I’m a strongly language-driven reader, so it was only a matter of time before I discovered the work of Diego Marani. There are undoubtedly others who write more prettily, sentence by sentence, but I’m not sure that there’s anyone else who carries language closer to the heart. In his fiction, it always assumes a central role, actually becoming character, story, and even setting. How does that alchemy work?

Well, Marani is an Italian native who lives and works in Brussels. His day job is at the European Union, dealing with issues of interpretation, so he’s a classic polyglot. In addition to Italian, he speaks French and English, translates from Finnish and Dutch, and is more than passingly acquainted with Slovenian and Spanish. While the fiction he writes in his own time isn’t overtly autobiographical, it’s clearly a transmutation of his own experiences with cultural dislocation and a sense of being adrift on a sea of half-familiar words.

New Finnish Grammar, Marani’s award-winning 2000 novel (trans. 2011 by Judith Landry), tells the story of a severely injured sailor found in Trieste in the middle of World War II. He has no memory of who he is or how he came to be there, and the only identifying information he bears is a tag on his clothing. A doctor, an expatriate Finn, recognizes the language on the tag and deduces that the sailor is a fellow countryman, thereafter arranging his return to Helsinki, where the sailor must relearn the basics of human interaction even while the war continues. His confusion is mirrored on a national scale, as Finland fights for independence, first on the side of Germany against the Soviet Union, and then to expel the Germans.

Aspects of the plot brings to mind The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, and as in that book, I’m not really giving anything away by saying that the wounded man’s identity isn’t what it first appears to be. Coincidentally or otherwise, Ondaatje is a language-driven author too, but in the more usual sense of being a word-besotted composer of lyric prose that approaches poetry. Marani writes in a more straightforward style, but language is even more integral to his project than to Ondaatje’s. The protagonist of New Finnish Grammar must invent a history and a self out of words. They’re nothing more than air, yet they’re the most important thing he has. Or any of us has, really.

Marani’s follow-up novel covers thematically similar ground. The Last of the Vostyachs (2004; trans. by Judith Landry in 2012) takes place in the same Nordic regions, this time in the present day with two main characters whose stories intertwine. The first is the last living speaker of an obscure Siberian tongue, recently released from the gulag and attempting to resume his traditional tribal way of life after the devastation of his people. He’s brought to Helsinki to be presented at a linguistics conference, but his presence is a threat to the organizing professor. This second main figure has built a career on theories that will be disproved by the Vostyach’s very existence, and so seeks to eliminate him in any way possible. The two men are as different as the tones of their respective narrative threads; the plight of the first is beautifully and poignantly described, while the ruthless machinations of the second play out as sinister comedy. The novel is a successful, genre-blending performance that again shows how all things are permeated by language, and also how much fun you can have with that idea.

And what could be more fun for someone like Marani than inventing a brand-new language? In 1996 he came up with Europanto, a mostly jocular attempt to create a universal means of communication. Unlike most serious (and seriously misguided) artificial languages, Europanto doesn’t really have rules. When you’re trying to speak or write it, you just grab whatever words come to mind from any of the major European languages and trust that you’ll be understood. Pretty much what kids in hostels do when they meet up, I imagine. Marani wrote a regular newspaper column in Europanto for years, and also concocted Les Adventures des Inspector Cabillot, which was published in the US in 2012. Let me give you a sample:

Was eine frigid morning van Octubre in Brussel. Die arbor des park was rubiconde, die benches floatingantes in eine caliginose fog. Sommige laborantes maghrebinos was der garbage collectingante terwhile singing melancholique tunes. Op der 50th floor des Europeane Polizei Tower der Chef Inspector General des Service des Bizarre Affairs, Capitain What, frapped op der tabula und dixit: “Dat esse keine joke! Call rapido Cabillot!”

Inspector Cabillot put seine Europanto crossverba under der desk, hanged der telefono und jumped op der cuirassed liftor por emergence cases.

“Moi demanded, Captain What?”

“Ja. Ich habe eine delicate mission por you.”

OK, that may be—in fact, is—a little obscure, but it’s not that hard to follow if you give it a chance. When I showed the passage to a multilingual friend, she reached the second paragraph before even realizing something was strange was afoot. I can’t speak anything other than English, but I still made plenty of headway and had fun parsing out the story. That I got anywhere at all with it is a testament to the power of human ingenuity, Marani’s more than mine. And it’s a tribute to the virtues of the good old-fashioned mystery story, in which good always triumphs over evil, and the detective always outsmarts the bad guys. “Better surrender, bandidos, villainos et mafiosos, porqué Inspector Cabillot never miss seine target!”

—James

“How angry am I? You don’t want to know. Nobody wants to know,” is the opening line of The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud, and immediately it’s obvious this is going to be an emotionally charged journey. Why is the narrator so angry? It takes the whole book to find out, and it’s worth the read. Her own thwarted ambition is just the tip of the iceberg. Since the narrator begins in the thick of an emotional reaction, we know from the beginning her telling might not be perfectly reliable. It is, however, intriguing. And honestly, how many times have we secretly found it entertaining to listen to an angry woman rant?

An interview that Messud gave about her new book raised a buzz-worthy debate about the importance of liking a main character. She deftly pointed out that the expectations were different for female characters as opposed to male characters, who aren’t required to be as likeable. You can read more about that intriguing debate here, but I’ll save that topic for another post.

