Let's Bust a Recap : The Scarlet Pimpernel

Okay, so the very first book I drew out of the TBR Jar was actually a book that was on my 2023 book list but I didn't get around to reading it last year, and that is: The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy. What are the odds?! I don't have an exact count on how many slips of paper I put in my TBR Jar but let's just say about 1 in 500.

And I'm so glad because this is one of the books I was slightly bummed I didn't get to last year. So many of my real-life friends have recommended this 1905 classic to me, and I totally get it. It was a page-turner. 

The Scarlet Pimpernel was originally a play co-written by the Baroness Emma Magdalena Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála Orczy de Orci and her husband Henry George Montagu MacLean Barstow—phew!—which opened in London's West End in 1903. The success of the play spurred on the success of the novel which allowed Emmuska and her husband to live out their lives in luxury. Emmuska (the name used by our authoress' friends and family meaning "little Emma") was born in Hungary and lived in Budapest, Brussels, and Paris before finally settling with her family in London when she was 14 years old. 

The Scarlet Pimpernel is set during the bloody French Revolution and centers on our titular hero who is a mysterious Englishman who, with his League of nineteen other brave men, cunningly sneaks in and out of France to rescue aristocrats from Madame la Guillotine and smuggle them into England. The novel also features our heroine Lady Marguerite Blakeney, a French actress and comedienne who has married Sir Percy and is the fashionable darling of British high society during all of this intrigue with the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel. She is put into an impossible position when a French agent demands that she help him learn the Scarlet Pimpernel's secret identity in exchange for the promise of her brother's safety. What results is an adventure of epic proportions and I loved every page of this daring, clever, romantic story. 

With this play/novel, Orczy established the "hero with a secret identity" in popular culture and her Scarlet Pimpernel quickly led to the rise of such famous characters as Zorro, the Shadow, Superman, Batman, and countless others, and the trope remains a popular one in serial fiction today. Even Stan Lee who read this novel as a boy, said the Scarlet Pimpernel was "the first character who could be called a superhero."

I would easily recommend The Scarlet Pimpernel to anyone who is looking to read more classic literature but isn't sure where to start. This novel clocks in at under 250 pages, it keeps you turning them, and the language isn't too difficult to get into. Which makes sense given that English was not Orczy's native tongue. The prose is simple, even repetitive at times, and easy to read. I said it once already and I'll say it again: I loved this book, and I'm so glad it cropped up out of the TBR Jar this year. 

What's your favorite classic?

Let's Bust a Recap : Night

"I remember, May 1944: I was 15-and-a-half, and I was thrown into a haunted universe where the story of the human adventure seemed to swing irrevocably between horror and malediction."

Night is a memoir of Elie Wiesel about his experience in Nazi German concentration camps at the end of World War II. It is very dark, hopeless, and depressing. It's actually the first in a trilogy by Elie Wiesel in which he describes his personal transition from darkness to light during and after the war. The following books in the trilogy are entitled "Dawn" and "Day".

The road to getting Night published was not easy. After being liberated from Buchenwald at the end of the war, age 16, Wiesel moved to Paris and in 1954 completed an 862-page manuscript about his experiences. This was somehow cut down to 245 pages and published in Argentina under the title "And the World Remained Silent". The French novelist Francois Mauriac took it upon himself to find a French publisher for Wiesel's work and in 1958, after more cuts, a 178-page book entitled "La Nuit" was published in France. Two years later in 1960, a 116-page English translation was published in New York under the title "Night". Over 40 years later, Farrar, Straus and Giroux approached Wiesel's wife Marion about preparing a new translation of Night and she accepted. In 2006, that translation was published and that is the book that I read on my way to Israel the first week of April.

In an introduction to the translation by his wife, Wiesel says that when the book was originally published in English, he was an unknown writer who was just getting started and whose English was far from good. Since that time, his wife has translated many of his other works and, according to Wiesel, she knows how to transmit his voice better than anyone else. As a result of her work, he maintains that Night is better than it was. 

I chose to read Night on my trip to Israel because we would be visiting Yad Vashem while in Jerusalem and it seemed appropriate. I finished the slim, 120-page volume on the way there. The weight of all that the Jewish nation survived during that horrific time in our not-so-distant history stayed on me during my time in Israel.

It's not fun to read about entire communities being slaughtered, families being ripped apart and never seeing each other again, living babies being tossed in the air by soldiers for target practice, a teenage son watching his father being beaten to death and then living with guilt for being afraid to stop it: these things ought never to be. But they happened. And we dishonor the lives lost if we sweep that part of our history under the rug.

While it is never pleasant to read accounts of such depraved, disgusting human behavior, I believe it is important to do so. The crimes and sins committed by humanity against humanity should rightly horrify and outrage us. Forgetting them may make us feel more comfortable, but by ignoring the past or blotting it out, we become far more susceptible to repeating it.

Night doesn't end on a happy or hopeful note. It is not uplifting in any way, shape, or form. Wiesel's writing is raw, heartbreaking, and painful. Despite all that, I would definitely recommend this book and because of all that, I would really like to read his following books Dawn and Day. Have any of you read them?

"Because I remember, I despair. 

Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair."