Daytripping: Knutsford (Cranford). . .

I suppose on the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice I should be blogging about something Austenesque, but even though I am an ardent Janeite, I'm heading north instead to celebrate  Elizabeth Gaskell's equally entertaining world of Cranford.

I've previously read Gaskell's North and South and her biography of Charlotte Bronte, but neither prepared me for the warmth, humour and touching poignancy that envelopes her group of elderly, opinionated and very proper spinsters (and no, I haven't yet seen the BBC adaptation with Judi Dench, which must be rectified as soon as possible!). These independent women are quite proud of their town and position in it, maintaining their dignity and social standing with limited resources and with the presence of as few men as possible, bemoaning the odd occasion when, "it seemed as if ill-luck would have it that we went to the only two households of Cranford where there was the encumbrance of a man, and in both places the man was where he ought not to have been - namely, in his own house, and in the way."  And yet despite the tough mockery and indifference, there is a lingering sadness and loneliness that often surrounds these women with regrets that nag particularly at Miss Matty, over lost opportunities for love and children, along with real fears of financial insecurity and safety concerns that are most prominent in the chapter "The Panic", where over-active imaginations and exaggerated story-telling, though comical, also heighten the legitimate fears of potential robbers caused by strange noises in the night that have visited every woman who has ever lived alone, in whatever century.

I really enjoyed spending time with these characters and there are scenes that still make me giggle, such as Miss Matty and her sister Deborah going off to their rooms to suck on their oranges in private so as not to offend by suggesting an "unpleasant association with a ceremony frequently gone through by little babies", or the description of the town's postman - a man so lame, that his wife has to deliver all the letters, except on special occasions, when the mail inevitably came very late. Cranford is indeed a town where nothing would ever happen, without the women.

It's also based on the town of Knutsford which is barely an hour's drive from Liverpool and where Gaskell herself lived for many years. I was passing through a few weeks ago and found it full of interesting architecture, posh shops and this memorial tower to Gaskell on the main street.

Engraved along the side of the tower are the titles of all of Gaskell's books.

There's also a tribute to Miss Matty herself.

And what is this building now?  A WH Smith.  I'm kicking myself that I didn't go inside to see if they actually sold Cranford, but I was running late and had already spent a fair bit of time in the Knutsford Waterstones (which did sell her books).

The women of Cranford visit each other almost daily and certainly when there is the slightest bit of gossip to impart. They drink tea, play cards and of course - quite delightedly - they knit: "Miss Pole and Miss Jessie Brown had set up a kind of intimacy, on the strength of the Shetland wool and the new knitting stitches". And as chance would happen, the latest edition of Piecework just happens to have an article on "The Knitting Ladies of Cranford" by Mary Lycan, which includes two patterns adapted from actual knitting books published in Edinburgh in the 1840s.

Both are inspired by Miss Pole and her penchant for "elegant economy".  I'm not sure I'd have much use for the Prudence Cap or Neck Ruff which she would have worn in the winter under her bonnet, but I do quite like the Muffatees -  basically fingerless gloves with a nice little ruffle at the cuffs.

I love the serendipitous tingle of classic literature and modern life colliding into each other and I anticipate this happening on a regular basis the more I explore England.

February Reading. . .

I've been in the reading doldrums recently.  Partly it's because I've been spending all my spare time on knitting projects.  But as a book rep, at this time of year, I need to dip into the first chapters of a lot of different manuscripts in order to get a feel for the book to help me in my selling appointments, and this type of scattered and unfinished reading always feels rushed and unsatisfying.

But I'm going to turn it all around this month.  Usually I get my reading mojo back by turning to the classics, and listening to the radio this morning, I heard about a terrific idea for an online bookclub.   Check out the City Builder Book Club which over the next few months will be facilitating a group read of Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in order to discuss how cities work.  The reading pace is very reasonable with just two chapters a week.  Sign me up - this book has been on my reading pile for ages and as a proud Torontonian, I'm actually embarrassed that I haven't yet read it, although I have read some of her other books.  No excuse now.

I was lucky enough to have a lovely conversation with Jane Jacobs several years ago.  I picked her up to drive her to an event at the University of Toronto where she was participating in a celebration of the Modern Library.  She'd just written an introduction to Dickens' Hard Times and though the drive was short we had a wonderful chat about the power of literature to change social policy, touching of course on Dickens but also Upton Sinclair (she'd also written an intro to The Jungle).  Oh, she was such a delightful woman.

