The Art of Reading: Red Berries by Albert Joseph Moore

The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt - Caroline Preston

     I needed a light, fun read and since I've been reading F. Scott Fitzgerald lately I decided to try The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt: a Novel in Pictures.  The novel tells the story of Frances Pratt, a young girl of the 1920's through a whimsical collection of Twenties ephemera. 
     The story and visuals take Frankie from high school in Cornish Flat, New Hampshire, Vassar College, Greenwich Village, Paris, and back.  Along the way she falls in love (several times), gets advice from Edna St. Vincent Millay (Vincent), and rents an apartment above Sylvia Beach's bookstore, Shakespeare and Company (the author's mother was actually the goddaughter of Sylvia Beach).
     Frankie is smart, spirited, and ambitious.  She writes the text of the scrapbook on her old Corona typewriter.  She yearns to be a writer and also to find love.  She gets a job editing a magazine, gets a story published, struggles to establish a life on her own, explores New York and Paris, and learns to drink.
     Frankie's story is delightful but the collection of vintage postcards, ticket stubs, menus, fabric swatches, and candy wrappers that are woven into her tale are exquisite.

     Its a wonderful trip through the bohemian, flapper culture of the 1920's.  I read a library copy but I'm very tempted to buy my own! 

~ Frances

The Beautiful and the Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald

     The Beautiful and the Damned is Fitzgerald's second novel, following This Side of Paradise which brought him early fame.  Like most of Fitzgerald's works it explores the themes of aspiration, love, money, and decadence.
     Anthony Patch is a Harvard graduate who floats along doing nothing while waiting to inherit his grandfather's fortune.  In New York, he meets and marries Gloria, a beautiful, frivolous girl who is willing to live off his meager monthly income and join him in waiting for his windfall.  The grandfather, though sickly, hangs onto life and the Patches rapidly waste away what money they have.  Their lives revolve around parties and drinking.
     Ultimately, the novel exposes an idle, lethargic society seeking but never finding a cause or a vocation.  Anthony talks of writing but doesn't; thinks of getting a job but only lasts six weeks when he does.  Gloria's purpose in life had been to catch a husband.  That done, she is at a loss.  Gloria wants to get into movies through an old beau in the business but Anthony's jealousy makes him discourage this until it is too late. 
     When his grandfather finally dies, his death does not bring the wealth they had waited for.  Due to an impromptu visit he made to see the couple in the past in which he caught them giving a wild, drunken party, he disinherits Anthony and leaves the money to his manservant.  Anthony petitions the will but is told it may take years to resolve.
     Anthony has a brief stint in the army, but the war ends before he leaves training camp.  During this time, he has an affair with a young woman in the town where he is stationed.  When the war is over he returns to New York and Gloria and they fall back into their old life of parties and alcohol.  As they run out of money Anthony's dependance on alcohol brings him to moral and physical decline.  When he reaches rock bottom his fortunes change but it is too late.
     The relationship and marriage of Anthony and Gloria is largely based on Fitzgerald's life with his wife, Zelda.  Although Fitzgerald is now considered to be a great writer and The Great Gatsby is on every high school reading list, when he died he considered himself a failure.  Not until the 1960's did he achieve the acclaim he has today.  I found a contemporary review of The Beautiful and the Damned from the New York Times on March 5, 1922.  The reviewer had little good to say about the novel and ended with:  "The novel is full of that kind of pseudo-realism which results from shutting one's eyes to all that is good in human nature, and looking only upon that which is small and mean-a view quite as false as its extreme opposite, which, reversing the process, results in what we have learned to classify as "glad" books. It is to be hoped that Mr. Fitzgerald, who possesses a genuine, undeniable talent, will some day acquire a less one-sided understanding."

     Since he went on to write The Great Gatsby, one of my favorite novels, I'm glad he didn't.

~ Frances

Bookish Quotes #33

"A good book is always on tap; it may be decanted and drunk a hundred times, and it is still there for further imbibement."

  ~Holbrook Jackson

"Having fun isn't hard when you've got a library card."

  ~Sylvia Plath

Waxing Poetic: The Seed Shop by Muriel Stuart

  
     Muriel Stuart (1885 - 1967) was the daughter of a Scottish barrister who wrote several books of poetry and lived most of her life in London.  She abandoned poetry during her later years and turned to gardening.  Her gardening book, Gardner’s Nightcap, was a bestseller in 1938 and has been reprinted by Persephone Books.

