A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

After having the book out of the library for literal months (I may have actually checked it out before lockdown), I have AT LONG LAST finished Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir Hope against Hope. It focuses mainly on the four years between her husband Osip Mandelstam’s first arrest in 1934 and his second (and final) arrest in 1938, a grace period which she frequently refers to as “a miracle,” although it’s also clear that the hopes raised and repeatedly dashed during this reprieve were in effect a part of the state persecution designed to grind them down.

When I used to read about the French Revolution as a child, I often wondered whether it was possible to survive during a reign of terror. I now know beyond doubt that it is impossible. Anybody who breathes the air of terror is doomed, even if nominally he manages to save his life. Everybody is a victim - not only those who die, but also all the killers, ideologists, accomplices and sycophants who close their eyes or wash their hands - even if they are secretly consumed with remorse at night. Every section of the population has been through the terrible sickness caused by terror, and none has so far recovered, or become fit again for normal civic life. It is an illness that is passed on to the next generation, so that the sons pay for the sins of the fathers and perhaps only the grandchildren begin to get over it - or at least it takes a different form with them.

Otherwise most of my reading this week has been proofreading for Her Magical Pet, which should be coming out… tomorrow! I’ll be sure to post a link, it’s got loads of amazing stories. (And also a link to the companion volume, His Magical Pet, but I didn’t proofread that one so the only story I have read in it is my own.)

What I’m Reading Now

Still working on Mary Renault’s The Charioteer I’M SO SORRY I meant to read this faster, I know at least five of you want this review. Life has gotten away from me this week. ( Some spoilery thoughts )

I’ve also begun reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Catriona! So far, Davie Balfour has spent the day wandering Edinburgh running errands. No sign of Alan Breck Stewart yet, but we have met the titular Catriona, full marks to Stevenson for promptitude on that one.

...Also I’ve abandoned the possibility of actually including an excerpt from my leads’ Kidnapped fic in my book, because there is no way that I can do the Lowland Scots dialogue. Readers will have to rest content with an enthusiastic discussion about the plot point where David Balfour and Alan Breck Stewart get tossed in a dungeon and the guards beat Alan for cheeking them (you know he would) and David cradles Alan’s battered head in his lap.

What I Plan to Read Next

Should I wait for the library to get Megan Whalen Turner’s Return of the Thief, or should I bow to the fact that I will inevitably want a copy and just buy it now?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I never really gelled with Bruce Brooks’ What Hearts, a 1993 Newbery Honor winner. It’s telling you about the characters rather than telling you a story about them, and this has the counterintuitive effect of making you feel that you don’t know the characters at all, like how suddenly in part three we discover out of the blue that Asa’s mother suffers depressions so deep that they sometimes result in month-long hospitalizations. I feel that this should have been hinted at in parts one and two.

I also never gelled with Gregory Manchess’s Above the Timberline, which was too bad because I’ve been intending to read this book for years. The illustrations are absolutely gorgeous - think Dinotopia meets the tundra - but the story just never caught fire for me. Maybe if I had struck while the iron was hot (or ice-cold, as it were) and read it a few years ago when I first heard about it? There is something to be said for following one’s whims in the reading life.

In support of this theory, I picked up Anne Blankman’s The Blackbird Girls on a whim: “That looks Soviet!” I said, catching sight of the cover across the library, and indeed, it’s a children’s book set during the aftermath of Chernobyl. When anti-Semitic schoolyard bully Oksana and her frequent victim Valentina are accidentally evacuated from Pripyat together, they become unlikely friends.

I could have done with a shorter Overcoming Prejudice plotline (do you KNOW how many historical fiction children’s books I’ve read about a character Overcoming Prejudice? DO YOU KNOW?), but once we got to the unlikely friends part (which takes place in Leningrad! There’s a whole chapter of sightseeing in Leningrad!!!!), I was sold. And it was so great to read a children’s book set in the Soviet Union, partly because this aligns so spectacularly with my interests, but also because it’s a little off the beaten path for American historical fiction and it’s just nice to see variety.

