I got Zama among 6 books I ordered during the New York Review of Books anniversary sale - the discount went up to 40% on orders over 4 books and so I went a little overboard. I surely have written before about how I'm a sucker for the look and feel of these books. (I believe the first one I ever came across was Raymond Queneau's Witch Grass, which I bought at a Borders in central New Jersey in 2003 despite never having heard of the author or book. I loved it. Though it may have been a few years earlier that I read a review of Richard Hughes' A High Wind in Jamaica, which was reissued by NYRB in 1999, so maybe I was already aware of the editions.) In any case, I added Zama to my order based on virtually nothing. This sentence from the publisher's website may have sealed the deal, "First published in 1956, Zama is now universally recognized as one of the masterpieces of modern Argentinean and Spanish-language literature." I think I was also trying balance Italian and non-Italian books (of the 6 books I ordered, 3 were Italian). And I hadn't read a whole lot of Argentinian literature. (Though with a name like Antonio di Benedetto, he is likely one of the Argentinians who hails from Italy.) Anyway...
Zama follows the rising and falling hopes of Diego de Zama, a government functionary in a remote town in the Spanish South American colonies in the late 18th Century. The first half of the book takes place in 1790 and Zama is hoping to be transferred to Santiago de Chile or Buenos Ayres or Peru in the near future. The book picks up again in 1794 and again in 1799 and Zama is still waiting on some change of circumstance. The book provides an opening to consider some complexities of colonial life -- of race, class, and nationality. For just one example, Zama is an americano - born in the new world - but considers himself a Spaniard, while recognizing that people born in Spain likely consider him as an inferior. The book also illustrates how painfully slow communication must have been. Waiting months for letters and news that is no longer current. The book was also frustrating. I found Zama a different character to reconcile; I didn't understand a lot of his motivations or his actions. I often found myself wondering, is this how a person in that time in those circumstances behave? And sometimes I thought that yes, maybe it was, even though it made no sense to me. And other times I thought, I have no idea. (To be fair, I almost never thought "No;" I vacillated between "yes maybe" and "I don't know.") In any case, this made it somewhat hard for me to connect. There were some really lovely passages though and the book really did make me reflect on what life must have been like in a remote place some 250 years ago.
I was 3/4 of the way through Zama when I felt like spending a day in bed reading a book. I could easily have finished Zama that day, but Zama wasn't the book I wanted a book I wanted to spend the day in bed reading. I had recently acquired Jasmine Guillory's third novel, The Wedding Party and it was exactly the book I wanted to spend the day in bed reading. I read each of her previous novels in a single day under the same circumstances. These books are a joy to read and The Wedding Party might be my favorite yet. I loved that it shared a timeline with the previous two books, so it felt like getting let in on secrets that were happening behind the scenes in the first (and to a lesser extent the second) book. These books are also very funny. The denouement in The Wedding Party had me laughing almost to the point of crying. Each one of these books is a perfect little Rom-Com and now I'm very excited for the next installation.
Tuesday, August 20, 2019
Thursday, August 8, 2019
The Invention of Truth, by Marta Morazzoni
I almost started The Invention of Truth, which I picked up last week - like so many books - at the Unique Boutique thrift store, over the weekend. Then, perhaps when I saw the reference to John Ruskin in the book, I remembered I had intended to read George Gissing's account of his travels in Italy. I set aside The Invention of Truth and along with it Ruskin's Stones of Venice to read next. (And now, having finished the former, I have set aside the latter for later still, but I'm going to Venice for the first time later this year and I want to be sure to read it and also to do a reread of Invisible Cities before then.) It's an extremely short book - just 99 pages - and I read it in little snippets as I went about my business over the course of the day yesterday. It's a good book for that type of reading as there are easy stopping places every couple pages at least. The story alternates, back and forth, imagining two stories with real-world corollaries: John Ruskin's late-in-life visit to Amiens, France, and the creation of the Bayeux Tapestry by 300 French needlewomen. The stories seem to have little in common, but here and there you catch a moment of resonance that feels a little bit secret and special. This was a very enjoyable little book.
