The Winter Ghosts -Kate Mosse

Pitiful  old Winter has returned ,

Limping up and down our roads,

Spreading his white blanket of snow

While the Cers wind cries in the branches of the pine trees.

- traditional Occitan song

So begins the story of an unsettling encounter between a young British man and an antiquarian bookseller that reveals a ghost story worthy of a Poe short story. In fact, I sometimes felt I was reading Poe, Oscar Wilde, or Henry James, as the tone of this novel has that same sort of solemn atmosphere and a sense of dark foreboding. While I found the story pretty predictable, it was satisfying to curl up in bed with just the bedside lamp on and settle into this story of grieving and eventual healing. The story is sad, but the description of setting and the psychological study of young Freddie, the narrator of this ghost story is compelling.

The year is 1933 and Freddie is in Toulouse,seeking a translator for a document that has come into his possession. When he enters La Rue des Penitents Gris, he is seeking a bookshop run by one Monsieur Saurat. An ancient document written in an old dialect holds a message that has haunted Freddie for four years. Monsieur Saurat is immediately intrigued and invites Freddie to sit over a glass of brandy while he examines the vellum. It's old - very old. The bookseller is intrigued. Before he will translate the piece, though, he asks Freddie how he came upon this important bit of history.

And the story goes from there. Freddie has ghosts in his family closet, but he has also encountered ghosts in the mountainous countryside of Ariege ... his beloved brother has been one of thousands lost to the barbed wire, bombs, and gas of the first world war and Freddie has suffered grief beyond his tolerance. Coming from a sanatorium, after a grief stricken breakdown, Freddie finds himself in the south of France. There, his tender state makes him susceptible to the connections of ghosts from the past. Freddie is the luckiest man, as he encounters a ghost that will heal him at a small price.

This is a good ghost story that began as a short story and grew into a novel. It's the perfect story for a cold winter's night. I've enjoyed Kate Mosse's writing in the past and I will, no doubt, continue to pick up her work in the future.

Could I have picked a more perfect book for this past cold week? In a word, no.

Citadel - Kate Mosse

Another exploration of the Christian and Cathar religious writings, the suppression of the burgeoning Cathar religious sect, and the archeological zeal with which their legendary hidden texts are sought form the basis for this latest novel by Kate Mosse. This time, the action revolves around the political division within France during WWII. The Vichy alignment with Nazi German invaders and the French Free Forces that were lead by DeGaulle and the partisan freedom fighters/resisters were in direct opposition. The people of the Languedoc region of France were equally divided. Informers for the Vichy /Nazi live side by side with those who support freedom from Nazi occupation. French Free Forces sympathizers form partisan resistance groups who help Jews escape Nazi arrest by leading them over the Pyrenees and into Spain or to the harbors along the southern French coast for escape by sea. Into this political quagmire, Nazi and Vichy political leaders push their way looking for supposed archaeological evidence of an Aryan race that is woven into the history of the early Cathar religious writings. They seek fragments of written Cathar texts hidden when Pope Innocent III declared a Catholic crusade against the sect and tried to wipe them out and establish conversion of the local peoples of the Languedoc. Other local historians look for the same religious relics to safeguard them from exploitation by Nazi forces and draw hope from a legendary 'ghost army' that will rise to help defeat the invaders and allow the Free French movement to retake control over France.

This is an involved novel. There are multiple stories going on here. A romance between a partisan fighter named Raoul and a young French woman named Sandrine. They meet when she finds one of his cohorts drowning in the local river, after escaping a horrid interrogation by local henchmen of the Vichy government. What did she witness? What did the poor man say to her before he was recaptured and murdered? What does Raoul know about the odd packet  found in his friend's apartment? Why does the local occupation force want that packet?

On another plane within the novel comes the story of a young monk from the 3rd century Lugdunum (Lyons) who is fleeing south through France with a sacred Christian text that he must keep safe and hide within the southern mountain caves. What is this text? Where does he hide it? Why must he be so secretive? These are the texts sought by the 20th century Germans and French. Who will find the texts and to what use will they be put?

The concept of time travel and reincarnation comes into play here too. Are Madeleine and Raoul and Baillard reincarnated Cathars who have come back to finish a sacred fight for freedom that has become wrapped up in World War II politics?

