just have to trust the story, which is not fictionalized biography or wholly the fictional March characters of Alcott's books.

The novel begins after Jo's Little Women has been published to great success and her publisher has contracted her for a second book. She is to conclude the March sisters' stories with marriages. Unable to reconcile herself to such an end, Jo can't give her fictionalized self and sisters romance and a ring.

Jo & Laurie have been best friends but Laurie's feelings are deepening, driving Jo away. Meg finds John Brooke is interested in her, but she feels the need to marry money or to at least allow John to marry well. Beth has died, but not in Jo's story, and Amy is the pig-tailed child dreamer.

The foursome friends of Jo, Laurie, Meg, and John have a week in New York City, with Jo smashing all Laurie's dreams. He moves on to college while Jo struggles to write her sequel. And struggles. And struggles.

But Jo can't finish her ficitonalized story until she comes to grips with her real story. Can she be a writer and a wife? Can she trust to love someone who might leave her, as her beloved sister Beth did?

I found the book charming, easy to read, and a great escape.

I received a free book through BookishFirst in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

from the publisher:

1869, Concord, Massachusetts: After the publication of her first novel, Jo March is shocked to discover her book of scribbles has become a bestseller, and her publisher and fans demand a sequel. While pressured into coming up with a story, she goes to New York with her dear friend Laurie for a week of inspiration--museums, operas, and even a once-in-a-lifetime reading by Charles Dickens himself!

But Laurie has romance on his mind, and despite her growing feelings, Jo's desire to remain independent leads her to turn down his heartfelt marriage proposal and sends the poor boy off to college heartbroken. When Laurie returns to Concord with a sophisticated new girlfriend, will Jo finally communicate her true heart's desire or lose the love of her life forever?

Jo & Laurie: A Romantic Retelling
by Margaret Stohl & Melissa De La Cruz
G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers
Publication June 2, 2020
ISBN-10: 1984812017
ISBN-13: 978-1984812018

Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy

I love this novel.

I love the writing, its beauty and quality, the slow reveal of backstory, the melding of the personal and communal crises.

I love the chilling portrayal of a near-future world devastated by climate change and human greed.

I loved the strength of will of the fragile and broken protagonist, Franny.

I love the love story of Franny and Niall, how they hold each other close while letting each other go.

I love the adventure, the chase, how Franny choses the impossible and survives.

I love that the novel made me cry. And think. And love it.

Five Stars. Read it.

I won a free ebook from a publisher giveaway. My review is fair and unbiased.

Migrations
by Charlotte McConaghy
Flatiron Books
Pub Date August 4, 2020
ISBN: 9781250204028
hard cover $26.99 (USD)

from the publisher

For readers of Flight Behavior and Station Eleven, a novel set on the brink of catastrophe, as a young woman chases the world’s last birds—and her own final chance for redemption.

Franny Stone has always been a wanderer. By following the ocean’s tides and the birds that soar above, she can forget the losses that have haunted her life. But when the wild she loves begins to disappear, Franny can no longer wander without a destination. She arrives in remote Greenland with one purpose: to find the world’s last flock of Arctic terns and follow them on their final migration. She convinces Ennis Malone, captain of the Saghani, to take her onboard, winning over his eccentric crew with promises that the birds she is tracking will lead them to fish.

As the Saghani fights its way south, Franny’s new shipmates begin to realize that she is full of dark secrets: night terrors, an unsent pile of letters, and an obsession with pursuing the terns at any cost. When the story of her past begins to unspool, Ennis and his crew must ask themselves what Franny is really running toward—and running from.

Propelled by a narrator as fierce and fragile as the terns she is following, Migrations is both an ode to our threatened world and a breathtaking page-turner about the lengths we will go for the people we love.

"As beautiful and as wrenching as anything I've ever read...Extraordinary." —Emily St. John Mandel

"I recommend Migrations with my whole heart." —Geraldine Brooks

Hieroglyphics by Jill McCorkle

And I guess that's why we hold on to our bits and pieces in the first place, because we aren't immortal, and though denial fills our days and years, especially those that have slipped away, that kernel of truth is always lodged within. We are all haunted by something-- ~from Hieroglyphics by Jill McCorkle

Through a dozen moves and the purges each involved, there were boxes that followed me. They remained sealed and taped in each successive basement, but I knew they were there for when I would need them.

The boxes held my diaries dating back to 1963 when I was ten, poems and unfinished novels I had written, scrapbooks and mementos.

There were other boxes, too. Boxes of photographs and slides, books owned by my grandfather or mother or father, my grandfather's papers and newspaper articles, directories and yearbooks, dad's memoirs, mom's medical history.

They were the 'bits and pieces' of my life and my parent's life and my grandfather's life.

I have always been a keeper of things. I see the trait in my family, especially keeping memories and telling stories of long ago.

In Jill McCorkle's new novel Hieroglyphics, Lil is eighty-five and worried about forgetting, but her childhood memories remain vivid and clear. "I can close my eyes and know every square inch," she says of her childhood home.

Oh, me, too! I dream of the 19th c farmhouse I grew up in. I know the view from every window by heart, the turning of the stairs, the weight of layers of blankets in the unheated bedroom.

"I am homesick and I am timesick...I miss all that no longer is," Lil says.

Lil is married to Frank, who is also haunted by the past, filled with "sadness and an awareness of the shadows." When he was ten years old his father died in a train wreck, extinguishing his mother's happiness. Frank is fixated on returning to his childhood home, hoping to find what he left behind.

