Each week, we'll be letting you know about the new releases the editors of O and Oprah.com couldn't stop reading. This week, we're obsessing over the romantic new novel:
By Alex Capus
When "a small grey figure wearing a bright red foulard" disrupts the funeral for respected Parisian civil servant Léon Le Gall—father of three, grandfather of 12, great-grandfather of four—at the venerable Notre Dame Cathedral, a family secret unravels. Seventy-four years prior, in the spring of 1918, while cycling to his new job in the village of Deauville, Léon had spontaneously raced a gap-toothed girl on a rusty, squeaky bike. Despite her damaged equipment, the girl in question, a certain young Louise Janvier, soundly beat him. Thus began a bewitchment—and an unrequited, lifelong love story. A near-fatal explosion during World War I separated the two, and years passed until they found one another again, only to be separated by World War II, not to mention spouses, children and assorted other complications, including one with a delicate box of tartes aux fraises. Interestingly enough, it's not the anxiety of how these two will ever be reunited—you somehow just know they will—but the eccentric charm of the novel itself that keeps you tearing through the pages. Capus' light, playful touch makes everything feel as if touched by an invisible French-speaking Mary Poppins, whether he's poking fun at a busybody landlord eating calf liver with onion or spinning up a description of Louise's polka-dot blouse. What results is a winsome bonbon of a novel in which "The End" feels like an unexpected and unfairly realistic awakening.
Each week, we'll be letting you know about the new releases the editors of O and Oprah.com couldn't stop reading. This week, we're obsessing over the short-story collection:
The News from Spain
By Joan Wickersham
A woman who's been married for 26 years—and whose husband has just had an affair—connects with an old friend on the eve of his wedding to a woman he doesn't love. The middle-aged owner of a bookstore tries to balance two deep and demanding attachments: a feverish reconnection with her elderly, ailing mother and a wild romance with a male customer. In each of these seven piercing stories, author Joan Wickersham reveals uncanny and complex parallels that occur when very different people love each other under very similar circumstances. What ostensibly links the tales is that somewhere along the line, the characters receive news from Spain. That news can be metaphorical (one twosome receives theirs via the wind rushing through a seashell on a beach) or realistic (a young bride is informed of her husband's death in Madrid). Furthermore, the stories all feature the same title, "The News from Spain," because each one is—in subtle, structural ways—a retelling of the previous tale. This tight organization displays a virtuosic control by the author, but the more compelling triumph is Wickersham's emotional cannonball into every single one of her characters. The masterpiece of the collection comes on page 79, when she explores the relationship between a paralyzed ex-ballerina and her gay caretaker, Malcolm. Malcolm's boyfriend is working in Europe, and so is the ex-ballerina's husband. Neither Malcolm nor his charge is sure whether his or her respective partner still wishes to be with him or her. The doubts and tenderness they share with each other as they stay at home, monitoring the mail without ever openly discussing their private feelings, are excruciating—in the best ways, ones that only the finest fiction can create, because you, the reader, feel as much or more than anyone on the page, be it the private, searing heartache or the over-the-top, sloppy happiness that so often happens in real-life love.
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The News from Spain
By Joan Wickersham
A woman who's been married for 26 years—and whose husband has just had an affair—connects with an old friend on the eve of his wedding to a woman he doesn't love. The middle-aged owner of a bookstore tries to balance two deep and demanding attachments: a feverish reconnection with her elderly, ailing mother and a wild romance with a male customer. In each of these seven piercing stories, author Joan Wickersham reveals uncanny and complex parallels that occur when very different people love each other under very similar circumstances. What ostensibly links the tales is that somewhere along the line, the characters receive news from Spain. That news can be metaphorical (one twosome receives theirs via the wind rushing through a seashell on a beach) or realistic (a young bride is informed of her husband's death in Madrid). Furthermore, the stories all feature the same title, "The News from Spain," because each one is—in subtle, structural ways—a retelling of the previous tale. This tight organization displays a virtuosic control by the author, but the more compelling triumph is Wickersham's emotional cannonball into every single one of her characters. The masterpiece of the collection comes on page 79, when she explores the relationship between a paralyzed ex-ballerina and her gay caretaker, Malcolm. Malcolm's boyfriend is working in Europe, and so is the ex-ballerina's husband. Neither Malcolm nor his charge is sure whether his or her respective partner still wishes to be with him or her. The doubts and tenderness they share with each other as they stay at home, monitoring the mail without ever openly discussing their private feelings, are excruciating—in the best ways, ones that only the finest fiction can create, because you, the reader, feel as much or more than anyone on the page, be it the private, searing heartache or the over-the-top, sloppy happiness that so often happens in real-life love.
