FICTION The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1904), Arthur Conan Doyle – My emergency book, the book on my phone, for when I need to read in the dark, or it is raining at the bus stop, or similar dire situations.  I have been dipping into it for two years or more, but decided to finish it up.  In the previous collection, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893), I could see Doyle growing bored with his creation to the extent that he shoved him off a cliff, but the stories in this book are rock solid magazine entertainment, every one of them. A Mirror for Witches (1928), Esther Forbes – How many of us read Johnny Tremain (1943) as a child?  All of us (among the U.S. us)?  This earlier novel is about a lively teenage witch in the Salem vicinity.  It is written in a lightly imitative 17th century, flavorful but not overdoing it.  The narrator thinks the girl is a witch, and the girl thinks she’s a witch, so the novel works as both inventive fantasy and as psychology.  It is a simpler younger cousin of James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), so enjoyable that I am tempted to revisit Johnny Tremain after, oh, not fifty years, but getting close. Soul (1935-46), Andrey Platonov – I wrote about this terrific collection here. The Gift (1938), Vladimir Nabokov – I should write at least a little something about this one, which I have read several times.  A favorite novel; a great book.  The quotation in the title above is from the second page. Near to the Wild Heart (1943), Clarice Lispector – This one received a bit of incomprehension back here. The Matchmaker (1954), Thornton Wilder – Twelve years ago I read On the Razzle (1981), Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of Johann Nestroy’s farce Einen Jux will er sich machen (1842).  Wilder, in his earlier version, moves the fun from Vienna to Yonkers and Manhattan. The Acceptance World (1955), Anthony Powell – The third novel of Dance to the Music of Time.  Perhaps I will have something to write about it after I read the fourth novel. A Rage in Harlem (1957), Chester Himes – The portrait of grotesque Harlem from the first, say, half of this novel is astounding.  Then Himes has to move through a plot, which also has its pleasures. Attila (1991), Aliocha Coll Attila (2014), Javier Serena – A little bit of stunt publishing here.  I will write a longer note on these two books.  It’s a good stunt. POETRY Ten Indian Classics (6th-19th c) – A collection of ten excerpts from the Murty Classical Library of India series for its tenth anniversary.  There is so much to read. The Necessary Angel (1951) & Collected Poems (1954), Wallace Stevens Counterparts (1954) & Brutus's Orchard (1957) & Collected Poems: 1936-1961 (1962), Roy Fuller GERTRUDE STEIN Patriarchal Poetry (1927) Stanzas in Meditation (1932) The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) Picasso (1938) IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE Journal du voleur (1949), Jean Genet – Genet parapatets around Europe cities and prisons, getting by as a beggar, thief, and prostitute.  His great weakness is that his type is brutes, which leads to some ugly places in the 1930s.  The French is somewhat easier and sometimes more abstract than in Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs (1943) but still rough going.  All that slang. Livro Sexto (1962), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen – Poems of the shore and the sea, but with a little more political protest than usual. Tempo de Mercês  (1973), Maria Judite de Carvalho – Speaking of more abstract, compared to the earlier two collections I read.  Sad stories where nothing happens. O Surrealismo Português (2024), Clara Rocha – A volume in a Portuguese series like those Oxford Very Short Introductions.  I wish I had a shelf of them.  Portuguese Surrealism lasted five years.

Loneliness is the fundamental condition of life — we are born by another, but born alone; die around others (if we are lucky and loved), but die alone; we spend our lives islanded in our one and only human experience — in these particular bodies and minds and circumstances drawn from the cosmic lottery — amid the immense ocean of time and chance teeming with all possible experience. Everything of beauty and substance that we make — every poem, every painting, every friendship — is an outstretched hand reaching out from one loneliness to another, reaching into the mute mouth… read article

Several years have passed since I last entered a bookstore selling new books, such as Barnes and Noble or the late Borders. Long ago they stopped feeling like home and a visit usually turned out to be a waste of time. Serendipitous discovery was rare. The portion of the goods on their tables and shelves that might potentially interest me was small. Most of the good stuff I already owned or didn’t want, and I could smell the algorithms mandating the stock. I’m seldom in the market for greeting cards, coffee mugs or tote bags.  So, like thousands of other readers, I rely on the few remaining used-book shops, online dealers and the occasional library sale. Much is lost, including a sentimental attachment to “real” bookstores, with their romantically crusty proprietors and bookshop cats, though something is sometimes gained – convenience, occasionally cheaper prices. Kingsley Amis’ “A Bookshop Idyll,” from his fourth book of poems, A Case of Samples (1957), reads like a report from a vanished kingdom. That was not his intent while writing it almost seventy years ago, but time sometimes adds layers of new meaning to literary works. It begins:     “Between the GARDENING and the COOKERY     Comes the brief POETRY shelf; By the Nonesuch Donne, a thin anthology     Offers itself.   “Critical, and with nothing else to do,     I scan the Contents page, Relieved to find the names are mostly new;     No one my age.”   Amis is ever alert to the predations of ego (including his own). The anthology is not a threat to the speaker. He continues:   “Like all strangers, they divide by sex:     Landscape near Parma Interests a man, so does The Double Vortex,     So does Rilke and Buddha.   “‘I travel, you see’, ‘I think’ and ‘I can read’     These titles seem to say; But I Remember You, Love is my Creed,     Poem for J.,   The ladies' choice, discountenance my patter     For several seconds; From somewhere in this (as in any) matter     A moral beckons.”   That some works are written for and marketed to women, and the same for men, is obviously true, but the lines have blurred since Amis’ time. With the growth in interest in “spiritual” matter and pop religion, no one would be surprised if a woman bought a copy of Rilke and Buddha. I once knew a woman who said the only poet she ever read was Rilke because he was “so spiritual.” Such a silly-sounding title might be written or read today by a man or woman. The poem concludes:   “Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart     Or squash it flat? Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart;     Girls aren’t like that.   “We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff     Can get by without it. Women don’t seem to think that’s good enough;     They write about it,   “And the awful way their poems lay open     Just doesn’t strike them. Women are really much nicer than men:     No wonder we like them.   “Deciding this, we can forget those times     We sat up half the night Chockfull of love, crammed with bright thoughts,     names, rhymes, and couldn’t write.”   Amis’ poem isn’t about books or bookstores or even poems after all. It’s about men and women and the truths and stereotypes that characterize us. Women possess certain advantages denied men, Amis suggests. With his echo of Byron’s Don Juan, he anatomizes us at our most hypocritical, vain and posturing but doesn’t dismiss us. For Amis, literature is meant to be interesting, amusing, even entertaining – qualities anathema to certain species of sticks-in-the-mud. That doesn’t mean lowbrow or one-dimensional. Consider Lucky Jim, Girl, 20, and Ending Up. He doesn’t harp but his focus is society and the social order, manners and morals. A consistent quality in Amis’ work, fiction or verse, is a comic surface with serious undertones.     Amis was born on this date, April 16, in 1922, and died in 1995 at age seventy-three.

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