A Work in Progress

April 30: Reading Notes (Mystery Edition)

Mmm.  Mysteries.  I am sure I have said it (many times) before, but I love mysteries and I could easily subsist on a steady diet of only mysteries when it comes to reading.  I do like a bit of variety, though, and there are too many other subjects (and stories) that I am interested in, so mysteries just get shuffled in with all my other reading.  And there has been a lot of it (other reading that is) this year.  Book subscriptions, readalongs, memoirs and numerous other reading tangents.  So my mystery reading, despite this photo, has been sort of slight this year.  As a matter of fact so far I have only read one (one!) mystery.  I am feeling pangs of withdrawal and think I need to do something about it. 

Lately I've been spending more reading time with the mysteries I've started over the course of this year (including pulling one out of my 'set aside for later' pile) and am trying to catch up a bit on those in progress books.  I've mentioned a few of these already.  I'm nearing the end of Hotel Paradise by Martha Grimes, which has been a reread.  I plan on continuing on with Emma Graham.  Cleo Coyle's On What Grounds, the first in a series of coffee house cozy mysteries, is pure unadulterated fluffy reading.  It's a very 'cozy' cozy.  Although there is a hunky detective, this is most decidedly a mystery with an amateur sleuth.

I love Peter Lovesey's Peter Diamond mystery, another first in a series set in Bath, The Last Detective.  This one is a solid police procedural with a likable though flawed (how could it be otherwise) detective, and it even has literary overtones as one of the characters is an academic who in the course of the story must put on a Jane Austen in Bath exhibit, a prospect he is not happy about since Jane Austen didn't like Bath!

I had this overwhelming urge to pick up a vintage crime novel, and after much consideration decided it was time to try Patricia Wentworth's first Miss Silver mystery, Grey Mask, which I am thoroughly enjoying and may well finish tonight.  She reminds me a lot of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple.  Miss Silver is quite formidable (and knits a mean sock).

And then there is Lucretia Grindle's The Faces of Angels, which is more a psychological crime novel set in Florence, Italy.  I started this last year but got sidetracked.  I've always wanted to get back to it and finish it, so maybe now is the time.  With the drastic change in the weather here from winter to summer (don't worry, though, we're going to revert back to winter again in just a day or so), I think it's time to revamp my Summering in Italy reading (which never quite took off last summer, so I hope to make a better show of it this summer).

So these are the mysteries I'm currently spending time with.

And then there are the books I'm 'thinking about reading'.  I'm always thinking about reading something new, even before I have turned the last page on a book that is still underway (I know I should focus more on what is in hand, but I can't help myself).  Since I am close to finishing a few mysteries, the question of what next is not a question I ask lightly.  This takes much pondering and browsing.  I have about seven or eight bins of mysteries as well as a towering bedside pile and a few on a shelf in my bedroom bookcase devoted to mysteries.  I can (literally) spend hours shifting books around, reading the blurbs, dipping into stories.  Trying out the books in search of just the right one to match my mood. 

And I am an equal opportunity (mostly) mystery reader.  I have loads of vintage crime novels by well known and not so well known authors, cozies, thrillers, crime novels, police procedurals, historical mysteries, noir, mysteries in translation . . . Just about every subgenre (is that the right term?) to fit any possible mood.

So this is a pile of possible mysteries that are under consideration.  By no means comprehensive or complete.  I'm not entirely sure what I'll want next.  A little American noir by Cornell Woolrich?  (Waltz into Darkness or Rear Window and Other Stories).  More vintage/Golden Age crime?  Gladys Mitchell came to mind today (The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop).  Another Summering in Italy possibility by Christobel Kent?  (Drowning River).  Straightforward crime?  (The Rage by Gene Kerrigan).  Or maybe a new release from the library?  (Crossbones Yard by Kate Rhodes or The Other Child by Charlotte Link).

And I didn't even include the newest Claudia Pineiro novel, or something by Evelyn Smith, who I just discovered, or Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine who I am thinking of rereading this year.  (I'll look back on this post and this photo in a month or so and will probably have chosen a totally different book than what appears in my pile!).

You see, I am totally spoiled for choice.  Choosing is, of course, half the fun, but it can be a difficult deciding.  No doubt that is why I have more than one mystery on my pile right now. 

Have you read any particularly good mysteries/crime novels this year?  Do tell!

The Wars by Timothy Findley

In his introduction to Timothy Findley's The Wars, author Guy Vanderhaeghe has put into words some of what I have been feeling about the book but have been unable to articulate adequately.  I'd been thinking about the story all weekend wondering what I was going to share about it when I finally got around to reading the introduction.  My copy is dog eared and pencil-marked from all the many parts that resonated with me or that felt especially important in the building up of the story.  I began by taking notes but soon had to abandon this as I didn't want to stop and write out what seemed important.  Everything seemed important was the problem. 

The Wars is a story of a young Canadian soldier who volunteers to fight in World War I.  Like so much of what I seem to be reading lately, it's a slim volume very carefully constructed, spare really, but each part necessary to the telling of the story, nothing superfluous.  I've been reading enough war literature in the last couple of years to know that so often these books are going to be harrowing, sometimes emotionally draining and not especially pleasant going at times. 

