3/18/22

If anyone here does not know The Sound of Music was based on the adventures of the Austrian Family von Trapp, stop reading now and run along home to grandma to ask her aaalll about it. Trust me, she knows.

Baroness von Trapp, aka the Little Governess Who Could and Did, wrote several books about the family's life, and this is the last of them. Thank goodness. It's a lovely piece of film lore that Christopher What's-it who played Captain von Trapp told an interviewer he felt he was "hit over the head with a Valentine" while working with the talented, lovely, wholesome Julie Andrews. Damn good thing grumpy ol' Chris didn't read any of the Baroness's books! He'd've flat died.

I wondered if I mightn't just suffer a diabetic coma myownself. Treacly is a good description of the Baroness's style, as are labored and stiff. The stories themselves, dating from 1949 to 1955, aren't in any way current or relevant to our modern world, but they are fascinating period pieces. Hawaii, still a territory, is just too gorgeous for words (did y'all know that "wiki" is a Hawaiian word for "easy"? You can learn useful things ANYwhere!) and so the Baroness uses very few of them to describe it. She spends a good bit of time being Catholic in this book, and Hawaii's indigenous religious observance of the hula is, let's say, treated condescendingly. The family's meeting with a Hawaiian Royal Princess is used as a chance to be, well, imperialistically kind. The Lady Bountiful, yeah?

How about the family's trip to South America? The Baroness calls it, unblushingly and without irony, the "land of manana"--I thought I would unswallow.

I suppose my horrible psychic abuse at the hands of Catholicism is what puts my back up about the book's slavishly servile extolling of the Catholic orthodoxy oof the day, but really! The breathless excitement of being taken to see the Actual Tomb of St. Peter under the Vatican was a little much (tip: People who aren't real don't have tombs, Baroness dear).

Oh well, it's read and off the shelves now. I do not in any way recommend it to anyone at all for any reason except if you need kindling after Civilization comes to an end on 12/21/12. ( )