letters and sodas: booknotes

It’s been a while since I picked up any of the books I picked for Emily’s Attacking the TBR Tome Challenge—I’ve only read three books from my list so far, and it’s already August! But after reading Fire and Hemlock I was in the mood for another novel, specifically another novel with a quirky romance aspect and The Time Traveler’s Wife seemed to fit the bill.

I feel like this is one of those books everyone but me read several years ago, and even if you haven’t read it, you probably know the basics of the plot: Henry travels through time; Clare doesn’t. Clare waits. This is both very unusual and not so unusual, as Clare notes in the prologue:

Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting. (VII)

The narrative, like Henry, jumps back and forth in time, and the story is told sometimes by Henry and sometimes by Clare, which works nicely: you get the perspective of each, and you also get a sense of how odd their situation is: with Clare, as a child, you see Henry in his 30s; when Henry, at age 28, is talking to Clare, you know that she’s aware of a whole set of shared experiences that this Henry hasn’t had yet. The structure of the book (plus of course the plot!) makes you think about time itself, about the self moving through time, about your future self that doesn’t exist yet, or perhaps does. It makes you think about whether you can talk about a future self with any certainty, or whether you don’t, rather, have an array of possible future selves that might or might not end up ever existing. And it was interesting to compare Niffenegger’s rules-of-time-travel to, say, Connie Willis’s: in Niffenegger’s books, it’s not a problem for a time traveler to meet his earlier self, to be in the same place/time twice, and there isn’t too much worry about causing problems or paradoxes: things mostly just happen the way they will happen, and that is that. This is all interesting stuff, and once I got used to the dialogue (which at first seemed stilted, too disconnected from the more lyrical descriptive passages), the first half of the book was really compelling: delicious weekend reading that I seriously did not want to put down. (Though I suppose in part that’s a testament to how I feel about reading generally at the moment: it’s making me happy, it’s my quiet-time and my alone-time and my thing-that-I-write-about and it’s a hell of a lot more fun than cleaning out the fridge or putting away the clean laundry or cooking in 90-degree-heat. So, um, I am indulging myself, and reading a whole lot.)

Speaking of reading: I like how readerly this book is, how Henry is a librarian who counts “a mystery novel in bed” among his pleasures, how Claire, entering the Newberry Library for the first time, talks about her “Christmas-morning sense of the library as a big box full of beautiful books,” how Henry notes that his apartment “is basically a couch, an armchair, and about four thousand books,” how Clare, on the morning after their “first date,” looks at his bookshelves, lists out authors and titles (X, 3, 15).

But—and I guess, in part, this is the trouble of reading a book like this several years after everyone else has read it—all through that first half I kept feeling slightly squirmy, like: “this gets sad, right? when does it get sad? is it going to be OK when it gets sad or is it going to feel sappy and emotionally manipulative and annoying?” Which is a worry I would say I have moderately often when reading fiction, and am not sure how to articulate. What makes a sad ending moving in a way that feels “honest” or “true” (whatever those things mean; I’m not sure those are even the right terms), and what makes a sad ending feel like a manipulation or a betrayal? I don’t know, but I am pretty sure I have a strong preference for ambiguous or hopeful or happy endings, rather than sad ones.

So yes: this book had me worried, and the end did indeed feel unsatisfying, but even so, there were things in the second half of the book that I liked, things like this:

The compelling thing about making art—or making anything, I suppose—is the moment when the vaporous, insubstantial idea becomes a solid there, a thing, a substance in a world of substances. Circe, Nimbue, Artemis, Athena, all the old sorceresses: they must have known the feeling as they transformed mere men into fabulous creatures, stole the secrets of the magicians, disposed armies: ah, look, there it is, the new thing. Call it a swine, a war, a laurel tree. Call it art. The magic I can make is small magic now, deferred magic. Every day I work, but nothing ever materializes. I feel like Penelope, weaving and unweaving (284).

