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The Box of Delights, by John Masefield

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Changing trains on his way home for Christmas from his first term at school, Kay Harker meets an old man who asks Kay to help him lift his large case onto his back. “ ‘Only I do date from pagan times and age makes joints to creak.’ ” Once on the train Kay, who seems to be around eleven or twelve, is approached by two suspicious men dressed as clergymen who entice him into playing cards for money.

When Kay disembarks in Condicote, he finds that his wallet and watch are missing. He meets the old man again, now revealed as a Punch-and-Judy man, who asks him to pass on a warning that “the wolves are running” to a woman outside Bob’s bakery. Carolina Louise, Kay’s guardian while his parents are absent, agrees to the stop and also tells him that the four Jones children will be staying with them at Seekings over Christmas: Peter who is near his age, Jemima, Susan, and young Maria with her revolvers. “ ‘I shall shoot and I shall shock, as long as my name’s Maria,’ ” the girl says later. She might be my favorite character.

The old man, Cole Hawlings, comes to Seekings to give a Punch and Judy show for the children, which he follows with a magical adventure where one thing turns into another, such as when “[i]t seemed to the children that the ceiling above them opened into a forest in a tropical night: they could see giant trees, with the stars in their boughs and fireflies gleaming out.”

Later he entrusts Kay with the magical box of the title with a knob on the outside which enables him to “go small” or “go swift.” Also, each time Kay opens the box, he’s transported into the past where he might meet up with Herne the Hunter, the Lady of the Oak, fairies, or a Roman legion. However, the wolves—human and animal—are after the box and the action accelerates with the robbers “scrobbling” people left, right and center and chasing after the children.

A beloved Christmas favorite in England since 1935, The Box of Delights is now available in the U.S. from the New York Review of Books in a revised edition that restores sections cut from previous versions and has been corrected from the manuscript. John Masefield was a well-known poet (author of “Sea Fever,” my mother’s favorite poem) and poet laureate for England from 1930-1967.

After finishing this book, I learned that it’s the sequel to The Midnight Folk, which I haven’t read. This could be why I was so confused at the beginning. I couldn’t figure out who Carolina Louise was—another child?—or where all the parents were? Yet my discombobulation turned out to be good preparation for the wild proceedings to come; the book does come at you fast and furious, with kidnappings, chases, robberies, and terrifying escapes. We’re told as writers to teach our readers how to read our book. Mission accomplished, Mr. Masefield!

It seems clear that Masefield’s book influenced many later children’s stories: T.H. White’s Sword in the Stone (1938), Elizabeth Goudge’s The Well of the Star (1941), C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books such as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1948), Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising (1973), and probably even J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. 

Today’s children might have trouble untangling the period slang, historical references, and folklore. Also, unlike the books mentioned above, the plot, if it exists at all, seems almost beside the point until we get towards the end. Instead, we fall from a fairly ordinary train journey into a series of increasingly odd adventures which are indeed delightful but can leave the reader feeling unmoored. Still, I hope children will try it; adults, too.

This is a book I will return to during the holiday season, as so many others do. I’ll probably skip around to favorite bits rather than read it straight through, but we’ll see.

Is there a book you like to reread in December?

Reprise: Diamond in the Window, by Jane Langton

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In one of my book clubs, we decide on a theme for the month and then each talk about the book we read. Our choices inspire great conversations and often end up on each other’s to-be-read lists. Our last theme was a favorite childhood book, so of course I chose this one which I wrote about in the early days of my blog. Here’s my earlier post about it. Note: the previous week I’d written about March, by Geraldine Brooks.

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Before leaving the Transcendentalists, I wanted to reread this young adult book where I first heard about them.  I found it one cold, rainy day at Whippoorwill Girl Scout camp where—having escaped from the prescribed activities—I was poking around some bookshelves in a dark corner of the hall.  Behind some mildewed Readers Digest Condensed Books, I found one with corners of the cover frayed by mice and the pages brown-spotted with damp.  I hid behind a chair to read it and got through the first few chapters before being discovered by one of the leaders and told to put it back.

