Tremor of Intent, by Anthony Burgess

Sometimes I underestimate my younger self. I think back to myself at age 23 and all I can think is how little I knew, how young I was, how underdeveloped as an adult. When I was 23, on the other hand, I believe I thought myself mature for my age. Maybe both things can be true. I first read Tremor of Intent at age 23 – in the fall of 1999, a window of time that has always, in retrospect, felt specific and significant to my early adulthood. 

I lived in Philadelphia for roughly the calendar year of 1999 and I always say I can remember the things that happened in 1999 with more specificity because if they happened while I lived in Philly, it must have been 1999. I remember the movies of 1999 because I saw them in Philly theaters: Eyes Wide Shut, The Thin Red Line, Magnolia, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Cruel Intentions, American Beauty, Go, Shakespeare in Love (which I have actually never seen, but my father and boyfriend went to see it in Philly while I was at work one evening).

Most of the books I read in 1999 were for school, and I remember some of those well too. I took my first college English class – a course called "The Twentieth Century" (a course name that seemed more profound in the final year of that century), in which I read a mix of poetry, short and long fiction, and theory. T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Alfred Jarry, Samuel Beckett, Zora Neale Hurston, Norman Mailer, David Foster Wallace, and Salman Rushdie. That was in the spring semester. In the fall semester my course load was in German and Linguistics. Also in the fall semester, things changed a lot for me, personally: my boyfriend who had been living with me in Philly moved to Boston to go back to school himself. I found myself alone in a city I didn't know very well. I also found myself taking frequent trips to Boston or to meet my boyfriend (who soon became my fiancé) halfway in New York. And so, even though I was still in school and also working, I had some time to read for pleasure. 

I think Tremor of Intent must have been the second Anthony Burgess book I read. A few years earlier, I had read his first book, The Long Day Wanes, which took me forever to finish, but I liked in the long run. I have no idea why I decided to start with that one. I think I may have started Napoleon Symphony sometime after that, but I'm pretty sure I never finished it, and I'm almost sure I started The Doctor is Sick in 1998, but also didn't finish that. After Tremor of Intent I read The Right to An Answer and perhaps Honey for the Bees, but I never liked anything as well as Tremor of Intent or The Long Day Wanes. I was very determined to read Anthony Burgess it seems (but not A Clockwork Orange, which I still haven't read). In any case, in the fall of 1999 I read – and loved – Tremor of Intent. Over the years, I've continued to remember it fondly, while the plot faded to the barest outline in my memory. I've given it as a gift at least once, I believe more than once.  

The decision to reread Tremor of Intent was partly to see if it held up, and partly to see if my 23-year-old self did. I'd say both of us came out mostly okay. What I remembered about Tremor of Intent was that it was a hilarious and suspenseful spy novel set on a cruise. I think I found it less funny this time. There were some troubling bits I didn't remember being troubled by before: the general condoning of a sexual relationship between a teen girl and the middle-aged protagonist, the perhaps too light treatment of actual pedophilia in another character, some uncomfortable stereotypes. It also had some wonderful bits that I didn't remember from before: mainly the incredible descriptions of the food served on the cruise (which was a gastronomic trip, a fact I hadn't remembered). Then there was the pleasure of reading again what I did remember in a general sense, but not in the specific – what must have made me love the book the first time around: Anthony Burgess' incredible facility with language, the wordplay, the double (and more, I'm sure) meanings. And this is where I get back to where I started this post. Reading Tremor of Intent now I found myself wondering, Did I really get this when I was 23? How much of it went over my head? Does it matter if it did, when I still loved it? I don't have answers for any of these questions. Myself at 23 – half my life ago – is hardly a person I remember anymore. 

The Trees, by Percival Everett

It is a rare writer who could write a comic novel about the history of lynching in America, but Percival Everett has done it. 

To be fair, some parts of The Trees are not comic. The underlying message of the book is that we should remember those who were killed by white supremacy. That we should remember that the history of lynching is American history, and that it represents a massacre spread out over years. This book is an act of remembering. 

About two thirds of the way in there is a chapter that goes on for several pages and consists almost entirely of a list of names. Early on, I found myself wondering, Were these actual people? They can't be. They must be. Emmet Till's name shows up on the 7th page, but even then I wasn't really sure. The first name I recognized after that was Matthew Shepard, and I can't even say that's when I was sure. It was on the page after that where suddenly there were so many names I recognized, starting with Ramarley Graham. I assume the list is chronological or approximately so, but even in the last couple pages there will still many names I'd never heard. It's powerful. (Incredibly, I didn't notice until after finishing the book that this list of names is right there on the cover.)

