When a story (not necessarily a specific book but a type of story that is) calls out, sometimes you just got to give in and listen to the voice. My end of the year reading and clearing of piles might end up in a simple clearing of the night table and reshelving, but better to start fresh than get bogged down in a read that is no longer calling out to me. I'm not quite sure what I am going to do with all that . . . but I picked up Chris Womersley's recently published novel City of Crows and am settling in quite nicely in those pages. It is still early days and maybe it is too soon to tell, but the story does fit my mood.
Europa Editions is one of those publishers whose newest releases I will pretty much get whatever they are (much like those NYRB Classics) as they always come out with quality and interesting books and I love that there is an emphasis on international and translated fiction. So I seem to have ordered or borrowed most of their fall frontlist releases and have been eyeing this book for a while. I think this is a third of their newer books that I now have in progress.
I have been feeling somewhat in a rut with some of my books (which truth be told is mostly those hangers on that I feel a tiny bit obligated to finish). Mostly, however, I am very much enjoying the books on my sidebar to the right. There are a few that I feel like I have been reading forever and am ready to turn that last page. So something new and very different has been appealing to me. Maybe not a crime novel and definitely not a setting of early 20th century or a war book (all things I love, but I have a fair sampling of those already on hand).
The best choice then, is some good historical fiction and City of Crows, bleak as I'm afraid it might ultimately be, just sounded right for the moment. This is set in seventeenth-century France and starts out with the death of a Plague victim. I capitalize Plague, since I think Death is going to be a theme and maybe even something of a character in this story.
Charlotte Picot, a young wife and mother living in the tiny village of Saint-Gilles has just lost her husband to the Plague--following on the heels of several of her small children. All that is left is Charlotte and her nine-year-old son Nicolas. They decide to steal away in the night after the burial of her husband. The other villagers might not look so kindly on her leaving, rather abandoning Saint-Gilles, but with the Plague upon them, it seems rather a wise thing to do.
So I have barely started reading and they are now traveling to the city of Lyon, which her husband told her about--more than a few days walk from her village and hopefully far enough away from the spread of the Plague. I know something is soon going to happen. Someone is going to carry off her son and she will risk all to follow and get him back. And I know she is going to cross paths with a former convict who will be her companion. It all sounds risky and maybe a little dark since their journey is to take them into the heart of Paris. I can't wait to see what happens.
So, maybe a bleak read considering the journey I am about to take with Charlotte. Will I be covering my eyes in anguish? What I think is going to save this dark storytelling is the light and very deft telling of the tale as I am very much liking Womersley's prose. Let me share a little taste. This is just after the burial of her husband.
"Night fell, Charlotte sensed a lurch in the atmosphere, the wind changing direction, and she stood with one hand pressed to her lower back, the other resting on a spade's rough wooden handle. It was a clear night and the rising June moon was as full and low as a monk's belly. She paused to listen to the last gossiping sounds of robins and the hiss of the wind through the oak trees, their slow-creaking limbs, the rattle of ivy that clung to their trunks. It was only the forest muttering its difficult speech. It was a language she had heard her entire life, but it never failed to imbue her with fear and melancholy, as if it were reminding her, perpetually, of some malevolence close at hand, of sprites and other unknown vermin scuttling about in the dark. There were stories after all, of an odd man in the forest who became a wolf at night and tore people's bodies to pieces. Other things, too. Ghosts, demons, spirits."
Then again, maybe this is a perfect autumn read? A story to read under a thick blanket with a cup of hot chocolate nearby and with a nice bright lamp close by. I only wish Europa Editions had a subscription like NYRB Classics. I would be the first to sign up!