Thoughts becoming words

Does the act of writing clarify one's ideas or obscure them? There would seem to be two points of view on that question, and I side with both of them.

The essayist Logan Pearsall Smith said this, "What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is full of gleaming thought; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings. But always the rarest, those streaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my reach."

Virginia Woolf said something similar in fewer words: "No book is born entire and  uncrippled as it was conceived."

I can recall hearing the novelist Ann Patchett say that no matter how hard she tries, the words she puts down on a page never quite equal the vision she had in her mind.

I know this can be true, for I have experienced it myself. Yet more often I have experienced just the opposite, where the words that come out are much grander than the thoughts that inspired them. Where, I wonder,  did that come from? I don't remember thinking that, but there it is.

Samuel Butler wrote, "Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such."

And E.M. Forster famously said, "How do I know what I think till I see what I say?" Exactly. Writing clarifies one's thoughts, except of course when it doesn't.

Bookshop rants

A book with a title like Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops has got to be good, right? Well, it's not, unless you happen to enjoy reading someone's rants.

Shaun Bythell owns a used bookshop in Scotland. Writing a book making sport of his customers doesn't seem like a sound business strategy, but that's what Bythell does here. Perhaps he can get away with it because often he writes about those people who visit his shop without buying anything and those who try to sell him old books he doesn't want in his store.

Yet the author even disparages those who do buy books, such as those who try to bargain for lower prices and those who seek out fine old books he hasn't yet had the chance to raise the prices on.

Bythell groups customers in the way a biologist would group animal species, complete with Latin names. Senex cum barba, for example, translates as "bearded pensioner." In this chapter he discusses the retirees with time on their hands who spend too much of their time in his shop. Unfortunately he devotes several paragraphs to lamenting the annoying driving habits of elderly people, as if that has anything to do with his bookshop.

Then he breaks down each species of bookshop customer into subspecies. In the retirees group, for example, he includes Downsizers, who try to sell him their old Reader's Digest books, and the Lycra-clad, who annoy the shopkeeper simply by what they wear.

Occasionally Bythell says something witty or something kind, but this doesn't happen often enough to make his book as much fun to read as you might hope

Get to the story

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do; once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and where is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?"

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

In The Heart's Invisible Furies, novelist John Boyne gives us a minor character who would agree with Alice. In a conversation with Cyril, the main character, about books they are reading, she asks whether Colm Toibin's novels are anything like Jeffrey Archer's.

"'Does this fella tell a story? He doesn't spend twenty pages describing the color of the sky?'"

"'He hasn't so far.'"

"'Good. Jeffrey Archer never talks about the color of the sky and I like that in a writer. I'd say Jeffrey Archer has never even looked up at the sky in his entire life.'"

This wonderfully comic passage goes on, but you get the idea.

We may think of this woman as stupid and Alice as immature, but most of us probably would agree with both of them to some extent.

We all like conversation in our stories. The Boyne passage above is composed entirely of conversation, and it is wonderful. No description is necessary. Most novels don't really get going until a second character shows up and a conversation begins.

As for pictures, we may think we left picture books behind us years ago, but admit it, don't you love to find pictures of any kind in the books you read? The pictures I've discovered in novels by William Boyd, Umberto Eco, Marisha Pessi and others have enriched the reading of all of them. The popularity of graphic novels proves, too, that grownup readers enjoy illustrations with their stories almost as much as children do. When I read a history book, a science book, a biography, or any other kind of nonfiction, I  want there to be photographs, drawings or graphs to break up the text.

Descriptions in novels are intended to take the place of pictures, and the best writers can do this very well. But some take it to an extreme. How much detail do we really need about the sky or the weather or the clothing worn by a character. A phrase or two can usually do the job. Then give us some action. Give us some conversation. And a picture or two wouldn't hurt either.

Irish intolerance

The title of John Boyne's 2017 novel The Heart's Invisible Furies stops you in your tracks. Does this really sound like something I want to read? What could it possibly be about? It sounds too serious, too angry, too challenging. The fact that it's 580 pages long is intimidating in itself.

I still can't decide if it's a good title or not, but I can now say it is a terrific novel, much easier to read than you might think but not so easy to grapple with.

