The face of Kevin, from Lionel Shriver's 'We Need to Talk About Kevin,' as reconstructed by a law enforcement composite sketch software.

You must excuse my absence on these pages in the last several weeks; I’m afraid I’ve been very busy with grad school applications and the hours of document tinkering and running around for various letters and documents they imply. I’m all done, now, so all I can do is look away and let other people decide my future for me—and, in the meantime, blog a little.

The other day I came across a mention in The Guardian of a very interesting project: writer Brian Joseph Davis has started a tumblr page on which he posts mug shots of literary characters he created with a police composite sketch software. The project is called The Composites.  The idea is great—so great, it’s almost a surprise no one has done this before—and the result is often fascinating. There’s a innocent-eyed, slightly pouting Tess from Tess of the d’Urbervilles; a cocky Humbert who stares right at you; an angry, worn-out Madame Bovary; and a grim-looking Mr. Rochester with a great set of whiskers. While the results aren’t always splendid, the faces are infinitely more fascinating than movie representations of these characters because they’re based purely on authorial descriptions; you can’t guess a well-known actor’s face underneath the features. 

The creator of the site invites viewers to send in the descriptions of characters they’d like to see. Some, sadly, are impossible to do, such as Holden Caulfied, whose only description in The Catcher in the Rye mentions “a new crew cut.” Are there any characters you’d like to see an image of?

In this age of proliferation for both literary prizes and book reviews, it was only a matter of time before a prize would be awarded to the best book reviews of the year. This prize now exists: created by the website Omnivore.com, which recycles culture reviews from newspaper and magazine websites, The Hatchet Job of the Year Award is meant to celebrate “the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the past twelve months”. The idea is that, with the decline of newspaper readership in favor of tweets, blogs, and reader reviews on sites like Amazon, the very important job of the true book critic must be honored in some way. The need to praise real, thought-out book reviewing is especially important since newspapers have begun to imitate the web-model themselves in recent years by publishing short, hip book reviews that are more like blurbs or ads than actual content. The truth is, newspapers and magazine should continue offering with pride what anyone with access to the internet can’t do: professional, objective reviews that evaluate books thoroughly, put them into context, and draw comparisons with others works. Because they have the resources, newspapers can provide this kind of in-depth analysis for every review they publish. Then, it’s the reviewers job to keep the standards high and offer something more than a plot summary and a bit of recycled pros and cons. Maybe this prize will help book critics achieve the recognition they deserve

I am becoming increasingly aware of the difference between run of the mill reviews and in-depth, meaty analyses. Often, really good reviews won’t even tell you if the book is bad or good. True reviews are not only there to tell if you should buy the book or not; they’re supposed to draw in material from the outside to help understand how specific books are to be appraised, and then pick at the smallest details to assess their intrinsic qualities. A good example are the amazing pieces over at the New York Review of Books. These are lengthy, in-depth reviews of books that are really essays about the books and the authors who wrote them. Recent excellent examples are the review of Joan Didion’s latest memoir Blue Nights and the phenomenal essay Julian Barnes wrote on Joyce Carol Oates’ own memoir A Widow’s Story.

It’s unfair, however, to say that you can’t get good content on social media. Sometimes, they do provide close contact with really brilliant literary thinkers. I’m thinking of people like Charles May, who, for quite some time now (by internet standards), has been producing consistently  insightful work on his blog, Reading the Short Story. May is an academic who has specialized on the form of the short story; his blog is a collection of his thoughts about books, reviews of contemporary and older short stories, and responses to comments and questions about the form. It’s a very interesting project, and a trustworthy source about authors and books who are worth reading; nowhere else on the internet will you find a lengthy review of a single short story by Alice Munro. 

