Rosie Schaap, “Drinking with Men”

Maybe it’s a little late for this, but I need to come clean. Sometimes, I read books written by friends or acquaintances. And then I review them. And then I don’t tell you that I know the author. (But I won’t do it any more, I promise.)

Which is not to say that I’m not honest in my reactions. I’m lucky enough to know some very gifted writers. (And, by the way, I draw the line at blogging about books written by my beloved husband, though they are very good.) It may have happened from time to time that I met someone and read their book and couldn’t think of anything polite to post on the Internet about it. In that case, I would keep silent. But my enthusiasm is always genuine. Some things you can’t fake.

Historic whiskey pot still at Jameson distillery in Cork, Ireland, courtesy Stephan Schulz. Rosie is partial to Jameson.

So why am I bringing this up now? I think it’s because Rosie Schaap, whom I have known and admired for years, is such a straight shooter. I  enjoyed Drinking with Men, and I would like to borrow, for a few hundred words, Rosie’s directness.

Drinking with Men is a memoir, framed around Rosie’s experiences with liquor. They started early, when as a teenager Rosie would tell fortunes for beer in the MetroNorth bar car, commuting to her New York City psychiatrist appointments. (Sometimes the sophistication of a Fairfield County teenager is breathtaking.) Then at 16, she dropped out of high school and left home to … follow the Grateful Dead. Wow.

But Drinking with Men isn’t primarily about being wild and crazy. Rather, it’s about someone finding her way, bar by bar, into her own skin. The MetroNorth commuters admired Rosie’s smarts. The Deadheads offered unconditional (if scruffy) community. The denizens of her local in North Bennington, VT, took care of her physically — and so on. She learned how to behave in a bar, which is maybe an idealized form of how to behave in life: be respectful, listen, buy a round when it’s your turn, contribute to the conversation, go outside if you feel sick. She learned one of the hard lessons of maturity, which is that nothing lasts forever. She even discusses the delicate issue of why and how it works for a good-looking woman to be a regular at a bar. (I would have liked more of this. Why are most bar regulars men rather than women? Do they tune your femaleness out? Is it a brother-sister thing… until it isn’t?)

The unexpected connection Rosie makes is between bar behavior and spiritual behavior. She is an nondenominational chaplain, and in the dark days following 9/11, she volunteered in that capacity. She found that the best way to help people was: “Don’t push. Don’t preach. Pray with them only if they ask. Make yourself available. Show up. Be present.” Good and bad things will come our way and a bar community at its best can sometimes function as a secular church, a contented family, an informal book club — with booze.

Alexandra Fuller, “Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness”

After the brilliance of the title Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight for Alexandra Fuller’s earlier memoir, you might find Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness  a little clunky. In the same way, I began Cocktail Hour… with some skepticism. Was Fuller just going back to the well, revisiting the scene of her earlier success? It looked like it, though there was a new streak of anger here, as Fuller sketched a portrait of her mother, “Nicola Fuller of Central Africa.” Grandiose, hard-drinking, manipulative; this is a pretty familiar — though very funny — monster-mother profile. Was Cocktail Hour… just Mommie Dearest with red earth, leopard, and Uzis?

Well, no. Because I think what I’m beginning to understand is that nothing in Africa plays out as it would anywhere else. And what’s refreshing about Cocktail Hour… is that Alexandra Fuller doesn’t dodge the ugly stuff. This book is not about nostalgia and how lovely life was when the whites were still in charge. “When I was a child, Mum presented Kenya to me as a place of such forbidding perfection that its flawlessness shattered in the telling and what I was left holding onto were shards of equatorial light… Kenya, in Mum’s telling,… was worth dying for if you were white (if you were black and you wanted to die for Kenya, that was another matter altogether. Then you were an unpleasant, uppity Kikuyu anarchist.)”  But after the ejection from Eden and a return to grim, damp post-war England, Nicola Huntingford couldn’t stay away. She returned to Nairobi and met and married the handsome Tim Fuller, who was fundamentally a farmer. But the story takes place in the 1960s and ’70s, when being a farmer in Africa meant being a minority white person not only employing black workers but occupying or owning land that had not so long ago been seized from natives.

