A Work in Progress

The Woman in the Dark, Dashiell Hammett

What better way to start the new year than with a little hardboiled American crime from the virtuoso novelist Dashiell Hammett.  I had just crossed paths with him in a very peripheral sort of way via Laurie King in her Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes mystery Locked Rooms (I still need to write about it), which is set in San Francisco and in which Hammett makes a cameo appearance and aides the pair in the solving of their most recent crime.  The Woman in the Dark is really little more than a novella and can be read in one sitting and felt very slight.  Hammett's novels are all fairly slight, he wastes not a word in his writing, but this one felt even thinner.  Still, a perfect little kick off to reading Hammett this year. 

Woman in the Dark, subtitled "a Novel of Dangerous Romance" was published in 1933 at the tail end of his writing career in installments for Liberty Magazine.  It came, too, only a few years after the start of what would be a lifelong relationship with playwright Lillian Hellman.  Apparently it is has more "romance" or the promise of a just possibly happy ending than his other works, but it's probably best not to read too much of the personal into his writing.  His final novel, however, The Thin Man does feature a romantically involved pair filled with witty dialogue and lots of clinking glasses.

The titular woman of the novella, Luise Fischer, a Swiss refugee, is running away from something (or someone in this case) in the opening pages of the story.  She is dressed to the nines in an evening gown and slippers.  She has stumbled in the road and broken a heel in her effort to get away fast.  And she rings the doorbell of the first house she encounters. 

"She was a tall woman and carried herself proudly, for all she was lame and the wind had tousled her hair and the gravel of the road and cut and dirtied her hands and bare arms and the red crepe of her gown."

There she comes across a man known only as "Brazil" and as things are wont to happen in just these kinds of situations, both have just enough baggage and the hint of sordid pasts (or presents) to make things interesting.  Brazil is as cool as a clear Arctic morning showing not the least bit of surprise, as if a woman in a red evening gown showing up on his doorstep is an everyday occurrence.  Into some lives these things happen.  He barely turns to her when she enters the room, and it is with a hoarse unemotional voice he replies to her anxious request for help.  Maybe Brazil has other things on his mind as he seems to already be giving refuge to a young woman hiding from a difficult father.

Things quickly become complicated for the lot.  Not far behind Luise two thugs come knocking on Brazil's door in search of their runaway maiden, but she doesn't want to return and Brazil is not going to let this damsel go unaided.  It turns out that Brazil is a recently released parolee who has a problem with confinement.  He cannot bear the idea of being locked up again, but against his better judgement he tries to help Luise free herself of what has now become unwanted attention.  One of the thugs was at one time her rescuer if he brought her to America.  It makes one curious what the story behind the story there is.  I can only imagine, however.

These situations rarely end well.  I won't give away the rest of the story, but only say that events snowball and Brazil gets himself into a messy situation.  It may be that Hammett was writing this with one eye towards pitching it as a movie, which it was eventually adapted to.  Woman in the Dark was filmed in B&W and starred Fay Wray, Ralph Bellamy and Melvyn Douglas in 1934, to what looks like fairly favorable attention.  It seems to be streaming on Amazon now, so I shall be seeing how it translated into film. 

Hammett only wrote five novels but loads and loads of short stories as well as a few screenplays.  It's interesting that he stopped writing for the last twenty-five years or so of his life, but I think he was ill for a good chunk of that time.  I hadn't actually planned on making reading his work into any sort of project, but it seems to be turning out that way, so I think now I will go back and pick up Red Harvest, his first crime novel and see where it takes me. 

Nights at the Alexandra, William Trevor

William Trevor is easily one of my very favorite writers and particularly a favorite short story writer.  He is an always reliably wonderful storyteller who writes with such grace and elegance.  His stories are so very often melancholic and his characters living quiet lives of desperation.  They are a little bit tragic but always sympathetic.  He was a prolific writer with an extensive backlist that includes easily as many short story collections as novels.  I will happily read my way, ever so slowly so as to savor, his entire oeuvre.

It was a given that I would have to read something by William Trevor in March especially since my monthly prompt was Irish Eyes are Smiling.  It was only a matter of choosing which of the many books I own by William Trevor that I would choose.  Since I was hoping to read more than one book for my prompt I decided on the slender Nights at the Alexandra, which is a novella and two short stories. 

Elegiac is one of those words that feels very ephemeral to me.  A word that is hard to explain, but it fits all three of the stories in this volume which are all set in mid-twentieth century Ireland.  In "Nights at the Alexandra" (1987) is narrated by a middle aged man looking back at his youth in a small Irish town. "I am a fifty-eight-year-old provincial, I have no children.  I have never married."  And immediately we are transported back to his youth.  We enter his mind and memory, but that falls away and we are living his life alongside him.  Harry, Frau Messinger tells him, "I have the happiest marriage in the world!  Please, when you think of me, remember that."  And think of her he will since her life and that of her husband will become inextricably linked together with his. 

