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!

A Book of Secrets. . .

Another book to add to the must-read pile. Michael Holroyd is a favourite author of mine - I've read several of his books, including his biographies of Lytton Strachey and Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. His books of memoir have also proved fascinating. This review in The Telegraph has peaked my interest in his latest book - especially as it continues the story of Violet Trefusis, in her post-Vita years.

Just Acquired. . .

Oh, I am a sucker for my Folio books. Two lovely new volumes came in the post this week. I love this image on Kafka's Metamorphosis. Guilty confession - I have never read any Kafka before, but I certainly will now. And this edition of Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front is illustrated with archival photographs of German soldiers during the war.

Art and Literature in the Inter-War Years. . .

This review in the Guardian has really made me want to read Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artist and the Imagination From Virginia Woolf to John Piper by Alexandra Harris.

From the review, written by Kathryn Hughes:

They loved country churches, tea in china cups wreathed with roses, old manor houses, abandoned fishing smacks, Gypsy caravans and, just as important, the soft English rain that smudged the outlines of all these precious things. Above all, their sensibility was local. While the other modernism saw national boundaries as just one more example of pernicious Ruritanian debris, romantic moderns celebrated the way England's crinkled coast enclosed the rooted and particular. Trees, stones, bodies, walls: these were no longer the flotsam that needed to be excluded from art. They were what art was all about.

I love this inter-war period of art and literature in all of its many beautiful and varied forms. I'll definitely be getting my hands on a copy of this.

Off to TIFF. . .

The Toronto Film Festival starts tomorrow and I'm enormously excited and prepared to exist on very little sleep for the next ten days. I have tickets to 20 films, with a four day, two time zone business trip sandwiched in the middle of it - I'm literally leaving one film to go straight to the airport. However, I love the rushing around and this year I really lucked out and got almost all of my top choices. I'll be avoiding most of the big Hollywood films that will show up later in theatres, but I had to make an exception for Colin Firth's new movie, The King's Speech. He plays George VI, forced to become king after his brother's abdication and terrified of public speaking because of his stammer. Geoffrey Rush plays his speech therapist and Helena Bonham Carter plays the Queen Mum. It's already getting some early Oscar buzz.

I'm a HUGE fan of Kristin Scott Thomas and so I'm tickled to be going to both of her new French films, Sarah's Key and Love Crime. And I'll be seeing Guillaume Canet's new film Little White Lies as well. Oooh, and Godard's Film Socialisme and Michael Winterbottom's The Trip, and Christopher Plummer's new movie Beginners and Rio Sex Comedy which stars the fabulous Charlottte Rampling, and other really intriguing films from India, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Germany and Turkey.

I'll try and post the odd review if I have time, or I'll wrap it all up at the end and list my favourites.

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.