Years ago, knowing my love for Sicily, a friend recommended Andrea Camilleri's mystery novels to me. Shortly thereafter, I picked up a copy of the first of them, The Shape of Water, and in the intervening years, I've come across another five or six used editions and amassed a small collection of his works. All without ever reading him. His recent death at the age of 93 (which I learned about via the Instagram of an Italian teenager I met 3 years ago in Sardinia), proved to be the nudge I needed. Last week I attended a conference in Baltimore and The Shape of Water got me pleasantly through the train trip down and back.
I'm sure I have written about this previously, but murder mysteries are my TV comfort viewing. In fact, they're practically the only television I watch. Generally speaking, I turn to television for different reasons than I turn to books. What I seek in television is an experience where you don't know exactly what will happen, but you can be secure that everything will tie up neatly in the end. I don't enjoy serial television where it takes a whole season (or - gasp! - a whole series) for the events to resolve themselves. I prefer watching with the certainty that in 45 to 90 minutes (depending on episode length), I can rest easy in the knowledge that the murderer has been captured. I also enjoy seeing the same tropes show up again and again in different shows. Every series has its locked room episode and its closed circle episode and I just love watching them play out.
In books, I enjoy complexity and uncertainty and I'm content even when things don't tie up neatly (as long as the story is well told, the writing good). I don't read a lot of murder mysteries. Which is not to say I don't enjoy reading murder mysteries. I get a similar sense of comfort from reading them that I get from watching them on TV, and I've amassed quite a collection of them at home with the idea that from time to time I do want to read a comfort book. I'm glad I finally broke the seal (or whatever metpahor you prefer) on Camilleri, and I'm glad I have a stack of his books at home to turn to when the mood strikes.
Monday, July 29, 2019
Tuesday, July 23, 2019
Journey by Moonlight, by Antal Szerb
Yesterday, I finished Journey by Moonlight. I loved it. Reading it, I recognized that it's part of a sub-genre I don't think I've ever identified before, but that I particularly enjoy. I would describe it as bourgeois alienation and exceptionalism. These are books about people who feel out of place in their fundamentally bourgeois lives and who act on a desire to escape, only to reflect on their own basic bourgeois-ness. A couple other books I've loved that fit this mold are The Garden Next Door and The Dream of My Return. In Journey by Moonlight, there are two parallel cases of this: the main character Mihály - whose central conflict is between his sense of exceptionalism and his desire to conform - and his wife Erzsi, who is attracted to Mihály because he is different, even as his decision to marry her was part of his attempt to conform and live a normal bourgeois life. As she observes late in the book, "Mihály returns my love at the moment simply because he is looking to me for bourgeois order and security, and everything I actually ran to him to escape from." Meanwhile, Mihály diagnoses his ailment as "acute nostalgia."
I think these stories appeal to me because I identify with them. The simultaneous belief in my own exceptionalism and fear that I was just normal was a tension I felt particularly strongly as a teenager -- and was probably the driving force behind a lot of my more regrettable and risky actions at the time. But as I've aged into a decidedly non-exceptional, fundamentally bourgeois adulthood, I still often have the sense that this isn't the real me. Or rather, that there is a self I largely suppress in my day-to-day life, especially my professional life.
I have a lot more to say on this topic, but I think I will save it for another post. In the meantime, here is quote from Journey by Moonlight that I particularly loved: "... in the spiritual life, opposites meet. It's not the cold passionless ones who become great ascetics, but the most hot-blooded, people with something worth renouncing."
I think these stories appeal to me because I identify with them. The simultaneous belief in my own exceptionalism and fear that I was just normal was a tension I felt particularly strongly as a teenager -- and was probably the driving force behind a lot of my more regrettable and risky actions at the time. But as I've aged into a decidedly non-exceptional, fundamentally bourgeois adulthood, I still often have the sense that this isn't the real me. Or rather, that there is a self I largely suppress in my day-to-day life, especially my professional life.
I have a lot more to say on this topic, but I think I will save it for another post. In the meantime, here is quote from Journey by Moonlight that I particularly loved: "... in the spiritual life, opposites meet. It's not the cold passionless ones who become great ascetics, but the most hot-blooded, people with something worth renouncing."
Monday, July 15, 2019
Glory, by Vladimir Nabokov
In 2002, when I was working at Harvard, I took a graduate seminar in the Comparative Literature department called "Memory and Modernity," taught by Svetlana Boym. I believe that class may be the last time I read Nabokov before picking up Glory (on the recommendation of someone I know only from Twitter!). We read Speak, Memory as well as some of his short stories. I also seem to remember re-reading The Real Life of Sebastian Knight in connection with this class, but I don't think it was assigned. I had read quite a bit of Nabokov at that point - 7 or 8 of his books I believe. I'm not sure quite why I stopped reading him - it wasn't a conscious decision at first. But as more time passed and I continued not reading him, I started to think of Nabokov as a writer of my youth.