The Messingers come to Ireland as their marriage pushes them outside the boundaries of acceptability in their own countries.  He is German and she English.  He much older with sons in the German Army and she beautiful with an unusual past history of travel and perhaps left on the shelf too long.  But their marriage is one of equals and they are happy together.  It's the War and they would end up in internment camps had they chosen to remain in either country.  In Ireland, a neutral country, the War is simply known as the Emergency.  The couple of more a matter of curiosity as to the possibility of their Jewishness than anything else. 

The Messingers befriend Harry, who is fifteen at the time of their friendship, but it is one that is frowned upon by Harry's mother.  The impropriety of it.  And they are Protestants and perhaps the Messingers are just too Continental.  Harry is meant to get his education, which is just barely average and in which he does not excel, and then go to work, just as his father did, in the family timberyard.  Only that is not what he wants.  Rather it is to run the Alexandra that is his dream, and the promise of the Messingers as Herr Messinger builds the Alexandra Cinema in honor of his wife. 

William Trevor's stories are always peopled with very average characters who have dreams that may or not be realized.  Often, as is the case in reality, they simply must settle and accept life as it is happens.  And if they do pursue their dreams, they come at a cost, as is the case with Harry. 

The two short stories, "The Ballroom of Romance" (1972) and "The Hill Bachelors" (2000) are perfect companion pieces.  They fit together as flip sides of the same coin.  The former story I read some years ago though it was a bit hazy.  It is, like all his work, well worth revisiting.  Each story is set in rural Ireland, about daughters (which is expected and generally what happens in stories), though also sons, who must return home and care for an aging parent after the death of a mother or father.  Living in rural Ireland after the midpoint of the twentieth century is lonely business.  Youth leave to go to the cities and rural life means hardship and loneliness.  It means cycling nine miles to get to the closest ballroom for a night's society, which perhaps ends in a bit of romantic tussle with someone you might not otherwise have looked at, but that's your only option.  Or maybe not even that is an option.  Knowing that you are stuck running a farm in the country isn't  much of an attraction for a single young woman who would prefer to work in a factory or be a clerk in a shoe shop. 

Melancholic stories but oh so beautifully told.  So very typically Trevor are the landscapes in these stories.  It may be familiar ground but his storytelling is always fresh  and engaging.  I've been so lucky with my reading this year as once again I am (in this case revisiting) an author of whom who I would love to pick up another book and start reading right now (John Wyndham, Sara Sheridan, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Barbara Comyns still linger in my mind).  If you have never read William Trevor, please go and find one of his books or at the least one of his short stories and read him this year.  You will not regret it!

April is here and with it comes a new prompt, and already I have a little stack of reading possibilities which I will tell you all about tomorrow!

Teaser Tuesday: The Lawyer's Secret

Finally.  A breakthrough!  And it is, unsurprisingly, thanks to the Victorians.  To Mary Elizabeth Braddon to be exact.  Nothing like a little melodramatic, Victorian, sensational storytelling to get a person out of their Classic reading slump.  Looking through my list of reads so far this year, there is not a single "Classic" finish yet.  Granted several could easily be considered modern classics, and they count too, but I am thinking along the lines of Canon-Classic-pre-20th century.  So, maybe M.E. Braddon might be a little bit of a stretch, and it is only a novella, but it is my way of easing back into Classic Literature.  Just a little taste, a teaser (literally today), to whet my appetite and make me want to reach for more.  Which, indeed, I do want to do.

I had been thinking of reading M.E. Braddon's The Lawyer's Secret ever since I bought it earlier this year.  It is a Hesperus Classic--they do those smart novella length classics, of which I have a number of on my shelves.  It's just over 110 pages long, and on closer perusal yesterday I realized the book actually contains two novellas, "The Lawyer's Secret" as well as "The Mystery at Fernwood".  Have you had the pleasure of reading any of Braddon's work?  If not, and if you like Wilkie Collins, do give her a try.  I read her Lady Audley's Secret a number of years ago and was suitably entertained and impressed. 

This is the sort of story you can easily apply the term "delicious" to.  Braddon knew well (and being a contemporary of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins could easily hold her own against) how to pull the reader into a story and then string them along, turning those pages quickly.  I just started reading a couple of days ago and already am nearly finished with the first novella.  The premise: a young woman is set to inherit a fortune, but only if she agrees to marry the man who was the dead man's adopted son.  Her lawyer/guardian encourages her to do so, but several married years later she is unhappy and a victim to her husband's miserly control over her inherited fortune.  There's more to the story, of course--she harbors a secret love for . . . oops best not to reveal too much to you.

Let me give you a proper teaser instead, M.E. Braddon's own wonderful storytelling--a few things about our heroine:

"She was very handsome.  Her hair was of the darkest brown, her eyes grey--those large grey eyes, fringed with long black lashes, which are more dangerous than all other eyes ever invented for the perdition of honest men.  They looked like deep pools of shining water, bordered by shadowy rushes; they looked like stray stars in a black  midnight sky; but they were so beautiful, like the signal lamp which announces the advent of an express upon the heels of a slow train, they seemed to say, 'Danger!'  Her nose was aquiline; her mouth small, clearly cut, and very determined in expression; her complexion brunette, and rather pale.  For the rest she was tall, her head set with a haughty grace upon her sloping shoulders, her hands perfect."

