The Weight and Balance of “War and Peace” 

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“War and Peace is a hymn to life. It is the Iliad and the Odyssey of Russia.” – Rosemary Edmonds, Introduction to War and Peace (Penguin,1978)

Leo Tolstoy is my favorite writer.  Well, that’s not quite true: I’m not the kind of gal who takes one book to a desert island. I have many favorite writers, including Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, and Doris Lessing. 

Yet I always come back to War and Peace.  I have read this immense, breathtaking novel – 1,444 pages in Rosemary Edmonds’ translation (Penguin) – twelve times.  Each time I marvel at the dramatic scenes of love and domesticity contrasted with the excitement and horrors of war. 

Some year ago, there was a three-day public reading of War and Peace in a university town. I wasn’t quite fanatical enough to make the journey, but I loved the idea. The characters are so vivid that when I read I become Natalia Rostov, a young fashionista who fusses over what her mother and cousin will wear to the ball; or her brother. Nikolai, who, wounded on the battlefield, realizes that the French might kill him – he, whom everyone loves! I am also fond of Marya Bolkonsky, an awkward heiress who devotes herself to religion.  And my favorite hussar officer is Denisov, who has an endearing lisp.

This month I have dipped into my favorite parts of W&P, but having sprained my wrist on Middlemarch, it has been an awkward experience. Ouch!  What I need is a six-volume set. Lots of slim volumes, if they weren’t so ancient, beat-up, and expensive!   Or I  need to rip my paperback into two parts, but I don’t have the strength.

And so I have a paperback-on-a- pillow system, combined with yoga exercises, too complicated to explain without diagrams, maps, and the Grateful Dead playing in the background. Since I don’t feel up to diagramming today, I will comment on the advantages and disadvantages of three paperback editions of War and Peace.

I’m an old-fashioned reader, and my favorite translators are, alas, dead: Aylmer and Louise Maude were friends of Tolstoy, who recommended their translation; Rosemary Edmonds was famous for her translations of Tolstoy; and Constance Garnett was the first translator of many 19th-century Russian writers.  Edmonds is my favorite but unfortunately her translation is out-of-print. 

The Oxford Maude translation is the best buy,  This wins the three-way contest in terms of background material.  The Maudes’ translation is elegant, and I’m also impressed by their scholarly introduction, lists of Dates of Principal Events, Principal Characters, footnotes, and maps. All the background you want and need.

The Penguin paperback Rosemary Edmonds translation (1978) is out-of-print but you can find used copies.   Penguin now publishes Anthony Briggs’ excellent 2005 translation, which comes with all the s fixin’s: maps, lists, and historical material.

translated by Rosemary Edmonds

It’s not that I don’t recommend Briggs – I do – but Edmonds happens to be my favorite Russian translator.  I highly recommend this if you can find it. It has a good introduction by Edmonds but no notes. There were fewer notes in 20th-century Penguins, I think.

 The Modern Library Constance Garnett translation is available in paperback or a a used hardcover. Garnett is a graceful writer, and I have loved her translations of other Russian writers as weel. Some people rant about Garnett’s mistakes, but if there are mistakes, only the most learned readers will know.  I love this edition, but again, no background material other than the introduction.  Double-check on that:  it’s been a long time since I’ve looked at this edition.

If you want a modern translation, I highly recommend Briggs’ in the 2005 Penguin. 

LET ME KNOW YOUR FAVORITE TRANSLATIONS!

The Good-to-Better News Cycle

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I am a fan of light news.  On Sunday I riffled through the newspaper, looking for the editorial section because there is always at least one light essay or sensible letter to the editor.  Alas, the editors had substituted a special section on Trump.

Don’t we get tired of politics? I wish they’d print old Cathy cartoons and humor columns in the style of Cornelia Otis Skinner.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to find better news. I have scrawled a few notes on the “good-to-medium” news cycle: Democrats and some Republicans have asked Kristi Noem, secretary of Homeland Security, to resign for ICE’s heinous crimes;  Kanya West apologized in the Wall Street Journal for anti-semitism; a Moby-Dick Marathon took place in January at the New Bedford Whaling Museum; and, for soap fans, trouble is brewing for Mariah, Devon, and Abby on The Young and the Restless.

You can take your notes on the better news in a special notebook, or type it on a vintage typewriter. You can make a ‘zine – remember ‘zines? – and distribute them at coffeehouses.

 Everything made more sense when it was on paper.

Exercises with “Anna Karenina” for the Avid Reader

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Anna Karenina or weight-lifting?

If you’re a constant reader, and carry a book wherever you go, you will not need to lift weights. That’s what I thought.  Walking, jogging, and calisthenics surely strengthen the muscles and improve flexibility, but it is not enough: I’ve sprained or strained my wrist while reading!

Do I need to lift weights? Honestly, I do have some pink 3-pound dumbbells – but that’s what reading Anna Karenina is for!  Two hours of reading Anna Karenina must be more than the equivalent of 5 minutes with the weights. Anyway, I hope so: I prefer my smooth, soft arms to the gym-induced muscles.

 Actors in old films seem more attractive than the perfectly-toned actors of today.  They are glamorous, but look softer somehow – should I use the word “real,” or “relatable”?   While watching a film about the space program in the 1960s, I noticed the crowd at a rocket launch at Cape Canaveral had that soft-limbed, approachable look. They were not glamorous: some wore polyester! Plaid shorts! Culottes! There was a different ethos then:  polyester freed our mothers and other housewives from ironing.  Of course I wore cotton and natural fabrics later, but I remember being decked out in a pink polyester minidress, fishnet stockings, and a white faux fur coat.  Not a natural fiber in the outfit!

This winter, I’m finally observing the effects of a “bookish” strained or sprained wrist. Holding up the hardcover of Middlemarch made one of my wrists ache.  I  switched to a paperback copy – still huge, but much lighter- and the ache is less noticeable.

Few hardbacks strain my wrist.  It’s those 900+-page books that are challenging. Fortunately, used paperbacks are a cheap alternative. 

Captain Nemo suggests that I should walk around carrying an Evelyn Waugh trilogy (bought second-hand on eBay ). It would be a challenging alternative to the three-pound pink dumbbells.  And hauling Dickens’ books, whether hardback or paperback, works up a sweat.

But I fear I’ll have to resort to the pink dumbbells. It’s inevitable.  Soon you’ll envy my biceps.  It should strengthen my wrists, too.

I need to apply heat or cold, or put on an Ace bandage on the wrist. I’d better look that up! Any suggestions?

Bashing Books:  The First Disappointing Read of the Year

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I’d rather translate literary criticism into Sanskrit than reread the novel I am about to bash. It was recommended by Maureen Corrigan on NPR and several bloggers and reviewers on Best Books of 2025 Lists.

Karen Russell’s The Antidote.  Dustbowl magic realism with a dose of Hallmark movie.  A compelling novel, set mostly in Nebraska in 1935, about a girl basketball player, a prairie witch, a photographer with a magic camera, and a sweet-natured farmer whose crops survive the Black Sunday dust storm.  

REASON TO READ:  Russell’s dark history of second- and third-generation settlers in Nebraska, many of whom are Polish refugees, is stark, well- researched, and terrifying.  Persecuted by the Germans in Poland, the first settlers in the 19th century ignore the injustice against Indians. They are already wretched on the infertile land.  Many witness so much violence that they are driven to confide their nightmarish memories to a prairie witch, who goes into a trance and erases the memories from their minds. The second- and third generations struggle to make sense of the corruption and desperation in their town. There is little help out there, even from FDR’s special programs.

REASON TO KEEP READING.  It’s a bit like reading Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, one of the best but grimmest novel I’ve read. Russell’s tightly-woven narrative depicts another harrowing history, but it turns into a Hallmark movie in the last hundred pages.

REASON TO STOP READING:  The tone changes to a kind of earnest mellowness in order to engineer a happy ending.   I like a happy ending, but this one feels false.  (I did read it to the end, though.)

