The German writer Walter Kempowski’s last novel, All for Nothing, is partly autobiographical, partly based based on his compilation of letters, diaries, and memoirs of World War II experiences. During World War II, the rebellious Kempowski was forced to join Hitler’s Youth, and in 1948 he was accused of espionage and served eight years in prison.
Set in 1945, All for Nothing focuses on a single family, the von Globigs, who live on Georgenhof, a small estate in East Prussia. In 1945, the Russians have invaded East Prussia and the German army is in retreat, but the von Globigs ignore the distant sound of gun fire and bombs falling. It seems impossible that the war will affect them, or that they will be forced to leave.. The refugees on the road seem to be people of a different species.
Only one family member understands the perils of the Second World War. Eberhard, the head of the household, is a special officer in the German army, stationed in Italy. Thus far he is safe, but his family is not: he warns them to leave.
The von Globigs are curiously anachronistic. Home is everything to them, and, indeed, this novel is about the meaning of home, and what it means when home is destroyed. Eberhard’s lovely, languid wife, Katharina, spends her days locked up in her comfortable apartment in the manor house reading novels: she locks the door so no one will disturb her. Peter, her bright, quiet 12-year-old son, studies with a knowledgeable but strange tutor and daydreams about how grand Georgenhof must appear to the refugees. And Auntie, a frugal housekeeper, is a savvy wheeler-dealer at the markets, bargaining and hustling. She is also an ardent Nazi who considers turning in traitors.
It is difficult to ignore the stream of refugees. Sometimes the von Globigs are asked to put someone up for the night. A talented singer and a one-armed pianist perform for them at home, and the music has a powerful impact, stimulating their imagination and making them more tolerant. But it is almost too late to leave by the time Katharina performs an act of unexpected bravery and is arrested. That is the first step of the destruction of the family.
Throughout the novel, Kempowski repeats the phrase, “All for nothing.” This emphasizes the miserable knowledge that the personality of an individual and an entire culture can be wiped out in a matter of weeks.
And at the end of the novel, Peter is (probably) saved by the generous act of a a former neighbor.
‘Speech’—is a prank of Parliament— ‘Tears’—is a trick of the nerve— But the Heart with the heaviest freight on— Doesn’t—always—move — - Emily Dickinson
“I’m crying, crying, crying”- The Animals
“Only love can break your heart.” – Neil Young
I learned the art of crying from WLS. Hours of listening to the radio, waiting for the new Al Stewart or Elton John. Larry Lujack, DJ, introduced us to the trope of male crying in rock songs, though he never said “trope of male crying.” He played back-to-back renditions of crying songs: Neil Young: “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.” The Band: “Crying Heart Blues.” The Animals: “I’m Crying.”
We believed instinctively that “only love can break your heart.”
Crying is so feminine, isn’t it? And no wonder: we spent one-eighth or possibly one-fourth of our girlhoods listening to sad love songs. So much crying goes on in those songs. I mean, so much.
We were hazy on the subject of men’s tears. Did they cry? But we were experts on feminine tears, and were fans of women’s crying songs, even though they encouraged our lovesick sighs, moans, and weeping.
I must have played Linda Ronstadt’s “The Tracks of My Tears” a thousand times during a tumultuous relationship. Bonnie Raitt’s “Love Has No Pride” got even more play. I wish I had had a little more pride.
And I wish I had read more Emily Dickinson. She was wry and distanced: tears were “a trick of the nerve.“
We cried over boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, husbands, ex-husbands, boring jobs, wishing we had kept the boring jobs, actually revising a an article on our wedding day (stopped at a print shop to send it by fax ), bad books, leaky roofs, winter…
A friend at book club recommended a book on crying, The Crying Book. The group decided against it – – “We’re already experts!” – but we had a fascinating discussion about crying. One friend had a Tiny Tears doll: you gave it its water bottle and it cried. What were they thinking?