It took me almost two years to find the book again and finish it.  I couldn’t remember the title or the author’s name, only the story, and after a while I began to believe that I had dreamed it.  When I finally came across it on my local library’s shelves, I couldn’t believe it.  It was as though a fantasy had suddenly become real.

Ned and Nora live in a Gothic monstrosity of a house in Concord, Massachusetts, with their aunt and uncle.  Aunt Lily teaches piano lessons to support the family because Uncle Freddy—who used to be a famous scholar—has lost his mind and spends his days arguing with marble busts of Thoreau and Emerson.  The children have a run-in with a couple of town worthies who consider the house and the family a blot on their sacred soil and threaten to take it for unpaid taxes and burn it down.

The children discover a mysterious room at the top of the house with some dusty toys and two twin beds.  Confronting Aunt Lily, they learn that Lily and Freddy’s youngest sister and brother had gone missing from that room as children, followed by Lily’s sweetheart, Prince Krishna.  Ned and Nora decide to sleep in the room themselves.  However, in their dreams, they are plunged into magical adventures, adventures which turn dangerous.

There are a few books I read as a child whose images have become so ingrained in my thoughts that they have become part of my private mythology.  This is one of them.  It wasn’t until I was grown and had read Emerson and Thoreau for myself that I recognised that each adventure embodies one of the Transcendentalist ideas and images, such as the rough wooden harp they found while climbing in an elm tree, an aeolian harp, although it is not named in the book.  The wind blowing across the harp strings translated the voices of nature into sounds they could understand:  “ ‘These trees and stones are audible to me,’ ” as Uncle Freddy quoted Emerson.

The adventure that I think about most often, though, is the one where they go into a mirror and find two statues of each of them, a little older than their current age.  Ned and Nora separate, each choosing one of their statues.  Behind that one stand two more.  Their choices eventually lead them to statues of themselves as adults, at which point they are able to see if they have chosen wisely.  Unlike real life, though, they are able to go back and make different choices.

What was one of your favorite books as a child?

The Painter of Silence, by Georgina Harding

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A sick and emaciated man collapses on the steps of a Romanian hospital in the town of Iași. He is deaf and mute and (we learn) has been since birth so is unable to communicate with anyone. A nurse named Safta recognises him as Augustin—Tinu for short—who shared her childhood on her parents’ estate Poiana. Although Tinu was the cook’s son and Safta the cherished daughter, they had a special bond. She encourages him to draw, as he did as a child, but at first he refuses.

It is the early 1950s and Stalin’s Russian holds the country in its grey and relentless grip. Yet, in trying to get through to Tinu, Safta begins to talk of their golden childhood, something she has refused to even think about for years.

She talks and talks, as do others who, unlike her, seem freed by knowing that he does not hear what they are saying. The theme of communication winds through the book. There is much that we, like Tinu, must intuit. Safta, too, must discern how best to help Tinu when he is released from the hospital.

Place and the social environment are important aspects of the story. The settings are described only briefly, yet come alive in the imagination. Here is the Poiana of their childhood:

The house at Poiana was imposing at first glance. There was its whiteness, the long neoclassical front, the pedimented porch and ranks of green-shuttered windows. It looked larger than it was because it was only one room deep. If a person came up the drive and looked in he might see right through the glimmer of glass to the garden beyond.

It was a place that light passed through, the light of successive windows thrown onto fine parquet floors in rooms that opened one on  to another, the doors of the rooms always open – save when great and irritated effort was made to close them during the coldest stretches of winter – since this was a house which people moved through freely, like the light: family, servants, visitors, villagers, who came on errands or to make a request or seek advice, the children of the house and the children of the servants. 

This is the novel I have been waiting for. Hoping for. It is quiet and asks much of the reader as it unfolds.

It is not that the language is gorgeous, though each sentence is remarkable in its elegant simplicity. It is not that the plot is thrilling, though terrible things happen and people must learn to live with them and with their own actions. It is not that the characters entertain us or steal our hearts, though we cannot help but walk with them as they move through a world that has changed beyond recognition. Yet it is a balm.

World Wars I and II destroyed a way of life that had seemed as though it would last forever. In England, it was the Victorian/Edwardian age, the age of empire; in Romania, it was the age of its birth as a relatively democratic constitutional monarchy. Romania had only become a country in 1859, gaining independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1878. Siding with the Entente Powers in WWI, Romania grew and prospered during the inter-war period, a time of wealth and privilege for the great families and stability for those who served them. Initially neutral in WWII, Romania eventually allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary to protect themselves from Russia.

That war (WWII) is mostly offstage in Harding’s story. Tinu notices the refugees and later the troops before he is himself apprehended. He does not understand why these things are happening, why everything keeps changing. Far away in Iași Safta resolutely puts one foot in front of another, keeping her head down, working as a nurse. It is only when Tinu turns up that she begins to allow memories of her childhood to emerge and to reckon with all she has lost.

We may not all be suffering through a world war or see our country invaded by Stalin’s Russia, but we all understand loss. Eventually, we all experience what Jane Smiley called the Age of Grief. We all have lost paradises of some sort or another and have things we cannot speak of, except perhaps to someone who cannot hear.

I have always felt our civilisation to be tenuous and had nightmares about its eventual rupture. Perhaps that is a legacy of growing up in the shadow of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Perhaps all of us, no matter when we were born, carry a secret store of anxiety. Harding’s story places a gentle hand on that wound and reassures me that I’m not alone. It asks me to remember what has been lost, cherish what is beautiful, and watch out for one other.

Have you read a novel that you didn’t know you were looking for?

The Liar’s Dictionary, by Eley Williams

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In 21st century London, Mallory works as a low-paid intern at Swansby’s, helping prepare their dictionary to be digitised. As the sole employee, she also must fend off threatening anonymous calls from a man angry about the dictionary’s newly inclusive definition of marriage.

When owner David Swansby finds a mountweazel—a non-existent word sometimes added to catch plagiarists—he  assigns Mallory to go through every single entry to verify that it is a real word. Mallory’s girlfriend Pip, a barista, decides to help, resulting in a fun version of Fictionary.

The absurdity of such a tedious task is increased by the fact that the last volume of Swansby’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary was never finished; all the men working there went off to war in 1914 and the printing presses were melted down. Now David Swansby wants to preserve his family’s work by putting the existing volumes online and closing down his great-grandfather’s company.

Alternating with Mallory’s story is that of Peter Winceworth, a laborer in the trenches of Swansby’s in 1899. Socially inept, Peter is the butt of jokes from his co-workers. He has affected a lisp since his youth, perhaps out of boredom or to annoy his father, and now clings to it as his secret way of showing contempt for his tormentors. Of course, he has been assigned to the “S” section of the dictionary.

He has another secret way to assert himself: He has begun to insert his own words into the dictionary. Some are fun sniglets—words that don’t appear in any dictionary, but should—while others are more personal, such as “winceworthliness, (n.), the value of idle pursuit.”

As a confirmed logophile, I enjoyed the audacious and whimsical use of language here. The etymologies and definitions, both real and fake, are like candy to me, and the whole enterprise of determining real words from fake raises interesting questions. For example, when Swansby explains to Mallory that a mountweazel is “a made-up word”:

“All words are made up,” I said.

“That is true,” David Swansby replied, “and also not a useful contribution.”

The term refers to a fictitious entry in the 1975 New Columbia Encyclopedia about Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a fountain designer turned photographer, deliberately placed as a copyright trap. Continuing the joke, there is actually a Lillian Virginia Mountweazel Research Collection which displays photos attributed to her, though a footnote acknowledges that “All the materials presented here as her works are authentic pieces created by other photographers, repurposed or collaged from media that are in the public domain.”

There are also some Easter-egg tributes to Lillian in this book. Don’t be put off by the mock-pompous preface about creating an ideal dictionary. Once past that and into the A-Z chapters, the story becomes a sprightly tale about two characters who hide themselves: Mallory who wants people to think she’s straight and Peter who shields his heart with lisps and lies. There’s occasional wordplay in the text as well, such as this from Peter on a park bench.

The best benchside exoticisms January could offer were all on show—the starling, the dandelion, the blown seeds and the birds skeining against the grey clouds, hazing it and mazing it, a featherlight kaleidoscope noon-damp and knowing the sky was never truly grey, just filled with a thousand years of birds’ paths, and wishful seeds . . .

