Milkman, by Anna Burns

I first heard of Milkman from my mother, who must have read it when it was pretty new. I remember her trying to explain it to me and it was a little hard to wrap my head around her description, but having now read it, I understand why. The description went something like, "It's about the troubles in Northern Ireland, and you don't know any of the characters' names, and there's a mysterious guy called 'Milkman' who everyone thinks is involved with the main character, but really she doesn't know him," which is completely accurate, but didn't give me much of a sense of the book. Though, my mother also said she thought I would like it, and she's usually good at knowing my taste in books, so it stuck with me in the back of my mind. Earlier this summer someone suggested we read it for our book club and I remembered my mom's recommendation, so I seconded the suggestion and eventually we selected it. 

I originally thought I was going to have to read it on my iPad -- I was able to get the ebook from the library -- but when I was in Ithaca a couple weeks ago browsing at bookshops (something that seemed so novel after all these months!), I saw a copy at The Odyssey Bookstore when I hadn't even thought to be looking for it, but I bought it on the spot and I'm so glad I did. I don't think I would have liked to read this as an ebook. The paragraphs are dense and long and I think that would have felt compounded on the screen. It took me two weeks to the day to finish Milkman, which somehow felt like an eternity. I had originally budgeted myself a week to read it ahead of our book club meeting, but thankfully others also found it slow going so we pushed it back a week and I finished in time. I don't know if it's that I've gotten used to finishing books in just a few days or if it's somehow compounded by being at home nearly all the time, but I don't think two weeks used to feel like a long time to be reading one book. There may have been a day or two where I didn't read it at all and there were definitely days where I only read 10-15 pages, but my pace did pick up for the last 100 pages or so. All this talk of how slow it felt is not to say I didn't enjoy it; quite the opposite. The narrator's voice is unique. I felt I could hear her and get inside her head. There was also something really beautiful that came through here and there: her latter years care for her young self. She was 18 years old, the middle of 10 or 11 children, living in the midst of this political and social situation that made her life and her options very narrow. You have the sense that she emerged from it into a wider world, and that the narrator is telling her young self: it's ok; you did ok; you could not have done differently.

One small reason I was interested in reading Milkman is that I had yet to read a book from Northern Ireland for my World Books Project -- I've read books from the Republic of Ireland and from the other 3 countries of the United Kingdom, so Northern Ireland seemed like a particular gap I needed to fill. And Milkman is very much about Northern Ireland. The political situation of Catholics in the North is not so much the backdrop for the events of the book as the milieu. Reading this book was pretty eye-opening for me. On the one hand, I did know things had been bad, but I guess I never quite internalized how bad. I visited Northern Ireland with my parents twice before the border opened; we had family friends in Belfast. The first time was in 1987 and we went by ferry I believe from Scotland, and I can't say I remember much about that crossing or visit. The second time was around Easter in 1989 or 1990 and we drove up from the Republic of Ireland and I will never forget that crossing. I was stretched out in the back seat of the car. As we stopped at the border, two soldiers were positioned on either side of our car, each pointing a gun at one of the four car windows. As we got to Belfast, there were bonfires burning all over. My mother tells me people were burning the pope in effigy. The city center was closed to traffic and there were checkpoints everywhere. It made a big impression, and yet somehow, perhaps because I was 13 and didn't comprehend the significance of what I saw (I had never had a gun pointed at me at a border crossing before, but then again neither had I crossed many borders), perhaps because I was just there a few days, I really didn't understand the scope of the Troubles. Milkman drove it home: the divided communities; the isolation; the mistrust; the dead or fled members of every family. 

How To Travel without Seeing, by Andrés Neuman

Reading How To Travel without Seeing at this moment -- when one can't travel at all -- was an interesting experience. I think I mentioned in my last post that I've been writing about travel in the absence of being able to travel. My project is almost the inverse of Neuman's in this book: what I've been recording are memories of travel, sometimes digging far into the past; this book is an in-the-moment record of Neuman's observations on a book tour (in two parts) through Latin America. 

