Celebrating Stella Gibbons. . .

There's a nice article here in the Guardian about the re-issues of Stella Gibbons' novels just out in the U.K. and available in Canada next month. These include two "sequels" to the delightful Cold Comfort Farm. Apparently, Virginia Woolf was enraged that the novel won the Prix Étranger when it was published in 1932. I'm particularly looking forward to reading Westwood, a novel set in London during the Second World War and featuring a bookish woman. The best news from this article is that there are 14 more re-issues to come over the next few seasons!

Art of the Novella Challenge #3: May Day

First published in 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald's novella May Day has many of the characteristics of his novels: fancy parties, the disillusioned and delusional, and lots of wealthy people getting drunk, behaving badly while quite oblivious to the desperation of those less fortunate all around them. In this case the story is compressed into roughly 24 hours in New York City which is booming with economic prosperity, but also teeming with tired and damaged soldiers coming back from the First World War. One such veteran is Gordon Sterrett, a former Yale graduate, now nervous, unemployed and broke. He visits a former classmate to try and borrow $300 in order to extricate himself from a messy relationship and to get set up as a commercial artist. His friend is not sympathetic. That evening - and several drinks later - he shows up at an alumni dance where he re-encounters Edith, the woman he had fallen in love with at school, who has shown up with another - also unsatisfactory - date. Crashing the party are two working class soldiers looking for booze, while outside on the streets, mobs are beating up on socialists and heading towards the leftist newspaper that Edith's brother writes for. By the early hours of the morning, several tragedies will have taken place.

This was a wonderful story. I loved the pacing, the settings - from glitzy ballroom to an all-night diner - the dialogue and the segues back and forth between the different scenes. Most poignant was the weariness and wariness that Fitzgerald imbues to many of his characters and their sense of loss in this post-war society set against the abundance of luxury consumer goods that beckon from the shop windows of the city.

For the WWI Collection. . .

Dovegreyreader has a lovely post about the recent team read she did with Matthew Hollis' new book, Now All Roads Lead to France, about the last few years of the poet Edward Thomas, focusing on his friendship with Robert Frost. You can read her post here.

The book sounds wonderful and I'll definitely be buying a copy. Reading about it sent me scurrying to my shelves in search of Elected Friends: Robert Frost & Edward Thomas To One Another, edited by Matthew Spencer. It's a collection of their letters which should be the perfect companion read. I've just opened it up near the end to read Frost's letter to Helen Thomas after hearing about her husband's death. It includes this bit:

I knew from the moment when I first met him at his unhappiest that he would someday clear his mind and save his life. I have had four wonderful years with him. I know he has done this all for you: he's all yours. But you must let me cry my cry for him as if he were almost all mine too.

To follow up, it's also worth digging out a copy of the Fall 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review - it contains the lost war poem by Frost entitled "War Thoughts At Home" and some essays on how the war and his relationship with Thomas influenced his writing. I knew there was a reason I hoard my books. A time and place for every one.

Art of the Novella Challenge #2: A Read and A Forgetting. . .

William Dean Howells' A Sleep and A Forgetting, first published in 1907, was probably not the best choice for a commuter read. I'm often a bit sleepy on the bus to work and frequently tired and eye-strained on the way back; the constant references to naps taken by the heroine and the rather languid prose didn't help. This is the story of thirty-year old Dr. Lanfear, the nephew of a famous psychologist, who is also fascinated by the workings of the mind. He's on holiday in Italy and stopping in San Remo to do a favour for a friend, he encounters an elderly man whose beautiful daughter has been traumatized by witnessing her mother's death and subsequently has lost both her long and short term memory. She'll meet someone and completley forget the encounter the next day. Beguiled and intrigued by her beauty and personality, Lanfear agrees to help Nannie, and through a series of walks and conversations in the surrounding countryside, she slowly grasps fragments of her past - vague perceptions more than solid facts - until a trip to the ruins of a town devasted by an earthquake and a subsequent shock bring the story to its conclusion. There are some big ideas being explored here about time, memory and ontology, such as in this passage where Lanfear ponders on his patient's state of consciousness:

He had always said to himself that there could be no persistence of personality, of character, of identity, of consciousness, except through memory; yet here, to the last implication of temperment, they all persisted. The soul that was passing in its integrity through time without the helps, the crutches, of remembrance by which his own personality supported itself, why should not it pass so through eternity without that loss of identity which was equivalent to annihilation?

