April 8, 2015 by Kat

Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Recuerdo”

Edna St. Vincent Millay

It is National Poetry Month!

Edna St. Vincent Millay, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, is one of my favorite American poets.

When I was a teenager, I memorized “Recuerdo.” Dried flowers mark this poem in my battered copy of her Collected Poems (or is it a weed?). My friends and I trailed through the woods carrying poetry books, though hiking was a struggle in our fashionable Dr. Scholl’s exercise sandals.

This enchanting poem is evocative not only of the intensity of love but also of her Bohemian identity.

“Recuerdo” by Edna St. Vincent Millay

We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

April 7, 2015 by Kat

Reading in Bed: Paperbacks vs. Hardcovers, & Quasi-Collectibles

Reading in bed has always been my thing.

“Honey, I’m home.”

I walk around in my stockingfeet while I make a cup of tea. I retire to my bed with three or four books. I keep meaning to replace the platform bed with a new frame and a spring mattress. I am too old to sleep on a platform bed. Was I ever young enough to sleep on a platform bed? I need a nice big fourposter bed with a tall headboard. And several very comfy pillows.

When you read in the supine position, as Laurie Colwin called it, paperbacks are the perfect weight. They are light and flexible. The spine of your Oxford paperback of War and Peace will not crack as you rest it lightly on your raised knees. On the other hand, a hardcover of War and Peace is unwieldly.

I fell in love with paperbacks as a girl in the ’60s. Who could resist the Ballantine paperback editions of Lord of the Rings? Or the Gothic love scenes depicted on the mass market covers of Wuthering Heights?

I do have my share of hardcovers. I own first editions of Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, Margaret Drabble, and others whose books I bought when new. But I am not a collector: I can take or leave limited editions. I am still gobsmacked by the idiocy of my spending $330 on the complete edition of Trollope’s The Duke’s Children (my shocking introduction to The Folio Society). I am oblivious to the allurement of leather covers et al but I wanted the complete text.

Anyway, I was sorting a few quasi-collectible yet affordable hardcover volumes and decided to take some snapshots.

The five tomes in the photograph are: Dickens’s Great Expectations (Penguin Hardback Classics), with cover art and design by Coralie Bickford-Smith; Thomas Hardy’s The Trumpet Major (Folio Society); Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (Heritage Press), Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (Everyman) , and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (Heritage Press).

I was startled when I pulled my copy of Hardy’s The Trumpet Major off the shelf and realized it was a Folio Society book. I bought it at a used bookstore years ago, because I loved the beautiful engravings by Peter Reddick. I characterized it a “book-in-a-box club” book.

Below is a photo of an illustrated page from The Trumpet Major. It’s a lovely, slightly tall red book with beautiful creamy paper and crisp print. .

The photo is a little dark, isn’t it?

Hardy’s Wessex novels are also available from the Heritage Press, which was founded in 1935 as an offshoot of George Macy’s Limited Editions club. The Heritage Club published cheaper unlimited editions of the illustrated classics originally published by the Limited Editions club.)

My Heritage Press copy of Far from the Madding Crowd has an introduction by Robert Cantwell and engravings by Agnes Miller Parker.

Below is an illustration of Bathsheba Everdene carrying a pail.

We all have to reread Far from the Madding Crowd to get ready for the new movie with Carey Mulligan.

I loved the Julie Christie movie, did you?

I also have a much-read Heritage Press edition of a novel that never makes a good movie, Wuthering Heights.

The color lithographs by Barnett Freedman have a curiously modern Y.A. air. There are Catherine and Heathcliff in all their rock-and-roll splendor as they stride across the moor. All they need are tattoos and piercings.

Penguin hardback classics and Everyman hardbacks are an inexpensive, sturdy, and attractive alternative to paperbacks or collectible hardbacks..

I love my Penguin hardback of Great Expectations and my Everyman of Buddenbrooks. No illustrations, though.

Are you a hardback or a paperback person? And do you collect any books?

April 6, 2015 by Kat

Eloise Jarvis McGraw’s Greensleeves

The narrator of Eloise Jarvis McGraw’s superb novel, Greensleeves, reissued recently in Nancy Pearl’s Book Crush series, is one of my favorite waitresses in literature.

The daughter of a famous actress and journalist, eighteen-year-old Shannon Kathleen Lightley has an identity crisis after high school. She has lived all over Europe, speaks several languages, yet always longed for stability. She was thrilled when her divorced parents agreed to let her spend her senior year living with her aunt in the small town of Mary Creek, Oregon. But the year was such a disaster that she now doesn’t want to go to college.