Then I got to thinking about Dickens.  The literary world is of course celebrating the 200th anniversary of his birth this year with all sorts of read-a-longs, reappraisals, exhibits and just general joy.  I've been meaning to pick up some Dickens myself and as his birthday is February 7th, this is the month to do it. I want to tackle one of the novels I haven't previously read, so I've scanned the shelves and have settled on The Old Curiosity Shop.  Really looking forward to it.

Right, that's February's reading sorted.  Now, if I could only work out how to read and knit at the same time.

New From NYRB. . .

It’s been ages since I gave NYRB Classics a bit of love, but I recently read another one of their amazing gems and so the gushing has to commence again.  


The book this time is The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnball.  I’d previously read his surrealist collection of short stories, Memories of the Future, so I knew to expect something wild and different.   Like that collection, The Letter Killers’ Club is similarly filled with great storytelling but it’s got an added narrative and thematic structure that creates a really original and thought-provoking read.  Our narrator gets pulled into a mysterious club that meets every Saturday in a room filled with empty bookshelves.  The members each take turns relating their own fictional tales, but from the top of their head, with no notes to refer to.   These stories cannot and never will be written down because the club is devoted to the idea of clearing the mind from the overwhelming and artistically suffocating existence of the world's printed pages, in order to focus on the simplicity and purity of literary "conceptions." The stories that follow are marvellous and diverse, ranging from a sci-fi tale about a bacteria experiment, designed to control the movements of limbs, that turns into a nightmarish world of mind-controlled drones and their dictators, to a comic tale about three men trying to decided definitively what mouths were specifically created for - whether to kiss, eat, or to spout words.  My favourite is the first tale, read aloud as a play about Guilden and Stern both competing for the role of Hamlet, which involves a visit to a shadowy, muttering cavern filled with former "roles", including Richard Burbage who takes the opportunity to escape. It's very clever and amusing.


Weaved in among the stories however, is our narrator's growing unease as he observes the different members, in particular a mysterious man named Rar who will eventually reveal just why the narrator has been invited to this exclusive club.  There's a very sophisticated and intriguing debate running through this novel about the danger and yet universal necessity of the printed word - which of course our narrator can't help setting down in the very book we are reading.  Fans of Calvino, Borges and even Beckett would enjoy this, along with readers of Orwell, Wells and Huxley.  It nestles very nicely, if a bit rebelliously, on the shelf of books about books and bibliophiles.

I have a few other recently published NYRB classics on the to-be-read-soon pile, all by writers I’ve previously read and admired, so I know I’m in for a treat.  Albert Cossery has a really unique literary style, combining political satire with a sense of absurdity cushioned by  humanity.  The Jokers was a fantastic read and I’m sure Proud Beggars will also deliver – plus I’m intrigued to read political fiction set in Cairo in the wake of Egypt’s ongoing protests.  I also have copies of Gregor von Rezzori’s An Ermine in Czernopol (his Memoirs of an Anti-Semite was such an unusual and powerful book), and Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories.  I’ve read his novel Assistant, plus in lieu of getting someday to Berlin myself (it's on the bucket list!)  I enjoy reading about the city, particularly in the early 20^th century, an interest fueled after devouring Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and then watching all of Fassbinder’s movie in a marathon three days (we won’t rant about the epilogue today).   

Coming out in March will be Amsterdam Stories by a new writer to me, who goes under the pseudonym Nescio.  His short stories have been compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald and I have visited Amsterdam, so I’m very much looking forward to the collection.  And then in April, NYRB is continuing to bring out the work of Stefan Zweig and will be publishing Confusion, about a civil servant’s love of reading and scholarship.  I’ve read and enjoyed a number of Zweig’s books, and I’m also thinking it might be a very good companion piece to one of my favourite NYRB titles of all time – John Williams’ heartbreaking Stoner. 

Over on their tumblr page, NYRB has posted a fall preview here and here for a fix of even more forthcoming goodies.

Chic Classics. . .

