A Work in Progress

April NYRB: Basic Black with Pearls

"Shirley and Coenraad’s affair has been going on for decades, but her longing for him is as desperate as ever. She is a Toronto housewife; he works for an international organization known only as the Agency. Their rendezvous take place in Tangier, in Hong Kong, in Rome and are arranged by an intricate code based on notes slipped into issues of National Geographic. He recognizes her by her costume: a respectable black dress and string of pearls; his appearance, however, is changeable. But something has happened, the code has been discovered, and Coenraad sends Shirley (who prefers to be known as “Lola Montez”) to Toronto, the last place she wants to go. There the trail leads her through the sites of her impoverished immigrant childhood and sends her, finally, to her own house, where she discards her pearls and trades in her basic black for a dress of vibrant multicolored silk."

Originally published in 1980 when Weinzweig was fifty-eight.

March NYRB: The Life and Opinions . . .

I'm not sure I have ever read a book translated from Romanian into English before.  Now I will have the opportunity as my March NYRB selection is Matei Calinescu's The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter.  I am in the middle of the February book, which I am enjoying very much and finding smooth going, but the Calinescu may be closer to the Chang in terms of a 'perhaps challenging read'.  This is an author and a book I know nothing about and likely would not have crossed my reading path had not NYRB nudged it my way.  But the beauty of my NYRB subscription is broadening my literary horizons, so I am up for it.  (If I managed to get through the Chang, I figure I can tackle whatever NYRB sends my way).

So, let's see, a little about Matei Calinescu first.  He was born and educated in Romania (1934-2009) and emigrated to America in 1973 where he taught comparative literature at Indiana University.  He was a "leading intellectual of his generation".  This novel achieved "cult status among generations of young people despite attempts by Romanian authorities to expunge Calinescu's name and works from cultural memory".  After the fall of Ceausescu Calinescu was able to return home.

The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Litchter is considered one of the top ten Romanian literary works of the 20th century.  Why does this description bring to my mind J.P. Donleavy's classic The Ginger Man?  (Which I have to be honest with you--I read it, but I could not warm up to at all).

"Ugly, unkempt, a haunter of low dives who begs for a living and lives on the street, Zacharias Lichter exists for all that in a state of unlikely rapture. After being engulfed by a divine flame as a teenager, Zacharias has devoted his days to doing nothing at all—apart, that is, from composing the odd poem he immediately throws away and consorting with a handful of stray friends: Poldy, for example, the catatonic alcoholic whom Zacharias considers a brilliant philosopher, or another more vigorous barfly whose prolific output of pornographic verses has won him the nickname of the Poet. Zacharias is a kind of holy fool, but one whose foolery calls in question both social convention and conventional wisdom. He is as much skeptic as ecstatic, affirming above all the truth of perplexity. This of course is what makes him a permanent outrage to the powers that be, be they reactionary or revolutionary, and to all other self-appointed champions of morality who are blind to their own absurdity. The only thing that scares Zacharias is that all-purpose servant of conformity, the psychiatrist."

Still, my mind is a blank slate and I am keeping an open mind.  Whenever something is called picaresque, and this one has been called that, I also think of Cervantes's Don Quixote, too.  Here is how the story opens:

"Many who chance to see him now and then, if only in passing, recognize him at once from the briefest of descriptions: a strange creature, so ludicrously ugly he produces a strong impression on even the indifferent observer--leaving behind one of those liminal but nagging memories that remain concealed in the shadows, only to surge forth from time to time with incredible freshness and precision."

He sounds like he could be quite interesting.  This read should be an adventure!  Apparently at the time of publication it passed the censor because they could not make head or tails of it, which means they were certainly the very people likely being skewered by his prose (much like Bohumil Hrabal's Closely Watched Trains--I see a pattern here!).  Maybe if Zacharias is to my liking I should give this Calinescu book a try?

