by Kelly Pickerill

Yesterday, I finished reading the young adult novel and one of our upcoming Oz First Editions Club picks:
The Emerald Atlas by John Stephens. It was an action-packed adventure starring three young orphans who are far from ordinary and are beginning to discover their destiny. But I don’t want to talk about it too much, cause I’m sure there will be blogs coming up from Emily, who is pumped about this first book in a trilogy by a new author who already shows so much promise.

After finishing a book, especially on a gorgeous Sunday, a little panicky voice whispers, “What are you going to read next? That book was so perfect for a Sunday on the porch with the sun and the soft breeze and the mild weather . . . and now what? You know you’re just going to pick something absolutely dismal, you always do — something depressing or overwritten — not at all a good segue from that delightfully charming book whose last page you just turned. It’s taunting you, that last page, isn’t it? Well, you should have slowed down, but no, you had to finish and it’s only five and the sun won’t set for two hours and what are you doing to do?!”

My anguished inner monologue was given further fuel because I had just days ago begun a book that seemed to have promise and found it wooden. I couldn’t slog through that. No, I needed to gamble, to start fresh.

Well I didn’t. I made supper and watched some tube and considered my reading over for Sunday.

Till bedtime. I took with me into bed Open City by Teju Cole, a book that initially got some buzz but, at least at Lemuria, that we haven’t heard much more about. This is the plot of the book as far as I can tell: Julius, a young Nigerian psychiatrist in his residency, meanders through New York City, musing on his life, his childhood in Nigeria, his patients, music, culture, anything really. But that’s not the importance of the book, as far as I can tell: it’s a meditation on solitude, on the paradoxes of silence, juxtaposing its oppression and its freedom, its narcissism and its sensitivity. Julius is a thoughtful narrator, and Cole has created a novel that speaks to its reader’s condition in situ — the condition of reading, of being alone and quiet, of being closed and withdrawn while simultaneously being opened to new ideas.

On an afternoon of heavy rain when ginkgo leaves were piled ankle-deep across the sidewalk looking like thousands of little yellow creatures freshly fallen from the sky, I went out walking.

chapter 3 opening, Open City

Today is overcast, and as the wind sometimes whips through the trees outside, I sit silently at my desk reading.

My renewed interest in the great writer Hemingway was ignited when I read the revised edition of A Moveable Feast, released in 2009, so when I learned that The Paris Wife chronicles the years that the writer spent in Paris with his first wife, Hadley, new interest arose. Those readers who love to read about the lives of famous writers will be intrigued, as will those who always enjoy historical fiction.

Largely based on facts that Paula McLain uncovered about the exciting and tumultuous times of the writer in the ’20s in Jazz Age Paris,  this new release opens a window, not only into the lives of the Hemingways and their adorable baby, whom they nicknamed “Mr. Bumby,” but also into the lives of such well known personalities as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein among others. Those readers who have studied this time period already know of the magic, excitement, and intellectual pursuits which characterized the expatriates’  lives. The Paris Wife rounds out the picture with eloquence and carefully researched details.

Told from the point of view of Hadley, the first wife, or the “Paris wife”, this novel gives an “up close and personal” view of  Hemingway, the man, and his newly emerging career. As he and Hadley travel throughout Europe, and particularly Spain, the reader watches as the writer gathers details for his first short story collection In Our Time, and for his first novel The Sun Also Rises.

Hemingway’s 1921 passport used to travel with Hadley. (Photo: JFK Library.)

Since Hadley tells the story, we see the events through her eyes and feel her pain when the writer becomes moody and irritable and unfaithful.We also see her joy and pride as her husband rises in fame. The reader feels as if he or she is right there on the scene, watching through a peep hole encountering the private life of one of the world’s best writers as Hemingway develops his art, draws friends, and repulses new enemies. I could hardly put this book down in order to eat or sleep!

Hadley Richardson Hemingway 1891-1979. (Photo: JFK Library.)

Nancy Horan, best selling author of Loving Frank says,

“The Paris Wife is mesmerizing. Hadley Hemingway’s voice, lean and lyrical, kept me in my seat, unable to take my eyes and ears away from these young lovers.Paula McLain is a first rate writer who creates a world you don’t want to leave. I loved this book.”

Here’s hoping that Paula McLain, who received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has already written another novel, as well as collections of poetry, will take on the research it would take to look into the lives of  Hemingway’s other three wives and tell their stories. Just think of the uniqueness of a  collection like that, if she should do so. I know that I’d be reading all of them.