This is the story of man's life, from birth to death. That man is Cyril Avery, who is not a real Avery, as his adoptive parents tell him repeatedly during his youth. Maude Avery, his adoptive mother, spends most of her time closed up in a room smoking cigarettes and writing novels she hopes nobody will ever read. (They do, and after her early death from cancer she becomes one of Ireland's greatest writers.) Charles Avery, his adoptive father, is a wealthy man but also a cheat, both on his wife and on his taxes.

As for his real mother and father, we read about them too. Catherine Goggin gets pregnant as a teenage girl, then is disowned by her parents and banned from the church and the town by an intolerant and hypocritical Irish priest. As this is Cyril's first-person account of his life, we know Catherine will reappear again somewhere in his story, and in fact she does several times. Their lives intersect at various points before they discover they are actually mother and son.

Irish intolerance shapes Cyril's own life, as he is a homosexual and Ireland despises homosexuals even more than it does unwed mothers, And so he must keep his heart's furies as invisible as possible, at least until he moves to Amsterdam later in his life. Before that, however, Cyril actually gets married and has a son, though not in that order. He deserts his wife immediately after the wedding ceremony, disappearing for years, leaving his bride in a country where divorce, too, is not tolerated.

If so much of the novel is about separation and distancing, Boyne eventually brings everyone together — mother and son, husband and wife, father and son, prodigal and homeland. Yes, the story is as serious as the title suggests, yet parts of it are as funny as anything P.G. Wodehouse ever wrote.

When nature breaks the law

Remove the dust jacket from Mary Roach's newest book and look at the spine. You'll see that it reads "ROACH FUZZ," which, accident or not, suggests the sense of humor that has made her books bestsellers.

In Fuzz (2021) Roach turns her attention to the eternal struggle of humans versus animals, or as her subtitle puts it, "When Nature Breaks the Law." Some animals kill and even eat people. Rats and other pests eat crops. Birds get in the way of planes and rockets. She doesn't tackle mosquito bites or the fly in your soup, but she travels the world to explore more significant points of conflict.

In their quest for easy food, bears wander into homes and supermarkets, and this problem sends her to the Canadian Rockies. Elephants kill a lot more people than bears or lions do, so Roach goes to India to see attempts at a solution. At the Vatican she explores what's being done, in a very Christian way, to battle bothersome gulls and rats.

Animal behavior interests Roach, but she is even more interested in how scientists and others are trying to solve these problems without going to the extreme of killing troublesome animals. Scientists, for example, are looking for a way to get mice to produce only male babies. And what might the unintended consequences be if these experiments prove successful? She asks about that, too.

Scarecrows don't really work, or at least not for long. Smart birds soon realize that a scarecrow means food, so it actually attracts them. What will scare them away? Noise? Motion? Dead birds? Scientists are looking into all these things.

Roach is as much a humorist as she is a science writer, and her books never fail to be as fun as they are informative. Readers, in fact, may be more likely to take away odd bits of amusing trivia from Fuzz than anything else. (Much of this is to found in footnotes, so don't ignore them.) For example:

There is such a thing as a chicken gun, but it's not for shooting chickens. Rather it's for shooting supermarket chickens at plane engines to test the effects of bird strikes.

As dangerous as elephants can be when they're sober, they are even more dangerous when drunk. And they like to get drunk.

The Vatican is the only nation in the world where no one has ever been born.

When you were a kid you probably came across books with titles like Science Can Be Fun. Mary Roach proves again and again that that is true.

In the shadows

Elizabeth Kostova first visited Bulgaria as a young American woman soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She fell in love with this beautiful country and, in time, with a Bulgarian man. Then in 2017 she mixed a little bit of her own history with a lot of Bulgarian history to create a knock-out book, The Shadow Land.

The novel finds a young American woman, Alexandra Boyd, landing in Bulgaria to teach English, but before she can even leave the airport she finds herself caught up in intrigue, danger and a hint of romance.

She encounters an old man in a wheelchair, an old woman and a tall handsome younger man trying to get into a cab. She stops to helps, but after they drive away she discovers she is still holding an urn containing somebody's ashes.And so, after just a few minutes in the country, her adventure begins.

