A Work in Progress

Short Story Sunday: The Half Brother

A twist of fate in Francis Wyndham's "The Half Brother" makes for a satisfying ending that gives the story a very nice and somewhat surprising balance.  Once again this is as much a character study as a proper beginning-middle-and-ending sort of story.  Wyndham has a knack for description-he paints vivid pictures of people and their little idiosyncrasies.  The Complete Fiction of Francis Wyndham is made up of two different collections of short stories plus a novella in between.  The stories in this first collection seem to be narrated by the same schoolboy--though his age and experience varies between stories--and some of the same characters move between stories as well.

Let's see if I can get this right.  Jack is the narrator's half brother but he is closer in age to his mother than a brother.  As a matter of fact his mother was the second wife of Jack's father, though she was much younger and one of Jack's contemporaries.  A first impression of Jack?

"Jack 'did a Jack' and missed our father's funeral.  He had taken his new girl to the Gargoyle Club the night before and had woken with such a monumental hangover that the train had left Paddington before he was out of bed."

To put it all in even sharper perspective--the girl was only seventeen, which made Jack quite proud since she had a most marvelous figure--"almost like a boy's".  At issue in the story is a life-sized effigy of an ancient Egyptian god named Horus.  A god of the sky, he was in the shape of a falcon (whose right eye was the Sun and the left the Moon).  Made out of dark, rough stone he has a sinister look about him giving the narrator's mother the creeps.  She asks her son to remove him from the house, which he does causing quite a kerfluffle when Jack finds out and throws what amounts to a massive hissy fit.

Aside from the statuette being the only thing amongst his father's things worth any value, it was something Jack associated fondly with his father (as much as someone like Jack can have a fondness for).  When it was sold the narrator got all of a measly hundred pounds for it, and when Jack went in search of it to get it back he paid one hundred and ten pounds to return it to its rightful place in his own home. 

The sale of the statuette and ensuing back and forth-ing of it is really all in service of showing Jack's personality off, I think.  He's quite something of a character, and with the narrator being such an excellent observer the reader gets a first row seat and view into his life and personality.  I won't ruin the story by telling you the twist (such as it is), but let me share a little more about Jack, since the narrator does such an admirable job in telling this story.

"Jack's dissipated past revealed itself in his face and made him look almost twenty years older than his age, but in spite of this there was still something boyish about him, both in behaviour and appearance.  His candid enthusiasm, his ungovernable touchiness, retained an adolescent innocence; the clumsy movement of his bony body suggested the physical uncertainty of a child rather than the stumblings of an elderly party.  Behind the benevolent beam, or offended scowl, of a grizzled patriarch, the short nose, wide smile and cleft chin evoked the attractive lad, cheeky and vulnerable by turns, that he must once have been."

I think every family must have at least one of these larger than life types in it.  In one short story I know all about Jack--his failings and fortunes and quirks and successes.  I am not sure I would necessarily like him but he makes for an interesting study.  He is sort of a condescending prig telling the narrator:

" . . . I do believe that in modern socialist Britain it's essential to be technically equipped  to earn your own living, to acquire some basic skill which is always going to be needed, whatever happens.  Mightn't you take a course or something or other?  I don't know what -- glass-blowing, or something?  Think about it anyway.  I know it's great fun sitting in the cinema all day but it doesn't really lead anywhere."

This makes the ending ever so much more satisfying. 

Next week a longer short story called "Ursula". 

* * *

I am in the midst of reading my New Yorker story now, "The Duniazát" by Salman Rushdie, an author I am afraid I must admit I have never read.  It has a 1001 Nights, fairy tale-ish feel to it.  You can read the author's Q&A here and the story here.

An Exercise in (bookish) Self-Indulgence

Books?  Me?  Self-indulgent.  Oh no, no, never.  I am all orderly and organized and all about finishing what I start and not meandering about.  Sure.

Okay, ready for this weekend's reading exercise?  Do play along.  You know how you have that mental list of books that you really really really want to read, but wait . . .  You want to, but now is just maybe not quite the right time.  I mean you already have that little pile on the go and must finish something else first.  Or you  have a review copy that has to be read by . . .  Or a library book with an approaching deadline.  So, okay, you want to read that 'other' book, but it can wait.  Sigh. Go to the back of the line, thank you very much.  You may have been so excited when you bought it and thought, now this one is next!  This I am going to crack open and read the moment I pull it out of the sack or box or mailer or whatever.  But then you pull it out and gaze at it longingly and then think, no, soon.  But not quite yet.  I own it, I can read it anytime I like.  Right?

So, this is the exercise.  Which of those books would you pick up and read right now--don't give any other reading-responsibility another thought. I mean it is (almost) summer.  You (or, that would be me . . .) deserve to be self-indulgent every once and a while.  And maybe even more often than that.

Which book you would you pick?  I can already feel my fingertips go tingly with anticipation.  Now, don't think: no, not this one--it's too long or too hard or too easy (!).  Fantasy choice.  Maybe it is the oldest book on your shelf, or the newest.  Maybe you bought it on a whim or had been wishing for it for ages.  I have to ponder this one for just a moment or two . . . 

