It's Number 18 and that means... (#CCSpin)

 The Autobiography by W. E. B. Du Bois:

It's subtitled "A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of its First Century' and he wrote it when he was ninety. He died in 1963 at the age of ninety-five, and the book first appeared in English in 1968 for what would have been his hundredth birthday.

 Du Bois was first African-American to earn a Ph. D. from Harvard (in Sociology) and did post-doctoral work in Germany, where he impressed (and was impressed by) Max Weber. He was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples, and edited their house magazine The Crisis. His most famous early book is The Souls of Black Folks. He eventually, though, gave up on the U.S. as unfixable, and died in Ghana. 

Should be a fascinating read. Did you know him or the book? Did you get something good? 

Othello

 

Othello, Act V, Sc. ii, l. 337 ff.

Othello:  

Soft you; a word or two before you go.

I have done the state some service, and they know't;

No more of that. I pray you, in your letters

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,

Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,

Nor set down aught in malice; then, must you speak

Of one that loved not wisely but too well;

Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,

Perplex'd in the extreme; of one whose hand,

Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away

Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdu'd eyes

Albeit unused to the melting mood,

Drop tears as fast the Arabian trees

Their med'cinable gum. Set you down this:

And say besides, that in Aleppo once,

Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk

Beat a Venetian and traduc'd the state,

I took by throat the circumcised dog,

And smote him thus.

 

-William Shakespeare

 

Othello has just learned that he has been bamboozled by Iago; he'd killed Desdemona, who had been perfectly true to him, and had attempted to have Cassio, his lieutenant, killed for sleeping with Desdemona, a thing that never happened. With 'And smote him thus' he stabs himself in place of the Turk, and dies two lines later. Iago has just murdered his wife Emilia, in front of magistrates and the audience, and is about to be hauled off to jail, torture, "the censure of this hellish villain."

 

We saw Othello on Tuesday at the Stratford (Ontario) festival in a very good production. Evan Bullung as Iago and André Sills as Othello (both 12 year Stratford veterans) were superb, and did a convincing job of the tricky scene (Act III, sc. iii) where the insinuating Iago turns Othello from trusting, infatuated husband to victim of the green-eyed monster (also a line from this play...)

 

I like to reread a Shakespeare play before seeing it on stage and did this time, too. It's not like I've ruined the suspense--and I find it helps to have the language in my head when I hear it played. 

 

Don't worry--it wasn't all tragedy. We also saw the musical Something Rotten while there... 

Classics Club Spin #45

 

What will I next read? Only the owl knows...

It's the 45th Classics Club spin and this will be my 25th spin. You've seen the rules before so straight to the list of books:

1.) Frances Burney/Evelina

2.) Willa Cather/Lucy Gayheart

3.) Willa Cather/Sappho and the Slave Girl

4.) Nella Larsen/Passing

5.) Sinclair Lewis/Elmer Gantry

6.) Jack London/The Iron Heel

7.) Jack London/Martin Eden

8.) Walter Pater/Imaginary Portraits

9.) Harry Mark Petrakis/A Dream of Kings

10.) Leslie Marmon Silko/Ceremony

11.) Edgar Wallace/The Four Just Men

12.) Eudora Welty/Delta Wedding

13.) Andrei Bely/Petersburg

14.) Mikhail Bulgakov/The Heart of a Dog

15.) Joachim Machado de Assis/The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas

16.) Benito Pérez Galdos/That Bringas Woman

17.) Dee Brown/Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

18.) W. E. B. Du Bois/The Autobiography

19.) R. L. Stevenson/An Inland Voyage

20.) Gotthold Lessing/Nathan the Wise 

 

On Sunday August 16th the number will be revealed. 

 

Which look good to you? Which have you read? 

Helen MacInnes' Prelude to Terror

Colin Grant is an art critic. He's recently moved to New York City to work at the Schofeld Gallery. A woman in the art world he knows approaches him on the behalf of millionaire art collector Victor Basset. Could he buy a painting at an auction in Vienna on Mr. Basset's behalf? The painting is a river scene by Salomon von Ruysdael of 1642. It might go for a $200,000, but Basset is worried he has a rival and if it were known Basset was bidding the price would go up.

There's an additional complication. The owner is a Hungarian national who wants to get out of Hungary (this is the 1970s) with this painting that the government would cheerfully confiscate if they knew about it. So for both those reasons it all needs to be hush-hush.

Of course it's Helen MacInnes so there are more complications than that...

This is the first of three spy novels by MacInnes which feature Robert Renwick. He's in Vienna working on a money-laundering scheme run from Eastern Europe. The money's being used to finance terrorist activity in the West. (The Red Army Faction had been in the news in the 70s.) 

I thought this was one of the better MacInnes books. It is fairly dark for MacInnes, though. This is her first novel after her husband Gilbert Highet died. Grant is a widower still in grief when it starts; if you know MacInnes, you won't be surprised that as an American dragged into a spy story, he will be involved in a romance. It doesn't pan out in this one.

It's possible I read this when it came out--both my parents were MacInnes fans--but if so I didn't remember it.

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Silver Age (1978). Painting. Is that a von Ruysdael river scene on the left of the cover?   

Ed McBain's Shotgun

"Oh, how they hoped for an original slaying once in a while, a well-conceived murder instead of these sloppy run-of-the-mill crimes of passion that were constantly being dumped into their laps. Oh, how they longed for a killer who would knock off somebody with a rare untraceable poison, Oh, how they wished they might find a body in a locked windowless room, Oh, how they wanted somebody to scheme and plot for months on end and then commit the perfect homicide, which everyone would think was suicide or something." 

"Meyer and Hawes got all the interesting cases."

Carella and Kling are called in when two bodies, a man and a woman, are found by the milkman making his morning rounds. The milkman liked the Leydens--she gave him a cup of coffee when he collected the bill, she didn't have to do that--and he seemed like a very nice man, only he had to travel a lot, missed his wife. "It scares you, you know?"

The first cops on the scene are happy to call it domestic trouble, murder-suicide, and wrap it up at once. But Carella sees through that. (Kling is busy throwing up--he's still new to the 87th--and murders--in this one.) 

Both the victims have been shot in the face, which must mark particular hatred on the part of the murderer. Some sort of creep? (Beyond the usual fact that murderers are creeps, of course...) Carella and Kling are on the track of somebody who meets girls in bars.