The familiar and now absent (from my life at least) rhythm of airports, immigration, and travel pulses through this book, but that wasn't the only jarring aspect of reading this book. Neuman wrote this book in 2009, though it wasn't published in English until 2016. I would not have recalled, but 2009 was the year the world was on alert for swine flu. Particularly during the first legs of Neuman's journey, there was an odd ring of the present -- or of travel during those last weeks before the present. (I managed to take ten flights (and also to get off an eleventh after boarding, when the restrictions on European travel were announced in March) in the first few weeks of 2020, and I watched as the number of masks and the general tension at airports increased over that space of time.) Neuman crosses checkpoints where temperatures are taken, where health forms must be completed, where masks are worn. I think if I had read this a year ago, I would have found this surprising. What I found surprising reading it now was that I had missed it before. I did travel some in 2009, but I guess not to places where the swine flu was. 

In fact, my reaction to the book's treatment of swine flu was just one example of an experience I had again and again while reading How To Travel without Seeing. The year 2009 is not so long ago, but (undoubtedly with some exceptions I can't think of right now) I am hard pressed to name an event that happened in 2009. Ok: I know there was Obama's inauguration at the beginning of the year. In fact, it was rather an eventful year in my personal life, but larger global events -- aside from the Obama presidency, and all that goes along with it -- there's nothing I could swear happened in 2009, and not a year earlier, a year later. But this book, written as it was as a (more or less) pure reflection of the present in 2009, had all kinds of references to current events that struck me: was that in 2009? and was that also in 2009? Much of this was related to Latin American politics, which I can't say I've ever followed closely. So, at the time of the book's writing, Lula was president of Brazil and was an established popular leader in South America; Evo Morales was just completing his first term as president of Bolivia; Chávez was still alive and Nicolás Maduro was an ambassador of some sort (he comes up!); FARC was still active in Colombia, but things were changing fast there; and -- the event that was most notable in the book, in part because it coincided perfectly with the author's time in Latin America, as well as preventing his planned stop in Tegucigalpa -- the coup was taking place in Honduras, which unlike everything else I've mentioned, I don't even remember as an event.

As well as following local politics, Neuman makes a point to seek out local writers, and a good portion of the book is devoted to excerpted pieces or reflections he's had on reading poems, essays, and stories by authors from the countries he visited. Most were not writers with whom I was familiar, though of course the big names come up (again and again): Borges, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, García Márquez, Bolaño. I was gratified to find Eduardo Halfon's writing come up when Neuman visited Guatemala (and slightly disappointed that Horacio Castellanos Moya's did not come up when he visited El Salvador). I looked up a couple of the writers whose names I didn't know and didn't find anything in English, though I'd like to do a more thorough investigation.

A couple chapters in, I was trying to figure out what this book reminded me of and I came to an unexpected conclusion: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. It's not just that it's similarly fragmented, though obviously that's part of it. It's definitely more of a personal piece, and also very rooted in the present. But the mixture of observations and fragments of other writing, the sense of a thesis behind it all, some thoughts just one sentence (e.g., "The sharp Paraguayan sigh."), it all had a feeling that reminded me of the Arcades Project. I can tell you the line where it hit me, from page 74: "Here the cars are like cable cars." (Though I can't tell you why that was the line where it hit me.)

Grove: A Field Novel, by Esther Kinsky

I started Grove toward the end of July. I read it for a week, set it aside for a week, read it for a week, set it aside for a week, and thought I would read it for another week before finishing, but in fact the last section took me just two days. My slow progress and long breaks should not be seen as criticisms: I loved this book. But it reads very slowly, and it wasn't the sort of book I could sit down and read for a long stretch. I also, as I mentioned in a previous post, found myself writing a lot while I was reading this book. I'm not much of a poetry person, but more than once I've read interviews with authors who say that poetry is what they read when they are in the midst of writing something. For me, I think this book served the same purpose. (And Esther Kinsky is, in fact, a poet as well.) The book is very much about the language it consists of and the images it evokes. I don't know if that makes any sense. 

