Monthly Archives: October 2008

Ella (of Box of Books) has released her latest Absent Classic installment, A Guide to Lost Colors, and it’s another delightful creation.  It’s the story of Augustus Pigeon and his apprenticeship to art scholar Dr. Voorhies.  Voorhies was known for his work in colors and had written the Voorhies Register, a complete catalogue of all colors in use in Dutch art between 1500 and 1700.  It becomes Augustus Pigeon’s job first to compare laboratory-created colors to those used in paintings and then to investigate possible new colors, ones left out of the register.  This quest for lost colors takes him to some odd and unexpected places and requires that he confront an entire cast of interesting characters.  In each episode he discovers a new color and in each one that color proves more elusive than he expected.

The story itself is wonderful, written in what I think of as Ella’s trademark amusing and gently ironic tone.  But as always with these Absent Classic books, the ancillary material — the introductions and notes and illustrations — provide their own pleasure.  The introduction to this book tells us that poor Augustus Pigeon, in spite of his early promise as an art scholar and the success of his book The Encyclopedia of Manufactured Pigments, came to somewhat of a bad end.  A scandal erupted when it was revealed that his encyclopedia was written after his eyesight had begun to degenerate.  How could an expert in color not be able to see?  After the scandal, Pigeon refused to allow his encyclopedia to be reprinted, but, in the hope that it might salvage his reputation, he did agree to let the Absent Classic series editor publish an appendix to the great work, and this is what is available to us today.

The introduction casts Pigeon’s story in an entirely different light.  The book is no longer the story of a young man at the beginning of a promising career, but instead is a sad tale of hopes dashed and promise lost.  But the fact that The Guide exists offers some consolation. As the introduction says:

Pigeon’s work on color theory and pigment analysis may well be discredited forever, but in this Guide we have a treasure — an Edwardian coming-of-age memoir, lightly sketched, full of absurd and delightful little stories.

The book’s footnotes, written by Dr. Yardlie, author of Was Rembrandt Colorblind?, offer an amusing counterpoint to the main tale.  My favorite note explains that:

…the immediate and most widespread use of the Voorhies Register was in art forgery.  Within five years of its publication, a formal complaint was filed with Scotland Yard, linking the Register with a sudden glut of forged Vermeers and Rembrandts.

The Guide to Lost Colors, with all its examples of good plans gone awry, seems to be saying that things never turn out as one expects and that life is sure to be a jumble of missed opportunities and lost chances.

The illustrations are wonderfully done, each one looking a little like the illustrations you might see in certain editions of nineteenth-century novels; in fact, they look like the illustrations in the Oxford edition of the Trollope novel I’m reading now.  They are dark with heavy crosshatching, and they reinforce the mood of earnestness and seriousness that can be so charming in earlier literature.

If you are interested in the project, make sure to check out Ella’s blog.  I’m already looking forward to the next installment!

Yesterday was a very lovely, very literary day.  Hobgoblin and I spent the day with four friends (three of whom have blogs, here, here, and here), eating in restaurants, visiting bookstores, and making our way to our final destination: Edith Wharton’s home, The Mount, in Lenox, MA.  She lived there from 1902 to 1911, when she moved to Europe for the rest of her life.

We started off meeting for lunch (well, some of us did — others were out running in races and joined us later) in one of those railroad diners filled with locals.  We aren’t locals, but we were made to feel welcome anyway.  And then we were off to a used bookstore, the Berkshire Book Company, an absolutely fabulous place that has a surprisingly varied selection of books for its size.  We entered the place thinking it would be a quick stop, but all of us were sucked in and didn’t made it out of there without spending more time and money than we had intended.  It’s the kind of place where you will find your favorite obscure author and be utterly charmed to see not only one but several books by that person.  The store had, for example, three or four books by Rose Macaulay, whom I haven’t yet read, but whom I recognized because of Emily’s enthusiasm for her.  I also found a great selection of Barbara Pym and Mary McCarthy.  I forgot to look for books by Josipovici, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find him there — a writer whom I never seem to find anywhere.