She sounds a little formidable, don't you think?  If not quite "formidable" then at least she is of independent nature--and I would expect nothing less from a Victorian heroine à la Mary Braddon!  I am now glued to the pages in order to find out just what that secret is.  I am curious about the cover illustration, which seems to have a briefcase as well as barbed wire around the handle.  I'm not even sure there was barbed wire in Victorian times?  Just how does it relate to that secret, which I am hoping will soon be revealed.

I mentioned I am ready to pick up another classic when I finish this one.  I have a few selections already.  Elizabeth Gaskell's The Poor Clare is a story of murder and revenge.  I have the Melville House Art of the Novella edition.  Another potential quckie with fewer than 100 pages.  And then there is the more M.E. Braddon, The Trail of the Serpent which involved another orphan, a murder and a mute detective.  And then there is Trollope.  He is one of those 'mean to read' authors.  Maybe it is finally time for Can You Forgive her?.  The latter two are chunky and full fledged stories.  Having a few books tempting me means I stay focused on my reading (and would in any case really since this is real suspense!) so I have something new to look forward to very soon.

Foster by Claire Keegan

Are all Irish stories tinged with sadness and melancholy and filled with secrets, some secrets devastating?  No, I suppose not, but the two I read for March (had I not run out of time I would have added more to my reading pile, but I'll get back to them later) certainly have those qualities.  Claire Keegan's beautiful novella, Foster, had the added bonus of being narrated by a young girl.  It's not quite a coming-of-age story, but it does have about it a realization of a different world and is about a transformative experience both literally and psychologically.  I have read a few of Claire Keegan's short stories, so I knew Foster would be good, but it was really, really good.  Much in the same way that William Trevor has a knowing way about his writing yet is totally unselfconscious, so too does Keegan (there must be something in the water in Ireland).  Both authors have an economy of style but neither lacks anything in the stories they tell.

It took me a while before I understood the title of the book, and it wasn't until I saw another jacket illustration with the title "The Foster" rather than just "Foster".  It's amazing how one three letter article can change the meaning of a word.  Foster could be the name of a boy, or it could be what a child is called who is sent off to stay with others when her family cannot take care of her.  The young girl in this story, nameless and small enough to be held on someone's lap (yet filled with wonder and enough curiosity to just barely understand things are trickier in life than they appear), is taken by her father to stay with 'her mother's people' some distance away.  Her mother is nearing the end of her pregnancy and already has a full house of small children and soon won't be able to manage all of them, so one is sent off to relatives.

Girleen, Kinsella calls her.  Her ma's brother if I have the family ties right.  Her father is a proud man yet he cannot provide for them all and hasn't even the money to take in the harvest.  Kinsella and his wife Edna are alone in their home, a well-kept farm all clean and tidy and well cared for.  The girl looks no better than a tinker's child, grimy with dirt under her nails and dusty feet in sandals.  Always in a hurry to leave her Da has forgotten to bring her bits and bobs as Edna calls them, so she takes her to find other clothes to 'tog her out' after a good scrubbing which includes under the nails and inside the ears. 

The child wants both to go back home with her Da and stay right where she is in this clean, quiet house where so much care and attention is shown her.  Surely she has left a ramshackle home for this place where she will even have her own books, even if at first she is togged out in clothes that are too big for her and must be rolled and cuffed and belong to someone else.  The couple has an obvious affection both for each other and for her and when Edna takes the girl on a quiet afternoon walk to a well the girl assumes there is something secretive in their journey.  The couple are fair but firm and Edna impresses upon her that:

"There are no secrets in this house, do you hear?"

"Where there's a secret, she says, there's shame, and shame is something we can do without."

The girl's "yeahs" turn into proper "yeses" and the attention shown her is loving and without censure or anger.  It is a different world for her.   And she blossoms.

"I wait until I see myself not as I was when I arrived, looking like a tinker's child, but as I am now, clean, in different clothes, with the woman behind me. I dip the ladle and bring it to my lips.  This water is cool and clean as anything I have ever tasted: it tastes of my father leaving, of him never having been there, of having nothing after he was gone.  I dip it again and lift it level with the sunlight.  I drink six measures of water and wish, for now, that this place without shame or secrets could be my home."

But the adult world is different than that of a child's.  Or maybe it's the world outside the Kinsella's home that is different.  The Kinsella's live without malice or shame yet they still have a secret they do not like to talk about.  It takes a (not particularly) well meaning village lady to shed light on their circumstances to the young girl.  There is malice in the world, or maybe it is jealousy or plain meanness in the revelations she shares with the girl about the Kinsella's painful 'secret'.  So maybe this is a coming-of-age story after all, in its own way.  The girl is exposed to hard truths in a cruel manner.  It's not anything that the Kinsellas did that will be shocking, but what happened to them.  So the girl gets a painful glimpse at the adult world.  The reader understands and maybe, too, the girl does in her own way. 

But what matters in the end is this new world and what it can hold for a small child, and the wish that she need never let it go.  She'll never quite be able to return to the life where she is little more than a ragamuffin tinker's child.

