Impending disaster always feels like it’s on the next page, and I found myself wanting to skip ahead to relieve the tension. Rage, despair, euphoria, and passion all have there place in this novel about the lost generation, and despite being about a specific place (Austria), and a particular time (the early 1920’s), the capitalist, socialist, democratic critique still felt pertinent.
Rarely have I read fiction that really turns its gaze fully on the working poor, and gives them a voice; one that’s angry and unapologetic. Read if you want to feel your blood pounding, and your heart racing. Set aside Gatsby and the entitled crowd that populate most of our American 20’s lit, and experience something gritty and bitter. The ending is satisfying in that it’s hard earned, isn’t cheap, and isn’t expected.
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams: A Life Story
by Peter Handke New York Review of Books
Our Price: $12.95
For two months this book, and the ideas it explores, has haunted me.
Observe, as Handke tries to fathom truth; puncture the obscurity of language; grapple with the impossibility, the horror, of "gone forever". Very few books have resonated with me on such a primal level, and also made me really think.
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is a book I gave a friend for Christmas, and then bought again for myself, and which will doubtlessly preoccupy me for many more months to come. It might even be the perfect summer read if you’re into this sort of thing as it's both pithy and portable.
Monica Dickens, great-granddaughter of Charles, wrote this delicious coming of age novel 70 years ago.
Dickens chronicles with deftness, compassion, and a sometimes ruthless honesty, the life of one completely unexceptional woman in the 1930’s. There is a frankness in Dickens’s portrayal of Mary, the main character, that I found refreshing. Mary could be petty, or generous; exuberant, or depressive, and all without a shred of coyness. Details of contemporary life abound, from fox hunting, to hat styles, to the minutia of proper English etiquette.
Mariana enthralled me (there’s no other word) in the same way that Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre or Bridget Jones’s Diary did. Persephone books, a family owned publisher in London, wiped the dust off of this forgotten classic and printed it up beautifully with french flaps, gorgeous cover art and an introduction by Harriet Lane. Curl up with a sherry to read this one.
There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales
by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya Penguin Group USA
Our Price: $15.00
Loved these. Read most of them, spellbound, on the T in the mornings, and the rest I read aloud with a friend. Scary stories of the supernatural are a favorite of mine, as are contemporary Russian authors, and interesting typefaces.
The element of these stories I found most chilling was not the ghosts, but instead the depiction of a certain Soviet Union/Russia; one populated by cynical and mercenary men and women struggling to survive. Of course, that only made the glimpses of selflessness and generosity that much more affecting. "The Old Monk’s Testament" literally brought tears to my eyes.
These stories were just the right combination of jarring realism and hopeful optimism.
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
by Lydia Davis Farrar Straus & Giroux
Our Price: $30.00
After reading one Lydia Davis collection a year ago, I immediately fell in love with the short story, developed my first author crush, and single-mindedly sought out every other novel, or compilation of her work that I could find.
Why? Because she’s focused and dissecting, while maintaining a whimsy and a creativity that almost startles in a "serious" writer. Her stories use language to reveal, not obscure, even when tackling confusing subjects. She extrapolates from segments of human behavior a sort of truth that I always end up feeling I should already have known (read "Affinity").
At close to 200 stories, this still conveniently small compendium will fascinate the philosopher, or the historian; the brokenhearted, the disorganized, or even the plainly curious-minded individual.
The Slynx (New York Review Books Classics)
by Tatyana Tolstaya NYRB Classics
Our Price: $14.95
The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya will satisfy any skeptic's desire for a cynical, Russian dystopian novel. Benedikt, as our narrator from a post-atomic, archaic world three hundred years after "the Blast" has leveled Moscow, is at once charming, aggravating and mystifying as he navigates through a society that has lost culture and modern technology- books are thought to be the cause of a mysterious illness and "freethiking" is a punishable offense. The "Oldeners", who miraculously survived the Blast and do not age, are frustrated observers of their despotic progeny; they are just as stymied by political divisions as they were three hundred years before. Brimming with literary references, fantastic science fiction and a strangely compelling hero, The Slynx satirizes without feeling preachy. Even my fifteen year old little brother read and enjoyed this novel.