Of course the list brought me back to two books I've talked about together before: 2666 with its list of murdered women in Mexico and The Gospel According to Jesus Christ with its list of martyrs. I felt sure I had seen this done somewhere else more recently, but I'm not sure where. Perhaps I'm thinking of EEG, which I described when I read it as "a catalogue of under-reported atrocities," and which, like The Trees, is very much a command to remember.

To return to the comic part of the novel: maybe we need humor in the face of trauma. This book certainly offers it. There is a dark comedy to the whole story, but there are also individual lines that are laugh-out-loud funny. (Maybe you had to be there, but the appearance for one page of a "Detective Wesley Snipes, no relation and White" had me screaming laughing. He could have had any name. He's never mentioned again.) To quote Lynn Steger Strong, the judge who selected The Trees as the winner in the first round of the 2022 Tournament of Books, "There’s so much sad and shitty in the world; so many books are so earnestly enmeshed in their own certainty and self-seriousness. The winner is The Trees, because in addition to all its many other accomplishments, it also made me laugh."

The Kiss Quotient, by Helen Hoang, and Lucky Breaks, by Yevgenia Belorusets

I've been in a reading slump for a couple months now. I've started some books I really wanted to read but have found it hard to stick with them. May was a really busy month for me at work and outside of it, and I just didn't feel like reading much. To close out the month, I added a couple days to my Memorial Day weekend and planned a trip to Montreal. I packed two books to take with me: Hamnet, which falls into the above mentioned category of books I really wanted to read but haven't stuck with; and Lucky Breaks, the next selection for my Women in Translation book club, which I had to finish by today.

Events took an unexpected turn last Saturday: my early morning flight was overbooked and I decided to volunteer (in exchange for rather a lot of money) to delay my departure by 12 hours. I could have gone home. I could have gone out and done something in Queens. Instead, exhausted, I checked into the Delta Sky Club and spent the entire day there. I read a few chapters of Hamnet, did some crosswords on my phone, ate the free snacks, and then somewhere in the early afternoon a friend texted me to say he was tearing through The Trees by Percival Everett and to remind me of the existence of e-books that can be checked out of the library. I promptly downloaded the SimplyE app and after first checking out Trust by Hernan Diaz, I realized I would need a different kind of book if my intention was to read on my phone for several hours at the Delta Sky Club. I remembered having heard good things about Helen Hoang's The Kiss Quotient when it came out a couple years ago and found it was available. I read two-thirds of it there at the airport, until the news came in that my replacement flight was delayed until the following morning. Then I went back home, set my alarm for 5am, and did it all over again. I read some more on my flight – though not much, since it's only an hour – and I finished reading  about an hour after checking into my B&B not quite 24 hours after I had expected to arrive there. I wouldn't say I loved The Kiss Quotient, a romance novel about a professionally successful and very rich woman with autism who hires a male escort to learn about sex and relationships, but it was exactly the right book for the circumstances. 

Unsurprisingly, I got no reading done during my actual vacation but on my flight home, I knew I had to start Lucky Breaks if I was going to finish it in time for my book club. It's a very short book – just about 100 pages – made up of several very short chapters/stories. The book seems to sit somewhere on the edge of fiction and non. Most of the stories recount the almost invisible narrator's encounters with women in various parts of Ukraine. Our book club decided to read a Ukrainian book because of current events, but I must say reading it with everything that's in the news was a strange sensation. Much of the book deals with the aftermath of the 2014 Russian incursion into Crimea and the Donbas region, including stories of women who live in those regions and those who have been displaced from them. Obviously, the book predates the current war, but it came out just as it was starting and reading it one feels the war was really no surprise at all. 

