The summer began on Memorial Day.  We sat at a picnic table wearing a vintage Chairman Mao cap (Chinese Revolution chic?), a Don’t Fall Run t-shirt, and yellow denim capris (the latter a “fashion-don’t”).  We were swilling iced tea and making a summer reading list.   I hope to read comedies and satires after devoting the spring to Greek tragedies! 

Here are two short books I recommend for summer reading, each under 200 pages. 

Vertigo, by Boileau-Narcejac.  This taut, elegantly-written French thriller, translated by Geoffrey Sainsbury, inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Vertigo.  The narrator, Flavieres, is a cop-turned-lawyer, who left the police after an episode of vertigo on a roof.  Another cop ran past him and continued to chase the crook. He fell off the roof and died. 

So Flavieres has a double history of trauma and vertigo.  And then his friend Gevigne hires him as a detective to follow his wife, Madeleine, who is, according to Gevigne, descending into madness.

What ensues is the stuff of hard-boiled noir.  Flavieres falls in love with beautiful, delicate Madeleine, who takes a lot of long walks. He is always crouching behind tombstones and barrels while she explores cemeteries or writes letters outside an inn. When she attempts suicide by jumping in the river, he saves her from drowning, and they develop a close friendship.  Later, after the famous bell-tower scene, he has a breakdown:  he is so obsessed with Madeleine that  he imagines her everywhere. 

.I wish I were a less literal person.  My familiarity with the Hitchcock film hindered my enjoyment of the mystery.  At a certain point, I began to superimpose  Hitchcock’s images on  he  narrative.  The actor Jimmy Stewart, aka Scottie, is as obsessive as Flavieres, but lacks his repulsive personality: it’s disconcerting to conflate two characters, one of whom is a movie star.  The sensitive, if extremely buxom Kim Novak also superseded delicate Madeleine in my imagination.  But in some ways, Kim Novak is perfect as the pseudo-Madeleine. In this film her acting is even stronger than Stewart’s.

If possible, read the book before you see the film, or at least before you’ve seen it half a dozen times. But here’s a Caveat: it is more disturbing than the film.

Ann Stafford, who co-authored a comic novel about working in a department store, Business As Usual, is also the author of an autobiographical book, Army without Banners. This slight book is billed as a novel, but reads like a collection of sketches. Set in London from October 1940 to December 1941, it is based on Stafford’s experiences as a volunteer ambulance driver during the Blitz in London.

The narrator, Mildred Gibson is busy doing volunteer work in the cozy village where she lives alone while her husband and son are away fighting the war.  But then her cousin Daphne writes asking her to come to London and volunteer with her as an ambulance driver.

That is the kind of letter we’d all dread, isn’t it?  Mildred is reluctant, but stoically volunteers.  She describes being ankle-deep in glass after a bombing; working to save two elderly sisters whose bombed house has lost a wall and a stairway; and the bombed and homeless lining up at the shelters. But it is not nonstop action: she describes long, dull hours at the ambulance station when there is nothing to do but knit or nap.

Jessica Hammett says in her introduction, “During the war it was agreed by many that it was easier to cope and control emotions if you were a part of a community.”  This is the case with Mildred and her fellow volunteers.

I recommend this poignant, uneven little book as a history of women volunteers in the Blitz. I am hanging onto my copy, not for the style, but because the later chapters are quite moving.