I found the premise of The Woman Upstairs both surprisingly intimate as a follow-up to Messud’s tremendous and sweeping 2006 novel, The Emperor’s Children, and reminiscent of the 2006 film (not the book it was based on necessarily, but the movie) Notes on a Scandal. I wondered if Notes on a Scandal inspired Messud at a time when she must have been pondering her next project. (If you haven’t seen it, Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett give compelling performances. They were both nominated for Oscars.) The story of a spinster who becomes obsessed with a wife/mother is both creepy and sad, especially since to the observer it’s obvious that the spinster is never going to get what she wants out of the situation. We’re left to judge: which is the greater crime? Obsession, or betrayal?

In The Woman Upstairs, Nora Eldridge is a schoolteacher approaching forty. While in her twenties, she was on track for a cosmopolitan career and traditional marriage but left it all behind presumably to become an artist. Instead, she ended up caring for her ailing mother and teaching school in Cambridge. When the novel begins, Nora is still grieving the death of her mother and leading a nondescript life as the unremarkable “woman upstairs.” Her life is lonely and claustrophobic until the newly-arrived-from-Paris Reza Shahid joins her third grade class. He’s the child she always wished she had, and after some other kids bully Reza, Nora has the opportunity to meet Reza’s glamorous Italian mother, Sirena. Before long, Sirena asks Nora to share a rented studio space so they can both work on their art. Nora’s work involves building miniature dioramas of famous artists’ rooms, but Sirena is already an accomplished professional artist and her audio-visual displays are as big and dramatic as Nora’s are small and controlled. Nora also meets Sirena’s husband, Skandar, and before long Nora has fallen in love with all of them. The “love” grows into an unhealthy fantasy life and Nora becomes increasingly obsessed with the entire family, and Sirena in particular.

Sirena decides to create an artistic representation of Alice’s Wonderland and enlists Nora’s help. Sirena films people’s reaction to her art, and Nora doesn’t realize that the camera is on all the time. Alone one night in their art studio, Nora forgets that Sirena can capture the full scope of her fantasy life on film. The repercussions of that evidence, and the separate and complex relationships that develop between Nora and Sirena, Nora and Skandar, and Nora and Reza all lead to a heartbreaking series of events.

What’s so masterfully done here is the complexity of the main characters. We can love them and hate them simultaneously, because Messud paints such a clear picture of how their strengths are also their greatest faults. Was Nora a lonely and naive victim or a pathetic stalker? Was Sirena as talented and magnanimous as Nora imagined or the most selfish person on the planet? And did Skandar act as he did out of passion or cruelty?

In contrast to the intimate nature of The Woman Upstairs, Messud’s prior novel, The Emperor’s Children, had a larger cast of characters and was more of a statement about the time period. That was the story of three privileged, entangled Brown graduates in the months leading up to 9/11. At first it seemed to me that the only thing the two novels had in common was the high quality of their craftsmanship. On a quick reread and further reflection, I realized that the two books share something else: a focus on the gap in relationships between what’s real and what’s perceived. All of Messud’s characters believe they’re living one life when in reality they’re living a far less flattering existence. No matter which story she’s telling, Messud has an uncanny ability to satirize and humanize her characters in a distinctive and memorable way.

I loved The Emperor’s Children just as much now upon a reread as I did when I read it seven years ago, so if you’re looking for a big meaty story to chomp down on, I highly recommend it. If, however, you want something more intimate and burning, try The Woman Upstairs. Either way, get to know Messud’s work. Her talent is remarkable, and her fiction utterly unique.

—Miriam

I’m putting the moral of this story right up front so no one misses it. Buy the book before it’s gone.

This is a lesson I learned long ago, but our Library of Forgotten Books project drilled the knowledge into me yet again. For the project, I (like everyone else in the store) had to choose a favorite book that had fallen out of the public eye and spotlight it so that a new audience could find the same joy in it that I did. Easy peasy. I’m often paralyzed by choice, but in this case I knew immediately who to turn to: Penelope Fitzgerald.

Born in England in 1916, she didn’t begin publishing fiction until she was in her sixties, but still produced nine classic novels along with several works of non-fiction and a pair of story collections. Before her death in 2000 she’d achieved considerable acclaim and even won a Booker Prize, but she modestly eschewed self-promotion and never reached as many readers as she deserved. And she deserves as many as she can get. Her work is always substantial, yet effortless to read, each novel a marvel of comic deftness. I don’t know of any author who can sketch scenes and characters better than she does, and certainly none of her competitors can match her for economy. Every time I’ve finish one of her books, I’m stunned to realize how much she accomplishes in so small a space. Her longest novel has fewer than 250 pages, but it’s as immersive as one twice its size.

Which of her books to add to the Library, though? I had particularly fond memories of Human Voices, her 1980 novel depicting emotional entanglements on the home front during World War Two. London is beset by bombers, and BBC Radio establishes a shelter for its employees so that they can safely continue the work of “saving Britain from despondency and panic” without ever leaving the office. Did I mention that it’s a co-ed shelter? Romance blooms for some, annoyances build between others, and  small moments of human interaction stand out against the larger historical backdrop. It’s a can’t-miss winner to please just about anyone.

When I went to order copies for the store, however, I was brought up short. The book isn’t out of print, but the publisher isn’t doing it any favors. Just a single copy was on hand for shipment. ONE. Across the entire nation. So I tried At Freddie’s, Fitzgerald’s behind-the-scenes peek at the actors in a decaying theater. Same deal. The Golden Child, her comedic thriller about the theft of Egyptian artifacts from the British Museum? No dice. OK, those are early novels. What about her later works, her masterfully researched and fully imagined fiction set in other lands? Innocence is set in Tuscany, and Fitzgerald imbues that landscape with all the charm of a travel ad without ever losing grip on the real difficulties the aristocrats and the lowborn alike experience in their shared villa. Then there’s The Beginning of Spring, set in Moscow on the verge of the Russian Revolution, and The Gate of Angels, set in the philosophical milieu of turn-of-the-20th-century academics who struggle with belief and doubt. Nope, nope, and nope.

