A Work in Progress

February: At the Source

Just under the gun.  My reading was enjoyable but my writing about this month's installment of At the Source might be a little perfunctory--am just going to share a very few highlights.  I've been under the weather for the last week or so and dragging, if that is any excuse.  February always flies by and even though it is a mere two days shorter than most other months, all of a sudden it just seems like March arrives.  Whoosh, if you know what I mean.

So.  Gillian Clarke.  She's a poet and you can tell, because she is to in tune with language and words and meanings.  She is also a reader and so is a reader's writer (isn't every writer a reader's writer?  Maybe so, but she writes in a way that tantalizes and I can appreciate that).  February's journal entry is titled "Land".  This is how it starts . . .

"On the cusp between winter and spring.  Mostly it's still indoor weather when I'm glad of bookish days.  The afternoons are gaining light, a minute at a time, but there's no shine to the garden."

Yes, that is how it has been for me as well.  March is coming in like a lion since it is bitterly cold and snowing lightly with the promise of more, and in a higher intensity on Monday night into Tuesday.  I keep fantasizing over my morning walk without layers of clothes, ear muffs, gloves, wool scarf.  But while my morning walk is in the dark still, I can (on a sunny day) return home before the sun has set and left me in the dark once more.  It is, however slowly in coming, giving me just a little hope that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

This is how Clarke plays with words.  "Wellbeing.  Being well.  A well of being."  An artist friend said to Clarke--"You know hoe lovely it is when you're sitting by a window in a big chair and it's raining, and you have a book and you think, 'How lucky I am!  How lucky!'  That's a 'found' poem.  I may struggle with poetry, but that is a poem even I can understand and appreciate.

"Those with a talent for sudden, inexplicable joy will know exactly what Sandra meant.  It describes being alive, having choice and chance and the gift of pleasure.  It's about the solitary but not lonely individual relishing the simple fact of being, the pleasures of body and mind.  Sight, sound and touch are explicit in that scene, ans taste and smell are implicit since the rain, the window, the chair imply a familiar room, its privacy, possession and pleasures, perhaps a fresh brew of coffee, the smell of rain, a street outside, and a city."

I do like that.  If Clarke continues to return again and again to the pleasures of solitude and privacy--she and I and this book are going to get on very well indeed.

Did you know the Welsh word, glas, means both blue and green?  And why not since this is a country where there are so many subtle gradations of the color in hill country.  "The many tones of green of the close fields shift through blues and violets as the land rolls into the distance."

Clarke was reading Colm Toibin's The Master at the time she was writing her journal.  I am going to pull my copy of the shelf.  Henry James, who the book is about, has always struck me as one very formidable man.  But if this is what he is like, and granted it is Toibin's rendering of him thus, I think I can understand and relate to James better than I think.

"He (Toibin about James) is wonderful on the pleasures of interiors, and of solitude."

"He shows how James turned away always at the last moment from emotional commitment, preferring the pleasures of solitude.  Toibin conjures the lovely interiors of apartments, villas, houses in New England and Europe, and in James's beloved Lamb house in Rye, where even the walled garden is a room."

* * * * *

"There's a side to all writers that loves nothing better than a book, a big chair, window."

There's a side to readers that loves that, too.

Second Person Singular by Sayed Kashua

There is so much I want to tell you about Sayed Kashua's Second Person Singular, but how much is enough to make you want to pick the book up for yourself and read it, but not too much to give all the  best parts away.  And there are lots of best parts.  This is a story best appreciated in how it unravels naturally on its own.  I promise not to give away spoilers but I am going to tease you just a little bit with the story.  This isn't just a good story, it's a pretty amazing construction on a variety of levels from the jacket illustration (which suits the story so well) to the complex multilayered story told from two very different perspectives that offers so much to think about. 

Sayed Kashua is Arab-Israeli who is immensely popular in Israel for his fiction, his journalism as well as for the TV show Arab Labor (now running into four seasons) that he created.  Kashua happens to be living in the US at the moment, but in Israel he has a most interesting, though to my eyes, also challenging place in society.  Arab-Israelis have a very unique situation that is both filled with advantages and pitfalls.  They are Israeli citizens and enjoy the same opportunities as their Jewish counterparts, yet they are Arabs and so must deal with a certain amount of distrust and prejudice.  They can move about the country with more ease than Palestinians and have more opportunities for work, travel, education, etc., but I imagine they walk a fine line between both groups not being entirely of one or the other.  We discussed what it means to be Arab-Israeli in some detail in my class, and it was impressed on me just how complex Israeli society is and how nuanced the gradations between ethnic groups.