Among the nominees for the Hatchet Job of the Year (see the shortlist here) are the wonderful classicist Mary Beard, for a Guardian review of Rome, by Robert Hughes, in which she spotted dozens of unacceptable and frustrating mistakes in the chapters about the city’s ancient history (high school level stuff, like confusing CE and BCE, apparently). Mary Beard has declared on her blog that she is not expecting to win the prize. For her, the review she wrote on Hughe’s book was simply part of her job. Reviewers, she writes, should act as “gate-keepers”, lest a book’s success depend entirely on “the size of its publicity budget and the enthusiasm of its publishers’ tweets”. In fact, Mary Beard is a little bit alarmed, because she fears that her review of the book may have been lauded above all others because these other reviewers may have either omitted to mention the erroneous material, or else failed to see it entirely—two “ghastly” prospects. Words of wisdom from a truly admirable woman (as a side note, I saw Mary Beard host the “ancient booker” event at the Cheltenham literary festival last year—she was great). If she wins, she will have gotten herself a year’s supply of potted shrimp. 

The original, 1937 cover for Of Mice and Men

I write “return” with a degree of critical care. Did the novella ever leave? If yes, why had it gone? Or maybe it was never really big at all, and therefore isn’t making a return so much as a début. All of this is unclear to me. But what has become definitely apparent is that there’s been a recent surge in interest for novellas. The form is infamously tricky to define, of course. A novella is supposed to be book-length, because it can be published on its own, but not quite novel-length. But then, does the novella exist at all? Maybe it’s just a long short story, or else a short novel. In terms of content and form — this has nothing to do with length — I have certainly found this true on some occasions. Some novellas, like Ethel Wilson’s “Tuesday and Wednesday” and “Lily’s Story,” which are collected in her Equations of Love, feel like short stories that have been inflated. In terms of emotional resonance and narrative breadth, they remain, well, a little short. Other novellas, like James’ The Aspern Papers, are much shorter than novels, but pack the punch of longer, more ambitious works.

Some clues as to the return of the novella:

To begin with, there was Julian Barnes’ first Booker victory in October with The Sense of and Ending, which was the shortest book on the shortlist, and has been called a novella by some. Also, last year, the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris inaugurated the Paris Literary Prize to celebrate the novella, which is awarded to a work of fiction between 20,000 and 30,000 words. And let’s remember how much ink was spilled a few years ago about Robert Bolano’s posthumous masterpiece 2666, which is really 5 interlinked novellas. Also, the American short story genius Jim Shepard’s most recent collection, You Think That’s Bad, contained a novella titled “Gojira, King of the Monsters”, which was also published separately as a stand-alone book. As for publishing houses, Penguin has of course recently had a lot of success with elegant collections of short books: Penguin Great Ideas, Penguin English Journeys, Penguin Great Loves… Last year, they came out with Mini Modern Classics, 50 short pieces of fiction, published as their own, lovely little books, to celebrate 50 years of Penguin Classics. What’s great about the selection is that the editors have generally chosen little-known stories; letting them stand on their own gives them some well-deserved visibility. To be fair, a lot of the stories that make up the books in the series are actually short stories, not novellas. Moreover, from what I can see most of the volumes collect more than one story. Borges’ The Widow Ching—Pirate, for instance, also includes 5 other stories from the Argentine master. The design for the collection is very nice, playing off the silver, black, and white of the traditional Penguin Modern Classics, with much bigger author pictures on the back covers. Penguin has also released 5 production videos for the series: they’re great fun to watch.

More directly novella-related, perhaps, Melville House, which is becoming increasingly renowned for great books and great designs, has published a collection of books called The Art of the Novella, featuring, among many others, Jacob’s Room, by Virginia Woolf, The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville, and 5 different stories entitled The Duel (by Casanova, Checkhov, Conrad, von Kleist, and Kuprin). The whole series is a great idea, and is perfectly executed: the choice is varied and classic, and the designs are remarkably simple and fresh. Their selection is sometimes a little wobbly in terms of form, however: I’m not entirely sure The Hounds of the Baskerville, for instance, is usually considered to be a novella, but that’s another story…