Such language can overwhelm a story yet here it just seems part of the fun. The story itself is light, a mere trifle, despite a few dark moments. I’m eager now to read the author’s two short story collections.

What is your favorite made-up word?

In the Fall, by Jeffrey Lent

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In Virginia during the last days of the Civil War, a wounded Union soldier becomes separated from his comrades and is found near death by an escaped slave who saves him. Norman Pelham and Leah Mebane become inseparable and, after he is demobilised and they marry, the two decide to walk to his home in Randolph, Vermont. As they pass through nearby Bethel, his fellow veterans—already home for several months—watch for him.

So they saw him pass along the road that Indian-summer morning with the sugarbush maples flaring on the hillsides and the hilltop sheep pastures overgrown with young cherry and maple. Word ran along the road ahead of him so near all his neighbors and townspeople saw him walking in the long easy stride of one who counted walking in months and years not miles, a rucksack cut from an issue blanket strapped to his back and by his side a girl near his own height in a sunfaded blue dress and carrying her own cardboard suitcase bound with rough twine.

Norman’s father has died while he was fighting, leaving the farm to him. His mother and two sisters, while abolitionists, are so shocked and troubled by Leah that they move into town, leaving the young couple to begin their new lives on the farm. Fired by their fierce love for each other, they ignore the scorn of their neighbors by keeping to themselves and plunging into the hard work of making a living from a hill farm.

Thus begins this saga of three generations of Pelhams, haunted by their troubled legacy of what Leah left behind and by America’s ongoing racial tensions.

This debut novel was a huge bestseller when it was released in 2000. I told the friend who recommended it to me that I didn’t know whether to bless her or curse her because I found it thoroughly addictive reading—the prose so luscious that I read slowly to savor it and could hardly bear to set it aside until I’d finished all 565 pages.

Lent takes his time with the story, enclosing me in the worlds of nineteenth-century farm life and early twentieth-century bootlegging, in New England’s mountains and North Carolina’s tobacco and cotton fields. I especially enjoyed the very specific details about tools and descriptions of places and processes in these time periods; they added so much richness to the fabric of the story. I could tell how fully the author inhabited each moment of the story as he wrote.

The partridge went up, a sudden burst of speckled animation that hit a long going-away glide down the mountain and he passed the splendid moment where his mind left him and was all out ahead of him, pinned down only on the flying bird as the gun came up. Then there was a pinwheel of feathers and both dogs broke past him and he was back.

A few things surprised me. For example, some significant events are skipped over in a sentence or two while others that seem lightweight unfold with great leisure. A possible reason could be that this is a story about men, so the female characters’ stories—aside from aspects that influence the men’s stories—are just not that important. Or maybe the reason is that we are in the men’s point of view and they simply don’t understand the women’s experiences. Maybe it’s something else altogether.

Much as I eventually loved the book, I almost stopped after the first couple of pages. Why? Because I don’t like when a chunk of text from later in the book is stuck in front as a prologue. It feels like an attempt to motivate the reader to plow through hundreds of pages until we finally meet these people and find out who they are, instead of just trusting the story. I’m not opposed to all prologues; some are great. But this book doesn’t need a prologue; Chapter One begins with a splendid hook. Once I got there, I was caught by the prose and the lovely grounding in time and place and character and theme.

I truly did not want this book to end. I keep opening it up in random places and looking closely at a single paragraph, trying to see how Lent works his magic. I read it aloud. Sometimes I copy it, writing in longhand, to get the feel of the sentences in my fingers. It really is beautifully done. I’m eager to read some of his later books.

Have you read a novel where it felt like falling into a dream from which you never want to wake up?

Before the Ruins, by Victoria Gosling

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“The year Peter went missing was the year of the floods.” Thus begins this tale from Andrea (Andy) set in the present-day but reaching back twenty years to the summer of 1996 when she and her friends have finished their final exams. A bored teenager with few prospects, Andy enriches her life by coming up with games to play with her three best friends: Peter, Marcus and Em. The guardrails come off when Andy’s alcoholic mother predicts the apocalypse is about to occur—if the world is ending, their actions have no consequences—and the four friends take over an empty manor house near Marlborough in Wiltshire.