McBain's stories often look like they're some sort of random violence--or some sort of creep--but in the end the solution is much more Sherlock Holmes-ish than that--untraceable poison, locked room--and this is no exception. Shooting somebody in the face might be a mark of particular animosity, as they speculate at first, but it just might also be a trick to make indentification difficult, especially for people who've never been fingerprinted...dental records are of no use...and our first cops are happy to think this was suicide or something...

Cotton and Hawes' case is a woman who's stabbed with a bread knife. Was that more interesting? I wouldn't have thought so, necessarily. But it turns out connected to Carella and Kling's case, and that's definitely another sign of a classic puzzle mystery.

Not the best McBain by any means, but a satisfactory entry.

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Silver Age (1970). Two People 

 

Robert Desnos' Landscape

 

Landscape

A version 

I dreamt of loving. The dream remains, but love

is no longer those lilacs and roses whose breath

filled the broad woods, where the sail of a flame

lay at the end of each arrow-straight path.

 

I dreamt of loving. The dream remains, but love

is no longer that storm whose white nerve sparked

the castle towers, or left the mind unrhymed,

or flared an instant, just where the road forked.

 

It is the star struck under my heel in the night.

It is the word no book on earth defines.

It is the foam on the wave, the cloud in the sky.

 

As they age, all things grow rigid and bright.

The streets fall nameless, and the knots untie.

Now with this landscape, I fix: I shine.

 

-Robert Desnos (tr. Don Paterson)

 

Bit of a random pick this evening. I like it, I think, but I'm also still thinking about it. Your thoughts?

 

Robert Desnos (1900-1945) was a French poet. He was associated with the Surrealists as a young man, but broke with André Breton over Breton's support of Communism. During the war he was a member of the French Resistance, and was captured in 1944, with his ultimate destination Theriesenstadt. He survived the war, but had contracted typhoid as a prisoner, and only survived it by a month, dying in June of 1945. This is from the last book of poetry published during his life, Contrée of 1944.

 

Don Paterson is a contemporary Scottish poet. This translation (or version) first appeared in Poetry in the April 2006 issue.

 

Random? Well, I'm rereading Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives. There's a lot of young people talking about poetry in it...

"One night, a girl whose name was Marguerite and whom I wanted  to sleep with started to read a poem by Robert Desnos. I didn't know who the fuck Robert Desnos was, but other people at my table did, and anyway, the poem was good, it got to you." [271]

I was a bit like the speaker in that passage, and I didn't know who Robert Desnos was...but now I know a bit more. We don't ever learn which poem of Desnos, but there doesn't seem to be much Desnos in English on the web anyway.

 

The French, if it's helpful:

 

Le Paysage  

J'avais rêvé d'aimer. J'aime encor mais l'amour

Ce n'est plus ce bouquet de lilas et de roses

Chargeant de leurs parfums la forét où repose

Une flamme à l'issue de sentiers sans détour.

 

J'avais rêvé d'aimer. J'aime encor mais l'amour

Ce n'est plus cet orage où l'éclair superpose

Ses bûchers aux châteaux, déroute, décompose,

Illumine en fuyant l'adieu au carrefour.

 

C'est silex en feu sous mons pas dans la nuit,

Le mot qu'aucun lexique au monde n'a traduit

L'écume sur la mer, dans le ciel ce nuage.

 

À vieillir tout devient rigide et lumineux,

Des boulevards sans nom et des cordes sans nœuds.

Je me sens me roidir avec le paysage.

 

-Robert Desnos

 

 

 

Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins

 '"Why should people give a damn about what I think, what I feel?", Henri said. "My little personal stories don't interest anyone, and history, the big story, isn't in my opinion a fit subject for a novel."'

That's Henri Perron (a character in The Mandarins) who hasn't figured out how to encapsulate history in a novel, but Simone de Beauvoir has managed a pretty good job of it.

There are two conflicts that drive the novel that interlock with each other. The first is politics.

The Mandarins begins at a party that first Christmas in 1944 after Paris has been liberated. The war isn't over, but its end is in sight. With the US and Soviet Russia looking so dominant, what will happen to France? 

Perron had founded a Resistance magazine L'Espoir during the war; his friend and mentor Robert Dubreuilh had written for it. Resistance members had distributed the magazine; some had died in doing so. The fate of the magazine is one of the main drivers of the novel's plot. Dubreuilh creates a new left wing Socialist movement, non-Communist but still hopeful of establishing a Popular Front with the Communists. He wants L'Espoir to be the house organ for his new movement.

Perron is in general agreement with Dubreuilh's politics, but feels that L'Espoir should remain independent. If he isn't able to say what he thinks, he's going to lose some of his audience, he fears, and his fears prove true. Dubreuilh manipulates him into supporting his movement; Perron is no longer viewed as truth-telling; the magazine does lose readers and becomes dependent on deep-pocketed donors with agendas.

Then the first reports of the Gulag start to arrive. Can Perron truly say nothing?  But if he reports on it, even with the hope of correcting what he sees as (excuseable) Soviet excesses, is a Popular Front still possible? Maybe he should just abandon politics? Go back to writing novels. But World War III feels close.

(One can ask was a Popular Front with Soviet Union under Stalin even possible after World War II? The character Scriassine says no.)

There's a second set of conflicts that also drive the novel; unsurprisingly (it is Simone de Beauvoir) it's the relationship between the sexes.

Both Perron and Dubreuilh are married at the start of the novel. Paula Perron could sing and used to do so, but she felt she could never be Edith Piaf. Now she's let her entire life be absorbed in promoting Perron's purported greatness. But Perron has fallen out of love with her during the war when they were generally separated, and he's no longer convinced of his own greatness. He tries to convince her to take an interest in singing again, or in something other than himself, but are his encouragements genuine? Or just selfishness? He's not entirely sure himself. In the meantime he has affairs.

Anne Dubreuilh is a psychoanalyst with a thriving practice of her own. She and Dubreuilh are no longer sleeping together, but she still finds him intellectually stimulating. But the war's over! She's still young! Pleasure is possible! After five years of chastity, she has a one night stand, with Scriassine, but it's not very satisfying. But the door is open.

With the end of the war travel again becomes possible, but nobody has money. Perron gets an offer to go to Portugal for a French cultural agency. Nadine, the Dubreuilh's daughter, desperate to go anywhere, convinces him to take her as his secretary; they become lovers.

