The Playful Little Dog by Jean Horton Berg (G&D Vintage)

Ooh, I like this one. Penguin Random House's Grosset & Dunlap Vintage imprint has been republishing children's books from the 1940s and 50s and recently chose this title for reissue.

A family living in an apartment with a puppy looks for a new house out of the city and discovers the neighbors at their new place has a bigger dog than their own.

It is a wonderful little story that has tension and release, tension and release, with everyone getting what they want in the end. Best of all, it is the perfect length for a bedtime story--"one short one before bed"--ages 3-5 most appropriate.

Definitely consider this one for Christmas this year. It's a gem from days gone by, though the family and the neighbors are all white people, and for that reason alone it feels a little bit distant in terms of how we live now. The change in our demography contrasts with what we see here and we look back in wonder at the "olden days" when we didn't have the rich complexity diversity has bestowed upon us.



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The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

When so many authors reference a work when completing their own, it is necessary to go to the source. Baldwin’s important work was first published in 1962, right in the middle of the Civil Rights movement. It must have been enormously affective to those trying to articulate their dispossession at that time. But so many authors, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jesmyn Ward, and Teju Cole to name a few I have read lately, specifically talk about how Baldwin influenced them and point out how little has changed in the fifty-some odd years since he wrote that short letter to his nephew and discussed his own experience in America.

But something has changed. We hear him now, through these later authors. They keep pointing to Baldwin, and now we can hear what he was saying:

"The treatment accorded the Negro during the Second World War marks, for me, a turning point in the Negro’s relation to America. To put it briefly, and somewhat too simply, a certain hope died, a certain respect for white America faded. One began to pity them, or to hate them…"

Was Baldwin the first to say in language clear and unmistakable that “the man”—the white man—was the oppressor? “In any case, white people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited buy this theft every hour that they lived, had no moral ground on which to stand.” Why does this sound true and reasoned now when it must have sounded and felt shocking when he wrote it? Same words. Can it be that we have learned something about the nature of oppression after all? That women’s rights, gay rights, transgender rights have finally taught us what oppression and discrimination is? Why has it taken so long for us to see what we have done to the American Negro? Is it because that oppression was economically advantageous or because we simply did not care?

Well, we care now. And it is clear that this will be sorted out, easy or hard, but it will be sorted out.

"Imagine yourself being told to ‘wait.’ And all this is happening in the richest and freest country in the world, and in the middle of the twentieth century. The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless."

The Chinese have a phrase “speaking bitterness.” This is what Baldwin does in this book. He tries to soften the blow: “This seems an extremely harsh way of stating the case…” and not all white people are the same (“I have many white friends”). “In the eeriest way possible, I suddenly had a glimpse of what white people must go through at a dinner table when they are trying to prove that Negroes are not subhuman.” This empathy, this ambiguity of feeling, this ability to see himself is what makes Baldwin so compelling.

"White Americans have contented themselves with gestures that are now described as ‘tokenism.’ For hard example, white Americans congratulate themselves on the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in the schools; they suppose, in spite of the mountain of evidence that has since accumulated to the contrary, that this is proof of a change of heart—or, as they like to say, progress…Most of the Negroes I know do not believe that this immense concession would ever have been made if it had not been for the competition of the Cold War, and the fact that Africa was liberating herself and therefore had, for political reasons, to be wooed by the descendants of the former masters. Had it been a matter of love or justice, the 1954 decision would surely have occurred sooner; were it not for the realities of power in this difficult era, it might very well not have occurred yet…In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems. These have to be dealt with…in political terms."

Yes. But it will also take a change of heart. Which comes first, we cannot know. At the end of this slim book Baldwin writes of spiritual resilience, despite his telling us he is not a religious man. It sounded like something I’d heard from Thich Nhat Hanh just the other day (Kristin Tippett’s On Being radio podcast). Baldwin tells us

"—this past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful. I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering—enough is certainly as good as a feast—but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are…It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and clarity not to teach your children to hate. The Negro boys and girls who are facing mobs today come out of a long line of improbable aristocrats—the only genuine aristocrats this country has produced."

That is what I believe. Witness the generosity and genuine goodness of the churchgoers after the Charleston shooting, and just the everyday survival of blacks after centuries of oppression and aggression in this country. Thich Nhat Hanh says something similar:

"You cannot grow lotus flowers on marble. You have to grow them on the mud. Without mud, you cannot have a lotus flower. Without suffering, you have no ways in order to learn how to be understanding and compassionate. That's why my definition of the kingdom of God is not a place where suffering is not, where there is no suffering…I could not like to go to a place where there is no suffering. I could not like to send my children to a place where there is no suffering because, in such a place, they have no way to learn how to be understanding and compassionate. And the kingdom of God is a place where there is understanding and compassion, and, therefore, suffering should exist."