The Zambezi River in Zambia, where Nicola Fuller of Central Africa now lives

The Fuller itinerary is confusing. First Kenya, then a reluctant spell in England. Then a foray into the former Rhodesia, which had, in 1965, unilaterally broken from the British Commonwealth and become a rogue nation. Then another spell in England (still damp and depressing) and then a return to Rhodesia. “We longed for the warmth and freedom, the real open spaces, the wild animals, the sky at night,” says Nicola in an unguarded moment. More frankly, Alexandra adds, “”What Mum didn’t say, but what she means is that she wanted to stay in White-ruled Africa…The other thing Mum cannot bring herself to say… is that her determination to stay in White-ruled Africa was the costliest decision of her life. The worst kind of costly; life and death kind of costly.” Because Rhodesia skidded into a guerilla war that would eventually turn the white-run country into majority-rule Zimbabwe. Tim Fuller had to spend more than half the year fighting in the hills, at six-week intervals, leaving Nicola on the farm with the children. They never went anywhere without an Uzi, and their Range Rover was mine-proofed. “Even at this late date, we carried on fighting for Rhodesia as if it were the last place on earth, as if to lose it would be the same as losing ourselves.”

And maybe it would have been. The Fullers lost a lot. Three children. Years. Household goods beyond counting. Sanity, too — Nicola spent considerable time being put back together by “a very talented psychiatrist.” Yet there they are, still in Africa, on the banks of the Zambezi River in Zambia, farming fish. It’s not an easy life, but it’s a rich one. The Tree of Forgetfulness is a real tree. Tim Fuller’s right-hand-man Mr. Zulu claims “They say ancestors stay inside it.” And Nicola Fuller of Central Africa is revealed as a woman whose primary attribute is courage.

Beryl Markham, “West with the Night”

How you read affects what you read. So the fact that I began West with the Night in bed in a tent in Kenya both gave it great relevance, and made my reading distracted and scattered. Because of course you don’t go to Kenya to loll around in your tent with a book. So my memory of Beryl Markham’s memoir is limited to impressions and to the bits I highlighted, which I did more for her elegant acid humor than anything else. For instance, “The essence of elephant hunting is discomfort in such lavish proportions that only the wealthy can afford it.” She takes a patrician view of the world: “Possibly I do the Babus [Indian telegraph operators] an injustice, but I think at best they used to read the novels of Anthony Trollope to each other over the wire.” So much for the Babus.

Beryl Markham in 1936

And evidently West with the Night only scratches the surface of Beryl Markham’s life, which was by any standards remarkable. As the memoir tells it, she was raised by her father on a farm in what was then British East Africa. The book is eloquent and elegiac about these unfettered days spent in the wild and among native friends. When her father’s farm failed, she struck out on her own as a trainer of race horses. Flying only occurred later as a career. The book’s title refers to her 1936 attempt to fly solo from England to New York. It was originally published in the 1940s and re-issued in the 1980s, becoming a surprise best seller and turning Markham into an octogenarian celebrity. Evidently there has been much speculation about the true authorship of the book, based on the fact that Markham had limited formal education and wrote very little else. Certainly the lyrical style is a big draw, though from time to time I found it self-conscious and grandiose.

I heard a story about Markham as a grande dame of Nairobi, stalking around with thick white hair like a dandelion in seed. During the 1982 attempted coup she drove through an armed road block on her way to dinner at the Muthaiga Club. She arrived unharmed though her car picked up a few bullet holes. “She ordered her pink gin and curry, and the bartender had to take away her keys so she wouldn’t drive home and get herself killed.”  The anecdote didn’t surprise me at all.

Will Schwalbe, “The End of Your Life Book Club”

I’m cheating here. Normally I don’t blog about a book unless I finish it, and my bookmark is stuck on page 292 of 326 in The End of Your Life Book Club. I just couldn’t face the chapter entitled “My Father’s Tears.” But that’s a compliment to Will Schwalbe; he made me care about his family. And I did know all along where this book was going. I just couldn’t go all the way with it.

Here’s the premise: in 2007 the accomplished and hard-working Mary Anne Schwalbe is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, for which there is no cure yet. The End of Your Life Book Club is about the books that Mary Anne and her son Will read during the last years of her life. It’s not in the least bit sentimental, but it is searing in places. It’s about life, love, and literature. The rhythm of chemo and checkups and dwindling strength, mouth sores and sleepless nights, good days and bad is interspersed with Will and Mary Anne’s discussions of a startling array of books. Will, who was at the time editor in chief of Hyperion Books, writes in the short first chapter, “Reading isn’t the opposite of doing; it’s the opposite of dying.”