I grant this 4 stars out of 5, which is awfully good, except that I’ve given the other books I’ve read this month  5 stars!  The Antidote could have been great. if the ending hadn’t been so unlikely.

Winter Scenes in Life, Literature & Films

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Jimmy Carter’s sweater speech: Keep the temp down and wear a cardigan!

On a bitterly cold January day, we are freezing.  The thermostat is set at 68 and we wear sweaters, in accordance with Jimmy Carter’s energy-saving suggestions in the 20th century. Carter advised Americans to wear cardigans but then he was a Southerner. We need more layers here.

Anyway, it is real winter -a layer of snow and lacy frost on the windows. My theory:  the snobbish faeries of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Kingdoms of Elfin did embroidery and fancy work and flung it into our world – a chilly Jackson Pollack – to prove mortal inferiority. The weather person says the high will be 13 degrees, and it will feel like 3 degrees.  It was 13 when I woke up so I am anxious for the weather person to be wrong.  Please, please get up to 20 !   

Winters used to be harder though. After a week in sub-zero temperatures in the 20th century, Captain Nemo and I donned several layers of clothes and ran, yes, ran, to a movie theater. The theater was empty. We were given free popcorn. No idea what the movie was, but it was bliss to get out of the house. N.B. Running home was less fun.

In the winter of 2026, I’m thinking of snowy scenes in books and movies.  

I remember Truffaut’s 1966 movie based on Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, set in a society that bans books and sends firemen to burn them.  It’s been years since I read Bradbury’s novel, but Truffaut’s movie is brilliant and horrific, starring Julie Christie and Oskar Werner. 

 The burning of books is allegedly done to preserve morality, but actually to control thinking. (People no longer read:  they watch interactive TV.) The firemen do not put out fires – they burn books – but one fireman, Guy Montag (Oskar Werner), begins to read after he meets a teacher, Clarisse (Julie Christie). Soon he is hooked on David Copperfield. 

Clarisse (Julie Christie) & Montag (Oskar Werner) at the Book People’s camp.

At the end of the movie, in the dead of winter, Werner has joined a camp of dissidents, the Book People.  (There are camps all over the country to resist the book-banning regime: there is no law against reciting books.) Each person memorizes a book to preserve it, and then burns it. They spend days reciting their books, so they aren’t forgotten.  Montag (below) is memorizing Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination.  Everybody is bundled up in winter clothes, and I remember thinking, “That’s my camp!” Fortunately, we don’t need it yet! It looks very cold.

There is so much winter poetry, but I am increasingly drawn to John Berryman’s work.

John Berryman

The Pulitzer Prize-winning John Berryman, one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century, knows the vocabulary of winter. In his stunning poem, “A Winter Piece to a Friend Away,” he shows off his stark, stripped sense of winter. In the first stanza, he cites the horror of “icy spiculae” and the winter’s undoing of the work of man: “Snow howls and hides the world/ We worked awhile to build.” 

And I love the alliteration and assonance. The line “Snow howls and hides the world” illustrates alliteration with “Snow howls and hides…” and also assonance with “Snow howls…” The two “ow’s” are pronounced differently, but the effect is the same on the page.

Here is the first stanza of this gorgeous poem..

Your letter came. — Glutted the earth & cold
With rains long heavy, follows intense frost;
        Snow howls and hides the world
We worked awhile to build; all the roads are lost;
Icy spiculae float, filling strange air;
No voice goes far; one is alone whirling since where,
        And when was it one crossed?
        You have been there.

… all the roads are lost

That’s winter for you!

I am a great fan of Willa Cather’s winter scenes.

.During my last semester of college, I lived in a semi-cozy rented room – in the sense that the bed took up almost the whole room – and curled up in the evenings with Willa Cather’s novels. In those days, she was considered a “craftsman,” not an “artist,” and not taught in college. I feel that I was one of an underground of women who got her into the canon.