I’m currently catching up on back issues of The New Yorker—I’m not quite sure how I got behind: I used to always be caught up! I used to see people reading old issues on the train and think, “really, you’re just reading that now?” But it’s OK: I don’t feel (too) bad about the fact that I’m just now reading the Summer Fiction issue (June 14 & 21). I like short stories, or at least, I think of myself as liking short stories, but somehow I don’t actually read that many of them in book form: at any given moment I’m much more likely to be reading a novel, or a book of poems, or maybe a book of essays. But that’s where The New Yorker comes in, except that I often find the short stories in its pages to be, well, semi-memorable at best. This may partly be a function of the fact that I don’t tend to write about those stories here, or to discuss them with anyone else—and what I read but don’t write or talk about, I tend to forget. But I’m starting to think it might also be about the subject matter. I’m generally just not that interested in short fiction about middle-aged people who are privileged, heterosexual, and/or having marital difficulties or career trouble. And I feel like The New Yorker‘s fiction section has a lot of that. Not that there aren’t other kinds of stories represented as well, and not that I don’t sometimes appreciate a style or phrase in those stories, or even the way the plot unfolds. But unless something formally quirky or interesting or fun is happening, it’s probably not going to resonate with me. Also, I think I like short shorts, or even just short-ish shorts, best of all short stories.

Which is why a two page story by Jonathan Safran Foer called “Here We Aren’t, So Quickly” made me pause when I started reading it and made me smile when I kept going. Here’s how it start: “I was not good at drawing faces. I was just joking most of the time. I was not decisive in changing rooms or anywhere. I was so late because I was looking for flowers.” And it continues like that, except with some paragraphs being all “You” statements, and some being a mix of “I” and “You” and some being “We.” (There are some “They” sentences at the end, and some that don’t even start with a pronoun—but not very many of those, comparatively speaking.) I love it, the pace of it, the length of it, the way it tells a story through all the accumulation of these insignificant-seeming bits and pieces, how it traces the line of the speaker’s life through love/marriage/parenthood/boredom but does so in an unexpected way.

You can only read the whole story on The New Yorker‘s website if you have a subscription to the magazine, but someone else liked this story enough to type the whole thing out: here it is in its entirety.

November 15, 1940: Coventry Cathedral is full of smoke and rubble, and Ned Henry is looking for the bishop’s bird stump, which is a Victorian vase, which he needs to find because Lady Schrapnell, who is rebuilding the cathedral in time for the 125th anniversary of its destruction, wants to know exactly what was in it when it burned, so she can reproduce it all, every last bit. Ned’s been on twelve “drops” from the 21st century into the past in the last week, and it seems he’s suffering from time-lag, though of course he doesn’t realize it (“Time-lag victims never think they’re time-lagged,” he says, as he worries about whether one if his companions is time-lagged and how he’ll get this companion to acknowledge it.) Ned’s pulled back to 21st-century Oxford to recover, but realizes Lady Schrapnell will never let him rest. So he’s sent off to the Victorian era to recuperate … but also to sort out a bit of a problem that another time-traveling historian has started.

I haven’t read Three Men in a Boat, which informs the structure (and humor) of this book, but even so, I found it very funny. Here’s Ned, talking about his upcoming trip to the past: note that a tendency toward the maudlin is one of time-lag’s symptoms:

The Victorian era. Long dreamy afternoons boating on the Thames and playing croquet on emerald lawns with girls in white frocks and fluttering hair ribbons. And later, tea under the willow tree, served in delicate Sèvres cups by bowing butlers, anxious to minister to one’s every whim, and those same girls, reading aloud from a slim volume of poetry, their voices floating like flower petals on the scented air. “All in the golden afternoon, where Childhood’s dreams are twined, In Memory’s mystic band—” (pp 29-30)

It’s not just funny though: there are also satisfying descriptions of Oxford, of the Thames and the Charwell and Christ Church, England in June, boats on the river, and an English bulldog—a very funny English bulldog who snorts and snores and walks crooked. There’s a lot of pondering about how history works/how the world works. And there’s a time-travel/mystery/suspense plot that’s exciting enough that, once I got into it, I really didn’t want to put the book down, because I was having so much fun keeping up with all the misunderstandings and misadventures and twists.

