Stocking up on Fall "Textbooks". . .

Okay, so I'm not going back to school, but I do always get that nostalgic ache in September for a pile of shiny new books. A trip to my favourite independent bookstores was a must this weekend. Here's what caught my eye:

I've been reading a lot in the media and on blogs about the re-issue of two novels exploring Nazi Germany by Hans Keilson - Death of the Adversary , translated by Ivo Jarosy, and Comedy In a Minor Key, translated by Damion Searls. Love the covers and I have been fascinated by this literary period since reading Hans Fallada and Irmgard Keun. I bought them both.

In my fantasy shop, there would definitely be a section devoted to bookstores, both real and imaginary. So A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cossé, translated by Alison Anderson. was a no-brainer. This sounds like a wonderful read about a Paris bookstore that only offers literary masterpieces as chosen by a top-secret committee, who subsequently are mysteriously targeted and threatened. This is published by the wonderful Europa Editions, one of a handful of presses whose publishing choices I trust implicitly. So I also picked up The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris by Leïla Marouane. It doesn't take much for me to pick up a book with Paris in the title, but this story of an Algerian man looking for an apartment and sexual encounters, narrated by an unsympathetic female, really intrigued me.

Two American writers I've been wanting to read for a while now have books on the pile. Many people have recommended the short stories of Lydia Davis to me and I definitely will get around to buying her collection soon. But in the meantime, I was drawn to her novel The End of the Story, about a woman trying to write a novel about a love affair. I'm normally quite skeptical about the review blurbs that get plastered onto the first pages of paperbacks, but this one from the Village Voice sold me: "The palettte of Davis's novel reminded me of green tea, bone, quartz light, and dried apricots, and its French room tone buzzes with the obsessiveness of Michel Leiris, the saltwater air of Jane Bowles and the grouchy who-cares-a-damn silence of Jean Rhys."

I also bought Kate Walbert's A Short History of Women, a novel tracing the twentieth century through five generations, starting with a suffragette who starves herself in 1914.

I can never resist a beautifully designed book, and Prose, a collection of short stories by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Martin Chambers, is a really gorgeous, inexpensive hardcover with lovely textured red endpapers. Bernhard is a writer I keep meaning to get around to reading. I have most of his novels on my shelf, and hopefully these stories will kickstart my exploration of his work.

And finally, this one is a bit of an oddity for me - Tom McCarthy's Tintin and the Secret of Literature. I've never read a Tintin cartoon before, but I have read and loved all three of McCarthy's novels - Remainder, Men in Space and his latest C. When I read a review that suggested C was inspired by McCarthy's interest in Tintin, well mine was also piqued. Since these cartoons first appeared in 1929, they are clearly a part of the cultural history of the time and I'm curious to read all about them.

This should keep me occupied for at least a semester.

A "Tessering" Type of Weekend. . .

Yes, I just finished reading Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time which I enjoyed very much though it was far darker than I expected, and while I wasn't jumping from planet to planet this weekend, it did feel like I was crossing a lot of cultural borders and travelling back and forth between various books. I got a surprising amount of things accomplished and yet none of it felt rushed. I have a new "slow" strategy for Saturdays and Sundays in which I continue to wake up at 6am as I do on weekdays, but instead of hitting the shower right away, I make a cup of tea, crawl back into bed and read for four hours - purely pleasure reading; whatever takes my fancy. Then I'm up officially at 10am and the whole day still stretches in front of me. Reading children's literature is a particularly delightful way to start a weekend.

But I was also feeling a bit scholarly so I started dipping into a recent anthology that I've acquired - The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry edited by Tim Kendall. I read the essays dealing with women's war poetry, containing some of the usual blather about how women's poetry has been ignored in the canon because most of it wasn't very good and the genre is masculinely predicated on having actually fought at the front etc. etc. Simon Featherstone's essay on Gertrude Stein and Mina Loy was interesting in its argument for expanding the definition of war poetry to include "an exploratory aesthetics and politics that develop through unexpected, often understated experiences of wartime change." And a footnote in Stacy Gillis's overview essay led me scrambling to my WWI bookcase to dig out The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory, edited by Patrick J. Quinn and Steven Trout. This is another anthology of interesting essays and Deborah Tyler-Bennett's look at women poets who used myths or folktales to critique the impact of war had me foraging for my Collected Poems 1912-1944 of H.D. (I really need to organize my bookcases) and making a note to find and read Edith Sitwell's poem "Clown's Houses" and the poetry of Iris Tree (who I know primarily as a subject in paintings by Bloomsberries) and Phyliss M'egroz (never previously heard of her). Hours worth of other interesting essays in both anthologies to read, so I'm keeping them at the ready on the bedside table.

