Farley Mowat, The Snow Walker

“The snow people know snow as they know themselves. In these days our scientists are busy studying the fifth elemental, not so much out of scientific curiosity but because we are anxious to hasten the rape of the north or we fear we might have to fight wars in the lands of snow. With vast expenditures of time and money, the scientists have begun to separate the innumerable varieties of snow and to give them names. They could have saved themselves the trouble. Eskimos have more than a hundred compound words to express different varieties and conditions of snow. The Lapps have almost as many. Yukagir reindeer herdsmen on the arctic coast of Siberia can tell the depth of snow cover, its degree of compactness, and the amount of internal ice crystallization it contains simply by glancing at the surface.

The northern people are happy when the snow lies heavy on the ground. They welcome the first snow in autumn, and often regret its passing in spring. Snow is their friend [shelter, transportation made easy/sleds, tracking of food/prey, food preservation…]. Without it they would have perished or—almost worse from their point of view—they would long since have been driven south to join us in our frenetic rush to wherever it is we are bound.”

As I finish and set down this slender paperback of 11 chapters, I wonder. I wonder if they are fiction, “stories”…though obviously the spirit is truth, information, insight (in this, respect, this book puts me in mind of Richard Powers’ The Overstory, which I read a while ago—review below). I wonder if the white Canadian author made them up or instead collected the indigenous tales while traveling way up there, and perhaps embellished or filled out, or with slightly changed details to protect privacy. I wonder at landscapes and peoples I have never seen, and their amazing resourcefulness.

I feel horror and woe at what “we” have done to them and their world; their remoteness did not shield them. This book came out nearly 50 years ago, in 1976; Lord knows what the state of things and people are up in northern-most (colonized-Canadian) territories, now. I shudder to think, presuming all the forces arrayed against them and their way of life portrayed here continued or accelerated, plus now the fast-advancing effects of climate change up in the Arctic.

I do not wonder why the title of one of these, “The Snow Walker,” became the title of the collection—I’ll return to that here in a bit.

This collection of stories creates a picture of a world that is not only gone, but probably destroyed, ruined, and gone. I fear this, 50 years after its publication, when the forces of destruction were already bearing down on people who had lived and even thrived north of the Arctic circle. Fish, game, and deer (caribou) were caught and used to feed themselves and their sled dogs. Plants were also harvested and used as needed. They made their own durable, practical clothing and household implements. They had stories, songs, and a body of morals and beliefs based on the rhythm of the seasons and community cooperation. Also, as Mowat educates the reader, the cold and the snow was adapted to and indeed leveraged.

When white men began to encroach, it began to go to hell: white men’s opportunistic greed and white men’s diseases, of course, but also the objects and practices they introduced these people to, from Christianity to rifles to other shiny metal objects and different types of clothing and dry goods. The white men especially wanted, and paid top dollar or bartered food and other desirable items for, the pelts of the white-furred arctic fox. Until they didn’t. Also the Canadian government resettled the natives like pawns, for staking territory, not for their benefit, offering false promises. Including “we’ll convey you back home if you don’t like it,” a repeated lie.

“In the land of the Kablunait—the white men—things may be as you say…but this is not the land of the Kablunait. I do not understand how it is in your land. You do not understand how it is here. We know what we know.”

Again and again, the specter of starvation looms and kills. Especially in the winters when the expected caribou haven’t come through; the deprivation and desperation is awful. Babies and children weaken and die, pregnancies are lost, old people roll over in their bed of skins inside the shelter and breathe their last, or set out on a winter’s night, choosing to walk into their own cold overnight death rather than continue to suffer and to consume resources younger and healthier people need to survive. Hungry dogs the people cannot feed end up being killed and eaten. A family left behind inside an igloo shelter, women and children, get buried alive under a massive snowdrift that the men who went off in search of food or help cannot breach. It’s so awful and so sad.

One of these stories, “Walk Well, My Brother,” retitled “The Snow Walker,” was made into a film. I found it totally predictable. A white bush pilot with little knowledge of or interest in the landscape or people below his wings crashes but survives. He survives because the ill indigenous woman who he reluctantly took on as a passenger knows what to do in this landscape, for food and shelter. She saves his life. They do not shag. He learns and lives; weakened by sickness, she dies. I do not, however, think his odyssey is quite what is meant by “snow walker.”

In one harrowing story, a native woman clearly sees the damage being wrought and exhorts her people to resist and to return to the old ways. They try for a time, but the assaults on their livelihoods and spirits cannot be overcome; she begins to lose her mind and behave dangerously and erratically, including destroying valuable tools and supplies. Two young men, her son and nephew, are sent to subdue her while the rest of the frightened group cower at a distance—they end up killing her, seeing no alternative. White men learn of this, arrest them, hold a trial, and condemn the boys to a white-man’s jail far away. The young men, and those left behind, are bewildered and, worst of all, stripped of hope and dignity.

I did love the story about a pregnant husky, cut off from her animal and human community, and a lone wolf that helped protect her pups. He dies fighting off a wolverine while the dog mother is hunting. Shortly after the dog and her pups are reunited with their family group. Restoring the dog to the community is not like recovering a pet (though there is affection between the man and the dog); a litter of pups is an important, valued resource. The human sees and understands what happened. He tells his son:

“Maktuk, my son, in a little time you also shall be a man and a hunter, and the wide plains will know your name. In those days to come you will have certain friends to help you in the hunt, and of these the foremost shall be Arnuk [this dog]; and then my father will know that we received his gift and he will be at ease. And in those times to come, all beasts shall fall to your spear and bow, save one alone. Never shall your hand be raised against Amow, the wolf—and so shall our people pay their debt to him.”

It’s not that death doesn’t happen, it’s not that death is avoidable, even in the places and tales where white men haven’t yet wreaked damage and havoc. Death that’s a part of the circle of life is understood by these people, of course. Death that destroys ecosystems and cultures and breaks people is another, crueler matter.

The Snow Walker is referred to tangentially in a few of these stories, but is the title of one of them; to go out and meet the Snow Walker is to choose and greet your death. Death in darkness and snow on land that once sustained you and yours—that is the overall theme of these beautifully told, detailed, respectful, and heart-rending stories.

Eric Hansen, Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust and Lunacy

“With thousands of orchids to study, hybridize, clone, and breed, it is not surprising how much money and time some orchid people will invest to satisfy their passion for these unusual plants. Power, prestige, and profit are among the more mundane reasons people get involved with orchids. There is a certain cache involved with owning something rare and beautiful, but curiosity, the love of exotic plants, the desire to create new hybrids and the drive to uncover complex botanical mysteries are the prime incentives that attract and hold the interest of true orchid lovers.”

The appeal and, indeed, the success of this book lies in the fact that the author is not an insider. He is a dogged investigative journalist, a smart fella, and an entertaining writer—and he brings back vivid pictures and commentary about this corner of the horticultural world. For a book on a specialty populated by everything from scientific researchers to collectors to propagators, some of them truly eccentric, it is surprisingly readable. The chapters are not long or belabored. Hansen keeps perspective, asks sharp questions and provides fair answers, and has a wonderful eye for detail.

I got a kick out of the sorts of things he noticed and described as he met orchid people. Stuff like this would never make the cut in a gardening magazine or scientific paper! Another reader might find his observations snarky or tangential, but hey, it’s all part of the picture and I daresay you won’t find these details in other books about orchids. For instance:

He visits a calm, polite, white-haired elderly lady in suburban Seattle. She shows him some of her favorite orchid houseplants. A cultivar called Magic Lantern, she declares, is a “bodice ripper!”

“Bodice ripper?” I took a closer look at the flower. The shiny, candy-apple-red staminoid that covered the reproductive organs was shaped like an extended tongue identical to the Rolling Stones logo. This shocking red protrusion nestled in the cleavage of two blushing petals then dropped down as if to lick the tip of an inverted pouch that looked like the head of an engorged penis. The blatant carnality of Magic Lantern was unmistakeable and I found myself wondering what sort of impression the flower was making on the old woman.

He gets a peek at orchid judging at a US orchid show, but not without some finagling. After talking to a variety of organizers, he’s finally “given clearance to bear silent witness to the proceedings.” Get a load of this:

A hush fell over the table and we sat in silence looking at the first plant. Surrounded by the grim-faced judges, the beautiful, fragile orchid looked naked and vulnerable. No one spoke at first as the judges focused their thoughts and concentrated on the task ahead.

“Nice lip,” ventured a student judge nervously.

“I’ve seen bigger,” said one of the accredited judges.

“Big, black, and beautiful, but the bugs been at it,” pointed out a third.

“Good gloss, but fatal flaws,” chimed in another.

“Cuppy, cuppy,” a woman snorted.

“Take it away,” mumbled a man across the table, as he went back to eating a chocolate-covered doughnut.

I was seated at a table of very hefty people and the contrast between the large bodies and the diminutive plant was extreme. No one could ever claim that orchid people are svelte. I found it ironic that these people, who were so utterly different from the orchids they judge, had spent so many years trying to establish what makes a perfectly formed flower. Huge hands with pudgy, nicotine-stained fingers reached out to caress the delicate blooms in a way that bordered on the obscene…

Another sample—this describes the expert judging of orchid fragrance:

With arms held tightly at his sides, Mr. Tokuda leaned toward the flower as if bowing at the waist, but with one foot set in front of the other. He was chewing gum rapidly as he took staccato sniffs from the flowers. He then began to shuffle his feet—slowly at first, but as he picked up the scent he became more animated until he was daring back and forth in front of the flower like a giant besuited insect nervously testing the fragrance.

Reading stuff like this, initially unexpected, made me giggle or hoot with pleasure. The truth is, Hansen was telling the truth!

But he’s serious about the topic, and tells all he sees and learns. I loved the chapter-ending picture he paints of a visit to 88-year-old researcher Dr. Gunnar Seidenfaden’s manor in the countryside outside of Copenhagen. “I want to end my life working on my book about Thai orchids. I would like to complete it by my 90th birthday,” the old botanist confides. The doctor is an example of what Hansen means by a true orchid lover (see extract above).

Gunnar emptied the bottle of port into our glasses. We had a toast to the success of what would be his final book and then drained the last sweet golden drops. It was after 3 am [Dr. Seidenfaden works starting at 10 pm each night] and I decided to let Gunnar get back to work. I went for a walk across the courtyard to where it led into the darkened fields. Looking back at the house I could see Gunnar at his desk, sketching, typing, and peering into his microscope…Watching him through that window, I found myself hoping he would be granted the blessing of time.

Hansen pursues orchid mania from many angles. Like many of the botanists he meets, has no patience for the uneven and ham-fisted application of CITES regulations (SWAT-team like raids of greenhouses to seize plants suspected of being illegally wild-collected and shipped; the confiscated evidence just dies in the hands of the authorities, such a sad waste). Allegedly these regulations are meant to suppress wild-collection. The rules don’t even distinguish between living and herbarium or preserved plants. A CITES official he interviews actually admits “we have no numbers, no idea” of the effectiveness of their rules and enforcement activities. Instead, basically, unfortunately, they’ve managed to suppress research and fruitful exchanges between experts. Let’s also bear in mind, for heavenssake, that orchid propagation and hybridization are presently more than sufficiently sophisticated (seeds and cuttings as well as—game-changing—tissue culture; greenhouse and lab techniques) that there would seem to be little need to ding or harass botanical researchers over some individual wild-collected plants.

Meanwhile, Hansen reminds, countless wild plants, including unknown and unnamed species, continue to succumb and/or go extinct, due to deforestation, development of roads, agriculture, hydro projects, etc. He tries to get answers or justifications from authorities, even foraying into the hallowed halls of Kew Gardens. But, well, it’s a stupid, counterproductive mess.

The book closes with him tagging along with Tom Nelson, a diligent orchid rescuer in Minnesota. These are terrestrial orchids, lady slippers (Cypripediums). Here the authorities don’t try to thwart this work. Some plants are plucked from the path of development, including peat-farming operations and road-widening projects; still, many are lost. I know enough to be left with a nagging question: neither our intrepid author nor Nelson mention that these orchids are dependent on specific mycorrhizal fungi in the soil for survival (was this not known at the time of this writing?). Unless each of those rescued plants came along with an ample soil ball, transplanting was likely to fail. Puzzling omission. It puts me in mind of all the orchids in the preceding chapters that I have little knowledge of—it takes a lot of research and trial-and-error to raise orchids from Thailand or Borneo or Brazil in captivity, never mind propagate them. Part of the appeal of orchids, I venture, is their mysterious and varied fussiness. Of course, avid growers will persist till they figure it out. Of that we can be sure.

My last reaction may seem beside the point but please understand, I’ve worked for magazines in the 1990s and I’m also the author of horticultural/botanical books. In this context, I am awed and a bit flummoxed by all the travel and research this book took. He does reveal that his trip to Turkey—to track down the allegedly aphrodisiac “fox testicle ice cream” made from indigenous orchid roots—was covered by National History magazine. That was an expensive expedition, and what was he even paid for the finished article, a few thousand bucks? Horticulture Magazine, my former employer, would never, ever have been in a position to fund any such thing. What about his trips to Kew, Paris, the Netherlands, Germany, Borneo? Is this guy independently wealthy, or a clever and frugal traveler? (Did he get grants?) I mean, what did he even get paid for this book, after investing many years and miles, published in 2000? I just cannot imagine how he worked this. SMH.

Glad he did, though—’twas a good read.

Frances Mayes, Women in Sunlight

“In comes Gianni, our local taxi driver. ‘The women have no men,’ he tells me. ‘They are on solo trips from the South of America, bringing a little dog, naughty, who peed in the carrier and barked all the way from the Rome airport.’

‘They have no car?’

‘No, but Grazia will sell them her mama’s Cinquecento as soon as the brakes are repaired.’

‘Is that legal?’ I know that it is not, unless they are registered residents. That Grazia. Maybe she has some scheme that gets around the law. I wouldn’t be surprised.

‘Why not?’

Why not is the local response to every preposterous proposition. Another thing I love.”

And thus I was swept into this tale of the three women from the South of America renting and later (spoiler) purchasing a ramshackle country house outside a charming and not-very-touristy Tuscan village. They originally met in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where they all happened to sign up for a tour of an “luxury retirement living community” on the outskirts, but were not persuaded. Two widows, one soon-to-be-divorced. Instead, they formed friendships and made a different plan. (Did they ever dodge a bullet!)

Their story is related by another American woman who is already present, in a nearby house, a writer. At first she is a bit standoffish, for she got here first. At first I thought she was older that our three heroines but it turns out she was not—our narrator is younger than them, but older than their children. She’s at work on a bio about a fifth woman character, her mentor Margaret, who passed away after a very productive and interesting life, but she becomes diverted by the new, alive arrivals.

The new arrivals, Camille, Susan, and Julia, are cast as a bit old-but-in-good-shape. I had to wince, as at least two of them are about my own age (just north of 60). Money for their Italian adventure is never an issue (which is not relatable, for me, but certainly keeps speed bumps out of the unfolding tale). They’ve had and have careers and savings, and their kids are fledged. That they would become so close so quickly, and undertake such an adventure together, speaks to the timing of their first meeting and to their shared social class but also to a forgiving flexibility that can come in later years. They all grow and change and, of course, bloom in Italy. Tensions are rare; they give each other a nice balance of space and support. Well, this is not utterly unbelievable, I muse as I ponder traveling with my own girlfriends or sisters.

Italian landscapes, light, and art are ardently described. For example:

Internet images of San Rocco occupied them over the months of planning, but they were in no way prepared the limpid light bathing the Renaissance facades of ochre, rose, sunflower yellow, and cream. The white marble steps leading up to the piazza’s church have over centuries worn to the soft glean of soap, and the tower bells ringing the quarter hour, the half hour, and the hour gong so resoundingly that their bones revererate.

On a jaunt north to Venice [personal aside, OH GOD,VENICE…I didn’t know when I picked up this book that once again I was going to visit Venice!/haven’t been there yet, long to go]:

One of the magic experiences on planet earth: zooming in an open boat across dark waters toward Venice.

And the food, lordy, the Italian food, not-to-mention-but-I-will the fresh pressed olive oil and the excellent regional wines red and white. I’m not going to quote any of that! Suffice to say there are gorgeous, mouth-watering cafe visits and snacks and desserts and feasts in nearly every chapter, to the point where the saturated reader rolls her eyes, c’mon, can it really all be that fabulous? Umm. I’ve been to Italy. It can.

Ah, perhaps it’s all a bit too perfect. Not one surly waiter, not one no-show contractor, not one aggressive tailgating driver? No side-trip-planning mishaps, despite not speaking Italian? (See the magical solution to needing a car in the extract above.) Well, they do weather being robbed—their rental house is ransacked while they are away exploring Venice and, among other things, jewelry of immense sentimental value is taken and never recovered. “Gypsies” were blamed, not surprising, but the racist assumption and the problem are not dwelt upon. The thieves ate some of their food and left behind three kittens. Kittens?!

Now I realize that the author also wrote Under the Tuscan Sun, which was made into a popular film. I believe the story there was a single, at-loose-ends woman went to Italy for diversion and fell in love with it all, bought a wreck of an old house, and worked to fix it up. Did she get a lover? Is she the same narrator as this subsequent book?, who did get a lover and even has the ultimately happy surprise of a late pregnancy at age 44 where nothing goes wrong. The father and she marry. The little boy is adorable. Their careers thrive.

As for the older women, their trajectory is similar, but perhaps with more nuance and flexibility. They aren’t blank slates; they’ve lived through a lot. Things from their past have to be let go, including a feckless husband and a beloved vacation home. One has a druggie daughter who has depleted her parents in every way; another has adopted grown daughters who decide to travel to China to try to find their birth parents (painful emotions for any of the parties don’t really surface—they later send their mom a “merry” text: “Couple of leads, dead ends, guess we’re stuck with you!”). One put her art in an attic long ago, and now rediscovers her urge, her inspiration, her power. Two gain lovers but of course not babies, nor new marriages. Once grasped, their independence is their joy.

So is this book lightweight escapist chick lit, a fairytale, a fantasy? Maybe it’s hard to utter a discouraging word or have dust-ups with housemates and neighbors when you’re so enchanted by the best of Italy—think of how well everyone gets along on a lovely vacation. Those delicious communal meals are a metaphor for seeking, creating, and savoring joy cooperatively, together—that’s not usually everyday life, but is worth imagining and manifesting when we can.

Caitlyn Hynes, Momo Has the Worries

“How do I know when I’m worried, you may ask? Identifying feelings is an important task!

My parents taught me how to do a full body scan. Checking in from head to toe helps me come up with a plan.”

The drawing on the front cover of this darling kiddie book is precious: wide-eyed, worried Momo the black dog is hugging his stuffed bunny, telegraphing both that he “has the worries” and that he is self-comforting.

Momo is a real dog, does look like the drawing, and—full disclosure—is a family member. The author is our nephew’s wife, “a proud mama, wife, animal lover, martial artist, baker, and mental health therapist who is passionate about empowering others to embrace their emotions and navigate them with self-compassion and care. She hopes to make mental health support accessible to young children and their loved ones using bibliotherapy…” Other readers would have no way of knowing this, but the drawings of the dog parents look like Justin and Caitlyn. I’m going to the guess the cats and the neighboring children are also based on real beings. Why not? Fun!

I adored reading aloud to my two sons when they were small and this book surely would have been in the pile. Caitlyn’s nailed the brief and lilting/rhyming text that makes kiddie books fun to read for the adults and fun to listen to for the little ones.

A couple other things I appreciate about this book: there’s realism, and the advice is sound. In particular, I notice that when worried Momo takes his full-body scan, the brain, the heart, and the stomach are drawn not as cartoons (say, a Valentine heart), but like the actual organs. Nice touch. Kids can handle this!

And the varied ways to deal with distress, anxiety, fear, and uncertainty are real and useful. After you take stock of where your body is reacting, you can: get comfort from hugs; do a breathing exercise; take a “mindful” walk; grab your stuffed animal; or go to your safe place alone and regroup. That’s a good collection of tools! Even at my age, I reflect that I’ve learned something useful here. To take a “mindful” walk is not to stomp around the block in a distracted, distraught haze, or to walk numbly until exhausted—instead, Momo recommends, we should open our senses. Don’t just move, don’t just look around. Stop, sniff, listen, feel the rain or wind or sunshine. As for retreating to a safe place, again, solid, and a tool too easy to forget or dismiss. Thank you, Momo. What a sweet and empowering little book!

J.A. Baker, The Peregrine

“A wrought-iron starkness of leafless trees stands sharply up along the valley skyline. The cold north air, like a lens of ice, transforms and clarifies. Wet ploughlands are dark as malt, stubbles are bearded with weeds and sodden with water. Gales have taken the last of the leaves. Autumn is thrown down. Winter stands.”

“Wild things are only truly alive in the place where they belong.”

“The sea breathed quietly, like a sleeping dog.”

Curled up on a sofa by a small light on a winter night, I must pause and place the bookmark in this deceptively slender little book. Because the dense writing is so continuously evocative and gorgeous that I need to slow down, savor, digest. What’s the hurry, really? It’s winter. Winter stands!

Which leads me to thoughts of why I plucked this book off the shelf. Well, it began when I took Kagan the dog on a chilly walk last week on the Erie Canal Trail. My mind and spirit often lament the lack of wildness around here—in the heart of Central New York’s farm country—but I can take him off the leash on that walk and he enjoys it, usually dashing ahead, occasionally detouring into the woods (young woods, sadly heavily infiltrated with invasive species), doubling back on the paved path to check on me. When I detected a raptor, not a large bird. Gliding and hunting. I took immediate note of how all other birds in our vicinity, the few winter stragglers, the gulls and ducks of the canal and river, had congregated and fallen into fearful silence or melted into shelter. The hunting bird soared and swooped up, then called out, three distinctive cries in succession. I committed the sound to memory and, as soon as we got home, searched on the Cornell birding website. A peregrine falcon.

Then I remembered I’d been gifted this book, and pulled it off the shelf. Time to learn.

But my interest in hawks preceded this moment. Up at the Nova Scotia place, last summer, on outings with the dog and even sometimes on my own, another species has captured my attention. I haven’t heard its call much but I’ve gotten clear views of it as it hunts along our side of the island. It was easy to identify, thanks to its distinctive white rump and fanned tail feathers—a marsh hawk, or harrier. Though not a sparrowhawk, Ged was the name I gave it. This winter, it was still around (I understand many area hawks migrate) and seemed to have a mate now. Once I saw one of them dive into the brushy meadow out back and fling back up within moments emphatically clutching its limp prey, a small rodent (rabbit? red squirrel?). Maybe hawks fascinate me not just because they are superbly beautiful, or because they are intriguing to watch in flight, but because also they are few. There, and actually, here, we have lots of crows, and when spring returns, there’ll be plenty of starlings, grackles, and sparrows. Up there, also, of course, there are also lots and lots of gulls and ducks of various kinds. Anyway, my point is, a hawk certainly stands out. Not a flock bird. In command of his body and his territory, his own agent, thrilling to watch.

OK, to this book, which was composed in the flat fenlands of eastern England. Baker set out to study his neighborhood’s peregrines (there are two at first, later a couple more) starting in autumn and is obsessively, with a scientist’s passion for and fidelity to observed details, tracking them daily. Mostly, it seems, on foot, which is a lot of effort and a lot of miles when you are a biped and your quarry has the advantage of flight. Occasionally by bicycle, I think, still arduous. This is not a wilderness area, but a valley with farms and, one assumes, roads, towns, and all the other features of development. The fields and waterways get frequent mention because they take up a lot of real estate. A seawall adjacent to an estuary is mentioned often, as are manmade features such as pylons that span the valley, and a chimney, posts, barns, roads and lanes. But the landforms, the mud, the trees, and the ebb and flow of water and wind, and the moods of the sky and clouds (yes, cold rain, it’s England; yes, gales, it’s the coast) dominate. As these things would to the birds.

Like me, he is drawn to the solitary but magnificent predator. He certainly describes and names lots of other bird species, but they are almost always in large flocks (gulls), or a small gang of a dozen, or even a few (jays, for instance) that congregate at times with their own kind. Every bird, every being, including our narrator, is cast and observed in relation to the whims and the habits and the hunger of the charismatic star, the peregrine.

Nor is the author idealizing or compartmentalizing this ecosystem. He encounters a bullet-slaughtered swan rotting in the marsh, notes an oil-covered sea bird grounded and dying on the beach, remarks on a bird splashing in a pond full of litter, debris, and sewage. Sheep graze, tractors work furrows, there is roadkill. From the opening chapter:

For ten years I followed the peregrine. I was possessed by it. It was a grail to me. Now it has gone. The long pursuit is over. Few peregrines are left, there will be fewer, they may not survive. Many die on their backs, clutching insanely at the sky in their last convulsions, withered and burnt away by the filthy, insidious pollen of farm chemicals. Before it is too late, I have tried to recapture the extraordinary beauty of this bird and convey the wonder of the land he lived in, a land to me as profuse and glorious as Africa. It is a dying world, like Mars, but glowing still.

In other words, the book is an elegy. Like Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire. (In which Abbey says “most of what I write about in this book is already gone or going under fast. This is not a travel guide, but an elegy. A memorial. You’re holding a tombstone in your hands. A bloody rock. Don’t drop it on your foot—throw it at something big and glassy. What do you have to lose?”) So swept up in the subsequent pages, I forgot Baker is also writing in the past tense (quick check: publication date is 1967). I spare a hopeful thought and fervent prayer for the survival of Ged and his mate on Long Island, Nova Scotia—I know we and neighboring landowners out there have no development (or harmful-chemical) plans, but I also know that the cascading effects of climate change are sifting into even that remote and relatively unspoiled place. I can, of course, do nothing for Baker’s birds but learn from them. And I can learn more about the Little Falls peregrine(s).

Asking around readily leads me to some information, for in a town this small, I’m not the only one who’s noticed them. In fact, I’m a couple of years late. I learn that a nesting pair moved from the Southside cliffs (where Kagan and I just saw one…so, have they moved back?) to the high, usused stone balconies on the tall Adirondack Bank building right downtown, where they evidently hatched four babies last summer while I was away in Nova Scotia. My friend Pooniel tells me “They've been in Little Falls for many years now. They've nested on the Adirondack Bank building. They LOVE the downtown radio tower. A noisy bunch during the summer Farmer's Market when they sit up there and squawk! I believe they've nested on the Southside cliffs as well.” And a story in mylittlefalls.com reveals that raptor expert Deborah Saltis has been here to check on them and, among other things, clarified that “the Eastern race of the peregrines went extinct due to pesticides, which made the eggshells thin so that their nesting failed. The peregrines we now have are a mix of three races, European, the Western part of the United States, and Canada,” she stated, adding, “They’ve made an amazing comeback.” So maybe our locally adapted birds have a happier ending than the ones in this book…

I am going to take to heart this passing remark from Baker, “Hawk-hunting sharpens vision.” Wish me luck, wish them luck.

And so, I have questions. This book might provide answers, contingent on it being about the British species and a different habitat. Though I do understand that peregrines are found almost all over the planet. While there is variation, a peregrine will have dark “sideburns” on its fierce face (I’m sorry but I think of Mister Darcy/Regency era gentlemen), and banded feathers on its chest (the adults). These are not huge animals. A male, called a “tiercel,” may be 16 inches long and weigh under 2 lbs., while a female “falcon” is perhaps a third bigger.

Their eyes see with impeccable detail. They’re significantly larger and heavier than human eyes. The author explains: “where the lateral and binocular visions focus, there are deep-pitted foveal areas; their numerous cells record a resolution eight times as great as that of a human retina.”

What do they eat? (See next paragraph.) Where do they nest or establish eyries? (High cliffs; as we have here in this valley; the tall buildings make a reasonable substitute. They make a “nest-scrape” for their eggs.) Are they the fastest animals in the world? (Baker says 100 mph or more, but the internet says 240 mph! Making the answer, I gather, yes.) Do crows harass them, or are the two species playing or skirmishing? (The two birds are approximately the same size, and do spar, but at least in the pages of this book, peregrines can elude and outfly crows when they wish.) Other factoids? They bathe every day (to rid themselves of lice), so a water source is a must, ideally accessed from a slope and at least 6 inches deep. Moulting, going from juvenile to adult feathers, takes up to six months, proceeding faster in warmer weather.

Peregrines are deadly killers, that’s the main takeaway from this book. And other creatures know it and alarm, evade, hide, cower, or panic; Baker speaks of the “unmistakable spoor of fear” when a peregrine is sensed. Typically they kill by swooping down—or up from under (element of surprise)—on other birds at high speed, 100 mph or more, wings tight against their body, lethal talons ready. This lethal dive is called a “stoop.” They disable or usually outright slaughter prey. Piercing and slashing the victim’s body with their sharp talons, later breaking the neck to be sure, plucking off feathers in the way, and then tearing off and gobbling most of the flesh. Often leaving behind wings, feet, beak uneaten. They can and will kill other raptors such as kestrels and sparrowhawks; they can and will kill creatures larger than them. They may also consume mice, rabbits, and other small animals, and the occasional worm or insect. But other birds are their main diet.

Happening upon a kill is, Baker says, like encountering “the warm embers of a dying fire” (I shudder, chilled). His descriptions are not sanitized; they are detailed and harrowing. A few samples:

• “It was almost dark when I found the remains…the feathers and wings of a common partridge, lying on the riverbank…blood looked black in the dusk, bare bones white as a grin of teeth.”

• “He mounted like a rocket, curved over in splendid parabola, dived down through the cumulus of pigeons. One bird fell back, gashed dead, looking astonished, like a man falling out of a tree. The ground came up and crushed it.”

• “The duck landed but the drake flew past. Suddenly realizing he was alone, he turned to go back. As he turned, the peregrine dashed up at him from the marsh and raked him with outstretched talons. The teal was tossed up and over, as though flung up on the horns of a bull. He landed with a splash of blood, his heart torn open.”

Not surprisingly, although gradually (like gaining altitude), the earthbound human with binoculars begins to merge somewhat with his quarry, so intent is his pursuit. He knows it and he yields to it. He ceases to walk, says instead “I went along,” or “I moved on.” One day he spontaneously remarks “Nothing is as beautifully, richly red as flowing blood on snow. [a pause] It is strange that the eye can love what mind and body hate.” More slippage: “I avoid humans, but hiding is difficult now the snow has come…I use what cover I can. It is like living in a foreign city during an insurrection.” Another day, unable to find the peregrines, he pauses in a field, shuts his eyes: “I tried to crystallize my will into the light-drenched prism of the hawk’s mind. Warm and firm-footed in long grass smelling of the sun, I sank into the skin and blood and bones of the hawk. The ground became a branch to my feet, the sun on my eyelids was heavy and warm. Like the hawk, I heard and hated the sound of man, the faceless horror of the stony places.” Candidly, humbly: “there is a bond: impalpable, indefinable, but it exists.”

This book spans seasons, autumn into winter into spring (after which peregrines depart/migrate). Autumn reminds the reader that humans with guns kill birds, too. Winter snow, ice, and cold remind the reader that food grows scarce and that some creatures die of natural causes, freezing and starving. The peregrines kill more in winter, if they can, just to get the same amount of calories they’d get in better weather. Spring brings welcome warmth, abundant life in all forms, but also farm chemicals. Baker’s outrage and grief is piercing— “foul poison burned within them like a burrowing fuse. Their life was lonely death, and would not be renewed…they were the last of their race.”

Why save or mourn such vicious killers? someone might wonder. Anyone with a sense of how ecosystems work wouldn’t ask.

Also can’t we simply be awed or humbled by their magnificence? Peregrines know and see and navigate things we can barely guess at, they are “of the wind, it is their element, only within it do they truly live.” We, though alive, cannot join them, can never feel what they feel or do what they do.

Over open parkland he found another thermal and circled within it till he was very high and small. From a great height he slanted gently down above the common, falling slowly to the skyline. Then he rose once more in a steep, flickering helix, hypnotic in style and rhythm, his long wings tireless and unfaltering. He shimmered and coiled and dwindled away over the sharp-spired hill, and was descending beyond it when distance suddenly quenched him. He left the blue sky baroque with fading curves of power and precision, of lithe and muscular flight.

Sometimes, often, I think about the inadequacy of words, but the author of this book strove and strove, letting the words flow, using them boldly. Coupled with his urgent commitment to follow, observe, and understand the peregrines, his prose is bracingly poetic. I do not believe he was showing off or romanticizing. Rather, he was earnestly, honestly, deploying his resources. My god, some of these passages are just stunning. And just when the reader is feeling saturated with all the information, adjectives, similes, speculations, and metaphors, he lays it down bluntly: A peregrine is beautiful.

Sarah Moss, Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland

“To drive from Stykkishølmur to Akureyri feels like passing through geologic time. We take a gravel road around the coast, bumping and leaping through an exaggerated Alpine landscape with a few Norwegian fjords cut-and-pasted around the foothills. There is no other traffic, no people, but grass and blueberry bushes and low birches massing on the hillsides. Streams glitter across the valley in the sun. The fjord is full of swans, and sometimes sheep wander into the road. Birds call. We go on, and up, and up, and down, Guy driving and the rest of us watching the land as if it’s some new kind of technology we’ve never seen before.”

For the author, for me, and for the friend who gave me this book, Iceland has an eerie and seductive fascination. It seems both harsh and gorgeous. The extremes of light and dark over the course of a year—and the author and her family (hubby, two small boys) do spend an entire year/a visiting professor in Reykjavik. The volcanic landscapes, lava red and moving or black and frozen in place, days filled with brown air and ash. The people (women and men) who knit, in the allegedly egalitarian society. The rugged mountain peaks. Hot springs, sea birds, geysers. Rumors of elves or trolls, presumably hearkening to the Viking/Norwegian folklore of Iceland’s earliest settlers.

I have passed through Keflavik airport, coming and going from Europe, always in the summer months. Remembering “Greenland is icy and Iceland is green,” I pressed my face to the small airplane window and peered out curiously. From the air, from that approach, Iceland looked neither icy nor green, but barren and treeless (lots of yellow-flowered bushes I thought were gorse; plus abundant scrubby light-purple lupines of some kind). The nearby Blue Lagoon, with its aquamarine, steaming water, is sprawling, perfectly visible, and it beckoned, as it no doubt does to many tourists. Our eight-hour layover was overnight and, eager as the Blue Lagoon is for tourist money, no shuttle buses run in those hours. Disappointed to miss that, we tried to nap, with our carry-on backpacks for pillows and our jackets for blankets. But at 2 am, the summer sun bright in my eyes, I gave up on sleeping and walked around while Al dozed more successfully. Keflavik knows it is a way-station, a hub for small-size jets for those traveling between North America and Europe, but it aggressively markets Iceland as a destination. The airport walls are plastered with mural-size photographs of beautiful blond people with braids and colorful sweaters, with images of wild waterfalls and fiery lava streams, with alpine meadows full of wildflowers. Oh my, I thought, groggily contemplating all this beauty. There’s a store called 66º North, full of handsome outdoor gear (we’re almost to the Arctic Circle!) and a Blue Lagoon shop offers cosmetics like genuine Icelandic mineral bath salts and lotions derived from lichens and seaweed. The food concession had an abundance of what appeared to be a local yogurt, called Skyr. Oh my to all of this!

Downstairs, dimly lit, had closed rental-car agencies. I paused before one to study the large map on the wall behind the counter. The highway that encircles the island nation, Route 1, is aptly called the Ring Road. Emblazoned across the center of the map, obscuring Iceland’s mysterious interior, is a stern warning in many languages, to the effect of “those who rent vehicles from us are forbidden to divert from the Ring Road.” Huh! I muttered. Well, I would! Isn’t the national park where two tectonic plates are splitting apart and steam and lava hiss forth, isn’t that in the middle? Not to mention, a tourist like me might want to explore a side road to see “the real Iceland.” Of course, these days, a unobtrusive tracking device attached to the rental car would probably bust me. I also sense now, now that I’ve read this book, that those interior roads are probably actually barely passable tracks full of rocks, ice, and lava fields. Especially if the main road, the good road, is composed of gravel in many places, yikes. (A few years back, I read an article in Newsweek recounting how a new road proposed across the interior—to spare tourists as well as Icelanders from having to do the full drive—was defeated. Not because it went through remote, rugged landscapes, not because the project would destroy fragile plant or animal communities, but because it passed through troll habitat. The trolls would fuck with the tourists before the sharp hardened lava had a chance to lacerate the rental-car tires. The trolls would punish the Icelanders for sacrificing wilderness to tourism.)

I’ve also been so captivated by dramatic landscape photographs of rural Iceland. The cold blue-green sea, the waterfalls, sky, rock, seabirds, sunlight, twilight, Northern Lights, ice, lava. Someone mentioned to me that some of the Game of Thrones episodes were filmed there; the “lands beyond The Wall” as well as other vast, sprawling settings—I believe it. In fact, the extract above captures what I imagine or would expect, if I could ever travel there as a destination. Last but not least, I’ve read a other books set in Iceland. Both had protagonists whose ancestors had left for more hospitable places like the upper Midwest of the United States: The Windows of Brimnes by Bill Holm left me with an abiding impression of his solitary summer cottage way up north among cliffs and screaming seabirds and crashing seas; The Tricking of Freya by Christina Sunley, which among other things, filled me with awe for Thingvellir, the national park I alluded to above.

