Unfamiliar words

I have been running a series of posts listing words found in Barbara Ann Kipfer's Word Nerd that are new to me. Actually there are hundreds of words listed in the book that are new to me, but those that particularly interest me are those that don't even seem necessary or are so rarely necessary that hardy anyone bothers to learn them, let alone use them. Here now is my final installment.

perpession — endurance of suffering

philodox — someone who likes to hear themselves talk (well, maybe this word is necessary)

prolepsis —anticipation before something starts

psithurism — rustling leaves

ramfeezled — worn out from work

rampick — a tree whose top branches are dead

repandous — bent upward

rixatrix — a quarreling woman

scantle — a small portion

A silential

silential — something performed in silence

sopite — to lull or put to sleep

sphalm — a mistake belief

stridulation — the noise of crickets

swesby — one who can be relied upon

syssition — a meal shared with others

theic — one who drinks too much

tirret — an outburst of temper

transhumance — the seasonal movement of livestock to different pasture

vetanda — forbidden things

I realize, of course, that many of the words I have listed, both here and previously, are technical or specialized terms that I would have never had any reason to ever hear, read or use. These may include such words as perpession, silential and transhumance. Others, perhaps like scantle or ramfeezled, may be slang terms that have spread to only a limited degree. In any case, most of us have probably managed to communicate very well without them.

Free people read mysteries

You need freedom of speech, law and order, hope and prosperity to be able to enjoy fictitious crimes and violence.

Liza Marklund, Books to Die For

Liza Marklund

Liza Marklund is a Swedish author of crime novels, one of which she co-authored with James Patterson. Her essay in Books to Die For is about The Ghost of Blackwood Hall, a Nancy Drew mystery by Carolyn Keene. She writes about how she devoured Nancy Drew books as a girl in Sweden and how these books have spread around the world and been translated into many languages. But they are not popular everywhere, she says. In some countries, even if they are available, they are rarely read.

From there Marklund goes on to say that in countries with oppressive governments, hardly anyone reads mysteries. "I spend quite a lot of time in Africa," she says, "and when I tell my friends in Kenya that I write fictional books about crimes being committed, they look at me strangely and ask: 'Why?'"

"If you're living too close to the real thing," she goes on, "the urge to indulge in the killing of individuals for the purposes of entertainment seems to be limited." In Argentina, she says, one can go into bookstores and find romance, political biographies, supernatural novels, horror and porn — but no crime novels.

Perhaps it is for the same reason that frivolous Hollywood musicals and comedies were so popular in America during the Depression years of the 1930s. Entertainment is an escape from real life. If novels about crime, danger, intrigue, betrayal and deceit seem too much like real life, where is the escape?

At a time when governments in Canada, the United States and other western countries are moving rapidly toward restricting freedoms, censoring speech and punishing dissent, it may pay to keep an eye on the crime fiction on the best-seller lists. It may be the canary in the coal mine.

Mysteries with influence

Good writers always influence their readers, especially when their readers are other writers. That's obvious, of course, yet Books to Die For, edited by John Connolly and Declan Burke and published in 2012, underscores this very obvious statement.

The idea was to ask some of the world greatest living mystery writers to write about their favorite mystery novels.  Thus Joe R. Lansdale writes a brief essay about Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely, Laura Lippman writes about James M. Cain's Love's Lovely Counterfeit, Max Allan Collins writes about Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury, Kathy Reichs writes about Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs and so forth. This is great stuff for any reader of crime novels, a good way to both revisit old favorites and to discover novels you missed and really must read.

Yet what struck me most about this book was how virtually every author discussed — and there are more than a hundred of them — has been influential in some significant way. Many of the contributors talk about how a particular book or author helped shape their own careers. Joseph Wambaugh, for example, tells how Truman Capote, the author of In Cold Blood, led him to write The Onion Field. Elmore Leonard says The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins made his own fiction much better.

In other cases, the influence was much broader and even more profound. What people like Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie did for mystery fiction has been commented upon many times. But how many of us have considered the impact of the Nancy Drew books, Sue Grafton's A Is for Alibi, Patricia Cornwell's Postmortem or Eric Ambler's espionage thrillers? Every year or so, it would seem, a mystery novel comes along that sends crime fiction off in a new direction, and the genre is much better for it.