“Every time I travel,” this book starts, “I feel a very slight feeling of dread at the moment of departure, a dread sometimes shaded with a soft shiver of elation. Because I know that any trip brings with it the possibility of death—or of sex (both highly improbable of course, yet not to be excluded altogether.” But the narrator’s travels are often more ordinary: he’s always bringing himself with him, after all. What’s more, he runs into people he knows, talks about small-town European gossip, carries his usual routines around, in modified form. (In Tokyo: “Although it was pastis time, we contented ourselves with a green tea” (p 9).) He moves from airport to hotel to shop to café, but sometimes seems more focused on the in-between, on the global all-places/no-place, than on the specificities of where he is: “You arrive in Tokyo the way you arrive in Bastia, from the sky. The plane flies in a long arc above the bay and aligns with the runway to touch down. Seen from above, at four thousand feet, there isn’t much difference between the Pacific and the Mediterranean.” (p 7). There are times when he does experience scenes/events/people that are peculiar to a place that isn’t home, but he’s often flip or critical: at the On Matsuri in Nara all he says is “too bad it’s raining, huh?”; in the same chapter he meets a Japanese woman who admires his work, but he just talks (to the reader, not her!) about how bad her French is—never mind that clearly he’s not managing to speak to her in Japanese. This all could get old quickly, and kind of does, but then there are passages like this, which I like a whole lot:

In Hanoi, the traffic punctuates each hour of the day and almost every hour of the night. The noise of car horns never stops in the streets, it forms a permanent background noise like an uninterrupted murmur that you could almost forget if it didn’t keep coming back at you, it being precisely the function of horns to attract attention, to signal and warn, to drown each other out, outhonk one another. Thousands of horns blow without a moment’s silence on the streets, shrill and loud, sharp and repetitive, insistent, some quick and piercing, fired off nearby in impatient salvoes, others remote, lost, muted by their distance, mainly from mopeds and motorcycles, but also from cars and taxis, tarpaulined trucks and three-wheeled vehicles, buses and vans and sometimes even—lost in the middle of an intersection, hardly audible in the surrounding turmoil— the delicate and isolated tinkle of a bicycle bell. (pp 58-59)

At the end, though, I found myself underwhelmed/glad to be done with reading this. Maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood; maybe I just read this at the wrong moment. I kept wanting to like this book more than I actually did; there were moments of interest, but not enough of them.

I’d read and liked three of Meg Rosoff’s books (and particularly liked two of them—What I Was and How I Live Now), so when I read Emma Carbone’s review on one of the NYPL blogs of The Bride’s Farewell, I knew I’d want to read it eventually. But I wasn’t sure I’d like it: after all, Emma hated How I Live Now, which I liked, and talked about how parts of this book were “bleak and miserable to the point of being excessive,” and I wasn’t sure I was that interested in the plotline. But now, having finished it, I’m wondering why I waited so long.

The book’s set in 1850s England, in the area around Salisbury, and is the story of Pell Ridley, a young woman who leaves home the day she was meant to be married. Pell is independent and strains against the expected roles of her time and place: she’s a better farrier than her husband-to-be, knows horses better than anyone around, and doesn’t want to be a wife, much less a mother: but she’s poor, from a large family, not formally educated, and no other options are given her. So she decides to find her own future the only way she can think of: by leaving, heading first for the horse fair at Salisbury and then on to who knows where.

Without saying too much more about the plot, which turns and circles and moves interestingly, I will just say that I liked this book a whole lot: I like Pell and her understanding of animals and how she’s observant and persistent; I like the setting, all the horses and dogs and the chalk landscapes of the south of England. Though there are indeed stretches of bleakness and moments where I squirmed and worried about the characters, none of it seemed gratuitous, and there are flashes of romance and love and joy, enough to make up for the rest. And I really like Rosoff’s writing, which is graceful and precise, each word well chosen. Like this, possibly my favorite paragraph in the whole book:

For those poor souls who can only think of the terrible fear and danger of a runaway horse, think of this: a speed like water flowing over stone, a skimming sensation that hovers and dips while the world spins around and the wind drags your skin taut across your bones. You can close your eyes and lose yourself in the rhythm, because nothing you do or shout or wish for will happen until the running makes up its mind to stop. So you hold steady, balancing yourself in the wake, and unhook your mind from the everyday while you sit at the silent center of it all and hope that the feeling won’t stop till you’re good and ready for life to be ordinary once more. (p 78)

