War, So Much War, by Mercè Rodoreda

I'm going to Barcelona in a week and so I wanted to read something by Mercè Rodoreda, but I've been a little frightened off from her since I started and had to abandon Death in Spring a couple years ago. It was so, so grim. The other books of hers I had not read were War, So Much War, which didn't sound like an upbeat book based on the title alone, and Camellia Street, which I've seen described as her starkest book. I thought about rereading A Broken Mirror, but I had already done two rereads in the first 2 months of 2024, so I thought I really should read something new to me. Last week, as I was reading about Rodoreda and her oeuvre, I read something that said there wasn't actually all that much war in War, So Much War, and I decided I would give it a try. 

The book is a sort of picaresque, following 15-year-old Adrià Guinart, who has left his home in Barcelona to fight in the Spanish Civil War. He's given a job doing kitchen work, but doesn't last long among the militia. He spends the remainder of the book wandering the Spanish countryside from village to village, where he is by turns beaten up and shunned or taken in and cared for by the people he comes across. Death, destruction, and brutality are everywhere, but occasionally there is kindness. Adrià is hungry, injured, and traumatized. His nightmares blend into his reality, and sometimes reality is the nightmare. 

I would respectfully disagree with the statement that there's not much war in this book, though I can see what led the publisher to say it. The war is more in the background than in the foreground of the book, but at the same time, it is everywhere. As in The Time of the Doves, War, So Much War tells the experience of war from the perspective of the civilians who are living through it. (I think it's fair to call Adrià a civilian, even if he did try and join up; he is a child.) The war permeates every aspect of their lives, but they still need to find food to eat, tend their land, bury their dead. This is the reality for most people living through war. The stories of war aren't just the ones about soldiers on the front line. 

What Have You Left Behind? by Bushra al-Maqtari

Let me start by saying I had only half finished What Have You Left Behind? by Bushra al-Maqtari when I started writing this as part of a longer essay on memorials that I'm still working through in my head. 

I believe there is power in the telling and the naming of things. This is the heart of Bushra al-Maqtari’s project in What Have You Left Behind? To name the victims of the ongoing civil war in Yemen and to provide the survivors the chance to bear witness to the horrors they were subjected to. As might be expected, this book is devastating and hard to read. The individual testimonies are short – mostly about 3 pages, give or take – but each one captures succinctly and plainly the worst moments in the storytellers' lives. I found I needed to stop frequently to maintain my focus on each individual story. 

I keep a mental running list of books that attempt to show the reader the scope of tragedy or evil through a simple accounting. In no particular order, they include: The Trees by Percival Everett, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by José Saramago, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. EEG by Daša Drndić does it too. On some level, the whole of EEG is an accounting of atrocities, but it includes enumerated lists as well: the catalog of books taken from deported Jews; the list of disappeared chess players. Reading Drndić turned me into a person who pauses to study any metal plaques I may come across on the sides of buildings, or paving stones, or memorial sites. It's my own way of counting and honoring the dead. 

It occurs to me now that Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness is sort of a meta version of this type of book. The narrator of that book is reading and editing accounts – not unlike the ones Bushra al-Maqtari collected – of testimonials from the surviving victims of the military regime in Guatemala (though the country is not named in the book). The witness accounts are mostly from indigenous people, who in some cases watched their entire communities get slaughtered. The reader of Senselessness gets the accounts only second hand, as the narrator filters them for us, pulling out phrases that he finds particularly resonant and stories that exemplify the horror. This book doesn’t read like the others, as a literal accounting, but we see the effects that reading such a enumeration of horrors has on the narrator. 

In What Have You Left Behind? the listing is the whole book. After 200 pages of individual accounts, there is "A List of Victims in Brief," going beyond those accounted for in the main text. It covers the period between March 26, 2015 and September 29, 2017 and goes on for some 40 pages. I must also add that reading this in the context of the current situation in Gaza was rough. The stories told in this book sound strikingly similar to those in the news every day from Gaza. 