The Seed Shop

Here in a quiet and dusty room they lie,

Faded as crumbled stone or shifting sand,

Forlorn as ashes, shrivelled, scentless, dry--

Meadows and gardens running through my hand.

Dead that shall quicken at the call of Spring,

Sleepers to stir beneath June's magic kiss,

Though birds pass over, unremembering,

And no bee seek here roses that were his.

In this brown husk a dale of hawthorn dreams,

A cedar in this narrow cell is thrust

That will drink deeply of a century's streams,

These lilies shall make summer on my dust.

Here in their safe and simple house of death,

Sealed in their shells a million roses leap;

Here I can blow a garden with my breath,

And in my hand a forest lies asleep.

The Art of Reading: Compartment C, Car 293 by Edward Hopper

The End of the Affair - Graham Greene

     Graham Greene's The End of the Affair is a dark, compelling, and beautifully written novel.  The narrator begins his tale by stating that it is "a record of hate far more than of love."
     Set in London before, during and after World War II, the novel tells of a doomed passionate, romance between a novelist, Maurice Bendrix, and Sarah, the wife of a dull civil servant, Henry.  But it is far from a traditional love story.  Bendrix is consumed by jealousy and even as he is in Sarah's arms he is envisioning the end of their love. His jealously tortures Sarah so that the precious time they spend together is poisoned by it.  His insecurity undermines their love.
     The story begins eighteen months after the affair has ended and Greene moves between past and present to weave the tale of the love and its destruction.  As the story opens, Bendrix meets Sarah's husband by chance and learns that he suspects her of infidelity.  Henry has no idea that Bendrix had an affair with her.  When he mentions that he has considered hiring a private detective to discover if she is being unfaithful, Bendrix, offers to see an investigator for Henry.  The seething jealousy that Bendrix has continued to feel is fueled once again.  He proceeds to hire a detective but the eventual outcome is not what he expects.
     Greene's characters are deep, flawed, tortured, and believable.  Told from the view of Bendrix and also using excerpts from Sarah's journal, their doomed love story is haunting. William Faulkner said of Greene's book, "For me one of the most true and moving novels of my time, in anybody's language."  It is certainly one of the best written books I've read lately.

~ Frances

Bookish Quotes #32

"Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know."
 ~John Keats

"We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate."
 ~Henry Miller

Waxing Poetic: Bright Star by John Keats

     The choice of this week's poem was influenced by watching the movie Bright Star earlier this week which tells of Keats love for Fanny Brawne.  Here is the poem of the same name.



Bright Star

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.

The Art of Reading: Mademoiselle Guillaumin Reading by Guillaumin Armand

The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes

     The 2011 Man Booker Prize winner, The Sense of an Ending is a book about time and memory.  Although it is a little slip of a book (I read it in one day), it is a powerful, thought-provoking novel that explores what it is to be human, to live a life, to accumulate a history.

We live in time - it holds us and moulds us - but I've ever felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's  malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.

     When protagonist Tony Webster, a retiree in his 60s, learns that the mother of his college girlfriend, Veronica, has left him a bequest (500 pounds and the diary of a school friend, Adrian), it forces him to look back on his past and his memories.  He met Veronica's mother only once - during a weekend visit to her home.  He revisits his youth, his childhood friendships, and his first love.  Tony tracks down Veronica and he discovers that he had cruelly wounded his friends years ago.  Suddenly his past and his vision of himself may require revision.
     In an NPR interview, Barnes said that the book explores memory and time:  "What time does to memory and what memory does to time, how they interact. And it's also about what happens to someone in later years when they discover that some of the certainties they've always relied on, certainties in their mind and memory ... are beginning to be undermined."
     In aging and growing old we tend to look back on the past and on our personal histories but as we grow older it becomes more difficult to verify and corroborate the past as the people who shared that past - our peers, our families - are lost.  As Barnes says in the novel:   "The history that happens underneath our noses ought to be the clearest. And yet, it's the most deliquescent."

     Tony is confronted with a letter he wrote 40 years earlier:  "I reread this letter several times.  I could scarcely deny its authorship or its ugliness.  All I could plead was that I had been its author then, but was not its author now.  Indeed, I didn't recognize that part of myself from which the letter came.  But perhaps this was simply further self-deception."

     As Tony looks back on his life, he begins to question the life he has chosen for himself.  He has always had an instinct for self-preservation but now he wonders if in choosing the "peaceable" life he has lived he has chosen not to live life fully:  “We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.”
     Beautifully written and carefully crafted, this was my first Barnes novel and now I think I will have to read more.