Greensleeves, first published in 1968, was one of my favorite books in childhood. In Nancy Pearl’s fascinating introduction, she points out that realistic fiction for teens dominated the shelves during the late twentieth century, while today fantasy and SF books have ascendency. McGraw, the author of three Newbery honor books, was perhaps best known for historical fiction.

Pearl writes,

But the novel of McGraw’s that I’ve always been fondest of is Greensleeves, which explores issues that teenagers–especially teen girls–can and do identify with. Actually, given my own experience of reading Greensleeves, maybe you don’t have to be a teenage girl to enjoy it. I first became acquainted with Shannon Kathleen Lightley, the main character and narrator, when I was in my twenties. I loved the novel then, and, having just reread it for the third time in two years, I love it still.

Shannon’s captivating voice and wit make this a Y.A. classic. And Shannon reminds me of Vicky Austin, the awkward heroine of several realistic novels by Madeleine L’Engle, among them Meet the Austins and The Moon by Night.

Shannon, who had given up on life in Oregon, was sitting in the Portland airport with the intention of returning to Europe when her Uncle Frosty, a lawyer, tracks her down and persuades her to stay in Portland for the summer. He hires her to do light detective work: he is investigating the validity of the will of an eccentric old woman who left all her money to neighbors for whimsical activities such as sky-diving lessons, a weed garden, studying “useless things,” and a trip to ancient Greece.

Shannon finds a job as a waitress at the Rainbow Cafe and moves into a boarding house: she actually rents the late Mrs. Dunningham’s room. And she experiments with her identity, wearing her long red hair in an upswept bouffant hairdo, snapping gum, and pretending she is from Idaho.

Because of her bright green uniform, she is nicknamed Greensleeves.

Her descriptions of waitressing are hilarious. Another waitress, a college girl, Helen, hands over most of the work to Shannon, who breaks character to make a few sarcastic remarks. Unfortunately, a bookworm, Sherry, looks up and stares at her and later tells her he enjoyed “the performance.”

But she is too busy to worry about Sherry.

For several minutes I was extremely active, while Helen shifted her weight to the other hip and turned a hamburger. Two new customers sat down near the three boys as I was starting that way with a handful of silverware, and she added that I might just take those ladies’ orders while I was there. I succumbed once more to temptation and asked her nervously if she didn’t think it would be too tricky for me. She gave me a fairly sharp glance, but said only, “You have to learn sometime, dear, and I do have my hands full right now.”

Life in the boarding house reminded me of my own university days living in rented rooms. Shannon befriends her neighbors. As she gets to know them–many are the beneficiaries of the will–she understands that Mrs. Dunningham was one of those whimsical 1960s people who tried to foster freedom.

Two men are interested in her, Sherry, a brilliant college student who wants to study “useless things,” and Dave, a talented artist who draws weeds and wild flowers. She loves Sherry, but being with Dave is like being with a sexual volcano.

What I love about Shannon is that she doesn’t give in to pressure and insists on knowing more about herself before she commits to a relationship. So smart. (Were we that smart?)

A very witty book, the kind of thing readers of all ages love.

Do you think I dare risk rereading McGraw’s Mara: Daughter of the Nile, set in ancient Egypt?

Well, maybe not!

April 5, 2015 by Kat

What I’m Reading Now: Wendy Pollard’s Pamela Hansford Johnson & Andrew D. Kaufman’s Give War and Peace a Chance

When I read nonfiction, I tend to peruse such esoteric tomes as Philip Hardie’s The Last Trojan Hero: A Cultural History of Virgil’s Aeneid.

But this weekend I am reading two very entertaining new books, Wendy Pollard’s biography, Pamela Hansford Johnson: Her Life, Works and Times, and Andrew D. Kaufman’s Give War and Peace a Chance: Tolstoyan Wisdom for Troubled Times.

Wendy Pollard’s brilliant biography of Pamela Hansford Johnson (1912-1981) is carefully-researched and engrossing. The fast-paced narrative is interwoven with excerpts from Johnson’s diaries, letters, detailed précis of her novels, and a history of their reception. It is the first biography of Johnson.

Johnson, a critically-acclaimed novelist and the author of literary studies of Ivy Compton-Burnett and Proust, is one of my favorite writers. Her Helena trilogy, Too Dear for My Possessing, An Avenue of Stone, and A Summer to Decide, is slightly reminiscent of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time.