I can see why Penguin has published The Wars as a modern classic.  It is harrowing and at times brutal and for me gut wrenching, but it is quite beautiful as well.  As I read I was both apprehensive of what was coming but also in awe of what Findley was managing to do at the same time.  When I finished reading I have to say I was bereft.  Not because of what happened to Robert Ross, the Canadian solider, (though maybe a little for that, too) but because I had finished the book and there was no more.  And I wanted to go back to the first pages or even start at the end and work my way back to the beginning of the story to see just how did Findley do that? 

This is a story that is filled with imagery and weighted with meaning (hence all my dog ears and pencil markings) and Robert is a complex and at times contradictory character.  Attractive, a scholar and an athlete, he comes from a good, well-to-do family.  In the beginning he's only nineteen, perhaps a little naive, and is quite close to his older sister Rowena who is disabled as she was born with water on the brain and must remain in a wheelchair.  He told her once that she was the first human being he remembered seeing.  

"He was lying in his crib and, waking from a nap through half-closed eyes, he saw his sister gliding in her chair across the room and coming to rest beside him.  She stared at him for a long, long time and he stared back.  When she smiled, he thought she was his mother.  Later, when he came to realize she couldn't walk and never left the chair, he became her guardian."

He does look after Rowena, a gentle woman who loves animals.  Perhaps it's because of Rowena, what she meant to him and her gentleness, that caused everything that came after to happen.  Surely it helped shape Robert, so maybe the choices he made were inevitable.  Like all good war stories this is one that vividly shows the absurdity of war and what it does to the young men who must go and fight.  It shows how families are wrenched apart and what it does to mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters who look up to their elder siblings.  But, too, there are moments of humanity amidst the inhumanity and carnage. 

This is a story that is much like a patchwork quilt, which is not to belie the genius of Findley's prose and storytelling.  I'm still not entirely sure who narrates the story, but it's so seamlessly done that it didn't dawn on me until midway through the story that I didn't know who exactly was speaking, but he is a researcher who is piecing together Robert's experiences in the war and his motivations.  This is done through a variety of sources--photographs, trawling through archives and speaking with people who knew Robert.  What happens to Robert in the war is a tragedy, but whatever his culpability, he's still viewed as a hero by those who knew him.

I'm being intentionally vague and not filling in any of the details, for to do so would ruin the effect for anyone planning on reading The Wars.  The blurb describes the story as, "In this world gone mad, Robert Ross performed a last desperate act to declare his commitment to life in the midst of death", and I think that's really all you need to know setting off.  I was happy to note that one of the passages I marked and starred was something that was also noted in the introduction:

"People can only be found in what they do."

And for me, this distills what is behind Timothy Findley's The Wars.  The brilliance of the construction to show who Robert Ross was is the beauty of the story despite the brutality, the horrific scenes of trench warfare and the tragedy that is war.  For me, Timothy Findley's The Wars, is one of the very best and probably my favorite of all the books I've read so far for Caroline's Literature and War Readalong.  Certainly it is for me one of the most memorable.

Circling back to the beginning--I said Guy Vanderhaeghe put into words what I was feeling.  So I'll end with those.  He writes about rereading The Wars on the last leg of a long bus trip where he could feel each bump of the road and was threatened by motion sickness:

"At intervals I would look up to rest my eyes on the surround of blackness pressing against the window, then plunge back into the story of Robert Ross, his family, his friends, and his comrades-in-arms as they whirled helplessly in the maelstrom of the Great War, the war that was supposed to end all wars and didn't.  I arrived at  my destination with the book finished, strangely exulted and disturbed by an encounter with a novel harrowing and uplifting, a novel that was both a marvellous work of art and a passionate indictment of the first cruel idiocy of the twentieth century."

This is a novel that begs to be revisited and I am sure I will do so someday.

You can read Caroline's thoughts on the book here.  I also read this along with Buried in Print and we've been chatting about it behind the scenes.  Next up is Anna Funder's All That I Am.  Although I didn't finish last month's The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen, I do plan to pick the book up once again and think I am once again in the right frame of mind to finally tackle it. 

Short Story Sunday: Defeat

I'm finding that when I crack open my Persephone short story collection I want to keep reading when I finish my allotted one story per weekend.  Had it not been for a lack of reading time this weekend I would have continued on.  Kay Boyle has long been someone I've wanted to read, and a quick perusal of my archives reminds me that I have had an opportunity to get a little taste of her writing already.  I have this habit of getting a little taste of an author and if I like her or him I will begin collecting all their work.  Kay Boyle is just such an author.

Kay Boyle lived a long and distinguished life.  She wrote more than 40 books, short stories, poetry, essays and children's books.  She was active artistically and politically and during the McCarthy era was blacklisted.  She was jailed twice for her opposition to the Vietnam War.  Louise Erdrich wrote the introduction to Fifty Stories.  I thought it was interesting that she says, "...like Albert Camus, she has always celebrated not the voices of those who make history, but the people who endure its workings: the silenced, the oppressed".  Boyle's formal education consisted of one single 'grieving' day in Kindergarten.  Instead she stayed home with her mother, to the happiness of both of them. 

"At eleven, Kay was pondering the theory of Cubism and writing fiction that described such imaginary incidents as the daily ride of Kaiser Wilhelm II through the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, a story that her mother read to guests along with Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons."