As young women we often cried. We burst into tears at work, but did not admit we were getting a divorce: we said we had heartburn or invented the death of an imaginary friend. We also tried different cures for crying: burning a boyfriend’s letters, throwing out your wedding pictures (Mom did that), pawning your ring, drinking unpotable cocktails from 195os recipes, reading Agatha Christie or Georgette Heyer, and singing crying songs.
Here is a lost beauty tip from the past for crying women: “Place cucumber slices on eyes and slather on makeup.” -Columnist at women’s magazine.
The tracks of my tears have furrowed the lines on my face. I have instituted a Zero Tears policy. Sometimes it works.
This year I am reading Mikhail Bulgakov’s early novels and stories. One of my favorites is A Country Doctor’s Notebook, a charming, posthumously-published collection of autobiographical short stories chronicling his 18 months as a country doctor.
Unlike his satiric masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, this quiet little book introduces Bulgakov’s serious side. The protagonist, a young, sardonic doctor, has a wry sense of humor, but is racked with self-doubt and loneliness. After qualifying as a doctor in Kiev in 1916, he was drafted to a remote country practice and the sole doctor of a 40-bed hospital.
Bulgakov deftly captures the country doctor’s loneliness and isolation. He misses Kiev: in this tiny hamlet, there are no shops, theaters, street lights, or electricity. The weather is glum, cold, and generally terrible.And he is awakened in the middle of the night during a blizzard to drive miles in a horse-drawn buggy to treat a patient.
Although his knowledge of medicine is textbook-perfect, the 25-year-old doctor is hampered by inexperience. Once he dashes back to his room to consult a reference book, and then recovers his near-photographic memory of a technique used during a difficult delivery. When a farmer brings in his beautiful daughter with her legs mangled from falling into a flax brake, he feels he is looking at a living corpse. The midwife whispers, “What’s the point of smashing her up anymore? She’ll die any minute now… you won’t save her.” The doctor, too expects her to die in surgery, but she survives the amputation of both legs. Months later, she walks in on crutches with her father to thank him and give the doctor the gift of an embroidered towel.
Throughout the book, he has many touching, often humorous encounters with country folk. He is astonished when a patient decides to take all of his medicine at one time, thinking it will be more efficient that way. The doctor treats many cases of siphylis, whole families at a time, even children and is grieved when a patient has left it too late to recover. Eventually, he decides to leave the practice to become a venereologist in Kiev. A few years later, Bulgakov gave up medicine to be a writer.
This book is touching, though never sentimental. In some ways I prefer Bulgakov’s gruff, sardonic realism to his satiric brilliance. Of course, my favorite of his books is TheWhite Guard, a kind of miniature War andPeace set during the Russian revolution. It has the perfect balance of gravity and humor.
THE POSSIBLE TBR: TEN BOOKS I MIGHT READ IN 2024
I was given a planner for Christmas, so I must plan. Here are ten books I might read in 2024.
1. Little, Big, by John Crowley. I am a fan of Crowley’s Aegypt trilogy, but have never read his famous novel, Little, Big, which won the World Fantasy Award. The jacket copy says: “This is the saga of the Drinkwater family, the sparkling inhabitants of Edgewood, and the ever-changing house that sits on the border between what we know is real and what we’ve always hoped is real.”
I rather think I live on that border!
2. Closely Watched Trains, by Bohumil Hrabal. I enjoyed Hrabal’s bizarre short novel, Dancing Lessons for the Advance in Age, which I read on vacation and promptly forgot. Closely Watched Trains is said to be a classic, and the 1966 film is is famous.
3. The Sojourner, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Last year I read The Yearling, which won the Pulitzer Prize. It is one of those sad animal books, beautifully-written but weepy. The Sojourner sounds fascinating, a historical novel that follows the life of a farmer, Ase, from the 1860s to the beginning of World War II. Throughout his life, he tries to find his adventurous brother, Ben, who left the farm to travel and never returned.
4. Christopher and His Kind, by Christopher Isherwood. The jacket copy says: “He describes his life in gay Berlin of the 1930s and his struggle to save his companion…from the Nazis.” I once wrote a paper on this exquisitely-written memoir.