Then Anne Dubreuilh gets an offer to go to a psychoanalysis conference in New York, with a subequent lecture tour. She hems and haws--she can't leave her husband, her daughter, her patients--but in the end she does go; in Chicago, she meets the writer Lewis Brogan, who becomes the great romance of her life.

What happens politcally? What happens romantically? Well, I can't tell you that, of course... 😉

The novel is structured in alternating chapters. It starts with third-person narration with Henri Perron as the focus character; the other chapters are in first person as written by Anne Dubreuilh. 

The novel is often called a roman à clef, though de Beauvoir didn't like that as a description. But if so, Henri Perron is Camus, Robert Dubreuilh is Sartre, Anne Dubreuilh is de Beauvoir herself, Scriassine is Arthur Koestler, and Lewis Brogan is Chicago novelist Nelson Algren, who is also the dedicatee of the book. But Dubreuilh is twenty years older than Sartre, Camus was much less sympathetic to Communism than Perron, de Beauvoir and Sartre didn't have a daughter. She does however say in her autobiography Force of Circumstance that Lewis 'is the one who approaches closest to a living model.' When Anne says to Lewis, "Why are all your best friends pickpockets, or drug addicts, or pimps?" that does feel very much like Algren.

Henri Perron says at one point: 

"If you spend the best days of your life trying to communicate with others, it's because others count..."

The novel came out in 1954 and won the Prix Goncourt for its year. I read it in the English translation by Leonard Friedman of 1957. 

It's a book off my Classics Club list:

and is my visit to Paris this July (hosted by Emma at Words and Peace):

 

 

 

Dream Song

 

Dream Song #14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.

After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,

we ourselves flash and yearn.

and, moreover, my mother told me as a boy

(repeatingly) 'Ever to confess you're bored

means you have no

 

Inner Resources. I conclude now I have no

inner resources, because I am heavy bored.

Peoples bore me,

literature bores me, especially great literature,

Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes,

as bad as achilles, 

 

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.

And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag,

and somehow a dog,

has taken itself & its tail considerably away

into mountains or sea or sky, leaving 

behind: me, wag.

 

-John Berryman

 

I'm not especially bored at the moment, great literature does not bore me, but I do love this poem, which is pretty great literature. There's a new volume of Berryman, Only Sing, 152 Uncollected Dream Songs out recently, and I was reading a review of it, which brought me back to my favorite of the original dream songs.

 

John Berryman (1914-1972)  was an American poet. His volume 77 Dream Songs won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Henry is his alter ego, or maybe better, his Id, that shows up in the Dream Songs.

 

It was my Dad rather than my Mom who was likely to give me conventional advice of this sort, though there was never a line about Inner Resources that I recall. But: where's your vim, vigor, and vitality?

 

 

 

Layla Erbil's What Remains (#EuropeanReadingChallenge)

i've no idea why i'm telling you all this my dear readers

i can't know

i feel like i should know everything

before putting my other foot in the grave [208]

Laylâ Erbil's verse novel of 2011 was published by Deep Vellum last year in English translation. 

Lahzen is our narrator; she's an elderly woman of the secular, political left living in Istanbul. She's remembering the events of her life and of Istanbul, her home. She doesn't tell us her story in chronological order, but reflecting backwards on it. There are several recurring themes.

The first is her childhood. She grew up in Fener, also known as Phanar, the once Greek neighborhood on the Golden Horn, the European side of Istanbul. In her childhood, she had Greek, Jewish, Armenian friends. Rosa, the Jew, broke her pencil in half one day when Lahzen had forgotten hers; an act, she tells us, promising forty years of friendship. But in September of 1955, state-sponsored riots against homes and businesses drove out the non-Turks. Rosa's family goes to Israel. Lahzen remembers Greek songs, and songs in mixed Turkish and Greek. Her sister, her aunt go to Orthodox churches to perform magic with candles for good luck. The multicultural Istanbul of her youth is gone, and she misses it. A copy of Marilyn Monroe's skirt from the famous photo over the steam grate remains in a shop window in an arcade:

all that remained

was marilyn's pleated white skirt

in hristo usta's shop window

its white now blotched with purplish rot

the keys to the shop window

remained with hristo usta who fled to athens

do you think he'll come back

one day

you never know

they miss it here [210]

A second thread involves the deaths and disappearances during the years of the military dictatorship in Turkey. As she herself was a leftist, some are people she knew; some are just news items. Her second husband Sabit was in jail, but was eventually released. (There was an earlier husband who was good-looking and had a motorcycle, but oh, well, maybe not such great husband material.)

What it means to be a good person in such a world is a recurring thought for her; she often turns to Kierkegaard, and in particular Kierkegaard's retelling of the story of Abraham and Isaac (in Fear and Trembling):  

...yes we can defend søren as someone who was trying to make the best of the world's fear of raging hellfires in those times; in a sense his love was harmless. he said "how does one become a good christian, that's always been my priority." in his day and age that was what it meant to be a good person. [159] 

In the present her relationship with Sabit is difficult. While he was in jail, she had an affair with his best friend Zeyyat, and maybe she's still a bit in love with Zeyyat. Is Sabit holding that one time infidelity over her head? A bit.

What remains at the end of a life in such a place? History and stones.

The book is billed as a verse novel. I can't comment on the verse, and largely didn't feel it. Probably my limitations, but who knows? Traduttore, traditore. Though it feels like the three ranslators (Ersan, Spangler, Wyers) knew what they were doing. I know nothing about modern Turkish poetry. Mostly I read it as oddly punctuated and capitalized prose, but even as that I quite enjoyed it.

what could the content of the text

be

other than

the writer in her own way

struggling to capture the truth

knowing that it cannot be captured [27]

 I first came across the book here.

 

Dorothy Sayers' Whose Body

"He was so upset, poor little man. He'd found a dead body in his bath."

Mr. Thipps, "the little architect man who's doing the church roof", goes to take a bath in the morning, but there's a dead man in the tub, naked except for a pair of pince-nez. Nobody he knows, he swears. "Uncommonly awkward for him."

That same evening, Sir Reuben Levy disappears. He's a successful financier, with plenty of business enemies in the course of things, though he's considered a sweetheart by his family and domestic staff.

Are the two cases connected? Well...

