I’m grateful – very grateful – to be well after an illness, but I have lost the ability to do “the crouch-and-spring” pose at bookshops. This combination of yoga and bad ballet, practiced by Frank Sinatra and Trevor Howard in the trenches in old war movies, is excellent for examining the books on the bottom shelves.
On a recent tour of bookshops, I rode my bike for the first time in a month. It was a challenge. There was smashed glass on the bridge. I was too fatigued to carry the bike over the glass. There is always glass on bridges. Why bridges?
But I did not get a flat tire, fortunately. I went to Barnes and Noble and the independent bookshops, where the display tables glittered with new books. I lowered myself slowly to the floor to squint at the titles on the bottom shelves. There was no question of dignity. There was no squatting like a frog. I rose slowly, trying not to lean on the bookcase.
And I was too fatigued to hang out and buy a drink at the cafe. This damned virus…
But I found some excellent books.
Here’s what I’ve been reading.
Cesar Aira’s The Famous Magician, reissued by New Directions in the ND Storybook series, is a combination of magic realism and literary criticism. A magician who does real magic approaches the narrator-writer: he will teach him magic if the writer gives up writing. The narrator needs time to think. Is magic more important than writing? There is musing, there is humor, and there is tension. The writer-narrator agonizes over the question. Don’t jump, we say. A brilliant, entertaining novella.
Ford Madox Ford’s clumsy first novel, The Shifting of the Fire, published in 1892, is an uneven tale of star-crossed lovers. The plot is melodramatic, though not without humor. Edith Ryland’s rich parents refuse to let her marry Clem Hollebone after his business fails. Absurdly, she marries an 80-year-old man for his money, thinking she will inherit and be able to support Clem. I’m on a break from this book, because the second half is even worse than the first, but Ford was only 18 when he wrote it. Recommended only for hardcore Ford fans.
I recently wrote that librarians were the perfect spies, then deleted the post because it was over the top. But who knew? I was right, sort of. Elyse Graham’s new book, Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II, describes the recruiting of English professors, librarians, historians, and other academics to work as undercover spies by the agency that morphed into the CIA. This book might be fun, but it is poorly-written, so I will not attempt it.