I had the sense almost as soon as I started What Have You Left Behind? that al-Maqtari undertook the project both to document the horrors that have been brought upon the civilians of Yemen indiscriminately by both sides in the civil war, but also as a way of doing something that might put her at a remove, even as she is collecting the most devastating stories out of what seems like an infinite supply of them. I thought about my father who, when he found himself in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001 in the moments before the collapse of the twin towers, bought a camera and took pictures until he was able to be evacuated. The camera creates a distance. It takes you from being a participant to being a spectator, a documentarian. I think doing reportage may have a similar effect. However, at the very end of the book, al-Maqtari includes her own testimony: a remembrance of a friend, a fellow activist and founder of a humanitarian relief organization, who was killed by a militia shell in 2018. This serves to remind us that while she is reporting on the war, she is also living through it, with all its devastating effects.

A Time of Gifts, by Patrick Leigh Fermor

I started Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts back in January and finished it this morning, making it the second book I've actually finished for Mark Slutsky's "Barely a Book Club" – despite starting them all. It is the first of a three-part memoir of Leigh Fermor's journey on foot from Holland to Constantinople, begun in 1933. This book covers his setting out from England in December 1933 just up to his arrival in Hungary at Easter in 1934. His travels took him through the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, modern-day Slovakia, with a backtrack to visit Prague, and then just to the border of Hungary at Esztergom. Leigh Fermor, who was just 18 when he started his journey, wandered through a Europe just before the onset of World War II, and because he did not write this book until the 1970s, he manages to capture both what he saw then without the advantage of retrospect, and also to bring the experience of the war and the decades that followed it to bear as well. 

I read the first half of A Time of Gifts rather slowly over a couple weeks in January. I decided it was not the right book to take with me on vacation to Mexico, so I set it aside while I read the two books I did take with me, and then I read the second half quite quickly - the bulk of it just in the last couple days. There were a few stretches of the book that I found a tad tedious – at times, Leigh Fermor goes on at considerable length about stretches of history that were mostly unfamiliar to me, where just a name here and there rang a bell from my high school European history class. He gets caught up, too, in some descriptions that I found made the places harder to imagine rather than easier. But when he comes across people, the force of his personality shines through and you wish you could have known him. Leigh Fermor made fast friends every place he stopped along the road, sometimes with minimal shared language. He communes with peasants and aristocrats, and everything between. He's not above sleeping in the town jail (an option that was evidently available to poor travelers) or in barns or in Salvation Army hostels where every inmate is checked for parasites, when on other nights he sleeps in palaces owned by friends of friends he's made along the way. The number of people who gave him a free bed and a meal along the road is astonishing. This must have been a more common practice 100 years ago, but one feels (and sees) that there must have been something, too, about Leigh Fermor himself that warmed people to him and led them to open their homes and share their food.

I think I found the second half the book more engaging than the first in part because it covered ground I was more familiar with. I've never been to Germany apart from a few hours in Trier, which I drove to after noticing how close I was to Germany on a visit to Luxembourg. But I have visited Vienna, Bratislava, and Budapest, traveling between the three cities by train, very close to what must have been Leigh Fermor's route on foot. 

Leigh Fermor's time in Vienna was of particular interest to me, coinciding as it did with a moment in Vienna that already interested me. The Vienna of my imagination comes from Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, was home to Freud and Elias Canetti. 1934, the year Leigh Fermor arrived in Vienna, was the same year Stefan Zweig left it. Freud stayed on another 4 years, but he should have left earlier: Marie Bonaparte essentially paid a ransom for him to allow him to escape. During his time in Vienna, Leigh Fermor observes,

The high proportion of foreign names demonstrated the inheritance of the Hapsburg Empire at its widest expansion. Many subjects of alien race, finding their regional capitals too narrow for them, streamed to the glittering Kaiserstadt: Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Rumanians, Poles, Italians, Jews from the whole of Central and Eastern Europe and every variety of Southern Slav. 