Raised and educated in Red Cloud and Lincoln, Nebraska, Willa Cather describes the hazards of winter, its beauty and its killing cold, sleigh-riding and ice-skating, its deathly blizzards and its eventual spring. So many of her novels have winter scenes, but I’ll write briefly about her superb novel A Lost Lady

This is the story of Marian Forrester, a vivacious young woman who spends summers in Sweet Water, Nebraska, with her much older husband, Captain Forrester. As long as Captain Forrester is in good health, she is happy, generous, and charming. She brings out cookies to the boys who fish in their stream, and is idolized by the narrator, Neil, then a young boy. But she looks forward to wintering in Denver.

It is through the narrator, Neil, that we learn about Marian. Marian loves being in Denver, but then a dreadful accident occurs. Captain Forrester hasn’t exactly lost his money, but he co-owns a bank, and gives away his money to the bankrupt customers when it fails. And then he has a stroke. Everyone admires this gallant man, but Marian becomes desperate when they move permanently to Sweet Water.

Is Marian a sympathetic character? Well, no, and after the captain’s stroke she becomes outrageous – making out with a guest during a sleigh ride, perhaps having an affair with him while her husband is at home. She seems very shallow, and the reader grieves as she falls from grace. What Cather does so well is to tell story from the young narrator’s point of view, whose disgust increases when Marian begins to do business with a sleazy lawyer, Ivy Peters. We are shocked by Marian’s behavior, but in the end Cather allows us, and the narrator, to understandt Marian’s perspective. And that is a relief: she’s not strong, but she’s not lost, either.

There is a 1934 movie of A Lost Lady starring Barbara Stanwyck. I love Barbara Stanwyck, and she would be great in the title role – steamy, shallow, but not a villain.

Jack Kerouac’s Daughter:  Why the Retro-Beats Don’t Read Her Book

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Perhaps the retro-Beats do read Jan Kerouac’s novel.  Perhaps I haven’t found the right retro-Beat. I asked my nephew, an avid Jack Kerouac fan, “Do you want my copy of Jan Kerouac’s Baby Driver?”  

“I might.”

“Jan is Kerouac’s daughter,” I added. 

“I’m a bit busy writing my thesis on Leonora Carrington.”

“That’s wonderful!”  I gave him the Carrington book. Both the Carrington and the Kerouac are NYRB Classics.

That said, I did admire Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, but you’d have to pay me to read Baby Driver.  There are too many dismal aspects to list: juvie, prostitution, drugs, alcohol, Belleville, and a stint as a racetrack hand.

As a member of the NYRB book club, I receive an interesting but quirky mix of books.  That’s because they choose one of their new titles for us every month.  As a result, I have a collection of newly translated Balzacs, which I love (more Balzac, please!), Natalia Ginzberg, another favorite writer; grim Holocaust literature (perhaps not the best choice for depressives); great Italian science fiction, a collection of Turkish short stories, and several magnificent German novels.

 But sometimes I pout.  “Why couldn’t I choose the book myself?” I say poutily.  I consider starting a pouty correspondence, but I don’t.

And then they sent me a copy of Barbara Pym’s The Sweet Dove Died.  I was so excited.

So no more pouting. I love Pym.  Thank you, NYRB Book Club. 

.   

Jane Gaskell’s “The Atlan Saga”: The Perils of Cija

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In the late 1970s, Ms. magazine published a glowing review of the unknown English writer Jane Gaskell’s five-book fantasy series, The Atlan Saga (first published in the U.S. in 1977). The reviewer claimed that the series was notable:  first, because Gaskell was one of the few women who had broken into SF/fantasy, and second, because she turned the fairy-tale princess stereotype into a believable, independent woman character.  The latter is true to an extent, but Cija is no superwoman: she needs all the friends she can get, whether they be good or evil, as she confronts monsters, escapes from a closely-guarded brothel, or manages to survive the plots of a sinister High Priest.

