Amy Smith Linton
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Four Books: Style to burn

10/27/2013

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Trying to keep a lid on my enthusiasm for recommending books by theme: this time it's all about style.

My mother and I used to stroll through her neighborhood when I visited. Walking and talking and discussing at the way people paint their shutters, how some people put in gardens and others let things run wild, we always looked into the windows as the daylight faded. Endlessly curious about the notion of home, she sometimes speculated about how the looks of a house might change the lives inside of it. 
          "If I lived there," she'd say, "I'd be much neater." 
           "Yes," I'd say. "And you'd have four perfect children." 
           "No, I'd still have you two, but we would all be different."

And that's how stories and style seem to me: the same plot goes very differently depending on the architecture and how the building is maintained.  Here are a few of the more striking novel dwellings:

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The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle.

Begins: "The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam, but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea."

Goodreads link HERE.


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Nocturnes for the King of Naples 
by Edmund White.

Opens with:
 "A young man leans with one shoulder against the way, and his slender body remains motionless against the huge open slab of night sky and night water behind him. He is facing the river. Little waves scuttling shoreward from a passing, passed scow slap against boards: perfunctory applause."

Goodreads link HERE.

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Self-Help 
by Lorrie Moore.

The first story, "How to be an Other Woman" starts:
"Meet in expensive beige raincoats, on a pea-soupy night."  

Another, "How to be a Writer" opens with solid, funny-but-true advice about writing: "First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astonaut. A movie star/missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you can fail at an early age--say fourteen. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at fifteen you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire."

Goodreads link HERE.

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Possession 
by A.S. Byatt.

First lines: "The book was thick and black and covered with dust. Its boards were  bowed and creaking; it had been maltreated in its own time. Its spine was missing, or, rather, protruded from amongst the leaves like a bulky marker."

Goodreads link HERE. 

Self-Help is an early collection of Lorrie Moore's stories. Full disclosure: she was one of my writing teachers, and I still have a bit of a crush on her. She is so smart. So funny. She can make you laugh out loud even as she breaks your heart. Her use of second person (the "you" of self-help books) make these seem like stories shared person-to-person. If this is a house, it's a split-level ranch, and you are at the kitchen table sipping coffee from a heavy avocado-green mug while the owner confides something important and strange.

Later I found out that The Last Unicorn is a beloved underground classic, but when I was twelve, I stood in a bookshop in Rockland, Maine, and weighed it against The Worm Ouroboros.  Lucky choice. I gobbled up this paperback with an uncomplicated and uncritical love, re-reading it countless times. And why not? Beagle pitches everything -- including a Lear-quoting butterfly and a magician named Schmendrick -- in beautiful, mock-high-heroic language. This book is not so much a house as a garden where you hear an old-fashioned ballad performed with perfect pitch, as, say Celia Pavey.

I picked up Nocturnes for the King of Naples on a whim. I liked the cover. It was published in 1978, and I read it around the time I was also first hearing about AIDS. It's a novel about lost love told in an unwavering fever-pitch of metaphor and beautiful language. Not homey, not cozy, this house, but astonishing: "A wind said incantations and hypnotized a match flame out of someone's cupped hands. Now the flame went out and only the cigarette pulsed, each draw molding gold leaf to cheekbones."  

And that sprawling Victorian Gothic revival mansion behind the fence? The one that nearly lured me back to grad school at least twice? That's Possession, a novel that follows two parallel stories: a pair of modern-day English scholars and a pair of Victorian poets. The former are investigating the latter, racing against a crass American and others to discover the mystery behind the poets. Byatt created a body of work for both of the Victorians (poetry and stories and letters and diary entries galore) and the way she shifts between the modern and the Victorian has made me by turns envious, greedy, and swoony with admiration.

As a reader, it's like one open-house after another, with realtors offering bowls of candy while perspective buyers stroll around and admire or not. You can even try out a stint in that stark modern minimalist place on the hill, or spend a week or so at that the lakeside cottage.  

For a writer, the view can be a lot more daunting.  Yeah, sure, you think, I can make me a stout little log cabin, but whoa -- the Great Camp Sagamore? Um, well. But you close the book, stop blogging, and try to get some work done.
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Four Books: Wuv, True Wuv

9/18/2013

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Only four books? 

Irony aside, it's a start. 

There's an enormous stack of books I want to tell everyone to read, right away. Surprising stories. Amazing writing.  With a four-book limit, there's a bit of constraint on this impulse.  

The theme this time: a crazy little thing called -- well, you know.