I'm always intrigued and delighted by those publishers who spend the time re-inventing the look of the classics, using ingenious design to make them irresistible objects of beauty to collect and treasure and sometimes just to drool over.  Penguin, Persephone, New Directions, Dalkey Archive,  Everyman, New York Review of Books, and Melville House's Neversink Library are all great investors in keeping these fabulous books alive along with many others, and I think their importance will only grow in this e-book era.

The French occasionally get in the act too, despite the fact that so many of their books seem to consist of endless rows of uniform cream covers with only type on the front.  A couple of years ago I walked into a French bookstore in Ottawa and was drawn to a series of paperback classics published by Gallimard's Folio imprint that were housed in these wonderfully textured slipcases.  Despite the fact that I read French very, very slowly, I was hooked and came home with several of them.

I just couldn't resist the flocked velvet of Romain Gary's La vie devant soi or the perfect subway tile design etched into the cardboard of Raymond Queneau's Zazie dans le métro.  Aren't they gorgeous? They are so much fun to fondle. 


Well Folio has done it again.  Earlier this fall, I came across these two books:

Both the slipcases are smooth but look closely - can you see the metal bookmarks attached to the slipcases magnetically?  Let me pull them away for you.

Is this not one of the most beautiful packaging ideas you've ever seen?  They simply scream "buy me".  So I did. And of course I have the best intentions of spending the time to improve my French by reading them one day.  Or at least making liberal use of the bookmarks.

Next in the Neversink Library Challenge: The President. . .

I've been a little remiss on my latest ongoing reading challenge but I DO mean to tackle all of The Neversink Library even though they are coming fast and furious from Melville House. Still, I mean to persevere because I absolutely trust their editorial eye.  I've just finished my third book: Georges Simenon's The President, translated by Daphne Woodward.  You don't have to twist my arm to get me to read a new Simenon, particularly one of his romans dur, and I hope to see more pop up in Neversink.  This novel is very different in subject matter from The Train, which I reviewed here, but like all the Simenons that I have read, it carries his trademark creation of gloomy, somewhat existential atmosphere, iresistably entwined with an almost effortless suspense. I use the term effortless in conjuction with Simenon's literary skill, because the suspense never seems to be overly contrived. He just has a wonderful way of slowly building up the reader's interest in how events will unfold that sometimes even surpasses that of the characters directly involved. And somehow the endings always manage to both surprise and yet perfectly suitable and satisfying.

In this case, it's an 82 year old man, the former Premier of France, who sits in his Louis-Philippe chair by the fire, listening to the latest political news on the radio and reflecting on his life and past career. That's the plot in a nutshell.  But there is SO much more going on.  There has been a political crisis and a coalition govenment has been formed, led by one Chalamont, a former colleague who used to work under the Premier before getting embroiled in a scandal.  The Premier has evidence that would be extremely damaging.  He sits in his chair as the wind howls outside and the electricty threatens to fail and he waits for Chalamont to pay a visit. An assortment of employees - paid for by the government - hover suspiciously around him.  His health may or may not, be dangerously weakening. And why does an old contemporary from the Premier's village keep calling to reassure him that he'll be at his funeral?

Simenon's characters often fantasize about living a different life; in this novel, the life is re-examined along with the process of creating parallel interpretations with the benefit of hindsight tempered with regrets and grudges. It's a no less poignant - if occasionally futile -  exercise, both to undertake and to read about.

My New Literary Crush: Michael Innes. . .

Michael Innes, where have you been all my life?

Well actually you've been lurking in the dark corners of my bookcases - part of a neglected group that was hidden behind another layer on my doublestacked shelves. Fortunately, (or desperately), I've had to cull my overflowing shelves lately and so discovered a few of his novels.  I can't remember when or where I bought them, but I must have read a glowing review somewhere.  And I'm delighted to have found such a treasure among my many unread books.

I love mysteries with a sense of humour and if it's of the academic or bibliophilic type, even better.  Which is why fiction written by authors who were also English professors (as John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, aka Michael Innes, was) are often so deliciously witty.  The New Sonia Wayward had me at the first mention of our protagonist's wonderfully silly and yet appropiate name - Colonel Ffolliot Petticate.  Folly and pettiness are certainly key themes that permeate this comedy of suspense.