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| from The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope-Poems |
I am fond, along with everyone I know, of saying things like, "I don't even have a moment to breathe." But what that means is, "I don't take a moment to breathe." Because there are hidden moments here and there, even in the most hectic life, moments that most of us spend staring off into space, or more often at our phones' glowing informative faces—when we could be breathing, or stretching, or humming a tune, or scribbling down a few choice lines or images on whatever is at hand. The back of a receipt. An envelope.
This was the first thought I had when I heard of a new artist's book that includes facsimiles of Emily Dickinson's "envelope-poems." Now on view at the New York Public Library, this lovely object offers insight into Dickinson's later years and creative process, as well as a celebration of the poet's famous economy: the title comes from Dickinson's manuscript A 821, "the gorgeous | nothings | which | compose | the | sunset | keep." But it also offers a reminder to the rest of us non-Dickinsons in the world. It's not your materials that matter (i.e. "This crappy old laptop is keeping me from writing my memoirs!"), or even your scope. We all have envelopes, and pens, and scattered (and non-grocery-list-related) thoughts. We all have tiny moments we can transform into gorgeous nothings.
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Each week, we'll be letting you know about the new releases the editors of O and Oprah.com couldn't stop reading. This week, we're enthralled by the newly rediscovered memoir:
Some Girls, Some Hats and Hitler
By Trudi Kanter
Who doesn't love buried treasure, especially when it's of the literary variety? Part love story and part intimate history of the Nazis' 1938 arrival in Vienna, Some Girls, Some Hats and Hitler was originally released—and promptly forgotten—in 1984. Wandering through a bookshop a few years ago, a British editor discovered the out-of-print memoir and decided to republish it. What makes the book so instantly mesmerizing is Trudi Kanter herself, who fashioned sentences just the way she fashioned hats as a milliner in late 1930s Vienna—each a dazzling, delicate object of delight. When Hitler overruns Austria, there is plenty of tension to draw the story forward: Jews are forced to wash the sidewalks with acid, her husband, Walter, is hunted by the SS, and Kanter must find visas that will allow them to escape to England. But what distinguishes this particular tale is the lavish portrait of Vienna just before the war, back when people went to cafés for "elevenses, delicate snacks and pastries with cream," and Sunday afternoon dates took place in forested gardens under chestnut trees. Her yearning for this vanished life creates the kind of dark, dreamy melody that causes you to fall for this lost Vienna too. And yet, Kanter is aware of what this era was built on. "The poor were getting poorer; the rich, richer," she announces in retrospect. In 1935, "hats became smaller and smaller" until "a feather and a sequin was a hat." In 1938, that age of decadence ends with the arrival of the Nazis. Kanter escapes the atrocities in her hometown but not its devastating losses—including her own young, dazzled way of looking at the world from that time when, as she describes, "Kisses fly in all directions. I try to catch them in my green butterfly net."
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Some Girls, Some Hats and Hitler
By Trudi Kanter
Who doesn't love buried treasure, especially when it's of the literary variety? Part love story and part intimate history of the Nazis' 1938 arrival in Vienna, Some Girls, Some Hats and Hitler was originally released—and promptly forgotten—in 1984. Wandering through a bookshop a few years ago, a British editor discovered the out-of-print memoir and decided to republish it. What makes the book so instantly mesmerizing is Trudi Kanter herself, who fashioned sentences just the way she fashioned hats as a milliner in late 1930s Vienna—each a dazzling, delicate object of delight. When Hitler overruns Austria, there is plenty of tension to draw the story forward: Jews are forced to wash the sidewalks with acid, her husband, Walter, is hunted by the SS, and Kanter must find visas that will allow them to escape to England. But what distinguishes this particular tale is the lavish portrait of Vienna just before the war, back when people went to cafés for "elevenses, delicate snacks and pastries with cream," and Sunday afternoon dates took place in forested gardens under chestnut trees. Her yearning for this vanished life creates the kind of dark, dreamy melody that causes you to fall for this lost Vienna too. And yet, Kanter is aware of what this era was built on. "The poor were getting poorer; the rich, richer," she announces in retrospect. In 1935, "hats became smaller and smaller" until "a feather and a sequin was a hat." In 1938, that age of decadence ends with the arrival of the Nazis. Kanter escapes the atrocities in her hometown but not its devastating losses—including her own young, dazzled way of looking at the world from that time when, as she describes, "Kisses fly in all directions. I try to catch them in my green butterfly net."
