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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Bilgewater by Jane Gardam
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of my failings as a writer is that I begin a book with attention to the author's descriptive details, her dialog, her scenes from beginning to end and I brush the edge of learning but then I lose my critiquing way. I started Bilgewater with much admiration for all of these writerly skills and then became involved in the story such that I never took note again. Every time I put the book down, I couldn't wait to pick it up again. All of my fondness for English life in novels resurfaced and I was right there in the Master's house with Bilgie bemoaning her motherless teen age self. Usually, I don't care for coming-of-age tales, eager to get on with adulthood, but this story beguiled me. She lives with her father, a master in a boy's school in the north of England. In first person (never easy to read), we learn of his absent-minded attention, their steady, funny housekeeper, Paula, her difficult friends and stalwart uncles and her initial reading difficulties. My attention never flagged and I lived with them all for the three days it took to read the story, eschewing tv to jump into bed at night to swim laps with Bilgie on school breaks and play chess with her dad. I shouldn't be surprised since Jane Gardam has never failed me and this is one more feather in her bonnet.


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Cookbooks

In the early 1980's, when I was managing a large Doubleday bookshop in a mall in Northern California, Mr. Nelson Doubleday himself paid us a visit over the holidays. I am not sure if it was Christmas or perhaps some gift-giving event like Mother's Day, but a new edition of the Joy of Cooking had come out and we were loaded with them. An endcap in the cookbook section was devoted to the fifty or so copies on display with some promo placards. On the shelf, the only other such offering was a copy or two of the Doubleday Cookbook, a similar but not so popular compendium of cooking. Mr. Doubleday had a titan-worthy fit and called the head office to order one hundred copies of the Doubleday Cookbook shipped to us and to the twenty other Doubleday Book Shops by overnight delivery so we could replace the Joy copies with "his" cookbook. But the customers did not want the Doubleday Cookbook. They wanted the Joy of  Cooking. Eventually, we had to send back copies or store them until he reappeared. It was such a misguided effort. He might have gotten publicists and media folk to give him equal time and interviews to create demand but that was not his way. I don't think we sold more than three or four copies of the
Doubleday Cookbook all year although it is a good overall recipe book. It could use an updated cover I thought at the time, and sure enough, by 1990, it had a colorful illustrated jacket as the The New Doubleday Cookbook was published.

So here off the top of my head are my ten favorite cookbooks of the hundreds I own. I do so little cooking these days, you'd think I was working full-time.

Julia Child's The Way to Cook
Victory Garden Cookbook by Marian Morash
Plenty and Jerusalem (two volumes counted as one)- Ottolenghi
The Essential New York Times Cookbook by Amanda Hesser
Gourmet Today Cookbook by Ruth Reichl
The Classic Italian Cookbook by Marcella Hazan
Essential Cuisines of Mexico by Diana Kennedy
The Art of Mexican Cooking by Diana Kennedy
Classical Turkish Cooking by Ayla E. Algar
Classic Home Desserts by Richard Sax

Vegetarian Cooking by Deborah Madison
The Food of Portugal by Jean Anderson
Lulu's Provencal Table by Richard Olney
The Cooking of Southwest France by Paula Wolfert
Provence Cookbook by Patricia Wells
Time-Life Good Cook Series
Lost Recipes by Marion Cunningham
A Book of Middle Eastern Food by Claudia Roden

The Ottolenghi books are the only new titles I have embraced as his recipes are popular among so many of my friends. My Asian cookbooks are well represented on the shelf, but almost never used, as with the Hungarian, German, Polish and Greek cookbooks. Then I have the single topic collections on soups, cookies, cakes, pies, meat, zucchini, bread, preserving. James Beard is a favorite with the other cook in my household. John Thorne's books like Simple Cooking and Outlaw Cook are favorites to browse, as is Alan Davidson, M F K Fisher or Elizabeth David. Then I have lots of antiquarian cookbooks which are fun to leaf through like Bettina's Cakes and Cookies or Charleston Receipts but which I have never cooked from. Some serious shelf weeding is in order but as soon as I start, I am lost in browsing. Stay tuned for progress reports. Think of the shelf space which could be freed, she said persuasively.

