A Work in Progress

Places in the Dark by Thomas H. Cook

I have a soft spot for novels that are narrated in the first person but tell a story that isn't so much about the narrator but someone they know well.  Thomas Cook's Places in the Dark, published in 2000, is just such a book.  I loved Cook's award-winning The Chatham School Affair and can't quite figure out why I waited so long to read another of his novels.  He's a masterful storyteller and not only does he write well but his plotting is assured and suspenseful.  He manages to breathe life into a story that sounds somewhat clichéd--a mysterious woman arrives in a small town, a year later she flees leaving one man dead and another on the verge of madness.  It sounds simple and the reader makes certain assumptions they believe will be true, but Cook is never quite so predictable.

"More than anyone I ever knew, my brother Billy felt the rapid wings of summer, how it darted like a bird through the trees of Maine, skittered along streams and ponds, then soared away, bright and gleaming, leaving us behind, shivering in coats and scarves."

Billy is a romantic and lives and loves passionately.  Younger than his brother Cal by five years they couldn't be more different but that doesn't lessen the closeness they feel for each other growing up in Maine in the 1930s.  Cal is practical and rational and looks after Billy who has no second thoughts before jumping into a fast moving river to save a small girl.  Billy's life is defined by the passion he feels.  He's guided by his heart, despite the skepticism both Cal and their father feel.  Cal looks after his younger brother but can never quite match the inner brightness that Billy carries with him.  And he never feels the unconditional love and respect his mother, in particular, reserves for her younger son.  Both are inveterate romantics.

Billy follows in his father's footsteps and takes over the running of the family newspaper, which is deemed unsuitable work for Cal.  Instead Cal is to study the law as it is cut and dried and requires no sentiment.  So each brother leads his own life in the small coastal town of Port Alma, separate yet working in close proximity of the other and their parents.  Then one cold November day Dora March steps off the Port Alma bus and throws both men's lives into an upheaval.  Dora is a beautiful but scarred woman who remains shy and somewhat skittish.  She obviously has something dark in her past, but it remains deeply hidden.  She takes a job first as a maid/companion to an elderly resident of the town, but after his death she begins working at The Sentinel for Billy.

"For all his life Billy loved the idea that people had secrets they held within themselves like gemstones in a velvet pouch, precious, dazzling, rare.  Perhaps that was what initially drew him to Dora.  Not her beauty, but how grotesquely it had been marred.  Not what she let him see, but what she hid."

It's, of course, unsurprising when Billy begins showing affection for Dora and perhaps more than that, as he hints that he's planning on asking her to marry him.  Cal isn't so easily convinced of Dora's intentions or motives.  In a way he is Dora's foil--both are afraid of love but for vastly different reasons.  She cautions him not to want love too much for it can have regrettable consequences.  And on the same bus Dora arrived on, she leaves Port Alma, and it's more than just a broken heart that is left in her wake.

Cook's suspense is more of a 'slow burn' sort of suspense.  He takes his time telling his story, there's nothing rushed about it.  He begins with a crime and then goes back and fills in the story.  Each thread is woven so naturally into the storyline that the flashbacks aren't even noticeable as it all flows together so nicely.  It's a simple story really, but Cook still manages to make it surprising.  I really enjoyed Places in the Dark and won't let so much time pass before I start another of his books.  As a matter of fact I've dug out the other books I own by him (including The Chatham School Affair for a reread), and have already started reading his forthcoming book The Quest for Anna Klein, which I am fortunate enough to have a galley copy of on my Nook.  If you enjoy a good, literate, suspenseful story, usually with a historical setting that involves a mystery or crime of some sort, you might give Thomas Cook a try.   

Teaser Tuesday: Lee Krasner - A Biography

When you're reading a book do you ever think ahead to the book you'll start when you finish the book in your hands?  Somehow I think you won't be surprised to hear I do that all the time.  No matter how much I am enjoying what I'm reading, somewhere in the back of my mind I'm mentally shuffling books around.  I've been slowly working my way through Kate Simon's Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood.  It's the first of three books she wrote about her life--particularly growing up in New York in the 1920s and 30s.  I love memoirs and Simon writes in a witty manner--glimpses of her world and family. 

In my ever growing pile of library books, however, I have Gail Levin's biography of artist Lee Krasner, which is a hefty hardcover of over 500 pages.  It's not something I'll be reading while walking on the treadmill, but I still want to have a go at reading it.  If you're not familiar with Lee Krasner you probably have heard of Jackson Pollack to whom Krasner was married.  Like so many other famous marriages where both individuals were creative and trying to make a name for themselves, Krasner (the wife) took on the role of nurturer and critic to Pollack.   Both she and Pollack were influential in the Abstract Impressionism movement.