After checking the stock on all her novels, only two were on hand in quantity—her last one, The Blue Flower, and the one I chose to promote to you, The Bookshop. It tells the tale of Florence Green, a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance who risks everything to open a bookshop—the only bookshop—in the seaside town of Hardborough. By making a success of a business so impractical, she invites the hostility of the town’s less prosperous shopkeepers and runs afoul of the local arts doyenne. Florence’s warehouse leaks, her cellar seeps, and the shop is apparently haunted. Trouble ensues when she dares to sell the then-scandalous Lolita. Only too late does she begin to suspect the truth: a town that lacks a bookshop isn’t always a town that wants one. Like all Fitzgerald’s fiction, The Bookshop is a sharply intelligent entertainment, and given my profession, it’s probably the novel I should have picked in the first place.

Don’t misunderstand— the other Fitzgerald books I’ve talked about are still available, and I’ll happily put one (or all) of them in your hands as soon as I can. It’s just that the publisher’s attention has moved on to shinier, more current titles. Those are the ones being talked about, and those are the ones taking precedence on printing presses, so those are the ones people are seeing and buying. Sales of older books suffer in comparison, and they fall lower and lower in priority, creating a whirlpool of sorts that can suck even the greatest book into the void.

Which points out why we launched the Library of Forgotten Books to begin with. By stopping every now and then to reconsider the past, we can stop the vicious cycle that sends stories into oblivion and fight back against the tyranny of the Next Big Thing. No matter when it was written, a book is always as new as its most recent reader.

—James

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card came out when I was seven. My brother was obsessed with the book, and like any bratty younger sister, I refused to read it on the simple principle that he liked it so much. I also dismissed the entire genre of science fiction back then, after struggling to understand the hype about Frank Herbert’s Dune and failing miserably. (Should I try that one again 20-some years later? Feel free to speak up. Maybe I was just too young to understand it.)

In any case, my brother is a persistent guy, and a few years later he wore me down by writing a long inscription and gifting me my very own copy of Ender’s Game. It was probably my high school graduation or some such event, which my brother used to liken me to Ender. “You too are heroic,” he wrote, and with that kind of flattery I had no choice but to continue reading.

Dune became an absolutely terrible movie back in the 80s, but until now, no one has tried to butcher Ender’s Game. Although the film won’t be out until November 1st, the first trailer just started making the rounds. I can’t decide if I’m excited or fearful. Being that The Hunger Games movie satisfied me (and I’m a huge fan of that series), I’ll remain optimistic that Hollywood can do justice to another classic story of kid saves the world. Orson Scott Card is one of the film’s producers, so at least he’s keeping a watchful eye on things.

Ender’s Game, like The Hunger Games, takes place in the future. Earth has been repeatedly attacked by an alien species and is on the brink of destruction. A special military school trains gifted children in the art of war, preparing them for the final battle to protect their planet. Ender Wiggin is the youngest of three children. His brother Peter torments him, but his sister Valentine is his closest friend. Though small, Ender gets into a fight with a much bigger and stronger boy and (accidentally) kills him. The incident attracts the attention of Commander Graff, who sees promise in Ender and recruits him to the Battle School. Under rigorous training, Ender becomes a leader, and former war hero Mazer Rackham takes Ender under his wing. As the final battle with the aliens looms, Ender breaks the rules in order to fulfill his potential.

The timing of the Ender’s Game movie seems like an attempt to capitalize on The Hunger Games audience, but I’m not sure it will have the same fan base. Ender’s Game won the most prestigious awards in science fiction, the Nebula and the Hugo, but that was back in the 1980s.  I don’t know of many adults who have read it for the first time since then, although it remains popular with the younger set. That said, both the protagonists in Ender’s Game and The Hunger Games employ brutal violence while remaining utterly blameless. Readers get to live out the fantasy of destroying the enemy without becoming the bad guy. There’s a dark appeal in that and it may be the a big reason for the success of these novels.

Will you be going to see The Ender’s Game movie? If you haven’t read the book, now would be a good time to form your own impression before Hollywood weighs in.

—Miriam

On Tuesday, May 7th, author Jonathan Evison paid a call on Island Books to celebrate the paperback publication of his novel The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving. It tells the story of Benjamin, on whom Fortune hasn’t smiled of late. He’s down to his last dollar when forced to take a job as a caregiver for Trevor, a nineteen-year-old kid confined to a wheelchair. The friendship that unexpectedly—and sometimes painfully—grows inspires an audacious sense of healing and forgiveness.

This was the third in our series of author talks presented in conjunction with the Mercer Island Arts Council (the first two events featured Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette and Tara Conklin, author of The House Girl). Three terrific, award-winning authors, all speaking right here in downtown Mercer Island. We’ll continue to host authors next fall and really hope to share these remarkable events with more people. Hint, hint.

