Last week my daughter got married under some trees next to a creek. I bought a pack of ponchos to protect her from rain because her silk dress was afraid of water. The wind blew a few drops and a woman in a long purple gown rushed a giant pink umbrella across the field to shield the bride and groom. They stayed dry under a shower of rose petals.
I partied for several days. But I also kept reading.
#30 in 2023
It is 1600 BC on the north shore of Crete. A man is with his son by the water and a volcano erupts and they run from a tsunami. They are not going to make it. Still he runs, hoping to see his wife for one last moment, with the wave rushing up behind him.
Sometimes a writer figures they need to do something new. Yet inspiration is on strike. Even the slimmest idea slips away like geckos up the wall. And then eureka, they find a conceit.
This is what Jim Shepard is doing in the stories of The World to Come. He lights upon disasters as a theme: a natural disaster like a cyclone; a man-made disaster like a train derailment; the Texas Tower 4 disaster where all 28 civilian contractors died on an offshore radar rig. The Montgolfier brothers try to fly in a balloon; one woman falls in love with another at the wrong time and place. And then there’s that volcano near Crete. At the heart of each disaster, there is some kind of love.
In the interval you have left you might even make clear with just a moment’s embrace and the time to hold her face still and engage her eyes that despite your lassitude and arrogance and petulance and selfishness and pettiness, she's granted you a gift for which you’ve never adequately expressed your joy.
#31 in 2023
Sometimes writers are writing in a hurry, the story is roaring ahead and they aren’t going to get too precious about how to tell it.
I had never heard of Lemn Sissay which is probably because I don’t live in England. Only the random nature of my book list led me to My Name is Why: A Memoir.
Secrets are the stones / That sink the boat / Take them out, look at them / Throw them out and float
This is the story of what can happen to a child whose Ethiopian student/single mother entrusts him to foster care and what happens when the foster parents reject the child. It’s all bad. After fighting to see his records for thirty years, Sissay finally got four thick folders of them and put them in this book. Read it if the topics of adoption, foster homes, looking for your roots, racism, and institutional care appeal to you.
Sissay was the UK poet of the 2012 Olympics, a tremendously funny, energetic, overwhelmingly creative man. This life wound of rejection is something he can never forget. He’s given more than one TED talk about it: I enjoyed this one.
#32 in 2023
I took a picture of The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies on top of a sheepskin in honour of the sheep roaming all over this novel; you will see them, you will smell them, you will feel their warm wool, and counting them will never be the same.
The book is a new addition to the genre of the World War II novel and one that foils your expectations at every twist. It’s hard to believe that this is Davies’s first novel, the writing is that rich and assured. There’s a romance, kinda; broken hearts, feral children, and drunken English radio stars. Davies takes the arrival of German POWs in Wales just before the end of the Second World War, and uses this event to study hatred between nations, beginning with the hatred between the Welsh and the English, and adding on the Germans, and, to some extent, Jews.
He starts to write. In the swaying candlelight the lines on the paper look like strips of bandages, and he has the strangest impression of his writing hand, unwinding them as it moves across the page, revealing the words beneath.
Rudolf Hess also makes an appearance, though I’m not convinced that was necessary, since everyone else — the Welsh girl and her village, the English soldiers and German prisoners, are so much more interesting, as is just about everything our author tells us about sheep.
You might shed a tear at the end.
#33 in 2023
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
I approached this book with trepidation, trying to remember what it was about Greene that I found off-putting. At first I liked this story of a jealous lover who sics a private detective on his married ex-girlfriend. Like The Welsh Girl, this novel is set during wartime; the London Blitz is a massive turning point, but what drew me in, apart from the forthright and joyful sex, was the voice of the jobbing writer.
I was trying to write a book that simply would not come. I did my daily five hundred words, but the characters never began to live. So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one’s days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air…
However halfway through the book, my problem with Greene reared its tiresome head, in a word: God, or, more specifically, the heroine’s struggle with faith and God and Catholicism and though the protagonist questions his own faith, I find myself wondering, why struggle at all? The big twist in the story is strangely reminiscent of another Catholic novel I read a few months ago — The Betrothed, in which the heroine makes a terrible vow to God as a bargain, in order for X thing not to happen. When X thing doesn’t happen, she is stuck with the terrible vow which causes a lot of pain to her and the people she loves. I can’t begin to understand the concept of these vows. Why would ‘God’ be happy if you promise to pay him with your own suffering and that of your loved ones? Why wouldn’t ‘God’ prefer that you do something positive instead, like feed the poor, or wash the dishes? I really don’t get it.