~ Frances

Bookish Quotes #31

"To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is a pleasure beyond compare."
~ Kenko Yoshida

"To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company."
~ Andre Gide

Reality and Dreams - Muriel Spark

 

     "He often wondered if we were all characters in one of God's dreams."  So begins Muriel Sparks Reality and Dreams.  The "he" is Tom Richards, a movie director, who has fallen from a crane while directing his latest movie.  Suffering from fractured hip and ribs, Tom moves in and out of sleep as an endless parade of nurses, doctors, and family members file through his hospital room to visit him.  As he lies in bed recovering his world is unraveling.  A new director takes over his movie, the title and plot are constantly changing, his daughters' marriages are falling apart, and all around him people are losing their jobs - being deemed redundant.

     Tom, on and off the set, sees himself as Godlike - directing his real world as well as his movies.  He views people in terms of how he would cast them in a motion picture.  Not only does he make his dreams reality in movies but he uses turns the reality of his life into cinematic dreams.  He becomes enthralled with the "stories" of the lives of his caretakers and when they are no longer needed he feels a loss.  "Their personal histories which he had become acquainted with were now lost to him forever like television serials broken off and never resumed."

     Still recovering and lacking mobility, Tom begins to go out at night in a taxi.  He befriends the driver, Dave, who is on call for Tom every evening, waiting outside Tom's house with the "engaged" sign on.  Tom sits in the front of the taxi with Dave as they cruise the city at night.  The first lines of T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock run through Tom's mind on these night rides:  Let us go then, you and I...  Prufrock, at the end of the poem, inhabits a sea dream in which if human voices wake him he will drown.  Tom, too, knows that he lives in a state between dreams and reality.

     When Tom's daughter, Marigold, disappears he is forced to dwell more and more in the real world in which he flounders.  His family and friends make half-baked attempts to locate her but it becomes apparent in their inability to give the police much insight into her life that they really don't know Marigold.  The novel plays out amid a sea of entangled, ill-advised relationships between all the people inhabiting Tom's world with sinister undertones and a plot twist at the end.

     As  with all Spark's works, her ability to make the absurd believable with vividly drawn characters and her darkly comic wit combine to create a sharp, incisive story held within a little slip of a book.

Waxing Poetic: I Am in Need of Music by Elizabeth Bishop

     
     Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979) was an American poet and short-story writer. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956 and a National Book Award Winner for Poetry in 1970.

I Am in Need of Music

I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling fingertips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
A song to fall like water on my head,
And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!

There is a magic made by melody:
A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool
Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep
To the subaqueous stillness of the sea,
And floats forever in a moon-green pool,
Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.

The Art of Reading: Elizabeth at Table by Auguste Macke

Saturday Snapshot: Squirrel Days

Incidents in the Rue Laugier - Anita Brookner

 

      "I have reached the age," writes the narrator, "when a woman begins to perceive that she is growing into the person whom she least plans to resemble: her mother."  So begins the story that Maffy creates from the scarce few words that survive in a journal written by her dead mother.  Maffy's memories of her mother, Maud, are of a woman who "read a lot, sighed a lot and went to bed early."  She knows very little of what her parents lives were like and she proceeds to invent a history to explain them.
     The young Maud lives a disappointing life as the daughter of a single mother who herself has led a disappointing life.  Forced once again into a summer at the country home of her mother's sister, who has fared better in life, she falls for a friend of her cousin.  David Tyler is the classic "golden boy" - handsome, charming, and also a cad.  Maud falls for him and is encouraged by her mother to go with him to Paris.  They have a brief affair that is, for Maud, life changing.  When he disappears and Maud thinks she is pregnant, Tyler's friend, Edward, is left to pick up the pieces.
     He offers to marry her and they proceed to marry even after Maud miscarries.  The problems are many.  Maud doesn't love him and continues to long for the passion she felt in Tyler's arm.  Edward desperately wants to win Maud's love but he is ill equipped to win her.  He also has led a disappointing life in which he longs for the dream of a sunlit garden of his youth that he strives to regain.  It is not surprising that together they live a slow, sad, disappointing life.  Maud holds on to the memory of Tyler even after she meets him at a wedding years later and realizes what a shallow, careless man he is.  Edward continues to long for something he feels he has lost but just what that is never comes into focus.
     The story that plods along is populated by precisely drawn characters that made me want to continue the journey in spite of the painfully sorrowful lives portrayed.  The themes of memory, what we choose to remember, how we creatively remember the past permeate the novel and are heightened by Maud's endless reading and reading of Proust.  They live their lives in search of lost time.
    This is my second Brookner.  I read Hotel du Lac last year and enjoyed the story much more.  However, the characterization in Incidents in the Rue Laugier were wonderful and I would recommend it for this if nothing else.