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Fingersmith begins: 

"My name, in those days, was Susan Trinder. People called me Sue. I know the year I was born in, but for many years I did not know the date and took my birthday at Christmas." 
Goodreads link HERE.


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Endless Love
starts:

"When I was seventeen and in full obedience to my heart's most urgent commands, I stepped far from the pathway of normal life and in a moment's time ruined everything I loved -- I loved so deeply, and when the love was interrupted, when the incorporeal body of love shrank back in terror and my own body was locked away, it was hard for others to believe that a life so new could suffer so irrevocably." 
Goodreads link HERE

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Persuasion opens with: 

"Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt." 
Goodreads link HERE

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Abel's Island begins this way: 

"Early in August 1907, the first year of their marriage, Abel and Amanda went to picnic in the woods some distance from the town where they lived. The sky was overcast, but Abel didn't think it would be so inconsiderate as to rain when he and his lovely wife were in the mood for an outing." 
Goodreads link HERE

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Love is a little thing shaped like a lizard./ That runs up and down and tickles your gizzard. Or so they* say. 


Persuasion is my favorite of the Austen novels. 
In the interest of honesty, I have to say that this cover 
 <---MIGHT have colored my first reading of the story, back in junior high. 
Who knew it was a classic? 
Still, I stand by my affection for this novel, even over Pride & Prejudice and Sense & Sensibility. Why? Well perhaps because, unlike so many  "romantic" stories, there is a pretty strong possibility that the two lovers will NOT get together. Plus, the emotional connection makes sense: they are attracted not just because of a pair of fine eyes or a lovely face, but because of their history, how they act under pressure, and what they hope to become. 

In Fingersmith, the love story sneaks up on a reader. This brick-thick book, set in the 1850s in England, begins with a nod to Oliver Twist and then piles on the suspense and complications of a dastardly plot to steal a family fortune. Betrayal, twists of identity, and the fate of two orphan girls in this milieu that denies the most basic of rights to female people -- this is the best of suspense. Conventional expectations about love and happy endings get a good cage-rattling (or at least mine did) when the story comes to its conclusion.  

Endless Love, on the other hand, explores that most traditional of romances: first love of boy meeting girl and losing her. Complete with all the sexual frankness and over-the-top emotionality that makes our teen years a joy to behold (...from the safety of an artillery bunker).  Though it was made into a rather dreadful movie with a baby Brooke Shields, the book is feverish, compelling, beautiful, and sad. Hemingway said it: "When two people love each other, there can be no happy ending." 

At 120 pages, Abel's Island is a miniature masterpiece about survival and finding meaning in the wild world.  A gently bred young mouse is whisked away from his beloved by a big storm, and spends a year alone, trying to escape his predicament. With eloquent illustrations by the author, of New Yorker cartooning fame. 


* In this case, the "They" who rhyme lizard with gizzard is a character in a book by Madeleine L'Engle. Not her most famous book, A Wrinkle in Time, but from a novel about the very square Austin family, A Ring of Endless Light. Because there are always more books...

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Four Books: London calling

7/7/2013

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Four books that might rest comfortably on the bookshelf together.  


It's second nature for me to recommend books. But instead of constantly bombarding my reader with suggestions (Hello, reader! Thanks for stopping by! Read THIS! Like, now.), this occasional blog feature will be my attempt to keep that impulse contained. 

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Opens with "I write this sitting in the kitchen sink."
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31122.I_Capture_the_Castle
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Starts: "The education bestoed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; when when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living."
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92780.Cold_Comfort_Farm

I Capture the Castle By Dodie Smith 


The Friendly Young Ladies by Mary Renault


Harriet Hume by Rebecca West


Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons




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First line: "Very quietly and carefully, hardly moving her thin young neck and round shoulders, Elsie looked at the french windows into the garden, then at the door, measuring distances."
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/67695.The_Friendly_Young_Ladies
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Begins: "Their feet, running down the wooden staircase from her room, made a sound like the scurrying of mice on midnight adventures; and when they paused on the landing to kiss, it was still in whispers that they told each other how much they were in love, as if they feared to awaken sleepers."
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1228842.Harriet_Hume

These four novels share a few obvious characteristics: they are set in London in the years around the World Wars, they follow the adventures of young women coming into their own in a challenging social milieu and were written by women near those times. These were contemporary novels of their day.

Cold Comfort Farm, particularly, is one of novels I return to and recommend time and again. Written in part as a satire of the dreary melodramatic agricultural novels (those of best-selling Mary Webb for one, and to some extent, D.H. Lawrence) of the time -- 1932 --  the novel is full of wonderful writing and invention. We should all be so lucky as to have Flora Poste applying the Higher Common Sense to our problems: " 'Nonsense!' said Flora. 'Nature is all very well in her place, but she must not be allowed to make things untidy.'"
           The spritely 1996 film version is also well worth watching.

