A couple of years ago, a friend of mine ran away to join the circus. She went on tour with Cirque du Soleil as part of the orchestra. Not quite the traditional big top and elephant-led parade, but it reminded me of childhood fantasies of criss-crossing the country as part of a circus. Sure, I wanted to get gussied up in pink satin and ride around the ring standing on the back of a big white horse, but that wasn’t my primary motivation. Being on the road appealed to me; in another place and time, I’d have fantasized about running off with a gypsy caravan. Most of all, I wanted to hang out with the circus people. I wanted to be one of those enlightened and cynical people behind the scenes, the ones who knew all the secrets.

These books share some of those secrets. People on my maillists have been raving about Water for Elephants for months, so I picked it up and became absorbed by this story of a Depression-era circus and the young runaway who joined it. It’s framed by the story of the same man at ninety-three, stuck in a comprehensive care retirement community, “one of the ancient dusty people, filed away like some worthless tschotchke.” The two stories feed off each other; Jacob doesn’t seem to have lost much of his orneriness and hot-headed courage over the years.

Gruen’s extensive research adds depth without calling attention to itself. Period and sensory details made me feel the bite of a toothless lion, the rocking of the train underfoot, the difficulty of moving from wheelchair to walker. Some circus characters and scenes turn out to be based on those she discovered in her reading. And I was charmed by the period photographs she included.

My only quibble was with the prologue. Some people can’t stand prologues; they skip them or refuse to read a book that has one. I don’t mind them, as long as they contribute to the story and aren’t just a—to me, lazy—way of foreshadowing or starting in media res, as we’re told to do. Here, the prologue is a chunk of the climax copied and pasted in front of Chapter One. It’s confusing because we don’t know the characters or what’s going on. It’s unnecessary because Chapter One’s opening is a fine start. And—for me—it detracts from the climax when we finally get there by adding a ho-hum, been-there dimension. It did not make me curious to read on; it simply exasperated me.

However, I was able to forget about it quickly and fell so thoroughly under the spell of the story that I read it all in one go. I kept trying to put it down so I could tackle my massive to-do list but next thing I knew, there I was reading it again. It even sent me back to Toby Tyler on which the 50’s tv show Circus Boy was based. The show starred Mickey Dolenz, later one of the Monkees, as Toby.

Although my copy of the book with its brittle brown pages doesn’t show a date, I thought it must date from the era of sugar-sweet children’s stories. Maybe, but this book surprised me with its candid look behind the tent flaps. Some of the details, such as the “lemonade” made from brook water with a few lemon slices for show, were similar to Gruen’s book (hers was a little worse: trough water with the straw filtered out). Certainly the idea was the same: circus people are like any other group of people, a mixture of kind, generous folks and cruel bullies. Even so, there are still days when running away to join the circus seems to me like a great idea.

Continuing the Turkish theme—and indeed there is a cat named Pamuk and a minor character named Orhan—my book club selected this novel about Turkey during the early 20th century. We had enjoyed a good discussion of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin a few years ago, so hoped for good things from this new novel.

The first half makes a good beach book, with its short chapters, so vibrant and humorous. In a mosaic of self-contained anecdotes, de Bernieres builds up a portrait of a small town on the southern coast of what is now Turkey, many of whose colorful characters have nicknames that reflect their professions (e.g., Iskander the Potter, Mehmet the Tinsman) or perceived characteristics (e.g., Lydia the Barren, Ali the Broken-Nosed). Muslims and Christians all consider themselves Ottomans, and there is no religious strife. In fact, they sometimes give offerings in each other’s traditions, saying they wanted to back both horses. De Bernieres is an excellent writer, and each scene is deeply imagined and brought to life with sensual detail that delights.

