There were many wonderful books in the store this Spring and Summer and I always wish for time enough to attack more of them, but life has many conspiratorial ways of interfering so I will share some brief thoughts on some of the best of what I did get to read.
"The rhythmical unit of the syllable is at the back of all of it-- the word, the phrase,the sentence, the syntax, the paragraph, and the way the heart moves when you read it."
She is a marvel.
The prolific English poet and novelist, Helen Dunmore, died this Spring. She was 64, and gifted in many ways. Her final novel, Birdcage Walk, was published this month. Dunmore frequently wrote of common people caught in the wake of history's tidal surges, and the new book is set in England at the time of the French Revolution. It is a shattering love story, and a book of the perils of ambition, of family, and of seeking a firmer footing in an uncertain world. Dunmore was unaware of her illness as she was writing the book, but as she remarks in the afterword, her subconscious must have sensed itThe question of what is left behind by a life haunts the novel. While I finished and edited it I was already seriously ill, but not yet aware of this. I suppose that a writer's creative self must have access to knowledge of which the conscious mind and the emotions are still ignorant, and that a novel written at such a time, under such a growing shadow, cannot help being full of sharper light, rather as a landscape becomes brilliantly distinct in the last sunlight before a storm.
I still think often of her early novel, Talking To the Dead. She will be missed by many. The Guardian published a haunting poem she completed a week before she died (You can read it HERE)
There has been much coverage in late Summer commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Indian Partition. The issues of the partition remain volatile and many contemporary writers from the sub-continent are both frustrated and fearful for the future of both India and Pakistan (Their opinions can be found HERE). No writer is more passionate than Arundhati Roy, whose second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, is a fascinating glimpse into an often overlooked, but valued group in Indian life, the transsexual community. Roy combines this touching story with excoriating chapters on the miscalculations and assassinations and murders that have plagued life in the two countries. Roy exploded onto the literary scene in 1997 with her first novel, The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize. Then she backed away from writing fiction and focused her heart and pen on numerous causes, frequently focusing on human rights in India. When she turned back to fiction for this lyrical, broad canvas of life in India's present, her passions and anger drove large sections of the story. The book is complicated, but well worth the effort to reconnect with this distinctive voice (You can read a detailed dissection of the book by Francine Prose HERE). 
Penelope Lively is 84 years old. Her 1987 Booker Prize winner, Moon Tiger, is a personal favorite. (You can read a fun piece about its history HERE) Until this May she had not published a short story collection in 27 years. Lively's The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories covers the deep contours of woman's lives during many stages. It is a superb collection. Like Alice Munro as she aged, Lively writes with deep understanding and compassion about the struggles inherent in late-middle age (and beyond), but retains a sharp ear for the dialogue and thoughts of young women as well. In an interview recently she marveled at finding these tangy, brief stories one by one, and relishing writing in the short story form again. Ever the realist, when asked in the interview if more were coming, she said simply, "None." (You can hear the interview HERE). In one of my favorite stories, "License to Kill", all of 12 pages long, Lively creates a girl of 18 and her charge, a woman over 80 on a shopping excursion. What starts with awkward silences and generalities evolves into a deeply surprising dialogue which opens a door for the young woman that we pray will stay open. Both voices seem absolutely accurate, and the story's end is a tiny miracle.
I turned 20 in the summer of 1968. By the time of my birthday Lyndon Johnson had announced he was not going to run for a second term as President, done in by the bog of Vietnam, Martin Luther King had been assassinated in April with much fury following, and in early June Robert Kennedy was assassinated having just won the California Primary, a natural stepping stone to the Presidential nomination in July, which was won (?) instead by Hubert Humphrey. It was an extraordinarily intense time in America. The dark year had begun in late January with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and most particularly within that offensive (at least for Americans),with the capture of the ancient city of Hue, and the vicious fight to recapture it. The battle for Hue has been mesmerizingly brought to life by Mark Bowden (Black Hawk Down) using personal reminiscence from all sides in the fight and newly available detailed reports of the days of the battle. Hue 1968 is destined to become a classic in the deep trove of great writing about that war. Hue shattered forever the myth of the invincibility of American forces in Vietnam, and destroyed the Pentagon's ability to control the narrative of its efforts. In essence, after Hue, there was no going back to trying to win the war and the American public turned against it in ever growing numbers. After Tet, even Walter Cronkite, the nations TV-news grandfather, publicly turned against the war and the lying. This is history told at its best, and is a story that insists be remembered.
As the war in Vietnam was shuddering to its bitter conclusion and Nixon was about to face the harsh music and resign (August 8, 1974), the New Yorker published the first story of a young woman named Ann Beattie. In 1974 America's youngish and upwardly mobile readers of magazines had ceased to wonder about the exhausting political world, and begun to wonder more about, themselves. Beattie became a principal chronicler of her generation (which is, I admit, also mine). In story after story her uncanny dialog (so authentic it seemed overheard) and sharp eye for the telling detail of clothing or possessions allowed us to laugh at ourselves, wince at the pretensions, and best of all, see ourselves with greater clarity. Forty years on she is still doing it. And doing it well. Her new collection, The Accomplished Guest, skewers familiar types, now in late Middle Age. ( You can hear her talk about it HERE.) Always smart and funny, and sometimes harrowing, this is a terrific collection from one of our masters of the short-form.