Although I'll be finishing up Kate Simon's book this week, I've been dipping into the Levin biography in anticipation.  Krasner left behind very little written record of her life and working process preferring oral history.  She gave many interviews to journalists, critics and art historians and talks before student audiences. 

"'I was in on the formation of what all the history books now write about the abstract expressionists.  I was in the WPA, part of the New York School, I knew Gorky, Hoffmann, de Kooning, Clement Greenberg before Jackson sis and in fact I introduced him to them.  But there;s never any mention of me in those history books, like I was never there,' protested Krasner in 1973.  The lack of attention provoked Krasner to aver, 'And being dogmatically independent, I stepped on a lot of toes.  Human beings being what they are, one way to deal with that is denying me artistic recognition'."

"Today Krasner's protest might be even more vehement, since artistic erasure has been compounded by personal misrepresentation and caricature--both inadvertent and willed.  Gossip has crowded out the facts that are available, and Krasner's life has been picked over for tidbits to serve other agendas--from playing second fiddle in Jackson Pollack's very sensational life to being aspects of her life to feminist stereotypes that do not fit.  In reality, well before she met Pollack, Krasner had established herself as an artist and had won the respect of peers; then, after scarcely fourteen years with him, she continued for nearly three decades to create and show her art."

To put my reading into perspective--Kate Simon was born in 1912 in the Warsaw Ghetto and emigrated to the Bronx.  Lee Krasner was born in 1908 in Brooklyn to Russian Jewish emigrant parents.  Simon died in 1980 and Krasner in 1984, so they were contemporaries.  I'm very excited to start reading about Lee Krasner (will return to Kate Simon's other memoirs later), and I suspect I'll be sharing what I read along the way.

The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham

W. Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil is easily the best book I've read all year, and it's probably actually the best book I've read in a very long time.  I've put off writing about it as it's the sort of book which I feel I can't do justice, but I want to jot down a few thoughts at least, as books (even favored books) fade from memory so quickly it seems.  The Painted Veil is the sort of story that I was captivated by while reading.  Maugham writes the most exquisite prose, elegant yet simple, and imbued with so much meaning.  This is a story of love and infidelity and betrayal, the search for meaning in life and perhaps for redemption, though these lessons are hard learned.  It's a story about a woman's spiritual and maybe even moral (is there such a thing?) awakening.  

Kitty Garstin is the more beautiful of two sisters who live in London in the 1920s with their parents.  All the attention is on Kitty who is expected to break hearts and make a very good marriage.  Several Seasons in, however, she hasn't yet achieved her goal, and when her younger sister announces her engagement to an eminently suitable young man Kitty can't bear to be her bridesmaid.  Rather than become a spinster she agrees to marry a doctor who is on leave from a government job in Hong Kong.  Walter Fane is enamored of Kitty, but the two couldn't be more different and ill-suited for each other.  Kitty, very much the socialite, is shallow and self-centered and Walter, shy and serious, is very bookish in nature.  

After a speedy betrothal so she can avoid her younger sister's wedding entirely, Kitty and Walter travel to Hong Kong where he returns to his job as a bacteriologist.  Although Hong Kong has a lively social scene, as the wife of a very junior and unimportant government employee, Walter has very little clout amongst those of any real importance in Society.  As loving and attentive Walter is towards Kitty, she finds him a bore, so it comes as no surprise when she embarks on an affair with Charlie Townsend, a colonial official who happens to be married with children.  Charlie is handsome and charming and sexually alluring.  He's also ambitious and desires to climb the political ladder in the colony.  Kitty's ready to give everything up for him as she realizes she doesn't and never has loved Walter. 

When Walter confronts Kitty about the affair he gives her the option of either going with him to the Chinese interior where a cholera epidemic is raging and he hopes to treat the people, or to marry Charlie who must immediately divorce his wife.  She admits to Walter she's in love with Charlie and believes he'll marry her but discovers she, a betrayer, has also been betrayed.  Charlie is as vain and self-centered as she and talks her into going with Walter to Mai-tan-fu rather than stirring up trouble.  There are very few westerners in the region and the villagers are astonished that someone who appears so fragile as does Kitty would be allowed to travel to such a ravaged area.  Mei-tan-fu will test both Kitty and Walter--how deep their love, or, hate goes and what their capacity for forgiveness and remorse.

The inspiration for this story came from Maugham's time in Italy where he was vacationing and was struck by something Dante wrote.  "Siena made me, Maremma unmade me: this he knows who after betrothal espoused me with his ring."  Maugham's Italian teacher passed along her own interpretation for the lines--a story of a gentlewoman who had been suspected of adultery by her husband.  He exposed her to noxious vapors in his castle in the Maremma for revenge.  Apparently this is Maugham's only novel begun with a story in mind rather than a character.  The title comes from a sonnet by Shelley: "Lift not the painted veil which those who live call life."  It seems apt for a story about the attainment of wisdom.

