Autumn Reading

By Catherine Bohne of the Community Bookstore

My dear friend Mr. Limulus and I were sitting around having tea in the gardens of the Ritz (Madrid) the other day , and the conversation turned to loss. It turned there, I suppose, for various reasons. Partly because of the season, the approaching vernal, autumnal sweetly melancholy descent impending. Even the stately pigeons seemed to be toying, in a late summer way, with playing at being mourning doves. We were thinking about loss, also, because of a vague rumor which had reached us about an acquaintance of ours. Orphaned at a young age, passed from family member to disinterested or rapidly expiring family member, he had grown up to have the sort of aesthete’s ambition that makes one so particular, it becomes paralyzing. He had adopted at some point before we came to know him, all the (presumably defensive) offensive and off-putting habits and quirks of the curmudgeon, so that his grumbling affection, when he attached it to you, was quite disarmingly sweet. I said to Mr. Limulus that this friend of ours was the sort of person you thought had frittered away a lifetime, waiting for life to begin. Only it never really had. And now, we had just learned, he was dying. No savings, no family, no medical insurance and...no, it seemed to me, mitigating epiphany. No grace. And it was awful to add all this up, and think uneasily that if you took the story of this friend of ours as indicative, it was easy to think of life as a stupidity, a bad joke, a wound being constantly inflicted, until it killed you.

Mr. Limulus sighed a little, stared off into space, as though decorously averting his gaze from my little tantrum, and sipped his tea. Perhaps he even quoted a line from the book which (in a second, I swear) I’m about to get around to reviewing: “Life goes on. Death goes on. Love goes on.” When the melancholic and peaceful silence had lingered on for a bit, he uncrossed his legs, tugged at his trouser’s crease, and crossed his legs again. With a small, prefatory intake of breath, he pointed out to me that several members of the graduated employees of the bookstore had rallied around this friend of ours, and were visiting him. Running errands, calling and checking on him. That this friend of ours quite naturally assumed that the loyalty of these still quite young people was, as indeed it is, his to depend on. I think that Mr. Limulus was trying to tell me that I had no business adding up lives as if they were balance sheets, and that there is real work to be done to make sense of life, in the face of its certain net sum of loss. That it isn’t the loss and horror that are to be remarked on and rebelled against, as if they could ever be avoided or denied, but that, if I could get my head around leaving the loss alone, I would see that the real work is in finding, and giving, the joy.

This is why, once returned to Brooklyn, it was quite something to come across The End of the Alphabet by C.S. Richardson, newly published in hardcover. The premise of this small gem of a book is that the hero, one Ambrose Zephyr, and his wife, Zipper Ashkenazi, mutually adoring and mated, are informed one day (and this is where the book begins) that he has almost certainly only one month to live. The doctor is wry, the disease is mysterious and undefined, and there is no questioning the diagnosis. So they set off. As a child, Ambrose had been obsessed by Alphabet-sets, generating multiple lists of increasing complexity (which he illustrated himself), from “A is for Anaconda” to “D is for a beach in the Dutch Antilles” to “I is for Italian bats in the Vatican belfry.” Overnight (there’s no more time to spare) he comes up with an alphabetic list of places for him and his wife to visit together, a sort of farewell tour of memory and significance, of beauty and meaning. They begin in Amsterdam, to visit a single Rembrandt painting that had meant something particular to Ambrose years before. The next day they’re in Berlin, where Ambrose visits the ghosts of his uncle’s second world war (and the uncle’s burden of love betrayed by absence), while Zipper gives Ambrose the alive and distinctly not unlovely city she knew more recently. They’re driven on, racing time... There are only two luxuries. Time and Love. What this book does is amazing. It’s tiny, the words are few and precise. There isn’t even room for superfluous punctuation, and dialogue and thoughts are all bundled together with description. Some days and destinations are given only a paragraph on a page. And yet it so reconstructs two whole lives and histories, makes them so real and vital, that when, in two sentences, Zipper cracks in a hotel bathtub in Paris, crying between her hands “You can’t have it!” I started sobbing. The book races on. Then racing stops. They go home. The alphabet carries on. J, L, and MNOPQRSTUVX, then Y, and inescapable Z are found at home. There are only two luxuries. And only one of them you can count on.

