It’s been a bit of a mad dash to finish up some reading before the year ends. I had a feeling if I didn’t read these books, they’d sit forever on the TBR table, which I’m trying to tame. The first two books I purchased recently. The other two are the firsts in a series I can now say have momentum into 2024.
A Beautiful Young Woman is a novella that takes place in Buenos Aires during Argentina’s Dirty War of the 1970s and ’80s. The political horror of that time isn’t front and center. We derive its presence from a woman’s lover we suspect is a revolutionary, a handsome man who abandoned her when she became a mother, and she, we assume, somehow still involved with him, and the resistance. The unnamed narrator, her son, remembers when they lived together in a two-room apartment with a kitchen and bathroom when he was seven years old. He looks back to piece together why she disappeared, attempting to understand what built up to that day.
There’s the memory of the botanical garden when his mother leaves him with another mother, a stranger, to disappear for no reason; a bomb scare that breaks up his school concert; a visit from his uncle who always brings chocolate but doesn’t this time, his expression grave; the constancy of his beautiful young mother’s emotional distance, preoccupied with something he can’t know; the mysterious phone calls she takes in the neighbor’s apartment; and that visit from Uncle Rodolfo when he didn’t bring the chocolate — afterward his mother rushes out of the apartment saying “I can’t take you with me.” The exquisite descriptions of the son’s perceptions — the sensations of his mother’s presence — becomes a child’s admiration but also a deeply felt vision of loss. The unfolding is slow and beautiful, a testament to the broken man he becomes.
I read 1913: The Year Before the Storm alone and all at once but had I not been on this determined last-minute read, I would’ve read it in the company of other books. The style doesn’t create involved narrative reading, rather excites by snapshots of events. It’s organized by months of the year before World War I began, written in some short, some long, lively vignettes where the author inserts the occasional entertaining comment. Not a political run-up to the war, the book instead brings out 1913’s enlightened cultural progress, the drive toward modernism in music, art, and literature.
This is the year Virginia Woolf published her first novel, The Voyage Out, and only 50 copies of it sold. It’s the year a publisher wrote to Kafka, curious about his new novella — “Is it called The Bug?” Meanwhile, Kafka was corresponding with his fiancée Felice Bauer, torturously undecided about his commitment to their love. It’s the year audiences hissed and laughed and shook their keys during concert performances of new work by Arnold Schönberg and his twelve-tone scale. And it’s the year the Federal Reserve was founded in New York, and the Brauns pushed the pram of their six-month-old baby Eva through Munich’s Hofgarten, the same month 24-year-old Adolf Hitler, a watercolor artist, arrived in the city.
Florian Illies’s 1913 is fascinating with this view of the world, focused primarily on Berlin, Vienna, Paris, and Munich, filled with hope and the energy of new ideas, as war loomed.
After reading Rosamond Lehmann’s first novel Dusty Answer, I immediately purchased two more of her novels. What is it about the way she writes, the way she can put into words exactly a young woman’s emotions and reactions, and the way it’s so seductively comforting to slip down into the world she creates where not a lot happens and yet you don’t want to leave it? She’s got me hooked. Invitation to the Waltz follows Olivia Curtis from the day of her 17th birthday to her first dance a few days later at the home of an aristocratic neighbor celebrating a daughter’s entrance into society. The timeframe is 1920’s rural England.
Olivia’s experiences with men at the dance range from a reclusive poet who commands intellectual superiority over the frivolous night to an old man seeking a return to youthfulness by dancing with the girls. A drunk, popular boy humiliates Olivia, and his friend, the debutante’s brother, talks with Olivia about books and then introduces her to his father in the library. It is a night of emotional swings from a sense of self worthlessness in the presence of the poet to a sense of belonging from the meaningful encounter in the library. Not much happens in terms of action on the page, but that’s not where it matters. Inside Olivia’s mind and heart is where the plot thickens. The sequel, The Weather in the Streets, takes up Olivia’s story when she’s older and involved in a forbidden love affair. That I’m saving for 2024.
Mark Ellis released the fifth book in his DCI Frank Merlin detective series this past May. I hadn’t heard of him or the series but took a chance and reviewed it, Dead in the Water, a complexity of espionage, murder, and theft set in 1942 wartime London. I enjoyed it so much I bought the earlier books in the series. The Embassy Murders is the first, where we learn about Merlin’s origins, born Francisco Diego Merino, the son of a Spanish seaman and then London store owner who anglicized the family name. Frank was born in London. He’s newly widowed, living in a small rented flat after selling the house, not yet able to let go of his grief.
Merlin is a stickler for doing his job honestly, no matter what influential superiors demand of him. In this case, it’s the British Foreign Office, American embassy officials, and Merlin’s boss at Scotland Yard, the Assistant Commissioner, as Merlin investigates the violent deaths of two embassy employees. It’s 1940 wartime London. Joseph Kennedy is the U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom. It’s an atmospheric time of uncertainty and peril. An official at the British Foreign Office barks at Merlin:
Within six months our country and empire may be utterly destroyed. Unless Mr. Chamberlain can find a sensible, peaceful way out of this mess, our only hope is to see the United States join the war.
The FO official is trying to downplay the “grubby deaths” that could interfere with diplomatic efforts between Britain and the U.S. As for Merlin’s reaction: “He had met quite a few toffee-nosed twerps in his time but he thought Douglas took the biscuit.” The Embassy Murders is everything I expected, the clever plotting, the crisply drawn, unpredictable characters, the wartime effect, and an attachment to Merlin that will keep me reading the series. The hours are counting down to the New Year, and I’m closing in on the book’s conclusion.
The Longest Chapter 