Many of the entries here may surprise you. Most readers probably do not think of A.S. Byatt, Stephen King and Donna Tartt as mystery writers, yet their books are discussed here. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams gets an entry, as does Mary Stewart's Touch Not the Cat and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. Other authors are notable for their absence. The editors do a good job of including crime novels from around the world. 

This book, while not as good as almost any of the books discussed in it, is nevertheless a feast for mystery fans.

Familiar character, original story

I heard Susan Isaacs speak in St. Petersburg shortly after the 2019 publication of Takes One to Know One, and I remember her saying that she was nearly finished writing it before she realized her main character was all wrong. After she found the right character, she rewrote her novel with ease, she said. The result is another entertaining gem of a crime novel.

Yet now I wonder why Isaacs had trouble discovering her main character when Corie is so much like many of the author's other central characters. She too, just as Isaacs herself was before writing Compromising Positions, her first novel, is a bored housewife looking for a little adventure. She had been an FBI agent before she married a prominent (and wealthy) judge with a teenage daughter. She still does occasional work for the FBI, but mostly she works as a scout for literary agencies, trying to identify recent Arabic fiction that might be worth translating into English. The protagonist in Past Perfect formerly worked for the CIA, so again Corie is not exactly an original. And like other Isaacs main characters, she is spunky, witty and Jewish.

Corie meets regularly for lunch with a small group of people who operate solo businesses from their homes, but one of them, a man named Pete Delaney, seems a little too much like her. That is, she is hiding the fact that she formerly worked for the FBI, but what is Pete hiding? Was he formerly in law enforcement, or is he hiding something more sinister?

It is the latter, of course, and if the main character doesn't seem that original, the plot certainly is. Isaacs confidently builds up the tension as Corie tries to probe Pete's secrets, often aided by her father, a retired cop. Things really get interesting when Pete himself begins to notice that Corie seems a little too much like him. It really does take one to know one.

Slow and steady

Murder mysteries typically either start slow and then gradually pick up speed as they approach the end or begin with a bang and then slow down in the middle before gaining speed again as the climax approaches. Donna Leon does something unusual. Her novels usually maintain the same leisurely pace throughout. yet are successful just the same.

Trace Elements (2020) is no exception.

A dying woman asks Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venice police, or the Questura, to investigate the death of her husband, Vittorio Fadalto, in an apparent traffic accident. She also says something about some mysterious money. It's hardly enough to even officially open an investigation, but Brunetti begins poking around anyway.

Fadalto worked as a water inspector, one of those responsible for making sure the drinking water of Venice is safe, containing no more than trace elements of impurities. Is there a motive for murder in there somewhere?

Brunetti, usually accompanied by Claudia Griffoni, proceeds slowly. Most heroes in detective novels seem to work nonstop, hardly ever pausing to eat or sleep. Yet Brunetti seems to work a short day, conducting just two or three brief interviews before taking the rest of the day off to spend with his family. He uses his time off profitably, however, thinking about his current case.

Even when Brunetti draws near to the solution to the mystery, Leon hardly alters her pace. This may sound dull, yet it never is. Whether Brunetti is talking with a suspect or with his own wife over dinner, the author manages to hold her readers glued to the page.

Shirley Jackson, teacher

Shirley Jackson

The 1968 collection of Shirley Jackson stories, Come Along With Me, also includes three of the lectures she gave during her lifetime. I commented on the stories in my last post, but her lectures are worth a few words, as well.

In one called "Experience and Fiction," she reflects on how a writer's own experiences get recycled into fiction. "Perhaps the most useful thing about being a writer of fiction is that nothing is ever wasted," she said, "all experience is good for something; you tend to see everything as a potential structure of words."

I don't write fiction, yet my own mind works much the same way. Any experience I have that is in any way unusual runs through my mind as words that might eventually be transposed into text, whether in a letter, an email, a blog post or whatever. Very few experiences ever actually get that far, of course, but I audition them all just the same. So I know what Jackson is talking about. Non-writers probably do much the same thing, imagining how they will describe their experiences the next time they talk with a friend. Still, converting real life into fiction is something a little different and requires much more skill.

"Biography of a Story" discusses her most famous short story "The Lottery": how she came to write it and how readers first reacted to it. She says she got the idea while pushing her baby up a hill in a stroller, then placed her daughter in a playpen and wrote the story in a matter of minutes. This was just three weeks before it was published in The New Yorker.