Walking: A Thursday Thirteen

I've been doing lots of walking lately--more than usual and mostly outside and was thinking maybe a book about walking might be in order.  I've got most of these on my own shelves, and a few on my wishlist.  I have only read a very few (are you surprised?).  I love walking and take a walk of one sort or another every single day.  Sometimes it is only a matter of practicality--the need to get to the bus to get to work or walk home in the evening, but sometimes (mostly weekends) I look for new areas and trails to explore.  Recently I discovered an old trail hidden away not too far from my house that lots of other walkers and runners use.  And I have walked a tiny bit along the riverfront (the Missouri River), which I think I would like to spend much more time on.  And then there is armchair walking (is there such a thing?  why not, right?) . . .

Wanderlust: a History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit -- "Drawing together many histories-of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores-Rebecca Solnit creates a fascinating portrait of the range of possibilities presented by walking."

On Foot: a History of Walking by Joseph Amato -- "In this fast-stepping history, Joseph A. Amato takes us on a journey of walking - from the first human migrations to marching Roman legions and ancient Greeks who considered man a "featherless biped"; from trekking medieval pilgrims to strolling courtiers; from urban pavement pounders to ambling window shoppers to suburban mall walkers."

Bold Spirit: Helga Estby's Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America by Linda Hunt -- "In 1896, a Norwegian immigrant and mother of eight children named Helga Estby was behind on taxes and the mortgage when she learned that a mysterious sponsor would pay $10,000 to a woman who walked across America.  Hoping to win the wager and save her family’s farm, Helga and her teenaged daughter Clara, armed with little more than a compass, red-pepper spray, a revolver, and Clara’s curling iron, set out on foot from Eastern Washington.  Their route would pass through 14 states, but they were not allowed to carry more than five dollars each.  As they visited Indian reservations, Western boomtowns, remote ranches and local civic leaders,  they confronted snowstorms, hunger, thieves and mountain lions with equal aplomb." 

The Walking Tour by Kathryn Davis -- "A woman in Maine seeks the truth regarding her mother's mysterious death and discovers infidelity and betrayal. Officially, the mother had a fatal accident while on a walking tour in Wales. The tour was with her husband, his colleague and the colleague's wife."

A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: from the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube by Patrick Leigh Fermor -- "At once a memoir of coming-of-age,  an account of a journey, and a dazzling exposition of the English language, A  Time of Gifts is also a portrait of a continent already showing ominous signs  of the holocaust to come."

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson -- "In A Walk in the Woods Bill Bryson tackles what is, for him, an entirely new subject: the American wilderness. Accompanied only by his old college buddy Stephen Katz, Bryson starts out one March morning in north Georgia, intending to walk the entire 2,100 miles to trail's end atop Maine's Mount Katahdin."

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce -- "Meet Harold Fry, recently retired. He lives in a small English village with his wife, Maureen, who seems irritated by almost everything he does. Little differentiates one day from the next. Then one morning a letter arrives, addressed to Harold in a shaky scrawl, from a woman he hasn’t heard from in twenty years. Queenie Hennessy is in hospice and is writing to say goodbye. But before Harold mails off a quick reply, a chance encounter convinces him that he absolutely must deliver his message to Queenie in person. In his yachting shoes and light coat, Harold Fry embarks on an urgent quest. Determined to walk six hundred miles to the hospice, Harold believes that as long as he walks, Queenie will live."

Walking by Henry David Thoreau -- "Originally given as part of a lecture in 1851, "Walking" was later published posthumously as an essay in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862. Now being a chief text in the environmental movement, Thoreau's "Walking" places man not separate from Nature and Wildness but within it and lyrically describes the ever beckoning call that draws us to explore and find ourselves lost in the beauty of the forests, rivers, and fields."

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert McFarlane -- "Macfarlane’s journeys take him from the chalk downs of England to the bird islands of the Scottish northwest, from Palestine to the sacred landscapes of Spain and the Himalayas. He matches strides with the footprints made by a man five thousand years ago near Liverpool, sails an open boat far out into the Atlantic at night, and commingles with walkers of many kinds, discovering that paths offer a means not just of traversing space but also of feeling, knowing, and thinking."

Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien -- "In Tim O'Brien's novel Going After Cacciato the theater of war becomes the theater of the absurd as a private deserts his post in Vietnam, intent on walking 8,000 miles to Paris for the peace talks. The remaining members of his squad are sent after him, but what happens then is anybody's guess . . ."

Tracks: One Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback by Robyn Davidson -- "Robyn Davidson's opens the memoir of her perilous journey across 1,700 miles of hostile Australian desert to the sea with only four camels and a dog for company with the following words: 'I experienced that sinking feeling you get when you know you have conned yourself into doing something difficult and there's no going back'."

In a Strange Room: Three Journeys by Damon Galgut -- " . . . a young loner travels across eastern Africa, Europe, and India. Unsure what he's after, and reluctant to return home, he follows the paths of travelers he meets along the way."

