Yesterday I went on a 5 mile walk. Ostensibly, my purpose was to pick up some film I'd dropped off at a darkroom that's a bit more than 2 miles away from my home. After I'd done that, I decided to visit
BIG Reuse, a sort of mega thrift store that mostly sells appliances and furniture but also has a surprisingly large and well-organized book section. If you cut out just that corner of the store, it would be a pretty decent stand-alone used bookstore. Along with Magdalen Nabb's
Death of an Englishman, I picked up
The Needle's Eye by Margaret Drabble and I was especially excited to find a very nice edition of
The Tale of the 1002nd Night by Joseph Roth. (They also had a copy of his
The Emperor's Tomb, which I seriously considered buying but it was the older translation rather than the 2013 Michael Hofmann translation and I didn't quite trust it.) When I finished my shopping at BIG Reuse I'd been on my feet for probably two hours. I thought I might just catch the subway home, but I really didn't feel like getting on the subway. My feet were hurting badly. I'm sure I'm not alone in this: during the pandemic, my feet have become unaccustomed to nearly all my shoes and I keep discovering shoes I once considered comfortable are no longer comfortable. So, by some twisted logic, I decided to keep walking and to visit a shoe store that I like that was about a mile further on. I got to the store and bought a pair of sneakers (time will tell if they'll be comfortable for long haul walks, but I'm optimistic). I considered wearing them out, but from there it was just a few more blocks to a bus I could take home, so I thought I'd be okay (having endured three hours on my feet already at that point). However, when I got to the bus stop my transit app said the bus was 25 minutes away. Another bus that would also take me home was just another half mile on, so I kept walking. At the second bus stop, I sat down in the bus shelter, where the other woman sitting there told me she'd been waiting for an hour. (I don't know what was up with the Brooklyn buses yesterday!) Luckily, I only had to wait about ten minutes. Because in my mind I was just going out for a walk, I'd left the house pretty much empty handed; just my phone and keys and a tote bag to bring my negatives home in. Before leaving, I thought about bringing the book I was reading, but I didn't want to carry more than I had to.
When the bus is running an hour behind, you know you have a long ride ahead of you even once it arrives. There will be people waiting at every stop, and people who need to get off at every stop. I had gotten on at the first stop, so was fortunate to get a seat before the inevitable rush, but I knew it would probably be close to an hour before I got home. (I could have been home in probably 20 minutes if I'd decided to take the subway rather than the bus, and I truly can't account for my decision; I have a weird partiality to the bus.) Fortunately, though I hadn't brought my own book, I had picked up three books while I was out. Being that I was already in the middle (nearing the end, in fact) of another book, I thought I should start the book I would likely finish fastest – the Magdalen Nabb was the obvious choice.
I'd read one other book from the Marshal Guarnaccia series back in 2016, but I was pleased to find that Death of an Englishman was the first book of the series because I've accumulated a few of the others over the years with the intention of starting from the beginning. (A bias of mine that I have written about before.) Set in Florence, circa 1980 this book describes an Italy that is still feeling the effects of the postwar period. I'm much more familiar with the period in the two decades or so following the end of World War II (in fact, I'm much more familiar still with the decade or so before the war than I am with the decades after), and I was surprised in this book to find those kind of aftershocks still present. The mass migration of the poor from the south of Italy to the north (and beyond into other parts of Europe) is subtly at the center of this book. (Now, sometimes, things go the other way. In Sardegna, I met a cameriere who came from Liguria to work there in the season.) Magdalen Nabb was an English expat living in Florence, and she likes to poke fun and the English and the Italians – and, at the center, how the two cultures are foreign to one another.