What I do get is that during a war, people are on edge, even British people who work in the Houses of Parliament and go to their clubs and drink nasty port.
Apparently the novel has spawned two feature films. In one, Deborah Kerr is the lead, and in the other, Julianne Moore. I’m not going to watch them. Also I discovered that the book was based on an honest-to-goodness affair that Greene had with a married woman, Catherine Walston. Here they are.
#34 in 2023
A Spy in the Archives: A Memoir of Cold War Russia was a kick in the pants because I’m working right this minute on a book about my encounters with the KGB in Soviet Latvia while I was at St. Antony’s College at Oxford University, and here’s good ol’ Sheila Fitzpatrick from Melbourne who was also at St. Antony’s, ten years before me, in the 1960s. Her doctorate was on the Russian writer Lunacharsky and she had to go to Moscow as an exchange student, and thus this memoir, which drops a bomb on page 2:
St. Antony’s was often referred to in the Soviet Union, and in the West, too, as a ‘spy college’, meaning that a number of the Fellows had worked for British intelligence in the past, and were presumed to retain some ties in the present.
I never knew that I went to a spy college. Why didn’t anybody tell me? My thesis supervisor translated Solzhenitsyn; he might have pulled me aside and whispered a thing or two before I took a trip to the Evil Empire.
But enough about me.
In the memoir, while living in Moscow, Fitzpatrick arrives relatively innocent of the KGB, then gradually gets used to her neighbours informing on her. She is set up in a honey trap by an East German man with a ludicrous name. Alone in his apartment, the guy pins her down on the couch within hours of their first meeting. As for what happens next, I leave you to read the book. But it turns out such entrapments were standard issue in the 60s and 70s. A similar sexual imbroglio, complete with blackmailing photographs, was described in the semi-autobiographical Latvian novel, Kuņas dēls, which I wrote about in a previous newsletter.
Fitzpatrick became a renowned Sovietologist yet still I read her skeptically. She calls herself a spy though she clearly wasn’t a spy; all historians and journalists are spies, she says (I disagree); she loves the glamour of being a spy, claiming that anyone is a spy who is a chameleon who can speak two languages and doesn’t know what his allegiance is. Rather a broad brush and so I’ll say read with care. Still, it’s a good description of the USSR of the 1960s.
If you’d like to hear how she used the Moscow telephone directories in order to calculate the impact of the Great Purges, try this podcast.
Speaking of writing and politics, I’m following the Writers’ Guild of America strike and you should, too. Here is a summary. Every time you relax with Netflix or HBO, you are consuming the work of a writer, and even though they wrote that great episode of Handmaid’s Tale, they might be driving cab to pay the rent. The profits are not being shared, and that is an understatement. To find out more, you might follow Patrick Somerville (writer of Tv series Station Eleven), a good friend of Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel (author of novel Station Eleven). Somerville describes the reasons for the strike very well on Substack and he posts from the strike lines on Twitter @patrickerville.
The people united will never be defeated and may the writers win.
In the meantime, I’m off to a month in Latvia and I’ll be writing my next newsletter from Ventspils. Love is in the air and may it spread to all you bookish friends of mine.
Scroll to the end and you’ll find a still life from the wedding.
Books I had to pass on: Dorothy Gallagher, Stories I Forgot to Tell You; Kathy O’Shaughnessy, In Love with George Eliot; and John Le Carre’s A Perfect Spy, though I really tried.
Currently I’m reading Paul Yoon, Run Me To Earth.
**
Still to read:
Featured Author: Percival Everett The Body of Martin Aguilerra, 1997 (Had to scavenge for it)
Second Latest Saved Title: Edith Wharton, Bunner Sisters, 1916 ( in an anthology)
Reader Recommended: Claire Louise-Bennett, Checkout 19, 2022 (still on hold)
The Random List:
Neil Gaiman, The Sandman. Dream Country, 1990. (Big hit graphic novel, totally not my genre)
Raymond Radiguet, The Devil in the Flesh, first published in 1923. (A story from World War One.)