All this attention on novellas is wonderful; for one thing, novellas are awesome. They’re short enough to be read in a few sittings and to be quite focused aesthetically, but they’re also long enough that they have the time to creep into the brain of the reader; they cut out their own space and demand that their issues be addressed. I have a short-standing theory that the act of reading happens en deux temps. Maybe this only happens to me, but I feel like I always need a short period of adaptation when I start reading a book, not really to get used to the characters and the setting so much as to adjust my reader’s ear to the rhythm of the writer’s voice and the linguistic rules of the book’s universe. I believe this is why I can’t immerse myself completely in a book and read long swaths of it in one sitting until I’ve passed a certain point (sometimes this point comes early, sometimes later, never after the midway point) — then all is well and I can drive on to the end, perfectly attuned to the story’s music. The advantage with novellas is that they’re so short and well-formed that even a reading en deux temps can occur quickly. You can begin with two or three short sittings to start immersing yourself in the world of the story bit by bit, like a swimmer gradually dipping his limbs deeper and deeper in cold water, and then finish off the rest of the story in a single, smooth dive. The novella invites you to do all of that in one day, or even a few hours. Ideally, I would suggest leaving a night’s sleep in the middle to allow the shift to occur and finish the novella the next day — it makes the experience last longer. 

Long-winded, baggy novels are great, but I have a particular fondness for the tight focus of short books. Among my favorite novellas are Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Alice Munro’s ”A Queer Streak”, Mann’s Death in Venice, James Joyce’s “The Dead”, Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, Henry James’ ”The Lesson of the Master”, Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Disinherited”, Maupassant’s Boule de Suif, and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. Some of these straddle the line with the short story or the novel, but the long and short of it is that they’re just the right length. Plus, they’re all exquisite and quick to revisit. Between lengthy dinners and short shopping sprees, why don’t we all dip into a novella for the Holidays? Happy reading!

The theme of the Salon du Livre de Montréal this year was: "The Book, time traveling machine."

Last week was held one of the most important events of the year for Montreal’s book industry: the Salon du Livre de Montréal. It’s a yearly book fair that joins together dozens of publishing houses, hundreds of writers, and thousands of visitors. Last Thursday, G. and I decided to take a break from essay-writing and grad school applications to go take a look at what the Salon had to offer this year. We were looking forward to a book-signing session with French writer Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt — a favorite of ours. Schmitt is a prolific writer of plays, short stories, and novels. He is most famous for a short philosophical novel, Oscar et la dame rose (Oscar and the Lady in Pink), and his masterpiece La Part de l’autre (which, as far as I can tell, has unfortunately not yet been translated into English), a work of counterfactual history that retells the story of Hitler’s life if he had been accepted into the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts (and therefore not become the Hitler we know) in parallel with the actual events of his life. 

We went over to Mr Schmitt’s stall and chose what book’s we’d buy to get signed by the author. G. chose Ulysses from Baghdad, and contemporary retelling of the Odyssey, and I went for one of Schmitt’s autobiographical works on music called Ma vie avec Mozart (My life with Mozart), which comes with its own CD! I was immediately won over by its lyric opening:

He is the one who started our correspondence.

One day, during my fifteenth year, he sent me a music. It modified my life. Better: it kept me alive. Without it, I would be dead. 

Ever since, I write him often, little notes scribbled on a table corner during the elaboration of a book, or long missives composed at night while a sky without stars hangs above the orange-hued city. 

When he feels like it, he answers, during a concert, in an airport lounge, at a street corner, always surprising, always dazzling. 

Books signed, we spent the rest of our time at the Salon going around the different publishers’ stalls, trying to resist the temptation of so many great titles, and happy to see that a lot of people are still into books and reading! The section for young readers, in particular, is absolutely enormous — proof of the amazing diversity of books now offered to the YA readership. At Leméac (one of my favorite French publishers), G. helped me find a rare copy of Jacques Poulin’s first novel Mon cheval pour un royaume (My Horse for a Kingdom) and Conversations avec un ami (Conversations With a Friend), a series of interviews with the master bibliophile Alberto Manguel. While we were waiting to pay for our books, G. and I turned around and realized we were standing a few feet away from Michel Tremblay, Québec’s most celebrated playwright. We mustered our courage and went over for a little congratulatory chat. He turned out to be extremely friendly. I mentioned to him that I’d seen an excellent production of his play Albertine en cinq temps (Albertine in Five Times) played in English at McGill’s TNC theatre a few weeks ago and he even expressed his dissapointment at not having been invited to see it! G. also mentioned to him that we’d been surprised to find a copy of one of his books in a bookshop in Dublin last Spring. 