It's these complexities that Kashua deals with in his fiction and on the TV show, and he does it with humor using satire and always with a very light touch.  This is the world he knows intimately and if you are at all curious about it, Second Person Singular is a most opportune work to begin with.  The story revolves around a note found in a book.  The note is playful, hinting at a potentially romantic encounter with the hopes of something more.  It has neither signature or name of recipient and no date to hint at when it was written.  It was folded away and inserted in the pages of Tolstoy's novella The Kreutzer Sonata.  The book was just purchased by an up and coming young lawyer who reads to try and better himself.  How fitting that in the pages of a book about an adulterous affair ending in murder that this note is found, and how curious that the handwriting happens to be that of the lawyer's wife Leila!  But how did it get there, and when?

The lawyer is never named.  From the first you get a sense that he is a happily married man with liberal ideas, very yuppified down to his expensive car and suits, daily cappuccinos and weekly salon evenings with other young urban professional couples.  His story is told in third person and faced with the prospect or possibility that his wife has cheated on him he goes a little mad.  So much for the idea of raising his children to be open minded and progressive.  He becomes obsessed with trying to find the truth of the matter.  He knows only that the book belonged to someone named Yonatan before it ended up on the shelves of a used bookstore. 

Yonatan is the key to the story.  He never utters a single word throughout the entire book yet his physical presence and impact on the other characters is immense.  I'm still thinking about Yonatan and I have more questions than answers at the moment.  Yonatan links the lawyer with a young social worker named Amir.  Amir tells his part of the story in first person.  Amir's story is sadder in some ways--the son of a 'collaborator' from a northern village, he moves to Jerusalem to study.  He's mild mannered, maybe a little bit of a pushover and a tiny bit of an oddball but the journey he makes from start to finish is going to be a very long one--not just physically but psychologically, too.  The two men's lives are going to cross paths in a very interesting and unusual way, one that is quite surprising, and hugely clever, I thought.  Are you curious?

It's how these lives intersect that I most want to tell you about, because Kashua pulls it off so brilliantly, but to do so would ruin the pleasure you are going to have in reading this story (am 'virtually' pressing a copy of this book into your hands--it's that good--I want you to read it, too).  I will say this is a story that plays with stereotypes, uncovers them, questions them and brings them out into the light.  With the precision of a surgeon Kashua dissects this paradoxical world and the ways in which Arab-Israelis choose to live or in some cases are forced to live. 

This is a story that is in great part about identity.  How does one live and live well, succeed as an Arab-Israeli in (Jewish) Israeli society?  Imagine trying to construct your life and image in a society where your own history is not the same as that of Israel.  Your language isn't the main language, how you study and what you study, how you dress and how people see you is all not exactly your own, but to really succeed you need to make it your own, or find a way to live within it--too keep your own identity while learning to live in another culture almost.  How Kashua tells this story is genius, I thought.  The book has a most interesting cover illustration.  The book is surely Tolstoy.  And the two men?  Perhaps not exactly who you think they are.  Nicely done from the cover illustration on. 

Sayed Kashua is already one of my great finds so far this year.  And yes, I will be reading more of his work.

Second Person Singular is translated from the Hebrew (Kashua speaks both Arabic and Hebrew as do most Arab-Israelis--and he happens to write in Hebrew, which I found quite interesting) by Mitch Ginsburg.  The translation is excellent by the way--it's a case of you forget you are even reading a translation.  The language is smooth, though this is such a foreign world to me--you definitely know you are reading about a different culture even if many of the larger themes are common to people the world over. 

Lady Addle, Anyone?

Wanted:  Have you seen this woman?  Information about her activities needed.  Apply below.

Lady Addle may remember, but I certainly don't!  Someone out there must have recommended Mary Dunn to me and made her sound so tempting that I ordered this book, which just arrived causing me much confusion.  Either she was recommended or the cold has addled my brain (and memory) sufficiently that I am now ordering books with no rhyme or reason whatsoever. 

I can only otherwise assume I meant to order a book by Nell Dunn (of Virago--Up the Junction fame, which I read at the beginning of the year, if you recall).  I fear I was trying to get Poor Cow by Dunn (Nell, that is), though how I managed to drop Lady Addle Remembers in the order basket is beyond me.

Alas, Lady Addle Remembers is mine now, too cheap to return it, so I will make the best of it.  The cover blurb reads 'a brilliant and hilarious parody of Victorian memoirs . . . highly recommended."  It is a spoof that comes complete with photographs.  If the TLS recommends it, surely it must be a worthwhile read?  And if not . . . well, there are only 113 pages to get through otherwise.

Teaser Tuesday: O Jerusalem

I know I have mentioned before how much I like Mary Russell, Laurie King's sleuthing heroine, who is married to an older Sherlock Holmes.  There may be a difference in ages, but this is a pairing of minds and dispositions that works well.  The two are suited for each other and with each new installment I learn just a little more about Mary and her history with Holmes.  I'm slowly working my way through the series with the intention of reading the whole run (there are now thirteen books) and am now reading book five, O Jerusalem.  Considering the class I am currently taking, contemporary Israeli Literature, and the fact that often the books are set in Jerusalem, it seems only fitting that I am visiting the city ca. 1919. 

