Of Books and Bicycles

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.

Now that the school year is underway again, I’m back to listening to audiobooks on my drive in.  I started the year off with Henning Mankell’s crime novel The Dogs of Riga, which I snatched up at the library after remembering that Kate from Kate’s Book Blog praised this series highly.  I think Kate was right — I enjoyed the book, both for its plot and for the main character, Kurt Wallender.

Wallender is a police officer in Sweden, and is the kind of character who seems much too nice and normal to get caught up in the kind of violent plots he finds himself enmeshed in.  He comes across as unassuming — he’s not particularly ambitious; he’s competent but doesn’t seem brilliant at what he does, or at least he doesn’t think he’s brilliant at what he does; he can make mistakes and bumble along like any average person.  And yet when he finds himself caught up in a plot involving international politics that could potentially put his life at risk — yes, he hesitates and agonizes over what to do, but ultimately he jumps into the fray.

The story begins with two men out on a ship who see two dead bodies afloat on a life raft; they pull the life raft closer to shore and then abandon it for the police to find.  Wallender is assigned the case.  Initially the case moves slowly, and Wallender has little idea where their few leads will take them.  But then the dead men turn out to be of eastern European origin and are traced to Latvia, at which point the situation becomes an international one and suddenly much more complicated.  Wallender travels to Latvia and has to negotiate a world that is entirely unfamiliar to him — it’s set during the time when the Soviet Union’s grip on eastern European countries is loosening and new forces are beginning to take its place.  The situation is complicated further when Wallender falls in love with the beautiful widow of a Latvian police officer.

The Dogs of Riga offers a satisfying plot, but it also offers much to think about, particularly in Wallender’s musings about the way the world seems to be falling apart around him.  The book has a mournful tone to it — Wallender himself is quietly sad — and much of this sadness comes from Wallender’s feeling that it no longer makes sense to be a police officer and to try to carry out justice in a society that cares about it so little.  He toys with the idea of applying for a job as a security officer and leaving his police work behind because of this loss of confidence in society and because of the toll his job takes on him personally.  He’s drawn back to the fight for order and justice, however; as much as he longs for a life that is simpler, he can’t quite leave his idealism behind. He’s a reluctant romantic — he wants a simpler, less complicated life, but at the same time when the chance comes along to be a hero and help a woman in distress, he can’t say no.

Listening to this book on audio worked particularly well because of the way the reader’s voice helped to create a sense of atmosphere.  I respond more emotionally to a book when I’m listening to it, and this means I get caught up in the character development and the excitement of the plot twists and turns that much more.  Now I’m left hoping that my library as more Mankell books on CD …

David Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is a moving, beautifully written, emotionally taxing, very well-told novel.  It’s the kind of book that’s difficult, not because of the way it’s written, but because of the direction you know the story is headed in — you get caught up in the novel’s world and want to stay in it, and yet you know things are going to go bad at some point and you dread the thought.

The novel is a retelling of Hamlet, a fact that shapes your experience of it one way or another.  If you are familiar with the play, then you have the pleasure of trying to figure out which character in the novel corresponds to which character in the play, and which plot event is a version of the play’s events.  The novel doesn’t follow Hamlet exactly, but it’s close enough that there are plenty of convergences to pick up on. You also have a general sense of the direction the plot will take and it’s satisfying to watch exactly how Wroblewski works everything out.

The risk of retelling a well-known story is that the reader might lose a sense of urgency or feel that what happens is too expected and familiar, and I did feel a laxness now and then when the novel followed the play particularly closely.  But the method offers plenty of other pleasures (although perhaps “pleasure” isn’t quite the right word, since we’re talking about a tragedy here), not least the experience of hoping against hope that things will turn out differently than you are afraid they will.

If the reader isn’t familiar with Hamlet, there is another possible risk, which is that some of the plot events may seem a little strange and out of place.  I read this book for a book group (which hasn’t yet met) and another member who hadn’t realized that it’s a version of Hamlet was a little startled to find that a ghost makes an appearance in a novel that is otherwise very down-to-earth and realistic.  But this friend said it was only a small jarring moment in what was otherwise a good experience.

If you do get the Hamlet reference, there is the intellectual pleasure of seeing just how Wroblewski reshapes a story originally set in a very different time and place.  He does this wonderfully well; with the possible exception of ghosts, there is no awkwardness in having a Hamlet who lives on a farm in Wisconsin in the 20th century and grows up raising dogs.  Wroblewski handles the relationships among the Hamlet, Claudius, and Gertrude characters marvelously well, and his take on Ophelia is astonishing.

But to set the Hamlet issue aside, the world of the novel is remarkably well-realized and his main character an appealing one.  Edgar’s life is simple — he attends school but spends most of his time working with the dogs his family is known for, the Sawtelle dogs, distinguished by their unusually strong ability to communicate with humans.  He and his mother and father raise and train the dogs, pouring their energy into them so that they are among the best-trained dogs available.