5. The Death of a Nobody by Jules Romains. According to the jacket copy, this is not the story of a man, but of an event. The death of Jacques Godard inspires brief passing memories in the minds of the porter, his fellow lodgers, and others who casually knew him.
6. The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard. Perhaps I will read a few of stories in this enormous anthology, which I bought years ago. However, I read Ballard’s The Drowned World and Drought last year and was not impressed. In fact, they were abysmally bad.
7. Heaven and Hardpan Farm by Nancy Hale. Library of America has reissued Nancy Hale’s short stories and her novel, The Prodigal Women. I find her work uneven, but this is one of her later novels, and perhaps I’ll give it a try..
8. Women in the Wall by Julia O’Faolain. I have a Virago edition of this historical novel, set in Gaul in the Dark Ages.
9. Diary of a Pilgrimage by Jerome K. Jerome. By the author of Three Men in a Boat.
10. Civil War Stories by Ambrose Bierce. Well, this is a classic, isn’t it? I’m not inspired, but it is a very slim volume of stories.
What’s on your TBR this year? Or your MTBR (Maybe TBR)?
One wonders: how can this superb Gothic writer be overlooked?
Victorian novel fans are rather like the Maenads, celebrating Dickens instead of Bacchus at secret rites. They adore sensation novelists like Wilkie Collins and Mary Braddon but Le Fanu has fallen into a ravine that devours neglected writers.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
And yet Le Fanu remains a secret superstar. In 2022 I lauded The Rose and the Key as my favorite book of all time. Was that rash? This year it is his intriguing Gothic, Wylder’s Hand, published in 1864, the same year as his famous novel, Uncle Silas.
Wylder’s Hand, a chilling Gothic mystery, revolves around the disappearance of Mark Wylder. For hundreds of years, the Wylders, the Brandons, and the Lakes, have quarreled about who owns the huge estate. It passes from feuding family to feuding family, and Mark has just become the heir. He and his beautiful, statuesque, silent cousin, Dorcas Brandon, who owns Brandon House, have decided on a marriage of convenience to keep the entire estate together.
The marriage never takes place.
Chapters III and IV are called, respectively, “Our Dinner Party at Brandon” and “In Which We Go to the Dining Room and the Party Breaks Up.” The narrator, an outsider, does not know the family well, but his dispassionate voice as he introduces the characters and situation makes the narrative all the more mysterious. Fragments are missing; when will we find out what happened? Just when you’ve got it figured out, everything changes.
Conspicuous at the party are two attractive siblings, the vivacious, impoverished Rachel Lake, who lives alone on a tiny income in a tiny house, and her glib, unscrupulous brother, Stanley, who schemes to marry Dorcas.
Mark disappears, and we don’t know why. We know that Stanley visits Rachel late at night and persuades her to go on a mysterious journey. But we don’t know the details. Has Mark bargained to spend a night with her in exchange for keeping silent about Stanley’s vices and troubles? Is Mark is in a madhouse? In Mark’s absence, Stanley persuades Dorcas to marry him.
Rachel is by far the strongest character, doing all she can to make peace and to save Mark’s brother, William, the vicar, from a scheming lawyer.
I have read somewhere – perhaps in a detective story – that the most common causes of murder are money and love. This is certainly true in this spellbinding novel, a Gothic mystery with elements of the supernatural.
Some books never make the TBR, though I have owned them for years. I shiver with apprehension every time I look at them, and yet I cannot give them away because they might make me wittier or thinner, or provide escape reading in February, the month devoted to The Green Hat and Terry Pratchett.
Kathy Acker’s DonQuixote was published in 1986. Neither my spouse nor I remember buying it. It’s as though it grew from the shelf like one of the pods in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Though I have tried to read it several times, I am repulsed by her profane, potty-mouthed, post-modern prose. And yet reading it would make me hip and fabulous, because Acker is the Patti Smith, or is it the William Burroughs? of “punk” literature.
Acker was relentlessly hip, and her writing relentlessly dull. In this boisterous little novel, a female Don Quixote has an abortion and then travels with dogs across America and London, meditating on the insane cultures. There is one amusing bit: Quixote believes that Prince should be the president of the United States, because “all the presidents since World War II have been stupid anyway.” He would have been better at show biz than Reagan, an actor.
