extreme legibility

  • in which peter cameron attempts to remember the books he’s read before he forgets them

    The publisher and date listed always refer to the edition of the book that I read; illustrations are chosen for the graphic appeal and may not correspond to the edition that is cited. Photographs are always of the author (unless otherwise indicated).

  • crazy pavements

    Crazy Pavements by Beverly Nichols (Jonathan Cape, 1934)

    A novel set in London during the 1920s, centering around the lives of a group of “bright young things” about whom Evelyn Waugh wrote with more devastating acuity.  The hero of Crazy Pavements is Brian Elme, a beautiful middle-class young man working as a gossip columnist for a ladies magazine.  All of his content is fabricated, and the threat of a lawsuit brings him into the exclusive and gilded world of Lady Julia, who is smitten by Brian’s beauty and naive guilelessness.  She takes him up and introduces him to her circle of aristocratic and debauched friends, who find Brian similarly ornamental and entertaining.  He falls madly in love with Lady Julia, and enters this new world avidly, renouncing his pedestrian former life and friends, including his roommate, Walter, with whom he lives in a sort of idyllic bachelor marriage.  Despite their proclaimed heterosexuality, they both seem to be gay and very much in love.  This circumstance seriously diminishes the authenticity of Brian’s passionate love for Lady Julia.  In fact queerness lurks just around every corner in this book, and Nichols is unable to create a convincingly heterosexual romance.

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    Nichols is not a bad or unentertaining writer, but he’s unable to elevate this material like Waugh, and the result is a little dreary and leaden, like the winter British weather Nichols constantly and convincingly evokes.

  • the home

    The Home by Penelope Mortimer (Random House, 1972) 

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    Another smart, engaging, and interesting novel by Mortimer.  

    Eleanor’s husband has recently left her for a much younger woman, and she has moved into a new house in London along with her two youngest (of five) children.  The Home is about this house, and several others, but mostly it’s about Eleanor’s descent into incapacitating depression as she fails to find a life for herself without her husband.  The novel also generously develops all five of her children, and her mother and mother-in-law both figure in the story, as do two of her ex-lovers, now both friends (one of whom is having an affair with and impregnates Eleanor’s oldest daughter).  Eleanor is a smart, likable, attractive, and candidly sexual middle-aged woman, and Mortimer presents her to the reader honestly and sensitively.  Like many of Mortimer’s novels, this reads (superficially, of course) like a  “woman’s novel,” and I enjoyed reading it very much.

  • period piece

    Period Piece by Gwen Raverat (Norton, 1953)

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    a young Gwen Raverat

    Another book that had been on my shelf for many years that I have never read, and I’m very glad I finally did.  I bought it because it was mentioned in a book about books that were lost/forgotten/unheralded.  

    Gwen Raverat was Charles Darwin’s granddaughter, and Period Piece is a memoir of her childhood in Victorian England.  Her father, one of Darwin’s five sons, married Maud du Prey, an American heiress, and they settled in Cambridge along with many other Darwins.  Despite the strictures of Victorian society , Gwen, the eldest child, grew up in a warm, loving, and slightly unconventional home.  Her memoir, written when she was in her 60s and published in the 1950s, is divided into independent chapters, each one addressing a different topic or aspect of family life. Raverat provides her own naive drawings for this book.  She is a natural writer: perceptive, smart, funny, self-deprecating.  Period Piece is a lovely, charming book — a portrait of a golden and privileged childhood spent in the bosom of a large extended family of loving and lovable human beings.

     

     

  • eustance chisholm and the works

    Eustace Chisholm and the Works by James Purdy (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1967)

    I read this because I had really enjoyed Mourners Below (see below), and while I liked this book and enjoyed reading it, it didn’t excite me quite as much as MB.  Perhaps a little Purdy goes a long way, and I should have allowed more time to pass between books.  