The Atlan books have their roots in pulp fiction, though they are what I call chic pulp. The dialogue is very smart and funny, and the action scenes leave you breathless, as the heroine jumps from danger to danger, sometimes escaping, sometimes saved by others. Cija is often depressed, with good reason. She fights monsters, loses friends, and is betrayed. But Gaskell’s style is charming and often lyrical, and though it can turn purple in a second – and then she’s poetic again! – it is great fun to read. These are comfort books.

Today I’m writing about the first two books, The Serpent and The Dragon. The other three are Atlan, The City, and Some Summer Lands.

In The Serpent, the first book in the series, set in ancient South America, we learn about Cija’s education. Raised in a tower, Princess Cija (pronounced Key-a), has been instructed by her mother the Dictatress that men are extinct. (The Dictatress and Cija are goddesses as well as royalty.)  Bored in the tower, she secretly writes a diary:  she stole an account book from her nurse. One day she is sitting on a ledge when she has an inkling that her mother might have lied about men.

 Imagine Cija’s surprise when Zerd, the general of an invading army, scales the tower and has a chat with her.  She thinks he is an exceptionally ugly, big woman, with blue skin and scales.  From the beginning, he finds her funny.  And soon she discovers he is one of the most powerful men in the world, and that she is about to be taken hostage by him, so the army in her mother’s conquered country doesn’t retaliate.  Cija is furious. How can she, a goddess, be a hostage?

Here is Cija’s diary summing-up of her conversation with her mother.

“But men are extinct!  Do you mean that there is one alive–a real man–an atavistic throwback or something?”  Was wildly, wildly excited.  Have also always wanted to see a brontosaurus, which Snedde told me are nearly as extinct as men.

“Darling,” said the Dictatress gravely, “for reasons of our own your nurses and I, purely in your own interests of course, have misled you as to the facts in the world outside your tower….  As many men exist as women.”

From the tower to the military camp, grumpy Cija submits to being a hostage, and travels with her nurse, Ooldra, who informs Cija that her mission is to seduce and kill Zerd.  Of course Cija is not athletic or flirtatious, and her background has not prepared her for either task. She spends a lot of time disguised as a boy, waiting for a chance.  Zerd knows exactly who she is. Meanwhile. a blond hostage named Smahil is attracted to Cija and looks after her.  

In the second book, The Dragon, Cija has matured:  her travels on the road, and unwanted sex with the ambitious Smahil, whose advances she tried to resist, have made her more sophisticated and warier of men. But this is also the book where Zerd woos her and (kind of) wins her. It is a case of the god-like general paying attention to a mousy young woman.

Zerd and Cija are traveling together to the capital, and stop to spend the night “where the forests are thicker and more like jungle, with fantastic undergrowth, difficult, ridged ground and conical boulders difficult to find a way between.” Cija wakes up in pain and cannot move her leg. She screams at Zerd to help her, and they see a gigantic snake intently swallowing her leg. It also has thousands of little teeth so he can’t rip the snake off her leg without tearing her leg off. He kills the snake with an axe, hitting it two inches below her foot, and then he continues to hack up the snake during its death agonies. Cija screams with pain, but Zerd saves her life.

“Oh thank you, thank you. No one has ever been so wonderful to me. You have saved my life so many times…”

So you can see, she’s in a bind about Zerd. He is the enemy of her people. He can be romantic, but she doesn’t actually want sex with anyone. And she has discovered that Smahil is her half-brother – the son of her father and Olldra the nurse – so she has an excuse to avoid him. Smahil continues to be keen: neither man cares what she is keen on.

I do empathize with Cija. In the course of the saga, much happens to humble her. She survives her flight from vigilante priests, saved from them by the High Priest at court, riots, has slipped a knife to a criminal so he can free an Atlan priest from jail, and fought on the side of bandits.

So does Cija have PTSD? Yes, that’s what we would say now. And she endures more and more as the book goes on.

I love these books, and will try to write something about the last three soon.

These are fabulous reads. I highly recommend them.