I highly recommend this novel The Paris Wife. We have already sold over a dozen copies even though the book has only been at Lemuria for a week or so. Nationally, The Paris Wife is also doing well. I am sure that I will chose it for our book club “Atlantis” as one of the future selections.

The Paris Wife by Paul Mclain (Random House/Ballantine, 2011)

A Moveable Feast is a collection of essays concerning the years of 1921-26 when Hemingway was in Paris with Hadley. Published posthumously, the 1964 first edition of A Moveable Feast opens with this memorable quotation:

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

-Ernest Hemingway, to a friend, 1950

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1964)

See Lisa’s blog on the 2009 edition of A Moveable Feast.

See Norma’s blog on her Unexpected Trip to Hemingway’s Key West Home

-Nan

by Kelly Pickerill

I’ve found myself unmotivated to read lately, and I think it’s because I haven’t come across a book I wanted to dive into head first. I sped through Etgar Keret’s collection of short stories, The Nimrod Flipout, a few weeks ago, and it was good, but short stories don’t keep my reading fortified like novels do.

The annoying thing about coming up book-dry is that it often happens when my reading’s the most voracious. Before I fully realized there wasn’t a book that was calling my name, I sort of saw it coming. I was reading one book, and before I got through it I had picked up and begun three or four others, searching more and more desperately for the next one that would grab me.

Before I knew it, the only book I wanted to read was the Bible. Not that that’s a bad thing; I made it a goal this year to read it all the way through since I never have before. But when you are a reader, and have the itch to read, and feel the pull by the Good Book only, the itch starts to become an irritation.

So I took home a copy of T. C. Boyle’s new book this week because we have signed firsts, and it sat in my Lemuria bag till last night, when I decided that something had to be done about this — let’s call it what it is — book slump. I felt like I wasn’t a reader anymore, and there’s only so much internet reading I can do before I begin to feel my brain is dangerously close to melting.

When I read a description of When the Killing’s Done (from Boyle’s website), “The novel takes up some of the environmental themes of earlier novels,” and that the inspiration for the novel was “a rather testy turf war fought between animal rights activists and the biologists of the National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy over the elimination of non-native species of plants and animals,” I cringed — not another “issues” novel. But y’all, it did what many books before it couldn’t; as I began reading, each word pulled me to the next, and then paragraphs, and pages, and now I’m forty pages in! The story and characters are great, but what I really love is Boyle’s writing style. His sentences approach run-on, but they’re the sort that you lose yourself in, until you realize that you’re not making yourself read this book simply because you have to uphold your “reader image.” You love it! And it loves you back. That’s requited book love.

Sometimes, despite our best efforts, books just fall through the cracks. I suppose the sheer volume of books that pass through our hands makes this inevitable, but it’s never too late to make amends — so that’s what I’m doing now.

When The Best of Zane Grey was released in May of last year, we ordered a copy, and it got swallowed up on the shelf, as happens to books sometimes (even good books). It wasn’t until December that we sold it. When the replacement copy came in, I saw the great cover and stopped to flip through it.

Immediately, I thought it’d be a great book to talk about here, especially with Christmas coming up. Then I put it out on the shelf, forgot about it, and didn’t remember I wanted to blog about it till it sold and the next copy came in. By then, I had a couple other things I was planning to write about, and it got pushed down the list of priorities again.

Fortunately, the book was brought to my attention again, and I’m glad to (finally) share it with you. Zane Grey (born with one of the all-time great “A Boy Named Sue” names — Pearl Zane Grey) was one of the first (and one of the greatest) American Western writers. It’s too bad that Zane Grey didn’t live to see modern publishing — his early life seems tailor-made for the back flap of a dust jacket, with the now-ubiquitous practice of listing every bizarre job or failed career move in the author bio. Grey worked as a movie-theater usher, played minor league baseball, practiced dentistry, and spent a great amount of time away from home fishing and consorting with mistresses.

He even has a great rejection story. Harper had rejected Grey’s first three novels, and when he met with Harper’s editor Ripley Hitchcock after submitting his fourth novel, Hitchcock told him, “I do not see anything in this to convince me you can write either narrative or fiction.” This fourth novel (The Last of the Plainsman) was finally published by a sporting magazine, with the understanding that Grey would receive no payment at all unless the book sold well enough to require a second printing. Of course, history has vindicated Zane Grey as an immensely popular author as well as a pioneer in the Western genre.

This new collection from Trafalgar Square brings together three of Grey’s later novels: Riders of the Purple Sage, The Trail Driver, and Rangers of the Lone Star.  I think this is an excellent introduction to one of the original Western writers who popularized the genre and paved the way for Louis L’Amour, Larry McMurtry, and Cormac McCarthy’s great Western novels.