Her own cab driver, Bobby, a gay poet and political activist, volunteers to help Alexandra return the ashes to the three unknown people. Against his advice, she reports finding the ashes to the police. After that their every move is monitored.

Kostova takes us step by step through Alexandra and Bobby's search, while at the same telling the story of the man whose ashes fill that urn. He was perhaps Bulgaria's finest violinist, at least until he was sent to a work camp by the communist government then in power. He left an account of his years of hard labor, and somehow this hidden history threatens some powerful person in modern Bulgaria.

Kostova tells her story an even pace, gradually accelerating toward the exciting resolution.

Signs of progress

The point of calling attention to progress is not self-congratulation but identifying the causes so we can do more of what works.

Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

When I read Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature a few years ago, it made sense to me. He argues in that book that human beings and civilization in general are getting better, and I have read enough history to believe this to be true.

So I was surprised to read in Pinker's follow-up book, Enlightenment Now (2018), how controversial that earlier book was. Critics argued that the world is getting worse, not better, and they had many examples to point to. In the later book, Pinker defends himself, going point by point, using plenty of graphs and statistics, to show that conditions really are improving in such areas as health, wealth, peace, the environment, democracy, knowledge, quality of life and equal rights.

There are many setbacks, he acknowledges, and he considers Donald Trump one of the big ones. He takes a punch at Trump in just about every chapter. One might wish he had waited for the Biden administration to finish his book. Yet to some extent Pinker anticipates Biden by slamming many left-wing ideas that threaten human progress. In his mind, progressives work counter to progress.

Capitalism works better than socialism, he argues. Environmental extremists pose a serious danger, he says, adding, "As with many apocalyptic movements, greenism is laced with misanthropy, including an indifference to starvation, an indulgence in ghoulish fantasies of a depopulated planet, and Nazi-like comparisons of human being to vermin, pathogens, and cancer." He believes science can conquer all environmental problems and that efforts should focus more on nuclear energy than windmills.

More troublesome is Pinker's apparent support of world government, as if such a government could be guaranteed to work for the people rather than for its leaders and other elites, and his hatred for all religion. He strongly favors humanism, which he defines as "good without God." Yet when disaster strikes, as in the recent Florida hurricane, humanistic do-gooders tend to get caught up in bureaucracy, red tape and now calls for equity, while religion-based groups set quickly to work helping people. Much of the human progress Pinker points to, such as colleges and hospitals and the end of slavery, were often the work of devout men and women with strong religious beliefs, while atheists gave us communism and the worst kinds of environmental extremism.

Adventurous readers

True readers boldly go where they haven't gone before.

Michael Dirda, Browsings

One of the advantages of reviewing books for a newspaper for so many years, in addition to all those free books, was that it forced me to read a great variety of books by a great variety of authors. Some reviewers somehow manage to specialize. They may review only mysteries or only romances or only children's books or only literary novels. But you may have to work for the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal to do this. Most book reviewers probably have to sample a little bit of everything.

Of course, reading a variety of books is something that qualifies a person to review books in the first place. So, chicken? Or the egg?

Michael Dirda

But Michael Dirda above is not just talking about book reviewers like himself. He speaks of "true readers," then gives a definition of that term: those who "boldly go where they haven't gone before." True readers, he suggests, are explorers. Adventurers. Astronauts. They may never write a book review in their lives, yet they have at least sampled William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, James Patterson, Emily Dickinson, Danielle Steel, Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, Nathaniel West, T.S. Eliot, Flannery O'Connor, C.S. Lewis, Zane Grey, etc. (No, I have never read Danielle Steel. I guess I am not really that adventurous.)

But in the same paragraph of the same essay, Dirda makes another, equally important comment. "Well, I say if you don't like them, don't read them. You're not in school any more. Even the best mountaineers aren't always up for an ascent of Mount Everest."

Sometimes being bold means, no, I'm not going to read that. I don't care if it is a bestseller. Or one of the great books. Being bold can mean not reading any more of a book or an author one has tried and found boring.

