The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy by Rachel Cusk

Hardcover, 256 pgs, Pub May 26th 2009 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN13: 9780374184032

One has to ask oneself why we read memoirs of travels. Wouldn’t it be better to just take off on our own, not knowing of other people’s troubles or joys in case we are fearful or disappointed? But Rachel Cusk reminds us why we read other people’s tales: she is observant, and terribly funny. Tales of her trips make ours resonant with laughter, too. How did we first manage when confronted with grocery stores without anything we would consider food in them?

Oh yes, training one’s palate until we recognize what is so special about food, in this case, in Italy. The simplicity of it. We meet the brusque-seeming, loud and insistent butcher, the tennis-playing hotelier who smokes incessantly, and the “four Englishwomen [on the train] their own laps full of purchases from Florence boutiques…returning to their rental villa in the hills….They seem to have outlived the world of men, of marriage and motherhood and children. They laugh hilariously at anything any one of them says. They are a third sex, these happy materialists.”

One of the best afternoon’s amusements is listening to Cusk detail the paintings she comes upon in her travels; endless pictures of Madonna and any number of versions of the Child. She gives the backstory of Raphael, his adoration of the work of Michelangelo, and his death at the early age of thirty-seven. The observations she makes about the “congested alleyway toward the Piazza della Signoria, where a riot of of café terraces and horse-drawn tourist carriages and pavement hawkers selling African jewelry is underway.” How much has this scene changed in millennia of Italian history? Or has it always been just like this, where people

“push and shove rudely, trying to get what they want…I have seen a fifteenth-century painting of the Piazza della Signoria, where children play and the burghers of Florence stroll and chat in its spacious spaces, while the monk Savonarola is burned at the stake in the background outside the Palazzo Vecchio. Here and there peasants carry bundles of twigs, to put on the fire.”

So few are the antiquities that people from the world over wait in long, snaking lines, “an overgrown humanity trying to fit into the narrow, beautiful past, like a person in corpulent middle age trying to squeeze in to a slender garment from their youth.” It takes one’s breath away, the clarity with which Cusk writes, reminding us of what we may have once observed but could not convey.

The Catholics have a large presence in Italy, the Basilica di San Francesco lending credence to “the giantism of Catholic architecture…which harmonize unexpectedly with the iconography of late capitalism…the airport terminal…and the shopping mall.” Cusk takes the stuffing out of adults who use “Christianity as a tool, a moralizing weapon they had fashioned in their own subconscious…the strange, dark chasm of repression and subjectivity…judgment lay down there…flowing like a black river.” Do I need to say Catholic school growing up in England was a less than satisfactory experience?

This is the book I would give a friend to explain why I love the work of Cusk so. How can one not appreciate the quiet way she inserts her family into an unfamiliar world and does not spare herself nor anyone else the sharpness of her observations. The family moves over a period of months, down the Italian coast, just south of Naples.

The last day of their southern journey, the ‘bottom’ of their vacation, they are denied a trip to Capri by boatman strike. Instead they boat to Positano where father, mother, and two children paid fifteen Euros each to lie on the beach. Beside them were young American newlyweds in white bathers, ‘groomed as gods” but timid and self-conscious. Cusk wishes she had a Raphael to paint them for her, and I do, too.

Cusk has a warmth in her writing for the magnificent, the ‘theatrical and sincere,’ the elaborate, the splendid Italians, and she tells us her children will always remember Italy as a place they want to live. Her husband gets no notice, and if we did not know she travelled in a family of four, we would not know he was there at all. This book was published in 2009, and three short years later her marriage lay in ruins. We see the beginning of that split here, methinks.

One feels quite as though one had done this journey, too, traveling along with sunburnt girls in the back of a car with the windows wide. The final week in a faded blue tent strike us as real as real can be—even with the call from the publisher saying the rights to publish her last book in South Korea allowed them the possibility of a glorious, comfortable night in a seaside resort with gold bathroom fixtures but an unused swimming pool and a beautifully-appointed restaurant in which no one ate.

‘Rewarding’ hardly seems adequate praise. I savor her work like Peruginas. Her writing is for me like one of those moments she describes whose effects will last forever…visually stunning, thought-provoking, delicious to remember. The summer feels lived.

Below please find reviews of Cusk's other works, in order:
Saving Agnes, 1993
The Temporary, 1995 (not reviewed yet)
The Country Life, 1997
A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother, 2002
The Lucky Ones, 2003
In the Fold, 2005
Arlington Park, 2006
The Bradshaw Variations, 2009
The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy, 2009
Aftermath: On Marriage & Separation, 2012
Outline, 2014
Medea, 2015
Transit, 2016
Kudos, 2018
Coventry: Essays, 2019






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Burma Chronicles & Pyongyang by Guy Delisle

Hardcover, 272 pages Pub April 1st 2009 by Jonathan Cape (first pub 2007) Orig Title Chroniques birmanes ISBN13: 9780224087711

Delisle manages to capture for us what a non-working foreigner not proficient in the local languages would perceive during his/her time in Rangoon. The heat. I'd always wondered about it. Delisle said his level of tolerance improved over the year he stayed there, so that he could stand up to 90degF before turning on the air conditioner, while when he'd arrived, 80degF was his limit.

Delisle's wife works as a physician for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) International as a physician, and this time we learn a little about how the process of country-siting is chosen, what kind of conditions employees endure as condition of their employment, and a little about the different roles sister organizations have within the same country. One can actually use this as a window into the work of the organization as well as into the country.

All of Delisle's graphic memoirs are interesting. This one made me laugh when he showed a picture of a pen and ink drawn made during 'the wet,' or the rainy season. The lines were all running and blurred, as though it had been dunked in a barrel of water or as if one had spilled water onto it. The rest of the year is 'the hot.' What else is striking is at that time (2006-07), permits were required for foreigners to travel around the country, due to a great deal of internal unrest.

Some of the physicians are stationed at remote outposts, and even though the organization is permitted to operate, getting permission to travel to and from those outposts is difficult and can be dangerous. But here the usefulness of having an artist making the trip is apparent. We envision the enormous ancient teak house in Mudan that is rented by MSF, and the local translation of a British village complete with fenced front gardens. You will remember Orwell was stationed in Burma between the world wars.

Anyway, Delisle is not a political writer, nor a journalist, but he adds a heck of a lot to our understanding nonetheless. I'm now officially a big fan.

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Hardcover, 184 pages Pub September 1st 2005 by Drawn and Quarterly (first pub October 2003) Orig Title Pyongyang ISBN13: 9781896597898 Literary Awards Urhunden Prize for Foreign Album (2014)

Delisle's Pyongyang experience is a little different from his other books because in the case of North Korea, Delisle is here to work on animation studies for a film. Apparently most major animation studios find animation devilishly expensive to produce in the home country and so go to lower-wage countries to do the in-between frames in a storyline so that the work is smooth and not herky-jerky.

Foreigners are asked to come for short periods of time to keep an eye on the project and get the work done on time and with the proper standards. While he was there, Delisle came across a not-insignificant number of people living in Pyongyang or passing through, on their way to remote outposts for different reasons. I'd always wondered about that, but wasn't sure if it actually happened. Must be pretty grim work, considering Delisle's experience ensconced in a big, empty, cold & impersonal hotel in the city...surely as comfortable a place as can be found.

Anyway, one gets a very good sense of what his days were like, what the city looked like, how fun was to be had, if it was to be had at all, but very little of the inner lives of residents, which is to be expected. Delisle's work again adds to the richness of our understanding of the world.





