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.