Death at the Sign of the Rook, by Kate Atkinson

I didn't know Kate Atkinson had a new Jackson Brodie book out until I came across this copy at Housing Works. I bought it on the spot, of course. I wanted to start it right away, but I made myself finish Heart Lamp and Transit before diving in. 

Part of the reason I was so eager to read a new Kate Atkinson Jackson Brodie book was I (correctly) assumed it was the kind of book that would break through the reading slump I've been in for the last few years. I find Kate Atkinson is always reliable for an engaging read, and the Jackson Brodie novels offer the fun predictability I enjoy in mysteries (though I primarily consume them on TV). I've read all the previous Jackson Brodie books in order, but it's been over a span of years and I find my memory of them hazy. I barely remember a thing about the most recent one, Big Sky, but I see looking back now at my post about it that I had a similar challenge reading it, in that the recurring characters (apart from Jackson Brodie himself) were more faint memories. The main thing I remember about Big Sky is that it was grittier than what I had come to expect from the series (there are definitely some darker moments in the books, as I recall, but the overall mood of Big Sky, as I remember it, was unusually dark.) Death at the Sign of the Rook is not that. It is decidedly cozy, and full of call-outs to other cozy mysteries from a fictional peer of Agatha Christie to Grantchester and Midsomer Murders. It even opens at a murder mystery theme weekend at a country house, though (thankfully) it doesn't deliver the predicable outcome of that trope.

It occurs to me that maybe a way out of my reading slump would be to read more books like this, and this morning I found myself considering why I don't. My answer to this is not totally thought out, but I have the beginnings of one. I've been a lifelong devotee of fiction -- for most of my adult life I've read fiction almost exclusively. But over the past several years, I've found myself more and more drawn to nonfiction. Primarily to memoir, though I've read some more straightforward nonfiction as well. Even as I read fiction, I find myself looking for books that provide me with a deeper understanding of a place or a time. If I think about the best books I've read over the years, the ones that come to mind are books like Death and the Dervish, which introduced me to a history and culture of which I was only faintly aware. After reading Death and the Dervish as well as Bosnian Chronicle, I got copies of Misha Glenny's history of the Balkans and Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, because I wanted to know everything about the region and its history. I haven't gotten around to either yet, but what I realize is that the books that I love are the books that make me want to know more. And sometimes they take me forever to read (I believe Death and the Dervish took two months and Bosnian Chronicle was a slog I recall), but they stay with me. When I am in a slump (which I have been since the middle of 2022 by my own assessment), I can read fast and fun books just as well as I did before, but they don't give me the drive make connections, learn more, and immerse myself -- in short, what I love about books.

Transit, by Anna Seghers

As I mentioned in my last post, I picked up Transit to read ahead of a trip I made to Provence in July. I spent a good while scanning my bookshelves for anything I might own that was about Provence. I didn't really know anything about Transit – I found my copy on the sidewalk in Brooklyn a few years ago and pretty much just grabbed it because of my general trust for NYRB classics. I'm not even sure what prompted me to pull it out in my search for a book about Provence, but when I saw it was set in WWII-era Marseille, I figured that was good enough. When I went on to read Anna Seghers' brief bio inside and saw that she left Marseille in 1940 on the same ship as Victor Serge, among others, I knew I had found the right book.

Transit is about the transient life in Marseille in the winter of 1940. As the only port in France still under the flag of France, Marseille was the stopping point for countless refugees from all over Europe looking for a passage out – to anywhere. The book's narrator has escaped a concentration camp and traveled through France mostly on foot as far as Marseille. There, he joins the throngs of people looking to leave, though he himself isn't certain of what he wants to do. Through a series of events, he is mistaken in Marseille for a respected German Jewish writer and he ends up falling in with the writer's wife, who is looking for her husband while also trying to flee. Transit is full of visits to packed bureaucratic offices and appointments with heartless officials who have the power (or are helpless) to determine your fate. the refugees help each other when they are in trouble or resent each other when they have fortune. The narrator runs into the same sad cases over and over in office after office and cafe after cafe. You get lost in the futility of it all.

I read some 60 pages the day I started Transit. It pulled me in immediately and I thought I might finish it before I left for France 5 days later. I got about halfway through before I left and while I did carry it with me to Paris and onward to Avignon, the Luberon region, and even a day trip to Marseille, I didn't get back to reading it until nearly a month after I got back home. When I lose momentum, it can be hard to get it back, but I did immediately take to Transit again when I went back to it. The fact that the bulk of the book could be described as repetitive made it easier to return. It almost didn't matter where I left off; the cycle of events in Transit could have continued on endlessly in my absence until I dropped in on them again. And yet, I really loved this book.

Heart Lamp, by Banu Mushtaq

After finishing A Gentleman in Moscow – ages ago now, it seems – I searched my bookshelves for something to read that might put me in the mindset for my then upcoming trip to Provence. I landed on Anna Seghers' Transit which I tore through at first, but then I lost all momentum when I actually left for my trip. I finally got back to it a couple weeks ago, but I wasn't able to finish it before I needed to start the next book for my Women in Translation book club. So last Friday, after I got the notification that my order of Heart Lamp had arrived at Greenlight Books (just in time – I was starting to get nervous), I went to pick it up and started it on the bus home. 

It had been a long time since I read a book of short stories, and I think it was a nice format for my current style of reading (i.e., barely reading at all). For the most part, I read each story in a single sitting, so there was nothing I had to remember or keep track of. 

While the stories in Heart Lamp are not interconnected in any formal way, they do all inhabit the same world. The stories feature well off families and poor, happy and unhappy, young and old. There is a lot of heartbreak in these stories, but some very funny parts too. Reading the stories as a whole they are greater than the sum of the parts. All together, they give you a colorful, beautiful, detailed picture of Muslim village life in the south of India.