Sunday Salon

Last Week

There were a couple of books, of course: I finished Shirley Hazzard's The Transit of Venus. Post coming soon? We'll see. It is half-written.

Then a slim volume of poetry, The Discarded Life by Adam Kirsch, which came out last year:

Which may be why, in that first eastern winter,

When I looked up to see the silhouettes

Of stripped black branches spidering across

The deeper blackness of a frozen night,...

Our eastern-ish backyard earlier today.
More sunset than frozen night, though...

Kirsch was raised in L.A., but then moved to the east coast, where he writes for The New Yorker. The volume is more or less the story of his move. He writes blank verse well, and yes, that is a bit 'damning with faint praise' in case you were wondering.

Some plays of Plautus, which I'm still thinking about.

Then Try Not To Be Strange by Michael Hingston, a history of the kingdom of Redonda, also out last year, from small Canadian press Biblioasis. Redonda is an actual island in the Caribbean, but the kingdom is a literary in-joke.  M. P. Shiel (born on Montserrat in 1865) was its first king: his father took him to the uninhabited island as a boy and proclaimed him king as a birthday present. Shiel went on to be a popular writer in England; his best known work is the last man sci-fi novel The Purple Cloud. (Pretty good and available from Project Gutenberg.) The kingdom was handed on to the English poet John Gawsworth (friend of Lawrence Durrell and frenemy to Dylan Thomas) before spawning a bunch of claimants to the throne, one of whom was the late Javier Marías.

'Try not to be strange,' is what M. P. Shiel's father told his son as the young Shiel emigrated to the U.K. Not entirely sure the advice was heeded. Pretty entertaining. I preferred the journalistic parts of the book to Hingston's memoir, but your mileage may vary.

Which leads to:

On the Stack

Some of those are the same as last week, but then I added three Redonda-related books to the stack. Am I really going on a Redonda bender? Maybe! The new ones are:

Javier Marías' All Souls

Javier Marías' Between Eternities and other essays

Lawrence Durrell's Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

I also downloaded M. P. Shiel's Prince Zaleski from Project Gutenberg, which is supposed to be Shiel's answer to Sherlock Holmes, written after Holmes went over the Reichenbach Falls and everybody still thought the great detective was dead.

Linking up with Readerbuzz' Sunday Salon:

Sit down, stay a while. How was your week?

Randy Boyagoda's Original Prin

The Toronto Public Library offers the Appel Salon program where authors come to the main library to talk about their most recent book; Randy Boyagoda came this fall to talk about his Original Prin. I thought the book sounded interesting and I must not have been the only one because, though I put it on the hold list the next day, the library only now delivered to me.

Original Prin is the comic story of Princely St. John Umbiligoda, (yes, really) a Sri Lankan immigrant and now a professor at a small--and getting smaller--Toronto-area Catholic university. He's married to Molly and has four daughters; at the start of the novel he has just had surgery for prostate cancer. He's in his 40s.

Also that getting smaller university is about to disappear entirely. The university president has hired a consulting firm to try to save something of the university, and the primary consultant is Prin's ex-girlfriend from graduate school, Wende. Does Prin still have feelings for Wende? How does that comport with his Catholic beliefs? Could he even do anything about it anyway, after his surgery? Well, of such stuff are novels made on.

At the Appel Salon talk, Boyagoda said he'd come to his editor (John Metcalf at Biblioasis) with a 600-page page manuscript. Metcalf told him inside that there was a 200-page novel seeking to get out. (Inside every fat man...) Metcalf put him on a diet of short comic novels and told him to cut and Boyagoda did: this was 223 pages in my edition. At the talk Boyagoda particularly mentioned Evelyn Waugh, which alarmed me: I'm not very fond of the what they tell me are the funny novels of Waugh, like Scoop or Vile Bodies. But something else that was said suggested to me Morte d'Urban, which I very much do like. The story is the idea of a good person trying to do good in a fallen (and bureaucratic) world.

Well, it was neither Waugh nor Powers. Not nearly so unedifying as Waugh, and, for my money, funnier than Waugh, but not as funny and warming as Powers. The humour is more of the nature of Prin's silly name than the situational humour of Fr. Urban in Morte d'Urban. There's a lot of guilt-ridden agonizing on the part of Prin, which is funny, but I do feel like I've read that before, though not in a Sri Lankan immigrant. The best moment I thought came early when Prin is in confessional with Fr. Tom.

Anyway, good, if not everything I had hoped. It's apparently the first of a planned trilogy. I don't know if that explains it, but the ending was both over the top and a bit unsatisfying, and not in the, I, the author, don't mean to satisfy you way.

Another entry for the Canadian Book Challenge:

Jorge Carrión's Bookshops: A Reader's History

Jorge Carrión is, among other things, a travel writer, and this volume is, among other things, a volume of travel, travel to bookshops. He imagines a passport which has, instead of the stamps of countries, the stamps of bookshops he's visited and there are bookshops in Buenos Aires, in Istanbul, in London, in New York, in Sydney, in San Francisco, in Santiago. He himself lives in Barcelona and, of course, there are bookshops he's visited in Barcelona. He describes the layout, the shelves, the windows, the signs, and most importantly, the stock.

That, of course, is one of the great pleasures of this book for a book lover: the thought of all those bookshops one (I) could go to. The ones I have been to (say 57th Street Books in Chicago) I now want to revisit; the ones I haven't, well, I've made a list.

But there's also a melancholy tone to the book. Carrión emphasizes early on that book selling is a business even though we as book lovers don't always want to see it that way. I may have been known to hoard a book or two that only my heirs and assigns will ever be able to get rid of, but by definition that can't be true of a bookseller: if they don't sell books they don't last in the business for very long.

And plenty of bookstores fail anyway. Increasingly as his book goes along (and as his writing of it went along--he seems to have been working on this book over the course of ten years) the bookshops he once visited have closed. 

Bookstores also take on other functions. He introduced me to the Spanish neologism cafebrería, that combination of a coffee shop and bookstore, a word that could usefully be imported into English. Of course it's a business and one does what one has to. Are these lists of the world's most beautiful bookstores any longer about books? Or have they become tourist destinations? If selling is necessary then can we complain when booksellers do what it takes? Carrión does not take a stand, but only brings up the question.

Anyway, enjoyable, even if I just lost an hour Googling bookstores that no longer exist where I've spent my time and money...