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    This is the story of a group of friends, mostly homosexually inclined, in Chicago.  The figure at the center is Amos Ratcliffe, a beautiful and brilliant boy who loves, and is loved by, Daniel Haws, his sleep-walking landlord.  They are both friendly with Eustace “Ace” Chisholm, who is writing an epic poem on old newspapers and living with his wife, Carla, and various (male) lovers.  What little plot there is concerns the efforts of a man named Ruben Masterson to seduce Amos and lure him away from Daniel, and this goes tragically awry with fatal consequences for both Daniel and Rueben’s mother, a wealthy dowager who is also charmed by Amos.  We get some interesting and dramatic story about all these characters, which involves such unsavory topics as drugs, incest, abortion, and torture.  This book, like MB, also concludes with an act of horrific sexual violence — Daniel is eviscerated by an army captain who loves him with a fatal repression that is expressed through torture.  

    Unpleasant as all this is, it is related in Purdy’s bright, odd, funny prose.  An uncomfortable book that doesn’t quite hang together, but definitely interesting and worth reading.  (I often thought of Edward Swift’s work while I read James Purdy — they take place in the same — or similar — psychological space.)

  • the stranger & the mersault investigation

    The Stranger by Albert Camus, translated by Matthew Ward

    The Mersault Investigation by Kamel Daoud (Vintage International, 1989)

    I had never read The Stranger, and was prompted to read it now as my book club had selected Kamel Daoud’s The Mersault Investigation, which is a retelling of the story from the POV of the “Arab’s” brother.  I found that book very disappointing, but I loved reading The Stranger.  It’s a short, brilliant novel about a French Algerian, whose sense of dislocation and disengagement leads him to senselessly murder an Arab man he encounters on the beach on a blazingly hot and bright summer day.  The novel begins a few days before the murder, as Mersault leaves Algiers to attend the funeral of his mother, who he has placed in a nursing home in the countryside.  His stoic acceptance of her death, and his inability to exhibit any emotional response to the loss of his mother, marks him as guilty of some nameless crime by those around him, and his apathetic coupling with, and engagement to, a beautiful and pleasant young woman also indicates his inability to feel or care about anything.

    The book is brilliantly written in first person, and is riveting to read, so simple and direct and horrorful.  The Merseult Investigation, by contrast, seems like a journalist’s idea of a novel that is exercised formulaically and tediously; no attempt at characterization or narrative is made, and reading it was extremely frustrating and disappointing.

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  • mourners below

    Mourners Below by James Purdy  (Viking, 1981)

    Reading this novel was similar to dreaming: the world depicted is vivid and engaging, but unhinged from reality.  The novel takes place in a small mid-western town, where a 17-year-old boy lives with his father.  The mother ran off many years ago, and the father and son are attended to by a neighbor woman who acts as cook and housekeeper.  The boy is a promising figure skater (!) but his father has put the kibosh  on his Olympic dreams, so  the boy is somewhat adrift: he’s graduated from High School but his grades weren’t good enough to admit him to college, so he’s being tutored by a young scholar who was a friend of the boy’s two older brothers, who were both killed in action in WWII.  The cold, domineering father refuses to acknowledge, let alone mourn, the loss of his two eldest sons, and the boy is devastated and lost without his two god-like older brothers.  The only person who shows him any warmth or concern is the housekeeper, but the father does his best to keep a distance between this warm and caring woman and his son.  

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    What plot exists concerns the machinations of a very young and wealthy widow, who had taken Justin, one of the boy’s brothers, as her lover, to seduce the boy and bear his child, which she succeeds in doing by giving a costume ball to which the boy is invited.  There is an intense dream-like eroticism to just about every interaction in the book, and feelings of incest and homosexuality figure in many of these relationships.  Like Eustace Chisholm and the Works, which I read subsequently, this book ends with a scene of gruesome sexual torture and violation.  A strange, mysterious and moving book, which simultaneously combines Purdy’s daring and decency.

