#80 in 2023
You didn’t want the evening to end. The St. Emilion was uncorked and the stinky cheese begged to be scraped onto the crust of baguette. The conversation slowed; you wanted this moment to last forever. That’s how I felt as I turned the last twenty pages of Chéri and The End of Chéri by the legendary French writer, Colette. I did not want to leave those boudoirs, those Louis Quatorze writing tables, those scented, wicked, painful scenes. Like many of you, I read Colette when I was very young, but I wonder if I understood or even liked her then. I would have found the age difference in the novel Chéri off-putting — a lengthy love affair that started when the man was a teenager (Chéri) and the woman in her mid-forties (Léa). That ‘robbing the cradle’ phenomenon repelled me in my youth, and the power imbalance still bothers me when I see a man with a much younger woman. But now that I’m long past forty, I find it all much more amusing.
…seeing Chéri shirtless in the afternoon under the lindens, or Chéri shirtless in the morning on top of the ermine bedcover, or Chéri shirtless at night on the lip of the basin of lukewarm water.
“No, no! I know that voice of yours! You’re going to make another one of your outrageous arguments. When you put on that voice and that face, I know you’r going to prove to me that your eyes are shaped like some kind of fish and your mouth looks like an upside-down number 3!”
She felt the desire, in short order and in rapid bursts, for a well-sprung victoria carriage drawn by an easygoing horse; then for an extremely fast automobile; then for a set of Directoire furnishings for her salon.
It’s great that the publishers paired Chéri with The End of Chéri. The rich and indolent Chéri grows up bewildered, cast out of time after serving in World War I, unable to find his meaning, searching for his lost love life. An entire epoch has changed, an entire era has died, and Colette captures the minutiae of that confusion.
“Beautiful…”, Léa said to herself as she climbed the stairs to her boudoir. “No. It’s over now. At this point, I need white linen next to my face, and very pale pink for my undies and dressing gowns. Beautiful…bah…it hardly matters anymore.”
Maybe I was impatient with Colette in the past because the translation was lumpy. Not so now. Félicitations to the translator, my bookish friend of many years, Paul Eprile, for making Colette so seductive in English. He applies the same skill to writer Jean Giono.
#81 in 2023 I would never invite Colette and Percival Everett to the same dinner party. It would be like trying to seat two planets at the same table. I’ve officially read eleven books by Everett (and skipped two), and that means I’ve carved through a third of his oeuvre. In between big novels he tosses off short stories, sends them to Graywolf Press, and they publish them like flipping pancakes. For example, the anthology Damned if I Do.
Everett is your go-to if you want to experience the American landscape, fly-fishing, systemic racism, AND literary theory PLUS the travails of a writer.
“You been tying any?”
“Bunch of nymphs,” Lem said. “Some zug bugs, Tellicos, some early brown stoneflies. And some grasshoppers and little black beetles. You?”
…the way it felt to trim the deer hair on his first grasshopper, the pieces of feathers floating, how much fun it was to dub the muskrat fur onto the thread with his thumb and index finger. He hadn’t even put the first winds of thread on the hook and he was already feeling better.
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The only thing about my job I found amusing was the list I’d receive every couple of months from my editor. The list was of hot names. Shelley was big again, but it had to be Shelley with an e-y and not Shelly with a y. Brad and Lars were always good. Brittany, Brandy, Sydney, Lucas, and Tasha were hot. I wanted so much to call my characters Agnes, Angus, Gertrude, and Gisela.
You get the picture, Everett is the writer as polymath. But he’s not gonna be fussing about the cut of his lavender gloves or describing the twinkle of the chandelier.
#82 in 2023
Anna Akhmatova, Selected Poems, 1969
Like Colette, Anna Akhmatova should be on everybody’s must-read list, yet given the wrong translation, she will fail to enchant. I can’t be fulsome about this translation of Akhmatova by Richard McKane. There must be a better one out there.
I first encountered Akhmatova when I began to study Russian, decades ago. My teacher was a gaunt and mournful Polish woman who walked the grounds of my college with her equally mournful greyhounds. I didn’t know she was mortally ill; she never told her handful of students; but she did try to teach us a brand new language via the writers Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam. Both of these artists suffered enormously under Stalin, and Akhmatova’s greatest poem ‘Requiem' commemorates the seventeen months she spent in a queue at the prison in Leningrad, together with hundreds of other women, because their men had been locked away for no good reason but terror.
… a smile fades on submissive lips, / fear trembles in a dry laugh. / I pray not for myself alone, but for everyone who stood with me, / in the cruel cold, in the July heat, / under the blind, red wall.
Even in a flawed translation, the power of this poet shines through. Perhaps a bookish reader can recommend the best English rendition.