If there is a serious thread in the beginning, it is of misogyny, women as property or pets that must be put down when they misbehave. As the story progresses, we see this attitude applied to those of particular ethnic backgrounds, such as Armenians, and other scapegoats, such as the unpopular local activist and teacher. We see people’s foolishness and cruelty when gathered together into a group. There was much written about mob psychology after WWII, trying to make sense of the Holocaust. This town is too small for the people to be anonymous in their mob, but, like eighth-graders in the hallway, they cannot resist egging on a fight or joining in the persecution of the day’s victim. And de Bernieres reminds us of the many other holocausts that led up to and followed the Great War.

Once the war starts, the story gets serious. We spend several chapters at Gallipoli, up to now well-documented from the Australian side, but here we see it from the Turkish side, through the eyes of one of the young men of the town. The vivid writing and sensual details that made the first half of the book so delightful here bring home the horror and occasional joy of war.

The brief chapters about Mustafa Kemal that were interpolated into the first half of the book now expand into longer narratives about the progress of the war, the various political factions in the country, and the War of Independence with Greece that followed the Great War. Although well-written and engaging, this part of the book is essentially a nonfiction summary of the political and military context. I found these sections unnecessary to the story, but perhaps my opinion is skewed because I had recently read several books about Ataturk and the end of the Ottoman empire.

In fact, by the time the story returns to the town in the final pages, I found I had lost interest in the characters and their dilemmas. Even the promised climax seemed rather flat to me, and the story trailed off. But perhaps that is the point. Even for those who survive, war destroys the quality of their lives. Nothing is the same afterwards. Poppies may grow over the mass graves in Gallipoli, but the longing to return home is never satisfied.

Sometimes I wonder why we even need stories. Reading (or watching) stories can be a distraction, just another way of filling up time. I’ve stopped listening to books on tape while I walk my usual 3-5 miles a day, in order to pay better attention to what’s around me, though I still listen to them in the car.

Yet I’ll never give up my addiction to stories. For me, it is not so much the surrogate thrill of an adventure story or the satisfaction of solving a mystery story’s puzzle—though I enjoy both—as it is the sense of being taken out of my life. Occasionally it’s just a relief to escape for a while from the endless story of me, but more often I actively want to be someplace else—Turkey or Antarctica—or I want to know what it is like to be someone else—an immigrant from Jamaica or an English student gone walkabout (or boat-about). As if I were an actor able to play many roles on stage, reading gives me the chance to experience alternative lives and bring back the lessons I’ve learned.

These stories of Jean McGarry’s are not so much about home as they are about family. They bring to life childhood and the way siblings relate to each other. “The Calling” reminded me of the nicknames, teasing and insults; as well as the underlying connection. I also particularly liked the subtlety of “Mr. and Mrs. Bull” where a woman visits her aunt and uncle for the first time in ten years, and we only gradually realise the great gift she has been given.

The stories are deeply imagined and precise, using the right details to create their world. Most of them are set in or near Providence. I recently spent several weeks in New England, reconnecting with old friends, wandering through small towns and rural routes, avoiding the fancy Boston bars and pilgrim re-enactors. I was overwhelmed by the number of ponds opening beside the road, ponds that sparkled under the sun, their ruff of pine trees dark and mysterious.

New England always seemed reticent and withdrawn to me. However, on this trip, I was surprised by how friendly everyone was: the gas station attendant who regaled me with the saga of a thunderstorm earlier in the day; the shop clerk wanted to chat about the relative merits of Carver and Plymouth; another who (though half my age) wanted to know all about my plans for the night; the young waiter who stayed to chat after taking my order, convinced he had waited on me before, even as the table of laughing girls called for him to come back and hang out with them.

Many of McGarry’s stories capture that defiant New England sadness that fills towns from Pawtucket to Barre, a hopelessness that is offset—buoyed somehow—by a feisty harshness, a determination to get by. The routes I traveled revealed vegetable stands with hand-painted signs and backyard body shops where men with tattooed arms lifted fenders and swung mallets. McGarry’s stories of families and communities struggling not to dissolve made me sad, until I recognised the network of connections that underlay them, like veins under the skin, tough fibers that would not give up their hold.