It is with good reason that people are criticized for writing about global events in a way that makes them "about me," but I think to do so is also the most natural thing in the world. So, I hope you will indulge me for a moment. For most of my young life, Ukraine wasn't a place I was independently aware of. I knew it as a region of the Soviet Union, I'd heard of Kyiv (though spelled Kiev and mostly just its eponymous preparation of chicken). When the Soviet Union broke apart, I can't say I was ever particularly aware of Ukraine as an independent nation. (The Baltic states are the ones I really remember becoming independent, and while I was certainly more aware of Ukraine as a place than, say, the Central Asian SSRs, it wasn't a place I knew much about at all.) I can place the moment when Ukraine gained some sort of distinction in my mind. Around 2002, I took a literature class with Svetlana Boym. One of the readings for the class was Chekhov's The Lady with the Dog, which takes place in Yalta. Professor Boym had a home in Yalta and the way she talked about it—well, I've wanted to go there ever since. When Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, I'll admit I was selfishly disappointed as well as being appalled generally. Something similar happened with the war this year. While Yalta still seemed out of bounds, I had started thinking about visiting Ukraine in the last couple years – inspired by some combination of things: some friends I made from Kamianets-Podilskyi several years back; Olia Hercules' cookbook, Summer Kitchens; reading about Joseph Roth's childhood outside Lviv; and most immediately this article by Rosa Lyster from the September 2021 NY Times Magazine "Voyages" issue. How could I know that war was right around the corner? And yet now, as I read Lucky Breaks, I realize I could have known. Maybe not specifically, but it wouldn't have come as such a shock of dissonance.

Persuasion, by Jane Austen

I know I've mentioned this before, but aside from Pride & Prejudice, which I first read in 2004, I read all of Jane Austen's novels back to back in the space of a few weeks in the winter of 2005-2006. I enjoyed each one so much that I always wanted to keep going, but in retrospect, this was not a good way to go about it. The books blended together and didn't get the individual attention they deserved. I read Persuasion at the end of this streak and as the years passed I found it to be the one I least remembered, except maybe Lady Susan (which I read second from last). It may be that my memory fails most of them, because I have in the years between 2006 and today watched and rewatched several adaptations – mainly Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility. Those stories and characters are all so intimately familiar to me now from the movies and miniseries, and eventually from having reread the first two more recently. I don't believe I've ever seen an adaptation of Northanger Abbey, but I think it's the book I remember most distinctly from that spree. I have bits of memories of Mansfield Park too. But Persuasion was a total blank. Apparently when I went back in 2009 and retroactively added and rated every book I'd read in Goodreads, I either didn't remember Persuasion at all, or remembered not liking it, because I gave it only 2 stars. I think by the time I got to it, I was done with Jane Austen.* I should have taken a breather. 

I've been intending to get back to Persuasion for years after seeing some people whose tastes I trust rank is as a favorite by Austen. I would see it mentioned admiringly, or see references to its characters, and strain and fail to remember a single thing about it. Clearly it deserved a reread. I won't list it as my new favorite Jane Austen book or anything, but I'm prepared to say I was very unfair to it the first time around. Perhaps I found Anne dull on my earlier reading? I still did; being about the only reasonable, level-headed character in the story makes her sympathetic, but not very interesting. But this time I enjoyed the story; I enjoyed portrayals of the unreasonable non-level-headed characters; I enjoyed the scenery. 

And while the story itself felt novel (because I remembered nothing of it), the book felt familiar because I'm so much more familiar with Jane Austen now than I was when I first read it. A few weeks ago I watched the recent Andrew Davies adaptation of Sanditon on Masterpiece. Davies is also responsible for the 1996 BBC Pride and Prejudice, and watching Sanditon I noticed him borrowing from himself. (I've seen that Pride and Prejudice enough times that every line is familiar.) What I noticed in reading Persuasion was that Jane Austen also borrows from herself. I saw reflections of so many of her other works in this one. 

* I used to have a rule, which I clearly broke for Jane Austen, about not reading books by the same author back to back. I created this rule some 25 years ago when, immediately after reading Beloved I started Sula and found it unreadable. A couple years later I went back and read Sula and loved it. I decided it was a mistake to immediately pick up another book by the author of a book you read and loved, because what you would really be looking for was a continuation of the earlier book. (Obviously, this rule didn't apply to sequels and series that were in fact continuations of the earlier books.)