Then Jackson transcribes excerpts from numerous letters about the story sent either to her or to the magazine's editors. Most of these letter writers believed her fiction to either be true or based on truth. Several ask where the custom of stoning to death randomly chosen members of the community is practiced. These letters are almost as shocking as the story itself, which is included in this book.

In the third lecture, "Notes for a Young Writer," Jackson says, "Remember, your story is an uneasy bargain with your reader. Your end of the bargain is to play fair, and keep him interested, his end of the bargain is to keep reading." While this may seem obvious, I think it is instructive to think of any written work, especially one that is available for purchase, as a bargain or even a contract. The seller promises, in effect, to deliver something worth reading. The buyer, in effect, promises to give it a fair reading.

As Jackson notes, this is an uneasy bargain. Many books are dull or poorly written or not what the reader actually wants to read. Some people buy a book then put it on a shelf and forget about it or give up on reading it before giving it a fair trial.

In her lecture, presumably delivered to students interested in becoming writers, she offers a number of valuable suggestions about writing the kind of stories that will make readers happy to keep their end of the bargain because the writers have kept theirs.

Isolation and menace

Shirley Jackson wrote two very different kinds of stories, both of them represented in Come Along with Me, edited by her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman and published in 1968.

When she died in 1965 she left an unfinished novel, Come Along with Me, and while it is only six chapters, we can be glad Hyman saw fit to publish it. These chapters, even the unedited ones, are brilliant, making readers wish desperately to know what happens next, or would have happened next if only Jackson had not died so prematurely. The rest of the book includes 16 stories, as well as three of her lectures.

The two kinds of stories she wrote include the fictional (although many initial readers of "The Lottery" were convinced it might be partly true) and the mostly true. The latter stories are humorous, and somewhat fictionalized, accounts of incidents involving her own family. This collection includes two gems, “Pajama Party” and “The Night We All Had Grippe.“ These are similar in that, besides being funny, both involve people swapping beds all night long. In the first case it's the girls at her daughter's pajama party who, for a variety or reasons, can't settle long in one bed with one bedmate but keep moving around. In the other, everyone in the family is sick, and every bedroom is either too hot, too cold or whatever. No one can get comfortable, and so they stay in motion throughout the night.

If these tales suggest delightfully confused congestion, most of Jackson's other stories hint at isolation and menace. In "The Summer People," for example, a couple decides to stay in their summer cottage past Labor Day, rather than rushing back to the city as they usually do. The locals, who put up with summer people because they support their economy, seem to turn in unison against the Allisons when they do the unthinkable by staying too long.

"The Bus" finds an elderly woman dropped off by a bus driver in a strange town.

In "Louisa, Please Come Home," a teenage girl runs away from home and each year on the same day she listens to her mother's radio appeal for her to come home. Yet when Louise finally does return home after several years have passed, her parents don't recognize her, insisting that Louisa, now a grown woman, is an imposter.

In "A Day in the Jungle," the runaway is a married woman fed up with her husband and her life, but actually desiring only to be pursued and caught and valued by him. A similar woman in  "The Beautiful Stranger" becomes convinced that her husband is an imposter, a handsome man only pretending to be her husband. She thrives on the excitement of this illicit relationship.

The book also includes Jackson's most famous short story, "The Lottery." Talk about isolation and menace.

A flashlight and a promise

The lead — like the title — should be a flashlight that shines down into the story. A lead is a promise. It promises that the piece of writing is going to be like this.

Roy Peter Clark, Murder Your Darlings

Most writers agonize more over their opening sentences than anything else, including the vital closing sentences. Get it right at the beginning and readers are likely to stick with you, at least for a while. Screw it up and you're lost while still in the starting gate.

When I was a newspaper reporter, and later a columnist and an editorial writer, I struggled with that first sentence, wanting to get it just right. Even then the copy desk would often change it. Once you have the right lead — or lede, as newspaper professionals call it —the rest of the story will flow from there, for both the writer and the reader.

Shirley Jackson

Lately I've been reading a number of Shirley Jackson short stories — more on this next time — and I was struck by how quickly she could grab the reader's attention. She begins "The Beautiful Stranger" with this line, "What might be called the first intimation of strangeness occurred at the railroad station." Here's how she opens "The Little House": "I'll have to get some decent lights, was her first thought, and her second: and a dog or something, or at least a bird, anything alive." "A Visit" begins, "The house in itself was, even before anything had happened there, as lovely a thing as she had ever seen."