This is an interesting story since there are teasers to events that take place in the Holy City in previous books, and now (the last book, The Moor, is set in 1923) Ms. King, the editor of Mary Russell's manuscripts, is finally publishing the memoirs.  Apparently she only just received the missing pages--postmarked with a Slovenian stamp--but this part of Mary's story fits in more naturally with the next book to come.  While Mary and Holmes have been happily married, the story goes back to her days as a mere apprentice.

It's interesting, too, to read about Palestine just after the war.  It's a time of unrest since only recently have the Turks lost control of the land yet it is an uneasy peace with many difficulties concerning boundaries and with Christian, Jewish and Muslim claims to 'ownership'.  It seems only natural that Mary would travel to the Holy Land, as she is a student of theology, speaks fluent Hebrew and is Jewish.  It is a series of murders that bring the pair to Palestine, and they must covertly enter the country, but it's as Arabs that they must pass and Mary is getting an education in speaking Arabic.  She is up for the challenge, which is just one reason I like her so much.

Mary must dress as a young Arab boy as the group crosses the desert on foot with Jerusalem as their destination.  Their Arab guides are none too pleased leading a female, but Mary is nothing if not tenacious.  She does have hidden talents, however, which means a certain begrudging respect is given.  My teaser is a bit more description about Mary and her abilities:

"Under the tutelage of Holmes and a number of others, over the last four years I had accumulated a variety of odd abilities.  I could pick a lock laboriously, drive a horse or a motorcar without coming to grief, dress up in a costume as a sort of amateur-dramatics-in-earnest, and fling a fully grown man (an unprepared and untrained man) to the ground.  My only two real gifts, gifts I was born with, were an ear for languages and a hand for throwing.  Be it a rock or a pointed object, my left hand had a skill for accuracy that I could in all honesty take no credit for, although I had on occasion found it useful."

She does indeed know how to throw a man (as one of the guides discovers . . .) and can throw a knife and hit her mark time after time almost on demand. 

This is a nicely twisty turny story that calls for attention to keep all the details straight.  It's a spy-ish sort of story, too.  They are there at the behest of Holmes's brother Mycroft, though the 'spymaster' in Palestine with whom they are meeting up has no qualms about letting both know they are expendable.  I'm quite curious to see where the pair are headed and what difficulties they are encounter on their way there! 

I'll tell you more when I finish.  Until then, if you want to catch up on the series, I've written about the other books, too: The Beekeeper's Apprentice, A Monstrous Regiment of Women, A Letter of Mary, and The Moor.  I'd say that guessing what the make up of my own personal book collection is, per capita I own more mysteries than anything else and always feel overwhelmed by choice (which is not a bad thing, mind you).  I want to keep the momentum going with this series and already have the next book in the queue! 

Ready to Choose a New: Classic Read

I know you will understand this dilemma.  And this is a problem that requires careful attention and thoroughness since the book I choose to read next will be one I spend a chunk of time with.  Technically I should wait until I finish Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata before making a choice, but it's a novella and I am ready for a full length novel.  I finished Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange a few days ago, and while I mull it over a bit before writing about it, I am ready for something new and different.  I think different will be easy since there are not too many books out there quite like the Burgess . . .

I usually have in mind the next book I want to read even before I finish whatever I have in hand, but I'm not quite sure what I am in the mood for right now.  I was thinking of rereading Jane Austen's Persuasion, and you might laugh when you hear the reason why.  Well, you won't laugh when I say it is my favorite Austen (of the books I've read--I still have two of her novels waiting for me) and any of her books are always worth revisiting.  However, over the weekend I saw the movie Mr. Turner (which I thought was really well done) and loved listening to the very proper way the characters spoke, and which put me in mind of an Austen novel.  Jane Austen could turn a mean sentence and to read her fiction is really sort of inspiring to me.

But you know how it goes, you begin looking at your shelves and all of a sudden your pile begins to grow and grow, and while I did put some of them back already, this is what I have ended up with.  Maybe Sholem Aleichem's Stempenyu: A Jewish Romance about "a young village girl girl who falls for a wildly popular klezmer fiddler".  I don't think I have ever read anything translated from Yiddish before.  But I have read this Melville House edition is riddled with typographical errors.  And I am already reading a fair amount of literature from the Jewish perspective so maybe something else now?

Which made me pick up Stendhal's The Abbess of Castro.  I've never read Stendhal.  This is the story of two doomed young lovers (this is a classic, would we expect them to have a happily ever after?--oh, a vote for the Austen, then).  It's set in Renaissance Italy and has "plenty of sword fights thrown in" which in my opinion is only a vote in its favor.