Many of Johnson’s novels, including the Helena trilogy, are now available from Bello as e-books or print-on-demand books.

I am utterly intrigued by this biography. Pamela was the daughter of Amy Clotilda Howson, an actress and singer. After Pamela’s father died when she was 11, Amy’s close relationship with Pamela became almost obsessional. Pamela left school at 16, worked as a secretary, wrote poetry, and had a rocky relationship with Dylan Thomas. Amy disapproved of some of Pamela’s boyfriends, though she liked Dylan Thomas, and, indeed, she and Pamela visited Dylan’s family in Wales. Pamela eventually married an Australian journalist with whom she had two children, and later married the novelist and scientist C. P. Snow, with whom she had one child.

Pollard, who has a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, is especially strong on criticism and reception of Pamela’s work. She critiques all of Pamela’s books, including a play and pseudonymous mysteries co-written with her first husband, and carefully summarizes and quotes the reviews

.There is also lots of literary gossip. When Pamela was writing a study of Ivy Compton-Burnett, Ivy invited her to dinner, but Ivy and her cronies addressed few remarks to Pamela, preferring to converse about people Pamela didn’t know. Later, when they met again, so Ivy could give her reviews to read for the study, she talked over Pamela’s head

Pamela recalled: “As I leafed roughly through [the reviews], I heard her talking busily above my head, but not to me. It was an uncanny experience.’

She did not, however, permit Ivy’s eccentricities to interfere with her criticism.

Pamels’s husband C. P. Snow upset many friends who were featured in his novels obviously based on real-life incidents. (Not to the extent of Karl Ove Knausgård, of course.) Ironically, Pamela was upset when William Cooper (the pseudonym of Harry Summerfield Hoff) featured Snow and a former girlfriend as characters in a charming series of autobiographical novels about a physics-teacher-turned-civil-servant (Scenes from Provincial Life, etc.) . Pamela was so disturbed by the portrait of the relationship that Cooper did not publish Scenes from Metropolitan Life until 1982, after the deaths of both Pamela and Snow.

Reading Pollard’s book has introduced me to many books I’d never heard of. It took her biography for me to find out that the Helena trilogy is actually a quartet. Pamela’s out-of-print novel Winter Quarters features characters from the Helena trilogy as minor characters.

I will write more about this biography after I’ve finished.

Andrew D. Kaufman’s Give War and Peace a Chance: Tolstoyan Wisdom for Troubled Time is a short, accessible book on the significance of Tolstoy’s masterpiece, War and Peace. (Yes, I am also rereading War and Peace, for the tenth time).

Kaufman provides valuable background, and there are many brilliant insights. I have a much better understanding of Tolstoy’s intentions (or lack of them) in writing W&P.. He did not want to write a book in the European tradition. For instance, did you know that Tolstoy disliked Turgenev’s short elegant Fathers and Sons? That when readers didn’t appreciate his long novel, he wrote a rebuttal? That he didn’t consider War and Peace a novel?

Tolstoy wrote,

What is War and Peace? It is not a novel, still less an epic poem, still less a historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wanted and was able to express, in the form in which it is expressed. Such a declaration of the author’s disregard of the conventional forms of artistic prose works might seem presumptuous, if it were premeditated and if it had no previous examples. The history of Russian literature since Pushkin’s time not only provides many examples of such departure from European forms, but does not offer even one example to the contrary.

Kaufman explains that Tolstoy’s unliterary language astonished readers. Kaufman writes, “War and Peace thrust readers raised on more polished literary fare out of their familiar paradigms and into a brave new fictional world,which, for all its strangeness, somehow starts to feel more “real” than reality itself.”

Tolstoy is unlike anyone else. The characters in W&P always seem fresh to me, and I wonder every time if Natasha or Andre will behave differently druing their terrible romance.

Kaufman’s tone is sometimes too pop–rather blog-like–but the book is excellent.

I hope your weekend reading has been as fascinating as mine.

April 2, 2015 by Kat

Mavis Gallant’s From the Fifteenth District

Mavis Gallant was one of the best Canadian writers of short stories.

Gallant, a journalist in Montreal who gave up her career in 1952 to move to Europe and write fiction, published 116 short stories in the New Yorker. She won The Governor General’s Award, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and the 2004 PEN/Nabokov Award for Lifetime Achievement. She died in 2014.