So, this long preamble is just to orient me, take stock of what I thought I knew, and to travel in the pages of a book once again to this enticing place.

Sarah Moss also had these fascinations and had traveled around Iceland, on a shoestring budget with a buddy when they were just 19 years old. When she was offered a one-year teaching job many years later, she seized the chance to return. “Travel writers are always writing home,” she opines to her students in a class on travel writing (her syllabus included the great Jonathan Raban, of course/he’s also an adventurous Brit)—but of course, that view is also the exercise of this very book.

A less-romantic portrait emerges. Iceland is not a gorgeous, flawless physical or social paradise. Her frame of reference is always, of course and necessarily, the England left behind, which isn’t perfect or idealized either. Iceland is, of course, totally different, in obvious and subtle ways. She describes what she sees and learns, she asks questions, she’s frank.

For starters, finding short-term housing is tricky and strange. She and her family arrive shortly after the banking crisis and, after a lot of trouble and the leveraging of any and all local connections, get a rental flat in Gardabaer, a Reykjavik suburb. “The building is on the corner of a development that was half-built when the banks collapsed and the money ran out, and it’s still half-built, as if the builders had downed tools and walked away one day in the winter of 2008…no-one else lives in our building.”

Getting around the city is not easy. Residents don’t walk or much use the buses; instead they favor huge vehicles, hummers and SUVs, drive like maniacs, and never use turn signals. The drivers are so reckless and aggressive that she and her husband try avoiding the acquisition of a vehicle (also to save money; her salary is now worth half what it would’ve been). She rides a bike to her school. They bundle up their boys when they go out and push the younger one’s stroller through pedestrian-unfriendly areas—in fact, a lava field, and later, slush and snow and strong winds, to get groceries and do other shopping. When they finally realize, especially with the onset of the long, dark, frigid winter, that they need to get a vehicle, finding a used one is a frustrating process. Icelanders don’t buy and sell used goods, it seems, not even clothing. (One woman relates how she actually destroyed an item of furniture when she upgraded to a new one; reusing other people’s stuff is considered gross/just not done.)

Speaking of groceries, not surprisingly most everything is imported and expensive. The vegetables and fruit are of miserable quality, except for a brief spell in summer when hothouse-grown greens are in some markets. Traditional Icelandic food seems to be a lot of salted and smoked fish (haddock) and meat (especially lamb). On one hasty trip, she accidentally buys and brings home whale meat; she never tries puffin breast (I don’t think I could either). She has mixed feelings about smuggling in her favorite food items, treats, and spices after a Christmas trip back to England, but she does it anyway.

She is captivated by Mount Esja, the mountain that hovers over Reykjavik the way Mt. Hood hovers over Portland, Oregon or Mt. Rainier over Seattle. She notes its colors and moods, and occasional disappearances due to weather or volcanic smoke. However,

I leave work early to catch the last of the slow purple sunset on the way home. Cycling along the peninsula one afternoon, I look back at the city and see that there is a pale green mist hanging over it, filling the space between Perlan and the church at Seltjarnarnes and trailing out over the sea beyond. At first I take it for another Arctic natural phenomenon—it has a beauty of a kind, this strange colour wrapping itself around the city’s landmarks and hovering on the lower slopes of Esja, as if the Northern Lights have somehow crept out by day—but…[it’s] not aurora but smog, “because there’s not enough wind.”

The city at the foot of this magnificent mountain is sprawling and has big stores like IKEA and Toys R Us, that is, it is not particularly historic or charming (I’m thinking of Anchorage, Alaska, another uninspiring urban area in a magnificent setting). She uncovers and comments on the ways education—her job, as well as her kids’ preschools—is different from what they are accustomed to. She and her husband pull one of their sons out of a kiddie school here after a couple weeks because the genders are segregated and the roles are so rigid (boys build things, girls clean, etc.) Her (mainly Icelandic) adult students balk at being asked to tell second-hand stories—interviewing another person, for example—and don’t like to talk in class for fear, another professor explains, of appearing foolish.

She tries hard to uncover what is uniquely Icelandic. They visit the island Heimaey where most of a village was devastated by a volcanic explosion as the residents did a hasty by-boat evacuation. In winter. In a storm. She inquires about knitting and the iconic Icelandic sweater (whose history, it turns out, is only a generation or two old). She interviews people who lived through the world wars and saw foreigners and warships come and go, and weathered the economy ebbing and flowing. She even drives out to meet a woman in a remote valley who is an expert on “the hidden folk.” She is respectful, but candid in her impressions and about her limitations (her biases; not enough time). It’s all so interesting.

Her writing is frequently gorgeous, I have to say. I can see, almost feel, what she is experiencing. I loved this passage (below). Hyperbolic? Maybe not, if you are there and paying attention?

Winter sunsets, like summer sunrises, go on for hours. The sun sidles over the horizon, but the sky stays pale for a long time. I walk the coast path long after the last light has drained from the sky and think about darkness, and I like it. I like the way it’s impossible to ignore the passing of time. Today is darker than yesterday, tomorrow will be darker than today. Dust we are and to dust we shall return. It makes me feel alive, makes me feel my life like heavy cloth on my hands.

The thing that interested me most in this book, though, turned out to be how she navigated being a outsider. How, in the short time they lived there, she sincerely and diligently tried to get a handle on the place. How she tried to savor what is good. How she felt, and how her feelings and assumptions and perceptions evolved. How she made friends. (Missing or glossed over, though, was her husband’s experience. She was the breadwinner, and clearly also devoted a lot of time to this book, or the notes for it, as well as her full-time job. Well, maybe she was protecting his privacy, maybe his story is not hers to tell. Still, including more about him, and them, might’ve painted a broader picture of what it’s like to move as a family to a foreign country.)

I have been—by chance and by design—a short-timer in a few places in my life. If we always lived like we might leave soon, we could really look, listen, and really learn. And we might still see and expand upon what attracted us in the first place. And still, here’s the catch, we would not be done. The opening extract here is from a trip they took after they had moved back to the UK and returned to visit, for there were, of course, unfinished things like a roadtrip to the north. She ends with “I’m still not ready to leave Iceland.” I get it.

Louise Penny, A Better Man

“She wasn’t interested, but you continued to harass her.”

“I wasn’t harassing her. She was afraid.” Cameron shot a filthy look at the man across the bistro. “She wanted to leave him, I could tell. I was just trying to help her break away.”

He lifted his head and met Gamache’s eyes. “I love my wife. I have two children. But there was something about Vivienne. Something…” he stopped and thought. “Not innocent. Not even fragile. She seemed strong, but confused. Beaten down. I just wanted to help her.”

“Gamache looked at Cameron’s face. Disfigured. And knew how deep the blows went. How deep the disfigurement went. And knew how much this man, while a boy, would have wanted someone to help him.”

“The best book yet in an outstanding, original oeuvre”—Wall Street Journal, so says the cover. I don’t agree; the superb A Great Reckoning is the standard to meet in this series IMO. I dunno, this one just didn’t go real well for me, even though it was clearly carefully crafted. Maybe a bit too much telling rather than showing? Her distinctive choppy writing style grated, even though I recognize how it amps up the tension. The mystery was knotty and frustrating and dragged on, for Gamache and his colleagues, but also for the restive reader (though one could argue that this is realistic). Also, WTF, a person of his rank invites a stranger, the murdered woman’s distraught father, to stay in his home?! How unprofessional is that?

Also, the murdered woman was abused, so a smart and (understandably) bitter woman who runs a shelter is consulted by the detectives. And yet in the Acknowledgments, the Clintons are among the people Penny thanks (I am thinking of Hillary’s victim-blaming in defense of Bill). Minor point, I’ll grant, and yet, perhaps a bit, err, dissonant?

Sprinkling in a Melville quote repeatedly (all truth, with malice in it), even when identified, felt labored. Could’ve cooked the whole meal without it.

Mitigating, however, was a passing but well-deployed quote from Anne of Green Gables by Clara, “I’m well in body, but considerably rumpled up in spirit”! Speaking of Clara, it was hard to swallow that her art career was being dramatically tanked overnight by mean tweets, to the extent that buyers wanted to return past works! and that a heavyweight NYC critic actually traveled to Three Pines to assess and judge (getting unexpectedly charmed by the bistro and village, naturally). Even though it’s true any artist can create poor or lazy work and have to be nudged into understanding/reckoning with that and then rebooting. Just, uhh, not like that.

Not nearly enough vivid descriptions of the bistro breakfasts, either. Why, Olivier didn’t bring forth cafe au laits and warm almond croissants till, what, page 420?!

I just felt scant joy in this book and wonder if the author didn’t either. Of course, it’s a homicide mystery, but anyone who follows this series avidly knows what I mean here. Le sigh.

Mitigating, though, are moments like the conversation extracted above. Why do people go into “helping” careers? Armand Gamache knows, Louise Penny knows.

Keith Miller, The Book of Flying: A Novel

“ ‘All is rumor. It’s why we write, it’s why we sing, it’s why we make love here in this city, enraptured and captivated by fear. For generations we have lived with the knowledge that some must ascend to the dark castle that the rest may live this life of love and song, fine food, stirring literature.’

‘But don’t you want to be free?’

‘Why do you think I write?’ She tapped the chapter he’d been reading. ‘I travel far from this city’s winding streets in these pages.’

‘And you never get lonely cooped up with your manuscript?’

‘Lonely? Sometimes I can hardly sleep my characters chatter so, clamoring to have their voices immortalized.’ ”

Honestly, I was a bit torn about this book (but it won me over). My reserve began with the subtitle, “a novel.” Just in case you thought you were buying a book about how to pilot a small aircraft? Of course it is not. It is a lush, fanciful tale about Pico, a solitary poet-librarian, who is in love with Sisu, a winged girl. His parents, too, were winged, but as sometimes happens, wings were not passed to him. The youngsters live in a city by the sea where about half the residents are winged and half are not. He learns—by intriguingly hidden message wedged into the floor of his lonely library (he is not the first curator/it is old)—that he can acquire wings, if he makes an arduous journey to a place on the other side of a dark and mysterious forest and a scorching desert, to the “morning town of Paunpuam.” This he decides to do. I had to page back later to discover whether he alerted the girl of his heart. Oops, he did not. So we can guess how this guileless Odysseus’s story will go.

It’s also a book about loving books, loving literature and poetry. In fact, before Pico sets out he surveys his library, knowing he must leave it all behind, but wanting to bring a few favorites along. His choices are: “a book of poems, a dense novel, a volume of queer stories.” These selections stay with him a long time, through all sorts of trials and mishaps, and are joined late in the tale by a plain book that he writes and transcribes in. Hmm. Pretty thorough. (And I, like any reader of this tale, pause to ask myself which ones I would choose if I was traveling light…) Down the line, he will get a chance to visit other collections and bookstores, and to read a portion of a book that features a visit to a planet of books, where everything is made of books, they are nourishment and beds and companions and creatures, even insect-size. Yeah, the telling’s all a bit self-regarding, but I think our author is in earnest and it’s endearing (if that doesn’t sound too patronizing).

Not too far along on his trek, Pico finds himself in the arms of Adevi, a beautiful, passionate, deadly Robber Queen. My first clear clue that this is not a child’s book, LOL. “I’ve betrayed her,” wails our hero after this formidable woman takes his virginity. “Climb down out of your brain, poet,” she says tartly, “You’re tangled in the cobwebs of your dreams. Welcome to the land of your body, with all its guilt, all its ecstacy.” A bit of time passes before he crawls to her bed and says simply “teach me.” Oh lordy, I eyerolled, am in for a repeat/version of Kvothe’s tedious, repetitive sexual education in Patrick Rothfuss’s Wise Man’s Fear? Fun for the horny, self-indulgent male fantasy author but not really for my reading pleasure, sigh. I’m with Adevi. Live in the moment, love the one you’re with, learn, live your life, yada-yada.

Other lovely lovers appear in later chapters. My favorite was the quirky, solitary whore Narya, who loved books and reading and writing as much as Pico (see extract of one of their conversations, above) (though, why did she have to be a whore? why not, oh, a waitress?). “What it is to encounter one’s passion in another.” Here is your match, blundering dude, I muttered. Even the author favors Narya, I think; on the back of the title page, a fragment of a Rilke poem is credited and given to Narya. That is highest honor, IMO.

But among the artifices and challenges tossed at our hero, the book had some moments that went beyond contrived or entertaining, uncovering or dislodging relatable moments and musings. In the city where he befriends Narya and others, Pico gets a little too comfortable, settles in, and abandons his quest. He takes his eyes off his goal, learns to love, works, finds community, “nests,” and feels the ups and downs and pangs of embedding in a place. Like the extract I chose suggests, these things are actually worthy and a way to live, even if (or especially if) trapped by circumstance, geography, or fear.

As in any journey, there are times when Pico doesn’t know what to do or where to turn. His arrival in that city, in fact, is rendered in vivid detail. He’s cold, he’s hungry, he’s disoriented, everyone is busy and knows one another, nobody sees him, he’s at loose ends. Have you seen that person on the streets where you live and work? Have you been that person? When, much later, he makes his stumbling way across the dry, hot desert and runs out of water, relief or rescue also seems elusive or impossible. And yet the wheel turns. It’s a fantasy that his suffering is alleviated, sure, but by cycling through that at least twice, Pico should learn. Reflecting on these two essentially similar and stressful scenarios, I thought about how, really, we never can make it on our own, and I thought about the times when help is, truly, mercy and grace. How extra-sweet a warm bed or a kind touch or food or water is, after deprivation. That he flies away alone on the last page, then, made me sad.

Before I leave off here, I also want to note that the author’s fascinating bio caught my eye. There he is on the inside back flap, a young, fresh-faced, bearded white guy, “Keith Miller is an American who was born in Tanzania, raised in Kenya, and wrote this novel while living in southern Sudan. He now lives in Egypt, where he is a design consultant and art teacher at a center for refugees.” (What on earth makes him American, then? Just his name…?) The people and the landscapes in the book suddenly seem to be ambitious acts of interpretation and imagination.

Also. I grabbed this book off the shelf here in our second home, on an rugged island off the southwest coast of Nova Scotia; I have no idea what it is doing here or how it washed up here. An unsigned Christmas tag is tucked inside, “For the house where books and stories live…” I do not remember receiving this book as a gift and don’t recognize the handwriting. Strange indeed. Well. Stories get around.

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“The gaiety with which they had set out had somehow vanished, and yet there was no emnity or malice between them. They were generous young souls; they had been reared in the lonely country nooks where fatalism is a strong sentiment, and they did not blame her. Such supplanting was to be.”

Ohhhh. Long sigh. Scarcely have I ever read such a sad story. Tess, who was blessed with beauty, intelligence, a fierce work ethic, and a beating heart, was unfortunate to be born into poverty in rural England in the late 1800s (the novel was published in 1891). Small pleasures intervene here and there—birdsong, a lovely view, laughter with friends, being competent at her work, picking flowers, and even falling in love—but mainly hers is a tragic tale. Rape at an early age, death of the infant (tellingly, she names it Sorrow), toil, confusion, pressure and compromise, and a final desperate act that leads to her death by hanging (she murders her rapist). Employers grind her down, family obligations press on her, her rapist stalks her, her husband deserts and disappoints her. Breaks her heart. All escapes are blocked.

The extract I chose above is from a scene where she is hanging out with other women, other farm laborers. They all have a crush on the same fellow, an upper-class young man who is doing time at the farm in order to learn farm management, but he favors Tess. He will eventually become her husband, but this will neither elevate her socially or economically, nor will the alliance help her escape her sad past. In the end, all escapes are blocked. Fatalism indeed.

Thomas Hardy was up to more than laying out and decrying the poor choices available to poor women in that place and time (Tess’s life and circumstances are much more grim than that of a Jane Austin heroine). He was up to more than suggesting that beauty and intelligence above one’s station are curses (he may or may not be as sexist as his male characters) …But I give him credit for telling a woman’s story in the times he lived in. Limning the tale is the emerging industrial revolution, which already is putting an end to a culture, a place, a way of life. Tess simply couldn’t navigate, despite her best efforts. Hardy paints a more general and bleak picture of a culture degrading into dehumanization; this, I wager, also made the book difficult/controversial for his contemporaries.

Thoroughly depressing.

Jane Smiley, Perestroika in Paris

“Sunny days were few and far between lately, but Paras didn’t much mind the rain. It was easier to live outside in all weathers than it was to be confined to a dark stall, unable to see much, but hearing every little thing, day and night. All the horses complained about being cooped up, even the least curious ones. And then, when the humans took you out, they got spooky when you were startled by something. The better riders just sat there, and said, “Ah-ah,” but a sensitive filly like Paras could feel in her very bones that that their hearts were pounding. If you lived out, there wasn’t much that surprised you. Paras could see things all over the Champ de Mars—humans large and small, dogs large and small, birds of all kinds soaring and swooping. If you lived out, every noise had a reason, every sight a before and after. No surprises…”

Oh! What a unique, entertaining, adorable novel! It even has a happy ending, and sometimes we just need that…so rare in this troubled world of ours.

I’ve never read anything quite like this little book—an adventure from the point of view of an animal, a race horse named Perestroika, “Paras,” and some friends she makes after she walks away from the barn and ends up sheltering at the big public park in Paris. “Paras in Paris,” I tried it aloud and smirked, though the author just drops it there. The new friends: a wise but lonely dog (Frida), an old, somewhat arrogant raven (Raoul), a pair of plucky ducks (…wait for it), plus a few assorted humans.

Certainly I’ve heard of Jane Smiley; she’s a highly regarded author who won a Pulitzer for a book called A Thousand Acres, which is set on a Midwestern farm but I understand is loosely based on King Lear. I may have to investigate it, but I wager that book is much heavier-going. It was obvious from the start of this one that I was in the hands of a master storyteller and my appreciation only deepened as the tale unfurled. It is entertaining, even laugh-out-loud funny in spots, but it is not frivolous, not a kiddie book. Nobody is mocked or a parody. Even the raven isn’t a cliché. The humans, though less prominent, are…human.

The build-up to the nifty ending somehow never veers into sentimentality or total predictability, even as it satisfies. This is just a fine tale, very finely told. And, as a Los Angeles Times reviewer quoted in the opening papers remarks, “In an era beset by polarization and even violent tribalism, it feels like a gift to find a novel in which characters of different species—with different desires and instincts—come together to build a community.” Consuming this book felt like dining on nourishing comfort food.

The laugh-out-loud moments chiefly came from the birds. The duck pair are called Sid and Nancy—ha! Sid is shrill and obnoxious; Nancy is tart and pragmatic. Late in the book, on a migration return trip back to Nancy and the latest batch of ducklings (males always take off, it seems; I first learned this in Make Way for Ducklings), he shares, well, prattles, his fresh thoughts with Raoul after some time away:

“Every summer is a new beginning, that’s what I’ve learned. I don’t have to carry the past with me. My approach to the dangers of reproduction is my choice. I am in charge of who I am and how I view things. I own my fears.”

“That’s a wise—”

“I’ve had my eyes opened. We had many group discussions as we were migrating, and I was given to realize that certain experiences I had as a duckling have a strong impact on my world view…” [on and on in this mode for a bit] …“I’m glad we’ve had this talk,” said Sid.

“Yes,” said Raoul.

Who among us cannot relate to such a conversation? Jane Smiley is subtle but I saw what she did there. The Los Angeles Times reviewer is spot on: the deeper meaning is about forming community. A bunch of loners (humans, too) traveling through daily life in close proximity discover, form, and benefit from community. Even self-absorbed Sid.

J.D. Salinger, “For Esmé, With Love and Squalor,” from Nine Stories

Addendum: I only realized a day later that I had finally been moved to pick up and read this story on Veteran’s Day (Remembrance Day). Not a coincidence, I have to believe, but one of those subterranean confluence things that happens now and then.

“About the time their tea was brought, the choir member caught me staring over at her party. She stared back at me, with those house-counting eyes of hers, then, abruptly, gave me a small, qualified smile. It was oddly radiant, as certain small, qualified smiles sometimes are.”

What in the world brought me to this book, and this particular story? Well, there’s a story behind it. One day, between tasks, I was standing briefly in my small “Red Corner” room, which consists of a window, a big bookcase, a small bookcase, and a beloved rocking chair, as well as some mementos (a tray full of seashells from Monhegan Island, Maine, from Bean Hollow State Beach south of Half Moon Bay, California, and of course some from Brier and Long Islands, Nova Scotia), pix of my sons, and so on. This small, admittedly cluttered space is my Linus blanket and my nexus. But on that day and in that moment, I looked critically at it. Too many books! Piles on the floor! Books I read long ago and have outgrown or didn’t like! Time for a purge. I quickly filled two large cardboard boxes, with little or no remorse. More recently acquired books found places on the shelves at last. Ah!

One of the discards was this book. I’ve had it for ages…decades. Have I ever even cracked it, read any of the stories? Am I even a J.D. Salinger fan? Good grief. Why hang on to it? But it didn’t fit in the stuffed boxes so I laid it on top. A few nights later, having finished some other book (see below, somewhere down there), I thought to myself, “Why not read a short story tonight? Rather than starting a new, substantial book right away?” I settled in and thumbed through. It was dusty and the years had not been kind to the cheap paperback: the pages were stained, browning, brittle. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Baffling and dull. “Just Before the War with the Eskimos.” “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut.” Baffling and dull. Who cares? Insipid, flaccid, almost plotless, and everyone smoking cigarettes like some old movie, so just … meh. Why bother? Back onto the discard pile the book went. Evidently his writing doesn’t age well, I thought. (I remember seeing “Easy Rider,” for the first time—being too young in the 6os—in the Brattle Theater in Cambridge in the late 1980s. Everyone in the audience, including me, laughed or twitched or cringed at the once-groovy parts. The disconnect with Salinger’s stories here felt much the same. Embarrassing now.)

Then, on a Facebook page that ebbs and flows with activity, Bard Writes, the moderator tried to rouse the Bard alumni who subscribe. “What are you reading this weekend?” she prodded. I took the bait, fresh off the above thoughts, and briefly slagged Salinger. Well. A few days passed and when I checked in on Facebook again, someone had responded. He wrote:

I read "Bananafish" when I was about thirteen, didn't get it, never went back until this week. And still don't get it. I don't get most of the stories in the collection (except "Esmé", which is downright touching and apparently spoke to many soldiers of the era returning with inner wounds).

I agree that many of the characters are hard to relate to (except perhaps as our parents in other times) today, not to mention the lavish use of cigarettes - which brands, how they hold them, what containers they use, ashtrays, spilling ashes... Screams "another world" today.

I feel about Salinger as I do about Eudora Welty - there's no doubt this is excellent, authoritative writing (though I find Welty's characters more engaging, perhaps precisely because they are so exotic to an urban Northerner), but generally, I have NO IDEA what's going on. I don't know what the central problem is, I don't know how it's resolved, I don't discern a necessary structure. I don't know, for instance, how Teddy's standing on something at the start of that story relates to his holding forth on a deck chair later, never mind the ending. A lot of the pieces seem structurally arbitrary, if intriguing.

Nor am I convinced by the glosses I've seen on several of these stories elsewhere. I really feel like the critics are straining to find meaning and structure beyond what the text supports.

It might be fun to do a whole thread on great works we find incomprehensible (James Joyce would probably top the list), yet feel we, as aspiring writers, should at least TRY to read. Salinger, for instance, apparently influenced a number of other writers I DO follow, so clearly they found something I'm having trouble grasping. And of course even if one doesn't "get" a writer, in the sense of deciphering a puzzle, simply being exposed to good style can be beneficial.

Helpful, interesting, thoughtful (I’d like to have more friends like him, frankly). However, the discards-project stalled and I got distracted and now a few months have gone by and I finally, finally moved the boxes down to the front hallway this evening. They go off to the local library’s donation bin, or get stuffed into a Little Free Library this week, by golly. Oh. There’s the Salinger again. Okay, mister, I’ll try one last time; I’ll read “For Esmé.”

Wow. It is a splendid little story—as suggested, it depicts soldier PTSD poignantly. The plot is simple. The narrator is temporarily stationed in a small British village for training and, on his last day before shipping out, has time on his hands and ventures into town. It’s raining and he ducks into the local church, where a children’s choir is rehearsing. He notices a precocious 13-year-old, because she had “the best upper register, the sweetest-sounding, the surest, and it automatically led the way. The young lady, however, seemed slightly bored with her own singing ability, or perhaps with the time and place…” He departs and ends up in a tea room. Before long, here comes the kid and her wiggly little brother, attended by a governess. She ends up coming over and sitting at his table and they chat. The chat is frank and wide-ranging. She introduces herself, Esmé, calls him out on being cagey about what he is doing in her village (“I wasn’t born yesterday, you know”), reveals that both her parents are dead (there were many war orphans, of course), and shares that she will be a jazz singer until she retires at age 30, in Ohio. He notices her large, unwieldy wristwatch; it was her late father’s. Her little brother slouches over and shares a silly joke, twice, and our narrator indulges him with good humor. For his part, he shares that he is an unpublished short-story writer. Before they leave, she asks him to “write a story exclusively for me sometime…[not] childish and silly. I prefer stories about squalor.”

She gets her story. Years later, when he receives an invitation to her wedding but ultimately concludes that he and his “breathtakingly level-headed” wife don’t have the funds to send him, so he writes the story at last. The squalor is a vivid and heart-wrenching description of a wounded soldier, shattered in mind and body, receiving a watch from a pen-pal. It’s damaged, but it reaches him. The reader realizes they maintained their correspondence over many years, miles, and…events.

Within the framework of a seemingly simple short story, Salinger suggests much. What he suggests spreads and unfurls in the reader’s imagination and heavy heart. Quite a feat for, oh, a mere 15 pages. Admiration for Salinger dawns at long last, thank you, Mister fellow-Bard-writer.

Kate Khavari, A Botanist’s Guide to Parties and Poisons: A Saffron Everleigh Mystery

“ ‘Certainly not! I’ve known him a week, Elizabeth.’ Granted, he’d examined her bare arms and legs at length yesterday, but she certainly wasn’t going to tell Elizabeth that. She might faint from excitement. Excitement over nothing more than a passing interest. It would be hard not to be interested in Alexander Ashton. His intelligence and academic accomplishments were attractive, yes, but he’d been kind. He hadn’t shied away from her when she described Dr. Berking’s actions, but in fact he had defended her on more than one occasion. And, apart from his reaction to the obvious misstep in her planning with the xolotol experiment, he seemed to be a level-headed sort of man. That his dark eyes were rather captivating was an added bonus.

Elizabeth gave her an arch look…”

Chose this one for its whimsical title and attractive cover (plus, I am genuinely interested in poisonous plants); for the fact that it’s a mystery (my guilty pleasure); and because I needed an “airplane book” (I was soon traveling California to New York with two plane changes, so needed distraction and entertainment, preferably lite).

I still think the title is cute. And I see that the young author is scooting on down the road; the opening chapter of the next one, A Botanist’s Guide to Flowers and Fatality, is dangled at the back of the book. I’m not tempted, but good for her.

As mysteries go, the author ain’t no Louise Penny or Sue Grafton, and Saffron Everleigh ain’t no Armand Gamache or Kinsey Millhone. In fact, despite blurb praise— “cleverly plotted,” “deft”—I found the plot often confusing and our heroine’s efforts rather stabby-stabby, rendering the obligatory wrap-up chapters too long. She’s a lone female research assistant in the botany department at London’s University College; it’s post-WW1. She attends a faculty mixer in which a professor’s wife collapses after sipping champagne, poisoned. Her doting grandfatherly professor mentor is soon hauled in as the main suspect. She works to clear his name, to figure out whodunit. But she doesn’t make compelling progress and missed a few things/got a few things quite wrong. (It made me think she’s not cut out for detective work.) I’m afraid I didn’t really care, which is a fatal flaw in a mystery novel—the reader should be at least intrigued, if not trying!

The romantic interest subplot was, at best, frustrating. This is 1923 and while professors can “have affairs,” Ms. Everleigh and handsome, smart, gallant research assistant Alexander Ashton’s dance was chaste as he helps her sleuthing. They grin and tease, they touch briefly or squeeze hands, they lay side by side in predicaments, but no shagging, sports fans. Just stuff like “there was an understanding twinkle in Alexander’s eyes that made her insides melt.” Oh, he has unruly curls. Reference also the silly extract above. Mercifully we are spared flaring nostrils and outright bodice-ripping. I didn’t love that our heroine trembled and wept rather too easily; it made me think she’s not cut out for detective work. Furthermore when a sinister professor hits on her or even threatens assault/rape, neither the incidents nor the recollections get past first base. It’s England, remember, it’s 1923, which gets our author off the hook…I guess. I suspect she just doesn’t want to write steam, isn’t comfortable.

However she has no trouble rendering in plentiful detail the late-plot abuse that was heaped on Ms. Everleigh and Mr. Ashton by the bad guys. It wasn’t the gore of, say, a Quentin Tarantino scene, but it was over-labored and unpleasant for the reader and miserable for the couple. Not sure why the author was willing and able to write that, but not, err, steam. Just sayin’.

As for “airplane book,” well, the book served me well enough, given that my flying day was uneven: interruptions, distractions, hurried walks to distant gates, and long, dull flights. Even keeping my expectations in check, Ms. Khavari is a jarring come-down from the masterful Tolstoy I read just prior. Overall her writing is guileless and, at times, cringe-worthy.

I feel a bit badly being so critical. I read her acknowledgements, my favorite part of writing my own books, and it’s clear she’s thrilled to be published, worked hard, researched (her botany was fine), got help and readers (friends as well as editors, like you do), thanked her supportive husband and parents. She is so young, I think; the back-cover photo looks like a wide-eyed 30-year-old. Her heroine is similarly young and guileless. The best I can say is that the author kept a strong hand on the tiller (or maybe we should credit her editor?) as far as pacing and tone. The book is fairly polished in that regard.

I may be taking this “I read disparately; I like to shift gears” business too much to heart!

Leo Tolstoy, Hadji Murat (from The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Other Stories, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

“…I set about picking the flower. But it was very difficult; not only was the stem prickly on all sides, even through the hankerchief I had wrapped around my hand, but it was so terribly tough that I struggled with it for some five minutes, tearing the fibers one by one. When I finally tore off the flower, the stem was all ragged, and the flower no longer seemed so fresh and beautiful. Besides, in its coarseness it did not fit in with the delicate flowers of the bouquet. I was sorry that I had vainly destroyed and thrown away a flower that had been beautiful in its place. ‘But what energy and life force,’ I thought, remembering the effort it had cost me to tear off the flower. ‘How staunchly it defended itself, and how dearly it sold its life.’ "

In this short-story collection, this is a long one, a novella. On the back cover I note that it was praised by the great Harold Bloom as “the best story in the world.” So I started in. Immediately I also noted that it’s a substantial story wrapped lightly in another one, a narration, scarcely interpretive…you almost forget, until the narrator reappears and seals on the final page. Where have I encountered this before? Oh, yes, that amazing Rick Bass story about the frozen lake and the dogs, “The Hermit’s Story.” Why did Rick Bass do that? Why did Tolstoy do this? Is it necessary, does it add anything? Obviously each author thought so. I figure it distances us from the main story slightly but significantly—creates an interval. To encourage the reader to reflect, as the author does, right by our side?, on its possible meaning.

The main story, the bulk, the nutritious nugget, is an incredible, dense, page-turning piece of work recounting the later years of a Tartar warlord. I learn from the book’s introduction that Tolstoy worked on it for years and years, from 1896 to 1904. It shows his research, his interest in historical accuracy.

The story changes setting and shifts its point of view frequently but with the seamless ease that only comes from great skill and hard work on the part of the writer—the writing and the necessary empathy is at times breathtaking. It swirls around Hajdi Murat, but there are many other characters, from peasants to royalty, from Russian to Chechen, men and women. It is a time of war, with atrocities and hatreds and deep feelings (can Muraj successfully bargain for the safety of his family, especially his beautiful strong son, of whom he is so proud and whom he loves so much?). Other men’s sons are slaughtered…and ultimately we never learn any details because Murat dies trying to elude his captors and rescue his family, a desperate act that, like desperate acts in wartime, feels both doomed and necessary. Thus both father and reader are denied that information, which of course is a pointed reminder about how wars go.

A couple of moments stood out to me. One was a woman’s reaction to the news of Murat’s death:

Butler went out to the porch. Marya Dmitrievna was sitting on the second step. She glanced at Butler and at once turned away angrily.

“What’s the matter, Marya Dmitrievna?” asked Butler.

“You’re all butchers. I can’t bear it. Real butchers,” she said, getting up.

“The same could happen to anyone,” said Butler, not knowing what to say. “That’s war.”

“War!” cried Marya Dmitrievna. “What war? You’re butchers, that’s all. A dead body should be put in the ground, and they just jeer. Real butchers,” she repeated and stepped off the porch and went into the house through the back door.

The other was a longer, yet spare description of the devastation of a village—people killed, women raped, the mosque as well as houses and orchards, even bee hives and the water supply destroyed or burned, children wailing and hungry cattle bellowing... I can’t/won’t retype it all here, it’s too grim.

The feeling that was experienced by all the Chechens, big and small, was stronger than hatred. It was not hatred, but a refusal to recognize these Russian dogs as human beings, and such loathing, disgust, and bewilderment before the absurd cruelty of these beings, that the wish to exterminate them, like the wish to exterminate rats, venomous spiders, and wolves, was as natural as the sense of self-preservation…

These parts resonate quite painfully right now, as the news is full of the violence between Hamas and Israel and in particular the reports of butchery and suffering of hostages and civilians filtering through to the rest of the world. Tolstoy is not merely describing a point in his land’s history; he is describing humans throughout time. It’s so disheartening, ugly, and awful. Like Marya Dimitrievna, I just want to get up off the step and turn my back on all of it in discouragement, dismay, and disgust.

I was repeatedly struck in this novella by an element that was not a human character or act, but the backdrop and presence of nature. The stars high over the soaring trees at night—the same stars over the butchering soldiers and the vulnerable villagers. The nightingales, who stop their sweet song when they are distracted or disturbed by humans and noises, but soon resume. And the hardy wildflower that bookends the telling. I am left wondering if a single human life even matters—or matters no more or less than the tenacious wildflower matters. Even as Tolstoy economically renders beauty and love, human frailty, violence and cruelty, there is a sad, sad hollowness at the heart of this tale.

Bill Buford, Dirt: Adventures in Lyon, as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking

“In practice, the idea wasn’t without merit: Namely, in Italy (or the peninsula that we now call Italy), from the late 1300s to the early 1600s, grand meals were treated like works of art, orchestrated productions, with many plates and much show off of the kitchen, a festa. At the time, the French did not eat this way. But in its telling, the idea would seem pretty cartoonish: that that changes in what we now think of as French cuisine were the doing of the princesslike daughter of the famous Florence Medici family, Caterina, who, in 1533, at the age of fourteen, traveled from Tuscany to marry a prince who would become the king of France, whereupon she introduced Italian ingredients and culinary secrets to her subjects. Today people refer to this as the ‘Catherine de’ Medici myth,’ which they cite with much hilarity.

I researched the idea. Not much was written in support of the thesis. Considerably more, however, was written against it. But it wasn’t always persuasive. Some critics didn’t appear to read Italian. Some rarely (or never) alluded to the Italian Renaissance. Many, in my humble opinion, sound more Franco-chauvenistic than scholarly. In any case, the implications were intriguing to consider: that at one point French cuisine did not exist, or at least not in a form we would recognize today; and that then, at another point, it did, and that the Italians may have had something to do with its coming into being…”

Oui, I chose a book about French cooking for my shift over to non-fiction for a spell. I’d heard this Caterina theory before, but honestly? What’s to really research and establish? Cultures cross-pollinate, especially when travel is possible, so what if the 14-year-old imported bride isn’t directly responsible?

I really picked up this book because I enjoy food and cooking, including Italian and French (and I have been fortunate to travel to both countries and enjoy some wonderful cuisine in each). Bill Buford is a food journalist and “a highly acclaimed writer and editor at the New Yorker." I mean, that’s an impressive writing credential right there, correct? We also learn that he wrote a book about Italian cooking, based on some apprenticeships there a few years back.

But let us separate the tale from the teller. The tale has this above pretext, which as you can see, I find a bit thin or lame, even if it is a place to start. His “research” unfolds, naturally, and this book reveals all. He’s not a bad writer…he has an eye for detail and a penchant for drama (a knack for ending chapters with occasional cliffhangers). I guess.

