Month: April 2006
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The Night Watch by Sarah WatersRiverhead (Penguin), 2006
A story told backwards; a story of how people came to be where (who) they are. The start of the first sentence: “So this, said Kay to herself, is the kind of person you’ve become: a person whose clocks and wristwatches have stopped […]” Elsewhere, Kay remarks that people’s pasts are “so much more interesting…
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The Great Good Thing by Roderick Townley Atheneum, 2001
A book about fairy-tales, stories, memories and dreams, family-history—and how all these things live on, or don’t. I was charmed from the opening lines: “Sylvie had an amazing life, but she didn’t get to live it very often.” Clever and sweet and pleasingly book-ish.
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Bellini in Istanbul by Lillias BeverTupelo Press, 2005
Archaeology as metaphor, excavation: bringing things to the light, brushing off the sand and dust. I am, generally speaking, a sucker for poems about art, poems about seeing, and so it’s not surprising that I enjoyed this collection. (The last poem, “Blue Guide to Istanbul,” was perhaps my favorite: descriptions of blue objects, small &…
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“Storm in June” by Irène Némirovsky Translated by Sandra SmithKnopf, 2006
I read an advance reader’s copy of Suite Française in March: it only contained the first section of the two part book (it was meant to be five parts, like a symphony, but Némirovsky was deported to Auschwitz and died before finishing it). “Storm in June,” the story of the Paris evacuation in 1940 and…
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Between the Acts by Virginia WoolfHogarth Press Uniform Edition, 1953 (originally 1941)
“Scraps and fragments,” swallows and starlings, bits of Shakespeare, bits of Byron, bits of Keats. Little pieces of literature and history that surface, little pieces of emotion, of meaning. The shifts in perspective, what is spoken and what is felt. Each person playing a role, whether aware of it or not; art and connection and…
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Anonymous: Enigmatic Images from Unknown Photographers by Robert Flynn JohnsonThames & Hudson, 2005 (originally 2004)
Light and water, the Eiffel Tower being built, Cliff House before the fire. So much detail: a carved ivory elephant resting on piano keys, narrow wooden bridges, the light in rooms across oceans. This book is gorgeous: a collection of well-chosen images, pictures to make you pause. (And to make you want to rummage through…