Of course if it's sword fights I'm after I could read Alexandre Dumas's Twenty Years After.  I loved The Three Musketeers, which is just the first of several books about the quartet of swordsmen.  This time out they aren't up against Milady but her son!  Somehow I feel like this would be rollicking good fun, but it is a hefty book with tiny print.

I used to read a Wilkie Collins novel (or two) every year but it's been a while since I picked up one of his full length stories (there have been a few short stories and a novella or two in the intervening years).  I thought Poor Miss Finch looked interesting.  I'm thinking, though, this is not going to be one of his suspenseful sensationalist stories.  Not that I have to have that.  This is a story of Lucilla Finch who is a blind girl and the two men, twins, who fall in love with her. 

There is always Mary Elizabeth Braddon, however, for a little sensationalism.  The Trail of the Serpent is about Jabez North, "a manipulative orphan who becomes a ruthless killer", Valerie de Cevennes, "a stunning heiress who falls into North's diabolical trap" and Mr. Peters, "a mute detective who communicates his brilliant reasoning through sign language".

Interesting that the two Victorian novels deal with disabilities--I didn't go looking for books like that.

And for something a little more modern I pulled F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night from the new book pile as it is a recent acquisition.  I'm sort of in the mood for something by him.  This one is set on the French Riviera in the 1920s and looks to be a sort of love triangle and no doubt story of dissipation.

They all sound good in different ways and I could happily start two or three but more than one new read would be altogether too greedy.  Has anyone read any of these and can put in a good word and tempt me in that direction?  I'll be dipping into each in turn and seeing which one grabs me and doesn't let go!

Short Story Sunday: A Dream of Winter

Short stories can be really deceptive.  In just a very few pages a whole world is constructed and conveyed to the reader and it is easy to be mislead, well, not mislead so much as it's easy to read only superficially.  I've only read Rosamund Lehmann's first novel Dusty Answer and that was years ago now.  I had this idea I would read all her books and in order that she wrote them (not sure what my fixation is with doing this other than I like the idea of being orderly and watching a natural growth of a writer).  But finally with Infinite Riches I have gotten a chance to read more of her work in the form of her 1946 short story, "A Dream of Winter".

There is a wonderful introduction in this collection of stories and the editor briefly discusses each short story.  Sometimes she is more forthcoming about a story's meaning than other times.  I always read the story and then flip to the front and find the brief passage and see what she has to say about a story to help illuminate or explain what I've just read.  Sometimes it is a mere reinforcement of what I've already read and sometimes I'm surprised by what I've missed. 

The Lehmann story is not at all hard going.  I thought it quite nicely done and for fear of being completely redundant (I think I must say this about every new story I read), this might be my new favorite.  There are little clues along the way, though maybe nothing is meant to be hidden from the reader.  So there are many descriptions of a time and a way of life, if I am simply a close enough reader I will catch them to make this a deeper and more fuller read than otherwise.

On the surface this is a story about a woman sick in bed with the flu.  It's cold, there has been a great frost but nonetheless two workman are just outside her window prying the lead panes out and taking the shingles off the roof in order to remove a bee hive that has grown too large (and too noisy).  It's not the best time of year to do this, bad for the bees, but the lady wishes it. There are hints that war is taking place in the background, no doubt her husband is off somewhere serving.  She is at home with her two children, in a country manor house once lived in by a now departed squire.  So there is the skeleton of the story.

Here's some of the flesh: the lady of the house notices the face of the workman, workmen--though the younger is far too shy to dare look into her bedroom.  The older workman's face is one that could belong to almost anyone.  "She had a lot of leisure in her life to look at faces.  She had friends with revolutionary ideas, and belonged to the Left Book Club."  The workman, friendly though he is, is a little critical of her desire to remove the bees just now with the cold.  She wants to remind him she's been waiting since September to have the work done, but . . .  And then there is the reminder that this way of life, her way of life, is even now vanishing.  "Life doesn't arrange stories with happy endings any more, see?  Never again."  The time of plenty for those in country houses is coming to an end.

And then to fill things in just a bit more with the editor's help--about this story that unravels a sense of "class guilt"--"her young son chastizes his sister for picking up the local dialect."  The editor notes, nodding my head in agreement, how children punctuate the story coming in and out (going up the ladder to look at the bees and down it and up again to bring a serving dish for the workman to scrape in the honey).  "Their natural curiosity, so swiftly  satisfied, their grasshopper minds, are caught to perfection.  The children in Rosamund Lehmann's fiction are always alive on the page."  And they are perceptive observers, too.  At one point the lady's son sort of castigates his mother for complaining about the noise of the bees--if she can't stand the hum of the bees what ever will she do in an air-raid?