She sounds a little formidable, doesn't she?  Although it appears she wrote broadly, I think she's best known as a short story writer.  I was impressed by that first story I read by her a number of years ago, and I am equally impressed by the one I read this weekend.

Bit of a warning--I do talk about the story in its entirety here, so beware of possible spoilers.

"Defeat", a story published in 1941, is set in France during World War II and is written from the perspective of a French soldier.  The defeat suffered in this story isn't just the literal one that the French endured when Germany invaded, but it's a moral one as well. 

". . . 'A country isn't defeated as long as its women aren't' or 'until its women are' or 'As long as the women of a country aren't defeated, it doesn't matter if the army is'--something like that . . . "

So explains a French soldier to two commercial travellers he runs into in a café.  The soldier is a soldier no longer as he has come back from the North, returning surreptitiously, and donning the role he played in his former life as it becomes obvious that the Germans cannot be easily ousted from his country.  He does not tell the story of his return to those in his village, rather to the two men he met through his work as a chauffeur of a mail bus.  

When the French knew they could not win, soldiers poured from the North back to the south, to their homes, coming back without their uniforms or their victory.  The man tells of his journey, of the kindnesses of those who helped him and of the disappointments of those who didn't out of fear.  He tells of a woman, a school teacher, who in blatant disregard of her safety helped the soldiers and snubbed the Germans by pinning the French colors in the schoolhouse and red, blue and white bunting of the flag all along the walls.  You see as long as the women of the country are not defeated, neither is the country.

As the soldier gets closer and closer to his home village he realizes that July 14, the French holiday of Independence, has arrived but without fanfare (so that's why the village seems so empty).  The Germans, however, see the day as one of celebration (perhaps of another sort--one to help demoralize).  They have strung lights and set up tables filled with food--fruit tarts, sweet chocolate, beer and lemonade.  

"'They had as much as you wanted of everything,' he said.  'And perhaps once you got near enough to start eating and drinking, then the other thing just followed naturally afterward--or that's the way I worked it out,' he said.  'Or maybe, if you've had a dress a long time that you wanted to wear and you hadn't had the chance of putting it on and showing it off because all the men were away--I mean if you were a woman.  I worked it out that maybe the time comes when you want to put it on so badly that you put it on just the same whatever's happened, or maybe, if you're one kind of a woman, any kind of uniform looks all right to you after a certain time'." 

This was a powerful story and exceptionally told.  Kay Boyle was already on my TBR list, but now I think I must pull off my shelf one of her books or at the very least the collection of stories I own by her in order to dip into it more this year.

Next week: Mollie Panter-Downes (one of my favorite authors!).

Lost in the Stacks Home Edition: Belle

Belle at Belle, Book, and Candle has been writing her on-line book journal (she detests the word 'blogger') since January 1, 2012.  She likes her mysteries spiced with humor not violence; adores P.G. Wodehouse, Beverley Nichols, and E.B. White; and, is developing a real fondness for Angela Thirkell, Barbara Pym, and Elizabeth Bowen.  She cherishes her real books but also owns both a Kindle Fire and a Nook for their convenience.  Her first job was as a 'page' shelving books in the public library.  She also worked for some years at a large, independent bookstore which has now gone the way of many.  When it sold to Borders, its death knell sounded.

Do make sure you click on over to Belle, Book and Candle for a few more photos--you can see a few details and see her shelves in situ!  She and I share quite an overlap of bookish favorites as I love or am interested in a number of authors she mentions and I do enjoy a good cozy mystery, too. 

1.  Describe your library/bookshelves.  Are the books randomly placed or do you have them organized in a special way?

I have three bookshelves that hold the majority of my books.  Two are Ikea's Billy shelves and one was made by my uncle and resided in my bedroom when I was growing up.  I cannot bear to part with it.  I recently remodeled my house and opened up two connecting rooms.  Now I have all my books around me which I love.  Eventually, I had an interior designer come in and, among other things, she 'designed' my bookshelves.  The books are in no particular order--maybe by size?  That was about two years ago and I have added to my library since then.  I try to follow her pattern but the shelves have gotten a bit overgrown.

2.  Do you like to weed and recycle as you read or do you prefer to hold on to all your books?

I have a difficult time of letting go of my books!  I did a major, major weeding right before the remodel.  I gave away boxes and boxes to friends who wanted them--mostly paperbacks.  I do use the library a lot.  I prefer to buy older, used books.  I usually pass books on to friends or donate them to the library for its book sale. 

3.  Are your books confined to one area or are they spread out over your house?

I try and keep my collection corralled in the three bookcases.  But, there are maverick stacks--bedside table reading, a pile of watercolor instruction books that live on a footstool, a couple of books I dip into now and again by my reading chair, a few located on the top shelf of my secretary desk . . . you know how it goes.  There is never really enough space.

4.  How long has your oldest unread book sat on your shelves?

Oh dear.  I have books that belonged to my grandmother that I have not read.  There is a small set of Eclectic English Classics inscribed with her maiden name which must be from her school days.  She was married sometime during World War I.  The copyright dates range from 1892 to 1894 and include Silas Marner by George Eliot The Life and Writings of Addison, The Roger de Coverley Papers from The Spectator, a volume of poems by Milton, and The Life of Samuel Johnson by Lord Macaulay.