Acker’s prose is awkward. “Don Quixote decided the only thing was to be happy. Since the only reason she went out of the house was to fuck, she decided that to be happy’s to fuck.”
But isn’t that clumsy writing?
Edna Ferber is an underrated, once popular, writer who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1924 for her novel, So Big, a page-turner about the struggles of a successful woman farmer and her worthless son. Not surprisingly, Ferber never attained the kudos of comparable male Pulitzer winners, like Sinclair Lewis and Booth Tarkington.
I discovered Ferber’s historical novels when I found a Ferber omnibus at a sale. She reminds me slightly of Willa Cather, and I’m surprised Ferber is not in the women’s sub-canon, if not the traditional academic canon. I enjoyed her novel Showboat, which was made into a Broadway musical and movie. And her melodramatic, fascinating novel, Giant, which was adapted as movie starring Elizabeth Taylor, traces the drama and dysfunction of an unhappy, rich oil family in Texas.
But there is one Ferber’s novel I cannot read, Cimmaron.
Cimmaron is, in a way, a Western, set during the Oklahoma Gold Rush. I read 125 pages, but the dreary landscape undid me In every scene, Oklahoma is dry and dusty, or muddy and dirty, and if I remember correctly, there are boards instead of sidewalks.
It is culture shock for Sabra, a young woman from a Southern family, who follows her husband, Yancey, a lawyer, into the wilds, because he wants the free land: there is “a land rush.” Sabra has the impossible task of turning of shack into a home, while Yancey, a lawyer, has to prove himself to their rough neighbors. And everybody has a gun. Nobody in Oklahoma in Cimmaron ever thought of gun control.
Depressing, yes? But will I finish Cimmaron in 2024?
It does feel like the time of year when I should read a historical novel.
Richard Garnett’s biography, Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life, is, in many ways, an appealing book. Fans of Russian literature will be curious about Constance Garnett, the famous early translator of Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky.
Her grandson, Richard Garnett, has written a thorough, if plodding, biography, with fascinating source material, including letters from Chekhov and Tolstoy.
It’s the size of the pages I don’t like, This attractive paperback has oversized pages crammed with print. Mjnd you, it’s not the size of the print so much as the size of the pages. But I might finish this in the summer, when the natural light is brighter, and it will seem more readable..
Do you hang on to books you positively dislike or will never read? Do tell.
Imagine yourself at the pound in the twentieth century. Hundreds of dogs and cats sit in cages waiting to be adopted. This is not a no-kill shelter: this large city, known to truckers as The Big Dirty, is basic in its approach to unwanted animals. You walk past rows of cages. The dogs and cats are frantic, terrified, bewildered, listless, or have given up. They whimper or wag their tails. They bark or meow. They stick their paws through the wire. They can smell death; they can smell the euthanized animals burning in the incinerator behind the building.
I try not to think about the incinerators, about the animals smelling burning flesh. The incinerators are monitored by the EPA and state air pollution agencies, because they generate toxic emissions, as do the incinerators at human crematories. Bodies are mostly water, but the gas-fueled incinerators emit carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and oxide nitrogen.
An anxious employee told me a horror story that haunts me. She was traumatized and going mad, or she wouldn’t have told a stranger. Someone had dropped off a litter of kittens stuffed in a paper sack. These poor terrified mutilated kittens had to be euthanized. I gave her a pack of kleenex from my purse.
I took a deep breath. I did not share the sad story with my husband, because this was supposed to be a happy day.
And at that moment, a tiny black-and-white kitten demanded our attention. She climbed up the wire cage door, stuck to it with her claws, and meowed plaintively.
She was the one.
We called her Starbuck. She relaxed as soon as we left the building. She purred in my lap in the car. A car was a better living space than a cage. And soon we were at home. Wow, she loved running around that space.