Oh, there is some wonderful imagery in this story, too.  I'll just share one more passage and that is that for fear of giving all the best bits away when I think you would better appreciate the story by simply reading it yourself.  But this is wonderful and I can't resist.

"She took her temperature and found it was lower: barely a hundred.  He had done her good.  Then she lay listening to the silence she had created.  One performs acts of will, and in doing so one commits acts of negation and destruction.  A balcony weighed upon her: torn out, exposed, violated, obscene as the photograph of a bombed house."

"What an extraordinary day, what an odd meeting and parting.  It seemed to her that her passive, dreaming, leisured life was nothing, in the last analysis, but a fluid element for receiving and preserving faint paradoxical images and symbols.  They were all she ultimately remembered."

Brilliant!

(Are you surprised?).

I can't let myself start yet another new book (yet) but if I were to walk to my shelves and pull the next Lehmann book to read, it would be A Note in Music.  It never hurts to just look, though, right?

Next week: a story by Djuna Barnes (my first taste of her work).

* * * * *

My New Yorker came a day late, so I have only just picked it up and started reading this week's short story (double issue so I have time to read at my leisure, Feb. 23/Mar 2) by Haruki Murakami.  I'm not very far in but it looks promising so far.

The People of Forever Are Not Afraid

Shani Boianjiu's novel The People of Forever Are Not Afraid was longlisted for the Orange (now Baileys) Prize in 2013.  The novel is actually a collection of interlinked stories based on the author's two years of mandatory service in the Israeli Defense Forces (both women and men must serve), which she began writing as a Harvard student for her English courses.  Boianjiu began her service when she was only eighteen and the stories, written when she was 25, reflect the sorts of preoccupations any young woman would have, though with a twist since the women in these stories have the added pressures of living in a country where border security is a constant worry.

In an interview with NPR the author notes that borders are one of the prevailing themes in the stories--the physical borders of manning checkpoints or acting as guards but also the border between youth and adulthood.  The stories center around three friends, Yael, Avishag and Lea, who live in a small northern border town, and follow them from high school through to middle age.  The stories move from one narrator to the next and it's not always clear from the outset who is speaking, but over the course of the book the reader gets a sense of what each woman is like--her history and a feel for her own unique 'voice'.

Since Boianjiu wrote the stories as a student at Harvard it's not surprising that she wrote them in English rather than Hebrew.  In a Q&A at the back of the paperback edition she discusses what it was like to write in English:

"I love the English language because it has a lot of words.  Writing in English was sort of an accident, but I think it helped me.  I had to work harder to find the words I needed,  Describing a Hebrew-speaking world in the English language and translating Hebrew idioms and phrases helped me tell stories in a new way, or color a scene in an unfamiliar light."

Interestingly the book had to be translated into Hebrew when it was published in Israel, but the author was not happy with it and decided to do her own translation of the stories.

Boianjiu did not set out to write a book about the female Israeli soldiers' experience, rather it was meant to be simply a book about young Israeli women--her contemporaries--and by nature of what life is like for young Israeli women it's not surprising that the bulk of the stories are about guarding checkpoints, spending hours in watch towers looking across the border with Egypt, dealing with refugees or about young Palestinian boys who steal from Israeli military camps.  There is a lot of the banal, occasional humor and sometimes scenes of horror and bloodshed. 

I'm not sure I would call any of these young women heroines--not in the true sense of the word.  They are very human and very much young women dumped into unusual circumstances with young men who are going to end up in the sorts of situations you expect that are going to occur when you mix together a mass of eighteen-year-olds.  Sometimes they are not even very nice young women, so I was happy to see that was one of the questions the author answered in her Q&A. 

"I am not interested in writing stories about heroes.  I am far more interested in the darkest corners of my characters' minds.  I think a lot of people might feel as though they are the only ones who have terrible thoughts or who have done ugly things, because everyone is so busy portraying such a wholesome image of themselves, young women in particular.  I also think human beings in general are not sympathetic.  They are beautiful, but not sympathetic."

This is such a curious book, interesting and in many cases very well done (considering she was not writing in her native language), but it has such a foreign feel to me (not a criticism or a bad thing in any way).  She often walks a line between reality and something else, you wonder even in a fictional setting how much of the stories is real and how much fantasy.  They sometimes verge on satiric or even the comic and perhaps best, what was mentioned in my class, there are moments of the absurd.  Like soldiers working a checkpoint on a road that is no longer used and where three Palestinians (two men and a boy) return to again and again, hoping to create some sort of conflict worthy of making the news. 

