Burning Secret, by Stefan Zweig

I have these little Stefan Zweig editions from Pushkin Press that are just perfect for when it's New Year's Eve and you're trying to fit one more book in before midnight. (I even considered starting another, but I think I've read enough these past few days.)

As I wrote two days ago, I thought about reading Zweig right after I finished The Sense of an Ending and at that time I pulled Burning Secret off the shelf, but eventually decided to wait – a little afraid, if I'm honest, that reading Zweig might push the nostalgic melancholic feeling a little too close to despair. Having now finished Burning Secret, I can't decide if my fear was warranted.

Reading Zweig, as with many of his contemporaries who were similarly displaced and killed by the rise of Nazism, I sometimes find it hard to read the story without constantly remembering the fate of the author. A tragedy hangs around the work, even when – as in the case of Burning Secret, originally published in 1913 – that tragedy lies far in the future. The woman and her son who are at the center of this story are well-to-do Austrian Jews. (How many Jews lived in Vienna in 1913, I find myself wondering while I'm reading. Roughly 175,000 apparently, and just 4,000 in 1946.)

Zweig is a masterful storyteller. At the outset, Burning Secret promises the story of a holiday affair. A young man sets out to seduce a married woman who is staying with her son in at the same hotel in the Austrian Alps. The seducer attempts to befriend the mother through the son, and this leads to a unexpected turn in the story, wherein in becomes the child's story, rather than that of the adults. Twelve-year-old Edgar is on the precipice of understanding the adult world and its secrets. He longs to be admitted into it, but is faced with the recognition of how shielded he has been as a child. By the end he wants only a resumption of his childhood simplicity. It was a wonderful little book to end the year with.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; Where Angels Fear to Tread; Devotion

Continuing my rush to the end of 2023, I've gone on a tear pulling short books off my shelf without giving a lot of thought to my selections. After finishing The Sense of an Ending, I thought I would read something by Stefan Zweig, but I didn't think I had the heart for it just then, so I settled instead on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I believe I first heard of this book by way of the movie, which I remember my friend Andrea trying to describe to me many years ago. I could have sworn the second time I heard of it was from Molly Young's newsletter, Read Like the Wind. Unfortunately, a quick search for various combinations of Molly Young Read Like the Wind and Jean Brodie, lead only to another edition of that newsletter, written by someone else while Molly Young was away, and recommending a different book by Muriel Spark. I'll retain the belief in my heart that that's where it came from. Perhaps an earlier iteration of the newsletter that's not so well archived online.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a delightful little book. At once hilarious, with a touch of darkness hanging around the edges. The titular Miss Brodie is a girls' teacher with unconventional methods, that are simultaneously admirable and disturbing. Miss Brodie is onto something in her critiques of traditional education for girls. This is interwar England. Miss Brodie is modern, and trying to prepare her girls for a modern world. She lived through the Great War, the aftermath of which changed her course and that of many women. But the modernity that attracts Miss Brodie is Italian and German fascism. This along with her involving her girls in her own sexual intrigues, makes her a troubling figure, even while she's so attractive to her girls – and the reader.

I could have sworn I'd seen the movie adaptation of E.M. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread, but nothing in the story was familiar beyond two English women traveling to Italy, and a man coming after them later. The one image I have in my mind when I try to picture the film is in Venice, which plays no part at all in the book, so I have to wonder if I'm thinking of a different film entirely. I can just picture Helena Bonham Carter and another woman sitting in a boat on a canal. (If you know what I might be thinking of that is not Where Angels Fear to Tread, do let me know.) 

This book was surprising at every turn, and not only because it wasn't what I thought I remembered (which was very little to begin with). It makes a terrible caricature of Italians, while also expressing a certain admiration for them. It isn't much kinder to the English for the most part. There are a lot of other things going on, but the interesting point of the book to me was its investigation of parenting. It makes a clear condemnation of what I think of as Victorian child-rearing, of which all the English characters are a product. They were all raised on some level at a distance by their parents, but are also stifled by them. By contrast, when these English young adults witness the the love between and Italian father and his baby, they are simultaneously disgusted and moved. The question the book asks is whether it's better to be brought up well (English) without love or badly (Italian) but loved, and it definitely settles on the latter (without completely accepting that being brought up this way could be to be brought up well). 

As I said at the beginning of this post, my method of selecting what books to read during these last few days has been fast an impulsive. It perhaps helps that over the holiday break I installed a new set of bookshelves for my fiction and finally got around to fully organizing them for the first time since I moved a year ago. (I never bothered before, knowing I was going to be replacing my shelves.) What that means is that I have handled every book in my collection (a bit over 800 books) in the last few days. I think it was this that reminded me about Howard Norman, though he is an author that comes to my mind from time to time. I read and really liked The Bird Artist about 25 years ago, then I read two subsequent books – The Museum Guard, which I liked somewhat less enthusiastically, and The Haunting of L, which I remember loving but don't remember a single thing about. Somewhere along the line, I acquired a couple other books by him and as I was sitting yesterday afternoon close to finishing Where Angels Fear to Tread, I thought: I should read Howard Norman. Devotion seemed suitably short (I had the intention of finishing it by today), so I settled on it. 

It's a strange sort of love story, about a swift romance followed by a swift betrayal, and a long, slow return – perhaps – to trust. It's also in some way about how hard it is – how long it takes – to know another person. It's a really lovely book about imperfect people, which I always appreciate.