Bookish Quotes #30

"Books are chocolate for the soul.  They don't make one fat.  One need not brush one's teeth after reading.  They are quiet.  One can bring them anywhere - no passport required.  Books have only one downfall:  even the fattest book has a last page, and then one needs a new one again."
  ~ Antonie Schneider

"Books are delightful society.  If you go into a room and find it full of books - even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome."
  ~ William Ewart Gladstone

Waxing Poetic: And Yet The Books by Czeslaw Milosz

    And Yet the Books by Czeslaw Milosz

And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,
That appeared once, still wet
As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,
And, touched, coddled, began to live
In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,
Tribes on the march, planets in motion.
“We are, ” they said, even as their pages
Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame
Licked away their letters. So much more durable
Than we are, whose frail warmth
Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes.
I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Nothing happens, no loss, it’s still a strange pageant,
Women’s dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

The Bookshop - Penelope Fitzgerald

     Penelope Fitzgerald's The Book Shop is a deceptively slender little book.  Within the 123 pages of the book, Fitzgerald packs a crisp, insightful portrait of an English seaside town and a courageous woman who dares to try to battle its resentment toward change and disdain toward anything new. 
     Florence Green is a middle aged woman living in Hardbrough, a little town slowing sliding into the sea.  When she decides to open a book shop, something the town lacks, she comes up against resistance at every turn.  She buys Old House, an ancient building left abandoned for years and haunted by ghosts the townspeople refer to as "rappers",  it seems that opening a book shop will be a harmless endeavor and a benefit for the town.  The town, however, sees it differently.
     Fitzgerald's deft and precise characterizations of the townspeople fill the slender volume with a vivid cast that are immediately recognizable and, most often, sadly believable.  They are typical of inhabitants of small country places where everyone knows everyone's business and conflicts and rivals expose just how nasty and mean spirited people can be to each other.  Her biggest opponent is Mrs. Gamart, a powerful, wealthy busybody who has other ideas for the use of Old House.  She attempts to appropriate the building to house an Arts Center before Florence has even managed to open the shop.  Florence, with no "political" power in the town and little encouragement from others, courageously fights a losing battle with the Mrs. Gamart and ultimately the town as a whole.  Even those in the town who don't openly try to thwart her endeavor turn a blind eye to the attempts to see her fail.
     She hires an 11-year old girl as an assistant and Christine turns out to be a better organizer and manager than Florence herself.  Together they try to ignore the poltergeist that inhabits the book shop and open a lending library within the shop.  The scenes of the first days of the library's operation are some of the most comical and telling in this black comedy.  The suppliers of the library send relatively few of the highly demanded Queen Mary and too many less sought after books that Florence and Christine attempt to push.  When the royal biography goes first to a less prominent citizen who is also the slowest reader,  in town, the ladies hovering over the books opening labeled with each patrons name are each indignant that they were not the first to get it.  Christine is the one who sees that, in the future, the check outs must be discreet to avoid class conflict.  But her hard nosed running of the library eventually lead to further problems for Florence when the young girl raps the knuckles of their fiercest enemy, Mrs. Gamart, when she get pushy in the check out line.  From then on its all out war.  Mrs Gamart tries everything from bringing in inspectors to investigating the employment of Christine in light of a child labor law to pressing for a new law that will ensure her take over of Old House.
    Surprisingly, Florence gains the respect and friendship of the town recluse, Mr. Brundish, the only remainder of the oldest family in town when she seeks his advice on whether or not to stock Nabakov's Lolita.  He embarks on a final, decisive attempt to stop Mrs. Gamart but is ultimately unsuccessful.
     One can't help but root for Florence in her doomed venture and be saddened by her inevitable failure as she discovers  "...a town that lacks a bookshop isn't always a town that wants one."

~ Frances

The Art of Reading: Literary Pursuits of a Young Lady - Harlamoff Alexej

     We thought we would add a new weekly post to start off 2012.  The Art of Reading will feature paintings depicting reading or paintings of literary subjects.  Our first painting is Literary Pursuits of a Young Lady by Harlamoff Alexej.