That passage also gives you a sense of the style which just wasn't suited to my reading mood on a crowded bus. I also found the ending rather weak and predictable. I think a second and closer reading would do this work more justice, but I think I'll keep moving on with the challenge.

One Novella Down. . .

Well, that was a lovely way to start the day. Cup of tea (actually several) and a sweeping story about a beautiful, headstrong woman named Freya, "a ship-child, a sea-girl", the two sailing captains who lust after her - one man's love is requited, but he's equally in love with his boat, the other is quite simply a delusional villain - and Freya's father who is completely oblivious to all the drama going on around him. Of course it was never going to end well, but Conrad rather deliciously and sympathetically, plays with the shifting level of each character's complicity in this tragic, tropical triangle. Not forgetting our curiously nosy and astute narrator who understands what is happening (is probably just a bit in love with Freya too), and who has a hand in the secrets but doesn't say anything until it's too late. It's an old-fashioned yarn of envy, pride, anger, and the melodramatic revenge plot that only can comes from being scorned and humilated over love. It was too early in the morning, but I really should have read this in a pub with a half-pint of shandy.

The Art of the Novella Reading Challenge. . .

Just back from a few weeks travelling and hiking around the U.K., visiting lots of art museums, treading literary paths, and of course buying books (more on that to come!). I'm so glad that today is a civic holiday, allowing me to unpack, unwind, and have a relaxing day at home. Not yet adjusted to the time difference, I've been up bright and early and catching up on some favourite blogs. I was reminded that today begins the Art of Novella Reading Challenge, started by Frances at Nonsuch Books - she's going to try and read all 42 in Melville House's colourful series in the month of August AND blog about each one. Melville has joined in the spirit and created these various different levels of participation:

Curious – Read 1 novella
Fascinated — Read 3 novellas
Captivated – Read 6 novellas
Passionate — Read 9 novellas
Mesmerized – Read 15 novellas
Obsessed – Read 21 novellas
Fanatical – Read 27 novellas
Unstoppable — Read 33 novellas
Bibliomaniac — Read all 42 novellas

I'm rooting for her! And a novella is perhaps just the perfect thing to tackle on this holiday Monday. I'd love to try and attempt the Bibliomaniac level myself, but I know there's a ton of work waiting on my desk tomorrow. Still, they are the perfect commuting reads so I'm also going to see how many I can read this month. Having just spent the last week in Cornwall, I'm up for a sea adventure, so I'm starting with Joseph Conrad's Freya of the Seven Isles, first published in 1912.

They'll Always Have Paris. . .

I recently spent a few days in the lovely city of Paris, having just read Hemingway's A Moveable Feast (yes, I'm aware it's such a clichéd thing to do, but I'd actually never read this memoir of living in Paris in the 1920s, even though I'd been on quite a Hemingway kick as a teenager). And having also read Paula McLain's novel The Paris Wife, told from the point of view of Hadley, Hemingway's first wife, I was curious to see how the original compared. Even though it was written several decades after the events it describes, I found it oddly moving (particulary Hemingway's regret over the end of his relationship with Hadley), very funny at times, and inspiring in his dedication to the work that good writing takes. Here's one passage I liked on him discovering the great Russian authors in Sylvia Beach's lending library at Shakespeare & Company:

To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you.

And no trip to Paris would be complete of course without a visit to the legendary bookstore that Beach inspired.
My hotel was in Montparnasse, just around the corner from La Closerie des Lilas, where Hemingway liked to spend time uninterrupted, and where he wrote parts of The Sun Also Rises. It's now quite a swanky restaurant.