I tried to read this classic mystery once before, when I was a teenager, and stopped after about fifty pages. It seemed that the story was going nowhere and—worse—seemed overly bogged down with descriptive passages. I was just coming off of The Sound and the Fury and Portrait of a Lady both of which I loved, so thought I was up to the challenge of heavy-duty prose. I just couldn't get interested in the story.

However, I'm glad I picked it up again. What a great read! Pieces of the brilliantly puzzling plot are doled out at just the right time to sustain the suspense. And the suspense is not the sickening car-chase kind that makes your adrenaline sing. It is the quiet, persistent, growing suspense that develops organically from the story.

One evening in July 1859, a drawing master, Walter Hartright, was walking home to London from visiting his mother. Just after he crossed Hampstead Heath, he encountered a woman dressed all in white who was in some distress and begged him to help her reach London. As they walked along, he mentioned that he was about to take up a post in Cumberland. She told him of a happy time in her life when Mrs. Fairlie of Limmeridge House was particularly kind to her, much to his astonishment, since Limmeridge House was precisely where he was headed.

This meeting and circumstances around it raise questions in Hartright's mind, questions which multiply and take on new significance as the plot unfolds. The story is told in first person, moving from Hartright's narrative to the journal of a woman, to various depositions given by characters at the appropriate moment. These shifts in point of view are handled very well. Each is justified and explained by the story. Moreover, they are clearly labeled and the voice of each varied appropriately for the character speaking. And having the character himself or herself actually provide the information gives it an immediacy and authenticity which would be missing in a second-hand recounting.

Mystery writers would do well to study Collins' technique, not just the way he handles voice and shifting points of view, but the way his characters are presented and allowed to shift and change over time in ways that seem perfectly natural. And, of course, the means he employs to create and sustain the reader's interest.

This memoir suffers from some of the same weaknesses as Snow (see my previous post). The chapters are disjointed and ramble from subject to subject, always circling around the Istanbul of Pamuk’s youth. He has good transitions between the chapters but the book as a whole never coheres, at least for me. However, some of the chapters are outstanding, so evocative that I feel I too am there, pretending the carpet in his grandmother’s museum of an apartment is the sea, watching the ships on the Bosphorus, walking the streets in search of the old wooden mansions that are falling to pieces. And scattered throughout the book are amazing photographs that capture the mystery and routine of daily life in the city.

What most delighted me were his extended meditations on a subject that has interested me for several years, ever since I first wandered through the Forum in Rome, surrounded by the bustling city, the whine of Vespas dodging among cars, the chattering voices of workers heading off for their mid-morning espresso. What does it do to you to grow up among the ruins? To be constantly reminded that your nation once ruled the world, but does so no longer? Would you feel inadequate, a failure because you could not equal the achievements of your ancestors? Would you be proud of the past? Or would you just walk by the ruins every day and not even notice them? The answer probably differs from one person to another.

In The Enigma of Arrival V.S. Naipaul writes about a man coming to stay ” . . . in the cottage of a half-neglected estate, an estate full of reminders of its Edwardian past, with few connections with the present.” He talks about living with the idea of decay and the way things seemed ” . . . like a vestige, a memory of another kind of house and garden and street, a token of something more complete, more ideal.” In this story, the people had not moved on, preferring to remain in the past.

Christopher Woodward’s In Ruins explores how our ideas about ruins have changed over time and from one civilization to another, analysing paintings, books and buildings. An architectural historian, I believe Woodward was at one time the curator of Leighton House, one of my favorite London museums. It is so crowded with THINGS—sculptures, paintings, furniture, bits and pieces of broken marble—a marvelous jumble to be sure but it made me want to go home and clean out the basement.

Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be better just to clear out all these old bits and pieces. Pamuk says that “. . . in Istanbul the remains of a glorious past civilization are everywhere visible.” Unlike the proudly displayed ruins in Rome or Greece, these ruins ” . . . inflict heartache on all who live among them.” However, he treasures that heartache and describes the peculiar melancholy—huzun—that they inspire.