Justine, by Iben Mondrup

I grabbed Justine out of the Little Free Library on my way to the airport a week ago Friday, even though I already had two books with me for the 3 night trip ahead. I'd never heard of it or its author; it was the publisher that caught my eye: Open Letter. They publish only books in translation, including some by authors I love (Mercè Rodoreda, most notably). I started reading it poolside at my hotel in Austin, but didn't get very far. It's not exactly poolside material, plus I didn't get enough sleep any of the nights I was away, so my reading energy was limited. When I took my seat for my flight home, I pulled it out to and put it in the seat pocked in front of me to potentially read en route, although I was still overtired. I was seated next to a flight attendant who must have recognized Iben Mondrup as a Danish name because she asked me about it. It turned out she was married to a Dane and spoke Danish. I told her what I wrote above: that I didn't know anything about the book or author, but had chosen it because of the publisher. This was a novel concept to her and she went on to look for other Open Letter books in her library app and asked me about other publishers I would recommend. In the moment, I could only think of New Directions, but I also recommended The Copenhagen Trilogy to her, which she immediately went and put on hold at the library. (I did warn her that it was a bit dark. Not as dark, it turns out, as Justine.)

Justine centers on a young woman artist (the eponymous Justine) who, as the book opens, has just lost her home – and with it all her work – to a fire. The home had belonged to her grandfather, a painter, and his work was also destroyed. For Justine, the fire represents the loss of her whole past – and then some. The story unfolds disjointedly, jumping in time to before the fire and back to the present. When the fire occurred, Justine was a short time away from staging an exhibit of her work at the National Gallery, and she has lost everything she prepared for it. So she must create a body of work to show (backing out isn't an option she's willing to consider), with no home, no studio, and no materials. She proceeds to get very drunk, frequently. She crashes at friends' houses, in a factory, in studios, borrows materials, charms and alienates the people around her who want to help. Even as Justine puts together a body of photographs and videos that will be her triumph, the reader is slowly made aware of a horrible, dark secret, the full effect of which is never seen in this book. (There is, evidently, a sequel.) 

I subscribe to Matt Bell's Writing Exercises (which I highly recommend to anyone who is at all interested in writing). This month's newsletter (The Novel-Shaped Story II) has stayed very much on my mind for some reason. Since reading it, I've found myself mentally applying the three-act framework retroactively to all kinds of books I've read, and it's been an eye-opening exercise. In Justine the inciting incident – the fire – is the first thing we know. It's happens before any exposition, and description of the characters, anything else in the book. And yet, even in that moment, there are clues to what we will later learn, and deceptions as well. The unclarity around time in the narrative slows the reader's comprehension of the central event of the book, even as it's there for us right on the first page. I didn't totally love this book, but its exposition is brilliant.

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, Balli Kaur Jaswal

The last month has been a lot. Work has been busy and I haven't had much mental energy outside of it. After finishing Loving Day, I started a long book I'd been intending to read for quite a while, but reading it was rarely what I wanted to do at the end of the day or in the morning. Instead, I watched Sanditon and Bridgerton and played Spelling Bee on my phone. And then I had some weekends away, so I did less reading then than I might have. Last Wednesday, after finishing a full rewatch of both seasons of Bridgerton, I decided maybe I should just start a new book. I mention Bridgerton only because I think it influenced my selection – I wanted to read something romantic. I didn't know much about Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows but the title at least suggested it might fit the bill. I picked it up a few years ago thinking it might represent Singapore in my world books project, because the author lives there, however the book is entirely about the Sikh community in London so I'm not sure that's fair. (Then again, my New Zealand book was entirely about a winemaker in nineteenth century France, so maybe it's ok? Or maybe I have to read a new book from New Zealand too.) In any case, I started Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows on Wednesday and finished it on a plane on Friday.  

At the center of the book is Nikki, a second generation Punjabi Londoner in her early 20s who signs up to teach what she believes will be a creative writing class for Sikh women. It turns out what was expected was a literacy class, but what the class in fact turns into is an erotic story-telling class filled with mostly older, widowed women, who most of society treats as invisible. Expected antics ensue, the women gain mutual respect, an unsolved murder is solved, and of course there is a love story for Nikki. This was a fun read that turned out to be just what I was looking for at the moment. 

On Film Adaptations and Atonement

A mistake I am known to make is rushing to read a book before the movie comes out. I say this is a mistake, because inevitably what ends up happening is the book is then too fresh in my mind when I see the movie, and all I can see are the differences. I know this is something that's happened to me several times, but the example I remember most clearly is Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The beginning or very nearly the beginning of the movie is set somewhere toward the middle of the events in the book and features a character whom, in the book, we believe – at that point in time – may be dead. This infuriated me on first watching the film, on Christmas Day of 2011, five months after finishing the book. I've since watched the movie several more times. The book has grown more and more distant in my memory, and the movie I quite like. I almost never do it on purpose, but I honestly think the better order of things is to watch a movie before reading the book it was adapted from. You will almost always get more out of the book, so it's unlikely to disappoint. 