In the opening paragraph, Sonia Wayward - Petticate's wife - has just died of natural causes while the couple was sailing in the English Channel. Something of their married life can be gleaned by what Petticate does next. After a careful consideration of how many of the suddenly extra pork chops now available for dinner he should eat, he takes his wife's clothes off, puts on her bathing suit and calmly tips her body overboard. When Petticate returns home to the small English village of Snigg's Green, he lies to his neighbours, telling them his wife is just on an extended trip and can't be contacted.  Sonia was a successful writer of romances and the main breadwinner.  She left an unfinished manuscript which Petticate, worried his income and way of life are about to disappear, tries to finish.  He finds he quite enjoys the writing and believes in his talent. But his nerves are being stretched to the limit;  he is under constant pressure from the police, Sonia's editor, and a famous sculptor to produce his wife, not to mention the unsettling presence of his two sinister servants who simply will not leave the house, even after being fired.

There are certainly shades of The Talented Mr. Ripley (published five years earlier), in The New Sonia Wayward.  Petticate shares Tom Ripley's growing ego, his paranoia, and even at times his touching vulnerability.  But Innes has a far more comic touch and the predicaments that Petticate finds himself in as a result of his lies and deceptions are very funny indeed, especially the last and most fitting one.

I'm hooked.  I have two other Innes books to read - another standalone novel, From London Far, and Hamlet, Revenge!, one of his Inspector Appleby mysteries.  If they prove to be as equally enjoyable, then this is going to be a very long affair.  Innes was quite prolific and the House of Stratus editions are very handsome indeed.

Two Very Different World War II Novels. . .

I've just read a great pairing of two very interesting novels, completely different in style, but both written by Germans, both containing short narratives compressed into just a few days, and each ostensibly - but not exclusively - about the Second World War, with one set just before, and one taking place during its end. I've previously read and enjoyed two novels by Irmgard Keun: The Artificial Silk Girl (reviewed here) and Child of All Nations. So I was thrilled to see that the inaugural book in Melville House's exciting new imprint, The Neversink Library, was Keun's 1937 novel After Midnight, translated by Anthea Bell.
After Midnight is far more political than the other two novels. It's the late 1930s and Sanna is a young woman living in Frankfurt with her older stepbrother Algin, a writer who has had some previous fame with one of his novels having been turned into a movie, but whose work has drawn the ire of the Nazis. Sanna who admits she is uneducated and ignorant of the world, is trying to enjoy an ordinary life, gossiping about men with her friends, hanging out in bars drinking, and helping Algin's wife Liska plan a party. But inevitably politics dangerously intrudes, most obviously in the appearance of Hitler himself, as the city makes preparations for his visit. Her best friend Gerti is in love with a man who is half-Jewish. Liska is in love with Heini, a writer who openly and cynically criticizes the new regime. They have Jewish friends who are trying to escape the country. Like Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone, this is a world full of the paranoia of not being able to trust your neighbour, grudges turning into denunciations, and the fear, and isolating loneliness of trying to live up to principles in a crazy world. It's a place where wives go out to buy lots of alcohol for their husbands, hoping to entice them to drink at home instead of in a bar where one loose, intoxicated word could lead to an arrest. But Keun has a lighter touch than Fallada; her female narrators are always young, naive and vulnerable but with a cynical toughness at their core and an ability to apply the hypocrises of daily life to the larger historical events. Sanna is learning as much about the pain and complexities of love as she is about politics and she states her discoveries - such as her thoughts about Gerti's predicament - very directly, if somewhat innocently:

It's hard enough to know your way around all the rules the authorities lay down for business - business as we all know, can be very trickily organized - and now we have to know the rules of love too. It isn't easy, it really isn't. Before you know it, you may find yourself castrated or in prison, which is not pleasant. Love is supposed to be all right, and German women are supposed to have children, but before you can do that some sort of process involving feelings is called for. And the law says no mistakes must be made in the process. I suppose the safest thing is not to love anyone at all. For as long as that's allowed.