If you have never read Ann Beattie, here is the end of one of her most anthologized stories, "Janus". (Read the entire story HERE). In the story a woman who sells real estate moves a beautiful bowl she owns to every house she tries to sell, as a talisman. She is also in an unsatisfying affair.
" Her lover had said that she was always too slow to know what she really loved. Why continue with her life the way it was? Why be two-faced he asked her. He had made the first move toward her, when she would not decide in his favor, would not change her life and come to him, he asked her what made her think she could have it both ways. And then he made the last move and left. It was a decision meant to break her will, to shatter her intransigent ideas about honoring previous commitments.
Time passed. Alone in the living room at night, she often looked at the bow sitting on the table, still and safe, unilluminated. In its way, it was perfect: the world cut in half, deep and smoothly empty. Near the rim, even in dim light, the eye moved toward one small flash of blue, a vanishing point on the horizon."
Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015. She is a Russian historian who was known here principally for her oral history of the Chernobyl disaster. Much of her work had gone out of print in this country. Because of the attention of the Prize her recent book, Secondhand Time, about the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the rise of Putin was published in English in 2016. It tells a a profoundly human tale of many individual lives during the period through Alexievich's brilliant use of oral history and her shaping of people's stories. She is a patient and encouraging listener and a firm believer in the potency of every life. She puts a painfully human face on recent Russian life and collective memory. It is a remarkable book.
This summer Alexievich brought out a new edition of her 1985 book, The Unwomanly Face of War. It is equally powerful, and perhaps even more important. It is an oral history of the 1 million Soviet women who fought during World War II.
Their stories are moving, funny, angry, confused, full of longing, fear that they have lost their femininity... any emotion you can imagine, these women experienced. The new edition features a long new introduction by Alexievich (you can read part of it HERE) and much new interview material that she painstakingly collected from this disappearing generation of voices. It is translated by the acknowledged stars of Russian translation, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Taken together these two books stand as an understated monument to the value of human life anywhere. They are essential.
In the introduction to The Unwomanly Face of War, Alexievich shares her way of "seeing" history and why she believes it matters,
I write not about war, but about human beings in a war. I write not the history of a war, but the history of feelings. I am a historian of feelings. On the one hand I examine specific human beings, living in a specific time and taking part in specific events, and on the other hand I have to discern the eternally human in them. The tremor of eternity. That which is in human beings at all time......I build temples out of our feelings.... Out of our desires, our disappointments. Dreams. Out of that which was, but might slip away.
And finally, here are two books that will be in the store in early autumn. They are two of what promises to be a rich season of reading with new novels by Louise Erdrich, Jennifer Egan, Nathan Englander, Jeffrey Eugenides, Celeste Ng and Jesmyn Ward, a new memoir from Adam Gopnik, a powerful new look at Putin and the new Totalitarianism by Masha Gessen, Harvard lectures by Toni Morrison, John McPhee on writing, a new John Le Carre that revisits George Smiley, Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Obama Years, Hillary Clinton on the 2016 election, and much much more.
The Hogarth Shakespeare Project asked 8 contemporary novelists, Margaret Atwood, AnneTyler, Jeanette Winterson and Jo Nesbo among others, to re-imagine plays of Shakespeare in our time and in the novel form. It has been a worthy and fascinating experiment, and one of the best in the series comes next month.
Edward St Aubyn has spent his career crafting novels about fighting to survive catastrophic family dysfunction (usually his own) in his five Patrick Melrose novels. So who better to take on Shakespeare's King Lear, the most dysfunctional family in literature (sorry, all you Greek geeks).
Dunbar (the book's title) is the patriarch of a contemporary family of media moguls bearing a strong resemblance to the Rupert Murdoch clan except with daughters rather than sons. Two of the daughters think dad is losing it, and the third (the stand in for Cordelia) is already out of the will in this version, and heart-brokenly estranged from her father. Shakespeare's Lear moves with terrifying speed towards its aching conclusion, and were it not so long, really should be done on stage without an intermission. St Aubyn achieves the same sense of dizzying dread. His subtle shifts in story and tone are utterly plausible, and you rip through the pages despite knowing little good could be in store for anyone. It is deft and ferocious and a cautionary tale for our times, alas.
The other book shares a strong focus on a family and a dark view of our present state. Salman Rushdie's new novel, Golden House, is a myth, a fable, and a nightmare about an immigrant family and life in these United States through the Obama Years which then leads to our present moment. It is his best book in years.
Filled with sharp insights into both personality and culture, the book is typical of Rushdie in its verbal dexterity and playfulness, its shifting tones and perspectives, and because the story is told us by a aspiring filmmaker,it is loaded with deliciously apt film references. But the book carries tremendous weight of responsibility as it progresses. Much of the responsibility is ours: Rushdie holds a mirror up to American life and insists we view the country we have become. In a recent review of the book Alex Clark states, "If you want to know the truth of a family, send in a stranger."
(read the whole review HERE).
That is true for this terrific book on many levels
And.....one last treat. Hillary Mantel, whose final installment in her magnificent Cromwell Trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, may not land next summer, has written a thoughtful essay on the continuing potency and growing myth of Princess Diana, and it is well worth a read. (You can get it HERE).