This is a gorgeous book, but don't expect the characters to be studies in black and white or even always likable.  Life is rarely so easy and neither are people so easily readable.  Certainly not Kitty or Walter.  Yet despite their shortcomings, particularly Kitty's, it's hard not to feel sympathetic towards them.  It's for moments like this that I love to read, and while there are always things to like about all stories, there are a few that reach down deep inside the very fiber of your being and convey some truth of living to the reader.  It's with equal hesitation and anticipation that I look forward to reading another book by W. Somerset Maugham.  

May 15: Reading Notes

I can't remember if I've mentioned that I've been watching the original episodes of Upstairs Downstairs.  I've been getting the DVDs from Netflix and had been waiting for the first disc from season three for weeks.  Didn't I have it at the top of my queue?  Why aren't they sending it to me?  Apparently the 1970s version of Upstairs Downstairs is no longer available from Netflix.  I'm not quite sure what happened and there has been no explanation forthcoming from them, only an "unavailable" when I try and add the discs to my queue.  Very annoying indeed.   I'm hoping that they get it back as it seems a 40th anniversary edition has recently been released, but rather than wait (since patience has never been my strong suit), I requested season three from interlibrary loan.  Lots of changes are underway for the residents of 165 Eaton Place.  It's been interesting seeing how the clothing styles and haircuts have changed, and as it is now 1912, we all know what's in the near future.  It was only on a whim that I started watching the show but it's become sort of addicting--very like a soap opera.  My other favorite 1920s costume drama has been The House of Elliott, which was sadly cancelled after only three seasons, so I have forever after been left hanging never to see how things ended for Beatrice and Evie.

I don't watch much TV but I do like to watch movies on the weekend.  Strangely I get in very little reading time as there is always so  much that needs to be done that I didn't get around to during the work week.  I keep fantasizing about lazing about on the sofa for hours on end reading, but that never seems to happen.  So most of my reading is done in snatched moments.  I've veered off a bit from my normal reading to pick up a favorite book that I like to revisit from time to time.  It's one of my very favorite comfort reads, On Borrowed Wings by Chandra Prasad.  I don't think I'll be writing about it again as I'm not sure how much more I have to say about it, since I wrote about it here and here already.  I like it so much because it's about not only finding yourself but also reinventing yourself along the way, and I am all for changing paths when needed.  It's also something of an adventure story.  A young woman takes the place of her brother at Yale when he dies in an accident.  The twist is that this is the 1930s and women are not allowed to attend, so she must disguise herself as a man.  I suspect any day now I'll be pulling a book by Clare Chambers out as well, as she is another of my favored comfort read authors.  I should mention that both authors write good, intelligent prose, so don't be put off by my categorization as I don't consider either to be mindless fluff.  

Doesn't Italy sound nice right now?  Specifically Sicily?  I've also pulled The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri off the shelves.  This is one of those books I've owned for a number of years and have eyed many a time only to return it to its place as I usually have too many other books started (so shouldn't start yet one more).  Well, I decided to just start one more since I'm drawn to the setting.  I'm not very far into the story yet, though it is a short book and seems to be a quick read.  I'm not sure yet how much of a sense of Italy I'm getting, but Inspector Montalbano is an interesting character.  Things seem quite laid back but politics seem a tangled mess.  Unlike so many other detectives that are anguished and often depressed Salvo seems very even tempered and even perhaps good humored.  I had no idea, but the books have been made into a TV show called Detective Montalbano (not very creative on the title, were they?) that might be worth watching after I've read more of the books.   

Alongside Inspector Montalbano I am being introduced to Camilla Ceder's Inspector Christian Tell in Frozen Moment.  The story opens with the discovery of a body that's not only been shot but run over by a car.  A young woman who knows the witness manages to insinuate herself into the crime scene for as yet unexplained reasons.  She's a journalism student, so perhaps is looking for a good story, but she seems to have an inexplicable interest in seeing the body (beyond a morbid curiosity anyway).  Ceder is a Swedish author, and blazoned across the cover of the book is "move over Wallander".  I often think publishers do a disservice to their authors by making these sorts of comparisons.  As a reader, if I like an author, I am perhaps likely to pick up a book by someone else writing in a similar vein.  But I think most readers see through this marketing ploy and it would be better off letting the new author's work stand on its own.  I've yet to read Henning Mankell, so I'm not familiar yet with Wallander anyway.  I should probably give him a try along with Steig Larsson, shouldn't I?