Reading this, I think of Joseph Roth coming to Vienna for his education after a childhood in what is now Western Ukraine, or the Ladino-speaking Elias Canetti, born in present-day Bulgaria, who spent part of his childhood in Vienna and returned there to go to university, staying – like Freud – until 1938. The chapter in A Time of Gifts about Vienna is infused with everything he didn't understand when he was there, but which the Leigh Fermor who was writing the book 40 years later knew lay just beneath the surface. 

Leigh Fermor's observation on arriving in Bratislava was surprisingly similar to one I had when I arrived there: "Listening to the unfamiliar hubbub of Slovak and Magyar the other side, I realized I was at last in a country where the indigenous sounds meant nothing at all." It seems obvious in retrospect, but when I planned my trip that included Bratislava and Budapest, I gave no thought at all to the potential language barrier. I studied German in college, not that I needed it at all in Vienna (or that I remembered much for that matter), but when I arrived in Bratislava, I realized I didn't know the most basic things: I couldn't say hello, or thank you. I couldn't read a menu. I had never felt so at sea. (The only place I'd been before where I truly didn't know any of the language was Tokyo - but Tokyo is quite easy to navigate as an English speaker, and even then I did know the words for Good Morning and Thank You.) When I traveled onward to Budapest, Hungrian was equally mysterious, but English was in much wider use. I wish I had read A Time of Gifts before that trip. 

On finishing A Time of Gifts I immediately went out and ordered the second volume of Leigh Fermor's memoir. I look forward to reading about the next leg of his journey. 

Mockingbird, by Walter Tevis

Mockingbird was the second book I brought with me to Mexico. Like Senselessness, I selected it primarily because it was a book I wouldn't mind leaving behind if I did finish it. I do kind of love the cover, but it's a beat up mass market edition that I didn't think I'd feel attached to. As usual, I didn't get any reading at all done while I was on the ground, but I started Mockingbird on the flight home. I was too tired to read much on the plane, but the first few pages did capture my attention, so I kept going with it after I got home. 

I seem to remember my father went on a Walter Tevis kick a few years ago and I got this on his recommendation. I'd never heard of Tevis, though of course I'd heard of the movie adaptations of his books. This was before The Queen's Gambit TV adaptation, which brought him a whole new round of attention. 

Mockingbird is set in a distant future when humanity is in decline, suicide is rampant, children have ceased to be born, and people live isolated from one another in a drugged state that respects the supreme rule of privacy. I suppose it's a bit different from many other books in the post-apocalyptic genre, because it seems to take place amid a long, slow decline, not in the aftermath of a single event. (I claim no expertise on the genre, so maybe this isn't as uncommon as I imagine.) I really had no idea what I was getting into when I started Mockingbird. In retrospect, I'm not surprised my dad was a fan because he enjoys post-apocalyptic fiction as a rule. I'm not so crazy about it usually, but I did love Mockingbird.

Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya (again)

I'm on a plane from New York to Cancun. I decided at the last moment to bring my copy of Horacio Castellanos Moya's Senselessness with me, because (as I'm sure I mentioned when I wrote about it before -- assuming I read it in a year when I was writing a about all the books I read) the edition I have is terribly marked up, with not very astute marginalia. "This guy is weird," for example. I recently came into another copy, so I decided i could bring my marked up copy to Mexico, read it, and leave it behind. It took me about three quarters of my flight to read it cover to cover. 

I didn't remember many details about Senselessness beyond that it was about a guy who gets a job copyediting 1100 pages of firsthand testimonies by indigenous people and activists who survived the brutal massacres of countless people at the hands of the military in an unnamed country. Our narrator is not always sympathetic, but he slips into a state of madness from reading -- absorbing -- these horrors day in and out. "I am not complete in the mind," is the opening passage of the book, a quote from one of these indigenous survivors, but a reflection as well of the narrator's own state. The reader must wonder if his growing paranoia is justified, or if it's only that he is not complete in the mind.