Earlier, in the letter to his nephew, Baldwin talks about the realities behind the words acceptance and integration:

"There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. You must accept them and accept them with love…And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it…It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity."

Baldwin speaks to what is happening now on the streets of America:

"The brutality with which Negroes are treated in this country simply cannot be overstated, however unwilling white men may be to hear it…the most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose. You do not need ten such men—one will do…as long as we in the West place on color the value that we do, we make it impossible for the great unwashed to consolidate themselves according to any other principle…If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relative conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare…If we do not now dare everything..."

...it will be fire this time.

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A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Fermor is considered by many to be one of the great travel writers in our time. I note he waited many years before he wrote of his wanderings. He kept a notebook, several really, and added and embellished what had not occurred to him at nineteen when he was walking to Constantinople. He admits to being a green young thing and, while he had a good education and many gifts, it is his insatiable curiosity and open demeanor that gained him so many friends and helpful companions.

This is what should be required reading in high school. Not college, but high school. We want youth to realize that the world is theirs, but they must first learn to navigate just a little, and prepare to be on their own. One should not have to require the whole book: just the first 120 pages should suffice. By the time Fermor has told of his "hoggish catalepsy" at Munich’s Hofbraushaus, if there is no comprehension in dull minds, there is no need to explain that one must have something to work with before one goes off wandering alone. The ecstatic enthusiasm and excitement of youth is everywhere evident. What it takes to succeed in the world is a great deal, but mostly it is interest in the world. It can be taught. I think.

Fermor indulges and cultivates his interest in architecture on his journey. It would be hard not to be impressed with the gorgeous relics on display throughout Europe. His impression of the "scenes of Biblical bloodshed [run] riot" in the churches made me laugh with recognition. My first visit to Europe produced the same feelings of shock and awe to see in churches the graphic display of Christ’s crucifixion.

Oh, what a moment in time Fermor captures: the brown shirts consolidating their power in Germany and Europe between the wars. He caught a little of that held-breath tension, and reviled himself for ever after for missing the significance of the street fighting in Vienna.

"I bitterly regretted this misappraisal later on: like Fabrice in La Chartreuse de Parme, when he was not quite sure whether he had been present at Waterloo."

When I was younger, though not young enough perhaps, I remember someone pressing into my hands a copy of the terrific travel story News From Tartary by Peter Fleming. It made me realize that such kind of travel was achievable, even something to strive for.

If only Cheryl Strayed in her memoir Wild had taken a leaf from Fermor’s book, her own work would have been substantially improved. But then, her work would have been better also had she followed the very different and equally anguished memoir by Helen Macdonald H is for Hawk which of course did not come out until after Strayed’s memoir. The exceedingly popular Wild did nothing for me but put me in a bloody state of mind while the other two memoirs add something both to my understanding and to my enjoyment of the world.

Rather early on in this book, Fermor makes glancing reference to his time in Crete when he captured a German general and secreted him away in a cave, something for which he would ever be famous. He tells of how they spoke lines of the same poem, first one then the other, realizing that at some distant time "they’d both drunk from the same spring." That capture was immortalized in a 1950s book by Stanley Moss called Ill Met: By Moonlight and a 1957 film starring Dirk Bogarde called Night Ambush.

I adore what Fermor discovers about Shakespeare as he searched for reasons Shakespeare would have placed an Bohemia near the sea in one of his plays:

"Shakespeare didn’t care a fig for the topography of the comedies. Unless it were some Italian town—Italy being the universal lucky dip for Renaissance playwrights—the spiritual setting was always the same. Woods and parkland on the Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire borders, that is; flocks and fairs and a palace or two, a mixture of Cockayne- and Cloud-Cuckoo- and fairyland with stage mountains rather taller than the Cotswolds and full of torrents and caves, haunted by bears and washed, if need be, by an ocean teeming with foundering ships and mermaids."

And this is a small thing, perhaps, but it so illuminates why Fermor was such a great travel writer: he becomes completely enraptured one night standing on a bridge in Prague, looking over the Vltava and tracing in his mind the twists and turns of the river--distances and changes in culture--on its way to the sea. It is Fermor looking at it, thinking about it, and speaking of it that makes the river a marvel of space and time.

