This column by Elinore Standard appeared in the September 02, 2005 Record Review as another in the ongoing series "My Reading Life."
Works mentioned: Excellent Women and Less Than Angels by Barbara Pym, The Great Fire, The Transit of Venus, The Bay of Noon, and The Evening of the Holiday by Shirley Hazzard, Mr. Bridge, Mrs. Bridge and Son of the Morning by Evan Connell, The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen, The Enforced Return by Neil Corcoran, In Country by Bobby Ann Mason.
RECOGNIZED, YES. FAMOUS, NO.
I just finished a 1978 reprint of "Excellent Women," an early (1952) novel by Barbara Pym and as I turned to the back flap, I read that Barbara Pym in 1977 was acclaimed “the most underrated writer of the century.” My goodness. Such a comment was probably meant to encourage prospective readers but it does seem rather dim. Is it an honor to be labeled the most underrated writer? Can it be that any accolade is better than no accolade? Perhaps back then, but I can’t imagine an agent or a publishing house or even a writer allowing this to be said in this day of Hype and Spin.
Then I go on to read another Pym novel, "Less Than Angels" (1955), reprinted by Dutton in 1977. Sure enough, another disconcerting blurb on the back flap: “…shunned by British publishers for fourteen years, she was rediscovered in England in 1977…” Shunned? What can this possibly mean? Is it that publishers were afraid of stories about the British middle class, specifically Anglican spinsters drinking innumerable cups of tea and a high percentage of clergymen per novel? Pym’s work was always well-reviewed, so what is this “shunned” which seems strong language when applied to books about church jumbles and altar guilds?
Pym’s work is quiet and it seems even quieter today than it must have seemed back in the ‘50’s when Britons were emerging from post-war austerity and still carried ration books. I find reading Pym’s graceful prose soothing and oddly gripping. I know nothing much is going to happen, but nevertheless I read on.
Shirley Hazzard is a writer I always knew about but somehow never read until recently. Her wonderful, fine though it is, never reached blockbuster proportions. I got her latest, “The Great Fire” (Viking, 2003) from the local library, attracted, perhaps, by the flame-colored cover and by the sense it was high time I read her, and then I was hooked. Hazzard is a stylish and sophisticated writer and her work must be read attentively. The characters are complicated and they often take unexpected turns.
After “Great Fire”, I went on to earlier books and devoured them in a two-week period: “The Transit of Venus”(Viking, 1980), and two novels set in Italy: “The Bay Of Noon” (1970) and “The Evening of the Holiday (1966). Hazzard is perhaps undervalued but not unheralded. She has won an O. Henry Short Story award, was nominated for the (U.S.) National Book Award three times and won it in 2003 for “The Great Fire”. She recently got the Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in recognition of the most distinguished American novel published in the last five years. So recognized, yes. Famous, no.
Evan Connell, is often thought of as another one of those WASP American writers who creates spent and repressed characters who have little to say to each other. He is likely to be grouped with Louis Auchincloss, and Walker Percy, although such pigeon-holing is usually wrong. Connell is the writer of two American classics: “Mrs. Bridge” (1959), and “Mr. Bridge” (1969). “Mrs. Bridge” was made into a Merchant/Ivory film and an adaptation titled “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge” became the 1990 film with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward
Writing in the February, 2005, Believer magazine, Mark Oppenheimer discusses Connell’s work at length. He says he read “Mrs. Bridge” three times and not long after a reading, he couldn’t remember any of the plot. He says each chapter is “a brief, dense moment of awkwardness among two or three characters…”
Oppenheimer says Connell’s short chapters are “…perfectly composed. None wastes a word. By the end of the book we have only a portrait, one of the truest in modern literature.” Mrs. Bridge, he says, “is a decent woman, hopefully naïve, willfully unliberated, cursed with a brain she is afraid to use and time that she cannot manage to fill.”
That’s pretty devastating right there, but “Mr. Bridge” is even sadder. Somehow, the ten years that separated the novels took Connell through the 1960’s when everything was coming apart, anyway, and you see the lives of the Bridges more and more in contrast to the world around them. The old gentility is irrelevant; Walter Bridge, a decent man with an icy heart and weird inner longings, is like the Dodo.
Connell, born in 1924, has written other books besides the “Bridge” novels, including ”Son of the Morning” (1984) about Custer at Little Big Horn, the best seller of his eighteen, and we can assume he is still writing. I agree with Oppenheimer who says Connell’s work “accepts the premise that the Wasp heritage lacks vitality yet it insists that good literature can still be made of that desiccated condition.”
Of all the novels I’ve ever read, which do I think is best? Naturally, this answer changes with the time of day, month, and year and yet I keep Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Death of the Heart” high up there on my list of greats. Bowen, who wrote 28 books, was always under-appreciated as I think all writers of serious literature usually are -- and, sorry to say, she is read less today than she was during her lifetime (1899-1973).
In a recent New York Times Book Review, Stacey D’Erasmo reviews a new biography of Bowen titled “The Enforced Return” by Neil Corcoran (Oxford, 2005). D’Erasmo describes Bowen as a “writer who bears down so hard on intimacy – among not only men and women, but men and women and their country, their houses, their pasts and themselves…” Not easy reading, ever, but I find I can’t get Bowen’s novels out of my head and I think of them, as A.S. Byatt says describing a Bowen work, as “one of those books that grow in the mind, in time.” Haunting is the word I would use -- haunting and bitter and painful. In the case of reading Bowen, I must decide if I want to feel good or if I want to think.
I always liked the work of Bobbie Ann Mason, an American from Kentucky who got her Ph.D. with a dissertation on the work of Vladimir Nobokov. She got tired, she says, of writing about the alienated Middle-European hero, so she thought she’d write about the opposite. (www.writersalmanac.org -- May 1, 2005).
When I taught writing, I introduced my students to passages from Mason’s “In Country” (1985) a novel narrated by the young sister of a Vietnam veteran who had been poisoned by agent orange. The book is set in a rural town, far from Washington where the family travels at the end of the story to visit the Vietnam Memorial. Mason writes about poor rural Americans, people who haven’t been to college, who drive rusty old beaters and work at Wal-Mart. Mason says, “I’ve always found it difficult to start with a definite idea, but if I start with a pond that’s being drained because of a diesel fuel leak and a cow named Hortense and some blackbirds flying over and a woman in the distance waving, then I might get somewhere.”
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
DIARY OF ANOTHER NOBODY
This column, one in the ongoing "My Reading Life" series by Elinore Standard, appeared in the August 12, 2005 Record Review.
Works mentioned: Diary of Another Nobody by Hubert Berry, Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith, A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Book of One's Own by Thomas Mallon. The Diary of a Country Parson by James Woodforde, Nightsong of the Last Tram by Robert Douglas, This Day: Diaries From American Women.
DIARY OF ANOTHER NOBODY
“The Diary of Another Nobody” by Hubert Berry, (Porlock, 2005) was set down as a real diary during the summer of 1952. Berry, the resident of a small town in Buckinghamshire, simply records the events in his everyday life. He talks about the weather, what he has for dinner, the progress of his tomato plants, life at the local pub. Although such uncomplicated happenings were recorded only 50 years ago, they seem today like the record of life lived hundreds of years earlier. We are reminded of how the pace of our present-day living has increased in such a short time.
Look at Berry’s entry for July 15, 1952: “The beer is not too good at the Mason Arms although the cider is excellent. This morning we went exploring to Castle Rock and I saw and tried to kill an adder. I expect I shall stay at home this evening to read ‘The Cruel Sea’ while Audrey goes for a drink.”
Another “Diary of a Nobody” can be found at www.gutenberg.org, in e-book #1026, written by George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith and posted at Gutenberg in August 1977. It begins: “Why should I not publish my diary? I have often seen reminiscences of people I have never even heard of, and I fail to see – because I do not happen to be a ‘somebody’ – why my diary should not be interesting. My only regret is that I did not commence it when I was a youth.” This “diary” goes on for twenty or so pages and it continues in the same everyday vein as the Berry diary.
Project Gutenberg is the source of hundreds of diaries and other texts and, as of a year ago, it had over 10,000 contributions and more are welcome. It is a great place to find unpublished pioneer diaries, for example. The project is public and the work is free -- subject to various honor-system user stipulations.
“A Midwife’s Tale” by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (Knopf, 1990) is the Pulitzer Prize-winning life of Martha Ballard, based on her diary kept faithfully between 1785 and 1812. This must-read for students of U.S. history, is the record of Ballard’s work as a midwife and healer as well as her domestic life in Hallowell, Maine. In her Introduction, Ulrich says, “Like many diaries of farm women, it is filled with trivia about domestic chores and pastimes. Yet it is in the very dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitious dailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard’s book lies.”
I have my own Aunt Mary Bishop’s diary from 1866, a small green leather book, worn thin and minutely written in pencil. In the back is a pouch containing a flimsy bit of Confederate money: “The Farmers and Manufacturers Bank of Savannah will pay Twenty Dollars on Demand…” Mary Bishop was still in her teens when she kept it, unmarried and living at the family place in Ellisburg, PA, a hardscrabble Allegheny Mountain hamlet, barely on the map.
The June 5th entry reads: “Got breakfast, made the beds and swept. Commenced papering the sitting room, sewed a little and went for a walk this evening.”
June 7th: “Arose at 4 o’clock got breakfast and done up the work, made a cake, sewed carpet together. Got dinner and supper and went over to Mr. Ellis after supper and up to James’s to a dance in the evening.”
Nowhere does the diary use the word “I”. There is no color or description, no opinion, no personal reaction, not a word of dissatisfaction or satisfaction, pain or pleasure. The diary a stunning record of daily drudgery.
In the Introduction his “A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries,” (Penguin, 1984) Thomas Mallon describes diary keepers: “Some are chroniclers of the everyday. Others have kept their books only in special times – over the course of a trip or during a crisis. Some have used them to record journeys of the soul, plan the art of the future, confess the sins of the flesh, or to lecture the world from beyond the grave. And some of them, prisoners and invalids, have used them not so much to record lives as create them, their diaries being the only world in which they could fully live.”
Mallon says some diaries should be consumed slowly because certain lives, usually quiet ones,” seem meant to be slipped into for only a few minutes a day, like a footbath.” He uses as an example “The Diary of a Country Parson, 1758-1802” by James Woodforde, “a quiet, sentimental bachelor who had a dog named ‘Rover’.”
Robert Douglas, a former prison officer, has written “Night Song of the Last Tram: A Glasgow Childhood.” (Hodder, 2005). In the June 17. 2005 Times Literary Supplement reviewer Bernard Wasserstein, says Douglas writes “with a grace and assurance that turn everyday episodes into the stuff of romance.” Douglas is old enough to remember the notorious Victorian tenements of Glasgow, those squalid walk-ups just as awful as those on our own Lower East Side. As this last pre-WWII generation fades, Douglas recalls horse-drawn carts, gas streetlights, the cry of the rag-and-bone man, the drunken father, the saintly mother, the inspiring but cruel schoolmaster, and the trolley car.
A gem you may try to find is, “This Day: Diaries From American Women” published in 2003 by Beyond Words Publishing of Hillsboro, Oregon, a collection of 35 entries selected from more than 529 day-diaries. “They all lent a unique voice to the project. And that is why their contributions matter, because each woman offers readers a perspective,” as editor Joni B. Cole points out, “from one day in her life that no one else – no one else – could have contributed to this book...”
Here is an 8:00 pm entry by a South Carolina healthcare director: “I just sat down and took a breath. I’m drinking my fifth Diet Coke for the day. I should titrate the caffeine with some red wine. Life is all about finding balance, is it not?”
Everyday episodes. Dailiness. Dairies of nobodies. These works are so much closer to the way we live our own lives, they verify our own nobodiness. All those celebrity biographies and ghost-written tell-alls seem from Mars, like something we’d see in the movies or read in a novel.
* * *
Works mentioned: Diary of Another Nobody by Hubert Berry, Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith, A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Book of One's Own by Thomas Mallon. The Diary of a Country Parson by James Woodforde, Nightsong of the Last Tram by Robert Douglas, This Day: Diaries From American Women.
DIARY OF ANOTHER NOBODY
“The Diary of Another Nobody” by Hubert Berry, (Porlock, 2005) was set down as a real diary during the summer of 1952. Berry, the resident of a small town in Buckinghamshire, simply records the events in his everyday life. He talks about the weather, what he has for dinner, the progress of his tomato plants, life at the local pub. Although such uncomplicated happenings were recorded only 50 years ago, they seem today like the record of life lived hundreds of years earlier. We are reminded of how the pace of our present-day living has increased in such a short time.
Look at Berry’s entry for July 15, 1952: “The beer is not too good at the Mason Arms although the cider is excellent. This morning we went exploring to Castle Rock and I saw and tried to kill an adder. I expect I shall stay at home this evening to read ‘The Cruel Sea’ while Audrey goes for a drink.”
Another “Diary of a Nobody” can be found at www.gutenberg.org, in e-book #1026, written by George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith and posted at Gutenberg in August 1977. It begins: “Why should I not publish my diary? I have often seen reminiscences of people I have never even heard of, and I fail to see – because I do not happen to be a ‘somebody’ – why my diary should not be interesting. My only regret is that I did not commence it when I was a youth.” This “diary” goes on for twenty or so pages and it continues in the same everyday vein as the Berry diary.
Project Gutenberg is the source of hundreds of diaries and other texts and, as of a year ago, it had over 10,000 contributions and more are welcome. It is a great place to find unpublished pioneer diaries, for example. The project is public and the work is free -- subject to various honor-system user stipulations.
“A Midwife’s Tale” by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (Knopf, 1990) is the Pulitzer Prize-winning life of Martha Ballard, based on her diary kept faithfully between 1785 and 1812. This must-read for students of U.S. history, is the record of Ballard’s work as a midwife and healer as well as her domestic life in Hallowell, Maine. In her Introduction, Ulrich says, “Like many diaries of farm women, it is filled with trivia about domestic chores and pastimes. Yet it is in the very dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitious dailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard’s book lies.”
I have my own Aunt Mary Bishop’s diary from 1866, a small green leather book, worn thin and minutely written in pencil. In the back is a pouch containing a flimsy bit of Confederate money: “The Farmers and Manufacturers Bank of Savannah will pay Twenty Dollars on Demand…” Mary Bishop was still in her teens when she kept it, unmarried and living at the family place in Ellisburg, PA, a hardscrabble Allegheny Mountain hamlet, barely on the map.
The June 5th entry reads: “Got breakfast, made the beds and swept. Commenced papering the sitting room, sewed a little and went for a walk this evening.”
June 7th: “Arose at 4 o’clock got breakfast and done up the work, made a cake, sewed carpet together. Got dinner and supper and went over to Mr. Ellis after supper and up to James’s to a dance in the evening.”
Nowhere does the diary use the word “I”. There is no color or description, no opinion, no personal reaction, not a word of dissatisfaction or satisfaction, pain or pleasure. The diary a stunning record of daily drudgery.
In the Introduction his “A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries,” (Penguin, 1984) Thomas Mallon describes diary keepers: “Some are chroniclers of the everyday. Others have kept their books only in special times – over the course of a trip or during a crisis. Some have used them to record journeys of the soul, plan the art of the future, confess the sins of the flesh, or to lecture the world from beyond the grave. And some of them, prisoners and invalids, have used them not so much to record lives as create them, their diaries being the only world in which they could fully live.”
Mallon says some diaries should be consumed slowly because certain lives, usually quiet ones,” seem meant to be slipped into for only a few minutes a day, like a footbath.” He uses as an example “The Diary of a Country Parson, 1758-1802” by James Woodforde, “a quiet, sentimental bachelor who had a dog named ‘Rover’.”
Robert Douglas, a former prison officer, has written “Night Song of the Last Tram: A Glasgow Childhood.” (Hodder, 2005). In the June 17. 2005 Times Literary Supplement reviewer Bernard Wasserstein, says Douglas writes “with a grace and assurance that turn everyday episodes into the stuff of romance.” Douglas is old enough to remember the notorious Victorian tenements of Glasgow, those squalid walk-ups just as awful as those on our own Lower East Side. As this last pre-WWII generation fades, Douglas recalls horse-drawn carts, gas streetlights, the cry of the rag-and-bone man, the drunken father, the saintly mother, the inspiring but cruel schoolmaster, and the trolley car.
A gem you may try to find is, “This Day: Diaries From American Women” published in 2003 by Beyond Words Publishing of Hillsboro, Oregon, a collection of 35 entries selected from more than 529 day-diaries. “They all lent a unique voice to the project. And that is why their contributions matter, because each woman offers readers a perspective,” as editor Joni B. Cole points out, “from one day in her life that no one else – no one else – could have contributed to this book...”
Here is an 8:00 pm entry by a South Carolina healthcare director: “I just sat down and took a breath. I’m drinking my fifth Diet Coke for the day. I should titrate the caffeine with some red wine. Life is all about finding balance, is it not?”
Everyday episodes. Dailiness. Dairies of nobodies. These works are so much closer to the way we live our own lives, they verify our own nobodiness. All those celebrity biographies and ghost-written tell-alls seem from Mars, like something we’d see in the movies or read in a novel.
* * *
THE POLYSYLLABIC SPREE
This piece by Elinore Standard appeared as one in the ongoing "My Reading Life" column in the July 15, 2005 Record Review.
Works mentioned: The Polysyllabic Spree, About a Boy, and A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby, The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem,
THE POLYSYLLABIC SPREE
“Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else.”
Someone gave me “The Polysyllabic Spree” by Nick Hornby (McSweeney’s, 2004) a quirky chronicle of 14 months of reading from September 2003, to November, 2004, which starts off with two lists: books bought and a shorter one of books read. Hornby’s regular column in “The Believer” magazine is titled “The Stuff I’ve Been Reading” a general subject irresistible to me. Whenever I come across a list from such a fellow reader, I am right in there, poised to glean whatever I can.
In “Spree” Hornby describes “the circuitous process by which we come to books,” and he says “reading begets reading in strange and unscientific ways” as he wanders from book to book. As observed in a little review in the New York “Times”, (December 22, 2004) Hornby likes “The Fortress of Solitude” by Jonathan Lethem and says Kurt Vonnegut is “the greatest living writer in America.”
Not long ago, Hornby had a tiff with editors at “The Believer” and because of it, his column disappeared for a month, the very month that commenced my new subsctiption. Fortunately, he was back the following month (February, 2005) with this explanation: “…they (the editors) have never approved of me reading anything about sport, and nor do they like me referring to books wherein people eat meat or farmed fish… Anyway, I was stupid enough to try to accommodate their whims and you can’t negotiate with moral terrorists. In my last column,” Hornby continues, “I wrote a little about cricket, and I made a slightly off-color joke about Chekhov, and that was it: I was banned from the magazine, sine die, which is why my column was mysteriously absent from the last issue and replaced by a whole load of pictures. Pictures! This is how they announce my death! It’s like a kind of happy-clappy North Korea round here.”
Hornby is mainly a novelist and football fan and seems to do the book reviewing reluctantly or in spite of himself. He wants to read what he wants to read and resents it if compulsory reading is imposed on him. How familiar this sounds.
“About a Boy” (Penguin, 1998) is Nick Hornby’s story of a selfish, lying bachelor, a real skunk, who reluctantly becomes attached to a 12-year old misfit. Will, the bachelor, is not above inventing a fantasy child and declaring himself a lonely, divorced dad in order to pick up bright, attractive, available single moms. Hornby’s writing is hip and funny and his dialogue is so real it is almost as if he took a tape recorder into the playground and the fern bar and simply transcribed conversations between parents and children, single women in groups, and mothers and prospective boyfriends. Funny, yes, but sad. At least Hornby resists any temptation to rehabilitate Will, a man completely blank inside. This novel was made into a movie with Hugh Grant in 2002 and for once, the movie is more entertaining than the book mainly because the acting is so surprisingly good and the directors changed the last third and devised an up-beat, if not happy, ending.