5.  What is your most treasured book?

I have three.  One is Laird & Lee's Vest Pocket Webster Dictionary for Constant Use that was my grandfather's and has his name written in it in his hand; copyright 1906.  Another is a small New Testament that was my father's and has his name written by his hand in it.  It was printed in England by the Oxford University Press.  No date; perhaps the late 1920s.  The last one is a copy of Little Women that was my mother's and is inscribed to her by her mother on 'Christmas 1932'.  It has illustrations by Frances Brundage and a copyright date of MCMXXIX.

6.  If you could pick one "lost in the stacks/on your bookshelves" book to rediscover and share with other readers, which would it be?

The Once and Future King by T.H. White; copyright 1939.  This is a book I have had since I read it in high school.  It was the basis for the play and movie Camelot.  I loved the story of King Arthur, Merlin, Guenever and Lancelot.  I have seen both the play and the movie many times.  The copy I have is a mass market paperback and the print is too small for a woman-of-a-certain-age eyes.  I really must either find a hardcover copy of this and hope that the print is larger or else I will buy the Kindle version so I can adjust the font size. 

I actually met Richard Harris backstage at the theater when he was here playing King Arthur in the stage play of Camelot.  One of my best memories ever!

Many thanks to Belle for sharing photos of her bookshelves with us.  Check back next Friday for a peek into another reader's library.

Adrift in a Sea of (challenging) Prose

How do you approach a book you know is going to be challenging?  I said yesterday that my NYRB subscription is presenting me with opportunities to try authors I might not otherwise have considered reading previously.  And I see now, too, that it's going to push me to read outside my normal comfort zone, which is never a bad thing.  It's always good to expand my thinking and try literary forms that are new to me.  I tend to read books that are similar in type--similar genres, stories and with fairly straightforward structures.  So when I saw Anne Tyler's blurb on the back of Renate Adler's Pitch Dark, my current NYRB subscription title, I knew I was going to be presented with a reading challenge.

"If you simply allow [Adler's fragments] to settle in their own patterns, flashing light where they will, you'll find Pitch Dark a bright kaleidoscope of a book."

Now, I would normally call what Adler has written as "experimental fiction", but I think I am being chastened by Gary Indiana who has written in the Feb/Mar issue of Bookforum about Renate Adler and NYRB's two recent reissues of her 1976 novel Speedboat and Pitch Dark which was originally published in 1983.

"The kind of thought debris you find on the Internet describes novels in this form as 'experimental,' which is predictive of a certain off-putting difficulty and self-indulgent esoterica. Often, too, it is declared by a gatekeeping sort of criticism that anything that deviates far from a nineteenth-century template is 'not a novel.' It seems late in the day for such parsing. But in fact, classifications that formerly reflected a delight in all literary forms and the intellectual pleasure of differentiating them—Mary McCarthy’s essays 'Novel, Tale, Romance' and 'The Fact in Fiction' come to mind—now serve as filtering screens for the literary market, which is currently dominated by aesthetic conservatism of a depressingly conformist ilk: middle-class marriage saved, or ruined, or attacked by vampires.

As for what form he is talking about?  He describes her books as:

" . . . consist[ing] of anecdotes, vignettes, jokes, aphorisms, epigrammatic asides, and longer passages of prose—eclectic inventories of consciousness. Their immediate effect is that of a flea market in Samarqand or Ouagadougou, where the items on display (vintage clothes, military decorations, photo albums, broken appliances) are fractionally different enough, in style and provenance, from their cousins at the local swap meet to look like artifacts of an alternate universe. Adler’s eye and ear for the peculiar are unmatched in American letters."

His description actually sounds quite appealing to me, but I don't always do well with narratives that don't follow a structure I am used to.  I tend to feel adrift, or more often like I am sinking, in the story.  If I begin feeling lost in the narrative, it makes me feel a little disoriented and that I am 'not getting it'. 

So, back to my original question.  How do you approach a book that is challenging?  I'm determined to read Pitch Dark, and read it carefully and slowly.  But how do I keep my bearings in the story and not feel adrift?  And worse, lost?  Maybe it would be beneficial to read the afterword first, which in this case is by Muriel Spark.  I'm both a little apprehensive about reading this book and excited for the challenge.  So this is my post as I begin reading.  Maybe I'll let you know how it's going midway through, and can adjust my expectations accordingly.  In the meantime, any advice is welcome. 

An Armenian Sketchbook by Vasily Grossman

I'm not sure I would have picked up Vasily Grossman's An Armenian Sketchbook (Dobro vam published in Sobranie sochinenii v 4-h tomakh, translated from Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler) had it not been for my NYRB subscription.  To be honest Armenia isn't high up on my list of potential travel destinations, but then this isn't really a travel narrative per se.  Sketchbook is an apt title and description, however, as Grossman very lovingly writes about his experiences with and impressions of the Armenian people, for whom he has an obvious respect and affection.  The pieces that make up this volume are 'sketches' of the two months he spent there in 1962 while rewriting a "clumsy" literal translation of an Armenian war novel.