Below, a random alphabetical slice from the list of books the two Schwalbes read and discussed during Mary Anne’s illness:

• Günter Grass, The Tin Drum
• The Haggadah
• David Halberstam, The Coldest Winter 
• Susan Halpern, The Etiquette of Illness 
• Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train; The Price of Salt; The Talented Mr. Ripley 
• Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner; A Thousand Splendid Suns 
• John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
• Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories; Christopher and His Kind 
• Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat 

They read Ken Follett and Alistair MacLean and Rohinton Mistry, Solzhenitsyn and Sendak. Not everything is analyzed in detail but everything is taken seriously, on its merits. These are people for whom reading is as important as oxygen.

But one of them is dying. So braided into the literary discussion is Schwalbe’s thoughtful account of his mother’s courage and stamina as well as the nuts and bolts of that terrible cancer trajectory. They discuss books; they discuss death. At the end of the last oncologist’s appointment, when she has decided to stop treatment, Mary Anne signs a new Do Not Resuscitate form. Then the doctor says, “Do you mind if I give you a hug?”

It’s not a very hopeful sign when your oncologist gives you a good-bye hug — but that only went through my mind later. It was a hug of genuine sweetness and affection: two people comforting each other, like sisters parting before one left on a long trip to a distant land.”

That’s where I stopped. Maybe you’ll get through to the end. After all, there aren’t that many books about the life-and-death power of reading.

Ruth Reichl, “Tender at the Bone”

You know those books that you always know you’ll read eventually? Tender at the Bone was one of those for me.  I’ve enjoyed Ruth Reichl’s writing ever since she became the restaurant critic for the New York Times in 1993, and her memoirs (this is one of three) have been big sellers. Besides that, why would you not want to read about a woman who found her way in life through food? Especially when she is as good at portraying character as she is at describing a meal?

Van Gogh's red cabbage and onions. Start chopping!

And there are some memorable characters in this book. In fact the very opening chapter, “The Queen of Mold,” sketches Reichl’s mother in colorful, funny, disturbing and affectionate colors — for one of the aspects of life Reichl must deal with is her mother’s mental illness. She sets this up really well, and it’s one of the key qualities that makes Tender at the Bone more than just a food memoir. At first we wonder why Mrs. Reichl has such odd ideas. Comments made by family friends puzzle little Ruth. When her mother’s mental illness is finally named, we aren’t surprised, but by that point she has us completely hooked.

Hooked on what? Generosity. Humor. Vivid description of sensory material. And enough narrative tension to keep us turning the pages. How will Ruth manage in a francophone Montreal boarding school at age 13? Or as a camp counselor on the French island of Oléron? Will she ever have a boyfriend? Will she and her friend Serafina survive their girls-only  trip to Tunis? Above all, what does Reichl owe her mother? Toward the end of the book she describes coming back to her parents’ house as an married career woman, well on the way to earning a reputation as a professional cook. Her mother is in a manic state. “I pushed the door open and hesitated, dreading the moment when I would lose myself. Crossing the threshold, I had a falling sensation, as if I were careening backward in time. I tried desperately to grab onto the Gypsy chef, but she was gone, along with the restaurant owner and wife. All that was left was a little girl.” If you’ve ever known people who made you lose your footing as a reasonable, functional adult, this will be a familiar nightmare.

We all find our ways to cope with life, and Reichl’s, to our benefit, turned out to be food. She tips her hand early on, describing her honorary grandmother’s cook: “Alice would have snickered derisively at the notion, but she was the first person I ever met who understood the power of cooking.  She was a great cook, but she cooked more for herself than for other people, not because she was hungry but because she was comforted by the rituals of the kitchen.” Order; precision; repetition; the exercise of familiar skills. Comfort, creation, and yumminess at the end. Thanks, Ruth.

Jill Ker Conway, “The Road from Coorain”

Why do we read memoir anyway? Whose life is interesting enough to, well, deserve that I should spend several hours on it, instead of alphabetizing my spice cupboard or for that matter, writing my own memoir?  Who is going to provide me with a vicarious experience that will be informative or stimulating or packed with emotional insight?

