The Little World

For many years, one of my favorite Catholic authors has been Giovanni Guareschi, an Italian author who wrote throughout the 50s and 60s. His most well known stories center around Don Camillo, the two-fisted priest in a small town on the Po river valley, and his friend and adversary Peppone, the communist mayor. Guareschi wrote a number of other stories (both novels and comic pieces about his home life) as well as a great deal of political commentary which has never been translated.

Although his work was very popular in the 50s and 60s (and can still be found in used bookstores in old Catholic Book Club editions) he seems almost entirely forgotten these days, which is say, because beneith their humor his stories often have a real depth of sentiment and character not often found.

Surfing around the other day I found a Tripod site maintained by an Indian Guareschi fan who has made most of his work in English available online. He's even obtained the blessing of Guareschi's two children, a letter from whom appears on his site.

What follows is the first Don Camillo story.

A Confession
Don Camillo had been born with a constitutional preference for calling a spade a spade. Upon a certain when there had been a local scandal involving landowners of ripe age and young girls of his parish, he had, in the course of his mass, embarked upon a seemly and suitably generalized address, when he had suddenly become aware of the fact that one of the chief offenders was present among the foremost ranks of his congregation. Flinging all restraint to the four winds and also flinging a hastily snatched cloth over the head of the Crucified Lord above the high altar in order that the divine ears might not be offended, he had set his arms firmly akimbo and had resumed his sermon. And so stentorian had been the voice that issued from the lips of the big man and so uncompromising had been his language that the very roof of the little church had seemed to tremble.
When the time of the elections drew near Don Camillo had naturally been explicit in his allusions to the local leftists. Thus came a fine evening when, as he was going home at dusk, an individual muffled in a cloak sprang out of a hedge as he passed by and, taking advantage of the fact that Don Camillo was handicapped by his bicycle and by a large parcel containing seventy eggs attached to its handlebars, belaboured him with a heavy stick and promptly vanished as though the earth had swallowed him.
Don Camillo had kept his own counsel. Having arrived at the presbytery and deposited the eggs in safety, he had gone into the church to discuss the matter with the Lord, as was his inevitable habit in moments of perplexity.
'What should I do?' Don Camillo had inquired.
'Anoint your back with a little oil beaten up in water and hold your tongue,' the Lord had replied from above the altar. 'We must forgive those who offend us. That is the rule.'
'Very true, Lord,' agreed Don Comillo, 'but on this occasion we are discussing blows, not offences.'
'And what do you mean by that? Surely you are not trying to tell me that injuries done to the body are more painful than those aimed at the spirit?'
'I see your point, Lord. But You should also bear in mind that in the beating of me, who am Your minister, an injury has been done to Yourself also. I am really more concerned on Your behalf than on my own.'
'And was I not a greater minister of God than you are? And did I not forgive those who nailed me to the Cross?'
'There is never any use in arguing with You!' Don Camillo had exclaimed. 'You are always in the right. Your will be done. We must forgive. All the same, don't forget that if these ruffians, encouraged by my silence, should crack my skull, the responsibility will lie with You. I could cite several passages from the Old Testament. . . .'
'Don Camillo, are you proposing to instruct me in the Old Testament? As for this business, I assume full responsibility. Moreover, strictly between Ourselves, the beating has done you no harm. It may teach you let politics alone in my house.'
Don Camillo had duly forgiven. But nevertheless one thing had stuck in his gullet like a fish bone: curiosity as to the identity of his assailant.
Time passed. Late one evening, while he sat in the confessional, Don Camillo discerned through the grille the countenance of the local leader of the extreme leftists, Peppone.
That Peppone should come to confession at all was a sensational event, and Don Camillo was proportionately gratified.
'God be with you, brother; with you who, more than any man, have need of His holy blessing. It is a long time since you last went to confession?'
'Not since 1918,' replied Peppone.
'You must have committed a great number of sins in the course of those twenty-eight years, with your head so crammed with crazy notions. . . .'
'A good few, undoubtedly,' sighed Peppone.
'For example?'
'For example, two months ago I gave you a hiding.'
'That was serious indeed,' replied Don Camillo, 'since in assaulting a minister of God, you have attacked God Himself.'
'But I have repented,' exclaimed Peppone. 'And moreover, it was not as God's minister that I beat you, but as my political adversary. In any case, I did it in a moment of weakness.'
'Apart from this and from your membership of your accursed Party, have you any other sins on your conscience?'
Peppone spilled all the beans.
Taken as a whole, his offences were not very serious, and Don Camillo let him off with a score of Paters and Aves. Then, while Peppone was kneeling at the altar rails performing his penance, Don Camillo went and knelt before the crucifix.
'Lord,' he said, 'You must forgive me, but I am going to beat him up for You.'
'You are going to do nothing of the kind,' replied the Lord. 'I have forgiven him and you must forgive him also. All things considered, he is not a bad soul.'
'Lord, you can never trust a Red! They live by lies. Only look at him; Barabbas incarnate!'
'It's as good a face as most, Don Camillo; it is your heart that is venomous!'
'Lord, if I have ever served You well, grant me just this one small grace: let me at least break this candle on his shoulders. Dear Lord, what, after all, is a candle?'
'No,' replied the Lord, 'Your hands were made for blessing, not for striking.'
Don Camillo sighed heavily.
He genuflected and left the sanctuary. As he turned to make a final sign of the cross he found himself exactly behind Peppone who, on his knees, was apparently absorbed in prayer.
'Lord,' groaned Don Camillo, clasping his hands and gazing at the crucifix. 'My hands were made for blessing, but not my feet!'
'There is something in that,' replied the Lord from above the altar, 'but all the same, Don Camillo, bear it in mind: only one!'
The kick landed like a thunderbolt and Peppone received it without so much as blinking an eye. Then he got to his feet and sighed with relief.
'I've been waiting for that for the last ten minutes,' he remarked. 'I feel better now.'
'So do I!' exclaimed Don Camillo, whose heart was now as light and serene as a May morning.
The Lord said nothing at all, but it was easy enough to see that He too was pleased.

Christmas Eve

The blog will be going quiet for a couple days here, until the second or third day of Christmas. Church and family time intervenes.

However, for the holy day, I'd like to put up the following story, another of the Don Camillo Stories by Giovanni Guareschi.

Appointment at Midnight

It had all begun one day in July, when Peppone and his gang appeared in full force at the rectory.

"We want a Te Deum!" Peppone shouted. "A public thanksgiving. Someone has shot at our national Leader." Don Camillo was perplexed. "I understand," he said calmly, "but I don't see why we should hold a service of thanksgiving just because a poor devil has been shot. Say what you like, he's a human being."

Peppone clenched his fists. "We want to give thanks because he wasn't killed! And don't try to be funny, because we're in a state of national emergency. So here's the plan. You organize the Te Deum, complete with music, singing, flowers, curtains, lighting effects, and bells, and announce it by means of a poster with an angel on either side on the church door. Meanwhile we'll print leaflets and put them prominently on display. Then we'll see who shows up. Everyone that fails to show up is a filthy reactionary. We'll take down the names of the absent and then make a series of house-to-house visits."

"Well spoken, Chief," Smilzo said solemnly. "We must first identify and then punish all those guilty of incitement to public disorder. The people have had quite enough!"

Don Camillo looked over at him. "Are you going to list the names?" he asked.

"Of course," said Smilzo.

"Then put mine down at the head of the list, because I won't be at the thanksgiving service."

Peppone pushed his hat back on his head and put his hands on his hips. "So you refuse to publicly thank the Almighty for having saved an honest man from an attempted crime, is that it?"