I recently read Gallant’s 1979 collection of short stories, From the Fifteenth District. (It is in print as an Open Road Media e-book.). Like the Canadian writer Alice Munro, Gallant has the ability to compress the power of a novel into a short form. These stunning stories, shaped by Gallant’s percipience of the tragic destruction of Europe during World War II, cover long periods of time and depict the characters’ endurance of violence and later reshaping of lives.

“The Moslem Wife” is the best story in the collection. It delineates the the uneventful happiness of a hotel-keeping couple, Netta and Jack, in the South of France. All changes with the war. The hotel business for Netta’s family has been secure for two generations, though in her childhood they moved nomadically from room to room in the busy season. The story begins with Netta’s father Mr. Asher renewing a lease on the family hotel for 100 years. (Netta is 11.) He is confident after World War I “that there would never be a man-made catastrophe in Europe again. The dead of the recent war, the doomed nonsense of the Russian Bolsheviks had finally knocked sense into European heads.”

Some years later, when Netta marries her dilettante cousin, Jack (also the son of hoteliers), they run the hotel and live an idyllic life . (There are tennis courts, a lily pond, a winter garden, and a rose garden.) They have sex constantly. The guests at the hotel refer to her as “the Moslem wife. Netta loves the hotel and does not like to travel.

She would have been glad to see the same sun rising out of the same sea from the window every day until she died. She loved Jack, and what she liked best after him was the hotel. It was a place where, once, people had come to die of tuberculosis, yet it held no trace of feeling of danger. … here the dead had never been allowed to corrupt the living; the dead had been dressed for an outing and removed as soon as their first muscular stiffness relaxed.

Death and famine move in during World War II. Jack has gone to America with a woman, but Netta sees brutality and experiences hunger. The Italians are billeted in the hotel, then the Germans. The hotel is in ruins after the war, but Netta stays on. She writes to Jack and asks for books. He sends her Fireman Flower, The Horse’s Mouth, Four Quartets, The Stuff to Glue the Troops, Better Than a Kick in the Pants, and Put Out More Flags.

This long, powerful story captures the grief of the war more than anything else I have read.

In “The Remission, ” Gallant recounts the decay of an English family who move to a house on the Riviera called La Mas. Alec Webb, a war veteran who is dying of cancer, refuses to be treated by the National Health Service. Living cheaply in France seems feasible, though the money is acquired through the grace of Barbara’s brothers and by bankrupting his sister. Barbara, his wife, a profligate spender, goes through the money and neglects her children. The children become French, and Barbara becomes poor. It is Gallant’s style and her talent for expressing the slowness of time that make this so memorable.

“Baum, Gabriel, 1935-( )” is the story of a later generation. It is 1961, and Gabriel has recently been discharged from the French Army after two years in Algeria. In Paris he is an actor. As the years go by, he moves from the theater into bit parts on TV. The films are mostly about World War II: by the ’80s the films become less accurate and the new generation of actors know less history.

“Potter” is the story of a Polish intellectual who has spent time in prison for his radical beliefs. Sometimes he can get a passport to travel to France and sometimes not. He falls in love with a young Canadian woman in Paris whose idea of history begins with the War in Vietnam. Their differences enchant them.

The only story in the collection that did not grab me was the very odd title story in which three dead people who are haunted by people from the present. The other stories, however, are superb. I am so thankful I have discovered Gallant.

April 1, 2015 by Kat

Robin Morgan’s “Monster”

Robin Morgan

At Mirabile Dictu, we are celebrating National Poetry Month.

In 1972, I heard Robin Morgan read from her first book of poems, Monster, at the Women’s Center in Iowa City. I was a teenager, and it was the first poetry reading I attended.

Morgan is an award-winning writer, poet, feminist leader, political analyst, journalist, editor, and co-founder of the Women’s Media Center. “Monster” is a feminist poem that reflects the radicalism of the Second Wave Women’s Movement.

It was a very different time.

Although I no longer am the radical young girl who attended that reading, I still get chills when I read the title poem, “Monster.” (Note: Morgan’s Monster has been reissued as an e-book by Open Road Media.)

“Monster”
by Robin Morgan

Listen. I’m really slowly dying
inside myself tonight.
And I’m not about to run down the list
of rapes and burnings and beatings and smiles
and sulks and rages and all the other crap
you’ve laid on women throughout your history
(we had no part in it — although god knows we tried)
together with your thick, demanding bodies laid on ours,
while your proud sweat, like liquid arrogance,
suffocated our very pores.
Not tonight.