My favourite passage from A Moveable Feast was this one on writing in cafes and getting totally immersed in the process. He certainly worked at his craft:

Some days it went so well that you could make the country so that you could walk into it through the timber to come out into the clearing and work up onto the high ground and see the hills beyond the arm of the lake. A pencil lead might break off in the conical nose of the pencil sharpener and you would use the small blade of the penknife to clear it or else sharpen the pencil carefully with the sharp blade and then slip your arm through the sweat-salted leather of your pack strap to lift the pack again, get the other arm through and feel the weight settle on your back and feel the pine needles under your moccasins as you started down for the lake.

Also accompanying me on the trip was Enrique Vila-Matas's Never Any End to Paris, translated by Anne McLean. It seemed the perfect literary companion with its title taken straight from Hemingway. However as Vila-Matas notes, while A Moveable Feast chronicles Hemingway's years in Paris when he was "very poor but very happy", Never Any End to Paris is about his own sojourn in the mid-1970s, when he was "very poor and very unhappy." It too is a meditation on starting out as a writer, given as a series of lectures, looking back on those early days when, following his literary idol, he rented a small garret (from Marguerite Duras no less), and set out to write his first novel. But as with tourists today, there's no getting away from the self-consciousness of it all:

I bought myself two pairs of glasses, two identical pairs, which I didn't need at all, I bought them to look more intellectual. And I began smoking a pipe, which I judged (perhaps influenced by photos of Jean-Paul Sartre in the Café de Flore) to look more interesting than taking drags on mere cigarettes. But I only smoked the pipe in public, as I couldn't afford to spend much money on aromatic tobacco. Sometimes, sitting on the terrace of some café, as I pretended to read some maudit French poet, I played the intellectual, leaving my pipe on the ashtray(sometimes the pipe wasn't even lit) and taking out what were apparently my reading glasses and taking off the other pair, identical to the first and with which I couldn't read a thing either. But this didn't cause me too much grief, since I wasn't trying to read the wretched French poets in public, but rather to feign being a profound Parisian cafe terrace intellectual. I was, ladies and gentlemen, a walking nightmare.

This passage gives a good example of the tone throughout; witty, self-deprecating, just a tad obnoxious at times, but always entertaining. He encounters a number of writers along the way, has a memorable encounter with an intense Isabelle Adjani at a party, and does a fair bit of posturing and pondering about his life, his first novel, cinema, and why nobody - especially his wife -seems to see his physical resemblance to Hemingway. Carrying at all times in his back pocket a crumpled list of writing tips given to him by Duras, this memoir is as much a reflection on the difficulties a writer has in finding inspiration and subject matter, as it is about recounting youthful life-shaping experiences. It's also inevitably about Paris, and that was feast enough for me.

Summertime and the Cotton Knitting is Easy. . .

I recently was working at the book fair of a long (eight day!) academic conference that took place in the lovely city of Fredericton, New Brunswick. I found a really wonderful shop downtown called Yarns on York and absolutely fell in love with the colour of this deep coral yarn. It's called Sawya and is 60% cotton, 25% alpaca and 15% silk. It's created by Mirasol, and I love that proceeds go to building schools in remote areas of Peru. It's a dream to knit, and I had a lot of fun creating this summer scarf.

Then I finally finished a project that I've been working on since January. Part of the problem was that I was using this lovely textured, 100% cotton yarn made by Mission Falls, which then was subsequently discontinued. Of course I didn't initially buy enough and so had to scour a number of yarn stores in and around Toronto before I thankfully found a few more balls.

My inspiration for this was taking a block from Nicky Epstein's fabulous book Knitting Block by Block called Seed Stitch Cookie Twist (page 194) and expanding it into a scarf.

It turned out to be quite heavy so I think I'll be using it more as a fall scarf. But it's wide enough to work as a nice summer wrap for cooler nights.

Read the Small Print. . .

