“I observed more than once how in their conversations the small overrode the great, even history.” — Svetlana Alexievich
“It’s a pity that I was beautiful only during the war . . . My best years were spent there. Burned up. Afterward I aged quickly . . . ” — Anna Galai, submachine gunner
Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War is such powerful oral history (It’s taking self forever to get through; she can’t help poring over each interview).
Antonina Mironovna Lenkova:
My passion was books. I sobbed over the novels of Lidia Charskaya, read and re-read Turgenev.
Note by the author:
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Because of the title, maybe you were expecting something written in the same antic spirit with which Mikhail Bulgakov wrote The Master and Margarita. Julie Lekstrom Himes’s novel, however, is a completely different animal. It’s straightforward realism: a searing look at how cruelly the Stalinist state treated its artists and writers (and gets really painful to read around p. 216)
Bulgakov is not the only victim of the state. No writer, it seems, escaped. The cruelest fates are reserved for Mayakovsky and Mandelstam. But there were many others.
p. 213, Margarita has disappeared, and Bulgakov goes to Lubyanka on a futile search for information.
Guard: I have no information available.
Bulgakov: Every week I hear the same thing — do you know if she is even in there?
Guard: Is she out there with you?
Bulgakov: Of course not.
Guard: Then she is here.
Meanwhile, inside Lubyanka, Margarita “was told her attitude did not help her. When she returned to her cell, a metal shutter had been screwed over the window. Where the clock had hung there were only wires.”
Since we know precisely how much sun passes through this window every day (16 minutes, Margarita could tell by the clock), the sudden withdrawal of this small comfort (the guards knew!) is particularly awful.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Loving this book because of all the writerly mentions. In addition to Bulgakov (Must watch the movie with Charlotte Rampling), there are Osip Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Anna Akhmatova . . .
All tortured, sent into exile, heartbreaking. But at least their words survived.
On p. 138, there’s a mention of Gogol (Self has to type on the floor, sitting on throw pillows; sitting at a desk gives her hand and wrist cramps. But the other day, she noticed spiders crawling over her legs and feet and she’s like constantly on the alert with Off! spray).
p. 138:
In his later years, Gogol had become convinced that God had abandoned him. Tortured, half-crazed, he burnt his remaining manuscripts only days before he died. As though the promise of man’s redemption must perish with him. He claimed the Devil had tricked him into doing so. He’d been only forty-one.
p. 139:
In 1931 when Gogol’s body was exhumed he was discovered to be facing downward. The writer had had a terrible fear of being buried alive, so much so that he’d willed his casket be fitted with a breathing tube as well as a rope by which to sound some external bell if needed.
As the grimness gathers around Bulgakov, the novel can only get more depressing. But so far, self has been able to persist.
This novel won the 2017 First Novel Prize from New York’s Center for Fiction, “the only literary center in the United States devoted to the art of fiction.”
Kudos to Ms. Himes.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
In 2013, she read a total of 30 books.
In 2014, to her great disappointment, she managed to read only 7.
Thus far, in 2016, she’s read 18 books. Oh happy happy joy joy.
2013 was a great year for her reading life.
She read:
In 2015, self’s great reads were:
This year, self’s favorite books have been:
She’s struggling through Northanger Abbey. Really struggling. But she is determined to finish it.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
This is the kind of story where everything is told.
But after reading a paragraph or so, self thinks Tolstoy knows everything in the world, so it is okay for him to tell us readers everything.
The plot, such as it is, goes thus:
A bureacrat feels pain in his stomach, which he realizes a few weeks later seems connected to what he eats. The symptoms manifest at meal time, which means he becomes particularly nasty before a meal. His wife figures this out on her own as well. Tolstoy writes true to RL (Real Life): knowing the cause does not mean that Ilyich tries to correct this behavior, or that the wife is any more sympathetic to him.
His wife finally tells Ilyich see a doctor. The doctor does not tell Ilyich anything, but decides to run more tests:
Praskovya Fyodorovan’s external attitude to her husband’s illness, which she voiced to others and to him, was that Ivan Ilyich was to blame for the illness and that his whole illness was a new unpleasantnes he was causing his wife. Ivan Ilyich felt this came from her involuntarily, but that did not make it easier for him.