Little Reunions by Eileen Chang

I wish I had a better visual frame of reference when it comes to China, particularly WWII-era China.  I have a vague idea in mind, but I have no background when it comes to film or even Chinese literature really.  Reading books like Little Reunions by Eileen Chang (Xiao tuan yuan translated from the Chinese by Jane Weizhan Pan and Martin Merz) always makes me feel not only ambitious but a little proud when I have tackled them, even if I've not fully grasped what Chang was doing.  I can tell I am in the presence of a literary master but feel only on the periphery of appreciating and understanding her writing. 

Little Reunions is not exactly a hard read, but it is a dense and challenging one thanks to its structure.  For me it required perseverance and disciplined daily reading to get through it.  It's such a lush, rich read, but I don't think my own mental visual library was sufficient to match it.  So very much happened, yet I am not sure I can explain it except in wide overarching swathes.  I can generally explain but I think the beauty is in the small details and descriptions.  The story is told in these, what for me seems, flashes of memory.  She moves from place to place and scene to scene, and while the switches are almost seamless, you almost don't realize time has passed or where she is in her storytelling.  There is not really a proper beginning, middle and end as you expect in novels, and the cast of characters is huge.  Like a Russian novel the names or honorifics vary, making that eight-page character list very helpful in orienting yourself.  One character might be referred to just once or twice and another many times but by more than one name.

A little background--From what I have read Little Reunions is Chang's most autobiographical novel.  She was born in Shanghai to an aristocratic family.  Her mother was educated abroad and preferred to live there rather than China.  Her father, on the other hand, was an opium addict with conservative views that clashed with Eileen.  Her literary career began early and she enjoyed great success until the mid-1950s when she fell out of favor with the government.  At that point she emigrated to California where she worked as a researcher in Berkeley and continued to write.  Little Reunions was written in 1976 and published in China in 2009, but this is the first English translation.  Apparently her executors were given a 600-page handwritten manuscript, but I am not sure how much editing was involved to create the final work. 

The translator's note mentions the English title of the novel is meant to reflect "Chang's musings on her life".  The story centers around Julie, who at the start is a schoolgirl in Hong Kong just before war breaks out.  Born in Shanghai, her mother and father have separated.  Her mother seems to be out of her life more than in it, and it's obvious that their relationship is fraught with tension.  Her father is an opium addict living with his concubine.  Julie has been instructed to call them Second Uncle and Second Aunt (Rachel).  She has one brother, Julian, who makes numerous appearances yet it feels he is off stage most of the time.  The narrative is 'stories' (I'm not sure what to call them since the narrative flows even if the scenes are constantly moving around in  time) of her life and of her family and relationships with two men, but in particular her first husband Chih-Yung.  She is so often separated from her mother and husband and family, hence the "little reunions" when their lives reconnect again and again.

I have some very vivid images in my mind from this book, and some very visceral responses to her relationships (Chih-Yung mostly had other wives and lovers scattered all over China, and Julie's mother could verge on cruel), yet at the same time this is a story that is also very elusive.  It follows Julie over the course of years as she lives in Hong Kong and returns to Shanghai during the war.  She goes to school and embarks on a writing career with one of her books even being adapted to a movie.  There is a very deep connection with her family and her ancestors.  And there is her trials with lovers.  The descriptions are amazing, but I feel my attention was focused too much on trying to make sense of the narrative--seeing the trees for the forest sort of situation.  Read once for story and then again for the parts that make it up?   

It is not, perhaps, the best place to start with her work, but it is certainly very compelling at the same time.  I'm going to pick up her short story collection, Love in a Fallen City, next.  In a review I read, her writing was compared to that of Eve Babitz Anais Nin and Eileen Myles (I have the first two writers' books on my TBR piles and now will look at Myles as well)--"Chang draws the reader into her inner realm with direct, yet lyrical, prose that allow events, scenery, and characters to  mod the story." (Los Angeles Review of Books).  That same review mentions a collection of essays by Chang, Written on the Water, that the reviewer calls "something of a blueprint for Little Reunions", so it seems a natural next step (along with the short stories) for me to get into and understand Chang's life and work.  The book was a tease into her world, and now I want to know more.  Maybe after I am more familiar with her, it will be time to revisit Little Reunions and I will have a firmer mental idea and better visuals for really seeing into her writing.  As expected NYRB has started off the year with a very provocative and amazing work.