I'm trying to decide if this would be the coolest poster ever, or if it just makes my eyes hurt. Spineless Classics creates posters that include the entire text of the book - in about 4pt, which apparently can be read if you have 20/20 vision, or with a magnifying glass. You can see the different selections on their website here. (Thanks to The Fabric of My Life for the link).

A Little Russian Surrealism from the 1920s. . .

Quadraturan from Valeriy Kozhin on Vimeo.

I love this animated film of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s short story "Quadraturan" found in his collection of surreal and very funny tales written in the 1920s called Memories of the Future, translated by Joanne Turnball. I highly recommend the whole collection - there's a great story called "The Bookmark" in which the Eiffel Tower decides to run away. The other thing I like about the collection is how many of the pieces deal in some way with relationships between words, books and readers. Completely original and entertaining. Thanks to NYRB's A Different Stripe for the link to the video.

Looking forward to Krzhizhanovsky's next book, also published by NYRB Classics, coming out in December. The Letter Killers Club promises a group of writers who are "professional killers of conceptions" and compares it to G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, a book I also quite liked.

Woody Goes to Paris. . .

It's been a while since I've so enjoyed a Woody Allen movie but his latest, Midnight in Paris, is the perfect summer escape. Not only for all the great shots of the city - the opening is a lovely montage of different Paris locations in the day, in the rain and at night - but the script is clever, moving and very funny. Owen Wilson plays Gil Pender, a Hollywood hack who wants to be a serious novelist. He is visiting Paris with his fiancee Inez (played by Rachel McAdams) and her parents, none of whom find the city as enchanting as he does. While Inez spends her time in the company of a pendantic bore, played by Michael Sheen, Gil gets transported back to 1920s Paris and starts hanging out with Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein and a young woman who has been modelling for Picasso. There's a very entertaining scene in a bar where Gil is trying to explain that he's a time traveller to Dali, Man Ray and Buñuel, none of whom find it at all unusual. Oh, and the gorgeous clothes! And music by Cole Porter. And the Charleston. Just cinematic bliss.

A couple of other related things to recommend:

I'm fairly new to downloading podcasts, but I've thankfully discovered Filmspotting and it has quickly become my essential Friday treat. Matty and Adam are terrific at talking about what makes a movie worth seeing, they love many of my favourite films, they have a funny segment called Massacre Theatre where they enact a famous scene for viewers to guess at, and every episode ends with a fun and thoughtful "Top 5" list on various cinematic subjects. Plus they don't just review new films, but often embark on marathons to further their own ongoing education. Their latest episode was just wonderful - a review of Midnight at Paris (they loved it), a discussion about Red, the last film in their Krzysztof Kieslowski marathon, and their Top 5 movies set in Paris. Honestly, if you love film, you must listen to these guys! You can download their free podcast from iTunes or listen to it at their website here.

And if you love Paris (and who doesn't?) and Woody Allen films, particularly Husbands and Wives, you would enjoy Hervé Le Tellier's novel Enough About Love. Two women in their forties embark on affairs - one will be successful, one won't - and the novel follows both women, their husbands and their new lovers, as they talk, philosophize and intellecualize about relationships and love. There is a psychatrist - as in many Allen films - but he's one of the participants involved, so he's not much help. I loved the playfulness of the prose and seriousness of the discussions. Very French, and yes, it will make you want to go to Paris tout suite!

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.

Guess Who's Coming To My TV Screen?. . .

I just bought this fabulous DVD set of all nine movies that Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn made together - some of which, like Woman of the Year, Adam's Rib and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? I've previously seen, though not recently - and others which are new to me. I'm dedicating this week to watching them all in chronological order. I started tonight with the documentary that was included as an extra - The Spencer Tracy Legacy, made in 1986 and narrated by Hepburn. She doesn't talk about their personal life, but at the end she reads a letter that she felt compelled to write one night to Spencer, eighteen years after his death. It's loving and affectionate but full of questions - still - about the personal demons that haunted him. There are tears in her eyes as she reads, and I needed the kleenex as well. I'm looking forward to a marathon of this magical movie duo.