Grove is divided into three parts, which cover several trips to Italy taken by the narrator. The first and third part are solo trips in some rough present, in the wake of the death of a partner, about whom you learn little. Both are winter trips to out of the way places, or places reserved for summer vacations. In the middle section, the narrator recalls what seems to have been frequent childhood trips to Italy with her family. Her father, repelled by eels, and fascinated by the Etruscans, Byzantine mosaics, and Fra Angelico, brings his family to Italy to follow his passions. 

The subtitle "A Field Novel" is not totally clear in its meaning, but much of the book is centered on observations of the natural world in the villages the narrator visits, particularly birds and trees. Eels make unexpectedly frequent appearances in this book. There are observations on the built world as well, particularly in its run down state. All of these observations seem to be filters for the narrator processing her loss, of her partner and of her father before that. Another recurring theme is places of the living and places of the dead. The narrator visits many, many cemeteries, but the places of the living she visits aren't very inhabited by the living either. 

I could say much more, but I won't. This book is gorgeous.

The Intuitionist, by Colson Whitehead

I haven't been in the mood to read. Or perhaps I haven't been reading the right things. Or perhaps (and I do think this is the root of it) my mental energy has been sapped by work and I haven't had it in me to read. (Is that different from not being "in the mood"? Who can say.)

The week before last, I continued to read Grove in small bits and I got through the second section (out of three) in it. I also participated in a week-long #1000wordsofsummer beginning August 10. The two-week #1000wordsofsummer hit at a time when I was very busy with work and I didn't feel up to it, but when this one came up, even though I was again (still?) very busy with work, I decided to give it a go. I wrote upwards of 1000 words on 6 of the 7 days (and 500 and change on one of them), and ended the week with some 9500 words. (On one of those days, I wrote the >1000-word love letter to markets that was my last post here.) Grove turns out to be a very good book to read when I want to write. Or maybe just a very good book for what I've mostly been writing, which is memories of travel. That is, in fact, much of what Grove is, and it's definitely been part of my inspiration.

Last weekend, in a very unusual turn of events this side of COVID, I didn't read at all. I had to work half a day or so on Saturday, and after that I just laid around on the couch for a while, cooked dinner at 4pm, and then watched TV the rest of the evening. Sunday, I ran two errands, which involved walking 4 miles in total, and I discovered that I haven't kept in shape quite as much as I'd hoped (my legs were very sore on Monday). But it was nice to be out. It was in the 60s and rainy here, and I wore long pants and a jacket and it felt pleasantly cool. Monday morning, I thought about resuming Grove, but decided to take a week away and started The Intuitionist instead. Given that the last time I took a break from Grove, I chose a 700-page book and then also had to read another book for a book club, I thought I'd be smarter and pick something short, something that might last me a few days, and then I could go back to Grove refreshed, or at least sated in my desire for plot. But that's not quite how it worked out. It wasn't The Intuitionist's fault. I made decent headway Monday and Tuesday, but I barely touched it Wednesday and didn't at all on Thursday. I thought I could catch up on Friday because my day theoretically ends early on summer Fridays, but I didn't actually end early, and only had a little time with it before I had to do other things. Finally, yesterday, I went back to it and read in earnest. And then I read the full second half ("half" in how the book is broken up, it's actually less than half) this morning before I had to work again at 12:30.