Bold readers don't always read the same kinds of books by the same authors, books they know they will like. Bold readers experiment, sampling other authors, other writing styles, other kinds of books. But they don't necessarily finish them. Sometimes it takes courage to give up.

Two treasures

Can you discover more than one treasure at the same time? Charlie Lovett's wonderful 2017 novel The Lost Book of the Grail answers, why not?

If you have read much Anthony Trollope, you have probably heard of the fictional English town of Barchester. Lovett takes us there again in the company of Arthur Prescott, named after King Arthur and obsessed with Holy Grail legends since his childhood. Now he works happily with ancient manuscripts in the Barchester Cathedral Library. Suddenly those manuscripts are threatened.

Bethany Davis, a young American, comes to Barchester to digitalize these manuscripts. In his mind, Arthur views this project as making them expendable. His suspicions gain validity when Bethany's employer, an American billionaire, makes an offer to buy the manuscripts, and the cathedral hierarchy, desperate for money, takes the offer seriously.

Bethany turns out to be a Grail enthusiast, too, and together, along with a couple of friends, they begin a quest not for the Grail itself but for a book about the Grail and an almost mythical early saint. When they find it at last, it turns out to be more than Arthur could have hoped for. And the other treasure? Why, it's Bethany's heart, to Arthur an even greater prize.

Lovett first won acclaim for his novel The Bookman's Tale, but I found this an even more rewarding tale. And his scholarship is as impressive as his writing.

Not isolated enough

It's an old story. Governments just won't leave you alone.

In I'm Staying Here (2018), Italian writer Marco Balzano lets a woman named Trina tell her story. Her people live in Curon, a tiny and seemingly isolated mountain village so far north in Italy that everyone speaks German. Trina, a teacher, is among the few who can actually understand their own country's language.

Trina addresses her story to Marica, her beloved daughter, whose disappearance seems to trigger all the trials that follow, almost as if it were all her fault. In the 1930s the people of Curon are being pulled in two different directions — by Mussolini and the Fascists in the south and by Hitler and the Nazis in the north. Some of the people are lured north, where at least others speak their language. Some of Trina's relatives are among them, and they secretly take Marica with them.

While the Nazis prepare for war, the Fascists talk of building a dam and flooding the valley in which Curon sets. When war breaks out it swallows up Erich, Trina's husband, who is forced to fight for the Fascists, while their son, Michael, idolizes Hitler and eventually joins the German army. When Erich returns from combat with injuries, he vows never to fight again when he recovers. Yet his war isn't over.

To escape both the Fascists and the Nazis, the two of them flee into the Alps to wait out the war with a few others. When the war ends and they are finally able to return to their farm, however, they find that the dam project remains very much alive. The novel is based on reality, and the cover illustration shows the church's bell tower that still today juts out of the lake covering Curon.

Even translated into English, Bolzano's graceful prose shines through. This is both a beautiful novel and a powerful one with a message so many of us can identify with: Why can't they just leave us alone?

Titles that sing

Most of us love lists, especially lists that represent someone's opinions when we have opinions of our own on the same subject. And so I stopped for a moment at, and then later returned to, Michael Dirda's list in Browsings of some of his favorite book titles.

He lists Jane Austen's Persuasion as No. 1 on his list, and I agree it is a terrific title, or at least it is once you have read the novel. Until you do it is no more than a single word, hardly the equal of Pride and Prejudice.

Several of the titles Dirda lists leave me baffled, perhaps because I haven't read the books. They include Pavane and, most curious of all, A History of English Prose Rhythm. More to my liking are The Man Who Was Thursday, The Well at the World's End, Trent's Last Case and The Door Into Summer.

Just a few days ago I noticed the brilliance of some of Ray Bradbury's titles: I Sing the Body Electric!, The Golden Apples of the Sun and Something Wicked This Way Comes, for example. Fahrenheit 451 is pretty good, too.

Other writers also have a knack for terrific titles. Among the best is Alexander McCall Smith, whose novels have titles like Tears of the Giraffe, Morality for Beautiful Girls, The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon, A Promise of Ankles, The Right Attitude to Rain, The Geometry of Holding Hands and so many more.

Mystery writer Donna Leon has some excellent titles, many of which employ familiar phrases: Suffer the Little Children, Earthly Remains, Friends in High Places and Through a Glass, Darkly, for example.