Hornby’s latest novel, “A Long Way Down”, is reviewed in the May 06, 2005
“Times Literary Supplement” by Sean O’Brien. O’Brien says the novel opens “with the meeting of four strangers on the roof of Toppers’ House, a London tower block popular with suicides.” The novel seems to weigh the four characters’ reasons for killing themselves, pro and con, and it’s hard to tell (from this short review) if Hornby is serious or not. Subsequently, the novel has been published in the US (Riverhead) and was reviewed respectfully and uneasily in the New York Times (June 12) by Chris Heath. To me it seems risky (and possibly suicidal) to undertake a novel about suicide but Hornby is inevitably brave and confident.
Hornby went on an author tour throughout the US to promote “A Long Way Down” and called it “the closest thing I’ve ever been to actually not living.” He told the New York Times Book Review that the shift from writing a book to promoting one “…does feel a bit like you’ve come out of some dark place and all these flashbulbs go off. It’s like a hostage being released or something.” (June 26)
In an Internet (www.nickhornby.co.uk) interview, Hornby talked about what kinds of books that are published in the mass market today and what kind of books win literary prizes: “…you’ve got all that Jackie Collins stuff on one side and all this very difficult, dark, inaccessible literature on the other.” The literary novels may get the prizes but guess which kind make money for everybody?
Writing in “The Believer” (April, 2005—yes! In spite of themselves they’ve managed to hang onto him!) he says, “What I’ve always loved about fiction is its ability to be smart about people who aren’t themselves smart, or at least don’t necessarily have the resources to describe their own emotional states.” Although he is commenting on Ian McEwan, Hornby cites Mark Twain and Charles Dickens and Roddy Doyle as writers who are able to be smart in this way. “It seems to me to be a more remarkable gift than the ability to let extremely literate people say extremely literate things.” What an interesting and provocative observation. I’d never have thought it up myself. So thanks, Nick, way to go.
* * *
Works mentioned: The Polysyllabic Spree, About a Boy, and A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby, The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem,
THE POLYSYLLABIC SPREE
“Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else.”
Someone gave me “The Polysyllabic Spree” by Nick Hornby (McSweeney’s, 2004) a quirky chronicle of 14 months of reading from September 2003, to November, 2004, which starts off with two lists: books bought and a shorter one of books read. Hornby’s regular column in “The Believer” magazine is titled “The Stuff I’ve Been Reading” a general subject irresistible to me. Whenever I come across a list from such a fellow reader, I am right in there, poised to glean whatever I can.
In “Spree” Hornby describes “the circuitous process by which we come to books,” and he says “reading begets reading in strange and unscientific ways” as he wanders from book to book. As observed in a little review in the New York “Times”, (December 22, 2004) Hornby likes “The Fortress of Solitude” by Jonathan Lethem and says Kurt Vonnegut is “the greatest living writer in America.”
Not long ago, Hornby had a tiff with editors at “The Believer” and because of it, his column disappeared for a month, the very month that commenced my new subsctiption. Fortunately, he was back the following month (February, 2005) with this explanation: “…they (the editors) have never approved of me reading anything about sport, and nor do they like me referring to books wherein people eat meat or farmed fish… Anyway, I was stupid enough to try to accommodate their whims and you can’t negotiate with moral terrorists. In my last column,” Hornby continues, “I wrote a little about cricket, and I made a slightly off-color joke about Chekhov, and that was it: I was banned from the magazine, sine die, which is why my column was mysteriously absent from the last issue and replaced by a whole load of pictures. Pictures! This is how they announce my death! It’s like a kind of happy-clappy North Korea round here.”
Hornby is mainly a novelist and football fan and seems to do the book reviewing reluctantly or in spite of himself. He wants to read what he wants to read and resents it if compulsory reading is imposed on him. How familiar this sounds.
“About a Boy” (Penguin, 1998) is Nick Hornby’s story of a selfish, lying bachelor, a real skunk, who reluctantly becomes attached to a 12-year old misfit. Will, the bachelor, is not above inventing a fantasy child and declaring himself a lonely, divorced dad in order to pick up bright, attractive, available single moms. Hornby’s writing is hip and funny and his dialogue is so real it is almost as if he took a tape recorder into the playground and the fern bar and simply transcribed conversations between parents and children, single women in groups, and mothers and prospective boyfriends. Funny, yes, but sad. At least Hornby resists any temptation to rehabilitate Will, a man completely blank inside. This novel was made into a movie with Hugh Grant in 2002 and for once, the movie is more entertaining than the book mainly because the acting is so surprisingly good and the directors changed the last third and devised an up-beat, if not happy, ending.
Hornby’s latest novel, “A Long Way Down”, is reviewed in the May 06, 2005
“Times Literary Supplement” by Sean O’Brien. O’Brien says the novel opens “with the meeting of four strangers on the roof of Toppers’ House, a London tower block popular with suicides.” The novel seems to weigh the four characters’ reasons for killing themselves, pro and con, and it’s hard to tell (from this short review) if Hornby is serious or not. Subsequently, the novel has been published in the US (Riverhead) and was reviewed respectfully and uneasily in the New York Times (June 12) by Chris Heath. To me it seems risky (and possibly suicidal) to undertake a novel about suicide but Hornby is inevitably brave and confident.
Hornby went on an author tour throughout the US to promote “A Long Way Down” and called it “the closest thing I’ve ever been to actually not living.” He told the New York Times Book Review that the shift from writing a book to promoting one “…does feel a bit like you’ve come out of some dark place and all these flashbulbs go off. It’s like a hostage being released or something.” (June 26)
In an Internet (www.nickhornby.co.uk) interview, Hornby talked about what kinds of books that are published in the mass market today and what kind of books win literary prizes: “…you’ve got all that Jackie Collins stuff on one side and all this very difficult, dark, inaccessible literature on the other.” The literary novels may get the prizes but guess which kind make money for everybody?
Writing in “The Believer” (April, 2005—yes! In spite of themselves they’ve managed to hang onto him!) he says, “What I’ve always loved about fiction is its ability to be smart about people who aren’t themselves smart, or at least don’t necessarily have the resources to describe their own emotional states.” Although he is commenting on Ian McEwan, Hornby cites Mark Twain and Charles Dickens and Roddy Doyle as writers who are able to be smart in this way. “It seems to me to be a more remarkable gift than the ability to let extremely literate people say extremely literate things.” What an interesting and provocative observation. I’d never have thought it up myself. So thanks, Nick, way to go.
* * *
GET ME REWRITE!
This piece appeared in the ongoing "My Reading Life" column by Elinore Standard in the June 24, 2005 Record Review.
Works mentioned: The Bookman's Wake by John Dunning, Wasted Beauty by Eric Bogosian,
"Crimes Against the Reader" by Rick Moody in the April, 2005 Believer magazine, Corrupts Absolutely by Alexa Hunt, Paul Clifford by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse by Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee, Poems by Julia Moore, "The Tay Bridge Disaster" and other poems by William T. McGonagall.
GET ME REWRITE!
Even a competent writer is capable of coming up with a terrible sentence. “We slipped around like a pair of peeled avocados twisted together in Saran Wrap.” Really. This is from John Dunning in “The Bookman’s Wake” (p. 64) (Pocket, 1995) one in his Cliff Janeway, rare book dealer and private eye, series. Dunning’s knowledge of collectible books is always interesting and so are his plots and characters. When I came across the avocado sentence, I had to stop and re-read and then I got out a post-it and made note. Although Dunning, who can (usually) be counted on for good, sound writing, is responsible for it, I wondered where his editor was.
And how about this: “…the frazzled doctor’s eyes are like slit-open gray prunes,” a passage from “Wasted Beauty” by Eric Bogosian (S&S, 2005), described in a recent “Publishers’ Weekly” review as written with “fresh, frank turn of phrase”. No kidding?
Rick Moody, the writer and critic, was on the distinguished five-person committee that judged the unusually controversial 2004 National Book Award. The panel, headed by Moody, was criticized widely and harshly for selecting as finalists five little-known authors in the fiction category. Little-known (women!) authors are unlikely to sell, award or no award, and the more literary the writing, the less likely it is to become a blockbuster. Bad for sales, bad for business, bad for the corporate bottom line.
In a piece titled “Crimes Against The Reader” in the April, 2005, “The Believer” magazine, Moody looks back at the latest National Book Award and the ire it inspired. He talks about the politics of such awards and about what might be called “literary taste” and what we think of as “good” writing and “bad” writing. “We decide,” Moody says, “that Don DeLillo is certainly a better writer than Jacqueline Susann. We decide that though Jackie Collins may be amusing she cannot, in fact, write a palatable English-language sentence. We know,” Moody continues, “that Collins does not rewrite enough, and that even if she did it probably would not help. Whereas DeLillo’s published work is an irresistible resource for both perfect craft and sheer talent and imagination. His sentences sing and remain in the memory.” There is just no accounting for taste.
Alexa Hunt, pseudonym for a writer who has produced many romances, has a new mystery titled “Corrupts Absolutely” (Forge, April, 2005) and this sentence was cited in a recent “Publishers’ Weekly” review: “Mmm, I love hairy men,” she breathed, plowing her splayed fingers through the mat on his chest…”
This sort of sentence is enough to get a writer a “Bulwer-Lytton Award,” given each year by San Jose State as a mocking tribute to Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents – except at occasional intervals…” opening to his immortal “Paul Clifford” (1830). All readers of “Peanuts” are familiar with the “dark and stormy night” line that Snoopy kept pecking out on his typewriter. The annual “Dark and Stormy Night Contest, as it is also known, elicits thousands of entries that bring tears to your eyes. Ten finalists are chosen and then one distinguished winner. The $250 prize was won in 2004 by Californian Dave Zobel with this:
“She resolved to end the love affair with Ramon tonight…summarily, like Martha Stewart ripping the sand vein out of a shrimp’s tail…though the term ‘love affair’ now struck her as a ridiculous euphemism…not unlike ‘sand vein,’ which is after all an intestine, not a vein…and that tarry substance inside certainly isn’t sand…and that brought her back to Ramon.”
Second place in the 2004 contest went to Canadian Pamela Patchet Hamilton who described her style as “Dave Barry with a feminist twist,” in this entry: “The notion that they would no longer be a couple dashed Helen’s hopes and scrambled her thoughts not unlike the time her sleeve caught the edge of the open egg carton and the contents hit the floor like fragile things hitting cold tiles, more pitiable because they were the expensive organic brown eggs from free-range chickens, and one of them clearly had double yolks entwined in one sac just the way Helen and Richard used to be.”
Rules for the 2005 competition may be found at www.bulwer-lytton.com (“where www means ‘wretched writers welcome’”). A link at this site took me to bad poetry and I have two suggestions along these lines, should you be interested.
First, is an anthology titled “The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse” collected by Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee (Coward-McCann, 1930), a gem I’ve managed to hang on to through countless moves over many years. Not only are mediocre and minor poets included (although there are a good many of them); some of the great are also present, including Robert Burns, Byron, Keats, Emerson, Poe and a large selection from Wordsworth. Some of the most awful poetry is by the American, “Sweet Singer of Michigan,” Julia Moore (1847-1920), whose work is concerned to a large extent with total abstinence and violent (and early) death.
Second is the work of William Topaz McGonagall, Victorian poet and tragedian of Dundee, widely hailed as the writer of the worst poetry in the English language. (Julia Moore may be the runner-up). You can read some of his stuff, including the dreadful “Tay Bridge Disaster” on a great website devoted to McGonagall: www.mcgonagall-online.org. As a bonus, you can request the McGonagall ”Gem of the Day” by e-mail -- that is if you can stand to corrupt your computer with this vile poetry.
* * *
Works mentioned: The Bookman's Wake by John Dunning, Wasted Beauty by Eric Bogosian,
"Crimes Against the Reader" by Rick Moody in the April, 2005 Believer magazine, Corrupts Absolutely by Alexa Hunt, Paul Clifford by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse by Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee, Poems by Julia Moore, "The Tay Bridge Disaster" and other poems by William T. McGonagall.
GET ME REWRITE!
Even a competent writer is capable of coming up with a terrible sentence. “We slipped around like a pair of peeled avocados twisted together in Saran Wrap.” Really. This is from John Dunning in “The Bookman’s Wake” (p. 64) (Pocket, 1995) one in his Cliff Janeway, rare book dealer and private eye, series. Dunning’s knowledge of collectible books is always interesting and so are his plots and characters. When I came across the avocado sentence, I had to stop and re-read and then I got out a post-it and made note. Although Dunning, who can (usually) be counted on for good, sound writing, is responsible for it, I wondered where his editor was.
And how about this: “…the frazzled doctor’s eyes are like slit-open gray prunes,” a passage from “Wasted Beauty” by Eric Bogosian (S&S, 2005), described in a recent “Publishers’ Weekly” review as written with “fresh, frank turn of phrase”. No kidding?
Rick Moody, the writer and critic, was on the distinguished five-person committee that judged the unusually controversial 2004 National Book Award. The panel, headed by Moody, was criticized widely and harshly for selecting as finalists five little-known authors in the fiction category. Little-known (women!) authors are unlikely to sell, award or no award, and the more literary the writing, the less likely it is to become a blockbuster. Bad for sales, bad for business, bad for the corporate bottom line.
In a piece titled “Crimes Against The Reader” in the April, 2005, “The Believer” magazine, Moody looks back at the latest National Book Award and the ire it inspired. He talks about the politics of such awards and about what might be called “literary taste” and what we think of as “good” writing and “bad” writing. “We decide,” Moody says, “that Don DeLillo is certainly a better writer than Jacqueline Susann. We decide that though Jackie Collins may be amusing she cannot, in fact, write a palatable English-language sentence. We know,” Moody continues, “that Collins does not rewrite enough, and that even if she did it probably would not help. Whereas DeLillo’s published work is an irresistible resource for both perfect craft and sheer talent and imagination. His sentences sing and remain in the memory.” There is just no accounting for taste.
Alexa Hunt, pseudonym for a writer who has produced many romances, has a new mystery titled “Corrupts Absolutely” (Forge, April, 2005) and this sentence was cited in a recent “Publishers’ Weekly” review: “Mmm, I love hairy men,” she breathed, plowing her splayed fingers through the mat on his chest…”
This sort of sentence is enough to get a writer a “Bulwer-Lytton Award,” given each year by San Jose State as a mocking tribute to Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents – except at occasional intervals…” opening to his immortal “Paul Clifford” (1830). All readers of “Peanuts” are familiar with the “dark and stormy night” line that Snoopy kept pecking out on his typewriter. The annual “Dark and Stormy Night Contest, as it is also known, elicits thousands of entries that bring tears to your eyes. Ten finalists are chosen and then one distinguished winner. The $250 prize was won in 2004 by Californian Dave Zobel with this:
“She resolved to end the love affair with Ramon tonight…summarily, like Martha Stewart ripping the sand vein out of a shrimp’s tail…though the term ‘love affair’ now struck her as a ridiculous euphemism…not unlike ‘sand vein,’ which is after all an intestine, not a vein…and that tarry substance inside certainly isn’t sand…and that brought her back to Ramon.”
Second place in the 2004 contest went to Canadian Pamela Patchet Hamilton who described her style as “Dave Barry with a feminist twist,” in this entry: “The notion that they would no longer be a couple dashed Helen’s hopes and scrambled her thoughts not unlike the time her sleeve caught the edge of the open egg carton and the contents hit the floor like fragile things hitting cold tiles, more pitiable because they were the expensive organic brown eggs from free-range chickens, and one of them clearly had double yolks entwined in one sac just the way Helen and Richard used to be.”
Rules for the 2005 competition may be found at www.bulwer-lytton.com (“where www means ‘wretched writers welcome’”). A link at this site took me to bad poetry and I have two suggestions along these lines, should you be interested.
First, is an anthology titled “The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse” collected by Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee (Coward-McCann, 1930), a gem I’ve managed to hang on to through countless moves over many years. Not only are mediocre and minor poets included (although there are a good many of them); some of the great are also present, including Robert Burns, Byron, Keats, Emerson, Poe and a large selection from Wordsworth. Some of the most awful poetry is by the American, “Sweet Singer of Michigan,” Julia Moore (1847-1920), whose work is concerned to a large extent with total abstinence and violent (and early) death.
Second is the work of William Topaz McGonagall, Victorian poet and tragedian of Dundee, widely hailed as the writer of the worst poetry in the English language. (Julia Moore may be the runner-up). You can read some of his stuff, including the dreadful “Tay Bridge Disaster” on a great website devoted to McGonagall: www.mcgonagall-online.org. As a bonus, you can request the McGonagall ”Gem of the Day” by e-mail -- that is if you can stand to corrupt your computer with this vile poetry.
* * *
THE STUFF I'VE BEEN READING
This column in the continuing "My Reading Life" series by Elinore Standard appeared in the Record Review in May, 2005.
Works mentioned in the piece: The Stuff I've Been Reading by Nick Hornby (in the "Believer" magazine), Liberation Road by David Robbins, The Namesake and The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpha Lahiri, A Handful of Kings by Mark Jacobs. Desert Burial by Brian Littlefair, The House in Paris and The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen, The Jade Palace Vendetta by Dale Furutani, Prince of Fire by Daniel Silva, Saturday by Ian McEwan, Ulysses by James Joyce.
THE STUFF I'VE BEEN READING
As you’ve probably noticed by now, I enjoy lists of books. I like to see other people’s lists and I like to keep my own. I love it when somebody tells me what to read. A while ago, I discovered a monthly column titled “The Stuff I’ve Been Reading” by Nick Hornby, novelist, screenwriter, and major soccer fan, in “The Believer” magazine. “The Believer” is not exactly your everyday “People” or “Time” so you may not have come across it in the dentist’s waiting room.
“The Believer” is a gorgeously-designed literary monthly published by McSweeney’s of San Francisco and edited by about five different people. I don’t know whose money makes it go because it has no, that is zero, advertising. It is not the “New York Review of Books” or “The London Review of Books”, nor is it like another other literary review I can think of. The initial appeal for me was Nick Hornby and he is the reason I subscribed. More on him in this space some other time.
Hornby is a good maker of reading lists and the magazine, for that matter, provides a list of all the books mentioned in each issue, so imagine my glee as I flip through a periodical that seems designed for somebody like me. Hornby’s column begins with a list of books he bought and books he read during the preceding month, and they are not always the same. So, taking the idea from Hornby, here is what I have bought or borrowed recently and what I have read:
“Liberation Road: A novel of WWII and The Red Ball Express” by David L. Robbins (Bantam, 2005). I chose this on impulse from the Bedford Free Library’s shelf of new and interesting fiction. Every once in a while you get lucky and happen upon an author whose work is completely new to you. This fact-based novel is the story of 6,000 trucks and 23,000 drivers – most of them African-American – who forged a lifeline of supplies in the Allied battle to liberate France. The solid writing and research in this book offer fine description of the post-D-Day Omaha and Utah beachheads and the insane fighting in the hedgerows of Normandy that ensued. As the Allied armies pressed on into France, the heroic drivers kept the troops supplied and suffered great losses themselves. This is a touching, moving, wonderful book and I’ve discovered a new author.