This was another amazing story and it won a "Davy Byrnes Award".  Foster is a slim book well worth searching out.  I am already looking forward to getting back to those short stories I started reading last year.   Claire Keegan--another author to look for!

Lanterns Across the Snow by Susan Hill

So that dusting of snow I was expecting . . .  It looks like we are going to have a white Christmas after all.  I still enjoyed a nice walk this afternoon and managed to squeeze in a few errands and a most delicious lunch despite the heavy snowfall.  And then it was time to read, and how fitting since I read Susan Hill's Lanterns Across the Snow.  It is, I think, going to be a perfect holiday read that I will happily return to again.  The refrain in this novella is "last night, the snow fell.  And then I began to remember.  I remembered all the things I had forgotten.  Or so it had seemed."  Last night the snow fell, and today the snow fell, too.

Lanterns in the Snow is a reminiscence in more than one way.  It is the narrator's remembrance of one magical, perfect Christmas--the sort of Christmas that only happens in those years of childhood that are so full of wonder.  It is also a story that loosely recalls the Nativity.  It is filled with gorgeous descriptions of nature and food and family.  You can easily read it in one sitting (best enjoyed with a hot drink and maybe some gingerbread).  If you plan ahead you might even read it in three short sittings since the story is broken into three chapters--Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and St. Stephan's Day. 

The narrator looks back on the childhood of her ninth year when she lived with her family in the vicarage of a small village.  Her brother is her best friend and also her, at times, biggest annoyance.  She both admires her father who is so important to the community and bemoans the fact that even on the most loved of all childhood holidays he must work.  Death and birth take no holiday and so her father must attend to those most in need.  This underlying message of hope is quite nicely presented and not heavy handed, but I especially appreciated the descriptions of the natural world, which make the story quite vivid.

"She stood at the window, looking out.  Christmas Eve; and the snow fell like goose-down."

That sounds oddly familiar to me today!  I just need a lantern to make it complete.  Lanterns, and perhaps the light or the illumination from them can do double duty both as a feeling of warmth and beauty but also hope.  And lanterns are threaded through the story--from the carolers on Christmas Eve to the lanterns on the ice where Fanny watches her parents happily skate hand in hand. 

Another youthful reminiscence I read recently is Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales, which is another gorgeous story.  Since Thomas is a poet you can imagine how lyrical his prose is.  Another snowy story, which is what I imagine for Wales at this time of year. 

"Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed.  But here a small boy says: 'It snowed last year, too.  I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea."

A Child's Christmas in Wales is much shorter and more impressionistic.  It is less a story than another child's observation of Christmas Day and all the treats and wonders that it contains.  

Both books have beautiful illustrations and both will grace my shelves permanently.  I had only read Hill's stories of suspense and the macabre, so this was quite a change, and I have never read Dylan Thomas, but now I will certainly seek out his poetry.  As holiday celebrations are taking place, I'll leave you with a few happy images and hope your holiday is equally as lovely.

"I sit here, beside the window, and watch the snow, and the blackbird who comes and sits under the flowering bush, and after a while hops out further, to find the food that I have thrown.  The yellow flowers of the bush are dusted with snow, and the bare branches of the tall tree are outlined delicately in white.  And I sit here, beside the window, and my lamp throws its light in a pool onto the ground below, but there is no snow so close to the building, the overhang of the roof above deflects it."

"And all last night, and all today, I have sat here quietly and remembered.  Remembered joy and sorrow, nights and days, summer and winter, in that perfect place."

"I remember my room at the very top of the tall old house, and the view out over the churchyard, and the gravestone of my two dead brothers.  Remember the stone church and the fields beyond, remember the wood and the lanes and Ladyman Barrow."

Books Read in 2014: The Catch-Up Post

One of the things I really wanted to do this year (which I did sort of do pretty well actually) is write about all the books I finished reading in some manner or another.  I never feel like I've quite finished with a book until I have written about it.  There were a number of really good reads, as a matter of fact, I wanted to write about this year but didn't get around to.  Now so much time has passed that I think I won't be able to manage a proper post (though I have a few books still set aside that I am going to try and tackle in the coming week), but maybe just to feel like I am starting with a mostly clean slate let me tell you about a few reads that are worth mentioning. 

First up are two NYRB Classics that I received from my year long subscription.  The first goes all the way back to the last days of 2013!  Alfred Hayes's My Face for the World to See was the freebie book I got for renewing my subscription.  Thinking I was going to kick things off the right way, I read it before the old year was even out.  (Too bad I wasn't as ambitious with the rest of the books I received on subscription--but no worries--thankfully books in my own personal collection have neither expiration dates nor due dates!).  This is a Hollywood novel of the 1950s written from an insider's view.  It's the story of an affair between two unnamed (perhaps morally bankrupt) characters.  Slight in length but not in quality.  Maybe I should reread this one and write about it as it deserves.

On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry by William H. Gass is another slight book, but one filled with lots of depth and meaning.  I think Gass is a formidable writer.  It was with lots of interest and happy anticipation that I approached a book on the color blue, but this was so much more than about a color.  It's all the variations and permutations on the word and what it stands for.  And so eloquently told.

