On Lighthouses, Such Fine Boys, The Word is Murder

I could have sworn I'd taken a picture of Jazmina Barrera's On Lighthouses, but I don't seem to have. I also could have sworn I still had it, but I can't seem to find it anywhere. I'm sure it will turn up in an hour or so, when I no longer need it. 

On Lighthouses was the December selection for my women in translation book club. It's a bit different for us – we mostly read fiction. On Lighthouses would, I suppose, best be described as a collection of connected personal essays. Jazmina Berrara visits a handful of lighthouses and we get a little bit of history, a little bit of literary analysis, a little bit of personal anecdote while she writes vaguely about each one and the context of her visit. It's a small book, and the collection of lighthouses she visits feels haphazard: 3 are in New York (2 in the city, one on Long Island) presumably because she lived here when she was writing it. The others are in the pacific northwest and Spain. Perhaps I'm forgetting one? I found the bits about the history of lighthouses most interesting, while some of the meaning and metaphor she ascribed to lighthouses felt forced. But now and then it was beautiful. I did immediately order a copy for a friend of mine who just completed work on a 2-hour special for PBS about the lighthouses of Wisconsin. 

After finishing On Lighthouses, I started and then set aside two other long books (I think I was getting ahead of myself with the upcoming holiday break) before turning to the always reliable Patrick Modiano. Another five star book from Modiano! This one actually took me more than a week to read, but that's because I didn't read on several days. Covering the usual Modiano territory, Such Fine Boys is an account of the students and faculty from the Valvert School, a private boarding school for wealthy children, who you come to suspect have ended up there for some particular reason. Each chapter focuses on a different student. Some are narrated in the first person by one Patrick Modiano, while sometimes he is in conversation with another former student or faculty member who takes over the storytelling for a chapter. The stories span from the era of occupied France to the present-day of the book (published in France in 1982). There is a near complete absence of parenting, a surprising intermingling of wealth and seediness, a dark current running under it all. In these vignettes, there are echoes of stories told more completely in other Modiano books. I was reminded particularly of Villa Triste. Then there's a story of a student getting caught up in a roundup in occupied Paris, "one of the roundups that, in the past few months, had routinely preceded convoys to the east." Modiano's own father was picked up this way, and these roundups are described in detail in Dora Bruder. I was, of course, delighted to find some of the usual Modiano places turning up: Parc Monceau with its merry-go-round. Modiano's Paris is a place that may only exist in memory and books, at this point, but I haven't stopped trying to find it. I'll be in Paris again in a few months. Perhaps I'll devote a day to visiting the locations that turn up again and again in his books. 

My father was here for Christmas and brought with him The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz. He finished it while here and left it behind for me to read. I previously read Horowitz's Magpie Murders, but I mainly know Horowitz as the creator of one of my favorite TV programs: Foyle's War. This made The Word is Murder rather a fun read, because Horowitz narrates the novel as himself: creator of the popular TV program Foyle's War (and of Midsomer Murders, and writer of a few episodes of Poirot, and author of a popular children's book series). The premise is that he has been brought on by a former detective who advised him on some TV programs to write a book about him as he investigates a the case of a woman who was murdered on the very day she arranged her own funeral. The book is full of references to real programs and people, and it's difficult to know what aspects of the book are fiction (was Horowitz hired by Spielberg to write the Tintin sequel?) and what is based on reality (an especially intriguing note in the acknowledgements suggests that at least one aspect of the mystery may be based on a real event). This was a fun mystery, which I finished in 24 hours. It was just the kind of book I needed on my holiday break. 

Four Seasons in Rome, by Anthony Doerr

After finishing my Szerb re-reads, I decided to continue with the Italian theme with Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr. A few weeks back I was looking at my shelves for something else, when I noticed it and pulled it out to potentially read ahead of my planned trip to Rome over Thanksgiving. I had forgotten I had this book, or why exactly I had gotten it. I can only assume it was on a books to read about Italy list. 

I was already feeling very primed for my visit to Rome from the Rome section of Journey By Moonlight, but just a few pages into Four Seasons in Rome I had the feeling that I had really chosen well. Doerr's book is not just about Rome, but about a year he spent living in Monteverde on the Janiculum (or Gianicolense) hill Rome, which is precisely where I would be staying on my trip. I was looking forward to staying on that side of the Tiber and getting to know the Trastevere end of Rome (Janiculum and Trastevere also feature in Journey By Moonlight as it happens), and here was a book about precisely that. 

Quite early on in Four Seasons in Rome, Doerr mentions the Porta di San Pancrazio and the Fontana dell'Acqua Paola (il fontanone) and I made those among my first stops on the day I arrived in Rome. To reach il fontanone from my Roman apartment, I had to walk up to the very top of the Janiculum hill and then a little bit back down to the point where the fountain faces out over the entire city. The fountain had also been recommended to me by the women in whose apartment I was staying. They expressed their surprise that it was not a site prominently featured in most guidebooks to Rome, comparing it favorably to the Trevi Fountain. As I approached the fountain from behind, with the view out to Rome ahead of me, I realized I had actually been there before. I discovered the fountain and the adjacent overlook after a visit to the Orto Botanico (Botanic Garden) di Roma, which occupies a hillside in Trastevere, on my previous to Rome in March of last year. The main entrance of the botanic garden is near the bottom of the hill, but you can take a winding path through the garden up to the top of the hill and if you exit through the gate there you will find yourself right beside il fontanone. 

When you turn your back to the fountain and look out at the city from the viewpoint on Via Garibaldi, you are just above the courtyard of some sort of academic institution and on that day in March of 2023 when I visited, down in that courtyard a woman who appeared to be cleaner or worker of some sort was taking a cigarette break. The light was so good and the shadows so stark. In the months between then and now, I had forgotten all about the monumental fountain and the dramatic view of the city, but I remembered very clearly looking down from above at this woman having a cigarette and feeling that I was peering in on something very private. There were a dozen or more people standing along the fence just above her, but she seemed completely unaware of any of us. It's one of my favorite photos from that trip. 

As the title suggests, Four Seasons in Rome is an account of a year in Rome and it's divided into a section for each season. I read the first section, Autumn, and part of Winter before I left for Rome. Again, the timing felt very apt, as I would be going to Rome just as autumn was coming to an end. I finished Winter and read some of Spring while there. I read the last of Spring on the plane home, and then I read summer here on my couch in Brooklyn, where it currently feels very wintry. I have only been to Rome in winter and the very winter-adjacent parts of fall and spring. I've experienced mild temperatures in Rome, but never what would be described as real heat. I've experienced Rome in torrential rain, in a sudden and intense hail storm, and in a freak snow storm that shut down the entire city for a day. Reading Doerr made me want to experience Rome in the springtime, and reaffirmed my feeling that I'd prefer not to be there in summer. Seasons aside, Doerr's observations about Rome beautifully articulate what I love about the city – its history, its lifestyle and pace, its beauty (and occasional ugliness). I can't imagine reading this book and not falling in love with Rome, even if you'd never been there.