One of my favorite stories takes place in that guard tower I mentioned above that overlooks the Egyptian border.  Across the way sits another guard tower manned by two Egyptian soldiers bored to the point they won't even look across the way.  A diplomatic incident takes place when Avishag cannot take the feel of her uniform against her skin and disrobes, as does her fellow (female also) soldier, lying down in the tower but in full view of the other side.  She finally (unintentionally) catches the eye of one of the Egyptian soldiers and one phone calls leads to another until it makes its way back to some high ranking Israeli official.  Yes, causing a diplomatic incident (and resulting in a little time in jail for the nude sunbathers).

You don't often get to read about being a soldier from the woman's perspective, even if Boianjiu didn't set out to tell this sort story in particular, and even if these women are anything but heroic, it's an interesting set of stories to read.  For these young women, those first eighteen years are a long breathless race--grades, boys, clothes, popularity, then a two-year long "mind numbing respite" and chance to think before whatever takes place after.  Along with everything else, there is life and death and families, marriage and even the promise of children.  Once again this is a view into a world I am likely never to see.

If you are curious, the New Yorker published "Means of Suppressing Demonstrations" (the story I mention above about the three Palestinians) in 2012, so you can have a taste of the author's work yourself.

The Evening Chorus by Helen Humphreys

Helen Humphreys writes some of the most lyrical prose I have come across.  I'm slowly reading my way through her work, some of it read in pre-blogging days so I think it demands to be revisited now.  Her novels tend be slender affairs, but slender can be misleading.  A book small in stature and slight in heft doesn't mean the story is in any way lacking.  Her stories might be light on plotting but  they are always rich in interior emotions and long on deeper meaning as long as the reader is patient and open to her style.  

There is a compactness to her storytelling, and The Evening Chorus is just what I was expecting yet surprising in its way, too.  It has her usual economy of style in terms of writing and storytelling with very little wasted, yet she manages to thread several different lives together very deftly and connect them in the end.  What is remembered after that last page is turned is not the war but the beauty of the natural world which is what makes life so bearable for these damaged souls.

The Evening Chorus is a war story.  While the first section of the book takes place in a POW camp, the horrors of war are mostly hinted at or take place off stage.  Yet each character carries the scars of the war in his or her own way.  And each character manages to find beauty in their world despite the losses and hardships.

James Hunter is not a man made for war.  The idea of killing someone so foreign to him he decides to join the RAF so he can be removed from the actual physical action of combat and having to see who he is killing close up.  It is actually a blessing when he is shot down over enemy territory and sent to a POW camp.  As an officer he is even given certain privileges.  The other POWs are mostly of his own class and education and each takes on a nickname reflecting the man's personality, James becoming the Birdman.  There is a nest of redwings in a tree just on the other side of the wire fence and with so much time on his hands he decides to make a study of them.  

There is something staid and serious about James.  He prefers to sit out the war and make the best of it with his studies, not sharing too much with the other men.  Like what he feels for his wife Rose who he married somewhat impetuously just before he was called up.  They've been apart longer than they've been together.  His letters are filled with his observations of nature and birds and questions for Rose to look up and send back the information for.  His seriousness perhaps belies his real emotion for her, but as a scientist he is not one to wear his heart on his sleeve.

One of their commonalities is an appreciation for nature and Rose is a countrywoman at heart.  But maybe it was as much a desire to get out from under her demanding mother's thumb as it was a feeling of love and attraction she had for James when she married him.  Now she finds she has fallen in love with an airman stationed nearby who is waiting for orders to rejoin the war.  She didn't go looking for trouble, but it found her anyway.  She fights a sense of loneliness in her small cottage once shared with James.  Now she wonders if she ever really loved him.  Her attraction to the airman is natural and comfortable and the two can talk endlessly about anything.  She's accepted the realization that she simply married the wrong man and feels no regret about her affair.

Everything becomes muddied and complicated when James's sister Enid writes to ask to come stay when she is bombed out of her London apartment.  She has nowhere else to go and Rose's cottage is just close enough to London to make it the most practical of resolutions for someplace to stay temporarily.  Enid is churlish and demanding and Rose resentful at having to hide her affair.  But both women have more in common, secrets they carry inside, than either realizes. 

Setting is so important in this story.  It's nature and the natural world that sometimes parallels, sometimes explains and sometimes contrasts the characters' motives and actions, yet Humphreys manages this in the most delicate of ways.  Everything is weighted--James's redwings and Rose's dog, Enid's observations of the Ash forest where she comes to live.  It wasn't until after I'd finished reading and flipped back to look at the bits I marked and underlined that it all began coming together that it is the greater world and our place in it that helps give meaning to the 'whys' that befuddle our lives.

This is such a beautiful story and elegantly told.  And it's a hopeful story, too.  Now that I know what happens I feel like going back to the beginning and starting all over again to see how Humphreys did it.  I am sure it has been carefully constructed with each element placed just so even though it feels so effortless.  That first impression of slightness, of bits of the story happening off stage is indeed misleading.  There is nothing wasted or unintentional here even though she makes it all look so easy.

