newyorker:

My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with “plume”), and forty years ago, in my final year at Cambridge, I was recruited by the British security service. In the early spring of 1972, when exams were only weeks away, I found a new boyfriend, a historian called Jeremy Mott. He was of a certain old-fashioned type—lanky, large-nosed, with an out-sized Adam’s apple. He was unkempt, clever in an understated way, and extremely polite. I’d noticed quite a few of his sort around. They all seemed to have descended from a single family and to have come from private schools in the North of England where they were issued with the same clothes. These were the last men on earth still wearing Harris-tweed jackets with leather patches on the elbows and trim on the cuffs. I learned, though not from Jeremy, that he was expected to get a first and that he had already published an article in a scholarly journal of sixteenth-century studies.

- The first paragraph of Ian McEwan’s “Hand on the Shoulder,” featured in this week’s issue. To read the rest: http://nyr.kr/IjHBFH

Now I want to read the novel. Which is probably bound to disappoint, with a dash of sordid sexual malaise. But McEwan is one of the few writers who is on point, formally, all of the time. So perhaps it’s not too late for another Atonement-level masterpiece? All I want is to be entertained and sucked into a world of perfect composition. Is that too much to ask?

1. Long Day’s Journey Into Night - Eugene O’Neill
2. Under Western Eyes - Joseph Conrad
3. Guerillas - V.S. Naipaul
4. Regeneration - Pat Barker
5. Angels in America - Tony Kushner
6. Wolf Dreams - Yasmina Khadra
7. Darkness Visible - William Styron
8. The Violent Bear It Away - Flannery O’Connor
9. Waiting for the Barbarians - J.M. Coetzee
10. Wit - Margaret Edson
11. My Loose Thread - Dennis Cooper
12. The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, & Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins
13. Proust Was a Neuroscientist - Jonah Lehrer
14. Possession - A.S. Byatt
15. Collected Poems - Frank O’Hara
16. This Side of Paradise - F. Scott Fitzgerald
17. Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
18. 1984 - George Orwell
19. A Gate at the Stairs - Lorrie Moore
20. Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
21. White Teeth - Zadie Smith
22. Changing My Mind - Zadie Smith
23. A Room with a View - E.M. Forster
24. The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides
25. 1Q84 - Haruki Murakami
26. Collected Poems - Anne Sexton
27. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon
28. Raise the High Beam Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction - J.D. Salinger
29. The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
30. If on a winter’s night a traveler - Italo Calvino

Favorites bolded. Terrible are struck through.

Books Re-Read

• The History of Love - Nicole Krauss
• The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
• Sophie’s World - Jostein Gaarder
• To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
• The Golden Compass - Philip Pullman
• Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami
• High Fidelity - Nick Hornby
• About a Boy - Nick Hornby

Re-reading is actually far more enjoyable, but I try to put at least four years between each re-read, so college favorites will have to wait a little longer. Wait for me, Brideshead Revisited! (Jk?)

“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. 

I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.” 

-Michael Ondaatje

There are moments when I think taking time off is worth it just so I can set aside the space to read books like The English Patient. The language is lush and poetic, while still retaining a bit of blunt cruelty. I wish there were more books out there like this one. Books about the nature of relationships, time, coincidence, violence, loss, belonging. To be emotionally accurate is, at least to me, what literature should embody.

I watched the movie after finishing the novel. It’s a wonderful translation, albeit not exactly a full one (the ending really got the shaft). I wonder why so many people despise it so much. It is a bit slow, but so is the source material, and much of the pacing is the very point of the story. I wish people would stop referring to movies like this as ‘pretentious’ - what does that even mean? 

Both book and movie make you think. About the images that endure after war. The brief moments that fill up a greater space than non-stop action could ever buy. Many call the novel a ‘romance’ or ‘love story.’ Perhaps a better descriptor is that this is a novel about manifestations of love. How often it bleeds through the boundaries we set. So one learns to not view individual stories through facts. Instead, Ondaatje shows how love leans into the environment in which it is built. And how easily that crumbles.