“The Namesake” by Jhumpa Lahiri (Houghton, 2003). For whatever the reason, I had avoided this well-reviewed novel until I recently took it out from the Bedford Library. Although I liked Lahiri’s “The Interpreter of Maladies” I somehow hadn’t been ready for this one. It is a novel about Indian-American professionals making their way in a different culture, far away from family and tradition. It is about courage and duty and obedience and the tangled ties between generations. The book’s sly humor cannot mask the underlying sadness of the story. A friend told me she cried when she finished it and I also didn’t want it to end. A gem, a prize!
“A Handful of Kings” by Mark Jacobs (Simon & Schuster, 2004). Described as a “literary thriller” in a piece by author Tom Bissell in the March, 2005 “Believer” magazine, I ordered it through the library System on Bissell’s recommendation. I ploughed along through a tale of U.S. diplomats, usually at odds with each other, uniting briefly to foil a terrorist plot and a kidnapping. I kept having to stop and re-read and finally gave up and closed the book.
“Swimming in the Volcano” was also recommended as a literary thriller by Tom Bissell and I also ordered it on his say-so. The first page of this 500-plus-page doorstop had dialogue written in a kind of Caribbean dialect and I stopped right there. The novel may very well be wonderful but it is not for me.
“Desert Burial” by Brian Littlefair, (Holt, 2002) another mentioned in the “Believer” piece, also came via WLS. When I realized the action is set in the near-future I didn’t open it. I try to avoid future anything.
The novelist A.S. Byatt was quoted in a recent New York Times Book Review as saying “The House in Paris” (1935) is Elizabeth Bowen’s best novel. I had always thought Bowen’s “The Death of the Heart” was perhaps the finest novel I had ever read, and so I ordered “The House in Paris” through the library system and it made its way to me from Eastchester. In Bowen’s novels, the neglected child, the isolated or orphaned young person, is a recurring character. “The House in Paris” gives us two such children, one an unwanted boy and the other a slightly older girl who gets fobbed off on relatives. Byatt says this novel is “one of those books that grow in the mind, in time,” and I find this it true. Although I read it nearly a month ago, “The House in Paris” is still very much with me.
“The Jade Palace Vendetta” by Dale Furutani (Morrow, 1999) is the second in his Samurai trilogy. Set in early 1600s feudal Japan, it is written by this Japanese-American author in an easy, literate style. It may add to your enjoyment if you have some knowledge of Japanese history and customs, but Furutani doesn’t try to go over anybody’s head. The characters and atmosphere are believable and the main plot, about the search for a stolen child, I found intriguing enough so I want to read the other two in the trilogy. I picked this one off the try-shelf at the library.
“Prince of Fire” by Daniel Silva (Putnam’s, 2005) I got new at Costco for ten bucks off the list price. I’ve been a fan of Silva’s Gabriel Allon thrillers and had been waiting for this new one to appear which is why I paid money for it. Compared to the previous novels featuring Allon, the art restorer/Israeli intelligence agent/killer, I found this one disappointing (maybe because I paid for it) and I thought the main character barely held up. The detailed history and background of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict makes the book worthwhile.
“Saturday” by Ian McEwan (Doubleday, 2005). Also bought at Costco. This current bestseller takes place entirely during a day in the life of a London neurosurgeon. It is also the day of the big London anti-Iraq war march in February, 2003. McEwan’s handling of time has always been an interesting feature of his work, and in this novel it is especially so. It brings to mind other one-day novels such as James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. Perowne, the surgeon, is encouraged by his poet grown daughter to read novels so that he might develop the literary side of “a man who attempts to ease the miseries of failing minds by repairing brains.” She sets him lists that have “so far persuaded him that fiction is too humanly flawed, too sprawling, and hit-or-miss to inspire wonder at the magnificence of human ingenuity, of the impossible dazzlingly achieved.”
Of course, this is not all that happens during the surgeon’s day -- there are dark gatherings and unexpected crises. It is as if this novel is a piece of metafiction and McEwan has stepped into “Saturday” himself and that he has, indeed, dazzlingly achieved the impossible. A simply astounding work.
* * *
Works mentioned in the piece: The Stuff I've Been Reading by Nick Hornby (in the "Believer" magazine), Liberation Road by David Robbins, The Namesake and The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpha Lahiri, A Handful of Kings by Mark Jacobs. Desert Burial by Brian Littlefair, The House in Paris and The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen, The Jade Palace Vendetta by Dale Furutani, Prince of Fire by Daniel Silva, Saturday by Ian McEwan, Ulysses by James Joyce.
THE STUFF I'VE BEEN READING
As you’ve probably noticed by now, I enjoy lists of books. I like to see other people’s lists and I like to keep my own. I love it when somebody tells me what to read. A while ago, I discovered a monthly column titled “The Stuff I’ve Been Reading” by Nick Hornby, novelist, screenwriter, and major soccer fan, in “The Believer” magazine. “The Believer” is not exactly your everyday “People” or “Time” so you may not have come across it in the dentist’s waiting room.
“The Believer” is a gorgeously-designed literary monthly published by McSweeney’s of San Francisco and edited by about five different people. I don’t know whose money makes it go because it has no, that is zero, advertising. It is not the “New York Review of Books” or “The London Review of Books”, nor is it like another other literary review I can think of. The initial appeal for me was Nick Hornby and he is the reason I subscribed. More on him in this space some other time.
Hornby is a good maker of reading lists and the magazine, for that matter, provides a list of all the books mentioned in each issue, so imagine my glee as I flip through a periodical that seems designed for somebody like me. Hornby’s column begins with a list of books he bought and books he read during the preceding month, and they are not always the same. So, taking the idea from Hornby, here is what I have bought or borrowed recently and what I have read:
“Liberation Road: A novel of WWII and The Red Ball Express” by David L. Robbins (Bantam, 2005). I chose this on impulse from the Bedford Free Library’s shelf of new and interesting fiction. Every once in a while you get lucky and happen upon an author whose work is completely new to you. This fact-based novel is the story of 6,000 trucks and 23,000 drivers – most of them African-American – who forged a lifeline of supplies in the Allied battle to liberate France. The solid writing and research in this book offer fine description of the post-D-Day Omaha and Utah beachheads and the insane fighting in the hedgerows of Normandy that ensued. As the Allied armies pressed on into France, the heroic drivers kept the troops supplied and suffered great losses themselves. This is a touching, moving, wonderful book and I’ve discovered a new author.
“The Namesake” by Jhumpa Lahiri (Houghton, 2003). For whatever the reason, I had avoided this well-reviewed novel until I recently took it out from the Bedford Library. Although I liked Lahiri’s “The Interpreter of Maladies” I somehow hadn’t been ready for this one. It is a novel about Indian-American professionals making their way in a different culture, far away from family and tradition. It is about courage and duty and obedience and the tangled ties between generations. The book’s sly humor cannot mask the underlying sadness of the story. A friend told me she cried when she finished it and I also didn’t want it to end. A gem, a prize!
“A Handful of Kings” by Mark Jacobs (Simon & Schuster, 2004). Described as a “literary thriller” in a piece by author Tom Bissell in the March, 2005 “Believer” magazine, I ordered it through the library System on Bissell’s recommendation. I ploughed along through a tale of U.S. diplomats, usually at odds with each other, uniting briefly to foil a terrorist plot and a kidnapping. I kept having to stop and re-read and finally gave up and closed the book.
“Swimming in the Volcano” was also recommended as a literary thriller by Tom Bissell and I also ordered it on his say-so. The first page of this 500-plus-page doorstop had dialogue written in a kind of Caribbean dialect and I stopped right there. The novel may very well be wonderful but it is not for me.
“Desert Burial” by Brian Littlefair, (Holt, 2002) another mentioned in the “Believer” piece, also came via WLS. When I realized the action is set in the near-future I didn’t open it. I try to avoid future anything.
The novelist A.S. Byatt was quoted in a recent New York Times Book Review as saying “The House in Paris” (1935) is Elizabeth Bowen’s best novel. I had always thought Bowen’s “The Death of the Heart” was perhaps the finest novel I had ever read, and so I ordered “The House in Paris” through the library system and it made its way to me from Eastchester. In Bowen’s novels, the neglected child, the isolated or orphaned young person, is a recurring character. “The House in Paris” gives us two such children, one an unwanted boy and the other a slightly older girl who gets fobbed off on relatives. Byatt says this novel is “one of those books that grow in the mind, in time,” and I find this it true. Although I read it nearly a month ago, “The House in Paris” is still very much with me.
“The Jade Palace Vendetta” by Dale Furutani (Morrow, 1999) is the second in his Samurai trilogy. Set in early 1600s feudal Japan, it is written by this Japanese-American author in an easy, literate style. It may add to your enjoyment if you have some knowledge of Japanese history and customs, but Furutani doesn’t try to go over anybody’s head. The characters and atmosphere are believable and the main plot, about the search for a stolen child, I found intriguing enough so I want to read the other two in the trilogy. I picked this one off the try-shelf at the library.
“Prince of Fire” by Daniel Silva (Putnam’s, 2005) I got new at Costco for ten bucks off the list price. I’ve been a fan of Silva’s Gabriel Allon thrillers and had been waiting for this new one to appear which is why I paid money for it. Compared to the previous novels featuring Allon, the art restorer/Israeli intelligence agent/killer, I found this one disappointing (maybe because I paid for it) and I thought the main character barely held up. The detailed history and background of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict makes the book worthwhile.
“Saturday” by Ian McEwan (Doubleday, 2005). Also bought at Costco. This current bestseller takes place entirely during a day in the life of a London neurosurgeon. It is also the day of the big London anti-Iraq war march in February, 2003. McEwan’s handling of time has always been an interesting feature of his work, and in this novel it is especially so. It brings to mind other one-day novels such as James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. Perowne, the surgeon, is encouraged by his poet grown daughter to read novels so that he might develop the literary side of “a man who attempts to ease the miseries of failing minds by repairing brains.” She sets him lists that have “so far persuaded him that fiction is too humanly flawed, too sprawling, and hit-or-miss to inspire wonder at the magnificence of human ingenuity, of the impossible dazzlingly achieved.”
Of course, this is not all that happens during the surgeon’s day -- there are dark gatherings and unexpected crises. It is as if this novel is a piece of metafiction and McEwan has stepped into “Saturday” himself and that he has, indeed, dazzlingly achieved the impossible. A simply astounding work.
* * *
AND THE TOAD CAME HOME
This column in the "My Reading Life" series by Elinore Standard appeared in the Record Review in March, 2005
Works mentioned in the piece: The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, A Reading Diary by Alberto Manguel.
AND THE TOAD --- CAME --- HOME
On NPR I recently heard children’s book author and reviewer Daniel Pinkwater talk about a new, abridged edition of the 1908 Kenneth Grahame children’s classic, “The Wind in The Willows." Although the characters, Rat, Mole, Badger and Toad, seemed familiar, I realized that somehow I neither read it nor was it read to me. What a lack!
I quickly ordered the original 1908 version illustrated in 1961 by Ernest H. Shepard from Amazon, ($5.99), where I also browsed through another young reader’s edition with nice illustrations by Don Daily and re-told by G. C. Barrett. The original text is shortened somewhat but it does retain the spirit of the original so I decided to get it for the beginning reader in our family.
I checked the local library system and found the Pinkwater version, illustrated by Inga Moore, at three libraries. Many have the original with the Shepard illustrations and there are plenty of others. Several libraries have the unabridged audiobook and I discovered an abridged (2 tapes) BBC version read by Alan Bennett. Although there are many videos of “The Wind In The Willows”, the most likely version includes voices of Judy Collins, Roddy McDowall, Jose Ferrer and Eddie Bracken. Netflix (www.netflix.com) will mail DVD’s and is usually good source for movie and TV classics. Although they have several listings for “The Wind In The Willows” I was put off by the Disneyish animation in what I found.
Read this opening line of the original Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) “The Wind In The Willows”, close your eyes, and think what comes to mind:
The mole had been working very hard all the
morning, spring cleaning his little home.”
Don’t you want to snuggle deeper into your cozy chair and keep reading? Don’t you think of warmth and the safety of home? When mole returns to his old underground home after adventuring afar, he looks around at his familiar things and realizes how much it all means to him. He realizes the value of such a base in one’s existence.
“But it was good to think he had this to come back to, this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.”
Kenneth Grahame offers sly insights into human nature that may be lost on the young but will delight the older reader, such as when Mole observes, “After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy working.” Kind of like being in Florida and knowing it is 15 degrees and snowing in The North Country.
For “A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader’s Reflections On A Year of Books”, (Farrar, 2004), Alberto Manguel kept a volume of notes, reflections, impressions, sketches, all elicited by his re-reading 12 of his favorite old books. In one chapter, Manguel, an Argentine by birth, is about to buy his own house near Poitiers in France after not having one for a long time, and he begins thinking about “The Wind In The Willows” and the comforts of home. He says, “Kenneth Grahame is masterly at describing comfort,” and so Manguel decided to re-read “The Wind In The Willows”.
Manguel says he is like Mole in that he likes orderly adventures and as an exile he says, “I know that you can feel utterly at home in a place that is not the one to which you feel the deepest attachment. (Mole would agree).” He observes, “…throughout my reading year I found myself traveling to many different cities and yet wishing to be back home, in my house in a small village in France, where I keep my books and do my work.” Mole would agree with that, too.
If, by some small chance, you are unfamiliar with the story of “The Wind in the Willows”, it goes like this: Mole emerges from his underground home into the Springtime world above. He meets Rat and together they paddle a little boat around The River. While they are picnicking, Badger makes a brief appearance and Toad appears in a one-man shell, rowing erratically and tipping over. Mole and Rat visit Toad at Toad Hall and find him excited about setting out in his latest passion: a gypsy caravan. Toad convinces them to come along. They’ve not gone far when the caravan is wiped off the road by a speeding motor car and instead of lamenting, Toad is possessed by the newest new thing. A hopelessly bad driver, Toad wrecks one expensive auto after another and Rat and Mole give up. Winter has come and Mole sets off into the Wild Wood where he is terrorized by stoats and weasels. Heavily armed, Rat sets off to find Mole. A snowstorm covers up everything but reunited, they stumble upon the entrance to Badger’s snug burrow. The antisocial but kindly Badger welcomes them and eventually shows them a safe way out of the Wild Wood. Along about Yuletide, Mole realizes he is homesick and invites Rat to visit him for a change. Together they give Mole’s place a makeover and have a happy homecoming. Now it is summer again and Badger, Mole and Rat decide to do an intervention on Toad, who is a menace on the roads. They lecture him about his reckless ways and lock him in his room. He escapes and steals a motorcar outside a pub. Toad is caught and thrown into a dungeon where he stays until he bribes his way out. In the guise of a washerwoman, he wheedles a ride on a railway train and escapes from the pursuing Bobbies. Toad then gets a ride on a barge and is insulting to the bargewoman. Toad steals the barge horse and the barge runs aground. “Ha,, Ha,,” laughs Toad who then sells the horse. With shillings in his pocket, Toad hitches a ride in a passing motorcar, the very one he had taken from the pub. Overcome by his driving obsession, he grabs the wheel and plunges the car into a pond. Chased by the law once again, Toad jumps in the river and is saved by Rat. Rat is disgusted and Toad repents a little, seeing what an awful ass he has made of himself. In his absence, Toad Hall has been taken over by the Wild Wooders who are squatting there, wrecking the place. Badger knows a secret passageway to Toad Hall and together the four friends resolve to reclaim it. Armed with pistols and swords and sticks and accompanied by other friendly animals, they rush in and whack the evildoers. They get the place cleaned up and send out invitations to a celebration banquet. Although Toad has been forbidden to make speeches, he does sing one last little song that begins: “When the Toad ----came----home!”
And the moral of the story is? I was doing fine until I asked. You could say the moral is: you can do whatever you feel like doing if you have enough money to bail yourself out when you get in trouble. As Ratty observes, “Toad is rather rich, you know.” Although he is slightly contrite in the end, you get the feeling Toad is like every other irresponsible rich boy you’ve ever met: his impulse control is set on zero.
Electing to leave the story on a positive note, I prefer to remember the sweetness and loyalty of the animal friendships and Kenneth Grahame’s gorgeous descriptions of the seasons in nature, the fields, the Wild Wood and The River in “The Wind in the Willows."
Works mentioned in the piece: The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, A Reading Diary by Alberto Manguel.
AND THE TOAD --- CAME --- HOME
On NPR I recently heard children’s book author and reviewer Daniel Pinkwater talk about a new, abridged edition of the 1908 Kenneth Grahame children’s classic, “The Wind in The Willows." Although the characters, Rat, Mole, Badger and Toad, seemed familiar, I realized that somehow I neither read it nor was it read to me. What a lack!
I quickly ordered the original 1908 version illustrated in 1961 by Ernest H. Shepard from Amazon, ($5.99), where I also browsed through another young reader’s edition with nice illustrations by Don Daily and re-told by G. C. Barrett. The original text is shortened somewhat but it does retain the spirit of the original so I decided to get it for the beginning reader in our family.
I checked the local library system and found the Pinkwater version, illustrated by Inga Moore, at three libraries. Many have the original with the Shepard illustrations and there are plenty of others. Several libraries have the unabridged audiobook and I discovered an abridged (2 tapes) BBC version read by Alan Bennett. Although there are many videos of “The Wind In The Willows”, the most likely version includes voices of Judy Collins, Roddy McDowall, Jose Ferrer and Eddie Bracken. Netflix (www.netflix.com) will mail DVD’s and is usually good source for movie and TV classics. Although they have several listings for “The Wind In The Willows” I was put off by the Disneyish animation in what I found.
Read this opening line of the original Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) “The Wind In The Willows”, close your eyes, and think what comes to mind:
The mole had been working very hard all the
morning, spring cleaning his little home.”
Don’t you want to snuggle deeper into your cozy chair and keep reading? Don’t you think of warmth and the safety of home? When mole returns to his old underground home after adventuring afar, he looks around at his familiar things and realizes how much it all means to him. He realizes the value of such a base in one’s existence.
“But it was good to think he had this to come back to, this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.”
Kenneth Grahame offers sly insights into human nature that may be lost on the young but will delight the older reader, such as when Mole observes, “After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy working.” Kind of like being in Florida and knowing it is 15 degrees and snowing in The North Country.
For “A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader’s Reflections On A Year of Books”, (Farrar, 2004), Alberto Manguel kept a volume of notes, reflections, impressions, sketches, all elicited by his re-reading 12 of his favorite old books. In one chapter, Manguel, an Argentine by birth, is about to buy his own house near Poitiers in France after not having one for a long time, and he begins thinking about “The Wind In The Willows” and the comforts of home. He says, “Kenneth Grahame is masterly at describing comfort,” and so Manguel decided to re-read “The Wind In The Willows”.
Manguel says he is like Mole in that he likes orderly adventures and as an exile he says, “I know that you can feel utterly at home in a place that is not the one to which you feel the deepest attachment. (Mole would agree).” He observes, “…throughout my reading year I found myself traveling to many different cities and yet wishing to be back home, in my house in a small village in France, where I keep my books and do my work.” Mole would agree with that, too.