"No. I won't let a religious service give you and your hot-heads an excuse to beat up innocent people. If you really want to thank the Almighty, come with your friends and I'll say a Mass, just as I did yesterday when Gigino Forcella fell off the roof without getting a single scratch on his body."

Peppone brought his fist down on the table. "The people want a solemn ceremony, a Te Deum, I tell you, not just an everyday Mass. This is a cause for national thanksgiving."

"The thanksgiving is a strictly private affair," Don Camillo insisted. "Every good Christian should rejoice when his neighbor is saved from danger, to be sure. But by your reasoning Gigino Forcella's family was entitled to a Te Deum too."

Peppone's face looked like an advertisement for apoplexy. "How can you mention Gigino Forcella in the same breath with our Leader? Gigino doesn't interest anyone outside his own family anyhow. And our Leader is known the world over."

Don Camillo was not impressed. "Gigino Forcella's family is a small one, while that of your Leader is made up of several million people. That's the only difference. It's a bigger family, if you like, but it doesn't include the whole nation. If the local members of your Leader's family want me to say a special Mass, I'll be glad to oblige them. But in view of the threats you made a few minutes ago it will have to be a purely family affair. I won't have anyone that doesn't belong to your Party in the church. Otherwise I should be abetting your blackmail. People must come to church of their own free will and not because of the fear of punishment. The church is no place for political propaganda."

Smilzo pulled the visor of his cap around to one side, put his hands on his hips and looked up at Don Camillo. "Look who's talking!" he said with a leer. "If there happened to be a God, He'd freeze you to the ground for such a shameless lie."

As for Peppone, he was bursting with things to say but didn't know where to begin. "You Judas!" he shouted. "You've sold Christ for thirty American dollars!"

"Don't pay him any attention, Chief," Smilzo begged him. "Certain people can't be treated any other way." He took a notebook out of his pocket, licked the point of his pencil and wrote something down. "Don Camillo!" he said. "Exclamation point! Now that you're on my blacklist not even the Almighty can save you."

And Peppone added: "Keep your Te Deums and your Masses as well. The Party has no use for your Madonna and saints. And here's what I'll do to the next Party member that sets foot in your church!" So saying, he picked up a chair and crushed the backboard of it in his fingers, looking straight into Don Camillo's eyes.

"Mind you get it mended now," Don Camillo said calmly.

Peppone made no answer, but turned on his heels, and walked out, followed by his gang, who slammed the door behind them. A moment later Smilzo came back, with a defiant look on his face, picked up the chair and bore it away. He held his head high and his chest stuck out, and he strutted as triumphantly as if he represented the inevitable onward march of the proletarian revolution.

~~~

Don Camillo got his chair back but Peppone and Peppone's followers and their families stayed away from church.

Three months later Bigio had a baby, but as he was a Party member the question of a baptism never came up. When Bigio saw the priest coming he dodged out of the way, but one evening Don Camillo managed to stop him. "If it's in obedience to Party orders that you're not coming to church, transeat, I can let that go by. Your sins are on your own conscience. But you let your son come at least once in his life, to be baptized. Or have you already enrolled him in the Party?"

Bigio, who was the most reasonable of the gang, threw out his arms. "The order goes for the whole family," he said. "If the Chief were to know that I'd had my baby baptized he'd take my hide off."

"Peppone doesn't have to know," Don Camillo suggested.

That night they brought the baby to him for a clandestine baptism. That was all Don Camillo managed to achieve, but he was not discouraged.

"Lord," he said to Christ, at the altar, "I'm waiting for Christmas. In all the years that I've been here they've never missed the midnight Mass. A few years ago, when Giubai was wanted by the police, he came on Christmas Eve and I saw him in the far corner, with his coat collar turned up all around his face. Lord, just have confidence in me!"

"I've always had confidence in you," Christ said to him with a smile, "but can you have confidence in yourself?"

"Well ... to a certain extent. I have more faith in You." As Christmas approached Don Camillo tried to find out which way the wind was blowing, and word came back to him that husbands and wives were arguing over the question, with the wives maintaining that on Christmas Eve they really must break the rule. As the time grew shorter and shorter, the arguments became more and more heated, until finally the women flatly declared: "We and the children are going to church; you can do what you please."

Peppone, whose wife had given him an unforgettable kick in the shins, was well aware of what was brewing and finally decided to leave the women and children free while the men kept up the boycott. They had said they wouldn't set foot in the church, and they would stick to their word. In order to prevent any last-minute weakening Peppone summoned the men to an appointment in the People's Palace. There they would answer the challenge of the Midnight Mass with a democratic "midnight cell meeting," whose ceremonial would consist of readings from the classics of the religion of Marx and Lenin and selected passages from such great democrats as Stalin and his ilk.

When Christmas Eve came the church was filled with candlelight and singing, while on the hard benches of the bare People's Palace the men listened to Peppone reading things none of them understood. Every now and then the wind blew a few notes from the church organ against the closed windows.

The Mass was over early, because something was tormenting Don Camillo's mind. When he was left alone in the church he took off his vestments and padlocked the church door. He walked up and down for several minutes and then stopped before Christ on the Cross.

"Lord," he said, "Did You see?"

"Yes, I saw," Christ answered. "You were over-confident. You relied too much on your own powers."

"No, that isn't it," said Don Camillo. "I pinned all my faith on You."

"And so now you've lost your faith, is that it then?"

"Never!" said Don Camillo indignantly. "If a starving man sees a crust of bread on the table before him, he can't just sit tight and say: 'I knew God wouldn't let me die of hunger.' God isn't going to put it in his mouth; he must stretch out his hand. To have faith that God will provide doesn't dispense a fellow from using his head. If the bread doesn't jump into his mouth, he has to go get it. The Scriptures tell us that if the mountain doesn't go to Christ, then Christ will go to the mountain."

Christ smiled. "Only it's not me, it's Mohammed," he objected.

"Forgive me," said the chagrined Don Camillo. "I only meant--"

"There's nothing to forgive, Don Camillo. It's not words that count, it's intentions."

Don Camillo ran his big hand over his forehead and looked up at Christ. But he was thinking of Mohammed, and Christ knew it and smiled.

~~~

"Comrades," Peppone was saying, "as a fitting close to this meeting at which we have borne witness to our democratic faith, I shall read you a masterly profile of Mao Tse Tung. Just then the door opened and in came a powerfully built man in a heavy coat, who made his way like a tank through the benches on which the men were sitting, went up onto the platform where Peppone was holding forth and set a gray-green box on the speaker's table. All the men in the front rows recognized the box immediately. They bad seen it during the war, when Don Camillo risked German bullets in order to visit them up in the mountains. And automatically they rose to their feet. Don Camillo lifted the lid off the box, and there was his field altar. Peppone stepped quickly down from the platform, and a moment later, when Don Camillo turned around and grunted, Smilzo proudly leapt up beside him. As he had done so many times in the old days, he helped the priest don his vestments, lit the candles and knelt down at one side of the altar to serve him.

It was a simple Mass, military style, and of an almost clandestine character. But they had put out the lights in the hall, so that the candles on the little altar stood out in the dark. The organ notes that had blown against the closed windows were still vibrating and from the towers of church and town hall the chimes echoed through the valley while the golden wings of the great angel seemed to spread over the Little World.

Shotgun Wedding

Every so often we post one of Giovanni Guareschi's Don Camillo stories, both because he's one of the best Catholic culture short story writers of the last century, and because sometimes we get enough realism to know we're not going to have time to post that day.

For some reason, this story has been on my mind lately, so here it is.

