Greetings from Merrie Olde England!

First and foremost, helloooo from London. I have spent the week wandering about, doing a mix of touristy and non-touristy things. (Where does shopping at H&M fit in?) This morning, however, is about finding a coffee shop and reading my book.

What is my vacation book, you ask? Well, it's a tome: A Book of Memories, by Peter Nadas, a Hungarian writer. Originally published in the mid-1980s, it has that strange Eastern European intellectual coming to terms with a totalitarian regime by avoiding it sort of vibe. (See: Milan Kundera) Also like Kundera, Nadas is a very sensual and sexual writer. Memories is a mix of memoirs, which mix and intertwine until I sometimes am not sure who is talking. His main character, to this point, is a young writer who grew up in Stalinist and post-Stalinist Hungary, and is lately of East Berlin. He is beautiful and seductive, and emotional and sensitive and yet manipulative and almost sadistic. And sexually, it seems he is drawn to most everyone, and most everyone is drawn to him. Yet this doesn't come off as crude, as it might in other hands.

Nadas is a beautiful stylist, yet the prose can be difficult for an English-speaking reader. It is flowery, and looooong, which sentences extending for lines and lines, and paragraphs for pages. Plus, while not quite stream-of-consciousness, the narrators will break off on detailed tangents, and then return to their central narrative without missing a beat. (Whether the reader can do so remains to be seen.)

I marked a few passages from the first third of the novel, but most of them are either so long, or so unclear out of context, that I will limit myself to sharing just one:

Like every moment we want to be significant, this one, too, turns out to be insignificant; we have to remind ourselves afterward that what we have been waiting for so eagerly is actually here, has finally come, and nothing has changed, everything is the same, it's simply here, the waiting is over.

Baggage

Last Sunday, I read a book in two sittings. I had forgotten how to do that, and it was glorious. The book in question was Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, a fictionalized collection of essays about the Vietnam War and its impact on those who served.

The title essay speaks to the heart of the tragedy that was Vietnam - the things they carried included supplies, weapons, trinkets, superstitions, drugs, fear, cowardice, and bravado.

A few passages:

[T]he war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

And an observation as relevant today as ever:

The only certainty that summer [of 1968] was moral confusion. It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.

And strangely enough, I may have been most affected by the last chapter, "The Lives of the Dead," where O'Brien discusses childhood love and loss.

But this too is true: stories can save us. I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, and even still, right here, I keep dreaming Linda Alive. And Ted Lavender too, and Kiowa, and Curt Lemon, and [more]. They're all dead. But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.

I had never heard of this book until this spring, when I saw a theatrical adaptation, which was ambitious but a bit of a disaster. Which is a shame, because O'Brien's creation is powerful and fundamentally honest.

Today in Google Reader

Google Reader is one of my new best friends. I love it. It makes keeping up with websites that I forget to visit regularly sooooo much easier. Except when I don't get to it for a few days and have a zillion unread stories to try to sort through.

Anyway, here's what I discovered along with my morning chai:

Ian McEwan and some other authors I don't really know were shortlisted for this year's Booker. I'm still waiting to get to read last year's winner, Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss.

Starbucks has come to Russia. (And looks awesome in Cyrillic - check the pic) And drinks there are expensive! Also of note: "Moscow has one coffeehouse for every 3,187 people. New York has one for every 365 people, and Paris one for every 126." I wonder what the stats are for LA...

Entanglements

Not many authors could combine a murder mystery, a treatise on the history of science, and a ghost story. Such was the ambition of Rebecca Stott in Ghostwalk. The murders - a spate from the 1660s, plus that of the woman researching them. The history - about Isaac Newton and his flirtation with alchemy, plus what alchemy meant to the scientists of the late 17th century. And the ghosts - well, they are everywhere. The novel is also one of obsession, obsessions that kill, although the word may never be stated.

I don't mind ghosts, but I think they may have been the weakest part of the novel. Because Lydia Brooke, brought in by her former lover to finish the murdered woman's book, is too sensible to believe in such things. And Stott never convinces me why she should. She convinces me why I should, but then I am gullible.

These weaknesses - and it is Stott's first novel, so I can forgive them - fortunately don't diminish too much from what is a lovely and haunting tale. Lydia is intriguing and thoughtful, and the decision to frame the novel as a letter to her lover was a wise one.

Stott's got a lovely voice, and I hope she continues to write fiction. Consider the quiet power of passages like these:

It's called entanglement, Mr. Brydon; the word describes the snares of love as well as a mystery in quantum physics. It's not just particles of light or energy that can become entangled; it's time too. Yes, moments of time can become entangled. The seventeenth century and the present have become entangled; they have become connected across time and space.

and love...

I saw that I no longer knew anything. Anything was possible. If someone had told me that you had issued an order for me to be attacked to frighten me into leaving Cambridge so that I would no longer be your Achilles' heel [Erin's note: and how much did this line make me want to be someone Achilles' heel?], if they had said that you wanted me out of the way at any price, I might have believed them. And then if someone had said that you would protect me above all else, sacrifice everything for me, that you loved me above all else, yes, I would have believed that too.

Holy F***

I know I complain a lot about how behind I get on my reading (particularly of New Yorkers, and I just finished the July 2 issue today while at jury duty). But it has assumed tragic proportions - my magazine pile now stands 31 issues deep, and includes issues dating back to January of certain mags. AND it doesn't fit in my nightstand anymore.

This calls for desperate measures.

And yet, I'm currently enraptured by a most unusual academic mystery, Rebecca Stott's Ghostwalk. More on that soon.