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The Lies They Tell by Tuvia Tenenbom

Paperback Pub March 1st 2017 by Gefen Books ISBN13: 9789652299116

Tuvia Tenenbom is a man of enormous appetite. Most of us will agree about that, despite other disagreement we will have at the end of this review, or at the end of his travel memoir around the United States. Tenenbom, by his own description, is an overweight, cigarette-smoking, brandy-drinking, non-religious, non-apologetic, argumentative, shape-shifting Israeli Jew who claims whatever citizenship (German, American, Israeli) will grant him greatest access to people’s inner thoughts. The more he wrote, the more he revealed about himself, a phenomenon he'd trumpeted about in his experience with talkative but reluctant interviewees, despite themselves.

I could pick at inconsistencies I found in Tenenbom’s observations about the people in our country, but mostly I was rapt. He is a thoughtful, seeking man with a background in religion, computers, journalism, theatre, and a lifetime of attention paid to history and world affairs. He makes notes of his interactions as he travels the northern route to the west coast, to Alaska and Hawaii, and then the southern route back to New York City. It was a huge journey, and his memoir is informative and fascinating.

He wanted to know who Americans were: what we thought of Jews, Palestinians, and Israelis; how party politics manifest amongst us; how do conservatives and liberals justify themselves? What was immediately apparent to him setting off from New York City was race, how it segregates us, how it completely colors our experiences, our choices, our lives. We overlap so little, Tenenbom had to go out of his way to get through the barriers to entry: white people and black both told him to “stay away,” be careful,” “watch yourself,” etc. if he entered or wanted to enter the places black people lived in Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco, Honolulu, Charleston…cities whose class divisions left a mark on his psyche.

As he travels he reports a bit of the day’s news. This was 2015, the year Dylan Root entered Emanuel AME Church in Charleston and shot nine people, this was the year of the Bataclan nightclub massacre in Paris, this was the year President Obama renamed Mount McKinley in Alaska Mount Denali. Tenenbom finds that politics often determined where an individual stood on climate change, their support for Palestine, their perceptions of Jews, gay rights, abortion rights, the boundaries so clear cut opinions seemed cookie-cutter and instinctive rather than well-thought-out and reasoned. Mostly folks were surprisingly unwilling to share their thoughts on politics, apparently afraid it would spoil their personal and business relationships. This struck Tenenbom as suspicious: how can one arrive at a well-argued position without refining it at every opportunity? Americans are a fearful people, he concluded.

Rights of gun-ownership was a subject that arose for Tenenbom in the midwest. He found he liked handling others’ weaponry very much and, to his surprise, he himself was very good at shooting targets. We get his explanation of how handguns or guns which use magazines require permits…we never get a full-throated disavowal of such weapons. One suspects he thinks it is the least of our worries. If we dealt with the more obvious divisions among us, guns wouldn’t be an obstacle to good self-governance. Possibly.

In October of the same year of the Charleston shooting, nine people are killed by a gunman at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. Tenenbom points out how quickly the news fades when race as a motive is not involved. When someone else points out that more white people are killed by police in America each year than blacks, he investigates. His statistics read:

"during 2015 [as of sometime in the fall season], almost 250 blacks and close to five hundred whites were killed by US law enforcement personnel."

Without some indication of the percentage of blacks’ minority status, it is hard to use these statistics properly, but the truth is that I did not know white people were being shot by police at higher levels than black people. What does it mean for our understanding of police work, or the Black Lives Matter movement? What should it mean?

There is nothing knee-jerk about Tenenbom. If he has an opinion, it is usually thought-out, or if not, like his undecided stance on climate change, he is willing to continue to collect information. He doesn’t like the selfishness he often observes among wealthy conservatives , but neither does he like the unexamined righteousness of liberals who have an opportunity to make a difference where they are and insist instead on opining about politics in distant lands while doing nothing at home. He likes black people, their culture, and what they add to diversity, a word which gets bandied about atrociously in this book. We don’t have much diversity, for all our many cultures, in America, because white people are privileged and have separate opportunities, no matter how woke they think they are.

What I don’t understand about Tenenbom’s point of view is his mix of nationalism and religion. Just like his willingness to call himself German, American, or Israeli depending on which works better for his purpose, he blithely says he loves his adopted America, but his Jewishness seems more important to him, despite his self-proclaimed non-religiosity. If a Muslim does the same thing, do we react differently? I think we do. Muslims are constantly having to reiterate publicly their love of America, and how it supersedes their love of religion.

The thing about Tenenbom that is so interesting is that he gives the impression he can be persuaded. He’s interested. He pays attention. He asks questions. He knows what injustice is and will call it out. He doesn’t like everyone parroting support for Palestinians without knowing more about the situation in Israel. I still think he is being disingenuous in claiming “no foul” in the settlements, in the outsized responses to Palestinian resistance, in the discrimination of opportunity, etc.

No, Jews don’t have to be better than everyone in the world. They have to strive to be better than they are, is all. Americans have their own indignities to face, the most egregious right now being race and class. Both countries could use clear-sighted critics. He and I agree on Samantha Power, former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Sometimes “liberal” turns a corner into something else entirely.

I’d like to hear a podcast discussion between Tuvia Tenenbom and David Remnick of the The New Yorker. I think they are on opposite sides of the Israel questions, and they might be able to uncover sources of anti-Semitism in the U.S. that is hidden to most of us.





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Blind Spot by Teju Cole

Hardcover, 352 pages Expected publication: June 13th 2017 by Random House ISBN13: 9780399591075

This book of photographs paired with short essays is due out in the next two weeks. I want to give you ample time to order one for delivery on publication. Teju Cole’s art is exceptional at the same time it is accessible. In my experience, the confluence of these two things happens only rarely, which is how Cole has come to occupy an exalted place in my pantheon of artists. If I say his photography can stop us in our tracks, it says nothing of his writing, which always adds something to my understanding. Today I discovered his website has soundtracks which open doors. And there it is, his specialness: Cole’s observations enlarge our conversation.

This may be the most excellent travel book I have read in recent years, the result of years of near-constant travel by the author. Scrolling through the Table of Contents is a tease, each destination intriguing, irresistible, stoking our curiosity. Each entry is accompanied by a photograph, or is it the other way around?

“I want to make the kinds of pictures editors of the travel section will dislike or find unusable. I want to see the things the people who live there see, or at least what they would see after all the performance of tourism has been stripped away.”

Yes, this is my favored way of travel, for “the shock of familiarity, the impossibility of exact repetition.” It is the reason most photographs of locales seemed unable to capture even a piece of my experience. But Cole manages it. In the entry for “Palm Beach,” his picture is of a construction site, a pile of substratum—in this case, sand—piled high before an elaborate pinkish villa. His written entry is one of his shortest, only three sentences, one of them the Latin phrase Et in Arcadia ego, washing the scene with knowledge of what we are viewing, and what is to come.

Cole calls this work a lyric essay, a “singing line” connecting the places. There is some of that. What connects all these places for me are Cole’s eyes…and his teacherly quality of showing us what he is thinking. It is remarkable, and totally engrossing.

“Human experience varies greatly in its externals, but on the emotional and psychological level, we have a great deal of similarity with one another.”

Yes, this insight, so obvious written down, is something I have been struggling with for such a long time, going back and forth over the idea that we are the same, we are different. Cole tells us that this book stands alone, or can be seen as fourth in a quartet addressing his “concern with the limits of vision.” I want to sink into that thought, in the context of what he has given us, because outside the frame of a photograph, outside of our observation, outside of us, is everything else.

My favorite among the essays, if we can call them such, filled as much with what Cole did not say as with what he did, is the piece called “Black River.” Cole evokes the open sea, Derek Walcott, crocodiles, and white egrets. A tropical coastal swamp filled with crocodiles also had white egrets decorating the bushy green of overhanging mangroves, the large white splashes almost equidistant from one another, the closest they can be for maximum happiness, I like to think, t hough it could also be minimum happiness, I guess. Any closer and there will be discord, like the rest of us live.

