'The Bookshop in the Woods' by Soizick Meister; acrylic on canvas
This was a month that I read some books that have been lingering on my TBR for far too long, a gorgeous new poetry collection from a local independent publisher; a comic literary meta-fiction; two wonderful novels, one set in India the other in Italy; a memoir from a woman involved in the European theater world, American film industry, and knew everybody; and three collections of short stories. Two of those were for Czech Lit Month hosted by Stu at Winstonsdad's Blog and though very different from each other were both excellent. If a title is linked it will take you to my full review.
A House Called Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Poetry from Copper Canyon Press - ed. by Michael Wiegers Copper Canyon Press is a long-established, non-profit, independent publisher of poetry located right across Elliott Bay on the northeast shore of Washington State's Olympic Peninsula. For this anthology Executive Editor Michael Wiegers tapped the collective wisdom of current and former colleagues for their recommendations from the hundreds of volumes of poetry they've published over fifty years from the early years when the books were printed in letter-press to the latest collections. His interesting preface touches on definitions of poetry and how his own perception of it has evolved, the ideas behind and history of Copper Canyon Press, the community of poets and their readers, and how poetry challenges and changes the narrative.
This little publisher has had an outsize influence and reputation in the literary world and some of the luminaries they've published include: W.S. Merwin, Carolyn Forché, Denise Levertov, Lucille Clifton, Ted Kooser, C.D. Wright, Heather McHugh, Ocean Vuong, Arthur Sze, and Ursula K. Le Guin. It's fascinating to see how the work has changed over the years and sample the variety of voices, there is something for everyone here. The book is beautifully designed with the elegant cover design provided by Erika Blumenfeld, artist in residence at NASA. Highly recommended.
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
—W.S. Merwin's Separation from the collection The Second Four Books of Poems published in 1993
Copper Canyon Press, 2023
The Kindness of Strangers: A Theatrical Life - Salka Viertel Reading the author's account of her eventful life during the most tumultuous years of the last century I had the impression that she must have been someone whose warmth, kindness, and intelligence attracted people like a magnet. Salomea Sara Steuermann was born in the small town of Sambor in Galicia, at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to a comfortably off family. Her father was the first Jewish mayor of the town and her mother had been an aspiring opera singer before her marriage. Against her parents' wishes Salka wanted to become an actress, but WWI interrupts and life changes for all. She became a leading dramatic actress in Germany, married Berthold Viertel, writer and director, survived the very difficult years after the war, had three sons, and she and Berthold knew absolutely everybody. She was hired early in her career by Max Reinhardt, took part in the long discussions Karl Kraus held at café tables, and fed lunch to Franz Kafka and Max Brod in Prague.
In 1928 Berthold was offered a three-year contract by Fox and they moved to California. It was initially supposed to be a temporary stay, but they put down roots and their sons became California kids. Unfortunately, Salka's acting career went by the wayside, she didn't enjoy acting in films and didn't see herself as beautiful or young enough to do well in Hollywood. She eventually became a scriptwriter, specializing in vehicles featuring her good friend Greta Garbo. Salka's house in Santa Monica was a gathering place for the many artists fleeing Europe including Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Arnold Schoenberg, and Charlie Chaplin. Much of her salary went to supporting family back home and helping others, and she was instrumental in helping numerous people secure visas and affidavits to leave Europe.
Later, she was caught up in the McCarthyite madness of the 1950s because a fellow scriptwriter took out his annoyance with her by labeling her a communist at a lunch the studio head was at. After some difficult years she left the US and went to Switzerland where she met her first grandchild and there she ends her story. An afterword by Donna Rifkind gives a summary of Salka's remaining years and Lawrence Weschler provides the introduction. What I found especially interesting to read about was her childhood in Sambor and the theatrical world of Weimar Germany, Vienna, and Prague, and the cultural clash in Hollywood between the studio heads who were from East European shtetl backgrounds and the assimilated, cultured Jews who had not treated their East European brethren well back in Europe, and now got a dose of their own medicine when they needed help. A fascinating look at the people and the time.
NYRB, 2019
The Last Bell - Johannes Urzidil (tr. David Burnett) A small selection of stories from various collections of this undeservedly overlooked writer. Set in Bohemia in the late 1800s and first half of the 20th century, they give readers a perceptive look into a disappeared world and the people in it. Read for Czech Lit Month. Highly recommended.
Pushkin Press, 2017
From the Land of the Moon - Milena Agus (tr. Ann Goldstein) A gorgeous, ambiguous, bittersweet novella about family, art, memory, imagination, and perception that packs an emotional wallop. A granddaughter tells the story of her paternal grandmother who grew up in a small, traditional village on Sardinia. She is a beautiful, passionate, artistic person who writes poetry, and whose behavior doesn't conform to expectations and is considered mad by her family and the villagers. In 1943 when she is thirty she is forced to marry a man who lodges with their family after being bombed out of his home in Cagliari. He is a decent man and treats his new wife with kindness, but there is no love on either side.
Suffering from kidney stones she is sent to a spa on the mainland to be treated where she meets and falls in love with a man she calls the Veteran who is also undergoing treatment for kidney stones and injuries he received in the war.