This is a good read,if you are a fan of archaeology, history, ancient religious myth and legend, and adventure.
I have read all of Kate Mosse's other novels, so it was a natural for me to grab this one. I enjoy her way  of weaving the past legends of the Languedoc region of France into the documented history of the place. I understand that her novel, Labyrinth has been made into a television mini-series. The characters of that novel appear in this latest novel (no spoilers) when Sandrine acknowledges that her dreams hold a powerful message to the French citizens in the resistance.

I'm a sucker for folklore, religious intrigue, and the history of the Languedoc region ... feel the same? This would be a great  vacation read.

Poetry Jam - Tales of the Hunt

Tales of the Hunt

Scrape the stone and make the dust

Gather up the deep red rust

Mix it with the bison blood

Make a paste that feels like mud

Gather round a blazing fire

Smoky meat drips on its pyre

Feast and then turn to the wall

Draw the hunt, tell to all

The rust of ages on those rocks

Will stay until a boy unlocks

A crumbling stone, an echo deep

A world released from a long sleep

Back when I was still teaching reading and social studies and 'all that stuff ' to youngsters, I found a book called First Painter by Kathryn Lasky.  The class was doing a bit of work on oral history and how it might have progressed from telling tales to written stories so I used the book to help the kids understand how the transition might have begun. 

I found some old pieces of brick and took them, some burnt wood coals, and my stone mortar and pestles to school and read the story with the children. I gave the mortar and pestles to the children when it was circle time and every time I paused in reading the story, the children carefully passed the mortar and pestles on to the next child so that everyone got a chance to grind the brick to ochre dust and the wood coals to black ash. Then, we mixed the black and red dusts with egg whites and let things dry up a bit to make paint paste.  A friend donated old slate roof tiles and each kid got a chance to make their own stone painting ... the kids were filled with awe at what they could create with the basics from the Earth. 

The minute I opened this week's Poetry Jam challenge, I knew I would write in some fashion about that magical day in the classroom. 

The Lost City of Z - David Grann

This book was a stretch for me, as it covered multiple ventures into Amazonia by the British surveyor, cartographer, explorer, and legendary adventurer Lt. Colonel Percy H. Fawcett, in search of a lost center of ancient civilization. The book jumps back and forth between modern explorations of the Amazon River and some of it tributaries, the history of the Spanish explorers of the 1500's and their high jinks in the conquer and massacre of the native populations of Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil, the more modern rape of the rainforests by the rubber barons, and finally the various political endeavors to become familiar with and tame the indigenous peoples of subtropical Brazil. All these interesting back stories serve to make a tapestry on which the various explorations of Fawcett and his multiple teams of adventurers traipse. Their time of exploration ranged from 1907 until 1925. Since then, they have piqued the interest of numerous other adventurers who have followed them and either become sick and disappointed or have met the same fate as the Fawcett expedition - 'disappeared'.

Who can resist a story of adventure, exciting tanglings with snakes and insects, extreme climate challenges, hostile and mysterious natives, infighting and suspicion between different explorers, and the mystery of uncharted regions deep in the jungles of Amazonia ? I couldn't, but the book was too detailed for me. After reading five or six chapters, I started to bog down, so I got the unabridged audio version of the book at the local library. That was a much better experience.  Listening to the narrator reading quickly and with great expression helped me stay interested in the story of Fawcett's obsessive search for a mysterious lost civilization in the center of the South American jungle and a modern day reporter's research into his mysterious disappearance.

David Grann became involved with the story when he was investigating an Arthur Conan Doyle novel called 'The Lost World'. He came across the name of Percy Harrison Fawcett and became intrigued by this man, considered the last of the great territorial cartographers and explorers and Doyle's inspiration for his novel.   In his investigation of the Royal Geographic Society and Fawcett's biography, he became even more intrigued with Fawcett's drive to become the man to conquer the South American jungle and the unknown depths of the Amazon River. It's an amazing story and a continuing mystery ... is there a Lost City of Z ? Grann's investigation became somewhat of an obsession as he researched Fawcett's private papers, records of the exploration voyages into South America, and made his own Amazon exploration of Fawcett's last expedition - the one on which he was lost with his son and another family friend.

This is an intriguing story that heralds back to Conrad's novel The Heart of Darkness . Stranger than fiction, though, it's a true story of the British will to expand the empire and map the world and a man that tested his physical and psychological limits as he searched one of the last great uncharted frontiers of the world. Amazing stuff ...