The arrival in bookstores of a book by Teju Cole is an event. His pictures makes us look, and his words are like the egrets, spaced for maximum pleasure. Whether or not you read this as a series or alone, make sure you pick it up, just to gaze. You need have no agenda. His magic does not make much of itself. He takes us along for the ride. Bravo!



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My Life with Bob by Pamela Paul

Hardcover, 256 pages Pub May 2nd 2017 by Henry Holt and Co. ISBN13: 9781627796316

Coming out at this time of year, Pamela Paul’s memoir is reminiscent of a commencement speech, albeit book-length and one just as interesting for the parents as for the graduates. It is a blast to listen to an obsessive reader share her thoughts on books, her travels and travails. Bob is her lifelong companion and record, her Book of Books, the place she can note what she has read. It gives date of completion, and, because Paul tried to read books about the countries or cities she visits or lives, we deduce a sense of location. It is her book of memories then, a record of where she has been.

Paul was the single daughter born into a family of seven sons. Despite the expected in-house torture and rough-housing, her psyche remained remarkably intact, though her parent’s divorce may have had more effect than discussed here. She did emerge as a reader, an introvert, and from a young age wanted to write. In this book she has boldly decided to write about what she’s read in the context of her life, and astonishingly, it is interesting. We enjoy retracing her faltering steps as a burgeoning adult, in which she recalls with uncommon accuracy the embarrassed and confused feelings of a teen.

France plays a large role in Paul’s life. Although her American Field Service (AFS) experience in a small town in suburban France was not as she imagined, it set the table for her next visit and the one after that. Eventually she found a family in France that became a second home, a family that subsequently attended her weddings and met her children. This kind of close long-term relationship defines Paul, I think. We all have trajectories, but not all of us cultivate the path as we go so that it becomes personal, the impact felt on both sides.

Paul’s decision after college to go directly to Thailand without the usual scramble for underpaid work at home was prescient but daring. She’d not get another chance to see that part of the world with any depth, though the China portion of the trip gave me the screaming heebies. It sounded perfectly horrendous, completely uncomfortable, filled with sickness and incomprehension. The China trip was her father’s idea, and it never became hers. The unmitigated disaster of that trip reminds us that we have to own our journey, start to finish, for us to manage it with any kind of finesse.

There was a marriage that lasted a year. The utter heartbreak Paul experienced does not lacerate us: from the moment she begins to speak of her first husband we are suspicious. She is much too happy much too soon. Love is one thing. Blindness is another. In my mind I modify Thoreau to read: beware all enterprises that require giving up a large, rent-controlled flat in New York City...

"…the minute a subject veered from the fictional world, the private world, the secluded, just-us-on-top-of-the-mountain world, into the greater, grittier territory below, the nonfictional world, my husband and I had serious differences…Even when we each happily read those same books about the perfidy of man, we read them in opposite ways…this kind of book contested my essentially optimistic view of the world rather than overturned it…whereas for him, the world really was that bleak, and the books proved it."

Here you have, folks, a political difference so profound it can break nations in two. Ayn Rand’s work became Paul’s personal standard for judging viewpoints. Paul admits--she who practically worships books--that she threw one of Ayn Rand’s books in the trash after reading it, so that no one else would be polluted by its ideas. I laughed. I did the same thing, though I contemplated burning it before I did. In my tiny garage-turned-apartment in New Mexico, I wrestled with Rand’s horrifying vision of a society of go-getters and decided that to burn her book would invest it with too much significance.

I loved reading about Paul’s poor dating experiences after that. She was inoculated against irrational exuberance after her divorce, but she still wanted intimacy. She manages to share with us chortle-inducing instances of “okay, I’ve had enough of that” with some of the men she met later. My favorite might be the time a boyfriend convinces her that he’d been to the Grand Canyon before and so can show her “the best way to see it.” Har-dee-har-har. This memoir is a great example of smart and funny, gifting us many moments of remembering our own worst histories and reinforcing for younger women coming along that our judgment may be the only thing separating us from a much worse time of it.

Pamela Paul is now books editor of The New York Times and no longer has to struggle to find the coin to buy a new book. She is the best kind of editor for all of us because she is has read widely and acknowledges the draw of genre fiction while communicating her admiration for the range of new nonfiction that helps us cope with our history and our future. She is also an interested and informed consumer of Children’s lit and Young Adult titles, which aids me immeasurably since these are not my specialty and therefore necessitate me seeking assistance from a trusted source.

Access to all there is out there comes with its own set of stresses, but Paul has extended her reach by asking some of the best writers in the country to read and review titles in the NYT Book Review, and to talk about their selections on the Book Review Podcast, available each week from iTunes as an automatic download. Her guests and her own considered opinions help to narrow the field for us.

This is a great vacation read, not at all strenuous, yet it is involving. Imagine the unlikeliness of the concept: an introverted reader and editor writes a book about her life…reading…and it is interesting! Totes amazeballs. It occurs to me that Goodreads is one big Bob. I’m so glad Paul put the effort in to share with us: big mistakes don’t have to be the end of the world. It depends what happens after that. See what I mean about commencement?



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South and West: From a Notebook by Joan Didion

Hardcover, 160 pages Pub March 7th 2017 by Knopf Publishing Group ISBN13: 9781524732790

Joan Didion’s notebook of her drive across Louisiana and Mississippi with her husband in the summer of 1970 is filled with glimpses and impressions of the blazing heat, canopies of kudzu, a sense of disintegration and insularity. Didion interviewed friends of friends and folks who knew about important local happenings, but she had a hard time gathering the ambition to follow through with attending events in the muggy heat. She made notes, but the aimless drift through a South she knew was important somehow never fanned into flame...until now. Her instincts were right. The South tethers us still, to a past we cannot escape.

Didion’s experience of the South is that of confederate flag beach towels at the motel pool, debutante dresses, and plans for dinner out with local literati, illegal bottles of liquor smuggled in a large leather handbag carried expressly for that purpose. The childhood of a young white boy in the South may be the best childhood in the world, she imagines.

The house of one family had a slave certificate still hanging on the wall and servants that dated back a generation. Everyone seemed sure of where they stood on the race question, and stated it openly. The order to integrate schools immediately (80% black, 20% white) came in February: why didn’t they wait until September when a little more time might have gotten some folks to go along, a local white man with school-aged kids opined. "I can't sacrifice my kids to idealism," he concludes.

Didion and her husband sought the gravesite of William Faulkner in Oxford, Mississippi but found only a young black man leaning against a two-tone sedan in the heat, waiting for customers, selling marijuana, perhaps. It was too hot to think too much about it. They never found the grave but the graveyard feel of the South pervaded her writing nonetheless. Death is a feature of the South. It feels close, as does rot, and subsidence. And yet, the South holds a history, slavery, which will not die, no matter how we wish it would.

The University of Mississippi is in Oxford with that elusive gravesite of Faulkner’s. The university library carries only textbooks, a few bestsellers, and Faulkner novels. Didion mentions her visit there:"…I saw a black girl on the campus. She was wearing an Afro and a clinging jersey and was quite beautiful with a NY/LA coastal arrogance. I could not think what she was doing at Ol’ Miss or what she thought about it." One cannot help think that the piece would have been infinitely improved if she had roused herself enough to ask the girl that question. All through this book she never crossed the color barrier once except to be introduced to the maid or gardener of a white homeowner.