I think Jackson's opening lines nicely illustrate the two metaphors Roy Peter Clark uses in the opening lines of this blog post. A good lead is both a flashlight and a promise. It gives us a peek at what's in there, like shining a flashlight into a dark attic. It also makes a promise as to what's inside.

Jackson does both of these things not just with her opening lines but with individual phrases within those sentences. Consider the light and the promises conveyed by these phrases: "the first intimation of strangeness," "anything alive" and "even before anything had happened there." Don't they make you want to read more?

Few of us write the kinds of stories Shirley Jackson wrote, but Clark's advice holds whatever we we happen to be writing.

To be somebody

I was midway into Kelly McClorey's impressive debut novel Nobody, Somebody, Anybody before I read the dust jacket and saw that it is "laugh-out-loud funny." I hadn't noticed.

I didn't laugh, or even smile, at any point in this book, but I was certainly moved, even saddened.

The story is narrated by Amy Hanley, a young woman working a summer job as a chambermaid at the Yacht Club. Unlike a yacht, she lacks an anchor. Her mother died recently. She has no close friends, no boyfriend, no permanent job, no confidence. She greatly admires Florence Nightingale, whom she quotes frequently as if her words were Scripture. She is training to become an EMT, but she has twice failed the final exam and is running out of chances. She thinks of herself, as the title suggests, as a Nobody.

During the course of the novel, Amy hardly ever makes a good choice. She steams open her landlord's mail and sees that he plans to go to Ukraine to find a bride. She resentfully destroys property belonging to a co-worker. To give herself more self-esteem, she sends a congratulation letter to herself, praising her for passing the EMT test, and then tells others about receiving the letter. She thinks of this lie as perhaps having a placebo effect, giving her enough confidence to actually pass the test. What it does, of course, is to add to the pressure

She begins to feel like Somebody when Gary, her landlord, invites her to his apartment to sample his cooking and to help him prepare his home for the arrival of Irina from Ukraine. The growing friendship with Gary fools her into thinking she can replace the other woman in Gary's heart. Gary is certainly no prize, but she is that desperate

By the end of the novel, Amy decides to reinvent herself. She's willing to become Anybody, as long as it isn't Amy Hanley.

There's nothing funny, or even amusing, about people giving in to self-destructive impulses, but Nobody, Somebody, Anybody is nevertheless engaging and, in its low-key way, even powerful. It reminds us that the world is full of Amy Hanleys, those who want so much to be Somebody, at least to Someone, that they are willing to settle for Anybody.

The recent case of the Alabama corrections officer who helped a murder suspect escape and then ran off with him provides an example.

Escape to France, escape from France

For every Jew who escaped Nazi-occupied territory during World War II, there must have been a good story to tell. One such story is found in A Bookshop in Berlin by Francoise Frenkel, first published in 1945.

Frenkel was a young Polish Jew who, in the 1930s, decided to open a French bookstore in Germany. Others told her such a bookstore in Berlin would surely fail, not because she was a Jew but because of the hard feelings left over from the Great War against anything French. She opened it anyway and soon discovered a surprising number of loyal customers.

The trouble started for her in 1935 as the Nazis began to gain power. Eventually most of the books, magazines and newspapers in her store became forbidden, and her Jewishness became an issue. In 1939 she decided it was time to flee to Paris. But then, in short order, the Nazis went to war and conquered France.

The rest of the book tells of her flight from one part of France to another, always trying to stay a step ahead of both the Nazis and the French collaborators. She found French people willing to risk their own lives to protect her, as well as others willing to betray her. She was arrested more than once, but fortunately by French authorities unwilling to turn her over to the Germans. After two failed attempts to escape into Switzerland, she finally made it through the barb wire to freedom.

Frenkel's book is hardly an edge-of-the-seat thriller. Much of it is rather tedious. Still it's a dramatic story of just one Jew's successful attempt to escape the reach of the Nazis. There were other such stories, but not nearly enough of them.

