Dear readers,
Being read aloud to is one of the activities I cherish most. It is a miniature version of what you might experience at a concert, a religious service or a sports event: the joy of an encounter magnified by the knowledge that you are sharing it with other people. (In the case of reading, usually just one other person.) It belongs to the valuable category of activities that combine sustained self-embodiment with blissful self-transcendence.
The benefit of reading aloud — as opposed to concerts, etc. — is that you can do it any time and at no cost as long as you are able to locate a book and a person willing to vocalize it. Ending the day with an hour of being read to is gentle and luxurious. (I will, if asked, be the reader myself, but I don’t have an especially mellifluous voice. Working on that.)
Both of the books below work well for this purpose. If you have suggestions for others that lend themselves to recitation, please let me know. I’m hoping to amass a big pile for the cold months ahead.
—Molly
When Samuel Wilson Fussell graduates from Oxford and moves to New York City, his health nosedives. He quickly realizes that the malady is not biological but environmental; New York’s surplus of people, noises and smells causes the author to feel like a quivering prey animal. The solution he lands upon is to join a Y.M.C.A. and start lifting. Muscle, he reasons, will make him unassailable.
Cut to a year later and Fussell has become a member of the iron cognoscenti. His protein intake skyrockets; no hamburger or tuna can is safe. He starts talking like Kirk Douglas in “Spartacus” — instead of saying thank you to a co-worker, Fussell barks, “No kindness forgotten, no transgression forgiven.” He moves to California, starts juicing (steroids, not carrots), participates in bodybuilding competitions, quotes Nietzsche to himself and totally loses his mind. Does he relocate it? I’ll never tell! Read the book and find out.
Fussell’s voyage will be recognizable to anyone who has undergone the mortification and triumph of extreme voluntary exertion — meaning, anyone who has paused in the midst of training (for whatever) and asked: “Am I in heaven or am I in hell?”
The first time I interacted with a French person was in 1992, when I got sick in the cafeteria and was ordered by the (inexplicably French) school nurse to eat only cooked vegetables for the next few days, because everything else would be “too harsh on the stomach.” The accuracy of this edict is of no importance; the point is that this individual became the referent for all my future encounters with French people. From the French I came to expect — and often received — unequivocal and provocative advice.
The French character in Helen DeWitt’s novella delivers beautifully on that front. Her advice: Do not buy linen in places other than Ireland, do not play Chopin on instruments other than the pianoforte and do not neglect to pay your servants their full wages when you go on vacation during Ramadan, as you must. All of these tips she bestows upon her teenage daughter, who narrates a tale of adventure and trickery.
It would be unsporting to spoil the plot of a 60-page novella so I’ll simply list a handful of pertinent words: Morocco, embezzle, seamstress, fortune, nitwit, loyalty, cognac. DeWitt’s mastery of adverbs is deserving of worship.
This is part of a series from New Directions that offers short works in gleaming hardback editions to “deliver the pleasure one felt as a child reading a marvelous book from cover to cover in an afternoon.”
Read if you like: Katia Mann’s “Unwritten Memories,” Henry James’s classic novella about a furniture dispute, defeating enemies
Available from: New Directions
Why don’t you …
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Certify that fiction has absolutely nothing on truth with a classic pictorial history of the Mexican Revolution? (Revolutionaries in magenta socks…an assassin disguised as a CARICATURE ARTIST…a dictator who flees to Long Island…)
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Open the VALVE OF YOUR SOUL with this Emily Dickinson poem?
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Ponder the future of fashion with the wonderful ANGELA NAGLE?
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