February NYRB: All for Nothing

Time for a little fanfare as my newest NYRB subscription book came in the mail yesterday.  I knew I would not be finished with the January selection, Eileen Chang's Little Reunions, but I am actually quite pleased with my progress in it.  I was a little apprehensive about the book, as it seemed a little formidable when I first picked it up.  The story comes with an eight page index of characters and while not especially chunky, those 320 or so odd pages are filled with dense print.  It is a novel that requires, for me at least, steady concentration and is not a book that is especially dippable--one to read a little and set down for a few days. 

To that end I have very religiously been reading about six pages daily.  I realize that sounds like very little effort, but that is what has made it so manageable.  Sometimes facing a difficult or long text makes me not want to pick it up until 'I know I will have a chunk of time to spend with it'.  As my reading is done mostly in small daily doses here and there throughout the day, there never seems to be a time where I get unlimited free reading.  So six pages is eminently manageable.  And now I am nearing the halfway mark.  Often I want to spend even more time with the story and look forward to the next six pages, so with continued dedication I will finish it (even if it takes me longer than the month between NYRB books that arrive in the mail).

I am hoping that works the same with Walter Kempowski's All for Nothing (Alles Umsonst, translated from the German by Anthea Bell).  Actually I have the UK edition of this book, which I started to read a couple of years ago for Caroline's Literature and War Readalong.  I quite liked what I read, but it was a case of too many books and not enough time.  I meant to get back to it, and now I will.  In length it is about the same as the Chang (but with no extensive character list), but there are shorter chapters and lots of text breaks so I hope to read more in each sitting and will be starting today. 

All for Nothing was Kapowski's last book and was only published in 2006, so a fairly recent one compared to many other NYRB selections. 

"In East Prussia, January 1945, the German forces are in retreat and the Red Army is approaching. The von Globig family’s manor house, the Georgenhof, is falling into disrepair. Auntie runs the estate as best she can since Eberhard von Globig, a special officer in the German army, went to war, leaving behind his beautiful but vague wife, Katharina, and her bookish twelve-year-old son, Peter. As the road fills with Germans fleeing the occupied territories, the Georgenhof begins to receive strange visitors—a Nazi violinist, a dissident painter, a Baltic baron, even a Jewish refugee. Yet in the main, life continues as banal, wondrous, and complicit as ever for the family, until their caution, their hedged bets, and their denial are answered by the wholly expected events they haven’t allowed themselves to imagine."

Walter Kempowski was a boy of fifteen when he witnessed this mass exodus of German population in 1945.  His own father had been conscripted by then and died in battle on the Baltic coast.  It sounds as though Kempowski used autobiographical material in his writings.  He had spent eight years in prison for being found guilty of collaborating with American intelligence and when he was released he was deported to the west as by then the Iron Curtain had fallen.  In her introduction Jenny Erpenbeck writes, "he developed an unsentimental, strikingly precise style that leaves it up to the reader to assess and evaluate what is presented."

I'm really looking forward to reading this.  He sounds like an important writer who was quite prolific, though I don't think much of his writing has been translated into English.  Hopefully there will be more to come. 

If I accomplish one reading 'goal' this year it is to get through all my NYRBs!  They can be substantial reads, but they are worth all the time and effort and in the end the most rewarding, too.

January NYRB: Little Reunions

I didn't do so well with my NYRB subscription last year.  I finished a handful of books and started a few more beyond that.  There were several I wanted to read but just didn't manage.  And a few that might not have been my first choice of subscription book for those titles released in a particular month.  That said, I love this subscription, all those NYRBs that I get are worthy reads, though some will be outside my comfort zone or normal choice of novel.  Part of why I subscribe is to expand my horizon and get a taste of world literature from all different eras.  I also love that they have a good mix of stories, sometimes nonfiction and especially that many of the books are translations.  This one is translated from Chinese.