If, by some small chance, you are unfamiliar with the story of “The Wind in the Willows”, it goes like this: Mole emerges from his underground home into the Springtime world above. He meets Rat and together they paddle a little boat around The River. While they are picnicking, Badger makes a brief appearance and Toad appears in a one-man shell, rowing erratically and tipping over. Mole and Rat visit Toad at Toad Hall and find him excited about setting out in his latest passion: a gypsy caravan. Toad convinces them to come along. They’ve not gone far when the caravan is wiped off the road by a speeding motor car and instead of lamenting, Toad is possessed by the newest new thing. A hopelessly bad driver, Toad wrecks one expensive auto after another and Rat and Mole give up. Winter has come and Mole sets off into the Wild Wood where he is terrorized by stoats and weasels. Heavily armed, Rat sets off to find Mole. A snowstorm covers up everything but reunited, they stumble upon the entrance to Badger’s snug burrow. The antisocial but kindly Badger welcomes them and eventually shows them a safe way out of the Wild Wood. Along about Yuletide, Mole realizes he is homesick and invites Rat to visit him for a change. Together they give Mole’s place a makeover and have a happy homecoming. Now it is summer again and Badger, Mole and Rat decide to do an intervention on Toad, who is a menace on the roads. They lecture him about his reckless ways and lock him in his room. He escapes and steals a motorcar outside a pub. Toad is caught and thrown into a dungeon where he stays until he bribes his way out. In the guise of a washerwoman, he wheedles a ride on a railway train and escapes from the pursuing Bobbies. Toad then gets a ride on a barge and is insulting to the bargewoman. Toad steals the barge horse and the barge runs aground. “Ha,, Ha,,” laughs Toad who then sells the horse. With shillings in his pocket, Toad hitches a ride in a passing motorcar, the very one he had taken from the pub. Overcome by his driving obsession, he grabs the wheel and plunges the car into a pond. Chased by the law once again, Toad jumps in the river and is saved by Rat. Rat is disgusted and Toad repents a little, seeing what an awful ass he has made of himself. In his absence, Toad Hall has been taken over by the Wild Wooders who are squatting there, wrecking the place. Badger knows a secret passageway to Toad Hall and together the four friends resolve to reclaim it. Armed with pistols and swords and sticks and accompanied by other friendly animals, they rush in and whack the evildoers. They get the place cleaned up and send out invitations to a celebration banquet. Although Toad has been forbidden to make speeches, he does sing one last little song that begins: “When the Toad ----came----home!”
And the moral of the story is? I was doing fine until I asked. You could say the moral is: you can do whatever you feel like doing if you have enough money to bail yourself out when you get in trouble. As Ratty observes, “Toad is rather rich, you know.” Although he is slightly contrite in the end, you get the feeling Toad is like every other irresponsible rich boy you’ve ever met: his impulse control is set on zero.
Electing to leave the story on a positive note, I prefer to remember the sweetness and loyalty of the animal friendships and Kenneth Grahame’s gorgeous descriptions of the seasons in nature, the fields, the Wild Wood and The River in “The Wind in the Willows."
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
GENTLE READS
This column by Elinore Standard is one in the ongoing "My Reading Life" series in the Record Review and it appeared in February, 2005.
MY READING LIFE
"Gentle Reads"
Works mentioned in this piece: Land Girls and Wives of the Fisherman by Angela Huth, Quite a Year for Plums, by Bailey White, Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, Old Devils by Kingsley Amis, Walking Across Egypt, by Clive Edgerton, Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie, Evening Star and Loop Group by Larry McMurtry, A Town Like Alice, Trustee from the Toolroom, On the Beach, The Far Country, In the Wet, Lonely Road, and Landfall by Nevil Shute, Remarkable Reads by J. Peder Zane, Sunset Song and A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassick Gibbon,
There seems to be a recognized book genre called “gentle reads”, works that are positive in tone, feature little, if any, sex and violence, and have settings that evoke this kinder, gentler time before the world became a globe. Since there is now a website for everything, when I Googled “gentle reads” I found several throughout the GLOBE that have interesting and extensive lists of books that you can read without being scared out of your mind or having your tail feathers ruffled in some unpleasant way.
I’m thinking about places where Winter is Summer and the world is upside down. I’m thinking about a place about as far away as possible from the eastern coast of the US. New Zealand? Close. Australia? Very close. Tasmania? Yes, Tasmania, home of Errol Flynn, that swashbuckling rascal of the silver screen. From way down there, from that former far-flung colonial outpost, we have the website of the State Library of Tasmania: www.statelibrary.tas.gov and books, books, lists and more lists of books!
On the Tasmanian “Gentle Reads” list are 22 novels by Nevil Shute, the Rumpole books by John Mortimer, Angela Huth’s “The Land Girls” and “Wives of the Fisherman”, Bailey White’s “Quite a Year for Plums” as well as all the mysteries by Dorothy L. Sayers (was there ever a more romantic moment than in “Gaudy Night” when Lord Peter Wimsey proposes to Harriet Vane and she finally accepts?).
As many libraries do, the Tasmanian Library maintains all kinds of lists including “Fishing Mysteries”, “Big Teeth” monster fiction, “The Detective Doesn’t Wear Trousers”, and “Seniors” fiction . The last category includes Kingsley Amis’s “The Old Devils”, winner of the 1986 Booker Prize, featuring a set of retired old cronies, (“media Welshmen”), who gather daily at a pub that is a home away from home. Their quiet routine gets stirred up when friends, who left years before for a glamorous life in London, return to Wales, a place “very like England and yet not England at all.” This book is available through the Westchester Library System.
Also on this Seniors list are Clive Edgerton’s “Walking Across Egypt”, Alison Lurie’s “Foreign Affairs: and Larry McMurtry’s “Evening Star”. I am sure McMurtry’s recent “Loop Group” will appear on this list before long.
“Walking Across Egypt” is not about walking across Egypt. It is the title of a church hymn written by the author – words and music in the back of the book. Clive Edgerton is an American author who I had never read before, although he has written many books. I see why his work is on the same list as Bailey White. Edgerton was born in the South and lives in North Carolina and writes about the South. “Egypt” is indeed a comfort read about a feisty old lady who becomes the guardian of a juvenile delinquent. The novel is full of great Southern cooking and Edgerton writes dialect that is not annoying, a trick that is a lot harder to do than you might think.
Long before I discovered the Tasmanian list, I went on a Nevil Shute (1899-1960) kick, finding many of his novels at the Bedford Village library and at the Halle Library in Pound Ridge. I re-read “A Town Like Alice” a haunting story that had been made into a wonderful BBC-TV series starring Bryan Brown, and “The Trustee From The Toolroom” an intriguing tale of a legacy and a sunken sailboat. “Toolroom” became a movie titled “The Legacy”.
If you want to create your own Nevil Shute library, you can buy many of his novels online from Amazon (www.Amazon.com). Shute worked at British aircraft companies in the early years of aviation and had a strong interest in flying, often reflected in his work. “Landfall: A Channel Story” (1940), about a young reconnaissance pilot, became a movie in 1949 and was later made into a BBC-TV serial. I recently re-read “Landfall” and breezed through it, an engrossing read even today.
In 1948, Shute visited Australia and was so taken with the country he emigrated with his family and bought a ranch. Australia became the setting for what are the two best-known of Shute’s works: “On the Beach” and “A Town Like Alice”.
Shute went on to write many novels set in the Australia of the immediate post-World War II, including “The Far Country”, “In The Wet”, and “Lonely Road” all of which you can find in local libraries. You can usually go online to a library's website using your library card number to access and reserve. This system works efficiently and you can browse at home to your heart’s content.
“Remarkable Reads” (Norton, 2004), is an anthology edited by J. Peder Zane and it features short essays about special books chosen by prominent authors. The writer Margot Livesey recommends a book by Lewis Grassick Gibbon, “Sunset Song”, which later became the first in a trilogy titled “A Scots Quair”. Livesey, a Scotswoman transplanted to Boston and to London, says she recognizes the 1932 Gibbon novel as “embodying the essence of my homeland and the exquisite detail with which Gibbon describes the land.” At the heart of this gentle read is the story of a biddable girl who becomes a strong-minded woman.
I quickly ordered the trilogy through the library system, and right away recognized the beauty of Gibbon’s prose. But there is a Glossary of Scottish words at the back, the print is tiny, the book is heavy, and, gentle though it is, I decided to abandon it. It just wasn’t the right moment for me to go that deeply into 1911 rural Scotland.
* * *
Elinore Standard is the co-editor with Laura Furman of Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading. (Carroll & Graf, 1997).
MY READING LIFE
"Gentle Reads"
Works mentioned in this piece: Land Girls and Wives of the Fisherman by Angela Huth, Quite a Year for Plums, by Bailey White, Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, Old Devils by Kingsley Amis, Walking Across Egypt, by Clive Edgerton, Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie, Evening Star and Loop Group by Larry McMurtry, A Town Like Alice, Trustee from the Toolroom, On the Beach, The Far Country, In the Wet, Lonely Road, and Landfall by Nevil Shute, Remarkable Reads by J. Peder Zane, Sunset Song and A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassick Gibbon,
There seems to be a recognized book genre called “gentle reads”, works that are positive in tone, feature little, if any, sex and violence, and have settings that evoke this kinder, gentler time before the world became a globe. Since there is now a website for everything, when I Googled “gentle reads” I found several throughout the GLOBE that have interesting and extensive lists of books that you can read without being scared out of your mind or having your tail feathers ruffled in some unpleasant way.
I’m thinking about places where Winter is Summer and the world is upside down. I’m thinking about a place about as far away as possible from the eastern coast of the US. New Zealand? Close. Australia? Very close. Tasmania? Yes, Tasmania, home of Errol Flynn, that swashbuckling rascal of the silver screen. From way down there, from that former far-flung colonial outpost, we have the website of the State Library of Tasmania: www.statelibrary.tas.gov and books, books, lists and more lists of books!
On the Tasmanian “Gentle Reads” list are 22 novels by Nevil Shute, the Rumpole books by John Mortimer, Angela Huth’s “The Land Girls” and “Wives of the Fisherman”, Bailey White’s “Quite a Year for Plums” as well as all the mysteries by Dorothy L. Sayers (was there ever a more romantic moment than in “Gaudy Night” when Lord Peter Wimsey proposes to Harriet Vane and she finally accepts?).
As many libraries do, the Tasmanian Library maintains all kinds of lists including “Fishing Mysteries”, “Big Teeth” monster fiction, “The Detective Doesn’t Wear Trousers”, and “Seniors” fiction . The last category includes Kingsley Amis’s “The Old Devils”, winner of the 1986 Booker Prize, featuring a set of retired old cronies, (“media Welshmen”), who gather daily at a pub that is a home away from home. Their quiet routine gets stirred up when friends, who left years before for a glamorous life in London, return to Wales, a place “very like England and yet not England at all.” This book is available through the Westchester Library System.
Also on this Seniors list are Clive Edgerton’s “Walking Across Egypt”, Alison Lurie’s “Foreign Affairs: and Larry McMurtry’s “Evening Star”. I am sure McMurtry’s recent “Loop Group” will appear on this list before long.
“Walking Across Egypt” is not about walking across Egypt. It is the title of a church hymn written by the author – words and music in the back of the book. Clive Edgerton is an American author who I had never read before, although he has written many books. I see why his work is on the same list as Bailey White. Edgerton was born in the South and lives in North Carolina and writes about the South. “Egypt” is indeed a comfort read about a feisty old lady who becomes the guardian of a juvenile delinquent. The novel is full of great Southern cooking and Edgerton writes dialect that is not annoying, a trick that is a lot harder to do than you might think.
Long before I discovered the Tasmanian list, I went on a Nevil Shute (1899-1960) kick, finding many of his novels at the Bedford Village library and at the Halle Library in Pound Ridge. I re-read “A Town Like Alice” a haunting story that had been made into a wonderful BBC-TV series starring Bryan Brown, and “The Trustee From The Toolroom” an intriguing tale of a legacy and a sunken sailboat. “Toolroom” became a movie titled “The Legacy”.
If you want to create your own Nevil Shute library, you can buy many of his novels online from Amazon (www.Amazon.com). Shute worked at British aircraft companies in the early years of aviation and had a strong interest in flying, often reflected in his work. “Landfall: A Channel Story” (1940), about a young reconnaissance pilot, became a movie in 1949 and was later made into a BBC-TV serial. I recently re-read “Landfall” and breezed through it, an engrossing read even today.
In 1948, Shute visited Australia and was so taken with the country he emigrated with his family and bought a ranch. Australia became the setting for what are the two best-known of Shute’s works: “On the Beach” and “A Town Like Alice”.
Shute went on to write many novels set in the Australia of the immediate post-World War II, including “The Far Country”, “In The Wet”, and “Lonely Road” all of which you can find in local libraries. You can usually go online to a library's website using your library card number to access and reserve. This system works efficiently and you can browse at home to your heart’s content.
“Remarkable Reads” (Norton, 2004), is an anthology edited by J. Peder Zane and it features short essays about special books chosen by prominent authors. The writer Margot Livesey recommends a book by Lewis Grassick Gibbon, “Sunset Song”, which later became the first in a trilogy titled “A Scots Quair”. Livesey, a Scotswoman transplanted to Boston and to London, says she recognizes the 1932 Gibbon novel as “embodying the essence of my homeland and the exquisite detail with which Gibbon describes the land.” At the heart of this gentle read is the story of a biddable girl who becomes a strong-minded woman.
I quickly ordered the trilogy through the library system, and right away recognized the beauty of Gibbon’s prose. But there is a Glossary of Scottish words at the back, the print is tiny, the book is heavy, and, gentle though it is, I decided to abandon it. It just wasn’t the right moment for me to go that deeply into 1911 rural Scotland.
* * *
Elinore Standard is the co-editor with Laura Furman of Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading. (Carroll & Graf, 1997).
Thursday, May 1, 2008
TO BREAK THE FROZEN SEA
This piece from January, 2005 is one in the ongoing "My Reading Life" column by Elinore Standard in the Record Review.
Works mentioned: "The Lost Garden" by Josephine Humphreys, "The Amateur Marriage" by Anne Tyler, "Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," by Mark Haddon, "Brick Lane," by Monica Ali, "The Sleeping Father," by Matthew Sharp, "Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy, "The Guards," by Ken Bruen, "The Great Fire" and "The Transit of Venus" by Shirley Hazzard, "How Reading Changed My Life" by Anna Quindlen, "Aurora Leigh" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
TO BREAK THE FROZEN SEA INSIDE US
If the book we are reading does not wake us,
as with a fist hammering on our skull, why
then do we read it? Good God, we would
also be happy if we had no books, and such
books as make us happy we could, if need
be, write ourselves. But what we must have
are those books which come upon us like
ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the
death of one we love better than ourselves,
like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break
the frozen sea inside us.
Franz Kafka
Josephine Humphreys, author of “The Lost Garden”, (Norton, 2002) says “…the author is at one end of the experience of writing and the reader is at the other, and the book is the contract between you.” Humphreys also says, “Every story is a story about death. But perhaps if we are lucky, our story about death is also a story about love.”
Anne Tyler was interviewed by Mel Gussow of the New York Times on the occasion of the publication of “The Amateur Marriage” (Knopf, 2004), in which she talks about the way she approaches her subjects and settings, and about her cultural interests.
Tyler says, “I read contemporary fiction nonstop—particularly the newer writers, who seem to me to be starting out at a higher and higher level.” She lists Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”, Monica Ali’s “Brick Lane”, and one she describes as a “fresh, funny, quirky book”: “The Sleeping Father” by Matthew Sharp.
She cites as an influence the literary and personal interest of Reynolds Price, her first teacher, and adds, “I’m sure that my years of faithfully rereading ‘Anna Karenina’ must have been for some purpose. Really,” she concludes, “we’re all standing on other writers’ shoulders.”
Ken Bruen is the author of noir thrillers usually set in the west of Ireland or in the rawest sections of South London. His characters have been described as hard and bitter and their actions are often borderline psychotic and usually shocking. “The Guards” (St. Martin’s, 2001) features a falling-down drunk ex-cop who reads and solves mysteries when he is not wiped.
He is explaining to a mocking friend what he sees in books:
As I’ve said, my father worked on the railways. He loved cowboy books. There was always a battered Zane Grey in his jacket. He began to pass them on to me. My mother would say,
“You’ll make a sissy out of him.”
When she wasn’t within earshot, he’d whisper,“Don’t mind your mother. She means well. But you keep reading.”
“Why, Dad?” Not that I was going to stop, I was already hooked.
“They’ll give you options.”
“What’s options?”
A faraway look would come into his eyes and then,
“Freedom, son.”
In Shirley Hazzard’s remarkable novel, “The Great Fire” (Farrar, 2003), the main character describes two young people who have managed to be different from their awful parents: “They are wonderfully well-read, a poetic pair who live in literature and make free with it. They are right to cling to it: it has delivered them.”
Reading has delivered many young people who later go on to write about it as lifesaving and, as it was for the Bruen character, liberating.
Another of Hazzard’s characters, a woman who is emerging from an uneventful life at the age of 40, talks about reading in “The Transit of Venus” a novel from 1980 (Viking): “It occurred to her, in her isolation, that books might have helped. It was the first time she had reckoned with the fact she did not read, that neither she nor Christian (her husband) read – and here was the true discovery, for she had relied on him to maintain a literary household.” Although they had books in the house, these are people who are always meaning to read but never quite get around to it.
The American novelist and essayist, Anna Quindlen, has written a short tribute to reading, “How Reading Changed My Life” (Ballantine, 1998), in which she describes her own Reading Life. “In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. More powerfully and persuasively than from the ‘shalt nots’ of the Ten Commandments, I learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong.” At the end of her book, Quindlen includes several pages of reading lists, about which she says, “Reading lists are arbitrary and capricious, but most people like them, and so do I.” And you, as a reader of this column, know that I do, too!
For an epigram to this gem, Quindlen uses an excerpt from “Aurora Leigh” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
Books, books, books!
I had found the secret of a garret-room
Piled high, packed large, -- where, creeping in
And out
Among the giant fossils of my past,
Like some small nimble mouse between
The ribs
Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there
At this or that box, pulling through the gap,
In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,
The first book first. And how I felt it beat
Under my pillow, in the morning’s dark,
An hour before the sun would let me read!
My books!
* * *
Elinore Standard is the co-editor, along with Laura Furman, of “Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading” (Carroll & Graf, 1997).
Works mentioned: "The Lost Garden" by Josephine Humphreys, "The Amateur Marriage" by Anne Tyler, "Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," by Mark Haddon, "Brick Lane," by Monica Ali, "The Sleeping Father," by Matthew Sharp, "Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy, "The Guards," by Ken Bruen, "The Great Fire" and "The Transit of Venus" by Shirley Hazzard, "How Reading Changed My Life" by Anna Quindlen, "Aurora Leigh" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
TO BREAK THE FROZEN SEA INSIDE US
If the book we are reading does not wake us,
as with a fist hammering on our skull, why
then do we read it? Good God, we would
also be happy if we had no books, and such
books as make us happy we could, if need
be, write ourselves. But what we must have
are those books which come upon us like
ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the
death of one we love better than ourselves,
like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break
the frozen sea inside us.
Franz Kafka
Josephine Humphreys, author of “The Lost Garden”, (Norton, 2002) says “…the author is at one end of the experience of writing and the reader is at the other, and the book is the contract between you.” Humphreys also says, “Every story is a story about death. But perhaps if we are lucky, our story about death is also a story about love.”
Anne Tyler was interviewed by Mel Gussow of the New York Times on the occasion of the publication of “The Amateur Marriage” (Knopf, 2004), in which she talks about the way she approaches her subjects and settings, and about her cultural interests.
Tyler says, “I read contemporary fiction nonstop—particularly the newer writers, who seem to me to be starting out at a higher and higher level.” She lists Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”, Monica Ali’s “Brick Lane”, and one she describes as a “fresh, funny, quirky book”: “The Sleeping Father” by Matthew Sharp.
She cites as an influence the literary and personal interest of Reynolds Price, her first teacher, and adds, “I’m sure that my years of faithfully rereading ‘Anna Karenina’ must have been for some purpose. Really,” she concludes, “we’re all standing on other writers’ shoulders.”
Ken Bruen is the author of noir thrillers usually set in the west of Ireland or in the rawest sections of South London. His characters have been described as hard and bitter and their actions are often borderline psychotic and usually shocking. “The Guards” (St. Martin’s, 2001) features a falling-down drunk ex-cop who reads and solves mysteries when he is not wiped.
