The Most of It - Mary Ruefle

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Most of It by Poet Mary Ruefle is her first book of prose. Quirky and surprising assessments of commonplace things beginning with snow which awakens her desire for sex and ending with burial and comments on the tombs of Jesus and of King Tut. In between she comments on killing, dying, lichen, birds, religion, housekeeping and a potpourri of thoughts from an anchorite on lists, penance, prayer, Shakespeare, news, books, rabbits and mistaken facts. The book defies description but yields similes and smiles. And I read and reread in a kind of calisthenics of the mind.

"Soon the trains, too, shall pass out of all being, while books, I'm afraid, will go on pretending the are still among us. My friend--for nothing hinders me from calling you my friend, especially the fact we have never met, and are only now pretending to--if all the world were made of paper, and perhaps it is, it could one day conceivably burn for year, like the rainforests of Brazil were once so fond of doing, and eventually we'd be reduced to a few square heaps of ash, as if the sun had strayed too close, or one among us drifted too far, the sensitivity of his organs of perception so extreme he regarded all of civilization and most of literature, an illusion."

Just pick it up and read a few opening sentences of the short pieces which make up the book:
"This morning I want to talk a little bit about killing."
"Fire is my companion, but I do not talk to it, it talks to me."
"A pet is a good way to tell time, better than a clock, for time is a measure of the changing position of objects, and soon it will be time to feed the pet, to exercise the pet, to replace its little ball, clip its nails or talons, wash it ever so gently, vaccuum up its shedding and so forth."
"After father died, he said that dying had taken a longer time than he had previously imagined possible."
"I wanted to go into the forest and collect lichen."
"Remove everything beautiful from your home, remove everything you like, love, cherish or are fond of."

See what I mean? Unexpected and compelling.

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The Best American Essays 2024 - Wesley Morris

The Best American Essays 2024: An Engaging Essay Collection with Award-Winning Voices by Wesley Morris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Impressive collection edited by Pulitzer-winner Wesley Morris. I have read over half of them and was particularly impressed and touched by the work of Jenisha Watts relating her journey as a young writer from Kentucky; Jennifer Senior "The Ones We Sent Away" about her institutionalized aunt; Richard Prins' heartbreaking tale of mental illness in the mother of his child; and Christienne L. Hinz lovely piece on being a weed and natural gardening. I also was drawn to Brock Clarke's piece "Woodstove" about deaths in his family, dogs and people. There are also essays "grappling with the issues of our time" from Teju Cole, Sallie Tisdale, Yiyun LiRémy Ngamije, and Jerald Walker.

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Ladies Lunch - Lore Segal

Ladies' Lunch: and Other Stories by Lore Segal
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The late Lore Segal's brilliant collection Ladies' Lunch: and Other Stories is gloriously relatable if you're past sixty and/or have ever known a New Yorker, witty throughout, particularly from these five women who have been meeting every other month for the last thirty years. The titular story is worthy of laughter and tears as the women undergo changes in life and health and abilities. The characters are treasures and they even try meeting on zoom during COVID.

At the restaurant, Hope "opened the door into the ladies' room and saw, in the mirror behind the basins, that her hair was coming out of its pins. She took the pins out and stood gazing a the crone with the grey, shoulder-length hair girlishly loosened. Hope saw what Diane Arbus might have seen. She gazed, appalled, and being appalled pricked her interest. 'I've got an agenda: the Arbus factor in old age.' Hope looked forward to saying to jack the next time it would be convenient for Jeremy and Nora to arrange lunch for them at the Café Provence (chosen because it had bathrooms on the street floor)."

Also poignant is the story "Making Good" about a group of Jews meeting visiting Austrians in a "Bridge Building Workshop" to face off against anti-Semitism and Holocaust anger in the windowless basement meeting room under Rabbi Samuel Rosen's reform synagogue."


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Sisters by a River - Barbara Comyns

Sisters by a River is good escape fare. Such an odd book narrated in short pieces in first person by a young girl growing up amidst a large family of five sisters, a mad mother who is deaf, a nutty grandmother and an alcoholic father plus various staff, governesses and helpers and dogs in a rambling mansion along the River Avon in England. "Mammy had her excape in her imaginary lovers, we children did not have much excape in the winter, but when the summer came there was the sun and river, some mornings I would get up at five and row up the river before anyone else had been on it, and the larks would be singing and the cows standing together in the little bays where the water was shallow, and everything would seem so good and clean, I felt I wanted to cry with so much hapiness, this feeling would sometimes stay with me all day."

I can't really figure why it is so compelling. I want to keep reading but there's an anxiety as to how it will end? Violence? Bankruptcy? Abandonment? Is it to see if she grows up in the face of so much antagonism from parents and older sister Mary who's twenty by the end of the book to the author's sixteen? Is it to see what is next in the escapades of the six sisters? Or in their tales and animals? Is it to see if she learns to spell? The quirky misspellings are intact in the book and they scream out at me as I read along, "horrorible" or frit for fright or tiered for tired, imaginative and not impossible, but they jerk the reader out of the story, especially a grammatical reader. But like all Barbara Comyns's novels thus far, I am completely in her thrall and cannot wait to pick up another story plus the new biography.