I’m tired of listing your triumph, our oppression,
especially tonight, while two men whom I like –
one of whom I live with, father of my child, and
claim to be in life-giving, death-serious struggle with –
while you two sit at the kitchen table dancing
an ornate ritual of what you think passes for struggle
which fools nobody. Your shared oppression, grief,
and love as effeminists in a burning patriarchal world
still cannot cut through power plays of maleness.

The baby is asleep a room away. White. Male. American.
Potentially the most powerful, deadly creature
of the species.
His hair, oh pain, curls into fragrant tendrils damp
with the sweat of his summery sleep. Not yet, and on my life
if I can help it never will be “quite a man.”
But just two days ago on seeing me naked for what must be
the three-thousandth time in his not-yet two years,
he suddenly thought of
the furry creature who yawns through his favorite television program;
connected that image with my genitals; laughed,
and said, “Monster.”

I want a woman’s revolution like a lover.
I lust for it, I want so much this freedom,
this end to struggle and fear and lies
we all exhale, that I could die just
with the passionate uttering of that desire.
Just once in this my only lifetime to dance
all alone and bare on a high cliff under cypress trees
with no fear of where I place my feet.
To even glimpse what I might have been and never never
will become, had I not had to “waste my life” fighting
for what my lack of freedom keeps me from glimpsing.
Those who abhor violence refuse to admit they are already
experiencing it, committing it.
Those who lie in the arms of the “individual solution,”
the “private odyssey,” the “personal growth,”
are the most conformist of all,
because to admit suffering is to begin
the creation of freedom.
Those who fear dying refuse to admit that they are already dead.
Well, I am dying, suffocating from this hopelessness tonight,
from this dead weight of struggling with
even those few men I love and care about
each day they kill me.

Do you understand? Dying. Going crazy.
Really. No poetic metaphor.
Hallucinating thin rainbow-colored nets
like cobwebs all over my skin
and dreaming more and more when I can sleep
of being killed or killing.
Sweet revolution, how I wish the female tears
rolling silently down my face this second were each a bullet,
each word I write, each character on my typewriter bullets
to kill whatever it is in men that builds this empire,
colonized my very body,
then named the colony Monster.

I am one of the “man-haters,” some have said.
I don’t have the time or patience here to say again why or how
I hate not men but what it is men do in this culture, or
how the system of sexism, power dominance, and competition
is the enemy, not people — but how men, still, created that system
and preserve it and reap concrete benefits from it.
Words and rhetoric that merely
gush from my arteries when grazed
by the razoredge of humanistic love. Enough.
I will say, however, that you, men, will have to be freed,
as well, though we women may have to kick and kill you
into freedom
since most of you will embrace death quite gladly
rather than give up your power to hold power.

Compassion for the suicidal impulse in our killers? Well,
on a plane ride once, the man across the aisle –
who was a World War Two paraplegic,
dead totally from the waist down,
wheeled in and out of the cabin — spent the whole trip avidly
devouring first newspaper sports pages
and then sports magazines,
loudly pointing out to anyone who would listen
(mostly the stewardesses) which athlete was a “real man.”

Two men in the seats directly behind me talked the whole time
about which Caribbean islands were the best for whoring, and
which color of ass was hotter and more pliant.
The stewardess smiled and served them coffee.
I gripped the arms of my seat more than once
to stop my getting up and screaming to the entire planeload
of human beings what was torturing us all — stopped because I knew
they’d take me for a crazy, an incipient
hijacker perhaps, and wrestle me down until Bellevue Hospital
could receive me at our landing in New York.
(No hijacker, I understood then, ever really wants to take
the plane. She/he wants to take passengers’ minds, to turn
them inside out, to create the revolution
35,000 feet above sea level
and land with a magical flying cadre
and, oh, yes, to win.)
Stopping myself is becoming a tactical luxury,
going fast.

My hives rise more frequently, stigmata of my passion.
Someday you’ll take away my baby, one way or the other.
And the man I’ve loved, one way or the other.
Why should that nauseate me with terror?
You’ve already taken me away from myself
with my only road back to go forward
into more madness, monsters, cobwebs, nausea,
in order to free you — men — from killing us, killing us.

No colonized people so isolated one from the other
for so long as women.
None cramped with compassion for the oppressor
who breathes on the next pillow each night.
No people so old who, having, we now discover, invented
agriculture, weaving, pottery, language, cooking
with fire, and healing medicine, must now invent a revolution
so total as to destroy maleness, femaleness, death.

Oh mother, I am tired and sick.
One sister, new to this pain called feminist consciousness
for want of a scream to name it, asked me last week
“But how do you stop from going crazy?”
No way, my sister.
No way.
This is a pore war, I thought once, on acid.