He is explaining to a mocking friend what he sees in books:
As I’ve said, my father worked on the railways. He loved cowboy books. There was always a battered Zane Grey in his jacket. He began to pass them on to me. My mother would say,
“You’ll make a sissy out of him.”
When she wasn’t within earshot, he’d whisper,“Don’t mind your mother. She means well. But you keep reading.”
“Why, Dad?” Not that I was going to stop, I was already hooked.
“They’ll give you options.”
“What’s options?”
A faraway look would come into his eyes and then,
“Freedom, son.”
In Shirley Hazzard’s remarkable novel, “The Great Fire” (Farrar, 2003), the main character describes two young people who have managed to be different from their awful parents: “They are wonderfully well-read, a poetic pair who live in literature and make free with it. They are right to cling to it: it has delivered them.”
Reading has delivered many young people who later go on to write about it as lifesaving and, as it was for the Bruen character, liberating.
Another of Hazzard’s characters, a woman who is emerging from an uneventful life at the age of 40, talks about reading in “The Transit of Venus” a novel from 1980 (Viking): “It occurred to her, in her isolation, that books might have helped. It was the first time she had reckoned with the fact she did not read, that neither she nor Christian (her husband) read – and here was the true discovery, for she had relied on him to maintain a literary household.” Although they had books in the house, these are people who are always meaning to read but never quite get around to it.
The American novelist and essayist, Anna Quindlen, has written a short tribute to reading, “How Reading Changed My Life” (Ballantine, 1998), in which she describes her own Reading Life. “In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. More powerfully and persuasively than from the ‘shalt nots’ of the Ten Commandments, I learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong.” At the end of her book, Quindlen includes several pages of reading lists, about which she says, “Reading lists are arbitrary and capricious, but most people like them, and so do I.” And you, as a reader of this column, know that I do, too!
For an epigram to this gem, Quindlen uses an excerpt from “Aurora Leigh” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
Books, books, books!
I had found the secret of a garret-room
Piled high, packed large, -- where, creeping in
And out
Among the giant fossils of my past,
Like some small nimble mouse between
The ribs
Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there
At this or that box, pulling through the gap,
In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,
The first book first. And how I felt it beat
Under my pillow, in the morning’s dark,
An hour before the sun would let me read!
My books!
* * *
Elinore Standard is the co-editor, along with Laura Furman, of “Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading” (Carroll & Graf, 1997).
Monday, April 28, 2008
THE STUFF I'VE BEEN READING
This piece first appeared in the Record Review in 2006 as one in an ongoing series of "My Reading Life" columns by Elinore Standard.
Works mentioned: "Liberation Road" by David Robbins, "The Namesake" and "Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri, "A Handful of Kings" by Mark Jacobs, "Swimming in the Volcano" by Tom Bissell, "Desert Burial" by Brian Littlefair, "The House in Paris" and "The Death of the Heart" by Elizabeth Bowen, "The Jade Palace Vendetta" by Dale Furutani, "Prince of Fire" by Daniel Silva, "Saturday" by Ian McEwan.
THE STUFF I'VE BEEN READING
As you’ve probably noticed by now, I enjoy lists of books. I like to see other people’s lists and I like to keep my own. I love it when somebody tells me what to read. A while ago, I discovered a monthly column titled “The Stuff I’ve Been Reading” by Nick Hornby, novelist, screenwriter, and major soccer fan, in “The Believer” magazine. “The Believer” is not exactly your everyday “People” or “Time” so you may not have come across it in the dentist’s waiting room.
“The Believer” is a gorgeously-designed literary monthly published by McSweeney’s of San Francisco and edited by about five different people. I don’t know whose money makes it go because it has no, that is zero, advertising. It is not the “New York Review of Books” or “The London Review of Books”, nor is it like another other literary review I can think of. The initial appeal for me was Nick Hornby and he is the reason I subscribed. More on him in this space some other time.
Hornby is a good maker of reading lists and the magazine, for that matter, provides a list of all the books mentioned in each issue, so imagine my glee as I flip through a periodical that seems designed for somebody like me. Hornby’s column begins with a list of books he bought and books he read during the preceding month, and they are not always the same. So, taking the idea from Hornby, here is what I have bought or borrowed recently and what I have read:
“Liberation Road: A novel of WWII and The Red Ball Express” by David L. Robbins (Bantam, 2005). I chose this on impulse from the Bedford Free Library’s shelf of new and interesting fiction. Every once in a while you get lucky and happen upon an author whose work is completely new to you. This fact-based novel is the story of 6,000 trucks and 23,000 drivers – most of them African-American – who forged a lifeline of supplies in the Allied battle to liberate France. The solid writing and research in this book offer fine description of the post-D-Day Omaha and Utah beachheads and the insane fighting in the hedgerows of Normandy that ensued. As the Allied armies pressed on into France, the heroic drivers kept the troops supplied and suffered great losses themselves. This is a touching, moving, wonderful book and I’ve discovered a new author.
“The Namesake” by Jhumpa Lahiri (Houghton, 2003). For whatever the reason, I had avoided this well-reviewed novel until I recently took it out from the library. Although I liked Lahiri’s “The Interpreter of Maladies” I somehow hadn’t been ready for this one. It is a novel about Indian-American professionals making their way in a different culture, far away from family and tradition. It is about courage and duty and obedience and the tangled ties between generations. The book’s sly humor cannot mask the underlying sadness of the story. A friend told me she cried when she finished it and I also didn’t want it to end. A gem, a prize!
“A Handful of Kings” by Mark Jacobs (Simon & Schuster, 2004). Described as a “literary thriller” in a piece by author Tom Bissell in the March, 2005 “Believer” magazine, I ordered it through the local Library System on Bissell’s recommendation. I ploughed along through a tale of U.S. diplomats, usually at odds with each other, uniting briefly to foil a terrorist plot and a kidnapping. I kept having to stop and re-read and finally closed book and gave up.
“Swimming in the Volcano” was also recommended as a literary thriller by Tom Bissell and I also ordered it through WLS on his say-so. The first page of this 500-plus-page doorstop had dialogue written in a kind of Caribbean dialect and I stopped right there. The novel may very well be wonderful but it is not for me.
“Desert Burial” by Brian Littlefair, (Holt, 2002) another mentioned in the “Believer” piece, also came via WLS. When I realized the action is set in the near-future I didn’t open it. I try to avoid future anything.
The novelist A.S. Byatt was quoted in a recent New York Times Book Review as saying “The House in Paris” (1935) is Elizabeth Bowen’s best novel. I had always thought Bowen’s “The Death of the Heart” was perhaps the finest novel I had ever read, and so I ordered “The House in Paris” through the library system and it slowly made its way to me. In Bowen’s novels, the neglected child, the isolated or orphaned young person, is a recurring character. “The House in Paris” gives us two such children, one an unwanted boy and the other a slightly older girl who gets fobbed off on relatives. Byatt says this novel is “one of those books that grow in the mind, in time,” and I find this it true. Although I read it nearly a month ago, “The House in Paris” is still very much with me.
“The Jade Palace Vendetta” by Dale Furutani (Morrow, 1999) is the second in his Samurai trilogy. Set in early 1600s feudal Japan, it is written by this Japanese-American author in an easy, literate style. It may add to your enjoyment if you have some knowledge of Japanese history and customs, but Furutani doesn’t try to go over anybody’s head. The characters and atmosphere are believable and the main plot, about the search for a stolen child, I found intriguing enough so I want to read the other two in the trilogy. I picked this one off the mystery display shelf as a try-book.
“Prince of Fire” by Daniel Silva (Putnam’s, 2005) I got new at Costco for ten bucks off the list price. I’ve been a fan of Silva’s Gabriel Allon thrillers and had been waiting for this new one to appear which is why I paid money for it. Compared to the previous novels featuring Allon, the art restorer/Israeli intelligence agent/killer, I found this one disappointing (maybe because I paid for it) and I thought the main character barely held up. The detailed history and background of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict makes the book worthwhile.
“Saturday” by Ian McEwan (Doubleday, 2005). Also bought at Costco. This current bestseller takes place entirely during a day in the life of a London neurosurgeon. It is also the day of the big London anti-Iraq war march in February, 2003. McEwan’s handling of time has always been an interesting feature of his work, and in this novel it is especially so. It brings to mind other one-day novels such as James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. Perowne, the surgeon, is encouraged by his poet grown daughter to read novels so that he might develop the literary side of “a man who attempts to ease the miseries of failing minds by repairing brains.” She sets him lists that have “so far persuaded him that fiction is too humanly flawed, too sprawling, and hit-or-miss to inspire wonder at the magnificence of human ingenuity, of the impossible dazzlingly achieved.” Of course, this is not all that happens during the surgeon’s day -- there are dark gatherings and unexpected crises. It is as if this novel is a piece of metafiction and McEwan has stepped into “Saturday” himself and that he has, indeed, dazzlingly achieved the impossible. An astounding work.
Elinore Standard is the co-editor of "Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading" (Carroll & Graf 1997)
Works mentioned: "Liberation Road" by David Robbins, "The Namesake" and "Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri, "A Handful of Kings" by Mark Jacobs, "Swimming in the Volcano" by Tom Bissell, "Desert Burial" by Brian Littlefair, "The House in Paris" and "The Death of the Heart" by Elizabeth Bowen, "The Jade Palace Vendetta" by Dale Furutani, "Prince of Fire" by Daniel Silva, "Saturday" by Ian McEwan.
THE STUFF I'VE BEEN READING
As you’ve probably noticed by now, I enjoy lists of books. I like to see other people’s lists and I like to keep my own. I love it when somebody tells me what to read. A while ago, I discovered a monthly column titled “The Stuff I’ve Been Reading” by Nick Hornby, novelist, screenwriter, and major soccer fan, in “The Believer” magazine. “The Believer” is not exactly your everyday “People” or “Time” so you may not have come across it in the dentist’s waiting room.
“The Believer” is a gorgeously-designed literary monthly published by McSweeney’s of San Francisco and edited by about five different people. I don’t know whose money makes it go because it has no, that is zero, advertising. It is not the “New York Review of Books” or “The London Review of Books”, nor is it like another other literary review I can think of. The initial appeal for me was Nick Hornby and he is the reason I subscribed. More on him in this space some other time.
Hornby is a good maker of reading lists and the magazine, for that matter, provides a list of all the books mentioned in each issue, so imagine my glee as I flip through a periodical that seems designed for somebody like me. Hornby’s column begins with a list of books he bought and books he read during the preceding month, and they are not always the same. So, taking the idea from Hornby, here is what I have bought or borrowed recently and what I have read:
“Liberation Road: A novel of WWII and The Red Ball Express” by David L. Robbins (Bantam, 2005). I chose this on impulse from the Bedford Free Library’s shelf of new and interesting fiction. Every once in a while you get lucky and happen upon an author whose work is completely new to you. This fact-based novel is the story of 6,000 trucks and 23,000 drivers – most of them African-American – who forged a lifeline of supplies in the Allied battle to liberate France. The solid writing and research in this book offer fine description of the post-D-Day Omaha and Utah beachheads and the insane fighting in the hedgerows of Normandy that ensued. As the Allied armies pressed on into France, the heroic drivers kept the troops supplied and suffered great losses themselves. This is a touching, moving, wonderful book and I’ve discovered a new author.
“The Namesake” by Jhumpa Lahiri (Houghton, 2003). For whatever the reason, I had avoided this well-reviewed novel until I recently took it out from the library. Although I liked Lahiri’s “The Interpreter of Maladies” I somehow hadn’t been ready for this one. It is a novel about Indian-American professionals making their way in a different culture, far away from family and tradition. It is about courage and duty and obedience and the tangled ties between generations. The book’s sly humor cannot mask the underlying sadness of the story. A friend told me she cried when she finished it and I also didn’t want it to end. A gem, a prize!
“A Handful of Kings” by Mark Jacobs (Simon & Schuster, 2004). Described as a “literary thriller” in a piece by author Tom Bissell in the March, 2005 “Believer” magazine, I ordered it through the local Library System on Bissell’s recommendation. I ploughed along through a tale of U.S. diplomats, usually at odds with each other, uniting briefly to foil a terrorist plot and a kidnapping. I kept having to stop and re-read and finally closed book and gave up.
“Swimming in the Volcano” was also recommended as a literary thriller by Tom Bissell and I also ordered it through WLS on his say-so. The first page of this 500-plus-page doorstop had dialogue written in a kind of Caribbean dialect and I stopped right there. The novel may very well be wonderful but it is not for me.
“Desert Burial” by Brian Littlefair, (Holt, 2002) another mentioned in the “Believer” piece, also came via WLS. When I realized the action is set in the near-future I didn’t open it. I try to avoid future anything.
The novelist A.S. Byatt was quoted in a recent New York Times Book Review as saying “The House in Paris” (1935) is Elizabeth Bowen’s best novel. I had always thought Bowen’s “The Death of the Heart” was perhaps the finest novel I had ever read, and so I ordered “The House in Paris” through the library system and it slowly made its way to me. In Bowen’s novels, the neglected child, the isolated or orphaned young person, is a recurring character. “The House in Paris” gives us two such children, one an unwanted boy and the other a slightly older girl who gets fobbed off on relatives. Byatt says this novel is “one of those books that grow in the mind, in time,” and I find this it true. Although I read it nearly a month ago, “The House in Paris” is still very much with me.
“The Jade Palace Vendetta” by Dale Furutani (Morrow, 1999) is the second in his Samurai trilogy. Set in early 1600s feudal Japan, it is written by this Japanese-American author in an easy, literate style. It may add to your enjoyment if you have some knowledge of Japanese history and customs, but Furutani doesn’t try to go over anybody’s head. The characters and atmosphere are believable and the main plot, about the search for a stolen child, I found intriguing enough so I want to read the other two in the trilogy. I picked this one off the mystery display shelf as a try-book.
“Prince of Fire” by Daniel Silva (Putnam’s, 2005) I got new at Costco for ten bucks off the list price. I’ve been a fan of Silva’s Gabriel Allon thrillers and had been waiting for this new one to appear which is why I paid money for it. Compared to the previous novels featuring Allon, the art restorer/Israeli intelligence agent/killer, I found this one disappointing (maybe because I paid for it) and I thought the main character barely held up. The detailed history and background of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict makes the book worthwhile.
“Saturday” by Ian McEwan (Doubleday, 2005). Also bought at Costco. This current bestseller takes place entirely during a day in the life of a London neurosurgeon. It is also the day of the big London anti-Iraq war march in February, 2003. McEwan’s handling of time has always been an interesting feature of his work, and in this novel it is especially so. It brings to mind other one-day novels such as James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. Perowne, the surgeon, is encouraged by his poet grown daughter to read novels so that he might develop the literary side of “a man who attempts to ease the miseries of failing minds by repairing brains.” She sets him lists that have “so far persuaded him that fiction is too humanly flawed, too sprawling, and hit-or-miss to inspire wonder at the magnificence of human ingenuity, of the impossible dazzlingly achieved.” Of course, this is not all that happens during the surgeon’s day -- there are dark gatherings and unexpected crises. It is as if this novel is a piece of metafiction and McEwan has stepped into “Saturday” himself and that he has, indeed, dazzlingly achieved the impossible. An astounding work.
Elinore Standard is the co-editor of "Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading" (Carroll & Graf 1997)
Monday, March 31, 2008
LIBRARY PATRON
This piece by Elinore Standard appeared in the (Bedford, Pound Ridge, NY) Record Review as
another in the ongoing series "My Reading Life".
LIBRARY PATRON
In pre-computer days, when you browsed through the library, you could look at the signatures on the withdrawal card in the back of the book to see who were the previous borrowers. This was a handy bit of information, lost now to our freak-out for privacy that we know isn’t even remotely private. Those names told you the book you were considering had been read by a fellow appreciator of mystery or romance or biography. I followed the path of people I thought of as good readers and their names were an endorsement, a seal of approval. Sometimes I’d look for a cryptic smiley face or an exclamation point, or an X, and I’d know whose mark it was and from that little sign, what they thought of the book.
Every now and then, I still find a signature card in an older book. The names in ink or pencil go back maybe to the 1950’s, and I take a long look at them in remembrance of readers who have since then moved away or died. I wonder what was going on in their lives at the time they checked out the book and I try to think about what was happening in the world. I try to picture them and hear their voices.
There is another kind of silent communication among library patrons, one that librarians would certainly frown upon, and that is the faint pencil corrections or comments made by anonymous proof readers of the many and inexcusable typos so often found in newer books. A book I read recently had one outrageous typo boldly circled on the first page and I thought, “Way to go!” Some books, despite all the spellchecking in the world, don’t seem to have been edited at all. I often itch to make the little circles or checks but I resist because such practice 1.) intrudes upon the reader, 2.) seems a bit priggish, 3.) defaces the book, 4.) might get me busted.
Sometimes I find things in library books, left there as bookmarks by previous readers. In a copy of Elizabeth Bowen’s “The House in Paris” (1936), recently borrowed through the Westchester (NY) Library System from the Eastchester Public Library, I have a student rush ticket from the 2002 season of the New York City Ballet. I will use it as my own bookmark and unless it disappears behind my bed, will tuck it into the book and send it back down county.
I’ve found letters and shopping lists and dried leaves in books, all traces of other readers. I know that librarians purge this trash when they check books in, but to me what escapes them is treasure.
When I was a graduate student, I would hurry right after class to the stacks and grab all of the books I’d need to do an assigned paper. If I didn’t get there first, they’d be gone and -- worse – perhaps hidden. Books get mysteriously squirreled away. Like hiding nuts, you need to remember where you put them.
At the Hiram Halle Library in Pound Ridge, years ago there was a patron who took cookbooks. She didn’t take them out, she borrowed them permanently. The librarians knew who she was but they could never really prove it. Cookbooks have always been expensive and the library had (and still has) a fine collection, many of which were gifts. It wasn’t just one book that went missing. The thefts happened regularly. The library was off the hook when suspect moved away from town, presumably to become the bane of another library.
Not all the thievery happened on the inside. Once upon a time, the Halle library had a fine, early American weathervane atop the cupola on the old schoolhouse section of the library building. Few people realized it was a treasure until the weathervane was stolen. Yes, thieves must have cased the place and one night climbed up and removed it. Insurance paid a little and a new weathervane was bought, but the original was gone forever.
When I first moved to Pound Ridge, an old tradition of Wednesday half-day closing was observed. The elementary school dismissed at Noon and Schelling’s market closed for the afternoon. The Halle Library was closed all day Tuesday and half-day on Wednesday. One afternoon of closing, as a Trustee of the Library I got a call from the Library’s security monitor to say the alarm had gone off. I threw my little .410 shot gun in the car and drove there quickly. With the gun properly broken and tucked under my arm, I raced up the path only to be followed by the local police who had arrived on my heels. I explained why I had come and they advised me to put the shot gun, away, and I did. Today I would have been blown to pieces. The front door was indeed wide open and the police entered cautiously, weapons at the ready. There, in one of the red armchairs in the foyer, a patron was sitting, reading. Except for him, the place was empty and the alarm was making an awful noise. The elderly man finally looked up, astounded, and the policemen asked him what he was doing in there.
“What?”
They faced him and asked again.
“What did you say?” He adjusted his hearing aid.
They asked once more and he responded, “I’m reading.”
“How did you get in?”
“The door was open.”
“You can’t be in here, the library is closed.”
“No, the library is open,” he insisted.