And there you have it, self’s first quote from Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Self might as well call 2016 the Year of the Classics because she’s adding more books to her reading list and these are they:
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Leo Tolstoy
Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
The Odyssey, by Homer (not sure yet which translation to read)
perhaps some Pliny the Elder and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
The Pile of Stuff is incredible, simply incredible. She probably hasn’t looked at it for over six months. This morning, she went through a New York Times Book Review from about a year ago. Here are the books that most piqued her interest:
Recommended by crime writer Patricia Cornwell in the By the Book section: Chris Kyle’s American Sniper, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and “anything by Marcella Hazan.”
Ann Patchett’s The Patron Saint of Liars and This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (Harper, $27.99)
Autobiography of a Corpse, by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull (New York Review of Books, $15.95)
The Isle of Youth: Stories, by Laura van den Berg (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $14)
In the Memorial Room, by Janet Frame (Counterpoint, $24)
The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 2: 1923 – 1925, edited by Sandra Spanier, Albert J. DeFazio III and Robert W. Trogdon (Cambridge University Press, $40)
The Discovery of Middle Earth: Mapping the Lost World of the Celts, by Graham Robb (W. W. Norton, $28.95)
Today, self got to see Paul Haggis’s new movie, “Third Person,” and it is seamless and complex and lovely and moody. It focuses on odd couples. The woman who most aroused self’s sympathy was the woman played by Mila Kunis. Having said that, James Franco gives such a wicked and sly performance, as her ex-husband. He projects such smugness, with just a glance. His partner, a beautiful, long-legged French gazelle, is the third leg of a triangle, and she also delivers a performance that is complex and moving. In fact, all the actors in this movie were at the top of their game (well, maybe not Liam Neeson, who gets by on looking worried, all of the time)
Now, self has been weeding her Pile of Stuff of unnecessary materials. She has so much catch-up reading to do!
One of the back issues self picks up is The New York Review of Books of May 22, 2014. There’s a review by Masha Gessen of a translation of one of Dovlatov’s works: Pushkin Hills. Gessen quotes another Russian emigré writer, Joseph Brodsky, who says of Sergei Dovlatov:
His stories rest primarily on the rhythm of the sentence; the cadence of the narrative voice. They are written like poems: the plot is secondary, it is but a pretext for speech. It is song rather than storytelling.
Self wonders how Dovlatov could have escaped her notice until now.
Another excellent review is by Michael Gorra, on Starting Over: Stories by Elizabeth Spencer. Spencer wrote The Light in the Piazza, which has such an audacious plot self is sure that Spenser, if having to pitch to a publishing house today, would never be signed on.
Another of the reviews that stood out is Francine Prose’s review of Emma Donoghue’s latest, Frog Music.
Self is currently reading Richard Price’s Lush Life. She hopes she can do a better job of finishing it than she did with Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story collection, Unaccustomed Earth. Self kept obsessively going back over the first page of Unaccustomed Earth because of course the writing is lovely. If only it wasn’t so stately and dolorous. She got about halfway through it.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
For some reason, self’s reading pace in 2014 has been positively glacial.
She brought three books with her when she left California, and she’s only managed to finish one: the Jhumpa Lahiri collection Unaccustomed Earth.
What happened was, at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, she wrote like she was on fire. She was only able to read a few pages at a time of UE. By the last week of her stay in Annaghmakerrig, she’d calmed down and began re-reading the last three stories of UE. And only then was she truly able to appreciate the stories’ many-layered richness.
Then, she left the Tyrone Guthrie Centre and began an odyssey that included: Dublin, Cambridge, Oxford, and Cork.
She’s still in Cork, by the way. If anyone’s trying to keep tabs.
Here she is, on p. 14 of Jhumpa’s novel The Namesake, which she began reading two weeks ago (Self wasn’t kidding when she described her reading pace as glacial). It begins, with all things, with a character being moved — no, haunted — by Gogol’s story “The Overcoat.”
Self will quote a little excerpt, and then she has to make herself go outside because the day really is too beautiful.
Ashoke was always devastated when Akaky was robbed “in a square that looked to him like a dreadful desert,” leaving him cold and vulnerable, and Akaky’s death, some pages later, never failed to bring tears to his eyes. In some ways the story made less sense each time he read it, the scenes he pictured so vividly, and absorbed so fully, growing more elusive and profound.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Kanlaon 