 

Learning that a valuable diamond necklace had been stolen at the manor fifty years earlier and never recovered, they embark on a new game of playing detective. Em acquires a cheap copy of the necklace—a tourist item in town—and they take turns hiding it, a game that has the added relish of perhaps actually finding the real necklace and changing their lives. Another teen, the suspiciously charismatic David, turns up one day, claiming to be a friend of the absent owners and quickly becomes a part of the group.  

 

Yet there’s an ominous push-pull within the group as they practice deceiving one another. Relationships fray; secrets and lies erode trust; betrayals lurk in the shadows. The story builds gradually, moving between the search for Peter in the present and unpacking the events of the past, turning them this way and that, looking at them anew.

Memory is a house, a castle with many rooms. Some of the rooms are deeper inside, honeycombed away. Each has a thousand keys – an image, a smell, a sound. Behind each door are a thousand other doors.

I was drawn to this novel because I like the narrator of the audiobook, Kristin Atherton, and because a reviewer compared it to Tana French’s work. My favorite is The Likeness of which I said, “French captures so well the fun of being part of a tight group of friends, when you’re young, and it’s all happening for the first time, and everything seems unbearably sweet.” Gosling’s story comes at youthful friendship from another angle, capturing its mystery and beauty, but also its fragility and fear.

 

To sleep on? Or to wake? This was the question facing me. To sleep, or to wake and face the reckoning, to find out what had been lost.

I thought Before the Ruins would be another in a long line of gothic mysteries about a narrator revisiting formative events in the past, secrets that come to light, etc. However, I underestimated the book. It rewards deeper investigation, from the pun in the title (before) to the use of diamonds as a MacGuffin to the sly use of imagery (floods, treasure, playing games, losing your nerve at the prospect of a leap).

 

Caught up in the story I noticed little else, but on reflection I wish we could have gotten to know the characters other than Andy a bit better. The way they are presented makes sense since we are getting the story through her point of view which comes with her own blinders; only near the end do their actions indicate more complexity. I would also have welcomed more description of the manor itself.

 

As a writer, several things in this book impressed me: the complexity of the narrative with multiple storylines and reveal after reveal; Gosling’s willingness to let the slow burn unfold in sentence after delicious sentence; and the way she hits the reader flat out near the end, signaling that whatever you thought the theme was, it’s so much more. No spoilers here, but be prepared to discover layers upon unexpected layers of this story.

 

Have you read a novel that turned out to be much more than you expected?

 

 

Spell Freedom, by Elaine Weiss

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Many people contributed to the success—partial as it was—of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. We’ve all heard the names of the famous leaders, their words and deeds. In this book, subtitled “The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement,” Elaine Weiss tells the story of some of those we haven’t heard of, courageous people who came before the famous speeches and laid the foundations for success by creating the citizen schools that prepared Black Americans in the Jim Crow South to register to vote.

These unsung heroes had to start the school in secret, sometimes in the back room of beauty parlor, and create their own materials, adapted to the needs of an illiterate or barely literate adult population. Weiss doesn’t shy away from the difficulties, the terrible repercussions they all risked from a South wedded to White Supremacy.

Participants in the schools learned not just how to read and write, but also how to decipher the voter registration literacy tests intended to keep them from voting. They also learned what their rights were and gained the confidence to exercise them. By the time the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, these secret schools had spread across the South, helping thousands of people register to vote.

I came to this book reluctantly when it was selected by my book club for this month. I figured I already knew about the Civil Rights Movement. I couldn’t miss it, growing up in Baltimore in the 1950s and 1960s. And then there are all the books, articles and discussions I’ve absorbed since. Yet once I started reading, I was hooked. And as it turns out, most of the book was new to me.

Weiss begins with the 1954 Brown v. Topeka Board of Education ruling that said racial segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. She shows how that news was received by Septima Clark, a 56-year-old teacher from South Carolina; Esau Jenkins, a Sea Island aspiring businessman and bus driver; and Bernice Robinson, a beautician from Charleston. The three of them understood that doing away with segregation would take work, dangerous yet necessary work.