Last night, I watched the 2007 film Atonement, based on the Ian McEwan novel, which I read in 2003. In cases like this, when that much time has passed (or even half as much), between my reading of a book and the release of a movie, I find myself thinking I should re-read the book so it's fresh in my memory. I think I'm afraid seeing the movie will cancel out the book in my mind. But my experience watching Atonement suggests something else. 

I really liked the book Atonement when I read it. I went on to read three other Ian McEwan books on the strength of my feelings about Atonement, none of which I liked as well. Nearly 20 years on, I remembered very little. I wasn't particularly interested in the movie when it came out. I remember being aware that it came out, but I don't remember hearing much about it. I imagine I thought it couldn't stand up to the book. It was only much more recently that I heard anything at all about the movie that made me curious. Specifically, it was something about the green dress Keira Knightly wears in the film. I'm not sure if it was this article or another, but I remember being surprised to learn the film featured any costume that was now considered iconic, given how little I'd heard about it at the time. Anyway, I can't say I thought about it much again until I was scrolling on HBO last night, saw that it was streaming, and rather impulsively decided to watch it. I really enjoyed it. I felt like I remembered just enough of the story – or perhaps more accurately that I'd forgotten just enough of the story. 

I see on Goodreads I only gave Atonement 4 stars, but I suspect if I had rated it at the time I read it I would have given it 5. (In 2009, I went back and retroactively added and rated every book I'd read as far back as I kept records, so all ratings for books I read before 2009 are based on how much I remembered liking them in 2009.) I think my high opinion of the book faded a bit as acclaim for it grew. The other thing I see when I look up Atonement on Goodreads is a review by my ex-husband, written in 2007 – a year after we split up – though I am nearly certain he actually read the book while we were together. That this review exists is a surprise to me. I can only imagine that he meant to offend (maybe just to kid – maybe I'm thinking too badly of him) when he, apparently, suggested that Harry Potter fans would enjoy it. In any case, his middling opinion undoubtedly negatively affected my own feelings about the book (an unfortunate theme in our relationship). In any case, seeing the movie actually reminded me how much I once liked the book. Maybe I should watch more movies of books I read decades ago. 

Loving Day, by Mat Johnson

Mat Johnson is a writer I know of because of Twitter. I've followed him there for years, though I can't remember how I initially found my way to him. Several years ago, I found a copy of his book Pym at the thrift shop I used to frequent on my lunch break back when I worked in Murray Hill. I didn't buy it, a decision I found myself soon after when I read (again, I have no idea where, though likely also on Twitter) something that made me curious to read it. It has stayed in the back of my mind. Last year, when I was visiting the Bay Area over Thanksgiving, I found Loving Day at a San Francisco thrift shop and I saw it as an opportunity to correct my mistake. I came very close to starting it that week. I think I had in mind that if I finished it while I was there, I could leave it behind with the friend I was visiting, who is biracial. Knowing nothing about it besides the title, I thought it might be of particular interest to her (and indeed, while I was reading it, I thought that several times again). I'm having a hard time remembering any off the top of my head, though I'm sure I've read other books that center mixed race characters. But Loving Day is surely the only book I've read that is specifically about being mixed race. What's odd is that this is so remarkable. Loving Day is about a biracial man, recently divorced, who moves back home to Philadelphia where he discovers he has a teenaged daughter, whom he was previously unaware of. His daughter, the product of a relationship he had as a teenager with a Jewish girl, has been raised as a white Jew, though we eventually learn she had suspicions that she was part Black. This was a funny and sweet book.

Home Reading Service, by Fabio Morábito

Last Friday evening, I started Vladimir by Julia May Jonas, a book I found recently in the Little Free Library near my apartment. (At the same time, I also found a copy of Lolita, which I read some 25 years ago and grabbed anyway because I own nearly every other book by Nabokov and I figured I should round out my collection. I wondered if the two books may have been left there by the same person, at the same time.) I found myself really enjoying it. I was drawn in by the narrator's voice, by a familiar self-loathing heterosexuality and disgust with the physical body. Over the next couple days, I read 150 pages and then on Sunday around 5pm I had to stop reading abruptly as I saw what was about to come (which should have been quite clear to me from the beginning, and yet hadn't stopped me then). Around 2am that night, I woke up feeling anxious about the book and fretted about it for an hour or so before I could fall asleep again. Monday morning, I stared at it on my coffee table. I was only about 80 pages from finishing it, but I couldn't face it. 

