Dear reader,
I'm not going to go into various reasons why you might want to go somewhere else right now. In fact, Americans are always enthusiastic tourists, willing to be expatriates, a game where they study history and decipher habits in their neighborhoods and far away places.
This roving impulse has a more benign version, but it doesn't go into that either. Also, with tribute to the hard-typing globetrotter, travel writing runs out of me. What I feel is a crude, burrowing cosmopolitanism, a book that digs into the soil of the place and appears with local dirt under the fingernails. There are two of them. One is a memoir of life on foreign lands, and the other is an extended excursion into exotic literature.
– ao
Shortly before his death, Orio's father – an American diplomat who married an American Irish nobleman – writes that his daughter “want to grow freely from all this national sense that makes people so unhappy. He said that when she grew up, she could really freely marry someone she likes.
She was willing to obligate. In 1924 she married the Italian Marquise and lived with him in La Force, the property of his ancestors, in the picturesque Tuscan Valley.
“It was pointed out to me sometimes,” she begins this memoir (published as she approaches “endgame” in her words). Both of her books endure the implicit promises of its opening sentence and wander happily from there.
“Images and Shadows” speaks to life of privilege and achievement in an attractive, casual, derailed, while at the same time in a keen, analytical style. The respected biographer (such as Lord Byron and Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi) may have created a novelist with a keen manners in Patricia's manners on the lines of Edith Wharton and Ford Maddox Ford. She writes affectionately about the amazing people she met, and about the wonderful sense of their ridiculous things. Example: Her mother's second husband is an architect and writer, “The History of Taste” “It would have certainly been a fascinating and interesting book” if he had passed the first four words, “It's very difficult…”
This book isn't like that. It's straightforward yet formal, honest and not intimate. Orio's natural elegance underestimates her toughness, passion and courage, and underestimates the qualities that saturate this highly civilized book, especially in the support of anti-fascist parties during World War II.
Read if you like: Henry James, Bernard Berenson, Tuscan Villa, a long afternoon drinking tea with your grandmother.
Available: Books for sale at small town libraries. Your friend is obsessed with the idea of moving to Italy.
“Canada O: American Notes on Canadian Culture,” Edmund Wilson
Non-fiction, 1965
Perhaps the hardest-working American literary critic of the 20th century, Wilson had a horrifying range. He wrote powerful books on Marxism, Dead Sea Scrolls, Civil War Literature, and countless collections of essays, reviews, diaries and letters. He is proud to not do academic submissions or staff work in magazines, he liked to master the subject by writing about it.
After a visit to Toronto in the 1950s, Wilson was fully interested in Canada and began enquiries that brought this volume, with subtle subtitles with “American Notes on Canadian Culture.” It should be noted that this book was published in 1965, so it does not include much of what our people here consider to be Canadian culture. There's no Neil Young or Joni Mitchell. There's no Margaret Atwood or Alice Munroe (but a bit of Mavis Gallant). There are no SCTV or David Cronenberg.
Still, “O Canada” is a massive, but appropriately modest fandom, a deep Canadian cut. Wilson is a clear and thorough writer, with a trick to captivate his subjects with contagious appeal. So you can learn quite a bit of Canadian history here – studying right now is no bad thing – you may not feel like you are in school and want to go to the library looking for the works of Hugh McLennan and Marie Claire Blace.
But most of the time, despite Canada's reputation south of the border, it could be wiped out by Wilson's sense that Canada is a fierce and dramatic country. This was not only due to the Quebecoa separatist movement, which had gained momentum at the time, but also because nationalism and national identity were pressing questions to vigilant and curious readers. Just as they are still.
Read it if you like: Putin, butter tart, Rush.
Available: If everything else fails, I can borrow a copy of mine.
Thank you for being a subscriber
We plunge further into The New York Times or our book recommendations.
If you enjoy what you're reading, consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Here you will be browsing all subscriber-only newsletters.
Friendly reminders: Check out the book at your local library! Many libraries allow you to reserve copies online.