On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz -- "On Looking begins with inattention. It is about attending to the joys of the unattended, the perceived 'ordinary.' Horowitz encourages us to rediscover the extraordinary things that we are missing in our ordinary activities. Even when engaged in the simplest of activities like taking a walk around the block, we pay so little attention to most of what is right before us that we are sleepwalkers in our own lives."

Of course I am always happy to get ever more suggestions.  I am especially curious about fictional books that have to do with walking.  I was surprised I came up with the few on my own list, but surely there are more.  And I like the idea of reading about walkers who do extraordinary things like Helga Estby.  So, please feel free to add titles (or take away suggestions as well!).

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent

Reading Hannah Kent's Baileys Womens Prize nominated Burial Rites was an intense and harrowing read.  Despite knowing the outcome, or maybe because I knew what the outcome would be I set this one aside more than once, but just recently felt the desire to press on.  Why not a fictionalized true crime novel for my summer of murder and mayhem?  It is equally as engaging as it is dark and forbidding.  Based on a true story, Kent's novel imagines condemned murderess Agnes Magnúsdóttir's last months.  It's not so much a question of did she or didn't she, rather the degree of participation and culpability in the crime.  This is early 19th century, rural northern Iceland we're talking about.  Agnes is a servant.  You can imagine the rest.  Hannah Kent's novel fills in all the blanks and adds visuals.  She weaves quite an impressive story.

I think I will forever have this book, or the latter part of it anyway, mingled in my mind with the unhappy ending to Anne Boleyn's life.  I was watching Wolf Hall at the same time, and if you watched that last episode, well . . .   You know how it ended for Anne, too.  How do you face an executioner?  Knowing you are not guilty in the way they say and wanting so intensely to live.  Kent conveys those emotions vividly, which is why this was such a difficult read for me.

"They said I must die.  They said that I stole the breath from men, and now they must steal mine.  I imagine, then, that we are all candle flames, greasy-bright, fluttering in the darkness and the howl of the wind, and in the stillness of the room I hear footsteps, awful coming footsteps, coming to blow me out and send my life up and away from me in a grey wreath of smoke.  I will vanish into the air and the night.  They will blow us all out, one by one, until it is only their own light by which they see themselves.  Where will I be then?"

So begins Agnes's story, which she narrates in part.  Her final days are to be spent on a farmstead with a local family "of upright Christians, who would inspire  repentance by good example, and who would benefit from the work the prisoners do as they await execution".  In other words there is no other accommodations available for the prisoners so families are selected to "house" them.  When Agnes arrives she is a muddied mess, having been treated on her journey as little more than an animal.  The local family has two grown daughters and is a working farm--they act out of christian responsibility but not out of any pleasure in aiding the Icelandic government.  

Of course Agnes is meant to spend her final days usefully helping out the family and by repenting to her father confessor--a man she had met in her younger days who has just recently finished his studies.  There is little repenting but much confessing in the end--but not in the way the reverend or anyone else expects or wants.  Agnes tells her story--her story and not just the crime that leads to her demise.  It is a story filled with sadness and a prescient tale--almost as though it was all writ loudly in the stars so to speak.  Orphaned young and sent into servitude.  She ends up in a household of a single man where she believes she is to be the main housekeeper only to find there is already a younger, prettier woman there believing she herself is meant to fill that exact role.  It's a claustrophobic household filled with jealousy, tempers easily lost and of lies and faithlessness. 

I won't go into the crime, best to let Agnes tell her own story, but she is not the only participant.  There was almost only ever one outcome and Agnes knew it, but knew it too late.  And so Kent tells a story of a Victorian Society where blame and responsibility weigh heavily, no matter you are a woman or maybe all the more so since you are a woman.  As the story unravels Agnes becomes less a prisoner, maybe even something of a victim, but only in a very few eyes.  She knows the game, she understands only too well.

"All my life people have thought I was too clever.  Too clever by half, they'd say.  And you know what Reverend?  That's exactly why they don't pity me.  Because they think I'm too smart, too knowing to get caught up in this by accident."

This is a finely crafted story.  As dark and bleak as it was, and no matter that I had to stop and take a few breathes along the way, I was quite impressed by it.  It oozes a particular kind of atmosphere.  It is claustrophobic and cloying knowing where it all is leading, but I was fixated until the very end.

The novel includes additional information at the end--the author explains the backstory and how she built on what little is known.  She used actual documents in her research, of course, but she weaves them into the story.  Although much is imagined by the author it takes on a feel of reality, as if this is really Agnes and what happened on that terrible fateful night.  Interestingly the novel grew out of her PhD work and the time she spent in Iceland studying--a country and culture she obviously loves and admires.  I am not sure how you follow up a book like this, but I hope she plans on writing more.

For a good readalike you might try one of my favorites, Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace.