Then there is Francine Prose, who has given us Bigfoot Dreams, Household Saints and Guided Tours of Hell.

If Dirda likes one-word titles, I tend to favor wordy ones. I have yet to read The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams, but I may have purchased it just for the title. The same goes for Love and Other Consolation Prizes by Jamie Ford and The Psychology of Time Travel by Kate Mascarenhas. And Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates. And Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessi. And how could I resist The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, a novel by Eva Jurczyk?

Don't judge a book by its cover? You had me at the title.

Rediscovery

I have one more thing to say about Christopher Fowler's The Book of Forgotten Authors before I place it back on the shelf — make that two more things. These are just comments on two things Fowler says near the end of his book, in which he writes about 99 talented writers who are now all but forgotten.

If you rediscover one author from this selection of ninety-nine, you will have conferred upon them a kind of immortality.

Harper Lee

The late Harper Lee did not achieve "a kind of immortality" by writing To Kill a Mockingbird. Rather it was achieved, at least for the time being, because people continue to read it. For the authors Fowler writes about in his book, immortality, you might say, hangs by a thread. In most cases, their books are out of print. Old copies of their books can still be found in used bookstores and perhaps a few attics, but few of us want to read old books we've never heard of by authors we've never heard of.

Fowler aids the cause by writing about them after reading their books himself, but any of us can do the same by finding and reading their books, too. And there are countless other forgotten authors for whom we can give a temporary breath of life simply by reading their work.

Life is not a box of chocolates, it's a weathered old paperback, and you never know what you're going to find in it.

This metaphor seems a bit confused to me since, unlike Forrest Gump, Fowler really isn't talking about our lives but rather just the lives of old books. But I do like the suggestion that old books can contain great stories, surprising information and amazing wisdom. Or we may find they are better left forgotten.

Earlier I wrote that few of us want to read old books we've never heard of by authors we've never heard of, but I could have condensed it to just "few of us want to read old books." And even when we do read old books, we prefer them in new editions.

But I agree with Fowler that many old books do deserve to be given new life. Somebody once thought these books were worth writing, worth publishing and worth reading. Perhaps that worth, that treasure, still rests within them waiting to be rediscovered. You never know.

Finding herself

Sometimes it's easier to go on living, not even knowing who you are, when at least you know precisely where you are while you go on not knowing.

Fredrik Backman, Britt-Marie Was Here

Britt-Marie Was Here (2014) by Fredrik Backman is nothing like The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend by Katrina Bivald, reviewed here on Aug. 31, except for the fact that they both tell the same story.

That story is this: An introverted woman still trying to discover her place in the world finds herself in a very small town in the middle of nowhere and within days dramatically changes the town, just as the town dramatically changes her.

The novels actually have something else in common: Both were written by Swedish authors and became bestsellers in the United States and elsewhere. Was Bivald influenced by the blueprint developed two years previously by Backman? Who can say?

Britt-Marie Was Here picks up a subplot from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, another Backman novel published a year earlier and reviewed here on July 1. Britt-Marie is a 60-something woman with firm ideas about what's proper and what's not and whose quest for orderliness in the world leads her to compulsive cleaning. In the earlier book we learn that her husband, Kent, is unfaithful. Before she can go to bed each night, she must wash Kent's shirt to remove the perfume smell.

Now in Britt-Marie Was Here, she has left Kent and accepts the only job she can find, as the temporary director of a recreation center scheduled for demolition in the nothing town of Borg. The few kids in Borg are soccer crazy, but they have neither a pitch nor a coach. As recreation director Britt-Marie reluctantly agrees to become their coach, even though she lacks both any knowledge of or any interest in soccer.

Before long violence comes to Borg, boys die, a policeman falls in love with Britt-Marie, the soccer team and its coach give the town hope for its future and Kent tracks down his wife and begs her to return home. But has he really changed or does he just have a lot of dirty shirts? Britt-Marie, who craves order, faces a decision that could change everything.

Backman has a gift for making a narrative both terribly funny and terribly poignant at the same time, leaving a reader to wonder about the reason for all those tears.