At the Iowa caucuses on Monday night,  Hillary and Bernie had a “virtual tie.” Early Tuesday morning, it was determined that Hillary had won by 0.3 percent (according to CBS).   In some precincts, a coin toss decided the winner because supporters of Hillary or Bernie refused to budge.  My husband and I could not visualize this, but here is a fascinating video of a coin toss in tiny Hardin Township.  There were 29 people for Hillary and 29 for Bernie. They were very smart to film this.  (Bernie won.)

Another giveaway!  I recently gave away two boxes of books to the Planned Parenthood Book Sale, but thought some of you might  be interested in  F. M. Mayor’s The Squire’s Daughter (Virago)  or Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point (Modern Library: it is Huxley’s masterpiece). The giveaway is open to readers in the U.S. or Canada.  Alas, the postal are now outrageous outside of North America.

Leave a comment if you’d like one or both of these, or email me at mirabiledictu.org@gmail.com.

Here is a little information about the books.

1. Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point, a brilliant 1920s satiric novel about Bright Young Things, with a huge cast of characters, writers, artists, scientists, anarchists and suicides. So many miserable love affairs!  This is a Modern Library hardcover, sans book jacket.
2.  F. M. Mayor’s The Squire’s Daughter begins at the turn of the century, a Golden Age for the aristocracy. Fast forward 30 years, and Carne, the DeLaceys’ Jacobean mansion, is too expensive, the servant problem is shocking, and the Squire is faced with selling it. His two daughters gad about London, and his son is a dilettante who socializes with arty types. But then there is their golden cousin, Rex, a brilliant, strong, attractive, athletic man (like Jamie in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander book–Jamie, Jamie!–I must try to finish Volume 1!). If only Rex were the heir! Sir Geoffrey thinks….

Take one and call me in the morning!

I was flat-on-my-back tired today.  I read and stared at the ceiling.  I’m not hallucinating, or at least I don’t think I am, but the living room ceiling looks high–higher than the kitchen ceiling. So I took a nap. I got up in time for a doctor’s appointment, where I apologized for seeming slow and tired.  The doctor says I don’t seem slow and tired.  Whew!  What a relief. When I came home, I drank coffee.  The ceiling looked normal.   I’m getting a cold.  I thought I was seriously tired, but it’s just a cold.

While I was sleepy,  I began to think about sleep disorders in literature, because colds are so unromantic.

Here is a Short List of Sleep Disorders in Lit

1 In Carolyn See’s There Will Never Be Another You, set in a post-9/11 near future shaped by paranoia about terrorism, teams of doctors are trained to deal with chemical or biological attacks. Edith’s son is one of the doctors, but she doesn’t care about this aspect of life right now.  She  is grieving over her husband’s death, and takes an Ambien every time she wakes up, so she can sleep round the clock.

Edith says,

I woke up on the couch, where I’d been sleeping for the last two months. I was alone.  I looked at the ceiling for quite a long time. and then I said, “Let me just keep my eyes open.”

The insomnia, pills, and grief are a small part of a very complicated novel. See’s strange, lively, brilliant novels are always surprising and beautiful.

2 Gail Godwin is excellent on insomnia in her 1974 novel, The Odd Woman.  The heroine, Jane, an English professor at a Midwestern university, has insomnia, and, no wonder! Her life is a mess! She is having an affair with a married man, she realizes she cannot give failing grades to the scatty papers turned in by a hippie draft dodger and a black student from the ghetto, and then her grandmother dies.  Jane’s mother has serious insomnia.

Her mother, Kitty, a veteran insomniac of many years, read spiritual guides.  She had a large collection of them in different languages, spanning the centuries from Boethius to Thomas Merton, and she kept them stacked, according to a private rotating section, on the tray table next to her side of the bed which she shared–after almost 25 years–with Jane’s stepfather, Ray. … When the malady grew more challenging,… she resurrected her Latin or went into the tongue of her father’s forebears.  And recnetly–as if she anticipated further demands on her nights–she had been teaching herself Italian with a dual-language edition of La Vita Nuva.

3 Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven.  Le Guin, an  award-winning science fiction writer, is always compelling, but I have never returned to this terrifying novel.  The hero, George Orr, has dreams that alter reality, and takes drugs to try to control it, then consults a manipulative psychotherapist who does not have his best interests at heart.

4 Gabriel García Márquez’s The Hundred Years of Solitude.” If you like magic realism, you’ll love this mythic novel. At one point, a mythical Latin American town, Macondo, is struck by a plague of insomnia.  The insomniacs no longer remember the names of objects, plants and animals, and have to label them.

5 Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. There is more than one dream in Wuthering Heights, a story of doomed love.  Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, an orphan, are reaised together and are soulmates.   After Catherine’s father dies, her brother, Hindley, turns  Heathcliff into a farmhand, and Catherine ditches him for the refined Edgar Linton, Before she marries Edgar, she has  dream in which she goes to heaven and gets thrown out because she weeps  to “come back to earth.” She knows that she should not marry Linton, because Heathcliff is her other half.

It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he’s so handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.”

6. Last but not least, here is a beautiful “Ode to Sleep” by Statius, translated by Kathleen Coleman.  POETRY WILL CURE YOUR INSOMNIA!

What is the charge, young god, what have I done
Alone to be denied, in desperate straits,
Epitome of Calm, your treasure, Sleep?
Hush holds enmeshed each herd, fowl, prowling beast;
The trees, capitulating, nod to aching sleep:
The raging floods relinquish their frim roar;
The heavy sea has ceased and oceans curl
Upon the lap of land to sink in rest.
The moon has now in seven visits seen
My wild eyes staring; seven stars of dawn
And twilight have returned to me
And sunrise, transient witness of distress,
Has in compassion sprayed dew from her whip.
Where is the strength I need? It would defeat
The consecrated Argus, thousand-eyed,
Despite the watch which one part of him keeps,
Nerves taut, on guard relentlessly.
On Sleep, some couple, bodies interlocked,
Must shut you from their night-long ecstasy;
So come to me. I issue no demand
that you enfold my eyes’ gaze with your wings —
Let all the world, more fortunate, beg that.
Your wand-tip’s mere caress, your hovering form
Poised lightly on tiptoe; that is enough.