Many thanks to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for sending The Evening Chorus my way.  I am always happy for the opportunity to read one of Helen Humphreys's books.  I think I will pick up Afterimage for a reread now while I let this one settle a bit in my mind. 

February 16: This Week's Reading

Fantasy picture.  Isn't sunshine and sand a nice idea?  Someone somewhere is living this scene, but it is not me!  But let's pretend.  I have no right really to complain considering how awful some people have had it this winter, but cold is cold, and it is cold here and promises to be so all week long.  So let's think about reading instead.

I am at the pivotal moment/the halfway mark or further in a number of books and just need some uninterrupted quiet time to be able to add the books to the finished pile.  So a quick little run down of this week's reading and then I am off to sit and get on with it. 

(I keep telling myself no more new books until I finish at least three, so the pressure is on).

I'm nearly finished reading a new book by Helen Humphreys called The Evening Chorus.  I tend to get on very well with her writing and it has been no different with this slender novel.  I don't want to say too much about it since I am planning on writing about it in just a few days, but I will say she revisits WWII in this newest book.  When I first started reading I had this urge to reread one of her earlier books, Afterimage, and so have pulled it from my shelves.  The novel was inspired by the life of Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.  I have this idea for a new reading project and Afterimage would work perfectly as one of the reading choices, but must catch up with my other reading first.

I must say Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange has been very . . . colorful?  I saw the movie years ago so nothing that is happening is much of a surprise, but reading the story rather than seeing it has been an interesting experience.  I should probably be careful when I say I do like it, but less for the what happens in the story than the way it is told and why it is told.  I can only read this in short bursts, however.  I've not much left but I'll keep going at my measured, though not terribly fast, clip.

I've already told you about Sayed Kashua's Second Person Singular.  I've got a bit of time to read it still before my class discusses it, but I find I don't want to  put the book down and have been reading it in tandem (literally) with Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata.  I have quite mixed feelings about Tolstoy.  I do love his fiction, but I don't always like how women fare in his stories.  He is a complex individual and I guess it is reflected in his writing.  Anyway this is such an intriguing reading pair--so glad I found the two books. 

Hell and Good Company by Richard Rhodes has been very compelling reading and I'm down to those last hundred pages, which sound like nothing at all but when it comes to nonfiction it always takes me twice as long as I expect.  Knowing that I get to pick a new nonfiction when I finish is always a great motivator, though.  I know I should be reading A World Elsewhere: An American Woman in Wartime Germany by Sigrid MacRae next (it's a library copy, so a little added pressure), but there have been a few other temptations lately that seem to be stacking up next to my bedside.  

And then there is my usual lunchtime/meal reading.  Do you have books you read while you eat?  Just like gym reading, I have meal reading.  Certain books just pair well with certain activities.  For me, Laura Lippman's Baltimore Blues (the first Tess Monaghan mystery) and Jane Harris's Gillespie and I have been my books of choice of late.  Both are completely engrossing for different reasons.  I like Tess (for me she feels like a cross between Stephanie Plum and Barbara Havers).  She's fun to spend time with--however weird that sounds. 

And as for the Harris.  I was recently bemoaning how thrillers these days all seem to be compared with Gone Girl (which I have still not yet read and wonder if I am the last person who likes to read thrillers has not yet done so), and while I know why publishers do and normally don't mind--lately it has been wearing thin on me and I want something different (but still suspenseful).  Well, strange as it sounds, Gillespie and I has been marvelously suspenseful and even comes with an unreliable narrator.  Yes, this is what I want in a suspenseful novel.  The right idea and a fresh idea--even though the book is several years old now.  And not a book you would typically think would be suspenseful.  

One other reading note for this week.  I am on the mailing list for the weekly Library of America short story.  It arrives in my email inbox each Sunday, and while I often think I should read this one or that one . . . I think I do want to read this week's story--A Matter of Principle by Charles W. Chesnutt.

"In this satirical tale, a debutante seeks a husband who will meet with her parents’ approval and who, in particular, is “as fair of complexion as she."

I feel as though I have been talking about and reading the same handful of books for ages now, so hopefully very soon I will have some 'fresh blood' to share bookwise.

Short Story Sunday: The Sentimentality of William Tavener

I love Willa Cather's work.  Who ever would have thought my adult self would say that since when I was a teenager in high school she was so 'talked up' by the nun's that I did everything I could to avoid her work.  She wasn't just talked up but more thrust upon us, and being just the tiniest bit rebellious and thinking that anyone else must be better than a Nebraska author (I was dreaming of traveling and of Europe so nothing so close to home could possibly tempt me), but I have changed my tune.  She's marvelous. 

