Stuff I’ve Been Reading

Lots of re-reads because
1. I’m in turmoil. The familiar is a comfort.
2. The majority of my books have been in storage for almost a year. We all have been reunited but they’re still in boxes stacked against the wall. So I read what has been unpacked.

Here’s what’s been going on:

Stalin and the Kirov Murder, by Robert Conquest. An old favorite. A terrifying book – written in the 80s, before the Berlin Wall fell, before the archives opened, during the era when one had to rely on rumors, speculation, and samizdat … but he got most everything right. The murder of Kirov in 1934 was the pretext for Stalin to launch his Terror. This is a very slim book. Reads like a bat out of hell. Essential, as all of Conquest’s books are.

Ritz of the Bayou, by Nancy Lemann
I adore her and I keep hoping she’ll write another novel. Her last novel, Malaise, was written in 2004. I have been a gigantic fan ever since I read Lives of the Saints, her first novel, a gentle eccentric story about a bunch of party-hounds in New Orleans, and the melancholic nostalgic young woman who re-enters her childhood world after college up among the Yankees. I was hooked by her prose instantly. You’d recognize it anywhere. More books followed. Sportsman’s Paradise, The Fiery Pantheon (maybe my favorite? Although I love them all) and then Malaise. In the meantime, back in the mid-late 80s, she went to New Orleans to “cover” the trial of the sitting Governor for Vanity Fair. I may be the only person even aware of this book at this point – and it was amazing to mention it to James Wolcott, and to hear that not only did he know Nancy Lemann, but he remembered this whole project! She went there on assignment, and she sent back these gentle humorous dispatches, more about the atmosphere of the trial – and New Orleans – than the trial itself (although she covered that as well). It’s about the jazz bars and the deserted streets and the hurricane warnings and silver-haired gents in seersucker suits making ribald comments and etc. I adore it. Haven’t read it in years. Am laughing out loud. If she ever writes another novel, I will faint from excitement.

Vile Bodies, by Evelyn Waugh
Oh GOD. I decided I needed a little levity in these times of turmoil. Waugh is dark as fuck, if you think about his overall theme, but his books are so hilarious you forget that he is writing about a decaying and corrupted society on the brink of total and utter collapse. The race car sequence in Vile Bodies is a masterpiece. The cars going round and round and round, the crowds moving up the hill, then down, unable to commit to a single spot for viewing. The sequence is so funny you almost forget that there’s a very disturbing metaphor at play. Probably gonna re-read Scoop next. When I can find it in the piles of boxes.

A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel, by Hilary Mantel
I read this relatively recently but … to be honest, I devoured it at such a rapid rate, I think I need to read it again to just slow my roll and absorb more. I love the Wolf Hall trilogy, I love Mantel, but honestly I think this one is her best. You probably wouldn’t even get to it if you weren’t turned on by Wolf Hall. Who wants to read an 800 page novel about the French Revolution though? I mean, many people do, I do, but … there’s a reason that publishers turned this one down, flat-out, nope, go somewhere else, bye … UNTIL the success of Wolf Hall. Then they were like, “Oh. Okay. Here’s an enormous TOME because apparently people like your stuff.” The Wolf Hall books are of more manageable (and commercial) length, and the story is broken up into three separate volumes. Here, you get it all in one. When you read it though … it doesn’t FEEL long. Mantel knows how to make you turn the page. She is one of the best fiction writers today focusing on power and politics. She is brilliant and thought-provoking on Thomas Cromwell, and brilliant here on Robespierre, whose name has come down through history with shivers of revulsion attached to it. But Mantel loves him. Or at least she’s obsessed. Thomas Carlyle called Robespierre “the sea-green incorruptible” (Shivers) and Mantel shows how that process happened, while also digging so deep into his character you imagine it MUST be the truth. This book is a huge undertaking but I’m looking forward to it. I need to get back to Proust too. Volume three awaits. I think I’ll launch that one in 2022.

The Kindness of Strangers, by Salka Viertel
I’ve been meaning to read this memoir for a long time. Viertel is most well-known for being Greta Garbo’s companion in Garbo’s early years in Hollywood, when Garbo didn’t speak the language, felt totally isolated, and Viertel was her connection, her friend, etc. So I bought this for the Garbo factor but … Garbo makes up only a small part of it. In fact, Garbo hasn’t entered the picture yet at all. Viertel grew up in a small garrison town in “Galicia”, in what is now Poland, but which then was part of the Austrian empire. She was early on drawn to being an actress, a controversial choice! Currently I am reading about her first job, as an ingenue, in provincial towns, where she’s learning her trade, and living in cold houses, and dreaming of becoming famous. She eventually would. Her life was such – a Jewish woman born in Poland in the early years of the 20th century – that she intersected with everyone and every massive world event, sending the world into roiling chaos, chaos from which we – the world – STILL haven’t recovered. She was in Vienna, pre-collapse, she was in Berlin, pre-Hitler, she was a famous actress. She met everyone. Einstein. Kafka. And, of course, Garbo. I haven’t gotten there yet. I am just loving her gentle and yet very specific evocation of life in the sleepy Austrian empire in the moment just before all hell broke loose.

Greta Garbo and Salka Viertel