Literary Bits & Pieces: Amy Hempel’s “A Full-Service Shelter,” Elsa Morante’s “Arturo’s Island,” & Two Links

We are mourning the death of our cat, whose personality was so strong the house seems empty.  I can’t even bear to throw away her hairy pillow.  Nothing seemed right this week, until I read Amy Hempel’s lyrical  short story, “A Full-Service Shelter,”  about a volunteer at an animal shelter in Spanish Harlem.

 They knew us as the ones who checked the day’s euth list for the names of the dogs scheduled to be killed the next morning, who came to take the death-row dogs, who were mostly pit bulls, for a last long walk, brought them good dinners, cleaned out their kennels, and made their beds with beach towels and bath mats and Scooby-Doo fleece blankets still warm from industrial dryers. They knew me as one who made their beds less neatly over the course of a difficult evening, who thought of the artist whose young daughter came to visit his studio, pointed to the painting she liked, and asked, “Why didn’t you make them all good?”

You can read this poignant story in Hempel’s new collection of short stories, Sing to It. 

Has anyone read Ann Goldstein’s new translation of Elsa Morante’s Arturo’s Island? Reviewers love it.  And I already have this 1962 paperback of Arturo’s Island in a translation by Isabel Quigly. Is it worth trying?

TWO LITERARY LINKS.

In the New York Times essay, “A 1970s Japanese Novel Leading the Way to Ferrante,” Jiayang Fan recommends Yuko Tsushima 1979 novel Territory of Light for Ferrante fans.  She says,

At first glance, “Territory of Light” seems part of the same cultural moment that has produced recent novels exploring, with unapologetic honesty, the raw interior of the female psyche. Could the Japanese novelist Yuko Tsushima have been inspired by the works of Jenny Offill and Elena Ferrante, whose protagonists — young mothers negotiating life in the wake of marital betrayal — mirror that of Tsushima’s own book?

The answer is no. Tsushima, who died in 2016, first published monthly installments of what would become “Territory of Light” a full four decades ago, when she too was a single mother struggling to eke out an existence in Tokyo. The fact that the novel, which has been elegantly translated into English by Geraldine Harcourt, seems to be in direct dialogue with contemporary novels of motherhood, however, suggests both its deep prescience and the enduring relevance of its insights.

2.  At Literary Hub, I was fascinated by Artemis Leontis’s essay about Eva Palmer Sikelianos:, “It Was All Greek to Her: With the Sappho-Obsessed in 1900s Paris.”  Leontis, author of Eva Palmer Sikelianos:  A Life in Ruins, writes,

In the summer of 1900, Eva Palmer was reading the lines of Sappho in the company of her friends Renée Vivien and Natalie Clifford Barney, preparing for a series of Sapphic performances in Bar Harbor, a summer island resort on Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine. Of the three women, Barney and Vivien (who was later christened, in a portrait, “Sapho 1900”) are well known as formative members of a Paris-based literary subculture of self-described women lovers, or “Sapphics.”

In a period that scholars have identified as “pivotal” in delineating modern lesbian identity, they interwove the fragmented texts of Sappho in their life and work, making the archaic Greek poet Sappho of Lesbos the quintessential figure of female same-sex desire and Sapphism, or lesbianism. They appear in the history of gay and lesbian sexuality as the women who contributed substantially to the turn-of-the-century decadent rewriting of Baudelaire’s lexicon of the sexualized woman.

Eva Palmer is largely absent from this history. She has made cameo appearances as the “pre-Raphaelite” beauty with “the most miraculous long red hair” who performed in two of Barney’s garden theatricals in Paris. Yet Eva’s correspondence, along with such sources as photographs and newspaper coverage, indicate that she participated in many more performances. From 1900 to the summer of 1907, the years when she moved with Barney between the United States and Paris, she developed a performance style that complemented the poetic language of Vivien and Barney by implicating Sappho in the practice of modern life. Eva’s acts helped transform the fragmented Sapphic poetic corpus into a new way of thinking and creating, before her differences with Barney propelled her to move to Greece to live a different version of the Sapphic life.

I hope you have a happy reading weekend!