It seems like The Intuitionist is the Colson Whitehead novel that gets recommended to me most often. I did enjoy it quite a bit, but I don't think it has the power of his two most recent books. In addition to those two, the other book of Whitehead's I've read is John Henry Days, about the to-do surrounding the issuance of a commemorative John Henry stamp, which I found slow going, but rewarding in the end. The Intuitionist reminded me more of it than the others. There was one thing peculiar to me that made The Intuitionist an interesting read. The book centers on the work of elevator inspectors. In my day job I work with the people who develop the elevator safety codes. One of my favorite people I know through work was personally responsible for this work at Otis, until his retirement several years ago. I kept wondering if he knew about this book. I'm half tempted to send it to him. I wonder what he would think.

A Love Letter to Some Markets I've Visited

For me, the Marché Jean-Talon is the ur-market. The first time I visited Jean-Talon, in Montreal's Little Italy, was in August of 2007. I had taken the train up to Montreal for a few days to visit a friend who was living there, and we went out there to pick up some produce for our dinner. Jean-Talon in August is a sight to see: vegetables for miles; everything big (the vegetables are bigger in Canada because of the long hours of sunlight in summer - it’s true!) and bright and bursting. The colors: green, obviously, but so many shades of green! And red, of course, but also purple and yellow, and orange. Buckets of red and yellow tomatoes; of green, orange and yellow peppers; of purple and pale green and golden and white cauliflower. The most beautiful mushrooms, of every variety from white to golden to earthy brown. And berries: strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries. A giant tub of ground cherries is $20 Canadian. And let’s not forget the plants and flowers. Potted pepper plants with tiny red chilis, basil, rosemary, and other herbs I couldn’t identify. Bunches of dried purple, orange, and yellow flowers. 

Since that first visit, I’ve made a point to go to Marché Jean-Talon every time I’ve gone to Montreal. It’s the largest permanent open air market in North America, though obviously the selection shrinks dramatically in the Quebecois winter. In the summer, the market stands selling produce extend well outside the structure, but in winter, the central part of the market remains open, the bakers and butchers and cheesemongers still open for business, and a scaled back outdoor market with whatever is in season (or whatever never goes out of season). I’ve also sought out Montreal’s other markets. None is as impressive as Jean Talon, of course, but each has its charm and sensibility. 

Perhaps Jean-Talon opened my eyes to markets as a concept. While New York has a few nominal markets (the Essex Street Market, which I never visited in its traditional hey day; the Chelsea Market, which feels too segmented into shops to be a proper market; and the glut of food halls that have made homes in the city overy the past few years), there has never seemed to me to be a market culture here. The Union Square green market, and some of its smaller counterparts, are perhaps the closer comparisons, but unlike at the Montreal markets or the ones I’ve visited since in other parts of the world, you should expect to pay more at our green markets than you would if you bought the food elsewhere -- admittedly, for higher quality food. (This is perhaps a peculiarity of American farming and food costs, which I don’t know much about, but have heard anecdotally from many European visitors that our food seems to them outrageously expensive. And I, on the flip side, am always struck at how inexpensive food is when I travel.) Or maybe it’s just New York. When I lived in Boston, I remember going to Haymarket on Saturday mornings. There, the produce is dirt cheap (and often on its last legs). My father, who lives in Philadelphia, does the bulk of his shopping at the Italian market, where he might pay $1 for a bucket of tomatoes or peppers. The Italian market.

The first time I visited Palermo, in 2015, I got a little map of the city which showed each of the city’s three main markets and the specialties of each: the Mercato di Ballarò, the city’s oldest market; the Mercato il Capo, where you can buy clothes and cell phone accessories alongside your vegetables; and the Vucciria night market for street food. Having by this time visited many markets, I was expecting a market structure, if not a fully enclosed space. I walked up to the Mercato di Ballarò, along the streets lined with vendors, wondering where the main market was. I turned north and walked toward the Mercato il Capo, and then as I approached the Porta Carini, past roughly constructed tables heaped with vegetables and fruits, with tarps stretched overhead, I saw the prototype for the Philadelphia Italian market. How had I failed to recognize it? The Italian market indeed.

