Sunday Sundries, 177

1. AOTW: I am dividing this week's award among all you tailgaters out there!

2. At the recommendation of someone I know well, I ordered and watched (Joyce did not join me) the Netflix DVD of John Wick (2014) with Keanu Reeves as a former Super Hitman, lethal and laconic (is there another type?), who wreaks his vengeance on the Russian mob when the scion of the family steals his Ford Mustang and kills his new puppy. (I am not making this up.) Scones of folks die, almost all shot by Wick, who never misses, of course, except when a miss will allow the plot to advance.

Bloody and horrifying, especially so in these grim days after another school shooting when the sound of rapid gunfire is a voice from hell.

No links or images today for this one.

And no excuse for me for watching it all (though it did take me four or five days). I will not be checking out the sequels.

3. We're delighted that Doc Martin is back, and we are streaming the latest season. Both of us love that series--and the motley mix of characters, the humor that is entertaining and painful at the same time.

4. I finished a couple of books this week ...

     - The first was in the series of novels I'm reading about Irish PI Jack Taylor (whom I met via the eponymous TV series)--Priest, a novel that features a grisly beheading of a priest, who, of course, turns out to have been a Bad Boy (with boys). Taylor--who battles with (and often loses to) alcohol--has a personal life that is darker than black. He's a former cop in Galway who now plays outside the system, administering vigilante justice when it's called for, and--in the last two novels, anyhow--suffering horrific end-of-the-novel experiences. Ken Bruen, author, is an excellent writer--literate and allusive (Taylor is a Big Reader)--but I'm gonna take a little break from the series, I think. Just reading about Taylor's Dark World makes my own sun dim.

     - The second is Manhattan Beach, the most recent novel by Jennifer Egan, whose works I began reading when I saw the glowing reviews of Beach when it first cam out in 2017. So, as is my wont, I got her earlier books (novels and a collection of stories) and read them in the order of their appearance--well, except for the story collection (Emerald City), her first book, which I read just before Beach.

The reviews of Beach indicated that it was more--what?--conventional than her earlier works, and this is somewhat true, I guess. I mean, there's a plot that involves the Mob in NYC. But it's hardly--pardon the pun--a Beach Read. She shifts points-of-view throughout (there are three major sets of eyeballs through which we look); she plays with Father Time (back and forth we go); she fools us (me) now and then.

It's World War II time--the home front--and our main character, Anna Kerrigan, a young woman, is growing up with a profoundly disabled sister (Lydia), a mom, missing (dead?) father (whom she has not seen since early girlhood).

She's working as kind of a Rosie-the-Riveter character on the waterfront, then decides she wants to become a diver (the kind with the full suit and metal globular head); she convinces the skeptical men in charge that she can do it, and ... well, don't want to spoil things.

The second p-o-v is her father's--earlier (when he was home) and later (when ... ain't tellin').

The third is a local Mob boss who employs her father and, later on, unwittingly, re-connects with Anna, now grown.

Egan artfully weaves all of these tales--lots of excitement, some Mob violence, some woman-convincing-dense-men segments. It's a novel about women, about abortion, about family, about war, about the desperation that can lead us all hither and yon.

Early in the novel, she writes about the beach and the sea--"an electric mixture of attraction and dread" (6). And this is true in so many other ways in this fine novel.

About the only complaint I have? (Nitpickery?) I felt her "dating" in the novel was a bit ... obtrusive. Mentions of films and music and cultural clues about what year it was--all seemed to me a little forced at times.

She's quite a talent, Jennifer Egan. Can't wait for the next one ...

5. Final Word--A word I liked this week from one of my various online word-of-the-day providers.

     - from dictionary.com

This one brought back a memory from the Hiram Schools--7th or 8th grade? 1956? 57? 58? We had a substitute Sunday school teacher, Aaron Kelker, the father of friend Johnny Kelker (who was a grade behind me), and the Admissions Director at Hiram College. He came to the class that Sunday morning at the Hiram Christian Church and spent the whole time telling us the story of Rasputin, of whom I'd never heard. And have never forgotten, thanks to Mr. Kelker's galvanizing story!

Rasputin [ra-spyoo-tin, -tn]

noun

1. any person who exercises great but insidious influence.

2. Grigori Efimovich, 1871–1916, Siberian peasant monk who was very influential at the court of Czar Nicholas II and Czarina Alexandra.

... the dynamics of the situation do not permit him to be a Rasputin, whispering in Nixon's ear.

-- David Nevin, "Autocrat in the Action Arena," Life, September 5, 1969

ORIGIN

Grigori Efimovich Rasputin (c1871-1916) was a Russian peasant and self-proclaimed mystic and holy man (he had no official position in the Russian Orthodox Church). By 1904 Rasputin was popular among the high society of St. Petersburg, and in 1906 he became the healer of Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov, heir to the Russian throne and the hemophiliac son of Czar Nicholas II and his wife, Czarina Alexandra Feodorovna (a granddaughter of Queen Victoria and a carrier of hemophilia). In December 1916 Rasputin was murdered by Russian noblemen because of his influence over Czar Nicholas and the czarina.