As I sort through the family papers, photos and mementos that have recently been handed down to me, I struggle with deciding how much of the past to hold on to and how much to jettison. As one of my sons said, what do I want with photos of people I never met? Of course, I won’t get rid of anything. I’ll hand it off to another sibling, but I wonder if anyone in the next generation will care.

I wasn’t sure how to read this book. At first I thought it was going to be one of those books where the power of the language enchants me and carries me through the story. Then I thought that it was going to be a surreal book, like one of Kafka’s. Then I thought perhaps it was a political novel, like one of Graham Greene’s ‘entertainments’.

I never did figure it out. A little of each, perhaps. The story lurched from one incident to another, with me joining the main character in not understanding exactly what was going on. At least there was a main character! The premise is that Ka, a famous poet, gets trapped by a blizzard in a remote town in Turkey, where he’s gone to research an article about suicides among young women and to see an old flame who is now divorced.

And that’s about it. He watches the snow from his hotel room, talks with the women, and wanders around town. He meets—by appointment and by accident—and talks with a number of people, supposedly to learn about the head-scarf girls, young women who are said to have killed themselves rather than remove their head scarves, the wearing of which has been banned in the schools. However, their talks range much further, into history and dreams and religion.

The first part of the book fascinated me but the middle bogged down in confusion. I only kept reading because it was for my book club, but I’m glad I did as the end picked up and the various threads began to make a little more sense. I came to realize that the fragmented story reflected the fragmentation of these people’s lives, rudderless since the breakup of the Ottoman empire, their identity erratic and uncertain. It also reflected the fragmentation of the political body of Turkey, torn between continuing Ataturk’s westernizing reforms, Kurdish separatism and Islamic fundamentalism.

One person in my book club asked if we thought Pamuk deliberately made the book so hard to read. Did he think about the reader or write this book simply for himself? I myself believe that one must always write for oneself, but then the writer has to step back and consider his or her responsibility to the reader.

We talked a lot about the suicides and the political situation. Writing about politics in a novel is dangerous stuff, but Pamuk carries it off with elan. We agreed that the deceptively simple story held a great deal of complexity, with so many different threads that untangling them would be a worthy subject for a doctoral thesis.

We also talked about the progress of Ka’s pursuit of Ipek. I found it curious that he loved her even before he arrived in town, saying that he is the type of man who “‘. . . can fall in love with a woman only if he knows next to nothing about her.'” However, another person pointed out that this ability to reach across the gulf that separates one person from another and simply fall in love is what redeems us. This disjointed book finally cohered around the image of a snowflake, isolated and unique. Pamuk asks: “How much can we ever know about love and pain in another's heart?” In the end, we cannot understand other people; we don’t know how to read them. We can only love them.

Watching awards shows where people stumble to the podium clutching their lists of people to thank, I’ve sometimes thought that if I were ever to win an award, the first people I would want to thank would be people like the guys at Brentwood who keep my old car running, Paul at Eddie’s who without fail points me to just the right bottle of wine, Jeff Schneider who always has that obscure hardware item that I need for a project, Bernie Severe and his wonderful sons who rescue and refinish my hardwood floors, the folks at Al Pacino’s who make a consistently perfect Queens pizza for my Sunday night treat, the maintenance team (Mike, Jonathan and Grover) who come to my aid when water starts pouring through the ceiling in the middle of the night—all the people, in other words, who make my life possible. Sure, they are getting paid for doing their jobs, but I want them to know that I notice and appreciate how well they are doing them.

In Brockmeier’s richly imagined novel, he alternates the story of a woman—Laura Byrd—who has been left alone in an Antarctic research station with the story of the inhabitants of the City—people who have died but are still remembered. He bases the latter on an African tradition where people are not wholly dead until the last person to know them dies.