Grossman was born in the Ukrainian town of Berdichev, which was home to one of Europe's largest Jewish communities.  During World War II he was a reporter for the Russian army newspaper, Red Star.  Interestingly an article he wrote in late 1944 ("The Hell of Treblinka") was one of the earliest published about the Nazi concentration camps and was used in the Nuremberg trials.  He went on to write novels to much acclaim, but being a Jew and speaking out against Soviet Society meant his later work went unpublished during his lifetime.  Had it not been for Stalin's death in 1953 it's likely he would have been arrested during the purges carried out against the Jews.

In 1961 when Grossman was preparing a manuscript, Life and Fate, for possible publication in a Russian literary journal, the KGB confiscated not only the novel but anything associated with it down to the typewriter ribbons.  At the time Kruschev was in power and there was something of a cultural thaw occurring so he sincerely believed he had a chance of publishing his work.  It compared Nazism with Stalinism, however, showing the two as "mirror images" of each other.  Needless to say, the authorities were not going to allow the work to be printed. 

Boris Pasternak had caused quite a stir by winning the Nobel Prize only a few years earlier, and there was no desire to allow Grossman to be yet another literary martyr, so they simply removed the work.  It's uncertain why Grossman was offered/took on the translation work when he did--possibly to get away from marital difficulties he was having but also perhaps it was a way for the authorities to "compensate" Grossman and keep him quiet.  This is all a bit of a rehash of what I read in the introduction, but not knowing anything about Vasily Grossman prior to reading the book I found it really fascinating.

When he traveled to Armenia he didn't actually speak or read Armenian, but his translation work was meant to be a rewrite of the already translated Russian version.  It didn't matter, however, that Grossman couldn't communicate directly with the people he met.  He was treated with great hospitality, particularly by the Armenian peasants (though less so by the literary intelligentsia).  He wasn't allowed to spend even a kopeck of his own money there.

The sketches are almost meanderings of his travels, but each portrait--whether of a person, a place or a thing flows one into the next in a way that you don't even realize that he's changed topics.  There's a little bit of history, there are 'character' (best really to say people) sketches, spiritual reflections, cultural observations.  What he writes about runs the gamut of subjects, none more important than the other.  And there is lots of the personal in the writing, too.  Grossman died only a few years later, and at the time he didn't realize he was at the beginning of his illness.  He suffered from health issues during his travels, painful in his embarrassment but he leaves nothing out of his text.  There is such a humility and honesty to his writing.

"The gift possessed by a great poet or scientist is not the highest of gifts.  Among even the most brilliant virtuosos of the mathematical formula, of the musical phrase and poetic line, of the paintbrush and chisel are all too many people who are weak, petty-minded, greedy, servile, venal, and envious--people like slugs or mollusks, moral nobodies in whim, thanks to the irritating pangs of conscience, a pearl is sometimes born.  But the supreme human gift is beauty of the soul; it is nobility, magnanimity, and personal courage in the name of what is good.  It is a gift possessed by certain shy, anonymous warriors, by certain ordinary soldiers but for whose exploits we would cease to be human."

Another slender book, but this is one that demands to be read slowly.  I found myself even rereading certain passages for their descriptive eloquence (like how he describes the many fields full of stones, which he likened to the bones of dead mountains!).  I like the idea that I've not just read a Russian author, but a Soviet author, as it fits a different piece of the puzzle that is Russian literature.  I might have never given Vasily Grossman a second glance, but thanks to NYRB I've added another author to my list of writers I want to explore.  I'm even contemplating reading his Life and Fate, though it would be a large undertaking as it weighs in at nearly 900 pages.  I will have a chance to revisit his work later this year, however, when I read Everything Flows for Caroline's Literature and War Readalong. 

Stefanie at So Many Books is also a NYRB subscriber and recently wrote about An Armenian Sketchbook, too.  If you are thinking of reading Vasily Grossman, An Armenian Sketchbook would be an excellent introduction to his work. 

The Coldest Winter by Paula Fox

Paula Fox's The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe can easily be read on its own, but it is a continuation of sorts of her memoir, Borrowed Finery.  Borrowed Finery, which I loved, covers her early youth up until her very early 20s.  In 1946 when Fox was twenty-three she spent a year in Europe where among other jobs she was employed by a British peer to work for his small wire service.  She was sent to Paris and Warsaw to report on life after the war.  She wrote mostly human interest stories rather than hard-core news, an acute observer of people and places and the smaller details of the world around her, she writes about the personal with great skill.  It's the same sort of perceptive insight that made her earlier memoir so evocative.

Published in 2005, The Coldest Winter looks back at the year 1946 from the vantage point of age and experience.  Fox notes, "I see the past differently as I grow older, so in a sense the past changes".  The book is as much about post-War Europe as it is about Fox.  The daughter of a Hollywood screenwriter and a Cuban mother, she moved in artistic circles.  She writes about hearing Paul Robeson sing, going to clubs frequented by the likes of Billie Holiday and attending parties given by painter Wolf Kahn.  "Memory often seems to begin in the middle of some story," she writes.  But her stories, even related some fifty-odd years later feel as fresh as if she penned them the moment they happened.

This is a slim book, for a fast reader it could likely be read in a single sitting.  She writes about living in New York, her job to earn money to travel to London and then her experiences working abroad and finally traveling in Spain ("As I boarded the train in Paris, I was too young and too dumb to worry about entering a Fascist country") where she had relatives living.  Fox's writing particularly shines in her descriptions of the people she met and on occasion lived with and the circumstances in which they were living.