For an academic, Conway knows a lot about sheep.

Actually, most of the memoirs I’ve read recently fall into that category, which suggests that either I’ve been very lucky in my selection or that I’m selling the entire genre too short. Because Jill Ker Conway’s The Road from Coorain is another worth-while read. First, and most notably, because Conway grew up in the Australian bush, and her description of that childhood is a loving and vivid portrait of a kind of life that probably doesn’t exist any more. (It bears comparison to the brilliant Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller, a memoir of an African childhood.) I suspect that Conway’s descriptions of life on Coorain, a sheep station, will stick with me longer than the rest of the book simply for their exotic quality, and possibly because Conway describes them with the special clarity of childhood memories.

The rest of her story colors an intellectual coming-of-age tale (not dissimilar to Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase) with a specifically Australian palette. Conway gradually discovers that she is a true intellectual, but in the 1950s this makes her a very unusual woman. Further complication is supplied by Australia’s own identity crisis during the period. Conway is troubled by the colonial spirit of her country, and by its persistence in measuring itself against Great Britain. Having spent her early childhood in an environment that was specifically, uniquely Australian, she deplores an intellectual culture that takes its values and principles from that island nation on the other side of the globe. She compares the Australian origin myth to the American:

Why was my mind full of images of exhausted, marginal people, or outlaws like Ned Kelly, rather than triumphant frontier figures like Daniel Boone or Buffalo Bill? I knew that somehow it had to do with our relationship to nature, and with the way in which the first settlers’ encounter with this environment had formed the inner landscape of the mind, the unspoken, unanalyzed relationship to the order of creation which governs our psyches at the deepest level. Australians saw that relationship as cruel and harsh…”

This is just not material — not a past, not provocative writing about a past — that I could find anywhere besides the memoir of a thoughtful observer and writer who had an unusual experience to relate. Possibly a good definition of what makes the genre worth reading?

Karen Armstrong, “The Spiral Staircase”

Karen Armstrong, it turns out, is a big deal. She’s an author and speaker on spirituality whose A History of God is evidently an incisive and readable history of the Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It’s probably her best-known book, and it sounds fascinating but it’s The Spiral Staircase that fell into my hands. Thus I read Armstrong’s memoir without any real sense of why I should be interested in her, which is slightly disconcerting.

Of course, there’s the nun experience: one of my little obsessions. Armstrong entered a Catholic convent in 1962 at the age of sixteen, confidently looking forward to a lifelong union with God. Seven years later, after earnest effort, great misunderstanding and deep pain, she was released from her vows and became an ordinary undergraduate at her Oxford college. Yet despite her evident brilliance –which she manages to convey without seeming to brag, a neat trick — her PhD. thesis was failed and she did not receive her doctorate. Thus two cloistered worlds, the convent and academia, were closed to her.

Staircase at the Vatican: probably not what Armstrong had in mind

These developments take up the first half of the book, and I found them riveting, though I wasn’t sure why I was supposed to be interested.  Armstrong is an excellent writer and her outsider’s view of 1960s Oxford was fascinating. The stress here is on her outsider-ness, for Armstrong was not just emotionally damaged by her convent years: it turned out that she was an undiagnosed epileptic. Until 1975 she struggled with seizures and amnesia, despite being under a psychiatrist’s care. For a while she taught, and she wrote Through the Narrow Gate, about her years as a nun. The publicity for that book brought her to the attention of TV producers and she was enlisted to write and present a six-part documentary on St. Paul. (Can you imagine that on TV today?) It was this development that brought her back to the study of religion, in a completely different context, and set her on the path to her current eminence. The Spiral Staircase is structured after the first of T.S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday poems, and shows us Armstrong’s life as a climb — arduous, but satisfying — from darkness into light. She went into the convent to find God, she lost him, and found him again in a very different guise.

Yet for me this book felt like an incidental work. It sounds as if her thinking on spirituality and on the related monotheistic religions is so important that any memoir has to be secondary. Toward the end we get a sense of what feels like her non-memoir voice, and it takes on a new authority.  About her decision to write A History of God, she says:

The great myths show that when you follow somebody else’s path, you go astray. The hero has to set off by himself, leaving the old world and the old ways behind…. He must fight his own monsters, not somebody else’s, explore his own labyrinth, and endure his own ordeal before he can find what is missing in his life. Thus transfigured, he (or she) can bring something of value to the world that has been left behind… In the words of the Old French text of The Quest of the Holy Grail, he must enter the forest ‘at a point that he, himself, had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path.’”