Surprise! A copy of one of Michel Tremblay's books we found in a Dublin bookstore last Spring.

We left the Salon joyful and relaxed and went to discuss books and authors we loved over dessert and a glass of porto in a nearby restaurant. A well deserved evening of fun in the cold November darkness. 

As you may have guessed by now, I love to compare covers of the same book that appear in different places, or else over the course of different editions. Sometimes these comparisons can be very funny because of the wide disparity between covers for the same book — so much so that at times you wonder if the covers belong to the same book at all. The publication of Michael Ondaatje’s new novel The Cat’s Table at the end of the summer has given me am opportunity to compare and contrast the book’s covers in the UK, the US, and Canada. This particular book caught my attention for a comparative study because, unlike what is sometimes seen, all three covers feature the same elements — namely a large boat at sea — but interpret the subject in slightly different ways. 

I’ll start with the US edition, published by Knopf, whose cover caps this post. The image used on the cover, in shades of coal-grey and black, has a nostalgic quality to it. It looks like a grainy, poorly developed black and white photograph. The dreamy effect is hightened by the tight framing of the image on the very front of the boat. I quite like it, although if anything maybe the white border at the top and bottom where the text appears makes it a little bit too serious. 

The Canadian edition, published by McClelland and Steward, has a similarly quirkiness to it, created by the slanting of the photo of the boat. The picture is also taken from a much greater distance, and the entirety of the boat and a swath of grey sea is revealed. A sense of age and nostalgia is signified by the sepia tint, the washed out clouds, and the classic border. The effect of the entire composition is much more conservative and toned down (and even, dare I say, boring) than the US cover, despite the bolder font and use of some color. 

As for the British cover, published by Jonathan Cape, the subject is, again, a boat, but it is treated much more boldly by a cartoonish image — it could be right out of a Tintin album — in tones of white, black, and yellow against a dark sky. The main boat is also flanked by two tug boats, rendered in darker shades, one of which stands at the forefront of the image. Like in the US cover the boat is facing and sailing towards the viewer, which makes the illustration much less static. Moreover the energetic imagery and block-lettered, shadowed font used for the title makes this cover eye-catching and interesting to look at. Both the subject and the aesthetics remind me of the cover for Tagore’s Nationalism, published in the trove of beautiful book covers that is the Penguin Great Ideas series. 

I haven’t read The Cat’s Table so I can’t say if the cover respects the content of the novel (although it looks promising since I know the action takes place on a boat), but I wonder how efficient these covers as stand-alone works of commercial art? I would argue that I find the UK cover more interesting than the others, but do you think there is one that works better than the others aesthetically, or from a marketing standpoint? I’d love to know your thoughts…