"A year and a half after the end of the war and the German occupation, Paris was muted and looked bruised and forlorn.  Everywhere I went, I sensed the tracks of the wold that had tried to devour the city.  But Paris proved inedible, as it had been ever since its tribal beginnings on an island in the Seine, the Ile de la Cité."

In 1946 a visit to the Louvre was not a crush of tourists as it is now.  She was nearly alone in the museum save for a drunken custodian.  Fox was to attend a peace conference in Paris, but it's life in Warsaw that she writes about so vividly and where the effects of the war were still felt quite literally through the cold and destruction, where "life is lived among the ruins".  

"The cold was so intense that like many others I took to wearing sheets of newspaper under  my coat.  There was hardly any public transportation, a few streetcars to whose sides people clung like flies on a lump of sugar, two or three buses, a few tiny cars with no windshield wipers and perpetually fogged windows, and some motorbikes with wooden seats strapped on the front, from which after the shortest ride, one toppled like a stone."

As a young woman of twenty-three I don't think I could have done what Paula Fox managed to do in 1946.  Travel to a war-torn Europe and move in the circles she did, get to know people who had just been devastated by war and write about their lives with clear-eyed cool observation but also compassion.  In some ways there is a sense of naivety in some of her journeys yet perhaps due to her haphazard upbringing there is also a certain savvy in knowing people, too.  When she returns home from her final weeks in Spain she is mistaken for a European and is asked whether she can speak English.  Her bold reply (the first time in the US she had spoken so), "Indeed I do" must have come from her sense of accomplishment and experience--or as she writes seeing something beyond her own life and something other than herself.

Weekend Reading: A Little Sampling

Since winter seems to be lingering I have of late been trying to get out of the house on weekend mornings, in order to treat myself.  Go somewhere cheerful where there are people yet I can still be alone--solitary but amidst a small crowd of people, if that doesn't sound too odd.  I have been going for a nice hot cup of coffee or tea at a local coffee shop that happens to be right across from my branch of the public library.  If I am lucky and get there early enough I sit at a table next to one of the big windows with my books, magazines, notebook, pen in hand and read or write letters.  All at my leisure for a couple of hours.  No telephone or TV, no serious distractions, just me and my reading.  It's been pleasant and I think I might continue doing it, though I might see what other places I can frequent for a change of pace (and scenery). 

This photo is actually from a few weeks ago, so no snow yesterday, though maybe the same cloudy skies.  Strangely I can sit and read even while customers come and go and music plays softly.  I sometimes have a hard time reading on my lunch break in the library where I work--maybe it's just too quiet and then when students are chatting or talking on their cell phones it's hard for me to block it out.  In any case, I like my weekend morning excursions and must say I look forward to them during the work week (even if it means no sleeping late on Sundays).

Sometimes I take just a book and magazine with me, other times I have a small array of choices to dip into.  I thought I'd share a sampling of my reading from this past weekend.  You can see how my mind meanders . . .

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From Eagle Pond by Donald Hall:

"Her (Hall's grandmother) only literature was letters, but what a letterist she was.  Nor did it start with her.  In the back chamber, in old chests and boxes, along with diaries and slates and chalk and pens and dried inkwells, there are bundles of letters and postcards--Civil War letters, letters dispatched before stamps existed, letters of great formal intimacy often addressed to names I cannot place from names I cannot place.  Nor did it end with her.  I inherited the matter of Eagle Pond letters.  I annoy my friends by answering their letters immediately.  I puzzle publishers and magazine editors and impresarios of the poetry reading by by writing instead of telephoning.  I loathe the damned telephone; I prize the bundle of envelopes left each day in the outsized mailbox.  Every day is Christmas, as I settle back into my blue chair and hear my friends out, knowing that late in the day I will talk back to them.  Last time I counted, I was talking (I dictate) four thousand letters and postcards a year."

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From April issue of The Atlantic (Benjamin Schwarz):

" A writer's posthumous renown is often untethered to his life's toil, even when that toil is writing.  Edward Thomas is now regarded as maybe the finest poet of the First World War, and one of the greatest of of the 20th century.  His marriage of precise pastoral observation to a severe clarity of vision, and his easy technical virtuosity as displayed in his natural use of diction and of the rhythms of everyday speech, has made him something od a poet's poet: Auden and Cecil Day-Lewis said they had 'little or no hope of ever equaling' Thomas, and at Westminster Abbey in 1985, Ted Hughes declared him 'the father of us all'."

An excerpt from a short but very interesting article about Edward Thomas (Yes, am going to read his One Green Field very, very soon!).

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Books added to wish/reading list from same issue of The Atlantic:

What Matters in Jane Austen: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved by John Mullan

The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout (though will start with her Olive Kitteridge, which was called "her most celebrated and most emotionally powerful book")

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From May issue of Vogue (Megan O'Grady):

"'I have for a very long time wanted to write an unapologetic love story,' says Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.  'But one that is very much set in a practical world affected by things like getting a visa and paying rent.'  The Nigerian writer's third novel, Americanah (Knopf), is that rare thing in contemporary literary fiction: a lush, bighearted love story that also happens to be a piercingly funny social critique."