This was a Big Deal, and we were nervous beforehand. To prepare, we read Evison’s posted author bio and learned he liked beer. Really liked beer. But not IPAs. Cue the panic beer run ten minutes before signing. He was the first author we’ve had who pretty much went through a six-pack of Coronas while making his amazing talk. He was in no hurry and stayed late having long and generous conversations with the audience. There was great discussion of Dickens and Shakespeare, and a great love expressed for the small people of life, à la Steinbeck and Twain. The novels of all those writers show how life acts upon regular people and how they experience it. As Evison puts it, he wants to “experience as many other lives as he can” through his deeply empathic writing. We also enjoyed great discussion on the importance of audience, not in the marketing sense but in the way the ultimate meaning of a novel arises out of the reader’s experience.

I don’t know that we have ever seen an author as deeply dedicated to the novel and to the experience of writing as Jonathan Evison. Though on the surface he is a very funny and profane storyteller, that’s not all he is. As one knowledgeable customer said, “he’s the real deal.” He’s certainly a guy going through life at a full gallop. Again, read the bio—“M for manic.” It was a very impressive evening.

—Roger

It was with anticipation that I stayed up late a few weeks ago to read my advance copy of And The Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini. The book opens with a fable about parental love that a father tells to his son and daughter as they travel from their small Afghan village to Kabul. The story sets the stage for a novel about familial heartbreak and the length and depth of love.

The siblings Abdullah and Pari share a special bond. Since their mother’s death, Abdullah has basically been both father and mother to little Pari. So it’s with surprise and horror that upon their arrival in Kabul, their father sells Pari to a childless couple in order to make ends meet. The children are ripped apart and their lives are changed forever.

Abdullah returns to their small village with his father, and Pari becomes the daughter of a privileged and deeply unhappy couple. Pari is so young that she loses the memory of her original family, yet as she grows up she knows in her heart that some essential part of herself is missing. Her adoptive mother, who is caught in a loveless marriage (**spoiler: we later find out that her husband is gay and spent his entire life in love with Pari’s real uncle, their chauffeur), looks to Pari to fill the gaping hole in her heart. It’s a terrible burden for an adoptive child to bear, and the repercussions will only grow and worsen as mother and daughter age.

Much like Hosseini’s other novels, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, the heartbreaking and shocking initial premise quiets down into a mellower second half of the book, as the characters grow older and become more fixed in their identities. It’s inevitable that as they pass into middle age, their stories lose steam and veer towards the maudlin and depressing. In fiction, as in life, it’s the formative events of youth that move us in a way that adulthood never can.

I loved the first half of And the Mountains Echoed, but to be honest the second half somewhat lost me. Maybe the bar had been set too high at the beginning. While perhaps more true to life, the ending left me unsatisfied. I won’t spoil it for you, but I’ll be curious to hear what our readers think when they reach the end. Without the vigor and energy that Hosseini brought to his first novel, the new book reflects a writer that, like his characters, may have grown tired with the whole endeavor.

—Miriam

In 1991, the shortlist for the Booker Prize, the UK’s most prestigious literary award, consisted of six male authors and no women at all. To that point, in fact, only ten percent of all shortlisted books in the history of that prize had been written by women. But the 1991 list was the one that sparked a movement of sorts, as a group was formed dedicated to doing something about this particular kind of gender disparity. By 1996 they’d launched their own award for women’s writing, with a corporate sponsor to promote it and an anonymous donor who agreed to contribute the funding for a £30,000 annual prize. Thus was born the Orange Prize, open to female writers from any nation whose books were published in the UK. Over the years, winners have included Ann Patchett, Zadie Smith, Rose Tremain, Ann Michaels, and many others. As of last year, the telecommunications company that had long sponsored the prize decided to focus its efforts elsewhere, so while new sponsorship is being sought, the award is officially referred to as The Women’s Prize for Fiction. I prefer the handle my colleague Cindy coined—The Prize Formerly Known As The Orange Prize, or The P.F.K.A.T.O.P. for short.

This year’s shortlist is a veritable Who’s Who for ladies of letters, all high-visibility, well-respected candidates:

• Hilary Mantel for Bring Up the Bodies
  
• Barbara Kingsolver for Flight Behaviour (as it’s spelled across the pond)
  
• Kate Atkinson for Life After Life
  
• A.M. Homes for May We Be Forgiven
  
• Zadie Smith for NW
  
• Maria Semple for Where’d You Go, Bernadette
  

Mantel has already won just about everything there is to win for her very popular historical novel, and the other nominees are also favorites, here at Island Books and in the larger world. If there’s a dark horse, it must be the entry from Seattle, Maria Semple, who’s a relative newcomer to fiction, although her latest satiric comedy is a runaway hit. It’s great to see one of our own share the spotlight with international bigshots, and that’s one of the nicest aspects of the P.F.K.A.T.O.P. Very few other literary prizes draw from such a broad geography.

But the P.F.K.A.T.O.P. is not without detractors. Since its beginnings, some have criticized it sharply. Booker winner A.S. Byatt called it “a sexist prize” that was “never needed,” and critic Auberon Waugh referred to it as the “Lemon Prize.” The iconoclastic feminist Germaine Greer speculated that we’d next see a prize for “writers with red hair.” On the other hand, American novelist Cynthia Ozick has said that given the global history of sexual discrimination, the prize “was not born into an innocent republic of letters” and went on to say that, “[f]or readers and writers, in sum, the more prizes the better, however they are structured, and philosophy be damned.” I tend to take her view on this matter, as I do with most related issues. She can be pretty convincing (and quite funny) on the topic of writing and gender. Watch her eviscerate Norman Mailer at a 1971 debate in New York on the subject of “Women’s Liberation.”