Shotgun Wedding

Whenever Don Camillo saw old man Rocchi come to the church or the rectory he grumbled to himself: "Here's the commissar." For old man Rocchi was the leader of the watchdogs who appoint themselves in every parish to scrutinize the conduct of the priest, in church and out of it, and to write letters of protest to the bishop when they find it shocking or even improper. Of course the old man never missed a single service, and since he and his family occupied one of the front pews he followed everything Don Camillo said and did, and would turn to say to his wife in the middle of Mass: "He skipped something," or: "Today he's not got his wits about him," or: "Don Camillo isn't what he used to be." And he would go to the rectory afterwards to comment upon the sermon and give Don Camillo some sound advice.

Don Camillo wasn't the type to worry about such things, but it was a bother to feel old Rocchi's eyes constantly upon him, and whenever he had to blow his nose in the middle of Mass he raised his eyes to Christ on the cross above the altar and silently prayed: "Lord help me blow my nose in a manner that will not cause a scandal!" For Rocchi was a great stickler for form. More than once he had remarked: "When the priest at Treville has to blow his nose in the middle of Mass, nobody knows it, but this one sounds like a trumpet calling to the Last Judgment."

That is the kind of a man Rocchi was, and if such men exist in the world it must mean that they have a place to fill in it. He had three sons and one daughter, Paolina, who was the most virtuous and most beautiful girl in the village. And it was Paolina that startled Don Camillo almost out of his wits one day in the confessional.

"I can't grant you absolution before you do what you are supposed to," he told her.

"I know," said the girl.

This is the sort of thing that happens in every village, and in order to understand it one really has to have lived in one of the low houses in the broad valley and to have seen the moon rise like a great red ball over the bank of the river. There is no visible movement in the valley and a stranger may have the idea that nothing ever happens along the deserted river banks, that nothing could happen in the red and blue houses. Yet more things happen there than up in the mountains or in the big city. For the blazing summer sun gets into people's veins, and that big red moon is utterly unlike the pale satellite they see in other places; it blazes just like the sun, inflaming the imaginations of the living and the bones of the dead. Even in winter, when the valley is filled with cold and fog, the heat stored up during the summer is so great that people's imaginations aren't cooled off sufficiently to see things as they actually are. That is why every now and then a shotgun peeps out of a thicket or a girl does something she oughtn't do.

Paolina went home, and when the family had finished saying the evening rosary she stepped up to her father. "Father, I must have a talk with you," she said.

The others went their various ways and Paolina and her father were left beside the fire.

"What's it all about?" asked the old man suspiciously.

"It's time to think about my getting married."

"Don't you bother your head about that. When the time comes, we'll find the right sort of fellow."

"The time has already come, Father, and I've found him."

The old man opened his eyes wide. "Go straight to bed, and don't let me hear you talk of such things again!" he ordered.

"Very well," said the girl, "but you'll hear other people talking about them."

"Have you given some cause for scandal?" asked the horrified father.

"No, but the scandal will come out. It's not something that can be concealed."

Rocchi took hold of the first thing that came to hand, which happened to be a broken broomstick. The girl crouched in a corner, hiding her head, and received a rain of blows upon her back. Luckily the broomstick broke again and her father quieted down.

"If you're so unlucky as to be still alive, get up," he told her. "Does anyone know about it?"

"He knows--" murmured the girl, causing the old man to lose his head again and start to beat her with a stick taken from a bundle of faggots by the fire. "And so does Don Camillo," she added. "He wouldn't grant me absolution." Again the old man took it out on her. Finally she got in another word: "If you kill me, it will be an even worse scandal," she said, and that calmed him.

"Who's the man?" he asked.

"Falchetto," she answered.

She would have produced less of an effect if she had named Beelzebub in person. Falchetto was the nickname of Gigi Bariga, one of the most stalwart of Peppone's henchmen. He was the intellectual member of the gang, the one who wrote speeches, organized rallies and explained the Party directives. Because he understood more than the others, he was the unholiest of them all. The girl had taken so much punishment by now that the old man pushed her onto a couch and sat down beside her.

"You've beaten me enough," she said. "If you touch me again, I'll call for help and tell everybody. I have to protect the life of my child."

At eleven o'clock that night the old man gave in to his fatigue. "I can't kill you, and in the state you're in, you can't very well enter a convent," he said. "Marry, then, and be damned, both of you."

When Falchetto saw the effects of Paolina's beating his jaw dropped. "We must get married," she said, "or this will be the death of me."

"Of course!" said Falchetto. "That's what I've been asking you all along. Right away, if you give the word, Paolina."

It was no use thinking of marriage at quarter to one in the morning, but words exchanged at the garden gate, before the fields covered with snow, had a certain value and significance.

"Have you told your father everything?" Falchetto asked.

She did not answer, and Falchetto realized that it was a stupid question.

"I'll take my Tommy gun and shoot up your entire family," he exclaimed. "I'll--"

"There's no need to shoot. All we have to do is go get the priest's permission."

Falchetto stepped back. "You know I can't do that," he said. "Just think of my position. We can go to the mayor."

The girl pulled her shawl around her. "No, never," she said. "I don't care about what may happen. Either we are married like Christians or else I'll never see you again."

"Paolina!--" Falchetto implored her, but she had already slipped through the gate in the opposite direction from that which she had so often taken before.

Paolina stayed in bed for two days, and on the third day her father came up to her room. "You saw him the other evening," he said: "I happen to know."

"So do I."

"Well, then?"

"Nothing doing. He won't have a Christian wedding. And I say a Christian wedding or nothing at all."

The other man shouted and stamped his feet. Then he left his daughter, threw his overcoat over his shoulders and went out. And a few minutes later Don Camillo had a difficult problem before him.

"Father, you already know the story," said Rocchi.

"I do. Children need looking after. It's a parent's job to give them some moral principles."

Rocchi was properly put in his place, and he would gladly have strangled Don Camillo.

"I've consented to the marriage, but the rascal won't have anything to do with the Church."

"That doesn't surprise me."

"I've come to ask you this: is it more scandalous for a girl in my daughter's condition to marry outside the Church or not to marry at all?"

Don Camillo shook his head. "This isn't a question of scandal. It's a question of good or evil. We must consider the unborn child."

"All I care about is to get them married and let them be damned!" said Rocchi.

"Then why do you ask for my advice? If all you care about is to get them married, let them marry as they please."

"But she says if she can't have a church wedding she'll have none at all," groaned the unhappy father.

Don Camillo smiled. "You ought to be proud of your daughter. Two wrongs don't make a right. I say she has a head on her shoulders and you ought to be proud of her."

"I'll have to kill her, that's all," Rocchi shouted as he left the rectory.

"You don't expect me to argue the girl out of a church wedding, do you?" Don Camillo shouted back after him.

During the night Paolina heard a hail of pebbles against her window and finally her resistance was overcome and she went down. Falchetto was waiting, and when she saw his face she burst into tears.

"I've left the Party," he told her. "Tomorrow they'll get out an announcement of my expulsion. Peppone wanted me to write it myself."

The girl went closer to him. "Did he beat you up?" she asked.

"I thought he'd never stop," Falchetto admitted. "When are we going to get married?"

"Right away, if you give the word," she said. And her impulse was just as foolish as his, because it was almost one o'clock in the morning and poor Falchetto had one eye as black as a lump of coal.

"I'll talk to the priest about it tomorrow," he said. "But I won't go near the town hall. I don't want to see Peppone." He touched his black eye and Paolina put a hand on his shoulder.

"We'll go to the mayor, too," she said. "I'll be there to stick up for you."

Paolina went early the next morning to Don Camillo. "You can grant me absolution," she told him. "I didn't do any of the things I confessed to you. My only sin is to have told you a big lie."