Knopf U.S. is publishing a huge biography of Spencer Tracy this fall, by James Curtis. It's over a thousand pages and to be honest, I don't know that I need such a detailed portrayal, but I am absolutely mesmerized by the cover. This is definitely not the first image that comes to mind when I think of Tracy, but the photo completely draws me in with its claustrophobic intensity.

New WWI novels. . .

George at Great War Fiction has this review of a new novel called Bleakly Hall by Elaine Di Rollo which sounds right up my alley. It's the story of two women who met during the war while working as a nurse and ambulance driver respectively, and have now come to work at Bleakly Hall, a military hospital for the shellshocked that uses hydropathic treatments. It's interesting to note that the author is an academic teaching in the actual building that used to be Craiglockhart Hospital (familiar to fans of Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy). As George states in his review, he's usually sceptical about contemporary fiction set during the Great War, but in this novel, "the period detail is accurate, the investigation into what war does to people is acute, and the psychology, even of the most outrageous characters, is believable." I look forward to reading it.

I also have a copy on the to-be-read pile of Louisa Young's My Dear I Wanted To Tell You - also a fictional look at WWI, but more of a romantic saga. And Jacqueline Winspear's latest Maisie Dobbs mystery, A Lesson in Secrets, is beckoning. In this one, Maisie heads off to Cambridge working undercover for the British Secret Service.

Return to Cold Comfort Farm. . .

I'm really quite excited that Vintage U.K. is bringing back into print some of Stella Gibbons' other novels this fall. Cold Comfort Farm is one of those books I never get tired of re-reading. I actually perused Conference at Cold Comfort Farm many years ago but remember not thinking much of it at the time. I had discovered it among the stacks of an academic library while waiting for a friend who was doing some research. I think I only had an hour to speed read my way through it, so I may have not have done it justice. According to the book's description, the farm is hosting a conference of the "International Thinkers Group" that includes Mr. Mybug, so that promises to be fun; I'm willing to give it another go. I know I've never read Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm, a collection of short stories that includes scenes of a typical Starkadder Christmas complete with "unsuitable presents and unpleasant insertions into the pudding." While I'm sure neither of these will match up to the original, I'm definitely game to revisit the farm and its eccentric characters.

Vintage is also republishing two other novels by Gibbons that I'm also looking forward to reading. Starlight is about two poor sisters who get a new landlord with a wife who seems to be possessed by spirits, and Westwood looks particularly like my cup of tea - the story of a bookish girl and her more beautiful friend, vying for the attentions of an egotistic playwright who doesn't seem to deserve either of them. I'm hoping it contains some good doses of literary satire. Cold Comfort Farm was Gibbons' first novel. Were the others so slight or badly written that they merited languishing in obscurity all this time? I can't quite believe it.

Jazz and Jealousy. . .

I do love a movie with a good jazz score. I think of Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows with that great score by Miles Davis, Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder with music composed and played by Duke Ellington and his orchestra, and Elmer Berstein's score for Preminger's The Man With the Golden Arm.

So I was looking forward this afternoon to watching Basil Dearden's 1962 movie All Night Long. My DVD is part of Criterion's Eclipse Series #25: Basil Deardon's London Underground, a set of four movies by this British director. It's a retelling of Othello set among jazz musicians as a party is held for the first year anniversary of married couple Delia and Rex. He's the leader of a successful jazz band; she's a former singer who gave up her career for marriage. Johnny Cousin is the Iago in this film; a jealous drummer who wants a band of his own with Delia as its star, and who tries to break the couple up by feeding Rex's jealousy. You know the story; the ending won't quite be the same. It was all a bit melodramatic (thunderclaps at portentous moments) and the acting isn't terribly good. The party seems quite devoid of guests except for the main characters (no budget for extras, I suppose) and there's an awful lot of going in and out of rooms whenever Deardon needs some quiet for two characters to talk. Still, the music is terrific and the musicians include Dave Brubeck, Charles Mingus and Tubby Hayes with enough camera time on them to let them rip. Their scenes are definitely the best bits of the movie.