This went on, back and forth. The distinguished patron became flustered. The police were adamant. I told them I recognized the man and by this time, the officers realized that with his hearing aid turned off, he couldn’t hear a thing -- not the claxon sounding in the space all around him, not their arrival. Forgetting the days of closing, the patron had walked to the library as usual, found the door unlocked, went in, got comfortable, and had himself a read.
The policemen made the patron leave, although he did so reluctantly. They shut the library door firmly and locked it. They warned me not to run around with a shot gun. They returned to their cruiser to write up the report of another exciting small-town incident.
Nobody got arrested. Nobody was dead.
Happy Ending.
* * *
Elinore Standard is the co-editor of “Bookworms:
Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading” (Carroll & Graf, 1997)
another in the ongoing series "My Reading Life".
LIBRARY PATRON
In pre-computer days, when you browsed through the library, you could look at the signatures on the withdrawal card in the back of the book to see who were the previous borrowers. This was a handy bit of information, lost now to our freak-out for privacy that we know isn’t even remotely private. Those names told you the book you were considering had been read by a fellow appreciator of mystery or romance or biography. I followed the path of people I thought of as good readers and their names were an endorsement, a seal of approval. Sometimes I’d look for a cryptic smiley face or an exclamation point, or an X, and I’d know whose mark it was and from that little sign, what they thought of the book.
Every now and then, I still find a signature card in an older book. The names in ink or pencil go back maybe to the 1950’s, and I take a long look at them in remembrance of readers who have since then moved away or died. I wonder what was going on in their lives at the time they checked out the book and I try to think about what was happening in the world. I try to picture them and hear their voices.
There is another kind of silent communication among library patrons, one that librarians would certainly frown upon, and that is the faint pencil corrections or comments made by anonymous proof readers of the many and inexcusable typos so often found in newer books. A book I read recently had one outrageous typo boldly circled on the first page and I thought, “Way to go!” Some books, despite all the spellchecking in the world, don’t seem to have been edited at all. I often itch to make the little circles or checks but I resist because such practice 1.) intrudes upon the reader, 2.) seems a bit priggish, 3.) defaces the book, 4.) might get me busted.
Sometimes I find things in library books, left there as bookmarks by previous readers. In a copy of Elizabeth Bowen’s “The House in Paris” (1936), recently borrowed through the Westchester (NY) Library System from the Eastchester Public Library, I have a student rush ticket from the 2002 season of the New York City Ballet. I will use it as my own bookmark and unless it disappears behind my bed, will tuck it into the book and send it back down county.
I’ve found letters and shopping lists and dried leaves in books, all traces of other readers. I know that librarians purge this trash when they check books in, but to me what escapes them is treasure.
When I was a graduate student, I would hurry right after class to the stacks and grab all of the books I’d need to do an assigned paper. If I didn’t get there first, they’d be gone and -- worse – perhaps hidden. Books get mysteriously squirreled away. Like hiding nuts, you need to remember where you put them.
At the Hiram Halle Library in Pound Ridge, years ago there was a patron who took cookbooks. She didn’t take them out, she borrowed them permanently. The librarians knew who she was but they could never really prove it. Cookbooks have always been expensive and the library had (and still has) a fine collection, many of which were gifts. It wasn’t just one book that went missing. The thefts happened regularly. The library was off the hook when suspect moved away from town, presumably to become the bane of another library.
Not all the thievery happened on the inside. Once upon a time, the Halle library had a fine, early American weathervane atop the cupola on the old schoolhouse section of the library building. Few people realized it was a treasure until the weathervane was stolen. Yes, thieves must have cased the place and one night climbed up and removed it. Insurance paid a little and a new weathervane was bought, but the original was gone forever.
When I first moved to Pound Ridge, an old tradition of Wednesday half-day closing was observed. The elementary school dismissed at Noon and Schelling’s market closed for the afternoon. The Halle Library was closed all day Tuesday and half-day on Wednesday. One afternoon of closing, as a Trustee of the Library I got a call from the Library’s security monitor to say the alarm had gone off. I threw my little .410 shot gun in the car and drove there quickly. With the gun properly broken and tucked under my arm, I raced up the path only to be followed by the local police who had arrived on my heels. I explained why I had come and they advised me to put the shot gun, away, and I did. Today I would have been blown to pieces. The front door was indeed wide open and the police entered cautiously, weapons at the ready. There, in one of the red armchairs in the foyer, a patron was sitting, reading. Except for him, the place was empty and the alarm was making an awful noise. The elderly man finally looked up, astounded, and the policemen asked him what he was doing in there.
“What?”
They faced him and asked again.
“What did you say?” He adjusted his hearing aid.
They asked once more and he responded, “I’m reading.”
“How did you get in?”
“The door was open.”
“You can’t be in here, the library is closed.”
“No, the library is open,” he insisted.
This went on, back and forth. The distinguished patron became flustered. The police were adamant. I told them I recognized the man and by this time, the officers realized that with his hearing aid turned off, he couldn’t hear a thing -- not the claxon sounding in the space all around him, not their arrival. Forgetting the days of closing, the patron had walked to the library as usual, found the door unlocked, went in, got comfortable, and had himself a read.
The policemen made the patron leave, although he did so reluctantly. They shut the library door firmly and locked it. They warned me not to run around with a shot gun. They returned to their cruiser to write up the report of another exciting small-town incident.
Nobody got arrested. Nobody was dead.
Happy Ending.
* * *
Elinore Standard is the co-editor of “Bookworms:
Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading” (Carroll & Graf, 1997)
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
BOOKS FOR THR MASSES
This piece by Elinore Standard first appeared as one in an ongoing series in The Record Review titled "My Reading Life."
Works mentioned in this piece: "City Journal," Love in the Valley, Literary Taste And How To Form It,
BOOKS FOR THE MASSES
In a recent article in the urban policy magazine,“City Journal”, titled “The Classics in the Slums” by Jonathan Rose, the author states that the classics in “the canon” – that is, the received list of “great” books acknowledged as necessary to an education – enabled “the masses” to become thinking individuals. “Until fairly recently,” Rose says, “Britain had an amazingly vital autodidact culture, where a large minority of the working classes passionately pursued classic literature, philosophy and music.
In the last part of the 19th Century and beginning of the 20th, self-taught working class people read the classics in part because contemporary literature was too expensive. A home library could be built up, Rose says, “by haunting used-book stalls, scavenging castoffs, or buying cheap out-of-copyright reprints,” all offering only yesterday’s authors.
Welsh collier Joseph Keating (b. 1871) said, “Volumes by living authors were too high-priced for me. Our school-books never mentioned living writers; and the impression in my mind was that an author, to be a living author, must be dead; and that his work was all the better if he died of neglect and starvation.”
Rose continues: “In the mining towns of South Wales, colliers had pennies deducted from their wages to support their own libraries, more than 100 of them by 1934. The miners themselves determined which books to buy. There were sophisticated literary debates down in the pits, where one collier heard high praise for George Meredith. That evening, he tried to borrow Meredith’s ‘Love in the Valley’ from the local miners’ library, only to find 12 names on the waiting list for a single copy.
“‘Every miner has a hobby,’” explained one Welsh collier. “‘It may be a reaction from physical strain. The miner works in a dark, strange world. He comes up into light. It is a new world. It is stimulating. He wants to do something…Think what reading means to an active mind that is locked away in the dark for hours every day!’”
The English playwright, novelist and essayist, Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) understood the potential of a vast new reading public and believed in getting this public to read by whatever means. Born in the heart of Staffordshire in what is known as “the potteries”, --six towns that later formed the city of Stoke-on-Trent, Bennett wrote fiction about the drab lives and ugly surroundings of working class and middle class people he grew up with.
He also wrote “Literary Taste: How To Form It” first published by A.P. Watt in 1909. “Literary Taste” is an exhortation, a sermon, a plea for self-improvement through reading. The Education Act of 1870 produced what Bennett called “a new, eager reading public with no tradition of self-culture by means of books.” In a pre-public free library era, he set out to show people how they could develop literary taste by scrimping to buy books, by diligent and regular reading of certain works, and by thinking about this reading.
“Literary Taste” contains three of the most delicious reading lists you’ll ever find and I am happy to announce you can read it all on-line for absolutely nothing if you go to
www.readbookonline.net, a site containing 200 of the best novels of the 20th Century. Arnold Bennett would be astounded and pleased to think that many works on his own list can come to your virtual personal library completely free of charge.
In 1909, the total cost of Bennett’s 335-volume library was about £26, or, as Bennett points out, sixpence a day for three years. Figure a pound was worth about $5.00 back then and understand a worker made perhaps that much in a week, it isn’t as inexpensive as it sounds, but still…
“When you have read, wholly or in part,” Bennett says, “a majority of these 335 volumes with enjoyment, you may begin to whisper to yourself that your literary taste is formed; and you may pronounce judgment on modern works which come before the bar of your opinion in the calm assurance that, through to err is human, you do at any rate know what you are talking about.”
He divides the literary holdings into three periods: The first is from the beginning of literature to John Dryden or roughly to the end of the 17th Century. He eliminates The Bible from his list because he assumes everybody already has one. This list includes Bede, More, Chaucer, Donne, Milton, and Shakespeare, of course.
Period Two goes from William Congreve to Jane Austen or roughly the entire 18th Century into the 19th. Here we find Locke, Newton, Defoe, Addison and Steele, Adam Smith, Gibbon, Malthus, Pope, Gray, Cowper, Blake and Robert Burns.
Bennett’s Period Three extends from Scott through the 19th Century. As Rose points out in his “City Journal” piece, material under copyright – all the new stuff – then as now, costs more. So Bennett’s third list is the most expensive because it contains a larger proportion of copyright works. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Tennyson, Browning. Lamb, Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, Stevenson are on the fiction list, and Darwin, Newman, Hazlitt, Macaulay, and Carlyle, among others, are on the non-fiction list.
There is a lot about Arnold Bennett on the website of the Stoke-on-Trent City Council Libraries. www.stoke.gov.uk/council/libraries. This excellent site has many links and you can find information, for example, about the well-known local potteries. You can read a lively and slightly nasty exchange between Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf (she says he has a most peculiar accent), you can get maps and find out what is happening locally, and you can print out a recipe for “Omelette Arnold Bennett” created just for him by a famous chef during Bennett’s day.
I like the encouraging tone of “Literary Taste” and for having been compiled 100 years ago, Bennett’s approach and his list hold up today. Often he explains why he has rejected a work one might expect to find included. He is always mindful of the pocketbook. As you’ll notice with us contemporary stone readers and compilers of lists, there is a passion, an obsession. And there is joy: Bennett says, “the spirit of literature is unifying, it joins the candle and the star.”
Elinore Standard elstd@aol.com
There is an excerpt about Arnold Bennett in
“Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading”
Laura Furman and Elinore Standard, Eds. (Carroll& Graf, 1997)
Works mentioned in this piece: "City Journal," Love in the Valley, Literary Taste And How To Form It,
BOOKS FOR THE MASSES
In a recent article in the urban policy magazine,“City Journal”, titled “The Classics in the Slums” by Jonathan Rose, the author states that the classics in “the canon” – that is, the received list of “great” books acknowledged as necessary to an education – enabled “the masses” to become thinking individuals. “Until fairly recently,” Rose says, “Britain had an amazingly vital autodidact culture, where a large minority of the working classes passionately pursued classic literature, philosophy and music.
In the last part of the 19th Century and beginning of the 20th, self-taught working class people read the classics in part because contemporary literature was too expensive. A home library could be built up, Rose says, “by haunting used-book stalls, scavenging castoffs, or buying cheap out-of-copyright reprints,” all offering only yesterday’s authors.
Welsh collier Joseph Keating (b. 1871) said, “Volumes by living authors were too high-priced for me. Our school-books never mentioned living writers; and the impression in my mind was that an author, to be a living author, must be dead; and that his work was all the better if he died of neglect and starvation.”
Rose continues: “In the mining towns of South Wales, colliers had pennies deducted from their wages to support their own libraries, more than 100 of them by 1934. The miners themselves determined which books to buy. There were sophisticated literary debates down in the pits, where one collier heard high praise for George Meredith. That evening, he tried to borrow Meredith’s ‘Love in the Valley’ from the local miners’ library, only to find 12 names on the waiting list for a single copy.
“‘Every miner has a hobby,’” explained one Welsh collier. “‘It may be a reaction from physical strain. The miner works in a dark, strange world. He comes up into light. It is a new world. It is stimulating. He wants to do something…Think what reading means to an active mind that is locked away in the dark for hours every day!’”
The English playwright, novelist and essayist, Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) understood the potential of a vast new reading public and believed in getting this public to read by whatever means. Born in the heart of Staffordshire in what is known as “the potteries”, --six towns that later formed the city of Stoke-on-Trent, Bennett wrote fiction about the drab lives and ugly surroundings of working class and middle class people he grew up with.
He also wrote “Literary Taste: How To Form It” first published by A.P. Watt in 1909. “Literary Taste” is an exhortation, a sermon, a plea for self-improvement through reading. The Education Act of 1870 produced what Bennett called “a new, eager reading public with no tradition of self-culture by means of books.” In a pre-public free library era, he set out to show people how they could develop literary taste by scrimping to buy books, by diligent and regular reading of certain works, and by thinking about this reading.
“Literary Taste” contains three of the most delicious reading lists you’ll ever find and I am happy to announce you can read it all on-line for absolutely nothing if you go to
www.readbookonline.net, a site containing 200 of the best novels of the 20th Century. Arnold Bennett would be astounded and pleased to think that many works on his own list can come to your virtual personal library completely free of charge.
In 1909, the total cost of Bennett’s 335-volume library was about £26, or, as Bennett points out, sixpence a day for three years. Figure a pound was worth about $5.00 back then and understand a worker made perhaps that much in a week, it isn’t as inexpensive as it sounds, but still…
“When you have read, wholly or in part,” Bennett says, “a majority of these 335 volumes with enjoyment, you may begin to whisper to yourself that your literary taste is formed; and you may pronounce judgment on modern works which come before the bar of your opinion in the calm assurance that, through to err is human, you do at any rate know what you are talking about.”
He divides the literary holdings into three periods: The first is from the beginning of literature to John Dryden or roughly to the end of the 17th Century. He eliminates The Bible from his list because he assumes everybody already has one. This list includes Bede, More, Chaucer, Donne, Milton, and Shakespeare, of course.
Period Two goes from William Congreve to Jane Austen or roughly the entire 18th Century into the 19th. Here we find Locke, Newton, Defoe, Addison and Steele, Adam Smith, Gibbon, Malthus, Pope, Gray, Cowper, Blake and Robert Burns.
Bennett’s Period Three extends from Scott through the 19th Century. As Rose points out in his “City Journal” piece, material under copyright – all the new stuff – then as now, costs more. So Bennett’s third list is the most expensive because it contains a larger proportion of copyright works. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Tennyson, Browning. Lamb, Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, Stevenson are on the fiction list, and Darwin, Newman, Hazlitt, Macaulay, and Carlyle, among others, are on the non-fiction list.
There is a lot about Arnold Bennett on the website of the Stoke-on-Trent City Council Libraries. www.stoke.gov.uk/council/libraries. This excellent site has many links and you can find information, for example, about the well-known local potteries. You can read a lively and slightly nasty exchange between Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf (she says he has a most peculiar accent), you can get maps and find out what is happening locally, and you can print out a recipe for “Omelette Arnold Bennett” created just for him by a famous chef during Bennett’s day.
I like the encouraging tone of “Literary Taste” and for having been compiled 100 years ago, Bennett’s approach and his list hold up today. Often he explains why he has rejected a work one might expect to find included. He is always mindful of the pocketbook. As you’ll notice with us contemporary stone readers and compilers of lists, there is a passion, an obsession. And there is joy: Bennett says, “the spirit of literature is unifying, it joins the candle and the star.”
Elinore Standard elstd@aol.com
There is an excerpt about Arnold Bennett in
“Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading”
Laura Furman and Elinore Standard, Eds. (Carroll& Graf, 1997)
Sunday, March 23, 2008
DETECTED, INSPECTED
This column by Elinore Standard appeared in The Record Review in August, 2004, as one in the ongoing "My Reading Life" series.
Works mentioned in this piece: Death in Dublin, Death of an Irish Lover, Death of a Joyce Scholar, Death of an Irish Tinker, Outsider in Amsterdam, Corpse in the Dyke, Blond Baboon, Love in Amsterdam, King of the Rainy Country, Roseanna, Laughing Policeman, Aqua Alta, Murder Down Under, Bony and the Mouse, Sands of Windee, Fade to Clear, Over the Shoulder, Underkill.
MY READING LIFE
DETECTED, INSPECTED
Come with me on a trip around the world to meet a few of my favorite detectives along the way.
We’ll travel eastward, stopping first in Ireland. Bartholomew Gill is, alas, no longer with us (he died in 2002) but we’ll look around the Dublin of his novels, the locale for more than 15 novels featuring brainy Dublin police Inspector of Detectives, Peter McGarr.
In such mysteries as “Death in Dublin”, “Death of an Irish Lover”, “Death of a Joyce Scholar”, and “Death of an Irish Tinker”, McGarr and Gill’s other characters evolve as the series progresses. His people change: they get older and wiser, they rise in rank, some leave the force,they marry, they split, they die. Gill’s writing is comfortable to read and I’m sorry he’s gone. I miss him already. Our local libraries have many of the McGarr novels and they are also available in paperback, generally published by Harper.
Hop across the Channel, now, to the Netherlands and the work of Janwillem Van de Wetering whose Commisaris of the Amsterdam police, and his subordinates, policemen Grijpstra and deGier have partnered in an enjoyable series that includes such titles as “Outsider in Amsterdam,” “The Corpse in the Dike,” “The Blond Baboon,” and others, now reprinted in paperback (many by Soho) and available on Amazon.
Although the murders in these books are brutal, there is a thoughtfulness and humanity on the part of the characters that sometimes borders on the quirky. DeGier is a tall, skinny, Zen-practicing cat owner and flutist and Grijpstra is an ageing and somewhat dissolute drummer. They worship their elderly boss and make inside jokes about just about everything.
In 1972, the late English writer Nicolas Freeling (1927-2003) actually had the nerve to kill off his own Amsterdam police Commisaris, Piet Van der Valk, after several successful novels. A “Guardian” obit of Freeling said, “He was tired of the tyranny of having to write the same story over and over again.” I always missed Van der Valk (“Love in Amsterdam” 1962, “King of the Rainy Country, 1967) but I did enjoy Freeling’s sop to his disappointed fans: two novels featuring Arlette Van der Valk, the widow. Freeling also wrote 16 novels set in and around the Alsace region of France with Henri Castang as the detective-hero in those. Good, but not as good, as the Dutch series.
Get on a coastwise freighter and make your way up the North Sea to the Stockholm of the early 1970s, and to climate and atmosphere as cold as the long, dim days of Nordic Winter. Swedish husband-and-wife writers, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo created 15 novels in a police procedural series featuring Martin Beck of the Stockholm homicide squad. Written before 1975, when Wahloo died, titles include “Roseanna" (1965) and “The Laughing Policeman” (1971) which was later made into a movie featuring Walter Matthau.
Martin Beck is solid and methodical and usually fed up with the general incompetence of the police force and the dehumanizing aspects of his job. His colleague, Lennart Kollberg, hates violence and refuses to carry a gun.
Should you wish to remain in Arctic emotional deepfreeze, check current detective titles by Swedish novelist Henning Mankill and Norwegian, Karin Fossum.
Thaw out, and head South, now, to watery Venice and the Inspector Guido Brunetti novels by Donna Leon. This is a fairly recent series, a dozen novels beginning in 1992, and Leon seems to write a new one almost yearly, so that’s good. I love it that Brunetti often comes home for lunch and as the reader, I get to share what he’s having. My favorite in this series is “Aqua Alta” (1996), set during the winter floods when many of the streets and sidewalks are under water and Venetians make their way about town on boardwalks hurriedly placed for that purpose.