#83 in 2023
A gothic novel is supposed to be scary but I was a bit creeped out before I even read the first sentence of The Vet’s Daughter, published in 1959, and revived by Virago. The foreword informed me that the author, Barbara Comyns, also wrote a novel called The Juniper Tree, based on the Grimm fairy tale about parents who destroy their children, a tale that became a suicide note on a wall (read Martha Baillie’s memoir There is No Blue). Also, Comyns was married to a man who worked with the renegade Kim Philby, whom she considered to be delightful. Thus I was filled with dread before I read the first paragraph.
The Vet’s Daughter is the story of a girl in London who starts downtrodden and things go downhill from there. A female David Copperfield, she is exploited by the entire world except for the rare good soul, including a plain man she calls Blinkers. Her monstrous father is a veterinarian and she tends to a parade of suffering animals — monkeys and parrots, and a little dog whose ears stick straight up when they are not supposed to, so her dastardly father attaches weights to them. And that is by far not the worst thing that happens.
I didn’t become a roaring fan of Comyns, though I am curious about her other books, and grand authors like Sarah Waters and Graham Greene love The Vet’s Daughter. Waters claims to have read it many times, because she always re-discovers something magical. That’s true; Comyns makes every sentence count, from the very first one where our heroine is accosted by a stranger as she walks home along the privet hedges.
The air was sharp and wintry, and the street very still. The only people to be seen were a few pale women with black string bags. Under the gate a dried leaf rustled very gently. I thought, ‘It’s minutes like this that seem to last so long’.
#84 in 2023
Last month I joined an online book club to shiver through Shirley Jackson’s classic novel The Haunting of Hill House, with a daily commentary provided by her biographer, Ruth Franklin. All this began a few days after the attacks by Hamas on October 7. As Franklin revealed in her own Substack account, that day brought with it the moral conundrum of whether you do something pleasurable, like talk about a book about a haunted house, at a time of great tragedy and horror.
She of all people should know how to answer the question of art in dark times, of the relationship between writers and carnage, given her book A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction. It is a literary critique of narratives about the Holocaust ranging from Tadeusz Borowski, Primo Levi, W.G. Sebald, Schindler’s List, and Jonathan Safran Foer. This book is for those of you who like to dig deep: critical, thoughtful, emotional, and listing only slightly to the academic side.
Since I myself am a writer of memoirs, I’m particularly interested in her discussion about truth and memory, and I nod in recognition at the confusion of definitions. For example these are the definitions of Eli Wiesel’s Night: novel/autobiography," "non-fictional novel," "semi-fictional memoir," "fictional-autobiographical memoir," "fictionalized autobiographical memoir," and "memoir-novel."
Anyone whose writing is based in fact has to ask themselves when to embellish and why. Facts are sacrosanct for lawmakers and chroniclers and must be noted down, no question. But since the days of Homer, storytellers think differently. If no cares about a list of facts, it’s like that tree falling in the forest: what is the value of that list?
If this question interests you, find Franklin’s book. There is one glaring absence, however, and I’m surprised she didn't notice: not one of these books was written by a woman. Why? And why isn't she wondering why? Or maybe that’s why her current project is a new look at Anne Frank.
... a novel about Auschwitz can never only be about Auschwitz: it is a novel also about Armenia, about Siberia, about Cambodia, about Bosnia, about Darfur.
Franklin’s husband works for something called The Center for Peace Communications and has made a series of films called Whispered in Gaza, about Palestinians suffering under Hamas.
As an antidote to the current mood, I’m reading: Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo-land
Sadly, lost interest in: Joyce Cary, Herself surprised; Iris Owens, After Claude; Susan Jane Gilman, Donna Has Left the Building
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Here’s my new list, concocted as usual from a convoluted lottery. I’ve already opened and closed some of these books.
Featured Author: Percival Everett, Wounded, 2005 (novel)
Second Latest Saved: Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye, Eastern Europe: an intimate history of a divided land, 2023 (very excited to read this, thank you, Antanas)
Reader Recommended: Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, a memoir, 2023 (thank you, Graham)
Oldest Title on the List: Susan Jane Gilman, Donna Has Left the Building, 2019 (another whimsy-book)
The Random List: Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo-land, 2021 (bestselling novel)
Joyce Cary, Herself surprised, 1951 (has a pulp fiction cover)
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, 1929 (are you kidding me? is this a test?)
Iris Owens, After Claude, 2010 (know nothing)
Alexandros Papadiamentes, The Murderess, 1983 (translated from the Greek)
Lynn Nottage, Ruined, 2004 (a play, winner of the Pulitzer Prize)
A wonderful and appetite-fostering read as usual! I remember reading Shirley Jackson's The Haunting as a teenager, supplied by my parents' subscription to Reader's Digest Condensed novels. A horrible thing to do to novels but that one survived the shrinkage.
As always, thank you for your insightful reviews, Banuta!