Fireflies, heat lightning, heavy vines and soggy ground, fainting heat, water that smells of fish, vacant expressions, algae-covered ditches, fast-melting ice. The South is present everywhere in her words, in the barely-stirring observations she makes from a sitting position. But the 1970s South is evoked as surely as the 1950s and 1960s South. Things change only incrementally, imperceptibly.

The travel by car was onerous, and Didion tells us she had to avoid cities with airports because she would immediately book a ticket out. It was a struggle, this trip, and one evening they stopped late for dinner:

"The sun was still blazing on the pavement outside. The food seemed to have been deep-fried for the lunch business and kept lukewarm on the steam table. Eating is an ordeal, as in an institution, something to be endured in the interests of survival."

The point of view is distant and unconvinced when a dinner host says something about how the blacks would return to the delta if there were jobs anymore because “this is a place with a strong pull.” Didion’s judgment is as clear as a torch in a muggy dark night.

We return to California and it is here that Didion's intimacy with us becomes the story. She tells us of her upbringing and we see where she gets her sense of confidence and superiority. She’d never had anything blocking her way, in the “peculiar vacuum” of her childhood. She’d come from an affluent family and only saw in hindsight her extraordinary luck in a world that offers most people little certainty. She’d “been rewarded out of proportion to her scholarship,” but she remembers only her failures. Looking back, sometimes she does not “feel up to the landscape.” She tries to place herself, place us, in history.

The sentences in this book are a remarkable evocation of place, even if she “never wrote the piece” and her notes on her upbringing at the end are scattershot, gorgeous, real, thoughtful, meaningful, relatable, full of atmosphere and intimacy.

Kimberly Farr narrated this audio collection of notes, and her quiet sophistication is quite up to the task of looking askance at the deep-rooted and culturally-queer habits of the South, and at the naiveté of Didion's upbringing in California. Didion thinks people make too much and too little, both, of their effect on, say, the South, or the West. She takes the long view now, musing that we all seem so inconsequential except when we are not.

A clip of the Penguin Random House audio production is given below:




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Love and Other Ways of Dying: Essays by Michael Paterniti

Mike Paterniti is slyly profound. It is hard to pick a favorite among these essays, and it gets harder the more distance one gets from reading them. They stay around like a seed planted. They grow. It is easy to underestimate Paterniti because his writing voice is self-deprecating and meant to be goofily funny. But a couple of essays in this nonfiction collection prove his bonafides as someone who knows what seeing is, what wonder is. These essays range the world, and though early on I’d picked one or two I thought showcased his talent, two near the end of the collection spoke to me most directly. Ask me again in a week and I will choose a different set.

A GR friend pointed to this title, and his enthusiastic review made me want to see what he saw. The two essays David points to in his review, “Eating Jack Hooker’s Cow” and “Driving Mr. Albert,” are two I wish all the pundits and newscasters had read before the presidential campaign started in the U.S. Paterniti tells of warring motels along an ignored stretch of road in Kansas, one motel owned by the whites, and two on either side of that owned by the yellows. It is a transcendent piece of writing because both sides are understandable in their resentments and there seems no solution in sight unless they get to know one another to see what suffering is.

In his review David points to that bit in “Driving Mr. Albert,” a horrible and ghastly story about driving across country with Einstein’s brain in the car trunk, where Paterniti points out “Frankly, out in America, you get the feeling that America is dying.” There is a stench of formaldehyde in his words throughout which makes one want to wretch, and nothing he writes along the way makes it better. It is a kind of grotesquerie but we cannot pull away. This man went and witnessed and we can just say, “how about that?”

One essay—I want to say story because it reads so much like fiction—that stood out for me was “The Suicide Catcher,” set in Nanjing, China. A man takes it upon himself to try and keep people from jumping to their deaths along a stretch of bridge over the Yangtze River. Paterniti flew to Nanjing to meet Mr. Chen:

"He had a paunch, blackened teeth, and the raspy cough of an avid smoker—and he never stopped watching, even when he allowed himself a cigarette, smoking a cheap brand named after the city itself. He wore a baseball cap with a brim that poked out like an oversized duck’s bill, like the Cyrano of duck bills, the crown of which read They spy on you."

The piece is mesmerizing. Paterniti caught that “China feel” precisely, down to the eight-table local restaurant near the bridge, the walls of which held side-by-side posters of Buddha and liquor ads, and the cloudy glasses of which held beer or grain alcohol that Mr. Chen slammed down with a greedy satisfaction and pride. Paterniti caught the feel of suicide-catching, too, as he stood without Mr. Chen on the bridge later. A man, boozed to the gills, decided he could no longer take the pressure of caring for a sick relative and his family as well. He very nearly succeeded in rolling himself over the balustrade…

“Never Forget” made me shake with fear and brought me to tears. For the first time since our presidential campaign started this time I realized that we human beings have many documented cases—here is another one—of mass delusion and slaughter of fellow humans. It can happen again. It makes no sense, but no matter how remote it seems, we must be vigilant. In this essay the author is in Cambodia with his wife and child. He walks in the park with his son who clutched him “like a snake-spooked chimpanzee,” while everyone smiles and points at them. Everyone smiles so consistently he starts to get paranoid. “Why is everyone smiling?” he wonders. “Was the joke on me?…Or are they smiling because they can?” Chum Mey, a survivor of Cambodia’s Killing Fields, smiles too, though we may never understand how.

"In the first spasm of violence, everyone wearing glasses was killed. Everyone who spoke a foreign language was killed. Everyone with a university education was killed. Word was sent to expats living abroad to come home and join the new Cambodia; when a thousand or so arrived on special flights from Beijing, they were killed. Monks, so revered in Cambodian society and long the voice of conscience there, were killed. Lawyers, doctors, and diplomats were killed. Bureaucrats, soldiers, and policemen, even factory workers (Who in the minds of the Khmer Rouge were equivalent to industrialization itself), were killed."

I am not equating what is happening here with what has happened elsewhere. I am merely pointing out that people can be led to madness. Dystopia has its roots in that fear. In fiction it can be thrilling. In real life it is unqualified horror. Paterniti ended up returning to Cambodia for the trials which had dragged on so very long that everyone on both sides of the case were dying before sentencing. Chum Mey was there, smiling. Paterniti was strong to witness this episode in history, and brave.

It may be worth pointing out that this type of nonfiction storytelling is kind of an unusual genre. Or is it? I mean, it is not journalism exactly. Where does a quirky, interested, interesting voice writing nonfiction fit in the canon unless one is telling news? He writes magazine pieces for GQ. But this is still an unusual category: not travel writing or memoir-writing or straight journalism. The author barely appears in these pieces except for playing straight man or adding an occasional editorial comment or two. It is more like the pieces published in The New Yorker, I guess. Anyway, if someone else were as quirky and observant as Paterniti and could write as well, they might find an audience. My guess is that Paterniti would say, “No, don’t. It ain’t that easy…” But he’d say it with a smile.


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Known and Strange Things: Essays by Teju Cole

This book of essays by Teju Cole aren’t always essays: they might be scraps of thought, well-digested and to an immediate point. They are fiercely intelligent, opinionated, meaningful in a way that allow us to get to the heart of how another thinks. And does he think! Let’s be frank: many of us don’t do enough thinking, and Cole shows us the way it can be done in a way that educates, informs, and excites us.

The work in this volume are nonfiction pieces published in a wide variety of outlets and that he chose from an eight-year period of travel and almost constant writing. The emphasis in these pieces, he tells us in the Preface, is on “epiphany.” We can enjoy kernels of ideas that may have had a long gestation, but have finally burst onto the scene with a few sentences but little heavy-handedness or any of the weight of “pronouncements.” This reads like a bared heart in the midst of negotiating life, as James Baldwin says in The Fire Next Time, “as nobly as possible, for the sake of those coming after us.”