Quick! Hop on QUANTAS or hurry to the stacks at your local library, or go on line, and order any of the many Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte books by Arthur W. Upfield (1888-1964) generally not in print but still available for sale through Amazon. These stories, set in flyblown small towns of Western Australia during the 1930’s to ‘50’s, are gems of description and in each one, Detective Inspector Bonaparte or “Bony” as he is called, uses his Aboriginal tradecraft and cunning to deal in interesting depth with a timely Australian problem: flood, rabbits, drought, wildfire, and to solve whatever crime that happens his way.
Upfield reprint titles include: “Murder Down Under” (Touchstone, 1998), “Bony and the Mouse” (Harper, 1991), “The Sands of Windee”, (Macmillan, 1985). Thinking in his own Dreamtime, the patient Detective Inspector Bony says, “Never race Time. Make Time an ally, for Time is the greatest detective that ever was or ever will be.”
At last, we make our way back home to San Francisco where we meet Allen Choice the young private eye in three recent novels by American writer, Leonard Chang. Chang studied philosophy at Dartmouth and Harvard and his work is pleasingly literary. His latest and most absorbing novel is “Fade to Clear” (St. Martin’s, 2004) in which the Korean-American PI works to find an abducted child and faces his own issues of resistance to personal commitment. The writing is a little “noir” in the tradition of the old-fashioned sleuths of Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald and Dashiell Hammett .
This Chang novel is set in San Francisco and moves around Silicon Valley. It includes generous lashings of Kierkegaard which may sound off-putting but is really not. . “Fade to Clear” has a third person point of view and is written in the present tense, something not easy for a writer to manage without annoying the reader. I am impressed by Chang’s insight into his complex characters and his willingness to try a little literary razzle-dazzle.
Chang has also written “Over the Shoulder” (Harper 2001) and “Underkill” (St. Martin’s 2003). In his website (www.leonardchang.com) remarks Chang says he is going to write more Allen Choice novels, how many more, “I’m not sure, but it feels like I’ve only started to delve into his character and family.” Chang’s first three Allen Choice novels have the makings of a durable series.
Of course, we could keep circling the globe, going around and around like the Flying Dutchman. We could return to Europe for George Simenon’s, Le Commissaire Jules Maigret of the Paris Police Judiciaire, probably (next to Sherlock Holmes) the most famous fictional detective that ever was. Maigret figures in 78 novels and 28 short stories, and at least 50 films. On sheer output, Simenon stands first. If we felt like it, we could head down to southern Africa, to Botswana and Alexander McCall Smith’s adorable and best selling Mma Ramotswe, the “traditionally-sized” proprietor of the No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.
The frequent flyer miles are racking up. Oh, what pleasures such armchair travel can provide!
Elinore Standard is the editor, along with Laura Furman of “Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading" (1997, Carroll & Graf).
Works mentioned in this piece: Death in Dublin, Death of an Irish Lover, Death of a Joyce Scholar, Death of an Irish Tinker, Outsider in Amsterdam, Corpse in the Dyke, Blond Baboon, Love in Amsterdam, King of the Rainy Country, Roseanna, Laughing Policeman, Aqua Alta, Murder Down Under, Bony and the Mouse, Sands of Windee, Fade to Clear, Over the Shoulder, Underkill.
MY READING LIFE
DETECTED, INSPECTED
Come with me on a trip around the world to meet a few of my favorite detectives along the way.
We’ll travel eastward, stopping first in Ireland. Bartholomew Gill is, alas, no longer with us (he died in 2002) but we’ll look around the Dublin of his novels, the locale for more than 15 novels featuring brainy Dublin police Inspector of Detectives, Peter McGarr.
In such mysteries as “Death in Dublin”, “Death of an Irish Lover”, “Death of a Joyce Scholar”, and “Death of an Irish Tinker”, McGarr and Gill’s other characters evolve as the series progresses. His people change: they get older and wiser, they rise in rank, some leave the force,they marry, they split, they die. Gill’s writing is comfortable to read and I’m sorry he’s gone. I miss him already. Our local libraries have many of the McGarr novels and they are also available in paperback, generally published by Harper.
Hop across the Channel, now, to the Netherlands and the work of Janwillem Van de Wetering whose Commisaris of the Amsterdam police, and his subordinates, policemen Grijpstra and deGier have partnered in an enjoyable series that includes such titles as “Outsider in Amsterdam,” “The Corpse in the Dike,” “The Blond Baboon,” and others, now reprinted in paperback (many by Soho) and available on Amazon.
Although the murders in these books are brutal, there is a thoughtfulness and humanity on the part of the characters that sometimes borders on the quirky. DeGier is a tall, skinny, Zen-practicing cat owner and flutist and Grijpstra is an ageing and somewhat dissolute drummer. They worship their elderly boss and make inside jokes about just about everything.
In 1972, the late English writer Nicolas Freeling (1927-2003) actually had the nerve to kill off his own Amsterdam police Commisaris, Piet Van der Valk, after several successful novels. A “Guardian” obit of Freeling said, “He was tired of the tyranny of having to write the same story over and over again.” I always missed Van der Valk (“Love in Amsterdam” 1962, “King of the Rainy Country, 1967) but I did enjoy Freeling’s sop to his disappointed fans: two novels featuring Arlette Van der Valk, the widow. Freeling also wrote 16 novels set in and around the Alsace region of France with Henri Castang as the detective-hero in those. Good, but not as good, as the Dutch series.
Get on a coastwise freighter and make your way up the North Sea to the Stockholm of the early 1970s, and to climate and atmosphere as cold as the long, dim days of Nordic Winter. Swedish husband-and-wife writers, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo created 15 novels in a police procedural series featuring Martin Beck of the Stockholm homicide squad. Written before 1975, when Wahloo died, titles include “Roseanna" (1965) and “The Laughing Policeman” (1971) which was later made into a movie featuring Walter Matthau.
Martin Beck is solid and methodical and usually fed up with the general incompetence of the police force and the dehumanizing aspects of his job. His colleague, Lennart Kollberg, hates violence and refuses to carry a gun.
Should you wish to remain in Arctic emotional deepfreeze, check current detective titles by Swedish novelist Henning Mankill and Norwegian, Karin Fossum.
Thaw out, and head South, now, to watery Venice and the Inspector Guido Brunetti novels by Donna Leon. This is a fairly recent series, a dozen novels beginning in 1992, and Leon seems to write a new one almost yearly, so that’s good. I love it that Brunetti often comes home for lunch and as the reader, I get to share what he’s having. My favorite in this series is “Aqua Alta” (1996), set during the winter floods when many of the streets and sidewalks are under water and Venetians make their way about town on boardwalks hurriedly placed for that purpose.
Quick! Hop on QUANTAS or hurry to the stacks at your local library, or go on line, and order any of the many Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte books by Arthur W. Upfield (1888-1964) generally not in print but still available for sale through Amazon. These stories, set in flyblown small towns of Western Australia during the 1930’s to ‘50’s, are gems of description and in each one, Detective Inspector Bonaparte or “Bony” as he is called, uses his Aboriginal tradecraft and cunning to deal in interesting depth with a timely Australian problem: flood, rabbits, drought, wildfire, and to solve whatever crime that happens his way.
Upfield reprint titles include: “Murder Down Under” (Touchstone, 1998), “Bony and the Mouse” (Harper, 1991), “The Sands of Windee”, (Macmillan, 1985). Thinking in his own Dreamtime, the patient Detective Inspector Bony says, “Never race Time. Make Time an ally, for Time is the greatest detective that ever was or ever will be.”
At last, we make our way back home to San Francisco where we meet Allen Choice the young private eye in three recent novels by American writer, Leonard Chang. Chang studied philosophy at Dartmouth and Harvard and his work is pleasingly literary. His latest and most absorbing novel is “Fade to Clear” (St. Martin’s, 2004) in which the Korean-American PI works to find an abducted child and faces his own issues of resistance to personal commitment. The writing is a little “noir” in the tradition of the old-fashioned sleuths of Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald and Dashiell Hammett .
This Chang novel is set in San Francisco and moves around Silicon Valley. It includes generous lashings of Kierkegaard which may sound off-putting but is really not. . “Fade to Clear” has a third person point of view and is written in the present tense, something not easy for a writer to manage without annoying the reader. I am impressed by Chang’s insight into his complex characters and his willingness to try a little literary razzle-dazzle.
Chang has also written “Over the Shoulder” (Harper 2001) and “Underkill” (St. Martin’s 2003). In his website (www.leonardchang.com) remarks Chang says he is going to write more Allen Choice novels, how many more, “I’m not sure, but it feels like I’ve only started to delve into his character and family.” Chang’s first three Allen Choice novels have the makings of a durable series.
Of course, we could keep circling the globe, going around and around like the Flying Dutchman. We could return to Europe for George Simenon’s, Le Commissaire Jules Maigret of the Paris Police Judiciaire, probably (next to Sherlock Holmes) the most famous fictional detective that ever was. Maigret figures in 78 novels and 28 short stories, and at least 50 films. On sheer output, Simenon stands first. If we felt like it, we could head down to southern Africa, to Botswana and Alexander McCall Smith’s adorable and best selling Mma Ramotswe, the “traditionally-sized” proprietor of the No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.
The frequent flyer miles are racking up. Oh, what pleasures such armchair travel can provide!
Elinore Standard is the editor, along with Laura Furman of “Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading" (1997, Carroll & Graf).
NOTHING LIKE JANE
This column is from the ongoing series "MY READING LIFE" by Elinore Standard in The Record Review, December, 2004.
NOTHING LIKE JANE WHEN YOU ARE IN A TIGHT SPOT
I don’t know how many times I’ve read Jane Austen’s novels, nor do I remember when I read the first one. I go to them when I am tired of reading thrillers in which people get sliced and shot and blown up. I go to Jane Austen when I can’t stand another saga of family dysfunction and abuse. I turn to Jane Austen when the nightly news says the world around me is collapsing beneath the weight of fear, violence, lying and rage. I read Jane Austen to recover.
My favorite stories, fiction and non, are about how women manage and how people change their lives. I enjoy humor when it is witty and dialogue when it is stimulating. I mind being preached to. I appreciate a loyal and self-reliant character. I like happy endings.
Lately I’ve tried other so-called “comfort” novels, while attempting to avoid the bodice-ripper Regency romances and the mystery “cozies”that are so often included in this genre. Right after the ugliness of the recent presidential election, I even went so far as to try Agnes Sligh Turnbull, an American writer of bestsellers in the 1950s through the 70s. Like Jane Austen, she often writes about clergy and pastoral politics and the genteel life. Turnbull’s settings, often in upper class, pre-World War II urban America evoke what has been called a “kinder, gentler, age.” However, this kinder age as portrayed by Turnbull -- in addition to being completely humorless -- discriminated against all minorities, was Stone Age in its treatment of women, and it assumed an ethno-centric, white male-dominated, ruling class society. People were polite, though, and they all wore hats.
After reading this appalling opening line (page 1) from Turnbull’s “The Two Bishops” (Houghton, 1980), I fled back to Jane Austen:
“The warm effulgence of the late June day fell upon
the Bishop’s garden here and there.”
Karen Joy Fowler has written the delightful “The Jane Austen Book Club” (Putnam’s, 2004), in which she says, “Each of us has a private Jane Austen.” Fowler’s novel is more about the book club characters and why they read what they read than it is about Austen, but at the back of the book there is a generous bibliography and a chronological listing of what others through the years have had to say about the great Jane Austen. Fowler quotes Rudyard Kipling as saying, “Nothing like Jane when you’re in a tight spot.” (from “A Choice of Kipling’s Prose” ed: Craig Raine.) (Faber, 1987).
A chapter in a much darker recent novel, “Our Kind” by Kate Walbert,
(Scribner, 2004) has a reading group struggling to discuss Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” about which one character says, “I frankly, was confused, I couldn’t make heads or tails.” In comparing Woolf to Jane Austen, she adds, “Austen knew how to tell a story, and her books mean something. How many years later? You can read them again and again. In fact, I think we should read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ next…”
In “The Lesson of Balzac” (1905) Henry James said, “The key to Jane Austen’s fortune with posterity has been in part the extraordinary grace of her facility…” Such ease and simplicity may be the secret to the amazing survival and popularity of her work throughout two centuries. In her short lifetime she produced six novels which, given the fact she was a female (and an “Old Maid” as D.H.Lawrence called her) and getting published was hard enough without that. I wonder if there had been more Austen books written, would they seem as precious in the way they gently remind us today of the enduring foibles and follies of human nature.
Just to remind you, the six Austen novels, in order of publication: “Sense and Sensibility” (1811), “Pride and Prejudice” (1813), “Mansfield Park” (1814), “Emma” (1815), “Persuasion” (1817 Posth.) and “Northanger Abbey” (1817 Posth.). Although the books were not published in exactly the order they were written, they all deal with common themes such as the control of passion, miscommunication, the humbling of the vain and self-satisfied, and virtue rewarded. In addition, they all seem to be to be about money and the want of it.
“Northanger Abbey” of the six, is quite strange and it is the only one I have not persistently re-read. Perhaps this is because it seems like a juvenile exercise, which it pretty much is. Austen wrote it perhaps ten years earlier than any of the others but it wasn’t published until after her death. Unlike the other five novels, I find little comfort in “Northanger Abbey”. The three brother-sister pairs of characters seem farcical at times and, as I do with other novels old and new, I find myself becoming impatient.
Mark Twain didn’t exactly love Jane Austen’s work. He said, “Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’, I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” Among other non-appreciators are Joseph Conrad, “What is it all about?”; Rebecca West, “...you will see women haggard with desire or triumphant with love…”; H. G. Wells, “A certain ineluctable faded charm. Like some of the loveliest butterflies – with no guts at all.” And so on… Of course, there have always been detractors but the appreciators far outnumber them.
In “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf said of Jane Austen: “Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching…”
For me, as a reader in the 21st Century, these brave qualities are what make Jane Austen so reassuring, over and over again.
NOTHING LIKE JANE WHEN YOU ARE IN A TIGHT SPOT
I don’t know how many times I’ve read Jane Austen’s novels, nor do I remember when I read the first one. I go to them when I am tired of reading thrillers in which people get sliced and shot and blown up. I go to Jane Austen when I can’t stand another saga of family dysfunction and abuse. I turn to Jane Austen when the nightly news says the world around me is collapsing beneath the weight of fear, violence, lying and rage. I read Jane Austen to recover.
My favorite stories, fiction and non, are about how women manage and how people change their lives. I enjoy humor when it is witty and dialogue when it is stimulating. I mind being preached to. I appreciate a loyal and self-reliant character. I like happy endings.
Lately I’ve tried other so-called “comfort” novels, while attempting to avoid the bodice-ripper Regency romances and the mystery “cozies”that are so often included in this genre. Right after the ugliness of the recent presidential election, I even went so far as to try Agnes Sligh Turnbull, an American writer of bestsellers in the 1950s through the 70s. Like Jane Austen, she often writes about clergy and pastoral politics and the genteel life. Turnbull’s settings, often in upper class, pre-World War II urban America evoke what has been called a “kinder, gentler, age.” However, this kinder age as portrayed by Turnbull -- in addition to being completely humorless -- discriminated against all minorities, was Stone Age in its treatment of women, and it assumed an ethno-centric, white male-dominated, ruling class society. People were polite, though, and they all wore hats.
After reading this appalling opening line (page 1) from Turnbull’s “The Two Bishops” (Houghton, 1980), I fled back to Jane Austen:
“The warm effulgence of the late June day fell upon
the Bishop’s garden here and there.”
Karen Joy Fowler has written the delightful “The Jane Austen Book Club” (Putnam’s, 2004), in which she says, “Each of us has a private Jane Austen.” Fowler’s novel is more about the book club characters and why they read what they read than it is about Austen, but at the back of the book there is a generous bibliography and a chronological listing of what others through the years have had to say about the great Jane Austen. Fowler quotes Rudyard Kipling as saying, “Nothing like Jane when you’re in a tight spot.” (from “A Choice of Kipling’s Prose” ed: Craig Raine.) (Faber, 1987).
A chapter in a much darker recent novel, “Our Kind” by Kate Walbert,
(Scribner, 2004) has a reading group struggling to discuss Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” about which one character says, “I frankly, was confused, I couldn’t make heads or tails.” In comparing Woolf to Jane Austen, she adds, “Austen knew how to tell a story, and her books mean something. How many years later? You can read them again and again. In fact, I think we should read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ next…”
In “The Lesson of Balzac” (1905) Henry James said, “The key to Jane Austen’s fortune with posterity has been in part the extraordinary grace of her facility…” Such ease and simplicity may be the secret to the amazing survival and popularity of her work throughout two centuries. In her short lifetime she produced six novels which, given the fact she was a female (and an “Old Maid” as D.H.Lawrence called her) and getting published was hard enough without that. I wonder if there had been more Austen books written, would they seem as precious in the way they gently remind us today of the enduring foibles and follies of human nature.
Just to remind you, the six Austen novels, in order of publication: “Sense and Sensibility” (1811), “Pride and Prejudice” (1813), “Mansfield Park” (1814), “Emma” (1815), “Persuasion” (1817 Posth.) and “Northanger Abbey” (1817 Posth.). Although the books were not published in exactly the order they were written, they all deal with common themes such as the control of passion, miscommunication, the humbling of the vain and self-satisfied, and virtue rewarded. In addition, they all seem to be to be about money and the want of it.
“Northanger Abbey” of the six, is quite strange and it is the only one I have not persistently re-read. Perhaps this is because it seems like a juvenile exercise, which it pretty much is. Austen wrote it perhaps ten years earlier than any of the others but it wasn’t published until after her death. Unlike the other five novels, I find little comfort in “Northanger Abbey”. The three brother-sister pairs of characters seem farcical at times and, as I do with other novels old and new, I find myself becoming impatient.
Mark Twain didn’t exactly love Jane Austen’s work. He said, “Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’, I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” Among other non-appreciators are Joseph Conrad, “What is it all about?”; Rebecca West, “...you will see women haggard with desire or triumphant with love…”; H. G. Wells, “A certain ineluctable faded charm. Like some of the loveliest butterflies – with no guts at all.” And so on… Of course, there have always been detractors but the appreciators far outnumber them.
In “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf said of Jane Austen: “Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching…”
For me, as a reader in the 21st Century, these brave qualities are what make Jane Austen so reassuring, over and over again.
Monday, March 17, 2008
ALL THAT HARD WORK
This column by Elinore Standard appeared in a November, 2004 Record Review as one in the ongoing "My Reading Life" series.
Works mentioned in this piece: Traces of Thomas Hariot. A Brief and True Report,
ALL THAT HARD WORK
“The Traces of Thomas Hariot” by Muriel Rukeyser (Random House, 1970) is an ambitious biography taken on by Rukeyser, (1913-1980) who is best remembered as a distinguished American poet.
Thomas Hariot, (1560-1621) – tutor to Ralegh (today an “i” is added), friend of Francis Drake and Christopher Marlowe -- went as a surveyor and historian to the New World. He set out from Plymouth as part of Richard Grenville’s 1585 expedition to explore and record the “Virginia” wilderness. Hariot’s (spelling in the 16th Century was ad hoc: one can use “Heriot”, “Harriott”, “Herriot”, “Herriott” or any variation) only surviving book, “A Brief and True Report” was the first writing in English about America. It was published in 1588, three months before the sailing of the Spanish Armada.
