Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

 I chose this book because the author was one of Granta's "Best Spanish Speaking Writers Under 22" and I intend to read others. From Argentina, this is her first novel although she has published short stories and won prizes. The story of two mothers whose children are poisoned by some unnamed ecological disaster, the tale is dystopian in the extreme. I had to look up the definition of dystopian: "The utopia and its derivative, the dystopia, are genres of literature that explore social and political structures. ... Dystopian (or dystopic) fiction (sometimes combined with, but distinct from apocalyptic literature) is the opposite: the portrayal of a setting that completely disagrees with the author's ethos."
The story is a fast-paced nightmare which I read in a short evening but couldn't quite finish its disturbing conclusion just before retiring and waited until the next day. The translation is smooth. I had trouble delineating between the two speakers but it didn't seem to matter since they were relating common stories. It brought me back to Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go which was similarly troubling. The author's command of her characters is impressive, her descriptions vivid and rhythm fast. I don't know the author's "ethos" but would be curious to read her stories if I can handle it.


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Independent People by Halldór Laxness
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Our book group chose Independent People for rainy February's title and I tried several times to get into it without success. After about 150 pages, I was ready to concede defeat but persevered and finally started to cotton to this long, dense tale of an irascible Icelandic sheep farmer who buries two wives and numerous children and animals in his single-minded ambition to be an independent man beholden to none. Great swathes of text describe the unremitting misery of the climate and the lives of sheep and men, living and dead, as they struggle to survive.
"Great is the tyranny of mankind," says Laxness, and great is the tyranny of the Classics reading list which brought this book to my attention. Yet, I admit that I liked it! The author can be wry and funny and poetic in spite of the hackneyed poetry salted throughout, the husbandry and the grim weather: "And the ceaseless rain of this inclement summer poured down upon the three little unprotected workmen of the moors...turning their headgear into a shapeless, sodden mass and running down their necks and faces in rivulets stained with the colour from their hats." Yet there is youth and beauty and love: "she was leading two spirited young thoroughbreds whose coats glistened with good feeding, glossy as silk. The sunshine and the breeze played in her golden hair, in its waves and its curls; her young bosom rose cupped above her slender waist, her arms were naked to the shoulder, her eyebrows curved in a high care-free bow. Her keen eyes reminded him both of the sky and of its hawks; her skin, radiant with the fresh bloom of youth, colour incomparable, make him think of wholesome new milk in May." (402) Bjartur, the key figure, relentlessly pursues his dream of independence realized in Summerhouses, his bought-and-paid-for plot of land after eighteen years of servitude, as his family dies or abandons him and his sheep fail with disease. And the book by a Nobel Laureate hones to the definition of a classic as it tackles the human condition and our universal responses. My response would have been to abandon the sheep and retire with the coffee and a book while the snows blow around the croft, but these were hardier souls who needed the sheep to go on, to sell, to eat, to be independent people.


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Abibliophobia

I can remember when I had a total book collection of two shelves in the Magnolia bedroom which I shared with my younger sister. How I loved to fondle and look at my titles until I had to cover all of the books with wrapping paper to disguise a few which my mother disapproved of. My mom had strong feelings about appropriate reading matter. No Nancy Drew or romance. No D. H. Lawrence. No Nabokov, or at least not Lolita. No Peyton Place which was downstairs in my dad's office hidden behind his botanical texts. Once all the books were wrapped, only I knew which titles were which and I could relax and read Chocolates for Breakfast, actually a well-written but sexy novel, or J. D. Salinger whose reputation for smut was known. Now after years of bookselling, I have around seven thousand titles, shelves bulging and books cascading all over the place. Sometimes I just roam the shelves, looking at all of the things I've yet to read, those that I want to reread but never will, and those that, alas, I will never read and should pull. It is an addiction. Books do furnish a room but they can also clutter and drown the hopeful reader. Sometimes in my more fatalistic moods, I divide the number of books by the longevity figures on how many years I have left, then divide by weeks to see how many I would need to read each week to dent the surface. With luck and twenty or twenty-five years, it's only 240 books a year or just two books each week. Who couldn't handle that? Me at 90? Of course, some of them are reference such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, art books or cookbooks and not really a required cover-to-cover exploration. I just have to give up television and socializing and hope for good eyes and health. Toward this end, I have a book club which only meets once a year and which is devoted to each member reading up to six titles that have been on their shelves for twenty years or more, published prior to 1992. This has been most edifying. I've discovered treasures like Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes, Moritz Thomsen's The Saddest Pleasure: a journey on two rivers, and Mabel Dodge Luhan's The Edge of Taos Desert plus the inspiration of Brenda Ueland's If You Want to Write. 

