Wild books

Virginia Woolf

Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.

Virginia Woolf

There truly is something wild about the books one finds at a used book store or a library sale or the book table at a Goodwill store. They may not be organized in any way. They may be forgotten books by forgotten authors. Or they be former bestsellers who now years later nobody cares to read. And the books certainly are homeless, some of them looking as bedraggled as an old dog at the pound.

Each of these books has an unknown history, although some of them may have the name of a previous owner printed on the inside front cover.

Perhaps the saddest-looking used books are the newer ones, whose previous owners didn't think enough of them to keep them very long after their purchase, whether read or unread. Older books must have had an owner who treasured them on a shelf for years, or perhaps a series of owners who loved them before passing them on to someone else, who may also have loved them.

In a store that sells new books, all the books look new. They appear more domesticated, as Virginia Woolf put it. Or perhaps they are just virginal. With used books, one never knows. Some look as good as new. Others show their age. Some have pages folded over. Some have coffee stains or food stains. Some may even have passages underlined, a clue showing that a previous owner found something of value inside.

Human monsters

Two orphans, a girl and a boy, separated by 360 years, are marooned on the same island off the coast of Australia in Jess Kidd's beautiful 2022 novel The Night Ship. And when I call it beautiful, I refer not just to the story she tells but also to the clothbound book itself. Publishers don't always give such artistic attention to novels, but Atria did so here with the cover design and the inside art. The pages are even a physical pleasure to turn.

As for the story, Mayken is aboard the Batavia bound from Holland to the Dutch Indies in 1629 in the company of her nursemaid, Imke. But while Imke sleeps at night, Mayken loves to explore the ship, even breaking all rules, disguised as a boy, to roam below decks in search of a monster she believes to be hiding there. Through her wanderings she meets a variety of men and women aboard the ship, many of whom will later help her and others who turn out to be worse than any imagined monster.

The Batavia wrecks, with most of the passengers finding their way to a small island with no fresh water and little food other than what can be salvaged from the ship. The novel turns into The Lord of the Flies revisited as men divide and seek to conquer the limited resources, women included.

In 1989, the death of his mother sends young Gil to this same island, where his grandfather, Joss, is a fisherman at odds with most of the other fishermen on the island. Gil is described as weird, and some of his actions deserve that adjective. Like Mayken so many years before him, he becomes targeted, especially after other boys come to the island to summer with their fathers.

Meanwhile scientists on the island dig for artifacts to try to determine exactly what happened to the Batavia and its passengers. Much of this story is based on historical events.

Kidd takes us back and forth in time to tell two stories that gradually become one.

Peaking too early

War makes everything simple. There's a tunnel in front of you and you put your head down, and you struggle forward for the light at the end of it, one bloody impossible step at a time, and that frees you up somehow.

Louis de Berniece's, So Much Life Left Over

Peaking too early in life can cause a problem for many people, such as athletes, gorgeous movie stars and fashion models, ballerinas, chess masters, mathematicians, the best boy sopranos, whatever. What do they do with the rest of their lives?

Louis de Bernieres applies this idea to soldiers and nurses in the years between one world war and the next in his provocative 2018 novel So Much Life Left Over. They survived the war. How can they survive the peace?

Although there are many characters, most of the attention falls on Daniel Pitt, a pilot who didn't expect to live through the war. Now he looks for a career involving planes or motorcycles or anything fast and dangerous. He marries Rosie, who lost the man she loved in the war. They have a daughter and then a son, losing a boy in between. Done having children, Rosie turns Daniel away and then tries to turn the children against him.

Daniel turns to other women, first a girl in Ceylon, where they live after the war, and later a housemaid in England. Rosie's sister, a lesbian, wants children and invites Daniel into her bed, with her lover's permission. They have two children together, with Daniel called their godfather.

The lives of these and other characters don't seem to come into focus again until a new war with Germany breaks out. War makes everything simple again.

Whose fault?

When you read something that you don't understand, do you blame the writer or do you blame yourself? Most of us probably blame ourselves most of the time. I'm not smart enough to understand that. I didn't read carefully enough. I couldn't concentrate. Any of these may be true, of course, but writers sometimes need to share the blame.

The whole point of writing is to communicate, to convey one's thoughts, one's ideas, one's information, one's inspiration or whatever to others. When the message doesn't get across, the writer may be as much to blame as the reader.

Thomas Pynchon

A writer's message may be intended for certain readers, of course. Scholars write for other scholars, not for ordinary people on the street. Poets write for those who appreciate poetry. Thomas Pynchon didn't write for the same audience as Danielle Steel. The writer is more likely at fault when the intended audience doesn't understand.

