"Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake," by Anna Quindlen

As a member of the Baby Boomer generation, I enjoy reading memoirs and other books written by my contemporaries; I feel a real connection to people who have experienced the same slice of time, of history, at the same age. There have been several books by Baby Boomers about what it is like to get into the territory formerly labeled “old.” Of course my generation, with its sense of itself as exceptional, has relabeled these years. “Sixty is the new forty.” “Old age now means at least 70 or 75.” These are the stories we tell ourselves. We are too healthy, too active, too involved, to be old. (Except for when we are not; we have all experienced, or had friends our age who have experienced, serious health problems.) One such book is the one I have just read, Anna Quindlen’s “Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir” (Random House, 2012). Quindlen, a novelist/journalist/columnist/self-help author, shares memories of her own life and work, along with reflections on aging and intimations of mortality both as she has experienced them and in a wider context. One section I particularly liked was her thoughts on the big changes in women’s lives over the past 40 years or so, and the related issues that still exist. The book is thoughtful and serious, yet with a light touch. It is easy to read and to connect to, especially for fellow Baby Boomer women, but I think younger and older readers would enjoy the book as well.

"Crusoe's Daughter," by Jane Gardam

There is a special pleasure in opening a novel and immediately feeling one is in the hands of a master. (Side note: I really wish there were an equivalent, non-gendered term for women, one that did not have the other connotations that the word “mistress” does. Or better still, a gender-neutral term. “Master” is ostensibly gender-neutral nowadays, but it doesn't really feel that way.) There is that leap of recognition and joy at knowing that one can absolutely trust that the pages ahead will be beautifully written and will take the reader on a journey that will be original, that will connect with one’s own experience yet make one see the world in a new way. This is what I have learned to feel when beginning a novel by Jane Gardam. On 3/18/10 I wrote about how terrific her paired novels, “Old Filth” and “The Man in the Wooden Hat” were. I have read some of her other work as well, including her short story collection “The People on Privilege Hill.” I have just finished her “Crusoe’s Daughter,” which was originally published in the U.S. in 1985, has now been reissued (Europa, 2012), and is being reviewed very positively this year. Oh, what a novel! It is the story of Polly Flint, from age six to her current age of 85, and her life in a yellow house on the marshes in rural northern England. An orphan, she is raised by two aunts and a few other adults (a friend who lives with the aunts, a housekeeper, an uncle who comes to visit regularly); she rarely travels away from her beloved house and marshes; she has brushes with love and sex, but never marries. She never goes to school (she is what we would now call home-schooled) but her real education comes through the books in her late grandfather’s library. In particular, throughout her life, her great guiding light is the novel “Robinson Crusoe.” She reads and re-reads it dozens of times, eventually translates it into German and French, and writes about it. More important, she uses it as a source of inspiration, information, strength, and moral guidance. I worry that this plot description in no way does justice to the power and beauty of the story. “Crusoe’s Daughter” is crisply, precisely written, yet sings. It is so engaging that I spent most of a day reading it, a day when I should have been doing other things, but just had to keep reading, not in a page-turner bestseller way, but in the way one feels when one has entered a unique, compelling universe and can’t bear not to stay in it to the end. I haven’t given this designation to a book for a while, but enthusiastically give it to “Crusoe’s Daughter”: Highly recommended!

"Hemingway & Gellhorn": The Film

On Monday evening (5/28/12) I watched “Hemingway & Gellhorn” on HBO. This new film focuses on the two writers' work and relationship during and after the years of the Spanish Civil War. Martha Gellhorn was a great writer and brave war correspondent/reporter in her own right, and the two writers are portrayed in the thick of both the Spanish Civil War and other situations such as a trip to China and secret meetings with Chiang Kai-shek and his wife Madame Chiang, and with Chou En-lai (Zhou Enlai). The thrill and danger of wartime and world affairs were part of what attracted the two to each other. There is apparently, for example, nothing like a romantic interlude in a hotel that is being bombed at the time. Although Hemingway admired Gellhorn immensely, was unfaithful to his second wife with her, and then made Gellhorn his third wife, he also sometimes felt competitive with her, and resented her going off to report on wars and other stories around the world. The movie stars Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman, both of whom are great actors and did well in this film, but somehow Owen -- whose acting I usually admire admire and enjoy -- didn’t quite capture Hemingway for me. To be fair, this may be because Owen played Hemingway in a more subdued manner than he is usually portrayed, and perhaps this more nuanced portrayal is actually more accurate than the exaggerated one we are used to. Kidman as Gellhorn was brilliant. This movie was directed by Philip Kaufman, who lives and works here in San Francisco. In fact, the whole movie was filmed in the San Francisco Bay Area, with some very creative use of various Bay Area sites to stand in for Spain, Cuba, and China, among other places.

Behind Every Great Novelist...

I laughed out loud when I saw the illustration to a New York Times Book Review (5/13/12) Christopher Benfey review of a book titled “Lives of the Novelists,” by John Sutherland. The illustration is in the form of a nine-paneled cartoon, and is titled “Behind Every Great Novelist….” The nine panels are titled as follows: Childhood Trauma, Miserable Job, Moment of Self-Discovery, Episode of Debauchery, Pathologic Ambition, Loyal Pet, Neglected Spouse, Personal Demons, and -- wait for it! -- Years of Boring Hard Work. I love the dramatic stereotypes of the first eight panels and then the surprise juxtaposition and reality check provided by the last panel.