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In the same issue of Vogue there is an article and several page spread about Carey Mulligan and the forthcoming new adaptation of The Great Gatsby that is well worth a glance (beautiful and elegant clothes).

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As well an excerpt from Edna O'Brien's forthcoming memoir Country Girl, which I'm looking forward to reading.

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A quick perusal of the most recent The New York Review netted the announcement of the next NYRB Classics book club title that I look forward to getting in May: Transit by Anna Seghers.  Caroline wrote about it last year, so it had already been on my wishlist.  I've finished Vasily Grossman's An Armenian Sketchbook (which I need to write about soon) and will be starting Renate Adler's Pitch Dark soon.  Although I'm moving very slowly with my NYRB books, I am enjoying them immensely.  They're good and not to be rushed, so it's nice to know I have more good books to look forward to.

And I'll leave you with one more photo.  I didn't set out yesterday to go book shopping.  Last weekend I discovered a new (new to me anyway, unbeknownst to me it has been there for more than a year now!) used bookstore in a part of my downtown that had just been empty storefronts.  When I walked by it previously it was closed and appeared to only be open during the work week (not surprising since my downtown tends to roll up the sidewalks after business hours and on weekends--sadly--it once used to be a thriving area).  I assumed I would have to try and drop in some time on a day off from work, but when I happened by it was open!  I think it was just a random thing, but since I was lucky enough to go in and browse and since there was a half off sale I couldn't resist stocking up on a few new mysteries and an additional novel or two.  They have lots of pulpy sorts of books--you know, old titles with those lurid but strangely inviting covers.  The owner said he gets in new stock almost every day, so I hope to get back there for more browsing.  Yes, a quick look and I walk away with a stack of books, and all for the low, low, low, low price of $10 and change.  I can complain about the weather, but not about my new books!

Short Story Sunday: It All Begins Again

I've had a run in of sorts before with Helen Hull.  She was one of my Lost in the Stacks authors back in 2011.  Here is a little of what I had to say about her then:

Helen Hull was born in 1888 in Michigan and died in 1971.  She was a professor of English at Columbia University in New York from 1916 to 1956 and spent her summers writing.  She was a respected author during her lifetime and published 17 novels, more than 65 short stories and and number of books about writing.  My library has several of her later novels as well as a couple of books about writing/literature, so it was hard to choose which to bring home.  In the end I liked the beginning of Through the House Door (1940), so settled on it.

From what I've been able to gather about Hull's life and work it seems as though she has suffered the same fate as many other women writers from this era.  By her death in the early 70s most of her books had gone out of print and she had all but disappeared as a name from the literary world.  She had been classified as a writer of 'women's fiction', which is almost certainly the kiss of death when it comes to being accepted as a serious writer of literary fiction, despite the rave reviews I read in the New York Times.

Although I didn't manage to read all of Through the House Door, I did buy a copy of her novel Quest (still in print) which is published by The Feminist Press, so look forward to reading more of her later.  Now I have finally gotten a proper taste of her writing in the 1941 short story, "It All Begins Again".  Last week's story was somewhat painful to read, having to view the prejudicial mistreatment of a woman.  This week's story set in an American town (partially set in Michigan) during the Second World War had a melancholy tone as well, though she is an eloquent and thoughtful writer, once who calls for equally thoughtful reading and perhaps even multiple reads.  She's a writer from whose stories you could easily tease out a number of meanings. 

In "It All Begins Again" Mary Bristol, now in her 70s muses on her life and her family as war rages in Europe.  Although on the surface the war is not the focus of the story, it comes through subtly in the comments and conversation and in her memories.  After a serious illness lays Mary low, her daughter convinces her to come stay.  Mary would prefer not to.  As a matter of fact Mary almost regrets having recovered from it at all. 

". . . she felt rather silly about it, having been sure that she was through with life.  Much like the state of mind of one who has stripped her house and packed her trunks for a long journey, only to find herself sitting on top of a locked trunk in an empty house with no place to go and no reason for going."

Both sons are now dead, as is her husband.  Her daughter Vera, a matron of high society, gently bullies Mary and her family as well.  As Mary prepares to travel to Vera's home to recuperate she thinks back on her son, who was wounded at Verdun and never quite recovered and even farther back to other wars.  She remembers her mother weeping for the husband away fighting and then his time spent in a Southern prison.

"When he came back, he was a gaunt, bearded stranger Mary had never seen."

And now there is this new war.  Mary's son-in-law thinks only of his business and its failings when it should be doing well with all the demands of the fighting abroad.  And Vera thinks of her children and home and how to manage them all.  How to keep up with the neighbors despite the down-at-heel appearance of their house, and how her own daughter Hilda is dating someone unsuitable, and son Bill is failing in his college studies.  Vera remarks on what it is to raise these modern children as if never in the history of the world has anyone had to contend with such problems, though Mary notes she said just the same thing about her own children.

". . . it all begins again, the old struggle."

And as the family struggles with its own problems, so, too the world struggles, as just then Paris falls to the Germans.  Her father, her sons, and now these grandchildren must face all the same old problems once again.  So Hull neatly parallels the two struggles, the changes and difficulties and how so much of life and its demands is cyclical.  What really changes in life?  The reasons may be new, the spin we put on the struggles, but underneath it all the motivations are not so very different.  All very deftly and subtly explored by Hull in yet another excellent story. 