Parker of Scotland Yard is assigned the Levy case, suspects they might be, and wonders if this unknown corpse is his man. But the dead man was not Sir Reuben Levy.

And Lord Peter Wimsey offers himself to help with the case of the dead man in the bath.

This is the first of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries and comes out in 1923, though we learn he's been involved in an earlier case. that of the Attenbury Emeralds. He took to crime-solving to help with his shell shock after World War I, and turns out to be good at it.

And are the two cases connected? Of course they are.

I've read a bunch of the Lord Peter Wimsey stories before, but not all of them and not this one, I think, all out of order. It is a series that benefits from reading in order, and I might go through the series. It certainly starts off well.

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Golden Age (1923). Piece of Furniture: Bathtub.  

Virginia Woolf's The Years

 

     "All talk would be nonsense, I suppose, if it were written down," she said, stirring her coffee.

     Maggie stopped the machine for a moment and smiled.

     "And even if it isn't," she said.

     "But it's the only way we have of knowing each other," Rose protested.

  

The Years was the last novel completed by Virginia Woolf during her life, and came out in 1937. It was the biggest financial success of her lifetime, though I have to imagine Mrs. Dalloway has sold more copies now. It's the story of the Pargiter family across three generations. Colonel Abel Pargiter, who served in India, and his wife Rose, are the parents of seven children; they form the core of the novel, though there are also cousins and family friends.

 

The novel is arranged in ten chapters, each labelled with a year. The longest are the first, 1880, and the last, 'The Present Day,' presumably 1936 or so, just before the novel appears. In 1880, we meet the seven children--Eleanor, Morris, Milly, Edward, Delia, Martin, and Rose. Mother Rose has been bedridden for years, and may finally be dying, and we see the children's (and husband's--who keeps a mistress) reaction to their mother's imminent death. Delia, the rebellious one, thinks it's time for her to go; others are more uncertain, but it's true Rose the mother doesn't have much of a life by then. At the end of the chapter, after a couple of dream-haunted days of collapses and rallies, she dies.

 

The other year chapters all take place on a single day, and are built around a meeting of family members. In 1891, it's the day of Parnell's death, the advocate for Irish Home Rule; Colonel Abel goes to visit his brother and sister-in-law for his niece Maggie's birthday. Abel, perfectly content in his imperialism, had no use for Parnell, but admires his sister-in-law's emotion at the death. In 1917 Maggie, now married to a Frenchman René (Renny), hosts Eleanor for dinner; German air raids on London occur that night. 1918 sees the day of the armistice; we follow Crosby, the Pargiter nurse and maid, now pensioned off, in the shortest chapter; she's annoyed by all the celebratory guns going off. In 'The Present Day', Delia and her husband Patrick, throw a party; all the surviving family members appear; there's a dance and dinner, and the party ends at dawn:

"The sun had risen, and the sky above the houses wore an air of extraordinary beauty, simplicity and peace."

So it's a family novel, but if so, it's quite different from what you might expect; it's impressionistic in its style, sketch-y, even, so long as you don't imagine that as a derogatory adjective. It's half the length of Buddenbrooks, for example, and avoids scenes that might have been expected: Charles, one of Maggie's children, dies in World War I, but we only learn that obliquely and long after the event.

 

Woolf conceived the novel after she'd given a lecture 'Professions for Women' in 1931:

"When your secretary invited me to come here, she told me that your Society is concerned with the employment of women and she suggested that I might tell you something about my own professional experiences. It is true I am a woman; it is true I am employed; but what professional experiences have I had? It is difficult to say." 

That set her to thinking and she initially imagined a novel-essay about the Pargiter family, a blend of essays about the status of women mixed with fictional episodes. That book was reconstructed after her death and is available, titled The Pargiters, but I haven't read it. In the end, though, the essays became her book Three Guineas and the fictional episodes became the novel The Years. That initial conception is still visible; in the first generation, there aren't many possibilities for women: Eleanor ends up looking after her widowed father, only becoming a great world traveler after his death; Kitty, a cousin, whom  Edward Pargiter loved and wanted to marry, marries instead a great lord and lives that lifestyle; Delia, in that first generation but somewhat younger, becomes a suffragette and is sent to prison for her agitation. It's only in the third generation that real professional possibilities open up for women: Peggy, Maggie's daughter, becomes a doctor, though it doesn't seem to make her very happy.

 

But a schematic essay-novel is not the novel Virginia Woolf has given us (though the idea of it definitely colors the criticism from what I've seen). Several of the male characters are also well-rounded, particularly Abel, the patriarch, and North, Peggy and Charles' brother, who also served in World War I, but then went to be a farmer in Africa.  Like any family novel of multiple generations, it's interested in the passing of time, and 1880 to 1935 are a time of great changes in England. In 1880, tea is being made with a spirit lamp and people travel in horse-drawn carriages; in 1936, the flash and circle symbol of the British Union of Fascists is graffitied on walls, and Eleanor discusses traveling by plane (though she doesn't).

 

It's also very good on family relations. As aunt and niece suggest in that opening quote, there's never perfect understanding or communication. During that final party, Edward, by then a professor, quotes Sophocles, but refuses to translate:

"It's no go, North thought. He can't say what he wants to say; he's afraid. They're all afraid; afraid of being laughed at; afraid of giving themselves away. He's afraid too, he thought, looking at the young man with a fine forehead and a weak chin, who was gesticulating too emphatically. We're all afraid of each other, he thought; afraid of what?"

And yet that's not the whole of the story either; again as that opening quote suggests, there is communication. North dances with a girl at the party, asks her for a date, she accepts. The next generation? Another way in which this would be unlike Buddenbrooks. This is a family with a decent amount of good will toward each other--not true of all families-- even if they don't always articulate it. The party is a success; it, and the novel, end with 'simplicity and peace.'

οὔτοι συνέχθειν, άλλα συνφιλεῖν ἔφυν

-Sophocles, Antigone, l.523 (Antigone speaking) 

And what was it Edward was unable to say in English? Elizabeth Wyckoff translates as, "I cannot share in hatred, but in love."

 

Nothing of Virginia Woolf's is exactly unknown or ignored. As I noted, you can easily enough find the novel The Pargiters she decided against giving us. But when I first was reading Virginia Woolf, thirty years ago or whatever, I read Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, Orlando, the Common Reader series, etc., but it didn't occur to me to read The Years. I don't know what bit of received opinion I picked up that I didn't need to read it, but it was wrong. 