Read More
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Each week, we'll be letting you know about the new releases the editors of O and Oprah.com couldn't stop reading. This week, we're enthralled by the page-turning novel:
It's Fine by Me
By Per Petterson
Novels about teenager angst can sometimes sound, well...teenage. Not so in the case of It's Fine by Me by Norwegian writer Per Petterson, who previously wrote the haunting, spare Out Stealing Horses. In this newly translated novel (courtesy of Don Bartlett), he follows the struggles of Audun Sletten, a 13-year-old boy who supports his mother by delivering newspapers. Having recently moved to town, this family of two remains slightly lost. Audun makes one friend (a classmate), as does his mother (a lover). But the majority of their time is spent reflecting on the violence that Audun's father created in their old home, at one point shooting a pistol at the ceiling while 2-year-old Audun crawled around on the floor screaming. Like so many who grow up with chaos, Audun tries to make up all kinds of elaborate, even slightly comic rules to prevent the same thing from happening again. "You must never drink alone," he says, "never drink on Sundays, never drink before seven o'clock and if you do, it has to be on a Saturday. If you're hungover, you go for a walk in the forest, and you must never drink the hair of the dog. Do that, and you are an alcoholic ... you are finished. Then you spend the rest of your days walking through the valley of the shadow of death. ... They give you a wide berth in the street, scurry behind the canned food when you're in the shop to buy beer. ... And then you die."
But his efforts to move on become all the more difficult when his father shows up—awakening not only memories but also new, acutely understandable fears. The tangle of this boy's mind—and the direct, graceful way it's portrayed—creates a tale that's far more adult than adolescent, one that asks the age-old question about how to deal with the past: Stay and pretend it's not happening, or run and pretend you don't care? Or...find some other way (please).
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It's Fine by Me
By Per Petterson
Novels about teenager angst can sometimes sound, well...teenage. Not so in the case of It's Fine by Me by Norwegian writer Per Petterson, who previously wrote the haunting, spare Out Stealing Horses. In this newly translated novel (courtesy of Don Bartlett), he follows the struggles of Audun Sletten, a 13-year-old boy who supports his mother by delivering newspapers. Having recently moved to town, this family of two remains slightly lost. Audun makes one friend (a classmate), as does his mother (a lover). But the majority of their time is spent reflecting on the violence that Audun's father created in their old home, at one point shooting a pistol at the ceiling while 2-year-old Audun crawled around on the floor screaming. Like so many who grow up with chaos, Audun tries to make up all kinds of elaborate, even slightly comic rules to prevent the same thing from happening again. "You must never drink alone," he says, "never drink on Sundays, never drink before seven o'clock and if you do, it has to be on a Saturday. If you're hungover, you go for a walk in the forest, and you must never drink the hair of the dog. Do that, and you are an alcoholic ... you are finished. Then you spend the rest of your days walking through the valley of the shadow of death. ... They give you a wide berth in the street, scurry behind the canned food when you're in the shop to buy beer. ... And then you die."
But his efforts to move on become all the more difficult when his father shows up—awakening not only memories but also new, acutely understandable fears. The tangle of this boy's mind—and the direct, graceful way it's portrayed—creates a tale that's far more adult than adolescent, one that asks the age-old question about how to deal with the past: Stay and pretend it's not happening, or run and pretend you don't care? Or...find some other way (please).