It wasn’t until I read this paragraph that I began to understand what all the fuss was about. The Spiral Staircase is pretty satisfying, but I’m left with the impression that Armstrong writes with more passion about God than she does about herself.

Tobias Wolff, “This Boy’s Life”

“Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.”

Tobias Wolff is right, don’t you think? That’s a pretty good description of one facet of childishness (or immaturity: but that’s another story). This flash of insight comes toward the end of This Boy’s Life, his clear-sighted memoir of his teenage years in the Pacific Northwest. There was pain aplenty for the young Tobias, and little help dealing with it. Of course it felt like a necessary feature of his life — that’s the way it works.

Tobias Wolff went to high school in Concrete, Washington

The dysfunctional-childhood memoir is not a favorite of mine, but This Boy’s Life has tugged at my sleeve so often now that when it showed up again, I succumbed. Maybe you remember the background: Duke and Rosemary Wolff divorced in the 1950s and split up their sons. The elder, Geoffrey, stayed in the East with his father who turned out to be a con man. His memoir/portrait of his father, The Duke of Deception, was published first, in 1979, and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. The younger son, Tobias, went West with his mother. This Boy’s Life covers the period when they lived in the Pacific Northwest with a deeply unpleasant character whom Rosemary eventually, reluctantly, married. (The film version came out in 1993 and starred Leonardo DiCaprio.) Dwight is a malicious micro-manager of his stepson’s life: “Some of the chores [he assigned] were reasonable, some unreasonable, some bizarre as the meanest whims of a gnome setting tasks to a treasure seeker.”

What strikes me as unusual about Tobias Wolff’s book is his attentive reconstruction of his adolescent self. He’s a bad apple and knows it, yet has no idea how to redeem himself. There’s a poignant scene where a well-meaning priest tries to get through to him and the young Tobias simply cannot relinquish all that’s left to him: a cobbled-together self-respect based on appearing impervious to hurt.

There’s a train-wreck logic to the book. We see Rosemary Wolff making one bad choice after another, and Tobias following suit. He picks the wrong friends, skimps on his studies, shop lifts, vandalizes, drinks — it all seems inevitable. But never for a moment did I consider ending the misery by putting the book down. The writing is lovely, clear and brisk with occasional bursts of the picturesque. One scene I bet made it to the movie is the Christmas when Dwight cut down a blue spruce and then spray painted it white, killing it. The family celebrates amid the falling needles.

But I think I also finished the book to keep faith with the young Tobias. His adult self, the author, treats him with the grave respect the boy so desperately craved. Staying with him seems like the least the reader can do, and it’s deeply rewarding.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, “A Time to Keep Silence”

My passion for nun literature is not quite matched by my passion for monk literature — which, by the way, is not as rich a field. Matthew Lewis’s 1796 The Monk, an early Gothic, springs to mind but I can’t think of anything since then. [Addendum: my husband reminded me of The Name of the Rose.] Literary attention to cloistered communities has focused on women rather than men. Here’s a theory: if criticism of The Church (Catholic or other) is intended, writers focused on nuns, as in  Diderot’s The Nun,or priests, as in Wilkie Collins’ The Black Robe. Monks offer neither the worldly possibilities of power-hungry priests nor the ostensibly kinky sexual dynamics of the convent.

St. Wandrille, right up PLF's alley

Well, it’s neither of those thrills that Patrick Leigh Fermor went looking for when he took himself off to the Abbey of St. Wandrille de Fontanelle, near Rouen, in the early 1950s. Instead he was in search of a quiet and cheap place to live while he wrote. A Time to Keep Silence was published in 1957, based on letters he wrote while at the monastery and then further descriptions of further monastic experiences. It’s a thin book and feels faintly cobbled together, as if Leigh Fermor had re-read his letters and thought, “Hmm, wonder if there’s something publishable here.” Which is not to say that the book is disrespectful. On the contrary, it’s the author’s improbable wonder and enthusiasm for these monasteries that give A Time to Keep Silence its considerable sober charm.