 

This was my spin book for Classics Club Spin #44, and a very good spin it was! 

Georgi Gospodinov's Death and the Gardener

"Surely this is why we tell stories. To create another parallel corridor where the world and everything in it are in their rightful places. To divert the story down another furrow when danger and death flood in, just as he would divert the water into another row in his garden."

He, in the sentence above, is the dying father of the narrator; the father liked to garden. The narrator is a middle-aged Bulgarian novelist whose name is only given as Georgi, and that only in the flap description.

Of the four novels of Gospodinov's I've read this easily feels the most autobiographical, but Gospodinov in a headnote insists it is a novel.

The father Dinyo had been diagnosed with fatal lung cancer seventeen years earlier. Rather miraculously at that time it had gone into remission, but now, in the late fall of 2023, it's come roaring back. Georgi starts a handwritten diary to deal with his feelings. When the first set of scans comes back, there's basically no hope:

"Well, at least till Christmas, we'll get together, see the snowdrops spring up, my father said, looking at the doctor with such expectation. Christmas was twenty days away, almost no time at all. 

Christmas might be possible, the doctor replied.

And this answer was at once the most merciful and merciless I have ever heard."

Georgi's father was a storyteller himself, not professionally, just in conversation, and when the present becomes too difficult to bear, Georgi recalls one of his father's stories. It's clear Georgi simply likes his father in addition to loving him. Georgi, the writer (and reader,) turns to other writers for consolation. There's Sontag, unsurprisingly, who herself was diagnosed with a cancer that was supposed to kill her, which went away for a number of years, but in the end did return; also Montaigne, various stoics, Borges. Homer, and here as well, is a frequent touchstone for Gospodinov.

There are a few markers this is a novel. Gaustine, a recurring character in Gospodinov's fiction, shows up in this, but mostly to be quoted. Gospodinov uses himself as a character in other novels; The Physics of Sorrow is in some ways a generational family novel, but with an amusing medical/science-fiction-y twist to aid the narration. In the Booker International winner, Time Shelter, the writer Georgi Gospodinov is hired as a consultant for a psychological therapeutic project, because he's good at storytelling; Gaustine, though, makes the plot go in that novel. The distance in this between Georgi the character and Georgi Gospodinov the actual novelist feels much smaller. It's less expansive, less playful than his other novels, but also very touching. 

The Tragedy of X

"Well," said Inspector Thumm suddenly, "plain or fancy, it's a puzzler, and Mr. Bruno thought you'd be interested."

Inspector Thumm of the New York Police and Walter Bruno, the district attorney, call up on Drury Lane, retired Shakespearean actor, for help in a particularly puzzling murder case. Lane had been a help on a previous case. 

Harvey Longstreet, of the brokerage firm De Witt and Longstreet, was poisoned on the streetcar. He was a travelling with his business partner and other associates, but Longstreet wasn't very popular, and any of them would cheerfully have seen him dead. But how was it done? It was raining and the windows were closed; the streetcar was full after the Longstreet party got on and they didn't make any stops. The poison was fast-acting and everyone who could have done it was there.

The conductor of that street car sends a letter to Thumm saying he had information; his body is found bashed on the head and thrown from a ferry boat. And Longstreet's partner De Witt is murdered on a suburban train. The Commuter Murders! 

After Lane has heard the facts of the first murder, he says he knows who did it, but can't prove it. I read this twenty-five years ago, and I remembered the nature of the clue that Lane sees (though he doesn't disclose it until the end) but had still forgotten who the muderer was. But it is one of the best Queen mysteries, and shows up on best overall mystery lists as well. After reading Drury Lane's Last Case recently, I thought it was time to reread this one. Highly recommended!

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Golden Age (1933). Train. 

Drury Lane's Last Case

    "Sure, sure," said Thumm in a trembling voice. A thousand dollars! Tears of joy gathered in his stony eyes. These were lean days. A thousand dollars for keeping a skinny envelope in his safe!

    "Second," and the man went swiftly to the door, "if I should fail to call on a twentieth, you must not open the envelope except in the presence of Mr. Drury Lane."

 

It's 1933 and Inspector Thumm has retired from the New York police to hang up his shingle as a private investigator. But when he was still with New York's finest he'd solved three earlier cases with the aid of Drury Lane, retired Shakespearean actor. 

On the 20th of May, Thumm receives the needed phone call, but on the 20th of June, nothing. He prepares to contact Drury Lane and open the envelope.

 

But in the meantime he's got another case. Donoghue, an ex-cop, but now a guard at the Britannic Museum, has disappeared. The same day that he disappeared, someone smashed a display case at the museum. At first it seems nothing has happened, but eventually it's discovered that someone replaced a 1599 printing of Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare with a 1606 printing from the same publisher. The 1606 printing is actually rarer, and presumably more valuable.

 

Are the two cases connected? Of course they are!

 

Well, what's in the envelope unsealed in the presence of Drury Lane? It's that note shown on the cover, on Saxon Library stationary, with the mysterious letters 3HS wM. The Saxon Library has just given that 1599 Shakespeare to the Britannic Museum, so there's your connection. But what do those mysterious letters mean? 

 

Actually that was the most disappointing thing about the mystery. Turn the picture upside down--well, since that may be a little difficult unless you're reading this on a phone, let me do it for you. 😉 Ah, now it reads Wm SHe. Since we're dealing with stolen copies of Shakespeare's poetry, you probably can guess the nature of the clue. But Thumm couldn't, and nobody else could either, except maybe Drury Lane, who was coy about what he knew.

 

A second somebody also disappears before a body is found murdered, blown up in a building. First they have to determine just who it is who has been killed, and then who did the killing. The ending was both surprising and satisfactory.

 

The cousins behind the Ellery Queen pseudonym wrote four novels with Drury Lane as the hero detective; they originally came out under the pseudonym Barnaby Ross, though eventually they fessed up it was them. The first two--The Tragedy of X and The Tragedy of Y--often show up on lists of all-time greatest mysteries. This isn't quite in the league of those two, but it's still pretty entertaining.

 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

 

Golden Age (1933). Book.
 

Quoting Walt Whitman

 

Tears 

 

Tears! Tears! Tears!