The Other City is strange and wonderful, a book about seeing, a book about reading. It’s a slim novel, but one to read slowly: it’s full of images that I wanted to linger over. It starts normally enough: a winter day, an antiquarian bookshop, snow starting to fall outside, the smell and texture of paper. But then our narrator finds a book in a new language, not just a language he doesn’t know but a language whose characters he’s never even seen before, and he starts questioning the reality that most people take for granted. He thinks the book must come from elsewhere, from someplace utterly strange yet also extremely close: “The frontier of our world is not far away; it doesn’t run along the horizon or in the depths. It glimmers faintly close by, in the twilight of our nearest surroundings; out of the corner of our eye we can always glimpse another world, without realizing it” (p 2). And so begins his obsession with the place where the book has come from, this other world, this other city.

The other city is a shadow-Prague, a nighttime Prague, an underwater Prague, a different city that uses the spaces left empty or ignored by the daytime Prague, and a city with its own culture, customs, objects, religious rituals. Sometimes its signs and objects are seen in the daytime Prague; sometimes there are unexplained strangenesses: “Someone found a live wriggling starfish on their wet living-room carpet one morning, someone else was waiting for a train one evening at a little station and climbed aboard a car whose interior consisted of a cold Gothic chapel” (p 12). But mostly, the narrator thinks, we see what we expect to see; we think about the things for which we have a vocabulary and ignore everything else.

But we can look in the corners, in the empty spaces, in the nighttime streets, and that’s what the narrator starts to do. He finds that the other city is a place of subterranean churches, of sea creatures and the cult of a god mauled by a tiger, a place “where folds in fabric are more important than faces and have names, whereas thickets of faces merge into an indifferent blur” (p 34). It’s a city of menace but also of charm and beauty, a place where twenty-inch-tall elk live inside the statues on Charles Bridge, with a man who comes around to clean up after them and give them fresh food and water. The narrator sits in a darkened restaurant and watches, and there’s this, which is just so lovely: “The elks made long graceful leaps and their antlers drew lines of light in the darkness” (p 98). The narrator moves through the other city, letting events lead him from place to place, hoping to find its center, with the fountains and palaces of which he’s heard its inhabitants talk, but he only finds apartment buildings, a shipwreck, a jungle, a temple. The temple-keeper tells him there is no center, tells him that there “is an endless chain of cities, a circle without beginning or end,” and goes on to enumerate the other other cities (p 155):

There is the city-jungle and the city where people live in the pillars of tall viaducts that crisscross each other in countless overpasses and underpasses, the city of sounds and nothing else, the city in the swamp, the city of smooth white balls rolling on concrete, the city comprising apartments spread across several continents, the city where sculptures fall endlessly from dark clouds and smash on the paving stones, the city where the moon’s path passes through the insides of apartments. (pp 155-156)

Which isn’t quite what our narrator has been hoping to hear. Exhausted, he makes his way home, where he realizes what he’s already been told: that you only can set off for the heart of the other city when you leave your own city behind entirely; you can only fully enter a world different from your own when you leave behind all the rules and questions of your world, when you stop trying to make sense of the other world by the grammar of your own.

The flap copy calls this a “Romantic novel in every sense of the word,” which it is: it’s a romance, a love story, and also a story set in the Romantic era, with protagonists who are part of the French Romantic literary/musical/dramatic scene. It’s the story of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, first an actress, then a poet, and it’s the story of her loves: her ill-fated affairs, her marriage, and her great love for the writer Henri de Latouche. It moves back and forth in time, starting in 1821 and moving ahead but also looking back, in alternating chapters, at Marceline’s youth and early adulthood, and it has its poetic moments, but it’s mostly straight first-person narration, which I found less compelling than I thought it’d be.