The novel depicts a couple of days in Sanna's life as she interacts with various self-absorbed characters who later appear as guests at the party, while trying to wrestle with her own feelings of love and pity for a cousin who has turned up unexpectedly. There is so much wonderful imagery, dialogue and disillusionment packed into this novel's brief slice of Weimar life, along with a poignant commentary on the plight of German writers during this time, struggling with their conscience to make a living in an atmosphere of censorship. As Heini remarks: "A writer who is afraid is no true writer." I really loved this novel; it was both gutsy and poetic. I'm sure there's a PhD thesis out there on the role of parties as precursor to death or disaster in 20th century literature - think Mrs. Dalloway or Joyce's "The Dead" - and while I wouldn't quite put Keun in that tight circle of masterpieces, I do think she's owed a spot on the guest list.

Heinrich Böll’s 1949 novel The Train Was on Time, translated by Leila Vennewitz, is also published by Melville House as part of their Essential Heinrich Böll series. This was his first novel, and the first writing of his that I've read. It follows a few days in the life of Andreas, a twenty-four year old German soldier, as he travels by train towards the Eastern Front, during the last year of the war. He becomes convinced that he will die shortly - this coming Sunday - and it will be somewhere en route between Lvov and Cernauti. He becomes obsessed with the word "soon"; a rhythmic mantra that both soothes and drives him crazy as the train carries on:

Soon. Soon. Soon. Soon. When is Soon? What a terrible word: Soon. Soon can mean in one second, Soon can mean in one year. Soon is a terrible word. This Soon compresses the future, shrinks it, offers no certainty, no certainty whatever, it stands for absolute uncertainty. Soon is nothing and Soon is a lot. Soon is everything. Soon is death. . .

The reader could replace "soon" with "war" or even "this novel" and you would have the thematic gist of this story. Certain of his predicament, Andreas engages in both the ordinary - eating, drinking, playing cards with two fellow soldiers in the corridor of the train - and the philosophical. He thinks back to a pair of enigmatic female eyes he briefly saw as he was wounded. He thinks about his chaplain friend Paul and tries to pray, not only for all the people he has hurt or insulted in the past, but also the millions of Jews who have been murdered by the Nazis. His last night is spent in the company of a Polish prostitute and spy, in one last attempt to grasp some meaning out of life, to find some human connection of commonality and empathy, and perhaps to even contemplate escaping his fate. This was a novel with far more claustrophobic interiority and existential, almost nightmarish angst than Keun's, but no less urgent in its tale of inevitable despair and the yearning for life's beauty and humanity.

On The Road - With Books. . .

What a lovely little gem of a book. A sweet and funny middle-aged romance hitched to an exuberant ode to bookselling

Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley was first published in 1917; the edition I read is part of Melville House's Classic Novellas Series and was the perfect choice for my bus rides this week. The author's bio on the jacket flap was also fascinating. This was the first of Morley's books, but he wrote over 100 of them, including Kitty Foyle. He also founded the Baker Street Irregulars literary club and edited editions of Bartlett's Familar Quotations.

Helen McGill is a 39 year old woman who has baked too many loaves of bread in her time and devoted the last fifteen years to taking care of her ungrateful brother Andrew, himself a successful author of books containing reflections on man's relationship to nature. As such he's always leaving home for long periods of time to find literary inspiration, leaving Helen to do all the work on the farm.

When the devilish Roger Mifflin shows up with his Parnassus, a type of caravan that doubles as a travelling bookshop which he is hoping to sell to Andrew, Helen decides to buy it on a whim and have a few adventures herself. The two hit the road discussing the art of bookselling, the woes of creating an "anthology" of baked goods, and generally enjoying each other's company. Until an angry and disbelieving Andrew appears, determined to put a stop to the nonsense.

The tale is told from Helen's point of view and her gumption and growing excitement over the possibilities of her new life are inspiring and infectious. And you'll smile a lot at her self-reflections and Mifflin's philosophical and literary musings. My favourite is his idea for "Chloroform Classics" - books all written by authors over the age of forty. It's very much a reminder not to be too complacent about life; it's never too late to make a change. I have the sequel - The Haunted Bookshop - on my shelves, bought at a used bookstore many years ago. I'm eager to see what these two get up to next.

Sinister Simenon. . .

Georges Simenon was such a prolific writer that I've been a bit wary of reading him - could someone who regularly cranked out three to twelve books a year, really be that good?

Well, let's just say that this may be the start of a lifelong addiction.