But right out of the gate, I found Buford to be a complete ass. He name-drops celebrity chefs, like we are supposed to not only know who they are but be dazzled into reverence. He uses his connections in the celebrity-chef world to catapult himself, his wife, and their sons (twins, toddlers) to Lyon, France. Without a job lined up. Oh hey, he’ll eventually write this book…but désolé, I highly doubt that covered the expenses of uprooting his family, all the plane tickets back and forth, the rent and furniture and appliances for the apartment in Lyon, additional living expenses while there, etc. Early on, while his wife travels over to Lyon to firm up the apartment and clean, prepare, and start to furnish it, Bill is back in NYC taking care of the little guys, which he admits is demanding and exhausting. But, wait, no, he is not! He calls a sitter, and leaves town, popping on the Amtrak down to Washington DC to have dinner and chat about his French/Lyonnaise aspirations with a celebrity chef friend.

Once he and his family are in Lyon, and the boys are in a preschool, we do not hear a heck of a lot more about them, except that they struggle to adapt to their new surroundings and the French language. Of the wife, not much is mentioned; she can speak French and is a wine expert, so we assume she is getting something out of this adventure. Our hero spends his days visiting restaurants and dining clubs and culinary schools, following up on leads and introductions, trying to get a foothold there. Yes, he moved his family across the ocean to a foreign country without a job to go to.

He does, after a bit, take up with a neighborhood bread baker. Because at least that is something, and why not learn about French bread-baking (spoiler alert: the key is flour, not water, not yeast, not even really technique) while waiting for a better offer. Also “Bob” makes very good, very popular bread. Does Bill get paid? Doubtful, given that Bob himself seems to run the place on a shoestring. Later our hero does segue into taking classes at a rigorous cooking school (but not the whole program) and eventually gets work in the kitchen of a nice restaurant—finally. (One notices that he bypasses the career path of aspiring young chefs he meets along the way; by being pushy/persuasive/persistent, by name-dropping, by revealing he’s a credentialed American food journalist.) All through this, I found him selfish and self-indulgent, entirely focused on his own odyssey.

So imagine my surprise when, in a later chapter, the wife (who has a name, Jessica) enthuses about their new life in France. “No one who visits France knows it in the way we are starting to understand Lyon!” Maybe she didn’t mind being uprooted. Maybe she or both of them think this family adventure will be good for the growing boys. The adults will figure it out.

I reflect: this is another reason I picked up this book and stayed with it. I wanted to hear what it’s like to do something this major with your life. What happens—I know, I’ve moved (though not to Europe)—is that you get to know your neighbors, the qualities and quirks of your surroundings, and how things work (from the post office to the food market to transportation). At times, you find it ugly and sordid, at times you find it charming and beautiful. You learn to see it.

Another element of this book is kitchen life, a punishing environment of cramped quarters and stress. I’ve never worked in the kitchen of a restaurant, simple or fancy, because I’m a woman. Evidently in Lyon, France, as in the USA, the kitchen is the macho domain of angry, obsessive, dysfunctional, fast-moving (but talented!) guys. I’m getting PTSD flashbacks to the prima-donna chef at the second-rate Italian-American restaurant I waitressed at for a couple years long ago, screaming-spitting-mad at the newbie who cut the tomatoes wrong and too slow; I’m getting the familiar and unpleasant whiff of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential tales. Buford offers:

In the beginning, no one ever takes you aside and says, “Hey, let me tell you how this place works.” Instead, built into the culture of the kitchen is a pathological intolerance of the novice and a perverse bully’s pleasure in watching a novice’s failed efforts to figure out a kitchen that everyone else there already knew. For them, it must be very funny.

Le sigh. This crap is universal?

As felicitous or chatty as his writing style can be, the book lagged at times, reading as episodic notes on meals, ingredients, side trips, restaurants large and small, urban and country, with mentions of esteemed chefs by name wherever possible. Exploring French food from both sides of the table, the prep and the eating, I mean, allows him to do deep dives into recipes, ingredients, and trends. But he never really squares off with the elephant in the room: is it possible to relish food made by prima-donnas, dour workaholics, and jerks? Or is this an impolite or taboo question? Can wonderful food be made by wonderful people? Hmm.

I preferred his forays into specific favorite items like cheese and bread. When he visits a high-altitude cow-herder and cheesemaker, I read his observations with interest. He posits that humus, the soil/dirt the native alpine grasses grow in, is the key to the quality and flavor, making this insight sound like…an insight (a gardener or small farmer would say duh; conspicuously missing, though, was the word terroir). However the following aside was fun, partly because it is so not objective:

It is extreme, this Alpage cheese, which is why I came. I found myself wondering: How can you not love the French? Really. No irony. How can you not love a people who, isolated, in a field or a stable or a vineyard, far from normal society, no one looking, left to their own devices, obsess over their food and drink, worry it, and strive for an expression of purity that would not just be baffling but incomprehensible to their agricultural counterparts just about everywhere else in the world?

A whole section on his own take on perfecting an MOF recipe, duck pie, not for the competition (he had not earned requisite credentials, but unsurprisingly feels he could) but for the sake of it—this was also infectious. It was obsessive and self-indulgent, but in the end, I had to smile and appreciate how much this guy just loves food and cooking.

The book ends almost where it began, with bread, with flour rather, and again the insight about the good soil the wheat is grown in. Hence the title of the book, I guess: look closely, it’s a bag of flour! Leaving me to reflect that sometimes we set out on a journey or to learn something and our assumptions derail us or lead to detours (the Medici princess turned out not to be the key at all). And we understand when at last we are ready to understand.

Holly Ringland, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart

“June finished her coffee, picked up her gardening gloves, and stuffed them into the pocket of her vest. She walked into the brightening morning, through the fields towards the seedling houses her mother had built. Sometimes her longing to have just one more conversation with her mother made her feel as if she might splinter to bits if she breathed too hard. Knowing that Alice was aching for Agnes in the same way tormented June. History’s inclination to repeat itself was nothing but cruel.”

One thing I appreciated about this novel was that the author (mostly) did not lay it on too thick. There is a grace, a matter-of-fact candor and beauty to her lines, as in this extract. That tone will be my lasting impression of this bittersweet, lovingly written story.

A sister gifted this book to me because she knows my love of botany and especially of flowers (well, she may have had additional reasons). Flowers play a major role here. June (above) is the current steward of the family homestead, Thornfield, which was converted into fields and greenhouses that raise a wide variety of native flowers for the cut-flower market. The farm is also a place to work and live, and find refuge, for women who have nowhere else to go or who need to retreat from the world for solace, healing, and safety. The staff is literally called “The Flowers” and while they work hard, they care for one another and make their own family, sweating shoulder-to-shoulder, and preparing and sharing meals shoulder-to-shoulder. There is an heirloom book on the premises called “The Thornfield Bible,” which lays out the meanings of various flowers, a la the Victorian-era “language of flowers.” Because sometimes words fail us and there are other ways to communicate.

Each chapter’s headnote features a flower and relays its meaning according to the Thornfield Bible. I found endless fascination in these unfamiliar plants (recognizing only banksia and grevillea, which I’ve met in bouquets and dry-climate California gardens); I sometimes diverted to this laptop to google, so I could see what they looked like. For they are all Australian flowers. A pretty resilient bunch!

Indeed, the entire tale is firmly rooted not just in Australian flora, but in vividly described Australian landscapes. I had to assume the author has been there, even lived in some of these (or similar) locales. The book’s appendix, actually, confirms that she grew up there and has native/aboriginal roots in the Northwest Territory region—and that the places described so beautifully are not literally real places, though she aimed to be true to the spirit and look. So another reading pleasure for me was being introduced to and picturing three vividly rendered Australian landscapes through which the tale moves: Thornfield, blooming down a gravel road in a dry area; a seaside landscape with sugar-cane fields aside a small town; and a deep-interior desert area with a national park where our heroine Alice works for a time. I hope they are as beautiful as described (flowers and trees, as well as rock formations, morning and sunset light, and the small towns), as I’ve never been to Australia.

Upon this backdrop we follow the life of Alice, who grows up by the sea until she is orphaned in catastrophic fire and comes to live with her grandmother June at Thornfield. Later she flees heavy dose of anguish and confusion and betrayal, choosing to run to completely unfamiliar territory, the aforementioned interior national park. What made Alice’s trajectory so bittersweet, despite the ever-present beauty of landscape and flowers, was the trauma and heartbreak (limned with grief), as well as the things not known or said. With her grandmother but also with her lovers—and even with her women friends.

Abusive men, particularly her late father and one of her boyfriends, figure. But the author doesn’t really try to understand why they lash out—that’s not why she’s here. Though the novel’s endpiece: “If you have been or are affected by family violence, please know the 1-800-RESPECT hotline is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week…” Having experienced some abuse from my first husband, I found Alice’s mental gymnastics especially painful to read (“If I apologize for not being more aware of his feelings, if I’m really calm and ingratiating, he won’t get upset and things will be fine…”).

Alice learns, she does some healing, and—she sidles up to this insight, as does this reader—gains some integration of her fractured life. Integration of the landscapes, even, for the desert was once a sea. Integration of family, even once fractured. Integration of cultures (the Bulgarian first love, the Mexican girlfriend and, of course, the native Australians), with curiosity and respect paving the way. Learning how fire destroys, rejuvenates, cleanses. Salt water, fresh water, deep-in-the-earth water. Returning to a place of origin, it changed and you changed. The diversity of flowers that populate this story knew the secrets of survival and integration already…the way forward revealed. Will she couple up again, perhaps become a mother herself, start anew in a new place? The author leaves those questions open. Healing and integration first...that is the story here. As for history repeating itself, what runs in our blood and the past and how much agency we have, hmmm, well, the exploration of Alice’s life up to the point where we leave her seems to show yes and no. Which rings true to me.

One last comment about this book. Alice always loved stories, fairy tales, and the Wonderland book she was named for by her late mother Agnes, and I reflect that there is an whiff of fairytale here. When, near book’s end, she finds safe harbor at last with nurturing Sally, the prose glows with wondrous comfort:

Dusk. Sally made leek and potato soup while Alice lay on the couch, watching as the sun finish painting the clouds and passed its brush to the stars.

They ate without talking, the silence between them filled with the clink of cutlery against china, the music of the wind chimes, the rolling sea, the warbling of the chickens, and Pip’s occasional yawns…When dinner was cleared away Sally showed Alice to her room. She gave her fluffy towels and extra-plump pillows.

The wounded young woman in me wants to be taken in at Sally’s house, too. I think of a scene in Neil Gaiman’s strange fairytale of a book The House at the End of the Lane: a lost, damaged, and bewildered child is taken in and given a bubblebath, then his host brings him a cup of tea; he savors the moment with awe, “I never had hot tea while in a tub.”

The stuff of fairytales! And yet, we can do these things for one another. I’ve had an occasional Sally in my life, and I hope also I have been Sally for my children, siblings, and beloved friends.

Andre Dubus III, House of Sand and Fog

“I sit and regard these cows, these radishes, and again I think to myself: These people do not deserve what they have.

When I first came to these United States, I expected to see more of the caliber of men I met in my business dealings in Tehran, the disciplined men of the American military, the usually fit and well-dressed executives of the defense industry, their wives who were perfect hostesses in our most lavish homes. And of course the films and television programs imported from here showed to us only successful people: they were all attractive to the eye, they dressed in the latest fashion, they drove new automobiles and were forever behaving like ladies and gentlemen, even when sinning against their God.

But I was quite mistaken and this became clear to me in only one week of driving my family up and down this West Coast. Yes, there is more wealth here than anywhere in the world. Every market has all items well stocked at all times. And there is Beverly Hills and more places like it. But so many of the people live in homes not much more colorful than air base housing. Furthermore, those late nights I have driven back to the pooldar apartment in Berkeley after working, I have seen in the windows the pale blue glow of at least one television in every home. And I am told that many family meals are eaten in front of that screen as well. {Worse now—cell phones everywhere, everyone!} And perhaps this explains the face of Americans, the eyes that never appear satisfied, at peace with their work, or the day God has given them; these people have the eyes of very small children who are forever looking for their next source of distraction, entertainment, or a sweet taste in their mouth. And it is no longer a surprise that it is the recent immigrants who excel in this land, the Orientals, the Greeks, and yes, the Persians. We know rich opportunity when we see it.”

Those are the insights of the former Colonel Massoud Amir Behrani, exiled from Iran with his wife Nadereh to California’s Bay Area. He is a proud, smart, seasoned, and stressed-out older man, trying to support and protect his family. They have dwindling savings and he works, at the novel’s start, two menial jobs, which help somewhat but of course not enough. One is a road crew, with other immigrants, picking up roadside trash, but at shift’s end, he slips into a hotel restroom and cleans up and changes into nice clothes and retrieves his older luxury car from the underground parking garage and drives home to his deceived family (after enduring a lobby desk employee trying to catch his eye and declare pointedly and aggressively, Can I help you, sir?). The charade has been reasonably successful, as his daughter was recently married off to a wealthy young man, also Iranian. Next is to fledge his son Esmail (to a good university is the plan), who is still a young teen but tall, polite, intelligent, and handsome. And Americanizing, with an enthusiasm for skateboarding and computer games. Behrani discovers and seizes on a brand-new plan to restore their fortunes and his dignity: buy a distressed house at auction, move his family there, improve it, and flip it for a large profit.

Unfortunately the house he buys cheaply at auction is the centerpiece problem, the house of sand and fog. It’s in a coastal town, south of Half Moon Bay (not a real town, I realize, somewhat familiar with San Mateo County). It’s been owned/occupied by a young blue-collar white couple originally from the Boston suburbs, Nick and Kathy; her late father had bought it long ago as a vacation home. When Nick leaves without notice or explanation, Kathy manages to hang on to her sobriety but chain-smokes and lies to her family. She supports herself cleaning houses and offices. She also ignores tax notices until one day, police deputies and a locksmith arrive and eject her. Long story short: the ejection was a county error (another house with a similar street name), though the bewildered young woman doesn’t discover this right away. One of the cops, Lester Burton, takes pity on her and gives her the number for Legal Aid. Lester is also really attracted to her, though married (unhappily). He ends up trying to help her, getting her stuff into a storage locker and paying her bill at a cheap motel while the Iranian family move in to the house. Won’t be long before Kathy and Les are shagging and he coaxes her out of sobriety, coaxes her to share a bottle of chardonnay in a fancy SF restaurant… and then, predictably, horrifically, she soon careens down the slippery slope. (So reprehensible—she told him she was three years sober—this was a plot element I could barely countenance; cops are not trained in or acquainted with addiction?! I guess this tipped the reader, but sadly not Kathy herself, to his lack of a moral compass.)

Watching this plot unfurl was like watching a car wreck in slow motion. Nobody can stop it, nobody’s right, nobody’s wrong, “solutions” are elusive or fail, love is not enough, people become their worst selves, and the whole thing is a loud, messy, tragic, ennervating clusterfuck. Well, actually, on reflection, Les was a rudderless mess and took the others down with him. I just cringed and winced my way to the bitter end.

Dubus is a good storyteller, don’t get me wrong. He establishes and sustains that gut-twisting, page-turning dread, tosses in some surprises (worse than I feared at times, and better than I feared at others). He captures pride, desperation, anger, fear, compassion, grief, racism, loyalty, love, estrangement. He nails that woozy feeling when things spiral out of control—Kathy’s slippage, though, is perhaps too repetitive, hammered too hard. Lester’s is…fog. Nadereh was naive and heartbreaking and her proud husband’s best efforts fell to his flaws. I rooted for each of them and none of them.

Here is the moment that emerged from wreckage for me. Kathy’s Legal Aid lawyer visits her in jail (her job sure changed over the course of this tale):

Connie Walsh shook her head, her lips pressing tightly together. “Then what is our defense, Kathy?”

“I don’t have one. A family is gone.” My throat started to close up and I turned my face away.

When all was said and done, I think I just question the point of this well-told, layered, grim book. Is it just a parable about bad impulses and bad luck?

Donna Leon, Dressed for Death

“Because I think the political wave of the future is groups like the Lega, groups which aim at fragmenting larger groups, breaking larger units into smaller. Just look at Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia. Look at our own political lege, wanting to chop Italy back up into a lot of smaller, independent units.”

I highlight that snippet, out of context, partly because it made me stop and think about out of context things, like today’s Republican party or the way too many poor white Americans look down on poor black and brown Americans. Divide and conquer.

But I also highlight it because it is this sort of commentary, embedded in the lite entertainment of a well-written murder mystery, is what sets Donna Leon apart and elevates the entire Guido Brunetti series. I read murder mysteries sometimes for diversion, the junk food of reading, a guilty pleasure—but, perhaps slyly—Donna Leon is up to a bit more.

One of the bad guys is a banker, and what’s not to enjoy in Brunetti’s ruminations:

…he also thought about the way bankers always avoided using the word “money,” thought of the broad panoply of words they’d invented to replace that crasser term: funds, finances, investments, liquidity, assets. Euphemism was usually devoted to crasser things: death and bodily functions. Did that mean there was something fundamentally sordid about money and that the language of bankers attempted to disguise or deny this fact?

This series additionally appeals to me because, Venice. Leon is frank about its beautiful side and its corruption, about the stinky polluted canals and annoying tourists and untenable rents as well as describing beautiful food and drink, pride of place, and tradition. This particular episode takes place during the heat of summer and her rendering is pretty merciless; note to self, do not visit in the sweltering month of August. Air conditioning is an occasional respite but Leon, true to form, considers how ultimately unsustainable and polluting that is. The whole picture wobbles improbably and ennervatingly—the city and surroundings, the infrastructure, the sea of humanity, the murder mystery itself.

Who bludgeoned to death a middle-aged transvestite and dumped the body in a field behind a slaughterhouse? Implicit in the tale is Brunetti and his staff’s assumption that all deaths are worthy of solving and mourning.

Nice to see that what I thought was the ending was actually not. Brunetti tends to solve the mystery but has to settle for workaround justice; this time, all the guilty people were toppled. Ha!

As the book proceeded, seemingly disparate plot points and details began to click into place, for our hero as well as for the reader. Improbably at first but soon quite clear. I reflect that sometimes in real life unconnected things turn out to be connected; this is part of the pleasure and part of the lesson of reading a well-crafted murder mystery. Grazie, Signora Leon.

Douglas Preston, The Lost City of the Monkey God

“Honduras is a spectacularly interesting country, whose people have a bifurcating history that goes back and forth to both the Old World and the New. While the Spanish history of Honduras is well known, its pre-Columbian history (beyond Copán) is still an enigma. People need history in order to know themselves, to build a sense of identity and pride, continuity, community, and hope for the future. That is why the legend of the White City runs so deep in the Honduran national psyche: it’s a direct connection to a pre-Columbian past that was rich, complex, and worthy of remembrance. Five hundred years ago, the survivors of the castrophe at T1 who walked out of the city did not just disappear. Most of them lived on, and their descendants are still part of the vibrant mestizo culture of Honduras today.”

This is a formidable book. I learned a lot, and was challenged by the author—as I hope any reader would be—to consider the issues raised. The many issues. Preston was the writer (National Geographic, New Yorker) that in 2012 accompanied a team of scientists and their military-infrastructure support into the incredibly dense Honduran jungle in pursuit of “the lost city.” Long a legend in regional lore (and Preston does remark that many legends have some basis in fact), the city turned out to be at least three major sites. It was lidar technology that confirmed their presence and mapped their features. When helicopters, machetes, and tents drop in to do the “truthing on the ground” work, the challenges, danger, and thrill accelerate.

Preston is both vivid and thoughtful in the telling, observing and interpreting, interviewing doggedly and researching thoroughly. In the fine print in the book’s appendices, he states “No details, events, discoveries, or conversations have been reconstructed after the event or imagined.” Woah; he is one badass hardworking reporter. I can’t imagine how many hours, years, it took to put this book together. (That he’s had the time, energy, bandwidth to write other books on completely different topics is completely impressive and astounding to me.)

I have a basic understanding of lidar (I’m married to a land surveyor; I also learned more about it when I edited John Richard Saylor’s book on lakes—lidar revealed and increased the mystery of the Carolina “bays,” many of which have become obscured by vegetation). So when Preston wedges himself into a rickety-looking Cessna with this sophisticated gear as it does its flybys over the impenetrable jungle, I could picture it: so many lasers are shot down towards the earth that enough manage to get through the leaves, trunks, vines. The thick jungle did yield its secrets. The massive white things that looked vaguely like pillars turn out to be pillars. There are also pyramids, mounds, plazas, staircases, various buildings, and what appear to be signs of supporting reservoirs and agriculture. Once the images are downloaded and verified (as “definitely not Maya” but something else—“they belonged to an ancient culture all its own that dominated Mosquitia many centuries ago”), there was “pandemonium.” Preston observes that the lead archeologist, a sober, methodical man, wrote in his notebook that banner day: HOLY SHIT!

The discovery, of course, electrifies the nation of Honduras as well as the archeology world. Well, not all archeologists are elated. Preston spends a little time on the detractors, but it was hard for me to follow what the objections really were. Word usage (“lost” and “civilization” and “discovery” are fraught, evidently)? Too many white/“colonial” researchers, disrespecting indigenous people? Cheating by using lidar? Well, as he readily admits, “the sad truth is that, until recently, many archeologists were shockingly insensitive and arrogant.” I appreciated that he paused to delve into this dust-up, reflecting that such matters had never really been on my radar. It was appropriate to school the reader here.

Preston also sees from the air the scars of clear-cutting, including some that are approaching the special areas. He is frank about the dominance and accelerating threats of drug cartels, rampant looting of already verified archeological sites, and the rogue cattle industry, even to the point of factually challenging McDonalds’ claim that they use no former-rainforest beef.

He and the rest of the initial foray endure arduous camping conditions as they begin to verify and document the lidar discoveries. A common and scarily huge snake called fer-de-lance that can shoot its lethal venom up to 6 feet. The other wild animals—quails, wild pigs, spider monkeys—were unconcerned about the humans, leading one of the experts on the expedition to remark “I don’t think the animals have ever seen people before.” The howler monkeys objected to their presence, though, and made an incredible racket. And let’s not forget the biting insects, especially the ubiquitous and numerous chiggers and sand fleas. When he dove into his tent and slathered his naked body in 100% DEET, then sprayed his clothing and put it on, I shuddered at how thoroughly he was poisoning himself, a tough but necessary decision. Also after torrential downpours, the mud became slick, sucking, and deep, utterly daunting. And the vegetation, always the vegetation, coating, strangling, engulfing verdure under massive trees. Grass so high and thick that slashing machetes made scant progress. Precipitous embankments. What a picture. Just wow.

Months later, the group dispersed, many of them come down with a disease, signaled by weeping wounds that didn’t heal. The tiny biting insects (and the unknown animals that were the original vector) passed on a leish parasite—similar, it seems, to the way deer ticks transmit Lyme disease. A scary, difficult-to-understand, difficult-to-treat malady that afflicts even our author. He explores the science, recounts his experience, including risky treatment at the NIH, and then, near the end of the book, spends more time reflecting on disease.

For what caused the catastrophic collapse and abandonment of the jungle-swallowed complex of cities? Devastating disease, traceable to white Europeans out on the coasts: smallpox and more, an “inferno of contagion.” 90 percent mortality! It annihilated these places, robbing the few survivors of everything: family, friends, culture, yes, but also language, history, religion, culture. No connection to the past. Which is why, we have to imagine, finding “the lost cities” resonates so intensely with today’s Hondurans.

Preston also delves into why the disease-exchange was so heavily weighted; Europeans didn’t bring back many the other direction, pretty much just syphilis, nor did they suffer such dramatic losses. Long story short: it has to do with Europeans having a longer history of dense urban areas and interactions with disease-carrying animals. There’s warnings about cultural exchanges to come, about climate change havoc, and the inevitable diseases, indeed pandemics. Prescient. This book preceded Covid by a few years! (Dr. Fauci himself, then at the NIH, makes an appearance, telling the author, regarding his brush with leish, “You got a really cold jolt of what it’s like for the bottom billion people on earth.”) Disease is not just biology, it is also social and cultural.

Two final things linger with me here, as I reflect on this intense adventure and intensive recounting. Work began on unearthing a huge cache of statues and pottery, possibly the most major find. Those studying them figured out that they were not deposited on the plaza over time but all at once, many broken. Something seen in other civilizations. Before you abandon ship, consolidate and dump and break all your significant objects, and don’t look back. Give up, reproach or desperately try to appease your gods, obliterate life as you knew it? Block the way for others, depart, and don’t look back.

Absorb that for a moment: would you? could you? would it make sense or feel right as a parting shot?

The other was Preston’s return, and final, trip to the site several years later. It was sobering to see the area cleared out, including an ample helicopter landing strip and a semi-permanent camp and infrastructure, including walkways over all that mud. As he must’ve known would have to happen, so it could be further excavated and studied. “But at the edge of the clearing, I was happy to see the virgin wall of jungle still rising up on all sides, dark, unfathomable, muttering with animal sounds. Our camp was still but a tiny puncture wound in the great wilderness.” Perspective. Never once does he mention Ozymandius, but one can’t help but think, if we can bear it, that we are small, our moment is small, and it’s inevitable that civilizations come and go—’twas ever thus.

Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“Now, when a man has been underestimated by a friend, he has some cause for taking offense—since it is our friends who should overestimate our capacities. They should have an exaggerated opinion of our moral fortitude, our aesthetic sensibilities, and our intellectual scope. Why, they should practically imagine us leaping through a window in the nick of time with the works of Shakespeare in one hand and a pistol in the other!”

Well, this novel was a total delight. And it wasn’t really the subject matter—a Russian aristocrat, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, is placed under house arrest in Moscow’s finest hotel in 1922 and stays there for decades. It was the telling. This author is a fun, sly, wise, earnest storyteller and the captivated reader just laps up the tale, entertained, moved, and at times nourished.

The great world spins outside and the Russia Rostov once knew changes forever. An aristocratic man of intellect, charm, and habit, he slowly but surely finds his way in his time of humbling imprisonment. He goes from an elegant suite furnished in gorgeous, meaningful, and eventually worn-down family heirlooms to a tiny, cramped space in the attic. He goes from a customer to a (superb) waiter. He navigates boredom and despair. He makes friends and over the years and the dramas, large and small, has adventures and, despite his small world, expands his heart.

Similarly, those around him and the readers of this tale come to appreciate him. As a Washington Post reviewer commented, “In our own allegedly classless society, we seem to have retained only what’s deplorable about aristocracy—the oppression, the snobbery, the racism—and thrown out those qualities that were worth retaining, which makes [this book] an endearing reminder of the graciousness of real class. It has nothing to do with money; it’s predicated on the kind of moral discipline that never goes out of style.”

The staff crew he joins become his brothers, other male friends figure, including a gifted but eccentric and eventually embittered poet that (to my surprise) embraces the arc of the story. But it is the women that command attention and move the narrative forward. Anna, the actress who becomes his lover and friend. Nina, the girl who entertains and explores, then fledges and joins the fray of history, only to reappear years later and, in desperation—her husband has been arrested and “sent away”—leaves her young daughter Sofia with him. “The Count make some efforts to discover her whereabouts, all of them fruitless. One assumes Nina made her own efforts to communicate with the Count, but no word was forthcoming, and Nina Kulikova simply disappeared into the vastness of the Russian East.” Sofia, he then essentially raises, with a little help from his friends. Almost imperceptibly, he guides her, she guides him, and he goes from “Uncle” to “Papa.” We witness how confinement cannot confine the human heart, and changes can be borne.

The novel was not a lark or as “lite” as the reader at first thinks. Limning Rostov’s odyssey is abundant, sobering commentary on the upheaval of the Bolshevik revolution and the Stalin years, the advent of nuclear power, even the (disheartening) changes in Russian architecture. And consult my extracted quote for a sample of the way the author tucks in heft and meaning.

Ah, this book was indeed endearing—loved it!

Sara Stein, Noah’s Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Back Yards

“Most of us live on ravaged land.”

Before Doug Tallamy and Robin Wall Kimmerer, there was (the late) Sara Stein—I have discovered. This is an account, a journey of years, of a gardener in rural Connecticut, trying to garden responsibly. She’s smart and candid. She learns on the job and she thinks aloud. The book is interspersed with good sketches of those she shares “her” yard with, not just plants but also creatures, from snakes to earthworms, shrews to birds.

I am embarrassed that I’m only now reading Sara Stein. I’ve spent most of my professional adult life working in the editorial department at the esteemed Horticulture Magazine and went on to write many articles and books about gardening, plants, and nature. In my defense, this book came out in 1993. In those days, I was a mere fledgling, a junior editor at the magazine. I was fortunate to be mentored by Roger B. Swain, our science editor (the guy in the red suspenders on the popular Victory Garden show), and I was exposed to other then-leaders of American gardening thought such as Allen B. Lacy, Henry Mitchell, and Elsie Cox (whose monthly Q&A column I grew up to edit, and whom Sara Stein read avidly, yikes!). I also learned a lot from the likes of Bill McDorman, Jan Blum, Neil Diboll, and regular contributors to the magazine Janet H. Sanchez and Carol Bishop Hipps. (I deliberately do not hail our editor-in-chief, the effete Thomas C. Cooper, who to our consternation or annoyance was less interested in horticulture than in hobnobbing with celebrity British garden writers and taking two-hour lunches at the squash club with the editor of The Atlantic, then based in Boston; while he gave me some room to grow, I eschewed his snobbery. But I digress.)

Now I feel abashed. I also think she some of what she is pondering and saying is quite similar to today’s heroes, aforementioned Doug Tallamy and Robin Wall Kimmerer. She is asking “what are we doing? what are we doing to the land?!” and she is not spending much ink dissing suburban landscaping—its sterility and dullness is assumed. Instead she is respectfully, diligently studying plant life (function, not just form), as well as the life of the soil, and ecosystem in general. How shall we garden? Shall we garden? Can we remediate, help, do things to help heal the ravaged landscape?

She backtracks to our/my very assumptions about gardening:

[There were] baffling divergences among the ways of plants and the ways of gardeners. A fundamental disparity is that plants grow where they can, whereas gardeners grow plants where they will. The plants’ “choice” implies no intent, merely the happenstance that their seeds fall or their rhizomes wander into circumstances in which they can survive. Gardening strives to defeat chance, or at least to rig the odds, and to do so is necessarily hard work.

Thus I learned from gardening books to create good garden loam at the same time that I learned from botany texts that there is virtually no ground of any sort in which some plants can’t grow well.

BAM.

One of my earliest gardening enthusiasms was water gardening. Because I was a renter in those days, I had to content myself with a plastic-lined half-whisky barrel planted with a miniature blue-flowered waterlily and some aquatic companions, irises and pickerel rush, plus some in-water, oxygenating parrots-feather. And a few goldfish. Dragonflies and bees came! It was so cool. I parlayed this hobby into editing and writing articles on various water-gardening topics for the magazine and, later, for two books (now long out of print; well, so much has changed, from plants offered to techniques). Sara Stein is interested in water gardening too, but she has an earthen pond on her land and also wants to attract and nurture frogs, bugs, fish, butterflies.

It struck me late and hard that I had no idea how to plant a water lily. [I could tell or show her!] I called the nursery for horticultural advice. The woman I spoke with said there was no trick at all: one simply lowers the pots into 8 inches of water…What pots?

According to this expert, one never plants aquatics directly in the mud. One pots them, places the pots in shallow water for the summer, moves them to deep water in the fall, pulls the pots in the spring, puts them back in shallow water, and so on, for as many as five years…How was one to find the sunken pots come spring? “That,” she replied, “is why we don’t recommend earth-bottomed ponds.”

How can a nursery that specializes in aquatics be so archly biased against the natural wetlands in which their specialty originated?

BAM.

So at the time of reading those two passages, and even now, days later, I am feeling back-at-heel, a bit aghast that I never had similar thoughts. I just went merrily trucking down the gardening, and gardening-education, lane. Suddenly I feel like Jon Snow; I know nothing!

Well, to be fair, Sara Stein also had to lose her gardening assumptions and look more carefully at what she was doing. The careful looking is the thing. From that, you learn…who and what inhabits your landscape, their life cycles, and what they might need or appreciate. She and her husband changed their ways. For instance, they got rid of the sterile lawnscape, and mowed paths between grasses and meadow flowers. She learned how understory plants, shrubs usually, function, not just as food and shelter but also as bridges between resources.

Her property became a work-in-progress and her goal was creating habitats, harmonious compositions (she calls them “snapshots”), and diversity. Diversity of plants = diversity of life. Though she collects and appreciates native plants for all the now-familiar reasons, she is not an “only local/regional” purist. Late in the book, she reflects

…am I really still a gardener altering the land to suit my image of it? How authentic is it to cram onto a sliver of land so many more species than arrived here on their own?

I’m really not sure.

I’m not sure either. It all flows from her initial BAM: We are living, and trying to garden, on ravaged land.

This is a very challenging book. I am challenged to look more closely at my little in-town garden beds, and at my 10-acre (mostly spruce swamp) second home. Thanks to her, I’m thinking about both of them differently. I have a lot of observing and learning to do.

Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“The worst was yet to come, he knew. Already he could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door, but the worst that would have happened was also already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been—which he would have had to live with for the rest of his life.”

A simple-looking book, with what looks like a woodcut of rooftops under snow (the tale proceeds from autumn to Christmas in a small city in Ireland). A small book, small trim size, easy to hold in the palms of your hands. Crisp white pages. Plain language, short chapters. And yet. A world of mundane details and routine but limned with feeling, suffering, insight, and courage.

The story unfurls—at an even pace—and the skill and heart of the author grows on you. When I finished, I felt a bit stunned. Then, I thumbed back through to check on a few things and saw that she had subtly but firmly attended to every thread.

The protagonist Bill Furlong, the community’s fuel merchant (coal, turf, logs, etc.) has a relatively comfortable life and he knows it. He’s more prosperous than some, despite being raised simply by a single mother, with the charity of an older widow. He’s happily married, has a decent home, has five healthy, promising daughters who have the chance to go to a good school and develop their talents. He and his wife are able to feed and clothe the girls and get them each a nice Christmas present. His daily routine does weigh on him, though. “What was it all for?…the work and the constant worry.”

His ennui creates an opening for change. I don’t think this is just a plot device. His restlessness and attentiveness allow in new information, about his late mother and his paternity, about the church, about the convent-laundry on the outskirts where he makes coal deliveries.

Accompanying author notes and the book dedication make clear that while this is a work of fiction, the women and children “who suffered time in Ireland’s mother and baby homes and Magdalen laundries” were a real, if hidden or condoned horror. Sarah, the girl who hides in the convent’s coal room—barefoot in winter and mute in her suffering (her infant baby just disappeared one day)—weighs on his heart. Until he acts to save her, but almost reflexively, thinking “if saving was what this could be called” even as he takes her hand and walks her back to his home. Why would this young girl, leaking breast milk from the removed baby, barefoot and cold, sneak out of the convent at night and huddle in the dark coal shed? He doesn’t even ask. The answer is completely obvious. It was better than the alternative.

Furlong’s understanding of his own origins and life, and empathy for Sarah, build inexorably and quietly…and concurrently. Which makes perfect sense. His decision dawns on him as it dawns on the reader. As he and the girl now approach his home, the juxtaposition of her bare, dirty, cold feet and the parcel he carries, nice new shoes for one of his daughters, underscores the great distance between her and his girls. A gap he has committed to conveying her across, a good man in a hard world. I felt he was more ready than he thought, for he has just walked her right through town, greeting a few neighbors on the way—out in the open, matter-of-fact.

Is he heroic? He wouldn’t say so. He would say he just did what he had to do, no way around it.

PS I had this book, a gift, for a while, but coincidentally (?) picked it up on Saint Patrick’s Day. Well, a year ago, I was reading Joyce. I did appreciate the Irish-isms in the text, the cadence of conversation, presented quite naturally, as one would expect with an Irish author. For examples: “Was it out at Wilson’s, you were?” “Is it the kettle you’re after?” “She’s young yet…won’t she find her stride.”

Deborah K. Shepherd, So Happy Together

“Every once in a while, I catch a fleeting glimpse of that Jack-of-the-past, and it makes my heart happy, like some rare bird sighting. Well, maybe not totally rare, not like an emu running around in our yard in Connecticut, but more like a bird you didn’t even know you were looking for, like the indigo bunting that landed on the lilac outside our back door last spring. Yes. That kind of delight.”

To be honest, reading this book felt like eating junk food. Yummy if overly sugary, compulsive, consumed in less than a day, and not a bit nourishing. Also followed by a rueful, regret-hangover, as in, did I really just consume that?