Don Camillo was puzzled, but she quickly explained. "If I hadn't made up that story, my father would never have let me marry Falchetto."

Don Camillo shook his head. "Don't tell him the truth at this point," he advised her, secretly thinking that old man Rocchi had it coming to him.

"No, I won't tell him, not even after we're married," said the girl. "He beat me just as hard as if what I told him had been true."

"That's what I say," chimed in Don Camillo. "Such a beating shouldn't be given in vain."

As he passed by the altar, Christ frowned down at him. "Lord," said Don Camillo, "Whosoever shall exalt himself shall be humbled and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted."

"Don Camillo," said Christ, "for some time now you've been skating on thin ice."

"With God's help no ice is too thin," said Don Camillo. "This wedding will be worth a dozen of the usual kind."

And so it was.

God's Spirit Was on the Waters

I'm not a great one for inspiration, and I've never been to New Orleans, but I wanted to put something up here in honor of all those suffering from the hurricane's aftermath. This is another of the Don Camillo stories by Giovanni Guareschi:

The Bell
The river embankment did not give way, even where everyone said it was sure to crack, and so the next morning many people went back to the village, which lay below the water-level, in order to fetch more of their belongings. But toward nine o'clock something unexpected happened. The water had risen higher and although it did not penetrate the main embankment, it found a weak spot elsewhere.

About a mile east of the village, the road running along the embankment went over a bridge across the Fossone, a tributary which poured at this point into the Po. The Fossone had solid banks of its own, but because the Po was so high, it had reversed its course and was running away from instead of into the river. Just below the bridge, where the banks of the Fossone joined those of the river, the water tunneled underneath and then came up in a jet, making the hole larger and larger. There was no way of holding it, and the villagers soon returned with wagons and trucks to seek safety.

Don Camillo had worked all alone until three o'clock in the morning, carrying things to the second floor and attic of the rectory. Then he was so tired that he fell into a dead sleep. At half-past nine in the morning he was awakened by the shouts of people running to take refuge on the embankment. Soon the noise died away, and he got up to look out of the window at the deserted church square. He went down to explore further and then climbed up in the bell tower. From this vantage point he could see that the water had already crept up on the lower part of the village and was slowly creeping higher. It had encircled the isolated hut of old Merola, and when it reached the ground-floor windows the whole thing crumbled. Don Camillo sighed. The old man had not wanted to leave, and it was by sheer force that they had taken him away. Now the pace of the advancing water was faster; the rain had left the earth so thoroughly soaked that it could not absorb a drop. It was up to the higher part of the village, which lay stretched out perfectly flat before it. Hearing a crash in the distance, he looked through his field-glasses and saw that a hundred and fifty feet of one bank of the Fossone had given away. Then, going over to another window, he noticed a crowd of people on the main embankment gazing in the direction of the village.

Those who had gone with their trucks and wagons for a second load of their belongings had been forced back. Now they stood with evacuees from other villages, who had brought their livestock and household goods with them, looking down at the newly flooded area, half a mile away. No one spoke, and old women shed silent tears. Their village seemed to be dying there before them, and they began to think of it as already dead.

"There is no God!" said an old man gloomily.

But just as that moment the church bell rang. There was no mistaking the sound, even if the tone was somewhat different from usual. All eyes were fixed on the church tower.

After Don Camillo had seen the crowd on the embankment he went back to the ground. The water had climbed the three steps leading to the church door and was running into the nave.

"Lord, forgive me for forgetting that it is Sunday," said Don Camillo, kneeling in front of the altar.

Before going to prepare himself in the sacristy, Don Camillo stepped into the little room at the base of the bell tower, whose floor was lower than that of the church and already covered with eight or ten inches of water. He tugged at a rope, hoping that it was the right one. It was, and when the crowd on the embankment heard it ring, they said:

"Eleven o'clock Mass!"

The women joined their hands in prayer and the men took off their hats.

Don Camillo lit the candles and began to say Mass. The water was climbing the altar steps and soon it touched his vestments. It was muddy and cold, but Don Camillo paid no attention. His congregation was dry and safe on the embank. ment. And when it was time for the sermon, he did not mind the fact that the church was empty, but preached to his parishioners just as if they were there before him. There were three feet of water in the nave, and pews and confessionals had overturned and were floating at random. The door was wide open, and beyond it he could see the submerged houses on the square and the lowering clouds on the horizon.

"Brethren," he said, "the waters have boiled up from the river bed and now are sweeping everything before them. But one day they will be calmed and return to their rightful place and the sun will shine again. Even if you lose everything you have, you can still be rich in your faith in God. Only those who doubt God's mercy and justice will be impoverished, even if their possessions are intact."

And he went on at considerable length in the flooded church, while from the embankment people continued to stare at the tower. When the bell sounded for the elevation, the women knelt down on the damp ground and the men bowed their heads. Then the bell rang again for the final blessing. The Mass was over, and people moved about freely and talked in a low tone of voice, hoping to hear the bell again. Soon afterward it rang out gaily once more, and the men took out their watches and said:

"Noon! It's time to go for dinner."

They got into whatever vehicles they had with them and went to the improvised canteens and shelters. And looking back over their shoulders at the village, which seemed to be afloat in a sea of mud, they were obviously thinking:

"As long as Don Camillo's there, everything's all right."

Before Don Camillo went back to the rectory he looked up at Christ above the altar.

"Forgive me, Lord, for not kneeling. If I were to kneel, I'd be in water up to the neck."

His head was bent and he could not be sure that Christ had smiled. But he was almost sure that He had, for there was a glow in his heart that made him forget the fact that he was soaked to the waist. He was able to get to the rectory, seizing on the way a floating ladder, with which he managed to climb into a second-storey window. He changed his clothes, had something to eat and went to bed. Toward three in the afternoon there was a knock at the window.

"Come in," said Don Camillo, and there was Peppone.

"If you'll come down, there's a boat rowed by some of my boys waiting for you," Peppone mumbled.
When a man is lying in bed, or even sitting up in it, he is in no position to come out with a phrase that will go down in history. So Don Camillo leaped to his feet and shouted:

"The old guard dies, but it never surrenders!"

Although he was on his feet, he had nothing on but his drawers, and this detracted from the solemnity of the occasion. But Peppone was in no mood to notice.

"Then devil take you," he said angrily. "You may not get another chance to escape so soon!"

The rescue squad rowed on. When the boat passed in front of the open church door, Peppone shouted to the rowers to watch out on the left. While they were looking in the other direction, he had time to take off his cap and put it back on without being observed. For the rest of the way he cudgeled his brain to know what Don Camillo had meant about the old guard that dies but never surrenders. Even if the water stood eight feet high, the flood seemed to him to have abated since he knew that Don Camillo was at his post.

Gatekeeping Baptism

Duly vested, Don Camillo approached the font.'What do you wish to name this child?' he asked Peppone's wife.

'Lenin Libero Antonio,' she replied.

'Then go and get him baptized in Russia,' said Camillo calmly, replacing the cover on the font.

The priest's hands were as large as shovels and the three left the church without protest. But as Don Camillo was attempting to slip into the sacristy he was arrested by the voice of the Lord.

'Don Camillo, you have done a very wicked thing. Go at once and bring those people back and baptize their child.'

'But Lord,' protested Don Camillo, 'You really must bear in mind that baptism is not a jest. Baptism is a sacred matter. Baptism is...'

'Don Camillo, the Lord interrupted him, 'Are attempting to teach me the nature of baptism? Did I not invent it? I tell you that you have been guilty of gross presumption, because, suppose that child were to die at this moment, it would be your fault if it failed to attain Paradise !'