Frank's childhood home is now occupied by single mom Shelley and her child Harvey. Harvey is fearful, misses his father, sees ghosts, and losses himself in an alter-ego superhero with a mustache that covers the scar from his cleft palate surgery. Shelley is a court reporter who is overinvolved with the trial, in trouble for writing her thoughts into the transcript.

Each character is struggling with the scars of their past. They have kept things secret, they seek to understand the mystery of their parents.

This is a dense book, emotionally charged, with a story that opens like a night blooming flower. There is darkness, with some flashes of humor and light. It tugged at my heart. And it chilled me with recognition and the knowledge that in the blink of an eye I will be Lil, leaving behind those boxes of diaries.

I was given a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Hieroglyphics
by Jill McCorkle
Algonquin Books
Publication Date July, 28, 2020 
ISBN 9781616209728
PRICE $26.95 (USD)

from the publisher

Lil and Frank married young, launched into courtship when they bonded over how they both—suddenly, tragically—lost a parent when they were children. Over time, their marriage grew and strengthened, with each still wishing for so much more understanding of the parents they’d lost prematurely.

Now, after many years in Boston, they have retired in North Carolina. There, Lil, determined to leave a history for their children, sifts through letters and notes and diary entries—perhaps revealing more secrets than Frank wants their children to know. Meanwhile, Frank has become obsessed with what might have been left behind at the house he lived in as a boy on the outskirts of town, where a young single mother, Shelley, is just trying to raise her son with some sense of normalcy. Frank’s repeated visits to Shelley’s house begin to trigger memories of her own family, memories that she’d rather forget. Because, after all, not all parents are ones you wish to remember.

Hieroglyphics reveals the difficulty of ever really knowing the intentions and dreams and secrets of the people who raised you. In her deeply layered and masterful novel, Jill McCorkle deconstructs and reconstructs what it means to be a father or a mother, and what it means to be a child piecing together the world all around us, a child learning to make sense of the hieroglyphics of history and memory.

Covid-19 Life: Happy Birthday to Me!

A birthday is usually when the family gets together with a meal and a cake. These days, the 'get together' is different in kind.

Some FaceTime or Zoom--or have a drive-by car parade with police escort.

I got to to to the doctor. Nothing serious, folk. But it was an excuse to stop by our son's house and see him and his partner and the grandpuppies! Sunny went wild and after she wore herself out, Ellie came up to get her time. Even Hazel the cat came out for a little pet time.

Sunny at a trip to the dog park

Ellie at the dog park

We wore masks.

The kids gave me my presents--a wonderful Jane Austen themed collection of coloring books, a Jane Austen Tea Party recipe book, new colored pencils, and a pencil sharpener that can make THREE KINDS OF POINTS!

 This marzipan hedgehog is the cutest thing!

I was able to give Melissa her birthday present, the Baby Cactus quilt and succulent pillow!

I came home to book mail! The Book Club Cookbook win The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner! Yes, still on a JA theme birthday!

Not bad.

I had a bee house from my brother to give to my son, and I had a new mask that, luckily, fits him better. The bee house my brother gave me is below.

Hubby made dinner. We bought steak. We have not eaten steak in literally years. I avoid buying beef, for my health and the health of the planet. But we had steak and baked potato and a green salad. A bit of nostalgia, as it were.

So, not a bad day, all told, considering the limitations of sheltering in place.

I will close with some terrific photos from my brother and his girlfriend's trip to the Kewanee Penninsula earlier this month.

 Cooper Harbor Lighthouse

Stay safe.

A Heart Lost in Wonder: The Life and Faith of Gerard Manley Hopkins by Catharine Randall

A Heart Lost in Wonder by Catharine Randall is part of the far ranging Library of Religious Biography. Gerard Manley Hopkins poetry is unique and memorable, full of vivid images, but I knew little about his career as a priest or his life and how it affected his poetry.

Hopkins viewed everything through his faith, finding the divine in every tree and mountain.

Hopkins developed a personal and unique philosophy to explain the power of beauty in this world through the lens of faith. The draw of beauty was so powerful, he believed it might eclipse the divine. He would go weeks with his eyes fixated on the ground in self-denial.

Drawn by the traditions of the Catholic church he converted and he believed he was called to the priesthood. 

It seems like the absolute wrong choice that Hopkins would become a Jesuit--in effect, an itinerant teacher. I can personally attest that no one can who has not lived it can fully comprehend the sacrifices of itinerary, to be removed from a place that feeds one and set in a place that kills one's soul.

A perfectionist, he the work of grading papers and teaching wore Hopkins out and allowed no personal time for his poetry or an internal life.

He responded to the beauty of Wales and the rural assignments but the cities with their poverty and ugliness were soul-destroying. He denied himself poetry but rhapsodized in his journals.

Randall's book delves into the theologies that inspired Hopkins and shows how to interpret his poetry through the lens of his faith.  I am not Catholic and I am not deeply familiar with Newman or Loyola but she presents them very well. 

It is very interesting, but difficult to comprehend Hopkin's unique view of poetry. Cooper discusses the poems as vehicles for Hopkins's theology. 

Hopkins suffered a faith crisis in his later life and died an early death.

I enjoyed the book but do not feel I could comprehend it in one reading. It is dense and deserves a deeper study.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

A Heart Lost in Wonder: The Life and Faith of Gerard Manley Hopkins
by Catharine Randall
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Pub Date 28 Jul 2020
ISBN: 9780802877703
paperback $22.00 (USD)