Teaser Tuesday: Death in the Fog

"I had developed a mania for the work of Mignon G. Eberhart, an American author of detective stories, and could read nothing else.  Her books, like the films of Alice Faye, were so similar to each other that they may have seemed almost indistinguishable to an untrained eye, but subtle differences between them added piquancy to the expert's taste.  Some of her earlier novels were difficult to find, and I would advertise for these in the trade papers.  Just as the dreaded moment arrived when I had read them all, a new one was published by the Crime Club."  (The narrator in Francis Wyndham's short story "Obsession").

That was the gentle nudge I need to go to my shelves and pull Mignon Eberhart's Death in the Fog, a standalone mystery published in 1933 to read next.  As I have finished a few mysteries (posts to hopefully follow soon), I was in need of something new to take their place on my summer mystery reading pile.  Eberhard was born in Lincoln, Nebraska so I should be reading her in any case, but the other draw is that she was writing just at the time of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, so this is truly vintage crime.

I'd started reading the introduction to this book, but decided to leave it until I after I finish reading for fear some juicy detail would be revealed.  I like not knowing too much before going into any story, but the less I know about a crime or mystery novel the better.  Eberhart was, as the narrator in the story notes, quite popular in her day.  She was called the "American Agatha Christie" though I think sadly she is not much read these days.  She wrote a series of nurse mysteries featuring Nurse Keate and are very much in the vein of a Christie novel in that all aspects of the crime are laid out for the reader to puzzle through. 

Death in the Fog is something a little bit different.  It is still a mystery but it absolutely oozes atmosphere.  It was a dark and stormy night?  Go grab a copy of this book, find a nice quiet corner, turn on the tableside lamp and join me in reading!  The novel was originally published under the title The Dark Garden and in the introduction it is compared to the "surreal, storm-wracked world" of Jane Eyre or Rebecca.  Interestingly it's noted that even when the book was published in the 1930s that a large part of the mystery reading public was made up of women and "at its rather bitter and lonely heart, [the novel is] a book about women."

"Death in the Fog is a mystery novel, written for an audience that consumed--and still consumes, in this new heyday of the genre--four or five such books a week, always demanding something new, something with a hook to keep the interest, a book you can't put down, a page-tuner."

I had to chuckle at that quote--in my case it would only be wishful thinking when it comes to reading several books in a week, though I know people who do consume books that way.  It reminded me of the narrator in the Wyndham story, however.  I am meant to be giving you a teaser from the story, so here is a little something to help set the scene.  The story is set in Chicago and it opens on a very foggy night with a woman waiting.  She sits in a large house, rather heavy and ornate and dark.  This is not, by the way, our heroine.  Her name is Charlotte and she does actually remind me a little of Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca.  Eberhart is very good on setting--so many details to help the reader fix it all in their mind.  And yes, lots and lots of atmosphere.

"Very soon the fog would envelop the house.  It would be heavy, too, pressing against the windows so that the place would be an island shut in upon itself and bound about by the smothering gray blankness."

"Although as to that there was always a feeling of isolation about the place which was due, perhaps, to the untidy park which lay, darkly unkempt and made wild and uneven by the ravine which twisted through it, between the house and the public road.  The whole was enclosed, except on the lake side, by a high brick wall which was old and solid and, somehow, marked the feeling of remoteness and isolation, which characterized the whole estate, although in point of fact it was not remote from the world at all."

I do love it when books cross paths.  And in this case, not just books, but a fictional character has firmly placed a book in my hands.  How very kind!

Short Story Sunday: Obsessions

I can see that reading the work of Francis Wyndham is going to be both immensely satisfying and a little dissatisfying at the same time.  Two stories in and I can say I love his storytelling, the themes he writes about and the way he writes.  They are a glimpse inside a world I am curious about but is long since past.  It's so easy to fall into his stories--they almost seem like little snippets of people's lives, character sketches if you will, or slices of life.  Yet . . .   The stories are not exactly short stories with a problem or issue that gets resolved by the end.  I find myself looking into this world and reading about it and being absorbed by it, but then the story ends and there is no more as much as I want to keep going.  Hence the remark about dissatisfaction.  Only in that I am left wanting more.  But maybe that is actually a good, or successful story?

"I still dream about the Manor, although I have not seen it for over thirty years and could not have entered it more than a dozen times in the days when I lived near by."

"More haunting than haunted, it was a placidly beautiful house . . .  In "Obsessions", once again it is a schoolboy narrating this story of the Bignall family with whom he gets to know, almost by default, as a young man.  I say default as it seems as though schoolboy friendships seem to be somewhat superficial.  Holidays might be spent one place or another but due mostly from simply being thrown together than a mutual interest in the other's life.  But no matter, as this narrator is a keen observer whatever the circumstances.  It may be the through the youngest Bignall that he is introduced to the family, but over time his path continues crossing with theirs.

I think 'obsessions' has a double meaning here.  The narrator's obsession with the Manor and the Bignall family but also Lady Fuller's obsessions, too.  We all have little obsessions, right?  First let me introduce you quickly to the Bignall family.  The elder Bignall, Sir Jocelyn:

"Over seventy when I knew him, he was like a clumsy caricature of the old-fashioned country squire, with pendulous purple cheeks matching the purple checks on his expensively tailored knickerbocker suits."