'Lord, do not let us be melodramatic,' retorted Don Camillo. 'Why in the name of Heaven should it die? It's as pink and white as a rose !'

'Which means exactly nothing!' the Lord admonished him. 'What if a tile should fall on its head or it should suddenly have convulsions? It was your duty to baptize it.'

Don Camillo raised protesting arms: 'But Lord, just think it over. If it were certain that the child would go to Hell, we might stretch a point; but seeing that despite being the son of that nasty piece of work he might very easily manage to slip into Paradise, how can You ask me to risk anyone going there with such a name as Lenin? I'm thinking of the reputation of Paradise.'

'The reputation of Paradise is my business,' the Lord shouted angrily. 'What matters to me is that a man should be a decent fellow and I care less than nothing whether his name be Lenin or Button. At the very most, you should have pointed out to those people that saddling children with fantastic names may involve them in annoyances when they grow up.'

'Very well,' replied Don Camillo. 'I am always in the wrong. I must see what I can do about it.'
from "The Baptism", The Little World of Don Camillo by Giovanni Guareschi

I was a bit surprised to read Dr. Ed Peters' posts on the set of baptisms at which Pope Francis recently officiated, in which one of the babies baptized was the child of two parents who are not married in the Church. Peters is cautious about the precedent being set. In his first post on the topic he wrote:

First, unlike the foot-washing episode last Holy Week (here and here), the pope’s actions today occasion no reason to think that canon or liturgical law has been—what’s the right word?—disregarded, for no canon or liturgical law forbids baptizing the babies of unmarried couples, etc. Indeed, Church law generally favors the administration of sacraments and, in the case of baptism, it requires only that there be “a founded hope” that the child will be raised Catholic (1983 CIC 868 § 1, 2º). A minister could certainly discern ‘founded hope’ for a Catholic upbringing under these circumstances and outsiders should not second-guess his decision.

But here’s the rub: a minister could also arrive at precisely the opposite conclusion on these facts and, equally in accord with the very same Church law, he could delay the baptism. I know of many pastors who have reached this conclusion and who used the occasion of a request for a baby’s baptism to assist the parents toward undertaking their duties in a more responsible manner, including helping them to regularize their marriage status in the Church, resume attendance at Sunday Mass, participate fully in the sacraments, and so on.

Now, if the pope’s action today was as reported (again, we don’t know that yet), pastors who delay a baby’s baptism in order to help reactivate the Faith in the baby’s parents are going to have a harder time doing that as word gets out about the pope’s (apparently) different approach to the rite. Whether that was the message Francis intended to send is irrelevant to whether that is the message that he seems to have sent.

In his second post he elaborates on why he is more concerned about the situation of parents married outside the Church than about single mothers -- Pope Francis being famous for having emphasized back in Argentina that priests should not refuse to baptize the children of single mothers:

Quite simply, being an unwed mother is not sinful. Besides the fact that the acts by which a single woman became pregnant (assuming they were objectively sinful in the first place) could have been repented of long before the baby comes for baptism, a variety of circumstances could result in there being no sin associated with the pregnancy whatsoever, let alone with motherhood! I don’t know what priests might be like in Argentina, but I am very sure I have never heard of an American priest withholding baptism from a baby based solely on the fact that the mother of said baby was not married. A pastor could well arrive at a founded hope that the child of such a mother could be raised Catholic and proceed with the baptism in accord with Canon 868.

But the situation of Catholics actually married outside the Church is quite different. Setting aside my concerns that canonical form itself has become a pastoral stumbling block, I know how the law on canonical form currently reads and that, in the great majority of cases in which canonical form is violated, the Catholics involved are in objective grave sin and give scandal by their state. From that fact, it seems quite plausible to me that a pastor might delay the baptism of the child of such parents until, also in accord with Canon 868, a founded hope that the child could be raised Catholic is attained.

Certainly, I recognize that baptism of an infant should represent (on the part of the parents) a serious intention to raise their child as an active and believing Catholic. But it seems to me important to be clear on why that is. By being baptize, an infant is made a member of the Church, of Christ's body on earth. To attain the purpose for which we are all created (to know, love and serve God, and to be happy with Him one day in heaven) the child must be shown how to live the faith and instructed in the faith's beliefs. Parents who do not make an effort to bring up their children in the faith they were baptized into do those children a great wrong. And so, it makes sense to use what leverage the Church has to try to make sure that the parents understand those responsibilities before baptizing their child, and that the parents commit to making that effort.

However, baptism is not a reward for being committed to raising your child in the faith. And at the end of the day, while it's important that the Church strive to draw from the parents a commitment to raise their child in the faith, it seems to me that the Church also has a solemn duty to baptize those who come (or are brought) to it seeking baptism. This is where I found myself kind of perplexed by Dr. Peters' take:

Final point: Lost in this whole discussion has been, I fear, any recognition of the fact that, while baptism is of great value, it is also to take on very serious, life-long duties. Imposing via baptism those burdens on a child who is at heightened risk of not receiving adequate assistance in the Faith, and on some parents who in public respects seem ill-equipped to live the very Faith they want passed on to their children, is itself pastorally problematic, no?

Now, maybe I'm an odd mix of old fashioned and new, but it seems to me that the value of baptism should much outweigh its obligations when thinking this through. While the Church emphasizes God's mercy and thus trusts that God must deal mercifully with those who, though unbaptized, have to the best of their ability lived a good life: we also say that the only way that we know people receive the graces necessary for salvation is through baptism.

This is one of the reasons that we've always made sure that our children are baptized as soon as possible after birth. (William at just five days.) No, I don't believe that if our child somehow died without baptism, that God would consign him to limbo or to hell. I believe that God's love and mercy finds ways to work in such situations. But I would much, much rather that they be baptized. If we are right in believing that baptism washes away original sin and infuses the soul with God's grace, then it makes a difference.

As such, it seems to me presumptuous and risky to take the approach that since we can count on God's mercy and love towards those who aren't baptized, we should hold off baptizing a child we're not sure will be properly raised in the faith so as not to impose the obligations of being a Catholic on that child. It seems to me that in doing so, we put that child's soul at risk. We deny the child the graces of the sacrament, we leave him with the stain of original sin. Even if his upbringing is not as well formed in the faith as we could hope, it seems to me that we must believe that the graces of baptism will make a different in that child's life, and a difference that we should not deny.

So while it seems entirely appropriate to take action to try to impress on parents who bring their child to be baptized that they must raise their child in the faith, I am very skeptical of the idea of telling parents (whatever the state of their marriage or lack thereof) who bring their child to be baptized that we refuse.

Guareschi: How I Got Like This

A couple times in the past I've posted Don Camillo stories by Giovanni Guareschi. Now I find that all of the first collection, The Little World of Don Camillo, is available online in PDF.

What follows is the introduction to The Little World, in which Guareschi tells how he came to be the man who wrote the Don Camillo stories. Guareschi's history is in many ways a reflection of and counterpoint to Italy's history from the Great War through the 1960s. In a time during which Fascists, Communists, Socialists, Monarchists and Christian Democrats vied, sometimes violently, for control of Italy, Guareschi kept a critical, humane and humorous eye on all of them.

How I Got Like This
My life began on the 1st of May 1908, and between one thing and another, it still goes on.

When I was born my mother had been teaching in the elementary school for nine years and she continued to teach until the end of 1949. In recognition of her work, the parish priest of the village presented her with an alarm clock in the name of all the people, and after fifty years of teaching in schools where there was no electric light or water but, in compensation, an abundant supply of cockroaches, flies, and mosquitoes, my mother now passes her time waiting for the State to consider her request for a pension and listening to the tick-tock of the alarm clock given her by the village.