On this reading, I read Senselessness as a sort of sequel to Castellanos Moya's book, The Dream of My Return, which I've also read twice, but it seems to me in the wrong order. I should go back and read it now with this fresh in my mind. In The Dream of My Return, the narrator is on the verge of leaving Mexico City for his home country, where his life may be in danger, but where he feels a compulsion to return, risking his own life. This potentially dangerous copyediting job could be the thing that awaits him there.

Dark Back of Time, by Javier Marías

I started Dark Back of Time on New Year's Day, continuing my tradition of now nearly a decade of starting the year with Javier Marías. Dark Back of Time is a strange book – a memoir of sorts, written as a response to the attention he received following the publication of All Souls, the novel which first brought him some level of celebrity. Even before his death in 2022, but especially since it I've been dreading the inevitable New Year's Day when I've run out of new Javier Marías books to read. I suppose at that point, I'll just start over. I've always thought he would benefit from rereading, and I feel this even more after reading Dark Back of Time. 

Evidently, on the publication of All Souls many readers assumed it was a roman à clef (today we'd probably be more likely to say autofiction), taking the characters in the book as stand-ins for real individuals on faculty at Oxford. This was an assumption made by readers who knew only a little about Marías (he recalls his students assuming he had a small child because that book's narrator is father to a baby), but also by some of his own colleagues at Oxford – one of whom went so far as to make assumptions about who was the married professor with whom the narrator had an affair. (Marías for his part claims he doesn't know who this colleague might be imagining he had an affair with.) 

Correcting these false assumptions is where the book starts out – and goes on for quite a few chapters. (I laughed out loud early in the book when Marías forcefully states that there has never been a significant Luisa in his life. I felt I was beginning to understand his continual reuse of that name for the women in his books.) Ironically, as the book goes on enumerating apparently true events from the real life and family history of Marías, I recognized more and more instances that show up in his later books. He uses names and addresses from his own family and life (the ones that jumped out at me were Custardoy - the last name of a grand or great-grandfather, and Calle de Covarrubias a street in Madrid) as characters and settings in his novels, which bear the same relationship to the narrator as to the author. 

But as with many Marías books, it takes a while before you see where things are going and understand what the book is actually about. After several chapters spent addressing these false assumptions, Dark Back of Time changes course and goes in depth into the one part of All Souls that was based in reality: the story of John Gawsworth, writer, poet, and King Juan I of Redonda. Marías – along with the narrator of All Souls – discovered Gawsworth by accident and became fascinated with his life, which took many unexpected turns, ending in poverty. Following the publication of All Souls, through a series of loose connections, Marías found several more coincidences related to Gawsworth and his circle, and recounting these unbelievable real stories (as opposed to the believable fictions) takes up the remainder of the book.

Marías is especially interested in the small events or even accidents, without which he the author, you the reader, any person in fact, might never have come to be. Or might have been instead a different person. The "dark back of time" is the (borrowed) language Marías uses to talk about the things that didn't happen, but might have. The alternate version of the world where by some accident (or the lack of it), things turn out differently. These two realities – the actual world and the alternate possibility coexist, we are always aware of the way things could have been different. 

I think Marías would have been amused by the headline of his New York Times obituary, which includes both the world in which he is living, and that in which he has died.

Family Lexicon, by Nalatia Ginzburg (again)

I did start the year with Javier Marías, as is my tradition, but I had to pause that book in progress to reread Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon because it was selected (partially at my suggestion) for my Women in Translation book club, which meets today. I enjoyed it the first time – I mainly remembered Ginzburg's descriptions of her overbearing but hilarious father, and a snippet about her time in exile in Abruzzo – but I liked it even more the second time around. In the intervening years, I've learned a lot more about Ginzburg's life and read another book of hers, as well as a book by Cesare Pavese, who is a significant figure in Family Lexicon. Last March, I visited the graves of Natalia Ginzburg and her husband Leone Ginzburg in Rome. 