Along with reading my mysteries I'm hoping to finish Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises this week, which despite the simplicity of prose I am finding to be a much more challenging read than I anticipated.  And I hope to get back to Winifred Holtby's South Riding, too.

One small side note, I'm planning on posting a tad less this summer.  I'll be taking the weekends off--along with Saturdays I will likely not be posting on either Fridays or Sundays.  I'm hoping that a little less time spent working on posts can be time spent reading.  Or maybe working in the yard.  Preferably reading, of course, but you know how these things go.

Lost in the Stacks: Sunday, Monday, and Always

Dawn Powell should very decidedly not be in my 'lost in the stacks' posts.  At the time of her death in 1965 most of her work was out of print and it was only through the attention of Tim Page and Gore Vidal that her work was reissued.  During her lifetime her work was acclaimed, but she never had quite the success of her more famous contemporaries despite being well regarded by the likes of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway.  She seems always to have been on the cusp of something greater, but never quite pushed over the edge into fame. 

I think many people who read her now, read her and love her and appreciate her work but she seems to me to be a still somewhat neglected author.  I rarely see her name bandied about the blogosphere (my corner of it anyway), which is why I chose her as my lost in the stacks author.  My library has several of her books, but I think she's not circulated as often as she could and should be, so I've brought home Sunday, Monday, and Always, which contains the original eighteen stories that appeared in the collection during Powell's life and an additional four in the reissue.

She wrote over a hundred short stories, which were printed in magazines such as The New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Story and the Saturday Evening Post.   According to the introduction by Tim Page short story-writing came easily to Powell, though not naturally.

"In all her work, she fought off a tendency to overwrite, and she seems to have found this clipped, tautly controlled genre restrictive.  After all, much of her best writing always went into inspired digressions from her plots and such method was not suited to the traditional short-story form, which has room for few, if any, meanderings."

I love short stories (something you wouldn't have heard me say even five years ago), though I don't read nearly enough of them.  Page writes that there was a time when short story-writing was a lucrative business (think F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway), though not so much anymore it seems which is a real pity.  For Powell it was a way to pay the bills while she worked on her novels.  Sunday, Monday, and Always was published in 1952 and here's a little of what the New York Times had to say about it: 

"A collection of short stories, her first, by the author of The Locusts Have No King is likely to be something of a reading event.  And so it is, it must be wryly noted, for these unusual stories, some of them no more than vignettes, reveal in Miss Powell the kind of demure and deceitful authority that, for example, Jane Austen knew a thing or two about.  The female writer, no doubt of it, is the deadlier of the species.  Our own time has produced several specimens, notably Dorothy Parker.  Miss Powell, of these, is not to be outranked; her observation is merciless, her style a marvel of economy, her pen double-edged."

The review goes on to say:

"...the savageness of her portrait is always balanced by the implication that the likeness is from life, and what a pity it is that life can be so dreadful.  It is one of Miss Powell's triumphs that, somehow, unobtrusively, the warmth of her pity comes through."

I want to read every book I bring home from the library and share here on Fridays, but I can never quite manage it.  I do want to read these stories, however.  Since I have finished Daphne du Maurier's Early Stories, I can very conveniently pick this one up and read or two a day.  Dawn Powell is not a new to me author, I wrote about her here and here, and now I am looking forward to finally revisiting her work.  She's well worth seeking out in a bookstore or your own local library.

Looking Forward to Reading . . .

I keep a little notebook handy for writing down reading suggestions or when I spot a new or forthcoming book I'd like to either buy or borrow.  My list is getting longer and longer and spring always seems to be a busy publishing time, so I thought I'd share a few books I've got my eye on to read.

All Yours by Claudia Pineiro - I thought her Thursday Night Widows was a great read and am looking forward to this one, though it isn't due out until early next year here in the US.  "A portrait of a woman betrayed, at first desperate to save her marriage, then obsessed with murderous revenge."

The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay by Beverly Jensen - I wanted to read this when it came out but didn't get around to it.  I am taken with the lovely cover for the paperback, so it's on my wishlist.  "In 1916, Idella and Avis Hillock live on the edge of a chilly bluff in New Brunswick-a hardscrabble world of potato farms and lobster traps, rough men, hard work, and baffling beauty."  Shallow, I know, but the period is right up my alley!

A Token of Affection by Andrew Taylor - I'm not sure where this falls in Taylor's work as I can't find a description, but I've enjoyed the few books by him I've read and this is a reminder I need to get back to his Lydmouth series.

The Summer Garden by Paullina Simons - I've read two books by Simons about Tatiana and Alexander--mammoth books that I devoured they were so hard to put down.  There was another that I was a little afraid to read (would the momentum be broken, can an author bring back the magic yet again), and now I find out their adventures continue.  Do I dare read it?