At the time when I was born, my father was interested in all kinds of machines, from harvesters to gramophones, and he possessed an enormous moustache, very similar to the one I wear under my nose. He still has the splendid moustache, but for some time he has not been interested in much of anything, and he passes his time reading the newspapers. He also reads what I write, but he does not like my way of writing and thinking.

In his day my father was a very brilliant man, and he travelled around by automobile at a time, in Italy, when entire populations went from one time to another in order to see that darned machine that ran by itself. The only memory I have of these ancient splendours is an old automobile horn - the kind with the rubber ball that you squeeze. My father screwed this to the head of his bed and he used to sound it every so often, especially in the summertime.

I also have a brother, but I had an argument with him two weeks ago and I prefer not to discuss him.

In addition to the above I have a motor-cycle with four cylinders, an automobile with six cylinders, and a wife and two children.

My parents had decided that I should become a naval engineer and so I ended up studying law and thus, in a short time, I became famous as a signboard artist and caricaturist. Since no one at school had ever made me study drawing, drawing naturally had a particular fascination for me and, after doing caricatures and public advertisements, I studied wood-carving and scenic design.

At the same time I kept busy as a doorman in a sugar refinery, a superintendant of a parking lot for bicycles, and since I knew nothing at all about music I began to give mandolin lessons to some friends. I had an excellent record as a census-taker. I was a teacher in a boarding school and then I got a job correcting proofs on a local newspaper. To supplement my modest salary I began to write stories about local events and since I had a free day on Sunday I took over the editorship of the weekly magazine which came out on Monday. In order to get it together as quickly as possible I wrote three-quarters of it.

One fine day I took a train and went to Milan, where I wormed my way into a humour magazine called Bertoldo. Here I was forced to stop writing, but I was allowed to draw. I took advantage of this by drawing in white on black paper, something which created vast depressed areas in the magazine.

I was born in Parma near the Po River; people born in this area have heads as hard as pig iron and I succeeded in becoming editor-in-chief of Bertoldo. This is the magazine in which Saul Steinberg, who at that time was studying architecture in Milan, published his first drawings and for which he worked until he left to go to America.

For reasons entirely beyond my control, the war broke out and one day in 1942 I went on a terrific drunk because my brother was lost in Russia and I couldn't find anything about him. That night I went up and down the streets of Milan shouting things which filled several sheets of legal-size paper - as I found out the next day when I was arrested by the political police. Then a lot of people worried about me and they finally got me released. However, the political police wanted me out of circulation and so had me called into the army, and on the 9th of September 1943, with the fall of Fascism, I was taken prisoner again, this time at Alessendria in Northern Italy by the Germans. Since I did not want to work for the Germans, I was sent to a Polish concentration camps. I was in various concentration camps until April 1945, when my camp was taken over by the English and after five months I was sent back to Italy.

The period I spent in prison was the most intensely active of my life. In fact I had to do everything to stay alive and succeeded almost completely by dedicating myself to a precise programme which is summarized in my slogan 'I will not die even they kill me'. (It is not easy to remain alive when one is reduced to sack of bones of which the total weight is one hundred pounds, and this includes lice, bedbugs, fleas, hunger, and melancholy.)

When I returned to Italy I found that many things were changed, especially the Italians, and I spent a good deal of time trying to figure out whether they had changed for the better or for the worse. In the end I discovered that they had not changed at all, and then I became so depressed that I shut myself in my house.
Shortly afterwards a new magazine called Candido was established in Milan and, in working for it, I found myself up to my eyes in politics, although I was then, and still am, an independant. Nevertheless, the magazine values my contributions very highly - perhaps because I am editor-in-chief.

A few months ago the leader of the Italian Communists Mr. Palmiro Togliatti, made a speech in which he lost his temper and called the Milanese journalist who invented the character with the triple nostrils 'a triple idiot'. The threefold idiot is me and this was for me the most prized recognition of my work as a political journalist. The man with three nostrils is now famous in Italy, and it was I who created him. I must admit that I am proud because to succeed in characterizing
a Communist with a stroke of the pen (that is, putting under the nose three, instead of two, nostrils) is not a bad idea, and it worked very well.

And why should I be modest? The other things that I wrote and drew during the days before the election also worked very well; to prove it I have in my attica sack full of newspaper clippings which malign me; whoever wants to know more can come and read them.

The stories in The Little World of Don Camillo were very successful in Italy, and this book, which collects the first series of these stories, is already in its seventh edition. Many people people have written long articles on The Little World of Don Camillo and many people have written me letters about this or that story, and so now I am a little confused, and I would find myself rather embarrassed if I had to make any judgement of The Little World of Don Camillo. The background of these stories is my home, Parma, the Emilian Plain along the Po where political passion often reaches a disturbing intensity, and yet these people are attractive and hospitable and generous and have a highly developed sense of humour. It must be the sun, a terrible sun which beats on their brains during the summer, or perhaps it is the fog, a heavy fog which oppresses them during the winter.

The people in these stories are true to life and the stories are so true that more that once, after I had written a story, the thing actually happened and one read it in the news.

In fact the truth surpasses the imagination. I once wrote a story about the Communist, Peppone, who was annoyed during a political meeting by an aeroplane which threw down pamphlets of the opposition. Peppone took up a machine-gun, but he could not bring himself to fire on the plane. When I wrote this I said to myself, 'This is too fantastic.' Some months later at Spilimberg not only did the Communists fire on an aeroplane that distributed anti-Communist pamphlets, but they shot it down.
I have nothing more to say about The Little World of Don Camillo. You can't expect that after a poor fellow has written a book he should also understand it.

I am 5 feet 10 inches high and I have written eight books in all. I have also done a movie which is called People Like This, now being distributed throughout Italy. Many people like the movie; others do not like it. As far as I am concerned, the movie leaves me indifferent. Many things in life me indifferent now, but that is not my fault. It is the fault of the war. The war destroyed a lot of things we had within us. We have seen too many dead and too many living. In addition to 5 feet 10 inches, I have all my hair.
G.G.

Seven Continents Book Challenge

Inspired by Enbrethiliel, Melanie Bettinelli has created the Seven Continent Book Challenge: name favorite books and authors from each continent. We're playing a bit fast and loose here, as we're not necessarily picking favorite works or writers, but things that evoke a region for us (a bit of a stretch in places, but you'll forgive us),

1. What is your favourite book set in Europe? Who is your favourite European author?

MrsDarwin

 A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Fermor, a young Irishman with a prodigious memory and talent for languages, set off in 1933 on a walking tour of Mitteleuropa from the mouth of the Rhine to Constantinople. He traverses the broad and beautiful heart of Europe and gives life and richness to places I'd always pictured in Communist gray: Romania, Transylvania, Hungary, Slovakia, Yugoslavia. The third, posthumous volume, The Broken Road, is finally published, but we've not had time to read it yet.

Darwin

Spain: The Cypresses Believe in God by Jose Maria Gironella is the first of a set of three novels dealing with the Spanish Civil War.  The story follows a group of characters centering around the Alvear family, the husband from an anti-clerical family in Madrid, the wife a devout Catholic from a Basque family.  As such, their network of friends and relatives spans the sectarian and geographic divisions which exploded into war.  Gironella himself was a nationalist, but he does a good job of showing the pressures and feelings which drove members of both sides.