Elsewhere in Italy, I’ve seen enclosed markets and covered markets with market stalls. In Grassano, in the hills of Basilicata, I stopped in the Mercato Coperto di Piazza della Libertà, a small, rather ugly indoor market with vegetable stalls, butchers, a fish stall, and a couple alimentari stalls. It was mid-morning on a weekday and the market was quiet, with only about half the stalls open for business. I went in to use the restroom, but paused on my way to have a look around. If I ever want to feel down about American food culture, I need just remind myself that in a backwater Italian town of 5,000, you can walk into the dingy little market in the town center and have at your fingertips all the varieties of cheeses, the cured meats, the fresh meats, the olives, the oil, everything you could wish for, and whatever produce is in season. It breaks my heart.

In Venice, where square footage on land is scarce, the Mercato di Rialto takes over the space under the tall arches of a building that’s raised one level up (ground floors are risky in Venice anyway) and runs right up to the canal side. Though distinctly Venetian in form, right down to the ogee arch on the windows of the upper level, the market hall is reminiscent of the petites halles market structures found in many a French village. The market in Mirepoix, in Ariège, is on Mondays in one of these structures. It sits directly across from the church on one side of the town center, but the market stalls - couverts - continue under the arcades that go fully around the central square.

Marché Jean-Talon has been around for less than a century, while the market in Mirepoix has been going for hundreds of years. But you can see the latter reflected in the former. The style of the market is very French. But situated, as it is, in the heart of Montreal’s Italian community, that influence is there as well. Many of the shops that surround the market sell Italian specialty items. Maybe that’s part of what makes it so special for me. It’s a market of the new world, and the first market I fell in love with.

Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata

As I wrote yesterday, I had a book I had to finish ahead of a book club meeting this morning. That book was Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata, which was this month's selection for the Idlewild Books Women in Translation book club. (As it happens, August is Women in Translation Month. Go read some women in translation!)

This is a slim book (160 pages, but smaller than standard trade paperback size) that I read in a couple hours yesterday. The narrator, Keiko, is a 36-year-old woman who has been working in a convenience store for half her life. It's never spelled out, but Keiko is likely neuroatypical. Her job at the convenience store comes with training and a manual that serve as a model for being for Keiko. She recognizes that she is not what other people consider normal, but she learns to appear normal by mimicking them, with a deep understanding of what she's doing. She borrows other people's patterns of speech, but will combine different patterns to suit the occasion. Her deep self-awareness makes her aware of this behavior in other people too, where they probably don't even see it themselves. For instance, she observes that her sister has changed after she has a baby, and she attributes it to the time she is likely spending with other parents. Her observation of other people was, for me, one of the most interesting aspects of the book. 

Convenience Store Woman shared certain similarities with a book I read earlier this year, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. Like Keiko, Eleanor devotes much of her own attention to appearing normal and generally going unnoticed. But Eleanor suffers from PTSD, and her story is one of recovery and entering "normal" society. Keiko goes some length toward trying to take a path that would seem more typical for a woman her age, but her self-discovery is that she belongs in the convenience store. 

The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas

I dug myself into a bit of a hole last weekend. I still have The Famished Road and Light Years sitting unfinished (187 pages into the former and 160 pages into the latter) on the table beside my couch. About two weeks ago, after finishing Emma, I started a new book: Grove by Esther Kinsky. It's a beautifully written book about loss and solitude and travel and Italy, which I will write about eventually when I finish it. I read it for five days, Monday through Friday of the week before last, and arrived, on the Friday, at the end of Part One. It was very slow going. The chapters are short, which keeps things moving in a way, but I found myself pausing a lot, thinking a lot, writing a little, and actually starting up my Italian studies again. (All of these are positives, it's true.) But Grove is not the sort of book you dive into for a weekend of reading and that was the sort of book I thought I needed last weekend. So, I set Grove aside and I picked up The Three Musketeers last Saturday. I read about 70 pages that day and another 70 or so on Sunday. Almost immediately I had the thought that it had been foolish of me to take a break from one book with another book that was nearly 700 pages long -- especially foolish considering there was yet another book I needed to read for a book club meeting a week later (that is, tomorrow as I'm writing this). The visions of arriving at this weekend -- today -- with five unfinished books on my side table loomed over me. Fortunately, as the days passed -- even as I was back to working during the week -- my reading pace picked up. Late Thursday, it occurred to me I might actually be able to finish The Three Musketeers on Friday (thanks to my work's summer Fridays early closure) and start today fresh with just my book club book to finish. And I did: I read just over 200 pages yesterday and finished it just in time for my weekly Friday night movie club screening.