And the winner is... Photo courtesy of telegraph.co.uk

The first few weeks of October are always an exciting time because of two very important announcements, which are made around this time every year: the laureate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the winner of the Man Booker Prize. While these two announcements are a big deal in the book world, and generate a lot of critical and journalistic content, there really is little reason for me to get that excited. Every year, I feel increasingly bored by the Booker’s shortlist, and while I’ve read a handful of past winners (sometimes, almost exclusively because they had won), I just don’t feel as compelled as I once did to read them, or even to go out and buy the most recent winner. It seems to me a lot of Booker-winning books end up loosing some resonance after some years. I mean, we still talk about some of the past winners like Margaret Atwood, John Banville, and Yann Martel; but what about Vernon God Little’s 2003-winner DBC Pierre (the shortlist that year included Oryx and Crake and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane) or Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (1995)? Not to mention the winners in the 70s and 80s, almost all of which I’ve never heard of. As for the Nobel, well, ever since I started getting excited for that prize, circa 2007, I’d never heard of the writers who won it before the announcement itself — and only after Doris Lessing’s victory did I go out and buy one of her books (it was The Cleft, I wasn’t disappointed). That says a lot either about the Swedish academy’s knack for picking obscure geniuses, or else my own ignorance of writers outside the popular circuits. Either way, it’s a known fact that there’s a disconnect between what authors people are reading and talking about (at least in the English-speaking world), and what authors the Swedish academy are reading and talking about — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. This year, the winner is the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, on the grounds that “through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality.” On the Nobel Prize’s website, they have house poll that asks you if you’ve read him or not. 82% of the people who answered the poll haven’t. Still, I’m quite happy with the win, especially because it’s apparently been expected for a long time. Every year journalists would go to Tranströmer’s apartment building on the morning of the announcement in case he won the Nobel the world’s biggest literary prize. The poet’s wife would bring them tea and biscuits. Every year, they left disappointed; someone else won the Nobel. This year, there efforts — and, more importantly, Tranströmer’s efforts — were rewarded. 

But back to the Booker, which is our main subject today. It’s become quite controversial this year, and it’s even spurred the creation of a new (as yet unfunded and unnamed) prize, in order to fill the gap left behind by the Booker’s interest in “readability,” the most loaded term in the book world these days, and the one this year’s panel has decided to put at the forefront of their judging criteria. The debate between literary and commercial fiction is hot stuff these days, but it must be remembered that the Booker Prize has always sought to recompense books somewhere between the high and mid-brow.

In this context, Julian Barnes’ victory for his short novel (more of a novella, really) The Sense of an Ending surprised and pleased many. Barnes — white, male, sixty-something, of the McEwan-Amis-Rushdie generation — represents the establishment in British letters, but also a bit of a black sheep on the grounds of his experimentalism with form and his continental outlook. Moreover, this was his fourth Booker in nomination, and critics seem to agree that his book was by far the best on the shortlist. So the literary seems to have won over readability in the end, whatever that means. 

An added bonus: I think The Sense of an Ending also has the most beautiful cover out of all the books on the Booker shortlist.

Although I’ve — shamefully — never read anything by Barnes myself, I must say I’m quite pleased with his victory. I’ve been interested in him from afar for some time, and I think he really is an important and extremely intelligent writer. His short story “Sleeping with John Updike”, published in The Guardian a couple of years ago, is very well done, and his 2000 Art of Fiction interview with The Paris Review, which has a lot to do with France and French Literature (Barnes is an inveterate francophile and one of the most popular British writers in France). I was also very much impressed by a masterful review Barnes wrote last year for Lydia Davis’ new translation of Madame Bovary (a book Barnes admires, and calls “the first great shopping and fucking novel”), in which he shows of his shrewdness as critic, translator, and essayist: 

So we might fantasise the translator of our dreams: someone, naturally, who admires the novel and its author, and who sympathises with its heroine; a woman, perhaps, to help us better navigate the sexual politics of the time; someone with excellent French and better English, perhaps with a little experience of translating in the opposite direction as well. Then we make a key decision: should this translator be ancient or modern? Flaubert’s contemporary, or ours? After a little thought, we might plump for an Englishwoman of Flaubert’s time, whose prose would inevitably be free of anachronism or other style-jarringness. And if she was of the time, then might we not reasonably imagine the author helping her? Let’s push it further: the translator not only knows the author, but lives in his house, able to observe his spoken as well as his written French. They might work side by side on the text for as long as it takes. And now let’s push it to the limit: the female English translator might become the Frenchman’s lover – they always say that the best way to learn a language is through pillow talk.

Barnes, obviously, is an astute thinker, a skillful writer, and a witty person. His Booker is well-deserved, and The Sense of an Ending will certainly end up with my name on it under the Christmas tree this year. Hopefully by then I’ll have picked up some of his other books. 

Mourir auprès de toi is a short stop animation film by Spike Jonze, featuring the felt book cover characters created by Olympia Le Tan.