I haven't given up on this set or Deardon though. I quite enjoyed Victim, a 1961 film about homophobia in England starring Dirk Bogarde, and next up will be 1960's The League of Gentlemen, a heist movie starring Richard Attenborough and Roger Livesey which looks like fun. 1959's Sapphire, about a murder that stirs up racial unrest, rounds out the set.

A Spaetzle Saturday. . .

Some days it's all about the quest for that perfect meal.

Yesterday morning, I was reading one of my favourite food blogs - Smitten Kitchen - and there was this post about how to make spaetzle, a type of German noodles that I'd never heard of or tasted before. As someone who has long wanted to try making homemade pasta but who lacks the required counter space, equipment and patience, this seemed a perfect and easy alternative. However, as the blogger rightly pointed out, it helps to have a Spaetzle Maker.

I was shortly due to meet a friend for a long walk, en route to a farmer's market (where a basket of organic onions would come in handy later). Enthusing about my sudden obsessive need to make spaetzle that night (which she completely understood; she's known me too long), I enlisted her help in checking out several local kitchen gadget stores in search for this elusive tool. Either the spring weather has created spaetzle fever, or Smitten Kitchen has a lot of Toronto readers, but I heard from more than one retailer that they'd either just sold out, or didn't carry them, but had recently had inquires. I'd nearly given up, but thankfully I remembered The Pepper Mill and yes, they had them (see above) and yes, they still have more in stock.

Okay, so why did this recipe torment me all day, apart from the fact that it's really fun to say?

1. Easy ingredients. Flour, eggs (a lot of them - I used Omega 3 ones) and milk. Combine.

2. They are so much fun to make! Once the batter has cooled in the fridge for an hour, you just bring a large pot of salted water to boil, put the spaetzle maker over the top and pour the batter into the little box. Then you slide the box back and forth and the batter falls through the holes into the hot water, creating little squiggles of noodles.

3. They cook incredibly fast. You'll know when they're done when they rise to the top like this. It only takes a minute or two. I did them in several batches, or else it gets too crowded.

4. They are so versatile. Drain them in a colander and then you can use them in any recipe calling for pasta. I fried up some onions and pancetta in some melted butter and then added the spaetzle, some ground pepper and thyme and there was the dinner I'd been happily anticipating all day.

5. As hoped, it was absolutely delicious!

A couple of things to note. The recipe which I followed from the Smitten Kitchen post above, makes a LOT of spaetzle. It could easily serve four if used as the main dish, and six-eight if you were serving is just as a side dish. I'm going to use the leftovers to bake a large Spaetzle n' Cheese dish for dinner tonight. I may never buy macaroni again. Also, when moving the spaetzle maker back and forth, be careful so that the batter doesn't go down the side of the pot where it'll hit your stove element and start to burn. It did get a bit messy at times and you have to work fast, but it was completely worth it.

UPDATED: I used the leftover spaetzle in place of macaroni and it was fantastic. The spaetzle doesn't dry up overnight and takes the sauce really well. It just adds an extra creaminess to the whole dish. This is definitely replacing my old Mac n' Cheese standard.

Holiday in the Lakes. . .

Life and work has been a bit hectic lately, but I just got back from a lovely holiday in England. I had great spring weather and it was so relaxing to gaze on green grass and daffodils, which were blooming everywhere. I went on a couple of wonderful walks in the Lake District, using Ambleside as a base - just fresh air, good company, breathtakingly beautiful scenery, friendly, inquisitive sheep, Jaffa Cakes at the breaks, and no electronic devices for miles. Utter bliss. First off, a walk in true Wordsworth country up to this point overlooking Grasmere.

The next day I dipped my feet in this very cold water at Angle Tarn where we stopped for lunch.