And you, men. Lovers, brothers, fathers, sons.
I have loved you and love you still, if for no other reason
than that you came wailing from the monster
while the monster hunched in pain to give you the power
to break her spell.
Well, we must break it ourselves, at last.
And I will speak less and less and less to you
and more and more in crazy gibberish you cannot understand:
witches’ incantations, poetry, old women’s mutterings,
schizophrenic code, accents, keening, firebombs,
poison, knives, bullets, and whatever else will invent
this freedom.

May my hives bloom bravely until my flesh is aflame
and burns through the cobwebs.
May we go mad together, my sisters.
May our labor agony in bringing forth this revolution
be the death of all pain.
May we comprehend that we cannot be stopped.

May I learn how to survive until my part is finished.
May I realize that I

am a
monster. I am

a
monster.
I am a monster.

And I am proud.

March 31, 2015 by Kat

Rumer Godden’s Cromartie vs the God Shiva

Rumer Godden’s Cromartie vs the God Shiva is a miniature classic with an over-long title. It is Godden’s last novel, written at age 89.

Based on a court case resolved in 1994 about a stolen 12th-century bronze statue of the god Shiva that turned up at the British Museum, it explores the issue of whether museums and dealers have a right to art treasures.

In Godden’s novel, a stolen statue of Shiva turns up in London in the possession of a Canadian antique dealer, Mr. Cromartie. The government of India wants it returned.

After the dense opening pages, which present information in the form of dialogue, this gracefully-written book proceeds at a fast clip. Sir George Fothergill, QC, and his head clerk, Walter Johnson, debate whether to take on the case representing Shiva acting through the government of India.

Sir George has his doubts.

I don’t want to oppose you, Walter–when have I ever?” he asked. “But this is too fantastical–a Hindu god going to war.”

“Acting through the government of India, Sir, which seems solid enough to me.”

“It can’t be solid if it’s a spirit, which I don’t believe is active. No, I can’t bring myself to do it. We should be a laughing stock.”

But his colleague, Honor Wyatt, Q.C., thinks the case is “poignant,” and the firm takes it on, assigning it to Michael Dean, the senior of the junior barristers, who was raised in India. The figurine of Shiva was stolen from a lovely hotel on the coast of Coromandel, where its value had only recently been discovered. Mr. Cromartie, the dealer, claims to have known nothing of the theft: he tells Michael that he won’t return Shiva to India unless properly paid, and claims he was recently been told the hotel was in financial difficulties and the hotel owner only pretended to steal it.

Michael travels to Coromandel to investigate the case. He admires the beauty of Patna Hall, an old-fashioned luxury hotel built by the beach and hills by an English businessman in the early 20th century. The Englishman’s granddaughter, known as Auntie Sanni, now runs it, but it was Professor Webster, an archaeologist who comes every year with a group of tourists, who discovered that the original Shiva had been replaced by a fake sometime in the last year.

Who stole and sold it ? A guest? An inhabitant of the village? An archaeologist? And who made the perfect replica?

And then Artemis arrives, a young beautiful American archaeologist, who is intellectual, vital, and volatile. She is intensely competitive at everything she does and swims like a mermaid. And yet there is something lost about her.

Michael falls in love with her.

The intense danger of the hotel’s magically colorful private beach is stressed throughout: the waves are so strong that one cannot swim without wearing a wicker helmet. Michael goes for an early-morning swim.

Crabs scurried across it, there was an occasional starfish and blue jellyfish. All along was the barrier of tossing white, higher than his head, as the waves swept in, rearing up before crashing down; he had not realized till last night how gigantic they were. Beyond them the open sea was calm and azure blue….

“Ours is not a gentle sea,” Auntie Sanni had told Michael, as she told all her guests, when she saw him in his bathrobe. She always said, “Please remember it is dangerous to go in alone to bathe, even for strong swimmers. You must take a guard.”

The solution to the mystery is sad, moving, and complicated. In some ways it reflects the qualities of Shiva Nataraja, who Godden tells us represents creation, preservation, destruction, concealment, favour.

A lovely book. Godden wrote another book set in Patna Hall, Coromandel Sea Change. It’s on the TBR.

March 30, 2015 by Kat

The Folio Society Pushkin Notebook

My free Folio Society gift: a Pushkin’s Queen of Spades notebook.

Last week my Folio Society copy of the complete edition of Trollope’s The Duke’s Children arrived.

I photographed it, blogged about it, and then hid it from my husband.