Tuesday, August 6, 2019
By the Ionian Sea, by George Gissing
Last fall, I went to Calabria. Some months before my trip, I discovered that George Gissing (for whom I've had an affection since reading The Odd Women several years back) had taken a trip there and written a book about it. I thought I might read it before I went, but despite downloading it to my phone (it's past copyright and available for free), I never got around to it. Then, a month or so ago, I got a paperback copy. And after my recent accidental theme of reading books about travels in Italy, I decided to make it intentional.
Gissing made his trip in the fall of 1897, as far as I can tell. He was drawn to modern day Calabria (and, in fact, Puglia and Basilicata, though he describes the whole region as Calabria) because of his interest in the ancient history of Magna Græcia. After departing Naples by ship to Paola, Gissing traveled by carriage over the mountains to Cosenza, the first stop on his Calabrian journey, and the city where I spent 3 nights at the end of my visit to southern Italy. Gissing's interest in Cosenza related to the death there of the Visigothic king Alaric. He was reportedly buried near the confluence of the Busento and Crati rivers. Gissing visited the spot and marveled that a king and his treasures may have been buried beneath his feet and in full view of the city nearby. He also remarked on the new and hideous railway bridge. Today, there is a small park on the riverbanks where the two rivers merge and there is a statue of Alaric that was erected in 2018. You can see both the statue (on the bottom left) and the railway bridge in this photo I took during my stay in Cosenza.
Apart from visits to Cosenza, Gissing's and my paths diverge. He took the train from Cosenza on to Taranto, in modern-day Puglia, then made his way back west and south along the Ionian coast. I saw the Ionian sea only briefly on my travels, somewhere in the vicinity of Trebisacce while I was on my way to Aliano. I did note one other similarity between my experience and Gissing's: in every museum he visited, he was the lone visitor. This was my experience at both museums I visited in Cosenza, and even in Matera, which is comparatively full of tourists, I was one of very few visitors to the museums I stopped in.
While Gissing's observations on the people and culture of the south of Italy are rather paternalistic, they are also entertaining and his writing is beautiful. At the time of his visit to the south of Italy, the war of Italian unification was only a few decades past and Calabria was unfrequented by visitors from outside, or even elsewhere in Italy. He succeeds in capturing a place and a time and people who were largely left out of writing at the time.
Apart from visits to Cosenza, Gissing's and my paths diverge. He took the train from Cosenza on to Taranto, in modern-day Puglia, then made his way back west and south along the Ionian coast. I saw the Ionian sea only briefly on my travels, somewhere in the vicinity of Trebisacce while I was on my way to Aliano. I did note one other similarity between my experience and Gissing's: in every museum he visited, he was the lone visitor. This was my experience at both museums I visited in Cosenza, and even in Matera, which is comparatively full of tourists, I was one of very few visitors to the museums I stopped in.
While Gissing's observations on the people and culture of the south of Italy are rather paternalistic, they are also entertaining and his writing is beautiful. At the time of his visit to the south of Italy, the war of Italian unification was only a few decades past and Calabria was unfrequented by visitors from outside, or even elsewhere in Italy. He succeeds in capturing a place and a time and people who were largely left out of writing at the time.
Saturday, August 3, 2019
The King of a Rainy Country, by Brigid Brophy
I think I've mentioned before that I get a lot of books at thrift stores. At the Goodwill, paperbacks are typically $.99 or $1.99 and I've picked up some gems at Goodwills around the city. The Salvation Army usually charges 10% of the price listed on the book, so a paperback might be $1.29 or $1.49 or thereabouts. Books at Housing Works thrift stores are a little pricier, but still usually $4 or less (at the Housing Works bookstore, you'll find a much larger selection, but also higher prices). But the place I pick up books most frequently is the Unique Boutique thrift store on 3rd Avenue, mainly because it's just a couple blocks from my work and makes for a good destination when I want to leave the office at lunchtime. Paperbacks are $1, hardbacks are $2, and cookbooks are $3. (They get a lot of cookbooks for some reason, and some good ones. I picked up 2 excellent Lidia Bastianich cookbooks there a while back, as well as the James Beard bread book.) I go to Unique Boutique about once a week and there's nearly always something I want to read, or that looks interesting on the shelves. Sometimes I come across something very unusual, as with The King of a Rainy Country. I had never heard of it, but the cover art caught my eye and a quick read of Brigid Brophy's bio intrigued me. (And at $1, what did I have to lose?) Last Friday, I finished The Shape of Water on the train back from Baltimore. After arriving at Penn Station, I stopped off at my office to drop off some things and realized I needed a new book to read on the subway home. I keep a small stash of books at work - mostly ones I've picked up at Unique Boutique on my lunch break - for just such an occasion, so I grabbed The King of a Rainy Country and went on my way.