Perhaps if each month I create a little fanfare with each new selection and post something special about the book I will be able to make more of a commitment to reading it.  I really do want to read all the books, though if it doesn't happen in the month I get it, that's okay, too.  I see the books as an investment and a happy addition to my own personal library.  I can always reach for one of the books later (and in some cases that ends up being 'much' later).

January's book choice is by an author I have long wanted to read as I have heard many good things about her, Eileen Chang.  I am not sure Little Reunions would ever have been my jumping off place for her work, and I do have several of her books already on my shelves, but I'm willing to dive in here.  She sounds like she led an interesting life that straddled several different periods and cultures.  She was born in Shanghai in 1920 and lived in Hong Kong for a time before ultimately ending up in the US.  She's considered one of the most influential modern Chinese writers and I am excited to finally give her work a try. 

As for Little Reunions the blurb reads in part:

" . .  .a dark romance opens with Julie, living at a convent school in Hong Kong on the eve of the Japanese invasion.  Her mother, Rachel, long divorced from Julie's opium-addict father, saunters around the world with various lovers.  Recollections of Julie's horrifying but privileged childhood in Shanghai clash with a flamboyant, sometimes incestuous cast of relations that crowd her life.  Eventually, back in Shanghai, she meets the magnetic Chih-yung, a traitor who collaborates with the Japanese puppet regime. Soon they’re in the throes of an impassioned love affair that swings back and forth between ardor and anxiety, secrecy and ruin. Like Julie’s relationship with her mother, her marriage to Chih-yung is marked by long stretches of separation interspersed with unexpected little reunions. Chang’s emotionally fraught, bitterly humorous novel holds a fractured mirror directly in front of her own heart."

There is a character list in the back of the book which is eight pages long!  Should that make me nervous?  There is nothing for it, but to just start reading!  Is anyone else a NYRB Classics subscriber?  Or have you read Eileen Chang before?

Three More: Hrabal, Brookner, Ginzburg

I think to start this post I must refer you to what Caroline wrote about Bohumil Hrabal's Closely Watched Trains, a Czech coming of age novel written in 1965 and adapted to film a year or so later to great acclaim.  I think it is one of Hrabal's best known and most successful books, though he was quite prolific and possibly one of the best known Czech modern writers.  I read it for her Literature and War Readalong earlier in the year (back when I was a better blogger and more in tune with the book blogging world, which I greatly hope to get back to in the new year).

I'm afraid the novel is going to get mostly a passing mention on my part (hence the reference to what Caroline wrote about it when it was fresh in her mind) as it is a classic that I struggled with.  I admire Hrabal and had read him before, but I think sometimes you come to classics ill-prepared and maybe not in the best frame of mind to tackle them and that is what happened with me and the Hrabal.  You know you are on to something really good, but you just can't quite grasp it on the first go. 

The story is set in Nazi Occupied Czechoslovakia and takes place mostly at a railway station run by misfits and collaborators.  At the center of it all is a young man who desperately wants to lose his virginity but has a few issues with his, should we say, delivery?  It is a comic novel, a little crazy and over the top.  It is slender, almost novella-like and really demands attention and maybe to be read in a single sitting.  Carefully.  None of which I did.  Sometimes when you can't hold all the narrative threads together in quite the right way, the story 'loses something in the translation' (and in this case, that literally is so as this was translated from Czech).  I did actually watch the Oscar-award winning film, which helped but I know it is a book where I missed something in my reading.  There is more to the story than the farcical play and sexual antics.  It is a novel that demands a better second reading by me sometime. 