The often-cliche-laden plot is narrated by Caro (as in Carolyn) Mills, a young woman from Vermont who attends the University of Arizona at Tucson in the late 60s. She is a gifted student, always gets back to the dorm before curfew, and yet parties and shags her way through, too, good multitasking, girl! Caro falls in love twice—once with her soulmate Peter, and next with Jack, the man she marries and has three children with. Caro and Jack move East and settle in Westport, Connecticut (rich white people, golf at the country club, etc.); Jack inexorably lets go of his ideals as he goes to work for his dad’s legal firm. Wife and mother, she inexorably lets go of her promise and aspirations as a playwright. She gets a nose job (losing her Jewish nose inherited from her late mother), dyes and straightens her wild dark curly hair and…surprise, gets the bored rich white suburban housewife blues. When all three little ones are shipped off to summer camp in Maine, she runs away, to go find Peter, whom she has held in her heart all these years.

The reunion does not go as fantasized. Because, you see, Peter was and is gay, though Cleopatra-Queen-of-Denial kept hoping she could seduce him somehow. Could I guess what next? Peter sends her back to Jack and the kids, helping her to realize she loves them all. Good changes, a reboot as we say nowadays, follow…quitting Dad’s firm and doing righteous lawyering, moving into funky Brooklyn. Peter finds love, too. Nobody goes to Vietnam, nobody dies of a drug overdose (though Caro has a bad trip), nobody dies of AIDS. The only thing the ending was missing was Caro writing a Tony-winning play.

Now, carrying a torch for someone you loved long ago when you were younger is relatable. I hung in with the novel to see if Caro and Peter would indeed meet again and how that would go, 20 years later. That scene, those scenes, to my mind offered the book’s best opportunity for seriousness, insight, a little depth, some messiness.

It looked promising, as Caro dealt first his elderly, sick mother, helping her, seeing her with fresh eyes, talking about her son with her. Those scenes were real and poignant without being sappy—perhaps the best scenes in the entire book, come to think of it.

Caro and Peter’s reunion was, I thought, less brave and less touching. Oh, they both got a reality check, and they were able to recapture something of their unique and comfortable bond—they were able to talk, even to tease one another a bit and laugh a bit. Missing from all that (if I were to write this…!) were more powerful emotions. I guess I was looking for more of an awkward interlude as both struggled with the past and the present, that long ache. Some tender and wordless gap, even some tears, more time…the book just galloped along before wrapping up too neatly.

Donna Leon, Death in a Strange Country: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery

“It would have been easy for Brunetti to grow indifferent to the beauty of the city, to walk in the midst of it, looking and not really seeing. But then it always happened: a window he had never noticed before would swim into his ken or the sun would gleam in an archway, and he would actually feel his heart tighten in response to something infinitely more complex than beauty…He had never spoken of this to anyone. No foreigner would understand; any Venetian would find it redundant.”

This winter I just can’t seem to divert away from Venice, or my romantic vision of the ancient, storied, “sinking,” tourist-overwhelmed city, with the sprawling plaza and bells of the great San Marco, the Rialto bridge and the Bridge of Sighs, the labyrinthine navigation in alleys and canals (canals full of “fetid” water, according to Brunetti and many others), the slants of morning and evening light on water and stone. Maybe I should never go, for I will be disappointed or overwhelmed.

Also true is that my guilty pleasure is mystery novels, and this is the second in this series. I have a list, from another fan (my aunt), and after the confusion of entering Inspector Gamache’s world midway, I am resolved to diligently read Commissario Brunetti tales in chronological order. His take on Venice and the way he gets around on foot and in boats, the places he gets coffee and pastries, the restaurants, etc. etc., are worth the price of admission although pretty much tangential to the plot.

I totally get his impatience with and disdain for tourists, having once lived in an apartment on the summer-jammed Bearskin Neck in Rockport, Massachusetts. I smirked at this passage: “There were times when he wanted to scream at them, even push them aside, but he contented himself by taking out his aggression through the single expedient of refusing to stop or in any way alter his walking in order to allow them a photo opportunity…he lived here, damn it, and they could wait for their stupid pictures until he got past them, or they could take home a picture of a real Venetian, probably the closest any of them would come to making real contact with the city in any significant way…” (This excerpt omits the sneering at “disappointed Germans,” but you can infer it!) All the feels. Which of course means that, if I ever get there, I hope to be respectful, on or off the beaten track.

It’s a good tale. Like the first one, which I read some time ago but still recall (scroll down/it’s got to be here), Brunetti’s careful, insightful, emotionally intelligent sleuthing and instincts solve the mystery but the official resolution is quite different (we get a peek at “what passes for justice in Italy,” as another fan commented). Looks like that’s going to be a hallmark of this series. Perhaps we can look forward to his triumph in eventually nailing his preening, corrupt boss and/or his anguish at discovering his father-in-law’s true activities. I’m a little concerned that he drank a Brandy Alexander at 10:00 in the morning, even though he had a good reason. Also he spoons an awful lot of sugar into those little cups of coffee. Well, his job is stressful. All in all, a thoughtful, entertaining odyssey with small felicitous touches (see opening extract) and (sadly, demoralizingly) believable undercurrents.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city. Finally he comes to Isidora, a city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls among the bettors. He was thinking of all of these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.”

I don’t tend to judge books by their cover, and certainly, beloved books come in different editions and sizes and covers. But when I came upon Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, it was the book itself, the white cover, its elegant simplicity, that captivated me. Just white, with an embossed or recessed window or windows and neat, flowing words, title and author, oh, and a distant soaring bird, drawn like a child renders a seagull, two swipes of the pen. A slender, beautiful, white paperback. I held it, I ran my fingers over its subtly textured surface. I wanted it. No matter what was inside.

When I finally sat down to read it, I soon paused. The prose was so magical and so strange, it was like poetry, and it demanded savoring and digesting and pondering. How could it be so lovely, when the book was originally written in Italian? I would have suspend my disbelief, trust the translator, and just enjoy being swept up in the gorgeous writing.

But I could not continue. I had questions. The book is framed in short chapters, young Marco Polo the Venetian traveler, very far from home, telling vividly of cities he has seen? visited? invented? imagined? studied? explored? To an old, pensive Kublai (Qublai) Khan. Occasional interjecting chapters, also short, relate conversations between the two men. My ignorance halted me. Were they contemporaries? Did they meet? Is this at all plausible? Could Marco have learned his language in order to converse? What is going on here?

A week or two later, I felt less at sea. I had googled and learned that, apparently, they did meet. The age difference Calvino describes is plausible. Polo’s deference to The Great Khan is plausible. He is there long enough to gain facility with the language. The setting for their conversations—a terrace in a large palace—is also plausible. I returned to reading. Meanwhile, my husband and I watched several documentaries about Marco Polo, about which more in a moment.

I walked down to the local library and checked out The Travels of Marco Polo, Descriptions of the World, thinking it (despite being hundreds of years old and translated into English) was, as they say in history class, a primary source. I learned that, between 1271 and 1295 Marco Polo accompanied his father and uncle on their second trip penetrating deep into China (then called Cathay), via the fabled Silk Road, crossing deserts, braving dangers, encountering strange new people and cultures and architecture. They eventually ended up in the distant court of the Tartar emperor Kublai Khan, the mighty grandson of Genghis. The exotic foreigners were welcomed. Marco then allegedly worked for the khan, heading delegations to far-flung cities to secure them to the empire and to report back what he saw and learned (we learn from the documentaries that deploying foreigners in this fashion was a standard, indeed, pragmatic practice in the Tartar Empire). Several decades later, the khan old and declining, the Polos petitioned to leave and return to Venice. They were homesick and they perhaps correctly divined that they’d be vulnerable once the great one died; allegedly, he was reluctant to let them go but finally agreed if they would see a princess bride safely to her distant Persian groom. (Apparently the Polos took so long to get to Persia that the intended groom had passed away and they negotiated marrying her to his son, then they were at last free to go home.)

Back in Venice, I lose the thread of the dad and uncle, but Marco shares tales of great adventures and sights…to some wonder and some skepticism. Not long after, Venice gets into conflict with another city-state, Genoa, and our hero is imprisoned. But! As luck would have it, his cellmate is Rusticello, a writer of popular romances and adventures. (You can’t make this stuff up…) The book I checked out of the library evidently was the fruit of their collaboration.

 And the book has had a checkered career. Some thought it was nonsense, made up or embellished by his co-author and other scribes who recopied and recopied it/no printing press had yet been invented. Others found it riveting and the book became a popular best-seller. Drawings/paintings were added to illustrate the more intriguing or bizarre moments and elements. Christopher Columbus is said to have brought along a copy on his voyage, made notes in the margins, flagged “cities in the Orient” he might encounter.

 OK as to the films and documentaries we watched. The divide continues. Skeptics, lead by a British scholar/librarian named Frances Wood, baldly state that Polo “never went to China.” Wood cites his significant omissions: no mention of chopsticks, no mention of teahouses, no mention of women foot-binding, no mention of the Great Wall. Believers, who cite Marco’s detailed and accurate accounts of salt-production methods and paper money manufacture and use, consider him an eyewitness. (PS-the Great Wall really wasn’t erected until later, in the Ming Dynasty, so there.) However, there’s evidently no mention of Marco or any Polos in Chinese records of the period. Yet the book accurately describes canals, bridges, palaces, influential people, a campaign of tree-planting alongside major roads that actually happened. So, who knows?

 And what was Polo’s status to Italo Calvino? Would Calvino consider him an imaginative storyteller, or an observant eyewitness?

 I will say this. I have no doubt Calvino was amply familiar with the book. In fact, this book at times mimics the form of Polo’s, although it is far more engaging. A typical entry in Polo’s book goes like this:

After four days, you reach a place called Kashcar, which, it is said, was formerly an independent kingdom, but is now subject to the dominion of the great khan. Its inhabitants are of the Mahometan religion…the language of the people is peculiar to themselves. They subsist by commerce and manufacture, particularly works of cotton. They have handsome gardens, orchards, and vineyards…

And Calvino’s Polo’s entries typically go like this:

Leaving there and proceeding for three days toward the east, you reach Diomira, a city with sixty silver domes, bronze statues of all the gods, streets paved with lead, a crystal theater, a golden cock that crows each morning on a tower…but the special quality of this city for the man who arrives there on a September evening, when the days are growing shorter and the multicolored lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman’s voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time.

I mean, this is the way it should’ve been written, eh?

But Invisible Cities isn’t just a revisit, a reimagining. There are undercurrents. Polo is sensitive to the great khan’s moods and deftly deflects or manipulates him…into…what?...cheering up? Staying awake and engaged for more? Is this like Scheherazade, whereby the storyteller keeps talking to stay alive? Or is this Polo a vehicle and actually any one of us, trying to understand and take stock of a life or our own life and the places we have seen?

Also these cities Polo describes have women’s names. Hmmm? Two men, one old, one young, chatting, envisioning, fantasizing, remembering—perhaps that’s all that’s going on here. Some cities are castles-in-the-sky, beautiful, innovative, and strange, some are not what they at first seem or have a shadow side, others are unhappy and ugly. Whatever, dudes. A possibility, though this slender and strange book is absolutely more complex than that.

The enchanting rewrite of Polo’s book is not sustained to the end. Things that should not be there creep in: gas jets, tram tickets, airports, motorcycles, molecules. These items are included casually, embedded. At first they are anomalies, and I wanted to blip over them, pretend they weren’t there, cling to the beautiful, mysterious visions of “somewhere in Asia” or “somewhere long ago and far away.” But the modern elements start to accumulate and I realize, as I must, that they are here to stay and I can’t go back.

So, too, of course, does the voice change, leaving the Polo character behind and becoming, I assume, some version of Calvino himself. Bringing the present into focus like this disheartened me. Not because modern travel and modern cities can be brutal, squalid, and ugly…the cycles of history show that ‘twas ever thus. Once Calvino and the present start to fill the screen, so to speak, I felt deflated. I really, really did not enjoy finding mention of Los Angeles in these pages!

 What changed? When did the book shift? I thumb back, but I already know the answer. It was a conversation between Polo and the khan, wherein the khan pointedly observes “there is still one [city] of which you never speak”…his home, Venice. Polo, for once, does not evade. “Every time I describe a city, I am saying something about Venice.” Of course. It’s all Venice, it was always Venice—the book may be read as a catalog, a tribute, a love letter, an elegy, a reckoning with the city of his blood and heart and memories.

 And ultimately, Calvino has not journeyed this far without at least trying to contend with the dilemma of being a finite human in history. The very last paragraph in this unusual, daring book is, I think, earned—and, a hand extended to the trembling reader:

And Polo said, “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

Isak Dinesen, “The Ring”

“The man and the woman looked at one another.

This meeting in the wood from beginning to end passed without a word, what happened could only be rendered by pantomime. To the two actors in the pantomime, it was timeless, according to the clock it lasted four minutes.

She had never in her life been exposed to danger. It did not occur to her to sum up her position, or to work out the length of time it would take to call her husband or Mathias, whom at his moment she could hear shouting to his dogs. She beheld the man before her as she would have beheld a forest ghost: the apparition itself, not the sequels of it, changes the world to the human who faces it.”

This is a short story, and my manner of finding and reading it today was unplanned…as unplanned as the turn of the plot, one might say. I was cleaning out files and found this story, printed out sometime in the forgotten past from a computer’s printer (rather than xeroxed from a book), without a title or author noted. Why did I have it? Why had I saved it? What was it, why wasn’t it labeled? I took a break and sat down to read it with concentration and care—that took about 10 minutes, it wasn’t very long. The story gave me an odd feeling, because I still had no memory of saving it nor my motives for doing so. Also, short though it was, it had a disquieting spookiness about it. And depth, of the labyrinthine sort.

She did not recognize danger. She was a naive, protected, privileged, self-absorbed young woman, only 19. The opening informs the reader that she is just married, a week ago, to a beau she had since she was a child. Living with him is like playing house. Accompanying him on this day to visit his farm animals, she experiences two childish emotions: admiration for his knowledge and competence in a realm she has no knowledge of or facility with, and bored jealousy. Her urge, on the slow walk back past the woods to the meadow towards their home, to duck into a “fort” she had earlier discovered, to see if he would miss her and frantically seek her out—what little kid hasn’t indulged that fantasy as regards their parents?

She did not recognize danger when she blundered into the starving, hurt, desperate man. “He moved his right arm [his left is broken] till it hung down straight before him, between his legs. Without lifting the hand he bent the wrist and slowly raised the point of the knife till it pointed at her throat…he did not smile…but his nostrils distended, the corners of his mouth quivered a little.” This, this reader recognizes, is a threat of rape and/or death. Our heroine is utterly clueless, oblivious to either possibility. He must’ve seen this. He desists.

Maybe he’s going to rob her? She offers the only thing she has of value, her brand-new wedding band. He doesn’t take it. It falls, he kicks it aside. He only takes what he needs. That is why there are gnawed bones in his fort, remnants of the animals he has poached from her husband and his associate’s herd (fleeing had led to the broken arm). Her hankerchief had also fallen on the ground and that, he can use. He wraps it around his blade and now it fits better into his tattered sheath. He only takes what he needs. In a resonant instant, she sees and groks—her privilege, his desperation. Changed, she retreats. Reunited with her husband, she says not a word about the encounter and is vague about the missing ring, which her husband airily says he will replace.

I did—thank you, google—find out the name of the story and the author. Dinesen. Of course. A few years ago, I read a book of her short stories and, reflecting, this is clearly her work. The strange and unsaid things that pass between men and women. The power of a brief moment to profoundly alter someone’s reality. The subtly interjected commentary, portentous and insightful. Her work is full of ghostly stories like this one, where meaning is conveyed suggestively and yet devastatingly. Phew. Was Dinesen a master craftswoman or a witch? “The apparition itself, not the sequels of it, changes the world to the human who faces it.”

This story, in the right hands and with the right actress, would make an amazing film.

Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“I found Daffy in the library, perched at the top of a wheeled ladder…she went on reading as if I had never been born…I felt my inner cauldron beginning to boil: that bubbling pot of occult brew that could so quickly transform Flavia the Invisible into Flavia the Holy Terror.

I seized one of the rungs and gave the ladder a good shake, and then a shove to start it rolling. Once in motion, it was easy enough to sustain, with Daffy clinging to the top like a paralyzed limpet as I pushed the thing down the long room.

‘Stop it, Flavia! Stop it!’

As the doorway approached at an alarming rate, I braked, then ran round behind the ladder and raced off again in the opposite direction, and all the while, Daffy teetering away up top like the lookout on a whaler in a North Atlantic blow.

‘Where’s Father?’ I shouted.

‘He’s still in his study with the Inspector. Stop this! Stop it!’

As she looked a little green around the gills, I stopped.

Daffy came shakily down the ladder and stepped gingerly off onto the floor. I thought for a moment she would lunge at me, but she seemed to be taking an unusually long time regaining her land legs.

‘Sometimes you scare me’, she said.

I was about to retort that there were times I scared myself, but then I remembered that silence can sometimes do more damage than words. I bit my tongue.”

Lord knows how this book came into my possession. It’s possible that somebody gave it to me simply because of the title; everyone knows I love pie. Really the book is not about pie. It’s a “Flavia de Luce Novel” (a mystery series, with a 11-year-old sleuth) and perhaps, ostensibly?, a YA novel.

A few pages into it and I recoiled. Maybe it’s supposed to be jolly good fun, but I found it patently ridiculous. I can’t even believe I toughed it out and finished, for it never really improved (then again, I finished Orhan Pamuk’s execrable Museum of Innocence, scroll down). I guess I wanted to see if the author could actually sustain such a character—and the setting, about which more in a moment—for over 300 pages. As the excerpt above demonstrates, Flavia is a precocious brat. While siblings do tease and torment one another, to recall the scene in sea metaphors is not only weird, it requires artifice in a heated moment. Yeah, no. Nor are smart 11-year-olds cruel, impulsive, illogical, AND philosophical and self-aware all in a short span. Nor do siblings in conflict tend to say things like “you scare me” and “I scare myself.” Good grief.

How precocious is she? Some adult’s idea of precocious. She’s a chemistry whiz (with an outfitted lab inherited from a late eccentric great-uncle, reference books, and notebooks in a forgotten upper floor of the mansion), well-versed in contemporary and world history and literature, and unbelievably witty and exuberant. She’s “bold, brilliant, and, yes, adorable,” gushes a review quoted on the back cover. Here’s some more vintage Flavia:

• Seed biscuits and milk! I hated Mrs. Mullett’s seed biscuits the way Saint Paul hated sin. Perhaps even more so. I wanted to clamber up onto the table, and with the sausage on the end of a fork as my scepter, shout in my best Laurence Olivier voice, ‘Will no one rid us of this turbulent pastry cook?’

• Even from a quarter mile away I could hear the notes of the Toccata by Pietro Domenico Paradisi—the one from his Sonata in A Major—come tripping out to meet me. … Even on his best days, Bach, to my way of thinking, couldn’t hold a candle to Pietro Domenico Paradisi.

• When the water was at a rolling boil, I removed it from the heat and let it cool for several minutes, then dropped in two heaped teaspoons of Partington’s Chicken Essence and a tablespoon of good old NaHCO3…Chicken fizz! O Lord, protect all of us who toil in the vineyards of experimental chemistry!

Nope, not actually adorable. She is, how shall I express my reserve in polite language?, a contrivance. Eyebrow raised, patience tried, I investigated the author and now I think I have a theory. He is a 70-year-old man.

As for the setting—it’s a rambling, somewhat dilapidated English manor house called Buckshaw, complete with an artificial lake with an island in the middle; naturally the island has a folly, where our heroine can retreat to think. There’s an inscrutable but loyal handyman named Dogger. And a part-time cook and cleaner, who is of course stout, tart-tongued, and named Mrs. Mullett. The three girls are readers and ace musicians, but appear unsupervised—well-educated, it seems, but no mention of the school or tutors. Their remote (literally and figuratively) father is a widower who’s obsessed with his stamp collection. Mom evidently died in a climbing accident in Tibet when they were toddlers. (Occasionally the author hints that the girls and their father are undemonstrative and lacking in affection because she is not there, but, ahem, what mother of toddlers goes to Tibet without her family, to climb mountains?) The nearby village has a whimsical name, naturally: Bishop’s Lacey. They eat Wheatabix and have tea and dislike Mrs. Mullett’s custard pie and, yes, her seedy biscuits. It’s all…so freaking twee. Rural English village life as imagined by somebody who’s never been there. Is the author British? Nope.

In this environment and with these characters, a complex plot is spun, a murder is committed, Father is thrown in jail, and Flavia tears around on her bicycle (dubbed Gladys) and gets into precarious situations, trying to solve it all. Which, being very clever, she does, and as expected, everything is alright in the end. Inspector Hewitt grudgingly admires her. This reader rolls her eyes. I’ll take Pippi Longstocking, Anne of Green Gables, or Hermione Granger any day.

Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“ ‘You’re taking too long,’ he told him. ‘You can’t draw this out forever, you know. It’s time you got on with your account. Just tell the whole damn story as fast as you possibly can—and do it, please without stirring the ladies up all over again.’

‘Shelter of the World,’ said Mogor, bowing deeply, ‘there is nothing I desire more earnestly than for my whole tale to be told, for it is what men long for above all things. But to bring the Lady Black Eyes into the embrace of Argalia the Turk, I must first explain certain military developments involving the three great powers standing between Italy and Hindustan, that is to say, Wormwood Khan the Uzbek warlord, Shah Ishmael or Ismail the Safavid king of Persia, and the Ottoman Sultan.’

‘A curse on all storytellers,’ said Akbar irritably, drinking deeply from a red and gold goblet of wine. ‘And a pox on your children too.’ ”

Well, unlike the Emperor Akbar, I was not in a hurry for this complex, intriguing story to end. It weaves together Renaissance Florence (about which I know some) and India’s Mughal Empire (of which I know next to nothing, so appreciated all the vivid details of landscape and culture). It weaves together childhood friends, royal families, pirates, nobles, servants and slaves, whores and princesses, warriors and soldiers. It covers vast areas of land and sea and decades of turbulent events. It gives credence to mysteries, myths, and curses, but also relies soberly on reason and the realities of human nature. I was so entertained. In fact, as I remarked to my husband, I tried to slow myself down, make the book last longer. I walked away, but was soon drawn back. One stylistic thing I just relished: chapters are titled by their opening lines (“In Andizban the pheasants grew so fat…” “On the road to Genoa an empty inn” “After Tansen sang the song of fire” “The Duke had locked up his palace” etc. etc.). Propelled by these, how could I stop reading?

Woven into this colorful cloth are resonant moments of humor and insight, which the plot and the characters bring forth but are hardly embedded in the distant past or unique to the rollicking tale. A boy who becomes a man but keeps returning to a certain forest for peace and solitude, even as the surrounding world changes radically. A strange and clearly traumatized woman who becomes “a palace of memories,” erasing or subsuming her own personality and history in order to parrot oral histories…and the man who tries to “heal” her by coaxing forth the stories and assuring her that she’ll never have to tell them again; his object is to possess her as lover or wife. But once emptied, her past roars back and she commits suicide. The “savior” is astonished but others around them yell ‘you messed with something you don’t understand!’…treating trauma is not for amateurs. A ruler who ponders “I” vs. “we,” who reflects that tents, even grand ones used for his and his entourages’ journeys, signify the temporary nature of everything, who struggles to parse divinity and free will. A wife of an accomplished man who has suffered career setbacks (to summarize!) wonders why he hasn’t learned the value of love and simplicity—that he is rich and accomplished, and not “just a failure.” Old friends confronting the new reality they now find themselves in…are they still bound, and what does that feel like now? Even the humbling wonders of watching people you had assumptions about change.

Rushdie also asks, through the story arcs of diverse characters, about home. Is it a place? A place in time? Will you return, is it ever possible to go back? Can you establish in a new place? Is it your extended family or bosom friends/comrades in arms or originating community? The book explores these questions, though rather glancingly, I thought. I’m aware that “home” is a constant theme in his work, not the least of which is because he lives in exile.

At any rate, imagine my astonishment, not at the last page (the expected resolution arrived safely and satisfied), but at the pages after the last page: a long, detailed, very serious historical and cultural bibliography. Rushdie didn’t make up all this stuff and the story is (also) a serious work of scholarship.

May I also add, I picked this up as a tattered paperback in a dusty used-book shop, for a buck. (Because, Firenze. I’ve been seduced and enchanted by it/fortunate to have traveled there twice.) How is this even possible? OH THE WONDERS OF BOOKS.

And may I finally add that belatedly I notice on the back cover, words of praise from the great Ursula K. LeGuin, calling the novel “Brilliant” and adding “Rushdie’s sumptuous mixture of history and fable is magnificent.” Yes, it is.

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Occasionally, when Ammu listened to songs that she loved on the radio, something stirred inside her. A liquid ache spread under her skin, and she walked out into the world like a witch, to a better, happier place. On days like this there was something restless and untamed about her. As though she had temporarily set aside the morality of motherhood and divorcee-hood. Even her walk changed from a safe mother-walk to another wilder sort of walk. She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank with her little plastic transistor shaped like a tangerine. She smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims.

What was it that gave Ammu this Unsafe Edge? This air of unpredictability? It was what she had battling inside her. An unmixable mix. The infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber. It was this that grew inside her, and eventually led to her love by night the man her children loved by day.”

This whole book gave me a deep ache, as it shuttled back and forth in time towards the inevitable smashup. A violent shattering of a body and several souls, during and in the aftermath of a child’s death. “Hideous grief,” as the author finally, succinctly, firmly set it down in the final pages.

Although Ammu, the divorced mother returned to her hometown and homestead, is an important and fully drawn character, as are other adults—her brother, the old ladies in residence, her “untouchable” lover, and more—this really is a story about the children. Her young twins, a boy Esta and a girl Rahel. And their visiting cousin Sophie. How they see and move through the world, from observing frogs and ants and the river to the way they dress themselves vs. the way adults dress them to make-believe games. Even how they hear, mishear, and try to navigate the adults. Lay Ter. Also we see how adults nurture, misunderstand, and abuse them. A drink vendor molests the confused boy. A mother makes a regrettable outburst. Strange and complex political and business alliances and forces swirl around them. An environment and social structure head for a cliff.

Wonderful writing, descriptive of landscapes both pristine and ruined, of family dynamics, and of complex cultural and political changes in that part of India at that time. Sensual and honest and lurid. In this regard, the slow telling filled in deliciously. It painted vivid pictures and kept me present.

Yet I confess I got impatient with the sluggish progress of the storyline, and the author continually commenting “things can change in a day.” Indeed the theme and the point of the tale. What actually happened on that one day is a slow-burn, flashback series of disconnected reveals. Squirming, I barked at the author, “Stop telling and show!” About two-thirds of the way through, I was at least relieved to encounter a passage that made clear that whatever happened to Sophie was not directly the twins’ fault; it was an accident. Small comfort there, as nobody ever put it to them that way, and their world shattered. Brutally and irrevocably—those that survived never recovered. Such a terrible price to pay, all in the heedless vortex of one day. Was it inevitable? Could things have gone another way? Isn’t this the nature of tragic accidents…sometimes it’s just not a narrow miss.

Damon Galgut, The Promise

“She calls the farm a few hours later, but there is nobody around to pick up. The phone rings and continues to ring. A lonely sound, made more lonely by the way it repeats identically over and over, with no solution in sight. At one end the ringing, and the other end Amor. She has caused it to happen, from far away.

After a minute she gives up. Sits there for a little while, then tries again. She knows by now were will be no response, but she’s after something else. She hears the tinny beep against her ear and it almost physically conjures for her the empty rooms and passages down which it carries. That corner. That ornament. That sill. She closes her eyes, listening. A commotion of longing and revulsion inside. How did it become so complicated? Home used to mean only one Thing, not a blizzard of things at war.”

The author makes it look easy and relatable. Yet over and over again as I traveled through this novel, I was conscious of being swept up by a master storyteller. Balanced and paced, patient and thorough, even as the narrative hurtles through the decades and dramatic, piercing, dreadful, appalling, tragic, and also ordinary things happen. Galgut is like an excellent conductor, in full command of his orchestra. The tale is at turns utterly mundane and queasily buoyant.

It’s set in modern-day South Africa, well, actually it appears to cover a period roughly from the 1960s to the 1990s, I think—a time of dramatic changes, though apartheid and riots and Mandela and the Truth and Reconciliation work are only mentioned glancingly.

Primarily this is the story of one family. Amor was for me the main character, perhaps because we start and end with her, but the four sections of the book are titled for her family members: Ma, Pa, brother Anton, sister Astrid. Her arc, including her protracted absences, as the parents die and the siblings disperse, are all part of the fabric of this saga of a white, wealthy family and “their” farm. As South Africa changes and convulses around them.

The book left me disquieted, obviously the intent. It’s a portrait, a snapshot of a time and place. The cluelessness, cruelty, and rapaciousness of the white people; the subjugation, suffering, and rage of the black Africans. Squalid, dangerous cities (Astrid is carjacked and murdered, for her BMW and jewelry), suburban sprawl behind gates and security systems. Relieved by a rugby championship that briefly unifies the nation. And Amor’s final effort to, at last, keep a promise her dying mother made to the black maid decades back. When the maid’s son, once her friend and now an angry stranger, spits at her gesture, she softly, doggedly insists, “I have a name, Lukas.” One person, trying to wrest personal from general.

We get to know the family and other characters, often intimately, navigating their daily lives in that place and time. The omniscient tone is mostly matter-of-fact, but occasionally harsh or sarcastic, as the person or situation merits. Ah, look at all the lonely people.

Then, like a puff of smoke, the engrossing book ends and all these unique people slide away. Even Amor; her work here is done. A clue may be in the epigraph, attributed to Federico Fellini, which I almost forgot about until I thumbed back through the book after finishing it:

This morning I met a woman with a golden nose. She was writing in a Cadillac with a monkey in her arms. Her driver stopped and she asked me, “Are you Fellini?” With this metallic voice she continued, “Why is it that in your movies, there is not even one normal person?”

Aha.

PS - Discovered this book because I saw an article touting the Booker Prize; The Promise was 2021’s winner. I googled Booker Prize, trying to find out more and how prestigious etc. That was kind of a strange exercise. It’s a British thing but awarded to “the best novel written in English and published in the UK or Ireland [and presumably South Africa],” noting that the award inevitably leads to the top book getting a publicity boost and potentially worldwide distribution. Scrolling through the prize’s history, it all feels a bit clubby, even though the scope has broadened over the years and black, brown, and Asian authors (for example Kazuo Ishiguro, Arundhati Roy), and even Americans (George Saunders) have been shortlisted or won. Yet you see a lot of the same names repeat and there seems to be a history of controversy, from who wins, to who gets to judge, to judges defying the rules and awarding two books at once, to controversial acceptance speeches. Phew. Still, without that article, I might never have chosen to read this book…

Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

“There was only one thing to do, then. She curled up on the bed, feeling small and pink and tender as a cocktail shrimp, and let her fantasy go, like a balloon soaring into the sky until it burst.”

I’m trying to put my finger on what it is about this novel that troubles me, despite the fact that so many have showered it with praise and despite the fact that I got wrapped up in it the past two days. That it’s a quick read may be a clue—it does have a whiff of “beach reading” about it.

It it the bland, stereotyped setting? The story is set in suburbia in the late 90s (no cell phones or googling of everything, yet) and features the teenage Richardson siblings, plus their parents and classmates and general environs. They live in the highly touted “progressive” Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights. This turns out to be a real place, a super-suburbia, planned in look and feel to be both privileged and colorblind (blacks and Asians allowed! so long as they’re affluent). Seems like an extreme spot for the author to pry back the protective cover of suburbia except, evidently, she knows the place, grew up there. Her familiarity with it certainly gives the prose an ease and swift pace. But I continued to harbor the nagging question of whether she was mocking or sneering at it and its residents, or if this is more a Sympathy for Suburbia novel?

Into this placid, well-oiled world comes two wild cards: Mia, a free-spirited single mother, an artist, and her precocious, earnest daughter Pearl, who have almost no possessions and rent half a duplex from the Richardsons. And a poor young Chinese immigrant woman, Bebe, who, abandoned by the father of her newborn and desperate as she tries to care for it without resources or support, leaves the baby at a firehouse (safe spot). Soon infertile friends of the Richardsons are in the process of adopting that baby—highlighting, again, privilege vs. poverty. May I also comment that it was a little hard to believe that practically every character was intertwined by book’s end—a lot of coincidences. Hmmm.

The author works to be fair to everyone (“deeply empathetic,” trumpets the cover), which felt at times labor-intensive and faintly contrived. This thoroughness and even-handedness, however, has the effect of humanizing even the most unappealing character, the control-freak Richardson mother. We last see her in the middle of the night, in her robe on apartment stairs, hair down, reckoning with the day that led her and her family there and the arc of her own life and heart.

The subplot about the Chinese-immigrant waitress and her baby brought up a host of issues: the struggles and confusion of immigrants in poverty; infertility and adoption; courts/judges/lawyers; press coverage and discussion of controversial issues; racism (including, why no good Asian dolls or kiddie books?); compassion. Here, compassion for all parties in this arena—even the lawyers, even the judge—felt like an exercise. But when, ultimately, Bebe nabs her baby in the night and boards a plane for Canton—presumably making a clean getaway despite the heavy press coverage—I yelled at the book, “How? with what money? How did she book the flight? How did she get to the airport? There are no direct flights!”

Also in retrospect the artist Mia, so intriguing to the reader and to the teens (even her own daughter mostly likes her), is a bit saintly and unbelievable. As a foil to Mrs. Richardson, she often seems reasonable, kind, and respectful. But on her own? Obsessed with her art, I get (I know a couple artists like that). But never had, contemplated, refused, or needed a partner or love interest? Still a virgin? No friends, anywhere?

What did work was the rendering of sibling dynamics (which perhaps Ng also knows firsthand). The Richardson teens have relatable hanging-out moments—watching TV together, shared meals—and get interested in one another’s friends, but can also be clueless or mean/snarky or simply wrong about one another. We discover that they carry bits of the parents and presumably, actually, their family tree. When we learn Mia’s backstory, her relationship with and memories of her only brother ring true and are poignant. The author nails all this and I reflected, after I left Mrs. Richardson on the dark stairs and after the moment where Mia glimpses one of her brother’s endearing mannerisms in Pearl, about my own siblings and my own children. A good storyteller will leave space for such reflections in their readers.

Ng has occasional nifty turns of phrase that I paused over. The opening excerpt, I am well-aware, mixes metaphors, but deliberately IMO. Cocktail shrimp are undoubtedly offered as appetizers at adult parties and holidays in this milieu. Yet a balloon on a string hearkens to childhood parties. This young woman has just decided, after considering her college acceptance to Yale, her boyfriend’s (understandable, honestly) horror of parenthood, and the projected judgment of their parents and peers, to get an abortion. Which she then does, without even telling him she’d gotten pregnant. (She appears to have her mother’s pragmatism.) Another wording I admired is when Pearl brings one of the boys through her apartment and they pass her eccentric mother at work on a project: “ ‘Part of the process,’ Pearl informed him as they cut through the living room, with the nonchalant air of a native unfazed by the curious customs of the land.”

I don’t know, though. Is it enough to just peek behind these doors with the even-handed author and reflect on the truism that we never really know what someone else is going through? And Sympathy for Suburbia doesn’t hold up once the McMansion is literally burnt down—a heavy-handed way to jolt everyone, I thought, brow furrowed, wondering if Ng scorns this world after all. “Little fires everywhere” was not a mere metaphor? Having a wild child light the matches was, sorry, over the top and doesn’t let the author off the hook for me here. Meh.

Henry Beston, The Outermost House

“For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

Well, that’s an interesting perspective I haven’t heard before. Huh. Food for thought. He does repeat/return to this notion of animal (and plant) “nations” throughout the book.

All my reading life I have been drawn to and collected books about nature, from Annie Dillard and Edward Abbey and Loren Eiseley to Henry Thoreau, Barry Lopez, and Robin Wall Kimmerer. (Somehow, my aspiration to be on those shelves has somewhat come true, though quite modestly—I have yet to plunge in directly; most of my books are horticulture- and botany-themed.) I certainly had a sense that this slim paperback belonged on the shelf and have had a copy for years, perhaps decades, without ever cracking it open, not sure why. Perhaps the aggressive “THE ENDURING CLASSIC!” trumpeted on my edition’s cover was a bit off-putting. Perhaps it was because the book takes place on Cape Cod, which in my few forays over the years has left me a bit cold—overbuilt, swarming with tourists, private beaches blocked by trophy houses, etc. But I decided I could no long overlook or avoid the book now that I have a small home overlooking the sea. I am here now. My and Henry’s time has come.

Turns out, it’s an old book: it was first published in 1928. So the Cape Cod he knew is quite gone, I’m sure, though I notice that the many positive reviews credit Beston and the book with persuading the powers that be to protect some of the landscape, to create Cape Cod National Seashore. In his day, it was a quieter, far less populated place, certainly where he was, which was mid-way out, Eastham, “facing the Atlantic, on the forearm of the Cape.” He erected a simple house out out on the dunes (just a shack, though with lots of windows!), heated with a little stove and accessing a well. Not the sort of thing that would, or could, be built today. But at the time, his modest little house was allowed, and was indeed the outermost. He relates that he came in late summer to stay a couple of weeks and elected to remain for the spin of an entire year.