What I’m Reading Now

Another quote from Nadezhda Mandelstam, set off by a reminiscence about a kind landlady she and her husband stayed with while in exile in the mid-1930s:

There were once many kind people, and even unkind ones pretended to be good because that was the thing to do. Such pretense was the source of the hypocrisy and dishonesty so much exposed in the realist literature at the end of the last century. The unexpected result of this kind of critical writing was that kind people disappeared. Kindness is not, after all, an inborn quality - it has to be cultivated, and this only happens when it is in demand. For our generation, kindness was an old-fashioned, vanished quality, and its exponents were as extinct as the mammoth.

In a way this is a paraphrase of La Rochefoucauld: “Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.” I think the idea of this sort of realist literature is that exposing hypocrites might encourage honest and sincere kindness, but perhaps this aim is fundamentally flawed; maybe most humans can only offer forth so much sincerity.

Jeannette Ng’s Under the Pendulum Sun is a chonk of a book, and I’m only about halfway through. I’m enjoying the world-building of the land of the fae (Arcadia, as the book calls it), but wow, this is going in a more incestuous direction than I anticipated.

And I’ve begun Mary Renault’s The Charioteer! Fairly sure that I am going to drown in feelings.

What I Plan to Read Next

Waiting to continue my hobo journey with Nels Anderson’s On Hobos and Homelessness. Come on, interlibrary loan!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I read Gerald Durrell’s The Drunken Forest, about his collecting trip in South America which was cut unfortunately short by a revolution in Paraguay. Durrell seems to be one of those people who lives more in six months than many people do in their entire lives: he’s just gotten together a good collection when the revolution makes it impossible to get most of his specimens out of the country, so he has to release the animals and leave on a rickety little plane… but within a few days he throws himself into collecting rheas (ostrich-like birds) on the pampas in Argentina. I aspire to react to setbacks with such sangfroid.

I also zoomed through Gale Galligan’s graphic novel adaptation of the Babysitters Club book Logan Likes Mary Anne!, which I don’t think I ever read in novel form. In fact, I’m not sure I ever read any of the first ten or so books in the Babysitters Club series, which is weird because I read so many of the others. Why, younger self??

I don’t know if M. F. K. Fisher herself revised How to Cook a Wolf, or if some later editor got a hold of her marginal notes and then inserted them into the main text, always [closed off with brackets] to show where the edits have been made. This makes for an annoyingly choppy reading experience, especially as the effect of the notes is almost always to diffuse the power of the original passage.

Otherwise I enjoyed the book, but boy do I wish I had a copy with the original unrevised text, or at very least a less disruptive way of adding in the revisions.

And finally, I galloped through Elizabeth Warnock Fernea’s A View of the Nile, about the years that she and her family spent in Egypt in the early 60s. The book is a bit slow to get started (I galloped partly because it’s an interlibrary loan with a tight turnaround time), but it hits its stride once Fernea and her husband leave Cairo for Nubia to complete an anthropological study before the Aswan Dam floods all the traditional Nubian villages.

I knew almost nothing about Nubia before reading this book, and Fernea paints such a fascinating picture of the Nubian community where she lives with her husband and two young children that I was left rather sorry that the book didn’t include an epilogue; I would have loved it if the book checked back in to see how the community fared after the Egyptian government transplanted it above the Aswan Dam.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m back in the saddle with Svetlana Aleksievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, although I have to take it slow: too much at once and you drown. The mother of a girl who was badly injured in a terrorist bombing on the Moscow Metro tells Aleksievich, “You’re a writer, you’ll understand what I mean: Words have very little in common with what goes on inside of you.” And yet she keeps talking, and Aleksievich keeps recording: words are insufficient, but they are all we have.

Also, a quote from Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope, her memoir about her husband (the poet Osip Mandelstam)’s arrest and the Stalinist era more generally. She’s musing, here, about a fellow that she thinks might have informed on Mandelstam: “But he scarcely matters. He was just a poor wretch who happened to live in terrible times. Can a man really be held accountable for his own actions? His behavior, even his character, is always in the merciless grip of the age, which squeezes out of him the drop of good or evil that it needs from him.”

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m pining away for Alex Halberstadt’s Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and a Reckoning. I’m first in line on the holds list! Hurry up and read the book, person who has it checked out!!!