I have to thank George at Great War Fiction for this post on Patrick Hamilton's Gorse Trilogy which contains a character who is a WWI poet. This led me to the previously unknown Black Spring Press, which not only publishes the trilogy, but also the works of Julian Maclaren-Ross, a writer I've been interested in since I read he was the inspiration for the writer X Trapnel, in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, one of my favourite books. In addition to ordering the Hamilton, I also bought a copy of Maclaren-Ross's Bitten By the Tarantula and Other Writing which includes short stories, some novellas and unpublished work, and a bunch of literary and film criticism. My books arrived at the post office on Friday night and I read his film essays, including one on the early films of Hitchcock - it has me itching to watch Saboteur and Shadow of a Doubt. From the introduction to this collection, I also learned that Maclaren-Ross married a niece of Leonard Woolf. All roads apparently lead to Bloomsbury . . .

My evenings have been spent at Cinematheque Ontario which is running its Best of the Decade series. I saw three very beautiful films by Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke (Platform, Still Life and The World) and he was actually there in person to introduce them which was a treat. Then today it was a 1954 Italian melodrama, Senso directed by Luchino Visconti followed by Silent Light, directed by Carlos Reygadas, a Mexico/France/Netherland/Germany co-production which was also of interest since it starred Canadian writer Miriam Toews.

Whew. That's enough travelling for the moment. At least I didn't have to pass through "The Black Thing" - just a bit of rain.

On viewing Brief Encounter for the umpteenth time. . .

What can I say? I just adore this movie, which I've seen dozens of times on television and via DVD (one of the first I ever bought), but never until today on the big screen. What a treat, via Cinematheque's David Lean retrospective. It's just so beautifully filmed. My favourite scene now (it changes at every viewing) is when Laura is travelling back home by train after Alec has declared he loves her ( I have a major crush on Trevor Howard), and she's looking out the window and fantasizing about how their lives might be if they were younger and free. They are clichéd, romantic dreams of waltzing at parties, watching the moonlight on the deck of a ship, escaping to a tropical island etc, but her reflection in the mirror - as Lean films it - looks so beautifully young and hopeful - it's just mesmerizing. As Alec says to her, "you're only middle-aged once" (now my favourite line, perhaps my new mantra!)

And I love that one of the books that originally got me interested in women's writing between the wars, was also inspired by Brief Encounter. Nicola Beauman's A Very Great Profession, originally published in 1983 by Virago and recently reprinted by Beauman's own successful publishing house, Persephone Books, is such a terrific introduction to women's writing of this period. Beauman writes in her introduction that the idea for the book came after seeing the movie on television:

In it the heroine, Laura Jesson, goes into the local town every week to do a bit of shopping, have a café lunch, go to the cinema and change her library book. This is the highlight of her week. It was the glimpse of her newly borrowed Kate O'Brien in her shopping basket that made me want to find out about the other novels [she] had been reading during her life. . .

and

I kept the picture in my mind of Laura Jesson taking elevenses in the refreshment room of Milford Junction and returning home with her Boots library book. It seemed so strange that an enormous body of fiction should influence and delight a whole generation and then be ignored or dismissed.

Organized into subject headings reflecting the preoccupations of the times such as "War", "Surplus Women", "Feminism", and "Domesticity" and making clear distinctions between "Romance", "Love" and "Sex", the book not only introduces dozens of writers but clearly places them in historical and literary contexts. I have discovered so many great and enjoyable books, both from this critical study and from Persephone Books which I collect. Do take a look at their website and sign up for their lovely newsletter which is free with annual purchases of their books. They are beautifully designed with endpaper reproductions of fabrics from the period in which the book was written or set, and each comes with its own bookmark. I treasure the one from A Very Great Profession which is the photo of Laura with her shopping basket that graced the cover of the Virago edition. In my fantasy bookstore, there would definitely be a whole section devoted just to Persephone Books - I've never read one that I didn't enjoy. My favourites are: William - An Englishman by Cicely Hamilton, Saplings by Noel Streatfeild, Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum, Kitchen Essays by Agnes Jekyll, Manja by Anna Gmeyner and The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby. They've even reprinted a Canadian classic - Ethel Wilson's Hetty Dorval. I just received their latest catalogue and newsletter in the mail and am really looking forward to the spring publication of Nicola Beauman's new book, The Other Elizabeth Taylor - a biography of yet another terrific and unjustly neglected writer.