Edgar’s life is also shaped by the fact that he was born unable to speak, although he can hear normally.  This is a mystery to the doctors, who conducted test and after test on him but could never figure out the problem.  Something about this inability to speak gives him an unusually close rapport with the dogs, so close that his ability to train them sometimes suffers.  His companion, Almondine, is always by his side; she is trained to keep an eye on him and to alert the others if he is in trouble.  Her devotion to him — and his to her — is almost too moving to bear.

The novel’s point of view is most often focused on Edgar, with some chapters that shift to other characters and now and then even to Almondine, and Wroblewski often tells us what Edgar is thinking and feeling, but he rarely tells us what Edgar thinks of his inability to speak.  This fact is simply a given, something Edgar seems to accept.  (The one exception to this general rule is horrifying, however — all the more horrifying because of this earlier reticence.)  We also don’t learn much about Edgar’s life off the farm.  We know he attends school, but what his experience is like there we have no idea, and we never hear of any friends or outside interests or future plans.  For such a long novel, it’s remarkably focused on just a few people in a constrained setting.  This narrowness of focus intensifies the sense of doom that slowly settles over everybody; if things are going to go wrong, they are going to go spectacularly wrong and it will be a horrifying sight.  The farm is all that Edgar knows — it’s his whole world, and this gives him a strength and a vulnerability that are wrenching to behold.

This is Wroblewski’s first novel, and I’m very curious to see what he will publish next; this is a wonderful debut from a writer I hope gives us many more books in the future.

(If you decide to read the hard cover version of this book, I’d suggest not reading the front flap, as it gives away way too much of the plot.  After all I’ve said about Hamlet, you might think I’ve given away too much too, but the description on the front flap gives many more details than I have here, and I wish I hadn’t known them when I was reading.)

I’ve just started some lovely new books that I would like to tell you about.  One is Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall, which starts out at a fast pace, with a quick survey of the heroine’s childhood and then the early years of her marriage.  I am horrified at her struggle with her in-laws, who do their best to make her life as miserable as possible by ordering, manipulating, and guilting her into living as they think she should.  It reminds me of Evelina and the way that character got knocked around and ordered about by nearly everyone.  It’s painful.  But I have a feeling the action hasn’t really gotten going yet, and the book is about to take off in another direction.

Then I started Kenko’s Essays in Idleness, a collection of thoughts from a 14th century Japanese writer.  I picked up this book because of Philip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay, which has a brief selection from Kenko.  I was utterly charmed by the very first entry (it is now on my sidebar):

What a strange, demented feeling it gives me when I realize I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head.

This is such a perfect description of blogging!  Or at least what blogging can be.  It doesn’t really describe my method, as I tend to keep my nonsensical thoughts to myself, but I enjoy reading bloggers who use the medium this way, and I love the idea of spending whole days doing nothing but jotting down thoughts.

While comparing Essays in Idleness and Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book, the editor of my edition writes that both books:

… belong to the random mode of composition known as zuihitsu (follow the brush) in Japanese.  This form — or lack of form — was most congenial to Japanese writers, who turned to it perhaps because it was less “dishonest” than creating fiction.  The formlessness of the zuihitsu did not impede enjoyment by readers; indeed, they took pleasure not only in moving from one to another of the great variety of subjects treated but in tracing subtle links joining the successive episodes.

Leaving aside the question of the honesty or dishonesty of fiction versus nonfiction (a point we could argue about for days), I’m drawn to this lack of form, the loosely associative kind of writing you find in essays and diaries and blogs.

Thinking of loosely associative kinds of writing brings me to my third book, Jenny Diski’s Stranger on a Train, which I already have fallen in love with.  It’s a travel book, sort of, but also an anti-travel book, meaning that Diski seems to be fighting against the usual approaches to travel every step of the way.  In the book’s first section, she describes riding all day on the London underground’s Circle Line, which, as the name implies, travels in a continuous circle, so she never had to get off.  She would visit the library, find three books to check out, and read them as she rode around in circles underground.  This is a perfect introduction to a book that, so far at least, is about trying to stay still while moving through space, or maybe I should say it’s about the hope that moving through space can offer a novel way of staying still.  The next chapter describes a sea voyage she took that allowed her to spend three weeks doing hardly anything but staring at the sea.  She’s traveling, but really she’s trying to find a section of time where nothing at all happens.  As someone who believes that if only life would slow down and nothing would happen for a while I would be able to think and come to grips with things and finally do something, I find this immensely appealing.  Of course, the attempt is doomed to failure, but I can’t help but admire her for trying.

Diski might be trying to stay still, but her book wanders all over the place, through time and space and from story to philosophical reflection back to story.  It reminds me of Geoff Dyer’s Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, another travel book that is about learning to stay still, and which also has a difficult, prickly persona who meanders through places and ideas, trying to make sense of life.  This is another genre I need to read more in — the anti-travel travel book.  I wonder what other examples are out there.