Further proof of the validity of the P.F.K.A.T.O.P., if any was needed, arose from a recent kerfuffle that started on one of the the world’s most visited websites and spread from there. A Wikipedia moderator, motivated by an over-inflated sense of efficiency and who knows what else, decided to streamline the site’s lengthy list of “American Novelists” by moving some members of it into subcategories. He (of course it was a he) began to systematically delete women’s names from the main list and spin them off into their own section, “American Women Novelists,” without creating a comparable “American Men Novelists” section. Most of you will quickly recognize why this was problematic and can skip the next paragraph, but if not, read on.

It’s useful at times to differentiate one thing from another, and no one questions that it’s constructive to do so. That’s why Wikipedia has subcategories in the first place, and why we have more than one section in the bookstore, and why bakeries sell more than one kind of cake. But when those bakeries organize their stock, they don’t pick one flavor to favor. They don’t declare that “cake” by default means “chocolate,” so chocolate cakes don’t need a label, while all other kinds—carrot, angel food, red velvet—get shelved separately. They hang up one big sign that says “CAKE” and stick little identifying flags on all the varieties equally. Cake is cake and writers are writers; they shouldn’t be judged by the color of their frosting or their gender, but instead by the content of their character and the quality of their crumb. So to speak.

After the moderator’s reshuffling was brought to public attention (initially by Amanda Filipacchi, one of the affected writers), Wikipedia rolled back the change, so that’s good. What’s not so good is that it happened in the first place, and that a substantial number of people still don’t understand what the brouhaha was about, including the guy who started the whole thing. You can read some defensive comments from him at the bottom of this summary article from the New York Review of Books.

I don’t know if it’ll ever happen, but until everyone recognizes that you can’t measure the difference between men and women by how much one gender deviates from “normal,” I think there’s a place for the P.F.K.A.T.O.P. I’ll be applauding the winner on June 5th, whoever she may be.

—James

This past week I listened to my very first audiobook. Generally I prefer to take in information by reading with my eyes and reserve my ears for music. My husband, however, loves listening to NPR and talk radio. So as we embarked on a road trip from Mercer Island to southern California, I suggested we meet in the middle and try something new: an audiobook.

We each picked a title for which we hadn’t yet found the time. I chose In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson—not exactly light fare. The book is narrative nonfiction about America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Germany, William E. Dodd and the critical period in history leading up to World War II. Larson draws a compelling picture of Berlin during the rise of the Third Reich and demonstrates why the world failed to understand the extent of the evil coming into power. Beasts was a huge bestseller and I know a number of people who found it fascinating. Since my husband likes history and nonfiction I thought we would both get into it.

My husband chose The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells. He knows I like fiction. We tried The Invisible Man first, and quickly learned a lesson. The beginning was agonizingly slow, and unlike when you read a physical book, it’s not so easy to skip forward. Description after description of the man checking in at his lodging and hiding his face, the suspicious hostess finding excuses to pop into the room and assess her mysterious guest. His face is covered in bandages and glasses and a hat. We knew there would be more to the story—it’s a classic, after all—but we just didn’t have the patience.

So we moved on to The Garden of Beasts, skeptical that the problem was not The Invisible Man, not audiobooks, but us and our lack of concentration. We persevered nonetheless. It was slow going at first, but early on I could tell that the narrator’s voice agreed better with us and that the language and subject matter were more compelling. Soon we were discussing what Berlin must have been like during that time period and all the various characters and relationships. I liked that listening was more of a social experience that we could have together, as opposed to when I read a book while he does something else.

If you’re going to try an audiobook, keep in mind it requires different skills than reading. I recommend choosing something fast-paced and meticulously written, and if the narrator’s voice doesn’t please you it will be hard to get lost in the story. Even though I generally prefer fiction, I found that listening to nonfiction was similar to listening to the news and was a good genre for an audiobook.

I won’t lie; I enjoy reading more. But it wasn’t bad. We survived a two week road trip with 7 month old twins and two toy poodles, and while I wouldn’t do that long of a road trip again, I’d be willing to repeat the audiobook experience the next time I have to spend a few hours in a car. It was efficient. I hate to miss out on time I could have spent reading, after all.

—Miriam

At Lady Molly’s begins with Nicholas Jenkins, having broken off his affair with Jean and now concocting “scenarios” for the film industry, being introduced through a studio colleague to the slackly-run home of the titular Lady Molly Jeavons, where he meets various members of the sprawling Tolland family (of which Molly is a part) and hears the news of Widmerpool’s engagement to an older woman, Mildred. Jenkins later lunches with Widmerpool, who quizzes him awkwardly on the propriety of premarital intercourse with one’s intended. Quiggin invites Jenkins to weekend in the country with him and Mona, who have been cohabiting since she divorced Templer. While there, Jenkins meets Quiggins’ landlord, the wealthy but left-leaning eccentric Erridge, who heads the Tolland family, and his sisters, realizing instantaneously that he’s fated to marry the younger one, Isobel. Jenkins then dines at a night club with a group that includes a jaundiced Widmerpool and his fianceé. Mr. Jeavons confidentially reveals to Jenkins a long-ago connection he has to Mildred, and dances her off as Widmerpool retires from the scene because of his illness. Erridge travels to China to investigate the political situation there, bringing Mona with him and creating a minor scandal. Widmerpool’s engagement founders, and Jenkins’ is made public. During another party at Lady Molly’s, Mildred’s brother-in-law discreetly reports to Jenkins that she dropped Widmerpool after a fumbling failure in the bedroom, immediately followed by the appearance of the jilted fiancé, who offers Jenkins advice on marriage.