The Cradle in the Grave by Sophie Hannah - I've yet to read any of her books, but it's not due to lack of interest, I assure you.  She's writing them faster than I can read them.  Must read her first this year!

A Little Dinner Before the Play by Agnes Jekyll - Penguin has a whole series of books on food topics that have lovely cover designs.  I want the whole set as they are so pretty.  "Originally published in The Times in the early 1920s, these divinely witty and brilliantly observed pieces are still loved today for their warmth and friendly advice and, with their emphasis on fresh, simple, stylish dishes, were years ahead of their time."

 "Whether extolling the merits of a cheerful breakfast tray, conjuring up a winter picnic of figs and mulled wine, sharing delicious Tuscan recipes, or suggesting a last-minute pre- theatre dinner, the sparkling writings of the society hostess and philanthropist Agnes Jekyll describe food for every imaginable occasion and mood."

Crimson Warning by Tasha Alexander - I'm behind in my Lady Emily novels and now there is a new one coming out this fall.  "Secrets prove deadly in this new novel from Tasha Alexander featuring Lady Emily Hargreaves. Some very prominent people in London are waking up to find their doorsteps smeared with red paint, the precursor to the revelation of a dark secret – and worse – by someone who enjoys destroying lives."

Bitter Truth: A Bess Crawford Mystery by Charles Todd - I'm also behind in this series (though only by one book and I think I can easily catch up before this comes out later this year).   No plot description for this one either yet, but some authors I know I will read automatically as I like their characters. 

The Virgin Cure by Ami McKay - I loved her first novel, The Birth House!  Finally she ha a new one coming out early next year.  "'I am Moth, a girl from the lowest part of Chrystie Street, born to a slum-house mystic and the man who broke her heart.' So begins The Virgin Cure, a novel set in the tenements of lower Manhattan in the year 1871. As a young child, Moth's father smiled, tipped his hat and walked away from her forever. The summer she turned twelve, her mother sold her as a servant to a wealthy woman, with no intention of ever seeing her again.

Emma by Jane Austen - I love, love, love the new cover designs for the forthcoming Penguin Threads series.  I think I am going to have to buy them all just because they're so lovely.  I can't think of a time when I've seen needlework like this grace the cover of a classic novel.  Kudos to Penguin and needle artist Jillian Tamaki. 

Or the Bull Kills You by Jason Webster - More crime fiction set in Spain.  I think Spain is going to be my new favored literary destination (or one of them anyway).  "Chief Inspector Max Cámara thinks in proverbs,and he hates one thing above all: bullfighting. One hot afternoon in Valencia, however, he has to stand in for his boss, judging a festival corrida starring Spain’s most famous young matador. That night, he is back in the bullring, and what he finds on the blood-stained sand shocks the city of Valencia to its core. Cámara is roped into investigating a grisly murder while dealing with violent shadows from his own past, as well as confronting the suspiciousness of the bullfighting community and the stonewalling of local politicians in full electoral campaign. To top it all, Fallas, the loudest fiesta in the country, has just got underway. For Cámara, it seems his problems have only just begun..."

Storm at the Door by Stefan Merrill Block - This sounds interesting--a novel about depression as well as love, marriage and family life. 

Lots for my wishlist--a few I'll definitely be buying and a few more that I hope to find at my library!

Early Stories of Daphne du Maurier

I've been enjoying reading Daphne du Maurier's Early Stories, which I had to request from another library through interlibrary loan.  As much as I would love to own this (I've been collecting DdM's books for a while now and think she's an exceptional short story writer), it's not only long out of print but the used copies are also well out of my budget.  I did a little run down of the story collections by her that I'm aware of, and soon I'll be able to add The Doll: Short Stories to my list (I hear a few of the stories in this Early Stories collection are also included in The Doll).  I'm trying to patiently wait for my copy to come in the mail, and since I'm immersed in this volume I'm not doing too badly so far (but still can't wait to get it). 

I've been trying to slowly work my way through all her short stories, so this collection has been quite interesting.  They were written between 1927 and 1930 when the author was under twenty-three and before she had published her first novel.  All had appeared in various periodicals at the time.  Although most of the stories in this collection aren't quite on par with her later work, most are still surprisingly sophisticated and all are well written.  I'm nearly finished with the collection, which has eighteen stories but so far only one has the trademark du Maurier dark atmosphere--suspense verging on horror.  But they all have a sense of irony about them, often coming with a twist at the end.  And the stories are often about social ills of the period but aren't in any way heavy handed.  Very impressive for a writer only in her early twenties! 