The book is clearly derived from his notes, letters, and journals. Beston was 40 years old at the time and evidently a bachelor, though not friendless or given to being a hermit. I looked up more information, intrigued, liking him, and learned that he later married another writer, settled in mid-coast Maine, and raised two daughters with her, but that first she challenged him to write this book, allegedly saying “Write it—no marriage till your [beach book] is written.” He went on to author others, but none were as popular or celebrated as this freshman effort.

Forceful, inquisitive, and eloquent, The Outermost House is intense. He obviously gave himself the assignment of being thorough in his observations and descriptions, which are passionate and detailed, not in the least bit dull. He has a lot to tell. The moods and appearances of the sea, offshore, and, washing up on the sand. The dune and marsh topography and how wind and water alter it. Birds! He lavishes attention on everything from seagulls and terns, to less-familiar seabirds who use Cape Cod as a stopover in their great migrations, to a wee song sparrow that favors the peaked roof of his tiny abode. (He’s less interested in plants, though he doesn’t ignore them… personally disappointing.) Storms—fearsome winter ones, sluicing autumn ones, the drenching rains of spring. He renders mood, colors, sounds, textures, even scents, with forthright prose. He means to deliver a vivid portrait and he does.

I did have to pause and marvel at how he described the scent of familiar seaweeds above the tideline, a smell I experience often here (because the Bay of Fundy tides pull out so far, stranding plenty at low tide) and would best characterize as pungent and be done. Not him.

Inland forty feet or so from the edge of low tide, other odours await. Here the tides have strewn a moist tableland with lumpy tangles, wisps, and matted festoons of ocean vegetation—with common sea grass, with rockweed olive-green and rockweed olive-brown, with the crushed and wrinkled leaves of sea lettuce, with edible purple-red dulse and bleached sea-moss, with slimy and gelatinous cords seven and eight feet long. In the hot noontide they lie, slowly, slowly withering—for their very substance is water—and sending an odour of ocean and vegetation into the burning air. I like this good natural savour.

This guy is like a master painter with loads of hues in his palette, or a virtuoso musician. Descriptive passages like this abound in this book, filling me with assent and carrying me headlong onward, reminding me what words can do.

Beston’s year on the dunes is not solitary, he hastens to point out. He goes into town for supplies periodically, like one does (this is part of my own seaside-house life). He befriends the fellows who work at the nearby Nauset Light, welcoming them for a chat even in the middle of the night if they pop in on their rounds, and joining them for coffee and conversation when in the vicinity of their quarters. When there is a bad storm and a wreck—and he graphically relates hair-raising descriptions of several—he’s right there with other Cape residents, trying to help (some sailors die, some are rescued; I certainly got the impression that it’s up to the sea who survives!) and sifting through debris after.

I noticed and appreciated that he was attuned to the damage humans do to the natural world:

A new danger…now threatens the birds at sea. An irreducible residue of crude oil, called by refiners “slop,” remains in stills after oil distillation, and this is pumped into southbound tankers and emptied far offshore. This wretched pollution floats over large areas, and the birds alight in it and get it on their feathers. They inevitably die.

That was in the late 1920s. I’d like to think humans no longer do such an awful thing, but. In fact, if Beston could see the pollution we’ve dumped into the “boundless” oceans in my lifetime, I bet he’d be shocked and horrified.

He also observes and laments the presence of English starlings in Cape Cod ecosystems, commenting that “the presence of these rabble blackbirds disturbs the entire natural economy of the region” as they greedily devour masses of autumnal seeds and berries. I didn’t realize that problems with what we nowadays call invasive species were perceived that long ago. Sobering. Further testament to this fellow’s keen powers of perception.

But, sad and true though these observations may be, I don’t want to linger with them. The overall arc of the book is splendid and beautiful. Because I live part-time by the sea and chose to read it while in this house, I felt validated, inspired, and uplifted by the accuracy of his observations. The coast on a dark night does feel like you are in “interplanetary space.” When he speaks of spring’s return and winter’s receding chill, he cites the “ghost of cold.” Spot-on.

The final chapter, “Orion Rises in the Dunes,” is brief but gorgeously written, as he sums up his year with the return of autumn—like the constellation, “my year upon the beach had come full circle.” The book comes to a crescendo here, like a great wave gathering mass, force, and speed. I could not help but speculate that these few last words were yet another assignment he gave himself (or perhaps, his editor required it) (or, perhaps his wife-to-be pressed him, “sum up, dear! you must!”). In fact, you might say he breaks the fourth wall. “What understanding of nature [did I gain] … from so strange a year?” “And of what of Nature itself, you say, that callous and cruel engine, red in tooth and fang?”

His answers are earned, so I straightened up and paid careful attention. “Creation is still going on…Creation is here and now.” (italics his) And to the second question?

As for “red in tooth and fang,” whenever I hear the phrase or its intellectual echoes I know that some passer-by has been getting life from books. [OH, SNAP] It is true that there are grim arrangements. Beware of judging them by whatever human values are in style…Live in Nature, and you will soon see that for all its non-human rhythm, it is no cave of pain. As I write I think of my beloved birds of the great beach, and of their beauty and zest for living. And if there are fears, know also that Nature has its unexpected and unappreciated mercies.

A bold, frank piece of witnessing. Sitting here on this rocky, scrubby hill overlooking the restless wintry sea, I hail his sincere report and I hail its truthfulness.

Sue Grafton, V is for Vengeance

“I was apprehensive about dinner. Rosie’s Hungarian by birth and favors strange native dishes, many composed of animal organs smothered in sour cream. Earlier that week, she’d served sautéed sweetbreads (a calf’s thymus gland, if you want the offal truth). I’d eaten with my usual oinky appetite. I was mopping up the plate with half a dinner roll when she told me what it was. Thymus gland? What could I do about it when I’d already eaten it? Short of running to the ladies’ room to jam a fork down my throat, I was stuck. It didn’t help that I enjoyed it.”

Ahhaha, Ms. Kinsey Millhone, I saw what you did there and snickered. I almost rolled my eyes except for the fact that you refrained from highlighting or lingering on “offal.” We also get “I’m a big fan of forgiveness, as long as I’m given the opportunity to get even first.”Occasional toss-off lines like this in this long series maintain her persona as a “hard-boiled,” sassy PI, and make for fun “lite” reading. Her eating habits are still appalling, such as McDonalds-gone-cold for breakfast, Fritos for lunch, and dinner at Rosie’s yucky neighborhood restaurant/bar. And yet Kinsey is tidy, regularly cleaning her small, spare apartment and rented office across town, even housesitting/cleaning for her elderly neighbor Henry (who is actually a good cook and feeds her well when he is in residence). She still goes for runs along Cliff Drive; has her durable little black dress; her hair is still a fright; her VW Bug is gone, though, replaced by a Mustang, of all things. I’ve always pictured her as petite and wiry but cute, if disheveled. Maybe Holly Hunter could play her in the film version of one of these rollicking mystery stories.

I haven’t checked in with her in years, because my dad used to send me each book after he finished it and he’s gone now. Also I think the author has passed away, without getting to Z. All this saddens me so. I spontaneously grabbed this one as a used paperback a couple days ago in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, guessing that V is where I left off. It’s the tail-end of the holiday season out here and this sort of reading is certifiably junk food for me. But ‘tis the season for spontaneous and excessive consumption of junk food! Hell, I ate Christmas candy and leftovers while plowing through this installment.

Can’t say as how I really enjoyed this book or even tried to figure out whodunit, who was lying, who was withholding valuable information, or why Kinsey loaned a couple hundred bucks to and also put her ass on the line for a petty crook named Pinky. The overall plot was piecing together, tracking down, and bringing down a crime ring trafficking in…shoplifted items, mostly clothing. Sorry, I had trouble believing this generated substantial volume and big money, or that organized crime would even bother. I suppose. Yawn to the plot. Also the setting is stubbornly still, what, the 80s, so, no cell phones, no internet searches…instead, trips to the library and looking up people and businesses in phone books—these anachronisms made this reader restless and, err, disconnected. How would Kinsey operate in 2022?

Nah, I read it for the same reason I’ve always read Kinsey Millhone mysteries. They’re set in and around Santa Teresa, which is unabashedly my hometown of Santa Barbara, with only the most subtle name-changes of streets and businesses. State Street, Hollister Avenue, the neighborhood off Cliff Drive, the semi-industrial back streets of Goleta, lower Milpas Street, it’s all familiar and correctly described. It’s also a hoot that Grafton renders the working-class, even seedy, side of Santa Barbara, a city that presents and markets itself as posh—that’s actually my favorite joke here.

Kirk Wallace Johnson, The Feather Thief

“Before the Hermès bag or Louboutin heel, the ultimate status indicator was a dead bird. The more exotic, the more expensive, and the more expensive, the more status conferred upon its owner. In one of the stranger intersections of animal and man, the feathers of brightly colored male birds, which had evolved to attract the attention of drab females, were poached so that women could attract men and demonstrate their perch in society. After millions of years, the birds had grown too beautiful to exist solely for their own species.”

This non-fiction “thriller” was given to me last Christmas by somebody who knows how much I love natural-history museums (see review of Richard Fortey’s Dry Storeroom No. 1, much below). It involves the odd and daring theft in 2009 of old, rare bird “skins” (entire body preserved, wings tucked, cotton in eyeholes, data tag cinched around feet/talons) from the Tring, an outpost of the British Museum of Natural History, located in a small English village. The thief was a precocious young American man, a tier of ornate Victorian fishing flies as well as a virtuoso flute player, in London attending the Royal Academy of Music.

Beautiful, colorful, rare feathers are no longer a staple of women’s fashion, but they remain sought-after fly-tying ingredients, expensive and highly desirable to diehard enthusiasts. The problem isn’t just that the right feathers are rare, but that most are protected by the international CITES (conservation) regulations. Are the rules enforced/do enthusiasts respect the rules? Is there a black market? What do you think?

Interestingly <cough> vintage-Victorian-era flies are art alone—they never are deployed by fishers! “After millions of years,” the author comments at one point in this complex tale, “the birds had grown too beautiful to exist solely for their own species.”

I set the intriguing but eccentric-looking book in the “to be read in winter” stack. As this winter roared in, I got busy baking Christmas cookies for family and friends—an annual tradition for me (but not nearly as fun or messy as when my kids were young and helped), taking many successive nights in the kitchen. I like to pick out an episode of “This American Life” podcast to listen to as I work. And lo, what to my wondering eyes should appear as I scrolled through the “recommended” list, but a story/interview called “The Feather Heist.” Rang a bell. I checked; yes, based on the unread book. Part of the author’s promotional tour.

So I listened as I baked, utterly captivated by the strange story. The thief, Edwin Rist, was a homeschooled, intelligent, talented young man from Claverack, New York (not far from where I presently live), perhaps a bit coddled but also parented to encourage and develop his enthusiasms and skills (not a criticism/I tried to be that kind of parent, too). Heralded as the best fly-tier of his generation, his enthusiasm…or obsession…lead to him planning and executing the theft. He wasn’t caught right away. The museum’s staff noticed and investigated the broken back window he used for his bold nighttime break-in, but—after anxiously checking their most prized specimens, Darwin’s finches and a few related items—did not notice what had been taken until much later when a visiting researcher requested access to the rare birds collected by Darwin’s contemporary, Alfred Russel Wallace, and found the stash plundered.

In the ensuing year or so, Rist snipped off and discarded accession tags (essentially rendering the specimens worthless to science, or at least greatly hobbling), and plucked, pried, and shaved off individual feathers. Some he sold (he also evidently sold a few entire skins, with the identifying/incriminating tags removed), some he fenced to an acolyte in Norway, some he probably hoarded for his own use. Some were never recovered. Thousands, perhaps, millions of dollars’ worth and, as the author hammers home, the theft blew “a devastating hole” in the scientific record.

Rist was eventually caught and brought to trial. He plead guilty but was not jailed, never came fully clean, never admitted to or revealed where the still-missing items are. The incident broke the heart of the natural-history people, was controversial in the fly-tying world (a mighty strange subculture), and stirred outrage in the author and some of his allies, including highly credentialed ornithologists and researchers. Rist’s defense? Asberger’s. With precedent in the British courts. Yes, he walked. In the single interview the young man granted to the dogged author, he sneered at the natural-history museum, where these lovely feathered specimens languished “in boxes in the dark.” “I’m not a scientist,” he allowed. Oh, in that moment I would’ve slapped the lad! Rist also rationalized that because his theft was from an institution, not from a person, what real harm? In the “This American Life” conversation, as well as in the epilogue of the book, we learn that to this day, he walks freely, and has a career as a professional musician in Europe…using another name.

Johnson really carries this story. He shared just enough of his personal life to give us context—he first heard of Rist and the Tring while fly-fishing in New Mexico, trying to clear his head after frustrating, dangerous, and distressing work as an advocate for resettling Iraqi allies. He goes down the rabbit hole of theft, obsession, black markets, science, the British legal system, what Asperger’s may or may not be (suffice to say, he does not think Rist has the condition nor that it would excuse his behavior), the fly-tying subculture, the history of the intersection of feathers and humans (see opening quote above). He is a persistent (obsessed?) and skilled researcher, a smart fella, and a natural storyteller. This weird side-project did lead to a book contract, took him many years and to many places, and appears to have received excellent reviews…proving, once again, that any topic becomes compelling in the right hands. It’s also good to learn, in the epilogue, that the book’s surprising popularity exposed problems and inspired changes, from better security at natural-history museums to a movement, not unlike the one that finally dethroned women’s ornate feather hats, to use more sustainable (dyed) feathers in fly-tying.

Had a genuine guffaw in the moment when the author persists in his concerns and accusations at a fly-fishing symposium and trade show and is threatened with “you do not want to piss us off”:

Between [my time in] Fallujah and battling the government [bureacracy and politics], I was used to all manner of threats, but there was something exhilarating about receiving one from a man with a pinch of feathers in his hand.

Yet I have to say the part that I enjoyed most was reading about Wallace. Probably because I also relish learning about plant explorers—similar era, similar dudes (mostly smart, determined white British guys who managed to get funding for their expeditions). Wallace, the author reminds us, formulated the theory of natural selection, “the survival of the fittest,” concurrently with Darwin, though he never became a household name and is perhaps mostly forgotten. His epiphany came on a specimen-collecting expedition in the New Guinea area; he was halted and confined to a small hut because his body was swollen and pocked by innumerable insect bites. In misery, but with his brain still whirring with all he had seen and collected, the insights coalesced. And then I learned something I didn’t know about Wallace’s train of thought:

…his thoughts turned worriedly towards the future. “It seems sad, that one the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild inhospitable regions…while on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant regions…we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy… “This consideration,” he concluded, “must surely tell us that living things were not made for man.”

We may (big sigh) be sure.

Wallace anticipated correctly that the specimens would be valued, perhaps—certainly—in ways he could not even imagine in his day. As if the role birds played in his and Darwin’s insights about evolution were not enough, there is indeed more. Scientists compared specimens in the Tring’s egg collection to demonstrate that shells had grown thinner after the introduction of DDT pesticides, which, as we know, are now banned. Feather samples from the Tring holdings helped document rising mercury levels in the oceans, leading researchers to call them "the memory of the ocean.” If we and natural history museums survive a bit longer, further insights may be derived. I’m with the author—the crime was disrespectful on many levels, outrageous.

At times in the telling, Johnson’s energy and conviction flags. The project is taking years and costing lots of expensive travel. It’s a strange story. He’s nothing but an “amateur bird-heist investigator.” In his “This American Life” interview, he concedes that, near the end of his investigations, when he got really close—visiting the acolyte/accomplice in Norway—he also had a breakdown moment of “what does all this even matter, in the grand scheme of things?” And yet his tale, a true story, let’s not forget!, casts a large and meaningful net: science, nature, the sweep of time, human frailties, morality, dedication, love of beauty, love of, and need for, knowledge.

Joan Clark, Latitudes of Melt

“For years I wouldn’t visit the Cape because I thought it would make me lonely for Tom. I am lonely for him, but because I enjoy solitude it’s a manageable loneliness. During the past few years I’ve been out to the Cape several times and now I can visit it with the detachment of someone who has settled into another life, someone who has made herself over into someone else.”

Although I have another home, and other beloved places, that I return to in the Canadian Maritimes, I have come to think of Newfoundland (evidently properly pronounced as new-found-land, not new-f’len’) and Labrador as off the edge of the map. The distances, I now understand, are great—why, in these modern times, it takes a ferry from North Sydney in Cape Breton six to eight hours to reach Port aux Basques in the very southwestest part of the huge province, depending on weather! People refer to it as “The Rock.” Is it therefore desolate and unpopulated? Evidently not or not all of it. The city of St. John’s looks modern and even pretty—brightly colored homes and businesses, apparently a desirable magnet for artists and not a cheap place to live. Gros Morne National Park looks spectacular. And then, the icebergs. The icebergs floating by. Even in summer.

One thing this long, sweeping, detailed novel schooled me on was the icebergs. One of the main characters, Stan, is an ice engineer—“ice was Stan’s birthright”—and his career takes him to both poles, to the IMAX filming of the wreck of the Titanic, and figures in his wife’s strange and tragic death. His work is often funded by those parties wanting to drill for oil in the Grand Banks; parsing ice’s movements, behavior, and qualities is critical. (I thumb back to the back of the title page, having noticed that no mention is made of climate change and the accelerating melting of polar ice in our lifetime; this book came out in 2000. Sobering to think that just over two decades later, the research focus has dramatically diverted.)

I also discern that latitudes of melt is not an expression invented by this author, and I appreciated her pausing to explain:

Of the ten thousand icebergs calved in Greenland each year, about one-tenth crossed the latitude of 48 degrees north; half that number made it to the latitude of 46 degrees; few of these would make it past the tail end of the Banks at the latitude of 43 degrees. Because Newfoundland was roughly between 46 and 51 degrees north, it was smack in the middle of the latitudes of melt. Every year, icebergs drifted down the Labrador Current to ground in the island’s coves and bays.

Then she connects them to Stan’s work:

For an ice man, the size and variety of bergs were a scientific and strategic challenge, which was not to say that Stan ignored these temples of beauty, their supple elegance and fluid grandeur, the way they had perfected the art of becoming anything under the sun: a Roman bath or a tropical lagoon; an alpine cliff or an Arizona canyon, the Taj Mahal or the Colossus of Rhodes. These wonders of the world weren’t replicas or imitations but sculptural abstractions, monuments of artless splendor. …so lethal that in spite of the iceberg watch begun after the Titanic disaster, the best advice he could give anyone traveling or working in the North Atlantic was to tell them to stay out of an iceberg’s way. Impossible of course, which was why so much of ERI’s research was focused on how ships, boats and now oil-drilling platforms and pipelines could be protected against the ice.

The character that begins, ends, and unites this decades-spanning tale is Aurora, Stan’s mother (that’s her words quoted at the start of this review, after she becomes a widow in her old age). She’s found as an infant in a blanket-filled cradle on a piece of ice by a couple of Newfoundland fishermen, after the Titanic’s wreck. The family that takes her in, gives her her auspicious and hopeful name, and raises her as one of their own, live simple, impoverished lives in a hardscrabble village on Cape Race. They make an effort to report her rescue, sending notices to newspapers, but nobody ever claims the child. She becomes one of them, from childhood chores and roaming on the moors, to marrying a local fellow, to raising children, to navigating widowhood and becoming a devoted grandmother.

It is the granddaughter, Sheila, who tracks down Aurora’s origins in Ireland. But the novel doesn’t really build to these revelations, avidly towing along the reader’s curiosity as the mystery finally gets solved. Nor does learning the details substantially change the old lady’s life because, she already had a family and a life and a story.

The part where the author retraces the baby’s origins—right back to conception and the womb!—is a stylistic diversion from the rest of the book, a vivid recounting of what might or must have happened, right up to the wreck and that terrifying, tragic night in the North Atlantic. The tone change troubled me a little, until I reflected, why not? what other way to explore the backstory, except by imagination?

What I truly enjoyed was how well and evenly (an even pace, I mean) the author told the tale of several generations. Relationships, travel, homes, and conversations all slowly but surely inhabited their own time, right up to and including the correspondence between aging Aurora and young Sheila. Beautiful work. Hard work. I learn from a clipping about the author tucked into the front that the book took five years to write—I can believe it.

The author also shares that she was still working on the novel with the epic and popular Titanic film came out. “I freaked,” she confesses. “I wouldn’t go see it until I’d written about four drafts of my book…I thought people would be tired of the Titanic.” We’re not, I’m not, because Jack and Rose were hardly the only story from that wreck, of course.

Aurora’s final days and Stan’s visit to the wreck interweave in the masterfully composed final chapter. Darkness and ice to darkness and ice, with human love and hopes and fears twined in—great moments suggesting that time is more elastic than the arc of our lives.

Diane Setterfield, Once Upon a River

“The Thames that goes north, south, east, and west to finally go east, that seeps to one side and the other as it moves forwards, that goes slow as it goes fast, that evaporates into the sky while meandering to the sea, is more about motion than about beginnings. If it has a beginning, it is located in a dark, inaccessible place. Better study where it goes than where it came from.”

After the relentless gloom of the short stories by Iranian women, and after completing an intensive non-fiction book of my own, I was ready for a “once upon a time” novel. This one began with “There once was an inn that sat peacefully on the bank of the Thames at Radcot, a day’s walk from the source…The Swan at Radcot had its own specialty. It was where you went for storytelling.” Oh, how I love storytelling inns…The Hobbit! The Name of the Wind! Ahhhhh, I got a steaming mug of herbal tea and curled up on the sofa with the snoozing dog and this book, ready, eager, relaxed, too.

It did not disappoint. Like the river at the center of the tale, literally (action takes place on both sides of it) and figuratively (every character has a relationship with the river, whether gazing, boating for business or pleasure, fishing, or monitoring its seasonal rising and falling out of concern for a dwelling or farm crops), the novel sometimes moves fast, sometimes drags and diverts. I would say the author kept a strong hand on the tiller in this strange and engrossing story that is mostly about a mute little girl that nearly drowned. The mixing of fantasy—dragon damage to a thatched roof, a mysterious rescuing ferryman named Quietly (shades of Frederick Forsyth’s The Shepherd)—and science (a postscript about how it is possible for a person, especially someone as small as a child, to revive after being immersed in cold water) had me furrowing my brow at times. But the river takes everything along.

Supporting characters, people who were not the little girl or those who claimed her, captured my attention. Two couples in particular: the photographer and the nurse, and the mixed-race farmer and his slightly deformed wife. Their backstories and their affection for one another were sweet.

The complex ways children challenge and also hold our hearts was also drawn realistically and poignantly. “I know what it is not to belong…well, I see a child on the edge of things,” Armstrong says of his errant stepson Robin. So, he loved the boy, right up to the brink. Jonathan, the pubkeepers’ last child, has Downs Syndrome (not called so, but correctly described), and the family and patrons make space for and encourage him; he has some gifts for them in return. The little mute girl, who awakened powerful parental feelings in quite a few people, turned out not to be—as I grumpily suspected—a mere focal point. She couldn’t speak, but actually she told them all along who she belonged with, “she was looking expectantly down the river, as though waiting for someone.”

And because the story began and ended in the storytelling pub, the author earned her place by the fireplace by relating and revealing all this and more in the voice of a bard. In the voice of a river. Really enjoyable—beguiling—just what I hoped it would be!

(Edited by Kaveh Basmenji), Short Stories by Iranian Women

From there came the ambiguous hum of the alley and the street, gradually dissolving with the coming of silence, and eventually joining the silence of the evening. At that moment the strokes of Shahzadeh’s clock echoed into the pine branches and the multicolor sparkle of the minarets’ tiles, and immediately after that the deep, melancholic voice of the muezzin rose. What sunsets! There was the sound of grandmother’s hookah gurgling and her lamenting voice praying, and the call to prayer was the best opportunity for the forgiveness of her sins. Wherever I happened to be, playing or on the rooftop, I could see her battered face nodding in response to the neighbors who said, ‘Lady, sorrow will destroy you.’ She would move the pipe of her hookah and dab with the corner of her headscarf the teardrop that lay at the corner of her eye. —Mihan Bahrami, “Garden of Sorrow”

I aimed to read this collection of short stories without preconceptions. I only looked up the title to find out the meaning. Afsaneh simply means “fable” or “tale” in Persian. I also noted that the editor, the person who gathered these stories is a man—odd. Maybe. Knowing little about Iran, I mean, really, daily life, ordinary lives, not what can be gleaned from the Western world’s press and propaganda, I hoped for a glimpse. Of course it will be flawed or even skewed (again, a man chose all the stories) (it’s been translated into English and there’s no easy way for me to judge if the translations are any good…I do spot confusion/errors with pronouns here and there and the occasional typo, but, heck, English is difficult).

Embedded in these stories are details of weather, terrain, food, and so on that provide context and paint pictures for a far-off, ignorant reader like me. Snow! A grimy train station and old, dirty, but still-functioning long-distance passenger train that takes a long time to go from a city called Khorramshahr to Tehran. Acacia trees here, pistachio and jujube trees there. Hot tea. Minarets. Mulberries, dill, chamomile, woodsmoke, fingernail polish, copper trays, moonlight on the sea and in alleys, daffodils, chickpeas, cattle, perfume, dust.

But the 20 tales here, if generalization is possible, are both vivid and grindingly sad. So much so that I set the book aside often, depressed by the suffering, the misery and fear, the smallness of the world of these women. Is it because I can dress as I please and go where I want? Is it because my husband doesn’t beat me or remove my children? Is it because I don’t live in squalor and poverty, I don’t live in a war zone? Bright girl children lose their sparkle. Young brides are beaten, or discarded for a younger new bride. Mother-in-laws nobody wants to take in, shuttled here and there—this recurs in several stories and never goes well for the old woman. A widow knits and unravels her work for a grandchild she is not allowed to see (her daughter’s husband forbids it and abuses her daughter), knits and unravels, with nothing else to occupy her time and her hands. A young wife nervously gauges her husband’s volatile moods and when he explodes in rage, she desperately chants an (unanswered) prayer then abases herself (it’s that or do nothing), clings to his leg and sobs for mercy but gets none—a pattern that repeats.

So much for leaving my preconceptions at the door. And just last week, an American woman friend shared a very short video on Facebook of a young (30-ish?) Iranian woman addressing a phone camera from inside a dimly lit apartment. Initially she’s swathed in a chador, but she unwinds it and discards it, weeping, revealing a coat, then jeans and a tank top—now, she almost looks like one of us. Captions scroll across: “I am an Iranian woman…I have had enough…I have suffocated my whole life…help us speak now,” while she makes the trap-thumb hand gesture and a Sia song (“I’m unstoppable”) plays. How did this make its way to YouTube? Who added the Sia (which I find jarring, not hope-inspiring)? Who put on the captions? Like the book, the video is filtered through a Western lens. But the woman’s anguish is perfectly clear.

Somewhere buried in my memory is a Western journalist, Oriana Fallaci?, somehow getting an interview with the leader of the Islamic Revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and losing her cool, standing up, tearing off her chador and exclaiming “I will not wear this stupid medieval rag!” I guess I did come to this book with some preconceptions—not that the oppression of women in Iran is a world secret. (At this very moment, Iran is on the front page of the NYTimes: “Stymied by protests, Iran unleashes its wrath on its youth.”)

Every story here, without exception, is told from a woman’s point of view. Men operate in their own arena and are absent all day or all the time, inscrutable, unfair, imperious, cruel and, basically, strangers. No matter if the protagonist is a child or an old woman or somewhere in between, there is little or no true connection or communication with men at all. Sons are cuddly when young but soon slip away. There are no love stories, no sex scenes, no crushes, no meaningful conversations (the male editor explains why in his brief introduction: “…little, if any, direct reference to earthly love and carnal relations…[is] attributable to the conditions of the society the writers have been living in and the unwritten codes they have been constrained by—both before and after the Islamic Revolution of 1979”). Pretty extraordinary for a volume of diverse-age authors—and perhaps they’re diverse in other ways, like geography or social station, hard to tell. “I’ll kill myself one day and get rid of this damn life” says one character, without fire, after being beaten, again, by her husband. Excuse me, male editor, but women reading these stories by Iranian women can read between the lines. Oof.

Two of the many stories mitigate these unnourished and sad emotional lives, this harsh alienation. A young girl finds a brief friendship with a doting old bus driver (this small, evocative tale felt very Tolstoy), and a bored hospital patient feels compassion for a young man in the same ward who’s been maimed and blinded in combat and becomes abandoned by fiancee and family. But these are fleeting, fragile connections at best.

A major feature of many of these stories is, what can I call them, strange flights of fancy or fantasy? Dreams and visions and hallucinations, hauntings, animals that speak and trees that give birth, rivers that wreak havoc and seas that crest over apartment buildings, alleys that shift until the familiar is unfamiliar. Some are (safely?) couched in the disorientation of illness and medication, such as a sick little girl and the woman in the overcrowded hospital on pain meds. Some tales were really hard to follow (even taking into account the challenges of translation), disorienting, even disturbing, but I felt that maybe if these Iranian women can’t go out, they can go in. At first, I scrutinized such scenes and stories for hidden messages or metaphors, but I think perhaps it’s more about wild and inscrutable imagination—perhaps their greatest or only freedom. Without it, sorrow would destroy them.

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights

“When I began this gathering of essays, which, yes, comes from the French essai, meaning to try, or to attempt, I planned on writing one of these things—these attempts—every day for a year. When I decided this I was walking back to my lodging in a castle (delight) from two very strong expressos at a cafe in Umbertide (delight)…a field of sunflowers stretched to the horizon, casting their seedy grins to the sun above, the honeybees in the linden trees thick enough for me not only to hear but to feel in my body, the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything.”

Ever since one of my sisters (we’re all readers) gave me this book, I have been thanking her and thanking the world I encounter every day. And thanking this fun, smart, curious, righteous author, a young biracial poet and teacher somewhere in the Midwest, Indianapolis I think, though he gets out and travels a lot (as evidenced by many entries in this book, but especially the one where everyone on a flight falls enthusiastically in love with an infant among them), because not only has he entertained me and opened my eyes and heart to the things that catch his attention, but, bonus: he has validated writing digressively!

I’ve since acquired one of his poetry books and it, too, is a delight. A review on the back cover of that book compares Gay to Walt Whitman, one of my favorites, and I just find that so fitting. Like Whitman, he is a sponge for the world, at turns enchanted, challenged, and heartbroken. Like Whitman, he is never at a loss for words. Like Whitman, everything is hyperpersonal and yet universal or, well, potentially universal. Not to minimize either poet, but it is enchanting just to follow them around. So much feeling—so much yes.

Entries in this book of delights aren’t always happy, or light, or come to a satisfying conclusion. Cruelty, pain, racism, loss, poverty, indifference, grief, and climate change are all in the stew. This white girl was particularly struck by his thoughts on “negreeting,” that is, the practice or habit of black people nodding at other black people—as he correctly points out, white people don’t do this. (Instead, around here, ugh, they put up yard signs declaring “All Lives Matter” or “Elise backs the Blue and we back Elise,” or as my husband and I call them, “Dog-Whistle ‘Black Lives Don’t Matter’ Signs.”) He notices negreeting is a particularly American thing (just as our brand of racism/our shameful racial history is a particularly American thing). When he returns from Canada, landing back in Denver: “I was immediately negreeted, again and again, five times in ten minutes, which felt comfortable and inviting and true. Felt like being held, in a way, and seen, in a way.” There’s the delight, I guess…a feeling this reader will never know, and, never need to know either.

But the poet argues for and demonstrates compassion and, in these daily observances, looks for hope, beauty, and humor. I especially appreciated “Annoyed No More.” In less than two pages, he deftly exposes his own (and our own) wretched pettiness, speculates “maybe it’s an unacknowledged lack-of-control feeling that stokes it. Maybe it’s dehydration or hunger or sleepiness, poor baby,” and wraps up by relating how he tried to get teenagers to discuss annoyance until they became exasperated:

And when I said, ‘Well, do you know why it was annoying,’ they said, “Because it was annoying.” And when I said, annoyingly, “I get that, but what about their behavior made it annoy you,’ they yelled, throwing their gummy bears at me, ‘The annoyingness!’

I mean, honestly. I laughed out loud.

Thank you, Mr. Ross Gay, for sharing your authentic probing, wonderful comedic timing, discursive style, delicious adjectives, and irresistible charisma. It’s not about you, I know, but I was glad to ride around with you. Seek delight and it will be found—this seems so obvious, and often also brave or foolish, but there it is, every day, sure enough, and it’s no accident, I’m sure, that the practice is not just enriching but, well, fun.

P.S. Here’s some resonant Whitman:

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem…”

Brad Kessler, Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, A Short History of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese

“Today again this lovely wind; the meadows plunge like waves. Trees toss their heads, the pasture turns to swells. I don’t know where it rises from or where it goes. We don’t have enough words in English for our winds. Boreas, zephyr, Santa Ana, Squamish, Chinook. We need one here in New England. A local wind god. He comes this time of year, an ocean-faring breeze that brings hammered blue skies, clear mornings, fringed gentians, yellow hollyhocks, a constant seething in the dark. He makes these days seem so impermanent. A rock we cling to for a little while before we’re scraped into the deep.

…We live in exile, not from Paradise but from the present. How often do we dwell there? How often does a wind bring us back?”

What I loved best about this book is that the author so inhabits his world—a small farm in Vermont—that I could live, breathe, smell, and touch it through his vivid descriptions of his daily life, environs, and thoughts. His world is small and it is everything.

So the reader gains an appreciation for the long hours of a farmer’s day, tethered to his land and animals and routines. I learned all sorts of things about goats, and herding, and milk and cheesemaking. He educated me on this sort of animal-human bonding and interdependence. I appreciated his thorough and thoughtful style. It is a deep dive.

At one point later in the book, while he is monitoring some cheese he is making, “contemplative work,” he speaks of his reclusive neighbors up the mountain from the farm. Carthusian monks. They don’t make cheese or booze or jam. “The only thing our monks produce is silence.” He and his wife have never been up to the monastery, but they do hear the bells ring out routinely. The monks’ world, too, is small and it is everything. “Through extreme solitude, contemplation, and silence the monks are supposed to be drawn closer to God. They have no one else to talk to.” Ah.

This author also showed me that you can live and work AND write.

Howard Norman, I Hate to Leave this Beautiful Place, A Memoir

“…I thought hard and with some uneasiness about why I had been so willing to subscribe to Halley’s reductionist philosophy of life and death. Why couldn’t I muster up a response that was more natural to my character, something caustic, or at least probing? Why didn’t I confirm, if only in my private thoughts, that death in fact is not ‘all pretty straightforward’? Of course we’d really just met, but that was not it. Maybe Halley’s platitudes offered solace, in the way that a beautiful landscape can offer solace. If you are fortunate and willing, you can live inside it with perfect equanimity.”

Well, even though I’ve never read any novels by Howard Norman and, in fact, never even heard of him, I was drawn to his thin but intense memoir. Who could resist a title like that? Not me. Like most of us writers, he’s taken work where he could get it and the title comes from the time when he was paid to travel to Canada’s Northwest Territories to collect Inuit stories. An old woman told of a soapstone carver that had been turned into a goose. “I hate to leave this beautiful place” was his migration-time lament. I was struck also by how the soapstone carver was related to be a good man, a family man, a hard worker, and yet he was turned into a goose and had to leave every year…so unfair. So…Book of Job!

I was fooled by the shortness of this book, a mere 194 pages, thinking it would be a lighter or quicker read. Not with this guy. As the excerpt above illustrates, he is a sharp and probing thinker. I often paused, staring into space, doing my own thinking, feeling challenged and moved.

There are five sections or chapters, and while they proceed through his life in chronological order, each one could stand alone as a snapshot of who and where he was. No bridges between, except our narrator. Makes for a smaller, less thorough (less tedious) memoir. Nor does he consider himself fascinating; no, it is the strange and varied world and circumstance that is fascinating. I certainly felt he could write about almost any topic at all, of his choosing, and it would be interesting and worth reading (like the late great Lee Sandlin).