If, on the other hand, you’re just bound and determined to sum up life in a nutshell, I might gently insist that you read Written Lives, by Javier Marias, newly in paperback. Marias, published here by New Directions, is often the darling of literary intellectuals due to cleverly bizarro novels like Dark Back of Time and Heart So White. By his own account, Spain’s leading writer had the most fun of all his books with this one. Having once been set the task for an anthology called “Unique Tales” of writing biographical notes for extremely obscure authors (but extremely—so much so that “any information... about them was sometimes both minimal and difficult to unearth and, therefore, so fragmentary and often so bizarre that it looked as if I had simply invented it all”), Marias got the taste for the snippet biography, and decided to apply the same technique, to hilarious ends, to various scions of the literary canon. Mr. Limulus and I once spent an indulgent afternoon reading various three-page biographies aloud to each other from this book—gasping with laughter and choking on our petit-fours. I now feel that all I really know, worth knowing, about Henry James is that he once crawled into a ditch to avoid meeting Ford Maddox Ford (who crops up to an alarming extent through these bios), and about William Faulkner that he was fired from the Post Office for refusing to be “beholden to any son-of-a-bitch who had two cents to buy a stamp.” James Joyce comes off as a revoltingly loathsome, nasty little man, but his pecadillos will make you laugh. Marias debunks the 1959 rumor that Isak Dinesen lived on a diet of oysters and champagne (in case you were still wondering, fifty years later), by unearthing the fact that she also ate prawns, asparagus, grapes and tea (which makes her more of a gourmand than Eva Gardner, who—fyi—lived off of popcorn, bubble gum and scotch).

Here, we are interrupted by an anecdotal Guest Review, by Dario Cipani (age four), as reported to me by his mother:

“I have to tell you that Mouse HATED that book by Daisy Ashford (The Young Visitors).

His papa started reading it to him at bedtime. The first night, he fell asleep out of sheer boredom, something that never happens. The second night, he stayed awake but sighed conspicuously. The third night, he interrupted to say, “Papa, can you show me the cover of this book?” [Papa obliged] “You know why, Papa? Because I want to remember it so that I NEVER NEVER read it again.” I tried to push him a little by asking, “Come on, wasn’t there a line or two that was funny, at least?” to which he dryly replied, “Zero.”

And finally, there is only one thing I don’t understand about The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (newly in paperback), and that is why it’s been labeled a young adult novel, unless it is the case, as it may well be, that in our sorry times Truth has been relegated to children. I suspect, and this book encourages me to believe, that it couldn’t be left in safer hands. What is this book? Well, on the surface, it’s the story of a girl, Liesel, growing up on the outskirts of Munich in Nazi Germany. The book makes no bones from the first page that this is not going to be a happy story. The narrator is Death. An exhausted, overworked, gruffly ironic, not unsympathetic and weary Death. A Death whose endless rounds are sometimes, rarely, given a fragile spark of illumination by a beautiful story. Liesel comes to his attention partly because in her times, and in her story, she and the people she comes to love (and you, Dear Reader, will) encounter Death so often, are so often near him, that it’s as if he can’t help being caught up in their story. What a premise. The real magic and mystery of this book is how the author manages to take such a misery-soaked premise, and slowly, faultlessly weaves it into a triumph of love and beauty. Partly he does this with the gorgeousness of the words. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone being as boldly and successfully playful with language, since Dylan Thomas. “His eyes looked painful and loud.” An “airy hallway” is “steeped in wooden emptiness.” “Outside, the world whistled. The rain was stained.” Partly it’s the character of Death, who grumps his way through the story, constantly giving away endings (they’re his job, after all) saying things like “I don’t have much interest in building mystery. Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It’s the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest and astound me.” And this is part of the magic of the book, too, that this is just what it delivers. In a narrative in which each character is implicitly ultimately doomed, the story of these people—a tough little girl, her lemon-haired, starving, boy-next-door best friend, the adoptive parents who beat, threaten, feed and love her, the hidden Jew in their basement who gives her a gift of words, and the whole irascible cast of the poor neighborhood of Himmel Strasse—pulls you in, takes you by the hand, and shows you all the beauty of each painful, impossible, but nonetheless performed and achieved kindness. It’s a beautiful book. A wise book. In spite of never looking away from any horror, this is a joyful book, celebrating what after all there is to celebrate—the generosity we do manage to find in ourselves, and the triumph of love despite and through the destruction.

Limulus interrupts again here to ask, as perhaps you are asking, why, in a set of reviews which will span the holiday season, I’m stubbornly concentrating on such gloomy stuff. Well, don’t think I haven’t asked myself. As I said in the beginning, it’s partly the season, I imagine. The days are shortening, and we’re heading into that quiet, dark time of the year; cold days, long nights. The time which finally, during the darkest, coldest days, will be interrupted by celebrations. It’s easy to lose sight, often, of what there is to celebrate, to get lost in the details and forget the sense. I love these books because they are all, in some ways, about life, and its brevity. They remind me of triumphs which are won, not so much through achieving anything, perhaps, but simply by existing. They remind me of love.