As there are too many stories to write about in one post, I'm splitting them up and will give a little taste of each, but no worries as I won't give away endings.

Panic is the most atmospheric of the group I've read.  It has elements of horror about it with a nice oppressive feel to it.  A young couple travels to Paris for a bit of a fling only to find the city's hotels filled.  They end up in a drab, dreary place in Montparnasse that has obviously seen better days.  What began as an exciting adventure turns into something very sordid.  The woman suddenly seems younger and less experienced than first thought by her suitor as the hotel gives off an ominous feel.

I'd read La Saint Vierge before as it has appeared in other collections.  Although not my favorite story is it is very polished.  A young Breton wife worries over her fisherman husband who is preparing once again to go to sea for his work.  She's little more than a peasant girl with little education but much love that's not quite reciprocated by her handsome husband.  She begs the Virgin to look out for her husband and asks for a sign her prayer has been heard. 

In A Difference in Temperament a married couple, who in reality love each other, talk at cross purposes.  Although they try and communicate they end up not listening and miscommunicate their feelings and then misinterpret the responses.  How often does that happen?! 

And Now to God the Father is one of my favorite stories so far.  Reverend James Hollaway is the Vicar of St. Swithins' Church of Upper Chesham St., one of the more wealthy London neighborhoods.  He's well liked and well respected by his upper class parishioners.  A very fastidious man, he looks younger than his years and well knows it.  He's happy to give advice to all who seek it, though he has an unfortunate tendency to be shallow, hypocritical and self-serving. 

If you've ever thought of reinventing yourself or perhaps just running away, Adieu Sagesse might be a good blueprint.  Richard Furgerson might be a dull man living with a charming family in a small town with small town attitudes, but he'll get the last laugh.

Adieu Sagesse is not du Maurier's only light-hearted (though somewhat satirical) story, Frustration is another humorous example of her abilities.  After a seven year engagement a young couple marries despite the advice their families have against it.  Their suggestion was to wait another seven years and plan properly.  The groom has few prospects but the couple is tired of their very chaste wait.  They happily marry only to have everything that can go wrong, well, go wrong.

Piccadilly is a morality tale of sorts.  A young woman who's in service falls for the wrong man.  If only she had not been so superstitious.  She looked for the right signs, but made all the wrong choices.  The things we do for love and the consequences that follow...Quite a bitter story.

Tame Cat is another story of a young woman's downfall, though this time it is through no fault of her own.  The young woman in this story is simply very young and naive on the inside, while outwardly she is a blooming flower.  Her education comes at a cost of a mother's love and trust.    

Mazie is a bleak story of a woman on the game, so to speak.  She has no money and no future.  She goes into dress shops to just look but gets shooed out when the clerks spot her more than once.  She dreams of a better life, but you just know she's not going to get it.  Even walking barefoot on a sandy beach is out of her reach.  This is almost more a portrait than a story. 

I've got a handful of stories left to read and will write about those next week.  The illustration (for Panic) I've included in my post is one of several in the book, though the artist's name is not given.  I might just have to pick up one of Daphne du Maurier's novels to read next before diving into another collection of stories.

Teaser Tuesday: Three Books Waiting

Three for the price of one today, or, I just feel like reading tonight rather than thinking too hard on a blog post.  I've got several books lined up to read soon, but I am trying to be good and actually finish something before diving into these.  So as I rotate books out of my reading pile, these are at the top of the TBR pile to rotate in.  In anticipation, here is a little taste of each.

My next classic is going to be Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy.  I attempted it once before, and I actually found the bookmark I used stuck in between pages 84 and 85.  It's based on an actual criminal case that occurred in upstate New York in 1906.  Did I already mention it has over 800 pages filled with tiny print (I think I did...).  I want to start reading and have it be so engaging that I can't put it down. 

"Dusk--of a summer night."

"And the tall walls of the commercial heart of an American city of perhaps 400,000 inhabitants--such walls as in time may linger here as a mere fable."

"And up the broad street, now comparatively hushed, a little band of six,--a man of about fifty, short, stout, with bushy hair protruding from under a round black felt hat, a most unimportant-looking person, who carried a small portable organ such as is customarily used by street preachers and singers.  And with him a woman perhaps five years his junior, taller, not so broad, but solid of frame and vigorous, very plain face and dress, and yet not homely, leading with one hand a small boy of seven and in the other carrying a Bible and several hymn books.  With these three, but walking independently behind, was a girl of fifteen, a boy of twelve and another girl of nine, all following obediently, but not too enthusiastically, in the wake of the others."

