#16 in 2024
There is no rye bread in Toronto. Don’t waste your breath telling me otherwise. Every visitor from Latvia tucks a loaf into their suitcase as a gift, to bring joy to us who live in a desert.
At first Michaele Weissman didn’t like Latvian rye bread. Too dark, too bitter. Then she tolerated it. Then she fell in love with it, and now her husband markets rye bread up down the East Coast of the US and also online, via Black Rooster Food, which also sells the breads at gourmet stores like Zabar’s in New York.
That husband of hers is the reason The Rye Bread Marriage was written. They've been together for forty years. That’s a long time, and I should know, since I was married for twenty-five. How to stay married is a major theme in this book, especially across major cultural differences.
He is so Latvian, so wrapped up in the history and culture of a tiny captive land that few can locate on a map. And you, you are so expansively American — American and Jewish. Your grandparents did not yearn for the old country. They preferred an America of fatty brisket, roast chicken, Chinese food, and fluffy challah without a gram of roughage. Also, ice cream.
Bread is the gateway but managing a mixed marriage is the primary theme of this memoir. The subtitle, How I found Happiness with a Partner I’ll Never Understand, might have been generated by an algorithm for the marketing department, but I still find it amusing. And thank you, bookish friend Inga, who put this book in my hands.
Of all the books I’ve read in English that try to describe the inscrutable Latvians, Weissman has done the best job, both lovingly and critically. I salute her for capturing what we are like. Why we don’t like throwing things out. Why we insist on dressing up. Why there’s a big hole in our hearts. Weissman doesn’t shy away from the tragic histories that butt up between Jews and Latvians because of World War II. She pits love against difference, and the tradition of bread is her bridge.
Bread made exclusively with rye was often dismissed by Western Europeans as food for dumb beasts and peasants…In lands where little wheat was grown, such as Scandinavia and the Baltics and parts of Russia, anti-rye prejudice did not exist…It pleased me to think that John’s ancestors in Latvia and mine in Belarus ate the same kind of rye bread back in the day.
I finished the book and thought, what the hell, I’ll bake some rye bread myself. I consulted The Rye Baker by Stanley Ginsberg. There was the bread I wanted — Rīga Rye — this bread is so good, that, to me, (says Stanley) even a light film of butter is a distraction. Even better, there was the classic Saldskāba maize — Sweet-Sour Rye Bread. I rolled up my sleeves and read the instructions. Start with making a scald-sponge to intensify the bread’s apple character. Scald-sponge?! Oh boy…I rolled down my sleeves and mooned over the photographs instead.
#17 in 2024
A man is about to turn sixty and feels it is time to share everything he has gained from thirty years of meditation and yoga practice. He starts to write and slides into such a profound depression that only electroshock can pull him back from the brink. This memoir by Frenchman Emmanuel Carrère is shelved in the fiction section which is weird because mostly Yoga is non-fiction. A visit to a yoga retreat is interrupted by the assassinations in Paris at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, where one of the dead is Carrère’s friend. A summer retreat in Greece changes completely when boats full of refugee children from Syria show up.
Meditation is pissing and shitting when you piss and shit, nothing more. As that pretty well sums up what I’m doing here, without going into too much detail, I sometimes get the amused impression that I am really, finally, meditating. I’m neither happy nor sad, I throw the good old dogs their sticks, the stick of vanity, the stick of self-hatred, the stick of being too slow on the uptake and of the bitter taste that leaves behind, and it’s quite surprising, but the fact is I almost feel good.
#18 in 2024
I kicked off my year of reading Colette with Claudine at School, Claudine in Paris, Claudine Married, Claudine and Annie. She married a man much older than her, a well-known author called Willy, and legend has it that he made her write the first novel, which was published under his name. Claudine at School sparked a craze, and so she wrote more. Racy stories sell, as does puberty, but I was surprised by the many blithe scenes of homosexual lust, given that this was the era when Oscar Wilde was sent to jail as a ‘sodomite’.
(a nice Claudine clip here from the film with Keira Knightly)
Parisians loved the first novel, in which Claudine is a precocious fifteen-year old taunting her fellow students. I found it voyeuristic and maybe Colette’s husband made it so. It looks like she shook him off in the following novels, where sexual adventures are always on the horizon, but the rest of the world, the passing time, how people reveal their needs are things that she captures with a few bold strokes.
Well, after all, it’s not so terrible going out alone in Paris. I brought back some very interesting observations from my little walk: 1) it is much warmer than in Montigny; 2) your nose is still black inside when you get home; 3) people stare at you if you stand still in front of a newspaper kiosk; 4) people also stare at you when you don’t let yourself be disrespectfully treated on the pavement.
Yes, a man pinched her bum and she hit him with her umbrella. Claudine is very lonesome, and when she runs into a former school chum, poverty has forced the girl to become the sex slave of a wealthy uncle. Claudine doesn’t meet her again, and her isolation deepens. Who’s surprised when she falls in love with the first man who pays attention to her — Willy, lightly disguised as the forty-year old Renaud. One thing leads to another leads to the third novel, Claudine Married. Colette-Claudine has a passionate love affair with another bored woman which ends very badly, but is nevertheless lusciously described, down to the blue tailor-made which gives her lover’s golden hair a reddish tinge, and her complicated feather hat crowned with embattled grey seagulls. By the last novel, her marriage is basically over. Neither rye bread nor baguette will save it.
I shall be the woman travelling alone who intrigues a hotel dining-room for a week, with whom schoolboys on holiday and arthritics in spas suddenly violently in love… I shall be the solitary diner…the one whom a man remorselessly pursues because she is pretty and a stranger, or because of the big, lustrous pearls he has noticed on her fingers…The one who is murdered one night in a hotel bedroom and whose body is found outraged and bleeding…
When Colette died, in 1954, she was given a state funeral, and yet when we think Ģreat French Writer or even Great Writer or Great Woman Writer we don’t shout —— Colette! Maybe we should.