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| Photo Courtesy of BBC News |
I know it's a luxury of my life that I get to think this, and yet I sometimes find myself wondering what I'm really doing here. Here in my life, I mean. Reading my kid a picture book about the rain forest the other day sent me into a mental tailspin. The rainforests! Are getting destroyed! What am I doing about it? Nothing! I don't volunteer, I don't donate large sums of money, I don't save the children (except my own, of course, when they teeter off the playground equipment). I don't even use cloth diapers! I'm part of the problem! Of course (and here come the excuses of which we all have so many) what could I do that would really make an impact without turning my life upside down, or maybe it needs to be turned upside? (And don't say use cloth diapers.)
So it was like something chimed in my chest when I read this BBC News story about Hernando Guanlao, a 60-something book lover in Manila who turned his private book collection into a lending library for his community. Twelve years ago, his parents died and Guanlao was looking for a way to honor their memory. Since he had shared with them a love of reading, he decided to put his books -- 100 or so -- outside his house, encouraging people to borrow them on an honor system. Over a decade later, his collection has swelled to the thousands, providing reading material to a community in which few people can afford to buy books and there is not a public lending library. Guanlao told the BBC, "It seems to me that the books are speaking to me. That's why it multiplies like that. The books are telling me they want to be read... they want to be passed around."
Books now overtake nearly all of Guanlao's home -- and life, since he quit his job in order to run the library, living off his savings. And this, as you may guess, was what spoke to me so eloquently. Here is a man who has found a way to combine a wish to help others with his personal passion, and it's changed not just his community's life, but his own. There was of course risk here -- he may well have lost all his books, in a place where books are expensive. And yet, as he told the BBC, "You don't do justice to these books if you put them in a cabinet or a box. A book should be used and reused. It has life, it has a message. As a book caretaker, you become a full man." Words which should be inscribed on every overstuffed bookcase everywhere, probably. (Read the full article to learn Guanlao's plans for even more intrepid and creative book-sharing.)
Guanlao offers another gift, too, even to those of us too remote to visit his library: a reminder that sometimes, when you're least expecting it, a need dovetails with your passion, and your life's mission finds you.
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Each week, we'll be letting you know about the new releases the editors of O and Oprah.com couldn't stop reading. This week, we're enthralled by the page-turning novel:
The Incense Game: A Novel of Feudal Japan
By Laura Joh Rowland
It's 1703, and Japan's capital, Edo (now known as Tokyo), has been ravaged by an earthquake. The city is filled with rubble, and the rubble is filled with bodies. While surveying the wreckage, Sano Ichiro, samurai, former police investigator and chamberlain to the shogun, Japan's ruler, finds three female corpses with crimson eyes—two women and their teacher, who, at the time of their demise, were playing an ancient game that required them to guess the ingredients in complex blends of incense. Sano senses that something is off about the bodies, and a cursory probing reveals that they don't owe their deaths to violent seismic activity but rather to arsenic. Sano reports the murder to the police, only to find himself blackmailed into finding the killer himself. Along with his brilliant and just plain butt-kicking wife, Lady Reiko, and his adroit and precocious 12-year-old son, Masahiro, he sets out into the decimated city. The ensuing investigation is fascinating, in large part because of the window it gives into the universe of the shogun's court, whose calculating politics are as chilling as Edo's gray, decimated winter landscape. As Sano mournfully observes, when it comes to his colleagues who work in this system, "There's always someone who wants to knock the high chestnut out of the tree." It shouldn't be so much fun to watch the courtiers play their deadly games, but as anyone who's ever gone on a weekend-long Tudors binge knows, there are few things as delicious as a good old-fashioned power struggle—especially the costume-drama variety, involving sword battles and perfectly timed barbs exchanged by witty women pretending that they're just drinking tea.