I'm wondering if there is enough time this year to salvage my very optimistic reading plans I made at the end of 2010?  I was so certain that this year was going to be my year, but here it is rapidly approaching the halfway mark and I have very little to show for it.  Well, little that resembles anything in my reading plans, that is.  I have some great books on my list of to-reads, but they are mostly very long or a little on the challenging side.   Maritta Wolff's book Night Shift was published in 1942 and quite popular when it first came out.  It fits in well with the other books I've been reading lately, and I feel like reading it, so now's the moment.  Or very soon anyway.

"The personnel manager dropped the telephone back in the cradle, the radiator behind her made a little whistling sound and right after that there came a buzz from the inner mechanism of the electric clock on the corner of the desk.  Wham!  Whistle!  Buzz!As if there was some idiotic relationship between the three noises, leading through a brief climax to a finality, Virginia Braun thought.  And she almost laughed out loud."

I've been racking up the ILL requests lately, so I have a stack in the order I need to read them (I think I've mentioned I try hard to read my ILL books since the library went to special trouble to get them for me).  I'm nearing the end of my current book, so next up will be Camilla Ceder's Frozen Moment.  Ceder is a new to me Swedish crime author featuring Inspector Christian Tell.   Tell is a "world-weary detective with a chequered past".  It sounds as though this is going to be a detective/reporter set up much like Mari Jungstedt's novels (Unseen and Inner Circle) that I read a couple of years ago. 

"In the old days, when they were both working, Åke Melkersson liked to get up an hour before his wife--she was more of a night person--just to indulge himself for that hour with a cup of coffee and the crossword in the morning paper.  A quarter of an hour before they were due to leave, he would wake Kristina; she would get dressed more or less in her sleep, then stumble her way to the garage and collapse in the passenger seat with a blanket over her knees.  She would sleep all the way to the timber factory gate, where he would get out and she would drive the short distance to Hjällbo and the post office where she had worked for so many years."

Since I've got my work cut out for me here, I'd better go read!

Paris Wife by Paula McLain

I don't know much about Ernest Hemingway and even less about any of his wives.  Perhaps that's just as well as with some authors their reputation precedes them, and when the reputation isn't always a particularly favorable one the less said the better, it seems.  My perspective has shifted ever so slightly since I finished reading Paula McLain's very excellent Paris Wife, which is a fictional biography of sorts about Hemingway's first wife Hadley Richardson and their life together in 1920s Paris.  I had little knowledge and few expectations going into this book, so perhaps this has helped in forming my opinions.  I still don't know a lot about either Ernest or Hadley, though it seems as though McLain tried to paint an accurate portrait of both individuals.  I don't think she glosses over their behavior or shortcomings yet she doesn't exactly condemn their actions either.  It seems as though she tries to simply present the facts of their lives paying special attention to what they might have been feeling emotionally during their short marriage.

Hadley Richardson was a very average young American woman when she met Ernest.  She had a fairly conventional upbringing in St. Louis, though her mother was very protective of her after a childhood accident.  She met Ernest when she was visiting a friend in Chicago.  Several years her junior, Ernest was full of life and energy and Hadley felt an immediate attraction.  Hemingway had served in Italy during WWI as an ambulance driver but was injured and invalided out.  He was working as a reporter when he met Hadley and the two corresponded after her return home.  Despite concerns of family members they married a year later in 1921, living for a while in Chicago and then moving to Paris at the suggestion of Hemingway's mentor Sherwood Anderson.

I think Hadley must have been Hemingway's muse.  She was immensely supportive of his work and didn't shy away from trying anything he had an interest in.  The two became part of the expatriate community that included Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce and Ezra Pound.  Other than his journalistic work he hadn't been published and was struggling to find his own voice.  He would write during the day--sometimes taking a separate room away from his and Hadley's apartment or writing at cafés where he could chat with other writers and artists.  If Hadley's upbringing was fairly conventional her lifestyle in Paris was not.  The 20s was about youth culture and shaking off   the past, which had been darkened with the bloodshed of WWI.  Hemingway was not the only writer    looking for a new language to express how the world had changed.  In a letter to Hemingway before their marriage Hadley wrote "The world's a jail and we're going to break it together."  But Paris wasn't everything Hadley expected it to be.  She took care of their home all day and while she missed Ernest, it didn't seem that he missed her.  He was part of the creative sphere of Paris and she was not.

By all appearances Ernest and Hadley had a very typical middle class marriage but they were just about the only ones of their group to do so.  Marriage and family life were considered bourgeoisie and most of their friends were either unfaithful or didn't believe in having children.  People drank hard and played even harder, so it's not surprising that staying happily married in such an environment would be a challenge.  They moved to Toronto when Hadley was ready to give birth to their son, John, but it was stifling for Ernest who didn't seem to be cut out for domesticity.  As soon as the baby was old enough to travel they sailed once again for France.  Whatever happiness they initially had seemed to erode away in the Parisian milieu of the 1920s. 