Cole references Baldwin in all these pieces in his unapologetic gaze, but he does so explicitly in several pieces, notably “Black Body” in which he tells of visiting the small town in Switzerland, Leukerbad (or Loèche-les-Bains), where Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain found its final form. Cole expands on his time in Switzerland in “Far Away From Here,” which might be my favorite of these essays. Cole tells how he was given six months to work and write in Zurich and though he did precious little writing, he was totally absorbed every day, gazing at the landscape, walking the mountains, photographing the crags, trails, and lakes, thinking, unfettered. This is someone who carries all he needs in his head, and I loved that freedom as much as he.

But how can I choose a favorite from among these pieces when each spoke of ways to approach a subject with which we have struggled—or haven’t yet…About race and class: “how little sense of shame [Americans] seemed to have,” he writes, looking at America from his upbringing in Lagos. Cole echoes Baldwin again in “Bad Laws” about Israel and its laws concerning the rights of Palestinians:

”The reality is that, as a Palestinian Arab, in order to defend yourself against the persecution you face, not only do you have to be an expert in Israeli law, you also have to be a Jewish Israeli and have the force of the Israeli state as your guarantor…Israel uses an extremely complex legal and bureaucratic apparatus to dispossess Palestinians of their land, hoping perhaps to forestall accusations of a brutal land grab.”

Earlier Baldwin reminded us that “…few liberals have any notion of how long, how costly, and how heartbreaking a task it is to gather the evidence that one can carry into court [to prove malfeasance, official or not], or how long such court battles take.” Americans looking at Israel and Palestine should be able to discern some outline of our own justifications and methods, and vice versa.

Photography is one of Cole’s special interests and he is eloquent in Section Two "Seeing Things" in discussing what makes great photography as opposed to the “dispiriting stream of empty images [that the] Russians call poshlost: fake emotion, unearned nostalgia.” And then he discusses “Death in the Browser Tab,” wherein he tells us what he sees and what he knows after retracing the steps caught by the phone footage recording Walter Scott being shot in the back by eight bullets from a .45-caliber Glock 21.

Politics is what humans do, though “the sheer quantity of impacted bullshit in politics” is clearly not something Cole relishes. In "The Reprint" Cole admits he did not vote until sixteen years after he was eligible, and when he did vote finally, for Obama, “like a mutation that happens quietly on a genetic level and later completely alters the body’s function, I could feel my relationship to other Americans changing. I had a sense—dubious to me for so long, and therefore avoided—of common cause.” He notes that Obama was “not an angry black man, the son of slaves” but a biracial outsider who invisibly worked his way to the center of the political establishment piggybacking the experience of American blacks by hiding in plain sight. The night Obama won, Cole was in Harlem.

“There was as exuberant and unscripted an outpouring of joy as I ever expect to see anywhere… Black presidents are no novelty for to me. About half my life, the half I lived in Nigeria, had been spent under their rule, and, in my mind, the color of the president was neither here nor there. But this is America. Race mattered.”

Cole will speak out in "A Reader's War" against Obama’s “clandestine brand of justice” and his “ominous, discomfiting, illegal, and immoral use of weaponized drones against defenseless strangers…done for our sakes.” He admits that Obama believes he is trying “to keep us safe,” and writes “I am not naive…and I know our enemies are not all imaginary…I am grateful to those whose bravery keeps us safe.” It is one of the most difficult questions about political and military power that we face today and Cole wrestles the issue heroically. Not any of us have yet answered this question well, and until we do, the disconnect between justice and drone strikes will continue to plague us. We have unleashed a terrible swift sword on far away lands while we continue to suffer the brutality of a thousand cuts from our own citizens. Cosmic justice?

When Cole talks about literature I experience a frisson. There is nothing quite like someone very clever and well-spoken addressing something about which one cares deeply. His insights add to my pleasure, and detract nothing. His description of the poetry of Derek Walcott remind me of the first time I encountered Walcott’s work: “This is poetry with a painterly hand, stroke by patient stroke.” I have forever thought of Walcott in this way, in color and in motion: turquoise and pale yellow, cool beige and hibiscus pink, the palest gray and an ethereal green I am not sure is water, air, or sea grass. The ocean creates tides through his work, and it seems so fresh.

When Cole writes of his visit to V.S. Naipaul in “Natives on the Boat," we sense how Cole’s initial reserve is eventually won over by Naipaul’s deeply curious and wide-ranging questions. In the very next essay, “Housing Mr. Biswas,” Cole writes an ecstatic celebration of Naipaul’s accomplishment in creating the “smart and funny, but also often petulant, mean, and unsympathetic” Mr. Biswas in Trinidad,

“an important island in the Caribbean but not a particularly influential one on the world stage…the times and places—the farms, the roads, the villages, the thrumming energy of the city, the mornings, afternoon, dusks, and nights—are described with profound and vigilant affection…it brings to startling fruition in twentieth century Trinidad the promise of the nineteenth century European novel.”

He’s right of course. Naipaul is a beloved writer of a type of novel no longer written, and perhaps now not often read.

Reading all these essays in one big gulp was a lot to digest so I am going to recommend a slower savoring. This is a book one must own and keep handy for those small moments when one wants a short, sharp shock of something wonderful. By all means read it all at once so you know where to go back to when you can dig up copies of some of the photos he talks about or want to recall how Cole manages in so few words to convey so much meaning. His is a voice thoughtful in expressing what he sees and yet so vulnerable and human I want to say—read this—this man is what’s been missing from your lives.


These collected essays will be published August 9, 2016. I read the e-galley provided to me by Netgalley and Random House. I note that some of the essays about art or photography that were initially published in newspapers sometimes were accompanied by examples of the work he discusses. In a perfect world, these would be included in the final book, but truthfully, his writing is clear and compelling enough to not make that nicety strictly necessary. Apologies to the publisher for quoting from a galley: my excuse is that the work is previously published and therefore no surprise.


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Katherine Carlyle by Rupert Thomson

This novel has the spine-tingling atmosphere of an episode of Netflix’s original series Sense8. Chance, coincidence, gambles, even miracles figure into the actions of a young woman seeking to make sense of her life and her mother’s death. The distinct sense of foreboding that pervades the pages comes partly from us: we are involved, judging the character’s choices against our own. The main character cannot be sure how this will play out, either. "I feel new. I’m a blank slate. A gamble…" This is a teenaged alienation story that does not run to drugs, alcohol, nor sexual perversion.

Katherine (Kit) Carlyle was an IVF baby who had been kept as a frozen embryo for eight years before she was implanted in her mother’s uterus with two other embryos. She was the one who survived, and from her years waiting in limbo, we know her conception and birth was a kind of gamble. Kit is nineteen and living in Rome when we meet her. Somehow Kit claims a kind of DNA memory of that pre-time of frozen suspension, and finds herself going in search of those origins when she feels abandoned by her parents--her mother to death, and her father to a peripatetic career.

Kit is a woman who doesn’t always have the motivations we associate with a woman of her wealth, beauty, and intellect. She is young but her naïveté is paired with a world consciousness that few people over thirty can claim. She also has waist-length hair. When I pointed out to friends that this seemed a male fantasy, one man said “not so fast: women with very long hair tend to obsess over it.” It turns out that hair is like a talisman in this novel, a touchstone upon which feelings, actions, and behaviors turn.

Author Rupert Thomson has published nine other novels, one described by critic Jonathan Miles writing for Salon.com as "disquieting" for the horrific scenes of sexual abuse depicted. Thomson, now sixty years old, has been praised for his sentence craft and is often in the running for major literary prizes. One suspects it is his unusual sense of story rather than his writing talent that advances other authors over him to win prizes. In this novel, for instance, the palpable sense of doom and danger does not often play out: we readers are bloodied but whole. There is a rape scene late in the novel, but it is not graphic and is only implied.