In the night, in solitude, tears.

On the white shore dripping, dripping, suck'd in by the sand,

Tears, not a star shining, dark and desolate,

Moist tears, from the eyes of a muffled head;

O who is that ghost? that form in the dark, with tears?

What shapeless lump is that, bent, crouch'd there on the sand?

Streaming tears, sobbing tears, throes, choked with wild cries,

O storm, embodied, rising, careering with swift steps along the beach!

O wild and dismal night storm, with wind--O belching and desperate!

O shade so sedate and decorous by day, with calm countenance and regulated pace,

But away at night as you fly, none looking--O then the unloosen'd ocean,

Of tears, tears, tears!

 

-Walt Whitman

 

I've been reading Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts. Miss La Trobe writes and organizes a pageant depicting the history of England at a country house. It was a benefit to fund new lighting for the local church. The pageant was held outside, and the weather mostly cooperated, but it did rain for a bit in the middle. (It is England after all.) After the pageant is over, one of audience says, "While we're waiting, tell me, did you feel when the shower fell someone wept for us all? There's a poem, Tears tears tears, it begins. And goes on Oh then the unloosened ocean...but I can't remember the rest."

 

More than I ever knew. I was somewhat surprised to discover it was Whitman. I almost titled this post Still More Weather, but I'm still a little uncertain whether the poem is about weather, comparing a storm to a person crying, or about a person, calm enough during the day, but crying in the night, and comparing that person to a storm on the shore. Not that one really needs to decide, of course.

 

Post coming soon-ish on Between the Acts. 

 

May Wrapup

Poetry Department

Richard Howard/No Traveller

From 1989, one of Howard's best collections. It opens with a wonderful sequence of imagined letters, set in 1953. Two young gay men, frenemies, are in Paris and they're both writing to somebody Roderick, back home in the U.S. Ivo is gossipy and tart; his great moment is when he sees the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Edward and and Wallis Simpson. Richard is more serious; he spies the poet Wallace Stevens, and insinuates himself as Stevens' guide to Paris.  

        "To hear her talk, as she does,

about her escape from France,

you would suppose she had swum the Channel,

with her maid between her teeth!"

 

From one of Ivo's letters, this is supposed to be Wallis Simpson talking about Lady Diana Cooper. Meow!

 

Just now typing this, it occurred to me that we have Wallis and Wallace. Deliberate? Oh, probably. It's all made up--Wallace Stevens apparently never got to Paris--but so very convincing. And so very fun.

 

7 Greeks (tr. by Guy Davenport)

 

The seven are Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman, Anakreon, Herakleitos, Diogenes, and Herondas. Numbers 5 and 6 are philosophers; the others are poets. I think Davenport is a great translator, and his introduction was superb. I do have doubts about translating scraps where all that survives is one word per line. (The same applies to Anne Carson's translation of Sappho.) That's what we've got, but it feels a bit like a romantic preferring the ruins of Tintern Abbey to an actual building.

 

Here's an Archilochos poem in Davenport's translation that made it on to the blog before.

 

Karl Shapiro/Trial of a Poet

 

This is Shapiro's book of 1947. He'd been a clerk in the Army, serving in the Pacific for most of the war; his Pulitzer-prize winning book of poetry written from New Guinea, V-Letter and Other Poems, showed up on the blog earlier. This is still quite engaged with his war experience. Like a lot of American poets of that time his poetry is moving from formal to a more free verse; this is interestingly transitional.

 

And one of the poems, one that he uses for the title of the middle section, is 'The Progress of Faust':
 

He was born in Deutschland, as you would expect,

And graduated in magic from Cracow

in Fifteen Five.

 

Which brings us to:

 

 

 

Poetry Department (Faust Subdivision)

 

After reading a bunch of Goethe last summer, and traveling to Germany last fall, I'd been thinking about rereading Faust, which I've read before but not in forever. I read Part I in Kaufmann's translation and Part II in Philip Wayne's. Kaufmann only translated the first part; he says the second part isn't as good. Is that true? Well, it is true that in Philip Wayne's translation the second part isn't as good, but I remain uncertain about the German. Wayne is certainly the inferior English poet.

 

Goethe's house in Weimar from its garden

 

Christopher Marlowe/Doctor Faustus

 

But better than either as an English poet, of course, is Marlowe. I do think that Shakespeare is better at shaking a scene, but when it comes to bombasting out blank verse, Kit strikes me as fully the equal of William. One interesting bit from all the Faust/Goethe reading I've done is that Goethe (and most Germans of that era) first knew the Faust story from puppet shows, and that German puppet shows were based on Marlowe's version carried back over into Germany.

 

Literary Criticism

 

Erich Heller/The Artist's Journey Into the Interior and Other Essays

 

I was reading something about music the previous month--Peter Kalkavage's Music and the Idea of a World--and Kalkavage said one of the best books about Thomas Mann was Erich Heller's Thomas Mann: The Ironic German. My library doesn't have a circulating copy of that, but they did have this. Pretty fascinating stuff. Good on Thomas Mann (as was the Kalkavage) and also on Goethe.

Cooking

 

Clare de Boer, Jess Shadbolt, and Annie Shi/The King Cookbook

 

King is a restaurant in New York City.  I have to admit to not having cooked anything out of the book yet, but I scanned several pages before I returned it to the library... The recipe for Tunisian Chicken looks very tasty. One of the desserts is likelier to be first, though: our local farmer's market had local strawberries for the first time today, and their recipe for Eton Mess looked particularly yummy.

 

Mystery Department

 

Ovidia Yu/Aunty Lee's Delights

 

The first (2013) of a series of mysteries set in Singapore involving Aunty Lee. She's a recent widow who runs a tea shop, and has a murder on her hands to solve. Enjoyable characters, though I knew who the murderer was practically from the start. And while I would agree with Yu's politics I'm sure, they seemed a little dogmatic in a mystery novel. Still, I'm likely enough to carry on with the series.

 

At one point Aunty Lee says, explaining why she knows somebody convenient to solving the mystery, Singapore is a small town and everybody knows everybody. Pooh, I thought: I've been to Singapore; it's not that small a town. But then when I told a friend who's from Singapore I'd read the novel, she said, oh, yes, my brother went to high school with her, and that she had been a stagehand for one of Yu's plays.