"In a way I've used the words, yet I've quite ignored their content, and in that sense I've not employed them at all, they've only appeared.  I haven't even exercised the form."

But don't worry, exercise he does.  This is a book I did really want to write about but it was a little too challenging for me--I couldn't quite wrap my head around it all and in the end it defeated me.  I have another chance to read him, however, since my subscription included a book of his short stories as well.  I hold that book in reserve.  (Mostly because it scares me in the way James Joyce scares me, if you know what I mean).

Although I am impatiently awaiting my first NYRB of 2015 (I renewed my subscription and am now waiting for my next freebie book as well as January's selection which won't be here for another week or so, I think), I decided to cancel my Art of the Novella subscription.  It pained me to do so, as I love those cool Melville House novellas, but I am supposed to be on a budget and I have fallen far behind in reading all my novellas.  I wrote about most of them (in the case of a couple, it was only teasers but close enough). 

I think Henry James falls into that William H. Gass category of being formidable.  I read The Lesson of the Master this year, which is a story of a young writer being befriended by a famous writer he has for long held in high esteem.  I don't think I'll be giving anything away by saying the two will fall for the same woman and the twist at the end is quite illuminating.  There is indeed a "lesson" here, but I wonder if it is the one the "Master" really meant to teach.

Antonia White's The Lost Traveller is the second in a quartet of books about Nanda Grey.  I wrote about Frost in May here, and I plan on reading the next two books in 2015.  It's obvious that White drew on her own life experiences to write the books, but after a seventeen year gap between the first and second she decided to fictionalize and invent more and so Nanda became Clara Batchelor.  The story continues Clara's coming of age--her deep friendships much frowned upon in the convent, her difficulties with her parents--especially her father on whom rests so much of her feeling of identity and desire for love and approval.  Perhaps so much so that she leaves school and home to work as a nanny and thinks she falls in love.  What better way to please your parents, well, mostly your father, than make a proper Catholic marriage?  This is the sort of searching Clara does--

"How do people become real?  Does one just change as they get older?  Or did something definite happen to you?"  (She's asking her mother).

I thought I knew the trajectory Clara was bound for, but when I picked up the next book, The Sugar House, I think things are going to move in a different direction after all.  Hopefully I'll find out sooner than later.

I had this idea of reading all of Molly Keane's (M.J. Farrell's) books in the order she wrote them.  I don't seem to be making the best of progress, however.  For so long Mad Puppetstown sat on my night stand that I think I must have started reading it at least three separate times.  The third time was the charm, but it's a pity I didn't write about it right away.  This novel, while not her best, is very much Molly Keane territory in that it is about a great house, and the Anglo-Irish family living there.  In this case, Easter Chevington and her two cousins Basil and Evelyn.  It's a house much loved but this is the period of the Great War and the Easter Uprising and life is tumultuous in Ireland, and so the three cousins flee to England leaving behind an old aunt who's not about to be put out of her beloved home under any circumstances.  Things do come full circle, not without some drama and upheaval.  Next up is Conversation Piece, which I hope to get to sooner than I did with poor Mad Puppetstown.

I can tell you right now that Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being is going to be on my favorites (forthcoming) list.  It was longlisted for last year's Man Booker Prize.  I can see why.  It's an amazing read--multi-layered, well written, thoughtful, and filled with thought.  It's a story within stories, told from varying perspectives in parallel times.  And she pulls it all off perfectly and beautifully.  I'm still undecided whether Ozeki means by the title--a tale for the time being, or a tale for the Time Being--as in a measure of time or someone who has almost magical mystical qualities.  That play on words is just one example of how intricately this novel is structured.  It's the story of a diary written by a Japanese schoolgirl who is being bullied and she sends her diary out into the world--it's found by a woman, a writer living on the Pacific coast of Canada.  Just thinking about it makes me all tingly for what Ozeki did in this book--did I already say it is So Interesting?  There is just so much to it, that even thinking about it months later leaves me with such a feeling of satisfaction and satiation.  When I think of how I really need to read more Good Books, this is exactly what I have in mind. 

So, this is it.  Save for a very few books that I'll talk about soon, this has been my reading year, to be expanded upon in the next couple of days as I make everything all tidy for 2015!

Fear by Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig's 1920 novella Fear (Angst in German, translated by Anthea Bell) is the story of one woman's torment when she becomes the victim of a blackmailer.  The catch is she's married and has been enjoying an affair with a pianist.  One day she is seen leaving her lover's apartment by his former mistress.  The woman begins gradually demanding ever larger amounts of money.  The fear of being caught out by her husband causes such agony that she despairs losing everything in her life that is comfortable and happy.  This is a morality tale of sorts, and a gripping one at that.

What is it that makes a woman who appears to have everything take a chance like Irene Wagner takes by having a fling with a man she doesn't even love?  The thrill of the chase?  The idea of an adventure?

"Satiety can be as much of an incitement as hunger, and it was the very safety and security of Irene's existence that made her feel curious and ready for an adventure."