…since her whole life she had been told that she was like someone from the land of the moon, it seemed to her that she had finally met someone from her own land, and that was the principal thing in life, which she had never had.
Ater she returns home she gives birth to a son who becomes an acclaimed pianist. The narrator also writes about her maternal grandmother, a woman who at first glance, seems to have led a staid and uneventful life, but as it turns out that is far from the reality. The final pages turn much of what has gone before on its head.
What makes this beautifully written debut book stand out are the different perceptions of and versions of Grandmother's life. Was she delusional or simply misunderstood? Whose version is true? Are any of them or does truth lie somewhere in the middle? Highly recommended.
Europa Editions, 2010
Prague Noir - ed. by Pavel Mandys (tr. Miriam Margada) The second book I read for Czech Lit Month was this collection of fourteen stories that showcase some of the authors currently writing crime fiction in the Czech Republic. What I especially enjoyed was the range of stories included. There are some that draw on Prague's history and mystical traditions and others that are firmly set in the modern city. A particularly strong collection in this series.
Akashic Books, 2018
Who's Who When Everyone is Someone Else - C.D. Rose This is a funhouse mirror of a book, it might be a cross between Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler and Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, and is a comic meta-fiction that is filled with literary easter eggs. The narrator, who has much in common with the author including his first book, has been invited to give ten lectures at a university in an unnamed city somewhere in Central Europe on lost, forgotten or unjustly neglected books. The invitation was issued because of that first book, The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure, but he also has another aim—to find out more about Maxim Guyavitch, a writer whose literary output consists of nine short stories and is rumored to be buried in the city.
Each lecture is included along with the usually brutal critique of it by the Profesora whose role in the university and the narrator's visit is decidedly opaque. One of the book's most enjoyable sets of easter eggs has to do with the authors of the books the narrator lectures about. Between lectures he walks around the confusing and endlessly sprawling city.
We natives know something no one else does: the city moves every night, when no one is looking.
He spends much time in ?, a nearby bar (yes, a question mark is the name), spends time with an odd assortment of people that include a taxi driver who drives like a maniac and has a couple of boxes of moldy books in the trunk that might have a few treasures among them, the Profesora's Assistant, who might be Ana or Oto or not, and Fausto Squattrinato, a performance artist and petty thief who always shows up in whatever city the narrator finds himself in.
This book is best described by the narrator himself when he's talking about one of the forgotten books in a lecture:
The book goes on with this mix of styles and stories, a bizarre game of doublings and counterfeits, frauds and mirrors, coincidences and ruptures, often losing its own plot and then seemingly inventing another one on the spot to compensate for the loss of the first, digging its way into and then out of a labyrinth of tunnels and mirrors, all the while running the gamut of registers from crime thriller to tourist guide to historical tract to philosophical treatise.
As much fun as C.D. Rose has here, there is a real underlying appreciation for the books that sit neglected on dusty shelves or moldering away in a box somewhere, and the writers and readers who pick up them again.
Melville House, 2018
The Earthspinner - Anuradha Roy A novel set India and England told through the lives of two people from the small community of Kummarapet. A novel of creativity, transformation, possibility, and change in which a potter's dream of a horse in flames striding through the ocean and his finding of a lost puppy who becomes a beloved addition to the community are major catalysts in the story. Highly recommended.
HarperVia, 2022
Muckross Abbey and Other Stories - Sabina Murray A collection of ten gothic ghost stories that take place in the here and now, and are set in places that range from an ancient Irish abbey to a girls school in Australia. There are traditional ghost story elements: a foggy Dartmoor, a mirror that shows more than reflections, spooky children, the ancient abbey complete with grisly tale, unsettled ghosts, and others who are out for retribution.
But it was Dartmoor in an obscuring, earthbound cloud, embraced by one of its impenetrable, legendary mists. The rain had started to patter in. He could barely see three feet in front of him now and the only sound was that of a low wind, a sort of breathing, as if the moors were inhaling and exhaling, as if the moors themselves were alive.
A story set in a rented vacation house in Southern France is a twisted take on Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca; in another a wife disappears on her honeymoon when an old love reappears; a handmade ouija board used by two schoolgirls has an unusual power; the friendship of two schoolgirls turns out to be dangerous; and a playwright travels to an artists' residency in Ireland after the ending of a just-begun love affair and death of her husband; and a Lewis Carroll story comes into play in a story about a pregnant woman who is told a spine-tingling tale when she accidentally gets locked out of her house.
There are a few really strong stories in the collection, but the quality is variable, and I found one story almost unreadable. I did appreciate the lack of blood and gore, and the way the author combines gothic-tinged ghost stories with the modern world.
Grove Press, 2023
The new month's reading has just started with a biography of a surrealist writer and painter, and a historical novel taking place at the time of the Napoleonic wars and I'm wondering what exactly happened to a character when he was in Portugal, at this point it doesn't look good. I've also been dipping into a favorite poetry book, Wisława Szymborska's Map. For October I'll just let my reading inclinations go where they want, what about you? Do you have nicely ordered plans or are you also going to be a reading will-of-the-wisp?
No comments:
Post a Comment