Septima Clark came to the Highlander Folk School in rural Tennessee, a training ground for labor organizing created by Myles and Zilphia Horton that was pivoting to support civil-rights activism. Initially mistrustful of the fully integrated school, Mrs. Clark was shocked to share a room with a White person and sit at a table with White people for the first time. Yet the vision of White and Black people working together day after day to come up with practical plans for challenging segregation is one that would stay with her and encourage her for the rest of her life.

She brought Mr. Jenkins and Mrs. Robinson to Highlander. The compelling portraits of these three unlikely leaders fuel the story: ordinary people doing extraordinary things. The writing is clear and compelling; Weiss transforms her extensive research into riveting stories. We do meet the famous leaders in these pages but usually in the context of these unsung heroes.

Weiss also doesn’t shy away from the movement’s internal struggles and the sexism of its leaders. Most of all she brings home to the reader the terrible dangers faced by these teachers and organizers, as well as by everyone sitting in at a store counter or trying to register to vote. They are fired from jobs, kicked out of their homes, beaten and shot.

We need their stories today. We need to remember how hard they had to fight for the right to vote—now in danger once again—and that they did win again and again. We have much to learn from Mrs. Clark, Mr. Johnson, and Mrs. Robinson: the way they organised within their communities, found creative ways to help people, and got up each time they were knocked down.

Elaine Weiss kindly came to our book club meeting and proved to be a fascinating speaker with a sure command of her material. She said that her interest in this story began when she heard of the March 2019 firebombing of the current Highlander Center, complete with White Nationalist symbols. She wondered what this place could be doing that it should still be such a powerful symbol. 

Then she was curious about people like Septima Clark, whom most people haven’t heard of. She found a brief autobiography, Ready from Within, that Mrs. Clark wrote of her early life and an academic biography, Freedom’s Teacher, that focuses on her teaching techniques. In her research, Weiss was shocked by the systematic oppression and the economic punishment for attempting to vote. She reminded us that Septima Clark was financially insecure for the rest of her life; her friends had to get together to pay for her grave marker.

I hope many people will read this book. There is so much that will fire your imagination and strengthen your resolve in these dark times. Elaine Weiss said that in tough moments she often thinks What would Septima do? From now on I will, too.

Where are you finding courage these days?

Incidental Inventions, by Elena Ferrante

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“I have to say that I write with greater dedication when I start digging into common, I would almost say trite, situations and feelings, and insist on expressing everything that—out of habit, to keep the peace—we tend to be silent about . . . I’m interested in the ordinary or, rather, what we have forced inside the uniform of the ordinary. I’m interested in digging into that and causing confusion, pushing myself to go beyond appearances.”

That’s Elena Ferrante in her essay “Digging,” one of 51 brief essays in this collection. Originally published in the Guardian every week for a year, she wrote them in response to a question from an editor. This was at her request, because she “had no experience with that type of writing” and was both “flattered” and “frightened.”

Oddly enough, that’s the same way Jan Struther (AKA Joyce Maxtone Graham) wrote the Mrs. Miniver columns. When the London Times wanted her to write a column about ‘an ordinary sort of woman – like yourself,’ she asked them to provide a question or prompt.

I did not expect much from these essays, each only about 500 words. And yet I found myself reading the next and the next, unable to stop until other voices called me away. Part of what makes them so addictive is that for all she talks about constructing a public image—“[Daniel Day-Lewis] is a sort of title by which I refer to a valuable body of work . . . If he should suddenly be transformed into a flesh-and-blood person, poor him, poor me.”—and for all she conceals her own identity, there is an openness in her writing that makes me believe she is opening her most secret self and telling the truth.

She writes about keeping a diary and why she avoids exclamation points, about lying and insomnia, about long marriages and her fear of plants. She writes about the positive side of change, and yet “We cannot tear off what once seemed to be our skin without pain; something endures and resists.” She writes about her favorite film and why it “seduces and sometimes scares me.” And every now and then she talks about writing.

In her introduction, she says she usually writes by “putting one word after another . . . what I find at the end—assuming that I find something—is surprising, especially to me. It’s as if one sentence had generated the next, taking advantage of my still uncertain intentions.” Yet here, constrained by time and space, she “rummaged through memory in search of small illustrative experiences; impulsively drew on convictions formed by books read many years ago . . . pursued sudden intuitions . . .”