Irene is happily married to a successful lawyer, one of the best known and regarded in the city.  She has two lovely children and a beautiful home.  She leads a completely comfortable middle-class, bourgeois existence.  Her life is, apparently, too calm and contented.  Her life it not unlike other famous heroines--Emma Bovary maybe, or Eline Vere--who glimpse a world of romance in the books they read and the plays they see at the theatre.  A world unlike their own and peopled with romantic figures who lead lives of extravagance.  Into the mixture of this comfortable boredom add one young man filled with "ardent and obvious desire" and a new and exciting passion is sure to ignite.

"Perhaps all that really attracted her to him was a touch of grief lying like a shadow on his rather too interestingly arranged features."

This is not the stuff of her usual mild but meaningless flirtations with other men.  Irene has a certain something and the men of her class pay her "respectful court".  But perhaps it is the added danger attached to this artist.  They meet, they chat.  He pays her attention and shows interest in what she has to say.  Interest moves from curiosity to the sensual sphere, and then all is lost for Irene.  Into her orderly, middle class life she adds a weekly tryst with this young man.  He becomes just one more of her normal pleasures.

It becomes a dangerous game to Irene.  Her life, which was so full of routine, takes on an added and exciting hue.  She begins pushing the boundaries.  Like a top whirling around and around she herself begins to spin out of control. 

"Not since girlhood had she felt so light at heart, with all her senses so animated.  Nothing like it had sent sparks flying through her body, not in the first days of her marriage or in her lover's embrace, and the idea of wasting this strange lightness, this sweet frenzy of the blood, on well-regulated hours seemed unendurable."

And then it happens.  It all comes to a head.  There's a woman waiting in the stairwell.  A knowing look in her eyes.  She knows Irene's name.  Knows what she's been up to.  The threat now, to her placid bourgeois existence is obvious.  In one blink of an eye she can lose everything she took for granted.  The woman bars her way, she has scorn in her eyes and a fierceness in her tone. 

"That's right, oh yes, what they call a real lady, every so respectable!  Not satisfied with her husband and all his money and that, no, not her, she has to go stealing a poor girl's fellow too!"

And so it begins.  The demands for money.  For more and more money.  Irene tells her the affair is over and she will not return to her lover's apartment, but the damage is, of course, done.  And now she is at the mercy of her blackmailer.  Irene feels hunted by this woman who seems to know all about her.  Where she lives.  Where she goes.  Irene now only feels safe outside the house and in the company of her friends and it is a frenzied existence she begins leading.  Again, like that top spinning out of control.

What is most eye opening to Irene is that she realizes how little she actually knows her husband and understands his feelings.  Despite their years together and their intimacies, she finds she cannot even imagine how he will respond to the knowledge of his wife's betrayal. 

Zweig quite brilliantly uses the idea of crime and punishments as meted out by Irene's husband to cast light on the characters.  Irene begins really seeing what her husband is like and his beliefs and how he will regard her own pitiful transgressions.  Will he understand that she was never in love with this other man?  It was only the idea of an adventure which lured her into straying.  Like a demon sitting on her shoulder at all times, this fear eats away at her until she is ready to pull an "Emma Bovary".  And if you've read Flaubert you'll know what I mean.  And if not, I'll just say a trip to the pharmacy and a small purchase of something powdery and lethal is one way out of her troubles.

This could have ended all too predictably.  A woman stumbles.  She has an affair.  She pays.  But Zweig is too much a master of his art to leave the reader with such an expected ending.  This is what I love about Stefan Zweig.  Aside from being an assured storyteller and careful observer of human foibles and shortcomings, he gives the reader something more.  I won't say Irene doesn't pay in her own way.  But there is a stunning twist at the end which leaves something more for the reader to think about when all is said and done.

I have loved everything I have read by Stefan Zweig.  And Fear is yet one more example of why I will keep returning again and again to his work.  He truly is a master of the short story and novella.  His works, slender though they may be, always pack a punch.

I read this last month for Caroline and Lizzy's German Literature Month.  I had hoped to read more of Zweig's short stories and more books translated from German in general, but there never is enough hours in the week to squeeze in all I want to read.  In this case, quality certainly trumps quantity. 

Parnassus on Wheels, Christopher Morley

Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley is just as charming and delightful as I was expecting it to be.  Definitely one of those why did I wait so long to read books!  I absolutely adore Helen McGill and she elicited more than one chuckle and the odd guffaw out of me.  If I had a brother like her, though, I think I would have 'run away' a little sooner.  Then again, in his way he does save the day, so I guess he redeems himself in the end.  Actually I quite admire Helen and think she's a woman of much wisdom, a lot of practicality and just enough desire for romance in her life (but not exactly actively pursuing it, if you know what I mean) to make her story rather enviable.  At almost forty, and maybe a little frumpy, she makes me feel as though maybe there's hope for me yet.  I just might find a little adventure and romance in my own life, but if all else fails I have books like Parnassus to entertain me. 