Abibliophobia, the fear of being without books, will not happen here but I must take care when I travel.

Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.: Tales by Eve Babitz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A NYRB classic, Babitz in her witty singular voice offers up Los Angeles and Hollywood of the Sixties and Seventies, not long after my first enchanted visit, in her incomparable portraits and badass tales. I had a good time with this book.


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Fashion

Having spent hours poring over Zappo's website, I remember the distress and the joy of shoe shopping when I was fourteen or fifteen and wearing a size eleven woman's shoe. Of course, there were few to be found in town except sensible brown oxfords or white bucks which made my foot look like Clementine's ("wearing boxes without topses"). Then we discovered Capezio in New Rochelle, NY. I'll never forget the excitement of that first pair. Ballet flats. No arch support. Red leather. I was in heaven. They still sell them.

And it was not only shoes that caused problems. I was about five foot ten inches tall in 7th grade. Finding clothes offered challenges especially at the all-important age of thirteen when "everyone" was wearing the same thing, the flat knit angora pullover sweater and matching unpressed pleated skirt. De rigeur.

My mother was helpful, taking dressmaking classes and learning how to sew and tailor. she made many of my skirts and dresses. Most of them came from the fancy couture patterns I insisted upon, having spent a great deal of time with Mademoiselle and Glamour and Vogue magazines. Even at the tender age of fourteen, I loved fashion magazines and followed the lives of the models as eagerly as my sister stalked the Beatles. 

My mother, my ally, my friend, turned on me over a handbag. She gave me the money to go downtown and buy a bucket bag, a leather bucket-shaped purse being touted as the latest fashion for the teens. I went downtown and completely ignored the bucket bags because I had found the featured Glamour "item of the month," a black patent carryall with large white polka dots - goes with everything - and it was less than the bucket bag. I bought it and carried it home with pride and delight. My mom threw a fit. This was so far from her idea of a school purse that I had trespassed on her very intelligence, displaying a frivolousness with her money that was not acceptable, even infuriating. I pleaded and wept and bellowed my dismay. She remained obdurate. She told me to return it. I refused. She wrapped it up and returned it herself, unfazed by my wailing. My resentment clung for years. Even now, if I saw that bag for sale, I'd buy it. Gaudy. Festive. Fun. What's not to love about polka dots?

Was it the bag? Was it independence? Was it a chance to express my own sense of fashion in an approved manner vis a vis Glamour Magazine? I was going to become a writer and live in a garret, goddammit, but I would do so stylishly.

That purse was dearer to me than any person at the time. It was the sine qua non of fashion taste and pizzazz. Even my crush in biology, Larry Somebody, couldn't really compete with the polka dot bag. I can't think of another article before or since which has generated such pride of possession. Or perhaps I've blown it out of proportion. Only a handbag, you say? But it meant that I could have a tiny taste of the life I coveted from the New York world only glimpsed in magazines. The Mademoiselle College Issue was another absorption when it arrived, or perhaps I bought a copy. Actual living commoners like me were dressed in the latest fashion as they prepared to go off to college, one of the "Seven Sisters" like Vassar or Radcliffe or Smith, and then photographed on campus. I spent as much time on that fall issue as I did on any subsequent textbook until Statistics. The fascination fashion and modeling was eventually surpassed by bell-bottomed Levis and hippie plaid shirts with my embroidered denim jacket in the next decade, but in the early Sixties, this was where my heart dwelled. Ask me about Carol Linley or Dolores Hartman or Verushka and I could tell you anything, even the sad truth that I was too big to be a fashion model.