New words

A moue

It's time once again to return to Barbara Ann Kipfer's Word Nerd for a list of words that are new to me, words nobody I know uses for the simple reason that they hardly seem necessary in ordinary conversation.

gambrinous — being full of beer.

gangoozler — someone who stares for prolonged periods at something unusual.

griffonage — sloppy, illegible handwriting.

hallelujatic — something pertaining to hallelujahs.

hegira — a journey undertaken to escape a troublesome situation.

hunksit — having a short neck.

hurrygraph — a hastily written letter. (This may explain the griffonage.)

illeism — referring to oneself in the third person.

inermous — without thorns or prickles.

inkhornism — a literary compilation that is overworked and unnecessarily intellectual.

intercolumniation — the clear space between two columns.

islomania — a passion for islands.

kirkbuzzer — someone who robs churches.

macher — someone who gets things done.

momurdotes — a case of the sulks.

moue — a pouting face.

nachlass — unpublished material left after an author dies.

nasion — hair between the eyebrows.

nudiustertian — pertaining to the day before yesterday.

occiput — the back of a head.

omnium — the sum total of one's desires or values.

orlings — the teeth of a comb

So how many of these words can you work into a conversation over the next week?

Another odd couple

I have been a Rachel Joyce fan since The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, and now with Miss Benson's Beetle (2020) she has equalled, if not surpassed, that novel.

The plot doesn't sound like much. A plump, introverted middle-aged woman travels to New Caledonia in 1950 to search for a golden beetle, accompanied by a much younger woman different from her in every way imaginable. It's a buddy novel — an Odd Couple novel — featuring women, yet Joyce turns it into something much more than that.

Margery Benson was a little girl when her father told her about a gold beetle found only in New Caledonia, except that no one has officially found it yet. Then he committed suicide, but she has never given up the dream of going half way around the world to try to find her mythical beetle. When she loses her teaching job because of her response to being humiliated in her classroom, she realizes that if she is ever going to pursue her dream, now is the time.

When she advertises for someone to accompany her on her expedition, the applicants leave much to be desired. One is a former prisoner of war who isn't always clear whether he's still in a Japanese prison or not. The winning candidate turns out to be Enid Pretty, a peroxide blonde who is a magnet to men and who never stops talking. Enid has none of the qualifications necessary for this overseas adventure, including a passport, but at least she isn't a crazed former POW.

Enid's own goal in life is to have a baby, but her reason for wanting to go beetle hunting is to stay a few steps ahead of the law. Meanwhile the former POW follows their trail to New Caledonia.

Much that follows may be predictable, but it all happens in such an original, often hilarious and sometimes poignant manner that it hardly matters. This is a novel that brings joy to the heart, a smile to the face and a tear to the eye. We love Margery and Enid as much as they eventually come to love each other. You won't easily find more wonderful characters than these.

Shut up and listen

Even if he talked, and she didn't, it still counted as a conversation.

Rachel Joyce, Miss Benson's Beetle

As someone who normally contributes very little to conversations, that sentence from Rachel Joyce's fine novel Miss Benson's Beetle (more about that next time) stood out for me. Conversation involves both talking and listening. Ideally there is some of each for each participant in a conversation, but as Margery Benson observes in the novel, neither is absolutely necessary.

There are some people, of course, who could never have a conversation without talking. Their own voice is, in fact, the only one they want to hear. Other participants are little more than props.

Recently I participated in a series of group discussions where the basic ground-rules were 1) no one reveals any personal details shared in the group, 2) everyone gives the speaker their full attention, and 3) no one interrupts another person who is talking.

Even for me, rules two and three were difficult to follow. I had to bite my tongue more than once. Others found them all but impossible. When other people talk, their words remind us of our own situations, our own experiences. Our minds wander. Someone else has lost a loved not? Well, we have lost loved ones too. Someone else has been sick? Well, we've had something worse. Someone else has moved into a new home? Well, we have moved into new homes. Instead of listening fully to what others are saying, we start thinking about what we can say next. Sometimes, too often in fact, we jump in before the other person has finished and try to make the conversation about us. I call this "hijacking a conversation."

One woman in the group lost her husband just a few months before. She revealed that since his death she has yet to find anyone she can share her thoughts and feelings with. Her friends interrupt. Everyone wants to give her advice. All want to tell their own stories of loss. Yes, these count as conversations, but sometimes what we really want and what we really need is a monologue— with an audience willing to just shut up and listen.

Some people pay analysts a lot of money to experience this, but we shouldn't have to. Sometimes we all need a Margery Benson, and sometimes we just need to be one.