More disturbing are the dreams and fantasies of the young woman, who likes to imagine her father searching for her, trying to find her. She writes letters to him, and despite accusing him of not loving her enough, she dreams that he will feel anxious moments trying to locate her with the few clues she has left behind. The author adds to our sense of unease by italicizing a sentence that could only be said by an older person to a younger one: "Even negative experiences contribute to the sum of who you are." There is a sense of inevitability about pain and exposure, though Thomson does not do his worst, to Kit nor to us, in this novel.

Thomson’s work may simply be too uncomfortable to win the prizes, but this novel stands as an entry in the new literature being written that gives us a sense of being untethered in time and space. Thomson’s characters appear to acknowledge and accept the many mysteries that come with interactions with new people. It remains an open question whether his reading public wants that, too.

**Rupert will be participating in a series of events in the US this fall. Please see below for a list of readings and interviews for the novel KATHERINE CARLYLE.**

EVENTS

ST PAUL, MN
Twin Cities Literary Festival – 10/17

NEW YORK, NY
Bookcourt – Talk, Q&A, Signing – 10/19/15
Greenlight Bookstore in conversation with Rebecca Mead – Talk, Q&A, Signing – 10/20/15
Center for Fiction in conversation with w/ Rebecca Carol – Talk, Q&A, Signing –10/22/15

BOSTON, MA
Boston Book Festival – 10/24/15

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Hav by Jan Morris

Morris, most everyone knows, is one of the premier travel writers of the 20th Century. She went everywhere, and wrote with such interest and erudition about the places she visited that one reads her works simply because she writes better than anyone else. One publisher gave her the opportunity to write fiction, and Morris created an invented place, Hav, to which many folks immediately wanted to book a flight.

This novel is composed of two parts: in Last Letters from Hav Morris describes for us her first glimpse of the Protectorate of Hav, its residents, flora, fauna, religions, and origins. In Hav of the Myrmidons written twenty years later, Morris returns to a much-changed Protectorate. In the Epilogue to the combined novel called simply Hav published by nyrb, Morris tells us that the allegories of old Hav have been transmuted from a place of “overlapping ancient cultures but with familiar signposts based in history” to allegories of “civic prodigies…hitherto inconceivable and themselves all but fictional still.”

Hav is an international protectorate near the Black Sea and on the Mediterranean. Every major nation had its representatives there, ensconced in (formerly) grand buildings that carried a storied history. When Morris visited in the 1980’s, Hav was rundown and a tiny bit disreputable, but the glamour of earlier days still shone through.

Morris shares her first impressions upon her arrival at night (monotonous and cold, stark and forbidding) and those again modified by clear morning light (bright, colorful, polyglot). She stays several months, buys an automobile, and travels by ferry to outlying islands. She meets the important citizens and legal representatives of countries occupying national concessions in Hav and witnesses the major celebrations—the coming of the snow raspberries and the Roof Race. Her visits to The Iron Dog, and The House of the Chinese Master (“the most astonishing aesthetic experience Hav can offer”) are accompanied by marvelously detailed descriptions composed of wonder and awe.

The novel is just a travel memoir, a very good one with historical references and informative notes about where to find the best food, until Morris comes to her discussion of the British Concession and its history in the province. Morris seems to become much more pointed in her references when she describes the British consul, his wife, and English interests in establishing a base in Hav. Morris includes notes General C.J. Napier wrote to his wife about Hav: “A dreadful hole—worse than Sind!” and “Oh what a foretaste of hell this is.” The British always kept some distance from true involvement in the life of Hav (they “loathed the Protectorate”), created buildings that looked quite like those created in India for their comfort, and were reputed to house only spies in their offices.

We learn that celebrities and leaders from many countries visited Hav in its heyday. Morris’ description of Nijinsky’s visit is particularly poignant, but Hitler and Wagner (at different times, naturally), George Sand and Chopin, Kim Philby, and the shadowy Sir Edmund Backhouse, scholarly sinologist and baronet, were all said to have stayed there at some time or another.

An escarpment just to the north of Hav was home to a cave-dwelling tribe of troglodytes who never settled in the city proper but who form “a still living bridge between the city and its remotest origins.” Their language has a fragile connection with the Celtic, but is still incomprehensible to everyone outside their group. It is said when they first saw the peninsula upon which Hav now sits, surrounded by blue sea, they called the place “Summer,” or hav in the surviving Celtic language of the West.

The underlying political structure of Hav was a shambles of competing interests and insufficiently expansionist beliefs which added to the rich confusion of organic growth in the labyrinthine city. Hav was likewise a rich stew of religions, all in stages of isolation from their original tenets. One mysterious group called Cathars of Hav was composed of secret members of the community and whose ceremonies and meetings involve robes and chants in underground locations. The Cathars are said to trace their history to the Crusades and their beliefs to Manicheanism, or the dualistic cosmology between the forces of good and evil, darkness and light. This group alone gives Morris pause in her ramblings about the city, but she does not spend much capital thinking about them before she is advised by the British Consul to leave the city in haste.

Morris ends Last Letters from Hav on a note of uncertainty, with low-flying war planes streaking over the city. Morris sees warships on the near horizon as she pauses on an overlook near where she will abandon her vehicle and catch a train away from Hav.

Morris uses the word “maze” to describe Hav more than once, leading us to think she meant, among other things, to suggest “a-maze…ing” Hav. In 2005 Morris was invited to revisit Hav. Her later map of the city looks completely different from the earlier one, with many of the wonderful places she described razed. Now the Myrmidon Tower dominates the landscape: “a virtuoso display of unashamed, unrestricted, technologically unexampled vulgarity” upon which is emblazoned the state emblem of the Republic, the letter ‘M’ flashing in sequential colors of red, yellow, green and blue and overlaid against an Achillean helmet outlined in gold. When Morris ascends the Tower, she discovers the nearby newly constructed Lazaretto! Resort (“the name is written with an exclamation mark because we believe you will find it a truly exclamatory experience”) is, in fact, built like a maze when viewed from above. The suites are named for places once a part of the old Hav before the Intervention in 1985.

As luck would have it, the first people Morris interacts with in the New Hav are a “very English middle-aged couple” whose advice “don’t experiment too much with the local stuff” seems designed to remind Morris however things have changed, much has stayed the same. But then: “The thing is one feels so safe here. The security’s really marvelous, it’s all so clean and friendly, and well, everything we’re used to really.” And that turns out to be the most frightening and curious thing.

The troglydytes who originally named Hav are no longer living in whitewashed caves on the escarpment but have been moved to barracks near the airport where the menfolk work on airport construction. While many Morris spoke with seemed pleased with the central heating and the comfortable living, one man pointed out that they were experiments of “ethnic engineering,” given a few certainties in exchange for their unique though hardscrabble culture.

Morris must leave after only six days this time, while she was forced to leave after six months on her first visit. Things have changed quite a lot and the menace is palpable. People are afraid to speak openly for a very tight grip by the Cathars of Hav hear all and see all.

This science fiction reminds us what a woman of the world Ms. Morris is, for she has caught the national character of each resident group in Hav quite clearly. But it is her certainty that events and locales have really lost their historical basis and point of origin is one that stays with us long after we put her book down. The world is renewing itself, and has become strange to even one so practiced in the art of travel.

”The great ‘M’! ‘M’ for what? ‘M’ really for Myrmidon, or ‘M’ for Mammon? For Mohammed the Prophet? For Mani the Manichaean? ‘M’ for McDonald’s, or Monsanto, or Microsoft? ‘M’ for Melchik? ‘M’ for Minoan? ‘M’ for Maze?...’M’ for Me?”