Starbuck was so small that she had to be fed tiny morsels by hand for the first few weeks. When she caught a cold, I sat with her in the bathroom and ran the shower so the steam would clear up her sinuses. And perhaps because I gave her so much attention, she became not only a good friend to cats and humans but a social worker and feline rights activist.
A few years later, we adopted a kitten named Louisa May. Starbuck washed her, cuddled with her, and taught her how to use the litter box.
Starbuck and Louisa May were inseparable. One of their favorite activities was breaking into the attic. They would claw at the carpet under the door for hours, having figured out by kitty engineering or instinct that the door might open if they dug their claws in the right spot for long enough. One day I found the door open and the two cats happily burrowing in boxes of books. Louisa May left tiny claw tears on the cover of a Willa Cather book. I was so impressed with their break-in that I couldn’t stop laughing.
Starbuck also became a social worker. When our oldest cat, Martian, who really was ancient, began to spend most of her time dozing in the Barcalounger, she was bullied at meals. Emma was a feline rights activist: she escorted Martian to the food bowls and batted away the bully while Martian ate.
Nowadays, in our small city, a no-kill shelter seems to have taken over the work of the pound. And what a good thing that is! We loved our cats from the pound, but I am so happy that the animals now have a better chance of finding a good home. There are many adult rescue cats, as well as kittens. And the adult cats often are “buddy cats,” who come from the same home and cannot be separated.
I lived at the square in a cozy railroad apartment. At the time, I was an insomniac who devoted hours to studying classics. I translated the Gettysburg Adress into Greek in the style of Lysias, a whimsical task assigned by my Greek Composition professor. Who thought these things up, I wondered? It was in the tradition of the nineteenth-century gentleman reading classics at Oxford or Harvard. I would never become a nineteenth-century gentleman, but I might well be the reincarnation of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who also translated Greek.
But what to do about the loneliness? There I was, stuck in a carrel at the library, consulting reference books, dictionaries, classical journals, re-translating Lysias’s speeches, and skimming a biography of Abraham Lincoln (that was unnecessary). Sometimes I dragged my books down to the cafeteria for a snack and coffee. It was the refuge of raggedy, wild-eyed, incoherent students who had not slept in days and barely remembered their names. There should have been a sign above the coffee pot: WE NEVER SLEEP.
And then it happened: someone was giving away free Siamese kittens at the market. She was wild, but it was love at first sight. Here’s what no one told me: Chloe knew Greek.
It was no longer necessary to live in the library. Chloe helped me: she batted at my Bic pen when I wrote in a spiral notebook, guiding me to refine my prose. She sat in the dictionary when I tried to look up kakodaimon (“evil genius”).
“Chloe, don’t you want to look up kakodaimon?”
She did not. And so I affectionately called her Kakodaimon if she left footprints in the cornbread, ripped the curtains while speedily climbing them as if they were Mount Everest, or knocked over the Christmas tree.
Chloe was not thrilled when we adopted other cats. One day she led them through the back of cupboard to a crawl space between the floors. One of the cats got lost. We called her name repeatedly to guide her back through the portal.
I wonder why we didn’t name any of our later cats Chloe. Some people do that. If their dog is Fluffy, all their later dogs are called Fluffy.
But we have never had another Siamese. And it wouldn’t be right to call a calico or tuxedo cat Chloe.
Readers of this blog know that I am a Doris Lessing fan. Not all of her books are equally brilliant, but the best are classics. I recently reread parts of The Four-Gated City, the fifth in her Children of Violence quintet, which Lessing considered a bildungsroman. And yet I find that claim very strange. It is true of the first four books in the series, which follow the life of Martha Quest from her teens to the age of 30. But the final volume is a novel of ideas that gradually abandons the semblance of a conventional narrative.
It is not, however, surprising that Martha, a former Communist, would become the subject of an experimental novel. After moving to London in the late 1940s, she takes a job as a live-in secretary-cum-editor-cum -housekeeper to Mark Coleridge, a factory owner and leftist writer of a best-selling utopian novel:
In the course of the novel, Martha and Mark analyze post-war politics, the evolution of the extended family to gird up Mark’s floundering dysfunctional nuclear family, the Laingian theory that the mentally ill are psychic, and the unity of the Aldermaston marches against nuclear disarmament.