And yet, each essay is tightly constructed. They begin with a clear statement such as: “I was a terrible mother, a great mother.”  Or “Stereotypes are crude simplifications, but generally they don’t lie.” Then we are off into memories and thoughts until a punchy last line, such as “We’ll always know too little about ourselves.”

These are the two sides of writing: the mystery of how one word or thought leads to another with sometimes surprising results and the careful crafting of that hot mess into a clear and cogent whole. She says:

My effort at faithfulness [in writing] cannot be separated from the search for coherence, the imposition of order and meaning, even the imitation of the lack of order and meaning. Because writing is innately artificial, its every use involves some form of fiction. The dividing line is rather, as Virginia Woolf said, how much truth the fiction inherent in writing is able to capture.

She admits that “The yearning to give written form to the world isn’t a guarantee of good literature.” Also, even when our efforts succeed, “We remain dissatisfied and, successful or not, the writing will continue to remind us that it’s a tool with which one can extract much more than we have been able to.”

Still, the energy that drives these essay, and all of her writing, is “the wonder—the wonder of knowing how to read, to write, to transform signs into things.”

The illustrations by Andrea Ucini at the start of each essay are not only charming, but also add another layer to the piece. The cover illustration of a woman peeking out from among the pages of a book is the one for “Keeping a Diary.”

What draws you to Elena Ferrante’s writing?

Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf

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Reading this classic novel now, more than fifty years since I first encountered it as an undergrad, is quite a different experience. Back then I was confused and thrilled by Woolf’s modernist, experimental style that expanded forever my idea of what a novel could be.

Now I see it as a story of midlife, in several senses of the word. The story unfolds as a day in the lives of a handful of people in London going about their ordinary business, and we get thrown right into the middle of things. Clarissa Dalloway is preparing to give a party. Newly returned from India, Peter Walsh sets out to recapture the past by exploring London and visiting Clarissa, his first love. Richard Dalloway is off to lunch with old friend Hugh Whitbread at Lady Bruton’s. Septimus Smith, a damaged veteran of the Great War, and his wife Rezia are walking through the park, on their way to an appointment with a doctor.

Since Clarissa, Peter and others are in their early fifties, we have another sense of midlife. It’s a time of life when we look back nostalgically, but also when we measure ourselves—and others—assessing how we have changed with age, and calculating what we have made of our years. Have we measured up to our early promise?

Time comes up frequently, not just in the characters’ reflections on how they and each other have aged, their memories of the past, and the bustling busy lives of their present; but also in the more linear sense of the clocks sounding the hours of the day. Time in this novel is both infinite and finite.

Another sense of midlife underpins the story: the Bible’s “Media vita in morte sumus”—“In the midst of life we are in death.” Death comes up frequently, whether it’s Septimus thinking of suicide or Clarissa hearing old Mrs Hilbery at the party say “how it is certain we must die.” Clarissa herself has recently been ill which has turned her hair white and left a concern still about her heart.

In my youth the book’s theme that struck me most strongly centered on solitude versus society. Plunging into this novel, we have opportunities to see most of the characters alone—really see them; right into their jumbled, chaotic thoughts, sublime ideas, and snarky digs. We see Peter like his namesake in Kensington Gardens never having fully grown up, and Clarissa awash in memories of a golden childhood and gloriously loving her present life—until she’s brought low by self-doubt or sensing criticism from others.

We also see them with others, whether through intimate conversations or Clarissa’s crowded party. In some instances simply exchanging a look with someone else—a young woman in the park or an elderly woman in a window across the street—becomes a vital communication.

Clarissa believes that her strength is that she knows what other people are feeling. In fact, all the characters think they do, but they are mistaken. Richard is certain that Clarissa will know he loves her without his saying so. Peter thinks he and Clarissa read each other’s minds. The worst offenders are the two doctors to whom Septimus goes for treatment; they burst with confidence that they know what is wrong with him, but their pompous, one-size-fits-all solutions are worse than useless.

There’s a reason why so many books and essays and dissertations have been written about this novel. It is so rich—so full of life. You can look at it through the lens of class or gender; you can hold it up to Woolf’s own life; or consider the fragility of a world that is on the cusp of change—the book came out in 1925, so this year is its centennial.