"If Ernest was changing, Montparnasse was, too.  American tourists flooded the scene hoping to get a glimpse of a real bohemian while the usual suspects grew wilder and stranger for the new audience.  Kiki was one of the most famous artist's models around, and May Ray's lover and muse.  She could often be seen at the Dôme or Rotonde with her pet mouse.  It was small and white, and she wore it attached to her wrist with a delicate silver chain.  The fleshy redhead Flossie Martin held court in front of the Select shouting obscenities to locals and tourists alike.  Bob McAlmon vomited neatly in the flowerbeds of all the best cafés and then ordered another absinthe.  That absinthe was illegal deterred no one, and the same held true for opium and cocaine.  Ernest and I had always been more than happy enough with alcohol, but there was the very real feeling, for many, of needing to up the ante--to feel more and risk more.  It grew harder and harder to shock anyone."

It can be really painful reading about the disintegration of a marriage.  As supportive of Ernest as Hadley was she couldn't be a critic, but there would be others who could talk about literature in a way that she couldn't.  Their ongoing joke was that she liked Henry James, an author Hemingway saw as mired in the past.  Ernest and Hadley had traveled to Pamplona to see the running of the bulls, where he finally found inspiration for his writing.  It was during this period that he wrote his famous novel, The Sun Also Rises, and also met and began an affair with Pauline Pfeiffer who became his second wife.

Whatever you think about Ernest Hemingway the man, Paris Wife made for fascinating reading, McLain offers a glimpse into a marriage and a world that seems by parts both interesting and immensely sad.  I'm not sure how much further I want or need to delve into these lives but it has been enlightening.  I suspect he had the ability to be a real bastard, but I still feel a twinge 'something' (sympathy?  understanding?) for his struggles as an author.  It seems as though he worked so hard to create this myth of being 'Ernest Hemingway' that not even he could really live up to it and he and others suffered for it along the way.

This has inspired me to finally pick up Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, to get an even fuller picture of this period.  I've also got A Moveable Feast, which was published posthumously about his life in 20s Paris with Hadley, at the ready.  And out of curiosity I've been dipping into Hadley: The First Mrs. Hemingway by Alice Hunt Sokoloff.   

Simon's Five Books Meme

Perfect timing.  I was in the mood for a meme and Simon at Stuck in a Book has come up with one--One Book, Two Book, Three Book, Four and Five.  Do check out the comment area of his post, too, and see what everyone else is also reading.

1.  The (well in my case "a") book I'm currently reading:

I just started reading S.J. Bolton's Now You See Me, which is coming out in June.  I won it through Library Thing's Early Reader's program.  I've enjoyed her other books, but this one on first impression seems even better than her previous books.  Almost from the first page I've been hooked.

2.  The last book I finished:

A long time ago I read a novel by Thomas Cook, which I thought was very good and have always meant to read more of his work--he's a prolific author and I've been collecting his books over the years (now it's time to read more of them I think).  Places in the Dark was staring at me from the top of the pile and when I started reading I didn't want to put it down either.  I hope to write about it later this week.

3.  The next book I want to read:

Last week at work a book of criticism crossed my desk about Theodore Dreiser and his book An American Tragedy in particular.  I started reading it once before, but I think the sheer size (just short of 900 pages) put me off in the end.  I always try and have one classic on the go, so I need to finish my current read, but I think I'm going to give this another try.  I've been very much in a mystery/crime fiction mood lately, so this would actually fit in nicely with my other books. 

4.  The last book I bought:

I'm cheating since I added two new books to my stacks yesterday.  I've never tried Tess Gerritsen, but I was tempted by Ice Cold at the supermarket (of all places) yesterday.  I was meant to be food shopping, not book shopping, but you know how it goes.  This is a Rizzoli & Isles novel, and while I don't like to read series books out of order, maybe it won't matter in this case.  And it was a good mail day, too (how sad if we stop getting mail on Saturdays....I like getting mail).  I recently read Domingo Villar's newest mystery, liked it so much I had to order the first book he wrote, Water-Blue Eyes.

4.  The last book I was given:

Sadly I don't often get books as gifts from people as I have so many I think they're afraid of buying something I might already own.  But I was recently surprised when a collection of short stories by Edna O'Brien showed up on my doorstep from the kind people at Little Brown.  Saints and Sinners is due out tomorrow as a matter of fact.  I'm working on a book of stories by Daphne du Maurier at the moment, but I hope to start this one when I'm finished.  I love short stories and am trying to be better about reading them more often. 

Feel free to share your five books.