Dear reader,
What are the scope of your attention these days? Mine seems to have surrendered to almost completely whimsical unrest, a counterflow condition that you might call Gerbil-like (fuzzy, skittering, frequently trapped in the wheels).
No one wants to go to Full Hamster. So it helps you do the day's work that relies at least in part on getting lost in literature. Other voices, trustworthy seduction of other rooms. But often I reach for a great mind with small doses that I can hold in one hand, concentrated pellets of wisdom, concentrated pellets. And I was especially soothed by the soft work of two famous incisive women who are not known for suffering from fools.
This doesn't mean that the books in this week's newsletter are free of whims and joys. Intermittently falls into something strange and fantastical. Sometimes even recipes (because of poison, but still). Both bring a welcome bite and astringency to their tone, a kind of brave witch hazel for the soul.
– Lee
“Lover and Other Stories” by Nadine Gordimer
Fiction, 2003
The back catalogue of South Africa's Nobel Prize winner Nadine Goldimer is not what sane readers call comfortable food. Her words tend to have sticks and stones. And there is not much mercy in “booty and other stories.” But the fantasy of mortality – this book was published in the year when my husband, who had been 50 years old, turned 80 soon after his death, but it seemed to at least soften the corners a little.
Each piece here deals with death and the primitive impulse to push it back in that way. In “Generation Gap,” the man leaves his lovely 42-year-old wife in the confusion and rage of an adult child, due to a much younger and mediocre violinist. Lucy, a disgusted lawyer who recently accompanied her widowed father on a trip to Italy, looks back at the ancestors of names she has never met before.
“Diamond Mine” provides a short, dreamlike record of the sexual awakening of an Afrikaans soldier and a teenage girl about to be sent to war, and “homage” makes him seem unseen in the cemetery. He follows the inner monologue of an unknown stateless assassin. Of the beloved political figures he was drafted to kill.
Two excellent mini novels followed later by “Mission Statement,” an elegant account of middle-aged romance between British aid workers and local black bureaucrats, and various far-reaching embodied narrators It is an elegant description of complex, fantastical “karma.” Flung Incarnations (Bourgeois Insurance Executive, the fetus that was cancelled in the Russian Prime Minister's Office).
Goldimer is a tricky writer. Some of her writings land like clean, perfect arrows, some seem very mazel-like and oddly constructively designed.
But be careful if she hits the spot. Take “loot” and “loot” which are deceptive wis of eg stories about earthquakes that produce tide waves with knockout coders. It was first published in New Yorker 26 years ago, so you can read the story. Know that their version (how? Why?) omits the last line. This Swiss website has italic stories. You can't get everything! – But totally.
Read it if you like: Drop the sun's damage, the fateful love, and drop the word “Veld” into casual conversations.
Available: Amazon, and various international departure lounges.
“Murder in the Dark” by Margaret Atwood
Fiction, 1983
Are there any literary units of measurement smaller than vignettes? A copy of the cover of “Murder in the Dark” describes its contents as “short fiction and prose poems,” which seems fair enough, but it seems to me that Atwood stuffs this bantamweight collection. It doesn't cover how attractive it is.
It takes a little time for her to grow. The first handful of sketches remember most of the lake and cartoon books scarce and fleeting memories, but as pathetic as a dandelion puff, is pleasant but substantial. In the sixth piece, she begins cooking, looking back at a long past Paramar called “boyfriend.” (The boys themselves are interchangeable, as well as the smell of “leather and banana peel, or the vestibule of an old cinema, a whim of the future.”)
“Raw Materials” offers Mexican travelogues that are not covered by Mexican travelogues, stories of Mezcal and the temple of death, and Enny, the first world tourist who turns into existential horror by the end. “Simmer” is a woman who imagines a world where “handmade tales” is spinning the speculative gender dystopia into the kitchen and whipping a souffle or pear flambé, while women imagine a briefcase. and work with a pinstripe suit.
As twin thought exercises on the act of writing popular fiction, “female novels” and “happy endings” are totally drawls, and it's been over 40 years and still depressed.
It comes out when “Murder in the Dark” enters and retreates from the more substantial center of the book to a series of flotsams and fragments. Incidentally, the title story is not about actual murder, but rather a parlor game that contains misdirection, straight face lies that are hidden when the lights turn on. Or, as Atwood has, it's not a bad phon for a novelist.
Read if you like: Canada, Second Wave Feminism, a very small palace of memory.
Available: Virago Press Paperback, and the almost bachelor's bedside table you know.
Why…
Treat yourself to another neat, ruthless little story of Atwood's “Stone Mattress”? And they may cancel plans for that Arctic cruise.
Will you pick up Bernardine Evaristo's Polyphonic 2019 novel “Girl, Woman, Other”? This week's theme is appropriately vignette-like (more or less, more or less dozens of main characters), but it's also big and rich.
Spend a few hours with monumental diva Marianne Faithful. Her “Faithful: Autobiography” is one of the greatest rock memoirs of all time, full of sex, stardust and terrible decisions.
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