The Life of a Bookstore

My colleague and friend Dennis Bacigalupi (who wrote a wonderful guest post on Annie Dillard here on 2/23/12), knowing how much I love bookstores, told me about his working for a while, many years ago, in the famed New York bookstore, Books & Co. He said it was a great place to work, a place where the employees really knew and cared about books, where customers could find books they could find nowhere else, and which formed a community gathering place for writers and readers from the neighborhood (near the Whitney Museum) and from throughout the city and country. Dennis lent me his copy of “Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co.” (Harcourt Brace, 1999), by Lynne Tillman, which, as the title promises, tells the story of the bookstore, its owner, the many readings and other events held there, and the way the bookstore wove itself into the fabric of literary New York. Much of the book is told in the voice of the founder and owner of the store, Jeannette Watson, interspersed with passages from various writers, employees, customers, friends, and observers. The way the story is told makes it feel very immediate, as if the reader were there in the bookstore among all the other people who cared so deeply about books. People were passionate about this bookstore that had such a wonderful selection of books on so many topics. Its regular visitors included, just to name a few, writers Susan Sontag, Brendan Gill, Salman Rushdie, Paul Auster, Fran Lebovitz, Amy Hempel, Richard Howard, Susan Cheever, Calvin Trillin, Woody Allen, and Harold Brodkey. Unfortunately, the bookstore had to close in 1997 for economic reasons, the sad story of so many independent bookstores. But it had a great run of almost 20 years, made huge contributions to literature and the literary community, and will long be remembered. It was a real pleasure to read about it, and it makes me wish I had visited the bookstore at least once before it closed. Bonus features in this book are photos of various people related to the bookstore and two fascinating appendices: “Jeannette Watson’s Secret List of Fifty Books, Her Best-Sellers” (how I wish I could reproduce that list here for you, so we could all see which we have read, which we want to read, which are new to us and look intriguing, and which we wish she had included…) and “Twenty Years of Books & Co. Readings,” an incredible “Who’s Who” of the literary world.

Banned Books in Arizona

Today I write belatedly on the recent Arizona law banning certain books purported to promote solidarity based on ethnicity rather than individuality. Arizona bill 2281 of earlier this year banned Ethnic Studies programs in Arizona schools, and along with that, forbade teachers to teach related texts. Soon after, school districts -- notoriously the Tucson School District -- cleared classrooms (in front of sometimes crying students) of books taught in those classes. These books included Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," the anthology "Rethinking Columbus," Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States," and selected books by such well-known and critically praised authors as Sherman Alexie, James Baldwin, Sandra Cisneros, Junot Diaz, Isabel Allende, Jonathan Kozol, and Gloria Anzaldua, among many others. The law was primarily aimed at Mexican-American Ethnic Studies programs, and Latino/a authors and books, clearly because of the large number of Mexican Americans in Arizona. Also affected were programs and books related to African Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans, along with feminist and progressive publications (and ideas). This law and the related book censorship are clearly outrageous, anti-democratic, and frightening. Educators should have the freedom to teach with access to and reference to all books. And freedom of speech and expression in the form of books are basic to democracy and the exchange of ideas. (This seems so obvious; I never thought we would have to re-state it; this shows my naivete.) This Arizona law, especially in the context of other current threats to freedom and civil and human rights, and any similar laws (because once one state has succeeded in doing this, others may follow), must be resisted.

"Aerogrammes," by Tania James

I read and very much liked Tania James’ debut novel, “Atlas of Unknowns,” when it came out in 2009; it was very well reviewed and received. It is the story of two sisters from India, one of whom moved to the U.S. to study, and the other who came to find the first when she disappeared. The shifting yet enduring relationship between them, and the emotions involved, were compellingly portrayed, as were the obvious and subtle differences between life in India and life in the U.S. So when I saw that James had a new book out, a short story collection titled “Aerogrammes,” I knew I had to read it. Not only had I liked her earlier book, but also the word “aerogrammes” is evocative for me. These are the thin blue sheets of paper, ingeniously folded into one piece that serves as letter and an envelope as well , that are so familiar from my childhood in India. We almost always used them when writing back and forth to relatives and friends in Canada and the United States, and when we returned to America, I still got letters from friends in India in the same well-known form. My mother still gets them from her old friends in India. To this day, I have some aerogramme letters saved somewhere deep in a box or two in a closet or two, souvenirs of that time in my life. This is obviously not an adequate reason to read the book, but it drew me in. So how are the stories? Let’s put it this way: when I finished, I felt I had been on a rather bumpy journey through various completely different terrains. The settings of the stories are widely scattered, but more than that, the styles, the tones, the emotional temperatures, the characters are so very diverse that I didn’t feel much unity in the collection. It is an interesting question to consider: should there be a feeling of cohesiveness in a short story collection? Do we admire the extremely diverse array of experiences provided by an author, such as in this case, or do we feel a bit jostled and unsettled? I found some of the stories fascinating and sure-footed; others seemed too wispy, or too self-consciously quirky. I liked the stories “Aerogrammes” (and not just because of the title!), “Light and Luminous,” and “Escape Key” (although the latter was especially painful to read). I only mildly liked “Lion and Panther in London,” “What To Do with Henry,” or “Girl Marries Ghost,” probably at least partially because I didn’t particularly like reading about – respectively – wrestlers, a family that raised a chimpanzee, and a woman who married a ghost. I will say, though, that all of the stories are beautifully written, and I will definitely continue reading whatever Tania James publishes.