————————————————————-

Either the books are getting better or I’m becoming more amenable to Powell’s style (or both), because At Lady Molly’s was probably my favorite in the series so far. Long out of school, the characters seem to be playing for higher stakes, and their gossip is juicier than ever. I have to keep reminding myself that the Dance was written well after the period that it describes, as it feels so authentically of that era. That’s why its fairly frank treatment of sexuality, especially alternative sexuality, is refreshing. Witness the interesting ménage that Norah Tolland and Elizabeth Walpole-Wilson establish. Powell is no radical, but neither is he judgmental, and I can think of few other novels of the 1930s that would have presented that sort of material at all.

Jenkins, as Powell’s stand-in, continues to display the same refusal to condemn anyone or anything completely. When interrogated by prospective in-laws about Widmerpool’s fitness for marriage, Jenkins conveniently and typically finds a way to politely duck the questions. Widmerpool, despite his obnoxiousness, is actually growing more respectable in Jenkins’ eyes, apparently because he’s so consistently himself. Jenkins even seems to be seeing Widmerpool as a kind of reverse doppelganger when he considers how the two of them have shared affection for the same women. I get a sense that Jenkins is wondering if there’s not something to Widmerpool’s forcefulness.

He’s not alone, either. I’m realizing that many of the most ridiculous, grotesque characters are the most strong-willed, while the ones with initially appealing personalities are vague and malleable, even unformed. Compare Widmerpool, Erridge, and even Gypsy to superficially better-mannered, socially-adept figures such as Stringham and Templer. The former achieve their desires more often than not, while the latter squander their promise and become increasingly confused about what they should be doing with their lives. Add Truscott to that list, too. Once pegged as an up-and-comer who would star in any field he chose, he still hasn’t accomplished anything and has now lost his business position. He’s the poster boy for what we talked about in earlier installments, the tendency of bright young things to fade and fall out of contact. You never know with the Dance, though—he may express some willpower and stage a comeback yet.

Speaking of the importance of will, what do you make of this from page 203, narrated by Jenkins on the topic of his own impending nuptials?

Marriage, as I have said, is a form of action, of violence almost: an assertion of the will.

How romantic. And I loved this bit from page 136 as well:

Would it be too explicit, too exaggerated, to say that when I set eyes on Isobel Tolland, I knew at once that I should marry her? Something like that is the truth; certainly nearer the truth than merely to record those vague, inchoate sentiments of interest of which I was so immediately conscious. It was as if I had known her for many years already; enjoyed happiness with her and suffered sadness. I was conscious of that, as of another life, nostalgically remembered. Then, at that moment, to be compelled to go through all the paraphernalia of introduction, of “getting to know” one another by means of the normal formalities of social life, seemed hardly worth while. We knew one another already; the future was determinate. But what—it may reasonably be asked—what about the fact that only a short time before I had been desperately in love with Jean Duport; was still, indeed, not sure that I had been wholly cured? Were the delights and agonies of all that to be tied up with ribbon, so to speak, and thrown in a drawer to be forgotten? What about the girls with whom I seemed to stand nightly in cinema queues? What, indeed?

You can’t say he’s going into this with his eyes closed.

One last quote from page 97, which I share only because I had trouble making heads or tails of it:

Later that evening, I found myself kicking my heels in one of those interminable cinema queues of which I have already spoken, paired off and stationary, as if life’s co-educational school, out in a “crocodile,” had come to a sudden standstill: that co-educational school of iron discipline, equally pitiless in pleasure and in pain.

“That co-educational school” would seem to be life, and as best I can tell, “out in a ‘crocodile’” just means “walking in a pair.” So the metaphor says that life is a way of proceeding into the world in gendered pairs, but it’s temporarily ground to a halt? A lot of weight being placed on waiting in movie lines in this book. I’m surprised Powell didn’t call it Standing Nightly in a Queue.

Oh, I almost forgot to give a prize. The winner of a copy of Third Movement, courtesy of University of Chicago Press, is Mary C. Mary, contact us at info@mercerislandbooks.com to claim your book. We’ll take a hiatus from handouts next month, but resume the freebies in June.

Next up: Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant on May 30th. Available as part of Second Movement or separately as an ebook.

—James

Painting by Max Ginsburg from the cover of the 1980s Warner Books edition of At Lady Molly’s.

Previous installments:

• Book One: A Question of Upbringing
• Book Two: A Buyer’s Market
• Book Three: The Acceptance World

April 23rd is the International Day of the Book. It’s official—the UN passed a declaration about it in 1995. Why did they pick that date? Well, it’s Shakespeare’s birthday, for one thing. It’s also La Diada de Sant Jordi, a major holiday in Barcelona and the rest of Catalonia since the fifteenth century. In English, we call it St. George’s Day.

Historically, Catalonian men gave women roses on that day, and women gave men a book to celebrate the occasion—”a rose for love and a book forever.” In modern times, the books go to both genders, and half of all books sold in the region every year are exchanged on April 23rd.

A few years ago, an independent bookstore in Austin, Texas decided to bring this tradition to the US. At the time, the employees at BookPeople were very excited about a new novel called The Angel’s Game by Barcelona native Carlos Ruiz Zafon. It’s a marvelously atmospheric thriller that features a secret Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a huge library of old, forgotten titles lovingly preserved by a select few. According to tradition, each initiate of this clandestine place is allowed to take one book from it and must protect it for life. So the good people of BookPeople each chose a favorite volume that had fallen out of favor, and they spent the month around St. George’s Day promoting those titles and competing to see which one reached the most new readers.