Reading Glory brought me right back to that class with Professor Boym. In fact, I found myself wondering why we hadn't read Glory for that class. We did read Chekhov's The Lady with the Dog, which the book's hero picks up to read on p. 91. We also read Nabokov's short story, A Guide to Berlin, which covers some of the same geography as Glory does. Then there is the fact that Glory starts out in Crimea, The Lady with the Dog takes place there as well, and Professor Boym talked so affectionately of Yalta - a place I previously only knew of by name from whatever I had learned in history class about the Yalta Conference - that I've wanted to go there since. Professor Boym had a particular interest in nostalgia, and the whole of Glory is a study in nostalgia. Nearly every character is trying to recapture some half-imagined past or place. And then, the hero's constant invention and reinvention of himself also seems like it would be familiar to Professor Boym. Of course, she was certainly familiar with the book, it just didn't come to my attention until recently (though I had owned it for years).
I learned of Professor Boym's untimely 2015 death by chance from a passing tweet and it took me completely by surprise. When I'd had her as a professor, she had been young (43, the same age I am now). Though several years had passed, it seemed impossible that she could have died. I can't say I thought about her often between 2002 and 2015, nor really between learning of her death and the present, but reading Glory brought back some details I had forgotten, and also reminded me how much of what I know about Nabokov I learned from Professor Boym.
In actual fact, I read Glory in just 4 or 5 days, but it felt like an eternity because I took a 9-day vacation at about 80 pages in and didn't touch the book (except to move it from bag to bag) the whole time I was away. (Of course, I also packed and lugged all over the Azores a second book just in case I finished Glory on vacation. Will I never learn? Good thing I'm a light packer in all other respects.)
Reading Glory brought me right back to that class with Professor Boym. In fact, I found myself wondering why we hadn't read Glory for that class. We did read Chekhov's The Lady with the Dog, which the book's hero picks up to read on p. 91. We also read Nabokov's short story, A Guide to Berlin, which covers some of the same geography as Glory does. Then there is the fact that Glory starts out in Crimea, The Lady with the Dog takes place there as well, and Professor Boym talked so affectionately of Yalta - a place I previously only knew of by name from whatever I had learned in history class about the Yalta Conference - that I've wanted to go there since. Professor Boym had a particular interest in nostalgia, and the whole of Glory is a study in nostalgia. Nearly every character is trying to recapture some half-imagined past or place. And then, the hero's constant invention and reinvention of himself also seems like it would be familiar to Professor Boym. Of course, she was certainly familiar with the book, it just didn't come to my attention until recently (though I had owned it for years).
I learned of Professor Boym's untimely 2015 death by chance from a passing tweet and it took me completely by surprise. When I'd had her as a professor, she had been young (43, the same age I am now). Though several years had passed, it seemed impossible that she could have died. I can't say I thought about her often between 2002 and 2015, nor really between learning of her death and the present, but reading Glory brought back some details I had forgotten, and also reminded me how much of what I know about Nabokov I learned from Professor Boym.
In actual fact, I read Glory in just 4 or 5 days, but it felt like an eternity because I took a 9-day vacation at about 80 pages in and didn't touch the book (except to move it from bag to bag) the whole time I was away. (Of course, I also packed and lugged all over the Azores a second book just in case I finished Glory on vacation. Will I never learn? Good thing I'm a light packer in all other respects.)
Thursday, July 11, 2019
State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett
A friend recommended this book to me years ago and I ordered a copy and put it on my shelf and did not read it. Then, a few weeks ago it was suggested for summer reading in a newsletter I subscribe to, which just happened to arrive on a day I needed a new book to start, and so I decided to pick it up based on these two recommendations, but not actually knowing anything about the book. I really enjoyed it, but I made the mistake of going on vacation between finishing it and actually sitting down to write about it. Or maybe I didn't sit down and write about it right away because I didn't have a whole lot to say about it, even though I enjoyed* it. In any case, this was a good book. I'd recommend it to a lot of different types of readers. It's accessible, without being dumb; exciting, and also intelligent.
*Can we talk briefly about the word enjoy? I use the word enjoy rather a lot. Years ago some British person - I have zero recollection who it was - pointed out to me that the British use "enjoy" completely differently than Americans, and that it is usually used in the context of something unpleasant. This made a big impression and has fascinated me since. I've kept an eye/ear out for this British usage, and yet have never come across it, though I believe I kind of do understand the sense. One might say, "We are enjoying our third straight week of this heatwave," for instance. There's a touch of irony in the enjoy, but it's almost just a synonym for experience.
*Can we talk briefly about the word enjoy? I use the word enjoy rather a lot. Years ago some British person - I have zero recollection who it was - pointed out to me that the British use "enjoy" completely differently than Americans, and that it is usually used in the context of something unpleasant. This made a big impression and has fascinated me since. I've kept an eye/ear out for this British usage, and yet have never come across it, though I believe I kind of do understand the sense. One might say, "We are enjoying our third straight week of this heatwave," for instance. There's a touch of irony in the enjoy, but it's almost just a synonym for experience.
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