Tag: fiction

June in Books

Reading The Leopard is like viewing a portrait of a bygone monarch in a gallery. They mean nothing to you but notice how the brush strokes are skillfully done as it immortalizes a world that no longer exists; you acknowledge that it is important as a record… and then walk away and move on to the next portrait. But you retrace your steps, give it a tender, wistful gaze, and your eyes rest on Bendico, the Prince’s faithful Great Dane; the one detail that truly manages to tug at your emotions and whose fate emphasizes the vicissitudes of life and history.

Background for Love allowed me to lean back momentarily, put my feet up, and whisked me toward the sunlight despite the bittersweet awareness that darkness would soon descend on the sunlit Europe of this story. That darkness came for A Bookshop in Berlin, a true account of a bookseller’s incredible escape from Nazi-occupied Europe that eerily mirrors the current state of the world where prejudice and ignorance defy truth and multitudes are easily swayed by propaganda, but where hope also shines through in heroic acts of kindness.

Lawrence Ypil’s poetry served as punctuation marks between these novels. And Alba de Céspedes? The powerhouse that is Alba de Céspedes? She demands a separate post.

So that was June. It did not leave time or headspace for making concrete reading plans. While it started with that epitome of a retelling which is James, whenever there was a need to retreat in the solace of books, I’d instinctively pick up a volume from a stack of Pushkin Press Classics that hadn’t been assigned places on the shelf yet.

In the month wherein my heaviest schedule clamored to be felt and the risk of a WWIII threatened to make everything inconsequential, it somehow made sense to work harder, to live more, and to continue reading. Wait, is it really July already?

Helen Wolff: Background for Love

“What do you think I should do now?”
“You should read a good book for a change.”

“At my death, burn or throw away unread,” wrote Helen Wolff on the envelope in which the manuscript was found in 2007. Being a revered editor and publisher of literary giants such as Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, and Gunter Grass, among many others, she probably judged her own writings with more exacting standards and deemed Background for Love unfit for publication.

After all, it is a perfectly imperfect novella. We can find fault with the characters and their decisions if we want to. Nothing grand or earth-shattering happens here. It is a story of a young girl wrestling between the desire for independence and the man she loves. And most of us have been there, and may or may not have ended up acting wisely. But you see, some of the most authentic writings are those unfit for publication, simply because life is flawed and will not live up to a lot of ideals.

What made me relish the pages so easily — aside from the cat she named Colette after the writer, aside from the picturesque beauty of Saint-Tropez as a backdrop, and the bittersweet awareness that darkness would soon descend on the sunlit Europe of this story — was the authenticity and intimacy of Wolff’s writing. It makes me wish she had written more, and one can only wistfully imagine the triumph of what she would have considered fit for publication!

But we can only be grateful for how this little gem did not perish into oblivion. As rain begins to steal into the sunny days in my part of the world, this book made me lean back, put my feet up… and whisked me toward the sunlight. 

Olga Tokarczuk: The Empusium

“Wojnicz had noticed that every discussion, whether about democracy, the fifth dimension, the role of religion, socialism, Europe, or modern art, eventually led to women.”

Reading Olga with UP Symphony rehearsing Shostakovich as background.

Mischief. More literary mischief from Olga.

That the first death in the book happens to be of a woman whom our dear Wojnicz mistakes for a servant, when she is in fact the guesthouse proprietor’s wife, is not negligible.

And then, mushrooms. Then the puns in the names: January and August, two characters named after months, months named after a two-faced Roman god and a Roman Caesar; Dr. Semperweiss, because, always white; and it’s not a mere coincidence how the owner of the Guesthouse for Gentlemen where Wojnicz lodges is named Wilhelm “Willi” Opitz (see Opitz syndrome, especially in males); the Tuntschi, definitely a nod to the Sennentuntschi of Alpine folklore involving an ill-treated doll that retaliates; and Empusium, after Empusa, the female shape-shifter of Greek mythology.

The Empusium is Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain reframed, they say. Friends who have known me way back from my Thomas Mann reading phase know the story of how I developed a fever while reading the Magic Mountain. (They tried to assuage my sickness by saying that it’s the best state in which to read Thomas Mann. Hah!) Strangely enough, I also got sick a day after I started reading The Empusium. Whether that’s part of Olga’s mischief, I cannot say for sure, but, “The story has a spirit of sickness,” says my mom ominously. 

While Mann’s mountain was an allegory for a sick Europe, Olga’s mountain is glaringly sick with misogyny. In the author’s note, Olga divulges that the chauvinistic passages were paraphrased from the words of history’s famous men, and she names all of them. Why do you think it’s labeled as a “horror story”?