I do hope these short story posts aren't too boring to read--I sometimes think they are more for me than for those of you reading these posts.  Knowing I am going to try and write something about them makes me think of them in a different way and read just a little bit closer, go back over passages and try and piece together just what I think an author is trying to convey.  Maybe to try and break up the monotony for you, I'll try and include some non-Persephone stories in my future short story Sunday readings.  I have no shortage of good collections to choose from, that's for sure. 

Next week a story by Kay Boyle.  The next four stories were all written during the war years, so I am curious to see how much of a role it actually plays in the narratives.  I'll be in the Forties for a while, with the last story in the collection from the mid-1980s. 

Lost in the Stacks Home Edition: Sam

I think I've been following Sam's blog, Book Chase, almost since I started blogging.  He, like me, is a fan of Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley novels, and I admire his (complete I think?) collection of Joyce Carol Oates books (an author I've read far too little of), which you can see in the third photo below.  Sam is a recently retired Oil & Gas professional who, with the exception of a few years spent in North Africa, London, and China, has lived in Houston for more than forty years.  He finally has time for some of the finer things in life: books, baseball, and bluegrass music.  He greatly looks forward to attending book festivals and music events around the country--if the weather ever warms  up.

1. Describe your library/bookshelves. Are the books randomly placed or do you have them organized in a special way?

For years, my shelves were a mixture of randomness and little groupings of favorite topics or authors.  But it got so difficult for me to locate that one book I could picture so clearly in my m ind that I finally decided to bring some order to the shelves by alphabetizing all the fiction by author.

My main shelves have three sections, with the middle section reserved primarily for nonfiction (by subject), old books, and my growing Library of American collection (up to 62 volumes now).  It includes a shelf for books about authors that is a mix of nonfiction and novels, one on country music  history, and one that holds my favorite books about baseball and travel memoirs, including several favorites about long-distance walking treks.

I also have a separate bookshelf for my collection of Civil War books.  The books are mostly nonfiction, but I house my smaller collection of Civil War novels on one of the shelves.  As a Southerner, and descendent of at least one Confederate soldier, I tend to collect books about Southern officers, but I am also a big admirer of Grant and Lincoln, so I have numerous volumes on both men, as well as books about a few Union generals.

3. Are your books confined to one area or are they spread out over your house?

Other than my closets (in several rooms) Imentioned, my books are pretty much confined to my study.  I do have a few strays that end up in places I last read them, and I always keep a book in the car for those times I end up stuck in traffic or in some long, boring line or doctor's office.  Now, I do have to admit that my wife if the "book policeman," not me.  As long as I keep them shelves or out of sight, she is happy enough to see me bring new ones into the house at a continuing rate of three or four a week.  That seems a small enough price to pay.

4. How long has your oldest unread book sat on your shelves?

I bought a whole lots of books in 1989 for some reason--so many that I have still not read all of them, meaning I have a lot of twenty-three-year-old books to choose from when it comes to the oldest unread book on my shelves.  Let's go with Amy Tan's first novel, The Joy Luck Club, as representative of that period.  1989 was the first year I could afford to indulge my reading habit, and I really overdid it.  So I have a pristine (and I mean never opened) first edition copy of the novel that, from what I understand, has become a collector's item.  In fact, modern first edition collectors consider several of those 1989 books very desirable, so I guess I had good instincts back then.

5. What is your most treasured book?

My collection includes some fairly valuable books--and some early Charles Dickens volumes that I treasure.  But my most treasured book is worth about 30 cents: a Signet paperback of Planet of the Apes that I bought in a Nashville bus station in May of 1968.  I treasure the book because of the memories associated with it.  I bought the book while in Nashville on a three-day pass I had earned during Army Basic Training in nearby Ft. Campbell, Kentucky.  We were allowed no reading material during basic and I knew that I would have to somehow hide the book from my Drill instructors for the final three weeks of training or I would lose it.  Well, it's still with me, and every time I pick it up, I feel nineteen-years-old again--and then I notice how old and yellow the pages are.

6. If you could pick one "lost in the stacks/on your bookshelves" book to rediscover and share with other readers, which would it be?

I would choose MacKinlay Kantor's Andersonville 1955 novel about the infamous Georgia prisoner-of-war camp in which so many Union soldiers died horrible deaths during the Civil War.  When I first read the novel, I knew very little about Andersonville and what really happened there.  I expected that Kantor had greatly exaggerated the truth or created some incidents just to make this story more dramatic.  And I was wrong.  Truth, in this instance is every bit as strange as fiction, and this is the one book that I recommend to people when they ask me why I am so fascinated by Civil War history.  This 760-page chunkster has led more than one person I know to share that passion with me.  It's a little intimidating at first glance but this book is a wonderful read.

Had to share these two photos not least for the Poe, Woolf and Twain figurines, but I also spot a shelf full of Modern Library editions (I've toyed with collecting them myself . . .).

This brick paperweight, which you can just glimpse in the top photo sitting on the library stairs on the right side of Sam's bookcase has an interesting provenance.  It was salvaged by Sam from William Faulkner's flowerbeds years ago when the gardener was redoing the beds.  A very cool piece of literary history, don't you think?

Many thanks to Sam for sharing photos of his bookshelves with us.  Check back next Friday for a peek into another reader's library.