This is the gorgeous view from the top of Wansfell Pike, overlooking the town of Ambleside. It's so hard to really capture the effect, but from here all you can see are peaks everywhere and Lake Windermere to the left.

On this trip I was also visiting a friend in Liverpool who took me out to Crosby Beach at the north part of the city, which contains a really interesting art installation by artist Antony Gormley. Called Another Place, he created one hundred life-size figures of himself and placed them at various points along several kilometres of the beach. They are all staring out at the water and the effect is quiet and reflective but not intrusive. Very peaceful, though I think it might look completely different, and possibly more fearful, when the tide comes in.



My reading on this trip has been True North: In Praise of England's Better Half by Martin Wainwright - a book debunking the negative stereotypes of Northern England. It's a terrific read - I'm constantly writing down a list of places I need to visit, historical buildings to see, art galleries to go to, and even bands to check out, like The Doves. Technically, I'm a Northern girl myself having been born in Yorkshire, but I came to Canada when I was just nine months old and have lived here ever since, so even though I visit England often, there's so much about the history and culture of my birth country that I'm ignorant of. I never get tired of exploring it though.

Chaplin's 1920s Paris. . .

I watched a wonderful movie last night, A Woman of Paris, the first drama that Charlie Chaplin directed. It premiered in 1923 and apart from a brief cameo, Chaplin chose not to act in it. In the DVD extras, Chaplin's biographer David Robinson introduces the film - which, though a critical success, flopped at the box office - and I was touched to learn that when Chaplin was 86, he went back and wrote a new score for the film that he had loved so much. Edna Purviance plays Marie St-Claire, a young woman who travels to Paris alone after her fiancé Jean fails to show up at the train station. A year later, she's the mistress of Pierre, a millionaire playboy, suavely portrayed by Adolphe Menjou. When Marie unexpectedly encounters Jean, now living in Paris as a struggling artist along with his disapproving mother, she has to re-evaluate what she really wants from life: love or luxury? There are so many clever and marvellous moments in this film. It's terrific at capturing the immoral, partying decadence of Paris in the twenties, the touching and humourous relationship between Marie and Pierre, the catty female friendships (a precursor to The Women?), and the ultimate tragedy and Marie's final decision. The costumes are absolutely gorgeous and despite the melodrama, there's a warmth, wit and sophistication between the characters that makes this a completely different type of film from G.W. Pabst's 1929 Pandora's Box, for example.

The DVD set also has a great documentary about the making of the film that includes an interview with Liv Ullmann talking about the film's innovations. It also includes a much later 1957 Chaplin film, The King of New York which I think I will be watching tonight.

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.

A Good Take on Tey. . .

I seem to be on a bit of a mystery reading kick. Just finished Nicola Upson's An Expert in Murder which features Josephine Tey as the protagonist. I've only read one of Tey's mysteries - the wonderfully inventive The Daughter of Time - and I don't know why I've never explored more of her work as I certainly love this "golden age" of crime writing.

I enjoyed Upson's debut mystery very much, set as it is in the world of theater during the run of Tey's very successful play Richard of Bordeaux in 1934 (something else to look up and read). Tey meets a young girl and fan on the train down to London. The girl is subsequently murdered at King's Cross, just minutes after saying goodbye and the connections to the play and Tey are only heightened and complicated when a second murder occurs in the theatre itself. There's a charming, solid detective named Archie Penrose who loves Tey but is reluctant to act on it as he still feels guilt over the death of Tey's lover Jack - his best friend - during the war. The reverberations, grief and secrets of the First World War are prevalent everywhere in this intricate and entertaining mystery; all of the characters have absorbed its sadness in one way or another. It's a good companion series to the Maisie Dobbs novels of Jacqueline Winspear. Apart from an unconvincing motive on the part of one accomplice character, I thought this was a very accomplished first book and look forward to reading the next in the series - Angel With Two Faces - particularly as it's also set in the theatre world. This time it's the Minack Theatre in Cornwall, a place I'm hoping to visit during the summer. And I must read more of Tey's detective novels as well.

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!