I found Rebecca Hume at a used book store, and having some vague recollection of the name (it's shameful what large chunks of history are missing from my education), I brought it. Of course, I know now that (Dame) Rebecca West was one of the intellectual lights of her time, a reporter, essayist and novelist, who drew on her affair with H.G. Wells for this odd little novel, which she subtitled "A London Fantasy." Not that this is a roman-a-clef, instead, it's a surreal story about a woman who is granted a telepathic view into her lover's mind -- not at all a blessing. While it's not a book I return to, it's one of those original stories that surprises and lingers.

Mary Renault's The Bull from the Sea and A Mask for Apollo are just two of a series of compelling historical novels set in Ancient Greece that made the rounds every other year or so through my book-loving family. Bringing to life the stories of Theseus, Alexander the Great, the Peloponnesian Wars, Renault fueled my (our) interest in archeology, mythology, and the classics of Western Civ. 
         In contrast, The Friendly Young Ladies parallels Renault's own life during the end times of the British Empire: it's the story of a girl who runs away to London to spend time with her estranged older sister. Like Renault herself, the older sister is working as a writer and living with a woman. The subtleties of the older sister's love-life escape the younger sister (as they also, evidently, proved too subtle for some reviewers at the time), to humorous effect, but the novel is not so much about sexuality as about decisions on making a decent life, taking responsibility and generally, growing up. 
          It's surprising to imagine this book published in 1944, when Radcliffe's Well of Loneliness was still banned as pornography in the UK, and "sexual inversion" was considered criminal and corrupt. I'd heard about this novel, but didn't find it until Vintage Books reissued The Friendly Young Ladies in 2003, twenty years after Renault died.  
          Making me grateful once more to be living now, here.

Although Dodie Smith is famous for writing The One Hundred and One Dalmatians, she worked primarily a playwright. She wrote I Capture the Castle while living in Pennsylvania in the 1940's, homesick for England. I first read this novel at age eleven or twelve; it was one of my mom's books. 
          The narrator's determination to write despite the slow grind of genteel poverty -- well, I'd say it inspired me, but that doesn't quite cover my pre-teen identification with young Cassandra, living in a crumbling castle with her sister and her mad father and her dramatic, odd, nature-loving step-mother. 

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Flying over the ocean And Back Again

6/17/2013

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I've been e-free for two weeks: no cell phone, no e-mail, no Twitting or Tumbling, very little television, and zero consulting of the Google. I carried an actual paper notebook, a smoothly-writing pen, and my camera.

It was only strange for the first two days. 

I could just as easily blame the strangeness on travel as much as having all that freed-up time and no pings of contact from the wider world.  Even though I won the economy-class lottery jackpot (a solo seat in the AB aisle meant that I was able to sleep flat, curled up tight as a bean on the flight from Philly to Roma), the change of location and time is still a shock to the system.   Not brag-complaining.  

It took a few days for my handwriting to regain some of its bygone neatness –– much typing in the past few months. Time stretched: without an online Scrabble game or random link to visit, it was just me and my paper, and my eyes looking around.

I gobble up books while traveling. Self-control for any bookworm requires an attempt to regulate the hours spent with a nose in a book. Trying to keep a lid on it, I permit reading on the treadmill, for an hour before sleep or at noontime, and, of course, any time on a plane or a train or when someone else is driving. Not having an e-reader, I prepared for this trip as usual: my carry-on bag is well stocked. I fear running out of words before running out of time.    

On the connection into Philly, I gulped down Gail Caldwell’s memoir Let’s Take the Long Way Home. It starts, heartbreakingly, with, “It’s an old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died, so we shared that, too. “ I bawled my eyes out.
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As for the rest of the airplane time there and back again, it went in a series of swoops and flights: Kristin Cashore's Bitterblue and Vanesssa Diffenbaugh's The Language of Flowers, and my favorite of the trip, Eleanor Brown's The Weird Sisters. I've got a lot to say about that -- whole pages in my travel journal -- but it will wait for another day. 

Here in the real world, back on my own side of the big pond, my e-connections are buzzing and glowing. 283 e-mails. 14 voice messages. 22 Facebook notifications, 134 e-mails on the other address, and 12 voice messages on the other phone. Winnowed down: four good e-mails, six valuable phone messages, and a lot of gossip on Facebook. 

How many minutes would it have been for me to check these things during these e-free days?


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