In case you're not familiar with this lovely novella, Parnassus is a travelling bookshop in the form of a caravan that is pulled by a horse named Peg and accompanied by a dog called Bock.  It's owner is a spry little gentleman, a contemporary in age, who Helen refers to as the Professor.  He's been the sole proprietor of Parnassus for years.  He travels up and down the east coast with his supply of books proselytizing the joys of reading.  But he's getting a little tired of the wandering life and wants to settle back in his native Brooklyn to write his memoirs.  His idea is to sell Parnassus to someone he knows appreciates literature--Andrew McGill, Helen's brother, is a literary man.  He's a successful writer but is known to take off at a moment's notice in search of a story or following an inspiration.

When Helen hears of the Professor's plan to offer Parnassus up for sale to Andrew, she decides to intervene and buy it herself, loathe is she to let him go off once again while she stays at home taking care of their farm.

" . . . all the time I was counting eggs and turning out three meals a day, and running the farm when Andrew got a literary fit and would go off on some vagabond jaunt to collect adventures for a new book."

"I made up my mind to give Andrew some of his own medicine.  And that's my story."

Helen estimates that over the course of fifteen years she's baked more than 400 loaves of bread a year which comes out to more than 6,000 loaves total.  And then there are the meals she's cooked and all the eggs she's collected and sold (giving her a reasonably comfortable nest egg, which she dips into to buy Parnassus) and the care and support she's given her brother.  She leaves Andrew a note, packs her bag and sets off with the Professor.  She'll give him a ride to a train depot and he'll give her a little hands on training on how to sell books as they go.  Yes, indeed, Helen deserves a vacation! 

What follows are all sorts of adventures and misadventures with Andrew hot on their heels.  He thinks Helen has been hoodwinked, and she fears he'll spoil her fun and then take Parnassus for his own.  The Professor is well known and well respected and a talented and enthusiastic bookseller.  His yearly stops at familiar farms and businesses are looked forward to and he's invited in to share meals and partake of free board in exchange for his literary expertise of matching reader with book.  Helen watches with admiration and picks up his skills, but knows she is in his shadow and as long as he travels with her, she'll never feel quite so comfortable in the job until he is on his way back home to Brooklyn. 

It's 1907 and not many women travel on their own in the way Helen plans.  While she's entirely competent in taking care of herself, it's just not quite the same traveling on her own.  Both animals obviously miss the professor and even Helen finds over the course of their short acquaintance he's grown on her.  All of a sudden this solitary life of bookselling is not quite as appealing.  And then there is the matter of the strange footprints she finds outside the caravan one morning and a lost horseshoe that pains Peg . . .  Helen is a practical woman but maybe, too, just a little soft-hearted as well. 

This is a story made for bibliophiles and surely written by a bibliophile.  Christopher Morley knows what we're thinking, just how make his reader mentally nod their head in agreement, turn down pages and make notations in the margins.

"'Lord!' he said, 'when you sell a man a book you don't sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue--you sell hm a whole new life.  Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night--there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean."

* * * * *

"A good book ought to have something simple about it.  And, like Eve, it ought to come from somewhere near the third rib: there ought to be a heart beating in it."

* * * * *

"When you see the marvellous insight into human nature which a truly great book shows, it is bound to make you feel small . . ."

* * * * *

" . . . all the great things in life are done by discontented people."

Hear, hear!  The last is something the Professor had written in his journal, and considering my own discontent in life of late, it makes me somehow feel better about it all.  See, isn't this a wonderful little book.  It's just the sort you press into a friend's hands.  So, I am 'virtually' pressing it into yours.  You can read it for free via Project Gutenberg.  Helen's adventures continue in The Haunted Bookshop, which I have at the ready and will be starting to read later this week.  I suspect it is going to be a treat of a book, just like Parnassus on Wheels was!

Teaser Tuesday: Parnassus on Wheels

Between my newest RIP reads, which I have added to an already towering pile of 'in progress' reads and a number of crime novels (which seem to make up the bulk of that towering pile at the moment), I am very much in the mood for a story of the 'charming', 'comfort read' type.  I wouldn't mind a story that is somewhat predictable or even very romance-ish.  Something 'nice' with no violence or nasty characters, but in keeping with trying to reduce the number of books already on the go, I was thinking that it is time to pick up my next Melville House novella.  I have fallen very behind in my subscription reading, and I have about three novellas now that I need to write about sometime soon before they completely fade from memory.

Have you read Christopher Morley?  I think he is quite popular with booklovers.  He wrote Parnassus on Wheels in 1917 (finally a book to add to  my 'Century of Books'?) and a sequel, The Haunted Bookshop in 1919.  I have strong feeling that they are both going to fall into that 'charming' category.  The blurb notes that Parnassus on Wheels has been a "longtime favorite of bibliophiles".  It is "not only a charming romantic comedy, but an inspiring ode to a life in books."  It is a story of a woman who thinks books can "rescue her from a life of servitude."

I'm only just starting to read the novella, so here is a teaser from the opening pages:

"I wonder if there isn't a lot of bunkum in higher education?  I never found that people who were learned in logarithms and other kinds of poetry were any quicker in washing dishes or darning socks.  I've done a good deal of reading when I could, and I don't want to 'admit impediments' to the love of books, but I've also seen lots of good, practical folk spoiled by too much fine print.  Reading sonnets always gives me hiccups, too."