Again from the Epilogue, Morris says “A whole world…has come into being since I wrote Last Letters from Hav. New states have emerged, and new kinds of cities suddenly erupted.” The world is a new thing in this century, and history doesn’t always provide a signpost. Morris, the great traveler, is perplexed and uneasy.


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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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The Third Plate by Dan Barber

The grace and fluency with which James Beard Award-winning Chef Barber relates his experiences in his Blue Hill restaurant in New York City, walking the fields of his Stone Barns organic farm in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and in his travels to Europe and throughout the United States left me wide-eyed with wonder. This extraordinary memoir and travel account is engrossing in a way that few writers achieve. Barber is gentle in his instruction, but he is telling us what he has learned about the inadequacy of the current concept of food sustainability, and it is a lesson we really need to assimilate and organize around.

Happily, his lessons are filled with well-cogitated thought, possibilities, solutions, humor, and beautiful images. I’d heard Corby Kummer interview the New York restaurateur on the New York Times book podcast back in the spring of ‘14, and thought it sounded like something I’d like to look at. I felt no urgency. Only when I obtained a copy for someone else and began to browse through it did I discover the can’t-put-it-down page-turning clarity, and the irresistible humor in Barber’s writing. I am trying now to figure out how many copies of the book I can give away for Christmas without repeating myself.

This book is divided into four sections, called Soil, Land, Sea, and Seeds. You won’t have heard these stories in quite this way before, and if they seem familiar, you will find it enlightening to see what Barber has chosen to highlight. Barber moves gradually through his dawning realization that the way we have been eating, in restaurants and at home, is not actually going to be able to sustain the land, the ocean, nor the planet, no matter that we gradually move from pesticide-grown vegetables to organics. There has to be a greater understanding of the web of interconnections between the soil and our eating habits. We have to be willing to increase the diversity of our diet and think about eating foods that replenish the balance in the soil along with ones we use more commonly.

It may be obvious to those who have paid attention to the concept of sustainability that we haven’t yet come around to actually managing the task ahead of us. Barber suggests it is more than simply changing our diets from meat-centric to vegetable-centric. He concludes that we “cherry-pick” our vegetables and therefore limit the amount a farm can sustainably produce for a given community. A farm has to grow cover crops on at least some of the land, and that is part of the cost of crops we actually eat. He urges us to think about how this works in fact, and what this reality means for pricing, output, and consumption.

But I may be making it sound boring. In Barber’s hands, it is anything but that. His work is filled with enlightening vignettes about the places, the people, the restaurants that led him to learn so much about sustainability and its opportunities. Barber awakened me to certain understandings about plant pairings that I’d sort of heard about, but never really believed possible: like having four different crops growing in the same space at the same time to preserve and replenish soil vitality. Especially, or perhaps only, in small scale operations where crops are harvested by hand might this be possible…but it is possible, in fact desirable!

Vignettes about the fish farmers and restaurants featuring fish were particularly interesting. I hadn’t followed the latest developments in that field and am astonished, pleased, and heartened to know that there are some doing things which enhance wildlife rather than diminish it. He tells of a fish farm in Spain which hosts vastly increased numbers of migrating birds as well as produces exceptional-tasting fish for market. It gives me hope that the work on the west coast of the USA to preserve and restore the tidal salt marshes near San Francisco might be successful for life of all kinds, including our own.

Barber outlines his own learning curve, his oversights and humiliations, and he is very funny in places, showing the reactions of people with different world views meeting (at Barber’s behest) face to face and trying to be civil, or in speaking of finely tuned chefs at their most passionate or most perplexed:

’Dan,’ [Ángel] said, turning to me, ‘have you ever cooked naked in your kitchen?’

Ángel features in another very funny bit:

”[Santiago] goes to different ponds in Veta la Palma [Spain] at different times of the year. Always at the full moon,” Ángel said.

Thinking of Steiner and his lunar planting schedule, I guessed, “Because the fish have better flavor when the moon is full.”

“No,” [Ángel] said, looking puzzled. “So he can see what he’s catching.”

The section on wheat farming was completely new and fascinating to me. In the very beginning of the book Barber reproduces a photograph of the perennial Midwest native prairie wheat (with root system) alongside higher-yielding grain varieties planted to replace it. I was truly shocked by the difference in the profiles of the two plants, and thought it indicative of what modern agriculture has done, in every aspect of our food profile, to the concept of sustainability. The good news is that there are folks around the country thinking about our food future. Barber managed to create an international community of thoughtful practitioners striving to figure out how we can best produce what we will need to live on earth.

This completely fascinating book happens to be very easy to read. Someone in your family, not just the foodies, will love reading of Barber’s researches and spending time with this thoroughly decent guy who is willing to share his successes and failures in the field.


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Hard Choices by Hillary Clinton

Clinton sets herself up to be compared with Dean Acheson by recalling his Pulitzer Prize-winning book at the outset. But her title echoes Cyrus Vance, Secretary of State during the Carter administration. What she is doing is tracing the thread of American foreign policy through the administrations of Democratic presidents to show the continuity of political thinking and foreign involvment. One must remember that Acheson wrote at a time when faith in government was at an all-time high, and many folks read his book before criticizing it. I am not at all sure the same could be said for Clinton’s comprehensive memoir about her four-year (2009-2013) term as Secretary of State for the Obama Administration.

I come away thinking there is perhaps no person with better credentials to be president. She could handle the job, certainly. But we would have to decide if she is the person we want to lead our country and the world into the future. She would be an activist president for sure, clearly convinced that American leadership is all we should or could consider. Clinton blasts critics who proclaimed Obama “led from behind” on Libya, and said his leadership was in fact critical to the success of that international involvement.

Clinton’s time as senator from New York was good preparation for the prodding, jockeying, and cajoling that is done in international forums with government heads of state. Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense while Clinton was Secretary of State, expressed a vast admiration for Clinton’s intelligence, experience, restraint, and pragmatism in his own memoir, Duty. Both longtime Washington insiders, Clinton and Gates shared a sense of service, a clear-eyed realism, and a healthy skepticism. I believe they also shared a mutual distrust of Vladimir Putin and both sought to marginalize, where possible, his inputs.

A lot happens in four years when the world is the stage, as Hillary Clinton’s memoir of her time as Secretary reminds us. Clinton logged nearly a million miles in her role as Chief Diplomat, though like all managers, she spends more time dealing with and talking about trouble areas than about countries whose troubles were not catastrophic.

Most revealing and interesting for me were her discussions about Syria, Iran, Gaza, Libya, Russia, and Afghanistan, including the Bin Laden raid and Benghazi. She was remarkably open about the steps that led to backdoor talks with Iran, and the calculations she had to make when considering deteriorating situations in Syria, Libya, and Gaza.

The Syria section reveals the calculus around the support for rebels. The Iran talks were equally revealing—Clinton is remarkably frank about her assessment of country rulers and their personal ‘styles.’ It almost reads like a Wikileaks cache in this section and perhaps she is willing to talk about it because of those leaks. When it comes to Gaza, Clinton hauls out the (surely tattered by now) “strong support for Israel” that we have come to expect, but tempers it with unenthusiastic observations about Prime Minister Netanyahu’s political history, party backing, and current positions. She managed to avoid the wider invasion of Gaza that we are experiencing now, but consistently reiterated the increasingly critical need and strong support for a two-state solution.