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The Incense Game: A Novel of Feudal Japan
By Laura Joh Rowland
It's 1703, and Japan's capital, Edo (now known as Tokyo), has been ravaged by an earthquake. The city is filled with rubble, and the rubble is filled with bodies. While surveying the wreckage, Sano Ichiro, samurai, former police investigator and chamberlain to the shogun, Japan's ruler, finds three female corpses with crimson eyes—two women and their teacher, who, at the time of their demise, were playing an ancient game that required them to guess the ingredients in complex blends of incense. Sano senses that something is off about the bodies, and a cursory probing reveals that they don't owe their deaths to violent seismic activity but rather to arsenic. Sano reports the murder to the police, only to find himself blackmailed into finding the killer himself. Along with his brilliant and just plain butt-kicking wife, Lady Reiko, and his adroit and precocious 12-year-old son, Masahiro, he sets out into the decimated city. The ensuing investigation is fascinating, in large part because of the window it gives into the universe of the shogun's court, whose calculating politics are as chilling as Edo's gray, decimated winter landscape. As Sano mournfully observes, when it comes to his colleagues who work in this system, "There's always someone who wants to knock the high chestnut out of the tree." It shouldn't be so much fun to watch the courtiers play their deadly games, but as anyone who's ever gone on a weekend-long Tudors binge knows, there are few things as delicious as a good old-fashioned power struggle—especially the costume-drama variety, involving sword battles and perfectly timed barbs exchanged by witty women pretending that they're just drinking tea.
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The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
Great American Novel? It's at least very, very good.
She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb
This early Oprah book club pick still changes lives.
Personal History by Katharine Graham
A revealing autobiography that never feels like TMI.
Each week, we'll be letting you know about the new releases the editors of O and Oprah.com couldn't stop reading. This Monday, we can't get enough of the gorgeously written debut novel:
The Orchardist
By Amanda Coplin
When a lonely orchard tender shelters two young girls on the run from a cruel, vindictive pursuer, you'd expect some kind of romance to ensue. But in Amanda Coplin's lavish novel set in turn-of-the-last-century Washington State, another kind of love takes precedence—the kind that turns strangers into fellow saviors. After his mother's death and his sister's disappearance, William Talmadge has spent his whole adult life cultivating apples, pears and apricots in the remote wilderness. The two girls—Della and Jane—have left behind a childhood of unspeakable sexual abuse. Both are pregnant and wary of any human connection, preferring to sleep outside in the meadows and only coming up to the cabin porch to eat the meals Talmadge leaves for them. But when their abuser finally shows up, the two girls make a violent decision—one that alters all of their lives for decades. The exquisitely described landscapes in this tale astonish (expect "cold-embittered forests," "bright meadows thick with wildflowers" and "the dark maw of canyons") but so do the emotional lives of its characters, such as when Della tries to understand why she rides wild, untrainable horses that regularly threaten to kill her. "What she wanted was the despair," writes Coplin. "Or something else, something that lived with the despair. But the moment she found it, she failed to find what it was she wanted so badly. So she would ride again." Feeling anything just to feel something, helping somebody else with their past because you're helpless about your own, these are the kinds of complex, double-edged insights that make this book a wise and great American novel.
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The Orchardist
By Amanda Coplin
When a lonely orchard tender shelters two young girls on the run from a cruel, vindictive pursuer, you'd expect some kind of romance to ensue. But in Amanda Coplin's lavish novel set in turn-of-the-last-century Washington State, another kind of love takes precedence—the kind that turns strangers into fellow saviors. After his mother's death and his sister's disappearance, William Talmadge has spent his whole adult life cultivating apples, pears and apricots in the remote wilderness. The two girls—Della and Jane—have left behind a childhood of unspeakable sexual abuse. Both are pregnant and wary of any human connection, preferring to sleep outside in the meadows and only coming up to the cabin porch to eat the meals Talmadge leaves for them. But when their abuser finally shows up, the two girls make a violent decision—one that alters all of their lives for decades. The exquisitely described landscapes in this tale astonish (expect "cold-embittered forests," "bright meadows thick with wildflowers" and "the dark maw of canyons") but so do the emotional lives of its characters, such as when Della tries to understand why she rides wild, untrainable horses that regularly threaten to kill her. "What she wanted was the despair," writes Coplin. "Or something else, something that lived with the despair. But the moment she found it, she failed to find what it was she wanted so badly. So she would ride again." Feeling anything just to feel something, helping somebody else with their past because you're helpless about your own, these are the kinds of complex, double-edged insights that make this book a wise and great American novel.
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 |
| Photo: Philip Friedman/Studio D |
Winter of the World (Dutton), book two in ken Follett's Century Trilogy, has just been published.
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