Bob Mustin
Fiction, historical fiction

Bob Mustin's Blog

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Dec.23.2009

I'm going to kick back, blog-wise, until after the gift opening, until hanging out with family and friends winds down, and until I get bored with the plethora of bowl games. Meanwhile, my wish for those who've been suffering the winter's storms will be a return to warmth and electricity and a hard...

Dec.18.2009

The Persistence Of A Fractured Germany

Homecoming, by Bernhard Schlink I have a musician friend, the son of a divorced couple, who had no contact as a child with his father. His father was a heavy drinker living in South Carolina in a house trailer with several other destitute drinkers. My friend didn’t know this until at age...

Dec.16.2009

Tiger, the Media, and Writers

Tiger, the Media, and Writers We should be concerned that Tiger Woods and his serial infidelities strikes us as more important—certainly more enthralling—than healthcare, the environment, the U.S.’s tandem wars, joblessness, AIDS, Mexico’s drug cartels, terrorism, and perhaps many other...

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Dec.16.2009

Tiger, the Media, and Writers

Dec.12.2009

The Dysfunction of Irish Families

The Gathering, by Anne Enright I wasn’t familiar with Enright’s previous work when I bought this book; I must confess I bought it because it won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, always looking for another writer’s work to fall in love with. Did I fall in love with The Gathering? It’s a close call...

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Dec.02.2009

A New Escalation Between Religion and Secularism

The Family, by Jeff Sharlet I rarely read and virtually never post on writing of a polemical nature. When I first heard of Sharlet’s book I thought it would be of this kind, and it is—sort of. I’d seen Rachel Maddow on MSNBC gasping at Sharlet’s revelations in this book, seen him on a number...

Nov.30.2009

Religion and Brutality in Eastern Europe

Occasionally I go exploring book-wise. I used to do the same with records back in my rock ‘n’ roll days, and most of the time I found pearls among the commercial swine. So it is with books, I find – some pearls, a few zircons, an occasional lump of coal, a rare bucket of mud. Whitcroft’s book, a...

Nov.27.2009

The Radical Rule of Thumb

Recently, I experienced the movie, "The Baader Meinhof Complex." It's a difficult movie to experience - a German language film, subtitled casually (meaning the German isn't always translated precisely) in English, with Bourne-style. thumping music and sharp, quick cinematic cuts, clearly...

Nov.18.2009

Embodying Peace

During my own search for meaning, I’ve come across quests to understand peace—inner and outer-as far back as the ninth century and China’s T’ang dynasty, including a document passed down by one Wang Chen: The Dao of Peace – Lessons on the Dynamics of Conflict. Peace through conflict? That...

Nov.12.2009

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables – Part Five: Jean Valjean

The last part of Hugo’s great book begins in medias res: with the Army’s assault on the Rue Saint-Denis barricade in full force. Enjolras and the other revolutionaries have managed to capture Javert and are holding him, planning to kill him when time permits. M. Fauchelevent, our Jean...

Nov.05.2009

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables – Part Four: The Idyll Of The Rue Plumet And The Epic Of the Rue Saint-Denis

At the outset in this Part, Hugo demonstrates his understanding of the French society he’s haunted to yet another degree, that of the political ramifications of social unrest in the early nineteenth century. He begins with a sharply focused discourse on the July 1830 revolt. Here, the monarchy is...

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Oct.29.2009

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables – Part Three: Marius

Hugo opens Part Three with a depiction of a street urchin: known simply as le gamin. Such children were turned out to live in the streets because of abject poverty or, as in the case of the Thénardiers and their son Gavroche, the families simply didn’t want them. There, in the streets, these...

Oct.21.2009

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables – Part Two: Cosette

Just when you think Hugo will smother you with the domestic and social travails of post-revolutionary France, he surprises. In this opening to Part Two, he gives us a military historian’s depiction of the Battle of Waterloo. Julie Rose’s copious notes tell us that Hugo visited the site of the...

Oct.15.2009

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables – Part One: Fantine

Those who have only a peripheral acquaintance with Les Misérables will find it surprising that its Book One opens, not with Jean Valjean, but with one Charles Myriel, the Bishop of Digne. Myriel has descended from a well-to-do French family, but his devotion to God has caused him to shun all...

Oct.08.2009

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables – An Overview

For the past three summers, I’ve picked some rather voluminous reads to get me through the hots and humids of North Carolina. Two years ago, it was War and Peace. Last year, Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. This year, I decided to take on Hugo’s fabled tome, Les Misérables. Of the three, I have fewer...

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master. ”

—ERNEST HEMINGWAY, New York Journal-American, Jul. 11, 1961

About Bob

I've been a North Carolina Writers Network writer-in-residence at Peace College under Doris Betts' guiding hand. In the early '90s, I was the editor of a small literary journal,The Rural Sophisticate, based in Georgia. My work has appeared in The...

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