She tends to be lumped into a class of authors known as regionalists, but she is really so much more than that.  Why does that make it sound like her fiction is something less than other classic writers?  (Or is my perception off?).  Actually as I was reading "The Sentimentality of William Tavener" in Infinite Riches I was thinking how versatile she is.  How does someone who was never married write so elegantly and so perceptively about a marriage?  I've never thought an author could or should only write about those things they have experienced or that were closest to their lives, but maybe it makes it easier?  It certainly doesn't matter in the case of this story--yes, another cracker of a story in a collection filled with them.

The Taveners are a married couple with several children all boys.  They are a farm family and so are used to hard work and a certain hardness of character and restrained emotion. 

"It takes a strong woman to make any sort of success of living in the West, and Hester undoubtedly was that.  When people spoke of William Tavener as the most prosperous farmer in McPherson County, they usually added that his wide was a 'good manager'.  She was an executive woman, quick of tongue and something of an imperatrix.  The only reason her husband did not consult her about his business was that she did not wait to be consulted."

She's a strong woman and determined, well-spoken and practical.  But underneath it all, too, there is a soft spot.  For farm boys in a rural area with strict parents and in the early part of the twentieth century proper off the farm entertainments are surely few and far between so when the circus comes to town, it is going to be celebrated and anticipated . . . if you are lucky enough to be able to go.  Which the Tavener boys are not allowed. 

It's Hester's careful maneuvering and insistence that nothing ever bad came of a group of well-brought up boys like their own going to a circus that will throw new light on her own marriage and subtly change the relationships and dynamics for all of them.  As a matter of fact her own story of a youthful outing to a circus brings to light a shared memory they didn't realize they had.  Both were at that circus so many years ago not knowing the other at the time.  At that moment their marriage takes on a different hue. 

"Their relationship had become purely  a business one, like that between landlord and tenant.  In her desire to indulge her boys she had unconsciously assumed a defensive and almost hostile attitude towards her husband.  No debtor ever haggled with his usurer more doggedly than did Hester with her husband on behalf of her sons."

That shared moment of this forgotten incident in their youth begins a reminiscence between the two and they begin to really talk again for hours and hours.  And it sets a different tone between the two, a remembered history and what initially brought them together.  And William pulls from his wallet the money for the boys to go to the circus.  An astonishing moment for them when they wake up with the news that they can go and a moment, too, of a tinge of melancholy knowing that in their mother they have perhaps lost a powerful ally.  So beautifully told this story of lost or maybe forgotten love remembered and renewed.  Such a perfect story for any weekend but especially on Valentine's Day!

Next weekend a story by (an author I keep meaning to get back to) -- Rosamond Lehmann.

* * * * *

This week's (February 16 issue) New Yorker story is a curious one, but I liked it very much.  To be honest I wasn't sure what I thought when I read it, but now that I have sat down and must think about it to write something, it's hit me how much I do like it.  I've had an interest in mazes and labyrinths for a while now, just one of those things that hovers in the back of my mind and every once in a while I will come across something about them that will make me think.  Amelia Gray's (another new-to-me writer) "Labyrinth" is part of a story collection due out in April called Gutshot: Stories.  If you click through on the link and take a peek at the cover illustration you can get an idea of what this story is like--yes, a eerie sort of story indeed.

"Dale had been doing a lot of reading on Hellenic myth, so when he said he had a surprise for us at his Pumpkin Jamboree we knew he wasn't screwing around."

And he wasn't though whether the labyrinth took on a life of its own or if Dale had something to do with it does make me wonder . . .   Oops getting ahead of myself here.  The jamboree is a fall festival that you would find in a small town or in the countryside and this one includes a labyrinth.  Not to be confused with a maze as the two are not alike.  " . . . the path is unicursal, not multicursal.  There's only one road, and it leads to only one place."  You can't get lost, but that doesn't mean there is no point to getting to the middle.  And what is in the center is the point and what the reader discovers in the very last line of the story.  And I'm not telling, because this is a story you can read for yourself since it is online!  So, go on, nudge, nudge.  This is a very short story and you can easily read it in a short sitting (and get in a short story this week).  Then go and read the author's Q&A here.  I'm quite intrigued by her and what she had to say.  I like the idea of a retelling of the Theseus myth.  And I like what she has to say about short fiction:

"What’s the most a writer can say in the fewest lines? There’s a breathtaking quality to brevity. W. S. Merwin’s 'Elegy' is the poetic equivalent of a leg-sweep takedown. Even when I’m writing longer pieces, I look for small moments, turns of phrase, which allow each scene to stand alone."

I'm definitely going to check out her new collection of stories, and maybe while I'm waiting I'll look for her Museum of the Weird because something 'beguiling' and 'bewitching' sounds like great fun indeed.