I dove in with an Inspector Maigret mystery from 1932. Maigret and the Tavern by the Seine, translated by Geoffrey Sainsbury, was a completely enjoyable read. It's a hot summer, Madame Maigret keeps imploring her husband to join her in the country and he keeps finding excuses to miss his train. On the trail of a six year old murder, he warily starts participating in the weekend partying of a group of dissipated and dissatisfied friends. The case takes a new twist when one of them is found shot and the one discovered holding the gun makes a run for it. The plotting was solid, although I did guess the murderer, though not the motive. Nevertheless, I loved Maigret's unrushed gloominess and self-righteous cynicism:

The case didn't taste nice. A musty taste of commonplace existence, with a remote undercurrent of something a bit crooked.

Simenon's writing has often been compared to that of Patricia Highsmith or Jim Thompson - both writers that I admire - and they certainly share an ontological fascination with doubles, with characters fantasizing about becoming somebody else, and with exploring how jealousy, envy and even (perhaps especially) boredom, can break down the social and psychological barriers between ordinary and evil. It's there in Maigret and it definitely seems to be a major theme of his romans durs. I followed up the mystery with the much darker The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, translated by Marc Romano and D. Thin, and first published in 1938. This is the story of Kees Popinga, a respectable Dutch manager who learns that his boss plans to fake his suicide and escape to a new life because he's driven the company into bankruptcy. After the initial shock, Popinga decides to emulate him and also run away from his family and the inevitable stresses that losing his job and savings will entail. But first, he'll pay a visit to his boss's former mistress. Who laughs at him and pays the price with her life. The novel then moves to the streets, cafes and bars of Paris where the fugitive Popinga, while trying to avoid the police, and extricate himself from a gang of car thieves, becomes incensed with the way the newspapers are portraying him. This isn't so much a crime novel as a major identity crisis - the story of a man who relishes the freedom to become someone completely different, but who plummets into a delusional, obsessive fury when he realizes that society not only doesn't comprehend and admire who he really is - they don't even care:

He'd made only one mistake: right from the start, he should have considered the whole world his enemy. Now they didn't take him seriously. They weren't scared. It made perfect sense for them to treat him like a clown.

Luc Sante sums the novel up perfectly in his introduction to this NYRB Classics edition:

You the reader assume the fears and tribulatoins of a character you cannot possibly like. You live and die (so to speak), sweat and cringe with him. You carry a knot in your chest as he drags himself around ever bleaker and more remote corners of Paris. You become almost physically uncomfortable on his behalf, even as you are repulsed by him. And then, after you have closed the book and put it back on the shelf, you realize that all along you have been reading a comedy.

More please!

Brown paper packages. . .

Not tied with string . . .

These are a few of my favourite things. . .

Just in time for the holiday weekend - my box of Dalkey Archive books arrived (and in less than a week - very impressive). They are having an awesome summer sale and I just couldn't resist stocking up on their backlist. They publish some fabulous books, including a lot of literature in translation. Their website page listing the details of their sale seems to be down at the moment, but keep checking back. Or start making a list in the meantime. The more books bought, the greater the discount, so I ended up buying twenty (and even then it was hard to cull the titles from the over 50 I initially wrote down as potentials). It makes a nice, meaty pile that I can't wait to dive into.

Not sure if you can read all the titles so here they are with links to each book's enticing description:
The Great Fire of London by Jacques Roubard, The Walk: Notes on a Romantic Image by Jeffrey Robinson, Langrishe, Go Down by Aidan Higgins, Castle to Castle by Céline, Melancholy by Jon Fosse, The King by Donald Barthelme, Odile by Raymond Queneau, The Journalist by Harry Matthews, Time Must Have a Stop by Aldous Huxley, Everyday Life by Lydie Salvayre, Brecht at Night by Mati Unt, Pack of Lies by Gilbert Sorrentino, In Transit by Brigid Brophy, Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine by Stanley Crawford, OULIPO: A Primer of Potential Literature edited by Warren F. Motte, Bornholm Night-Ferry by Aidan Higgins, Foreign Parts by Janice Galloway, Spleen by Olive Moore and I'm Not Stiller by Max Frisch. I also ordered Portrait of the Writer as a Domesticated Animal by Lydie Salvayre, but it's not yet published. More than enough to start with though - I think my first read will be this:

The Human Factor. . .

