Just reading Michael Hoffman's terrific new collection of essays, and found this, in a review of a book about the friendship between Robert Frost and Edward Thomas: "They both had families--Frost with his four children, Thomas with three--[...] but basically neither had very much to show for his time on earth... ."
Now, I'm thinking to myself, I guess that's not something you'd say of a woman with four, or even just three, children, so how come you can say it of a man?
A friend--my beekeeper friend--gave me a book on Sunday by a writer I'd never heard of, J.L. Carr. The book is called A Month in the Country, it was published in 1980 and set in Yorkshire shortly after World War I, which is one of the traumas that run under the story (the second is a broken marriage). It is a quiet, beautifully written, sensuous, touching short novel, like a Hardy poem or an Edward Thomas. It is in fact a masterpiece, republished in 2000 by New York Review Books with an introduction by Michael Holroyd. It is perfect, without any reservations. The kind of book that leaves you with a inner smile. As with one of Edward Thomas's poem you think, if I'd written that I would have justified my existence.
And now, I shall take my inner smile and my bike and head for the campus gym, down a long shady street lined with small Victorian cottages and larger boarding houses, around the corner past Whole Foods, under the Caltrain tracks, down the bike path that runs behind the shopping centre and the high school, up another street and onto campus by the soccer fields. What will be on CNN today? It's a good bet they won't have anything to say about Greece, which is what interests me, but lots on jailbreaks and gun crimes.
I'm reading Wallace Stevens' 'Auroras of Autumn'--actually a lecture about Stevens, which quotes a poem that begins "Lights out. Shades up. / A look at the weather." And I'm looking out the window here in the California Bay Area, where the weather doesn't change very much from day to day. It's always beautiful, pretty much always an ideal temperature, with a cool breeze and blue sky.
Kind of boring. I miss rainy Vancouver at times, I miss Paris clouds, I miss places where you look out the window at night before you close the shutters or draw the shades and imagine what the look of the sky portends in the way of weather for the following day; or when you get up in the morning and even before you open the shutters, from the tinge of the light that filters through them, or the sound of tires on the pavement outside, you sniff out what the weather is going to be like. The light, the sound--of rain for one, all the things that go with unpredictable weather places.
I'm not being entirely honest. In the south of France, where the weather is a lot like California, our next door neighbour, a farmer, tracks the phases of the moon, and wouldn't dream of planting out lettuce or cutting his hair or nails if the moon is waxing or waning (I forget which, though he has told me many times, and it doesn't upset him in the least that I think this is folklore: he knows he knows better). The weather matters to him, it's linked to his work, he steps out his front door each night, holds the screen open, and looks up at the sky, too, and sees probabilities in the stars that I am not conscious of. So probably there is more weather to be reckoned with, in sunny weather places, than I reckon.
Still, at least for a week or two, when I find myself back in the north, I am glad of the uncertainty. The grey areas.
Yesterday I stopped by the library reading room, where they put new books, in glossy plastic, for a while before they move them to their proper stacks. It is always fun to scan the shelves for books you've seen reviewed or writers you've heard of but not read. I checked out three: Michael Hofmann's new collection of essays, a Bolano translation (I've only ever read short stories in the New Yorker) and Yasmina Reza's Happy are the Happy, translated from French.
I started with the Reza, which looked easy and played to my French nostalgia with an opening scene set in a supermarket cheese department. But I read two or three pages and decided it was boring and put it on the bench in the front hall to go back to the library. Maybe I'll have another go, I don't know.
The title comes from a nice Borges quote. Layers of irony. The borrowed irony, the unhappy, but boring opening scene in the supermarket. Bah.
The streets around Stanford University and Palo Alto, its municipality, tend, like university towns everywhere, to be named after rival institutions--Princeton, Oxford--or historic figures--say, Tennyson and Kipling. Our friends live on Amherst Street, after the college and, presumably, Emily Dickinson. In their large front yard under a venerable oak tree they have raised vegetable beds and an array of beehives (and other hives, with permission, in friends' gardens). A month or so ago we were sitting in their garden talking about the trove of spring honey stored in the garage. The town yard sale was coming up: why not put a table on the sidewalk, a few flyers on the telephone poles and have a pop-up shop while the neighbours sold their cast-off pots and pans, and outgrown Ikea cribs?