Flash forward to 2013, when we at Island Books have decided to steal … er, borrow this fabulous idea and create our own Library of Forgotten Books. Our highly literate staff has selected an assortment of wonderful volumes that haven’t gotten the love they deserve. At least not lately. There’s a little something for everyone on the list. Our selections include a heartfelt memoir of a marriage of opposites, essays on old New York, and writing about the singular pleasures of the table, not to mention novels of death and war, love and delight, and the unfettered possibilities of the imagination.

Give one (or more) of them a good home, won’t you? Though they’re not brand new, the stories are far from stale. Of course you can visit our website to see all the titles, but you’ll want to come into the store to page through them in person. Books like these are most alive when you hold them in your hands. As they say in Catalonia, a book is forever. As long as someone remembers it.

—James

After a week like the last one, I struggle with what to write in this venue. It would be silly of us to overemphasize the importance of books in light of the recent events. I’ve turned away from the half-finished pile of titles on my nightstands and tables to watch the news incessantly, even during a road trip to southern California visiting old friends and family. As I introduce my infants for the first time to important people in my life, I can’t help but feel the shakiness of the world they’re entering and worry about how they will understand the tragedies of our nation.

Before bedtime we hold our babies in our laps and read them a story, just as generations before us all over the world have put their kids to sleep. These enduring books, like Goodnight Moon, Where the Wild Things Are, and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? are a comfort: stories that remain unchanged in a constantly changing world. I see the safety these stories provide and they reassure me that my kids will always have one place to go where they will feel safe.

Books serve many purposes, but today I’m thinking about how they can make you feel at home. Safely tucked in bed, when I’m scared and lonely and worried during the day, I can still crack open my old copy of Pride and Prejudice and know a world where children do not die and true love prevails. The biggest problems are who to marry. I know I’ll turn back again and again to these safe worlds and appreciate the comfort they provide. That’s the role that books, and the safe haven of bookstores, play in relation to today’s tragic events. For that I’m deeply grateful.

—Miriam

“Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves.”

—Umberto Eco, from The Name of the Rose

Books occasionally talk to blogs, too, and vice versa. And blogs about books talk to blogs about books, and so on. This was one of those weeks where almost everything I read reminded me of something else I’d read or written, to the point where I started thinking that no one, including me, had ever thought a thought that had never been thought before. Does that make sense? Probably not. I’ll try to untangle the ball of yarn for you with a few examples.

The first is a new novel by English writer Jane Gardam called Last Friends. It’s the concluding volume in a trilogy that I didn’t know was going to be one. At age 84 she’s still working at the top of her game, and has surprised her fans by adding more nuance and depth to the saga that she began in Old Filth and continued in The Man in the Wooden Hat. When an author works the same territory repeatedly, my interest often wanes with each new release, but in this case I think Gardam has enriched the ground on which her series stands. I talked more about the added value of this kind of multi-channel storytelling a couple of months ago on this very blog.

A few weeks after that I wrote about the nominees for this year’s Best Translated Book Award. The finalists for that prize have now been named, and I’m glad to see that most of my favorites have made the grade, especially the complex and fascinating Maidenhair by Mikhail Shiskin. A colleague at another shop recommends it eloquently, calling it “[a]n intoxicating, revelatory masterpiece overflowing with courage and beauty, a living testament to the written word. This book is not a book, it is a boat to carry you across oceans.” You almost need a cigarette after reading that blurb, don’t you?

Speaking of other stores, I ran across some striking photos from San Francisco’s Green Apple Books at the LA Review of Books blog. The gorgeous wear and tear on their lovingly preserved floors sparked memories of last summer’s communal effort to restore our own much-abused carpet.

Why did I start making so many links between what I was reading and what I’d written? It’s almost certainly because I picked up Surfaces and Essences by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander this week. It immediately brought to mind a post I made here several months ago about consciousness and cognition. Hofstadter is one of the world’s leading experts on how the human mind works, and in this characteristically conversational new book he and his junior colleague posit that the basis for all human thought is analogy. That is, we categorize things both physical and abstract and compare them to each other every minute of our lives, often in ways that we don’t even notice. I won’t try to explain in a paragraph what these two brilliant academics get up to in five hundred or so pages, so I’ll just say that reading their book is like taking an exciting intellectual journey, one that will undoubtedly have you, like me, making unexpected connections between yourself and the world around you.

—James

When someone tells me a book rattled them, I become curious. When my mother-in-law says it over a text as we play Words With Friends, I’m even more intrigued. 

“It was awful,” she said.

“But could you put it down?” I asked.

“No. I couldn’t stop reading it.”

Alarm bells went off. I’m okay skipping out on a disturbing book, if it’s bad. But compelling and impossible to put down? I’m not going to miss out on that. And so I had to pick up The Dinner by Herman Koch and see what she was talking about.

The Dinner is structured like a meal, and the setting is a pretentious restaurant, but this isn’t really a book about a dinner. This is a story about the lengths people will go to protect their children and how parents influence their kids. That subject isn’t immediately evident in the first half of the book. I’m guilty of skipping over the server’s description of the appetizer, the uncorking of the wine, and trips to the restroom. It was only when I was ready to give up on the entire book that the story became interesting.