The Edward Snowdon leaks in May 2013 came after Clinton resigned in February 2013. Clinton must have been aware of and not in opposition to the information collected during her tenure…perhaps even using it in fact. It would have been interesting to hear what she would say to Angela Merkel about the taps on Merkel’s personal phone, when Clinton makes the observation that she and Merkel are often considered two of a kind and expresses admiration for what Merkel has been able to do while she has been in office.

Clinton had areas of concern that she championed wherever she went: women’s rights and human rights. She is a tough negotiator and gave plenty of government leaders some restless nights with those “hard choices” she talks about. Clinton recognized and harnessed the power of the connected world, and the tendency of the world to shrink as telecommunications, cell phone connection, and social media improved. Fortunately, she is not afraid of changes in the status of women, LGBT citizens, and minority voices, and instead welcomes them.

She recognizes that all talent will be needed in a 21st Century world facing climate change, shifts in energy dependencies, and the economic upheavals that will bring. We cannot afford to shun anyone with a good idea and had better take advantage of all the skills our citizens can bring. It’s a question of making sure they are all able to grasp opportunity when it presents itself. I like this concept a lot, and think her insistence on human and economic and political rights for all citizens may be her longest legacy.

Clinton felt so strongly about energy policy, economics, and the interdependencies of trade that her role as a wide-view activist Secretary of State surely encroached on the roles of other cabinet-level officials. In her memoir she sounds positively Presidential in making decisions, deciding directions, and in the scope and definition of her role. Obama had much on his plate in handling domestic intransigence so he was probably pleased to have someone with Clinton’s understanding, reach, and clout. She says they worked well together, and I’m sure it worked about as well as any team with high stakes and powerful players.

What struck me as I listened to Clinton’s memoir is the number of times familiar names were recycled again and again in different jobs, some from much earlier administrations, as though they are the only ones who could handle the work. I suppose it is true that experience counts, but isn’t that one reason Obama was elected to office…that he actually didn’t have all the experience (and all the baggage)? Foreign countries trying to keep tabs on who is doing what in the American government must be pleased they don't have to research the background of anyone new. There simply has to be some transfer of responsibilities to new players: a requirement of top-level posts should be finding and training their own replacements. Sometimes it just sounded like a closed system though I can appreciate the time constraints in finding someone able to handle a task effectively and with grace. If anyone is interested in trying to solve the intractable problems involved with government work, they should make their wishes known, and be known, because it is who you know that counts.

I do not think there is any certainty about Hillary Clinton taking on another campaign for President, though there is probably no person better equipped to handle her activist agenda, despite her age. She is both revered and feared at home and abroad. Enormously motivated, she believes she has and can still make a difference in people’s lives. I feel confident that this seasoned political actor wants to see what American voters decide in November 2014. [Biden says he is doing the same.] If the attitudes and will of the American people were to significantly change the balance of power in the Congress in favor of Republicans, she may be swayed one way or the other. On the other side of the equation, the Democrats must find and field another credible candidate for Clinton to relax her sense of responsibility. In many ways, we'd be lucky to have her--she is a dogged American proponent. She can't be the only person able to take this on, though we have seen what lack of leadership has done for other countries, the Middle East in particular. That wouldn't happen on Clinton's watch.

Readers who lived through this period may feel they’ve “heard all that” Clinton has to say, but I don’t think anyone can say they’ve heard it all until they hear it from the woman who did the driving. It was a tumultuous period in world history and it was completely enlightening to hear what our Chief Diplomat had to say about it. Hillary Clinton remains something of a marvel.

Clinton only narrated the introduction and the epilogue, but Kathleen Chalfant had a voice that recreated Clinton’s accents and speaking style so completely, I was unsure sometimes who was narrating. Chalfant did a fantastic job with the place and personal names and the pacing. Simon & Schuster Audio provided a copy of this to me for review.


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Lazy Days by Erlend Loe

I need a new shelf called "Silly." Loe is talented, no doubt about it. A few times laughs escaped me in a surprise assault. But he indulges himself this time. I suspect he didn't have a subject but needed to publish, so he just picked something--anything--so he could make a few bucks. Such is his reputation in Europe and Norway that he could pull that off.

A playwright and his family vacation in Germany. The playwright, obsessed with Nigella Lawson since his wife gave him one of her cookbooks for Christmas, does not like Germany and pretends to be working while his family tours. In fact, he daydreams about Nigella in her "thin blue sweater" making him taste her concoctions. He's got the whole ridiculous obsession thing down, humiliatingly familiar to us all as it is. He makes it funny, because his wife seems to divine what he's up to and doesn't seem to mind awfully much. We can hear her sigh. She's just as happy to have him out of her hair, what with his comments about Germany getting very annoying and sometimes embarrassing.

For those brain-dead from a fast-paced working life who none-the-less feel guilty on vacation without having a book on their chaise as they sit in the sun, this nothing-really-happens ridiculous train-of-thought by a Norwegian nutcase is a good companion. It's funny enough to pick up and put down for a week without ever being really challenged.

Loe's Doppler was a runaway bestseller in Norway and Europe. It established his reputation and is also small, funny, and great vacation material. It might be a classic of existential angst in our time of plenty-for-some. It is perfect for that overworked executive beginning to wonder if life in the fast lane is worth the effort.

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The Other Language by Francesca Marciano

Marciano writes with such naturalness and lack of artifice in each of these carefully composed and engrossing stories of women on the cusp that the reader is convinced the stories are about the author herself. By the fourth intimate portrait we bow to the skill and craft that brought these stories to life. We are privy to an entrancing fragility surrounding each central character as she faces choices and events that will shape her future. Her confusion and uncertainty is something we know very well indeed.

This sophisticated, sexy, adult collection about women not quite at ease in the world brings us to Italy, Africa, New York, and India. We feel no dislocation because we are privy to the intimate thoughts of our protagonist who carries her sensibility with her. The characters range from city to country and beyond but we never lose our vision of the internal.

Marciano’s characters are friends, charming friends, beautiful friends, who have our sympathy. They are vulnerable, capable, and sexual in ways we recognize. And perhaps they are a little deluded. In “An Indian Soirée,‎” “his wife” and “her husband” shrugged off their old lives as easily as old clothes only to discover they’d been together and away from the world too long. Moments of revelation are peeled so carefully, they are manifest in a look, or in a comment exchanged.

In “In the Presence of Men,” the richest and widest of the offerings, we see truths about a youngish divorcée, a small-town matron harboring an undervalued and unmatched skill, and an American filmmaker seemingly so sure of his attractiveness he disregards those that prop him up. When Lara’s high-profile guests leave her new house in the country, we see Lara standing at the kitchen counter eating a non-fat yogurt for dinner as she contemplates a full refrigerator, vegetables neatly stacked by color. The sadness, despair, even desolation that creeps over her afflicts us as well.

Stella and Andrea lie to one another, just a little, when they meet after many years in “Big Island, Small Island.” And Elsa lies to herself, just a little, in “Roman Romance.” But these lies are necessary. These infidelities we recognize but ordinarily cannot articulate, and we forgive them. We would do the same.

A favorite among these bittersweet stories is “Chanel,” in which Caterina and Pascal try on designer clothes in fancy boutiques as a spirit-lifter and self-actualizing experience. Years pass, but the friendship, experience, and the dress (!) linger.

Best of all, in “Quantum Theory,” a man and a woman acknowledge a strong bond between them and do not act on it. The memorable visual in that story, the two reclining on parallel benches but holding hands, will stay with me a very long time.

This magnificent collection is a map to the hidden treasure of the female mind, each story adding to our delight and understanding and wonder. Marciano charts the inner landscape as intimately as a close friend fingering our sore spots, and we accept, rejoice, despair with her discoveries. I know now the tiny but scarring humiliations left from relationships are not mine alone to bear. We made a mess; Marciano made art. Even the cover rocks!


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