The Best of Zane Grey (Trafalgar Square, 2010)

All of the above can be found in Joanne Harris’s novel Five Quarters of the Orange. You may not recognize the name Joanne Harris, but you know her work.  She wrote the novel that the sweet little movie Chocolat (starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp) is based on. I don’t know about you, but I adore that movie (especially the Johnny Depp moments), so when Ellen recommended Five Quarters of the Orange to me, it was just extra incentive to read something by Joanne Harris.

Five Quarters of the Orange is set in German-occupied France, specifically in a small village called Les Laveuses near the city of Angers in the Loire valley. Harris’s narrator and main character Framboise narrates the story of both her present life (she’s now 50 and just moving back to Les Laveuses) and the tragic event that occurred in her village during WWII when she was only 9 years old.  I don’t want to give away the story, but I will say that part of what makes this novel so wonderful is Harris’s ability to blend this tragic tale of war, German occupation, and a mother’s mental illness with beautiful (and kind of sensual) descriptions of the French countryside, farm life, and mouthwatering French recipes.

Here’s an example of a particularly wonderful recipe for cherry liqueur.  It’s given near the beginning of the novel, and it stuck with me all the way through.  I also started craving some cherry liqueur…

The secret is to leave the stones in. Layer cherries and sugar one on the other in a widemouthed glass jar, covering each layer gradually with clear spirit (kirsch is best, but you can use vodka or even Armagnac) up to half the jar’s capacity. Top up with spirit and wait. Every month, turn the jar carefully to release any accumulated sugar. In three years’ time the spirit has bled the cherries white, itself stained deep red now, penetrating even to the stone and the tiny almond inside it, becoming pungent, evocative, a scent of autumn past. Serve in tiny liqueur glasses, with a spoon to scoop out the cherry, and leave it in the mouth until the macerated fruit dissolves under the tongue. Pierce the stone with the point of a tooth to release the liqueur trapped inside and leave it for a long time in the mouth, playing it with the tip of the tongue, rolling it under, over, like a single prayer bead. Try to the remember the time of its ripening, that summer, that hot autumn, the time the well ran dry, the time we had the wasps’ nests, time past, lost, found again in the hard place at the heart of the fruit…

(pg. 9)

See what I mean when I say that the writing is a bit sensual? The recipes, for the most part, come from the diary that Framboise’s mother kept as she was going mad.  Seemingly meaningless notes are scribbled between lines of recipes which Framboise works to decode.

As for the dark secret bit, you’re just going to have to read the book to find out about that…because I’m not telling.

P.S. For those of you who read my last blog about my New Year’s resolution to read fifty books this year, I’m actually ahead of myself.  It’s only January 22, and I’ve already read six books.  So far, so good!  -Kaycie

Death of the Adversary: A Novel by Hans Keilson

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

Francine Prose wrote a compelling review back in August in the New York Times Book Review about two novels by the author Hans Keilson. His two books and Death of the Adversary and Comedy in a Minor Key were written about life prior to and during WWII and received accolades in 1959 when Death of the Adversary was published.

Translated into English in 1962 (Orion Press, NY) and first published in 2010 for the American public, Death of the Adversary is a psychological tour de force. Death is the story of a young boy growing up in the 1930s, a young boy uncannily sensitive to the psychological, political, cultural, personal atmosphere looming about him.

He is particularly aware of an unseen force, or rather menace, whose sting he intuits in conversations between his loving mother and father and later in schoolmates and friends. He tries to understand the fear growing around him, tries to integrate it into his worldview with rationalizations inept to the ever consuming power of the threat. The threat is real and it is unnamed in the book. Some of his friends speak of a presence they admire and ultimately proffer their allegiance and souls. We realize the threat is Hitler and Nazism.

So how does a young boy or anyone for that matter digest the ambivalence emanating from his German/Danish culture and come to terms with something that steals his early hope for stability and security to prosper and flourish, that steals hope itself? This is a “psychological fable (see blurb on back of paperback) of enormous proportions showing how the mind can’t see beyond it own limitations, its own experience but at a much deeper, non-thinking level feel the agonizing, irreconcilable horror of something so evil as unknown or unknowable, admired by despised.

Who can better write of such things than this author who became a psychoanalyst treating children traumatized by war? Not only an an articulate author and psycholanalyst, Keilson was hidden during WWII and eventually became a member of the Dutch resistance. The questions he eloquently asks in this book would make a lively discussion for a book group. Many WWII books have been published recently and this should be one of the first we read. Then I would suggest Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas, The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer, and Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand.

Read more about Bonhoeffer here and The Invisible Bridge here.

-Pat