He has a reputation of being a very bad landlord.  Seldom at home as he often got on his wife's nerves.  Curiously she was also called Jocelyn.  She had a former husband but she "bolted" with Sir Jocelyn--her only mark on an otherwise unblemished reputation. 

"A small, pretty old lady with bad-tempered features almost obliterated by powder . . ."

The pair are childless but she has a daughter, Madge, by her first husband and it is her grandson, "confusingly called Jocelyn, too" who introduced the narrator to his family.  It's Lady Fuller, young Jocelyn's mother, whose obsessions the story is mostly concerned with.

"Madge Fuller had a tall, slim body ideally suited to the clothes in fashion during the early 1930s, which she continued to wear long after they had gone out of date."

It's her "obsession" that's at the heart (and humor) of the story.   It's during the war.  The younger Jocelyn is off fighting and the narrator is at Oxford waiting to be called up.  He's invited by Lady Fuller to have lunch in a hotel restaurant with coffee to follow the meal, which she feels is much better suited to have at table rather than being thrust into the lounge (and what a vulgar word that is) to take it there.  All forms of request, even bullying, are ignored, much to the chagrin of Lady Fuller.

"'You do think I'm right, don't you?  I mean, it only encourages them if one give in.  In no other country would one be prevented from drinking one's coffee at  the dining table.  It's typical of England, I'm afraid: no wonder if looks as if we're going to lose this ridiculous war!  I do most abjectly apologise--it's too awful, you haven't had any coffee'!"

I think I am not doing the story justice, but it is wonderfully done--the characterizations make the story.  I can see this family!  And even the narrator's personality comes through.  How often does a character in a story prompt a reader to go and look for a book from their own bookshelves?  (Maybe more often than I think?).  I'm off to go find a Mignon Eberhart novel.  I've written about her before!  The narrator "had developed a mania" for her work and "could read nothing else".  I have never come across another reader who likes her work, and in most cases no one even seems to be familiar with her these days.  So I feel the pain . . .  After the disappointment of not having a coffee after dinner:

"All bookshops and libraries were closed: I felt the throbbing onset of the addict's withdrawal pains.  How would I get through the night?  I made myself a cup of Nescafé and went to bed wide awake."

Next week: "The Half Brother".

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This week's New Yorker story (May 25 issue) is by a Danish author, Dorthe Nors called "The Freezer" which has rather sinister overtones, doesn't it?  It also begins on a ferry in the North Sea at night, which helps create a very dark atmosphere.  It's a very short short story, nicely done and with precision and succinctness in a way that doesn't manage to lose anything either in the brevity or the translation.  On this dark night and this journey to England a woman looks back at her school years when she is bullied by an older student.  She is actually bullied twice over since her friends failed to support her even as it was happening.  I'm always impressed by the originality of authors and how they manage to breathe new life into stories that seem all too common place at times.  You can see the Q&A with the author here. 

Penguin Great Food Series Revisited

My, how time flies.  Remember this post?  Probably not and that's okay.  I am almost too embarrassed to mention it since I wrote it at the end of 2012.  Maybe we could almost call it 2013 and then it wouldn't seem as though so much time has passed.  I am always so full of plans, aren't I?

Since this year is supposed to be all about reading from my own shelves and this piles of lovely little Penguins happens to be sitting out and in my daily line of sight, I was thinking maybe it was time to revamp my plans to read through the Penguin Great Food series of books.  What initially prompted it all was reading Agnes Jekyll's A Little Dinner Before the Play, which is a series of columns she wrote for The Times in the 1920s.  I really liked it and knew I had to have the whole set, which I then set about acquiring.  And they have been sitting, waiting and staring at me ever since.

They are slender little volumes, gorgeously designed--usually selections from larger, longer works, so just the perfect length for a taste--literally and figuratively.  A taste of each author's writing and an (imagined) taste of various cuisines from different cultures and at different periods in history.  All in all a perfect sampling of writing for a perfect little reading project.

It sounded good at the time and it still sounds pretty good now.  I think my error was trying to put them in some sort of order and then read them in said order.  I was stuck on the first book--just wasn't quite what I wanted at the moment and so it languished, was set aside and sort of forgotten.  But I have decided to give it another go.  This time, however, I will choose the books on whim and desire--who cares which order.  And I have started with an author I hugely admire--M.F.K. Fisher. 

I read and loved her Gastronomical Me.  She is not only a most impressive author, but a woman of culture and panache.  And while my own palate is pretty unstudied and unsophisticated, I can still love her writing and the things she writes about.  I might not be tempted by all the dishes she writes about, but I certainly can appreciate how she writes about them.  Maybe I will even read more of her work this year (because after I read her I had to have as much of her other writing as I could get my hands on . . . you know how that goes).  But I am starting with the Penguin book, Love in a Dish and Other Pieces, which is a series of culinary essays. 