And now, with more than 12 hours left in 2023, maybe I can finish even one more book. I have my eye on Stefan Zweig again.

The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes

There was a line in Trust that struck me as something I might want to refer back to, so I committed the page number to memory. "We do so many stupid things when we're young. No trace should remain of youth, not even memory." This phrase was still ringing in my head and felt very apt as I was reading The Sense of and Ending. Like Trust, The Sense of an Ending is about an older man looking back on a relationship from his youth, reflecting on how he has changed as a person. At one point in the book, the narrator is confronted with an actual artifact from his youth – a letter he wrote, but only remembered in broad strokes – and he's forced to confront his past self, in a way we can often avoid when we rely only on memories.

If I remember correctly, it was on the basis that a friend of mine who is a professor was teaching this book as part of a class that appealed to me that I got this book in the first place. Also on her syllabus was J.M Coetzee's Disgrace, which I briefly considered reading as a follow up. It is perhaps in the spirit of this book, that I've searched my email history and am now scrolling through years of her Facebook posts looking for confirmation of this. I seem to remember her putting out a general call, of some sort, for recommendations for this course – but what exactly was the topic? I can't recall. What I do remember, is the books that came to mind for me in response to her prompt were The Good Soldier and The Age of Innocence*. 

I have a list in my notebook under the heading, 'Books with "That Mood,"' and the list includes those two books, along with Mercè Rodoreda's A Broken Mirror* and Garden By the Sea (I believe it was the occasion of finish the latter that led me to start this list); "everything by Patrick Modiano, but especially Villa Triste;" Antonio Muñoz Molina's Winter in Lisbon; Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity**; and a handful of others. I have just added The Sense of an Ending to the list. 

"That Mood," if I had to describe it, would be a melancholic nostalgia. (Is that redundant? Doesn't nostalgia always imply melancholy, sadness, loss?) What many of these books have in common are a first person narrator recalling events from a more or less distant past, often when the things that were going on around them were somewhat beyond their comprehension, while now – with age and time and memory – the pieces from the past seem to fit together differently. Maybe I'm making generalizations in trying to force all these books together, but I know there is a common feeling they left me with.

*As an aside, I read The Age of Innocence, A Broken Mirror, and Beware of Pity during periods when I didn't write about every book I read, but the former two both made my "Best Books I Read This Decade" post from the end of 2019. Beware of Pity I addressed when writing about another book I read by Stefan Zweig, so that's what I've linked there.

**Stefan Zweig even comes up in The Sense of an Ending: when the narrator meets up, some 40 years later, with the woman he dated in college she's reading a Stefan Zweig book and he confesses – to us, not to her – that he has never read Zweig.

Kalpa Imperial, by Angélica Gorodischer, and Trust, by Domenico Starnone

I'm inclined to start this post in the way I think I've started nearly every post this year, with a lament about my reading habits. But I figure I've written enough about that already and I will surely write more about it when I compose my year in review in a few days, so there's no need to dwell on it today. Also, I've finished 2 books in as many days and more than 3 days remain in the year, so I should focus on making up for lost time.

I started Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire that Never Was thanks to Mark Slutsky's Barely a Book Club. I started both the earlier selections for the non-club this year as well, but Kalpa Imperial is the only one I finished. I almost don't know what to say about it. It was fantastic and strange; not at all what I was expecting. Each chapter is its own tale, mostly describing a ruler and how she or he came to power. Sometimes en entire dynasty is included, sometimes an anecdote that gives you a sense of the climate, so to speak, of a particular leader. As a reader it's easy to find yourself lost: Where do these stories take place – are we on earth or somewhere else? Is this the past or the future? How many thousands of years does the book span? There are many gaps – we rarely know what has taken place between the chapters. 

As I was finishing Kalpa Imperial yesterday, Italo Calvino's book Invisible Cities came to mind. It's been two decades since I read it (something I should remedy!), but I remember the basic construct: dozens of cities are described, but each description is, in the end, a description of Venice with all her different facets. I had this sense with Kalpa Imperial – that each of the distinct stories was actually a story about the same thing. I feel I would benefit from rereading it now that I have seen the whole. 

I have a stack of books that I started this year and set aside without finishing, but kept on my side table with the idea that I might yet finish them. After finishing Kalpa Imperial yesterday, I eyed the stack and decided, rather thank going back to any of those books, I'd start something fresh. 

I picked up Domenico Starnone's Trust (not to be confused with the Hernan Diaz book of the same title that came out last year) when I was out gift shopping last week. I've really enjoyed the other two Starnone books I've read – and that it was translated by Jhumpa Lahiri only added to my interest. Starnone's books are pleasantly slim, but not light. It's been nearly 5 years since I read the last one, so it's mostly a vague feeling that I remember. When I started Trust what immediately came to mind was Javier Marías. When the book opens, the narrator is describing a relationship from his early adulthood that has an intensity that I tend to think of as only possible in early adulthood. The relationship comes to an end quite soon, but it continues to hang over the rest of the narrator's life, with unexpected results. In any case, there was something about the character and his relationship with women that reminded me of Marías. I sometimes wonder why I'm so drawn to Marías when he writes from a perspective of what could reasonably be called toxic masculinity. There's something of this in the Starnone character, but also a self-awareness (and also a lack of it, which we the readers are made to see). Trust drew me in immediately, and my reaction on finishing it was that it was very much my thing, but with a lingering question of why these kinds of books are "my thing."