What's most striking to me about this book is that Ginzburg manages to maintain a light and humorous tone almost throughout, despite the difficult and tragic times she lived through. Only a couple times do you get a hint of the terror and deep sorrow she must have experienced living through the German occupation of Italy during World War II, the many arrests of her husband – during the last of which he was killed in prison, the risk of deportation to German concentration camps, and so much more. The number of times in this book that members of her family and close circle are in hiding, in prison, exiled, or living under an assumed name or traveling with false papers is astonishing, and yet is treated as the normal course of life – because for young Natalia Ginzburg, it already was. (Natalia Ginzburg was still a child when her family hid the Italian Socialist Filippo Turati in their home for a period of time before his escape to France.)

The other thing that really comes out in this book, which I find it very hard to wrap my head around, is how young Natalia Ginzburg was during all these events. She married Leone at age 22, had 3 children with him, and was a widow at 27. Her youth and inexperience show when she talks about developing a sudden awareness of money after her marriage when she's put in a position of managing a household. I found her lack of certainty when it came to knowing whether her home was being adequately cleaned by her housekeeper completely charming. Later, when she realizes she must take her 3 children and escape the village in Abruzzo where she'd been living in exile, you see for a moment her total vulnerability: when she comes to realize that the maternal protection she took for granted can't be ever present, and she must fend for herself in a truly life or death situation. Even this, she narrates as if the solution came together very simply, never dwelling on what must have been a terrifying journey.

I was struck, on my first reading of Family Lexicon, by Ginzburg's family's internal exile, a Mussolini policy I first learned about from reading Carlo Levi. Natalia and Leone Ginzburg were sent to a village called Pizzoli in Abruzzo. Her brother Alberto and his wife were sent to a town a little father south, Rocca di Mezzo. I found myself wondering, on this reading, about how effective (if at all) this practice of internal exile was. Prior to the German occupation, life in the Abruzzi villages sounded almost idyllic. After the war, Alberto and his wife reflect on how happy they were in Rocco di Mezzo. Carlo Levi's ongoing attachment to Aliano and his decision to be buried there after his death say a lot about his experience there. (To say nothing of the larger effect Carlo Levi's memoir about his exile had on the entire region.) I don't know where I'm going with this, I just find it ironic that all these people who were sent to remote parts of Italy as punishment, were like, actually it was nice.

I'm really glad I ended up reading Family Lexicon again. Parts of it had really stayed with me, but I feel like I got so much more out of it this time and I'm really excited to have influenced my book club to read it so I have more people to talk to about Natalia Ginzburg.

2023 in Books

Last year was my worst reading year since 2013 and 2014, in each of which I read 22 books (but in one of those years I read War and Peace and in the other I read Infinite Jest, so my page count was surely higher). Actually, 2023 would have counted as a pretty good reading year for me if it weren't for my reading habits of the last decade. It's been hard not to feel down about it, but when I reflect on all the other things that have happened in the last 12 months, even as I do feel I spent too much time on my phone when I could have been reading, I start to understand why maybe that's what my mind needed. 

I moved at the very end of 2022, so 2023 was a year of setting up my new home. I undertook two major home renovation projects: a new kitchen and a new HVAC system, both of which had me displaced in my home for a period of weeks, first in March and then in October; and countless minor home renovation projects. (Among these, I had solar panels installed on my roof, which could be counted as a major renovation, but honestly it required very little effort or discomfort on my part.) My last home improvement project of 2023, completed on Christmas and Boxing Day, was the installation of the bookshelves pictured here, and finally getting my fiction back to its proper organization. Last year was also an exceptionally busy year for me professionally, which was both exhausting and rewarding. (Not incidentally, I got a promotion in September.) I traveled quite a bit in 2023 – not quite at pre-pandemic levels, but approaching it. And, most miserably, I had extremely unpleasant major dental work done in November and December (which, sadly, is only half done). 