Lovely book, but I had mixed emotions.

I was:

1. Excited, because to have a new edition of The Duke’s Children with an additional volume (Trollope wrote a four-volume novel which was published in three volumes) makes it a new book.

2. Depressed, because paperback reading copies are fine for me and I could have bought a plane ticket to Florida instead.

Trollope’s The Duke’s Children, with bedraggled geranium .

Then I shook the box. Where was my gift? Weren’t we supposed to get a free journal or stationery?

Well, it’s not Amazon Prime, I reminded myself. Chill. They’re British. It’s like the TLS app. Good luck with that.

When another box from the Folio Society arrived today, I wasn’t surprised. It contained my “free gift,” a notebook with the cover art from the Folio Society edition of Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades and Other Stories.

I love it! In fact, I want more notebooks, if there are any others.

So now I feel at peace. I got my book and the toy gifty book (the notebook). And since I have spent my full allotment and more for Folio Society membership, I can now sit back–whew–and enjoy the book.

March 29, 2015 by Kat

Coffee at the Borgias’ and Helen MacDonald’s H Is for Hawk

“Flora” (sitter thought to be Lucrezia Borgia) by Bartolomeo Veneeto

When I take the bus in my small city, I sense that I immediately rise from middle-class matron to upper-class termagent. It is not like the tube; it is not like the Metro.

Everybody has a cold, everybody is poor, some are just out of prison and talking at the top of their voice about Jesus, and the majority are distracted by the panem et circenses of their phones.

Thank God for electronics, I think.

I jump off the bus and walk two miles from the mall to the bookstore.

I love to spend a day browsing at the bookstore. I usually buy a book or two (when I have not spent my book budget at the Folio Society). And I always buy a coffee, because it is nice to sit and sip and read. I know who makes a good latte. Today, however, the barista is unfamiliar, older than most, a shifty blonde, and averts her eyes throughout the transaction.

I speculate: On drugs? That is uncharitable, right? Even if I’m right, which I probably am, I should be thinking of this with concern and instead I am thinking in bus terms: who is this person sitting next to me?

I decide to have just coffee.

She takes a long time getting the coffee.

I sip the coffee, immediately get cramps, throw out the coffee, and manage to walk back to the bus stop.

I hold it together until I get home. Thank God my husband can go out to get 7-Up and crackers.

So do you think the barista was a Borgia?

Helen MacDonald’s H Is for Hawk

Few books have been so lauded in the last year as Helen MacDonald’s H Is for Hawk, a memoir of her grief for her dead father, her training of a goshawk to fend off depression, and a short, creative biography of T. H. White, whose memoir The Goshawk was her inspiration and nemesis. MacDonald’s popular book won the Costa Award and the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2014.

To prepare for this book, which was published this month here, I read The Goshawk. White, best-known for his novel The Once and Future King, decided to train a goshawk, the wildest of hawks, after he left his job as an unhappy teacher at a public school. MacDonald first read The Goshawk when she was a child, and was upset, as I was, by many passages about Gos’s training.

Although White’s writing is extraordinarily graceful, I was nauseated by his account of the cruel training of Gos. He learned about falconry from a book published in the Renaissance, and the methods were unnecessarily rigid: we learn all about White’s sado-mashochism. He kept the bird awake for three to nine days until Gos finally took food from his hand. The bird was terrified. Both man and bird were deadened with exhaustion. And the training went on.

MacDonald, a researcher at Cambridge, is an expert falconer. When her father died in 2007, she spiraled into a deep depression. Finally she decided to train a goshawk for the first time. She had ordered the hawk from an aviary, and when she met the man with the bird at the quay, he was carrying two boxes with birds, the younger for another falconer. He opened the boxes to check the identity, and Helen fell in love with the first one, which happened to be the wrong one..

Although she tries to be poetic, her prose is overwritten and flowery. Too many adjectives, and too many fragments.

Infinite caution. Daylight irrigating the box. Scratching talons, another thump. ‘And another. The air turned syrupy, slow, flecked with dust.

And I ask myself: syrupy and dusty?

She continues:

The last few seconds before a battle. And with the last bow pulled free, he reached inside, and amidst a whirring, chaotic clattering of wings and feet and talons and high-pitched twittering and it’s all happening at once, the man pulls an enormous, enormous hawk out of the box and in a strange coincidence of world and deed a great flood of sunlight drenches us and everything is brilliance and fury . . . . She is a conjuring trick. A reptile. A fallen angel. A griffon from the pages of an illuminated bestiary. Something bright and distant, like gold falling through water. A broken marionette of wings, legs and light-splashed feathers.