So here’s what I came home with: two nonfiction books by Mary McCarthy, her collection of essays On the Contrary and Ideas and the Novel, a book of literary criticism.  Also I found Jeanette Winterson’s novel Sexing the Cherry which I’ll be reading for Slaves of Golconda in January.  And then I grabbed Barbara Pym’s No Fond Return of Love, and finally (for something completely different), Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual.  I could easily have come home with many more books, but the time came to move on.

Next we were on to the highlight of the day, Edith Wharton’s house.  It’s a lovely place on beautiful grounds; it’s got gardens and lawns, but what I liked most about it was that the deep, dark, and fragrant Massachusetts forest was never very far away.  The house is elegant and fashionable, but I’m realizing as I think about it now that it’s also a good place for a nature lover.  Not only is the forest — and also a creek and a small lake — right nearby, but the house is designed to let as much light and air in as possible.  There are a number of rooms where you can open doors to terraces outside so that indoors and outdoors mix.

It’s a summer home, which meant that it was designed to house the Whartons and only a few guests, but that doesn’t mean the place is small — there is an entire wing devoted to servants’ quarters.  But it has a comfortable, simple feel to it, even with its classical Italian and French influences, as the website says.  Interestingly, Wharton herself designed the place; she was a devotee of architecture and gardens and knew precisely what effect she wanted to create.

Unfortunately, the house is in danger of closing as the organization that maintains it is deep in debt.  It would be a real shame for the place to close; it’s interesting for Wharton fans but also for anybody who likes to tour houses and gardens; really, it’s such a charming spot I think anybody would enjoy a visit there.

After strolling around the gardens for a while, we said goodbye to two of the people in our group and headed out to dinner with the others.  We stopped in Great Barrington, one of those very cute, very New Englandy towns and almost got ourselves in trouble when on our way to a restaurant we found another used bookstore.  Fortunately the place was about to close or we might have come home with even more books.  Dinner conversation was all about books and bicycles — perfect, right? — and then we all went home.

I was tempted to take the day off of work today, just to stay in the happy mellow mood I enjoyed yesterday, but I was dutiful and went to class.  It was great, though, to have the kind of day that makes me forget all the usual work and life worries for a while.  I need those kinds of days now and then.

First of all, the Slaves of Golconda reading group is picking its new book for the next go-round, so go take a look and consider joining in!  The group is open to anybody who wants to read along.  You can post about the book on your own blog if you want, or you can participate in the discussion board, or you can do both.  Or just post comments on other people’s blogs — whatever you like.  Litlove has some fabulous choices for the next group reading, so go check them out and cast your vote for what sounds good.

And now, on to John Darnton’s crime novel Black and White and Dead All Over.  In short, this book kind of sucks.  Sorry for the bluntness, but it’s incoherently plotted and badly written.  What saved it for me is that I went into it with low expectations and so appreciated what I could about the story and the context and let the rest wash over me.

The novel is set in New York City and describes a newspaper modeled on the New York Times.  The main character is a reporter, Jude Hurley, who is asked to write the story after a powerful, much-hated editor is murdered.  Working sort of alongside him, sort of against him, is detective Priscilla Bollingsworth.  These two share information when they think they have something to gain from it, and otherwise are involved in a competition/flirtation as they work toward solving the murder.  The murder soon turns into multiple murders, though, as reporter after reporter is killed off, each in a particularly gruesome way.

This sounds like a promising premise, which makes Darnton’s failure to do anything with it particularly disappointing.  But the book’s flaws are numerous.  The main one is that the characters aren’t interesting; most, really all, of them are stereotypes.  Jude is work-obsessed and ambivalent about the future of his relationship with his cardboard cut-out girlfriend, who does nothing but complain that Jude does nothing but work.  Their conversations are painful to read — painful not because there is any emotional pull to them but because they are horribly written.  The detective is similarly work-obsessed but also surprisingly attractive, capable of letting her hair down and belting out a blues tune when the moment is right.  The reporters and editors at the newspaper are a collection of nasty people, from plagiarists to malingerers to gossip-mongers — well, they are all gossip-mongers — and they might be interesting, if they weren’t very hard to distinguish from one another and very hard to care about.

Even the resolution of the mystery fails to be interesting; I was surprised when I learned who the murderer was, not because it was an exciting plot twist, but because I was given no reason to care.  The resolution seemed to come out of no where, and there was no way anyone could have figured it out ahead of time.  The explanation for the motive was full of information readers didn’t have access to ahead of time, and it felt haphazardly pulled together.