This was the second Dumas book I've read. The first was The Count of Monte Cristo, which I enjoyed despite the poor translation (which I have written about previously). The edition of The Three Musketeers that I read was translated by Richard Pevear, which was part of the attraction for me. I knew this wouldn't have the stumbling adherence to the French syntax that made The Count of Monte Cristo so awkward. I hoped that my enjoyment of the story would benefit as a result. I was not disappointed. I also feel fortunate that I didn't actually know the story of The Three Musketeers at all. In fact, my primary awareness of them came from crosswords, where they are occasionally answers (Athos most frequently), and which was how I came to know their names (and which was also the source of much confusion on my part, prior to reading the book, about the fact that there were clearly four of them, not three). But beyond the names, I knew nothing. The book is an action-packed delight. The distinct characters of the musketeers themselves, and of their lackeys, were wonderfully entertaining. Milady, the evil genius villain, is incredible. I'd love to read an alternate version centering her story! 

Emma, by Jane Austen

I very rarely reread books. I like the idea of rereading, but with limited time and unlimited books, the previously unread always seems to get priority of place for me. I first read Emma in 2005. I was something of a latecomer to Jane Austen, as I wrote when I reread Pride and Prejudice in 2016. I first read that book in November of 2004 when I was subletting an apartment and ran out of my own reading material. About a year after that I went back and read the remainder of her novels in the space of just a few weeks (pausing somewhere in the middle to also read The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling). If my record-keeping is accurate, I read Emma right in the middle of the pack: Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park before; Northanger Abbey, (Tom Jones), Lady Susan, and Persuasion after. Reading them all in such quick succession was, I think, not such a good idea in the end. They all kind of blended together. For reasons that probably don't have much to do with merit, Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey are the ones that stood out for me. (And Tom Jones, which I adored, and was, I have to say, a refreshing break from Jane Austen.)

I started rereading Emma back in February to refresh my memory ahead of the new film adaptation. But this was during that period this year when I was sick and none of my reading was going well and I set it aside after about 25 pages. I didn't think I'd go back any time soon, but then my friend group who have been watching movies together (that is to say, simultaneously in our own homes) throughout quarantine selected Clueless as our film for last week. I had just finished Romance in Marseille and Emma seemed like it would be a fun change from what I'd been reading lately. 

My experience going back to Emma was similar to my experience going back to Pride and Prejudice. In the period since I first read the book, I've seen multiple TV and film adaptations, multiple times. The story and its twists are now quite familiar to me; perhaps too familiar. In fact, the moment when Emma offends Miss Bates and is lectured by Mr. Knightley is, I think, one of the reasons I stopped reading it in February: I dreaded that moment. (Today, I read it without too much pain.) I think it took me a hundred pages or more to really get beyond the anticipation of everything and fall into the text, but once I did, it was a delight. 