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Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures is not a quick read try as I did to make it so (overdue at the library). Clarice Lispector is deeply thoughtful and concerned with identity and mysticism and love in ways that have never crossed my mind. Sheila Heti has written an afterward guiding the reader although I am still flailing. The book begins with a lone comma, and ends with a colon" and goes blank.

The story is about a woman named Lóri and her overwhelming obsession with and love for "the philosophy teacher Ulisses, who to a modern feminist reads as insufferably self-important."At one point, the narrator panics because she's unable to answer the question who am I and soothes herself by making a list of the things she can do:

"eat--look at fruit in the market--see people's faces--feel love--feel hate--have something not known and feel a unbearable suffering--wait impatiently for the beloved--sea--go into the sea--buy a new swimsuit--make coffee--look at objects--listen to music--holding hands--irritation--be right--not be right and give in to someone who is--be forgiven for the vanity of living--be a woman--do myself credit--laugh at the absurdity of my condition--have no choice--have a choice--fall asleep."

Lovely writing:

Her smile in springtime, "was a smile that had the idiocy of angels."

"Long before the arrival of the new season came its harbinger: unexpectedly a mildness in the wind, the first softness in the air. Impossible! Impossible that this softness in the air wouldn't bring more! says the heart, breaking."

On a memorable visit to a market, she sees the "pure purple blood running from a crushed beet root on the ground;" the potato...born inside the earth...whiter than a peeled apple; the fish smell was their souls after death; and the pears...so replete with themselves, almost at their peak; and the unwonted turnips. "

Maybe I've aged out of these love themes and the existential concerns that rack the narrator in physical anguish. Or a reread is in order. I also will go back to the author's fiction.

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To Write As If Already Dead

To Write as if Already Dead by Kate Zambreno
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Kate Zambreno is one of my favorite writers. I am inspired by her combo of memoir and subjective criticism on art and literature. To Write as if Already Dead presents itself in this style talking about Hervé Guibert Hervé Guibert's diary-like novel of his final months with AIDS, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, and the challenges of his friendship with Muzil (Michel Foucault); then I learn from the inside cover both books are considered fiction. She talks about her second pregnancy during the pandemic alongside her comments on Hervé Guibert. One can't help but recall the horrors of the eighties while, at the same time, revisiting our pointless responses to COVID: washing vegetables, masking in the park, shortages and hospital crowding and so many deaths. All the sad and scary stuff we went through and I wonder what is store for us now.

Her notes are abundant and spark links to writers new to me like Sofia Samatar Bhanu Kapil, Renee Gladman, Chantal Akerman, Kate Briggs, Hélène Cixous, Suzanne Scanlon as well as artists and photographers.

Kate Zambreno also writes and teaches through the pandemic and my interest was piqued not only by what she was reading and writing, her interest in fragments and diaries, and what she assigned her students. Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Roland Barthes, Robert Walser, and W G SEBALD.



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For Whom the Bell Tolls

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I started with enthusiasm for the nature writing "As they spoke, the owl flew between the trees with the softness of all silence, dropping past them, then rising, the wings beating quickly, but with no noise of feathers moving as the bird hunted."

Was amused by the famous post-coital passage where the "earth moves." "Oh," she said, "I die each time. Do you not die?"

"No, almost. But did thee feel the earth move?"

"Yes. As I died. Put thy arm around me, please."

And cringed at the effective battle descriptions. "In all that, in the fear that dries your mouth and your throat, in the smashed plaster dust and the sudden panic of a wall falling, collapsing in the flash and roar of a shellburst, clearing the gun, dragging those away who had been serving it, lying face downward and covered with rubble, your head behind the shield working on a stoppage, getting the broken case out, straightening the belt again, you are now lying straight behind the shield, the gun searching the roadside again;"

But the stilted characters, the artificiality the author uses to simulate formal Spanish, interfered with my reading and the book became a dramatic slog as I awaited and awaited the denouement. Would they he ever blow up the damn bridge?

In Jeffrey Meyers bio of Hemingway: A Biography, he excerpts some of the contemporary reviews of the book most of whom felt it reinstated Hemingway's literary reputation after some of his work of the 1930's. Edmund Wilson: "an imagination for social and political phenomena such as he has hardly given evidence of before." Dorothy Parker: "written with a wisdom that washes the mind and cools it. It is written with an understanding that rips the heart with compassion." Lionel Trilling: Hemingway is wholly aware of the moral and political tensions which existed in actual fact" and is writing "to the top of his bent...equal to Tolstoy in his best battle manner" but weaknesses he pointed out: astonishing melodrama in place of tragedy...and devastating meaninglessness of the death of Robert Jordan...men all dominance and knowledge, the women all essential innocence and responsive passion." That struck me, too. Graham Greene criticized the love story 'told with Mr. Hemingway's usual romantic carnality." and V. S. Pritchett agreed that the novel "was marred by the love affair" but the book restored the author to "his seriousness as a writer."

Read this because a friend is doing the Atlantic's List and I had a copy, https://www.theatlantic.com/books/arc..., but this title is not on the list. Will I go on to read A Farewell to Arms? Stay tuned.



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