I open the box of my favorite postcards
and turn them over looking for de Chirico
because I remember seeing you standing
facing a wall no wider than a column where
to your left was a hall going straight back
into darkness, the floor a ramp sloping down
to where you stood alone and where the room
opened out on your right to an auditorium
full of people who had just heard you read
and were now listening to the other poet.
I was looking for the de Chirico because of
the places, the empty places. The word
“boulevard” came to mind. Standing on the side
of the fountains in Paris where the water
blew onto me when I was fifteen. It was night.
It was dark then too and I was alone.
Why didn’t you find me? Why didn’t
somebody find me all those years? The form
of love was purity. An art. An architecture.
Maybe a train. Maybe the shadow of a statue
and the statue with its front turned away
from me. Maybe one young girl playing alone,
hearing even small sounds ring off cobblestones
and the stone walls. I turn the cards looking
for the one and come to Giacometti’s eyes
full of caring and something remote.
His eyes are loving and empty, but not with
nothingness, not for the usual reasons, but because
he is working. The Rothko Chapel empty. A cheap
statue of Sappho in the modern city of Mytilene
and ancient sunlight. David Park’s four men
with smudges for mouths, backed by water,
each held still by the impossibility of what
art can accomplish. A broken river god,
only the body. A girl playing with her rabbit in bed.
The postcard of a summer lightning storm over Iowa.

Over the years, Sammy had regretted nearly everything about his affair with Bacon except, until now, its secrecy. The need for stealth and concealment was something that he had always taken for granted as a necessary condition both of that love and of the shadow loves, each paler and more furtive than the last, that it had cast. Back in the summer of 1941, they had stood to lose so much, it seemed, through the shame and ruination of exposure. Sammy could not have known that one day he would come to regard all the things that their loving each other had seemed to put at so much risk – his career in comic books, his relations with his family, his place in the world – as the walls of a prison, an airless, lightless keep from which there was no hope of escape.

 -Michael Chabon

This was an incredible novel, despite my initial doubts about the subject matter (comic books?). Michael Chabon’s writing style is not effortlessly elegant, but it moves at a pace that reminds me of children’s books. Slow down, and you’ll catch the details. The outline is, ultimately, just as compelling as the details. I rarely read books with this type of tone - I love lush, meandering prose that describes emotion, art, and life in a way that compresses the surface area of any pore that could absorb it into a compact shape that flits back and forth while maintaining a frighteningly high density.

But Kavalier and Clay was exciting. It sped along like a pulp, but held zero pretensions about its subject matter and infused the prose with a surprisingly rich vocabulary. And, for once, it wasn’t the style that drew me in, but the story. A story that managed to flip my preferences for the various characters as it progressed, a story free of needless vulgarity, a story which modeled itself after the nostalgic sheen of the period, after a zeitgeist that imbued itself with hope rather than narcissism, after how the fleeting, episodic nature of life can add up to only a small flash of recognition. And it restores my faith a bit in books that don’t chart the exact paths of our thoughts in order to evoke a strong emotion. Most of all, I’m glad that, no matter what path one may choose to get there, that sense of emotion will always be the driving factor. 

Just once I knew what life was for.
In Boston, quite suddenly, I understood;
walked there along the Charles River,
watched the lights copying themselves,
all neoned and strobe-hearted, opening
their mouths as wide as opera singers;
counted the stars, my little campaigners,
my scar daisies, and knew that I walked my love
on the night green side of it and cried
my heart to the eastbound cars and cried
my heart to the westbound cars and took
my truth across a small humped bridge
and hurried my truth, the charm of it, home
and hoarded these constants into morning
only to find them gone.

If I were to live my life
in catfish forms
in scaffolds of skin and whiskers
at the bottom of a pond
and you were to come by
   one evening
when the moon was shining
down into my dark home
and stand there at the edge
of my affection
and think, “It’s beautiful
here by this pond. I wish
    somebody loved me,”
I’d love you and be your catfish
friend and drive such lonely
thoughts from your mind
and suddenly you would be
   at peace,
and ask yourself, “I wonder
if there are any catfish
in this pond? It seems like
a perfect place for them.”

-Richard Brautigan