And in the final section, Lessing one-ups the level of defiant rule-breaking by embracing science fiction in the form of describing a world-wide disaster, documented by the surviving characters in the form of letters and other papers.
Lessing is best-known for her naturalistic writing about women’s lives, and, indeed, one of the most interesting sections of of this novel is a portrait of Martha’s unhappy mother. Mrs. Quest, a widow who lives on an African farm with her son and his family, has always disliked her radical daughter. But suddenly she writes a letter to Martha announcing plans to visit her in London. Martha promptly has a nervous breakdown.
Martha knows exactly what her relationship with her mother is like. And Mrs. Quest has no conception of the changes in London: she imagines the England of her youth before World War I. And who can she possibly imagine Martha to be now? But in a way, Mrs. Quest knows the visit will be a disaster. She keeps postponing the visit.
The voyage to England is not the happy adventure Mrs. Quest had hoped for. Her disillusion and disappointment on the the cruise ship is sad, even terrifying, because Mrs. Quest’s life is rather like this voyage, and she would rather not face it. She perceives with dismay that the passengers drug themselves with food, sleep, silly games, and drinking. And this is her first glimmering of the sadness that the trip will bring.
Lessing devotes some remarkable pages to Mrs. Quest’s old age as it is revealed to her on the ship. She writes,
Mrs. Quest, an old lady among old ladies, all of them widows (for women live longer than men), sat in her deck chair, which had been placed well out of the wind. She would much rather have been in it. She had a rug over her knees, and she knitted something or other: they all knitted or sewed, and they watched others at play. When Mrs. Quest had said how much she loved a voyage, a good deal of what she loved was the games…. She always had… but had she, she wondered? Well, she had always been a good sort, of course. Now a good sort, obeying, as she always had, she played whist and bridge.
And this is the fate of a certain generation of women. Mrs. Quest goes along with the games and even pretends to have rewarding relationships with her children and grandchildren, as do the other women of her age. In reality, her family tolerates but does not love her. And Mrs. Quest wonders if this is true of any of the other old women.
Mind you, not all old women in Lessing’s books are tragic figures. In her 1995 novel, Love, Again, Sarah Durham, a vigorous woman in her sixties, is a writer and director of a small, prestigious theater. Then one days she happens to read the memoirs of a society woman, written in old age.
A strange thing, Sarah thought, that she had picked the book up. Once, she would never even have opened a book by an old person: nothing to do with her, she had thought.
Of course Sarah does not lead the life of an “old woman.” Over the course of a summer in France, where the theater is rehearsing a production of a new play, Sarah falls in love for the first time in years. She had forgotten the bloom and intensity of love. But iove is a challenge. Love is mortal. Love is irrelevant, Sarah thinks at the end of the summer.
In short, Sarah is an old woman of Lessing’s generation, who believed in themselves but were faced with the knowledge of a sell-by date in the eyes of others. But Lessing’s Martha Quests and Sarah Durhams have more freedom than the Mrs. Quests: let us pray in this strange age that freedom will continue.
Mysteries are practically proscribed at our house. An invisible banner above our mystery shelves reads: “If it is not Simenon, it is not worth reading.” I cannot coax my husband to read Dorothy Sayers, James M. Cain, Ellery Queen, or even Agatha Christie. He simply is not interested.
I became a mystery fan after I saw the Peter Wimsey series on Masterpiece Theater years ago: I enjoy Golden Age detective fiction, police procedurals, some thrillers, and historical mysteries.
This weekend I lost myself in genre fiction. I read three mysteries in three days. The first two were Golden Age mysteries: Margery Allingham’s Black Plumes (1940), which is set in an art gallery where a slashed painting is one of many senseless, malicious acts that end in murder; and Anthony Boucher’s Rocket to the Morgue (1942), a locked-room mystery in which a detective and a nun strive to prevent the murder of of a greedy literary executor who has been attacked. I thoroughly enjoyed these, and may write more about them later.