This concept of the “living-dead” enables him to pay tribute to the overlapping networks of friends, associates and acquaintances in which even the quietest life is embedded. One of the characters tries to come up with a number, deciding on fifty thousand “or maybe even seventy”. The story brings out the impact we have on each other, however fleeting our contact, and how dependent on each other we are. Characters like Laura who find themselves alone panic and go searching for someone—anyone—to be with.

I don’t mean to make the story sound heavy and philosophical. It’s not. It moves quickly, nimbly weaving together the multiple stories. Most people I’ve talked with read it in one sitting, thinking they’ll read just one more chapter, just one more. Same with me. Aside from quibbles about the realism of some Antarctic details, I found it one of the best and most provocative books I’ve read all year.

Standard practice in making fantasy work is to keep all the other elements as realistic as possible, so the inhabitants of the City live in apartments or houses like ours. They work at mundane jobs such as repairing clocks, running a fitness club, or selling jewelry. At first I thought this unlikely. People mostly complain about their jobs, celebrating hump day on Wednesday and looking forward to TGIF parties, so why after death’s release would they choose to take their jobs up again? I considered habit and boredom. Someone in my book club pointed out that a few people worked in fields that they had always wanted to try.

But the main thing I realised—what we so often forget—is that our work is partly what ties us into the community. However boring or difficult, every job confers that benefit. And, herd animals that we are, we want to be part of a community. So, to all of you whose courtesy and commitment enrich my days and give you a place in my life: thank you.

Since this is an expression I often find myself using, I figured I’d better read the classic where it originated. I’m very glad I did. What a delight! I felt as though I were sitting out on a pub’s patio or garden being entertained by the stories of a most charming man, such as the man in Robin Hood’s Bay who told us how the smugglers used to outwit the law by passing the goods from house to house by way of their secretly interconnected attics, or the man in Cornwall who told us about hermits and mazes and waterfalls before warning us about working farms.

This book, first published in 1889, tells of the antics that ensue when Jerome sets out with two friends and a dog to spend a fortnight traveling the Thames from Kingston to Oxford. Alternately rowing and towing their boat upstream, the three friends exchange tales of past adventures and find themselves tumbling into new ones. They’ve chosen to camp out rather than sleep at inns, and the resulting battles with canvas and cookpots left me shaking with laughter.

In addition to recounting their escapades, Jerome offers descriptions of the towns they pass and his surprising and hilarious musings on various subjects. Whether you consider it a novel or a travelogue, every page is packed with that quiet, self-deprecating, utterly ridiculous English humor. For example, Jerome reflects on an innkeeper who has, at great trouble and expense, papered over a room full of antique carved oak, and wonders if today’s junk will become tomorrow’s treasures, such as the loathsome china dogs that clutter furnished lodgings. “In 2288 people will gush over it. The making of such dogs will have become a lost art. Our descendents will wonder how we did it, and say how clever we were. We shall be referred to lovingly as ‘those grand old artists that flourished in the nineteenth century, and produced those china dogs.'”

I couldn’t keep from snickering throughout his description of his friend Harris trying to guide people out of the maze at Hampton Court. Confident that he knew the way, Harris kept picking up lost souls along the way, getting more and more lost, until they finally called out for help from the keeper. However, it was just their luck that he happened to be new to the job and also got lost. They would catch sight of him now and then but they couldn’t manage to meet up. Ah well, as Jerome says, “Such is life; and we are but as grass that is cut down, and put into the oven and baked.”

One reason this was such a perfect book was that their adventure took place during the same season I was reading it, which made it easy to imagine being on the boat with them, watching the fields and towns slip by. And of course, it was this time of year, three years ago, that I was actually on a boat on the Thames near Windsor with my niece and a bunch of rowdy but charming morris dancers.