I've read the first essay and am into the second.  In it she writes about traveling by train with her uncle from California to Chicago in 1927.  I think she must have surely been influenced a little by him.  He was a seasoned train traveler and knew how to navigate the system, especially the dining car.  When presented with the choice of dishes, she responds with an "I don't really care" and is gently castigated.  He tells her she should never reply in such a manner since it is stupid, which she is not.

"It implies that the intentions of your host are basically wasted on you.  So make up your mind, before you open your mouth.  Let him believe, even if it is a lie, that you would infinitely prefer the exotic wild asparagus to the banal mushrooms, or vice versa.  Let him feel that it matter to you . . . and even that he does!" 

"'All this', my uncle added gently, 'may someday teach you about the art of seduction, as well as the more important art of knowing yourself'."

The other bit of wisdom from her uncle Evan--"The only test of a good breakfast place is its baked apple".  I wonder if you can use that test still these days?!

Other books in the series (and in no particular order to be read):

**The Well Kept Kitchen by Gervase Markham
**The Joys of Excess by Samuel Pepys (based on Pepys' diaries)
**Everlasting Syllabub and the Art of Carving by Hannah Glasse
**Recipes from the White Hart Inn by William Verrall
**The Pleasures of the Table by Brillat-Savarin
**The Elegant Economist by Eliza Acton
**The Chef at War by Alexis Soyer
**The Campaign for Domestic Happiness by Isabella Beeton
**From Absinthe to Zest by Alexandre Dumas
**Notes from Madras by Colonel Wyvern
**Buffalo Cake and Indian Pudding by Dr. A.W. Chase
**A Dissertation Upon Roasting a Pig and Other Essays by Charles Lamb
**Exciting Food for Southern Types by Pellegrino Artusi
**A Little Dinner Before the Play by Agnes Jekyll
**Love in a Dish and Other Pieces by M.F.K. Fisher
**A Taste of the Sun by Elizabeth David
**Murder in the Kitchen by Alice B. Toklas
**A Middle Eastern Feast by Claudia Roden
**Eating with the Pilgrims and Other Pieces by Calvin Trillin (essays appearing mostly in The New Yorker)
**Recipes & Lessons from A Delicious Cooking Revolution by Alice Water

At the Source: Cardiff

If I didn't already like Gillian Clarke's At the Source, her essay "Cardiff" would (and did, really) totally sell me on the book.  I love essays.  Why don't I read them more often and more regularly?  Maybe I need to do something about that.  But first "Cardiff".  If the rest of At the Source has something of a nature slant to it, the essays that make up the first part of the book (the rest is diary-like entries for each month of the year) focus more on home and history.  And of course they are written with her elegant (she is a poet) prose that makes you see, feel and imagine her world. 

"Cardiff" is about her family, their history--her history, and her childhood.  I can't begin to give you a summary that would capture her eloquence.  She segues from image to image seamlessly moving around in time and space and you can see it all in your mind.  But let me share with you a few random impressions of what I read. 

Ga is the name she uses for her grandmother.  A word I'd never heard--a family/childhood word or a Welsh word?  Her father worked for the BBC.

"My father's coat was whiskery tweed and felt like the fur of the black bear in the tobacconist shop near the Prince of Wales Theatre, where before dirty films and bingo, they showed Snow White, or The Wizard of Oz, or Lassie Come Home."

On an outing with her father as a child in the "city of tall stories"--even then there were bluebells.

"In the museum the Blue Lady's dress is so blue it is a lake of bluebells in Porthkerry woods.  So blue that she's the sea off Pembrokeshire.  Because of her, blue is my favorite colour."

Clarke's father worked for the BBC. Her mother was glamorous.  This was during the war years.  She and her family lived in a house in Cyncoed, a house she returned to later, where she lived at "crucial periods in [her] life".  It is a house she can never leave behind and she wrote about.  From her poem-sequence 'Cofiant' ('Biography'):

Houses we've lived in
inhabit us
and history's restless
in the rooms of the mind.

Isn't that lovely?  I like how it's not just the person who inhabits the house, but how it leaves its mark on the dweller.  Enviably (for me) it was a house from which she could always see the sea.

Beautiful and poetic imagery:

"Stories layered with stories, all laid down in the mind to become part of being."

Books surely must have been part of what inspired some of those stories (books and the view from her window and the experiences of a freedom of childhood--a true freedom children no longer have--to go about on their own from dawn to dusk--exploring the world around them).

Asterisked this:

"Libraries had always been full of objects of desire.  To a bookworm, there is nothing so bleak as reaching the last word of the last page of a book an hour before bedtime, and nothing more thrilling than the Saturday morning find in the library, a new novel by a favourite writer, or something vaguely illicit, and hours of secret reading ahead.  It was almost a vice.  From early childhood I'd read all night, unable to stop turning pages.  In school I read under the blankets by torchlight.  Home for the holidays, sent to make the guests' beds in the roomy old house in Plymouth Road, I'd be caught out reading the books on bedside tables."