Monstrous Love: Rachel Ingalls’ “Mrs. Caliban”

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Monsters in literature are often sympathetic. In Apuleius’ charming comic novel, The Golden Ass, the hero, Lucius, is transformed into an ass. Hubris was his crime: he spied on a witch and borrowed one of her unguents. Lucius is hilarious, but it’s hard work being an ass. Fortunately, he recovers his human form.

And there is Mary Shelley’s famous novel, Frankenstein, in which mad Dr. Frankenstein creates a sentient monster. Tragically, Frankenstein botched the job, and the sympathetic monster’s appearance terrifies human beings. There’s a Gothic Wuthering Heights feeling to this novel. Heathcliff became a monster after he was rejected by Catherine.

But best of all is Rachel Ingalls’ short novel, Mrs. Caliban, the story of a housewife who falls in love with a sea monster. Lauded by critics and readers, this book has gone in and out of print since its publication in 1984. 

Left to herself, ignored by her husband, Dorothy is one of the saddest housewives ever. Her son Scotty died, her beloved dog was run over by a car, and her husband is having an affair. . Is it any wonder she begins to hear voices on the radio? “Don’t worry, Dorothy, you’ll have another baby all right. You have to relax and stop worrying.”  But the most important radio transmission is a warning that a monster has escaped from a lab after killing two scientists. 

Is Dorothy hallucinating? She is frightened. But when the monster shows up in her kitchen and explains that he was tortured in the lab, she feeds him celery from her hand and learns that His name is Larry. Dorothy and Larry become lovers.

But it is Ingalls’ spare writing, combined with quirkiness, that makes this a classic.  There are other monsters in this book. At the supermarket, Dorothy and her best friend Estelle “were comparing recipes for meat sauce when a figure like a huge doll came trotting down the aisles. It was female, dressed in a sort of drum-majorette’s outfit, and carried a tray with a band that went around the neck. Long curls brushed out from under a species of military hat composed of metallic-painted cardboard, red glitter, and side rosettes.”

This doll-like figure carries a tray of cheese samples and aggressively asks them to try and buy them. Both make excuses. And after she leaves, another doll-like figure with cheese approaches them, and then a rather scary doll-like figure. These doll-like women represent the mechanical forces of female desperation and sexuality. Both Dorothy and Estelle have tried to not to buy into doll-like live

You can interpret the book two ways. Dorothy may have been driven mad by her sadness. That is the sophisticated reading. But my preferred reading is that Dorothy meets the monster.

Then things go drastically awry after a while, and we must ask, Who is the monster?  Perhaps Dorothy is the monster.  She discovers more and more personal betrayals. She can’t take it anymore.

I have read this odd novel several times, and each time I notice different details. One of the most fascinating novels of the 20th century, it is well worth reading.

Two Short Novels by Colette:  “Break of Day” & “Duo”

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I’ve been crying over Colette’s novels, Break of Day, The Vagabond, and Duo.  Colette is unsentimental, lyrical and playful, yet somehow this time around I’m disturbed by the heroines’ bravado and rejection of love. 

In my twenties when I first read Colette, I foolishly thought I was Colette. Not literally, barely figuratively, I identified with her courageous heroines, who were much more experienced than I and worked respectively as a music hall artist, a writer, and a costume designer.  (The reader’s moxie and power of imagination awes me!)  

Then in my thirties and forties, I admired the heroines’ strength and independence and pitied their loneliness, but the sentences are so graceful that I also felt joy. Still later (now), as a Woman of a Certain Age, I  am swept away by her style and subtlety but grieve for the characters’ mistakes, but perhaps they’re not mistakes. The decisions they make are painful.  And yet when I first read these books when I was very young, I approved of their recklessness and independence. Freedom, liberty, and equality! That was the dream.

I recently reread two of her short novels, Break of Day and Duo, which are so different in style they might have been written by different writers. Break of Day is an autofiction masterpiece, a melange of narrative and letters; Duo is very slight, a piece about the destruction of a marriage, later adapted as a play.

In the masterpiece Break of Day, narrated by Colette in her fifties, she describes summer days by the sea – dazzling sunrises and sunsets – and rollicking picnics with her artist friends.  She also quotes extracts from her late mother Sido’s letters, and strives to emulate Sido in middle age.  