Respected in his day and forgotten in ours, Hariot was a mathematician, alchemist, naturalist, and astrologer who investigated intellectual powers of change and magic – enough to get anybody in trouble with the Star Chamber – and Hariot (unlike some of his close friends including Raleigh) survived a long stay in the Tower of London.
To me, “The Traces of Thomas Hariot” is as much about the process required to produce a first-rate biography about an historical figure who left little written record as it is about the figure himself. I’ve owned “The Traces of Thomas Hariot” since 1970, and I always wondered what made Rukeyser choose so difficult a subject. I get the feeling the work took on a life of its own as it progressed -- as these things often do.
She began her inquiry into Thomas Hariot while teaching poetry at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville. There are hints and glances at Hariot in work by Raleigh, Marlowe, Spenser, Roger Bacon, Donne and other Elizabethans, and Rukeyser asked herself and her students, “Who was he? Where was he to be found?” There was little written about him, but there were clues and what Rukeyser calls, “excitements”.
In the early 1960’s, she commenced a search for Hariot papers and materials in England and examined sources in museums and private libraries; the clock began running. She waited years for Hariot’s own papers to be published so that what she was saying about him could become verifiable. As she worked in the British Museum with microfilms of the Hariot papers, a fellow scholar informed her publisher that her work should not be published because Rukeyser was not consulting original manuscripts. She found another publisher. A friend wrote, “By now, it is an obsession with you, and these obsessive things sometimes turn out well.”
She hits pay dirt in the library at Alnwick, the home of the present-day Duke of Northumberland whose forebear, The “Wizard” Earl of Northumberland, had been Hariot’s patron. She had been given permission by the Duke to visit two years earlier and she appeared unannounced, acting boldly on a rather old invitation. The day came when she finally met the Duke. “He came toward us, and I began to show him the papers of his family with which I was working. I told him some of what I was after. He put his head on one side, with its legendary red hair, and the turning point of all my endeavor came. He said, ‘It’s very much like fox-hunting.”
She goes to Raleigh country in Dorset, England, and a place called “Nag’s Head”. In the U.S. she goes, as Hariot once did, across the sandbars in Roanoke Sound, North Carolina, to Kitty Hawk, Nag’s Head and Hattaras. Back in England, she meets and interviews descendants of Raleigh and Hariot and of the many others connected to the expedition.
In Madrid, Rukeyser gets access to the archives of the Spanish Duke of Medina Sidonia, to complete the account of the “other side” of the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Then back she goes to London in 1968, to Syon House, a Northumberland residence where Hariot ended his days. She discusses the possible planting of a Hariot Trail, so that the New World plants and trees described in “A Brief and True Report” might also be set out on the present-day site of Hariot’s former home and laboratory.
Years pass and one can see that as Rukeyser proceeded, she got sucked deeper and deeper into the black hole of research. You get the feeling that some of it was drudgery and a lot of it was fun. You understand that Rukeyser, a person with the time and the means, could afford the expense of foreign questing. You are aware that her own distinguished reputation as a poet and teacher gave her credibility and entrée, and you realize that she had an international network of friends and acquaintances and what they used to call “connections” in academia and publishing.
At the end of the book, there is an eleven-page partial reading list and citation of 300 sources. Her Acknowledgments list is long, including: “To Sarah Lawrence College and to my students there, whom I first set the errand of searching with me for the traces of Thomas Hariot”.
As she concludes the book, Rukeyser describes herself as “exhausted” and accepts that there are gaps in the story of Hariot she can never possibly fill. To make the challenge greater (in those pre-digital days before fax, e-mail, Google, hard-drive backup and Jet Blue), the second publisher lost her manuscript and they lost treasured illustrations. Rukeyser compares the long delays for the book with “Hariot’s long story of delay and failure.”
And you know what? I am going down deeper and deeper into my own interest in what Rukeyser went through in order to produce a responsible biography. I am much more fascinated by that process than I am by Thomas Hariot! I Google “Muriel Rukeyser” and I come up with 10,000 results! This is enough to feed the most voracious obsession! I Google “Thomas Hariot” and I find 4,700 –- amounting to many, many pages of references and endless pathways to follow. Practically all of the Rukeyser entries have to do with her poetry; few have to do with Hariot. I get tired of paging through. Unlike Rukeyser, I give up.
Elinore Standard is the co-editor of “Bookworms: Great Writers and
Readers Celebrate Reading” (Carroll&Graf, 1997).
Works mentioned in this piece: Traces of Thomas Hariot. A Brief and True Report,
ALL THAT HARD WORK
“The Traces of Thomas Hariot” by Muriel Rukeyser (Random House, 1970) is an ambitious biography taken on by Rukeyser, (1913-1980) who is best remembered as a distinguished American poet.
Thomas Hariot, (1560-1621) – tutor to Ralegh (today an “i” is added), friend of Francis Drake and Christopher Marlowe -- went as a surveyor and historian to the New World. He set out from Plymouth as part of Richard Grenville’s 1585 expedition to explore and record the “Virginia” wilderness. Hariot’s (spelling in the 16th Century was ad hoc: one can use “Heriot”, “Harriott”, “Herriot”, “Herriott” or any variation) only surviving book, “A Brief and True Report” was the first writing in English about America. It was published in 1588, three months before the sailing of the Spanish Armada.
Respected in his day and forgotten in ours, Hariot was a mathematician, alchemist, naturalist, and astrologer who investigated intellectual powers of change and magic – enough to get anybody in trouble with the Star Chamber – and Hariot (unlike some of his close friends including Raleigh) survived a long stay in the Tower of London.
To me, “The Traces of Thomas Hariot” is as much about the process required to produce a first-rate biography about an historical figure who left little written record as it is about the figure himself. I’ve owned “The Traces of Thomas Hariot” since 1970, and I always wondered what made Rukeyser choose so difficult a subject. I get the feeling the work took on a life of its own as it progressed -- as these things often do.
She began her inquiry into Thomas Hariot while teaching poetry at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville. There are hints and glances at Hariot in work by Raleigh, Marlowe, Spenser, Roger Bacon, Donne and other Elizabethans, and Rukeyser asked herself and her students, “Who was he? Where was he to be found?” There was little written about him, but there were clues and what Rukeyser calls, “excitements”.
In the early 1960’s, she commenced a search for Hariot papers and materials in England and examined sources in museums and private libraries; the clock began running. She waited years for Hariot’s own papers to be published so that what she was saying about him could become verifiable. As she worked in the British Museum with microfilms of the Hariot papers, a fellow scholar informed her publisher that her work should not be published because Rukeyser was not consulting original manuscripts. She found another publisher. A friend wrote, “By now, it is an obsession with you, and these obsessive things sometimes turn out well.”
She hits pay dirt in the library at Alnwick, the home of the present-day Duke of Northumberland whose forebear, The “Wizard” Earl of Northumberland, had been Hariot’s patron. She had been given permission by the Duke to visit two years earlier and she appeared unannounced, acting boldly on a rather old invitation. The day came when she finally met the Duke. “He came toward us, and I began to show him the papers of his family with which I was working. I told him some of what I was after. He put his head on one side, with its legendary red hair, and the turning point of all my endeavor came. He said, ‘It’s very much like fox-hunting.”
She goes to Raleigh country in Dorset, England, and a place called “Nag’s Head”. In the U.S. she goes, as Hariot once did, across the sandbars in Roanoke Sound, North Carolina, to Kitty Hawk, Nag’s Head and Hattaras. Back in England, she meets and interviews descendants of Raleigh and Hariot and of the many others connected to the expedition.
In Madrid, Rukeyser gets access to the archives of the Spanish Duke of Medina Sidonia, to complete the account of the “other side” of the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Then back she goes to London in 1968, to Syon House, a Northumberland residence where Hariot ended his days. She discusses the possible planting of a Hariot Trail, so that the New World plants and trees described in “A Brief and True Report” might also be set out on the present-day site of Hariot’s former home and laboratory.
Years pass and one can see that as Rukeyser proceeded, she got sucked deeper and deeper into the black hole of research. You get the feeling that some of it was drudgery and a lot of it was fun. You understand that Rukeyser, a person with the time and the means, could afford the expense of foreign questing. You are aware that her own distinguished reputation as a poet and teacher gave her credibility and entrée, and you realize that she had an international network of friends and acquaintances and what they used to call “connections” in academia and publishing.
At the end of the book, there is an eleven-page partial reading list and citation of 300 sources. Her Acknowledgments list is long, including: “To Sarah Lawrence College and to my students there, whom I first set the errand of searching with me for the traces of Thomas Hariot”.
As she concludes the book, Rukeyser describes herself as “exhausted” and accepts that there are gaps in the story of Hariot she can never possibly fill. To make the challenge greater (in those pre-digital days before fax, e-mail, Google, hard-drive backup and Jet Blue), the second publisher lost her manuscript and they lost treasured illustrations. Rukeyser compares the long delays for the book with “Hariot’s long story of delay and failure.”
And you know what? I am going down deeper and deeper into my own interest in what Rukeyser went through in order to produce a responsible biography. I am much more fascinated by that process than I am by Thomas Hariot! I Google “Muriel Rukeyser” and I come up with 10,000 results! This is enough to feed the most voracious obsession! I Google “Thomas Hariot” and I find 4,700 –- amounting to many, many pages of references and endless pathways to follow. Practically all of the Rukeyser entries have to do with her poetry; few have to do with Hariot. I get tired of paging through. Unlike Rukeyser, I give up.
Elinore Standard is the co-editor of “Bookworms: Great Writers and
Readers Celebrate Reading” (Carroll&Graf, 1997).
Sunday, March 16, 2008
FOR THAT PERSON WHO HAS EVERYTHING
A "MY READING LIFE" column by Elinore Standard as it appeared in the December, 2004 issue of The Record Review.
Works mentioned in this piece: Gigi-Gugi, Interior Desecrations, Gallery of Regrettable Food,
Philadelphia Main Line Classics, Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia.
FOR THAT PERSON WHO HAS EVERYTHING
Ah, what to get that person who has everything? A book is usually a safe
and often welcome choice. I remember the time long ago when I pouted my way through Christmas and several days thereafter because the books I had hoped for were not beneath the tree. My parents thought it was a waste of good money to buy something that could be so easily borrowed from the local library.
Now it is more convenient to buy a book online than it is to drive to a bookstore. By using e-mail you can have Amazon send boxes of books to your door, and because we live in such a crazy world, you can pay for them with virtual plastic. Too tempting by half, but there are always ways to rationalize.
One way I trick myself is to buy books for somebody else, getting the vicarious thrill without the guilt of spending (hear this, O my parents!) money on myself. I recently heard Daniel Pinkwater reading Chih-Yuan Chen’s’s “Gugi, Gugi”( Kane/Miller, 2004), a children’s book about a family of ducks and an extra large egg that rolls into their nest (“Mother duck didn’t notice, she was reading!”) on NPR and it sounded so charming I knew I’d have to order it for my granddaughter, but lucky duck me, I’d get to see it first.
I recently saw an ad in “Publishers’ Weekly” for “Interior Desecrations: Horrible Homes From The Brass Age of American Design” by James Lileks (Crown, 2004) and I thought, hmmmm, this could be good. I recollected a split-level with its avocado-hued kitchen and a New York City apartment with avocado trees growing from pots nobody ever watered, brown-tipped leaves sprawling across a grimy ceiling. I thought of orange and white daisies on contact paper, and brown upholstery. I saw fake wood paneling and shag, shag, shag. Was it this horrible? Could it possibly have been The Age of Aquarius? Mr. Lileks brings it all back in a compendium of bad taste. Spare us a 70s home décor revival; current lifestyle rage for the 40s and 50s is bad enough.
I don’t know who you’d actually buy this book for. Not for your mother -- I hope not. You might get it for yourself, just for reassurance about the way we do not live now.
If you want to really make yourself queasy, try “The Gallery of Regrettable Food” by the same author. Salt! Sugar! Starch! Oh, boy, it is all there in revolting photographs the author gathered from various magazines and cookbooks, heavy on the 1940s. You can get both of Mr. Lileks’s books – packaged together by Crown – from Amazon for about $30.00.
“Gallery of Regrettable Food” includes such sections as “Cooking With 7UP”, “The A.1 Guide To Better Sex”, “Submit To The Power Of Ketchup”, PLUS! The really awful photographs, This book is so much fun and if you enjoy it, you’ll love Mr. Lileks’s website, “The Institute of Official Cheer”. That’s www.lileks.com. James Lileks has a regular column in the Minneapolis
“Star-Tribune” and he gets crazy stuff from the newspaper’s archives and from unconventional far-flung sources. The site has links to his collections of matchbooks, postcards, motel architecture, 70’s figure skating costumes and routines, etc., all with his own funny and often raunchy commentary.
There is one link I laughed my head off at: the illustrated “Dorcus Collection” presumably a long-forgotten men’s clothing line. Lileks has a good time with the black and white fashion photographs and his ad copy describes “Miracle Breethe-Thru shirts for hot days on the links or our swank, absorbent evening wear.” Now that’s Dorcus! I say “presumably” because it dawned on me Liluks made it all up.
Perhaps just a quick browse through the old recipe books at the back of your own kitchen shelves will satisfy an appetite for pure camp. I’ve got a real honey titled “Philadelphia Main Line Classics" put out in 1982 by The Saturday Club of Wayne, PA, and now in its seventh printing, a total of about 80,000 copies, thank you very much. I am impressed by the fifteen or so recipes for dips: curry dip, hot clam dip, deviled ham dip, caviar dip, crab dip, blue cheese dip, and so on, almost all based on a lot of cream cheese. Remember sour cream and dry onion soup mix: the ubiquitous dip for potato chips? Those were dippy days.
This is your basic Lileks-style canned cream soup, mayonnaise and crustless white bread recipe book, backed up by staples like canned onion rings and bottled artichoke hearts, frozen Cool-Whip and, yes, that universal solvent -- Cheeze Whiz. This collection puts the retro back into retro, heavy on the canapés. And, think: no offensive garlic or exotic spices to annoy your palate!
Maybe down there in Philadelphia they are still serving this stuff. I wouldn’t be surprised; they certainly were when I left. True confession: I like a lot of it and right this minute, I wouldn’t mind having a nice hot helping of celery casserole, (p. 283).
And if the domestic arts are not their thing, and you are desperate and really can’t think what to get that somebody, there is the “Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia”, (printed in Germany by Steidl/Fuel) containing photographs, drawings, and text, all part of a personal collection of over 3,000 tattoos signifying gang, clan, and ethnic membership gathered over years by prison attendant, Danzig Baldav. This may be an idea for an ambitious US prison worker or anthropologist in need of a thesis topic. We Americans could also use our own decoder for all that body ink.
Elinore Standard is the co-editor of ‘”Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading” (Carroll&Graf, 1997).
Works mentioned in this piece: Gigi-Gugi, Interior Desecrations, Gallery of Regrettable Food,
Philadelphia Main Line Classics, Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia.
FOR THAT PERSON WHO HAS EVERYTHING
Ah, what to get that person who has everything? A book is usually a safe
and often welcome choice. I remember the time long ago when I pouted my way through Christmas and several days thereafter because the books I had hoped for were not beneath the tree. My parents thought it was a waste of good money to buy something that could be so easily borrowed from the local library.
Now it is more convenient to buy a book online than it is to drive to a bookstore. By using e-mail you can have Amazon send boxes of books to your door, and because we live in such a crazy world, you can pay for them with virtual plastic. Too tempting by half, but there are always ways to rationalize.
One way I trick myself is to buy books for somebody else, getting the vicarious thrill without the guilt of spending (hear this, O my parents!) money on myself. I recently heard Daniel Pinkwater reading Chih-Yuan Chen’s’s “Gugi, Gugi”( Kane/Miller, 2004), a children’s book about a family of ducks and an extra large egg that rolls into their nest (“Mother duck didn’t notice, she was reading!”) on NPR and it sounded so charming I knew I’d have to order it for my granddaughter, but lucky duck me, I’d get to see it first.
I recently saw an ad in “Publishers’ Weekly” for “Interior Desecrations: Horrible Homes From The Brass Age of American Design” by James Lileks (Crown, 2004) and I thought, hmmmm, this could be good. I recollected a split-level with its avocado-hued kitchen and a New York City apartment with avocado trees growing from pots nobody ever watered, brown-tipped leaves sprawling across a grimy ceiling. I thought of orange and white daisies on contact paper, and brown upholstery. I saw fake wood paneling and shag, shag, shag. Was it this horrible? Could it possibly have been The Age of Aquarius? Mr. Lileks brings it all back in a compendium of bad taste. Spare us a 70s home décor revival; current lifestyle rage for the 40s and 50s is bad enough.
I don’t know who you’d actually buy this book for. Not for your mother -- I hope not. You might get it for yourself, just for reassurance about the way we do not live now.
If you want to really make yourself queasy, try “The Gallery of Regrettable Food” by the same author. Salt! Sugar! Starch! Oh, boy, it is all there in revolting photographs the author gathered from various magazines and cookbooks, heavy on the 1940s. You can get both of Mr. Lileks’s books – packaged together by Crown – from Amazon for about $30.00.
“Gallery of Regrettable Food” includes such sections as “Cooking With 7UP”, “The A.1 Guide To Better Sex”, “Submit To The Power Of Ketchup”, PLUS! The really awful photographs, This book is so much fun and if you enjoy it, you’ll love Mr. Lileks’s website, “The Institute of Official Cheer”. That’s www.lileks.com. James Lileks has a regular column in the Minneapolis
“Star-Tribune” and he gets crazy stuff from the newspaper’s archives and from unconventional far-flung sources. The site has links to his collections of matchbooks, postcards, motel architecture, 70’s figure skating costumes and routines, etc., all with his own funny and often raunchy commentary.
There is one link I laughed my head off at: the illustrated “Dorcus Collection” presumably a long-forgotten men’s clothing line. Lileks has a good time with the black and white fashion photographs and his ad copy describes “Miracle Breethe-Thru shirts for hot days on the links or our swank, absorbent evening wear.” Now that’s Dorcus! I say “presumably” because it dawned on me Liluks made it all up.
Perhaps just a quick browse through the old recipe books at the back of your own kitchen shelves will satisfy an appetite for pure camp. I’ve got a real honey titled “Philadelphia Main Line Classics" put out in 1982 by The Saturday Club of Wayne, PA, and now in its seventh printing, a total of about 80,000 copies, thank you very much. I am impressed by the fifteen or so recipes for dips: curry dip, hot clam dip, deviled ham dip, caviar dip, crab dip, blue cheese dip, and so on, almost all based on a lot of cream cheese. Remember sour cream and dry onion soup mix: the ubiquitous dip for potato chips? Those were dippy days.
This is your basic Lileks-style canned cream soup, mayonnaise and crustless white bread recipe book, backed up by staples like canned onion rings and bottled artichoke hearts, frozen Cool-Whip and, yes, that universal solvent -- Cheeze Whiz. This collection puts the retro back into retro, heavy on the canapés. And, think: no offensive garlic or exotic spices to annoy your palate!
Maybe down there in Philadelphia they are still serving this stuff. I wouldn’t be surprised; they certainly were when I left. True confession: I like a lot of it and right this minute, I wouldn’t mind having a nice hot helping of celery casserole, (p. 283).
And if the domestic arts are not their thing, and you are desperate and really can’t think what to get that somebody, there is the “Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia”, (printed in Germany by Steidl/Fuel) containing photographs, drawings, and text, all part of a personal collection of over 3,000 tattoos signifying gang, clan, and ethnic membership gathered over years by prison attendant, Danzig Baldav. This may be an idea for an ambitious US prison worker or anthropologist in need of a thesis topic. We Americans could also use our own decoder for all that body ink.
Elinore Standard is the co-editor of ‘”Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading” (Carroll&Graf, 1997).
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