It's been a horrible day weatherwise in Toronto - snow, freezing rain, ice pellets, more snow, blowing wind - I was so glad to have the day off and not have to venture out into it. Instead it felt like a lazy Sunday. I spent the day taking intense, grateful pleasure in the warm, cozy things that are part of my apartment, such as these two pillows:

I found the material - which has a soft velvet texture, lovely to rest one's head against - in a sale bin at a fabric store. It only cost $3.00! and there was just enough in the remnant to get two pillow covers out of it. I sewed these over the holidays and I just love them - they pull together all the colours of my living room.
Today I needed to read not only something enjoyable but aesthically beautiful as well. Folios have always been my weakness. I've belonged to the society for some years now (you only need to buy four books a year) and I just love their selection, the bindings, the paper, the illustrations -these are truly beautiful books to hold and behold. And the volume calling to me today was Graham Greene's The Human Factor.

I've read about five books of his (The End of the Affair is my favourite) and he never disappoints. He's the type of writer I turn to when I have the time to sit and read a book straight through in one or two sittings. And I'm partial to spy stories. The Human Factor follows a group of ordinary men who work in an office of the British Secret Service, and the investigation that follows when a leak is suspected. As with all of Greene's work, morals, loyalty, politics and love are all individually questioned, defined, and debated. The cover, designed by Bill Bragg who also illustrates the interior, is absolutely perfect, capturing not only the utter loneliness and anonymity of doing this type of work, (and the insomnia that goes with it) but re-enforcing the recurrent theme of knowing your particular "box" in life and staying within it. Here's a wonderful passage in which one character uses an abstract painting by Ben Nicholson containing squares of different colours to articulate a certain cold, bureaucratic philosophy:

Percival pointed at a yellow square. "There's your section 6. That's your square from now on. You don't need to worry about the blue and the red. All you have to do is pinpoint our man and then tell me. You've no responsibility for what happens in the blue or red squares. in fact not even in the yellow. You just report. No bad conscience. No guilt. . . Nothing to keep you awake. Do just try to understand that picture. Particularly the yellow square. If you could only see it with my eyes, you would sleep well tonight."

But of course that yellow square isn't just paint but contains a human being. And the reader, perhaps is also bathed in a yellow square of their own, cast by their reading lamp. Delicious chills abound. A used bookstore - Halliday & Son - also plays a large role in this thriller, as does the incessant rain. Here is one of the interior illustrations by Bragg.

Yes, it really was the perfect book to read today.

The Go-Between. . .

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

I've heard the phrase many times - now I've finally finished the novel, The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley that begins with this famous line. First published in 1953, it's set in the hot and almost continually sunny summer of 1900, a "Golden Age". Leo Colston is approaching thirteen and is staying with a rich schoolmate at his stately home for a few weeks. Insecure and naive, he starts taking messages between his friend's older sister and her secret lover - a farmer, handsome and virile, but of course of the wrong class. Tragedy ensues.

I was hooked right from the prologue as Leo, now an elderly man in his sixties ruminates on that summer and how it shaped (for the worst) his entire life. He imagines a conversation with his 12 year old self who reproaches him:

"But you have had half a century to get over it! Half a century, half the twentieth century, that glorious epoch, that golden age I bequeathed to you!".

And his answer breaks your heart:

"Has the twentieth century," I should ask, "done so much better than I have? When you leave this room, which I admit is dull and cheerless, and take the last bus to your home in the past, if you haven't missed it - ask yourself whether you found everything so radiant as you imagined it. Ask yourself whether it has fulfilled your hopes. You were vanquished, Colston, you were vanquished, and so was your century, your precious century that you hoped so much of."

That almost sums up the core questions of this novel - can one ever really make that last bus to the past? And do we want to? Colston's recollections of the boy he was - his innocence and vanity, coupled with his awkward insecurities are so beautifully and delicately portrayed. Hartley has vividly captured the constant heat of the summer, the tension of a village cricket match (the only British novel I know which prefaces the description of the match with a helpful summary of the rules of the game), and the complicated relationships within a family and among the different classes. A strong sense of the supernatural (as experienced in a child's imagination) and an elegy for the historical dead, both past and future (several of the characters will die in the First World War) permeates this lovely novel. A completely absorbing and thoughtful reading experience.