             A light snow.

It’s snowing.  Just a light snowfall.

But our house is very cold.  And so I am sitting under one blanket and four comforters.  I am drinking Mellow Moments herbal tea.  A cat is sitting on my feet.  Another cat is sitting under the top comforter. We are keeping warm as best we can.

Since I (very slightly) neatened the bedroom, we are down to 10 books on the bookstand.  Classics, literary fiction, best-sellers, genre books–you name it.

In winter you can read something heavy, or something light.  Any literary distraction is welcome.  Here’s what I’ve been reading, some still in progress, followed by a list of books on my nightstand.

1. Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War.  At the age of 100, Herman Wouk, who won the Pulitzer for The Caine Mutiny, is in the news:  he has written a memoir.  I have long meant to read his critically-acclaimed novels about World War II,  The Winds of War and its sequel, War and Remembrance.  And so I downloaded The Winds of War on the e-reader

Let me just say The Winds of War is gripping.  I tore through 270 of 886 pages, and can’t wait to tear through another 270 pages.  Wouk writes very smoothly and intelligently, and he tells a good, no, a great, well-plotted story.  This well-crafted historical novel revolves around the Henry family:  in 1939,  just before the German invasion of Poland, Victor “Pug” Henry, a naval officer, has been offered the position of US Naval attaché in Berlin and reluctantly accepted it.  (He prefers to be on a ship.)  His beautiful wife, Rhoda, who is used to moving around with her husband, prefers a city to a naval base.   Their oldest son, Warren, is a naval officer, their daughter Madeleine is a student who makes herself indispensible at a rradio station, and their other son, Byron, rebelliously refuses to go into the Navy and, works as a secretary for a Jewish writer in Italy, where he falls in love with Jastrow’s niece, Natalie Jastrow.  Then, despite all the rumors about Hitler,  he and Natalie go off on a wild jaunt to Poland, to visit her ambassador boyfriend in Warsaw and iattend  a family wedding in a Polish village.  Then the Germans attack, and  on a dangerous car trip back to Warsaw with the wedding party, Byron is wounded, his passport is taken away, but they continue on, because he knows it’s a very bad idea to stick around the Germans.  In Warsaw they meet more danger and deprivation, but to Byron it is an adventure and to Natalie an opportunity to volunteer as a nurse at the hospital.

Here is an example of Wouk’s crystalline prose.

It took them two days to go the ninety-five kilometers.  While it was happening it seemed to Byron a saga that he would be telling his grandchildren, if he lived through it.  But so much happened afterward to him that his five-day trip from Cracow to Warsaw soon became a garbled memory.  The breakdown of the water pump that halted them for half a day, on a deserted back road in a forest, until Byron, tinkering with it in a daze of illness, to his astonishment got it to work; the leak in the gas tank that compelled them to take great risks to buy more; the disappearance of the hysterical bride from the hayfield where they spent one night and the long search for her; the two blood-caked boys they found asleep by the roadside, who had a confused story of falling out of a truck and who rode the last thirty kilometers to Warsaw sitting on wooden slats on the sizzling hood of the Fiat–all this dimmed.  But he always remembered how ungodly sick to the stomach he was, and the horrible embarrassment of his frequent excursions into the bushes…

If you’re not up to War and Peace, which is my favorite book, try Wouk’s best-seller, which he considered his War and Peace. 

2. I admired and enjoyed Sarah Vincent’s The Testament of Vida Tremayne,  a 2014 novel I discovered by accident–I had mixed it up with another book.   It is utterly fascinating, the convoluted story, told partly in a journal, partly in a traditional narrative, of the thorny relationship between Vida, a writer, and her successful, materialistic, non-literary realtor daughter, Dory.  The two women also must examine their sudden intense  friendship with a mad, mysterious fan, who writes to Vida and then insinuates herself into the house.  The book turns on a dime from a cozy realistic literary novel into  literary horror.

Vida is a  blocked writer whose literary novels no longer sell; her publisher wants her to start writing vampire novels. She loved her country house, named “The Gingerbread House,” after her cricially-acclaimed novel of the same title, but after her husband leaves her, she finds the house too quiet.  Her daughter Dory, who hates leaving London to visit her mother in the country, finds Vida collapsed in her kitchen .  Vida falls into a catatonic state in a mental hospital and is diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. When Dory goes back to the house, she finds that a woman, Rhiannon, who claims to be living there, is back from London.   Dory is amazed by how quickly Rhiannon, her mother’s fan, becomes her friend, too:  there is lots of looking into eyes and sympathetic responses.  But Dory reads Vida’s journal, and learns about Rhiannon’s scatty program for removing blocks to creativity.  Don’t sign up unless you like starvation, incense, scrubbing floors, no reading or writing, meditation, and pumas.

BOOKS ON MY NIGHTSTAND!

1. Homer’s Iliad (in Greek)

2. Caroline Alexander’s new translation of Homer’s Iliad, the first by a woman.

3. Angela Thirkell’s Wild Strawberries

4. The Julian Symons Omnibus

5. Ovid’s Fasti

6. The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford (magnificent!)

7. Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris

8.  The Diary of Anais Nin

9. Emily Kimbrough’s So Near and Yet So Far

10. Chekhov’s short stories (Folio Society four-volume set)

SO MANY GREAT BOOKS!  What to read next?