Brief Encounters with Che Guevara by Ben Fountain

I didn’t know about Ben Fountain until I read about him in Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article “Late Bloomers.” Here was a man who quit a successful career in the law to devote himself to writing, but who didn’t publish his first book until the age of 48. (My own first book came out when I was the same age, but made a much smaller splash.) Fountain and I share a fascination with Haiti, which he first visited in 1991. (I first went there in 1996, but although Fountain has been back many times I have not yet returned.)

Fountain’s collection of short stories, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, turns out to be excellent. In its variety of locales, sharpness of observation, and affinity with the natural world, it reminds me of the fiction of Barry Lopez, which is high praise.

Books to return to

I keep a list of all-time favorite books that I revisit from time to time, but I’m aware that there’s a certain tendency to cheat by including a work that looks impressive but isn’t really an all-time favorite. (I did resist the temptation to include The Man Without Qualities just to show off that I made it through all three volumes.)

A more interesting and probably more honest sort of list would be a list of books that one has read more than once. Here’s mine, as best as I can reconstruct it. I have not included books that I reread in the line of duty, only those reread for pleasure. Someday it will probably be possible to put a list like this into a computer and reach some startlingly accurate conclusions about the personality of the reader.

Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Realms of Gold by Margaret Drabble
The Ice Age by Margaret Drabble
The Radiant Way trilogy by Margaret Drabble
The Man Who Walked Through Time by Colin Fletcher
Twentyone Twice by Mark Harris

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
A Rage in Harlem (and others) by Chester Himes
The Courage of Turtles by Edward Hoagland
Amerika by Franz Kafka
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen

So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed by John McPhee
Redburn by Herman Melville
The Bottom of the Harbor by Joseph Mitchell
The Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O’Brian
Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

Swann’s Way, Within a Budding Grove, The Guermantes Way, and Cities of the Plain by Marcel Proust (I’ve read the later volumes, but not more than once)
The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau
Men of Concord by Henry David Thoreau
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

Popular pages

A Natural Curiosity isn’t one of the most popular blogs on the great series of tubes that makes up the Internet, but I do get visitors from some surprisingly far-flung places, and I notice some surprising patterns among the pages that people look at.

A few of my book reviews pop up again and again, and they are mostly reviews of some fairly obscure African works — including my review of And Night Fell, a South African prison memoir that I wrote about way back in 1984.

Maybe there just isn’t much else on the Internet about some of these books. Too bad.

And Night Fell by Molefe Pheto
Mission to Kala by Mongo Beti
A Woman in Her Prime by Asare Konadu
The Sand Child by Tahar ben Jelloun

The Book of Lost Books

Over the Thanksgiving break, I was talking with Jenn and my mother when the subject of lost books came up: Hemingway’s stolen suitcase full of short stories, Bruno Schulz’s novel The Messiah, manuscripts lost to deliberate fire (Sir Richard Burton, Nikolai Gogol) or to accidental fire (Malcolm Lowry, the library at Alexandria).

It occurred to me that a collection of these stories might be interesting to read and to write. I even thought of an appropriate title: The Book of Lost Books. (In my literal-minded way, I like books with concrete titles like The Tin Drum, or that baldly state what they are: The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, The Book of Daniel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.)

Before I started working, though, I thought it best to check whether anyone else had been there first. And so I found not only that the book has been done, but under the very same title. The Book of Lost Books by Stuart Kelly was published in 2006, and I must admit that Kelly did a nice job.

I don’t see a chapter on Malcolm Lowry, though, and the loss of his enormous “bolus,” The Voyage That Never Ends. In his introduction, Kelly does mention that the original manuscript of Lowry’s Ultramarine was stolen from his publisher’s car and that the book “had to be recreated from what was left in Lowry’s wastebasket.”

Lafcadio Hearn and the velocipede

Next year the Library of America plans to publish the first volume of writings of Lafcadio Hearn, an intriguing but nearly forgotten author with a taste for the exotic and macabre. The book includes a selection of Hearn’s journalism from Cincinnati and New Orleans.

I’ve been reading Inventing New Orleans, which collects Hearn’s New Orleans writings. Only a fraction of these have been chosen for the new volume, and a comparison of titles shows that the most significant pieces have generally made the cut. It would have been good, though, to find room for more of the lighter and more ephemeral ones, like “The Unspeakable Velocipede.” Here is an excerpt:

The velocipede is like a vicious dog, because it always attacks any one who runs away from it; but it is also like a lion which attacks any one who dares to face it boldly. It is like a fox in treachery, like a panther in agility, like a tiger in cruelty, like a gorilla in ferocity, like a greyhound in speed, like a badger in taking a good hold of the calf of your leg, and like the Devil for impudence.

You cannot turn a corner so quickly that a velocipede cannot turn after you still quicker. There is but one possible means of escaping a velocipede. Velocipedes are like grizzly bears; they cannot climb trees....

The only way to attack the velocipede successfully is to attack their riders — as the Romans learned to do in fighting against trained elephants. Trained elephants sometimes turned and trampled down their own supporters. So with velocipedes. If you stand your ground well and direct your just rage and wholly excusable indignation against the rider, you will find the velocipede treacherously abandon its owner and fling him in the dust and trample wildly upon him.