I liked that he listens, carefully and respectfully to others. I especially loved his rendering of his friendship with a retired bellman, Isador Sarovnik, who fled Nazi Germany for where he and young Howard met, late-1960s, somewhat seedy Halifax, Nova Scotia. He “wasn’t technically my uncle,” but they became pals. The older man passes on stories, wisdom, opinions of our hero’s girlfriend, career advice; the younger man brings food, companionship, and takes him on a beach outing. They share meals the eight nights of Hannukah. Distracted as young Howard is by trying to find his way, he still is able to astutely, movingly observe and love the old man: “I loved him, so I loved his tragic-comic way of inverting logic in order to define himself by his worst moments. I knew that when this whole thing about [something Isador regretted] got most deeply to him, he’d put on his scratchy record of Bach’s suites for unaccompanied cello and Chopin’s nocturnes on the turntable, a duet between sad and sad…”

Other episodes in this interesting writer’s life were engaging and similarly discussed—that is, he was observant and his natural wryness balanced his earnestness. The high-school summer he worked for a bookmobile, navigated occasional appearances by his hapless absentee father, and got a hand job in a movie theater from his brother’s girlfriend. People he met on those Inuit trips (avid John Lennon fans, the old woman who told the story about the man-turned-goose, a wise poet, a hostile angakok who wore a necklace of busted old transistor radios). His obsession with Ken Burns’s Civil War series and how it led to an odd vision and a visit to a possibly bemused but insightful therapist. The last chapter examines a trauma of sorts—“of sorts,” because he does understand that what happened was not personal. He and his wife allowed a single-mother poet and her toddler to house-sit their Washington, DC home one summer, while they enjoyed their other/summer home in Vermont. A murder-suicide ensued, in their dining room. She knifed her baby and then killed herself “more gently,” whatever that means. He describes horror and confusion, the media frenzy, how his wife and teenage daughter respond; he reprints an excerpt from an NPR interview with him and his wife in the aftermath. Like everything else in his life, in this memoir, he notices and ponders details. But the truth of it for him rings like a bell, after all that: “Out of some misguided attempt to remain stoical, I was making myself physically sick, habituated as I was to keeping so much sadness inside, along with seething anger [at that woman]. Better I should have stood on the coast of Nova Scotia and screamed.”

I saw what he did there. He circled back. The book—his life—has at least one other circling-back theme. Birds. For whatever reason, they have always interested them, from the goose he inexpertly trapped and accidentally killed that fraught teen summer, to a sick kingfisher on a pond near his Vermont home, to pelicans and oystercatchers at Point Reyes, where he travels/flees to clear his head. I notice on the cover, “A memoir by the author of The Bird Artist.” So if I seek out his novels, I expect birds. I expect birds and curiosity and candor.

Joan MacCracken, The Winter House: A Season of Sharing

“Janet had met many special people and their family members, all faced with end-of-life issues and the loss of a loved one. Even through her own personal struggles, Janet continued working with these families. That work had kept her going after her divorce, those rather lonely single years before she met John, and then during these past three years since his death. Giving to others was a gift to herself.”

Janet is one of four older women (late 70s, for the most part) who live in a small mid-Coast Maine town. Janet, Marty, Catherine, and Elizabeth. Widowed, divorced, on their own. And all facing another long, snowy, cold Maine winter. Elizabeth looks around at her big house, now empty except for her, and no visitors expected till summer—well, everyone wants to visit Maine in summer! Loneliness and big heat bills loom. She decides to invite other women in a similar situation to move in, just for the winter months.

These four had not been a posse before…Elizabeth invites Marty, and Marty brings in Catherine, and Catherine suggests Janet. The idea snowballs. They meet, they talk, they choose rooms and set a few ground rules. Spoiler: it works out beautifully and they become close.

The back cover of the book, rather than summarizing or teasing the plot, states the agenda: “What does an older woman do when she finds herself alone in her later years? Will she live by herself for the rest of her life? Will she look for another husband or partner, or move in with her children? The Winter House presents a creative alternative.” Also, right inside the front cover is a small but prominent notice: “A portion of the profits from the sale of this book will be donated to At Home Downeast, a program to support aging in place.” A good friend of mine, still coupled as I am, gave me this book and I mean to get back to her and say, if life takes us down that road, my dear, I’m in.

From November until early May, these four share the big house. They navigate different morning and evening routines, shopping and meal preparation, and various appointments and incidents from cataract operations to yoga classes. A dog and a cat, also new housemates, work it out. Warmth, comfort, and moments of sharing memories as well as sharing traumas/griefs/estrangements from adult children abound. They have a lot in common, I thought, principally of course the time of life and the place, but also genial good will. When a granddaughter arrives (in winter!) and confides that she needs to get an abortion, they listen and help—this subplot was very touching. A couple of them, in fact, are no stranger to abortion (though nowadays it’s safe and legal) and the young woman literally gets four nurturing grandmothers to talk it over, set it up, hold her hand, and help her through.

I confess that sometimes I couldn’t keep them all straight. Partly because of their similarities, but partly also I have to blame the author. Her writing is very workmanlike, even clunky at times (conversation is “she said,” “she replied,” “she commented”). Also I don’t think she described anyone’s appearance, or reinforced it, so a mental picture was lacking (well, okay, Elizabeth was zaftig). The only one that really stood out to me was Marty, the retired lesbian physician. Her character was more detailed and nuanced and as a result relatable and memorable. (Later, examining the book again, I see that our author is also a retired doctor, aha!)

Despite those flaws, I admit I had a comfort level with the book. I know the area, Bangor, Ellsworth, and Belfast. I know the sorts of houses, the landscape is familiar; I know winters like that. Retired, educated white ladies volunteering for hospice, persevering at yoga, taking cooking and painting classes, listening to books on tape while on long drives, recalling Middlebury College days, attending community events, playing the Bananagrams word game, hiring young local lads to help out, etc. etc. —it’s all recognizably contemporary and middle-class (or, upper-). Missing was a fluidity, or context, or deeper dive, which I felt this author was either not interested in or not capable of. I was a touch disappointed that the book just ended. Nobody died or moved away, and they didn’t even say “let’s do this again next winter!” It was all evenly and baldly in the moment. But maybe that’s just how a tale like this must go. One thing I’ve definitely noticed as I get older is that, you just don’t know what next winter will look like.

L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Saying one’s prayers isn’t exactly the same thing as praying,” said Anne meditatively. “But I’m going to imagine that I’m the wind that is blowing up there in those tree tops. When I get tired of the trees, I’ll imagine I’m gently waving down here in the ferns—and then I’ll fly over to Mrs. Lynde’s garden and set the flowers dancing—and then I’ll go with one great swoop over the clover field—and then I’ll blow over the Lake of Shining Waters and ripple it all up into little sparkling waves. Oh, there’s so much scope for imagination in a wind!”

Ay carumba, what a whimsical project to read a beloved children’s fantasy story. One must, as our heroine loves to say, deploy one’s scope for imagination, or the experience might just end up being too quaint or saccharine. And yet, this old book was an enjoyable read, disarmingly so at at times.

I did thumb back to the fine print to find out when it was first published: 1908. And the author is a woman, Lucy Maud Montgomery, but chose to use her initials L.M., which I suppose is preferable to, say, “Mrs. Walter Montgomery.” While I don’t want to interject too much modernism, modern sensibilities, or present-day feminism into Anne’s tale, the way she in particular but also other women are portrayed is more relatable than I expected. Indeed, we might say that women-wear-the-pants in this idyllic time in the small towns of rural Prince Edward Island—and one small city, Charlottetown—in the misty past. Anne is adopted by an older, unmarried brother (Matthew) and sister (Marilla), but they quickly agree that rearing, educating, and managing Anne is totally Marilla’s job. Mrs. Rachel Lynde, the area’s presiding gossip and bossypants, plays an important role and her husband is only glancingly mentioned as a “meek little man.” A female schoolteacher (the male teacher that preceded her was a less impressive and is often shown flirting with one of his students/a factor in him not being invited to stay?), a minister’s wife, and the aristocratic elderly but ultimately kindly Miss Barry influence and encourage Anne’s education, materially and morally. Anne and her bestie Diana and other girls are susceptible to worrying about fashion (oh, everyone is wearing puffed sleeves, it is quite the rage!), but Marilla is on hand to counsel against vanity. Anne and other girls aspire to go to college alongside a few boys (of course, though, their main aspiration is to become schoolteachers; no budding chemists, doctors, or engineers among the girls). And our Anne does not bow to the patriarchy. The iconic scene where she smashes her slate over a teasing young lad’s head is fun and she is not sorry, even when scolded. She is not impressed by the minister’s sermons and is able to explain to Marilla why not; one inflection point for me was how her perceptions of this man evolve over time.

Yet I still react to this story as a fantasy. I think of two other classics, A Secret Garden and A Little Princess. An unfortunate little girl—neglected and/or orphaned—navigates her misery, finds people to love and who love her, and triumphs gloriously by the end. Honestly I found it a bit over the top that Anne didn’t just do well but won “first place” in the school competition and received an awful lot of thrilling adulation by the later chapters, even though she manages to be modest. And the annoying lad morphing into a friend and presumably a suitor over time was also a bit fairy-tale-ish. At least he was her intellectual equal and respected her.

Anne’s backstory is inarguably sad. Her parents died “of fever” when she was a baby, and she was passed from family to family as a caregiver. One family had a drunk dad, another had three sets (!) of twins. Indeed as Marilla and Matthew debate keeping her (they’d requested a boy but somehow got Anne instead), there is a scene where a brusque woman with a houseful of children offers to take her and Anne quakes. I understand some filmed versions of the book explore this backstory, the better to emphasize Anne’s early traumas and PTSD, I guess, but ugh, mercifully IMO Montgomery chooses not to overstate. Instead she gives us ample evidence of how this plucky child has navigated a hard youth with her “arc of imagination.” Imagination helps and The Force is strong with this one. As Anne blurts to Marilla one day, “One can’t stay sad very long in such an interesting world, can one?”

There have always been high-strung and emotional children, and to the extent that Anne is a believable character (she is mighty precocious, to be sure), the arc of this story is about her healing and growing. Her antics certainly present challenges to those around her, especially Marilla, who occasionally has to suppress her amusement in order to maintain discipline and guide and nurture the child. Modern-day critics may suggest Anne had ADHD or, even, was bipolar. Maybe so. And yet we see that Anne found her way and thrived back in the day without benefit of diagnosis, professional help, or medication, and her strong spirit was an asset, not a liability. Lots of activity, fresh air, stability, and love!

Also want to mention, a key fantasy element is the landscape. While I understand that Prince Edward Island still to this day has beautiful coastline and farmland and charming little villages, the portrait the book paints is so very idyllic. A glimpse of simpler times. Every season is lovingly described, for example. Of course, this is Anne’s own outlook, the “arc of her imagination,” but the author certainly indulges.

Spring: “Spring had come once more to Green Gables—the beautiful, capricious, reluctant Canadian spring, lingering along through April and May in a succession of sweet, fresh, chilly days, with pink sunsets and miracles of resurrection and growth. The maples in Lover’s Lane were red-budded and little curly ferns pushed up around the Dryad’s Bubble. Away up in the barrens, behind Mr. Silas Sloane’s place, the mayflowers blossomed out, pink and white stars of sweetness under their brown leaves…”

Summer: “One June evening, when the orchards were pink-blossomed again, when the frogs were singing silverly sweet in the marshes about the head of the Lake of Shining Waters, and the air was full of the savor of clover fields and balsamic fir woods…" “Anne had the golden summer of her life as freedom and frolic went. She walked, rowed, berried, and dreamed to her heart’s content…”

Fall: “October was a beautiful month at Green Gables, when the birches in the hollow turned as golden as sunshine and the maples behind the orchard were royal crimson and the wild cherry trees along the lane put on the loveliest shades of dark red and bronzy green, while the fields sunned themselves in aftermaths.”

Winter: “The night was clear and frosty, all ebony of shadow and silver of snowy slope; big stars were shining over the silent fields; here and there dark pointed firs stood up with snow powdering their branches and the wind whistling through them.”

I am reminded of Ursula K. LeGuin’s sly praise for Lord of the Rings, “I like Tolkien’s writing because he always tells us what the weather is.” I wanted to believe it all, to inhabit that idyllic and beautiful fantasy world; that is, I enjoyed Montgomery’s writing for the same reason.

James Joyce, Dubliners

“He began to invent sentences and phrases from the notices which his book would get. Mr Chandler has the gift of easy and graceful verse…A wistful sadness pervades these poems…The Celtic note. It was a pity his name was not more Irish-looking…”

—Upon my word (and here I consciously imitate the way Joyce punctuates), upon my word, I did not mean to take up a James Joyce book in the month of March, on the very eve of St Patrick’s Day! And yet, here I am. This worn paperback edition of Joyce’s famous short stories has sat unread on my shelves for many long years. I thought perhaps I’d give it a try at last, give Joyce another go. After all, short stories are arguably more digestible than big thick novels.

Well, anything is more digestible, in my view and my recollection, than Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake. Despite my fine Bard College education, and indeed my genuine Celtic heritage, I was not successful in reading, never mind enjoying or drawing insight from, the works of the celebrated James Joyce. I once signed up for a semester-long course on Ulysses, feeling guidance might be worthwhile or even necessary. I bought the book, and I dutifully bought the other book required by the professor, evidently a detailed interpretation or study guide (my first hint that I was not going to succeed…that one was thicker than the novel itself). I went to class, I sat down, I witnessed Professor Clark Rodewald’s great enthusiasm for this “genius.” Back at home, I opened the novel and read the first few pages. Heavy going. Turgid. Strange. I diverted to the other book and thumbing through it, pausing here and there, I began to feel a bit ill. Word games? Literary references so obscure and erudite they had to be carefully explained to pikers like me? My brow furrowed. Just after the flyleaf, its author had inserted a quote from Joyce; the gist was ‘I have made my novel as complex and ornate as possible so as to keep my readers very busy, thus to assure my immortality.’ Or words to that effect. Was Joyce joking? What if he was serious? I regarded both books balefully. I felt more than merely daunted, I felt he was playing with his readers. A big NOPE was forming. A few days later, back on campus, I made my decision and went and dropped the class. It was still early enough in the semester that I could choose something else, and I did. Professor Rodewald was dismayed, but I could not be moved.

And I haven’t returned to Joyce since. A lot of time has passed. I circle back with an open mind; I will read Joyce, I still at least try, starting here.

But as I work my way through these short stories, in order, my discomfort grows. Clearly they are meant, as a group, to paint a diverse portrait of the city of Joyce’s birth. It appears he is shooting mostly in the middle, that is, they are middle-class rather than street people or aristocracy. The city is bustling and run-down and pretentious and mean, also damp and cold and windy and dirty. The stories are often grim or, if not grim, not very flattering. The people are ugly and small and petty and lead small lives of disappointment, deprivation, drunkenness, frustration, poverty (in every sense), and corruption (in every sense).

Most are unaware; they just endure or stumble along. A young woman hatches a plan to escape her dreary life as a caregiver to her horrid, elderly parents, by planning to run off with a fellow, maybe marry him, go far away…but, as they go to board the ship to Buenos Aires, she is paralyzed. As her lover shouts at her to come along, “she set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.” Ugh. You can’t leave, eh? Another woman, unmarried and unattractive, takes great pride in her job as a maid, neatly cutting the toast for her charges just so, etc. We’re told she’s “greatly loved,” both at work and in her social life—she goes to visit a family she once worked for—but really it’s a loveless and lonely life, limned in order and routine but lacking in color.

When someone tries to be self-aware or to rise above (see extract at top), there is an unpleasant whiff of mockery. Yes, by Joyce. I am getting the disturbing feeling that the author might actually be sneering at his characters. At the very least, he thinks they’re all dull and unfulfilled. No warm sunlight, no brief pleasure, no comfort of religion (oh, Joyce’s contempt for the church is not that well-disguised) or community, just slogging along. Even friendships are portrayed as essentially shallow (male conversations are particularly hollow), and love is quite out of reach. He, on the other hand, got away and is smarter than them—could that be what is going on here? Meh.

Yes, I’m aware Joyce was Dublin-born and bred, but that once he left, he rarely returned. He spent much of his life in Trieste, Italy, which is nothing like! So he wrote these stories from afar, based on memory, I guess. What a humorless and dreary project, honestly. The great NOPE of my youthful encounter with the great man returns. To be sure, the writing is exceedingly well-crafted. He is a master of not over-explaining, yet leading the reader to devastation or woe. But to what end? To hammer home that Dubliners lead small, hard lives? (Is this Joyce’s universal belief/perception? Did he write about Trieste, for example, with as little mercy?) Nope, this author is just not for me.

PS - Okay to be fair: the best is last. The final, longest story in the book, “The Dead,” is often mentioned as a masterpiece. It is indeed well-done, a vivid, thorough composition of sights, sounds, feelings, memories, manners. I have no doubt the loose ends are deliberate (why is young Lily bitter? what was Miss Ivor’s problem?! what persuaded him to, at the last minute, drop the Robert Browning quote from his speech?). It’s interesting that it is mainly a tale of women but the protagonist is a man (which, I figure, accounts for the disconnects). And the ending brings down the curtain magnificently and leaves the audience stunned into silence and their own thoughts.

Frank Parker Day, Rockbound

“He was vaguely conscious of a force beating beneath him, perhaps the rhythmic impulse of the sea at the cliff’s foot, and of the unending restlessness of the sea. It seemed to him that God and the devil were in a gigantic struggle, the one building up islands and continents for men to live on, the other personified by the sea, growling, roaring, and gnawing away at what God had made.”

Right from the first chapter, I was asking myself, “what manner of story is this?” Because it is written in a rough dialect, particularly when characters are speaking or thinking to themselves—and meanwhile each chapter opens with a literary quote, from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, presented in its original Middle English. Both elements compelled me to read slower, even to try reading aloud, in an effort to parse what was meant. All the while, I am thinking, this is a tale of life on an island off the southern side of Nova Scotia at, guessing, the turn of the last century, an inside report like Carolyn Chute’s The Beans of Egypt, Maine.

And yet, ‘tis not, if Chaucer may be quoted. For the denizens of Rockbound and adjacent islands are uncouth and uneducated. The only book they know is the Bible (barely) and, in fact, as the story proceeds, it took a battle to get a schoolhouse built and bring a teacher out for their feral children. Seems to me the Chaucer bits are an odd choice, too, for nobody on these remote islands is on a pilgrimage or mixing with people they’ve just met, people of varying viewpoints or stations in life so to speak. A bit of a head-scratcher, frankly, unless it’s just that our author liked Chaucer and found quotes that would serve.

So, who IS this author? A rudimentary check of the back cover and the scholarly Afterword reveals that although he’d been born and raised in Nova Scotia, he not an islander nor a fisherman/farmer but rather a visitor from the mainland and, as I surmised, an educated, traveled man. Once published, the book was controversial, with the islanders decrying his unflattering portrait of them (they could read). The book does open with a disclaimer— “No reference is intended in this book to any actual character or definite district. The story is entirely fictitious.” Meanwhile, I recall our Nova Scotian friend Renee telling me that the book’s islands correspond to Ironbound, Tancook, and Pearl islands, off Chester, in Mahone Bay, and that many characters, even with fictitious names, were clearly recognizable.

And yet, setting all that aside, I found the tale vivid, realistic, and engaging. The author spared no gritty detail: we get filled in everything from local folklore to what they wore and ate to how herring is gutted and cleaned. The hardships David endured and his sturdiness, diligent work ethic, and thoughtfulness won my heart and I rooted for him. I loved that he would go sit in a certain spot on the island to think; I loved that he was a devoted friend; I loved that he was a man of integrity, despite a lack of role models and in a petty and competitive atmosphere; I loved that he tried to look for the best in the people around him; I loved that he could have fun and that he could feel heartbreak. In my own way, I’ve learned that Nova Scotia island life is not a utopia socially or materially and found the way he navigated his lot in life interesting and believable.

One of the minor characters struck me, Fanny. Like all the island women, she was a stout, strong person and a hard worker. She is also characterized as attractive, and the crew of island men around her roughly respected her even as they all vied to bed her. The author diverts to her briefly, “She never got a man, but she bore three lasses, knowing no more than Fanny who were their fathers…[she] saved her pennies and looked after herself, and when she was too old to work, she bought a little white cottage in Liscomb [on the mainland…perhaps Lunenburg?].” I would’ve liked to hear her full story, from her point of view.

All that said, though, I thought David’s arc was compelling and had a satisfying finish. A fairy-tale ending, some might criticize, I suppose, but, hell, look what he went through to get there. It was a fine story, to be sure.

Lastly, a thought about David and the other islanders being not only for the most part illiterate but also superstitious. They believed in and were periodically bedeviled by ghosts. If you think this is contrived or they were foolish or simpletons, you’ve been living in civilization too long. Solitude and close proximity to unforgiving rocks and weather, under the big sky and astride the roaring ocean, absolutely justifies a sense of what some call “the supernatural.”

Brandon Stanton, Humans

“There’s an old cliche that ‘everyone has a story', but there’s a reason it’s a cliche. Every person has a story because everyone has a struggle. The heart of the story is the struggle—the obstacle that has been faced, and hopefully overcome. It can be an obvious physical feat, like climbing a mountain or rescuing someone from drowning. It can be a mental battle: like depression, or addiction, or schizophrenia. It can be comedic or tragic. But none of these particular elements are the reason that struggles are crucial to a story. Struggles are crucial because they’re transformative. Struggles change people. And a well-told story merely follows the arc of that transformation.”

If you know Brandon Stanton’s work, you know he is a gifted portrait photographer. His Facebook page, HONY (Humans of New York) is a major reason I haven’t abandoned Facebook yet. Stories, in parts, appear periodically and keep the HONY community at the edge of their seats with installments over the course of day. Sometimes they end in a fundraiser. Notice I said “the HONY community”? The comments, discussion, and outpouring of support and donations is incredible. It’s awesome. The best of diverse people in this troubled world, right in the heart of the oft-annoying internet!

This is one of several books that are an outgrowth of the HONY page. It’s big and weighs several pounds, a coffee-table tome. Like any coffee-table tome, it’s best dipped into here and there, thumbed through, pausing at one or two pages. Then digesting. Unlike other coffee-table books, though, it’s not just beauty or fluff or diversion…quite the contrary. It’s stirring and disturbing and intense. One person, one story at a time.

Unlike the HONY page or the website, the book has extended commentary by Stanton (see excerpt above). The book is divided into four sections: The Approach, Randomness, Struggle, and You Can’t Do This Here. If you think viewing and absorbing the thoughts, feelings, beliefs, anguish, fear, longing, and love of diverse humans around the globe is intense, imagine what it must be like for him! Thus his brief written remarks in this book format, in the section introductions, are worth reading and pondering. He, more than anyone else, has witnessed, collected, and absorbed so much. He confides that he realized, after several trips, after pushing the book deadline back, that it was “never going to be an anthropological study. It was never going to be a perfect balance of every ethnicity, every religion, every voice. It just wasn’t possible." And what did he learn from this hard, taxing, incomplete, complex effort? Because each person is not only photographed, but interviewed (frequently via an interpreter, of course), and then Stanton chooses a photograph (or several) and excerpts to go with and, it’s not always their face. Sometimes it’s their lamenting hands, or their tensed or relaxed legs. Sometimes there’s another person, or an animal, in the image. He says “you can feel when the person is being truthful, no matter what language they’re speaking. Because truth is often spoken haltingly. With pauses. Like it’s being dug up, one spoonful at a time, from somewhere deep.” “Truth feels heavy.”

On my first pass through this remarkable, heavy book, several pages/humans stood out to me and linger in my memory:

The funky-looking, colorfully dressed old white couple, sitting on a park bench: “We don’t have any hobbies. We do try to get together a few times a month to judge people and complain about things.” Snork-laugh. (Stanton comments in his introduction that the fact that many of his encounters occur in parks has “nothing to do with my love of nature. It’s because people are much more approachable when they’re sitting under a tree than when they’re rushing down a sidewalk.”) Another park bench, pages later: a beaming skinny black guy with a beaming toddler on each knee declaring “I’m the best uncle.” Adorable.

Then, the sad-eyed girl in the hijab revealing that “when it was time to enroll in grade seven, my mother told me we couldn’t afford it. I cried and begged but she just stayed silent. My teachers were so sad that they offered to pay half the tuition. But it wasn’t enough because we’d still have to pay for the books and exams. So my mother made me understand that school was not in my luck. I’m still seventeen, but now I’m married and I work as a maid for a family. I wash their clothes, wash their dishes, clean their bathroom. Their house is near a school. So every morning I have to watch the children walk by in their uniforms…” Heartbreaking. The dead-eyed woman in Rwanda recounting, over several pages, the horrors of the genocide, including the night soldiers came to her home and her teenage self escaped out a window to cower in a tree while her family, including little siblings, was slaughtered: “I listened to their screams until I fainted.” Heartbreaking.

Phew. Like I said, intense. Interestingly, and I’m sure deliberately, the location of each person/story is noted at the end in small, gray type, almost as if it is fading into the page, an afterthought. Because location is not the point.

Joshua Hammer, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu

“Timbuktu had been the incubator for the richness of Islam, and Islam in its perverted form had attempted to destroy it. But the original power of the culture itself, and the people, like Haidara, who had become entranced by that power, had saved the great manuscripts in the end.”

So, that’s the summary of this short but intense work of earnest, detailed journalism. But I wasn’t a page or two into the first chapter when I had to just stop. I couldn’t understand what was unfolding without some context and I—embarrassingly—had little. The author, a former bureau chief for Newsweek and a contributor to publications such as Smithsonian, New York Review of Books, and Outside, had launched right into his tale and left me in the dust.

Where is Timbuktu? Many people use the name to mean “some really faraway mysterious and exotic place” or “the end of the known world,” but, why? It is an ancient city in Mali, in western Africa. Turns out that Mali is landlocked, bordered to the north by Algeria, to the east by Niger, the west by Mauritania, Senegal, and Guinea, and to the south by Cote D’Ivoire and Burkina Faso. Look at those border lines. Straight. Straight through long-established cultural/tribal and geographical lines; could only have been drawn by white colonial Europeans. Though landlocked, the great river Niger flows through Mali; the author vividly describes the river, several times, as “olive green" in color, often bustling with various kinds of boats (commerce, travelers), its width and currents subject to cycles of flooding and drought. The city, puzzlingly, is not on the river, though nearby (20 km north), in a bowl of dry land on the edge of the great Sahara desert.

Originally a seasonal settlement, Timbuktu built up as it established its reputation as a crossroads of trade routes…in the 12th century. Salt, dates, jewelry, Maghrebi spices, incense, European fabrics, as well as the products of jungle and savannah—slaves, gold, ivory, cotton, shea butter. As is so often the case with trade centers, the city became not only prosperous but diverse ethnically, socially, and economically. It became an Islamic center, with the great diversity keeping it tolerant and vital.

Next I learn of Mansa Musa, the legendary king of the Malian empire (which was larger and different in shape from present-day Mali). Some stories call him “the richest king who ever lived.” He set out from Timbuktu on the hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca with “several thousand silk-clad slaves and 80 camels carrying 300 pounds of gold dust each,” which he dispensed along his way, securing his and his sprawling empire’s fame and reputation. Among the things he brought back from his travels, the accounts relate, were a famous Andalusian poet and an architect from Cairo to design an imposing mosque that stands in Timbuktu to this day.

But what really put Timbuktu on the map was what followed: the city became, in the late 14th century, a regional center of culture and in particular, scholasticism. A great university grew up and reportedly once was a community of over 25,000. Scholars and students gathered to study algebra, trigonometry, physics, chemistry, astronomy, ethics, logic, medicine, pharmacology, linguistics, poetry, nutrition, historical accounts, maps, legal principles and analysis, dictionaries, encyclopedias, Islamic texts and analyses, and more. Scribes and bookmakers abounded to support and disseminate the learning. I found on YouTube a short video featuring the African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates visiting Mali in 2016, in which he said Timbuktu first appeared on his radar as a child in a Ripley’s Believe or Not book showing turbaned, serious, imposing African scholars at the Timbuktu university. “When Europe was in its Middle Ages, Africans were flocking to this university,” he marveled. Contrast this with the pronouncement of British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in a 1963 BBC interview: “Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none…there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness.”

How ignorant and how wrong. The books of Timbuktu contained all that and more. It was critical to collect, preserve, and them for study and translation. Enter this book’s complex saga of modern-day Africans, principally a man named Abdel Bader Haidera, to do just that. The project begins modestly but soon mushrooms, as helpers, funds, and an appropriate storage facility all become urgently necessary. It becomes Haidera’s life work. International money and expertise came, but the process was constant and ongoing.

As Timbuktu’s fortunes waxed and waned over the centuries, people in the area (often wealthy homeowners, but not always) collected and tried to preserve the texts. The texts that survive to this day are old, fragile, and vulnerable to damage from insects, weather, and simple handling. Some were in trunks or boxes in private homes. Some were buried in caves and under the desert sand. Some people did not want to part with their family treasures. Haidera’s early days in the project are spent trying to cajole and bargain and buy as he builds the collections.

Then the greatest modern-day threat emerged and is recounted in this book. Al-Qaeda gained a foothold in the region, conducting brutal raids and kidnapping Westerners for ransoms, eventually occupying Timbuktu itself and clamping down. They began with maiming and executing citizens who they saw as in violation of Sharia law and those scenes (beatings, amputations, stonings) are harrowing. They also destroyed some ancient monuments and art, calling them symbols of idolatry. Haidera and those who supported his preservation project realized that the fragile written/illustrated repository of the region’s glorious past was soon going to be in the crosshairs. A risky grassroots effort to move everything, piecemeal, out of the city and to relative safety down in Bamako (over 400 miles southwest), where Haidara had relocated, ensued…its operations and tactics are full of drama and courage. Eventually the occupiers did build a bonfire and set a match to a pile of ancient manuscripts—that scene is as horrifying in its way as some of the amputation events.

The author of this book has diplomatic contacts from which he coaxes information and insights. I am in no position to question the accuracy, but a picture certainly emerges of a fraught time, when the entire country nearly succumbed to Al Qaeda. French military intervention is described as swift, intensive, and necessary. When the tale ends, the library project was successful but no books had (yet) returned to Timbuktu, as the political/social situation remained unstable.

I cannot leave Mali without remarking on the music. I do know of the captivating “African blues” of the late Ali Farka Touré, and trying to navigate this book led me to the music of “divas” Oumou Sangaré and Fatoumata Diawara, and to the long-standing (personnel-changing) Taureg group Tinariwen. The “Festival of the Desert,” conceived and run by “impresario” Manny Ansar—in the context of this book and what I know now of Mali—feels like a precarious event. Bono dropping in briefly by posh private jet and crowing from the stage, under heavy security, “we are all brothers here!” actually feels a bit clueless. As for Tinariwen, the nomadic Tauregs are on the sidelines of the tale of the bad-ass librarians, but I couldn’t help wondering about them. Some of them made a regrettable and short-lived alliance with the Al Qaeda factions, hoping to promote—as they have for decades, if not centuries—their own independent homeland of “Azawad,” only to see the possibility slip away again. I felt like they remain the ongoing victims of history, colonialism and more. Their music is sad and beautiful.

Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“His friends and therapists had helped him to see that that was doing them a disservice. Their lives could not be defined by their deaths. They belonged not in perpetual pain but in the beauty of their short lives.”

+

“…Now, all showered and in warm clothes, they’d joined the others in a meal of beef stew and warm apple crisp with thick cream. Comfort foods that rarely failed in their one great task.”

Yes, another Inspector Gamache book, the next in the series. It’s winter! Also much of the book is set not too far from here, in wintry rural Southern Quebec. Hardly an important plot point in a murder-mystery novel, but there’s a scene where a blizzard comes on suddenly and Gamache and others have to hastily clean off and dig out a car, brace its back wheels with boards, and point it down a snowy driveway…where they find the plow has been by and a wall of ice and snow chunks blocks their progress…what to do? Floor it! What if, assuming they can eject into the road, the plow was passing back, or another vehicle happened to be in their path? What if the barrier damages the car and its occupants, what about steering or stopping once they succeed in busting through? I tell you, that scene was terrifying! (Also, in retrospect, maybe a bit unbelievable: they were unaware of the forecast? the storm was that sudden and that intense? driveways get obstructed like that when hours and hours, or a night, goes by and several passes of the plows freeze.)

The plot ran on two tracks and was complex. It kept me, and the detectives, guessing, but that’s the fun of reading such books, eh. Penny’s descriptions of Montreal’s sordid underbelly (“junkies, trannies, and whores”) was a bit cliched and cursory. And the little girl in the red coat beggared belief—she was real, not imagined, not a memory, hallucination, or symbol? Huh. Well, what do I know? Amelia is terrifying in her own special ways.

Still, this novel had all the enjoyable parts of this series. Friends and colleagues collaborating, comforting, discussing, worrying, loving, helping, and sharing wonderful meals. Penny’s pithy and sincere insights into human nature once again enrich the telling.

Diana Gabaldon, Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone

“ ‘I can see little…fruiting things…on the ends here. It might be a different kind of fungus that feeds off the larger ones.’

‘Fungus,’ he said, and repeated it happily. ‘Fungus. What a pleasant word.’

I smiled.

‘Well, it is rather better than saprophyte. That means a … they’re not quite plants…but growing things that live on dead things.’

He blinked and looked speculatively from the blood-spots to me.

‘Do not all living things live on the dead?’

That made me blink.

‘Well…I suppose they do,’ I said slowly, and he nodded, pleased.”

Another book in a long series, the Outlander series (to be clear: I am a fan of the books, not the television show). The eighth, or is it the ninth? All are about this thick, that is to say, many hundreds of pages. I’ve read them all and then, like other fans, had to wait and wait for this installment. We knew the title and fretted, wondering which one of the main characters would say this while gasping their last breath? Dinna fash, everyone is fairly well and the bees remain in Claire’s garden…and, now we have to wait for the next book, as this one’s last line clearly promises there is more to come, more to live through, more to tell.

I kept my expectations of this installment in check. Not surprisingly, the filmed version got popular, and changed plot lines, and put faces to names. This fan was not too thrilled and didn’t tune in. I didna wish to share this beloved series and characters with a crowd. As for continuing to read the series, I wasn’t sure the author could sustain my interest and affection. Might she get tired, lazy, sloppy, distracted, lose her storytelling mojo, get mired in complex subplots?

To find out, I settled in with this big book in the dark and quiet month of January, curled up on a sofa before a blazing fire with a snoozing dog by my side. Perfect reading conditions. When the power went out for nearly two days, I kept going…something to do, and feeling a pang of sympathy or understanding, as the setting is colonial North America. All the talk of privies, candlelight, scrounging for food, drying wet clothing by a fire, getting around on foot or horseback or wagon, borrowing from and depending on neighbors was actually pretty relatable.

The author did sustain my interest and affection. Perhaps it was the ideal reading conditions, but I really felt like the book moved at a nice, even pace. Not too much detail, not too little. She took the time to tell with care.

Care not only for the particulars of daily life in those times, but also for the people. Perhaps more than previous installments in this series, this book is an ensemble piece. The characters, realistically, remember, reminisce, process grief and trauma, experience confusion and doubt and curiosity, hope and love, too, and move in and out of one another’s lives.

The role/importance of Christian beliefs and rituals seemed more prominent than it has in past books, I noticed. Well, one of the characters is a minister. Also we also may factor in that Herself is a devout, practicing Catholic.

I appreciated how so often “family” becomes the people you care for and who need you, a generous and practical feature of life in those times. But also, I reflect, to some extent a feature in the arc of my own life (though I have never taken in and raised somebody else’s child).

And, as has been true from the very first book in the series, I always appreciate the accuracy and verisimilitude of the herbal/horticultural details.

Another difference from some of the previous titles, perhaps, this one is a compelling boots-on-the-ground historical novel, the focus less sweeping. The time-travel premise remains, occasionally (you gotta love that the Mackenzies brought these three books back with them: Lord of the Rings, Green Eggs & Ham and, for Claire, of course, a Merck Manual). I imagine some fans are going to complain that Go Tell the Bees is not as exciting or intriguing as earlier installments.

The book instead spends quality time with people and places. We get vivid pictures of colonial Savannah, living off the beaten track in the North Carolina mountains, the streets of fickle Philadelphia, and even a side trip to Canajoharie in the Mohawk Valley (where I now live; I was sorry there wasn’t more scenery description and dubious that Joseph Brant was as relaxed as portrayed here). The American Revolution is underway, war is in the air, as is vigilante action…a fraught time. We see stances and events unfold from the point of view of diverse people, soldiers and officers, medical people, clergy, children, Quakers, city dwellers, country dwellers, etc. etc. Those who participated, those who did not or tried not to; shifting loyalties, divided loyalties, confusion. As one character reflects (was it Roger Mac? Claire? I can’t put my finger on that passage right now…900-page book…!!), actually living through history is quite different from reading an historical account long after.

Overall I felt Gabaldon kept a firm hand on the tiller; this was evident and cause for appreciation because I was fortunate to be able read the thick book straight through, without haste and with concentration. It was actually nice not to steel myself against dreadful or exciting hyperbolic moments. Not that there weren’t moments of danger, but the book just seems a more mature, thoughtful effort. It left me feeling satisfied, not wrung out and anxious. That’s a fine reading experience. I’ll be happy to tune in again later, whatever may come.

Louise Penny, Glass Houses

“He picked up his perspiring glass and tipped it toward the Chief Superintendent. “To a higher court.”

Gamache lifted his glass. “To burning ships.”