This Too Shall Pass by Milena Busquets My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This Too Shall Pass by Milena Busquets
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a short, languid novel of the narrator's sadness and ennui in a seaside town in her ancestral summer. After her mother's death, she is stunned by grief using drugs, sex and alcohol to cope as she looks back at memories of her mother, her boyfriends, her two ex-husbands, while contemplating mortality. The author offers some lovely passages: "Nacho belongs to the summer just like the boating trips do, or the naps in the hammock, or the freshly baked bread we buy straight from the oven on our way home after being out all night, kneaded by the arms of drowsy men who watch us devour it with sad eyes." Or "I could describe each and every corner of my mother's house. I know and remember the changing colors of the mahogany shelves where she kept her books, from mahogany to garnet and finally black according to the time of day and when dusk fell. I know the exact temperature of my father's hands, like bread fresh out of the oven, and in a snap I could draw you the half-empty glass of red wine he always kept in the kitchen."

I could smell the Med at Cadaques and the fresh bread. Not much happens, little plot, but moments and musings, yet I wanted to pick the book up every evening and be back in Spain. Maybe it has a Catalonian sensibility, the painful loss she feels, the distanced lovers, her two young sons, close friendships with women, the warmth of the sun, the sleeplessness. Who is the narrator once she is no longer a daughter? "I will never be seen through your eyes again," she says in the imaginary conversation with her belated mother which threads through the book.

"A seductive voice" says the back of the book, a "summery, sexy , cool," "one of the most elegant books you'll read" declares the French paper. So the seductive elegance enticed me enough to finish the book in a day or two.



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Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Otessa Moshfegh is described as one of the brightest new voices in fiction, an NEA fellow, Stanford Stegner grad, and she is but this book is a hard sale. Her story is suspenseful -- I kept reading avidly late into the night -- but it is a bleak tale (and I love bleak) of a young girl who is trapped living with her overbearing ex-cop alcoholic father, working at a prison for boys, suffering an eating disorder and troubled by her lack of intimate connections until Rebecca comes to work at the prison and provides a "ticket to a new life...She was so clever and beautiful, I thought, the embodiment of all my fantasies for myself." What keeps you reading other than the edge-of-seat shenanigans at the end, are strategic references to the beautiful, loving life she lives now, fifty years later, and the superb writing: "She whirled off her coat as though in slow motion -- this is how I remember it -- and shook it like a bullfighter as she strode up the corridor toward me, hair rippling behind her, eyes like daggers shooting down straight through my heart to my guts." She notes the motto written on a pack of Pall Malls "a shield between two lions -- Per aspera ad astra. Through the thorns to the stars. That described my plight to a tee." The story winds up hopefully "not a direct line to paradise, but I believe I got on the right road, with all the appropriate trips and kinks." I am glad I read Eileen and will read her next book but it's a relief not to be the bookseller for this one.


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And for more bleak titles, Paul Bryant on Goodreads offers a "rich seam of female self-loathing in fiction:"

Grotesque by Natsuo Kirio - the unnamed un-beautiful older sister spends her whole life hating everybody especially herself
A Day Off by Storom Jameson - the unnamed middle-aged alcoholic frump spends a day hating everybody especially herself
Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill - the unnamed (as I seeing a pattern here?) wife spends a solid  year or so hating mostly herself
Dietland by Sarai Walker - Plum Kettle (hey, unroll your eyes, that's her name)spends her entire life self-loathing her own plus-size body
All of Jean Rhys' novels except Wide Sargasso Sea - the variously named alcoholic heroines all of whom are Jean, spend their allotted few months in each book totally hating themselves and pretty  much everything else (the curtains, the breakfast egg, etc.)
 The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek - the gold standard of female self-loathing against which all other self-loathers are to be judged. Erica Kohut spends her entire waking moments hating herself and everything else to such a level of frenzy that the women in the above-mentioned books would only look on in envy and loathe themselves a little bit more because they couldn't quite get to the level of loathingness Erica Kohut achieves with seeming ease.

That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana by Carlo Emilio Gadda
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Baroque, ornate, dense, tangled, funny, brilliant unfinished 400-page rant from Carlo Emilio Gadda which
 
thwarts logical conclusions and forces the reader to go along for the ride in the many-layered, stinky, cacaphony of corruption and magic depicted as 1927 Rome. Ostensibly a detective novel, there's a theft, a murder, and a host of descriptions of Mussolini-era Italy including the memorable references to Il Doochay as "Death's Head," or "Fierce Face," or the Shit...the syphilitic Swaggerer." But the investigation is incomplete, derailed like the train in one scene, and the tale ends inconclusively, indeed an inventive "mess."

The book club discussion was lively and mostly enthusiastic. One member, Dani, even produced a fantastic glossary of the book's elaborate vocabulary.
William Weaver's translation was masterful in dealing with Gadda's imaginative vocabulary, made-up words, puns and double-meanings.

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