I often don't understand what I am reading. Certain Bible passages baffle me. Sometimes I tackle books about black holes or time travel that are mostly beyond me. But then that was also true when, in the first grade, I first encountered a Dick and Jane reader. Some of the Robert Frost poems I've been reading lately I can appreciate, others not so much. Some of those William Trevor stories I reviewed here recently left me perplexed. My fault? Trevor's fault? I don't really know, but I'm willing to take the blame.

How to celebrate a birthday

Writing in Oh Reader magazine, Mary Ellen Collins says she wanted to do something special to celebrate her 50th birthday, something in addition to the trip to Africa she was planning with her husband. Her decision was to purchase 50 books, all at the same time.

And so the two of them headed to a Barnes and Noble with her list of desired books. She found all if them, she reports: Running with Scissors, Blue Shoe, The Art of Happiness and all the others. They stacked books on the checkout counter while they went back to search for others, drawing admiring fans as they went. They left with several shopping bags full of new books.

I have walked out of Barnes and Noble with a single shopping bag full of books, and I know how exciting just the heft of the bag can be, knowing what's inside. Imagine having four such bags at once.

If I walked into Barnes and Noble with a list of 50 books I desired, I doubt they would have even half of them in stock. Even a large store rarely has on its shelves the books I most desperately seek. So I am not sure I could pull off what Collins does, even if I had the funds for it. I would have to search a number of independent book stores, used book stores and, as a last resort, Amazon to find what I want. That would at least stretch out the pleasure. But that is pretty much what I do anyway, without the birthday excuse.

I already have more than 80 books waiting their turn to be read. Even so, my 80th birthday appoaches, and a man can dream.

Misdirection

Although not a mystery writer in the usual sense, the late William Trevor was nevertheless a mystery writer. Each of the 10 stories in his final collection of short stories, Last Stories, is a little mystery, full of subtle clues that lead to a final resolution. Or don't. Sometimes the resolution, like the clues themselves, are so subtle readers may be left scratching their heads.

As in any good mystery, there is a lot of misdirection in Trevor's stories. Even the titles misdirect the reader. When the title refers to someone, the story is most often about someone else. "The Piano Teacher's Pupil," for example, is actually about the piano teacher, not the pupil. Once she had a lover who in time abandoned her, yet she treasures that time when he was hers. Now she has a student, more gifted than any other, who steals something each time he comes to her house. Yet she treasures having him as a pupil. Paradise comes at a price she's willing to pay.

"The Crippled Man," rather than being about the crippled man, is mostly about the woman who takes care of him, although it turns out that he is taking care of her.

In "The Unknown Girl," Trevor's focus falls on Harriet, a woman whose home this girl had sometimes cleaned before stepping into traffic and being killed. Gradually Harriet comes to realize that the girl's death may be related to her unrequited love for Harriet's son.

Trevor's stories are like paintings on which the artist adds a dab of paint here and a dab of paint there. Not until the final brushstroke does an observer realize what the painting reveals. At times he even refers to different characters in alternate sentences in the same paragraph, requiring careful reading (and rereading) to understand what exactly is going on.

His stories don't make easy reading, yet they are so tender, so beautiful, so delicate that they are all worth the effort.

Curses!

Except for the two years I lived in a college dormitory, I have rarely been around people who swore habitually. My family, my friends and, for the most part, my work associates have rarely used profane or obscene language.

Most of my exposure to such language has come through novels, movies and, increasingly, television. Yet I recall so many great novels, movies and TV shows in which bad language was nonexistent, or in the case of Gone with the Wind, virtually so. The absence of crude language may have sometimes actually been a significant factor in their success. I recall how the television comedy Seinfeld used such words as "master of my domain" and "shrinkage" to avoid crude language, thus creating classic episodes.

Rarely have I mentioned the bad language in the novels I review here, although I did on Aug. 14 when I called Lee Smith's Silver Alert a "surprisingly potty-mouthed novel." The only other book by Smith I had read was her memoir Dimestore, from which I got the picture of her as an elegant, older Southern lady. So I didn't expect cover-to-cover cursing in the novel. Some of her characters might be expected to swear, making their language choices more understandable, yet even Smith's narration was curse-filled. What made this even more surprising was that her story will appeal mainly to older readers, especially older women, the very people most likely to be repelled by such language. What did Smith hope to gain by this?

The television show Gutfeld! bleeps out most of the obscenities, often leading to sentences where so many words are bleeped that the TV audience has to guess not just what words are being spoken but also what point is being made. Is this an argument for not bleeping bad language? No, it's an argument for avoiding language that must be bleeped.

Timothy Jay, a college professor, was quoted in The Wall Street Journal as saying, "People who have better vocabularies, which is related to intelligence and education, are better at swearing." True or not, this makes little sense to me. Better vocabularies should mean better alternatives to crude words. And the fact that those same Gutfeld! guests refrain from swearing when they appear on other television programs demonstrates that they know other ways of making the same points.

The headline on that Journal article, published last April, was "Curses! Why All The Crude Talk?" I pose the same question.