As a youth she was in love with the idea of university, "and relished [her] new life.  She went away to school when young but later going to school in Cardiff was suddenly glamorous.  She recalls walking to college every day and walking along the "rose-red road of Edward VII Avenue" under the huge elms that touched overhead.  And then seeing them suffer with Dutch Elm Disease. 

"I saw them felled.  It was like watching a great cathedral fall."

She worked in the university's library.  Sounds she associates with that still associates with books, with reading and falling in love with the idea of studying English Literature (from her years working in the library): a tramp snoring over a book he wasn't reading, pigeons cooing on the window ledges.

I associate the smell of freshly cut grass on hot humid days with summers of my youth.  I smell the smell and am instantly and vividly transported back in time. 

So "Cardiff" is about memory, too. 

Here's a memory to end my post and one I think we will all be able to relate to:

"Learning for learning's sake would, we were told, give us the world.  This seems amazing to me now.  I don't think many students feel the romance of university that we did.  We knew we were privileged and were grateful for it.  I was no scholar, but I loved English, language excited me, and reading gave me other worlds."

Yes, thank goodness for books!

At the Source: March, April & Cardiff

I didn't mean to fall behind in my reading of Gillian Clarke's At the Source, but I hope to get back on track this month.  It's a book I like to read without lots of distractions, and I haven't had lots of those sorts of reading opportunities of late.  Yesterday afternoon I had a quiet hour or two and I devoted my time to catching up (or nearly so) by reading Clarke's March and April entries and her very wonderful essay titled "Cardiff".  That alone is worth the price of the book!

Her monthly diary entries are actually fairly short.  They remind me a little of last year's The Curious Gardener, though I feel slightly more in my comfort zone with Gillian Clarke than I did with Anna Pavord.  Don't get me wrong, I loved the Pavord, but I am not a gardener (the closest I come is an 'armchair gardener' and then my knowledge is pretty limited).  Clarke's observations are more general and they touch upon a number of subjects--writing, nature, Wales, and more autobiographical writing, too. 

March is titled "Breaking Waters".  It's what you expect and maybe not exactly so.  Snow, rain, rivers and even birth.  Yes, literally breaking waters.  I like to follow her train of thought.  She begins with the thrush and songbirds in general:

"We must live with nature if we are to live at all.  Then, one evening this month a thrush sang again in the beech brake at the end of Cae Blaen Cwrt.  There is no evening song like it.  The thrush sings in rhyming couplet, the poet among birds, as Browning knew: 'That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over'."

And then the blackbird:

"I love the blackbird.  It sings all day, everywhere, pausing only at nightfall.  At dawn it is the first and clearest song.  It does not stop for rain.  Indeed it seems to love the rain, as if each drop eased the song more fluidly, fluently from its throat."

See how she nicely segues from bird to bird to water?  I love birdsong, too.  It is the first sign that winter surely must be coming to an end when I am on my morning walk to the bus--still dark, still cold but I can hear them--birds singing to each other (and maybe to me--in their own way).  And now?  Light and soon warmth and a veritable symphony of birdsong.

The spring thaw and then the spring solstice and she moves on to those breaking waters--in the form of Britain's longest river, the Severn.  The Severn flows east through the mountains of Wales and then down along the English border gaining in power from the rivers it joins up with.  At the tides are at their peak during the spring solstice.

"To watch a heave of water travelling so fast!  To ride it between fields, past cathedrals.  What a water-beast!  What a muscular old mud-dragon of brown water!  The physics of tide and moon, of the turning planet, the geography of mountain and river plain, the particular geology, the deepest of horseshoe bends and the right funnel shape for the tides to back up, the push and shove, the give  have made it a wonder of nature.  Even thinking about it is thrilling."

She does convey that in her wonderful description.  She paints quite a picture and I can even hear the whoosh of the water.  Not just a gurgle, I think, but a force--water rushing!  If March is all about water, April is about warmth.  When Gillian Clarke writes you don't just see it mentally, but you feel it and smell it too.  It's vivid.  2007.  Dry March days turn into a heatwave in April.  Making it unbearable not only for people, but those birthing animals, too. 

"In the weather's present tense April heat feels like forever and ever.  We enjoy the thoughtless happiness that warmth and sunlight bring, caught too by the warning it carries.  This is not normal.  Nothing can be depended on any more, not the winds of March, nor April showers.  The climate is unweaving the poetry."

Isn't that last line great?  Those hot winds from Africa are famous, bringing that heat along and warming things up.  If too much water takes its toll on nature, so, too, does the wind.  It wears the stone away and takes away the topsoil leaving behind a fine layer of rust-red dust, Saharan in origin.  

Clarke meanders in an entirely pleasant way from topic to topic, returning to one she began in March and moving on to something new and particular to April.  The year she was keeping this diary was an especially "superb bluebell year".  I've never seen a bluebell wood, have you?  I hadn't even seen one or thought what it might be like.  I want to walk in a wood that might date back to 1600!  Clarke is fortunate enough to have one on her own land.