The first section is the longest, most thorough, and richest. Leigh Fermor finds the monastic discipline initially bewildering: “only by living for a while in a monastery can one quite grasp its staggering difference from the ordinary life that we lead. The two ways of life do not share a single attribute; and the thoughts, ambitions, sounds, lights, time and mood that surround the inhabitants of a cloister are not only unlike anything to which one is accustomed, but in some curious way, seem its exact reverse.” For a man as gregarious as PLF, the discipline of severely limited conversation must have been difficult yet among the Benedictines of St. Wandrille he found much to learn and much to cherish. Of course readers of A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water will know how much Leigh Fermor relishes sensory and intellectual stimulation — the languages, the music, the vestments, the architecture,  the books of St. Wandrille give him great pleasure.

Not so much the harsh discipline of La Grande Trappe, the Cistercian monastery in southern Normandy. This was clearly an alienating experience for Leigh Fermor: he finally says that “I was not in possession of any mental instrument with which to to gauge and record my findings” in the monastery. Finally, tacked on as it were, is a short section on the survival of the rock monasteries in Cappadocia, now part of Turkey.

Two of Leigh Fermor’s strengths as a writer — and, I have to believe, as a person — were his whole-hearted embrace of life and his ability to seek out the best in a situation. Add those to his astounding literary gifts and you get a travel writer whom you’d follow anywhere. Even into the cloister.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, “Between the Woods and the Water”

Between the Woods and the Water takes up exactly where Patrick Leigh Fermor left off at the end of A Time of Gifts; the first sentence reads “Perhaps I had made too long a halt on the bridge.”  (A reminder that beneath the lovely rambling quality of these books lies artful structure.) The bridge crosses the Danube, and PLF is about to enter Hungary for the first time, on Easter Eve. With no further fuss, he sweeps us into a brilliant celebration of Easter in the old cathedral of Esztergom, complete with all the elaborate vestments, military uniforms, and glamor  you could want. (Scimitars! Monocles! Egret feathers!)

Esztergom Cathedral, cars cropped from the photo

Is it my imagination, or is this volume more poignant than the earlier one? And if I’m right, is that because Leigh Fermor is writing nine years after A Time of Gifts? Could the bittersweet edge be that of a man looking back thirty-odd years? Or could it be caused by the knowledge that nothing is left of the sweet, lazy culture of the Hungarian aristocracy that took him in as a youthful wanderer? As our narrator says of his hosts, “Homesick for the past, seeing nobody but their own congeners on the neighboring estates and the peasants who worked there, they lived a backward-looking, a genealogical, almost a Confucian dream and many sentences ended in a sigh.”

Summer is all around Leigh Fermor as he travels across the Great Hungarian Plain on foot paths or roads bad enough to be almost impassable in a car. (This is 1934, remember.)  He is now a thousand miles from England and his mission — to reach Constantinople on foot — is still before him. He is still delighted by much of what he encounters: one host loans him a beautiful mount whom he rides across country for several days. He stops at a peasant’s cottage, the occupant brings him a drink, and, he writes “I sipped it slowly and thought: I’m drinking this glass of milk on a chestnut horse on the Great Hungarian Plain.”

I wonder if Leigh Fermor didn’t write this volume as a memorial of sorts. It’s not just about the aristocrats, but also about the topography, the language, the history, and the tremendous variety of people he meets. For instance, there’s the interlude with a family of Hasidic Jews from Szatmar, who study Torah by paraffin lamp in a remote logging camp. Everyone gets very excited when they read the Psalms together in a hodge-podge of German and Hebrew.

Patrick Leigh Fermor died last month. This book ends with the phrase “To Be Concluded” and I hope there are very complete notes somewhere, though only the most confident writer would dare to mess with PLF’s prose. Anyway, this is the kind of story that just doesn’t emerge organically from modern culture:

One [woman], extremely beautiful and with enormous grey-green eyes, was the daughter of a former Foreign Minister. (At the opera in Paris, where he was staying for the Peace Conference, a friend had asked him who someone — another Rumanian — had married; and he had answered, truthfully, ‘Une grue, hélas.’ ‘Alas, a harlot’ and a few moment later, a hand appeared from the next box, holding a visiting card from the husband in question; there was a duel with pistols and her father was shot through the stomach and spent the rest of his life in great pain.

I’m glad Patrick Leigh Fermor left us some trace of this world.