Italy (and points East): Comrade Don Camillo is one of a number of books by Giovanni Guareschi tell stories about Don Camillo, a two-fisted priest who is pastor of a small village in the Po River Valley, and his friend/enemy the village's communist mayor Peppone.  They're all delightful and give a strong sense of rural Italy in the 1950s and 1960s.  This particular one is among the later books.  Peppone has become a member of the Italian Parliament and has been chosen to take a group of party loyalists on a tour of the USSR.  Don Camillo blackmails him into including him in the group, disguised as Comrade Tarocci.  The book is the most novelistic of the Don Camillo collections (the rest are really collections of short stories, though they sometimes have a story arc of sorts) and it gives an Italian's-eye view of Russia in the period just after Stalin.


2. What is your favourite book set in North America? Who is your favourite North American author?


First, from our great neighbor to the North: The Salterton Trilogy, by Robertson Davies. Davies is a Canadian author, and of his work we best prefer the three books set in Salterton: Tempest Tost, about an amateur theatrical production of The Tempest; Leaven of Malice, a tempest in a university town teapot, touched off by a false marriage announcement in the local paper; and Mixture of Frailties, about the world education of a young opera singer from Salterton.

Davies is the master of dry humor, and though in some of his other books he can descend into a rather dark and grotesque view of humanity, in the Salterton Trilogy his touch is light and unerring. Here we must reproduce a rather long selection from Leaven of Malice, in which a young author is talking up his planned epic about Canada:

"Could I talk to you for a minute, about the novel? I'd appreciate your help, Mr. Ridley."

"This is rather a busy time."

But Rumball had already seated himself, and his shyness had fallen from him. His eyes gleamed.

"It's going to be a big thing. I know that. It's not conceit; I feel it just as if the book was somebody else's. It's something nobody has tried to do in Canada before. It's about the West--"

"I recall quite a few novels about the West."

"Yes, but they were all about man's conquest of the prairie. This is just the opposite. It's the prairie's conquest of man. See? A big concept. A huge panorama. I only hope I can handle it. You remember that film The Plough That Broke The Plain? I'm calling my book The Plain That Broke The Plough. I open with a tremendous description of the Prairie; vast, elemental, brooding, slumbrous; I reckon on at least fifteen thousand words of that. Then, Man comes. Not the Red Man; he understands the prairie; he croons to it. No, this is the White Man; he doesn't understand the prairie; he rips up its belly with a blade; he ravishes it. 'Take it easy,' says the Red Man. 'Ah, drop dead,' says the White Man. You see? There's your conflict. But the real conflict is between the White Man and the prairie. The struggle goes on for three generations, and at last the prairie breaks the White Man. Just throws him off. 

..."But there's just one thing I'd like your advice about. Names. Names are so important in a book. Now the big force in my book is the prairie itself, I just call the Prairie. But my people who are struggling against it are two families; one is English, from the North, and I thought of calling them the Chimneyholes, only they pronounce it Chumnel. The other is Scandinavian and I want to call them the Ruokatavarakauppas. I'm worried that the vowel sounds in the two names may not be sufficiently differentiated. Because, you see, I want to get a big poetic sweep into the writing, and if the main words in the novel aren't right, the whole thing may bog down, do you see?"

End of Track is a memoir by James H. Kyner, who enlisted in the Union Army at the ripe underage of 15, immediately lost his leg at at Shiloh, and went on to be a contractor grading and building Western railroads. You don't get a whole lot more American than that. He published his story in 1937, and it's good reading.

Not representative of the country as a whole, but does draw characters from all over North America: the U.S., the Caribbean, even Canada: Absalom, Absalom! , by William Faulkner. Faulkner is heavy going, but this strangely compelling story lingers long after you've finally deciphered his sentence structure.

And speaking of the Caribbean: Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys, a native of Dominica. Rhys, disturbed by Charlotte Bronte's depictions of the Caribbean in Jane Eyre, set out to write a companion volume which told the story from the Creole perspective.

3. What is your favourite book set in South America? Who is your favourite South American author?

One Hundred Years of Solitude , by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This was, I think, one of the first of the wave of "magical realism" lit that's become so prevalent, and Marquez, a Colombian author, does it better than most because (as far as I know, anyway) he's not imitating someone else's style, but developing something new.

4. What is your favourite book set in Asia? Who is your favourite Asian author?

Darwin

An Artist of the Floating World, by Kazuo Ishiguro tells the story of Masuji Ono, an aging painter living in post-WW2 Japan.  Ono's school of painters had become deeply bought into the nationalism which led to the war, and he had participated in a committee of artists policing unpatriotic activities.  Now everything which his generation and his movement stood for has been rejected, and Ono struggles with the meaning of his life and his responsibility, trying to sort out whether there is genuine nobility and accomplishment to be defended against the rejection of the younger generation.  Ishiguro's family left Japan in 1960 when he was five, and he is a British novelists, not a Japanese one, but he uses the setting of his ancestral country to work through themes which are universal as well as specific.  (Ishiguro is perhaps most famous for his novel Remains of the Day, which was made into an outstanding movie with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.)

The Master of Go, by Yasunari Kawabata is a Japanese novel originally published in 1954, relating a climactic game of Go, a Japanese strategy game, between an aging master and a fast rising rival.  The game was real, played in 1938, and the book was recommended to me when I was learning Go.  If you have any interest in the game, it's worth reading on that front, but the book also stands on its own both as a window into Japanese culture and as more universal look at a transition point from an old tradition-guided way of doing things to a modern, analytical one.

MrsDarwin

Captivity, by Mary Ann Harbert, subtitled "44 Months in Red China". In 1968 Harbert and a friend were planning to sail around the world. They strayed into Chinese waters and were "detained" -- not imprisoned -- until 1972. One can question certain details of Harbert's narrative and still be drawn in by her descriptions of trying to deal with the puppets of the Cultural Revolution and find out exactly what her crime is so she can go home. (No torture, for readers like me for whom that matters.)

Dusk, by F. Sionil Jose. Dusk was recommended to me by Enbrethiliel, my favorite Philippina blogger, who has been educating her Western readers on the literary heritage of the Philippines. The book is the first of a five-volume series set in the town of Rosales, and chronicles the hardships of the transition from the Spanish rule of the Philippines, and the American invasion.

5. What is your favourite book set in Australasia? Who is your favourite antipodean author?

Darwin

We realized that we're pretty weak on literature from Australia and New Zealand, but one novel from  an Australian author that I did recently read is The Daughters of Mars, by Thomas Keneally.  It tells the story of two sisters, both of them nurses.  As the book opens, they are dealing with their mother, who is in the last stages of cancer.  Shortly after her death, World War One begins, and both sisters become military nurses, traveling to Egypt, as hospital ship off Gallipoli and finally France.  The novel overall is very good, though a postmodern touch in how Keneally brought it to a conclusion frustrated me.

MrsDarwin

Ngaio Marsh was a mystery writer from New Zealand who was ranked with the "Queens of Crime": Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Agatha Christie. It's been years since I read her books, but I remember liking them quite a bit, especially as many of them involve the theater.


6. Have you ever read, or do you know of, any books written by authors in Antarctica/ the Arctic?

H.P. Lovecraft's giant blind albino penguins are about the only thing that come to mind... Oh, and Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, Jr,, the novella that introduced the world to The Thing.

We haven't read Shackleton or Peary or Amundsen writing about their various polar expeditions, but there is good lit out there about the icy extremes of the earth.

7. Who are your favourite African authors and books set in Africa?

MrsDarwin

I really enjoyed The Lion Sleeps Tonight: And Other Stories of Africa, a book of essays by South African journalist Rian Malan.

Master Harold . . . And The Boys is a play by South African playwright Athol Fugard, about the complex relationship between a young man and the black employees in his father's tea shop.