But the third one is the knock-out: Julian Symons’s The Man Who Lost His Wife (1970), a psychological thriller about a publisher’s psychotic, violent breakdown.
Mild-mannered Gilbert Welton is a bit of a bore. He likes a quiet life and has a strict routine. When his charming wife, Virginia, announces that she plans to go on vacation alone to consider the state of their marriage, Gilbert is convinced that she got the idea from a women’s magazine. He envisions the headlines: “Do You Need a Holiday from Your Husband? … The Strain of Being Happily Married… Are You a Robot Wife?’
Gilbert does not have a high opinion of Virginia’s intelligence. But he becomes madly jealous at a dinner party when he notices that other men find her attractive. He is furious at his pushy, flirtatious partner, Max, who poaches best-selling writers and is saving the company from ruin with dicey practices. Gilbert wonders if Virginia is having an affair with Max. (It is possible.) When Virginia and Max, too, incidentally, are out of the country, Gilbert settles down to his routine again.
The first part of the novel is delightful, set mostly in Gilbert’s publishing office, and reminds me a bit of a novel by Angus Wilson or perhaps Barbara Pym. There are lost manuscripts, arguments about whether to publish an art book about the new Spatial Realists (conservative Gilbert nixes it), lunches at the club, and conversations with an unconventional, emotional American writer who has been recruited by Max.
But we do get the feeling that something is wrong with Gilbert. He goes to a Spatial Realists art show and is convinced that his wife is the subject of one of the paintings.. And then his obsession takes a more disturbing turn. He is indirectly responsible for his drunken ex-wife’s s suicide, and one aggressive incident leads to to another. He travels to Yugoslavia to find Virginia when he cannot contact her at the hotel, has a violent encounter on the road , and eventually there is a murder.
And after that, I am not at all sure about Gilbert’s perceptions. Needless to say, this violence does not go undetected. Does he actually go home to a docile wife, who says, “A woman’s place is with her husband. I mean, she should live his life, not the other way around.” Or is that his imagination? It doesn’t sound at all like Virginia. There are a few other scenes that seem off.
Is this meant to be realism, or psychosis?
At any rate, I raced through this brilliant, suspenseful novel.
It’s a snow day… and another snow day… and another snow day…
We have had a week of snow, with temps below zero. Graceful patterns of frost on the windows, but so cold that I wear my coat inside. Today I walked around the block, or rather I scrambled and skittered. There was climbing involved, over heaps of snow dumped at the intersections by plows.
:There was even more snow, as I recall, when I was a girl. Winter lasted from November to Easter (sometimes later). We had few snow days, unless there was a life-threatening blizzard. Mom drove us to school, very cautiously, on the coldest, snowiest days.
We had fun on those snowy days at school. Our teacher, Mrs. W, made the days magical. We played games when we couldn’t go outside: “Hide the eraser,” word games (perhaps Password?), and Twister. (Many of us volunteered to bring in Twister games.)
Mrs. W also had a talent for choosing the best books to read aloud: The Pushcart War (now available as an NYRB book), Berries Goodman, Rascal, Snow Treasure, A Spell Is Cast, and Borden Deal’s A Long Way Home (which is $95 at Abebooks – what the hell?), among others.
Our enjoyment of Emily Cheney Neville’s Berries Goodman led us to the library to check out her earlier book, It’s Like This, Cat, which won the Newbery Award. I adore the first sentence:
My father is always talking about how a dog can be very educational for a boy. This is one reason I got a cat.
Even the title made us giggle. “It’s Like this, Cat!” we shrieked with laughter. We considered the title a bit of Beatnik slang, followed by the vocative of our favorite animal – the vocative of all us Kats, Kathys, Katrinas, Kates, etc..
I feel a bit like a Cat these days at bookstores. I crawl or slink on the floor to see the books on the bottom shelves. One bookseller thought I was having some kind of seizure. ”No, I’m just looking.” Have you ever tried to read the titles on the tiny Slightly Foxed books? Especially on the bottom shelves. You have to stand on your head.