"Early winter rain and cool spring sunlight through leafless oak trees brought one of the finest flowerings ever.  The fact that they were ours, and while we were in charge no one would ever, ever plough them up, made theirs the bluest blue in the world, the almost violet of the dress in Renoir's La Parisienne in the National Museum in Cardiff, lapis lazuli blue, rarest of pigments.  And the smell!  We walked the coconut-scented gorse track to where the yellow gorse to the left gave out and the blue floor of the wood was spread before us, the scent changing from spice to floral.  We were dizzy with breathing it.  Ours!"

She worries that this native bluebell sitting so near the Atlantic, surely the bluest and most intense of all the world will be lost to climate change.  I appreciate her fear and wonder if I will ever get to see it myself.

I think I will save her essay, "Cardiff" for my next post as this one will otherwise get entirely too unwieldy.  It is my favorite bit of the book so far, and so much about it to appreciate and tell you about.  Lots of quotable bits so I will have to pick and choose carefully.  Until then, imagine those bluebell woods!  I'll be back in a day or two!

I wonder what May's chapter will bring?  A peek ahead and I see we return once again to the blackbird . . .

Rattle His Bones by Carola Dunn

Carola Dunn is up to book twenty-two of the Daisy Dalrymple mystery series.  Rattle His Bones is number eight.  I had better step things up a bit if I have any chance at all of catching up with Daisy's adventures.  I won't give away the solution to the mystery, but I am going to catch up with Daisy's personal life, which is of course one of the biggest draws for me to these books.

Dunn was born and raised in England but has lived in the US for more than thirty years now.  She's a prolific writer of not just mysteries but Regency romances as well.  I've not read any of the latter, but I am quite fond of Daisy.  The series is set in 1920s England and Daisy is a Honorable, but without the cash to go along with the aristocratic background.  Her beloved brother and former betrothed were both killed in the Great War and now Daisy must more or less make her own way in the world.  Probably to the chagrin of her mother, she works as a free lance writer selling her articles on British life to magazines, particularly American magazines.  It's just enough to make ends meet though she shares a flat with Lucy, an artist and photographer, and another very independent "Bright Young Thing". 

Actually in comparison to Lucy, Daisy shows much restraint in her personal life no matter how unconventional she might be.  Daisy has a knack for stumbling, often literally, over dead bodies.  As a matter of fact that is how she met her fiancé, Alec Fletcher, a Detective Chief Inspector with Scotland Yard.  No matter that the two don't share similar backgrounds, and the two come from different social classes.  Love knows no bounds and the two clicked from the first.  And now they are engaged to be married (maybe in the next book?). 

Alec was married previously but his wife died of Influenza and now his mother helps raise his daughter Belinda.  Marrying into a ready-made family?  Daisy will surely take it all in stride.  She did manage to save Belinda's puppy from potentially being returned to the dog pound when he ate one of Mrs. Fletcher's slippers.  Diplomacy is one of Daisy's strong points.  No doubt a result of her posh upbringing.  But then Daisy is an entirely likable woman and if anyone could save the day, it's Daisy.

It's summer in 1923 and Daisy is spending the day with her nephew, Derek, and Belinda at the Natural History Museum.  It's meant to be a fun outing for the kids, but also a working afternoon for Daisy as she begins her research into an article on the museum.  It would normally prove to be a quiet and uneventful afternoon.  What excitement could possibly occur in a museum filled with prehistoric bones and gemstones and other ancient artifacts?  But this is Daisy we're talking about.   

Musty old museum filled with dusty bones?  In reality the museum is a seething hotbed of jealousies and petty rivalries.  This is an institution filled with academics, you know.  And someone has it out for the curator of the gemstone collection.  So much so that he has been stabbed.  Daisy hears a loud crash and is the first on the scene to see the curator dead amongst the bones of a dinosaur.  One of the more difficult and little-liked curators.  So it turns out that there are any number of people who would want the man dead.  One of his colleagues?  Maybe a now penniless crown prince of a small country who visits the museum to see royal gems gifted to Queen Victoria (who then donated them to the museum to the prince's exasperation), or a museum guest?

Daisy has an "in" since she knows the detectives sent to investigate the case, and she is already there doing research.  Since she is asking questions anyway . . .  So  mixture of natural curiosity and the fact that she is one of the main witnesses means she is once again involved in a case that lands in DCI Fletcher's lap.

Like her previous novels, this is another very cozy, light and entertaining mystery very much in the vein of an Agatha Christie novel.  Lots of puzzle piecing but a healthy dose, too, of family drama and a continuation of Daisy and Alec's growing romance.  The bits where they are together, not investigating, but just getting on in life (dining and going to the theater and the cozier domestic scenes) are my favorite parts.  These books are definitely "mystery-lite" but I find them an enjoyable way to spend a few afternoons of pure escapism. 

I read a number of these books in my pre-blogging days, but the previous two at least, can be found in my archives: Dead in the Water, and before that Styx and Stones.  Next up is To Davy Jones Below, which I hope to get to sooner than later since I am expecting a wedding soon.