For me in this reading it is the sense of time that demands my attention. Like these characters I strain to reckon the long years behind me: the golden times that I weave into stories for my grandchildren and the bitter griefs and regrets that I keep to myself. I consider what I will do with the few years that remain, knowing how much I value being alone and how much I enjoy being with others.

We are all born and we all die. That is what we have in common. What comes in between is our own unique story. By slicing one day out of the lives of this small group of people, Woolf gives us a glimpse of the extraordinary richness of the lives humming all around us.

If you’ve read Mrs. Dalloway, what did you think about it? If you’ve reread it, did your opinion change?

Note: My thanks to Tash for her discussion of the novel on her Woolfish! Substack and to all the commenters there as well for expanding my understanding of the novel.

Ghostwalk, by Rebecca Stott

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I’ve been on a bit of a Cambridge streak in my reading lately, so here we are again. Stott’s debut novel opens like a mystery: Cambridge historian Elizabeth Vogelsang, whose potentially controversial book on Isaac Newton’s use of alchemy is nearly finished, is found drowned in a river at the end of her garden, clutching a prism. Lydia Brooke, one of her former students, is urged by Elizabeth’s son Cameron to finish the book.

One difficulty is that she has her own work to do. Another is that Cameron is her former lover whom she’s not sure she can resist. However, she does move into Elizabeth’s home, where she feels her mentor around her and where the light—and her computer—begin to play tricks on her.

Most of the book is told in the first person as though it were a letter from Lydia to Cameron, though some chapters of the manuscript are inserted. That manuscript, which is apparently only missing the last chapter, explores Newton’s rise to fame, a series of unsolved seventeenth-century murders, and if there might be a connection between them. Lydia begins to feel that intrigues and conspiracies from Newton’s past are creeping into the present.

Even as Lydia is trying to work out whether her mentor committed suicide or was murdered, Cameron is being menaced by an animal rights group over his work as a neuroscientist that involves experiments on animals. There’s also a fortune teller whom Elizabeth had apparently befriended—perhaps my favorite character—and an odd young woman named Will who seems to have some knowledge of the various forces threatening Cameron and Lydia.

The breadth of Stott’s research is stunning. We learn a lot about Newton’s life and work. She brings the seventeenth century to life, especially in the manuscript chapters. There’s a lot interesting information from that time period about glassmaking, the plague, optics, and of course alchemy.

This is such an intelligent book. And the dark yet lyrical atmosphere is perfect for an October read. However, I struggled to finish it. Much as I loved individual elements, the story as a whole felt murky. The parallel plots of the past and the present never quite came together, perhaps because the seventeenth-century conspiracies fascinated me while those in the present-day seemed irrelevant.

I’m also not a big fan of second-person point of view. Since she’s writing to him, Lydia refers to Cameron as “you,” which is fine occasionally. However, when she’s recounting dialogue, telling him what he’s said, she must use “you said” as the dialogue tag. This throws me out of the story because of course he knows what he’s said, but Stott is forced by her point of view choice into these clumsy conversations.

Still, there’s much to admire here. I learned a lot about Isaac Newton and alchemy. I reveled in gloomy back stairs in Cambridge colleges and a sun-filled studio set in an orchard. And I’m always curious about the ways the past bleeds into the present. Here’s an excerpt from the first chapter:

Lily went to prison because the seventeenth century was missing from her court records, from her story. Her time line needed to be longer, much longer, and there were many sidelines and tracks, twistings and turnings and yes, it was a labyrinth, a skein of silk that began to weave itself in 1665, 339 years ago.

I’ve been thinking about labyrinths this summer. Ariadne giving Theseus the thread so that he could find his way back out of the labyrinth, away from the black void of the flesh–eating Minotaur. Unravellings have to start somewhere. Now that I see, for the first time, how connected everything is, I know that the threads between Isaac Newton and us were all attached, like the ground elder under Kit’s soil.

Most of all, I admire Stott’s ambition. Ghostwalk is an enormously complicated story, thoroughly researched and well written. Most of all, it is intelligent and exercises our own little grey cells.

What do you look for in historical fiction?