'Lady Reading at an Open Window' by Clementine Helene Dufau; oil on canvas
August has become Women in Translation month, an increasingly popular reading event and this year I wanted to read a few of the WIT books from my TBR rather than focusing on new books, and I ended up reading four of them. But WIT books are a staple of my reading and this year has been no exception. Here's a list of those I've reviewed on the blog from January through July:
Linked titles will take you to my post.
All the Beauty In the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me - Patrick Bringley (illus. Maya McMahon) The author took a job as a guard at the Met in June 2008 after his brother Tom died of cancer at twenty-seven. Two years older than Patrick, Tom was a talented mathematician and newly married. The two had been very close and his loss was devastating for his younger brother who gave up a coveted job at The New Yorker and applied for a job 'in the most beautiful place' he knew and became part of a quieter world which gave him the space and time to grieve.
I look at a dozing maidservant, her cheek resting on her palm, while behind her the empty, well-kept household receives that sanctifying Vermeer light. I startle at the picture because I can't believe he's captured it—that feeling we sometimes have that an intimate setting possesses a grandeur and holiness of its own. It was my constant feeling in Tom's hospital room, and it's one that I can recover on these church-mouse quiet mornings at the Met.
It's an insider's view, not from a curator or someone in management who is tucked away in an office, but someone who's out on the floor with the art and visitors. And Bringley looks at the art, he finds out more about the pieces he's spending his days with, and descriptions of it are sprinkled throughout his account. (His website has links to high-resolution images of all the artworks he mentions.) His fellow guards are a varied bunch, some are aspiring artists themselves, others have already had a career in an entirely different field and take the job later in life, and some have made a career of it. As diverse as the city they live in they are from just about every country in the world, but there are large contingents from Guyana, Albania, West Africa, and Russia. Slowly the art, the atmosphere, and the people around him help Bringley rejoin the tumbling stream of daily life again.
He incorporates general information about the museum and its history (it's approximately the size of 3,000 average NYC apartments), gives glimpses into nooks and crannies, questions he's asked, overheard bits and pieces, and what it's like to work the blockbuster shows. One of my favorite parts is his description of the Islamic art wing which he visits as it's being built and then works in the galleries. This memoir was a lovely way to revisit a place where I've spent so many hours and often got myself lost in, but stumbled across something new and amazing in the process.
Simon & Schuster, 2023
Three Streets - Yoko Tawada (tr. Margaret Mitsutani) Three stories from the Japanese-German writer set in former East Berlin from a larger collection not yet translated into English. What links the stories is that each is set on a real Berlin street named after a well-known person and as a narrator strolls along them she's aware of the presence of possibilities that might have happened instead and the ghosts of that place. An interesting introduction to a writer with an unusual and expansive imagination. It was read for Women in Translation month.
New Directions, 2022
The Happy Prisoner - Monica Dickens First published in 1946 this is a novel about the North family immediately after the war. Set in farm country in Shropshire, the extended household includes widowed Hattie North, her daughters, unruly Violet who works for their tenant farmer Fred Williams, and high-strung Heather and her two young children; Mrs. North's ten-year-old niece Evelyn, and son Oliver whose perspective we see his family from. Wounded by a shell, he's lost a leg and a splinter from the shell grazed his heart. This keeps him bedridden until time and quiet do their healing work. Elizabeth Day arrives to nurse him and help with household tasks. Efficient and self-contained, the family doesn't quite know what to make of her, but grow to depend on her especially during a time of upheavals in the family's lives.
Violet, to everyone's surprise including her own, has received and accepted a marriage proposal, Heather is waiting for her husband John to return from Australia after being a POW, his scatty, charming mother comes to stay for a time, and Evelyn's father Bob is coming over from America to take her home. Oliver watches it all from his perch in bed which is fitted to a window recess; he's become deeply interested in the other lives lived in the house and eventually begins to meddle in them.
His transition to this comparatively contented, contemplative state had been so gradual that it was hard to say just how it had come about. It had crept up on him with the lessening in intensity and frequency of his attacks of pain.
This is the first Monica Dickens book I've read and I liked the basic story, but found the characters a little off-putting. Since the story is one of character studies, that was a problem. Another issue for me was that at a couple of points it came perilously close to reading more like a French farce with people running in and out and slamming doors. There are some poignant and humorous moments to enjoy, and an interesting look at the time, but overall the book didn't work well for me.
Bloomsbury Reader, 2012
A Bookshop in Berlin - Françoise Frenkel (tr. Stephanie Smee) Written in 1943-1944 this is an account of the author's early years in Poland, studies in Paris, and her determination to open a bookshop that specialized in sharing all the glories of French culture that she felt so passionately about. She writes of her experiences in Berlin and what she witnessed happening in Germany and France, and what happened to La Maison du Livre and herself as the Nazis came to power and she fled to France. She joined the exodus from Paris south where her safety was in increasing jeopardy. The book was read for Women in Translation month. Highly recommended.
Atria Books, 2019
Dancing With the Muse in Old Age - Priscilla Long Using a combination of scientific studies, examples, and plain common sense, the writer is out to rid people of the pernicious and inaccurate belief that old age is a time of inevitable decline. Ageism is dangerous for people at any age, if someone sees aging in negative terms at twenty, as they get older it's more likely that their life spans will be shorter and health will be worse.
It cannot be stated too often: Internalized ageism—whether conscious or not—is an important cause of decline.