Not that I wasn’t reasonably interested in Marceline and her story, particularly her dual love for her husband and for Latouche, but the narration struck me as so inward-looking, so centered on Marceline’s emotions and her story, herself as the actress and writer of her own life, with comparatively few scene-setting details, comparatively few descriptions of the world. The narrator of the novel is an “I” that loves and feels and moves through the world; I could have done with more description and less feeling; I would have liked for more of the story to be told indirectly, with the description of a time or a place creating a mood, and letting the reader infer more about the emotion of the story from that. At one point in the novel, Marceline talks about how critics berated her performances for having “an excess of sensibility,” and that’s sometimes how I felt about the book as a whole (p 54).

That said, I like how the book starts right with Marceline’s voice, with the emotional heart of things, with this: “I spent the afternoon with Henri. Again the same vertigo, as though walking an exposed ridge and not knowing which side to fall on, a wild commotion in my chest.” (p 1). And there are some lovely bits of detail: the “orange-colored bergère” in Henri’s apartment, by the piano and the window, his tall windows and their view of the Seine, the sand strewn on the floor in the Flemish fashion in Marceline’s first childhood home, the bits and moods of the cities she sees as an actress, from one city to the next. I liked this a lot:

Rochefort was tiny, and oddly laid out. It was a port, or more accurately a shipyard, differing markedly from the three towns I had previously known, casting all my points of reference to the winds. The sight of masts suddenly rising at the end of a street astonished me. I could never get used to seeing a ship between two houses. I was intrigued, charmed, and vaguely frightened. (p 60)

And this:

Bordeaux appealed to me. With its medieval aspect, its tree-planted alleys, its big, red-tiled, white-stone buildings, its high, clear windows, its sumptuous townhouses, its wrought-iron balconies, it looked something like the Spain that was so much talked of. The air was soft, the sun generous. As a girl from the north, I felt every morning as though I were entering a veil of light. (p 66)

I wanted more of that, more about place, more about light, more about streets and buildings, which isn’t quite to say less of Marceline herself. I do like the idea of self-invention and self-reinvention, telling stories as a way to make sense of things, Marceline saying, of herself at a young age, “already I was learning to retell my life” (p 89). But though I would say I enjoyed this book well enough, it didn’t really resonate with me as much as I thought it might.

Earlier this month I read and really enjoyed Blackout, Connie Willis’s latest book, so I knew I wanted to go back and read this one, which is set in the same world. It’s Oxford in 2054 and the history department, which uses time travel to observe the past, is at the center of this story. Kivrin Engle, a young medievalist, is about to take the first trip to the Middle Ages. Whole centuries had been off-limits to historians due to their danger, but the acting head of the history department, a medievalist himself, is eager to get someone into the 1300s, however risky that may be. The acting head and the rest of his department, though, aren’t so great at planning and preparation, so Mr. Dunworthy, whose area of specialty is the 20th century but who has been unofficially tutoring Kivrin and acting as her mentor, steps in to make sure everything goes smoothly. Except, of course, it doesn’t. The tech running the trip falls ill, along with much of the rest of Oxford, Kivrin ends up in the wrong year and isn’t sure she can find her way back, and everyone ends up in quite a bit of danger.

At the start of the book, Kivrin talks about how she wants to go to the past to learn about ordinary people: “There are scarcely any records, except for parish registers and tax rolls,” she says, “and nobody knows what their lives were like at all. That’s why I want to go. I want to find out about them, how they lived, what they were like” (7). And learn she does. Some of the lessons are a bit obviously foreshadowed (you know, when the acting head of the history department talks about how people in the middle ages didn’t feel grief, weren’t bothered by death, etc. that Kivrin will learn otherwise), but Kivrin’s experience in a small village is still touching: a family takes her in and takes care of her; she grows close to them and the village priest, and meanwhile, learns how much Dunworthy’s caring and concern matter to her. This all sounds a bit cheesy, but it’s really well done: the book ends up being about faith (in humanity, mostly) and love and determination as much as about time travel or the past, but you know, it works.

The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag picks up a little more than a month after The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie leaves off, so it was good to read them consecutively. It’s summer in Bishop’s Lacey, the little village outside of which eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce lives with her father and two older sister’s in the old family manor, Buckshaw. Flavia’s relaxing in the churchyard when she sees that she has company: it turns out that the van of a famous puppeteer, Rupert Porson, has broken down, and he and his assistant are stranded. The vicar convinces them to put on a show while they wait for the mechanic to fix the van, and Flavia’s roped into helping them set up and settle in: they’ve been given permission to camp in the field of a neighboring farm. The farm belongs to a couple whose young son was found hanged in the woods five years earlier, and they’ve become reclusive since then: Flavia has a more-than-a-little creepy encounter with the woman of the house, which makes you wonder what other creepiness has happened on/near this farm, and what other creepiness is still in store.