The fact that The Dinner hit all the bestseller lists is surprising, considering it’s a foreign translation and perhaps an acquired taste for American readers, contains the most unlikeable characters possible, and takes a long time to pick up steam. That said, once I got into it I couldn’t put it down, just like my mother-in-law predicted. One big clue that I’d enjoy it was the back cover, which featured praise from authors of some of my favorite recent books, including Gillian Flynn and S.J. Watson.

Two Dutch couples meet for dinner to discuss a recent and troubling incident with their sons. Paul Lohman is the misanthropic and increasingly unreliable narrator. He and his wife Claire are meeting his brother Serge and his sister-in-law Babette that evening, and Paul loathes Serge. Serge is a slick and popular politician while Paul is a history teacher on indefinite leave, and they couldn’t be more different.

Paul seems to hate everything and everyone except his wife and son, Michel. The first troubling revelation is about the crime that Michel and Serge’s son committed, but as the story broadens, we learn more about Paul and how his actions may have led up to Michel’s dangerous mistake. What at first appears to be a cynical but insightful narration becomes harder to trust, as Paul reveals secret after secret leading up to this dinner. His past behavior becomes harder to justify, and the revelations that come with each chapter paint a growing picture of life viewed through disturbed lenses.

Without spoiling the surprising revelations that make the book so shocking and compelling, I will admit that the end left me thoroughly unsatisfied. I wanted to see the kids punished, to know the consequences of Paul’s previous actions, and more than that, I wanted a clearer understanding of Paul’s wife Claire, who surprises everyone, including the other characters, by turning out to be the complete opposite of what she seems. Lady Macbeth would have been proud of Claire.

The Dinner has been compared with Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, another favorite thriller I read recently. If you enjoyed Gone Girl and could live with the ending, you’ll like The Dinner too.

—Miriam

The brave writers who entered our short story contest have given me courage to put pen to paper. You may know me as “the owner’s wife” or the one who buys all the non-book “stuff.” But I too am a bookseller like the rest and have the great pleasure of hosting the store’s regular book club.

Last Thursday evening at the store’s monthly meeting we again had a really good discussion, this time about the novel Running the Rift by Naomi Benaron. The wrenching truth about the ungodly days in the mid-nineties, when Rwandan Hutus turned on their Tutsi neighbors as the western world turned a blind eye, was more clear through the fictional tale than it ever could have been with the cold facts of history alone. Our conversation took us on tangents about the persuasive power of propaganda, the pitfalls of colonialism, and above all else, the power of fiction to draw one in emotionally.

But I have to admit while reading this heart breaking nightmare of a tale in the evenings, by day I commented to my co-workers that it felt like I was being forced to eat my vegetables before I could have dessert. And the desserts calling out to me from the new fiction table were novels by a couple of my favorite go-to authors, Kate Atkinson with her new foray into the supernatural, Life After Life,  and Jacqueline WInspear’s tenth Maisie Dobbs novel, Leaving Everything Most Loved. I will get to these books soon, because I know that I will thoroughly enjoy them as I have every other book they’ve written.

The folks who show up for our book club could draw out a great discussion from anything that we throw at them, which is why we try to serve more than one kind of fare. Sometimes there’s a savory main course, sometimes there’s a side of greens (hopefully tasty as well as nutritious), and sometimes just a snack. All are welcome to join our spring book club series which meets at 7:30pm on the last Thursday of each month at Island Books. It’s a three-course meal with The Barbarian Nurseries In April, The Orchardist in May, and for dessert in June, Where’d You Go, Bernadette.

—Nancy

When David Sedaris published his book of essays about anthropomorphized animals, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, in 2010, he made an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. In addition to the amusing snail joke Sedaris shared at the end of this clip, he mentioned that he originally wanted to call the book “Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls,” but his editor nixed the idea.

Well, looks like that title made it to print after all, and on April 23rd, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls hits shelves. While Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk had a fictional format and a dysfunctional and adult Aesop’s Fables quality to it, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls returns to the essay format where Sedaris flourishes. This collection is something of a traveler’s diary, covering a range of venues from North Carolina to England to Australia. No other writer can work in a colonoscopy, Costco, and a chintzy wedding gift quite the way Sedaris can, and although much of this book rehashes his favorite topics (like dysfunctional family and experiences living abroad), there’s a new tinge of melancholy and fewer laugh-out-loud moments in his writing. The youthful energy of his older breakout work has ripened into a more mature cynicism.

I’ve loved David Sedaris since I read Me Talk Pretty One Day in 2000, but I knew I really loved him when I heard he recently confessed his love for the television show Breaking Bad (my husband and I are obsessed with that show, and I can see how Breaking Bad’s absurdities would appeal to Sedaris’s sense of humor). His longtime fans will find plenty to enjoy in his latest, but don’t expect anything revolutionary.

If you’ve never read Sedaris before, try the paragraph below (excerpted from Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls:

“I don’t know how these couples do it, spend hours each night tucking their kids in, reading them books about misguided kittens or seals who wear uniforms, and then rereading them if the child so orders. In my house, our parents put us to bed with two simple words: ‘Shut up.’ That was always the last thing we heard before our lights were turned off. Our artwork did not hang on the refrigerator or anywhere near it, because our parents recognized it for what it was: crap. They did not live in a child’s house, we lived in theirs.”

If that made you laugh, that’s all you need to know to diagnose a love for this writer that will only ripen over time. Run over to Island Books as soon as you can and get the book. In fact, I recommend a few copies of his backlist titles too. After recently reading The Round House and The Dinner (I’ll get to that book here next week), some lighter fare is definitely in order, and anything by David Sedaris fits that bill nicely.

—Miriam