***

Ah.  Anita Brookner.  She is infinitely bingeable if you ask me.  I actually intended Leaving Home to be the first of a a good binge, but it didn't materialize (so I plan on trying again in 2018).  You can put her in the Barbara Comyns category for me.  As in--more please.  I know it seems like she writes the same story over and over (it's not but she does write about the same themes quite a lot, but she does it so well it always feels fresh and new).  Maybe I am just drawn to her protagonists (maybe I am too like them and am just trying to figure the world out so it makes sense that I want to know their stories, too).  They tend to be solitary and intellectual, not necessarily by choice but certainly by circumstances.  They are not poor, but at least solidly middle class and sometimes coming rather down in the world, maybe a little awkward and wishing for something more.  For me that is highly relatable.

In Leaving Home, Emma is an only daughter living with a widowed mother who fears her own life will turn out  much the same.  She wants more.  She studies landscape gardening, from an academic standpoint and ends up in Paris where she meets a vibrant, very French woman who works in the library Emma frequents.  And there has her inspiration, bumps into real life, if you will.  Francoise, her friend, might just be a little bit manipulative even if it is not intentional.  Some people just breathe in life and exude the kind of success that seems easy and without effort.  That's Francoise.

It may be effortless for Francoise, but none of the social interactions Emma takes on is ever as easy.  It's not as though Emma never takes risks, but maybe she is just a little too quiet, a little too reserved for those efforts to make more than a tiny ripple.  I can see Emma wishing for something more and maybe making an attempt, but that ripple is never quite enough and in the end maybe it is preferable--that solitariness.  For me a Brookner novel is always a gem of a read.  Just writing about this story, even at a distance makes me want to pull another of her novels from my shelves.  So, yes, another Brookner will be joining a Comyns in my January pile of books!

***

I am disappointed to say that my NYRB subscription-reading year was a mixed bag having read less than half the books I received, though I do have several in progress books and good intentions for most of the rest.  That doesn't stop me from optimistically renewing my subscription with high hopes on potential fantastic reads.  Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon, however, was one of my favorite books both from the subscription and overall from my reading year.  I have not read much by her but I want to read more, and even with the little I have read, I feel like I can say Family Lexicon is so Natalia Ginzburg.  It was originally published in Italian in 1963 as Lessico Famigliare and just reissued this year by NYRB and translated into English by Jenny McPhee.

In her preface Ginzburg assures the reader that the events and people are real, that she did not invent a single thing, but she tells the reader to "read it as a novel, and therefore not demand of it any more or less than a novel can offer."  So it is a memoir of sorts, but creatively presented?  I always wonder how writers can do it, wrote about their history and tell their family stories in a way that seems to fresh and 'present' yet do so from the vantage point of many decades later.  Writers do it all the time, she just seems to be more forward about putting it all into that context.

It is aptly titled because her family indeed has its own lexicon--it's own language, those intimate family traditions and habits of calling things and people and references to situations in their own particular manner.  Sometimes it is a little peculiar, sometimes funny or quirky.  In a sense this is much in the vein of a Comyns novel, though not exactly like it either.  Ginzburg was born in Sicily to a Jewish father and Catholic mother and grew up in Turin in a country under Fascist rule.  However, her family was staunchly antifascist.  They were sort of quirky an bohemian and literary--just really really interesting.  The book blurb calls this a book about family and language and about storytelling--all things I love reading about.  And Ginzburg is a very good storyteller.  And yes, she is another "must read more of her work" writers for me!

Teaser Tuesday: The Violins of Saint-Jacques

It's Murphy's Law.  I was trying really hard to be patient for my July NYRB to arrive, which is Patrick Leigh Fermor's only novel, The Violins of Saint-Jacques, but I finally broke down and sifted and sorted and moved and re-stacked and toppled books in my book room to find my own old copy--a John Murray edition reissued in paperback in 2004.  I knew I owned it.  For a long time I even knew where it was on my shelves (approximately anyway), but then I knew it had been moved and just wasn't quite sure where exactly it had been moved to.  So I held off.  I want to read the nice, new NYRB Classic edition which will have a lovely new introduction and spanking crisp white pages.  But it is a week and a half now into the month and my copy is still en route and I didn't want to wait a moment more.  So I spent a good chunk of my Monday night free time (which evening free time during the work week is very limited) sweating as I looked for the book.  And . . . success!  I even managed to only take it and only one other book away with me.