Here is one of her many homages to Sido:

Whenever I feel myself inferior to everything about me, threatened by my own mediocrity, frightened by the discover that a muscle is losing its strength, I can still hold up my head and say, ‘I am the daughter of the woman who wrote that letter…

And there is love.  There is always a love affair in Colette’s novels.  Colette herself had many affairs with men and women, and was married three times.  In Break of Day, Colette’s neighbor, Vail, who is 35 to her 50, spends whole days with her and is obviously in love.  They swim together, she makes lunch for him, and he watches her mulch the garden and complains about her ruining her hands. She is too experienced to think an affair with him would work.  She doesn’t care about the age difference, but feels that it might be time to think about something besides love.  In real life, she was 52 when she fell in love with a 35-year-old Jewish bachelor, Maurice Goudeket, and they did marry. Later, during World War II, she rescued Maurice from a concentration camp by writing for Nazi publications. Obviously, this was a case of doing anything for love.

One of the most striking aspects of this novel is the narrator’s choice to call herself Colette.  She does not bother to change her name in Break of Day; she called the narrator Renee in The Vagabond. But she explains that readers should not mistake the character Colette in Break of Day for Colette herself. “Am I writing about myself? Have patience, that is my model.”

Duo, a novella about a couple in crisis, is written in the third person, much of it in dialogue. This short examination of the destruction of a marriage reads like a play, and was later adapted as a play.

Alice and Michel are on vacation on their farm.   Michel, a businessman who brokers theater deals, is in financial trouble. He is deeply in love with his wife Alice, a costume designer, but won’t burden her with worries about the farm. Everything changes when Michel finds a love letter to Alice from his business partner.

Colette describes the hell of a breach of trust in marriage, and Michel’s sleeplessness and constant interrogation of Alice. But whatever palliative half-truth she tells, he is in terrible pain. And Alice is cold: she is exhausted and doesn’t care that much after a while.  It seems entirely trivial to her. And, oddly, the cook empathizes with her: she shows Alice the bruises and cuts her husband inflicts on her. Their situations are different but they comfort each other..

The translation is everything here:  I started reading an awkward translation by Margaret Crosland and almost put away the book. Then I found Frederick A. Blossom’s elegant translation – it’s very stagy, but that’s the nature of the piece.

Much of Colette’s work is untranslated. Should I learn French so I can read her other work? Is there a website somewhere with English translations of unknown books or essays?

Safety’s Just Another Word…

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The new neighbor from Rhode Island or New Hampshire – a two-name state anyway – gushes about the charms of our city. 

 “I love it here. It’s so quaint. And as long as I’ve got Target and Starbucks I’m okay,” she confesses.  “And It’s so safe here.  You have no idea what that means to us.”

Don’t I? “It is a nice neighborhood. And I love Target and Starbucks too.”  

I don’t address the safety issues.  Poor soul! It’s not Nirvana. But one thing we can all agree on is that we want to be safe.

There are degrees of safety in our neighborhood.  You don’t have to pack heat when you take a walk. (“Lay down your weapon NOW.” – Jack Bauer in 24, Brenda in The Closer)  Most of the neighborhood streets are safe, but pedestrians need to take a few detours.  

Stop and turn around in the middle of the block on X Street because those lively people in the church parking lot are drug dealers.  You say, I have a wild imagination. But in fact, I’m NOT wrong.  You intuit degrees of safety in a city, with all a city’s problems. 

Pedestrians beware! There is an extremely dangerous intersection at the corners of Audubon and Turkey Vulture Streets. A small parking lot on this corner has NO barriers, no curbs, NOTHING between the parking lot and the sidewalk. Some geniuses park right on the sidewalk!

I don’t mean it’s NOT safe here, but it has a city’s advantages and disadvantages. Grew up in a small town, then moved to another idyllic small town – in retrospect I wish I had stayed.  But it has been my fate to move to the city for the sake of work and family. That’s life in the 21st century.