Any Human Heart, the Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart by William Boyd

Any Human Heart by William  Boyd
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This fictional journal of the writer Logan Mountstuart kept me enthralled for the bulk of this bulky novel. I was sorry to see it end. I miss it. When starting with his childhood, I twitched and sighed hoping that we would soon be into Oxford days, but after twenty or thirty pages, I was hooked. Not a fan of roman a clef or historical fiction, here I was enjoying both, in a journal format, particularly the protagonist's encounters with real life figures like Hemingway or Joyce or Picasso or the Duke of Windsor. Settings were seductive, Oxford, Paris , Zurich, Bermuda or New York City. The spy tasks during WWII, the haunting prisoner of war years and aftermath, the art gallery milieu, the publishing business fascinated me. There is a Meiner Badhof interaction toward the end, oddly involving our hero, which didn't seem to fit, but I never faltered in my bulldozing through the book, picking it up at even a hint of insomnia. My favorite quote from his Southern France retirement oasis of which he writes:

The pleasures of my life here are simple – simple, inexpensive and democratic. A warm hill of Marmande tomatoes on a roadside vendor’s stall. A cold beer on a pavement table of the Café de France – Marie Therese inside making me a sandwich au Camembert. Munching the knob off a fresh baguette as I wander back from Saint-Sabine. The farinaceous smell of the white dust raised by a breeze from the driveway. A cuckoo sounding in the perfectly silent woods beyond the meadow. The huge grey, cerise, pink, orange and washed-out blue of a sunset seen from my rear terrace. The drilling of the cicadas at noon – the soft dialling tone of the crickets as dusk slowly gathers. A good book, a hammock and a cold, beaded bottle of blanc sec. A rough red wine and steak frites. The cool, dark, shuttered silence of my bedroom – and as I go to sleep the prospect that all this will be available to me again, unchanged, tomorrow. (p.479)

I need only the hammock and cold, beaded bottle of blanc sec to supplement this good book.


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Dear Fang, With Love by Rufi Thorpe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Our family had been jumbled by history by war, by falling and rising regimes, by escapes across the world, by drives through orange groves and trips to Disneyland and the slow poison of sugary flowers on supermarket cakes."

Thorpe's new novel (despite the awful cover) is even better than her first, The Girls from Corona del Mar, which got four stars from me. Teen parents, Lucas and Katya decide to have a baby, Vera, who Katya raises on her own while Lucas seeks his own way, attending college, teaching, without seeing his daughter. Seventeen years later, Lucas takes Vera on a history tour of Vilnius, Lithuania where his Jewish grandmother was born and escaped after hiding in the forest during the war, Vera's recent diagnosis of bipolar disease is questioned as the two of them explore the ancient city and their own relationship while alternating chapters reveal the emails Vera sends home to her Samoan boyfriend, Fang.

Thorpe describes Vilnius, a place I never even dreamed of wanting to visit but now I do. She takes us on a tour of the city and through the characters, we explore lives and history of Jewish survivors. Grim and intense descriptions of mental illness and the doctors and medication to try to turn it around made me count my blessings. I loved the characters, especially Judith and Susan and impossibly thick Johnny Depp and unwitting Daniel.I had trouble picturing Lucas but I never tired of his struggles, trying to be a father, trying to curb his drinking.

Favorite quotes:

Vera, about the concert singer:
"the singer was an incredibly short fat little man who was shaped just like a teapot, only he was wearing a tuxedo....his voice..was like bronze and chocolate melted together and flung through the air in spangles...like something stretched impossibly taut, a piece of silk against the sky, and then something that sags, soft and dead, the belly of a shot fox, the clicking jaw of a dying mink."

Susan, in her fifties:
"It's different when you're my age. All the available men are fish that have already been thrown back. Everyone has gotten divorced. They have years of bad habits and resentments built up and you have to try to find someone who is fucked up in the exact matching, complementary way to your own fucked-up-ness. It's very tiring. Excruciating, really. And all the men who want to date me are in their sixties, all the guys my own age are dating thirty-year-olds, and it's like dating Mr. Rogers, I swear to God."

Lucas, who teaches English:
"What I have always loved most about literature was the way it eased my own loneliness. Even as my mother's son, at my most awkward and chubby and sunburned, sure I would never have a girlfriend, there was always Shakespeare. There was the possibility of having one's most opaque yearnings and vague intimations transformed before one's eyes in to the beautiful forms of perfectly expressed thought."


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