This is a series I have stuck with for years, featuring Chief Inspector Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec (provincial police), a smart, sensitive and savvy solver of mysteries, often murders. Reading murder mysteries is a guilty pleasure, not because I’m particularly drawn to murders or murderers but because I’m drawn to Gamache. And Quebec. Sometimes the books have been set in places I know, like the old walled city of Quebec and the streets of Montreal. Often the setting is a fictional village, called Three Pines, in the charming Eastern Townships near the Vermont border, where Gamache and his wife reside part-time. There are regular characters (the cranky elderly poet and her profane pet duck, I grow weary of; the gay couple who run the bistro and cook fabulous food, on the other hand, have my heart…and appetite…forever), but Gamache himself remains the best and most interesting. I am—deliberately—proceeding chronologically and slowly through the series, portioning it out, to prolong the guilty pleasure and so I don’t catch up to the author’s pace and then have to wait for the next installment.

The plot of this one revolved around a very real and contemporary problem, drug running. How hard it is to combat, how terrible the damage is to individuals and to society. Penny renders all this with her usual sharpness and heart. People do get hurt, do die, do get killed over the illegal opioid trade. Indeed there is one law-enforcement character who’s lost his own daughter to addiction…she’s not dead, but, he’s lost her. It’s personal. Gamache and his helpers are well-aware, as they work to stem the tide, knowing that it’s really more than a tide. More like a tsunami. I have no quibble with her sensitive, frank rendering of this topic. The moral dilemmas are nuanced and real. There are powerful moments in these pages.

But the telling was at times, trying. Information is withheld only from us, the readers. Notably, who is the defendant at the trial? Everyone else knows. Gamache, the lawyers, the judge, others in the courtroom. To keep us guessing for so long wasn’t just annoying, it seemed superfluous and manipulative. Grrr.

Also. My husband likes to joke that Miss Marple is the obvious murderer; she always happens to be around when a crime is committed…she is the constant, consistent common denominator in every tale. Ha ha. Same with this series, or rather, lately, the village of Three Pines. How many complex and heinous crimes can really happen in such a small and remote place, how many criminals can be drawn specifically to such a small and remote place, how much more can it and its residents bear?! (And poor Gamache, his refuge not a place of peace but crime-ridden!) In Glass Houses, when a criminal, the head of a major drug cartel, with henchmen, shows up in the bistro instead of out near the border where the latest shipment of illegal drugs is slated to cross, he takes Gamache and his colleagues by surprise. The book’s reader, distracted by the approaching denouement, scarcely pauses over that detail.

But afterwards, on reflection, I was, like, c’mon…they knew Gamache kept a home in this village. How stupid, imprudent, and unnecessary! Hubris? Nah, this longtime fan thought uncharitably, just convenient for the plot. Meh. Can’t we, or dear Gamache, just settle into a comfy chair by one of the bistro’s fireplaces and sip a cafe au lait and enjoy a fresh, perfectly flaky buttery croissant while gazing out at a soft, fresh snowfall? Can’t everyone just live and work and relax and dine in peace? Maybe settle in with a good book or a good conversation with a neighbor? But then, we wouldn’t have a mystery series.

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“For nearly thirty years, her life—of which he knew so strangely little—had been spent in this rich atmosphere that he already felt to be too dense and yet too stimulating for his lungs. He thought of the theaters she must have been to, the pictures she must have looked at, the sober and splendid old houses she must have frequented, the people she must have talked with, the incessant stir of ideas, curiosities, images and associations thrown out by an intensely social race in a setting of immemorial manners; and suddenly he remembered the young Frenchman who had once said to him: ‘Ah, good conversation—there is nothing like it, is there?’ ”

I felt impelled to read this book, as surely as it had been thrust into my hands. First, there was a nudge. I was brought on to edit/fact-check a gardening book by a painter, a non-gardener, honestly, a charming project because her approach was refreshing. When that author spoke of why she added trellises to her small urban garden space, she referred to this book, or rather, the film of it:

I remember young May Welland promenading on the arm of her fiancé, Newland Archer, through a Victorian garden in the Martin Scorsese film “The Age of Innocence.” While Newland tunes out May’s voice, distracted by his inner doubts, I tune out both of them, distracted by the beautiful green trellis behind them.  On and on they stroll, her in her calico dress, him in his silk bow-tie, under the pergola, past the wisteria, trailing vines, and fern fronds. Through the trellis openings we catch glimpses of the irises and rose bushes and foxgloves behind them.

Ahhh—the beauty of the trellis! Achieved with startling simplicity, a geometric arrangement of wooden sticks in different patterns, these structures create rooms, walls, arches and walkways. They add romance and mystery. And freedom: freedom for the eye to roam around, freedom of sunlight and air. Trellises frame views and lend structure to the exuberance of a garden. Even though my own garden is small, I watched that scene and resolved to import some of the romance of an Edith Wharton novel.

Then, there was another nudge. Just a couple of weeks ago, while driving back to central New York from Boston, I left the interstate highway and plunged into the autumnal Berkshires, unable to resist the golden light. I decided to look up and visit, at long last, Herman Melville’s historic home on the outskirts of Pittsfield, open to the public on weekends for tours. As my phone directed me there, I passed a similar attraction: Edith Wharton’s historic home “The Mount” in Lenox. Passed, did not stop. Noted that it was up on a hill, huge and imposing, undoubtedly filled with grand period furniture and furnishings. I wasn’t too interested in glimpsing how the “one-percenters” of another era lived. (Melville’s more-modest wooden home up the road, with its preserved view of Mt. Greylock and modest writing desk, was more down-to-earth, though he and his family were not impoverished.)

The Age of Innocence was written by someone who knew, then, written by an insider. (My mind casts back to another insider-view book I read a few years ago, The Beans of Egypt, Maine by Caroline Chute…quite another world, obviously, but same species.) Interesting that Wharton, a woman of wealth and privilege, chose to write this deceptively gentle portrait from the viewpoint of a man, Newland Archer. I went to the library and checked out the book, resolving to suspend my disbelief and enter the story on its own terms.

What about “Newland,” eh? What kind of name is that? Perhaps meant to signal that the protagonist was an American, in the new land, though—regrettably, the author underlines—its young culture was already dulled by tedium, dilettantism, hypocrisy, and subterranean manueverings. The woman he falls in love with, Ellen Olenska, puts a point on it in one of their headlong, intensive conversations: '“It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it a copy of another country…do you suppose Christopher Columbus would have taken all that trouble just to go to the Opera with the Selfridge Merrys?” Mic drop, Ellen! That his name is assumed to be suitable and elegant, and not to telegraph what it really means or promises, seems to me to be a summary of the entire tale.

Was that a safe choice, telling it from a male perspective? The author subscribes to Newland Archer some decidedly feminist thoughts and ideas, especially for his milieu and time. “He did not in the least wish the future Mrs. Newland to be a simpleton,” we hear early on. He gets, and regrets, that May has been groomed, or rather “trained,” to be insipid and charming. Reflections on his eventual mother-in-law are rather more devastating, “…her firm placid features, to which a lifelong mastery over trifles had given an air of factitious authority…” Ouch. He does see the double-bind. Or perhaps more accurately, the author bears witness to the double-bind. “A woman’s standard of truthfulness was tacitly held to be lower: she was the subject creature, and versed in the arts of the enslaved.” (Huzzah, by the way, that Edith Wharton wrote under her own name and also won a Pulitzer Prize for this novel.)

Not that the author is easy on the men, either. They don’t really work, they suck on cigars in stuffy parlors talking of inanities or delicately judging their own kind, one flagrantly cheats on his wife (but it’s okay, tolerated). One devoted wife must deal with a husband who suffers from vague “elevated temperatures” that divert her from fun and to a (beastly) vacation home every winter <modern eyeroll, sorry not sorry>. Another fellow “was a mild and silent man, with no opinions but with many habits.”

Ellen’s choices and moves, in such context, are ultimately as good as it gets. All things considered. As for him, he became “a prisoner in an armed camp” and the moment he completely understands this, in a familiar setting among familiar people doing familiar things, is breathtakingly painful. Thank you, Edith Wharton, for sparing your heroine at least some crushing misery.

A tangential comment or query: the book is enriched with colorful details, among them many references to the actors and playwrights and composers this social set attends and fawns over, as well as the authors and poets they read, or at least have on this display in their correctly decorated libraries. I recognized almost none of these and wondered whether the author made them up, or if their names and works have simply faded away with time. A pair I certainly did recognize, mentioned only in passing and not elaborated upon, were Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. A couple renowned and still remembered not only for their vivid writing skills but intense love affair. Yet another passing irony or missed opportunity in this tale of ironies and lost opportunities?

The book’s ending kicked Newland’s expended and suppressed emotions up an notch. (We don’t get Ellen’s, which were only conjecture—see the opening quote to this review; I will conjecture that she got to see the ghost of him in his young son and to learn that he was at least alive and well.) The very last page left me teary, even if it made sense both in what it suggested and it what it showed. On reflection, perhaps it was just right. Though utterly sad.

Hope Jahren, Lab Girl

“I have been told that I am intelligent, and I have been told that I am simple-minded. I have been told that I am trying to do too much, and I have been told that what I have done amounts to very little. I have been told that I can’t do what I want to do because I am a woman, and I have been told that I have only been allowed to do what I have done because I am a woman. I have been told that I have eternal life, and I have been told that I will burn myself out into an early death. I have been admonished for being too feminine and I have been distrusted for being too masculine. I have been warned that I am too sensitive and I have been accused of being heartlessly callous. But I was told all these things by people who can’t understand the present or see the future any better than I can…”

This splendid, bold, on-point, headlong insight comes very late in this intriguing memoir, which is on its surface a recap of a geobiologist’s professional-life journey. It begins with her hanging around her father’s lab (benches, tables, equipment, gadgets, supplies); he was a physics and earth science professor at a rural Midwestern community college. The tale proceeds to her, over decades, setting up her very own labs, eventually installing the Isotope Geobiology Lab in Hawai’i, and doing forest/climate-change research at a prestigious university in Oslo, Norway.

Her undergrad and grad-school experiences are related with candor. Long hours, frustration, humor, excitement, loneliness. On a field-research trip, she meets a guy named Bill, who becomes lab support, science-experiment partner, teaching assistant, sounding board, and best friend. But never, as she tells it, was Bill her boyfriend; he sometimes teases her or winces about her love life and is cast as a brilliant, eccentric loner. Yet he is ying to her yang, and she tows him along through her career, repeatedly writing his salary into her grant applications. At one point she calls him, simply, “a great man.”

At all stages of her advancing career, she puts in such long hours at her work (overnight is normal) that reading about it exhausted and scared me. When she peels back that “work ethic” to share that she suffers manic episodes and has to get meds, I thought, “well, DUH.”

Later she marries and has a son (a difficult pregnancy due to having to go off the psych drugs for a while), and Bill is cast as an uncle. The Bill subplot hovers around the edges of the entire book but, like her, the reader accepts and values him and their relationship. There’s less detail about the husband and son, but they are not central to the arc of her scientific work and/or she is protecting their privacy.

She is rather modest, as she has been a Fulbright scholar (three times!), won many awards, done major research, and earned academic tenure.

Short, vivid chapters on plant biology and trees and soil and forestry and sphagnum moss and geologic time and other topics closely related to her teaching and research are interspersed throughout her narrative. These interludes, usually rather brief, are nonetheless captivating and insightful. At first, although I enjoyed them, I wasn’t sure they belonged in the book.

Does the personal stuff get in the way of the seriousness of her scientific inquiries and work? Does it relate? Is the anthropomorphizing getting in the way of the biology? (For example: “No risk is more terrifying than that taken by the first root” and “Vines are not sinister; they are just hopelessly ambitious.”) I had to ponder her “science chapters” and these questions, as a reader and as an amateur naturalist/botanist. Although I don’t have anywhere near her credentials or experience, I, too have spent decades studying and writing about plants and nature, and I have been accused of anthropomorphizing. If a scientist of her caliber can talk about the world with such language…

Ultimately the fact that she weaves the personal, the human, and the science together throughout this book heartened me. Why should science writing be dispassionate and remove the narrator? Does that make it better, or legitimate? Indeed the more the reader learns about Jahren, on and off campus, in labs and out in the field, the more we understand how the study of nature is messy and participatory—and, literally, engrossing. We are in the ecosystem. Our personal biology, our life story is part of the whole. Indeed, stepping back, taking ourselves out of the picture is potentially dangerous, for us and for the planet. You might even go so far as to say that we won’t care, or viscerally understand, unless we sit right down and plunge our hands into the soil, the foliage, the water. No part of the book is tangential, when you look at it this way.

Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“Everything that Mr. Hosokawa had ever known or suspected about the way life worked had been proven to be incorrect these past months.”

I feel I have to collect my emotions before I try to express my feelings about this novel. It was indeed a good story, the kind of book you think about when you’re away from and are eager to return to; the kind of book where you develop fondness for one or more characters. But there was something more to it. By the end, the world as it was, and all assumptions, are shifted. For the reader as well as the characters.

Really it is a “what happens if you put a diverse group of people in the same room?” plot, which the author then follows faithfully and compassionately to the end. A private dinner party of (mostly) fancy people, in a vice-president’s official mansion in an unnamed South American country, convenes. A successful and wealthy Japanese businessman is being wooed, on the hope or belief that this evening will encourage him to open a factory here, bringing jobs, opportunity, and visibility to a struggling economy. Mr. Hosokawa and the guests are as elegant as the catered meal, and the star of the evening is a renowned opera singer (it was discerned that the Japanese businessman is a big fan and she was persuaded to come and perform, for a big fee). The proceedings are abruptly halted when armed insurgents burst in, via air-conditioning ducts, windows, and doors.

They want the president. He canceled at the 11th hour and is not there. The generals confer about this unforeseen problem while the soldiers (who are no more than teenagers in rags from the jungle) point guns. It is decided to take everyone hostage. Meanwhile, police and military converge outside the compound walls and broadcast ultimatums. An unarmed, savvy, bland Swiss/Red Cross negotiator arrives and secures the release of all the women (except the opera singer) and some of the men. The opera singer’s accompanist dies (diabetic coma; no insulin; refused to leave her) and his body is sent out; those within later learn that the press reported that the savage captors cut off his hands and killed him, totally untrue.

Then a stalemate ensues. Days pass. The generals send constantly revised demands via the Swiss guy, who returns most days bearing food and some supplies. People sleep on the floors and some sofas; the diva gets a bed and a bedroom. The young soldiers take security shifts, patrol, clean and polish their weapons daily, frisk the unarmed Swiss negotiator, and cow their prisoners—though, a little bit less every day, for it is obvious they are not much more than children (and two turn out to be girls). Over the weeks, the commotion outside dissipates or maybe just recedes.

As at the original party, the opera singer remains a focal point. She is beautiful and entitled and magnificently talented. One hostage turns out to be a decent accompanist, another manages to get a box of sheet music for operas delivered along with the daily food, and practice and concerts begin. “Years later when this period of internment was remembered by the people who were actually there, they saw it in two distinct periods: before the box and after the box.”

There are men of many nationalities and Mr. Hosokawa’s personal translator, Gen, becomes invaluable because he is adept in many languages. He translates instructions from the Generals. He delivers declarations of love from the Russians to the American singer. He ends up tutoring one of the soldiers. The room spins around him; he is necessary, he is tired; he is swept into unexpected situations.

Meanwhile, meals are prepared, mood swings come and go, things become a bit more lax. The middle part of the novel does lag…but it is because the reader is experiencing the tedium with the prisoners. And the generals? They clearly never had a Plan B. They are not in the mood to execute their hostages. Ennui and impending doom mix, with every soul inside the house rethinking the lives they are now cut off from and still, somehow, finding moments of pleasure, insight, and even love. The reader doesn’t want the stalemate to end and I recoiled from the inevitable end when it came. For me, the novel became a layered fable about assumptions. How do we know another person? Ourselves? How do we communicate? What does music do? What is faith, what is fear? What matters? How can we countenance loss and death?

Also, of course, set things in motion and they will go somewhere. This is an unsettling, provocative read.

CODA: We—diverse and different—collectively lived through and survived the Covid-19 pandemic (well, so far). Years from now, looking back, will we be like the hostages who lived…a shared history, a shared bond, a shared responsibility to the memory of those who did not survive?

Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“Do all of these horrifying assertions frighten you? Should you stop eating out? Wipe yourself down with antiseptic towelettes every time you pass a restaurant? No way. Like I said before, your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.”

This book was a hell of a ride. Over a period of three or four decades, our hero goes from a punk with hubris to a seasoned head chef, from a roiling Provincetown seafood-joint pit kitchen to New York City’s celebrated French-style bistro Les Halles. He mixes with and learns from a motley crew of profane, dysfunctional-yet-functional galley pirates and expresses unalloyed admiration and affection for the professionals that collaborated with him in the vaunted kitchen at book’s end (in fact, he dedicates the book to his comrades and adds exuberantly, “Cooks rule!”). 

Along the way, oh, I can’t even. Read it yourself if you want all the exciting, grody, sordid, hyperbolic details. Only occasionally delectable.

Suffice to say he loves food, loves to learn about it, loves to shop for it, loves to sling it. He also loves competent, talented colleagues. Good ones are indulged and lavished with appreciation, no matter what they look or smell like, no matter how outlandish their personal or work habits. (In particular, he holds journeymen Ecuadorians in very high esteem; culinary-school graduates, not so much.) Managing supplies and suppliers, I learned, is a high-wire act—one must not only be agile and imaginative, but also organized, imperious, and ruthless. 

The fast pace and high volume of the (mostly NYC) restaurants he careens through comes vividly, sweatily, hectically alive. I believed, err, most of it, and enjoyed all of it. And we’ll have to take his word for it (those unacquainted with restaurant work), that behind Oz’s curtain in the kitchen, all sorts of improbable, specialized skills and ingredients require coordination both verbal and non-verbal in order to coalesce into a gorgeous, delicious, hot meal that arrives calmly on a plate in front of us out in the dining room. Indeed food preparation is a freaking feat. He didn’t use this metaphor, but I thought of an orchestral performance. (He didn’t use this metaphor because he prefers raunchy punk rock blaring in his workplace.)

Among my takeaways: eat in a good restaurant on a Thursday (fresh food will have arrived by then, but it isn’t yet the weekend rush and both the kitchen and the waitstaff ought to be able to do good work). Don’t order mussels (“more often than not, they are allowed to wallow in their own foul-smelling piss at the bottom of a reach-in”). Don’t go out for Sunday brunch (chef and best staff have the day off, you are served sauce-draped leftovers). Also, Baltimore sucks and Tokyo is magnificent!

Sobering indeed to reflect that, 20+ years after this best-selling book came out, this talented chef and engaging storyteller took his own life (2018). I’ve known or brushed close to a couple of people who committed suicide over the years and what can I say? We never really know or can “find out why”; we speculate that they just wanted to end the pain they were in, or to control one thing, the moment and the agent of their death. Bourdain marvels in these pages that he’s still alive after all the hard work, drama, and self-abuse. Had he died of natural causes, I would have guessed a combination of alcohol, illegal drugs, and a broken body (and, tangentially, excessive butter, fois gras, and red meat). Having this information in the back of my mind as I read this supremely entertaining book gave the telling a whiff of woe. He’d been killing himself for years. What happened to his joie de vivre, his brio, his boundless curiosity, his sense of adventure? He had an outsize amount of all of the above! So sad.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe

“Hymn to Matter: ‘Blessed be you, universal matter, immeasurable time, boundless ether, triple abyss of stars and atoms and generations: you who by overflowing and dissolving our narrow standards or measurement reveal to us the dimensions of God.’ ”

Even though this is a slim little book, I could tell immediately that it was going be difficult for me to get through, difficult to understand. I expected a few apologies and caveats from the translator (the original was in French, of course), but the opening pages also carry the apologies and caveats of credentialed peers. These peers are at pains to assure the reader that “the amazing lucidity of [his] scientific vision” is not at odds with his “immense love of God,” and that Teilhard is “authentically and profoundly in accord with the thought of Saint Paul.” What I am hearing = fret not, dear reader, though a scientist, the author is not—heaven forfend—a pantheist! Sigh. The separation of nature and man goes to the very heart of my resistance to key Christian teachings.

And yet, my Christian heritage is strong; both sets of my parents went to church every Sunday, considered themselves believers, were active participants, and shared and modeled their beliefs to me and my siblings all their lives. My copy of this book was a gift from my maternal grandmother, a conservative Irish Catholic. I adored her and am chagrined that it has sat unread on my shelves all these many years. The inscription on the flyleaf says it was for my 18th birthday. What was she thinking?! I wouldn’t have had a clue. I barely have a clue now (“The thought of Saint Paul,” what is that?) Already as a teen, I had a strong interest in nature and science. Perhaps she thought this fellow was a way to reach me. I see that he was a paleontologist. A paleontologist Christian brother? A curiosity indeed. Let’s forge on and try to hear what he has to say.

Chapter on mass and prayer: Lordy, this book is a slog for me. The prose is beautiful and pitched high, but so far we are in conversation with God and Lord Jesus (used interchangeably? I struggle to follow). I find this as presumptuous as Captain Ahab’s conviction that the white whale is out to get him. Furthermore our author holds the Christian belief that God’s kingdom is not of this world.

But because the term towards which the earth is moving lies not merely beyond each individual thing but beyond the totality of things; because the world travails, not to bring forth from within itself some supreme reality, but to find its consummation through a union with a pre-existent Being; it follows than man can never reach the blazing centre of the universe simply by living more and more for himself nor even by spending his life in service of some earthly cause however great…

Sigh. See? Powerful use of language, deft reasoning within the confines of his assumptions, but where he’s coming from and where he goes doesn’t make any sense to me. He appears to aim for expansion but closes doors. Meh.

Chapter of “stories”: The theme here, in several episodes, is visions. A painting of Christ on a church wall, a host held aloft during a mass, a locket of sorts that holds a communion host. Blur out the Christianity and you might think this fellow is reporting eloquently on hallucinogenic experiences. Again, evocative writing, describing sensations of ecstatic unity. Again, anthropomorphizing or, perhaps more precisely, deifying. To be clear, I am on board with awe and humility in the face of creation. In fact, hmm! Reading this book and parsing my resistance does help clarify my own thinking/perceptions/beliefs.

Chapter on “the spiritual power of matter”: See extracted quote at the top of this review. Here he engages, and addresses, God in and of the world and so it is probably the most important chapter. Or at least I should be the most comfortable here. But then he repeats the common scold and straw man, “Sometimes, thinking they are responding to your irresistible appeal, men will hurl themselves for love of you into the exterior abyss of selfish pleasure-seeking: they are deceived by a reflection or by an echo,” and I’m shaking my head ‘no’ again. The translator also tucks in a long—and to me, intrusive and defensive—footnote cautioning the reader from making a “dangerous mistake,” that of following in our author’s footsteps without “treading, like him, the traditional paths of asceticism.” I see this as defensive, and also controlling. And reflect once again that author and translator (and a great body of Christian scholarship and traditions) end up here again and again because of where they start. To be fair, though, I don’t doubt that the traditional paths of asceticism have their gifts.

Chapter of “Pensées” (“thoughts”): Random, short nuggets: meditations, prayers, insights, pronouncements, syntheses, etc. All variations on the foregoing, established themes. In the end, much as I admire his passionate prose, my own views and experiences of this universe we share cannot operate within Christian dogma. The white whale and Captain Ahab were locked into one another; God the Father and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin engage one another. Or, maybe not? Who am I to say?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“At first, Lagos assaulted her; the sun-dazed haste, the yellow buses full of squashed limbs, the sweating hawkers racing after cars, the advertisements on hulking billboards (others scrawled on walls—PLUMBER CALL 0801777777) and the heaps of rubbish that rose on the roadsides like a taunt. Commerce thrummed too defiantly…”

This vivid, engrossing, provocative novel schooled this white American girl in many things, including painting a picture of daily life in Africa’s most populous nation, Nigeria. The main character, Ifemelu, grew up there but went to the United States for college, stayed for a series of jobs and relationships, and eventually moved back. “Americanah” is what her African friends call people like her, insinuating that time spent here changed, upgraded, and/or corrupted. That is, it’s not a clear insult. I guess it’s a description. Anyway, seeing America, American people, American cities, the election of Obama, and American racism through Ifemulu’s sharp intellect and detailed observations was an eye-opener.

I know white Americans who have read or are reading White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, and heard some of their responses to it, including discomfort, shame, guilt, annoyance, skepticism, outrage, and grief. I haven’t read it yet myself but perhaps taking on the topic in a novel might be, what?, more digestible, more relatable (if we’re going to read about this…we learn by stories, by walking in someone else’s shoes)? In the latter part of her time in America, Ifemelu launches and then experiences success with a gloves-off blog about race. In fact, she gets a Princeton fellowship to support it; that is, she can live there and pay her bills while working on it. She calls it “Understanding America for the Non-American Black,” deliberately never revealing whether she is African, Carribean, or from some other place. (Yes. Obama’s first election and blogging—much of this book clearly takes place about 10-15 years ago.) She holds forth on topics as diverse as “American tribalism,” “What do WASPs Aspire to?”, food (“the fruit has no flavor here”) and hair care (decrying how black women damage their natural hair with harsh chemicals). Her voice is smart and tart. Here’s a good sample:

Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. American doesn’t care. So what if you weren’t “black” in your country? You’re in America now. We all have our moments of initiation into the Society of Former Negroes. Mine was in a class in undergrad when I was asked to give the black perspective, only I had no idea what that was. So I just made something up. And admit it—you say “I’m not black” only because you know black is at the bottom of America’s race ladder.

Although Ifemelu is certainly a well-developed character, we spend over 500 pages with her, her blog entries were the most didactic element of the novel. I also had to think, with a heavy heart, that all this was before Donald Trump was elected, American white supremacy was emboldened, George Floyd was murdered by a cruel and indifferent white cop, and more. America’s “progress” with racism generally sucks.

Meanwhile Ifemelu’s own story propels, that is, not just the parts where she navigates and describes American society. Neither the “hot white ex” or the “Professor Hunk” boyfriends last (I wish she hadn’t dubbed them so/they both deserved better IMO), for she can never quite shake or forget her first love, Obinze, her Nigerian high-school relationship. They did have “a plan” when they parted and tried to keep in touch via letters and later email, but it didn’t hold up because, well, life intervened. She was on the rocky road to becoming an Americanah; for his part, he went to England to become a citizen and stay. His time in London was not what he had pictured. He experienced poverty, fear, racism, and humiliation, and was eventually deported. Back in Nigeria, he marries and has a daughter. She delays her return to Nigeria when her beloved teenage cousin attempts suicide (not coincidentally, living in an all-white New England town—Ifemelu identifies the trauma of subtle, constant racism as a factor, the boy’s mother retorts “many teenagers suffer from depression”). Adichie renders all the characters with candor as well as tenderness.

Ifemelu and Obinze’s foundational bond lives in their hearts over the years and struggles. Repatriating was challenging for her (a bit about her forays into the whiny just-moved-back social club was funny-sad) and I feared she would not be able to, finally neither quite American nor quite Nigerian. That she’d be adrift and alienated. I knew she’d run into Obinze eventually and I feared the relationship would not revive for the same reasons. I put off reading the last 50 pages, feeling woe for each of them. On the last page (spoiler alert), when hope blooms, it doesn’t feel like a romance-novel ending but like a genuine homecoming.

Casper Ter Kuile, The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices

“…Many of us are unbundling and remixing our spiritual lives and re-creating practices that help connect us to ourselves, to one another, to nature, and to the transcendent. It isn’t always easy. But we have inherited great traditions from our spiritual ancestors…”

The author was, until recently, the co-host of the popular podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. He graduated from Harvard Divinity School and remains connected to it as a “Ministry Innovation Fellow” (apparently he doesn’t ‘believe in’ or subscribe to any particular religion, though because of his education, he’s explored many). He is also British, gay, married, young, and hip and—with this book—he is mainly addressing his contemporaries.

The above extract is basically his thesis. In the context of a diverse, interconnected global culture, he correctly observes that “we are more fragmented…and lonely.” Religion is no longer something most people (his contemporaries) turn or return to and yet, certain elements offer wisdom, help, and direction. Especially rituals.

He argues first that “tradition” is better/preferable/more useful than “convention.” To avoid sleepwalking through rituals and to receive their gifts of relevance and meaning, we are empowered when we explore traditions, which he argues is an “inherently creative” approach. Even in a secular world, we can still pray and grow, do good, find purpose, and feel hope and gratitude. A house of worship is not required, and no need to reinvent the wheel.

Full of earnest enthusiasm, he examines and commends everything from CrossFit gyms and Tough Mudder obstacle course events to communal meals, organized around seasons or holidays (or not) to capture and enjoy the fruits of community. To connect with yourself, he suggests various good tactics, most especially quiet time. He himself takes a 24-hour “tech Sabbath” once a week and if I get nothing else out of this book, that seems a sensible, nay, necessary habit to add to modern life. Urging readers to reconnect with nature is perfectly fine and warranted, but this is his weakest, vaguest chapter (well, he admits he lives in a city). He never quite “gets” or outright states that respect for all life—not just human life—would be a game-changer personally as well as globally, living as we do in a time when nature is in crisis. Well. This is organized religion’s (certainly, Chrisianity’s) biggest flaw or blind spot, isn’t it?

One spot in his discussion of the tradition of “memento mori” (bearing in mind that we are all mortal/life is short) caused me to recoil:

There are many ways to adapt this practice. My friend Darrell Jones III has built it into his workout. You might download an app like WeCroak, which pings you five times a day to remind you of your coming death. Or you can find a short phrase to say out loud as you put on moisturizer or makeup in the morning, or every time you get in the car. The secret is to repeat it often, so that you experience a regular moment of reflection and gratitude for being alive.

The “WeCroak app” will “ping” me five times a day?! Oh dear God.

Ter Kuile’s strongest chapter is on prayer: the types, the uses, the benefits. There, he walks his talk—discovers and explores traditions, gets creative. (Though he stops short of “building a significant relationship with” a higher power.) There are occasional other lovely moments and insights in these pages. A short meditation on “the necessity of repetition,” connecting honesty and loyalty, and gently, humbly, but firmly reminding us that “rigor” is the fuel of commitment.

This reader also chafed, all book long, at his continual references to other thinkers and their books. His academic background is showing! Of course, yes, I know, he’s done a ton of research and reading and is citing or crediting the sources of key ideas. No need to reinvent the wheel. But the constant name- and title-dropping disrupts his narrative and has the cumulative effect of making it sound like he is still a college student and not confident in his own ideas and perceived truths. Oh well, he’s young, still finding his voice. The book is still an engagement of what we* have and what we* need. I’d like to hear from him again in 10 or 20 years.

* some of us

Wayne Shorey, The Little Yokozuna

“ ‘If you catch anything in a net of words,’ said the old woman, ‘ you have taken the first step to losing it.’ "

I believe the author intended this slender, entertaining little book to be a “children’s book.” The cover promises “demon warriors, sumo wrestling, and baseball—East meets West in a fantastic adventure.” The Little Yokozuna delivers all that!

There’s a whole pack of brothers and sisters, going on an adventure to recover one of their own, Little Harriet. They begin in Boston, in the Japanese garden behind the MFA. There, pursuing a chipmunk, Little Harriet goes behind the traditional plantings and stone lantern and vanishes…and from that point, they give chase. Sometimes they are separated and have different adventures; they cope with uncertainty and injuries. In the book’s latter pages they are reunited and work together to find and rescue her. The Japanese-garden portals involve magical breezes, “accordion” scenery, a puzzling old man, travel in Japan and through time, a sassy talking monkey, and new friends. American kids, they receive some education in Japanese geography, food, traditions, and sports along the way.

The siblings are a diverse group, though close in age. One is black, ‘Siah (short for Josiah), and I rather sensed that he wasn’t the only adopted one. Some of them speak a little Japanese, which comes in handy. Their dad taught them. In fact, they were initially in the Boston Japanese garden because they were looking for ideas for making him a Japanese garden at home, presumably a Boston suburb. They have different strengths and skills, are respectful and polite, and are devoted to one another. (As a parent myself, this caused me to admire the good work of their unseen parents. But their parents barely figure in this tale—as it should be! Think Narnia!) (Well, the dad figures more than the mom, but look who wrote the book.) I also loved the various nicknames, the boy named Knuckleball, the girl called “Q.J.” for Quiddity Jane, the big brother known as Owen Greatheart and, of course, the little Little Harriet. The author nails the way a group of siblings works, from teasing to great affection, from competition to teamwork. Lines such as “ ‘Think, O brainless one,” said Annie’ ” made me guffaw, and “Want me to rock you?” spoken gently by an older one to a weary younger one made me smile.

And so! The backstory is what makes the book so endearing for me. Not just because I hail from a similar group of siblings (eight kids in my family, too, all close in age). Not just because I have lived in the Boston area and been an avid Red Sox fan, and so also got those references. Shorey was born and raised in Japan, the back cover tells us so. Full disclosure, I also met him once and learned that he had a large pack of children, some adopted. Now that I’ve read the book, aha!, I see what he did here. He put his own kids into an adventure story, a marvelous, exciting adventure, complete with obstacles and choices, not-too-scary danger, lessons, new friends, and success in rescuing Little Harriet at last. Along the way, he taught them a little bit about the culture he grew up in, cross-pollinating the tale with brave deeds and honoring their bonds and individual uniquenesses. He captured quite a bit in a net of words. What a great gift a dad-writer gave to his kids! I hope they loved this book.

Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“How can we live in a time when social media makes us friends with people all over the world, but our sense of neighbor is shrinking?”

Slender and earnest, this novel at turns entertained me and touched me. I confess I picked it up not only wishing for a “lite read” (which is welcome now and then) but also for a visit to the way life once was. I mean, the basic plot is a single 40-something, well-employed woman—she works as a staff horticulturist/groundskeeper at an obviously well-funded college—who decides to use some time off to visit old friends, one by one. Suburban Connecticut, Seattle, New York City, London. Remember those days? Buy a plane or Amtrak ticket, pack a bag, go hang out with your friend and her family for a few days. See local sights, stop for ice cream, stay up late chatting (with wine, despite exhaustion). It all seems so remote and quaint nowadays: a secure job, college campuses full of people, eating in busy restaurants, no pandemic, no masks, ease of travel. In ordinary times, this book would not be escapist reading!

Well, it’s not totally escapist. There are references to Twitter hashtags and Facebook posts, as well as the damage wrought by suburban sprawl and climate change. Her friends are navigating real-world problems in their careers and relationships. The book is fairly current, I mean. I looked—2020. Written in 2019, we presume.

Okay, having dispensed with context, let’s just try to enjoy this tale on its own terms. Because the author sustains the narrator May’s voice, keeps the ball in the air so to speak, I was able to come on in and follow the story and consider the ideas. Too many quotes like the one I extract above (which, by the way, I agree with) and May would’ve only been a pretext for the author’s opinions. An artifice that troubled me more was her continual literary references, when we did not learn that her childhood home or her public school was full of literature, never see her reading a book, and she majored in horticulture in college—it just didn’t add up, wasn’t believable. Even if it was funny-sad that had to go out and buy a suitcase (didn’t have one!), and chose a gray one with a scrape, which she then dubbed “Grendel” (because Grendel stood outside the socializing and feasting of Heorot). Other than those quibbles, though, really, it’s a good story.

Just because I’m in a position to follow the botany, horticulture, and gardening remarks, those bits were consistently correct and fun. She has a hearty scorn for annuals, loves and respects trees, and sniffs roses and orange blossoms. She knows her stuff and loves her work, equally assiduous whether designing a display or performing a menial task such as raking. Out for a brief walk in Manhattan (one of the four friend-visits), she sees three “desperate-looking” honey locusts, suffering from too much salt in the soil. “Horrified, I said out loud, ‘these trees are being poisoned!’ “ She brings home small talismans from her trips and arrays them on her kitchen windowsill. Yep, I’d be her friend.

But the way May reveals herself, her own story, blooms slowly, which was credibly and skillfully done. In the early chapters, I found her wan and clueless, but in fact she is not. She’s a sharp and often funny observer, and her travels erode her aloofness and reveal her traumas, her opinions, and her heart. She had a spark before she went visiting, and the warmth of friends is not to be underestimated (despite settings and relationship challenges). Her fire is glowing by the book’s end.

By the way, her rules for visiting are:

1. Do not arrive telling stories about the difficulties of your trip.

2. Bring a gift.

3. Make your bed and open the curtains. A guest room is not a cave just because it’s temporary.

4. Help in the kitchen, if you’re wanted.

5. Unless you are very good with children, wait until you hear at least one adult moving around before getting up in the morning.

6. Don’t feed the pets.

7. Don’t sit in your host’s place.

8. Say good night before bed.

9. Always send a thank-you note.
   

   6. and 7. seem superfluous/duh, and I would instead insert “treat your friend to a meal/coffee/ice cream/groceries,” “leave a thank-you note on the pillow,” and “give them time/take breaks, so they can finish the argument with their husband or take care of a work email or phone call.”

Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”

This slender, meandering, interesting book came out just as the pandemic bore down on the world—a circumstance the author could not have foreseen when she began writing. Suddenly the topic, and some of her insights, seem urgently interesting, urgently relevant to our enforced shut-down.

I discovered her when I wandered into the “On Being” podcast. I gleaned from listening to that short interview that the author lives in England and is the mother of a young boy and also that she is humble and thoughtful, chooses her words with care. I was a little bit leery when I acquired a copy of the book and saw a ringing endorsement from Liz Gilbert blasted onto the front cover—Liz Gilbert again?! Am I traveling in this middle-aged-woman angst-to-self-care genre again?! Gah! But that was probably just the work of the marketing team, for May is solidly British, guileless in comparison to American counterparts. (She identifies shame and embarrassment as her own culture’s burdens; we instead have self-absorption and hubris.)

As the quote I’ve extracted above indicates, she is defining wintering as a period of rest and regrouping, a fallow period or a period of transition. Nor does wintering always happen in winter months; a personal change or crisis can precipitate it. She reminds us that the world’s systems are naturally cyclical and so can and should be our own rhythms. Obviously, ignoring or denying creates tension (at least!), whether it’s being a workaholic mother or staying up late on dark nights in brightly lit rooms.

On her tour are Northern lights, pre-Industrial-revolution sleep patterns, taking brief, shouting wintry dips in the ocean, depression, bees, Stonehenge at the Winter Solstice, navigating illness—yours and someone else’s, hibernating dormice, Christmas choirs, wolves, teacher burnout, and snow. (Her seaside town gets so little snow compared to where I live, in Upstate New York’s “snow belt,” that her insights on this topic seemed grasping, but really, that’s not her fault.) There might have been more.

Keeping the book brief and steadily in motion is a substantial achievement, in my opinion, for “wintering” is a big topic. She candidly confronts this, in the final chapter: “I want this all to end like a neat narrative arc should,” all troubles solved or at least engagement underway. But “I don’t feel up to the task,” she admits, and her reader, having followed her this far, nods in appreciation, relief, and yes, gratitude. Let us take what you’ve given us here, food for thought, interesting information, fresh ideas, and go forth.

Richard Russo, Bridge of Sighs

“What I discovered I liked best about striking out on my bicycle was that the farther I got from home, the more interesting and unusual my thoughts became. I discovered I could think things in a new landscape that never would have occurred to me at home or in my own well-traveled neighborhood.”

The first third, or more, of this long book caused me to squirm with impatience. Its narrator, Lou Lynch (or “Lucy,” thanks to an elementary-school teacher who called “Lou C. Lynch” during attendance and launched a lifelong nickname) is long-winded. He’s recounting his whole life story, growing up in a fictional Rust Belt town in Central New York: what it looked like, the social structures, the residents, the corner store his family runs and he inherits. Daily life mundane, painful, and only rarely transcendent, it’s all here.

Like other Richard Russo novels, the story’s clearly set in Gloversville, a once-prospering town with tanneries as the backbone of the economy. (A small inside joke, he calls it Thomaston; I know Russo no longer lives in his hometown or any other blighted village around here, but relocated to a mid-coast Maine town by that name.) The creeks run with the toxic discharge from the factories, an environmental crime that stays with the townspeople long after the jobs are gone, in the form of various cancers. Russo’s rage and sorrow about that, even filtered through a boring narrator, is abundantly clear.

Yeah, Lucy is dull. And he remembers everything and overthinks everything in excruciating detail, from the girls he had crushes on to the alley fights after the middle-school Friday night dances, from the local diner cook’s words and appearance to his friendship with a fence-painting older black man. He’s droning and earnest and provincial, and the only reason I didn’t give up was that I know Russo is a splendid writer; he was just showing us the character.

Glad I stuck with the book. Before I was through, I was moved again and again by Russo’s keen insights into not just Lucy, but a wide cast of characters. I expected boys and men throwing blows, a complex relationship with a mother, friendships deep and shallow, and entrenched social castes and those who cross the lines. But I have to say the character I was most touched by was the woman Lucy married and shared his life with, Sarah. Russo mapped her heart with exquisite skill and respect. I was afraid she was going to be an Anne-Tyler-ish character, tired and rueful and forgiving, but he did a deeper dive and I appreciated it (every sense of the word “appreciate”).

Donna Leon, Death at La Fenice: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery

“A thick fog had appeared during the night, seeping up from the waters upon which the city was built, not drifting in from the sea. When he stepped out his front door, cold, misty tendrils wrapped themselves around his face, slipped beneath his collar….buildings slipped in and out of sight, as though they, and not the fog, shifted and moved.”

Venice, Italy, that ancient, historic, improbable city, has long been on my bucket list. Why? asked my husband. Why indeed, when I am such a North American and such a nature-lover? Because it is one of the world’s greatest examples of man-made beauty. I’ve been to Firenze and Roma and would also love to see Siena, but of them all, Venezia seems the most impossible and amazing. Additionally I am perpetually drawn to the sea and to islands. But this city of islands is sinking into the sea or rather, thanks to climate change, the waters are rising. In pre-Covid-19 times, I understand it groaned under a constant tide of tourists, to the point where daily life of the residents became increasingly submerged and impractical. More recently I read a story that the iconic Caffè Florian on Piazza San Marco was in danger—after centuries!—of going out of business (snarky comments from disgruntled tourists on Trip Advisor suggest little pity, as it is wildly overpriced and the quality disappointing). And yet, I long to go. One of my sisters, who has been there, suggests the way to really see Venice is to “wander…get lost!”

Well, the best I can do now is to travel there in the pages of a book, and I sought a book written by somebody who knows Venezia very well. Donna Leon’s Commissario Guido Brunetti mystery series was suggested to me, and this is the first book. I paused over this passage, which appears rather early in the proceedings:

Brunetti often mused that the crime rate in Venice was low—one of the lowest in Europe and certainly the lowest in Italy—because the criminals, and they were almost always thieves, simply didn’t know how to get away. Only a resident could navigate the spiderweb of narrow calles, could know in advance that this one was a dead end or that one ended in a canal. And the Venetians, the native population, tended to be law-abiding, if only because their tradition and history had given them an excessive respect for the rights of private property and the imperative need to see to its safekeeping. So there was very little crime, and when there was an act of violence or, much more rarely, a murder, the criminal was quickly and easily found: the husband, the neighbor, the business partner. Usually all they had to do was round up the usual suspects.

I presume Ms. Leon speaks correctly here, but it also makes me wonder about this series. I’ve been advised that there are at least two dozen more Commissario Guido Brunetti mystery books! What will he have to do, how will she tell his stories, with this evident lack of interesting material? Hmm!

In this debut, the mystery swirls around the sudden death by poisoning of a famous, gifted conductor in his dressing room between acts in an opera performance. I was struck by how Brunetti proceeds pretty much solo. Oh, he orders an autopsy, sends evidence to a lab, gets documents translated for him, asks colleagues to find out bits and pieces that may or may not help solve the puzzle. But, unlike, say, Chief Inspector Gamache, he does not work in a cooperative team of sleuths really, no meetings, no out-loud speculative discussions, no “war room.” He visits or calls witnesses and other people of interest all by himself, telling nobody, following his own dogged process and intuition, and only reporting to his superior what he deems necessary or expedient. I notice he navigates the fecklessness and <cough> provincial attitudes of various colleagues quite deftly; he’s no fool, and he does the best he can with the tools at his disposal. Thus he operates more like a private investigator than a police chief, IMO. He moves pretty much alone in the fog, I mean.

And our hero does solve it. And the reader does get to enjoy the satisfaction of that expected moment near the end of the book, as tension crescendos, the “spilling moment,” shall we call it. What made this book so interesting, though, was that although Leon operates within the formula, there are unexpected twists, revelations, choices. Her writing is graceful and more skillful than at first it appears. She is a fine weaver indeed. I bet she rarely gets lost in the calles of Venice.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”

This is a profound, hard-working, heartfelt book that addresses things that matter a lot to me: plants, nature, community, kinship, the nature of learning about nature, and the fear and responsibility I feel for our beleaguered planet right now. The author is a scientist (a botanist and an ecologist) of Native American descent, also a teacher (college professor), a mother, an explorer, a philosopher, a cook, a gardener, and more. Using the launchpad of the art and meaning of growing, harvesting, and braiding the native grass known as sweetgrass, she weaves an important message. This relationship with Mother Nature only works when we give (with care and respect) as we take. We have been taking far too much, far too heedlessly, for far too long. No wonder this land, this planet, is in trouble.

As the extracted quote above suggests, she is somehow (!) an optimist. She writes with great knowledge, her own, her students’, her colleagues’, the work of others who care for the earth, and with credit to the stories handed down to her through the indigenous culture that is her heritage. Her voice throughout is so thoughtful and confiding, and also urgent. I felt like I was sitting in her living room or an informal classroom setting, maybe over hot mugs of tea, listening, asking questions, chatting, nodding in agreement, learning, and worrying, weeping/grieving, wondering.

Because I already have facility with a lot of the botany and natural history she shares, I was at ease. Though I was also lamenting, “Ah! Where was she, where was SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry when I was young and hungering for this knowledge?! I had no idea about this school and what its teachers and programs offered!” No adult, no teacher, no high-school guidance counselor ever pointed me in that direction; how different my path might have been. Alas!

She extracts and relays insights from nature that had not yet “clicked” or had eluded me, and reading them filled my heart like a sail. For instance, speaking of lichens, “when conditions are harsh and life is tenuous, it takes a team sworn to reciprocity to keep life moving forward.” For instance, “Like the maple, leaders are the first to offer their gifts…leadership is rooted not in power and authority, but in service and wisdom.” For instance, “perpetual growth is simply not compatible with natural law.” This is information the natural world gives us. What can we give back, starting with listening and heeding?

I once heard an interview with musician/songwriter Graham Nash in which he stated that “we want to write from our hearts so we have a chance of reaching your heart.” Writing from her heart, she weaves her message that we are joined to all the life on earth in “obligate symbiosis.” The book is powerful because she speaks truth.

Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“The sea and the clouds don’t stay the same for five minutes running and I’m scared I’ll miss something if I stay inside.”

I extract that particular quote not because it’s important to the novel’s plot or even illuminating of the main character, but for strictly personal reasons. The speaker is on Guernsey in the English Channel and her windows look out over a fine view that includes the ocean. I have a small second home on an island (off Southwest Nova Scotia), that I can’t travel to right now due to the border being closed due to the ongoing pandemic, and her remark pierced my heart! There are many reasons why island life clarifies the mind and fills the soul, and she nailed one of them.

Okay, that business out of the way, I’ll now talk about this reading experience. I picked up this little book thinking, “ahh, what a twee title…British author…this will be diverting and adorable, with cottages and teatime and eccentric British characters.”

Oh, there are cottages, and a few instances of teatime. There’s a raft of eccentric British characters, complete with suitable names (mercifully, no Priscilla Winkelbottom or Sir William Forthright; my favorites = Clovis Fossey, Miss Isola Pribby). Every now and then, the narrative veered into territory so precious I winced. For example: [a visitor] “wrote poems to the freesias and daffodils. Also to the tomatoes. He was agog with adoration for the Guernsey cows and the blooded bulls, and he composed a little song in honor of their cowbells (“tinkle, tinkle, such a merry sound”). Directly beneath the cows, [in his estimation] were the simple folk of the country parishes, who still speak the Norman patois and believe in fairies and witches…” The fact that this excerpt is a quote within the tale doesn’t pardon it. So meta, eh! And yet, isn’t this atmosphere what I thought I was signing up for…?

However, it became apparent that this was not going to be a charming, gratifyingly lite story. In fact, steadily and grimly, the characters paint a vivid, complex, and often heart-wrenching story of Guernsey under German occupation. Yes, Nazis. Life in this sweet place goes into a tailspin. Rationing, then hunger, deprivation, cruelty, abandoned pets killed en masse, sobbing and frightened children separated from their parents and sent away to the mainland for safety, loneliness, fear, desperately burning almost anything for fuel for heat. Two residents rescue and clean up a mere child of a Todt slave (in the crowd of workers sent to erect bunkers but barely fed and literally kept in pens), gently washing off filth and lice, tenderly feeding, only to get betrayed, arrested, and sent to imprisonment in Germany. Horrifying, gruesome conditions at Ravenbruck and Belsen are described by those who experienced them.

Among the ways the islanders coped, though, was their makeshift literary society, originally invented on the fly to explain why they were out after curfew. They were not all readers to begin with, and their learning curve is often intriguing and…oh, must I use this word?…endearing. The guy who will only read Seneca, and another who passionately rebuts a “disgusting” author named Chaucer (over the Parson, not the Wife of Bath!). An avid cook is indignant that the group doesn’t consider cookbooks to be literature (what do they know?!). Enjoying the Brontes leads to reading Jane Austen. Appreciating Charles Lamb leads to pondering his shocking biography. And so on.

The book is cleverly cast as letters between the characters, and an occasional telegram in ALL CAPS as warranted. The technique works and makes the reading propulsive and fun, conferring extra drama and discovery. Even when the tale was sadder and bleaker than I had anticipated, I came along. I liked the many voices, the conflicts, the friendships forged, the arc of a couple of romances, the satisfying subplots…even when some of the characters were, I lament again, a bit twee. It’s all artfully constructed (and must’ve been a lot of work—Shaffer began the book but fell ill and her niece Barrows completed it). Ultimately, this novel was like a homespun but good recipe: a little of this and that, eventually warming.

PS - I would definitely dread a film version.

Dame Daphne Sheldrick, Love, Life, and Elephants: An African Love Story

“…this proved to me that the antelopes—and indeed many animals—are able to pick up thought processes and that telepathy is a real means of communication, especially among family members with strong emotional bonds. I had no difficulties reaching this conclusion; for me, the natural world was—and still is—so full of mysterious wonders that we humans have yet to fully understand.”

As the title foretells, this is a memoir of sweeping scope! It takes place principally in Kenya, and is told in great detail and with candor by a smart and sensitive woman, Daphne Sheldrick (1934-2018). The descendant of white British settlers (who arrived when the area was still a British colony), she grew up on a farm in rough country near the Great Rift Valley. Her life’s work, begun when married to David Sheldrick, the founder Warden of Tsavo (Kenya's largest National Park) and continued after his death by a foundation that bears his name, revolved around aiding African wildlife, particularly orphaned elephants.

I found myself responding to her story on many levels, as it is indeed a richly layered story.

British/white imperialism in Africa: She explains—though I don’t know if this is wholly or partially correct—that “the reason for British involvement in East Africa was not actually Kenya itself—it was [adjacent on the western border] Uganda and the source of the Nile.” She begins by telling of her great-grandparents, people descended from “solid pioneering stock…stoical, adventurous, enamored of Africa.” Men, women and children, heavily laden with food but also tools, furnishings, luggage, and livestock, traveled by boat and steam locomotive from South Africa to “allotments” in the interior bush of Kenya. Her grandfather, a boy when his family made this journey, did tell how the convoy passed through tribal lands to the consternation and curiosity of the natives. They also witnessed gorgeous, unspoiled scenery, teeming with abundant wildlife (which sometimes halted the progress of the train). Their land grants were in previously unoccupied wilderness. The survivors of this arduous journey struggled and suffered, and were later moved to a more hospitable area, but I had to think, if the Africans had not settled in an area, there was probably good reason (lack of water, lousy soil, predators, challenging weather, insect-borne diseases etc.)! Anyway, she does not judge her predecessors. Later, we learn of how her own parents’ farm struggled, with her aging father taking extra work to combat their poverty. And yet, they had staff, paid Africans, so I found myself feeling judge-y, as in, “that’s poverty?” Though, of course, we understand that a farm cannot be run by a small family alone.

As her story progresses, I didn’t find cause to brand her a racist any more than her situation and the times dictated. Her father and, later, each of her two husbands, worked closely with native Africans, learning their languages and ways (including how to utilize every part of an animal carcass), respecting their many differences (again we reflect on the folly of outsiders drawing borders around a plethora of diverse tribes), boring wells to bring water and creating roads and bridges to improve travel and commerce, etc. Most significant to her story is the ongoing and earnest efforts to educate, train, and employ native Africans in appreciating and protecting their native landscapes and wildlife. This approach would seem morally right, practical, and sustainable.

She and her family were nervous when in 1963, Kenya became independent. She doesn’t belabor their objections though she does matter-of-factly describe tensions between competing tribes and corruption at all levels of the native government, fretting (with cause, it turns out) that the new regime might not be as helpful or effective in protecting landscapes and wildlife. I watched for but never found any conviction that Africans can protect their own heritage without white help, from scientists, organizationally/logistically, not to mention generous funding (up to and including the World Bank!).

Turning the tide on habitat destruction, slaughter, and the poaching trade was key. During WW2, her father was assigned to acquire and process meat to feed troops and prisoners; he killed thousands of wildebeests and zebras and felt badly about it. And the high demand for rhino horns and elephant tusks also came from beyond African’s borders. So I sense that the habitat destruction, slaughter, and poaching trade were problems principally created by outsiders. She doesn’t really delve into this, but it grieved me to ponder. In this context, though, she and her husband and their associates became part of the solutions and worked doggedly towards conservation goals. African ecotourism also evolved in her her lifetime from bounty hunting to camping, lodge-based, and photography safaris; they and their contemporaries were part of that shift, too.

Love and marriage: A subplot in her long and interesting tale is personal. Marrying the wrong guy too young, the right guy later, and having a companion as a widow—all this is related frankly. The first marriage was, she relates, disappointing emotionally (and sexually, we infer) though she takes the high road in ensuing years in the best interests of their daughter and even calls her ex a good lifelong friend. Her middle years with the right guy, David Sheldrick, were happy and productive. They were truly partners and worked very well together, dovetailing skills, learning in compelling “boots on the ground” fashion. Their extensive and varied field experience taught them many things not only about different animal species but also about ecology and habitats. She is quick to point out proudly that things her husband discerned were later validated by scientists. The last guy was an occasional companion, a “fun” arrangement that suited both parties. I observed how she related all this carefully, knowing that part of her audience was her daughters and grandchildren. Her love and admiration for Sheldrick was radiant and reciprocated. I loved that when they were camping, even after long years of marriage, he’d pick a nosegay of wildflowers and leave them on her pillow in their tent.

But the heart of her tale is the animals she’s tended, from birds to warthogs to rhinos to elephants, as well as creatures I’d never heard of, including duikers, civet cats, and kudus. Many orphans are nursed back to health in pens on the grounds of the park, in their own yard and barns, even in their own bedroom or windowsill. She is consistently, ardently attentive to their needs, physical and emotional. She or her family or staff name them, often with native names that indicated where they were found/rescued from. She remembers their quirks and misadventures, intuits and respects their personalities, weeps when they die of disease or mishap or violence, and cheers (with tears in her eyes) when they successfully rejoin their wild counterparts—the ultimate goal. It was intriguing, too, to learn of intra-species friendships; my favorite was the inseparable Stroppy the rhino and Punda the zebra. The battle against poachers and, later, encroaching civilization, waxes and wanes but is ever-present.

Most of all I was captivated by the elephants. As her stories amply show, they are intelligent, social, and emotional. Babies wail and grieve for their dead mothers, often experiencing PTSD. It was Daphne herself, through trial and error, that discovered a milk formula that would save the lives of very young orphaned elephants. A favorite matriarch named Eleanor helps Daphne and her staff nurture, educate, and fledge weaned orphans. One day, a rehabilitated tame adolescent male gallops off toward a wild herd while she and others watch in confusion and alarm, until they realize: somehow, though he was orphaned very young, he knows, recognizes that these are his relatives—and they welcome him. Once she is a bit too familiar with an older female she thinks she knows (discounting her doubts) and gets picked up and hurled onto some rocks, breaking her leg and other bones. Her healing process is long, painful, and difficult. But she does not return to caring for elephants angry or wary. Instead she understands what happened, forgives, and moves on—a lesson she learned from the elephants themselves.

A wildlife biologist might scoff at this book, with all the charming animal names and her entertaining stories of her wards’ antics. They might say, as she describes and muses about their behavior and how they interact, “oh, anthropomorphizing!” Not so fast. Without preconceptions, and with keen observation, she, her late husband, and their many colleagues over decades have opened the doors to discovery.

Glennon Doyle, Untamed

“I’ll tell you this: the braver I am, the luckier I get.”

This book was an enthusiastic gift from a friend I adore and admire. It is, in fact, a current bestseller and probably because women friends and sisters are buying and gifting it like mad. It’s got Oprah’s and Elizabeth Gilbert’s blessings (where is Anne Lamott?), and is a selection of Reese’s book club (Reese Witherspoon, the actress? she’s curating books these days?). The cover is a wild, attention-grabbing riot of color. I have to confess, I felt a bit…marketed at.

Like other empowering books aimed at middle-aged women, Untamed is part memoir and part inspirational-speaker presentation. Look what I, Glennon, have been through, figured out, and triumphed over! Glennon has been through plenty: bulimia, addiction, anxiety, depression, a marriage to a cheating man, birthing and parenting three children, giving talks and book tours and answering emails from her fans, falling in love with and eventually marrying a woman (a soccer star!), learning to work with the ex in the raising of their growing children, confronting and surmounting her churlish attitude toward's the ex’s girlfriend, etc. Different from my own trajectory, and yet there’s plenty to relate to, shed a tear over, twist and shout over, cringe over, and cheer for. Glennon is a smart, funny, assiduously mostly-humble teller of her tale.

Where I chafe is when she segues into inspiring pronouncements: “we all must live lives of our own,” “heartbreak delivers your purpose,” “own your wanting.” I don’t respond to stuff like that by jumping up, bright-eyed and a bit teary, cheering and fist-pumping; I’m not in an Oprah studio audience. I’m more like, “I’m here inside my life, doing the best I can, lady, it’s not all about me,” and “heartbreak sometimes just shatters your fucking heart,” and “I am not entitled to everything I want.” Nor do I believe that these measured responses mean I missed Glennon’s important message or that I am a passive or failed or incomplete woman or person. I’m just a patient and striving human, trying to balance thinking, feeling, creating, and breathing. So I’m afraid Glennon’s strident, facile calls to my inner cheetah missed the mark at times. I do appreciate much of her hard-won wisdom; her pants don’t have to fit me.

She’s right about making bold choices leading to a feeling, a state, of being fortunate. I have wept at what I have had to tear down and leave behind, but I am better and more distilled in my new life/home/job/marriage. It’s not really a matter of being untamed or busting out of a cage. More, it’s a complex brew of intuition, faith, clear-eyed analysis, and courage.

Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue

“She had never liked the Bay Area, with its irresolute and timid weather, the tendency of its skies in any season to bleed grey, the way it arranged its hills and vistas like a diva setting up chairs around her to ensure the admiration of visitors.”

That is the irritable (and, I thought, evocative) musings of a smart and capable Oakland woman having a bad day. She is Gwen Shanks, an African-American midwife, hugely pregnant herself, and married to the often-feckless Archy Stallings. Her business partner and best friend is the petite, sharp-as-hell Aviva Roth-Jaffe.

Aviva’s husband Nat Jaffe and Archy are also business partners and best friends. They run Brokeland Records, a sprawling, eclectic record store (focusing mostly on their mutually beloved jazz and R&B) on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. Other characters include-but-are-not-limited-to two irresistible, hilarious (not to themselves) teens: Julius “Julie” Jaffe and a recently surfaced illegitimate son of Archy’s, Titus Joyner…and an array of neighborhood figures and customers, from the world-weary undertaker and his team of sharp-dressed thugs, to the (surprise!) corrupt city councilman, to an elderly but entirely formidable female Asian kung-fu instructor named, I am not kidding, Master Jew. To get this party started, Chabon injects a rich retired football star who wants to open a huge “media complex” on beleaguered Telegraph Avenue (thus, assuredly, putting Archy and Nat’s store out of business), precious clients of Aviva and Gwen (the author’s rendering of entitled white Berkeley hippies narrowly avoids snark/he is able to humanize them), and the resurfacing of Archy’s MIA father and his still-sexy but jaded girlfriend (who happen to be former blaxploitation action-movie stars; Chabon humanizes them, too). There’s an array of funky cars. Astounding restaurants (egg rolls AND glazed donuts). Sexual attraction between the teen boys. Other people’s babies. Skateboards and bicycles. Pancakes. A blimp, er, zeppelin, named “Minnie Riperton.” Really!

In short, Chabon creates or rather, renders, an ecosystem of late-90s Oakland. It’s wild and complex and poignant. It’s rich and sad and funny. Although with each passing year, as the landscape and the culture changes, and the people do, too…this book will become harder for people who come after us to follow or understand (for instance, will readers of the future have the slightest clue why naming a high-flying zeppelin after Minnie Riperton is clever and amusing?) All that, yes, but it’s still quite a ride.



Toni Morrison, Beloved

“And these ‘men’…could, if you let them, stop you from hearing doves or loving moonlight. So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky; lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept…”

This is a novel about the lives of black slaves, after. When “free.” This is a novel about what trauma does to human beings, their bodies, their hearts, their memories, their bonds and relationships with one another. It is a hard book to read, though short. Morrison imagines it all, but the vivid and horrific truth slams. This is sustained rage and grief (note that Morrison put the word “men” in quote marks in the passage above). This is the brutal telling.

Also, the novel is based on real events; Morrison built it upon an old newspaper clipping. A cornered, escaped slave killed her toddler and was prepared to kill her other children rather than let the whitepeople take them. Shifting narrators circle this horror. The reader is left gutted. Is the cruelty and violence and degradation depicted here hyperbolic? Did people really think and feel these things? Are the ghosts real? Not even valid questions, in my opinion. The book is like a complex symphony, say, with themes and truths that are loud and clear.

John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“…and then Dad said, ‘You know what I believe? I remember in college I was taking this math class taught by this tiny old woman. She was talking about fast Fourier transforms and she stopped mid sentence and said, ‘Sometimes it seems the universe wants to be noticed.’ “

Well, the antidote to The Museum of Innocence was actually a YA novel about young love. Ah, it was just the thing.

I thought to read a YA book, because it’s been a long time since I was a YA and I wanted to re-enter that world, where so much is unknown and so much is pitched high, especially love and misery. A decade or more ago, my son was a young teen and took his first steps into romance and I happened to mention it in a call with one of my sisters. Whose older daughter had just broken up with her first boyfriend. So the moms chatted about young love, and, we were not condescending! We had observed that—because all our children had ever known of love was the way we love them (wholly, attentively, respectfully)—first love IS love. They were naturally tender and thoughtful, that much we could see. It was…so very sweet. Innocent. Real. The boy in this book offers his love like that right from the start. Because, my sister and I would say, he came from a loving home. That, and he has been forced to grow up fast and to understand life to be finite.

This novel pairs two precocious 17-year-olds, and their short lives and short romance have an extra boundary. They are both cancer patients. In fact, they meet at a weekly support group for teens with cancer diagnoses. She’s the narrator and evidently more terminal than him, and lugs around an oxygen tank because her cancer-ridden lungs “are crap at breathing.” He’s had a leg amputated but has an 80% survival-rate prognosis. There are generous helpings of teen snark and angst and vapidness and video games, but also eagerness to learn, loyalty, and adventure. As book’s end approaches, though, he’s in the unfortunate 20%. His cancer comes roaring back (in a scan, “I lit up like a Christmas tree”). What happens next is funny, exciting (a trip to Amsterdam, thanks to the Wish Foundation…why? read the book!), mundane, and heartbreaking. On the sidelines, friendships and relationships with/perceptions of the various parents, siblings, doctors, nurses, and “patient conferences” are all rendered pretty realistically and without sentimentality—the author did a good job. Cancer just sucks and nobody, including our protagonists, sugar-coats that.

But they’ll always have Amsterdam. After I finished this book, I wanted to curl up in rumpled blankets in a dark room and cry for a while.

Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence 

“I would like to say a few words about the illusion of time, as there is the one sort of time we can call our own, and another—shall we call it “official” time?—that we share with others. It is important to elaborate this distinction, first to gain the respect of those readers who might think me a strange, obsessed, and even frightening person, on account of my having spent eight lovelorn years trudging in and out of Füsun’s house…”

Too late, that ship has sailed! I am VERY done with this book. I cannot quite believe that I persevered through over 500 pages of this excruciating novel. Many’s the time I wanted to toss it aside in disgust. I stuck with it because I kept hoping, or suspecting, that at some point late in the game, there would be a plot turn that alleviated and justified the slog. Because I know nothing much about the city of Istanbul, and Covid-19 keeps us all at home, unable to travel (indeed, most of the countries of the world will not receive any American travelers at this time), and because I had heard that Pamuk was one of its most celebrated contemporary authors, I thought I’d read this book in order to “visit” Istanbul’s streets and waterfront and cafés and barber shops etc. Also, Pamuk’s a Nobel Prize winner and, got into trouble for calling Turkey to task for the Armenian genocide and (more recently) oppression and slaughter of Kurds. So, I presumed, a good and brave man and a good writer, well-regarded. I clipped an interview with him from NYTimes Magazine, years ago, and I thought I’d better appreciate the article if I read the book. Last but not least, I’m aware that evidently he has established a Museum of Innocence in Istanbul. The article described it and sought the author’s insights; I’ll return to that shortly.

The setting indeed is Istanbul, and the “official” time is the 1970s through about the mid-1990s. The narrator, of course, controlled my impressions and, as he began as a handsome and rich young man who “worked” in the family business, he related the setting through the eyes of wealth. His father’s chauffeur drove him through “colorful” and squalid neighborhoods. He dined in trendy restaurants with views of the Bosphorus. He drank an awful lot of raki (we can guess what raki might be, but the upshot is that it’s a social lubricant and, often, a way to put one’s broken-hearted self into a drunken stupor). In a book of short, three- to four-page chapters, a very long (interminable!) one described his high-society engagement party to the right sort of woman (barely described) at the city’s most prestigious venue, a luxurious Hilton Hotel. As the story and the years proceeded, our narrator, Kemal, occasionally remarked on social and political unrest. But mostly to express its inconvenience to him, such as curfews he and the chauffeur rushed through, or detouring around neighborhoods where a bomb had gone off over “some trouble,” or whining about unattractive political graffiti. Since I had grown to loathe Kemal, I began to hope he would inadvertently find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and get blown up.

Why is he so loathsome? Because it’s all about him, him, him. Lots of awareness, hundreds of pages of vivid details, but precious little self-awareness. It ends up feeling like a wasted life.

The plot of the book centers around Kemal’s love affair with a lower-class “distant relation,” a young woman about 12 years his junior named Füsun. She is of course beautiful. Kemal thinks so, everyone thinks so. He buys a gift for his fiancée in a shop she works at, and before long, they are having an affair. Using his mother’s “spare apartment,” which is furnished in things and furniture that his mother has grown weary of or has fallen out of fashion. Füsun “gives” him her virginity and soon they are having fabulous sex. A chapter entitled “The Happiest Day of My Life” is about a day they spend making love in the apartment. Needless to say, the aforementioned society-approved engagement falls apart. And Füsun goes off and marries a young aspiring filmmaker; she aspires to be an actress. Why not? She is beautiful. Everyone thinks so.

Then ensues a period where Kemal suffers heartbreak. He is literally sick and in pain. The fiancée sticks around for part of this, tries to comfort him and coax him back, but eventually comes to her senses. (There is some explanation about the trickiness of not being a virgin in that society in those times; it works out okay if you go on to marry the person you’re shagging, but a breakup can be a problem for the tainted woman. For men? Of course not. Heck, Kemal and his pals frequent only the best brothels.) The agony and malaise Kemal endures, well, no broken-hearted person has ever been through what he’s been through! 

But guess what, dear reader? Over a year later, he finds Füsun again! So what if she’s married and the young couple are now living in a low-rent but colorful neighborhood with her parents? He comes around, overjoyed just to be breathing the air she is breathing. He nicks little things from this apartment (I mean little things, curios, her barrettes), and sometimes leaves replacements or wads of cash. He is there four or more nights a week, for dinner and watching movies on TV with the whole family till nearly midnight. If they grow weary of him or don’t welcome him, there is no way of knowing, for Kemal is oblivious. Sometimes, he confides, he has trouble getting up and leaving, “a strange inertia,” which he frets about. Yeah, really.

Kemal, being rich, determines to finance Füsun’s husband’s filmmaking, which may be why the guy tolerates this hovering, this intrusion. In the end, both men decide she should not be a movie star. The industry is too sordid for someone as beautiful and perfect as Füsun. They manipulate things so her dreams are thwarted. Then the young husband leaves her for an actress. Hooray! Now Kemal can have her back! (PS-And we are asked to believe that the eight-year marriage to that guy was unconsummated; <eyeroll>. Of course Kemal believes it, further proof that she was always his.)

I read with increasing irritation. Kemal doesn’t love this girl. He’s obsessed with her. He smothers her. He controls her. He is baffled that she isn’t as happy as he is, when they are finally reunited. He is clueless. Once upon a time, he taught her to drive a car and while it took forever for her to get a driver’s license (Turkish women shouldn’t have one; she also refused to bribe or let Kemal bribe the examiners), she persevered and finally got one. I cheered when The Moment finally came: baffled, besotted, “happy” Kemal is a passenger in a car that she deliberately slams into a tree. Moments before, she bluntly, angrily told him “You don’t understand at all; I haven’t had a chance to live my own life.” She dies instantly, which was clearly her goal. He survives, and has a long recovery period.

She was a caged bird. (The reader might even think Pamuk telegraphed this, for Füsun had a pet bird in a cage yet liked to paint birds that were not caged.) (Or maybe that was too subtle?) He didn’t get it, he never gets it. Not even then.

Instead, after he recovers from the accident, he comes up with a brilliant idea. He buys her parents’ building (her father long passed away; he sets up her elderly mother in a nice apartment elsewhere) and turns it into “The Museum of Innocence.” It is furnished with everything that reminds him of Füsun and their “love.” Yes, the barrettes. Yes, the bed they shagged on. Even the hundreds of stubs of cigarettes she smoked, which he analyzed to discern her moods. My god, he even tracks down and buys the wreckage of the car (though it will be a problem to display something that large, oh dear me…) Utterly sensitive to her, and utterly insensitive to her. I wanted to slap him a thousand times. 

Is this a parable about the misery of being a beautiful young woman in a certain place and time? Is Füsun like a Turkish Marilyn Monroe, admired by and lusted after by men, but utterly alone, not known, thwarted, not really loved? 

The author (according to the NYTimes article) would have it be a parable about stuff, and how mundane stuff inspires or holds memories. He makes the case that someone like Kemal, because he’s rich, gets to be called a “collector” and feels himself a preservationist, whereas a poorer man is scorned as a “hoarder” and experiences shame. Interesting. Sure, yeah, okay. But this insight is hardly worth the price of admission.

In an unusual twist, near the end, we learn that Kemal hired the author to tell his tale and the author has done so, faithfully, without much if any judgment. It was a sort of “breaking the fourth wall” moment, a brief diversion, possibly clever, but, in the service of what, exactly?

The book reminded me of Nabokov’s Lolita, although a case can be made that Nabokov found Humbert-Humbert revolting. Pamuk doesn’t go that far. Museum of “Innocence”? Is that a poor or approximate translation from Turkish? I’d call it “Museum of Failure to Launch” or “Museum of Male Erotic Obsession” or, hey!, “Museum of the Objects of the Objectified Lover.” To hell with these guys. If you love someone, you want what’s best for them. Newsflash, it might not be shagging YOU or being in the beam of your adoring gaze. And you can’t catch any person in the butterfly net of objects they’ve touched, used, or saved.

Earlier this year, I read Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, which featured another love-lorn man who observed/stalked, loved/obsessed over a beautiful woman he met when he was younger. I’ve had it with these guys. If you love a woman, beautiful or not, you don’t buy the mirror that was in the restaurant where you glimpsed her once. You don’t save all her f--king cigarette butts and codify the ways she stubbed them out. You know nothing, Jon Snow. I’m annoyed and chagrined to have now read several books on this theme. I’m outa here. I think I need to find a good novel by a woman.

coda: Well, that’s a first! Although this review is admittedly long and irritable, I thought to post it on amazon.com. Especially after scanning a few other reviews and realizing I wasn’t alone in disliking the book. Amazon rejected my review because I didn’t “adhere to the guidelines.” Close examination of the guidelines reveals they will not allow me to try again…and that I was probably dinged for profanity. Sorry not sorry.

second coda: I had a conversation with someone who also read this book, and they were astonished that I disliked it so. He felt I missed the point, which was that the whole tale was a parable about the city of Istanbul, teetering on past glories and prosperity and present, pervasive ruin. It killed itself; it wallows—Füsun is the trapped, lamented beauty and Kemal, the defeated, feckless aristocracy. Museum the most apt metaphor or vessel. Hmm.