So, when I think back on the last year (or year and a half in truth, because the physical and mental energy associated with my move date back to then), it's not surprising that at the end of my days I didn't often feel motivated to pick up a book and read, though it might have been good for my mental health. I also barely wrote in the last year, and I know the two are connected. This last week and change, I've been off work with few obligations and I finally got back into a reading groove. My favorite way to spend the last days of the year is reading on the couch with my feel up, occasionally interrupted by some baking project or a walk in the winter sun. This year – rather unexpectedly – gave me that desired break. I hope I can keep up into the new year some of what I felt I got back to in the last week.

And so, the books: I read 23 books in 2023 (finishing 7 of those in the last week). In chronological order, they were:

• All Souls, by Javier Marías
• Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson
• The Bookshop, by Penelope Fitzgerald
• Drunk on Love, by Jasmine Guillory
• Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters, by Maria José Silveira
• Carte Blanche, by Carlo Lucarelli
• Dora Bruder, by Patrick Modiano
• Scattered All Over the Earth, by Yōko Tawada
• The Tale of the 1002nd Night, by Joseph Roth
• In Concrete, by Anne Garréta
• Eve Out of Her Ruins, by Ananda Devi
• Provenance, by Ann Leckie
• Easy Motion Tourist, by Leye Adenle
• Strangers I Know, by Claudia Durastanti
• This Census Taker, by China Miéville
• The House of Doors, by Tan Twan Eng
• Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire that Never Was, by Angélica Gorodischer
• Trust, by Domenico Starnone
• The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark
• Where Angels Fear to Tread, by E.M. Forster
• Devotion, by Howard Norman
• Burning Secret, by Stefan Zweig

A thing that kept happening to me last year was I would select a book that I thought would be just the thing to get me out of my reading rut, and then the book would turn out to be not at all what I thought it was. I finished some of these (In Concrete and This Census Taker are a couple examples from the list above), but I also started a lot of books I did not finish. Among these were Midnight in the Century; Zorba the Greek; Hav; Beautiful World, Where Are You; The Bridge on the Drina; The Discomfort of Evening; and several others that I've since forgotten. I hope to get back to some of these (Zorba, Hav, and Drina in particular.) My decision over the summer to start Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis was an attempt to try something totally different. I read 185 depressing but informative pages of it, and may yet return. It felt startlingly relevant.

And on to the stats: 

I read 11 books by women last year, or just under 50% (which is better than I feared). Apart from the U.S., which accounts for just 3 books I read last year, I read books from 11-ish countries. I'm counting Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig as compatriots, though I'm unsure what to call the country. For the sake of simplicity we can go with Roth's preferred fatherland, the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. The others were: Argentina, Brazil, France, Italy, Japan/Germany (whichever is more proper to assign for Tawada), Malaysia, Mauritius, Nigeria, Spain, and the United Kingdom (my most read country, with 6 books, though perhaps I should have separated out Scotland, from where I read one book). Only Malaysia was new to me. I read 11 books in translation and one book in its original French. I didn't reread any books or finish a single work of nonfiction in 2023. 

I'm finding it very hard to name a favorite book from 2023. It may be recency bias, but The Sense of an Ending and Kalpa Imperial stand out. From the earlier clutch, Scattered All Over the Earth might be my favorite. I believe reading Dora Bruder had the greatest effect on me of any book I read this year, and it stands apart such that I'm unable to rate it alongside everything else. It was my first time reading a whole book in a language other than English, and I still marvel a bit at having done it. It felt something like magic, especially as I got on and understood more and more without having to refer to Google Translate. It was also a beautiful and affecting book. Other notable books from the year include Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters, which felt like an education in Brazilian history; Provenance, which succeeded in getting me out of a rut where all those other books failed; The House of Doors, which made me really want to visit Penang; and Trust, which had this intriguing concept of mutual trust and mutual destruction at the center that I can't get over.

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.