I did like reading about the world of newspapers and learning a little about how the process of story-writing and publishing goes on, but when I met with my book group to discuss the book, two of the members who have newspaper experience said even there he didn’t get all the facts right.  Our conversation turned to the mystery of how this book got such good reviews and why an editor didn’t shorten it drastically.  It could have been a much better book if it were shorter, with fewer characters and fewer incidents that didn’t add much to the plot.

It’s frustrating to think that in a time when it’s so hard for good writers to get published this sort of low-quality writing gets attention.  But this is his fifth novel, and he seems to have had success as a novelist, so something he’s doing is appealing to readers.  I just don’t get it, though.

I adored Jenny Diski’s book Stranger on a Train.  The book won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the J.R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography, and this sums up one of the things I liked about it, which is that it resists genre classification.  It’s a travel book, yes, but it’s probably not very much like what you think about when you think about travel books.  Diski, who is British, travels around America on Amtrak (and she also travels across the ocean on a freighter), but she sees no sights and goes to no tourist locations.  She is on the freighter, on the train, in or nearby a train station, and briefly in the house of some friends, but never does she see anything famous, except for the landscape viewed through the train window.

And the book is autobiography, or perhaps it’s better to call it memoir, and yet its focus is on her travel experiences with only some occasional trips back in time to tell stories from her earlier years.

What I loved about the book is summed up in its subtitle: “Daydreaming and Smoking Around America with Interruptions.”  She does an awful lot of daydreaming and even more smoking; in fact, as she says at one point, smoking, or the quest for a good place to smoke, soon becomes the entire point of the whole journey.  Most of the trains she travels on have a room set aside for smokers, and as far as Diski is concerned, the seedier these are the better.  Smoking for Diski is a form of rebellion, a highly satisfying fuck you to all the rule-followers around her, and she glories in the badness of it:

It was not simply a matter of physical addiction — nicotine-replacement products work quite well in that respect — which prevented me from giving up (even on a pragmatically temporary basis) when confronted with the difficulties of smoking in the face of North American puritanism, it was the puritanism itself.  I didn’t want to do as I was told, I didn’t want to be more comfortable by conforming, giving in, as I saw it, to the pressures of an anti-smoking policy that was reinforced by moral imperatives.  Very childish.  Yes, exactly.  I also didn’t want to become an ex-smoker, not if it meant that I became someone who tsked and sighed whenever I caught a whiff of smoke in the air.

So she hangs out in the dirty smoking rooms with her fellow smokers, talking and sharing stories with them, enjoying their company so much that the non-smokers start to get a little jealous.

The “interruptions” in the subtitle mean a number of things — they are the layovers at various train stations and the visits Diski makes with some friends, but they are also the times Diski gets caught up in the stories and lives of the people around her and loses her detachment and solitude.  She struggles –as I would too — with her interest in the stories of the people she meets (which are invariably suprising and bizarre so that she begins to wonder if there is anybody nice and normal and boring out there — which there probably isn’t) and her fatigue with them.  It’s exhausting to interact with people all the time, even if you will never see them again.

Mostly, though, what I loved about the book is the voice.  I fear that Diski is someone who wouldn’t like me if we were to meet (I’m too much of a rule-follower probably), but I enjoyed her company.  She’s a difficult, prickly kind of person, but one who expains herself so well and has such interesting things to say and has such a great degree of self-awareness that she makes a wonderful traveling companion.

She manages to capture something true about America as well, even though (or perhaps because) she doesn’t set out to “see America.”  Instead we learn something about Americans — or least Americans who ride the trains, which is its own distinct subset.  She captures the voices and the mannerisms and the essence of these people in an open, nonjudgmental way that can marvel at people’s oddities without laughing at or condemning them. I suspect this is because she knows she’s a bit of an oddity herself — and, in fact, she knows that we all are.

I got lucky and found a copy of her book Skating to Antarctica on Book Mooch and am hoping to read all her nonfiction at some point.  As much as I love novels and will always read them (Diski has published quite a few novels too), this kind of nonfiction is what I love best — the genre-bending, voice-driven, loose-association-following kind.