(An aside . . . the state of my book room was already terribly messy, but it is looking like a whirlwind [that would be me] blew through it and if the next time I go in and don't find a pile or two of books sprawled onto the floor in a big heap I will be very surprised.  Too hot at the moment to do anything about it, however.)

But you know Murphy's Law.  My copy will most certainly be in this week's mail.  Because no good deed (or effort) goes unpunished as the saying goes.  I have my old copy in hand however and now will happily start reading.  The story is set on an Aegean island where an English traveler meets an elderly Frenchwoman and is "captivated" by a painting she owns.  I think it is going to be a story within a story, as she tells him what the painting means and we learn the history of the island perhaps.  My teaser is a description of the Frenchwoman.

"Mademoiselle de Rennes lived in a white, thick-walled island house surrounded by flowers in ribbed white amphorae and by pots of marjoram and basil.  The headland on which it rested overlooked a steep bay and a wide stretch of the Aegean bounded on the east by the watersheds of Anatolia and to the south by the floating ghosts of Samos and Chios.  Mademoiselle de Rennes, with heavy horn-rimmed glasses across the high bridge of her nose, was reading in a deck-chair under a vine trellis.  Phrosoula, the girl of the evening before, soon appeared carrying a table that was already laid, and 'pot luck' turned out to be the best meal I had eaten for months.  The wine, too, from the surrounding vineyards which Mademoiselle de Rennes had tended for years, was excellent.  The conversation ranged all over the world once more and ended with a long and diverting account of some pre-fascist elections in Cagliari.  She asked me for news of the French West Indies, but she herself was less expansive about them than the many other islands in which she lived."

I think Mademoiselle de Rennes is going to be a very interesting character to read about.  And then Patrick Leigh Fermor does the exotic so very well.  For a man who dropped out of school and let the world be his education he was such an amazing writer.  I am going to enjoy this read.  With less than 200 pages I expect to finish it well before the end of the month, so I hope to get back to one of my other NYRBS (maybe Guy de Maupassant's Like Death).

The Farm in the Green Mountains

Where does NYRB find these wonderful memoirs?  Thank goodness they do and that they are reissuing these modern classics.  The Farm in the Green Mountains by Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer is yet another delightful book that was originally published in 1949 as a series of essays/columns in a newspaper and then collected in the form it's in now and translated from German into English in the mid-1980s.  Alice and Carl Zuckmayer, along with their two daughters fled Hitler at the start of WWII.  Carl was a playwright whose most recent play satirized the militarization of Germany garnering the wrong sort of attention from the government.  They went first to Austria, then Switzerland eventually landing in the US and ultimately an eighteenth-century farmhouse in the Vermont countryside.  Lucky for us, since Alice's memoir of their experiences in America during and after WWII makes for a most entertaining read. 

The book is made up of a collection of reworked letters that Alice wrote to her in-laws and then fleshed out and added to later.  The introduction calls the nineteen chapters "vignettes", which is an apt description.  It has an interesting history as a few of those letters were initially published in a Munich newspaper after the war by author Erich Kästner (known here for his book-turned-movie, The Parent Trap).   Happily they must have had enough success to call for more material.

"The intricacies of their days, the ins and outs of life on the farm as it is learned and lived by these unlikely inhabitants, this is superficially what The Farm in the Green Mountains is about.  On a deeper level, it's a story of perseverance, protection, everyday heroism, and joy."

So, Carl is a writer and Alice a former actor turned medical student, though the research she seems to be involved in during her years in Vermont appears to have more of a historical slant.  The book covers the war years and some years after, but it was written in hindsight--some chapters much much later as the book itself was edited and the chapters collected decades after their years in America when they were again living in Europe.  Interestingly Alice notes that she wrote it in German and had to look up some farming terms as it referred to a world she knew only in English.  Many immigrants, or in this case exiles from the war, came to the US only temporarily.  They worked to earn money to return to and live in Europe.  For the Zuckmayers, however, they were somewhat adrift.  Their former home was no longer theirs, at least in spirit, once they returned to Europe.  They ended up living in a new home with no history attached.  So they would work and earn abroad so they could return to Vermont to live.  In a sense that farmhouse was what they thought of as "home".