There are certain seasonal books that I go back to again and again. For example, when the leaves are all gone in November and the rain takes over, then it is time to read Jane Eyre once more. March, when the ground starts to get mushy, makes me want to read The Secret Garden and think about Dickon and Mary digging in the dirt. Deep summer makes me pick up Colette to enjoy her sensual descriptions of flowers and fruit and sun-tanned men. I usually choose Break of Day but really any of her books works fine. Now my shelf of seasonal books has increased by one: Jerome’s book is one I will come back to in early summer or whenever I need a good laugh.

I hadn’t read this classic since my schooldays but bits of it have stayed with me over the years, particularly Lucinda Matlock: “It takes life to love Life.” Rereading it now was a mixed experience. The pieces hardly seemed like poems to me, but rather pieces of conversation, almost completely devoid of imagery, and few with any subtlety of meaning.

What they do have is emotion and plenty of it. Each poem is meant to be a single person speaking to us from beyond the grave, as though we were walking through a cemetery and the tombstones began to talk to us. They do not speak to us of Heaven or Hell but instead are preoccupied with their earthly concerns: married couples continue their hostilities; the soldier killed in the Philippines debates just and unjust wars; the unrepentant capitalist applauds his own actions while those ruined by him vent their bitterness.

What I found most interesting were the intertwining fates of the individuals, how they affected one another, and how unaware of each other they were. So many secrets and dreams and disappointments. In fact, the book seemed to me more like a novel, and I was gratified to find when I picked up his autobiography Across Spoon River that he originally envisioned the book as a novel. The autobiography gave the sources for many of Spoon River’s denizens and had the same rather peevish tone of many of the poems, as though it were written to get back at everyone who had harmed Masters, or not appreciated him sufficiently.

For the most part, the poems are depressing reading. Yet the book—with its tales of crooked politicians and hypocritical preachers, judges and newspaper editors who have been bought and paid for—is curiously contemporary. One friend of mine says that she finds it horribly depressing to think that people have not changed over the centuries. I, on the other hand, am comforted to think that today’s appalling scandals, reckless destruction, and blatant power-grabbing are nothing new. Greed, dishonesty and selfishness have always been a part of human nature, just as generosity, self-sacrifice, and integrity have been. And no society has been completely successful at taming the one while nurturing the other.

I didn’t intend to write about this book, thinking I had nothing to say about it. However, the three novellas have stuck with me for weeks like a tune that I cannot get out of my head.

The first concerns a vocal group that has received a grant to spend two weeks in a Belgian chateau preparing for a difficult concert. Told mostly from the point of view of one of the women, the director’s wife, the story teases out the harmonics and dissonances of the ever-changing relationships between the three men and two women who make up the group.

The second follows a woman who goes on an archeological dig in Whitby, England, taking along her nightmares from a stint in Bosnia. She encounters a man with a dog and finds herself in the middle of a two hundred-year-old murder mystery.

The third, oddly enough, relates the adventures of two small children brought up in total isolation by their parents in an Arctic research station. What is most remarkable about this story is the way Faber captures the world-view of such children, their beliefs and magical thinking.

I picked up the book because my attention was caught by the settings: I’ve been to Belgium and explored its dark woods and golden fields. I’ve spent time in Whitby, climbed the steps to the Abbey ruins, and walked along the Marine Parade. I haven’t been to either pole but, buried in Scott’s journals or Cherry-Gerard’s memoirs, sometimes feel as though I have.

What has stuck with me, however, is not so much the pleasure of revisiting places I love as it is the characters. The woman in Whitby kept saying, “‘I want. I want.'” So fundamentally human. And yet so poignant, with its unspecified object. In these stories, people fumble toward understanding what they want, sometimes aware of, but more often disregarding the effect their pursuit is having on others.

One reason I read so much is that motives—my own and those of others—remain so murky to me. I search stories for clues, motifs, signatures. I find people who want without knowing what for, who recognise a little too late that the random notes are actually a tune, who reach for a resolution that slips away even as their fingers seem to close on it. I took comfort from the children, who at least understood what they were looking for when they found it.