Oh, joy! The holidays are behind us and the days are getting longer. I love sunlight, and if I lived in ancient times I would worship Helios.
Godden weaves the fascinating story of five Anglican nuns who establish a convent in the Himalyas–a mission with very mixed results. Distracted from their meditations, partly because of the altitude, partly because of the extreme weather, partly because of the constant noise of construction/revovations in the palace-turned-convent, the nuns become daydreamers. It’s as if they are on a reluctant drug trip, escaping through fantasies of might-have-been marriages, exotic gardens, and tragic personal histories. The mother superior, Sister Clodagh, tries to hold everything together, but even she finds herself slipping.
Godden’s whimsical descriptions of daily life in the convent and her character-revealing dialogue are charming. In the following excerpt, it is Christmas Eve, and the nuns have returned to the convent soaking wet and freezing cold after cutting boughs in the forest on Christmas Eve and find a gift waiting for them.
‘It’s a parcel for us!’ cried Sister Honey.
‘Not for us,’ corrected Sister Clodagh. ‘Mr Dean knows better than to send us presents. It’s for the Order.’
‘That’s splitting a hair,’ said Sister Ruth boldly, but, as if she had not heard her, Sister Clodagh opened the parcel. Inside were five pairs of Tibetan boots, knee high and made of felt and worked with wool and lined with fleece.
‘Ahh!’ whispered Sister Briony, going down on her knees as if they were something holy. ‘Dear goodness! Just feel the warmth and the fleece and the softness. Blessings on the dear, dear man. Now I shall be able to get about on my poor feet without wanting to cry at every step.’
I had a little talk with myself. “You know better than that. YOU DO NOT READ TO BLOG.”
THAT IS JUST THE END if I start giving myself assignments. No, Kat, you are certainly not an editor pitching books to yourself.
The dialogue between self as editor and self as writer goes like this.
“There’s a new book out; somehow we missed it; everybody else has reviewed it. Can you read it overnight and do a quick phone interview with the author? Oh, and can you take five buses, three trains, and walk a mile to pick up the book?”
Now you can get the books on Netgalley. But is it a privilege to be a pinch hitter?
Perhaps I’m going on another reading path now. I want to get back to pre-Wifi days, when I savored Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks without worrying about getting it done. I loved Buddenbrooks so much I went to a free showing of an old black-and-white German movie, and was enraptured even though I hardly understood any of it.
Before I began my book journal in the zips, I never thought about the number of books I read. I recently looked through it, and you know what? Reading the titles, dates, and authors means little to to me. In the zips I discovered Monica Dickens and read a lot of her, in the 2010s I reread a lot of Charles Dickens. What does it mean?
Somehow, this doesn’t sum up those years for me. Sometimes I can remember a particular day when I read a book, or the bookstore where I found it. But it leaves me with the question, What was I like back then? Wouldn’t it be almost better to write down the weather report? Sunny…sunny…rained…misted.
