Reading Diary
NBCC member Heller McAlpin recently spent a week in the Adirondacks away from the internet, and here's a page from her reading diary:
Literary: Irene Nemirovsky's gorgeous, heartbreaking "Suite Francaise" in English and then French (pictured to the left). The Tolystoyan first part reminds me of Francine du Plessix Gray's chapter in "Them" describing her escape from Paris with her mother. I wonder whether the American edition would have splashed her picture on the cover like the French one had she looked less Semitic and more like Marisha Pessl? Flaubertian echoes in Book 2 are striking; her Parisians feel modern, but her provincial French villagers seem quaintly nineteenth century.
Informational: a bound edition of Harper's New Monthly magazine, dated July 1885, yields an article about Ampersand Pond, "the wildest and most beautiful of all the Adirondack waters." The unnamed writer noted, "On its shore, some five-and-twenty years ago, the now almost forgotten Adirondack Club had their shanty -- the successor of the Philosophers' Camp at Follensbee Pond." The section on Emerson's philosophers' camp in William Chapman White's "Adirondack Country" (1954) is a near-solid block of yellow, telltale signs of my grandfather-in-law, dead for 20 years, who never read without a hi-liter in hand.
"Wildflowers of New York in Color" reveals that what I thought might be an out-of-season wild strawberry blossom is actually a wood anemone. I make lists of confirmed floral sightings and, while I'm at it, a wish-list, including Buttonbush and Mocassin flower. After poring through several mushroom guides, I'm less confident about the identity of the fungi I've harvested, and recall the denouement of Elinor Lipman's "The Inn at Lake Devine" as well as a placard at the new Natural History Museum of the Adirondacks' Wild Center: "All mushrooms are edible, though there are some you only eat once."
Juvenile: Reading to my little nephews, G. Warren Schloat, Jr.'s "Playtime for You" (1950) evokes a June Cleaver world where Mother stayed home and did housework while kids kept busy with art projects. My favorite: "Ice the Cake: Some day mother will bake cup cakes. She will let you ice them." My nephews are not as sociologically entranced as I.
-- Heller McAlpin
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posted by Critical Mass 4:37:00 PM
5 Comments:
Do your nephews prefer them in plastic packets from the supermarket?
Actually, my nephews have probably never had cupcakes as we know them. Their parents make them treats like pumpkin bars with organic spelt flour, sweetened with maple syrup rather than sugar. It's the corny simplicity of Schloat's book that failed to amuse them, not the prospect of icing cupcakes. Another choice passage: "How to Make a Place Mat: This is called a paper place mat because you PLACE things on the MAT."
Regarding the photo of Irene Nemirovsky--I loved Suite Francaise so much that I might have to find that edition--I cannot read French--lovingly remove the jacket, and frame it. Pessl's looks and her book's popularity may fade, but Nemirovsky's work will endure. Looking into those intelligent eyes, one wonders how many wonderful books died with her, unwritten.
Heller, I don't like corny simplicity either, but neither do I subscribe to the the green religion (or any religion, for that matter), despite my organic garden. Your second example - the placemats - give a clearer picture of the book.
Considering that Nemirovsky published 9 books in the same decade that she gave birth to her 2 daughters--many of which have now been re-released in French-- and penned the first 2 parts of Suite Francaise under what had to have been horrendous stress, it's fairly safe to say that many many wonderful books died with her. I wonder, too, how much she might have revised the first two books once she wrote her way to the end of her project, though her prolific speed and elaborate notes suggest that she probably wasn't a big reviser.
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