Common stereotypes about the elderly are often entirely wrong and one is the idea that creativity decreases significantly or stops in old age. Instead, as Long shows, it is a time when creativity frequently increases and develops in new ways. However, the book is not just for Long's fellow artists although most of her examples come from those in the arts, but for everyone. She is careful to back up her many examples of older artists doing some of their best work with concrete data. There are some very interesting examples of people who started their creative lives after having a busy career in a different field, and others that show how artists have accommodated their creativity when physical limitations have changed what they can do.
Not only did I come away from this book with a reinforced belief that old age has the potential and freedom to be a time of increased creativity, but with a long list of artists in different fields whose work I want to explore. Highly recommended.
Epicenter Press, 2022
The Bridge of Beyond - Simone Schwarz-Bart (tr. Barbara Bray) A multi-generation story of the lives of the women of the Lougandor family of Guadeloupe. Theirs are not easy lives, these mothers and daughters, but ones of resilience, joy, and sorrow set in a lush landscape with an oppressive history. Toussine raises her granddaughter Telumee from age ten in the small, inland community of Fond-Zombi which is reached by crossing the rickety Bridge of Beyond. The author's gorgeous prose brings the people and place alive. Read for Women in Translation month. Highly recommended.
NYRB, 2013
Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World - Irene Vallejo (tr. Charlotte Whittle) The fourth book I read for Women in Translation month is a particular joy for a booklover to read. Ostensibly a history of the early years of writing, books, and libraries in Egypt, Greece, and Rome, it's also about book history through the centuries, and a personal memoir of the author's and her family's reading lives. What made this book such a pleasure was the author's curiosity and knowledge, yes, but most important was her storytelling ability. Early book history had me on the edge of my seat.
Vallejo begins with the army of hunters Egypt's Ptolemies sent out in all directions to track down their quarry: scrolls for the Library of Alexandria where the kings wanted to gather all the books of the world and the top scholars.
It was said that Ptolemy II sent messengers to the kings and rulers of every country on Earth. In a sealed letter, he would ask them to take the trouble of sending him simply everything they had for his collection: all the work of the poets and prose writers of their kingdom, the orators and philosophers, the doctors, and seers, the historians, and everyone else.
Finding work by the Greeks was a top priority and the tactics used to acquire them were ruthless. The city of Alexandria and its library are on-going themes, and so are the Greek classics. The story of working out how to organize and catalogue libraries is a surprisingly engrossing one. Vallejo takes her account back and forth in time and illustrates her points with numerous fascinating stories. And in a bit of bookish serendipity a book I just read a couple of weeks ago for WIT Month (A Bookshop in Berlin), gets a major mention here. The author's sensible view on the future of the book comes from looking at its history with a long view.
When we compare something old and something new—like a book and an iPad or a nun sitting next to a texting teenager on a train—we believe that the new thing has more of a future, when in fact the reverse is true. The longer an object or custom has been with us, the greater its staying power. On average, the newest things die out first.
Vallejo's enthusiasm for her subject catches the reader up too. She must be one of those memorable teachers who have an impact on her students' lives because she's so effective at sharing what she is interested in. And as is fitting for a book read for Women in Translation month, she tells the story of Sumerian poet and priestess Enheduanna, who was the first author to sign her text fifteen hundred years before Homer. Highly recommended.
Alfred A. Knopf, 2022
Fire Will Freeze - Margaret Millar Published in 1944 this is one of Millar's earlier books and is more a satire of the country house mysteries of the Golden Age than the crime fiction or psychological suspense of her later work. There's a big dollop of screwball comedy, an uncomfortably gothic house, two eerie residents, and an ill-assorted group of holiday-makers on their way to a ski lodge in the Quebec wilderness in a blizzard in a 'Sno-bus'. When their driver disappears they follow his footsteps which lead towards the house where they get shot at as they approach. Even more disconcerting is the reaction of the woman who looks out at them from the front door as they make their way to it.
There are just two people who live in the grey stone pile: Frances Rudd, a woman of a certain age who is a bit unusual, and her nurse-companion, Floraine Larue, but their driver isn't there or at least that's what they're told. As increasingly unnerving things happen during the night, the group becomes even more on edge and mistrustful. The incongruous group of skiers include: Herbert and Maudie Thropple, a mismatched honeymoon couple; Mr. Hunter, an ineffectual older man and his daughter Joyce, a cool, competent young woman who is studying psychology; Paula Lashley and Chad Ross, an unhappy young couple; Anthony Goodwin, a silly English poet and his patron, Evaline Vista, a wealthy older woman; Gracie Mornng, a cheerful, practical striptease dancer; Charles Crawford, or least that's the name he gives; and Isobel Seton, a thirty-five-year-old New Yorker who tends to take charge to the others' annoyance and who we spend the most time with. When frustrated, she composes imaginary letters in her head, and in the opening sentences she's drafting one to Abercrombie & Fitch:
"I am returning to you, via dog-sled, a pair of skis for which I foolishly paid you seventy-five dollars on January the fourteenth. I feel your staff should have more responsibility to the general public than to sell skis to anyone simply for the asking."
The strength of the story is in the humor and snappy dialog, but it does sit oddly with the ghoulish goings-on. The crime part of the story doesn't really work that well and there's a surprising element in it that gets brought in very late. But an enjoyable read nonetheless especially when Miss Seton is trying to figure out what's going on or is exchanging barbs with Charles Crawford.
Soho Syndicate, 2017
With four books from my TBR read for Women in Translation month and a few really outstanding books, August was a good reading month for me. Now I'm looking forward to taking part in Stu's Czech Lit Month in September. Here's his original post and a follow-up with links to lists of Czech titles and authors. Have you made any reading plans for next month?
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