 

Literary Novels

 

Four novels from Canadian publisher Biblioasis made it into this post.  The real find of those I felt was Alice Chadwick's Dark Like Under.

 

Richard Hell/Godlike

 

This takes the romance of French poets Rimbaud and Verlaine and translates it to 1970s New York City. I somehow missed it when it first came out in 2005, but it's recently been reissued by New York Review Books. I listened to a lot of Television and Voidoids back in the day.

 

Richard Hell came to Toronto's Appel Salon at the downtown library. It was a pretty good author event. Surprisingly for a seminal punk musician who took Hell for his stage name, he was a pretty genial guy. Unsurprisingly he's a bit hard of hearing. He said after his first novel had been taken as nothing more than thinly disguised biography, he decided to write about homosexual French poets for his second novel; then nobody would think this one autobiographical. Ha. He still gets told, I didn't know you were gay. (He's not.) But it is quite believable, and some of the drug-taking may have autobiographic elements, though he's supposed to have straightened up since.

 

Sent me off to read some Verlaine poetry. 

 

Comics

 

Quino/Mafalda

 

An Argentine comic strip about a little girl and her friends. The whole run (1964-1973) is being issued in an English translation by Frank Wynne in five volumes. This was the first and it came out last year; the second later will appear later this year. Quino only ended it because he felt it safer to flee the country. They're pretty great.

 

All in all a pretty good month's worth of reading. 

 

For the Commonplace Book 

 

"He [Caspar David Friedrich] was probably the first European painter to whom it happened that a picture of his was hung upside down." 

-- Erich Heller

 

"I don't see why/people can't look things up, I always do." 

-- Richard Howard's 'Love Which Alters" (voicing Proust)

 

"And yet he himself did not seem to think as a matter of free choice, but rather yielded philosophy as a cow yields milk--in helpless bondage to a dispensation of Nature." 

-- Erich Heller (of Hegel)

 

Mephistopheles: "I am the spirit that negates."

Mephistopheles: "Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint."

--Faust, Part I, l. 1338, English by Walter Kaufmann

 

Faust: I am too old to be content to play

Too young to be without desire

 

Faust: Ich bin zu alt, um nur zu spielen

Zu jung, um ohne Wunsch zu sein

-Faust, Part 1, l. 1546-7, English by Walter Kaufmann

 

Faust: A petty case of paltry legacies

-Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, Act I, sc. i, l. 27

 

(I feel like somebody needs to write a mystery novel with that as the title.) 

 

Mephistopheles: Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.

-Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, Act I, sc. iii, l. 75

 

One wrong will not balance against another: to be honorable and just is our only defense agains men without honor or justice.

-Diogenes 39, English by Guy Davenport

(Why does this one seem especially relevant?)

Give up philosophy because I'm an old man? It's at the end of the race you break into a burst of speed.

-Diogenes 124, English by Guy Davenport

 

The books still around the house

 

How was your month of reading?

Leonie Swann's Three Bags Full

 

George Glenn, an Irish shepherd, has been found dead in his pasturage with a spade driven through his chest. Miss Maple, the cleverest sheep in Glennkill, and possibly the world, says, "I think we ought to find out what kind of human. We owe old George that. If a fierce dog took one of our lambs he always tried to find the culprit. Anyway, he was our shepherd. No one had a right to stick a spade in him. That's wolfish behavior."

Turns out there's a suitable list of suspects: an earlier unsolved murder in the village, the drug trade passing through since Glennkill is on the coast, George had a complicated love life. The elements of a decent mystery story are there.

The gimmick, of course, is the sheep, and when I got the book from the library, I wasn't entirely sure I was going to read it. There are a number of ways it could have veered off into ridiculousness. But it does pretty well. The sheep still feel sheep-like, and the different point of view is fun. In fact, if you were looking for an easy-reading, but pretty perfect example of defamiliarization, this would do nicely. 

The sheep also fill the Watson role in an interesting way. Watson sees and fails to understand; it's important to keep the story hidden; the sheep, who live with humans, see them pretty closely and quite often fail to understand the things humans do. (How can they not smell that!) 

It's my visit to Ireland for the year...

 

...but the novel orignally came out in German in 2005, and was translated by the late, great Anthea Bell.  I'm not sure now where I saw mention of the book, but there's a movie version just come out titled The Sheep Detectives, so I'm sure it had something to do with that.

More Weather

#315

He fumbles at your Soul

As Players at the Keys

Before they drop full Music on --

He stuns you by degrees --

Prepares your brittle Nature

For the Ethereal Blow

By fainter Hammers -- further heard --

Then nearer -- Then so slow --

Your Breath has time to straighten --

Your Brain -- to bubble Cool --

Deals -- One -- imperial -- Thunderbolt --

That scalps your naked Soul --

 

When Winds take Forests in their Paws --

The Universe -- is still --

 

-Emily Dickinson

 

It's possible thunderstorm weather for us, sticky, though now there's a breeze picking up.  Fainter Hammers have indeed been further heard. So far not any nearer. It's still possible any actual rain will blow right past us.

 

Emily Dickinson, of course, didn't title her poems with numbers--they had no titles--and the numbers I use come from the Thomas H. Johnson edition of 1955. It's popular and it's what I have. He numbers the poems in the order he believes they were composed. Last week's poem was number #316, and he assigns them both to 1862. Assuming his dating is right, she was working out a theme at the time. And just what was the weather like in Amherst in June of 1862?

The Wind

 

#316

The Wind didn't come from the Orchard -- today --

Further than that ---

Nor stop to play with the Hay --

Nor joggle a Hat --

He's a transitive Fellow -- very --

Rely on that --

 

If He leave a Bur at the Door

We know He has climbed a Fir --

But the Fir is Where -- Declare --

Were you ever there?

 

If He brings Odors of Clovers --

And that is His business -- not Ours --

Then He has been with the Mowers --

Whetting away the Hours

To sweet pauses of Hay --

His Way -- of a June Day --

 

If He fling Sand, and Pebble --

Little Boys Hats -- and Stubble --

With an occasional Steeple --

And a hoarse "Get out of the way, I say,"

Who'd be the fool to stay?

Would you -- Say --

Would you be the fool to stay?