It's always interesting to see your own country through the eyes of those who come from or have lived most of their lives someplace else.  The Zuckmayers had a very good experience living and traveling in the US and in particular Vermont, and Alice writes about it with much affection and humor.  She particularly liked our libraries (I do, too) and there are several chapters of what the academic library she used (Dartmouth's) was like and what a pleasant experience it was and how it compared to those she knew from home.  Of course we have known that all along, but it is nice to get that affirmation from a visitor so to speak.

The Zuckmayers and their daughters were really more than visitors, however.  Although Alice certainly, and maybe Carl as well, must have had some experience of farm living or care of animals to a certain extent in Europe (the editor calls them "urbane sophisticates") the vignettes chronicle their education as farmers.  Their farmhouse was fairly rustic (but with their landlord they improved it), Vermont is filled with as many eccentric individuals as we might imagine, and the USDA (as it was then at least) was hugely helpful in getting their farm up and running.  They raised birds--chickens, geese, ducks among a few other animals.  Once an animal had a name it was no longer up for slaughter, and weird as this may sound, the chapter on "rats" turned out to be one of my favorites in the whole book.  I saw it and thought, 'oh, dear', but more than once Alice had me utterly riveted to her storytelling!

"We had begun the farm experiment with the illusion that it would be a foundation for self-sufficiency and would give Zuck [Carl] the possibility of doing his work."

"He had had the choice of rowing as a slave in the Hollywood galleys with the convict's wages for forced labor or, on the other hand, doing his own work as his own mater.  But in America everything is always different and unforeseeable."

The book follows their adventures but there is a mishmash of topics really.  She writes generally about America, the holidays and their search for a place to live, and then there is much about turning their farm into a working farm.  It's fascinating stuff and memorably told.  There is lots about the animals and the people of Vermont (sort of kind of in that order even), but also about how they lived and where they went and then later what life was like going back to Europe. 

As I was reading I marked so many passages and dog eared so many pages thinking I would share this and this and this, but now there is too much to choose from and maybe it's better to just virtually present the book to you with a nod and a smile, and a 'you really have to read this . . .'

Teaser Tuesday: The Farm in the Green Mountains

I have already hinted at how much I am enjoying my current NYRB book, Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer's The Farm in the Green Mountains.  She is such an engaging writer and I love reading about Vermont in the 1940s through the eyes of an immigrant.  I have learned how they came to Vermont and how they decided to settle where they did.  I've read about how they celebrated Christmas and now she is painting a picture of that titular farm.  This isn't just a picture postcard cozy farmhouse that city folk take over and inhabit, but the Herdan-Zuckmayer's literally turned it into a working farm.

It all starts with a hen and a duck, and reading about these first rather eccentric animals puts me in mind of Stefanie's (at So many Books) Dashwoods!  You wouldn't think chickens could have such distinct personalities, but it appears they very much do.  In this case it is Elise the hen and Gussy the duck who are the first of what will be many farm animals.  Elise actually belongs to a neighbor, but soon will be acquired by the Herdan-Zuckmayers.

"In one of the huge modern chicken houses was a chicken that appeared uncommonly miserable, thin, and haggard.  It was not being attacked by other hens, but as soon as it wanted to go to the feeding station they made a game of forcing it away."

"'It will die,' explained the owner.  'It is a healthy chicken, but it can't survive here'."

"'Can I buy it?' I asked.  'I'd like to begin with a difficult chicken so that I can get used to having difficult animals before we get a flock'."

"'You don't need to give me more than fifty cents for it,' said the owner.  'It doesn't lay eggs because it is too scared.  But there is also a duck,' he continued, ' that you can have for nothing.  She is too tough to kill and eat, and she disturbs the entire duck pen'.  Thus we got to know Gussy, the antisocial duck."