First of all I have to excuse myself for not posting anything on the blog in the last couple of months. My life has become a little less hectic now so I should be able to write here more often. For the time being, I want to share a short film I found via the The New Yorker‘s Book Bench. The film is related to the blog in more than one way. Directed by Spike Jonze, it was created in collaboration with Olympia Le-Tan, who made the book-clutches I mentioned a few months back. The film, called Mourir auprès de toi (To Die By Your Side) is also set in the famous Shakespeare and Company bookshop, in Paris, which I’ve also blogged about. It features Le-Tan’s stitched book covers coming to life at night after the bookshop has closed, and an unlikely love story between the characters on two of the covers… Watch it here! 

P.S. A few weeks ago, G. came across this perfume ad for Lancôme’s impossibly named Trésor Midnight Rose, featuring Emma Watson (aka Hermione Granger). The entire video is awful, by the way, but we’re pretty sure the bookshop at the beginning, where Watson meets her beau, buys a copy of a fictitious book called Midnight Rose, and loses her hat, is also Shakespeare and Company. 

Cheers to xelgend.blogspot.com, where I found this awesome image!

Other than books and reading, one of my great interests is food. I like to eat, I like to cook, I like to watch cooking shows, learn how to cook new things, go to the restaurant, try new foods, and plan meals. It was only natural that, at some point, these two passions — reading, eating — would intersect. My literary-cum-culinary obsession has nothing to do with cookbooks or bibliophagy; rather, it’s an interest in food as described within books. I’m always intrigued, and sometimes fascinated, whenever food is mentioned in a novel or a story — even if only in passing — and I often feel a deep urge to taste whatever the food in question is.

Here’s an example. In the beginning of A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s memoirs of Paris in the 1920s, Hemingway goes to a café to write. He orders a plate of oysters and a glass of white wine. He describes eating “the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture.” This wonderful passage is the reason why I began eating oysters. Hemingway is great on food, by the way. Among my favorite of his culinary passages is the description of the rabbit cooked with onions and red wine in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and raw tuna Santiago eats while he’s out on his boat in The Old Man and the Sea: “He picked up a piece and put in his mouth and chewed it slowly. It was not unpleasant. Chew it well, he thought, and get all the juices. It would not be bad to eat with a little lime or with lemon or with salt.”

"Still Life with Oysters", by Gustabe Caillebotte (1881).

My interest in food description in books began when I read Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events as a child. In one of the books, I think it was The Ersatz Elevator, something called salmon puffs are featured during a reception. Salmon puffs. They weren’t described in detail and they weren’t important to the plot, and yet the very name made my mouth water for flaky, fishy goodness. I moved on from there, longing, in Tolkien, for the seed-cakes Bilbo “had baked that afternoon for his after-supper morsel” in The Hobbit, and for Lembas bread in The Lord of the Rings (who hasn’t), and of course for the rabbit stew Sam makes with the coneys Gollum brings him in the chapter entitled “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”. Strange, I know, but then a lot of literary fetichism is.

Now I can’t help but notice when food is described (or even just mentioned) in fiction. One of my favourite writers on food is Ian McEwan, who mentions food in his books in a consistently interesting way. In Atonement, there’s the roast and potatoes served at the country house in the first section of the novel, which the cook has to turn into cold cuts and salad because the weather is too warm; in On Chesil Beach, Edward and Florence spend their first evening as a married couple eating “a slice of melon decorated by a single glazed cherry (…), slices of long-ago roasted beef in thickened gravy, soft boiled vegetables, and potatoes of a bluish hue.” The novel takes place in 1962, and McEwan adds that “this was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine, but no one much minded at the time, except visitors from abroad.” I also love (and, in some ways, abhor) the last few pages of Solar, in which the obese main character, traveling to New Mexico, wolfs down a strange dish (an invention of McEwan’s) made up of “four wedges of skinless chicken breast, interleaved with three minute steaks, the whole wrapped in bacon, with a honey and cheese topping, and served with twice-roasted potatoes already impregnated with butter and cream cheese.” However, the McEwan food reference I prefer is in Saturday, in which the protagonist, Dr. Perowne, cooks up a memorable fish stew, lovingly described in all the details of its making: “He has now, he reckons, about two and a half litres of bright orange stock which he’ll cook for another five minutes. Just before dinner, he’ll reheat it, and simmer the clams, monkfish, mussels and prawns in it for ten minutes. They’ll eat the stew with brown bread, salad and red wine.” (McEwan put the recipe up on his website, by the way.)

