The Same Sea by Amos Oz

I had never read the Israeli novelist Amos Oz before, but I picked this up because I had heard Alan Cheuse say it was the best novel he had read in recent years. That was too much to live up to, as I should have known, but I did find this short novel intriguing and lyrical.

The book is written partly in prose and partly in verse, though the distinction is sometimes mostly typographical. The plot concerns an aging accountant, his adventurous son, who is traveling among the Himalayas, his son’s young and restless girlfriend (or ex-girlfriend) and the accountant’s female friend, who is not quite a lover but a little too close to be just a friend. Points of view change, postcards arrive from the Himalayas, and various characters (not always obvious which ones) ruminate on life, mortality, and the sunlight on the sea.

This is a passage I liked:

Scorched earth

The teeth of time, smoke without fire. On the back of my hand
I see the brown mark that once used to be, at the very same spot,
on my father’s gnarled hand. And so my father is back
from underground. For years he has failed and now, at last,
remembered to hand over to his son a patch of pigment
from his estate. The teeth of time. Scorch-mark without fire.
Ancestral seal. The gift of the dead
on the back of your hand.

William Maxwell’s Improvisations

The second volume of William Maxwell’s works just came out from the Library of America — edited by my old friend Chris Carduff. The volume contains the short novel So Long, See You Tomorrow, which I recently reread after many years. But it also contains forty of the very short stories that Maxwell called “improvisations” — apparently in the same way that Graham Greene separated his “entertainments” like Our Man in Havana from what he considered his serious novels. These were written as presents for Maxwell’s wife, and were sometimes rolled up with ribbon and placed between the boughs of a Christmas tree.

Although many of these stories begin “Once upon a time,” and many of them have animals as heroes or take place in what could be medieval England, they are not at all cute. The psychology of these tales is adult and rather unsettling. They have titles like “The man who had no friends and didn’t want any” or “The kingdom where straightforward, logical thinking was admired over every other kind.” I find them more satisfying than almost anything selected by Irving Howe for his anthology Short Shorts.

Here is the beginning of “A mean and spiteful toad,” which I read aloud at my book group the other day:

A toad sat under a dead leaf that was the same color it was. Most toads are nice harmless creatures, full of fears, and with good reason, but this toad was mean and spiteful. For no reason. It was born that way. One day a little girl on her way home from school saw him and nudged him gently with the toe of her shoe to see him hop. Which he did, helplessly. But the bile churned in his ice-cold veins and he said — thought not so she could hear it — You will turn against the people who love you the most. And for the whole rest of the day, under the leaf that was the same color he was, he was pleased. Of all the curses he had ever put on people and on other toads, this struck him as the most original.

On the shelf

Last night, after a small but enjoyable meeting of our monthly book discussion group at McNally Jackson , I wandered over to the literary criticism section and spotted the unmistakable aqua color of my book on the bottom shelf. Two copies of A Basket of Leaves were wedged there side by side.

My book has only been available for a short while in the US, and this was the first time I’d seen it on sale in a bookstore. It was a nice moment. And to make it better, Jenn and I had just met up with Johnny Temple of Akashic Books, whose author Jennifer Baumgardner was reading at the store that night. 

Consider the Lobster

I went to the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday, though I only attended one event and browsed the books before having an iced coffee and an almond croissant and heading back home. (It was just too hot and sticky that day.)

I enjoyed the discussion I attended, but when the subject turned to suicide by authors, I was put off by the remark of one participant who said he thought of David Foster Wallace as “David Foster Child.” So this guy considers Wallace difficult and immature, I thought. Maybe so, but it was a rude thing to say, and in this context someone might get the idea that Wallace had killed himself.

Still, there was a nagging doubt in my mind, and when I got home I checked Wikipedia and found that it was so — making that remark even more insensitive than I’d thought.

I haven’t read Infinite Jest, but I found a lot to like in Wallace’s essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster, which I reviewed. As the title essay showed, Wallace combined literary playfulness with an unusual degree of compassion. Does a person who feels the suffering of lobsters this keenly eventually find the suffering of others too much to bear?

Thoreau’s renewable energy plan

I discovered this quote while rereading Men of Concord, which collects writings on friends and neighbors from Thoreau’s Journal, with illustrations by N.C. Wyeth. George Minott was the source of many of the best stories of hunting and the outdoors that Thoreau preserved in the Journal, and this account of Minott’s woodlot is a nice example of a sustainable energy strategy based on local resources.

December 11, 1856. Minott tells me that his and his sister’s wood-lot together contains about ten acres and has, with a very slight exception at one time, supplied all their fuel for thirty years, and he thinks would constantly continue to do so. They keep one fire all the time, and two some of the time, and burn about eight cords in a year. He knows his wood-lot and what grows in it as well as an ordinary farmer does his corn-field, for he has cut his own wood till within two or three years; knows the history of every stump on it and the age of every sapling; knows how many beech trees and black birches there are there, as another knows his pear or cherry trees. He complains that the choppers make a very long carf nowadays, doing most of the cutting on one side, to avoid changing hands so much. It is more economical, as well as more poetical, to have a wood-lot and cut and get out your own wood from year to year than to buy it at your door. Minott may say to his trees: ‘Submit to my axe. I cut your father on this very spot.’ How many sweet passages there must have been in his life there, chopping all alone in the short winter days! How many rabbits, partridges, foxes he saw! A rill runs through the lot, where he has quenched his thirst, and several times he has laid it bare. At last rheumatism has made him a prisoner, and he is compelled to let a stranger, a vandal, it may be, go into his lot with an axe. It is fit that he should be buried there.