***

"Elise blossomed.  She made up for everything which had been denied her in communal living.  After three weeks we had to put her on a diet so that she wouldn't burst."

"Later, when the regular farm hens arrived, she held the top position in the chicken house.  She was, so to speak, the headmistress and assigned nests, perches, and feeding spots to the newcomers.  She was not intelligent, but her mental capacity fit comfortably in the chicken community."

Apparently Gussy's case was quite different.   Gussy was a bit of a shrew but she turned into a very independent mother duck.  Somehow somewhere I feel like there is an important lesson to be learned in animal-keeping.  Sometimes it's thought humans are so very superior, but I think watching the animal world can be a little like looking in a mirror!  It's just as entertaining to read about the animal dynamics in this book as the human dynamics.  And I swear I came across a reference somewhere in this book (and maybe a few other places outside the book, too) that Vermont has a fair few eccentrics. 

Maybe that is where I need to go next!

Last Month, This Month: My NYRBs

I'm having a so-so NYRB reading year.  Not in the selections they are sending, which are always somewhere between really good and pretty amazing.  My so-so is just in how well I am keeping up with reading them as they come out.  Some year, I swear I am going to make good and read each and every NYRB that comes through my door via subscription including the freebie.  But for now I guess I shall just continue to chip away at them.

I really enjoyed April's book, Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon, which is this interesting melding of fact/memoir and fiction.  She hints at not wanting to bother with straightforward memoir, so the book falls somewhere in the realm of literature/fiction.  It certainly reads like a memoir, but surely coming at a life's history is tricky and you have to fill in the gaps in some way.  Calling it fiction must give you the freedom to perhaps embellish a little.  I hope to write about it next week some time (still need to read the afterword which I expect will be quite illuminating).  I wrote a teaser to the book here.

I am reading May's selection now (it took the long, circuitous route to my mailbox so arrived quite late in the month).  NYRB has a knack for choosing and publishing interesting memoirs--quite often those memoirs are reissues of older books that were perhaps forgotten but should not have been!  I am quite thoroughly enjoying Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer's The Farm in the Green Mountains.  The book was originally published in 1968 and came about from a series of letters home.  The Zuckmayer's were German and lived and flourished in Weimar-era Berlin but had to flee--first to Austria, then Switzerland and finally they landed in the US.  LA didn't suit them so they moved to the east coast and ultimately took up residence in Vermont.  I love these kinds of books where I get a different perspective on my own country through the eyes of immigrants.  This has that layer of nostalgia about it as she is writing about WWII era Vermont.  I am trying to read a chapter/letter a day and hope to make steady progress and finish it well before the end of the month so I can get to June's book.

As a side note I have to say I have had a really good run with nonfiction/memoir-ish selections from NYRB--there has been Eleanor Pereny's More Was Lost and Teffi's Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea from last year and both of which I recall still with fond memories.  And several years back when I first started subscribing I discovered Vasily Grossman's An Armenian Sketchbook.

Ah.  June's book looks like it might be challenging (not least due to the 400 pages that make up the text--more to love, right?), though I see some very good reviews about it.  This month's book is a reissue of the 1968 Arabia Felix: The Danish Expedition 1761-1767.  It chronicles the expedition made by six men from Copenhagen traveling by sea to Arabia Felix (what we know as Yemen today).  It sounds like quite a cutthroat expedition, which took seven years and only one survivor returned to Denmark.  "Based on diaries, notebooks, and sketches that lay unread in Danish archives until the twentieth century, Arabia Felix is a tale of intellectual rivalry and a comedy of very bad manners, as well as an utterly absorbing adventure."   

If it ends up being more challenging than I can manage in the summer heat, I plan on going back to February or March's books, which have fallen through the cracks--Guy de Maupassant's Like Death or Henry Green's Living.  Any time I pick up a NYRB I know I am in good hands, so wherever I end up at the end of the month, I know I will be in for a treat.