 

-Emily Dickinson

 

This just seemed to fit the season. The wind frequently leaves Bur/pine cones on our doorstep, though I moved this one up a couple of steps to get the door in. We know where those come from: there's a giant pine tree in our front yard, so I Declare I have been there. Our backyard Orchard is two apples and a pear--none of which bear much fruit, alas, too shady and too many squirrels--but if we get blossom smells, which we did last night, it's from the lilac bushes of our neighbors to the north.

 

The Mowers have been busy this season, and we get plenty of Clover smell, too. So far--fortunately--no occasional Steeple has landed in our front yard, though the Anglican church is only a block away...

 

 

A Biblioasis Bender

 

Biblioasis is a small Canadian publisher and bookshop based in Windsor, Ontario. One of their successes--so much so she's moved on to Knopf in the meantime--is Anakana Schofield, who came to Toronto's main library for an event on Thursday. I was thinking about reading/rereading some of hers, and that got me to look at the Biblioasis website. Why look at all those books I hadn't otherwise noticed!

Anakana Schofield/Martin John

I had passed on this one when it first came out in 2015. Martin John is a OCD serial sexual abuser, living in London, England. Now such a novel can either be good or bad, right? If it's bad why are you reading it? But if it's good, you've just spent 300 pages (in this case) inside the head of a seriously unpleasant person. I did think this was quite good, but it's written in a close third person, and there's no escape. The back cover says it's 'darkly comic,' and so it is, but maybe not funny enough? (Though how could such a thing be all that funny.) Certainly sometimes novels like this work, are even important--Notes from the Underground, Lolita--but in any case you have to be in a mood to read them. 

Anakana Schofield/Malarky

Malarky has got some darkness, too, but more plain humour. Philomena, Phil, often just known as 'Our Woman', is living on a not very successful cattle farm in Ireland. She learns two things: her husband is having an affair with a woman she labels Red the Twit, and her youngest and only son, Jimmy, is gay. She doesn't use the words, but there's a sexual revolution going on, and maybe she should take part, too! She seduces a traveling salesman her own age and then a lonely security guard, handsome and younger, who has emigrated from Syria. But can a middle-aged Irish woman from a small town really join the sexual revolution? Maybe not.

The novel occurs in a couple of time streams, and Schofield writes in a softened Irish dialect:

    "Get out and about a bit, my husband urged me, go in to town, have a look at the shops. I lived alone then with my husband. If you're wondering I have three children, though now I have only two and no husband neither...

    It was the second time my husband instructed me on that day. The shops, to the male, ever the solution to the glowering female, but in this instance they were no use whatsoever for unbinding me from misery."

The language is fun. The time shifts make it a little tricky--Schofield is often labelled an experimental novelist--but this wasn't especially difficult, and the shifts are well-signaled.

What I hadn't realized until this reading is that Martin John and Bina (the main character of her third novel) both appear in this volume, making the three a sort of loose trilogy.

Her new novel--I'm currently number 38 on the hold list--her fourth, Library of Brothel, sounds interesting. Since they bought 45 copies, I might even see it pretty soon. At the Appel Salon event, she was fun: lively and thoughtful both, and while she lives in Canada now, I wonder how long it's been, because she still has a strong Irish accent, which is just one of the best ways to hear English spoken.

Ivana Sajko/Love Novel

Ivana Sajko/Every Time We Say Goodbye

 

Two novellas by a contemporary Croatian writer. Love Novel is about a married couple in an unnamed EU country; it's 'love in late capitalism' according to the back of the book. She's an underemployed actress; he wants to write. They're not poor by African standards, but they're poor by modern European standards. Will their marriage survive?

 

I thought this was strong, and I might say something more after I've read Every Time We Say Goodbye.

 

Ray Robertson/Estates Large and Small

 

Ray Robertson is a Canadian writer. I've read a couple of his novels before, but his more recent work seems to be non-fiction on popular music (a long time interest of his) and aging (and aren't we all more interested in that as time goes by...) None of which I've read. This novel from 2022 had slipped past my notice.

 

Phil (could there be a Biblioasis pattern here?) runs a small used-book store. Business has been getting worse, and during the pandemic, he decides a bricks-and-mortar store no longer makes sense. He hires a service to setup his eStore; Cameron, a young woman confined to a wheelchair after an car accident, organizes the website; he hires his nephew to enter in the books. There was a wife, but she's long gone. He smokes dope and listens to Grateful Dead board tapes.

 

Phil is still buying books from estates (large and small). Mostly they're husbands who collected, and widows who decide to sell, but at one home with a good collection of interesting and saleable books, Phil tells the woman something conventional, I'm sorry for your loss, but it turns out she's the one dying, stage four lung cancer, and it's time for death-cleaning. But wouldn't you want your books, at least until... They work something out.

 

At first I thought this novel was just a little too low-key and short on event, but I came around. (You see the possibility of the Cameron-nephew romance, right?)  It's certainly not a thriller, but I now think it may be the best of Robertson's novels. (At least of the ones I've read.)

 

Alice Chadwick/Dark Like Under

 

This was the real discovery for me. I hadn't heard about it at all. It's a day in the life of an English public school (that's private for North Americans) in the 1980s. The school is in some unnamed small town--one of its students is from a farming family. The students are told to look down upon students from the other (public if you're a North American) school, but our story's school is hardly Eton or Rugby. Two main things happen at the start of that day, just after midnight.

 

Robin is seen leaving a party with Jonah, Tin's (Thomasin's) boyfriend.  Tin is good-looking, somewhat damaged--her mother committed suicide when she was a kid--and trouble. Robin worships Tin, and Tin doesn't actually treat Jonah very well, but Tin still wants him.

 

But also that night, popular teacher Mr. Ardennes died. He was the leader of the school faculty's liberal faction; the principal Gomme won't stand for any infractions at all, such as being in the hall without a hall pass, or refusing to wear the school blazer on a hot day. We gradually learn that Mr. Ardennes committed suicide and that Robin and Jonah were the last ones to see him alive.

 

This was Alice Chadwick's debut novel and it came out last year. It's possible the novel had too many characters for 330 pages, but I thought it was a pretty remarkable debut, and a very good read.

 

Biblioasis isn't just novels, though!

 

They have a nice line in contemporary formal poetry, something I like, and I just pulled all those off the shelf for their photo op, after posting a poem of Alexandra Oliver's earlier this week. Pino Colluccio has also been on the site once, though not from this book.

 

Do you read books just because of the press? Do you have particular publishers you like?