When I started King of a Rainy Country, a novel about a young woman living in London with her dirtbag not-quite-boyfriend and working for a pornographic bookseller, I assumed I was leaving my spate of books about Italy behind, so I was completely caught off guard when suddenly on page 100, the couple heads off to Italy to chaperone a group of American tourists to the major sights (a gig they fell into by whim, luck, and chance). The tour winds up in Venice, where Mihály and Erzi's tour through Italy began in Journey by Moonlight. In fact, the two books make a very interesting pair. The King of a Rainy Country was originally published in 1956; Journey by Moonlight in 1937. It's not so long, but the ~20 years (and the war, of which Antal Szerb was a victim) that separate the books are era-defining. The King of a Rainy Country feels surprisingly current, but Journey by Moonlight is very clearly from another time. Also worth noting, the latter book mostly focuses on the man's internal struggle, while The King of a Rainy Country is told from the woman's perspective. But I think there is a common thread between the narrator* of The King of a Rainy Country and Mihály from Journey by Moonlight, though it's hard to pinpoint exactly. Instead, I'll transcribe a conversation between the narrator and dirtbag Neale that captures it for me:
*I believe that if an author chooses not to tell you the narrator's name until p. 194 -- even if it is in the blurb on the back of the book -- it's for a reason. (Regular readers may recall I voiced this complaint related to A Heart So White as well.)
When I started King of a Rainy Country, a novel about a young woman living in London with her dirtbag not-quite-boyfriend and working for a pornographic bookseller, I assumed I was leaving my spate of books about Italy behind, so I was completely caught off guard when suddenly on page 100, the couple heads off to Italy to chaperone a group of American tourists to the major sights (a gig they fell into by whim, luck, and chance). The tour winds up in Venice, where Mihály and Erzi's tour through Italy began in Journey by Moonlight. In fact, the two books make a very interesting pair. The King of a Rainy Country was originally published in 1956; Journey by Moonlight in 1937. It's not so long, but the ~20 years (and the war, of which Antal Szerb was a victim) that separate the books are era-defining. The King of a Rainy Country feels surprisingly current, but Journey by Moonlight is very clearly from another time. Also worth noting, the latter book mostly focuses on the man's internal struggle, while The King of a Rainy Country is told from the woman's perspective. But I think there is a common thread between the narrator* of The King of a Rainy Country and Mihály from Journey by Moonlight, though it's hard to pinpoint exactly. Instead, I'll transcribe a conversation between the narrator and dirtbag Neale that captures it for me:
Later he asked: "Could there ever be one moment so supreme that everything would be justified for evermore?"Anyway, I loved this book. It was so unexpected, constantly taking surprising - and often funny - turns, never quite what I thought it would be.
"I believe so."
"All romantics believe so. But once the moment was over - supposing it ever came - once it was over, wouldn't you begin looking for new moments?"
"No. Not if it really had been the moment."
"You mean you couldn't tell till afterwards? You might cheat yourself like that for ever, going from one false moment to the next, getting tawdrier all the time. Promiscuity is an instinct as well as monogamy."
"Perhaps I'm wrong then. Perhaps there really is no mistaking the moment when it comes."
...
"O I'm so afraid that it's true about to travel hopefully being better than to arrive. It might be all in the quest, all in the search, all in the anticipation. When it came, there might be nothing there."
"That's what you're afraid of," I said.
"Yes, aren't you?"
"No, I believe there will be something there."
"I suppose I do, too, in a way," Neale said. "At least I'm willing to be convinced. Perhaps the moment will happen and convince me."
"Perhaps it will." I got up.
He looked down at me, as I stood on the step below him. "Will the moment just rise and overwhelm me?"
"Yes."
*I believe that if an author chooses not to tell you the narrator's name until p. 194 -- even if it is in the blurb on the back of the book -- it's for a reason. (Regular readers may recall I voiced this complaint related to A Heart So White as well.)
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