And so they did. When I turned up, after lunch, there was a table set with a red and yellow cloth, and enough chairs for passersby to settle down and chat. The honey jars--most had been sold by then--were labelled 'Amherst Apiaries, 2015 Spring Honey.' The label on the top of the jars, designed by Marj, was round with a honey bee in its centre. The honey was, as honey is, translucent gold. I came home with 12-11 ounce jars of '2015 Spring Honey.' The jars, which say, 'Made in USA,' are embossed with grapes, apples, cherries, peaches and pears. The honey is delicious.
Just wrote the jacket copy for a new translation. I sent it in early, months early, and thought I was off the hook for a bit, but right away got a request for jacket copy from my on-the-ball editor. He's right, of course, besides being--I think--new to the job and keen: it's much easier for me to write the blurb when the translation is still fresh on my mind. A very rough draft, I'm going to let cook slowly on the back burner for a few days.
So now I have no excuse not to get on my bike and head for the gym. I have to go anyway, so why put it off? Afterwards I can pick up a couple books at the library and have an espresso, decaf, at Coupa and watch the machines chew up the demolition site. Meanwhile, if I turn my head and look out the window I see a little pot of sage on the balcony, and another of mint. Leaves droopy. I should water them, it will get me moving in the direction of my gym shoes. On the other hand, there's a rocking chair out there that is rocking all by itself.
The short novel I finished last night is called La figlia oscura (The Lost Daughter). On the surface it is a simple narrative: a 40-some Italian intellectual rents a beach apartment for a month one summer. Her ex-husband and two grown daughters live in Toronto. Most days she takes her books and notebooks to the beach and swims, sunbathes, prepares her courses for the next academic year, and watches people, especially an extended family of nouveaux-riches from Naples: they fascinate and repel her; they resemble the people she grew up with, people she couldn't wait to get away from. She is particularly drawn to a young mother who reminds her both of herself, and of her daughters. Their lives will briefly intersect.
Under this simple narrative is a storm of emotions that replay the crises in the narrator's life--her abandonment of her children for three years when she was starting her career as a writer and couldn't develop a sense of herself as a person apart from her family. Her turbulent relationship with her own mother. Social class. Her sexual life.
What is remarkable about this story is not how it is told (a straightforward linear narrative of some weeks in the life of the narrator, broken up by dense returns to the past, full of emotional turbulence and extended, probing analysis of her feelings and the roots of her feelings). What is remarkable is the depth and honesty of the feelings and the intellectual powers brought to bear on what might appear to be small events, but which are, in fact, wars she is still fighting.
And alongside this raw, brutal analysis, an erotics of place, of things, of food. The book teems with life of all kinds--disgust but above all gusto. Energy. Range. The scenes at the beach, in the pine wood on the way back to the apartment, at a dance, at the market, in the kitchen.
Is it because I am a woman--and god knows we are hard on one another--that I want to find reasons why this should be a woman's book, rather than a universal book? The more I think about these books, and writing about them helps me sort out my thoughts, the more I think they are outstanding, in any terms. Not genteel tidy little poems, big messy canvases. I can hardly imagine how much energy and persistence it must have taken to write them. A lot of stuff must have got broken in the process.
She may be a pseudonym but there's no way she's not a woman.
I was going on about Jenny Diski yesterday, and Ferrante, in the domain of fiction, is equally brutal in her honesty, full of rough edges, and alive! god, how to adequately communicate how in-your-face her work is, how she is writing stuff that no woman has written so powerfully before--about herself, her feelings about motherhood, the ambiguities of all sorts of relationships, sex, desire, things that most of us would look around uneasily for the bullet with our name on it if we said them out loud (like walking around without your veil on). Her aggressiveness. Her guilt. The self-loathing. The insecurity. The vulnerability. The honesty and the self-knowledge. "She" doesn't hide anything, from herself. Her life, as seen through the books, in which the same situations and characters recur, is a work in progress, ripped out.
Harder to define is how the way these books--which are character-based--are written contribute to their power. There's an expansiveness and a brutality that is like something out of Philip Roth. Without the deliberate burlesque, the comic exaggeration. Stylistically, not much, if any, innovation. Tonally, yes. We aren't used to women being out-there like this. I wonder how much men like these books.
I'm finishing the last of the Ferrante books, or the last to me, since I didn't read them in the order they were written. I'm reading them in Italian, ordered from Amazon Italia last year in France, lugged back in my suitcase, so this is really the last one, not just the latest translation (I hear the translations are excellent), and now what am I going to do?