Instead I picked up another book from my coffee table, which I had found in that same Little Free Library just two days earlier: Home Reading Service by Fabio Morábito. I didn't know anything about this book or its author before I found it. It seems not much has been translated into English, but this book was the recipient of Mexico's 2018 Premio Xavier Villarrutia and was released in English* last year. Set in Cuernavaca, the book is narrated by Eduardo who — in the wake of a never-described driving accident — has been mandated to perform community service. A priest friend of his sister's arranges for him to do this in the form of serving as a reader in the homes of the old and infirm. He has five clients: a pair of elderly brothers, a retired military man, a deaf family who read lips, a partly paralyzed aspiring opera singer, and a couple who appear to be in perfect health and of means, so that he has no idea why they've been offered his services. The book follows a trail of funny, unexpected events, intrigues, and tragedies among these characters and others in his life as Eduardo comes to terms with himself. This was a really fun read.

* Here's a fun interview with the book's translator. 

Garden by the Sea, by Mercè Rodoreda

Garden by the Sea is the third book I've read by Mercè Rodoreda. I read A Broken Mirror in 2018, which is unfortunately a year I took off from writing about the books I read. I say "unfortunately" because today I find it hard to remember much about it. I have images in my mind (it must have been a very visual book!) of the house in Barcelona where the story takes place, the garden with its fountain, the wall outside the house, the foyer, the staircase, the bedrooms; images of a jeweler's shop, a brooch, a carriage, a street. I do remember bits of the story, but more I remember the general mood: aching, melancholic, nostalgic. I loved it. I named it one of my favorite books I read that year. 

About a year later, I read Rodoreda's most famous book, The Time of the Doves. I have a lot of lingering mental images from this book too— most distinctly, a room on the top of a building filled with pigeons— and the memory of a mood: poverty, privation, war in the distance. But I didn't love The Time of the Doves the way I did A Broken Mirror. I found the story sometimes hard to follow and the narrative style — sort of stream of consciousness — a bit disengaging. Most of all, there was something about the relationship between the narrator and her husband that never quite clicked for me. I couldn't understand why she loved him, why she put up with him, why she let him fill that room at the top of their house with pigeons! It never felt like he loved her in return. And, I mean, I know such relationships exist; I was just unconvinced by this one. 

So I guess you could say that going into Garden by the Sea, I was hopeful that I would find another A Broken Mirror and a little wary that I might find instead another The Time of the Doves. I'm pleased to report it was the former. I knew within just a few pages that I would love this book. Garden by the Sea is narrated by the aging gardener at the seaside estate that serves as the summer home for a wealthy young couple from Barcelona. The reader develops an affection for the gardener and we do learn a little about his story and quite a lot about his lifestyle, but the main story he tells us is of a love triangle between the Senyora of the house, her husband, and her childhood sweetheart, who shows up, suddenly a wealthy, married man, on the neighboring seaside estate. The book has an upstairs/downstairs quality, where the reader gets to listen in on the gossip of the gardener, cooks, and housekeepers. It's been a very long time since I read The Remains of the Day — and the gardener is a very different kind of narrator (a different kind of person) from that book's butler — but I found myself thinking of it as I read Garden by the Sea with its secondhand plot. 

Like the other two Rodoreda books I've read, Garden by the Sea is also an intensely visual book. Flowers are ever-present, defining each moment of the season as they bloom and die, or are picked for a bouquet or trampled at a party or under attack by aphids or unearthed and repotted. But there are so many other visual details as well: the specific color of the dresses the gardener's long-dead wife wore; the rowboat, with its red paint peeling over the years, and then repainted; the old eucalyptus tree; the little beach at the bottom of the stairs below the garden; the swimming pool on the neighboring estate that is lit from inside(!); the sunflower wallpaper at the local inn that the gardener buys to repaper his own kitchen; the handmade envelopes where the gardener stores his seeds. I can picture all these things. I have such a strong, tangible image of this lovely seaside villa and the Catalonian town where it stood, and it's stunning.