"I never expected to be an author!  But I do think there are some amusing things about the story of Andrew and myself and how books broke up our placid life.  When John Gutenberg, whose real name (so the Professor says) was John Gooseflesh, borrowed money to set up his printing press he launched a lot of troubles on the world."

Hah.  The story's narrator (in Parnassus on Wheels) has a wonderful 'voice'.  She makes me chuckle inside with her wry observations.  If this is what I had to do every day I would want a little adventure of my own, too (which I think in this case is going to be having a roving bookstore).

"I didn't think much of all this, but I'm an easy-going woman and as long as Andrew kept the farm going I had plenty to do on my own hook.  Hot bread and coffee, eggs and preserves for breakfast; soup and hot meat, vegetables, dumplings, gravy, brown bread and white, huckleberry pudding, chocolate cake and buttermilk for dinner; muffins, tea, sausage rolls, blackberries and cream, and doughnuts for supper--that's the kind of menu I had been preparing three times a day for years.  I hadn't time to worry about what wasn't my business".

That's quite a daily menu!  It reminds me of the Little House books.  I guess all that heavy farm work calls for lots of serious meals!

I think this is going to be great fun.  I wonder if I can count The Haunted Bookshop towards my RIP reading?  This should be a satisfying read, but I might just have a look at a few lists I made in the past of favorite comfort reads (here and here) and mine the lists for another potential comfort read.  It's been a few years since I have made those lists, so maybe it's time to revamp them.  Surely I've added to them in the last few years.  What is your latest favorite comfort read?  

Teaser Tuesday: The Country of the Pointed Firs

I've started reading my next novella (from the Art of the Novella Series by Melville House), The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett, and it puts me in mind of May Sarton.  I love May Sarton, so I see this as a good sign indeed.  The Country of the Pointed Firs is just under 160 pages and is made up of twenty-one or so chapters that are loosely connected stories.  Sketches really, as the chapters are quite brief.  In some cases not much happens at all, but Orne Jewett paints a vivid picture in them.

The novella opens with the arrival of a (as yet unnamed) female narrator who has just returned to the coastal town of Dunnet, Maine.  She eventually takes up residence in an empty schoolhouse where she writes.  She is a keen and careful observer of the natural (and social) world around her.  I don't know yet how old she is, but I think she is unmarried.  And I think she must like her solitude to want to live in this schoolhouse with its beautiful view.  Remind you of anyone?  I recently picked up May Sarton's The House by the Sea: A Journal, which is also about Sarton's moving to coastal Maine.  I think I now will need to read the two as companion books.  Serendipity!  I love it when books cross paths like this.

The chapters are almost quick snapshots of a vanished way of life--bits about the place and the people and her experiences.  It is easy to read one or two in a short sitting and I think I will take my time with the book and do just that--one or two sketches each day that will over the course of the coming few weeks create a particular place (and likely time) in my mind.  As a matter of fact I keep finding myself making little squiggly lines in the margins where I note places I want to remember, or underlining to draw my attention back to something especially elegant or picturesque.  Here are a few teasers to give you a little of the flavor of my reading.

"There was something about the coast town of Dunnet which make it seem more attractive than other maritime villages of eastern Maine.  Perhaps it was the simple fact of acquaintance with that neighborhood which made it so attaching, and gave such interest to the rocky shore and dark woods, and the few houses which seemed to be securely wedged and tree-nailed in among the ledges by the Landing.  These houses made the most of the seaward view, and there was a gayety and determined floweriness in their bits of garden ground, the small-paned high windows in the peaks of their steep gables were like knowing eyes that watched the harbor and the far sea-line beyond, or looked northward all along the shore and its background of spruces and balsam firs.  When one really knows a village like this and its surroundings, it is like becoming acquainted with a single person.  The process of falling in love at first sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair."

That's really lovely, dopn't you think, and so very true of places of people.  Now close your eyes and try and imagine the place--the woods and rocky shore the sea.  Can you hear the waves rushing onto the rocks?  Can you smell the salty air.  Or depending on which way you face, maybe you can smell the fresh greenery of the spruce trees.  I can.  It's invigorating (we weird as that may sound).  That's how the novella begins.  That is the first sight of the narrator who has returned to Dunnet, the quietest of seaside villages, late in June.

By July she hires a little white schoolhouse, which sits on the brink of a hill "much wind-blown and weather-beaten" and which has a most beautiful view of sea and shore from its door".

"Selfish as it may appear, the retired situation seemed to posses great advantages, and I spent many days there quite undisturbed, with the sea-breeze blowing through the small, high windows and swaying the heavy outside shutters to and fro."

If I click my heels together three times do you think I can wish myself there?  No, probably not.  I will have to content myself with continuing on with my reading and let it all play out in my imagination.  This is going to be perfect beginning of the summertime reading, I think.  This is going to be a book to read slowly and savor, I think.  Now I must compare with May Sarton's journal.  I think I may have to share more from the pair of books later.  I have (very long) had a copy of this novella in a larger collection of stories by her, and now I realize this is going to be a 'why did I ever wait this long to read' sort of book.  See what treasures await you on your (rather await me on my) bookcase shelves?