Though this first in Fermor's travel trilogy starts just before Christmas 1933, this book and its companions are perfect summer reading material. Indulge your better self.


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Climates by André Maurois

Was there ever a marriage that wasn’t unequal in love? Perhaps you can tell me, for this book would make it seem that there has never been such a thing. But if you have ever loved someone who didn’t love you back in quite the same way, you may discover here a voice that speaks to the pain of that.

At first we hear the voice of the young man Philippe, who becomes enamored of a very young, very pretty girl in a white dress. She may believe she loves him back, and marries him, but until she meets the dashing intellectual François, depth of feeling is something she’s never really known. Philippe’s obsessive feelings for Odile turn to jealousy when he discovers the turn in her affection, and it tears him apart.

Isabelle writes the second half of the book, and Maurois outdoes himself in writing in the voice of a woman in love. The love of Isabelle for Philippe parallels that of Philippe for Odile, and we see how the unrequited love of another changes us. When he is the one most loved, Philippe takes on the very same coquettishness and sly diversion that Odile had displayed. But Isabelle, from her position of feminine helplessness in French society circa 1920’s, becomes the stronger for her position of weakness. Her love is stronger, longer, more all-encompassing, and more forgiving.

Sarah Bakewell, author of How to Live or The Life of Montaigne and cataloger of rare books at the National Trust in London, wrote a piece on Maurois for The New Yorker magazine in 2012, just before this book was republished. In that piece she first quotes Maurois' Phillippe who could not feel at home with Odile's family: "'I seemed solemn, boring, and even though I loathed my own silences, I withdrew into them.' It was 'not my sort of climate,' he felt." Bakewell goes on to explain

This is why the novel is called “Climates”: in its examination of love, it also becomes an examination of the atmospheres we need to be fully ourselves. Philippe’s complaint about Odile’s family goes to the heart of the book. One can not just transfer one’s personality intact from one environment to the next. Relationships have different qualities of air, different barometric pressures. With Odile, Philippe is first expanded and enchanted, then he contracts and distorts into a jealous monster. With Isabelle, despite himself, he is himself.

Rush out and buy this new translation by Adriana Hunter of a 1928 masterpiece reprinted by Other Press. You will read it in a day, obsessively, for nearly every line has some truth that we recognize, and that makes us ache. It is nearly Valentine’s Day, and one wants to revisit those true things and share them, even if with a man long dead. His writing is polished and spare: he does not write too many words, but enough to tell us that he knows what man is, and how he loves, even against his better judgment.



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Slow Motion Riot by Peter Blauner

Blauner belongs to that group of writers who excel at honing the edge of large city life: it feels big, dangerous, and completely outside the control of any individual, much like a slow motion riot in fact. Originally published in 1991, this novel won an Edgar and was named a NYT International Book of the Year. Now, on the occasion of its publication as an ebook by Open Road Media, it is being reoffered to the reading public. For those of you who like your reads gritty and real, don’t miss it this time around.

The novel opens in a Probation Office where an idealistic young man, Baum (or Bomb, as he is called by some), hopes to make a difference and tells of his clients--the felons and the misdemeanors. There is true madness here, and despair and confusion, and a withering boredom borne of ignorance. The story hinges on three of Baum’s clients, and one of his coworkers. In a series of chapters much like looking into separate apartments throughout the city, we are privy to the thinking and activities of these individuals, which gives us an insight Baum doesn’t necessarily share. We sense violence on its way long before it is played out.

If a reader were to plot this novel on a contour map, one would see Baum pushing a large iron ball up a steep hill. There is gathering potential in the first, slower half of the novel. In the second half, the ball slips its constraints and rolls free. There is a crushing energy and destructive quality to the path of the story that will keep readers riveted, so stay on course to this critical juncture.

Blauner calls his books social novels with an element of suspense. That sounds right. You will want to read what Blauner himself says about his own books, since his style is clear and he’s willing to share. He is deliberate in his choices and his constructions are not haphazard. It takes him several years to write a book, of which this is only the first. You may find you would like to follow him through his oeuvre, for he has chosen a distinct subject area that may be underserved in our literature. I note that Blauner says his books sold better in Europe than in America at first.

This book was published twenty years ago, and while it is beginning to have some telltale signs of age, one could read it as current. In fact, the social consciousness of the young is arguably stronger today than it was then, and for this reason, it may be just the right dose of highly embroidered imagination for a young market. I recommend this title, or choose another of his later novels. This is an unusual writer who has something unique to offer, and it would be a shame to overlook him in the rush for the next bestseller.


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