  • at freddie’s

    At Freddie’s by Penelope Fitzgerald (David R. Godine, 1985)

    A curious, somewhat half-baked novel by this masterful writer.  It takes place in the early 1960s, in London, in and around an eccentric and floundering acting school for young children, which has long supplied fledgling talent to West End theaters.  It is owned and operated by Freddie (Frieda), an ancient, though ageless, doyenne of the British theater world, whose origins can be traced to the origins of the Old Vic (if not further) and whose supporters include just about everyone, including the Master himself, Noel Coward.  Two young Irish newcomers in London are hired to teach academics to the unruly and uninterested children, and the slight book follows their tentative and insufficient romance.  Fitzgerald writes with her customary assured, all-knowing brilliance, but the books is too scattered  and unfocused to satisfy the reader.  For once her brevity and succinctness seems inadequate, and the book doesn’t seem to be completely thought out and perfectly executed, as do her others.  But what there is, is often wise and delightful; it just doesn’t add up to anything much

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  • a man’s blessing

    A Man’s Blessing by Leonardo Sciasca (Harper & Row, 1968)

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    An odd, short novel about a murder in Sicily sometime in the 1960s.  Two men, a pharmacist and a doctor, are killed while out hunting in the countryside; the pharmacist had recently received a threatening anonymous letter that turns out to be a fake, a decoy.  The professor, a decent, single man, takes an interest in solving the crime and his investigation, which leads him to the murderer (the doctor’s wife’s lover) also leads to his murder.  The slight story is told with elegance and economy but gets a bit bogged down with Italian politics.  I liked the character of the professor, and enjoyed reading the book.

  • the news from paraguay

    The News from Paraguay by Lily Tuck (Harper 2004)

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    photo of Ella Lynch

    An interesting but frustrating book: a novelization of the life of Ella Lynch, a beautiful Irish woman who meets the future dictator of Paraguay in Paris and follows him to South America, where she bears him five sons and stands by him in the face of both great splendor and hardship.  Ella is smart, independent, and brave, and it is hard to understand what keeps her so devoted to the loutish, belligerent, cruel, and violent Franco.  The fact that the narrative is comprised of many different elements (letters, journal entries, governmental records, etc.) and is told from many different points of view doesn’t help the book present a coherent Ella.  Tuck seems to be going for a sort of intimate epic, and it doesn’t really work.  Much of the book deals with the pointless and hopeless war Franco wages with Brazil and Argentina, the logistics and details of which never become very clear or engaging.  But there are many beautifully rendered scenes and characters, and many indelible moments and images.  Tuck is a good, smart writer, but I think this interesting book falls somewhat short.

     

     

  • my mortal enemy

    My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather  (Knopf, 1926)

    A very short (120 pages) novel published by Cather in 1926.  The books is divided into two sections, set ten years apart.  In the first section, Nellie Birdseye, 15, leaves her provincial Midwestern hometown to visit New York City with her Aunt Lydia.  They are taken  under the wing of the Henshaws, a glamorous wealthy couple, originally natives of the same Midwestern town, who famously eloped because Myra’s (Mrs.  Henshaw’s) wealthy guardian threatened to cut her out of his will if she married the self-made and socially inferior Henshaw.  He (the guardian) was true to his word, but the Henshaws flourished anyway in New York City, and delight and charm Nellie and her Aunt with their gracious hospitality and warm friendliness.  But toward the end of her stay in New York City, Nellie begins to perceive cracks in the beautiful facade of the Henshaw’s life and marriage.

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    Ten years later, Nellie arrives in a coastal Californian town to teach at newly founded college, and finds that the Henshaws are living in the same cheap rooming house that she inhabits.  They have fallen on hard times, and Mrs. Henshaw is seriously ill and bedridden.  But both Henshaws are delighted to see Nellie, and their friendship is rekindled and flourishes, although Mrs. H. has grown bitter and despondent as a result of her fall from grace and illness.  She lashes out at her friend and husband, who both devotedly stand by her until she dies.

    I felt there was something slight and undeveloped about this book, some theme or feeling that fails to make itself fully felt.  But what is there is gentle and beautiful — a sad and compelling story about the treacherous arc of life, and the quiet beauty of Cather’s prose is matched by the elegant Knopf production, complete with line drawings heading each chapter, and blocks of color surrounding the page numbers at the top of each page.