Darwin

We think of him as a French author, but Albert Camus was in fact from Algeria -- French Algeria -- and the African sun is the inciting factor in The Stranger.

Joseph Conrad was form Poland and emigrated to England, but his classic novel Heart of Darkness is perhaps his most famous work, telling the story of seaman Charles Marlow in a journey up river the Belgian Congo to find Mr. Kurtz, an agent of the ivory company who is reported to be one of the most effect ivory agents. As he does so, however, he finds himself going deeper and deeper into the results of European greed and cruelty. Belgian Congo was notorious in turn-of-the-century Europe as the site of the some of worst abuses of the colonial era.

Fear and Hope

One of the gems of 1950s and 60s Catholic publishing was a series of collections of short stories (translated from Italian) by an author named Giovanni Guareschi about the parish priest of a small town in the Po river valley and his rival (and friend) the town's communist mayor. In the past I've run several individual Don Camillo stories, with the help of a site which features most of the Dom Camillo stories online.

Today I wanted to link to a series of three stories, however, so links will have to suffice. This is from the collection The Little World of Don Camillo.

Fear

The Fear Continues

Men of Good Will

Looking Back at 2008 Reading

At the beginning of last year I started keeping a list in the sidebar of all the books I'd finished. More than anything else, this was in order to keep some sort of record of what I read, an oddly slippery thing for someone with a lot of books to keep hold of.

One of thing I've come to realize, looking back, is that my memory of how long it's been since I've read various books is rather fluid. Some of these I feel as if I'd read a very long time ago, while other books I feel as if I read very recently and yet judging from this record I must assume it's been more than a year.

I'm not really sure how many books I expected to find that I read during a year, but twenty seems a moderately respectable total. Though as I look over the list, I feel as if I am not quite as weighty a reader as I sometimes fancy myself to be. Below I break them up according to rough genres:

Light Fiction
The Red Pavilion: A Judge Dee Mystery
The Lacquer Screen: A Chinese Detective Story
van Gulik's early books of Judge Dee stories are translated and only slightly adapted from original Chinese stories, but these are van Gulik's own novels, based on the medieval Chinese detective genre.

Brother Odd
I'd been meaning to try one of Dean Koontz's Odd books for quite some time, though by accident I picked up the third one at the library.

Comrade Don Camillo
Giovanni Guareschi's Don Camillo books are so good that when I picked this up to read one or two of the chapters (which were written as sequential but essentially stand-alone stories) I found myself reading the whole thing in the course of a day or two.

The Foreign Correspondent: A Novel
One of the most recent of Alan Furst's series of espionage novels set in the early years of World War II, this story of Italian anti-fascists in pre-invasion France is enjoyable but not Furst's best. I'm eager to try his more recent The Spies of Warsaw which reviewers have said has him back at his best.

The Horse and His Boy
The Silver Chair
We've been working through the Narnia books with the girls -- our six-year-old being the primary audience -- but between parent hand-offs I tend not to get the whole book unless I go off and read the whole thing on my own, which I did with these two, which are among my favorites.

Quality Fiction
The History Of Our World Beyond The Wave
This was a second or third pass through this peculiar, yet beautiful, novel about the aftermath of a giant wave that cleanses the globe of civilization and most of its people. Anyone expecting a realistic science fiction novel would be deeply disappointed, but for anyone with a love of books and prose style this book is hauntingly evocative.

China Court
JulieD got me started on this Rumer Godden novel through her podcast read alouds, but I found myself so involved in it that I had to go finish reading it the old fashioned way: in print.

A Soldier of the Great War
I continue to owe Kyle an in-depth review of Mark Helprin's novel, but for now I'll just that I strongly recommend it for its evocative imagery and it's prose style, but there were elements of it which I also found mildly frustrating.

History
One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer
Nathaniel Fick's account of Marine training and fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq is fascinating, and of an even-handedness to interest all but the most ideological on both sides of the war debate.

The Great Pyramid: Ancient Egypt Revisited
Romer's book is the first really serious study of the Great Pyramid to come out in a number of years, and its a fascinating read, covering the history of Egyptian pyramid building, with its culmination in the Great Pyramid, the history of the Great Pyramids surveying and excavation by various teams of archeologists, and a fascinating discussion of what the physical remains at the site tell us about the survey and construction methods. Technical, but very interesting.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
I considered creating a "popular science" category for this, as I didn't really come out considering it serious history, but it was an interesting read for what it was. I enjoyed it enoug to try Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed but I found that much of what had annoyed me about the intrusions of Diamond's opinions and worldview into Guns, Germs, and Steel was present in even greater quantities in his editorializing on collapsed societies of the past and how they might be similar to our own, and it eventually got returned to the library unfinished.

The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice
A fascinating group biography of Company A, a national guard unit turned army during WW2 and assigned to the first wave on Omaha beach on D-Day.

A Soldier From the Wars Returning
Written by a veteran who fought in the British army in both the Great War and WW2, this account of the Great War and life as a junior officer in it is a fascinating first hand account, and also a somewhat revisionist one as compared to the sometimes overplayed stereotypes built up through the poetry and writings of authors like Sassoon and Graves.

Five Days in London: May 1940
Lukacs' incredibly up-close history covers the first days of Churchill's prime ministership, in which the question of whether Britain would remain in the war or follow France's lead in seeking terms with Germany (and whether the British would have any army left to stay in the war with) remained in question.

Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945
Catherine Merridale's book is as much a social history of the Red Army as a military and political history of the Eastern Front, and both elements are fascinating for anyone with a serious interest in World War II.

Hobby
Designing the New Kitchen Garden: An American Potager Handbook
Hobby Farm
It's a Long Road to a Tomato
This family being what it is, setting up a household vegetable garden could not be done without extensive reading -- though as it happens most of the reading took place after the plants were safely in the ground. The Potager Handbook was interesting for its attempt to come up with an aesthetic approach to vegetable gardening which produced a garden that was beautiful to look at throughout the year (rather than just your farm-style rows of like pants) while also being timed to produce food for the table during as much of the year as possible. You can tell, however, that this was based on the author's grad school thesis. Long Road to a Tomato was an enjoyable set of essays by a New Yorker who deciced to abandon city life to make his living off an upstate organic farm and the New York City farmers market. Every so often, however, one would be hit with very jarring cultural references that reminded me how far apart the author and I were on nearly very conceivable topic.

The New Rules of Lifting
Big Tex recommended this book and it's companion volume for women to MrsDarwin and me, and thus far its been highly useful, though grueling. If you're serious about getting into shape, it's not a bad way to go.

The Read-Aloud List

I'm writing up the past year's homeschooling for our assessments -- one week before the public schools start -- and since I am not a great record keeper I'm scrounging through my planning book trying to see what we read this year. I often feel like I haven't done anything all year, so writing up what we've read is always encouraging to me.

Belles on Their Toes
David Copperfield (first third)
Betsy-Tacy and Tib
Confessions (selections)
Little Women (second half)
Interior Castle (opening sections)
Evangeline
The Gospel of John
The Little World of Don Camillo
Three men on a boat (to say nothing of the dog)
Julius Caesar (selections)
Romeo and Juliet (selections)
Twelfth Night
The Book of the City of Ladies (selections)
My Man Jeeves
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Miss Hickory
The Swiss Family Robinson (started)
Around the World in Eighty Days (bedtime read)
The Hobbit (bedtime read)

Poetry memorization for speech meet:
Isabel: Ozymandias
Julia: scene from Twelfth Night
Eleanor: Jabberwock and scene from Twelfth Night


There are plenty of other stories and whatnot that we read at various times, but these are the major works.