Dear reader,
I recently moved out of my apartment. I hope this has added even the most troublesome papers on DIY organizing to your reading list. How did the “life-changing magic” of tidying pass me through completely?
Perhaps one of the neat and cheerful manifestos of Scandinavian and Japan taught me something about writing more neatly. Unfortunately, in that field, minimalism is generally not my bag, like home decoration. Give me a lily. Sing to me a song of gorgeous writing, semicolons and fat, enveloping the horns like an overgrown houseplant. Run my windy paragraph for free, like the kitchen drawyer storage in expired covid tests and outdated technology (hello, sweet blackberry)!
In the cold light of a moving truck, I finally found some fortitude. Still, all the actual houseplants survived the purge, and the works of two authors whose prose style evoke the unique whims of Swedish death cleaning. I like to think that both have gorgeous living rooms.
– Lee
“The Story of a Woman,” by Annie Elneau
Non-fiction, 1988
Ernau's Lean Requiem – translated from France by Tanya Leslie – begins with Hegel's quote about the nature of human suffering and the calls from a nursing home in a hospital outside of Paris.
The following are reported in pure observation mode: The body is wrapped in gauze “like a small mummy.” Co's choice (oak, mauve lining); inconspicuous service (Gusty Rain, Prerecorded Organ Music, then lunch at an indifferent restaurant). “It's all,” she said calmly, “It's definitely over.”
Still, for the next few days, Elnaud often crying for no reason, realizing that he had forgotten the simple order of things. She had trouble reading and peeling off the vegetables properly. A few weeks after the funeral, she wrote the life of “the only woman who really meant something to me” and wrote herself forensically, not (Quelle Horreur).
We learn that Elnaux's mother, the fourth-born in a family of six of farm workers and weavers, escaped from intense poverty but embraced her Catholicism. She managed to start a small grocery store and lost her eldest son to Diffteria at 6am. She occasionally slapped her second and last child, Annie, across the face, but poured her hopes and desires onto her. And before dementia took her heart, she was already lost a bit, caught up in old rules about age and class, and seemed unsuitable for the empty time of retirement.
I was able to throw some adjectives at you about the intentional austerity of “Women's Stories.” My pockets are filled with a lot of gorgeous things that Elnaud definitely disliked – I like the overalls of my colleague Dwight Garner the best. This bike is built for speed, but it holds almost everything.
Read it if you like: Chantal Akelman films, Midlife Crisis, let people talk about their own abilities at parties.
Available: Seven Stories Press, or Normandy's underrated Airbnb nightstand.
“My Death” by Lisa Tuttle
Fiction, 2004
Appreciation for the clever people in New York chose a cover illustration by late feminist artist and occultist Marjorie Cameron for the recent reissue of Lisa Tuttle's creepy mystery of “My Death.”
Initially, Cameron's two shaggy, savory sketches of her hairy two look like her beast trapped in some kind of pagan tango.
However, when the novel's nameless narrator goes to Edinburgh to meet with his agents and first stops at the National Gallery, the presence of his favorite old painting by a (fictional) portraitist tells the story of Logan's longtime lover and the muse Helen Elizabeth Ralston.
Like the narrator, Ralston was an ambitious young American who came to England in search of art and adventure, staying for at least an older, more skilled man. Now in the 90s she is still alive and lives nearby. She also knows her aspiring biographer and is very happy to speak.
That's when “My Death” began to become glorious and strange in a way that would more than justify the intertwined figures on the cover. Don't expect a big impact. Tuttle – She herself is a native Texan who moved to England in the 80s, and has a quieter, more creepy sensibility. Her voice from the beginning is straightforward, conversational and almost annoying, but the obvious plains of the story bloom in something strange and doubled somewhere between Hitchcock and “The Hanging Rock Picnic.” I finished it properly on a stormy night and had a strange dream.
Read if you like: Lochs, Shirley Jackson, Catch your reflections in strange places.
Available from NYRB reissue.
Why…
Ride along Rachel Cask's French Vision Quest.
Are you leaning on speculative horrors with a more doubling of Helen Phillips' excellent 2019 novel The Need this time with a mother twist?
Read fond memories of Lisa Tuttle's 1970s friendship with George R.R. Martin. Only eyewear is very groovy.
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