Sadly, I had a picture of myself at a reading feeling uncomfortable because the book is over-dramatic and the prose is blowsy.

She asked if she could have the bird she liked, and he agreed to it.

MacDonald’s training of her bird, Mabel, is much more humane than White’s. She and the bird have a relationship: Mabel even likes to play. But there are problems. MacDonald is still depressed. Her job at Cambridge is coming to an end. And then there are some stresses with training Mabel.

Sometimes she retells White’s The Goshawk creatively from a third person point of view, and that does not work for me. She also writes a kind of psychoanalytic biography of him.

I gave up on the book halfway through.

I’m just not interested in falconry, and her writing is too florid for my taste. I know that many have loved this, and I hope the quotes will encourage those of you who like such prose to seek it out. I would give you my copy, but it’s an e-book!

March 27, 2015 by Kat

Literary Figures & Painters: New Novels About Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Emily Dickinson, & Dorothy Richardson

Some novels about literary figures are stunning, others are trashy.

Anybody can cash in on our favorite writers. Novels about Virginia Woolf are especially copious.

Two novels about Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf have recently been published, one about, Emily Dickinson, and another about Dorothy Richardson.

1. Priya Parmar’s Vanessa and Her Sister has been well-reviewed: this novel is written in the form of the diary of Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s painter sister. It is said to be “an intimate glimpse” into the lives of Vanessa and Virginia and the Bloomsbury group.

Why haven’t I read it yet? Novels about the Stephens sisters, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, can be dicey, because the members of the Bloomsbury group are so much more talented than most writers. What if I’m disappointed?

A gracefully-written 2009 novel.

But I did admire Susan Sellers’s Vanessa & Virginia, a novel published in 2009. written from the point of view of Vanessa Bell. Broken into a series of short, beautifully written sketches, this is a poetic account of Vanessa’s painting, her ambivalent relationship with her difficult diva of a younger sister, Virginia Woolf, and her long, somewhat shocking love affair with Duncan Grant, an artist who prefers men and has a series of homosexual affairs.

2. Norah Vincent’s Adeline: A Novel of Virginia Woolf will be published April 7. I’m not sure how many novels about Virginia Woolf I can digest in a year, but it is the kind of thing I read.

Here is the description:

On April 18, 1941, twenty-two days after Virginia Woolf went for a walk near her weekend house in Sussex and never returned, her body was reclaimed from the River Ouse. Norah Vincent’s Adeline reimagines the events that brought Woolf to the riverbank, offering us a denouement worthy of its protagonist.

With poetic precision and psychological acuity, Vincent channels Virginia and Leonard Woolf, T. S. and Vivienne Eliot, Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, laying bare their genius and their blind spots, their achievements and their failings, from the inside out. And haunting every page is Adeline, the name given to Virginia Stephen at birth, which becomes the source of Virginia’s greatest consolation, and her greatest torment.

Perhaps it will be good. They like it at Goodreads.

3. William Nicholson’s Amherst, a new novel about Emily Dickinson, would be a wonderful excuse to reread her poems. Nicholson is a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. He is best-known for Shadowlands.

Here is an excerpt from the description:

Alice Dickinson, a young advertising executive in London, decides to take time off work to research her idea for a screenplay: the true story of the scandalous, adulterous love affair that took place between a young, Amherst college faculty wife, Mabel Loomis Todd, and the college’s treasurer, Austin Dickinson, in the 1880s. Austin, twenty-four years Mabel’s senior and married, was the brother of the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson, whose house provided the setting for Austin and Mabel’s trysts.

It, too, has been well-received.

4. Louisa Treger’s The Lodger is a novel about Dorothy Richardson, the author of Pilgrimage and the creator of stream-of-consciousness. (No, Joyce did not invent stram-of-consciousness. It’s the boys who think so!)

I have been a fan of Richardson for decades.

The description:

Dorothy exists just above the poverty line, doing secretarial work at a dentist’s office and living in a seedy boarding house in Bloomsbury, when she is invited to spend the weekend with a childhood friend. Jane recently married a writer, who is hovering on the brink of fame. His name is H.G. Wells, or Bertie, as he is known to friends.

Was there any woman writer in those days who did not have an affair with H. G. Wells? Rebecca West, Violet Hunt, and Elizabeth Von Arnim. So many women writers.

If you have any favorite novels about literary figures, let me know. There are so many!

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