Dickens is another great author on food. It’s always mentioned in passing, but with Dickens’ usual passionate verve. I’ve always wished I could taste the punch that Mr. Micawber specializes in making in David Copperfield, or the “two prodigious lobsters”, the “enormous crab”, and the “large canvas bag of shrimps” that Mr Peggotty brings to David. Or how could anyone forget the pudding Mrs Cratchit makes in a A Christmas Carol, ”like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.” And then there are the pies, of course. It seems that in Dickens the word pie is like a burning brand, a miracle; he just needs to say the word and you can imagine the thick, golden pastry and the juicy meats inside, and the hot little pie-shops with their windows foggy with condensation. In David Copperfield there’s a “beefsteak pie (…) curiously flavoured (…) by a miscellaneous taste of tea, coffee, butter, bacon, cheese, new loaves, firewood, candles, and walnut ketchup, continually ascending from the shop”, and of course, how could I not mention the “beautiful round compact pork pie” Pip brings Magwich at the beginning of Great Expectations! I’m not sure how I would react to seeing the actual pie, but reading about it certainly makes my mouth water…

What about you? Have books every made you hungry for anything?

An illustration of Mr. Micawber mixing punch in Charles Dickens' "David Copperfield". Back then, punch was a drink of rum, lemon, and sugar, served warm.

Spanish writer and translator Javier Marías’ Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear (the first volume of a novel in three parts) came to me trailing its own clouds of glory. Lucinda, my beloved bibliotherapist over at Mr. Bs Emporium of Reading Delights, sent it to me calling it a cross between Proust and John Le Carré. The blurbs on the book itself (I have the British edition) are of the kind that are so emphatic in their appreciation that they couldn’t be anything but honest. “Nothing will stop me from devouring all Marías’s previous books” writes on critic, while another declares: “The next thing Marías deserves is the Nobel Prize”. Obviously, my expectations were quite high. Surprisingly, they were satisfied.

This is the novel's UK paperback cover (published by Vintage). It fits with the mood of the book much better than the US cover, especially since motorcycles do not feature in the novel...

Part of the novel’s charm emerges from its pure originality, which is also the reason why it cannot disappoint. Cross between Proust and Le Carré is right; Marías creates his own genre with Your Face Tomorrow — a plotless, murky universe of espionage, Oxford Dons, wartime tales, and undercover agencies. Even that could be déjà-vu, I suppose, if it wasn’t for the added element of Marías’ distinct style. The author is not showing off, he’s having fun. He’s writing from his guts, letting his pen go wherever it wants — or so it seems, because, in the dark work of Your Face Tomorrow, it is essential that you conclude your trajectories, and Marías always concludes his trajectories. This is no easy feat in a novel of digressions, as this one is; the story advances slowly, surely, but the structure of the narrative is built up like Russian dolls, with bits of story fitting into one another. There’s simply nothing quite like it. 

The story itself is about a Spaniard called Jacques Deza, the narrator, who is approached by a strange man called Bertram Tupra during a party hosted by a friend they have in common in Oxford. Tupra, it turns out, is the head of a special agency whose job it is, through the work of skilled, hand-picked agents, to conjecture large amounts of information about people by observing them closely for a very short time — things about them you could only find out if you’d known them for years. Deza is specifically chosen because he has this rare gift himself, a kind of instinctive judgement, the ability to know people incredibly well just by watching them, and begins to work for Tupra, watching videos and observing interviews with all sorts of people in order to find out how they would act when faced with a hard dilemma, if they are to be trusted, and what their values are. The larger purpose of this task remains a mystery, at least in this volume. 