Romance in Marseille, by Claude McKay

Romance in Marseille was published for the first time this year -- nearly a century after it was written. It's the story of Lafala, a ship-worker from an unnamed locale in colonized West Africa, who stows away on a boat heading to New York out of Marseille. After being discovered, he's locked in a freezing bathroom on the boat for the bulk of the crossing. On his arrival in New York, he finds he has lost the use of his legs, and he is taken to a hospital where they are amputated. Things take an unexpected turn when a fellow patient -- a Black man from Harlem -- puts Lafala in touch with a lawyer who sues the shipping company, which settles for a large payment. The company is made to provide Lafala with high quality artificial limbs and he's shipped back to Marseille first class and finds a new quality of life there with his money, though without his legs. 

The most interesting part of this book is the portrait of 1920s Marseille itself. In the bars and brothels in Quayside, sailors and workers of different races from all over the world mingle. Lafala's circle includes other Africans, African-Americans, West Indians, among others. The common thread of the African Diaspora and life at sea binds them together. Lafala's love interest is Sudanese, by way of Morocco. The Marseille of this book is a global city, a port connected to the whole world. It made me curious about Marseille, and also left me wondering if anyplace like this exists in the present day.

The Third Tower: Journeys in Italy, by Antal Szerb

Have you ever read just one book by an author and felt prepared to claim that author among your favorites? I wrote about it rather poorly, but that was how I felt after reading Antal Szerb's Journey By Moonlight. That book, which I read just about a year ago, went right to my heart, my mind, my inside. After reading it I started searching out Szerb's other works in a passive way; when I found myself in a bookshop, I'd usually remember to see if they had anything. They never did. Journey By Moonlight is his most well known work by a long shot. I'm not even sure there is a U.S. publisher for his other works. Early on in quarantine, remembering my luck ordering used books from the UK in the fall, I thought what the hell, and ordered 3 of his books in these pretty Pushkin Press editions.* 

I'm not sure what precisely drove me to pull out The Third Tower: Journeys in Italy this morning. I certainly didn't expect I would finish it by this evening (though it is a small book: just 105 pages and smaller than standard trade paperback size). The book is an account, told in small, episodic observations, of a trip Szerb made to Italy in August of 1936. The Spanish Civil War hangs in the background (in the first chapter, Szerb tells us he wanted to go to Spain but settled on Italy due to current events, and the situation in Spain pops up here and there). Fascism in Italy is more in the foreground; he bears witness to it in his accounts of the newspapers he reads, the people he sees on trains and along his travels. The tensions elsewhere in Europe are palpable. In Venice, he notes that hotels where French is spoken are expensive, while those where German is spoken are cheap. While I know something of the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, I don't have a great sense of Hungarian history or culture specifically. It's hard for me to wrap my head around what a vacation in Italy would be like for a Hungarian of Jewish heritage in 1936, even as I was reading an account of just that. (He does touch on the reaction he receives when he tells people he's from Hungary, which seems to be a mild fascination.) Szerb's passing references to Hungarian writers before him whose names meant nothing to me left me feeling rather ignorant. (Besides Szerb, the only Hungarian writer I've read is Sandor Marai and Imre Kertész is the only other I can name off the top of my head.)

Tracing parts of the route covered in Journey by Moonlight, in 1936 Szerb visited Venice, Vicenza, Lake Garda, Bologna, Ravenna, San Marino, Ferrara, and Trieste. Venice gets the most attention, and several of the other cities get just one short chapter. There are odd chapters on other topics too, on the heat, on the Fascist populous, on traveling alone. Unsurprisingly, that last chapter - called Solitude - struck a chord with me. 

When I started The Third Tower this morning, I tweeted, "I read the first two pages of this book and I already know I'm about to have my heart broken" with the photo at right. This journal turned out indeed to be an account of Szerb's farewell visit to Italy. War arrived in earnest not long after this. Szerb was put in a concentration camp in 1944 and was killed there in 1945. He was not even as old as I am now. 

*While you're there, I encourage you to peruse the author pictures on the Pushkin Press authors page, which I find unaccountably amusing. I was surprised to stumble across a photo of the previous author I read, Eduardo Halfon, while I was scrolling down to Szerb.