In which I review Abbott Kahler’s Eden Undone
Abbott Kahler, who previously published under the name Karen Abbot, consistently writes works of narrative non-fiction that combine impeccable research, the story-telling devices of fiction, memorable characters, and impeccable prose. As a reader, I find it hard to put them down. As a writer, I marvel at her writing chops. As a reviewer, I struggle to write about them, because I don’t want to spoil any of the twists and turns.
Her newest book, Eden Undone: A True Story of Sex, Murder, and Utopia, has twists and turns aplenty and characters who blow past memorable to just plain crazy.
The book tells the story of three separate groups of Europeans who fled the fracturing world of Europe between the two world wars for the Galápagos Islands. Each group set out to create their own vision of a utopian paradise.
Kahler makes it clear from page one that their differing dreams of Utopia fail. She opens the book in 1934 with a macabre discovery on a tiny remote island in the northern part of the Galápagos: two bodies that had been mummified by the tropical sun. The two had died of thirst, leaving behind an overturned skiff, baby clothes, several photographs, and a batch of letters.
Leaving us with no hints about who the bodies were, or why they had ended up on a lava-covered island with no fresh water, she moves back several years and introduces us to the three groups who settled on the nearby island of Floreana: a German doctor with extreme ideas about health and natural living and his married lover/patient, a traumatized German veteran of the Great War and his family, and a gun-toting, riding crop-waving Austrian baroness known as “Crazy Panties” and her two young male paramours. Each of the three groups had different ideas about their island paradise should look like and conflict between them was inevitable and ultimately violent.
Eden Undone is beautifully written, intense, and creepy. A perfect book to pick up for the spooky season.
From the Archives: Joan of Arc and the French resistance
More than once in the last few years, I’ve stumbled across stories in old issues of the Chicago Tribune that caught my imagination even though they did not deal with my current project.
This headline from May 13, 1945, grabbed my attention: “FRANCE HONORS JOAN OF ARC AS ‘FIRST PARTISAN’. “
The piece began “The French paid homage today to their national heroine of five centuries, Joan of Arc, who was hailed as the ‘first of the resistants’ in military, religious and popular ceremonies.” The article went on to briefly describe the ceremonies and to point out that in prior years it had been French royalists who had celebrated the Maid of Orleans, not French republicans.
It seemed to me that with this recognition, the story of Joan of Arc had come full circle.
Over time, the phrase the “Joan of Arc of [fill in the blank]” has become shorthand for a (usually young) woman leading an army against an occupying foreign power. The term has been applied to the solidly historical Ani Pachen of Tibet and the semi-mythical Trieu Thi Trinh of third century Vietnam. The Women’s Era, a popular African American women’s newspaper founded in 1890, called Harriet Tubman “the Black Joan of Arc.” Novelist Henry Miller heard the story of Greek nationalist Laskarina Bouboulina and asked, “How is it we don’t hear more about Bouboulina? …She sounds like another Joan of Arc.” Even at the scale of a besieged city, we find a local heroine described as the “Joan of Arc of Braunschweig.” Each of these women embodied to some degree what Halina Filipowicz describes as the central element of the “Joan of Arc cult”: “a deeply felt need for a democratic hero of unflinching loyalty to a patriotic mission.”
Joan of Arc had long been the model against which other female resistance fighters where measured. Now it seemed the French government had turned the tables by dubbing Joan of Arc “the first of the resistants” rather than naming a woman resistance fighter “a twentieth century Joan of Arc.”*
*I almost typed “the Joan of Arc of France,” but that doesn’t work for obvious reasons.
From the Archives: In which I Finally Read A Woman of No Importance
Earlier this month, I was called to jury duty. I must admit, I thought about trying to get out of it on the grounds that I am under deadline on this book.* But I just couldn’t do it. I believe in the importance of the jury system. And I have spent the last few years thinking about the destruction of of the rule of law in Nazi Germany. So, I grumbled about the loss of a day. I prayed that I wouldn’t end up on a jury and lose more than a day. And I thanked the powers that regulate civic duty that I was assigned to a downtown court instead of one in the distant suburbs.
All of which is a long lead-in to the fact that I decided Sonia Purnell’s A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II was the perfect thing to read in the jurors’ waiting room. The subject was adjacent to what I’m working on, but not so close that I needed to take notes. And by all accounts, it was a gripping read.
I am, as is so often the case, late to the game. Many of you may have already read Purnell’s bestselling account of Virgina Hall,** the American woman who talked her way into Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) and was the first Allied woman deployed behind enemy lines—prosthetic leg and all.
A Woman of No Importance is a fascinating biography, with the tone of a thriller. Purnell starts with Hall as, in fact, a woman of no importance who had opted out of the life of a Baltimore socialite and been repeatedly frustrated in her attempts to join the diplomatic corps as more than a secretary. She traces Hall’s unlikely acceptance by SOE—in large part because the newly formed agency was desperate—and her invisible rise as a covert operator working with the French resistance in spite of repeated bumbling and failures on the part of SOE.
Because these days I read narrative non-fiction from a writer’s viewpoint,*** I was struck by the skill with which she weaves the larger story of World War II into Hall’s story. She consistently gives readers the information they need, without dumping a chunk of information that disrupts the story line. It is harder to do than you might think.
If you’re interested in World War II, spies, spies in World War II, or forgotten women who did amazing things, this one’s for you.
*Probably not a valid excuse, now that I think about it.
**After all, lots of people reading (or at least buying) a book is what makes a book a best-seller.
***A habit I hope to ditch after I recover from writing the current book. It may require serious rehab involving sitting on the rear deck with a pitcher of ice tea, a stack of really well-written books, and no way to make notes in the margins.