As with the last Flavia de Luce mystery, in this one the stranger who arrives in town dies soon after—and turns out not to be a stranger at all. And once again, Flavia has a role in unraveling how the “stranger” is connected to Bishop’s Lacey, and why he’s ended up dead.

I am (still) fond of Flavia and her boldness and cleverness; passages like the below crack me up:

“You are unreliable, Flavia,” he said. “Utterly unreliable.”
Of course I was! It was one of the things I loved most about myself.
Eleven-year-olds are supposed to be unreliable. We’re past the age of being poppets: the age where people bend over and poke us in the tum with their fingers and make idiotic noises that sound like “boof-boof”—just the thought of which is enough to make me bring up my Bovril. And yet we’re sitll not at the age where anyone ever mistakes us for a grown-up. The fact is, we’re invisible—except when we choose not to be. (p 112)

I like the little world of Bishop’s Lacey, and I feel like Bradley’s writing is better in this book than the last one—or maybe I was just paying better attention—I really enjoyed the descriptions of, say, the cool damp forest and all its plant life, or the wonder of looking down from above at a well-constructed puppet theater, the magic of it. And, like with The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, I like the conventions of the mystery, the way different characters, many with a motive, are introduced, and the way you stay guessing. I read this book over the course of a few days when I was sick with a nasty cold, and it felt like perfect curled-up-with-a-blanket reading.

I don’t normally read mysteries, and I forget where I first heard about this one: I know that Danielle over at A Work in Progress mentioned it last year, but I feel like I read about it elsewhere as well. No matter: I finally got around to placing a hold on it at the library, and was delighted to see it waiting for me on the shelf—I really like the cover.

Flavia de Luce, our heroine/sleuth, is only eleven. She’s a precocious child who know’s she’s smart, but who manages to be charming rather than annoying—well, annoying to her older sisters, but not to this reader, anyhow. I like her narrative voice, which gives us lines like this in the first chapter, after she’s ruined her sister Ophelia’s pearl necklace in a science experiment: “Retribution was not long in coming, but then with Ophelia, it never was. Ophelia was not, as I was, a long-range planner who believed in letting the soup of revenge simmer to perfection” (p 5). The de Luce girls’ mother is dead; they live in the rambling family manor with their father, who’s distant and seems to care only about stamp-collecting. And as the sister who’s not like the other two, Flavia’s probably had a bit of a lonely childhood. She has an aptitude for (and love for) chemistry, though, and science has become a solace for her—it’s great to hear her talk about it with such excitement and delight, like when she says: “I still shivered with joy whenever I thought of the rainy autumn day that Chemistry had fallen into my life,” (p 8), and goes on to tell about accidentally kicking a book off the bookcase (she was pretending to be a mountain climber), leafing through it, and becoming entranced. When she realizes that the chemistry book is connected to the disused chemistry lab upstairs, filled with glassware and chemicals left by a deceased uncle, she’s beyond delighted: “my life came to life,” she says, and you can feel her excitement (p 10). Speaking of excitement, Flavia is pretty much delighted when a stranger appears—and dies—in her own backyard: the death’s a mystery to solve, and Flavia sets about doing so at once. I like Flavia’s independence and cleverness and the fact that she’s an eleven-year-old 1950s feminist, delighted when she learns that radium was discovered by a woman, annoyed by the fact that the detective from the police department asks her to make tea for him and his team, and amused by an old booklet on bicycling by “the leader of the Women’s League of Health and Beauty” (p 73). (“Was there ever a companion booklet, Cycling for Men of All Ages? I wondered. And if so, had it been written by the leader of the Men’s League of Health and Handsomeness?” (ibid.).)

This being a mystery, I don’t want to say too much more: but I’m glad I read it, and now I have the sequel checked out from the library as well!