Yet, the book is also about a lot more than that. Two of its characters were inspired by real people the author knew well. The first is Sir Peter Russel, who becomes Peter Wheeler in the story, a professor of Hispanic History at Oxford, a perfectionist and a hedonist of sorts, with a past as a spy for the MI5 and MI6 in the 1930s and 40s. (You can read the fascinating obituary of Professor Sir Peter Russell here to get a sense of the richness of the character). Through him and the party he hosts in Oxford, Marías cleverly explores the aura of this mythic university and the quirky characters who inhabit it (as he did in his 1992 novel All Souls), as well as the secret history of so many Oxford pre-war graduates who were hired as spies by the British government. The author’s own father also finds his way into the novel as the narrator’s father, a journalist during the Spanish Civil War who was imprisoned after Franco’s victory on the basis of lies told by a treacherous friend. 

Fever and Spear is a masterpiece: an intellectual thriller, an introspective page turner, a narrative experiment which burns its own unassuming, singular path through contemporary literature. Only a full school year and an undergraduate thesis will stop me from reading the other two volumes of Marías’ Your Face Tomorrow.

Javier Marías. Photo taken from Conversational Reading.

When you're not feeling too well, slipping into a hot bath with a good book can do miracles. The hard part is choosing what book to read.

It’s good to remember that sometimes, when things aren’t going so well or your feeling a bit under the weather, books are there to offer comfort. Not any book, mind you. Novels are usually good, although it’s important to make sure the that subject matter isn’t closely related to what’s bothering you, and you wouldn’t want to pull something too hefty or difficult off the shelf. Ulysses is a great read in some contexts, but when you need to bundle up with a blanket, a cuppa, and a good book, I don’t think it offers the right kind of escapism. Mind you, I usually go for particularly light — or at least highly readable, which isn’t quite the same thing — books when I need comfort lit because I usually seek these books out as a break from school work, in which my principal task is reading fiction (yes, these are the woes of an English major). 

The excellent Sarah Crown, from The Guardian, recently posted an article on her blog on sick lit, or the kind of literature she goes to when she’s ill (apparently, she has years of experience). The number one rule, according to her, is never to read something for the first time. I agree. Your mind, confounded by disease or simply troubled with other things, won’t have the capacity to cope with anything new to read, or at least it won’t be able to appreciate it. A visit from an old friend can do a lot of good when you’re not feeling well, but having to make the effort of conversing with someone new most certainly won’t. Revisits are therefore ideal, and Sarah Crown adds that revisiting anything is not necessarily the best idea either (once again, Ulysses comes to mind). As she puts it: “A crucial balance of familiarity, likeability and narrative propulsion must be struck.”

For readability and escapism, one of the most satisfying types of books I fall back on is of course YA or fantasy novels (I know G. would agree — how many times have I seen her reach for The Lord of the Rings after a stressful day of studying during exam periods). The Harry Potter books have changed my mind off dreary thoughts many times and invariably color sick days in bed with more fun and excitement than the TV ever could, and I’ve always told myself that my next bad cold would be the perfect opportunity to plunge once again into Philip Pullman’s engrossing His Dark Materials. 

Non-fiction of the most confessional and charming kind also features prominently on my list of Comfort Lit. As already mentioned on this blog, Diana Athill’s memoir Yesterday Morning and a hot bath once saved me from a dreadful November flu. In the same vein, I revisit Anne Fadiman’s brilliant, funny, moving “confessional essays” — collected in Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader and At Large and at Small: Confessions of a Literary Hedonist — whenever I need to quiet down and cheer up. Speaking of Anne Fadiman, a bibliophile if there ever was one (her husband once offered her 19 pounds of used books for her birthday, to her delight) my preferred Comfort Lit is books about books — those rare, wonderful volumes that treat of literature and reading. I am always enchanted by their eccentricity, their passion, and their inevitably charming prose. The best writer on the subject is certainly Alberto Manguel, whose History of Reading and The Library at Night — readable, magical — are bibles for bibliophiles. 

So that’s what I pull out when I need some Comfort Lit. What about you?