#19 in 2024
I reached out for a piece of chicken and nonchalantly picked up the head. It was not the part I had had in mind, but I bit into the eyeballs with great gusto, and sucked out the brains. The ice was finally broken when one of the officers asked in Cambodian whether I spoke Khmer….They repeated that they were going to sit there drinking all day, until they died. (Fenton in Saigon)
Journalists are my heroes. They practice one of the most dangerous professions in the world. Journalists risk being detained, murdered, arrested, and they suffer enormous abuse online, whether they are writing about totalitarianism or about ecological crimes. Yet without them we’re lost.
A streetside library yielded this 1994 paperback published by Granta Books called The Best of Granta Reportage. Though the stories are all old, they haven’t lost any of their turbulence. Alll fiction seems frivolous when you hear the news from Ryszard Kapuściński, James Fenton, Martha Gellhorn, Svetlana Alexiyevich, John le Carré. Though some of these writers are not professional journalists, they are as unflinching as any reporter. The professional ones describe a man or a woman being beaten to death right in front of their eyes, and sometimes even save one. They talk to young people waiting in their tents with their friends for the government tanks to come and crush them. Whether it is about looting in Los Angeles or an interview with an ex-spy, every single article pulls you deep into the struggles of the globe. Honduras and El Salvador, the fall of Saigon, the invasion of Panama, political change in Romania. The only weak story in the whole collection is Germaine Greer’s fantasies rather than facts about Cuba.
The last thing I wanted was to be left alone in that forest: I did not know who controlled it or which army was where or which direction I should set off in. There is nothing worse than finding yourself alone in somebody else’s country during somebody else’s war. (Kapuściński in Honduras)
#20 in 2024
Canadian author Bronwyn Fischer wrote her first novel at about the same age as Colette when she created Claudine. Both beginnings are brimming with the brio of youth. However, while teenage Claudine is more than worldly-wise, the 18 year old protagonist of The Adult, Natalie, is a painfully self-conscious innocent who has left her home at Lake Temagami for the first time to study at the University of Toronto.
I thought about all the classrooms filled with wood desks so old that they had turned dark and red. The strong and sure voices of the professors who taught, a trance. I wondered if soon, someone would tell me what I should be. I imagined a teacher taking me aside, telling me that I had an unrealized aptitude. A calling so exacting they couldn’t believe I hadn’t realized it yet.
Like Claudine, Natalie becomes entangled with a lover much older than her, and like Claudine, the sexual awakening is glorious and makes for the most tender scenes of the novel; and like for married Claudine, this awakening is lesbian. Like all the Claudines, this is a Bildungsroman. Toronto is not Paris and yet the novel is very much of this city and skewers its urban pretensions.
The girl across from me had a tattoo. A snake coming down her arm. I thought if I ever got a tattoo, it would be of a husband telling his wife that he wanted to move from their nice house to live in the wilderness. And then on the opposite arm I’d get his wife, her eyes held in the longest blink.
Full disclosure: Bronwyn Fischer sat kitty corner to me in fiction class at the MFA program in writing. I was jealous of her super-specific paragraphs. If I wrote, “they went into the house”, Bronwyn would make a literary meal of where the house was and how the light fell on the (specific colour) door and how someone felt when they put the key in the lock and the particular sound the key made when they turned it. She once gave me four fabulous words to finish a sentence. These are the words: so he kissed them. Doesn’t sound like much? Those words were made of gold. There is a hungry readership for the stories Bronwyn has to tell; I had to wait for months to get the book from the library, not just because the system was hacked.
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My reading life really improved when I made a rule of abandoning any book if I lost interest, whether it was on the first page or the penultimate one. I follow this rule with rare exceptions and it doesn’t mean the book was necessarily bad, it was just the wrong time and the wrong place for our relationship. This month the list of abandonment is long, and so it’s time for a brand new list.
Meanwhile, dear readers, stay bookish!
Was not pulled into: Elaine Equi, The intangibles; Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee Members; T. Coraghessan Boyle, Drop City: Klaus Mann, Flucht in den Norden; Barry Lopez, Horizon (apologies)
What I’m reading now: Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fayne
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The new list:
Featured Author: Colette, Barks and Purrs, 1904 (her cat Fanchette is a major character in the Claudine books, as well as a black dog called Toby)
Second Latest Title Saved: Henry James, The American Scene, 1905-1906 (not my favourite author, but okay here goes)
Reader Recommended: Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1851 (because my bookish friend Pauls insisted, thank you)
Oldest Title on the List: Jenny Lawson, Let’s Pretend this never Happened (a mostly true memoir), 2012 (the last title in a series of whimsical books)
The Random List:
Megan Nolan, Ordinary Human Failings, 2024 (hasn’t been published in Canada yet, on order at the library)
Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees : over thirty years of conversations with Robert Irwin, 2008 (book about a Los Angeles artist)
Shehan Karunatilaka, The seven moons of Maali Almeida, 2023 (a novel set in Sri Lanka)
Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy, 1990 (great author)
Derek Jarman, Pharmacopoeia : a dungeness notebook, 2022 (the artist writes about his garden)
Andrew Solomon, The noonday demon : an atlas of depression, 2001 (a study, a memoir)
If you’re wondering how this list is put together, check out my system here. However, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t constantly make exceptions to my rules.
I LOVE this newsletter!!!! Thank you for all the great book recommendations. Also, I sorely miss the rye bread of my Brooklyn childhood. It was referred to as “corn bread” because it was baked on a bed of cornmeal which clung to the underside. (https://www.seriouseats.com/jewish-corn-rye-comeback)